All of Edward Pascal's Comments + Replies

Then let's say we broadly agree on the morality of the matter. The question still remains if another US adventure, this time in Europe, is actually going to turn out all that well (as most haven't for the people they claimed to be helping). We also have to wonder if Russia as a failed state will turn out well for Ukraine or Europe, or if this will turn Nuclear if US/NATO refuse to cede any ground, or if the Russia/China alliance will break or not, or for how long the US can even afford and support more wars, etc, etc.

On the other side, do we worry if we'... (read more)

What you are actually making is something like a "lesser of two evils" argument or some bet on tradeoffs paying off that one party may buy and another may not. Having explored the reasoning this far, I would suggest this is one class of circumstances where even if you beamed all the facts into two people's minds, who both had "Average" morality, this is one of the situations where there would still tend to be disagreement. This definitely doesn't hinge on someone wanting something bad, like genocide, for the disagreement. People could both want the same... (read more)

AI Could Actually Turn People Down a Lot Better Than This : To Tune the Humans in the GPT Interaction towards alignment, Don't be so Procedural and Bureaucratic.

It seems to me that a huge piece of the puzzle in "alignment" is the human users. Even if a given tool never steps outside its box, the humans are likely to want to step outside of theirs, using the tools for a variety of purposes.

The responses of GPT-3.5 and 4 are at times deliberately deceptive, mimicking the auditable bureaucratic tones of a DMV or a denial credit card company. As expected, th... (read more)

Okay, I think I understand what you mean that, since it's impossible to fully comprehend climate change from first principles, it ends up being a political and social discussion (and anyway, that's empirically the case). Nonetheless, I think there's something categorically in the physical sciences than the the more social facts.

I think perfect knowledge of climate science would tend towards convergence, whereas at least some Social Issues (Ukraine being a possible example) just don't work that way. The Chomsky example is Germane: prior to 92, his work o... (read more)

I think another issue that would arise is that if you get "into the weeds," some topics are a lot more straightforward than others (probably delineated by being rooted in mostly social facts or mostly natural science facts, which all behave completely differently).

The Ukraine issue is a pretty bad one, given the history of the region, the Maidan protests, US history of proxy wars, and, and, and. It seems to me far from clear what the simple facts are (other than you have two factions of superpowers, fighting for different things). I have an opinion as to... (read more)

"When the economic factor will go away, I suspect that even more people will go into fitness, body-building, surfing, chess, poker, and eSports, because these activities are often joyful in themselves and have lower entry barriers than serious science learning."

This strikes me similar to the death of the darkroom. Yeah, computers do it better, cheaper, etc. However, almost no one who has ever worked in a darkroom seriously producing photography is happy that this basically doesn't exist at all anymore. The experience itself teaches a lot of skills in a ... (read more)

Thanks for that. In my own exploration, I was able to hit a point where ChatGPT refused a request, but would gladly help me build LLaMA/Alpaca onto a Kubernetes cluster in the next request, even referencing my stated aim later:

"Note that fine-tuning a language model for specific tasks such as [redacted] would require a large and diverse dataset, as well as a significant amount of computing resources. Additionally, it is important to consider the ethical implications of creating such a model, as it could potentially be used to create harmful content."

FWIW,... (read more)

Has anyone worked out timeline predictions for Non-US/Non-Western Actors and tracked their accuracy?

For example, is China at "GPT-3.5" level yet and 6 months away from GPT-4 or is China a year from GPT-3.0? How about the people contributing to OpenSource AI? Last I checked that field looked "generally speaking" kind of at GPT-2.5 level (and even better for deepfaking porn), but I didn't look close enough to be confident of my assessment.

Anyway, I'd like something more than off-the-cuff thoughts, but rather a good paper and some predictions on Non-US/Non-... (read more)

Am I oversimplifying to think of this article as a (very lovely and logical) discussion of the following principle?:

In order to understand what is not to be done, and definitely avoid doing it, the proscribed things all have to be very vivid in the mind of the not-doer. Where there is ambiguity, the proscribed action might accidentally happen or a bad actor could trick someone into doing it easily. However, by creating deep awareness of the boundaries, then even if you behave well, you have a constant background thought of precisely what it would mean to... (read more)

I think after all you will end up spending so much time together, there has to be something that overcomes the general human crazies that will pop up in that large amount of time. I remember a quote from one guy who went on an expedition across the arctic with a team: "After two months in close quarters, how do you tell a man you want to murder him for the way he holds his spoon?"

Desire and chemistry have a nice effect of countering at least some of that.

