All of vlad.proex's Comments + Replies

vlad.proex1212

Here's a thought experiment.

In version A, I have a button that non invasively scans my brain and creates 10 perfect copies of my brain state in a computer. I press the button. For an instant, 11 identical mind states exist in the universe. Then each mind starts diverging along different causal chains.

Intuitively, I expect the following:

  • I won't experience anything unusual after pressing the button (eg, I won't wake up in a computer). I will still feel that I am in my physical body, in the room with the button
  • each of the mind copies will feel that they ar
... (read more)

Nice! Last weekend I expanded https://www.gptrim.com/ to allow the user to a) see savings in both characters and tokens; b) determine their own combination of word processing functions. Then I saw, like you said, that to save tokens you only want to remove stopwords. I will next add the option to remove punctuation. I also want to give users two general recipes: optimize for saving tokens vs. optimize for saving characters. Always happy to take more ideas.

I will probably write again on this, on my new personal Substack or other websites, reporting what I'v... (read more)

I see your point. I think the existing tokenizer is designed to keep all parts of text, while the idea here is to sacrifice some information in favor of compression. But writing this, I also realized that this approach is more effective at saving characters than tokens.

This is what I was hoping for when I wrote this post. Thank you for your insight. 

New position: sometimes when using ChatGPT, you only care about the number of characters, because of the character limit in the chat message. In that case, you want to get rid of spaces. But if you want to save on tokens, you probably should keep spaces. I think the solution is: a) allow the user to choose the mix of transformations for their use case; b) show them how much they are saving in characters and tokens so they can optimize for their use case. 

2Emily Thomas
Oh, if we're only optimizing for tokens we can get the Tolkien example down from 187 to 110. Word stemming adds tokens (while reducing characters). If we only care about tokens then removing the stopwords was doing all the work. If we only remove the stopwords and nothing else we get: don't humans also genuinely original ideas? Come, read fantasy book. either Tolkien clone, Song Ice Fire. Tolkien professor Anglo-Saxon language culture; no secret got inspiration. Song Ice Fire War Roses dragons. Lannister Stark Lancaster York, map Westeros Britain (minus Scotland) upside down-Ireland stuck bottom - wake, sheeple! Dullards blend Tolkien slurry shape another Tolkien-clone. Tolkien-level artistic geniuses blend human experience, history, artistic corpus slurry form entirely new genre. , difference finely blend spices add slurry Which GPT-4 outputs to: Don't humans also have genuinely original ideas? Come, let's read a fantasy book. It could either be a Tolkien clone or a Song of Ice and Fire. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon language and culture; it's no secret where he got his inspiration. Song of Ice and Fire is based on the War of the Roses with dragons. Lannister and Stark are analogous to Lancaster and York, and the map of Westeros resembles Britain (minus Scotland) upside down, with Ireland stuck at the bottom - wake up, sheeple! Dullards merely blend Tolkien's ideas into a slurry to shape another Tolkien clone. However, Tolkien-level artistic geniuses blend human experience, history, and artistic corpus into a slurry to form an entirely new genre. It's like the difference between finely blending spices and merely adding them to a slurry. This can probably be refined further.

Free, universal financial tracker.

I wrote an article on this subject (i.e. why do we play zero-sum games while praising positive-sum games?)

https://native-wonder.blogspot.com/2020/12/things-people-want.html

Thank you, this is very useful. Lately I've been interested in programs that are fully online and could be completed in a year. Would you have any recommendations for that?

3Master Programs ML/AI
The programs in continental Europe (e.g. Amsterdam, Darmstadt, Tübingen, ETH, and Lausanne) are usually 2 years long and the UK ones (Edinburgh, Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL) take one year. I don't know how well the UK ones adapted their program to online teaching, I have just heard that Edinburgh is currently struggling to do so. 

Strongly upvoted. As a Kindle-dependent newcomer who's delving into the classics, this is precious.

I have read RAZ. Does this file include it? I would actually need only the posts that are not there.

Do you plan to do this for other authors?

9sone3d
Yudkowsky' Lesswrong Posts NOT INCLUDED in RAZ: Rationality From AI to Zombies >>DOWNLOAD .EPUB HERE add: Some of the lasts posts are missing. Were not included when I create this .epub
3sone3d
This file include ALL Yudkowsky’s posts from Lesswrong. This means it contains RAZ. I have a handcrafted .epub with all his posts that are not in RAZ. I will find it and post it here. Stay tuned. Yes, it’s posible to do the same with other authors.

I had trouble understanding how the different facts and judgments in your post are connected between each other and with the concept of upside decay.

But I want to say that I really appreciate the concept, because something very similar occurred to me once, though at the time I didn't give it a name. I was studying the careers of creative artists, and there is a lot of discrimination in these fields. Against women, against people who start out in less prestigious institutions, and so on.

My idea was that because many people were excluded and diversity... (read more)

Thank you for your questions, they're proving very useful.

But it is interesting to understand, what's happening to other children, who actually do math. Suddenly you realize, that "solving problems" for them is less energy demanding, which is awkward!

I'm not sure this is the case. We're humans, maths is hard for everyone. I imagine it's more about developing an ethics of work early on and being willing to delay gratification and experience unpleasant sensations for the purpose of learning something valuable. Though of co... (read more)

3Данило Глинський
  This is false, there are a few genius mathematician who early in childhood proved it is easy for some humans. Exactly! There is even more specific concept in programming psychology, it is called "notional machines". Small little machines in your head which can interpret using rules.  I think those also can transfer to math learning, as after rule-based machines concept is grasped, all the algorithmic, iterative, replacable and transitive concepts from math start making sense.

