SAMUEL RATNAM

is this working

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ok this will be the 20th writing.

I think this has been a somewhat productive exercise so far. My barrier to writing things that other people will see has reduced. I’m not sure my writing quality has necessarily gotten much better. These writings tend to be much too short and unstructured - which is well suited to my mind tends to function. But I think I would benefit from actually committing to something and editing it from start to finish.

I do think the commitment mechanism is probably quite useful though.

I’m going to start working on a short story here. I will not stop until it’s finished. The notes will be messy and perhaps not the most comprehensible. Sorry.

Knowledge

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Knowledge is mental structure that is isomorphic to reality.

We can never know things as they truly are. We are fed light particles that reflect off surfaces and our brains use this to build an incredibly rich model of our experience. Isn’t it incredible that we can have dreams that are practically indistinguishable from our waking lives? But these models are only models of our experience. The thing producing them is an approximation of reality, simulated inside our brain, optimised to be useful. Reality is far too complex to hold in a brain. So it is a simplification, an abstraction we interact with.

This mental structure is only useful insofar as it can predict future experience. It can do this because it shares structural properties with the structure of reality. Knowledge is structure that mirrors the structure of reality. This enables it to make predictions and understand the world mechanistically, without ever being able to directly interact with it.

If anyone claims that language models don’t ‘truly’ understand the world because they are not embodied and therefore their concepts are not grounded in the world, I think the same equally applies to humans.

How to automate

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Step 1: Do it manually. Enough time that you get a familiarity with the task. Learn the shape of it, pay attention to the edge cases, look for patterns. Record as much data as possible.

Step 2: Once you’ve noticed a pattern, build a system to replicate the manual steps.

Step 3: If the system is capable of operating by itself you’re done, else go back to step 1 but faster.

zone of chaosnormalcy