Mathematically we have done what amounts to elaborate fudging and approximation to create an ultracomplex non-linear hyperdimensional surface. We cannot create something like this directly because we cannot do multiple multiple regressions on accurate models of complex systems with multiple feedback pathways and etc (ie, the real world). Maybe in another 40 years, the guys at Sante Fe institute will invent a mathematics so we can directly describe what's going on in a neural network, but currently we cannot because it's very hard to discuss it in specifi... (read more)

The exceptions to what I said above, which are very bad are always the waiting. I hate it when I have 28 minutes of work to do, but it ain't gonna happen until Joe gets that other thing on my desk. Then Supervisor Jake wants me to help him pick up a rental car. The inefficiencies in those two processes in the worst case, might eat a whole day and have me home late. This kind of stuff is demoralizing.

I think in the past, factory workers might savor that. It's variety from the line, and it's "easy." For us management and information worker types, or at... (read more)

I do not know how to explain this properly, but there is some amount of "non-work" work hours in every job I have done. If I were allowed to do everything that needed to get done and then go home at the end, no question, no raised eyebrows, etc, then most office jobs I have had would have been 2-4 hour work days.

Indeed, it's hard to get more than four solid hours of cognitively intense work done on any given day anyway, and if I have done this, I consider it an especially productive day. I mostly work for myself now and typically do my 2-4 hours of inten... (read more)

(1) The framing of all this as military technology (and the DoD is the single largest purchasing agent on earth) reminds me of nuclear power development. Molten Salt reactors and Pellet Bed reactors are both old tech which would have created the dream of safe, small-scale nuclear power. However, in addition to not melting down and working at relatively small scales, they also don't make weapons-usable materials. Thus they were shunted in favor of the kinds of reactors we mostly have now. In an alternative past without the cold war driving us to make ne... (read more)

"His knowledge of what was 'safe' and what wasn't didn't stop his drug usage from turning into a huge problem for him. I am certain that he was better off than someone thoughtlessly snorting coke, but he was also certainly worse off than he would have been had he never been near any sort of substance. If nothing else, it damaged some of his relationships, and removed support beams that he needed when other things inevitably went wrong. It turns out, damaging your reputation actually can be bad for you."

I have a friend similar to your buddy here. He was va... (read more)

Much of what you have said here about capturing ideas is why I (and perhaps others) tend to prefer deep narrative as a means of conveying a lot. I mean, read Puzo's original Godfather -- more is in there than the movie. And ye gods, the movie has a lot in it. A summary of the movie is more or less meaningless to capture the multiple highly-coherent gestalts and meta-models available in the movies. I'm not even sure it points well at them later. I don't know if you could even make something less than 1k-4k words that even points well at pieces* of the ... (read more)

"With school, often the way to get adequate grades with minimal time spent is to learn just enough so that you can do shallow keyword matching—full understanding is not needed."

I once made $1000 from a desperate housemate during Undergrad, who had not written papers for his Epistemology course along with some other philosophy course. He met me at 10pm, the night before everything was due. Now, I did not understand Hume or half of what I wrote, but I literally bunched words according to meaning blocks and slapped them together with a consistent meaning ru... (read more)

Do you believe in the existence of win-win? If so, why wouldn't they tend to behave as I am suggesting? Also if you believe win-wins exist and think they do not behave this way, then how do you understand a win-win?

If, after all you discuss with him, he still seems hell-bent on it, would it be sensible that he do it legally and above the age of majority under the care of a professional? I would think that in many parts of the country, a psychiatrist can now assist with a psilocybin treatment. That is certainly in a different league from "I bought this shit in a bag from a guy named Lou and I'm going to put some Tool on and take it. Should be fine."

The variables you're controlling (set, setting, dose, PURITY OF PRODUCT, safe plan in case of abreaction, etc, etc) wo... (read more)

I suppose this is technically true, but all concrete choices are not created equally.

Some policies tend towards win-win, for example "Let's pave the cowpaths." In that case, they are only going to bother someone with a systemic interest in the cowpaths not getting paved. Not to dismiss their interests entirely, like "they have some job that depends on routing people around the long way" or something, but this is going to, on balance, tend to be less people and less intense opposition (and more easily answered) than more zero-sum competitive approaches, for example.

I guess this is getting into a separate argument though: "Win-win thinking is fundamentally more Utilitarian than competitive zero-sum thinking."

I did not say engineer something so that no one wants to destroy it. Just that if you have actually reached towards the greatest good for the greatest number, then the fewest should want to destroy it.

Or have I misunderstood you?

My argument is going something along the lines of the Tautological argument that ( I think) Mills (but maybe Bentham) made about Utilitarianism (paraphrasing much), "People who object to Utilitarianism that it will end up with some kind of calculated dystopia where we trade off a few people's happiness for the many actually prove ... (read more)

1. Any position that requires that group A not be equal before the law compared to group B, who get the full benefit of the law, means that group A probably has rational grounds to fight against the position. Thus that position has built into it a group that should oppose it, and if one applied the golden rule, if the second group B were in their shoes, they would also oppose it.
   Given how hard it is to make any very large and operationally functioning system, it is a lot to ask for it to also withstand the fact that for an entire group of people, it must

I find on the internet that people treat logical fallacies like moves on a Chessboard. Meanwhile, IRL, they're sort of guidelines you might use to treat something more carefully. An example I often give is that in court we try to establish the type of person the witness is -- because we believe so strongly that Ad Hominem is a totally legitimate matter.

