Annotated Bibliography

Welcome

• Welcome! This website is My public tab manager, or An annotated bibliography of my life, or An ongoing experiment with modes of relating to the world of knowledge and information. Expand the next bullet point to learn more about the philosophy of it, or just look around.
• A note on philosophy
  • This site is meant to embody a system of engaging with information that centers around the separation of information curation from information consumption. There are several good reasons to separate these activities:
    • Curating information and consuming information are activities that engage different modes of attention. Doing the activities jointly entails jumping back and forth between these different modes, which can limit the degree to which we can sink into either one.
      • When we curate, we are often thinking about the big, global picture of how a domain of ideas is interconnected. This is a zooming out, an expansion.
      • When we consume, we are often focusing in on a detailed story, narrative, or explanation. We are asked not to think about connections between a large set of ideas but to engage in explicit reasoning about a small one. This is a zooming in, a contraction.
    • If we fail to separate curation from consumption, we might indeed find that we mostly only do one thing, which is consume. When we consume without curating, then our consumption patterns will be more unreflective, more imposed on us by external forces.
    • When we consciously exercise in a conscious step of curation, we gain the benefit that in the spare moments where there is not enough time to settle in to the zoomed out, big picture of our lives and perceive a direction in the content we wish to consume, we can still make progress in a direction that we have previously laid out in a moment when such contemplation was possible.
  • To facilitate this separation, the site has a couple distinct ways of presenting content:
    • Outlines: These are where the products of curation live. Outlines are meant to help convey the structure or “gestalt” of a collection of a collection of documents. Nodes within outlines are sometimes contracted by default to keep “detail-level” data from interfering with this big picture presentation.
    • Annotations: These are pages are meant to contain summaries, reflections, responses, or extensions—artifacts of the consumption of information. Annotations can be attached to nodes within an outline.
    • Additionally, there are roll pages which collect in chronological order annotations to a given outline.
  • What’s here is a very much minimal, (almost) viable feature set. I’d like to only invest additional time into this project once I’ve validated it by actually finding it useful.
• Development
  • [x] Automatically generate a persistent item id, e.g. by hashing or abbreviating the item contents. Add button to copy link to node to clipboard to facilitate linking to nodes.
  • [x] Show when a contracted node has an annotation
  • [ ] Expand to and highlight the node linked in query string. Fix scrolling to node
  • [ ] Store node contracted/expanded status for a given user in browser data
  • [ ] Improve the embedded annotation display
  • [ ] Build out roll pages

Reading Material

• Bookish Stuff
• Postrationality Stuff
  • Frameworks
  • Practices
  • Heuristics and Discursive Writings
• Metacrisis, meaning crisis, game theory, blockchain stuff
• AI Stuff
  • Learning theory
  • Reinforcement learning
  • Causal Learning
  • Deep Learning Theory
  • Mechanistic interpretability
  • Alignment
• Math
• Physics, etc.
• Stuff of Life

Reading Log

• Queued
• Reading
  • Bookish Stuff / Radical Honesty
  • Meta/meaningcrisis, game theory, blockchain / Awakening from the meaning crisis
  • Bookish Stuff / Buddhism without beliefs
• Read (See all)
  • Heuristics and Discursive Writings / The fine art of opportunism

    Some quotes: “Perhaps the single biggest barrier to opportunistic behaviors is a sort of puritanism drilled into us by most cultures that an outcome is not won fairly if it is won without an effort proportionate to its value. Gamblers are not respected in any culture. Not even smart gamblers who learn to count the cards at blackjack.” “Burst. If all your work disciplines were acquired through a moral ethic and a sense of static work-life balance, you won’t be able to do this.

    Continue reading
  • Meta/meaningcrisis, game theory, blockchain / Attractors in the Space of Mind Architectures and the Super Cooperation Cluster

    This is sort of how the argument comes across to me: There is some most powerful and agentic thing in the universe; let’s call this God. One way that you could be powerful and agentic is by being a super-cooperator. Being a super-cooperator might also make you very wise (and forgiving, etc). Therefore, God must be very wise and forgiving. There’s a bit of a logical problem with this posing of it, which is apparent if we look at the implications being asserted:

    Continue reading
  • Meta/meaningcrisis, game theory, blockchain / Attractors in the Space of Mind Architectures and the Super Cooperation Cluster

    When you mix together Is, Ought, Darwinism, and the idea of a Super Cooperation Cluster, this is what comes to mind more me: It is not at all obvious to me that, at the level of “is”, something like a blissful, godlike, super cooperation cluster must arise. The overarching narrative of collaboration wins over defection seems a bit overly simplistic and fails to take into account all of the local incentives which lead to game-theoretic instability.

    Continue reading