(...) the term technical is a red flag for me, as it is many times used not for the routine business of implementing ideas but for the parts, ideas and all, which are just hard to understand and many times contain the main novelties.
- Saharon Shelah
As a true-born Dutchman I endorse Crocker's rules.
For my most of my writing see my short-forms (new shortform, old shortform)
Twitter: @FellowHominid
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/view/afdago/home
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I've been told a Bayes net is "just" a functor from a free Cartesian category to a category of probability spaces /Markov Kernels.
In EA there is a lot of chatter about OpenAI being evil and why you should do this coding bootcamp to work at Anthropic. However there are a number of other competitors - not least of which Elon Musk - in the race to AGI. Since there is little meaningful moat beyond scale [and the government is likely to be involved soon] all the focus on the minutia of OpenAI & Anthropic may very well end up misplaced.
I don't have any. I'm also wary of soothsayers.
Phillip Tetlock pretty convingingly showed that most geopolitics experts are no such thing. The inherent irreducible uncertainty is just quite high.
On Taiwan specifically you should know that the number of Westerners that can read Chinese at a high enough level that they can actually co. Chinese is incredibly difficult. Most China experts you see on the news will struggle with reading the newspaper unassisted (learning Chinese is that hard. I know this is surprising; I was very surprised when I realized this during an attempt to learn chinese).
I did my best on writing down some of the key military facts on the Taiwan situation that can be reasonably inferred recently. You can find it in my recent shortforms.
Even when confining too concrete questions like how many missiles, how much shipbuilding capacity, how well would an amphibious landing go, how would US allies be able to assist, how vulnerable/obsolete are aircraft carriers etc the net aggregated uncertainty on the balance of power is still quite large.
The current boom in fusion energy startups seems to have been set off by deep advances in material sciences (eg. magnets), electronics, manufacturing. These bottlenecks likely were the main reason fusion energy was not possible in the 60s. On priors it is more likely that centralisation was a result rather than a cause of fusion being hard.
As a point of comparison - do you think the US nuclear programme was substantially slowed down because it was a centralized government programme?
I just donated $400. This is not a minor amount for me but after thinking about it carefully this is an amount that feels substantial while remaining in my budget. I think it's important to support things, people and institutions that bring great value to oneself and the world. LessWrong is certainly one of those.
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1Thermal vision cuts right through tree cover, traditional camouflage and the cover of night.
Human soldiers in the open are helpless against cheap FPS drones with thermal vision.
A youtubw channel went through a dozen countermeasures. Nothing worked except one: Umbrellas.
Sorry i phrased this wrong. You are right. I meant roundtrip time which is twice the length but scales linearly not quadratically.
I actually ran the debate contest to get to the bottom of Jake Cannells arguments. Some of the argument, especially around the landauer argument dont hold up but i think it s important not to throw out the baby with bathwater. I think most of the analysis holds up.
The advances build on top of each other. I am not expert in material sciences or magnetmanufacturing but I'd bet a lot of improvements & innovation has been downstream of improved computers & electronics. Neither were available in the 60s.