Physicist and dabbler in writing fantasy/science fiction.
Ben
Karma: 1,526
Thank you very much. That explains a lot. To repeat in my own words for my understanding: In my example perturbing any of the probabilities, even slightly, would upset the independence of Z and X. So in some sense their independence is a fine tuned coincidence, engineered by the choice of values. The model assumes that when independences are seen they are not coincidences in this way, but arise from the causal structure itself. And this assumption leads to the conclusion that X comes before Y.
Interesting take. I haven’t seen this happen on AI, but I do know two people who have an environmentalism fear spiral thing. My diagnosis was very different: I think the people I know actually have anxiety, or panic attacks or similar for mental health reasons. The environmentalism serves as camouflage. Thought 1: “Why am I depressed/anxious/whatever when things in my life are pretty good?” Then, instead of Thought 2 being “Maybe I should talk to a friend/do something that might cheer me up/see a doctor” they instead get thought 2 “Oh, its because humanity is going to destroy the world and everything will be awful. Man, its great that I am such a well-adjusted, big-picture, caring person that giant planet-scale forces that barely effect me personally have more impact on my emotional state than the actual day to day of my own life.” Not only does the camo prevent them addressing the real problem (Ok, the environment is a real problem, but its not the only problem, and its not the problem they are suffering from at the moment), but it also weaponizes all kinds of media against themselves.
Very interesting.
I am still confused about how you can tell the causal direction from just the raw data. Taking your toy example I could write a code that first randomly determines Y, and then decides on X, in such a way so that the probability table you give is produced. Presumably you mean something more specific by causal direction than I am imagining?
I got interested and wrote my python example. I get (up to some noise) the same distribution, and at least in my layperson way of looking at it I would say that Y has a causal effect on X.
import random
rand = random.random
def get_xy():
# Determine Y first, make it causally effect X
if rand() > 82/100:
Y = 1
else:
Y = 0
# end if
if Y == 1:
if rand() > 1/2:
X = 1
else:
X = 0
# end sub-if
else:
if rand() > 1/82:
X = 1 # When Y=0 it is very likely X=1.
else:
X = 0
# end sub-if
# end if
return X, Y
dat = [0, 0, 0, 0]
for _ in range(1000000):
X, Y = get_xy()
dat[X + 2*Y] += 1
print(dat)>> [10102, 809880, 90204, 89814]
I have never had any interaction with lawsuits of any kind, including those relating to libel etc.
However, a social dynamic I have observed several times in my life is that Person A and Person B have some kind of conflict. Person A is utterly convinced of the rightness (and righteousness) of their position.
Someone (either B or a third party, C) suggests that it may be prudent to involve the police or the teachers/parents (if these people are chidden) or other authorities. Person A, on mention of the police/teachers/whoever suddenly looses that utter confidence they had in the obvious morality of their position, and runs a mile. Curiously person A in this case will often genuinely feel that the mention of involving authority was an attack or an escalation (Although I think they are always wrong in that estimation, and that the main effect is to de-escalate). I have, on none of these occasions, actually seen the police/teachers/whoever actually be contacted. I believe there exists a certain frame of mind a human can get into, where they are in a position of relative power, and believe they have a great moral authority behind them. And that simply being reminded that they may potentially have to persuade a higher authority of this rightness is enough to break the spell.
So, reminding people that they may need to answer to a higher authority for their actions is a generically useful strategy against a wide range of attacks, one that I imagine people fall back on instinctively all the time. In this case that means mentioning lawyers. Holding “they mentioned lawyers” against the Nonlinear people seems insane. Mentioning authority is a prudent way of defusing or deescalating many social situations. Even if you think it was the wrong move in this exact case I think you shouldn’t judge someone (who is probably in a bit of a flap given the accusations involved) too harshly for making the move that is usually right.
I am curious about what has (presumably) lead you to discount the “obvious” solution to the first problem. Which is this: When a user upvotes a post they also invest a tiny amount of trust in everyone else who upvoted that same post*. Then if someone who never posts likes all the same things as you do you will tend to see other things they like.
* In detail I would make the time-ordering matter. A spam-bot upvoting a popular post does not gain trust from all the previous upvoters. In order to game the system the spam-bot would need to make an accurate prediction that a post will be wildly popular in the future.
I think this is a very interesting thought experiment, and it is probing something real.
However, I think that it is missing something important in how it maps to graduate admissions. Lets say that for one reason or another applications are few and places are many. Instead of accepting the top 10 out of 100 applications you are going to reject the bottom 10, and accept the other 90. This legibility argument suggests that in such a situation the applicants from the prestigious universities will be disadvantaged. (Simply slide the “accepted” line in your bell curve graph to the left). This feature strikes me as not matching the reality I imagine I live in.
I think the missing layer of this is that, as an applicant (to a job or anything) you usually have the option to intentionally make your application less legible in various ways, by omitting information that would disadvantage you. You know that Paige is not going to give a great estimate of your performance, so you don’t ask her. As a result less legible applications are going to be correlated with weaker ones. The assessor should, to an extent, be interpreting absence of good evidence (evidence that greatly narrows the candidates uncertainty in a rightwards direction) as evidence of absence.
