gjm

Karma: 30,916

Hi. I’m Gareth McCaughan. I’ve been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is “gjm” (not “Gjm” despite the wiki software’s preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of “g”, “gjm”, or “gjm11”. The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). My business cards say “mathematician” but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren’t.

If you’re wondering why some of my very old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it’s because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW’s resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.

gjm 2 Dec 2024 20:26 UTC
3 points
0
on: 2024 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
There is arguably a discrepancy between the title of the question “P(Anti-Agathics)” and the actual text of the question; there might be ways of “reaching an age of 1000 years” that I at least wouldn’t want to call “anti-agathics”. Uploading into a purely virtual existence. Uploading into a robot whose parts can be repaired and replaced ad infinitum. Repeated transfer of consciousness into some sort of biological clones, so that you get a new body when the old one starts to wear out.
My sense is that the first of those is definitely not intended to be covered by the question, and the second probably isn’t; I’m not sure about the third. “Magical” options like survival of your immortal soul in a post-mortem heaven or hell, magical resurrection of your body by divine intervention, and reincarnation, are presumably also not intended.
In future years, it might be worth tweaking the wording by e.g. inserting the word “biological” or some wording like “in something that could credibly be claimed to be the body they are now living in”. Or some other thing that better matches the actual intent of the question.

gjm 2 Dec 2024 20:18 UTC
3 points
3
on: 2024 Unofficial LessWrong Census/Survey
I have just noticed something that I think has been kinda unsatisfactory about the probability questions since for ever.
There’s a question about the probability of “supernatural events (including God, ghosts, magic, etc.)” having occurred since the beginning of the universe. There’s another question about the probability of there being a god.
I notice an inclination to make sure that the first probability is >= the second, for the obvious reason. But, depending on how the first question is interpreted, that may be wrong.
If the existence of a god is considered a “supernatural event since the beginning of the universe” then obviously that’s the case. But note that one thing a fair number of people have believed is that a god created the universe and then, so to speak, stepped away and let it run itself. (It would be hard to distinguish such a universe from a purely natural one, but perhaps you could identify some features of the universe that such a being would be more or less likely to build in.) In that case, you could have a universe that (1) created by a god in which (2) no supernatural events have ever occurred or will ever occur.
The unsatisfactory thing, to be clear, is the ambiguity.
For future years, it might be worth considering either (1) replacing “God” with something like “acts of God” or “divine interventions” in the first question, or (2) adding an explicit clarification that the mere existence of a god should be considered a “supernatural event” in the relevant sense even if what that god did was to make a universe that runs naturally, or (3) tweaking the second question to explicitly exclude “deistic” gods.

gjm 29 Nov 2024 22:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
“Trauma” meaning psychological as opposed to physical damage goes back to the late 19th century.
I agree that there’s a widespread tendency to exaggerate the unpleasantness/harm done by mere words. (But I suggest there’s an opposite temptation too, to say that obviously no one can be substantially harmed by mere words, that physical harm is different in kind from mere psychological upset, etc., and that this is also wrong.)
I agree that much of the trans community seems to have embraced what looks to me like a severely hyperbolic view of how much threat trans people are under. (But, usual caveats: it’s very common for the situation of a minority group to look and feel much worse from the inside than from the outside, and generally this isn’t only a matter of people on the inside being oversensitive, it’s also a matter of people on the outside not appreciating how much unpleasantness those on the inside face. So my guess is that that view is less hyperbolic than it looks to me.)
I agree that the term “deadname” is probably popular partly because “using my deadname” has more of an obviously-hostile-move sound than “using my old name” or similar. But if we avoid every term with any spin attached, we’ll have to stop calling people liberals (as if no one else cared about freedom) or conservatives (as if their opponents were against preserving valuable things) or Catholics (the word means “universal”) or pro-life or pro-choice or, or, or, or. For my part, I avoid some spinny terms but not others, on the basis of gut feeling about how much actual wrongness is baked into them and how easy it is to find other language, which (I don’t know how coherently) cashes out as being broadly OK with “liberal” and “conservative”, preferring to avoid “pro-life” and “pro-choice” or at least making some snarky remarks about the terms before using them, avoiding the broadest uses of the term “transphobia”, etc. And for me “deadname” seems obviously basically OK even though, yes, the term was probably chosen partly for connotations one might take issue with. Your mileage may vary.

