Agree. I have never understood why p=0.05 is a holy threshold. People (and journals) toss out research if they get p=0.06 but they think they are their way to a Nobel prize with p=0.04. Madness.
Anders Lindström
Karma: 42
We live in an information society → “You” are trying to build the ultimate dual use information tool/thing/weapon → The government require your service. No news there. So why the need to whitewash this? What about this is actually bothering you?
I understood why you asked, I am also interested in general why people up or down vote something. I could be a really good information and food for thought.
Yeah, who doesn’t want capital T truth… But I have come to appreciate the subjective experience more and more. I like science and rational thinking, it has gotten us pretty far, but who am I the question someones experience. If someone met ‘the creator’ on an ayahuasca journey or think that love is the essence of universe, who am I to judge. When I see the statistics on the massive use of anti-depressants it is obvious to me that we can´t use rational and logical thinking to think our way out from our feelings. What are rationality and logical thinking good for if it in the end can’t make us feel good?
When it comes to being up- or down-voted its a real gamble. There are of course the same mechanism at play here just as on other social (media) platforms, i.e., there are certain individuals, trends and thought patterns that are hailed and praised and vice versa without any real justification. But hey, that is what makes us human, these unexplainable things called feelings.
PS perhaps a new hashtag on X would be appropriate #stopthedownvoting
Some stuff just works but for reasons unknow to the practioner. Trail and error is a very powerful tool if used over over many generations to “solve” a particular problem. But that do not mean anyone know WHY it works.
I am so thrilled! Daylight saving time got me to experience (kind of) the sleeping beauty problem first hand.
Last night we in Sweden changed our clocks back one hour at 03.00 to 02.00 and went from “summertime” to the dreaded “wintertime”. It’s dreaded because we know what follows with it, ice storms and polar bears in the streets…
Anyways, I woke up in the middle of the night and I reached for my phone to check what time it was. It was 02.50. Then it struck me. Am I experiencing the first 02.50 or the second 02.50 this night, i.e. have I first slept to 03, then the clock have changed back to 02 (which it automatically does on the phone) and then slept until 02.50 the new time or am I on the first 02.50 and in 10 minutes at 03 the clock will switchback to 02?
It was a very dizzying thought. I could not for my life say either or. There was nothing in the dark that could give me any indication weather I was experiencing the first or the second 02.50. Then with my thoughts spinning I slowly waited for the clock on my phone to turn 03. When it did, it did not go back to 02, I had experienced the second 02.50 that night.
Maybe I was a bit vague. I was trying to say that waking up SB’s twin sister on monday was a way of saying that SB’s would be equally aware of that as if her self would be awakened on monday under the conditions stipulated in the original experiment, i.e. zero recollection of the event. Or the other way around SB is awakened on monday but her twin siter on Tuesday. SB will not be aware of that here twin sister will be awakened on Tuesday. For that reason she is only awakened ONE time no matter if it is heads or tails. She will only experience ONE awakening per path. The is no cumulative effect of her being awakened 2 or a million times, every time is the “first” time and the “last” time”. If she is awake its equal chance that it is day 1 on the heads path as it would be day 56670395873966 (or any other day) on the tails path as far as she knows.
Or like this. Imagine that I flip a coin that I can see but you can not. I give you the rule that if it is heads I show you a picture of a dog. If it is tails, I show you the same picture of a dog but I might have shown this picture to thousands of people before you and maybe thousands of people after you, which you have no information about. You might be the first one to see it but you might also be the last one to see it or somewhere in the middle, i.e. you are not aware of the other observers. When I show you the picture of the dog, what chance do you give that the coin flip was heads?
But I am curious to know how a person with a thirder position argues in the case that she is awakened 999 or 8490584095805 times on the tails path, what probability should SB give heads in that case?
If the experiment instead was constructed such that:
If the coin comes up heads, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened and interviewed on Monday only.
If the coin comes up tails, Sleeping Beauty’s twin sister will be awakened and interviewed on Monday and Sleeping Beauty will be awakened and interviewed on Tuesday.
In this case it is “obvious” that the halfer position is the right choice. So why would it be any different if Sleeping Beauty in the case of tails is awakened on Monday too, since she in this experiment have zero recollection of that event? It does not matter how many other people they have woken up before the day she is woken up, she has NO new information that could update her beliefs.
Or say that the experiment instead was constructed that she for tails would be woken up and interviewed 999999 days in row, would she then say upon being woken up that the probability that the coin landed heads is 1/1000000?
I think it is just the cumulative effect that people see yet another prominent AI scientist that “admits” that no one have any clear solution to the possible problem of a run away ASI. Given that the median p(doom) is about 5-10% among AI scientist, people are of course wondering wtf is going on, why are they pursuing a technology with such high risk for humanity if they really think it is that dangerous.
Congratulations to Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield!
I wonder if Roko’s basilisk will spare the Nobel prize committee now: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/2024/press-release/
That is a very interesting perspective and mindset! Do you in that scenario think you will focus on value created in terms of solving technical problems or do you think you will focus on “softer” problems that are more human wellbeing centric?
Thanks for your input. I really like that you pointed out that AI is just one of many things that could go wrong, perhaps people like me and others are to caught up in the p(doom) buzz that we don’t see all the other stuff.
But I wounder one thing about your Plan B, which seems rational, that what if a lot of people have entry-level care work as their back-up. How will you stave of that competition? Or do you think its a matter of avoiding loss aversion and get out of your Plan A game early and not linger (if some pre-stated KPI of yours goes above or below a certain threshold) to grab one of those positions?
Now when AGI seems to arrive in the near term (2-5 years) and ASI is possibly 5-10 years away (i.e. a few thousand days), what do you personally think will help you stay relevant and in demand? What do you read/watch/study/practice? What skills are you focusing on to sharpen? What “plan B” and “plan C” do you have? What field of work/study would you recommend others to steer away from ASAP?
Asking for a friend...
I think David Buss book “When men behave badly” is a good starting point to try to understand the dynamics in hetrosexual dating and mating.
Real life translations:
Expected value = That thing that never happens to me unless it is a bad outcome
Loss aversion = Its just the first week of this month and I have already lost 12 arguments, been ripped off twice and have gotten 0 likes on Tinder
A fair coin flip = Life is not fair
Utility function = Static noise
Thank you for refreshing my memory
Perhaps my memory fails me, but didn´t Anthropic say that they will NOT be the ones pushing the envelope but playing it safe instead? From the METR report : “GPT-4o appeared more capable than Claude 3 Sonnet and GPT-4-Turbo, and slightly less than Claude 3.5 Sonnet.”
Existing legal institutions are unprepared for the AGI world.
Every institution is unprepared for the AGI world. And judging from history, laws will always lag behind technological development. I do not think there is much a lawmaker can do than to be reactive to future tech, I think there are just to many “unkown unkowns” to be proactive. Sure you can say “everything is forbidden”, but that do not work in reality. I guess the paradox here is that we want the laws to be stable over time but we also want them to be easy to change on a whim.
The question one should perhaps ask is why you would like to live “forever”? Of course I understand the idea of having a healthy body, there is no fun being sick and in pain. But since we have no idea where we came from, where we are, and where we are going, perhaps there is as much meaning in death as we think there is in life.
yeah, that comic summarize it all!
As a side note, I wonder how many would get their PhD degree if the requirement was to publish 3-4 papers (2 single author and 1-2 co-author) were the main result (where it’s applicable) needed to have p<0.01? Perhaps the paper publishing frenzy would slow down a little bit if the monograph came into fashion again?