qbolec

Bugs or Fea­tures?

What does it take to ban a thing?

• qbolec 8 Jan 2021 23:07 UTC

  32 points

  on: Science in a High-Di­men­sional World

  Our universe is “local”—things only interact directly with nearby things, and only so many things can be nearby at once.

  After reading this sentence, I had a short moment of illumination, that this is actually backwards: perhaps what our brains perceive as locality, is the property of “being influenced by/​related to”. Perhaps childs brain learns which “pixels” of retina are near each other, by observing they often have correlated colors, and similarly which places in space are nearby because you can move things or itself between them etc. So, whatever high-dimensional structure the real universe would have, we would still evolve to notice which nodes in the graph are connected and declare them “local”. This doesn’t mean, that the observation from the quoted sentence is a tautology: it wouldn’t be true in a universe with much higher connectivity—we’re lucky to live in a universe with a low [Treewidth](https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Treewidth), and thus can hope to grasp it.

ChatGPT seems over­con­fi­dent to me

• qbolec 11 Dec 2022 7:37 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: The “mind-body vi­cious cy­cle” model of RSI & back pain

  The extremely-minimalist description would be: “Stop believing in the orthodox model, stop worrying, feel and act as if you’re healthy, and then the pain goes away”.

  IDK if this will be important to you, but I’d like to thank you for this comment, as it relieved my back pain after 8 years! Thank you @p.b. for asking for clarification and not giving up after first response. Thank you @Steven Byrens for writing the article and taking time to respond.

  8 fucking years..

  I’ve read this article and comments a month ago. Immediately after reading it the pain was gone. (I never had mystical experiences, like enlightenment, so the closest thing I can compare it to personally, was the “perspectival shift” I’ve felt ten years ago when “the map is not the territory” finally clicked)

  I know—it could’ve been “just a placebo effect”—but as the author argues, who cares, and that’s kinda the main point of the claim. Still, I was afraid of giving myself a false hope—there were several few days long remissions of pain scattered along these 8 years, but the pain always returned—this is why I gave myself and this method a month before writing this comment. So far it works!

  I know—“Post hoc ergo propter hoc” is not the best heuristic—there could be other explanations of my pain relief. For example a week or two before reading this article I’ve started following this exercise routine daily. However, I’ve paused the routine for three days before reading your article, and the pain relief happened exactly when I’ve finished reading your comment, so IMO timing and rarity (8 years...) of the event really suggests this comment is what helped. I still do the exercise routine, and it surely contributes and helps, too. Yet, I do the routine just once in the morning, yet I consciously feel how whenever throughout the day the pain starts to raise its head again, I can do a mental move inspired by this article to restore calm and dissolve the pain.

  Also this is definitely how it felt from the inside! In the hope that it will help somebody else alleviate their pain here are some specific patterns of thoughts induced by this article I found helpful:

  • “oh, so my pain-center is simply confused about the signals, it is screaming like a child who can’t express well what’s wrong, and I was overreacting. I should show it love, not anger, I should calm it down, I must be the adult in the room and figure out what’s the real problem here.”

  • “I should ignore the pain by gently putting the pain to the side (like you do to the thoughts during meditation) as opposed to fighting through it. Like hitting snooze, vs clenching my jaw and fist to overcome it.”

  • “yeah, I’ve heard you pain-center, but I think you are mistaken about the magnitude and source of the problem, and I am actively working on the solution to the real problem, so please do not distract me while I am helping you”

  • “the pain-center is presenting me a whole crayon-drawn image of a tiger, but it was just connecting-the-dots creatively, and there really was no tiger, just the dots”. I think this one is most helpful metaphor for me. I can feel how I dissolve a full certainty of “the pain of the whole upper back” into individual, small, shaky dots of unsure signals from small patches of the back.

  • “looks like it was just one small place around this shoulder blade which started the alarm, maybe I should just change the position of right arm, oh, yes, this brought relief, good”

  • “ok, so this part near neck is so tense it started complaining, and this was probably because I was trying too hard to finish answering this email before visiting the restroom—let’s just give myself a pause and treat the body more gently”.

