quiet_NaN

Karma: 344

quiet_NaN Apr 20, 2024, 7:38 PM
1 point
−3
on: hydrogen tube transport
You quoted:
the vehicle can cruise at Mach 2.8 while consuming less than half the energy per passenger of a Boeing 747 at a cruise speed of Mach 0.81

This is not how Mach works. You are subsonic iff your Mach number is smaller than one. The fact that you would be supersonic if you were flying in a different medium has no bearing on your Mach number.
I would also like to point out that while hydrogen on its own is rather inert and harmless, its reputation in transportation as a gas which stays inert under all practical conditions is not entirely unblemished.
The beings travelling in the carriages are likely descendants of survivors of the Oxygen Catastrophe and will require an oxygen-containing atmosphere to survive.
Neglecting nitrogen, you have oxygen surrounded by hydrogen surrounded by oxygen. If you need to escape, you will need to pass through that atmosphere of one bar H2. There is no great way to do that, too little O2 means too little oxidation and suffocation, more O2 means that the your atmosphere is explosive. (The trick with hydrox does not work at ambient pressure.)
Contrast with a vacuum-filled tunnel. If anything goes badly wrong, you can always flood the tunnel with air over a minute, going to conditions which are as safe as a regular tunnel during an accident which is still not all that great. But being 10km up in the air is also not great if something goes wrong.
Barlow’s formula means that the material required for a vacuum tunnel scales with the diameter squared. For transporting humans, a diameter of 1m might be sufficient. At least, I would not pay 42 times as much for the privilege of travelling in a 6.5m outer diameter (i.e. 747 sized) cabin instead. Just lie there and sleep or watch TV on the overhead screen.

quiet_NaN Apr 20, 2024, 5:31 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Joel Burget’s comment on: CTMU insight: maybe consciousness *can* affect quantum outcomes?
If this was true, how could we tell? In other words, is this a testable hypothesis?
This. Physics runs on falsifiable predictions. If ‘consciousness can affect quantum outcomes’ is any more true than the classic ‘there is an invisible dragon in my garage’, then discovering that fact would seem easy from an experimentalist standpoint. Sources of quantum randomness (e.g. weak source+detector) are readily available, so any claimant who thinks they can predict or affect their outcomes could probably be tested initially for a few 100$.
General remark:
One way this could turn out to be true is if it’s a priori more likely that there are special, nonrandom portions of the quantum multiverse we’re being sampled from. For example, if we had a priori reasons for expecting that we’re in a simulation by some superintelligence trying to calculate the most likely distribution of superintelligences in foreign universes for acausal trade reasons, then we would have a priori reasons for expecting to find ourselves in Everett branches in which our civilization ends up producing some kind of superintelligence – i.e., that it’s in our logical past that our civilization ends up building some sort of superintelligence.
It is not clear to me that this would result in a lower Kolmogorov complexity at all. Such an algorithm could of course use a pseudo-random number generator for the vast majority quantum events which do not affect p(ASI) (like the creation of CMB photons), but this is orthogonal to someone nudging the relevant quantum events towards ASI. For these relevant events, I am not sure that the description “just do whatever favors ASI” is actually shorter than just the sequence of events.
I mean, if we are simulated by a Turing Machine (which is equivalent to quantum events having a low Kolmogorov complexity), then a TM which just implements the true laws of physics (and cheats with a PNRG, not like the inhabitants would ever notice) is surely simpler than one which tries to optimize towards some distant outcome state.
As an analogy, think about the Kolmogorov complexity of a transcript of a very long game of chess. If both opponents are following a simple algorithm of “determine the allowed moves, then use a PRNG to pick one of them”, that should have a bound complexity. If both are chess AIs which want to win the game (i.e. optimize towards a certain state) and use a deterministic PRNG (lest we are incompressible), the size of your Turing Machine—which /is/ the Kolmogorov complexity—just explodes.
Of course, if your goal is to build a universe which invents ASI, do you really need QM at all? Sure, some algorithms run faster in-universe on a QC, but if you cared about efficiency, you would not use so many levels of abstraction in the first place.
Look at me rambling about universe-simulating TMs. Enough, enough.

