ChristianKl

Karma: 35,457

ChristianKl Apr 8, 2025, 6:35 PM
4 points
2
on: Misinformation is the default, and information is the government telling you your tap water is safe to drink
I did agree with the framing of the problem at the beginning but it’s unclear to me why the conclusion is something besides “focus on how we can produce more reliable sources of information”.
If you take an issue like ‘people don’t believe in CDC guidance’ it’s possible to reform the CDC in a way that forces it to give explicit reasoning that’s backed for all their recommendations.
Instead of fighting misinformation it would be possible to focus on improving the processes inside institutions to make those more reliable.

ChristianKl Apr 7, 2025, 9:19 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
You made statements that you know why the field is stuck. That both contains an assertion of the field being stuck and you knowing the explanation is due to diminishing returns. I made no claim that I know the answer to either of those questions.
#1 There is not a significant group of young capable researchers saying we are taking things in the wrong direction, but a smaller number of older ones.
If you think that theoretical physics is going in the wrong direction and are unlikely going to get to research in a way you think will make progress, there are good reasons for not being not making your PHD in theoretical physics. The strongest disbelievers filter themselves out.
But even among the people who are actually in the field, I don’t see a good reason why you would publically see signs.
You might ask PHD students: “If you wouldn’t need to seek grants and would get a lab with 5 million dollar per year, would you pursue the same research agendas as you are currently do or would you pursue research for which you wouldn’t get grants in the current academic environment?”
It might be interesting to ask that question for researchers in every field and see the responses, but unfortunately I don’t know of any source that asks such a question in a good way.
I followed Hinton et all before they became famous. I saw the paradigm thing play out in front of my eyes there.
It’s certainly possible for their to be fields where it can be obvious to outsiders that a particular paradigm changing approach will work, but that’s not necessary for there to be superior paradigms that could be persued.

ChristianKl Apr 7, 2025, 7:43 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: NormanPerlmutter’s comment on: NormanPerlmutter’s Shortform
While the Trump administration campaigned on deporting very many people till now they haven’t. Instead they seem to pursue a policy of taking actions that produce fear I potential immigrants and managed to drastically reduce the inflow illegal immigrants that way.
Both mainstream media and the Trump administration like it if the policies look scary.
If you want to decide whether it makes sense to be personally scared it’s important to think through your personal threat models.

ChristianKl Apr 7, 2025, 1:23 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
There are people like Sabine Hossenfelder who think that there are experiments we could run that we currently don’t run, because they don’t fit into the string physics paradigm.
If you look back through history, in most times you would not see data that shows that a specific non-hegemonic scientific paradigm is better than the hegemonic paradigm. We usually only have clear data that a different paradigm is better when the old paradigm stops being hegemonic.

ChristianKl Apr 6, 2025, 11:16 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
The idea that progress is stalled because everyone is hypnotized by string theory, I think is simply false, and I say that despite having studied alternative theories of physics, much much more than the typical person who knows some string theory.
Are you saying that progress in physics hasn’t stalled or that string theory isn’t to blame?

ChristianKl Apr 6, 2025, 2:22 PM
10 points
2
in reply to: dscft’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
The paper you linked about the last big breakthrough seems to be from 1997, so roughly 28 years ago. What do you consider to be the biggest breakthrough since then?

ChristianKl Apr 6, 2025, 2:19 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
In many cases, new paradigms care about different metrics than older paradigms. In the beginning, successful new paradigms usually don’t fulfill the qualities that heterodox researchers in the field are looking to. You might want to read Thomas Khun’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”.
There are ways you can make it easier to overturn paradigms. You can change the way research is funded. You could change the grant-making processes in a way that makes it easier for very smart young people to pursue research agendas that heterodox old people don’t find interesting.
There’s the Max Planck quote of “Science advances one funeral at a time”. In the last decades, old researchers got more power over which research gets conducted than back in 1950 when Planck wrote his autobiography.

ChristianKl Apr 5, 2025, 11:25 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
I think the problem is that you ignore the idea that science works via paradigms. Even if there’s a possible paradigm besides string theory that would produce more progress, there are a lot of different things that people who aren’t working on string theory could work on. Most of them won’t lead anywhere.
If a new paradigm could be found that has more potential, that paradigm would have new low hanging fruit.
However, researchers that would write papers about that low hanging fruit, might have trouble getting published in journals of the old paradigm because they are solving problems of interest to the new paradigm and not problems of interest of the old paradigm. Getting funding to work on problems of a new paradigm is also harder.

