All of purge's Comments + Replies

purge20

The concern seems to be that some people would think they needed to throw food out if it was past its expiration date, leading to ‘food waste.’ But wasn’t that exactly what the label was for and what it meant?

No, current date labels are generally voluntary and indicate when the manufacturer wants it sold by--beyond that date, the food is usually still safe but not as tasty (and so not as good for brand value).  The new rule would (assuming it works as intended) add a second later date that actually means what you and a lot of other people thought the first date was supposed to mean.

purge21

There's no way to raise a human such that their value system cleanly revolves around the one single goal of duplicating a strawberry, and nothing else.

 

I think you're misreading Eliezer here.  "Duplicate this strawberry" is just a particular task instruction.  The value system is "don't destroy the world as a side effect."

purge10

Reminder for next week's predictions: Memorial Day is coming up.

purge100

Feature request: I'd like to have options on /allPosts or the front page to filter out the posts I've already read or bookmarked.

3Ruby
Oh, that's pretty sensible.
purge20

I think you're referring to narrowness of an AI's goals, but Rossin seems to be referring to narrowness of the AI's capabilities.

purge50

In the 1980-81 catalogue, there were 2139 hits for “Ph.D.” and the catalogue was 239 pages, a ratio of 8.9. In the 2011-2013 catalogue, there were 4132 hits and the catalogue was 414 pages, a ratio of 10.0. So if anything, there are fewer professors per class - professors are teaching slightly more courses on average.

Isn't that backwards?  A higher "Ph.D."/catalogue page ratio would suggest a higher professor/class ratio, wouldn't it?  Still, as you say, it's only a small difference.

3johnswentworth
Good catch, thanks. Fixed.
purge10

I started with screen for multiplexing and session persistence.  Later I switched to tmux.  I liked it fine, but Emacs has been gradually devouring my workflow for a long time, so before long I dropped tmux in favor of splitting windows and running shells all within Emacs, and using its server mode/emacsclient for session persistence (with a little help from dtach to keep emacsclient itself running to remember my window layout).  Just recently I've dropped dtach as well in favor of a few lines of elisp to save and restore alternate window layouts.

purge30

Another option of course is to use the corn as corn if the problem persists.

Probably not.  The variety of corn grown for ethanol production isn't the variety people eat.  (Source: The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.)

purge20

Yes--if a bit of your wrench breaks off inside the lock, the key may not fit anymore.  Also (and more likely, as I understand it) picking the lock will wear down edges of the various parts, making it even easier for someone else to pick.

purge10

I didn't notice the fiction tag at first and thought it was real until the VR stuff.

Same here.  I guess we need to keep training our discriminators.

3JenniferRM
I noticed something was wrong when Kathleen was introduced in excruciating detail. True love is something no one actually brags about to third parties in that way. If real then it is too blessed/braggy to share, and if not real... well... fiction is a lie told for fun, basically, so such things can occur in fiction <3 With suspicion already raised, the double punch of "The Machine" and "Joseph Norck" caused me to google for someone named Norck involved in computer science, and no such professor exists. Then I leaned back and enjoyed the story :-)
Answer by purge30

In our universe, the most vulnerable people are the ones who vote most often.  In the alternate universe, the most vulnerable have the least power.  So I doubt they would have done much better in terms of real results.  I do think there's more social pressure to care for children than for the elderly, but that may have only resulted in more effort wasted on measures that show off our devotion to those values without actually being effective.

purge20

Forcing everyone with Omicron into extended isolation would shut down a lot of things over the next few weeks (with little upside to compensate) and if this included hospital staff it likely kills more people rather than less people.

I wonder--could hospitals establish a strict enough boundary between Covid and non-Covid areas so that staff who are infected but with no (or super mild) symptoms could still work in the area where everyone else already has Covid anyway?  Or would that lead to inevitable leaks across the boundary?  Or would it require... (read more)

purge40

Epistemic status: this is not my field.  I am unfamiliar with any research in it beyond what I've seen on LW.

Same here.

Experimenting with extreme discounting sounds (to us non-experts, anyway) like it could possibly teach us something interesting and maybe helpful.  But it doesn't look useful for a real implementation, since we in fact don't discount the future that much, and we want the AI to give us what we actually want; extreme discounting is a handicap.  So although we might learn a bit about how to train out bad behavior, we'd end up r... (read more)

purge50

Leftwingers who fervently oppose this kind of research seem to agree on one thing with neonazis: if we find such genetic differences, well, that would make racism fine.

