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I don't think the Elimination approach gives P(Heads|Awake) = 1/3 or P(Monday|Awake) = 2/3 in the Single Awakening problem. In that problem, there are 6 possibilities:
P(Heads&Monday) = 0.25
P(Heads&Tuesday) = 0.25
P(Tails&Monday&Woken) = 0.125
P(Tails&Monday&Sleeping) = 0.125
P(Tails&Tuesday&Woken) = 0.125
P(Tails&Tuesday&Sleeping) = 0.125
Therefore:
P(Heads|Awake)
= P(Heads&Monday) / (P(Heads&Monday) + P(Tails&Monday&Woken) + P(Tails&Tuesday&Woken))
= 0.5
And:
P(Monday|Awake)
= (P(Heads&Monday) + P(Tails&Monday&Woken)) / (P(Heads&Monday) + P(Tails&Monday&Woken) + P(Tails&Tuesday&Woken))
= 0.75
I also consider myself as someone who had—and still has—high hopes for rationality, and so I think it’s sad that we disagree, not on the object level, but on whether we can trust the community to faithfully report their beliefs. Sure, some of it may be political maneuvering, but I mostly think it’s political maneuvering of the form of—tailoring the words, metaphors, and style to a particular audience, and choosing to engage on particular issues, rather than outright lying about beliefs.
I don’t think I’m using “semantics” in a non-standard sense, but I may be using it in a more technical sense? I’m aware of certain terms which have different meanings inside of and outside of linguistics (such as “denotation”) and this may be one.
I owe you an apology; you’re right that you did not accuse me of violating norms, and I’m sorry for saying that you did. I only intended to draw parallels between your focus on the meta level and Zack’s focus on the meta level, and in my hurry I erred in painting you and him with the same brush.
I additionally want to clarify that I didn’t think you were accusing me of lying, but merely wanted preemptively close off some of the possible directions this conversation could go.
Thank you for providing those links! I did see some of them on his blog and skipped over them because I thought, based on the first paragraph or title, they were more intracommunity discourse. I have now read them all.
I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me. Of the rest, they are focused on issues which I don’t find particularly relevant to my own personal journey, and while I wish that Zack felt like he was able to discuss these issues openly, I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with him is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.
I know other people are interested in those things. I specifically phrased my previous post in an attempt to avoid arguing about what other people care about. I can neither defend nor explain their positions. Neither do I intend to dismiss or malign those preferences by labeling them semantics. That previous sentence is not to be read as a denial of ever labeling them semantics, but rather as a denial of thinking that semantics is anything to dismiss or malign. Semantics is a long and storied discipline on philosophy and linguistics. I took an entire college course on semantics. Nevertheless, I don’t find it particularly interesting.
I’ve read a human’s guide to words. I understand you cannot redefine reality by redefining words. I am trying to step past disagreement you and I might have regarding the definitions of words and figure out if we have disagreements about reality.
I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate. So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking. If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.
But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving? Tabooing the words “man” and “woman”, since what I mean by semantics is “which categories get which label”. I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.
What factual question is/was Zack trying to figure out? “Is a woman” or “is a man” are pure semantics, and if that’s all there is then… okay… but presumably there’s something else?
I think this post could be really good, and perhaps there should be an effort to make this post as good as it can be. Right now I think it has a number of issues.
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It's too short. It moves very quickly past the important technical details, trusting the user to pick them up. I think it would be better if it was a bit longer and luxuriated on the important technical bits.
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It is very physics-brained. Ideally we could get some math-literate non-physicists to go over this with help from a physicist to do a better job phrasing it in ways that are unfamiliar to non-physicists.
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It should be published somewhere without part 2. Part 2 is intracommunity discourse, Part 1 is a great explainer, and I'd love to be able to link to it without part 2 as a consideration.
There are distributions which won't approach a normal—Lévy distributions and Cauchy distributions are the most commonly known.
Yeah, to be clear I don't have any information to suggest that the above is happening—I don't work in EA circles—except for the fact that Ben said the EA ecosystem doesn't have defenses against this happening, and that is one of the defenses I expect to exist.
