Carl Feynman

Karma: 1,413

I was born in 1962 (so I’m in my 60s). I was raised rationalist, more or less, before we had a name for it. I went to MIT, and have a bachelors degree in philosophy and linguistics, and a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science. I got married in 1991, and have two kids. I live in the Boston area. I’ve worked as various kinds of engineer: electronics, computer architecture, optics, robotics, software.

Around 1992, I was delighted to discover the Extropians. I’ve enjoyed being in that kind of circles since then. My experience with the Less Wrong community has been “I was just standing here, and a bunch of people gathered, and now I’m in the middle of a crowd.” A very delightful and wonderful crowd, just to be clear.

I‘m signed up for cryonics. I think it has a 5% chance of working, which is either very small or very large, depending on how you think about it.

I may or may not have qualia, depending on your definition. I think that philosophical zombies are possible, and I am one. This is a very unimportant fact about me, but seems to incite a lot of conversation with people who care.

I am reflectively consistent, in the sense that I can examine my behavior and desires, and understand what gives rise to them, and there are no contradictions I‘m aware of. I’ve been that way since about 2015. It took decades of work and I’m not sure if that work was worth it.

Carl Feynman 10 Nov 2024 16:16 UTC
22 points
9
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
The Antarctic Treaty (and subsequent treaties) forbid colonization. They also forbid extraction of useful resources from Antarctica, thereby eliminating one of the main motivations for colonization. They further forbid any profitable capitalist activity on the continent. So you can’t even do activities that would tend toward permanent settlement, like surveying to find mining opportunities, or opening a tourist hotel. Basically, the treaty system is set up so that not only can’t you colonize, but you can’t even get close to colonizing.
Northern Greenland is inhabited, and it’s at a similar latitude.
(Begin semi-joke paragraph) I think the US should pull out of the treaty, and then announce that Antarctica is now part of the US, all countries are welcome to continue their purely scientific activity provided they get a visa, and announce the continent is now open to productive activity. What’s the point of having the world’s most powerful navy if you can’t do a fait accompli once in a while? Trump would love it, since it’s simultaneously unprecedented, arrogant and profitable. Biggest real estate development deal ever! It’s huuuge!

Carl Feynman 6 Nov 2024 17:23 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
A fascinating recent paper on the topic of human bandwidth is https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234. Title and abstract:
The Unbearable Slowness of Being
Jieyu Zheng, Markus Meister
This article is about the neural conundrum behind the slowness of human behavior. The information throughput of a human being is about 10 bits/s. In comparison, our sensory systems gather data at an enormous rate, no less than 1 gigabits/s. The stark contrast between these numbers remains unexplained. Resolving this paradox should teach us something fundamental about brain function: What neural substrate sets this low speed limit on the pace of our existence? Why does the brain need billions of neurons to deal with 10 bits/s? Why can we only think about one thing at a time? We consider plausible explanations for the conundrum and propose new research directions to address the paradox between fast neurons and slow behavior.

Carl Feynman 5 Nov 2024 16:48 UTC
17 points
6
in reply to: zoop’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
They’re measuring a noisy phenomenon, yes, but that’s only half the problem. The other half of the problem is that society demands answers. New psychology results are a matter of considerable public interest and you can become rich and famous from them. In the gap between the difficulty of supply and the massive demand grows a culture of fakery. The same is true of nutrition— everyone wants to know what the healthy thing to eat is, and the fact that our current methods are incapable of discerning this is no obstacle to people who claim to know.
For a counterexample, look at the field of planetary science. Scanty evidence dribbles in from occasional spacecraft missions and telescopic observations, but the field is intellectually sound because public attention doesn’t rest on the outcome.

