(updated name)
Chloe Thompson
Karma: 82
You also could just use this to disguise your ‘style’ if you want to say something anonymously going forward (doesn’t work for stuff you’ve already got out there). Just ask an LLM to reword it in a different style before you post, could be a plugin or something, and then it can’t be identified as being by you, right?
Yep that’s it! Glad my explanation helped.
(Though if we want to be a bit pedantic about it, we’d say that actually a world where 21 heads in a row ever happens is not unlikely (If heaps and heaps of coin tosses happen across the world over time, like in our world), but a world where any particular given sequence of 21 coin flips is all heads is yes very unlikely (before any of them have been flipped)).)
Ah yes this was confusing to me for a while too, glad to be able to help someone else out with it!
The key thing to realise for me, is that the probability of 21 heads in a row changes as you toss each of those 21 coins.
The sequence of 21 heads in a row does indeed have much less than 0.5 chance, to be precise , which is 0.000000476837158. But it only has such a tiny probability before any of those 21 coins have been tossed. However as soon as the first coin is tossed, the probability of those 21 coins all being heads changes. If first coin is tails, the probability of all 21 coins being heads goes down to 0, if first coin is heads the probability of all 21 coins being heads goes up to . Say you by unlikely luck keep tossing heads. Then with each additional heads in a row you toss, the probability of all 21 coins being heads goes steadily up and up, til by the time you’ve tossed 20 heads in a row, the probability of all 21 being heads is now.… 0.5, i.e. the same as a the probability of a single coin toss being heads! And our apparent contradition is gone :)
The more ‘mathematical’ way to express this would be: The unconditional probability of tossing 21 heads in a row is , i.e. 0.000000476837158 but the probability of tossing 21 heads in a row conditional on having already tossed 20 heads in a row is .
Let me know if any of that is still confusing.
Love this way at pointing at this distinction!
Oooo cool I didn’t know this github trick!
thanks!
Thank you!
Thanks! What do you mean about the cross referencing?
Thanks!
Good for any particular topic or just in general?
[Question] What’s The Best Place to Look When You Have A Question About x?
Oooo thanks for this, just used it to write a post for my blog and it was more fun and easier than usual: My Anxiety Keeps Persisting Even Though It Has Been Diagnosed, Rude
Thanks for sharing your ideas. I’m a bit confused about your core claim and would love if you could could clarify (Or refer to the specific part of your writing that addresses these questions): I get the general gist of your claim, that AI alignment depends on whether humans can all have the same values, but I don’t know how much ‘the same’ you mean. You say ‘substantially’ align, could you give some examples of how aligned you mean? For example, do you mean all humans sharing the same political ideology (libertarian/communist/ etc)? Do you mean that for all non-trivial ethical questions (When is abortion permissable? How much duty do you have to your family vs yourself? How many resources should we devote to making things better on earth vs exploring space?), that you would need to be able to ask any human on earth and say 99% would give you the same answer?
Likewise with the idea of humans needing to compete less and cooperate more. How much less and more? For example, competition between firms is a core part of capitalism, do you think we need to completely eliminate capitalism? Or do you only mean eliminating zero/negative sum competition like war?
Yes great question. Looking at programming in general, there seem to be many obvious counterexamples, where computers have certain capabilities (‘features’) that humans don’t (e.g. doing millions of arithmetic operations extremely fast with zero clumsy errors) and likewise where they have certain problem (‘bugs’) that we don’t (e.g. adversarial examples for image classifiers, which don’t trip humans up at all but entire ruin the neural nets classification.)
Yes, if all humans agreed on everything, there would still be significant technical problems to get an AI to align with all the humans. Most of the existing arguments for the difficulty of AI alignment would still hold even if all humans agreed. If you (Henry) think these existing arguments are wrong, could you say something about why you think that, i.e. offer counterarguments?
Chris Aruffo has done some work on this: http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/
I love this idea and would watch this stream!
These are a couple posts I came up with in a quick search, so not necessarily the best examples:
Covid 9/23: There Is a War“The FDA, having observed and accepted conclusive evidence that booster shots are highly effective, has rejected allowing people to get those booster shots unless they are over the age of 65, are immunocompromised or high risk, or are willing to lie on a form. The CDC will probably concur. I think we all know what this means. It means war! …”
Covid 11/18: Paxlovid Remains Illegal
“It seems to continue to be the official position that:
Paxlovid is safe and effective.
Paxlovid has proven this sufficiently that it isn’t ‘ethical’ to continue running a clinical trial on it.
Paxlovid will be approved by the FDA in December.
Until then, Paxlovid must remain illegal.
[...]
Washington Examiner points out the obvious, that the FDA is killing thousands of people by delaying Pfizer’s and Merck’s Covid treatments. It’s good to state simple things simply:
“So, set Merck aside for now and consider Pfizer’s Paxlovid. In the past 30 days, more than 37,000 people died of COVID in the United States, according to the CDC . Over the next 35 days, Paxlovid could prevent tens of thousands of avoidable deaths. But instead, the FDA won’t immediately let Pfizer sell a drug it knows to be lifesaving. ”...”
Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know (SSC post written when CDC was still telling people not to wear masks)
So if studies generally suggest masks are effective, and the CDC wasn’t deliberately lying to us, why are they recommending against mask use? …[He goes on to give some possible reasons.]
Covid 8/27: The Fall of the CDC
“An attempt at a “good faith” interpretation of the new testing guidelines, that you ‘do not necessarily need a test’ even if you have been within 6 feet of a known positive for fifteen minutes, is that the CDC is lying. That they are doing the exact same thing with testing that was previously done with masks. …”
CDC Changes Isolation Guidelines
Here was the CDC’s explicit reasoning on not requiring a test, quote from the Washington Post article:
“Walensky said the agency decided not to require a negative test result after people had isolated for five days because the results are often inaccurateat that point in an infection. PCR tests — those typically performed in a lab which are around 98 percent effective — can show positive results long after a person is no longer infectious because of the presence of viral remnants,she said. It remains unclear how well rapid, at-home tests determine someone’s ability to transmit the virus in the latter part of their infection, she added.”
This is standard government thinking. We can’t use PCR for the sensible reason that it will stay positive long after infectiousness. We can’t use rapid tests because we don’t know how accurate they are in this particular situation, so instead we’re going to (1) not run experiments to find out, experiments remain illegal and (2) instead not run any tests at all, which is known to be about 50% accurate. I call heads.
ETA: https://twitter.com/robertwiblin/status/1463748021011681285
“The US CDC in an article updated in October 2021 is still telling people not to wear N95 masks, even though they are in abundant supply and vastly more effective than the cloth masks they seemingly recommend.
Absolutely disgraceful: https://cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/about-face-coverings.html″
There’s a 16 week Zoom book club coming up for Burns’ book about TEAM-CBT, facilitated by a TEAM-CBT trainer, in case anyone is interested (starts Sep 8th 2021): https://www.feelinggreattherapycenter.com/book-club
(I just signed up)
These are really good descriptions! (Going by my own and friends’ experience). For me I might just tweak it to put anxiety as the height rather than the gravity. Thank you for writing these up!