Dana

Karma: 72

Dana 26 Nov 2024 1:44 UTC
−1 points
−2
on: Crosspost: Developing the middle ground on polarized topics
I interpret the main argument as:
You cannot predict the direction of policy that would result from certain discussions/beliefs
The discussions improve the accuracy of our collective world model, which is very valuable
Therefore, we should have the discussions first and worry about policy later.
I agree that in many cases there will be unforeseen positive consequences as a result of the improved world model, but in my view, it is obviously false that we cannot make good directionally-correct predictions of this sort for many X. And the negative will clearly outweigh the positive for some large group in many cases. In that case, the question is how much you are willing to sacrifice for the collective knowledge.
If you want to highlight people who handle this well, the only interesting case is people from group A in favor of discussing X where X is presumed to lead to Y and Y negatively impacts A. Piper’s X has a positive impact on her beliefs (discussing solutions to falling birth-rates as one who believes it is a problem), and Caplan’s X has a positive impact on him (he is obviously high IQ), so neither of these are interesting samples. There is no reason for either of these to inherently want to avoid discussing these X. Even worse, Caplan’s rejected “Y” is a clear strawman, which begs the question and actually negatively updates me on his beliefs. More realistic Ys are things like IQ-based segregation, resource allocation, reproductive policies, etc.
If I reject these Ys for ideological reasons, and the middle ground looks like what I think it looks like, I do not want to expose the middle ground.

Dana 6 Nov 2024 17:26 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
I agree with you that people like him do a service to prediction markets: contributing a huge amount of either liquidity or information. I don’t agree with you that it is clear which one he is providing, especially considering the outcome. He did also win his popular vote bet, which was hovering around, I’m not sure, ~20% most of the time?
I think he (Theo) probably did have a true probability around 80% as well. That’s what it looks like at least. I’m not sure why you would assume he should be more conservative than Kelly. I’m sure Musk is not, as one example of a competent risk-taker.

Dana 5 Nov 2024 17:33 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Matt Goldenberg’s comment on: Matt Goldenberg’s Short Term Feed
A few glaring issues here:
1) Does the question imply causation or not? It shouldn’t.
2) Are these stats intended to be realistic such that I need to consider potential flaws and take a holistic view or just a toy scenario to test my numerical skills? If I believe it’s the former and I’m confident X and Y are positively correlated, a 2x2 grid showing X and Y negatively correlated should of course make me question the quality of your data proportionally.
3) Is this an adversarial question such that my response may be taken out of context or otherwise misused?
The sample interviews from Veritasium did not seem to address any of these issues:
(1) They seemed to cut out the gun question, but the skin cream question implied causation, “Did the skin cream make the rash better or worse?”
(2) One person mentioned “I Wouldn’t have expected that...” which implies he thought it was real data,
(3) the last person clearly interpreted it adversarially.
In the original study, the question was stated as “cities that enacted a ban on carrying concealed handguns were more likely to have a decrease in crime.” This framing is not as bad, but still too close to implying causation in my opinion.

Dana 22 Oct 2024 3:26 UTC
1 point
0
on: Distinguishing ways AI can be “concentrated”
I do not really understand your framing of these three “dimensions”. The way I see it, they form a dependency chain. If either of the first two are concentrated, they can easily cut off access during takeoff (and I would expect this). If both of the first two are diffuse, the third will necessarily also be diffuse.

How could one control AI without access to the hardware/software? What would stop one with access to the hardware/software from controlling AI?

Dana 16 Oct 2024 19:09 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
I’ve updated my comment. You are correct as long as you pre-commit to a single answer beforehand, not if you are making the decision after waking up. The only reason pre-committing to heads works, though, is because it completely removes the Tuesday interview from the experiment. She will no longer be awoken on Tuesday, even if the result is tails. So, this doesn’t really seem to be in the spirit of the experiment in my opinion. I suppose the same pre-commit logic holds if you say the correct response gets (1/coin-side-wake-up-count) * value per response though.

Dana 16 Oct 2024 18:44 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Gurkenglas’s comment on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
Halfer makes sense if you pre-commit to a single answer before the coin-flip, but not if you are making the decisions independently after each wake-up event. If you say heads, you have a 50% chance of surviving when asked on Monday, and a 0% chance of surviving when asked on Tuesday. If you say tails, you have a 50% chance of surviving Monday and a 100% chance of surviving Tuesday.

