Yeah, that’s fair—it’s certainly possible that the things that make intelligence relatively hard for evolution may not apply to human engineers. OTOH, if intelligence is a bundle of different modules that all coexistent in humans and of which different animals have evolved in various proportions, that seems to point away from the blank slate/”all you need is scaling” direction.
Daniel_Eth
Karma: 578
This is probably a good thing—I’d imagine that if you could sue the FDA, they’d be a lot more hesitant to approve anything.
I think in practice allowing them to be sued for egregious malpractice would lead them to be more hesitant to approve, since I think people are much more likely to sue for damage from approved drugs than damage from being prevented from drugs, plus I think judges/juries would find those cases more sympathetic. I also think this standard would potentially cause them to be less likely to change course when they make a mistake and instead try to dig up evidence to justify their case.
So just to be clear, the model isn’t necessarily endorsing the claim, just saying that the claim is a potential crux.
One more crux that we should have included (under the section on “The Human Brain”):
”Human brain appears to be a scaled-up version of a more generic mammalian/primate brain”
Paths To High-Level Machine Intelligence
I think very few people would explicitly articulate a view like that, but I also think there are people who hold a view along the lines of, “Moore will continue strong for a number of years, and then after that compute/$ will grow at <20% as fast” – in which case, if we’re bottlenecked on hardware, whether Moore ends several years earlier vs later could have a large effect on timelines.
Thanks!
I agree that symbolic doesn’t have to mean not bitter lesson-y (though in practice I think there are often effects in that direction). I might even go a bit further than you here and claim that a system with a significant amount of handcrafted aspects might still be bitter lesson-y, under the right conditions. The bitter lesson doesn’t claim that the maximally naive and brute-force method possible will win, but instead that, among competing methods, more computationally-scalable methods will generally win over time (as compute increases). This shouldn’t be surprising, as if methods A and B were both appealing enough to receive attention to begin with, then as compute increases drastically, we’d expect the method of the two that was more compute-leveraging to pull ahead. This doesn’t mean that a different method C, which was more naive/brute-force than either A or B, but wasn’t remotely competitive with A and B to begin with, would also pull ahead. Also, insofar as people are hardcoding in things that do scale well with compute (maybe certain types of biases, for instance), that may be more compatible with the bitter lesson than, say, hardcoding in domain knowledge.
Part of me also wonders what happens to the bitter lesson if compute really levels off. In such a world, the future gains from leveraging further compute don’t seem as appealing, and it’s possible larger gains can be had elsewhere.
Thanks for the comments!
Re: The Hard Paths Hypothesis
I think it’s very unlikely that Earth has seen other species as intelligent as humans (with the possible exception of other Homo species). In short, I suspect there is strong selection pressure for (at least many of) the different traits that allow humans to have civilization to go together. Consider dexterity – such skills allow one to use intelligence to make tools; that is, the more dexterous one is, the greater the evolutionary value of high intelligence, and the more intelligent one is, the greater the evolutionary value of dexterity. Similar positive feedback loops also seem likely between intelligence and: longevity, being omnivorous, having cumulative culture, hypersociality, language ability, vocal control, etc.
Regarding dolphins and whales, it is true that many have more neurons than us, but they also have thin cortices, low neuronal packing densities, and low axonal conduction velocities (in addition to lower EQs than humans).
Additionally, birds and mammals are both considered unusually intelligent for animals (more so than reptiles, amphibians, fish, etc), and both birds and mammals have seen (neurological evidence of) gradual trends of increasing (maximum) intelligence over the course of the past 100 MY or more (and even extant nonhuman great apes seem most likely to be somewhat smarter than their last common ancestors with humans). So if there was a previously intelligent species, I’d be scratching my head about when it would have evolved. While we can’t completely rule out a previous species as smart as humans (we also can’t completely rule out a previous technological species, for which all artifacts have been destroyed), I think the balance of evidence is pretty strongly against, though I’ll admit that not everyone shares this view. Personally, I’d be absolutely shocked if there were 10+ (not very closely related) previous intelligent species, which is what would be required to reduce compute by just 1 OOM. (And even then, insofar as the different species shared a common ancestor, there still could be a hard step that the ancestor passed.)
But I do think it’s the case that certain bottlenecks on Earth wouldn’t be a bottleneck for engineers. For instance, I think there’s a good chance that we simply got lucky in the past several hundred million years for the climate staying ~stable instead of spiraling into uninhabitable hothouse or snowball states (i.e., we may be subject to survivorship bias here); this seems very easy for human engineers to work around in simulations. The same is plausibly true for other bottlenecks as well.
Re: Brain imitation learning
My cop-out answer here is that this is already covered by the “other methods” section. My real answer is that the model isn’t great at handling approaches that are intermediate between different methods. I agree it makes sense to continue to watch this space.
Also, the train of thought seems somewhat binary. If doctors are somewhat competent, but the doctors who worked at the FDA were unusually competent, then having an FDA would still make sense.
“Resources are always limited (as they should be) and prioritization is necessary. Why should they focus on who is and isn’t wearing a mask over enforcing laws against, I don’t know, robbery, rape and murder?”
