All of Beckeck's Comments + Replies

yeah, if the system is trying to do things I agree it's (at least a proto) agent. My point is that creation happens in lots of places with respect to an LLM, and it's not implausible that use steps (hell even sufficiently advanced prompt engineering) can effect agency in a system, particularly as capabilities continue to advance. 

1mattmacdermott
Seems like we don’t really disagree

"Seems mistaken to think that the way you use a model is what determines whether or not it’s an agent. It’s surely determined by how you train it?" 
---> Nah, pre training, fine tuning, scaffolding and especially RL seem like they all affect it. Currently scaffolding only gets you shitty agents, but it at least sorta works 


 

4mattmacdermott
Pre-training, finetuning and RL are all types of training. But sure, expand 'train' to 'create' in order to include anything else like scaffolding. The point is it's not what you do in response to the outputs of the system, it's what the system tries to do.

Top post claims that while principle one (seek broad accountability) mightbe useful in a more perfect world, but that here in reality it doesn't work great.

Reasons include that the pressure to be held in high standards by the Public tend to cause orgs to Do PR, rather then speak truth.

know " sentence needs an ending 

 

"ARC (they just changed names to METR, but I will call them ARC for this post)" ---almost but not quite 

-- ARC Evals (the evaluation of frontier models people, led by Beth Barnes, with Paul on board/ advising) has become METR,  ARC (alignment research center, doing big brain math and heuristic arguments, led by Paul) remains ARC. 

2Zvi
Ah, thanks for clearing that up. That definitely wasn't made clear to me.

" football, hockey, rugby, boxing, kick-boxing and MMA to be amongst the worst sports for this stuff." - - I'm not up to date on the current literature but I'm pretty sure this list is rather wrong. I don't remember all the details of the study I do remember (and I don't have time for a lit review) but in it women's high school soccer actually had the highest concussion rate (idk if it was per participant season or hour or per game minute or...).

I accept that mayonaise is an evolution of allioli (but maintain that the historical fact is that its american ubiquity routes through french chefs). 

Wikipedia also doesn't say that it's not a mother sauce, if you scroll down you'll find this: 
"Auguste Escoffier wrote that mayonnaise was a French mother sauce of cold sauces,[27] like 'espagnole or velouté. "
I originally wrote "controversially a mother sauce" because the most common listing of mother sauces on the internet is ~wrong- The youtube video i linked includes primary source scholarship o... (read more)

2TeaTieAndHat
Mayonnaise is an evolution of aillioli, but not the same thing: it doesn’t have garlic. In fact, southern France also has aioli, with garlic, and these two things are separate.


This is as much a nitpick with Zvi's article as with this one, but french food just seems hard to find because its easy to misidentify.  french technique is the bedrock of american food - both as the history of fine dining(/haute cuisine)  routes directly through french chefs, restaurants, systems, and techniques and as french food has been repurposed into american food.  
Some examples: mayonnaise, the delicate, challenging-to-make emulsion of flavored fats and vinegars,controversially a mother sauce* becomes 'mayo' the white stuff that goes... (read more)

2Vanilla_cabs
In addition, in the context of cooking, chef means "cook", and it's common to call the cook "chef", even if it's your friend who's making a barbecue. It has positive connotations, implying that the cook is skilled.
5Said Achmiz
I don’t think it’s true that the origins of mayonnaise have anything to do with mother sauces. Wikipedia seems to agree. (It also doesn’t seem to be French in origin.)

I feel like giving the French credit for stew is a stretch even stretchier than giving them credit for thinly slicing meat.

Thank god for the French inventing stew, I say, so that the British, Spanish, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Russians, West Africans, North Africans, Northeast Native Americans, Aztecs, Mayans, Persians, Pakistanis, South Indians, Central Asians and Chinese could learn how to put ingredients in a pot and boil them.

If it's the case that the game theory here is correct I'm sad why it can't be simply explained as such, if the game theory here isn't correct I'm sad it's curated.

