https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK499956/

Homeopathy is basically mistake proof compared to real medicine, including a doctor visit. For a sufficiently minor ailment, avoiding risk of a potentially lethal mistake is just safer.

  1) written words,
  2) models of math / RL / materials science,
  3) some smaller, formalized space like the game space of chess,

I’m morbidly curious what the world’s various intelligence (espionage) outfits have attempted, studied, and concluded in terms of manipulating large numbers of people via the internet.

Many negative tropes I see repeated ubiquitously online make me think about mass demoralization, anger, hopelessness, etc.

I realize this may seem off topic to some, this is just where my mind goes when I see a title like this one.

Edited

https://paulgraham.com/useful.html

In my experience, you need to keep a human in the loop. This implies that you can't get the technology to scale, but I'm optimistic because LLMs have rapidly gotten better at following directions while I've been using them over the last six months.

Summarization is probably the clearest strength of LLMs over a human. With ever-growing context windows, summarizing books in one shot becomes feasible. Most books can be summarized in one sentence, though the most useful, information-dense ones cannot.

I had Gemini 1.5 Pro summarize an old book titled Natural Hormonal Enhancement yesterday. Having just read the book, the result was acceptable.

https://hawleypeters.com/summary-of-natural-hormonal-enhance...

For information-dense books, it seems clear to me that chatting with the book is the way to go. I think there's promise to build a competent agent for this kind of use case. Imagine gathering 15 papers and then chatting about their contents with an agent with queries like:

What's the consensus? Where do these papers diverge in their conclusions? Please translate this passage into plain English.

I haven't done this myself, but I have a hard time imagining such an agent being useless. Perhaps this is a failure of imagination on my part.

The brightest spot in my experimentation is [Cursor](https://cursor.sh). It's good for little dev tasks like refactoring a small block of code and chatting about how to use vim. I imagine it'd be able to talk about how to set up various configs, particularly if you @ the documentation, a feature that it supports, including [adding documentation](https://docs.cursor.sh/features/custom-docs).

Edit: I think a lot of disappointment comes from these kinds of tools not being AGI, or a replacement for a human that does some repetitive task. They magnify the power of somebody that's already curious and driven. They still empower lazy, disengaged users, but with goals like doing the bare minimum, and avoiding work altogether, these tools cannot help one accomplish much of use.

Both spent about two decades living in near poverty and only recently experienced financial success.

I don’t believe telling either of them to switch strategies would have been helpful.

We could infer from these two cases that “don’t give up” is the unifying factor, and that that’s helpful advice. I think history is littered with counter examples. Giving up may not be psychologically healthy (or advisable), but advising somebody “don’t give up” can still be cruel and unhelpful. Resisting the urge to give advice may be kindest.

I suspect most advice broadcast on the internet does more to inflate the author’s reputation than to help the audience. Even if this is true, it doesn’t rule out the possibility of a small quantity of exceptional advice having an outsized positive impact that outweighs the over abundance of reputation inflating advice.

Edit for pedantry reasons: *prepared as a beverage

- Being anti-mimetic means having the freedom to counteract negative forms of mimetic desire that lead to unhealthy obsessions and never-satisfied striving.

- Anti-mimetic actions are a sign of contradiction to a culture that likes to float downstream.

- Scheduling activities at off-peak times can make experiences less stressful and more enjoyable.

- Reading books that challenge your views can broaden your perspective.

- Filtering feedback and only taking what you need helps you move forward, not live in the past.

- Investing in deep silence can help people embrace their purpose and reduce chasing bad ideas.

- Setting up an environment away from mimetically popular locations can help escape negative forces of mimesis.

- Speaking the truth, even when inconvenient, is foundational to living an anti-mimetic life.

- Developing the skill of de-escalation is important but rarely possessed.

- Discovering and living out your personal calling helps you navigate the mimetic noise of the world.

Looking over the points, it almost feels like the source material might have been generated by a language model in the first place. It’s a bunch of buzzwords and typical listicle-style advice tied to “anti-memisis” :/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

The way you react to that is pretty rude.

It's not a medical problem.

I'm just tall and small cars are the wrong size for my body. Like choosing a piece of clothing, the solution is to choose a vehicle that fits my body.

I mean, I could try to have surgery to change my height, but that's wrongheaded, right?

I mean, pedestrians do, right? I guess it depends on the local driving culture.

My best friend is blind, and this is precisely how he feels trying to navigate the world.

But yeah, living in America, car ownership seems unavoidable for most people in most areas.

Edit, more context: I've routinely gotten in and out of small sedans all my life. When I was younger, this wasn't much of a problem, but now that I'm in my thirties, it's become very frustrating and dibilitating.