Jacob, or “Jisk” when there are too many Jacobs about and I need a nickname.
Honestly pretty disappointed with the state of the modern LW site, but it’s marginally better than other non-blogs so I’m still here.
It should be possible to easily find me from the username I use here, though not vice versa, for interview reasons.
I can’t make out anything but word salad from this comment.
[Originally regarding Said Achmiz and myself ca. 2023]
I feel like you both favor a more aggressive flavor of discourse than I tend to like.
The aggressiveness is, I think, a symptom of the underlying trait, which is being disagreeable about taking people’s frames as valid
Most people, when given a weird framing of a situation which feels vaguely off but comes from someone who seems well-intentioned and cooperative, will go along with it and argue within that frame rather than contest it.
But this is very exploitable, and you don’t have to actually be consciously trying to exploit it to do so. And so people who do this a lot (e.g. Duncan, but also numerous other people I respect more, including Eliezer except when he’s explicitly being careful about it, which he usually is) can warp the whole field of discourse around them
Obviously most people who are disagreeable about this are disagreeable in general, and therefore usually aggressive about arguments and discourse. This isn’t necessary in principle but if anyone knows how to teach it I’ve never met them
Doesn’t this imply that having a theory of the domain you’re experimenting in is of low to no value? I find that hard to believe, and therefore doubt your assumptions are correct and applicable.
https://philpapers.org/rec/ARVIAA
This paper uses famous problems from philosophy of science and philosophical psychology—underdetermination of theory by evidence, Nelson Goodman’s new riddle of induction, theory-ladenness of observation, and “Kripkenstein’s” rule-following paradox—to show that it is empirically impossible to reliably interpret which functions a large language model (LLM) AI has learned, and thus, that reliably aligning LLM behavior with human values is provably impossible.
So, this seems provisionally to be bullshit because it doesn’t admit of thinking probabilistically or simplicity priors. But I’m not totally sure it’r worthless. Anyone read it in detail?
The older deck sucks. It contains the entirety of the essay without regard to what’s important. This deck is still messy—including too much focusing on the ordering and numbering of the virtues—but it’s significantly superior, and contains concise hearts of the matter. If you’re trying to create a memory aid for the Twelve Virtues, this deck was absolutely an improvement.
If there are a lot of people for the very-low-context NY meetup, possibly at least one very-low-context meetup per quarter is worth doing, to see if that gets people in/back more?
Like others, apparently “think like a mathematician” is enough to get it to work.
Not only is there not a standard name for this set of numbers, but it’s not clear what that set of numbers is. I consulted a better mathematician in the past, and he said that if you allow multiplication it becomes an known unsolved problem whether its representations are unique and whether it can construct all algebraic numbers.
If you give it the up-front caveat “this can represent all rational numbers and at least some algebraic irrationals”, I think that rules out the polynomial appromixation approach, since you can’t give arbitrary arguments and get intermediate values by continuity. But I’m not certain of that.
Yep, that works for Gemini 2.5 as well, got it in one try. In fact, just “think like a mathematician” is enough. Post canceled, everybody go home.
Yes, figure out the notation. The test I gave the LLMs to be sure their solutions weren’t secretly the same as mine in different language was to ask them to properly encode 30,000 and (210)^(2/5).
I meant to leave this link in that footnote. It’s really quite awful.
Sure, done.
Can anyone provide an example conversation (or prefix thereof) which leads to a ‘Nova’ state? I’m finding it moderately tricky to imagine, not being the kind of person who goes looking for it.
Paraphrasing Eddington: If your theory of morality is incompatible with factory farming, then so much the worse for factory farming. If it says not to touch the trolley problem, well, even nominally-obvious thought experiments can be wrong sometimes. But if it says to run a risk of death for all humanity for animals or minds that don’t share human values, there is no hope for it; so much the worse for the theory, at best, or so much for morality at worst.
I find them visually awful and disable them in settings. And avoid using archive.is because there’s no way to turn that off.
Not that I browse LW that much, in fairness.
People typically only select into this sort of role if they’re a bit more prone to conflict about it, which means a lot of the work is kinda thankless because people are pushing back on you for being too conflicty.
Things can be done to encourage this behavior anway, such as with how the site works. Instead the opposite has been done; this is the root of my many heated disagreements with the LW team.
Addressing primarily Rethink Priorities’s talk at EAG.
Assume that digital minds will be most of the minds the future holds. Won’t this overwhelmingly be after whatever capability escalation passes for “the Singularity”, and therefore be addressed at 99.9% efficiency by delaying consideration of the problem after that capability exists and makes it vastly easier?
Said had a habit of responding to posts that were reasonably well-reasoned but sparsely justified with one-word comments like “Sources?”, or very short coments along the lines of “X point is insufficeiently justified.” without any throat-clearing or praise, which is a good example of it done well.
In general, “Your premises are treated as obvious when they are actually bizarre, and your argument is therefore irrelevant.” is maybe the central example of when this is both highly confrontational but also highly necessary.