Morpheus

Karma: 845

Morpheus May 24, 2025, 4:20 AM
3 points
0
on: That’s Not How Epigenetic Modifications Work
The mistake: methyl groups usually do not stick around long-term; they turn over regularly. Here are two studies which measured the turnover. Turnover timescale varies by location on the DNA strand, but turnover every few days is typical.

I don’t know if someone else was making this particular mistake. I certainly find it quite tricky to describe these things with language unless I am extremely careful. I am still confused, but I do find your suggested pathway via transposons more plausible, and the story for why transposons fits into my head. I don’t think a correct story for why not epigenetic “bit-flips” currently fits properly into my head, and that correct story would have to be created in order to convince other people. Ideally, some testable predictions^[1].

But if the methyl groups are instead part of a dynamic equilibrium, especially with high redundancy (and therefore stability), then that’s a whole different situation.

I don’t understand why this has to be such a dichotomy? What I hear you say is that these dynamic equilibria are too stable to be a root cause of aging. I think this is true in the case of X-inactivation^[2], which is redundant across most of the X-chromosome. But as far as I can tell, the number of redundant parts that make up one “unit” that can bit-flip lies on a spectrum. Example: one methylated C is probably too unstable to encode something. But what if I have a local cluster of five of them where each one reinforces each other (because enzymes that change the methylation often check the methylation status of close-by C’s)? That’s the point of CpG islands, right? So some of these CpG islands are probably more stable than others, and some could be just stable/unstable enough to be a root cause of aging, no?
1. ↩︎
  For example, my guess would be that the transposon story and the accumulating epigenetic chaos story make different predictions about which methylations would serve as an aging clock and how well. They would also predict different things if we compare aging in different species, because transposons and mitochondria are (quite?) universal in eukaryotes, while epigenetics between eukaryotes is quite different.
2. ↩︎
  My understanding is X-inactivation almost never bit-flips in adults. If it were unstable on the timescale of years, you’d sometimes see one white hair in a spot where a cat has black hair, for example. Maybe it is more common in cells with faster turnover?

Morpheus May 23, 2025, 8:15 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Units Have More Depth Than I Thought
Yep! When I was in high school I was self-learning physics and was learning calculus via Khan academy, which made me learn that “sometimes”, “somehow”, you can for example solve a differential equation by getting all the dx and x’s on one side and dy’s and y’s on the other. I was always expecting when I would study this stuff more rigorously in university, this would be explained at some point. To my great disappointment, the mandatory class on this subject for my CS degree “real analysis”, did not in fact clear up why this works in the slightest!? I don’t know if every real analysis class is this bad (My linear algebra courses were excellent in comparison), but mine was mostly focusing on making students adopt “rigor”^[1], presenting definition after definition and theorem after theorem (for short theorems proofs were included, but with zero sub-text what the motivation or idea of the proof was. Complicated proofs were just skipped). Starting studying during Corona and not being able to ask professors questions like that directly certainly didn’t help. Somehow I forgot, though, that I never got these questions answered that I had hoped to get an answer to. Also, the quotient in df/dx still confuses me, and it might be due to my confusion about division? Looking at the wikipedia article you link, maybe I should take a look at differential forms?

As my secondary subject for my bachelor, I chose physics, but that mostly involved applying Euler-Lagrange to particular systems. I remember becoming really confused why this can work at this point and noticing that I can’t fit the explanation in my head (I am in fact still confused and would love if you can point me to useful resources!). I remember thinking why can you differentiate with respect to speed and treat acceleration etc. as not dependent on speed, weird. Clearly, when framing them all as a function of time, it made no sense (and still doesn’t). I was looking it up on Wikipedia and apparently “Differential Geometry” was the answer to my questions, so I got 2–3 textbooks on Differential Geometry (for physics), but just skimming, I couldn’t find something that made this click.

Probably I should have looked more aggressively for people to tutor me. Now with language models it feels worth taking another stab at this though. For example when I told GPT4-o the rough areas I am confused about (link to full chat): there are these people talking about scaling laws in the context of “scaling laws” in engineering, and it seems like I might be missing some prerequisites, because I’ve bounced off this topic a few times even though this seems extremely interesting. Which led it to introduce dimensionless analysis to me, and then I asked more questions and ultimately gave me some textbook recommendations: “Street fighting mathematics”, I had already heard praise for in “Biology by the numbers”, so then I checked it out and discovered this gold.

