LESSWRONG
LW

Quick Takes

Has Tyler Cowen ever explicitly admitted to being wrong about anything?

Not 'revised estimates' or 'updated predictions' but 'I was wrong'.

Every time I see him talk about learning something new, he always seems to be talking about how this vindicates what he said/thought before.

Gemini 2.5 pro didn't seem to find anything, when I did a max reasoning budget search with url search on in aistudio.

Zach Stein-Perlman2h20

this is evidence that tyler cowen has never been wrong about anything

4Garrett Baker11h

He has mentioned the phrase a bunch. I haven’t looked through enough of these links enough to form an opinion though.

23Kabir Kumar11h

thank you for this search. Looking at the results, top 3 are by commentors. Then one about not thinking a short book could be this good. I don't think this is Cowen actually saying he made a wrong prediction, just using it to express how the book is unexpectedly good at talking about a topic that might normally take longer, though happy to hear why I'm wrong here. Another commentor: another commentor: Ending here for now, doesn't seem to be any real instances of Tyler Cowen saying he was wrong about something he thought was true yet.

Kaj's shortform feed

Kaj_Sotala10h364

Every now and then in discussions of animal welfare, I see the idea that the "amount" of their subjective experience should be weighted by something like their total amount of neurons. Is there a writeup somewhere of what the reasoning behind that intuition is? Because it doesn't seem intuitive to me at all.

From something like a functionalist perspective, where pleasure and pain exist because they have particular functions in the brain, I would not expect pleasure and pain to become more intense merely because the brain happens to have more neurons. Rather... (read more)

Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)

Shankar Sivarajan3h30

I don't have a detailed writeup, but this seems straightforward enough to fit in this comment: you're conducting your moral reasoning backwards, which is why it looks like other people have a sophisticated intuition about neurobiology you don't.

The "moral intuition"^[1] you start with is that insects^[2] aren't worth as much as people, and then if you feel like you need to justify that, you can use your knowledge of the current best understanding of animal cognition to construct a metric that fits of as much complexity as you like.

^{^}
I'd call m

... (read more)

7MinusGix5h

To me the core of neuron counting as an intuition is that all living beings seem to have a depth to their reactions that scales with the size of their mind. There's a richness to a human mind in its reactions to the world which other animals don't have, just as dogs have a deeper interaction with everything than insects do. This is pretty strongly correlated with our emotions for why/when we care about creatures, how much we 'recognize' their depth. This is why people are most often interested when learning that certain animals have more depth than we might intuitively think. ---------------------------------------- As for whether there is an article, I don't know of any that I like, but I'll lay out some thoughts. This will be somewhat rambly, in part to try to give some stronger reasons, but also related ideas that aren't spelled out enough. One important consideration I often have to keep in mind in these sorts of discussions, is that when we evaluate moral worth, we do not just care about instantaneous pleasure/pain, but rather an intricate weighting of hundreds of different considerations. This very well may mean that we care about weighting by richness of mind, even if we determine that a scale would say that two beings experience the ~same level of pain. Duplication: If we aren't weighting by 'richness of mind' or some related factor, then we still end up with a similar weighting factor by not considering the mind as one solid thing with a core singular self receiving input. If a simple system can have pain just as intense as a more complex system, then why wouldn't the subsystems within a large brain have their own intense 'experiences'? I experience a twinge of discomfort when thinking of an embarrassing event some years ago. To my 'self' this is a relatively minor pain, but my brain is using substantially more neurons than lie within a beetle. More subsystems fire. While the core mind handles this as minor sensation, that small subsystem of the mind ma

2Gunnar_Zarncke6h

Some thoughts. For clarity, my first reading of this was to consider the possible interpretation of a binary distinction: That either the whole entity can experience pain or not. And thus we'd have to count the entities as a measure of welfare. I agree that weighing by neurons doesn't seem appropriate when pain is not a result of individual neurons but their assembly. Weighing by neurons then is not much different from weighing by weight conditioned on having the required complexity. But why would a large being have a higher weight than a smaller one, everything considered equal? Wouldn't that priviledge large animals (and even incentivise growth)? A comment on possible misinterpretations: You should rule out (if intended) that people think you equate sense resolution with pain sensation intensity. I think you don't, but I'm not very sure. Yes, social animals often possess more elaborate ways to express pain, including facial expressions, vocalizations, and behavioral changes, which can serve communicative functions within their group. However, suppression of pain expression is also widespread, especially in species where showing pain could lower social rank or make an individual vulnerable to predation or aggression[1]. The question is what this expression tells us about the sensation. For example, assuming introversion is linked to this expression, does it imply that extroverts feel more pain? I agree that more complex processing is needed to detect (reflect) on pain. Pain expression can serve signalling functions such as alerting without reflection, but for more specific adaptation, such as familial care, require empathy, which arguably requires modeling other's perceptions. Because expressing pain is suppressed in some species, we have to face this dichotomy: If the expression of pain informs about the amount or intensity of pain, then it follows that the same amount of injury can lead to very different amounts of pain, including none, even within a species

