Eric Raymond

• Eric Raymond 31 Mar 2023 19:24 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: Against an AI Re­search Moratorium

  Of course the word “might” is doing a lot of work here! Because there is no guaranteed happy solution, the best we can do is steer away from futures we absolutely know we we do not want to be in, like a grinding totalitarianism rationalized by “We’re saving you from the looming threat of killer AIs!”

  ″ At least with the current system, corporations are able to test models before release”. The history of proprietary software does not inspire any confidence at all that this will be done adequately, or even at all; in a fight between time-to-market and software quality, getting their firstest almost always wins. It’s not reasonable to expect this to change simply because some people have strong opinions about AI risk.

Against an AI Re­search Moratorium

• Eric Raymond 29 Nov 2022 22:20 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: GradientDissenter’s comment on: LessWrong read­ers are in­vited to ap­ply to the Lurkshop

  Thank you, GradientDissenter. I am pleased and honored that you though to invite me, andin the normal course of events would have jumped at the invitation. I think I could add some value to the conversation about X-risks.

  Unfortunately, I am recovering from major surgery and don’t have the physical stamina to do a conference yet. If your event had been scheduled even a month later I think I would be able to give you a different answer.

  If you run any future events of this kind I would be very interested in attending.

• Eric Raymond 4 Apr 2022 16:49 UTC

  12 points

  3

  on: Be­ing the (Pareto) Best in the World

  My name is Eric S. Raymond, and I approve this message. :-)

  I’ve been applying this strategy consciously for a long time, working the polymathy, looking for ways to apply insights across fields. And I in fact did become famous and respected this way, by applying the toolkits of cultural anthropology, evo-psych, and libertarian economics to software engineering.

  The “riches” part has eluded me, however.

• Eric Raymond 4 Apr 2022 16:32 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  Maybe I’m stating what is now obvious, but this applies to shortages of other outputs as well.

  Think of potential producers for a good as a portfolio of options, one or more of which is exercised when you need to actually have it. You want to have multiple options available to reduce your risk that no producer will be able to deliver

  When the cost of transportation is high, production has to be local to you, so it is more likely that all your options have correlated risks. As the cost of transport drops it gets possible to pick up options from producers further away, so the risks de-correlate. Trade networks get larger.

  But that’s not all good. Transport disruption is always a risk in trade, even when it’s very local. But as trade networks get larger and the transport network has more moving parts, coordination issues increase.

  Also, you’re trading decorrelation of risk for the possibility of becoming critically dependent on suppliers far away from you. Which brings us back to my original post.

• Eric Raymond 3 Apr 2022 12:44 UTC

  −6 points

  on: Avoid­ing Mo­ral Fads?

  Today

  Today’s analog to eugenics, lobotomy and “recovered memories” seems extremely obvious to me: transgenderism, especially in its manifestations as puberty blockers and “reassignment” surgery applied to prepubescent children who are not true morphogenetic intersexes.

  We are living through an atrocity justified by a weirdly Gnostic view of human identity, and I expect the eventual reckoning to be terrible.

• Eric Raymond 3 Apr 2022 12:07 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Mateusz Bagiński’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  Corrected, thanks for spotting that.

• Eric Raymond 3 Apr 2022 0:14 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: TLW’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  I got the 40% from one of Peter Zeihan’s talks. I don’t know where he got it from, but I have yet to catch him in a clear error on statistics I know how to check.

• Eric Raymond 3 Apr 2022 0:12 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: michaelkeenan’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  I should have said 40% of the feedstock for exported fertilizer. I also should have explicitly noted that because a lot of wheat is still produced locally to where it’s consumed, the famine risk is limited to places that are dependent on wheat imports.

  Unfortunately there are plenty of those. And they are generally places that are poor by other measures as well, making coping with economic shocks more fraught.

  Your argument that 3X current phosphate prices is tolerable seems sound. On the other hand, anything that has to be mined has inelastic supply because the cost of the capital equipment—and in many countries the cost of the regulatory approvals—is so high.

• Eric Raymond 2 Apr 2022 20:53 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: michaelkeenan’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  Those are interesting figures and I thank you for them, but I think they underpredict the impact.

  First, there’s no reason to believe we’ll keep as much as a quarter of Russian and Ukrainian wheat production. Peter Zeihan says Ukraine will be a net wheat importer for some years, and I’ve found him to be pretty careful and non-alarmist about claims like that.

  Second, don’t forget the phosphate problem. As long as Russia can’t sell its phosphate because it’s been sanctioned out of SWIFT etc., 40% of the normal feedstock for fertilizers is out of play. This is going to push up prices and hit productivity seriously in a lot of wheat-growing areas that aren’t in the war zone. (As usual, the US will be far less impacted than most other places—we have large domestic phosphate reserves.)

