Muireall and DaemonicSigil trade physics problems. Answers and discussion of the answers have been spoilered so you can try the problems yourself. Please also use spoiler formatting (type ">!") in the comments. DaemonicSigil Smeared Out Sun Okay, so the first problem is from Thinking Physics. (I promise I'll have some...
Muireall I often wonder if I'd be able to tell if a technology were uncompetitive for fundamental viability reasons or for reasons of path dependence—if the ultimate performance would be a winner once we'd worked out a few trillion dollars of kinks, but we never go down that road because...
I went through a similar exercise trying to develop key drivers and indicators for a couple slow scenarios back in May 2023, focusing on lessons from the semiconductor industry. I think my "slow" is even slower than yours, so it may not be super useful to you, but maybe you'll find it interesting.
Yeah, plus all the other stuff Alexander and Metz wrote about it, I guess.
It's just a figure of speech for the sorts of thing Alexander describes in Kolmogorov Complicity. More or less the same idea as "Safe Space" in the NYT piece's title—a venue or network where people can have the conversations they want about those ideas without getting yelled at or worse.
... (read more)Mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov lived in the Soviet Union at a time when true freedom of thought was impossible. He reacted by saying whatever the Soviets wanted him to say about politics, while honorably pursuing truth in everything else. As a result, he not only made great discoveries, but gained enough status to protect other scientists, and to make occasional very careful forays into
That section is framed with
Part of the appeal of Slate Star Codex, faithful readers said, was Mr. Siskind’s willingness to step outside acceptable topics. But he wrote in a wordy, often roundabout way that left many wondering what he really believed.
More broadly, part of the piece's thesis is that the SSC community is the epicenter of a creative and influential intellectual movement, some of whose strengths come from a high tolerance for entertaining weird or disreputable ideas.
Metz is trying to convey how Alexander makes space for these ideas without staking his own credibility on them. This is, for example, what Kolmogorov Complicity is about; it's also what Alexander says he's doing with... (read more)
In 2021, I was following these events and already less fond of Scott Alexander than most people here, and I still came away with the impression that Metz's main modes were bumbling and pattern-matching. At least that's the impression I've been carrying around until today. I find his answers here clear, thoughtful, and occasionally cutting, although I get the impression he leaves more forceful versions on the table for the sake of geniality. I'm wondering whether I absorbed some of the community's preconceptions or instinctive judgments about him or journalists in general.
I do get the stubbornness, but I read that mostly as his having been basically proven right (and having put in the work at the time to be so confident).
Muireall and DaemonicSigil trade physics problems. Answers and discussion of the answers have been spoilered so you can try the problems yourself. Please also use spoiler formatting (type ">!") in the comments.
In the 2D case, there's no escaping exponential decay of the autocorrelation function for any observable satisfying certain regularity properties. (I'm not sure if this is known to be true in higher dimensions. If it's not, then there could conceivably be traps with sub-exponential escape times or even attractors, but I'd be surprised if that's relevant here—I think it's just hard to prove.) Sticking to 2D, the question is just how the time constant in that exponent for the observable in question compares to 20 seconds.
The presence of persistent collective behavior is a decent intuition but I'm not sure it saves you. I'd start by noting that for any analysis of large-scale... (read more)
Related would be some refactoring of Deception Chess.
When I think about what I'd expect to see in experiments like that, I get curious about a sort of "baseline" set of experiments without deception or even verbal explanations. When can I distinguish the better of two chess engines more efficiently than playing them against each other and looking at the win/loss record? How much does it help to see the engines' analyses over just observing moves?
How is this related? Well, how deep is Chess? Ratings range between, say, 800 and 3500, with 300 points being enough to distinguish players (human or computer) reasonably well. So we might say there are about 10 "levels"... (read 674 more words →)
I sometimes wonder how much we could learn from toy models of superhuman performance, in terms of what to expect from AI progress. I suspect the answer is "not much", but I figured I'd toss some thoughts out here, as much to discharge any need I feel to think about them further as to see if anyone has any good pointers here.
Like—when is performance about making super-smart moves, and when is it about consistently not blundering for as long as possible? My impression is that in Chess, something like "average centipawn loss" (according to some analysis engine) doesn't explain outcomes as well as "worst move per game". (I don't know the keywords... (read more)
Many times have I heard people talk about ideas they thought up that are ‘super infohazardous’ and ‘may substantially advance capabilities’ and then later when I have been made privy to the idea, realized that they had, in fact, reinvented an idea that had been publicly available in the ML literature for several years with very mixed evidence for its success – hence why it was not widely used and known to the person coming up with the idea.
I’d be very interested if anyone has specific examples of ideas like this they could share (that are by now widely known or obviously not hazardous). I’m sympathetic to the sorts of things the article says, but I don’t actually have any picture of the class of ideas it’s talking about.
Since Raemon's Thinking Physics exercise I've been toying with writing physics puzzles along those lines. (For fun, not because I'm aiming to write better exercise candidates.) If you assume an undergrad-level background and expand to modern physics and engineering there are interesting places you can go. I think a lot about noise and measurement, so that's where my mind has been. Maybe some baseline questions could look like the below? Curious to hear anyone's thoughts.
You're standing at one end of a grocery aisle. In your cart, you have a damped oscillator in a thermal bath, initially in equilibrium.
You push the cart, making sure it moves smoothly according to a... (read more)
I have a moment so I'll summarize some of my thinking here for the sake of discussion. It's a bit more fleshed out at the link. I don't say much about AI capabilities directly since that's better-covered by others.
In the first broad scenario, AI contributes to normal economic growth and social change. Key drivers limit the size and term of bets industry players are willing to make: [1A] the frontier is deeply specialized into a particular paradigm, [1B] AI research and production depend on lumpy capital projects, [1C] firms have difficulty capturing profits from training and running large models, and [1D] returns from scaling new methods are uncertain.
In the second, AI drives... (read 676 more words →)