Habryka's Shortform Feed

habryka4d*694

Gary Marcus asked me to make a critique of his 2024 predictions, for which he claimed that he got "7/7 correct". I don't really know why I did this, but here is my critique:

For convenience, here are the predictions:

7-10 GPT-4 level models
No massive advance (no GPT-5, or disappointing GPT-5)
Price wars
Very little moat for anyone
No robust solution to hallucinations
Modest lasting corporate adoption
Modest profits, split 7-10 ways

I think the best way to evaluate them is to invert every one of them, and then see whether the version you wrote, or the i... (read more)

Showing 3 of 25 replies (Click to show all)

ryan_greenblatt5h64

One lesson you should maybe take away is that if you want your predictions to be robust to different interpretations (including interpretations that you think are uncharitable), it could be worthwhile to try to make them more precise (in the case of a tweet, this could be in a linked blog post which explains in more detail). E.g., in the case of "No massive advance (no GPT-5, or disappointing GPT-5)" you could have said "Within 2024 no AI system will be publicly released which is as much of a qualitative advance over GPT-4 in broad capabilites as GPT-4 is ... (read more)

8yams22h

I think Oliver put in a great effort here, and that the two of you have very different information environments, which results in him reading your points (which are underspecified relative to, e.g., Daniel Kokotajlo’s predictions ) differently than you may have intended them. For instance, as someone in a similar environment to Habryka, that there would soon be dozens of GPT-4 level models around was a common belief by mid-2023, based on estimates of the compute used and Nvidia’s manufacturing projections. In your information environment, your 7-10 number looks ambitious, and you want credit for guessing way higher than other people you talked to (and you should in fact demand credit from those who guessed lower!). In our information environment, 7-10 looks conservative. You were directionally correct compared to your peers, but less correct than people I was talking to at the time (and in fact incorrect, since you gave both a lower and upper bound - you’d have just won the points from Oli on that one if you said ‘7+’ and not 7-10’). I’m not trying to turn the screw; I think it’s awesome that you’re around here now, and I want to introduce an alternative hypothesis to ‘Oliver is being uncharitable and doing motivated reasoning.’ Oliver’s detailed breakdown above looks, to me, like an olive branch more than anything (I’m pretty surprised he did it!), and I wish I knew how best to encourage you to see it that way. I think it would be cool for you and someone in Habryka’s reference class to quickly come up with predictions for mid-2026, and drill down on any perceived ambiguities, to increase your confidence in another review to be conducted in the near-ish future. There’s something to be gained from us all learning how best to talk to each other.

2tslarm1d

I agree with your point about profits; it seems pretty clear that you were not referring to money made by the people selling the shovels. But I don't see the substance in your first two points: * You chose to give a range with both a lower and an upper bound; the success of the prediction was evaluated accordingly. I don't see what you have to complain about here. * In the linked tweet, you didn't go out on a limb and say GPT-5 wasn't imminent! You said it either was not imminent or would be disappointing. And you said this in a parenthetical to the claim "No massive advance". Clearly the success of the prediction "No massive advance (no GPT-5, or disappointing GPT-5)" does not depend solely on the nonexistence of GPT-5; it can be true if GPT-5 arrives but is bad, and it can be false if GPT-5 doesn't arrive but another "massive advance" does. (If you meant it only to apply to GPT-5, you surely would have just said that: "No GPT-5 or disappointing GPT-5.") Regarding adoption, surely that deserves some fleshing out? Your original prediction was not "corporate adoption has disappointing ROI"; it was "Modest lasting corporate adoption". The word "lasting" makes this tricky to evaluate, but it's far from obvious that your prediction was correct.

Mikhail Samin's Shortform

Mikhail Samin2d364

i made a thing!

it is a chatbot with 200k tokens of context about AI safety. it is surprisingly good- better than you expect current LLMs to be- at answering questions and counterarguments about AI safety. A third of its dialogues contain genuinely great and valid arguments.

You can try the chatbot at https://whycare.aisgf.us (ignore the interface; it hasn't been optimized yet). Please ask it some hard questions! Especially if you're not convinced of AI x-risk yourself, or can repeat the kinds of questions others ask you.

Send feedback to ms@contact.ms.

