Was on Vivek Hebbar's team at MIRI, now working with Adrià Garriga-Alonso on various empirical alignment projects.
I'm looking for projects in interpretability, activation engineering, and control/oversight; DM me if you're interested in working with me.
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The cost of goods has the same units as the cost of shipping: $/kg. Referencing between them lets you understand how the economy works, e.g. why construction material sourcing and drink bottling has to be local, but oil tankers exist.
- An iPhone costs $4,600/kg, about the same as SpaceX charges to launch it to orbit. [1]
- Beef, copper, and off-season strawberries are $11/kg, about the same as a 75kg person taking a three-hour, 250km Uber ride costing $3/km.
- Oranges and aluminum are $2-4/kg, about the same as flying them to Antarctica. [2]
- Rice and crude oil are ~$0.60/kg, about the same as $0.72 for shipping it 5000km across the US via truck. [3,4] Palm oil, soybean oil, and steel are around this price range, with wheat being cheaper. [3]
- Coal and iron ore are $0.10/kg, significantly more than the cost of shipping it around the entire world via smallish (Handysize) bulk carriers. Large bulk carriers are another 4x more efficient [6].
- Water is very cheap, with tap water $0.002/kg in NYC. But shipping via tanker is also very cheap, so you can ship it maybe 1000 km before equaling its cost.
It's really impressive that for the price of a winter strawberry, we can ship a strawberry-sized lump of coal around the world 100-400 times.
[1] iPhone is $4600/kg, large launches sell for $3500/kg, and rideshares for small satellites $6000/kg. Geostationary orbit is more expensive, so it's okay for them to cost more than an iPhone per kg, but Starlink wants to be cheaper.
[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000711415. Can't find numbers but Antarctica flights cost $1.05/kg in 1996.
[3] https://www.bts.gov/content/average-freight-revenue-ton-mile
[4] https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities
[5] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1232861/tap-water-prices-in-selected-us-cities/
[6] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-unit-shipping-costs-for-dry-bulk-carrier-ships-per-tkm-EUR-tkm-in-2019_tbl3_351748799
2Maybe Galois with group theory? He died in 1832, but his work was only published in 1846, upon which it kicked off the development of group theory, e.g. with Cayley's 1854 paper defining a group. Claude writes that there was not much progress in the intervening years:
The period between Galois' death in 1832 and the publication of his manuscripts in 1846 did see some developments in the theory of permutations and algebraic equations, which were important precursors to group theory. However, there wasn't much direct progress on what we would now recognize as group theory.
Some notable developments in this period:
1. Cauchy's work on permutations in the 1840s further developed the idea of permutation groups, which he had first explored in the 1820s. However, Cauchy did not develop the abstract group concept.
2. Plücker's 1835 work on geometric transformations and his introduction of homogeneous coordinates laid some groundwork for the later application of group theory to geometry.
3. Eisenstein's work on cyclotomy and cubic reciprocity in the 1840s involved ideas related to permutations and roots of unity, which would later be interpreted in terms of group theory.
4. Abel's work on elliptic functions and the insolubility of the quintic equation, while published earlier, continued to be influential in this period and provided important context for Galois' ideas.
However, none of these developments directly anticipated Galois' fundamental insights about the structure of solutions to polynomial equations and the corresponding groups of permutations. The abstract concept of a group and the idea of studying groups in their own right, independent of their application to equations, did not really emerge until after Galois' work became known.
So while the 1832-1846 period saw some important algebraic developments, it seems fair to say that Galois' ideas on group theory were not significantly advanced or paralleled during this time. The relative lack of progress in these 14 years supports the view of Galois' work as a singular and ahead-of-its-time discovery.
This is indeed a crux, maybe it's still worth talking about.
I still agree with myself above and think this is a bad moderation decision. Although I don't know the full story and don't see you on the moderation log.
Someone asked basically this question before, and someone gave basically the same answer. It's a good idea, but there are some problems with it: it depends on your and your counterparties' risk aversion, wealth, and information levels, which are often extraneous.
The question makes sense if you fix a time control.
How much power is required to run the most efficient superhuman chess engines? There's this discussion saying Stockfish running on a phone is superhuman, but is that one watt or 10 watts? Could we beat grandmasters with 0.1 watts if we tried?
Any technical results yet?
I agree with the anarchopunk thing, and maybe afrofuturism, because you can interpret "a subculture advocating for X will often not think about some important component W of X for various political reasons" as self-sabotage. But on BDSM, this is not at all my model of fetishes, and I would bet at 2.5:1 odds that you would lose a debate against what Wikipedia says, judged by a neutral observer.
I don't believe that data is limiting because the finite data argument only applies to pretraining. Models can do self-critique or be objectively rated on their ability to perform tasks, and trained via RL. This is how humans learn, so it is possible to be very sample-efficient, and currently a small proportion of training compute is RL.
If the majority of training compute and data are outcome-based RL, it is not clear that the "Playing human roles is pretty human" section holds, because the system is not primarily trained to play human roles.