Atoms vs BitsModify

2025-01-29 16:37:01

If there's one thing people love to see on a blog, it's self-indulgent meta-posting about the process of blogging – you're welcome.

Pre-scheduling posts is a psychological trick to maximize the chance that this blog continues to exist in future. Basically: most blogs seem to die because the authors hit some kind of life-or-writing block, where they fail to write anything for a number of months. If they don't pre-schedule any posts, that means the blog doesn't publish for a few months.

It's already hard in general to re-start a habit you've gotten out of, as anyone who's stopped going to the gym for a bit can attest, but I think it's extra-hard to re-start publishing after a long break: once a blog has been dead for a while, authors feel like their next post has to be "good enough" to justify suddenly troubling people's inboxes again.

At ATVBT, our lack of abilities and therefore low standards for Good Enough are already a bulwark against this issue, but pre-scheduling posts is another trick we keep up our sleeves.

Pre-scheduling posts has a definite Ants vs Crickets, storing-up-your-grain element that truly is difficult to manage psychologically. While you're on a writing kick and writing 2 posts per week, it's hard to imagine you'll ever hit a drought, so most authors either just pre-schedule minimally (one post per week till they run out of posts) or send out bonus posts while they have them.

But anyone who read about Joseph and his multicoloured dreamcoat as a child should know that this behaviour results in starvation and/or humiliating conversations with your little brother. You really should save up some poasting for a rainy day.

As a result, most of the time this blog has a bunch of time-insensitive content scheduled ~monthly for ~six months into the future. I guess the really smart thing would be to space the scheduled content even more – one per month for 3 months, then every couple months for 6 months, then every three months after that. [EDIT: when you say "I should really do X instead of Y," very often you should just immediately go and do X, so I went and re-scheduled our posts to taper out more at the end.]

In the meantime, we'll probably write other posts that are either more time-sensitive or that we're more excited about, and slot those in before the pre-scheduled ones. So your experience as a reader will be (theoretically) weekly newsletters, right to your inbox. But even if we fail to write anything new in 2025, we can be confident you'll at least get some atoms and bits in your inbox throughout the year.

My one great fear about this system is that eventually, by accident, one of these posts will be incredibly topical and in very poor taste unintentionally. If there has been a national scandal about pre-scheduled email systems immediately before you read this piece, I apologise – it was not intentional, this was written last year.

[edit: I apparently wrote a very similar post two years ago, and then forgot about it. Fortunately I believe in spaced repetition through newsletters].

2025-01-22 17:37:49

Recently I had to make a big life decision ("one way door", as the kids say) under a huge amount of stress. I would wake up at night with my stomach aching and be unable to fall back to sleep because the thought of this situation just latched onto my mind, like some kind of Lovecraftian octopus reaching its tentacles into my brain.

I was very aware that my brain wasn't functioning well, but that also that I wasn't going to get a new brain (literally or metaphorically) before the deadline for this decision was up.

As best I can tell, there are only three options for what to do in this situation:

1) Decide based on gut instinct: your brain is shutting down, but your gut is still functional.

One downside of gut-decisioning is that your gut is in (literal or metaphorical) fight or flight mode, and I suspect that whether your gut says "stay and fight" or "fly away" is more of a default property of your character than a specific response to the details of your situation.

Another downside is that it's hard to tell if your gut is wisely responding to the long-term implications of your current stress reaction, or just... trying to avoid your current stress situation. I think it's possible that your gut would scream Get Out just to avoid acute but short-term pain, even at the cost of the long-term best solution.

2) Defer to a friend: your brain is shutting down, but your friends still have them.

If there's someone in your life you trust enough to have context and share your values and have your best interest at hard, and who has presumably already heard you complain about the situation at length, you can just... ask them what to do and then defer to it.

I think this only works if you're actually so certain in this person that you can defer to them without re-analyzing and evaluating their conclusions, at which point you're not really deferring but just using their opinion as one extra input for your brain and/or gut.

I sometimes suspect that, since other people's decisions are so easy and obvious where your own decisions are impossible, I'd be better off swapping life-decisions with my most trusted friends and let someone else "pilot" my life without my fears or sloths or insecurities getting a say. Of course I have had this conversation with friends over the years, and of course I've never actually followed through with it.

3) Follow a principle: your brain is shutting down, but your eternal principles are eternal.

In the moment of great stress, I felt like I re-appreciated the value of having and hewing to eternal principles. Of course there's still some subjectivity in how you apply the principle to your situation, but I couldn't help feeling like a person with a clearer and sharper set of Predefined Principles than I have would have been able to respond to the stress by saying: "well, I always X" or "well, I never Y" and then make the decision that way. (As always, you wish you'd stored grain while the going was good, but when the going is good who's thinking about grain-storage?)

A funny thing is, you also have these same options when making normal decisions under non-stressful conditions. In that case you do also have a fourth option of listening to your rational brain, but your rational brain is probably still limited (though not as limited) and you might still be better off using one of the other three.

