AnthonyC

Karma: 2,359

AnthonyC 28 Nov 2024 20:38 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Mitigating Geomagnetic Storm and EMP Risks to the Electrical Grid (Shallow Dive)
How much impact, if any, would it have if more of our long and medium distance transmission lines eventually moved to HVDC lines?

AnthonyC 26 Nov 2024 22:53 UTC
5 points
−2
on: What epsilon do you subtract from “certainty” in your own probability estimates?
I don’t.
Every probability estimate I make is implicitly contingent on a whole host of things I can’t fully list or don’t bother to specify because it’s not worth the overhead. This is one of them. Somewhere in my head, implicitly or explicitly, is a world model that includes the rest, including ones I’m not aware of. I do not know if the set of assumptions this implies is finite or not. I know false memories and hallucinations and tricks and so on exist, but unless I already have specific reason to expect such, I reason without keeping track. When I say P(Heads), I actually mean it as shorthand for P(Heads|all the model assumptions needed for “Heads” to make sense as a concept or event). When I find a reason to think one of my unstated model assumptions is wrong, I’m changing which set of conditional probabilities I’m even thinking about.
Over time, as I improve my world model and my level of understanding of my world model, I am more able to explicitly identify my underlying assumptions and choose to question them or question other things in light of them, when I deem it worth the effort, in order to get a little bit closer to a more general underlying probability distribution.

AnthonyC 26 Nov 2024 16:59 UTC
4 points
0
on: Mitigating Geomagnetic Storm and EMP Risks to the Electrical Grid (Shallow Dive)
You mention microgrids, but what about energy storage systems? Geomagnetic storms typically last minutes ot hours, so if I have even a 4 hour battery in my home, with an inverter, I’m a lot less susceptible to grid failures. And if everyone does, the grid operators have more options for shutting down parts of the grid to prevent equipment failures without causing blackouts. If most large centralized generating facilities have energy storage, then temporarily shutting down parts of the grid does not need to involve much loss of energy production.

AnthonyC 26 Nov 2024 16:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: You are not too “irrational” to know your preferences.
Good question. Curious to hear what the OP thinks, too.
Personally I’m not convinced that the results of a conscious process are actually “wants” in the sense the described here, until they become more deeply internalized. Like, obviously if I want ice cream it’s partly because at some point I consciously chose to try it and (plausibly) wanted to try it. But I don’t know that I can choose to want something, as opposed to putting myself in the position of choosing something with the hope or expectation that will come to want it.
The way I think about it, I can choose to try things, or do things. I can choose to want to want things, or want to like things. As I try and do the things I want to want and like, I may come to want them. I can use various techniques to make those subconscious changes faster, easier, or more likely. But I don’t think I can choose to want things.
I do think this matters, because in the long run, choosing to not do or get the things you want, in favor of the things you consciously think you should want, or want to want, but don’t, is not good for mental health.

AnthonyC 24 Nov 2024 3:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are metaphors?
Plus, butter is churned, so it is a few percent air by volume when solid.

AnthonyC 22 Nov 2024 11:59 UTC
4 points
0
on: Don’t want Goodhart? — Specify the variables more
Humans have been trying to parse out the hidden variables in the word “good” for millennia—plausibly since before the dawn of writing. We’ve made progress—a lot of it—but that doesn’t stop the remaining problem from being very hard, because yes, the word is something like an abstraction of an approximation of a loose cloud of ideas. We can parse out and taboo variables 1-9, and come to agree on them, and still caught off guard by variable 184 when it interacts with variables 125 and 4437, each of which is irrelevant (or an unchanging background) to most people in most contexts to the point we’ve never bothered to consciously notice them.
You talked about thermometers. You’re right, but consider that it took centuries to go from “We want to measure how hot or cold things are,” to “here’s the actual physical definition of temperature.” Even still it’s unintuitive, there’s no single instrument that works to measure it in all cases, and it doesn’t quite align with what every user of the word wants out of the concept. “Good” is a lot more complicated than “temperature.”
In other words, yes, of course, let’s keep doing this, more and better! But let’s be honest about it being actually hard and complicated.

