Purplehermann

Karma: 131

Purplehermann 4 Mar 2025 9:13 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: Daniel Kokotajlo’s Shortform
Runescape would be a good one

Purplehermann 2 Mar 2025 19:27 UTC
1 point
0
on: Purplehermann’s Shortform
Bryan Johnson is getting a ton of data on biomarkers, but N=1.
How hard would it be to set up a smart home-test kit, which automatically uploads your biomarker data to an open-source database of health?
Combining that with food and exercise journaling, and we could start to get some crazy amounts of high resolution data on health
Getting health companies to offer discounts for people doing this religiously could create a virtuous cycle of more people putting up results, getting better results and therefore more people signing up for health services

Purplehermann 2 Mar 2025 18:52 UTC
3 points
5
on: Share AI Safety Ideas: Both Crazy and Not
Test driven blind development (tests by humans, AIs developing without knowing the tests unless they fail)
Don’t let AIs actually run code directly in prod, make it go through tests before it can be deployed with a certain amount of resources
Making standard gitlab pipelines (including with testing stages) to lower friction . Adding standard tests for bad faith could be a way too get ahead of this
This (TDBD) is actually going to be the best framework for development for a certain stage as AI isn’t actually reliable compared to SWEs, but will generally write more code more quickly (and perhaps better)

Purplehermann 25 Feb 2025 22:02 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
Definitely an interesting survey to run.
I don’t think the US wants to triple the population with immigrants, and $200/month would require a massive subsidy. (Internet says $1557/month average rent in US)
How many people would you have to get in your city to justify the progress?
100 Million would only be half an order of magnitude larger than Tokyo, and you’re unlikely to get enough people to fill it in the US (at nearly a third of the population, you’d need to take a lot of population from other cities)
How much do you have to subsidize living costs, and how much are you willing to subsidize?

Purplehermann 25 Feb 2025 10:05 UTC
2 points
1
on: Export Surplusses
USA is the world government from a money perspective. They can simply tax the world by printing dollars and sending them overseas.
Any lesson learned about decifits/surpluses from the US is suspect.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative /New Silk Road means owning parts of other countries is a terminal value.
Other countries mostly have net neutral imports/exports if I remember correctly.
The way you get rich in an economy is by producing more valuable things and trading for what you want and storing surplus currency (dollars at the world stage).
At times you need to give away your labor so as to start participating and get access, but you need to be getting stuff back to get richer in real terms.
No different than individuals in standard economies

Purplehermann 25 Feb 2025 7:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
Our cruxes is whether the amount of investment to build one has a positive expected return on investment, breaking down into
1. If you could populate such a city
2. Whether this is a “try everything regardless of cost” issue, given that a replacent is being developed for other reasons.
I suggest focusing on 1, as it’s pretty fundamental to your idea and easier to get traction on

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 11:00 UTC
2 points
0
on: Power Lies Trembling: a three-book review
I found the graph confusing, why one set of points is unstable/stable

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 10:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The case for the death penalty
Just notice that systems are not stable, even if you got to decide all policy in a given point in time, policy will naturally warp and people will abuse it.
If killing people, quickly etc was normal, I assume regimes would use this to stop people from unseating them. (Trump may have been killed, see the attempts to paint him as a rapist)

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 10:37 UTC
4 points
3
on: Announcement: Learning Theory Online Course
Please record this course and release the problems

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 10:26 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The case for the death penalty
Hitler
Trump—if killing people on short time lines was accepted...
Girl owes guy money, gets him killed for rape. (Her friends join in)
People who were canceled?
I could see nasty business issues, mafias using this etc—but that sounds like a novel so we’ll leave it aside

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 10:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Yair Halberstadt’s comment on: The case for the death penalty
Regardless, it doesn’t have to.

