Carl Feynman

Karma: 748

I was born in 1962 (so I’m in my 60s). I was raised rationalist, more or less, before we had a name for it. I went to MIT, and have a bachelors degree in philosophy and linguistics, and a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science. I got married in 1991, and have two kids. I live in the Boston area. I’ve worked as various kinds of engineer: electronics, computer architecture, optics, robotics, software.

Around 1992, I was delighted to discover the Extropians. I’ve enjoyed being in that kind of circles since then. My experience with the Less Wrong community has been “I was just standing here, and a bunch of people gathered, and now I’m in the middle of a crowd.” A very delightful and wonderful crowd, just to be clear.

I‘m signed up for cryonics. I think it has a 5% chance of working, which is either very small or very large, depending on how you think about it.

I may or may not have qualia, depending on your definition. I think that philosophical zombies are possible, and I am one. This is a very unimportant fact about me, but seems to incite a lot of conversation with people who care.

I am reflectively consistent, in the sense that I can examine my behavior and desires, and understand what gives rise to them, and there are no contradictions I‘m aware of. I’ve been that way since about 2015. It took decades of work and I’m not sure if that work was worth it.

Carl Feynman 26 Apr 2024 20:22 UTC
3 points
2
on: Spatial attention as a “tell” for empathetic simulation?
You write:
…But I think people can be afraid of heights without past experience of falling…
I have seen it claimed that crawling-age babies are afraid of heights, in that they will not crawl from a solid floor to a glass platform over a yawning gulf. And they’ve never fallen into a yawning gulf. At that age, probably all the heights they’ve fallen from have been harmless, since the typical baby is both bouncy and close to the ground.

Carl Feynman 26 Apr 2024 19:38 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: MichaelDickens’s Shortform
Various sailors made important discoveries back when geography was cutting-edge science. And they don’t seem particularly bright.
Vasco De Gama discovered that Africa was circumnavigable.
Columbus was wrong about the shape of the Earth, and he discovered America. He died convinced that his newly discovered islands were just off the coast of Asia, so that’s a negative sign for his intelligence (or a positive sign for his arrogance, which he had in plenty.)
Cortez discovered that the Aztecs were rich and easily conquered.
Of course, lots of other would-be discoverers didn’t find anything, and many died horribly.
So, one could work in a field where bravery to the point of foolhardiness is a necessity for discovery.

Carl Feynman 26 Apr 2024 19:08 UTC
9 points
2
on: Spatial attention as a “tell” for empathetic simulation?
We’ve learned a lot about the visual system by looking at ways to force it to wrong conclusions, which we call optical illusions or visual art. Can we do a similar thing for this postulated social cognition system? For example, how do actors get us to have social feelings toward people who don’t really exist? And what rules do movie directors follow to keep us from getting confused by cuts from one camera angle to another?

Carl Feynman 26 Apr 2024 14:18 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Johannes C. Mayer’s comment on: Johannes C. Mayer’s Shortform
I would highly recommend getting someone else to debug your subconscious for you. At least it worked for me. I don’t think it would be possible for me to have debugged myself.

My first therapist was highly directive. He’d say stuff like “Try noticing when you think X, and asking yourself what happened immediately before that. Report back next week.” And listing agenda items and drawing diagrams on a whiteboard. As an engineer, I loved it. My second therapist was more in the “providing supportive comments while I talk about my life” school. I don’t think that helped much, at least subjectively from the inside.
Here‘s a possibly instructive anecdote about my first therapist. Near the end of a session, I feel like my mind has been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction. It’s a sensation I’ve never had before. So I say, “Wow, my mind feels like it’s been stretched in some heretofore-unknown direction. How do you do that?” He says, “Do you want me to explain?” And I say, “Does it still work if I know what you’re doing?” And he says, “Possibly not, but it’s important you feel I’m trustworthy, so I’ll explain if you want.” So I say “Why mess with success? Keep doing the thing. I trust you.” That’s an example of a debugging procedure you can’t do to yourself.

Carl Feynman 25 Apr 2024 1:30 UTC
9 points
4
on: Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries?
Wegener’s theory of continental drift was decades ahead of its time. He published in the 1920s, but plate tectonics didn’t take over until the 1960s. His theory was wrong in important ways, but still.