A coup... (read more)

Showing 3 of 12 replies (Click to show all)

2Mikhail Samin8h

This specific page is not really optimized for any use by anyone whatsoever; there are maybe five bugs each solvable with one query to claude, and all not a priority; the cool thing i want people to look at is the chatbot (when you give it some plausible context)! (Also, non-personalized intros to why you should care about ai safety are still better done by people.) I really wouldn't want to give a random member of the US general public a thing that advocates for AI risk while having a gender drop-down like that.[1] The kinds of interfaces it would have if we get to scale it[2] would be very dependent on where specific people are coming from. I.e., demographic info can be pre-filled and not necessarily displayed if it's from ads; or maybe we ask one person we're talking to to share it with two other people, and generate unique links with pre-filled info that was provided by the first person; etc. Voice mode would have a huge latency due to the 200k token context and thinking prior to responding. 1. ^ Non-binary people are people, but the dropdown creates unnecessary negative halo effect for a significant portion of the general public. Also, dropdowns = unnecessary clicks = bad. 2. ^ which I really want to! someone please give us the budget and volunteers! at the moment, we have only me working full-time (for free), $10k from SFF, and ~$15k from EAs who considered this to be the most effective nonprofit in this field. reach out if you want to donate your time or money. (donations are tax-deductible in the us.)

1Kabir Kumar8h

Is the 200k context itself available to use anywhere? How different is it from the Stampy.ai dataset? Nw if you don't know due to not knowing what exactly stampy's dataset is. I get questions a lot, from regular ml researchers on what exactly alignment is and I wish I had an actually good thing to send them. Currently I either give a definition myself or send them to alignmentforum.

Mikhail Samin6h20

Nope, I’m somewhat concerned about unethical uses (eg talking to a lot of people without disclosing it’s ai), so won’t publicly share the context.

If the chatbot answers questions well enough, we could in principle embed it into whatever you want if that seems useful. Currently have a couple of requests like that. DM me somewhere?

Stampy uses RAG & is worse.

johnswentworth's Shortform

johnswentworth3dΩ421234

I was a relatively late adopter of the smartphone. I was still using a flip phone until around 2015 or 2016 ish. From 2013 to early 2015, I worked as a data scientist at a startup whose product was a mobile social media app; my determination to avoid smartphones became somewhat of a joke there.

Even back then, developers talked about UI design for smartphones in terms of attention. Like, the core "advantages" of the smartphone were the "ability to present timely information" (i.e. interrupt/distract you) and always being on hand. Also it was small, so anyth... (read more)

Showing 3 of 28 replies (Click to show all)

Adam Zerner6h40

My main concern with heavy LLM usage is what Paul Graham discusses in Writes and Write-Nots. His argument is basically that writing is thinking and that if you use LLM's to do your writing for you, well, your ability to think will erode.

4Adam Zerner6h

I'm similar, for both smart phones and LLM usage. For smart phones there was one argument that moved me a moderate amount. I'm a web developer and startup founder. I was talking to my cousin's boyfriend who is also in tech. He made the argument to me that if I don't actively use smart phones I won't be able to empathize as much with smart phone users, which is important because to a meaningful extent, that's who I'm building for. I didn't think the empathy point was as strong as my cousin's boyfriend thought it was. Like, he seemed to think it was pretty essential and that if I don't use smart phones I just wouldn't be able to develop enough empathy to build a good product. I, on the other hand, saw it as something "useful" but not "essential". Looking back, I think I'd downgrade it to something like "a little useful" instead of "useful". I'm not sure where I'm going with this, exactly. Just kinda reflecting and thinking out loud.

3DirectedEvolution2d

I think that these are genuinely hard questions to answer in a scientific way. My own speculation is that using AI to solve problems is a skill of its own, along with recognizing which problems they are currently not good for. Some use of LLMs teaches these skills, which is useful. I think a potential failure mode for AI might be when people systematically choose to work on lower-impact problems that AI can be used to solve, rather than higher-impact problems that AI is less useful for but that can be solved in other ways. Of course, AI can also increase people's ambitions by unlocking the ability to pursue higher-impact goals they would not have been able to otherwise achieve. Whether or not AI increases or decreases human ambition on net seems like a key question. In my world, I see limited use of AI except as a complement to traditional internet search, a coding assistant by competent programmers, a sort of Grammarly on steroids, an OK-at-best tutor that's cheap and always available on any topic, and a way to get meaningless paperwork done faster. These use cases all seem basically ambition-enhancing to me. That's the reason I asked John why he's worried about this version of AI. My experience is that once I gained some familiarity with the limitations of AI, it's been a straightforwaredly useful tool, with none of the serious downsides I have experienced from social media and smartphones. The issues I've seen seem to have to do with using AI to deepfake political policy proposals, homework, blog posts, and job applications. These are genuine and serious problems, but mainly have to do with adding a tremendous amount of noise to collective discourse rather than the self-sabotage enabled by smartphones and social media. So I'm wondering if John's more concerned about those social issues or by some sort of self-sabotage capacity from AI that I'm not seeing. Using AI to do your homework is obviously self-sabotage, but given the context I'm assuming that's not wha

leogao's Shortform

leogao2d650

random brainstorming ideas for things the ideal sane discourse encouraging social media platform would have:

have an LM look at the comment you're writing and real time give feedback on things like "are you sure you want to say that? people will interpret that as an attack and become more defensive, so your point will not be heard". addendum: if it notices you're really fuming and flame warring, literally gray out the text box for 2 minutes with a message like "take a deep breath. go for a walk. yelling never changes minds"
have some threaded chat component

... (read more)

Showing 3 of 9 replies (Click to show all)

Algon7h20

have some threaded chat component bolted on (I have takes on best threading system).

