It’s vaporware, so it can do whatever you imagine. It’s hard to constrain a project that doesn’t exist, as far as we know.
skybrian
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When you’re actually a little curious, you might start by using a search engine to find a decent answer to your question. At least, if it’s the sort of question for which that would work. Maybe even look for a book to read?
But, maybe we should acknowledge that much of the time we aren’t actually curious and are just engaging in conversation for enjoyment? In that case, cheering on others who make an effort to research things and linking to their work is probably the best you can do. Even if you’re not actually curious, you can notice people who are, and you can look for content that’s actually about concrete things.
For example, my curiosity about the history of politics in Turkey is limited, so while I did read Scott Alexander’s recent book review and some responses with interest, I’m not planning on reading an actual book on it. I don’t think he’s all that curious either, since he just read one book, but that’s going further than me.
Museums I’ll give you (when they are open again).
For bookstores, in these days of electronic books, I don’t think it matters where you live. I remember the last time I went into Powell’s. I looked around for a while, dutifully bought one book for old time’s sake, and realized later while reading it that I was annoyed that it wasn’t electronic. I still go to a local library (when there’s not a pandemic) but it’s mostly for the walk.
Teachers: that’s something I hadn’t considered. Since getting out of school, I’m mostly self-taught.
Of course this post is all meta, and my comment will be meta as well. We do it because it’s easy.
I think part of the solution is being actually curious about the world.
When enthusiastic New Yorkers say things like “everything at your fingertips” I want to ask what they mean by everything, since it seems subjective, based on what sorts of places one values? In this case: restaurants and parks?
I’m wondering if these loans should really be considered loans, or some other kind of trade? It sounds like you’re doing something like trading 100 X for 90 Y and the option to later pay 95 Y for 100 X. Is there any real “defaulting” on the loan? It seems like you just don’t exercise the option.
I wonder what “O(n) performance” is supposed to mean, if anything?
The question here is whether general arguments that experts make based on inference are reliable, or do you need specific evidence. What is the track record for expert inferences about vaccines?
From a quick search, it seems that the clinical trial success rate for vaccines is about 33%, which is significantly higher than for medical trials in general, but still not all that high? Perhaps there is a better estimate for this.
Estimation of clinical trial success rates and related parameters https://academic.oup.com/biostatistics/article/20/2/273/4817524
I found an answer on the PCR question here:
But there is something good to say about their data collection: since the UK study that’s included in these numbers tested its subjects by nasal swab every week, regardless of any symptoms, we can actually get a read on something that everyone’s been wondering about: transmission.
AstraZeneca has not applied for emergency use authorization, because it has been told not to do so.
That resolves a mystery for me if true. How do you know this?
(I was wondering if maybe they are selling all they can make in other countries.)
I’m not sure about this statement in the blog post:
In the meantime, the single dose alone is 76% effective, presumably against symptomatic infection (WaPo) and was found to be 67% effective against further transmission.
I read another article saying that this is disputed by some experts:
With a seductive number, AstraZeneca study fueled hopes that eclipsed its data
Media reports seized on a reference in the paper from Oxford researchers that a single dose of the vaccine cut positive test results by 67%, pointing to it as the first evidence that a vaccine could prevent transmission of the virus. But the paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, does not prove or even claim that — although it hints at the possibility.[...]
If a person tests negative, Andrew Pollard, one of the study authors and a professor of pediatric infection and immunity at the University of Oxford, told STAT via email, “then it is a reasonable assumption that they cannot transmit.”
But it is a big and unjustified leap, outside experts agree, from that suggestion to proof of decreased transmission from people who are vaccinated.
“The study showed a decrease in [viral] shedding, not ‘transmission,’” said Carlos del Rio, a professor of infectious diseases at the Emory University School of Medicine. “The bottom line is, no, one cannot draw a conclusion or straight line.”
Unfortunately the article doesn’t say specifically why these experts consider this an unreasonable inference while the study’s author thinks it’s a reasonable inference. The closest thing is “There are too many, in my view, moving variables.”
I can imagine one possibility for a counterintuitive result. Suppose the vaccine turns severe cases into asymptomatic cases, and transmissions happen mostly in asymptomatic cases?
