All of hwold's Comments + Replies

although I'm not sure if he claims that every ruliad must have observers

 

Of course yes, since there's only one ruliad by definition, and we’re observers living inside it.

In Wolfram terms I think the question would more be like : "does every slice in rulial space (or every rulial reference frame) has an observer ?"

Possibly of interest : https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/12/observer-theory/

One part that I don’t see as sufficiently emphasized is the "as a time-persistent pattern" part. It seems to me that that part is bringing with it a lot of con... (read more)

Do we have the value of the sum as a function of x, before going to the limit as x goes to 0 ? If yes, it would help (bonus points if it can be proven in a few lines).

2Shankar Sivarajan
Mathematica yields e(1+i)x(e2ix−4e(1+i)x+e2x+e(2+2i)x+1)2(−ex+eix)2(−1+e(1+i)x)2. That probably simplifies though.

To me, the correct way to do this is to compute the (implied) rate of returns of solar investment over the lifetime of the panels :

(x-x^25)/(1-x)=20/3.2 => x ~ 0.85

x = 1/(1+r) => x ~ 0.17

So yes, a 17% rate of returns is insanely good (if the two assumptions, "25 years lifetime" and "3.2k/year", stands) and will beat pretty much every other investment.

(which should makes you suspicious about the assumptions)

A person stating which entities they admit into their hypotheses, that others may not (“I believe in atoms”; “I believe in God”).

This one does not looks like the others to me.

I am not a community organizer, but if I was, I would just edict the MAD rule : if any dispute can’t be reasonably settled (in a way that would escalate to a panel), both the plaintiff and the defendant are kicked out of the community. The ratio of assholes to victims being low (hopefully), frame it as a noble sacrifice from the victim to keep the rest of the community safe (whoever is the actual victim here). "Some of you may die, but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make".

True, you’re slightly disincentivizing the reporting of true abuses (but not so much... (read more)

This is how adults deal with fights among children. The adults don't care who started it, who did what to whom, justice, fairness, or anything at all but getting them to stop bothering the adults.

It is not a way to deal with adults.

There are a bunch of problems with this even if implemented in good faith, but an obvious attack is that you convince a friend external to the community to (meet the minimum qualifications for membership and) accuse your target. This gets your target and your friend banned without investigation, but of course your friend does not care about getting banned.

2Shankar Sivarajan
This is unironically a great idea. It doesn't hinge on annoying questions of evidentiary standards, mens rea, seriousness of the charge, conflicts of interest etc. The idea that you can take anyone down, no matter how influential or powerful, if you're willing to go down with them really appeals to me. Yeah, you probably can't.

category boundaries should be drawn for epistemic and not instrumental reasons

 

Sounds very wrong to me. In my view, computationally unbounded agents don’t need categories at all ; categories are a way for computationally bounded agents to approximate perfect Bayesian reasoning, and how to judge the quality of the approximation will depend on the agent goals — different agents with different goals will care differently about a similar error.

(It's actually somewhat interesting; the logarithmic score doesn't work as a measure of category-system goodness

... (read more)
2tailcalled
MSE can also be seen as a special-case of log-loss for a Gaussian distribution with constant variance.
2Said Achmiz
This can only be true if they do not ever have to interact with computationally bounded agents.

Naive question : about immunogenicity, what are the problems with the obvious strategy to counter it ? (target the thymus first to "whitelist" the delivery method).

2GeneSmith
You know, I actually looked into this at one point. At the time I didn't find any obvious reason why it wouldn't work. But I didn't spend that much time digging into the details, so my prior is it will be hard for some reason I haven't discovered yet. If you could actually find a way to present aribtrary "self-antigens" to T and B cells during the development phase within the thymus, that would be an incredibly powerful technology. It seems plausible to me that we could potentially cure a large percentage of autoimmune conditions with that technology, provided we knew which epitopes were triggering a particular immune response. But I know much less about this area than about gene editing, so it's entirely plausible I'm wrong. There's already a few therapies that basically take this approach; allergy shots are probably the most basic, though I don't believe they actually do anything with the thymus. The general term for this approach seems to be "Immune Tolerance". With a short search, I don't see anything about reprogramming the thymus.