AnthonyC 22 Nov 2024 11:18 UTC
7 points
4
on: LLM chatbots have ~half of the kinds of “consciousness” that humans believe in. Humans should avoid going crazy about that.
I find this intuitively reasonable and in alignment with my own perceptions. A pet peeve of mine has long been that people say “sentient” instead of “sapient”—at minimum since I first read The Color of Magic and really thought about the difference. We’ve never collectively had to consider minds that were more clearly sapient than sentient, and our word-categories aren’t up to it.
I think it’s going to be very difficult to disentangle the degree to which LLMs experience vs imitate the more felt aspects/definitions of consciousness. Not least because even humans sometimes get mixed up about this within ourselves.
In the right person, a gradual-onset mix of physicalized depression symptoms, anhedonia, and alexithymia can go a long way towards making you, in some sense, not fully conscious in a way that is invisible to almost everyone around you. Ask me how I know: There’s a near decade-long period of my life where, when I reminisce about it, I sometimes say things like, “Yeah, I wish I’d been there.”

AnthonyC 22 Nov 2024 11:05 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are metaphors?
Edit to add: I think almost every concept we use in life is part metaphor, part not, and the difference is one of degree and not kind. I was definitely surprised to learn this, or at least to learn how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Almost all human thinking is part metaphor.
Words have uses not meanings. Definitions are abstractions.
In otherwise, everything is (in part) a metaphor.

AnthonyC 22 Nov 2024 10:56 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are metaphors?
This is almost true. Fat is less dense than water, so a tablespoon of butter weighs something like 10% less than a half ounce. Not enough to matter in practice for most cooking. Your toast and your average chocolate chip cookie don’t care. But, many approximations like this exist, and are collectively important enough that professionals use weight not volume in most recipes. And enough that the difference in fat content between butters (as low as 80% in the US but more often 85+% in European or otherwise “premium” butters) can matter in more sensitive recipes, like pie crust and drop biscuits. I used to add 1-2 Tbsp of shortening to my pie crust. I stopped when I switched to Kerrygold butter—no longer needed.

AnthonyC 22 Nov 2024 10:47 UTC
6 points
0
on: Which things were you surprised to learn are metaphors?
A classic example is that, at least in English, time is often described using distance metaphors
For me, I knew this was a metaphor, but until I took Mandarin in college I never realized that other languages/cultures/people used different spatial metaphors for time. Is the future in front of you, or behind? Are you moving towards it, or it towards you? This has some practical applications, since apparently even in English people have different intuitions about what it means to push a meeting or event up/out/back/ahead.

AnthonyC 22 Nov 2024 10:34 UTC
3 points
1
on: Dangerous capability tests should be harder
I think it would be more accurate to say we should have multiple levels of dangerous capability tests, which reflect different levels of increased danger.
For example, someone who has never pipetted before might struggle to measure microliters precisely or contaminate the tip when touching a bottle. Acquiring these skills often takes months of learning from experienced scientists — something terrorists can’t easily do.
This seems like a very thin line of defense. I first worked as an intern in a bio lab and learned how to pipette when I was in high school. Physical lack of a fume hood for sterile technique seems like a slightly bigger barrier, but even then, it’s not all that hard to find people with radical beliefs who have science or engineering degrees, and many of those will be able to get access to basic lab facilities. How many people have ever worked in a wet lab for one month? In the proposed scenario, all of those people will have access to the knowledge and skills needed to make bioweapons within a year or two. How many of these people could be persuaded to teach a layperson the basic mechanical skills needed? Maybe pay them and claim they’re teaching an introductory class for a job training program or something.
In other words:
you probably aren’t going to make perfect meringues the first time because everything about your kitchen — the humidity, the dimensions, and power of your oven, the exact timing of how long you whipped the egg whites — is a little bit different than the person who wrote the recipe
is true. But, it’s not so reassuring if I want to make sure no one successfully makes meringues without permission, and they each can get at least a handful of attempts on average, and there are millions of people who’ve done other kinds of cooking before, and in addition to the recipe you’re allowed to watch every video and read every article available for free online showing different aspects of the processes being demonstrated.

AnthonyC 20 Nov 2024 13:36 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: What changes should happen in the HHS?
This is true. But ideally I don’t think what we need is to be clever, except to the extent that it’s a clever way to communicate with people so they understand why the current policies produce bad incentives and agree about changing them.

AnthonyC 20 Nov 2024 12:42 UTC
2 points
0
on: What changes should happen in the HHS?
I think our collective HHS needs are less “clever policy ideas” and more “actively shoot ourselves in the foot slightly less often.”

