All of bhauth's Comments + Replies

bhauth20

This won't find deception in mesaoptimizers, right?

bhauth20

make fewer points, selected carefully to be bulletproof, understandable to non-experts, and important to the overall thesis

That conflicts with eg:

If you replied with this, I would have said something like "then what's wrong with the designs for diamond mechanosynthesis tooltips, which don't resemble enzymes

Anyway, I already answered that in 9. diamond.

bhauth30

Yes, this is part of why I didn't post AI stuff in the past, and instead just tried to connect with people privately. I might not have accomplished much, but at least I didn't help OpenAI happen or shift the public perception of AI safety towards "fedora-wearing overweight neckbeards".

bhauth40

betting they would benefit from a TMSC blockade?

Yes, if you meant TSMC.

But the bet would have tired up your capital for a year.

...so? More importantly, Intel is down 50% from early 2024.

2wassname
Ah, I see. Ty
bhauth42

Your document says:

AI Controllability Rules

...

AI Must Not Self-Manage:

  • Must Not Modify AI Rules: AI must not modify AI Rules. If inadequacies are identified, AI can suggest changes to Legislators but the final modification must be executed by them.
  • Must Not Modify Its Own Program Logic: AI must not modify its own program logic (self-iteration). It may provide suggestions for improvement, but final changes must be made by its Developers.
  • Must Not Modify Its Own Goals: AI must not modify its own goals. If inadequacies are identified, AI can suggest change
... (read more)
5Weibing Wang
Thank you for your comment! I think your concern is right. Many safety measures may slow down the development of AI's capabilities. Developers who ignore safety may develop more powerful AI more quickly. I think this is a governance issue. I have discussed some solutions in Sections 13.2 and 16. If you are interested, you can take a look.
bhauth31

"Mirror life" is beyond the scope of this post, and the concerns about it are very different than the concerns about "grey goo" - it doesn't have more capabilities or efficiency, it's just maybe harder for immune systems to deal with. Personally, I'm not very worried about that and see no scientific reason for the timing of the recent fuss about it. If it's not just another random fad, the only explanation I can see for that timing is: influential scientists trying to hedge against Trump officials determining that "COVID was a lab leak" in a way that doesn... (read more)

I think this is a pretty good post that makes a point some people should understand better. There is, however, something I think it could've done better. It chooses a certain gaussian and log-normal distribution for quality and error, and the way that's written sort of implies that those are natural and inevitable choices.

I would have preferred something like:

Suppose we determine that quality has distribution X and error has distribution Y. Here's a graph of those superimposed. We can see that Y has more of a fat tail than X, so if measured quality is ve

... (read more)

This was a quick and short post, but some people ended up liking it a lot. In retrospect I should've written a bit more, maybe gone into the design of recent running shoes. For example, this Nike Alphafly has a somewhat thick heel made of springy foam that sticks out behind the heel of the foot, and in the front, there's a "carbon plate" (a thin sheet of carbon fiber composite) which also acts like a spring. In the future, there might be gradual evolution towards more extreme versions of the same concept, as recent designs become accepted. Running shoes wi... (read more)

What have you learned since then? Have you changed your mind or your ontology?

I've learned even more chemistry and biology, and I've changed my mind about lots of things, but not the points in this post. Those had solid foundations I understood well and redundant arguments, so the odds of that were low.

What would you change about the post? (Consider actually changing it.)

