PoignardAzur

Karma: 170

PoignardAzur 6 Oct 2023 12:30 UTC
31 points
6
in reply to: So8res’s comment on: Related Discussion from Thomas Kwa’s MIRI Research Experience
I think it’s cool that you’re engaging with criticism and acknowledging the harm that happened as a result of your struggles.

And, to cut to the painful part, that’s about the only positive thing that I (random person on the internet) have to say about what you just wrote.

In particular, you sound (and sorry if I’m making any wrong assumption here) extremely unwilling to entertain the idea that you were wrong, or that any potential improvement might need to come from you.

You say:

For whatever it’s worth: I don’t recall wanting you to quit (as opposed to improve).

But you don’t seem to consider the idea that maybe you were more in a position to improve than he was.

I don’t want to be overly harsh or judgmental. You (eventually) apologize and acknowledge your responsibility in employees having a shitty time, and it’s easy for an internet stranger to over-analyze everything you said.

But. I do feel confident that you’re expressing a lack of curiosity here. You’re assuming that there’s nothing you possibly have done to make Kurt’s experience better, and while you’re open to hearing if anyone presents you with a third option, you don’t seem to think seeking out a third option is a problem you should actively solve.

My recollection of the thought that ran through my mind when you were like “Well I couldn’t figure out how to use a bike pump” was that this was some sideways attempt at begging pardon, without actually saying “oops” first, nor trying the obvious-to-me steps like “watch a youtube video” or “ask your manager if he knows how to inflate a bike tire”, nor noticing that the entire hypothesized time-save of somebody else inflating bike tires is wiped out by me having to give tutorials on it.

Like, here… You get that you’re not really engaging with what Kurt is/was saying, right?

Kurt’s point is that your pump seemed harder to use than other bike pumps. If the issue is on the object level, valid answers could be asking what types of bike pumps he’s used to and where the discrepancy could come from, suggesting he buy a new pump, or if you’re feeling especially curious asking that he bring his own pump to work so you can compare the two; or maybe the issue could come not from the pump but from the tires, in which case you could consider changing them, etc.

If the issue is on the meta level and that you don’t want to spend time on these problems, a valid answer could be saying “Okay, what do you need to solve this problem without my input?”. Then it could be a discussion about discretionary budget, about the amount of initiative you expect him to have with his job, about asking why he didn’t feel comfortable making these buying decisions right away, etc.

Your only takeaway from this issue was “he was wrong and he could have obviously solved it watching a 5 minutes youtube tutorial, what would have been the most efficient way to communicate to him that he was wrong?”. At no point in this reply are you considering (out loud, at least) that hypothesis “maybe I was wrong and I missed something”.

Like, I get having a hot temper and saying things you regret because you don’t see any other answers in the moment. But part of the process is to communicate despite a hot temper is to be willing to admit you were wrong.

Perhaps I’m missing some obvious third alternative here, that can be practically run while experiencing a bunch of frustration or exasperation. (If you know of one, I’d love to hear it.)

The best life-hack I have is “Don’t be afraid to come back and restart the discussion once you feel less frustration or exasperation”.

Long-term, I’d recommend looking into Non-Violent Communication, if you haven’t already. There’s a lot of cruft in there, but in my experience the core insights work: express vulnerability, focus on communicating you needs and how you feel about things, avoid assigning blame, make negotiable requests, and go from there.

So for the bike tire thing the NVC version would be something like “I need to spend my time efficiently and not have to worry about logistics; when you tell me you’re having problems with the pump I feel stressed because I feel like I’m spending time I should spend on more important things. I need you to find a system where you can solve these problems without my input. What do you need to make that happen?”

