All of fiddler's Comments + Replies

See my above comment, where I was trying to get a handle on this. It increasingly seems like the answer is that most of it comes from breakthrough+serial intervals

I cobbled together a compartmental fitting model for Omicron to try to get a handle on some viral characteristics empirically. It's not completely polished yet, but this is late enough already, so I figured the speed premium was enough to share this version in a comment before writing up a full-length explanation of some of the choices made (e.g. whether to treat vaccination as some chance of removal or decreased risk by interaction). 

You can find the code here in an interactive environment. 

https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/pasdesc/Omicron-Model-Fittin... (read more)

Ok, I think I understand our crux here. In the fields of math I’m talking about, 3^(-1) is a far better way to express the multiplicative inverse of 3, simply because it’s not dependent on any specific representation scheme and immediately carries the relevant meaning. I don’t know enough about the pedagogy of elementary school math to opine on that.

Sorry for the lack of clarity-I’m not talking about high school algebra, I’m talking about abstract algebra. I guess if we’re writing -2 as a simplification, that’s fine, but seems to introduce a kind of meaningless extra step-I don’t quite understand the “special cases” you’re talking about, because it seems to me that you can eliminate subtraction without doing this? In fact, for anything more abstract than calculus, that’s standard-groups, for example, don’t have subtraction defined (usually) other than as the addition of the inverse.

This seems super annoying when you start dealing with more abstract math: while it's plausibly more intuitive as a transition into finite fields (thinking specifically of quadratic residues, for example), it would really really suck for graphing, functions, calculus, or any sort of coefficent-based work. It also sounds tremendously annoying for conceptualizing bases/field-adjoins/sigma notation.

I’m trying to figure out what you mean-my current interpretation is that my post is an example of reason that will lead us astray. I could be wrong about this, and would appreciate correction, as the analogy isn’t quite “clicking” for me. If I’m right, I think it’s generally a good norm to provide some warrant for these types of things: I can vaguely see what you might mean, but it’s not obvious enough to me to be able to engage in productive discourse, or change my current endorsement of my opinion: I’m open to the possibility you might be right, but I don’t know what you’re saying. This might be just an understanding failure on my part, in which case I’d appreciate any guidance/correction/clarification.

This post seems excellent overall, and makes several arguments that I think represent the best of LessWrong self-reflection about rationality. It also spurred an interesting ongoing conversation about what integrity means, and how it interacts with updating.

The first part of the post is dedicated to discussions of misaligned incentives, and makes the claim that poorly aligned incentives are primarily to blame for irrational or incorrect decisions. I’m a little bit confused about this, specifically that nobody has pointed out the obvious corollary: the peop... (read more)

That’s a fair point-see my comment to Raemon. The way I read it, the mod consensus was that we can’t just curate the post, meaning that comments are essentially the only option. To me, this means an incorrect/low quality post isn’t disqualifying, which doesn’t decrease the utility of the review, just the frame under which it should be interpreted.

That’s fair-I wasn’t disparaging the usefulness of the comment, just pointing out that the post itself is not actually what’s being reviewed, which is important, because it means that a low-quality post that sparks high-quality discussion isn’t disqualifying.

Note that this review is not of the content that was nominated; nomination justifications strongly suggest that the comment suggestion, not the linkpost, was nominated.

(Epistemic status: I don’t have much background in this. Not particularly confident, and attempting to avoid making statements that don’t seem strongly supported.)

I found this post interesting and useful, because it brought a clear unexpected result to the fore, and proposed a potential model that seems not incongruent with reality. On a meta-level, I think supporting these types of posts is quite good, especially because this one has a clear distinction between the “hard thing to explain” and the “potential explanation,” which seems very important to allo... (read more)

I strongly oppose collation of this post, despite thinking that it is an extremely well-written summary of an interesting argument on an interesting topic. The reason that I do so is because I believe it represents a substantial epistemic hazard because of the way it was written, and the source material it comes from. I think this is particularly harmful because both justifications for nominations amount to "this post was key in allowing percolation of a new thesis unaligned with the goals of the community into community knowledge," which is a justificatio... (read more)

This seems to me like a valuable post, both on the object level, and as a particularly emblematic example of a category ("Just-so-story debunkers") that would be good to broadly encourage.

The tradeoff view of manioc production is an excellent insight, and is an important objection to encourage: the original post and book (haven't read in the entirety) appear to have leaned to heavily on what might be described as a special case of a just-so story: the phenomena is a behavior difference is explained as an absolute by using a post-hoc framework, and then doe... (read more)

I think this post significantly benefits in popularity, and lacks in rigor and epistemic value, from being written in English. The assumptions that the post makes in some part of the post contradict the judgements reached in others, and the entire post, in my eyes, does not support its conclusion. I have two main issues with the post, neither of which involve the title or the concept, which I find excellent:

First, the concrete examples presented in the article point towards a different definition of optimal takeover than is eventually reached. All of the p... (read more)

Oops, you're correct. 

This review is more broadly of the first several posts of the sequence, and discusses the entire sequence. 

