Hi. I'm Gareth McCaughan. I've been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is "gjm" (not "Gjm" despite the wiki software's preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of "g", "gjm", or "gjm11". The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). My business cards say "mathematician" but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren't.
If you're wondering why some of my very old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it's because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW's resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.
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The Additional Questions Elephant (first image in article, "image credit: Planecrash") is definitely older than Planecrash; see e.g. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1036583-reaction-images for an instance from 2015.
They're present on the original for which this is a linkpost. I don't know what the mechanism was by which the text was imported here from the original, but presumably whatever it was it didn't preserve the images.
Yes, that sounds much more normal to me.
Though in the particular case here, something else seems off: when you write you would normally italicize both the "f" and the "x", as you can see in the rendering in this very paragraph. I can't think of any situation in actual mathematical writing where you would italicize one and not the other in order to make some distinction between function-names and variable names.
For that matter, I'm not wild about making a distinction between "variables" and "functions". If you write and also then it would be normal for "f" and "x" to be italicized and not "sin". I was going to say that the reason is that f and x are in fact both variables, and it just happens that one of them takes values that are functions, whereas sin is a fixed function and you'll never see anything like "let sin = 3" or "let sin = cos" -- but actually that isn't quite right either, because named mathematical constants like e are usually italicized. I think the actual distinction is that single-letter names-of-things get italicized and multiple-letter ones usually don't.
(Brief self-review for LW 2023 review.)
Obviously there's nothing original in my writeup as opposed to the paper it's about. The paper still seems like an important one, though I haven't particularly followed the literature and wouldn't know if it's been refuted or built upon by other later work. In particular, in popular AI discourse one constantly hears things along the lines of "LLMs are just pushing symbols around and don't have any sort of model of the actual world in them", and this paper seems to me to be good evidence that transformer networks, even quite small ones, can build internal models that aren't just symbol-pushing.
There's a substantial error in the post as it stands (corrected in comments, but I never edited the post): I claim that the different legal-move-prediction abilities of the "network trained on a smallish number of good games" and "network trained on a much larger number of random games" cases is because the network isn't big enough to capture both "legal" and "good strategy" well, when in fact it seems more likely that the difference is mostly because the random-game training set is so much larger. I'm not sure what the etiquette is around making edits now in such cases.
I'm confused by what you say about italics. Mathematical variables are almost always italicized, so how would italicizing something help to clarify that it isn't a variable?
It seems like a thing that literally[1] everyone does sometimes. "Let's all go out for dinner." "OK, where shall we go?" As soon as you ask that question you're "optimizing for group fun" in some sense. Presumably the question is intending to ask about some more-than-averagely explicit, or more-than-averagely sophisticated, or more-than-averagely effortful, "optimizing for group fun", but to me at least it wasn't very clear what sort of thing it was intending to point at.
[1] Almost literally.
Yeah, I do see the value of keeping things the same across multiple years, which is why I said "might be worth" rather than "would be a good idea" or anything of the sort.
To me, "anti-agathics" specifically suggests drugs or something of the kind. Not so strongly that it's obvious to me that the question isn't interested in other kinds of anti-aging measures, but strongly enough to make it not obvious whether it is or not.
1There is arguably a discrepancy between the title of the question "P(Anti-Agathics)" and the actual text of the question; there might be ways of "reaching an age of 1000 years" that I at least wouldn't want to call "anti-agathics". Uploading into a purely virtual existence. Uploading into a robot whose parts can be repaired and replaced ad infinitum. Repeated transfer of consciousness into some sort of biological clones, so that you get a new body when the old one starts to wear out.
My sense is that the first of those is definitely not intended to be covered by the question, and the second probably isn't; I'm not sure about the third. "Magical" options like survival of your immortal soul in a post-mortem heaven or hell, magical resurrection of your body by divine intervention, and reincarnation, are presumably also not intended.
In future years, it might be worth tweaking the wording by e.g. inserting the word "biological" or some wording like "in something that could credibly be claimed to be the body they are now living in". Or some other thing that better matches the actual intent of the question.
I have just noticed something that I think has been kinda unsatisfactory about the probability questions since for ever.
There's a question about the probability of "supernatural events (including God, ghosts, magic, etc.)" having occurred since the beginning of the universe. There's another question about the probability of there being a god.
I notice an inclination to make sure that the first probability is >= the second, for the obvious reason. But, depending on how the first question is interpreted, that may be wrong.
If the existence of a god is considered a "supernatural event since the beginning of the universe" then obviously that's the case. But note that one thing a fair number of people have believed is that a god created the universe and then, so to speak, stepped away and let it run itself. (It would be hard to distinguish such a universe from a purely natural one, but perhaps you could identify some features of the universe that such a being would be more or less likely to build in.) In that case, you could have a universe that (1) created by a god in which (2) no supernatural events have ever occurred or will ever occur.
The unsatisfactory thing, to be clear, is the ambiguity.
For future years, it might be worth considering either (1) replacing "God" with something like "acts of God" or "divine interventions" in the first question, or (2) adding an explicit clarification that the mere existence of a god should be considered a "supernatural event" in the relevant sense even if what that god did was to make a universe that runs naturally, or (3) tweaking the second question to explicitly exclude "deistic" gods.
Pedantic note: there are many instances of "syncopathy" that I am fairly sure should be "sycophancy".
(It's an understandable mistake -- "syncopathy" is composed of familiar components, which could plausibly be put together to mean something like "the disease of agreeing too much" which is, at least in the context of AI, not far off what sycophancy in fact means. Whereas if you can parse "sycophancy" at all you might work out that it means "fig-showing" which obviously has nothing to do with anything. So far as I can tell, no one actually knows how "fig-showing" came to be the term for servile flattery.)