All of philip_b's Comments + Replies

What benefits does raising VO2Max give one in normal life? I think we'll probably either die from AI in 2 to 20 years, or transform ourselves in the singularity, hence prolonging my life via improving health is not important. Thus I ask: what benefits does raising VO2Max give me now?

2Dennis Towne
It's a risk hedge, it has social benefits, and it has capacity / functionality benefits. Risk hedge:  If AI doesn't kill us, there will be a time lag between now and when we can transform ourselves/obsolete our biology.  Maintaining your current biological hardware increases the odds of getting to the transformation state.  If you're old (like me), this matters a lot. Social benefits:  Being in shape changes how you look, and that improves how other people treat you. Depending on how social you are, this may have a lot or very little impact. Capacity / functionality:  If you can run a mile, you can walk a mile without getting tired.  You can climb stairs more easily, you can rush across an airport to catch a flight, you can carry your groceries in one trip instead of two.  It's like the saying goes:  if you're deadlifting 250 pounds, you're not going to throw out your back picking up your kid. For me, the big one is hardware maintenance until I can upload.  Uploading is at least two decades out (probably more like five).  My odds of getting there are materially better if I put effort into hardware maintenance now.
-2Deii
How and why would an AI kill us in the next two years? triggering WW3?, an attack of that caliber would leave it without the ability to replace/mantain it's own infrastructure, just curious
2Grayson Chao
It's thought that having a higher VO2Max can improve various 'quality of life' markers like cognitive functioning (particularly sustained attention and working memory) and sleep quality.

I think the way to learn any skill is to basically:

  1. Practice it
  2. Sleep
  3. Goto 1

And the time spent in each iteration of item 1 is capped in usefulness or at least has diminishing returns. I think this has nothing to do with frustration. Also, I think reminding yourself of the experience is not that important and I think there is no cap of 1 thing a day.

Ah, ok, I didn't know when exactly Milei has started being the president. I didn't pay attention to the jump. The original post said "1 year" so I counted off one year (right after the jump) and saw that the slope was smaller than before. But you're right, yeah. But I must also point out that this is the official rate and idk of anyone actually uses it.

1Annapurna
For the purposes on legal imports, that was the reference rate. So many products where indexed at that rate. 

Through conversations with locals, I understood why. President Milei's initial action was severely devaluing the Argentine Peso, making dollar-denominated goods more expensive.

Not true. A year ago blue dollar rate was approximately the same as now [1], and the official USD-Peso rate has been rising more slowly than before Milei. [2]

2Annapurna
You are right that the Dollar Blue has been fairly stable during the entirety of Milei's presidency, but the official USD-ARS rate did see a very strong devaluation as soon as Milei got to power. Your own second source points to that.  https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67688727 https://www.reuters.com/markets/markets-greet-argentinas-tough-pill-fix-economy-with-cautious-optimism-2023-12-13/  
3abstractapplic
The second graph you link to seems - unless I'm missing something? - to confirm the point you're trying to use it to rebut: set the x axis to five years and you can absolutely see a massive jump where Milei changed the exchange rate. (Regardless, strong-upvoted for picking holes and citing sources.)

m - often used together with n to denote the height and width of a matrix

At first I disbelieved. I thought A > B. Then I wrote code myself and checked, and got that B > A. I believed this result. Then I thought about it and realized why my reason for A > B was wrong. But I still didn't understand (and now I don't understand either) why the described random process is not equivalent to randomly choosing 2, 4, or 6 every roll. I thought some more and now I have some doubts. My first doubt is whether there exists some kind of standard way of describing random processes and conditioning on them, and whether the problem as stated by notfnofn. Perhaps the problem is just underspecified? Anyway, this is very interesting.

If you think you might be in a solipsist simulation, you might try to add some chaotic randomness to your decisions. For example, go outside under some trees and wait till any kind of tree leaf or seed or anything hits your left half of the face, choose one course of action. If it hits the other half of your face, choose another course of action. If you do this multiple times in your life, each of your decisions will depend on the state of the whole earth and on all your previous decisions, since weather is chaotic. And thus the simulators will be unable t... (read more)

1David Matolcsi
The simulators can just use a random number generator to generate the events you use in your decision-making. They lose no information by this, your decision based on leaves falling on your face would be uncorrelated anyway with all other decisions anyway from their perspective, so they might as well replace it with a random number generator. (In reality, there might be some hidden correlation between the leaf falling on your left face, and another leaf falling on someone else's face, as both events are causally downstream of the weather, but given that the process is chaotic, the simulators would have no way to determine this correlation, so they might as well replace it with randomness, the simulation doesn't become any less informative.) Separately, I don't object to being sometimes forked and used in solipsist branches, I usually enjoy myself, so I'm fine with the simulators creating more moments of me, so I have no motive to try schemes that make it harder to make solipsist simulations of me.

