Nick_Tarleton

Karma: 5,672

Nick_Tarleton May 26, 2025, 1:05 AM
8 points
0
on: Meditations on Doge
Looking at the source of the first quote in the post, this, shortly after, is interesting:

[...] we have to first recognize that the treatment of the marshrutka drivers was part of a more systematic policy (if it could be called that), one that was dictated not by economics but by a political logic. It was: Remain in power by creating economic disorder.

Shevardnadze behaved in this way in large part because he was in a much weaker position than the other state builders we have encountered in this and the previous chapter. Even after he outsmarted the warlords he was faced with strong regional powers within Georgia. He was grasping on to power rather than building a capable state, and he tried to do this by placating powerful interests by co-opting them with riches (or at the very least with bribes). Corruption in developing countries is common, so marshrutka drivers’ bribing state officials isn’t that unusual. But what went on in Georgia was a little different from this type of corruption. Shevardnadze set up the system so that the drivers were bound to break the law, and this provided low-hanging fruit for the police. He made lawbreaking inevitable and created a system that encouraged corruption.

The main reason for this was to control society, which was now continually guilty of breaking the law. You could avoid implementation of the law by paying a bribe today, but the state could come after you at any time. Yet this scheme also controlled officials in the state, another potentially powerful group—accepting bribes was illegal, so the state could go after them too if it wanted to.

Nick_Tarleton May 13, 2025, 7:02 PM
0 points
−2
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
Neither the mortality-rate nor the energy-use map lines up that closely with the US geopolitical sphere of influence. (E.g. Russia and China on the one hand, Latin America on the other.)

I’m not saying the US government isn’t partially responsible for unequal distribution, but your previous comment sounds like treating it as the only or primary significant factor.

(I’m also not sure what point you’re trying to make at all with the energy-use map, given how similar it looks to the mortality-rate map.)

Nick_Tarleton May 6, 2025, 6:46 PM
30 points
25
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Eukryt Wrts Blg
to try to shun or shame people for saying things that are outside the Overton window.

(emphasis mine) Is that what the OP is doing? Certainly not overtly. I fear that this is a fallacy I see all the time in politicized conversations:
1. X is outside the Overton window
2. A disapproves of B saying [some particular instance of X]
3. Therefore A’s disapproval must be motivated by X being outside the Overton window

Nick_Tarleton Apr 16, 2025, 9:43 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: StanislavKrym’s comment on: Surprising LLM reasoning failures make me think we still need qualitative breakthroughs for AGI
That article is sloppily written enough to say “Early testers report that the AI [i.e. o3 and/or o4-mini] can generate original research ideas in fields like nuclear fusion, drug discovery, and materials science; tasks usually reserved for PhD-level experts” linking, as a citation, to OpenAI’s January release announcement of o3-mini.
TechCrunch attributes the rumor to a paywalled article in The Information (and attributes the price to specialized agents, not o3 or o4-mini themselves).

Nick_Tarleton Apr 15, 2025, 5:23 AM
8 points
4
on: Unbendable Arm as Test Case for Religious Belief
(I have successfully done Unbendable Arm after Valentine showed me in person, without explaining any of the biomechanics. My experience of it didn’t involve visualization, but felt like placing my fingertips on the wall across the room and resolving that they’d stay there. Contra jimmy’s comment, IIRC I initially held my arm wrong without any cueing.)

Strongly related: Believing In. From that post:

My guess is that for lack of good concepts for distinguishing “believing in” from deception, LessWrongers, EAs, and “nerds” in general are often both too harsh on folks doing positive-sum “believing in,” and too lax on folks doing deception. (The “too lax” happens because many can tell there’s a “believing in”-shaped gap in their notions of e.g. “don’t say better things about your start-up than a reasonable outside observer would,” but they can’t tell its exact shape, so they loosen their “don’t deceive” in general.)

I feel like this post is similarly too lax on, not deception, but propositional-and-false religious beliefs.

Nick_Tarleton Apr 7, 2025, 7:06 PM
6 points
2
in reply to: LVSN’s comment on: Well-foundedness as an organizing principle of healthy minds and societies
Not sure what Richard would say, but off the cuff, I’d distinguish ‘imparting information that happens to induce guilt’ from ‘guilting’, based on intent to cooperatively inform vs. psychologically attack.

My read of the post is that some degree of “being virtuously willing to contend with guilt as a fair emergent consequence of hearing carefully considered and selected information” is required for being well-founded or part of a well-founded system (receive criticism without generating internal conflict, etc).

Nick_Tarleton Feb 20, 2025, 7:59 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: MondSemmel’s comment on: Arbital has been imported to LessWrong
I don’t feel a different term is needed/important, but n=1, due to some uses I’ve seen of ‘lens’ as a technical metaphor it strongly makes me think ‘different mechanically-generated view of the same data/artifact’, not ‘different artifact that’s (supposed to be) about the same subject matter’, so I find the usage here a bit disorienting at first.

Nick_Tarleton Feb 13, 2025, 8:35 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: AI #103: Show Me the Money
The Y-axis seemed to me like roughly ‘populist’.

