philh

Karma: 5,622

philh 22 Jul 2021 15:54 UTC
4 points
in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Ask Not “How Are You Doing?”
Have you tried something like “what’s something exciting” instead? “The most exciting” would lead me down some internal flailing like “ahh geeze, the most exciting? Okay time to rank all the things that have happened”, but I could believe it works better on average.

philh 17 Jul 2021 10:49 UTC
14 points
in reply to: CellBioGuy’s comment on: Re: Competent Elites
To clarify, does this differ from saying that this community-at-large believes things you don’t believe?

Like, I could imagine someone saying this community “lacks brakes” on the subject of AI risk, because we take it seriously and encourage other people to take it seriously and sometimes to significantly change their life in response to taking it seriously. And how someone feels about that probably depends on whether they think AI risk actually is that big a deal or not. (I guess someone could say, like, “yes, that’s the community lacking brakes, and in this case that’s a good thing”.)

Is that the sort of thing you mean, or?

philh 12 Jul 2021 8:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: PeterMcCluskey’s comment on: Book Review: Order Without Law
Interesting, thanks!

I imagine it’s been too long by now, but if by chance you happen to remember where you got the sense of reluctance from, I’d be curious to hear more?

(I guess we should note the possibility that he was an anarchist in 1991 but not in 2017, but I have no particular reason to expect that.)

philh 11 Jul 2021 22:31 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Sherrinford’s comment on: Book Review: Order Without Law
Thank you! :)

Book Review: Order Without Law

philh10 Jul 2021 21:50 UTC

64 points

5 comments49 min readLW link

(reasonableapproximation.net)

philh 6 Jul 2021 20:00 UTC
2 points
on: Causes of a Debt Crisis—Economic

You’d think there’d be some way to make a more symmetric asset, but there really isn’t, not one that people are interested in.

Today’s Money Stuff talks about “cash-settled swaps”: “just a bet in which you pay me $1 for every dollar that Tesla stock goes up, and I pay you $1 for every dollar that Tesla stock goes down.”

Do you have thoughts on those? They sound like they’d be more symmetric, but I could well believe I’m missing something. (Maybe them being exactly symmetric makes them not super useful? But I don’t see why they’d have to be; I assume you could make it $0.80 for every dollar that Tesla stock goes up, or one party could pay the other for entering into the trade.)

philh 5 Jul 2021 21:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Fall of Civilizations #13: The Assyrians—Empire of Iron

(Okay look this is a three hour episode, approximately none of the names are in my orthography which means I have trouble telling people apart, and the dates don’t mean much to me either. I’d be amazed if I don’t misremember anything here.)

During some Persian civil war, one of the combatants hired a bunch of Greek mercenaries. They won one particular battle, but the Persian dude got killed so there wasn’t much left for the greeks and they started running away towards the Black Sea. On the way they found two large abandoned cities that they had no idea what was going on. This was before the Parthenon or the Colusseum. Now we know the names of the cities (one was Nineveh, I forget the other) and that they were part of the Assyrian empire.

The empire started with a city named Assur, somehow related to the previous Sumerian empire. It became pretty good at fighting. The god of the city (also called Assur, it was normal for a city to have a god back then) came to take over the place of the king of the gods. Then came the bronze age collapse and it survived better than most.

They started conquering places around them. For a while Babylon kept them in check, but then didn’t, and they conquered Babylon. Their kings got pretty brutal. They could field large armies, over 100k when the world population was only like 50m. The armies did have to go home for harvest though, so there were only a few months of the year where they could campaign. Their subjects could time insurrections carefully to avoid getting spanked. Except then they didn’t need that, either, and laid siege to a city for three years. They also had army engineers making siege engines and digging roads through mountains and stuff. A lot of their subjects didn’t much like them, but they didn’t much like each other either, so they didn’t team up and Assyria was able to suppress them one at a time even if they rebelled simultaneously.

They also have a lot of writing, on clay tablets which means a lot of it has survived, enough that most has never even been looked at by an expert. There’s a letter from a child at school to his mum, complaining that you never buy me new clothes. Father’s servant’s son gets new clothes. His mother loves him even though he’s adopted, but you don’t love me.

