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Sometimes people use "modulo" to mean something like "depending on", e.g. "seems good, modulo the outcome of that experiment" [correct me ITT if you think they mean something else; I'm not 100% sure]. Does this make sense, assuming the term comes from modular arithmetic?
Like, in modular arithmetic you'd say "5 is 3, modulo 2". It's kind of like saying "5 is the same as 3, if you only consider their relationship to modulus 2". This seems pretty different to the usage I'm wondering about; almost its converse: to import the local English meaning of "modulo", you'd be saying "5 is the same as 3, as long as you've taken their relationship to the modulus 2 into account". This latter statement is false; 5 and 3 are super different even if you've taken this relationship into account.
But the sense of the original quote doesn't work with the mathematical meaning: "seems good, if you only consider the outcome of that experiment and nothing else".
Is there a math word that means the thing people want "modulo" to mean?
Well, not that much, right? If you had an 11-word diceware passphrase to start, each word is about 7 characters on average, so you have maybe 90 places to insert a token - only 6.5 extra bits come from choosing a place to insert your character. And of course you get the same added entropy from inserting a random 3 base32 chars at a random location.
Happy to grant that a cracker assuming no unicode won't be able to crack your password, but if that's your goal then it might be a bad idea to post about your strategy on the public internet ;)
maybe; probably the easiest way to do this is to choose a random 4-digit hexadecimal number, which gives you 16 bits when you enter it (e.g. via ctrl+u on linux). But personally I think I'd usually rather just enter those hex digits directly, for the same entropy minus a keystroke. Or, even better, maybe just type a random 3-character base32 string for one fewer bit.
Some thoughts after doing this exercise:
I did the exercise because I couldn't sleep; I didn't keep careful count of the time, and I didn't do it all in one sitting. I'd guess I spent about an hour on it total, but I think there's a case to be made that this was cheating. However, "fresh eyes" is actually a really killer trick when doing this kind of exercise, in my experience, and it's usually available in practice. So I don't feel too bad about it.
I really really dislike the experience of saying things I think are totally stupid, and I currently don't buy that I should start trying to say stupider things. My favorite things in the above list came from refusing to just say another totally stupid thing. Nearly everything in my list is stupid in some way, but the things that are so stupid they don't even feel interesting basically make me feel sad. I trust my first-round aesthetic pruner to actually be helping to train my babbler in constructive directions.
The following don't really feel worth having said, to me:
- Throw it really hard
- Catapult
- Kick it really hard
- Wormhole
- Nuclear explosion based craft
My favorites didn't come after spewing this stuff; instead they came when I refused to be okay with just saying more of that kind of junk:
- Move the thing upward by one foot per day
- Name the thing "420 69 Doge To The Moon" and hope Elon takes the bait
- The various bogo-send options
- Optical tweezers
The difference isn't really that these are less stupid; in fact they're kind of more stupid, practically speaking. But I actually viscerally like them, unlike the first group. Forcing myself to produce things I hate feels like a bad strategy on lots of levels.
A thing that was going through my head but I wasn't sure how to turn into a real idea (vulgar language from a movie):
Perhaps you would like me to stop the car and you two can fuck yourselves to Lutsk!
Whoa. I also thought of this, though for me it was like thing 24 or something, and I was too embarrassed to actually include it in my post.
- Hire SpaceX to send it
- Bribe an astronaut on the next manned moon mission to bring it with them
- Bribe an engineer on the next robotic moon mission to send it with the rover
- Get on a manned mars mission, and throw it out the airlock at just the right speed
- Massive evacuated sphere (like a balloon but arbitrarily light), aimed very carefully
- Catapult
- Send instructions on how to build a copy of the thing, and where to put it, such that an alien race will do it as a gesture of goodwill
- Same, but with an incentive of some kind
- Same, but do it acausally
- Make a miniature moon and put the thing on that
- Build an AGI with the goal of putting the thing on the moon with 99% confidence, with minimum impact to other things
- Carve the thing out of the moon's surface, using lasers from satellites around Earth
- Build a reverse space elevator: the earth is in a luno-stationary orbit due to tidal locking, so you could in principle build an extremely tall tower on the moon's surface that came relatively close to earth. Then, you could lower objects down that tower after launching them a relatively short distance, exchanging them for moonrock ballast.
