All of Randomized, Controlled's Comments + Replies

Yes!

If you're interested in rerunning this, consider doing it with two tokens that don't have an obvious ordinal relationship. Ie, in the training set, GPT sees "A" then "B" a billion trillion times, and perhaps has a sense that in many contexts "A" is preferred to "B".

Under this view, perhaps a certain set of interpretability techniques might emerge under a paradigm that makes certain assumptions (eg, that ML kernals are "mostly" linear, that systems are "mostly" stateless, that exotic hacks of the underlying hardware aren't in play, etc). If a series of anomalies were to accumulate that couldn't be explained within this matrix, you might expect to see a new paradigm needed.

Kuhn’s view is that during normal science scientists neither test nor seek to confirm the guiding theories of their disciplinary matrix. Nor do they regard anomalous results as falsifying those theories. (It is only speculative puzzle-solutions that can be falsified in a Popperian fashion during normal science (1970b, 19).) Rather, anomalies are ignored or explained away if at all possible. It is only the accumulation of particularly troublesome anomalies that poses a serious problem for the existing disciplinary matrix. A particularly troublesome anomaly

The Standford Phil Encylopedia gives:

According to Kuhn the development of a science is not uniform but has alternating ‘normal’ and ‘revolutionary’ (or ‘extraordinary’) phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science. Normal science does resemble the standard cumulative picture of scientific progress, on the surface at least. Kuhn describes normal science as ‘puzzle-solving’ (1962/1970a, 35–42). While this term suggests that normal science is not dramatic, its main purpose is t

I wrote "estimate of up to 15% chance", which is compatible with what you're saying here. But I don't mind updating it to be more precise.

This roughly corresponds to the risk stance I've been taking since finishing my primary course of vaxx.

I just tested + for the first time today. At the very least, this is comforting to read. Thanks!

<3

This comment was made before I updated the question to clarify what's in scope and added the moderation guidelines.

I'm sorry to hear about your health issues with LC. They sounds truly terrible. This question isn't addressed at the topic you're asking about, however.

But what is the base rate? How do demographic factors affect the base rate? Vaccination status?

4 month follow up: a lot of heat was very helpful, but underpowered to fully deal with this problem, and also inconvenient to constantly have a hotwater bottle in the back of my sweater like a hunchback of Notre Dame. Gently ramped up, progressive upper back strengthening has been very helpful for getting to a much more sustainably comfortable point. There's still some lingering issues in the spot between the shoulder blades and occasionally I do still treat with heat, but it's much much better now.

Cf Something to Protect?

Yeah, as a 1.5 week follow up, the heat treatement has continued to has continued to be effective, with the sense of tightness continuing to resolve. But it's also required a fairly high dose: probably several hours a day sitting with the waterbottle shoved into my t-shirt. I have a more ergonomic chair arriving tomorrow, G-d and B-zzos willing.

Two days later: this is working quite well so far.

I've worked as a professional programmer for nine years now. I think in at some point a few years ago, it actually began to erode my sense of agency working with computers. At a certain point I became less interested in hobby programming. This was 100% a healthy thing, I started doing things like dancing a lot of contact improv and rock climbing. But when I largely stopped hobby programming, almost all my programming experience was coming from working on production systems. Writing production code is slow. I've routinely had the experience of one or two li... (read more)

Interesting. Maybe you're right.

I think my model here is something more like, "ML agents that can do good text generation get rolled out to the masses by google and apple, and then some amount of glue infrastructure is developed or even just you can say, "hey google, help me with my dating profile" and it'll do a thing that's 70th or 80th percentile for writing quality, diluting out those of us who were doing 85th to 99th percentile writing.

I imagine it will get commercialized.

But shortly after than it'll be available to everyone and we'll have lost another useful signal

See, your first mistake here was not to consult with John Wentworth and Paul Christiano about thermodynamics.

I bet you didn't even ring up JeffTK!

So much for the rationalist virtue of scholarship..

Overall, this post is a bit confusing--it's like someone from a completely different society was suddenly transported to modern USA. What are you asking / telling us?

I had a similar reaction, I had the impression that Zvi is more worldly and jaded than the median LWer.

High quality, interesting, funny writing has been a difficult to manufacture signal up till now. It's possible GPT-n will change that. But folks on LW are probably filtering for people who will filter for making real pretty with the letter forms.

A small bit of anecdata in favor of the vasoconstriction mechanism: I'm about two weeks into a flare up of upper back soreness/tightness/yeck. It's been a bit chronic/mild for... maybe six months, but I did some stuff that flared it up to... 1.3/10ish two weeks ago. Uncomfortable, and concerning, but not crazy. What was worrying was that it didn't seem to be resolving. Sitting at the computer definitely made it worse. I tried some alternations to my seating (currently not very ergonomic for logistic reasons that are taking time to fix). Adding lower back s... (read more)

I have been the only weirdo I know of who wears a P100. I say this to emphasize that I've been taking covid seriously.

I don't see any reason to believe covid will be over in two months, or N months, for any value of N less than "however long it takes for humans to come into a new equilibrium with a novel virus." I don't know how long that will be, but 2 seems wrong.

As someone who's worn a p100 a lot, I can also say it's hardly cost free. It has all sorts of social, convenience, physical and psychological costs. Maybe those costs are <<< than your ... (read more)

Thanks for this, Elizabeth. 

