I don’t know where anger fits into this. Also I should look at how these behaviors manifest in other animals.
Morpheus
Karma: 677
Hypothesis based on the fact that status is a strong drive and people who are on the outer ends of that spectrum get classified as having a “personality disorder” and are going to be very resistant to therapy:
weak-status-fear==psychopathy: psychopathy is caused by the loop leading to fear of loosing status, being less strong than average or possibly broken. (psychopathy is Probably on a spectrum. I don’t see a reason why little of this feeling would be less optimal than none.)
strong-status-fear==(?histrionic personality disorder)
weak-status-seeking-loop==(?schizoid personality disorder)
strong-status-seeking-loop==(?narcissism)
Was thinking about Steven Byrnes agenda to figure out social drives and what makes a psychopath a psychopath. One clearly existing social drive that seemed to be a thing was “status-seeking” and “status-fear” (fear of loosing status). Both of these could themselves be made of several drives? The idea that status-seeking and status-fear are different came to me when trying to think of the simplest hypothesis explaining psychopathy and from introspecting that both of these feelings feel very different to me and distinct from other fears. These two could be made more mostly separate loops, but I can’t complicate my fake framework even more just yet.
If someone is interested, I’d write a post how to stress test this fake-framework and what I’d expect in the world where it is true or isn’t (Most interesting would be social drives that are distinct from the above? Or maybe they use some of the same sub-circuitry? Like jealousy seems obviously like it would fit under strong status fear, so histrionic personality would go with being more jealous)
Since I am already on the fancy note-taking train, I’d find examples of your actual note files way more interesting.
On my phone, rotating the screen by 180° quickly reverses the direction and then I rotate it back slowly.
I think from the perspective of a radical probabilist, it is very natural to not only have a word of where your current point estimate is at, but also have some tagging for the words indicating how much computation went into it or if this estimate already tries to take the listeners model into account also?
I misread your whole post by thinking your title implied “your post would question whether the entropy increased=> the post argues it decreases” and then I was reading sloppily and didn’t notice my error.
Also you should halt and reevaluate your intuitions if they lead you to believe there is a perpetual motion machine.
Photosynthesis? Most of the carbon is bound from CO2 by using sun exergy.
Cool post. I agree with the many-shot part in principle. It strikes me that in a few years (hopefully not months?), this will look naive in a similar way that all the thinking on ways a well boxed AI might be controlled look naive now. If I understand correctly, these kinds of simulations would require a certain level of slowing down and doing things that are slightly inconvenient once you hit a certain capability level. I don’t trust labs like OpenAI, Deepmind, (Anthropic maybe?) to execute such a strategy well.
If legibility of expertise is a bottleneck to progress and adequacy of civilization, it seems like creating better benchmarks for knowledge and expertise for humans might be a valuable public good. While that seems difficult for aesthetics, it seems easier for engineering? I’d rather listen to a physics PhD, who gets Thinking Physics questions right (with good calibration), years into their professional career, than one who doesn’t.
One way to do that is to force experts to make forecasts, but this takes a lot of time to hash out and even more time to resolve.
One idea I just had related to this: the same way we use datasets like MMLU and MMMU, etc. to evaluate language models, we use a small dataset like this and then experts are allowed to take the test and performance on the test is always public (and then you make a new test every month or year).
Maybe you also get some participants to do these questions in a quiz show format and put it on YouTube, so the test becomes more popular? I would watch that.
The disadvantage of this method compared to tests people prepare for in academia would be that the data would be quite noisy. On the other hand, this measure could be more robust to goodharting and fraud (although of course this would become a harder problem once someone actually cared about that test). This process would inevitably miss genius hedgehog’s of course, but maybe not their ideas, if the generalists can properly evaluate them.
There are also some obvious issues in choosing what kinds of questions one uses as representative.
It not being linked on Twitter and Facebook seems more like a feature than a bug, given that when I asked Gwern why a page like this doesn’t already exist, he wrote me he doesn’t want people to mock it.
> I really like the importance Tags, but what I would really like is a page
> where I can just go through all the posts ordered by importance. I just
> stumbled over another importance 9 post (iron rules) when I thought I had
> read all of them. Clicking on the importance tag, just leads to a page
> explaining the importance tag.
Yeah, that is a mix of ‘too hard to fix’ and ‘I’m not sure I want to
fix it’. (I don’t know how Hakyll works well enough to do it
’normally’, and while I think I can just treat it as a tag-directory,
like ‘meta/importance/1’, ‘meta/importance/2’ etc, that’s a little
awkward.) Do I *want* people to be able to go through a list of
articles sorted by importance and be able to easily mock it—avoiding
any actual substantive critique?
I went through Gwern’s posts and collected all the posts with importance 8 and higher as of 2024-09-04 in case someone else was searching for something like this.
