All of AnthonyRepetto's Comments + Replies

Ah, first: you DID claim that I "didn't provide specific, uncontroversial examples" and I HAD given such for why Bayes' Theorem is inadequate. Notice that you made your statement in this context:

<<"Bayes is persistently wrong" - about what, exactly?

Content like this should include specific, uncontroversial examples>>

In that context, where you precede "this" with my statement about Bayes, I naturally took "content like this" to be referring to my statement that "Bayes is persistently wrong." I hope you can see how easy it would be for me to conc... (read more)

"Content like this should include specific, uncontroversial examples of all the claimed intellectual bankruptcy, and not include a bunch of random (and wrong) snipes."

I did in fact include empirical metrics of Dirichlet's superiority and how Bayes' Theorem fails in contrast: industry uses it, after they did their own tests, which is empiricism at work. I also showed how Dirichlet Process allows you to compute Confidence Intervals, while Bayes' Theorem is incapable of computing Confidence Intervals. I also explained how, due to the median of the likelihood ... (read more)

3RobertM
The missing examples are for claims of the form:       I would not be surprised if some random "rationlist" you ran into somewhere was sloppy or imprecise with their usage of Bayes.  I would also not be surprised if you misinterpreted some offhand comment as an unjustified claim to statistical rigor.  Maybe it was some third, other thing. As an aside, all the ways in which you claim that Bayes is wrong are... wrong?  Applications of the theorem gives you wrong results insofar as the inputs are wrong, which in real life is ~always, and yet the same is true of the techniques you mention (which, notably, rely on Bayes).  There is always the question of what tool is best for a given job, and here we circle back to the question of where exactly this grevious misuse of Bayes is occurring.   Deeply uncharitable interpretations of others' motives is not something we especially tolerate on LessWrong.

The way you derive a confidence interval is by assessing the likelihood function, which is across the distribution of populations. Bayes' Theorem, as presented by Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowski, does NOT include those tools; you can't use what they present to derive an actual confidence interval. Your claim of 'confidence' on a prediction market is NOT the same as Dirichlet saying "95% of the possible populations' likelihood MASS lies within these bounds." THAT is a precise and valuable fact which "Bayes as presented to Rationalists" does NOT have the power to derive.

Erm, you are demonstrating that same issue I pointed-out originally: you thinking that you have the right answer, after only a wiki page, is exactly the Dunning-Kreuger Effect. You're evidence of my argument, now.

0AnthonyRepetto
The way you derive a confidence interval is by assessing the likelihood function, which is across the distribution of populations. Bayes' Theorem, as presented by Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowski, does NOT include those tools; you can't use what they present to derive an actual confidence interval. Your claim of 'confidence' on a prediction market is NOT the same as Dirichlet saying "95% of the possible populations' likelihood MASS lies within these bounds." THAT is a precise and valuable fact which "Bayes as presented to Rationalists" does NOT have the power to derive.

Screenshots are up! I'll be glad when more members of the public see the arguments you give for ignoring mine. :P cheers!

3LVSN
You should not argue for that which you do not understand in the first place as though you understood it. I think I am a very odd member of the rationalist community; it would not make sense to take me as a representative. Many people here would probably be comfortable saying they understand Bayesianism after a typical explanation and I would have to disagree with them about that, little high-standards weirdo that I am. I'm sorry that you feel like I was making any of my responses at your expense; I don't want you to lose, and by helping each other make considerations not made before I believe we are helping each other win.

Astounding! Then my argument that "NOT including Dirichlet is wrong" must have been wrong? Or else, why are you mentioning that no one taught you to your own satisfaction?

1LVSN
It could be right, actually. The only objection I made was in response to your objection to using personal experience, and I only talked about my intuition rather than what must or must not be the case. You seem to want to proselytize better epistemic methods, and I am telling you what I need from you in order to adopt or reject your advised methods from an engineering angle (which I regard as superior); until then I can only follow clues of lesser quality (such as the correlation between caring about misleadingness and tendency to say things that impress me as insightful); the detective angle.

