LessWrong 2.0 Reader

‹‹ I noticed a strong commonality among the questions that I had found particularly fascinating: most of them involved reasoning about knowledge, information, or uncertainty under constraints ››

This is also true for me, and I loved reading this post for this reason!

Back in the day I applied to study with Joe Halpern because of his work on epistemic logic, and ended up studying Logic in Amsterdam.  At some point I got tired of Logic and its contrived puzzles (Muddy Children, etc) and decided to focus on Probability instead.

Has anyone studied the idea of rewarding people according to how much their input improves the aggregate (whatever algorithm is being used), rather than for their individual accuracy?

Why did FHI get closed down? In the end, because it did not fit in with the surrounding administrative culture. I often described Oxford like a coral reef of calcified institutions built on top of each other, a hard structure that had emerged organically and haphazardly and hence had many little nooks and crannies where colorful fish could hide and thrive. FHI was one such fish but grew too big for its hole. At that point it became either vulnerable to predators, or had to enlarge the hole, upsetting the neighbors. When an organization grows in size or influence, it needs to scale in the right way to function well internally – but it also needs to scale its relationships to the environment to match what it is.

*preferably not the last state but some where the person felt normal.

I believe that's right! Though, if person can be reconstructed from N bits of information, and dead body retains K << N, then we need to save N-K bits (or maybe all N, for robustness) somewhere else.

It's an interesting question how many bits can be inferred from social networks trace of the person, actually.

I'd love your feedback on my thoughts on decision theory.

If you're trying to get a sense of my approach in order to determine whether it's interesting enough to be worth your time, I'd suggest starting with this article [LW · GW] (3 minute read).

I'm also considering applying for funding to create a conceptual alignment course.

Sebastian Borgeaud, one of the lead authors of the Chinchilla scaling paper, admits there was a bug in their code. https://twitter.com/borgeaud_s/status/1780988694163321250 

Claim that the Chinchilla paper calculated the implied scaling laws incorrectly. Yes, it seems entirely plausible that there was a mistake, tons of huge training runs relied on the incorrect result, and only now did someone realize this. Why do you ask?

Like, I hear you, but that is...also not how they teach gun safety.  Like, if there is one fact you know about gun safety, it's that the entire field emphasizes that a gun is inherently dangerous towards anything it is pointed towards.

Possible to say anything more about the story?

A vehicle in a hydrogen-filled tube can't use air around it for engines

Why not? Your "fuel" tanks could simply carry oxygen to burn the surrounding hydrogen "air" with.

and shouldn't emit exhaust.

Exhaust would be water vapor, easily removed even passively via condensation and drains. Hydrogen will (of course) have to be replaced to maintain pressure.

I'm not a parent, but if I was I expect I would need this locked down before I could commit. And I would need to decide on attendance earlier, because traveling with kids is a lot more work.