Another question I am still confused by: how does your choice of units affect what types of dimensionless quantities you discover? Why do we have Ampere as a fundamental unit instead of just M,L,T? What do I lose? What do I lose if I reduce the number of dimensions even further? Are there other units that would be worth adding under some circumstances? What makes this non-arbitrary? Why is Temperature a different unit from Energy?

Also, I notice all the formalizations of dimensional analysis that Terence Tao mentions here strike me as ugly? Is that me being stupid, thinking that there must exist something nicer?
1. ↩︎
  Which I found mostly annoying and trivial, but made me glade I had spent ~60h before university just practicing proving things. How to proove it is a great book!

Morpheus May 21, 2025, 3:36 PM
1 point
0
on: Morpheus’s Shortform
Thinking about this thread on “How could I have thought of that faster?”. In practice, I noticed the phrasing doesn’t work well for me and I prefer “How could I have seen this faster”? I especially like this framing for when I have identified a “blindspot”, “developmental milestone” or noticing someone’s wizard power is clearly hinting at a powerful learnable skill or concept I wasn’t aware of and that I don’t yet possess.

I feel this frame helps me to better find areas where there are cached beliefs to correct, and remember hints at the shape of the thing in the past. I do feel like I have an easier time correcting object-level believes, compared to finding good ways to hone heuristics about my own thinking and how I could avoid some types of “going in circles”. I find it hard to account for hindsight, and also memory can be trickery.

Looking back at the original thread:

See, if I’d noticed myself doing anything remotely like that, I’d go back, figure out which steps of thought were actually performing intrinsically necessary cognitive work, and then retrain myself to perform only those steps over the course of 30 seconds. I mean, I suspect that this actually requires something like a fast perceptual view of minds as engines and thoughts as doing work and like actually draws on my mind design knowledge, but, even so, I ask: Do you constantly look back and ask “How could I have thought that faster?” Okay, well, every time I’m surprised by reality I look back and think “What about my model and my way of thinking could I change that would have predicted that better, without predicting a bunch of other things worse?

I currently don’t have a fast perceptual view like that, even though I think I understand the concepts mentioned above. I don’t feel like thinking of my mind as an engine helps me in post-mortems. So either I lack a skill here or this was hinting at a point I’d find elementary.

Morpheus May 18, 2025, 9:29 AM

3 points

on: Writing Causal Models Like We Write Programs

Funnily enough, cluncs and the do operator are easily implemented in nix (Merging attribute sets is quite important in nix). Only problem is that nix doesn’t support even the most basic numeric operations (like sqrt, pow (so I gave up on implementing your causal examples)).

let
  do = model: overrides: let self = model (self // overrides); in self;

  quad = self: {
    x = 4;
    constant = 3;
    linear = 2 * self.x + self.constant;
    result = self.x * self.x + self.linear;
  };

  quadDefault = do quad { };
  quad2 = do quad { x = 2; };
  quadNoLinear = do quad { linear = 0; };

in {
  default = quadDefault.result;
  overridden = quad2.result;
  noLinear = quadNoLinear.result;
}

Morpheus May 8, 2025, 1:38 AM
6 points
2
on: Morpheus’s Shortform
It is time that I apply the principle of more dakka and just start writing (or rather publishing) more. I know deliberate practice works for writing. If you want to be good at something, you need to do it badly and then just keep going with doing the thing is very common advice. I still find it very hard to do.
- Things I ran into when writing before that stopped me:
  - It’s hard to decide what to write about
  - I get anxiety about writing something that is not good enough
  - Topics that go into my head about what to write about revolve mostly about how it is hard to write.
  - Some of the writers that I admire would see it as below their standard to write a post like that? Lots of unproductive self-reinforcing status anxiety follows.
  - Perfectionism around writing and what I can do on the platform that I am writing on.
  - The real pain: All the small decisions at the end. “Do I also post this on my blog or is it too much work?”, deciding to try and in the worst case I can eliminate that part of the process tomorrow. Noticing those annoyances could also be added to the post, then noticing how this is taking over the post
  - At the end, I fell for the trap of editing again (I could have been done in 1h, and now it is 1h 46 minutes).
- Things that worked in my favor this time, so I ended up publishing this.
  - I decided to stick with 1 hour of writing and just publishing what I have at that point sounds safe to my brain.
  - I decided to just put it on Twitter and hope for the best on the distraction front.
  - Instead of editing my earlier drafts, I gave each draft an iteration number (feels more like progress!) and then I just started writing again and completing things with copilot. (This was draft 3)
  - I decided to stick with a nested list format, which is my favorite format for writing.
  - I decided no actually this nested list doesn’t work on Twitter, so I will put this in an lw shortform
  - gave up on adding more relevant links. That is valuable in general, and maybe I can find ways to make this easier and less distraction prone (I end up searching for a specific blogpost I like and then don’t end up finding it and read something else interesting from that blog).

