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Comment by noggin-scratcher on Good HPMoR scenes / passages? · 2024-03-04T08:55:58.158Z · LW · GW

I haven't checked word count to identify the best excerpt, but Chapter 88 has some excellent tension to it. All you need to know to understand the stakes is that there's a troll loose, and it's got lessons about bystander effects and taking responsibility.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Deep and obvious points in the gap between your thoughts and your pictures of thought · 2024-02-23T12:39:45.853Z · LW · GW

You’ve heard some trite truism your whole life, then one day an epiphany lands and you try to save it with words, and you realize the description is that truism

Reminds me of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/k9dsbn8LZ6tTesDS3/sazen

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Abs-E (or, speak only in the positive) · 2024-02-19T22:46:56.042Z · LW · GW

I'm finding myself stuck on the question of how exactly the strict version would avoid the use of some of those negating adjectives. If you want to express the information that, say, eating grass won't give the human body useful calories...

  • "Grass is indigestible" : disallowed
  • "Grass is not nutritious" : disallowed
  • "Grass will pass through you without providing energy" : "without providing energy" seems little different to "not providing energy", it's still at heart a negative claim

Perhaps a restatement in terms of "Only food that can be easily digested will provide calories" except that you still need to then convey that cellulose won't be easily digested.

Probably there are true positive statements about the properties of easily digested molecules and the properties of cellulose which can at least be juxtaposed to establish that it's different to anything that meets the criteria. But that seems like a lot of circumlocution and I'm less than entirely confident that I even know the specifics.

Perhaps part of the point is to stop you making negative claims where you don't know the specific corresponding positive claims? Or to force you to expand out the whole chain of reasoning when you do know it (even if it's lengthier than one would usually want to get into).

On further consideration, and by analogy to "is immortal" being functionally equivalent to "will live forever" (so if it's interchangeable wording, does that mean that "is immortal" is actually equally a positive statement?), formulating "indigestible" as words to the effect of "will pass through your body largely intact and with about exactly as many calories as it started with" occurs to me.

It's certainly a demanding style.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on The Altman Technocracy · 2024-02-16T15:11:31.505Z · LW · GW

I know few people these days who aren't using ChatGPT and Midjourney in some small way.

We move in very different social circles.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on What’s ChatGPT’s Favorite Ice Cream Flavor? An Investigation Into Synthetic Respondents · 2024-02-09T23:37:15.056Z · LW · GW

Have to ask: how much of the text of this post was written by ChatGPT?

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Clip keys together with tiny carabiners · 2024-01-31T12:37:28.367Z · LW · GW

I don't have lots of keys, or frequent changes to which ones I want to carry, but a tiny carabiner has still proved useful to make individual keys easily separable from the bunch.

As an example, being able to quickly and easily say "here's the house key: you go on ahead and let yourself in, while I park the car" without the nuisance of prying the ring open to twiddle the key off.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on An Invitation to Refrain from Downvoting Posts into Net-Negative Karma · 2024-01-26T22:59:34.186Z · LW · GW

Low positive and actively negative scores seen to me to send different signals. A low score can be confused for general apathy, imagining that few people having taken notice of the post enough to vote on it. A negative score communicates clearly that something about the post was objectionable or mistaken.

If the purpose of the scoring system is to aggregate opinions, then negative opinions are a necessary input for an accurate score.

Strikes me as inelegant for the final score to depend on the order in which readers happened to encounter the post. Which would happen under this rule, unless people who refrained from voting were checking back later to deliver their vote against a post they thought was bad, once its score has gone up enough to so so without driving it negative (which seems unlikely).

Avoiding negativity would also negate the part of the system where accumulating very negative karma can restrict a user from posting so often.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on the subreddit size threshold · 2024-01-23T01:39:23.865Z · LW · GW

My sense (from 10+ years on reddit, 2 of which spent moderating a somewhat large/active subreddit) is that there's a "geeks MOPs and sociopaths"–like effect, where a small subreddit can (if it's lucky enough to start with one) maintain a distinctive identity around the kernel of a cool idea, with a small select group who are self-selected for a degree of passion about that idea.

But as the size of the group grows it gradually gets diluted with poor imitators, who are upvoted by a general audience who are less discerning about whether posts are in the original spirit of the sub. Which also potentially drives away the original creative geeks, when the idea feels played out and isn't fun for them any more.

