Maxwell Peterson

Karma: 1,018

Maxwell Peterson 27 Jan 2025 20:22 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: johnswentworth’s Shortform
I had seen recommendations for T3/T4 on twitter to help with low energy, and even purchased some, but haven’t taken it. I hadn’t considered that the thyroid might respond by shrinking, and now think that that’s a worrying intervention! So I’m glad I read this—thank you.

Maxwell Peterson 27 Jan 2025 18:03 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: The Clueless Sniper and the Principle of Indifference
Oh… wait a minute! I looked up Principal of Indifference, to try and find stronger assertions on when it should or shouldn’t be used, and was surprised to see what it actually means! Wikipedia:

>The principle of indifference states that in the absence of any relevant evidence, agents should distribute their credence (or “degrees of belief”) equally among all the possible outcomes under consideration. In Bayesian probability, this is the simplest non-informative prior.

So I think the superior is wrong to call it “principle of indifference”! You are the one arguing for indifference: “it could hit anywhere in a radius around the targets, and we can’t say more” is POI. “It is more likely to hit the adult you aimed at” is not POI! It’s an argument about the tendency of errors to cancel.

Error cancelling tends to produce Gaussian distributions. POI gives uniform distributions.
I still think I agree with the superior that it’s marginally more likely to hit the target aimed for, but now I disagree with them that this assertion is POI.

Maxwell Peterson 27 Jan 2025 17:53 UTC
9 points
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on: What did you learn from leaked documents?
If you meant specifically negative secrets, about clandestine acts, I don’t have anything, but MrBeast’s document that new employees are given when they join his company surprised me. It’s 30+ pages of excellent, specific advice, as well as clear directions about how MrBeast videos are different and thus employees must think and act differently than they would at any other production company.

The clarity of it, and the density of information, makes it hands-down the best work document I’ve ever read, and having read many in my 10 years of corporate work—all of them less clear, all of them less interesting—I was impressed. There is a tendency in work documents, at least in corporations, to 1) care more about style than substance and 2) adhere to a style that is stifled, banal, and obsessively adheres to Textbook Dictionary English and Grammar. MrBeast just writes how he talks, and it works.

I’d never considered watching any MrBeast video, I thought they were for stupid people, but after being impressed by the document I gave them a try, and now I’ve watched many and enjoyed them.

https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6623bf84e83241ec49b548e4/66edaa19db6e9359bb92931f_How-To-Succeed-At-MrBeast-Production%20(2).pdf

Maxwell Peterson 27 Jan 2025 17:43 UTC
11 points
1
on: The present perfect tense is ruining your life
Having previously been supremely convinced of this way of thinking by reading The Last Psychiatrist, and having lived by it for the last few years, I do now suspect it’s possible to take it too far.

I think the desire for status—the goal of being able to say and think “I am this type of person”, and be recognized for it—is a part of the motivation system. As you say, some (most?) take it too far. But if one truly excises this way of thinking from themselves, they’ve kind of… excised part of their motivational system!

I think you’ve anticipated this point, because you say

>”But what if I really want what’s in the mines? Sometimes you have to do unpleasant work to get what you want.” Absolutely, but when you’re honest about it, you’ll correctly recognize those situations as life-consuming work, and that’ll affect how you relate to the task. You’ll say, “I want to find three pieces of gold,” instead of saying, “I want to work in the mines.” And so you won’t expect to feel alive or rejuvenated or joyful from the work itself.

But I’m not so sure that replacement maintains the motivation that the identity-based motivation gives. For example, when I was training for and fighting in amateur boxing, I trained and ran all the time. During runs, especially sprinting, where I was tired and wanted to quit, I would say out loud (or even yell) things like “this is easy for me because I’m a fighter!” If I had instead been thinking “this sucks but I have to do it anyway because the payoff is worth it”, that would have felt a good deal less motivating.

