Sometimes I have an internal desire different to do something different than what I think should be done (for example, I might desire to play a game while also thinking the better choice is to read). I've been experimenting with using randomness to mediate this. I keep a D20 with me, give each side of the dispute some odds proportional to the strength of its resolve, and then roll the die.
In theory, this means neither side will overpower the other, and even a small resolve still has a chance. I'm not sure how useful this is, but it's fun, and can sort of g...
Someone just told me that the solution to conflicting experiments is more experiments. Taken literally this is wrong: more experiments just means more conflict. What we need are fewer experiments. We need to get rid of the bad experiments.
Why expect that future experiments will be better? Maybe if the experimenters read the past experiments, they could learn from them. Well, maybe, but maybe if you read the experiments today, you could figure out which ones are bad today. If you don't read the experiments today and don't bother to judge which ones are better, what incentive is there for future experimenters to make better experiments, rather than accumulating conflict?
The ultimate goal of this line of research is to gain a better understanding of how human value system operates. The problem I see regarding current approaches to studying values is that we cannot study {values/desires/preferences} in isolation from the rest of cognitive mechanisms, cause according to latest theories values are just a part of a broader system governing behaviour in general. With that you have to have a decent model of human behaviour first to then be able to explain value ...
I don't see how we could ever get superhuman intelligence out of GPT-3. My understanding is that the goal of GPT neural nets is to predict the next token based on web text written by humans. GPT-N as N -> inf will be perfect at creating text that could be written by the average internet user.
But the average internet user isn't that smart! Let's say there's some text on the internet that reads, "The simplest method to break the light speed barrier is..." The most likely continuation of that text will not be an actual method to break the light speed barrier! It'll probably be some technobabble from a sci-fi story. So that's what we'll get from GPT-N!
(I realize this is an old thread, but I thought the conversation was interesting. If responding to such an old thread is norm-breaking, I apologize.)
My understanding is that it's possible there's a neural net along the path of GPT-1 -> N that plateaus at perfectly predicting the next token of text written by a human that stops way short of having to model the entire Earth. And that would basically be a human internet poster right?
(I'm completely ignoring the discussion about whether GPT-N needs to model the entire Earth in order to predict text. &...
There's something very creepy to me about the part of research consent forms where it says "my participation was entirely voluntary."
If someone explicitely writes into their consent forms "my participation was entirely voluntary" and the participation isn't voluntary it might be easier to attack the person running the trial later.
Sex-related characteristics are medically relevant; accurately assessing them saves lives.
But neither assigned sex nor gender identity alone properly capture them. Is anyone else interested in designing a characteristic string instead, so all humans, esp. all women and gender diverse folks, get proper medical care?
This idea started yesterday, when I had severe abdominal pain, and started googling.
Eventually, I rea...
The standard way to run medical trial is to focus on people that are "normal". That usually means that people in clinical trials don't take other drugs that have side effects. From a clinical trial standpoint taking hormones is taking a drug with a lot of side effects that relatively few people in the population take.
The average clinical trial does not recruit an amount of trans participants to measure effects on those and running clinical trials is already expensive enough the way it is currently. That's extra true if you want to distinguish between...
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 simula...
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.).
My take on complex systems theory is that it seems to be the kind of theory that many arguments proposed in favor of would still give the same predictions until it is blatantly obvious that we can in fact understand the relevant system. Results like chaotic relationships, or stochastic-without-mean relationships seem definitive arguments in favor of the science, though these are rarely posed about neural networks.
Merely pointing out that we don’t understand something, that there seems to be a lot going on, or that there exist nonlinear interactions imo isn...
I have downvoted my comment here, because I disagree with past me. Complex systems theory seems pretty cool from where I stand now, and I think past me has a few confusions about what complex systems theory even is.
Noticing I've been operating under a bias where I notice existential risk precursors pretty easily (EG, biotech, advances in computing hardware), but I notice no precursors of existential safety. To me it is as if technologies that tend to do more good than harm, or at least, would improve our odds by their introduction, social or otherwise, do not exist. That can't be right, surely?...
When I think about what they might be... I find only cultural technologies, or political conditions: the strength of global governance, the clarity of global discourses, per...
The point I was trying to make is that we click on and read negative news, and this skews our perceptions of what's happening, and critically the negativity bias operates regardless of the actual reality of the problem, that is it doesn't distinguish between the things that are very bad, just merely bad but solvable, and not bad at all.
In essence, I'm positing a selection effect, where we keep hearing more about the bad things, and hear less or none about the good things, so we are biased to believe that our world is more negative than it actually is.
And t...
(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...
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 thro...
I have a heuristic to evaluate topics to potentially write about where I especially look for topics to write about that usually people are averse to writing about. It seems that topics that score high according to this heuristic might be good to write about as they can yield content with high utility compared to what is available, simply because other content of this kind (and especially good content of this kind) is rare.
Somebody told me that they read some of my writing and liked it. They said that they liked how honest it was. Perhaps writing about topi...
i absolutely hate bureaucracy, dumb forms, stupid websites etc. like, I almost had a literal breakdown trying to install Minecraft recently (and eventually failed). God.
I think what's so crushing about it, is that it reminds me that the wrong people are designing things, and that they wont allow them to be fixed, and I can only find solace in thinking that the inefficiency of their designs is also a sign that they can be defeated.
In 1987 President Reagan said to the United Nations "how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world." Isn't an unaligned Artificial General Intelligence that alien threat? And it's easy - and perhaps overly obvious and comforting - to say that humanity would unite, but ...
God, I wish real analysis was at least half as elegant as any other math subject — way too much pathological examples that I can't care less about. I've heard some good things about constructivism though, hopefully analysis is done better there.
Yeah, real analysis sucks. But you have to go through it to get to delightful stuff— I particularly love harmonic and functional analysis. Real analysis is just a bunch of pathological cases and technical persnicketiness that you need to have to keep you from steering over a cliff when you get to the more advanced stuff. I’ve encountered some other subjects that have the same feeling to them. For example, measure-theoretic probability is a dry technical subject that you need to get through before you get the fun of stochastic differ...
Why haven't mosquitos evolved to be less itchy? Is there just not enough selection pressure posed by humans yet? (yes probably) Or are they evolving towards that direction? (they of course already evolved towards being less itchy while biting, but not enough to make that lack-of-itch permanent)
this is a request for help i've been trying and failing to catch this one for god knows how long plz halp
tbh would be somewhat content coexisting with them (at the level of houseflies) as long as they evolved the itch and high-pitch noise away, modulo disease risk considerations.
There’s also positive selection for itchiness. Mosquito spit contains dozens of carefully evolved proteins. We don’t know what they all are, but some of them are anticoagulants and anesthetics. Presumably they wouldn’t be there if they didn’t have a purpose. And your body, when it detects these foreign proteins, mounts a protective reaction, causing redness, swelling, and itching. IIRC, that reaction does a good job of killing any viruses that came in with the mosquito saliva. We’ve evolved to have that reaction. T...
Consider two claims:
These two claims should probably not both be true! If any system can be modeled as maximizing a utility function, and it is possible to build a corrigible system, then naively the corrigible system can be modeled as maximizing a utility function.
I exp... (read more)