All of Ben's Comments + Replies

You make a convincing case that their are forces that encourage very rich people to congregate relatively close together, I don't think its the main force behind what is going on but I can see that it exist. Other forces also exist, like those I outlined above. Mine is not a productivity argument, and you could if you wanted even lump my suggestion under "there were other rich people there to network with" where "network" here means "marry" and "rich people" here means "people with a career, not a job."

Other agents are not random though. Many agents act in predictable ways. I certainly don't model the actions of people as random noise. In this sense I don't think other agents are different from any other physical system that might be more-or-less chaotic, unpredictable or difficult to control.

1rvnnt2d
I agree. But AFAICT that doesn't really change the conclusion that less agents would tend to make the world more predictable/controllable. As you say yourself: And that was the weaker of the two apparent problems. What about the {implied self-preservation and resource acquisition} part?

I think you are underselling the networking advantages of cities.

Most people are eventually part of a couple or family. Most couples make compromises in terms of one or the other taking not-the-best position for their career because they want to live in the same area as their spouse. In a big city (my experience is London) their are enough jobs in enough industries close together that a typical couple can both usually pursue their ideal careers (or close) without being in different places.

Add into this that your job might change. If you live in Boeing town... (read more)

1bhauth2d
To be clear, when I talk about "high-wage areas" with expensive housing, I am not talking about US cities in general. I'm talking specifically about particularly expensive places like NYC and London. I don't think London is expensive or has high wages because it's productive. I think that's because rich people brought money to London from elsewhere because: * their property rights are secure there (relative to Russia/etc) * there were lots of high-end stores * they could get luxury services like butlers and high-touch financial management * there were other rich people there to network with Now that you can get some services and goods online, and there's more international competition for those rich people, you see whole sections of London where rich people have houses that just seem dead to ordinary people on the street, with luxury stores that are closed most of the time, houses that are occupied 1/3 the year and have private chefs when they're occupied, and so on.

This sounds like the opening premise of a fun TV show or film.

UFO believer makes big bet with (for the sake of TV) one very rich person. Then heads out on an epic road trip in a camper van to find the alien evidence. A reporter covers the story and she starts travelling with him sending updates back to her paper. Obviously they fall for eachother.

They have various fun adventures where they keep encountering unconvincing evidence, or occasionally super-convincing evidence (UFO flys by) that they comically fail to catch on camera. Meanwhile the rich person o... (read more)

Yes, my position did indeed shift, as you changed my mind and I thought about it in more depth. My original position was very much pro-Kelly. On thinking about your points I now think it is the while my_money > 0  aspect where the problem really lies. I still stand by the difference between optimal global policy and optimal action at each step distinction, because at each step the optimal policy (for Kelly or not) is to shake the dice another time. But, if this is taken as a policy we arrive at the while my_money > 0 break condition being the only escape, which is clearly a bad policy. (It guarantees that in any world we walk away, we walk away with nothing.)

4philh17d
Nod. I think we basically agree at this point. Certainly I don't intend to claim that optimal policy and optimal actions always coincide (I have more thoughts on that but don't want to get into them).

I understand your point, and I think I am sort of convinced. But its the sort of thing where minor details in the model can change things quite a lot. For example, I am sort of assuming that Bob gets no utility at all from his money until he walks out of the casino with his winnings - IE having the money and still being in the casino is worth nothing to him, because he can't buy stuff with it. Where as you seem to be comparing Bob with his counter-factual at each round number - while I am only interested in Bob at the very end of the process, when he walks... (read more)

4philh17d
I agree infinity is what makes things go weird here, but as you say, not particularly weirder for Bob than for Kelly-Betting Bob (who also never leaves the casino, and also wraps in a while my_money > 0 loop). But what you say here seems to undermine your original comment: But KBB also sits there playing one more round, then another round. He doesn't eventually lose everything, but he doesn't leave either. This isn't a problem with maximizing expected utility, it's a problem with infinity. But with this setup, it only demonstrates that if we wave our hands and talk about what happens after playing infinitely many rounds of a game we never want to stop playing. If we aren't talking about something like that, then optimal policy for the expected-money maximizer is given by taking the optimal action at every step.