gjm 29 Nov 2024 21:30 UTC
10 points
5
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
I don’t think “deadname” is a ridiculous term just because no one died. The idea is that the name is dead: it’s not being used any more. Latin is a “dead language” because (roughly speaking) no one speaks or writes in Latin. “James” is a “dead name” because (roughly speaking) no one calls that person “James” any more.
This all seems pretty obvious to me, and evidently it seems the opposite way to you, and both of us are very smart [citation needed], so probably at least one of us is being mindkilled a bit by feeling strongly about some aspect of the issue. I don’t claim to know which of us it is :-).

gjm 3 Nov 2024 17:11 UTC
15 points
8
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
I think you’re using “memetic” to mean “of high memetic fitness”, and I wish you wouldn’t. No one uses “genetic” in that way.
An idea that gets itself copied a lot (either because of “actually good” qualities like internal consistency, doing well at explaining observations, etc., or because of “bad” (or at least irrelevant) ones like memorability, grabbing the emotions, etc.) has high memetic fitness. Similarly, a genetically transmissible trait that tends to lead to its bearers having more surviving offspring with the same trait has high genetic fitness. On the other hand, calling a trait genetic means that it propagates through the genes rather than being taught, formed by the environment, etc., and one could similarly call an idea or practice memetic if it comes about by people learning it from one another rather than (e.g.) being instinctive or a thing that everyone in a particular environment invents out of necessity.
When you say, e.g., “lots of work in that field will be highly memetic despite trash statistics, blatant p-hacking, etc.” I am pretty certain you mean “of high memetic fitness” rather than “people aware of it are aware of it because they learned of it from others rather than because it came to them instinctively or they reinvented it spontaneously because it was obvious from what was around them”.
(It would be possible, though I’d dislike it, to use “memetic” to mean something like “of high memetic fitness for ‘bad’ reasons”—i.e., liable to be popular for the sort of reason that we might not appreciate without the notion of memes. But I don’t think that can be your meaning in the words I quoted, which seem to presuppose that the “default” way for a piece of work to be “memetic” is for it to be of high quality.)

gjm 13 Oct 2024 2:53 UTC
7 points
4
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton Awarded Nobel Prizes
Unless I misread, it said “mRNA” before.

gjm 9 Oct 2024 22:46 UTC
22 points
11
on: Demis Hassabis and Geoffrey Hinton Awarded Nobel Prizes
Correction: the 2024 Nobel Prize in Medicine was for the discovery of microRNA, not mRNA which is also important but a different thing.

gjm 9 Oct 2024 2:08 UTC
12 points
6
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: strawberry calm’s Shortform
I think it’s more “Hinton’s concerns are evidence that worrying about AI x-risk isn’t silly” than “Hinton’s concerns are evidence that worrying about AI x-risk is correct”. The most common negative response to AI x-risk concerns is (I think) dismissal, and it seems relevant to that to be able to point to someone who (1) clearly has some deep technical knowledge, (2) doesn’t seem to be otherwise insane, (3) has no obvious personal stake in making people worry about x-risk, and (4) is very smart, and who thinks AI x-risk is a serious problem.
It’s hard to square “ha ha ha, look at those stupid nerds who think AI is magic and expect it to turn into a god” or “ha ha ha, look at those slimy techbros talking up their field to inflate the value of their investments” or “ha ha ha, look at those idiots who don’t know that so-called AI systems are just stochastic parrots that obviously will never be able to think” with the fact that one of the people you’re laughing at is Geoffrey Hinton.
(I suppose he probably has a pile of Google shares so maybe you could squeeze him into the “techbro talking up his investments” box, but that seems unconvincing to me.)

