After reading this, I prompted Claude with
Please write a parody of chapter 3 of the 1926 winnie the pooh, where instead of winnie and piglet searching for a woozle, some bloggers are looking for bloggers similar to matt levine, and not realizing that they are the bloggers who are similar to matt levine. This will be a humorous reply to the attached post.
Hastings
Arxiv is basically one huge, glacially slow internet comment section, where you reply to an article by citing it. It’s more interactive than it looks- most early career researchers are set up to get a ping whenever they are cited.
Keep in mind that representative democracy as practiced in the US is doing as well as it is while holding up to hundreds of millions of dollars of destructive pessimization effort- any alternative system is going to be hit with similar efforts. Just off the top of my head: we are being hit with about $50 dollars per capita of spending this fall, and that’s plenty to brain-melt a meaningful fraction of the population. Each member of a 500 member sortition body chosing a president, if their identity is leaked, is going to be immediately hit with OOM 30 million dollars of attempts to change their mind. This is a different environment than a calm deliberation and consideration of the issues as examined by the linked studies.
(figures computed by dividing 2024 election spending by targeted population)
What are the odds that Polymarket resolves “Trump yes” and Harris takes office in 2025? If these mystery traders expect to profit from hidden information, the hidden information could be about an anticipated failure of UMA instead of about the election itself.
Are there any mainstream programming languages that make it ergonomic to write high level numerical code that doesn’t allocate once the serious calculation starts? So far for this task C is by far the best option but it’s very manual, and Julia tries and does pretty well but you have to constantly make sure that the compiler successfully optimized away the allocations that you think it optimized away. (Obviously Fortran is also very good for this, but ugh)
To say that most academic research is anything, you’re going to have to pick a measure over research. Uniform measure is not going to be exciting – you’re going to get almost entirely undergraduate assignments and Third World paper mills. If your weighted sampler is “papers linked in articles about how academia is woke” you’re going to find a high %fake. If your weighed measure is “papers read during work hours by employees at F500 companies” you’ll find a lower, nonzero %fake.
Handwringing over public, vitriolic retractions spats is going to fuck your epistemology via sampling bias. There is no replication crisis in underwater basket weaving
Yeah, I definitely oversimplified somewhere. I’m definitely tripped up by “this statement is false” or statements that don’t terminate. Worse, thinking in that direction, I appear to have claimed that the utterance “What color is your t-shirt” is associated with a probability of being true.
Evaluating the truth of statements in a world of ambiguous language.
I think that your a-before-e example is confusing your intuition- a typical watermark that occurs 10% of the time isn’t going to be semantic, it’s more like “this n-gram hashed with my nonce == 0 mod 10”
I’m at this point pretty confident that under the Copenhagen interpretation, whenever an intergalactic photon hits earth, the wave-function collapse takes place on a semi-spherical wave-front many millions of lightyears in diameter. I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the interpretation of this event is in many-worlds. I know that it causes earth to pick which world it is in out of the possible worlds that split off when the photon was created, but I’m not sure if there is any event on the whole spherical wavefront.
It’s not a pure hypothetical- we are likely to see gravitational lens interferometry in our lifetime (if someone hasn’t achieved it yet outside of my attempt at literature review) which will either confirm that these considerations are real, or produce a shock result that they aren’t.
One feature of every lesswrong Petrov day ritual is the understanding that the people on the other side of the button have basically similar goals and reasoning processes, especially when aggregated into a group. I wonder if the mods at /r/sneerclub would be interested in a Petrov day collaboration in the future.
Does it ever fail to complete a proof, and honestly announce failure? A single time I have gotten claude to successfully disprove a statement that I asked it to prove, after trying to find a proof and instead finding a disproof, but I’ve never had it try for a while and then announce that it has not made progress either way.
The funniest possible outcome is that no one opts in and so the world is saved but the blog post is ruined.
I would hate to remove the possibility of a funny outcome. No opt in!
I greatly enjoyed this book back in the day, but the whole scenario was wild enough to summon the moral immune system. Past a certain point, for me it’s a safe default to put up mental barriers and actively try not to learn moral lessons from horror fiction. Worm, Gideon the 9th, anything by Stephen King- great, but I don’t quite expect to learn great lessons.
While rejecting them as sources of wisdom now, I can remember these books and return to them if I suddenly need to make moral choices in a world where people can grow wiser by being tortured for months, or stronger by
killing and then mentally fusing with your childhood friend. or achieve coordination by mind controlling your entire community and spending their lives like pawns
This is a good point! As a result of this effect and Jensen’s inequality, chaos is a much more significant limit on testing CUDA programs than for example cpp programs
Huang
I enjoyed doing this interview. I haven’t done too much extemporaneous public speaking, and it was a weird but wonderful experience being on the other side of the youtube camera. Thanks Elizabeth!
If a trebuchet requires you to solve the double pendulum problem (a classic example of a chaotic system) in order to aim, it is not a competition-winning trebuchet.
Ah, this is not quite the takeaway- and getting the subtlety here right is important for larger conclusions. If a simulating a trebuchet requires solving the double pendulum problem over many error-doublings, it is not a competition-winning trebuchet. This is an important distinction.
If you start with a simulator and a random assortment of pieces, and then start naively optimizing for pumpkin distance, you will quickly see the sort of design shown at 5:02 in the video, where the resulting machine is unphysical because its performance depends on coincidences that will go away in the face of tiny changes in initial conditions. This behaviour shows up with a variety of simulators and optimizers.
An expensive but probably effective solution is to perturb a design several times, simulate it several times, and stop simulation once the simulations diverge.
An ineffective solution is to limit the time of the solution, as many efficient and real-world designs take a long time to fire, because they begin with the machine slowly falling away from an unstable equilibrium.
The chaos-theory motivated cheap solution is to limit the number of rotations of bodies in the solution before terminating it, as experience shows error doublings tend to come from rotations in trebuchet-like chaotic systems.
The solution I currently have implemented at jstreb.hgreer.com is to only allow the direction of the projectile to rotate once before firing (specifically, it is released if it is moving upwards and to the right at a velocity above a threshold) which is not elegant, but seems mostly effective. I want to move to the “perturb and simulate several times” approach in the future.
The structure of language kind of screwed us here. Picture literally any reasonable policy for discussing each other’s religious affiliation in the workplace. Now implement that policy, but your workers speak a language where the grammar only functions if you know whether each referent is a “True” christian.
export INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL=change_yourself
Keep track of your past attemts to $INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL, so that you can better predict whether your future attempts to $INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL will succeed, and so better choose between plans that require $INSTRUMENTAL_GOAL and plans that route around it.
Since you’re already in it: do you happen to know if the popular system of epicycles accurately represented the (relative, per body) distance of each planet from earth over time, or just the angle? I’ve been curious about this for a while but haven’t had time to dig in. They’d at minimum have to get it right for the moon and sun for predicting eclipse type.