I wish to hear these takes.

1sjadler21h

One consideration re: the tone-warning LLMs: make sure to be aware that this means you're pseudo-publishing someone's comment before they meant to. Not publishing in discoverable sense, but logging it to a database somewhere (i.e., probably controlled by the LLM provider) - and depending on the types of writing, this might affect people's willingness to actually write stuff

3leogao1d

the LLM cost should not be too bad. it would mostly be looking at vague vibes rather than requiring lots of reasoning about the thing. I trust e.g AI summaries vastly less because they can require actual intelligence. I'm happy to fund this a moderate amount for the MVP. I think it would be cool if this existed. I don't really want to deal with all the problems that come with modifying something that already works for other people, at least not before we're confident the ideas are good. this points towards building a new thing. fwiw I think if building a new thing, the chat part would be most interesting/valuable standalone (and I think it's good to have platforms grow out of a simple core rather than to do everything at once)

Sam Marks's Shortform

Sam Marks1d533

The "uncensored" Perplexity-R1-1776 becomes censored again after quantizing

Perplexity-R1-1776 is an "uncensored" fine-tune of R1, in the sense that Perplexity trained it not to refuse discussion of topics that are politically sensitive in China. However, Rager et al. (2025)^[1] documents (see section 4.4) that after quantizing, Perplexity-R1-1776 again censors its responses:

I found this pretty surprising. I think a reasonable guess for what's going on here is that Perplexity-R1-1776 was finetuned in bf16, but the mechanism that it learned for non-refus... (read more)

Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)

the gears to ascension7h20

not enough noise in fine-tuning training then

1Adam Karvonen21h

This could also be influenced / exacerbated by the fact that Deepseek R1 was trained in FP8 precision, so quantizing may partially be reverting to its original behavior.

5cloud1d

(Copied from Slack DM) If finetuning to remove censorship causes a shift in parameters that is small relative to the quantization step size, then an additional quantization step will simply undo finetuning (reverting to censorship). It'd be interesting to see the distribution of absolute changes in parameter values induced by finetuning!

Morphism's Shortform

Morphism22h30

All "infohazards" I've seen seem to just be more and more complicated versions of "Here's a Löbian proof that you're now manually breathing". A sufficiently well-designed mind would recognize these sorts of things before allowing them to fully unfold.

5habryka10h

The classical infohazard is "here is a way to build a nuke using nothing but the parts of a microwave". I think you are thinking of a much narrower class of infohazards than that word is intended to refer to.

Morphism7h10

I'd categorize that as an exfohazard rather than an infohazard.

Info on how to build a nuke using nothing but parts of a microwave doesn't harm the bearer, except possibly by way of some other cognitive flaw/vulnerability (e.g. difficulty keeping secrets)

Maybe "cognitohazard" is a closer word to the thing I'm trying to point towards. Though, I would be interested in learning about pure infohazards that aren't cognitohazards.

(If you know of one and want to share it with me, it may be prudent to dm rather than comment here)

1Karl Krueger10h

Breathing mindfulness meditation seems to fix that one. We might look for structurally similar fixes for other such "infohazards".

Jimrandomh's Shortform

jimrandomh1d0-7

If you think insects suffer and that that matters, the correct conclusion is not "eat less honey", it's "soak every meter of Earth with DDT". Which I support. Bees and honey only matter if you very specifically care about domesticated insect suffering.

Showing 3 of 7 replies (Click to show all)

jimrandomh9h40

So, first: The logistical details of reducing wild impact biomass are mooted by the fact that I meant it as a reductio, not a proposal. I have no strong reason to think that spraying insecticide would be a better strategy than gene drives or sterile insect technique or deforestation, or that DDT is the most effective insecticide.

To put rough numbers on it: honeybees are about 4e-7 by count or 7e-4 by biomass of all insects (estimate by o3). There is no such extreme skew for mammals and birds (o3). While domesticated honeybees have some bad things happen to... (read more)

8niplav19h

(Being nitpicky) The extermination of insects needs more than just the fact that they suffer, but 1. They suffer so much that their existence is not outweighed by other positive things (e.g. their happiness, their contribution to the welfare of other beings, their intrinsic value). 2. There is no easier/more valuable method for relieving their suffering while keeping other goods. 3. The suffering outweighs other goods at every "margin", i.e. there is no amount of insects for which it isn't better to reduce their population.