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 10:11 UTC
0 points
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on: The case for corporal punishment
Corporal vs jail is overdetermined—the former shocks and horrifies people, most people would also choose the former.
I would caution against torture. I can’t articulate the reasoning, but I feel that torture is worse/ less wholesome (for both the torturer and tortured) than pain caused by straightforward damage.
It is also less scary—the idea of being tortured without any real damage isn’t visceral the way beatings are
P.S. you should care about justice/vengeance, and in those areas I believe corporal punishment >> torture/prison

Purplehermann 24 Feb 2025 10:02 UTC
3 points
0
on: The case for the death penalty
While I find your analysis mostly correct, I’d be strongly against weakening norms against killing people through legal institutions.
I believe this would increase the value of lawfare, as instead of lengthy drawn out jail time where an enemy could pull a reversal they are simply dead.
This would worry me at the political, ideological and private levels

Purplehermann 22 Feb 2025 21:18 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
Lower/Higher risk and reward is the wrong frame.
Your proposal is high cost.
Building infrastructure is expensive. It may or may not be used, and even if used it may not be worthwhile.
R&D for VR is happening regardless, so 0 extra cost or risk.
Would you invest your own money into such a project?
“This is demonstrably false. Honestly the very fact that city rents in many 1st world countries are much higher than rural rents proves that if you reduced the rents more people would migrate to the cities.”
Sure, there is marginal demand for living in cities in general. You could even argue that there is marginal demand to live in bigger vs smaller cities.
This doesn’t change the equation: where are you getting one billion residents—all of Africa? There is no demand for a city of that size.

Purplehermann 21 Feb 2025 9:58 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Right now only low-E tier human intelligences are being discussed, they’ll be able to procreate with humans and be a minority.
Considering current human distributions and a lack of 160+ IQ people having written off sub-100 IQ populations as morally useless I doubt a new sub-population at 200+ is going to suddenly turn on humanity
If you go straight to 1000IQ or something sure, we might be like animals compared to them

Purplehermann 21 Feb 2025 9:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Your direction sounds great—but how well can $4M move the needle there? How well can genesmith move the needle with his time and energy?
I think you’re correct about the cheapest/easist strategy in general, but completely off in regards to marginal advantages.
Major labs will already be pouring massive amounts of money and human capital into direct AI alignment and using AIs to align AGI if we get to a freeze, and the further along in capabilities we get the more impactful such research would be.
Genesmith’s strategy benefits much more from starting now and has way less human talent and capital involved, hence higher marginal value

Purplehermann 20 Feb 2025 20:42 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
He already addressed this.
If somehow international cooperation gives us a pause on going full AGI or at least no ASI—what then?
Just hope it never happens, like nuke wars?
The answer now is to set later generations up to be more able.
This could mean doing fundamental research (whether in AI alignment or international game theory or something else), it could mean building institutions to enable it, and it could mean making them actually smarter.
Genes might be the cheapest/easist way to affect marginal chances given the talent already involved in alignment and the amount of resources required to get involved politically or in building institutions

Purplehermann 20 Feb 2025 20:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
A few notes on massive cities:
Cities of 10Ms exist, there is always some difficulty in scaling, but scaling 1.5-2 OOMs doesn’t seem like it would be impossible to figure out if particularly motivated.
China and other countries have built large cities and then failed to populate them
The max population you wrote (1.6B) is bigger than china, bigger than Africa, similar to both American Continents plus Europe .
Which is part of why no one really wants to build something so big, especially not at once.
Everything is opportunity cost, and the question of alternate routes matters alot in deciding to pursue something. Throwing everything and the kitchen sink at something costs a lot of resources.
Given that VR development is currently underway regardless, starting this resource intense project which may be made obsolete by the time it’s done is an expected waste of resources. If VR hit a real wall that might change things (though see above).
If this giga-city would be expected to 1000x tech progress or something crazy then sure, waste some resources to make extra sure it happens sooner rather than later.
Tl;dr:
Probably wouldn’t work, there’s no demand, very expensive, VR is being developed and would actually be able to say what you’re hoping but even better

Purplehermann 20 Feb 2025 16:56 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: samuelshadrach’s comment on: xpostah’s Shortform
Vr might be cheaper

Purplehermann 20 Feb 2025 8:27 UTC
9 points
0
on: How to Make Superbabies
Have you thought about how to get the data yourself?
Perhaps offering payment to people willing to get iq tested and give a genetic sample, and paying more for higher scores on the test?
I understand that money is an issue, but as long as you’re raising this seems like an area you could plug infinite money into and get returns