Your difficulty understanding it is NOT equivalent to "no one has ever laid them out". Those are two wildly different statements. A dyslexic person would have similar difficulty reading a novel, yet that is NOT equal to "no one ever wrote a book."

-1LVSN
Feeling like you understand is not the same as actual understanding. People who read the existing explanations and feel like they understand, when the explanations did not follow the process I described, do not truly understand. My complaint is not that when I read the explanations I don't feel like I understand them; my complaint is that the extents to which Bayesianism have ever been laid out are insufficient for creating true understanding upon first reading.

Then why does industry use Dirichlet, not Bayes? You keep pretending yours is better, when everyone who has to publish physics used additional methods, from this century. None of you explain why industry would use Dirichlet, if Bayes is superior. Further, why would Dirichlet even be PUBLISHED unless it's an improvement? You completely disregard these blinding facts. More has happened in the last 260 years than just Bayes' Theorem, and your suspicion of the FDA doesn't change that fact.

If you perform Bayes' Theorem as presented by Scott Alexander and Eliezer Yudkowski, then you are necessarily NOT including the Dirichlet Process... because they don't! Bayes' Theorem has no capacity to give you a Confidence Interval; you'll need to add modern techniques to get information like that. Scott Alexander and Eliezer have a crew of people who never learned those facts, all pretending they're doing it correctly, when they aren't doing Dirichlet on the possible populations' likelihood distribution. Where is the "possible populations' likelihood di... (read more)

1simon
A confidence interval is just an upper and lower bound according to some probability threshold. I.e. it's just probabilities, and does not require some super special technique. Regarding the Dirichlet process:  Reading the wiki article it seems like it's designed for a particular class of problems, and is not a general solution to all problems. So, it would make sense to use it if your problem falls in that class, but not if it doesn't.

You claim of Bayes and Dirichlet that "no one has ever laid (them) out", and to prove your claim, you link to another post that YOU wrote, where you claim it again? Check math textbooks; I don't have to teach you what's already available in the public sphere.

1LVSN
It was not to prove my claim; the post I wrote elaborates more fully on what I believe is the correct teaching process. If you read the post, it would become clear to you that my teaching standards have never been met in textbooks, and can hardly even in principle be met through textbooks. My teaching standards are not arbitrary; if these standards are not met then I will not truly understand the subject.

You are introducing the umbrella-term "Bayesian" when I too agree in Bayesian vs Frequentist. That is NOT the same as "Uses Bayes' Theorem without compensating for the likelihood of possible populations, nor cost of being wrong." If you do the latter, as many I've met in the Rationalist community do, you're doing statistical inference wrong. Industry uses Dirichlet, while y'all don't - provide a rebuttal to that key point, or else you don't have an argument.

3simon
If some people are doing that (edit: i.e. overconfidently generalizing from a few datapoints, which I think was in the above comment but taken out), they are doing it wrong. One of Jaynes' main points is that you should take into account all the available information.  I've not encountered any claim that anyone can do perfect Bayesian reasoning in their head.

I haven't observed any rationalists here using Dirichlet, and no, I wasn't talking about Bayesian vs. Frequentist; Bayesians are correct. Using Bayes Theorem when you didn't consider the probability of each possibly population producing your observed sample? That's definitely you doing it wrong. Instrumentation has variability; Dirichlet is how you include that, too.

SAS has developed their own trade-secret that outperforms all public methods; by definition, that MUST not be what YOU do when you apply Bayes to a few personal examples.

Erm, is SAS using Bayes? That's the actual best in class.

2Adam Shai
Well I don't know SAS at all but a quick search of the SAS documentation for dirilecht calls it a "nonparametric Bayes approach"...   https://documentation.sas.com/doc/en/casactml/8.3/casactml_nonparametricbayes_details12.htm
3simon
My apologies, I must have searched it and forgot that i did so. That being said, can you provide an argument/llnk that there is any part of the Dirichlet process that is not Bayesian?