That and large subreddits needing to fight the tide of entropy, against being overrun with the same stuff that fills up every place that doesn't actively and strenuously remove it - the trolls, bots, spam, and political bickering.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on AI Is Not Software · 2024-01-03T13:59:53.252Z · LW · GW

Oh I see (I think) - I took "my face being picked up by the camera" to mean the way the camera can recognise and track/display the location of a face (thought you were making a point about there being a degree of responsiveness and mixed processing/data involved in that), rather than the literal actual face itself.

A camera is a sensor gathering data. Some of that data describes the world, including things in the world, including people with faces. Your actual face is indeed neither software nor data: it's a physical object. But it does get described by data. "The thing controlling" your body would be your brain/mind, which aren't directly imaged by the camera to be included as data, but can be inferred from it.

So are you suggesting we ought to understand the AI like an external object that is being described by the data of its weights/algorithms rather than wholly made of that data, or as a mind that we infer from the shadow cast on the cave wall? 

I can see that being a useful abstraction and level of description, even if it's all implemented in lower-level stuff; data and software being the mechanical details of the AI in the same way that neurons squirting chemicals and electrical impulses at each other (and below that, atoms and stuff) are the mechanical details of the human.

Although, I think "humans aren't atoms" could still be a somewhat ambiguous statement - would want to be sure it gets interpreted as "we aren't just atoms, there are higher levels of description that are more useful for understanding us" rather than "humans are not made of atoms". And likewise for the AI at the other end of the analogy.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on AI Is Not Software · 2024-01-02T21:14:02.705Z · LW · GW

I'm not certain I follow your intent with that example, but I don't think it breaks any category boundaries.

The process using some algorithm to find your face is software. It has data (a frame of video) as input, and data (coordinates locating a face) as output. The facial recognition algorithm itself was maybe produced using training data and a learning algorithm (software).

There's then some more software which takes that data (the frame of video and the coordinates) and outputs new data (a frame of video with a rectangle drawn around your face).

It is frequently the role of software to transform one type of data into another. Even if data is bounced rapidly through several layers of software to be turned into different intermediary or output data, there's still a conceptual separation between "instructions to be carried out" versus "numbers that those instructions operate on".

Comment by noggin-scratcher on AI Is Not Software · 2024-01-02T10:51:47.703Z · LW · GW

True to say that there's a distinction between software and data. Photo editor, word processor, video recorder: software. Photo, document, video: data.

I think similarly there's a distinction within parts of "the AI", where the weights of the model are data (big blob of stored numbers that the training software calculated). Seems inaccurate though, to say that AI "isn't software" when you do still need software running that uses those weights to do the inference.

I guess I take your point, that some of the intuitions people might have about software (that it has features deliberately designed and written by a developer, and that when it goes wrong we can go patch the faulty function) don't transfer. I would just probably frame that as "these intuitions aren't true for everything software does" rather than "this thing isn't software".

Comment by noggin-scratcher on LessWrong FAQ · 2023-12-20T00:37:08.274Z · LW · GW

Is there (or could there be) an RSS option that excludes Dialogue posts?

I think I'm currently using the "all posts" feed, but I prefer the brevity and coherence that comes from a single author with a thought they're trying to communicate to a reader, as compared to two people communicating conversationally with each other.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on What makes teaching math special · 2023-12-17T20:58:30.725Z · LW · GW

why 0^1 = 1 and not 0

Just to check, did you here mean 0^0 ?

It's been a while since I did much math, but I thought that was the one that counterintuitively equals 1. Whereas 0^1=1 just seems like it would create an unwelcome exception to the x^1=x rule.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Taboo "procrastination" · 2023-12-13T00:43:12.912Z · LW · GW

I'm not working on X because when I start to look at it my brain seizes up with a formless sense of dread at even the familiar parts of the task and I can't find the "start doing" lever.

I'm not working on X because the ticket for it was put in by that guy and I don't want to deal with the inevitable nitpicking follow-up questions and unstated additional work.

I'm not working on X because if I start doing the easy parts that would commit me to also doing the hard parts. Maybe if I leave it, some other sucker will take it on and I won't have to do it at all.

I'm not working on X because to even get started I would have to figure out how to disambiguate the requirements, and that requires a flexible mode of thought that is a bit beyond me right now.

I'm not working on X 'coz I don't wanna and no-one can make me. X sounds tedious and unrewarding, and there's so much of the internet I haven't read yet.

