LGS

Karma: 577

LGS 14 Jul 2026 23:42 UTC
7 points
−3
on: Our response to Séb Krier on Plan A
This response is too angry and generally not a good look. I don’t have a position on the object level at the moment, but reading some of this response makes me think more favorably of Séb; a lot of what you say seems like disingenuous nitpicking and yelling “we didn’t say that!!!” when you said something quite similar and it’s clear Séb simply disagrees.
For example, you say:
Much of this is wrong. Specifically, we believe: (b) not all profits will accrue to labs,^[1] (c) that Plan A would significantly decrease lab profits,^[2] and (e) ‘de facto’ nationalization is not an optimal response.^[3]
This is kind of ridiculous: you believe (b) not all profits accrue to the labs, because some accrue to NVIDIA and a tiny handful of other firms. Séb disagrees, clearly. But instead of addressing your disagreement productively you accuse him of lying. (c) You do believe that Plan A would not significantly decrease the relative profits, i.e. you think that even with the extreme slowdown, the AI labs eat the world. Séb disagrees. (e) I do think Plan A sounds like de facto nationalization, and I think it’s disingenuous to imply that the government can already do more (it costs the government a large amount of political capital to try and they may also lose in court).
I’m disappointed by this response.

LGS 26 Feb 2026 14:09 UTC
10 points
0
on: The optimal age to freeze eggs is 19
I don’t expect there’s any good data on women under age 25. Your claim that 19 is the best age appears to be based on the one graph of “fecundability”, which is not the probability of pregnancy conditioned on trying but the probability of pregnancy conditioned on nothing, i.e. it’s confounded by whether the couples want kids. It’s from a paper that’s been unpublished for 3 years now.
You have some graphs based on Herasight’s model, but I don’t believe Herasight’s model is based on much data from young women. I’m happy to be corrected if wrong; do they have much data on women below age 25? They’re likely just extrapolating backwards from the data they have about older women.

LGS 25 Jun 2025 1:27 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ben Livengood’s comment on: Consider chilling out in 2028
Exactly! The frontier labs have the compute and incentive to push capabilities forward, while randos on lesswrong are instead more likely to study alignment in weak open source models

LGS 24 Jun 2025 15:44 UTC
8 points
5
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: Consider chilling out in 2028
Exactly
The universe doesn’t care if you try to hide your oh so secret insights; multiple frontier labs are working on those insights
The only people who care are the people here getting more doomy and having worse norms for conversations.

LGS 24 Jun 2025 15:18 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Random Developer’s comment on: Consider chilling out in 2028
I don’t appreciate the local discourse norm of “let’s not mention the scary ideas but rest assured they’re very very scary”. It’s not healthy. If you explained the idea, we could shoot it down! But if it’s scary and hidden then we can’t.
Also, multiple frontier labs are currently working on it and you think your lesswrong comment is going to make a difference?
You should at least say by when you will consider this specific single breakthrough thing to be falsified.

LGS 24 Feb 2025 22:51 UTC
13 points
4
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
You should show your calculation or your code, including all the data and parameter choices. Otherwise I can’t evaluate this.
I assume you’re picking parameters to exaggerate the effects, because just from the exaggerations you’ve already conceded (0.9/0.6 shouldn’t be squared and attenuation to get direct effects should be 0.824), you’ve already exaggerated the results by a factor of sqrt(0.9/0.6)/0.824 for editing, which is around a 50% overestimate.
I don’t think that was deliberate on your part, but I think wishful thinking and the desire to paint a compelling story (and get funding) is causing you to be biased in what you adjust for and in which mistakes you catch. It’s natural in your position to scrutinize low estimates but not high ones. So to trust your numbers I’d need to understand how you got them.

LGS 24 Feb 2025 3:34 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
I don’t understand. Can you explain how you’re inferring the SNP effect sizes?

LGS 24 Feb 2025 2:09 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
I’m talking about this graph:
What are the calculations used for this graph. Text says to see the appendix but the appendix does not actually explain how you got this graph.

LGS 23 Feb 2025 22:27 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
You’re mixing up h^2 estimates with predictor R^2 performance. It’s possible to get an estimate of h^2 with much less statistical power than it takes to build a predictor that good.
Thanks. I understand now. But isn’t the R^2 the relevant measure? You don’t know which genes to edit to get the h^2 number (nor do you know what to select on). You’re doing the calculation 0.2*(0.9/0.6)^2 when the relevant calculation is something like 0.05*(0.9/0.6). Off by a factor of 6 for the power of selection, or sqrt(6)=2.45 for the power of editing

