tailcalled

• tailcalled 24 Nov 2024 9:06 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  A possible model is that while good startups have an elevation in the “cult-factor”, they have an even greater elevation in the unique factor related to the product they are building. Like SpaceX has cult-like elements but SpaceX also has Mars and Mars is much bigger than the cult-like elements, so if we define a cult to require that the biggest thing going on for them is cultishness then SpaceX is not a cult.

  This is justified by LDSL (I really should write up the post explaining it...).

• tailcalled 23 Nov 2024 9:40 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: quet­zal_rain­bow’s Shortform

  I feel like one should use a different term than vitalism to describe the unpredictability, since Henri Bergson cane up with vitalism based on the idea that physics can make short-term predictions about the positions of things but that by understanding higher powers one can also learn to predict what kinds of life will emerge etc..

  Like let’s say you have a big pile of grain. A simple physical calculation can tell you that this pile will stay attached to the ground (gravity) and a more complex one can tell you that it will remain ~static for a while. But you can’t use Newtonian mechanics, relativity, or quantum mechanics to predict the fact that it will likely grow moldy or get eaten by mice, even though that will also happen.

• tailcalled 22 Nov 2024 16:58 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: 1a3orn’s comment on: Ben Pace’s Short­form Feed

  Singapore and the US both have a military, a police, and taxation. This seems much more clear-cut to me than “cults” do.

  I think maybe one could treat “cult” more like a pronoun than like a theoretical object. Like when one is in the vicinity of one of the groups Ben Pace mentioned, it makes sense to have a short term to talk about the group, and “the cult” is useful for disambiguating the cult from other groups that might be present.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 11:44 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: What changes should hap­pen in the HHS?

  I like vaccines and suspect they (or antibiotics) account for the majority of the value provided by the medical system. I don’t usually see discussion of what can be done to promote or improve vaccines, so I don’t know much about it, but the important part is they remain available and get improved and promoted in whatever ways are reasonable.

  Beyond that, a major health problem is obesity and here semaglutide seems like it would help a lot.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 11:10 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Ben’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  I think there’s something to this. Also since making the OP, I’ve been thinking that human control of fire seems important. If trees have the majority of the biomass, but humans can burn the trees for energy or just to make space, then that also makes humans special (and overlaps a lot with what you say about energy controlled).

  This also neatly connects human society to the evolutionary ecology since human dominance hierarchies determine who is able to control what energy (or set fire to what trees).

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 10:50 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  The OP is more of a statement that you get different results depending on whether you focus on organism count or biomass or energy flow. I motivate this line of inquiry by a question about what evolution selects for, but that’s secondary to the main point.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 8:49 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Dmitry Vaintrob’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  In the case of gradient flow, we expect almost-all starting conditions to end up in a similar functional relationship when restricting attention to their on-distribution behavior. This allows us to pick a canonical winner.

  Evolution is somewhat different from this in that we’re not working with a random distribution but instead a historical distribution, but that should just increase the convergence even more.

  The noteworthy part is that despite this convergence, there’s still multiple winners because it depends on your weighting (and I guess because the species aren’t independent, too).

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 8:41 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  But the problem I mention seems to still apply even if you hold the environment fixed.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 7:49 UTC

  2 points

  −1

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  E.g. suppose there’s some game where you can reproduce by getting resources, and you get resources by playing certain strategies, and it turns out there’s an equilibrium where there’s 90% strategy A in the ecosystem (by some arbitrary accounting) and 10% strategy B. It’s kind of silly to ask whether it’s A or B that’s winning based on this.

  But this is an abstraction that would never occur in reality. The real systems that inspire this sort of thing have lots of pelagibacter communis and the strategies A and B are constantly diverging off into various experimental organisms that fit neither strategy and then die out.

  When you choose to model this as a mixture of A and B, you’re already implicitly picking out both A and B as especially worth paying attention to—that is, as “winners” in some sense.

  Actually I guess I endorse this response in the real world too, where if a species is materially changing to exploit a new niche, it seems wrong to say “oh, that old species that’s totally dead now sure were winners.” If the old species had particular genes with a satisfying story for making it more adaptable than its competitors, perhaps better to take a gene’s-eye view and say those genes won. If not, just call it all a wash.

  But in this case you could just say A’ is winning over A. Like if you were training a neural network, you wouldn’t say that your random initialization won the loss function, you’d say the optimized network scores better loss than the initial random initialization.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 7:41 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  I like to treat the environment/​ecology as the cause. So that e.g. trees are caused by the sun.