  Let me try to ballpark this based on your figures. I’ll steelman the case for low impact by choosing a low guess for the decrease in wheat yield due to not having phosphates, let’s say 40% . I know this is low because a lot of growing areas have tired soil that barely produces at all without fertilizers. Multiply this with the lost volume of Russian phosphate exports and it looks like world wheat production takes a 16% hit. Add that to the 8% from the lost wheat exports and we’re down 24%.

  That’s best case. It’s more likely the impact is worse, producing a century-scale shock.

• Eric Raymond 2 Apr 2022 20:18 UTC

  28 points

  in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  The reason it happens this way is that in a multi-agent economy with reliable trade, reserves against disruption get interpreted as wasteful and competed out. Investors seek the higher returns from companies that cut that below-the-line cost and plow the savings into capital goods or other things that can increase future revenues.

  For example, Just In Time delivery swept the business world because investors and managers optimizing for profits began to see warehouses full of inputs as places that were costing money, not making money. JIT eliminates that inventory, but it relies on the assumption that you can always collect your inputs from suppliers just before you need them.

  This was continuous with a century-long trend of vertically-integrated manufacturing dis-aggregating into contract networks, which made total sense as long as transaction costs kept dropping.

  Another way to look at it is this: As long as communications and transport are getting cheaper and more reliable, profit maximizers will try to use them to replace more expensive goods, including storage space. Since food is perishable, the advantage of not buffering it in warehouses is exceptionally high. Which is fine until the cost gradients reverse and JITting your food from overseas gets expensive, at which point you can be in a heap of trouble.

  Is efficiency-driven supercriticality the only reason for interconnected failures at all scales? No. Is it an important driver, perhaps the single most important one under modern conditions? Evidence points to yes. Worked example follows: embedded electronics for automobiles.

  This is an example of how even ordinary fluctuations in demand for non-perishable goods (something much less disruptive than a war) can cause cascade failures in a system that’s supercritical due to insufficient buffering. In 2020, automobile manufacturers reacted to a COVID-induced collapse in demand for their product by letting their contracts with the chip fabs making their car electronics go un-renewed—assuming that once demand picked up they could buy the chips again at the same prices.

  When they went back beginning in later 2021, they discovered that (a) the chip fabs had converted the idled capacity to higher-margin products, and (b) they hadn’t warehoused enough parts to keep making cars until they could buy line capacity. The consequences rippled down the chain towards consumers as a bunch of availability and price shocks, nearly wrecking several manufacturers and damaging a legion of related service businesses.

  Took them a lot more money to get production reestablished than it would have to keep their piece of the fab capacity running through the slump. The recovery isn’t done yet, and business schools are already treating this as a textbook case of the management stupids

• Eric Raymond 2 Apr 2022 18:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Austin Chen’s comment on: Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

  I don’t know how to quantify the risk. I believe it’s serious because (a) global economic analysts like Peter Zeihan say it’s serious, and (b) it’s difficult for me to construct a plausible scenario in which that many tons per wheat a month becoming unavailable doesn’t cause famine somewhere. The risk would be especially acute in places like Egypt, Bangladesh, and Japan that combine a large population with a shortage of arable land—but while Japanese are wealthy enough to meet rising prices in the grain markets and get by, Egyptians and Bangladeshis are not.

Moloch and the sand­pile catastrophe

• Eric Raymond 29 Apr 2021 13:33 UTC

  8 points

  0

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ism be­fore the Sequences

  One big difference is that there are theoretical cracks in the lightspeed wall that don’t have any go-to-another-quantum-world analog. The Alcubierre solution to the field equations is a thing, after all. More importantly for this discussion, we can construct thought experiments about superluminal travel that have truth conditions because we know what a starfield would look like from N lightyears thataway. Quantumporting doesn’t have analogues of either of those things.

  But that’s kind of a distraction. The interesting question for this discussion is how, if at all, the two claims “galaxies receding outside our light cone continue to exist” and “Russell’s teapot exists” are different. I think we agree that there is a predictivist account of “teapot”.

  You assert that a predictivist definition of meaning and truth value cannot sustain an account of the “galaxies” claim, and that predictivism is therefore insufficient. I, a predictivist, deny your assertion—you have smuggled in an assumption that predictivists somehow aren’t allowed to assign meaning to counterfactuals that violate physical law, which I (a predictivist) am quite willing to do as long as hypotheically violating that physical law would not bar us from being able to cash out a truth claim in expected experiences.

