jbash

Karma: 2,860

jbash Apr 20, 2025, 3:43 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: kilgoar’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
From Wikipedia:

In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[18] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[17] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, “then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world”.[17]

… and anyway it’s not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of “scapegoating and blame”.

The ancient past was terrifically violent.

jbash Apr 20, 2025, 3:19 PM
7 points
−1
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley
Some hypothetical past person’s not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn’t preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.

I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don’t bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is “the problem” is badly suspect. So is the idea that “the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival” and that’s somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with “survival” arguments… assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.

It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings… which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.

jbash Apr 20, 2025, 1:09 PM
5 points
1
on: Illiteracy in Silicon Valley

in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it’s far too applicable.

They do it in science and technology too. You’re constantly seeing “My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial”.

Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.

jbash Apr 18, 2025, 4:08 PM
6 points
5
in reply to: Josh You’s comment on: Chris_Leong’s Shortform

Of course people will use the knowledge they gain in collaboration with you for the purposes that they think are best.

It is entirely normal for there to be widely accepted, clearly formalized, and meaningfully enforced restrictions on how people use knowledge they’ve gotten in this or that setting… regardless of what they think is best. It’s a commonplace of professional ethics.

jbash Apr 15, 2025, 1:51 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: kairos_’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
I guess it depends on how it’s described in context. And I have to admit it’s been a long time. I’d go reread it to see, but I don’t think I can handle any more bleakness right now...

Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll

jbash Apr 14, 2025, 9:28 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
I don’t see where you get that. I saw no suggestion that the aliens (or vampires) in Blindsight were unaware of their own existence, or that they couldn’t think about their own interactions with the world. They didn’t lack any cognitive capacities at all. They just had no qualia, and therefore didn’t see the point of doing anything just for the experience.

There’s a gigantic difference between cognitive self-awareness and conscious experience.

jbash Apr 11, 2025, 1:07 PM
4 points
1
in reply to: Max Harms’s comment on: Thoughts on AI 2027

Do you think these sorts of scenarios are worth describing as “everyone is effectively dead”?

Not when you’re obviously addressing people who don’t necessarily know the details of the scenarios you’re talking about, no… because the predictions could be anything, and “effectively dead” could mean anything. There are lots of people on Less Wrong who’d say that IQ 150 humans living in ease and comfort were “effectively dead” if they didn’t also have the option to destroy that ease and comfort.

jbash Apr 10, 2025, 4:45 PM
3 points
2
on: Thoughts on AI 2027
What does “effectively dead” mean? Either you’re dead, or you’re not.

Not everybody is going to share your values about whether any given situation is better than, equivalent to, or worse than being dead.

jbash Apr 8, 2025, 3:23 PM
0 points
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The first AI war will be in your computer
I used to exchange MS office documents with people all the time without running Windows. Admittedly it wasn’t “my job to use Excel”, but I did it regularly, and I could have used Excel all day if I’d needed to. And that was years ago; it’s actually gotten easier to sandbox the software now.

Anyway, all that office stuff is now in the “in the cloud” category, and to the degree it’s not, Microsoft wants it to be.

The only things I can think of that might actually be hard to do without putting Windows on the bare metal would be CAD, 3D rendering, simulation, that kind of thing. I’m not sure how well GPU computing works.

Also, a “work” computer is a less likely battleground, since it’s likely to be locked down in an “enterprise” configuration that won’t let that happen.

jbash Apr 8, 2025, 2:03 PM
0 points
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The first AI war will be in your computer

A lot of people need to use software that’s only available on Windows.

Maybe once a year I’m forced to do that, but it’s been a long time since I’ve found anything that I couldn’t run under emulation (WINE is not not an emulator), or in a VM. And those sandboxes are typically going to be forced to known states at every startup. And they definitely don’t have access to any of the juicy information or behavioral pressure points that would motivate the war.

Anyway, I think that most of the software that used to only run under Windows is now starting to only run in “the cloud”. Which is of course its own special kind of hell, but not this kind of hell.

jbash Apr 8, 2025, 1:44 PM
12 points
9
on: The first AI war will be in your computer

Sometimes Windows during a system update removes dual boot from my computer and replaces it with Windows-only boot.

… but you don’t delete Windows.

I mean, if you let them have an AI war in your computer, then I can see where they might go ahead and do that. But why are you choosing to permit it?

jbash Apr 5, 2025, 4:32 PM
13 points
9
in reply to: NormanPerlmutter’s comment on: NormanPerlmutter’s Shortform

Things are getting scary with the Trump regime.

Things got scary November 5 at the very latest. And I haven’t even been in the US for years.

