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Would you be willing to share your ethnicity? Even as simple as “Asian / not Asian”?
I do think it has some of that feeling to me, yeah. I had to re-read the entire thing 3 or 4 times to understand what it meant. My best guesses as to why:
I felt whiplashed on transitions like “be motivated towards what's good and true. This is exactly what Marc Gafni is trying to do with Cosmo-Erotic Humanism”, since I don’t know him or that type of Humanism, but the sentence structure suggests to me that I am expected to know these. A possible rewrite could perhaps be “There are two projects I know of that aim to create a belief system that works with, instead of against, technology. The first is Marc Gafni; he calls his ‘Cosmo-Erotic Humanism’…”
There are some places I feel a colon would be better than a comma. Though I’m not sure how important these are, it would help slow down the pace of the writing:
“increasingly let go of faith in higher powers as a tenet of our central religion: secular humanism.” “But this is crumbling: the cold philosophy”
While minor punctuation differences like this are usually not too important, the way you wrote gives me a sense of, like, too much happening too fast: “wow, this is a ton of information delivered extremely quickly, and I don’t know what appolonian means, I don’t know who Gafni is, or what dataism is…” So maybe slowing down the pace with stronger punctuation like colons is more important than it would otherwise be?
Also, phrases like “our central religion is secular humanism” and “mystical true wise core” read as very Woo. I can see where both are coming from, but I’ve read a lot of Woo, but I think many readers would bounce off these phrases. They can still be communicated, but perhaps something like “in place of religion, many have turned to Secular Humanism. Secular humanism says that X, Y, Z, but has no concept of a higher power. That means the core motivation that…”
(To be honest I’ve forgotten what secular humanism is, so this was another phrase that added to my feeling of everything moving too fast, and me being lost).
There are some typos too.
So maybe I’d advise making the overall piece of writing slower, by giving more set-up each time you introduce a term readers are likely to be unfamiliar with. On the other hand, that’s a hassle, and probably annoying to do in every note, if you write on this topic often. But it’s the best I’ve got!
I read this book in 2020, and the way this post serves as a refresher and different look at it is great.
I think there might be some mistakes in the log-odds section?
The orcs example starts:
We now want to consider the hypothesis that we were attacked by orcs, the prior odds are 10:1
Then there is a 1/3 wall-destruction rate, so orcs should be more likely in the posterior, but the post says:
There were 20 destroyed walls and 37 intact walls… corresponding to 1:20 odds that the orcs did it.
We started at 10:1 (likely that it’s orcs?), then saw evidence suggesting orcs, and ended up with a posterior quite against orcs. Which doesn’t seem right. I was thinking maybe “10:1” for the prior should be “1:10”, but even then, going from 1:10 in the prior to 1:20 in the posterior, when orcs are evidenced, doesn’t work either.
All that said, I just woke up, so it’s possible I’m all wrong!
In Korea every convenience store sells “hangover preventative”, “hangover cure drink”, with pop idols on the label. Then you come back to America and the instant you say “hangover preventative”, people look at you crazy, like no such thing could possibly exist or help. I wonder how we got this way!
Thanks for your review! I've updated the post to make the medications warning be in italicized bold, in the third paragraph of the post, and included the nutrient warning more explicitly as well.
Thank you!
“(although itiots might still fall for the "I'm an idiot like you" persona such as Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, and particularly Alex Jones).”
This line is too current-culture-war for LessWrong. I began to argue with it in this comment, before deleting what I wrote, and limiting myself to this.
It changed to be much more swipe-focused. It’s been 5 years since I used it, but even in 2018, I remember being surprised at how much it had changed. Apparently now even open messaging is gone, and you need to have someone Like you before you can message them, though I haven’t actually checked this.
Yes, agree - I've looked into non-identical distributions in previous posts, and found that identicality isn't important, but I haven't looked at non-independence at all. I agree dependent chains, like the books example, is an open question!
