All of Petter's Comments + Replies

Petter20

Thanks, that makes sense given your assumptions and results.

Petter2821

You think it is likely/possible that a nuclear war kills almost everyone in the US and Europe. Since you estimate the chance of this happening to 1 in 6, are you moving to South America or Australia for a year or two? 

0Andrew AJ
Should we wait for reply to this question?
3Ege Erdil
I also want to know Tegmark's answer to this question.
Petter80

With the right prompt, I get the following results for a few examples I tried (first attempts, no cherry-picking).

Input: ( ) ( ( ) )

Output: Balanced

Input: ( ) ( ( )

Output: Unbalanced

Input: ) (

Output: Unbalanced

Input: ( ) ( ) ( )

Output: Balanced

So it is definitely able to learn balancing a small number of parentheses.

Petter20

Looks like a solid improvement over what’s being used in the paper. Does it introduce any new optimization difficulties?

0Stuart_Armstrong
I suspect it makes optimisation easier, because we don't need to compute a tradeoff. But that's just an informal impression.
Petter00

The number 0.0000000000000000000000000001 does not tell me much. Numbers in high dimensions are tricky. For example, the volume of a unit sphere decays exponentially with dimension. A unit sphere in dimension 24 has very little volume.

Petter20

Agreed. The diagram strongly suggests that they do sum to one, so this geometrical method is more confusing than helpful.

Petter00

Are these misconceptions really common? I thought Kahneman was pretty clear on this in Thinking, Fast and Slow.

2Good_Burning_Plastic
He was. but it's not like everybody who ever uses his terminology has actually read his book.
Petter20

It is not a good proxy. Deepmind is a small team and there are many more teams within Alphabet doing machine learning. Remember that the market cap of Goog is $500 billion. (Although if one wants to invest in AI in general I think it is a cheap stock)

Petter10

I'm convinced that humans must spike their blood sugar and/or pump their body full of stimulants such as caffeine in order to get past the natural tendency to find it unbearably dull to memorize words and syntax by rote and lifeless connection with the structures in their native language.

Just a comment: This is certainly not true for every human. Some people really enjoy that.

Petter-10

I actually think it would work pretty well. The banned user sees all of their contributions and any IP used by the banned user also sees their contributions. All other users and IPs do not see it.

Petter-10

I think it is better if banning decisions are not made public, even (especially) to the banned user.

The banned user should not notice anything, but their posts, messages, and votes do not appear to anyone else.

1polymathwannabe
Wouldn't it impose a huge load on the servers to maintain multiple versions of the website for each banned user?
Petter30

This exact topic comes up in the discussion you linked to – towards the end under “The difference between Eliezer and Nassim Taleb.” (not a descriptive caption)

0[anonymous]
You're right. I've updated the post to reflect this. Thanks!
Petter00

Perhaps I will attend future meetups in the Stockholm area, but not today.

Petter00

Stress and having trouble sleeping causes cancer?

0Crux
Both conditions greatly decrease the body's ability to repair and heal. If you believe that the body has any sort of immune response to the proliferation of cancerous cells, then it would follow that stress and sleep deprivation would increase the likelihood of getting cancer. I don't have an estimate for how much of a factor this is besides noting it as simply one more reason to make sure to avoid chronic stress and sleep deprivation.
Petter20

Google will ask you for references before hiring, but will ignore and never read your cover letter.

0[anonymous]
I never apply to jobs with a cover letter. I feel like it screens out those who waste their own time, and will inevitably waste mine. However, I'm starting to realise that's not prudent, and I reckon I should game their system with key words.
Petter00

Thank you for this article.

Many worlds seem not so much an interpretation anymore. They are really there as different non-interacting blobs!

Petter00

I meant in general. I did not look up the numbers for Wikipedia.

Petter10

Mobile is a larger platform than desktop 2015. That fact and the knowledge graph seem like very plausible explanations.

2VipulNaik
Eh? Desktop is still more than half: https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyCombined.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthlyMobile.htm https://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesPageViewsMonthly.htm
Petter-10

Then the entire result of the modification is tautologically true, right?

6Stuart_Armstrong
All of maths is tautologically true, so I'm not sure what you're arguing.
Petter10

So, first you have the utility functions that pay both agents 10 if they cooperate and 1 if they don’t.

Then you change the utility functions to pay the agents 0 if they cooperate and 1 if they don’t. Naturally they will then stop cooperating.

I don’t get it. If you are the one specifying the utility functions, then obviously you can make them cooperate or defect, right?

4Stuart_Armstrong
The change in utility function isn't removing 10 by hand; it's by removing any utility they gain from acausal trade (whatever it is) while preserving utility gained through direct actions. Thus incentivising them to only focus on direct actions (roughly).
Petter50

This post had more statements of the type “p < 0.01” than I would expect at LW. I recently read “Frequentist Statistics are Frequently Subjective” here.

3Luke_A_Somers
It's easy to calculate, and as long as you keep in mind what it means, it's not bad to include.
Petter50

80,000 Hours (your employer?) has the following as its web page title:

“How to make a difference with your career”

and writes on the front page

“If you want to make the world a better place…”

To me, those are synonyms to “changing the world,” for the purpose of career description.

9ozziegooen
My previous employer. I still have a lot of respect for them, but do not directly agree with everything they do. Also, I realize that while I would prefer that these things were understood, in a world in which they are not understood, the terminology has some marketing privileges. 80,000 Hours does go far beyond the phrase, as I mentioned in the end. They use it as marketing terminology and follow it up with a pretty specific philosophy. Most groups that use this phrase don't do that.
Petter80

No, everyone who applies to Google is not ulta-smart but most who are hired are probably pretty smart.

Given that everyone who are hired are smart, gwerns point is valid.

Petter00

Perhaps it’s the other way around? The study only suggests that the time of day affects the decision, not that worse decisions are made when hungry.

Petter20

Sometimes the environment really is adversarial, though.

Regular expressions as implemented in many programming languages work fine for almost all inputs, but with terrible upper bounds. This is why libraries like re2 are needed if you want to let anyone on the Internet use regular expressions in your search engine.

Another example that comes to mind is that quicksort runs in n·log n expected time if randomly sorted beforehand.

0ChristianKl
If you have an search engine you don't want to allow people to search your whole corpus anyway. You usually want to search an index.
3lackofcheese
The Internet can be pretty scary, but it is still very much short of an adversarial superintelligence. Sure, sometimes people will want to bring your website down, and sometimes it could be an organized effort, but even that is nothing like a genuine worst case.