"Applied Rationality Training Regime" Review#5

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 January 30, Review#5. 

   Murphyjitsu with puzzle as form-building toy problem.... a sixth-grade puzzle of filling in a simplified and relabelled periodic table. The puzzle was sent to me, with a separate solution, by a granddaughter who lives a few thousand miles away; so, for me at least, there's the issue of solving it, and there's the much more complex issue of what to say about it. From the end of the day, I see it as a conversation involving Sarah+Jim, my Murphyjitsu team, on both issues; Spider-Duck on the puzzle; Marian on what (not) to say... and my wife, to approve the result. Now I'm wishing I could do it all over again, for "form-building", but I guess what I've spent the last little while on is at least partially just that -- doing it over again in my head, but with better form, with my sub-problems and checklists better organized than they were this morning.  I think I can claim that I'm not just working it as I would have worked it before all this (model "A"), not just working out some self-improvement (model "B"), but working on improving my self-improvement (model "C"), and thus to some extent applying Douglas Engelbart's ABC Model of recursive self-improvement.  Yes, it's his birthday. And yes, I'm aware of the Yudkowsky "Insufficiently Recursive" critique:

1. Engelbart committed the Classic Mistake of AI: underestimating how much cognitive work gets done by hidden algorithms running beneath the surface of introspection, and overestimating what you can do by fiddling with the visible control levers.
2. Engelbart anchored on the way that someone as intelligent as Engelbart would use computers, but there was only one of him - and due to point 1 above, he couldn't use computers to make other people as smart as him.

Those both strike me as legitimate, but OTOH I think that Engelbart's work arguably did start a recursive improvement process in easier/faster creation of each next generation of software leading to a new generation of hardware leading( to opportunities for a new generation of software, and so on. Epistemic status? Well, I'm not confident, but a lot of stuff happens that isn't hidden and without Engelbart, even some of those hidden algorithms would have run quite a bit more slowly. As a graduate student in the UPenn CIS Dept in the late 70s, I think everybody I knew thought Moore's Law would peter out in a while; that came up in discussions of the need for massive parallelism (and proving theorems about massive parallelism, in my case). It didn't peter out. Why did new kinds of circuitry, not just shrunken versions of the old, keep appearing when they were needed? Partly, I think, because interactive software and the mice that helped it squeak did make engineers and even physicists effectively just a bit more intelligent than they would have been without it. I'd really like to have a better sense of how strongly I should believe that, if at all, but it's not something I'm going to work on now. Tomorrow ends the month.