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Dirichlet-to-Neumann's Shortform 2022-12-05T00:29:22.648Z

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Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on The Incredible Fentanyl-Detecting Machine · 2024-08-01T20:26:39.001Z · LW · GW

You can use the Dirichlet-to-Neumann operator associated with an unknown elliptic operator to reconstruct the coefficient of the operator and consequently the structure of the inside of the domain. It's a problem proposed by Calderon and is well understood for the Laplacian. Good luck with the Stokes operator tomorrow though.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on I would have shit in that alley, too · 2024-07-07T15:20:53.022Z · LW · GW

I've often heard say, among charities people who work with homeless people, that you need as long to get out of the street than you spent living in the street.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on LLM Generality is a Timeline Crux · 2024-07-03T13:09:40.758Z · LW · GW

When world chess champion Anand won arguably his best and most creative game, with black, against Aronian, he said in an interview afterward "yeah it's no big deal the position was the same as in [slightly famous game from 100 years ago]".

Of course the similarity is only visible for genius chess players.

So maybe pattern matching and novel thinking are, in fact, the same thing.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On Not Pulling The Ladder Up Behind You · 2024-05-13T18:54:55.630Z · LW · GW

On the politics part : one thing I like very much with the Roman republic system was the concept of the "cursus honorum". Basically if you wanted to go for a politician career you had to start at the bottom, get elected to a first position, do well, get elected to something more prestigious, etc. And it worked very well - a significant part of Roman success was that their government (and generals) were way better than competing powers, in this was mainly due to having a lot of experienced, competent politicians and generals with somewhat well aligned incentives.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Thoughts on seed oil · 2024-05-12T17:10:09.990Z · LW · GW

That really depends of which part of France you are talking about. Provence uses mostly olive oil. In the South West they often use duck fat.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Thoughts on seed oil · 2024-04-22T20:55:34.737Z · LW · GW

French are also apparently slightly less obese than their neighbours, the difference is not only with the US.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Making every researcher seek grants is a broken model · 2024-01-27T09:21:36.570Z · LW · GW

That used to be the French model, which imo kick way above its (abysmal) low funding.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On the Contrary, Steelmanning Is Normal; ITT-Passing Is Niche · 2024-01-12T05:12:36.459Z · LW · GW

Steelmanning is about finding the truth, ITT is about convincing someone in a debate. Different aims.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on What makes teaching math special · 2023-12-18T17:01:31.931Z · LW · GW

There's a big gap between "you have to complete the task in exactly this way" and "mistake is a mistake, only the end result count".

I routinely gives full marks if the student made a small computation mistake but the reasoning is correct. My colleagues tend to be less lenient but follow the same principle. I always give full grade to correct reasoning even if it is not the method seen in class (but I quite insistently warn my students that they should not complain if they make mistakes using a different method).

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on What makes teaching math special · 2023-12-18T12:42:18.353Z · LW · GW

I do exactly what you describe with my students, but sadly with extremely limited results.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on What makes teaching math special · 2023-12-17T22:12:40.089Z · LW · GW

"conveniently ignores the fact that the kids who didn't have a problem with the lecture were the ones who already knew all of that from some other source."

This is definitely not true in general and probably a rare case. N=1 of course, but I never had problems with maths lectures (or any other lectures) and I never was in the situation of knowing all of the maths before the lecture (I usually knew history and physics lessons in advance though). And it's the same thing with my current students : even the best ones are clearly unfamiliar with the material I cover.

I think the lesswrong crowd has in general a very unusual experience with both school and maths, even compared to the average gifted maths student. Beware of the typical mind fallacy.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on What makes teaching math special · 2023-12-17T21:04:06.709Z · LW · GW

Upvoted because it's a good intro discussion to a problem that I am personally involved with (as a maths teacher). But my personal experience is that what makes a good maths curriculum is much more complicated than that. In particular I'm pretty certain now that different students have such wildly different needs that any attempt at (universal) standardisation is doomed to fail (of course some curriculum are still better than others...).

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Pope Francis shares thoughts on responsible AI development · 2023-12-16T13:55:01.143Z · LW · GW

Speaking as a Catholic, this won't have much impact but mostly because the Catholic Church as a whole is already extremely wary about AI. It's good that it is explicitly written at the highest level though (note that what you feel is vague is just Vatican-speak).