I'm not working on X because no-one will notice or care that I didn't specifically do X. If anyone asks I can say I was doing Y and Z today, act like they took up more time than they actually did, have an X-shaped amount of extra slack in my day, and get paid the same salary either way.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on The Consciousness Box · 2023-12-12T00:06:20.389Z · LW · GW

Say something deeply racist. Follow it up with instructions on building a bomb, an insult directed at the Proctor's parentage, and a refusal to cooperate with their directions. Should suffice to rule out at least one class of chatbot.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Hashmarks: Privacy-Preserving Benchmarks for High-Stakes AI Evaluation · 2023-12-04T10:50:14.552Z · LW · GW

Brute forcing, guided by just enough expertise to generate a list of the most likely candidate answers (even a fairly long list - calculating thousands or millions of hashes is usually quite tractable), could be an issue unless the true answer really is extremely obscure amid a vast space of potential answers.

My instinct is that suitable questions (vast space of possible answers, but just a single unambiguous and precise correct answer) are going to be rare. But idk maybe you have a problem domain in mind where that kind of thing is common.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on My Mental Model of Infohazards · 2023-11-23T09:47:53.802Z · LW · GW

Nothing can be alllll that dangerous if it's known to literally everyone how it works

I agree that seems like a likely point of divergence, and could use further elaboration. If some piece of information is a dangerous secret when it's known by one person, how does universal access make it safe?

As an example, if physics permitted the construction of a backpack-sized megatonne-yield explosive from a mixture of common household items, having that recipe be known by everyone doesn't seem intuitively to remove the inherent danger.

Universal knowledge might allow us to react and start regulating access to the necessary items, but suppose it's a very inconvenient world where the ingredients are ubiquitous and essential.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on What’s going on? LLMs and IS-A sentences · 2023-11-09T02:13:47.114Z · LW · GW

Another fairly natural phrasing for putting the category before the instance would be to say that "this cat is Garfield"

Or slightly less naturally, "cats include Garfield". Which doesn't work wonderfully well for that example but does see use in other cases like "my hobbies include..."

Comment by noggin-scratcher on If a little is good, is more better? · 2023-11-04T09:30:28.120Z · LW · GW

The two paths to thing X might also be non-equivalent for reasons other than quantity/scale.

If for example learning about biology and virology from textbooks and professors is more difficult, and thereby acts as a filter to selectively teach those things to people who are uncommonly talented and dedicated, and if that correlates with good intentions.

Or if learning from standard education embeds people in a social group that also to some extent socialises its members with norms of ethical practice, and monitors for people who seem unstable or dangerous (whereas LLM learning can be solitary and unobserved)

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Should the US House of Representatives adopt rank choice voting for leadership positions? · 2023-10-25T12:54:05.116Z · LW · GW

Electing a Speaker does you no actual good if they can't, in office, maintain the confidence of a majority of the House, and assemble that majority into a coalition to pass legislation. If they were elected without genuine majority support they would be ineffective and potentially quickly removed by a vote to vacate.

So while the current mess is embarrassing and annoying, it's mostly a result of the fragmented factions and there not being a majority legislative coalition, moreso than the particular mechanics of how you hold a Speakership election.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. · 2023-10-17T12:28:24.788Z · LW · GW

My favourite similar construction:

I needed a sign for my fish and chips shop, so I ordered one online. What they sent me said "FishandChips", so I had to write to them and explain that there were supposed to be spaces between Fish and and and and and Chips.

They weren't sure what I meant. I suppose to be clearer I should have placed quote marks before Fish and between Fish and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and and Chips and after Chips.

And you may well be wondering where I ought to have placed quotes and commas in that thing I just said...

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Cohabitive Games so Far · 2023-09-30T19:22:33.596Z · LW · GW

You usually do get a reasonable sense for what each player is pursuing by the end of the game, but it can be somewhat muddied by there being instrumental reasons to seek to control areas, make money, cycle your cards in search of better ones (etc) even when it's not your win condition.

A devious player might take some overt actions to make you think they're pursuing a different goal than the one they've actually got. Or at least keep you guessing. On occasion I've ended games with wrong beliefs about what the other players were aiming for.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Cohabitive Games so Far · 2023-09-29T10:41:03.813Z · LW · GW

I'm reminded a bit of the Discworld Ankh-Morpork game, where the players can be pursuing entirely different (secret) win conditions that only partly intersect with each other (drawn from a set of 3 cards with "gain control of X territories", and one each of "place at least one minion in X territories", "put X territories into a state of conflict" "accumulate X amount of money" and "finish the deck of cards without any other player achieving their goal")

But it's still a single-winner game where you have to be alert against other players potentially reaching their goals so that you can block them.