- Quantum-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn't, destroy this everett branch.
- Tegmark-1-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn't, destroy a large local region of space.
- Tegmark-4-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn't, derive a logical contradiction
- Pray for God to send the thing to the moon
- Offer to sell your soul to the devil in exchange for the thing being sent to the moon
- Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do the best one
- Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do the worst one
- Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do all of them
- Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, put all the letters from all the answers into a big bag, and shake it and draw from it repeatedly until you draw a sentence that describes a strategy for sending a thing to the moon, and then do that
- Somehow annihilate the earth (except for the thing). The thing will then probably fall to the moon? Probably, figure out whether that's right before annihilating the earth
- Pull a Raymond-Smullyan-style "will you answer my next question honestly?" scam on the director of NASA, forcing him to kiss you... er... I mean, send the thing to the moon
- Wait until moon tourism is cheap
- Start a religion whose central tenets include the belief that this thing being on the moon is a prerequisite for the creation of a universal utopia
- Non-reverse-space-elevator: build a space elevator, and then throw the thing off the top when the moon is nearby
- Big ol' rocket
- Nuclear explosion based craft
- Wormhole
- Unrealistically-good weather control, allowing you to harness the motion of the molecules in the atmosphere to propel objects however you want via extremely careful placement.
- Redefine or reconceptualize "the moon" to mean wherever the thing is already
- Redefine or reconceptualize "thing" to mean a thing that's already on the moon
- Redefine or reconceptualize "send" to mean keeping the sent thing away from the target
- Build an extremely detailed simulation of the moon with the thing on it
- Wait for the sun to engulf the earth-moon system, mixing what's-left-of-the-thing up with what's-left-of-the-moon
- Propel the earth, "wandering earth"-style, to become a moon of Jupiter. Now at least the thing is on a moon.
- Propel the earth, "wandering earth"-style, to collide with the moon, and be sure the thing is located at the point of collision
- Throw it really hard
- Gun
- Put your face between a really big grapefruit and the moon, put the thing in the grapefruit, and then insert a spoon into the grapefruit. When the grapefruit squirts at your face, pull away quickly
- Make a popular movie that involves the thing being sent to the moon, in a very memeable way, and hope Elon takes the bait
- Name the thing "420 69 Doge To The Moon" and hope Elon takes the bait
- So, y'know how you can levitate things in ultrasonic standing waves? Can you do that with light waves on a super small scale? I think you can, and I think I've seen some IBM animation that was made this way? "optical tweezers", was it called? So, do that, with the standing waves slowly drifting up toward the moon
- Eh; things seeming to retain a particular identity over time is just a useful fiction - "the thing" next year is just a subset of the causal results of the thing as it is now, not really any more special than any other causal results of the thing as it is now. So since the moon is in the thing's future light cone already, the job is more-or-less already accomplished.
- Turn back time to the moment when the parts of the thing were most recently intermixed with the parts of the moon. Maybe the big bang? or maybe some more recent time.
- Starting somewhere on the equator, move the thing upward by one foot. Tomorrow, move it up by another foot. Continue until you reach the moon. Surely it's never all that hard to just move the thing one more foot, right?
- Kick it really hard
- Nanobot swarm
- Adult-sized stomp rocket
(I've added my $50 to RatsWrong's side of this bet)
For contingent evolutionary-psychological reasons, humans are innately biased to prefer "their own" ideas, and in that context, a "principle of charity" can be useful as a corrective heuristic
I claim that the reasons for this bias are, in an important sense, not contingent. i.e. an alien race would almost certainly have similar biases, and the forces in favor of this bias won't entirely disappear in a world with magically-different discourse norms (at least as long as speakers' identities are attached to their statements).
As soon as I've said "P", it is the case that my epistemic reputation is bound up with the group's belief in the truth of P. If people later come to believe P, it means that (a) whatever scoring rule we're using to incentivize good predictions in the first place will reward me, and (b) people will update more on things I say in the future.
