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This hardly seems an argument against the one in the shortform, namely
Neither a physicalist nor a functionalist theory of consciousness can reasonably justify a number like this. Shrimp have 5 orders of magnitude fewer neurons than humans, so whether suffering is the result of a physical process or an information processing one, this implies that shrimp neurons do 4 orders of magnitude more of this process per second than human neurons. The authors get around this by refusing to stake themselves on any theory of consciousness.
If the original authors never thought of this that seems on them.
but most of the population will just succumb to the pressure. Okay Microsoft, if you insist that I use Edge, I will; if you insist that I use Bing, I will; if you insist that I have MSN as my starting web page, I will
Only about 5% of people use edge, with 66% chrome and 17% safari. Bing is similar, with 4% marketshare and Google having about 90%. I don’t know the number with MSN as their starting page (my parents had this), but I’d guess its also lower than you expect. I think you over-estimate the impact of nudge economics
That's an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements[1] and the size of those advancements.
Edit: But also this wouldn't show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn't know what the field looks like now.
Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously. ↩︎
Claude says its a gray area when I ask, since this isn’t asking for the journalist to make a general change to the story or present Ben or the subject in a particular light.
This doesn’t seem to address the question, which was why do people believe there is a physics slow-down in the first place.
(you also may want to look into other ways of improving your conscientiousness if you're struggling with that. Things like todo systems, or daily planners, or simply regularly trying hard things)
It seems reasonable to mention that I know of many who have started doing "spells" like this, with a rationalized "oh I'm just hypnotizing myself, I don't actually believe in magic" framing who then start to go off the deep-end and start actually believing in magic.
That's not to say this happens in every case or even in most cases. Its also not to say that hypnotizing yourself can't be useful sometimes. But it is to say that if you find this tempting to do because you really like the idea of magic existing in real life, I suggest you re-read some parts of the sequences.
I'm not sure what the type signature of is, or what it means to "not take into account 's simulation"
I know you know about logical decision theory, and I know you know its not formalized, and I'm not going to be able to formalize it in a LessWrong comment, so I'm not sure what you want me to say here. Do you reject the idea of logical counterfactuals? Do you not see how they could be used here?
I think you've misunderstood me entirely. Usually in a decision problem, we assume the agent has a perfectly true world model, and we assume that it's in a particular situation (e.g. with omega and knowing how omega will react to different actions). But in reality, an agent has to learn which kind of world its in using an inductor. That's all I meant by "get its beliefs".
Because we're talking about priors and their influence, all of this is happening inside the agent's brain. The agent is going about daily life, and thinks "hm, maybe there is an evil demon simulating me who will give me -101010^10 utility if I don't do what they want for my next action". I don't see why this is obviously ill-defined without further specification of the training setup.
Can you give something specific? It seems like pretty much every statement has a footnote grounding the relevant high-level claim in low-level indicators, and in cases where that's not the case, those predictions often seem clear derivatives of precise claims in eg their compute forecast
I mean its not like they shy away from concrete predictions. Eg their first prediction is
We forecast that mid-2025 agents will score 85% on SWEBench-Verified.
Edit: oh wait nevermind their first prediction is actually
Specifically, we forecast that they score 65% on the OSWorld benchmark of basic computer tasks (compared to 38% for Operator and 70% for a typical skilled non-expert human).
The closing off of China after/during Tinamen square I don't think happened after a transition of power, though I could be mis-remembering. See also the one-child policy, which I also don't think happened during a power transition (allowed for 2 children in 2015, then removed all limits in 2021, while Xi came to power in 2012).
I agree the zero-covid policy change ended up being slow. I don't know why it was slow though, I know a popular narrative is that the regime didn't want to lose face, but one fact about China is the reason why many decisions are made is highly obscured. It seems entirely possible to me there were groups (possibly consisting of Xi himself) who believed zero-covid was smart. I don't know much about this though.
I will also say this is one example of china being abnormally slow of many examples of them being abnormally fast, and I think the abnormally fast examples win out overall.
