All of gbear605's Comments + Replies

I haven't read Fossil Future, but it sounds like he's ignoring the option of combining solar and wind with batteries (and other types of electrical storage, like pumped water). The technology is available today and can be more easily deployed than fossil fuels at this point.

Parts of this are easily falsifiable through the fact that organ transplant recipients sometimes get donor’s memories and preferences

The citation is to an unreputable journal. Some of their sources might have basis (though a lot of them also seem unreputable), but I wouldn't take this at face value. 

There can also be meaning that the author simply didn't intend. In biblical interpretation, for instance, there have been many different (and conflicting!) interpretations given to texts that were written with a completely different intent. One reader reads the story of Adam and Eve as a text that supports feminism, another reader sees the opposite, and the original writer didn't intend to give either meaning. But both readers still get those meanings from the text.

Interestingly, it apparently used to be Zebra, but is now Zulu. I'm not sure why they switched over, but it seems to be the predominant choice since the early 1950s. 

I understand that definition, which is why I’m confused for why you brought up the behavior of bacteria as evidence for why bacteria has experience. I don’t think any non-animals have experience, and I think many animals (like sponges) also don’t. As I see it, bacteria are more akin to natural chemical reactions than they are to humans.

I brought up the simulation of a bacteria because an atom-for-atom simulation of a bacteria is completely identical to a bacteria - the thing that has experience is represented in the atoms of the bacteria, so a perfect simulation of a bacteria must also internally experience things.

If bacteria have experience, then I see no reason to say that a computer program doesn’t have experience. If you want to say that a bacteria has experience based on guesses from its actions, then why not say that a computer program has experience based on its words?

From a different angle, suppose that we have a computer program that can perfectly simulate a bacteria. Does that bacteria have experience? I don’t see any reason why not, since it will demonstrate all the same ability to act on intention. And if so, then why couldn’t a different computer progra... (read more)

If you look far enough back in time, humans are are descended from animals akin to sponges that seem to me like they couldn’t possibly have experience. They don’t even have neurons. If you go back even further we’re the descendants of single celled organisms that absolutely don’t have experience. But at some point along the line, animals developed the ability to have experience. If you believe in a higher being, then maybe it introduced it, or maybe some other metaphysical cause, but otherwise it seems like qualia has to arise spontaneously from the evolut... (read more)

Nit: "if he does that then Caplan won't get paid back, even if Caplin wins the bet" misspells "Caplan" in the second instance.

Cable companies are forcing you to pay for channels you don’t want. Cable companies are using unbundling to mislead customers and charge extra for basic channels everyone should have.

I think this would be more acceptable if either everything was bundled or nothing was. But generally speaking companies bundle channels that few people want, to give the appearance of a really good deal, and unbundle the really popular channels (like sports channels) to profit. So you sign up for a TV package that has "hundreds of channels", but you get lots of channels that you don't care about and none of the channels you really want. You're screwed both ways.

I think you're totally spot on about ChatGPT and near term LLMs. The technology is still super far away from anything that could actually replace a programmer because of all of the complexities involved.

Where I think you go wrong is looking at the long term future AIs. As a black box, at work I take in instructions on Slack (text), look at the existing code and documentation (text), and produce merge requests, documentation, and requests for more detailed requirements (text). Nothing there requires some essentially human element - the AI just needs to be g... (read more)

Prediction market on whether the lawsuit will succeed:

https://manifold.markets/Gabrielle/will-the-justice-department-win-its

I’m not a legal expert, but I expect that this sort of lawsuit, involving coordination between multiple states’ attorneys general and the department of justice, would take months of planning and would have to have started before public-facing products like ChatGPT were even released.

The feared outcome looks something like this:

• A paperclip manufacturing company puts an AI in charge of optimizing its paperclip production.
• The AI optimizes the factory and then realizes that it could make more paperclips by turning more factories into paperclips. To do that, it has to be in charge of those factories, and humans won’t let it do that. So it needs to take control of those factories by force, without humans being able to stop it.
• The AI develops a super virus that will be an epidemic to wipe out humanity.
• The AI contacts a genetics lab and

We're worried about AI getting too powerful, but logically that means humans are getting too powerful, right?

