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That is a complicated subject which would require a dedicated post to explore in detail.
Research into exercise physiology plus personal experience lifting weights.
Another way to think about books is as training data for a deep learning network. When you feed a thousand photos of airplanes into a neural network your goal isn't to get the network to remember the specific airplanes in your training dataset. If you did you'd probably have made the mistake of overtraining it. Rather, your goal is to teach the network to recognize the abstract concept of an airplane. Books could be similar. Their purpose could be to feed many variations of the a single concept through a human brain so it can absorb the pattern.
We have a chemical weapons ban because chemical weapons are obsolete. We have a Biological Weapons Convention too, but I think that's because today's biological weapons are like chemical weapons and future biological weapons favor non-state actors. Russia, China and the USA haven't even joined the Ottawa Treaty which bans landmines. We don't have a "multilateral, international governmental/legal agreement to halt" the production of nuclear weapons, cyberweapons or autonomous weapons. Nuclear weapons are easier to ban than AI because nuclear weapons require uranium, centrifuges and missiles whereas AI requires an AWS account. The risk of nuclear weapons are well-understood. The risks of AI are not.
If the short timeline theories are correct then the only thing which could slow the development of AI is to break civilization so hard technological progress grinds to a halt. If the short timeline theories are correct then nuclear war could slow down the advent of AI by mere decades.
Good point about the tropics. I could be wrong about the seasonal directionality. I had an unstated assumption that even if direction of the effect was inverted the change wouldn't be significant enough to account for the data. That was my real crux.
My reference point for religious rituals was Christmas in the United States. India's biggest religious rituals take place outside. Even if India's religious rituals were much bigger, they wouldn't cause a takeoff as fast as we observed in Zvi's graph.
That's a informative variant graph. I'm updating my probabilities to 98% it's one or more strains and 99% it's one or more strains and/or a change to the measurement. I'm going to add another prediction: 95% confidence that India fails to get B1.617 under control before it burns through the population.
But experts say India is unlikely to meet its target of covering 250 million people by July, especially as cases continue to surge.
―Covid-19 vaccination: How is India's inoculation drive going from BBC News via Yahoo News
India is hosed. I wonder what happens when B1.617 hits other countries that haven't vaccinated their populations yet?
Great post. India will be a disaster for human welfare. I predict at 90% confidence that one or more new strains are responsible for the exponential growth of infections in India. Only three other things could cause it:
- Summer. Seasonal change doesn't make sense because infections ought to go down, not up.
- A change to testing or reporting. Possible but unlikely.
- Complete breakdown of society on the scale of a civil war. If this happened I would have heard about it.
I predict with 98% confidence that the exponential growth is caused by a new strain, new strains, and/or sampling bias (testing + reporting).
If [you] still need to get vaccinated, there are lots of places to go if you look around.
This is true where I live. I am in the youngest adult age bracket and live in a Blue city. I got my first vaccination yesterday by taking a ferry to a nearby Red district.
I recommend Hy because it's what I personally use and I can therefore vouch for it. I have heard nothing but good things about Clojure. I even attend a Clojure user group. The Clojure programmers I meet tend to be smart which is a good sign.
The recommendation to lift weights applies to boys and girls. If you are a woman, lifting weights won't make you bulky. It will make you hot.
To build off of your comment here, the idea that "anger can feel good" is a phrase where the meaning of individual words depends heavily on one's direct experience, personal background and cultural context.
Emotional machinery is universal. Emotional ontologies can be culture-specific. I do differ on a lot of cultural assumptions relative to community here on Less Wrong such as on the flexibility of abstract concepts, civilization-specific ontologies, the essence of goodness and stuff that isn't even on the Western map.
If you want feedback on your blog then there are four options:
- You can review the work yourself.
- You can publish it online and read the comments.
- You can join a group where writers share drafts with each other.
- You can hire someone to read your work.