If you wanted to find convincing evidence for P, I'm now a much better candidate to find that evidence than someone who has instead said "eh; maybe P?" And someone who has said "~P" is similarly well-incentivized to find evidence for ~P.
I would agree more with your rephrased title.
People do actually have a somewhat-shared set of criteria in mind when they talk about whether a thing is safe, though, in a way that they (or at least I) don't when talking about its qwrgzness. e.g., if it kills 99% of life on earth over a ten year period, I'm pretty sure almost everyone would agree that it's unsafe. No further specification work is required. It doesn't seem fundamentally confused to refer to a thing as "unsafe" if you think it might do that.
I do think that some people are clearly talking about meanings of the word "safe" that aren't so clear-cut (e.g. Sam Altman saying GPT-4 is the safest model yet™️), and in those cases I agree that these statements are much closer to "meaningless".
Part of my point is that there is a difference between the fact of the matter and what we know. Some things are safe despite our ignorance, and some are unsafe despite our ignorance.
The issue is that the standards are meant to help achieve systems that are safe in the informal sense. If they don't, they're bad standards. How can you talk about whether a standard is sufficient, if it's incoherent to discuss whether layperson-unsafe systems can pass it?
I don't think it's true that the safety of a thing depends on an explicit standard. There's no explicit standard for whether a grizzly bear is safe. There are only guidelines about how best to interact with them, and information about how grizzly bears typically act. I don't think this implies that it's incoherent to talk about the situations in which a grizzly bear is safe.
Similarly, if I make a simple html web site "without a clear indication about what the system can safely be used for... verification that it passed a relevant standard, and clear instruction that it cannot be used elsewhere", I don't think that's sufficient for it to be considered unsafe.
Sometimes a thing will reliably cause serious harm to people who interact with it. It seems to me that this is sufficient for it to be called unsafe. Sometimes a thing will reliably cause no harm, and that seems sufficient for it to be considered safe. Knowledge of whether a thing is safe or not is a different question, and there are edge cases where a thing might occasionally cause minor harm. But I think the requirement you lay out is too stringent.
I think I agree that this isn't a good explicit rule of thumb, and I somewhat regret how I put this.
But it's also true that a belief in someone's good-faith engagement (including an onlooker's), and in particular their openness to honest reconsideration, is an important factor in the motivational calculus, and for good reasons.
I think it's pretty rough for me to engage with you here, because you seem to be consistently failing to read the things I've written. I did not say it was low-effort. I said that it was possible. Separately, you seem to think that I owe you something that I just definitely do not owe you. For the moment, I don't care whether you think I'm arguing in bad faith; at least I'm reading what you've written.
Nor should I, unless I believe that someone somewhere might honestly reconsider their position based on such an attempt. So far my guess is that you're not saying that you expect to honestly reconsider your position, and Said certainly isn't. If that's wrong then let me know! I don't make a habit of starting doomed projects.
I'm not sure what you mean - as far as I can tell, I'm the one who suggested trying to rephrase the insulting comment, and in my world Said roughly agreed with me about its infeasibility in his response, since it's not going to be possible for me to prove either point: Any rephrasing I give will elicit objections on both semantics-relative-to-Said and Said-generatability grounds, and readers who believe Said will go on believing him, while readers who disbelieve will go on disbelieving.
By that measure, my comment does not qualify as an insult. (And indeed, as it happens, I wouldn’t call it “an insult”; but “insulting” is slightly different in connotation, I think. Either way, I don’t think that my comment may fairly be said to have these qualities which you list.
I think I disagree that your comment does not have these qualities in some measure, and they are roughly what I'm objecting to when I ask that people not be insulting. I don't think I want you to never say anything with an unflattering implication, though I do think this is usually best avoided as well. I'm hopeful that this is a crux, as it might explain some of the other conversation I've seen about the extent to which you can predict people's perception of rudeness.
There are of course more insulting ways you could have conveyed the same meaning. But there are also less insulting ways (when considering the extent to which the comment emphasizes the unflatteringness and the call to action that I'm suggesting readers will infer).
Certainly there’s no “call to non-belief-based action”…!)