A prime example of what (I believe) Yudkowsky is talking about in this bullet point is Social Desirability Bias. 

"What is the highest cost we are willing to spend in order to save a single child dying from leukemia ?". Obviously the correct answer is not infinite. Obviously teaching an AI that the answer  to this class of questions is "infinite" is lethal. Also, incidentally, most humans will reply "infinite" to this question.

E=mc2 is only valid in the rest frame of the system. The formula in a non-rest frame is E^2 - p^2*c ^2=m^2*c^4 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-momentum for more details.

In general Perpetuals trade above the price of the underlying coins

I’m confused by this. Doesn’t this means that long positions almost always pays short positions, even if the index is increasing ? If so, why would anyone go long on the future ?

What’s the point of buying bitcoins in your scheme ?

1Isma
"Every hour, each perpetual contract has a funding payment where longs pay shorts if perpetual is trading at a premium to index, and shorts pay longs if trading at a discount. This funding payment is equal to TWAP ((Future - Index ) / Index) / 24. " Source: https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024780791-What-Are-Futures- Regarding the claim that PERP contracts systematically trade above the spot, I'd say that in the past few months it's been true for maybe 60% of the time? It really depends on the coin and the market sentiment. So the funding rate (which updates every hour) can vary a lot or even go negative (meaning that longs pay shorts) a few hours per day. I personally leave PERP contracts for short-term directional trades that I close in less than 24 hours. And so I'd do this arbitrage on quarterly futures [e.g. BTC-0326 is expiring in a few days and still trading at a small premium] so I can lock in the premium for the duration of the trade. At one point in the past few weeks, BTC-1231 traded 20% above spot! Which isn't so unusual in crypto actually..

I don’t understand where that 1/2 comes from. Unless I have made a gross mistake P(A|A => B) < P(A) even if P(A&B) > P(A&not(B)). In your first example, if I swap P(AB) and P(A&not(B)) so that P(AB) = .5 and P(A&not(B))=.3 then P(A|A=>B) = .5/.7 ~ 0.71 < 0.8 = P(A).

5Chris_Leong
This confused me as well. This being true ensures that the ratio P(A):P(not A) doubles at each step. But part of this comic seems to imply that being less than a half stops the trolling, when it should only stop the trolling from proceeding at such a fast-paced rate.

You’re right, the 2^(-3/4) (and the 2^1/4) is probably quantitatively wrong (unless each side is perfectly heat-conducing but both are isolated from each other. Or if the planet is a coin facing the sun. You know, spherical cows in a vacuum…). But I don’t think that changes the qualitative conclusion, which hold as long as the bright side is hotter but not twice as hotter than the perfectly-heat-conducing planet.

0Thomas
Oh, yes, it does change, of course. The result, that a faster rotating planet is warmer, is against the Al Gore's theology about Climate Change, formerly known as the Global Warming. As Scott Alexander said - the scientific community consensus was wrong, I was right. I am not sure about him, I know I am right here and the "science community" as it is self-proclaimed - is wrong. A faster rotating planet is warmer.

Given perfect conduction (uniform surface temperature, bright side and dark side have the same temperature at all times), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation#Temperature_relation_between_a_planet_and_its_star applies : temperature does not depend on rotation speed. Then T = T_sun sqrt(R_sun/(2D)) ; it is the temperature T that balance incoming radiation P_inc = pi (R_planet^2) (R_sun^2) (T_sun^4)/(D^2) and emitted radiation P_em = 4 pi (R_planet^2) * T^4

Let's suppose no conduction at all. The bright side and the dark side does not exch... (read more)

0Thomas
This is clearly wrong. The bright side hasn't an uniform temperature T.

Yes, "intrication" is the standard translation of "entanglement" in QM. But nobody else uses it, and therefore I fear there is an obvious failure mode where someone Googles it and start shouting "WTF is that?"

"évidence" the noun is just a shorthand for "obvious thing" (most typical usage is « C’est l’évidence même » = “It’s obvious”. « Ce n’est pas la peine d’asséner de telles évidences » = “Such obvious things are not worth stating”).

