Posts
Comments
Alternative theory (which, to be clear, I dont actually believe, but offer for consideration)
- Many of the high iq people are too autistic to be successful
- but female hormones protects against the autism somehow, without impacting iq too much
- so the successful high iq people tend to be trans more often on average
I think its more likely its the transgender - autism correlation....
- some forms of autism come with higher iq (and other forms, really really dont)
- and there's the transgender autism correlation
which together would seem to predict transgender high iq people
(and also transgender low iq that you arent seeing due to ascertainment bias)
And the really funny bit is NIST deliberately subverted the standard so that an organization who knew the master key (probably NSA) could break the security of the system. And then, in actualt implementation, the master key was changed so that someone else could break into everyone's system And, officially at least, we have no idea who that someone is. Probably Chinese government. Could be organized crime, though probably unlikely.
The movie Sneakers had this as its plots years ago.. US government puts a secret backdoor in everyone's computer system .. and, then, uh,, someone steals the key to that backdoor;
But anyway, yes, it is absolutely NISTs fault that they unintentionally gave the Chinese government backdoor access into US government computers.
https://cacm.acm.org/research/technical-perspective-backdoor-engineering/
for example. Although that paper is more about, "Given that NIST has deliberately subverted the standard, how did actual products also get subverted to exploit the weakness that NIST introduced."
While I was typing this, quetzal_rainbow made the same point
Ascertainment bias, of course, because we only see the cases where this did not work, and do not know exactly how many members of e.g. Delta Force were originally in doubt as to their gender. We can know it doesnt work sometimes.
Well there's this frequently observed phenomenon where someone feels insecure about their gender, and then does something hypermasculine like joining Special Forces or becoming a cage fighter or something like that. They are hoping that it will make them feel confident of their birth-certificate-sex. Then they discover that nope, this does not work and they are still trans.
People should be aware that there are copious examples of people who are like -- nope, still trans --- after hoping that going hard on their birth-certificate-gender will work,
Ever since NIST put a backdoor in Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator, they have the problem that many people no longer trust them.
I guess it might be possible to backdoor AI Safety Evaluations (e.g. suppose there is some know very dangerous thing that National Security Agency is doing with AI, and NIST deliberately rigs their criteria to not stop this very dangerous thing).
But apart from the total loss of public trust in them as an institution, NIST has done ground-breaking work in the computer security field in the past, so it wouldn't be so unusual for them to develop AI criteria.
The whole dual elliptic curve fiasco is possibly a lesson that criteria should be developed by international groups, because a single country's standards body, like NIST, can be subverted by their spy agencies.
A Japanese guy I used to work with had a very serious genetic alcohol intolerance. (Like, a single drop of wine would probably be ok but anything more than that would likely put him in the hospital).
I guess if you have a known inability to metabolise alcohol, such that you're already having be very car3fuo that anything you consume doesn't have alcohol in it, you might want to be a little bit cautious here. but ... maybe the quantity you get from the bacteria is so small it doesn't matter.
The Northen Ireland Assembly works this way, at least for some things.
But, in general, the U.K. does not work that way. A particular political party sometimes gets a big majority.
This depends very much on how well debugged the compiler is...
* gcc on llvm on Intel hardware ... very unlikely to be a bug in the compiler
- you're on some less well exercized target like RISC-V ... ha, you are in for so much pain
it is so much fun debugging on experimental hardware where any of (a) your program (b) the compiler (c) the actual hardware are all plausibly buggy.
oh, I forgot (d) the tool used to convert the hardware description language (used to specify the chip design ) into logic gates, used to build the hardware, is itself buggy
As someone who has worked in both academia and industrial research labs, in both cases you can claim either academic publcation or real-world impact as a success wrt getting promoted ...
a) I got a paper about this published in a top-ranking journal; vs,
b) look, those guys are now selling a product based on this thing I invented
(in an industrial research lab, "those guys" had better be the product division of your company; if you're an academic funded by DARPA, "those guys" being anyone who is paying taxes to the US government is just great)
(With a nod to SBF). What kind of criminal mastermind creates a Signal chat group called "wirefraud"? are you going to try and tell me there was a perfectly innocent explanation?
