Garrett Baker

• Garrett Baker 19 Apr 2025 15:14 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Julian Bradshaw’s comment on: A Dissent on Honesty

  It seems pretty likely SBF happened because everyone in EA was implicitly trusting everyone else in EA. If people were more suspicious of each other, that seems less likely to have been allowed to happen.

• Garrett Baker 18 Apr 2025 7:58 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: George Ingebretsen’s comment on: Ryan Kidd’s Shortform

  Don’t double update! I got that information from that same interview!

• Garrett Baker 17 Apr 2025 21:47 UTC

  5 points

  1

  in reply to: Ryan Kidd’s comment on: Ryan Kidd’s Shortform

  My vague understanding is this is kinda what capabilities progress ends up looking like in big labs. Lots of very small experiments playing around with various parameters people with a track-record of good heuristics in this space feel should be played around with. Then a slow scale up to bigger and bigger models and then you combine everything together & “push to main” on the next big model run.

  I’d also guess that the bottleneck isn’t so much on the number of people playing around with the parameters, but much more on good heuristics regarding which parameters to play around with.

• Garrett Baker 17 Apr 2025 21:36 UTC

  46 points

  38

  in reply to: jacquesthibs’s comment on: jacquesthibs’s Shortform

  It seems useful for those who disagreed to reflect on this LessWrong comment from ~3 months ago (around the time the Epoch/​OpenAI scandal happened).

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #31 (Tues­day 04/​22)

Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #30 (Tues­day 04/​15)

• Garrett Baker 14 Apr 2025 0:42 UTC

  9 points

  0

  in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexan­der Gietelink Ol­den­z­iel’s Shortform

  The strong version of this argument seems false (eg Habryka’s comment), but I think the weak version is true. That is, energy put into “purposely and deliberately develop a technology Y that is fundamentally different than X that does the same role as X without harm Z but slightly less competitively.” is inefficient compared to energy put into strategies (i), (ii), and (iii).

• Garrett Baker 13 Apr 2025 2:49 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: ni­plav’s Shortform

  If it is encoding relevant info then this would be the definition of steganography

• Garrett Baker 12 Apr 2025 21:33 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Will US tar­iffs push data cen­ters for large model train­ing offshore?

  Note that “smartphones, computers and more electronics” are exempt. I’d guess this would include (or end up including) datacenters. The details of the exemption are here.

• Garrett Baker 8 Apr 2025 21:01 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: CB’s comment on: Jemist’s Shortform

  This hardly seems an argument against the one in the shortform, namely

  Neither a physicalist nor a functionalist theory of consciousness can reasonably justify a number like this. Shrimp have 5 orders of magnitude fewer neurons than humans, so whether suffering is the result of a physical process or an information processing one, this implies that shrimp neurons do 4 orders of magnitude more of this process per second than human neurons. The authors get around this by refusing to stake themselves on any theory of consciousness.

  If the original authors never thought of this that seems on them.

• Garrett Baker 8 Apr 2025 15:13 UTC

  9 points

  0

  on: The first AI war will be in your com­puter

  but most of the population will just succumb to the pressure. Okay Microsoft, if you insist that I use Edge, I will; if you insist that I use Bing, I will; if you insist that I have MSN as my starting web page, I will

  Only about 5% of people use edge, with 66% chrome and 17% safari. Bing is similar, with 4% marketshare and Google having about 90%. I don’t know the number with MSN as their starting page (my parents had this), but I’d guess its also lower than you expect. I think you over-estimate the impact of nudge economics

• Garrett Baker 5 Apr 2025 19:24 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Buck’s comment on: How much progress ac­tu­ally hap­pens in the­o­ret­i­cal physics?

  That’s an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements^[1] and the size of those advancements.

  Edit: But also this wouldn’t show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn’t know what the field looks like now.

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously.

• Garrett Baker 5 Apr 2025 18:15 UTC

  4 points

  2

  in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  Claude says its a gray area when I ask, since this isn’t asking for the journalist to make a general change to the story or present Ben or the subject in a particular light.

• Garrett Baker 5 Apr 2025 7:50 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Adam Scherlis’s comment on: How much progress ac­tu­ally hap­pens in the­o­ret­i­cal physics?

