mruwnik

• mruwnik 28 Oct 2022 19:43 UTC

  30 points

  23

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Ukraine and the Crimea Question

  There sort of is a big difference in moral character between the two groups, though. Certainly in the case of the soldiers on the front lines. Yes, terrible things are being done by people on both sides, such is war—it creates wonderful opportunities for those lacking morals. But so far only one side has rape as part of its doctrine. Only one side is engaged in wide spread plundering etc. That seems like an important distinction.

  I agree that the current discourse is not objective. It’s not supposed to be—it’s propaganda. I also agree that it’s not Middle-earth. There is a lot of shady things going on during this birthing of a nation. That being said, this is one of the few conflicts where the Goodies and Baddies are obvious.

• mruwnik 5 Nov 2022 11:53 UTC

  16 points

  6

  on: Should we “go against na­ture”?

  There are more senses, which also get mixed in. There are also aesthetic or mystical meanings. So it’s usually more a case of natural forests being more beautiful than a sterile lawn, or not harming the lunar goddess.

  Improving on nature depends on your point of view. Fertilizing allowed for the massive population boom of the last 100 years, but it also harms the ecosystems where it is used, leaving monocultural deserts. Irrigation allows for growing in places previously unavailable, but in the long term it raises the salinity. Canals and levees change the structure of the waterway they’re applied to, causing mayhem in the local ecosystems. River control causes rivers to flow a lot faster, resulting in flash floods and erosion, and also kills of fish species etc. that can’t survive in the changed environment.

  Which is simply to say that everything has tradeoffs, and improvements have costs, which might not be obvious. Chesterton’s fence and all. Technology is wonderful. Landsailor is moving every time. But so are wild forests. The spread of humanity is continuously further encroaching on the few remaining wildernesses. In this sense, championing nature is to try to preserve the few remaining places that are untouched by humans, because that in itself is valuable. It’s not against humanity, other than incidentally—it’s about wild beauty.

  Though to be fair, there aren’t really any pristine places left—everywhere has signs of human activity. For example the Amazonian rain forest structure was extensively managed to have more edible species. And there’s no reason in principle for human activity to be worse for diversity etc. than natural ecosystems. Solarpunk is a good example of a compromise between the two.

• mruwnik 30 Nov 2022 21:46 UTC

  13 points

  1

  in reply to: MikkW’s comment on: Bed­bugs are a Solved Prob­lem—DIY Bio-Weapon works.

  It depends a lot on the fungus lifecycle. If it’s an obligatory insect parasite, then it won’t do anything anywhere else, so it won’t really spread other than to other insects. A quick look at Wikipedia says that it attacks arthropods with different strains showing different ranges, with some only attacking selective species, and others being a lot less discriminate. So you don’t have to worry about it causing mold or infecting humans or (invertebrate) pets or plants. There were at least seven noted human infections in people with a suppressed immune system, but I’m guessing that if you’re in that situation you’d be a lot more paranoid anyway.

  The spores could potentially cause allergy issues, though Aprehend claims that it’s fine.

• mruwnik 11 Oct 2022 13:19 UTC

  13 points

  0

  in reply to: Malmesbury’s comment on: Do bam­boos set them­selves on fire?

  Check out pyrophytes. Or in general fire ecology, which is quite fascinating. Conifers are common culprits. Sequoia’s are a well known example of a plant that pretty much require a fire for their seeds—the cones are thick and often covered in an additional layer for protection, which require high temperatures for them to crack and let the seeds fall out. A lot of plants in Australia, California etc, (i.e. places where you’d expect common fires) tend to have various fire protections or enhancements. Though you can also get them in other places—Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) is a temperate species that isn’t very competitive (gymnosperms are generally less well off than angiosperms and tend to live in less hospitable places), but has:

  • a tall trunk with branches high up

  • a very thick lower bark

  • fine, flaky bark on the upper portions

  • pine cones that open when the weather is nice (i.e. hot and dry)

  • very light, wind dispersed seeds

  • a tendency to be a pioneer species (i.e. grows on open dirt, after disruptions like fires)

  All of the above are useful in the case of a fire—temperate forest fires tend to be in the understory (at least in naturalish European ones, which I’m most familiar with), so the insides and upper branches are protected. At the same time, flakes of bark, thinner than most paper, break off, catch fire and are blown over to light other stuff on fire. The heat opens the cones and disperses the seeds, which can sprout on a nicely cleared area, freshly fertilized with lovely wood ash.

