LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Please feel free to elaborate on the specific qualms you have with what's written! Super happy to retract anything necessary and learn!

It's a warning if the history consists of various groups having extreme confidence about solving all the problems in ways that subsequent groups don't accept.

Haskell is a beautiful language, but in my admittedly limited experience it's been quite hard to reason about memory usage in deployed software (which is important because programs run on physical hardware. No matter how beautiful your abstract machine, you will run into issues where the assumptions that abstraction makes don't match reality).

That's not to say more robust programming languages aren't possible. IMO rust is quite nice, and easily interoperable with a lot of existing code, which is probably a major factor in why it's seeing much higher adoption.

But to echo and build off what @ustice said earlier [LW(p) · GW(p)]:

The hard part of programming isn't writing a program that transforms simple inputs with fully known properties into simple outputs that are meet some known requirement. The hard parts are finding or creating a mostly-non-leaky abstraction that maps well onto your inputs, and determining what precise machine-interpretable rules produce outputs that look like the ones you want.

Most bugs I've seen come at the boundaries of the system, where it turns out that one of your assumptions about your inputs was wrong, or that one of your assumptions about how your outputs will be used was wrong.

I almost never see bugs like this

• My sort(list, comparison_fn) function fails to correctly sort the list"
• My graph traversal algorithm skips nodes it should have hit
• My pick_winning_poker_hand() function doesn't always recognize straights

Instead, I usually see stuff like

• My program assumes that when the server receives an order_received webhook, and then hits the server to fetch the order details from the vendor's API for the order identified in the webhook payload, the vendor's API will return the order details and not a 404 not found"
• My server returns nothing at all when fetching the user's bill for this month, because while the logic is correct (determine the amount due for each order and sum), this particular user had 350,000 individual orders this month so the endpoint takes >30 seconds, times out, and returns nothing.
• The program takes satellite images along with Metadata that includes the exact timesamp, which satellite took the picture, and how the satellite was angles. It identifies locations which match a specific feature, and spits out a latitude, longitude, label, and confidence score. However, when viewing the locations on a map, they appear to be 100-700 meters off, but only for points within the borders of China (because the programmer didn't know about GCJ-02)

Programming languages that help you write code that is "correct" mostly help prevent the first type of bug, not the second.

I feel *so* pedantic making this comment — please forgive me — but also:

CeraVe may have degraded in quality when they were purchased by L’Oréal and potentially changed the source of the fatty alcohols in their formulation. Fatty alcohols that have been sourced from coconut are more likely to cause skin irritation than those that have been sourced from palm. Plus, retinoids can actually push these fatty alcohols deeper into the pores for the ultimate backfire effect. My source is u/WearingCoats on Reddit, who runs a dermatology practice and does product consulting for drugstore brands. She's another one of my favourite resources; I recommend running a search on her posts if there's something specific you're interested in learning.

In general, you don't want to use a moisturizer that is heavy or occlusive over retinoids. It could make the treatment more effective than intended, which might compromise your moisture barrier and contribute to irritated skin. Cetaphil may work better for you if you're going down that route. I personally own a variety of moisturizers, which I rotate depending on what else I'm using on my face, and the season.

Niacinamide decreases sebum production, which is great for acne, as well as giving your skin a “mattifying” look…. but it can also compound a drying effect. I personally apply a few drops in the morning before my moisturizer, but it's one of those things where if you go too hard, too fast, and throw too many things at your skin at once, you're likely to overwhelm your moisture barrier.

Vitamin C is a can of worms. There are a bunch of different compounds that are all called "vitamin C," including L-ascorbic acid (which can come in a powder form, or suspended in water or oils like squalene and silicone), magnesium or sodium ascorbyl phosphate, ascorbyl glucoside, 3-0 ethyl ascorbic acid, and ascorbyl palmitate. (I don’t have a fantastic memory; I grabbed these out of Skincare Decoded.) Water-based L-ascorbic acid serum in combination with vitamin E and ferulic acid is the classic, patented formula developed by SkinCeuticals, which has the most scientific data to back up its claims. However, it's also ridiculously expensive and the price keeps going up. I personally use Timeless' clone of this formula and buy a new bottle every couple of months or so, but there's no way to tell if it's truly effective short of getting into research equipment and controlled studies.

Some of the vitamin C products are better than others, and some are pretty much rubbish (hi hi, ascorbyl palmitate). L-ascorbic acid is notoriously unstable in water, which is why SkinCeuticals holds the holy grail with their patented formula to stabilize it. Sodium ascorbyl phosphate actually has some promising evidence as an acne treatment, and I really think that it should have been marketed as such instead of a less effective L-AA alternative. There are also less-studied antioxidants you might want to check out, like resveratrol and EUK-134. It's important to pay attention to the concentrations that have actually been studied in clinical trials because many cosmetics lines underdose (or overdose!) their products and can't really claim that they have scientific evidence behind them. For example, The Ordinary's resveratrol formulation contains double the amount that has been studied, which might be irritating to some people's skin.

I'm skeptical about hyaluronic acid being the holy grail of humectants, compared to, say, good ol' glycerin, especially given the marketing hype around it. Here's a blog post comparing some of the research surrounding the two. Like @nebuchadnezzar [LW · GW]pointed out, molecular weight matters, and HA comes in a variety of different sizes so you don't quite know what you're getting in terms of penetration and effects. Also, humectants are hydrophilic, meaning, they grab water molecules around them and bind them to themselves, but the downside is that they're not discerning about where they're getting their water from, pulling water from your skin as well as drawing water from the air. If you’re in a dry environment, this can actually work in the opposite direction of what you want. One trick is to apply humectants over wet skin or in the shower, or mist your face with water (when I’m feeling purely indulgent, I use Mario Badescu’s rosewater spray).

@Vanessa Kosoy [LW · GW], it's hard for me to give a straight answer to your question because there are so many factors to consider in your skincare routine, which is why I think a primer on some of the basic science will lead you to being better equipped to pick the right products for you.

That ought to buy you a couple weeks, anyway. ;)

Any pinching concern with those straps?

Or is that sentence meant to indicate that an instance running after training might figure out how to hack the computer running it so it can actually change it's own weights?

I was thinking of a scenario where OpenAI deliberately gives it access to its own weights to see if it can self improve.

I agree that it would be more like to just speed up normal ML research.

Enjoyed this post! Quick question about obtaining the steering vectors:

Do you train them one at a time, possibly adding an additional orthogonality constraint between each train?

Under the current version of the interactive model, its median prediction is just two decades earlier than that from Cotra’s forecast

Just?

Question about the "rules of the game" you present.  Are you allowed to simply look at layer 0 transcoder features for the final 10 tokens - you could probably roughly estimate the input string from these features' top activators.  From you case study, it seems that you effectively look at layer 0 transcoder features for a few of the final tokens through a backwards search, but wonder if you can skip the search and simply look at transcoder features.  Thank you.

By "gag order" do you mean just as a matter of private agreement, or something heavier-handed, with e.g. potential criminal consequences?

I have trouble understanding the absolute silence we seem to be having. There seem to be very few leaks, and all of them are very mild-mannered and are failing to build any consensus narrative that challenges OA's press in the public sphere.

Are people not able to share info over Signal or otherwise tolerate some risk here? It doesn't add up to me if the risk is just some chance of OA trying to then sue you to bankruptcy, especially since I think a lot of us would offer support in that case, and the media wouldn't paint OA in a good light for it.

I am confused. (And I grateful to William for at least saying this much, given the climate!)