Posts

If you are also the worst at politics 2024-05-26T20:07:49.201Z
shortest goddamn bayes guide ever 2024-05-10T07:06:23.734Z
Is being a trans woman (or just low-T) +20 IQ? 2024-04-24T20:04:36.829Z
Speedrun ruiner research idea 2024-04-13T23:42:29.479Z
Upcoming unambiguously good tech possibilities? (Like eg indoor plumbing) 2024-04-11T23:14:06.355Z
Any evidence or reason to expect a multiverse / Everett branches? 2024-04-09T05:26:30.990Z
Best *organization* red-pill books and posts? 2024-03-20T07:01:16.536Z
Fixed point or oscillate or noise 2024-03-14T18:37:11.212Z
Let's build definitely-not-conscious AI 2024-03-06T07:50:01.880Z
What's this 3rd secret directive of evolution called? (survive & spread & ___) 2024-02-07T14:11:58.143Z
Wrong answer bias 2024-02-01T20:05:38.573Z
The economy is mostly newbs (strat predictions) 2024-02-01T19:15:49.420Z
What exactly did that great AI future involve again? 2024-01-28T10:10:21.270Z
Decent plan prize winner & highlights 2024-01-19T23:30:34.242Z
Decent plan prize announcement (1 paragraph, $1k) 2024-01-12T06:27:44.495Z
Go flash blinking lights at printed text right now 2023-11-05T07:29:44.630Z
Responsible scaling policy TLDR 2023-09-28T18:51:20.330Z
Series of absurd upgrades in nature's great search 2023-09-03T09:35:20.760Z
We can do better than DoWhatIMean (inextricably kind AI) 2023-08-19T05:41:47.046Z
Could fabs own AI? 2023-08-19T00:16:37.848Z
Could we breed/engineer intelligent parrots? 2023-08-02T07:32:17.686Z
When did you orient? 2023-06-19T07:22:27.968Z
Work dumber not smarter 2023-06-01T12:40:31.264Z
When should I close the fridge? 2023-05-17T16:56:35.629Z
Distinguishing misuse is difficult and uncomfortable 2023-05-01T16:23:17.040Z
More money with less risk: sell services instead of model access 2023-03-04T20:51:36.480Z
Planning capacity and daemons 2022-09-26T00:15:42.409Z
Inner alignment: what are we pointing at? 2022-09-18T11:09:58.661Z
AI-assisted list of ten concrete alignment things to do right now 2022-09-07T08:38:29.757Z
Do yourself a FAVAR: security mindset 2022-06-18T02:08:47.415Z
Against unstoppable crypto prediction markets 2021-02-25T06:02:23.102Z
lukehmiles's Shortform 2020-01-27T00:52:37.833Z
Creating Environments to Design and Test Embedded Agents 2019-08-23T03:17:33.265Z

Comments

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-06-25T20:24:32.353Z · LW · GW

(Quoting my recent comment)

Apparently in the US we are too ashamed to say we have "worms" or "parasites", so instead we say we have "helminths". Using this keyword makes google work. This article estimates at least 5 million people (possibly far more) in the US have one of the 6 considered parasites. Other parasites may also be around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7847297/ (table 1)

This is way more infections than I thought!!

Note the weird symptoms. Blurry vision, headache, respiratory illness, blindness, impaired cognition, fever... Not just IBS and anemia!

The author does not appear to be a crank

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-06-25T20:22:23.416Z · LW · GW

If you do this I would recommend taking 3 days between each one, then waiting 2-3 weeks for eggs to hatch, then taking each again. Were you gardening or anything when you first got sick?

Apparently in the US we are too ashamed to say we have "worms" or "parasites", so instead we say we have "helminths". Using this keyword makes google work. This article estimates at least 5 million people (possibly far more) in the US have one of 6 considered parasites. Other parasites may also be around. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7847297/

Note the weird symptoms. Blurry vision, headache, respiratory illness, blindness, impaired cognition, fever... Not just IBS and anemia!

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-06-25T20:01:32.465Z · LW · GW

I bet my $300 against your $600 that taking these three dewormers cures your condition

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on The Leopold Model: Analysis and Reactions · 2024-06-17T18:24:48.595Z · LW · GW

Very good counterpoint

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on The Leopold Model: Analysis and Reactions · 2024-06-17T10:09:34.355Z · LW · GW

Hmm I didn't spend 47 hours watching the interview, reading all three long posts, and clicking the central links but

Is this not just a dude tryna make a buck here?

I mean if you start a fund to make money on orange dogs (at the same exact time you wrote your essays) then you should be totally ignored when you talk about how great and necessary orange dogs are?