#1 only works if you can figure out what is wrong, which you can't. Besides, you already have published 50 posts on your blog (and written who-knows-how-many drafts) over many years without making progress. #2 tells you useful information but not how to structure a post. #3 might or might not fix your problem. Not everyone's personality is suitable for writing groups. #4 makes sense if you have money and can find the right teacher.
I have trouble deciding how to structure posts (or whether I should split them into a series), and I'm terrible at writing introductions and conclusions. I'm also not particularly good at headlines, although I consider this a less-important problem.
I read the five most recent posts on your blog. Your self-assessment is correct. Your posts do have structural problems. Your introductions and conclusions are terrible. Your headlines aren't great either. These issues mostly stem from your posts' lack of a clear objective.
- "Etherium GPU mining for paranoid noobs" is written like story but the meat of the post is instructional. The objective (what the reader is supposed to get out of this) is confused. You should turn it into a story or you should turn it into an instruction manual.
- "Indexing and sorting to find data quickly" could be better than it is. The sentence-level writing is fine. The technical information is fine. The post is unclear about what value the reader is supposed to obtain by reading the post. Your post should be a systematic tour from low-level to high-level but it reads more like list of things. One level should flow naturally from the last by solving a problem in the previous level. The introduction and conclusion of this post are bad because they digress from the meat of the post.
- "How to write examples for documentation" has an unambiguous objective. It needs at least one example. Multiple examples would be good. A single example would be better. The post should start with a bad example and then show the user how you iterate the bad example into a good example. Delete the last paragraph.
- "Easy mistakes when writing OCaml C bindings" does use examples. If the mistakes are random then it should be a list of things. The post shows more promise than a list of things. Instead of listing mistakes you should structure this post as a sequential checklist of how to debug your OCaml C bindings.
- "How to use
Core.Command.Param" should be written either in the format of random access technical documentation or as an introductory guide.
I have lots of experience teaching things and I am available for hire. If you would like to hire me to help you learn how to write better then PM me and maybe we can work something out.
I had intended to drop[1] the case for anger entirely.
"Dropping", a debate context, refers to ignoring an argument without attempting to refute it. ↩︎
When I watch the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr, I am inspired by his total absence of anger. Perhaps he is a saint, in which case I endeavor to follow his example.
Yes. Suppressing anger is counterproductive.
I agree that aggressive motivation can be useful in the weightroom, on the dais and elsewhere. I consider anger to tautologically require a desire to inflict suffering upon a conscious being. If we define anger more broadly to include a zealous zen master or a deadlifter then anger can be a good thing.
Could anthropomorphizing cancer and then getting angry at it help advance science? Maybe. I do not personally derive utility from this mindset but others might.
This may be a disagreement about words. For me, hate comes from disgust and aversion whereas anger comes from a desire for comeuppance and redress. It sounds to me like your definition of hate is similar to my definition of anger. If my definition of anger equals your anger of hate then we are in agreement about reality.
Your friend's argument is basically the opposite of Georgian economics. It is a set of policies that maximizes land speculation at the expense of capital investment and even rent seeking. If you want to maximize value for incumbents then restrict construction without establishing rent controls. If you want to keep rents accessible to an influx of poor people then allow construction. You cannot provide housing for an influx of residents while restricting construction. There won't be enough living space to go around. The only way to provide sufficient housing while keeping prices low is to restrict immigration, which San Francisco lacks the sovereignty to do.
Every country wants their own Silicon Valley. Few have succeeded in creating one. Building new hubs is hard because there are massive network effects. In theory, it is possible. (Many countries have built massive industrial sectors via government-led industrial policy.) The problem is that centralized decision-makers are bad at urban planning in general and bad at building startup hubs in particular .
Thank you for the note about the thousand-to-one comment ratio. This platform doesn't provide view count analytics and I haven't installed such software on my blog so I have no idea what the actual ratios are.
By the way, I found this post on your blog (but I found your blog here) but chose to comment here because I prefer Less Wrong's commenting system to Wordpress's.
