Smashter's Great Adventure

Where are you and where are you going?
Smashter
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by Smashter »

Scott 2 wrote:
Mon Mar 11, 2024 8:40 am
Work, don't work. It's all good.
Thanks for this perspective. I need this to fully sink in.

I would be doing grocery delivery if I was single. DW truly enjoys going to the store and picking produce out in person. My brother is the same way. That's something that makes no sense to me.

Smashter
Posts: 545
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Location: Midwest USA

Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by Smashter »

I fed Claude Opus an HTML file with all my answers on Quora over the last 12 years (46,000 words.)

I gave it the following prompt
what can you tell me about the author of these posts? can you take a guess at their myers briggs personality type? can you offer this person any words of wisdom for living a happy life? can you identify any patterns in their thinking that are not serving them well?
After a couple minutes, it responded:
Based on the series of answers provided by Smashter, here are some insights and observations about the author:

Personality Type:
From the posts, Smashter comes across as an ENTP (Extroverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving) personality type on the Myers-Briggs scale. Some key traits that point to this:
  • He tends to be analytical, questioning established ideas and ways of doing things.

    He seems extroverted and enjoys novel experiences and interactions with others.

    He focuses more on possibilities and theories rather than just concrete facts.

    He appears adaptable and open to changing his mind based on new information.

    However, personality typing has limitations, so this is just a tentative guess based on limited information.
Patterns of Thinking:
A few patterns emerge in Smashter's posts that may not always be serving him well:
  • He tends to idealize certain paths in life (e.g. focusing solely on basketball in college) at the expense of being more well-rounded. This tunnel vision mentality caused him to feel lost at times.

    He displays black-and-white thinking in some cases, fully buying into one perspective before swinging to the opposite view after being exposed to a compelling counterargument. Integrating nuance and holding multiple perspectives could be beneficial.

    He seems prone to self-judgment and regret when reflecting on perceived mistakes or missed opportunities from his past. Practicing more self-compassion would likely increase his happiness.

    His analytical mind sometimes leads him to rationalize or explain away his gut ethical concerns (e.g. working as an agent's assistant despite moral qualms). Staying true to his values is important.
Words of Wisdom:
Here are a few pieces of advice for Smashter as he navigates life:
  • Your worth as a person is not defined by external markers of success. You have inherent value regardless of accolades, job titles, salaries, etc.

    Root your self-esteem in your character and how you treat others.

    Keep investing in self-awareness and personal growth. Therapy, journaling, meditation, and heart-to-heart talks with loved ones can all help you understand yourself on a deeper level. This will empower you to make wiser choices.

    When in doubt, bet on yourself and what lights you up inside. Playing it safe and following a traditional path is tempting, but you seem to thrive when taking bold leaps in a direction that fascinates you. Let your curiosity guide you.

    Forgive yourself for your missteps and have faith in your ability to learn and do better going forward. You're human, and your past does not determine your future. Look ahead with hope.

    Prioritize relationships, experiences and making a positive impact over chasing status and material success. Focus on what will matter to you in the end - the people you lifted up and the moments of awe and connection.
In summary, Smashter comes across as a highly intelligent, analytical and driven person who is willing to question the status quo in pursuit of a life true to himself. If he leads with his curiosity, treats himself with compassion and defines success on his own terms, he will likely find his way to enduring happiness and fulfillment. The twists and turns of his journey will simply make him wiser and his story richer in the end.
Seems pretty accurate to me. Though I certainly wouldn't qualify as "highly intelligent" on these boards :)

The advice does feel a bit generic, but that's kind of how advice goes. It's interesting how it really leans into the "experiences over things" approach. I wonder if that's become such commonplace advice that it would be really hard to move it away from default suggesting that. Or maybe I don't give it enough credit, and if I'd written a bunch of posts about how I was broke, jaded and disillusioned after chasing experiences it would tell me to get grounded, acquire simple things, and save money.

I assume every LLM has already scraped all of Quora, hence my lack of concern with giving Claude all this personal info. Don't these models "read" literally everything on the internet daily, or something like that? Cat's out the bag now, I guess.

