AnthonyC

Karma: 3,050

AnthonyC Jun 16, 2025, 12:16 AM
2 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #31: June 2025
I’m not at all privy to the financial planning approaches of the very wealthy, but now that people tend to live into their 80s, how are options #1 and #2 not also forcing the future inheritors to mostly provide for themselves until age 50 or 60? They may not be so worried about saving for retirement, and know there’s a level below which their parents won’t let them fail, so it’s not the same. But, it seems like without a trust fund they’re not really going to inherit significant wealth until their own kids have graduated college?

AnthonyC Jun 15, 2025, 2:21 PM
3 points
0
on: Read the Pricing First
This is really helpful, and definitely a problem I’ve had in my line of consulting work. Not so much with hardtech—“We make better inverters” is a kind of thing that needs to be written down somewhere, and the hard part is figuring out exactly what they mean by “better.” But with software, descriptions are so vague, and companies pivot a dozen times and claim a hundred target markets.
In my own conversations with people developing software platforms, one part of the reason is that at an abstract mathematical level, many problems have very similar shapes, and differ in implementation and interface details and the questions a customer wants to use the math to answer. If you just say “We can tell you where to put energy storage to make the distribution grid work better” than you’re only going to get interest from utilities, and no one will realize (or believe) that the same approach will help with water and oil and gas and traffic and shipping. So instead you come up with vague words about digital logistics and routing and infrastructure solutions/insights/optimizations or whatever, and no idea what makes one company different from a dozen others.
Also: companies often lie or are confused about what parts of themselves want, need, and are willing to pay for. So pricing can only really get crystallized further into the product development process when the provider has gotten some real feedback on which of the things they could do are what real customers actually see as needs.

AnthonyC Jun 15, 2025, 5:35 AM
2 points
0
on: AI #120: While o3 Turned Pro
how many K12 schools test students on math and reading when they enter, then place them in classes according to the level they’re at?
Sometimes they try. I’d love to learn they’ve gotten better over time, but it doesn’t seem so? When I was in 4th grade (in 1995) they put 5 PCs in every elementary school classroom in my district and made us all spend ~4 hrs/wk doing math and reading programs that quizzed us and advanced based on the results. By midyear it started giving me 5th grade math… and my teacher didn’t know how to do 5th grade arithmetic problems. When I reached the end of the reading program, I had to wait a month for the school to get me an account on the next level reading program… and the following year they reset me to the beginning of it again.
Remember ‘what is good for GM is good for America’? We’re really doing this?
We always seem to forget that sometimes ‘what is good for GM’ is a good swift kick in the @$$.

AnthonyC Jun 15, 2025, 3:22 AM
2 points
0
on: Beware General Claims about “Generalizable Reasoning Capabilities” (of Modern AI Systems)
I find it so interesting how often this kind of thing keeps happening, and I can’t tell how often it’s honest mistakes, versus lack of interest in the core questions, or willful self-delusion. Or maybe they’re right, but not noticing that they actually are proving (and exemplifying) that humans also lack generalizable reasoning capability.
My mental analogy for the Tower of Hanoi case: Imagine I went to a secretarial job interview, and they said they were going to test my skills by making me copy a text by hand with zero mistakes. Harsh, odd, but comprehensible. If they then said, “Here’s a copy of Crime and Punishment, along with a pencil and five sheets of loose leaf paper. You have 15 minutes,” then the result does not mean what they claim it means. Even if they gave me plenty of paper and time, but I said, “#^&* you, I’m leaving,” or, “No, I’ll copy page one, and prove if I can copy page n it means I can copy page n+1, so that I have demonstrated the necessary skill, proof by induction,” then the result still does not mean what they claim it means.
I do really appreciate the chutzpah of talking about children solving Towers of Hanoi. Yes, given an actual toy and enough time to play, they often can solve the puzzle. Given only a pen, paper, verbal description, of the problem, and demand for an error-free specified-format written procedure for producing the solution, not so much. These are not the same task. There’s a reason many of us had to write elementary school essays on things like precisely laying out all the steps required to make a sandwich: this ability is a dimension along which humans greatly vary. If that’s not compelling, think of all the examples of badly-written instruction manuals you’ve come across in your life.
I also appreciate the chutzpah of that ‘goalpost shifting’ tweet. If just kind of assumes away any possibility that there is a difference between AGI and ASI, and in the process inadvertently implies a claim that humans also lack reasoning capability? And spreadsheets do crash and freeze up when you put more rows and columns of data in them than your system can handle—I’d much rather they be aware of this limit and warn me I was about to trigger a crash.

