All of IL's Comments + Replies

ILΩ176319

When you exhaust all the language data from text, you can start extracting language from audio and video.

As far as I know the largest public repository of audio and video is YouTube. We can do a rough back-of-the-envelope computation for how much data is in there:

  • According to some 2019 article I found, in every minute 50 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube. If we assume this was the average for the last 15 years, that gets us 200 billion minutes of video.
  • An average conversation has 150 words per minute, according to a Google search. That gets us 30T wor
... (read more)

Very interesting!

There are a few things in the calculation that seem wrong to me:

  • If I did things right,15 years * (365 days/yr) * (24 hours/day) * (60 mins/hour) * (50 youtube!hours / min) * (60 youtube!mins / youtube!hour) = 24B youtube!minutes, not 200B.
  • I'd expect much less than 100% of Youtube video time to contain speech.  I don't know what a reasonable discount for this would be, though.
  • In the opposite direction, 1% useful seems too low.  IIRC, web scrape quality pruning discards less than 99%, and this data is less messy than a web scrape.

I... (read more)

I agree that this points in the direction of video becoming increasingly important.

But why assume only 1% is useful? And more importantly, why use only the language data? Even if we don't have the scaling laws, but it seems pretty clear that there's a ton of information in the non-language parts of videos that'd be useful to a general-purpose agent—almost certainly more than in the language parts. (Of course, it'll take more computation to extract the same amount of useful information from video than from text.) 

IL252

The previous SOTA for MATH (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03300.pdf) is a fine-tuned GPT-2 (1.5b params), whereas the previous SOTA for GSM8K (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.11171.pdf) is PaLM (540b params), using a similar "majority voting" method as Minerva (query each question ~40 times, take the most common answer).

Here's a thought experiment: Suppose that a market is perfectly efficient, except that every 50 years or so there's a crash, which sufficiently smart people can predict a month in advance. Would you say that this market is efficient? Technically it isn't, because smart people have a systematic advantage over the market. But practically, no trader systematically beats the market, because no trader lives long enough!

I suppose you can create a long-living institution, a "black swan fund", that very rarely makes bets on predictable crashes, and over a few centuries can prove it has higher returns. But I guess not enough people care about returns over these timescales.

IL100

What's the best way to convince skeptics of the severity of COVID? I keep seeing people saying it's just a slightly worse flu, or that car accidents kill a lot more people, and so on. I want some short text or image that illustrates just how serious this is.

I found this heartbreaking testimony from an Italian ICU doctor: https://twitter.com/silviast9/status/1236933818654896129

But I guess skeptics will want a more authoritative source.

4jdfaben
It is now literally not true that car accidents kill more people, in either the UK or Italy, and won't be true in the US in about a week. I've found the time-delayed log graphs like this one pretty convincing: https://images.app.goo.gl/iKrfzw9Wt7hAqkVB6
5Lukas Finnveden
Angela Merkel says that 60-70% of Germany is likely to be infected. That's useful if people believe that it won't infect that many. Example source, though you can google for others. If they're willing to believe a redditor's summary, this one says that WHO says that 20% of infected people needed hospital treatment for weeks. (If they want primary sources, maybe you could find those claims in the links / somewhere else.) Putting together 1 and 2 (and generalising from Germany to whatever country they're in), they ought to be convinced that it's pretty severe.
8Steven Byrnes
A nice figure is that 1 person infected with COVID-19 requires (I think) 100x the hospital capacity of 1 person infected with the flu - 30x likelier to need hospitalization, and they stay there 3x longer if they do (you'll have to check these figures, but it's something like that I think...). Then that connects to the nightmarish Italian hospital situation you mention, and the fact that the death rate is dramatically higher without available hospital beds, including for young healthy people.
1Ofer
Maybe citing the CDC:
4gwillen
For today, I have been directing people to this chart of Italian intensive care hospitalizations and deaths, 2020 COVID-19 vs 2018-2019 flu season: https://twitter.com/DellAnnaLuca/status/1236805732525207552 (Source: http://www.biotecnologi.org/ecco-perche-il-coronavirus-non-e-una-semplice-influenza/) As well as this news story about Italy banning all public gatherings across the whole country: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-51810673 Plus the fact the the stock market is down >10% over the last week...