Great suggestion, I’ll look into that.

Yes, that means « obvious »/« self-evident »

0polymathwannabe
Maybe you're thinking of évident the adjective, not évidence the noun.

I’m trying to translate some material from LessWrong for a friend (interested with various subjects aborded here, but can’t read english…), and I’m struggling to find the best translation for “evidence”. I have many candidates, but every one of them is a little bit off relative to the connotation of "evidence". Since it’s a so central term in all the writings here, I figured out that it could not be bad to spend a little time finding a really good translation, rather than a just-okayish one.

English readers :

  • Could you find a few different sent
... (read more)
0tomtim
Bonjour! Translation can be frustrating, but it's almost never because one of the languages sucks. From my experience, there is probably an equal number of concepts that are hard to translate the other way around. Here are my attempts: “Evidence for a given theory is the observation of an event that is more likely to occur if the theory is true than if it is false” Une donnée en faveur d’une théorie consiste en l’observation d’un évènement plus probable si la théorie est vraie que si la théorie est fausse. or Une indication en faveur d’une théorie consiste en l’observation d’un évènement plus probable si la théorie est vraie que si la théorie est fausse. or Un élément de preuve en faveur d’une théorie consiste en l’observation d’un évènement plus probable si la théorie est vraie que si la théorie est fausse. “Generalization from fictional evidence” Généralisation depuis des données fictionelles.
0VoiceOfRa
Aren't there existing French Bayesian textbooks? What words do they use?
0Strangeattractor
Of the words you mentioned, phrases involving "preuve" probably get closest, such as "ensemble de preuves" for "body of evidence". But I would also look into using the word "faits" (facts) in some situations, and "constat de faits". Here are some links to definitions at the Word Reference translation dictionary site: http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/facts http://www.wordreference.com/fren/constat%20de%20faits http://www.wordreference.com/enfr/evidence
0satt
Of those four, I like "clue" the most. As Lumifer says, the word "proof" in English arguably connotes evidence supporting something; "sign" might have a similar problem; and "observation" feels a bit too vague to me, since an observation may be irrelevant to a hypothesis and hence not evidence at all. The singular "clue" doesn't read well to me in the phrase "conservation of expected clue", but I think pluralizing it may help ("conservation of expected clues"). It might be feasible to invent a new word meaning something like "clueness", which might align better with the technical meaning of "evidence". That said, if I examine how "preuve" is actually translated from French to English in official documents, the French "preuve" does sometimes seem to mean "evidence" in pretty much the English sense. So maybe "preuve" doesn't have the potential connotation (of evidence in support of a hypothesis) that Lumifer worries about. Perhaps "intriqué avec"? (It occurred to me that French quantum physicists must have had to deal with the phrase "entangled with" for a long time, so one could simply borrow whatever French translation those physicists use. I went to English Wikipedia's "Quantum entanglement" entry to look at the sidebar's list of alternative languages. It links to the French entry "Intrication quantique", though that title isn't the answer, because "intrication" is a noun, not an adjectival phrase. However, the entry's second sentence mentions (in bold, helpfully) "état intriqué", which certainly looks like "entangled state", and when I Google the phrase "entangled with" along with "intrication" & "quantique", I see snippets of French like "intriqués avec" and "états quantiques intriqués". Googling "intriqué avec" confirms that the phrase is used in French discussions of quantum mechanics in contexts where it seems to mean "entangled with".)
3Vaniver
What did Laplace call it? He invented a lot of this stuff, and presumably wrote in French.
0polymathwannabe
Anything wrong with l'évidence?
2Lumifer
In the Bayesian framework "evidence" basically means "relevant information" -- data which will (or could) affect the probabilities you're considering. Can't help you with French, but I would rather go more generic ("information"), than more specific with wrong connotations ("clue", "proof", "sign"). Actually, "proof" is explicitly wrong.

Can’t tell for the Romantic Manifesto, but in Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand uses the word “value” as a synonym of “rule of conduct”. For example, she argue that “rational evaluation” is a correct value for man in the same way that “flying” is a correct value for birds.

