Pretentious Penguin

Karma: 98

Pretentious Penguin Feb 20, 2025, 3:42 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
It should be noted that the psychologists and anthropologists in the above tables were not selected based on winning a Nobel prize, nor any prize. On pages 51-52 of The Making of a Scientist Roe writes
For the psychologists the preliminary list was made up by me in consultation, separately, with Dr. E. G. Boring and Dr. David Shakow. We simply went over the membership list of the American Psychological Association and put down everyone we knew to be actively engaged in research and otherwise qualified. This preliminary list was then rated, in the usual fashion, by Dr. Boring, of Harvard University, [...]
and then lists a bunch of other professors involved in rating the list, and “the men who ranked at the top were selected, with some adjustment so as to include representatives of different sorts of psychology.”
(Incidentally, I wonder whether Professor Boring’s lectures lived up to his name.)

Pretentious Penguin Feb 20, 2025, 4:10 AM
6 points
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on: How to Make Superbabies
Nobel prize winners (especially those in math and sciences) tend to have IQs significantly above the population average.
There is no Nobel prize in math. And the word “especially” would imply that there exists data on the IQs of Nobel laureates in literature and peace which shows a weaker trend than the trend for sciences laureates; has anybody ever managed to convince a bunch of literature Nobel laureates to take IQ tests? I can’t find anything by Googling, and I’m skeptical.
To be clear, the general claim that people who win prestigious STEM awards have above-average IQs is obviously true.

Pretentious Penguin Jan 18, 2025, 8:36 PM
1 point
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on: Chance is in the Map, not the Territory
The title of this post was effectively clickbait for me, since my primary thought in clicking on it was “I wonder what claim the post will make about the foundations of quantum mechanics”, but then I discovered this topic is relegated to a follow-up post. Maybe “Chance is in the map, not the (classical) territory” or “Chance is in the map, not the territory: Part 1” would’ve been better titles?

Pretentious Penguin Jan 17, 2025, 12:57 AM
1 point
1
in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: Is “VNM-agent” one of several options, for what minds can grow up into?
So would it be accurate to say that a preference over lotteries (where each lottery involves only real-valued probabilities) satisfies the axioms of the VNM theorem (except for the Archimedean property) if and only if that preference is equivalent to maximizing the expectation value of a surreal-valued utility function?

Re the parent example, I agree that changing in an expectable way is problematic to rational optimizing, but I think “what kind of agent am I happy about being?” is a distinct question from “what kinds of agents exist among minds in the world?”.

Pretentious Penguin Jan 17, 2025, 12:38 AM
1 point
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on: Remap your caps lock key
If you’re on macOS and still want caps lock to be accessible for the rare occasions when you want it, you can use Karabiner-Elements to swap the caps lock key and the escape key.

Pretentious Penguin Jan 9, 2025, 8:11 PM
4 points
1
in reply to: ProgramCrafter’s comment on: Is “VNM-agent” one of several options, for what minds can grow up into?
What is the precise statement for being able to use surreal numbers when we remove the Archimedean axiom? The surreal version of the VNM representation theorem in “Surreal Decisions” (https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.00862) seems to still have a surreal version of the Archimedean axiom.

Re the parent example, I was imagining that the 2-priority utility function for the parent only applied after they already had children, and that their utility function before having children is able to trade off between not having children, having some who live, and having some who die. Anecdotally it seems a lot of new parents experience diachronic inconsistency in their preferences.

Pretentious Penguin Dec 31, 2024, 5:29 PM
6 points
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on: Is “VNM-agent” one of several options, for what minds can grow up into?
It seems to me that the “continuity/Archimedean” property is the least intuitively necessary of the four axioms of the VNM utility theorem. One way of specifying preferences over lotteries that still obeys the other three axioms is assigning to each possible world two real numbers $U_{1}$ and $U_{2}$ instead of one, where $U_{1}$ is a “top priority” and $U_{2}$ is a “secondary priority”. If two lotteries have different $⟨ U_{1} ⟩$ , the one with greater $⟨ U_{1} ⟩$ is ranked higher, and $⟨ U_{2} ⟩$ is used as a tie-breaker. One possible real-world example (with integer-valued $U_{1}$ for deterministic outcomes) would be a parent whose top priority is minimizing the number of their children who die within the parent’s lifetime, with the rest of their utility function being secondary.
I’d be interested in whether there exist any preferences over lotteries quantifying our intuitive understanding of risk aversion while still obeying the other three axioms of the VNM theorem. I spent about an hour trying to construct an example without success, and suspect it might be impossible.

