All of Cedar's Comments + Replies

2Brendan Long
I'll be out of town (getting married on the 25th) but I'd be happy to do something the weekend after.
Cedar10

it's upstairs on fl2. if you see a map that only shows a meeting room 6 on fl2, don't believe it. ask the front desk staff for room 5!

Cedar10

I'm at the library. Meeting room 5 is upstairs!

Cedar10

By the way, please let me know if you'll need a ride to the library. I will be starting out from the lake hills area as early as 12:30pm and potentially making a detour through redmond if people need picking up.

Cedar10

Got it. WORTH.

Not wearing glasses have huge social signaling benefits & people somehow treat me nicer & listen to me more. As usual this is based on my perceptions and may be placebo effect.

If you about break even per-hour, you should definitely get it 

Cedar10

you can get cold water pressure driven bidets for like $60

 

https://www.amazon.com/Veken-Ultra-Slim-Non-Electric-Adjustable-Attachment/dp/B082HFS8KT/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=bidet&qid=1678545307&sr=8-6

 

actually nvm this one is only $29.

No clue about the quality though. May be better to go for something $20.

Installing mine costed me around 2 hours. You could use it for a year.

Which means the cost per hour actually comes down to something like $7.5, which is way below minimum wage!

Cedar10

checked out talon. looks amazing for people with disabilities.

now as a person with no obvious disabilities i wonder if it's still worth it to learn it for:

  1. just incase
  2. maybe eyetracking etc would make it easier to do things on my computer vs mouse & kbd.

any opinions?

2the gears to ascension
eyetracking requires dedicated hardware I don't have. the disability level it takes before talon is a great augmentation is very slight - in general, speaking sloppily because this isn't the best way to express the social model of disability, but it's a solid one - disability is when you need transhumanism to be considered "normal" by society. (a society without the concept of disability would be one where transhumanism was so completely pervasive that no relative difference was perceptible no matter how internally weak the person's original body.) Talon is great for impromptu dictation. it's not as good as whisper at dictation but it is dang close, and it's much faster. I'm hopeful it'll get whisper integration for dictation at some point. but in the meantime, it's great to have it when my fingers are too cold to type. I'd def suggest trying it out just in case, and if you like it, keep using it. it's distinctly better than dragon and patreon-supported, and I can in fact get stuff done coding with it. (though usually I use it for web browsing. eg I typed this comment but can still go, computer wake, press escape, hints on, click arch prime, tab close,)
Cedar-2-3

Ty 4 the catch. Used chatgpt to generate the html and i think when i asked it to add the CSS, it didn't have enough characters to give me everything.

Cedar2-5

somewhat far-fetched guess:

internet -> everybody does astrology now -> zebra gets confused with Libra -> replacement with Zulu

29eB1
According to Wikipedia, the rough timeline is that there were several standards in use by military and civil aviation in the 1940s and earlier, including separate standards for Latin America and elsewhere, and these used Zebra in the US and UK. The International Air Transport Association presented a draft in1947 to the standards body International Civil Aviation Organization that was meant to rectify this, but it still contained Zebra. Apparently this alphabet wasn't good enough, because the ICAO hired a linguistics professor to create a revised alphabet, and it's this one that first contained Zulu, published in 1951. There were several subsequent revisions following this, where the words were tested in university laboratories in the US and UK, before the final list was broadly adopted in 1956. Interestingly, according to this document written in 1959, the team that was revising the 1951 list attempted to replace Zulu with Zebra, but found that it didn't help the intelligibility of the alphabet, so Zulu was kept in the final standard.
Cedar30

Oh! This is really good to know. Thank you so much for speaking up!

Answer by Cedar10

Friend of mine: "people listed seem cool; prolly easy to meet without spending money tho"

Cedar40

Wup time to edit that : D

Got the "My experiences are universal" going on in here

Cedar61

Don’t think about big words or small words—think about which particular word you mean.