I wouldn't say they actually agree on that point.  It's probably more that they think others will be more easily persuaded to support discriminatory policies if genetic differences are real.  Opposing this research is soldier mindset.

1David Hugh-Jones
I think that's basically correct. Or maybe put another way: they act as if finding such genetic differences would plausibly legitimize racial discrimination. That may not be nuts. Suppose there is real racial discrimination (not a big ask). Then if we discover substantively large differences between ethnic groups, it might be easier to "get away with" racial discrimination because someone can just claim "oh well, ethnic groups are different and that's why we see different outcomes". Similarly, non-deliberate (e.g. unconscious or "structural") discrimination might be harder to spot, if everyone just assumes that different outcomes between groups are the result of different genetics. 
purge140

Melanie contended that a truly intelligent machine would understand what we really mean when we give it incomplete instructions, or else not deserve the mantle of "truly intelligent".

This sounds pretty reasonable in itself: a generally capable AI has a good change of being able to distinguish between what we say and what we mean, within the AI's post-training instructions.  But I get the impression that she then implicitly takes it a step further, thinking that the AI would necessarily also reflect on its core programming/trained model, to check for a... (read more)

purge10

"solder" -> "soldier"

"solders" -> "soldiers"

"barricade, the entrances" -> "barricade the entrances"

2lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.
Answer by purge10

my understanding is that crypto is secured not by trust, guns, or rules, but by fundamental computational limits

While there are hard physical limits on computation (or at least there seem to be, based on our current knowledge of physics), cryptographic systems are not generally based on those limits, and are not known to be difficult to break.  It's just that we haven't discovered an easy way to break them yet--except for all the cryptosystems where we have discovered a way, and so we don't use those systems anymore.  This should not inspire too ... (read more)

purge50

"She took pulled back" -> "She pulled back"

4lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.
purge100

If one person doesn’t get it, and needs to have it patiently explained to them, the increased efficiency might not be worth it in that instance.

Corollary: if you surround yourself with a group of fellow game theory nerds, you can do more frontier exploration.  But successfully developing/explaining/using new mechanisms within this group will then be less instructive about how easy it will be to export new mechanisms beyond the group.

7gwillen
Hanging out with quant finance people probably also helps with this. At least some of them have clever things like this that they play as games at the office.
5Gunnar_Zarncke
Yeah, and it is hard to figure out how smart people have to be exactly. I tried such an approach at our office with tasks to be distributed and used one such tool. Unfortunately, not everyone got it and that resulted in very disappointing assignments and anger as a result.
purge80

This example doesn't fit the updated definition:

One tip is on 2, and the other tip is on 2 ÷ 2 = 1.

Good read, I don't think I'd heard of Ramanujan primes before.

2DirectedEvolution
Thanks :D I’ll update that soon.
purge20

My guess is that without school we would clearly be at or near the peak, so the question is whether school will change that. My guess is no at least right away, because when we look at last year we don’t see a rise happening in September.

Many schools that weren't open/in-person last year will be this year, though.

purge10

Think Twice is another good one for geometric proofs.

I also liked Epic Math Time's video on the operation a^log b.

purge10
>>> x = True
>>> id(x)
[etc...]

Due to Python's style of reference passing, most of these print statements will show matching id values even if you use any kind of object, not just True/False.  Try to predict the output here, then run it to check:

def compare(x, y):
  print(x == y, id(x) == id(y), x is y)
a = {"0": "1"}
b = {"0": "1"}
print(a == b, id(a) == id(b), a is b)
compare(a, b)
c = a
d = a
print(c == d, id(c) == id(d), c is d)
compare(c, d)
1konstell
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uqP4bHPFQReHD2uGn/an-apprentice-experiment-in-python-programming-part-4#Python_Objects_in_Memory__from_comments_
purge20

Two teams of two players (strong + weak vs. medium + medium) is fairly common, I think.  It's called ren go.  But 2 vs. 1 would be different--the team of 2 players would be handicapped not just by the weaker player, but also by the lack of communication.  This is a possible way to handicap, sure, but it can't be tuned as precisely as komi or even star-point handicap stones.  Precision is an important consideration for handicapping.

I've also seen another method where two players of unequal strength played an even game, but a stronger thi... (read more)

purge10

The most important bit here is not "double-layered"; it's "all recruits".  There was no unmasked group for comparison, so this study tells us nothing about mask effectiveness beyond "some people still got infected, so they're less than 100% effective".

purge10

Correction: for participants on day 14, it was somewhere between 11 and 33 out of 1847 (0.6%-1.8%).  Not that it makes much of a difference.

purge10

It's not that I "don't believe in Evidence-Based Medicine", it's that you didn't mention in your first comment that your were talking about a different study, so I really didn't know what you were talking about.  Thanks for giving the link.

