alexey

Karma: 108

Genetically edited mosquitoes haven’t scaled yet. Why?

alexeyDec 30, 2024, 9:37 PM

24 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

(eryney.substack.com)

alexey Dec 27, 2024, 3:44 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: Thelo’s comment on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
I mostly agree, but it’s a double-digit percent increase in bankruptcies which ends up being (from the post)
about 4bps (0.04%)/year of additional bankruptcies

alexey Dec 27, 2024, 3:41 PM
15 points
12
in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
But, crucially, if one product is not available, then these people will very likely form an addiction to something else. That is what ‘addictive personality disorder’ means.
Except whatever they got addicted to before the legalization of online sports betting, it apparently led to much lower bankruptcy rates etc.
I feel that the discourse has quietly assumed a fabricated option: if these people can’t gamble then they will be happy unharmed non-addicts.
This post isn’t quietly assuming something: it’s loudly giving evidence that they will be much less harmed.

alexey Dec 12, 2024, 8:07 PM
1 point
0
on: The lying p value
Do you expect anyone to answer “agree” to the starting question?

alexey Nov 25, 2024, 7:51 PM
1 point
0
on: A superficially plausible promising alternate Earth without lockstep
Bywayeans are pretty censorious and scrupulous about violations of the NAP
Except against people who enjoy sunsets, apparently?

alexey Nov 9, 2024, 5:19 PM
1 point
0
on: The unreasonable effectiveness of plasmid sequencing as a service
He’d walk on over to nearby industry labs with candy and a sales pitch for why they should use his services. He primarily targeted top, Nobel-prize-winning research groups
and
Plasmidsaurus has historically done very little ‘traditional’ marketing — no brochures, few cold reach-outs
seem to be a bit contradictory?

alexey Nov 1, 2024, 7:14 PM
1 point
0
on: Should we abstain from voting? (In nondeterministic elections)
If people followed Brennan’s advice, those ignorant of their lack of knowledge would keep voting, while well-educated people might think they’re not competent enough and abstain.
I’d add that people ignorant enough not to know or not to understand Brennan’s argument would also keep voting.

alexey Oct 15, 2024, 8:18 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Wbrom’s comment on: Did Christopher Hitchens change his mind about waterboarding?
Was this post significantly edited? Because this seems to be exactly the take in the post from the start:
because he thought it wasn’t bad enough to be considered torture. Then he had it tried on himself, and changed his mind, coming to believe it is torture and should not be performed.
to the end
This is supported by Malcom’s claim that Hitchens was “a proponent of torture”, which is clearly false going by Christopher’s public articles on the subject. The question is only over whether Hitchens considered waterboarding to be a form of torture, and therefore permissible or not, which Malcolm seems to have not understood.

alexey Sep 14, 2024, 1:15 PM
1 point
0
on: Adverse Selection by Life-Saving Charities
It’s absurd to end up with a framework that believes a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is just as good as life for a woman in some other country with similarly high per capita income.
You could similarly argue a life for a woman in Saudi Arabia is worse than for a man, but it seems absurd to conclude from that that saving lives of SA men is better than saving lives of SA women.
Whether you save a life in Congo, Sri Lanka or Australia, I can’t think of strong reasons for why #2 would vary all that much.
It seems to me there are obvious differences: 1. family size (in the limit, the saved person may have no family at all); 2. how expected the person’s death is otherwise.

alexey Aug 18, 2024, 6:51 PM
1 point
0
on: Only Fools Avoid Hindsight Bias
But you aren’t asked about $E (P (e))$ (your current estimate of your prior). If you want to put it in this way, it would be $E_{t_{1}} (E_{t_{0}} (P (e)))$ , your current estimate of your previous estimate. And you do have exact knowledge what that estimate was.

alexey Apr 29, 2024, 11:07 AM
7 points
2
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Back to Basics: Truth is Unitary
Here is a counter-argument against Rovelli I found reasonable: Aristotle and Falling Objects | Diagonal Argument

alexey Dec 29, 2023, 7:58 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: GeneSmith’s comment on: Black Box Biology
so the maximum “downside” would be the sum of the differences between that reference populations lives and those without the variant for all variants you edit (plus any effects from off-targets)
I don’t think that’s true? It has to assume the variants don’t interact with each other. Your reference population would only have 0.01% people with (the rarest) 2 variants at once, 0.0001% with 3 variants, and so on.

alexey Dec 22, 2023, 10:33 AM
2 points
1
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Extrapolating from Five Words
Yes, but this exact case is when you say “This would be useful for trying out different variations on a phrase to see what those small variations change about the implied meaning” and when it can be particularly misleading because the LLM is contrasting with the previous version which the humans reading/hearing the final version don’t know about.
So it would be more useful for that purpose to use a new chat.

alexey Dec 16, 2023, 2:23 PM
1 point
1
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: Extrapolating from Five Words
But the screenshot says “if i instead say the words...”. This seems like it has to be in the same chat with the “matters” version.

alexey Dec 16, 2023, 11:41 AM
2 points
0
on: In Defense of Parselmouths
but speak only the truth to other Parselmouths and (by implication) speak only truth to Quakers.
I would merely like to note that the implication seems contrary to the source of the name: I expect Quirrell and most historical Parselmouths in HPMOR would very much lie to Quakers (Quirrell would maybe derive some entertainment from not saying factually false things while misleading them).