Your position is consistent, though to me somewhat troubling.

I wouldn't equate "unable to have different preferences or to envision a better situation" with "happy". Perhaps Plato's cave applies here. Or consider a child who is born in an underground prison, Banelike, and never sees the light of sun. Who is then offered the opportunity of freedom on the surface and refuses out of fear or ignorance. Would you think they are "happy"? Perhaps, but they could be happier. Or at least they could experience a richer level ... (read more)

0[comment deleted]

I agree with you, though I don't think the linked account expects an "eternal old age"; what made you think that? As I see it, it's actually an argument about the inner experience of humans and how the author thinks we wouldn't be happy with a very long lifespan. I don't agree with the author, but I linked the post as anecdotal evidence that some people who are no longer young may reject the idea of a very long lifespan because of a general feeling of life-weariness (to what extent this feeling is connected to the biological p... (read more)

2AnthonyC
You're right, nothing explicitly stated anything about old age, but the study itself has "burials" right up in the headline. IDK if respondents knew those questions were coming when they answered the "lifespan" question, but if they did, I doubt most people automatically assume an increased lifespan meant they'd start being younger than they currently were. That's all conjecture on my part, but I think it's similarly plausible as psychological life-weariness as an explanation. As I understand it, the theoretical limits on energy efficiency of irreversible computing are a function of ambient temperature (because they involve dumping heat/entropy into the environment). That means if the future universe keeps getting colder as it expands, the amount of computing you can do with a fixed supply of stored energy goes up without bound, as long as you use it slowly enough. That's basically Dyson's Eternal Intelligence, though I don't think anyone knows what the computing architecture would look like. Things like the Omega Point spacetime in a collapsing universe seem more speculative to me but still might be possible.

Personally, I am strongly inclined towards non-interference. I have little trouble accepting that people choose wrong, knowing how fallible I am myself. I also think that, given how complex the universe is for us, it will always be easier to find arguments for inaction than for action.

And this is precisely why I am interested in arguments for interference. Most of the time, the option of non-interference is the easiest for me; which makes me at least a bit suspicious. It makes me wonder: have I carefully considered all the opposing arguments?

'Morali... (read more)

4Stuart Anderson
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Maybe some kind of social app inspired by liquid democracy/quadratic voting might work?

Do you think it's wise to entrust the collective with judging the worth of intellectuals? I can think of a lot of reasons this could go wrong: cognitive biases, emotional reasoning, ignorance, Dunning–Kruger effect, politically-driven decisions... Just look at what's happening now with cancel culture.

In general this connects to the problem of expertise. If even intellectuals have trouble understanding who among them is worthy of trust and respect, how c... (read more)

Do you think it's wise to entrust the collective with judging the worth of intellectuals?

The idea as described doesn't necessitate that.

  • Everyone rates everyose else. This creates a web of trust.
  • An individual user then designates a few sources they trust. The system uses those seeds to propagate trust through the network, by a transitivity assumption.
  • So every individual gets custom trust ratings of everyone else, based on who they personally trust to evaluate trustworthiness.

This doesn't directly solve the base-level problem of evaluating intellectuals, but... (read more)

TIL 'former' and 'latter' are used to distinguish between two things. Corrected.

The survey is quite simplistic. 19% said "I want to live forever", while 42% said "I want to live longer than a normal lifespan, but not forever". The problem is in the ambiguity. What does 'forever' mean? A million years? Until the heat death of the universe?

And what is 'longer than a normal lifespan'? Ten years longer? A million years longer?

My guess is that most people who chose the second option want to live until they're 100 or something, and that is in fact "longer than the average lifespan" wh... (read more)

6AnthonyC
That linked account seems to assume that people who want to live forever expect to "get old" along the way, in the same way they do now, and I don't think that's accurate. I wouldn't want to live even for centuries, let alone forever, in a 90 year old's body, in world where most of the people I know and love are gone forever. But many of those same 90 year olds will gladly profess to believe, or at least hope, to be reunited with loved ones in death and remain with them forever.  But if you offer me the chance to stay in a 25 or 30 year old's body/level of health, and everyone else I love would get the same, I'd at least like the chance to see what it's like and (Ian Banks' Culture-style) get to choose my lifespan, not all at once but each and every day, based on how well it works out. I have no idea if I would actually want to live for TREE(3) years, but I'd much rather have the choice, and not have to make it within the next 50 years.   Are you sure? That seems like a question of physics, and the accessible energy reserves and computational capacity of our light cone (the latter of which may be infinite even if the former is not).  Any survey of this type runs into, not just the nuances of the questions and how they're asked, but how little most people have really thought about the question, or what the different answers would actually imply.

The general trend has been to make computers user-friendly, and to hide the complexity from the user. On one hand, this has been helpful for their diffusion, and I'm sure it benefited a lot of people in a lot of ways (besides making a lot of money). If I think of my parents, for instance, I can't believe they would have ever started to use computers had they been more complicated.

On the other hand, this might be the fundamental obstacle in the way of coding literacy. To do stuff in the modern world, you actually have to know how to read and writ... (read more)

To stay on computer science analogies, this reminds me of the principle of abstraction. When you call an API, it sort of feels like magic. A task gets done, and you trust that it was done correctly, and that saves you the time of controlling the code and rewriting it from scratch. "We have only to think out how this is to be done once, and forget then how it is done." (A. Turing, 1947). 

Thank you for the welcome and the feedback! Yes, I am set on deepening my engagement with Reality and tackling more practical tasks. I also want to work on keeping score on my judgments and getting better at detecting & analysing my mistakes. I will definitely write more about it when the moment comes.