jimrandomh

LessWrong developer, rationalist since the Overcoming Bias days. Jargon connoisseur.

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There's been a lot of previous interest in indoor CO2 in the rationality community, including an (unsuccessful) CO2 stripper project, some research summaries and self experiments. The results are confusing, I suspect some of the older research might be fake. But I noticed something that has greatly changed how I think about CO2 in relation to cognition.

Exhaled air is about 50kPPM CO2. Outdoor air is about 400ppm; indoor air ranges from 500 to 1500ppm depending on ventilation. Since exhaled air has CO2 about two orders of magnitude larger than the variance in room CO2, if even a small percentage of inhaled air is reinhalation of exhaled air, this will have a significantly larger effect than changes in ventilation. I'm having trouble finding a straight answer about what percentage of inhaled air is rebreathed (other than in the context of mask-wearing), but given the diffusivity of CO2, I would be surprised if it wasn't at least 1%.

This predicts that a slight breeze, which replaces their in front of your face and prevents reinhalation, would have a considerably larger effect than ventilating an indoor space where the air is mostly still. This matches my subjective experience of indoor vs outdoor spaces, which, while extremely confounded, feels like an air-quality difference larger than CO2 sensors would predict.

This also predicts that a small fan, positioned so it replaces the air in front of my face, would have a large effect on the same axis as improved ventilation would. I just set one up. I don't know whether it's making a difference but I plan to leave it there for at least a few days.

(Note: CO2 is sometimes used as a proxy for ventilation in contexts where the thing you actually care about is respiratory aerosol, because it affects transmissibility of respiratory diseases like COVID and influenza. This doesn't help with that at all and if anything would make it worse.)

I'm reading you to be saying that you think on its overt purpose this policy is bad, but ineffective, and the covert reason of testing the ability of the US federal government to regulate AI is worth the information cost of a bad policy.

I think preventing the existence of deceptive deepfakes would be quite good (if it would work); audio/video recording has done wonders for accountability in all sorts of contexts, and it's going to be terrible to suddenly have every recording subjected to reasonable doubt. I think preventing the existence of AI-generated fictional-character-only child pornography is neutral-ish (I'm uncertain of the sign of its effect on rates of actual child abuse).

There's an open letter at https://openletter.net/l/disrupting-deepfakes. I signed, but with caveats, which I'm putting here.

Background context is that I participated in building the software platform behind the letter, without a specific open letter in hand. It has mechanisms for sorting noteworthy signatures to the top, and validating signatures for authenticity. I expect there to be other open letters in the future, and I think this is an important piece of civilizational infrastructure.

I think the world having access to deepfakes, and deepfake-porn technology in particular, is net bad. However, the stakes are small compared to the upcoming stakes with superintelligence, which has a high probability of killing literally everyone.

If translated into legislation, I think what this does is put turnkey-hosted deepfake porn generation, as well as pre-tuned-for-porn model weights, into a place very similar to where piracy is today. Which is to say: The Pirate Bay is illegal, wget is not, and the legal distinction is the advertised purpose.

(Where non-porn deepfakes are concerned, I expect them to try a bit harder at watermarking, still fail, and successfully defend themselves legally on the basis that they tried.)

The analogy to piracy goes a little further. If laws are passed, deepfakes will be a little less prevalent than they would otherwise be, there won't be above-board businesses around it... and there will still be lots of it. I don't think there-being-lots-of-it can be prevented by any feasible means. The benefit of this will be the creation of common knowledge that the US federal government's current toolkit is not capable of holding back AI development and access, even when it wants to.

I would much rather they learn that now, when there's still a nonzero chance of building regulatory tools that would function, rather than later.

I went to an Apple store for a demo, and said: the two things I want to evaluate are comfort, and use as an external monitor. I brought a compatible laptop (a Macbook Pro). They replied that the demo was highly scripted, and they weren't allowed to let me do that. I went through their scripted demo. It was worse than I expected. I'm not expecting Apple to take over the VR headset market any time soon.

Bias note: Apple is intensely, uniquely totalitarian over software that runs on iPhones and iPads, in a way I find offensive, not just in a sense of not wanting to use it, but also in a sense of not wanting it to be permitted in the world. They have brought this model with them to Vision Pro, and for this reason I am rooting for them to fail.

I think most people evaluating the Vision Pro have not tried Meta's Quest Pro and Quest 3, and are comparing it to earlier-generation headsets. They used an external battery pack and still managed to come in heavier than the Quest 3, which has the battery built in. The screen and passthrough look better, but I don't think this is because Apple has any technology that Meta doesn't; I think the difference is entirely explained by Apple having used more-expensive and heavier versions of commodity parts, which implies that if this is a good tradeoff, then their lead will only last for one generation at most. (In particular, the display panel is dual-sourced from Sony and LG, not made in-house.)