  Below is what the flaky stuff looks like

  

• mruwnik 18 Sep 2023 18:46 UTC

  12 points

  6

  on: The Talk: a brief ex­pla­na­tion of sex­ual dimorphism

  organisms with mitochondria always use sexual reproduction

  Or at least their ancestors did. You mention Bdelloidea in a comment, which are one of the inevitable exceptions (as you mention in the introduction, which I very appreciate, as “everything in biology has exceptions” is something I often find myself saying), but they are descended from eucaryotes which did have mitochondria.

  The opposite seems true, though—true sexual reproduction seems to be exclusively by eukaryotes. So you could also say that sex makes mitochondria necessary. There seem to be a couple of good jokes there...

  One other pedantic note to add to this generally excellent article is that non-eukaryotic organisms also have methods to mix their genes, what with bacterial conjugation or viral recombination, without the dimorphism.

• mruwnik 12 Dec 2022 19:55 UTC

  10 points

  2

  on: A crisis for on­line com­mu­ni­ca­tion: bots and bot users will over­run the In­ter­net?

  Obligatory xkcd:

  

• mruwnik 30 Nov 2022 9:04 UTC

  10 points

  0

  in reply to: FinalFormal2’s comment on: Su­per­in­tel­li­gent AI is nec­es­sary for an amaz­ing fu­ture, but far from sufficient

  Looking at the agents that aren’t hypothetical, i.e. biology, one thing that they tend to have in common is resource hogging. Mainly for the simple reason that those which didn’t try to get as much of the pie as possible tend to get outcompeted by those which did. So while you can’t tell for sure what any hypothetical aliens would be like, it’s certainly plausible to model them as wanting to collect resources, as that’s pretty much universal. At least among those agents that tend to spread. This suggests that if there are expansionary aliens around, they’re likely to be the kind that would also like our resources (this is where Hanson’s grabby aliens come in). Looking at the only data we have, this tends to end badly for the existent species if the newcomers have better abilities (for lack of a better phrase).

  Any potential aliens will be, well, alien, which if I understand correctly is sort of your point. This means that they’re likely to have totally different values etc. and would have a totally different vision of what the universe should look like. This would be fascinating, as long as it isn’t at the cost of human values.

  The same argumentation applies for AGI—if (or when) it appears, it stands to reason that it’ll go for power at the cost of humans. That could be fine, as long as it did nice things (like in the Culture books), but that’s throwing a dart at an ocean of hypothesis space and hoping to hit a specific starfish that lives off the coast of Australia.

  This post isn’t telling a very specific story that requires multiple things to go exactly right. It’s considering the possible ways to partition the hypothesis space with the assumptions that AGI and aliens are possible. And then trying to put a number on them. Nate specifically said that these weren’t hard calculations, just a way to be more precise about what he thinks.

• mruwnik 28 Oct 2022 19:23 UTC

  9 points

  1

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Ukraine and the Crimea Question

  This is a real problem in Poland. On the one hand, Ukrainians are to Poland as Poles are to west Europe (cheap hard labour), so both side want to keep up good relations. On the other hand, Bandera’s boys did play at genocide. On the third hand, they’re the only thing keeping the Russians away. So you get this dance between “our brother Ukrainians need help, let’s show everyone how nice we are” and “they murdered my father and stole my land and now don’t even have the good grace to apologise”.

• mruwnik 13 Apr 2024 18:49 UTC

  8 points

  2

  in reply to: Stephen McAleese’s comment on: LLMs for Align­ment Re­search: a safety pri­or­ity?

  It’s not just from https://​​aisafety.info/​​. It also uses Arbital, any posts from the alignment forum, LW, EA forum that seem relevant and have a minimum karma, a bunch of arXiv papers, and a couple of other sources. This is a a relatively up to date list of the sources used (it also contains the actual data).

• mruwnik 22 Dec 2023 13:42 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: AI Safety Chatbot

  1. gpt-3.5-turbo for now

  2. that’s also being tried

  What links here?

