brambleboy

Karma: 96

brambleboy 8 Dec 2024 19:36 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Daniel Tan’s comment on: Daniel Tan’s Shortform
This seems too strict to me, because it says that humans aren’t generally intelligent, and that a system isn’t AGI if it’s not a world-class underwater basket weaver. I’d call that weak ASI.

brambleboy 21 Nov 2024 2:02 UTC
2 points
0
on: Introducing Fatebook: the fastest way to make and track predictions
Fatebook has worked nicely for me so far, and I think it’d be cool to use it more throughout the day. Some features I’d like to see:
- Currently tags seem to only be useful for filtering your track record. I’d like to be able to filter the forecast list by tag.
- Allow clicking and dragging the bar to modify probabilities.
- An option to input probabilities in formats besides percentages, such as odds ratios or bits.
- An option to resolve by a specific time, not just a date, plus an option for push notification reminders instead of emails. This would open the door to super short-term forecasts like “Will I solve this problem in the next hour?”. I’ve made a substitute for this feature by making reminders in Google Keep with a link to the prediction.

brambleboy 19 Nov 2024 16:06 UTC
1 point
1
on: Social events with plausible deniability
When I see an event with the stated purpose of opposing highly politically polarized things such as cancel culture and safe spaces, I imagine a bunch of people with shared politics repeating their beliefs to each other and snickering, and any beliefs that are actually highly controversial within that group are met with “No no, that’s what they want you to think, you missed the point!” It seems possible to avoid that failure mode with a genuine truth-seeking culture, so I hope you succeeded.

brambleboy 14 Nov 2024 17:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Is Success the Enemy of Freedom? (Full)
It’s been about 4 years. How do you feel about this now?

brambleboy 11 Nov 2024 21:03 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: whestler’s comment on: Are we dropping the ball on Recommendation AIs?
Bluesky has custom feeds that can bring in posts from all platforms that use the AT Protocol, but Bluesky is the only such platform right now. Most feeds I’ve found so far are simple keyword searches, which work nicely for having communities around certain topics, but I hope to see more sophisticated ones pop up.

brambleboy 5 Nov 2024 7:40 UTC
47 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
While the broader message might be good, the study the video is about didn’t replicate.

brambleboy 15 Oct 2024 5:43 UTC
6 points
4
in reply to: Isaac King’s comment on: Isaac King’s Shortform
While most people have super flimsy defenses of meat-eating, that doesn’t mean everyone does. Some people simply think it’s quite unlikely that non-human animals are sentient (besides primates, maybe). For example, IIRC Eliezer Yudkowsky and Rob Bensinger’s guess is that consciousness is highly contingent on factors such as general intelligence and sociality, or something like that.

I think the “5% chance is still too much” argument is convincing, but it begs similar questions such as “Are you really so confident that fetuses aren’t sentient? How could you be so sure?”

brambleboy 12 Oct 2024 18:34 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: (Maybe) A Bag of Heuristics is All There Is & A Bag of Heuristics is All You Need
I agree that origami AIs would still be intelligent if implementing the same computations. I was trying to point at LLMs potentially being ‘sphexish’: having behaviors made of baked if-then patterns linked together that superficially resemble ones designed on-the-fly for a purpose. I think this is related to what the “heuristic hypothesis” is getting at.

brambleboy 11 Oct 2024 6:13 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: (Maybe) A Bag of Heuristics is All There Is & A Bag of Heuristics is All You Need
The paper “Auto-Regressive Next-Token Predictors are Universal Learners” made me a little more skeptical of attributing general reasoning ability to LLMs. They show that even linear predictive models, basically just linear regression, can technically perform any algorithm when used autoregressively like with chain-of-thought. The results aren’t that mind-blowing but it made me wonder whether performing certain algorithms correctly with a scratchpad is as much evidence of intelligence as I thought.

brambleboy 11 Oct 2024 5:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: If AI is in a bubble and the bubble bursts, what would you do?
Even if you know a certain market is a bubble, it’s not exactly trivial to exploit if you don’t know when it’s going to burst, which prices will be affected, and to what degree. “The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent” and all that.
Personally, while I think that investment will decrease and companies will die off, I doubt there’s a true AI bubble, because there are so many articles about it being in a bubble that it couldn’t possibly be a big surprise for the markets if it popped, and therefore the hypothetical pop is already priced out of existence. I think it’s possible that some traders are waiting to pull the trigger on selling their shares once the market starts trending downwards, which would cause an abrupt drop and extra panic selling… but then it would correct itself pretty quickly if the prices weren’t actually inflated before the dip. (I’m not a financial expert so don’t take this that seriously)

brambleboy 3 Oct 2024 19:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: What are some beautiful, rationalist artworks?
The fourth image is of the “Z machine”, or the Z Pulsed Power Facility, which creates massive electromagnetic pulses for experiments. It’s awesome.

brambleboy 1 Oct 2024 21:06 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Orfeas’s comment on: What are your greatest one-shot life improvements?
I can second this. I recommend the chrome extension Unhook, which allows you to disable individual parts of YouTube, and Youtube-shorts block, which makes YouTube shorts play like normal videos.