Mao is kind of an exception, but thats because he had so much power that it was impossible to challenge his authority even when he messed up
Ish? The reason he pursued the cultural revolution was because people were starting to question his power, after the great leap forward, but yeah he could be an outlier. I do think that many autocracies are governed by charismatic & powerful leaders though, so not that much an outlier.
Let be an agent which can be instantiated in a much simpler world and has different goals from our limited Bayesian agent . We say is malign with respect to if where is the "real" world and is the world where has decided to simulate all of 's observations for the purpose of trying to invade their prior.
Now what influences ? Well will only simulate all of 's observations if it expects this will give it some influence over . Let be an unformalized logical counterfactual operation that could make.
Then is maximal when takes into account 's simulation, and when doesn't take into account 's simulation. In particular, if is a logical counterfactual which doesn't take 's simulation into account, then
So the way in which the agent "gets its beliefs" about the structure of the decision theory problem is via these logical-counterfactual-conditional operations, same as in causal decision theory, and same as in evidential decision theory.
no, I am not going to do what the evil super-simple-simulators want me to do because they will try to invade my prior iff (I would act like they have invaded my prior iff they invade my prior)
This seems a pretty big backpedal from "I expect this to start not happening right away."
My world model would have a loose model of myself in it, and this will change which worlds I'm more or less likely to be found in. For example, a logical decision theorist, trying to model omega, will have very low probability that omega has predicted it will two box.
Autarchies, including China, seem more likely to reconfigure their entire economic and social systems overnight than democracies like the US, so this seems false.
Oh my point wasn't against solomonoff in general, maybe more crisply, my clam is different decision theories will find different "pathologies" in the solomonoff prior, and in particular for causal and evidential decision theorists, I could totally buy the misaligned prior bit, and I could totally buy, if formalized, the whole thing rests on the interaction between bad decision theory and solomonoff.
I think I mostly agree with this, I think things possibly get more complicated when you throw decision theory into the mix. I think it unlikely I'm being adversarially simulated in part. I could believe that such malign prior problems are actually decision theory problems much more than epistemic problems. Eg "no, I am not going to do what the evil super-simple-simulators want me to do because they will try to invade my prior iff (I would act like they have invaded my prior iff they invade my prior)".
I'm curious about what neuroscience evidence you're thinking of which supports that model.
I'm curious which model it was. Can you post some quotes? Especially after the mask dropped?
That is the wrong question to ask. By their nature the result of experiments is unknown. The bar is whether or not in expectation and on the margin do they provide positive externalities, and the answer is clearly yes.
Note the error bars in the original
After that I was writing shorter posts but without long context the things I write are very counterintuitive. So they got ruined)
This sounds like a rationalization. It seems much more likely the ideas just aren't that high quality if you need a whole hour for a single argument that couldn't possibly be broken up into smaller pieces that don't suck.
Edit: Since if the long post is disliked, you can say "well they just didn't read it", and if the short post is disliked you can say "well it just sucks because its small". Meanwhile, it should in fact be pretty surprising you don't have any interesting or novel or useful insights in your whole 40 minute post which can't be explained in a reasonable length of blog post time.
usually if you randomly get a downvote early instead of an upvote, so your post has “-1” karma now, then no one else will open or read it
I will say that I often do read -1 downvoted posts, I will also say that much of the time it is deserved, despite how noisy a signal it may be.
Some of my articles take 40 minutes to read, so it can be anything, downvotes give me zero information and just demotivate more and more.
I think you should try writing shorter posts. Both for your sake (so you get more targeted information), and for the readers' sake.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alkanes-mars there are alkanes -- big organic molecules -- on Mars. these can be produced by abiotic processes, but usually that makes shorter chains than these. so....life? We Shall See.
Very exciting! I think the biggest "loophole" here is probably that they used a novel technique for detection, maybe if we used that technique more we would have to update the view that such big molecules are so unlikely to be produced non-biologically.
I'm a bit skeptical, there's a reasonable amount of passed-down wisdom I've heard claiming (I think justifiably) that
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If you write messy code, and say "I'll clean it later" you probably won't. So insofar as you eventually want to discover something others build upon, you should write it clean from the start.