  • Stephen McAleese's comment on LLMs for Align­ment Re­search: a safety pri­or­ity? by abramdemski (5 Apr 2024 19:08 UTC; 1 point)

• mruwnik 10 Mar 2023 18:55 UTC

  7 points

  3

  in reply to: Amalthea’s comment on: Speed run­ning ev­ery­one through the bad al­igne­ment bingo. $5k bounty for a LW con­ver­sa­tional agent

  Check https://​​aisafety.info/​​ - any feedback (or even better—answers) is useful

• mruwnik 6 Nov 2022 11:29 UTC

  7 points

  6

  in reply to: mwacksen’s comment on: Ukraine and the Crimea Question

  Your if clause is somewhat of a false dichotomy. There are other reasons to keep fighting:

  • you might be fighting a rear action that you know you won’t win, but will allow the rest to escape

  • you might be bogging down an enemies strength to keep them from going somewhere else

  • you might be able to inflict enough damage on them to cause them to be ineffective in later battles

  • you might want to inspire others

  • you might care about glory

  • you might have nowhere else to go

  • you might just be nihilistic

  • you might have someone pointing a gun at your back to stop you from retreating

  Most of these boil down to iterated games, rather than just a one off prisoner’s dilemma.

  Mariupol is a tragedy. But it really didn’t stop Ukrainians from continuing the fight as long as they could. The reason they stopped was because they ran out of supplies. They also inflicted massive damage on their enemy. There is a lesson here.

  Stories of last stands are powerful. A large bunch of inspiring stories are about doomed last stands—Thermopylae, Beowulf, Roland’s song, Westerplatte etc. We can argue about whether they were worth the suffering of the protagonists, whether it’s morally good, etc., but they work.

• mruwnik 25 Jul 2023 12:05 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: arisAlexis’s comment on: Cry­on­ics and Regret

  Which is a bit over 3 years of saving up every penny of the average wages where I live. If you subtract the average rent and starvation rations from that income, you’re up to 5.5 years. The first info I could find on google (from 2018) claims the average person here saves around $100 monthly, which gives you over 40 years of saving. This is only for one person. If you have multiple children, a SO, etc., that starts ballooning quickly. This is in a country which while not yet classified as developed, is almost there (Poland).

  50k is a lot for pretty much most of the world. It’s the cost of a not very nice flat (i.e. middling location, or bad condition) here.

• mruwnik 9 May 2023 9:13 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Cookiecarver’s comment on: All AGI Safety ques­tions wel­come (es­pe­cially ba­sic ones) [May 2023]

  No.

  Atheism is totally irrelevant. A deist would come to exactly the same conclusions. A Christian might not be convinced of it, but mainly because of eschatological reasons. Unless you go the route of saying that AGI is the antichrist or something, which would be fun. Or that God(s) will intervene if things get too bad?

  Reductive materialism also is irrelevant. It might sort of play an issue with whether an AGI is conscious, but that whole topic is a red herring—you don’t need a conscious system for it to kill everyone.

  This feeds into the computational theory of mind—it makes it a lot easier to posit the possibility of a conscious AGI if you don’t require a soul for it, but again—consciousness isn’t really needed for an unsafe AI.

  I have fundamental Christian friends who are ardent believers, but who also recognize the issues behind AGI safety. They might not think it that much of a problem (pretty much everything pales in comparison to eternal heaven and hell), but they can understand and appreciate the issues.

• mruwnik 10 Mar 2023 18:54 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Speed run­ning ev­ery­one through the bad al­igne­ment bingo. $5k bounty for a LW con­ver­sa­tional agent

  The chatbot should get better over time, but for now the website works quite well as a collection of questions and answers, where the answers go through an editing process. New questions can be easily added, and if you can’t find an answer, but there is a similar question waiting to be answered, you can bump its priority a bit, which will hopefully result in someone working on it sooner.

• mruwnik 15 Jan 2023 11:24 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: memeticimagery’s comment on: A gen­eral com­ment on dis­cus­sions of ge­netic group differences

  Well, race is a very ill defined term from a genetic point of view. How would you define “white”? “Black” covers vastly more, genetically speaking, than all the other races put together. Which is to be expected, since humans originated in Africa. Where your ancestors are from is important in that it will make you more or less susceptible to various things (e.g. Africans are more resistant to malaria, Scandinavians are more resistant to HIV, pastoral people can tolerate lactose), but these tend to be single genes, or at most a few. In the case of features that are regulated by multiple genes, it’s spread out a lot more, with lots of genes giving small boosts.