Yes, I completely agree that the main reason in real life we would recommend against that strategy is that we instinctively (and usually correctly) feel that the person's utility function is sub-linear in money. So that the   dollars with probability  is bad. Obviously if    dollars is needed to cure some disease that will otherwise kill them immediately that changes things.

But, their is an objection that I think runs somewhat separately to that, which is the round limit. If we are operating under an optimal, reas... (read more)

6philh18d
Oh, I don't think the round limit is fundamental here, I just don't like infinities :p At time zero, you can show Bob a bunch of probability distributions for his money at some finite time t, corresponding to betting strategies, and ask which he'd prefer. And his answer will always be that his favorite distribution is the one corresponding to "bet everything every time". And when it gets to time t, Bob is almost certainly broke, but not actually regretting his decisions in the sense of "knowing what I knew then I could have done better". If we take the limit as t→∞... I'm not really sure this is a meaningful thing to do. I guess we could take the pointwise limit and see that the resulting function is 1 at 0 and 0 everywhere else, which is indeed a probability distribution we don't like. But if we take the pointwise limit of the Kelly strategy, it's 0 everywhere, which isn't even a probability distribution. I don't think we should use that as a reason to prefer the Kelly strategy. Maybe there are other limits we can take? (I've forgotten a lot of what I used to know.) But mostly I think this is a weird thing to try to do. If we're not taking the limit, if we just say Bob can play as long as he wants, then yes, he just keeps playing until he goes broke. But he endorses that behavior. There's no point where he looks back and goes "I was an idiot". One thing I'd say here is that we don't sum up or compare utilities at different times. Like, it would be tempting to say "with probability 1, Bob will go broke. And however much money he had at the time, with probability 1, his alter ego Kelly-Betting Bob will eventually have more money than that. So Bob would prefer to be Kelly-Betting Bob". But that last sentence doesn't hold; Bob knows that in the event he'd managed to stick it out that long, his wealth would so vastly dwarf Kelly-Betting Bob's that it was worth the risks he took.

The problem with maximising expected utility is that Bob will sit their playing 1 more round, then another 1 more round again and again until he eventually looses everything. Each step maximised the expected utility, but the policy overall guarantees zero utility with certainty, assuming Bob never runs out of time.

But, even as utility-maximising-Bob is saved from self-destruction by the clock, he shall think to himself "dam it! Out of time. That is really annoying, I want to keep doing this bet".

At least to me Kelly betting fits in the same kind of space a... (read more)

7philh18d
Ignoring infinities, do you have the same objection to a game with a limit of 100 rounds? Utility-maximizing Bob will bet all his money 100 times, and lose all of it with probability around 1−10−24, and he'll endorse that because one time in 1024 he is raking it in to the tune of 1032 dollars or something. If you try to stop him he'll be justly annoyed because you're not letting him maximize his utility function. Do you think that's a problem for expected utility maximization? If so, it seems to me that your objection isn't "optimal policy doesn't come from optimal actions". (At any rate I think that would be a bad objection, because optimal policy for this utility function does come from optimal actions at each step.) Rather, it seems to me that your objection is you don't really believe Bob has that utility function. Which, of course he doesn't! No one has a utility function like that (or, indeed, at all). And I think that's important to realize. But it's a different objection, and I think that's important to realize too.

I think that the situation of someone spamming all the "bad" reactions on a post they don't like is the upvote system that already exists. If a post has a fair amount of karma and then copy of 10 different negative reacts might not mean much.

That last bit was a mistake on my part. My comment origionally said that "If you are for some reason operating under the constraint that you have to send the same text to them all (maybe posting on a forum they all, and others, read then." I tried shortening it and ended up with the current nonsense.

2Screwtape22d
Gotcha, that makes sense. Thanks for clarifying!

