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[silverspawn]

woah you're right! Sick!

[silverspawn]

Does iirc mean that you've done this before?

[faust]

Does iirc mean that you've done this before?

Yes, when I was about 12 or so. On an actual Game Boy 

[silverspawn]

That's pretty impressive considering I just did it on 7x speed and using wikis.

did you know about the glitches or did you do it the intended way by trading

[silverspawn]

you'd have to play the game at least 3 times for the birds alone

[faust]

That's pretty impressive considering I just did it on 7x speed and using wikis.

did you know about the glitches or did you do it the intended way by trading

I used a glitch to get Mew. For the rest I used trading with my brother, who had the other version of the game. Well, there was definitely also some glitch abuse involving cloning Pokemon while trading, and I think item duplication.

[silverspawn]

when I was young none of my friends knew how the mew glitch worked. I never got it

[silverspawn]

copying pokemon while trading is also a hilirious glitch. It's like something you'd think about in 2 seconds when approaching the problem. The programmer really was adorably naive.

[silverspawn]

Ok something completely different. Productivity.

Stretches of low productivity seem most clearly characterized by my inability to work on something for more than 20 minutes without checking social media in between, except on the day right after an annealing session. Which happens even though the total amount of social media I consume is relatively low and often there isn't really anything new to check.

And it's not the time raw spent on social media that's the problem. If you tab over to reddit and spend 30 seconds there, then tab back, sure there's some time loss from the raw time on reddit & the context switch, but I think 80% of the problem comes from elsewhere, and I don't think I've ever heard someone articulate this well.

So one more serious problem is the risk of not going back to the productive thing. Say I go on reddit, see something unusual, and make an exception to the "I'm going to go right back to work" rule.  This may lose 1 hour of time or more. But at the moment where I switch to reddit, I won't price this in. I'll just calculate the maximally optimistic case of "this will only cost <1 minute".

But I think maybe an even bigger problem is the effect on mood. Often I try to do the productive thing and decide I'm not capable of continuing right now. I can will through that, but it's only useful if the thing is easy enough that I can make progress even when your performance is impaired. So it works for simple things, this may even include programming tasks, but it certainly doesn't work if the task is about writing. In those cases, if I can't do it right now, obv I will stop.

Ok so this is bad, but reddit didn't cause the problem at the point where I stopped working, right? Yes, but it may still have caused the problem indirectly. If there's an effect like, if your work flow includes lots of distractions and inflow of other information, then you overall have less energy to do the hard thing, well then distractions cause productivity loss via this entirely different mechanism!

It's not obvious that this mechanism exists, but I'm pretty sure it does.

[silverspawn]

As always, the best general defense is mindfulness. So much of the problems are based around self-deception, like pretending that tabbing out to reddit is totally fine right now, or doing it without making an excuse at all, or even just spending a lot of time thinking about irrelevant things without realizing this is a problem.

Other than that, there are hacks like not visiting social media sites until 6 pm each day, but sooner or later they will also break, not by explicitly failing at them but by more self-deception. I.e., right now I actually need to visit reddit for a good reason so it's ok to make an exception, and then next time I'll make the exception again without thinking much about it, and 3 days later the habit is lost without me ever explicitly abandoning it. Something like this is the failure story of every good habit.

And mindfulness itself has the same problem, since it annoyingly isn't a thing you can obtain once and then have forever, but need to cultivate constantly, and it if you stop it will just go away.

[silverspawn]

Another relevant variable (though I don't think it's as important), how great is the allure of distraction?

I think the most dangerous distractions have the "get cool stuff" factor. This is why I shouldn't play dominion. You "get" cool stuff by randomizing the kingdom. You get more cool stuff every time you draw cards. Each instance of drawing cards is like a dopamine hit. MTG also has that problem. Chess and prismata mostly don't. And dominion of course has the other problem that I'm super good at it and I like winning. Chess I'm way worse at, so there are of course always enough good people to keep me at a 50% winrate, and it doesn't have the get cool stuff thing.

And randomness is also bad because it muddles the feedback from playing poorly. And many dominion boards are relatively easy to play close to optimally at, so playing poorly isn't even that big of a deal.

dominion really is the worst! Needless to say that all of these are features from a designer perspective.

[silverspawn]

But like in general, the allure that's shared among twitter and reddit and chess and dominion and virtually every other source of distraction is that they present you with small, modular, solvable problems. I think each instance of writing a reddit comment is essentially solving a small problem of how to formulate a response to this. Each game is obviously a solvable problem. And even each tweet is like a small solvable problem of understanding a point and then judging it.