brambleboy 23 Sep 2024 22:15 UTC
1 point
0
on: Proveably Safe Self Driving Cars
(Disclaimer: I’m not very knowledgeable about safety engineering or formal proofs)
I notice that whenever someone brings up “What if this unexpected thing happens?”, you emphasize that it’s about not causing accidents. I’m worried that it’s hard to define exactly who caused an accident, for the same reason that deciding who’s liable in the legal system is hard.
It seems quite easy to say that the person who sabotaged the stop sign was at fault for the accident. What if the saboteur poured oil on the road instead? Is it their fault if the car crashes from sliding on the oil? Okay, they’re being malicious, so they’re at fault. But what if the oil spill was an accident from a truck tipping over? Is it the truck driver’s fault? What if the road was slippery because of ice? Nobody causes the weather, right? On the contrary: the city could’ve cleared and salted the roads earlier, but they didn’t. In the counterfactual world where they did it earlier, the accident wouldn’t have happened.
Okay, how about instead of backward chaining forever, we just check whether the system could have avoided the accident in the counterfactual where it took different actions. The problem is: even in the case where an adversarial stop sign leads to the car crashing, the system potentially could’ve avoided it. Stop signs are placed by humans somewhat arbitrarily using heuristics to determine if an intersection is risky. Shouldn’t the system be able to tell that an intersection is risky, even when there truly isn’t a stop sign there?
The paper tackles the problem by formalizing which behaviors and assumptions regarding the movement of cars and pedestrians are “reasonable” or “unreasonable”, then proving within the toy model that only unreasonable behavior leads to crashes. Makes sense, but in the real world people don’t just follow paths, they do all kinds of things that influence the world. Wouldn’t the legal system be simple if we could just use equations like these to determine liability? I’m just not sure we should expect to eventually cover the long tail of potential situations sufficiently enough to make “provably safe” meaningful.
Also, I’m concerned because they don’t seem to describe it as a toy model despite the extremely simplified set of things they’re considering, and there might be questionable incentives at play to make it seem more sound than it is. From another document on their website:
We believe the industry can come together to create a collaborative platform which provides a “safety seal” that first and foremost will create a safer product, but at the same time will protect OEMs from unreasonable and unwarranted liability assignment by regulators and society.
So they want the cars to be safe, but they also want to avoid liability by proving the accident was someone else’s fault.

brambleboy 19 Sep 2024 15:19 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Dana’s comment on: Pronouns are Annoying
If random strangers start calling you “she”, that implies you look feminine enough to be mistaken for a woman. I think most men would prefer to look masculine for many reasons: not being mistaken for a woman, being conventionally attractive, being assumed to have a ‘manly’ rather than ‘effeminate’ personality, looking your age, etc.

If you look obviously masculine, then being misgendered constantly would just be bewildering. Surely something is signaling that you use feminine pronouns.

If it’s just people online misgendering you based on your writing, then that’s less weird. But I think it still would bother some people for some of the reasons above.

brambleboy 11 Sep 2024 4:26 UTC
4 points
3
on: AI forecasting bots incoming
I predict that implementing bots like these into social media platforms (in their current state) would be poorly received by the public. I think many people’s reaction to Grok’s probability estimate would be “Why should I believe this? How could Grok, or anyone, know that?” If it were a prediction market, the answer would be “because <economic and empirical explanation as to why you can trust the markets>”. There’s no equivalent answer for a new bot, besides “because our tests say it works” (making the full analysis visible might help). From these comments, it seems like it’s not hard to elicit bad forecasts. Many people in the public would learn about this kind of forecasting for the first time from this, and if the estimates aren’t super impressive, it’ll leave a bad taste in their mouths. Meanwhile the media will likely deride it as “Big Tech wants you to trust their fallible chatbots as fortune-tellers now”.

brambleboy 22 Aug 2024 22:46 UTC
1 point
2
on: I’m Sorry Fluttershy
The images on this post appear to be broken.

brambleboy 28 Jul 2024 15:54 UTC
0 points
−1
on: You should go to ML conferences
If you go on Twitter/X and find the right people, you can get most of the benefits you list here. There are tastemakers that share and discuss intriguing papers, and researchers who post their own papers with explanation threads which are often more useful than the papers themselves. The researchers are usually available to answer questions about their work, and you can read the answers they’ve given already. You’re also ahead of the game because preprints can appear way before conferences.

brambleboy 12 Jul 2024 0:14 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: andeslodes’s comment on: When is a mind me?
It may be through extrapolating too much from your (first-person, subjective) experiences with objects that seemingly possess intrinsic, observer-independent properties, like the classical objects of everyday life.
Are you trying to say that quantum physics provides evidence that physical reality is subjective, with conscious observers having a fundamental role? Rob implicitly assumes the position advocated by The Quantum Physics Sequence, which argues that reality exists independently of observers and that quantum stuff doesn’t suggest otherwise. It’s just one of the many presuppositions he makes that’s commonly shared on here. If that’s your main objection, you should make that clear.

brambleboy 30 Jun 2024 17:39 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: Stephen Fowler’s Shortform
Another example in ML of a “non-conservative” optimization process: a common failure mode of GANs is mode collapse, wherein the generator and discriminator get stuck in a loop. The generator produces just one output that fools the discriminator, the discriminator memorizes it, the generator switches to another, until eventually they get back to the same output again.
In the rolling ball analogy, we could say that the ball rolls down into a divot, but the landscape flexes against the ball to raise it up again, and then the ball rolls into another divot, and so on.

brambleboy 25 Jun 2024 18:04 UTC
10 points
7
on: Monthly Roundup #19: June 2024
So of course Robin Hanson offered polls on these so-called taboo topics. The ‘controversial’ positions got overwhelming support. The tenth question, whether demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance got affirmed 54%-17%, and the rest were a lot less close than that. Three were roughly 90%-1%. I realize Hanson has unusual followers, but the ‘taboo questions’ academics want to discuss? People largely agree on the answers, and the academics have decided saying that answer out loud is not permitted.
I understand criticizing the censorship of controversial research, but to suggest that these questions aren’t actually controversial or taboo outside of academia is absurd to me. People largely agree that “Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores”? Even a politician in a deeply conservative district wouldn’t dare say that and risk scaring off his constituents.