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Clean code leads to easier extensibility, which seems pretty important eg if you want to try a bunch of different small variations on the same experiment.
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Clean code decreases the number of bugs and the time spent debugging. This seems especially useful insofar as you are trying to rule-out hypotheses with high confidence, or prove hypotheses with high confidence.
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Generally (this may be double-counting 2 and 3), paradoxically, clean code is faster rather than dirty code.
You say you came from a more SWE based paradigm though, so you probably know all this already.
Ok first, when naming things I think you should do everything you can to not use double-negatives. So you should say "gym average" or "no gym average". Its shorter, and much less confusing.
Second, I'm still confused. Translating what you said, we'd have "no gym removed average" -> "gym average" (since you remove everyone who doesn't go to the gym meaning the only people remaining go to the gym), and "gym removed average" -> "no gym average" (since we're removing everyone who goes to the gym meaning the only remaining people don't go to the gym).
Therefore we have,
gym average = no gym removed average < gym removed average = no gym average
So it looks like the gym doesn't help, since those who don't go to the gym have a higher average number of pushups they can do than those who go to the gym.
Note: You can verify this is the case by filtering for male respondents with male partners and female respondents with female partners in the survey data
I think the math works out to be that the variation is much more extreme when you get to much more extreme probabilities. Going from 4% to 8% is 2x profits, but going from 50% to 58% is only 1.16x profits.
This seems likely to depend on your preferred style of research, so what is your preferred style of research?
And then if we say the bottleneck to meritocracy is mostly c rather than a or b, then in fact it seems like our society is absolutely obsessed with making our institutions highly accessible to as broad a pool of talent as possible. There are people who make a whole career out of just advocating for equality.
I work at GDM so obviously take that into account here, but in my internal conversations about external benchmarks we take cheating very seriously -- we don't want eval data to leak into training data, and have multiple lines of defense to keep that from happening.
What do you mean by "we"? Do you work on the pretraining team, talk directly with the pretraining team, are just aware of the methods the pretraining team uses, or some other thing?
More to the point, I haven't seen people try to scale those things either. The closest might be something like TripleByte? Or headhunting companies? Certainly when I think of a typical (or 95th-99th percentile) "person who says they care a lot about meritocracy" I'm not imagining a recruiter, or someone in charge of such a firm. Are you?
I think much of venture capital is trying to scale this thing, and as you said they don't use the framework you use. The philosophy there is much more oriented towards making sure nobody falls beneath the cracks. Provide the opportunity, then let the market allocate the credit.
That is, the way to scale meritocracy turns out to be maximizing c rather than the other considerations you listed, on current margins.
Also this conclusion is highly dependent on you, who has thought about this topic for all of 10 minutes, out-thinking the hypothetical people who are actually serious about meritocracy. For example perhaps they do more one-on-one talent scouting or funding, which is indeed very very common and seems to be much more in-demand than psychometric evaluations.
Given that ~ no one really does this, I conclude that very few people are serious about moving towards a meritocracy.
The field you should look at I think is Industrial and Organizational Psychology, as well as the classic Item Response Theory.
I suspect the vast majority of that sort of name-calling is much more politically motivated than based on not seeing the right slogans. For example if you go to Pause AI's website the first thing you see is a big, bold
and AI pause advocates are constantly arguing "no, we don't actually believe that" to the people who call them "luddites", but I have never actually seen anyone change their mind based on such an argument.
I don't think Pause AI's current bottleneck is people being pro AI in general not wanting to join (but of course I could be wrong). Most people are just against AI, and Pause AI's current strategy is to make them care enough about the issue to use their feet, while also telling them "its much much worse than you would've imagined bro".
That's a whole seven words!, most of which are a whole three syllables! There is no way a motto like that catches on.
An effect I noticed: Going through Aella's correlation matrix (with poorly labeled columns sadly), a feature which strongly correlates with the length of a relationship is codependency. Plotting question 20. "The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner's" (li0toxk) assuming that's what "codependency" refers to
The shaded region is a 95% posterior estimate for the mean of the distribution conditioned on the time-range (every 2 years) and cis-male respondents, with prior .