The Marine study doesn't address the effects of masks.  Both the participants and nonparticipants wore masks.  The actual difference between those groups was that the participants were asked about symptoms, tested, and isolated if positive at day 0, 7, and 14, versus only on day 14 for nonparticipants. &nb... (read more)

1purge
Correction: for participants on day 14, it was somewhere between 11 and 33 out of 1847 (0.6%-1.8%).  Not that it makes much of a difference.
purge10

What military recruits are you talking about?  I didn't see any reference to the military.

-1ChristianKl
This sounds like you basically don't believe in Evidence-Based Medicine and form your believe based on simple pathopathological models (the thing that Evidence-Based Medicine was about to fight) or don't care about mask wearing to form an informed opinion about it. To recap, there are actual studies on mask wearing. One of them is SARS-CoV-2 Transmission among Marine Recruits during Quarantine. The benefit of studying military recruits is that it's likely the best group for complience to policies as the training instructors made sure that they were wearing their masks. I now this might sound harsh but "I think you are wrong because of "one sentence pathopathological models'" is not the kind of argument I like to see on LessWrong from people who haven't done any research to be familiar with the topic.  It's not that I believe that you should always reason in an Evidence-Based manner, but be at least a bit more sophisticated about it.
purge10

My current understanding is that masks work by keeping you from spreading virus. If you don't have the virus, wearing a mask is useless.

That's an overstatement, by my understanding.  Masks are better at stopping outgoing germs than incoming ones, but they still do some good for both directions.

2ChristianKl
Why do you believe there wasn't a significant effect of mask wearing in the military recruits if not because the masks didn't protect the wearer?
purge40

Also seemingly reversed:

A lot of folks, it seems to me, focus a lot on the content

1Aaron Bergman
Yup, fixing. Gotta get better at proofreading.
purge50

 on the coin being heads-biased,  on it being tails-biased, and  on it being tails-biased

1/3 on it being fair.

2Stuart_Armstrong
Thanks! The typo is now corrected.
purge10

I had thought you were arguing for strong selection pressure based on variation in pigmentation among aboriginal Australians compared to their latitude within Australia.  The map doesn't support that (in Australia or South America), since it has nothing to do with skin color.

If instead you're arguing for pressure based on aboriginal Australians quickly becoming darker-skinned than their southeast Asian ancestors, then that doesn't point to the importance of vitamin D.  It points to the importance of not getting skin cancer.  Rapid evolution ... (read more)

2ChristianKl
As I said I don't think Australian's are the best example and South American's are better.  I do agree that the image is misleading and I will look into updating the argument. I still believe that the thesis that evolutionary pressure lead people to develop dark skin while living near the equator in America is true, but it needs more sources.
purge10

On the other hand, B is about the skin color of the residents of the area by their sensitivity for the wavelength of 305mn.

The source you linked to says something different:

The coefficient of variation (CoV) for UVB (Fig. 9.1B) is strongly associated with its seasonal nature outside of the tropics

So that's the standard deviation divided by the mean, all calculated purely from UVB levels throughout the year, not from skin color.

Even if the map were based on skin color, that still wouldn't point to rapid evolution unless they excluded Australians of European... (read more)

2ChristianKl
The argument is not about rapid evolution in the few hundred years since Europeans arrived in Australia but about rapid evolution in the thousands/ten's of thousand years.  Populations that become native Australians had to first leave Africa, then pass through Iran with his farther from the equator and then travel through the Philippines to arrive in Australia.  I think native South American case is more interesting then Australia given that it's population had to migrate through the Bering street in the Lithic stage which required them to be far from the equator.
Answer by purge10

Closing the loop: I got my second shot at 8 weeks, on the basis that 1) I could get it as a walk-in with no wait, and 2) there's more "normal" available to go back to now.

purge10

How did you arrive at 12 weeks?

purge10

I did confirm that my slot would be available for someone else, although I can't guarantee that the slot was filled.

I have relaxed my own precautions to some extent after the first shot.  I'm not too worried about being barred from anything based on anyone else's policies--the limiting factors are more likely to be my own caution, local prevalence, and whether someone else's onerous policies (general, not specific to my vaccination status) make an activity not worth doing anyway.

