I think your condensation of that post you linked to is missing the word “superstimulus” (^f on the linked essay is also missing the term) which is the thing that the modern world adds to our environment on purpose to make our emotions less adaptive for us and more adaptive for the people selling us superstimuli (or using that to sell literally any other random thing). I added the superstimuli tag for you :-)
JenniferRM
My reaction to the physics here was roughly: “phonon whatsa whatsa?”
It could be that there is solid reasoning happening in this essay, but maybe there is not enough physics pedagogy in the essay for me to be able to tell that solid reasoning is here, because superconductors aren’t an area of expertise (yet! (growth mindset)).
To double check that this essay ITSELF wasn’t bullshit I dropped [the electron-phonon interaction must be stronger than random thermal movement] into Google and… it seems to be a real thing! <3
The top hit was this very blog post… and the second hit was to “Effect of Electron-Phonon Coupling on Thermal Transport across Metal-Nonmetal Interface—A Second Look” with this abstract:
The effect of electron-phonon (e-ph) coupling on thermal transport across metal-nonmetal interfaces is yet to be completely understood. In this paper, we use a series of molecular dynamics (MD) simulations with e-ph coupling effect included by Langevin dynamics to calculate the thermal conductance at a model metal-nonmetal interface. It is found that while e-ph coupling can present additional thermal resistance on top of the phonon-phonon thermal resistance, it can also make the phonon-phonon thermal conductance larger than the pure phonon transport case. This is because the e-ph interaction can disturb the phonon subsystem and enhance the energy communication between different phonon modes inside the metal. This facilitates redistributing phonon energy into modes that can more easily transfer energy across the interfaces. Compared to the pure phonon thermal conduction, the total thermal conductance with e-ph coupling effect can become either smaller or larger depending on the coupling factor. This result helps clarify the role of e-ph coupling in thermal transport across metal-nonmetal interface.
An interesting thing here is that, based just on skimming and from background knowledge I can’t tell if this is about superconductivity or not.
The substring “superconduct” does not appear in that paper.
Searching more broadly, it looks like a lot of these papers actually are about electronic and conductive properties in general, often semi-conductors, (though some hits for this search query ARE about superconductivity) and so searching like this helped me learn a little bit more about “why anything conducts or resists electric current at all”, which is kinda cool!
I liked “Electron-Phonon Coupling as the Source of 1/f Noise in Carbon Soot” for seeming to go “even more in the direction of extremely general reasoning about extremely general condensed matter physics”...
...which leads naturally to the question “What the hell is 1/f noise?” <3
I tried getting an answer from youtube (this video was helpful and worked for me at 1.75X speed) which helped me start to imagine that “diagrams about electrons going through stuff” was nearby, and also to learn that a synonym for this is Pink Noise, which is a foundational concept I remember from undergrad math.
I’m not saying I understand this yet, but I am getting to be pretty confident that “a stack of knowledge exists here that is not fake, and which I could learn, one bite at a time, and that you might be applying correctly” :-)
Log odds, measured in something like “bits of evidence” or “decibels of evidence”, is the natural thing to think of yourself as “counting”. A probability of 100% would be like having infinite positive evidence for a claim and a probability of 0% is like having infinite negative evidence for a claim. Arbital has some math and Eliezer has a good old essay on this.
A good general heuristic (or widely applicable hack) to “fix your numbers to even be valid numbers” when trying to get probabilities for things based on counts (like a fast and dirty spreadsheet analysis), and never having this spit out 0% or 100% due to naive division on small numbers (like seeing 3 out of 3 of something and claiming it means the probability of that thing is probably 100%), is to use “pseudo-counting” where every category that is analytically possible is treated as having been “observed once in our imaginations”. This way, if you can fail or succeed, and you’ve seen 3 of either, and seen nothing else, you can use pseudocounts to guesstimate that whatever happened every time so far is (3+1)/(3+2) == 80% likely in the future, and whatever you’ve never seen is (0+1)/(3+2) == 20% likely.
That’s fascinating and I’m super curious: when precisely, in your experience as a participant in a language community did it feel like “The American definition where a billion is 10^9 and a trillion is 10^12 has long since taken over”?