Note also that codependency and sex satisfaction are basically uncorrelated
This shouldn't be that surprising. Of course the longer two people are together the more their long term routines will be caught up with each other. But also this seems like a very reasonable candidate for why people will stick together even without a good sex life.
This seems right as a criticism, but this seems better placed on the EA forum. I can't remember the last time I heard anyone talking about ITN on LessWrong. There are many considerations ITN leaves out, which should be unsurprising given how simplified it is.
So, the recipe for making a broken science you can't trust is
- The public cares a lot about answers to questions that fall within the science's domain.
- The science currently has no good attack angles on those questions.
To return to LessWrong's favorite topic, this doesn't bode well for alignment.
I understand the argument, I think I buy a limited version of it (and also want to acknowledge that it is very clever and I do like it), but I also don't think this can explain the magnitude of the difference between the different fields. If we go back and ask "what was physics' original goal?" we end up with "to explain how the heavens move, and the path that objects travel", and this has basically been solved. Physicists didn't substitute this for something easier. The next big problem was to explain heat & electricity, and that was solved. Then the internals of the atom, and the paradox of a fixed speed of light. And those were solved.
I think maybe your argument holds for individual researchers. Individual education researchers are perhaps more constrained in what their colleagues will be interested in than individual physicists (though even that I'm somewhat doubtful of, maybe less doubtful on the scale of labs). But it seems to definitely break down when comparing the two fields against each other. Then, physics clearly has a very good track record of asking questions and then solving them extraordinarily well.
I will also note that Aella's relationships data is public, and has the following questions:
1. Your age? (rkkox57)
2. Which category fits you best? (4790ydl)
3. In a world where your partner was fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would you be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides your partner? (ao3mcdk)
4. In a world where you were fully aware and deeply okay with it, how much would *your partner* be interested in having sexual/romantic experiences with people besides you? (wcq3vrx)
5. To get a little more specific, how long have you been in a relationship with this person? (wqx272y)
6. Which category fits your partner best? (u9jccbo)
7. Are you married to your partner? (pfqs9ad)
8. Do you have children with your partner? (qgjf1nu)
9. Have you or your partner ever cheated on each other? (hhf9b8h)
10. On average, over the last six months, about how often do you watch porn or consume erotic content for the purposes of arousal? (vnw3xxz)
11. How often do you and your partner have a fight? (x6jw4sp)
12. "It’s hard to imagine being happy without this relationship." (6u0bje)
13. "I have no secrets from my partner" (bgassjt)
14. "If my partner and I ever split up, it would be a logistical nightmare (e.g., separating house, friends) (e1claef)
15. "If my relationship ended I would be absolutely devastated" (2ytl03s)
16. "I don't really worry about other attractive people gaining too much of my partner's affection" (61m55wv)
17. "I sometimes worry that my partner will leave me for someone better" (xkjzgym)
18. "My relationship is playful" (w2uykq1)
19. "My partner an I are politically aligned" (12ycrs5)
20. "We have compatible humor" (o9empfe)
21. "The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner's" (li0toxk)
22. "The passion in this relationship is deeply intense" (gwzrhth)
23. "I share the same hobbies with my partner" (89hl8ys)
24. "My relationship causes me grief or sorrow" (rm0dtr6)
25. "If we broke up, I think I could date a higher quality person than they could" (vh27ywp)
26. "In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea" (1y6wfih)
27. "I feel like I would still be a desirable mate even if my partner left me" (qboob7y)
28. "My partner and I are sexually compatible" (9nxbebp)
29. "I often feel jealousy in my relationship" (kfcicm9)
30. "I think this relationship will last for a very long time" (ob8595u)
31. "My partner enables me to learn and grow" (e2oy448)
32. "My partner doesn't excite me" (6fcm06c)
33. "My partner doesn't sexually fulfill me" (xxf5wfc)
34. "I rely on my partner for a sense of self worth" (j0nv7n9)
35. "My partner and I handle fights well" (brtsa94)
36. "I feel confident in my relationship's ability to withstand everything life has to throw at us" (p81ekto)
37. "I sometimes fear my partner" (a21v31h)
38. "I try to stay aware of my partner's potential infidelity" (5qbgizc)
39. "I share my thoughts and opinions with my partner" (6lwugp9)