gjm 27 Aug 2024 11:25 UTC
2 points
0
on: My Apartment Art Commission Process
Pedantic correction: you have some sizes where you’ve written e.g. 20′ x 20′ and I’m pretty sure you mean 20“ x 20”.
(Also, the final note saying pixel art is good for crisp upscaling and you should start with the lowest-resolution version seems very weird to me, though the way it’s worded makes it unlikely that this is a mistake; another sentence or so elaborating on why this is a good idea would be interesting to me.)

gjm 26 Jul 2024 19:40 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: kave’s comment on: “AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems”
So maybe e.g. the (not very auto-) autoformalization part produced a theorem-statement template with some sort of placeholder where the relevant constant value goes, and AlphaProof knew it needed to find a suitable value to put in the gap.

gjm 26 Jul 2024 19:37 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: “AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems”
I’m pretty sure what’s going on is:
- The system automatically generates candidate theorems it might try to prove, expressing possible answers, and attempts to prove them.
- In this case, the version of the theorem it ended up being able to prove was the one with 2 in that position. (Which is just as well, since—I assume, not having actually tried to solve the problem for myself—that is in fact the unique number for which such a theorem is true.)
- So the thing you end up getting a proof of includes the answer, but not because the system was told the answer in advance.
It would be nice to have this more explicitly from the AlphaProof people, though.
[EDITED to add:] Actually, as per the tweet from W T Gowers quoted by “O O” elsewhere in this thread, we do have it explicitly, not from the AlphaProof people but from one of the mathematicians the AlphaProof people engaged to evaluate their solutions.

gjm 26 Jul 2024 9:49 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: “AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems”
The AlphaZero algorithm doesn’t obviously not involve an LLM. It has a “policy network” to propose moves, and I don’t know what that looks like in the case of AlphaProof. If I had to guess blindly I would guess it’s an LLM, but maybe they’ve got something else instead.

gjm 26 Jul 2024 1:30 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: “AI achieves silver-medal standard solving International Mathematical Olympiad problems”
I don’t think this [sc. that AlphaProof uses an LLM to generate candidate next steps] is true, actually.
Hmm, maybe you’re right. I thought I’d seen something that said it did that, but perhaps I hallucinated it. (What they’ve written isn’t specific enough to make it clear that it doesn’t do that either, at least to me. They say “AlphaProof generates solution candidates”, but nothing about how it generates them. I get the impression that it’s something at least kinda LLM-like, but could be wrong.)

gjm 25 Jul 2024 18:08 UTC
2 points
0
on: AlphaProof: an LLM to auto-formalize + AlphaZero self-trained to prove mathematical statements in Lean
Looks like this was posted 4 minutes before my https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TyCdgpCfX7sfiobsH/ai-achieves-silver-medal-standard-solving-international but I’m not deleting mine because I think some of the links, comments, etc. in my version are useful.

gjm 25 Jul 2024 15:22 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: On the CrowdStrike Incident
Nothing you have said seems to make any sort of conspiracy theory around this more plausible than the alternative, namely that it’s just chance. There are 336 half-hours per week; when two notable things happen in a week, about half a percent of the time one of them happens within half an hour of the other. The sort of conspiracies you’re talking about seem to me more unlikely than that.
(Why a week? Arbitrary choice of timeframe. The point isn’t a detailed probability calculation, it’s that minor coincidences happen all the time.)

gjm 24 Jul 2024 22:22 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Mitchell_Porter’s comment on: On the CrowdStrike Incident
Given how much harm such an incident could do CrowdStrike, and given how much harm it could do an individual at Crowdstrike who turned out to have caused it on purpose, your second explanation seems wildly improbable.
The third one seems pretty improbable too. I’m trying to imagine a concrete sequence of events that matches your description, and I really don’t think I can. Especially as Trump’s formal acceptance of the GOP nomination can hardly have been any sort of news to anyone.
(Maybe I’ve misunderstood your tone and your comment is simply a joke, in which case fair enough. But if you’re making any sort of serious suggestion that the incident was anything to do with Mr Trump, I think you’re even crazier than he is.)

