Tim Liptrot

Karma: 753

Tim Liptrot 17 Apr 2024 23:02 UTC
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in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Building Blocks of Politics: An Overview of Selectorate Theory
Those redditors have pretty weak arguments. The first comment is basically “the other academics all agree with the popular claim that Gilley is criticizing, so the popular claim must be true”. The second guy basically states “Gilley correctly argues that Hoschild’s evidence for a population decline is too weak. But if the evidence is bad, Gilley can’t prove there was a genocide. Therefore Gilley is wrong”.

Tim Liptrot 4 Apr 2024 12:03 UTC
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on: Building Blocks of Politics: An Overview of Selectorate Theory
The King Leopold thing is fake by the way. Bueno de Mesquita’s account is based on “King Leopold’s Ghost” which is a work of dishonest scholarship. Basically Hoschild used selective quotations and an intense blindness to the context to frame Leopold’s adventure’s in Africa as exploitative when they were really altruistic. For example, the hand-cutting quote “I will have to cut off the hand of every villager to meet my quota” is a cut from a longer passage that says “we have to adjust downward these quotas because the current demands on my unit are unworkable. To actually implement this I will have to cut off the hand of every villager”. Even the policy entrepreneur’s he quotes to make them seem anti-leopold were writing essays with the thesis “The Belgian’s here are under resourced which creates problems, so we need greater Belgian involvement”. Source https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/ So I think the importance of political culture and ideology is understated in the opening anecdote.

In general the model does make a good starting position.

Tim Liptrot 7 Mar 2024 17:32 UTC
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in reply to: Bird Concept’s comment on: Does anyone know good essays on how different AI timelines will affect asset prices?
Thanks this was really helpful!

Tim Liptrot 7 Aug 2023 19:41 UTC
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in reply to: langoro’s comment on: The Sinews of Sudan’s Latest War
That was a typo, there was originally a note explaining that the line is sarcasm.

Thanks I’m really glad you identified that before it went elsewhere to create problems.

Tim Liptrot 4 Aug 2023 22:16 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: The Sinews of Sudan’s Latest War
“Once you know which side you’re on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it’s like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy. ”—Big Yud
I really doubt that people in the comment section will start siding with the RSF or the SAF and turning arguments into soldiers here. To almost all westerners Sudan todays is as distant as “Louis XVI during the French Revolution”.

Tim Liptrot 4 Aug 2023 22:11 UTC
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in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: The Sinews of Sudan’s Latest War
It’s a good question. The obvious answer is that I was not comparing the current conflict with the most deadly conflicts since WW2, but with typical conflicts in Sudan and its environs over the past 20 years. I would guess Sudan has seen maybe 15k direct deaths so far (I believe official figures undercount Darfur and are far too low). Indirect deaths will be much higher due to the economic devastation from the war reaching Sudan’s capital. The conflict shows no signs of stopping, so we can expect the ultimate death toll to be higher.
I don’t have time to grab data, but only a small minority of conflicts enter the tens of thousands of battle deaths (which are easier to measure than civilian). By Wikipedia there are 62 conflicts since 1950 over 25k deaths. Total conflicts with 100 or more battle deaths is easily in the thousands, most of which you have never heard of like the Heglig War.
I expect that the death rate per month will decline over the course of the war until peace happens, at least in Khartoum and central Sudan. I don’t understand the Darfur dynamics that produce massacres there so I cannot speculate on that.

Tim Liptrot 4 Aug 2023 18:47 UTC
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on: The Sinews of Sudan’s Latest War
I already have upvotes! Huzzah!

Tim Liptrot 27 Jul 2023 19:52 UTC
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on: SSA rejects anthropic shadow, too
For new readers: SSA = Self-sampling assumption. Read that in Bostrums “Anthropic Bias”. SIA might mean “Sampling independence assumption” but I am just guessing.

Tim Liptrot 28 Jan 2023 17:12 UTC
1 point
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on: rockthecasbah’s Shortform
Does anyone have a good piece on hedging investments for AI risk? Would love a read, thanks!

Tim Liptrot 28 Jan 2023 17:11 UTC
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in reply to: Sinityy’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
Hahahaha that sounds like the worst value for money intervention I could possible do to become sexier. I’ve heard the surgery is super painful and debilitating when you do it.

Tim Liptrot 28 Jan 2023 17:10 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Dr. Birdbrain’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
This is helpful. I started taking creatine but got lazy about it, I’ll get back on it.

As far as strength training, I started getting great female attention before I put on much muscle. I’ve become much more time constrained because I work like 55 hours a week anyway, so I only work out once or twice a week. Thanks for the recomendation on the youtube channel.

Tim Liptrot 22 Oct 2022 19:27 UTC
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in reply to: niplav’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
Exactly, this is the ring everyone else is optimizing for. So it’s tough to get relative to the other interventions.

Tim Liptrot 21 Oct 2022 19:12 UTC
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in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
Bumble, Hinge and Tinder.

I averaged that last time I was single. Should be able to get back there.

Tim Liptrot 21 Oct 2022 3:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
There is a failure mode here of overinvesting in status signals and underinvesting in being a pillar of your friend group.

I already have a good “status” so it’s not a priority anyway, relative to the other areas.

Tim Liptrot 21 Oct 2022 3:17 UTC
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
That’s helpful, thank you.

