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Some comments are truncated due to high volume. (⌘F to expand all)
A tricky thing about feedback on LW (or maybe just human nature or webforum nature):
- Post: Maybe there's a target out there let's all go look (50 points)
- Comments: so inspiring! We should all go look!
- Post: What "target" really means (100 points)
- Comments: I feel much less confused, thank you
- Post: I shot an arrow at the target (5 points)
- Comments: bro you missed
- Post: Target probably in the NW cavern in the SE canyon (1 point)
- Comments: doubt it
- Post: Targets and arrows - a fictional allegory (500 points)
- Comments: I am totally Edd in this story
- Post: I hit the target. Target is dead. I have the head. (40 points)
- Comments: thanks. cool.
Basically, if you try to actually do a thing or be particularly specific/concrete then you are held to a much higher standard.
There are some counterexamples. And LW is better than lots of sites.
Nonetheless, I feel here like I have a warm welcome to talk bullshit around the water cooler but angry stares when I try to mortar a few bricks.
I feel like this is almost a good site for getting your hands dirty and getting feedback and such. Just a more positive culture towards actual shots on target would be sufficient I think. Not sure how that could be achieved.
Maybe this is like publication culture vs workshop culture or something.
10
4
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1Unpolished first thoughts:
- Selection effect: people who go to a blog to read bc they like reading, not doing
- Concrete things are hard reads, math-heavy posts, doesn't feel ok to vote when you don't actually understand
- In general easier things have wider audience
- Making someone change their mind is more valuable to them than saying you did something?
- There are many small targets and few big ideas/frames, votes are distributed proportionally
9
1It's not perfect, but one approach I saw on here and liked a lot was @turntrout's MATS team's approach for some of the initial shard theory work, where they made an initial post outlining the problem and soliciting predictions on a set of concrete questions (which gave a nice affordance for engagement, namely "make predictions and maybe comment on your predictions), and then they made a follow-up post with their actual results. Seemed to get quite good engagement.
A confounding factor, though, was that was also an unusually impressive bit of research.
At least as far as safety research goes, concrete empirical safety research is often well received.
I think you're directionally correct and would like to see lesswrong reward concrete work more. But I think your analysis is suffering from survivorship bias. Lots of "look at the target" posts die on the vine so you never see their low karma, and decent arrow-shot posts tend to get more like 50 even when the comments section is empty.
5
I think a large cause might be that posts talking about the target are more accessible to a larger number of people. Posts like List of Lethalities are understandable to people who aren't alignment researchers, while something the original Latent Adversarial Training post (which used to be my candidate for the least votes:promising ratio post) is mostly relevant to and understandable by people who think about inner alignment or adversarial robustness. This is to say nothing of posts with more technical content.
This seems like an issue with the territory that there are far more people who want to read things about alignment than people who work on alignment. The LW admins already try to counter similar effects by maintaining high walls for the garden, and with the karma-weighted voting system. On the other hand, it's not clear that pushing along those dimensions would make this problem better; plausibly you need slightly different mechanisms to account for this. The Alignment Forum sort-of seems like something that tries to address this: more vote balancing between posts about targets and posts about attempts to reach it because of the selection effect.
This doesn't fully address the problem, and I think you were trying to point out the effects of not accounting for some topics having epistemic standards that are easier to meet than others, even when the latter is arguably more valuable. I think it's plausible that's more important, but there are other ways to improve it as well[1].
1. ^
When I finished writing, I realized that what you were pointing out is also somewhat applicable to this comment. You point out a problem, and focus on one cause that's particularly large and hard to solve. I write a comment about another cause that's plausibly smaller but easier to solve, because that meets an easier epistemic standard than failing at solving the harder problem.
4
I certainly see where you are coming from.
One thing that might be cofounding it slightly is that (depending on the target) the reward for actually taking home targets might not be LW karma but something real. So the "I have the head" only gives 40 karma. But the "head" might well also be worth something in the real world, like if its some AI code toy example that does something cool it might lead to a new job. Or if its something more esoteric like "meditation technique improves performance at work" then you get the performance boost.
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Data point: my journeyman posts on inconclusive lit reviews get 40-70 karma (unless I make a big claim and then retract it. Those both got great numbers). But I am frequently approached to do lit reviews, and I have to assume the boring posts no one comments on contribute to the reputation that attracts those.