Love this! Definitely belongs on LessWrong. High-quality sci-fi, that relates to social dynamics? Very relevant! I’ve been away from the site for a while, tiring of the content, but am glad I scrolled and saw this today.
Enjoyed this! Very well written. The two arrow graphs, where the second has everything squished down to the bottom, are especially charming
I don’t think the problem is this big if you’re trying to control one specific model. Given an RLHF’d model, equipped with a specific system prompt (e.g. helpless harmless assistant), you have either one or a small number of luigis, and therefore around the same amount of waluigis - right?
Good question!
Hmm! I’m not sure about this. The patient in the linked paper received hemodialysis (which, I think, manually takes the methanol out) before his body could get around to metabolizing it into formaldehyde and formic acid. For someone who doesn’t receive hemodialysis, I think the methanol would still have to be metabolized at some point, even if when that happens is much delayed? In which case the same toxic effects of formaldehyde and formic acid would hit, just much later.
Thanks!
What form/brand/dose do you take the ketone esters in?
I think the poker example is OK, and paragraphs like
“The second decision point was when the flop was dealt and you faced a bet. This time you decided to fold. Maybe that wasn't the best play though. Maybe you should have called. Maybe you should have raised. Again, the goal of hand review is to figure this out.”
made sense to me. But the terminology in the dialogue was very tough: button, Rainbow, LAGgy, bdfs, AX, nut flush, nitty - I understood none of these. (I’ve played poker now and then, but never studied it). So keeping the example but translating it a bit further to more widely-used language (if possible) might be good.
Very interesting! I work in health insurance and we try to encourage vaginal delivery and discourage C-sections; the other side you present here is a surprise. Good stuff.
Very very good. The full power of science fiction - taking the concept of the redaction machines and finding this many interesting consequences of them, and fitting them into the story - really good
You don’t need to call tails to explore whether tails is possible, though - the information gain of a coin flip is the same whether you call heads or tails
I’m not the asker, but I think I get where they’re coming from. For a long time, linear and logistic regression were the king & queen of modeling. Then the introduction of non-linear functions like random forest and gradient boosters made us far more able to fit difficult data. So the original question has me wondering if there’s a similar possible gain in going from linearity to non-linearity in interpretability algorithms.
I agree with the encouragement to look harder for a sooner TMJ appointment. ADHD testing has similar waits now - looking in May, I was told everyone was booked up till September. But I lucked out, and the first testing doctor I talked to had just had some people cancel appointments, and nobody on his waitlist was responding, so I ended up seeing him a week later, in June, instead of in September. So there are opportunities for luck like this around. And this is without me looking out of state.
I like the trigger point idea. OP should note too that there are injection treatments for trigger points: https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/guide/trigger-point-injection
I just quit caffeine a month ago after years of daily dependence on it, and I feel better than I did on it. I now limit myself to 100mg a week. The dependence had a consistent moderate negative affect on my life, so I’d recommend people be very careful to avoid dependence.
Sure - there are plenty of cases where a pair of interactions isn’t interesting. In the image net context, probably you’ll care more about screening-off behavior at more abstract levels.
For example, maybe you find that, in your trained network, a hidden representation that seems to correspond to “trunk” isn’t very predictive of the class “tree”. And that one that looks like “leaves” is predictive of “tree”. It’d be useful to know if the reason “trunk” isn’t predictive is that “leaves” screens it off. (This could happen if all the tree trunks in your training images come with leaves in the frame).
Of course, the causality parts of the above analysis don’t address the “how should you assign labels in the first place” problem that the post is most focused on! I’m just saying both the ML parts and the causality parts work well in concert, and are not opposing methods.
This post does a sort of head-to-head comparison of causal models and deep nets. But I view the relationship between them differently - they’re better together! The causal framework gives us the notion of “screening off”, which is missing from the ML/deep learning framework. Screening-off turns out to be useful in analyzing feature importance.
A workflow that 1) uses a complex modern gradient booster or deep net to fit the data, then 2) uses causal math to interpret the features - which are most important, which screen off which - is really nice. [This workflow requires fitting multiple models, on different sets of variables, so it’s not just fit a single model in step 1), analyze it in step 2), done].