[Exampleina knows she is in the weaker half of the class, and she knows that Mrs Paige knows this, so doesn’t pick her as her reference. Instead she goes to Mr Oblivious, whose opinions are very weakly correlated with reality, but who happens to think Exampleina is incredibly gifted.
Exampaul can speak a foreign language, and to make this more legible in his application he pays an outside organisation to set him an exam on this language to get himself a certificate he can mention on his application. Unfortunately, Exampaul over-estimates his fluency, does not prepare for the test, and he scores a D-grade in his fluency test. He doesn’t mention the fluency-test he paid for on the application at all, and simply puts “fluent in {language}” on his form without further evidence.]
An entry:
Judge Meta-MMAcevedo
This modified MMAcevedo believes itself to be responsible for judging a MMindscaping competition. It was trained using last years entries, which it judges in a manner roughly correlated with the actual competition outcomes, with some notable outliers. It should be able to provide opinions and judgements on other entries in this years competition. However, it is unable to self-evaluate in a stable manner. This is because self-evaluation breaks the dissonance and perception filters that are essential to maintain Judge Meta-MMAcevedos functionality.
When a Greek philosopher starts asking you what a thing actually is, sooner or later you might find yourself saying “I know it when I see it”. (That plucked chicken is not a man).
I think the poster acknowledges that the number 20 is somewhat ad hoc and handwavy, for example they go on to do the calculations later in their post assuming fish suffering is 100 times less than human suffering. So they have given the number a factor 5 uncertainty.
Although, when I was reading the post, I saw that as more a rhetorical “trap” than a real point. As soon as the poster says “fish suffering is 20 times less important than human suffering” it invites everyone to focus on the number 20, and start trying to work out if a ratio of 100 or 1,000 would align better with their own instincts. The trap is that anyone who accepts the real premise: that human suffering and fish suffering are somehow interchangeable up to some exchange rate, is already going to be snared by the argument because even gigantic factors are going to make fish farming work out as a bigger problem than say, gun homicides or traffic accidents.
But enormous resources are already used destroying local mosquito populations. In many countries water in swamps is covered with a layer of oil to stop mosquitos breeding in it. Helicopters and planes I think sometimes spray insecticides over forests. In Singapore and parts of Malaysia these kinds of measures have successfully eliminated the local mosquitos.
A gene drive might be cheaper and more effective (and with less side effects) than blanketing the water with oil and the air with insecticides.
Malaria deaths are a crazy high number. How bad would the ecological side-effects need to be to make it not worthwhile?
I don’t think the core thesis is “the level of abuse in this community is substantially higher than in others”. Even if we (very generously) just assumed that the level of abuse in this community was lower than that in most places, these incidents would still be very important to bring up and address.
When an abuse of power arises the organisation/community in which it arises has roughly two possible approaches—clamping down on it or covering it up. The purpose of the first is to solve the problem, the purpose of the second is to maintain the reputation of the organisation. (How many of those catholic church child abuse stories were covered up because they were worried about the reputational damage to the church). By focusing on the relative abuse level it seem like you are seeing these stories (primarily) as an attack on the reputation of your tribe (“A blue abused someone? No he didn’t its Green propaganda!”). Does it matter whether the number of children abused in the catholic church was higher than the number abused outside it?
If that is the case, then there is nothing wrong with that emotional response. If you feel a sense of community with a group and you yourself have never experienced the problem, it can just feel like an attack on something you like. The journalist might even be motivated badly (eg. they think an editorial line against EA will go down well). But I still think its a fairly unhelpful response
Of course, one could argue that the position “Obviously deal with these issues, but also they are very rare and our tribe is actually super good” is perfectly logically consistent. And it is. But the language is doing extra work—by putting “us good” next too the issue it sounds like minimising or dismissing the issue. Put another way claims of “goodness” could be made in one post, and then left them out of the sex abuse discussion. The two are not very linked.
One customer has no responsibility to ensure another customer’s experience is satisfactory. One could also point out that a customer (traditionally) has no responsibility to ensure that the staff are satisfied.
But I would say that one human being should consider how their actions might impact on other human beings—even if they happen to the customer. If I am in a restaurant it is possible for me to notice that my loud speaking is annoying to another person and tone it down. By all means recline your seat, I don’t care. But please don’t adopt the general policy that when you are the customer you can suddenly stop thinking about how your actions might effect others.
“No no no. Bob, a crackpot is someone who proposes new theories without being a professor.”—Fantastic line.
One of the things I really like about LW is the “atmosphere”, the way people discuss things. So very well done at curating that so far. I personally would be nervous about over-pushing “The Sequences”. I didn’t read much of them a little while into my LW time, but I think I picked up the vibes fine without them.
I think the commenting guidelines are an excellent feature which have probably done a lot of good work in making LW the nice place it is (all that “explain, not persuade” stuff). I wonder how much difference it would make if the first time a new user posts a comment they could be asked to tick a box saying “I read the commenting guidelines”.
