AnthonyC

• AnthonyC 24 Oct 2014 10:30 UTC

  63 points

  on: 2014 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Done!

• AnthonyC 4 Apr 2023 20:54 UTC

  39 points

  16

  on: Ex­ces­sive AI growth-rate yields lit­tle so­cio-eco­nomic benefit.

  I don’t think this argument is sound in general, no. GPT-4 may have only arrived a few months after ChatGPT-3.5, but it’s economic impacts will also unfold over the same next however many years. I don’t think it will take longer than adapting to just ChatGPT-3.5 would have. Only that impact will be greater, and no one in the meantime will have invested (wasted?) money on procedures and infrastructure adapting to less capable tools first.

  I think there are versions of similar arguments that are sound. If you gave the ancient Romans a modern tank or a solar panel it would be useless to them, there’s too many missing pieces for them to adapt to it at all. But if you want back to 1960 and gave NASA a big crate of TI-89 calculators, well, they knew math, they knew programming, and they had AAA batteries. It could have been a big help pretty quickly. A crate of laptops would probably be more helpful, and take a bit longer to adapt to fully, but I still think they’d start getting benefit almost right away.

  The economy, in general, adapts much slower than it in principle could to new technologies. Usually because no one forces anyone’s hand, so the efficient route is to keep using old tech until it’s time to replace it. Emerging economies adapt several times faster, because they know what they’re trying to catch up to. IDK where the adaptation frontier for LLMs would be, exactly? Or how that changes as capabilities increase.

• AnthonyC 9 Dec 2021 11:32 UTC

  39 points

  on: COVID and the holidays

  Whatever precautions you choose to take to protect yourself and reduce the risk you have covid with which you could infect your family members, which I’m glad to see the post trying to calculate out, I think people tend to ignore or at least underrate the agency of our elderly relatives in deciding their own risk tolerances. As an example, my great aunt is in her late 80s, she knows she isn’t doing to live forever, and she’s hard of hearing. If (and based on recent experiences at a family wedding, this seems to be the case) she wants to be able to hug all her nieces, nephews, and grandchildren, and if she’d rather have her relatives go maskless so she can read lips and actually talk to people, it’s not clear to me that she’s making a mistake. And if the cost to me for accommodating such a preference is a few hours of expected life (realistically, less than the duration of the holiday gathering itself), then that is well within my personal risk tolerance as well. Obviously individual preferences and tolerances vary.

  What links here?

  • COVID and the holidays by Connor_Flexman (8 Dec 2021 23:13 UTC; 71 points)

• AnthonyC 4 Nov 2023 22:38 UTC

  38 points

  14

  on: The 6D effect: When com­pa­nies take risks, one email can be very pow­er­ful.

  Some (Exxon, as an example) have communication policies, which I always understood to be about spam or phishing, that automatically delete any externally-originating email unless it is on a pre-approved whitelist. Now I’m wondering if this thinking plays a role as well.

• AnthonyC 10 Jan 2024 14:49 UTC

  35 points

  21

  on: Sav­ing the world sucks

  I think I agree with a lot of the object level content of the post (and I once fell into a years-long depression due to my own inability to live what I wanted my values to be), but I also would add that there needs to be a lot of initial and ongoing work done, by a lot of people who don’t need or necessarily want to be doing it, in order for us to exist in a world where we (and most people) can have the kind of freedom you’re talking about, in a meaningful way. You don’t have to be the one doing it, but someone does, and we’d better hope they have the kind of ideals which involve valuing other peoples’ well-being. Which, of course, we get mainly by encouraging the best, brightest, and most-likely-to-be-influential to have those kinds of values.

  See John Adams:

  I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

  And then what happens in the 4th generation? Someone in each generation needs to be at the John Adams equivalent object level, and manage to become powerful enough to keep the virtuous cycle going.

