ACrackedPot's Shortform

I really, really dislike waste.

But the thing is, I basically hate the way everybody else hates waste, because I get the impression that they don't actually hate waste, they hate something else.

People who talk about limited resources don't actually hate waste - they hate the expenditure of limited resources.

People who talk about waste disposal don't actually hate waste - they hate landfills, or trash on the side of the road, or any number of other things that aren't actually waste.

People who talk about opportunity costs ('wasteful spending') don't hate the waste, they hate how choices were made, or who made the choices.

Mind, wasting limited resources is bad.  Waste disposal is itself devoting additional resources - say, the land for the landfill - to waste.  And opportunity costs are indeed the heart of the issue with waste.

At this point, the whole concept of finishing the food on your plate because kids in Africa don't have enough to eat is the kind of old-fashioned where jokes about it being old fashioned are becoming old fashioned, but the basic sentiment there really cuts to the heart of what I mean by "waste", and what makes it a problem.

Waste is something that isn't used.  It is value that is destroyed.

The plastic wrapping your meat that you throw away isn't waste.  It had a purpose to serve, and it fulfilled it.  Calling that waste is just a value judgment on the purpose it was put to.  The plastic is garbage, and the conflation of waste and garbage has diminished an important concept.

Food you purchase, that is never eaten and thrown away?  That is waste.  Waste, in this sense, is the opposite of exploitation.  To waste is to fail to exploit.  However, we use the word waste now to just mean that we don't approve of the way something is used, and the use of the word to express disapproval of a use has basically destroyed - not the original use of the word, but the root meaning which gives the very use of the word to express disapproval weight.  Think of the term "wasteful spending" - you already know the phrase just means spending that the speaker disapproves of, the word "wasteful" has lost all other significance.

Mind, I'm not arguing that "waste" literally only means a specific thing.  I'm arguing that an important concept has been eroded by use by people who were deliberately trying to establish a link with that concept.

Which is frustrating, because it has eroded a class of criticisms that I think society desperately needs, which have been supplanted by criticisms rooted in things like environmentalism, even when environmentalism isn't actually a great fit for the criticisms - it's just the framing for this class of criticism where there is a common conceptual referent, a common symbolic language.

And this actually undermines environmentalism; think about corporate "green" policies, and how often they're actually cost-cutting measures.  Cutting waste, once upon a time, had the same kind of public appeal; now if somebody talks about cutting waste, I'm wondering what they're trying to take away from me.  We've lost a symbol in our language, and the replacement isn't actually a very good fit.

This concept is not fully formed.  It is necessary that it is not fully formed, because once I have finished forming it, it won't be something I can communicate any longer; it will become, to borrow a turn of phrase from SMBC, rotten with specificity.

I have noticed a shortcoming in my model of reality.  It isn't a problem with the accuracy of the model, but rather there is an important feature of the model missing.  It is particularly to do with people, and the shortcoming is this: I have no conceptual texture, no conceptual hook, to attach nebuluous information to people to.

To explain what I need a hook for, a professional acquantance has recriprocated trust.  There is a professional relationship there, but also a human interaction; the trust involved means we can proceed professionally without negotiating contractual terms beforehand.  However, it would undermine the trust in a very fundamental way to actually treat this as the meaning of the trust.  That is to say, modeling the relationship as transactional would undermine the basis of the relationship (but for the purposes of describing things, I'm going to do that anyways, basically because it's easier to explain that way; any fair description of a relationship of any kind should not be put to a short number of words).

I have a pretty good model of this person, as a person.  They have an (adult) child who has developed a chronic condition; part of basic social interaction is that, having received this information, I need to ask about said child the next time we interact.  This is something that is troubling this person; my responsibility, to phrase it in a misleading way, is to acknowledge them, to make what they have said into something that has been heard, and in a way that lets them know that they have been heard.

So, returning to the shortcoming: I have no conceptual texture to attach this to.  I have never built any kind of cognitive architecture that serves this kind of purpose; my interactions with other humans are focused on understanding them, which has basically served me socially thus far.  But I have no conceptual hook to attach things like "Ask after this person's child".  My model is now updated to include the pain of that situation; there is nothing in the model that is designed to prompt me to ask.  I have heard; now I need to let this person know that they have been heard, and I reach for a tool I suddenly realize has never existed.  I knew this particular tool was necessary, but have never needed it before.

It's maybe tempting to build general-purpose mental architecture to deal with this problem, but as I examine it, it looks like maybe this is a problem that actually needs to be resolved on a more individual basis, because as I mentally survey the situation, a large part of the problem in the first place is the overuse of general-purpose mental architecture.  I should have noticed this missing tool before.