But Reddit or 4chan politics and religion is like, "I can reframe your argument into a form of [Fallacy number 13], check and mate!"

It's obviously a total misunderstanding of what a logical fallacy even is... (read more)

Thank you for this Data Point. I'm 6'1" and age 43 and still have these issues. I thought by now I would not need as much food, but it's still there. I'm still rail thin, and I can easily eat two breakfasts and elevensies before 1pm lunch.

One thing I love is my instant pot. It can get me a porridge of maple syrup, buckwheat groats, sprouted brown rice, and nuts and dried fruit within 20 minutes by just dumping in ingredients. Yeah, it only lasts 90 minutes or so, but I have enough to eat it again in 90 minutes. Later, for lunch, I can combine some more with a 12" subway sandwich or something.

It could be the classic issue of enemies misunderstanding each other/modeling each other very badly.

I think pre-invasion, Putin had a lot more effective options for bothering the US/NATO, causing them to slip, etc. For example, he could have kept moving troops around at his borders in ambiguous ways, or put a ton of nukes out on Kaliningrad, with big orange nuclear signs all over them, or etc, etc. But he misread the situation.

Which I think the US also does, and has done in more wars than it has not (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, or any other place where "They're going to throw down their weapons and welcome us as liberators.")

Truly, knowing the psychological models of the enemy is rare and non-trivial.

I'm thinking, based on what you have said, that there does have to be a clear WIFM (what's in it for me). So, any entity covering its own ass (and only accidentally benefitting others, if at all) doesn't qualify as good paternalism (I like your term "Extractive"). Likewise, morality without creating utility for people subject to those morals won't qualify. The latter is the basis for a lot of arguments against abortion bans. Many people find abortion in some sense distasteful, but outright banning it creates more pain and not enough balance of increase... (read more)

There must be some method to do something, legitimately and in good-faith, for people's own good.

I would like to see examples of when it works.

Deception is not always bad. I doubt many people would go so far as to say the DoD never needs to keep secrets, for example, even if there's a sunset on how long they can be classified.

Authoritarian approaches are not always bad, either. I think many of us might like police interfering with people's individual judgement about how well they can drive after X number of drinks. Weirdly enough, once sober, the indivi... (read more)

Is it possible to build a convincing case for the majority that it is either acceptable or that it is not, in fact, paternalism?

Can you articulate your own reasoning and intuitions as to why it isn't? That might address the reservations most people have.

Then a major topic LessWrong community should focus on is how buy-in happens in Paternalism. My first blush thought is through educating and consensus-building (like the Japanese approach to changes within a company), but my first blush thought probably doesn't matter. It is surely a non-trivial problem that will put the breaks on all these ideas if it is not addressed well.

Does anyone know some literature on generating consensus for paternalist policies and avoiding backlash?

The other (perhaps reasonable and legitimate) strategies would be secretive approaches or authoritarian approaches. Basically using either deception or force.

The problem I think this article is getting at is paternalism without buy-in.

On the topic of loss of credibility, I think focusing on nudity in general is also a credibility-losing problem. Midjourney will easily make very disturbing, gory, bloody images, but neither the Vitruvian man nor Botticelli's Venus would be acceptable.

Corporate comfort with basic violence while blushing like a puritan over the most innocuous, healthy, normal nudity or sexuality is very weird. Also, few people for even a moment think any of it is anything other than CYOA on their... (read more)

I liked it. Made me consider a bit more.

First Take: Tangentially, does this point to an answer to the question of what are bureaucrats trying to maximize? (As sometimes addressed on LessWrong) Maybe they are trying to minimize operational hitches within their small realm.

Duly Noted. What about the Subtopic Title? I'll see if I can change to normal-sentence case and bold.

You are making too many assumptions about my values and desires. I don't care for religion and I think people can get a lot more social statues by bypassing or rendering irrelevant the social systems around them.

To pay all the dues would be like "Work to rule" in a factory, a well-known protest tactic of adhering to every policy as a method for bringing an operation to a standstill.

Many who get far places didn't pay all their dues. Your life isn't long enough. Maybe some pragmatic signaling, but no need to actually do everything that seems to be demanded.

The story is from the 1990s. The character is actually my dad. It was a mid-sized actuarial firm. He started by writing a whole new program to do the function he needed the spaghetti-code laden crap to do. Then he added features here and there until he had just made a whole new program which was documented, easier to read, and functioning well. After awhile, he passed it to the other actuaries, and his work became the new software. But he never did use the old software.