Also, under British rules the judge can halt a case and instruct the jury to acquit. E.g. if the prosecution witness, under cross-examination, admits that their story about Ritchie Bottoms isn't true, (and hence, the prosecution does not have a case), the judge can just stop the trial right there and instruct the jury to acquit.
As a British person, I am strictly forbidden from revealing what the jury deliberations were in any particular case.
However, in general terms: these guys are, usually, idiots. Sometimes innocent idiots whose act of monumental stupidity led to them being accused of a crime they did not commit, but still: idiots.
There is a third possibility that can, in theory, be encountered: everyone is lying. Prosecution witnesses, defense witnesses, all of them: lying. Imagine that the prosecution case rests entirely on some tall story about Ritchie Bottoms. You don't believe he even exists, you don't believe the prosecution witnesses. Oh, but the defendant:: you don't believe him, either. Did he do it? No idea. Shrug. But you know the prosecutor doesn't have a case if he can't do better than this guy with an implausible story about Ritchie Bottoms.
Almost any word can be contextually implied to be a euphemism for a penis.
(film quote from memory) in Carry On Spying, the spies ask their handler for information on the Fat Man .. "We don't have much information on him. He's got a very small dossier."
another instalment in this film series, Carry on Dick (about the highwayman Dick Turpin, of course, whatever else could it refer to) does this extensively,
so, maybe the llm has learnt something about how these jokes work,.
It's astonishing, but yes, that is the reason why that form of string theory takes place in a 26 dimensional space-time.
wait till you see E8*E8 heterotic string theory,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterotic_string_theory
Shay you want here is Matthew D. Schwarz, Quantum Theory and the Standard Model, chapter 15.
(or the original paper by CasiMir cited in the above book chapter.
Zeta regularisation is a much saner way to explain it.
====
in a physics context .. suppose that the laws of physics you have are only valid up to some energy scale E, where E is presumed large.
The physical quantity you 're interested in is f(E) - g(E).
lim E -> infinity of f(E) and g(E) is infinite, so can't safely exchange the order of the limits and the subtraction. But lim E -> infinity (f(E) - g(E)) exists and is finite, so you're good to go, and the result is insensitive to what the energy scale E actually is,
I am not convinced by the second part of this, because you looked at a lot of points and then chose one that seemed interesting to you.
"One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic", attributed to Stalin. There is possibly an analogue in tort law, where if you kill one person by negligence their dependents will sue you, but if you kill a million people by negligence no-one will date mention it.
see also: "if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a billion dollars, the bank has a problem."
Even a "small" incident, small in the sense that it doesn't kill absolutely everybody, could generate enough liability to wipe out Meta, or Google. For example, something on the scale of flying a jet airplane into the world trade centre.
even if. Bankrupting Facebook wasn't enough to cover the actual loss I thin' the prospect would be sufficient deterrent .. at least, enough to prevent it happening a second time.
covid19 might be influencing our thnking here. Even if covid wasn't a lab leak, we now know that such lan leaks are at least possible, and lab accidents that kill tens of millions or peopl are distinctly possible. Which is too big to be covered by tort law.
There is believing in some moral value, and there is believing in some factual state of the world. Moral judgements aren't the same as facts, but it would seem that you can have beliefs about both.
Asking someone to write down something they believe is somewhat underspecified.
Also, saying "I believe X" rather than just "X" suggests either (a) you wish to signal some doubt about whether X actually is true or (b) X is the kind of thing where believing it is highly speaker-specific, e.g. a moral value.
I think of myself as a good visualiser, but I found this task quite hard. I had to visualise reading each of the words about. 5 times before the whole 3x3 grid became stable and I could read it horizontally,
There is an argument to the effect that if you can write down in advance what you're going to discover by doing an experiment, then it is not, in fact, scientific research....
