All of Maxwell Peterson's Comments + Replies

That’s an interesting example. The CEO I had in mind while writing this was a buff guy with a very force-of-will kind of character, but he appreciated such questions.

I guess all our examples were non-public, company-only meetings. I don’t know the Musk example you describe, but since we know about it, I’m guessing it was more public? Or was it secretly recorded and leaked later?

Good point!

Yup - from the release page a week ago:

>Web search is available now in feature preview for all paid Claude users in the United States. Support for users on our free plan and more countries is coming soon.

It feels like people mainly gain status from making posts, not comments. And it’s harder to make a post that primarily points out a lack of skepticism / care. For example, while I am here disagreeing via a comment, doing so will be negligible to my status. I’d be better off posting about some interesting topic… but posting is harder!

The line "Your browser does not support the video tag." appears multiple times in this post for me, on both Chrome and Safari.

Thank you!

No clear findings, no. However, the biggest period at which I shook the feeling was when I returned to work after a 3-month leave, and began working on an LLM Agent in early 2022 (back when that was very new and very exciting, instead of a thing that’s everywhere like today). I was up and excited and energetic for at least a month straight, and I think longer than that. 

Now I’m back to finding work somewhat uninteresting, and also back to being tired. So one theory that is always lurking in my head now is: am I tired because I am bored? Some... (read more)

I find the evidence being asserted unclear. Is the entire thought here based on what hours of the day he’s posting on X? Is it rather the content of his X posts that is the strongest indication? Or is it what Musk has said in his recent televised appearances? I’ve found him reserved and even-spoken in the clips I’ve watched, though I don’t read his X posts, so I am having trouble understanding why you think this in the first place.

I quite enjoyed the fan-written sequel Significant Digits: https://www.anarchyishyperbole.com/p/significant-digits.html?m=1

Yesterday, I realized in my conversations with Claude over the past week or so, I don’t think it’s talked about how much of a genius I am, perhaps not even once. I remember in the fall it would do this all the time. Maybe there’s been an update?

The Elections panel on OP’s image says “combat disinformation”, so while you’re technically right, I think Christian’s “fighting election misinformation” rephrasing is close enough to make no difference.

Well okay then :)! You giving a disagree-vote makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining.

I am not sure what people are disagreeing with here. The only factual claims I see are “the preexisting chain of command is incompetent or corrupt”, which I agree with (on incompetence), that “the president has a lot of power”, “is supposed to control all the agencies”, and “if the new CEO of a private company…”. None of these seem incorrect to me. I’ve strong-upvoted in both ways.

I had seen recommendations for T3/T4 on twitter to help with low energy, and even purchased some, but haven’t taken it. I hadn’t considered that the thyroid might respond by shrinking, and now think that that’s a worrying intervention! So I’m glad I read this - thank you.

Oh… wait a minute! I looked up Principal of Indifference, to try and find stronger assertions on when it should or shouldn’t be used, and was surprised to see what it actually means! Wikipedia:

>The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or "degrees of belief") equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration. In Bayesian probability, this is the simplest non-informative prior.

So I think the superior is wrong to call it “principle of indifference”! You are the one... (read more)

Having previously been supremely convinced of this way of thinking by reading The Last Psychiatrist, and having lived by it for the last few years, I do now suspect it’s possible to take it too far. 

I think the desire for status - the goal of being able to say and think “I am this type of person”, and be recognized for it - is a part of the motivation system. As you say, some (most?) take it too far. But if one truly excises this way of thinking from themselves, they’ve kind of… excised part of their motivational system!

I think you’ve anticipated this... (read more)

Interesting! I also agree with the superior, but I can see where your intuition might be coming from: if we drop a bouncy ball in the middle of a circle, there will be some bounce to it, and maybe the bounce will always be kinda large, so there might be good reason to think it ending up at rest in the very center is less likely than it ending up off-center. For the sniper’s bullet, however, I think it’s different.

Do you agree with AnthonyC’s view that the bullet’s perturbations are well-modeled by a random walk? If so, maybe I’ll simulate it if I have time and report back - but only makes sense to do that if you agree that the random walk model is appropriate in the first place.

>The semicircular canals track changes in your head’s orientation. The otoliths track which way is down. But why not just combine them? Why did they evolve to be separate?

