All of lise's Comments + Replies

lise20

Let's say you have a few million tabs open in your mobile Chrome browser, because you never close anything, but now your browser is getting slow and laggy.

Another fix for this specifically is to use Firefox onn Android, which does something like a suspend on inactive tabs. In my experience this completely fixes the "slow and laggy" aspect even with hundreds of suspended tabs.

Of course then you don't have a list of all your tabs, which is a useful resource you might want to create anyway.

1Adam Scherlis
Chrome actually stays pretty responsive in most circumstances (I think it does a similar thing with inactive tabs), with the crucial exception of the part of the UI that shows you all your open tabs in a scrollable list. It also gets slower to start up.
lise52

Perhaps just [Shard theory alignment requires "magic"] to indicate that the word is used in a different way?

lise10

"Making the pie bigger" feels to me simply like there's more stuff (= wealth?) to choose from. If everything would cost money, that would mean you have more options to spend your money on, either because new things are invented or because existing things get cheaper so you have to spend less of your money on them.

lise10

(commenting just to say I upvoted for the "horribly confusing" line)

lise83

Agreed with the overall point in this post that there is value in reframing and rediscovery. However,

the tendency of LW bloggers to rediscover ideas of famous philosophers and pretend that they discovered it first

consists of two points and I think the second one also deserves some consideration. 

I don't agree with the framing of pretense -- if you don't know about the earlier idea, you probably sincerely think you discovered it. But if such a "discovery" turns out to be a reframing after all, I think there is also a lot of value to be had in pointing ... (read more)

1Erik Jenner
Agreed. In addition to the point about deepening understanding, see also this comment by Jacob Steinhardt: if the relationship to existing work isn't pointed out, that makes it harder to know whether it's worth reading the post or not (for readers who are aware of the previous work).
lise0-1

If there isn't, you could use a Nitter mirror & pull its RSS feed.

lise10

epistemic status: haven't read "The Sense of Style" but I did read "Clear and Simple as the Truth"

I generally agree with your points on the consequences of using classic style & I like this post for naming and explaining them. But I don't think classic style is bad in principle; rather, it's bad in certain contexts (like on the LessWrong forum, but not e.g. in fiction books or manuals), and I wish you had more explicitly stated those contexts in which you think it is bad.

4Cleo Nardo
I think classic style is bad for all the situations that Pinker endorses it: * Academic papers * Non-fiction books * Textbooks * Blog posts * Manuals This is because I can't think of any situations where the five limitations I mention would be appropriate.
lise10

I specifically do not agree with your beef with the word "rationalizing". For me (a non-native English speaker) it has a very clear meaning: it is related to "rational", but adding the suffix -izing indicates that it means to [try to make something rational], just like "commoditizing" means to [try to make something a commodity]. Whether or not you succeed in doing so is another question. These kinds of relationships between words make a lot of sense and I think that they generally disambiguate, not confuse.

Words like to/two/too are a different case which I have no strong opinions on.

lise21

Meta level answer: I like the spotlights. Don't always click on them but they also function as reminders that these topics exist & I can read more about them if I want to. Plus, I find them aesthetically pleasing on the page.

lise63

I like what you did there.

...but the fact that I (think that I) understand this post & can use this to my advantage — instead of going through the entire lengthy process of failing to convey wisdom on my own — means that you can unzip wisdom. At least a little. :)

1Sable
Thanks! And you can, it just takes a while :)
lise20

I disagree that filtering the AI tag would accomplish this, at least for my purposes.

The thing about Alignment Forum crossposts is that they're usually quite technical & focused purely on AI, containing the bulk of things I don't want to see. The rest of the AI tag however often contains ideas about the human brain, analogies with the real world, and other content that I find interesting, even though the post ultimately ties those ideas back into an AI framing.

So a separate filter for this would be useful IMO.

lise55

Tiny Feature Request:

I like that there's a "crossposted to the EA Forum; click to see  comments" message on crossposts. I would like it even more though if it actually sent me to the post's comments section if I click it. (But maybe that's just me?)

1RobertM
Hm, yeah, that sure does seem like it ought to behave like that.
lise20

I don't know whether this is exactly what you meant by "missing insights", but I've noticed that I use search way less than I should, in my own notes & resources as well as in web search engines.

In the case of my own notes, adding more SRS cards usually fixes this: if I've been actively learning cards on some concept, I often do remember that I have resources related to that concept I can check when it comes up.

In the case of the web... well, this is an ongoing process. There have been whole subdomains of my life where it hadn't occurred to me that tho... (read more)

lise50

Also reminds me of the Thrive-Survive spectrum.

lise40

Apparently spreading "fake news" about the military will soon carry a prison term of max. 15 years. (The Russian parliament passed a bill a few hours ago, which could be signed into law as soon as Saturday.)