One of the big fears with AI alignment is that the latter doesn't logically proceed from the first. If you're trying to create an AI that makes paperclips and then it kills all humans because it wasn't aligned (with any human's actual goals), it was powerful in a way that no human was. You do definitely need to worry about what goal the AI is aligned with, but even more important than that is ensuring that you can align an AI to any human's preferences, or else the worry about which goal is pointless.

The Flynn effect isn't really meaningful outside of IQ tests. Most medieval and early modern peasants were uneducated and didn't know much about the world far from their home, but they definitely weren't dumb. If you look at the actual techniques they used to run their farms, they're very impressive and require a good deal of knowledge and fairly abstract thinking to do optimally, which they often did. 

Also, many of the weaving patterns that they've been doing for thousands of years are very complex, much more complex than a basic knitting stitch.

• At least 90% of internet users could solve it within one minute.

While I understand the reasoning behind this bar, having a bar greater than something like 99.99% of internet users is strongly discriminatory and regressive. Captchas are used to gate parts of the internet that are required for daily life. For instance, almost all free email services require filling out captchas, and many government agencies now require you to have an email address to interact with them. A bar that cuts out a meaningful number of humans means that those humans become unable t... (read more)

Workers at a business are generally more aligned with each other than they are with the shareholders of the business. For example, if the company is debating a policy that has a 51% chance of doubling profit and a 49% chance of bankrupting the company, I would expect most shareholders to be in favor (since it's positive EV for them). But for worker-owners, that's a 49% chance of losing their job and a 51% chance of increasing salary but not doubling (since it's profit that is doubling, not revenue, and their salaries are part of the expenses), so I would e... (read more)

I think the biggest issue in software development is the winner-takes-all position with many internet businesses. For the business to survive, you have to take the whole market, which means you need to have lots of capital to expand quickly, which means you need venture capital. It's the same problem that self-funded startups have. People generally agree that self-funded startups are better to work at, but they can't grow quite as fast as VC-funded startups and lose the race. But that doesn't apply outside of the software sphere (which is why VC primarily ... (read more)

So Diplomacy is not a computationally complex game, it's a game about out-strategizing your opponents where roughly all of the strategy is convincing other of your opponents to work with you. There are no new tactics to invent and an AI can't really see deeper into the game than other players, it just has to be more persuasive and make decisions about the right people at the right time. You often have to do things like plan ahead to make your actions so that in a future turn someone else will choose to ally with you. The AI didn't do any specific psycholog... (read more)

 What does this picture [pale blue dot] make you think about?

This one in particular seems unhelpful, since the picture is only meaningful if the viewer knows what it's a photo of. Sagan's description of it does a lot to imbue so much emotion into it.

That seems like a really limiting definition of intelligence. Stephen Hawking, even when he was very disabled, was certainly intelligent. However, his ability to be agentic was only possible thanks to the technology he relied on (his wheelchair and his speaking device). If that had been taken away from him, he would no longer have had any ability to alter the future, but he would certainly still have been just as intelligent. 

A mitigating factor for the criminality is that smarter people are usually less in need of committing crimes. Society values conventional intelligence and usually will pay well for it, so someone who is smarter will tend to get better jobs and make more money, so they won't need to resort to crime (especially petty crime).

My understanding of Spanish (also not a Spanish speaker) is that it's a palatal nasal /ɲ/, not a palatalized alveolar nasal /nʲ/. With a palatal nasal, you're making the sound with the tip of your tongue at the soft palate (the soft part at the top of your mouth, behind the alveolar ridge). With a palatalized nasal, it's a "secondary" articulation, with the body of your tongue moving to the soft palate.

That said, the Spanish ñ is a good example of a palatal or palatalized sound for an English speaker.

Yeah, that's absolutely more correct, but it is at least a little helpful for a monolingual English speaker to understand what palatalization is.

Not sure I can explain it in text to a native English speaker what palatalization is; you would need to hear actual examples.

There are some examples in English. It's not quite the same as how Slavic languages work*, but it's close enough to get the idea: If you compare "cute" and "coot", the "k" sound in "cute" is palatalized while the "k" sound in "coot" is not. Another example would be "feud" and "food".