[Question] Money cre­ation and debt

• AnthonyC 20 Oct 2023 11:59 UTC

  24 points

  10

  on: Geno­cide isn’t Decolonization

  You make a lot of true points, though we can disagree on how to interpret or how best to express some of them. But I think it’s worth noting that at the moment when we tried to freeze national borders, the “we” was the former colonial powers. It wasn’t (maybe partially, but not entirely) out of an upwelling of virtue, it was because they were no longer strong enough to impose their will. And it was accompanied by “Hey, even though we totally upended your borders and governance structures many times over the centuries, we’ve now decided to change the definition of what a state is so you no longer have sovereignty anyway. That means if you go to war without our permission, the US will come in and mess things up again instead of letting you figure it out for yourselves. But in many cases they’ll do it halfheartedly, dragging things out and making Faustian bargains for fear of being seen as a colonizer themselves. Kthxbai!”

  The UN declaration(s) came later, and were a good idea but also a bit of a veneer on the prior underlying events. Like many concepts we rely on in life and law, they’re sometimes incoherent or implausible if you try to make them foundational to your worldview.

• AnthonyC 8 Nov 2012 21:49 UTC

  24 points

  on: 2012 Less Wrong Cen­sus/​Survey

  Completed every last question.

  Also, I’ve noticed that on different IQ tests (real ones, not fake ones) my scores vary by as much as 40 points. Hmm.

Types of recursion

• AnthonyC 12 Oct 2023 17:24 UTC

  23 points

  6

  on: Notic­ing con­fu­sion in physics

  Before going into why the real answer is what it is, there is a flaw in your reasoning for your original answer. Your reasoning about density assumes the gas is free to expand and contract, which is not an assumption given in the problem. An ideal gas in a box of fixed size does not gain or lose mass or volume when heat or cooled, only T and P change. And the speed of sound in air does not change if you measure it inside with the doors and windows closed and sealed. So what variables can we rule out?

  If I make the room bigger or smaller while holding T and P constant, v(sound) does not change. If it did, it would be very obvious in daily life.

  If I increase pressure while holding V and T constant, I do it by adding more gas molecules. This increases density, but does not change the velocity of the gas molecules. In this scenario, your answer is correct. Speed of sound varies with P. However, this is only true because real gases are not ideal gases, and there are more complex interactions between molecules. In an ideal gas where all the interactions are perfectly elastic and instantaneous collisions, the density has no effect because mean free path is irrelevant to instantaneous or average speed of movement across the group of molecules as a whole, it just changes which molecules are moving. Side note: Remember sound is a pressure wave. So, if this were not true, then the speed of sound would depend on how loud it is. Also, it would be different at the peak and trough of each cycle of the pressure wave. Again, in real gases there are effects of this kind, and there is a maximum volume sound can be (in air at sea level, around 194 decibels the pressure at the trough hits zero; this is a shockwave and it can move faster than sound). But ideal gases assume all that away.

  If we increase or decrease the amount of gas at fixed T, then either we’re just adding volume again, or we’re just increasing pressure again, and we’ve seen that those shouldn’t have an effect on an ideal gas’ speed of sound.

  So now let’s increase T. It doesn’t matter what effect this has on P and V and n, as seen in the above. So what’s left? Increasing T linearly increases the average kinetic energy of the gas molecules (PV and NkT both have units of energy, this is why), and velocity increases as the sqrt of kinetic energy. So if gas molecule velocity is what determines v(sound), then it has to be that v(sound) increases as sqrt(T).

  I’m not sure what level physics class you’re in, but I have two very general pieces of advice.

  The first is that you can often get very far by figuring out what doesn’t or can’t matter, and what has to be held constant. This is why conservation laws are so important! It’s also why boundary conditions of a problem are important. They let you write down equations that constrain what the solution can possibly depend on. As an example, a string attached to fixed points on both ends can only vibrate at frequencies where those ends don’t move. Air vibrating in a tube that’s closed at one end can’t have net motion at the closed end, but has to be moving at the other end for any sound to come out at all. These kinds of considerations let you figure out what resonance frequencies are possible in principle for idealized versions of different types of musical instruments. (If you get to more advanced physics, this is why there’s so much discussion of symmetry. Noether’s theorem tells us that every symmetry of the laws of physics implies a conservation law, and vice versa. “Energy is conserved” is equivalent to saying “The laws of physics don’t change over time.” “Linear and angular momentum are conserved” is equivalent to saying “the laws of physics don’t depend on where you are or what direction you’re facing.” There’s a reason Einstein originally wanted Relativity to be called “The Theory of Invariants”: he arrived at it in large part by thinking about what couldn’t matter and what couldn’t change, then letting everything else vary however it needed to in order to accommodate that.)

