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All of John Steidley's Comments + Replies

80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from the Job Board (and similar EA orgs should do similarly)
John Steidley1917

Because it's obviously annoying and burning the commons. Imagine if I made a bot that posted the same comment on every post of less wrong, surely that wouldn't be acceptable behavior.

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3kave
I think if you made a bot that posted the same comment on every post except for, say, a link to a high-quality audio narration of the post, it would probably be acceptable behaviour. EDIT: Though my true rejection is more like, I wouldn't rule out the site admins making an auto commenter that reminded people of argumentative norms or something like that. Of course, it seems likely that whatever end the auto commenter was supposed to serve would be better served using a different UI element than a comment (as also seems true here), but it's not something I would say we should never try. I think as site admins we should be trying to serve something like the overall health and vision of the site, and not just locally the user's level of annoyance, though I do think the user's level of annoyance is a relevant thing to take into account! There's something a little loopy here that's hard to reason about. People might be annoyed because a comment burns the commons. But I think there's a difference in opinion about whether it's burning or contributing to the commons. And then, I imagine, those who think it's burning the commons want to offer their annoyance as proof of the burn. But there's a circularity there I don't know quite how to think through.
4Bird Concept
[censored_meme.png] I like review bot and think it's good
6habryka
It's relatively normal for forums/subreddits to have bots that serve specific functions and post similar comments on posts when they meet certain conditions (like most subreddits I use have some collection of bots, whether it's a bot that looks up the text of any magic card mentioned, or a bot that automatically reposts the moderation guidelines when there are too many comments, etc.)
Intuition for 1 + 2 + 3 + … = -1/12
John Steidley711

The finish was quite a jump for me. I guess I could go and try to stare at your parenthesis and figure it out myself, but mostly I feel somewhat abandoned at that step. I was excited when I found 1, 2, 4, 8... = -1 to be making sense, but that excitement doesn't quite feel sufficient for me to want to decode the relationships between the terms in those two(?) patterns and all the relevant values

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4Shankar Sivarajan
That's fair. What I was trying to convey (in my notation, deliberately annoying to reduce a sense of familiarity) is limx→0−∑∞k=1kekxcos(kx)=−112 . Any ideas for how I could write that better? I added some actual values for concreteness. Hopefully that helps.
"Is There Anything That's Worth More"
John Steidley10

Zack, the second line of your quoted lyrics should be "I guess *we already..."

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2Zack_M_Davis
(Thanks; fixed.)
3 Levels of Rationality Verification
John Steidley10

I'm currently one of the four members of the core team at CFAR (though the newest addition by far). I also co-ran the Prague Workshop Series in the fall of 2022. I've been significantly involved with CFAR since its most recent instructor training program in 2019.

I second what Eli Tyre says here. The closest thing to "rationality verification" that CFAR did in my experience was the 2019 instructor training program, which was careful to point out it wasn't verifying rationality broadly, just certifying the ability to teach one specific class.

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1Randomized, Controlled
Quintin is arguing that AGI is unlikely by end of decade
Did anybody calculate the Briers score for per-state election forecasts?
John Steidley10

I think this comment would be better placed as a reply to the post that I'm linking. Perhaps you should put it there?

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2Oscar_Cunningham
Done.
2Oscar_Cunningham
Does it make sense to calculate the score like this for events that aren't independent? You no longer have the cool property that it doesn't matter how you chop up your observations. I think the correct thing to do would be to score the single probability that each model gave to this exact outcome. Equivalently you could add the scores for each state, but for each use the probabilities conditional on the states you've already scored. For 538 these probabilities are available via their interactive forecast. Otherwise you're counting the correlated part of the outcomes multiple times. So it's not surprising that The Economist does best overall, because they had the highest probability for a Biden win and that did in fact occur. EDIT: My suggested method has the nice property that if you score two perfectly correlated events then the second one always gives exactly 0 points.
Gifts Which Money Cannot Buy
John Steidley240

My summary: Give gifts using the parts of your world-model that are strongest. Usually the answer isn't going to end up being based on your understanding of their hobby.

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johnswentworth230

I would think about relative advantage rather than just which parts of your world-model are strongest, but roughly speaking I agree with this.

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A simple device for indoor air management
John Steidley40

Window AC units don't actually pull air from outside.

https://homeairguides.com/how-does-a-window-air-conditioner-work/

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6habryka
Oops, yep, that makes total sense now that I thought about the physics for 2 minutes.
A simple device for indoor air management
John Steidley40

Hey, I've been looking into air quality quite a bit recently. I have several questions.

What air quality sensor are you using? How are you getting outdoor data?

I suspect some of the confusion in the results may be due to circulation within the home and monitor placement. Have you thought much about circulation?

Additionally, it looks like indoor PM2.5 is tracking outdoor PM2.5. Have you thought much about other sources of ventilation?

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2Richard Korzekwa
I'm using one of these: https://blatn.com/products/brwissen-desktop-br-a18-air-quality-monitor-indoor-pollution-tester-for-co2-meter-pm1-0-pm2-5-pm10-particulate-matter-analyzer-hcho-formaldehyde-tvoc-air-gas-detector I get the outdoor data from PurpleAir. There are two stations within a few blocks of me, and they both seem to report very similar numbers, though I have not done anything to formally estimate the error/variance. Yes, and it does seem to depend somewhat on where the sensor is placed and what the circulation is. I took notes on where it was sitting, but I haven't tried to notice any patterns yet. I had a fan running to circulate air in the room the whole time that data was being recorded. I did not open the door very many times. Some, yes. I do expect the indoor PM2.5 to track it at least a little, since I would (naively, at least) expect the filtration system to work linearly (that is, it removes a percentage of particulates that is not dependent on the particulate concentration. But it does not seem to be linear, since it was removing a smaller fraction later in the day when the outdoor concentration was higher. It does seem like this might be explained by a leak somewhere? I've been considering how hard it would be to build a system that can maintain a positive pressure difference in the house, so that it will reduce particulate inflow through cracks, other windows, etc. I'm not sure how hard that is to achieve. Have you done experiments of your own?
interpreting GPT: the logit lens
John SteidleyΩ230

It doesn't sound hard at all. The things Gwern is describing are the same sort of thing that people do for interpretability where they, eg, find an image that maximizes the probability of the network predicting a target class.

Of course, you need access to the model, so only OpenAI could do it for GPT-3 right now.

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6gwern
Doing it with GPT-3 would be quite challenging just for compute requirements like RAM. You'd want to test this out on GPT-2-117M first, definitely. If the approach works at all, it should work well for the smallest models too.
TurnTrout's shortform feed
John Steidley50

I've was thinking along similar lines!

From my notes from 2019-11-24: "Deontology is like the learned policy of bounded rationality of consequentialism"

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