Yeah, this post makes me wonder if there are non-abusive employers in EA who are nevertheless enabling abusers by normalizing behavior that makes abuse popular. Employers who pay their employees months late without clarity on why and what the plan is to get people paid eventually. Employers who employ people without writing things down, like how much people will get paid and when. Employers who try to enforce non-disclosure of work culture and pay.
None of the things above are necessarily dealbreakers in the right context or environment, but when an employer does those things they are making it difficult to distinguish themself from an abusive employer, and also enabling abusive employers because they're not obviously doing something nonstandard. This is highlighted by:
I relatedly think that the EA ecosystem doesn’t have reliable defenses against such predators.
If EAs want to have defenses, against these predators, they have to act in such a way that the early red flags here (not paid on time, no contracts just verbal agreements) are actually serious red flags by having non-abusive employers categorically not engage in them, and having more established EA employees react in horror if they hear about this happening.
Find an area of the thing you want to do where quality matters to you less. Instead of trying to write the next great American novel, write fanfic[1]. Instead of trying to paint a masterpiece, buy a sketchbook and trace a bunch of stuff. Instead of trying to replace your dish-ware with handmade ceramics, see how many mugs you can make in an hour. Instead of trying to invent a new beautiful operating system in a new programming language, hack together a program for a one-off use case and then throw it away.
[1] not a diss to fanfic—but for me, at least, it's easier to not worry about my writing quality when I do so
I think an important point missing from the discussion on compute is training vs inference: you can totally get a state-of-the-art language model performing inference on a laptop.
This is a slight point in favor of Yudkowsky: thinking is cheap, finding the right algorithm (including weights) is expensive. Right now we're brute-forcing the discovery of this algorithm using a LOT of data, and maybe it's impossible to do any better than brute-forcing. (Well, the human brain can do it, but I'll ignore that.)
Could you run a LLM on a desktop from 2008? No. But, once the algorithm is "discovered" by a large computer it's being run on consumer hardware instead of supercomputers, and I think that points towards Yudkowsky's gesture at running AI on consumer hardware rather than Hanson's gesture at Watson and other programs run on supercomputers.
If there really is no better way to find AI minds than brute-forcing the training of billions of parameters on a trillion tokens, then that points in the direction of Hanson, but I don't really think that this would have been an important crux for either of them. (And I don't really think that there aren't more efficient ways of training.)
On the whole, I think this is more of a wash than a point for Hanson.
General principles of OSes and Networks is invaluable to basically everyone.
How programming languages, compilers, and interpreters work will help you master specific programming languages.
Hmm, no, I don't believe I use sex and gender interchangeably. Let's taboo those two terms.
I think that most people don't care about a person's chromosomes. When I inspect the way I use the words "sex" and "gender", I don't feel like either of them is a disguised query for that person's chromosomes.
I think that many people care about hormone balances. Testosterone and Estrogen change the way your body behaves, and the type of hormone a person's body naturally produces and whether they're suppressing that and/or augmenting with a different hormone is definitely relevant for sports and medicine.
I think that many people care about appearance. Most people's sexual attraction is keyed to whether a person looks a certain way. Examples include: Straight men being attracted to gay men in feminine clothing, masc lesbians and gay twinks accidentally hitting on each other or even making out without realizing they're not "technically" attracted to their gender, straight women being attracted to butch lesbians.
I think that many people care about "intent-to-fit-into-and-interact-with-the-world-as-a-specific-social-role", which is pretty hard for me to point at without the word gender. But our society does have two primary social roles, and committing to living in one social role is important to people. I think lots of people track who is in which social role and interact with those people in different ways.
It sounds like our disagreement is that you doubt that anyone cares about the "intent to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role", whereas in my experience lots of people care a lot about this.
I'm not really sure the Harvard thing is a good analogy? Consider the following phrases:
- I identify as a woman
- I identify as a person with XX chromosomes
- I identify as a Harvard Graduate
- I identify as a Bostonian
- I identify as an academic
- I identify as a Christian
- I identify as a lesbian Which of those identify phrases mean things? It's the ones which are about primarily social roles and not about physical fact. I think all of these are meaningful except the second and third.
