All of quanticle's Comments + Replies

The whole thing might be LLM slop. Where do ICU nurses have a low enough workload that they can slack off on the job without consequences?

Some people do not have the intuition that organizations should run as efficiently as possible and avoid wasting time or resources.

Some of us don't want every organization to be turned into an Amazon warehouse. An organization that runs as efficiently as possible and wastes no time at all is one that's pretty hellish to work in.

if you’re in a dysfunctional organization where everything is about private fiefdoms instead of getting things done…why not…leave?

Because the dysfunctional organization pays well. Or the the commute is really short, and I'd r... (read more)

The content of the complaint caused me to have additional doubt about the truth of Ann Altman's claims. One of the key claims in pythagoras0515's post is that Ann Altman's claims have been self-consistent. That is, Ann Altman has been claiming that approximately the same acts occurred, over a consistent period of time, when given the opportunity to express her views. However, here, there is significant divergence. In the lawsuit complaint, she is alleging that the abuse took place, repeatedly over eight to nine years, a claim that is not supported by any o... (read more)

Working on alignment is great, but it is not the future we should be prepping for. Do you have a plan?

I do not, because a future where an unaligned superintelligence takes over is precisely as survivable as a future in which the sun spontaneously implodes.

Any apocalypse that you can plan for isn't really an apocalypse.

But it only spends 0.000001 percent of it’s time (less than 32 s/yr) interacting with us. Because it’s bored and has better things to do.

What if one of those "better things" is disassembling Earth's biosphere in order to access more resources?

The Firefox problem on Claude was fixed after I sent them an e-mail about it.

The link 404s. I think the correct link is: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/231-misconceptions-about-china-and-artificial-intelligence-helen-toner/

Just going by the standard that you set forth:

The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded,

The program expanded in response to Amazon wanting to collect data about more retailers, not because Amazon was viewing this program as a profit center.

it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing

But that doesn't seem to have occurred. Until the Wall... (read more)

The overall impression that I got from the program was that as it proved profitable and expanded, it took on a larger workforce and it became harder for leaders to detect when employees were following their individual incentives to cut corners and gradually accumulate risks of capsizing the whole thing.

That's not the impression I got. From the article, it says that many of the retailers that the Wall Street Journal had contacted regarding Big River had no idea that the entity was affiliated with Amazon (even despite the rather-obvious-in-hindsight namin... (read more)

(with an all-in-one solution they just buy one thing and are done)

That's a very common misconception regarding all-in-one tools. In practice, all-in-one tools always need a significant degree of setup, configuration and customization before they are useful for the customer. Salesforce, for example, requires so much customization, you can make a career out of just doing Salesforce customization. Sharepoint is similar.

Thus the trade-off isn't between a narrowly focused tool that does one job extremely well versus an all-in-one tool that does a bunch of th... (read more)

I also have a “Done” column, which is arguably pointless as I just delete everything off the “Done” column every couple weeks,

Having a "Done" column (or an archive board) can be very useful if you want to see when was the last time you completed a recurring task. It helps prevent tasks with long recurrences (quarterly, biennially, etc) from falling through the cracks. For example: dentist appointments. They're supposed to happen once a year. And, ideally, you'd create a task to schedule the next one immediately when you get back from the previous one. B... (read more)

The last answer is especially gross:

He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It’s just obvious what his name is.

Can we apply the same logic to doors? "It took me less than five minutes to pick the lock so..."

Or people's dress choices? "She chose to wear a tight top and a miniskirt so..."

Metz persistently fails to state why it was necessary to publish Scott Alexander's real name in order to critique his ideas.

The second wheelbarrow example has a protagonist who knows the true value of the wheelbarrow, but still loses out:

At the town fair, a wheelbarrow is up for auction. You think the fair price of the wheelbarrow is around $120 (with some uncertainty), so you submit a bid for $108. You find out that you didn’t win—the winning bidder ends up being some schmuck who bid $180. You don’t exchange any money or wheelbarrows. When you get home, you check online out of curiosity, and indeed the item retails for $120. Your estimate was great, your bid was reasonable,

That point is contradicted by the wheelbarrow examples in the OP, which seem to imply that either you'll be the greater fool or you'll be outbid by the greater fool. Why wasn't Burry outbid by a fool who thought that Avant! was worth $40 a share?

