All of Douglas_Knight's Comments + Replies

How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?

In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to ha... (read more)

In fact, many 21st century fusion companies do not use Tokomaks, but use other designs from the 60s. My estimate from wikipedia is about half.

It is a weird claim that the current boom, concentrated in time, is the result of many advances, which were spread out over time. All these advances are being used at the same time because funders are paying for them now and not earlier. How do you know that you need all of those advances and not just some of them? People could have tried using ceramic superconductors in Tokomaks in the 90s, but they didn't, because of centralization. Maybe that wouldn't be enough because you need all the other advances, but it would have yielded more useful data than the actually performed experiments with large Tokomaks.

2Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
The advances build on top of each other. I am not expert in material sciences or magnetmanufacturing but I'd bet a lot of improvements & innovation has been downstream of improved computers & electronics. Neither were available in the 60s.

The transmission utility is not purely a transmission company. It spends money on both generation and transmission. Some generation charges leave to other companies. This is not a competitive market, but even if it were, it would only give you a bound on the cost of generation and tell you nothing about the cost of transmission.

You say solar is getting cheaper, but it is only the panels that are getting cheaper. They will continue to get even cheaper, but this is not relevant to retrofitting individual houses, where the cost is already dominated by labor. As the cost of labor dominates, economies of scale in labor will be more relevant.

2jefftk
Part of them getting cheaper is becoming higher output, which means the same labor cost gets you more power. For example, in 2018 we got 360W panels while in 2024 we got 425W ones. But I agree this isn't the main component.

To a first approximation, solar is legal for individual residences and illegal on a larger scale.

2Matt Goldenberg
really, say more?

Maybe you could learn something by looking at the public filings, but you didn't look at them. By regulation, not by being public, it has to spend proportionate to its income, but whether it is spending on transmission or generation is a fiction dictated by the regulator. It may well be that its transmission operating costs are much lower than its price and that a change of prices would be viable without any improvement in efficiency. This is exactly what I would how I would expect the company to set prices if it controlled the regulator: to extract as much money as possible on transmission to minimize competition. I don't know how corrupt the regulator is, but that ignorance is exactly my point.

2jefftk
That's the key place where we disagree: my understanding is that the "generation" charges are actual money leaving the utility for a competitive market, and this is a real division.

Even in this last comment you keep making that very distinction. The regulator dictates the price but you assert that you know what the monopoly spends.

If you just want to assert that the current set of regulations are unsustainable, then I agree. But not a single one of the comments reflects a belief that this is the topic, not even any of your comments.

2jefftk
First, don't we know that? It's a public company and it has to report what it spends. But more importantly, I do generally think getting a regulated monopoly like this to become more efficient is intractable, at least in the short to medium term.

Yes, if we assume that there is a competitive market for generation, price of transmission may prevent grid solar generation from being built. But you asserted that you could learn the cost of transmission from the bill.

2jefftk
Maybe we're meaning different things by "cost"? If a large monopoly spends $X to do Y then even if they're pretty inefficient in how they do Y I'd still describe $X as the cost. We might discuss ways to get the cost down closer to what we think it should be possible to do Y for (changing regulations, subjecting the monopoly to market forces in other ways, etc) but "cost" still seems like a fine word for it?

These numbers are dictated by the regulator. What mechanism is there to make them have any relation to the real world?

2jefftk
I don't know this area well, but my understanding is that the "generation" portion represents a market where different companies can compete to provide power, while the other portion is the specific company that has wires to my house operating as a regulated monopoly. So while I don't trust the detailed breakdown of the different monopoly charges (I suspect the company has quite a bit of freedom in practice to move costs between buckets) the high-level generation-vs-the-rest breakdown seems trustworthy.

That breakdown is fiction dictated by the regulator.

2jefftk
How so?

Why do we even believe the claims about congressional trades? It is widely believed that Hillary Clinton's commodity trading was falsified by the broker. Why not the same for stocks? These records were created once a year. It would be easy to look back at the year to choose good trades after the fact. Today we supposedly have 1 day notice of Pelosi's trades, which would be hard to fake.