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Strong agree. I think this is because in the rest of the world, framing is a higher status activity than filling, so independent thinkers gravitate towards the higher-status activity of framing.
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Or independent thinkers try to find new frames because the ones on offer are insufficient? I think this is roughly what people mean when they say that AI is "pre-paradigmatic," i.e., we don't have the frames for filling to be very productive yet. Given that, I'm more sympathetic to framing posts on the margin than I am to filling ones, although I hope (and expect) that filling-type work will become more useful as we gain a better understanding of AI.
2
This response is specific to AI/AI alignment, right? I wasn't "sub-tweeting" the state of AI alignment, and was more thinking of other endeavours (quantified self, paradise engineering, forecasting research).
In general, the bias towards framing can be swamped by other considerations.
3
I see this as occurring with various pieces of Infrabayesianism, like Diffractor's UDT posts. They're dense enough mathematically (hitting the target) which makes them challenging to read... and then also challenging to discuss. There are fewer comments even from the people who read the entire post because they don't feel competent enough to make useful commentary (with some truth behind that feeling); the silence also further making commentation harder. At least that's what I've noticed in myself, even though I enjoy & upvote those posts.
Less attention seems natural because of specialization into cognitive niches, not everyone has read all the details of SAEs, or knows all the mathematics referenced in certain agent foundations posts. But it does still make it a problem in socially incentivizing good research.
I don't know if there are any great solutions. More up-weighting for research-level posts? I view the distillation idea from a ~year ago as helping with drawing attention towards strong (but dense) posts, but it appeared to die down. Try to revive that more?
1
What was the distillation idea from a year ago?
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https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zo9zKcz47JxDErFzQ/call-for-distillers
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It's a lot easier to signal the kind of intelligence that LessWrong values-in-practice by writing a philosophical treatise than by actually accomplishing something.
1[comment deleted]
Where has the "rights of the living vs rights of the unborn" debate already been had? In the context of longevity. (Presuming that at some point an exponentially increasing population consumes its cubically increasing resources.)
7
I couldn't easily remember this, and then tried throwing it into our beta-testing LessWrong-contexted-LLM. (I'm interested in whether the following turned out to be helpful)
(it said more stuff but much of it seemed less relevant)
It pulled in these posts as potentially relevant (some of this doesn't seem like what you meant but filtering it manually didn't feel worth it).
2
Thank you! Seems like this bot works quite well for this task
I wonder how many recent trans people tried/considered doubling down on their assigned sex (eg males taking more testosterone) instead first. Maybe (for some people) either end of gender spectrum is comfortable and being in the middle feels bad¿ Anybody know? Don't want to ask my friends because this Q will certainly anger them
7
If it worked, sounds potentially compatible with whatever the inverse(s) of agender is/are? Can at least say that many cisgender people get hormone therapy when they aren't getting what they would like out of their hormones (i.e., menopause, low testosterone, etc). Hormones do useful things, and having them miscalibrated relative to your preferences can be unpleasant.
It's also not uncommon to try to 'double down' on a quality you're repressing, i.e., if someone's actively trying to be their assigned sex, they may in fact try particularly hard to conform to it, consciously or otherwise. Even if not repressed, I know I've deliberately answered a few challenges in life where I discovered 'this is particularly hard for me' with 'then I will apply additional effort to achieving it', and I'm sure I've also done it subconsciously.
3
Hey, Luke. I don't know if I'm still your friend, but I'm not angered, and I'll bite --- plenty of people I know have tried this. Joining the military is common, although I have no idea if this is to effect hypermasculinity or not (most of my trans friends are dmab.) Janae Marie Kroc is probably the most extreme example I can name, but I expect if you find a forum for exmilitary trans folk somewhere you'll be able to find a lot more data on this.
I think I could argue that in the years I knew you personally (like 2015 to 2017) I was trying to do this in some kind of way. LK was one of the first people I publicly floated my name to --- we were out running around campus, I don't know if you were still dating at the time. I have absolutely no idea if either of you care. N=1.
They are, consciously or not, trying to hide in the closet. This is not the worst idea anyone's ever had, especially in a hostile environment.