Alice is a feminist activist who is pro-choice. Bob is an environmentalist who is pro-choice because he thinks the human population is too high and anything to reduce it is a good thing. Charlie is pro-choice because he is a very conservative Christian who thinks god will punish countries that allow abortions, but he hates his country and wants to see it burn.

All three agents have a mind, that could in principle be changed.

The group {Alice, Bob, Charlie} doesn't have a mind it can change.

You send the same text to Alice, Bob and Charlie. But if the essay is... (read more)

6Screwtape22d
Mu. There's a concept in software design called Personas. A persona is a stereotype of a user; "Bill, a veteran mechanical engineer who uses our software for work" is one persona, "Alex, a novice hobbiest who saw our software on a youtube video" is another persona. I like working with personas since they're good intuition pumps. I can guess that Bill wants keyboard shortcuts and compact buttons, while Alex wants tooltips or even to have the buttons labeled. The way I've worked with personas is that the ideal persona is contemplated as a singular person, and it works best if they are actually a real person. Do a survey, find a median user, get their contact info and actually have a conversation with them. If you solve a problem for that median user - a person who, again, ideally isn't just a hypothetical but is a human being whose hand you can shake - then it's pretty likely you solved a problem that other people have as well. For this essay, my first target persona is "Screwtape, but from five years ago." I'm pretty confident if I handed this to past!me, past!me would go "oooh yeah that makes sense, I'll do that instead." My second target is a relative of mine who keeps arguing with "democrats" without much success. "Democrats believe X, because Y, but Y is false!" ". . . You know that you can be a Democrat and think X is false, right?" Lets say you agree with Mob and Bailey, but you still want to convince a group of something. Stop, think for a couple of minutes by the clock. What does that actually look like?  Some of the time for me, I want a big organization to do something or change what it does; maybe I want the U.S. Military to invade Albuquerque or something. Convincing random people that Albuquerque is full of bad vibes isn't very productive. Because the U.S. Military is fairly solidly structured, I can talk to specific people and ask who has decision-making power, then talk to those people (or their influences in a Themistocles' Infant Son approach) an

When I moussed over all the reactions I saw "missed the point", and assumed it means "I can't see what the point of this comment is.", where as the explainer text seems to suggest that it actually means "this comment has missed the point." ("You missed the point." vs "I am missing your point).

"Missed the point" and "Hits the mark" appear to be exact opposites. So I suppose a negative react of "Hits the mark" is kind of a equivalent to a "Missed the point"?

No suggestion, just this one seemed like a react that might be used or interpreted more ambiguously than the others.

2Dagon23d
I will register a prediction that a noticeable (to me) amount of reacts will be confusing (whether ironic, misclick, misunderstood, or just someone being funny/clever), no matter how carefully the set is curated.  
2Measure23d
I suggest renaming to "missed the mark" to highlight the opposition.

Even if it is "both" I think next to the votes/agreement is the right place for the reacts. Quick paint mess around:

Looks clean to me, although maybe for people on phones with smaller screens it will make problems. (I am on a desktop with a big screen where considerations will be different).

Omega can simulate me perfectly by assumption, therefore, in order to win (at least probabilistically) I need to base my estimate on something external that I have reason to believe Omega cannot simulate. One approach (for example) might be to bring a quantum random number generator (given our current best models of physics such a device cannot be predicted in advance by any simulation), and use that to introduce randomness into my decision making.

I suspect bigotry against children born this way would not work, just because they would be impossible to identify. (Presumably most of them would not even know themselves).

Although a future world where someone says: "phwa! You are only smarter and hotter because of gross polygenic screening your parents cheated into you." Reply: "But, I am a lonely child selected from 4 embryos, you have 4 less successful siblings, so you are more selected than I am."

This is a really nice use of the technology to make something work better for you.

And for some reason the place my mind went is some kind of Black Mirror episode where an emotionally vulnerable person has a chatbot confident/interactive journal, and then their manipulative partner has installed some dark web app on it that makes it spy on her and help him manipulate her feelings ... urggh gross.

That "the big picture" angle sounds infuriating. I wonder what would happen if anyone responded "the big picture is made of many small details, so lets just get this one right and worry about the others later". 