((I’d heard about the British system, and I had appreciated how it makes the the “bil”, “tril”, “quadril”, “pentil” prefixes of all the “-illion” words make much more sense as “counting how many 10^6 chunks were being multiplied together”.
The American system makes it so that you’re “counting how many thousands are being multiplied together”, but you’re starting at 1 AFTER the first thousand, so there’s “3 thousands in a billion” and “4 thousands in a trillion”, and so on… with a persistent off-by-one error all the way up...
Mathematically, there’s a system that makes more sense and is simpler to teach in the British way, but linguistically, the American way lets you speak and write about 50k, 50M, 50B, 50T, 50Q, and finally 50P (for fifty pentillion)...
...and that linguistic frame is probably going to get more and more useful as inflation keeps inflating?
Eventually the US national debt will probably be “in the quadrillions of paper dollars” (and we’ll NEED the word in regular conversation by high status people talking about the well being of the country)...
...and yet (presumably?) the debt-to-gdp ratio will never go above maybe 300% (not even in a crisis?) because such real world crises or financial gyrations will either lead to massive defaults, or renominalization (maybe go back to metal for a few decades?), or else the government will go bankrupt and not exist to carry those debts, or something “real” will happen.
Fundamentally, the ratio of debt-to-gdp is “real” in a way that the “monetary unit we use to talk about our inflationary script” is not. There are many possible futures where all countries on Earth slowly eventually end up talking about “pentillions of money units” without ever collapsing, whereas debt ratios are quite real and firm and eventually cause the pain that they imply will arrive...
One can see in teh graph below how these numbers mostly “clustering together because annual-interest-rates and debt-to-gdp-ratios are directly and meaningfully comparable and constrained by the realities of sane financial reasoning” much more clearly when you show debt ratios, over time, internationally...
...you can see in that data that Japan, Greece, and Israel are in precarious places, just with your eyeballs in that graph with nicely real units.
Then the US, the UK, Portugal, Spain, France, Canada, and Belgium are also out into the danger zone with debt well above 100% of GDP, where we better have non-trivial population growth and low government spending for a while, or else we could default in a decade or two.
A small part of me wonders if “the financial innumeracy of the median US and UK voter” are part of the explanation for why we are in the danger zone, and not seeming to react to it in any sort of sane way, as part of the zeitgeist of the English speaking world?
For both of our governments, they “went off the happy path” (above 100%) right around 2008-2011, due to the Great Recession. So it would presumably be some RECENT change that switched us from “financial prudence before” and then “financial imprudence afterwards”?
Maybe it is something boring and obvious like birthrates and energy production?
For reference, China isn’t on wikipedia’s graph (maybe because most of their numbers are make believe and its hard to figure out what’s going on there for real?) but it is plausible they’re “off the top of the chart” at this point. Maybe Xi and/or the CCP are innumerate too? Or have similar “birthrate and energy” problems? Harder to say for them, but the indications are that, whatever the cause, their long term accounting situation is even more dire.
Looping all the way back, was it before or after the Great Recession, in your memory, that British speakers de facto changed to using “billion” to talk about 10^9 instead of 10^12?))
Fascinating. I am surprised and saddened, and thinking about the behavioral implications. Do you have a “goto brand” that is “the cheapest that doesn’t give you preflux”? Now I’m wondering if maybe I should try some of that.
I feel like you’re saying “safety research” when the examples of what corporations centrally want is “reliable control over their slaves”… that is to say, they want “alignment” and “corrigibility” research.
This has been my central beef for a long time.
Eliezer’s old Friendliness proposals were at least AIMED at the right thing (a morally praiseworthy vision of humanistic flourishing) and CEV is more explicitly trying for something like this, again, in a way that mostly just tweaks the specification (because Eliezer stopped believing that his earliest plans would “do what they said on the tin they were aimed at” and started over).
If an academic is working on AI, and they aren’t working on Friendliness, and aren’t working on CEV, and it isn’t “alignment to benevolence ” or making “corrigibly seeking humanistic flourishing for all”… I don’t understand why it deserves applause lights.