Or, I don’t know, maybe in marital and relationship fidelity. I am not a person who cheats; it would be a stain on my soul if I cheated. “I must never be a person who cheats.” This makes it easy to not cheat. This identity-based rule works well for me, and I don’t think replacing it with non-identity thinking would be safe for me personally.

But again I think I do agree! And most normal people would probably be better off from the advice to do more things they want to do, and less things they want to have done. But to readers who have already gone down this road… don’t feel like you need to take it all the way! Preserving some identity-based motivation is good and important.

Maxwell Peterson 27 Jan 2025 17:22 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Jim Buhler’s comment on: The Clueless Sniper and the Principle of Indifference
Interesting! I also agree with the superior, but I can see where your intuition might be coming from: if we drop a bouncy ball in the middle of a circle, there will be some bounce to it, and maybe the bounce will always be kinda large, so there might be good reason to think it ending up at rest in the very center is less likely than it ending up off-center. For the sniper’s bullet, however, I think it’s different.
Do you agree with AnthonyC’s view that the bullet’s perturbations are well-modeled by a random walk? If so, maybe I’ll simulate it if I have time and report back—but only makes sense to do that if you agree that the random walk model is appropriate in the first place.

Maxwell Peterson 24 Jan 2025 20:17 UTC
2 points
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on: Insights from “The Manga Guide to Physiology”
>The semicircular canals track changes in your head’s orientation. The otoliths track which way is down. But why not just combine them? Why did they evolve to be separate?
Here’s an idea.

The body is completely obsessed with inferring its state of poisonedness, and uses inner ear orientation sensors to help infer this. This is why car / sea / VR sickness exist. Since inferring poisonedness quickly is important, so it can start forcing itself to throw up, having two sensors is better because.. it’s more.. fault-tolerant? Not sure. But maybe there’s something here.

Maxwell Peterson 22 Jan 2025 18:25 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?
Ahh. The correlations being dependent on inputs, but things appearing random to Alice and Bob, does seem trickier than whatever I was imaginining was meant by quantum randomness/uncertainty. Don’t fully have my head around it yet, but this difference seems important. Thanks!

Maxwell Peterson 16 Jan 2025 1:17 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?
Ahh. One is uncertain which world they’re in. This feels like it could address it neatly. Thanks!

Maxwell Peterson 16 Jan 2025 1:14 UTC
11 points
−4
on: Everywhere I Look, I See Kat Woods
Strong-downvoted.
She’s all over the EA and AI-related subreddits /r/singularity, /r/artificial, /r/ArtificialIntelligence, /r/ChatGPT, /r/OpenAI, /r/Futurology
In other words, everywhere but here. Since that’s the case, it would be better to take your fight to those places. Ms. Woods’s only post on Less Wrong in the past year was a short notice about o3 safety testing sign-ups, which was unobjectionable.
I don’t like the vibes.
I was thinking the same thing. This post badly, badly clashes with the vibe of Less Wrong. I think you should delete it, and repost to a site in which catty takedowns are part of the vibe. Less Wrong is not the place for it.

Maxwell Peterson 16 Jan 2025 1:01 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?
I expect our intuitions about objective randomness would clash quite violently! My own intuition revolts at even the phrase itself :)

Maxwell Peterson 16 Jan 2025 0:59 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?
I looked into it a bit, and understand it to mean that one must accept one of:
1. Physical uncertainty exists
2. Non-locality exists
3. Quantum mechanics is wrong
  
  is that breakdown correct?

Maxwell Peterson 16 Jan 2025 0:57 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?
Been thinking about your answer here, and still can’t decide if I should view this as solving the conundrum, or just renaming it. If that makes sense?

Do weights of quantum configuration, though they may not be probabilities, similar enough in concept to still imply that physical, irreducible uncertainty exists?

I’ve phrased this badly (part of why it took me so long to actually write it) but maybe you see the question I’m waving at?

Maxwell Peterson 14 Jan 2025 17:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?
Hm—reading Ben’s linked comment, it seems to me that the thrust is that negative probabilities must be admitted. But I don’t understand how that is related to the map vs. territory / probability-in-the-mind-or-physical distinction?

