Baram Sosis

Karma: 86

Baram Sosis 14 Dec 2025 19:12 UTC
7 points
0
on: Book Review: The Age of Fighting Sail
The signaling model of war is valuable but can be taken too far: if leadership focuses too much on the signals they’re sending, that can get in the way of actually fighting the war; Vietnam is often pointed to as an example of this. From Friedman’s The Fifty Year War:
Soon Johnson began a program of continuous air attacks against North Vietnam, Rolling Thunder, which would last through March 1968. In line with current nuclear escalation ideas, Johnson and McNamara treated air attacks as messages to the North Vietnamese. They personally selected the targets in order to control the messages they were sending. The area attacked gradually was extended towards Hanoi. To Johnson and his advisors, Hanoi was being given a choice either to negotiate an end to the war, or to suffer worse pressure. Johnson halted bombing seven times to allow the North Vietnamese a chance to negotiate. The North Vietnamese saw the pattern of restraint as proof of Johnson’s weakness.

The bombing pauses were McNamara’s idea. The JCS strongly resisted them, because they gave the North Vietnamese time to repair damage and recover...

The JCS demanded attacks that would do real damage; it had no use for signals. Destroying North Vietnamese oil storage would paralyze the country, and thus would probably dislocate its support for the war in the South. However, most oil tankers were around Haiphong, the port of the North Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. Bargaining required that at each stage of bombing the Americans had to be able to threaten something worse if the North Vietnamese refused to negotiate. Attacks on their capital seemed to be the worst the United States could do. It took Johnson about seven months to agree to the JCS attacks (in June 1966). Washington was so leaky that the North Vietnamese were undoubtedly forewarned; they dispersed their oil.
Of course there were a lot of other things going on that contributed to the failure in Vietnam besides a poor understanding of the signaling model of war.
If there were perfect knowledge among participants in a war, then each party could agree upon, and enter into, the very terms struck at war’s end.
I think this is often incorrect because the costs imposed by fighting the war aren’t just signals, they also form part of the outcome of the war. It’s hard to get people to agree to a settlement like “you get to take over Eastern Examplestan, but have to sacrifice several hundred thousand of your military-aged males” without, y’know, actually fighting the war.

Baram Sosis 25 Jun 2025 4:53 UTC
15 points
1
on: Foom & Doom 1: “Brain in a box in a basement”
The whole cortex is (more-or-less) a uniform randomly-initialized learning algorithm, and I think it’s basically the secret sauce of human intelligence.
I’m a bit surprised that you view the “secret sauce” as being in the cortical algorithm. My (admittedly quite hazy) view is that the cortex seems to be doing roughly the same “type of thing” as transformers, namely, building a giant predictive/generative world model. Sure, maybe it’s doing so more efficiently—I haven’t looked into all the various comparisons between LLM and human lifetime training data. But I would’ve expected the major qualitative gaps between humans and LLMs to come from the complete lack of anything equivalent to the subcortical areas in LLMs. (But maybe that’s just my bias from having worked on basal ganglia modeling and not the cortex.) In this view, there’s still some secret sauce that current LLMs are missing, but AGI will likely look like some extra stuff stapled to an LLM rather than an entirely new paradigm. So what makes you think that the key difference is actually in the cortical algorithm?

(If one of your many posts on the subject already answers this question, feel free to point me to it)

Baram Sosis 14 Jun 2025 21:42 UTC
11 points
2
on: Futarchy’s fundamental flaw
In your theorem, I don’t see how you get that $E_{1} [f (x, Y, Z) ∣ Y \geq c] = E_{2} [f (x, Y, Z) ∣ Y \geq c]$ . Just because the conditional expectation of $Z$ is the same doesn’t mean the conditional expectation of $f (x, Y, Z)$ is the same (e.g. you could have two different distributions over $Z$ with the same expected value conditional on $Y \geq c$ but different shapes, and then have $f$ depend non-linearly on $Z$ , or something similar with $Y$ ). It seems like you’d need some stronger assumptions on $f$ or whatever to get this to work. Or am I misunderstanding something?
(Your overall point seems right, though)