1Dweomite
I'm unsure what you mean by "simply explained" and how it's different from this post.  Do you mean you wanted to see a formal proof of the theorem instead of an illustrative example?  Or that you dislike the dialog format?

plus one for "stop worrying about what people will say in response so much, get the actual information out there, stop being afraid."

see also Anna Salamon's takes on 'not doing PR'  that someone else might find and link? 
 

2Charlie Steiner
I was too lazy to find the right character. Whoops, looks like I misread the comment though.

"Gemma think that objective function and its implications through. At all.2"


*doesn't

 

1WilliamKiely
@Zvi 

given this notional use case (and the relative inexperience of the implied user), I think its even more important to (as Gunnar mentioned) contextualize this advice as to whom its for, and how they should use it. 

doing that properly would take more than i have for this at the moment, but i'd appreciate epistemic tagging regarding things like; 
this only could work at a new/small scale (for reasons including because the cost of keeping everyone 100% context scales with org size and because benefits don't)
that strategy has to fit the employees you have, and this sort of strategy constrains the type of person you can hire to those who would fit it (which is a cost to be considered, not a fatal flaw).
 

I think that steelmanning a person is usually a bad idea, rather one should steelman positions (when one cares about the matter to which the positions are relevant).

I claim this avoids a sufficient swath of the OP's outlined problems of steelmanning for the articles claim of 'nicheness', and that the semi tautology of 'appropriate steelmanning is appropriate' more accurately maps reality. 

also:
"The problem isn't 'charity is a good conversational norm, but these people are doing it wrong'; the problem is that charity is a bad conversational norm. If no... (read more)

2Rob Bensinger
My reply to Abram is relevant here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/MdZyLnLHuaHrCskjy/itt-passing-and-civility-are-good-charity-is-bad?commentId=qxLsjFbhNMeDXAjSb 

First, Writing things so you know them seems valuable.

Second, Fwiw In my struggles with depression, I've found physical habits to be the easiest route to something better. When you don't know what to do but need to do something, go for a walk/hike/jog and let your brain sync up with your body a little, burn some calories to regain some hunger, and deserve some the tiredness you may already feel.

1MSRayne
Good point! In those states of mind it is just as hard to make the choice to do some physical thing as to make any other choice, but perhaps I could try to hold in mind the intention to always do some exercise on the upswing, when I am getting back into the gear of action. Ideally I could even learn to do it on the downswing, before I'm so deep in the apathy valley as to be unable to make the choice.

Good video, even if I'm don't quite agree with the superlative. I suspect that the festival film this video is about (this YouTube is a Pete Whitaker behind the scenes https://youtu.be/pDCSzC7PJBg) will be better, and also I'm excited for the full 3d/ vr films that should be coming out soon (here is Alex honold doing the behind the scenes thing https://youtu.be/dy4jGZ--gre)

1Kenny
The "behind the scenes" video apparently isn't available now :( But thanks for sharing some extra details! I think a big part of why I think this is (maybe not literally literally, but 'seriously literally' anyways) "the best" free solo video is that it's so focused and almost 'spare'. It doesn't include any of the 'social drama' around free solo climbing (or any kind of relatively dangerous climbing, e.g. mountaineering). I found that fairly annoying about "Free Solo". I still want to see a (LOT) more of the actual climbing for that climb. I've watched a good bit of videos/movies about free solo climbing, but this video is the most 'perfect gem' in terms of a focus on free soloing. It's not about a climbing trip involving free solo climbs. It's about one free solo climb, and it's almost perfect that: (a) this is Magnus's first 'real' free solo climb (> ~20m); (b) Magnus is a great climber. It highlights/demonstrates that, in a very real sense, the biggest difficulty of free solo climbing is mental/emotional; not physical.

