LessWrong 2.0 Reader

In the context of minimum wage.

I assume Abdullah has many options mean he has many job offers/alternatives to jobs.

What does it mean for Benjamin to have many options?

I continue to think that capabilities from in-context RL are and will be a rounding error compared to capabilities from training (and of course, compute expenditure in training has also increased quite a lot in the last two years).

I do think that test-time compute might matter a lot (e.g. o1), but I don't expect that things which look like in-context RL are an especially efficient way to make use of test-time compute.

It seems like if the SCP hypothesis is true, block characters should cause it to act strangely.

• If a trebuchet requires you to solve the double pendulum problem (a classic example of a chaotic system) in order to aim, it is not a competition-winning trebuchet.

Ah, this is not quite the takeaway- and getting the subtlety here right is important for larger conclusions. If a simulating a trebuchet requires solving the double pendulum problem over many error-doublings, it is not a competition-winning trebuchet. This is an important distinction. 

If you start with a simulator and a random assortment of pieces, and then start naively optimizing for pumpkin distance, you will quickly see the sort of design shown at 5:02 in the video, where the resulting machine is unphysical because its performance depends on coincidences that will go away in the face of tiny changes in initial conditions. This behaviour shows up with a variety of simulators and optimizers.

An expensive but probably effective solution is to perturb a design several times, simulate it several times, and stop simulation once the simulations diverge. 

An ineffective solution is to limit the time of the solution, as many efficient and real-world designs take a long time to fire, because they begin with the machine slowly falling away from an unstable equilibrium. 

The chaos-theory motivated cheap solution is to limit the number of rotations of bodies in the solution before terminating it, as experience shows error doublings tend to come from rotations in trebuchet-like chaotic systems. 

The solution I currently have implemented at jstreb.hgreer.com is to only allow the direction of the projectile to rotate once before firing (specifically, it is released if it is moving upwards and to the right at a velocity above a threshold) which is not elegant, but seems mostly effective. I want to move to the "perturb and simulate several times" approach in the future.

Yep! If I think about those 10 people, 5 are having, or I expect to have large impact on the future. As for ages, all the people I thought of except one were over 20. There was one 14yo who is just naturally super high G.

No, not microscopic.

Coherent light produced by lasers is not microscopic, we see its traces in the air. And we see the consequences (old fashioned holography and the ability to cut things with focused light, even at large distances). Room temperature is fine for that.

Superconductors used in the industry are not microscopic (and the temperatures are high enough to enable industrial use of them in rather common devices such as MRI scanners).

It's just... having a proof is supposed to boost our confidence that the conclusion is correct...

if the proof relies on assumptions which are already quite far from the majority opinion about our actual reality (and are probably going to deviate further, as AIs will be better physicists and engineers than us and will leverage the strangeness of our physics much further than we do), then what's the point of that "proof"?

how does having this kind of "proof" increase our confidence in what seems informally correct for a single branch reality (and rather uncertain in a presumed multiverse, but we don't even know if we are in a multiverse, so bringing a multiverse in might, indeed, be one of the possible objections to the statement, but I don't know if one wants to pursue this line of discourse, because it is much more complicated than what we are doing here so far)?

(as an intellectual exercise, a proof like that is still of interest, even under the unrealistic assumption that we live in a computable reality, I would not argue with that; it's still interesting)

I'm basically confused about what a canonical example of changing values looks like to you. Like I assume you have some examples that make you postulate that it is possible or something. I've seen changes in food taste used as a canonical example before, but if that's not your example, then I would like to hear what your example is.

No. I can't make any sense of where that came from.

So e.g. if you sometimes feel like eating one kind of food and other times feel like eating another kind of food, you just think "ah, my food preference arbitrarily changed", not "my situation changed to make so that the way to objectively improve my food intake is different now than it was in the past"?

No, there is simply no such thing as a utility function over foodstuffs.

The connection to moral systems could be due to the fact that curing people of trapped priors or other narcissism-like self-defending pathologies is hard and punishing and you won't do it for them unless you have a lot of love and faith in you.

I wonder if it also has something to do with certain kinds of information being locally nonexcludable goods, they have a cost to spread, but the value of the information is never obvious to a potential buyer until after the transfer has taken place. A person only pays their teacher back if the teacher can convey a sense of moral responsibility to do so.

Finally, harari's definition of religion is just a system of ideas that brings order between people. This is usually a much more useful definition than definitions like "claims about the supernatural" or whatever. In this frame, many truths, "trade allows mutual benefit", or [the english language] or [how to not be cripplingly insane] are religious in that it benefits all of us a little bit if more people have these ideas installed.