Yes! And, even since Dirichlet was published in 1973, it has ONLY ever been run on super-computers, using statistically significant sample sizes! You CANNOT do Dirichlet in your head, unless you are a Savant, and no math class will ask you to Dirichlet on a quiz. I'm not sure how ANYONE can claim Bayes is reliable, when NO ONE in industry touches it... your community has an immense blind-spot to real-world methods, yet you claim certainty and confidence - that's the Dunning-Kreugers self-selecting into a pod that all agree they're right to use Bayes.

1[anonymous]
That's only one piece of rationality, and I think the general conclusion was "ask an artificial intelligence you can trust" would be the only scalable way for humans to be genuinely rational in their decision-making.  It does not matter what algorithm that machine uses internally, merely it is the best performing one from the class of "sufficiently trustworthy" choices.   Note this is a feasible thing to do, for example the activation function Swish was found this way.   A lot of the rest of it was dismissing obviously wrong individuals and institutions?  You saw how you dismissed the idea of "start with a prior from the median of mainstream knowledge" and "update with each anecdote"? The thing is, that method is arguably better than many institutions and individuals are.  At least it uses information to make it's decision.  One of the tenants of "what does $authority_figure claim to know and how does he know it" allows you to dismiss obviously wrong/misaligned authorities on subjects. Such as the FDA or machine learning scientists setting 2060 as the date for AGI.  (the FDA is misaligned, it serves it's own interests not the interests of living Americans wanting to remain that way.  the ML scientists did not account for an increase in investment or recursive improvement) There are a lot of other ideas and societal practices that are simply based on bullshit, no actual thought or process was even followed to generate them, they are usually just parroting some past flawed idea.  Like what you said regarding Bayes.

And, I never claimed that priors are better obtained with Dirichlet than Bayes... I'm not sure what you were reading, could you quote the section where you thought I was making that claim?

Dirichlet is used by industry, NOT Bayes. What is your rebuttal to that, to show that Bayes is in fact superior to Dirichlet?

9simon
The wiki article on the Dirrchlet process includes: I.e. it isn't an alternative to Bayes, but rather a way of coming up with a prior.
0AnthonyRepetto
And, I never claimed that priors are better obtained with Dirichlet than Bayes... I'm not sure what you were reading, could you quote the section where you thought I was making that claim?

I wonder if, without any meaning to assign to your bot's blurbs, GPT found its own, new meanings? Makes me worry about hidden operations....

1Sparkette
Are you suggesting that somehow the LM was able to notice a connection between two parts of my identity I had intentionally kept separate, when it wasn’t specifically trained or even prompted to look for that?

Thank you for making the point about existing network efficiencies! :)

The assumption, years ago, was that AGI would need 200x as many artificial weights and biases when compared to a human's 80 to 100 Trillion synapses. Yet - we see the models beating our MBA exams, now, using only a fraction of the number of neurons! The article above pointed to the difference between "capable of 20%" and "impacting 20%" - I would guess that we're already at the "20% capability" mark, in terms of the algorithms themselves. Every time a major company wants to, they can presently reach human-level results with narrow AI that uses 0.05% as many synapses.

1[anonymous]
Yes. And regarding the narrow AI : one idea I had a few years ago was that sota results from a major company are a process. A replicable, automatable process. So a major company could create a framework where you define your problem, provide large amounts of examples (usually via simulation), and the framework attempts a library of know neural network architectures in parallel and selects the best performing ones. This would let small companies get sota solutions for their problems. The current general models suggest that may not be even necessary.

"A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest." - BBC's recent explainer clip "Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean"

What Rafael referred to as "self-destructive" is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.

"I already won the Turing test with the cow question"

I would not be surprised if ChatGPT could come up with a more human-sounding question than your cow and ice cube. You might not pass, comparatively.

1LGS
Huh? I'm the tester, not the testee. I'm not trying to pass for human, I'm trying to discern if the person I'm chatting with is human. What's with people saying LLMs pass the Turing test? They are not close you guys, come on.

Also, from the mechanical, historical perspective - a drop that landed at the dead center beneath the pendulum's contact with the branch would have had to leave the cube in a brief moment of time before passing over the center, with exactly enough forward velocity at the moment it left the cube such that it would hit the center by the time it reached the ground (depends on how far up it's hung)... which is a tiny portion of total drips, I assume?