1speck144720h

I think I was being pithy instead of clear, I apologize. I'm trying to emphasize that your criticism of this argument is substantially wrong - this is indeed not feasible, but that ( (a) in your enumeration) is the smallest of these criticisms and the only one that applies, and this error does not damage the implied critique of the original argument as I read it. This would actually accomplish a decent portion of the goals that are implied by this valuation of insect pain and the "horrible consequences" would not actually be horrible in this account. This argument against eating honey relies on a sort of social trust - you probably don't accept that bee suffering is 15% as important as time-equivalent human suffering, but somebody else is saying that it is, and the result of that belief is really catastrophic. Rhetorically this makes sense and is completely valid - to paraphrase and generalize, "here's a method of reasoning that you probably accept, here's a conclusion it can reach, here's the amount of uncertainty you can have before that conclusion is no longer reached, that somebody else who thinks like you and cares about the things you do believes these numbers to be correct is a good reason to trust this argument at least a small amount, so don't eat honey." The implicit criticism here, as I read it, is something like "sure, but these numbers are very obviously batshit. There's a silent addendum if you keep thinking this way, 'don't eat honey' is the bottom line but the postscript is 'also this is only a hedge until we can, by whatever means available, completely eliminate non-reflective or semi-reflective life in the universe even at the cost of all reflective life', and if this conclusion actually does follow, then the social trust that compels me towards the original conclusion disappears." That is, there's a straightforward counterargument to the original post, which is that the argument is completely numerical and the numbers make no sense. (You could

depressurize's Shortform

depressurize21h114

There was a recent post titled "Spaced Repetition Systems Have Gotten Way Better": https://domenic.me/fsrs/

It mentions this:

But what’s less widely known is that a quiet revolution has greatly improved spaced repetition systems over the last couple of years, making them significantly more efficient and less frustrating to use. The magic ingredient is a new scheduling algorithm known as FSRS, by Jarrett Ye.

I was skeptical, but I tried getting into spaced repetition again and I can say that the FSRS algorithm feels just magical. I often find that I'm just bar... (read more)

silentbob9h20

So, I was wondering whether this is usable in anki, and indeed, there appears to be a simple setting for it without even having to install a plugin, as described here in 4 easy steps. I'll see if it makes a notable difference.

Not so relatedly, this made me realize a connection I hadn't really thought about before: I wish music apps like Spotify would use something vaguely like spaced repetition for Shuffle mode. In the sense of finding some good algorithm to predict, based on past listening behavior, which song in a playlist the user is most likely to curr... (read more)

TurnTrout's shortform feed

TurnTrout3d21-4

In a thread which claimed that Nate Soares radicalized a co-founder of e-acc, Nate deleted my comment – presumably to hide negative information and anecdotes about how he treats people. He also blocked me from commenting on his posts.

The information which Nate suppressed

The post concerned (among other topics) how to effectively communicate about AI safety, and positive anecdotes about Nate's recent approach. (Additionally, he mentions "I’m regularly told that I’m just an idealistic rationalist who’s enamored by the virtue of truth" -- a love which apparent... (read more)

Showing 3 of 35 replies (Click to show all)

1Knight Lee19h

I actually didn't see that glaring example! Very good point. That said, my feeling is Trump et al. weren't reacting against any specific woke activism, but very woke policies (and opinions) which resulted from the activism. Although they reversed very many Democrat policies, I don't think they reversed them so badly that a stronger Democrat policy will result in a stronger policy in the opposite direction under the Trump administration.[citation needed] I guess The Overton window effect may still be stronger than the reverse-psychology effect. In a counterfactual world where one of these woke policies/opinions was weaker among Democrats (e.g. the right to abortion), that specific opinion would probably do even worse under Trump (abortion might be banned). Trump's policies are still positively correlated with public opinion. He mostly held back from banning abortion and cutting medical benefits because he knew these liberal policies were popular. But he aggressively attacked immigration (and foreign aid) because these liberal policies were less popular. Despite appearances, he's not actually maximizing E(liberal tears). The one counter-reaction, is that in aggregate, all the woke policies and opinions may have made Trump popular enough to get elected? But I doubt that pausing AI etc. will be so politically significant it'll determine who wins the election. PS: I changed my mind on net negatives. Net negative activism may be possible when it makes the cause (e.g. AI Notkilleveryoneism) becomes partisan and snaps into one side of the political aisle? But even Elon Musk supporting it hasn't caused that to happen?

habryka11h*74

That said, my feeling is Trump et al. weren't reacting against any specific woke activism, but very woke policies (and opinions) which resulted from the activism.

I don't think this is true, and that indeed the counter-reaction is strongly to the woke activism. My sense is a lot of current US politics stuff is very identity focused, the policies on both sides matter surprisingly little (instead a lot of what is going on is something more like personal persecution of the outgroup and trying to find ways to hurt them, and to prop up your own status, which actually ends up with surprisingly similar policies on both ends).