I think this is good advice for most people who are used to being forced to use big words by school systems, but I personally follow a different version of this.

I see compression as an important feature of communication, and there are always tradeoffs to be made between

  1. Making my sentence short
  2. Conveying exactly what I want to say.

And sometimes I settle with transferring a "good enough" version of my idea, because communicating all the hairy details takes too much t... (read more)

5Marco P
There are certainly always tradeoffs, but sometimes clarity can help save time/social credit simultaneously, since in a lot of cases making someone truly use their own brain is a bigger ask than just reading another sentence or two.
Cedar30
  • AI is pretty safe: unaligned AGI has a mere 7% chance of causing doom, plus a further 7% chance of causing short term lock-in of something mediocre
  • Your opponent risks bad lock-in: If there’s a ‘lock-in’ of something mediocre, your opponent has a 5% chance of locking in something actively terrible, whereas you’ll always pick good mediocre lock-in world (and mediocre lock-ins are either 5% as good as utopia, -5% as good)
  • Your opponent risks messing up utopia: In the event of aligned AGI, you will reliably achieve the best outcome, whereas your opponent has a
... (read more)
Cedar11

This is great : D

Now you be lookin nice n proppa!

Cedar10

Great! Now, lesswrong uses markdown syntax. Which means you can do

# Section

## SubSection

### Sub Sub Section

Consider using this in you LessWrong, and substack posts. This would greatly help readability and make it easier for you readers to engage with your work.

2[anonymous]
Thanks so much!!
Cedar10

Welcome to LessWrong!

This post is missing a TL;DR in the beginning, and section titles (section TLDRs, basically) in between.

1[anonymous]
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ve added these to the post.
Cedar20

That sounds reasonable! Thanks for the explanation!

Cedar30

I'm new to alignment and I'm pretty clueless.

What's Ought's take on the "stop publishing all capabilities research" stance that e.g. Yudkowsky is taking in this tweet? https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1557184416786423809

2Noosphere89
I disagree with the absolutism shown here (a common problem of Eliezer Yudkowsky), though I'd probably agree with a weaker version (that capabilities research, absent good reasons, should automatically be treated as negative.)
Cedar10

25,50,75:

I'm thinking, just like how to can infer whether it's normal or lognormal, we can use one of the bell curve shaped distribution that gives a sort of closest approximation.

More generally, it'd be awesome if there a way to get the max entropy distribution given a bunch of statistics like quantiles or nsamples with min and max.

Cedar10

For to(a,b), is there a way to specify other confidence intervals?

 

E.g. let's say I have the 25, 50, 75 percentiles, but not the 5 and 95 percentiles?

3ozziegooen
Not yet. There are a few different ways of specifying the distribution, but we don't yet have options for doing from the 25th&75th percentiles. It would be nice to do eventually. (Might be very doable to add in a PR, for a fairly motivated person).  https://www.squiggle-language.com/docs/Api/Dist#normal You can type in, normal({p5: 10, p95:30}). It should later be possible to say normal({p25: 10, p75:30}). Separately; when you say "25, 50, 75 percentiles"; do you mean all at once? This would be an overspecification; you only need two points. Also; would you want this to work for normal/lognormal distributions, or anything else? 
2Chris_Leong
There may not be an open round, as we may find connections through our networks. However, if there is, we will post it on the forum.
Cedar10

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Hna2P8gcTyRgNDYBY/race-along-rashomon-ridge

This feels related. This also talks about paths in hyperparameter space, but instead of linear paths it talks about paths consisting of optimal models between two optimal models.

Cedar10

Thanks Thomas! I really appreciate this!

Cedar70

Yooo! That sounds amazing. Please do let me know once that report is up!

Cedar20

Beautiful! Thank you for the link and references. That makes a lot of sense!

Cedar41

: (

That's not how the story went in my mind.