Now, some of these could be lies, (I could say I'm an academic but not actually care about academics!) but they're not nonsensical.
Now, obviously, you'll tell me that the social role is the good-enough sorting mechanism and so we should discard it for better sorting mechanisms involving physical characteristics. That's pretty close to gender abolitionism, to be honest, and I don't really understand where you get off the following train:
Let me analyze an example you gave while my terms are tabooed: changing rooms. Our goal is to "avoid the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers". Obviously, if we look at all four categories I proposed above, (XX/XY, testosterone/estrogen, masculine appearance/feminine appearance, male-social-role/female-social-role), all four of them have approximately the same distribution of attraction to the opposite category. However, only one of them is directly visible to strangers in the dressing room—masculine appearance/feminine appearance. (We could introduce a new category, penis vs. vagina, but then you'll have very masculine vagina havers in the vagina room and very feminine penis havers in the penis room.)
I would guess that you don't agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct? If I'm right about that, what part of the above analysis do you object to?
I think that one thing you're missing is that lots of people... use gender as a very strong feature of navigating the world. They treat "male" and "female" as natural categories, and make lots of judgements based on whether someone "is" male or female.
You don't seem to do that, which puts you pretty far along the spectrum towards gender abolition, and you're right, from a gender abolition perspective there's no reason to be trans (or to be worried about people using the restroom they prefer or wearing the clothes they prefer or taking hormones to alter their body in ways they prefer).
But I think you're expecting that most people act this way, and they don't! For example, there are lots of people who would be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a feminine gay man, but wouldn't be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a trans woman, even if the two hypothetical people look very similar.
Some examples of X that I have seen include:
- Women sleeping in the same room or tent as this person
- Muslim women not wearing a headscarf in their presence
- Women going to a bathroom or changing room together
- Straight men or lesbian women being attracted to this person
I don't really know how to explain this any more than I already have. To lay it out simply:
- Here is this thing, gender.
- Lots of people care about gender a lot
- It's a valid position to say "I don't care about this thing and don't understand why anyone else does"
- Nevertheless, understanding that people do care will help you better understand why a lot of stuff around gender happens.
Note: I am not trying to convince you to care about gender! I am merely trying to explain some of the ways other people, both trans and cis, care about gender.
I've met many self-identified women (trans and otherwise) that did not prefer female-gendered terms, prompting plenty of inadvertent social gaffes on my end.
I think that if someone self identifies as a woman to you, and you use a gendered term to describe them (she, policewoman, actress) that is not a social gaffe on your part. I think that it is fine for someone to identify as a woman, but advocate for the use of gender neutral language in all cases even applied to them, but they should not put pressure on those who do so differently.
and the most reliable heuristic I could think of was "in conversation, don't bring up video games or guns when talking to women."
I would not make this assumption about cis women, and so I also wouldn't make it about trans women. If you're living in two subcultures, one with few trans women but many cis women who this assumption applies to and one with few cis women but many trans women who this assumption applies to, I could see how you would arrive at this and find it doesn't work very well.
I remain rudderless and find gender categories way too broad and opaque to discern any meaningful guidance
It is possible you don't interact with people's gender that frequently, which is fine, but this isn't true of most people I interact with. Some examples of places where knowing someone identifies as a woman vs. as a man vs. as nonbinary would affect your view of their behavior:
- Which bathroom they use, and whether you can go to the same changing room in a pool/gym.
- Which clothing they will wear, which clothing they will shop for, and how you should react to them wearing said clothing. (Is your friend being silly by wearing a skirt? probably if he's a man, but unlikely if she's a woman.)
- With whom they are okay with casual friendly touches (for example, many people are more open to hugs from the same gender)
Obviously, you should ask about these things if you need to know, and I agree that in many cases being specific is important. However, many humans spend a lot of time policing other's gender presentations. If I saw a male friend walking into a women's restroom, I would warn them that they're going in the wrong one. I would do this to my trans male friends but not my trans female friends. Maybe they would correct me and explain the situation. Maybe they would be hostile, in which case they would be rude. And if you need to know, or they need to tell you, they can.