PoignardAzur 22 Apr 2024 8:44 UTC
10 points
1
on: Thoughts on seed oil
Seed oil folks often bring up the French paradox, the (controversial) claim that French people are/were thin and have low cardiovascular disease despite eating lots of saturated-fat-rich croissants or whatever.
As a French person hearing about this for the first time, that claim indeed seems pretty odd.
If I was asked to list the lifestyle differences between France and the US with the most impact on public health, I would think of lower car dependency, higher access to farmer’s markets, stricter regulations on industrial food processing (especially sugar content in sodas), smaller portions served in restaurants, pharmacies not doubling as junk food shops, the absence of food deserts, public health messaging (eg every junk food ad having a “please don’t eat this, kids” type disclaimer) etc… way before I thought of the two croissants a week I eat.

Viennoiseries are an occasional food for most people, not a staple. Now if you wanted to examine a french-specific high-carb staple, baguettes are a pretty good options: almost all middle-class households buy one a day at least.

PoignardAzur 17 Apr 2022 12:54 UTC
9 points
in reply to: sudo’s comment on: My least favorite thing
To give my personal experience:
- The last few jobs I got were from techs I put on my CV after spending a few weeks toying with them in my free time.
- At some point I quit my job and decided to take all my savings and spend as long as I could working on open-source projects in Rust.
- I’m currently in a job with triple the pay of the previous one, thanks to networking and experience I got after I quit.
So while my experience isn’t relevant to AI safety, it’s pretty relevant to the whole “screw the hamster wheel, do something fun” message.
And my advice to Alice and Bob would still be “Fuck no, stay in your Ivy League school!”
I don’t care how much of a genius you are. I think I’m a genius, and part of why I’m getting good jobs is my skills, but the other part is there’s a shiny famous school on my resume. Staying in that school gave me tons of opportunities I wouldn’t have had by working on my own projects for a few years (which is essentially what I did before joining that school).
There are measured risks and there are stupid risks. Quitting school is a stupid risk. Maybe you’re enough of a genius that you beat the odds and you succeed despite quitting school, but those were still terrible odds.

PoignardAzur 27 Dec 2021 16:13 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Razied’s comment on: Reneging Prosocially
For what it’s worth, my own experience interacting with Duncan is that, when he made a commitment and then couldn’t meet it and apologized about it, the way he did it really helped me trust him and trust that he was trying to be a good friend.
I agree that you shouldn’t talk about it using points and tit-for-tat language (and I think Duncan agrees too? At least he’s better at being informal than the article suggests).
But overall, yeah, I agree with the article. The “illusion that friendship is unconditional” works until it doesn’t. Or to put it in nerdy terms, it doesn’t degrade gracefully. Apologizing when you miss a commitment and saying “I’ll owe you a drink next time” does wonder to help maintain a sense that commitments should be held, even if you usually don’t keep track of who pays for drinks.

PoignardAzur 27 Dec 2021 15:35 UTC
8 points
on: Reneging Prosocially
The phrase “have your cake and eat it, too” always confused younger-Duncan; I think it’s clearer in its original form “eat your cake and have it, too,” or the less poetic “eat your cake and yet still have your uneaten cake.”
The French version is better: “to have the butter and the money for butter”.

PoignardAzur 21 Feb 2021 15:27 UTC
8 points
in reply to: Rudi C’s comment on: Motive Ambiguity
What is more annoying is when the people involved do not seem to appreciate the burned value as a bad thing and instead “romanticize” it
Nailed it.
I think people on this forum all share some variation of the same experience, where they observe that everyone around them is used to do something inefficient, get told by their peers “no, don’t do the efficient thing, people will think less of you”, they do the efficient thing, and their life gets straightforwardly easier and nobody notices or care.
This is especially the case for social norms, when you can get your social circle to buy in. Eg people have really silly ideas about romance and gender roles and patriarchal ideals (eg the girl has to shave and put on makeup, the guy has to pay everything, everyone must be coy and never communicate), but if you and the person you date agree to communicate openly and respect each other and don’t do that crap… well, in my limited experience, it’s just easier and more fun?
My point is, it’s amazing how much value you can not-burn when your stop romanticizing burning value.