British vs American English differ sometimes in palatalization. For instance, in British English (RP), "tube" is pronounced with a palatalized "t" ... (read more)

The risk is a good point given some of the uncertainties we’re dealing with right now. I’d estimate maybe 1% risk of those per year (more weighted towards the latter half of the time frame, but I’ll assume that it’s constant), so perhaps with a discounting rate of that it would need to be more like $1400. That’s still much less than the assumption.

Looking at my consumption right now, I objectively would not spend the $1000 on something that lasts for more than 30 years, so I believe that shouldn’t be relevant. To make this more direct, we could phrase it as something like “a $1000 vacation now or a $1400 vacation in 30 years”, though that ignores consumption offsetting.

For the point about smoothing consumption, does that actually work given that retirement savings are usually invested and are expected to give returns higher than inflation? For instance, my current savings plan means that although my income is going to go up, and my amount saved will go up proportionally, the majority of my money when I retire will be from early in my career. 

For a more specific example, consider two situations where I'm working until I'm 65 and have returns of 6% per annum (and taking all dollar amounts to be inflation adjusted):

• I s

if I put things in my cart, don't check out, and come back the next day, I'm going to be frustrated if the site has forgotten my selections!

Ironically, I get frustrated by the inverse of this. If I put something in my shopping cart, I definitely don’t still want it tomorrow. I keep on accidentally having items that I don’t want in my order when I check out, and then I have to go back through all the order steps to remove the item (since there’s hardly ever a removal button from the credit card screen). It’s so frustrating! I don’t want you to remember things about me from previous days, just get rid of it all.

A single human is always going to have a risk of a sudden mental break, or perhaps simply not having been trustworthy in the first place. So it seems to me like a system where the most knowledgeable person has the single decision is always going to be somewhat more risky than a situation where that most knowledgeable person also has to double check with literally anyone else. If you make sure that the two people are always together, it doesn’t hurt anything (other than the salary for that person, I suppose, but that’s negligible).

For political reasons, we ... (read more)

The policy could just be “at least one person has to agree with the President to launch the nuclear arsenal”. It probably doesn’t change the game that much, but it at least gets rid of the possible risk that the President has a sudden mental break and decides to launch missiles for no reason. Notably it doesn’t hurt the ability to respond to an attack, since in that situation there would undoubtedly be at least one aide willing to agree, presumably almost all of them.

Actually consulting with the aide isn’t necessary, just an extra button press to ensure that something completely crazy doesn’t happen.

What I’m referring to is the two-man rule: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule

US military policy requires that for a nuclear weapon to actually be launched, two people at the silo or on the submarine have to coordinate to launch the missile. The decision still comes from a single person (the President), but the people who follow out the order have to be double checked, so that a single crazy serviceman doesn’t launch a missile.

It wouldn’t be crazy for the President to require a second person to help make the decision, since the President is going ... (read more)

In the case of nuclear weapons, they infamously have been made to require two individuals to both press the button (or turn the key) to launch the missile. Even if some situations aren’t currently setup like that, they certainly all could be made to require at least two people.

For the "Will Russia use chemical or biological weapons in 2022?" question, the creator provided information about an ambiguous outcome, though it seems very subjective:

If, when the question closes, there is widespread reporting that Russia did the attacks and there is not much reported doubt, then I will resolve YES. If it seems ambiguous I will either resolve as N/A or at a percentage that I think is reasonable. (Eg. resolve at 33% if I think there’s a 2/3 chance that the attacks were false flag attacks.) This of course would also go the other way if there are supposed Ukrainian attacks that are widely believed to be caused by Russia.

In my experience, paying for the extra seat room often gives you a seat that doesn’t actually have more legroom, or actually have less (!!) legroom. when the payment is so disconnected from the actual experience, it becomes useless as a signal.

Doing some research, it sounds like imposters syndrome is totally present among mountain climbers. Unless you’ve conquered Everest, there’s always some taller or more dangerous mountain that someone else has done.