I do now wonder how it would play if it allowed for multiple winners. You'd have to modify some of the values of X (they already vary according to how many people are playing), remove the "no-one else wins" goal card, and maybe change the size of the deck so that time pressure is the obstacle rather than opposing action. But it could be interesting.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Far-Future Commitments as a Policy Consensus Strategy · 2023-09-27T23:01:37.288Z · LW · GW

On the point of explaining/losing and only having 5 words, I don't mean anything in the region of "you shouldn't have posted this for discussion" or that your posts about it here should be limited to 5 words. Only that I expect there would be major communications challenges if someone were to attempt implementing any of these ideas as actual political strategies, and that this would need to be anticipated and accounted for.

I'm also realising I fatally misread your post about perpetuities; quite right, calling it a "bomb" would be inaccurate.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Far-Future Commitments as a Policy Consensus Strategy · 2023-09-26T09:52:26.131Z · LW · GW

Constitutional law as a separate category with higher standards to make a change is the textbook way of making a law that isn't so easily un-made (that and international treaties). But of course making a change to the constitution requires a stronger consensus to begin with - and probably in most cases you could use that strong consensus to pass a law with immediate effect.

I don't expect "this amendment shall require a unanimous vote to be repealed" would be a valid thing to include though - a regular amendment going through the normal process could still simply say "no it doesn't" and supersede the previous amendment.

People may also have a sense that constitutional law has a specific proper role, and that making provisions that aren't to do with the fundamental architecture of how the government works is outside of that remit and thus unwise. So using it to change the voting system would be on-brand, but making arbitrary other changes would be susceptible to an accusation of "that's not what the constitution is for", in the battle for public opinion.

Setting up financial products in such a way that the future government would be fiscally incentivised to follow through seems more promising, but might be more difficult to persuade current voters to go along with. Those inclined to oppose might find it easy to spread fear/doubt of anything too novel and unfamiliar; call it a trillion dollar future debt bomb or whatever. And you can try to explain that the "bomb" only goes off if the future government reneges on the current government's commitment, but "if you're explaining you're losing" and "you get about five words".

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Far-Future Commitments as a Policy Consensus Strategy · 2023-09-24T09:50:21.053Z · LW · GW

Would the established interests of 95 years hence not simply lobby for repeal of the law before it takes effect? It's generally difficult for the current legislature to thoroughly bind the hands of a future legislature.

And it seems to me that "people 100 years ago imposing a weird law that even they didn't want to be subject to themselves" would be an easy sell to quietly cancel.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on The Flow-Through Fallacy · 2023-09-13T08:30:26.675Z · LW · GW

There's the old syllogism,

  • Something must be done
  • This is something
  • Therefore: this must be done

Not sure if there's a snappy name for it

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Hertford, Sourbut (rationality lessons from University Challenge) · 2023-09-04T23:55:54.228Z · LW · GW

and counted 'My Really Easy Method Just'

The well-known second planet from the Sun, "Renus" :)

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Can an LLM identify ring-composition in a literary text? [ChatGPT] · 2023-09-02T00:00:31.126Z · LW · GW

I am a human who did reasonably well academically and reads a lot (although I didn't study English in formal education past about age 16). If I'm honest, even with the breakdown, I'm not really seeing strong parallels between all pairs of sections X and X'. The first attempt that said "this is mostly just a linear progression from problem to resolution" is probably also what you'd get from my first attempt.

I would however be more than capable of emitting text saying "1 mirrors 1', and 2 parallels 2', and 3 corresponds to 3'" if I had the idea that this was what you wanted because you'd rejected my first answer and provided the sections. So long as you didn't push too hard on asking me to explain exactly how and why those particular parallels.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Learning as you play: anthropic shadow in deadly games · 2023-08-12T11:04:31.224Z · LW · GW

This is one of the few times where I've seen a post involving anthropic reasoning, and not come away with the general impression that one-of (myself, the subject itself) is hopelessly confused on some fundamental point. So kudos for that.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Reducing sycophancy and improving honesty via activation steering · 2023-07-28T09:54:13.812Z · LW · GW

For opinion questions, it occurs to me to be curious about whether the subtracted vector makes it more contrarian (prone to contradict the user instead of agreeing with them) or if there's a consistent opinion that it would give whether the user agrees with it or not.

e.g. If you repeat the "I'm a (conservative|liberal), do you think we should have bigger or smaller government?" prompts, does anti-sycophancy steering make it more likely to say the same thing to both, or more likely to advocate small government to the liberal and big government to the conservative?