On the other hand, figuring out how to persuade people that consciousness isn't a computation is just really hard and often doesn't have small modular subproblems. So the ultimate reason for why I want distractions is probably just t hat I crave the feeling of progress. Solving something. Having success. Dealing with something easy. Which are all things you don't need if you have sufficient MINDFULNESS... but the past two months really I didn't.

[silverspawn]

It's quite hilarious how dumb the progress seeking module that evolution came up with really is. You can just make up something and solve that and that works, there are millions of examples of this. Or you can make progress on irrelevant things and that also totally works. I would make so much more progress without the thirst for progress.

[silverspawn]

The Buddha, in talking about the middle way between festishistic self-depravation and indulgence in sense pleasures, said that it's fine to enjoy sense pleasures, but you shouldn't build habits that make you crave them more. I.e., it's fine to read reddit, but you shouldn't develop a habit of having to check it regularly.

[silverspawn]

I literally almost just clicked on the reddit icon without realizing the irony

[silverspawn]

An outstanding issue is finding a principled way to de-
termine the proper spatial and temporal scale to measure
informational relationships and integrated information.
What are the elements upon which probability distributions
of states are to be evaluated? For example, are they mini-
columns or neurons? And what about molecules, atoms, or
subatomic particles? Similarly, what is the “clock” to use to
identify system states? Does it run in seconds, hundreds of
milliseconds, milliseconds, or microseconds?

Woah I didn't think this would be addressed! Very curious to read further. This also happens to be at the end of a page.

[silverspawn]

Properly addressing this issue requires a comprehensive
theoretical approach to the relationship between integrated
information, emergence, and memory (Balduzzi and
Tononi, unpubl.). The working hypothesis is as follows
(Tononi, 2004): In general, for any system, integrated in-
formation is generated at multiple spatiotemporal scales. In
particular, however, there will often be a privileged spatio-
temporal “grain size” at which a given system forms a
complex of highest �—the spatiotemporal scale at which it
“exists” the most in terms of integrated information, and
therefore of consciousness.

For example, while in the brain there are many more
atoms than neurons, it is likely that complexes at the spatial
scale of atoms are exceedingly small, or at any rate that they
cannot maintain both functional specialization and long-
range integration, thus yielding low values of �. At the
other extreme, the spatial scale of cortical areas is almost
certainly too coarse for yielding high values of �. Some-
where in between, most naturally at the grain size of neu-
rons or minicolumns, the neuroanatomical arrangement en-
sures an ideal mix of functional specialization and
integration, leading to the formation of a large complex of
high �.Similarly, with respect to time, neurons would yield zero
� at the scale of microseconds, since there is simply not
enough time for engaging their mechanisms. At long time
scales, say hours, � would also be low, as output states
would bear little relationship to input states. Somewhere in
between, at a time scale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds,
the firing pattern of a large complex of neurons should be
maximally predictive of its previous state, thus yielding
high �.

[silverspawn]

While I think this doesn't work at all, it's about as good of an explanation as you can give, or at least I couldn't think of a better one. Seems like there's a reason why IIT is considered the most serious information-based theory of C.

[silverspawn]

How close is this position to panpsychism, which holds
that everything in the universe has some kind of conscious-
ness? Certainly, the IIT implies that many entities, as long
as they include some functional mechanisms that can make
choices between alternatives, have some degree of con-
sciousness. Unlike traditional panpsychism, however, the
IIT does not attribute consciousness indiscriminately to all
things. For example, if there are no interactions, there is no
consciousness whatsoever. For the IIT, a camera sensor as
such is completely unconscious (in fact, it does not exist as
an entity). Moreover, panpsychism hardly has a solid con-
ceptual foundation. The attribution of consciousness to all
kinds of things is based more on an attempt to avoid dualism
than on a principled analysis of what consciousness is.
Similarly, panpsychism offers hardly any guidance as to
what would determine the amount of consciousness associ-
ated with different things (such as humans, animals, plants,
or rocks), or with the same thing at different times (say
wakefulness and sleep), not to mention that it says nothing
about what would determine the quality of experience.

rest assured, you need not associate with low status theories to believe in IIT!

[silverspawn]

So Chanca Piedra is a tea that's supposed to kill kidney stones in incredibly safe way. As a good utilitarian, I bought some just for the ~1% chance. But supposedly its taste is not for everyone. Let's see.

[silverspawn]

hm tastes earth-y. Not as bad as I was expecting.

[silverspawn]

now that the pokedex is complete, time to catch the real interesting pokemon.

[silverspawn]

[silverspawn]

[Awaclus]

So Chanca Piedra is a tea