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on in defense of Linus Pauling · 2024-06-05T06:26:56.380Z · LW · GW

I wonder if maybe the rate of infections is vastly underestimated (most fungus/bacteria/protozoa/archaea/animals don't show up on most tests) and just keeping your body very acidic indefinitely could be worth it overall. If most of the benefit comes from preventing initial infection from a handful of nasty permanent things (eg toxoplasmosis) then you probably wouldn't observe benefits to vitamin C supplementation in studies except over very long time scales or with very young children

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on Just admit that you’ve zoned out · 2024-06-05T06:15:42.551Z · LW · GW

N=1 this never happens to me 1-on-1 — I am pretty much always completely engaged in any convo in person. (Not contradicting you in any way.)

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on The Standard Analogy · 2024-06-05T06:11:04.772Z · LW · GW

This is a great summary of the evidence to date on Simplicia's side. Much of it is new to me. I'm sure it took many hours to find and compile. So thank you.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on Evidence of Learned Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing Neural Network · 2024-06-05T05:17:03.761Z · LW · GW

I think this is pretty excellent. I wonder if maybe this is one of those "it works so well it's boring" research directions and you are massively underrating it.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-06-03T02:17:25.154Z · LW · GW

Oh that's a lot of evidence against a worm probably. I am out of ideas. Good luck. I hope you can figure it out

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on Rana Dexsin's Shortform · 2024-05-31T06:24:56.429Z · LW · GW

See also gun owners and suicide. The gun is just sitting there.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on Decaeneus's Shortform · 2024-05-31T06:21:20.272Z · LW · GW

See also different practitioners in the same field with very different methodologies they are sure is the Best Way To Do Things

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on Value Claims (In Particular) Are Usually Bullshit · 2024-05-31T06:07:40.190Z · LW · GW

Hmm lots of popular value claims are quite beneficial to the recipient ("wash your hands and make everyone you know wash them too or you're disgusting" or "save up your money or you're poverty-minded")

Lots of factual claims with zero value implications or actual personal value are memetically fit (eg flame wars on certain physics topics)

Lots of factual-looking claims actually written by someone with an opinion who cares ("did you know Africa has the most languages of any continent?")

Lots of people with opinions who care actually do know the facts (eg some ai safety people are tired and just like "pause ai now!! Evil companies!!")

Maybe there's a better place to draw the line? Maybe the wise thing is to focus on the conversations where people demonstrate real interest in root causes of things, without totally ignoring the other subjects "nobody can EXPLAIN to me why murder is actually bad"

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-30T21:43:18.163Z · LW · GW

False negative rate is high apparently.

Seems like 5-10% false negative for when they already know exactly what you have? And a 30% number is randomly quoted online... I guess it totally depends on what someone has, how much they poop, etc

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC266208/?page=2

Some reports of people just taking dewormers despite negative tests and having good results. Example:

https://old.reddit.com/r/SIBO/comments/euuvqw/psa_your_sibo_could_be_parasites_even_if_you/

Idk how broad-spectrum/effective dewormers typically are. Apparently this one killed a bunch of random stuff but some species can come back after:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7983463/

Yeah i would bet 40% on a worm (ie 67% of my 60% on GI pathogen)

weird stuff started happening to me like extreme sensitivity to caffeine

Only explanation for this (and the salt sensitivity etc) IMO is a hole/thinning in gut lining. Which is moderately likely (30%?) with nonworm gut pathogen but very likely (75%?) with a worm.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-30T04:32:45.687Z · LW · GW

Perhaps an intestinal parasite like a tapeworm? All the really weird symptoms explained by worm poo and worm bites (poking holes) in the GI tract? How do you know your infection from years ago was viral?

I think they are easy to kill with dewormers. If you have some unusual fungus or bacteria or virus (or eukaryote or archaea) then it could be very hard to kill.

I think taking dewormers might be easier than getting a proper colonoscopy or test. If it is a parasite then you'll see it in the toilet. (And you said you're pretty underweight so fasting seems off the table.) I have not researched side effects and risks of dewormers.

If the underlying thing is totally autoimmune then getting rid of a parasite could actually make it worse. Easy to get a new parasite though if you wanted to go back lol

Here is chatgpt trying to make score cards for various causes based on the stuff you listed in your reddit posts.

https://chatgpt.com/share/66fcba19-cfbf-4e3d-86e7-8f40c536d624

Anyway I would place like 60% on GI tract pathogen, 15% on pathogen elsewhere, 10% on poisoning, 10% on autoimmune without pathogen or poison, and 5% on all other causes. Just guessing obviously.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-30T03:17:25.345Z · LW · GW

Well if you've always been supplementing it then try not supplementing it!

But I had some weird food issues for years (eg seizures after eating garlic) that are mostly gone with 250mcg daily vit D. I started taking K with it about a year ago because people say D alone can have long term side effects. I don't know why a giant dose is different from a regular dose... I also had normal levels IIRC. Maybe a giant dose gets stuff deeper into certain tissues or something ¿

Zinc carnosine is supposed to increase mucus production. My understanding is that mucus is the source of all good things health-wise (unless it's in your lungs lol). My mom and I both took it for food vs brain stuff and it seemed to help us both a bit (we were in decent starting condition so a big effect would be hard to see).

