samshap

• samshap 24 Jul 2021 5:12 UTC

  26 points

  on: Delta var­i­ant: we should prob­a­bly be re-masking

  You reach the opposite conclusion from Tomas Pueyo (who seems to be your primary reference):

  “If you’re vaccinated, you’re mostly safe, especially with mRNA vaccines. Keep your guard up for now, avoid events that might become super-spreaders, but you don’t need to worry much more than that.”

  Checking your math, I think your biggest error is equating long covid (at least one symptom still present after 28 days) with lifelong CFS. The vast majority seem to clear up in the next 8 weeks: https://​​www.nature.com/​​articles/​​s41591-021-01292-y

  I believe the 64% reduction in symptomatic infections is an outlier (compare with the UK data, e.g.), and if you’ve had an mRNA vaccine the number is much higher.

  Finally, not accounting for age in your long covid statistics is a mistake. Young people are making up a large percentage of the infected because they are disproportionally unvaccinated. Those young and vaccinated are quite well protected from severe infection. And while some long covid comes from mild cases, it’s highly correlated with severe cases.

• samshap 21 Mar 2020 5:51 UTC

  15 points

  on: The Ham­mer and the Dance

  I’ve been lurking lesswrong for years, and this is the article that actually got me to create an account. I am promoting this to everyone I can that has a scrap of political influence—my bosses (I work at a major university), my local newspaper, my rabbis, my local politicians. Every state in the country should be enacting the same measures as New York and Texas.

  I would urge the lesswrong community to

  a: constructively critique the article as Chris recommends (use argument to make it stronger)

  b: shut up and do the impossible—if your state governor hasn’t already shut down restaurants, public gatherings, and restricted all non-essential travel, get them to do it ASAP. If we figured out how to get a handler to unbox a superhuman intelligence, and how to defeat Voldemort, we at least owe this an attempt.

Com­men­su­rable Scien­tific Paradigms; or, com­putable induction

• samshap 14 Jul 2020 1:28 UTC

  14 points

  on: The Ghost of Joseph Weber

  Thanks for presenting your thesis. However, one of your figures doesn’t support your argument on closer inspection. The figure that you point to as being the ‘unfiltered’ data is measuring cross-correlation between the Hanford and Livingston datasets, so we should expect it to look completely different than the datasets themselves.

  I also want to push back on a particular point—there’s nothing wrong in principle with using a black-hole shaped filter to find black holes. You just have to adjust the prior based on the complexity of your filter.

• samshap 22 Oct 2021 1:32 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Lethriloth’s comment on: Petrov Day Ret­ro­spec­tive: 2021

  I’m actually ok with the social pressures inherent in the activity. It’s a subtle reminder of the real influence of this community. The fact that this community would enforce a certain norm makes me more likely to be a conscientious objector in contexts with the opposite norm. (This is true of historical C.O.s, who often come from religious communities).

• samshap 30 Jul 2023 22:22 UTC

  12 points

  11

  on: Ra­tion­al­iza­tion Max­i­mizes Ex­pected Value

  I agree that the type of rationalization you’ve described is often practically rational. And it’s at most a minor crime against epestemic rationality. If anything, the epestemic crime here is not anticipating that your preferences will change after you’ve made a choice.

  However, I don’t think this case is what people have in mind when they critique rationalization.

  The more central case is when we rationalize decisions that affect other people; for example, Alice might make a decision that maximizes her preferences and disregards Bob’s, but after the fact she’ll invent reasons that make her decision appear less callous: “I thought Bob would want me to do it!”

  While this behavior might be practically rational from Alice’s selfish perspective, she’s being epestemically unvirtuous by lying to Bob, degrading his ability to predict her future behavior.

  Maybe you can use specific terminology to differentiate your case from the more central one, maybe “preference rationalization”?

• samshap 4 Aug 2023 20:57 UTC

  10 points

  3

  in reply to: Carl Feynman’s comment on: The Sinews of Su­dan’s Lat­est War

  How is this in the wrong place?

