Douglas_Knight

Karma: 7,650

Douglas_Knight Apr 6, 2025, 3:28 PM
7 points
5
on: How much progress actually happens in theoretical physics?
First, you should distinguish theoretical physics from fundamental physics. For example, there is a theory of superconductivity, but it doesn’t apply to high temperature superconductors, so there is room for more theories. The high status of fundamental physics is probably bad for theoretical physics, drawing people away from a huge range of open problems, but this isn’t the fault of string theory. String theory compounded this by producing the illusion of opportunity, but it is hard to say how much is each problem.

Second, even if string theory is wrong, it can be useful. AdS is obviously wrong, but its ease of study can be useful. People go back and forth between general arguments and specific arguments. General arguments about what any theory of quantum gravity must look like are good. Checking that they can be made rigorous in specific theories like string theory is also good. Having more specific theories would be better.

Douglas_Knight Dec 6, 2024, 7:34 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Should there be just one western AGI project?
How is this a response? Yes, advances accumulate over time, which is exactly my point and seems to me to be a rebuttal to the idea that the centralized project has been sane, let alone effective. Which advances do we need? How many do we need? Why is this the magic decade in which we have enough advances, rather than 30 years ago or 30 years hence?

In fact, the current boom does not reflect a belief that we have accumulated enough advances that if we combine them all they will work. Instead, there are many different fusion companies trying experiments to harness different advances. They all have different hypotheses and the fact that they are all contemporaries is a coincidence that you fail to explain. If there were a single bottleneck technology that they all use, that would explain it, but I don’t think that’s true. Computers are a particularly bad explanation because they have continuously improved: they have contributed to everything, but at different times.

Surely the reason that they are not trying to combine everything is that it takes time to assimilate advances. Some advances are new and will take time. But some are old and they could have started working on incorporating them decades ago. The failure of the centralized project to do that is extremely damning.

Douglas_Knight Dec 6, 2024, 3:59 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Should there be just one western AGI project?
In fact, many 21st century fusion companies do not use Tokomaks, but use other designs from the 60s. My estimate from wikipedia is about half.

Douglas_Knight Dec 6, 2024, 3:58 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s comment on: Should there be just one western AGI project?
It is a weird claim that the current boom, concentrated in time, is the result of many advances, which were spread out over time. All these advances are being used at the same time because funders are paying for them now and not earlier. How do you know that you need all of those advances and not just some of them? People could have tried using ceramic superconductors in Tokomaks in the 90s, but they didn’t, because of centralization. Maybe that wouldn’t be enough because you need all the other advances, but it would have yielded more useful data than the actually performed experiments with large Tokomaks.

Douglas_Knight Nov 7, 2024, 5:06 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
The transmission utility is not purely a transmission company. It spends money on both generation and transmission. Some generation charges leave to other companies. This is not a competitive market, but even if it were, it would only give you a bound on the cost of generation and tell you nothing about the cost of transmission.

Douglas_Knight Nov 6, 2024, 11:01 PM
2 points
0
on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
You say solar is getting cheaper, but it is only the panels that are getting cheaper. They will continue to get even cheaper, but this is not relevant to retrofitting individual houses, where the cost is already dominated by labor. As the cost of labor dominates, economies of scale in labor will be more relevant.

Douglas_Knight Nov 6, 2024, 10:56 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
To a first approximation, solar is legal for individual residences and illegal on a larger scale.

Douglas_Knight Nov 6, 2024, 10:55 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
Maybe you could learn something by looking at the public filings, but you didn’t look at them. By regulation, not by being public, it has to spend proportionate to its income, but whether it is spending on transmission or generation is a fiction dictated by the regulator. It may well be that its transmission operating costs are much lower than its price and that a change of prices would be viable without any improvement in efficiency. This is exactly what I would how I would expect the company to set prices if it controlled the regulator: to extract as much money as possible on transmission to minimize competition. I don’t know how corrupt the regulator is, but that ignorance is exactly my point.

Douglas_Knight Nov 6, 2024, 7:34 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
Even in this last comment you keep making that very distinction. The regulator dictates the price but you assert that you know what the monopoly spends.

If you just want to assert that the current set of regulations are unsustainable, then I agree. But not a single one of the comments reflects a belief that this is the topic, not even any of your comments.

Douglas_Knight Nov 6, 2024, 5:28 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
Yes, if we assume that there is a competitive market for generation, price of transmission may prevent grid solar generation from being built. But you asserted that you could learn the cost of transmission from the bill.

Douglas_Knight Nov 5, 2024, 9:53 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
These numbers are dictated by the regulator. What mechanism is there to make them have any relation to the real world?

Douglas_Knight Nov 4, 2024, 9:31 PM
0 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Is the Power Grid Sustainable?
That breakdown is fiction dictated by the regulator.

Douglas_Knight Aug 31, 2024, 5:55 PM
2 points
0
on: Congressional Insider Trading
Why do we even believe the claims about congressional trades? It is widely believed that Hillary Clinton’s commodity trading was falsified by the broker. Why not the same for stocks? These records were created once a year. It would be easy to look back at the year to choose good trades after the fact. Today we supposedly have 1 day notice of Pelosi’s trades, which would be hard to fake.