I think doing some chat therapy with one of these systems would be super interesting. I've had nothing but frustrating experiences with human therapists.

jacob
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by jacob »

Smashter wrote:
Sun Mar 24, 2024 10:29 am
I think doing some chat therapy with one of these systems would be super interesting.
Certainly better than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA ... I suspect one problem with an internet based analysis is that it might miss someone's development (if any) over time. I for one would prefer not to have my present self analyzed based on my writings from 15 years ago ;-P (I lean more king than prince these days. Trying to protect my domain rather than conquering new ones. I'd likely tell my young whippersnapper self to slow down and be less annoying.) OTOH, I'd expect a human analyst to be projecting either their own presumptions or the cultural presumptions too much. The "words of wisdom" was pretty generic blah. Not particularly directed at ENTP. (I do think ENTP was a fairly good call though.)

But yeah, much like simple decision trees tend to be better at medical diagnosis that meat-based doctors, I could see how psychological diagnoses would be aided by this. In particular, an AI might easily understand people better (based on their writing) than they understand themselves. To what degree would that pass a Turing test?

daylen
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by daylen »

Opus doesn't have access to any data beyond august 2023 (it will tell you if you ask it). Real-time updating is a feature the creators of these models are working towards. I have had about a hundred conversations now with various models and see them like an arc of opening and closing entropic pockets. Meaning that I often get more interesting results by (1) starting slow, priming, and leaving the objective open (2) climaxing with difficult and diverse questions that are often interdisciplinary (3) circle back around to what was primed in at the beginning and try countering the bias of the climax.

The basic idea is that a conversational arc can deviate away from what might otherwise be an averaged, boring response.

Smashter
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by Smashter »

jacob wrote:
Sun Mar 24, 2024 11:06 am
To what degree would that pass a Turing test?
This system (Claude 3 Opus) easily passes a Turing Test in my opinion. When I tell it to be conversational and act like a friend it sounds perfectly human. It'll start sentences with phrases like, "For sure, I totally hear what you're saying, but here's the thing..." which is a level of human-soundingness I hadn't been able to get other systems to achieve.

And that's a good point about how it might overindex on very old writing when doing it's analysis. At some point I might feed it some of my fresher blog posts and see what it says.

I thought about asking you, a myers briggs expert who has also had extensive chats with me, if you agreed with the analysis. So thanks for chiming in on that.

@Daylen, thanks for those tips!

I will have to give that a try. But I'm still confused as to what you mean by:
daylen wrote:
Sun Mar 24, 2024 11:09 am
...like an arc of opening and closing entropic pockets.
Your explanation afterward is clear, but why use that language? What is an entropic pocket? The mind of Daylen works in mysterious ways and I'm always curious to learn more :D

daylen
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by daylen »

The space of all possible responses or essays is huge, the majority of which we would find gibberish. What these models train on is a small fraction of what is possible. This training attempts to capture the low-entropy sea of order and predictability. The water we swim in. [High] entropic pockets appear in this sea as disordered and unpredictable mixing. For instance, a chemistry textbook is fairly low-entropy and the ERE book is fairly low-entropy, but the combination of a chemistry textbook and the ERE book could form a relatively [higher-]entropic pocket ripe for the exploration of novel connections. What does a mad ERE chemist look like?

I tend to see culture inclusive of other languages as a fluid sea of potential. Some areas more ordered or solid-like than others, continuously dissolving, mixing, and re-crystallizing.

I am not sure where I initially heard the idea of "entopic pockets" or whether I just made it up but here is what Claude has to say:

what are entropic pockets?
Entropic pockets, also known as entropy-stabilized alloys, are a novel class of materials that consist of multiple elements mixed in high concentrations, close to equiatomic ratios. The term "entropic" refers to the high configurational entropy of these alloys, which stabilizes the solid solution phase and prevents the formation of intermetallic compounds.

Key characteristics of entropic pockets include:

1. High entropy: The alloys contain at least five principal elements, each with an atomic concentration between 5% and 35%, leading to a high configurational entropy of mixing.

2. Solid solution formation: The high entropy of mixing favors the formation of simple solid solution phases (e.g., face-centered cubic, body-centered cubic, or hexagonal close-packed) rather than complex ordered intermetallic compounds.

3. Unique properties: Entropic pockets exhibit a combination of desirable properties, such as high strength, high hardness, excellent thermal stability, good wear resistance, and corrosion resistance, making them attractive for various applications.

4. Sluggish diffusion: The presence of multiple principal elements with different atomic sizes leads to severe lattice distortion and reduced atomic diffusion, resulting in enhanced high-temperature stability and creep resistance.

5. Tailorable properties: The composition of entropic pockets can be adjusted to optimize specific properties for targeted applications.