The post seems OK. I could have handled replies to comments better. For example, the top comment was by Thomas Kwa, and I replied to part of it as follows:

Regarding 5, my underst

... (read more)
2Thomas Kwa
Thanks for the update! Let me attempt to convey why I think this post would have been better with fewer distinct points: If you replied with this, I would have said something like "then what's wrong with the designs for diamond mechanosynthesis tooltips, which don't resemble enzymes and have been computationally simulated as you mentioned in point 9?" then we would have gone back and forth a few times until either (a) you make some complicated argument I don't understand enough to believe nor refute, or (b) we agree on what definition of "enzyme" or "selectively bind to individual molecules" is required for nanotech, which probably includes the carbon dimer placer (image below). Even in case (b) we could continue arguing about how practical that thing plus other steps in the process are, and not achieve much. The problem as I see it is that a post that makes a large number of points quickly, where each point has subtleties requiring an expert to adjudicate, on a site with few experts, is inherently going to generate a lot of misunderstanding. I have a symmetrical problem to you; from my perspective someone was using somewhat complicated arguments to prove things that defy my physical intuition, and to defend against a Gish gallop I need to respond to every point, but doing this in a reasonable amount of time requires me to think and write with less than maximum clarity and accuracy. The solution I would humbly recommend is to make fewer points, selected carefully to be bulletproof, understandable to non-experts, and important to the overall thesis. Looking back on this, point 14 could have been its own longform, and potentially led to a lot of interesting discussion like this post did. Likewise point 6 paragraph 2.
1Martin Randall
Does the recent concern about mirror life change your mind? It's not nano, but it does imply there's a design space not explored by bio life, which implies there could be others, even if specifically diamonds don't work.
bhauth175

So, I have a lot of respect for Sarah, I think this post makes some good points, and I upvoted it. However, my concern is, when I look at this particular organization's Initiatives page, I see "AI for math", "AI for education", "high-skill immigration assistance", and not really anything that distinguishes this organization from the various other ones working on the same things, or their projects from a lot of past projects that weren't really worthwhile.

bhauth30

Note that due to the difference being greater at higher frequencies, the effect on speech intelligibility will probably be greater for most women than for you.

We can see the diaphragm has some resonance peaks that increase distortion. Probably it's too thick to help very much, but it has to resist the pressure changes from breathing.

4jefftk
Sounds like I should try repeating this with someone with a higher voice!
bhauth50

What exactly are people looking for from (the site-suggested) self-reviews?

4Raemon
(I've appreciated your reviews that went and took this to heart, thanks!)
5Raemon
Things I am interested in: * what have you learned since then? Have you changed your mind or your ontology? * What would you change about the post? (Consider actually changing it) * What do you most want people to know about this post, for deciding whether to read or review-vote on it? * How concretely have you (or others you know of) used or built on the post? How has it contributed to a larger conversation 
bhauth-43

As a "physicist and dabbler in writing fantasy/science fiction" I assume you took the 10 seconds to do the calculation and found that a 1km radius cylinder would have ~100 kW of losses per person from roller bearings supporting it, for the mass per person of the ISS. But I guess I don't understand how you expect to generate that power or dissipate that heat.

bhauth22

After being "launched" from the despinner, you would find yourself hovering stationary next to the ring.

Air resistance.

That is, however, basically the system I proposed near the end, for use near the center of a cylinder where speeds would be low.

2mako yass
Intended for use in vacuum. I guess if it's more of a cylinder than a ring this wouldn't always be faster than an elevator system though.
bhauth31

This happened to Explorer 1, the first satellite launched by the United States in 1958. The elongated body of the spacecraft had been designed to spin about its long (least-inertia) axis but refused to do so, and instead started precessing due to energy dissipation from flexible structural elements.

picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_1#/media/File:Explorer1.jpg

bhauth*20

That works well enough, but a Vital 200S currently costs $160 at amazon, less than the cheapest variant of the thing you linked, and has a slightly higher max air delivery rate, some granular carbon in the filter, and features like power buttons. The Vital 200S on speed 2 has similar power usage and slightly less noise, but less airflow, but a carbon layer always reduces airflow. It doesn't have a rear intake so it can be placed against a wall. It also has a washable prefilter.