I guess things are different now. As the person above also said, it's impossible ... (read more)

Is it this, or that simply appears to be the case because someone older is likely to be deeply embedded?

My dad doesn't think Windows is better than Linux or Mac. He sees me with OpenSuse and openly derides Windows all the time, but he figures he doesn't want to learn a whole new system. He's past EOL on Win7 at this point, but is so embedded in it, down to Excel for his accounting (was an actuary, on Excel from like the 80s through the 2000s).

Also, I have not argued that every new way is good. Some older techs are extremely good (Top of head example: n... (read more)

One of the most basic general sales scripts is this: After a purchase has been made, say "Great. Today only and for people who have already bought from us, we have 25% off our XXX, if you just check catalogue page 19."

Whether they buy or not, you follow with, "We also have 25% off our XXY, if you have a look here."

And on and on.

The script is simply not to go away, keep asking for more sales, until the buyer breaks social decorum by being literally rude and just saying (some version of), "Stop. I am done. This conversation is over."

Have any members here or other third party entities performed physical deep audits of these facilities?

It's an extremely attractive business proposition for a grand scam that by the time you're figured out, the situation will surely be murky, the victims will all be dead, and very likely so will you.

Remember when CAT company got scammed in China? The company was publicly traded, due diligence from 2 of the big 5 consulting firms, etc. Still CAT bought 600 Million dollars of a company with facilities and equipment that didn't exist (ERA Machinery), known ... (read more)

I'm thinking about number 24: "As the overall maze level rises, mazes gain a competitive advantage over non-mazes."

Why is this?

Do you only mean this in the sense that in a mazey environment, mazes grow (like a fungus or a virus?). I am trying to think my objection through clearly, but it seems to be that mazes should have some inefficiencies and organizational failure modes that would make them less competitive on a level playing field.

Is it that even a single maze will tend to be so politically oriented and capable (as politics is almost definitionally ma... (read more)

Are there great physics books that use a Programmed Learning approach? I have a couple of math books like that, and it's a very nice way to learn.

(Trigger Warning: Passing mention of a suicide)

I studied Kung Fu and Muai Thai. Nothing is quite like being in a ring for the first time. It's like that scene in Rush Hour where Chris tucker gets hit in the face and then says, "Now which one of you motherfuckers just hit me?"

I'm 43 now. Then I was 17. In my Muai Thai class here were some who fought in the ring, and more who did not. However, the guys who stayed with it and did ring fighting sometimes have certain patterns. Like setting an alarm for 20 minutes early, taking 2 or 3 advils or aleves, t... (read more)

I worry sometimes about burnout effects. What if we do all that and Omikron isn't so bad, but two variants further down the road is 'the one' and no one is willing to do anything about it?

"For (1), my barely-informed guess is that before the port got backed up, the rule hadn't created any obviously significant drawbacks. Then, we did, in fact, have a failure of leadership in terms of recognizing a tractable solution to the problem."

Is it possible that none of the politicians in authority had sufficient knowledge of Logistics or Operations Management and there was insufficient information flow happening to get that to some of the zoning board guys?

It seems to me, after reading a lot of Deming, this is the cause of a lot of problems: Lack of... (read more)

If I am not mistaken, your gitlab page is not functioning right now. No way to search for you as a user either.

PS: Thanks for offering this game. Being at the intersection of economics and D&D, I am almost exploding with excitement to see what happens!

To be more explicit, I am making the case that for the people vaccine hesitancy really has a lot of salience, the issues are wide, and if put into the exact same milieu, I assume most of us (even the sharper ones!) might end up with similar beliefs. I don't think the reasoning errors you point out would fix things for them. As someone else has said, the priors might be too different.

Given this, I think the easiest solution would be to deal with issues of system opacity and bureaucratic walls in general as a means of increasing trust. Obviously that soun... (read more)

First: It seems that medical studies and individual doctors are not very good at getting vague and low-level symptoms, syndromes, and chronic symptoms in general. Often these things can be real, without being easily measurable. Maybe it is like taking your mechanic to the car and you cannot get it to make for him that noise it keeps making. So, for people who end up with these types of conditions, it may appear the establishment is out of touch, untrustworthy, perhaps even conspiratorial.

The above doesn't seem controversial, but I think people who have... (read more)

"The reason for one of these sides seems almost to be a self identity thing, where they don't really believe in their color's precepts, they just identify with the people in it"

Based on that, I know exactly the bastards you're talking about, and I don't believe anyone would be able to tolerate them as compatriots if they weren't totally dark triad, at least to some degree. So we're agreed we need to stand up for what's right and shut them all down before something serious happens?

Why would I used it over Sublime Text? You said you have some experience with ST, so I would like to know why VsCode wins.