Dana

Karma: 89

Dana Mar 22, 2025, 9:55 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: thedudeabides’s comment on: Why Were We Wrong About China and AI? A Case Study in Failed Rationality
I think LW consensus has been that the main existential risk is AI development in general. The only viable long-term option is to shut it all down. Or at least slow it down as much as possible until we can come up with better solutions. DeepSeek from my perspective should incentivize slowing down development (if you agree with the fast follower dynamic. Also by reducing profit margins generally), and I believe it has.
Anyway, I don’t see how this relates to these predictions. The predictions are about China’s interest in racing to AGI. Do you believe China would now rather have an AGI race with USA than agree to a pause?

Dana Mar 22, 2025, 4:08 PM
6 points
2
on: Why Were We Wrong About China and AI? A Case Study in Failed Rationality
I’m not convinced that these were bad predictions for the most part.
The main prediction: 1) China lacks compute. 2) CCP values stability and control → China will not be the first to build unsafe AI/AGI.
Both of these premises are unambiguously true as far as I’m aware. So, these predictions being bad suggests that we now believe China is likely to build AGI without realizing it threatens stability/control, and with minimal compute, before USA? All while refusing to agree to any sort of deal to slow down? Why? Seems unlikely.
American companies, on the other hand, are still explicitly racing toward AGI, are incredibly well resourced, have strong government support, and have a penchant for disruption. The current administration also cares less about stability than any other in recent history.
So, from my perspective, USA racing to AGI looks even more dangerous than before, almost desperate. Whereas China is fast following, which I think everyone expected? Did anyone suggest that China would not be able to fast-follow American AI?

Dana Mar 22, 2025, 2:51 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Rafael Harth’s Shortform
I keep some folders (and often some other transient files) on my desktop and pin my main apps to the taskbar. With apps pinned to your taskbar, you can open a new instance with Windows+shift+num (or just Windows+num if the app isn’t open yet).
I do the same as you and search for any other apps that I don’t want to pin.

Dana Mar 7, 2025, 9:17 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
Well, vision and mapping seem like they could be pretty generic (and I expect much better vision in future base models anyway). For the third limitation, I think it’s quite possible that Claude could provide an appropriate segmentation strategy for whatever environment it is told it is being placed into.
Whether this would be a display of its intelligence, or just its capabilities, is beside the point from my perspective.

Dana Mar 7, 2025, 6:09 PM
9 points
1
on: So how well is Claude playing Pokémon?
But these issues seem far from insurmountable, even with current tech. It is just that they are not actually trying, because they want to limit scaffolding.
From what I’ve seen, the main issues:
1) Poor vision → Can be improved through tool use, will surely improve greatly regardless with new models
2) Poor mapping → Can be improved greatly + straightforwardly through tool use
3) Poor executive function → I feel like this would benefit greatly from something like a separation of concerns. Currently my impression is Claude is getting overwhelmed with context, loses track of what’s going on, then starts messing with its long-term planning. From a clean context, its long-term planning seems fairly decent. Same for loops, I would expect a clean-context Claude could read a summary of recent steps constituting a loop and understand that it is in a loop and that it needs to try something else.
E.g., separate contexts for each of battling, navigation, summarization, long-term planning, coordination, etc.

Dana Nov 26, 2024, 1:44 AM
−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 Nov 6, 2024, 5:26 PM
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 Nov 5, 2024, 5:33 PM
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 Oct 22, 2024, 3:26 AM
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 Oct 16, 2024, 7:09 PM
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 Oct 16, 2024, 6:44 PM
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 Oct 16, 2024, 6:41 PM
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 Sep 19, 2024, 1:31 AM
10 points
15
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 May 30, 2024, 11:34 PM
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 Nov 20, 2023, 9:38 PM
11 points
0
in reply to: kwiat.dev’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 Sep 4, 2023, 8:17 PM
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 Jun 14, 2023, 11:33 AM
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 Mar 26, 2023, 10:19 PM
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 Jan 18, 2023, 6:36 PM
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 Jan 7, 2023, 6:30 PM
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.