notfnofn

Karma: 430

notfnofn Dec 28, 2024, 3:07 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: AlphaAndOmega’s Shortform
corank has to be more than 1, not equal to 1. I’m not sure if such a matrix exists; the reason I was able to change its mind by supplying a corank-1 matrix was that its kernel behaved in a way that significantly violated its intuition.

notfnofn Dec 28, 2024, 1:25 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: AlphaAndOmega’s comment on: AlphaAndOmega’s Shortform
I similarly felt in the past that by the time computers were pareto-better than I at math, there would already be mass-layoffs. I no longer believe this to be the case at all, and have been thinking about how I should orient myself in the future. I was very fortunate to land an offer for an applied-math research job in the next few months, but my plan is to devote a lot more energy to networking + building people skills while I’m there instead of just hyperfocusing on learning the relevant fields.

o1 (standard, not pro) is still not the best at math reasoning though. I occasionally give it linear algebra lemmas that I suspect it to be able to help with, but it always has major errors. Here are some examples:
- I have a finite-dimensional real vector space $V$ equipped with a symmetric bilinear form $(\cdot, \cdot)$ which is not necessarily non-degenerate. Let $n$ be the dimension of $V$ , $K$ be the subspace of $V$ with $(K, V) = 0$ , and $k$ be the dimension of $K$ . Let $W_{1}$ and $W_{2}$ be $n + k$ dimensional real vector spaces that contain $V$ and are equipped with symmetric non-degenerate bilinear forms that extend $(\cdot, \cdot)$ . Show that there exists an isometry from $W_{1}$ to $W_{2}$ that restricts to the identity on $V$ . To its credit, it gave me some references that helped me prove this, but its argument was completely bogus.
- Let $V$ be a real finite-dimensinoal vector space equipped with a symmetric non-degenerate bilinear form $(\cdot, \cdot)$ and let $σ$ be an isometry of $V$ . Prove or disprove that the restriction of $(\cdot, \cdot)$ to the fixed-point subspace of $σ$ on $V$ is non-degenerate. (Here it sort of had the right idea but its counter-examples were never right).
- Does there exist a symmetric irreducible square matrix with diagonal entries $2$ and non-positive integer off-diagonal entries such that the corank is more than $1$ ? Here it gave a completely wrong proof of “no” and, no matter how many times I corrected its errors, kept gaslighting me into believing that the general idea must work and that it’s a standard result in the field that it follows from a book that I happened to actually have read. It kept insisting this, no matter how many times I corrected its errors, until I presented with an example of a corank-1 matrix that made it clear that its idea was unfixable.
I have a strong suspicion that o3 will be much better than o1 though.

notfnofn Dec 27, 2024, 5:48 PM
3 points
0
on: Letter from an Alien Mind
My decision to avoid satellite view is a relic from a time of conserving data (and even then it might have been a case of using salt to accelerate cooking time). I wonder if there’s a risk of using it in places where cellular data is spotty, though. I’d imagine that using satellite view would reduce the efficiency in which the application saves local map information that might be important if I make a wrong turn where there’s no data available.

notfnofn Dec 24, 2024, 9:08 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Tom Davidson’s comment on: When Is Insurance Worth It?
From the original post:
The purpose if insurance is not to help us pay for things that we literally do not have enough money to pay for. It does help in that situation, but the purpose of insurance is much broader than that. What insurance does is help us avoid large drawndowns on our accumulated wealth, in order for our wealth to gather compound interest faster.
Think about that. Even though insurance is an expected loss, it helps us earn more money in the long run. This comes back to the Kelly criterion, which teaches us that the compounding effects on wealth can make it worth paying a little up front to avoid a potential large loss later.
Click the link for a more in-depth explanation

notfnofn Dec 24, 2024, 12:04 PM
1 point
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on: Why is neuron count of human brain relevant to AI timelines?
If you are making an argument on how much compute can find an intelligent mind, you have to look at how much compute used by all of evolution.
Just to make sure I fully understand your argument, is this paraphrase correct?
“Suppose we have the compute theoretically required to simulate the human brain down to an adequate granularity for obtaining its intelligence (which might be at the level of cells instead of, say, the atomic level). Even so, one has to consider the compute required to actually build such a simulation, which could be much larger as the human brain was built by the full universe.”
(My personal view is that the opposite direction is true: it seems with recent evidence that we can pareto-exceed human intelligence while being very far from the compute required to simulate a brain. An idea I’ve seen floating around here is that natural selection built our brain randomly with a reward function that valued producing offspring so there is a lot of architecture that is irrelevant to intelligence)

notfnofn Dec 22, 2024, 11:19 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
Spotify recommended first recommended her to me in September 2023 and later that September I came across r/slatestarcodex, which was my first exposure to the rationalist community. That’s kind of funny.

