All of transhumanist_atom_understander's Comments + Replies

The last formula in this post, the conservation of expected evidence, had a mistake which I've only just now fixed. Since I guess it's not obvious even to me, I'll put a reminder for myself here, which may not be useful to others. Really I'm just "translating" from the "law of iterated expectations" I learned in my stats theory class, which was:

$$E\left[E\right[X|Y\left]\right]=E\left[X\right]$$

This is using a notation which is pretty standard for defining conditional expectations. To define it you can first consider the expected value given a particular value of the random variable $Y$. Think ... (read more)

It would be nice if you had the sexes of the siblings, since it's supposedly only the older brothers that count, though I don't really expect that to change anything.

Really the important thing is just to separate birth order from family size. Usually the way I think of this is, we can look at number of older brothers, with a given number of older siblings. I like this setup because it looks like a randomized trial. I have two older siblings, so do you, meiosis randomizes their sexes.

But I guess with the data you have you can look at birth order with a give... (read more)

After reading this post, I handed over $200 for a month of ChatGPT pro and I don't think I can go back. o1-pro and Deep Research are next level. o1-pro often understands my code or what I'm asking about without a whole conversation of clarifying, whereas other models it's more work than it's worth to get them focused on the real issue rather than something superficially similar. And then I can use "Deep Research" to get links to webpages relevant to what I'm working on. It's like... smart Google, basically. Google that knows what I'm looking for. I never would have known this existed if I didn't hand over the $200.

Depends entirely on Cybercab. A driverless car can be made cheaper for a variety of reasons. If the self-driving tech actually works, and if it's widely legal, and if Tesla can mass produce it at a low price, then they can justify that valuation. Cybercab is a potential solution to the problem that they need to introduce a low priced car to get their sales growing again but cheap electric cars is a competitive market now without much profit margin. But there's a lot of ifs.

Yeah, just went through this whole same line of evasion. Alright, the Collatz conjecture will never be "proved" in this restrictive sense—and neither will the Steve conjecture or the irrationality of √2—do we care? It may still be proved according to the ordinary meaning.

Alright, so Collatz will be proved, and the proof will not be done by "staying in arithmetic". Just as the proof that there do not exist numbers p and q that satisfy the equation p² = 2 q² (or equivalently, that all numbers do not satisfy it) is not done by "staying in arithmetic". It doesn't matter.

Not off the top of my head, but since a proof of Collatz does not require working under these constraints, I don't think the distinction has any important implications.

We can eliminate the concept of rational numbers by framing it as the proof that there are no integer solutions to p² = 2 q²... but... no proof by contradiction? If escape from self-reference is that easy, then surely it is possible to prove the Collatz conjecture. Someone just needs to prove that the existence of any cycle beyond the familiar one implies a contradiction.

Yes, the proof that there's no rational solution to x²=2. It doesn't require real numbers.

Yeah, I think this is the distinction I'm struggling with. To start with proofs in Euclid, why can I prove that the square root of two is irrational? Why can I prove there are infinite prime numbers? If I saw that they are escaping this self-reference somehow, maybe I'd get the point. And without that, I don't see that I can rule out such an escape in Collatz.

Yes, de Finetti's theorem shows that if our beliefs are unchanged by exchanging members of the sequence, that's mathematically equivalent to having some "unknown probability" that we can learn by observing the sequence.

Importantly, this is always against some particular background state of knowledge, in which our beliefs are exchangeable. We ordinary have exchangeable beliefs about coin flips, for example, but may not if we had less information (such as not knowing they're coin flips) or more (like information about the initial conditions of each flip).

In ... (read more)

Well, usually I'm not inherently interested in a probability density function, I'm using it to calculate something else, like a moment or an entropy or something. But I guess I'll see what you use it for in future posts.

This two-point distribution is important as the distribution where Markov's inequality is an equality, so it's cool to have it visualized as part of the proof.

is the correction to the probability density function really what you want, and are other deviations from Gaussianity expressible with cumulants? All I can think of is that the Gaussian is the maximum entropy distribution so maybe there's a formula for how far below the maximum entropy you are. I don't know what it'd be good for though.