Carl Feynman 5 Nov 2024 16:06 UTC
4 points
0
on: What’s a good book for a technically-minded 11-year old?
Here is a category of book that I really loved at that age: non-embarrasing novels about how adults do stuff. Since, for me, that age was in 1973, the particular books I name might be obsolete. There’s a series of novels by Arthur Hailey, with titles like “Hotel” and “Airport”, that are set inside the titular institutions, and follow people as they deal with problems and interact with each other. And there is no, or at least minimal, sex, so they’re not icky to a kid. They’re not idealized; there is a reasonable degree of fallibility, venality and scheming, but that is also fascinating. And all the motivations, and the way the systems work, is clearly explained, so it can be understood by an unsophisticated reader.
These books were bestsellers back in the day, so you might be able to find a copy in the library. See if he likes it!
Another novel in this vein is “The view from the fortieth floor”, which is about a badly managed magazine going bankrupt. Doesn’t sound amazing, I know, but if you’re a kid, who’s never seen bad managers blunder into ineluctable financial doom, it’s really neat.
My wife is a middle school librarian. I’ll ask her when I see her for more books like this.

Carl Feynman 5 Nov 2024 15:32 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Martin Sustrik’s comment on: What’s a good book for a technically-minded 11-year old?
Doesn’t matter, because HPMOR is engaging enough on a chapter-by-chapter basis. I read lots of books when I was a kid when I didn’t understand the overarching plot. As long as I had a reasonable expectation that cool stuff would happen in the next chapter, I’d keep reading. I read “Stand On Zanzibar” repeatedly as a child, and didn’t understand the plot until I reread it as an adult last year. Same with the detective novel “A Deadly Shade of Gold”. I read it for the fistfights, snappy dialogue, and insights into adult life. The plot was lost on me.

Carl Feynman 3 Nov 2024 16:33 UTC
20 points
0
in reply to: Purplehermann’s comment on: Purplehermann’s Shortform
In general the human body is only capable of healing injuries that are the kind of thing that, if they were smaller, would still leave the victim alive, in the Stone Age. If an injury is of a type that would be immediately fatal in the Stone Age, there’s no evolutionary pressure to make it survivable. For example, we can regrow peripheral nerves, because losing a peripheral nerve means a numb patch and a weak limb, but you could live with this for a few months even if you’re a caveman. On the other hand, we can’t regrow spinal cord, because a transected spinal cord is fatal within a day or two even given the finest Stone Age nursing care (it didn’t become survivable until about 1946.). On the third hand, we can heal brain from strokes, even though brain is more complex than spinal cord, because a small stroke is perfectly survivable as long as you have someone to feed you until you get better. We can survive huge surgical incisions, even though those would be fatal in the Stone Age, because small penetrating wounds were survivable, and the healing mechanisms can just do the same thing all along the incision. This is why we sew wounds up: to convince the healing mechanisms that it’s only a small cut.
Unfortunately this argument suggests regrowing limbs is impossible. An amputation is bad but survivable, and after it heals, you can still get around. But many years of spending a lot of bodily energy on regrowing a limb that is pretty useless for most of that time doesn’t seem worthwhile.
Some particular problems I see:

In humans, there’s no mechanism for a growing limb to connect correctly to an adult injury site. For example, there’s already a bunch of scar tissue there, which has to be cleared away progressively as the limb grows. Evolution has not seen fit to provide us with this complex biochemistry, unlike the case of salamanders.
Children have a high level of circulating growth hormone, which tells the arm cells how fast to grow. If you tried to provide this to an adult, their other bones would also grow, causing deformity (acromegaly).
It’s odd that we can’t grow new teeth when the old ones fall out. More than once, I mean. Drilling for cavities makes sense because the enamel (outer tooth layer) is essentially dead, and doesn’t regrow. But we should be able to grow a whole new tooth from the root when we get a cavity.

Carl Feynman 28 Oct 2024 21:08 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: simon’s comment on: Electrostatic Airships?
To hold the surface out, you need to have a magnetic field tangent to the surface. But you can’t have a continuous magnetic field tangent to every point on the surface of a sphere. That’s a theorem of topology, called the Hairy Ball Theorem. So there has to be some area of the ball that’s unsupported. I guess if the area is small enough, you just let it dimple inwards in tension. The balloon would be covered in dimples, like a golf ball.

Carl Feynman 25 Oct 2024 21:16 UTC
15 points
−1
in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Drake Thomas’s Shortform
Thanks for clearing that up. It sounds like we’re thinking along very similar lines, but that I came to a decision to stop earlier. From a position inside one of major AI labs, you’ll be positioned to more correctly perceive when the risks start outweighing the benefits. I was perceiving events more remotely from over here in Boston, and from inside a company that uses AI as a one of a number of tools, not as the main product.