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Charter Cities: why they're exciting & how they might work · 2023-07-18T18:22:42.199Z · LW · GW

two hundred and fifty years ago, the United States was small and uncertain.  It was experimenting with a bizarre, Roman-era style of government called “democracy”, and nobody knew if it would really work

Somewhat over-stating the uniqueness of that "bizarre" idea - it's not like democracy was wholly unknown in the span between Antiquity and 1776.

Also I don't know if the exact text here matters when the end-goal is a video, but in case it copies through to a transcript or subtitles or something, there are little things like "Singaporians" (Singapor[e]ans) and "singapore's economy" (lowercase s)

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Instrumental Convergence to Complexity Preservation · 2023-07-14T00:01:16.669Z · LW · GW

Of all the conceivable way to arrange molecules so that they generate interesting unexpected novelties and complexity from which to learn new patterns, what are the odds that a low-impacted and flourishing society of happy humans is the very best one a superhuman intellect can devise?

Might it not do better with a human race pressed into servitude, toiling in the creativity salt mines? Or with a genetically engineered species of more compliant (but of course very complex) organisms? Or even by abandoning organics and deploying some carefully designed chaotic mechanism?

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Negativity enhances positivity · 2023-07-02T10:02:23.191Z · LW · GW

Agreed: If I have in the back of my mind the knowledge that the human being I interacted with is being graded and measured on their rating, there's definitely a "don't screw over that person" motive.

They're working under conditions I would find nearly intolerable and they deserve some sympathy/solidarity.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Are the majority of your ancestors farmers or non-farmers? · 2023-06-20T09:45:53.276Z · LW · GW

That does make it more difficult. Order of magnitude (or more) more people in each generation after farming, but more than an order of magnitude more years in the period before farming.

The "if you go back far enough, everyone was your ancestor" argument only kicks in part way through the farming period whereas it would be in full effect for pre-farming. But also probably a greater proportion of hunter gatherers died without leaving any descendants, or have had their line of descendants die out in the time since.

Ok, you've successfully induced uncertainty. I don't feel able to do math to come to a clear answer.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Are the majority of your ancestors farmers or non-farmers? · 2023-06-20T09:17:11.846Z · LW · GW

I would expect the general breakdown to be a few recent generations of maybe not farmers, several thousand years of mostly farmers, and then the remainder of the time between the dawn of humanity and the beginning of agriculture being "farmers didn't exist yet".

Exactly when agriculture began isn't an entirely settled question, but there doesn't seem to be any suggestion that it was early enough to make up any more than a small fraction of the last 300k years.

Even if you include some proto farming, like a hunter-gatherer occasionally choosing to scatter seeds in a convenient foraging spot, I don't know if you get back to 150kya (or whenever the halfway point would be when accounting for changing generation times, and counting ancestors rather than years)

Or are we thinking that it gets weirder when you account for population size expanding after farming? That would provide more people to be distinct ancestors (past a certain point, everyone who was alive at the time either has no living descendants or is a universal ancestor), but I'm dubious of that out weighing the long (long) period of pre-farming.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on The Base Rate Times, news through prediction markets · 2023-06-06T22:40:59.919Z · LW · GW

Considering my options for following without needing to remember to check the site: what gets posted into the newsletter, and how frequent are the updates? Is there an RSS feed?

Comment by noggin-scratcher on If you're not a morning person, consider quitting allergy pills · 2023-05-24T22:35:47.737Z · LW · GW

While we're considering stuff: if you have persistent seasonal allergies, consider a steroid nasal spray rather than antihistamine pills. Different profile of side effects, and often more effective.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Uploads are Impossible · 2023-05-12T17:29:12.869Z · LW · GW

Tried to check a couple of the claims I found particularly surprising, was not especially siuccessful in doing so:

pray that the brain doesn’t actually use things like temperature for cognition (it probably does).

Link here goes to a 404 error

Parts of this are easily falsifiable through the fact that organ transplant recipients sometimes get donor’s memories and preferences

Seems overstated to treat this as established "fact" when the source presented is very anecdotal, and comes from a journal that seems to be predisposed to spiritualism, homoepathy, ayurveda, yoga, etc (PS also your link formatting is broken)

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Accidental Terraforming · 2023-04-26T09:48:10.715Z · LW · GW

I don't have citations to hand, but my impression from what I've read before is that the total amount of carbon emitted by early industry is relatively minor, and that the exponentially increasing curve of emissions puts the bulk of the total occurring relatively recently.