This is why I disagree with the OP; like you, I believe that it's possible to gain from informed trading, even in a market filled with adverse selection.

I don't think the Widgets Inc. example is a good one. Michael Lewis has a good counterpoint in The Big Short, which I will quote at length:

The alarmingly named Avant! Corporation was a good example. He [Michael Burry] had found it searching for the word "accepted" in news stories. He knew, standing at the edge of the playing field, he needed to find unorthodox ways to tilt it to his advantage, and that usually meant finding situations the world might not be fully aware of. "I wasn't looking for a news report of a scam or fraud per se," he said. "That wou

Why isn’t there a standardized test given by a third party for job relevant skills?

That's what Triplebyte was trying to do for programming jobs. It didn't seem to work out very well for them. Last I heard, they'd been acquired by Karat after running out of funding.

My intuition here is “actually fairly good.” Firms typically spend a decent amount on hiring processes—they run screening tests, conduct interviews, look at CVs, and ask for references. It’s fair to say that companies have a reasonable amount of data collected when they make hiring decisions, and generally, the people involved are incentivized to hire well.

Every part of this is false. Companies don't collect a fair amount of data during the hiring process, and the data they do collect is often irrelevant or biased. How much do you really learn about a c... (read more)

Do you know a healthy kid who will do nothing?

Yes. Many. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that most people in this community, who claim that they're self-motivated learners who were stunted by school would have been worse off without the structure of a formal education. One only needs to go through the archives and look at all the posts about akrasia to find evidence of this.

What does "lowercase 'p' political advocacy" mean, in this context? I'm familiar with similar formulations for "democratic" ("lowercase 'd' democratic") to distinguish matters relating to the system of government from the eponymous American political party. I'm also familiar with "lowercase 'c' conservative" to distinguish a reluctance to embrace change over any particular program of traditionalist values. But what does "lowercase 'p' politics" mean? How is it different from "uppercase 'P' Politics"?

3-year later follow-up: I bought a Hi-Tec C Coleto pen for my brother, who is in a profession where he has to write a lot, and color code forms, etc. He likes it a lot. Thanks for the recommendation.

On the other hand, if plaintiff has already elicited testimony from the engineer to the effect that the conversation happened, could defendant try to imply that it didn’t happen by asking the manager whether he recalled the meeting? I mean, yes, but it’s probably a really bad strategy. Try to think about how you would exploit that as plaintiff: either so many people are mentioning potentially life-threatening risks of your product that you can’t recall them all, in which case the company is negligent, or your memory is so bad it was negligent for you to h

The thing I said that the defendant would not dispute is the fact that the engineer said something to them, not whether they should have believed him.

I still disagree. If it wasn't written down, it didn't happen, as far as the organization is concerned. The engineer's manager can (and probably will) claim that they didn't recall the conversation, or dispute the wording, or argue that while the engineer may have said something, it wasn't at all apparent that the problem was a serious concern.

There's a reason that whistleblowers focus so hard on generatin... (read more)

If you notice something risky, say something. If the thing you predicted happens, point out the fact that you communicated it.

I think this needs to be emphasized more. If a catastrophe happens, corporations often try to pin blame on individual low-level employees while deflecting blame from the broader organization. Having a documented paper trail indicating that you communicated your concerns up the chain of command prevents that same chain from labeling you as a "rogue employee" or "bad apple" who was acting outside the system to further your personal reputation or financial goals.

Plaintiff wants to prove that an engineer told the CEO that the widgets were dangerous. So he introduces testimony from the engineer that the engineer told the CEO that the widgets were dangerous. Defendant does not dispute this.

Why wouldn't the defendant dispute this? In every legal proceeding I've seen, the defendant has always produced witnesses and evidence supporting their analysis. In this case, I would expect the defendant to produce analyses showing that the widgets were expected to be safe, and if they caused harm, it was due to unforeseen circ... (read more)

Would it be as self evidently damning as you think it would be? If so, then why would a company like Google explicitly pursue such a weak strategy? It's not just Google either. When I worked at a different FAANG company, I was told in orientation to never use legal terminology in e-mail, for similar reasons.

The first lawyer will be hardly able to contain his delight as he asks the court to mark “WidgetCo Safe Communication Guidelines” for evidence.

