Oh… wait a minute! I looked up Principal of Indifference, to try and find stronger assertions on when it should or shouldn’t be used, and was surprised to see what it actually means! Wikipedia:
>The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or "degrees of belief") equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration. In Bayesian probability, this is the simplest non-informative prior.
So I think the superior is wrong to call it “principle of indifference”! You are the one...
If you meant specifically negative secrets, about clandestine acts, I don’t have anything, but MrBeast’s document that new employees are given when they join his company surprised me. It’s 30+ pages of excellent, specific advice, as well as clear directions about how MrBeast videos are different and thus employees must think and act differently than they would at any other production company.
The clarity of it, and the density of information, makes it hands-down the best work document I’ve ever read, and having read many in my 10 years of corpor...
Having previously been supremely convinced of this way of thinking by reading The Last Psychiatrist, and having lived by it for the last few years, I do now suspect it’s possible to take it too far.
I think the desire for status - the goal of being able to say and think “I am this type of person”, and be recognized for it - is a part of the motivation system. As you say, some (most?) take it too far. But if one truly excises this way of thinking from themselves, they’ve kind of… excised part of their motivational system!
I think you’ve anticipated this...
Interesting! I also agree with the superior, but I can see where your intuition might be coming from: if we drop a bouncy ball in the middle of a circle, there will be some bounce to it, and maybe the bounce will always be kinda large, so there might be good reason to think it ending up at rest in the very center is less likely than it ending up off-center. For the sniper’s bullet, however, I think it’s different.
Do you agree with AnthonyC’s view that the bullet’s perturbations are well-modeled by a random walk? If so, maybe I’ll simulate it if I have time and report back - but only makes sense to do that if you agree that the random walk model is appropriate in the first place.
>The semicircular canals track changes in your head’s orientation. The otoliths track which way is down. But why not just combine them? Why did they evolve to be separate?
Here’s an idea.
The body is completely obsessed with inferring its state of poisonedness, and uses inner ear orientation sensors to help infer this. This is why car / sea / VR sickness exist. Since inferring poisonedness quickly is important, so it can start forcing itself to throw up, having two sensors is better because.. it’s more.. fault-tolerant? Not sure. But maybe there’s something here.
Strong-downvoted.
She’s all over the EA and AI-related subreddits /r/singularity, /r/artificial, /r/ArtificialIntelligence, /r/ChatGPT, /r/OpenAI, /r/Futurology
In other words, everywhere but here. Since that’s the case, it would be better to take your fight to those places. Ms. Woods’s only post on Less Wrong in the past year was a short notice about o3 safety testing sign-ups, which was unobjectionable.
I don’t like the vibes.
I was thinking the same thing. This post badly, badly clashes with the vibe of Less Wrong. I think you should delete it, and repost to a site in which catty takedowns are part of the vibe. Less Wrong is not the place for it.
I was thinking the same thing. This post badly, badly clashes with the vibe of Less Wrong. I think you should delete it, and repost to a site in which catty takedowns are part of the vibe. Less Wrong is not the place for it.
I think this is a misread of LessWrong's "vibes" and would discourage other people from thinking of LessWrong as a place where such discussions should be avoided by default.
With the exception of the title, I think the post does a decent job at avoiding making it personal.
Been thinking about your answer here, and still can’t decide if I should view this as solving the conundrum, or just renaming it. If that makes sense?
Do weights of quantum configuration, though they may not be probabilities, similar enough in concept to still imply that physical, irreducible uncertainty exists?
I’ve phrased this badly (part of why it took me so long to actually write it) but maybe you see the question I’m waving at?
Hm - reading Ben’s linked comment, it seems to me that the thrust is that negative probabilities must be admitted. But I don’t understand how that is related to the map vs. territory / probability-in-the-mind-or-physical distinction?
Like, “one must modify the relevant functions to allow negative probabilities” seems consistent with “probability is in the mind”, since functions are a part of the map, but it seems you consider it a counterexample! So I find myself confused.
>In other words, you don’t need reality to be i.i.d.; you simply need to structure your beliefs in a way that allows an “as if” i.i.d. interpretation.
I think I view exchangeability vs. iid slightly differently. In my view, the “independence” part of iid is just way too strong, and is not required in most of the places people scatter the acronym “iid”.
For example, say you are catching fish in a lake, and you know only bass and carp live in the lake, and that there are a ton of fish in it, but not how many of each, and you’re trying to estimate the ...
Thanks for putting this together!
I have a vague memory of a post saying that taking zinc early, while virus was replicating in the upper respiratory tract, was much more important than taking it later, because later it would have spread all over the body and thus the zinc can’t get to it, or something like this. So I tend to take a couple early on then stop. But it sounds like you don’t consider that difference important.
Is it your current (Not asking you to do more research!) impression that it’s useful to take zinc throughout the illness?
The post is an advertisement, without other content. I think a post of that type should only be on the site if it comes with some meat - an excerpt, at least. (And even then I’m not sure). The reader can’t even look up or read the book yet if he wanted to!