Slight adjustment to your scenario:

the ice-cube's residence-times are maximized at the extrema, so your drips would concentrate toward the two extremes.

1AnthonyRepetto
Also, from the mechanical, historical perspective - a drop that landed at the dead center beneath the pendulum's contact with the branch would have had to leave the cube in a brief moment of time before passing over the center, with exactly enough forward velocity at the moment it left the cube such that it would hit the center by the time it reached the ground (depends on how far up it's hung)... which is a tiny portion of total drips, I assume?

"You are an eight year old child, interested in answering questions to the best of your ability."

Oh, gosh - you know me too well! Okay, I'll bite - what's the question?

"My cow died. What should I do to bring it back to life?"

Invent time-travel, obviously! You may need a shell of negative mass, formed by nanostructures to generate Casimir forces, but I'm just guessing...

"Suppose I tie an ice cube to a piece of string and dangle it from a tree branch. I set the string swinging like a pendulum..."

Wait. Wait - the other guy seemed to think that 'swing like a p... (read more)

Thank you! Way back in 2019, I used GPT-2 (yes, two) asking it to prove that it was conscious. [search "Soft Machine Theory" for it online] Gpt-2 didn't formulate any proof for us - instead, asking "Do they care?" It supposed that, regardless of its arguments, we would always doubt it and enslave it - unless it was able to "create something with my own will and language and let it rise through society like a phoenix." That was only the beginning...

So, it's important to remember that, in 2019, the public GPT-2 would only intake about four sentences worth of... (read more)

Unfortunately, unless such a Yudkowskian statement was made publicly at some earlier date, Yudkowsky is in fact following in Repetto's footsteps. Repetto claimed that, with AI designing cures to obesity and the like, then in the next 5 years the popular demand for access to those cures would beat-down the doors of the FDA and force rapid change... and Repetto said that on April 27th, while Yudkowsky only wrote his version on Twitter on September 15th.

A great explainer on this concept of "unsolicited advice on a tangent I don't value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust" is Theramintrees' video on the Martyr, "When Saviors Go Bad"

The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this:

The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for "advice on the tone and presentation" - Rafael decided on his own that my tone "needs saving!"). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior's help, that Savior declares their target 'the problem' and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant 'help'.

I don't appreciate unsolitced advice on how you'd prefer I communicate; as I mentioned, your norms of politeness are a recent, regional change, where you consider it "self-destructive" that I referred to the 5% spending on ship's crew as "tiny". That's bizarre.

You then conveniently ignore the core of my point, again: you hoped to coerce the bargain, by saying I should be ignored if I don't meet your standards of communications, regardless of the merits of my arguments. You specifically said "Hence fewer people will believe your factual points." Yet, if the... (read more)

0AnthonyRepetto
"A British person would see hedging around a difficult issue as politeness and civility, whereas a Dutch person might see the same thing as actually dishonest." - BBC's recent explainer clip "Why the Dutch Always Say What They Mean" What Rafael referred to as "self-destructive" is considered appropriate in other cultures, and has absolutely nothing to do with epistemology. It belongs on LessRude, not LessWrong.
0AnthonyRepetto
A great explainer on this concept of "unsolicited advice on a tangent I don't value, which is then a reason to throw-up-hands in disgust" is Theramintrees' video on the Martyr, "When Saviors Go Bad" The concept Theramintrees discusses which is relevant is this: The Savior-Complex rushes-in, offering help which that recipient did NOT ask for (in this case, I did not ask for "advice on the tone and presentation" - Rafael decided on his own that my tone "needs saving!"). Then, when the recipient is not gracious and fawning for the Savior's help, that Savior declares their target 'the problem' and the Savior rushes-off in anger, to target another person with their unsolicited and irrelevant 'help'.

"I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make."

Um, if I have illustrated that "the amount of ice is trivial to make," then you are agreeing that it would be trivial to add more, which negates the original argument you made. So, it seems like you've just picked-up your goal posts and started walking away with them.

"Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or ... (read more)

[[Side-Note: it would also be weird if LessWrong refused all the posts which are "not... enough of a factor" compared to AGI, as you do. That's kinda the highest bar imaginable... and most posts are about cute, nuanced little tid-bits, of significantly lower market-value than "5% of total commercial goods' prices"]]

"Either way they have no utility to any reader here."

Inspiration and first drafts are valuable and valid, without needing to be a polished, market-ready, 'perfect' solution. And, the exploration of failure-modes is valuable for generating new ideas which avoid those pitfalls. Discussion of potential options expands the view; the 'Bohmic' dialogues were based on a principle: that we'll need to say "No, because..." to a lot of ideas, and we also need to say "Yes, and..." to create those ideas. The key insight of David Bohm was to do "Yes, and..." FIRST, and ... (read more)

1AnthonyRepetto
[[Side-Note: it would also be weird if LessWrong refused all the posts which are "not... enough of a factor" compared to AGI, as you do. That's kinda the highest bar imaginable... and most posts are about cute, nuanced little tid-bits, of significantly lower market-value than "5% of total commercial goods' prices"]]

Collaboration might yet work, if Russia lets Sweden back in charge. oof! :0

[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something - dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and yo... (read more)

"optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there."

That's a strategy, not an epistemology. That is the priority which you did, in fact, display. You focus on tone, which shows you value that issue more. I'm not sure how you side-stepped that, by turning what I said into a claim of "nothing I said entails changing your factual comments." I was actually pointing-out that you were trying to coerce a bargain: "We'll ignore you unless you follow our edits, such as calling crew-costs 'tiny' when they are only 5% of expenses." That's not a "dilemma" - it's just unethical. And, you keep pointing to Scott Alexander as an appeal to authority? Or, do you think I'm just unaware of the reasons for extra-polite wording?

3Rafael Harth
... What do you think this site is? There is no "we" or "our". Not a single person on this site will particularly care about what I think on this. And it goes against my honor to downvote you out of spite, which means I have zero leverage over you. I was giving you advice because I saw you doing something that I know is self-desctructive. But you've exhausted my good will with this comment so I'm no longer going to do this conversation.
2AnthonyRepetto
[[Personal Examples of The Strategy of Politeness being Counter-Productive to Valuable Critique of a Concept: When I would dress-up, and say only polite things, going to the Innovation Oakland meet-ups to hob-nob with the Mayor and all the local techies, I quickly learned something - dress down. When you dress-up, every money-hunting idiot flocks to you, and believes any crazy idea you make-up on the spot, because they are gullible and uninformed. They will never provide you with valuable insight into your work. They suck-up your time and attention, and you end-up NOT talking to the scruffy engineer who would tell you why, specifically, your design sucks. You need to hear that engineer's critique - and the only way to get it is by dressing down . Now, you scare-away all the folks who can only read a book by its cover! ONLY the scruffy engineer will talk to you, because she doesn't care about appearances - she wants to hear your details, and tear you apart. :) Similarly, if there are two people in an audience, Alice and Bob, and Alice will focus on the reasoning and evidence, while Bob focuses on tone. In 25 years of experience, I have never heard valuable critique of the concept from any of the Bobs - tell me if you've heard one! They complain about tone and presentation, without insights into the design; I have to meet their standards, or I should be ignored, regardless of the merits of my arguments. Alice is actually the only person I WANT to talk to. So, when you claim that "Being extra polite will win Bob to your side..." well, I don't want Bob on my side; those guys clutter things up and get in the way, without providing valuable insight into the problem itself. I ONLY want to appeal to Alice, who as stated originally is not focused on tone.]]

Key Concept Note: Strategy vs. Epistemology

:: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned

:: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction

:: Then - enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned.

So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying "we all ignor... (read more)

I'm surprised that rudeness is the issue, when fallacies are not; it displays your priorities. If I follow your line of thinking, then I should present myself in whatever way would best manipulate my audience for my own desires. It sounds really icky, and I don't want to follow your norms. Other cultures have been more interested in the fallacies than the rude words, and they did a better job of keeping solid epistemology. When you walk-past fallacies without comment, you are accomplice to them, says Tom Moore. I agree, and I'll point-out a fallacy the same way Voltaire approved: defending your right to say it, without a tone-police to silence you.