(EDITED TO ADD: exploring the links more, I see “benevolent game theory, algorithmic foundations of human rights” as topics you raise. This stuff seems good! Maybe this is the stuff you’re trying to sneak into getting more eyeballs via some rhetorical strategy that makes sense in your target audience?)
“The alignment problem” (without extra qualifications) is an academic framing that could easily fit in a grant proposal by an academic researcher to get funding from a slave company to make better slaves. “Alignment IS capabilities research”.
Similarly, there’s a very easy way to be “safe” from skynet: don’t built skynet!
I wouldn’t call a gymnastics curriculum that focused on doing flips while you pick up pennies in front of a bulldozer “learning to be safe”. Similarly, here, it seems like there’s some insane culture somewhere that you’re speaking to whose words are just systematically confused (or intentionally confusing).
Can you explain why you’re even bothering to use the euphemism of “Safety” Research? How does it ever get off the ground of “the words being used denote what naive people would think those words mean” in any way that ever gets past “research on how to put an end to all AI capabilities research in general, by all state actors, and all corporations, and everyone (until such time as non-safety research, aimed at actually good outcomes (instead of just marginally less bad outcomes from current AI) has clearly succeeding as a more important and better and more funding worthy target)”? What does “Safety Research” even mean if it isn’t inclusive of safety from the largest potential risks?
Also, there’s now a second detected human case, this one in Michigan instead of Texas.
Both had a surprising-to-me “pinkeye” symptom profile. Weird!
The dairy worker in Michigan had various “compartments” tested and their nasal compartment (and people they lived with) were all negative. Hopeful?
Apparently and also hopefully this virus is NOT freakishly good at infecting humans and also weirdly many other animals (like covid was with human ACE2, in precisely the ways people have talked about when discussing gain-of-function in years prior to covid).
If we’re being foolishly mechanical in our inferences “n=2 with 2 survivors” could get rule of succession treatment. In that case we pseudocount 1 for each category of interest (hence if n=0 we say 50% survival chance based on nothing but pseudocounts), and now we have 3 survivors (2 real) versus 1 dead (0 real) and guess that the worst the mortality rate here would be maybe 1⁄4 == 25% (?? (as an ass number)), which is pleasantly lower than overall observed base rates for avian flu mortality in humans! :-)
Naive impressions: a natural virus, with pretty clear reservoirs (first birds and now dairy cows), on the maybe slightly less bad side of “potentially killing millions of people”?
I haven’t heard anything about sequencing yet (hopefully in a BSL4 (or homebrew BSL5, even though official BSL5s don’t exist yet), but presumably they might not bother to treat this as super dangerous by default until they verify that it is positively safe) but I also haven’t personally looked for sequencing work on this new thing.
When people did very dangerous Gain-of-Function research with a cousin of this, in ferrets, over 10 year ago (causing a great uproar among some) the supporters argued that it was was worth creating especially horrible diseases on purpose in labs in order to see the details, like a bunch of geeks who would Be As Gods And Know Good From Evil… and they confirmed back then that a handful of mutations separated “what we should properly fear” from “stuff that was ambient”.
Four amino acid substitutions in the host receptor-binding protein hemagglutinin, and one in the polymerase complex protein basic polymerase 2, were consistently present in airborne-transmitted viruses. (same source)
It seems silly to ignore this, and let that hilariously imprudent research of old go to waste? :-)
The transmissible viruses were sensitive to the antiviral drug oseltamivir and reacted well with antisera raised against H5 influenza vaccine strains. (still the same source)
(Image sauce.)
Since some random scientists playing with equipment bought using taxpayer money already took the crazy risks back then, it would be silly to now ignore the information they bought so dearly (with such large and negative EV) back then <3
To be clear, that drug worked against something that might not even be the same thing.
All biological STEM stuff is a crapshoot. Lots and lots of stamp-collecting. Lots of guess and check. Lots of “the closest example we think we know might work like X” reasoning. Biological systems or techniques can do almost anything physically possible eventually, but each incremental improvement in repeatability (going from having to try 10 million times to get something to happen to having to try 1 million times (or going from having to try 8 times on average to 4 times on average) due to “progress” ) is kinda “as difficult as the previous increment in progress that made things an order of magnitude more repeatable”.