What an excellent article, all around. I subscribed to Linear No Threshold before reading this. Thank you for the update.
Note to readers: justinpombrio's parent comment was written when this post was titled "Place-Based Programming", before I changed the title to "Place-Based Programming - Part 1".
I think the disagreement here comes from me communicating different things to different people. I showed SatvikBeri a more complete system of which this post is just a tiny part. If all you see is this post (without the "Part 1") then justinpombrio's comment makes sense. If you see the entire project then SatvikBeri's comment makes sense.
justinpombrio's particular example can be solved with the defnp macro in Part 2.
(defnp myfunc [x] x)
(assert (= 3 value-of (myfunc 3))) ;; works
Note to readers: skybrian's parent comment was written when this post was titled "Place-Based Programming", before I changed the title to "Place-Based Programming - Part 1".
Your are correct that the code here in Part 1 breaks when you use variables with nonlocal scope. I begin to solve this problem in Part 2.
It's also essentially the same kind of caching that's commonly done by build systems.
Yes. I often think about this project as "writing a compiler". Some of the techniques I use come from Makefiles.
Fixed. Thanks.
I do this too. Then, after opening it in cognito, I press "Don't recommend channel".
Do you use a particular CSS editor plugin?
You can go from hash to source code by saving the source code too in addition to saving the value. You can go from place to source code by treating source code as a value. Otherwise, hashing is a trapdoor function.
Thanks. I have changed "simple caching system" to "persistent memoization system".
This is accurate. Places are analogous to pointers.
An aircraft carrier costs $13 billion. An anti-ship cruise missile costs $2 million. Few surface warships survived the first day of the Singularity War.
A cruise missile is a complex machine, guided by sensitive electronics. Semiconductor fabricators are even more complex machines. Few semiconductor factories survived the nuclear retaliation.
A B-52 Stratofortress is a simpler machine.
Robert (Bob) Manchester's bomber flew west from Boeing Field. The crew disassembled their landing gear and dropped it in the Pacific Ocean. The staticy voice of Mark Campbell, Leader of the Human Resistance, radioed into Robert's headset. Robert could barely hear it over the noise of the engines. He turned the volume up. It would damage his hearing but that didn't matter anymore. The attack wouldn't save America. Nothing could at this point. But the attack might buy time to launch a few extra von Neumann probes.
The squadron flew over miles after miles of automated factories. What was once called Tianjin was now just Sector 153. The first few flak cannons felt perfunctory. The anti-air fire increased as they drew closer to enemy network hub. Robert dropped the bombs. The pilot, Peter Garcia, looked for a target to kamikaze.
They drew closer to the ground. Robert Manchester looked out the window. He wondered why the Eurasian AI had chosen to structure its industry around such humanoid robots.
I don't mind jumping through a few extra hoops in order to access a website idiosyncratically. But sometimes the process feels overly sectarian.
I was trying out the Tencent cloud without using Tor when I got a CAPTCHA. Sure, whatever. They verified my email. That's normal. Then they wanted to verify my phone number. Okay. (Using phone numbers to verify accounts is standard practice for Chinese companies.) Then they required me to verify my credit card with a nominal $1 charge. I can understand their wanting to take extra care when it comes to processing international transactions. Then they required me to send a photo of my driver's licence. Fine. Then they required 24 hours to process my application. Okay. Then they rejected my application. I wonder if that's what the Internet feels like everyday to non-Americans.
I often anonymize my traffic with Tor. Sometimes I'll end up on the French or German Google, which helps remind me that the Internet I see everyday is not the Internet everyone else sees.
Other people use Tor too, which is necessary to anonymize my traffic. Some Tor users aren't really people. They're bots. By accessing access the Internet from the same Tor exit relays as these bots, websites often suspect me of being a bot.
I encounter many pages like this.
This is a Russian CAPTCHA.