Nice. I have a suggestion how to improve the article. Put a clearly stated theorem somewhere in the middle, in its own block, like in academic math articles.

1egor.timatkov
It's a great idea. I ended up bolding the one line that states my conclusion to make it easier to spot.
5kilotaras
Strong agree. Hiding the main result beyond spoiler makes for a great reveal, but less useful for skimming.

Why do you hate earworms? To me, they are mildly pleasant. The only moments when I wish I didn’t have an earworm happening at that moment is when I’m trying to remember another tune and the earworm for musicianship purposes and the earworm prevents me from being able to do that.

1dkl9
Some of the difference may be the quality (enjoyability, negative of annoyance) of the songs we respectively get as earworms (based ultimately on the quality of the songs we hear). Some of it may be that I can get distracted from verbal thinking by earworm lyrics. The rest is arbitrary personal mind-differences.

Instead of inspecting all programs in the UP, just inspect all programs with length less than n. As n becomes larger and larger, this covers more and more of the total probability mass in the up and the total probability mass covered this way approaches 1. What to do about the non-halting programs? Well, just run all the programs for m steps, I guess. I think this is the approximation of UP that is implied.

Well, now I'm wondering - is neural network training chaotic?

Sometimes!

https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2024/02/12/fractal.html

This is awesome, I would love more posts like this. Out of curiosity, how many hours have you and your colleague spent on this research.

2Alex_Altair
Definitely on the order of "tens of hours", but it'd be hard to say more specifically. Also, almost all of that time (at least for me) went into learning stuff that didn't go into this post. Partly that's because the project is broader than this post, and partly because I have my own research priority of understanding systems theory pretty well.
4Elizabeth
I've spent about 55 hours on the whole project so far, of which maybe half went to this post. I think @Alex_Altair  is the same ballpark. I'm unhappy with how high that number is but the investigation was, uh, fractal, in how new details that needed investigation before we could publish kept popping up. 

In my personal experience, exposure therapy did help me with the fear of such "extreme" risks.

1Chipmonk
This may sound tautological, but how do you know you that 1) you had the extreme fears; 2) it was exposure (as opposed to anything else or stochasticity) that fixed it?

In the very beginning of the post, I read: "Quick psychology experiment". Then, I read: "Right now, if I offered you a bet ...". Because of this, I thought about a potential real life situation, not a platonic ideal situation, that the author is offering me this bet. I declined both bets. Not because they are bad bets in an abstract world, but because I don't trust the author in the first bet and I trust them even less in the second bet.

If you rejected the first bet and accepted the second bet, just that is enough to rule you out from having any utility

... (read more)
4Charlie Steiner
Sure. In fact, it might be good if I included a footnote describing the experimental design of the experiment on undergrads anyway.

So you say humans don't reason about the space and objects around them by keeping 3d representations. You think that instead the human brain collects a bunch of heuristics what the response should be to a 2d projection of 3d space, given different angles - an incomprehhensible mishmash of neurons like in an artificial neural network that doesn't have any CNN layers for identifying the digit by image, and just memorizes all rules for all types of pictures with all types of angle like a fully connected layer.

I guess I was not clear enough. In your original post, you wrote "On one hand, there are countably many definitions ..." and "On the other hand, Cantor's diagonal argument applies here, too. ...". So, you talked about two statements - "On one hand, (1)", "On the other hand, (2)". I would expect that when someone says "One one hand, ..., but on the other hand, ...", what they say in those ellipses should contradict each other. So, in my previous comment, I just wanted to point out that (2) does not contradict (1) because countable infinity + 1 is still coun... (read more)

2Viliam
Cantor's diagonal argument is not "I can find +1, and n+1 is more than n", which indeed would be wrong. It is "if you believe that you have a countable set that already contains all of them, I can still find +1 it does not contain". The problem is not that +1 is more, but that there is a contradiction between the assumption that you have the things enumerated, and the fact that you have not -- because there is at least one (but probably much more) item outside the enumeration. I am sorry, this is getting complicated and my free time budget is short these days, so... I'm "tapping out".

Ok, so let's say you've been able to find a countably infinite amount of real numbers and you now call them "definable". You apply the Cantor's argument to generate one more number that's not in this set (and you go from the language to the meta language when doing this). Countably infinite + 1 is still only countably infinite. How would you go to a higher cardinality of "definable" objects? I don't see an easy way.

