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Tuesday, June 13th 2023
Tue, Jun 13th 2023

AI 6
World Modeling 2
Rationality 2
World Optimization 1
Betting 1
Extraterrestrial Life 1
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Shortform
5Yitz3d
Does anyone here know of (or would be willing to offer) funding for creating experimental visualization tools? I’ve been working on a program which I think has a lot of potential, but it’s the sort of thing where I expect it to be most powerful in the context of “accidental” discoveries made while playing with it (see e.g. early use of the microscope, etc.).
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2Prometheus3d
The following is a conversation between myself in 2022, and a newer version of me earlier this year. On the Nature of Intelligence and its "True Name": 2022 Me:  This has become less obvious to me as I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of what general intelligence is. Until recently, I always made the assumption that intelligence and agency were the same thing. But General Intelligence, or G, might not be agentic. Agents that behave like RLs may only be narrow forms of intelligence, without generalizability. G might be something closer to a simulator. From my very naive perception of neuroscience, it could be that we (our intelligence) is not agentic, but just simulates agents. In this situation, the prefrontal cortex not only runs simulations to predict its next sensory input, but might also run simulations to predict inputs from other parts of the brain. In this scenario, “desire” or “goals”, might be simulations to better predict narrowly-intelligent agentic optimizers. Though the simulator might be myopic, I think this prediction model allows for non-myopic behavior, in a similar way GPT has non-myopic behavior, despite only trying to predict the next token (it has an understanding of where a future word “should” be within the context of a sentence, paragraph, or story). I think this model of G allows for the appearance of intelligent goal-seeking behavior, long-term planning, and self-awareness. I have yet to find another model for G that allows for all three. The True Name of G might be Algorithm Optimized To Reduce Predictive Loss. 2023 Me: interesting, me’22, but let me ask you something: you seem to think this majestic ‘G’ is something humans have, but other species do not, and then name the True Name of ‘G’ to be Algorithm Optimized To Reduce Predictive Loss. Do you *really* think other animals don’t do this? How long is a cat going to survive if it can’t predict where it’s going to land? Or where the mouse’s path trajectory is heading? Did you th
2devansh3d
(I promised I'd publish this last night no matter what state it was in, and then didn't get very far before the deadline. I will go back and edit and improve it later.)   I feel like I keep, over and over, hearing a complaint from people who get most of their information about college admissions from WhatsApp groups or their parents’ friends or a certain extraordinarily pervasive subreddit (you all know what I’m talking about). Something like “College admissions is ridiculous! Look at this person, who was top of his math class and took 10 AP classes and started lots of clubs, he didn’t get into a single Ivy, he’s going to UCLA!” I think the closest allegory I can find for this is something like “look at this guy, he’s 7 feet tall, didn’t even make it to the NBA!” There’s something important that they’re both missing, some fundamental confusion of a tiny part of the overall metric from reality.
2riceissa3d
I used to have a model of breathing that went something like this: when breathing in, the lungs somehow get bigger, creating lower air pressure inside the lungs causing air to flow in. Then when breathing out the lungs get smaller, creating higher air pressure inside the lungs and causing air to flow out. How do the lungs get bigger and smaller? Eventually I learned that there's a muscle called the diaphragm that is attached to the bottom of the lungs (??) that pulls or pushes the lungs. If I keep my nose plugged but my mouth open, the air will travel through my mouth. If I keep my mouth closed but my nose open, the air will travel through my nostrils. So far, so good. Then a few days ago, I noticed that if I keep both my nose and mouth open, I could choose to breathe in solely through one or the other. This... doesn't make sense, according to the model. The model would predict that the air just flows through both pathways, maybe preferentially going through the mouth since that seems like the larger pathway. So something is clearly wrong with how I think about breathing. Is there some sort of further switch inside that blocks one of the pathways? Does the nose or the mouth contain variable-size cavities that can control air pressure to direct the flow? I still have no idea. I'm eventually going to look it up, but I might think about this for a little bit longer (or maybe someone here will tell me). I thought this was a pretty interesting example of how the explanations you hear about seemingly-basic things are easy to accept but don't make sense on further reflection. But it's hard to notice the flaw too. In my case, after a recent ENT visit where I was told my nasal passages are inflamed, I've been putting more effort into consciously breathing through my nose. Then one day I woke up and as soon as I woke up I did something like consciously breathe through my nose with mouth closed, and then somehow I opened my mouth but then still tried to breathe through my n
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