40. "This relationship is good for me" (wko8n8m)
41. "My partner takes priority over everything else in my life" (2sslsr1)
42. "We respect each other" (c39vvrk)
43. "My partner is more concerned with being right than with getting along" (rlkw670)
44. "I am more needy than my partner" (f3or362)
45. "I feel emotionally safe with my partner" (or9gg0a)
46. "I'm satisfied with our sex life" (6g14ks)
47. "My partner physically desires me" (kh7ppyp)
48. "My partner and I feel comfortable explicitly discussing our relationship on a meta level" (jrzzb06)
49. "My partner knows all my sexual fantasies" (s3cgjd2)
50. "My partner and I are intellectually matched" (ku1vm67)
51. "I am careful to maintain a personal identity separate from my partner" (u5esujt)
52. "I'm worried I'm not good enough for my partner" (45rohqq)
53. "My partner judges me" (fr4mr4a)
54. Did you answer this survey honestly/for a real partner? (7bfie2v)
55. On average, over the last six months, about how often do you and your partner have sex? (n1iblql)
56. Is the partner you just answered for, your longest romantic relationship? (zjfk3cu)
which should allow you to test a lot of your candidate answers, for example your first 3 hypotheses could be answered by looking at these:
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- Do you have children with your partner? (qgjf1nu)
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- "If my partner and I ever split up, it would be a logistical nightmare (e.g., separating house, friends) (e1claef) or 21. "The long-term routines and structure of my life are intertwined with my partner's" (li0toxk)
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- "I feel like I would still be a desirable mate even if my partner left me" (qboob7y)
Historically attempts to curtail this right lead to really really dark places. Part of living in a society with rights and laws is that people will do bad things the legal system has no ability to prevent. And on net, that’s a good thing. See also.
An obvious answer you missed: Lacking a prenup, courts often rule in favor of the woman over the man in the case of a contested divorce.
I didn't say anything about temperature prediction, and I'd also like to see any other method (intuition based or otherwise) do better than the current best mathematical models here. It seems unlikely to me that the trends in that graph will continue arbitrarily far.
Thanks for the pointer to that paper, the abstract makes me think there's a sort of slow-acting self-reinforcing feedback loop between predictive error minimisation via improving modelling and via improving the economy itself.
Yeah, that was my claim.
Even more importantly, we only measured the AIs at software tasks and don't know what the trend is for other domains like math or law, it could be wildly different.
You probably mention this somewhere, but I'll ask here, are you currently researching whether these results hold for those other domains? I'm personally more interested about math than law.
It does not seem like this writer is aware of the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem. There are criticisms one can level against utility as a concept, but the central question ends up being which of those axioms do you disagree with and why? For example, Garabrant's Geometric Rationality is a great counter if you're looking for one.
Edit: I notice that all of your previous posts have been of this same format, and they all consistently receive negative karma. You should probably reconsider what you post to this forum.
The weather, or the behavior of any economy larger than village size, for example -- systems so chaotically interdependent that exact prediction is effectively impossible (not just in fact but in principle).
Flagging that those two examples seem false. The weather is chaotic, yes, and there's a sense in which the economy is anti-inductive, but modeling methods are advancing, and will likely find more loop-holes in chaos theory.
For example, in thermodynamics, temperature is non-chaotic while the precise kinetic energies and locations of all particles are. A reasonable candidate similarity in weather are hurricanes.
Similarly as our understanding of the economy advances it will get more efficient which means it will be easier to model. eg (note: I've only skimmed this paper). And definitely large economies are even more predictable than small villages, talk about not having a competitive market!
My model is that early on physics had very impressive & novel math, which attracted people who like math, who did more math largely with the constraint the math had to be trying to model something in the real world, which produced more impressive & novel math, which attracted more people who like math, etc etc, and this is the origin of the equilibrium.
Note a similar argument can be made for economics, though the nice math came much later on, and obviously was much less impactful than literally inventing calculus.