I'm in the process of turning the ideas in a stack of my notebooks into what I hope will be a short paper, which is just one illustration of what I think was the real trade-off, which is between conciseness and time spent writing. Or for another, see the polished 20-page papers on logical decision theory. Though it's not the same, they cover much of the same ground as the older expositions of timeless decision theory and updateless decision theory. There was a long period where these kinds of decision theories were only available through posts, and then th... (read more)

Yes, and I'm realizing I went into a digression that wasn't really relevant to my original point. In this particular post I just wanted to discuss the first principles calculation, that tells you that the sunlight hitting a relatively small area can supply all our electricity needs. The fact that just the area on roofs even makes a dent is one of the things that makes sense from this perspective, since roof area is not that large. Where to put solar panels is an economic question that doesn't particularly matter for any of the points I'm going to make in t... (read more)

I'm replying to a post that said they lacked energy despite iron supplementation. Maybe it wasn't iron deficiency, or maybe it could have been solved by raising the supplement dose, I don't know, but if it was iron deficiency and the supplements weren't helping then it's good to know you can get iron in the same form as in meat from Impossible burgers.

Yeah, this is a US-centric perspective of mine but there's no shortage of land here. This sounds to me like classic thriftiness about that which is not scarce, which isn't real thriftiness. I mean, "effective use of both farmland and rooftops"... rooftops? What's scarce here in the US is labor, not land. Why have all these people climbing up on rooftops? An interesting contrast is Texas (mostly utility solar) vs California (lots of rooftop solar). The interesting number, which I don't know off the top of my head, is how many people are employed in the solar sector per unit capacity installed. I seem to remember California employs a lot more people, disproportionately to how much more solar it has.

The heme iron in meat is absorbed better than the non-heme iron in iron supplements, but Impossible Burger has heme iron. It's very frustrating that this biotech advance of in vitro heme production is so far only used for this specific brand of meat substitutes but that's the situation. I'm not sure why iron supplements didn't work for you, as that same paper shows that even non-heme iron is absorbed well when blood iron is low, but maybe it depends on the individual? In any case, and I promise the company isn't paying me to say this, I recommend Impossibl... (read more)

The natural gas generation capacity that you need to cover for solar when it's cloudy is, of course, less than what is required to make up for loss of solar after sundown.

Sure. There's enough sunlight to run the whole country, so it's physically possible, but it's not at the moment technologically or economically practical, and may not be our best option in the near future. Until this wave of battery installations, though, I thought even California had saturated its solar potential. In the next post I'll write in more detail about what I think is now possible, but briefly, it's now feasible for all western US peak load (the extra power needed while people are awake) to be provided by solar and batteries. Whether we'll also use solar for base load, and whether we'll use it in cloudy areas, is a more difficult question that requires extrapolating prices, and I'll try to address that in the third post.

I finally googled what Elon Musk has said about solar power, and found that he did a similar calculation recently on twitter:

Once you understand Kardashev Scale, it becomes utterly obvious that essentially all energy generation will be solar.

Also, just do the math on solar on Earth and you soon figure out that a relatively small corner of Texas or New Mexico can easily serve all US electricity.

One square mile on the surface receives ~2.5 Gigawatts of solar energy. That’s Gigawatts with a “G”. It’s ~30% higher in space. The Starlink global satellite

Sort of. I think the distribution of Θ is the Ap distribution, since it satisfies that formula; Θ=p is Ap. It's just that Jaynes prefers an exposition modeled on propositional logic, whereas a standard probability textbook begins with the definition of "random variables" like Θ, but this seems to me just a notational difference, since an equation like Θ=p is after all a proposition from the perspective of propositional logic. So I would rather say that Bayesian statisticians are in fact using it, and I was just explaining why you don't find any exposition ... (read more)

In solar-heavy areas before batteries (and without hydro), electricity in the early evening was provided by natural gas peaker plants, which can and do quickly shut off. Consider a scenario with growing demand. Prices in the early evening have to get pretty high before it's worth paying for a whole natural gas plant just to run it for only a few hours.

I seen the argument made by Robert Bryce and Alex Epstein, who don't suggest economic models, but the reason it's at least not obvious to me is that we need to consider supply, demand, price as functions of time. Solar produces a glut of electricity during the day. It makes sense to me that it would increase the price of electricity in the early evening, when solar isn't generating but demand is still high. It would do so by reducing the profitability of building natural gas plants to supply those hours, which results in either fewer natural gas plants (if demand is elastic) or the prices rising until they're profitable (if demand is inelastic). How this affects the average price throughout the whole day I don't know.

Yes, Tesla's role in battery storage is actually odd and niche—their importance seems to be reducing the skill level required to built a battery energy storage facility by packaging batteries into self contained modules that contain all of the required equipment (thermal management, inverter, etc). The battery cells come from Asia.