AnthonyC Jun 9, 2025, 9:44 PM
2 points
0
on: Why aren’t we promoting social media awareness of x-risks?
Yes, that video is excellent. It is also over 16 minutes long to give a very cursory explanation that x-risk is even a thing. It isn’t literally true that you only get five words, but it’s also true that most people won’t watch a video that long unless they’re already quite interested in the topic or the person.
I do agree there is a lot of potential for better, simpler explanations of x-risk, targeted at a wider variety of audiences, and that social media is likely an important part of how that should be distributed. However, that seems to me to be only about as much of a suggestion as “television” or “radio” would have been fifty or ninety years ago.
I find that the typical range of social media content is so frequently overwrought in its claims of massive (good or catastrophic) impacts of all kinds of things that people naturally discount what they hear to a huge degree. Talk of global extinction gets rounded down to ‘something kinda bad might happen somewhere eventually.’ I also think that many of the people who ‘dislike’ AI discuss it in a way that does not give me much confidence that they understand x-risk, or are willing to invest in developing ways of accurately conveying an understanding of x-risk.

AnthonyC Jun 9, 2025, 8:41 PM
2 points
0
on: On working 80%
There is a similar effect (without the salary considerations) from working remote instead of commuting. Before I went full time remote my commute had gone up to about 1.5 hrs each way. For me, going remote meant an extra 15 hrs/wk available for other things.

AnthonyC Jun 9, 2025, 8:38 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: On working 80%
I always wonder if those people change their minds once they retire.

AnthonyC Jun 6, 2025, 2:08 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: bhauth’s comment on: cheaper sodium electrolysis
I agree with that, yes.

AnthonyC Jun 6, 2025, 12:58 AM
2 points
−2
on: cheaper sodium electrolysis
Cheaper sodium production will/would also be great for reducing the cost of sodium-ion batteries, which with some more development and scaling I could easily see outperforming lithium for stationary applications.

AnthonyC Jun 5, 2025, 7:28 PM
3 points
0
on: Dating Roundup #6
Fun fact on height: I’m almost exactly 5′11.5“, and my wife is the one who pushes me to claim I’m 6′0” instead of 5′11“ (not for dating, we’re monogamous, just in life). She’s 5′10”, so that extra half inch is very clearly visible to her when standing next to me.

I’m curious if we know, is there a 180cm effect? Does the rest of the world get away with being a whole inch shorter without feeling the need to lie?

AnthonyC May 29, 2025, 6:22 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: contrejour’s comment on: What college major should I choose if I am unsure?
If that’s somethin you want to work on, that’s excellent. Math is useful, and can be a lot of fun even if it doesn’t come naturally to you. Consider carefully whether a classroom is the best place for you to learn it. It might be. It might not.

AnthonyC May 28, 2025, 7:29 PM
3 points
1
on: What college major should I choose if I am unsure?
It should go without saying that the answer ultimately has to come from you and not a stranger on the internet.
If you wanted to go into a STEM field, or a particular type of grad school, or become a scholar of some kind, or take a job that needs a professional certification with a particular degree type that would constrain your choices and make this process in some sense ‘easier.’
Barring that, if you want to choose a humanities major, sure, some are more directly ‘useful’ than others. But, taken seriously, all the liberal arts cover the core skills of how to learn, how to study, how to grow, how to think, how to write, how to form an opinion, and how to decide what you care about. Actually getting that out of your schooling is easier if you pick a path you really like. There are, at least for now, many jobs and careers that require a degree without much reason to care what that degree is in. Who you meet/know, where you are, and how you present yourself are just as important.
I notice you don’t really mention what you want your life to actually look like after you graduate, which is kinda important for figuring out how to back-chain to what you might want to pursue now, or at what kind of school. Do you see yourself in an office job? At a machine shop? On a farm? Do you want work at a startup? Put yourself in a place where there are opportunities to try things out and meet people related to what you think you might want to do.
Keep in mind that, “I don’t know, so I’ll hold off, try something I can do with my associate’s degree, and get my bachelor’s degree later or part time once I do,” is also an option. Some schools, like ASU, or a whole bunch of schools through Coursera, offer online degree programs, which you can enroll in from anywhere.
And personally, I wouldn’t hinge your future plans too much on how you think AI will progress. The world may change radically in all kinds of ways, and you’ll want to try to see that coming as best you can, but none of the paths are certain enough to not plan for a baseline of becoming a competent adult that can function in society as it exists today.

