LessWrong Team
I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
Ruby
Karma: 16,517
I don’t think it was a study or result at all, just a parable by someone to assert the solution.
https://excellentjourney.net/2015/03/04/art-fear-the-ceramics-class-and-quantity-before-quality/
Curated! It’s not in the title but this post is a phenomenal example of the challenges of interpreting empirical data. Supposedly RCTs are the gold standard and let us really know about the causal impact of interventions, and theoretically yes, but in practice it seems our civilizations runs rather large-seeming RCTs which in fact do not settle questions of major broad interest. They’re evidence but they don’t give you the answer on their own – reasoning still required. Rationality still required.
I don’t know for how many years I’ve had vitamin D measured and being told it’s important, and then hearing there’s not consensus, yet still I’m told that vitamin D is important. I appreciate that following this post, I have an actual sense of the state of things and an idea at reasonable inference. It’s really remarkable how pervasive health advice (and action, via fortification) is with some much uncertainty remaining and all the research done kinda inadequate.
Also well-written nice explanation.
Kudos!
Addendum: it seems many people with Bipolar, including one I know personally, claim Vitamin D functions as a potent antidepressant. Just a small data point on its weird and many effects.
Cheers!
<notice>Curated! This post contains both (1) superbly readable and accessible explanation that makes me feel like I understand something I thought I already did to a yet deeper degree, (2) elegant novel experiment to highlight their points. I have definitely updated on the significance of roles from this post.
Role tags were a formatting trick that became the security architecture and the cognitive scaffolding of modern LLMs.
I’d also say the point of the steady evolution of roles and how they’re used (and leave open vulnerability) feels like it says something about the way our civilization is developing AI, and not in a positive way.Overall, kudos for this great research and post!</notice>
Curated. Among the Lightcone team, we say “shoggoth” rather than “LLM”. I asked shoggoth, shoggoth said, shoggoth did. It means one can elide which particular model one used, and we keep in mind that we are working with alien entities we don’t fundamentally understand or trust. Contrast with “I asked Claude”, which I think shapes one’s thoughts towards a much more anthropomorphic LLM conception and relation.
Given that, the history of the shoggoth meme is quite interesting to me. Crazy that it started how it did, but makes sense. I appreciate the scholarship of the author, and the evocativeness conveyed from Lovecraft’s works. I appreciate seeing that the original source has more richness, and appropriate richness to our situation.The text implies that they lacked the capacity for rational self-interest, that their war against the Old Ones was closer to the malfunction of a miscalibrated machine than any conscious act of rebellion.[3]
Kudos!
Curated. We are not yet at the point where I can ask an LLM to write me a first-rate LW post on an arbitrary topic, e.g. boobies, and get a first rate LW post. For now, it’s an impressive accomplishment: this is a great LW post about boobies.
If you move past the temptation to dismiss the topic as unserious, turns out there’s actually a really interesting evolutionary mystery here that I’m grateful for pointing out. For one thing I didn’t realize that other mammals have breasts develop and then recede as needed, or that human time of development is weird. It is weird. I kind of assumed that humans had some sexual ornamentation adaptation and it was just that. Turns out there’s more to it.
@rba, I’d actually suggest editing the post to prompt people to think about the problem and possible answers before giving them to them. There’s a good “rationality” puzzle here.Another thing about this post is it isn’t just a roundup of other existing work. If I understand correctly, rba ran their own genetic analysis here, which is pretty cool (making this clearer in the post would be good). I appreciate the care and attention placed on methodology. I didn’t think or analyze it detail, but sounded sensible.
I find the topic amusing, but this a good piece of scholarship and science. Kudos!
Curated. A lot could be said about this post and a lot is being said about this post (see the 111 comments on it), but a thing I find neat about it is that it continues the debate around an old idea that’s still important and perhaps cruxy for many.
Oneshotness is not new (not a new concept, not a new argument, not a new debate); yet it is a critical argument for alignment difficult, and is still contested, with implications for what people do. Having made many attempts to explain their side, I could imagine someone giving up and being like “the people who get it, get it, and those who don’t, don’t” and not bothering further to try to argue it. I lean that way. Eliezer admits frustration and the tone matches, but he’s still talking and writing with the hope of being convincing. People are responding, debating further. It’s heated and we’re in the realm of accusations of motivated cognition, strawmanning, motte & bailey, but in this post Eliezer is bringing object level arguments (e.g. analogies) in attempt to advance the conversation, and 111 comments later, conversation is being had. It might not be enough, but I think there are some dignity points in that.
So I publicly wrote that I was throwing my agency at my problems this year, here’s an interim update:
Attempted to send some longitudinal biosamples[1] to a research label, but shipping was delayed and dry-ice ran out, so they thawed and I lost the batch. Recollecting and trying again.