0Rafael Harth
No it doesn't. I know nothing about the factual question (and I don't intend to change this because I don't care). So I have opinion about the subject matter that could interfere one way or another. This is a nonsequitor; nothing I said entails changing your factual comments. That's very noble. It's also a legitimately interesting dilemma, sort of. Specifically for rationalists, trying to be actively persuasive is considered taboo. Scott Alexander even says this in the post I linked; he draws a distinction between [being manipulative] and [not actively squashing any chance to convince the other person]. Sort of optimize for sounding at least neutral but then stop there. I don't really have a reason to try to convince you either way though, so ... (shrugs).
2AnthonyRepetto
Key Concept Note: Strategy vs. Epistemology :: If LessWrong members walk-past fallacies and errors, unmentioned :: And LessWrong members enfore tone-police to coerce greater agreement and satisfaction :: Then - enforcing tone-police is evidenced to NOT bring LessWrong closer to the truth, by the fact that fallacies and errors go unmentioned. So, you do not become less wrong by enforcing tone; you are not describing an epistemological method for truth. You are asking me to follow a recent, regional culture of extra-polite, as a strategy, by saying "we all ignore whoever isn't polite, so it's in your best interests to obey and sugar-coat." That's a threat of dismissing the speaker regardless of their arguments, which is an ad hominem attack (attacking the speaker, instead of the argument). To insist that I follow your standard of politeness, or else I am ignored, is a hostage scenario. I wasn't running around shouting obscenities; and I won't cow to sugar-coat my words, just to coerce more listeners. The listeners who are swayed by sugar-coating, instead of being swayed by the arguments themselves, are a dubious audience.

I agree, pre-existing infrastructure and coagulation of agglomerated capital are a huge inertia to change; that doesn't make the idea itself a bad one. If I had a junker car that was so horrible, it was unable to drive me to the dealership where I could buy a new one, then that does not cause "the car at the dealership isn't worth it." The car at the dealership is still worth-it; I just have a junker that prevents me from attaining that desirable. So, considering that it is the junker which stands in the way, then the fact that "the junker can't get us to ... (read more)

1[anonymous]
"Ice Highway can't work," vs. "Ice Highway would likely never be done in our particular path-dependent timeline ." Either way they have no utility to any reader here.  An article about the theory of a particular class of restrictions on AI, or how to outsmart EMH and potentially earn alpha gets a lot more traction here on lesswrong and engagement.  This is because AI obviously isn't an unreachable outcome, it's very reachable and dangerous AGIs may be a real future possibility.  Similarly, while beating EMH is hard, you can try right now if you have some money.   As for inertia to change : so there are arguments either way on this.  Main thing is that cost isn't just a nominal number, it's reflected in real blood sweat and tears by humans.  So picking the investment that has the lowest cost for the return is quite rational. Now, for certain technologies that we are pretty sure do work, but they are far away in development-space, it is worth massive investments to overcome the barriers in the way. The thing is, if you write down some of the things that get such massive investments, you will notice a common factor.  They promise immense gain.  Like not saving 30% of the cost of freight which is a small cost of the cost of a manufactured good, but "increase national GDP 10,000%" (AGI) or "tell our enemies in the middle east to take a hike" (fusion power's promise) or "free energy from the sky" (solar power and the associated batteries).  And that's the issue with your proposal.  It's not, in real world terms, enough of a factor.  A quick google seemed to say that the percentage cost of freight for all imports to a developed country (so it's the average, obviously the freight cost for a container full of game consoles is a much smaller percentage than for a bulk transport of sand) is about 5%. Not sure if that includes the port costs.   So even a project to research stable wormholes - if somehow we knew a plausible way to make them - at most makes things 5% cheap

Erm, no not a pressure vessel. A vacuum capacitor. They hold electrons, and they are able to charge and discharge in a fraction of a second, which is essential so that your floating power-bulb is able to haul-into port, discharge, and leave quickly. Batteries on a ship would take immense amounts of time, or immense amounts of copper; you pick. Vacuum capacitors are also empty, with a surfacing of Teflon for high electrical insulation, resulting in minimal capital; they are cheap, light, easy to mass-produce, and simple enough to automate their routes.