Pretentious Penguin Dec 21, 2024, 4:00 PM
2 points
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on: When Is Insurance Worth It?
It seems to me that another common and valid reason for insurance is if your utility is a nonlinear function of your wealth, but the insurance company values wealth linearly on the margin. E.g. for life insurance, the marginal value of a dollar for your kids after you die so that they can have food and housing and such is much higher than the marginal value of a dollar paid in premiums while you’re working.

Pretentious Penguin Aug 21, 2024, 5:13 PM
1 point
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on: LLM Applications I Want To See
If you wanted to learn that there was a new deadly epidemic in China, you’d have to expose yourself to a lot of content most people would rather not see.
I don’t think this claim as written is true. I learned of COVID-19 for the first time from BBC News on New Years’ Eve 2019 and followed the course of the pandemic obsessively in January/February on BBC News and some academic website whose name I’ve forgotten (I think it was affiliated with the University of Washington?) without ever going on 4chan or other similar forums.

Pretentious Penguin Jun 8, 2024, 2:15 AM
5 points
2
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Book review: The Quincunx
Maybe instead narrating posts automatically when published, the poster could be shown a message like “Do you want to narrate this post right now? Once narrated, the audio cannot be changed.” And if they say no then there’s a button they can press to narrate it later (e.g. after editing). And maybe you could charge $1 if people want to change the audio after accepting their one free narration?

Pretentious Penguin Jun 4, 2024, 6:41 PM
2 points
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on: in defense of Linus Pauling
quinoa or “raw water” or burnt food or fad diets
What’s wrong with quinoa?

Pretentious Penguin Apr 12, 2024, 8:16 PM
1 point
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in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Ackshually, many worlds is wrong
Hmmm, I think there’s still some linguistic confusion remaining. While we certainly need to invent new mathematics to describe quantum field theory, are you making the stronger claim that there’s something “non-native” about the way that wavefunctions in non-relativistic quantum mechanics are described using functional analysis? Especially since a lot of modern functional analysis theory was motivated by quantum mechanics, I don’t see how a new branch of math could describe wavefunctions more natively.

Pretentious Penguin Apr 12, 2024, 8:10 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Ackshually, many worlds is wrong
I was assigned this reading for a class once but only skimmed it—now I wish I’d read it more closely!

Pretentious Penguin Apr 12, 2024, 6:51 PM
1 point
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in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Ackshually, many worlds is wrong
Okay, so by “wavefunction as a classical mathematical object” you mean a vector in Hilbert space? In that case, what do you mean by the adjective “classical”?

Pretentious Penguin Apr 12, 2024, 4:46 AM
1 point
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in reply to: tailcalled’s comment on: Ackshually, many worlds is wrong
Why do you speak of deterministic, stochastic, and quantum as three options for a fundamental ontology? In the absence of a measurement/collapse postulate, quantum mechanics is a deterministic theory, and with a collapse postulate, it’s a stochastic theory in the sense that the state of the system evolves deterministically except for instantaneous stochastic jumps when “measurements” occur.

Also, what do you mean by “the wavefunction as a classical mathematical object”?

Pretentious Penguin Apr 12, 2024, 4:29 AM
2 points
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in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Ackshually, many worlds is wrong
Where could I find the proof that “as quantum amplitude of a piece of the wavefunction goes to zero, the probability that I will ‘find myself’ in that piece also goes to zero” is equivalent to the Born rule?

Pretentious Penguin Apr 8, 2024, 9:06 PM
1 point
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in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
This might be the closest thing to such a list: https://www.goodtheorist.science/

Pretentious Penguin Apr 8, 2024, 9:52 AM
2 points
1
in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: The 2nd Demographic Transition
The entirety of Japanese society, government, politics, economy, etc, changed dramatically beginning in the late 1940’s, in a rather sudden way largely due to the influence of a foreign power. Thus I think that the fact that formal legal equality for women in Japan began in the late 40’s, and Japan’s fertility rate decline also began in the late 40’s, provides extremely little information on the relationship between gender equality and fertility in developed countries. Edit: Thomas Kwa already said basically the same thing, I just didn’t see his comment when I wrote mine.

Pretentious Penguin Apr 7, 2024, 8:33 PM
2 points
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in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: The 2nd Demographic Transition
Is it still true that “more gender egalitarian countries have lower fertility rates” if you only include industrialized / wealthy countries? Thinking off the top of my head, some of the least gender egalitarian OECD countries, South Korea and Japan, also have some of the lowest fertility rates.

An Affordable CO2 Monitor

Pretentious PenguinMar 21, 2024, 3:06 AM

28 points

1 comment1 min readLW link

Pretentious Penguin

An Afford­able CO2 Monitor

An Affordable CO2 Monitor