LessWrong 2.0 Reader

From your talk on tensors, I am sure it will not surprise you at all to know that the sandwhich thing itself (mapping from operators to operators) is often called a superoperator.

Oh it does surprise me, superoperators are a physics term but I just know linear algebra and dabble in physics, so I didn't know that one. Like I'd think of it as the functor over vector spaces that maps $V\mapsto V\otimes V$.

I think the reason it is as it is is their isn't a clear line between operators that modify the state and those that represent measurements. For example, the Hamiltonian operator evolves the state with time. But, taking the trace of the Hamiltonian operator applied to the state gives the expectation value of the energy.

Hm, I guess it's true that we'd usually think of the matrix exponential as mapping $V⊸V$ to $V⊸V$, rather than as mapping $V\otimes V⊸C$ to $V⊸V$. I guess it's easy enough to set up a differential equation for the latter, but it's much less elegant than the usual form.

Get that agreement in writing.

I'm not sure that would be particularly reassuring to me (writing as one of the contributors). First, how would one check that the agreement had been adhered to (maybe it's possible, I don't know)? Second, people in my experience often don't notice they are training on data (as mentioned in a post above by ozziegooen).

Just a pointer, I'd strongly recommend basically anything by Alan Hajek about this topic. "The reference class problem is your problem too" is a highlight. I find him to be an exceptionally clear thinker on philosophy of probability, and expect discussions about probability and beliefs would be less confused if more people read his work.

I'm quite uncertain whether Kat's posts are a net good or net bad. But on a meta level, I'm strongly in favor of this type of post existing (meaning this one here, not Kat's posts). Trends that change the vibe or typical content of a platform are a big deal and absolutely worth discussing. And if a person is a major contributor to such a change, imo that makes her a valid target of criticism.

You just are, a point of awareness, coextensive with time and space, deathless.

This feels like a sleight of hand. I am a part of a universe, with somewhat arbitrary boundaries. The universe is deathless (if we ignore the possible heat death for a moment). I am definitely not.

I might be deathless in the sense that some parts that I might choose to include in my boundary will continue to exist after my brain stops working. Though they will no longer be under the active control of my brain. And even the effects that persist for some moment after my death -- trivial example: I put a bottle on the table, then I die; the bottle still stands on the table; more complex example: people keep remembering me, my children keep doing what I taught them, people in future can find my blog articles and learn from them -- will gradually dissolve in noise.

Unless I choose to include the noise itself in my definition of self. But that's a kind of "you can eat chocolate, as long as you agree to call your broccoli 'chocolate'."

I suppose the religions do it by believing that there is some divine power that drives the noise; that instead of simply increasing entropy, it is some kind of funny game played by Brahma, and as long as you include Brahma in your extended self, you can keep having fun literally forever. From my perspective, noise is just noise, and mystical insights that suggest something different are likely to simply be factually wrong.

The notion of ‘fairness’ discussed in e.g. the FDT paper is something like: it’s fair to respond to your policy, i.e. what you would do in any counterfactual situation, but it’s not fair to respond to the way that policy is decided.

I think the hope is that you might get a result like “for all fair decision problems, decision-making procedure A is better than decision-making procedure B by some criterion to do with the outcomes it leads to”.

Without the fairness assumption you could create an instant counterexample to any such result by writing down a decision problem where decision-making procedure A is explicitly penalised e.g. omega checks if you use A and gives you minus a million points if so.

You made a choice.

Could you have made a different choice? Yes, if you had different inputs, or a different state of mind when you started thinking about the choice.

But if we take the inputs and your initial state of mind as constants, there was only one outcome you could have arrived to.

But you didn't know what that outcome would be, until you actually arrived there. It was a deterministic computation you had to make.

*

Why do you feel you had a freedom of choice? Because a different initial state of mind, or maybe even a small difference in inputs, could have led you to a different conclusion. As you don't know the result of the calculation until you actually make it, your initial guess is just a set of plausible conclusions, but the actual conclusion will only be known after you make it, so it feels like it was "magically, freely" picked from the set. Instead, it was just picked "unpredictably" in the sense that you were not able to predict it until you made it.

Agreed. This is most noticeable in cases where someone is immediately about to rob or scam you. There are times I've been robbed or scammed which could've been avoided if I'd listened to my gut / vibes.

we have a verbal agreement that these materials will not be used in model training

Get that agreement in writing.

I am happy to bet 1:1 OpenAI will refuse to make an agreement in writing to not use the problems/the answers for testing.

You have done work that contributes to AI capabilities, and you have misled mathematicians who contributed to that work about its nature.

Just the greentext. Yes, I totally agree that the study probably never happened. I just engaged with the actualy underling hypothesis, and to do so felt like some summary of the study helped. But I phrased it badly and it seems like I am claiming the study actually happened. I will edit.