2Viliam
The important thing is not to move the goalpost. We assumed that we have an enumeration of all X numbers (where X means "real" or "definable real"). Then we found an X number outside the enumeration, therefore the assumption that the enumeration contains all X numbers was wrong. The End. We don't really "go to a higher cardinality", we just show that we are not there yet, which is a contradiction to the assumption that we are. A proof by contradiction does not let you take another iteration when needed. The spirit is "take all the iterations you need, even infinitely many of them, and when you are done, come here and read the argument why the enumeration you have is still not the enumeration of all X". If you say "yeah, well I need a few more iterations", that's cheating; you should have already done that. Because if we allow the "one more iteration, please", then we could kinda prove that any set is countable. I mean, I give you an enumeration that I say contains all, you find a counter-example, I say oops and give you a set+1, you find another counter-example, oops again, but still countable + countable = countable. The only way out is when you say "okay, don't waste my time, give me your final interation", and then you refuse to do one more iteration to fix the problem. * And if this still doesn't make you happy... well, there is a reason for that, and if you tried to carefully follow to its source, you might eventually get to Skolem's paradox (which says, kind of, "in first-order logic, everything is kinda countable, even things that are provably uncountable"). But it's complicated. I think the lesson from all this is that you have to be really super careful about definitions, because you get into a territory where the tiniest changes in definitions might have a "butterfly effect" on the outcome. For example, the number that is "definable" despite not being in the enumeration of "definable numbers" is simply definable for a slightly different definition of

To check if A causes B, you can check what happens when you intervene and modify A, and also what happens when you intervene and modify B. That's not always possible though. You can consult "Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference" by Pearl for more details.

They commit to not using your data to train their models without explicit permission.

I've just registered on their website because of this article. During registration, I was told that conversations marked by their automated system that overlooks if you are following their terms of use are regularly overlooked by humans and used to train their models.

4Radford Neal
I think I've figured out what you meant, but for your information, in standard English usage, to "overlook" something means to not see it.  The metaphor is that you are looking "over" where the thing is, into the distance, not noticing the thing close to you.  Your sentence would be better phrased as "conversations marked by their automated system that looks at whether you are following their terms of use are regularly looked at by humans".

In Anthropic's support page for "I want to opt out of my prompts and results being used for training" they say:

We will not use your Inputs or Outputs to train our models, unless: (1) your conversations are flagged for Trust & Safety review (in which case we may use or analyze them to improve our ability to detect and enforce our Usage Policy, including training models for use by our Trust and Safety team, consistent with Anthropic’s safety mission), or (2) you’ve explicitly reported the materials to us (for example via our feedback mechanisms), or (3

... (read more)

When learning to sing, humming is used to extend your range higher. Not sure if it's used to extend it lower.

I would like to make a recommendation to Johannes that he should try to write and post content in a way that invokes less feelings of cringe in people. I know it does invoke that because I personally feel cringe.

Still, I think that there isn’t much objectively bad about this post. I’m not saying the post is very good or convincing. I think its style is super weird but that should be considered to be okay in this community. These thoughts remind me of something Scott Alexander once wrote - that sometimes he hears someone say true but low status things - and... (read more)

5Mo Putera
For anyone who's curious, this is what Scott said, in reference to him getting older – I remember it because I noticed the same in myself as I aged too: This was back in 2017. 
3Johannes C. Mayer
For which parts do you feel cringe?

I've been learning to play diatonic harmonica for the last 2 years. This is my first instrument and I can confirm that learning an instrument (and music theory) is a lot of fun and it has also taught me some new things about how to learn things in general.

5jmh
I was thinking that there must be a population of people that do tend to hum often. If the theory is any good then one might try to identify those members of the humming population and do a study on health/wellness.

Unless I don’t recognize the sounds. It’s like asking me to beatbox the last 5 seconds of the gurgling of a nearby river. How the fudge would I do that?

Wait, are there people who can do that?

I think that's pretty easy :)

1Shoshannah Tekofsky
[mind blown] Minds are so interesting! Thank you for sharing!
3Emrik
Learning math fundamentals from a textbook, rather than via one's own sense of where the densest confusions are, is sort of an oxymoron. If you want to be rigorous, you should do anything but defer to consensus. And from a socioepistemological perspective: if you want math fundamentals to be rigorous, you'd encourage people to try to come up with their own fundamentals before they einstellung on what's been written before. If the fundamentals are robust, they're likely to rediscover it; if they aren't, there's a chance they'll revolutionize the field.