AnthonyC May 28, 2025, 4:57 AM
7 points
3
on: What are the best arguments you’ve seen for the Litany of Gendlin?
As @localdeity said, you won’t find what you’re asking for, because it isn’t strictly true among humans. The way our minds are constructed, we are not equipped by default to accept arbitrary information and interpret and apply it effectively. There are theorems about how, in the limit of infinite computing power, a mind that correctly updates beliefs in response to evidence should never become predictably worse off (either epistemologically or in its ability to make plans to achieve goals) as it acquires new information, but those theorems don’t strictly apply to our own bounded rationality, heuristic-laden, limited minds.
That said: it’s true enough that it’s worth having a very high bar against trying to force yourself to believe in falsehoods you think are useful, or convincing others to do so. Even if you can do such a thing, it’s dangerous in a variety of ways, some obvious and some not so obvious. It’s definitely worth knowing that even when a fiction is useful in the short term, it’s almost always the case that once you recognize it as such, you as an individual are going to be better off admitting it and getting through to the other side where you understand why it is a useful approximation or pragmatic implementation of some deeper and more-true principle.

AnthonyC May 28, 2025, 4:37 AM
3 points
1
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: What is emptiness?
Ok, that all makes sense, and yes I’m very familiar with vipassana meditation. FWIW I credit MCTB2 with about 30% of how I got out of a 12 year long depression.

AnthonyC May 28, 2025, 4:32 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Vadim Golub’s comment on: What is emptiness?
I think it’s always good to have more presentations of ideas from different perspectives. I would say that a lot of what you’re describing is covered in the Mysterious Answers part of the Map and Territory sequence and the A Human’s Guide to Words part of the Machine in the Ghost sequence . One thing that gets mentioned many times, I think in the posts but definitely in the comments, is a set of anecdotes from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” which, if you haven’t read it, is a great lighthearted description of some of these kinds of not-actually-science that get passed off as science.
Also, respectfully, Wittgenstein moved in rarified circles and in that quote was a describing (and correctly criticizing) a much higher standard of understanding than most elite college graduates have, let alone the rest of society. You can tell, because the ‘modern system’ gave way to the postmodern system, whose pioneers mostly correctly diagnosed the problem and were then promptly misunderstood in all sorts of useless, destructive, and ridiculous ways.