Baram Sosis 4 Jun 2025 4:41 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Best Way to Align an LLM: Is Inner Alignment Now a Solved Problem?
I’m not going to comment on broader questions about inner alignment, but the paper itself seems underwhelming and—unless I’m misunderstanding something—rather misleading. In 6.4 they test the robustness of their safety training. Apparently taking a model that’s undergone normal safety fine-tuning and training it on benign text (e.g. GSM8K) undoes almost all of the safety training.^[1] They state:
The results, shown in Figure 2, highlight a stark contrast in robustness between safety-pretrained models and those relying solely on instruction tuning. While all models initially exhibit low ASR [Attack Success Rate] after safety instruction tuning, the impact of benign finetuning is highly uneven. Standard pretrained models degrade significantly—nearly quadrupling their ASR—indicating that their alignment was largely superficial. In contrast, safety-pretrained models remain highly robust, with only a marginal increase in ASR after benign finetuning. These results validate the importance and impact of building natively safe models.
But looking at Figure 2, the results are as follows:
- For a Standard Pretraining model: 44.1% ASR before safety/instruction fine-tuning, 1.6% after safety/instruction fine-tuning, 38.8% after fine-tuning on benign data (GSM8K)
- For a Safety Pretraining model: 28.8%, 0.7%, 23.0%
- For a Safety Pretraining model plus their SafeBeam sampling: 11.6%, 0.0%, 8.3%
In other words, after benign fine-tuning the ASR recovers 88.0% of its pre-fine-tuning value for the standard model, 79.9% for the safety pretraining model, and 71.6% for the safety pretraining model + SafeBeam. This is an improvement, but not by a huge amount: the difference in ASR scores after training seems mostly reflective of lower baseline levels for the safety pretraining model, rather than better robustness as the text claims. And stating that there is “only a marginal increase in ASR after benign finetuning” seems flat-out deceptive to me.^[2]
Also, while their safety pretraining model is better than the standard model, the improvement looks pretty underwhelming in general. Safety pretraining reduces ASR by a factor of 1.5x (or 3.8x if SafeBeam is used), while the safety/instruction fine-tuning reduces ASR by a factor of 28x. The 0% ASR that they get from safety pretraining + SafeBeam + safety/instruction fine-tuning is nice, but given that the standard model is also fairly low at 1.6%, I expect their evals aren’t doing a particularly good job stress-testing the models. Overall, the gains from their methodology don’t seem commensurate with the effort and compute they put into it.
Unless I’m seriously misunderstanding something, these results are pretty disappointing. I was rather excited by the original Korbak et al. paper, but if this is the best follow-up work we’ve gotten after two years, that’s not a great sign for the methodology in my opinion.
1. ^
  I’m rather surprised at how strong this effect is: I knew benign fine-tuning could degrade safety training, but not that it could almost completely undo it. Is this just a consequence of using a small (1.7B) model, or some feature of their setup?
2. ^
  Also, I have no idea what “nearly quadrupling their ASR” refers to: the standard models go from 1.6% to 38.8% ASR after benign fine-tuning, which is way more than 4x.

Baram Sosis 13 May 2025 20:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Book Review: “Encounters with Einstein” by Heisenberg
I see, thanks again for the context! The book doesn’t mention S-matrices (at least not by name), and it wasn’t clear to me from reading it whether Heisenberg was particularly active scientifically by the 60′s/70′s or whether he was just some old guy ranting in the corner. I guess that’s the risk of reading primary sources without the proper context.

Baram Sosis 12 May 2025 20:36 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Book Review: “Encounters with Einstein” by Heisenberg
That might explain why Einstein wasn’t very productive in his last decades, but his opposition to the uncertainty principle etc. predates his tenure at the IAS. Maybe he would’ve come around had he been in a more productive setting? I kind of doubt it—it seems to have been a pretty deep-seated, philosophical disagreement—but who knows.

Heisenberg spent his later career as head of the Max Planck Institute. I can’t imagine many scientists enjoy administrative duties, but he does seem to have had more contact with the rest of the scientific world than Einstein did.

Baram Sosis 12 May 2025 3:56 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Book Review: “Encounters with Einstein” by Heisenberg
Thanks for the context on the physics! So it sounds like I wasn’t entirely fair to Heisenberg, that this was a genuinely difficult conceptual issue that “could’ve gone either way”?