All of gwd's Comments + Replies

FWIW I normally eat dinner around 6, go to bed 5 hours later at 11pm, and eat my next meal 8.5 hours later at 7:30am; at which point "break-fast" is certainly the right word, since I haven't eaten for 13 hours.  Contrast to breakfast, which only has to last me 5 hours (until lunch at 12:30pm), and lunch which again only has to last me 5.5 hours (until 6pm).

People say that meta-analyses can weed out whatever statistical vagaries there may be from individual studies; but looking of that graph of the meta-study of saturated fat, I'm just not convinced of that at all.  Like, relative risk of CVD events suddenly goes from 0.2 to 0.8 at a threshold of 9%, and then just stays there?  Relative risk of stroke goes from 0.6 at 9% to 0.9 at 12% and then down to 0.5 at 13%? Does that say to you, "more saturated fat is bad", or "there's a statistical anomaly causing this jump"?

The "purpose" of most martial arts is to defeat other martial artists of roughly the same skill level, within the rules of the given martial art. 

Not only skill level, but usually physical capability level (as proxied by weight and sex) as well.  As an aside, although I'm not at all knowledgeable about martial arts or MMA, it always seemed like an interesting thing to do might to use some sort of an ELO system for fighting as well: a really good lightweight might end up fighting a mediocre heavyweight, and the overall winner for a year might be t... (read more)

I like the MVP!  One comment re the idea of this becoming a larger thing in journalism, in relation to Goodhart's Law ("Once a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be useful as a measure"):

• Affecting policy and public opinion is a "target"
• "Real" journalism affects both public opinion and policy, and thus is a "proxy target"
• If "real" journalism started being affected by prediction markets, then prediction markets would also become a proxy target
• This would destroy their usefulness as measures

For example, even now, how much of the "85% chance Russia gai... (read more)

I was chatting with a friend of mine who works in the AI space.  He said that the big thing that got them to GPT-4 was the data set; which was basically the entire internet.  But now that they've given it the entire internet, there's no easy way for them to go further along that axis;; that the next big increase in capabilities would require a significantly different direction than "more text / more parameters / more compute".

Thanks for these, I'll take a look.  After your challenge, I tried to think of where my impression came from.  I've had a number of conversations with relatives on Facebook (including my aunt, who is in her 60's) about whether GPT "knows" things; but it turns out so far I've only had one conversation about the potential of an AI apocalypse (with my sister, who started programming 5 years ago).  So I'll reduce confidence in my assessment re what "people on the street" think, and try to look for more information.

Re HackerNews -- one of the tri... (read more)

Can you give a reference?  A quick Google search didn't turn anything like that up.

To me it's an attempt at the simple, obvious strategy of telling people ~all the truth he can about a subject they care a lot about and where he and they have common interests.  This doesn't seem like an attempt to be clever or explore high-variance tails.  More like an attempt to explore the obvious strategy, or to follow the obvious bits of common-sense ethics, now that lots of allegedly clever 4-dimensional chess has turned out stupid.

But it does risk giving up something.  Even the average tech person on a forum like Hacker News still thi... (read more)

Sorry -- that was my first post on this forum, and I couldn't figure out the editor.  I didn't actually click "submit", but accidentally hit a key combo that it interpreted as "submit".

 I've edited it now with what I was trying to get at in the first place.

• People may be biased towards thinking that the narrow slice of time they live in is the most important period in history, but statistically this is unlikely.
• If people think that something will cause the apocalypse or bring about a utopian society, historically speaking they are likely to be wrong.

Part of the problem with these two is that whether an apocalypse happens or not often depends on whether people took the risk of it happening seriously.  We absolutely, could have had a nuclear holocaust in the 70's and 80's; one of the reasons we didn't is b... (read more)