Prove you're human by typing "вчepaшний garden". Maybe I should write some OCR software to make proving my humanity less inconvenient.
Another time I had to identify which Chinese characters were written incorrectly.
The most frustrating CAPTCHAs require me to annotate images for self-driving cars. I do not mind annotating images of self-driving cars. I do mind, after having spent several minutes annotating images of self-driving cards, getting rejected based off of a traffic analysis of my IP address.
What an informative, well-researched, well-written post. I am curious about the Iterated Embryo Selection. If you use two parents then would it result in inbreeding? Would you need more than two parents to avoid inbreeding? If the latter then that could reduce the rate of adoption.
You also mention that "that optimizing for any objective X will eventually impact another objective Y if one pushes hard enough". This is true. I wonder how much of it can be avoided by both optimizing for a positive trait X while simultaneously optimizing against the traits of people with negative life outcomes.
The laptop is from 2013. It doesn't even have an Nvidia-compatible GPU. I actually did train on low resolution footage. The model takes a 64x64 pixel image as input.
Keyboard shortcuts are faster than the mouse. Keys accessible from homerow are faster than distant keys like the arrow keys. Keyboard shortcuts you can combine are more powerful than standalone keyboard shortcuts. As gianlucatruda mentioned, the important thing is Vim keybindings, not the editor itself. You can get a similar speed boost by installing Vim keybindings on your favorite editor.
I learned Vim very early in my programming career because I knew the upfront investment would pay itself over many times—and it has. Vim has paid my initial investment back many times over purely in terms of time saved. But speed does not just help me save time editing files. It also helps me think faster because my memory is volatile. For every time interval there is a chance I will forget a critical piece of information. My volatile memory puts a limit on how complex of a task I can handle. If my think-decide-act cycles iterate faster, I can complete more complicated tasks before my volatile memory expires.
In addition, some old Unix utilities like less use a subset of Vim keybindings by default.
I'm in the same boat. I do most of my text editing in Spacemacs with Vim keybindings. Please let me know if you figure out a good in-browser text entry solution.
It memorized them.
Stavrova and Ehlebracht (2019) observed that individuals perceived that highly cynical people have greater cognitive ability despite finding a consistently negative relationship when directly measuring these characteristics.
―Quote from Can You Ever Be Too Smart for Your Own Good?, from the PSYCHOLOGY/BIOLOGY links.
The above quote could be interpreted one of two ways. It could mean people believe that cynical people (in general) have greater cognitive ability or it could mean that people, when they observe cynicism, treat it as a sign of greater cognitive ability. I looked up Stavrova and Ehlebracht's paper to find out which one it is.
Four studies showed that laypeople tend to believe in cynical individuals’ cognitive superiority. A further three studies based on the data of about 200,000 individuals from 30 countries debunked these lay beliefs as illusionary by revealing that cynical (vs. less cynical) individuals generally do worse on cognitive ability and academic competency tasks. Cross-cultural analyses showed that competent individuals held contingent attitudes and endorsed cynicism only if it was warranted in a given sociocultural environment. Less competent individuals embraced cynicism unconditionally, suggesting that—at low levels of competence—holding a cynical worldview might represent an adaptive default strategy to avoid the potential costs of falling prey to others’ cunning.
Of course, this only has a chance of working if the inputs and labels come from a continuous stream, as they would if the input were the output of another network.
Predictive processing is thus well-suited for BNNs because the real-time sensory data of a living organism, including sensory data preprocessed by another network, is a continuous stream.
Due to the need to iterate the vs until convergence, the predictive coding network had roughly a 100x greater computational cost than the backprop network.
The paper claims that predictive coding takes more compute. I agree that predictive coding ought to be more parallelizable. If you are using a GPU then backpropagation is already sufficiently parallelizable. However, it may be that neuromorphic hardware could parallelize better than a GPU, thus producing an increase in compute power that outstrips the 100x greater computational cost of the algorithm itself.