If the Ziobrowski data is dominated by a few big trades, why not look at them? Are they companies that were affected by congressional action? That is the worst scenario. If not, then I see three possibilities (1) noise; (2) falsified data; or (3) as Christian says, it was a bribe of information from inside the company, not information from inside the government.

Douglas_Knight Aug 24, 2024, 9:38 PM
0 points
0
on: Quick look: applications of chaos theory
What is Chaos Theory? It sounds to me like an arbitrary grouping of results of people playing around with computers, not a coherent theory. If it were about a social group, that provides more coherence. Indeed, the people who pushed the term “Chaos” do form a social group, but I do not think this group really includes all the people included in, say, Gleick’s book.

A lot of the results were things that they could have predicted from theory before computers, but they don’t seem to have been predicted. In particular Lyapunov died in 1918. If the theory is his theory, then it’s hard to articulate what the people with computers contributed, but it may still have been important to actually use the computers. Similarly, I think it wrong to dismiss something as just information theory, not chaos theory. The only concrete result I know is the reconstruction from symbolic dynamics, but this makes it clear how to apply information theory.

Douglas_Knight Aug 17, 2024, 4:00 AM
13 points
6
on: How unusual is the fact that there is no AI monopoly?
Your history is definitely wrong. Patents don’t enforce themselves. Hollywood is on the west coast to make physical distance from Edison’s lawyers and muscle. The Wright brothers went down in history as the inventors of the airplane, but they wasted the rest of their lives fighting over the patents.

Linchpin patents are rare. Maybe you patent one invention to make it just barely work, but that’s not the end of the story. Someone else patents something else needed to make it scalable. Now there are two patents and a bilateral monopoly.

None of this is to say that patents were unimportant, so it’s not an answer at all.

Douglas_Knight Jul 4, 2024, 3:33 AM
−34 points
−25
on: 80,000 hours should remove OpenAI from the Job Board (and similar EA orgs should do similarly)
What you say about OpenAI makes it the apotheosis of EA and thus I think it would be better for 80k to endorse it to make that clear, rather than to perform the kayfabe of fake opposition.

Douglas_Knight Jul 4, 2024, 3:29 AM
2 points
0
on: In Defense of Lawyers Playing Their Part
Instead of imagining if all trials were bench trials, instead perform the experiment. Or just look at the countries where this is true!

Douglas_Knight Apr 27, 2024, 6:42 PM
16 points
11
on: Losing Faith In Contrarianism
What does it mean to claim that these people are contrarians?

Is there a consensus position at all? For any existing policy, you could claim that there is some kind of centrist compromise that it’s a good policy, so people who propose changing policy, like Hanson and Caplan, are defying that compromise. But there is not really any explicit consensus goal of most policies, so claiming existing institutions are a bad compromise because they pursue multiple goals and separating those goals is not in defiance of any consensus. Caplan, Hanson, and Sailer are offensive because they feel we should try to understand the world and try steer it. They may be wrong, but the people opposed to them rarely offer an opposing position, but are rather opposed to any position. It seems to me that the difference between true and false is much smaller than the gap between argument and pseudoscience. Maybe Sailer is wrong, but the consensus position that he is peddling pseudoscience is much more wrong and much more dangerous.

Sailer rarely argues for genetic causes, but leaves that to the psychologists. He believes it and sometimes he uses the hypothesis, but usually he uses the hypotheses 1-4 that Turkheimer, Harden, and Nisbett concede. Spelling out the consequences of those claims is enough to unperson him. Maybe he’s wrong about these, but he’s certainly not claiming to be a contrarian. And people who act like these are false rarely acknowledge an academic consensus. Or compare Jay: it’s very hard to distinguish genetic effects from systemic effects, so when Jay argues that racial IQ gaps aren’t genetic, he is (explicitly!) arguing that they are caused by racial differences in parenting. Sailer often claims this (he thinks it’s half the effect), but people hate this just as much as anything else he says. Calling him a contrarian and focusing attention on one claim seem like an attempt to mislead.

That is a very clear example, but I think something similar is going on in the rest. Guzey seems to have gone overboard in reaction to Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep. Did that book represent a consensus? I don’t know, but it was concrete enough to be wrong, which seems to me much better than an illusion of a consensus.

Douglas_Knight Mar 26, 2024, 7:42 PM
39 points
29
on: My Interview With Cade Metz on His Reporting About Slate Star Codex
That they have a “real names” policy is a blatant lie.

They withhold “real names” every day, even ones so “obvious” as to be in wikipedia. If they hate the subject, such as Virgil Texas, they assert that it is a pen name. Their treatment of Scott is off the charts hostile.

If we cannot achieve common knowledge of this, what is the point of any other detail?

Douglas_Knight Jan 25, 2024, 7:09 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Will quantum randomness affect the 2028 election?
How about cancer deaths? From the point of view of 2012, was Beau Biden’s death in 2015 after diagnosis in 2013 due to quantum randomness? That sure had a big effect on the Democratic primary, if not the general election.