Epistemic Status: The thesis of this review feels highly unoriginal, but I can't find where anyone else discusses it. I'm also very worried about proving too much. At minimum, I think this is an interesting exploration of some abstract ideas. Considering posting as a top-level post. I DO NOT ENDORSE THE POSITION IMPLIED BY THIS REVIEW (that leaving immoral mazes is bad), AND AM FAIRLY SURE I'M INCORRECT.

The rough thesis of "Meditations on Moloch"... (read more)

Thanks! I’m obviously not saying I want to remove this post, I enjoyed it. I’m mostly wondering how we want to norm-set going forwards.

I think you’re mostly right. To be clear, I think that there’s a lot of value in unfiltered information, but I mostly worry about other topics being drowned out by unfiltered information on a forum like this. My personal preference is to link out or do independent research to acquire unfiltered information in a community with specific views/frames of reference, because I think it’s always going to be skewed by that communities thought, and I don’t find research onerous.

I’d support either the creation of a separate [Briefs] tag that can be filtered like oth... (read more)

To effectively extend on Raemon's commentary:

I think this post is quite good, overall, and adequately elaborates on the disadvantages and insufficiencies of the Wizard's Code of Honesty beyond the irritatingly pedantic idiomatic example. However, I find the implicit thesis of the post deeply confusing (that EY's post is less "broadly useful" than it initially appears). As I understand them, the two posts are saying basically identical things, but are focused in slightly different areas, and draw very different conclusions. EY's notes the issues with the wi... (read more)

I think my comment in response to Raemon is applicable here as well. I found your argument as to why progress studies writ large is important persuasive. However, I do not feel as though this post is the correct way to go about that. Updating towards believing that progress studies are important has actually increased my conviction that this post should not be collated: important areas of study deserve good models, and given the diversity of posts in progress studies, the exact direction is still very nebulous and susceptible to influences like collation.

T... (read more)

I’m a bit confused-I thought that this was what I was trying to say. I don’t think this is a broadly accurate portray of reasons for action as discussed elsewhere in the story, see great-grandparent for why. Separately, I think it’s a really bad idea to be implicitly tying harm done by AI (hard sci-fi) to a prerequisite of anthropomorphized consciousness (fantasy). Maybe we agree, and are miscommunication?

(strong-upvoted, I think this discussion is productive and fruitful)

I think this is an interesting distinction. I think I’m probably interpreting the goals of a review as more of a “Let’s create a body of gold standard work,” whereas it seems as though you’re interpreting it more through a lens of “Let’s showcase interesting work.” I think the central question where these two differ is exemplified by this post: what happens when we get a post that is nice to have in small quantities. In the review-as-goal world, that’s not a super helpful post to curate. I... (read more)

I notice I am confused.

I feel as though these type of posts add relatively little value to LessWrong, however, this post has quite a few upvotes. I don’t think novelty is a prerequisite for a high-quality post, but I feel as though this post was both not novel and not relevant, which worries me. I think that most of the information presented in this article is a. Not actionable b. Not related to LessWrong, and c. Easily replaceable with a Wikipedia or similar search. This would be my totally spot balled test for a topical post: at least one of these 3 must... (read more)

I agree that it’s narratively exciting; I worry that it makes the story counterproductive in its current form (I.e. computer people thinking “computers don’t think like that, so this is irrelevant)

I’m pretty impressed by this post overall, not necessarily because of the object-level arguments (though those are good as well), but because I think it’s emblematic of a very good epistemic habit that is unfortunately rare. The debate between Hanson and Zvi over this, like habryka noted, is a excellent example of how to do good object-level debate that reveals details of shared models over text. I suspect that this is the best post to canonize to reward that, but I’m not convinced of this. On the meta-level, the one major improvement/further work I’d lik... (read more)

I think Raemon’s comments accurately describe my general feeling about this post-intriguing, but not well-optimized for a post.

However, I also think that this post may be the source of a subtle misconception in simulacra levels that the broader LessWrong community has adopted. Specifically, I think the distinction between 3 and 4 is blurred in this post, and tries to draw the false analogy that 1:2::3:4. Going from 3 (masks the absence of a profound reality) to 4 (no profound reality) is more clearly described not as a “widespread understanding” that they... (read more)

I’m really curious to see some of the raw output (not curated) to try and get an estimate on how many oysters you have to pick through to find the pearls. (I’m especially interested w.r.t. the essay-like things-the extension of the essay on assertions was by far the scariest and most impressive thing I’ve seen from GPT-3, because the majority of its examples were completely correct, and it held a thesis for the majority of the piece.)

On a similar note, I know there have been experiments using either a differently-trained GPT or other text-prediction models

I think this might just be a rephrasal of what several other commenters have said, but I found this conception somewhat helpful.

Based on intuitive modeling of this scenario and several others like it, I found that I ran into the expected “paradox” in the original statement of the problem, but not in the statement where you roll one dice to determine the 1/3 chance of me being offered the wager, and then the original wager. I suspect that the reason why is something like this:

Loosing 1B is a uniquely bad outcome, worse than its monetary utility would imply,