All of Malmesbury's Comments + Replies

That's impressive work! Out of curiosity, how long did it take to figure all of this out?

Putting error-correction codes in the genetic code is an interesting idea. In the context of the Pikachu thought experiment, though, here what I think would happen in the long run: because of the drift barrier, evolution can't distinguish between a ~1/N error rate and a zero error rate. So, there's nothing to prevent the rest of the machinery to become less accurate, until the error rate reaches 1/N after error correction. Now that I think about, you could probably keep things in control by systematically sequencing the genes for the replication machinery and breeding based on that. There is a spark of hope.

Oh yeah, I mean to compare things that have the same functionality (e.g. human-made butterfly robot vs natural butterfly). Obviously shovels are more simple than butterflies. But, seeing stuff like the wax motor and other examples people have posted, humans are definitely capable of coming up with great simple mechanisms, and I underestimated that. Thanks for bringing it up.

Kudos for taking the challenge! If I understand correctly, your first point is actually pretty similar to how E. coli follows gradients of nutrients, even when the scale of the gradient is much larger than the size of a cell.

You might enjoy this story I wrote a few months ago, also about AI doom and also set in the future: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BgTsxMq5bgzKTLsLA/this-is-already-your-second-chance

Self-review: It's been long enough that I've forgotten most of the details of the post, so it's a good time to re-read it and get a sense of what it reads like for someone who's discovering the content for the first time. I still believe most of the ideas here are correct. My goal here was to write a bottom-up overview of how the basic molecular structure of DNA might "inevitably" lead to stuff like sexually-dimorphic ornaments, after a long chain of events. The point I wanted to get at was that the male/female binary, which human cultures often depict as ... (read more)

Which one? I hope it's not the one where you have to put chocolate, because this is the most crucial instruction.

2steven0461
"Broekveg" should be "Broekweg"

it's no biology lab

I'm afraid you're overestimating how well biologists follow the safety procedures. I wouldn't be surprised if we all had fluorescent bacteria in our guts.

3quetzal_rainbow
I think that all bacteria are evolutionary optimized in favor of replication speed, so any unnecessary piece of DNA get ditched.

Oh, that's a really good point. Actually, it might be common for chemists to work with panels of related molecules, while in clinical trials they only work with one purified drug candidate. This makes it less likely for them to discover things by accident. Surely a piece of the puzzle!

Sure, all these stories totally sound like urban legends, but the sweeteners are out there and I don't see how they could have been discovered otherwise (unless they were covertly screening drugs on a large number of people).

That's a great question, this is totally mysterious to me. There are a lot of examples of people putting thaumatin in transgenic fruits or vegetables (and somehow in the milk of transgenic mice because there's always one creepy study), but I don't know why it hasn't been commercialized. It sounds like superfruits would make a nice healthy alternative to palm-oil-and-chocolate-based comfort foods. Maybe it's a regulatory problem?

4gwern
"Ow! My bones are so brittle. But I always drink plenty of... 'malk'‽"

That sounds exciting! I hadn't seen Elisabeth's comment, I just wrote a reply. Do you think there are modifications I should make to the main text to clarify?

2Elizabeth
Thanks for replying! I'd love to see a response to https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA8DWsHJeFZhDcQuo/the-talk-a-brief-explanation-of-sexual-dimorphism?commentId=zcN3aWbvNCDqJnJab as well, which I think makes a really important point. 

That sounds plausible, but I've not looked into the empirical research on that topic so I can't tell you much more! 

(Sorry I missed your comment)

Here by "reproduce" I just meant "make more copies of itself" in an immediate sense (so reproductive fitness is just "how fast it replicates right now"). For example, in Lenski's long-term evolution experiment, some variants were selected not because they increased the bacteria's daily growth rate, but because they made it easier to acquire further variants that themselves increased the daily growth rate. These "potentiating" variants were initially detrimental (the copy number of these variants decreased in the population... (read more)

You're right. Honestly I wouldn't be able to talk about this in detail because this is getting far from the things I know best (full disclosure, my own research is on bacteria). The few papers I've cited give some general patterns, and my general point was "things can go in many different ways depending on the specifics, and even the well-known Bateman principle isn't universal".

