espoire

Dowsing rods are real. They’re a social/psychological technology. Socially, they allow the user to surface information and intuitions about where to dig a well, which they can’t readily articulate or explain, and yet have that real information actually get used. Psychologically, in the absence of the above they’re also a randomness source, which can sometimes do better than human decision, in cases where humans are uninformed and/or badly biased towards being wrong. Which prong of the dilemma applies varies situationally.

Now I can't think of a single thing I could be skilled at that will remain human.

I feel that. I’d consider swallowing the bitter pill of accepting that the career I prepared for is dead or dying, and that I need to say “oops” and learn something else. …but what can I possibly learn fast enough to get enough years of employment out of it to pay for the education, before AI replaces my new field, too?

How can I avoid poverty?

Ugh, yes. Other people are the worst.

I’m Blue or maybe ex-Blue and I found the explanations of how certain ideas appear to the Red tribe to be interesting and informative. Also the recent historical context. I had no idea, for example, that anti-immigration used to be a Blue tenet (I had only barely began paying attention to politics around 2015ish).

For what it’s worth, I found the Red perspective taken by the essay to have some value in and of itself, and to not be too all-encompassing nor combative.

Mm, fair. I guess I don’t have a good mental model regarding whether the method by which one becomes interested in an idea has effects on the likely outcomes of that interest, but it sure does seem plausible that could be the case.

Ehh, I think there’s some real expected utility in rich people getting interested in fusion; I wouldn’t lump ‘fusion’ in with the rest of the crackpottery.

Thanks for sharing. I’m trans myself, and, well, I often feel unique and alone in that. It’s a bit comforting to know that others have walked very similar paths as I, though I’m sorry that you had to; I wouldn’t wish my earlier life on an enemy.

I wish I could have skipped all the suffering and depression and mental gymnastics. If only I’d been able to get hormones young, I probably wouldn’t now remain the most-depressed person that [most people I meet] have ever met. …but my parents were even worse about it, explicitly threatening me with homelessness. 😑 ... (read more)

I thought this was about cars at first! The financial costs of fuel and maintenance, the time costs of maintenance and commuting… of course, I figured it out, later.

I don’t really have a point.

I liked your writing.

this society goes on… things work pretty well for a while, until one day all that old stuff starts to wear out but at this point no one is alive who remembers how to make it, and civilization is lost

This is a serious fear I have for our real world. If AI stalls, we have some serious looming problems with illiteracy and attention atrophy among the kids, and with broken career paths in e.g. software which presently don’t have enough entry-level opportunity to replace the old guard.

Maybe we solve aging, and dodge these problems without AI going well and going... (read more)

This feels like an important clue towards constructing an AI (as opposed to training one). It would suggest that the apologist/revolutionary opposed system may be instrumentally useful in creating a functional intelligence, perhaps analogous to how the opposed system of defense/prosecution lawyers is useful in creating a functional criminal judging system out of flawed irrational humans.

It’s interesting, meriting further thought. My own efforts to write down an analogue of the human intelligence scaffold stalled out at trying to implement the explicit worl... (read more)

The random seed for watermarking doesn’t use the whole context, just a few tokens immediately preceding each choice. This is deliberate; it enables detection of e.g a couple of AI-written sentences taken out of context.

If you added a per-user private key into the random seed, you could indeed check whether a specific user used the same AI to write a block of text.

…but asking which user (if any) used that AI to write the text would be quite expensive. The only way to test that would be to rerun the watermark test for every individual user, and you’d probably have a few false positives in the mix just by sheer numbers. A one-in-a-million fluke should happen about once per million users, after all.

Sharing a thought trace I had after reading the above, in the hope that my thoughts may entertain someone. I feel a little dumb for having had them.

Wait, how can you be sure that set is distinct from just “all the primes”?

Oh, wait. Duh. Graham’s Number is very very divisible by 3.

On the hardest climb of my life so far, half my group turned back at around 85% of the way up. This was a correct decision, and things would have turned scary if they hadn’t. Indeed, the decisions to turn back are, for each of the people involved, the single thing they’ve ever done that I most respect.

The leader and organizer of our expedition was also the least physically-fit. Around mid-afternoon, he was feeling exhausted, and his winter coat was soaked in his sweat. It was late winter, and while the ambient temperature had been quite tolerable during th... (read more)

As someone who has successfully scaled two (very very easy, by comparison to those mentioned in this post) mountains: confirmed. It has been worthwhile in retrospect. My average happiness has been noticeably improved since I climbed the first one, which given what I’ve read in psychology is a big claim (allegedly hardly anything ever enduringly alters average happiness).

That said, I climbed much much easier mountains with almost no danger, summit and back down all within one day’s light (well, almost; it went dawn to late twilight at the end of the longer climb), no specialized equipment needed beyond a fancy backpack full of water plus one sandwich. My climbs were also in-the-moment fun.

It would be a grave error to assume that these effects remain additive, without side-effects, when you combine them all.

It’s my (weakly held) belief that some of the human intelligence genes act through lowering the happiness set point. Unhappy more often —> more problems to solve —> more practice solving problems —> better at solving problems. If true, even for a smallish subset of the human intelligence genes, then stacking that would be both horrifying and seems intuitively to me like it would fail past a certain point.

Evidence: ~all the cognit... (read more)

I can consciously move my eyes smoothly. It was a learned ability for me, starting and practicing from various related starting operations like “tracking an imaginary moving object” or “crossing ones eyes”.

It’s particularly obnoxious with traffic lights in the USA (at least, in Wisconsin, Illinois, Connecticut, New York, and Texas). Unless I actually point my head directly at the traffic lights, the actual light appears outside the signal, superimposed on e.g. the sky. Which can make them very hard to see if the sky is particularly bright or similar color. Stupid monochromatic traffic signal light…

Direct forced stabilization of an image on the retina using specialized devices also causes images to fade.

I’ve always had conscious control of my “automatic” eye movements, in that it takes a very small continual mental effort to enable those movements, and if I mentally relax the movements stop. (And with a deliberate mental effort, I can substantially amplify the random movements, which other people describe as very unnerving to see my eyes doing. I can move my eyes independently of each other like a gecko, too, a skill I developed via deliberate practi... (read more)

In fact, the photoreceptors of the Human eye aresomewhat sensitive to near-ultraviolet, but the natural lens screens these out to protect the retina. Older artificial lens replacements sometimes didn’t, and individuals with such a lens (and the rare individual without a lens) sometimes reported seeing near-ultraviolet as a blue-white or purplish color.

Neat!

Also striking in that I see an extra color past the violet end of a natural sun-lit rainbow (as compared to e.g. photographs or artistic renderings of a rainbow, which omit the last color) — and yep, blu... (read more)