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All of Nate Gibson's Comments + Replies

BHTV: Yudkowsky & Adam Frank on "religious experience"
Nate Gibson10

Looks like this is actually a link to their second talk on May 4th 2009. Not sure if the first talk still exists.

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1Nate Gibson
Looks like this is actually a link to their second talk on May 4th 2009. Not sure if the first talk still exists.
The Level Above Mine
Nate Gibson10

I think the relative amount of reality fluid in a world is the prior probability of being in that world.

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The Hidden Complexity of Wishes
Nate Gibson32

I think LaMDA and InstructGPT are clearly in the category of "genies that aren't very powerful or intelligent".

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gwern120

They also aren't that well-aligned either: they fail in numerous basic ways which are not due to unintelligence. My usual example: non-rhyming poems. Every week for the past year or so I have tested ChatGPT with the simple straightforward unambiguous prompt: "write a non-rhyming poem". Rhyming is not a hard concept, and non-rhyming is even easier, and there are probably at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of non-rhyming poems in its training data; ChatGPT knows, however imperfectly, what rhyming and non-rhyming is, as you can verify by asking ... (read more)

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Feeling Rational
Nate Gibson10

I think this article wonderfully illustrates the primary relationship between emotions and epistemic rationality. Namely, that emotions can be downstream of false beliefs. Robin Hanson added in another comment that this relationship can go the other direction, when strong emotions bias us in ways that make us less epistemically rational.

But I think there is also a separate relationship between emotions and instrumental rationality. Namely, that emotions can influence which decisions you make. This includes but is not limited to epistemic bias.

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Chapter 22: The Scientific Method
Nate Gibson10

Harry asks Draco to categorize the children of Squib couples as either Wizard, Squib, or Muggle. If a Squib is a non-magical child of a Wizard, how could a Squib couple produce a Squib child? What is the difference between a Squib and Muggle child produced from a Squib couple?

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5Andrea Salvoni
SPOILERS FOR THE HARRY POTTER BOOKS, I SUPPOSE Now I don't know if you will ever read this, and you might have found out about it already, but in the "canon" Harry Potter books, Squibs and Muggles are different, in the sense that Squibs are Wizards that cannot cast spells but can still kind of interact with magic. For example, in the fifth book when Harry and Dudley are attacked by Dementors, Dudley is unable to see them, and thinks that him feeling cold and dread is something done by Harry, to the point that Dudley punches Harry telling him to stop, while later on, during the trial to choose if they should expel Harry from Hogwarts or not, Mrs. Figg, a known Squib, is able to describe the appearance of Dementors, showing us that while Squibs cannot cast spells, they are still "magical" in some way, able to interact with the magical world. (Now, to be fair, someone, like Dumbledore, could have simply described to Mrs. Figg what Dementors look like, but this is never called into question and seems to be accepted as evidence during the trial, so it stands to reason that Squibs can see them).