  In the case of intelligence, it’s a bit like asking whether there’s a homosexuality or speech gene. The simple answer is no, the deeper answer is (as always in biology) “it depends”. For example, in the case of speech, there is a family in England that has a genetic disorder that results in them not being able to speak. This doesn’t mean that FOXP2 is responsible for speech. It just means that it’s a critical element, the lack of which will break the speech system.

  Intelligence is (most likely) similar. There are lots (hundreds or thousands) of genes correlated with intelligence. These genes are spread all over the gene pool, which has always (except remote islands, e.g. Tasmania) been mixing itself around. If there was a single gene for intelligence, I’m pretty sure it would spread really fast, unless it was a recent (e.g. 1000 years) mutation. Unless it was somehow intrinsically connected to superficial characteristics like toenail size, beard length, or skull shape, the intelligence gene would spread to other places without changing how the recipients look.

  It’s like eyesight. Having good eyes is very useful. So you’d expect most people to have similar levels of sight (sans various defects and with a normalish distribution) because natural selection will be pushing up to the Pareto limit. Intelligence is similar. It’s too useful to give up.

  An interesting example of cultural differences being more explanatory than genetics are the Dutch. Before 1875, the median height of Dutch men was 165cm. In 2014 it was 174cm. That’s not something that can be explained well with genetics (it’s too fast). The most likely explanation is that their genes had the potential to be really tall, but the environment didn’t supply enough resources. Average height is actually one of the best measures of social well being (along with when girls start menstruating), as it’s very sensitive to how healthy children are (each skipped meal and each illness result in a little less growth).

• mruwnik 27 Nov 2022 0:06 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: The First Filter

  Or also how to notice it?

• mruwnik 15 Nov 2022 18:00 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Spec­u­la­tion on Cur­rent Op­por­tu­ni­ties for Unusu­ally High Im­pact in Global Health

  As a general rule of thumb it’s correct. Antibiotic resistance is a growing problem—it’s your basic red queen situation. We’re currently far ahead, but bacteria are catching up. This film is a pretty way of showing it happen (sort of) live. MRSA is causing more and more problems, especially as it tends to pop up in places where vulnerable people are (since that’s where it gets its resistance in the first place). It helps that there are different families of antibiotics, so if a strain is resistant to one of them, you can switch to a different kind. Though this paper suggests that each class works for ~50 years (I’m not a microbiologist and don’t know how true that is, though it fits with my priors). So it’s a valid issue, especially in the context of livestock, where it’s common to mix in antibiotics with the food (as each day ill is a day not growing).

  That being said, this is mainly a problem in developed countries with ample access to antibiotics, which is a totally different case from the one you’re making. You could even say that it bolsters your idea, as why not send the weakened versions somewhere where they still have a chance of working?

• mruwnik 31 Oct 2022 12:05 UTC

  6 points

  5

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Ukraine and the Crimea Question

  The problem seems to be that this wasn’t clear from your original comment. I admit that after reading it I was under the impression that you were giving at least some credence to the claim that the Ukrainians turned Mariupol into Grozny 2.0. Though rereading it now, I see that my impression was coloured by your other comments—I interpreted it as “no one can tell what really went down, seeing as both sides are blaming each other” rather than “it’s worth knowing what both sides of an argument are saying if you want to come to a compromise”.

  This is a pity, since while I don’t agree with you on (my understanding of) your stance on the war and how to best end it, you raise important points which should definitely be considered.

• mruwnik 3 Jan 2024 11:49 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Apol­o­giz­ing is a Core Ra­tion­al­ist Skill

  Another, related Machiavellian tactic is, when starting a relationship that you suspect will be highly valuable to you, is to have an argument with them as soon as possible, and then to patch things up with a (sincere!) apology. I’m not suggesting to go out of your way to start a quarrel, more that it’s both a valuable data point as to how they handle problems (as most relationships will have patchy moments) and it’s also a good signal to them that you value them highly enough to go through a proper apology.