johnlawrenceaspden

Karma: 1,722

johnlawrenceaspden 15 May 2025 15:04 UTC
16 points
2
on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Hi, I’ve pre-ordered it on the UK Amazon, I hope that works for you. Let me know if I should do something different.
I have a number of reasonably well-respected friends in the University of Cambridge and its associated tech-sphere, I can try to get some of them to give endorsements if you think that will help and can send me a pdf.

johnlawrenceaspden 16 Feb 2025 16:20 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Review: Planecrash
Finally finished it, took about a month-and-a-half at around 3 hours a day. It kind of ate my life. I enjoyed it immensely.
I think the last thing that I liked as much as this was ‘Game of Thrones’. I think it’s probably a Great Work of Literature. Shame the future isn’t going to be long enough for it to get recognised as such...
I wouldn’t have wished it shorter. There were a couple of ‘Sandbox’ chapters that I’d probably cut, in the same way that Lord of the Rings could do without Tom Bombadil, but the main thing is well-paced and consistently both fun and thought-provoking.
It turned out that my preferred way to read it was to unzip project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub. In the unzipped structure all the chapters become plain html files with avatars included, which can be easily read in firefox.

johnlawrenceaspden 18 Jan 2025 19:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: johnlawrenceaspden’s comment on: Review: Planecrash
Have ended up reading project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub as the best of the options. 70 pages into a total of 183 (very long) pages. It is still great. Enjoying it immensely.

johnlawrenceaspden 6 Jan 2025 17:29 UTC
2 points
2
on: Review: Planecrash
Thank you so much for this! I tried to read this thing once before, and didn’t get into it at all, despite pretty much loving everything Eliezer has ever written, which experience I now put down to something about the original presentation.
I’m now about 10% of the way through, and loving it. Two days well spent, see y’all in a fortnight or so.....
For anyone in a similar position, I found (and am currently reading):
https://akrolsmir-glowflow-streamlit-app-79n743.streamlit.app
which is much more to my taste.
And I also found https://www.mikescher.com/blog/29/Project_Lawful_ebook, of which the project-lawful-avatars-moreinfo.epub version looks like the one I would prefer to read (but haven’t actually tried reading more than a couple of pages of yet).
I actually think that the avatars are really important to the feel of the story, and have been carefully chosen, and I wouldn’t want to be without them.

johnlawrenceaspden 28 Apr 2024 19:27 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: Slapstick’s comment on: So What’s Up With PUFAs Chemically?
I knew that those wise and good benefactors of humanity would turn out to have been warning us of the dangers of polyunsaturated fats all along.
They might want to mention it to people like my father, who, on the advice of his doctor, has been pretty much only eating polyunsaturated fats these last twenty years, for the good of his heart.
Or perhaps to McDonalds, who on the basis of a consumer-led campaign changed their famously good beef-dripping fried chips to vegetable-oil fried chips, coincidentally at about the time obesity and various other nasty diseases with no known cause really became fashionable in America.

johnlawrenceaspden 28 Apr 2024 19:20 UTC
2 points
0
on: So What’s Up With PUFAs Chemically?
Another thing linoleic acid does when there’s oxygen around is polymerize into a varnish, which is why linseed oil (lin-oleic) is traditionally used to waterproof cricket bats.
It used to say ‘do not eat’ in quite large letters on the cricket-bat-varnish bottles. Presumably now it says ‘heart-healthy!’.

johnlawrenceaspden 28 Apr 2024 18:53 UTC
4 points
2
on: So What’s Up With PUFAs Chemically?
I wouldn’t just write off the naive anti-seed oil position either from a chemical point of view. Metabolism is absurdly complicated and finely tuned. Substituting a slightly different substrate into a poorly understood set of reactions and feedback loops is unlikely to go well.
There was very little linoleic acid in the diet we evolved to eat. Sure, it’s essential in small quantities, but using it as a major energy source is likely a very bad idea a priori.

johnlawrenceaspden 25 Apr 2024 10:57 UTC
4 points
−2
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Examples of Highly Counterfactual Discoveries?
I don’t buy this, the curvedness of the sea is obvious to sailors, e.g. you see the tops of islands long before you see the beach, and indeed to anyone who has ever swum across a bay! Inland peoples might be able to believe the world is flat, but not anyone with boats.

johnlawrenceaspden 20 Apr 2024 10:38 UTC
4 points
−6
on: Daniel Dennett has died (1942-2024)
A Great Man and an inspiration to me and to this community and to all thinking men.
God rest his soul in peace in Paradise.

johnlawrenceaspden 27 Dec 2023 19:51 UTC
5 points
1
on: Merry Christmas Everyone!
alt-text is supposed to be: “I’m not even sure they’ve read Superintelligence”