The question to which Musk is relevant is not "how did we get to a world where battery storage is feasible" but "why would someone be investing in this ten or fifteen years ago when the technology was not there". It seems to me t... (read more)

This is a good example of neglecting magnitudes of effects. I think in this case most people just don't know the magnitude, and wouldn't really defend their answer in this way. It's worth considering why people sometimes do continue to emphasize that an effect is not literally zero, even when it is effectively zero on the relevant scale.

I think it's particularly common with risks. And the reason is that when someone doesn't want you to do something, but doesn't think their real reason will convince you, they often tell you it's risky. Sometimes this gives ... (read more)

It's great to have a LessWrong post that states the relationship between expected quality and a noisy measurement of quality:

$$E\left[\text{Quality}\right]=0.5\cdot \text{Performance}$$

(Why 0.5? Remember that performance is a sum of two random variables with standard deviation 1: the quality of the intervention and the noise of the trial. So when you see a performance number like 4, in expectation the quality of the intervention is 2 and the contribution from the noise of the trial (i.e. how lucky you got in the RCT) is also 2.)

We previously had a popular post on this topic, the tai... (read more)

Some other comments brought up that the heme iron in meat is better absorbed, which is true, see figure 1. But the good news is that Impossible burgers have heme iron. They make it in yeast by adding a plasmid with the heme biosynthesis enzymes, pathway in Figure 1 of their patent on the 56th page of the pdf.

I think we'll have an internet full of LLM-bots "thinking" up and doing stuff within a year.

Did this happen? At least not obviously.

Yes, it seems like biotech will provide the tools to build nanotech, and Drexler himself is still emphasizing the biotech pathway. In fact, in Engines of Creation, Drexlerian nanotech was called "second-generation nanotech", with the first generation understood to include current protein synthesis as well as future improvements to the ribosome.

I don't really see the point of further development of diamondoid nanotech. Drexler made his point in Nanosystems: certain capabilities that seem fantastical are physically possible. It conveniently opens with a list... (read more)

I didn't feel chills from music for a long time, and then started to get them again after doing physical therapy and learning exercises to straighten my back and improve my posture. It was a notable enough change that I reported it to my physical therapists, but I don't recall how I interpreted it at the time ("I'm getting chills again" vs "chills are real??" or what).

An example important in my life is planning: I "couldn't" make long-term plans or complete my to-do list as long as my "to-do list" was just a list of obligations rather than anything I really wanted done. More generally, I think plans "on paper" are especially easy case, since they don't take a telepath. For example, see the planning fallacy and Robin Hanson's comment that managers prefer the biased estimates. Getting to a corporate level, there's accounting. A cool related image is in episode two of Twin Peaks when Josie opens the safe and finds two ledg... (read more)

I wonder if there's also an analogy to the Gibbs sampling algorithm here.

For a believer, it will mostly bounce back and forth from "Assuming God is real, the bible is divinely inspired" and "Assuming the bible is divinely inspired, God must be real". But if these are not certainties, occasionally it must generate "Assuming God is real, the bible is actually not divinely inspired". And then from there, probably to "Assuming the bible is not divinely inspired, God is not real." But then also occasionally it can "recover", generating "Assuming the bible is no... (read more)

The reason nobody else talks about the A_p distribution is because the same concept appears in standard probability expositions as a random variable representing an unknown probability. For example, if you look in Hoff's "A First Course in Bayesian Statistics", it will discuss the "binomial model" with an unknown "parameter" Θ. The "event" Θ=p plays the same role as the proposition A_p, since P(Y=1|Θ=p) = p. I think Jaynes does have something to add, but not so much in the A_p distribution chapter as in his chapter on the physics of coin flips, and his ana... (read more)

Make sense. I suppose we assume that the insurance pays out the value of the asset, leaving our wealth unchanged. So assuming we buy the insurance, there's no randomness in our log wealth, which is guaranteed to be log(W-P). The difference between that, and our expected log wealth if we don't buy the insurance, is V. That's why log(W-P) is positive in the formula for V, and all the terms weighted by probabilities are negative.

My guesses at what the spoiler was going to be:

• Ten non-independent trials, a 10% chance each (in the prior state of knowledge, not conditional on previous results,), and only one trial can succeed. You satisfy these conditions with something like "I hid a ball in one of ten boxes", and the chance really is 100% that one is a "success".

