Razied

Karma: 1,944

Razied Dec 20, 2023, 10:49 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Liron’s comment on: Goal-Completeness is like Turing-Completeness for AGI
E.g. I claim humans are goal-complete General Intelligences because you can give us any goal-specification and we’ll very often be able to steer the future closer toward it.
If you’re thinking of “goals” as easily specified natural-language things, then I agree with you, but the point is that turing-completeness is a rigorously defined concept, and if you want to get the same level of rigour for “goal-completeness”, then most goals will be of the form “atom 1 is a location x, atom 2 is at location y, …” for all atoms in the universe. And when averaged across all such goals, literally just acting randomly performs as well as a human or a monkey trying their best to achieve the goal.

Razied Dec 20, 2023, 10:35 PM
12 points
0
on: Goal-Completeness is like Turing-Completeness for AGI
Goal-completeness doesn’t make much sense as a rigorous concept because of No-Free-Lunch theorems in optimisation. A goal is essentially a specification of a function to optimise, and all optimisation algorithms perform equally well (or rather poorly) when averaged across all functions.
There is no system that can take in an arbitrary goal specification (which is, say, a subset of the state space of the universe) and achieve that goal on average better than any other such system. My stupid random action generator is equally as bad as the superintelligence when averaged across all goals. Most goals are incredibly noisy, the ones that we care about form a tiny subset of the space of all goals, and any progress in AI we make is really about biasing our models to be good on the goals we care about.

Razied Dec 19, 2023, 9:12 PM
9 points
14
on: Monthly Roundup #13: December 2023
Zvi, you continue to be literally the best news aggregator on the planet for the stuff that I actually care about. Really, thanks a lot for doing this, it’s incredibly valuable to me.

Razied Dec 12, 2023, 4:37 PM
3 points
1
on: The likely first longevity drug is based on sketchy science. This is bad for science and bad for longevity.
Wouldn’t lowering igf-1 also lead to really shity quality of life from lower muscle mass and much longer recovery times from injury?

Razied Dec 6, 2023, 3:53 PM
50 points
28
on: Why Yudkowsky is wrong about “covalently bonded equivalents of biology”
The proteins themselves are primarily covalent, but a quick google search says that the forces in the lipid layer surrounding cells are primarily non-covalent, and the forces between cells seem also non-covalent. Aren’t those forces the ones we should be worrying about?
It seems like Eliezer is saying “the human body is a sand-castle, what if we made it a pure crystal block?”, and you’re responding with “but individual grains of sand are very strong!”

Razied Nov 14, 2023, 11:42 PM
2 points
0
on: SIA Is Just Being a Bayesian About the Fact That One Exists
But perhaps the bigger reason is that I find SIA intuitively extremely obvious. It’s just what you get when you apply Bayesian reasoning to the fact that you exist.
Correct, except for the fact that you’re failing to consider the possibility that you might not exist at all...
My entire uncertainty in anthropic reasoning is bound up in the degree to which an “observer” is at all a coherent concept.

Razied Oct 13, 2023, 9:52 PM
17 points
12
in reply to: Ben’s comment on: How can the world handle the HAMAS situation?
And my guess is that is how Hamas see and bill themselves.
And your guess would be completely, hopelessly wrong. There is an actual document called “The Covenant of Hamas” written in 1988 and updated in 2017, which you can read here, it starts with
Praise be to Allah, the Lord of all worlds. May the peace and blessings of Allah be upon Muhammad, the Master of Messengers and the Leader of the mujahidin, and upon his household and all his companions.
… so, uh, not a good start for the “not religious” thing. It continues:
1. The Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” is a Palestinian Islamic national liberation and resistance movement. Its goal is to liberate Palestine and confront the Zionist project. Its frame of reference is Islam, which determines its principles, objectives and means.
In the document they really seem to want to clarify at every opportunity that yes, indeed they are religious at the most basic level, and that religion impacts every single aspect of their decision-making. I strongly recommend that everyone here read the whole thing, just to see what it really means to take your religion seriously.

The 2017 version has been cleaned up, but in the 1988 covenant you also had this gem:

> The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: ‘O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.’ (Article 7)

>The HAMAS regards itself the spearhead and the vanguard of the circle of struggle against World Zionism… Islamic groups all over the Arab world should also do the same, since they are best equipped for their future role in the fight against the warmongering Jews.′

Razied Oct 13, 2023, 3:24 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: Max Chaplin’s comment on: How can the world handle the HAMAS situation?
It is important that Gazans won’t feel like their culture is being erased.
A new education curriculum is developed which fuses western education, progressive values and Muslim tradition while discouraging political violence.
These two things are incompatible. Their culture is the entire problem. To get a sense of the sheer vastness of the gap, consider the fact that Arabs read on average 6 pages per year. It would take a superintelligence to somehow convince the palestinians to embrace western thought and values while not feeling like their culture is being erased.

Razied Oct 10, 2023, 1:55 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: gbear605’s comment on: NYT on the Manifest forecasting conference
Oh, true! I was going to reply that since probability is just a function of a physical system, and the physical system is continuous, then probability is continuous… but if you change an integer variable in C from 35 to 5343 or whatever, there’s no real sense in which the variable goes through all intermediate values, even if the laws of physics are continuous.

Razied Oct 9, 2023, 11:17 PM
12 points
6
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: NYT on the Manifest forecasting conference
If he’s ever attended an event which started out with less than a 28% chance of orgy, which then went on to have an orgy, then that statement is false by the Intermediate Value Theorem, since there would have been an instant in time where the probability of the event crossed 28%.