I appreciate that you're still working in an environment I gave up on ever making progress in. I just...wasn't equal to it. I hope you're well.
2
Hey!!! Thanks for replying. But did you or anyone you know consider chemical cisgenderization? Or any mention of such in the forums? I would it expect it to be a much stronger effect than eg joining the military. Although I hear it is common for men in the military to take steroids, so maybe there would be some samples there.... I imagine taking cis hormones is not an attractive idea, because if you dislike the result then you're worse off than you started.
(Oh and we were still together then. LK has child now, not sure how that affects the equation.)
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"Chemical cisgenderization" is usually just called "detransition." To do it, you stop taking hormones. Unless you've had the appropriate surgeries (which most of us haven't because it's very expensive) your body will do it by itself.
Transfeminine HRT consists of synthetic estrogen and an anti-androgen of some sort (usually spironolactone or finasteride.) Estrogen monotherapy, in higher doses, is coming more into vogue now that more has been published that suggests it's more effective.
Anyway, I know some people who have tried. I'm told the dysphoria comes right back, worse than ever. I know at least one (AMAB nonbinary) person who actually needed to take low-dose T after their orchiectomy, although the dose was an order of magnitude less than what their body naturally produced, but that's rather an exceptional case.
Actual desistance rates are on the order of a few percent*, and >90% of those are for reasons other than "I'm not actually trans." [0]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8213007/
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Well there's this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.
People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like -- nope, still trans --- after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,
3
Ascertainment bias, of course, because we only see the cases where this did not work, and do not know exactly how many members of e.g. Delta Force were originally in doubt as to their gender. We can know it doesnt work sometimes.
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While I was typing this, quetzal_rainbow made the same point
3
I mean, the problem is if it works we won't hear about such people - they just live happily ever after and don't talk about uncomfortable period of their life.
Is there a good like uh "intro to China" book or YouTube channel? Like something that teaches me (possibly indirectly) what things are valued, how people think and act, extremely basic history, how politics works, how factories get put up, etc etc. Could be about government, industry, the common person, or whatever.. I wish I could be asking for something more specific, but I honestly do not even know the basics.
All I've read is Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China which was quite good although very obsolete. Also it is a comic book.
I'm not much of a reader ...
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I'm a fan of this blog which is mainly translations and commentary on Chinese social media posts but also has some history posts.
2
Thank you!
2
This is so much better than what claude was giving me
It's hard to grasp just how good backprop is. Normally in science you estimate the effect of 1-3 variables on 1-3 outcomes. With backprop you can estimate the effect of a trillion variables on an outcome. You don't even need more samples! Around 100 is typical for both (n vs batch_size)
I wonder how a workshop that teaches participants how to love easy victory and despise hard-fought battles could work
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Give people a long list of tasks, a short time interval, and then reward them based on the number of tasks solved. Repeat until they internalize the lesson that solving a problem quickly is good, spending lots of time on a problem is bad, so if something seems complicated they should ignore it and move on to the next task.
I wonder if a chat loop like this would be effective at shortcutting years of confused effort maybe in research andor engineering. (The AI just asks the questions and the person answers.)
- "what are you seeking?"
- "ok how will you do it?"
- "think of five different ways to do that"
- "describe a consistent picture of the consequences of that"
- "how could you do that in a day instead of a year"
- "give me five very different alternate theories of how the underlying system works"
Questions like that can be surprisingly easy to answer. Just hard to remember to ask.
2
Note that even current LLMs can pretty decently answer all but the first of those as well as ask them.
I notice I strong upvote on LW mobile a lot more than desktop because double-tap is more natural than long-click. Maybe mobile should have a min delay between the two taps?
Is it rude to make a new tag without also tagging a handful of posts for it? A few tags I kinda want:
- explanation: thing explained.
- idea: an idea for a thing someone could do (weaker version of "Research Agenda" tag)
- stating the obvious: pointing out something obviously true but maybe frequently overlooked
- experimental result
- theoretical result
- novel maybe: attempts to do something new (in the sense of novelty requirements for conference publications)
6
Good question! From the Wiki-Tag FAQ:
I believe all tags have to be approved. If I were going through the morning moderation queue, I wouldn't approve an empty tag.