It is unclear to me how easy it is get the full 15 years and how much of the law only applies to news about the military.

2Константин Токмаков
"For spreading false information about the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation under the guise of reliable reports, a fine of 700 thousand to 1.5 million rubles or a penalty of up to three years in prison is provided.   For spreading a fake using one's official position, by a group of persons or by a group of persons with artificial creation of evidence of the prosecution, the penalty will be from five to 10 years in prison. If deliberately false information entailed serious consequences, a penalty of 10 to 15 years in prison is provided."
2lsusr
This is a high-qualify comment. I appreciate you contributing to the discussion.
lise20

This seems a useful distinction to make. I think your terms also make sense, as this was indeed the kind-of-thing I expected them to distinguish between when reading the title.

I do want to note that discussions about summit-seeking might include mountaineering considerations. If the price to get to the new equilibrium is very high, this could lead one to decide not to aim for this equilibrium at all, even though the equilibrium itself (the summit) is good in other dimensions.

Maybe this is already what you're pointing at when you mention the "feasibility" of an equilibrium, but I think it's worth stating explicitly.

7Sable
Thanks for the feedback! I agree that the two conversations naturally want to coincide: any discussion of a distant equilibrium as compared to the current one seems likely to include, by default, an evaluation of the costs of the change, which is Mountaineering.  Likewise, wondering if a given equilibrium is a worthwhile goal (Summit-Seeking) seems to happen (at least to me) a lot in the middle of thinking about how to get there. The two conversations are necessarily intertwined - but without the ability to distinguish clearly between them, I worry about people talking past one another, where one person thinks they're still Summit-Seeking while the other believes the conversation has moved to Mountaineering. I guess I kind of think of it like dye in water - once properly dissolved, the two are indistinguishable, but it's still valuable to be able to talk about water-without-dye and dye-without-water.
lise30

Thanks for writing it up! I don't know if I buy the human caregiver model, as OP said above, but I do like this way of thinking about it. Esp. the zone of proximal development thing is interesting, and for some reason I hadn't thought about performance evaluation analogies before even though the correspondence is quite clear. Much food for thought.

lise30

If you have a list of such correspondences somewhere, I'd like to see it!

4Gunnar_Zarncke
Here are some suggested correspondences: * pretraining - is what humans do by default: Start training a model in a simple domain and then train on top of that model in broader and broader domains. * drop-out seems to be related to deliberate play * noise - you can sometimes give wrong answers or say "no" when they offer answers even if the answer is right to check how confident they are (of course giving the true answer immediately after) * zone of proximal development seems related to hyperparameters for the learning rate and size of the current model in relation to the size of the domain  * explore-exploit has obvious analogs Not exactly parenting but performance evaluation also has analogs too, and goodharting is common. Many of my counter-measure against goodharting are informed by ML: * high-dimensionality - many features allow to model the target closely  * but can lead to overfitting, thus  * drop-out - you let people know that a few randomly chosen features will be dropped from evaluation, so it doesn't make sense to put all your optimization on a few targets. * altering the performance evaluation regimes each year - while still aiming at roughly the same thing. * noise - leave the exact weights used unclear. 
3Gunnar_Zarncke
I keep saying that parenting is a useful source of inspiration and insight into ML training and alignment methods but so far few people seemed to believe me. Happy to hear that you are interested. I will write up some correspondences.
lise30

the movements of Polynesians across pacific Islands a couple of thousand years ago

In a nice coincidence, I read this review not a day after hearing about a genomic analysis study that did exactly this (published this September). It used the chromosome recombination idea to estimate when island populations split, and a different method comparing genetic variants to find which islands produced which new settler populations.

For those interested, here is the study, and here an article from Ars Technica summarizing it.

lise100

This is a useful analogy and very salient to me at this moment. I want to point at some related things:

1. The idea that all code inside a function should be written at one level of abstraction lower than its name. This would ensure that every function contains a set of boxes of approximately the same "size", which build up the bigger box of the container function in a way that makes sense. (How do molecules add up to this brick? How do bricks add up to this wall?) 
2. More generally, if all of the names in your code are well-chosen, it will read somewh... (read more)

5Adam Zerner
That's a great point with an even more awesome example! Thanks! I'm gonna remember that example. Yeah. I really wanted to talk more about everyday life and make the post less about code. I just wasn't able to make it work.
lise10

The part about FINST and demonstrative reference made me think about localizing in sign language. You can make the sign for an entity and point to a place in the 'sign space' in front of you, so that later you can refer back to the entity by referring to (pointing to, making signs at) that place. You could set up multiple entities in the space, and later discard them again and place new ones.

My understanding of (Dutch) sign language is only rudimentary so this should be taken with a grain of salt, but it's an interesting connection nonetheless.

3Vaniver
Fixed, thanks!