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Thanks!
I can't see a link to any LW dialog at the top.
Oh, I see! That makes a lot more sense. But he should really write up/link to his project then, or his collaborator's project.
Alas, I think it's quite unlikely that this article will make somebody fund me. It's just that I noticed how extremely slow I am (without collaborators) to create a proper grant application.
IDGI. Why don't you work w/ someone to get funding? If you're 15x more productive, then you've got a much better shot at finding/filling out grants and then getting funding for you and your partner.
EDIT:
Also, you're a game dev and hence good at programming. Surely you could work for free as an engineer at an AI alignment org or something and then shift into discussions w/ them about alignment?
Because future rewards are discounted
Don't you mean future values? Also, AFAICT, the only thing going on here that seperates online from offline RL is that offline RL algorithms shape the initial value function to give conservative behaviour. And so you get conservative behaviour.
Since you seem interested in nootropics, I wonder if you've read Gwern's list of nootropic self-experiments? He covers a lot of supplements, some of which are pretty obscure AFAICT.~
EDIT: https://gwern.net/nootropic/nootropics
No, it's just that my prior says nootropics almost never work so I was wondering if you had some data suggesting this did e.g. by dowing a RCT on yourself or using signal processing techniques to detect if supplementing this stuff lead to a causal change in reflex times or so forth.
EDIT: Though I am vegan and I'm really ignorant about what makes for a good diet. So I'd be curious to hear why it's helpful for vegans to take this stuff.
Why do you think DHA algea powder works?
Having a large set of small 2-10 minutes task on the screen may thus feel (incorrectly) overwhelming.
The size of a task on the screen is a leaky abstraction (of it's length in time).
This is a valuable insight and makes reading this whole post worth it for me. And the obvious thought for how to correct this error is to attatch time-estimates for small tasks and convert them into a time-period view on a calendar. That way, it feels like "oh, I need 20 minutes to do all my chores today, better set a pomdoro" instead of "I have 20 things to do! 20 is big!"
Will have to try this. TEST: It doesn't look that big, though I'm including starting steps of longer term tasks. Hmm, this doesn't feel that bad, thought maybe that's the endorphins from deciding to test this talking.
BTW I gave a strong upvote because I want to see more rationality related content on LW. Otherwise I would've given a normal upvote, or maybe not even that. Nevertheless, that still means this post gets a strong upvote.
I did notice that I learned much quicker than I have in the past when I’ve tried to learn instruments. Which tells me that my current character build optimisation towards learning and memory is working. That was a good data point to update on.
Wot.
Please explain!
This is not a video, but I think it counts as a useful example of tacit knowledge.
Domain: Google-fu
Link: https://gwern.net/search-case-studies
Person: Gwern
Background: Creator of consistently thorough essays
Why: Gwern talks you through what he did to hunt down obscure resources on the internet and in the process shows you how much dakka you could bring to bear on googling things you don't know.
Wow, I didn't realize just how bad student debt cancellation is from so many perspectives. Now I want more policy critiques like this.
John Carmack is a famously honest man. To illustrate this, I'll give you two stories. When Carmack was a kid, he desperately wanted the macs in his schools computer lab. So he and a buddy tried to steal some. They got caught because Carmack's friend was too fat to get through the window. Carmack went to juvie. When the counselor asked him if he wouldn't get caught, would he do it again? Carmack answered yes for this counterfactual.
Later, when working as a young developer, Carmack and his fellow employees would take the company workstations home to code games over the weekend. Their boss eventually noticed this and wondered if they were borrowing company property without permission. He quickly hit on a foolproof plan to catch them: just ask Carmack because he cannot tell a lie. Carmack said yes.
These stories aren't really a response to your point. I just find them to be hilarious examples of the inability to lie. They're also an existence proof of someone being unable to lie but still doing very well.
Ah, that makes sense! Well, it does seem to work out for some businesses, in particular East Asian business conglomerates. Let me quote from a common cog article on the topic of near every company having an equillibrium point past which further growth is difficult w/o a line of capital.
Chinese businessmen and the SME Loop
With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of successful traditional Chinese businessmen have chosen the route of escaping the SME loop by pursuing additional — and completely different — lines of businesses. This has led to the prevalence of ‘Asian conglomerates’ — where a parent holding company owns many subsidiaries in an incredibly diverse number of industries: energy, edible oils, shipping, real estate, hospitality, telecommunications and so on. The benefit of this structure has been to subsidise new business units with the profits of other business units.
Why a majority of Chinese businessmen chose this route remains a major source of mystery for me. When I left the point-of-sale business in late 2017, I wondered what steps my boss would take to escape the SME loop. And I began to wonder if the first generation of traditional Chinese businessmen chose the route of multiple diversified businesses because it was the easiest way to escape the SME loop ... or if perhaps there was something about developing markets that caused them to expand this way.