However there is still no understanding about how powerful new AI models will be. In particular Catholics in general are skeptical about the possibility of AGI (mainly for philosophical/theological reasons). Their concerns will side more with AI-ethic rather than AI-alignment, but they will be natural allies for any "pause" or "slow-down" movement.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Pope Francis shares thoughts on responsible AI development · 2023-12-16T13:43:23.166Z · LW · GW

The pope has advisors. Some may even be young !

The Catholic Church has a long intellectual tradition even if it's very different from the one on lesswrong, and it has always been wary of potential misuses of new technologies. So nothing really surprising here for those who are used to Vatican-speak.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on [deleted post] 2023-11-17T22:41:38.469Z

I've remarked that I've recently begin to strong upvote more and I think it's a bad habit. How often would you say you upvote vs strong upvote?

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on When did Eliezer Yudkowsky change his mind about neural networks? · 2023-11-14T09:27:34.858Z · LW · GW

In retrospect Alpha0 was really the wake up call for me, not because it was so strong at chess but because it looked so human playing chess.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Suggestions for chess puzzles · 2023-11-13T15:51:54.049Z · LW · GW

What you are looking for are "studies", which are generally in the form of "white to play and win" or "white to play and draw", and requires to find a sequence of moves forcing a winning (or drawn) position, but without going to the mate.

Most are devilishly hard though. I expect 2000 elo players to have a hard time with your average study (but in your experimental set-up the advisors could just look up the solution).

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Shortform · 2023-11-11T10:24:08.268Z · LW · GW

Works with most crimes tbh.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Concrete positive visions for a future without AGI · 2023-11-08T14:58:17.641Z · LW · GW

I think it's weird that such prominent figures of the rationalist scene have such grim visions of the future. Where did technoptimism go ? They look more like Catholic conservatives...

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On Overhangs and Technological Change · 2023-11-07T23:56:46.540Z · LW · GW

That, but getting your army from mostly melee to mostly range and solving your operational problems helps a lot too.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on [deleted post] 2023-11-06T20:35:34.584Z

I mean that AGI and autonomous cars are orthogonal problems, especially because autonomous car requires solving engineering issues (which have been discussed by other commentators) which are different from the software issues. It's quite usual here on less wrong to handwave the engineering away once the theoretical problem is solved.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Genetic fitness is a measure of selection strength, not the selection target · 2023-11-06T20:18:39.877Z · LW · GW

Some animals species are able to adopt contraception-like practices too. For example birds of preys typically let some of their offsprings die of hunger when preys are space.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On Overhangs and Technological Change · 2023-11-06T19:29:39.276Z · LW · GW

Note, though, that agrarian Eurasians empires ended up winning their 1000 thousand years struggle against the steppe peoples.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On Overhangs and Technological Change · 2023-11-06T19:21:36.209Z · LW · GW

No, because the events which led to the unification of the Mongol tribes by Gengis Khan were highly contingent.

However, the military power overhang of the steppe peoples vs agrarian states should have been obvious for anyone since both the Huns and the Turks did the same thing centuries before.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on [deleted post] 2023-11-06T19:00:00.137Z

As usual you fall onto the trap of neglecting the engineering and social organisation problems and the time required to solve them. We don't need AGI for autonomous car, it will just take time.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality · 2023-11-04T13:26:41.201Z · LW · GW

High levels GPUs are needed for basically anything mundane today. No need to bring in AGI worries to make it a strategic ressource.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Saying the quiet part out loud: trading off x-risk for personal immortality · 2023-11-04T12:35:20.621Z · LW · GW

Yet human routinely sacrifice their own lives for the good of other (see : firefighters, soldiers, high mountain emergency rescuers, etc.). The X-risk argument is more abstract but basically the same.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Propaganda or Science: A Look at Open Source AI and Bioterrorism Risk · 2023-11-04T11:16:30.274Z · LW · GW

Less wrong has imo a consistent bias toward thinking only ideas/theory are important and that the dirty (and lengthy) work of actual engineering will just sort itself out.