quiet_NaN Apr 16, 2024, 1:04 PM
4 points
0
on: Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian
Saliva causes cancer, but only if swallowed in small amounts over a long period of time.
(George Carlin)
For this to be a risk, the cancer risk would have to be superlinear in the acetaldehyde concentration. In a linear model, the high local concentrations would not matter overall, because the expected number of mutations you get would not depend on how you distribute the carcinogen among your body cells.
Or the cells in your mouth or throat could be especially vulnerable to cancer.
From my understanding, having bacteria in your mouth which break down sugar to ethanol is not some bizarre mad science scheme, but it is something which happens naturally, as an alternative to the lactic acid pathway, and people who never get cavities naturally lucked out on their microbiome. This in turn would mean that even among teetotaler AFR patients there should be an excess of oral cancers, and ideally an inverse correlation between number of lifetime cavities and cancer rates.
On the meta level, I find myself slightly annoyed if people use image formats to transport text, especially text like the quotes from Scott’s FAQ which could be easily copy-pasted into a quotation. Accessibility is probably less of an issue than it was 20 years ago thanks to ML, but this still does not optimize for robustness.

quiet_NaN Apr 13, 2024, 7:13 PM
37 points
0
on: Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
One thing to keep in mind is that the delta-v required to reach LEO is some 9.3km/s. (Handy map)
This is an upper limit for what delta-v can be militarily useful in ICBMs for fighting on our rock.
Going from LEO to the moon requires another 3.1km/s.
This might not seem much, but makes a huge difference in the payload to thruster ratio due to the rocket equation.
If physics were different and the moon was within reach of ICBMs then I imagine it might have become the default test site for nuclear tipped ICBMs.
Instead, the question was “do we want to develop an expensive delivery system with no military use^[1] purely as a propaganda stunt?”
Of course, ten years later, the Outer Space Treaty was signed which prohibits stationing weapons in orbit or on celestial bodies.^[2]
1. ^
  Or no military use until the moon people require nuking, at least.
2. ^
  The effect of forbidding nuking the moon is more accidental. I guess that if I were a superpower, I would be really nervous if a rival decided to put nukes into LEO where they would pass a few hundred kilometers over my cities and into them with the smallest of nudges. The fact that mankind decided to skip on a race of “who can pollute LEO most by putting most nukes there” (which would have entailed radioactive material being scattered when rockets blow up during launch (as rockets are wont to) as well as IT security considerations regarding authentication and deorbiting concerns^[3]) is one of the brighter moments in the history of our species.
3. ^
  Apart from ‘what if the nuke goes off on reentry?’ and ‘what if the radioactive material gets scattered’ there is also a case to be made that supplying a Great Old Ones with nuclear weapons may not be the wisest choice of action.

quiet_NaN Apr 12, 2024, 10:59 PM
2 points
1
in reply to: simeon_c’s comment on: simeon_c’s Shortform
I am sure that Putin had something like the Anschluss in mind when he started his invasion.
Luckily for the west, he was wrong about that.
From a Machiavellian perspective, the war in Ukraine is good for the West: for a modest investment in resources, we can bind a belligerent Russia while someone else does all the dying. From a humanitarian perspective, war is hell and we should hope for a peace where Putin gets whatever he has managed to grab while the rest of Ukraine joins NATO and will be protected by NATO nukes from further aggression.
I am also not sure that a conventional arms race is the answer to Russia. I am very doubtful that a war between a NATO member and Russia would stay a regional or conventional conflict.

quiet_NaN Apr 12, 2024, 10:27 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: “How the Gaza Health Ministry Fakes Casualty Numbers”
Anything related to the Israel/Palestine conflict is invoking politics the mind killer.
It is the hot button topic number one on the larger internet, from what I can tell.
“Either the ministry made an honest mistake or the the statistical analysis did” does not seem like the kind of statement most people will agree on.

quiet_NaN Apr 12, 2024, 10:03 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: “How the Gaza Health Ministry Fakes Casualty Numbers”
Link. (General motte content warning: this is a forum which has strong free speech norms, which disproportionally attracts people who would find it hard to voice their opinions elsewhere. On a bad day you will read five paragraphs of a comment on the war in Gaza only to realize that this is just the introduction the author’s main pet topic of holocaust denial. Also, content warning: discussion is meh.)
I am not sure it is the one I remember reading, not that I remember the discussion much. I normally read the CW thread, and vaguely remember the link going to twitter. Perhaps I misremember, or the CW post was deleted by its author, or they have changed reality again.