If you're not the type of person to be aware in the differences I've mentioned above, then maybe it is useless to you, but it's not useless to all people, and the person telling you won't necessarily know that.
On top of all of this, many trans people are gender abolitionists ideologically, but if they have to choose between being seen by society as a man vs. a woman, they are still going to make that choice even if they wish that society didn't make the disctinction.
The common justification trotted out (that it’s necessary to include the theoretically-possible transman who somehow can get pregnant and apparently suffers no dysphoria from carrying a fetus to term) is completely daft.
This is as far as I can tell completely false. Plenty of trans men carry fetuses to term. Plenty of trans men carried fetuses to term before they came out as trans men. Plenty of trans men decide to carry fetuses to term after they come out as trans men. A couple of facts I believe about the world that may help you make sense of this:
- Not everyone experiences dysphoria the same way and in the same amount. Someone may experience pregnancy as an extreme negative, but have no feelings around facial hair. Someone may desire facial hair very strongly, but have no strong opinions on pregnancy at all.
- Some people want to have their own children very strongly, and are willing to suffer considerably to achieve that, even if it means feeling dysphoric for 9 months.
This is the general feeling I get from a lot of this post: it represents a good understanding of the anti-trans side of the debate, and a good understanding of the rationalist interpretation of semantics applied to the trans debate, but it lacks understanding of the experiences of trans people, and it also lacks awareness that it is missing that understanding.
If anyone identifies to me as a woman, the same question and more: What am I supposed to do with this information? What new information has this communicated? Why should I care? Why does it matter?
The most basic piece of information that is being communicated here is that, assuming you speak English, the person would like you to use female-gendered terms (she/her/hers, actress instead of actor, etc.) for her. You touch on the rest with
Perhaps the theory here is there is an expectation that the word woman will (intentionally or not) dredge up in people’s minds everything else tangentially associated with the concept.
and I'm not sure why you discard this as worthless or deceptive. Maybe a better way of framing this is to translate "I identify as a women" to "I believe you will do a better job of modeling my personality, desires, actions, and other ways of interacting with you if you use predictions from the 'woman' category you have in your mind instead of the 'man' category in your mind."
Maybe you disagree that anyone in the world could be better modeled as a gender that was not their assigned gender at birth.
Likewise for nonbinary people. If someone tells you that they are nonbinary, they are telling you, "I would prefer for you to use gender-neutral terms to refer to me. If you associate me with your internal 'man' category or your internal 'woman' category, I believe you will make worse predictions of my actions than if you attempt to associate me with both or neither categories."
This isn't nearly as useless as telling someone your favorite shampoo brand. In case you were wondering, I prefer the most basic Pantene shampoo. Now you are able to predict things about how I buy shampoo better.
I am also nonbinary. Now you are able to predict things about how I interact with gender better.
Orthogonality in design states that we can construct an AGI which optimizes for any goal. Orthogonality at runtime would be an AGI design that would consist of an AGI which can switch between arbitrary goals while operating. Here, we are only really talking about the latter orthogonality
This should not be relegated to a footnote. I've always thought that design-time orthogonality is the core of the orthogonality thesis, and I was very confused by this post until I read the footnote.
There are tactics I have available to me which are not oriented towards truthseeking, but instead oriented towards "raising my status at the expense of yours". I would like to not use those tactics, because I think that they destroy the commons. I view "collaborative truth seeking" as a commitment between interlocutors to avoid those tactics which are good at status games or preaching to the choir, and focus on tactics which are good at convincing.
Additionally,
I can can just ... listen to the counterarguments and judge them on their merits, without getting distracted by the irrelevancy of whether the person seems "collaborative" with me
I do not have this skill. When I perceive my partner in discourse as non-collaborative, I have a harder time honestly judging their counterarguments, and I have a harder time generating good counterarguments. This means discourse with someone who is not being collaborative takes more effort, and I am less inclined to do it. When I say "this should be a norm in this space", I am partially saying "it will be easier for you to convince me if you adopt this norm".