If the Ziobrowski data is dominated by a few big trades, why not look at them? Are they companies that were affected by congressional action? That is the worst scenario. If ... (read more)

2Aleksander
Why are we to be so skeptical of congressional insider trading? I haven’t seen much evidence that Hillary’s commodity trading was faked by anyone, only not impossible to have been legitimate(just lucky) and thus not prosecutable. In general, without any evidence either way, my priors would lean heavily towards congressional insider trading because of how obvious it is as a process and how profitable it would be. On Ziobrowski’s 2004 paper, I can’t access it, but the later one which mimics the original but with the House doesn’t mention these large trades(unless I missed it in my skimming and ctrl-f)

What is Chaos Theory? It sounds to me like an arbitrary grouping of results of people playing around with computers, not a coherent theory. If it were about a social group, that provides more coherence. Indeed, the people who pushed the term "Chaos" do form a social group, but I do not think this group really includes all the people included in, say, Gleick's book.

A lot of the results were things that they could have predicted from theory before computers, but they don't seem to have been predicted. In particular Lyapunov died in 1918. If the theory is his... (read more)

Your history is definitely wrong. Patents don't enforce themselves. Hollywood is on the west coast to make physical distance from Edison's lawyers and muscle. The Wright brothers went down in history as the inventors of the airplane, but they wasted the rest of their lives fighting over the patents.

Linchpin patents are rare. Maybe you patent one invention to make it just barely work, but that's not the end of the story. Someone else patents something else needed to make it scalable. Now there are two patents and a bilateral monopoly.

None of this is to say that patents were unimportant, so it's not an answer at all.

Instead of imagining if all trials were bench trials, instead perform the experiment. Or just look at the countries where this is true!

What does it mean to claim that these people are contrarians?

Is there a consensus position at all? For any existing policy, you could claim that there is some kind of centrist compromise that it's a good policy, so people who propose changing policy, like Hanson and Caplan, are defying that compromise. But there is not really any explicit consensus goal of most policies, so claiming existing institutions are a bad compromise because they pursue multiple goals and separating those goals is not in defiance of any consensus. Caplan, Hanson, and Sailer are off... (read more)

2Viliam
Thanks for the link. While it didn't convince me completely, it makes a good point that as long as there are some environmental factors for IQ (such as malnutrition), we should not make strong claims about genetic differences between groups unless we have controlled for these factors. (I suppose the conclusion that the genetic differences between races are real, but also entirely caused by factors such as nutrition, would succeed to make both sides angry. And yet, as far as I know, it might be true. Uhm... what is the typical Ashkenazi diet?)

That they have a "real names" policy is a blatant lie.

They withhold "real names" every day, even ones so "obvious" as to be in wikipedia. If they hate the subject, such as Virgil Texas, they assert that it is a pen name. Their treatment of Scott is off the charts hostile.

If we cannot achieve common knowledge of this, what is the point of any other detail?

How about cancer deaths? From the point of view of 2012, was Beau Biden's death in 2015 after diagnosis in 2013 due to quantum randomness? That sure had a big effect on the Democratic primary, if not the general election.

Sure, but this is not new. You start by saying "AI in 2024" but this is true of everything that has been called AI and a lot of things that maybe should have been called AI, such as the PageRank algorithm. Credit scores have made decisions based on based on statistical models since the 50s.

2Davidmanheim
You're making a far different claim than I was - that everything using statistics for decisionmaking is not software. And I'd mostly agree, but don't think AI is particularly similar to statistics either, and the two both need intuition and understanding, but the intuitions needed differ greatly, so the point seems separate.

That sounds pretty similar to sublingual therapy. I think it is likely that sublingual therapy is better because of the denser dosing (weekly vs monthly), but the difference is small enough that it can only be assessed with a head-to-head trial. (If the difference is compliance, it would be difficult to measure, though potentially very large.)

The headline that environmental allergies are curable is a decades old. If this news has not spread, it is good that you promote it, but we should ponder why it is not common knowledge.