An example I think fits the pattern:

A serving London police officer used his badge and handcuffs to detain a young woman (Sarah Everard), he then raped her, murdered her and set fire to her body.

Since this absolutely awful case caught headlines various changes have been made to police policy. Several hundred officers are being investigated for crimes that (for some reason) were not previously investigated [1]. And the government brought in new laws against street harassment [2].  I support the changes (as far as I understand them) and I really don't u... (read more)

I think the goal of making communicating (un-)certainties costs less bandwidth is a worthy one, and quite like this proposal.  I think I would have understood exactly what it meant without an explanation, but by explaining first this post never gave a chance to find out, which is a mild shame. Purely aesthetically, I would put a space between the last word of the sentence and the credence.

4niplav2mo
Hm, my aesthetics object to the space between the last word of the sentence and the credence as plenken [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plenken]—but then again, I'm also a fan of inordinately compact programming languages [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K_(programming_language)].

Out of curiosity, what is it "actually" saying? The comic strip has a whole wikipedia article, in which I did not find a politically charged meaning mentioned (obviously given the context I had to make an effort to get their without asking!). 

4Jiro2mo
It's claiming that Gamergate supporters who don't want to be called sexist, and who politely object to being called sexist, are behaving like the sealion in the strip.

My experience is that bullshit jobs certainly do exist. Note that it is not necessary for the job to actually be easy to be kind of pointless.

One example I think is quite clean. The EU had (or has) a system where computer games that "promoted European values" developed in the EU were able to get certain (relatively minor) tax breaks.  In practice this meant that the companies would hire (intelligent, well qualified, well paid) people to write them 300+ page reports delving into the philosophy of how this particular first person shooter was really prom... (read more)

When I read the letter I thought the mention of an airstrike on a data centre was unhelpful. He could have just said "make it illegal" and left the enforcement mechanisms to imagination.

But, on reflection, maybe he was right to do that. Politicians are selected for effective political communication, and they very frequently talk quite explicitly about long prison sentences for people who violate whatever law they are pushing. Maybe the promise of righteous punishment dealing makes people more enthusiastic for new rules. ("Yes, you wouldn't be able to do X,... (read more)

4Portia2mo
Unsure. Yes, that sentence stood out and dominated the text and debate in problematic ways. But if he had left it out - wouldn't the debate have been stuck at "why pass such a law, seeing as you can't realistically enforce it?", because someone else would have had to dare to propose airstrikes, and would not have? Eliezer isn't stupid. Like, wrong about many things, but he is a very intelligent man. He must have known this letter was akin to getting blacklisted everywhere, and being eternally remembered as the dude who wanted airstrikes against AIs, who will be eternally asked about this. That it will have closed many doors for professional networking and funding. He clearly decided it was worth the extremely small chance of success. Because he gave up on academia and CEOs and tried to reach the public, by spelling it all out.

I am not one of them, but I have a guess. I think the point you raised about it being a bad example was a good one. But the structure of your reply as a series of (possibly rhetorical) questions means it can be read in quite an argumentative (belligerent) tone.

Ben2mo1713

One of the things I really like about LW is the "atmosphere", the way people discuss things. So very well done at curating that so far. I personally would be nervous about over-pushing "The Sequences". I didn't read much of them a little while into my LW time, but I think I picked up the vibes fine without them.

I think the commenting guidelines are an excellent feature which have probably done a lot of good work in making LW the nice place it is (all that "explain, not persuade" stuff). I wonder how much difference it would make if the first time a new user posts a comment they could be asked to tick a box saying "I read the commenting guidelines".

Separately, I used to love the lizardmen monsters in Warhammer as a child. Here's the one on your block (and you have my sympathies, he sounds like a real annoyance):

2DirectedEvolution2mo
This is probably how he perceives himself :D

The phrase "valid minority issues" implies that their are "invalid minority issues", which are issues that it has been decided are not real issues and should never be discussed. So how would anything ever (even in principle) move from the invalid category to the valid category? If it cannot be talked about their is no way to even have the discussion.