That's unfortunately all can do: there's a whole world of things to say about how sexual dimorphism actually develops in metazoans, but it takes years of learning to get a dee... (read more)

2Firinn
OK, "top level post on the biology of sexual dimorphism in primates" added to my todo list (though it might be a while since I'm working on another sequence). Now that I know you're a bacteria person, this makes more sense! I'm a human evolution person, so you wrote it very differently to how I would've. (If you'd like an introductory textbook, I always recommend Laland and Brown's Sense and Nonsense.) I don't know as much about the very earliest origins in bacteria, so that was super interesting to read about!  The stuff about adding a third sex reminded me somewhat of the principle that it's unstable to have an imbalance between the sexes; even if it would be optimal for the tribe to have one male and many females, an individual mother in such a gender-imbalanced tribe would maximise her number of grandchildren by having a male child. I've seen this used as the default example to prod undergrads out of group-selection wrongthink, so I'm curious if this is as universally known as I think it is.  I can't tell you whether to edit the post, but I think it's very common for people to act/joke/suggest as though the study of human evolution inevitably leads towards racist/sexist conclusions. In part, this is because fields like anthropology have a terrible history with sweeping conclusions like "women just evolved to be weaker" and other sins like "let's make a categorization system that ranks every race", which has certainly been used by unscientific movements like Red Pill. But anthropology has done a lot to clean up its act, as a field, and I don't think this is ground we want to cede. The study of human evolutionary biology has only ever confirmed, for me, that discrimination on grounds like race and sex is fundamentally misguided. So I try to push back gently, when I see it, against the implication that studying sexual selection or sexual dimorphism will lead towards bigoted beliefs. Studying science will generally lead away from bigoted beliefs, because bigoted b

What do you mean by curating? So far I've tried to answer the questions and objections when I saw them, are there some I've missed? (Obviously I don't pretend to be able to answer everything). Also, do you think there are some clarifications that I should add to the main text?

5habryka
Curation is a thing where the post shows up at the top of the frontpage for 1-2 weeks, and we send out the post to something like 30k people who are subscribed to get updates whenever we curate a post. This is one comment that seems good to respond to: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yA8DWsHJeFZhDcQuo/the-talk-a-brief-explanation-of-sexual-dimorphism?commentId=LmHAALLKHkyrDtvei 

I would guess that when organelles are inherited from both parents, the traitor organelle is disadvantaged by its burden on the host, but advantaged by it's ability to be the predominant organelle in the offspring. If the cost-benefit is favourable, then the traitor organelle will take over. OTOH, if only one parent transmits the organelle, the advantage disappears but the burden remains. So I'd expect that it makes it more difficult for traitor mitochondria to invade. Hopefully that makes sense!

Not quite, if it's less efficient at doing the normal mitochondria work, it puts a big burden on the cell, who is then less likely to reproduce.

3Yair Halberstadt
But wouldn't that be the case for any organelle, even one which is inherited from both parents?

Thank you for spotting this, I fixed it.

It's not so much the different types in themselves that prevent competition, but having multiple types make it possible to have a mechanism that forces all organelles to come from only one pre-selected parent. If all organelles come from the female, then a rogue mitochondria cannot take over by making more copies of itself or by poisoning other mitochondria, because the only way to make it to the next generation is to be in the female gamete, period. In other words, there's not much an organelle can do to increase in frequency, aside from improving the overall fitness of the organism. Does that make more sense?

2Yair Halberstadt
But by making more copies of itself/poisoning other mitochondria isn't it more likely to end up in the female gamete?

The n°1 reason why I said not mention fungi is that I'm absolutely not a mycologist and I wouldn't be able to talk about them. So I greatly appreciate that you do it! Typically, I had never heard of glomeromycota, despite them apparently being involved in symbiosis with 80% of plants. I like to think that I have a decent understanding of the living world, and then I'm constantly reminded that I don't, and probably nobody does...

According to this paper, the "root" factor is how much effort each parent invests in caring about offsprings, as in some species the male is the primary caregiver. But that's really hard to measure and check empirically, so they instead measure "the maximum number of independent offspring that parents can produce per unit of time", and they find very good agreement with which sex faces the most intense competition.

On notable exception is the hippocampus, where the males both face intense competition and invest more resources in the offspring. Because of course it had to be hippocampi.