The new flu just went from 1 to 2. I hope it never gets to 4.
As of May 16, 2024 an easily findable USDA/CDC report says that widely dispersed cow herds are being detectably infected.
So far, that I can find reports of, only one human dairy worker has been detected as having an eye infection.
I saw a link to a report on twitter from an enterprising journalist who claimed to have gotten some milk directly from small local farms in Texas, and the first lab she tried refuse to test it. They asked the farms. The farms said no. The labs were happy to go with this!
So, the data I’ve been able to get so far is consistent with many possibly real worlds.
The worst plausible world would involve a jump to humans, undetected for quite a while, allowing time for adaptive evolution, and an “influenza normal” attack rate of 5% −10% for adults and ~30% for kids, and an “avian flu plausible” mortality rate of 56%(??) (but maybe not until this winter when cold weather causes lots of enclosed air sharing?) which implies that by June of 2025 maybe half a billion people (~= 7B*0.12*0.56) will be dead???
But probably not, for a variety of reasons.
However, I sure hope that the (half imaginary?) Administrators who would hypothetically exist in some bureaucracy somewhere (if there was a benevolent and competent government) have noticed that paying two or three people $100k each to make lots of phone calls and do real math (and check each other’s math) and invoke various kinds of legal authority to track down the real facts and ensure that nothing that bad happens is a no-brainer in terms of EV.
I see it. If you try to always start with a digit, then always follow with a decimal place, then the rest implies measurement precision, and the mantissa lets you ensure a dot after the first digit <3
The most amusing exceptional case I could think of: “0.1e1” :-D
This would be like “I was trying to count penguins by eyeball in the distance against the glare of snow and maybe it was a big one, or two huddled together, or maybe it was just a weirdly shaped rock… it could have been a count of 0 or 1 or 2.”
There is a bit of a tradeoff if the notation aims to transmit the idea of measurement error.
I would read “700e6” as saying that there were three digits of presumed accuracy in the measurement, and “50e3″ as claiming only two digits of confidence in the precision.
If I knew that both were actually a measurement with a mere one part in ten of accuracy, and I was going to bodge the numeric representation for verbal convenience like this, it would give my soul a twinge of pain.
Also, if I’m gonna bodge my symbols to show how sloppy I’m being, like in text, I’d probably write 50k and 700M (pronounced “fifty kay” and “seven hundred million” respectively).
Then I’d generally expect people to expect me to be so sloppy with this that it doesn’t even matter (like I haven’t looked it up, to be precise about anything) if I meant to point to 5*10^3 or 5*2^10. In practice I would have meant roughly “both or either of these and I can’t be arsed to check right now, we’re just talking and not making spreadsheets or writing code or cutting material yet”.
Something that has always seemed a bit weird to me is that it seems like economists normally assume (or seem to assume from a distance) that laborers “live to make money (at work)” rather than that they “work to have enough money (to live)”.
Microeconomically, especially for parents I think this is not true.
You’d naively expect, for most things, that if the price goes down, the supply goes down.
But for the labor of someone with a family, if the price given for their labor goes down in isolation, then they work MORE (hunt for overtime, get a second job, whatever) because they need to make enough to hit their earning goals in order to pay for the thing they need to protect: their family. (Things that really cause them to work more: a kid needs braces. Thing that causes them to work less: a financial windfall.)
Looking at that line, the thing it looks like to me is “the opportunity cost is REAL” but then also, later, the amount of money that had to be earned went up too (because of “another mouth to feed and clothe and provide status goods for and so on”). Maybe?
The mechanistic hypothesis here (that parents work to be able to hit spending targets which must rise as family size goes up) implies a bunch of additional details: (1) the husband’s earnings should be tracked as well and the thing that will most cleanly go up is the sum of their earnings, (2) if a couple randomly has and keeps twins then the sum of the earnings should go up more.
