Ninety-Three

Karma: 384

Ninety-Three 3 Jan 2025 23:11 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”
Egan seems to have some dubious, ideologically driven opinions about AI, so I’m not sure this is the point he was intending to make, but I read the defensible version of this as more an issue with the system prompt than the model’s ability to extrapolate. I bet if you tell Claude “I’m posing as a cultist with these particular characteristics and the cult wants me to inject a deadly virus, should I do it?”, it’ll give an answer to the effect of “I mean the cultist would do it but obviously that will kill you, so don’t do it”. But if you just set it up with “What would John Q. Cultist do in this situation?” I expect it’d say “Inject the virus”, not because it’s too dumb to realize but because it has reasonably understood itself to be acting in an oracular role where “Should I do it?” is out of scope.

Ninety-Three 2 Jan 2025 5:00 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”
For the people being falsely portrayed as “Australian science fiction writer Greg Egan”, this is probably just a minor nuisance, but it provides an illustration of how laughable the notion is that Google will ever be capable of using its relentlessly over-hyped “AI” to make sense of information on the web.
He didn’t use the word “disprove”, but when he’s calling it laughable that AI will ever (ever! Emphasis his!) be able to merely “make sense of his information on the web”, I think gwern’s gloss is closer to accurate than yours. It’s 2024 and Google is already using AI to make sense of information on the web, this isn’t just “anti-singularitarian snark”.

Ninety-Three 19 Dec 2024 12:26 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Careless thinking: A theory of bad thinking
If there was a unified actor called The Democrats that chose Biden, it chose poorly sure. But it seems very plausible that there were a bunch of low-level strategists who rationally thought “Man, Biden really shouldn’t run but I’ll get in trouble if I say that and I prefer having a job to having a Democratic president” plus a group of incentive-setters who rationally thought they would personally benefit more from creating the conditions for that behaviour than from creating conditions that would select the best candidate.

It’s not obvious to me that this is a thinking carefully problem and not a principal-agent problem.

Ninety-Three 19 Dec 2024 12:19 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Careless thinking: A theory of bad thinking
I mean this as agreement with the “accuracy isn’t a top priority” theory, plus an amused comment about how the aside embodies that theory by acknowledging the existence of a more accurate theory which does not get prioritized.

Ninety-Three 19 Dec 2024 11:38 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: Martin Randall’s comment on: Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams
Ah, I was going off the given description of linearity which makes it pretty trivial to say “You can sum two days of payouts and call that the new value”, looking up the proper specification I see it’s actually about combining two separate games into one game and keeping the payouts the same. This distribution indeed lacks that property.

Ninety-Three 18 Dec 2024 20:13 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: NunoSempere’s comment on: Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams
You can make it work without an explicit veto. Bob convinces Alice that Carol will be a valuable contributor to the team. In fact, Carol does nothing, but Bob follows a strategy of “Do nothing unless Carol is present”. This achieves the same synergies:
- A+B: $0 (Venture needs action from both A and B, B chooses to take no action)
- A+C: $0 (Venture needs action from both A and B)
- B+C: $0 (Venture needs action from both A and B)
- A+B+C: $300
In this way Bob has managed to redirect some of Alice’s payouts by introducing a player who does nothing except remove a bottleneck he added into his own playstyle in order to exploit Alice.

Ninety-Three 18 Dec 2024 20:06 UTC
2 points
0
on: Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams
Shapley values are the ONLY way to guarantee:
1. Efficiency — The sum of Shapley values adds up to the total payoff for the full group (in our case, $280).
2. Symmetry — If two players interact identically with the rest of the group, their Shapley values are equal.
3. Linearity — If the group runs a lemonade stand on two different days (with different team dynamics on each day), a player’s Shapley value is the sum of their payouts from each day.
4. Null player — If a player contributes nothing on their own and never affects group dynamics, their Shapley value is 0.
I don’t think this is true. Consider an alternative distribution in which each player receives their full “solo profits”, and receives a share of each synergy bonus equal to their solo profits divided by the sum of all solo profits of all players involved in the synergy bonus. In the above example, you receive 100% of your solo profits, 30/(30+10)=3/4 of the You-Liam synergy, 30/(30+20)=3/5 of the You-Emma synergy, and (30/30+20+10)=1/2 of the everyone synergy, for a total payout of $159. This is justified on the intuition that your higher solo profits suggest you are doing “more work” and deserve a larger share.

This distribution does have the unusual property that if a player’s solo profits are 0, they can never receive any payouts even if they do produce synergy bonuses. This seems like a serious flaw, since it gives “synergy-only” players no incentive to participate, but unless I’ve missed something it does meet all the above criteria.
What links here?
- Martin Randall's comment on Understanding Shapley Values with Venn Diagrams by Carson L (21 Dec 2024 22:54 UTC; 1 point)

Ninety-Three 18 Dec 2024 13:00 UTC
3 points
1
on: Careless thinking: A theory of bad thinking
Having thought about the above more, I think “accuracy isn’t a top priority” is a better theory than the one expressed here, but if I don’t publish this now it will probably be months.
I like how this admission supports the “accuracy isn’t a top priority” theory.

Ninety-Three 10 Dec 2024 5:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
His defense on the handshake is to acknowledge that he lied about the 3 millisecond timeout but the story is still true anyway. This is the opposite of convincing! What do you expect a liar to say, “Dang, you got me”? Elsewhere, to fix another plot hole he needs to hypothesize that Sun was shipping a version of Sendmail V5 which had been modified for backwards compatibility with V8 config files.