The medical consensus is that sublingual immunotherapy is inferior to the injected immunotherapy that has been used for a century. Did you try that as a kid? If there's reason to believe sublingual is better, that's good to know, but it sounds like you just don't know about injections.

Sublingual immunotherapy has an obvious advantage because people don't like shots. And it doesn't require a prescription. Indeed, one should be suspicious of a conflict of interest in the medical consensus. But injected doses are more precisely controlled, so there is good re... (read more)

2Chipmonk
I was under the presumption that injected immunotherapy doesn't last? https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/treatments/25194-allergy-shots hmmm

In the post you talked about editing all 237 loci to make diabetes negligible, but now you talk about the normal human range. I think that is more correct. Editing all 237 loci would leave the normal human range; the effect on diabetes would be unpredictable and the probability of bad effects likely. Not because of pleiotropy, but just the breakdown of a control system outside of its tested regime.

First of all, the population numbers are complete garbage. This is completely circular. You are just reading out the beliefs about history used to fabricate them. The numbers are generated by people caring about the fall of Rome. The fall of Rome didn't cause of decline in China. Westerners caring about the fall of Rome caused the apparent decline in China.

Second, there was a tremendous scientific and technological regress in Rome. Not caused by the fall of Rome, but the rise of Rome. There was a continual regress in the Mediterranean from 150BC to at leas... (read more)

6Ege Erdil
I downvoted this comment for its overconfidence. I will freely admit that I don't know how population numbers are estimated in every case, but your analysis of the issue is highly simplistic. Estimates for population decline do not just depend on vague impressions of the significance of grand historical events such as the fall of Rome. Archaeological evidence, estimates of crop yields with contemporary technology on available farmland, surviving records from the time, etc. are all used in forming population estimates. It's far from being reliable, but what we know seems clear enough that I would give something like 80% to 90% chance that the first millennium indeed had slower population growth than the first millennium BC. You can't be certain with such things, but I also don't agree that the numbers are "complete garbage" and contain no useful information. I think you're conflating a lack of progress with regression here. I remark in the post that the slowdown in population growth seems to have begun around 200 BC, which is consistent with what you're saying here if you take it as a statement about growth rates and not about levels. If the pace of new discoveries slows down, that would appear to us as fewer notable scientists as well as slower growth in population, sizes of urban centers, etc. Aside from that, there are also many alternative explanations of a gap in a list of scientists, e.g. that Rome was comparatively less interested in funding fundamental research compared to the Hellenistic kingdoms. Progress in fundamental sciences doesn't always correlate so well with economic performance; e.g. the USSR was much better at fundamental science than their economic performance would suggest. I don't know what you're referring to by "Rome fomented a civil war in Egypt in 145 BC". 145 BC is when Ptolemy VI died; but as far as I know, there was no single "civil war" following his death, Alexandria was not destroyed, and Rome was not involved directly in Egyptia

Since those are rare causes of deaths, they don't matter and they're hard to measure. Also, this is a small study, so I trust earlier studies more.

7jefftk
Per the paper's table 2, deaths in the lifetime abstainer group were, as a fraction of all deaths in the group: * CVD: 13,562 (34%) * Cancer: 8,169 (20%) * CLRT: 2,030 (5%) * Alzheimer's:1,730 (4%) * Diabetes: 1574: (4%) * Accidents: 1331 (3%) * Flu and pneumonia: 952 (2%) * Kidneys: 895 (2%) Light drinking mortality relative to lifetime abstainers, with full controls ("model 2"): * CVD: 0.76 (0.73–0.80) * Cancer: 0.86 (0.81–0.91) * CRLT: 0.68 (0.60–0.76) * Alzheimer's: 0.68 (0.59–0.78) * Diabetes 0.72 (0.61–0.84) * Accidents: 0.96 (0.83–1.11) * Flu and pneumonia: 0.63 (0.52–0.75) * Kidneys: 0.66 (0.54–0.81) This really doesn't look like "the study is great, and the underlying effect is entirely alcohol reducing CVD". There are 40k lifetime abstainer and 26k light drinker deaths; how much bigger are the studies you prefer?