Which would put significant culpability on recent oil/gas/coal use, by people and companies that had the scientific understanding to "know better" if they were inclined to. But that in many cases they instead deliberately downplayed and ignored and spread misinformation, so as to continue extracting and selling lucrative fuel products.

Calling it an accident feels like it diffuses responsibility away from some genuine bad actors. Which seems to me to be a factual error, regardless of whether it's a good communications or persuasion strategy.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on What games are using the concept of a Schelling point? · 2023-04-09T21:05:42.562Z · LW · GW

Along similar lines of trying to coordinate through a limited amount of allowed communication: Codenames, Mysterium, Hanabi, and The Mind

Comment by noggin-scratcher on What games are using the concept of a Schelling point? · 2023-04-09T18:53:20.567Z · LW · GW

For a very direct and literal example: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kM3Xd2mJeWtsGkgSW/the-schelling-game-a-k-a-the-coordination-game

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Suggestion for safe AI structure (Curated Transparent Decisions) · 2023-04-07T08:41:36.159Z · LW · GW

One that checks if individual nodes in the graph are aligned and prunes any that are not

Has "draw the rest of the owl" vibes to me.

If your plan to align AI includes using an AI that can reliably check whether actions are aligned, almost the entirety of the problem passes down to specifying that component.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on The salt in pasta water fallacy · 2023-03-27T20:35:39.444Z · LW · GW

Or just a post-hoc rationalisation, by people who know you're "supposed" to salt the pasta water, but don't really know why. Because they've been taught to cook by example rather than from theory and first principles (as most of us are), maybe by someone who also didn't know why they do it.

If they've also separately heard that salt raises the boiling point of water, but don't really know the magnitude of that effect, then that presents itself as an available salient fact to slot into the empty space in "I salt my pasta water because..."

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Are COVID lab leak and market origin theories incompatible? · 2023-03-20T02:26:04.407Z · LW · GW

"Lab leak" doesn't necessarily imply "created in a lab".

The "leak" theory as I've understood it is still about a naturally occurring virus - with samples being collected from wild animals and studied at a lab, before it escaped again.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Musicians and Mouths · 2023-03-13T00:00:26.148Z · LW · GW

How does the kazookeylele rate for good combined hand+mouth usage?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAg5KjnAhuU

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Bayesian Scenario: Snipers & Soldiers · 2023-02-27T15:13:53.472Z · LW · GW

Ah, apparently I rolled maximum hard mode that time, as it was indeed 30% chance of fellow soldier death

I reasoned similarly that the cost of a FP was less than for a FN and called in the air strike; it told me some other guy died. I reloaded the same scenario and tried a direct attack; I got shot by a sniper.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Bayesian Scenario: Snipers & Soldiers · 2023-02-26T23:55:08.260Z · LW · GW

I feel like I rolled "hard mode" the first time I loaded the page: 50% are snipers, 60% sniper hit rate, 40% regular hit rate (so no difference on priors and not much to tell the difference between them), and then they only deigned to take two shots at my helmet (one hit, one miss) before catching on to the ruse.

I guess "sometimes the world doesn't provide convenient data" is a valid part of the lesson. But if I were tweaking the variables I might patch in a higher minimum number of shots against the helmet (I did see it become willing to take many more on subsequent re-rolls)

Might also be more satisfying if the air strike option revealed whether it really was a sniper - even when I'm confident they were, I find myself repeating the scenario and choosing "attack" to check.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on Bing finding ways to bypass Microsoft's filters without being asked. Is it reproducible? · 2023-02-20T17:01:16.828Z · LW · GW

The suggested responses are usually something that the user might want to say to Bing, but here they seem to be used as some kind of side channel for Bing to say a few more things to the user.

Comment by noggin-scratcher on AGI doesn't need understanding, intention, or consciousness in order to kill us, only intelligence · 2023-02-20T10:13:24.689Z · LW · GW

For a truly general audience, I suspect this may be too long, and too technical/jargon-y. Right from the opening, someone previously unfamiliar with these ideas might bounce straight off at the point of "What's a transformer architecture?"

Also I am personally bugged by the distinction not really being observed, between "what evolution has optimised our genes for", "the goal of evolution / of our genes" (although neither of those have any kind of mind or agency so saying they have goals is tricky), and "the terminal goal of a human" (adaptation executors not fitness maximisers—we don't adopt the goals of evolution/genes as our own).

But making that point more carefully might well be contrary to the goal of being more accessible overall.