(And if so, why are there less such conglomerates in the West? Why are these conglomerates far more common in Asia? These are interesting questions — but the answers aren’t readily available to me; not for a few decades, and not until I’ve have had the experience of growing such businesses.)
Perhaps the right way to think about this is that the relentless pursuit of growth led them to expand into adjacent markets — and the markets for commodities and infrastructure was ripe for the taking in the early years of South East Asia’s development.
Here, we see that chinese businessmen expand to keep up their free cash flow to fund their attempts to innovate enough to keep growing to larger scales.
Uh, Brian did cut out a great deal of fat from AirBnB and the company clearly survived its brush with death due to Covid19. So I don't see why you'd say it didn't work.
Brian Chesky, a co-founder of AirBnB, claimed that their company did get bloated and they lost focus before Covid happened and they had to cut the fat or die. And he claimed this error is common amongst late-state startups. From "The Social Radars: Brian Chesky, Co-Founder & CEO of Airbnb (Part II)". So I think turning into an octupus is something that happens to succesful startups, and is probably what's happening to Dropbox.
Even though I think the comment was useful, it doesn't look to me like it was as useful as the typical 139 karma comment as I expect LW readers to be fairly unlikely to start popping benzos after reading this post. IMO it should've gotten like 30-40 karma. Even 60 wouldn't have been too shocking to me. But 139? That's way more karma than anything else I've posted.
I don't think it warrants this much karma, and I now share @ryan_greenblatt's concerns about the ability to vote on Quick Takes and Popular Comments introducing algorithmic virality to LW. That sort of thing is typically corrosive to epistemic hygeine as it changes the incentives of commenting more towards posting applause-lights. I don't think that's a good change for LW, as I think we've got too much group-think as it is.
I think you should write it. It sounds funny and a bunch of people have been calling out what they see as bad arguements that alginment is hard lately e.g. TurnTrout, QuintinPope, ZackMDavis, and karma wise they did fairly well.
@habryka this comment has an anomalous amount of karma. It showed up on popular comments, I think, and I'm wondering if people liked the comment when they saw it there which lead to a feedback loop of more eyeballs on the comment, more likes, more eyeball etc. If so, is that the intended behaviour of the popular comments feature? It seems like it shouldn't be.
Good point. I grabbed the dataset of gdp per capita vs life expectancy for almost all nations from OurWorldInData, log transformed GDP per capita and got a correlation of 0.85.
Although GDP per capita is distinct from this expanded welfare metric, the correlation between GDP per capita and this expanded welfare metric is very strong at 0.96, though there is substantial variation across countries, and welfare is more dispersed (standard deviation of 1.51 in logs) than is income (standard deviation of 1.27 in logs).[9]
I checked the paper and it looks like they're comparing welfare by "how much more would person X from the US have to consume to move to another country i?" Which results in equations like this:
which says what the factor , should be in terms of differences in life expectancy, consumption, lessure and inequality. So I suppose it isn't suprising that it's quite correlated with GDP, given the individual correlations at play here, but I am suprised that it is so strongly correlated since I'd expect e.g. life expectancy vs gdp to correlate at maybe 0.8[1]. Which is a fair bit weaker than a 0.96 correlation!
This looks cool and I want to read it in detail, but I'd like to push back a bit against an implicit take that I thought was present here: namely, that GDP takes into account major technological breakthroughs. Let me just quote some text from this article: What Do GDP Growth Curves Really Mean?
More generally: when the price of a good falls a lot, that good is downweighted (proportional to its price drop) in real GDP calculations at end-of-period prices.
… and the way we calculate real GDP in practice is to use prices from a relatively recent year. We even move the reference year forward from time to time, so that it’s always near the end of the period when looking at long-term growth.
Real GDP Mainly Measures The Goods Which Are Revolutionized Least
Now let’s go back to our puzzle about growth since 1960, and electronics in particular.
The cost of a transistor has dropped by a stupidly huge amount since 1960 - I don’t have the data on hand, but let’s be conservative and call it a factor of 10^12 (i.e. a trillion). If we measure in 1960 prices, the transistors on a single modern chip would be worth billions. But instead we measure using recent prices, so the transistors on a single modern chip are worth… about as much as a single modern chip currently costs. And all the world’s transistors in 1960 were worth basically-zero.
1960 real GDP (and 1970 real GDP, and 1980 real GDP, etc) calculated at recent prices is dominated by the things which are expensive today - like real estate, for instance. Things which are cheap today are ignored in hindsight, even if they were a very big deal at the time.