Babylon was still starting shit, and at some point they got tired of it and completely destroyed the place. They took its god, Marduk, to Nineveh, and later made Nineveh the capital city. Some people think the Hanging Gardens of Babylon were actually there.

At some point there was a lot of insurrections at once, partly aided by Egypt which didn’t like Assyria. This included Judah, which had been separated from Israel by previous Assyrian conquests. Assyria marched on Lakish, sacked and destroyed it, and scattered the population throughout the empire—that was a thing they did a lot. Then tried to do the same to Jerusalem. The king had put up a new wall and a tunnel to a water supply, and paid a tribute, but they still besieged. But then something, possibly plague, killed a bunch of them and they had to turn back. This episode is something we have from both sides, because it’s in the Bible, though the Assyrians didn’t say much about their eventual defeat.

The king who did that seems to have become a lot less warlike and a lot more buildy afterwards. It might have been him who decided to rebuild Babylon in exactly its previous layout. When his eldest son died, he named his eldest remaining son his successor, but then changed his mind and named a different son. Eldest remaining son got pissed and started conspiring with the other sons, the successor had to flee. Successor came back with a big army, and a lot of usurper’s army surrendered because usurper had done something or other shitty. Successor killed the conspirators and their families. (Not sure at what point in this the previous king had died.)

This new king wants to avoid that kind of succession crisis, so he appoints his younger son king of Assyria, and elder son king of Babylon, underneath Assyria, when he dies. Which happens after a prolonged bout of possibly-depression, illness and paranoia, on a campaign to kill a bunch of people spreading a prophecy of his doom, in the town where the prophecy was made.

So his sons ascend. The new-new Assyrian king gets tired of the egyptians and attacks them. But then things kind of blow up with the Elamites(?), in modern-day Iran. King of Babylon has been feeling hard done by, no one takes him seriously, his brother is meddling and his advisors listen to his brother instead of him. So he offers to help the Elamites possibly in exchange for getting to be king of Babylon not subject to anyone else. Assyria beats the Elamites, we don’t know if they know Babylon was involved. In any case, then Babylon rebels and declares independence. So Assyria besieges Babylon, reduces them to cannibalism, finally enters and sacks the place again. Then goes on a war of extermination against Elam, completely destroys their capital Susa.

Also, this king hadn’t originally been intended for Kingship. He’d been going to do some temple work or something. So unlike most kings, he could read and write, and he was proud of it. He built a library and sent around for copies of every book published, which got preserved well when the city got burned later. But towards the end of his reign he seems to get depressed too, his last writing is a woe-is-me. Around this point we stop getting Assyrian chronicles and have to pick up with Babylonian ones a bit later.

So what goes wrong for Assyria? Part of it might be climate change. Until now they’d been in an unusually wet period, but now things started to dry up. In the north they had to start constructing irrigation like they’d been doing already in the south. This would have shaken their power. But the price of wheat didn’t change much, so it’s not clear how much difference it made.

Narrator thinks it’s more significant that the Elamites left a power vacuum, that was filled by the Medes, their old enemies who Assyria hadn’t had much contact with. And the Medes decided to attack Assyria, and came and burned Assur. Babylon declared independence again, joined forces with Media (a Babylonian prince married a Median princess, or something), and together they went on to completely destroy Nineveh. The king dies at some point (I think this was a new king by now?) and a general holds out for a bit but they beat him too, and that’s it for Assyria. Before too long no one in the area remembers them.

philh 4 Jul 2021 14:38 UTC
14 points
in reply to: Andy Jones’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
Those lines aren’t flat, they’re just hard to read on that scale. I made my own based on the heatmap of case rates for england (there doesn’t seem to be a whole-UK heatmap).

philh 4 Jul 2021 11:30 UTC
4 points
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Covid 7/1: Don’t Panic
I’ve seen graphs on /r/CoronavirusUK showing AZ and Pfizer roughly equal in count, and Moderna a tiny sliver. Couldn’t find any of those on demand, though. (I thought the data was available somewhere in the adverse effects reports, but I can’t find those now either.)

philh 27 Jun 2021 9:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Why did no LessWrong discourse on gain of function research develop in 2013/2014?
(I’m not sure to what extent you’re trying to “give background info” versus “be more specific about how people thought of GoF research as an infohazard” versus “be more specific about how GoF research actually was an infohazard” versus other things, so I might be talking past you a bit here.)