gjm 20 Jul 2024 1:44 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: Friendship is transactional, unconditional friendship is insurance
Right: as I said upthread, the discussion is largely about whether terms like “spending” are misleading or helpful when we’re talking about time rather than money. And, as you point out (or at least it seems clearly implied by what you say), whether a given term is helpful to a given person will depend on what other things are associated with that term in that person’s mind, so it’s not like there’s even a definite answer to “is it helpful or misleading?”.
(But, not that it matters all that much, I think you might possibly not have noticed that Ruby and Raemon are different people?)

gjm 19 Jul 2024 23:51 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Friendship is transactional, unconditional friendship is insurance
In such a world we’d presumably already have vocabulary adapted to that situation :-). But yes, I would feel fine using the term “spending” (but then I also feel fine talking about “spending time”) but wouldn’t want to assume that all my intuitions from the present world still apply.
(E.g., in the actual world, for anyone who is neither very rich or very poor spending always has saving as an alternative[1], and how much you save can have a big impact on your future well-being. In the hypothetical spend-it-or-lose-it world, that isn’t the case, and that feels like a pretty important difference.)
[1] For the very poor, much of their spending is basically compulsory and saving instead isn’t an option. For the very rich, the choice is still there but for normal-size purchases matters less because they’re going to have ample resources whether they spend or save.

gjm 19 Jul 2024 17:23 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Friendship is transactional, unconditional friendship is insurance
I am not convinced by the analogy. If you have $30 in your bank account you spend it on a book, you are $30 poorer; you had the option of just not doing that, in which case you would still have the $30. If you have 60 minutes ahead of you in the day and you spend it with a friend, then indeed you’re 60 minutes older = poorer at the end of that time; but you didn’t have the option of not spending those 60 minutes; they were going to pass by one way or another whatever you did.
You might still have given up something valuable! If you’d have preferred to devote those 60 minutes to earning money, or sleeping, or discovering timeless mathematical truths, then talking to your friend instead has had an opportunity cost. But the valuable thing you’ve foregone is that other thing you’d prefer to have done, not the time itself. That was always going to pass you by; it always does.
There aren’t exactly definite right and wrong answers here; everyone agrees that “spending” time is not exactly the same thing as spending money, ditto for “giving” time, and the question is merely whether it’s similar enough that the choice of language isn’t misleading us. And it seems to me that, because the time is going to go anyway, the least-misleading way to think of it is that the default, no-action, case to compare with—analogous to simply not spending money and having it sit in the bank—is whatever you’d have been doing with your time otherwise. If you help a friend out by doing some tedious task that makes their life better, then you are “giving” or “spending” time. If you sit and chat with a friend because you both enjoy talking with one another, then you’re not “giving” or “spending” in a sense that much resembles “giving” or “spending” money: you aren’t worse off afterwards than if you hadn’t done that; if you hadn’t, then you’d likely have occupied the same time doing something no better.
I’m in two minds as to whether I believe what I just wrote. The counter-argument goes like this: comparing the situation after spending an hour with your friend with the situation after spending an hour doing something else begs the question; it’s like comparing the situation after spending the $30 on a book with that after spending the $30 on something else. But I don’t think the counter-argument really works, precisely because you have the option of just leaving the $30 in the bank and never spending it on something else, and there is no corresponding option for money.

gjm 19 Jul 2024 1:23 UTC
1 point
6
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Friendship is transactional, unconditional friendship is insurance
You would be in the same situation if you’d done something else during that hour. You’re only “paying”, in the sense of giving up something valuable to you, in so far as you would have preferred to do something else.
That’s sometimes true of time spent with friends—maybe your friend is moving house and you help them unload a lot of boxes or something—but by and large we human beings tend to enjoy spending time with our friends. (Even when unloading boxes, actually.)