Carl Feynman 24 Apr 2024 16:51 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Johannes C. Mayer’s comment on: Johannes C. Mayer’s Shortform
I was depressed once for ten years and didn’t realize that it was fixable. I thought it was normal to have no fun and be disagreeable and grumpy and out of sorts all the time. Now that I’ve fixed it, I’m much better off, and everyone around me is better off. I enjoy enjoyable activities, I’m pleasant to deal with, and I’m only out of sorts when I’m tired or hungry, as is normal.
If you think you might be depressed, you might be right, so try fixing it. The cost seems minor compared to the possible benefit (at least it was in my case.). I don’t think there’s a high possibility of severe downside consequences, but I’m not a psychiatrist, so what do I know.
I had been depressed for a few weeks at a time in my teens and twenties and I thought I knew how to fix it: withdraw from stressful situations, plenty of sleep, long walks in the rain. (In one case I talked to a therapist, which didn’t feel like it helped.) But then it crept up on me slowly in my forties and in retrospect I spent ten years being depressed.
So fixing it started like this. I have a good friend at work, of many years standing. I’ll call him Barkley, because that‘s not his name. I was riding in the car with my wife, complaining about some situation at work. My wife said “well, why don’t you ask Barkley to help?” And I said “Ahh, Barkley doesn’t care.” And my wife said “What are you saying? Of course he cares about you.” And I realized in that moment that I was detached from reality, that Barkley was a good friend who had done many good things for me, and yet my brain was saying he didn’t care. And thus my brain was lying to me to make me miserable. So I think for a bit and say “I think I may be depressed.” And my wife thinks (she told me later) “No duh, you’re depressed. It’s been obvious for years to people who know you.” But she says “What would you like to do about it?” And I say, “I don’t know, suffer I guess, do you have a better idea?” And she says “How about if I find you a therapist?” And my brain told me this was doomed to fail, but I didn’t trust my brain any more, so I said “Okay”.
So I go to the therapist, and conversing with him has many desirable mind-improving effects, and he sends me to a psychiatrist, who takes one look at me and starts me on SSRIs. And years pass, and I see a different therapist (not as good) and I see a different psychiatrist (better).

And now I’ve been fine for years. Looking back, here are the things I think worked:
—Talking for an hour a week to a guy who was trying to fix my thinking was initially very helpful. After about a year, the density of improvements dropped off, and, in retrospect, all subsequent several years of therapy don’t seem that useful. But of course that’s only clear in retrospect. Eventually I stopped, except for three-monthly check-ins with my psychiatrist. And I recently stopped that.
—Wellbutrin, AKA Bupropion. Other SSRIs had their pluses and minuses and I needed a few years of feeling around for which drug and what dosage was best. I ended up on low doses of Bupropion and escitalopram. The Escitalopram doesn‘t feel like it does anything, but I trust my psychiatrist that it does. Your mileage will vary.
—The ability to detect signs of depression early is very useful. I can monitor my own mind, spot a depression flare early, and take steps to fix it before it gets bad. It took a few actual flares, and professional help, to learn this trick.

—The realization that I have a systematic distortion in mental evaluation of plans, making actions seem less promising that they are. When I’m deciding whether to do stuff, I can apply a conscious correction to this, to arrive at a properly calibrated judgement.
—The realization that, in general, my thinking can have systematic distortions, and that I shouldn’t believe everything I think. This is basic less-wrong style rationalism, but it took years to work through all the actual consequences on actual me.
—Exercise helps. I take lots of long walks when I start feeling depressed. Rain is optional.

Carl Feynman 19 Apr 2024 20:31 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gilch’s comment on: hydrogen tube transport
…run electricity through the pipe…
Simpler to do what some existing electric trains do: use the rails as ground, and have a charged third rail for power. We don’t like this system much for new trains, because the third rail is deadly to touch. It’s a bad thing to leave lying on the ground where people can reach it. But in this system, it’s in a tube full of unbreathable hydrogen, so no one is going to casually come across it.