quiet_NaN Apr 12, 2024, 3:26 PM
2 points
0
on: Medical Roundup #2
Regarding assisted suicide, the realistic alternative in the case of the 28 year old would not be that she would live unhappily ever after. The alternative is an an unilateral suicide attempt by her.
Unilateral suicide attempts impose additional costs on society. The patient can rarely communicate their decision to anyone close to them beforehand because any confidant might have them locked up in psychiatry instead. The lack of ability to talk about any particulars with someone who knows her real identity^[1], especially their therapist, will in turn mean that plenty of patients who could be dissuaded will not be dissuaded.
There is a direct cost of suicide attempts to society. Methods vary by ease of access, lethality, painfulness and impact on bystanders. Given that society defects against them by refusing to respect their choices regarding their continued existence, some patients will reciprocate and not optimize for a lack of traumatization of bystanders. Imagine being a conductor of any kind of train spotting someone lying on the tracks and knowing that you will never stop the train in time. For their loved ones, losing someone to suicide without advance warning also is a bad outcome.
I would argue that every unilateral suicide attempt normalizes further such attempts.^[2] While I believe that suicide is part of a fundamental right, I also think that not pushing that idea to vulnerable populations (like lovesick teenagers) is probably a good thing. Reading that a 28yo was medically killed at the end of a long medical intervention process will probably normalize suicide in the mind of a teenager than reading that she jumped from a tall building somewhere.
Of course, medically assisted suicide for psychiatric conditions could also be a carrot to dangle in front of patients to incentivize them to participate in mental health interventions. Given that these interventions are somewhat effective, death would not have to be the default outcome. And working with patients who are there out of their free will is probably more effective than working with whatever fraction of patients survived their previous attempt and got committed for a week or a month. (Of course, I think it is important to communicate the outcome odds clearly beforehand: “after one year of interventions, two out of five patients no longer wanted to die, one only wanted to die some of the time and was denied, one dropped out of treatment and was denied and one was assisted in their suicide.” People need that info to make an informed choice!)
1. ^
  Realistically, I would not even bet on being able to have a frank discussion with a suicide hotline. Given that they are medical professionals, they may be required by law to try their best to prevent suicides up to and including alerting law enforcement, and phone calls are not very anonymous per default.
2. ^
  Assisted suicides would not necessarily legitimize unilateral suicide attempts. People can be willing to accept a thing when regulated by the state and still be against it otherwise. States collecting taxes does not legitimize protection rackets.

quiet_NaN Apr 12, 2024, 2:04 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Medical Roundup #2
Anecdata: I have in my freezer deep-frozen cake which has been there fore months. If it was in the fridge (and thus ready to eat) I would eat a piece every time I open the fridge. But I have no compulsion to further the unhealthy eating habits of future me, let that schmuck eat a proper meal instead!
Ice cream I eat directly from the freezer, so that effect is not there for me.

quiet_NaN Apr 12, 2024, 1:51 PM
3 points
0
on: “How the Gaza Health Ministry Fakes Casualty Numbers”
The appropriate lesswrong-adjacent-adjacent place to post this would be the culture war thread of the motte. I think a tweet making similar claims was discussed there before.
I have some hot takes on this but this is not the place for them.

quiet_NaN Apr 11, 2024, 5:31 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Lukas_Gloor’s comment on: The Poker Theory of Poker Night
Thanks, this is interesting.
From my understanding, in no-limit games, one would want to only have some fraction of ones bankroll in chips on the table, so that one can re-buy after losing an all-in bluff. (I would guess that this fraction should be determined by the Kelly criterion or something.)
On the other hand, from browsing Wikipedia, it seems like many poker tournaments prohibit or limit re-buying after going bust. This would indicate that one has limited amounts of opportunity to get familiar with the strategy of the opponents (which could very well change once the stakes change).
(Of course, Kelly is kind of brutal with regard to gambling. In a zero sum game, the average edge is zero, so at least one participant should not be playing even from an EV perspective. But even under the generous assumption that you are 50% more likely than chance to win a 50 participant elimination tournament (e.g. because a third of the participants are actively trying to lose) (so your EV is 0.5 the buy-in) Kelly tells you to wager about 1% of your bankroll. So if the buy-in is 10k$ you would have to be a millionaire.)

quiet_NaN Apr 10, 2024, 4:12 AM
0 points
−1
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection
(sorry for thread necromancy)
Meta: I kind of wonder about the moderation score of gwern’s comment. Karma −5, Agreement −10. So someone saw that comment at −4 and thought ‘this is still rated too high’.
FWIW, I do not think his comment was bad. A bit tongue in cheek, perhaps, but I think his comment engages with the subject matter of the post more deeply than the parent comment.
Or some subset of people voting on LW either really like Banana Taffy or really hate gwern, or both.