I’m all for the police prioritizing serious crimes over more minor crimes (potentially to the extent of not enforcing the minor crime at all), but I have a problem, as a general rule, with the police telling people that they won’t enforce a law and will instead just be asking for voluntary compliance. That sort of statement is completely unnecessary, and seems to indicate that the city doesn’t have as strong control of their police as they should.
Potentially worth noting that if you add the lifetime anchor to the genome anchor, you most likely get ~the genome anchor.
Also, these physical limits – insofar as they are hard limits – are limits on various aspects of the impressiveness of the technology, but not on the cost of producing the technology. Learning-by-doing, economies of scale, process-engineering R&D, and spillover effects should still allow for costs to come down, even if the technology itself can hardly be improved.
“Mandates continue to make people angry”
True for some people, but also worth noting that they’re popular overall. Looks like around 60% of Americans support Biden’s mandate, for instance (this is pretty high for a cultural war issue).“Republicans are turning against vaccinations and vaccine mandates in general… would be rather disastrous if red states stopped requiring childhood immunizations”
Support has waned, and it would be terrible if they stopped them, but note that:Now republicans are split ~50:50; so it’s not like they have a consensus either way
Republicans being split and others (including independents) being in favor means that majority is clearly in favor, even in red states
Republican support has recovered somewhat already, and I’d expect support will continue to revert closer to pre-COVID levels as we progress further (especially years out); we might not reach pre-covid levels, but I’d be surprised if the general view of republicans was against several years from now (though OTOH, perhaps those against are more strongly against, so you could wind up in a single-issue voter type problem)
“3%”
This seems to be at the 12 week mark, which is somewhat arbitrary. Even according to the same study, looks like long covid rates are closer to 1% after 19 weeks.“To be blunt, they cheated (intentionally or otherwise)”
Flagging that I don’t like this language, for a couple reasons:I think it’s inaccurate/misrepresentative. “Cheating”, in my mind, implies some dishonesty. Yes, words can obviously be defined in any way, but I’m generally not a fan of redefining words with common definitions unless there’s a good reason. If, on the other hand, your claim is that they were indeed being dishonest, then I think you should come out and say that (otherwise what you’re doing is a little motte-and-bailey-ish).
I think it’s unnecessarily hostile. People make mistakes, including scientists making dumb mistakes. It’s good that they corrected their mistake (which is not something lots of people—including scientists—do). The fact that none of us caught it shows just how easy it is to make these sort of mistakes. (Again, this point doesn’t stand if you are trying to imply that it was intentional, but then I think you should state that.) I similarly don’t think it’s apt to call it “fessing up” when they correct their mistake.
Looks like this dropped after your post here so you wouldn’t have been able to incorporate it – advisors to the FDA are recommending moderna boosters for the same group of people that are getting pfizer boosters (65+, risk for health reasons, or risk for job), and also this will be at half dose. They should make a recommendation on J&J tomorrow.
Worth noting that Northern states abolished slavery long before industrialization. Perhaps even more striking, the British Empire (mostly) abolished slavery during the peak of its profitability. In both cases (and many others across the world), moral arguments seem to have played a very large role.
I can see how oodles more energy would mean more housing, construction, spaceflight, and so on, leading to higher GDP and higher quality of life. I don’t see how it would lead to revolutions in biotech and nanotech – surely the reason we haven’t cured aging or developed atomically precise manufacturing aren’t the energy requirements to do those things.
“at least nanotech and nano-scale manufacturing at a societal scale would require much more energy than we have been willing to provide it”
Maybe, but:
1) If we could build APM on a small scale now we would2) We can’t
3) This has nothing to do with energy limits
(My sense is also that advanced APM would be incredibly energy efficient and also would give us very cheap energy – Drexler provides arguments for why in Radical Abundance.)
I don’t think regulatory issues have hurt APM either (agree they have in biotech, though). Academic power struggles have hurt nanotech (and also biotech), though this seems to be the case in every academic field and not particularly related to creeping institutional sclerosis (over the past several hundred years, new scientific ideas have often had trouble breaking in through established paradigms, and we seem less bad on this front than we used to be). Regardless, neither of these issues would be solved with more energy, and academic power struggles would still exist even in the libertarian state Hall wants.
“the protocol I analyze later requires a specific form of niacin”
What’s the form? Also, do you know what sort of dosage is used here?If niacin is helpful for long covid, I wonder if taking it decreases the chances of getting long covid to begin with. Given how well tolerated it is, it might be worth taking just in case.
Thanks. I feel like for me the amount of attention for a marginal daily pill is negligibly small (I’m already taking a couple supplements, and I leave the bottles all on the kitchen table, so this would just mean taking one more pill with the others), but I suppose this depends on the person, and also the calculus is a bit different for people who aren’t taking any supplements now.
I think this is a good point, but I’d flag that the analogy might give the impression that intelligence is easier than it is—while animals have evolved flight multiple times by different paths (birds, insects, pterosaurs, bats) implying flight may be relatively easy, only one species has evolved intelligence.