LGS 23 Feb 2025 4:33 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
The paper you called largest ever GWAS gave a direct h^2 estimate of 0.05 for cognitive performance. How are these papers getting 0.2? I don’t understand what they’re doing. Some type of meta analysis?
The test-retest reliability you linked has different reliabilities for different subtests. The correct adjustment depends on which subtests are being used. If cognitive performance is some kind of sumscore of the subtests, its reliability would be higher than for the individual subtests.
Also, I don’t think the calculation 0.2*(0.9/0.6)^2 is the correct adjustment. A test-retest correlation is already essentially the square of a correlation of the test with an underlying latent factor (both the test AND the retest have error). E.g. if a test T can be written as
T=aX+sqrt(1-a)E
where X is ability and E is error (all with standard deviation 1 and the error independent of the ability), then a correlation of T with a resample of T (with new independent error but same ability) would be a^2. But the adjustment to h^2 should be proportional to a^2, so it should be proportional to the test-retest correlation, not the square of the test-retest correlation. Am I getting this wrong?
What links here?
- Steven Byrnes's comment on Heritability: Five Battles by Steven Byrnes (26 May 2025 13:46 UTC; 5 points)

LGS 23 Feb 2025 3:05 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Thanks! I understand their numbers a bit better, then. Still, direct effects of cognitive performance explain 5% of variance. Can’t multiply the variance explained of EA by the attenuation of cognitive performance!
Do you have evidence for direct effects of either one of them being higher than 5% of variance?
I don’t quite understand your numbers in the OP but it feels like you’re inflating them substantially. Is the full calculation somewhere?

LGS 23 Feb 2025 2:18 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
You should decide whether you’re using a GWAS on cognitive performance or on educational attainment (EA). This paper you linked is using a GWAS for EA, and finding that very little of the predictive power was direct effects. Exactly the opposite of your claim:
For predicting EA, the ratio of direct to population effect estimates is 0.556 (s.e. = 0.020), implying that 100% × 0.556² = 30.9% of the PGI’s R² is due to its direct effect.
Then they compare this to cognitive performance. For cognitive performance, the ratio was better, but it’s not 0.824, it’s ${0.824}^{2} = 0.68$ . But actually, even this is possibly too high: the table in figure 4 has a ratio that looks much smaller than this, and refers to supplementary table 10 for numbers. I checked supplementary table 10, and it says that the “direct-population ratio” is 0.656, not 0.824. So quite possibly the right value is ${0.656}^{2} = 0.43$ even for cognitive performance.
Why is the cognitive performance number bigger? Well, it’s possibly because there’s less data on cognitive performance, so the estimates are based on more obvious or easy-to-find effects. The final, predictive power of the direct effects for EA and for cognitive performance is similar, around 3% of the variance, if I’m reading it correctly (not sure about this). So the ratios are somewhat different, but the population GWAS predictive power is also somewhat different in the opposite direction, and these mostly cancel out.

LGS 22 Feb 2025 5:45 UTC
11 points
−3
in reply to: kman’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Your OP is completely misleading if you’re using plain GWAS!
GWAS is an association—that’s what the A stands for. Association is not causation. Anything that correlates with IQ (eg melanin) can show up in a GWAS for IQ. You’re gonna end up editing embryos to have lower melanin and claiming their IQ is 150

LGS 21 Feb 2025 23:56 UTC
19 points
0
on: How to Make Superbabies
Are your IQ gain estimates based on plain GWAS or on family-fixed-effects-GWAS? You don’t clarify. The latter would give much lower estimates than the former
What links here?
- kave's comment on How to Make Superbabies by GeneSmith (26 Feb 2025 20:21 UTC; 9 points)

LGS 21 Feb 2025 23:35 UTC
11 points
1
on: How to Make Superbabies
And these changes in chickens are mostly NOT the result of new mutations, but rather the result of getting all the big chicken genes into a single chicken.
Is there a citation for this? Or is that just a guess