I walked through some examples of Shapley Value here, and I'm not so sure it satisfies exactly what we want on an object level. I don't have a great realistic example here, but Shapley Value assigns counterfactual value to individuals who did in fact not contribute at all, if they would have contributed were your higher-performers not present. So you can easily have "dead weight" on a team which has a high Shapley Value, as long as they could provide value if their better teammates were gone.
my friend responds, "Your beliefs/desires, and ultimately your choice to study English, was determined by the state of your brain, which was determined by the laws of physics. So don't feel bad! You were forced to study English by the laws of physics."
The joke I always told was
"I choose to believe in free will, because if free will does exist, then I've chosen correctly, and if free will doesn't exist, then I was determined to choose this way since the beginning of the universe, and it's not my fault that I'm wrong!"
Reductionism means that "Jones" and "Smith" are not platonic concepts. They're made out of parts, and you can look at the parts and ask how they contribute to moral responsibility.
When you say "Smith has a brain tumor that made him do it", you are conceiving of Smith and the brain tumor as different parts, and concluding that the non-tumor part isn't responsible. If you ask "Is the Smith-and-brain-tumor system responsible for the murder", the answer is yes. If you break the mind of Jones into parts, you could similarly ask "Is the visual cortex of Jones responsible for the murder", and the answer would be no.
So, why do we conceive of "Smith" and "the brain tumor" as more naturally separable? Because we have an understanding that the person Smith was before the brain tumor has continuity with the current Smith+brain tumor system, that the brain tumor is separable using surgery, that the post-surgery Smith would have continuity with the current Smith+brain tumor system, that the post-surgery Smith would approve of the removal of the brain tumor, and the pre-tumor Smith would approve of the removal of the brain tumor.
Whereas we don't have an understanding of Jones in that way. If we did, maybe if we were visited by aliens which had much more advanced neuroscience, and they pointed out that lead exposure had changed a neural circuit so that it operated at 85% efficiency instead of the normal 100%, and they could easily change that, and the post-change Jones didn't want to commit any murders, we might not consider the new Jones morally responsible. But the old Jones-minus-efficiency was responsible.
One adversarial prior would be "my prior for bets of expected value X is O(1/X)".
No public estimates, but the difficulty of self driving cars definitely pushed my AGI timelines back. In 2018 I predicted full self driving by 2023; now that’s looking unlikely. Yes, the advance in text and image understanding and generation has improved a lot since 2018, but instead of shortening my estimates that’s merely rotated which capabilities will come online earlier and which will wait until AGI.
However, I expect some crazy TAI in the next few years. I fully expect “solve all the millennium problems” to be doable without AGI, as well as much of coding/design/engineering work. I also think it’s likely that text models will be able to do the work of a paralegal/research assistant/copywriter without AGI.
Additionally, if you have a problem which can be solved by either (a) crime or (b) doing something complicated to fix it, your ability to do (b) is higher the smarter you are.
It would be nice to have a couple examples comparing concrete distributions Q and P and examining their KL-divergence, why it's large or small, and why it's not symmetric.
If I were making one up, I might say "g distributes over composition of f".
It would be better if it was merely an organization that merely had contradictory goals (maybe a degrowth anarcho-socialist group? A hardcore anti-science christian organization?) but wasn't organized around the dislike of our group specifically.
More likely, the AI just finds a website with a non-compliant GET request, or a GET request with a SQL injection vulnerability.
I agree that before that point, an AI will be transformative, but not to the point of “AGI is the world superpower”.
That’s what people used to say about chess and go. Yes, mathematics requires intuition, but so does chess; the game tree’s too big to be explored fully.
Mathematics requires greater intuition and has a much broader and deeper “game” tree, but once we figure out the analogue to self-play, I think it will quickly surpass human mathematicians.
GPT-4 (Edited because I actually realize I put way more than 5% weight on the original phrasing): SOTA on language translation for every language (not just English/French and whatever else GPT-3 has), without fine-tuning.