Do you know a trustworthy and concise source about how to Keto? The time to find a non-terrible guide via google sucks.

Tim Liptrot 21 Oct 2022 3:10 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: A scheme to become sexier
Haha yeah status is sexy!

The main reason is just that status is ambiguous between a “trait” and a “proof”. Status is attractive partly because it mentally healthy, socially intelligent men will rise in status faster. But there’s also an element of status being intrinsically useful because it’s a resource to provide for a family.

The most efficient status-increasing interventions are all about presentation. Like I could get a white-house job to increase my status, but that would be super hard work. Earning the respect of my friends and advertising my career successes would also increase my status and is way easier. So I’ll address it in the “proofs” post.

Tim Liptrot 13 Jun 2022 21:52 UTC
12 points
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on: Contra EY: Can AGI destroy us without trial & error?
This an interesting essay and seems compelling to me. Because I am insufferable, I will pick the world’s smallest nit.

The Wright Brothers took 4 years to build their first successful prototype. It took another 23 years for the first mass manufactured airplane to appear, for a total of 27 years of R&D.

That’s true but artisanal airplanes were produced in the hundreds of thousands before mass manufacture. 200k airplanes served in WW1 just 15 years in. So call it 15 years of R&D.

Tim Liptrot 13 Jun 2022 21:21 UTC
3 points
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on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
Apologies if this has been said, but the reading level of this essay is stunningly high. I’ve read rationality A-Z and I can barely follow passages. For example
This happens in practice in real life, it is what happened in the only case we know about, and it seems to me that there are deep theoretical reasons to expect it to happen again: the first semi-outer-aligned solutions found, in the search ordering of a real-world bounded optimization process, are not inner-aligned solutions. This is sufficient on its own, even ignoring many other items on this list, to trash entire categories of naive alignment proposals which assume that if you optimize a bunch on a loss function calculated using some simple concept, you get perfect inner alignment on that concept.
I think Yud means here is our genes had a base objective of reproducing themselves. The genes wanted their humans to make babies which were also reproductively fit. But “real-world bounded optimization process” produced humans that sought different things, like sexual pleasure and food and alliances with powerful peers. In the early environment that worked because sex lead to babies and food lead to healthy babies and alliances lead to protection for the babies. But once we built civilization we started having sex with birth control as an end in itself, even letting it distract us from the baby-making objectives. So the genes had this goal but the mesa-optimizer (humans) was only aligned in one environment. When the environment changed it lost alignment. We can expect the same to happen to our AI.
Okay, I think I get it. But there are so few people on the planet that can parse this passage.
Has someone written a more accessible version of this yet?

Tim Liptrot 13 Jun 2022 21:20 UTC
1 point
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on: AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities
Apologies if this has been said, but the reading level of this essay is stunningly high. I’ve read rationality A-Z and I can barely follow passages. For example
This happens in practice in real life, it is what happened in the only case we know about, and it seems to me that there are deep theoretical reasons to expect it to happen again: the first semi-outer-aligned solutions found, in the search ordering of a real-world bounded optimization process, are not inner-aligned solutions. This is sufficient on its own, even ignoring many other items on this list, to trash entire categories of naive alignment proposals which assume that if you optimize a bunch on a loss function calculated using some simple concept, you get perfect inner alignment on that concept.
I think Yud means here is our genes had a base objective of reproducing themselves. The genes wanted their humans to make babies which were also reproductively fit. But “real-world bounded optimization process” produced humans that sought different things, like sexual pleasure and food and alliances with powerful peers. In the early environment that worked because sex lead to babies and food lead to healthy babies and alliances lead to protection for the babies. But once we built civilization we started having sex with birth control as an end in itself, even letting it distract us from the baby-making objectives. So the genes had this goal but the mesa-optimizer (humans) was only aligned in one environment. When the environment changed it lost alignment. We can expect the same to happen to our AI.
Okay, I think I get it. But there are so few people on the planet that can parse this passage.
Has someone written a more accessible version of this yet?

Tim Liptrot 17 May 2022 15:18 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: p.b.’s comment on: Starting too many projects, finishing none
Okay, let’s do that backwards planning exercise.

In the long run, I want to do my research but live a low stress and financially comfortable lifestyle. The traditional academic path won’t achieve that because I will end up doing my research but leading a high-stress and financially fraught lifestyle. There are three possible solutions to the problem, in rough order of preference A Pick a research agenda that is lucrative, so that I can supplement my income with lucrative consulting gigs and have a strong exit option B Learn to code and get a data science job, then do my research as a hobby C Get a government job related to my field (intelligence or aid)

Path A seems like the best one for both personal and EA reasons. Right now I split my time between writing on foreign investment and cabinet formation. But only the foreign investment work might pay the bills, the cabinet work ends with me in the brutal academia rat race. However, the foreign investment research might or might not succeed depending on contextual factors like competition, my ability to build a brand and the value of academic prestige in the field. So I should first try and figure out if the investment-academia path is satisfying.

I want to find out if that works over the next 6 months or so while in my academic program.

If the returns are too small and the competition too stressful, I should pivot toward a programming career. It’s a well-payed 40-hour industry, and I can do my research as a hobby for 8 hours a week. That sounds like a lovely life too. So if I pick that, I would deemphasize my research and focus on coding skills for interviews and building career capital there.

I’m satisfied with that plan. The next question is, how do I stick to it? More on this later.