I am not looking for solutions.  Mostly it is just interesting to notice;  usually, with these sorts of things, I've already solved the problem before I've had a chance to really notice, observe, and interact with the problem, much less notice the pieces of my mind which actually do the solving.  Which itself is an interesting thing to notice; how routine the construction of this kind of conceptual architecture has gotten, that the need for novel mental architecture actually makes me stop for a moment, and pay attention to what is going on.

It can sometimes be hard to notice the things you mentally automate; the point of automating things is to stop noticing them, after all.

Observe.  (If you don't want to or can't, it's a video showing the compression wave that forms in traffic when a car brakes.)

I first saw that video a few years ago.  I remembered it a few weeks ago when driving in traffic, and realizing that a particular traffic condition was caused by an event that had happened some time in the past, that had left an impression, a memory, in the patterns of traffic.  The event, no longer present, was still recorded.  The wave form in the traffic patterns was a record of an event - traffic can operate as a storage device.

Considering traffic as a memory storage device, it appears traffic reaches its capacity when it is no longer possible for traffic to move at all.  In practice I think traffic would approach this limit asymptotically, as each additional event stored in its memory reduces the speed at which traffic moves, such that it takes additional time to store each event in proportion to the number of events already stored.  That is, the memory storage of traffic is not infinite.

Notably, however, the memory storage of traffic can, at least in principle, be read. Traffic itself is an imperfect medium of storage - it depends on a constant flow of cars, or else the memory is erased, and also cars don't behave uniformly, such that events aren't stored perfectly.  However, it isn't perfectly lossy, either; I can know from an arbitrary slow-down that some event happened in traffic in the past.

You could probably program a really, really terrible computer on traffic.

But the more interesting thing, to me, is the idea that a wave in a moving medium can store information; this seems like the sort of "Aha" moment that, were I working on a problem that this could apply to, would solve that problem for me.  I'm not working on such a problem, but maybe this will find its way to somebody who is.

Edit: It occurs to me this may look like a trivial observation; of course waves can store information, that's what radio is.  But that's not what I mean; radio is information transmission, not information storage.  It's the persistence of the information that surprised me, and which I think might be useful, not the mere act of encoding information onto a wave.

It took me a little while to understand what criticism Aella raised over Eliezer's defense of the concept of truth [LW · GW].

So to try to summarize what I am now reasonably certain the criticism was:

Eliezer argues that "truth", as a concept, reflects our expectation that our experiences of reality can match our experiences of reality.

Aella's criticism is that "of reality" adds nothing to the previous sentence, and Eliezer is sneaking reality into his concept of truth; that is, Eliezer's argument can be reframed "Our expectation of our experiences can match our experiences".

The difficulty I had in understanding Aella's argument is that she framed it as a criticism of the usefulessness of truth, itself.  That is, I think she finds the kind of "truth" we are left with, after subtracting a reality (an external world) that adds nothing to it, to be kind of useless (either that or she expects readers to).

Whereas I think it's basically the same thing.  Just as subtracting "of reality" removes nothing from the argument, I think adding it doesn't actually add anything to the argument, because I think "reality", or "external world", are themselves just pointers at the fact that our experiences can be expected, something already implicit in the idea of having expectations in the first place.

Reality is just the pattern of experiences that we experience.  Truth is a pattern which correlates in some respect with some subset of the pattern of experiences that we experience.

If we consider the extra dimension(s) on which the amplitude of the wave function given to the Schrodinger Equation, the wave function instead defines a topology (or possibly another geometric object, depending on exactly what properties end up being invariant.)

If the topology can be evaluated over time by some alternative mathematical construct, that alternative mathematical construct may form the basis for a more powerful (in the sense of describing a wider range of potential phenomena) physics, because it should be constructable in such a way as to not possess the limitations of the Schrodinger Equation that the function returns a value for the entire dimensional space under consideration.  (That is, observe that for y=sin(x), the waveform cannot be evaluated in terms of y, because it isn't defined for all of y.)

Additionally, the amplitude of quantum waves are geometrically limited in a way that a geometric object possessing the dimension(s) of amplitude shouldn't be; quantum waves have an extent from 0 to the amplitude, whereas a generalized geometric object should permit discontinuous extents, or extents which do not include the origin, or extents which cross the origin.  If we treat the position but not the measure of the extent of the dimension(s) of amplitude as having topological properties, then with the exception of discontinuous extents / amplitudes, many of these geometries may be homotopic with the wave-function itself; however, there may be properties that can be described in terms of a geometric object / topology that cannot be described in terms of the homotopic wave function.