LGS 7 Feb 2025 1:10 UTC
1 point
0
on: A very strange probability paradox
Calculating these probabilities is fairly straightforward if you know some theory of generating functions. Here’s how it works.
Let $x$ be a variable representing the probability of a single 6, and let $y$ represent the probability of “even but not 6”. A single string consisting of even numbers can be written like, say, $x y x x y$ , and this expression (which simplifies to $x^{3} y^{2}$ ) is the same as the probability of the string. Now let’s find the generating function for all strings you can get in (A). These strings are generated by the following unambiguous regular expression:
$y^{*} (x y y^{*})^{*} x x$
The magical property of generating functions is that if you have an unambiguous regular expression, the corresponding generating function is easy to calculate: concatenation becomes product, union becomes sum, and star becomes the function $z \to 1 / (1 - z)$ . Using this, the generating function for the strings in (A) is
$f_{A} (x, y) = \frac{x^{2}}{1 - y - x y}$ .
Similarly, the strings possible in (B) have unambiguous regular expression $y^{*} x y^{*} x$ and generating function $f_{B} (x, y) = \frac{x^{2}}{(1 - y)^{2}}$ .
If you plug in the probabilities $x = 1 / 6, y = 1 / 3$ , the above functions will give you the probability of a string in (A) occurring and of a string in (B) occurring, respectively. But that’s not what we want; we want conditional expectations. To get that, we need the probability of each string to be weighted by its length (then to divide by the overall probability). The length of a string is the number of $x$ and $y$ variables in it—its degree. So we can get the sum of lengths-times-probabilities by scaling $x$ and $y$ by $t$ , taking a derivative with respect to $t$ , and plugging in $t = 1$ . Then we divide by the overall probabilities. So the conditional expectations are
${^f}_{A} (x, y) = \frac{\frac{d}{d t} f_{A} (t x, t y) |_{t = 1}}{f_{A} (x, y)} = \frac{2 - y}{1 - y - x y},$
${^f}_{B} (x, y) = \frac{\frac{d}{d t} f_{B} (t x, t y) |_{t = 1}}{f_{B} (x, y)} = \frac{2}{1 - y} .$
Now just plug in $x = 1 / 6, y = 1 / 3$ to get the conditional expectations.

LGS 26 Jan 2025 23:33 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety
There’s still my original question of where the feedback comes from. You say keep the transcripts where the final answer is correct, but how do you know the final answer? And how do you come up with the question?
What seems to be going on is that these models are actually quite supervised, despite everyone’s insistence on calling them unsupervised RL. The questions and answers appear to be high-quality human annotation instead of being machine generated. Let me know if I’m wrong about this.
If I’m right, it has implications for scaling. You need human annotators to scale, and you need to annotate increasingly hard problems. You don’t get to RL your way to infinite skill like alphazero; if, say, the Riemann hypothesis turns out to be like 3 OOMs of difficulty beyond what humans can currently annotate, then this type of training will never solve Riemann no matter how you scale.
What links here?
- Noosphere89's comment on Catastrophe through Chaos by Marius Hobbhahn (31 Jan 2025 18:33 UTC; 12 points)

LGS 26 Jan 2025 7:44 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Petropolitan’s comment on: Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety
I have no opinion about whether formalizing proofs will be a hard problem in 2025, but I think you’re underestimating the difficulty of the task (“math proofs are math proofs” is very much a false statement for today’s LLMs, for example).
In any event, my issue is that formalizing proofs is very clearly not involved in the o1/o3 pipeline, since those models make so many formally incorrect arguments. The people behind FrontierMath have said that o3 solved many of the problems using heuristic algorithms with wrong reasoning behind them; that’s not something a model trained on formally verified proofs would do. I see the same thing with o1, which was evaluated on the Putnam and got the right answer with a wrong proof on nearly every question.

LGS 17 Jan 2025 0:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: wassname’s comment on: Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety
Well the final answer is easy to evaluate. And like in rStar-Math, you can have a reward model that checks if each step is likely to be critical to a correct answer, then it assigns and implied value to the step.
Why is the final answer easy to evaluate? Let’s say we generate the problem “number of distinct solutions to x^3+y^3+xyz=0 modulo 17^17” or something. How do you know what the right answer is?
I agree that you can do this in a supervised way (a human puts in the right answer). Is that what you mean?
What about if the task is “prove that every integer can be written as the sum of at most 1000 different 11-th powers”? You can check such a proof in Lean, but how do you check it in English?
And like in rStar-Math, you can have a reward model that checks if each step is likely to be critical to a correct answer, then it assigns and implied value to the step.
My question is where the external feedback comes from. “Likely to be critical to a correct answer” according to whom? A model? Because then you don’t get the recursive self-improvement past what that model knows. You need an external source of feedback somewhere in the training loop.

LGS 16 Jan 2025 21:48 UTC
9 points
2
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Implications of the inference scaling paradigm for AI safety
Do you have a sense of where the feedback comes from? For chess or Go, at the end of the day, a game is won or lost. I don’t see how to do this elsewhere except for limited domains like simple programming which can quickly be run to test, or formal math proofs, or essentially tasks in NP (by which I mean that a correct solution can be efficiently verified).
For other tasks, like summarizing a book or even giving an English-language math proof, it is not clear how to detect correctness, and hence not clear how to ensure that a model like o5 doesn’t give a worse output after thinking/searching a long time than the output it would give in its first guess. When doing RL, it is usually very important to have non-gameable reward mechanisms, and I don’t see that in this paradigm.
I don’t even understand how they got from o1 to o3. Maybe a lot of supervised data, ie openAI internally created some FrontierMath style problems to train on? Would that be enough? Do you have any thoughts about this?