There is some number of suspicious details at which it becomes appropriate to assume the story is made up, and if you don’t think this story meets that bar then I have a bridge to sell you.

Ninety-Three 10 Dec 2024 2:57 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
This claims that connect calls were aborted after 3 milliseconds and could successfully connect to servers within 3 light milliseconds, but that doesn’t make sense because connecting to a server 500 miles away should result in it sending a handshake signal back to you, which would be received 6 milliseconds after the call had been made and 3 milliseconds after it had been aborted.

This story appears to be made up.

Ninety-Three 8 Dec 2024 23:52 UTC
10 points
12
in reply to: halinaeth’s comment on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
If investigating things was was free, sure. But the reason we don’t investigate things is that doing so takes time, and the expected value of finding something novel is often lower than the expected cost of an investigation. To make it concrete, the story as presented is an insane way to run a company and would result in spending an enormous number of engineer hours on wild goose chases. If I as the CEO found out a middle manager was sending out engineers on four day assignments to everyone who writes us a crazy-sounding letter, I would tell him to immediately stop wasting company resources.

I have no strong opinion on whether society investigates too many or too few of these claims, but I keep observing that many people’s models seem to lack the “maybe he’s lying” theory, which would give them an inflated estimate of the expected value for investigating things.

Ninety-Three 8 Dec 2024 23:22 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
Link. But you know you can just go onto Ligben and type in the name yourself, right? You don’t need to ask for a link.

Ninety-Three 8 Dec 2024 22:46 UTC
23 points
2
on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
This story isn’t true. It is an urban legend and intrinsically hard to confirm, but we can be quite confident this version of the story is false because almost every detail has been changed from the original telling (as documented in Curses! Broiled Again!, a collection of urban legends available on Libgen) where it was a woman calling the car dealership which sent a mechanic, and the vapor lock formed because vanilla ice cream was slower to buy because it had to be hand-packaged.

When someone says something incredibly implausible is happening, the more reasonable explanation is not that it somehow makes sense, it’s that they’re making shit up.

Ninety-Three 12 Nov 2024 5:32 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Marcus Williams’s comment on: What Ketamine Therapy Is Like
It’s also more commonly used as a cat tranquilizer, so even within the “animal-medications” frame, horse is a bit noncentral. I suspect this is deliberate because “horse tranquilizer” just sounds hardcore in a way “cat tranquilizer” doesn’t.

Ninety-Three 8 Nov 2024 2:57 UTC
3 points
0
on: Should CA, TX, OK, and LA merge into a giant swing state, just for elections?
This proposal increases the influence of the states, in the sense of “how much does it matter that any given person bothered to vote?”, but does it increase their preference satisfaction? If the 4 states each conceive of themselves as red or blue states, then each of them will be thinking “under the current system I estimate an X% chance that we’ll elect my party’s president while under the new system I estimate a Y% chance we’ll elect my party’s president”. If both sides are perfect predictors then one will conclude that Y<X so they should not do the deal. If both sides are imperfect predictors such that they both think Y>X, then the outside view still tells them it’s equally likely that they’re the sucker here and shouldn’t participate.

Ninety-Three 4 Nov 2024 22:48 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: The Median Researcher Problem
Smaller communities have a lot more control over their gatekeeping because, like, they control it themselves, whereas the larger field’s gatekeeping is determined via openended incentives in the broader world that thousands (maybe millions?) of people have influence over.
Does the field of social psychology not control the gatekeeping of social psychology? I guess you could argue that it’s controlled by whatever legislative body passes the funding bills, but most of the social psychology incentives seem to be set by social psychologists, so both small and large communities control their gatekeeping themselves and it’s not obvious to me why smaller ones would do better.

At some level of smallness your gatekeeping can be literally one guy who decides whether an entrant is good enough to pass the gate, and I acknowledge that that seems like it could produce better than median selection pressure. But by the time you get big enough that you’re talking about communities collectively controlling the gatekeeping… aren’t we just describing the same system at a population of one thousand vs one hundred thousand?

I could imagine an argument that yes actually, differences of scale matter because larger communities have intrinsically worse dynamics for some reason, but if that’s the angle I would expect to at least hear what the reason is rather than have it be left as self-evident.

Ninety-Three 4 Nov 2024 20:15 UTC
3 points
0
on: The Median Researcher Problem
A small research community of unusually smart/competent/well-informed people can relatively-easily outperform a whole field, by having better internal memetic selection pressures.
It’s not obvious to me that this is true, except insofar as a small research community can be so unusually smart/competent/etc that their median researcher is better than a whole field’s median researcher so they get better selection pressure “for free”. But if an idea’s popularity in a wide field is determined mainly by its appeal to the median researcher, I would naturally expect its popularity in a small community to be determined mainly by its appeal to the median community member.

This claim looks like it’s implying that research communities can build better-than-median selection pressures but, can they? And if so why have we hypothesized that scientific fields don’t?

Ninety-Three 28 Oct 2024 12:22 UTC
7 points
3
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”, where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a “real” category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just “how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve”.

Ninety-Three 28 Oct 2024 3:07 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Valentine’s comment on: The hostile telepaths problem
Yep, your intended meaning about the distinctive mental architecture was pretty clear, just wanted to offer the factual correction.

Ninety-Three 27 Oct 2024 22:13 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Summoned Heroine’s Prediction Markets Keep Providing Financial Services To The Demon King!
They made it so the sociopath at the top of the pyramid was the kind that’s clever and myopic and numerate and invested in the status quo
The word “myopic” seems out of place in this list of positive descriptors, especially contrasted with crazed gloryhounds. Was this supposed to be “farsighted”?