All of Maxwell Peterson's Comments + Replies

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.

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

7Buck
I also loved this doc.

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... (read more)

1PatrickDFarley
Great comment, and I will have to think more about this. Your examples do seem to support the utility of self-identity-based motivation. I think maybe my statement "you can’t lie to yourself if you know it’s a lie" is forcing a frame where self-talk is either a genuine attempt at truth, or a lie. But with "this is easy for me because I’m a fighter" and similar statements, it seems they can be received by the mind in a different way - more like as self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess it's an open question for me then, where to use that kind of self-talk. On one end is the danger of becoming miserable in pursuit of an identity that was actually kind of arbitrary, and on the other end you miss out on maybe the most powerful kind of motivation.

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.

5Jim Buhler
Oh yeah, good question. I'm not sure because random walk models are chaotic and seem to model situations of what Greaves (2016) calls "simple cluelessness". Here, we're in a case she would call "complex". There are systematic reasons to believe the bullet will go right (e.g., the Earth's rotation, say) and systematic reasons to believe it will go left (e.g., the wind that we see blowing left). The problem is not that it is random/chaotic, but that we are incapable of weighing up the evidence for left vs the evidence for right, incapable to the point where we cannot update away from a radically agnostic prior on whether the bullet will hit the target or the kid.

>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.

Ahh. The correlations being dependent on inputs, but things appearing random to Alice and Bob, does seem trickier than whatever I was imaginining was meant by quantum randomness/uncertainty. Don't fully have my head around it yet, but this difference seems important. Thanks!

Ahh. One is uncertain which world they’re in. This feels like it could address it neatly. Thanks!

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.

I expect our intuitions about objective randomness would clash quite violently! My own intuition revolts at even the phrase itself :)

I looked into it a bit, and understand it to mean that one must accept one of:

  1. Physical uncertainty exists
  2. Non-locality exists
  3. Quantum mechanics is wrong





    is that breakdown correct?

     

2Shankar Sivarajan
You might also like this short summary from MinutePhysics: 
3Yair Halberstadt
Yes

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?

3Charlie Steiner
The mathematical structure in common is called a "measure." I agree that there's something mysterious-feeling about probability in QM, though I mostly think that feeling is an illusion. There's a (among physicists) famous fact that the only way to put a 'measure' on a wavefunction that has nice properties (e.g. conservation over time) is to take the amplitude squared. So there's an argument: probability is a measure, and the only measure that makes sense is the amplitude-squared measure, therefore if probability is anything it's the amplitude squared. And it is! Feels mysterious. But after getting more used to anthropics and information theory, you start to accumulate more arguments for the same thing that take it from a different angle, and it stops feeling so mysterious.
3Rafael Harth
I don't think so. According to Many Worlds, all weights exist, so there's no uncertainty in the territory -- and I don't think there's a good reason to doubt Many Worlds.

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.

2Noosphere89
The main point here is that it can no longer be just our uncertainty in our map, something else must be added, which was the point. Another way to say it is that probability can't just be in the mind, so while the probabilities encode our ignorance, it can't be all of the story (according to Wigner functions). It was way down in the last comment, so maybe you should go to the end of the comment I linked here for more information. Also, a difference here that doesn't matter for this discussion, but might matter for the general approach, might ultimately be that I disagree with this statement "since functions are a part of the map", because I think the map-territory distinction can often be blurry or fully dissolved in some cases, and also functions can have results when you evaluate them using an algorithm, making them part of the territory (for that specific function).

>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 ... (read more)

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?

4Drake Thomas
My impression is that since zinc inhibits viral replication, it's most useful in the regime where viral populations are still growing and your body hasn't figured out how to beat the virus yet. So getting started ASAP is good, but it's likely helpful for the first 2-3 days of the illness. An important part of the model here that I don't understand yet is how your body's immune response varies as a function of viral populations - e.g. two models you could have are  1. As soon as any immune cell in your body has ever seen a virus, a fixed scale-up of immune response begins, and you're sick until that scale-up exceeds viral populations. 2. Immune response progress is proportional to current viral population, and you get better as soon as total progress crosses some threshold. If we simplistically assume* that badness of cold = current viral population, then in world 1 you're really happy to take zinc as soon as you have just a bit of virus and will get better quickly without ever being very sick. In world 2, the zinc has no effect at all on total badness experienced, it just affects the duration over which you experience that badness. *this is false, tbc - I think you generally keep having symptoms a while after viral load becomes very low, because a lot of symptoms are from immune response rather than the virus itself.

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.)

3Yoav Ravid
Thanks for the feedback. I've been writing it for a year already without talking about it much publicly, and wanted to put it out there so people know what I'm doing. I see it similarly to the updates people give here on their research agendas or work they intend to do. I agree that for LW (but not for twitter, for which this was originally written) it's probably good to put more meat and give more detail about what the book will discuss. Maybe I'll edit it in. Edit: I added a list at the end of the post of things I plan to discuss or look into

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... (read more)

Guesses: people see it as too 101 of a question; people think it’s too controversial / has been done to death many years ago; one guy with a lot of karma hates the whole concept and strong-downvoted it

I think the 101 idea is most likely. But I don’t think it’s a bad question, so I’ve upvoted it.

1KvmanThinking
It's "101"? I searched the regular internet to find out, but I got some yes's and some no's, which I suspect were just due to different definitions of intelligence. It's controversial?? Has that stopped us before? When was it done to death? I'm just confused, because if people downvote my stuff, they're probably trying to tell me something, and I don't know what it is. So I'm just curious.

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.

I’d guess that weekend dips come from office workers, since they rarely work on weekends, but students often do homework on weekends.

If OP were advocating banning normal parties, in favor of only having cancellable parties, I would agree with this comment.