4[anonymous]19h

I strongly disagree with this. I think the simplest and most illustrative example I can point to is that of pro-Palestinian activists. They almost universally failed to obtain their desired policies (divestments, the expulsion of 'Zionists' from left-of-center spheres), but nonetheless their specific activism, such as on college campuses, engendered a tremendous amount of backlash, both in the general election and afterwards (such as through a closer US-Israel relationship, etc). It has also resulted in ongoing heavy-handed[1] actions by the Trump administration to target universities who allowed this, deport foreigners who engaged in it, and crack down on such speech in the public sphere. In general, I think Trump 2.0 is a reaction to the wokeness of 2017-2022, which is itself a reaction to Trump 1.0, and most of this stuff is symbolic as opposed to substantive in nature.[2] I do think Trump 1.0 is a reaction to genuine policy and cultural changes that have pushed the West in a more progressive direction over the decades,[3] but I believe what happened afterward is qualitatively different in how it came about. I also disagree with this, though less strongly than above, mostly because I'm deeply uncertain about what will happen in the near-term future. The reason I don't agree is that Trump 2.0 has managed and likely will continue to manage to enact fundamental structural changes in the system that will heavily limit what kinds of policies can actually be enacted by Democrats in the future. In particular, I'm referring to the gutting of the bureaucratic-administrative state and the nomination and confirmation of Trump-supporting candidates to the judiciary. 1. ^ To put it mildly and euphemistically. 2. ^ For instance, despite all the talk about prison abolitionism and ACAB in the summer of 2020, close to no jurisdictions actually enacted complete defundings of police departments. But progressive activism in this general direction nevertheless

xpostah's Shortform

samuelshadrach15h21

Polymarket is not liquid enough to justify betting full-time.

Optimistically I expect if I invested $5k and 4 days per month for 6 months, I could make $7k +- $2k expected returns. Or $0-4k profit. I would have to split up the $5k into 6-7 bets and monitor them all separately.

I could probably make similar just working at a tech job.

Zach Furman's Shortform

Zach Furman3d427

I’ve been trying to understand modules for a long time. They’re a particular algebraic structure in commutative algebra which seems to show up everywhere any time you get anywhere close to talking about rings - and I could never figure out why. Any time I have some simple question about algebraic geometry, for instance, it almost invariably terminates in some completely obtuse property of some module. This confused me. It was never particularly clear to me from their definition why modules should be so central, or so “deep.”

I’m going to try to explain the ... (read more)

Showing 3 of 7 replies (Click to show all)

6Daniel Murfet1d

There's a certain point where commutative algebra outgrows arguments that are phrased purely in terms of ideals (e.g. at some point in Matsumura the proofs stop being about ideals and elements and start being about long exact sequences and Ext, Tor). Once you get to that point, and even further to modern commutative algebra which is often about derived categories (I spent some years embedded in this community), I find that I'm essentially using a transplanted intuition from that "old world" but now phrased in terms of diagrams in derived categories. E.g. a lot of Atiyah and Macdonald style arguments just reappear as e..g arguments about how to use the residue field to construct bounded complexes of finitely generated modules in the derived category of a local ring. Reconstructing that intuition in the derived category is part of making sense of the otherwise gun-metal machinery of homological algebra. Ultimately I don't see it as different, but the "externalised" view is the one that plugs into homological algebra and therefore, ultimately, wins. (Edit: saw Simon's reply after writing this, yeah agree!)

8Simon Pepin Lehalleur1d

Modules are just much more flexible than ideals. Two major advantages: * Richer geometry. An ideal is a closed subscheme of Spec(R), while modules are quasicoherent sheaves. An element x of M is a global section of the associated sheaf, and the ideal Ann(x) corresponds to the vanishing locus of that section. This leads to a nice geometric picture of associated primes and primary decomposition which explains how finitely generated modules are built out of modules R/P with P prime ideal (I am not an algebraist at heart, so for me the only way to remember the statement of primary decomposition is to translate from geometry 😅) * Richer (homological) algebra. Modules form an abelian category in which ideals do not play an especially prominent role (unless one looks at monoidal structure but let's not go there). The corresponding homological algebra (coherent sheaf cohomology, derived categories) is the core engine of modern algebraic geometry.

Simon Pepin Lehalleur15h30

Historically commutative algebra came out of algebraic number theory, and the rings involved - Z,Z_p, number rings, p-adic local rings... - are all (in the modern terminology) Dedekind domains.

Dedekind domains are not always principal, and this was the reason why mathematicians started studying ideals in the first place. However, the structure of finitely generated modules over Dedekind domains is still essentially determined by ideals (or rather fractional ideals), reflecting to some degree the fact that their geometry is simple (1-dim regular Noetherian domains).