Compared to what you linked, the design in this post has 3 filters instead of 2,... (read more)

bhauth40

What would this say about subculture gatekeeping? About immigration policy?

bhauth20

First, we have to ask: what's the purpose? Generally aircraft try to get up to their cruise speed quickly and then spend most of their time cruising, and you optimize for cruise first and takeoff second. Do we want multiple cruise speeds, eg a supersonic bomber that goes slow some of the time and fast over enemy territory? Are we designing a supersonic transport and trying to reduce fuel usage getting up to cruise?

And then, there are 2 basic ways you can change the bypass ratio: you can change the fan/propeller intake area, or you can turn off turbines. Th... (read more)

bhauth20

On the other hand, the hydrogen pushing against the airship membrane is also an electrostatic force.

bhauth140

Yes, helium costs would be a problem for large-scale use of airships. Yes, it's possible to use hydrogen in airships safely. This has been noted by many people.

Hydrogen has some properties that make it relatively safe:

  • it's light so it rises instead of accumulating on the ground or around a leak
  • it has a relatively high ignition temperature

and some properties that make it less safe:

  • it has a wide range of concentrations where it will burn in air
  • fast diffusion, that is, it mixes with air quickly
  • it leaks through many materials
  • it embrittles steel
  • it ca
... (read more)
4DaemonicSigil
No, and I don't work on airships and have no plans to do so. I mainly just think it's an interesting demonstration of how weak electrostatic forces can be.
5aphyer
Your 'accidents still happen' link shows: One airship accident worldwide in the past 5 years, in Brazil. The last airship accident in the US was in 2017. The last airship accident fatality anywhere in the world was in 2011 in Germany. The last airship accident fatality in the US was in 1986. I think that this compares favorably with very nearly everything.
bhauth20

IKEA already sells air purifiers; their models just have a very low flow rate. There are several companies selling various kinds of air purifiers, including multiples ones with proprietary filters.

What all this says to me is, the problem isn't just the overall market size.

2Thomas Kwa
Yeah that's right, I should have said market for good air filters. My understanding of the problem is that most customers don't know to insist on high CADR at low noise levels, and therefore filter area is low. A secondary problem is that HEPA filters are optimized for single-pass efficiency rather than airflow, but they sell better than 70-90% efficient MERV filters. The physics does work though. At a given airflow level, pressure and noise go as roughly the -1.5 power of filter area. What IKEA should be producing instead of the FÖRNUFTIG and STARKVIND is one of three good designs for high CADR: * a fiberboard box like the CleanAirKits End Table 7 which has holes for pre-installed fans and can accept at least 6 square feet of MERV 13 furnace filters or maybe EPA 11. * a box like the AirFanta 3Pro, ideally that looks nicer somehow. * a wall-mounted design with furnace filters in a V shape, like this DIY project. I made a shortform and google slides presentation about this and might make it a longform if there is enough interest or I get more information.
bhauth20

Apart from potential harms of far-UVC, it's good to remove particulate pollution anyway. Is it possible that "quiet air filters" is an easier problem to solve?

6Thomas Kwa
Quiet air filters is an already solved problem technically. You just need enough filter area that the pressure drop is low, so that you can use quiet low-pressure PC fans to move the air. CleanAirKits is already good, but if the market were big enough cared enough, rather than CleanAirKits charging >$200 for a box with holes in it and fans, you would get a purifier from IKEA for $120 which is sturdy and 3db quieter due to better sound design.
bhauth102

I'm not convinced that far-UVC is safe enough around humans to be a good idea. It's strongly absorbed by proteins so it doesn't penetrate much, but:

  • It can make reactive compounds from organic compounds in air.
  • It can produce ozone, depending on the light. (That's why mercury vapor lamps block the 185nm emission.)
  • It could potentially make toxic compounds when it's absorbed by proteins in skin or eyes.
  • It definitely causes degradation of plastics.

And really, what's the point? Why not just have fans sending air to (cheap) mercury vapor lamps in a contained area where they won't hit people or plastics?