She calls her philosophy objectivism because the thinks that correct values, which means rules of conduct that leads to environmental fitness (in her words says : “survival”), are objective.

I still don’t understand HOW cancer kills.

I mean, we just have some additional cells who does not perform their normal functionality. But we still have a big bunch of normal, functioning cells.

In my (very very) distant family, someone died from lung cancer a few months ago. I still don’t understand the link between the few additional cells in his lungs and the acute hepatic failure that killed him.

I read somewhere that a primary cancer seldom kills ; most of the time the metastasic-induced does. Why ? There should be far more "bad" cells in the primary site, doesn’t it ?

(medecine illiterate there, sorry if half of my assumptions are wrong)

0satt
To throw another reference into the discussion, section 1.8 of McKinnell et al.'s The Biological Basis of Cancer spends a few pages on this. Summary: cancers can cause organ failure, but because the body has "an enormous reserve of normal tissue plus a built-in mechanism to regenerate more" organ failure is not usually the proximate cause of (edit: non-leukaemia) cancer death; the most common cause of death is instead cachexia (wasting) and hence infection.
3NoSignalNoNoise
The most anatomical origins for cancers (skin, breast and prostate) are not vital organs, so a cancer in one of those places won't kill you if it stays in place. The danger is if it metastasizes to a vital organ (most commonly the lungs or liver) and interferes with its function. If a cancer starts in a vital organ, it's more likely to kill you through its effects on that organ, not by spreading elsewhere.
8[anonymous]
Other people have covered the effects of solid tumors quite well. Blood tumors often do not form solid masses. They are the result of stem cells in the bone marrow (or occasionally actual immune system cells) becoming cancerous. These cells are highly mobile and usually do not embed themselves in solid tissue (except for lymphomas). What they do is outcompete your normal bone marrow and blood cells, preventing your immune system from working and your red blood cells from regenerating and your platelets from clotting your blood. I've read reports from autopsies in the 1800s of people who died from (what we would call untreated) leukemia that their blood resembled pus more than blood due to the paucity of normal red blood cells and huge level of abnormal nonfunctional white blood cells.
6Ishaan
I'm not particularly knowledgeable about cancer but I can give you the simplified version: I think this is at the root of your misconception. It starts out as a few additional cells rapidly dividing, but the end-stage typically involves macroscopic-level changes, like this Here. Sometimes it's the sheer bulk of cells that kills in the same way a rock in your brain might, other times it's the gradual replacement of working cells with non-functional cells, and other times it messes up sophisticated signalling stuff. (For example, the cancer cells might be putting out large amounts of hormones, or diverting blood flow). Metastatis means little cancer "seed" cells are floating around all over your bloodstream, right? This means that at any random time, a cancerous growth can suddenly pop up in any random region with no warning. Some of these growths will be benign, and others deadly. You have to obsessively scan the body for new growths from then on if you want to protect yourself. With primary cancers at least you can sometimes just cut them or irradiate them or shrink them, or just work around them (like with lung cancer, just give them an oxygen tank to make up for the reduced efficiency).
5ChristianKl
In the West you can often operate the primary site away.
  • Cancerous cells multiply incontrollably until they form their little own neighborhood, called tumor, which slowly and ruthlessly pushes everything else out of its way. In the case of lung cancer, the obvious consequence is that there's less space available for the healthy lung to do its job.
  • Cancerous cells are ravenous consumers of resources, and compete with the host body for them. You slowly become emaciated and malnourished as your cancer steals your food from you.
  • Tumors arising in glands may result in the dangerous overproduction of certain hormones.

A few day ago, I saw an interesting article on a site somewhat related to lesswrong. Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to read it, so I bookmarked it.

Computer crashed, lost my last bookmarks and now I spent 2 hours trying to find this article, without luck. Here is the idea of the article, in a nutshell : we human are somewhat a king of learning machine, trying to build a model of the “reality”. In ML, overfitting means that in insisting too much on fitting the data, we actually get a worse out-of-sample performance (because we start to fit the modeling... (read more)