There is a mechanistic explanation. Alcohol is a blood thinner. Blood thinners protect from ischemic heart disease, which is such a large portion of mortality a small improvement can make up for worsening of all other causes. Which is exactly what we see in the observation.

It's that simple.

2jefftk
The paper claimed that in addition to a decrease in people dying from heart conditions there were also decreases in deaths from "chronic lower respiratory tract diseases, Alzheimer's disease, and influenza and pneumonia."

Before asking why, ask what. Why did the technological growth of ancient Rome not snowball into the industrial revolution? I reject the premise. Rome was a period of regress in both physical technology and social organization, although it did spread some technology westward.

More generally, the macro trends of history are largely fabricated to prove the desired conclusion that there is always exponential progress, except in a few collapses that are so sharp that they cannot be denied. Why did this growth not produce the industrial revolution? Because it wasn't progress.

Slaves reproducing themselves is nonmalthusian, but rare. Romans captured slaves in war and enslaved debtors. I think the only time in history chattel slaves reproduced themselves is the New World, which was quite nonmalthusian.

This is a very popular theory, but it seems to predict way too much. The Greeks and Romans did have animal powered wells and mills. They had water mills and water saws. They probably had windmills.

Yeah, FTX seems like a totally ordinary financial crime. You don't need utilitarianism or risk neutrality to steal customer money or take massive risks.

LaSota and Leverage said that they had high standards and were doing difficult things, whereas SBF said that he was doing the obvious things a little faster, a little more devoted to EV.

The hard part is being willing to call papers bad. The task I find difficult is getting people to acknowledge that I called them bad, rather than gaslighting me.

Someone just told me that the solution to conflicting experiments is more experiments. Taken literally this is wrong: more experiments just means more conflict. What we need are fewer experiments. We need to get rid of the bad experiments.

Why expect that future experiments will be better? Maybe if the experimenters read the past experiments, they could learn from them. Well, maybe, but maybe if you read the experiments today, you could figure out which ones are bad today. If you don't read the experiments today and don't bother to judge which ones are better, what incentive is there for future experimenters to make better experiments, rather than accumulating conflict?

1TLK
I’m a fan of there being many experiments, but I might be biased by my background in meta-analysis. Many good experiments are, of course, better than many poorly designed and/or executed experiments, but replication is important, even in good experiments. Even carefully controlled experiments have the potential of error. Also, having many experiments usually is a better test of the generalizability of the findings. Finally, having many experiments coming out of many different laboratories (independent of each other) increases confidence that the findings are not the result of the investigator’s preference for what the results should be. If there is conflict in findings it might be poor study design and/or execution or it might be that the field is missing something important about the truth.
2JBlack
Alternatively: there are no conflicting experiments - there are simply experiments that measure different things. The hard part is working out what the experiments were actually measuring, as opposed to what they were claimed to be measuring. In some cases the published results may be simply 'measuring' the creativity of the writers in inventing data. More honest experimenters may still measure things that they did not intend, or may generalize too far in interpreting the results. Further experiments do very often help in all these situations.
1JNS
Reasonably we need both, but most of all we need some way to figure out what happened in the situation where we have conflicting experiments, so as to be able to say "these results are invalid because XXX". Probably more of an adversarial process, where experiments and their results must be replicated*. Which means experiments must be documented way more detailed, and also data has to be much more clear and especially the steps that happen in clean up etc. Personally I think science is in crisis, people are incentivized to write lots of papers, publish results fast, and there is zero incentive to show a paper is false / bad, or replicate an experiment. *If possible, redoing some experiment is going to be very hard, especially if we would like the experiments to have as little in common as possible (building another collider to does what LHC does is not happening any time soon).

France had a military coup in 1958 followed by 6 months of dictatorship. What threshold had France not passed in 1958 to not count as a full democracy? Does the Dictator's Handbook actually say this?