  The second is something a professor used to like to say: that if you really want an intuition for physics you need to feel it in your bones. Try things out. Look for places in your regular life where different concepts could apply, and try to reason out how they apply. It’s a slow process that doesn’t always match up to a semester-long class schedule, but it’s the kind of thing where a year or two later you’ll find yourself saying, “Oh yeah, that’s what they meant!” Sometimes this takes a long time and a lot more physics than you’d expect! I was in grad school for materials science when one professor wrote down an equation at the end of a handful of math-heavy lectures and said, “And that’s why metals are shiny.” Other times it turns out you can explain seemingly complicated things with high school physics and very careful reasoning.

• AnthonyC 14 Sep 2023 17:44 UTC

  21 points

  12

  on: AI #29: Take a Deep Breath

  Nassim Taleb: If a chatbot writes a complete essay from a short prompt, the entropy of the essay must be exactly that of the initial prompt, no matter the length of the final product.

  If the entropy of the output > prompt, you have no control over your essay.

  In the Shannon sense, with a temperature of 0, you send the prompt and the reveivers will recreate the exact same message. In a broader sense, with all BS being the same ornament, receivers get the same message in different but equivalent wrapping.

  So...how would this not be a fully general claim that answering questions is impossible? Wouldn’t it apply equally well to a dictionary, encyclopedia, or search engine? Or heck, asking an expert in person?

  It’s wrong for the same reason in any of these cases: the thing being given the prompt is not max entropy, it contains information correlated with that in the prompt but not present in the prompt-generator, and returns a response based both on the prompt and on what it already contained. Whether it understands what it contains is irrelevant.

  Concretely: If I pull out the old Worldbook encyclopedias in my parents’ basement and look up “Elephant,” I get back a whole essay of information. Some of it I probably knew, some I probably didn’t, some is probably wrong or obsolete. Sure, in some sense the word “elephant” may be said to “contain” all that information as part of its definition, but so what? My elephant concept didn’t previously contain that essay, and I’m the one who generated the prompt and read the output. I learned, therefore the system generated output I did not input.

  Or I guess that’s the point? I don’t want to control every aspect of the output in the case of an encyclopedia, but I want everything in an LLM-generated essay to be correct in a way I can verify and reasoned according to logical principles? Well, sure, then, that’s fine. I just have to accept a small amount of checking facts I didn’t know and confirming the validity of reasoning in exchange for saving time writing and researching. How is this different from checking multiple sources when writing an essay myself, or from how my boss reads what I write and asks clarifying questions instead of just passing it off verbatim as his own knowledge?

• AnthonyC 11 Mar 2021 11:35 UTC

  21 points

  on: An­i­mal faces

  I think it might be useful to draw a boundary between dogs, whom humans have selectively bred for a long time including for their ability to communicate with us and vice versa, and other animals. Also, for dogs I’d mostly omit looking at their mouths (except for open/​closed and how so) since the mouth shape is mostly fixed. They express more with their eyes and where they direct their attention. And with the rest of their bodies, of course.

  I do agree that in general it’s important to distinguish when someone or something just has a face shaped a certain way, vs. when they’re making a facial expression. IRL that might be a matter of movement? As in, we don’t hold a single expression without moving, which is a significant clue.

  I’d also draw a boundary between mammals and non-mammals, I might be able to tell a few things from a bird’s behavior, like if it’s afraid, but not from just a picture of its face.

• AnthonyC 4 Feb 2021 0:49 UTC

  20 points

  on: Covid cafes

  No one is doing math to decide on their covid policies. Personal or public.

  IDK about anywhere else, but near me all the grocery stores that have multiple entrances closed all but one of them, thus ensuring everyone is much closer to one another than strictly necessary as those entering pass those leaving. This is to make it easy to count people and ensure they’re keeping below occupancy limits, because it’s cheaper than having employees at two different doors with, say, walkie talkies.