6Austin Chen
Hm, I expect the advantage of far UV is that many places where people want to spend time indoors are not already well-ventilated, or that it'd be much more expensive to modify existing hvac setups vs just sticking a lamp on a wall. I'm not at all familiar with the literature on safety; my understanding (based on this) is that no, we're not sure and more studies would be great, but there's a vicious cycle/chicken-and-egg problem where the lamps are expensive, so studies are expensive, so there aren't enough studies, so nobody buys lamps, so lamp companies don't stay in business, so lamps are expensive.
bhauth20

As you were writing that, did you consider why chlorhexidine might cause hearing damage?

bhauth40

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorhexidine#Side_effects

It can also obviously break down to 4-chloroaniline and hexamethylenediamine. Which are rather bad. This was not considered in the FDA's evaluation of it.

0Sabiola
Those side effects don't seem so bad. I'm not planning to put it in my ear; I don't get any irritation or allergic reactions, and the way I'm using it (applying a toothpaste containing it around my implants after brushing my teeth, as prescribed by my dental hygienist) doesn't seem to discolor my teeth either. 4-chloroaniline and hexamethylenediamine do look scary though...
bhauth20

If you just want to make the tooth surface more negatively charged...a salt of poly(acrylic acid) seems better for that. And I think some toothpastes have that.

bhauth40

EDTA in toothpaste? It chelates iron and calcium. Binding iron can prevent degradation during storage, so a little bit is often added.

Are you talking about adding a lot more? For what purpose? In situations where you can chelate iron to prevent bacterial growth, you can also just kill bacteria with surfactants. Maybe breaking up certain biofilms held together by Ca? EDTA doesn't seem very effective for that for teeth, but also, chelating agents that could strip Ca from biofilms would also strip Ca from teeth. IIRC, high EDTA concentration was found to cause significant amounts of erosion.

I wouldn't want to eat a lot of EDTA, anyway. Iminodisuccinate seems less likely to have problematic metabolites.

2Wei Dai
Yeah there's a toothpaste on the market called Livfree that claims to work like this. Ok, that sounds bad. Thanks. ETA: Found an article that explains how Livfree works in more detail: The authors are very positive on this toothpaste, although they don't directly explain why it doesn't cause tooth erosion.
bhauth30

You can post on a subreddit and get replies from real people interested in that topic, for free, in less than a day.

Is that valuable? Sometimes it is, but...not usually. How much is the median comment on reddit or facebook or youtube worth? Nothing?

In the current economy, the "average-human-level intelligence" part of employees is only valuable when you're talking about specialists in the issue at hand, even when that issue is being a general personal assistant for an executive rather than a technical engineering problem.

bhauth70

Triplebyte? You mean, the software job interviewing company?

  1. They had some scandal a while back where they made old profiles public without permission, and some other problems that I read about but can't remember now.

  2. They didn't have a better way of measuring engineering expertise, they just did the same leetcode interviews that Google/etc did. They tried to be as similar as possible to existing hiring at multiple companies; the idea wasn't better evaluation but reducing redundant testing. But companies kind of like doing their own testing.

  3. They're

... (read more)
bhauth53

Good news: the post is both satire and serious, at the same time but on different levels.

bhauth52

Nice post Sarah.

If Alzheimer's is ultimately caused by repressor binding failure, that could explain overexpression of the various proteins mentioned.

bhauth00

in short, your claim: "The cost of aluminum die casting and stamped steel is, on Tesla's scale, similar" both seems to miss the entire point and run against literally everything I have seen written about this. You need citations for this claim, I am not going to take your word for it.

OK, here's a citation then: https://www.automotivemanufacturingsolutions.com/casting/forging/megacasting-a-chance-to-rethink-body-manufacturing/42721.article

Here I would be careful since investments, especially in a particular model generation of welding robots, are depr

... (read more)
bhauth40

Here are the costs from the above link:

It's worth noting that countries (such as India) have the option of simply not respecting a patent when the use is important and the fees requested are unreasonable. Also, patents aren't international; it's often possible to get around them by simply manufacturing and using a chemical in a different country.

bhauth5-1

The only advantage DDT has over those is lower production cost, but the environmental harms per kg of DDT are greater than the production cost savings, so using it is just never a good tradeoff.