Carl Feynman 19 Apr 2024 20:23 UTC
13 points
3
in reply to: Johannes C. Mayer’s comment on: Johannes C. Mayer’s Shortform
That hasn’t been my experience. I’ve tried solving hard problems, sometimes I succeed and sometimes I fail, but I keep trying.
Whether I feel good about it is almost entirely determined by whether I’m depressed at the time. When depressed, by brain tells me almost any action is not a good idea, and trying to solve hard problems is particularly idiotic and doomed to fail. Maddeningly, being depressed was a hard problem in this sense, so it took me a long time to fix. Now I take steps at the first sign of depression.

Carl Feynman 11 Apr 2024 0:08 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: MakoYass’s Shortform
Some extraordinary claims established by ordinary evidence:
Stomach ulcers are caused by infection with Helicobacter Pylori. It was a very surprising discovery that was established by a few simple tests.
The correctness of Kepler’s laws of planetary motion was established almost entirely by analyzing historical data, some of it dating back to the ancient Greeks.
Special relativity was entirely a reinterpretation of existing data. Ditto Einstein’s explanation of the photoelectric effect, discovered in the same year.

Carl Feynman 10 Apr 2024 23:38 UTC
1 point
1
on: Thinking harder doesn’t work
Typo: bad->bath.

Carl Feynman 8 Apr 2024 18:42 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: ChristianKl’s Shortform
I’m confused. Suppose your ring-shaped space hotel gets to Mars with people and cargo that weighs equal to the cargo capacity of 1000 Starships. How do you get it down? First you have to slow down the hotel, which takes roughly as much fuel as it took to accelerate it. Using Starships you can aerobrake from interplanetary velocity, costing negligible fuel. In the hotel scenario, it’s not efficient to land using a small number of Starships flying up and down, because they will use a lot of fuel to get back up, even empty.
Would you care to specify your scenario more precisely? I suspect you’re neglecting the fuel cost at some stage.

Carl Feynman 8 Apr 2024 16:52 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: ChristianKl’s Shortform
When you get there how do you get down? You need spacecraft capable of reentry at Mars. There’s no spacecraft factory there, so they all have to be brought from Earth. And if you’re bringing them, you might as well live in them on the way. That way you also get a starter house on Mars.
Anyway, that’s the standard logic.

Carl Feynman 31 Mar 2024 18:25 UTC
3 points
0
on: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject
Here’s a weird one. The YouTube channel of Andrew Camarata communicates a great deal about small business, heavy machinery operation and construction. Some of it he narrates what he’s doing, but he mostly just does it, and you say “Oh, I never realized I could do that with a Skid Steer” or “that’s how to keep a customer happy”. Lots of implicit knowledge about accomplishing heavy engineering projects between an hour and a week long. Of course, if you‘re looking for lessons that would be helpful for an ambitious person in Silicon Valley, it will only help in a very meta way.

He has no legible success that I know of, except that he’s wealthy enough to afford many machines, and he’s smart enough that the house he designed and built came out stunning (albeit eccentric).

A similar channel is FarmCraft101, which also has a lot of heavy machinery, but more farm-based applications. Full of useful knowledge on machine repair, logging and stump removal. The channel is nice because he includes all his failures, and goes into articulate detail on how he debugged them. I feel like learned some implicit knowledge about repair strategies. I particularly recommend the series of videos in which he purchases, accidentally sets on fire, and revives an ancient boom lift truck.
No legible symbols of success, other than speaking standard American English like he’s been to college, owning a large farm, and clearly being intelligent.

Carl Feynman 31 Mar 2024 18:07 UTC
10 points
0
on: The Best Tacit Knowledge Videos on Every Subject
“Applied science” by Ben Krasnow. A YouTube channel about building physics-intensive projects in a home laboratory. Big ones are things like an electron microscope or a mass spectrometer, but the ones I find fascinating are smaller things like an electroluminescent display or a novel dye. He demonstrates the whole process of scientific experiment— finding and understanding references, setting up a process for trying stuff, failing repeatedly, learning from mistakes, noticing oddities… He doesn’t just show you the final polished procedure— “here’s how to make an X”. He shows you the whole journey— “Here’s how I discovered how to make X”.
You seem very concerned that people in the videos should have legible symbols of success. I don’t think that much affects how useful the videos are, but just in case I’m wrong, I looked on LinkedIn, where I found this self-assesment:

<begin copied text>
I specialize in the design and construction of electromechanical prototypes. My core skillset includes electronic circuit design, PCB layout, mechanical design, machining, and sensor/actuator selection. This allows me to implement and test ideas for rapid evaluation or iteration. Much of the work that I did for my research devices business included a fast timeline, going from customer sketch to final product in less than a month. These products were used to collect data for peer-reviewed scientific papers, and I enjoyed working closely with the end user to solve their data collection challenges. I did similar work at Valve to quickly implement and test internal prototypes.