Nick_Tarleton Feb 13, 2025, 8:19 PM
2 points
0
on: My model of what is going on with LLMs

The impressive performance we have obtained is because supervised (in this case technically “self-supervised”) learning is much easier than e.g. reinforcement learning and other paradigms that naturally learn planning policies. We do not actually know how to overcome this barrier.

What about current reasoning models trained using RL? (Do you think something like, we don’t know, and won’t easily figure out, how to make that work well outside a narrow class of tasks that doesn’t include ‘anything important’?)

Nick_Tarleton Feb 3, 2025, 8:17 PM
30 points
14
in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond
Few people who take radical veganism and left-anarchism seriously either ever kill anyone, or are as weird as the Zizians, so that can’t be the primary explanation. Unless you set a bar for ‘take seriously’ that almost only they pass, but then, it seems relevant that (a) their actions have been grossly imprudent and predictably ineffective by any normal standard + (b) the charitable^[1] explanations I’ve seen offered for why they’d do imprudent and ineffective things all involve their esoteric beliefs.
I do think ‘they take [uncommon, but not esoteric, moral views like veganism and anarchism] seriously’ shouldn’t be underrated as a factor, and modeling them without putting weight on it is wrong.
1. ^
  to their rationality, not necessarily their ethics

Nick_Tarleton Feb 3, 2025, 7:31 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Nathan Helm-Burger’s Shortform
I don’t think it’s an outright meaningless comparison, but I think it’s bad enough that it feels misleading or net-negative-for-discourse to describe it the way your comment did. Not sure how to unpack that feeling further.

Nick_Tarleton Feb 3, 2025, 7:25 PM
4 points
2
in reply to: ryan_greenblatt’s comment on: Nathan Helm-Burger’s Shortform
https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/providers claims that Cerebras achieves that OOM performance, for a single prompt, for 70B-parameter models. So nothing as smart as R1 is currently that fast, but some smart things come close.

Nick_Tarleton Feb 3, 2025, 7:19 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Nathan Helm-Burger’s comment on: Nathan Helm-Burger’s Shortform
I don’t see how it’s possible to make a useful comparison this way; human and LLM ability profiles, and just the nature of what they’re doing, are too different. An LLM can one-shot tasks that a human would need non-typing time to think about, so in that sense this underestimates the difference, but on a task that’s easy for a human but the LLM can only do with a long chain of thought, it overestimates the difference.

Put differently: the things that LLMs can do with one shot and no CoT imply that they can do a whole lot of cognitive work in a single forward pass, maybe a lot more than a human can ever do in the time it takes to type one word. But that cognitive work doesn’t compound like a human’s; it has to pass through the bottleneck of a single token, and be substantially repeated on each future token (at least without modifications like Coconut).

(Edit: The last sentence isn’t quite right — KV caching means the work doesn’t have to all be recomputed, though I would still say it doesn’t compound.)

Nick_Tarleton Feb 2, 2025, 11:25 PM
LW: 4 AF: 2
0
AF
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk
I don’t really have an empirical basis for this, but: If you trained something otherwise comparable to, if not current, then near-future reasoning models without any mention of angular momentum, and gave it a context with several different problems to which angular momentum was applicable, I’d be surprised if it couldn’t notice that $\to r \times \to p$ was a common interesting quantity, and then, in an extension of that context, correctly answer questions about it. If you gave it successive problem sets where the sum of that quantity was applicable, the integral, maybe other things, I’d be surprised if a (maybe more powerful) reasoning model couldn’t build something worth calling the ability to correctly answer questions about angular momentum. Do you expect otherwise, and/or is this not what you had in mind?

Nick_Tarleton Feb 2, 2025, 11:07 PM
LW: 7 AF: 3
3
AF
on: Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk
It seems right to me that “fixed, partial concepts with fixed, partial understanding” that are “mostly ‘in the data’” likely block LLMs from being AGI in the sense of this post. (I’m somewhat confused / surprised that people don’t talk about this more — I don’t know whether to interpret that as not noticing it, or having a different ontology, or noticing it but disagreeing that it’s a blocker, or thinking that it’ll be easy to overcome, or what. I’m curious if you have a sense from talking to people.)
These also seem right
- “LLMs have a weird, non-human shaped set of capabilities”
- “There is a broken inference”
- “we should also update that this behavior surprisingly turns out to not require as much general intelligence as we thought”
- “LLMs do not behave with respect to X like a person who understands X, for many X”
(though I feel confused about how to update on the conjunction of those, and the things LLMs are good at — all the ways they don’t behave like a person who doesn’t understand X, either, for many X.)
But: you seem to have a relatively strong prior^[1] on how hard it is to get from current techniques to AGI, and I’m not sure where you’re getting that prior from. I’m not saying I have a strong inside view in the other direction, but, like, just for instance — it’s really not apparent to me that there isn’t a clever continuous-training architecture, requiring relatively little new conceptual progress, that’s sufficient; if that’s less sample-efficient than what humans are doing, it’s not apparent to me that it can’t still accomplish the same things humans do, with a feasible amount of brute force. And it seems like that is apparent to you.
Or, looked at from a different angle: to my gut, it seems bizarre if whatever conceptual progress is required takes multiple decades, in the world I expect to see with no more conceptual progress, where probably:
- AI is transformative enough to motivate a whole lot of sustained attention on overcoming its remaining limitations
- AI that’s narrowly superhuman on some range of math & software tasks can accelerate research
1. ^
  It’s hard for me to tell how strong: “—though not super strongly” is hard for me to square with your butt-numbers, even taking into account that you disclaim them as butt-numbers.

