LESSWRONG
LW

All of Tomasz Darmetko's Comments + Replies

Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Tomasz Darmetko34

The situation is Mariupol is quite weird. Ukraine blames Russia for the destroying a lot of homes and Russia blames Ukraine for destroying the homes. It doesn't really make sense for either party to destroy the homes expect to blame the other party. 

There is very clear cause and effect here. In a counterfactual world were Russia did not attack Ukraine Mariupol would have been a well functioning city. We know this for a fact because Russia gathered invasion forces around Ukraine before. They withdrew and nothing bad happened.

It's like blaming Poles for... (read more)

Reply
-1ChristianKl
I think there are multiple factors at work in the Chechen war. One of them is that the Chechen population is largely Muslim and not Christian. That makes it politically easier to cause them hardship. The also repeatidly rebeled against Russian governance. There are multiple groups. Ukrainians who identify primarily as Ukrainians, Ukrainians who identify as Russians, and Ukrainians who identify as something else. I will call the Ukrainians who identify as Russian ethnic Russians for the following comment.  I think that attacking the military forces in Azostal, can be explained by military motivations that are not about punishing the ethnic Russians of the region. It is qualitatively different than destroying a lot of the homes in the city.  When it comes to the Ukrainians who do identify as Russians there's public pressure in Russia to engage in actions to protect them. There's the US cable from 2008 that describes that choice: From Russia's perspective, the events in 2013 and 2014 did force Russia to make a choice about whether or not to intervene. Putin decided to intervene in 2014 and as a result, massively increased his domestic approval. From the Russian perspective, I don't think that the ethnic-Russian community in Ukraine did anything wrong that's worth punishing. On the other hand, under the maximalist claim that Ukraine is a fake country and those people who identify as Ukrainian are actually Russian and those do deserve some punishment for resisting Russia.  As far as I understand they did that in retaliation for the bombing of the bridge and in territories where the majority is ethnic Ukrainians. They didn't do that in the areas they annexed.  To the extent that this is true, taking Moscow would be the only way to end the current war. The West seems pretty clear that it's not willing to support Ukraine that far. That's partly why the West doesn't give them missiles that are able to hit targets 300 kilometers away.  Europe is going to want peace so
Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Tomasz Darmetko61

I agree, finding a balance between Russian speaking minority rights and promotion of Ukrainian language is the right thing to do.

It was a right thing to do before this year invasion and it is a right thing right now too. The fact that Russia makes nuclear threats should not make otherwise desirable policy suddenly undesirable.

Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PEACE) voted to support Resolution 2189 "The new Ukrainian law on education: a major impediment to the teaching of national minorities' mother tongues". Only Ukrainian voters and one UK... (read more)

Reply
0ChristianKl
The situation is Mariupol is quite weird. Ukraine blames Russia for the destroying a lot of homes and Russia blames Ukraine for destroying the homes. It doesn't really make sense for either party to destroy the homes expect to blame the other party. Given fog of war it's hard to know without access to classified intelligence what really happened.  The current Ukrainian position is that they won't stop the war till they recapture all their territory including Crimea.  The only way to end the war before that point is to put pressure on Ukraine to accept something else. Talking about the desires and interests of the Crimean people who don't want to live under the rule of Ukraine is a way to do so. 
Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Tomasz Darmetko86

My point stands regardless.

But there are facts and objective reality exists.

This war is a war of choice and a war of conquest. Blanket condemnation would be equivalent to condemning all Germans, Soviets and Poles for the Second World War or blaming Germans and Jews for Holocaust.

Specific instances where Ukrainians are believed to be going too far like killing of Darya Dugina are reprimanded. Truth be told, if Ukrainians were responsible it was a war crime. Instances where perpetrator can not be yet established like Nordstreams are condemned. Shelling the Z... (read more)

Reply
1ChristianKl
If you take the 7 points, "assassinations lacking military value" is something that Ukraine did in Moscow. "disparaging de-escalation supporters as unpatriotic" if you look at the reaction to Elon Musk's de-escalation proposal that's something that Ukraine seems to be guilty of.  "misleading atrocity propaganda" is something where it's hard to know the ground truth given the fog of war, but it seems that Ukraine does engage in some misleading propaganda. That's not the language Western media uses to speak about it. Western government and media could also condemn it more clearly and say "don't do that again or there will be consequences". Apart from those points, there's also the issue of minority rights. If you look at what the EU expects Ukraine to do before Ukraine can be accepted as a member of the EU it's to stop violating the minority rights of Russian speakers in Ukraine. It would be possible to speak in the media about the details of the EU demands but that currently doesn't happen. Minority rights violations don't justify the war but they do matter. When discussing Crimea, it would be worthwhile for Western media to look at the desires of the Crimean population instead of ignoring them.
Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Tomasz Darmetko*30

I'm curious: do you agree that halting (and condemning) the following strategies can reduce escalation and help cool things down without giving in to blackmail?

 

All 1. to 7. have been condemned by some or all of the Western countries in multiple forms on multiple forums. 

Strong words unsupported by actions will not change the situation. To be more precise, I think there is ~0% chance that condemnation form Western countries would reduce my prediction of 10% chance that Russia may use nuclear weapons to 5% or less. This is excluding all situations... (read more)

Reply
1ChristianKl
Western media condemnation is pretty one-sided. Tegmark's suggestion would be condemnations that are not one-sided. 
Why I think there's a one-in-six chance of an imminent global nuclear war
Tomasz Darmetko5032

Regarding your Twitter comment about Musk's proposals:

Here's why I think there's now a one-in-six chance of an imminent global #NuclearWar, and why I appreciate @elonmusk and others urging de-escalation, which is IMHO in the national security interest of all nations

The real issue with backing down from nuclear threats is what happens when you back down.

Let's say we force Ukraine to allow Putin to keep the annexed territory because of nuclear weapons. This gives him, every Russian and every dictator around the world a clear message: nuclear weapons are the ... (read more)

Reply
-2Jack Werner
This is, without competition, the best counter-argument to Tegmarks post in its enterity, and it’s borderline dishonest that he does not even touch on it. Anything other than a thoughtful answer would reduce his original post to a theoretical game with no connection to reality.
Deepmind's Gopher--more powerful than GPT-3
Tomasz Darmetko80

I agree with you on tasks where there is not a lot of headroom. But on tasks like International Olympiad level mathematics and programming 4x reduction in model size keeping performance constant will be small. I expect many 1000x and bigger improvements vs. what scaling laws would predict currently.

For example, on MATH dataset "(...) models would need around 10^35 parameters to achieve 40% accuracy" where 40% accuracy is achieved by a PhD student and International Olympiad participant will get close to 90%. https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.03874

With 100 trillion... (read more)

Reply
3paulfchristiano
If you have big communities working on math, I don’t think you will see improvements like 1000x model size (the bigger the community, the harder it will be to get any fixed size of advantage). And I think you will have big communities working on the problem well before it becomes a big deal economically (the bigger the economic deal, the bigger the community). Both of those are quantitative and imperfect and uncertain, but I think they are pretty important rules of thumb for making sense of what happens in the world. Regarding the IMO disagreement, I think it's very plausible the IMO will be solved before there is a giant community. So that's more of a claim that even now, with not many people working on it, you probably aren't going to get progress that fast. I don't feel like this speaks to either the two main disagreements with Eliezer, but it does speak to something like "How often do we see jumps that look big to Paul?" where I'm claiming that I have a better sense for what improvements are "surprisingly big."