Causal math lacks the ability to auto-fit complex functions, and ML-without-causality lacks the ability to measure things like “which variables screen off which”. Causality tools, paired with modern feature-importance measures like SHAP values, help us interpret black-box models.
From my personal experience, I would have them take up one or two competitive arts.
Timing yourself to improve your personal best at, say, running, does not count. Running on a track against, or in a longer race against, a small handful of people that you can potentially beat does count, although I would lean toward recommending something where you have to deal with the counter-moves of your opponent. Boxing or kickboxing training that includes sparring against others counts; doing boxing training at a gym that does not do sparring doesn’t count. Playing chess or Go counts. Basketball, hockey, soccer, etc, all count. Playing online competitive video games technically counts under this definition, but I’m excluding it; those mostly make me feel bad.
Having an opponent that will challenge you with counter-moves, and do their best to get one over on you, but who you can beat if you train and try hard enough, has no substitute. Winning against someone who has put everything into the fight gives confidence that you can apply all over the place. Plus it feels great.
My experience: I’ve spent the past two years running and lifting. These mean I look great physically, and am healthy, and get the exercise endorphins and stuff. But they didn’t meet the competitive need! I’ve recently gotten back into boxing at a sparring gym. The competitive aspect of being in the ring, trying to best the other guy, is something I’ve really been missing. It also directs my training at a real concrete purpose, instead of the colder “increase the weight / increase running speed” metric-tracking approach to those forms of exercise.
I also play Go, and it used to serve this purpose well in my life.
(This competitiveness stuff might be more important for men than it is for women - I’m not sure. I’d definitely give this advice to a man, and I’d give it as a ‘maybe’ to a woman. Of course, women can get a lot of value from competition; I’m just not sure if the lack of it would gnaw at them the way it was gnawing at me.)
I have pretty bad energy-level problems and have been looking for more things to try to fix them. I’d always thought quitting caffeine would make it so I could attain my current energy levels without caffeine; it never occurred to me that energy levels after quitting could be higher. So this is very interesting. Thanks for sharing.
That’s great! Happy to hear it - thanks for reporting back, especially in such detail.
Whoops. That’s a big mistake on my part. Appreciate the correction.
Thanks! I’ll give it a read
I am having trouble concording “a low signal:noise ratio biases the effects, often towards zero” with the result in the final section, where you say
“the genetic correlation has ended up much bigger than the environmental correlation. This happened due to the measurement error; if it was not for the measurement error, they would be of similar magnitudes.”
In the second statement, the noise (measurement error) was high, so there’s a low signal:noise ratio - is that right? If so, doesn’t the first statement suggest the genetic correlation should be biased towards zero, instead of being inflated?
Thanks!
Wait! There’s doubts about the Tay story? I didn’t know that, and have failed to turn up anything in a few different searches just now. Can you say more, or drop a link if you have one?
Glad you’re trying it! Let me know if you end up feeling like it helps
A quibble: Amazon’s resume evaluator discriminated against women who went to women’s colleges, or were in women’s clubs. This is different from discriminating against women in general! I feel like this is an important difference. Women’s colleges, in particular, are not very high-rated, among all colleges. Knowing someone went to a women’s college means you also know they didn’t go to MIT, or Berkeley, or any of the many good state universities. I brought this up to a female friend who went to Columbia; she said Columbia had a women’s college, but that it was a bit of a meme at broader Columbia, for not being a very good school. Googling a bit now, I find there are either 31 or “less than 50” women’s colleges in the US, and that many are liberal arts colleges. If “women’s college” is a proxy variable for “liberal arts college”, that’s a good reason to ding people for listing a women’s college. Most women do not go to women’s colleges! And I’d bet almost none of the best STEM women went to a women’s college.
A prediction: if they included an explicit gender variable in the resume predictor, a candidate being female would carry much less of a penalty (if there was even a penalty) than a candidate having gone to a women’s college.