It felt obvious to me that once the probes are starting to make each other into paperclips, some sort of natural selection would take over where probes that prioritize survival over paperclip making would murder the rest and survive. And there'd be a new cycle of life.

gwern*270

It felt obvious to me that once the probes are starting to make each other into paperclips, some sort of natural selection would take over where probes that prioritize survival over paperclip making would murder the rest and survive.

I don't think that's obvious. Evolution of interesting or complex traits is not an immutable fact of existence which magicks agents and novelty out of nowhere to endless degrees; it is a predictable, understandable, and mathematically-modelable consequence of an algorithm* of replication, heritable variation, and selection w... (read more)

Cedar50

I kinda like the term "cheerleading" instead of narrative syncing. Kinda like "I define a cheer and y'all follow me and do the cheer".

Shameless plug here: I'm trying to get into alignment but struggling to get motivated emotionally. If any of you wants to do mutual cheerleading over a discord chat or something, please PM me. also PM me if you just want to hang out and chat and figure out whether you want information or cheerleading. I'd be glad to help with that too by rubber duckie-ing with you.

I'm doing this because I mistook my need for cheerleading as ... (read more)

Cedar20

I find it a very very useful summary of simulacrum levels and some of the things that happen in immoral mazes, and using normal people words have the added advantage that I can linkdrop with less fear of exposing my rationalist cultism.

Cedar50

Just to make sure we're on the same page, we seem to be both agreeing that

  1. Good virtual signaling is possible and should be attempted
  2. Moloch worship is possible, should be avoided, and may be the reason for why many people hate / avoid / devaluate virtual signaling.

And you seem to be saying, yes Moloch is real, yes things can go very bad. But we should still be trying to build good norms and standards to accurately signal virtues.

Does my summary feel fair and correct?

3Holly_Elmore
Yes
Cedar20

I agree with you in terms of virtual signaling being a proper and good thing with a real function. However, I think many people's objection against it is related to the higher order effects of goodharting and Moloch-worship (escalating virtual signalling in a game that always ends in a race to the bottom towards things like public self flagellation and self immolation). I was looking for it in the article but I didn't find it, so I figured I'd mention it here.

3Holly_Elmore
I mentioned goodharting, of which Moloch-worshipping is a more specific case. I don’t share the skepticism in these comments that good virtue signaling is possible and that people can keep the spirit of the law in their hearts. I also reject the implicit solution to just not legibly measure our characters at all. I think that is interpreted a signal of virtue among LWers and it shouldn’t be.
Cedar10

I would like to add my own modification to 19(valuing time). The actually important here is something like integral of mood over time. If you gain time but you aren't happy in it(content and curious and excited happy, not addiction -chasing happy), time is worth very little. So if going to visit your friends takes a lot of time but makes you happy over the week, do it anyways.

Cedar10

Got any tips on how to make good things addictive? I went through college and paid all my attention to graduating (instead of playing the infinite game), and now my life is dominated by anxieties and addictions.

Really need tips on how to make brain focus on solving hard problems again. I miss those days.

Cedar10

I was trying to point attention to this fact

A systematic way of finding the local minima of a loss function

But I thought about it a bit and i realized that I misunderstood the question, so I deleted my answer

Cedar20

Reflecting upon my experience, I have decided to wholeheartedly agree with you on being literal with young children. I think establishing a strong connection between language and objective reality is useful even when sometimes language is used to make illusions and manipulate.

Cedar40

I agree with you in terms of the fair and respectful systems grounding. My own experience with mazey-ness has been that they cause me intense anxiety and distress, and I'd imagine having that earlier in childhood being a very bad thing.

In terms of mazey organizations being common... I feel like it really depends on where you are and where you're from. In the social-economic section of China where I come from, for example, asking fake questions, sacrificing your own standards to fit in, manipulation, and "measure effort by who self-flagellates the hardest" ... (read more)

Cedar20

My objection to makeup is that it's sorta a zero sum game, where if everybody spends 1hr a day on makeup, the world isn't really a better place since beauty is a relative thing.