I think this last edit is bad.

1MIN0010
Please let me know why the edit is bad and I will improve it. I appreciate more constructive feedback.

Is there any "native" textbook that is pragmatic and explains how to use bayesian in practice (perhaps in some narrow domain)?

2johnswentworth
I don't know of a good one, but never looked very hard.

Did the model randomly stumble upon this strategy? Or was there an idea pitched by the language model, something like "hey, what if we try to hallucinate and maybe we can hack the game that way"?

1niki.h
Based on my understanding from talking with the author, it is the former.  The language model is simply used to provide a shaping reward based on the text outputs that the game shows after some actions; it's the RL optimization that learns the weird hallucination strategy, and the reason it's able to do it is because its capabilities in general are improved thanks to the shaping reward.

Are you able to play sounds using other programs (e.g. open a YouTube video in the background) while getting great latency in reaper or in something similar to reaper?

2jefftk
Yes

I've been thinking of buying an M1 MacBook because everyone says that Apple's sound system is great and works out of the box correctly with low latency and no problems, unlike Windows+Wasapi, Windows+ASIO, and Linux. I want to use it for music stuff without an external audio interface. How true is this and would you recommend it?

2jefftk
I get great latency with Reaper, so my guess is as long as you're using standard audio tools you'll be fine? My issue is that I want a custom stand-alone program, and there's something extra you need to do to get good latency I'm missing.

You says Vast.AI is the "most reliable provider". In my experience, it's an unreliable mess with sometimes buggy not properly working servers and non-existent support service. I will also say the same about runpod.io. On the other hand, lambdalabs had been very reliable in my experience and has a much better UX. The main problem with LambdaLabs is that nowadays it happens pretty often that it has no available servers.

1luciaquirke
Thanks for the comment, fair point! I found Vast.AI to be frustratingly unreliable when I started using it but it seems to have improved over the last three months, to the point where it feels comparable to (how I remember) LambdaLabs. LambdaLabs definitely has the best UI/UX though. I've amended the post to clarify. I've had one great and one average experience with RunPod customer service, but haven't interacted with anyone from the other services. 

This sounds similar to whether a contemporary machine learning model can break a cryptographic cipher, a hash function, or something like that.

1Alexander Kolpakov
Yes and no. Yes, because prime inference with high accuracy would make codebreaking much easier. No, because, for example, in RSA you need to deal with semiprimes, and that setup seems different as per Sam Blake's research here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.12290

Can you formulate the theorem statement in a precise and self-sufficient way that is usually used in textbooks and papers so that a reader can understand it just by reading it and looking up the used definitions?

Let  be the initial state of a Gibbs sampler on an undirected probabilistic graphical model, and  be the final state. Assume the sampler is initialized in equilibrium, so the distribution of both  and  is the distribution given by the graphical model.

Take any subsets  of , such that the variables in each subset are at least a distance  away from the variables in the other subsets (with distance given by shortest path length in the graph). Then  ... (read more)

I have a kinda-unrelated question. Does Bill Gates write gatesnotes completely himself just because he wants? Or is this a marketing/pr thing and is written by other people? If it's the former, then I want to read it. If it's the latter, I don't.

2Sodium
I read the post and see his blogs/videos from time to time. I feel like the tone/style across them is very consistent, so that's some weak evidence that he writes them himself?

Do you mean "What do you want me to do" in the tone of voice that means "There's nothing to do here, bugger off"? Or do you mean "What do you want me to do?" in the tone of voice that means "I'm ready to help with this. What should I do to remedy the problem?"?

1Johannes C. Mayer
I mean the situation where they are serious. If I would tell them a solution they would consider it and might even implement it. But they are not pointing their consequentialist reasoning skills toward the problem to crush it. See also this comment.

I have recently read The Little Typer by Friedman and Christiansen. I suspect that this book can serve as an introduction similarly to this (planned, so far) sequence of posts. However, the book is not concise at all.

Are those instructions for making a Molotov cocktail and for hotwiring a car real? They look like something someone who's only seen it done in movies would do. Same question for methamphetamine, except that recipe looks more plausible.

2Vitor
For meth it lists an ingredient (ether) that it doesn't actually use. And actual lab protocols are much more detailed about precise temperature, times, quantities, etc.
4kilotaras
Molotov looks pretty close. You can of make it better by but general scheme remains the same.

Thanks for writing this update! I think your English skills have improved a lot.

I've just read your previous two posts. I, too, will be interested to read another post of yours.