In other words: real GDP growth mostly tracks production of goods which aren’t revolutionized. Goods whose prices drop dramatically are downweighted to near-zero, in hindsight.
When we see slow, mostly-steady real GDP growth curves, that mostly tells us about the slow and steady increase in production of things which haven’t been revolutionized. It tells us approximately-nothing about the huge revolutions in e.g. electronics.
Important notice: benzodiazepines are serious business: benzo withdrawals are amongst the worst experiences a human can go through, and combinations of benzos with alcohol, barbiturates, opioids or tricyclic antidepressants are very dangerous: benzos played a role in 31% of the estimated 22,767 deaths from prescription drug overdose in the United States.
If you're experimenting with benzos, please be very careful!
Probably it would have been worse as a perpetual draft.
An example of you writing psuedocode woud've helped a great deal, especially if it illustrated what you thought was a core skill.
Thank you for this, I'm conducting user interviews right now and there were some suprising things in your review, as well as obviously good ideas that I would probably have missed. Organizing meetups in the field would not have occured to me, and is a good idea.
that's still the second worst thing that's happened when running a megameetup from my perspective.
You can't just say that and not elaborate!
This is a good counter-arguement! Though I think the missing factor of a square root doesn't change the qualitative nature of natural i.e. steady-state motion. But that's not much of a defence, is it? Especially when Aristotle stuck his neck out by saying double the weight, double the speed. It is to his detriment that he didn't check.
I think this only holds if fine tunes are composable, which as far as I can tell they aren't (fine tuning on one task subtly degrades performance on a bunch of other tasks, which isn't a big deal if you fine tune a little for performance on a few tasks but does mean you probably can't take a million independently-fine-tuned models and merge them into a single super model of the same size with the same performance on all million tasks).
I don't think I've ever heard of any evidence for this being the case.
Second most? What's the first? Linearization of a Newtonian V(r) about the earth's surface?
That makes sense.
Did you know they were going to close today? Were you suprised by the news?
This seems to have come out of nowhere. Was anyone aware of this ahead of time? Why didn't anyone try sharing the news to get prestigious academics, institutions and others to loudly say this is a terrible idea? Or get Kelsey Piper or someone to write a big news article about this?
Huh, that looks like it had a persistent effect too. Looks to me like you're a lot more productive when you work on your own stuff, now.
So what happened around Feb 25? It sure looks like something about your usage of Youtube and Twitter changed. Just to make sure I plotted an XMR chart, and yep, it sure looks like there's been a change in the process. (The a couple points lie outside the limits, and there are 3/4 consecutive points closer to the limits than the mean. Both signify exception variation, suggesting you did something different. The yellow line is just a divider showing the datapoint corresponding to the 18th Feb.)
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Huh, I didn't know this was equivalent to the born rule. It does feel pretty natural, do you have a reference to the proof?
Wasn't this the assumption originally used by Everret to recover Born statistics in his paper on MWI?
FWIW last I heard, nobody has constructed a pilot-wave theory that agrees with quantum field theory (QFT) in general and the standard model of particle physics in particular. The tricky part is that in QFT there’s observable interference between states that have different numbers of particles in them, e.g. a virtual electron can appear then disappear in one branch but not appear at all in another, and those branches have easily-observable interference in collision cross-sections etc. That messes with the pilot-wave formalism, I think.
Based off the abstracts of these papers:
QFT as pilot-wave theory of particle creation and destruction,
Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory,
Relativistically invariant extension of the de Broglie-Bohm theory of quantum mechanics,
Making nonlocal reality compatible with relativity,
Time in relativistic and non relativistic quantum mechanics,
and the Wikipedia page on de Broglie Bohm's section on QFT, it seems like this claim is wrong. I haven't read these papers yet, but someone I was talking to said Bohmian QFT is even more unnecessarily complicated than Bohmian QM.
I don't know if anyone has re-constructed the Standard Model in this framework as of yet.
EDIT: Changed "standard Bohmian QFT" -> "Bohmian QM"
I saw an interesting thread about how to strategically choose a problem & plan to make progress on it. It was motivated by the idea that you don't get taught how to choose good problems to work on in academia, so the author's wrote a paper on just that. This sorta reminded me of your project to teach people how to 10x their OODA looping, so I wanted to bring it to your attention @Raemon.
One way this essay could be even better is if you gave a couple of reframings for one of the questions you mention, and why they do/don't work.
QFT is relativistic quantum mechanics with fields i.e. a continuous limit of a lattice of harmonic oscillators, which you may have encountered in solid state theory. It is the framework for the standard model, our most rigorously tested theory by far. An interpretation of quantum mechanics that can't generalize to QFT is pretty much dead in the water. It would be like having an interpretation of physics that works for classical mechanics but can't generalize to special or general relativity.