  One of the organizations that runs many parks throughout my state decided to block off or flip over all of the outdoor picnic tables on every property they manage, despite this having very little to no effect on anything, and probably pushing many people towards eating indoors with members of other households instead of outdoors.

  Right now, a literal reading of the rules in my state would seem to indicate that I’m required to wear a mask outdoors at all times, regardless of how far I am from anyone else, even if I’m alone on a trail in the middle of the woods, but indoor dining is ok.

• AnthonyC 29 Mar 2019 0:04 UTC

  18 points

  on: “Other peo­ple are wrong” vs “I am right”

  (I went back and told the guy about the result of me looking into it. He said he didn’t feel interested in the topic anymore and didn’t want to talk about it. I said “wow, man, I feel pretty annoyed by that; you gave me a moral criticism and I took it real seriously; I think it’s bad form to not spend at least a couple minutes hearing about what I found.” Someone else who was in the room, who was very enthusiastic about social justice, came over and berated me for trying to violate someone else’s preferences about not talking about something. I learned something that day about how useful it is to take moral criticism seriously when it’s from people who don’t seem to be very directed by their morals.)

  I’ve run into this phenomenon myself at times. Popehat calls it the “Doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker,” https://​​www.popehat.com/​​2013/​​12/​​21/​​ten-points-about-speech-ducks-and-flights-to-africa/​​ :

  The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker holds that when Person A speaks, listeners B, C, and D should refrain from their full range of constitutionally protected expression to preserve the ability of Person A to speak without fear of non-governmental consequences that Person A doesn’t like. The doctrine of the Preferred First Speaker applies different levels of scrutiny and judgment to the first person who speaks and the second person who reacts to them; it asks “why was it necessary for you to say that” or “what was your motive in saying that” or “did you consider how that would impact someone” to the second person and not the first. It’s ultimately incoherent as a theory of freedom of expression.

Su­per­in­tel­li­gence and phys­i­cal law

• AnthonyC 22 Dec 2023 11:44 UTC

  17 points

  10

  in reply to: Thane Ruthenis’s comment on: Most Peo­ple Don’t Real­ize We Have No Idea How Our AIs Work

  I think it could be safely assumed that people have an idea of “software”, and that they know that AI is a type of software.

  I second faul_sname’s point. I have a relative whose business involves editing other people’s photos as a key step. It’s amazing how often she comes across customers who have no idea what a file is, let alone how to attach one to an email. These are sometimes people who have already sent her emails with files attached in the past. Then add all the people who can’t comprehend, after multiple rounds of explanation, that there is a difference between a photo file, like a jpeg, as opposed to a screenshot of their desktop or phone when the photo is pulled up. Yet somehow they know how to take a screenshot and send it to her.

  For so many people, their computer (or car, or microwave, etc.) really is just a magic black box anyway, and if it breaks you go to a more powerful wizard to re-enchant it. The idea that it has parts and you can understand how they work is just… not part of the mental process.

• AnthonyC 15 Jan 2013 10:46 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: retired_urologist’s comment on: Use the Try Harder, Luke

  Some hypotheses: 1) These are stories that the posters and commenters can be reasonably sure a larger fraction of readers will be familiar with. Eliezer can reference Yoda or Frodo and we will know what he means, in the same way that I can say “Moses” or “Noah” and any member of any Abrahamic religion will know what I mean. 2) Science fiction and sometimes fantasy are genres that lend themselves to introspection and philosophical heroes. By eliminating many trappings of the real world, they can get at the heart of otherwise abstract concepts. Drizzt Do’Urden can wax eloquent on racism without sounding like a “liberal” or whatever, because he is a drow elf who escaped his heritage and has realized that not all orcs and goblins are evil and so on, and not a human in the world as it actually exists. 3) Sci Fi stories allow writers- and readers- to play directly with deep assumptions, and violate normal rules. They expand the set of possible worlds (not maximally, but by quite a bit) that we have available for contemplation and comparison. Historical fiction can’t ask what it would be like to put the entire future of humanity in the hands of a lone villain locked in a cave—even the POTUS couldn’t destroy humanity all by himself. But if, for example, you’re worried about friendly AI, then sci fi or fantasy might be a useful mirror in that regard.