notfnofn Dec 22, 2024, 9:46 PM
3 points
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in reply to: Eric Neyman’s comment on: The Story of “I Have Been A Good Bing”
Huh. Vienna Teng was my top artist, too and this is the only other spotify wrapped I’ve seen here. Is she popular in these circles?

notfnofn Dec 22, 2024, 6:40 PM
9 points
3
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Kaj’s shortform feed
Even a year ago, I would have bet extremely high odds that data analyst-type jobs would be replaced well before postdocs in math and theoretical physics. It’s wild that the reverse is plausible now

notfnofn Dec 19, 2024, 7:44 PM
25 points
5
on: When Is Insurance Worth It?
Annoying anecdote: I interviewed for an entry-level actuarial position recently and, when asked about the purpose of insurance, I responded with essentially the above argument (along the lines of increasing everyone’s log expectation, with kelly betting as a motivation). The reply I got was “that’s overcomplicated; the purpose of insurance is to let people avoid risk”.

By the way, I agree strongly with this post and have been trying to make my insurance decisions based on this philosophy over the past year.

notfnofn Dec 18, 2024, 11:41 AM
1 point
0
on: What conclusions can be drawn from a single observation about wealth in tennis?
Some ideas discussed here + in comments

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/secrets-of-the-great-families

notfnofn Dec 18, 2024, 1:49 AM
1 point
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in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: notfnofn’s Shortform
Oops, yeah the written programs are supposed to be deterministic. The point of mentioning the RNG was to handle the fact that an AI might derive its performance from a strong random number generator, which a C code can’t emulate.

notfnofn Dec 17, 2024, 2:12 PM
1 point
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in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: notfnofn’s Shortform
To clarify: we are not running any programs, just providing code. In a sense, we are competing at the task of providing descriptions for very large numbers with an upper bound on the size of the description (and the requirement that the description is computable).

notfnofn Dec 16, 2024, 5:45 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Nathan Young’s Shortform
I personally used beeminder for this (which I think originated from this community)

notfnofn Dec 16, 2024, 2:02 PM
3 points
0
on: notfnofn’s Shortform
Little thought experiment with flavors of Newcomb and Berry’s Paradox:

I have the code of an ASI in front of me, translated into C along with an oracle to a high-quality RNG. This code is N characters. I want to compete with this ASI at the task of writing a 2N-character (edit: deterministic) C code that halts and prints a very large integer. Will I always win?

Sketch of why: I can write my C code to simulate the action of the ASI on a prompt like “write a 2N-character C code that halts and prints the largest integer” using every combination of possible RNG calls and print the max + 1 or something.

Sketch of why not: The ASI can make us both lose by “intending” to print a non-halting program if it is asked to. There might be probabilistic approaches for the ASI as well, where it produces a non-halting program with some chance. If I can detect this in the simulations, I might be able to work around this and still beat the ASI.
What links here?
- notfnofn's comment on shortplav by niplav (Dec 29, 2024, 1:34 PM; 3 points)

notfnofn Dec 13, 2024, 6:59 PM
1 point
0
on: Risk Aversion and Marginal Utility
Quick note: might be easier to replace your utility function as $u (x) = 1 - e^{- λ x}$ for some parameter $λ > 0$ (which is equivalent to the one you have, after rescaling and shifting). Utility functions should be convex but this is very convex, being bounded above.

Utility functions are discussed a lot here; I think it’s worth poking around a bit.

notfnofn Dec 12, 2024, 12:44 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Refuting Searle’s wall, Putnam’s rock, and Johnson’s popcorn
I just read through the sequence. Eliezer is a fantastic writer and surprisingly well-versed in many areas, but he generally writes to convince a broad audience of his perspective. I personally prefer writing that gets into the technical weeds and focuses on convincing the reader of the plausibility of their perspective, instead of the absolute truth of it (which is why I listed Scott Aaronson’s paper first; I’ve read many of his other papers and blogs, including on the topic of free will, and really enjoy them).