This could explain why there was a period where ring theory developed around ideals but the need for modules was not yet clarified?

sam's Shortform

sam1d40

Here are a cluster of things. Does this cluster have a well-known name?

A voter has some radical political preferences X, but the voting system where they live is FPTP, and their first preference has no chance of winning. So they vote for a person they like less who is more likely to win. The loss of the candidate who supported X is then cited as evidence that supporting X means you can't win.
A pollster goes into the field and gets a surprising result. They apply some unprincipled adjustment to move towards the average before publishing. (this example

... (read more)

CstineSublime17h10

Is the thing you're trying to label the peculiar confirmation bias where people instead of interpreting evidence to confirm to what they prefer or would like to be true, only to what they believe to be true - even if from their perspective it is pessimistic?

Or are you looking for a label for "this is unpopular therefore it can't win" as a specific kind of self-fulfilling prophecy? Like an inverted Keynesian beauty contest?

3Viliam21h

I don't know a standard name. I call it "fallacy of the revealed preferences", because these situations have in common "you do X, someone concludes that X is what you actually wanted because that's what you did, duh". More precisely, the entire concept of "revealed preferences" is prone to the motte-and-bailey game, where the correct conclusion is "given the options and constraints that you had at the moment, you chose X", but it gets interpreted as "X is what you would freely choose even if you had no constraints". (People usually don't state it explicitly like this, they just... don't mention the constraints, or even the possibility of having constraints.)

dbohdan's Shortform

dbohdan5d126

i learned something about agency when, on my second date with my now-girlfriend, i mentioned feeling cold and she about-faced into the nearest hotel, said she left a scarf in a room last week, and handed me the nicest one out of the hotel’s lost & found drawer

— @_brentbaum, tweet (2025-05-15)

you can just do things?

— @meansinfinity

not to burst your bubble but isn't this kinda stealing?

— @QiaochuYuan

What do people mean when they say "agency" and "you can just do things"? I get a sense it's two things, and the terms "agency" and "you can just d... (read more)

metachirality20h10

Here's a riddle: A woman falls in love with a man at her mother's funeral, but forgets to get contact info from him and can't get it from any of her acquaintances. How could she find him again? The answer is to kill her father in hopes that the man would come to the funeral.

It reminds me of [security mindset](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_mi_1.html), in which thinking like an attacker exposes leaky abstractions and unfounded assumptions, something that is also characteristic of being agentic and "just doing things."

3Viliam3d

I think this is one of the big painful points in our culture. There seems to be a positive correlation between agency and crime (and generally things that are in the same direction as crime, but with smaller magnitude, so we don't call them crime), and people kinda notice that, which kinda makes the lack of agency a virtue signal. The reason is that as a criminal, you have to be agenty. No one is going to steal money for you; that is, in the way that would land the money in your pockets. (Technically, there are also some non-agenty people involved in crime, I don't know what is the English idiom for them; I mean the kind of stupid or desperate person that you just tell "move this object from place A to place B" or "sign this legal document" and they do it for a few bucks without asking questions, and when shit hits the fan, they end up in jail instead of you.) And this is quite unfortunate, because it seems to me that many people notice the connection, and start treating agency with suspicion. And not without good reason! For example, if a random person approaches you out of the blue, most likely it is some kind of scammer. As a consequence, agenty people have to overcome not just their natural inertia, but also this mistrust. This probably depends a lot on specific culture and subculture. In ex-socialist countries, people are probably more suspicious of agency, because during socialism agency was borderline illegal (you are supposed to do what the system tells you to do, not introduce chaos). If you hang out with entrepreneurs or wannabe entrepreneurs, agency is probably valued highly (but I would also suspect scams to be more frequent).

Raemon's Shortform

Raemon1d138

TAP for fighting LLM-induced brain atrophy:

"send LLM query" ---> "open up a thinking doc and think on purpose."

What a thinking doc looks varies by person. Also, if you are sufficiently good at thinking, just "think on purpose" is maybe fine, but, I recommend having a clear sense of what it means to think on purpose and whether you are actually doing it.

I think having a doc is useful because it's easier to establish a context switch that is supportive of thinking.

For me, "think on purpose" means:

ask myself what my goals are right now (try to notice at le

... (read more)

4Thane Ruthenis1d

Whenever I send an LLM some query I expect to be able to answer myself (instead of requesting a primer on some unknown-to-me subject), I usually try to figure out how to solve it myself, either before reading the response, or before sending the query at all. I. e., I treat the LLM's take as a second opinion. This isn't a strategy against brain atrophy, though: it's because (1) I often expect to be disappointed by the LLM's answer, meaning I'll end up needing to solve the problem myself anyway, so might as well get started on that, (2) I'm wary of the LLM concocting some response that's subtly yet deeply flawed, so it's best if I have an independent take to contrast it with. And if I do skip this step before reading the response, I usually indeed then end up disappointed by/suspicious of the LLM's take, so end up having to think it over myself anyway. It confuses me a bit when people talk about LLMs atrophying their brains, because the idea of blindly taking an LLM's response at face value[1] doesn't immediately occur to me as a thing someone might do. So my advice for avoiding LLM brain atrophy would be to reframe your model of LLMs to feature a healthy, accurate level of distrust towards them. The brain-atrophy-preventing strategies then just become the natural, common-sensical things to do, rather than something extra. 1. ^ In situations where you would've otherwise reasoned it out on your own, I mean. I do mostly trust them to report the broad strokes of well-established knowledge accurately, at this point. But the no-LLM counterfactual there would've involved me likewise just reading that information from some (likely lower-quality) internet source, so there's no decrease in brain exercise.