Suppose you have a list of choices a selection must be made from, and that the decision theory axioms of orderability and transitivity apply.

It should then be possible to construct a binary tree representing this list of choices, such that a choice can be represented as a binary string.

Likewise, a binary string, in a certain sense, represents a choice.

In this specific sense, what computers automate is the process of selection, of choice.  Noticing this, and noticing that computers have automated away considerable amounts of "work", we must notice that "work", in the occupational sense, is to a significant extent the process of making selections.  The process of mechanization has been the process of converting physical labor into selective labor, and in some cases the creation of physical heuristics that substantially solve selective problems - a vacuum operates on a physical heuristic that things of certain sizes and weights are undesirable to have on/in carpeting, for instance.

Noticing that the information age has largely been an ongoing project of automating selection efforts, one notable exception does crop up - cases of crowdsources selection efforts.  Upvotes and downvotes and retweets and the various other crowdsourced mechanisms by which selective pressure is created are selective labor.  We tend to think of this process as being to our own benefit, but I will observe the massive amount of monetary value that is extracted by the hosting platforms in the process - value that the hosting platforms enable, but does not create.

There are additionally individuals who create value - and, I would hope, a livelihood - based purely on selective labor we might not notice as labor.  Curated musical lists, for example.  Additionally, I notice an increasing trend of corporate entities performing selective effort on behalf of individual clients; when you get down to it, housing renting versus buying is a tradeoff between selection power (the ability to make selections) versus selection effort (the requirement to do so).  And I notice the cost of renting is increasing relative to the cost of buying, and yet people I know who could buy, are still choosing to rent, and those who do buy, are increasingly buying housing which limits their exposure to selection effort (such as buying condos, duplexes, and in HOAs).

Other ways in which it looks like society is increasingly outsourcing selective effort: Political beliefs, truth-deciding (science), investment, maintenance of household items, movie selection, book selection, food selection.  Anything where a company sends people a box of preselected items on a regular basis, where that is supplanting a previous personal selection effort.

The combination of these two things, to me, is interesting, combined with other observations of society.  Because the high degree of selective effort we undertake for free in some situations, combined with what I can only describe as an increasingly widespread social resistance to other forms of selective effort, looks like fatigue of executive function.  We spend considerable effort making decisions for the financial benefit of social media corporations, and have little selective energy left to make decisions about our own lives.

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This situation might be a problem, might not.  It looks odd to me, to be certain, and I'm increasingly dubious over the structure of ownership of commons whose value is not created by those who extract value from them.

However, I think it's more important than I'm suggesting here.  I'll return to the idea that mechanization has been the process of eliminating all work except selective effort: This suggests that the effectiveness of a corporation is entirely in how effectively selective efforts take place.

The problem for a corporation, government, or other large impersonal entity is compounded, because the first selective effort, is selecting people to make selective efforts, who in turn will be selecting people to make selective efforts.  A structure must be created to maintain a consistent form of selective effort - bureaucracy.

This begins to look a lot like the alignment problem, because, indeed, that's basically what it is.  And it is perhaps illlustrative that thousands of years of social development have only really come up with one functional solution to the problem of alignment corruption: Competition, such that structures whose alignment becomes corrupted are dismantled or destroyed.  Which is to say, yet another form of selection.

"Goal-oriented behavior" is actually pretty complicated, and is not, in fact, a natural byproduct of general AI.  I think the kinds of tasks we currently employ computers to do are hiding a lot of this complexity.

Specifically, what we think of as artificial intelligence is distinct from motivational intelligence is distinct from goal-oriented behaviors.  Creating an AI that can successfully play any video game is an entirely different technology stack from creating an AI that "wants" to play video games, which in turn is an entirely different technology stack from creating an AI that translates a "desire" to play video games into a sequence of behaviors which can actually do so.

The AI alignment issue is noticing that good motivation is hard to get right; I think this needs to be "motivation is going to be hard to do at all, good or bad"; possibly harder than intelligence itself.  Part of the problem with AI writing right now is that the writing is, basically, unintentional.  You can get a lot further with unintentional writing, but intentional writing is far beyond anything that exists right now.  I think a lot of fears come about because of a belief that motivation can arise spontaneously, or that intentionality can arise out of the programming itself; that we might write our desires into machines such that machines will know desire.

What would it take for GPT-3 to want to run itself?  I don't think we have a handle on that question at all.

Goal-oriented behaviors, meanwhile, correspond to an interaction between motivation and intelligence that itself is immensely more complicated than either independently.