8Mvolz
According to this 2009 paper, seahorses aren't actually an exception, and the males are indeed the more choosy one, at least in this one experiment. (They're an "exception" to Bateman's principle in the sense they have the smaller gamete, but this is explained away by their greater parental investment.) In general, yes, parental investment can "outweigh" gamete size in some situations, and typically this ends up happening in cases where investment in offspring isn't as strongly physiologically sex-linked as it is in most mammals which allows different strategies to evolve more readily. For instance, in birds, the egg is quite large, but because incubation is quite time consuming (as is feeding) and this can be shared between parents, you end up with more bi-parental care, as a male can increase his reproductive success by staying and incubating. Because there are many species of bird with bi-parental care, this opened up the pathway for evolution of the jacana, where the male does all the parental care, and the male is rate limited by how many eggs he can incubate and is more choosy.  In mammals, since most of the energetic investment is in gestation and lactation, both of which only females can do, and you end up with bi-parental care being more rare than in birds. One notable exception being humans, which have an exceptionally long childhood that extends long after weaning.  Insects in general and fruit flies in particular were a particularly bad species to detect Bateman's principle in, because they're r selected rather than K selected. In K selected species, genetic quality of the mate matters much more because of how few offspring there are; in species where the goal is to produce as many offspring as possible, genetic quality and therefore mate quality and ergo choosiness has a much smaller impact. 
7npostavs
Let me just quote Wikipedia: "A seahorse [...] is any of 46 species of small marine fish in the genus Hippocampus." Because I spent a few confused minutes trying to figure out how males could face more intense competion in a brain part.

The "random sampling" that causes genetic drift is applied once every generation, asexual or not, so the optimal number of types depends on the ratio of generations that are asexual vs sexual. The Constable & Kokko paper has a mathematical model to quantify how many asexual generations you need for 2 being the optimum, and it turns out that most isogamous species are well into that regime.

That being said, you're entirely right when you ask "why is the equilibrium 2 instead of 3 or 5 or different for different species?" – Constable's model and empirical... (read more)

In their book on social dominance, Sidanius and Pratto make a relevant point: first, they cite a bunch of audit studies where researchers send fake resumes to employers, and find a marked bias against employing African American. Then, they point to Gallup polls asking people whether African American face any discrimination, and almost half of African-Americans themselves say they don't. Same for discrimination in justice or housing. So, when the book was published back in the 90s, many black people didn't believe in racial discrimination, even though it af... (read more)

2tailcalled
I don't think the Gallup polls are very well-designed (at least for this purpose). It seems like they ask about only a few bits of information about very abstract general questions that aren't straightforwardly related to people's personal experiences, and then they aggregate the data together into averages, destroying most of the information about who sees what. I don't feel I get a picture of what people mean by their claims of discrimination when reading those polls. So I agree that when a problem appears very diffusely, without it being reliably observable in the instances where it does occur, then it is hard to identify it by asking people about their experiences. However I am not sure social science is the solution to this. Social science typically also seems driven by ideology more than factual matters, and also social scientists usually seem plain bad at their job. Furthermore these sorts of studies tend to strip away so much context that they are hard to make sense of. I haven't specifically read the literatures you point at. If you think they are much better than other social science, feel encouraged to write it up. Again this is a really abstract study which strips away most detail. I'm not sure how I'd quantify discrimination in such a way that one can about who faces "more" discrimination, and I'm not sure how the participants quantify it. But I feel like there could totally be some sort of experiences behind it which explains their views. In fact the paper itself speculates that maybe what white people have in mind is that the institutions designed to rank and teach people have policies prefer to admit lower-skilled black people to higher-skilled white people, or that the American government has policies to require the contractors it works with to prefer hiring black people. Does this mean white people are """more""" discriminated against than black people? Dunno. It seems like the discrimination is in different areas that are hard to compare.

That single broader idea belongs in a single paragraph. Do not split ideas unnecessarily; and certainly do not combine them.

That's interesting, I usually don't think about this when writing. I will in the future.

