AIS student, self-proclaimed aspiring rationalist, very fond of game theory.
”The only good description is a self-referential description, just like this one.”
momom2
Karma: 401
War of Dots: CRUSHING my opponents with FACTS and LOGIC
According to Bloomberg, the US and Iran are expected to sign a memorandum of understanding whose core contents are:
- return to pre-war statu quo on territory, sovereignty, strait of Hormuz, nuclear programs, etc.
- $300B reparations from US to Iran
De-paywalled full text here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-16/read-the-14-point-draft-memorandum-between-the-us-and-iran?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc4MTY1NjY2MywiZXhwIjoxNzgyMjYxNDYzLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJUR1FUVkRUOTZPU0cwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI4M0Q4RjJERjFDQzA0MDFFQTlBNjg1RjY3N0FGQURERiJ9.Bq9TVRVNXZu1ep06Y3KiLnhlcb9SQ_ZKska1ZbY8yVM&leadSource=uverify%20wall
(Courtesy of pie_flavor, from the ACXD server.)
I count traumatic recollection of pain as a physical injury—it is a noticeable alteration to my behavior, encoded in physical matter. If there is none of it, then there’s no pain in the first place and the one and I aren’t talking about the same thing.
If the one proposed to stimulate me with contact heat thermodes, I would refuse, anticipating undesirable pain. But if the one did it anyway, I would argue that I have been injured, even if no scar remains—the injury lives on in my memory of the experience if nowhere else.
Huh, my experience was somewhat reversed: I took all such advice literally, often to great success, and only learned later on that people expected me to ignore it and treat it with disdain, but too late for me to integrate that attitude.
For example, I was told to always salute my teachers and call them Mr. and Ms., something which they enjoyed, which no one did, and which participated in giving me positive relationships with my teachers in college.
Another example: I was told to care for the poor and give my belongings to them. This resulted in a scolding and severe disillusion for giving away grocery money, which helped me get out of religion, but also matured into attraction towards EA.I guess it depends on how good you are at taking social cues? Perhaps such advice is good to integrate, but unfashionable to display, such that it is good for society to expose children (unable to understand the advisordoesn’t belief the advice) to it, but detrimental for individuals to be seen taking it seriously.
Haha, this was hilarious! Thanks for writing this.
It’s really funny because I listened a lot to the song Ken Theriot made on this poem, and I thought it was very beautiful… except I thought “give them the lie” meant “lie to them”.
I interpreted it as displaying an example of a cynical conman, going from institution to institution with utter disdain for ideals, and eventually dying in misery no closer to truth or happiness for having been a contrarian, with the lesson being to hope in ideals even should you recognize their failings.
Much time after the fact, I now realize that there is another argument you may have been talking about regarding the value of the species:
If the reason we care about humanity is that we care about each of its individuals (regardless of temporal distance) then we could consider that there exist N individuals in humanity, and then the longtermist thought experiment asserts that it is better to reach N-100 by processing the waste than to reach N-1000 by burying it.
In that case, I would answer that whether burying or processing the waste, N remains almost unchanged in expectation because population rebounds for any non-X risk.
So I guess the lesson there is to disregard any longtermist reasoning that doesn’t have such extreme gravity that the extreme volatility and predeterminedness of the future doesn’t blur all choices together.
I am assuming that any individual action basically doesn’t matter because balancing forces achieve almost the same consequences in the world where you counterfactually choose opposite, which I’m admittedly not that confident about...
I recommend reading the verses while trying to sing them to the music. The rhythm may not make much sense without Kathy Mar’s instrumentation.
Give my children minds
momom2′s Shortform
I read the ARC-AGI-3 paper entirely, and I’m unimpressed.
The “100% human-solvable, <1% AI solved” is basically p-hacking. They cook their metrics to guarantee high human scores and punish any sub-human score. They also prevent measurement of super-human performance, so in practice it’s close to a binary metric of “matches best human or not”.
There are also a number of incoherences in the stated methodology, but they’re non-central.
Their metric is:
Environment must be solved by at least 2⁄10 humans. Among the successes, pick the median (¤) of actions taken, that’s the baseline (per level of the environment), call it b.
Humans are defined as 100% for being the baseline (no analysis of how many humans solve the environment, or whether the average score is 100% or any deeper analysis of human performance).
An environment has n levels. Levels are attempted sequentially, in increasing order of difficulty; solving one unlocks the next one. The environment is solved if all levels are completed.
If a model doesn’t solve a level, it scores 0 on that level (and subsequent ones). If it does solve it in m steps, it receives (b/m)² score. (*)
Then take the weighted average of its scores over levels, where level k is weighted k.
(*) If the model is better than human (m < b), its level score is clamped at 1.15, but tbh it doesn’t really matter. Also, environment score is clamped at 1 for some reason.
(¤) They say “upper-median best”, which doesn’t make sense, and their example is the median of people who solve the environment, so I’m going with that interpretation.
There are two problems with this metric:
- Human variance. The baseline might be ultra-optimized, close to optimal, depending on the environment; it might also not. In their empirical evaluation of optimal score (probably from human performance not-first-run?), it’s clear that the baseline is very noisy.
- The way it’s calculated punishes sub-human performance quadratically for no reason, and upweighs the hardest levels, which means that it’s most informative only when approaching human performance.In addition, they decide to refuse any harness, even though it’s obviously the next step to get better on that kind of problem (they also show that ARC-AGI-3 is saturated with a human-made harness, so maybe they just didn’t want their benchmark to be obsolete before it was even out).
It’s like if they refused CoT on ARC-AGI-1.
I guess solving ARC-AGI-3 will be pretty trivial as soon as a model is RLHF’d to self-harness by default as a first step to any task.
Approximating human scores from the graphs, with Claude’s help, I get human average performance in the 40~80% range.
I highly recommend Mercedes Lackey’s songs too. In no particular order, I especially enjoyed:
Battle Dawn. The will and fury of having Something To Protect. Or in this case, something to avenge.
Shadow Stalker. Depression vanquished.
Threes. Many of Mercedes Lackey’s songs are similarly humorous, but this is my favorite.
There are many, many more.
With no link to it, it’s somewhat hard to tell.
I did not realize this was tagged fiction and at first I thought this was the introduction of a Scott-like post, then I kept getting more and more disappointed as it slipped into conspiracy theory (because there’s scant if any justification for the death of the creature making California slip into the sea—corpses don’t just disappear—and the connection with biotech seemed tenuous at best).
Thanks! This deconfused something for me which I was confused about for a long time!
Finally, we found something very odd: NousResearch/Hermes-3-Llama-3.1-8B
Based on what you say afterwards, I think you mean 3.2-3B here.
Brooms accelerate and decelerate (until they reach cruising speed in a few seconds, or they stop). But they don’t accelerate faster down than up; in that sense, they’re don’t work on classical physics.
My experience disagrees. I’m probably (diagnosed by my therapist but not a doctor) autistic and I have both a pretty deep intuitive understanding of intimacy as described here, evidenced by writing stories that include it, and little to no bad experience with misunderstanding it—though mostly because I didn’t have intimate relationships at all, I was aware enough of what was at stake to not make myself vulnerable.
Thank you very much! This is very clear!
Well, not quite. For once, a recent update changed that value (I think it’s only 1.5x as fast when attacking?), and second, I assumed fixed enemy damage rate (a stable situation, whether because the enemy is out of morale or because of averaging over a longer time than the enemy’s typical cycling speed).