Bets & Wagers

ARCHIVE

£25. COMPLETE

  • [[IMG_771232629E50-1.jpeg]] of bet
  • [[IMG_2459.png]] of proof
  • Objective? Fasting. 20 to 4. 30 days.
  • Timeframe? 01.11.24 -> 30.11.24
  • Constraints? Water, black tea, green tea, matcha. (during the 20 hour timeframe)
  • Why? toy-experiment wrt my focus/concentration stablility when fasting.
  • Updates?
    • 29.11.24 1819. What a pleasure it has been to follow through with this. Will record some lessons that I took away from the experience.
  • Lessons Learned?
    • Break fast initially with small portion of protein. 300-500 kcal.
    • Space out foods with 1000kcal max per portion.
    • Too-restricted for my calorie intake — I would propose this to somebody with a sedimentary lifestyle ie low kcal maintenance.
    • Eat slow, chew slow — to avoid bloating and gas
    • Finish eating a minimum of 2h before cycling

£50. COMPLETE

  • [[IMG_CFADF83F0E97-1.jpeg]] of bet
  • [[20241129183109.png]] of proof
  • Objective? Finish Alignment components section of Victoria Krakovna 24 papers/articles/blog posts. Thats roughly half a paper a day: seems very manageable.
  • Constraints? Must produce a great distillation. so good that you are proud enough to publish it to personal site.
  • Timeframe? Before 31.12.24
  • Why? Lacking background knowledge for these ideas, they are being thrown around and i need to brush up on it urgently.
  • Updates?
    • 14.11.24 0940. Rather than providing a isolated review of every individual paper, it would be much better for me to give broader literature reviews of that given topic. My reasoning for this is as follows: What style of learning are you trying to promote? Higher-order thinking, which requires the process of connecting different concepts and having a map of it. This is difficult to do when you are writing a review for each and every paper where you are repeating yourself a ton (albeit, this has merit for the fact that it is essentially free-recall).
    • 14.11.24 1200. Rather than staying isolated to the resources that are provided in the gsheet, you can expand outside of it. This will cost you time initially but will pay its dividends because it will form your landscape for the topic
    • 20.11.24 1654. Why I think that this will be a success. The papers are condensed to approx. 5 pages of actual material (albeit some are 80+ pages, this is irrelevant citations etc.). This means that they are small-chunks that I have to pick at and they require a deep understanding to garner the core contributions. It doesn’t take more than 1h30m -> 2h30m to complete each paper in this task. The pressure that I put on myself knowing that Im only giving myself that small window (few hours) to work on the paper and that I won’t be returning to it (only to polish up small details) means that I am able to transition to flow more easily.
    • 21.11.24 16:17. When I do a wager like this in the future. Set actual very specific metrics, i.e complete a distillation, minimum of 300 words, create one implementation for every resource that actually has outputs a working idea, etc.
    • 21.11.24 1843. As much as I might not think that I have made progress in this realm, I have, made significant progress. Take for example that in the 21 days thus far, I have completed 32h of study time. Thats 32/3weeks = 10h30m average a week of deep work! Compare that my previous self who could never think of pursuing something this big!
    • 22.11.24 0826. Create hypothesis’s for what the author will next present. i.e if they make contribution for an improvement on how to do something, envision, visualize, discuss how you would go about doing that thing and problems that you might face along the way. If you spend enough time doing this you will actually develop good intuition/taste for doing research. This also gives you the chance of discovering (but really you are recalling previously read ideas about the problem which were dormant/latent in your mind): beat that active recall!.
      • It is perfectly fine to go into further depths of referenced citations etc, that feel relevant. The key is not to get sucked into a tunnel where you are totally OOD.
    • 28.11.24 0755. Im noticing something beautiful happen while writing reviews for these papers. I notice that when forming summaries I am transferring knowledge through recall from one paper to another, thus drawing comparisons and such.
      • Honestly, the summaries are not my best output, and I would have likely benefited significantly given more patience with delving deeper on these papers. All-in-all, it is a massive leap forward for me to complete a resource in its entirety (before hopping around), so, pat on the back! 🥳
  • Lessons Learned?
    • Other than the insight on current research directions in Alignment, this was a taster for wether I even enjoy the field in the first place.
    • Jujitsu with the resource! Nietzsche, Aristotle and Descartes, are all great because of their ability to critique and question the truth: what is the Truth (ground truth)?