2025-01-15 17:11:39

I generally hate advice, and think most of it is bad and inapplicable.

Perhaps relatedly, I love trying to come up with advice-posts that I think are actually applicable and helpful for, if not most people in general, at least most people reading this blog right now.

One of those things is: if you haven't already, you should probably write a will. Right now.

One problem with a lot of advice is that if something is so unambiguously worth-doing, and not actually that hard to do, why would the reader not have done it already? In this case, I think I have a pretty simple explanation: most people are very avoidant of:

- tasks that are bureaucratic and legal
- the idea of death
- large amorphous tasks with no clear starting point
- tasks that involve hiring a professional
- tasks that seem far off, or low-probability, even if very important

Writing a will, people think, combines all of these avoidant properties and more. But I would argue that, for many of us, it's not actually crucial that a will be legally watertight – I strongly believe my next-of-kin would like to know my wishes and will follow them best as they can whether or not they're legally required to, so it's basically just kind to have something written that they can follow.

Here is a googledoc you can duplicate to start you off. The first tab is, I think, the literal briefest thing that could plausibly be called a [non legally binding!] will; in my view, you should just go to that tab and fill it in right now, without really thinking too much. It is MUCH easier to edit and improve a thing that already exists than to write something from scratch.

Again: if you just write some stuff in a googledoc, this is almost certainly not a legally valid will; the point here is just that, assuming your spouse/children/parents/other legal next-of-kin are basically predisposed to follow your wishes, just writing down your wishes is already a kind thing to do for them no matter the legal ramifications. So go do it!

I'm hesitant to even write the next steps after this, in case this allows you to procrastinate, because I truly think just "writing down roughly where you'd like your assets to go" has a significant share of the benefit of writing a will at all. But essentially, once you have something on digital paper, I think your next steps should be
1) fill out a more-fleshed-out version using a boilerplate template generated by your friendly neighbourhood LLM (see example here)
2) print that out, get two adults who are not beneficiaries to sign it, and keep physical copies in various places.

In this case, there's a greater chance that the thing you end up with could be a legal will, but this is extremely not legal advice. If it turns out your will is not legally binding, your assets will [most likely] instead go to your "default" next of kin, so if you have a lot of assets and/or a bad relationship with your immediate next-of-kin, you may well want to do something different.

But for many people in many cases I suspect a written, signed document expressing your desires would be go a long way towards determining where your assets go, whether or not that document would stand up under full legal scrutiny: basically, if the legal default recipients of your assets are inclined to follow your wishes then it's now very clear to everyone what your wishes were, whether or not the thing is watertight enough to ensure those wishes happen directly.

To end on a more uplifting note: once I overcame the various ick fields around the task of writing a will in general, I found it quite helpful and interesting just to ask myself: what would I want do with my money if I were no longer here? Which led to the obvious question: why am I not doing more of that with my money right now? Thinking about the impact I wanted to have with my life eventually helped me change what I did with my life today.

p.s. cannot stress enough how much this article is psychological but not legal advice. A non-legally-valid will will not be legally valid, and may cause your inheritors to pay more taxes even if they voluntarily decide to follow your wishes. But in my opinion it's always easier to have a polished v2 once you've made a rough v1, and writing something non-legally-binding down is better than thinking "I should really contact a lawyer I guess" and then procrastinating forever on that. So if you currently have no will, go here and make a version 0.

2025-01-08 17:36:24

There's a metaphysical claim about reincarnation: that we have a non-physical essence (aka a soul) that is reborn in new physical forms after our deaths. I don't think this is the kind of claim you can argue about successfully in a blogpost. What I want to advocate for is the personal benefit of taking (a certain kind of) reincarnation as a model of the world, a poetic belief if you will, whether or not you believe it literally.

To me, reincarnation gives an unusually motivating explanation and action-plan for everyday trials and troubles. I'm sure this has limits; I've been very fortunate lately and I don't doubt there are quantities of suffering at which I would not personally find the idea of reincarnation much succor. But for the kinds of medium-sized troubles that every life contains – rejections, reversals, disappointments, distress – I find the notion that "this soul is on earth right now in part to learn a lesson from this trouble" much more satisfying (and more productive) than the alternatives.[^1]

First, it implies a serious responsibility to learn from things that happen. So this is different from the claim/philosophy that "sometimes seemingly-bad things are a blessing in disguise"; rather, you have a kind of duty/purpose to learn from bad things and figure out some way that you can improve based on them. It centres learning and improving as a life purpose.

This is especially true for things where you keep running into "the same kind of trouble." Again, I think there are limits to this and I don't think this belief would be helpful or fruitful in every version of this experience. But at the same time, I think most of us are blind in certain ways to our own part in certain kinds of recurring medium-sized troubles in our life, and I think the framing that "maybe I chose this life specifically because I needed to learn about this big recurring challenge in it" is helpful for making that feel like an opportunity rather than a curse.