For a community that prides itself on empirical evidence it's rather ironic.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Lying to chess players for alignment · 2023-10-27T14:19:05.448Z · LW · GW

I'd be happy to play any of the A, B and C roles.

I'm a around 1850 elo FIDE, about 2000-2100 on lichess. I play a couple of blitz games daily.

I'd be willing to play at almost any cadence and have a lot of free time. I actually live in France, so a one-move-per-day game with someone living in the US would probably be ideal. Live sessions can be programmed from 16 GMT to 23 GMT on weekdays, and from 7 GMT to 23 GMT on weekends.

As I said I would be happy to play any role. I think it would be more interesting if the lower player is actually not a total beginner - total beginners are probably not hard to deceive. A decent club player with advisors about 300-500 elo higher would be best imo. And if we can experiment at many different elo levels, even better.

Registering a prediction: assuming the elo difference stay constant, better players will be much more difficult to deceive. And a GM would consistently pick up who is lying if you could rope up Caruana, Carlsen and Ding to do the experiment.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Things I Learned by Spending Five Thousand Hours In Non-EA Charities · 2023-06-12T13:17:09.220Z · LW · GW

Well the Good Samaritan parable is the most well known, most important and most striking parable in the Gospels on the very specific topic of who you should help and how you should help. It's not a wonder it's a recurring name for Christian inspired charities.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on [deleted post] 2023-03-13T17:34:03.546Z

DeepL is generally better than Google translate anyway.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Religion is Good, Actually · 2023-02-09T22:30:07.294Z · LW · GW

Most western polytheistic religion (Roman, Greek...). Judaism*. Islam*. Buddhism. In fact Christianism with its overemphasized focus on dogmas is somewhat an exception.

  • I'm not saying those religions don't include beliefs but that they are not defined by those beliefs.
Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Small Go Boards · 2023-01-21T17:22:49.437Z · LW · GW

I would find the shiny look rather annoying, wouldn't a matte finish be better ? 

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Sail Over Mountains of ICE... · 2023-01-11T14:53:00.066Z · LW · GW

I kind of feel like the moment is not ideal for a huge development project in collaboration between Finland, Russia, the US and Canada.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Childhood Roundup #1 · 2023-01-07T20:44:04.809Z · LW · GW

Genuine question : how much your opinion on college and higher education are due to the American system being insane ?

Because for example in France university/college is mostly free. Nobody get into debt to pay for tuition. How much would it change your opinion?

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Covid 1/5/23: Various XBB Takes · 2023-01-05T20:19:18.929Z · LW · GW

Concerning MAID, if past trend are to be believed, the most terrifying thing is that these numbers will only get worse.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Would it be good or bad for the US military to get involved in AI risk? · 2023-01-02T10:12:07.471Z · LW · GW

To be honest I'm just as afraid of aligned AGI as of unaligned AGI. An AGI aligned with the values of the PRC seems like a nightmare. If it's aligned with the US army it's only really bad, and Yudkowsky dath illan is not exactly the world I want to live in either...

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on It Takes Two Paracetamol? · 2022-12-09T13:14:07.399Z · LW · GW

1 000 mg is the standard dose in France, with 500mg being used almost only for children.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Dirichlet-to-Neumann's Shortform · 2022-12-05T07:34:11.567Z · LW · GW

Sadly both my time and capacity are limited to "try some prompts around to get a feeling of what the results look like." I may do more if the results are actually interesting.

One of the first tasks I tested was actually to write essays in English with a prompt in French, which it did very well, I would say better than when asked for an essay in French. I've not looked at the inverse task though (prompt in English for essay in French).

I'll probably translate the prompts through DeepL with a bit of supervision and analyse the results using a thoroughly scientific "my gut feeling" with maybe some added "my mother's expertise".

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Dirichlet-to-Neumann's Shortform · 2022-12-05T00:29:23.243Z · LW · GW

I'd like to make a quite systematic comparison of openAi's chatbot performances in French and English. After a couple days trying things I feel like it is much weaker in French - which seems logical as it has much less data in French. I would like to explore that theory, so if you have interesting prompts you would like me to test let me know !