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I think part of the issue here is that, if you ask why a computer does something, the answer is "Because it was programmed to."  So, to make a program do something, you just program it to do it.  Except this is moving the motivation, and intentionality, to the programmer; or, alternatively, to the person pressing the button causing the AI to act.

The AI in a computer game does what it does, because it is a program that is running, that causes things to happen.  If it's a first person shooter, the AI is trying to kill the player.  The AI has no notion of killing the player, however; it doesn't know what it is trying to do, it is just a series of instructions, which are, if you think about it, a set of heuristics that the programmer developed to kill the player.

This doesn't change if it's a neural network.  AlphaGo is not, in fact, trying to win a game of Go; it is the humans who trained it who have any motivation, AlphaGo itself is just a set of really good heuristics.  No matter how good you make those heuristics, AlphaGo will never start trying to win a game, because the idea of the heuristics in question trying to win a game is a category error.

I think, when people make the mental leap from "AI we have now" to "general AI", they're underspecifying what it is they are actually thinking about.

AI that can solve a specific, well-defined problem.

AI that can solve a well-defined problem. <- This is general AI; a set of universal problem-solving heuristics satisfies this criteria.

AI that can solve a poorly-defined problem. <- This, I think, is what people are afraid of, for fear that somebody will give it a problem, ask it to solve it, and it will tile the universe in paperclips.

Assuming all marginal economic growth comes from eliminating unnecessary expenses - increasing efficiency - then companies moving from a high-tax locality to a low-tax locality is, in fact, economic growth.

Is it a central example of economic growth,  or am I just engaging in a rhetorical exercise?

Well, assuming a diverse ecosystem of localities with different taxes and baskets of goods, I think a company moving from a high-tax locality to a low-tax locality - that is, assuming that we do in fact get something for paying taxes - this means a company is effectively moving from a high-cost plan which covers a wide range of bundled services, to a low-cost plan which covers a smaller range of bundled goods and services - that is, insofar as high taxes pay for anything at all, a company moving to a low-tax locality is reducing their consumption of those goods and services.  So, assuming that marginal economic growth arises from reducing consumption, and assuming that taxes are purchasing something, it is fair to describe this as a average, that is, central example of economic growth at the margins.

Whether or not taxes actually buy anything is, of course, another question entirely.  Another question is whether such economic growth in this case is coming at the expense of values we'd rather not sacrifice.

Another crackpot physics thing:

My crackpot physics just got about 10% less crackpot.  As it transpires, one of the -really weird- things in my physics, which I thought of as a negative dimension, already exists in mathematics - it's a Riemann Sphere.  (Thank you, Pato!)

This "really weird" thing is kind of the underlying topology of the universe in my crackpot physics - I analogized the interaction between this topology and mass once to an infinite series of Matryoshka dolls, where every other doll is "inside out and backwards".  Don't ask me to explain that; that entire avenue of "attempting to communicate this idea" was a complete and total failure, and it was only after drawing a picture of the topology I had in mind that someone (Pato) observed that I had just drawn a somewhat inaccurate picture of a Riemann Sphere.  (I drew it as a disk in which the entire boundary was the same point, 0, with dual infinities coinciding at the origin.  I guess, in retrospect, a sphere was a more obvious way of describing that.)

If we consider that the points are not evenly allocated over the surface of the sphere - they're concentrated at the poles (each of which is simultaneously 0 and infinity, the mapping is ambiguous), if we drew a line such that it crosses the same number of points with each revolution, we get - something like a logarithmic spiral.  (Well, it's a logarithmic spiral with the "disk" interpretation; it's a spherical spiral whose name I don't know in the spherical interpretation.)

If we consider the bundle of lines connecting the poles, and use this constant-measure-per-revolution spiral to describe their path, I think that's about ... 20% of the way to actually converting the insanity in my head into real mathematics.  Each of these lines is "distance" (or, alternatively, "time" - it depends on which of the two charts you employ).  The bundle of these spirals provides one dimension of rotation; there's a mathematical way of extracting a second dimension of rotation, to get a three-dimensional space, but I don't understand it at an intuitive level yet.

A particle's perspective is "constantly falling into an infinity"; because of the hyperbolic nature of the space, I think a particle always "thinks" it is at the equator - it never actually gets any closer.  Because the lines describe a spiral, the particle is "spinning".  Because of the nature of the geometry of the sphere, this spin expresses itself as a spinor, or at least something analogous to one.