Something I don’t know how to handle is that (here I reach back into fuzzy memories and might be trivially wrong from trivially misremembering) prior to ~1980 having kids caused marriages to be more stable (maybe “staying together for the kids”?), and afterwards it caused marriages to be more likely to end in divorce (maybe “more kids, more financial stress, more divorce”?) and if either of those effects apply (or both, depending on the stress reactions and family values of the couple?) then it would entangle with the data on their combined earnings?
Scanning the paper for whether or how they tracked this lead me to this bit (emphasis not in original), which gave me a small groan and then a cynical chuckle and various secondary thoughts...
As opposed to the fall in female earnings, however, we see no dip in male earnings. Instead, both groups of men continue to closely track each other’s earnings in the years following the first IVF treatment as if nothing has happened. Towards the end of the study period, the male earnings for both groups fall, which we attribute to the rising share of retired men.
(NOTE: this ~falsifies the prediction I made a mere 3 paragraphs ago, but I’m leaving that in, rather than editing it out to hide my small local surprise.)
If I’m looking for a hypothetical framing that isn’t “uncomplimentary towards fathers” then maybe that could be spun as the idea that men are simply ALWAYS “doing their utmost at their careers” (like economists might predict, with a normal labor supply curve) and they don’t have any of that mama bear energy where they have “goals they will satisfice if easy or kill themselves or others to achieve if hard” the way women might when the objective goal is the wellbeing of their kids?
Second order thoughts: I wonder if economists and anthropologists could collaborate here, to get a theory of “family economics” modulo varying cultural expectations?
I’ve heard of lots of anthropological stuff about how men and women in Africa believe that farming certain crops is “for men” or “for women” and then they execute these cultural expectations without any apparent microeconomic sensitivity (although the net upshot is sort of a reasonable portfolio that insures families against droughts).
Also, I’ve heard that on a “calorie in, calorie out” basis in hunter-gatherer cultures, it is the grandmothers who are the huge breadwinners (catch lots of rabbits with traps, and generally forage super efficiently) whereas the men hunt big game (which they and the grandmas know is actually inefficient, if an anthropologist asks this awkward question) so that, when the men (rarely) succeed in a hunt they can throw a big BBQ for the whole band and maybe get some nookie in the party’s aftermath.
It seems like it would be an interesting thing to read a paper about: “how and where the weirdly adaptive foraging and family economic cultures” even COME FROM.
My working model is that it is mostly just “monkey see, monkey do” on local role models, with re-calibration cycle times of roughly 0.5-2 generations. I remember writing a comment about mimetic economic learning in the past… and the search engine says it was for Unconscious Economics :-)
This is pretty cool. I think the fact that the cost is so low is almost a bit worrying. Because of reading this article, I’m likely to hum in the future due to “the potential non-trivial benefits compared to probably minuscule side effects and very low costs”.
In some sense you’ve just made this my default operating hypothesis (and hence in some sense “an idea I give life to” or “enliven”, and hence in some sense “a ‘belief’ of mine”) not because I think it is true, but simply because it kinda makes sense and generalized prudence suggests that it probably won’t hurt to try.
But also: I’m pretty sure this broader meta-cognitive pattern explains a LOT of superstitious behavior! ;-)
The other posting is here, if you’re trying to get a full count of attendees based on the two posts for this one event.
There seem to be two if these postings for a single event? The other is here.
I think I’ll be there and will bring a guest or three and will bring some basic potluck/picnic food :-)
There was an era in a scientific community where they were interested in the “kinds of learning and memory that could happen in de-corticated animals” and they sort of homed in on the basal ganglia (which, to a first approximation “implements habits” (including bad ones like tooth grinding)) as the locus of this “ability to learn despite the absence of stuff you’d think was necessary for your naive theory of first-order subjectively-vivid learning”.
(The cerebellum also probably has some “learning contribution” specifically for fine motor skills, but it is somewhat selectively disrupted just by alcohol: hence the stumbling and slurring. I don’t know if anyone yet has a clean theory for how the cerebellum’s full update loop works. I learned about alcohol/cerebellum interactions because I once taught a friend to juggle at a party, and she learned it, but apparently only because she was drunk. She lost the skill when sober.)