Having safe communication guidelines isn't as damning as you think it is. The counsel for WidgetCo would merely reply that the safe communication guidelines are there to prevent employees from accidentally creating liabilities by misusing legal language. This is no different than admonishing non-technical employees for misusing technical language.

Indeed this was Google's actual strategy.

Games, unlike many real life situations, are entered into by choice. If you are not playing to win, then one must ask why are you bothering to play? Or, more specifically, why are you playing this game and not some other?

Have you read Playing To Win, by David Sirlin? It makes many of the points that you make here, but it doesn't shy away from winning as the ultimate goal, as you seem to be doing. Sirlin doesn't fall into the trap of lost purposes. He keeps in mind that the goal is to win. Yes, of course, by all means try new strategies and learn the mechanics of the game, but remember that the goal is victory.

was militarily weakened severely

That's another highly contentious assertion. Even at the height of Vietnam, the US never considered Southeast Asia to be the main domain of competition against the Soviet Union. The primary focus was always on fielding a military force capable of challenging the Soviets in Western Europe. Indeed, one of the reasons the US failed in Vietnam is because the military was unwilling to commit its best units and commanders to what the generals perceived was a sideshow.

why the US allied with China against the USSR

Was the US e... (read more)

each one after 1900 was followed by either the Cuban Missile Crisis and the US becoming substantially geopolitically weaker than the USSR after losing the infowar over Vietnam

I'm sorry, what? That's a huge assertion. The Vietnam War was a disaster, but I fail to see how it made the US "significantly geopolitically weaker". One has to remember that, at the same time that the US was exiting Vietnam, its main rival, the Soviet Union, was entering a twenty-five year period of economic stagnation that would culminate in its collapse.

Chevron deference means that judges defer to federal agencies instead of interpreting the laws themselves where the statute is ambiguous.

Which is as it should be, according to the way the US system of government is set up. The legislative branch makes the law. The executive branch enforces the law. The judicial branch interprets the law. This is a fact that every American citizen ought to know, from their grade-school civics classes.

For example, would you rather the career bureaucrats in the Environmental Protection Agency determine what regulations a

I think they will probably do better and more regulations than if politicians were more directly involved

Why do you think this?

Furthermore, given the long history of government regulation having unintended consequences as a result of companies and private individuals optimizing their actions to take advantage of the regulation, it might be the case that government overregulation makes a catastrophic outcome more likely.

While overturning Chevron deference seems likely to have positive effects for many industries which I think are largely overregulated, it seems like it could be quite bad for AI governance. Assuming that the regulation of AI systems is conducted by members of a federal agency (either a pre-existing one or a new one designed for AI as several politicians have suggested), I expect that the bureaucrats and experts who staff the agency will need a fair amount of autonomy to do their job effectively. This is because the questions relevant AI regulation (i. e.

Sometimes if each team does everything within the rules to win then the game becomes less fun to watch and play

Then the solution is to change the rules. Basketball did this. After an infamous game where a team took the lead and then just passed the ball around to deny it to their opponents, basketball added a shot clock, to force teams to try to score (or else give the ball to the other team). (American) Football has all sorts of rules and penalties ("illegal formation", "ineligible receiver downfield", "pass interference", etc) whose sole purpose is to... (read more)

Isn’t this stupid? To have an extra set of ‘rules’ which aren’t really rules and everyone disagrees on what they actually are and you can choose to ignore them and still win the game?

Yes, it is stupid.

Games aren't real life. The purpose of participating in a game is to maximize performance, think laterally, exploit mistakes, and do everything you can, within the explicit rules, to win. Doing that is what makes games fun to play. Watching other people do that, at a level that you could never hope to reach is what makes spectator sports fun to watch.

Imagi... (read more)

This pattern is even more pronounced in motorsport. The history of Formula 1 is the story of teams finding ways to tweak their cars to gain an advantage, other teams whining about unfairness, and the FIA then tweaking the rules to outlaw the "innovation".

Examples include:

• Brabham BT-46 -- a car that used a fan to suck air out from underneath it, allowing it to produce extra downforce
• Tyrell P34 -- a car that had six wheels instead of four, to gain additional front grip for turning
• Williams FW-14B -- a car that featured an electronic active suspension to e

any therapeutic intervention that is now standardized and deployed on mass-scale has once not been backed by scientific evidence.