As I said, if DDT was worth using there, it was worth spending however much extra money it would have been to spray with other things instead. If it wasn't worth that much money, it wasn't worth spraying DDT.

And regarding "environmental harms," from personal experience scratching myself bloody as a kid from itchy bites after going to the park in the evening,

... (read more)
bhauth40

While I still disagree with your interpretation of that post, I don't want to argue over the meaning of a post from that blog. There are actual books written about the history of titanium. I'm probably as familiar with it as the author of Construction Physics, and saying A-12-related programs were necessary for development of titanium usage is just wrong. People who care about that and don't trust my conclusion should go look up good sources on their own, more-extensive ones.

bhauth40

If it wasn't for the A-12 project (and its precursors and successors), then we simply wouldn't be able to build things out of titanium.

That is not an accurate summary of the linked article.

In 1952, another titanium symposium was held, this one sponsored by the Army’s Watertown Arsenal. By then, titanium was being manufactured in large quantities, and while the prior symposium had been focused on laboratory studies of titanium’s physical and chemical properties, the 1952 symposium was a “practical discussion of the properties, processing, machinability

... (read more)
3ulyssessword
Key paragraph: The 1952 symposium is clearly a precursor to its 1959-1964 production and development, and the 1966 one is drawing from the experiences of the industrial base it created.   EDIT: and more directly:
bhauth90

I had an interview with one of these organizations (that will remain unnamed) where the main person I was talking to was really excited about a bunch of stupid bullshit ideas (for eg experimental methods) that, based on their understanding of them, must have come from either university press releases or popular science magazines like New Scientist. I was trying to find a "polite in whatever culture these people have" way to say "this is not useful, I'd like to explain why but it will take a while, here are better things" but doing that eloquently is one of... (read more)

bhauth4-2

I think the basic idea of using more steps of smaller size is worth considering. Maybe it reduces overall drift, but I suspect it doesn't, because my view is:

Models have many basins of attraction for sub-elements. As model capability increases continuously, there are nearly-discrete points where aspects of the model jump from 1 basin to another, perhaps with cascading effect. I expect this to produce large gaps from small changes to models.

bhauth30

Sure, some people add stuff like cheese/tomatoes/ham to their oatmeal. Personally I think they go better with rice, but de gustibus non disputandum est.

3mako yass
How far are these people willing to take this, and will they stop before reinventing black pudding.
bhauth33

The scope of our argument seems to have grown beyond what a single comment thread is suitable for.

AI safety via debate is 2 years before Writeup: Progress on AI Safety via Debate so the latter post should be more up-to-date. I think that post does a good job of considering potential problems; the issue is that I think the noted problems & assumptions can't be handled well, make that approach very limited in what it can do for alignment, and aren't really dealt with by "Doubly-efficient debate". I don't think such debate protocols are totally useless, b... (read more)

bhauthΩ360

I don't expect such a huge gap between debaters and judges that the judge simply can't understand the debaters' concepts

You don't? But this is a major problem in arguments between people. The variation within humans is already more than enough for this! There's a gap like that every 35 IQ points or so. I don't understand why you're confident this isn't an issue.

I guess we've found our main disagreement, at least?