Raemon1d60

I'm often in situations where either

a) I do basically expect the LLMs to get the right answer, and for it to be easily checkable. (like, I do in fact have a lot of boilerplate code to write)

and/or b) my current task is sufficiently tree structured, that it's pretty cheap to spin up an LLM to tackle one random subproblem while I mostly focus on a different thing. And the speedup from this is pretty noticeable. Sometimes the subproblem is something I expect it to get right, sometimes I don't really expect it to, BUT, there's a chance it will, and meanwhile I... (read more)

Nina Panickssery's Shortform

Nina Panickssery3d12-5

The motte and bailey of transhumanism

Most people on LW, and even most people in the US, are in favor of disease eradication, radical life extension, reduction of pain and suffering. A significant proportion (although likely a minority) are in favor of embryo selection or gene editing to increase intelligence and other desirable traits. I am also in favor of all these things. However, endorsing this form of generally popular transhumanism does not imply that one should endorse humanity’s succession by non-biological entities. Human “uploads” are much ... (read more)

Showing 3 of 15 replies (Click to show all)

2the gears to ascension2d

i want drastically upgraded biology, potentially with huge parts of the chemical stack swapped out in ways I can only abstractly characterize now without knowing what the search over viable designs will output. but in place, without switching to another substrate. it's not transhumanism, to my mind, unless it's to an already living person. gene editing isn't transhumanism, it's some other thing; but shoes are transhumanism for the same reason replacing all my cell walls with engineered super-bio nanotech that works near absolute zero is transhumanism. only the faintest of clues what space an ASI would even be looking in to figure out how to do that, but it's the goal in my mind for ultra-low-thermal-cost life. uploads are a silly idea, anyway, computers are just not better at biology than biology. anything you'd do with a computer, once you're advanced enough to know how, you'd rather do by improving biology

Nina Panickssery1d20

computers are just not better at biology than biology. anything you'd do with a computer, once you're advanced enough to know how, you'd rather do by improving biology

I share a similar intuition but I haven't thought about this enough and would be interested in pushback!

it's not transhumanism, to my mind, unless it's to an already living person. gene editing isn't transhumanism

You can do gene editing on adults (example). Also in some sense an embryo is a living person.

4Nina Panickssery2d

I would find that reasonably convincing, yes (especially because my prior is already that true ems would not have a tendency to report their experiences in a different way from us).

notrishi's Shortform

notrishi5mo1-2

The Sasha Rush/Jonathan Frankle wager: https://www.isattentionallyouneed.com/ is extremely unlikely to be untrue by 2027, but it's not because another architecture might not be better; it's because it asks whether a transformer-like model will be sota . I think it is more likely that transformers are a proper subset of a class of generalized token/sequence mixers. Even SSMs when unrolled into a cumulative sum are a special case of linear attention.
Personally I do believe that there will be a deeply recurrent method that is transformer-like to succeed the transformer architecture, even though this is an unpopular opinion.

notrishi1d10

I changed my mind on this after seeing the recent literature with regards to test time training linear attentions

tdko's Shortform

tdko1d120

METR's task length horizon analysis for Claude 4 Opus is out. The 50% task success chance is at 80 minutes, slightly worse than o3's 90 minutes. The 80% task success chance is tied with o3 at 20 minutes.

https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1940088546385436738

Cole Wyeth1d52

That looks like (minor) good news… appears more consistent with the slower trendline before reasoning models. Is Claude 4 Opus using a comparable amount of inference-time compute as o3?

I believe I predicted that models would fall behind even the slower exponential trendline (before inference time scaling) - before reaching 8-16 hour tasks. So far that hasn’t happened, but obviously it hasn’t resolved either.

johnswentworth's Shortform

johnswentworth1d130

How can biochemical interventions be spatially localized, and why is that problem important?

High vs low voltage has very different semantics at different places on a computer chip. In one spot, a high voltage might indicate a number is odd rather than even. In another spot, a high voltage might indicate a number is positive rather than negative. In another spot, it might indicate a jump instruction rather than an add.

Likewise, the same chemical species have very different semantics at different places in the human body. For example, high serotonin concentr... (read more)