I’ve been aware of the danger of superintelligence since the turn of the century, and I did my “just now orienting to the question” back in the early 2000s. I decided that it was way too early to stop working on AI back then, and I should just “monitor for new considerations or evidence or events.” Then in 2022, Sydney/Bing came along, and it was of near-human intelligence, and aggressively misaligned, despite the best efforts of its creators. I decided that was close enough to dangerous AI that it was time to stop working on such things. In retrospect I could have kept working safely in AI for another couple of years, i.e. until today. But I decided to pursue the “death with dignity” strategy: if it all goes wrong, at least you can’t blame me. Fortunately my employers were agreeable to have me pivot away from AI; there’s plenty of other work to be done.

Carl Feynman 23 Oct 2024 21:15 UTC
17 points
1
in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Drake Thomas’s Shortform
I’m not “trying to figure out” whether to work on capabilities, having already decided I’ve figured it out and given up such work. Are you interested in talking about this to someone like me? I can’t tell whether you want to restrict discussion to people who are still in the figuring out stage. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you.

Carl Feynman 20 Oct 2024 23:06 UTC
4 points
0
on: What if AGI was already accidentally created in 2019? [Fictional story]
It’s a cute idea, but AI is a terrible fiction writer.

Carl Feynman 16 Oct 2024 15:28 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Not only is this true in AI research, it’s true in all science and engineering research. You’re always up against the edge of technology, or it’s not research. And at the edge, you have to use lots of stuff just behind the edge. And one characteristic of stuff just behind the edge is that it doesn’t work without fiddling. And you have to build lots of tools that have little original content, but are needed to manipulate the thing you’re trying to build.

After decades of experience, I would say: any sensible researcher spends a substantial fraction of time trying to get stuff to work, or building prerequisites.

This is for engineering and science research. Maybe you’re doing mathematical or philosophical research; I don’t know what those are like.

Carl Feynman 30 Sep 2024 22:50 UTC
10 points
0
on: Point of Failure: Semiconductor-Grade Quartz
High-purity quartz is used as crucibles in which to melt silicon for semiconductors. It’s not a directly consumed raw material. Based on my understanding of the process, the problem is that a little bit of the crucible dissolves into the silicon every time a batch is melted. How long does a crucible last, and can its life be extended by various forms of cleverness? If the lifetime of a crucible is longer than the time it takes to restore the mines to production, then the interruption might not be serious. Assuming that the mines produce extra-fast for a while, to make up for the gap in production, of course.
IIRC, this sort of interruption to chip supply has happened twice, once with a glue factory fire in Nagoya, and once because of floods in Thailand that simultaneously destroyed several assembly plants. Both interruptions lasted about four months before production was restored, and resulted in a brief price increase instead of the Moore’s Law price decreases that semiconductor prices usually enjoy.
Epistemic status: I was trained as an electrical engineer, and worked for many years as a chip designer, but have not actually been in the business in this century, so any detailed knowledge is possibly obsolete.

Carl Feynman 24 Sep 2024 21:02 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s Shortform
Yes, things have certainly changed in the four months since I wrote my original comment, with the advent of o1 and Sakana’s Artificial Scientist. Both of those are still incapable of full automation of self-improvement, but they’re close. We’re clearly much closer to a recursive speed up of R&D, leading to FOOM.

Carl Feynman 15 Sep 2024 23:45 UTC
6 points
0
on: On the destruction of America’s best high school
I don’t think articles like this belong on Less Wrong, so I downvoted it. Presumably the author agrees, to some extent, or he wouldn’t have felt the need to pre-apologize. If people disagree with me, they are of course free to upvote it.

Also, the article in question was posted in October of 2020. Why bring it up now? It’s not like we can do anything about it.

Carl Feynman 30 Aug 2024 19:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jacob_drori’s comment on: Does a time-reversible physical law/Cellular Automaton always imply the First Law of Thermodynamics?
“Time-Symmetric” and “reversible” mean the same thing to me: if you look at the system with reversed time, it obeys the same law. But apparently they don’t mean the same to OP, and I notice I am confused. In any event, as Mr Drori points out, symmetry/reversibility implies symmetry under time translation. If, further, the system can be described by a Hamiltonian (like all physical systems) then Noether’s Theorem applies, and energy is conserved.

