notfnofn

Wiki Contributions

Comments

Sorted by

Spotify recommended first recommended her to me in September 2023 and later that September I came across r/slatestarcodex, which was my first exposure to the rationalist community. That's kind of funny.

Huh. Vienna Teng was my top artist, too and this is the only other spotify wrapped I've seen here. Is she popular in these circles?

Even a year ago, I would have bet extremely high odds that data analyst-type jobs would be replaced well before postdocs in math and theoretical physics. It's wild that the reverse is plausible now

Annoying anecdote: I interviewed for an entry-level actuarial position recently and, when asked about the purpose of insurance, I responded with essentially the above argument (along the lines of increasing everyone's log expectation, with kelly betting as a motivation). The reply I got was "that's overcomplicated; the purpose of insurance is to let people avoid risk".

By the way, I agree strongly with this post and have been trying to make my insurance decisions based on this philosophy over the past year.

Oops, yeah the written programs are supposed to be deterministic. The point of mentioning the RNG was to handle the fact that an AI might derive its performance from a strong random number generator, which a C code can't emulate.

To clarify: we are not running any programs, just providing code. In a sense, we are competing at the task of providing descriptions for very large numbers with an upper bound on the size of the description (and the requirement that the description is computable).

I personally used beeminder for this (which I think originated from this community)

Little thought experiment with flavors of Newcomb and Berry's Paradox:

I have the code of an ASI in front of me, translated into C along with an oracle to a high-quality RNG. This code is N characters. I want to compete with this ASI at the task of writing a 2N-character C code that halts and prints a very large integer. Will I always win?

Sketch of why: I can write my C code to simulate the action of the ASI on a prompt like "write a 2N-character C code that halts and prints the largest integer" using every combination of possible RNG calls and print the max + 1 or something.

Sketch of why not: The ASI can make us both lose by "intending" to print a non-halting program if it is asked to. There might be probabilistic approaches for the ASI as well, where it produces a non-halting program with some chance. If I can detect this in the simulations, I might be able to work around this and still beat the ASI.

Load More