Yes, which is why, in the ideal case, such as with the polio vaccine, we take great effort to gather that evidence before declaring our therapeutic interventions safe and efficacious.

Ah, but how do you make the artificial conscience value aligned with humanity? An "artificial conscience" that is capable of aligning a superhuman AI... would itself be an aligned superhuman AI.

We’ve taught AI how to speak, and it appears that openAI has taught their AI how to produce as little offensive content as possible.

The problem is that the AI can (and does) lie. Right now, ChatGPT and its ilk are a less than superhuman levels of intelligence, so we can catch their lies. But when a superhuman AI starts lying to you, how does one correct for that? If a superhuman AI starts veering off in a direction that is unexpected, how does one bring it back on track?

@gwern short story, Clippy highlights many of the issues with naively training a sup... (read more)

How would you measure the usage? If, for example, Google integrates Bard into its main search engine, as they are rumored to be doing, would that count as usage? If so, I would agree with your assessment.

However, I disagree that this would be a "drastic" impact. A better Google search is nice, but it's not life-changing in a way that would be noticed by someone who isn't deeply aware of and interested in technology. It's not like, e.g. Google Maps navigation suddenly allowing you to find your way around a strange city without having to buy any maps or decipher local road signs.

What I'm questioning is the implicit assumption in your post that AI safety research will inevitably take place in an academic environment, and therefore productivity practices derived from other academic settings will be helpful. Why should this be the case when, over the past few years, most of the AI capabilities research has occurred in corporate research labs?

Some of your suggestions, of course, work equally well in either environment. But not all, and even the ones which do work would require a shift in emphasis. For example, when you say professors ... (read more)

What is the purpose, beyond mere symbolism, of hiding this post to logged out users when the relevant data is available, in far more detail, on Google's official AI blog?

I am saying that successful professors are highly successful researchers

Are they? That's why I'm focusing on empirics. How do you know that these people are highly successful researchers? What impressive research findings have they developed, and how did e.g. networking and selling their work enable them to get to these findings? Similarly, with regards to bureaucracy, how did successfully navigating the bureaucracy of academia enable these researchers to improve their work?

The way it stands right now, what you're doing is pointing at some traits that c... (read more)

Well, augmenting reality with an extra dimension containing the thing that previously didn’t exist is the same as “trying and seeing what would happen.” It worked swimmingly for the complex numbers.

No it isn't. The difference between $i$ and the values returned by $Maverick\left(\right)$ is that $i$ can be used to prove further theorems and model phenomena, such as alternating current, that would be difficult, if not impossible to model with just the real numbers. Whereas positing the existence of $Maverick\left(\right)$ is just like positing the existence of a finite value $h$ that s... (read more)

For what it's worth, I had a very similar reaction to yours. Insects and arthropods are a common source of disgust and revulsion, and so comparing anyone to an insect or an arthropod, to me, shows that you're trying to indicate that this person is either disgusting or repulsive.

Probabilities as credences can correspond to confidence in propositions unrelated to future observations, e.g., philosophical beliefs or practically-unobservable facts. You can unambiguously assign probabilities to ‘cosmopsychism’ and ‘Everett’s many-worlds interpretation’ without expecting to ever observe their truth or falsity.

You can, but why would you? Beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. If two beliefs lead to the same anticipated experiences, then there's no particular reason to choose one belief over the other. Assigning probabilit... (read more)

One crude way of doing it is saying that a professor is successful if they are a professor at a top 10-ish university.

But why should that be the case? Academia is hypercompetitive, but the way it selects is not solely on the quality of one's research. Choosing the trendiest fields has a huge impact. Perhaps the professors that are chosen by prestigious universities are the ones that the prestigious universities think are the best at drawing in grant money and getting publications into high-impact journals, such as Nature, or Science.

Specifically I th

I was thinking more about the inside view/outside view distinction, and while I agree with Dagon's conclusion that probabilities should correspond to expected observations and expected observations only, I do think there is a way to salvage the inside view/outside view distinction. That is to treat someone saying, "My 'inside view' estimate of event $E$ is $X$," as being equivalent to someone saying that $P\left(E|\text{model is correct}\right)=X$. It's a conditional probability, where they're telling you what their probability of a given outcome is, assuming that their understan... (read more)