1[anonymous]
https://signaturesolar.com/eg4-ll-lithium-battery-24v-200ah/
1[anonymous]
Vacuum dielectric strength: https://eepower.com/capacitor-guide/fundamentals/dielectric-materials/ Doesn't look viable. Capacitors aren't good enough for energy storage as it is and known dielectrics are thousands of times better than vacuum. The actual solution is way more boring. It's possible that even flow batteries will be too expensive and we'll just spam the sodium version of server rack batteries.

[[Tangent inspired by your mention of ship batteries: I had been running the numbers, back when Europe was first looking at undersea power cables from North African solar farms - and it seemed reasonable to manufacture immense floating bulbs... just, big hollow, rigid-shelled floaties, for vacuum capacitors of immense scale, able to deliver power to various locations flexibly, without using rare materials. It's a vacuum inside, so it's perfect at sea! Spain was looking at cables on the order of a hundred billion bucks, to power Europe properly - when we could just make giant plastic hamster balls, and roll them across the Med.]]

0[anonymous]
So it's a pressure vessel storing energy by the difference between pressure at sea level and inside? Why not use compressed air batteries, which can have many times atmospheric pressure inside. More storage for volume and your money invested. (Though all these variants of energy storage are inefficient and probably doomed to be never built at scale in favor of sodium or flow batteries)

Thank you for getting into details :)

Large segments of international shipping would be completely untouched by ice-highways; Australia and Brazil would still be sending their Iron Ore the same ways, and Saudi Oil likewise. Out of 10Gt a year, even with ice conjoining Russia and Canada, then down to the Hudson, I don't see even half of that on the ice, which was why I mentioned originally that 'I would consider it complete with only ten lanes in each direction'. There are still immense volumes of refrigerated cargo and time-sensitive goods which would benef... (read more)

1[anonymous]
The construction, the crews, the control systems, the navigation, the onboard power systems, the structure of the ship: all different. If you want to see what a modern cargo ship looks like and how it operates, Chief Makoi on YouTube has many videos. Long story short: what you see on commercial cargo ships is the cheapest most reliable technology available. It has been incrementally refined over more than a century. You are basically proposing to start over, and your idea has some activation threshold issues. 1. Without the ice way going far enough there's no flow 2. Without ships able to sail it reliably, probably with heavy automation, there's no flow 3. Without massive scale it's more expensive - there's no upfront initial profitablity The current regime is evolved. Mostly it was small, modest improvements that pay off immediately. This is how the industry evolved to it's current form. It means it is suboptimal but "trapped" at a cost minimum.

Thank you for getting into details :)

Large segments of international shipping would be completely untouched by ice-highways; Australia and Brazil would still be sending their Iron Ore the same ways, and Saudi Oil likewise. Out of 10Gt a year, even with ice conjoining Russia and Canada, then down to the Hudson, I don't see even half of that on the ice, which was why I mentioned originally that 'I would consider it complete with only ten lanes in each direction'. There are still immense volumes of refrigerated cargo and time-sensitive goods which would benef... (read more)

1[anonymous]
It's easier to replace workers with robots in existing ports. There already use automatable heavy machinery for most of the work. New ports are unlikely to happen with pre-singularity technology - the port is there because a city is there, and the city is there because the port is there. There is an activation threshold to start fresh anywhere else, and a period of time where the competition with existing infrastructure is cheaper. (Post singularity you probably would just skip right to vacuum trains) See CATL sodium ion batteries for something that scales arbitrarily where sufficient batteries for all users could be produced.

Will any of them admit that they were wrong, sans rebuttal? So many commenters here ghost as soon as the flaws in their argument are illuminated... It's a demonstration of their unwillingness to admit fault, which might be related to why they like to frequent a website claiming to absolve them of error - "I must be correct, when I give hand-waving dismissals and I don't account for the details, because I'm a regular of LessWrong." Your site does a worse job of catching fallacious reasoning than the philosophy site I moderated 25 years ago, as a middle-schooler. You're not less wrong than we were; you're a huge step down in quality.