Razied Sep 28, 2023, 12:40 AM
23 points
14
on: Petrov Day [Spoiler Warning]
The most basic rationalist precept is to not forcibly impose your values onto another mind.
What? How does that make any sense at all? The most basic precept of rationality is to take actions which achieve future world states that rank highly under your preference ordering. Being less wrong, more right, being bayesian, saving the world, not imposing your values on others, etc. are all deductions that follow from that most basic principle: Act and Think Such That You Win.

Razied Sep 27, 2023, 7:11 PM
8 points
2
on: Bariatric surgery seems like a no-brainer for most morbidly obese people
Wait, do lesswrongers not know about semaglutide and tirzepatide yet? Why would anyone do something as extreme as bariatric surgery when tirzepatide patients lose pretty much the same amount of weight after a year as with the surgery?

Razied Aug 1, 2023, 7:04 PM
5 points
1
in reply to: Rosencrantz ’s comment on: Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning
But if you are right that you only respond to a limited set of story types, do you therefore aspire to opening yourself to different ones in future, or is your conclusion that you just want to stick to films with ‘man becomes strong’ character arcs?
Not especially, for the same reason that I don’t plan on starting to eat 90% dark chocolate to learn to like it, even if other people like it (and I can even appreciate that it has a few health benefits). I certainly am not saying that only movies that appeal to me be made, I’m happy that Barbie exists and that other people like it, but I’ll keep reading my male-protagonist progression fantasies on RoyalRoad.
Greta Gerwig obviously thinks so: when she says: “I think equally men have held themselves to just outrageous standards that no one can meet. And they have their own set of contradictions where they’re walking a tightrope. I think that’s something that’s universal.”
I have a profound sense of disgust and recoil when someone tells me to lower my standards about myself. Whenever I hear something like “it’s ok, you don’t need to improve, just be yourself, you’re enough”, I react strongly, because That Way Lay Weakness. I don’t have problems valuing myself, and I’m very good at appreciating my achievements, so that self-acceptance message is generally not properly aimed at me, it would be an overcorrection if I took that message even more to heart than I do right now.

Razied Aug 1, 2023, 6:22 PM
11 points
0
on: Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning
I watched Barbie and absolutely hated it. Though it did provide some value to me after I spent some time thinking about why precisely I hated it. Barbie really showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male-appealing story is “Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong”. I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough (evidence: most isekai stories), if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I’m not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it’s something like “Woman thinks she’s not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect”. And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think the women in my life seemed to enjoy it. But that archetype just doesn’t resonate with me at all.
The apparent end-point for the Kens in the movie is that they “find themselves”. This was (to me) a clear misunderstanding by the female authors of what the masculine instinct is like. Men don’t “find themselves”, they decide who they want to be and work towards climbing out of their pitiful initial states. (There was also the weird Ken obsession with horses, which are mostly a female-only thing)

Razied Jul 26, 2023, 11:41 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread—July 2023
I’m fairly sure that there’s architectures where each layer is a linear function of the concatenated activations of all previous layers, though I can’t seem to find it right now. If you add possible sparsity to that, then I think you get a fully general DAG.

Razied Jul 26, 2023, 2:44 PM
4 points
0
on: The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
Their paper for the sample preparation (here) has a trademark sign next to the “LK-99” name, which suggests they’ve trademarked it… strongly suggesting that the authors actually believe in their stuff.

Razied Jul 23, 2023, 11:41 PM
14 points
9
on: Please speak unpredictably
There are a whole bunch of ways that trying to optimise for unpredictability is not a good idea:
1. Most often technical discussions are not just exposition dumps, they’re a part of the creative process itself. Me telling you an idea is an essential part of my coming up with the idea. I essentially don’t know where I’m going before I get there, so it’s impossible for me to optimise for unpredictability on your end.
2. This ignores a whoooole bunch of status-effects and other goals of human conversation. The point of conversation is not solely to transmit information. In real life information-transfer is a minuscule part of most conversations: try telling your girlfriend to “speak unpredictably” when she gets home and wants to vent to you about her boss.
3. People often don’t say what they mean. The process of translating a mental idea into words on-the-fly often results in sequences of words that are very bad at communicating the idea. The only solution to this is to be redundant, repeat the idea multiple times in different ways until you hit one that your interlocutor understands.
Humans are not Vulcans, and we shouldn’t try to optimise human communication the way we’d optimise a network protocol.

Razied Jul 22, 2023, 2:02 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread—July 2023
I think you might want to look at the litterature on “sparse neural networks”, which is the right search term for what you mean here.

Razied Jul 19, 2023, 2:32 AM
4 points
−6
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Meta announces Llama 2; “open sources” it for commercial use
I’m really confused about how anybody thinks they can “license” these models. They’re obviously not works of authorship.
I’m confused why you’re confused, if I write a computer program that generates an artifact that is useful to other people, obviously the artifact should be considered a part of the program itself, and therefore subject to licensing just like the generating program. If I write a program to procedurally generate interesting minecraft maps, should I not be able to license the maps, just because there’s one extra step of authorship between me and them?

Razied Jul 13, 2023, 2:30 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Elon Musk announces xAI
The word “curiosity” has a fairly well-defined meaning in the Reinforcement Learning literature (see for instance this paper). There are vast numbers of papers that try to come up with ways to give an agent intrinsic rewards that map onto the human understanding of “curiosity”, and almost all of them are some form of “go towards states you haven’t seen before”. The predictable consequence of prioritising states you haven’t seen before is that you will want to change the state of the universe very very quickly.