teenager | mathematics enthusiast | MIT class of 2026 | vaguely Grey Triber | personal website: https://duck-master.github.io
duck_master
Karma: 88
Here’s a manually sorted list of meetup places in the USA, somewhat arbitrarily/unscientifically grouped by region for even greater convenience. I spent the past hour on this, so please make good use of it. (Warning: this is a long comment.)
NEW ENGLAND
Connecticut: Hartford
Massachusetts: Cambridge/Boston, Newton, Northampton
Vermont: Burlington
MID-ATLANTIC
DC: Washington
Maryland: Baltimore, College Park
New Jersey: Princeton
New York State: Java Village/Buffalo, Manhattan/New York City, Massapequa, Rochester
Pennsylvania: Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh
Virginia: Charlottesville, Norfolk, Richmond
West Virginia: Charlestown
MIDWEST
Michigan: Ann Arbor, Jackson
Illinois: Chicago, Urbana-Champaign
Indiana: South Bend, West Lafayette
Ohio: Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Toledo
Wisconsin: La Crosse, Madison, Stone Lake
SOUTHEAST
Alabama: Huntsville, Tuscaloosa
Florida: Fort Lauderdale, Gulf Breeze, Miami, West Palm Beach
Georgia: Atlanta
North Carolina: Asheville, Charlotte, Durham
Tennessee: Memphis
SOUTHWEST
Arizona: Phoenix, Tucson
Arkansas: Fayetteville
Colorado: Boulder, Carbondale, Denver
Louisiana: New Orleans
Missouri: Kansas City, St. Louis
Nevada: Las Vegas
New Mexico: Taos
Texas: Austin, College Station, Dallas, Houston, Lubbock, San Antonio, Westlake
Utah: Logan, Salt Lake City
NORTHWEST
Alaska: Anchorage
Minnesota: Minneapolis
South Dakota: Sioux Falls
Oregon: Corvallis, Eugene, Portland
Washington State: Bellingham, Redmond, Seattle
CALIFORNIA (subdivided)
Bay Area/Silicon Valley: Berkeley/Oakland, San Francisco, Sunnyvale
Central Valley: Davis, Grass Valley, Sacramento
Southern California: El Centro, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, San Diego
This is a good suggestion! I’ll plan on walking in addition to talking during my upcoming meetup.
I’m in the park now; how can I identify you?
@Screwtape I can make this but there is a different thing I also want to go to at 7:30pm.
This is an excellent tip! I plan on using it from now on in my day-to-day life.
I haven’t used GPT-4 (I’m no accelerationist, and don’t want to bother with subscribing), but I have tried ChatGPT for this use. In my experience it’s useful for finding small cosmetic changes to make and fixing typos/small grammar mistakes, but I tend to avoid copy-pasting the result wholesale. Also I tend to work with texts much shorter than posts, since ChatGPT’s shortish context window starts becoming an issue for decently long posts.
Hello LessWrong! I’m duck_master. I’ve lurked around this website since roughly the start of the SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic but I have never really been super active as of yet (in fact I wrote my first ever post last month). I’ve been around on the AstralCodexTen comment section and on Discord, though, among a half-dozen other websites and platforms. Here’s my personal website (note: rarely updated) for your perusal.
I am a lifelong mathematics enthusiast and a current MIT student. (I’m majoring in mathematics and computer science; I added the latter part out of peer pressure since computer science is really taking off in these days.) I am particularly interested in axiomatic mathematics, formal theorem provers, and the P vs NP problem, though I typically won’t complain about anything mathematical as long as the relevant abstraction tower isn’t too high (and I could potentially pivot to applied math in the future).
During the height of the pandemic in mid-2020, I initially “converted” to rationalism (previously I had been a Christian), but never really followed through and I actually became more irrational over the course of 2021 and 2022 (and not even in a metarational way, but purely in a my-life-is-getting-worse way). This year, I am hoping that I can connect with the rationalist and postrat communities more and be more systematic about my rationality practice.
Thank you for creating this website! I’ve signed up and started contributing.