  I believe I am a predictivist who understands predictivism correctly and consistently. I believe you are a predictivist in practice who has failed to understand predictivism in theory.

  How can we investigate, confirm, or refute these claims?

• Eric Raymond 15 Apr 2021 13:43 UTC

  5 points

  on: Against “Con­text-Free In­tegrity”

  Terminological point: I don’t think you can properly describe your hypothetical rationalist in Stalinist Russia as “paranoid”. His belief that he is surrounded by what amounts to a conspiracy out to subjugate and destroy him is neither fixated nor delusional; it is quite correct, even if many of the conspiracy’s members would choose to defect from it if they believed they could do so without endangering themselves.

  I also note that my experience of living in the US since around 2014 has been quite similar in kind, if not yet in degree. I pick out 2014 because of the rage-mobbing of Brendan Eich; that was the the point at which “social justice” began presenting to me as an overtly serious threat to free speech. Six years later, political censorship and the threat from cancel culture have escalated to the point where, while we may not yet have achieved Soviet levels of repression, we’re closing in fast on East Germany’s.

• Eric Raymond 15 Apr 2021 12:35 UTC

  8 points

  0

  on: Spe­cial­iz­ing in Prob­lems We Don’t Understand

  Endorsed. A lot of this article is strongly similar to an unfinished draft of mine about how to achieve breakthroughs on unsolved problems.

  I’m not ready to publish the entire draft yet, but I will add one effective heuristic. When tackling an unsolved problem, try to model how other people are likely to have attacked it and then avoid those approaches. If they worked, someone else would probably have achieved success with them before you came along.

• Eric Raymond 15 Apr 2021 10:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: peak.singularity’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ism be­fore the Sequences

  To be fair, I haven’t followed Less Wrong all that closely over the years. It’s more that I’ve known some of the key people for a while, notably Eliezer himself and Scott Alexander.

• Eric Raymond 15 Apr 2021 3:12 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ism be­fore the Sequences

  It seems to me that you’ve been taking your model of predictivism from people who need to read some Kripke. In Peirce’s predictivism, to assert that a statement is meaningful is precisely to assert that you have a truth condition for it, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily have the capability to test the condition.

  Consider Russell’s teapot. “A teapot orbits between Earth and Mars” is a truth claim that must unambiguously have a true or false value. There is a truth condition on on it; if you build sufficiently powerful telescopes and perform a whole-sky survey you will find it. It would be entirely silly to claim that the claim is meaningless because the telescopes don’t exist.

  The claim “Galaxies continue to exist when they exit our light-cone” has exactly the same status. The fact that you happen to to believe the right sort of telescope not only does not exist but cannot exist is irrelevant—you could after all be mistaken in believing that sort of observation is impossible. I think it is quite likely you are mistaken, as nonlocal realism seems the most likely escape from the bind Bell’s inequalities put us in.

  MWI presents a a subtler problem, not like Russell’s Teapot, because we haven’t the faintest idea what observing another quantum world would be like. In the case of the overly-distant galaxies, I can sketch a test condition for the claim that involves taking a superluminal jaunt 13 billion light-years thataway and checking all around me to see if the distribution of galaxies has a huge NOT THERE on the side away from Earth. I think a predictivist would be right to ask that you supply an analogous counterfactual before the claim “other quantum worlds exist” can be said to have a meaning.

• Eric Raymond 8 Apr 2021 4:12 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ism be­fore the Sequences

  Eliezer was more influenced by probability theory, I by analytic philosophy, yes. These variations are to be expected. I’m reading Jaynes now and finding him quite wonderful. I was a mathematician at one time, so that book is almost comfort food for me—part of the fun is running across old friends expressed in his slightly eccentric language.

  I already had a pretty firm grasp on Feynman’s “first-principles approach to reasoning” by the time I read his autobiographical stuff. So I enjoyed the books a lot, but more along the lines of “Great physicist and I think alike! Cool!” than being influenced by him. If I’d been able to read them 15 years earlier I probably would have been influenced.

  One of the reasons I chose a personal, heavily narratized mode to write the essay in was exactly so I could use that to organize what would otherwise have been a dry and forbidding mass of detail. Glad to know that worked—and, from what you don’t say, that I appear to have avoided the common “it’s all about my feelings” failure mode of such writing.

• Eric Raymond 8 Apr 2021 4:01 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: koroviev’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ism be­fore the Sequences

  I have run across Bucky Fuller of course. Often brilliant, occasionally cranky, geodesic domes turned out to suck because you can’t seal all those joints well enough. We could use more like him.