All of technicalities's Comments + Replies
Done, thanks!
1As of two years ago, the evidence for this was sparse. Looked like parity overall, though the pool of "supers" has improved over the last decade as more people got sampled.
There are other reasons to be down on XPT in particular.
1Maybe he dropped the "c" because it changes the "a" phoneme from æ to ɑː and gives a cleaner division in sounds: "brac-ket" pronounced together collides with "bracket" where "braa-ket" does not.
It's under "IDA". It's not the name people use much anymore (see scalable oversight and recursive reward modelling and critiques) but I'll expand the acronym.
The story I heard is that Lightspeed are using SFF's software and SFF jumped the gun in posting them and Lightspeed are still catching up. Definitely email.
d'oh! fixed
no, probably just my poor memory to blame
1Yep, no idea how I forgot this. concept erasure!
Not speaking for him, but for a tiny sample of what else is out there, ctrl+F "ordinary"
yeah you're right
If the funder comes through I'll consider a second review post I think
You're clearly right, thanks
Being named isn't meant as an honorific btw, just a basic aid to the reader orienting.
Ta!
I've added a line about the ecosystems. Nothing else in the umbrella strikes me as direct work (Public AI is cool but not alignment research afaict). (I liked your active inference paper btw, see ACS.)
A quick look suggests that the stable equilibrium things aren't in scope - not because they're outgroup but because this post is already unmanageable without handling policy, governance, political economy and ideology. The accusation of site bias against social context or mechanism was perfectly true last year, but no longer, and my personal scoping ...
I like this. It's like a structural version of control evaluations. Will think where to put it in
One big omission is Bengio's new stuff, but the talk wasn't very precise. Sounds like Russell:
With a causal and Bayesian model-based agent interpreting human expressions of rewards reflecting latent human preferences, as the amount of compute to approximate the exact Bayesian decisions increases, we increase the probability of safe decisions.
Another angle I couldn't fit in is him wanting to make microscope AI, to decrease our incentive to build agents.
I care a lot! Will probably make a section for this in the main post under "Getting the model to learn what we want", thanks for the correction.
I'm not seeing anything here about the costs of data collection (for licenced stuff) or curation (probably hundreds of thousands of cheap hours?), apart from one bullet on OAI's combined costs. As a total outsider I would guess this could move your estimates by 20-100%.
ICF is the only such mental viz whizz technique that has ever worked for me, and I say that having done CFAR, a dedicated focussing retreat, a weekend vipassana retreat, and a dedicated circling retreat.
From context I think he meant not fibre laser but "free-space optics", a then-hyped application of lasers to replace radio. I get this from him mentioning it in the same sentence as satellites and then comparing lasers to radio: "A continuing advance of communications satellites, and the use of laser beams for communication in place of electric currents and radio waves. A laser beam of visible light is made up of waves that are millions of times shorter than those of radio waves". So I don't think this rises above the background radiation (ha) of Asimov...
Good reason to apply this with nearly equal intensity to mainstream medical arguments, though. (Applies to a lesser extent to evidence-based places like Cochrane, but sadly still applies.)
Good catch! The book is generally written as the history of the world leading up to 2000, and most of its predictions are about that year. But this is clearly an exception and the section offers nothing more precise than "By the year 3000, then, it may well be that Earth will be only a small part of the human realm." I've moved it to the "nonresolved" tab.
DM me for your bounty ($10)! I added your comment to the changelog. Thanks!
Data collector here. Strongly agree with your general point: most of these entries are extremely far from modern "clairvoyant" (cleanly resolving) forecasting questions.
Space travel. Disagree. In context he means mass space travel. The relevant lead-up is this:
..."According to her, the Moon is a great place and she wants us to come visit her."
"Not likely!" his wife answers. "Imagine being shut up in an air - conditioned cave."
"When you are Aunt Jane's age, my honey lamb, and as frail as she is, with a bad heart thrown in,
Is the point that 1) AGI specifically is too weird for normal forecasting to work, or 2) that you don't trust judgmental forecasting in general, or 3) that respectability bias swamps the gains from aggregating a heavily selected crowd, spending more time, and debiasing in other ways?
The OpenPhil longtermists' respectability bias seems fairly small to me; their weirder stuff is comparable to Asimov (but not Clarke, who wrote a whole book about cryptids).
And against this, you have to factor in the Big Three's huge bias towards being entertaining instea...
Bentham was nonzero discount apparently (fn6). (He used 5% but only as an example.)
