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Answer by james_tMar 08, 202020

Thanks for asking this question. I have come down with something -- I've been feeling increasingly bad for the last 4-5 days, since I took a train out of NYC. In retrospect, I should have done so earlier, or not done so at all, but hindsight is 20-20.

I'm not certain I've got C19, but I'm trying to take actions that would help me if I do.

--A lot of fluids, obviously.

--I'm taking vitamin C in large quantities. There's currently a clinical trial which is testing this; I don't know if it will work out, obviously, but I mig... (read more)

What authors consistently give accurate pictures of complex topics they discuss?

james_t6y70

I thiiiiink this book makes some important mistakes, judging from a quick glance.

So, for instance -- he asks how much power the regular car-user consumes. He says that energy use per day per person is distance travelled per day, over distance per unit of fuel, times energy per unit of fuel. He plugs in numbers, gets 40 kWh / day / person. Significantly, he says that a liter of petrol (dude seems British) has about 10 kWh in it (which Google seems to confirm) and that a typical car gets 12 km / liter (ok, seems fair, haven't double-checked, whateve... (read more)

2ryan_b6y

I think the question of how efficient electric motors are is largely irrelevant to the purposes of the book. The whole point is to explore what our current requirements actually are, and whether renewable energy can meet them. Until and unless the majority of British drivers are in electric cars, it doesn't seem to have a bearing on that question. The 'without the hot air' angle is to eliminate this problem that environmental proposals often have where totally changing one aspect of society is totally feasible given that another aspect totally changes at the same time. You will also notice that his numbers for solar power aren't based on theoretical, or even estimated future, conversion efficiency; they are based on the efficiency available in the market at the time he was writing (he uses 10% efficiency for the kind of panel you could feasibly install everywhere, and put 20% for the top-of-the-line models, in 2008). That being said, you have effectively skipped to the conclusion of the book: the answer is no, at current consumption levels sustainable energy isn't feasible; the solution we have to pursue is reducing our energy consumption. He addresses the benefits of more efficient forms of getting around (including electric cars and trains and such) in the Transport chapter.

How does OpenAI's language model affect our AI timeline estimates?

james_t6y210

Vis-a-vis selecting inputs freely: OpenAI also included a large dump of unconditioned text generation in their github repo.

Book Trilogy Review: Remembrance of Earth’s Past (The Three Body Problem)

james_t6y20

Nice review, I enjoyed it. I read the books a while ago and it was good to see I'm not alone in seeing it as deeply conservative. As far as that goes, I wondered how much of that is sort of general Chinese attitude vs. non-Chinese attitude, and how much if it is unique to the author.

One thing that keeps bothering me about the book is I can't make sense of Wade.

Wade was the ideal swordholder, because he could stick to commitments. Is he supposed to be absolutely bound by them, though, and is that why he inexplicably obeys Cheng, because he agr... (read more)

5Inst6y

I think a lot of things is because it's Chinese. Liu Cixin (LCX) writes in an essay about how he felt that aside from the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution was the only thing that could make people lose complete hope in humanity. For the criticism Zvi brings up, the book is written by someone who is well-read and is familiar with history. For instance, the climatic battle wherein the massed human fleet is wiped out by a single Trisolarian attack craft? It's been done before; Battle of Tumu in Ming history involved an inexperienced Emperor under the control of an utterly incompetent eunuch lead an army to fight the Mongols in the steppes and gets 200,000 soldiers killed within 2 weeks as they run out of food and water. There's also a battle in the Chinese Warring States period wherein subterfuge by the enemy gets an incompetent commander put up, Zhao Kuo, who changes from a Fabian strategy to a direct attack strategy and gets 200,000 to 300,000 Zhao State soldiers wiped out by the Qin State, and unlike Rome after Cannae, Zhao never recovers. For more non-Chinese examples, a close examination of Empire of Japan policy before World War II and during World War II betrays rampant incompetence and what really amounted to a headless chicken that didn't know when to bide for time. Yamamato at the Battle of Midway charged in not knowing his codes were broken and utterly underestimating the Americans. Or we could point to World War I, called the First European Civil War by some leftist historians, severely weakening European civilization as a generation of young men were massacred in the trenches. As for Wade, it's the non-Western thing that comes to mind. When the Ming Dynasty fell, many former government officials sought not to eat grain grown in the succeeding Qing Dynasty, not because they felt their resistance would be successful, but because of a radical deontologism. What this resulted in was that once they ran through their stockpiles of food, they'd literal