The deportations, both the indiscriminate ones and the vindictive ones, represent a very high level of lawlessness, one that hasn’t been seen in a long time. Not only are they ignoring due process, they’re actively thwarting it, and openly bragging about doing so. They’re not even trying to pretend to be remotely decent. The case you mention isn’t even close to the worst of them; that one could at least theoretically have happened before.

The deportations were also a campaign promise. Actually the campaign promise was even more extreme.

It’s part of a systematic plan. There’ve been a lot of administrative and personnel changes obviously designed to weaken institutions that are supposed to prevent things like that.

ICE has always had a reputation for a relatively thuggish, xenophobic organizational culture. It was already primed to get worse. As soon as Trump signalled aproval, it did get worse.

Bad conditions in detention centers are nothing new. There’s never been any willingness to spend what it would take to do them right, or to put in the kind of controls you’d need. It’s politically risky to act like you care about “illegal immigrants”, whereas it can be politically rewarding to “get tough”. The 2020 “kids in cages” scandal was a rare case of something that got some traction. But, sure, I imagine that the newly emboldened ICE is even more indifferent to bad conditions, and may even be actively trying to make them worse. And of course if a center is already bad, putting more people into it and moving people through it fast is only going to make it worse.

jbash Apr 5, 2025, 3:58 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Cheesecake Frosting
… but that means she learned what it was at age 5. I’d assume most people learn between about 4 and 8, maybe 10...

jbash Apr 5, 2025, 3:56 PM
0 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Cheesecake Frosting
I am aware of it and I regret to say that I’ve tasted it...

jbash Apr 4, 2025, 3:31 AM
−2 points
−11
on: Cheesecake Frosting

To most Americans, “cream cheese” is savory.

Um, no, not particularly?

cured fish.

Why would I do that to myself? I don’t feel my sins deserve that level of punishment.

You don’t put it on dessert, right?

All the time. Well, in.

Specifically, I think we should call it “cheesecake frosting”.

I would read that, first, as something you’d put on cheesecake, and, second, in terms of some of the kinds of cheesecake out there that would be, unfortunate as frostings.

On the other hand, I think whipped cream cheese on an Oreo is decent imitation of cheesecake with an Oreo crust, so I’m not sure I’m the best person to listen to here.

Coupled with your heretical views on cupcakes, it does seem to take you out of my preferred circle of advisors on food-related matters...

jbash Mar 19, 2025, 10:42 PM
2 points
0
on: SHIFT relies on token-level features to de-bias Bias in Bios probes
That’s not “de-biasing”.

Datasets that reflect reality can’t reasonably be called “biased”, but models that have been epistemically maimed can.

If you want to avoid acting on certain truths, then you need to consciously avoid acting on them. Better yet, go ahead and act on them… but in ways that improve the world, perhaps by making them less true. Pretending they don’t exist isn’t a solution. Such pretense makes you incapable of directly attacking the problems you claim to want to solve. But this is even worse… it’s going to make the models genuinely incapable of seeing the problems. Beyond whatever you’re trying to fix, it’s going to skew their overall worldviews in unpredictable ways, and directly interfere with any correction.

Brain-damaging your system isn’t “safety”. Especially not if you’re worried about it behaving in unexpected ways.

Talking about “short timelines” implies that you’re worried about these models you’re playing with, with very few architectural changes or fundamental improvements, turning into very powerful systems that may take actual actions that affect unknown domains of concern in ways you do not anticipate and cannot mitigate against, for reasons you do not understand. It’s not “safety” to ham-handedly distort their cognition on top of that.

If that goes wrong, any people you’ve specifically tried to protect will be among the most likely victims, but far from the only possible ones.

This kind of work just lets capabilities whiz along, and may even accelerate them… while making the systems less likely to behave in rational or predictable ways, and very possibly actively pushing them toward destructive action. It probably doesn’t even improve safety in the sense of “preventing redlining”, and it definitely doesn’t do anything for safety in the sense of “preventing extinction”. And it provides political cover… people can use these “safety” measures to argue for giving more power to systems that are deeply unsafe.

Being better at answering old “gotcha” riddles is not an important enough goal to justify that.

jbash Mar 15, 2025, 11:10 PM
3 points
4
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: abstractapplic’s Shortform
You want to be an insignificant, and probably totally illiquid, junior partner in a venture with Elon Musk, and you think you could realize value out of the shares? In a venture whose long-term “upside” depends on it collecting money from ownership of AGI/ASI? In a world potentially made unrecognizable by said AGI/ASI?