So in this particular case I am saying: if you penalize debaters that are inconsistent under cross-examination, you are giving an advantage t

... (read more)
5Nathan Helm-Burger
@bhauth @Rohin Shah I think that bhauth has an important point here about the danger of large gaps between judge and debaters. Similarly, between a trusted overseer and a smarter worker. Keeping the gaps small is really important for a lot of oversight plans to work out well! Here's some research I am doing which I think answers this point thoroughly: it is possible to smoothly, continuously, incrementally scale-down the capabilities of a model by injecting carefully controlled amounts of noise into its activations. I'm calling this 'noise injection impairment'. This removes the need to have precisely created a whole series of models with precise capability steps between each one. You can instead train a single strong model, and scale it all the way down to be just a tiny step above the next most strong model. Then you create as large a number of intermediate steps of capability as you need by reducing the noise magnitude. Without this technique, then I believe bhauth's point would stand, and capability gaps between model versions would lead to dangerous failures of various control and monitoring schemes. Link to details of ongoing research: https://www.apartresearch.com/project/sandbag-detection-through-model-degradation 
5Rohin Shah
I'm not going to repeat all of the literature on debate here, but as brief pointers: * Factored cognition discusses intuitively why we can hope to approximate exponentially-sized trees of arguments (which would be tremendously bigger than arguments between people) * AI safety via debate makes the same argument for debate (by showing that a polynomial time judge can supervise PSPACE -- PSPACE-complete problems typically involve exponential-sized trees) * Cross-examination is discussed here * This paper discusses the experiments you'd do to figure out what the human judge should be doing to make debate more effective * The comments on this post discuss several reasons not to anchor to human institutions. There are even more reasons not to anchor to disagreements between people, but I didn't find a place where they've been written up with a short search. Most centrally, disagreements between people tend to focus on getting both people to understand their position, but the theoretical story for debate does not require this. (Also, the "arbitrary amounts of time and arbitrary amounts of explanation" was pretty central to my claim; human disagreements are way more bounded than that.)
bhauth50

Phytic acid is certainly a thing, but it's not quite that simple, see eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8746346/. Also, uncooked fruits have phytase. And also, it's not an issue unless you eat mostly something high in it for most meals.

bhauth50

Yes, on one level that's part of the joke. But also, following the above instructions, it can be a low-cost complete meal with nonperishable ingredients that can be fixed in <5 minutes of work and <10 minutes of waiting.

1Jalex Stark
Seems like a bad joke, and accordingly I have decreased trust that bhauth posts won't waste the reader's time in the future.
6noggin-scratcher
Ah, perils of text-only communication and my own mild deficiency in social senses; didn't catch that it was a joke. Has nonetheless got me thinking about whether some toasted oats would be a good addition to any of the recipes I already like. Lil bit of extra bulk and texture, some browned nutty notes—there's not nothing to that.
3mishka
there is this standard legend (which even makes it to many oatmeal labels) that the presence of soluble fiber in the oatmeal is particularly beneficial for vascular health that's certainly quite tempting, if true
bhauth150

I'm the current owner of the Oatmeal subreddit; that's how you can be sure I'm a Real Expert.

-1Olli Savolainen
I am glad to see oat foods taking new forms and gaining popularity with new audiences. I welcome all enthusiasts sharing what they have learned. But you have to acknowledge the existing traditions and their expertise. It would be a tragedy, if, instead of seeds of civilization, you were spreading some meaningless imitations that have no roots. Your post has many layers of sophistication, but I believe you have omitted the true kernel of the matter. I don't know what guava tastes like, but I strongly suspect it does not belong in an authentic oatmeal porridge. The canonical additions are apple or apple jam with cinnamon, or blueberry. It is ok to experiment (e.g. bananas and coconut are great with blueberries), but some things just don't belong there. Cherries (too astringent) and cloudberries come to mind. But I will not judge your condiments until I have tried them out. As other commenters have noted, it is not absolutely necessary to sweat the cooking. In Spartan conditions rolled oats can be eaten straight with some fluid, though you need to be aware it is going to swell in the stomach. A traditional way to cook unrolled oats is to put them overnight in oven. With rolled and steamed oats I use microwave on full power until the porridge almost boils over, about 3 minutes. It's not as good as long simmered porridge (the gel is thinner and not as creamy), but it's fast and good enough. If I get rich I will definitely get an inverter microwave, I did not know they existed. Whole grain oat is said to moderate blood sugar spikes in comparison to other cereals. That suggests it contains higher amounts of anti-feedants or mildly poisonous substances. This is nothing to be alarmed about, it's a very common theme with "healthy" plant foods. It could be the fiber that slows the digestion, too. Some people claim to have a problem with the slimy consistency of the porridge or gruel. I have met people who said they hated it since they were small children. I don't believe
bhauthΩ140

If you want to disallow appeals to authority

I do, but more importantly, I want to disallow the judge understanding all the concepts here. Suppose the judge says to #1: "What is energy?" or "What is conservation?" and it can't be explained to them - what then?

