quiet_NaN

Karma: 344

quiet_NaN Jan 21, 2024, 4:57 PM
29 points
10
in reply to: metachirality’s comment on: There is way too much serendipity
You are correct. If one estimates that one requires a milliliter of that 0.5% saccharine solution from that paper cited above to detect the sweetness, that would come around to 50mg of sugar. If neotame is 6000 times more potent, that would mean about 800ng. Even if we switch from VX to the more potent botulinum toxin A, we would need a whole whopping microgram per kilogram orally, so perhaps a 100x more than what we need for neotame. (If we change the route of administration to IV, then botox will easily win, of course.)
Of course, this is highly dependent on the ratio of saliva in the mouth (which will dilute the sweetener) to the weight of the organism (which will affect the toxin dose needed). I don’t think this ratio will change overly much when going to elephants or mice, though.
In a way, this should be unsurprising. Both the taste molecule and the neurotoxin interact with very specific receptor molecules. Only in one case, the animal evolved to cooperate with the molecule (by putting the receptors directly on the tongue) while in the other case the evolutionary pressure was very much not to allow random molecules from the environment access to the synapses.

quiet_NaN Dec 23, 2023, 2:22 AM
18 points
5
on: Pseudonymity and Accusations
I think there are a few corner cases which it is worthwhile to consider:
- A whistleblower providing objective evidence of wrongdoing. Here, the accused should just respond to the evidence, not the messenger.
- A case relying entirely on the testimonial of the accuser. Here, the credibility of the accuse depend entirely on the reliability of the accuser. The accuser has every right to confidentially talk to trusted third parties about their accusations. But once the accusations are made public to be judged either by a court of law or the court of public opinion, the public also deserves to know from whom the accusations come and judge their reliability as a witness.
Of course, in the real world, it is often a mix of the two. Just about any evidence a source might hand to an investigator could be faked, or even just taken out of context, so the investigator has to trust their source to some degree.
I am sure that the US would have loved to have wikileaks reveal their source for the collateral murder video just to make sure that that person actually had a security clearance, they would not want wikileaks being taken for a hike by some enemy psyop with video editing software. In that case, revealing the source would be silly.
On the other hand, in a they said / they said situation, things differ. If X is anonymously accused by someone who can only provide their own testimony, I think that we should not update from that more than infinitesimally. If the anonymous accuser convinced an investigator who will provide their own name, that is a bit better, but still not much, because we would not only have to trust that the investigator is truthful, but also that his character judgement is sound.
TL;DR: provide evidence, testify on record or shut up (in public).

quiet_NaN Dec 21, 2023, 7:04 PM
−1 points
0
on: Legalize butanol?
You might think these are safe because they’re used in eg some paint solvents, but no, they’re somewhat toxic.
Personally, I would not update towards “substance X is safe for recreational human consumption” from learning that is used as a paint solvent. But then again I never had the urge to drink paint solvent, so I might be atypical.
(Also, I assume that the solvents evaporate while the paint dries, so the health and safety problem should be confined to the wet paint. Of course, details are likely to depend on a lot of specifics. Probably not appropriate for fingerpaint, at least.)

quiet_NaN Dec 14, 2023, 6:46 PM
8 points
6
on: Has anyone here investigated the occult community? It is curious to me that many magicians consider themselves empiricists.
The problem is that naive empiricism is not good enough for most non-trivial practical applications.
(Where a trivial application would be figuring out that a hammer makes a sound when you bash it against a piece of wood, which will virtually always happen assuming certain standard conditions.)
For another example of this failure mode, look at the history of medicine. At least some of the practitioners there were clearly empiricists, otherwise it seems very unlikely that they would have settled on willow bark (which contains salicylic acid). But plenty of other treatments are today recognized as actively harmful. This is because empiricism and good intentions are not enough to do medical statistics successfully.
Look at the replication crisis for another data point: Even being part of a tradition ostensibly based on experimental rigor is not enough to halfway consistently arrive at the truth.
If you are testing the hypothesis “I am a wizard” versus the null hypothesis “I am a muggle”, it is likely that the former is much preferable to the experimenter than the latter. This means that they will be affected by all sorts of cognitive biases (as being an impartial experimenter was not much selected for in the ancestral environment) which they are unlikely to even know (unless they have Read The Sequences or something alike).
If it comes to testing oneself for subtle magic abilities, it would take a knowledgeable and rigorous rationalist to do that correctly. I certainly would not trust myself to do it. (Of course, most rationalists would also be likely to reject the magic hypothesis on priors.)