"Or the first replicator to catch on, if there were failed alternatives lost to history - but this seems unlikely, given the Fermi Paradox; a replicator should be more improbable than that, or the stars would teem with life already."

So do you thing that the vast majority of The Big Filter is concentrated on the creation of a first replicator? What's the justification for that?

-You can't prove I'm wrong!

-Well, I'm an optimist.

-Millions of people believe it, how can they all be wrong?

-You're relying too much on cold rationality.

-How can you possibly reduce all the beauty in the world to a bunch of equations?

Eliezer, I remember an earlier post of yours, when you said something like: "If I would never do impossible things, how could I ever become stronger?" That was a very inspirational message for me, much more than any other similar sayings I heard, and this post is full of such insights.

Anyway, on the subject of human augmentation, well, what about them? If you are talking about a timescale of decades, than intelligence augmentation does seems like a worthy avenue of investment (it doesn't has to be full scale neural rewiring, it could be just smarter nootropics).

...Can someone explain why?

Many people believe in an afterlife... why sign up for cryonics when you're going to go to Heaven when you die?

That's probably not the explanation, since there are many millions of atheists who heard about cryonics and/or extinction risks. I figure the actual explanation is a combination of conformity, the bystander effect, the tendency to focus on short term problems, and the Silliness Factor.

Eliezer, I have an objection to your metaethics and I don't think it's because I mixed levels:

If I understood your metaethics correctly, then you claim that human morality consists of two parts: a list of things that we value(like love, friendship, fairness etc), and what we can call "intuitions" that govern how our terminal values change when we face moral arguments. So we have a kind of strange loop (in the Hofstadterian sense); our values judge if a moral argument is valid or not, and the valid moral arguments change our terminal values. I thi... (read more)

why isn't the moral of this fable that pursuing subjective intuitions about correctness a wild goose chase?

Bacause those subjective intuitions are all we got. Sure, in an absolute sense, human intuitions on correctness are just as arbitrary as the pebblesorter's intuitions(and vastly more complex), but we don't judge intuitions in an absolute way, we judge them with are own intuitons. You can't unwind past your own intuitions. That was the point of Eliezer's series of posts.

The gap between autistic humans and neurotypical humans may be bigger than the gap between male and female humans. I would list autism as an exception to the psychological unity of humankind.

I remember reading "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" and thinking: "This guy is more alien than most aliens I saw in Sci-fi".

P.S : My great "Aha!" moment from reading this post is the realisation that morality is not just a utility function that maps states of the world to real numbers, but also a set of intuitions for changing that utility function.

Let me see if I get this straight:

Our morality is composed of a big computation that includes a list of the things that we value(love, friendship, happiness,...) and a list of valid moral arguments(contagion backward in time, symmetry,...). If so, then how do we discover those lists? I guess that the only way is to reflect on our own minds, but if we do that, then how do we know if a particular value comes from our big computation, or is it just part of our regular biases? And if our biases are inextricably tangled with The Big Computation, then what hope ... (read more)

The AIs will not care about the things you care about. They'll have no reason to.
The "AIs" will be created by us. If we're smart enough, we will program the AIs to value the things we value (not in the same way that evolution programmed us).

The important thing is that we humans value love, and therefore we want love to perpetuate throught the universe.

I guess that this will lead to your concept of volition, isn't it?

Anyway, is Obert really arguing that morality is entirely outside the mind? Couldn't the "fact" of morality that he is trying to discover be derived from his (or humanity's, or whatever) brain design? And if you tweak Subhan's definition of "want" enough, couldn't they actually reach agreement?