The debate about gain of function research started as a debate about infohazards when Fouchier and Kawaoka modified H5N1 in 2011 and published the modified sequence.

So this seems to me likely to be an infohazard that was found through GoF research, but not obviously GoF-research-as-infohazard. That is, even if we grant that the modified sequence was an infohazard and a mistake to publish, it doesn’t then follow that it’s a mistake to talk about GoF research in general. Because when GoF research is already happening, it’s already known within certain circles, and those circles disproportionately contain the people we’d want to keep the knowledge from. It might be the case that talking about GoF research is a mistake, but it’s not obviously so.

What I’m trying to get at is that “info hazard concerns” is pretty vague and not very helpful. What were people concerned about, specifically, and was it a reasonable thing to be concerned about? (It’s entirely possible that people made the mental leap from “this thing found through GoF is an infohazard” to “GoF is an infohazard”, but if so it seems important to realize that that’s a leap.)

a frame that suggests that possible military use or someone stealing engineered viruses and intentionally spreading them is what the problem is about.

Here, too: if this is what we’re worried about, it’s not clear that “not talking about GoF research” helps the problem at all.

philh 25 Jun 2021 15:30 UTC
4 points
in reply to: ofer’s comment on: Why did no LessWrong discourse on gain of function research develop in 2013/2014?
I agree probably only a small fraction of people were aware that GoF research was a thing until recently. I would assume that fraction included most of the people who were capable of acting on the knowledge. (That is, the question isn’t “what fraction of people know about GoF research” but “what fraction of people who are plausibly capable of causing GoF research to happen know about it”.) But maybe that depends on the specific way you think it’s hazardous .

philh 25 Jun 2021 13:16 UTC
2 points
in reply to: ofer’s comment on: Why did no LessWrong discourse on gain of function research develop in 2013/2014?
Can you be more specific? My vague impression is that if GoF research is already happening, talking about GoF research isn’t likely to be an info hazard because the info is already in the heads of the people in whose heads it’s hazardous.

philh 25 Jun 2021 11:41 UTC
2 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Planet Money: The Day India’s Cash Disappeared

2019 rerun of a 2017 episode.

Recently the Prime Minister of India, a guy named Modi, announced that all the 500 and 1000 rupee Indian banknotes would become worthless. That’s 85% of India’s cash, and most people don’t have credit cards. People had just 30 days to trade their cash in, and only a certain amount a day—a high amount by most Indians’ standards, but not for the wealthy. And the lines to do so were long.

This sucked hard for a lot of people. A man found 3000 Rupees in his dead wife’s Sari, weeks or months of farm work for him, and couldn’t trade it in because the deadline had passed. The bank was allowed to make exceptions but didn’t. A baby died because its parents didn’t have cash for a taxi.

The point was to get black money used by the mafia out of the economy. An engineer named Anil came up with it, along with his engineer buddies. They did run it by some economists too, who broadly thought it was a good idea. Then Anil quit his job and formed a sort of collective devoted to promoting this idea. He gave a talk on it thousands of times, to politicians, professors, businessmen, whoever would listen. Eventually he gave it to Modi, before Modi became Prime Minister but when Modi already had a reputation for being able to get shit done. It was supposed to be a nine minute meeting, it turned into ninety, and Modi said he’d make it happen if he became PM.

Economist criticizes: yes it’s a good plan but it’s an engineer’s plan, you need more data. Anil responds: this is why nothing gets better, you keep asking for more data when you need to do things. This will hurt at first but improve things in the long run.