I believe that none was intended, but I also expect that people (mostly subconsciously!) interpret (a very small) one from the particular choice of words and phrasing. Where the action is something like "you should scorn this person", and not just "this person has unflattering quality X". The latter does not imply the former.
For what it's worth, I don't think that one should never say insulting things. I think that people should avoid saying insulting things in certain contexts, and that LessWrong comments are one such context.
I find it hard to square your claim that insultingness was not the comment's purpose with the claim that it cannot be rewritten to elide the insult.
An insult is not simply a statement with a meaning that is unflattering to its target - it involves using words in a way that aggressively emphasizes the unflatteringness and suggests, to some extent, a call to non-belief-based action on the part of the reader.
If I write a comment entirely in bold, in some sense I cannot un-bold it without changing its effect on the reader. But I think it would be pretty frustrating to most people if I then claimed that I could not un-bold it without changing its meaning.
My guess is that you believe it's impossible because the content of your comment implies a negative fact about the person you're responding to. But insofar as you communicated a thing to me, it was in fact a thing about your own failure to comprehend, and your own experience of bizarreness. These are not unflattering facts about Duncan, except insofar as I already believe your ability to comprehend is vast enough to contain all "reasonable" thought processes.
But, of course, I recognize that my comment is insulting. That is not its purpose, and if I could write it non-insultingly, I would do so. But I cannot.
I want to register that I don't believe you that you cannot, if we're using the ordinary meaning of "cannot". I believe that it would be more costly for you, but it seems to me that people are very often able to express content like that in your comment, without being insulting.
I'm tempted to try to rephrase your comment in a non-insulting way, but I would only be able to convey its meaning-to-me, and I predict that this is different enough from its meaning-to-you that you would object on those grounds. However, insofar as you communicated a thing to me, you could have said that thing in a non-insulting way.
Other facts about how I experience this:
* It's often opposed to internal forces like "social pressure to believe the thing", or "bucket errors I don't feel ready to stop making yet"
* Noticing it doesn't usually result in immediate enlightenment / immediately knowing the answer, but it does result in some kind of mini-catharsis, which is great because it helps me actually want to notice it more.
* It's not always the case that an opposing loud voice was wrong, but I think it is always the case that the loud voice wasn't really justified in its loudness.
A thing I sort-of hoped to see in the "a few caveats" section:
* People's boundaries do not emanate purely from their platonic selves, irrespective of the culture they're in and the boundaries set by that culture. Related to the point about grooming/testing-the-waters, if the cultural boundary is set at a given place, people's personal boundaries will often expand or retract somewhat, to be nearer to the cultural boundary.
Perhaps controversially, I think this is a bad selection scheme even if you replace "password" with any other string.
any password generation scheme where this is relevant is a bad idea
I disagree; as the post mentions, sometimes considerations such as memorability come into play. One example might be choosing random English sentences as passwords. You might do that by choosing a random parse tree of a certain size. But some English sentences have ambiguous parses, i.e. they'll have multiple ways to generate them. You *could* try to sample to avoid this problem, but it becomes pretty tricky to do that carefully. If you instead find the "most ambiguous sentence" in your set, you can get a lower bound on the safety of your scheme.
Um, huh? There are 2^1000 1000-character passwords, not 2^4700. Where is the 4700 coming from?
(added after realizing the above was super wrong): Whoops, that's what I get for looking at comments first thing in the morning. log2(26^1000) = 4700 Still, the following bit stands:
I'd also like to register that, in my opinion, if it turns out that your comment is wrong and not my original statement, it's really bad manners to have said it so confidently.
(I'm now not sure if you made an error or if I did, though)
Update: I think you're actually totally right. The entropy gives a lower bound for the average, not the average itself. I'll update the post shortly.
To clarify a point in my sibling comment, the concept of "password strength" doesn't cleanly apply to an individual password. It's too contingent on factors that aren't within the password itself. Say I had some way of scoring passwords on their strength, and that this scoring method tells me that "correct horse battery staple" is a great password. But then some guy puts that password in a webcomic read by millions of people - now my password is going to be a lot worse, even though the content of the password didn't change.