Good point. Transfer learning is allowed but it still counts towards the total training data where "training data" is now everything a human can process over a lifetime.
What are the sign errors?
Daniel Kokotajlo was the person who originally pointed me to this article. Thank you!
There is no question that human brains have tons of instincts built-in. But there is a hard limit on how much information a single species' instincts can contain. It is implausible that human beings' cognitive instincts contain significantly more information than the human genome (750 megabytes). I expect our instincts contain much less.
Human brains definitely have special architectures too, like the hippocampus. The critical question is how important these special architectures are. Are our special architectures critical to general intelligence or are they just speed hacks? If they are speed hacks then we can outrace them by building a bigger computer or writing more efficient algorithms.
There is no doubt that humans transmit more cultural knowledge than other animals. This has to do with language. (More specifically, I think our biology underpinning language hit a critical point around 50,000 years ago.) Complex grammar is not present in any non-human animal. Wernicke's area is involved. Wernicke's area could be a special architecture.
How important are the above human advantages? I believe that taking a popular ANN architecture and merely scaling it up will not enable a neural network to compete with humans at StarCraft with equal quantities of training data. If, in addition, the ANN is not allowed to utilize transfer learning then I am willing to publicly bet money on this prediction. (The ANN must be restricted to a human rate of actions-per-second. The ANN does not get to play via an API or similar hand-coded preprocessor. If the ANN watches videos of other players then that counts towards its training data.)
The black circles represent neurons. The red triangles represent activations (action potentials). Action potentials' information content is shared between presynaptic neurons and postsynaptic neurons because activations are transmitted from the presynaptic neuron to the postsynaptic neuron.
The black arrows in the bottom diagram denote the physical creation of action potentials. The red arrows denote intra-neuron calculation of the gradient. Keep in mind that each neuron knows both the action potential it generates itself and the action potentials sent to it.
hat = .
This is fascinating. I expect many readers of Less Wrong would be interested in top-level posts about what the world looks like from the perspective of a state government civil servant.
In the specific case of Taiwan, the only sane strategy (which they are doing) is to require all newcomers to undergo a two-week quarantine.
Incoming visitors have a strong incentive to avoid quarantine. It is difficult for the Taiwanese government to confirm whether someone from the United States or another country has been vaccinated. Allowing visitors who claim to have been vaccinated enter the country without quarantine guarantees a COVID outbreak. Taiwan has COVID under control. Taiwan has few citizens vaccinated. A COVID outbreak in Taiwan would be a national disaster.
A mandatory quarantine may not make sense for Canada on consequentialist grounds since COVID has long since gotten out-of-control there. But the general principle of a mandatory quarantine is sound.
Future posts will be viewable on the NFT blockchain. You can alternatively wait for the price of Bitcoin to go down.
I could not comment on Substack itself. It presents me with a CAPTCHA where I have to prove I am human by demonstrating qualia. As a philosophical zombie, I believe this is discriminatory but must acknowledge that no one of ethical consequence is being harmed. Rather than fight this non-injustice, I am simply posting on the obsolete Less Wrong 2.0 instead.
Here are my thoughts on the new posts.
- HPMOR: The Epilogue was surprising yet inevitable. It is hard to say more without spoiling it.
- My favorite part of all the new posts is Scott Alexander's prescient "war to end all wars". Now would be a great time to apply his insights to betting markets if they weren't all doomed. The "sticks and stones" approach to mutually-assured destruction was a stroke of genius.
- I reluctantly acknowledge that introductory curations of established knowledge are a necessity for mortals. Luke Muelhauser's explanation is old hat if you have been keeping up with the literature for the last five millennia.
- You can judge Galef's book by a glance at the cover.
- I am looking forward to Gwern's follow-up post on where the multiversal reintegrator came from.
- Robin Hanson is correct. LessWrong's objective has shifted. Our priority these days is destroying the world, which we practice ritualistically every September 26th.