bideup

Karma: 352

bideup 21 Jul 2024 21:39 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Eli’s shortform feed

seems to me to be a crux between “man, we’re probably all going to die” and “we’re really really fucked”

Sorry, what’s the difference between these two positions? Is the second one meant to be a more extreme version of the first?

bideup 9 Jul 2024 22:50 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: Many arguments for AI x-risk are wrong
What’s the difference between “Alice is falling victim to confusions/reasoning mistakes about X” and “Alice disagrees with me about X”?

I feel like using the former puts undue social pressure on observers to conclude that you’re right, and makes it less likely they correctly adjudicate between the perspectives.

(Perhaps you can empathise with me here, since arguably certain people taking this sort of tone is one of the reasons AI x-risk arguments have not always been vetted as carefully as they should!)

bideup 27 May 2024 20:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir’s comment on: Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir’s Shortform
I learned maths mostly by teachers at school writing on a whiteboard, university lecturers writing on a blackboard or projector, and to a lesser extent friends writing on pieces of paper.

There was a tiny supplement of textbook-reading at school and large supplement of printed-notes-reading at university.

I would guess only a tiny fraction learn exclusively via typed materials. If you have any kind of teacher, how could you? Nobody shows you how to rearrange an equation by live-typing latex.

bideup 27 May 2024 20:46 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
In Texas Hold ’Em, the most popular form of poker, there is no drawing or discarding, just betting and folding.

This seems like strong evidence that those parts are where the skill lies — somebody came up with a version that removed the other parts, and everyone switched to it.

Not sure how that affects the metaphor. For me I think it weakened the punch, since I had to stop and remember that there exist forms of poker with drawing and discarding.

bideup 24 May 2024 19:46 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: James Stephen Brown’s comment on: A Positive Double Standard—Self-Help Principles Work For Individuals Not Populations
Right, I understand it now, thanks. I missed the labels on the x axis.

bideup 22 May 2024 22:04 UTC
1 point
0
on: A Positive Double Standard—Self-Help Principles Work For Individuals Not Populations
I found your bar chart more confusing than illuminating. Does it make sense to mark the bottom 20% of people, and those people’s 43% probability of staying in the bottom 20%, as two different fractions of the same bar? The 43% is 43% of the 20%, not of the original 100%.

bideup 22 May 2024 21:51 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: yanni’s Shortform
If many more people are extremely happy all the time than extremely depressed all the time, the bunch of people you describe would be managing their beliefs rationally. And indeed I think that’s probably the case.

bideup 18 May 2024 10:56 UTC
15 points
0
in reply to: mesaoptimizer’s comment on: Stephen Fowler’s Shortform
Can anybody confirm whether Paul is likely systematically silenced re OpenAI?

bideup 9 May 2024 7:35 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gjm’s comment on: How to be an amateur polyglot
I’m an adult from the UK and learnt the word faucet like last year

bideup 21 Apr 2024 12:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: A couple productivity tips for overthinkers
Thanks. Do you use this system for reading list(s) too?

bideup 21 Apr 2024 11:44 UTC
3 points
0
on: A couple productivity tips for overthinkers
When you say you use a kanban-style system, does that just refer to the fact that there are columns that you drag items between, or does it specifically mean that you also make use of an ‘in progress’ column?

If so, do you have one for each ‘todo’ column, or what?

And do you have a column for the ‘capture’ aspect of GTD, or do you do something else for that?

bideup 5 Feb 2024 11:09 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: My thoughts on the Beff Jezos—Connor Leahy debate
Are you interested in these debates in order to help form your own views, or convince others?

I feel like debates are inferior to reading people’s writings for the former purpose, and for the latter they deal collateral damage by making the public conversation more adversarial.

bideup 5 Feb 2024 11:05 UTC
6 points
1
on: Attention SAEs Scale to GPT-2 Small
I keep reading the title as Attention: SAEs Scale to GPT-2 Small.

Thanks for the heads up.

bideup 30 Jan 2024 22:31 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
I think what I was thinking of is that words can have arbitrary consequences and be arbitrarily high cost.

In the apologising case, making the right social API call might be an action of genuine significance. E.g. it might mean taking the hit on lowering onlookers’ opinion of my judgement, where if I’d argued instead that the person I wronged was talking nonsense I might have got away with preserving it.

John’s post is about how you can gain respect for apologising, but it does have often have costs too, and I think the respect is partly for being willing to pay them.

bideup 4 Jan 2024 12:53 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: M. Y. Zuo’s comment on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
Words are a type of action, and I guess apologising and then immediately moving on to defending yourself is not the sort of action which signals sincerity.

bideup 3 Jan 2024 8:59 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: A case for AI alignment being difficult
Explaining my downvote:

This comment contains ~5 negative statements about the post and the poster without explaining what it is that the commentor disagrees with.

As such it seems to disparage without moving the conversation forward, and is not the sort of comment I’d like to see on LessWrong.

bideup 2 Jan 2024 20:15 UTC
3 points
0
on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
The second footnote seems to be accidentally duplicated as the intro. Kinda works though.

bideup 2 Jan 2024 18:11 UTC
15 points
7
on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
“Not invoking the right social API call” feels like a clarifying way to think about a specific conversational pattern that I’ve noticed that often leads to a person (e.g. me) feeling like they’re virtuosly giving up ground, but not getting any credit for it.

It goes something like:

Alice: You were wrong to do X and Y.

Bob: I admit that I was wrong to do X and I’m sorry about it, but I think Y is unfair.

discussion continues about Y and Alice seems not to register Bob’s apology

It seems like maybe bundling in your apology for X with a protest against Y just doesn’t invoke the right API call. I’m not entirely sure what the simplest fix is, but it might just be swapping the order of the protest and the apology.

bideup 29 Dec 2023 11:45 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Critical review of Christiano’s disagreements with Yudkowsky
Is it true that scaling laws are independent of architecture? I don’t know much about scaling laws but that seems surely wrong to me.

e.g. how does RNN scaling compare to transformer scaling

bideup 28 Dec 2023 10:31 UTC
2 points
2
on: E.T. Jaynes Probability Theory: The logic of Science I
Your example of a strong syllogism (‘if A, then B. A is true, therefore B is true’) isn’t one.

It’s instead of the form ‘If A, then B. A is false, therefore B is false’, which is not logically valid (and also not a Jaynesian weak syllogism).

If Fisher lived to 100 he would have become a Bayesian

Fisher died at the age of 72

———————————————————————————————————

Fisher died a Frequentist

You could swap the conclusion with the second premise and weaken the new conclusion to ‘Fisher died before 100’, or change the premise to ‘Unless Fisher lived to a 100 he would not become a Bayesian’.