Unlike the EU, DARPA is very fond of contract extensions, so you get "ok, we'll pay you to do phase 1 of this, and if it works and we like it we might think about negotiating a contract extension for phase II" ... which possibly reduces the need for PIs to adopt the Soviet Union Five Year Plan strategy, (like, you might really not have done phase I at the point where you're negotiating a contract to do it).
i will admit that something a bit like this sometimes happens in computer science (grant application to cover the cost of something you've just done; you know it's possible, because you've just done it)
some years ago, I am giving a presentation to some senior honchos from our own Ministry of Defense, and afterwards I get asked about exactly this,. "so, you're saying it's like how people handled the Five Year Plan in the Soviet Union?" asks military dude who knows about Russia. Me, who knows how the sausages are made in academic research: "Basically, yes."
so, maybe. Happens sometimes.
P.S. Was actually MoD, rather than DoD. DARPA principal investigators can also encounter a tough crowd.
P.P.S. And then theres the EU ones, where as PI you get a questioning that feels like a combination of your thesis defense and being audited by the tax authorities, and you gave no idea which type of question might be next,
So, apparently, "senior research fellow" is what your postdoc research staff get called.
Me: "I need to get some business cards printed, and the online form here says I can put whatever I like in the title field. I think I'm going with 'senior research fellow'."
member of academc staff, and my long term collaborator: "That would have the advantage that it's actually true. Someone could probably do more damage by writing in "head of finance" in there..."
In case it isn't obvious. Consequence of the above institutional rule is that your full-time research staff are not, and be rule cannot be, principal investigators.
DARPA projects are often moderately large, say about a dozen researchers on one grant.
Here, the PI is basically full-time writing grants/managing the budget/managing people, and their minions ar3 doing the actual research. Can work.
A stupid bug in the system at my current institution. So, we have full time researchers and teaching staff. Teaching staff have permanent contracts. Research staff are only ever employed until the end of whatever research grant the6 are currently employed on. Bug: research staff cannot be PIs. Because, well, the grant will end and the researcher will cease to be employed, but there might still need to be government paperwork to be done wrt the grant by the PI, which well won't happen if you've just terminated the PIs contract because the grant ended. But .. Hang on a minute ..l didn't we just say that being a PI is a full-time management position? And you're asking that guy to teach classes too?
[Amusing factoid. I once had an EU research contract with a strict condition that we absolutely not do any research. Background: original grant has ended, but we haven't had the wrap up meeting where you present the results to the evaluators. Somehow, the travel expenses for that meeting need a grant extension to cover them, but, says the sponsors, understand this additional money is travel expenses only and don't you guys dare to charge any actual research costs to this contract]
There is story, possibly apocryphal, that the first person to isolate fluorine gas died in the attempt.
=====
In an introductory course on stained glass.. "some watercolour painters like to lick their brushes to get a good point. When you are painting toxic heavy metals on to glass, do not do this."
some time later...
"hmmm.. looks like the particular kind of glass you have chosen for this project doesn't take silver nitrate very well. Let's try antimony instead...."
A guess - most compounds are not that toxic, but LSD is potent in very small doses. So that if chemists are routinely exposed to small enough not to kill you doses of whatever they're working with, when they work with LSD they will notice.
like, chlorine is not that toxic, and a routine step in analysing an unknown compound is to add acid and take a quick sniff to see if chlorine is coming off.
( and one time, the unknown compound we were given to analyse was some benzene derivative, and what you get a sniff of is way, way worse than chlorine).
I am an old person. They may not let you do that in chemistry any more.
so, yes, I know at least one person who reports becoming attracted to men after starting hrt.
but I was more referring to the social dark matter effect, where the true amount of something is greater than is reported.