notfnofn Dec 11, 2024, 6:36 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Refuting Searle’s wall, Putnam’s rock, and Johnson’s popcorn
I’m going to read https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf, https://philpapers.org/rec/PERAAA-7, and the appendix here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dkCdMWLZb5GhkR7MG/ (as well as the actual original statements of Searle’s Wall, Johnston’s popcorn, and Putnam’s rock), and when that’s eventually done I might report back here or make a new post if this thread is long dead by then

notfnofn Dec 11, 2024, 2:52 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: Refuting Searle’s wall, Putnam’s rock, and Johnson’s popcorn
Okay, let me know if this is a fair assessment:
1. Let’s consider someone meditating in a dark and mostly-sealed room with minimal sensory inputs, and they’re meditating in a way that we can agree they’re having a conscious experience. Let’s pick a 1 second window and consider the CNS and local environment of the meditator during that window.
2. (I don’t know much physics, so this might need adjustment): Let’s say we had a reasonable guess of an “initial wavefunction” of the meditator in that window. Maybe this hypothetical is unreasonable in a deep way and this deserves to be fought. But supposing it can be done, and we had a sufficiently powerful supercomputer, we could encode and simulate possible trajectories of this CNS over a one second window. CF suggests that there is a genuine conscious experience there.
3. Now let’s look at how one such simulation is encoded, which we could view as a long string of 0s and 1s. The tricky part (I think) is as follows: we have a way of understanding these 0s and 1s as particles and the process of interpreting these as states of particles is “simple”. But I can’t convert that understanding rigorously into the length of a program because all programs can do is convert one encoding into another (and presumably we’ve designed this encoding to be as straightforward-to-interpret as possible, instead of as short as possible).
4. Let’s say I have sand swirling around in a sandstorm. I likewise pick a section of this, and do something like the above to encode it as a sequence of integers in a manner that is as easy for a human to interpret as possible, and makes no effort to be compressed.
5. Now I can ask for the K-complexity of the CNS string, given the sand swirling sequence as input (i.e. the size of the smallest turing machine that prints the CNS string with the sand swirling sequence on its input tape). Divide this by the K-complexity of the CNS string. If the resulting fraction is close to zero, maybe there’s a sense in which the sand swirling sequence is really emulating the meditator’s conscious experience. But this is ratio is probably closer to 1. (By the way, the choice of using K-complexity is itself suspect, but it can be swapped with other notions of complexity.)
What I can’t seem to shake is that it seems to be fundamentally important that we have some notion of 0s and 1s encoding things in a manner that is optimally “human-friendly”. I don’t know how this can be replaced with a way that avoids needing a sentient being.

notfnofn Dec 11, 2024, 1:53 PM
1 point
0
on: My thoughts on correlation and causation
Based on your previous posts (and other posts like this), I suspect this might not get any comments explaining the downvotes. So I’ll explain the reason for my downvote, which you may find helpful:

I don’t see any ideas. You start with a really weird, hard-to-read, and I think wrong definition of a Cartesian product, but then never mention cartesian products again. You then don’t define a relation, but I’m guessing that you meant a relation to be a subset of V x V. But then your definition of dependency doesn’t make sense. We usually discuss dependency over things called “random variables” (which are not actual variables in the sense that you’re using them), and it’s hard to find a charitable interpretation of what you could possibly mean in a way that makes sense.

The next section is a bunch of vague ramblings that make no effort to be coherent. How does a relation express a law of physics? What are the variables? How the heck are you getting boundary conditions into a relation? These are not rhetorical questions: I was trying to find a charitable interpretation to make any of these concepts make sense but I couldn’t.

For future posts I think you should:
1. Take the time to properly understand the concepts you want to talk about. I don’t think you know the formal definition of what it means for a random variable X to depend on a random variable Y, and I suspect you might not even know what a random variable is.
2. Properly flesh out your ideas instead of bringing up a bunch of vague concepts and hoping the reader can flesh them out for you. Definitely don’t publish anything that has things like “what are consequences???” in there: if you’re creating a theory you should obviously be the one to define everything.
3. Make sure each line actually follows from the line before it. You can use an AI to help you here: give it your draft and ask if every line convincingly follows from the prior assumptions.

notfnofn Dec 10, 2024, 12:54 PM
1 point
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in reply to: ToasterLightning’s comment on: Stupid Question: Why am I getting consistently downvoted?
I’ve had reddit redirect here for about almost a year now (with some slip ups here and there). It’s been fantastic for my mental health.