In 3, there’s also the Brown representability theorem: Cohomology groups are just homotopy groups, with the sphere spectrum replaced with the Eilenberg-MacLane spectrum.
Nisan
Karma: 6,812
“the geeks are generally worse, unless they make it an explicit optimization target, but there are a bunch of very competent sociopaths around, in the Venkatesh Rao sense of the word, which seem a lot more competent and empowered than even the sociopaths in other communities”
Are you combining Venkatesh Rao’s loser/clueless/sociopath taxonomy with David Chapman’s geek/mop/sociopath?
(ETA: I know this is not relevant to the discussion, but I confuse these sometimes.)
All the mathematicians quoted above can successfully write proofs that convince experts that something is true and why something is true; the quotes are about the difficulty of conveying the way the mathematician found that truth. All those mathematicians can convey the that and and the why — except for Mochizuki and his circle.
The matter of Mochizuki’s work on the abc conjecture is intriguing because the broader research community has neither accepted his proof nor refuted it. The way to bet now is that his proof is wrong:
Professional mathematicians have not and will not publicly declare that “Mochizuki’s proof is X% likely to be correct”. Why? I’d guess one reason is that it’s their job to provide a definitive verdict that serves as the source of truth for probabilistic forecasts. If the experts gave subjective probabilities, it would confuse judgments of different kinds.
There’s now this post by GradientDissenter and this post by me.
Gerrymandering California
Oh sorry, somehow I forgot what you wrote about Reginald Johnston before writing my comment! I haven’t read anything else about Puyi, so my suspicion is just a hunch.
I read that article. I’m suspicious because the story is too perfect, and surely lots of people wanted to discredit the monarchy, and there are no apologists to dispute the account.
Is there any high-quality, intelligent discussion on the internet about California’s ballot measure about gerrymandering, Prop 50?
What am I to conclude about your values from the fact that you’re moderately dominant in bed?
If you care about almost-identical copies, why not care about identical copies? Then there’s no need to split :)
You claim that:
the government is [not] somehow stopping people from working more.
but also:
the Netherlands [...] has enacted part-time-friendly policies
I’m skeptical that both of these claims are straightforwardly true. Due to the nature of labor law, a policy that is friendly to shorter work-weeks will in practice also be unfriendly to longer work-weeks.
In particular, my uninformed guess is that a Dutch employer and employee seeking to formalize a 40-hour-per-week working arrangement will encounter obstacles or costs that wouldn’t arise for a <35-hour-per-week arrangement. I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
I’ve been wondering the case of Teresa Youngblut and Felix Bauckholt. A hotel employee called the cops on them because they were “dressed in tactical clothing and protective gear, while also being armed”. Does this pass the threshold of “too weird” in New England? Or maybe it was New England forbearance that let them get away with it for as long as they did? Or maybe it’s possible to be weird in New England, as long as one has the right kind of vibe.
Do you have any advice for people financially exposed to capabilities progress on how not to do dumb stuff, not be targeted by political pressure, etc.?
Yes, Dan Luu wrote about how he writes a lot because he’s a fast typer.
See also Jevon’s paradox.
Maybe people notice that AIs are being drawn into the moral circle / a coalition, and are using that opportunity to bargain for their own coalition’s interests.
Yeah, you and I agree that people can clearly distinguish between my senses 1 and 2. I was responding to Paradiddle, who I read as conflating the two — he defines “conscious” as both “awake and aware” and as “there is something it [is] like to be us”. I could have been clearer about this.
I believe grad students and Less Wrong users in these conversations are usually working with sense 2, but in fact sense 2 is multiple things and different people mean different things, to the extent they mean anything at all.
Paradiddle claims to the contrary that practically everyone in these conversations is talking about the same thing and just has different intuitions about how it works. But you seem to disagree with Paradiddle? Are you saying that Critch’s subjects aren’t talking about what you mean by “conscious”?
I’m not Critch and I haven’t read much philosophy, but I am the kind of person who he would have interviewed in the OP. It’s clear to me that there are at least two senses of the word “conscious”.
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There’s the mundane sense which is just a synonym for “awake and aware”, as opposed to “asleep” or “lifeless”. “Is the patient conscious yet?” (This is cluster 11 in the OP.)
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There’s the sense(s) that get brought up in the late-night bull sessions Critch is talking about. “We are subjective beings.” “There is something it is like to be us.”
I confess sense 2 doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’m linguistically competent enough to understand it’s not the same as sense 1. I know these senses are different because the correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 1 is “Yes, I can hear you and I’m awake now”, and a correct response to “Are you conscious?” in sense 2 is to have an hour-long conversation about what it means.
So, this claim is at odds with my experience as an English speaker:
the obvious answer to what people mean by consciousness is the fact that it is like something to be them, i.e., they are subjective beings.
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Libertarianism teaches that when one wants an economic outcome, one may be tempted to use government to get that outcome; but one should use private-sector tools instead, even if it means inventing a new kind of institution.
When one craves meaning and community, one’s first thought is to reach for religion. But one should look for other sources of meaning and community first, including inventing one’s own meaning and inventing new kinds of communities.
Another reason labs don’t provide CoT is that if users see them, the labs will be incentivized to optimize for them, and this will decrease their informativeness. A flag like you propose would have a similar effect.