AnthonyC 18 Nov 2024 12:25 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: rotatingpaguro’s comment on: AI #90: The Wall
That’s a good point about public discussions. It’s not how I absorb information, but I can definitely see that.

AnthonyC 17 Nov 2024 13:21 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: rotatingpaguro’s comment on: AI #90: The Wall
I’m not sure where I’m proposing bureaucracy? The value is in making sure a conversation efficiently adds value for both parties, by not having to spend time rehashing things that are much faster absorbed in advance. This avoids the friction of needing to spend much of the time rehashing 101-level prerequisites. A very modest amount of groundwork beforehand maximizes the rate of insight in discussion.
I’m drawing in large part from personal experience. A significant part of my job is interviewing researchers, startup founders, investors, government officials, and assorted business people. Before I get on a call with these people, I look them (and their current and past employers, as needed) up on LinkedIn and Google Scholar and their own webpages. I briefly familiarize myself with what they’ve worked on and what they know and care about and how they think, as best I can anticipate, even if it’s only for 15 minutes. And then when I get into a conversation, I adapt. I’m picking their brain to try and learn, so I try to adapt to their communication style and translate between their worldview and my own. If I go in with an idea of what questions I want answered, and those turn out to not be the important questions, or this turns out to be the wrong person to discuss it with, I change direction. Not doing this often leaves everyone involved frustrated at having wasted their time.
Also, should I be thinking of this as a debate? Because that’s very different than a podcast or interview or discussion. These all have different goals. A podcast or interview is where I think the standard I am thinking of is most appropriate. If you want to have a deep discussion, it’s insufficient, and you need to do more prep work or you’ll never get into the meatiest parts of where you want to go. I do agree that if you’re having a (public-facing) debate where the goal is to win, then sure, this is not strictly necessary. The history of e.g. “debates” in politics, or between creationists and biologists, shows that clearly. I’m not sure I’d consider that “meaningful” debate, though. Meaningful debates happen by seriously engaging with the other side’s ideas, which requires understanding those ideas.

AnthonyC 16 Nov 2024 16:08 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: rotatingpaguro’s comment on: AI #90: The Wall
I can totally believe this. But, I also think that responsibly wearing the scientist hat entails prep work before engaging in a four hour public discussion with a domain expert in a field. At minimum that includes skimming the titles and ideally the abstracts/outlines of their key writings. Maybe ask Claude to summarize the highlights for you. If he’d done that he’d have figured out many of the answers to many of these questions on his own, or much faster during discussion. He’s too smart not to.

Otherwise, you’re not actually ready to have a meaningful scientific discussion with that person on that topic.

AnthonyC 15 Nov 2024 12:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: NicksName’s comment on: The Case Against Moral Realism
If I’m understanding you correctly, then I strongly disagree about what ethics and meta-ethics are for, as well as what “individual selfishness” means. The questions I care about flow from “What do I care about, and why?” and “How much do I think others should or will care about these things, and why?” Moral realism and amoral nihilism are far from the only options, and neither are ones I’m interested in accepting.

AnthonyC 15 Nov 2024 11:53 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: If I care about measure, choices have additional burden (+AI generated LW-comments)
I’m not saying it improves decision making. I’m saying it’s an argument for improving our decision making in general, if mundane decisions we wouldn’t normally think are all that important have much larger and long-lasting consequences. Each mundane decision affects a large number of lives that parts of me will experience, in addition to the effects on others.

AnthonyC 15 Nov 2024 10:51 UTC
4 points
0
on: If I care about measure, choices have additional burden (+AI generated LW-comments)
I don’t see #1 affecting decision making because it happens no matter what, and therefore shouldn’t differ based on our own choices or values. I guess you could argue it implies an absurdly high discount rate if you see the resulting branches as sufficiently separate from one another, but if the resulting worlds are ones I care about, then the measure dilution is just the default baseline I start from in my reasoning. Unless there is some way we can or could meaningfully increase the multiplication rate in some sets of branches but not others? I don’t think that’s likely with any methods or tech I can foresee.
#2 seems like an argument for improving ourselves to be more mindful in our choices to be more coherent on average, and #3 an argument for improving our average decision making. The main difference I can think of for how measure affects things is maybe in which features of the outcome distribution/probabilities among choices I care about.

AnthonyC 15 Nov 2024 10:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Satron’s comment on: Why would ASI share any resources with us?
It’s not my field of expertise, so I have only vague impressions of what is going on, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone else use me as a source.