Mill thought about personal time preference (and was extremely annoyed by people's discount there). Can't see anything about social rate of discounting.
Ooh that's more intense that I realised. There might be plugins for yEd, but I don't know em. Maybe Tetrad?
Givewell's fine!
Thanks again for caring about this.
Sounds fine. Just noticed they have a cloth and a surgical treatment. Take the mean?
Great! Comment below if you like this wording and this can be our bond:
"Gavin bets 100 USD to GiveWell, to Mike's 100 USD to GiveWell that the results of NCT04630054 will show a median reduction in Rt > 15.0 % for the effect of a whole population wearing masks [in whatever venues the trial chose to study]."
This is an interesting counterpoint (though I'd like to see a model of CO2 cost vs thinning cost if you have one), and it's funny we happen to have such a qualified person on the thread. But your manner is needlessly condescending and - around here - brandishing credentials as a club will seriously undermine you rather than buttressing you.
Stretching the definition of 'substantial' further:
Beth Zero was an ML researcher and Sneerclubber with some things to say. Her blog is down unfortunately but here's her collection of critical people. Here's a flavour of her thoughtful Bulverism. Her post on the uselessness of Solomonoff induction and the dishonesty of pushing it as an answer outside of philosophy was pretty good.
Sadly most of it is against foom, against short timelines, against longtermism, rather than anything specific about the Garrabrant or Demski or Kosoy programmes.
Nostalgebraist (2019) sees it as equivalent to solving large parts of philosophy: a noble but quixotic quest. (He also argues against short timelines but that's tangential here.)
...Here is what this ends up looking like: a quest to solve, once and for all, some of the most basic problems of existing and acting among others who are doing the same. Problems like “can anyone ever fully trust anyone else, or their future self, for that matter?” In the case where the “agents” are humans or human groups, problems of this sort have been wrestled with for a long
Huh, works for me. Anyway I'd rather not repeat his nasty slander but "They're [just] a sex cult" is the gist.
The received view of him is as just another heartless Conservative with an extra helping of tech fetishism and deceit. In reality he is an odd accelerationist just using the Tories (Ctrl+F "metastasising"). Despite him quoting Yudkowsky in that blog post, and it getting coverage in all the big papers, people don't really link him to LW or rationality, because those aren't legible, even in the country's chattering classes. We are fortunate that he is such a bad writer, so that no one reads his blog.
Here's a speculative rundown of things he probably got impl...
Great post. Do you have a sense of
- how much of tree success can be explained / replicated by interpretable models;
- whether a similar analysis would work for neural nets?
You suggest that trees work so well because they let you charge ahead when you've misspecified your model. But in the biomedical/social domains ML is most often deployed, we are always misspecifying the model. Do you think your new GLM would offer similar idiotproofing?
Yeah, the definition of evidence you use (that results must single out only one hypothesis) is quite strong, what people call "crucial" evidence.
I suspect there is no general way. ): Even the academic reviews tend to cherry-pick one or two flaws and gesture at the rest.
Partial solutions:
- Invest the time to follow the minority of Goodreads users who know their stuff. (Link is people I follow.)
- See if Stuart Ritchie has reviewed it for money.
The Economist ($) for non-Western events and live macroeconomics. They generally foreground the most important thing that happens every week, wherever it happens to occur. They pack the gist into a two page summary, "The World this Week". Their slant is pro-market pro-democracy pro-welfare pro-rights, rarely gets in the way. The obituaries are often extremely moving.
Raised in the old guard, Chalmers doesn't understand...
This amused me, given that in the 90s he was considered an outsider and an upstart, coming round here with his cognitive science, shaking things up. (" 'The Conscious Mind' is a stimulating, provocative and agenda-setting demolition-job on the ideology of scientific materialism. It is also an erudite, urbane and surprisingly readable plea for a non-reductive functionalist account of mind. It poses some formidable challenges to the tenets of mainstream materialism and its cognitivist offshoots" )
Not
...I did a full accounting, including vague cost-benefit ranking:
Ignoring the free ones, which you should just go and get now, I think the best are:
-
Sweet Dreams Contoured sleep mask. Massively improved sleep quality, without having to alter the room, close the windows, whatever. 100:1.
-
Bowflex SelectTech dumbbells. A cheap gym membership is £150 a year; using these a couple times a week for 2 years means I’ve saved hundreds of pounds and dozens of hours commuting. They should last 15 years, so maybe total 30:1. (During the pre
(riff on this tweet, which is a riff on the original)