(Edited to change "more rigorously" -> "most rigorously".)
Any ideas for corrigibility evals?
“Ask the question that produces the answer.” is a 42 character sentence.
This is beautiful.
IIRC pilot wave theory doesn't work for QFTs which is a big failure.
EDIT: I stand corrected. See:
QFT as pilot-wave theory of particle creation and destruction
Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory
Relativistically invariant extension of the de Broglie-Bohm theory of quantum mechanics
Making nonlocal reality compatible with relativity.
Time in relativistic and non relativistic quantum mechanics.
So apparently there are de Broglie-Bohm variants of QFTs. I'm unsure if these are full QFTs i.e. they can reproduce the standard model. I am unsure how exactly these theories work. But the theories would be noncal w/ hidden variables, as with classical Bohmian mechanics which is IMO a bad sign. But if it can reproduce the standard model, and I don't know if they can, then Bohmian mechanics is much more plausible than I thought. Even this boosts it substantially IMO. @the gears to ascension
This is an interesting post and I hope that you'll continue it.
OK, that explanation helped me understand coexponentials a bit but I'm unsure how it's relevant to the assymetry between the examples Alok gave.
Not a category theorist, I only understood this post through set theory analogies, so I have no idea what you just said.
Yeah.
This strikes me as deeply puzzling. Why is this the case?
I think speedrunning videos should count, though many people may not find them useful. Likewise for watching high level competitions.
I'm gonna quote from this article about why you'd prefer to learn tacit knowledge from "believable people" i.e. those who have 1) a record of at least 3 different successes and 2) have great explanations of their approach when probed.
Believability works for two reasons: a common-sense one, and a more interesting, less obvious one.
The common-sense reasoning is pretty obvious: when you want advice for practical skills, you should talk to people who have those skills. For instance, if you want advice on swimming, you don’t go to someone who has never swum before, you go to an accomplished swimmer instead. For some reason we seem to forget this when we talk about more abstract skills like marketing or investing or business.
The two requirements for believability makes more sense when seen in this light: many domains in life are more probabilistic than swimming, so you’ll want at least three successes to rule out luck. You’ll also want people to have ‘great explanations’ when you probe them because otherwise they won’t be of much help to you.
The more interesting, less obvious reason that believability works is because reality has a surprising amount of detail. I’m quoting from a famous article by John Salvatier, which you should read in its entirety. Salvatier opens with a story about building stairs, and then writes:
It’s tempting to think ‘So what?’ and dismiss these details as incidental or specific to stair carpentry. And they are specific to stair carpentry; that’s what makes them details. But the existence of a surprising number of meaningful details is not specific to stairs. Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.
You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.
If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.
You might think the fiddly detailiness of things is limited to human centric domains, and that physics itself is simple and elegant. That’s true in some sense – the physical laws themselves tend to be quite simple – but the manifestation of those laws is often complex and counterintuitive.The point that Salvatier makes is that everything is more complex and fiddly than you think. At the end of the piece, Salvatier argues that if you’re not aware of this fact, it’s likely you’ll miss out on some obvious cue in the environment that will then cause you — and other novices — to get stuck.
Why does this matter? Well, it matters once you consider the fact that practical advice has to account for all of this fiddliness — but in a roundabout way: good practical advice nearly never provides an exhaustive description of all the fiddliness you will experience. It can’t: it would make the advice too long-winded. Instead, good practical advice will tend to focus on the salient features of the skill or the domain, but in a way that will make the fiddliness of reality tractable.
In practice, how this often feels like is something like “Ahh, I didn’t get why the advice was phrased that way, but I see now. Ok.”
Think about what this means, though. It means that you cannot tell the difference between advice from a believable person and advice from a non-believable person from examination of the advice alone. To a novice, advice from a non-believable person will seem just as logical and as reasonable as advice from a more believable person, except for the fact that it will not work. And the reason it will not work (or that it will work less well) is that advice from less believable individuals will either focus on the wrong set of fiddly details, or fail to account for some of the fiddliness of reality.
To put this another way, when you hear the words “I don’t see why X can’t work …” from a person who isn’t yet believable in that domain, alarm bells should go off in your head. This person has not tested their ideas against reality, and — worse — they are not likely to know which set of fiddly details are important to account for.
"That's because it's genuinely bullshit," said the girl.
No? At least, Aristotelian physics was a reasonable approximation of Newtonian physics when you care about motion in fluids in everyday life.
See the paper "Aristotle's Physics: A Physicist's Look". Here's the abstract
I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and non-intuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids), in the same technical sense in which Newton theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good empirically grounded theory. The observation suggests some general considerations on inter-theoretical relations.