See, for instance, this article about a climber feeling imposters syndrome after climbing a difficult cliff, because “I felt like it must not be as hard as people said it was because I was able to do it.” It also quotes a psychologist who works with athletes as saying “Imposter syndrome is very common, very pervasive, ... It’s most common among hi... (read more)

I’m more familiar with DALL-E 2 than with Midjourney, so I’ll assume that they have the same shortcomings. If not, feel free to ignore this. It seems like there are still some crucial details that cause problems with AI art that will prevent it from being used for many types of art that will probably soon be fixed, and that’s why I would say “on the cusp” rather than “it’s already here”. I think the biggest issue for your example with Magic cards, there’s a certain level of art style consistency between the cards in a set that is necessary. From my experie... (read more)

Just a note on 1.: the LessWrong upvote system allows strong upvoting and upvotes from users with more karma update the total more. Seeing eight karma on a post doesn’t mean too much since it could be just from one or two people.

A lot of city dwellers then were doing manual labor (factory lines, construction), but I’m really not sure about the office workers from them. It’s a good question!

Hm, this was mostly anecdotal from speaking to German friends (including people in Munich!), so I guess I was speaking too generally. Certainly more people drink bottled water in Germany at restaurants compared to many other countries, but I see that I was overstating the case for at home.

Per Jeffrey L. Singman, Daily Life in Medieval Europe, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999, P. 54 - 55 (and text copied from https://stores.renstore.com/food-and-drink/dietary-requirements-of-a-medieval-peasant), “A prosperous English peasant in the 14th century would probably consume 2 - 3 pounds of [rye, oats, or barley] bread, 8 ounces of meat or fish or other protein and 2 - 3 pints of ale per day”, which works out to about 3500 to 5000 calories per day.

That same page lists various farm chores as burning 1500-7500 calories over an 8 hour perio... (read more)

Farm laborers historically ate a lot of calories just to be able to get through their days. Their calories weren’t very appetizing, but they had to eat a lot because they burned a lot.

In German, the tap water is known to be very hard, so essentially no one drinks tap water. Instead, it's common to drink alcoholic beverages (brewed, so they don't have the same mineral level) or bottled mineral water. The mineral water does contain some lithium (and some mineral waters contain very high levels), but most bottled water in Germany does not have very high levels of lithium. In this study, the "medium" sample was 171 µg/L while the "high lithium" sample was 1724 µg/L. So people who generally drink the high lithium bottled water would be at the lower end of SMTM's guesses, and everyone else would be safely outside of it.

Unfortunately, that question was set up poorly so that it is impossible to guess lower than a median of $5010. Of course, that's because the actual price of ETH was around $4800 back in November 2021, so the predictors are basically saying that it won't recover to that price by the end of 2022.

I'm not super familiar, but I just read the one page summary of the report. One of the supposed catalysts for $150k was EIP1559, which went into effect last August and didn't seem to affect the price. The other catalyst was supposed to be PoS coming shortly after, which has been continually delayed (though probably coming soon) and will have had a much longer gap after EIP1559. ETH HODLing seems to not be significant as expected, so that's another driver that has failed. The narrative also isn't there, and the recent crypto crashes are working against it. ... (read more)

I suspect most people that would say that they wouldn't kill Grandma would also say the same about a situation where they can kill someone else's grandma to give the money to their own family. Actually, in the hypothetical, you're not one of Grandma's heirs, so I interpreted it as if you're some random person who happens to be around Grandma, not one of her actual grandchildren.

So really, I think that it is either something like "the moral weight of the person next to me versus distant strangers" or "choosing to kill someone is fundamentally different than choosing to save someone's life and you can't add them up". 

California introduced the CCPA following the GDPR, which covers a lot of the same regulations although generally less strict.

It seems to me that the only thing that seems possible is to treat it like a human that took inspiration from many sources. In the vast majority of cases, the sources of the artwork are not obvious to any viewer (and the algorithm cannot tell you one). Moreover, any given created piece is really the combination of the millions of pieces of the art that the AI has seen, just like how a human takes inspiration from all of the pieces that it has seen. So it seems most similar to the human category, not the simple manipulations (because it isn’t a simple manip... (read more)