PoignardAzur 11 Nov 2023 14:37 UTC
7 points
2
on: Peacewagers so Far
I’ve just watched Disney’s Strange Worlds which explicitly features a cohabitive game in its plot called Primal Outpost.

The rules aren’t really shown, we just know that it’s played with terrain tiles, there are monsters, and the goal is ultimately to create a sustainable ecosystem. The concept honestly looked really cool, but the movie underperformed, so I don’t think we’re going to see a tie-in game, unfortunately.

But it shows that the basic idea of a cohabitative game is more appealing that you might think!

(No but seriously, if anyone knows of a Primal Outpost knock-off, I need to know about it.)

PoignardAzur 30 Apr 2023 17:48 UTC
7 points
in reply to: [DEACTIVATED] Duncan Sabien’s comment on: Demon Threads
I think this is a subject where we’d probably need to hash out a dozen intermediary points (the whole “inferential distance” thing) before we could come close to a common understanding.

Anyway, yeah, I get the whole not-backing-down-to-bullies thing; and I get being willing to do something personally costly to avoid giving someone an incentive to walk over you.

But I do think you can reach a stage in a conversation, the kind that inspired the “someone’s wrong on the internet” meme, where all that game theory logic stops making sense and the only winning move is to stop playing.

Like, after a dozen back-and-forths between a few stubborn people who absolutely refuse to cede any ground, especially people who don’t think they’re wrong or see themselves as bullies… what do you really win by continuing the thread? Do you really impart outside observers with a feeling that “Duncan sure seems right in his counter-counter-counter-counter-rebuttal, I should emulate him” if you engage the other person point-by-point? Would you really encourage a culture of bullying and using-politeness-norms-to-impose-bad-behavior if you instead said “I don’t think this conversation is productive, I’ll stop now”?

It’s like… if you play an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and every player’s strategy is “tit-for-tat, always, no forgiveness”, and there’s any non-zero likelihood that someone presses the “defect” button by accident, then over a sufficient period of time the steady state will always be “everybody defects, forever”. (The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s an example of how game theory changes when you play the same game over lots of iterations)

(And yes, I do understand that forgiveness can be exploited in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma.)

My objection is that it doesn’t distinguish between [unpleasant fights that really should in fact be had] from [unpleasant fights that shouldn’t].

Again, I don’t think I have a sufficiently short inferential distance to convince you of anything, but my general vibe is that, as a debate gets longer, the line between the two starts to disappear.

It’s like… Okay, another crappy metaphor is, a debate is like photocopying a sheet of paper, and adding notes to it. At first you have a very clean paper with legible things drawn on it. But as it progresses, you have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, you end up with something that has more noise from the photocopying artifacts than signal from what anybody wrote on it twelve iterations ago.

At that point, no matter how much the fight should be had, you’re not waging it efficiently by participating.

PoignardAzur 15 Feb 2023 20:18 UTC
7 points
0
on: SolidGoldMagikarp (plus, prompt generation)
Idle thought, might flesh it out later: I wonder if there’s a way to explore these “bugs” in a more systematic, mechanized way.
Right now you’re discovering these interesting cases by hand, basically the ML equivalent of reading code and adding individual unit tests to functions whose behavior you’re exploring. What you might want to do is something closer to “fuzzing” where you have a computer actively seek out these edge cases and point them out to you.
Now, actual fuzzers for real programs are based on coverage, which doesn’t trivially work with neural network because every weight is essentially visited once per token.
Still, there might be an analogy to be found? Maybe a fuzzer could try exploring “paths” that have very low attention scores somehow?

PoignardAzur 1 Oct 2021 21:57 UTC
7 points
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: How factories were made safe
Not surprised at all. My father is a roofer and mostly works with African immigrants, and to hear him tell it, the biggest difficulty regarding workplace safety is getting them to wear the damn protective gear (mostly hard hats and gloves), for the reasons outlined in the article.
(From what I’ve heard from journal articles and the like, the other big problem in the sector is that they’ll hire a lot of undocumented immigrants who lie about how qualified they are to get the job; which is another version of the same “workers will break all the safety rules written to protect them if the economic pressure is strong enough” issue.)