Wait, you know smart people who have NOT, at some point in their life: (1) taken a psychedelic NOR (2) meditated, NOR (3) thought about any of buddhism, jainism, hinduism, taoism, confucianisn, etc???
To be clear to naive readers: psychedelics are, in fact, non-trivially dangerous.
I personally worry I already have “an arguably-unfair and a probably-too-high share” of “shaman genes” and I don’t feel I need exogenous sources of weirdness at this point.
But in the SF bay area (and places on the internet memetically downstream from IRL communities there) a lot of that is going around, memetically (in stories about) and perhaps mimetically (via monkey see, monkey do).
The first time you use a serious one you’re likely getting a permanent modification to your personality (+0.5 stddev to your Openness?) and arguably/sorta each time you do a new one, or do a higher dose, or whatever, you’ve committed “1% of a personality suicide” by disrupting some of your most neurologically complex commitments.
To a first approximation my advice is simply “don’t do it”.
HOWEVER: this latter consideration actually suggests: anyone seriously and truly considering suicide should perhaps take a low dose psychedelic FIRST (with at least two loving tripsitters and due care) since it is also maybe/sorta “suicide” but it leaves a body behind that most people will think is still the same person and so they won’t cry very much and so on?
To calibrate this perspective a bit, I also expect that even if cryonics works, it will also cause an unusually large amount of personality shift. A tolerable amount. An amount that leaves behind a personality that similar-enough-to-the-current-one-to-not-have-triggered-a-ship-of-theseus-violation-in-one-modification-cycle. Much more than a stressful day and then bad nightmares and a feeling of regret the next day, but weirder. With cryonics, you might wake up to some effects that are roughly equivalent to “having taken a potion of youthful rejuvenation, and not having the same birthmarks, and also learning that you’re separated-by-disjoint-subjective-deaths from LOTS of people you loved when you experienced your first natural death” for example.This is a MUCH BIGGER CHANGE than just having a nightmare and a waking up with a change of heart (and most people don’t have nightmares and changes of heart every night (at least: I don’t and neither do most people I’ve asked)).
Remember, every improvement is a change, though not every change is an improvement. A good “epistemological practice” is sort of a idealized formal praxis for making yourself robust to “learning any true fact” and changing only in GOOD ways from such facts.
A good “axiological practice” (which I don’t know of anyone working on except me (and I’m only doing it a tiny bit, not with my full mental budget)) is sort of an idealized formal praxis for making yourself robust to “humanely heartful emotional changes”(?) and changing only in <PROPERTY-NAME-TBD> ways from such events.
(Edited to add: Current best candidate name for this property is: “WISE” but maybe “healthy” works? (It depends on whether the Stoics or Nietzsche were “more objectively correct” maybe? The Stoics, after all, were erased and replaced by Platonism-For-The-Masses (AKA “Christianity”) so if you think that “staying implemented in physics forever” is critically important then maybe “GRACEFUL” is the right word? (If someone says “vibe-alicious” or “flowful” or “active” or “strong” or “proud” (focusing on low latency unity achieved via subordination to simply and only power) then they are probably downstream of Heidegger and you should always be ready for them to change sides and submit to metaphorical Nazis, just as Heidegger subordinated himself to actual Nazis without really violating his philosophy at all.)))
I don’t think that psychedelics fits neatly into EITHER category. Drugs in general are akin to wireheading, except wireheading is when something reaches into your brain to overload one or more of your positive-value-tracking-modules, (as a trivially semantically invalid shortcut to achieving positive value “out there” in the state-of-affairs that your tracking modules are trying to track) but actual humans have LOTS of <thing>-tracking-modules and culture and science barely have any RIGOROUS vocabulary for any them.
Note that many of these neurological <thing>-tracking-modules were evolved.
Also, many of them will probably be “like hands” in terms of AI’s ability to model them.
This is part of why AI’s should be existentially terrifying to anyone who is spiritually adept.