Morpheus May 7, 2025, 11:55 PM
1 point
0
on: How Close We Are to a Complete List of Imprinted Genes
That is a high false positive and false negative rate, but not fatally so if we get more coverage in return.
Actually, if we are willing to tradeoff coverage for higher probability of false negative and false positives, bisulfite sequencing might also be on the table again, because you can just run the reaction for shorter which would keep more DNA intact (presumably with some kind of bias that might not be worth the headache).

Morpheus May 5, 2025, 9:03 PM
1 point
1
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform

why do stimulants help ADHD? well, they short circuit the part where your brain figures out what priorities to trust based on whether they achieve your true motives

I view taking stimulants more as a move to get the more reflective parts of my brain more power (“getting my taxes done is good, because we need to do it eventually, now is actually a good time, doing my taxes now will be as boring as doing them in the future, rather than playing magic the gathering now”) in steering compared to my more primitive “true motives” that tend to be hyperbolicly discounted (“dosing in bed is nice”, “washing dishes is boring”, “doing taxes is boring”). Maybe I am horrible at self-modelling, but the part where the self model is out of sync as an explanation why the self-reflective parts have less steering power seems unnecessary.

Morpheus Apr 14, 2025, 7:28 AM
2 points
0
on: Morpheus’s Shortform
Not sure what’s going on, but gpt-4o keeps using its search tool when it shouldn’t and telling me about either the weather, or sonic the hedgehog. I couldn’t find anything about this online. Are funny things like this happening to anyone else? I checked both my custom instructions and the memory items and nothing there mentions either of these.

Morpheus Apr 10, 2025, 11:20 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
Small groups of mammals can already cooperate with each other (wolf’s, lions, monkeys etc.). In mammals, I’d guess having a queen gives a bottleneck in how fast there can be off-spring. Also if there are large returns to division of labor in child-rearing, large animals are smart enough that both parents can do this together, while in wasps the males just die (why actually?). So wasps get higher marginal returns when evolving the first steps towards being eusocial. Also smaller animals have more diverse environments and need fewer years to “locked in” eusociality and workers get born without being fertile (eusocial groups where workers are still fertile are really unstable so prone to evolve away from eusociality again when circumstances aren’t in favor anymore). Also fathers can’t be as sure of their children and the other way around leading to less cooperation if new males join in, which termites overcome by having king and queen, ants just have a queen that stores her sperm, while naked mole rats are just fine with incest?

Morpheus Apr 7, 2025, 12:16 PM
3 points
0
on: The Feeling of Idea Scarcity
… that wasn’t enough to learn the pattern, though. Shortly out of college, reality was still hitting me over the head; that time the big idea was an efficient implementation of universal competitively-optimal portfolios. I lost a couple thousand dollars on wildly over-leveraged forex positions.
I am curious what that idea was and where it went wrong.

Morpheus Mar 23, 2025, 9:23 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Rafael Harth’s Shortform
In that case also consider installing PowerToys and pressing Alt+Space to open applications or files (to avoid unhelpful internet searches etc.).

Morpheus Mar 17, 2025, 2:00 AM
1 point
0
on: [LDSL#0] Some epistemological conundrums
I like this sequence and am aware it is not finished yet. Here’s my I am understanding so far. After reading the sequence, I think I can predict your response to the first 5 conundrums, so my previous confusion there (why cluster rather than factor) seems resolved. But I think I still disagree with the later examples that I was confused with before reading your sequence. One example of conundrums where I think I get what your reply would be:
- “Why isn’t factor analysis considered the main research tool?”
  
  Factor analysis doesn’t capture the main bottlenecks (people being depressed for different reasons, people are successful for different reasons etc.)
  
  For others, I don’t see how they connect well. My replies would be:
- “What is gifted child syndrome/twice-exceptionals?”
  
  I don’t know why you focus on this one? My impression why there’s a focus on this group is because helping them might be worth the investment? Or because the people writing and consuming that theorizing tend to be higher iq. Also, maybe “that phenomenon where desirable trait X and Y tend to be anticorrelated, because the others tend to not want to hang out with you as much, or you don’t want to hang out with them” (writing and math being anticorrelated in the average US college)? I don’t see the relation in the log-normals, other that maybe in your thinking you might want to single out that group, because it might have bottlenecks that are different?
- “Why would progressivism have paradoxical effects on diversity?”
  