Nearly weaned off Lexapro. It relieved a certain kind of anxious feeling but didn’t address primary anticipatory insomnia, and had side effects I didn’t like.
Tried ketamine (sublingual, dose matched to clinical anti-depression 40-minute IV dose, then divide by four to account for my impaired drug metabolism). Resulted in heavy sedation/dizziness + elevated mood, long-lasting – unpleasant but it did abort the bipolar down-state (possibly even swung a bit into elevated mood. I’ll probably try again when I next have a bipolar downstate, but with half the dose again.
Tried Gabapentin once for anticipatory insomnia (pre-motorsport event). Low-dose, seemingly effective and sufficiently out of my system by morning. (Gabapentin is excreted renally and bypasses my weird hepatic drug metabolism.
I’m now regularly taking fish oil, vitamin D3, and magnesium. Just started on NAC today.
Gabapentin and ketamine seem promising. Lexapro was information but not a long-term solution in and of itself. The recent period has been pretty stable, but hard to attribute to e.g. supplements at this time.I might be forgetting some other stuff, and also I don’t think I gave the list of everything else from earlier in this year, e.g. parasympathetic activation interventions (vagus nerve stimulation, HRV biofeedback), bright light in mornings, blue-blocking glasses for the evening, and other stuff.
- ^
I’m not going to give more detail.
Can you say more about what process you’re imagining here?
If I see another person complaining that no one reads their post when it starts with a 15-sentence epistemic status meta-commentary that doesn’t give me any reason to want to keep reading, I will explode into a violent burst of fury and laser beams.
Oh yeah, this one is definitely about me.
In the opposite direction, I think the Nuclear winter fears were inflated by Sagan and others, for political purpose, but those fears have endured to this day.
Thank you!
I think if your time/money budget allows, then nothing says you can’t get them something else...
Perishable items feel like they fall on some spectrum between non-perishable items and experiences, and I’m already in favor of experiences as being good gifts. I think your subconscious is just flat wrong: if you go out and look for premium chocolates, flowers, art supplies, or anything, really, there are very expensive premium ones that very often are actually better.
I listened to a podcast once about a guy who had a predatory loan shark empire and repented and gave it up for moral reasons.
Look, Sarah Chen is anthropically a very plausible name to encounter.
It’s an always-on foreground service. Indeed, works from lock-screen.
@Neel Nanda Not software you can try, but a detailed description: My Exobrain Software (forays into cyborgism)
Thanks! Sounds good. Yeah, I’ll check for those variants.
Regarding PRS quality, indeed. There’s a table in a collapsible section with an analysis of the quality of PRSs used. Interesting regarding your own conversion from GWAS to PRS.Your VCF is not enough to calcualte your PRS, because the reference (rather than variant) is the “effect allele” for many scores of interest; the default behaviour of tools like PRSKB CLI and PSG_Calc is to impute the missing alleles based on your VCF but this is going to be wrong, you likely want to re-call variants from your CRAM (this is dicussed at length in the blog post I linked earlier)
Ah, cool, yes. Interestingly Claude/GPT left a comment in its code mentioning exactly this problem, and then punted on it and I didn’t notice.
CNVs are fairly tractable to calculate from CRAMs
We attempted this and it failed because of contig mismatch with the reference on the CRAM. Going back to it, we could have just downloaded the appropriate one? (DRAGEN/Lumina?) Another thing not done for no good reason that I didn’t catch. (Other things I did catch, but not this.)
Cool, that gives me some things to do.
(To clarify, I don’t think that I have default poor executive function, but that it is still possible to have yet more. I do think the ups and downs of bipolar make habits harder to establish.)
I don’t have all my logs fit into the context window, they’d never fit. I ask it to load things when relevant, and handle things via search or other scripts for operating over the past. Todo items is more relevant. They technically fit but it’s costly to have a full-context window so I preload only recent and high-priority ones.
My system does have a bunch of offline processing where raw transcripts get mined and parsed in other documents. In one case, there’s two layers of that.
I’ve been doing a lot of large research projects with LLMs recently. A project might involve 10-20 “Claude Research Mode” runs or equivalent analyses with code, where each one is maxing out context.
The key thing is “session handoff” and “subagent calls”. I do all of this by hand, and I avoid having the harness automatically compact conversations (I don’t like opaque compression, I want to know what’s in context for any given chat instance.)
Whether or not I’m doing it well, I think there’s metis in where and how I split up the work (and have the model split up the work for itself), and for research this is worth working on.
I don’t have the perfect process up yet. But it’s definitely the case there are research projects worth tackling that are 20x as big as context windows, and LLMs are useful, and it’s not a bad process to be involved in the process connect the convos and calls together.
Oh, indeed. I curated it 5 minutes after a different one was curated so we revoked this curation, but I think it should properly be curated shortly.