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You would be deceiving someone regarding the strength of your belief. You know your belief is far weaker than can be supported by your statement, and in our general understanding of language a simple statement like 'X is happening tonight' is interpreted as having a strong degree of belief. 

If you actually truly disagree with that, then it wouldn't be deception, it would be miscommunication, but then again I don't think someone who has trouble assessing approximate Bayesian belief from simple statements would be able to function in society at all.

A minor point, perhaps a nitpick: both biological systems and electronic ones depend on directed diffusion. In our bodies diffusion is often directed by chemical potentials, and in electronics it is directed by electric or vector potentials. It's the strength of the 'direction' versus the strength of the diffusion that makes the difference. (See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_current)

Except in superconductors, of course.

So the reason why the time value of money works, and it makes sense to say that we can say that the utility of $1000 today and $1050 in a year are about the same, is because of the existence of the wider financial system. In other words, this isn't necessarily true in a vacuum; however if I wanted $1050 in a year, I can invest the $1000 I have right now into 1 year treasuries. The converse is more complex; if I am guaranteed $1050 in a year I may not be able to get a loan for $1000 right now from a bank because I'm not the fed and loans to me have a higher... (read more)

Is the fifth requirement not a little vague, in the context of agents with external memory and/or few-shot learning? 

I haven't heard of this, but I definitely do this.

I'm not sure why you keep bringing up social media, I haven't so it's quite irrelevant to my point.

Your specific point was that LW is better than predicting

96 of the last one civil wars and two depressions

I'm curious if you just think that, or if you actually have evidence demonstrating that LW as a community has a quantifiably better track record than social media. That's completely beside my point though, since I was never talking about social media.

Regarding overconfidence, GPT-4 is actually very very well-calibrated before RLHF post-training (see paper Fig. 8). I would not be surprised if the RLHF processes imparted other biases too, perhaps even in the human direction.

How?

Edit:

Also, are you asking me for sources that people have been worried about democratic backsliding for over 5 years? I mean, sure, but I'm genuinely a little surprised that this isn't common knowledge. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C44&q=democratic+backsliding+united+states&btnG=&oq=democratic+ba

A few specific examples of both academic and non-academic articles:

• https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?handle=hein.journals/jnlodmcy28&div=82&g_sent=1&casa_token=&collection=journals
• https://heinonline.org/HOL/Pa

Remember, the "exception throwing" behavior involves taking the entire space of outcomes and splitting it into two things: "Normal" and "Error." If we say this is what we ought to do in the general case, that's basically saying this binary property is inherent in the structure of the universe. 

I think it works in the specific context of programming because for a lot of functions (in the functional context for simplicity), behaviours are essentially bimodal distributions. They are rather well behaved for some inputs, and completely misbehaving (accordi... (read more)

I'm mostly talking about academic discourse. Also, what a weird hollier than thou attitude; are you implying LW is better? In what way?

Yeah, I'm interested in why we need strong guarantees of correctness in some contexts but not others, especially if we have control over that aspect of the system we're building as well. If we have choice over how much the system itself cares about errors, then I can design the system to be more robust to failure if I want it to be.

This would make sense if we are all great programmers who are perfect. In practice, that's not the case, and from what I hear from others not even in FAANG. Because of that, it's probably much better to give errors that will sho... (read more)

I would posit that humans behave in a much more optimal manner in terms of long-run quality of life than are given credit for, excluding gambling addicts.

A lot of people who are willing to bet everything (ie. follow a linear utility function) are lower income. It is more that just that, however. Lower income people just by necessity have less savings relative to income, so losing all their savings isn't a big deal compared to work-derived income. Losing a couple months of pay sucks, but eh.

People who like to think they're being more rational by not betting... (read more)

I come from science, so heavy scientific computing bias here.

I think you're largely focusing on the wrong metric. Whether exceptions should be thrown has little to do with reliability (and indeed, exceptions can be detrimental to reliability), but instead is more related to correctness. They are not always the same thing. In a scientific computing context, for example, a program can be unreliable, with memory leaks resulting in processes often being killed by the OS, but still always give correct results when a computation actually manages to finish.

If you... (read more)

How would you experimentally realise mechanism 1? It still feels like you need an additional mechanism to capture the energy, and it doesn't necessarily seems easier to experimentally realise.

With regards to 2, you don't necessarily need a thermal bath to jump states, right? You can just emit a photon or something. Even in the limit where you can fully harvest energy, thermodynamics is fully preserved. If all the energy is thermalised, you actually cannot necessarily recover Landauer's principle; my understanding is that because of thermodynamics, even if you don't thermalise all of that energy immediately and somehow harvest it, you still can't exceed Landauer's principle.

I don't buy your ~kT argument. You can make the temperature ratio arbitrarily large, and hence the energy arbitrarily small, as far as I understand your argument.

With your model, I don't understand why the energy 'generated' when swapping isn't thermalised (lost to heat). When you drop the energy of the destination state and the particle moves from your origin to your destination state, the energy 'generated' seems analogous to that from bit erasure; after all, bit erasure is moving a particle between states (50% of the time). If you have a mechanism for h... (read more)

You descale to prevent bits of scale from chipping off into your tea. That's basically it.

The dictionary definition of consumerism is: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consumerism

1: the theory that an increasing consumption of goods is economically desirable 

also : a preoccupation with and an inclination toward the buying of consumer goods 

2 : the promotion of the consumer's interests 

This is also definition 2.1 from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumerism):

Consumerism is the selfish and frivolous collecting of products, or economic materialism. In this sense consumerism is negative and in opposition to pos

Sure, it could easily be that I'm used to it, and so it's no problem for me. It's hard to judge this kind of thing since at some level it's very subjective and quite contingent on what kind of text you're used to reading.

I genuinely don't see a difference either way, except the second one takes up more space. This is because, like I said, the abstract is just a simple list of things that are covered, things they did, and things they found. You can put it in basically any format, and as long as it's a field you're familiar with so your eyes don't glaze over from the jargon and acronyms, it really doesn't make a difference.

Or, put differently, there's essentially zero cognitive load to reading something like this because it just reads like a grocery list to me.

Regarding the ... (read more)