Also, I was unable to tell from the paper when they do PCR+ tests. I have read that in some studies, they only do tests when a test subject shows symptoms, which would mean that some asymptomatic cases might be missed?
As a non-expert, I think we need to hedge our bets when experts disagree.
What’s an example of a misconception someone might have due to having a mistaken understanding of causality, as you describe here?
This is a bizarre example, sort of like using Bill Gates to show why nobody needs to work for a living. It ignores the extreme inequality of fame.
Tesla doesn’t need advertising because they get huge amounts of free publicity already, partly due to having interesting, newsworthy products, partly due to having a compelling story, and partly due to publicity stunts.
However, this free publicity is mostly unavailable for products that are merely useful without being newsworthy. There are millions of products like this. An exciting product might not need advertising but exciting isn’t the same as useful.
So It seems like the confidence to advertise a boring product might be a signal of sorts? However, given that many people in business are often unreasonably optimistic, it doesn’t seem like a particularly strong one. Faking confidence happens quite a lot.
It seems like some writers have habits to combat this, like writing every day or writing so many words a day. As long as you meet your quota, it’s okay to try harder.
Some do this in public, by publishing on a regular schedule.
If you write more than you need, you can prune more to get better quality.
One aspect that might be worth thinking about is the speed of spread. Seeing someone once a week means that it slows down the spread by 3 1⁄2 days on average, while seeing them once a month slows things down by 15 days on average. It also seems like they are more likely to find out they have it before they spread it to you?
Yes, sometimes we don’t notice. We miss a lot. But there are also ordinary clarifications like “did I hear you correctly” and “what did you mean by that?” Noticing that you didn’t understand something isn’t rare. If we didn’t notice when something seems absurd, jokes wouldn’t work.
It’s not quite the same, because if you’re confused and you notice you’re confused, you can ask. “Is this in American or European date format?” For GPT-3 to do the same, you might need to give it some specific examples of resolving ambiguity this way, and it might only do so when imitating certain styles.
It doesn’t seem as good as a more built-in preference for noticing and wanting to resolve inconsistency? Choosing based on context is built in using attention, and choosing randomly is built in as part of the text generator.
It’s also worth noticing that the GPT-3 world is the corpus, and a web corpus is a inconsistent place.
Having demoable technology is much different than having reliable technology. Take the history of driverless cars. Five teams completed the second DARPA grand challenge in 2005. Google started development secretly in 2009 and announced the project in October 2010. Waymo started testing without a safety driver on public roads in 2017. So we’ve had driverless cars for a decade, sort of, but we are much more cautious about allowing them on public roads.
Unreliable technologies can be widely used. GPT-3 is a successor to autocomplete, which everyone already has on their cell phones. Search engines don’t guarantee results and neither does Google Translate, but they are widely used. Machine learning also works well for optimization, where safety is guaranteed by the design but you want to improve efficiency.
I think when people talk about a “revolution” it goes beyond the unreliable use cases, though?
In that case, I’m looking for people sharing interesting prompts to use on AI Dungeon.
This method of caching assumes that an expression always evaluates to the same value. This is sometimes true in functional programming, but only if you’re careful. For example, suppose the expression is a function call, and you change the function’s definition and restart your program. When that happens, you need to delete the out-of-date entries from the cache or your program will read an out-of-date answer.
Also, since you’re using the text of an expression for the cache key, you should only use expressions that don’t refer to any local variables. For example, caching an expression that’s within a function and refers to a function parameter will result in bugs when the function is called more than once with different parameters.
So this might be okay in simple cases when you are working alone and know what you’re doing, but it likely would result in confusion when working on a team.
It’s also essentially the same kind of caching that’s commonly done by build systems. It’s common for makefiles to be subtly broken so that incremental builds are unreliable and you need to do a “clean build” (with an empty cache) when it really matters that a build is correct. (The make command will compare file dates, but that’s often not enough due to missing dependencies.)
But it still might be better to switch to a build system that’s designed for this sort of thing, because then at least people will expect to need to do a clean build whenever the results seem to be wrong.
(Bazel is a build system that tries very hard to make sure that incremental builds are always correct and you never need to do a “clean build,” but it’s hard enough to use that I don’t really recommend it.)