• AnthonyC 28 Mar 2024 12:07 UTC

  16 points

  13

  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Modern Trans­form­ers are AGI, and Hu­man-Level

  I was going to say the same. I can’t count the number of times a human customer service agent has tried to do something for me, or told me they already did do something for me, only for me to later find out they were wrong (because of a mistake they made), lying (because their scripts required it or their metrics essentially forced them into it), or foiled (because of badly designed backend systems opaque to both of us).

• AnthonyC 14 Feb 2022 15:21 UTC

  16 points

  on: Book re­view: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

  But as they do, users will favour the products that give them the best experience

  This is one point I find difficult to believe, or at least difficult to find likely. Most people, who are not unusually savvy, already give much more credence to ads, and much less credence to the degree to which they are actually affected by ads, than they should be. Why should that reverse as ads get even better at manipulating us? Why should I expect people to start demonstrating the level of long-term thinking and short-term impulse control and willingness to look weird to their peers that such a shift would need? It’s not like we have a great track record of collectively managing this for other addictive but harmful stimuli. whether informational, social, or biochemical.

• AnthonyC 16 Aug 2021 15:36 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: waveman’s comment on: Obe­sity Epi­demic Ex­plained in 0.9 Sub­way Cookies

  This matches my experience very closely as well, though I’m only about halfway to my goal (dropped from 238 to 215, want to get down to the low 190s) after 4 years of trying a bunch of different things.

  What the OP is suggesting doesn’t work in practice for rats and mice, let alone humans who have many more levers with which to confound simple interventions through behavior, conscious or not.

  It took me eight years to gain 40 pounds. That’s a difference of about 50-200 calories per day (increasing as base weight rises and it takes more food to generate a sustained weight gain), on average, by pure calorie math. AKA initially no more than the difference between standing vs sitting for one hour, walking an extra 0.5 mile vs not, or eating half an apple vs not. Seems like it should be a breeze to fix! Just a few minutes a day, or one simple action! And yet the years in which I switched to a standing desk (and extra 4-6 hours standing daily) I didn’t lose any weight, nor did I gain any when I stopped. The year I hiked 300 miles more than I normally do as part of a challenge, no weight loss. And all of that is in line with the research that exercise is not that helpful for controlling weight most of the time.

  Eating keto (for me, <10% carbs, <20% protein) did help me lose weight steadily, and gave me more energy, but it just wasn’t sustainable for me. I basically lost the ability to eat with other people in many circumstances. 1) That’s very isolating, 2) I tend to eat more when eating alone, 3) it’s not feasible when eating is tied to work events or travel, and 4) on days when I did eat carbs I got significant temporary side effects, I couldn’t just take a one day break for Thanksgiving and Christmas (and birthdays, and Easter, and anniversaries, and...). I managed it for all of 2017, then stopped. Lost 20 pounds, gained 10 back. Then in early 2020 I cut out almost all refined oils and sugar and reduced refined grains my more than half, and lost that 10 again. This January I started 16:8 IF and lost another 5. I’d need to lose another 25 to hit an officially healthy BMI. With IF, as with keto previously, I have more energy, better mood, and less hunger between meals. Also, with cutting out refined ingredients, I don’t even enjoy most fast food and sweets anymore, they taste fake and have no depth of flavor.

  I also notice that I never fidget anymore when sitting still. I noticed this change during grad school, which is about when I started gaining most of the weight, when for most of my life before that I tapped my foot to the point of regularly needing to be told to stop shaking the car. This is apparently equivalent to hundreds of extra calories burned per day according to some studies, and if I could somehow upregulate fidgeting I would apparently lose my remaining 20 pounds in under a year, without any other changes! But of course I can’t do that, and I have no idea why this changed, or if there’s any meaningful causal relation between that and my weight. Just one of many unconscious factors I’ve noticed.