Jisk, formerly Jacob. (And when Jacobs are locally scarce, still Jacob.)
LW has gone downhill a lot from its early days and I disapprove of most of the moderation choices but I’m still, sometimes, here.
It should be possible to easily find me from the username I use here, though not vice versa, for interview reasons.
Based on the classification of talk-giving and stand-up as Physical, the first and third are physical, somehow. (I disagree with this classification, because this is an absurd conclusion.)
But you marked giving a talk as physical in the ‘quiz’?
Giving a TED talk — ✗ you said Management, was Design/Physical Writing the talk is design. Delivering it well is physical (voice, stage presence, timing). High-g speakers often ace the first and flunk the second.
I think this is topsy-turvy; the delivery skill is a management skill.
A lot of “crystallized intelligence” is really just having a large corpus of related problems in your history, and being good at relating or transforming new problems into old ones that you’ve already conquered. This is one reason I think some human triumphalism over AIs memorizing their training distribution is misplaced — if that distribution is sufficiently large and general, and if you’re sufficiently good at pattern matching against it, then this is a wickedly powerful tool. One way to view it is that this is the meta-technique that lets AIs be very effective even without much “intelligence,” but another way is that more of human intelligence than we want to admit is actually just this.
I know several people, mostly of my parents’ generation, who despite years of effort struggle to type at 75 wpm, and are better at physical tasks of all kinds than I am. I am very poor at physical tasks and never learned to touch-type properly and I still write at >90 wpm from sheer practice. I don’t think it fits in this ontology at all.
Similarly, giving a good talk is a fundamentally different skill from anything involving lifting, carrying, or precise placement of force via tools (hammers, pliers, etc.) I am quite good at the former; when I put real effort into practicing it (also exercising my design skills), which I have only done a couple times, extremely good. I’m still shit at he latter, and all physical skills. It is just not a physical skill, even though the delivery is in the physical world and requires your attention on your body language. In this ontology it is a management skill. Performance and management are the same thing.
This is also what makes for good Dungeon Mastering. (I’ve done okay at that, too, but it strains my ability to improv.) And stand-up comedy is a Management skill for the same reason; both reading the room and reacting to it are management.
I would also argue some of the interactive parts of programming (good commit messages, good review) are as much management as design, but I’m less confidenh in that; most things in my head that involve other people are thoroughly mixed between management and design.
This a somewhat reassuring argument, that this social phenomenon can’t cause problems here. But it is not related to any of the reasons I was given and does not seem to be related to the thrust of the post or any of the key points of AI 2027.
“In a way that seems reasonable to the judge” is hiding an enormous amount of complexity that cannot possibly be adjudicated fairly or with a reasonable expectation that your methods at the factory to test it will be approved in court.
This might be a good idea if it was feasible to measure in an objective way, but that is absolutely not the case. And I’m not really sure it would be a good idea even then.
You’re looking at it backwards. A large fraction of ratfic readers also read royalroad. But a very small portion of royalroad reads (or wants to read) ratfic. Not enough to affect site trends or gather momentum for an audience. (Though there’s some good near-ratfic in the classic RR-bait categories, like Sky Pride in cultivation.)
Personally I wrote a novel on RR and posted chapters of it to /r/rational last year and… never got any comments. Not even critique. I think I gave up after a month. Was it too generic RR-bait? Was it just not appealing for some reason? I don’t know, and I don’t think I ever will.
That soured me on linking anything there.
The genie faces a single, static decision over probability distributions. There is no temporal sequence, no compounding, no intermediate node at which the genie might re-evaluate. The genie simply picks the best plan, and the best plan is the one whose probability distribution over outcomes ranks highest.
I don’t see how this is a contrast. Is this not what an ergodic strategy is doing, also? A resolute choice? All updateless decision theories are stepping outside time; there’s a reason the first step in that direction was called ‘timeless’ decision theory. Benja’s pretty explicit that these plans include probabilities; it is selecting choices that make sense at particular intermediate steps. If the correct strategy to make bets to achieve long-run growth, that optimizes the bankroll at the time labeled by the genie as ‘outcomes’ is to Kelly-bet, and that’s what you care about, the genie will choose to Kelly-bet.
However, it will not do that, because long-run growth is not what we care about. Optimizing long-run growth is correct, AIUI, only if losing your last dollar is infinitely bad and there is no bankroll size at which you cease to desire it to grow at the same strength you presently desire it. Certainly I prefer a quadrillion dollars to a trillion, but if I have a trillion (in 2025!USD-equivalent), I will cease to be particularly interested in what choice optimizes the long-run growth of that bankroll, and will instead be much more conservative.