Not GPT-4 specifically, assuming they keep the focus on next-token prediction of all human text, but "around the time of GPT-4": Superhuman theorem proving. I expect one of the millennium problems to be solved by an AI sometime in the next 5 years.
"metis" is an ancient greek word/goddess which originally meant "magical cunning", which drifted throughout ancient greek culture to mean something more like "wisdom/prudence/the je ne sais quoi of being able to solve practical problems".
James C. Scott uses it in his book Seeing Like a State to mean the implicit knowledge passed down through a culture.
How did you decide where the y-intercept for Huang’s law should be? It seems that even if you fix the slope to 25x per 5 years, the line could still be made to fit the data better by giving it a different y-intercept.
I think it's not necessarily the case that free-market pairwise bargaining always leads to the Shapley value. 10Y = X -Y has an infinite number of solutions, and the only principled ways I know of for choosing solutions is either Shapley value or the fact that in this scenario, since there are no other jobs, the owner should be able to negotiate X and Y down to epsilon.
If you apply Shapley value to a situation where there are more workers than jobs, regardless of how many businesses the jobs are split between, people who can't get jobs still have a nonzero Shapley value based on their counterfactual contribution to the enterprises they could be working at.
Unfortunately, sometimes your body doesn't give you a choice! If you use caffeine once a week, maybe you can avoid acclimating to it, but in my experience, drinking black tea went from "whoa, lots of caffeine" to "slight boost" over ~2 years of drinking it 5 days/week.
My experience:
- If you don't currently drink caffeinated drinks, an entire coffee is probably overkill for you right now. Start slow and build your way up. I find black tea and caffienated sparkling water (e.g. https://www.drinkaha.com/products/mango-black-tea) to be good pre-coffee drinks (which also don't have sugar)
- Try to aim caffeine intake for periods where you can be heads-down working. I find caffeine less effective when I'm running meetings or being interrupted constantly.
I think this is covered by preamble item -1: “None of this is about anything being impossible in principle.”
High dimensional spaces are unlikely to have local optima, and probably don’t have any optima at all.
Just recall what is necessary for a set of parameters to be at a optimum. All the gradients need to be zero, and the hessian needs to be positive semidefinite. In other words, you need to be surrounded by walls. In 4 dimensions, you can walk through walls. GPT3 has 175 billion parameters. In 175 billion dimensions, walls are so far beneath your notice that if you observe them at all it is like God looking down upon individual protons.
If there’s any randomness at all in the loss landscape, which of course there is, it’s vanishingly unlikely that all of the millions or billions of directions the model has to choose from will be simultaneously uphill. With so many directions to choose from you will always have at least one direction to escape. It’s just completely implausible that any big model comes close to any optima at all. In fact it’s implausible that an optimum exists. Unless you have a loss function that has a finite minimum value like squared loss (not cross entropy or softmax), or without explicit regularization that bounds the magnitude of the values, forces positive curvature, and hurts performance of the model, all real models diverge.
Source: https://moultano.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/why-deep-learning-works-even-though-it-shouldnt/
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DallE2 is bad at prepositional phrases (above, inside) and negation. It can understand some sentence structure, but not reliably.
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In the first example, none of those are paragraphs longer than a single sentence.
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In the first example, the images are not stylistically coherent! The bees are illustrated inconsistently from picture to picture. They look like they were drawn by different people working off of similar prompts and with similar materials.
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The variational feature is not what I’m talking about; I mean something like “Draw a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold, working in a supermarket, and going to a tea party with a unicorn, with the same dragon in each image”.
Here's another possible explanation: The models aren't actually as impressive as they're made out to be. For example, take DallE2. Yes, it can create amazingly realistic depictions of noun phrases automatically. But can it give you a stylistically coherent drawing based on a paragraph of text? Probably not. Can it draw the same character in three separate scenarios? No, it cannot.
DallE2 basically lifts the floor of quality for what you can get for free. But anyone who actually wants or needs the things you can get from a human artist cannot yet get it from an AI.
See also, this review of a startup that tries to do data extraction from papers: https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1518215876201250816
As other commenters have said, approximating integer ratios is important.