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-30T03:11:04.018Z · LW · GW

Jesus have you always been underweight? If it's new then I would bet you have like a tapeworm. If you've always been underweight then I would bet fasting is not worth the risk.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel's Shortform · 2024-05-29T07:05:53.758Z · LW · GW

So somebody gets an agent which efficiently productively indefinitely works on any specified goal, then they just let the government find out and take it? No countermeasures?

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on D0TheMath's Shortform · 2024-05-29T06:56:51.865Z · LW · GW

This is a great question. I can't think of a good answer. Surely someone has done it on a large scale...

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on D0TheMath's Shortform · 2024-05-29T06:50:46.895Z · LW · GW

This is cool I never heard of this. There are many other exceptions of course. Particularly with "turning things on" (car starting, computer starting, etc)

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on D0TheMath's Shortform · 2024-05-29T06:33:21.269Z · LW · GW

Seems like every field of engineering is like:

  • step 1: put the system in a happy state where everything is linear or maybe quadratic if you must
  • step 2: work out the diameter of the gas tube or whatever
  • step 3: cover everything in cement to make sure you never ever leave the happy state
    • if you found an efficiency improvement that uses an exponential then go sit in time out and come back when you can act like an adult
Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-29T06:05:41.604Z · LW · GW

Last random suggestion for you (not that you were requesting these): prepare ahead and do one very long fast (ideally like more than 3 days). Heard lots of success stories for totally weird conditions with this.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-29T06:01:49.499Z · LW · GW

You can speed up your experiments by testing multiple variables at once https://youtu.be/5oULEuOoRd0

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-29T05:54:33.721Z · LW · GW

Oh i read the reddit post you linked in another comment suggesting it may be auto immune. If you're not worried about the pathogen itself then you can just get hookworm to permanently suppress your immune system. You have to take iron the rest of your life to keep your red blood cell count high i think. It is supposed to be extremely effective.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on How to get nerds fascinated about mysterious chronic illness research? · 2024-05-29T05:51:08.268Z · LW · GW

Did you try megadosing vitamin D and zinc (maybe zinc carnosine) for multiple weeks?

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on What's a better term now that "AGI" is too vague? · 2024-05-29T04:56:50.820Z · LW · GW

Long horizon AI: an AI that can keep productively working productively on a nebulous task indefinitely

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-05-27T16:11:10.524Z · LW · GW

I was working on this cute math notation the other day. Curious if anybody knows a better way or if I am overcomplicating this.

Say you have . And you want to be some particular value.

Sometimes you can control , sometimes you can control , and you can always easily measure . So you might use these forms of the equation:

It's kind of confusing that seems proportional to both and . So here's where the notation comes in. Can write above like

Which seems a lot clearer to me.

And you could shorten it to , , and .

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on If you are also the worst at politics · 2024-05-27T03:44:03.183Z · LW · GW

Who is the new charismatic leader of prediction markets?

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on If you are also the worst at politics · 2024-05-27T03:43:09.357Z · LW · GW

Hmm I was mainly thinking of the"redistribute sex" phrasing fiasco, slatestarcodex being contra hanson on healthcare, tyler cowen being contra hanson on the self evaluated property tax, and the brutal quote tweets. But maybe these are in fact symptoms of success and I have it partially backwards... Hmm

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on If you are also the worst at politics · 2024-05-27T03:33:41.233Z · LW · GW

This is new info to me, thanks

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on AI companies aren't really using external evaluators · 2024-05-26T19:37:47.410Z · LW · GW

Some Anthropic statements have suggested that sharing is hard in general.

If they said that then they are speaking nonsense IMO. Once you have your stuff set up it's a button you click. You have to trust that the evaluator won't leak info or soil your reputation without good cause though.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on AI companies aren't really using external evaluators · 2024-05-26T19:32:18.428Z · LW · GW
Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on AI companies aren't really using external evaluators · 2024-05-26T19:10:12.965Z · LW · GW

Example #999 that I cannot read

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on AI companies aren't really using external evaluators · 2024-05-26T18:52:50.891Z · LW · GW

Be allowed? You're not allowed?

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on AI companies aren't really using external evaluators · 2024-05-26T18:46:52.350Z · LW · GW

Anthropic said that collaborating with METR "requir[ed] significant science and engineering support on our end"; it has not clarified why.

I can comment on this (I think without breaking NDA). I will oversimplify. They were changing around their deployment system, infra, etc. We wanted uptime and throughput. Big pain in the ass to keep the model up (with proper access control) while they were overhauling stuff. Furthermore, anthropic and METR kept changing points of contact (rapidly growing teams).