Carl Feynman 18 Aug 2024 1:55 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: denkenberger’s comment on: It’s time for a self-reproducing machine
Now I know more! Thanks.
That would suggest that an equal mass of tiny wind turbines would be more efficient. But I see really big turbines all over the midwest. What’s the explanation?

Carl Feynman 18 Aug 2024 1:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: JaredSykes’s comment on: It’s time for a self-reproducing machine
Yes. I know him. We met years ago when I was a grad student at the Media Lab. I haven’t followed his work on self-reproduction in detail, but from what I’ve seen he is not aiming at economically self-sufficient devices, while I am. So I’m not too impressed.

Carl Feynman 17 Aug 2024 21:57 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: It’s time for a self-reproducing machine
As I describe in my first reply to Jackson Wagner above, I can tolerate some inefficiency, as long as I stay above Soviet-style negative productivity. The goal is minimum reproduction time. Once I’ve scaled up, I can build a rolling mill if needed.
You could mill every single plate in a motor core out of sheet stock on a milling machine...
As you point out, that would be madness. I’ve got a sheet rolling machine listed, so I assume I can take plate and cold-roll it into sheet. Or heat the plate and hot-roll it if need be. The sheets are only a meter long and a few centimeters wide, so the rolling machine fits inside. They function like shingles for building the outside enclosure, and for various machine guards internally, so they don’t have to be big.
where are you quenching the stuff?
I’m quenching in a jar of used lubricant. Or fresh oil, if need be. 6% of the input is oil.
alloys isn’t necessarily that you can’t substitute X for Y, but that X costs three or four or ten times as much as Y for the specific application that Y is optimized for.
I’m a little reluctant to introduce this kind of evidence, but I’ve seen lots of machinist videos where they say “I pulled this out of the scrap bin, not sure what it is, but lets use it for this mandrel” (or whatever). And then it works fine. I am happy to believe that different alloys differ by tens of percent in their characteristics, and that getting the right alloy is an important occupation for real engineers. I just don’t think that many thousands of them all vary by “three or four or ten times.” I think I can get away with six or so.

Carl Feynman 17 Aug 2024 21:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: adastra22’s comment on: It’s time for a self-reproducing machine
I was actually thinking of a pair of humanlike arms with many degrees of freedom, and one or more cameras looking at things. You can have dozens of single datum sensors, or one camera. It’s much cheaper. Similarly, once you have some robot arms, there’s no gain in including many single use motors. For example, when I include an arbor press, I don’t mean a motorized press. I mean a big lever that you grab with the robot arm and pull down, to press in a shaft or shape a screw head.
There are two CNC machine tools, to automate some part shaping while the robot does something else.

Carl Feynman 17 Aug 2024 21:22 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: anithite’s comment on: It’s time for a self-reproducing machine
Yes, absolutely! A fine description of the current state of the art. I upvoted your post by 6 points (didn’t know I could do that!).
I’m imagining doing everything the machinist has to do with a mobile pair of robot arms. I can imagine a robot doing everything you listed in your first list of problems. Your “stupider stuff” is all software problems, so will be fixed once, centrally, and for good on the Autofac. The developers can debug their software as it fails, which is not a luxury machinists enjoy.
Call a problem that requires human input a “tough” problem. We can feed the solutions to any tough problems back into the model, using fine-tuning or putting it in the prompt. So ideally, any tough problem will have to be solved once. Or a small number of times, if the VLM is bad at generalizing. The longer we run the Autofacs, the more tough problems we hit, resolve, and never see again. With an exponentially increasing number of Autofacs, we might have to solve an exponentially increasing number of tough problems. This is infeasible and will destroy the scheme. We have to hope that the tough problems per hour per Autofac drops faster than the number of Autofacs increases. It’s a hope and only a hope—I can’t prove it’s the case.
What’s your feeling about the distribution of tough problems?

Carl Feynman

The Unbearable Slowness of Being