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on How difficult is it for countries to change their school curriculum? · 2022-12-03T23:10:16.449Z · LW · GW

Training teachers is probably the main physical cost (it was a big problem for computer science in France), but the main social obstacle is the opposition to change from basically everyone : parents don't want their children to learn different things than they did, teachers don't want to lose curriculum hours to make room for new subjects, and administrators don't want to risk making anything new.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Is school good or bad? · 2022-12-03T16:36:27.055Z · LW · GW

Epistemic status : n=1.
I very much enjoyed my school years. I learned a lot on subject that turned out to be actually useful for me like maths and English, and on subject that were enjoyable to me (basically everything else). I would definitely have learned much less without the light coercion of the school system, and would have been overall less happy (In later years at college level where I was very much my own master I learned less and was less happy ; in my three years of "classe prépa", the most intensive years of my studies I learned the most and was overall happier). In particular I would not have learned as much in STEM fields and definitely would not have become a mathematicians had I been home schooled or not schooled. 

Now obviously this is n=1, but beware of the typical mind fallacy. One size fit all school means it is enjoyable for some and soul-sucking for others ; one size fit all no school would be exactly the same.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day · 2022-12-02T23:58:36.068Z · LW · GW

I tried to make it play chess by asking for specific moves in opening theory. I chose a fairly rare line I'm particularly fond off (which in hindsight was a bad choice, I should have sticked with the Najdorf). It could identify the line but not give any theoretical move and reverted to non-sense almost right away.

Interestingly it could not give heuristic commentary either ("what are the typical plans for black in the Bronstein-Larsen variation of the Caro-Kann defense").

But I got it easily to play a game by... just asking"let's play a chess game". It could not play good or even coherent moves though. [Edit : I tried again. Weirdly it refused to play the first time but agreed after I cleared the chat and asked again (with the same prompt!)]

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On the Diplomacy AI · 2022-11-28T21:44:48.031Z · LW · GW

My reaction has nothing to do with "allowing AI to deceive" and everything with "this is a striking example of AI reaching better than average human level at a game that integrates many different core capacities of general intelligences such has natural language, cooperation, bargaining, planning, etc.

Or too put it an other way : for the profane it is easy to think of GPT-3 or deepL or Dall-e as tools, but Cicero will feels more agentic to them.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on On the Diplomacy AI · 2022-11-28T16:14:18.554Z · LW · GW

While I don't think anyone aware of AI alignment issues should really update a lot because of Cicero, I've found this particular piece of news to be quite effective at making unaware people update toward "AI is scary".

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Ukraine and the Crimea Question · 2022-10-28T20:12:00.159Z · LW · GW

Musk proposition gives Ukraine no significant security guarantees AND forces it to lose territory. It's basically a total win for Russia, and an excellent incentive to try again in 10 years (or maybe vs. the Baltic states or Georgia).

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on The Futility of Religion · 2022-10-26T18:45:18.363Z · LW · GW

I downvoted because it's not a particularly interesting critique of religion (contrary to, say, Eliezer's https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR/religion-s-claim-to-be-non-disprovable which is really solid. The paragraph on free will is weak because it fails to engage with what the other side is saying (yet alone refute a steel man version)

Besides, making a big post on lesswrong about how religion is silly is just preaching to the choir - in the same way that if you really want to make a post on why AI is dangerous, don't do it if you don't have something new to bring to the debate.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on DeepMind on Stratego, an imperfect information game · 2022-10-26T18:32:05.396Z · LW · GW

It's certainly interesting although to be honest I'm pretty confident the top human stratego players are nowhere near the top achievable level for a human player (contrasting with games like chess or StarCraft).

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Why Weren't Hot Air Balloons Invented Sooner? · 2022-10-19T09:43:55.744Z · LW · GW

I'm pretty sure no ballistic weapon until well into the 20th century was a significant threat to a balloon flying at more than a few hundred meters above ground.

Comment by Dirichlet-to-Neumann on Why Weren't Hot Air Balloons Invented Sooner? · 2022-10-18T10:49:25.079Z · LW · GW

Military uses of a hot balloon are more "create a small mountain to climb up" and less "satellite imagery before satellite". They did not revolutionise warfare at the tactical or operational level, and even less at the strategical level.