Did you click through from Paul's LW post to his blog? He gives a proof that a reversible computer can implement a PSPACE algorithm with only polynomially many erasures, and thus only polynomially much energy consumption, at the cost of running a little longer, hardly a noticeable difference compared to the exponential time required. But he also provides context which I suspect you need.

Right, the point is that a Reversible PSPACE appears physically realizable, while currently existing computers could not actually run for the exponential time necessary to compute PSPACE problems because they would also require exponentially much (free) energy.

It took 10 years from mass residential refrigeration to lead to use of CFCs. It took another half-century to detect atmospheric CFCs and the damage they were causing.

This makes it sound like it's an important point in the timeline, that substantial use of CFCs can be dated to c1930. This seems fundamentally wrong to me.

2DirectedEvolution
If you want to suggest different language that gets the point across that I'm trying to make here, I'll be happy to paste it in. It would be better if you could figure out the answer to the question you originally posed about the major drivers of commercial Freon demand so that substantial new information could be added to the story.

Mass introduction of modern residential refrigeration took place from 1914-1922.

What do you mean? Cooling food? I think that is a rounding error. A single wall AC has 10x as much freon as a refrigerator. Thus I think the bulk of the freon came later and there was not so long a delay from deployment to discovery. But it should be possible to look up actual freon production.

I think the growth of air conditioning was contained by the cost of electricity, not freon. It's hard for me to imagine electricity cheap and widespread enough to allow refrigerators w... (read more)

2DirectedEvolution
I don't know what the main products driving demand for freon were - I didn't look that up. That line was just referencing the fact that the motivation to synthesize Freon in the first place was for use in refrigerators.

I think talking about Google/DeepMind as a unitary entity is a mistake. I'm gonna guess that Peter agrees, and that's why he specified DeepMind. Google's publications identify at least two internal language models superior to Lambda, so their release of Bard based on Lambda doesn't tell us much. They are certainly behind in commercializing chatbots, but is that a weak claim. How DeepMind compares to OpenAI is difficult. Four people going to OpenAI is damning, though.

2dsj
A somewhat reliable source has told me that they don't have the compute infrastructure to support making a more advanced model available to users. That might also reflect limited engineering efforts to optimize state-of-the-art models for real world usage (think of the performance gains from GPT-3.5 Turbo) as opposed to hitting benchmarks for a paper to be published.

I assume you know this, but to be clear, OpenAI has already used pirated books. GPT-3 was trained on "books2" which appears to be all the text on libgen (and pretty much all the books on libgen have been through OCR). It was weighted the same as the common crawl, lower than Gutenberg or Reddit links. This seems to answer your second question: they will likely treat pdfs on the libgen the same as pdfs on the open web. If you're asking about whether they will train the model on the pixels in these pdfs, which might make up for losses in OCR, I have no idea.

5AnnaSalamon
I did not know this; thanks!

How many characters is your 500 line source file? It probably fits in 8k tokens. You can find out here

2Lone Pine
The entire conversation is over 60,000 characters according to wc. OpenAI's tool won't even let me compute the tokens if I paste more than 50k (?) characters, but when I deleted some of it, it gave me a value of >18,000 tokens. I'm not sure if/when ChatGPT starts to forgot part of the chat history (drops out of the context window) but it still seemed to remember the first file after long, winding discussion.

Since you have to manually activate plugins, they don't take any context until you do so. In particular, multiple plugins don't compete for context and the machine doesn't decide which one to use.

Please read the documentation and the blog post you cited.

4[anonymous]
"An experimental model that knows when and how to use plugins" Sounds like they updated the model. And it says you have to activate third party plugins. Browser, python interpreter will probably always be active.
2[anonymous]
That's rather useless then.

Does OpenAI say this, or are you inferring it entirely from the Wolfram blog post? Isn't that an odd place to learn such a thing?

And where does the Wolfram blog post say this? It sounds to me like he's doing something like this outsider, making one call to Wolfram, then using the LLM to evaluate the result and determine if it produced an error and retry.