2
At times, I have added tags that I felt were useful or missing, but usually, I add it to at least a few important posts to illustrate. At one time, one of them was removed but a good explanation for it was given.
Zettelkasten in five seconds with no tooling
Have one big textfile with every thought you ever have. Number the thoughts and don't make each thought too long. Reference thoughts with a pound (e.g. #456) for easy search.
I can only find capabilities jobs right now. I would be interested in starting a tiny applied research org or something. How hard is it to get funding for that? I don't have a strong relevant public record, but I did quite a lot of work at METR and elsewhere.
4
It might be easier to try to establish some track record by doing a small research project first. I don't know if you have enough runway for this though.
2
Yeah I just wanted to check that nobody is giving away money before I go do the exact opposite thing I've been doing. I might try to tidy something up and post it first
4
What do you mean by "applied research org"? Like, applied alignment research?
2
Yes.
2
I do think I could put a good team together and make decent contributions quickly
LW mods, please pay somebody to turn every post with 20+ karma into a diagram. Diagrams are just so vastly superior to words.
14
can you demonstrate this for a few posts? (I suspect it will be much harder than you think.)
1
The job would of course be done by a diagramming god, not a wordpleb like me
If i got double dog dared...
4
Link some posts you'd like diagrams of at least, then. If this were tractable, it might be cool. But I suspect most of the value is in even figuring out how to diagram the posts.
1
From the frontpage:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAqqeXcau9y2yiJdi/can-we-build-a-better-public-doublecrux
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lgq2DcuahKmLktDvC/applying-refusal-vector-ablation-to-a-llama-3-70b-agent
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ANGmJnZL2fskHX6tj/dyslucksia
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BRZf42vpFcHtSTraD/linkpost-towards-a-theoretical-understanding-of-the-reversal
Like all of them basically.
Think of it like a TLDR. There are many ways to TLDR but any method that's not terrible is fantastic
maybe you die young so you don't get your descendants sick
I've always wondered why evolution didn't select for longer lifespans more strongly. Like, surely a mouse that lives twice as long would have more kids and better knowledge of safe food sources. (And lead their descendants to the same food sources.) I have googled for an explanation a few times but not found one yet.
I thought of a potential explanation the other day. The older you get, the more pathogens you take on. (Especially if you're a mouse.) If you share a den with your grandkids then you mig...
116
I like this.
Another explanation I have heard:
a popular theory of aging is the mitochrondial theory of aging.
There are several variants of this theory some of which are definitely false, while some are plausibly in sorta-the-direction. It's a big controversy and I'm not an expert yada yada yada. Let me assume something like the following is true: aging is a metabolic phenomena where mitochrondia degrade overtime and at some point start to leak damaging byproducts which is substantially responsible for aging. Mitochrondial DNA have less repair mechanism than nuclear DNA. Over time they accrue mutations that are bad (much quicker than nuclear dna).
Species that reproduce fast & many may select less on (mitochrondial) mutational load since its matter less. On the other hand, species that have more selection on mitochrondial mutational load for whatever reason are less fecund. E.g. fetuses may be spontaneously aborted if the mitochrondia have too many mutations.
Some pieces of evidence: eggs contain the mitochrondia and are 'kept on ice', i.e. they do not metabolize. Birds have a much stronger selection pressure for high-functioning metabolism (because of flight)[1] and plausibly 'better mitochrondia'.
[there are also variant-hypotheses possible that have a similar mutation meltdown story but don't go through mitochrondia per se. There is some evidence and counterevidence for epigenetic and non-mitochrondial mutational meltdown theories of againg too. So not implausible]
1. ^
compare bats? what about their lifespans?
4
My cached mental explanation from undergrad when I was learning about the details of evolution and thinking about this was something along the lines of a heuristic like:
"Many plants and animals seem to have been selected for dying after a successful reproduction event. Part of this may be about giving maximal resources to that reproduction event (maybe your only one, or just your last one). But for animals that routinely survive their last reproductive event, and survive raising the children until the children become independent, then there's probably some other explanation. I think about this with mice as my prototypical example a lot, since they seem to have this pattern. Commonly both male and female mice will survive reproduction, potentially even multiple cycles. However, mice do seem to be selected for relatively fast senescence. What might underlie this?