10
9
8
The recent post on reliability and automation reminded me that my “textexpansion” tool Espanso is not reliable enough on Linux (Ubuntu, Gnome, X11). Anyone here using reliable alternatives?
I’ve been using Espanso for a while now, but its text expansions miss characters too often, which is worse than useless. I fiddled with Espanso’s settings just now and set the backend to Clipboard, which seems to help with that, but it still has bugs like the special characters remaining (“@my_email_shorthand” → “@myemail@gmail.com″).
In particular, I think you might need to catch many escape attempts before you can make a strong case for shutting down. (For concreteness, I mostly imagine situations where we need to catch the model trying to escape 30 times.)
So instead of leaving the race once the models start scheming against you, you keep going to gather more instances of scheming until you can finally convince people? As an outside reader of that story I’d just be screaming at the protagonists that clearly everyone can see where this is going where scheming attempt number 11 is just good enough to be successful. And in the worlds where we catch them 30 times successfully it feels like people would argue: this is clear evidence that the models aren’t “actually dangerous” yet, so let’s keep scaling “responsibly”.
There is probably a lot of variation between people regarding that. In my family meds across the board improved people’s sleep (by making people less sleepy during the day, so more active and less naps). When I reduced my medication from 70mg to 50mg for a month to test whether I still needed the full dose, the thing that was annoying the most was my sleep (waking up at night and not falling asleep again increased. Falling asleep initially was maybe slightly easier). Taking it too late in the afternoon is really bad for my sleep, though.
Things I learned that surprised me from a deep dive into how the medication I’ve been taking for years (Vyvanse) actually gets metabolized:
It says in the instructions that it works for 13 hours, and my psychiatrist informed me that it has a slow onset of about an hour. What that actually means is that after ~1h you reach 1⁄2 the peak concentration and after 13 hours you are at 1⁄2 the peak concentration again, because the half-life is 12h (and someone decided at some point 1⁄2 is where we decide the exponential starts and ends?). Importantly, this means 1⁄4 of the medication is still present the next day!
Here is some real data, which fit the simple exponential decay rather well (It’s from children though, which metabolize dextroamphetamine faster, which is why the half-life is only ~10h)
If you eat ~1-3 grams of baking soda, you can make the amount of medication you lose through urine (usually ~50%) go to 0[1] (don’t do this! Your body probably keeps its urine pH at the level it does for a reason! You could get kidney stones).
I thought the opposite effect (acidic urine gets rid of the medication quickly) explained why my ADHD psychologist had told me that the medication works less well combined with citric fruit, but no! Citric fruit actually increase your urine pH (or mostly don’t affect it much)? Probably because of the citric acid cycle which means there’s more acid leaving as co2 through your lungs? (I have this from gpt4 and a rough gloss over details checked out when checking Wikipedia, but this could be wrong, I barely remember my chemistry from school)
Instead, Grapefruit has some ingredients known to inhibit enzymes for several drugs, including dextroamphetamine (I don’t understand if this inhibitory effect is actually large enough to be a problem yet though)
This brings me to another observation: apparently each of these enzymes is used in >10-20% of drugs: (CYP3A4/5, CYP2D6, CYP2C9). Wow! Seems worth learning more about them! CYP2D6 gets actually used twice in the metabolism of dextroamphetamine, once for producing and once for degrading an active metabolite.
Currently still learning more about basics about neurotransmitters from a textbook, and I might write another update once/if at the point where I feel comfortable writing about the effects of dextroamphetamine on signal transmission.
- ↩︎
Urinary excretion of methylamphetamine in man (scihub is your friend)
Looking forward to the rest of the sequence! On my current model, I think I agree with ~50% of the “scientism” replies (roughly I agree with those relating to thinking of things as binary vs. continuous, while I disagree with the outlier/heavy-tailed replies), so I’ll see if you can change my mind.
The technical background is important, but in a somewhat different way than I’d thought when I wrote it. When I was writing it, I was hoping to help transmit my model of how things work so that people could use it to make their own decisions. I still think it’s good to try to do this, however imperfectly it might happen in practice. But I think the main reason it is important is because people want to know where I’m coming from, what kinds of things I considered, and how deeply I have investigated the matter.
Yes! I think it is beneficial and important that someone who has a lot of knowledge about this transmits their model on the internet. Maybe my Google foo is bad, but I usually have a hard time finding articles like this when there doesn’t happen to be one on Lesswrong (only can think of this counterexample I remember finding reasonably quickly).
Raising children better doesn’t scale well. Neither in how much ooomph you get out of it per person, nor in how many people you can reach with this special treatment.
I am a bit confused why some of these theories would be so hard to test? It seems like some core pathways that seem like they wouldn’t be reversible even in naive stem cells under any circumstances (like transposons copying themselves successfully), could possibly be tested by checking if clones derived from older cells age faster or something along those lines? The same goes for children from older parents? (Not sure to which extent that test would be made harder by all the mechanisms keeping the germ line immortal)