quiet_NaN Apr 10, 2024, 3:49 AM
2 points
1
on: Toward a Broader Conception of Adverse Selection
Not everyone is out to get you.
If your BATNA to winning the bid on that wheelbarrow auction is to order it for 120$ of Amazon with free overnight shipping, then winning the auction for 180$ is net negative for you.
But if your BATNA is to carry bags of sand on your back all summer, then 180$ for a wheelbarrow is a bloody bargain.
Assuming a toy model where dating preferences follow a global preference ordering (‘hotness’), then any person showing any interest in dating you is proof that you can likely do better.^[1] But if you follow that rule, you can practically never date anyone (because you are only sampling the field of partners), which leaves a lot of utility on the table because relationships can be net positive for all participants even if they do not precisely match their market values.
If you want to buy stock to make money from speculation then you need to worry that almost everyone you trade with is better informed than you and you will end up net negative. On the other hand, if you buy stock as a long term investment (tracking some index or whatever) then you probably care a lot less about overpaying one percent.
I think that Zvi mentions a few legitimate examples of things which are out to get you, and their advice to avoid ones with unlimited cost potential is certainly sound.
If I buy toilet paper in the supermarket, I am paying more than the market price. If I wanted, I could figure out what toilet paper costs in bulk, find a supplier and buy a lifetime supply of toilet paper, likely saving a few 100$ in the process. I am not doing this because these amounts of savings over a lifetime are just not worth the hassle. Instead, I trust that competition between discounters mean that their markup is less than an order of magnitude and cheerfully pay their price.
1. ^
  Don’t ask me if that is part of the reason why flirting is about avoiding the creation of common knowledge. I am just some nerd, why would I know?

quiet_NaN Apr 8, 2024, 12:38 AM
5 points
0
on: The Poker Theory of Poker Night
Poker seems nice as a hobby, but terrible as a job as discussed on the motte.
Also, if all bets were placed before the flop, the equilibrium strategy would probably be to bet along some fixed probability distribution depending on your position, the previous bets and what cards you have. Instead, the three rounds of betting after some cards are open on the table make the game much more complicated. If you know you have a winning hand, you do not want your opponent to fold, you want them to match your bet. So you kinda have to balance optimizing for the maximum pool at showdown with limiting the information you are leaking so there is a showdown. Or at least it would seem like that to me, I barely know the rules.
Role playing groups have a similar conundrum. In some way, it is even more severe because while you can have switching members of a poker night, having too many switching members in a role playing game does not work great. On the other hand, typical role players don’t have 56 things they would be rather doing. (Personally, I think having five people (DM plus four players) is ideal because you have a bit of leeway to play even if one cancels.) So far, my group manages ok without imposing penalties on players found to be absent without leave.

quiet_NaN Apr 4, 2024, 2:25 AM
2 points
1
on: How Often Does ¬Correlation ⇏ ¬Causation?
I think different people mean different things with “causation”.
On the one hand, we have things where A makes B vastly more likely. No lawyer tries to argue that while their client shot the victim in the head (A) and the victim died (B), it could still be the case that the cause of death was old age and their client was simply unlucky. This is the strictest useful definition of causation.
Things get more complicated when A is just one of many factors contributing to B. Nine (or so) of ten lung carcinoma are “caused” by smoking, we say. But for the individual smoker cancer patient, we can only give a probability that their smoking was the cause.
On the far side, on priors I find it likely that the genes which determine eye colors in humans might also influence the chance that they get depression due to a long causal chain in the human body. Perhaps blue eyed people have an extra $10^{- 6}$ or $10^{- 9}$ chance to get depression compared to green eyed people after correcting for all the confounders, or perhaps it is the other way round. So some eye colors are possibly what one might call a risk factor for depression. This would be the loosest (debatably) useful definition of causation.
For such very weak “causations”, a failure to find a significant correlation does not imply that there is no “causation”. Instead, the best we can do is say something like “The likelihood of the observed evidence in any universe where eye color increases the depression risk by more than a factor of $2.3 \times 10^{- 3}$ (or whatever) is less than one in 3.5 millions.” That is, we provide bounds instead of just saying there is no correlation.

quiet_NaN Apr 3, 2024, 5:10 PM
5 points
0
in reply to: RamblinDash’s comment on: Introducing Open Asteroid Impact
Well, I think Munroe is not thinking big enough here.
Of course, this might increase global warming in the long run because the impact crater can produce CO2 from both of the global firestorms devastating plant life and the destruction of carbonate rock in the earth mantle, but I think that this can be minimized by choosing a suitable impact location (which was not a concern for Chicxulub) and is partly offset by a decline in fossil fuel use due to indirect effects. Also, all of the tipping point factors in climate change would work to our advantage: larger polar caps reflect more light, more permafrost binds more CO2 and so on.
At the worst, climate engineering might require periodic impacts on a scale of one per decade, which seems sustainable.