My guess is that senescence can cause you to get out of the way of your existing offspring. Avoiding being a drag on them. There are many compatible (potentially co-occurring) ways this could happen. Some that I can think of off the top of my head are:
* Not being a vector for disease, while in a relatively weakened state of old age
* Not feeding predators, which could then increase in population and put further stress on the population of your descendants / relatives.
* Not consuming resources which might otherwise be more available to your descendants / relatives including:
* food
* good shelter locations
* potential mating opportunities
* etc
"
2
Thanks for the cached explanation, this is similar to what I thought before a few days ago. But now I'm thinking that an older-but-still-youthful mouse would be better at avoiding predators and could be just as fertile, if mice were long lived. So the food & shelter might be "better spent" on them, in terms of total expected descendants. This would only leave the disease explanation, yes?
3
My understanding was the typical explanation was antagonistic pleiotropy, but I don't know whether that's the consensus view.
This seems to have the name 'pathogen control hypothesis' in the literature - see review. I think it has all the hallmarks of a good predictive hypothesis, but I'd really want to see some simulations of which parameter scenarios induce selection this way.
2
They keywords are much appreciated. That second link is only from 2022! I wonder if anybody suggested this in like 1900. Edit: some of the citations are from very long ago
I wonder how well a water cooled stovetop thermoelectric backup generator could work.
This is only 30W but air cooled https://www.tegmart.com/thermoelectric-generators/wood-stove-air-cooled-30w-teg
You could use a fish tank water pump to bring water to/from the sink. Just fill up a bowl of water with the faucet and stick the tube in it. Leave the faucet running. Put a filter on the bowl. Float switch to detect low water, run wire with the water tube
Normal natural gas generator like $5k-10k and you have to be homeowner
I think really wide kettle with coily ...
(Quoting my recent comment)
Apparently in the US we are too ashamed to say we have "worms" or "parasites", so instead we say we have "helminths". Using this keyword makes google work. This article estimates at least 5 million people (possibly far more) in the US have one of the 6 considered parasites. Other parasites may also be around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7847297/ (table 1)
This is way more infections than I thought!!
Note the weird symptoms. Blurry vision, headache, respiratory illness, blindness, impaired cognition, fever... Not j...
I was working on this cute math notation the other day. Curious if anybody knows a better way or if I am overcomplicating this.
Say you have . And you want to be some particular value.
Sometimes you can control , sometimes you can control , and you can always easily measure . So you might use these forms of the equation:
It's kind of confusing that seems proportional to both and . So here's where the notation comes in. Can write above like
...
Seems it is easier / more streamlined / more googlable now for a teenage male to get testosterone blockers than testosterone. Latter is very frowned upon — I guess because it is cheating in sports. Try googling eg "get testosterone prescription high school reddit -trans -ftm". The results are exclusively people shaming the cheaters. Whereas of course googling "get testosterone blockers high school reddit" gives tons of love & support & practical advice.
Females however retain easy access to hormones via birth control.
I wonder what experiments physicists have dreamed up to find floating point errors in physics. Anybody know? Or can you run physics with large ints? Would you need like int256?
-1
What monster downvoted this
I wonder how much testosterone during puberty lowers IQ. Most of my high school math/CS friends seemed low-T and 3/4 of them transitioned since high school. They still seem smart as shit. The higher-T among us seem significantly brain damaged since high school (myself included). I wonder what the mechanism would be here...
Like 40% of my math/cs Twitter is trans women and another 30% is scrawny nerds and only like 9% big bald men.
14
Testosterone influences brain function but not so much general IQ. It may influence to which areas your attention and thus most of your learning goes. For example, Lower testosterone increases attention to happy faces while higher to angry faces.
3
Hmm I think the damaging effect would occur over many years but mainly during puberty. It looks like there's only two studies they mention lasting over a year. One found a damaging effect and the other found no effect.
3
Also, accelerate education, to learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits.
Or, if testosterone changes attention (as Gunnar wrote), learn as much as possible before the testosterone fully hits... and afterwards learn it again, because it could give you a new perspective.
2
It's really weird hypothesis because DHT is used as nootropic.
I think the most effect of high T, if it exists, is purely behavioral.
1
The hypothesis I would immediately come up with is that less traditionally masculine AMAB people are inclined towards less physical pursuits.