Also, apparently, Riemann Spheres are already used in both relativistic vacuum field equations and quantum mechanics.  Which, uh, really annoys me, because I'm increasingly certain there is "something" here, and increasingly annoyed that nobody else has apparently just sat down and tried to unify the fields in what, to me, is the most obvious bloody way to unify them; just assume they're all curvature, that the curvature varies like a decaying sine wave (like "sin(ln(x))/x", which exhibits exactly the kind of decay I have in mind).  Logarithmic decay of frequency over distance ensures that there is a scalar symmetry, as does a linear decay of amplitude over distance.

Yes, I'm aware of the intuitive geometry involved in an inverse-square law; I swear that the linear decay makes geometric sense too, given the topology in my head.  Rotation of a logarithmic spiral gives rise to a linear rescaling relative to the arclength of that rotation.  Yes, I'm aware that the inverse-square law also has lots of evidence - but it also has lots of evidence against it, which we've attempted to patch by assuming unobserved mass that precisely accounts for the observed anomalies.  I posit that the sinusoidal wave in question has ranges wherein the amplitude is decaying approximately linearly, which creates the apparent inverse-square behavior for certain ranges of distances - and because these regions of space are where matter tends to accumulate, having the most stable configurations, they're disproportionately where all of our observations are made.  It's kind of literally the edge cases, where the inverse-square relationship begins to break down (whether it really does, or apparently does), and the configurations become less stable, that we begin to observe deviations.

I'm still working on mapping my "sin(ln(x))/x" equation (this is not the correct equation, I don't think, it's just an equation that kind of looks right for what's in my head, and it gave me hints about where to start looking) to this structure; there are a few options, but none stand out yet as obviously correct.  The spherical logarithmic spiral is a likely candidate, but figuring out the definition of the spiral that maintains constant "measure" with each rotation requires some additional understanding on my part.

What does it mean, for a thing to move?

First, what phenomenon are we even talking about?  It's important to start here.  I'm going to start somewhat cavalierly: Motion is a state of affairs in which, if we measure two variables, X and T, where X is the position on some arbitrary dimension relative to some arbitrary point using some arbitrary scale, and T is the position in "time" as measured by a clock (also arbitrary), we can observe that X varies with T.

Notice there are actually two distinct phenomena here: There is the fact that "X" changed, which I am going to talk about.  Then there is the fact that "T" changed, which I will talk about later.  For now, it is taken as a given that "time passes".  In particular, the value "T" refers to the measurement of a clock whose position is given by X.

Taking "T" as a dimension for the purposes of our discussion here, what this means is that motion is a state of affairs in which a change in position in time additionally creates a change in position in space; that is, motion is a state of affairs in which a spacial dimension, and the time dimension, are not independent variables.  Indeed, special relativity gives us precisely the degree to which they are dependent on one another.

Consider geometries which are consistent with this behavior; if we hold motion in time as a given - that is, if we assume that the value on the clock will change - then the geometry can be a simple rotation.

However, suppose we don't hold motion in time as a given.  What geometry are we describing then?  I think we're looking at a three-dimensional geometry for this case, rather than a four-dimensional geometry.

Instead of further elaborations on my crackpot nonsense, something short:

I expect that there is some distance from a magnetic source between 10^5 meters and 10^7 meters at which there will be magnetic anomalies; in particular, there will be a phenomenon by which the apparent field strength drops much faster than expected and passes through zero into the negative (reversed polarity).

I specifically expect this to be somewhere in the vicinity of 10^6 meters, although the specific distance will vary with the mass of the object.

There should be a second magnetic anomaly somewhere in the vicinity of 10^12 m (So between 10^11 and 10^13), although I suspect at that distance it will be too faint to detect.

More easily detected, because there is a repulsive field at work at these distances - mass should be scarce at this distance from the dominant "local" masses, a scarcity that should continue up to about 10^18 m (between 10^17 and 10^19, although errors really begin to compound here); at 10^18 m, I expect an unusually dense distribution of matter; this value in the vicinity of 10^18 m should be the most common distance between objects in the galaxy.

It should be possible to find large masses (say, black holes) orbiting each other at, accounting for relativistic changes in distance, 10^18m, which we might otherwise expect to fall into one another - that is, there should be unexplainable orbital mechanics between large masses that are this distance apart.

I expect that there is some radius between 10^22 meters and 10^26 meters (vicinity of 10^24) which marks the largest possible size of a galaxy, and some radius between 10^28 and 10^32 (vicinity of 10^30) which marks the most common distance between galaxies.
 

Galaxies which are between the vicinity of 10^24 and the vicinity of 10^30 meters from one another should be moving apart, on average; galaxies which are greater than the vicinity of 10^30 meters from one another should be falling into one another on average.

Galaxies which are approximately 10^30 meters apart should be orbiting one another - neither moving towards nor away.