Here’s an idea.

The body is completely obsessed with inferring its state of poisonedness, and uses inner ear orientation sensors to help infer this. This is why car / sea / VR sickness exist. Since inferring poisonedness quickly is important, so it can start forcing itself to throw up, having two sensors is better because.. it’s more.. fault-tolerant? Not sure. But maybe there’s something here.

Ahh. The correlations being dependent on inputs, but things appearing random to Alice and Bob, does seem trickier than whatever I was imaginining was meant by quantum randomness/uncertainty. Don't fully have my head around it yet, but this difference seems important. Thanks!

Ahh. One is uncertain which world they’re in. This feels like it could address it neatly. Thanks!

Strong-downvoted.

She’s all over the EA and AI-related subreddits /r/singularity, /r/artificial, /r/ArtificialIntelligence, /r/ChatGPT, /r/OpenAI, /r/Futurology

In other words, everywhere but here. Since that’s the case, it would be better to take your fight to those places. Ms. Woods’s only post on Less Wrong in the past year was a short notice about o3 safety testing sign-ups, which was unobjectionable. 

I don’t like the vibes.

I was thinking the same thing. This post badly, badly clashes with the vibe of Less Wrong. I think you should delete it, and repost to a site in which catty takedowns are part of the vibe. Less Wrong is not the place for it.

I expect our intuitions about objective randomness would clash quite violently! My own intuition revolts at even the phrase itself :)

I looked into it a bit, and understand it to mean that one must accept one of:

1. Physical uncertainty exists
2. Non-locality exists

3. Quantum mechanics is wrong

   
   
   
   
   is that breakdown correct?

    

Been thinking about your answer here, and still can’t decide if I should view this as solving the conundrum, or just renaming it. If that makes sense? 

Do weights of quantum configuration, though they may not be probabilities, similar enough in concept to still imply that physical, irreducible uncertainty exists?

I’ve phrased this badly (part of why it took me so long to actually write it) but maybe you see the question I’m waving at?

Hm - reading Ben’s linked comment, it seems to me that the thrust is that negative probabilities must be admitted. But I don’t understand how that is related to the map vs. territory / probability-in-the-mind-or-physical distinction? 

Like, “one must modify the relevant functions to allow negative probabilities” seems consistent with “probability is in the mind”, since functions are a part of the map, but it seems you consider it a counterexample! So I find myself confused.

>In other words, you don’t need reality to be i.i.d.; you simply need to structure your beliefs in a way that allows an “as if” i.i.d. interpretation.

I think I view exchangeability vs. iid slightly differently. In my view, the “independence” part of iid is just way too strong, and is not required in most of the places people scatter the acronym “iid”. 

For example, say you are catching fish in a lake, and you know only bass and carp live in the lake, and that there are a ton of fish in it, but not how many of each, and you’re trying to estimate the ... (read more)

Thanks!

Thanks for putting this together!

I have a vague memory of a post saying that taking zinc early, while virus was replicating in the upper respiratory tract, was much more important than taking it later, because later it would have spread all over the body and thus the zinc can’t get to it, or something like this. So I tend to take a couple early on then stop. But it sounds like you don’t consider that difference important. 

Is it your current (Not asking you to do more research!) impression that it’s useful to take zinc throughout the illness?

The post is an advertisement, without other content. I think a post of that type should only be on the site if it comes with some meat - an excerpt, at least. (And even then I’m not sure). The reader can’t even look up or read the book yet if he wanted to!

(There is a quote of the thesis of the book, but the text is stuff I’ve been rereading for years now. It feels like someone is always telling me liberalism is under threat recently.)

Interesting! The current Sonnet 3.5 agrees (for equivalent concentrations), for the same reason you've described, and I was about to update the essay with a correction, but then 4o argued that 1. formaldehyde is metabolized much more quickly, so has little time to do damage or build up, and 2. that it considers formic acid's inhibition of a critical enzyme (cytochrome c oxidase) in the mitochondrial electron transport chain to be pretty bad.