Nick_Tarleton Feb 2, 2025, 10:30 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: The Failed Strategy of Artificial Intelligence Doomers
To be more object-level than Tsvi:

o1/o3/R1/R1-Zero seem to me like evidence that “scaling reasoning models in a self-play-ish regime” can reach superhuman performance on some class of tasks, with properties like {short horizons, cheap objective verifiability, at most shallow conceptual innovation needed} or maybe some subset thereof. This is important! But, for reasons similar to this part of Tsvi’s post, it’s a lot less apparent to me that it can get to superintelligence at all science and engineering tasks.

Nick_Tarleton Feb 2, 2025, 9:35 PM
30 points
17
in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond

Also the claim that Ziz “did the math” with relation to making decisions using FDT-ish theories

IMO Eliezer correctly identifies a crucial thing Ziz got wrong about decision theory:

… the misinterpretation “No matter what, I must act as if everyone in the world will perfectly predict me, even though they won’t.” …

also:

i think “actually most of your situations do not have that much subjunctive dependence” is pretty compelling personally

it’s not so much that most of the espoused decision theory is fundamentally incorrect but rather that subjunctive dependence is an empirical claim about how the world works, can be tested empirically, and seems insufficiently justified to me

and:

however i think the obvious limitation of this kind of approach is that it has no model for ppl behaving incoherent ways except as a strategy for gaslighting ppl about how accountable you are for your actions. this is a real strategy ppl often do but is not the whole of it imo

this is implied by how, as soon as ppl are not oppressing you “strategically”, the game theory around escalation breaks. by doing the Ziz approach, you wind up walking into bullets that were not meant for you, or maybe anyone, and have exerted no power here or counterfactually

Nick_Tarleton Jan 3, 2025, 8:20 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: Preference Inversion

Let’s look at preference for eating lots of sweets, for example. Society tries to teach us not to eat too much sweets because it’s unhealthy, and from the perspective of someone who likes eating sweets, this often feels coercive. Your explanation applied here would be that upon reflection, people will decide “Actually, eating a bunch of candy every day is great”—and no doubt, to a degree that is true, at least with the level of reflection that people actually do.

However when I decided to eat as much sweet as I wanted, I ended up deciding that sweets were gross, except in very small amounts or as a part of extended exercise where my body actually needs the sugar. What’s happening here is that society has a bit more wisdom than the candy loving kid, tries clumsily to teach the foolish kid that their ways are wrong and they’ll regret it, and often ends up succeeding more in constraining behavior than integrating the values in a way that the kid can make sense of upon reflection.

The OP addresses cases like this:

One thing that can cause confusion here—by design—is that perverted moralities are stabler if they also enjoin nonperversely good behaviors in most cases. This causes people to attribute the good behavior to the system of threats used to enforce preference inversion, imagining that they would not be naturally inclined to love their neighbor, work diligently for things they want, and rest sometimes. Likewise, perverted moralities also forbid many genuinely bad behaviors, which primes people who must do something harmless but forbidden to accompany it with needlessly harmful forbidden behaviors, because that’s what they’ve been taught to expect of themselves.

I agree that the comment you’re replying to is (narrowly) wrong (if understanding ‘prior’ as ‘temporally prior’), because someone might socially acquire a preference not to overeat sugar before they get the chance to learn they don’t want to overeat sugar. ISTM this is repaired by comparing not to ‘(temporally) prior preference’ but something like ‘reflectively stable preference absent coercive pressure’.

Nick_Tarleton Jan 3, 2025, 1:47 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Shortform Feed
I can easily imagine an argument that: SBF would be safe to release in 25 years, or for that matter tomorrow, not because he’d be decent and law-abiding, but because no one would trust him and the only crimes he’s likely to (or did) commit depend on people trusting him. I’m sure this isn’t entirely true, but it does seem like being world-infamous would have to mitigate his danger quite a bit.

More generally — and bringing it back closer to the OP — I feel interested in when, and to what extent, future harms by criminals or norm-breakers can be prevented just by making sure that everyone knows their track record and can decide not to trust them.

Nick_Tarleton Jan 1, 2025, 11:31 PM
20 points
4
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”
Though — I haven’t read all of his recent novels, but I think — none of those are (for lack of a better word) transhumanist like Permutation City or Diaspora, or even Schild’s Ladder or Incandescence. Concretely: no uploads, no immortality, no artificial minds, no interstellar civilization. I feel like this fits the pattern, even though the wildness of the physics doesn’t. (And each of those four earlier novels seems successively less about the implications of uploading/immortality/etc.)