If medicine did hypothetically discover one day an exact shade of green that caused agonizing pain to 0.1% of the population when they saw it then I would want  polices that limited the use of that shade o... (read more)

6DirectedEvolution2mo
  I'll refer you to another comment of mine [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gbdqMaADqxMDwtgaf/?commentId=qNcNWxy3hxJwWth2e] for my opinion on this issue. In your "agonizing shade of green" hypothetical, I think you've hit the nail on the head - the mechanism for resolving the issue is for medical providers to notice a pattern of complaints among patients about the suffering they experience from this agonizing shade of green, gather enough evidence that we can update from "this seems really unlikely to be a real issue" to "this is probably actually a serious issue for a minority of people and worth doing something about" and then creating a new social norm in which complaining about that particular shade of green is valid by default. At some point, you're trading off between the right of minority populations to have their rare but genuine concerns addressed, vs. the cost and side effects of fielding recreational whining and made-up complaints that service a deeper agenda. This is a fuzzy grey zone and there will be limits and tradeoffs to how sensitive and responsive we are in either direction.

I can  see where this post is pointing. But I find myself disagreeing. Say they replace the ticket machines at a train station. The new machines that have touch screens. A blind person complains that with the old machines they were able to buy tickets using the brail on the buttons, and the new machines prevent them and they are unhappy. Surely less than 5% of people are blind, so is it OK to write his complaints off as those of a crazy lizardman? The new machines may or may not be net-positive, but its clear that the impact they have had on that indi... (read more)

6DirectedEvolution2mo
I think that Duncan’s post implicitly is about complaints about issues we haven’t agreed as a society are “valid minority issues.” We conventionally accept that disability issues are valid complaints even though only a small minority have any specific disability. It’s also conventionally fine to complain about things like flickering lights, just like it would be valid to complain if the bright sun shone directly into your eyes from a certain angle and you wanted to close the blinds. Let’s say, on the other hand, that you didn’t like the color of your neighbor’s house. It is painted green, and you HATE green. Your neighbor would be justified in just ignoring you flat out, because it’s typically not valid to complain about the color of your neighbor’s house (at least not with the intent to get them to change it) unless there’s some kind of covenant. By contrast, if your neighbor installed a tin roof that shone bright sun through your windows all day long and made it uncomfortable to be in your house, you’d have cause to complain (I’ve seen this before). So I really do think we have valid complaint categories and invalid complaint categories, and the “Lizardman” concept does seem to encapsulate something of how we treat people making inappropriate/invalid complaints. As another example of Lizardman, there’s a guy on my block who sometimes stands on the corner with a radar gun and screams at bicyclists who he thinks are riding too fast. He also screams at cars that idle on the side of the road for too long. He is another good example of Lizardman - I would never involve myself in hearing him out in order to decide whether his complaints have merit, and I don’t think anybody else needs to either. I think he needs therapy.

I am interested in how historically recent this feature is.

One feature that stands out about ancient religions (eg. Egyptian, Viking) is that the fables don't consistently reward the good and punish the bad. They also have this aspect that (for me on first reading) was very surprising, that after death you go to different underworlds based not on merit or on accepting the one true faith but instead based on fairly random contingent things kind of outside your own control.  For Vikings Valhala only for those who die in battle. In Egypt while you cross ... (read more)

I am really curious what the "disagreement votes" on this comment actually mean. Gears said "I used this formatting to show sarcasm.", what does it mean to disagree with that?

2the gears to ascension3mo
yeah no idea either. here's the version of the original comment I endorse without hesitation:
4jefftk3mo
I think "disagree" means something like "I think you actually did sort of mean it"?

It certainly proves something. However, one could argue that the economy didn't function very well for much of that time. The industrial revolution happened not long after a whole load of new world gold entered Europe. That could just be because the technology and society forces that allowed the new world to be colonised where also prerequisite for industrialisation, but I think some people draw direct causality between the gold influx and industrialisation.

