I misread “organisms” as “organizations”.
And I feel like it actually does still apply somewhat, in the sense that the ideas passed down from team to team is the actual “DNA” whereas the behavior of the organization are determined by that but don’t direct feed back to that.
I think we’re talking about how the rules are generated and how they are interpreted and followed here. Basically, where the bugs come from.
I recently found InfoTopo https://sites.google.com/view/pierrebaudot/menu/infotopo-software
And it was so weird and exciting I immediately started being scared of losing it, and promptly archived it with the waybackmachine. https://web.archive.org/web/20220328135016/https://sites.google.com/view/pierrebaudot/menu/infotopo-software
But what this package does is it lets you do cool and weird things visualizing the informational relationships between different variables, discrete or complete.
I’m a bit overwhelmed in my life currently, but I would love it if somebody could take a look at it and comment, and maybe draw some connections with Judea Pearl’s works. I feel like I’m on the threshold of something great and awesome but I’m kindda stuck trying to understand this and not knowing where my attention should start.
About footnote #5 on arranged vs love marriages...
While the distribution for compatibility when finding a partner is long tailed, if the distribution for marginal gain on investing into an existing relationship is also as long tailed, then the comparative advantage sorta cancels out and you’re not as much better off looking harder vs developing the relationships you already have.
This sorta fits my experience too, where being vulnerable and putting in the work is occasionally given me large improvements in relationship satisfaction that I never expected based on the median improvement I get for each unit of work.
I went ahead and took a look! I am actually very new to the community and not at all aware of this.
I have some thoughts on this and I would love it if you would hop on a zoom call with me and help brainstorm a bit. You can find me at cedar.ren@gmail.com
Others are welcome too! I’m just a little lonely and a little lost, and would love to chat with people from lesswrong about these ideas
One thing notably missing from this post is the analysis about severity and how different countermeasures can make the virus evolve in different ways. E.g. if we stop people with fevers from travelling, it would give a no-fever variant a lot of advantage over a fever -causing variant.
It basically said “thanks I hate it” in response to that joke
I love how <3 has the dual interpretation of a heart and a fart.
Is there a particular reason for people to prefer eating animals who eat low quality food? Health, nutrition, etc?
I love your analysis. What do you think about this summary? : The solution to this optimization problem is to be the kind of agent that chooses only one box.
I find that merge sort starts becoming useful for items as few as a deck of cards. But bucket sort is probably better anyways
Of the three examples, only “rationality” came to mind : (
I’m ESL so that sorta ruins certain idiom based examples for me.
Every single piece has been tweaked toward the same end goal
I feel like there’ll be a better way to say this sentence once we figure out the answer to your first question,
How can we recognize adaptive systems in the wild? What universal behaviors indicate an adaptive optimizer?
It most definitely seems to make sense to say that systems can have goals, in a “if it looks like a duck it makes sense to call it a duck” kind of way. But at the same time, every single piece hasn’t been tweaked to the same end goal as the system. They are each tweaked towards their own survival, and that’s somewhat aligned with the system’s survival.
Something I wish there are more lesswrong posts for (or at least I wish I’ve seen more lesswrong posts for) is posts exploring alignment in the context of :
Organisms and their smaller replicator components (organisms < cells, cells < transposons& endoviruses & organelles)
Social thingies and their smaller sorta-replicator components (religions < religious ideas, companies < replicating Management ideas)
If you have your favorite post that falls into the above genre or mentions something to that effect, please absolutely link me to it! I’d love to read more.
I’m only halfway through the A-Z sequence, so I’d also very much appreciate it if you could point to things in there to get me excited about progressing through it!
Related reading linking mutual information to best possible classifier:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.04062.pdf
This one talks about estimating KL divergence and Mutual Information using neural networks, but I’m specifically linking it to show y’all Theorem 1,
Theorem 1 (Donsker-Varadhan representation). The KL divergence admits the following dual representation:
This links the mutual information to the best possible regression. But I haven’t figured out exactly how to parse / interpret this.
About Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization
I read it very recently so I claim to remember how it felt like to not have read it. I clicked on it because it fitted an intuition I had, but it was surprising how simple the answer was and how many other things it opened me up to. Like this:
This is truly epic.
I don’t know where this conditioned response comes from, but I tear up a little when I read things like this.
I’m scared that when the next threat to our civilization comes, the masses are so enmeshed in bullshit and the leaders so focused on producing it, that nobody rises to take action like this.
you should be able to get funding to cover most reasonable forms of upskilling and/or seeing-if-you-can-help trial period.
Hi Joe! I wonder if you have any pointers as to how to get help? I would like to try to help while being able to pay for rent and food. I think right now I’m may not br articulate enough to write grant proposals and get funding, so I think I could also use somebody to talk to to figure out what’s the most high impact thing I could do.
I wonder if you’d be willing to chat / know anybody who is?
My parents really cared about making things fair and giving expectations of fairness, and I really enjoyed it. It contributed to many of my qualities I care about (commitment to objective reality, attempt at consistency, integration of different parts of the self).
But sometimes I wonder if the opposite would be better, especially for surviving in maze-ey environment a la moral mazes.
Thank you so much! I didn’t know 80k does advising! In terms of people with knowledge on the possibilities… I have a background and a career path that doesn’t end up giving me a lot of access to people who know, so I’ll definitely try to get help at 80k.
Also worth bearing in mind as a general principle that if almost everything you try succeeds, you’re not trying enough challenging things. Just make sure to take negative outcomes as useful information (often you can ask for specific feedback too). There’s a psychological balance to be struck here, but trying at least a little more than you’re comfortable with will generally expand your comfort zone and widen your options.
This was very encouraging! Thank you.
Yes please!
Ty John for writing this up. This post and the comments really helps me find my own place and direction in terms of doing what I want to do.
Currently in academia and VERY unhappy about the bullshit I have to ingest and create. But I’m still waiting on my social, political, and financial safety nets before I can do anything remotely brave, kindda like tryactions mentioned in his comment.
So the most I’ll do is probably just read and write and talk to people on the side.
Speaking of talking to people...
My current research involves (manually) using CPU architectural artifacts to break sandboxing and steal data. I’ve been wondering whether I could do something on the lines of “make a simple AI that tries to break out of sandboxes, then make an unbreakable sandbox to contain it”.
Do shoot me a message if you have any thoughts, or is just curious. I would love to chat.