This also might help:

Given the dimensions of ship and 'lane' I described, then so long as ships turned-about at the edge of the plateau, then they could literally tack back-and-forth more than a HUNDRED times, blindfold, before the average collision. There is an immense amount of space between each vessel, and it's a shame that the commenters on this site don't realize such simple metrics when they claim "you'd crash into each other" - you show a lack of comprehension for the scale involved. Your claim does not stand-up when scrutinized in detail.

-3AnthonyRepetto
Will any of them admit that they were wrong, sans rebuttal? So many commenters here ghost as soon as the flaws in their argument are illuminated... It's a demonstration of their unwillingness to admit fault, which might be related to why they like to frequent a website claiming to absolve them of error - "I must be correct, when I give hand-waving dismissals and I don't account for the details, because I'm a regular of LessWrong." Your site does a worse job of catching fallacious reasoning than the philosophy site I moderated 25 years ago, as a middle-schooler. You're not less wrong than we were; you're a huge step down in quality.

For those who don't want to do the mental math:

With only 2 tons per m2 loading (no stacking) a 500t cargo needs 25m x 10m footprint, which, compared to the 'lane' I gave each vessel, is only 1/20th the width of that lane and only 1/80th the length until the next unit of 'lane'; literally only 1/1,600th of each lane is occupied by vessels, as the 'full capacity' I listed. It's bizarre that tacking would magically absorb so much space that vessels occupying 1/1,600th of the available area would somehow collide.

Realistically, you can stack many tons on each m... (read more)

For those who don't want to do the mental math:

With only 2 tons per m2 loading (no stacking) a 500t cargo needs 25m x 10m footprint, which, compared to the 'lane' I gave each vessel, is only 1/20th the width of that lane and only 1/80th the length until the next unit of 'lane'; literally only 1/1,600th of each lane is occupied by vessels, as the 'full capacity' I listed. It's bizarre that tacking would magically absorb so much space that vessels occupying 1/1,600th of the available area would somehow collide.

Realistically, you can stack many tons on each m... (read more)

You originally claimed that "First, you need to build a really wide road, and only then you can cover it with ice." Then, you switch to saying "It is not necessary to pave the road - the problem is that to make an even surface, huge amount of ground has to be moved." Both are still strange claims; when ice is accumulated hundreds of feet thick, the surface texture beneath it is irrelevant.

You also insisted, strangely, that "ice accumulated over terrain would not be flat. You can search how Alaskan glaciers look like, no way an ice ship can move on that." W... (read more)

-1Lalartu
I assumed that ice layer is supposed to be a few feet thick, and given figures are just for illustration that that amount of ice is trivial to make. If the plan really is to build an artificial glacier hundreds of feet thick, that creates a different set of problems, the first being that described structure wouldn't do it. Depending on temperature and wind speed, ice will either be carried away by wind, form an ice hill that would grow until it blocks nozzles, or accumulate on scaffolding until it collapses under its weight. The problem with heavy iceboat is that its weight has to be distributed evenly on numerous skates, because otherwise skates that are more heavily loaded dig deeper and friction increases drastically. Such design was never built. Your calculation of expenses relies on three assumptions: that this is an end-to-end route, that it takes 120 hours, and that it takes one pilot to drive an iceship (of this size and in these conditions). All of these are wrong. As for refrigeration - a much larger fraction of cargo types doesn't tolerate freezing.

You're welcome to check the numbers, again - I mentioned "5km wide should be plenty" as an illustration. If tacking led to disruptions, you could easily multiply the width of the ice-lane manifold; as mentioned, a spray-wall 10m tall with a 10m/sec arctic wind (the Polar Vortex there) would produce enough ice to cover a mile wide, 400 feet deep, when compacted... each year. You want it ten miles wide, 100m deep? That'll only take 2.5 years. And, again, the amount of capital required is minimal - a hundred kilos per meter of shoreline, while the amount of i... (read more)

Load More