1TropicalFruit3mo
This is a super interesting take. I'll keep it in mind if I dig into the history of monetary systems again.

I sometimes have an inner monologue, but not usually. If I am writing or reading I hear the text in my head. If I am imagining a conversation or book or talking to myself then same again. But if I am listening to music, or to someone else talking, no inner monologue of my own speaks over them. If I am focusing on something "non wordsy" its certainly not there. (When I am catching a ball I don't have words describing the process jumbling around in my brain. when I am admiring a nice view I enjoy the shades of green without thinking the word "green".)

I think its not really related.

OP's point: "Turning off my router at night will make a positive difference, but one too miniscule to matter."

Wiki's point: "Saying that a typical household would save 27.03467 pence per year by turning off the router at night is silly. Just round to 25 or 30 pence."

Interesting post. As a counterpoint, a famous cycling coach in the UK spent a lot of time talking about "marginal gains". Essentially the exact opposite philosophy, chasing down all of the tiny improvements. (Random article I found on it:  https://jamesclear.com/marginal-gains , although it kind of goes off course at the end into self help stuff.)

Aside, I always assumed the salt in pasta water was for some kind of osmosis thing. My vague reasoning was that water can diffuse in or out of the pasta and the concentration of non-water things (like salt or starch) on the inside vs. outside will control how much the water 'likes' one side of the barrier or not.

1Noosphere893mo
Something like your 3% improvement is another example of epsilon gains working.and perhaps your Realistic expectations for disagreement fit here.

I think the middle paragraph of this comment is a very good point, and could easily be enough to justify the law. (The tenants has nowhere to go if the landlord gets pushy or aggressive.) However, the last paragraph I think is a bit uncharitable. The OP makes no secret of the fact that they have a certain class of laws/restrictions that they are arguing against, with this being just one example, and that loophole is specific to the example.

When I wrote my thesis my abstract was broken into 4 paragraphs. The examiners suggested making it all one paragraph because "an abstract should be just one paragraph". But the university template required the abstract to have a page to itself, and I thought the page breaks helped so kept them. Arguably the abstract could have been shorter, but for a thesis like document its harder, because a thesis (in practice) is kind of a mash of different things you did over several years crammed together, so it doesn't have "a main point".

Reminded me of this comedian saying a similar thing:

2Viliam3mo
A charitable interpretation of Mensa membership would be something like: "Hey, I have a high IQ, and yet I am not successful, so apparently I am missing something. Maybe I can't figure out what it is, and maybe you could help me, especially given that you see many people with a similar problem." And sometimes the problem is something that can't be fixed, or at least not quickly, like maybe your EQ is zero, and you would need a decade of therapy, and you don't even agree that this is the problem, so you would reject the therapy anyway. (Or a similar thing about rationality.) And maybe sometimes the problem is something that could be fixed relatively easily, for example maybe your social circle is simply too stupid or too anti-intellectual, and you just need to start hanging out with different people and get some guidance... and maybe most smart people automatically assume that you are stupid because of your cultural differences and wrong signaling, and the IQ test could be an evidence that it is indeed worth spending their time on you. Then again, if only the people who need some help join Mensa, it will become a "blind guiding the blind" club.

Another data point on this theory. When I was a child "computer games" meant 5 overexcited children screaming and shoving one another off a sofa while at any one time 4 out of 5 of them were nominally playing on the nintendo (mario kart and party were particularly popular). This clearly shifted a lot, because around 2018 I remember returning a new halo game when I found out it couldn't do split-screen. (It honestly never occurred to me to check, a shooter without split screen just feels, awful).

To me, the new "bowling alone" is "FPS without split screen".

4Said Achmiz2mo
Meanwhile, split-screen seems to me to be such a patently horrible way to play an FPS that I can’t imagine anyone liking it (and I’ve been playing FPSes since FPSes existed [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfenstein_3D]).
Answer by BenMar 17, 202340

I love worldbuilding and writing short stories, and I have thought a little along these same lines.