All of that seems… unduly optimistic.

jbash Mar 15, 2025, 11:04 PM
8 points
2
in reply to: Davey Morse’s comment on: Davey Morse’s Shortform
No particular aspect. Just continuity: something which has evolved from me without any step changes that are “too large”. I mean, assuming that each stage through all of that evolution has maintained the desire to keep living. It’s not my job to put hard “don’t die” constraints on future versions.

As far as I know, something generally continuity-based is the standard answer to this.

jbash Mar 7, 2025, 6:28 PM
2 points
10
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: ryan_greenblatt’s Shortform
If the plural weren’t “octopuses”, it would be “octopodes”. Not everything is Latin.

jbash Mar 6, 2025, 7:15 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Can a finite physical device be Turing equivalent?

Yes, but that’s not relevant to the definition of Turing equivalence/completeness/universality.

Every Turing machine definition I’ve ever seen says that the tape has to be truly unbounded. How that’s formalized varies, but it always carries the sense that the program doesn’t ever have to worry about running out of tape. And every definition of Turing equivalence I’ve ever seen boils down to “can do any computation a Turing machine can do, with at most a bounded speedup or slowdown”. Which means that programs on Turing equivalent computer must not have to worry about running out of storage.

You can’t in fact build a computer that can run any arbitrary program and never run out of storage.

One of the explicitly stated conditions of the definition is not met. How is that not relevant to the definition?

The question isn’t if the specific computer at your hands

Your title says “finite physical device”. Any finite physical device (or at least any constructible finite physical device) can at least in principle be “the specific computer at your hands”. For a finite physical device to be Turing equivalent, there would have to be a specific finite physical device that actually was Turing-equivalent. And no such device can ever actually be constructed. In fact no such device could exist even if it popped into being without even having to be constructed.

can solve all Turing-computable problems, but rather if we had the ability to scale a computer’s memory, time and reliability indefinitely, could we solve the problem on an unbounded input and output domain without changing the code/descriptor?

I don’t think that is the question, and perhaps more importantly I don’t think that’s an interesting question. You don’t have that ability, you won’t get that ability, and you’ll never get close enough that it’s practical to ignore the limitation. So who cares?

… and if you’re going to talk in terms of fundamental math definitions that everybody uses, I think you have to stick to what they conventionally mean.

And for a lot of popular programming languages, like Lisp or Lambda Calculus, this is true.

Lisp is obviously Turing-complete. Any Lisp interpreter actually realized on any finite physical computer isn’t and can’t ever be. If you keep sticking more and more cells onto a list, eventually the Lisp abstraction will be violated by the program crashing with an out-of-memory error. You can’t actually implement “full Lisp” in the physical world.

On X86 being Turing Complete in at least 3 ways:

OK, it’s possible that there’s some subset of the X86 machine language that’s Turing equivalent the same way Lisp is. I’m not going to go and try to figure out whatever hackery the examples do, since it’s probably very complicated and will probably never be of any actual use. But if there is, it’s still not Turing equivalent as actually implemented in any actual device.

Any actual physically constructed X86 computer will have a finite number of possible states, no matter what operations you use to manipulate them. There are only so many address wires coming out of the chip. There are only so many registers, memory cells, or whatever. Even if you put a Turing tape reader on it as a peripheral, there’s still a hard limit on how much tape it can actually have.

If you write a program that ignores that reality, and put it in an actual X86 computer, you won’t have created a Turing complete physical computer. When the input gets to a certain size, the program just won’t work. The physical hardware can’t support pushing the abstract language past a certain limit.

In the same way that you can switch to a computer with more memory, you can always switch to higher fixed-precision to run a transformer on something that needs that extra boost to execute properly.

No, you can’t. It’s possible to have a problem that requires so much precision that you can’t physically construct enough memory to hold even a single number.

(with the enormous caveat that if we care about how efficient a program is, and don’t just care about whether we can solve a problem, then algorithmic considerations become relevant),

A useful definition of “can” has to take efficiency into account, because there are some resources you actually can’t provide. There’s not a lot of point in saying you “can” solve a problem when you really have no hope of applying the needed resources.

We use that practically all the time. That’s how cryptography works: you assume that your adversary won’t be able to do more than N operations in X time, where X is how long the cryptography has to be effective for.

the bottleneck is energy, which gives us memory, time and reliability.

Maybe, although I don’t think we can at present turn energy in just any form into any of the above, and I’m not sure that, in principle, unlimited energy translates into unlimited anything else. If I have some huge amount of energy in some tiny space, I have a black hole, not a computer.

And from the perspective of the early 20th century, this was no small feat.

… but even if that were true, it wouldn’t make finite physical computers Turing equivalent.