I agree that, in a society where everybody is judged by their made-up looks, innate beauty would matter less, and that's good.

However, people will start competing on effort spent on makeup, which to me feels like a really bad thing. Imagine everybody having to spend 2 hours on make-up every day before heading out. I think that's what some women already have to deal with in their workplaces and I'd rather not everybody's lives be like that.

5RHollerith
From Discussion with Eliezer Yudkowsky on AGI interventions: From Ngo and Yudkowsky on alignment difficulty:
Cedar10

Thank you so much! I didn't know 80k does advising! In terms of people with knowledge on the possibilities... I have a background and a career path that doesn't end up giving me a lot of access to people who know, so I'll definitely try to get help at 80k.

Also worth bearing in mind as a general principle that if almost everything you try succeeds, you're not trying enough challenging things. Just make sure to take negative outcomes as useful information (often you can ask for specific feedback too). There's a psychological balance to be struck here, but

... (read more)
Cedar40

My parents really cared about making things fair and giving expectations of fairness, and I really enjoyed it. It contributed to many of my qualities I care about (commitment to objective reality, attempt at consistency, integration of different parts of the self).

But sometimes I wonder if the opposite would be better, especially for surviving in maze-ey environment a la moral mazes.

jefftk130

This is speculative, but I think kids probably do better if they have the grounding of a fair and respectful system at home, and experience with healthy communication. They will be able to learn other systems when they are older as needed.

I also think that "moral maze" like systems are not as common as people here sometimes seem to think. Working in eight different organizations, six post college, none of them have felt well described by that. And I think avoiding that sort of environment is generally a pretty good idea and a one that I expect to be pretty practical for my kids.

Cedar10

you should be able to get funding to cover most reasonable forms of upskilling and/or seeing-if-you-can-help trial period.

Hi Joe! I wonder if you have any pointers as to how to get help? I would like to try to help while being able to pay for rent and food. I think right now I'm may not br articulate enough to write grant proposals and get funding, so I think I could also use somebody to talk to to figure out what's the most high impact thing I could do.

I wonder if you'd be willing to chat / know anybody who is?

1Joe Collman
Something like the 80,000 hours career advice seems like a good place to start - or finding anyone who has a good understanding of the range of possibilities (mine is a bit too narrowly slanted towards technical AIS). If you've decided on the AIS direction, then AI Safety Support is worth a look - they do personal calls for advice, and have many helpful links. That said, I wouldn't let the idea of "grant proposals" put you off. The forms you'd need to fill for the LTFF are not particularly complicated, and they do give grants for e.g. upskilling - you don't necessarily need a highly specific/detailed plan. If you don't have a clear idea where you might fit in, then the advice links above should help. If/when you do have a clear idea, don't worry about whether you can articulate it persuasively. If it makes sense, then people will be glad to hear it - and to give you pointers (e.g. fund managers). E.g. there's this from Evan Hubinger (who helps with the LTFF): Also worth bearing in mind as a general principle that if almost everything you try succeeds, you're not trying enough challenging things. Just make sure to take negative outcomes as useful information (often you can ask for specific feedback too). There's a psychological balance to be struck here, but trying at least a little more than you're comfortable with will generally expand your comfort zone and widen your options.
Cedar50

This is truly epic.

I don't know where this conditioned response comes from, but I tear up a little when I read things like this.

I'm scared that when the next threat to our civilization comes, the masses are so enmeshed in bullshit and the leaders so focused on producing it, that nobody rises to take action like this.