Dana 16 Oct 2024 18:41 UTC
7 points
1
on: Change My Mind: Thirders in “Sleeping Beauty” are Just Doing Epistemology Wrong
I would frame the question as “What is the probability that you are in heads-space?”, not “What is the probability of heads?”. The probability of heads is ¹⁄₂, but the probability that I am in heads-space, given I’ve just experiences a wake-up event, is ¹⁄₃.
The wake-up event is only equally likely on Monday. On Tuesday, the wake-up event is 0%/100%. We don’t know whether it is Tuesday or not, but we know there is some chance of it being Tuesday, because ¹⁄₃ of wake-up events happen on Tuesday, and we’ve just experienced a wake-up event:
P(Monday|wake-up) = ²⁄₃
P(Tuesday|wake-up) = ¹⁄₃
P(Heads|Tuesday) = ⁰⁄₁
P(Heads|Monday) = ¹⁄₂
P(Heads|wake-up) = P(Heads|Monday) * P(Monday|wake-up) + P(Heads|Tuesday) * P(Tuesday|wake-up) = ¹⁄₃

Dana 19 Sep 2024 1:31 UTC
9 points
12
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: Pronouns are Annoying
What would be upsetting about being called “she”? I don’t share your intuition. Whenever I imagine being misgendered (or am misgendered, e.g., on a voice call with a stranger), I don’t feel any strong emotional reaction. To the point that I generally will not correct them.
I could imagine it being very upsetting if I am misgendered by someone who should know me well enough not to misgender me, or if someone purposefully misgenders me. But the misgendering specifically is not the main offense in these two cases.
Perhaps myself and ymeskhout are less tied to our gender identity than most?

Dana 30 May 2024 23:34 UTC
8 points
3
in reply to: PeterH’s comment on: OpenAI: Helen Toner Speaks
These are the remarks Zvi was referring to in the post. Also worth noting Graham’s consistent choice of the word ‘agreed’ rather than ‘chose’, and Altman’s failed attempt to transition to chairman/advisor to YC. It sure doesn’t sound like Altman was the one making the decisions here.

Dana 20 Nov 2023 21:38 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Ariel Kwiatkowski’s comment on: “Why can’t you just turn it off?”
You’re not taking your own advice. Since your message, Ilya has publicly backed down, and Polymarket has Sam coming back as CEO at coinflip odds: Polymarket | Sam back as CEO of OpenAI?

Dana 4 Sep 2023 20:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Max H’s comment on: Summary of and Thoughts on the Hotz/Yudkowsky Debate
How is that addressing Hotz’s claim? Eliezer’s post doesn’t address any worlds with a God that is outside of the scope of our Game of Life, and it doesn’t address how well the initial conditions and rules were chosen. The only counter I see in that post is that terrible things have happened in the past, which provide a lower bound for how bad things can get in the future. But Hotz didn’t claim that things won’t go bad, just that it won’t be boring.

Dana 14 Jun 2023 11:33 UTC
11 points
0
in reply to: Gunnar_Zarncke’s comment on: My guess for why I was wrong about US housing
Property Prices Index by Country 2019 Mid-Year (numbeo.com)

Dana 26 Mar 2023 22:19 UTC
3 points
1
on: Don’t take bad options away from people
How about slavery? Should that be legal? Stealing food, medication? Age limits?
There are all sorts of things that are illegal which, in rare cases, would be better off being legal. But the legal system is a somewhat crude tool. Proponents of these laws would argue that in most cases, these options do more harm than good. Whether that’s true or not is an open question from what I can tell. Obviously if the scenarios you provide are representative then the answer is clear. But I’m not sure why we should assume that to be the case. Addiction and mental illness immediately come to mind when I think of the most probable reasons for people to decide to take these options.
I don’t want to live in a world where women have to prostitute themselves to afford rent. Have them be homeless until the homelessness situation becomes severe enough that we resolve it. Otherwise, IMO, we are just boiling the frog. There will be no protests, no riots, because selling our kidneys and having sex for rent is just enough for us to get by.
Maybe these options should be legal in developing countries. But in the developed world we can truly afford to avoid these scenarios for all mentally healthy and non-addicted individuals. So, let’s do that, rather than lowering our standards. If some portion of the population must suffer before we realize what we’re doing wrong, then that’s a price that needs to be paid.

Dana 18 Jan 2023 18:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: On AI and Interest Rates
It is explained in the first section of the referenced post: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years—EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
Unaligned: If you’re going to die soon, you probably want to spend your money soon.
Aligned: If you’re going to be rich soon, you probably don’t want to save your money.
Both scenarios depend upon the time-discounted value of money to be lower after AGI. I guess the underlying assumptions are that the value derived from aligned AGI will be distributed without respect to capital, and that capital is relatively worthless in the face of unaligned AGI.

Dana 7 Jan 2023 18:30 UTC
15 points
4
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why didn’t we get the four-hour workday?
You are not talking about per person, you are talking about per worker. Total working hours per person has increased ~20% from 1950-2000 for ages 25-55.

Dana 26 Nov 2022 18:19 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
The problem with this explanation is that there is a very clear delineation here between not-fraud and fraud. It is the difference between not touching customer deposits and touching them. Your explanation doesn’t dispute that they were knowingly and intentionally touching customer deposits. In that case, it is indisputably intentional, outright fraud. The only thing left to discuss is whether they knew the extent of the fraud or how risky it was.
I don’t think it was ill-intentioned based on SBF’s moral compass. He just had the belief, “I will pass a small amount of risk onto our customers, tell some small lies, and this will allow us to make more money for charity. This is net positive for the world.” Then the risks mounted, the web of lies became more complicated to navigate, and it just snowballed from there.

Dana 28 Aug 2022 20:36 UTC
9 points
0
on: Pronunciations
I find https://youglish.com/ to be very helpful with this.