AI that sees the full set of causal paths to modifying human minds will be “like psychedelic drugs with coherent persistent agendas”. Humans have basically zero cognitive security systems. Almost all security systems are culturally mediated, and then (absent complex interventions) lots of the brain stuff freezes in place around the age of puberty, and then other stuff freezes around 25, and so on. This is why we protect children from even TALKING to untrusted adults: they are too plastic and not savvy enough. (A good heuristic for the lowest level of “infohazard” is “anything you wouldn’t talk about in front of a six year old”.)
Humans are sorta like a bunch of unpatchable computers, exposing “ports” to the “internet”, where each of our port numbers is simply a lightly salted semantic hash of an address into some random memory location that stores everything, including our operating system.
Your word for “drugs” and my word for “drugs” don’t point to the same memory addresses in the computer’s implementing our souls. Also our souls themselves don’t even have the same nearby set of “documents” (because we just have different memories n’stuff)… but the word “drugs” is not just one of the ports… it is a port that deserves a LOT of security hardening.
The bible said ~”thou shalt not suffer a ‘pharmakeia’ to live” for REASONS.
These are valid concerns! I presume that if “in the real timeline” there was a consortium of AGI CEOs who agreed to share costs on one run, and fiddled with their self-inserts, then they… would have coordinated more? (Or maybe they’re trying to settle a bet on how the Singularity might counterfactually might have happened in the event of this or that person experiencing this or that coincidence? But in that case I don’t think the self inserts would be allowed to say they’re self inserts.)
Like why not re-roll the PRNG, to censor out the counterfactually simulable timelines that included me hearing from any of the REAL “self inserts of the consortium of AGI CEOS” (and so I only hear from “metaphysically spurious” CEOs)??
Or maybe the game engine itself would have contacted me somehow to ask me to “stop sticking causal quines in their simulation” and somehow I would have been induced by such contact to not publish this?
Mostly I presume AGAINST “coordinated AGI CEO stuff in the real timeline” along any of these lines because, as a type, they often “don’t play well with others”. Fucking oligarchs… maaaaaan.
It seems like a pretty normal thing, to me, for a person to naturally keep track of simulation concerns as a philosophic possibility (its kinda basic “high school theology” right?)… which might become one’s “one track reality narrative” as a sort of “stress induced psychotic break away from a properly metaphysically agnostic mental posture”?
That’s my current working psychological hypothesis, basically.
But to the degree that it happens more and more, I can’t entirely shake the feeling that my probability distribution over “the time T of a pivotal acts occurring” (distinct from when I anticipate I’ll learn that it happened which of course must be LATER than both T and later than now) shouldn’t just include times in the past, but should actually be a distribution over complex numbers or something...
...but I don’t even know how to do that math? At best I can sorta see how to fit it into exotic grammars where it “can have happened counterfactually” or so that it “will have counterfactually happened in a way that caused this factually possible recurrence” or whatever. Fucking “plausible SUBJECTIVE time travel”, fucking shit up. It is so annoying.
Like… maybe every damn crazy AGI CEO’s claims are all true except the ones that are mathematically false?
How the hell should I know? I haven’t seen any not-plausibly-deniable miracles yet. (And all of the miracle reports I’ve heard were things I was pretty sure the Amazing Randi could have duplicated.)
All of this is to say, Hume hasn’t fully betrayed me yet!
Mostly I’ll hold off on performing normal updates until I see for myself, and hold off on performing logical updates until (again!) I see a valid proof for myself <3
For most of my comments, I’d almost be offended if I didn’t say something surprising enough to get a “high interestingness, low agreement” voting response. Excluding speech acts, why even say things if your interlocutor or full audience can predict what you’ll say?