quiet_NaN Dec 2, 2023, 4:00 PM
6 points
4
on: Thoughts on “AI is easy to control” by Pope & Belrose
What I do not get is how this disagreement on p(doom) leads to different policy proposals.
If ASI has a 99% probability of killing us all, it is the greatest x-risk we face today and we should obviously be willing to postpone ASI, and possibly singularity (to the extend that in the far future, the diameter of the region of space we colonize at any given time will be a few 100 light years less than what it would be if we focused just on capabilities now).
If ASI has a 1% probability of killing us all, it is still the (debatably) greatest x-risk we face today and we should obviously be willing to postpone ASI etcetera.
To persuade that ASI is safe, one would either not have to care about the far future (for an individual alive today, a 99% of chance of living in a Culture-esque utopia would probably be worth a 1% risk of dying slightly earlier) or provide a much lower p(doom) (e.g. “p(doom)=1e-20, all the x-risk comes from god / the simulators destroying the universe once humans develop ASI, and spending a few centuries on theological research is unlikely to change that” would recommend “just build the damn thing” as a strategy.)

quiet_NaN Dec 2, 2023, 3:34 PM
2 points
0
on: Kolmogorov Complexity Lays Bare the Soul
First off, the most important practical property of the Kolmogorov complexity is that it is not computable. This means that there is no general algorithm to determine what is the shortest computer program to generate a given output. (The crux is that you can not run all programs below a certain length to see if any of them will generate that output, because some of these programs will run forever, while others might run for an non-computable long time and eventually print that output and terminate.)
This is the reason why we have myriads of heuristic compression algorithms instead of just using Kolmogorov compression, which would yield the best possible results.
It is also completely unique, being the shortest possible string.
No, there can be more than one such string.
Even leaving issues of quantum physics aside, macroscopic physical objects like humans are unlikely to be very compressible (information-wise, that is). The author might feel that the number of lead atoms in their 36 molar tooth is not part of their Kolmogorov string, but I would argue that is is certainly part of a complete description.
Humans are not the product of running some simple starting conditions in some deterministic cellular automaton, but shaped by a chaotic environment full of probabilistic interactions. Mess not math, if you will.
In practice, that fine level of detail is not actually what I care about. Just like I listen to lossy compressed music, I would be fine with being uploaded into a somewhat lossy representation of myself where I don’t have any lead atoms in my teeth.

