NoSuchPlace

Karma: 419

NoSuchPlace 14 Apr 2022 14:43 UTC
21 points
in reply to: Lambda’s comment on: Lies Told To Children
I think it would be more accurate to say that the test was meant to check whether the TV shows were effective than whether the children had a maximal inherent tendency towards virtuousness.

NoSuchPlace 4 Apr 2022 0:38 UTC
19 points
in reply to: Razied’s comment on: New Scaling Laws for Large Language Models
If I understand this correctly Deepmind is using each token in at most one update (They say they are training for less than one epoch), which means that it is hard to say anything about data efficiency of DL from this paper since the models are not trained to convergence on the data that they have seen.
They are probably doing this since they already have the data, and a new data point is more informative than an old one, even if your model is very slow to extract the available information with each update.

NoSuchPlace 29 Jun 2021 2:47 UTC
1 point
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Sam Altman and Ezra Klein on the AI Revolution
Searching his twitter, he barely seems to have mentioned GPT at all in 2020. Maybe he deleted some of his tweets?

NoSuchPlace 28 Jun 2021 18:08 UTC
4 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Sam Altman and Ezra Klein on the AI Revolution
I remember vividly reading one of his tweets last year, enthusiastically talking about how he’d started chatting with GPT-3 and it was impressing him with its intelligence.
Are you thinking of this tweet? I believe that was meant to be a joke. His actual position at the time appeared to be that GPT-3 is impressive but overhyped.

NoSuchPlace 21 Dec 2016 15:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Stupid Questions December 2016
Thank you I fixed it. I think the same argument shows that that question is also undefined. I think the real takeaway is that physics doesn’t deal well with some infinities.

NoSuchPlace 21 Dec 2016 1:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Stupid Questions December 2016
As you point out later in the thread the light can never touch any given sphere, since no matter which one you pick there will always be another sphere in front of it to block the light. At the same time the light beam must eventually hit something because the centre sphere is in its way. So your light beam must both eventually hit a sphere and never hit a sphere so your system is contradictory and thus ill defined.

You could make the question answerable by instead asking for the limit of the light beam as number of steps of packing done goes to infinity in which case the light reflects back at 180°, since it does that in every step of the packing. Alternately you could ask what happens to the light beam if it is reflected of a shape which is the limit of the packing you described, in which case it will split in three since the shape produced is a cube (since it will have no empty spaces). (Edit:no it doesn’t the answer to this question is again undefined via the argument in the first paragraph, since the matter it bounced of of had to belong to some sphere)

NoSuchPlace 14 Aug 2015 13:19 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Houshalter’s comment on: Open thread, Aug. 10 - Aug. 16, 2015
Since I don’t spend all my time inside avoiding every risk hoping for someone to find the cure to aging, I probably value a infinite life a large but finite amount times more than a year of life. This means that I must discount in such a way that after a finite number of button press Omega would need to grant me an infinite life span.

So I preform some Fermi calculations to obtain an upper bound on the number of button presses I need to obtain Immortality, press the button that often, then leave.

NoSuchPlace 24 May 2015 10:32 UTC
3 points
on: Prior probabilities and statistical significance
They are different concepts, either you use statistical significance or you do Bayesian updating (ie. using priors):

If you are using a 5% threshold roughly speaking this means that you will accept a hypothesis if the chance of getting equally strong data if your hypothesis is false is 5% or less.

If you are doing Bayesian updating you start with a probability for how likely a statement is (this is your prior) and update based on how likely your data would be if your statement was true or false.

here is an xkcd which highlights the difference: https://xkcd.com/1132/

NoSuchPlace 4 Sep 2014 21:12 UTC
12 points
on: Consistent extrapolated beliefs about math?

In particular, I intuitively believe that “my beliefs about the integers are consistent, because the integers exist”. That’s an uncomfortable situation to be in, because we know that a consistent theory can’t assert its own consistency.

That is true, however you don’t appear to be asserting the consistency of your beliefs, you are asserting the consistency of a particular subset of your beliefs which does not contain the assertion of its consistency. This is not in conflict with Gödel’s incompleteness theorem which implies that no theory may consistently assert its own consistency. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem does not forbid proofs of consistency by more powerful theories: for example there are proofs of the consistency of Peano arithmetic

NoSuchPlace 20 Aug 2014 22:55 UTC
0 points
in reply to: gsgs’s comment on: [Link] First talk by CSER
I think this is the relevant link

NoSuchPlace 27 Jul 2014 17:52 UTC
8 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
Quirrell doesn’t have a very large window in which to drink the blood.

According to this he should have plenty of time:

“Is it possible to Transfigure a living subject into a target that is static, such as a coin—no, excuse me, I’m terribly sorry, let’s just say a steel ball.”

Professor McGonagall shook her head. “Mr. Potter, even inanimate objects undergo small internal changes over time. There would be no visible changes to your body afterwards, and for the first minute, you would notice nothing wrong. But in an hour you would be sick, and in a day you would be dead.”
- hpmor ch15
I could see the drinker getting sick

From the transfiguration rules:

“I will never Transfigure anything that looks like food or anything else that goes inside a human body.”
- hpmor ch15
This presumably means don’t transfigure anything into food. However it could also be interpreted to mean, don’t transfigure food into anything. I am somewhat disappointed in McGonagall for not catching that ambiguity.

Also Quirrell is not a recognized transfiguration authority:

“If I am not sure whether a Transfiguration is safe, I will not try it until I have asked Professor McGonagall or Professor Flitwick or Professor Snape or the Headmaster, who are the only recognised authorities on Transfiguration at Hogwarts. Asking another student is not acceptable, even if they say that they remember asking the same question.”