  • “ok, I need to be more precise: which patch of my back is in pain right now? If I can’t tell, then perhaps it’s something in the environment that is causing stress, or some thought, or some anticipation, or maybe some physiological need? Let’s look around and find out what this alarm is about”

  • The Bohr’s horseshoe: “I was told that it works even if you don’t believe in it”

  • I just imagine a volume knob on the pain and just turn it down

  I am really excited about all this positive change in my mind, because as one can imagine (and if you can’t, recall main character of House M.D.) a constant pain corrupts other parts of your mind and life. It’s like a prior to interpret every sentence of family-members and every event in life. It’s a crony belief, a self-sustaining “bitch eating cracker syndrome”. It took 8 years to build this thought-cancer, and it will probably take some time to disband it, but I see the progress already.

  Also, I am “counter-factually frightened” by how close I was to completely missing this solution to my problem. I was actively seeking, you see, fruitlessly, though, for years! I had so much luck: to start reading LW long ago; to subscribe Scott Alexander’s blog (I even read his original review of “unlearn your pain” from 2016 yet it sounded negative and (I) concentrated too much on discrediting the underlying model of action, so perhaps I could fix my pain 6 years earlier); to develop a habit of reading LW and searching for interesting things and reading comments, not just the article.. Thank you again for this article and this comment thread. When I imagine how sad would be the future if on that afternoon I didn’t read it I want to cry...

  What links here?

  • The “mind-body vi­cious cy­cle” model of RSI & back pain by Steven Byrnes (9 Jun 2022 12:30 UTC; 76 points)

Are dogs bad?

[Question] A good ra­tio­nal fic­tion about IT-in­spired magic sys­tem?

• qbolec 22 Oct 2023 6:55 UTC

  15 points

  5

  on: Align­ment Im­pli­ca­tions of LLM Suc­cesses: a De­bate in One Act

  $0.2\cdot {59}^2\cdot 59$≈ 41,000

  Why not ${59}^{0.2\cdot {59}^2}$ ?

  The way I understood the story, to define a function on two numbers from $Z/59Z$ I need to fill-in a table with 59*59 cells, by picking for each cell a number from $Z/59Z$. If 20% of it is still to be filled, then there are 0.2*59*59 decisions to be made, each with 59 possibilities.

  Right?

Bab­ble on grow­ing trust

• qbolec 10 Jun 2021 17:21 UTC

  13 points

  on: Book re­view: “Feel­ing Great” by David Burns

  There’s a wonderful book “How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk”, which teaches that if you want your crying&shouting child to actually solve some problem/​change behavior/​listen to your advice at all, you must realize that there are actually two different personas in them (say: the reptile part of the brain and the neocortex) and you have to first address the first one before you can even start talking with the other: so for example when a child is having a tantrum, what you see is perhaps more like a frightened lizard, than a reasonable person you can persuade, so first you have to calm it down. And the trick to disarm this emotional alert is to actually acknowledge the message it tries to send you—usually by paraphrasing the emotional content (“Oh, I see you have a terrible day, you are angry that we have to finish playing...”) [which is even more important in case of children which don’t know how to verbalize the emotional state as they lack the words/​introspection skills]. There are subtleties to it, like for example: you don’t have to copy/​inhabit the same emotional state (you don’t have to be angry that the play is over yourself) but you need to match the tone and choice of words to the emotion you talk about so that the child believes you are really treating it seriously, not just impassionately describe/​condescending/​mocking it. So “I see you are angry” delivered in too robotic tone and poker face can backfire and restart the tantrum, but said with harsher tone and grim face can work much better—obviously this is much easier if you simply truly mean it and honestly try to convey that you accept the feelings of your child. It’s much more difficult when you are yourself struggling to learn empathy/​figure out how to talk about emotions/​etc. So I guess it’s more natural for some people than others.

  Crucially, only when you calm down this part of the brain which was overwhelmed by emotions, you can move forward to reason with the child and explain anything/​exchange arguments/​plan solution etc. And often this second stage is not even needed, as the child will be able to fix the problem themselves once they’re calmed down. OTOH if you start to reason with the child too early, while it’s still nervous, it will not lead anywhere except escalating the conflict. In some sense: there’s no one to answer your call, until you answer theirs.

  I’m saying all this, because I’ve found these techniques surprisingly helpful in other contexts, like talking to my grown up family members. In some sense an analogue of this is useful in the Internet debates too: you first should be able to paraphrase the stance of your opponent and demonstrate you understand where they’re coming from, before you say even a word of critique or argumentation—otherwise they’ll immediately label you as outsider who doesn’t know a shit and is not worth listening to.
  
