alexey

Karma: 128

alexey 7 Jan 2026 22:45 UTC
1 point
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on: Gödel’s Ontological Proof
These justifications of axioms 3 and 4 don’t really work together; according to the first one, we shouldn’t declare any property perfect before establishing it’s possible for an object satisfying it to exist, and then in Axiom 4 we do just that.

alexey 26 Jul 2025 14:31 UTC
1 point
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on: the void
And it could do that, effectively, with all the so-called “pre-training” data, the stuff written by real people… The assistant transcripts are different. If human minds were involved in their construction, it was only because humans were writing words for the assistant as a fictional character, playing the role of science-fiction authors rather than speaking for themselves. In this process, there was no real mind – human or otherwise – “inhabiting” the assistant role that some of the resulting text portrays.
But the base model already has to predict non-well-written fiction, because there is plenty of non-well-written fiction in the training data, no?
Do we have any data showing if base models do better or worse at predicting fiction compared to non-fictional texts? I’d naively expect bad fiction to be easier to predict than good fiction, as well.

alexey 27 Jun 2025 16:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Tahp’s comment on: Gödel, Escher, Bach in the age of LLMs
More generally speaking: every way you can change a source program without changing the compiler output is a way it contains information that the machine code doesn’t. And compilers do a lot of non-injective transformations, that is, transformations which have same outputs for different inputs. Loop unrolling, replacing for with while (or vice versa), etc.

alexey 22 Jun 2025 17:44 UTC
2 points
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on: Gödel, Escher, Bach in the age of LLMs
The higher-level language contains things like “for loops,” which are much easier for a human to understand than an incomprehensible string of binary which you feed directly into a wire as changes in voltage, but I don’t think it contains any information that the machine code does not.
As trivial examples: comments, variable naming, etc. are information contained in HLL programs, but not in the corresponding machine code programs.
The other way around seems closer to right, but even there the compiler can provide additional information.

alexey 15 May 2025 18:37 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: A Talmudic Rationalist Cautionary Tale
Do we know the tradition predates Christianity separating from Judaism? The particular story is later.
In fact, it seems at least possible (but I don’t know how plausible) that the causation is the other way around: the story is supposed to tell the readers that Rabbi Yeshua’s miracles don’t prove he’s right either.

alexey 27 Dec 2024 15:44 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Thelo’s comment on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
I mostly agree, but it’s a double-digit percent increase in bankruptcies which ends up being (from the post)
about 4bps (0.04%)/year of additional bankruptcies

alexey 27 Dec 2024 15:41 UTC
16 points
12
in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else. That is what ‘addictive personality disorder’ means.
Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc.
I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can’t gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts.
This post isn’t quietly assuming something: it’s loudly giving evidence that they will be much less harmed.

alexey 12 Dec 2024 20:07 UTC
1 point
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on: The lying p value
Do you expect anyone to answer “agree” to the starting question?

alexey 25 Nov 2024 19:51 UTC
1 point
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on: A superficially plausible promising alternate Earth without lockstep
Bywayeans are pretty censorious and scrupulous about violations of the NAP
Except against people who enjoy sunsets, apparently?

alexey 9 Nov 2024 17:19 UTC
1 point
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on: The unreasonable effectiveness of plasmid sequencing as a service
He’d walk on over to nearby industry labs with candy and a sales pitch for why they should use his services. He primarily targeted top, Nobel-prize-winning research groups
and
Plasmidsaurus has historically done very little ‘traditional’ marketing — no brochures, few cold reach-outs
seem to be a bit contradictory?

alexey 1 Nov 2024 19:14 UTC
1 point
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on: Should we abstain from voting? (In nondeterministic elections)
If people followed Brennan’s advice, those ignorant of their lack of knowledge would keep voting, while well-educated people might think they’re not competent enough and abstain.
I’d add that people ignorant enough not to know or not to understand Brennan’s argument would also keep voting.