Entropic pockets have garnered significant attention in recent years due to their potential for developing new materials with unprecedented combinations of properties. They find applications in various fields, including aerospace, energy, transportation, and manufacturing industries, where high-performance materials are required to operate under extreme conditions.
what might entropic pockets refer to in the realm of culture?
In the realm of culture, the concept of "entropic pockets" can be used as a metaphor to describe certain cultural phenomena or spaces characterized by a high degree of diversity, randomness, or unpredictability. These pockets can be seen as localized areas within a larger cultural context where various elements, ideas, or practices coexist and interact in unconventional or unexpected ways.

Some possible interpretations of entropic pockets in culture include:

1. Subcultures: Entropic pockets may refer to subcultures or alternative communities that diverge from mainstream cultural norms and values. These groups often embrace diverse and unconventional lifestyles, beliefs, or artistic expressions.

2. Creative spaces: Artists' studios, experimental theaters, or underground music venues can be seen as entropic pockets where different artistic styles, genres, and ideas mix and interact, leading to innovative and unexpected creations.

3. Multicultural neighborhoods: Urban areas where people from various ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds coexist and interact can be considered entropic pockets. These spaces foster cultural exchange, hybridization, and the emergence of new cultural forms.

4. Online communities: Some online spaces, such as forums, social media groups, or virtual worlds, can function as entropic pockets where people with diverse backgrounds and interests come together, leading to the cross-pollination of ideas and the formation of unexpected connections.

5. Festivals and events: Certain festivals, carnivals, or gatherings that bring together people from different walks of life and celebrate diversity, creativity, and unconventional expressions can be seen as temporary entropic pockets within a larger cultural landscape.

In these cultural entropic pockets, the interaction and mixing of diverse elements can lead to the emergence of novel and unpredictable cultural forms, practices, and ideas. These spaces often challenge established norms and hierarchies, fostering creativity, innovation, and cultural evolution.
Signs of convergent mixing. :)

jacob
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by jacob »

I'll do a shorter one. An entropic pocket is the same as what permaculturists call edge-spaces. A space of high-interaction between differences.

It helps to understand what entropy actually is. Lets metaphorically consider rolling two dies. The result of adding can be anywhere between 2 and 12. Some combinations will be more probable than others, but if all you had access to what the sum, the most likely combination would be 7 although other combinations would also be possible. Why 7? Because the average value of a roll is 3.5 (=(1+2+3+4+5+6)/2) and you got two die. Now suppose you had a thousand dies or a gazillion. What's the average roll. It's still 3.5 but the chance of outliers just got relatively MUCH smaller. Rolling two 1s with two dies happen... Rolling a thousand 1s with a thousand dies is very very unlikely. If you roll a thousand dies and add them up, you'll be close to 3500 much of the time.

Now here's where the mind-blowing happens. Suppose you just knew the sum total and not how it came about via the individual addition, you'd ascribe this unseen combinatorial dynamics to some other quantity. Historically, that quantity was called "temperature". Statistical physics essential associates what is commonly associated with the measurement of temperature with the most likely sum of molecular dice rolls. Basically how fast molecules are most likely to move on average ... if there are enough molecules they stick close to the average ... so we can have a stable measurement with an instrument known as a thermometer.

Now enter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon

Suppose you added a bunch of other dies with a different temperature to the first set. Eventually, they'd combine and reach the same temperature. But what happens initially is that there are two different temperatures. There are various theories for dealing with how these two sets eventually reach equilibrium. Heat transfer, conductivity, convection ... all simplifications of how molecules interact.

An entropic pocket is essentially a case of that for behavior that is more complicated than molecular dynamics. It's a fairly basic idea with a fancy new term. What happens when two different subdomains merge. Like how the the distribution of sums chance when adding 500 20-sided dies to your collection of 1000 six-sided dies.

Okay... that wasn't that short :-P

Smashter
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Re: Smashter's Great Adventure

Post by Smashter »

Thanks guys, I think I grok it now. I didn't expect to get so interested in the Maxwell's Demon wikipedia page. I liked reading about how many extremely smart and driven people have grappled with that thought experiment over the years.

From Daylen's Claude answer (my bolding):
Online communities: Some online spaces, such as forums, social media groups, or virtual worlds, can function as entropic pockets where people with diverse backgrounds and interests come together, leading to the cross-pollination of ideas and the formation of unexpected connections.
I can think of a place like that 8-)

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