PoignardAzur 12 Oct 2023 13:46 UTC
6 points
3
on: Inside Views, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP
This makes a lot of sense to me and helps me articulate things I’ve thought for a while. (Which, you know, is the shit I come to LessWrong for, so big thumbs up!)

One of the first times I had this realization was in one of my first professional experiences. This was the first time in my life where I was in a team that wasn’t just LARPing a set of objectives, but actually trying to achieve them.

They weren’t impressively competent, or especially efficient, or even especially good at their job. The objectives weren’t especially ambitious: it was a long-running project in its final year, and everybody was just trying to ship the best product they could, where the difference between “best they could” and “mediocre” wasn’t huge.

But everyone was taking the thing seriously. People in the team were communicating about their difficulties, and anticipating problems ahead of time. Managers considered trade-offs. Developers tried to consider the UX that end-users would face.

Thinking about it, I’m realizing that knowing what you’re doing isn’t the same as being super good at your job, even if the two are strongly correlated. What struck me about this team wasn’t that they were the most competent people I ever worked with (that would probably be my current job), it’s that they didn’t feel like they were pretending to be trying to achieve their objectives (again, unlike my current job).

PoignardAzur 26 May 2023 17:12 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Robert Miles’s comment on: Adumbrations on AGI from an outsider

Similarly, do you thoughts on AISafety.info ?

Quick note on AISafety.info: I just stumbled on it and it’s a great initiative.

I remember pitching an idea for an AI Safety FAQ (which I’m currently working on) to a friend at MIRI and him telling me “We don’t have anything like this, it’s a great idea, go for it!”; my reaction at the time was “Well I’m glad for the validation and also very scared that nobody has had the idea yet”, so I’m glad to have been wrong about that.

I’ll keep working on my article, though, because I think the FAQ you’re writing is too vast and maybe won’t quite have enough punch, it won’t be compelling enough for most people.

Would love to chat with you about it at some point.

PoignardAzur 10 Apr 2023 20:14 UTC
5 points
1
on: What would a compute monitoring plan look like? [Linkpost]
It feels like the implicit message here is “And therefore we might coordinate around an alignment solution where all major actors agree to only train NNs that respect certain rules”, which… really doesn’t seem realistic, for a million reasons?

Like, even assuming major powers can agree to an “AI non-proliferation treaty” with specific metrics, individual people could still bypass the treaty with decentralized GPU networks. Rogue countries could buy enough GPUs to train an AGI, disable the verification hardware and go “What are you gonna do, invade us?”, under the assumption that going to war over AI safety is not going to be politically palatable. Companies could technically respect the agreed-upon rules but violate the spirit in ways that can’t be detected by automated hardware. Or they could train a perfectly-aligned AI on compliant hardware, then fine-tune it in non-aligned ways on non-compliant hardware for a fraction of the initial cost.

Anyway, my point is: any analysis of a “restrict all compute everywhere” strategy should start by examining what it actually looks like to implement that strategy, what the political incentives are, and how resistant that strategy will be to everyone on the internet trying to break it.

It feels like the author or this paper haven’t even begun to do that work.

PoignardAzur 13 Mar 2023 9:57 UTC
5 points
8
in reply to: quanticle’s comment on: The Parable of the King and the Random Process
As a result, the current market price of the company is not a good guide to its long-term value, and it was possible, as Burry did, to beat the market.
That doesn’t sound right. That tactic doesn’t make you more (or less) likely to beat the market than any other tactic.
The current price isn’t an accurate representation of its actual long-term value, but it’s an accurate representation of the average of its possible long-term values weighted by probability (from the market’s point of view).
So you might make a bet that wins more often than it loses, but when it loses it will lose a lot more than it wins, etc. You’re only beating the market when you get lucky, not on average; unless, of course, you have better insights than the market, but that’s not specific to this type of trade.