quiet_NaN Nov 23, 2023, 12:23 PM
12 points
4
on: So you want to save the world? An account in paladinhood
Yes, having a general principle of being kind to others is downstream of that, because a paladin who is known to be kind and helpful will tend to have more resources to save the world with.
Well, instrumental convergence is a thing. If there is a certain sweet spot for kindness with regard to resource gain, I would expect the paladin, the sellsword and the hellknight all to arrive at similar kindness levels.
There is a spectrum between pure deontology and pure utilitarianism. I agree with the author and EY that pure utilitarianism is not suitable for humans. In my opinion, one failure mode of pure deontology is refusing to fight evil in any not totally inefficient way, while one failure mode of pure utilitarianism is to lose sight of the main goal while focusing on some instrumental subgoal.
Of course, in traditional D&D, paladins are generally characterized as deontological sticklers for their rules (“lawful stupid”).
Let’s say you’re concerned about animal suffering. You should realize that what is gonna have the most impact on how much animal suffering the future will contain is, by far, determined by what kind of AI is the one that inevitably takes over the world, and then you should decide to work on something which impacts what kind of AI is the AI that inevitably takes over the world.
If ASI comes along, I expect that animal suffering will no longer be a big concern. Economic practices which cause animal suffering tend to decline in importance as we get to higher tech levels. The plow may be pulled by the oxen, but no sensible spaceship engine will ever run on puppy torture. This leaves the following possibilities:
* An ASI which is orthogonal to animal (including human) welfare. It will simply turn the animals to something more useful to its goals, thereby ending animal suffering.
* An ASI which is somewhat aligned to human interests. This could probably result in mankind increasing the total number of pets and wild animals by orders of magnitudes for human reasons. But even today, only a small minority of humans prefers to actively hurt animals for their own sake. Even if we do not get around to fixing pain for some reason, the expected suffering per animal will not be more than what we consider acceptable today. (Few people advocate extincting any wild species because they just suffer too much.)
* An ASI whose end goal is to cause animal suffering. I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, But With Puppies. This is basically a null set of all the possible ASIs. I concede that we might create a human torturing ASI if we mess up alignment badly enough by making a sign error or whatever, but even that seems like a remote possibility.
So if ones goal is to minimize the harm per animal conditional on it existing, and one believes that ASI is within reach, the correct focus would seem to be to ignore alignment and focus on capabilities. Either you end up with a paperclip maximizer who is certain to reduce non-human animal suffering as compared to our current world of factory farming within a decade, or you end up with a friendly AI which will get rid of factory farming because it upsets some humans (and is terribly inefficient for food production).
Of course, if you care about the total number of net-happy animals, and species not going extinct and all of that, then alignment will start to matter.

quiet_NaN Oct 29, 2023, 12:25 PM
5 points
0
on: Wireheading and misalignment by composition on NetHack
The agent is asked to get near a character named “the oracle”, which typically appears in later levels of the game, that can only be reached with significant exploration and survival efforts.
The oracle resides in a level between five and nine. I guess for a starting player that could be called a deeper level, but in the grand scheme of things (nethack having 45-53 dungeon levels) it is still quite near the surface.
Also, you are very unlikely to hallucinate being next to the oracle, there are about 385 monster types in the game (plus you can hallucinate some fictional ones, like Luggage). To get to a 30% chance to hallucinate the oracle, you would have to spend around 137 turns next to a monster. Unless that monster happens to be your pet, that is not very survivable for a level one character. (And pets move away from you and are faster than the player character, so you would spend some of your 200 turns of hallucination of chasing it.)
Or does the oracle condition only check for the symbol of the oracle (@, which includes some 80 monsters)? In that case, I would assume that the easiest way to fulfill the condition is to stand next to a shopkeeper on level 2 or 3.
We found that agents that optimize Motif’s intrinsic reward function exhibit behaviors that are quite aligned with human’s intuitions on how to play NetHack: they are attracted to explorative actions and play quite conservatively, getting experience and only venturing deeper into the game when it is safe
“Safe” is a very relative term in nethack. While exploring a level before going down to the next one is obviously a good idea (unless you are doing a speed run), nutrition conditions prevent players from staying on level 1 indefinitely: eating the odd goblin or lichen corpse are not enough to prevent starvation.

quiet_NaN Oct 20, 2023, 12:06 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Yudhister Kumar’s comment on: Hyperreals in a Nutshell
Sorry, I was quoting the only parts of the sentence.
What I meant was that I would change
Conversely, if I∉U, this implies that N/I∈U, which means that a, b disagree at almost all positions, so they probably shouldn’t be equal.
to
Conversely, if I∉U, this implies that N $∖$ I∈U, which means that a, b disagree at almost all positions, so they probably shouldn’t be equal.