Do you have any thoughts on trying to use a PReP protocol with herpes antivirals? I spent about twenty minutes the other day doing some initial searches (just duckduckgo didn't have time to get into pubMed), and didn't turn up anything. Valaciclovir inhibits viral DNA synthesis and is, I believe, fairly safe/mostly well tolerated. 

Alarming that it freely "lies" (?) or hallucinates or whatever is going on, rather than replying "I don't know".

sorry to be a rube, but.. why is dredging important? I would guess to make shipping lanes and harbors accessible to larger ships, but is shipping lane and harbor capacity a serious bottleneck? Is dredging capacity one? Is it something else?

Oooooh, these are much better than the ones I was got from nightcafe (I just checked, I was actually using "CLIP guided diffusion".)

DALL-E 2's marshes and sunset marshes are slightly better than what I was getting.

I used nightcafe.studio, a VQGAN+CLIP webservice a bunch in March for the worldbuilding.ai entry I was working on. I found it.. okay for generating images that I could then edit in photoshop, but it took many many tries to get something decent. I'd be particularly interested in seeing what DALLE-E 2 does with these prompts:

"Beautiful giant sunset over the saltwater marsh with tiny abandoned buildings in the distance" "Glass greenhouse with a beautiful forest inside, with people and drones flying" "People dropping into a beautiful marsh from flying drones on a sunny day" "Happy children hanging from flying drones on a sunny day beautiful storybook illustration"

I'm not sure that "first-amendment style free speech" is a good frame for discussing speech issues on the internet. Much of what the internet, and social media does, is provide amplification rather than just speech. Maybe there should be more theorization of what rights and expectations citizens should have w/r/t being able to scale or amplify their speech.

As a kid I developed something that basically is a body scan. I worried about monsters while I was lying in bed. At some point I started imagining a field of green energy starting at the very bottom of my feet and working its way very slowly up each leg, then my torso, down my arms, and finally to the very top of my head. Once I was cloaked in this protective green shield I was safe, as long as I didn't move. It broke if I moved. But if I stayed still I could then inflate it outwards, enveloping my house, neighborhood, city, and eventually the entire world... (read more)

I'm sorry you've had to go through this. I wish it was otherwise.

How come these are spoilers?

Wait, rather than some cuckoo idea that this is related to altitude or marginally less cuckoo lithium theory, what if it's about regional cuisine and eating habits?

Pronunciation is left as an exercise to the reader

Also, before and during WW2, Japan had the most shockingly horrifying death-cult-y style leadership and culture. Dan Carlin does a good job sketching this in his Supernova in the East series.

I am not sure if this dichotomy is a helpful one but we can see Templarrr as stating that there is a theoretic 'failing' which need not be mutually exclusive with the pragmatic 'usefulness' of a theory.

That was what I was also trying to say, in a very pithy way : )

All these criticism can be true, and AGI can still be an existential threat.

I saw Katja's post too, and had a reasonably big update from it, although I don't think she addresses the impact of vaccination status on long-cov probability or badness, so my update is smaller than it might have been.

Thank you for this. I'd say prior to reading this I was around 70% that for someone recently vaccinated or boosted Omicron isn't really worth worrying about, and getting Omicron at some point might even be +EV, due to cross immunity effect. I'd say now I'm around.. 45% on this?

My sense is that EAs in general have not been in the "strict lockdown" mode, trying to do some more careful tradeoffs to allow for things like EAGs. This struck me as.. reasonable-ish at the time, (even up through delta). But if Omicron has a similar long-covid story, this suggests that the upcoming EAGs may not be a good idea in person.

Can your survey give P(long-covid | vaccination status) ?

I feel unreasonably validated by this

I posted mine a day after this comment, do you still feel that way?

A rough typology of music micro-skills from my first year and a half learning saxophone.

• Reading music

  • Getting notes + annotations correct

    • Binding notes + annotations + physical movements together crisply. Annotations were learned significantly after notes.
    • Reading the rests as intervals

  • Reading ahead on the sheet

  • Executing the next physical move correctly

  • Keeping your place in the music synchronized with what you're fingering...

  • ...even while you're beginning to chunk the music into phrases

  • Knowing where I am in the piece of music, being a

Sorry, I was being a bit flip/insider-y. Probably inappropriately so.

I'm curious how much you've engaged with the AI Safety literature/arguments?

"Yudkowsky's DM" --> Eliezer Yudkowsky's [Twitter] Direct Messages.

In the software industry we have the concept of responsible disclosure when one finds a security exploit in a published package.

Do we have responsible disclosure procedures for something that may represent a fundamental AI capability advancement? Who would you even disclose to? Slide into Yudkowsky's DMs?

There were periods of time when I would look at the site two or three times a week, but often just to check the 'adjusted prevalence' numbers, which are hidden by default under the "Details" dropdown. Oh, yeah, prevalence hasn't changed much, no need to update cached models, cool. Probably worth ~$20 aggregated.

The biggest update for me was realizing that going to the dentist was much less risky than it intuitively felt. This was great, probably worth at least $100 (or, I dunno, maybe worth negative money if the dentist is actually net harmful to me, which... (read more)