  And your post made me realize, that the technique from the book you describe is somewhat like this, if you look through “subagents model of the brain” perspective: there is a part of you which is having emotional crisis, and it’s terrified by some problem it needs to solve, but this part is not ready to listen for solution/​change, as long as it’s in the busy loop waiting for an ACK packet confirming someone got the S.O.S. signal. So you first need to emphatically talk with this part, describe what it feels, acknowledge its good intentions etc. and only then you can move on to actually persuade/​negotiate/​change anything. This also reminds me a bit the Focusing technique—where the analogue to the child which doesn’t know how to name their own emotions, so is stuck in demonstrating them until you guess the keyword for them seems even better. This all starts to look to me as communication problems, not unlike communication problems between people, but within various parts of the brain.

• qbolec 24 Feb 2022 21:09 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: jwpapi’s comment on: Rus­sia has In­vaded Ukraine

  So what’s the end state Putin wants to achieve through invading Ukraine? If Ukraine becomes part of Russia, then Russia will be bordering with NATO states.

[Question] Toy al­ign­ment prob­lem: So­cial Ne­work KPI design

• qbolec 28 Feb 2019 19:49 UTC

  7 points

  on: So You Want To Colonize The Uni­verse Part 3: Dust

  I suspect my following questions demonstrate such high level of confusion, that I am not sure if they even mean what I think they mean, but still I think this is the best place to ask them:

  1. My mental model of something very small hitting with very high energy something big is “Warner Bros cartoon”-like: one fast billard ball very quickly makes a hole in the big object by dislocating just one or a few more billard balls accelerating them all in the same direction without much effect to the integrity of the rest of the big object. I recall XKCD What If series explicitly addresing this mental model as flawed. Still, what if the big object is very flat, like a sail, and very loosely connected like a net? In general: is there any hope to make a spacecraft which simply doesn’t care about being hit, because (due to some “error codes” or “nanobots/​regeneration”) can tolerate holes and holes are the only thing caused by impacts to it?

  2. If there are particles which penetrate (almost) everything, why not make spacecraft from them? (Are neutrinos alien’s network?:))

  3. If photons are so low mass, why not use something more massive to shoot the sail with?

  4. Are there any “repulsive” /​ “potential energy” phenomena one could use to decelerate—I mean things like buouyancy, where (obviously in this example I am talking about very small velocities) a vehicle entering atmosphere could perhaps use a big balloon to covert kinetic energy to potential energy of buoyancy (with added benefit of being able to reuse some of this energy for going back home)? For another example, could a sufficiently advanced civilisation aim in between two stars so that the net force of their gravity pulled the spacecraft backwards till it (briefly) stops? I know this examples are silly, I just try to explain what would count as “this kind of solution”.

ChatGPT get­ting out of the box

• qbolec 5 Nov 2023 20:51 UTC

  6 points

  1

  on: The As­sumed In­tent Bias

  How to combine this with the fact that “the nudge” apparently doesn’t work https://​​phys.org/​​news/​​2022-08-nudge-theory-doesnt-evidence-future.html ?

• qbolec 12 Sep 2021 7:19 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: JenniferRM’s comment on: Bayeswatch 9: Zombies

  Lots of details could matter, and the spareness of the writing only hints at what could be going on “for really reals”.

  Thank you, this was enlightening for me—somehow, though I’ve read a few books and watched a few movies in my life, I hadn’t realized what you put here plainly, that these cuts are a device for the author to hide some truth from me (ok, this was obvious in “Memento”). I must’ve been very naive, as I simply thought it has more to do with MTV-culture/​catering to short attention span of the audience. It’s funny how this technique becomes immediately obvious to me once I mentally flip the roles with the author and ask a question “how would I hide something from the reader or mislead them to believe some alternative explanation while not outright lying?”.

  Hm, perhaps a similar, but more visible and annoying technique/​plot device is when the author abruptly ends a conversation between two characters by some explosion or arrival of third person, and they never get to finish their sentence or clarify some misunderstanding. On some level this is the same trick, but between two characters, as opposed to between author and reader.

  I now wonder what other “manipulation” techniques I was subjected to. Anyone care to list some they become aware of?

• qbolec 9 Feb 2021 7:59 UTC

  6 points

  on: Were the Great Tragedies of His­tory “Mere Rip­ples”?