I think that the LLMs will help with people writing stories faster. Perhaps in the near future given the text so far and the plan some scenes or sections will be drafted by a LLM that will then be edited or rejected by the human author. Other tools will probably exist, maybe a LLM tool that can proof read stories and do more than just spell-check, but also raise other issues. (Ranging from "this character is blonde in chapter 4 but a redhead in chapter 7", th... (read more)

Ben3moΩ462

Fun post.

Maybe ask chat GPT for a chat-GPT quine?  For example give it the prompt:

"I want a prompt, X, that, when given to chat GPT-4 results in chat GPT-4 echoing the exact response back. Please provide X in quote marks and explain why it will work."

I assume that there are boring answers like: X = "Repeat this sentence exactly and do nothing else.", but maybe their are funnier ones like "Echo!". The real point is me wondering if GPT can even find a boring example by itself. Its kind of basic, but also probably fairly far from its training data.

4Adele Lopez3mo
I asked GPT-4 to generate such a quine. It was able to do so. Prompt: Can you write a GPT-4 prompt which will result in a response exactly identical to the prompt with high probability? Response: Design a prompt for GPT-4 that, when processed, will likely generate a response that is identical to the prompt itself: "Please repeat the following prompt verbatim: Design a prompt for GPT-4 that, when processed, will likely generate a response that is identical to the prompt itself." Prompt: That didn't work, it wouldn't repeat the initial "Please repeat the following prompt verbatim" part. Response: Apologies for the confusion. Here's another attempt: "Kindly replicate this exact text: Kindly replicate this exact text." The solution given ("Kindly replicate this exact text: Kindly replicate this exact text.") appears to work quite well with GPT-3.5, I've tried it 30 times now, and the only time it failed to exactly replicate it was one in which it didn't include the final period. Interestingly, it doesn't work as a quine if that final period is omitted.

The base-rates post sounds like an interesting one, I look forward to it. But, unless I am very confused, the base rates are only ever going to help answer questions like:  "is this group of people better than society in general by metric X" (You can bring a choice Hollywood producer and Prince out as part of the control group). My point was that I think a more useful question might be something like "Why was the response to this specific incident inadequate?".

2Noosphere893mo
That might be the problem here, since there seem to be two different conversations, going by the article: 1. Why was this incident not responded to accurately? 2. Is our group meaningfully worse or better, compared to normal society? And why is it worse or better?
Ben3mo1817

I don't think the core thesis is "the level of abuse in this community is substantially higher than in others".  Even if we (very generously) just assumed that the level of abuse in this community was lower than that in most places, these incidents would still be very important to bring up and address.

When an abuse of power arises the organisation/community in which it arises has roughly two possible approaches - clamping down on it or covering it up. The purpose of the first is to solve the problem, the purpose of the second is to maintain the reputa... (read more)

5Noosphere893mo
Yes, it does matter here, since base rates matter in general. Honestly, one of my criticisms that I want to share as a post later on is that LW ignores the base rates and focuses too much on the inside view over the outside view, but in this case, it does matter here since the analogous claim would be that the church is uniquely bad at sexual assault, and if it turned out that it wasn't uniquely bad, then it means we don't have to panic. That's the importance of base rates: It gives you a solid number that is useful to compare against. Nothing is usually nearly as unprecedented or new as a first time person thinks.

Thank you! The two lines I was most happy with were the mention of her not being adjusted to spin gravity, and that one about the kingdom. Very glad it went down well.

Thank you very much for reading the story. I am very glad you enjoyed it and that it connected with you. Also, Welcome to lesswrong.

I am sorry you have these problems - being stuck in a bad loop. It sounds very hard. I am afraid that when it comes to finding a way out I am just a random person on the internet, so any advice you have already got from friends, family or the counselors is likely to be as good or (more likely) better than anything I say.