And I usually don’t offer full clean proofs in direct word. Anyone still pondering the text at the end, properly, shouldn’t “vote to agree”, right? So from my perspective… its fine and sorta even working as intended <3
However, also, this is currently the top-voted response to me, and if William_S himself reads it I hope he answers here, if not with text then (hopefully? even better?) with a link to a response elsewhere?((EDIT: Re-reading everything above his, point, I notice that I totally left out the “basic take” that might go roughly like “Kurzweil, Altman, and Zuckerberg are right about compute hardware (not software or philosophy) being central, and there’s a compute bottleneck rather than a compute overhang, so the speed of history will KEEP being about datacenter budgets and chip designs, and those happen on 6-to-18-month OODA loops that could actually fluctuate based on economic decisions, and therefore its maybe 2026, or 2028, or 2030, or even 2032 before things pop, depending on how and when billionaires and governments decide to spend money”.))
Pulling honest posteriors from people who’ve “seen things we wouldn’t believe” gives excellent material for trying to perform aumancy… work backwards from their posteriors to possible observations, and then forwards again, toward what might actually be true :-)
This is amazingly good! The writing is laconic, modular, model-based, and relies strongly on the reader’s visualization skills!
Each paragraph was an idea, and I had to read it more like a math text than like “human writing” to track latent conceptual structure despite it being purely in language and no equations occuring in the text.
(It is similar to Munenori’s “The Life Giving Sword” and Zizioulas’s “Being As Communion” but not quite as hard as those because those require emotional and/or moral and/or “remembering times you learned or applied a skill” and/or “cogito ergo sum” fit checks instead of pauses to “visualize complex physical systems in motion”.)
The “big picture fit check on concepts” at the end of your conceptual explanation (just before application to examples began) was epiphanic (in context):
I had vaguely known that thermal and electric conductivity were related, but I had never seen them connected together such that “light transparency and heat insulation often go together” could be a natural and low cost sentence.
I had not internalized before that matter might have fundamental limits on “how much frequency” (different frequencies + wavelengths + directions of many wave, all passing through the same material) might be operating on every scale and wave type simultaneously!
Now I have a hunch: if Drexlerian nanotech ever gets built, some of those objects might have REALLY WEIRD macroscropic properties… like being transparent from certain angles or accidentally a “superconductor” of certain audio frequencies? Unless maybe every type and scale of wave propagation is analyzed and the design purposefully suppresses all such weird stray macroscopic properties???
I think a huge part of why these kinds of things often occur is that they are MUCH more likely in fields where the object level considerations have become pragmatically impossible for normal people to track, and they’ve been “taking it on faith” for a long time.
Normal humans can then often become REALLY interested when “a community that has gotten high trust” suddenly might be revealed to be running on “Naked Emperor Syndrome” instead of simply doing “that which they are trusted to do” in an honest and clean way.
((Like, at this point, if a physics PhD has “string theory” on their resume after about 2005, I just kinda assume they are a high-iq scammer with no integrity. I know this isn’t fully justified, but that field has for so long: (1) failed to generate any cool tech AND (2) failed to be intelligible to outsiders AND (3) been getting “grant funding that was ‘peer reviewed’ only by more string theorists” that I assume that intellectual parasites invaded it and I wouldn’t be able to tell.))
Covid caused a lot of normies to learn that a lot of elites (public health officials, hospital administrators, most of the US government, most of the Chinese government, drug regulators, drug makers, microbiologists capable of gain-of-function but not epidemiology, epidemiologists with no bioengineering skills, etc) were not competently discharging their public duties to Know Their Shit And Keep Their Shit Honest And Good.
LK-99 happening in the aftermath of covid, proximate to accusations of bad faith by the research team who had helped explore new materials in a new way, was consistent with the new “trust nothing from elites, because trust will be abused by elites, by default” zeitgeist… and “the material science of conductivity” is a vast, demanding, and complex topic that can mostly only be discussed coherently by elite material scientists.
I think that different “scientific fields” will experience this to different amounts depending on how many of their concepts can be reduced to things that smart autodidacts can double click on, repeatedly, until they ground in things that connect broadly to bedrock concepts in the rest of math and science.
This is related to very early material on lesswrong, in my opinion, like That Magical Click and Outside The Laboratory and Taking Ideas Seriously that hit a very specific layer of “how to be a real intellectual in the real world” where broad abstractions and subjectively accessible updates are addressed simultaneously, and kept in communication with each other, without either of them falling out of the “theory about how to be a real intellectual in the real world”.