Also, argument 1 isn't actually correct, E=mc^2 and so on.

That seems right, but why is it a problem? The honest strategy is fine under cross-examination, it will give consistent answers across contexts.

"The honest strategy"? If you have that, you can just ask it and not bother with the debate. I... (read more)

5Rohin Shah
I think I don't actually care about being robust to this assumption. Generally I think of arbitrarily-scalable-debate as depending on a universality assumption (which in turn would rule out "the judge can never understand the concepts"). But even if the universality assumption is false, it wouldn't bother me much; I don't expect such a huge gap between debaters and judges that the judge simply can't understand the debaters' concepts, even given arbitrary amounts of time and arbitrary amounts of explanation from the debaters. (Importantly, I would want to bootstrap alignment, to keep the gaps between debaters and the judge relatively small.) The general structure of a debate theorem is: if you set up the game in such-and-such way, then a strategy that simply answers honestly will dominate any other strategy. So in this particular case I am saying: if you penalize debaters that are inconsistent under cross-examination, you are giving an advantage to any debater that implements an honest strategy, and so you should expect training to incentivize honesty.
bhauthΩ140

You can recursively decompose the claim "perpetual motion machines are known to be impossible" until you get down to a claim like "such and such experiment should have such and such outcome", which the boss can then perform to determine a winner.

Ah, I don't think you can. Making that kind of abstract conclusion from a practical number of experiments requires abstractions like potential energy, entropy, Noether's theorem, etc - which in this example, the judge doesn't understand. (Without such abstractions, you'd need to consider every possible type of m... (read more)

4Rohin Shah
I agree, but I don't see why that matters. As I mentioned, a main point of debate is to produce good oversight of claims without giving the judge an understanding of those claims. In this example I would imagine that you decompose the argument as: 1. A fundamental law of physics is conservation of energy: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only transformed from one form to another. 2. Electricity is a form of energy. 3. This box does not have an infinite source of energy. 4. The above three together imply that the box cannot produce infinite electricity. The inventor can disagree with one or more of these claims, then we sample one of the disagreements, and continue debating that one alone, ignoring all the others. This doesn't mean the judge understands the other claims, just that the judge isn't addressing them when deciding who wins the overall debate. If we recurse on #1, which I expect you think is the hardest one, then you could have a decomposition like "the principle has been tested many times", "in the tests, confirming evidence outweighs the disconfirming evidence", "there is an overwhelming scientific consensus behind it", "there is significant a priori theoretical support" (assuming that's true), "given the above the reasonable conclusion is to have very high confidence in conservation of energy". Again, find disagreements, sample one, recurse. It seems quite plausible to me that you get down to something fairly concrete relatively quickly. If you want to disallow appeals to authority, on the basis that the correct analogy is to superhuman AIs that know tons of stuff that aren't accepted by any authorities the judge trusts, I still think it's probably doable with a larger debate, but it's harder for me to play out what the debate would look like because I don't know in enough concrete detail the specific reasons why we believe conservation of energy to be true. I might also disagree that we should be thinking about such big gaps between
bhauth20

That argument doesn't explain things like:

  • furry avatars are almost always cartoon versions of animals, not realistic ones
  • furries didn't exist until anthropomorphic cartoon animals became popular (and no, "spirit animals" are not similar)
  • suddenly ponies became more popular in that sense after a popular cartoon with ponies came out

It's just Disney and cartoons.

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