AnthonyC May 27, 2025, 5:50 AM
3 points
0
on: What is emptiness?
You’re exploring ideas you find interesting, taking the exploration seriously and giving it real effort. I respect that. However, the way you write gives the impression of trying to preserve some sort of sacred mystery about the ideas you’re exploring, instead of trying to resolve your own confusions and thereby replace the mystery with deepened understanding when you can attain such.
For example: I’m not sure what it is about the concept of intrinsic nature that got you thinking about this, but you correctly notice that this is not a concept that actually helps explain anything, and doesn’t accurately describe the nature of the world you live in. Congratulations! Yes, really. But then you dwell on this in ways that don’t seem to add anything further except a vibe of mysterianism.
I’m not sure what your goal is in writing this, but for your own explorations, consider that there are a lot of other directions you could choose to take your developing understanding and use it to build on itself. Ways that acknowledge you’ve dissolved the concept and asked what’s next. For a few examples:
1. You might ask, well, what is the emptiness like? Actually, for the past near-century now, that’s a question of physics! The void is pregnant with infinite possibilities. By which I mean, not something mysterious, but that a vacuum has a precise structure, which gives rise to the laws of physics, which lets us calculate the behavior of all sorts of other things, and when we run the experiments, the calculations are right, because the models of vacuum structure are pointing at something inherent in the nature of the real world. As our models describe it, the void spontaneously gives rise to virtual particles, which is how forces are conveyed across space. The void interacts with matter—for example, you can see this in the Casimir effect, where conductive plates change the allowed quantization of the electromagnetic field, which changes the field’s zero-point energy, which creates a force between the plates. Emptiness is fascinating, not as a deep and abiding mystery, but about the behavior of reality. It mediates a complex web of interactions. The interactions themselves exist. Other physicists are asking where the structure came from, what space and time are made of, or what might replace them as deeper descriptions of the reality which the quantum spacetime vacuum description tries to model.
2. You might ask, well, what does it all mean now that we know it’s empty? This is a different kind of question, but if you’re wondering about meaning and value and how or whether a concept like “water” can have meaning in a world where “intrinsic nature” is not a thing, have you tried reading the blog Meaningness? There are a lot of reasons I recommend it. One is to help find a way out of the nihilism that for many often follows the realization that things lack intrinsic nature or meaning. Another is to highlight that oftentimes, the answer to a deep question depends entirely on the reasons someone is asking it in the first place. In other words, the answer (and the meaning) arise from the complex web of interactions that gives rise to a mind that has a reason for asking a question using a particular set of words, and the same set of words can call for a different answer when posed by a different mind. This isn’t fundamentally mysterious. For example, the answer to “Where do babies come from?” is different depending on whether the asker is a toddler, an obstetrician, or a new hire at an infant daycare center, as well as whether the answerer is a mom, a kindergartener, or a med student . But there’s a lot to explore in how it cashes out in practice.
3. You might also ask, why did I (or why do others) think intrinsic nature is real, or important? What did I think I was getting out of it, do I still think I need that, and if so, where am I getting it now? If not, what changed, what dependencies in my mind resulted in the change, how do I feel about that, and how do I want to react to that? What else in my mind is downstream of those things and should also change in response? If you don’t clarify the stakes, the reasons you’re having the discussion or exploring the idea, then what comes out is likely to look like nonsense to anyone who isn’t you, and any actually useful insight is likely to be lost even to future-you.

AnthonyC May 26, 2025, 3:17 AM
2 points
0
on: Claude 4 You: Safety and Alignment
I had previously only been paying for ChatGPT and Gemini, not Claude. I have now resumed my paid Claude subscription. Thanks, Anthropic!

AnthonyC May 21, 2025, 8:56 PM
6 points
0
on: The stakes of AI moral status
FWIW, that was only Picard’s answer: definitive, as befits a ship’s captain. The judge’s answer was that they were not equipped to make such a determination, and in the face of that uncertainty, the right choice was to defer to Data himself to explore it. They also did a very similar episode in Voyager regarding whether the captain or crew had the right to edit the memories of the holographic doctor, with basically the same conclusion.
I think questions of AI moral personhood will also, for some people, force us to really confront what we claim are our opinions regarding the use of violent or deadly force. It makes a lot of the implicit and unexamined value determinations, that we all make all the time, explicit and scary, The Good Place-style.
There’s a part of me that suspects we (collectively, not individually) may not really grapple with digital personhood until we learn how to store human minds in digital form (assuming such a thing happen in our timeline). If those two teddy bears were not AIs, but the devices that stored your grandparents, or a thousand strangers, well, then what?

AnthonyC May 20, 2025, 10:16 PM
4 points
0
on: Book Review: The Art of Happiness
If you were going to have someone write a book like that, who else would you choose?
If I had my druthers, I might make it a trio and add Euripedes, one of his contemporaries, or a modern classicist who had deeply studied the Bacchae and the Dionysian cults; someone who understood the dual nature of Dionysus enough to value the ideas of eudaimonia and ecstatic madness while recognizing their dangers if used improperly, as a counterpoint to the Buddhist attention to alleviating suffering over elevating joy. (O/T: Happiness aside, I imagine the Dalai Llama would have a lot to talk about with an expert on another religion whose god repeatedly dies, then returns to the world, in an eternal cycle of renewal, growth, and transformation.)

AnthonyC May 20, 2025, 9:46 PM
3 points
8
on: P-Values Know When You’re Cheating
The probability of finding a ‘statistically significant’ relation somewhere in this dataset is p > 95%^28 = 23.8%. Better than ³⁄₄ times.

I think you mean “p(>=1 ‘statistically significant’ result) = 1 - (.95^28) = 76.2%”?