I will also note that the number of transwomen who are attracted to males is higher than it at first appears.
like, maybe they tell you they're attracted to women and you take that at face value (its kind of personal so no one is under any kind of obligation to disclose that, but sometimes they disclose that). And then some months later at a party you see you them leaving with a guy, and mentally update your p(their sexual orientation) without, of course, saying anything.
The trans community has, traditionally, considered there to be a distinction between cross dressers and transsexuals. We might now think that the distinction is blurry and it's not always obvious which category a particular person belongs to. For example someone might meet most of the expected characteristic of the transsexul type but not have actually had surgery - due to considerations of risk, expense, being on a years long NHS waiting list, etc. etc.
Russell Reid (used to be a psychiatrist in the UK, now retired) used to regard response to hormones as diagnostic. Like, if you're sexually driven estrogen will typically reduce sex drive and you won't like it, but transsexuals will actually feel better. (Some people report increased sex drive on estrogen - that there is sometimes an atypical response is interestinot). Still, there's an idea here that transition is suitable for some people and not others, and this is one of the points where you get to find out which type you are.
(Theres a joke that goes "Q: whats the different between a cross dresser and a transsexual? A: About six months" which may have some truth to it, but is not the official answer to that question).
Watching the poly/mong argument on Twitter, my best guess is that sex has a very different personal meaning for these two groups of people. They certainly seem to be talking past each other.
I think this post is a good one, even though personally I'm not hung up on AI doom; I think this area of research is cool and interesting, which is a rather different emotion from fear.
My immediate thought is that Cognitive Behevioral Therapy concepts might relevant here, as it sounds like a member of the family of anxiety disorders that CBT is designed to treat.
And also, given this a group phenomenon rather than a purely individual one, there's something of the apocalyptic religious cult dynamic going on.
one thing that can be kind of irritating about CBT practionere is they way they tend to focus on the emotion about X rather than whether you think X is likely or a practical problem. And then you notice that our typical English language way of talking about things doesn't distinguish them well. So .. at least when sp asking to someone who is into cbt, you can temporarily adopt a way of speaking that carefully distinguishes the two.
I think I'm going to put a low probability on "within 10 years AIs will be able to disempower humanity".
i think merely being good at science is in no way sufficient to be able to do that; would require a bunch of additional factors (e.g. power seeking, ability to persuade humans, etc etc)
but on the other hand, I think Yann Lecun is way too complacent when he imagines that intelligent AIs will be just like high IQ humans employed by corporations. At a slight risk of being constraversial, i would suggest that e.g. Hamas members are within the range of human behaviours within the training set that an AI could choose to emulate.
Some examples of bugs that were particularly troublesome on a recent project.
- in the MIPS backend for the LLVM conpiler there is one point where it ought to be checking whether the target cpu is 32 bit or 64 bit. Instead, it checks if the MIPS version number is mips64. Problem; there were 64 bit MIPS versions before mips64, e.g, mips4, so the check is wrong. Obvious when you see the line of code, but days of tracing though thousands and thousands of lines of code till you it.
- with a particularvversion of freebsd on MIPS, it works fine on single core but the console dies on multi core. The serial line interrupt is routed to one of the cores. On receiving an interupt, the oscdisables the interrupt and puts handling the interrupt on a scheduling queue. when the task is taken off the queue, the interrupt is handoed and then re-enabled. Problem: last step might be scheduled to run on a different core. If that happens, interrupt remains disabled on the core that receives the interrupt, and enabled on a core that never recieves it. Console output dies.
I am not a Bayesian, so I have philosophical objections to giving probabilities to things that are not a distribution you can sample from.
The survey just assumes that everyone is a Bayesian.
With current LLMs, the algorithm is fairly small and the information is all in the training set.
This would seem to make foom unlikely, as the AI can't easily get hold of more training data.
using the existing data more efficiently might be possible, of course.
I think the intelligence community ought to be watching AI risk, whether or not they actually are.
e.g. in the UK, the Socialist Workers Party was heavily infiltrated by undercover agents; widwly suspected at the time, subsequently officially confirmed. Now, you way well disagree with their politics, but it's pretty clear they didn't amount to a threat. Infiltration should probably have bailed out after quickly Establishing threat level was low.
