philh

Karma: 7,678

philh Aug 18, 2024, 6:35 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: dr_s’s comment on: London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields
Sorry, I didn’t see this notification until after—did you find us?

philh Aug 16, 2024, 11:24 AM
3 points
0
on: Economics101 predicted the failure of special card payments for refugees, 3 months later whole of Germany wants to adopt it
I agree that econ 101 models are sometimes incorrect or inapplicable. But

I don’t know how much that additional cost is, but seemingly less than the benefit, because three months later, the whole of Germany wants to introduce this card. The introduction has to be delayed by some legal issues, and then a few counties want to introduce it independently. So popular is this special card!

The argument here seems to be that the card must satisfy a cost-benefit analysis or it wouldn’t be so popular, and I don’t buy that either.

philh Aug 15, 2024, 7:54 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Smaug123’s comment on: Organisation for Program Equilibrium reading group
Ah, I can sometimes make fridays but not tomorrow. Hope it goes well.

London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields

philhAug 8, 2024, 10:51 PM

15 points

3 comments1 min readLW link

philh Aug 3, 2024, 10:53 AM
2 points
0
on: Multiplex Gene Editing: Where Are We Now?

they turn a C/G base pair to an A/T, or vice versa.

Can they also turn it into a G/C or a T/A? I wasn’t sure if this was an example or a “this is the only edit they do”. Or I might just be misunderstanding and this question is wrong.

philh Jul 23, 2024, 8:38 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: rossry’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
I think Ben’s proposal is: between rounds, it takes a while to split the whole deck into suits, all hearts in one pile and all spades in another and so on. Instead you can just pick out four hearts, and four spades, and so on, and remove 0/2/2/4 cards from those piles, and shuffle the rest back into the deck. But no matter how you shuffle, I don’t think you can do that without leaking information.

philh Jul 22, 2024, 1:32 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews

The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson

I think I’ve read this twice, in my early teens and early twenties, and loved it both times. But I’m now 34 and can’t talk about it in depth. I think past-me especially liked the grimness and was impressed at how characters seemed to be doing things for internally motivated reasons. (IIRC Donaldson calls this giving characters “dignity”. I feel like since then I’ve picked up another term for it that’s temporarily slipped my mind.)

I still think A Dark and Hungry God Arises and This Day All Gods Die are excellent book titles.

A caveat is that back then I also loved Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I think that by my mid-twenties I enjoyed them but not so much. So plausibly I’d like the Gap Cycle less now than then too? But I want to re-read.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

I once saw a conversation that went something like: “I don’t find writing quality in sci-fi that important.” / “You clearly haven’t read Too Like the Lightning”.

I wasn’t sure if the second person meant TLTL’s writing is good or bad. Having read TLTL, both interpretations seemed plausible. (They meant good.)

I found it very difficult to get through this book, except that the last few chapters were kind of gripping. That was enough to get me to read the next one, which was hard to get through again. Ultimately I read the whole series, and I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the process of reading it. But they’re some of my favorite books to have read, and I can imagine myself re-reading them.

Crystal trilogy by Max Harms

I enjoyed this but don’t have much to say. As an AI safety parable it seemed plausible enough; I hadn’t previously seen aliens like that; I occasionally thought some of the writing was amateurish in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, but that wasn’t a big deal.

philh Jul 22, 2024, 11:45 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.

just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those

I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.

(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)

philh Jul 11, 2024, 6:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Exercise: Planmaking, Surprise Anticipation, and “Baba is You”
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there’s no randomness. There’s a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like “what will an astronaut do when they can’t move forward any more?”) might be “there are multiple equally good guesses here” which seems suboptimal.

Actually, there’s one detail of state that I’m not sure is visible, in some levels:

When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there’s probably a consistent rule for this but I’m not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.

philh Jul 9, 2024, 12:08 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there’s a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don’t.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I’ve used tend to be somewhere between “just fine” and “unpleasant but bearable”. I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they’re nonexcludable. Some are “open to everyone the attendant decides to let in”, and some are “open to everyone with a credit card”, and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they’re either “open to everyone” or “closed to everyone”, and calling that “excludable” feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it’s “excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people”, but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.

philh Jul 3, 2024, 11:26 AM
3 points
0
on: CIV: a story
So I guess Stuart is named for John Stuart Mill and Milton for Milton Friedman, but what about Carla (is CARLA an acronym?) and Victoria (Tori?)?

philh Jun 29, 2024, 11:08 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: My AI Model Delta Compared To Christiano
Note that to the extent this is true, it suggests verification is even harder than John thinks.

Book review: the Iliad

philhJun 18, 2024, 6:50 PM

31 points

2 comments14 min readLW link

(reasonableapproximation.net)

philh Jun 17, 2024, 10:12 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
In any case, where is this hedging discussion happening?
I’ve seen and taken part in discussions about hedging on LW, but the thing that made me write this comment was a conversation on Duncan Sabien’s facebook.
What things are over-discussed?
Interesting question, but nothing comes to mind.

philh Jun 15, 2024, 9:23 AM
10 points
1
on: philh’s Shortform
A thing that feels under-discussed when it comes to hedging is, hedging doesn’t just have to be swapping from “X” to “I believe X”. You can say “the sky looks blue” or “wikipedia says the sky is blue” or “rumor has it the sky is blue” or “IIRC the sky is blue” or “if I did the math right, the sky is blue”.

philh Jun 3, 2024, 3:52 PM
13 points
2
on: How it All Went Down: The Puzzle Hunt that took us way, way Less Online
I for one welcome our new AI overlord whom I unwittingly helped install. Otherwise I’d need to feel conflicted about my actions this weekend.

I still have questions about one of the puzzles. Will the solutions be made available somewhere (ideally in a format where people can try them unspoiled first), or should I just ask?

philh May 31, 2024, 1:46 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: det’s comment on: Big-endian is better than little-endian
Ah, thanks, I see now. You’re saying that even if it’s written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter.

Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?

philh May 31, 2024, 1:32 PM
7 points
0
on: OpenAI: Fallout

Even better, Daniel then get to keep his equity

I missed this part?

philh May 16, 2024, 4:40 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: det’s comment on: Big-endian is better than little-endian
Isn’t this showing that Hebrew and Arabic write numbers little-endian? Surely big-versus-little-endian isn’t about left-to-right or right-to-left, it’s about how numbers flow relative to word reading order.

philh Apr 27, 2024, 11:31 PM
17 points
16
on: On Not Pulling The Ladder Up Behind You
Ask me about the 2019 NYC Solstice Afterparty sometime if you want a minor ops horror story.
Consider yourself asked.

philh

Lon­don Ra­tion­al­ish meetup—Lin­coln’s Inn Fields

Book re­view: the Iliad

London Rationalish meetup—Lincoln’s Inn Fields

Book review: the Iliad