"AlphaStar: Mastering the Real-Time Strategy Game StarCraft II", DeepMind [won 10 of 11 games against human pros]

james_t6y120

My overall impression looking at this is still more or less summed up by what Francois Chollet said a bit ago.

Any problem can be treated as a pattern recognition problem if your training data covers a sufficiently dense sampling of the problem space. What's interesting is what happens when your training data is a sparse sampling of the space -- to extrapolate, you will need intelligence.

Whether an AI that plays StarCraft, DotA, or Overwatch succeeds or fails against top players, we'd have learned nothing from the outcome. Wins -- congrats, you&#

... (read more)

moridinamael6y360

Before now, it wasn't immediately obvious that SC2 is a game that can be played superhumanly well without anything that looks like long-term planning or counterfactual reasoning. The way humans play it relies on a combination of past experience, narrow skills, and "what-if" mental simulation of the opponent. Building a superhuman SC2 agent out of nothing more than LSTM units indicates that you can completely do away with planning, even when the action space is very large, even when the state space is VERY large, even when the possibilities a... (read more)

1avturchin6y

This assumes that human intelligence appears from something different than training on very large dataset of books, movies, parents chats etc.

What are good ML/AI related prediction / calibration questions for 2019?

james_t6y10

Fair. For (1), more than 50% because that was how they've been defining victories in these tournaments. For (2), no unplanned interventions -- i.e, it's fine if they want to drive it on a gravel driveway that they know the thing cannot handle, or fill it up at the supercharger because the car clearly cannot handle that, but in general no interventions because the car would potentially crash in a situation it (ostensibly) should handle. And for (3), meh, can beat the native scripted AI seems reasonable.

Generalising CNNs

james_t6y30

So if I understand you, for (1) you're proposing a "hard" attention over the image, rather than the "soft" differentiable attention which is typically meant by "attention" for NNs.

You might find interesting "Recurrent Models of Visual Attention" by DeepMind (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.6247.pdf). They use a hard attention over the image with RL to train where to attend. I found it interesting -- there's been subsequent work using hard attention (I thiiink this is a central paper for the topic, but I could be wrong, and I'm not at all sure what the most interesting recent one is) as well.

2James Crook6y

That paper is new to me - and yes related and interesting. I like their use of a 'glimpse' = more resolution in centre, less resolution further away. About 'hard' and 'soft' - if 'hard' and 'soft' mean what I think they do, then yes, the attention is 'hard'. It forces some weights to zero that in a fully connected network could end up non zero. That might require some attention in training, as a network that has attention 'way off' where it should be has no gradient to give it better solutions. Thanks for the link to the paper and the idea of thinking about to what extent the attention is/is-not differentiable.

Realistic thought experiments

james_t7y70

...you were an ancient being, with a mind vast and unsympathetic, concerned with all the events in the path of the light-cone, who has through some mistake been trapped in a smaller, duller mind, forgetting most of the wisdom natural to it, becoming encumbered by fleshy bounds, and who now must decide what to do with the potential it has left.

...the "you" listening to this was one of several complete agents inhabiting a body, each of which has their own plans, goals, and strategies, each of which jockeys for control over the actions of that body, and each of which can wage war or form alliances with each other to try gain more control over that body over the course of a lifetime?

LESSWRONG
LW

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