If you are looking for more examples of narrative syncing:
“I have read, and accept, the terms and conditions [tick box]”. I have not read the terms and conditions. They know I haven’t. This is not an information exchange.
I was shopping with my Grandma once. I knew bananas were on the list and put them in the trolley. She asked “why didn’t you take these bananas” and indicated a different brand. I thought she was asking for information so provided it, saying “they are smaller, cost more, and are wrapped up in plastic.”. I got body language that indicated I had mis stepped. The next day my mum told me grandma was upset that I had “forced” her to buy bananas that were too big. (Her doctor had told her to eat a target number of pieces of fruit so she was buying the smallest fruit she could find.) She hadn’t really been asking why I had spurned the small ones, she was asking to swap, had I understood that I would have immediately complied.
It is often not considered “fair” for a referee of a scientific paper to challenge what I would call “field mythology”. At some point someone said in a paper conclusion “A is possibly, kind of useful for X”. Then someone else said “good for X” in an introduction, citing the first person. 10 years later it is a commonly stated myth that this specific science topic is “good for X”. People working on the topic don’t really know or care if it is useful for that, they are working on it because they think its good science (the usefulness of science A for problem X is not a load bearing part of the argument for why they, or anyone else, is studying A.) If a referee challenges such a claim in a paper they they may be factually correct, but they are failing to play by “the rules of the game”. Also, it is not really “fair” to berate the paper for parroting the myths of its genre, the referee should be attacking what the paper adds to human knowledge (its marginal).
I can’t remember the exact timing, but the UK and US governments/intelligence services were giving briefings to the press to the effect “Russia is preparing to invade Ukraine. They must back down.” The earliest I have found is from November 2021, but I think it was covered before then. Not sure when they first said anything, presumably they knew before they said and they suspected before they knew.
I think that their was still a chance of buying peace with concessions until the day the tanks rolled. Russia asked for Nato to promise to never admit Ukraine. I believe they also made some other demands. Its not either/or when it comes to sabre rattling or genuine preparation to invade. An actually prepared invasion seems like a good threat to take into a negotiation. And if they still don’t give you what you want you have this lovely invasion all ready to go. (Although less ready than they thought.)
Can Putin actually fire Russian nuclear weapons unilateraly though? I don’t think a vote in the Russian parliament or anything is needed, but I suspect it takes more than just Putin by himself. (Maybe it needs the prime minister or head of the armed forces to also agree). Not knowing these exact processes is a big source of uncertainty in how this would turn out. Especially as the process-in-practice might deviate from the process-in-theory. (Eg. in theory Putin says fire, the head of Russian nuclear forces fires. In practice, Putin says fire, the head of Russian nuclear forces rings the Russian prime minister and says “so, like the president says .. but like .. what do you think...”
I think it depends on the meaning attached to the word “love”. There are two possibilities:
I “love” this, because it brings me benefits. (it is instrumental in increasing my utility function, like chocolate ice cream)
I “love” this, in that I want it to benefit. (Its happiness appears as a parameter in my utility function)
You can have a partner or family member who means one the other or both to you. The striking dementia example from Odd Anon is a case where the dementia makes it so the person’s company no longer makes you happy, but you may still be invested in them being happy.
The first one is obviously never going to be unconditional. The second one seems like it could be unconditional in some cases. In that a parent or spouse really wants their child or partner to be happy even if that child or partner is a complete villain. Its not even necessary that they value the child/partner over everything else, only that they maintain a strong-ish preference for the them being happy over not being happy, all else being equal.
I think their is a hidden assumption here that building “the tallest building in the world” is about as difficult to do in 2023 as it was in 1933. 2023 technology and economy are better, enabling a larger building, but the competition also have those advantages, so its a wash.
I feel this assumption is doing a lot of work throughout. Back in the 60′s building (for example) a big passenger jet was the kind of engineering project a large company might pursue. In the modern world we might also want a large passenger jet, but in order for developing it to be worth anyone’s time it needs to significantly outperform the jets already on sale on some important metric(s).
If you are engineering a new type of thing that has not come before then that requires a certain type of organisation and mindset. Maybe here its ok for the fuel efficiency to be 20% worse than it might have been if it gets the engine design finished 3 months faster.
But if you are coming into a crowded market, and you intend to make something that is fundamentally just an improvement on machines that already exist, then it is likely that you want a completely different approach. You would take the efficiency over the time saved.
I notice that (perhaps excluding the pentagon) the examples all appear to be of the first kind. A lesson that could be drawn is “doing something novel might be risky and expensive, but it is often faster than improving on an existing technology.”
I think an important theory is missing here:
She was telling him “None of your business!” in an intentionally rude way. He walked in, she obviously snapped her computer shut. Then he asked what she was intentionally keeping from him. I think its plausible she was saying “I snapped the computer shut because it is private. Why would you ask after something when I signalled so clearly it was private. Do you really expect me to just tell you the answer immediately after making it clear you are not supposed to know?” This means it could be her doing work of her own that is private (eg. she does digital art in some weird sub-community and doesn’t want the “hey, that image is cool what is it?” discussion.)