Merry Christmas Everyone!

johnlawrenceaspden27 Dec 2023 19:49 UTC

14 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

johnlawrenceaspden 3 Dec 2023 14:13 UTC
−3 points
−22
on: Book Review: 1948 by Benny Morris
Forgive me, I have strongly downvoted this dispassionate, interesting, well-written review of what sounds like a good book on an important subject because I want to keep politics out of Less Wrong.
This is the most hot-button of topics, and politics is the mind-killer. We have more important things to think about and I do not want to see any of our political capital used in this cause on either side.
typo-wise you have a few uses of it’s (it is) where it should be its (possessive), and “When they Egyptians” should probably read “When the Egyptians”.
I did enjoy your review. Thank you for writing it. Would you delete it and put it elsewhere?

johnlawrenceaspden 20 Nov 2023 17:49 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and others from OpenAI join Microsoft
Nicely done! I only come here for the humour these days.

johnlawrenceaspden 27 Oct 2023 18:54 UTC
2 points
1
on: Linkpost: Rishi Sunak’s Speech on AI (26th October)
Well, this is nice to see! Perhaps a little late, but still good news...

johnlawrenceaspden 1 Oct 2023 12:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: Propagating Facts into Aesthetics
caches out
cashes out?

johnlawrenceaspden 16 Sep 2023 10:56 UTC
−6 points
0
in reply to: Duncan Sabien (Inactive)’s comment on: Lies, Damn Lies, and Fabricated Options
Haven’t you just “fabricated an option” where it’s possible to talk about politics on less wrong without it turning into a mind-killed clusterfuck? I mean yes, it would be lovely.....

johnlawrenceaspden 28 Jul 2023 22:10 UTC
6 points
−3
on: Semaglutide and Muscle
I wouldn’t touch this stuff with someone else’s bargepole. It looks like it takes the willpower out of starvation, and as the saying goes, you can starve yourself thin, but you can’t starve yourself healthy.
I could be convinced, by many years of safety data and a well understood causal mechanism for both obesity and the action of these drugs, that that’s wrong and that they really are a panacea. But I am certainly not currently convinced!
The question that needs answering about obesity is ‘why on earth are people with enormous excess fat reserves feeling hungry?‘. It’s like having a car with the boot full of petrol in jerry cans but the ‘fuel low’ light is blinking.

johnlawrenceaspden 13 Jul 2023 20:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Aiyen’s comment on: When do “brains beat brawn” in Chess? An experiment
depends on facts about physics and psychology
It does, and a superintelligence will understand those facts better than we do.

johnlawrenceaspden 4 Jul 2023 12:02 UTC
2 points
0
on: Inference Speed is Not Unbounded
My basic argument is that the there are probably mathematical limits on how fast it is possible to learn.
Doubtless there are! And limits to how much it is possible to learn from given data.
But I think they’re surprisingly high, compared to how fast humans and other animals can do it.
There are theoretical limits to how fast you can multiply numbers, given a certain amount of processor power, but that doesn’t mean that I’d back the entirety of human civilization to beat a ZX81 in a multiplication contest.
What you need to explain is why learning algorithms are a ‘different sort of thing’ to multiplication algorithms.
Maybe our brains are specialized to learning the sorts of things that came in handy when we were animals.
But I’d be a bit surprised if they were specialized to abstract reasoning or making scientific inferences.

johnlawrenceaspden 4 Jul 2023 11:40 UTC
3 points
1
on: Inference Speed is Not Unbounded
All of RL’s successes, even the huge ones like AlphaGo (which beat the world champion at Go) or its successors, were not easy to train. For one thing, the process was very unstable and very sensitive to slight mistakes. The networks had to be designed with inductive biases specifically tuned to each problem.
And the end result was that there was no generalization. Every problem required you to rethink your approach from scratch. And an AI that mastered one task wouldn’t necessarily learn another one any faster.
I had the distinct impression that AlphaZero (the version of AlphaGo where they removed all the tweaks) could be left alone for an afternoon with the rules of almost any game in the same class as go, chess, shogi, checkers, noughts-and-crosses, connect four, othello etc, and teach itself up to superhuman performance.
In the case of chess, that involved rediscovering something like 400 years of human chess theorizing, to become the strongest player in history including better than all previous hand-constructed chess programs.
In the case of go, I am told that it not only rediscovered a whole 2000 year history of go theory, but added previously undiscovered strategies. “Like getting a textbook from the future”, is a quote I have heard.
That strikes me as neither slow nor ungeneral.
And there was enough information in the AlphaZero paper that it was replicated and improved on by the LeelaChessZero open-source project, so I don’t think there can have been that many special tweaks needed?

johnlawrenceaspden

Merry Christ­mas Every­one!

Merry Christmas Everyone!