• samshap 3 Apr 2021 3:28 UTC

  10 points

  0

  on: Pre­dic­tive Cod­ing has been Unified with Backpropagation

  Thanks for sharing!

  Two comments:

  • There seem to be a couple of sign errors in the manuscript. (Probably worth reaching out to the authors directly)

  • Their predictive coding algorithm holds the vhat values fixed during convergence, which actually implies a somewhat different network topology than the more traditional one shown in your figure.

• samshap 8 Mar 2022 13:21 UTC

  9 points

  on: Amer­ica’s In­visi­ble Grave­yard: Un­der­stand­ing the Mo­ral Im­pli­ca­tions of Western sanctions

  I’m downvoting this, not because it’s wrong or because of weak epistemics, but because politics is the mind killer, and this article is deliberately structured to make that worse.

  I believe politically sensitive topics like this can be addressed on less wrong, but the inflammatory headline and first sentence here are just clickbait.

• samshap 7 Nov 2021 2:01 UTC

  9 points

  on: Speak­ing of Stag Hunts

  I’m confused.

  In the counterfactual where lesswrong had the epistemic and moderation standards you desire, what would have been the result of the three posts in question, say three days after they were first posted? Can you explain why, using the standards you elucidated here?

  (If you’ve answered this elsewhere, I apologize).

  Full disclosure: I read all three of those posts, and downvoted the third post (and only that one), influenced in part by some of the comments to that post.

• samshap 22 Aug 2020 5:58 UTC

  LW: 9 AF: 7

  AF

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: Rad­i­cal Probabilism

  I definitely missed a few things on the first read through—thanks for repeating the ratio argument in your response.

  I’m still confused about this statement:

  Virtual evidence requires probability functions to take arguments which aren’t part of the event space.

  Why can’t virtual evidence messages be part of the event space? Is it because they are continuously valued?

  As to why one would want to have Bayesian updates be normative: one answer is that they maximize our predictive power, given sufficient compute. Given the name of this website, that seems a sufficient reason.

  A second answer you hint at here:

  The second seems more practical for the working Bayesian.

  As a working Bayesian myself, having a practical update rule is quite useful! As far as I can tell, I don’t see a good alternative in what you have provided.

  Then we have to ask why not (steelmanned) classical Bayesianism? I think you’ve two arguments, one of which I buy, the other I don’t.

  The practical problem with this, in contrast to a more radical-probabilism approach, is that the probability distribution then has to explicitly model all of that stuff.

  This is the weak argument. Computing P(A*|X) “the likelihood I recall seeing A given X” is not a fundamentally different thing than modeling P(A|X) “the likelihood signal A happened given X”. You have to model an extra channel effect or two, but that’s just a difference of degree.

  Immediately after, though, you have the better argument:

  As Scott and I discussed in Embedded World-Models, classical Bayesian models require the world to be in the hypothesis space (AKA realizability AKA grain of truth) in order to have good learning guarantees; so, in a sense, they require that the world is smaller than the probability distribution. Radical probabilism does not rest on this assumption for good learning properties.

  if I were to paraphrase—Classical Bayesianism can fail entirely when the world state does not fit into one of its nonzero probability hypotheses, which must be of necessity limited in any realizable implementation.

  I find this pretty convincing. In my experience this is a problem that crops up quite frequently, and requires meta-Bayesian methods you mentioned like calibration (to notice you are confused) and generation of novel hypotheses.

  (Although Bayesianism is not completely dead here. If you reformulate your estimation problem to be over the hypothesis space and model space jointly, then Bayesian updates can get you the sort of probability shifts discussed in Pascal’s Muggle. Of course, you still run into the ‘limited compute’ problem, but in many cases it might be easier than attempting to cover the entire hypothesis space. Probably worth a whole other post by itself.)

• samshap 14 Oct 2021 20:32 UTC

  8 points

  on: Is nuk­ing women and chil­dren cheaper than fire­bomb­ing them?