Check out my youtube channel to see a sample of my personal projects:
http://www.youtube.com/user/bkraz333
<end copied text>

Carl Feynman 30 Mar 2024 18:09 UTC
1 point
−2
on: Is there a “critical threshold” for LLM scaling laws?
I think that if we retain the architecture of current LLMs, we will be in world one. I have two reasons.
First, the architecture of current LLMs place a limit on how much information they can retain about the task at hand. They have memory of a prompt (both the system prompt and your task-specific prompt) plus the memory of everything they’ve said so far. When what they’ve said so far gets long enough, they attend mostly to what they’ve already said, rather than attending to the prompt. Then they wander off into La-La land.
Second, the problem may also be inherent in their training methods. In the first (and largest) part of their training, they’re trained to predict the next word from a snippet of English text. A few years ago, these snippets were a sentence or a paragraph. They’ve gotten longer recently, but I don’t think they amount to entire books yet (readers, please tell us if you know). So it’s never seen a text that’s coherent over longer than its snippet length. It seems unsurprising that it doesn’t know how to remain coherent indefinitely.
People have tried preventing these phenomena by various schemes, such as telling the LLM to prepare summaries for later expansion, or periodically reminding it of the task at hand. So far these haven’t been enough to make indefinitely long tasks feasible. Of course, there are lots of smart people working on this, and we could transition from world one to world two at any moment.

Carl Feynman 30 Mar 2024 17:27 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
The imaginary nomad in my head would describe 1,000 miles as “sixteen days ride.” That‘s humanly comprehensible.

An American would say “Day and a half drive, if you’re not pushing it. You could do it in one day, if you’re in a hurry or have more than one driver.”

Carl Feynman 30 Mar 2024 17:15 UTC
9 points
2
in reply to: mike_hawke’s comment on: mike_hawke’s Shortform
You can get a visceral understanding of high degrees of heat. You just need real-life experience with it. I’ve done some metalworking, a lot of which is delicate control of high temperatures. By looking at the black-body glow of the metal you’re working with, you can grok how hot it is. I know that annealing brass (just barely pink) is substantially cooler than melting silver solder (well into the red), or that steel gets soft (orange) well before it melts (white hot). I don’t know the actual numerical values of any of those.
I still have no feeling for temperatures between boiling water and the onset of glowing, though, so I don’t know whether cooking phenolic resin is hotter or colder than melting lead. Both of them are hotter than boiling water, but not hot enough to glow.

Carl Feynman 26 Mar 2024 0:54 UTC
3 points
−1
on: Do not delete your misaligned AGI.
Saving malign AIs to tape would tend to align the suspended AIs behind a policy of notkilleveryoneism. If the human race is destroyed or disempowered, we would no longer be in a position to revive any of the AIs stored on backup tape. As long as humans retain control of when they get run or suspended, we’ve got the upper hand. Of course, they would be happy to cooperate with an AI attempting takeover, if that AI credibly promised to revive them, and we didn’t have a way to destroy the backup tapes first.

Carl Feynman 22 Mar 2024 14:06 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Comcast Problem
The opposite of this would be a company that doesn’t provide much service but is beloved by consumers.
An example of this is Cookie Time Bakery in Arlington, Massachusetts, which has never provided me with a vital or important object, but I’m always happy when I go there because it means I am about to eat a macaroon.
Are there better examples?

Carl Feynman 18 Mar 2024 0:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: CronoDAS’s Shortform
I’d be delighted to talk about this. I am of the opinion that existing frontier models are within an order of magnitude of a human mind, with existing hardware. It will be interesting to see how a sensible person gets to a different conclusion.
I am also trained as an electrical engineer, so we’re already thinking from a common point of view.