• Regardless of whether the trials are independent, the maximum probability that at least one is a success is the sum of the probabilities per trial. In this case that doesn't yield a useful bound because we already know

Another consideration, though maybe not a fundamental one, is that past and future selves are the only beings we know for sure that we have lots of subjunctive dependence with, just from "structural" similarity like calculators from the same factory (to use an example from the TDT paper). Tumblr usr somnilogical elaborated on this a bit, concluding "future selves do help past selves!" An upload is a future self in the way that matters for this conclusion.

Yes, and I did look at something like four of the individual studies of depression, focusing on the ones testing pills so they would be comparable to the Prozac trial. As I said in the post, they all gave me the same impression: I didn't see a difference between the placebo and no-pill groups. So it was surprising to see the summary value of -0.25 SMD. Maybe it's some subtle effect in the studies I looked at which you can see once you aggregate. But maybe it's heterogeneity, and the effect is coming from the studies I didn't look at. As I mentioned in the post, not all of the placebo interventions were pills.

From a quick look on Wikipedia I don't see anything. Except for patients that report side effects from placebo, but of course that could be symptoms that they would have had in any case, which they incorrectly attribute to the placebo.

I don't see how you could get an accurate measure of a nocebo effect from misdiagnoses. I don't think anyone is willing to randomize patients to be misdiagnosed. And if you try to do it observationally, you run into the problem of distinguishing the effects of the misdiagnosis from whatever brought them to the doctor seeking diagnosis.

I took a look at The Secret of Our Success, and saw the study you're describing on page 277. I think you may be misremembering the disease. The data given is for bronchitis, emphysema and asthma (combined into one category). It does mention that similar results hold for cancer and heart attacks.

I took a look at the original paper. They checked 15 diseases, and bronchitis, emphysema and asthma was the only one that was significant after correction for multiple comparisons. I don't agree that the results for cancer and heart attacks are similar. They seem wi... (read more)

It's okay, the post is eight pages long and not super internally consistent, basically because I had to work on Monday and didn't want to edit it. I don't make a post like that expecting everyone to read every paragraph and get a perfectly clear idea of what I'm saying.

Observation of the cosmic microwave background was a simultaneous discovery, according to James Peebles' Nobel lecture. If I'm understanding this right, Bob Dicke's group at Princeton was already looking for the CMB based on a theoretical prediction of it, and were doing experiments to detect it, with relatively primitive equipment, when the Bell Labs publication came out.

"Norman Borlaug’s Green Revolution" seems to give the credit for turning India into a grain exporter solely to hybrid wheat, when rice is just as important to India as wheat.

It seems that the high-yield rice used in India's Green Revolution derives from the Chinese crop breeding program.

Yuan Longping, the "father of hybrid rice", is a household name in China, but in English-language sources I only seem to hear about Norman Borlaug, who people call "the father of the Green Revolution" rather than "the father of hybrid wheat", which seems more appropriate. I... (read more)

As someone who grew up with Greg Egan on the shelf, I want to note that Greg Egan said basically the same thing about "Neuromancer" (that it cares more about being fashionable than having the characters think through their situation), and "Quarantine" and "Permutation City" were in part responses to cyberpunk, so perhaps all is not lost.

Backing that up with Greg Egan interview quotes.

From the Karen Burnham interview, on hating "Neuromancer", and on the influence of cyberpunk on "Quarantine":

I read Neuromancer in 1985, because I was voting for the Hugos t

I'm looking into the history of QM interpretations and there's some interesting deviations from the story as told in the quantum sequence. So, of course, single-world was the default from the 1920s onward and many-worlds came later. But the strangeness of a single world was not realized immediately. The concept of a wavefunction collapse seems to originate with von Neumann in the 1930s, as part of his mathematicization of quantum mechanics–which makes sense in a way, imagine trying to talk about it without the concept of operators acting on a Hilbert space... (read more)

Yes, Sleeping Beauty has to account for the fact that, even if the result of the coin flip was such that she's being woken up on both Monday and Tuesday, if she bets on it being Monday, she will surely lose one of the two times. So she needs an extra dollar in the pot from the counterparty: betting $1 to $2 rather than $1 to $1. That pays for the loss when she makes the same bet on Tuesday. In expectation this is a fair bet: she either puts $1 in the pot and loses it, or puts $1 in the pot and gets $3 and then puts $1 in the pot and loses it, getting $2 to... (read more)