alexey Dec 16, 2023, 11:28 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Who is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) really, and how could he have done what he did? - three theories and a lot of evidence
Or to put it another way: in the full post you say
There is some evidence he has higher-than-normal narcissistic traits, and there’s a positive correlation between narcissistic traits and DAE. I think there is more evidence of him having DAE than there is of him having narcissistic traits
but to me it looks like you could have equally replaced DAE with “narcissistic traits” in Theories B and C, and provided the same list of evidence.
(1) Convicted criminals are more likely to have narcissistic traits.
(2) “extreme disregard for protecting his customers” is also evidence for narcissistic traits.
Etc. And then you could repeat the exercise with “sociopathy” and so on.
So there are two possibilities, as far as I can see:
1. One or more things on the list are in fact not evidence for narcissistic traits.
2. They are stronger evidence for DAE than for narcissistic traits.
But it isn’t clear which you believe and about what parts of the list in particular. (Of course, with the exception of (4) and (11), but they go in the opposite directions.)

alexey Dec 16, 2023, 11:05 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: spencerg’s comment on: Who is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) really, and how could he have done what he did? - three theories and a lot of evidence
Yes, it’s evidence. My question is how strong or weak this evidence is (and my expectation is that it’s weak). Your comparison relies on “wet grass is typically substantial evidence for rain”.

alexey Dec 11, 2023, 9:55 PM
1 point
0
on: Who is Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) really, and how could he have done what he did? - three theories and a lot of evidence
Based on the full text:
Some readers may think that this sounds circular: if I’m trying to explain why someone would do what SBF did, how is it valid to use the fact that he did it as a piece of evidence for the explanation? But treating the convictions as evidence for SBF’s DAE is valid in the same way that, if you were trying to explain why the grass is wet, it would be valid to use the fact that the grass is wet as evidence for the hypothesis that it rained recently (since wet grass is typically substantial evidence for rain).
But a lot of your pro-DAE evidence seems to me to fail this test. E.g. ok, he lied to the customers and to the Congress; why is this substantial evidence of DAE in particular?
oh, FTX doesn’t have a bank account, I guess people can wire to Alameda’s to get money on FTX….3 years later…oh fuck it looks like people wired $8b to Alameda and oh god we basically forgot about the stub account that corresponded to that, and so it was never delivered to FTX.
This seems like evidence in favor of Theory A and against DAE if you look at those as competing explanations? That is, he (is claiming that in this particular case he) commingled funds for reasons unrelated to DAE.
In November 2022, he also tweeted these statements
It seems likely he believed at that point that if a run could be avoided, he would have enough assets; so making these statements could help most customers, and not making them could hurt most of them, even if it helped a few lucky and quick ones. Not evidence of decreased empathy at all (in my view).
(3) There are multiple sources suggesting that he has a tendency and willingness to lie and deceive others.
Everything under this seems to fail the rain test, at least; very many people have this willingness, most of them don’t have DAE (simply based on the prevalence you mention). Is this particular “style” of dishonesty characteristic of DAE?
(4) is actual evidence for DAE, great.
(5) and (10) For the rain test you need to provide a reason to believe most manipulative people have DAE.
Etc.
For decreased affective guilt the situation seems to be worse: as far as I can see, no evidence for it is presented, just evidence there is some reported guilt and then
In the context of the large amounts of evidence for his lack of affective empathy, it seems more likely that the quote above is an example of cognitive guilt rather than affective guilt.
This seems to require a very large correlation between DAEmpathy and DAGuilt. Why couldn’t he have one but not the other?
When I wrote the above, I was just going by your stated definition of DAE; after going to the page you linked, which I should have done earlier, a lot of your evidence seems to cover the facets of psychopathy other than DAE; you could argue they are correlated, but it seems replacing DAE with psychopathy (as defined there) in theories B and C would make the evidence fit strictly better.

alexey Dec 4, 2023, 10:12 PM
2 points
0
on: Stuxnet, not Skynet: Humanity’s disempowerment by AI
I feel like people like Scott Aaronson who are demanding a specific scenario for how AI will actually kill us all… I hypothesize that most scenarios with vastly superhuman AI systems coexisting with humans end in the disempowerment of humans and either human extinction or some form of imprisonment or captivity akin to factory farming
Aaronson in that quote is “demanding a specific scenario” for how GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 in particular will kill us all. Do you believe they will be vastly superhuman?

alexey Nov 10, 2023, 12:23 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Contra Nora Belrose on Orthogonality Thesis Being Trivial
The quoted section more seems like instrumental convergence than orthogonality to me?
The second part of the sentence, yes. The bolded one seems to acknowledge AIs can have different goals, and I assume that version of EY wouldn’t count “God” as a good goal.
Another more relevant part:
Obviously, if the AI is going to be capable of making choices, you need to create an exception to the rules—create a Goal object whose desirability is not calculated by summing up the goals in the justification slot.
Presumably this goal object can be anything.
But in order to accept that, one needs to accept the orthogonality thesis.
I agree that EY rejected the argument because he accepted OT. I very much disagree that this is the only way to reject the argument. In fact, all four positions seem quite possible:
1. Accept OT, accept the argument: sure, AIs can have different goals, but this (starting an AI without explicit goals) is how you get an AI which would figure out the meaning of life.
2. Reject OT, reject the argument: you can think “figure out the meaning of life” is not a possible AI goal.
3. and 4. EY’s positions at different times.
In addition, OT can itself be a reason to charge ahead with creating an AGI: since it says an AGI can have any goal, you “just” need to create an AGI which will improve the world. It says nothing about setting an AGI’s goal being difficult.

alexey

Ge­net­i­cally ed­ited mosquitoes haven’t scaled yet. Why?

Genetically edited mosquitoes haven’t scaled yet. Why?