I tried to type "lesswrong.com" into the address bar of Safari using the two-finger hand tracking keyboard. I failed. I'm not sure whether the hand-tracking was misaligned with the passthrough camera, or just had an overzealous autocomplete that was unable to believe that I wanted a "w" instead of an "e", but I gave up after five tries and used the eye-tracking method instead.

During the demo, one of the first things they showed me was a SBS photo with the camera pitched down thirty degrees. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but it's something that rules out there being a clueful person behind the scenes. There's a preexisting 3D-video market (both porn and non-porn), and it's small and struggling. One of the problems it's struggling with, is that SBS video is very restrictive about what you can do with the camera; in particular, it's bad to move the camera, because that causes vestibular mismatch, and it's bad to tilt the camera, because that makes it so that gravity is pointing the wrong way. A large fraction of 3D-video content fails to follow these restrictions, and that makes it very upleasant to watch. If Apple can't even enforce the camerawork guidelines on the first few minutes of its in-store demo, then this bodes very poorly for the future content on the platform.

I have only skimmed the early parts of the Rootclaim videos, and the first ~half of Daniel Filan's tweet thread about it. So it's possible this was discussed somewhere in there, but there's something major that doesn't sit right with me:

In the first month of the pandemic, I was watching the news about it. I remember that the city government of Wuhan attempted to conceal the fact that there was a pandemic. I remember Li Wenliang being punished for speaking about it. I remember that reliable tests to determine whether someone had COVID were extremely scarce. I remember the US CDC publishing a paper absurdly claiming that the attack rate was near zero, because they wouldn't count infections unless they had a positive test, and then refused to test people who hadn't travelled to Wuhan. I remember Chinese whistleblowers visiting hospitals and filming the influx of patients.

It appears to me that all evidence for the claim that the virus originated in the wet market pass through Chinese government sources. And it appears to me that those same sources were unequipped to do effective contact tracing, and executing a coverup. When a coverup was no longer possible, the incentive would have been to confidently identify an origin, even if they had no idea what the true origin was; and they could easily create the impression that it started in any place they chose, simply by focusing their attention there, since cases would be found no matter where they focused.

Imo this comment is lowering the quality of the discourse. Like, if I steelman and expand what you're saying, it seems like you're trying to say something like "this response is pinging a deceptiveness-heuristic that I can't quite put my finger on". That phrasing adds information, and would prompt other commenters to evaluate and either add evidence of deceptiveness, or tell you you're false-positiving, or something like that. But your actual phrasing doesn't do that, it's basically name calling.

So, mod note: I strong-downvoted your comment and decided to leave it at that. Consider yourself frowned at.

There's a big difference between arguing that someone shouldn't be able to stay anonymous, and unilaterally posting names. Arguing against allowing anonymity (without posting names) would not have been against the rules. But, we're definitely not going to re-derive the philosophy of when anonymity should and shouldn't be allowed, after names are already posted. The time to argue for an exception was beforehand, not after the fact.

jimrandomh3moModerator Comment4331

We (the LW moderation team) have given Roko a one-week site ban and an indefinite post/topic ban for attempted doxing. We have deleted all comments that revealed real names, and ask that everyone respect the privacy of the people involved.

Genetically altering IQ is more or less about flipping a sufficient number of IQ-decreasing variants to their IQ-increasing counterparts. This sounds overly simplified, but it’s surprisingly accurate; most of the variance in the genome is linear in nature, by which I mean the effect of a gene doesn’t usually depend on which other genes are present. 

So modeling a continuous trait like intelligence is actually extremely straightforward: you simply add the effects of the IQ-increasing alleles to to those of the IQ-decreasing alleles and then normalize the score relative to some reference group.

If the mechanism of most of these genes is that their variants push something analogous to a hyperparameter in one direction or the other, and the number of parameters is much smaller than the number of genes, then this strategy will greatly underperform the simulated prediction. This is because the cumulative effect of flipping all these genes will be to move hyperparameters towards optimal but then drastically overshoot the optimum.

I think you're modeling the audience as knowing a lot less than we do. Someone who didn't know high school chemistry and biology would be at risk of being misled, sure. But I think that stuff should be treated as a common-knowledge background. At which point, obviously, you unpack the claim to: the weakest links in a structure determine its strength, biological structures have weak links in them which are noncovalent bonds, not all of those noncovalent bonds are weak for functional reasons, some are just hard to reinforce while constrained to things made by ribosomes. The fact that most links are not the weakest links, does not refute the claim. The fact that some weak links have a functional purpose, like enabling mobility, does not refute the claim.

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