“Even if the current Defence Professor at Hogwarts tells me that a Transfiguration is safe, and even if I see the Defence Professor do it and nothing bad seems to happen, I will not try it myself.”
- hpmor ch15
However since Quirrells past is unknown (as far as Hogwarts is concerned) he could be one of the best transfigures in the world and he wouldn’t be recognized as an authority. Also I don’t see Quirrell neglecting something as useful and versatile as transfiguration, so I would expect him to know how dangerous eating formerly transfigured food is.

NoSuchPlace 26 Jul 2014 14:33 UTC
13 points
in reply to: jaime2000’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

Also, won’t Quirrell die of transfiguration sickness if he drinks the blood of transfigured Rarity?

No, the unicorn will, but by the time Quirrell drinks it blood it won’t be transfigured any more, so he will be fine.

NoSuchPlace 26 Jul 2014 13:52 UTC
21 points
in reply to: Jurily’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
These seem to be the relevant quotes:

“For some reason or other,” said the amused voice of Professor Quirrell, “it seems that the scion of Malfoy is able to cast surprisingly strong magic for a first-year student. Due to the purity of his blood, of course. Certainly the good Lord Malfoy would not have openly flouted the underage magic laws by arranging for his son to receive a wand before his acceptance into Hogwarts.”

and

Only there was a reason why they usually didn’t bother giving wands to nine-year-olds. Age counted too, it wasn’t just how long you’d held a wand. Granger’s birthday had been only a few days into the year, when Harry had bought her that pouch. That meant she was twelve now, that she’d been twelve almost since the start of Hogwarts. And the truth was, Draco hadn’t been practicing much outside of class, probably not nearly as much as Hermione Granger of Ravenclaw. Draco hadn’t thought he needed any more practice to stay ahead...

-both hpmor ch.78

So from this it seems magic power increases with age, spells cast and time since first getting your wand (though the third could simply be due to the second)

So the reason Harry can only just now cast second year spells, is that he has only recently become sufficiently powerful. His partial transfiguration and patronous v2.0 don’t actually require a lot of spell power they only require you to do clever things.

NoSuchPlace 25 Jul 2014 22:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: pianoforte611’s comment on: Ethics in a Feedback Loop: A Parable
PeerGynt has already all but said so elsewhere

NoSuchPlace 20 Jun 2014 17:12 UTC
10 points
in reply to: FiftyTwo’s comment on: Open thread, 16-22 June 2014
Have a program use its own output as input, effectively letting you run programs for infinite amounts of time, which depending on how time travel is resolved may or may not give you a halting oracle.

Also you can now brute force most of mathematics:

one way to do this is using first order logic which is expressive enough to state most problems. First order logic is semi-decidable which means that there are algorithms which will eventually return a proof for correct statements. Since your computer will take at most ten seconds to do this, you will have a proof after ten seconds or know that the statement was incorrect if your computer remains silent.

NoSuchPlace 7 Jun 2014 22:18 UTC
7 points
on: What should a Bayesian do given probability of proving X vs. of disproving X?

Is it reasonable to assign P(X) = P(will_be_proven(X)) / (P(will_be_proven(X)) + P(will_be_disproven(X))) ?

No I don’t think so, consider the following example:

I flip a coin. If it comes up heads I take two green marbles, else I take one red and one green marble. Then I offer to let you see a random marble and I destroy the other one without showing you.

Then, suppose you wish to test whether my coin came up tails. if the marble is red, you have proven the coin came up tails and the chance of tails being disproven is zero, so your expression is 1, but it should be 0.5.

NoSuchPlace 5 Jun 2014 13:26 UTC
28 points
on: Links!
A 2 minute youtube video

I’m not going to explain what it is because that would ruin the video.

Also since explaining the video ruins it, here is a link to rot13

NoSuchPlace 30 May 2014 19:03 UTC
4 points
on: Does this seem to you like evidence for the existence of psychic abilities in humans?

I feel like I am forced to raise my credence level for remote viewing being real to somewhere between 50 and 60 percent.

A general note on this sort of situation without getting into the specifics of this case:

If something very unlikely ,say P, happens and you have something which would explain that, say A. You should increase your confidence in A and as you receive stronger evidence you continue increasing your confidence. However you should not keep increasing your confidence in A until it is almost 1:

Since your test isn’t between A and not A but between P and not P. You should simply move probability from not P to P which would increase the probability of things in P, like A, but not change the relative probabilities of things in P.

So the only way the quote could be correct is if you had started out believing that Psi is as good an explanation as all others put together for the things that you have observed. This seems wrong to me since even everyone involved flat out lying seems much more probable than Psi being real.

Also an Abstruse Goose which involves this sort of situation.

NoSuchPlace 28 Apr 2014 2:59 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Louie’s comment on: Request for concrete AI takeover mechanisms
Are you saying this is some thing which MIRI considers actively bad or are you just pointing out that this something which is not helpful for MIRI?

While I don’t see the benefit of this exercise I also don’t see any harm since for any idea which we come up with here some one else would very likely have come up with it before if it were actionable for humans.

NoSuchPlace 28 Apr 2014 1:39 UTC
0 points
on: Request for concrete AI takeover mechanisms
Some ideas which come to mind:
1. An AI could be very capable of predicting the stock market. It could then convince/trick/coerce a person into trading for it, making massive amounts of money, then the AI could have its proxy spend the new money to gain access to what ever the AI wants which is currently available on the market.
2. The AI could could make some program which does something incredibly cool which everyone will want to have. The program should also have the ability to communicate meaningfully with its user (this would probably count as the incredibly cool thing). This could (presumably) be achieved by the AI making copies of itself. After the program has be distributed, and assuming the AI has good social skills, it would have a lot of power via mass-manipulation.