- 1:2 is the octave
- 2:3 is the perfect fifth
- 3:4 is the perfect fourth
- 4:5 is the major third
- 5:6 is the minor third
and it just so happens that these ratios are close to powers of the 12th root of 2.
- 2^(12/12) is the octave
- 2^(7/12) is the perfect fifth
- 2^(5/12) is the perfect fourth
- 2^(4/12) is the major third
- 2^(3/12) is the minor third
You can do the math and verify those numbers are relatively close.
It's important to recognize that this correspondence is relatively recently discovered; it was developed independently in china in 1584 and in europe in 1605, and coexisted with other schemes for finding approximations of those ratios for hundreds of years, and there are still people who think that this system sucks and we should use a different one, because of minor differences in pitch. (Also, the Chinese system actually used 24th roots of 2, not 12th roots.) This system is called "Equal Temprament", and there any many other tuning systems that make slightly different choices.
Why not just use the exact integer ratios instead of the approximate ones? Well, if you're playing on a violin or singing, you can use exact integer ratios. But if you're using a fixed-note instrument, like a guitar (with frets) or a piano, then you have to deal with the issue that if you go up 1 octave and 1 minor third from a note, and also go up three perfect fourths, you get two notes that are almost identical, but different enough to go out of tune. (This is called the Syntonic comma.) So which one do you put on the piano? If you choose one, the other will sound a little wrong. Or, you could choose the average, and they'll both sound a little wrong.
- Even the political party which would be disincentivized by the phrasing to answer "yes" to the above question answered with a 11% positive rate. If we accept the discrepancy of the results being purely because of the engineered phrasing, then we have at least 22% of the population agreeing with committing violence in order to preserve their notion of what this country ought to be.
- This is an isolated demand for rigor. Your post uses a tweet and your personal feelings as evidence for the fact that "perhaps 1-5%" of the population supports a communist violent revolt. Is your post propaganda because it only focuses on the fears of a left-wing revolt and not a right-wing one? It was likely influenced to be that way because that's what you legitimately fear and are concerned about, and you're trying to convince others of your opinion. That's fine; I have no reason to believe that this post contains anything other than your true belief. The people writing the above survey question may have also had similar fears about a right-wing revolt, and phrased a question in a way that makes it less than perfectly useful for this analysis.
“Republicans (30%) are approximately three times as likely as Democrats (11%) to agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Agreement with this statement rises to 40% among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources and is 32% among those who most trust Fox News. One in four white evangelicals (26%) also agree that political violence may be necessary to save the country”
It’s more than 1-5%; it’s a sizable minority.
Programming languages: If they were written idiomatically and quickly, you can absolutely tell the difference between a list of primes generated by a Python vs C program. Hint: Python and C have different default numeric types.
I think that the main barrier is that I have no idea how to read this book.
It looks like a forum to me. Do I read all the posts, or are some of them comments from readers? Do I need to pay attention to usernames, post times, history of each comment?
There was a critical moment in 2006(?) where Hinton and Salakhutdinov(?) proposed training Restricted Boltzmann machines unsupervised in layers, and then 'unrolling' the RBMs to initialize the weights in the network, and then you could do further gradient descent updates from there, because the activations and gradients wouldn't explode or die out given that initialization. That got people to, I dunno, 6 layers instead of 3 layers or something? But it focused attention on the problem of exploding gradients as the reason why deeply layered neural nets never worked, and that kicked off the entire modern field of deep learning, more or less.
Does anyone have a good summary of the pre-alexnet history of neural nets? This comment and others about ReLUs contradict what I had been taught in masters level CS AI/ML classes (in 2018), which is also what Ngo seems to have in his model, that neural nets were mostly hardware-limited throughout their winter.
I'm a little confused about how to set the "Percentage Immune" slider. Is that "Percentage of people who are vaccinated"? If so, it's merely worded poorly. I'm worried, however, that what it really means is "Percentage of people are 100% immune", which would be near useless; vaccinations don't provide 100% immunity. Should I set this value to "percentage of people who are vaccinated × effectiveness of vaccines"?