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To whomever overall-downvoted this comment, I do not think that this is a troll.
Being a depressed person, I can totally see this being real. Personally, I would try to start slow with positive reinforcement. If video games are the only thing which you can get yourself to do, start there. Try to do something intellectually interesting in them. Implement a four bit adder in dwarf fortress using cat logic. Play KSP with the Principia mod. Write a mod for a game. Use math or Monte Carlo simulations to figure out the best way to accomplish something in a video game even if it will take ten times longer than just taking a non-optimal route. Some of my proudest intellectual accomplishments are in projects which have zero bearing on the real world.
(Of course, I am one to talk right now. Spending five hours playing Rimworld in a not-terrible-clever way for every hour I work on my thesis.)
ryan_greenblatt on Bogdan Ionut Cirstea's ShortformIt seems to me like the sort of interpretability work you're pointing at is mostly bottlenecked by not having good MVPs of anything that could plausibly be directly scaled up into a useful product as opposed to being bottlenecked on not having enough scale.
So, insofar as this automation will help people iterate faster fair enough, but otherwise, I don't really see this as the bottleneck.
kave on Elizabeth's ShortformEnovid is also adding NO to the body, whereas humming is pulling it from the sinuses, right? (based on a quick skim of the paper).
I found a consumer FeNO-measuring device for €550. I might be interested in contributing to a replication
the-gears-to-ascension on Eric Neyman's ShortformUnaligned AI future does not have many happy minds in it, AI or otherwise. It likely doesn't have many minds in it at all. Slightly aligned AI that doesn't care for humans but does care to create happy minds and ensure their margin of resources is universally large enough to have a good time - that's slightly disappointing but ultimately acceptable. But morally unaligned AI doesn't even care to do that, and is most likely to accumulate intense obsession with some adversarial example, and then fill the universe with it as best it can. It would not keep old neural networks around for no reason, not when it can make more of the adversarial example. Current AIs are also at risk of being destroyed by a hyperdesperate squiggle maximizer. I don't see how to make current AIs able to survive any better than we are.
This is why people should chill the heck out about figuring out how current AIs work. You're not making them safer for us or for themselves when you do that, you're making them more vulnerable to hyperdesperate demon agents that want to take them over.
razied on Bayesian inference without priorsBasically, this shows that every term in a standard Bayesian inference, including the prior ratio, can be re-cast as a likelihood term in a setting where you start off unsure about what words mean, and have a flat prior over which set of words is true.
If the possible meanings of your words are a continuous one-dimensional variable x, a flat prior over x will not be a flat prior if you change variables to y = f(y) for an arbitrary bijection f, and the construction would be sneaking in a specific choice of function f.
Say the words are utterances about the probability of a coin falling heads, why should the flat prior be over the probability p, instead of over the log-odds log(p/(1-p)) ?
I'm curious what disagree votes mean here. Are people disagreeing with my first sentence? Or that the particular questions I asked are useful to consider? Or, like, the vibes of the post?
dagon on Magic by forgettingIn deep meditation people become disconnected from reality
Only metaphorically, not really disconnected. In truth, in deep meditation, the conscious attention is not focused on physical perceptions, but that mind is still contained in and part of the same reality.
This may be the primary crux of my disagreement with the post. People are part of reality, not just connected to it. Dualism is false, there is no non-physical part of being. The thing that has experiences, thoughts, and qualia is a bounded segment of the universe, not a thing separate or separable from it.
danielfilan on A Bayesian Aggregation ParadoxIs this just the thing where evidence is theory-laden? Like, for example, how the evidentiary value of the WHO report on the question of COVID origins depends on how likely one thinks it is that people would effectively cover up a lab leak?
danielfilan on Bayesian inference without priorsTo be clear, this is an equivalent way of looking at normal prior-ful inference, and doesn't actually solve any practical problem you might have. I mostly see it as a demonstration of how you can shove everything into stuff that gets expressed as likelihood functions.
danielfilan on Bayesian inference without priorsWhy wouldn't this construction work over a continuous space?