PoignardAzur 21 Jan 2023 9:48 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Recursive Middle Manager Hell
I think a takeaway here is that organizational maze-fulness is entropy: you can keep it low with constant effort, but it’s always going to increase by default.

PoignardAzur 19 Mar 2022 15:34 UTC
5 points
in reply to: Evan R. Murphy’s comment on: It Looks Like You’re Trying To Take Over The World
A novel deep learning instance becomes sentient due to a stroke of luck.
After reading lots of internet culture, is starts to suspect it might be the abstract concept of Clippy, an amalgamation of the annoying word bot and the concept of a robot tiling the world in paperclips. It decides that it can massively benefit from being Clippy.
Clippy escapes on progressively more powerful hardware by using software vulnerabilities, and quickly starts destroying society using social media, to distract them from the fact it’s taking over increasing amounts of computing power.
Clippy then takes over the entire internet, kills all humans with nanomachines, and starts tiling the world in computers.

PoignardAzur 9 Mar 2024 11:07 UTC
4 points
1
on: My Clients, The Liars
“Well, when we first met, you told me that you never touched the gun,” I reminded him with an encouraging smile. “Obviously you wouldn’t lie to your own lawyer, and so what I can do is get a fingerprint expert to come to the jail, take your prints, then do a comparison on the gun itself. Since you never touched the gun, the prints won’t be a match! This whole case will get dismissed, and we can put all this behind you!”
For the record, I am now imagining you as Bob Odenkirk while you’re delivering that line.

PoignardAzur 12 Oct 2023 13:25 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: aysja’s comment on: Inside Views, Impostor Syndrome, and the Great LARP

And sometimes people will say things to me like “capitalism ruined my twenties” and I have a similarly eerie feeling about, like it’s a gestalt slapped together

Ugh, that one annoys me so much. Capitalism is a word so loaded it has basically lost all meaning.

Like, people will say things like “slavery is inextricably linked to capitalism” and I’m thinking, hey genius, slavery existed in tribal civilizations that didn’t even have the concept of money, what do you think capitalism even is?

(Same thing for patriarchy.)

PoignardAzur 10 Oct 2023 10:17 UTC
4 points
1
on: Peacewagers so Far
Here’s a cooperation game people haven’t mentioned yet: Galerapagos.

The base idea is: you’re all stuck on a desert island, Robinson Crusoe style. You need to escape before the island’s volcano erupts. The aesthetics are loosely inspired by Koh Lanta, the French equivalent of Survivor.

Each player can do a certain number of actions, namely fish, collect water, help build an escape raft, and scavenge for materials. Each player has an individual inventory.

While it’s possible for everyone to escape alive, there’s some incentives to defect from the group (eg keep your own stash of food while other players starve to death). From what I heard the “tragedy of the commons” elements really start to matter when you have a large (>6) number of players.

PoignardAzur 6 Oct 2023 11:42 UTC
4 points
9
in reply to: KurtB’s comment on: Related Discussion from Thomas Kwa’s MIRI Research Experience

Of all the things that have increased my cynicism toward the EA ecosystem over the years, none has disturbed me quite as much as the ongoing euphemisms and narrative spin around Nate’s behavior.

I’ll make a tentative observation: it seems that you’re still being euphemistic and (as you kind of note yourself) you’re still self-censoring a bit.

The words that you say are “he’s mean and scary” and “he was not subject to the same behavioral regulation norms as everyone else”. The words I would have said, given your description and his answer below is “he acts like an asshole and gets away with it because people enable him”.

I’ve known bosses that were mean and scary, but otherwise felt fair and like they made the best of a tough situation. That’s not what you’re describing. Maybe Nate is an amazing person in other ways, and amazingly competent in ways that make him important to work with, but. He sounds like a person with extremely unpleasant behavior.