Do you have a reference for the comparison of first-shot Pfizer vs. J&J?

purge10

I agree my personal impact on FDF is small, but I'd like it to point in the right direction.  I expect the impact would be less like "one person gets their shot X days earlier" and more like "X people get their shot one day earlier", though I'm not sure which of those would have the bigger effect.

As for the impact on perceptions, I'm not telling many people what I'm doing, and the people I have told don't have any vaccine hesitancy.  So I'm not worried about that.

Answer by purge20

I wound up with Pfizer, but I actually would have preferred to get J&J, due to the more established vaccine tech with less risk of allergic reaction.  They work similarly enough (put *NA into your cells, you build the spike protein yourself, and then react to it) that it's hard for me to believe that much of the apparent difference in effectiveness is real.  J&J scored worse, but on a harder test including the newer strains.  So I imagine J&J is comparable to the first shot of Pfizer/Moderna, and although the second shot does mak... (read more)

purge30

Not related to the main idea, but the point of os.path.join is to combine path elements using whichever delimiter the OS requires ("/" on Unix, "\" on Windows, etc., even though Windows in particular can also handle "/").  If you don't care about that portability, you might as well use normal string concatenation.  Or if you're using os.path.join, you might as well omit the "/" delimiters in your string literals to get extra portability.

purge40

I haven't seen that documentary, but I'd guess it's about the gripping language.  (If not, then there are multiple such languages in the world, even better!)

purge50

I'd like to be able to look through my list of posts and feel content that each and every one is something that I put into the world because I am really proud of it and it deserves to be there, but that mindset just leads me to the catch-22.

Another reason to be less strict about quality before publishing: you're not a perfect judge of the quality of your own work.  Sometimes your writing is better than you think it is, and filtering too hard means that some good writing won't be published.  If you don't lose any of your bets, you're not taking enough risks.

purge30

So "no manipulation" or "maintaining human free will" seems to require a form of indifference: we want the AI to know how its actions affect our decisions, but not take that influence into account when choosing those actions.

I think the butler can take that influence into account in making its choices, but still reduce its manipulativity by explaining to Petrov what it knows about how breakfast will affect Petrov's later choices.  When they're on equal epistemic footing, Petrov can also take that information into account, and perhaps choose to deliber... (read more)

purge70

"shaped by their values" != "aligned with their values".  I think Stuart is saying not that China will solve the alignment problem, but that they won't be interested in solving it because they're focused on expanding capabilities, and translating a book won't change that.

If so, I think he's wrong here. The book may lead them to realize that unaligned AGI doesn't actually constitute an improvement in capabilities. It's the creation of a new enemy. A bridge that might fall down is not a useful bridge and a successful military power, informed of that, wouldn't want to build it.

It's in no party's interests to create AGI that isn't aligned with at least the people overseeing the research project.

An AGI aligned with a few living humans is generally going to lead to better outcomes than an AGI aligned with nobody at all, there is... (read more)

-1Stuart Anderson
-
2ChristianKl
If you understand that there's an alignment problem then "shaped by their values" = "aligned with their values". That's especially true in a country that has a strong central leadership.
purge20

But the typical use of NDAs is notably different from the typical use of blackmail, isn't it? Even though in principle they could be used in all the same situations, they're aren't used that way in practice. Doesn't that make it reasonable to treat them differently?

purge20
If α is smaller it's less than half-silvered, and if α is bigger it's more than half-silvered.

Just a nit, but isn't this backwards? Less silvering means less reflection and more transmission, but this first diagram labels the transmitted amplitude as α, not the reflected amplitude.

1justinpombrio
Thanks. It was the diagram that was backwards; I meant for α to be the amplitude of reflection, not of transmission. I updated the diagram.
purge00

If we know that there's a burglar, then we think that either an alarm or a recession caused it; and if we're told that there's an alarm, we'd conclude it was less likely that there was a recession, since the recession had been explained away.

Should that be "since the burglar had been explained away"? Or am I confused?

Edit: I was confused. The burglar was explained; the recession was explained away.

purge00

If people weren't around, then "snow is white" would still be a true sentence, but it wouldn't be physically embodied anywhere (in quoted form). If we want to depict the quoted sentence, the easiest way to do that is to depict its physical embodiment.

purge20

Beliefs should pay rent, check. Arguments about truth are not just a matter of asserting privilege, check. And yet... when we do have floating beliefs, then our arguments about truth are largely a matter of asserting privilege. I missed that connection at first.