  I am confused? I can see you making the argument that the diversity angle might sometimes be the correct one if it is the bottleneck for a person (black person being arrested for doing drugs in the US? While less of a bottleneck for a lot of other minorities?)
- “What’s wrong with symptom treatment?”
  
  Do you think people’s intuition here is correctly adjusting for something like the epsilon fallacy? Or to quickly jumping to simplistic conclusions like in this college cost post you link (in a different context), where someone might (in my view accidentally) see the increasing number of small courses as a cause rather than a symptom?
- “What value does qualitative research provide?”
  
  I am reminded of
  
  My answer to “If not Bayesianism, then what?” is: all of human intellectual effort. Figuring out how things work, what’s true or false, what’s effective or useless, is “human complete.”
  
  and
  
  I actually started to talk about finding loosely-coupled constraints in an earlier draft of the post, but that quickly turned into the entire skill of model-building. That was when I decided to just go with the games, at least for this post.
  
  I feel like so far this sequence has mostly told me what tools not to use and, in practice, I cannot think of a case where reading this sequence has helped pick a better tool, but I was already pretty fond of log normals.

Morpheus Mar 13, 2025, 11:55 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform

So I should look out for that, e.g. by doing some manual fermi estimates or other direct checking about ABC or by investigating the strength of the steelman of reaction XYZ, or by keeping an eye out for people systematically reacting with XYZ without good foundation so I can notice this,

Accusing people in my head of not being numerate enough when this happens has helped, because then I don’t want to be a hypocrite. GPT4o or o1 are good at fermi estimates, making this even easier.

Morpheus Feb 20, 2025, 2:22 AM
1 point
0
on: General intelligence
I noticed the tag posts imported from Arbital that haven’t been edited on LW yet can’t be found when searching those tags from the “Add Tags” button above posts. Adding ineffective edits like spaces at the end of a paragraph seems to fix that problem.

Morpheus Feb 20, 2025, 2:18 AM
1 point
0
on: Orthogonality Thesis
I noticed the tag posts imported from Arbital that haven’t been edited on LW yet can’t be found when searching those tags from the “Add Tags” button above posts. Adding ineffective edits like spaces at the end of a paragraph seems to fix that problem.

Morpheus Feb 20, 2025, 1:48 AM
2 points
1
on: Static Place AI Makes AGI Redundant: Multiversal AI Alignment & Rational Utopia
I didn’t downvote, but my impression is the post seems to hand-wave away a lot of problems and gives the impression you haven’t actually thought clearly and in detail about whether the ideas you propose here are feasible.

Some people have been thinking for quite some time now that an AI that wants to be changed would be great, but that it’s not that easy to create one, so how is your proposal different? Maybe checkout the corrigibility tag. Figuring out which desiderata are actually feasible to implement and how is the hard part. Same goes for your Matroshka bunkers. What useful work are you getting out of your 100% safe Matroshka bunkers? After you thought about that for 5 minutes+, maybe checkout the AI boxing tag and the AI oracle tag. Maybe there is something to the reversibility idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Also using so many tags gives a bad impression (“AI Timelines”? “Tiling Agents”? “Infinities in Ethics”?). Read the description of the tags.

Morpheus Feb 17, 2025, 12:17 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: adamzerner’s Shortform
Finding some some friend (or language model?) to play Zendo (the science game) with makes this really intuitive on a gut level. Guessing a rule based on whether a sequence of 3 integers is either accepted or rejected works pretty well via text.

Morpheus Feb 4, 2025, 9:09 AM
4 points
3
on: Can someone, anyone, make superintelligence a more concrete concept?

NOTE: I posted this to LW and I’m new here so I don’t totally know the cross-posting policies. Hope it’s alright that I posted here too!

It seems you posted on LW twice instead or in addition to cross-posting to the EA forum.

Morpheus Feb 2, 2025, 6:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: RohanS’s comment on: RohanS’s Shortform
I just tried this with o3-mini-high and o3-mini. o3-mini-high identified and prevented the fork correctly, while o3-mini did not even correctly identify it lost.

Morpheus Jan 12, 2025, 12:52 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Dmitry Vaintrob’s comment on: The purposeful drunkard
Yes!