This was and is my proposal for evaluator model access: If at least 10 people at a lab can access a model then at least 1 person at METR must have access.

This is for the labs self-enforcing via public agreements.

This seems like something they would actually agree to.

If it were a law then you would replace METR with "a govt approved auditor".

I think conformance could be greatly improved by getting labs to use a little login widget (could be CLI) which allows eg METR to see access permission changes (possibly with codenames for models andor people). Ideally this would be very little effort for labs and sidestepping it would be more effort once it was set up.

Feedback welcome.

External red-teaming is not external model evaluation. External red-teaming ... several people .... ~10 hours each. External model evals ... experts ... evals suites ... ~10,000 hours developing.

Yes there is some awkwardness here... Red teaming could be extremely effective if structured as an open competition. Possibly more effective than orgs like METR. The problem is that this trains up tons of devs on Doing Evil With AI and probably also produces lots of really useful github repos. So I agree with you.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on jacquesthibs's Shortform · 2024-05-24T09:21:28.511Z · LW · GW

What am I missing?

His sister's accusations that he blocked her from parent's inheritance and that he molested her when he was a young teenager and that he got her social media accounts flagged as spam to hide the accusations

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on robo's Shortform · 2024-05-24T09:16:15.006Z · LW · GW

What do you mean by "following through"? Just sending another email?

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on simeon_c's Shortform · 2024-05-24T08:46:35.627Z · LW · GW

(My track record of 0% accuracy on which messages will politically snowball is holding up very well. I'm glad that sometimes people like you say things the way you say them, rather than only people like me saying things how I say them.)

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-05-24T08:41:26.441Z · LW · GW

I wonder if a chat loop like this would be effective at shortcutting years of confused effort maybe in research andor engineering. (The AI just asks the questions and the person answers.)

  • "what are you seeking?"
  • "ok how will you do it?"
  • "think of five different ways to do that"
  • "describe a consistent picture of the consequences of that"
  • "how could you do that in a day instead of a year"
  • "give me five very different alternate theories of how the underlying system works"

Questions like that can be surprisingly easy to answer. Just hard to remember to ask.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on What mistakes has the AI safety movement made? · 2024-05-24T07:30:50.102Z · LW · GW

I would add one. I haven't found a compelling thing to aim for long term. I have asked many people to describe a coherent positive future involving AI. I have heard no good answers. I have been unable to produce one myself.

Are we playing a game that has no happy endings? I hope we are not.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-05-14T05:41:17.542Z · LW · GW

The acceptable tone of voice here feels like 3mm wide to me. I'm always having bad manners

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on D0TheMath's Shortform · 2024-05-14T05:38:02.353Z · LW · GW

I swear to never joke again sir

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on We might be missing some key feature of AI takeoff; it'll probably seem like "we could've seen this coming" · 2024-05-12T09:22:26.477Z · LW · GW

I assumed somebody had. Maybe everyone did haha

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on D0TheMath's Shortform · 2024-05-12T09:21:28.540Z · LW · GW

#onlyReadBadWriters #hansonFTW

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-05-12T09:14:06.473Z · LW · GW

From the frontpage:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zAqqeXcau9y2yiJdi/can-we-build-a-better-public-doublecrux

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bkr9BozFuh7ytiwbK/my-hour-of-memoryless-lucidity

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Lgq2DcuahKmLktDvC/applying-refusal-vector-ablation-to-a-llama-3-70b-agent

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ANGmJnZL2fskHX6tj/dyslucksia

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BRZf42vpFcHtSTraD/linkpost-towards-a-theoretical-understanding-of-the-reversal

Like all of them basically.

most of the value is in even figuring out how to diagram the posts

Think of it like a TLDR. There are many ways to TLDR but any method that's not terrible is fantastic

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-05-12T09:04:28.605Z · LW · GW

The job would of course be done by a diagramming god, not a wordpleb like me

If i got double dog dared...

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on ChristianKl's Shortform · 2024-05-12T08:59:08.332Z · LW · GW

"Lo-salt" salt is salt with potassium. That's been my table salt for 5 years.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on David Gross's Shortform · 2024-05-12T08:38:03.228Z · LW · GW

Put your phone in the oven and stand in the grass and eat some grass and see how it tastes

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on lukehmiles's Shortform · 2024-05-12T08:34:23.827Z · LW · GW

LW mods, please pay somebody to turn every post with 20+ karma into a diagram. Diagrams are just so vastly superior to words.

Comment by lukehmiles (lcmgcd) on We might be missing some key feature of AI takeoff; it'll probably seem like "we could've seen this coming" · 2024-05-12T08:28:24.341Z · LW · GW

That title!! I was even fan of you and yam specifically and had even gone through a number of your old works looking for nuggets! Figure 22.3 makes up for it all though haha. Diagrams are so far superior to words...