quiet_NaN Apr 3, 2024, 4:51 PM
2 points
0
on: Introducing Open Asteroid Impact
All the doomers (who are mostly white male nerds who read too much scifi) complaining that large asteroid impacts could cause catastrophic climate changes are distracting from the real problem, which is that meteorite impacts TODAY are a tool of oppression used by privileged able-bodied white cis-men.
STEM people claim that there is no proof that asteroids disproportionally hit minorities, but a more compassionate analysis clearly proves them wrong.
Regarding direct impacts, it is clear that healthy men are more likely to dodge an meteorite than the malnourished, wheelchair-bound or women and children. Better health care services in Western countries can further improve the survival odds for the minority of privileged people subjected to asteroid hits, leaving disadvantaged minorities to pay the price.
Looking at https://openasteroidimpact.org/ is it clear that these are the same crowd of Silicon Valley techbros which are responsible for most of the problems in the world. They quote two deities (talk about privilege!) and a bunch of white people. Their board seems to be disproportionally White (and Asian) and male. No statement of diversity and inclusion.
I think we should therefore shame OAI and its competitors to include mechanisms to their asteroid steering which will further social and racial justice by redirecting some of the profits from the metals to disadvantaged minorities while also making sure that the impact deaths are fairly distributed between different ethnicities.

quiet_NaN Apr 3, 2024, 3:26 PM
7 points
0
on: Introducing Open Asteroid Impact
I think you are seriously underselling OAI. Asteroid impacts have the potential to solve many of the looming humanitarian and existential crisis:
- Asteroid impacts are a prime candidate to stop global warming.
- The x-risk from AI is much lower in timeline where OAI succeeds.
Basically, OAI is a magic bullet, which could enable a phase change in human technology. Global poverty will no longer be a thing. The Near East conflict will be solved. It will prevent Putin from conquering Ukraine and keep Taiwan out of the hands of China. It will end all colonialism and discrimination.

quiet_NaN Mar 27, 2024, 11:56 PM
14 points
3
on: On green
With regard to the Redwood trees, my personal thoughts as a blue person are that it is probably a bad idea to destroy something which is both rare and hard to replace (on a human timescale) without having a good reason.
If Redwood was the most common plant species by biomass, we would of course use it for lumber, or even cut down a few hundreds of them whenever we need space for a new Walmart.
Likewise archaeological sites or rare fossils. (Of course, all of that has limits. If we lived in some steampunk world where Redwood trees are the obvious thing to build moon rockets from, I would be willing to sacrifice a few of them for the Apollo missions.)
Generalized, this could be phrased as “don’t make the universe more boring”.
That being said, in terms of excitement per mole, the observable universe still has a lot of optimization potential. Let us perhaps keep Jupiter and Saturn for future generations, but Uranus and Neptune could probably be put to better use.

quiet_NaN Mar 19, 2024, 12:11 AM
3 points
−2
on: The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We’ve Tried)
The failure mode of having a lot of veto-holders is that nothing ever gets done. Which is fine if you are happy with the default state of affairs, but not so fine if you prefer not to run your state on the default budget of zero.
There are some international organizations heavily reliant on veto powers, the EU and the UN Security Council come to mind, and to a lesser degree NATO (as far as the admission of new members in concerned).
None of these are unmitigated success stories. From my understanding, getting stuff done in the EU means bribing or threatening every state who does not particularly benefit from whatever you want to do.
Likewise, getting Turkey to allow Sweden to join NATO was kind of difficult, from what I remember. Not very surprisingly, if you have to get 30 factions to agree on something, one will be likely to object for good or bad reasons.
The UN Security Council with its five veto-bearing permanent members does not even make a pretense at democratic legitimation. The three states with the biggest nuclear arsenals, plus two nuclear countries which used to be colonial powers. The nicest thing one can say about that arrangement is that it failed to start WW III, and in a few cases passed a resolution against some war criminal who did not have the backing of any of the veto powers.
I think veto powers as part of a system of checks and balances are good in moderation, but add to many of them and you end up with a stalemate.
--
I also do not think that the civil war could have been prevented by stacking the deck even more in favor of the South. Sooner or later the industrial economy in the North would have overtaken the slave economy in the South. At best, the North might have seceded in disgust, resulting in the South on track to become some rural backwater.