  This doesn’t seem to address the question, which was why do people believe there is a physics slow-down in the first place.

• Garrett Baker 5 Apr 2025 3:04 UTC

  20 points

  0

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Brien­neYud­kowsky’s Shortform

  (you also may want to look into other ways of improving your conscientiousness if you’re struggling with that. Things like todo systems, or daily planners, or simply regularly trying hard things)

• Garrett Baker 5 Apr 2025 3:02 UTC

  19 points

  13

  in reply to: LoganStrohl’s comment on: Brien­neYud­kowsky’s Shortform

  It seems reasonable to mention that I know of many who have started doing “spells” like this, with a rationalized “oh I’m just hypnotizing myself, I don’t actually believe in magic” framing who then start to go off the deep-end and start actually believing in magic.

  That’s not to say this happens in every case or even in most cases. Its also not to say that hypnotizing yourself can’t be useful sometimes. But it is to say that if you find this tempting to do because you really like the idea of magic existing in real life, I suggest you re-read some parts of the sequences.

• Garrett Baker 4 Apr 2025 20:17 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Jeremy Gillen’s comment on: Chang­ing my mind about Chris­ti­ano’s ma­lign prior argument

  I’m not sure what the type signature of $L_A$ is, or what it means to “not take into account $M$’s simulation”

  I know you know about logical decision theory, and I know you know its not formalized, and I’m not going to be able to formalize it in a LessWrong comment, so I’m not sure what you want me to say here. Do you reject the idea of logical counterfactuals? Do you not see how they could be used here?

  I think you’ve misunderstood me entirely. Usually in a decision problem, we assume the agent has a perfectly true world model, and we assume that it’s in a particular situation (e.g. with omega and knowing how omega will react to different actions). But in reality, an agent has to learn which kind of world its in using an inductor. That’s all I meant by “get its beliefs”.

  Because we’re talking about priors and their influence, all of this is happening inside the agent’s brain. The agent is going about daily life, and thinks “hm, maybe there is an evil demon simulating me who will give me −10¹⁰10^10 utility if I don’t do what they want for my next action”. I don’t see why this is obviously ill-defined without further specification of the training setup.

• Garrett Baker 4 Apr 2025 20:06 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: AI 2027: What Su­per­in­tel­li­gence Looks Like

  Can you give something specific? It seems like pretty much every statement has a footnote grounding the relevant high-level claim in low-level indicators, and in cases where that’s not the case, those predictions often seem clear derivatives of precise claims in eg their compute forecast

• Garrett Baker 4 Apr 2025 19:18 UTC

  2 points

  −2

  in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: AI 2027: What Su­per­in­tel­li­gence Looks Like

  I mean its not like they shy away from concrete predictions. Eg their first prediction is

  We forecast that mid-2025 agents will score 85% on SWEBench-Verified.

  Edit: oh wait nevermind their first prediction is actually

  Specifically, we forecast that they score 65% on the OSWorld benchmark of basic computer tasks (compared to 38% for Operator and 70% for a typical skilled non-expert human).

• Garrett Baker 4 Apr 2025 19:05 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

  The closing off of China after/​during Tinamen square I don’t think happened after a transition of power, though I could be mis-remembering. See also the one-child policy, which I also don’t think happened during a power transition (allowed for 2 children in 2015, then removed all limits in 2021, while Xi came to power in 2012).

  I agree the zero-covid policy change ended up being slow. I don’t know why it was slow though, I know a popular narrative is that the regime didn’t want to lose face, but one fact about China is the reason why many decisions are made is highly obscured. It seems entirely possible to me there were groups (possibly consisting of Xi himself) who believed zero-covid was smart. I don’t know much about this though.

  I will also say this is one example of china being abnormally slow of many examples of them being abnormally fast, and I think the abnormally fast examples win out overall.

  Mao is kind of an exception, but thats because he had so much power that it was impossible to challenge his authority even when he messed up

  Ish? The reason he pursued the cultural revolution was because people were starting to question his power, after the great leap forward, but yeah he could be an outlier. I do think that many autocracies are governed by charismatic & powerful leaders though, so not that much an outlier.