Or maybe a better summary of 4o's argument is "In equivalent concentrations, formaldehyde is worse, but the differenc... (read more)

Guesses: people see it as too 101 of a question; people think it’s too controversial / has been done to death many years ago; one guy with a lot of karma hates the whole concept and strong-downvoted it

I think the 101 idea is most likely. But I don’t think it’s a bad question, so I’ve upvoted it.

Years ago, a coworker and I were on a project with a guy we both thought was a total dummy, and worse, a dummy who talked all the time in meetings. We rarely expressed our opinion on this guy openly to each other - me and the coworker didn’t know each other well enough to be comfortable talking a lot of trash - but once, when discussing him privately after yet another useless meeting, my coworker drew in breath, sighed, looked at me, and said: “I’m sure he’s a great father.” We both laughed, and I still remember this as one of the most cutting insults I’ve heard.

Cheers!

I’d guess that weekend dips come from office workers, since they rarely work on weekends, but students often do homework on weekends.

If OP were advocating banning normal parties, in favor of only having cancellable parties, I would agree with this comment.

Appreciate it! Cheers.

A good post, of interest to all across the political spectrum, marred by the mistake at the end to become explicitly politically opinionated and say bad things about those who voted differently than OP.

The integral was incorrect! Fixed now, thanks! Also added the (f * g)(x) to the equality for those who find that notation better (I've just discovered that GPT-4o prefers it too). Cheers!

Yes, I’m not so sure either about the stockfish-pawns point.

In Michael Redmond’s AlphaGo vs AlphaGo series on YouTube, he often finds the winning AI carelessly loses points in the endgame. It might have a lead of 1.5 or 2.5 points, 20 moves before the game ends; but by the time the game ends, has played enough suboptimal moves to make itself win by 0.5 - the smallest possible margin.

It never causes itself to lose with these lazy moves; only reduces its margin of victory. Redmond theorizes, and I agree, that this is because the objective is to win, not maxi... (read more)

Quip about souls feels unnecessary and somehow grates on me. Something about putting an athiesm zinger into the tag for cooking… feels off.

Would you be willing to share your ethnicity? Even as simple as “Asian / not Asian”?

I do think it has some of that feeling to me, yeah. I had to re-read the entire thing 3 or 4 times to understand what it meant. My best guesses as to why:

I felt whiplashed on transitions like “be motivated towards what's good and true. This is exactly what Marc Gafni is trying to do with Cosmo-Erotic Humanism”, since I don’t know him or that type of Humanism, but the sentence structure suggests to me that I am expected to know these. A possible rewrite could perhaps be “There are two projects I know of that aim to create a belief system that works with, in... (read more)

I read this book in 2020, and the way this post serves as a refresher and different look at it is great.

I think there might be some mistakes in the log-odds section?

The orcs example starts:

We now want to consider the hypothesis that we were attacked by orcs, the prior odds are 10:1

Then there is a 1/3 wall-destruction rate, so orcs should be more likely in the posterior, but the post says:

There were 20 destroyed walls and 37 intact walls… corresponding to 1:20 odds that the orcs did it.

We started at 10:1 (likely that it’s orcs?), then saw evidence s... (read more)

In Korea every convenience store sells “hangover preventative”, “hangover cure drink”, with pop idols on the label. Then you come back to America and the instant you say “hangover preventative”, people look at you crazy, like no such thing could possibly exist or help. I wonder how we got this way!

Thanks for your review! I've updated the post to make the medications warning be in italicized bold, in the third paragraph of the post, and included the nutrient warning more explicitly as well.

Thank you!

“(although itiots might still fall for the "I'm an idiot like you" persona such as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and particularly Alex Jones).”

This line is too current-culture-war for LessWrong. I began to argue with it in this comment, before deleting what I wrote, and limiting myself to this.

It changed to be much more swipe-focused. It’s been 5 years since I used it, but even in 2018, I remember being surprised at how much it had changed. Apparently now even open messaging is gone, and you need to have someone Like you before you can message them, though I haven’t actually checked this.

Yes, agree - I've looked into non-identical distributions in previous posts, and found that identicality isn't important, but I haven't looked at non-independence at all. I agree dependent chains, like the books example, is an open question!

Love this! Definitely belongs on LessWrong. High-quality sci-fi, that relates to social dynamics? Very relevant! I’ve been away from the site for a while, tiring of the content, but am glad I scrolled and saw this today.