Another “prediction”, although it’s pushing the term “prediction”, since it can’t be evaluated: in a world where there were less than 50 men’s colleges in the US, and most were liberal arts, that world’s Amazon resume rater would penalize having gone to a men’s college.
Downvoted: There are multiple problems, and different people can work on different ones. Pointing to one problem and saying it should be addressed isn’t the same as saying work should be halted on all the other ones.
I also think that acting as if the Bostrom quote is about saving Canadians in particular is a bad misreading. Bostrom is using the population of Canada to give a sense for the size of the problem, not to call for a focus on Canadian aging. Cures for aging would probably be invented in the west, but could then be extended to Africa and Asia - people die from aging in those regions, too.
I think your objection in the final paragraph, about death being a good thing is a reasonable one - it’s certainly a popular belief. But your first two paragraphs are… arguing dirty.
This is super cool. I’d have thought this was a great post if it was just the content of the video, so the additional analysis is, like, super great.
Gotcha - thanks.
Both the first and third links in the Overview section of the repo are links to the Goddess of Everything Else book - I think the first link is meant to go to a different book instead?
Yeah, that makes sense. ToF itself didn’t make me sick - it was other games, like the nightmare PUBG-like VR shooter where you start by parachuting to a place on the ground, and the Walking Dead VR shooter. I would probably be fine if I restricted the games I played, but I wanted to play alllll the games, and returned my headset when I couldn’t.
I saw the title of this post and thought of ToF right away! I was an amateur boxer for a year and had a few fights and thought ToF was an excellent workout, and something I’d incorporate if I was still boxing (and if VR didn’t make me sick as a dog).
I like that notion of robustness! I’m having trouble understanding the big-O behavior here because of the 1/N^2 term - does the decreasing nature of this function as N goes up mean the mean becomes more robust than the median for large N, or does the median always win for any N?
I think this is great - the monetary incentive yesterday inspired me to write a new post and post a draft from a year ago, and tonight inspired me to write a post I’ve had in my head for months. (In the spirit of Goodhart’s Law, I’m waiting till 2:01am CST to post it, so that it will show up in the list of Sunday posts). Cheers!
My deck against the rival is:
Alessin_Adamant_Angel_Deck_A_Count: 3
Murderous_Minotaur_Deck_A_Count: 1
Patchy_Pirate_Deck_A_Count: 6
Sword_of_Shadows_Deck_A_Count: 2
This deck has around a 70% probability of beating the rival. I used a LightGBM booster trained on all the data. The out-of-sample accuracy before dumping all the data in was an AUC of 0.66, but the model is well-calibrated, so I'm confident in the ~70% probability.
I’d argue that moving the data like that is not as precise: “choose any data point right of the median, and add any amount to it” is a larger set of operations than “subtract the mean from the distribution”.
(Although: is there a larger class of operations than just subtracting the mean that result in identical means but different medians? If there were, that would damage my conception of robustness here, but I haven’t tried to think of how to find such a class of operations, if they exist.)
I appreciated your comment on my post earlier today! Don’t leave!
It’s a good observation that I hadn’t considered - thanks for sharing it. After thinking it over, I don’t think it’s important.
I don’t know quite how to say this succinctly, so I’ll say it in a rambling way: subtracting the mean is an operation precisely targeted to make the means the same. Of course mean-standardized distributions have the same means! In the family of all distributions, there will be a lot more with the same median than with the same mean (I can’t prove this properly, but it feels true). You’re right that, in the family of mean-standardized distributions, this isn’t true, but that’s a family of distributions specifically constructed to make it untrue. The behavior in that specific family isn’t very informative about the information content of these location parameters in general.
Thanks!
Hi - having a great time with this! I have a decent answer currently, but want to try a more sophisticated search procedure for the PvP deck. If I submit by 11:59pm CST on Sunday, is that still considered April 3rd? Or are you planning to run things on Sunday, making late Sunday submissions inconvenient?