I am (was) an X% researcher, where X<Y. I wish I had given up on AI safety earlier. I suspect it would've been better for me if AI safety resources explicitly said things like "if you're less than Y, don't even try", although I'm not sure if I would've believed them. Now, I'm glad that I'm not trying to do AI safety anymore and instead I just work at a well paying relaxed job doing practical machine learning. So, I think pushing too many EAs into AI safety will lead to those EAs suffering much more, which happened to me, so I don't want that to happen a... (read more)

In 2017, I remember reading 80K and thinking I was obviously unqualified for AI alignment work. I am glad that I did not heed that first impression. The best way to test goodness-of-fit is to try thinking about alignment and see if you're any good at it.

That said, I apparently am the only person of whom [community-respected friend of mine] initially had an unfavorable impression, which later became strongly positive.

7ViktoriaMalyasova
Philip, but were the obstacles that made you stop technical (such as, after your funding ran out, you tried to get new funding or a job in alignment, but couldn't) or psychological (such as, you felt worried that you are not good enough)?

Sorry to hear that you didn't make it as an AI Safety researcher, but thank you for trying.

You shouldn't feel any pressure, but have you considered trying to be involved in another way such as a) helping to train people trying to break into the field b) providing feedback on people's alignment proposals c) assisting in outreach (this one is more dependent on personal fit and is easier to do net harm)?

I think it's a shame how training up in AI Safety is often seen as an all-or-nothing bet, when many people have something valuable to contribute even if that's not through direct research.

2sudo
Oh man.

I still take these zinc lozenges when I suspect that I might fall with a common cold. I feel like they help me somewhat. Maybe my colds have been shorter since I've started taking Zinc but I'm not sure. I haven't been tracking any data explicitly. I guess I'm gonna be taking Zinc for common cold as long as I don't get further evidence about it not working.

Perhaps you can just use the international phonetic alphabet?

2Viliam
If I am just doing it for myself, yes. If I want to communicate with other people, most of them probably can't read IPA. Different audiences require different solutions. On a second thought, if I am just doing it only for myself, unless I am already fluent in IPA, it is probably less work to learn reading Cyrillic directly.

I don't know how to square that with the idea that one shouldn't ignore their crying kids. I have no idea how kids' crying at night works. Is it possible that a parent should just suck it up and come and comfort the baby every time they cry? Maybe you can comfort her since she's crying but not give her the reward of soothing her until she falls asleep? Is it possible that she cries at night because she's doesn't get enough cuddles during the day or because the room looks scary or something like that? I don't know enough about the situation and I don't have... (read more)

1ChristianKl
It seems like you don't have an explicit justification for why one shouldn't do that, and basically believe that because people have told you. There might be valid reasons for that notion or not, but there's no necessity to square it together.

Ok, I don't know more than that about addressing children's crying. I just thought that ignoring it is (almost always?) bad but I'm not sure.

2jefftk
What do you think about my response to pharadae below?

I'm not sure how to read this; where are you on the continuum from "I heard it's bad" to "I read all the papers and came to a deep considered view"?

I also thought so when I read your post. I'm at the "The book 'The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog' says so" point. The book is not about sleep in particular, it's about psychological trauma in childhood, especially the one obtained from neglect.

Also, I think this might cause the child to develop either an avoidant attachment style (there's no point in crying or asking others for help, they won't come anyway).

4jefftk
My understanding is the book is about children who were severely neglected and abused, and while I haven't read it I'd think it was even less relevant to evaluating sleep training than the kind of crummy studies we have on sleep training in particular? The gulf between "no one comes when I cry a little, I'm sleepy, let's go back to sleep" and "no one comes when I cry hungry for hours and hours in a dirty diaper" is huge, as is the one between "this happens a few times when I'm first learning how to sleep on my own" and "this happens every day for years". The general idea is that you're teaching them a pattern of when crying will and won't work, not that crying never works. In the rest of their life they still experience having requests (including pre-verbal ones like crying or pointing) acknowledged and respected.

I also don't know how to find tutors for narrow subjects. For instance, I would like a little bit of tutoring about

  • panoptic segmentation
  • dependent types

but I don't know how to find one.

The link to the next post in this post is broken.

What role do I, the data scientist dwarf, have?

5aphyer
You have no role and no effect - your fort will behave identically to a fort with the 13 dwarves you select and no-one else.  This is for game simplicity reasons - if you want a fluff explanation, you can imagine that you have a profession of your choice and are taking the place of one of the dwarves of that profession.  I'll edit the doc to include this.
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