alexey 15 Oct 2024 20:18 UTC
7 points
3
in reply to: Wbrom’s comment on: Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?
Was this post significantly edited? Because this seems to be exactly the take in the post from the start:
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.
to the end
This is supported by Malcom’s claim that Hitchens was “a proponent of torture”, which is clearly false going by Christopher’s public articles on the subject. The question is only over whether Hitchens considered waterboarding to be a form of torture, and therefore permissible or not, which Malcolm seems to have not understood.

alexey 14 Sep 2024 13:15 UTC
1 point
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on: Adverse Selection by Life-Saving Charities
It’s absurd to end up with a framework that believes a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income.
You could similarly argue a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is worse than for a man, but it seems absurd to conclude from that that saving lives of SA men is better than saving lives of SA women.
Whether you save a life in Congo, Sri Lanka or Australia, I can’t think of strong reasons for why #2 would vary all that much.
It seems to me there are obvious differences: 1. family size (in the limit, the saved person may have no family at all); 2. how expected the person’s death is otherwise.

alexey 18 Aug 2024 18:51 UTC
1 point
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on: Only Fools Avoid Hindsight Bias
But you aren’t asked about $E (P (e))$ (your current estimate of your prior). If you want to put it in this way, it would be $E_{t_{1}} (E_{t_{0}} (P (e)))$ , your current estimate of your previous estimate. And you do have exact knowledge what that estimate was.

alexey 29 Apr 2024 11:07 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Back to Basics: Truth is Unitary
Here is a counter-argument against Rovelli I found reasonable: Aristotle and Falling Objects | Diagonal Argument

alexey 29 Dec 2023 19:58 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: GeneSmith’s comment on: Black Box Biology
so the maximum “downside” would be the sum of the differences between that reference populations lives and those without the variant for all variants you edit (plus any effects from off-targets)
I don’t think that’s true? It has to assume the variants don’t interact with each other. Your reference population would only have 0.01% people with (the rarest) 2 variants at once, 0.0001% with 3 variants, and so on.

alexey 22 Dec 2023 10:33 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Extrapolating from Five Words
Yes, but this exact case is when you say “This would be useful for trying out different variations on a phrase to see what those small variations change about the implied meaning” and when it can be particularly misleading because the LLM is contrasting with the previous version which the humans reading/hearing the final version don’t know about.
So it would be more useful for that purpose to use a new chat.

alexey 16 Dec 2023 14:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Extrapolating from Five Words
But the screenshot says “if i instead say the words...”. This seems like it has to be in the same chat with the “matters” version.

alexey 16 Dec 2023 11:41 UTC
3 points
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on: In Defense of Parselmouths
but speak only the truth to other Parselmouths and (by implication) speak only truth to Quakers.
I would merely like to note that the implication seems contrary to the source of the name: I expect Quirrell and most historical Parselmouths in HPMOR would very much lie to Quakers (Quirrell would maybe derive some entertainment from not saying factually false things while misleading them).

alexey 16 Dec 2023 11:28 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Who is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) really, and how could he have done what he did? - three theories and a lot of evidence
Or to put it another way: in the full post you say
There is some evidence he has higher-than-normal narcissistic traits, and there’s a positive correlation between narcissistic traits and DAE. I think there is more evidence of him having DAE than there is of him having narcissistic traits
but to me it looks like you could have equally replaced DAE with “narcissistic traits” in Theories B and C, and provided the same list of evidence.
(1) Convicted criminals are more likely to have narcissistic traits.
(2) “extreme disregard for protecting his customers” is also evidence for narcissistic traits.
Etc. And then you could repeat the exercise with “sociopathy” and so on.
So there are two possibilities, as far as I can see:
1. One or more things on the list are in fact not evidence for narcissistic traits.
2. They are stronger evidence for DAE than for narcissistic traits.
But it isn’t clear which you believe and about what parts of the list in particular. (Of course, with the exception of (4) and (11), but they go in the opposite directions.)