One tip I have for other users: many of the neurons are not about vague sentiments or topics (as in most of the auto-suggested explanations), but are rather about very specific keywords or turns of phrase. I’d even guess that many of the neurons are effectively regexes.
Also apparently Neuronpedia cut me off for the day after I did ~20 neuron puzzles. If this limit could be raised for power users or something like that, it could potentially be beneficial.
This text shows another key point: not only should your posts be a surprise, but the kind of surprise that causes good actions.
Exactly what it says on the tin.
Thoughts I want to expand on for later:
Rationality/philosophical tip: stop being surprised by the passage of time
Possible confusingness of the Sequences?
People * infrastructure = organization (both factors need to exist)
No “intro to predicting” guide so far; writing a good one would decrease the activation energy to predict well
Impurity (as in impure functions) as a source of strength
Contrastingly, the ills of becoming too involved (eg internet dramas, head overflowing with thoughts)
Writing a personal diary more frequently (which I really want to do)
Also, meditating and playing piano more
This is an extremely important point. (I remember thinking a long time ago that Wikipedia just Exists, and that although random people are allowed to edit it, doing it is generally Wrong.) FWIW I’m an editor now—User:Duckmather.
In fact, organized resources like Wikipedia, LW sequences, SEP, etc. are basically amortized scholarship. (This is particularly true for Wikipedia; its entire point is that we find vaguely-related content from around—or beyond—the web and then paraphrase it into a mildly-coherent article. Source: am wikipedia editor.)
Maybe flow?
I also agree that, for the purpose of previewing the content, this post is poorly titled (maybe it should be titled something like “Having bad names makes you open the black box of the name”, except more concise?), although, for me, I didn’t as much stick to a particular wrong interpretation as just view the entire title as unclear.
Thanks for the reply. I take it that not only are you interested in the idea of knowledge, but that you are particularly interested in the idea of actionable knowledge.
Upon further reflection, I realize that all of the examples and partial definitions I gave in my earlier comment can in fact be summarized in a single, simple definition: a thing X has knowledge of a fact Y iff it contains some (sufficiently simple) representation of Y. (For example, a rock knows about the affairs of humans because it has a representation of those affairs in the form of Fisher information, which is enough simplicity for facts-about-the-world.) Using this definition, it becomes much easier to define actionable knowledge: a thing X has actionable knowledge of a fact Y iff it contains some sufficiently simple representation of Y, and this representation is so simple that an agent with access to this information could (with sufficiently minimal difficulty) make actions that are based on fact Y. (For example, I have actionable knowledge that 1 + 1 = 2, because my internal representation of this fact is so simple that I can literally type up its statement in a comment.) It also becomes clearer that actionable knowledge and knowledge are not the same (since, for example, the knowledge about the world that a computer that records cryptographic hashes of everything it observes could not be acted upon without breaking the hashes, which is presumably infeasible).
So as for the human psychology/robot vacuum example: If your robot vacuum’s internal representation of human psychology is complex (such as in the form of video recordings of humans only), then it’s not actionable knowledge and your robot vacuum can’t act on it; if it’s sufficiently simple, such as a low-complexity-yet-high-fidelity executable simulation of a human psyche, your robot vacuum can. My intuition also suggests in this case that your robot vacuum’s knowledge of human psychology is actionable iff it has a succinct representation of the natural abstraction of “human psychology” (I think this might be generalizable; i.e. knowledge is actionable iff it’s succinct when described in terms of natural abstractions), and that finding out whether your robot vacuum’s knowledge is sufficiently simple is essentially a matter of interpretability. As for the betting thing, the simple unified definition that I gave in the last paragraph should apply as well.
I think knowledge as a whole cannot be absent, but knowledge of a particular fact can definitely be absent (if there’s no relationship between the thing-of-discourse and the fact).
Since this is a literally a question about soliciting predictions, it should have one of those embedded-interactive-predictions-with-histograms gadgets* to make predicting easier. Also, it might be worth it to have two prediction gadgets, since this is basically a prediction: one gadget to predict what Recognized AI Safety Experts (tm) predict about how much damage unsafe AIs will do, and one gadget to predict about how much damage unsafe AIs will actually do (to mitigate weird second-order effects having to do with predicting a prediction).
