Isaac King

LESSWRONG
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Isaac King — LessWrong

9mo

And They're Currently Being Cracked

(A crosspost of Humans are Insecure Password Generators)

Any password longer than 12 characters or so is invulnerable to brute force attacks. So why do so many longer ones keep getting breached?

Because humans don't pick passwords randomly; we tend to pick ones that are easy to think of and easy to remember. This tendency can be exploited; attackers can identify passwords that are more likely than others and try those first.

The best way to think about this is that humans are picking passwords from some underlying distribution; a distribution that is not uniform across all possible strings of characters.^[1]

Any time you're trying to find a specific value from a... (read 1326 more words →)

Isaac King's Shortform

Isaac King

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?

Isaac King

There's a popular story that goes like this: Christopher Hitchens used to be in favor of the US waterboarding terrorists because he thought it wasn't bad enough to be considered torture. Then he had it tried on himself, and changed his mind, coming to believe it is torture and should not be performed.

(Context for those unfamiliar: in the ~decade following 9/11, the US engaged in a lot of... questionable behavior to prosecute the war on terror, and there was a big debate on whether waterboarding should be permitted. Many other public figures also volunteered to undergo the procedure as a part of this public debate; most notably Sean Hannity, who was an... (read 1930 more words →)

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In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part

Isaac King

This is a linkpost for In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part.

Michael Huemer writes about why he believes it’s wrong for lawyers to pursue unjust legal outcomes.

It's a good article, and one of the best defenses of this position I've seen. Still, I think this argument is mistaken. The reason why we require lawyers to fight for "their side" even if they believe they're in the wrong is to minimize the opportunity for bias.

Imagine if all trials were bench trials, decided by only one person as the judge. Even if they're taught to be as objective as possible, there would still be significant concerns about unconscious bias. One person only has one... (read 2408 more words →)

Mistakes people make when thinking about units

Isaac King

This is a linkpost for Parker Dimensional Analysis. Probably a little elementary for LessWrong, but I think it may still contain a few novel insights, particularly in the last section about Verison's error.

A couple years ago, there was an interesting clip on MSNBC.

A few weeks later, Matt Parker came out with a video analyzing why people tend to make mistakes like this. Now I'm normally a huge fan of Matt Parker. But in this case, I think he kinda dropped the ball.

He does have a very good insight. He realizes that people are treating the "million" as a unit, removing it from the numbers before performing the calculation, then putting it back... (read 2019 more words →)

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Duct Tape security

Isaac King

This is a linkpost for On Duct Tape and Fence Posts.

Eliezer writes about fence post security. When people think to themselves "in the current system, what's the weakest point?", and then dedicate their resources to shoring up the defenses at that point, not realizing that after the first small improvement in that area, there's likely now a new weakest point somewhere else.

Fence post security happens preemptively, when the designers of the system fixate on the most salient aspect(s) and don't consider the rest of the system. But this sort of fixation can also happen in retrospect, in which case it manifest a little differently but has similarly deleterious effects.

Consider a car that... (read 1269 more words →)

An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect

Isaac King

This is a linkpost for An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect.

Like anyone with a passing interest in ~~Kerbal Space Program~~ physics and spaceflight, I eventually came across the Oberth Effect. It's a very important effect, crucial to designing efficient trajectories for any rocket ship. And yet, I couldn't understand it.

Wikipedia's explanation focuses on how kinetic energy is proportional to the square of the speed, and therefore more energy is gained from a change in speed at a higher speed. I'm sure this is true, but it's not particularly helpful; simply memorizing formulae is not what leads to understanding of a phenomenon. You have to know what the numbers mean, how... (read 1680 more words →)

Stop talking about p(doom)

Isaac King

Epistemic status: Complete speculation, somewhat informed by copious arguing about the subject on Twitter.

As AI risk has moved into the mainstream over the past few years, I've come to believe that "p(doom)" is an actively harmful term for X-risk discourse, and people trying to mitigate X-risk should stop using it entirely.

Ambiguity

The first problem is that it's unclear what is actually being discussed. "p(doom)" can refer to many different things:

p(AI kills us within 5-10 years)
p(AI kills us within 80-200 years)
p(conditional on AGI, we die shortly afterwards)
p(conditional on superintelligence, we die shortly afterwards)
Like 10 other things.^[1]

These could have wildly different probabilities, and come along with different cruxes for disagreement. Depending on what specific "doom"... (read 807 more words →)

Understanding Subjective Probabilities

Isaac King

This is a linkpost for https://outsidetheasylum.blog/understanding-subjective-probabilities/. It's intended as an introduction to practical Bayesian probability for those who are skeptical of the notion. I plan to keep the primary link up to date with improvements and corrections, but won't do the same with this LessWrong post, so see there for the most recent version.

Any time a controversial prediction about the future comes up, there's a type of interaction that's pretty much guaranteed to happen.

Alice: "I think this thing is 20% likely to occur."
Bob: "Huh? How could you know that. You just made that number up!".

Or in Twitterese:

That is, any time someone attempts to provide a specific numerical probability on a future event,... (read 2849 more words →)

FTL travel summary

Isaac King

I started writing this 2 years ago, got bored, and never finished. Posting it now just to get it out of my drafts.

Desirability of fast travel

If a superintelligent AI gains power over the physical world, it's very likely to want to expand its influence quickly. This is most obvious for a misaligned SAI such as a paperclip maximizer; if it has a utility function that rewards it for making as many paperclips in a short time frame, it will want to gain access to as large a portion of the universe as possible in a short time.

Perfectly aligned (or only slightly misaligned) SAIs will also want to expand quickly. Even setting aside... (read 701 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?

List of Probability Calibration Exercises

Duct Tape security

Mistakes people make when thinking about units

Isaac King

Isaac King

Humans are Insecure Password Generators

Isaac King's Shortform

Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?

In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part

Mistakes people make when thinking about units

Duct Tape security

An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect

Isaac King

Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?

List of Probability Calibration Exercises

Duct Tape security

Mistakes people make when thinking about units

Isaac King

Isaac King

Humans are Insecure Password Generators

Isaac King's Shortform

Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?

In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part

Mistakes people make when thinking about units

Duct Tape security

An Actually Intuitive Explanation of the Oberth Effect

Ambiguity

Desirability of fast travel