FWIW: a lot of my motivation (in general) stems from my love of my future children.
Adele Lopez
Karma: 501
[Question] Are the Born probabilities really that mysterious?
This gives a nice intuitive explanation for the Jeffery-Bolker rotation which basically is a way of interpreting a belief as a utility, and vice versa.
Some thoughts:
What do probabilities mean without reference to any sort of agent? Presumably it has something to do with the ability to “win” De Finetti games in expectation. For avoiding subtle anthropomorphization, it might be good to think of this sort of probability as being instantiated in a bacterium’s chemical sensor, or something like that. And in this setting, it’s clear it wouldn’t mean anything without the context of the bacterium. Going further, it seems to me like the only mechanism which makes this mean anything is the fact that it helps make the bacterium “exist more” i.e. reproduce and thrive. So I think having a probability mean a probability inherently requires some sort of self-propagation—it means something if it’s part of why it exists. This idea can be taken to an even deeper level, where according to Zureck you can get the Born probabilities by looking at what quantum states allow information to persist through time (from within the system).
Does this imply anything about the difficulty of value learning? An AGI will be able to make accurate models of the world, so it will have the raw algorithms needed to do value learning… the hard part seems to be, as usual, pointing to the “correct” values. Not sure this helps with that so much.
A bounded agent creating a model will have to make decisions about how much detail to model various aspects of the world in. Can we use this idea to “factor” out that sort of trade-off as part of the utility function?
Basically, you move your arm around until you get to a position where it starts to hurt (or hurts more). Then you try to find a spot with your other hand where if you apply a shear force, the pain goes away when you try to move again.
It doesn’t, you’re of course allowed to write your own rebuttal, but a newspaper has no legal obligation to print it (or to print any particular thing AFAIK), and there’s no culture of doing so either.
Also, having random peptides along with an adjuvant (which triggers an immune response) might be risky even in cases where those random peptides are otherwise completely safe.
Alright, so the thing that antibodies are “trained” to detect is called an epitope. On page 23 of the white paper, it says:
VED might arise through vaccine design-induced distortion of viral epitopes, as has been proposed to occur by formalin treatment of RSV. a. Our preferred epitope type is synthetic peptides. Such peptides are chemically well defined and have a high degree of structural integrity.
So distortions of the epitope can cause an autoimmune reaction, and synthetic peptides are good because they’re stable and you know exactly what you are getting. But if you have a bunch of partial peptides mixed in, then it substantially weakens this point.
Re: 3. It does seem to be true that “damage” is required. Substances which provoke an immune response are called adjuvants, and the adjuvants in this vaccine are the Chitosan and the Tripolyphosphate.
Reading the paper more closely, it says that the truncated peptides are fine because the peptides get chopped up by proteases anyway. This does make me feel a bit less worried about this, but it also implies that this would be a potential issue for purified peptides as well.
ETA: I also did a spot-check to see at which point this would actually become an issue with the actual peptides in the vaccine using https://db.systemsbiology.net/sbeams/cgi/PeptideAtlas/Search It seems you can generally expect length 6 sequences of peptides in radvac to be unique to the virus, while length 4 sequences of peptides from radvac are typically widespread.
So at what point does a peptide go from triggering an immune reaction, to being completely inert?
Off the top of my head, I can think of three possible factors:
The length of the peptide matters. Presumably, your body wouldn’t create an immune reaction to dipeptides under any circumstances. But in this case, how close are these peptides to the threshold length? If they’re well above it, then it seems this risk is still relevant. If they’re close to the threshold, then that would mitigate a lot of this risk.
The amount of the peptide matters. I’d expect that your immune system generally does not create an immune response to a single foreign peptide it detects, and that there’s a certain amount (perhaps variable between different peptides) necessary to cause a reaction. That would explain why breathing doesn’t create autoimmune issues. But in this case, we might still expect a particular partial peptide to have a significant population, especially since certain peptide-peptide bonds are weaker than others. So again, this risk is still relevant.
The peptide must be associated with some sort of damage. It’s plausible that the immune system doesn’t create a response unless it detects actual damage (irritation at the human level). In that case, the vaccine presumably works because snorting a spray is sufficiently irritating. This risk is clearly still relevant in this case.
I suspect that the actual answer is likely a combination of all three, and maybe some other stuff is relevant.
Also, I checked the white paper, and it says the partial peptides aren’t an issue, but doesn’t seem to elaborate.
The cheapest options suffice for the vaccine—the peptides don’t need to be “purified” (this just means removing partial sequences), they don’t need any special modifications, and very small amounts suffice.
Seems like partial sequences could contribute to the autoimmune disease risk since they would be much more likely to match to normal cellular proteins. Has this been considered?
I think ACS’s main value add is that they use contractors to flexibly decide how to best preserve you at the time of medical death. They will either use their own preservation equipment, contract Suspended Animation (which is what ALCOR does), or contract CI, depending on who can get there fastest, what level of service you’ve paid for, who they think will do the best job etc… They’re also the oldest continuously running cryonics organization.
Minor nit, but it’s worth noting that while /r/TikTokCringe started as a contempt subreddit, it’s now just the main subreddit for TikTok content enjoyed genuinely.
The main lesson I’m getting from this is that it’s generally good that people don’t feel comfortable expressing these sorts of opinions.
Not quite sure how specifically this connects, but I think you would appreciate seeing it.
As a good example of the kind of gains we can get from abstraction, see this exposition of the HashLife algorithm, used to (perfectly) simulate Conway’s Game of Life at insane scales.
Earlier I mentioned I would run some nontrivial patterns for trillions of generations. Even just counting to a trillion takes a fair amount of time for a modern CPU; yet HashLife can run the breeder to one trillion generations, and print its resulting population of 1,302,083,334,180,208,337,404 in less than a second.
Entropy and temperature inherently require the abstraction of macrostates from microstates. Recommend reading this: http://www.av8n.com/physics/thermo/entropy.html if you haven’t seen this before (or just want an unconfused explanation).
I don’t know why the trade-off between population-size and average utility feels like it needs to be a mathematically justified, that function seems to be as much determined by arbitrary evolutionary selection as the rest of our utility functions.
My method for doing this is to imagine a spinner partitioned into certain sections (like a pie chart of the intended distribution), and then imagine spinning it rapidly and watching it slow down and seeing where it lands. I don’t know how well this actually works, but I adopted it after seeing a poll like the ones you linked asking people to choose based on this method, which ended up being very close. It’s does take a decent amount of mental effort, as well as a couple seconds for each round—I’d expect any method that works to have these properties.
Generally, it’s a good idea to listen to your body. Insomnia can be caused by vitamin D doses that are too high for you, so you may want to investigate or ask a doctor about that possibility.
Lot’s of people in the community have seasonal affective disorder (see e.g. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hC2NFsuf5anuGadFm/how-to-build-a-lumenator), so that would lead me to expect people would want to live in places with more sunlight, which tend to not have cold weather.
I think you missed the most interesting effect, which is that ingesting it would put you into some sort of ketosis or at higher levels: ketoacidosis.
I don’t think that’s what Eliezer found mysterious about the Born rule.