*I’m not sure what they’re supposed to be called.
Au contraire, I think that “mutual information between the object and the environment” is basically the right definition of “knowledge”, at least for knowledge about the world (as it correctly predicts that all four attempted “counterexamples” are in fact forms of knowledge), but that the knowledge of an object also depends on the level of abstraction of the object which you’re considering.
For example, for your rock example: A rock, as a quantum object, is continually acquiring mutual information with the affairs of humans by the imprinting of subatomic information onto the surface of rock by photons bouncing off the Earth. This means that, if I was to examine the rock-as-a-quantum-object for a really long time, I would know the affairs of humans (due to the subatomic imprinting of this information on the surface of the rock), and not only that, but also the complete workings of quantum gravity, the exact formation of the rock, the exact proportions of each chemical that went into producing the rock, the crystal structure of the rock, and the exact sequence of (micro-)chips/scratches that went into making this rock into its current shape. I feel perfectly fine counting all this as the knowledge of the rock-as-a-quantum-object, because this information about the world is stored in the rock.
(Whereas, if I were only allowed to examine the rock-as-a-macroscopic-object, I would still know roughly what chemicals it was made of and how they came to be, and the largest fractures of the rock, but I wouldn’t know about the affairs of humans; hence, such is the knowledge held by the rock-as-a-macroscopic-object. This makes sense because the rock-as-a-macroscopic-object is an abstraction of the rock-as-a-quantum-object, and abstractions always throw away information except that which is “useful at a distance”.)
For more abstract kinds of knowledge, my intuition defaults to question-answering/epistemic-probability/bet-type definitions, at least for sufficiently agent-y things. For example, I know that 1+1=2. If you were to ask me, “What is 1+1?”, I would respond “2″. If you were to ask me to bet on what 1+1 was, in such a way that the bet would be instantly decided by Omega, the omniscient alien, I would bet with very high probability (maybe 40:1odds in favor, if I had to come up with concrete numbers?) that it would be 2 (not 1, because of Cromwell’s law, and also because maybe my brain’s mental arithmetic functions are having a bad day). However, I do not know whether the Riemann Hypothesis is true, false, or independent of ZFC. If you asked me, “Is the Riemann Hypothesis true, false, or independent of ZFC?”, I would answer, “I don’t know” instead of choosing one of the three possibilities, because I don’t know. If you asked me to bet on whether the Riemann Hypothesis was true, false, or independent of ZFC, with the bet to be instantly decided by Omega, I might bet 70% true, 20% false, and 10% independent (totally made-up semi-plausible figures that no bearing on the heart of the argument; I haven’t really tested my probabilistic calibration), but I wouldn’t put >95% implied probability on anything because I’m not that confident in any one possibility. Thusly, for abstract kinds of knowledge, I think I would say that an agent (or a sufficiently agent-y thing) knows an abstract fact X if it tells you about this fact when prompted with a suitably phrased question, and/or if it places/would place a bet in favor of fact X with very high implied probability if prompted to bet about it.
(One problem with this definition is that, intuitively, when I woke up today, I had no idea what 384384*20201 was; the integers here are also completely arbitrary. However, after I typed it into a calculator and got 7764941184, I now know that 384384*20201 = 7764941184. I think this is also known as the problem of logical omniscience; Scott Aaronson once wrote a pretty nice essay about this topic and others from the perspective of computational complexity.)
I have basically no intuition whatsoever on what it means for a rock* to know that the Riemann Hypothesis is true, false, or independent of ZFC. My extremely stupid and unprincipled guess is that, unless a rock is physically inscribed with a proof of the true answer, it doesn’t know, and that otherwise it does.
*I’m using a rock here as a generic example of a clearly-non-agentic thing. Obviously, if a rock was an agent, it’d be a very special rock, at least in the part of the multiverse that I inhabit. Feel free to replace “rock” with other words for non-agents.
Bumping it again.
Question: I’m not old enough to drink alcohol, and I think this place is a bar—but would I even be allowed in the bar?