Password selection schemes aren't susceptible to this kind of problem, and you can consistently compare the strength of one with the strength of another, using methods like the ones I'm talking about in the OP.
I don't think that's how people normally do it; partly because I think it makes more sense to try to find good password *schemes*, rather than good individual passwords, and measuring a password's optimal encoding requires knowing the distribution of passwords already. The optimal encoding story doesn't help you choose a good password scheme; you need to add on top of it some way of aggregating the code word lengths. In the example from the OP, you could use the average code word length of the scheme, which has you evaluating Shannon entropy again, or you could use the minimum code word length, which brings you back to min-entropy.
Yep! I originally had a whole section about this, but cut it because it doesn't actually give you an ordering over schemes unless you also have a distribution over adversary strength, which seems like a big question. If one scheme's min-entropy is higher than another's max-entropy, you know that it's better for any beliefs about adversary strength.
Hm. On doing exactly as you suggest, I feel confused; it looks to me like the 25-44 cohort has really substantially more deaths than in recent years: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hcipg7yiuiai8m2/Screen Shot 2022-01-16 at 2.12.44 PM.png?dl=0 I don't know what your threshold for "significance" is, but 103 / 104 weeks spent above the preceding 208 weeks definitely meets my bar.
Am I missing something here?
A thing that feels especially good about this way of thinking about things is that it feels like the kind of problem with straightforward engineering / cryptography style solutions.
I'm interested in concrete ways for humans to evaluate and verify complex facts about the world. I'm especially interested in a set of things that might be described as "bootstrapping trust".
For example:
Say I want to compute some expensive function f on an input x. I have access to a computer C that can compute f; it gives me a result r. But I don't fully trust C - it might be maliciously programmed to tell me a wrong answer. In some cases, I can require that C produce a proof that f(x) = r that I can easily check. In others, I can't. Which cases are which?
A partial answer to this question is "the complexity class NP". But in practice this isn't really satisfying. I have to make some assumptions about what tools are available that I do trust.
Maybe I trust simple mathematical facts (and I think I even trust that serious mathematics and theoretical computer science track truth really well). I also trust my own senses and memory, to a nontrivial extent. Reaching much beyond that is starting to feel iffy. For example, I might not (yet) have a computer of my own that I trust to help me with the verification. What kinds of proof can I accept with the limitations I've chosen? And how can I use those trustworthy proofs to bootstrap other trusted tools?
Other problems in this bucket include "How can we have trustworthy evidence - say videos - in a world with nearly perfect generative models?" and a bunch of subquestions of "Does debate scale as an AI alignment strategy?"
This class of questions feels like an interesting lens on some things that are relevant to some sorts of AI alignment work such as debate and interpretability. It's also obviously related to some parts of information security and cryptography.
"Bootstrapping trust" is basically just a restatement of the whole problem. It's not exactly that I think this is a good way to decide how to direct AI alignment effort; I just notice that it seems somehow like a "fresh" way of viewing things.
IT security auditing; e.g. https://safetag.org/guide/
"Postmortem culture" from the Google SRE book: https://sre.google/sre-book/postmortem-culture/
This book has some other sections that are also about evaluation, but this chapter is possibly my favorite chapter from any corporate handbook.
Two that are focused on critique rather than evaluation per se:
- "the critical response process" is about useful critique in the arts: https://lizlerman.com/critical-response-process/
- "best practices for code review": https://smartbear.com/learn/code-review/best-practices-for-peer-code-review/
If I got to pick the moral of today's Petrov day incident, it would be something like "being trustworthy requires that you be more difficult to trick than it would be worth", and I think very few people reliably live up to this standard.
Beth Barnes notices: Rationalists seem to use the word "actually" a lot more than the typical English speaker; it seems like the word "really" means basically the same thing.
We wrote a quick script, and the words "actually" and "really" occur about equally often on LessWrong, while Google Trends suggests that "really" is ~3x more common in search volume. SSC has ~2/3 as many "actually"s as "really"s.
What's up with this? Should we stop?
San Francisco's mayor, London Breed, declared a state of emergency in the city on February 25th, and it seems like she was concerned about the disease (and specifically ICU capacity) as early as January.