Cedar10

About Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization

 

I read it very recently so I claim to remember how it felt like to not have read it. I clicked on it because it fitted an intuition I had, but it was surprising how simple the answer was and how many other things it opened me up to. Like this: 

Mutual Information Neural Estimation

Cedar30

Related reading linking mutual information to best possible classifier: 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.04062.pdf

This one talks about estimating KL divergence and Mutual Information using neural networks, but I'm specifically linking it to show y'all Theorem 1, 

 

Theorem 1 (Donsker-Varadhan representation). The KL divergence admits the following dual representation: 

 

 

This links the mutual information to the best possible regression. But I haven't figured out exactly how to parse / interpret this.

Cedar30

Ty! Ty!

I have an audible credit lying around that I'm not using, so I'm going to get started on Immune.

Thanks for the detailed response and the caveats. I'll keep them in mind!

Cedar30

!!! This got me so excited.

This is a knowledge gap I've always been missing about how the immune system works.

I love it and would love to get some sources I can read up on how immunity works, described in Mathy terms that I as a non biology person can understand.

6DirectedEvolution
I'm glad it excites you! Please bear in mind it's just a hypothesis, from a biomedical engineering graduate student enrolled in his first immunology survey class :) As a fellow mathy person, I'll say that one of the most important things to bear in mind is that, like all biology, formal mathematical modeling only allows us to predict the immune system's behavior in bits and pieces. This is partly due to the shortcomings of current methods. For example, we don't really have a good way to continuously monitor the course of a particular infection in vivo. Instead, we have to give a bunch of inbred mice the same infection, sacrifice them at intervals, take tissue samples, stain them for things like cell count or quantity and location of protein, and try to make sense of the jumble. An analogy might be trying to infer the "dynamics of an action movie" by taking still frames at roughly the same time points from all six Die Hard movies and looking at specific metrics, like whether or not there was a weapon in the shot. It's also because biological behavior at the level of the cell, especially that of the immune system, is so heterogeneous and dynamically interconnected. We understand that processes like feedback loops are important, and we can also gather the "data still frames" I just described to inform us about the causes and effects of these processes. For example, the adaptive immune response is to some extent a product of a positive feedback loop, in which activating cytokines and attracting chemokines cause an influx of immune cells to a site of infection. We can empirically determine how long that takes to happen in a particular infection, in a particular model organism, under particular treatment conditions. Sometimes, we can generalize, to give an estimate of how long a primary adaptive immune response takes to develop across many diseases. But my experience thus far is that understanding immunity, or any other biological process, really depends on having a
Cedar30

The most natural example of a stable equilibrium to me (and to most people of the type I interact with, given my model of people) should be something related to things falling / temperatures equilibrating.

I feel like hair length / beard length falls square into the box in which people think when promote to "think outside the box". And I'm really really curious as to how that box outside of the box works, and if over the course of collecting answers here you notice answers that are super common.

Answer by Cedar30

I've been thinking about entropy a lot these days, not just in the usual physical systems with atoms and such sense, but in the sense of "relating log probabilities to description length and coming up with a way of generating average-case short descriptions, then measuring the length of the description for the system and calling it entropy". So I might just run wild with it.

  1. Lies and manipulation in large organizations. This tends to an [immoral maze] / [high simulacrum level] equilibrium where people don't talk about object level things and mostly talk

... (read more)
Cedar100

Every single piece has been tweaked toward the same end goal

I feel like there'll be a better way to say this sentence once we figure out the answer to your first question,

How can we recognize adaptive systems in the wild? What universal behaviors indicate an adaptive optimizer?

It most definitely seems to make sense to say that systems can have goals, in a "if it looks like a duck it makes sense to call it a duck" kind of way. But at the same time, every single piece hasn't been tweaked to the same end goal as the system. They are each tweaked toward... (read more)

Cedar10

Of the three examples, only "rationality" came to mind : (

I'm ESL so that sorta ruins certain idiom based examples for me.

1nem
A stitch in time saves nine.  As in, if you use a stitch to fix a small tear in your shirt now, you won't have to use more stitches to fix a bigger tear later. and The land of the free and the home of the brave. Last line of the US National Anthem.
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