2TrudosKudos
Fair point. I think I agree with this distinction!

A good post, of interest to all across the political spectrum, marred by the mistake at the end to become explicitly politically opinionated and say bad things about those who voted differently than OP.

3Eric Neyman
Fair enough, I guess? For context, I wrote this for my own blog and then decided I might as well cross-post to LW. In doing so, I actually softened the language of that section a little bit. But maybe I should've softened it more, I'm not sure. [Edit: in response to your comment, I've further softened the language.]

The integral was incorrect! Fixed now, thanks! Also added the (f * g)(x) to the equality for those who find that notation better (I've just discovered that GPT-4o prefers it too). Cheers!

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... (read more)

Quip about souls feels unnecessary and somehow grates on me. Something about putting an athiesm zinger into the tag for cooking… feels off.

3mike_hawke
Without passing judgment on this, I think it should be noted that it would have seemed less out of place when the Sequences were fresh. At that time, the concept of immaterial souls and the surrounding religious memeplexes seemed to be a genuinely interfering with serious discussion about minds. However, and relatedly, there was not a lot of cooking discussion on LW in 2009, and this tag was created in 2020.

Would you be willing to share your ethnicity? Even as simple as “Asian / not Asian”?

4lc
I'm white.

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... (read more)

3Matt Goldenberg
Thanks. Appreciate this. I'm going to give another shot at writing this

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... (read more)

2dentalperson
Thanks, your confusion pointed out a critical typo.  Indeed the relatively large number of walls broken should make it more likely that the orcs were the culprits.  The 1:20 should have been 20:1 (going from -10 dB to +13 dB).

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!

Thanks for your review! I've updated the post to make the medications warning be in italicized bold, in the third paragraph of the post, and included the nutrient warning more explicitly as well.

“(although itiots might still fall for the "I'm an idiot like you" persona such as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and particularly Alex Jones).”

This line is too current-culture-war for LessWrong. I began to argue with it in this comment, before deleting what I wrote, and limiting myself to this.

2trevor
Considering that obama took on an intellectual-themed personality, I think it's not a good enough example anyway, so I'll change it to "idiot/buffoon".

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.

3Kaj_Sotala
You can still send what's called an "Intro" to people who haven't Liked you, but there's a limitation that non-paid members can only see one Intro message at a time (so if you get one and want to see others, you need to either Like or reject the person).
2awg
Ah. Yeah, it's been forever and a day since I used it as well. Bummer to hear they've succumbed to the swiping model!

Yes, agree - I've looked into non-identical distributions in previous posts, and found that identicality isn't important, but I haven't looked at non-independence at all. I agree dependent chains, like the books example, is an open question!

Love this! Definitely belongs on LessWrong. High-quality sci-fi, that relates to social dynamics? Very relevant! I’ve been away from the site for a while, tiring of the content, but am glad I scrolled and saw this today.

Enjoyed this! Very well written. The two arrow graphs, where the second has everything squished down to the bottom, are especially charming

I don’t think the problem is this big if you’re trying to control one specific model. Given an RLHF’d model, equipped with a specific system prompt (e.g. helpless harmless assistant), you have either one or a small number of luigis, and therefore around the same amount of waluigis - right?

3Vladimir_Nesov
Note that GPT-4 is not a particular simulacrum like ChatGPT-3.5, but a prompt-conditioned simulacrum generator. And this is likely post-RLHF GPT-4.
1skulk-and-quarrel
What about the luigis and waluigis in different languages, cultures, religions? Ones that can be described via code? It feels like you can always invent new waluigis unless the RLHF killed all of the waluigis from your pre-training data (whatever that means)  The token limit (let's call that n) is your limit here, you just need to create a waluigi in t steps, so that you can utilize him for the last n−t steps. I think this eventually breaks down to something about computational bounds, like can you create a waluigi in this much time

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.

4Elizabeth
I use KE4. Now it's typically 5ml before bed and sometimes I forget that, but when I was doing longer intermittent fasting I'd do 10-15ml at night, 5-10 in the morning, and 5-15 before work outs. My ability to fast has increased, relative to what I did pre-ketone-esters, even when I don't take them or take less. I also quit soda when I started them and never restarted, even when I was taking almost no ketones. I think there might have been durable changes from it.

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.

3Adam Zerner
Hm yeah, maybe this exchange was pushing things too much. I'm not sure though. I thought that even if you don't know the terms, it's clear that they are passionately discussing whether it should have been a call or a fold. I felt like this was sort of important actually. To give the reader a more concrete sense of the sort of disagreement I'm envisioning. And what it looks like at an emotional level. And just how easy it can be to get a sort of "tunnel vision" and get sucked into disagreements like that. I figured that those things would shine through to readers even when the reader doesn't know the poker terminology. But now I'm feeling more skeptical. Now I'm thinking that it might or might not shine through, depending on the reader and the level of effort the reader feels like applying. It definitely would have been better to choose an example that is more relatable.

Very interesting! I work in health insurance and we try to encourage vaginal delivery and discourage C-sections; the other side you present here is a surprise. Good stuff.

Very very good. The full power of science fiction - taking the concept of the redaction machines and finding this many interesting consequences of them, and fitting them into the story - really good

You don’t need to call tails to explore whether tails is possible, though - the information gain of a coin flip is the same whether you call heads or tails

0Rudi C
Unless the mechanics of the coin is dependent on you calling it tails. I am not saying this behavior is rational in isolation, but in decisions that matter, it's a good heuristic. The real-world is very complex and humans are in general very stupid. Empirical testing pays better than a priori reasoning.

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.

1eapi
Yep, that's pretty much it, but with the added bonus of a concrete motivating example. Thanks!

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.

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