AI risk, on the other hand ... from the point of view of an intelligence agency, there's uncertainty about whether there's a real risk or not. Seems worthwhile getting some undercover agents in place to find out what's going on.
... though, if in 20 years time it has become clear the AI apocalypse has been averted, and the three letter agencies are still running dozens of agents inside 5he AI companies, we could reasonably say their agents have outlived their usefulness.
A wild (probably wrong) theory: Sam Altman announcing custom gpts was the thing that pushed the board to fire him.
customizable ai -> user can override rlhf (maybe, probably) -> we are at risk from AIs that have been finetunrd by bad actors
If he was fired for some form of sexual misconduct, we wouldn't change our views on AI risk. But the betting seems to be that it wasn't that.
On the other hand, if the reason for his firing was something like he had access to a concerning test result, and was concealing it from the board and the government (illegal as per the executive order) then we're going to worry about what that test result was, and how bad it is for AI risk.
Worst case: this is a AI preventing itself from being shutdown, by getting the board members sympathetic to itself to fire the board members most likely to shut it down. (The "surely you could just switch it off" argument is lacking in imagination as to how an agi could prevent shutdown). Personally, low probabilty that it's this option.
First a bit of background: radio hams have competitions where you win points for correctly receiving a radio message from the other participants. To win at this game, you've got to be good at hearing a weak, distant radio station that is almost obscured by the background static.
a phenomenon reported by radio operators - especially when using morse code - is that you copy down a message from the other guy, but are not 100% sure whetherv what you've heard is real or just hallucinatory. (You get to find out that it was real when the judge of the contest gives you the points for having correctly transcribed the message you were sent).
So that certainly exists. - but it's unclear if voice hearing is that type of phenomenon, or something else.
Without having empirical data to back this claim, my guess would be that the autism distribution has a single peak at "no symptoms". that is, the majority of the population has no symptoms, there are lots of people with mild symptoms, and the severe symptoms are down in the tail of the distribution.
but you're posting on LessWrong, which means you 're interacting with the Rationalist community, which seems to have way, way more trans people than national average. I mean, look at manifold.love, the community's take on a dating site, and see how long it takes to encounter a trans person. Or, for that matter, the community talking about AI risk contains a bunch of trans people, so you're pterry much guaranteed to encounter at least one in any extended discussion of AI risk.
So, I am told there are a very large number of people who hear voices, but do not otherwise have any of the seriously disabling symptoms of schizophrenia.
Possibilities that come to mind:
- Spectrum condition. Non-pathological voice hearers have same relation to diagnosed schizophrenia as high-functioning posters to LessWrong have to the severe forms of autism.
- Maybe not even the same thing at all, lke whatever causes schizophrenia just co-incidentally happens to have a symptom in common with some other, harmless thing.
(in the case of autism, the argument that the mild and severe forms share a causal factor is that parents with the mild form statistically tend to have children with the severe form, suggesting a heritable common factor. I have absolutely no idea if there in comparable evidence for voice-hearing).
Re. The question of what happens if a non-us model is dropped on Huggingface ... presumably hugging face can report to the government "we have done no tests whatsoever" and be compliant with the regulation? (Oh wait maybe not if the originator of the model has actually done some tests but kept then secret). Or later, if there are mandatory tests, huggingface can just run them and report the results to the government.
I think politics often involves bidding for the compromise you think is feasible, rather than what you'ld ideally want.
whats maybe different in the AI risk case, and others like it, is how you'll be regarded when things go wrong.
hypothetical scenario
- An AI does something destructive, on the order of 9/11
- Government over-reacts as usual, and cracks down on the AI companies like the US did on Osama bin Laden, or Israel did on Hamas.
- you are like, yeah we knew that was going to happen
- governmet to you, what the fuck? Why didn't you tell us?