ChristianKl Apr 5, 2025, 3:41 PM
2 points
0
on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
It’s worth noting that we observe other forms of simplication of language as well. English reduced the amount of inflections of verbs. The distinction between singular and plural pronouns disappeared.

ChristianKl Apr 5, 2025, 3:24 PM
5 points
2
in reply to: RussellThor’s comment on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
In many cases, there are diminishing returns to a given scientific paradigm. The fact that you observe a field getting diminishing returns doesn’t mean that there isn’t a paradigm that the field could adopt that would allow for returns to flow again. Paradigm change is about pursuing ideas that people in the old paradigm don’t find promising.
Just adding more smart people who follow a hegemonic paradigm doesn’t automatically get you paradigm shifts that unlock new returns. If string theory stiffles progress, it would look from the inside like there are diminishing returns to theoretical physics.

How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?

ChristianKlApr 4, 2025, 11:08 PM

32 points

32 comments1 min readLW link

ChristianKl Apr 4, 2025, 3:03 PM
3 points
0
on: ChristianKl’s Shortform
There seems to be papers that show that if you naively train on chain of thought, you train models not to verbalize potentially problematic reasoning in their chain of thought. I however don’t see discussion about how to train chain of thought models to better verbalize their reasoning.

If you can easily train a model to hide it’s reasoning you should also be able to train models the other way around to be more explicit about their reasoning.

One approach I imagine is to take a query like diagnosing medical issues and replace key words that change the output and then see how well the chain of thought reflects that change. If the chain of thought tells you something about the change in outcome, you reinforce the chain of thought. If the chain of thought doesn’t reflect the outcome well, you punish the chain of thought.

ChristianKl Apr 4, 2025, 1:34 AM
4 points
2
on: How To Believe False Things
All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people.
I seems to me like you also need to have no desire to figure things out on your own. A lot of rationalists have experiences of seeking truth and finding out that certain beliefs people around them hold aren’t true. Rationalists who grow up in communities where many people believe in God frequently deconvert because they see enough signs that the beliefs of those people around them aren’t really fitting together.
Given that most people living in religious communities grow up believing in God just as the people around them do, it’s might be very normal to think that way, but it still feels really strange to me and probably does feel strange to many other rationalists as well.

ChristianKl Mar 24, 2025, 4:39 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Willow BP’s comment on: Good Research Takes are Not Sufficient for Good Strategic Takes
What do you mean with ‘must’? The word has to different meanings in this context and it seems bad epistemology not to distinguish them.

ChristianKl Mar 24, 2025, 2:56 PM
2 points
1
in reply to: iceman’s comment on: Elizabeth’s Shortform
Have you thought about making an altered version that strips out enough of the My Little Pony-IP to be able to sell the book on Amazon KDP? (or let someone else do that for you if you don’t want to do the work?)

ChristianKl Mar 21, 2025, 9:40 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: sjadler’s comment on: Anthropic, and taking “technical philosophy” more seriously
The existing ontology that we have around consciousness is pretty unclear. A better understanding the nature of consciousness and thus what’s valuable will likely come with new ontology.
When it comes to reasoning around statistics, robustness of judgements, causality, what it means not to Goodhart it’s likely that getting better at reasoning also means to come up with new ontology.

ChristianKl Mar 21, 2025, 1:50 PM
1 point
0
on: Defense Against The Super-Worms
Regardless of the details, we ought to prioritize taking all of our power plants, water purification stations, and nuclear facilities out of the world-wide-web.
I think it’s very questionable, to make major safety policy “regardless of the details”. If you want to increase the safety of power plants, listening to the people who are responsible for the safety of power plants and their analysis of the details, is likely a better step instead of making these kind of decisions without understanding the details.

ChristianKl Mar 18, 2025, 9:31 PM
2 points
0
on: Help make the orca language experiment happen
Orcas already seem to have language to communicate with other orcas. Before trying to teach them a new language, it would make more sense to better understand the capabilities of their existing language and maybe think about how it could be extended to communicate with them about what humans want to talk about with them.

ChristianKl Mar 15, 2025, 1:12 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Anon User’s comment on: Why Obedient AI May Be the Real Catastrophe
The author seems to just assume that his proposal will lead to a world where humans have a place instead of critically trying to argue that point.

ChristianKl Mar 10, 2025, 2:05 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Carl Feynman’s comment on: So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
It depends on how much Pokémon-like tasks are available. Given that a lot of capital goes into creating each Pokémon game, there aren’t that many Pokémon games. I would expect the number of games that are very Pokémon-like to also be limited.

ChristianKl

How much progress ac­tu­ally hap­pens in the­o­ret­i­cal physics?

How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?