Another benefit of reincarnation-thinking is that it highlights the ways that there are probably other angles to everything that seems obvious t0 you, and that part of your goal in this life should be to try to understand things from those other perspectives. I think it makes it easier to perform that mental maneuver beloved of Dale Carnegie and various others of understanding that if you were in some other person's shoes, you would do as they did.

I previously found it hard to believe this because, you know, when someone is being an asshole I think they're being an asshole, and have every opportunity not to be an asshole, same as I do. But I think the reincarnation model can provide some kind of grip on an idea that's a little different, namely: if, in a previous life, you were too strict, and unsympathetic to the loose ones in your life, you may have now chosen a life where you'd be too loose, and chafe against the strictures of the strict ones. I find this somehow much more helpful in fostering empathy.

I can't pretend I have achieved anything like sanguinity in this life, myself, so who am I to talk.[^2] Still, I'm much closer to inner peace with this belief than without it. And I think you can get some of the benefit of this belief just by holding the model, whether or not you literally believe it.

[^1]: I think this may be the Ancient Greek model of reincarnation, though I've only ever got that nth hand and I haven't read serious scholarship on it

[^2]: (though I suspect that's one thing I'm here to learn, and that I am driven towards people who do have it, to learn from them).

2025-01-06 16:11:02

One thing I find interesting is thinking about the brains of people smarter than me. There's some sense in which I probably can't model the brains of people smarter than me, because if I could model what they think then I would be as smart as they are. But I suspect that it's like trying to visualise the 4th/5th/6th dimensions: in some sense it's impossible, but there's benefits to trying anyway.[^1]

A claim I've seen is that more intelligent people are able to do more levels of recursion when modelling other people's minds (e.g. from "I believe X" to "I believe that Anna believes that Brian believes that I believe...")

To be clear, I've never seen this claim verified or "proven" in any sense, but it does seem intuitively plausible to me: modelling other minds is cognitively expensive, and I'm willing to believe that every additional level of modelling requires more and more cognitive capacity.

So, for example: level 1 is only modelling your own thoughts, "I believe X", with no model at all of what anyone else believes.

Level 2 is being able to think: "I believe X, but I believe that Anna believes A and that Brian believes B".

Level 3 is reaching: "I believe X, but I believe that Anna believes A, and that Anna believes I believe AX, and that Anna believes Brian believes AB, and I believe Brian believes...."

I'm going to come clean here and say I couldn't figure out the maths myself for this, but our friendly neighbourhood LLM claims the formula is

where P is the number of people and L is the number of levels. Said LLM also generated this table claiming the number operations required for each level and group size is:

If you have a better function (and can check the maths here) I'd be super happy to hear from you, but instinctively this pattern seems approximately right: every additional person and every additional level gets more and more expensive in terms of the operations you need to model everyone in the group.

Where does this leave us in terms of modelling people smarter than ourselves? Intuitively, I think there's a few recommendations.

First, I think we should at least try modelling people to an additional level of depth than we currently do. Perhaps it's not practical or even possible to build out the entire tree, but if you're able to ask yourself "what does my manager believe is happening right now? And what does my CEO believe? And what does my CEO believe I believe?" Call this level 2-and-a-half, or something – it's not a full map of beliefs to a level-3 depth, but it incorporates at least one piece of level 3 modelling for whoever seems most important in your current situation.

Second, I think it's worth trying to figure out the implications of someone modelling to a deeper depth than I am, even if I can't do the modelling myself. What would that person's actions and behavior look like? What would I need to be careful of when interacting with them? What would other people react to?

My guess is that usually the implication of anyone being at a level (or more) deeper than you is just "this person is likely to outplay me in any social-strategic game". Which is not at all a fun thing to feel, but at least is better than having it be true without realising it.

[^1]: Geoffrey Hinton says: "To deal with hyper-planes in a 14-dimensional space, visualize a 3-D space and say 'fourteen' to yourself very loudly. Everyone does it."

2025-01-03 07:09:48

In what currently appears to be two unconnected events, two veterans committed acts of terrorism within just a few days.

The Cybertruck bombing, in particular, is notable because the alleged perpetrator was in the US Army special forces. This suggests two things about him:

1. He underwent a comparatively rigorous psychological evaluation.
2. To the extent that he was exposed to blasts, he would have been more likely to suffer from CTE.

The INVICTA study is currently testing the hypothesis that Special Operations Training is specifically dangerous because of shoulder-fired heavy weapons. Weapons like recoilless rifles and shoulder-fired missiles operate on the backblast principle–blasting propellant from the back of the weapon to fire a projectile from the front of it.

It's suggested that this backblast, close to the operator's head, causes subconcussive injuries that accumulate and eventually lead to CTE.

The perpetrator was 37 years old, only slightly older than the age when CTE symptoms—such as aggression, impulsivity, and suicidal behavior—typically emerge. Since he shot himself in the head and his body was badly burned, a brain autopsy is unlikely to be confirmatory.

However, it’s interesting circumstantial evidence that someone who was initially screened for psychological stability but later underwent training linked to CTE went on to blow himself up at a Trump Hotel in a Cybertruck.