I think clever duplication of human intelligence is plenty sufficient for general superhuman capacity in the important sense  (wherein I mean something like 'it has capacities such that would be extincion causing if (it believes) minimizing its loss function is achieved by turning off humanity (which could turn it off/ start other (proto-)agis)').

for one,  I don't think humanity is that robust in the status quo, and 2, a team of internally aligned (because copies) human level intelligence capable of graduate level biology seems plenty existentially scary.

typo: "Gugguk" should be "Gigguk" 

1lsusr
Fixed. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Beck. For credibility, Eliezer once said I was chosen by the Food Gods. The following is on the pareto frontier of delicious, easy condiments and is robust to change (but not the most healthy). 
Chipotle Mayo:
(<5 min prep)
ingredients: 
2 cups good quality mayo (Hellman's is a classic)
1-2 minced chipotles in adobo *
1-2 pinch (ground toasted) cumin 
1/2 teaspoon (smoked) paprika 

1. combine ingredients
2. eat with things (potatoes, roast vegetables, meats...)  


* small cans are available in the hispanic section of most US g... (read more)

some places to look (with hope that others might add theirs): 
Moneyball (the book, the movie lacks detail but gets some of the spirit)
fivethirtyeight's methodology articles on their various sports/+ models (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-our-raptor-metric-works/ 
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-fivethirtyeight-2020-primary-model-works/)
probably a bunch of articles from grantland (which is archived but available, but i lack titles off the top of my head)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_analytics
zvi's sports betting articles&n... (read more)

in lieu of writing nothing instead, informally -
hey, good list! i wonder if you've read much of the recent history of sabermetrics, which to me is the modern equivalent (in that it's a history of bunch of nerds and some people who wanted to be rich who actualized statistical modeling at the frontier of the applied science)?

2Ben Pace
I just learned the word, thanks for the pointer. Seems like a solid place to look more.

I barely assed the exercise but like/liked this.
For (graph comfortable) me i found  the graphs* to cleanly get me to some subset of the relevant frames/questions/narratives.

if i'd written the post, a version of the final chart would have been first (or at least near).  i have various other thoughts on that level which feel both like quibbles and like significant differences in how you and i (or an agent and another agent) carryout the moment to moment cognition of an attempting to be rational agent.  

 



*except the green bar graph, which i could just guess at meanings for.

not an expert, but I think life is an existence proof for the power of nanotech, even if the specifics of a grey goo scenario seem less than likely possible. Trees turn sunlight and air into wood, ribosomes build peptides and proteins, and while current generation models of protein folding are a ways from having generative capacity, it's unclear how many breakthroughs are between humanity and that general/generative capacity.  
 

Jumping in here in what i hope is a prosocial way. I assert as hypothesis that the two of you currently disagree about what level of meta the conversation is/should-be at, and each feels that the other has an obligation to meet them at their level, and this has turned up the heat a lot. 

maybe there is a more oblique angle then this currently heated one?

8Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
It's prosocial.  For starters, AllAmericanBreakfast's "let's not engage," though itself stated in a kind of hot way, is good advice for me, too.  I'm going to step aside from this thread for at least three days, and if there's something good to come back to, I will try to do so.

to confirm what Vitor said, it's the logistics companies not the port that had a rules change: 
         "The rule change does not apply to terminals at the Port of Long Beach, which routinely stack containers up to six high. Many media reports over the weekend didn’t make a distinction between the port and inland zone, making it appear the port had new authority to increase vertical storage."
- https://www.freightwaves.com/news/city-of-long-beach-allows-logistics-companies-to-stack-containers-higher
 

6Elizabeth
If anyone wants to double-check this without dealing with the paywall, here's the 12ft link.

Yes, but not on the blog https://thezvi.wordpress.com/

2habryka
Huh, very weird. If you have a screenshot of broken images you can copy-paste here, would be useful. I tried to fix all of them, so would be surprised if they are broken for anyone.

I’m concerned with this list because it doesn’t distinguish between the epistemological context of the questions provided. For the purpose of this comment there are at least three categories.

First:
Broadly considered completed questions with unsatisfactory answers. These are analogous to Godelian incompleteness and most of this type of question are subforms of the general question: do you/we/does one have purpose or meaning, and what does that tell us about the decisions you/we/one should make?

This question isn’t answered in any easy sense but I think mos... (read more)