  It feels somewhat tribal and irrational to me that this gets downvoted without any comments presenting critique. I think it would be beneficial to everyone if thesis of the book were addressed. My best guess for why there are downvotes but no comments is that this is n-th iteration of the interchange between author and the community and community is tired of responding over and over again to the same claims. If that’s the case, then it would be beneficial to people like me of there was at list a link to a summary of discussion, so far. I think the book is written in quite clear way which should make critiquing it directly quite easy. And the subject matter is very important regardless if you agree to thesis (then you fear genocides etc.) agree with “longtermism” as defined in the book (then you fear the book can stand on the way to floorishing of posthumans) or you don’t think the definition matches the actual rules you and your community live by. I bet it’s the third case, but IMHO downvoting looks like a reaction typical for someone accepting the description but not liking the thesis (so more typical for second case) while comments could help explain why the critique does not apply. The are of course other possibilities beyond the three. For example: accepting that “longtermism” correctly caputres the assumptions, but the conclusions the author is coming to do not logically follow, or perhaps do follow, but the final judgment of the outcome is wrong, etc. I think it would be beneficial to me to learn what is the exact case and counterargument.

Im­pact of de­lay­ing vac­ci­na­tions on the to­tal num­ber of deaths

• qbolec 13 Sep 2022 20:28 UTC

  5 points

  0

  on: Deep Q-Net­works Explained

  Thank you! I’ve read up to and including section 4. Previously I did know a bit about neural networks, but had no experience with RL and in particular didn’t know how RL can actually bridge the gap between multiple actions leading to a sparse reward (as in: hour of Starcraft gameplay just to learn you’ve failed or won). Your article helped me realize how it is achieved—IIUC by:
  0. focusing on trying to predict what the reward will be more than on maximizing it
  1. using a recursive approach to infinite sum: sum(everything)=e+sum(verything).
  2. by using a different neural network on the LHS than on the RHS of this equality, so that one of them can be considered “fixed” and thus not taking part in backpropagation. Cool!
  
  Honestly, I am still a bit fuzzy on how exactly we solve the problem that most “e”s in e+sum(verything) will be zero—before reading the article I thought the secret sauce will be to have some imaginary “self-rewarding” which eventually sums up to the same total reward but in smaller increments over time (like maybe we should be happy about each vanishing pixel in Arkanoid, or each produced unit in Starcraft a little, even if there’s no direct reward for that from the environment)?
  After reading your explanation I have some vague intuition that even if “e” is zero, e+sum(verything) has better chance of figuring out what the future rewards will be, because we are one step closer to these rewards, and that somehow this small dent is enough to get things going. I imagine this works somewhat like this: if there are 5 keys I have to press in succession to score one point, then sooner or later I will sample the state after 4 presses and fix my predictor output for this state as the reward will be immediate result of one keypress, then I’ll be ready to learn what to do after 3 presses as I will already know what happens after 4th keypress so I can better predict this two-actions chain, and so on, and so on learning to predict consequences of a longer and longer combos. Is that right?
  
  Things which could improve the article:
  1. Could you please go over each occurrence of word “reward” in this article and make it clear if it should be “reward at step t” or “sum of rewards from step t onwards”? I felt it is really difficult for me to understand some parts of explanation because of this ambiguity.
  2. In the pseudo-code box you used “r(j) + Q(s’, a’, q)” formula. I was expecting “r(j)+gamma*q(s’,a’)” instead. This is because I thought this should be similar to what we saw earlier in the math formula (the one with red,green and blue parts) and I interpreted that Q(s’,a’,theta^-) in the math formula was meant to mean something like “the network output for state s’, proposed action a’ and weights set according to old frozen settings”, which I believe should be q(s’,a’) in the pseudocode. If I am wrong, then please clarify why we don’t need to multiplication by gamma and why Q can take three arguments, and why q is one of them, as none of this is clear to me.
  3. Some explanation of how this sparsity of rewards is really addressed in games which give you zero reward until the very end.
  

• qbolec 1 Mar 2019 7:29 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Diffractor’s comment on: So You Want To Colonize The Uni­verse Part 3: Dust

  I was afraid my questions might get ridiculed or ignored, but instead I’ve got a very gentle and simply expressed explanations helping me get out of confusion. Thank you for taking your time for writing your answer so clearly :)