  I’d highly recommend ‘The Bomber Mafia’ by Malcolm Gladwell on this subject, which details the internal debates of the US Army Air Corps generals during WWII.

  One of the key questions was whether to use the bombers to target strategic industries, or just for general attrition (i.e. firebombing of civilians). Obviously the first one would have been preferable from a humanitarian perspective (and likely would have ended the European War sooner), but it was very difficult to execute in practice.

NTIA—AI Ac­countabil­ity Announcement

• samshap 14 Aug 2023 2:11 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: Learn­ing as you play: an­thropic shadow in deadly games

  This doesn’t make sense to me. Why am I not allowed to update on still being in the game?

  I noticed that in your problem setup you deliberately removed n=6 from being in the prior distribution. That feels like cheating to me—it seems like a perfectly valid hypothesis.

  After seeing the first chamber come up empty, that should definitively update me away from n=6. Why can’t I update away from n=5 ?

• samshap 8 Jun 2022 2:59 UTC

  7 points

  2

  on: AGI Safety FAQ /​ all-dumb-ques­tions-al­lowed thread

  If the world’s governments decided tomorrow that RL was top-secret military technology (similar to nuclear weapons tech, for example), how much time would that buy us, if any? (Feel free to pick a different gateway technology for AGI, RL just seems like the most salient descriptor).

• samshap 5 Apr 2021 14:33 UTC

  7 points

  0

  in reply to: lumenwrites’s comment on: Pre­dic­tive Cod­ing has been Unified with Backpropagation

  TLDR for this paper: There is a separate set of ‘error’ neurons that communicate backwards. Their values converge on the appropriate back propagation terms.

  A large error at the top levels corresponds to ‘surprise’, while a large error at the lower levels corresponds more to the ‘override’.

• samshap 2 May 2022 14:35 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: sludgepuddle’s comment on: Quick Thoughts on A.I. Governance

  In my model, Chevron and the US military are probably open to AI governance, because: 1 - they are institutions traditionally enmeshed in larger cooperative/​rule-of-law systems, AND 2 - their leadership is unlikely to believe they can do AI ‘better’ than the larger AI community.

  My worry is instead about criminal organizations and ‘anti-social’ states (e.g. North korea) because of #1, and big tech because of #2.

  Because of location, EA can (and should) make decent connective with US big tech. I think the bigger challenge will be tech companies in other countries , especially China.

• samshap 5 Apr 2021 14:07 UTC

  6 points

  2

  in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: Pre­dic­tive Cod­ing has been Unified with Backpropagation

  I think that’s premature. This is just one (digital, synchronous) implementation of one model of BNN that can be shown to converge on the same result as backprop. In a neuromorphic implementation of this circuit, the convergence would occur on the same time scale as the forward propagation.

• samshap 3 Apr 2021 13:01 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: Pre­dic­tive Cod­ing has been Unified with Backpropagation

  Right side of equation 2. Also the v update step in algorithm 1 should have a negative sign (the text version earlier on the same page has it right).

• samshap 2 Mar 2021 15:36 UTC

  6 points

  on: We should not raise awareness

  Most of these extra simulacra levels are redundant or orthogonal to the originals. I don’t think they carve reality well.

  • L5 overlaps heavily with L1. Interestingness is a quality of most L1 statements that are worth communicating!

  • L7 is L2. “There’s a lion across the river” = I want you to buy X. It’s direct manipulation of reality.

  • L8 is L3 or L4 (in your example), although propaganda can also be at L2.

  • L10 overlaps heavily with L3. “We should raise awareness of X” = I’m part of the group that believes “X”.

  The only one that is salvageable is L6 (which is similar to L9), which I might call a True Level 5:

  “There’s a lion across the river.” = Listen to me! I say things worth hearing! (from the speaker’s perspective)

  There’s actually a lot of communication that falls within this bucket, characterized by the content of the statement having no instrumental value for the speaker. The speaker just wants your attention.