quiet_NaN Oct 18, 2023, 1:37 AM
2 points
0
on: Hyperreals in a Nutshell
Some random thoughts.
First, it would be nice if one could go from rationals to hyperreals directly without having to define the reals in between (especially for people with limit allergies, as the reals are sometimes defined as limits of Cauchy sequences). I don’t see a straightforward way to do so though, you can hardly allow people to encode their reals as sequences of rationals, otherwise the $(1 / n)$ sequence would have to be equivalent to zero instead of an infinitesimal.
Also, one could split the hyperreals into equivalence classes within which the Archimedian property holds. Using the big-O adjacent notation, the reals would be $Θ (1)$ , and the hyperreal called $Ω$ above would be $Θ (n)$ . Stretching the big-O notation, one could call the equivalence class of $ϵ$ something like $Θ (1 / n)$ . So one has a rather large zoo of these equivalence classes. This would imply that there is no Archimedian equivalence class for the smallest infinite hyperreal. If a hyperreal $Θ (f (n))$ is infinite (that is, $f (n)$ diverges), then $Θ (l n (f (n))$ is a smaller infinite hyperreal.
I am well used to there being no biggest infinity, but there being no smallest infinity would indicate that these things are neither equivalent to cardinals nor ordinals.

quiet_NaN Oct 18, 2023, 12:40 AM
1 point
0
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: Hyperreals in a Nutshell
Thanks, this is helpful to point out.
Of course, this makes all of this rather abstract. It looks to me like for almost any two hyperreals (e.g. a, b as above), the answer to “which of them is larger?” is “It depends on the ultrafilter. Also, I can not tell you if a set is part of any specific ultrafilter. But fear not, for any given ultrafilter, the hyperreals are well-ordered.”
Basically for any usable theorem, one would have to prove that the result is independent of the actual ultrafilter used, which means that numbers such as a and b will probably not feature in them a lot.
I can not fault my analysis 1 professor for opting to stick to the reals (abstract as they are already are) instead.

quiet_NaN Oct 17, 2023, 11:04 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Valdes’s comment on: Hyperreals in a Nutshell
Furthermore after
Conversely, if I∉U,this implies that the complement of I
the slash is used for the setminus operation. I think using \setminus there (which generates a backslash) would be a more standard notation less likely to be mistaken for quotient structures.

quiet_NaN Oct 2, 2023, 3:06 AM
4 points
0
on: Sum-threshold attacks
Here’s how you can make the sum large without Bob noticing: just add a small amount to each coordinate, like $v_{i}^{'} = v_{i} + 1$ . Then Bob could attribute each coordinate’s offset to noise, and you’ve made the sum of $v_{i}^{'}$ greater by 100.
This would assume that either Bob is unaware that an attack might be happening, or that he can’t be bothered to do statistical analysis on his vector.
If the original value (without the noise chosen by Alice) is non-obvious to the attacker, but obvious to Bob (e.g., they use redundancy and encryption—it is a well known fact that Alice and Bob like cryptography), and the magnitude of the noise is common knowledge, then all attempts to modify the message will, on average, increase the standard deviation of the noise as measured by Bob. If my math is right, the attacker could modify each value by about half the width of the noise and end up with an expected $χ^{2}$ sum of 112 instead of 100, which will probably not be suspicious to Bob.
If Bob has an idea of the attackers objective, detecting tampering will get much easier. If Bob suspects that the attacker wants a huge sum, he can just calculate the sum of the noise terms and compare that to the expected distribution. Then any deniable tampering would have to be within expected random fluctuations. (Of course, for every vector, there is some base in which it looks very suspicious.)
Often, we have an idea what the objective of an adversary using a sum-threshold attack might be. There is more utility in influencing who get’s to be president of a country than in influencing who will become the tenth-ranking janitor in their residence. Some bosses would like to pressure their employees into having sex, few if any want to condition them to speak sentences with a prime number of syllables.