hawkebia

Playing with DALL·E 2

"end of the world" images make me wonder if Dall-E thinks the world is flat

Replying toThe Opposite Of Autism

The Opposite Of Autism

Interesting. Though I think extremes represent fewer degrees of freedom; where certain traits/characteristics dominate, and heuristics can better model behaviour. The "typical" person has all the different traits pushing/pulling, and so fewer variables you can ignore. i.e. the typical person might be more representative of hard-mode.

Replying toThe Opposite Of Autism

The Ontics and The Decouplers

The Opposite Of Autism

I think identifying the blind spots of the typical AI engineer/architect is an interesting and potentially important goal. Though I'm not sure I follow the reasoning behind identifying the opposite as the path to "modeling the desires of the typical person."?

I think investigating this would be of interest to people working in AI alignment and whose ultimate goal and whose ultimate goal is improving the condition of humanity in general. Understanding the needs and wants of the subset of humans most unlike themselves would likely help in modeling the desires of the typical person.

Isn't that better and more easily accomplished by identifying the median person i.e. in what way is the typical AI engineer different from the general population, and adjusting for that?

Alternatively, one could find what is complementary to autism rather than the opposite of autism; assuming those are not necessarily the same. People who may be attracted to and good at roles/professions like people management, team sports, therapists etc.

I recently came across the posts which underpin the usage of "decoupling" within the rationalist community. While useful, I think they conflate a distinct approach to how people think and communicate, which I call Onticism, with Decoupling.

ontic /ˈɒntɪk/ adjective PHILOSOPHY
relating to entities and the facts about them;
relating to real as opposed to phenomenal existence.

The two posts are Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy by John Nert, and Decoupling vs Contextualising Norms by Chris Leong.

Here are the descriptions of two styles of conversation from Chris' piece:

Decoupling norms: It is considered eminently reasonable to require the truth of your claims to be considered in isolation - free of any potential implications. An insistence on raising

... (read 1564 more words →)

Replying toIs there a link between Immigration Policy and Inflation?

Is there a link between Immigration Policy and Inflation?

So trying to see what effect immigration has on inflation is fundamentally misguided - if immigration increases supply, which one might think would reduce prices, it's entirely possible that the government will react by creating more money, undoing this effect, since they can now do so without inflation going up.

This remains my primary question i.e. I definitely wouldn't think immigration is the only thing that creates inflation. But if we think its possible that immigration can impact price, then understanding if and how it could create "inflationary pressure" or "inflationary relief" would be quite useful to understand. Even if the government undoes it with other policies.

So, did the steadily declining immigration rate... (read more)

Is there a link between Immigration Policy and Inflation?

Future ML Systems Will Be Qualitatively Different

Inflation theories tend to cause a lot of debate, and the few responses I've gotten from economists on this question have been variations of "probably not". Hoping people here have access to good quality heterodox research and studies that give a slightly better answer one way or another. My Google efforts have failed so far.

The conventional position on rising inflation as I understand it is:

Something causes Aggregate Demand to rise, or Aggregate Supply to drop, or both, for some sustained period, causing an increase in prices.

This "something" could be increased money supply or some policy which raises consumption, and therefore Aggregate Demand. If production cannot keep up with this increased demand, prices... (read 436 more words →)

Replying toFuture ML Systems Will Be Qualitatively Different

hawkebia4y*

Heuristics explain some of the failure to predict emergent behaviours. Much of Engineering relies on "perfect is the enemy of good" thinking. But, extremely tiny errors and costs, especially the non-fungible types, compound and interfere at scale. One lesson may be that as our capacity to model and build complex systems improves, we simultaneously reduce the number of heuristics employed.

Material physical systems do use thresholds, but they don't completely ignore tiny values (eg. neurotransmitter molecules don't just disappear at low potential levels).

Replying toCapturing Uncertainty in Prediction Markets

What is being lost is related to your intuition in the earlier comment:

if the market is 49.9 / 50.1 in millions of dollars, then you can be fairly confident that 50% is the "right" price.

Without knowing how many people of the "I've studied this subject, and still don't think a reasonable prediction is possible" variety didn't participate in the market, it's very hard to place any trust in it being the "right" price.

This is similar to the "pundit" problem where you are only hearing from the most opinionated people. If 60 nutritionist are on TV and writing papers saying eating fats is bad, you may try to draw the "wrong" conclusion from... (read more)

Replying toCapturing Uncertainty in Prediction Markets

All these indicators are definitely useful for a market observer. And betting on these indicators would make for an interesting derivatives market - especially on higher volume questions. The issue I was referring to is that all these indicators are still only based on traders who felt certain enough to bet on the market.

Say 100 people who have researched East-Asian geopolitics saw the question "Will China invade Taiwan this year?". 20 did not feel confident enough to place a bet. Of the remaining 80 people, 20 bet small amounts because of their lack of certainty.

The market and most of the indicators you mentioned would be dominated by the 60 that placed large... (read more)

Replying toCapturing Uncertainty in Prediction Markets

First, I want to dispute the statement that a 50% is uninformative. It can be very informative depending on value of the outcomes.

Yes, absolutely. 50% can be incredibly useful. Unfortunately, it also represents the "I don't know" calibration option in most prediction markets. A market at 50% for "Will we discover a civilization ending asteroid in the next 50 years?" would be cause for much concern.

Is the market really saying that discovering this asteroid is essentially a coin flip with 1:1 odds? More likely it just represents the entire market saying "I don't know". It's these types of 50% that are considered useless, but I think do still convey information - especially... (read more)

I've been trying to make sense of what a 50% prediction means. Does it convey different meanings based on the question asked, and is it really as uninformative as it's made out to be. As a part of that discussion, I believe there is a possible solution to two big problems prediction markets currently face.

How to extract useful signal from 50% predictions
How to incentivize those with low certainty to participate

Predictions tend to be comprised of two steps:

What do I believe is going to happen?
How certain am I?

There are many cases where even if one has a sense of what is going to happen, there is little to no certainty that it will.... (read 510 more words →)

Replying toNon-Fungible Costs

Non-Fungible Costs

I think there is a certain "cost amnesia" that sets in after a "good" decision? Even for fairly large costs. So the "indistinguishability blindness" is often a cognitive response to maintain the image of a good decision rather than determined by hard numbers.

Regardless, this is likely entering speculation territory. It's something I'd noticed in my own life as well as in policy decisions i.e. a negative reaction to talking about fairly large costs because net-benefits were still positive.

Non-Fungible Costs