I don't know what actions the mayor's office actually took during this time, but it seems like she was at least aware and concerned well ahead of most other politicians.
darn - I've been playing it on my old ipad for a long time
Recently I tried to use Google to learn about the structure of the human nasal cavity & sinuses, and it seems to me that somehow medical illustrators haven't talked much to mechanical draftspeople. Just about every medical illustration I could find tried to use colors to indicate structure, and only gave a side-view (or occasionally a front view) of the region. In almost none of the illustrations was it clear which parts of your nasal cavity and sinuses are split down the middle of your head, vs joined together. I still feel pretty in-the-dark about it.
In drafting, you express 3d figures by drawing a set of multiple projections: Typically, you give a top view, a front view, and a side view (though other views, including cross-sections and arbitrary isometric perspective, may be useful or necessary). This lets you give enough detail that a (practiced) viewer can reconstruct a good mental model of the object, so that they can (for example) use their machine shop to produce the object out of raw material.
There's a pretty fun puzzle game that lets you practice this skill called ".projekt"; there are probably lots more.
It is possible to both rinse your phone and put copper tape on it.
Yeah, you're right that I imputed a particular mechanism that isn't supported by the Wikipedia page - thanks for pointing that out. I do still think that the ions-getting-on-things mechanism is part of the story, mostly because the reduction sizes are really large. This could indicate either (a) that most microbes end up on surfaces first via touch surfaces, and spread from there, or (b) that copper ends up on nearby surfaces. Or some of both.
In this particular case, though, I think it's quite likely (because I've seen my hands turn a bit blue) that in fact copper and copper oxides are getting on my hands as a result of the tape.
Oh, whoops, I somehow misread your original post ("shave" was edited to "have" in my brain)
Another random thought: wearing gloves is probably not a great idea in the default case, but if you wear gloves and then replace them, it seems like that's probably about as good as washing your hands or using hand sanitizer (and might be easier to do often when sitting in your seat on the plane; it might also dry out your hands less)
Another thing you might want to bring: swimming or safety goggles. Iiuc, it's possible for viruses to spread via your conjunctivae (although this is probably a much smaller effect than transmission via nose or mouth).
Re facial hair: it's recommended not to have facial hair when wearing a face mask, because it makes the seal weaker. Do you think the protective effect is larger than that effect?
You can buy bottles for arbitrary gels, and then put hand sanitizer in those bottles.
A thing I probably haven't thought enough about is, "how much this will impact your rate of copper ingestion, and is that very bad?" My guess is that this is less important than the effects on infectious disease; it seems like it would need to increase your copper consumption by 100x in order to produce major negative health effects (https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/toxprofiles/tp132-c2.pdf). I may try to be virtuous and do a fermi on this later but also I'd welcome someone else trying to do it.
Edited to add:
The most obvious effect of having too much copper is gastrointestinal distress. So if you try this and have stomach problems, maybe stop.
My plan is to use a reusable p100 mask, with copper tape on the structural components, hopefully forming a barrier between the external filters/valves and the internal surfaces, and then to wash my hands before / after wearing it. No idea whether this will be any good, but it seemed more workable / less potentially blameworthy than acquiring disposable masks in a shortage.
Recommendation: cover the back of your smartphone in copper tape.
Reasoning: in addition to the reasoning for putting copper on all commonly touched surfaces, your phone is an especially good choice because of the "copper halo effect", in which copper ions move from copper surfaces to nearby surfaces (like, say, your hands), leaving them much less hospitable to microbes. [Edit: As MalcolmOcean points out, this mechanism for the halo effect isn't supported by the Wikipedia page below. I made a leap to this explanation without realizing it. That said, I do think that copper (and copper oxides) will get on your hands as a result of this tape, partly because I've seen my hands turning a bit blue.]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimicrobial_copper-alloy_touch_surfaces
A downside is that your hands may turn slightly blue. [Also: See the comment below about uncertainty about how much copper you'll eat as a result of this; tldr: I don't know but I think it's probably fine]
[This is a signal boost for Lady Jade Beacham's response to Connor_Flexman, but the idea was originally introduced to me by James Payor]