(There is a quote of the thesis of the book, but the text is stuff I’ve been rereading for years now. It feels like someone is always telling me liberalism is under threat recently.)
Interesting! The current Sonnet 3.5 agrees (for equivalent concentrations), for the same reason you've described, and I was about to update the essay with a correction, but then 4o argued that 1. formaldehyde is metabolized much more quickly, so has little time to do damage or build up, and 2. that it considers formic acid's inhibition of a critical enzyme (cytochrome c oxidase) in the mitochondrial electron transport chain to be pretty bad.
Or maybe a better summary of 4o's argument is "In equivalent concentrations, formaldehyde is worse, but the differenc...
Years ago, a coworker and I were on a project with a guy we both thought was a total dummy, and worse, a dummy who talked all the time in meetings. We rarely expressed our opinion on this guy openly to each other - me and the coworker didn’t know each other well enough to be comfortable talking a lot of trash - but once, when discussing him privately after yet another useless meeting, my coworker drew in breath, sighed, looked at me, and said: “I’m sure he’s a great father.” We both laughed, and I still remember this as one of the most cutting insults I’ve heard.
Yes, I’m not so sure either about the stockfish-pawns point.
In Michael Redmond’s AlphaGo vs AlphaGo series on YouTube, he often finds the winning AI carelessly loses points in the endgame. It might have a lead of 1.5 or 2.5 points, 20 moves before the game ends; but by the time the game ends, has played enough suboptimal moves to make itself win by 0.5 - the smallest possible margin.
It never causes itself to lose with these lazy moves; only reduces its margin of victory. Redmond theorizes, and I agree, that this is because the objective is to win, not maxi...
I do think it has some of that feeling to me, yeah. I had to re-read the entire thing 3 or 4 times to understand what it meant. My best guesses as to why:
I felt whiplashed on transitions like “be motivated towards what's good and true. This is exactly what Marc Gafni is trying to do with Cosmo-Erotic Humanism”, since I don’t know him or that type of Humanism, but the sentence structure suggests to me that I am expected to know these. A possible rewrite could perhaps be “There are two projects I know of that aim to create a belief system that works with, in...
I read this book in 2020, and the way this post serves as a refresher and different look at it is great.
I think there might be some mistakes in the log-odds section?
The orcs example starts:
We now want to consider the hypothesis that we were attacked by orcs, the prior odds are 10:1
Then there is a 1/3 wall-destruction rate, so orcs should be more likely in the posterior, but the post says:
There were 20 destroyed walls and 37 intact walls… corresponding to 1:20 odds that the orcs did it.
We started at 10:1 (likely that it’s orcs?), then saw evidence s...
In Korea every convenience store sells “hangover preventative”, “hangover cure drink”, with pop idols on the label. Then you come back to America and the instant you say “hangover preventative”, people look at you crazy, like no such thing could possibly exist or help. I wonder how we got this way!
It changed to be much more swipe-focused. It’s been 5 years since I used it, but even in 2018, I remember being surprised at how much it had changed. Apparently now even open messaging is gone, and you need to have someone Like you before you can message them, though I haven’t actually checked this.
Hmm! I’m not sure about this. The patient in the linked paper received hemodialysis (which, I think, manually takes the methanol out) before his body could get around to metabolizing it into formaldehyde and formic acid. For someone who doesn’t receive hemodialysis, I think the methanol would still have to be metabolized at some point, even if when that happens is much delayed? In which case the same toxic effects of formaldehyde and formic acid would hit, just much later.
I think the poker example is OK, and paragraphs like
“The second decision point was when the flop was dealt and you faced a bet. This time you decided to fold. Maybe that wasn't the best play though. Maybe you should have called. Maybe you should have raised. Again, the goal of hand review is to figure this out.”
made sense to me. But the terminology in the dialogue was very tough: button, Rainbow, LAGgy, bdfs, AX, nut flush, nitty - I understood none of these. (I’ve played poker now and then, but never studied it). So keeping the example but translating it a bit further to more widely-used language (if possible) might be good.
I’m not the asker, but I think I get where they’re coming from. For a long time, linear and logistic regression were the king & queen of modeling. Then the introduction of non-linear functions like random forest and gradient boosters made us far more able to fit difficult data. So the original question has me wondering if there’s a similar possible gain in going from linearity to non-linearity in interpretability algorithms.
I agree with the encouragement to look harder for a sooner TMJ appointment. ADHD testing has similar waits now - looking in May, I was told everyone was booked up till September. But I lucked out, and the first testing doctor I talked to had just had some people cancel appointments, and nobody on his waitlist was responding, so I ended up seeing him a week later, in June, instead of in September. So there are opportunities for luck like this around. And this is without me looking out of state.
I had seen recommendations for T3/T4 on twitter to help with low energy, and even purchased some, but haven’t taken it. I hadn’t considered that the thyroid might respond by shrinking, and now think that that’s a worrying intervention! So I’m glad I read this - thank you.