On using words precisely: I find it more useful to think about how the reader will use the text to make an inference about what's going on in my head. Of course words have official labels that say what they are supposed to mean, but in pratice what matters is how you think I think, and how I think you think I think (you'll recognize a Schelling poi... (read more)

Could there be a signalling component? Nobody you see online would ever be in favour of conversion therapy, so there's no risk for you to be mistaken for one of them. The ideology where one excludes anyone who doesn't support gay rights become the baseline, the least sophisticated ideology, so it's tempting to be a meta-contrarian and argue against it, which signals intelligence and freedom of mind. But IRL, you see that there are pretty homophobic people around (could be some family members at the Christmas dinner), so being a meta-contrarian is no longer an option, as it would just signal intolerance.

I agree on the point that open source software doesn't have to be more secure. My understanding is that they are less likely to send user data to third parties as they're not trying to make ad money (or you could just remove that part from the source). For the exploits-finding AI, I can only hope that the white hats will outnumber the black hats.

I'm also a postdoc, and my institution more or less requires having a smartphone because you can't do anything without their proprietary 2-factors authentication. The other proprietary thing that seem mandatory is Zoom, have you found a way to escape from it?

1Bezzi
Well, I actually don't have the first problem since my institution still uses the old username + password login procedure (for other things needing 2FA like Protonmail I use a free desktop program to generate the keys). They also prefer Google Meets or MS Teams to Zoom. Both are nonfree, but at least they work directly in the browser and I don't have to install nonfree software on my laptop.

This is just my humble opinion, but I found this post hilarious.

2ChristianKl
I found it also funny, but it seems like many people don't share our humor.

I see your point, and you're right. Data leaks from big companies or governments are not impossible though, they happen regularly!

Android is (partially) open source but it's not "free as in freedom", which is a technically narrower thing: https://itsfoss.com/what-is-foss/

I agree, though it depends on whether rational design of genomes is even possible, and can do at least as well as natural selection. Can we ever come up with something like an ATP synthase? (Tbh, just maximizing the traits we know about may be enough to stay in the game for a while)

-1MrBaggers
This also brings into question "Ship of Theseus". If we were to genetically modify all our cells, would we still be us? Who/What are we? Am I the same person that went to sleep or am I a new person with the same memories?

Could an AI secretly make money on Onlyfans?

I was thinking about how a misaligned AI with write-access to the Internet could gain power without anyone noticing. It looks like porn would be a decent option. It's definitely easier than ordering peptides that turn into nanobots, and less noticeable than blackmail. All the AI has to do is generate realistic pictures of a hot girl and fish for horny subscribers. And then, when you've got money, you've got power.

If the pictures are convincing enough, it would be very hard for anyone to figure out it's fake, espe... (read more)

2ChristianKl
There are already plenty of ways that people can make money online via websites like Fiverr and Upwork. There's no need to do anything like creating fake porn to make money on the internet. 
2Dagon
This is just another example of something that humans with the assistance of tool-AI can do as well or better than AI on it's own.  Which makes it a good topic to watch for - how much (if any) porn revenue is computer-generated?  Nonzero, I'm sure, but I don't follow closely enough to know if it's significant. It's also another example of something that the median performer just doesn't make much, and is pretty well saturated with humans trying their hand (or other parts) at it.  For a long time yet, humans will be cheaper, at any quality/revenue level, than AI.
1Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel
Yes - seems sensible. I believe ARC is doing some work tracing out various possible attack vectors of AI. 

I'm only seeing this now, thanks for all the info!

I was thinking of making a TripAdvisor for concepts, in a kind of tongue-in-cheek way, like "this philosophical concept is worth 3.8 stars out of 5". But then, I figured that it would lead to every reader learning the same ideas. It's better if people explore random ideas independently, so they can make unique connections and come up with novel things. Still, a power-ranking of concepts could be very useful as long as you keep in mind that it doesn't replace exploration. 

Next year, we should give the Sneerclub reddit a big red button to destroy LW, and have a big red button here to destroy Sneerclub. Nuclear war is more fun when it's not all like-minded people.