Like, “one must modify the relevant functions to allow negative probabilities” seems consistent with “probability is in the mind”, since functions are a part of the map, but it seems you consider it a counterexample! So I find myself confused.

Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?

Maxwell Peterson14 Jan 2025 15:53 UTC

20 points

17 comments1 min readLW link

Maxwell Peterson 14 Jan 2025 15:42 UTC
1 point
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on: Chance is in the Map, not the Territory
>In other words, you don’t need reality to be i.i.d.; you simply need to structure your beliefs in a way that allows an “as if” i.i.d. interpretation.

I think I view exchangeability vs. iid slightly differently. In my view, the “independence” part of iid is just way too strong, and is not required in most of the places people scatter the acronym “iid”.

For example, say you are catching fish in a lake, and you know only bass and carp live in the lake, and that there are a ton of fish in it, but not how many of each, and you’re trying to estimate the proportion of carp as you catch fish.
When I catch a carp, the probability that my next catch is a carp goes up. So my probability is dependent on my previous catches—that’s why I can learn things about the proportion! If they were indeed independent, then I couldn’t learn anything. But happily, the correct requirement is not independence, but exchangeability, so I can still update my beliefs as I see more fish.

However, I may just be confused about “iid” as classicists use it, since I never properly learned classic statistics. Interested in what you think about the difference between the two in this example.

Maxwell Peterson 10 Jan 2025 21:32 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Drake Thomas’s Shortform
Thanks!

Maxwell Peterson 10 Jan 2025 18:07 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Drake Thomas’s comment on: Drake Thomas’s Shortform
Thanks for putting this together!

I have a vague memory of a post saying that taking zinc early, while virus was replicating in the upper respiratory tract, was much more important than taking it later, because later it would have spread all over the body and thus the zinc can’t get to it, or something like this. So I tend to take a couple early on then stop. But it sounds like you don’t consider that difference important.

Is it your current (Not asking you to do more research!) impression that it’s useful to take zinc throughout the illness?

Maxwell Peterson 19 Dec 2024 17:40 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: Yoav Ravid’s Shortform
The post is an advertisement, without other content. I think a post of that type should only be on the site if it comes with some meat—an excerpt, at least. (And even then I’m not sure). The reader can’t even look up or read the book yet if he wanted to!

(There is a quote of the thesis of the book, but the text is stuff I’ve been rereading for years now. It feels like someone is always telling me liberalism is under threat recently.)

Maxwell Peterson 18 Dec 2024 21:18 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Armand_Cognetta’s comment on: Activated Charcoal for Hangover Prevention: Way more than you wanted to know
Interesting! The current Sonnet 3.5 agrees (for equivalent concentrations), for the same reason you’ve described, and I was about to update the essay with a correction, but then 4o argued that 1. formaldehyde is metabolized much more quickly, so has little time to do damage or build up, and 2. that it considers formic acid’s inhibition of a critical enzyme (cytochrome c oxidase) in the mitochondrial electron transport chain to be pretty bad.

Or maybe a better summary of 4o’s argument is “In equivalent concentrations, formaldehyde is worse, but the differences in rapidity of metabolization mean formic acid builds up more and causes more damage in real-life scenarios.”

So I’ve linked your comment in the relevant section, sort of waving my hands and succumbing to both-sides-ism. Interested in what you think about the rapidity-of-metabolization argument.

Maxwell Peterson 16 Dec 2024 20:16 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: KvmanThinking’s comment on: are IQ tests a good measure of intelligence?
Guesses: people see it as too 101 of a question; people think it’s too controversial / has been done to death many years ago; one guy with a lot of karma hates the whole concept and strong-downvoted it

I think the 101 idea is most likely. But I don’t think it’s a bad question, so I’ve upvoted it.

Maxwell Peterson

Why aban­don “prob­a­bil­ity is in the mind” when it comes to quan­tum dy­nam­ics?

Why abandon “probability is in the mind” when it comes to quantum dynamics?