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Great paper! The gating approach is an interesting way to learn the JumpReLU threshold and it's exciting that it works well. We've been working on some related directions at OpenAI based on similar intuitions about feature shrinking.
Some questions:
I doubt you could have picked a worse example to make your point that contrarian takes are usually wrong than racial differences in IQ/intelligence.
logan-zoellner on Losing Faith In ContrarianismSam Atis—a super forecaster—had a piece arguing against The Case Against Education
If it's this piece, I would be interested to know why you found it convincing. He doesn't address (or seem to have even read) any of Brian's arguments. His argument basically boils down to "but so many people who work for universities think it's good".
michaeldickens on MichaelDickens's ShortformHave there been any great discoveries made by someone who wasn't particularly smart?
This seems worth knowing if you're considering pursuing a career with a low chance of high impact. Is there any hope for relatively ordinary people (like the average LW reader) to make great discoveries?
quila on quila's Shortformwhen i was younger, pre-rationalist, i tried to go on hunger strike to push my abusive parent to stop funding this.
they agreed to watch this as part of a negotiation. they watched part of it.
they changed their behavior slightly -- as a negotiation -- for about a month.
they didn't care.
they looked horror in the eye. they didn't flinch. they saw themself in it.
fvncc on Improving Dictionary Learning with Gated Sparse AutoencodersHi any idea how this would compare to just replacing the l1 loss with a smoothed l0 loss function? Something like ∑log(1+a|x|) (summed across the sparse representation).
peterbarnett on Rafael Harth's ShortformPeople in rich countries are happier than people in poor countries generally (this is both people who say they are "happy" or "very happy", and self-reported life satisfaction), see many of the graphs here https://ourworldindata.org/happiness-and-life-satisfaction
In general it seems like richer countries also have lower suicide rates: "for every 1000 US dollar increase in the GDP per capita, suicide rates are reduced by 2%"
kromem on Is being a trans woman +20 IQ?It implicitly does compare trans women to other women in talking about the performance similarity between men and women:
"Why aren't males way smarter than females on average? Males have ~13% higher cortical neuron density and 11% heavier brains (implying 1.112/3−1=7% more area?). One might expect males to have mean IQ far above females then, but instead the means and medians are similar"
So OP is saying "look, women and men are the same, but trans women are exceptional."
I'm saying that identifying the exceptionality of trans women ignores the environmental disadvantage other women experience, such that the earlier claims of unexceptionable performance of women (which as I quoted gets an explicit mention from a presumption of assumed likelihood of male competency based on what's effectively phrenology) are reflecting a disadvantaged sample vs trans women.
My point is that if you accounted for environmental factors the data would potentially show female exceptionality across the board and the key reason trans women end up being an outlier against both men and other women is because they are avoiding the early educational disadvantage other women experience.
saidachmiz on Losing Faith In ContrarianismHmm, this sounds like an awfully contrarian take to me.
sam-marks on Improving Dictionary Learning with Gated Sparse AutoencodersYep, you're totally right -- thanks!