8Amelia Bedelia
That is a cute idea but they'd do it right away [>95%]. Even if you just gave it to like five moderators. They are largely conflict theorists who believe rationalists are [insert the strongest politically derogatory terms imaginable] and LW being down is morally good. Maybe if there were real stakes they would consider it, like an independent party making a donation to both MIRI and an organization of SC's choice — except on second thought, I think they would find this too objectionable: "wow, you'll donate to charity but only if you get to humiliate me by forcing me to play your idiotic game? that really shows that [insert further derogation]") So maybe with a different group. It would be particularly cool if it were a foreign entity, but that seems difficult to arrange.
1Isaac King
Something like that would be much more representative of real defection risks. It's easy to cooperate with people we like; the hard part is cooperating with the outgroup. (Good luck getting /r/sneerclub to agree to this though, since that itself would require cooperation.)

I am not sure why,but this comment made me suddenly realize how close we used to be to doomsday(and still are)!

According to the paper, that would be the same individual making several shoots.

You mean seeds that can only work if there's fire? If you have any example in mind, I'm very interested.

mruwnik130

Check out pyrophytes. Or in general fire ecology, which is quite fascinating. Conifers are common culprits. Sequoia's are a well known example of a plant that pretty much require a fire for their seeds - the cones are thick and often covered in an additional layer for protection, which require high temperatures for them to crack and let the seeds fall out. A lot of plants in Australia, California etc, (i.e. places where you'd expect common fires) tend to have various fire protections or enhancements. Though you can also get them in other places - Scots pin... (read more)

Yes, I'm pretty sure there is some diminishing return after some decades (though, apparently, they hit pretty late for bamboos). Now if we stick to the absurd model with no diminishing returns, we can imagine a mutant that almost never reproduces, but when it does, it suddenly covers the entire planet, erasing all the other strains that have been growing exponentially in the meantime. The limit where it doesn't reproduce at all is when a bamboo in a forest appears dead, but will eventually turn the entire universe into copies of itself when comes the Armageddon.

You're right! Corrected. As where the extra resources are stored, I don't know enough about botanic to tell, but here's what they say in the paper: "First, plants that wait longer to flower may accumulate greater energy resources to invest in producing more seeds, and/or seeds that are better protected (Fenner 1985). (The latter scenario, involving better-protected seeds, seems less applicable to bamboos, whose ancestral fruit type is a caryopsis, i.e. fruits with seeds that are generally less well protected than those of many other flowering plants.) In b... (read more)

Many people would think that the second case is more fair. It depends on how these dollars were obtained.

Yeah, there was a bit of hyperbole, but overall when I see what gets in my RSS feed, it's clear that it tends to converge on a particular kind of people and I have to spend a lot of energy finding contradictory sources. On topics like the gender pay gap, I find that one "side" is basically always wrong, and it's hard to tell if it's just because they are really always wrong, or because of my confirmation bias. Also, by "favourite political tribe" I just mean that there are tribes with which I disagree more often than others. I don't think anybody really likes every tribe equally.

It's the second option in both cases (e.g. P(pay|gender) and P(pay) are equal). In addition, since they do the same work with the same productivity, it's assumed that they have the same circumstances and dispositions.

The commuting gap is what I was thinking of. Well done!

5Said Achmiz
Er, how exactly does this cause the man and the woman to get different salaries, unless they work at different companies, in different locations? And if so, then, contrary to the stipulations, they’re not doing “the exact same job”!

Nice try, but it's neither. To clarify, the company doesn't take gender into account when calculating the wages.

I didn't expect that. Do you think there are cases where an unfair society is better than a fair society?

John has $100 and Jill  has $100 is worse but more fair than John has $1,000 and Jill has $500.

In the riddle's world, there are indeed competitive labor markets. The firm would hire the woman if they could. It turns out they can't, because of the mystery phenomenon.

Oh yes, that's basically the same point! I love this channel btw. Now that you mention it, this post by Jason Crawford on precognition is also relevant.

0Jiro
Notice that that post doesn't actually call it precognition. Instead it says that you don't need precognition, because this is as good. People cannot do magic, or clairvoyance, or precognition. Those words mean things, which people can't do, and we already have perfectly good words to describe the things that people can do. Reusing "magic" or "clairvoyance" or "precognition" is the nonpolitical version of calling everyone you don't like a Nazi, or of saying that anything you believe in is "God". If you call everyone a Nazi, what are you going to call actual Nazis? If my "god" is utilitarianism, what do we call the being that creates universes and controls morality? Honest-to-God God?
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