2019 update: demonetization slowed India’s economic growth by 2 percentage points in the early months, which was almost all of its growth. You could see the effects from space as fewer lights were turned on. Since then growth has recovered. (This is not a very detailed update, annoyingly.)

philh 23 Jun 2021 12:47 UTC
5 points
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Planet Money: The capitalists of North Korea

Jessie grew up in North Korea. One day when she was like eight her family needed matches, so she picked a bunch of wild raspberries and sold them at market for the rough equivalent of a nickle. People didn’t buy them so much because they were good raspberries for the price but because she was eight. (I guess similar to lemonade stands.) With the leftover money she got a peach for her mum. Seeing her mum’s happiness at the peach she decided to make a lot of money to keep making her mum happy. So she kept that kind of thing up. One time she walked six hours each way to buy purer alcohol than people in her village were drinking, then sold it on. She was still small at the time so she could only carry 5kg of it. Also started smuggling between NK and China, I suspect that came a bit later.

NK has a weapons program, which raises the question where did that money come from? It used to be in an economic race with SK, but now SK’s economy is like 50x higher. NK is the only country to have had a peacetime famine in an urban, literate population.

When Kim Jong Un came into power, he said he was going to improve the economy and build weapons. For the economy he started turning a blind eye to capitalists (“dongju”?) like Jessie, who had always been operating illegally. He allowed people in to give business lessons. They weren’t allowed to discuss certain things, but if you talk about trading between a fictional “big island” and “small island”, everyone knows you mean China and NK. Some people were even allowed out of the country to learn business. One person was excited to see an ATM. But then the profits from this sort of thing went into the weapons program, which is awkward.

And because the capitalists were still in a legal grey area, they could have their stuff seized. Jessie’s uncle reported her. She lost everything and was lucky not to go to prison. So she smuggled herself out using her connections from smuggling goods. Now she’s in South Korea, but not really planning to go into business again. Her mum is dead now, and that was a lot of her motivation.

philh 13 Jun 2021 10:36 UTC
2 points
in reply to: adamzerner’s comment on: Bad names make you open the box
The other thing about filterPromotedPosts is that it kind of sounds like the input is promoted posts and the output is some unspecified subset of them.filterPostsForPromoted avoids that but starts to feel unwieldy to me. (But maybe I should just be more okay with unwieldy names.)

Even in an impure language I think filter sounds to me like it would return a new list rather than editing in place. That’s how the python filter function works for example, and Perl’s grep (which is basically a synonym for me), and I had to look this up but JavaScript’s filter too.

philh 11 Jun 2021 21:51 UTC
2 points
in reply to: maximkazhenkov’s comment on: We need a standard set of community advice for how to financially prepare for AGI
I’d worry that if we’re looking at a potentially civilization-ending pandemic, a would-be warlord with a handful of followers decides that north sentinel island seems a kind of attractive place to go all of a sudden.

philh 10 Jun 2021 21:26 UTC
2 points
in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: What to optimize for in life?
I’m not following why a larger Pareto frontier would mean fewer tradeoffs on the frontier, could you elaborate on that?

philh 10 Jun 2021 20:50 UTC
4 points
in reply to: AllAmericanBreakfast’s comment on: Search-in-Territory vs Search-in-Map
I’m not sure if these are examples of the thing you’re talking about or something else, but:

Consider a missile that’s guided by GPS until it reaches its rough target location, then uses sensors to locate the target precisely. (Though arguably this is simply “SIM followed by SIT”.)

Or consider when I do something similar myself. I use the map on my phone screen to guide me to roughly where I want to be, and then I use my eyes to guide me to exactly where I want to be. And I don’t just switch from SIM to SIT; I keep checking with both, in case e.g. I miss it and go too far.

philh 10 Jun 2021 20:39 UTC
5 points
in reply to: TheSimplestExplanation’s comment on: Search-in-Territory vs Search-in-Map
We’re want the rock that’s closest but not higher, and that’s what we get. We don’t necessarily get the closest rock, but we do get the best one, which is what John said.

philh 9 Jun 2021 22:41 UTC
4 points
in reply to: whiplashoo’s comment on: Why has no one compared Covid-19 and Vaccine Risks?
Apart from the things Jonathan mentions, the Pandemrix vaccine used for swine flu seems to have caused narcolepsy in rare cases.

Note that Fauci in that video is talking about delayed effects, not long-term effects.

philh

Book Re­view: Order Without Law

Fall of Civilizations #13: The Assyrians—Empire of Iron

Planet Money: The Day India’s Cash Disappeared

Planet Money: The capitalists of North Korea

Book Review: Order Without Law