6[anonymous]
I am inferring this because plugins would simply not work otherwise. Please think about what it would mean for each "plugin supported query" for the AI to have to read all of the tokens of all of the plugins.  Remember every piece of information OAI doesn't put into the model weights costs you tokens from your finite length context window.  Remember you can go look at the actual descriptions of many plugins and they eat 1000+ tokens alone, or 1/8 your window to remember what one plugin does. Or that what it would cost OAI to keep generating GPT-4 tokens again and again and again for the machine to fail to make a request over and over and over.  Or for a particular plugin to essentially lie in it's description and be useless.  Or the finer points of when to search bing vs wolfram alpha, for example for pokemon evolutions and math, wolfram, but for current news, bing...

Using nat.dev, I find that 002, 003, and Turbo all get the same result, wrong on the first and right on the second. This is an example of Turbo being Inferior to Chat. I also tried Cohere, which got both. I also tried Claude. Full v1.2 got both wrong. Instant 1.0, which should be inferior, got the second correct. It also produced a wordy answer to the first which I give half credit because it said that it was difficult but possible for the slow policeman to catch the fast thief. I only tried each twice, with and without "Let us think," which made no differ... (read more)

Right, Wikipedia cites a 1972 paper using viruses to deliver DNA, but no vaccine until 1984. Whereas, mRNA in lipids went from delivery in 1989 to a vaccine in 1993-1994. So twenty years on one metric, but ten years on another metric that probably screens off the first one by virtue of coming later.

But that's just playing around. Obstacles artificially created by the FDA are real obstacles. To the extent that the vaccine-hesitant mean anything by "old-fashioned," they mean large scale experience in humans. More people received vector vaccines in the Oxford... (read more)

Lots of people did assert that adenovirus vaccines were old-fashioned. But this is false. The first such vaccine was approved in 2019 (maybe a more appropriate comparison date is is 2015). I am skeptical of trying to manipulate lies, even if it is easy to predict that people will ultimately believe many falsehoods.

Note the tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Germans who got the illegal Stöcker vaccine, a recombinant protein vaccine, that is, a 20th century vaccine, an actual old-fashioned vaccine. Were they just opposed to government sanction, or did th... (read more)

2jefftk
Viral vector vaccines aren't old fashioned, I agree, but they are an older technology. We've been playing around with them since a least the 1980s (summary). You're right that the first one to get US approval wasn't until 2019, but a lot of that was the FDA moves very slowly when it doesn't have a reason to move quickly (well, and still pretty slowly even when it does). As of the beginning of covid I'd say viral vector vaccines had a ~20y head start?

Let's assume that OpenAI is reckless. Does giving them money make them more reckless?

It seems to me that your thought process is that OpenAI is evil and thus giving them money symbolically rewards evil. There can be some value in symbolic actions. This reminds me of the sporting and culture boycotts of Apartheid South Africa. To whatever extent that these worked, it wasn't about the money, but other forms of leverage.

Maybe tiny positive feedbacks reinforce behavior, although this seems pretty anthropomorphic. But maybe giving them money for services widens... (read more)

Lung cancer affects old people.

Also, while your link claims that lifetime healthcare costs are greater for smokers, it does not claim it is a consensus, but specifically mentions that many people claim the opposite. And that's before getting to Gerald Monroe's point.

The first thing to do is to distinguish human things from inhuman things. Physical things really are run by rigid laws. Social things like contracts, money, property, and a guilty verdict are caused by humans and this should make it obvious that they don't have rigid behavior. (The feeling of guilt is yet a third category.)

2Gunnar_Zarncke
I agree that social and physical things are different (I mean, I indicated so). But please explain how guilt is different.

A lot of people seem to think that signatures are magic. Would you agree with that description of your children? It would be interesting if you could figure out where this idea came from, either spontaneous generation or transmission.

4Gunnar_Zarncke
A lot of people seem to think that money/property/guilt are magic. Or, for that matter, more physical processes like electricity, GPS or refrigeration.
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