Also, I take it that this means you don't believe in the whole, "if a program implements consciousness, then it must be conscious while sitting passively on the hard disk" thing. I remember this came up before in the quantum series and it seemed to me absurd, sort of for the reasons you say.

I used that as an argument against timeless physics: If you could have consciousness in a timeless universe, than this means that you could simulate a conscious being without actually running the simulation, you could just put the data on the hard drive. I'm still waiting out for an answer on that one!

5Kenny
Huh? A "timeless universe" still contains 'time'; it's just not fundamental. Consciousness may be a lot of things, but it's definitely not static in 'time', i.e. it's dynamic with respect to causality.
6DanielLC
In order for it to be analogous, you'd have to put the contents of the memory for every step of the program as its running on the hard drive. The program itself isn't sufficient. Since there's no way to get the memory every step without actually running the program, it doesn't seem that paradoxical. Also, if time was an explicit dimension, that would just mean that the results of the program are spread out on a straight line aligned along the t-axis. I don't see why making it a curvy line makes it any different.

Vladimir, why not? From reading your comment, it seems like the only reason you don't hurt other people is because you will get hurt by it, so if you would take the pill, you would be able to hurt other people. Have I got it wrong? Is this really the only reason you don't hurt people?

Vladimir, if there was a pill that would make the function of the mirror neurons go away, in other words, a pill that would make you able to hurt people without feeling remorse or anguish, would you take it?

2Micah71381
Yes I would, assuming we are talking about just being able to not feel the pain of others at this stage of my life and forward, perhaps even by choice (so I could toggle it back on). Though, if we are not talking about a hypothetical "magic pill" then turning these off would have side effects I would like to avoid.

Roko, what exactly do you mean by "optimal"? "optimal" means "good", which is another word for "ethical", so your definition of ethics doesn't actually tell us anything new! An AI can view the supergoal of "creating more paperclips" as the optimal/correct/succesful/good thing to do. the value of the AI's supergoal(s) doesn't has anything to do with it's intelligence.

I still don't get the point of timeless physics. It seems to me like two different ways of looking at the same thing, like classical configuration space vs relational configuration space. Sure, it may make more sense to formulate the laws of physics without time, and it may make the equations much simpler, but how exactly does it change your expected observations? In what ways does a timeless universe differ from a timeful universe?

Also, I don't think it's neccessary to study quantum mechanics in order to understand personal identity. I've reached the same conclusions about identity without knowing anything about QM, I feel it's just simple deductions from materialism.

Wait a second, this doesn't make sense. If the universe is timeless, then you don't have to actually simulate the universe on a computer. You can just create a detailed model of the universe, put in the neccesery causality structure, stick it in the RAM, and voila! you have conscious beings living out their lives in a universe. You don't even have to put it in the RAM, you can just write out symbols on a piece of paper! Or can this impeccable line of reasoning be invalidated by experimental evidence?

-1Will_Sawin
The process of generating the model requires law-abiding computations.
3UnholySmoke
18 months too late, but http://xkcd.com/505/ By Eliezer's line of reasoning above - that the subjective experience is in the causal change between one state and the 'next' then yes, symbols are as good a substrate as any. FWIW, this is how I see things too.

But the experiment does'nt prove that the two photons are really identical, it just proves that the photons are identical as far as the configurations are concerned. The photons could still have tiny tags with a number on them, but for some reason the configurations don't care about tags.

0[anonymous]
Yes, technically, you could maybe do that. At least as long as you don't have two photons occupying the same state, in which case I am unsure. However, your generat quantum state does not have a precis number of photons. So before you can start flag anything, you would have to express the quantum state as a sum of states that has an exact number of photons. Then you could, separately for each term in that sum, label each photon. And then, a moment later, you would have to do that all over again. Because you cannot track over time which photon is which. So why would you go in to all that trouble to invent an epiphonomena?