I am far from certain. But I believe this thought experiment deviates from what you prescribe only in circumstances where you become the one relying on unnecessary and inappropriate assumptions. It looks to me like the argument there continues to hold for exactly the processes you suggest are superior.
Jensen’s inequality
Take any set of points, a, b, c, …
Take any convex function (=function that is ‘rising’ at every point, such that any line between two points on the function’s graph is above the function, =function which is concave up, = function whose second derivative (assuming it has one) is never negative) which can be applied to those points.
Then the mean of the functions mean(f(a), f(b), f(c), …) is less than the function of the mean f(mean(a, b, c, …)).
via the ergodic mapping, which finds the transformation that renders the wealth process ergodic, so that time and ensemble averages coincide
‘Ergodic’ kept looking like noise to me, and this seemed to be intended as an explanation but, to me, clarified nothing. (Feldspars problem, presumably.) I’ll attempt to rephrase, reflecting my present understanding after a few minutes of research:
Most processes that vary do so differently over time than at any present moment. The ensemble average is looking at a bunch of similar processes and how they’re varying right now, like forming the S&P 500 from 500 individual stocks, essentially buying the ensemble average of their growth (now and in the future). The time average of the growth, is the long run performance of one stock; the (past and/or future) time average of any individual stock is not the same as the ensemble. This makes prediction hard.
Something is ergodic if it does not have this problem. That could mean a steady state; a dollar bill’s value, denominated in USD, is mostly ergodic, though imperfectly because we might someday go full Weimar, abolish greenbacks, or make it an old print that’s a collector’s item. But you can construct things to be ergodic on purpose, as the examples describe; Kelly-betting is a strategy whose ‘many-worlds’ possible present instances have the same bankroll growth ensemble average that, in the long run, the time average predicts.
I am unclear if ‘the ergodic mapping’ is a specific coherent concept or a more flexible process that you apply to a phenomenon in imprecise ways to arrive at a result you can then prove is ergodic.
Perfect glomarization is glomarizing for everything. Glomarize over whether your son is learning to play guitar at all, and for piano, flute, bagpipes, timpani, soccer, baseball, handegg, caber tossing, buzkashi, karate, and arnis, all at once, if he might find it embarrassing to be known to be learning any of them until he’s publicly admitted to it.
So no, examples in everyday conversation are not really possible.
I think this is poorly stated, in that the first two or three times I read it I think I got the opposite claim that was intended, and so did the one commenter before me. To rephrase verbosely to be sure:
If you are honest and privacy-preserving, your glomarization must be perfect.
If you can’t glomarize and want to preserve privacy, you must be dishonest.
If you can’t glomarize and are honest, you cannot protect privacy
Though you can go partway − 80%-perfect honesty and 80%-perfect glomarization is probably good for 80%-preserved privacy.
So in the extreme you’d say that perfect privacy and perfect honesty mean no glomarization at all? That seems like it also removes privacy, to a sufficiently determined nosy ‘attacker.’
I don’t think it’s been trained on and all present frontier models one-shot it.
While implementing both threats simultaneously would presumably involve sending contradictory orders, I see nothing contradictory about making the two threats.
Thank you for writing this part and saving me the trouble.
As I allude to in the footnote, I find this easier in significant part because it is easier to put someone in the category “does not deserve the truth” (sometimes merely temporarily) than to concoct a mixture of half-truths I can believe enough to say them.
An example I sometimes relate, is an essay I was supposed to write for my high school vice-principal. He had instituted a weekly charitable service requirement, and we had to write five hundred words, weekly, about our experiences. I mostly did Habitat, because at least I could be sure I did something useful for someone, which was not common among my classmates, and the writing was harder than the labor, because… it wasn’t making me a better person. I tried to find some lesson that I could plausibly pretend mattered, and that was enormously difficult.
And then for the last one, I wrote about a thousand words on my reflection of the whole program, and whether it was achieving its goals, and precisely why I thought it had completely failed, both for me and all my classmates. Politely, but honestly.
He flipped his shit. Called me into his office, called my parents, I forget the rest.
So that night I wrote another essay, telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. My dad asked why I didn’t write that the first time. I replied that there wasn’t a single word in it I believed. And that was because, in that day, my vice principal had left the category of ‘people to be reasoned with’ and entered the category ‘idiot to be routed around.’ I was not dealing with this man like an equal[1], but an inferior.
This remains a much easier mental motion than bullshitting. This says good things about my honesty and, I expect, bad things about the rest of my moral character.
Let alone superior. I’m not sure I’ve ever related to anyone like a superior in my life, and it sure wasn’t in high school if I did. That got me into considerably more trouble than this bit did.
And same for stand-up? The thing about managing people is it’s primarily about controlling appearances and making sure they’re (honest but also) satisfying to the people managed.