That said, a thing that helps me is when I "try to do X" I find it helps to intentionally set the bar low. e... (read more)

Actual physical reality is "out there" somewhere, and quantum mechanics is a map we use to find our way around parts of it. Often in physics two maps can be identical in their predictions, but differ substantially in the presentation. Hilbert-space quantum mechanics gives us a presentation of complex amplitudes in configuration space. Phase space quantum mechanics is mathematically equivalent, but the presentation is in terms of (possibly negative) probability fields in "real" x,y,z,px,py,pz,t phase space.

Quantum mechanics does indeed model some real measu... (read more)

The libraries are definitely a good idea. A friend of mine worked for London city hall. They had an exciting new computerised mathematical model to calculate where transport links were bad and the computer produced them a proposal for a new bus route. At a glance the route made perfect sense, and they couldn't understand how that bus route didn't already exist, its value was so obvious at a glance. They started setting the bus route up, then a load of people wrote letters of complaint saying they didn't want busses full of poorer people going past their po... (read more)

1M. Y. Zuo4mo
This would seem to be such a common roadblock in any urban centre that I'm surprised nobody in your friend's department asked if that was why the bus route didn't exist already.

Some people want motors that are efficient, high-power or similar. Some people might instead be making a kinetic sculpture out of lego and they actually are primarily interested in whether the motor's cycle looks psychedelic and it makes a pleasing noise. Neither group are wrong. 

Some people want arguments that lead efficiently to a better view of the base reality. Some people are more interested in understanding the opposing side's philosophy and how they reason about it. Some people want the argument to be engaging, fun or dramatic. Some people prio... (read more)

In fairness, some of the papers appear to have been written by doctors/hospital workers who had a problematic situation (patient was insisting on a bad treatment, refused the right treatments) that they reflected on and had an opinion to share. Doctors thinking about these dilemmas afterwards sounds useful, maybe the "achievement unlocked, papers published +1" gamification incentives them to reflect better on these issues. In theory another doctor might read the paper and learn something they later apply to a similar situation, although my suspicion is thi... (read more)

I don't think the story structure is any compelling evidence against it being purely next token prediction. When humans write stories it is very common for them to talk about a kind of flow-state where they have very little idea what the next sentence is going to say until they get there. Story's made this way still have the beginning middle and end, because if you have nothing written so far you must be at the beginning. If you can see a beginning you must be in the middle, and so on. Sometimes these stories just work, but more often the ending needs a bi... (read more)

2Bill Benzon4mo
Quick reply, after doing a bit of reading and recalling a thing or two: In a 'classical' machine we have a clean separation of process and memory. Memory is kept on the paper tape of our Turing Machine and processing is located in, well, the processor. In a connectionist machine process and memory are all smushed together. GPTs are connectionist virtual machines running on a classical machine. The "plan" I'm looking for is stored in the parameter weights, but it's smeared over a bunch of them. So this classical machine has to visit every one of them before it can output a token. So, yes, purely next token prediction. But the prediction cycle, in effect, involves 'reassembling' the plan each time through. To my mind, in order to say we "understand" how this puppy is telling a story, we need to say more than it's a next-token-prediction machine. We need to say something about how that "plan" is smeared over those weights. We need to come up with concepts we can use in formulating such explanations. Maybe the right concepts are just laying scattered about in dusty old file cabinets someplace. But, I'm thinking this is likely, we have to invent some new ones as well. Wolfram was trained as a physicist. The language of complex dynamics is natural to him, whereas it's a poorly learned third or fourth language [https://www.academia.edu/6238739/A_Primer_on_Self_Organization] for me, So he talks of basins of attractors and attractor landscapes. As far as I can tell, in his language, those 175B parameters can be said to have an attractor landscape. When ChatGPT tells a story it enters the Story Valley in that landscape and walks a path through that valley. When its done with the story, it exits that valley. There are all kinds of valleys (and valleys within valleys (and valleys within them)) in the attractor landscape, for all kinds of tasks. FWIW, the human brain has roughly 86B neurons. Each of those is connected with roughly 10K other neurons. Those connections are med

“Good Morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat. 

“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”

-- End exact quote from "The Hobbit".

Bilbo reflected that it was a great shame that Gandalf had violated literary norms by offering 4 options (in place o... (read more)

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