  I kind of feel like pelagibacter communis could maybe be seen as “evolutionary heat” or “ecological heat”, like in the sense that the ecology has “space for” some microscopic activity so whatever major ecological causes pop up, some minimal species will evolve to fill up the minimal-species-niche.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 7:38 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  I wouldn’t go this far yet. E.g. I’ve been playing with the idea that the weighting where humans “win” evolution is something like adversarial robustness. This just wasn’t really a convincing enough weighting to be included in the OP. But if something like that turns out correct then one could imagine that e.g. humans get outcompeted by something that’s even more adversarially robust. Which is basically the standard alignment problem.

  Like I did not in fact interject in response to Nate or Eliezer. Someone asked me what triggered my line of thought, and I explained that it came from their argument, but I also said that my point was currently too incomplete.

• tailcalled 20 Nov 2024 7:29 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Steven Byrnes’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  Right, I think there are variants of it that might work out, but there’s also the aspect where some people argue that AGI will turn out to essentially be a bag-of-heuristics or similar, where inner alignment becomes less necessary because the heuristics achieve the outer goal even if they don’t do it as flexibly as they could.

  Richard Kennaway asked why I would think in those lines but the point of the OP isn’t to make an argument about AI alignment, it’s merely to think in those lines. Conclusions can come later once I’m finished exploring it.

• tailcalled 19 Nov 2024 18:59 UTC

  10 points

  −3

  in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

  Some people say that e.g. inner alignment failed for evolution in creating humans. In order for that claim of historical alignment difficulty to cash out, it feels like humans need to be “winners” of evolution in some sense, as otherwise species that don’t achieve as full agency as humans do seem like a plausibly more relevant comparison to look at. This is kind of a partial post, playing with the idea but not really deciding anything definitive.

Evolu­tion’s se­lec­tion tar­get de­pends on your weighting

• tailcalled 12 Nov 2024 18:55 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Blood Is Thicker Than Water 🐬

  I had been playing on and off with the idea that an ecological argument would show dolphins to be ultimately fish-like, but with my switch in general approach to things, I think ultimately the “dolphins are not fish” side wins out. Some of the most noteworthy characteristics of dolphins is that they are large, intelligent, social animals which provide parental care for extensive periods of time. There are literally 0 fish species with this combination of traits, whereas meanwhile the combo obviously screams “mammal!”.

  I was wondering if it was specific to mammals or if it applied to land vertebrates in general. Other animals that have evolved to live in the ocean include sea turtles and sea snakes, but they are quite land-animal-like to me. Frogs are an interesting edge-case in that at least they have marine-like offspring counts, but they literally have legs so obviously they don’t count.

• tailcalled 7 Nov 2024 20:17 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Fun­da­men­tal Uncer­tainty: Chap­ter 9 - How do we live with un­cer­tainty?

  But red exists only because we have the experience of seeing red. That is, red exists because we have found it useful to tell red apart from other colors. We can “objectively” define red to be light with a wavelength between 620 and 750 nanometers, but we define it thus because those wavelengths correspond to what many people subjectively identify as red. Thus, whether or not an apple is red is neither a properly objective nor subjective fact, but intersubjective knowledge that depends on both the world and how we experience it. So it goes for all truth that can be known.

  At first glance, red seems like such a special color to me. It’s the color of blood and many fruit, the advanced color that primates and flying animals see and other animals can’t distinguish, it’s the most primitive step towards heat vision, and it’s the color at the lowest end of the range of common electron bandgap. Obviously the word itself is kind of arbitrary but the color seems as non-arbitrary as could be.

• tailcalled 6 Nov 2024 18:46 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Scis­sors State­ments for Pres­i­dent?

  And I guess I should say, I have a more sun-oriented and less competition-oriented view. A surplus (e.g. in energy from the sun or negentropy from the night) has a natural “shape” (e.g. trees or solar panels) that the surplus dissipates into. There is some flexibility in this shape that leaves room for choice, but a lot less than rationalists usually assume.

• tailcalled 6 Nov 2024 18:39 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: Scis­sors State­ments for Pres­i­dent?

  Kind of. First, the big exception: If you manage to enforce global authoritarianism, you can stockpile surplus indefinitely, basically tiling the world with charged-up batteries. But what’s the point of that?

  Secondly, “waste/​signaling cascade” is kind of in the eye of the beholder. If a forest is standing in some region, is it wasting sunlight that could’ve been used on farming? Even in a very literal sense, you could say the answer is yes since the trees are competing in a zero-sum game for height. But without that competition, you wouldn’t have “trees” at all, so calling it a waste is a value judgement that trees are worthless. (Which of course you are entitled to make, but this is clearly a disagreement with the people who like solarpunk.)

  But yeah, ultimately I’m kind of thinking of life as entropy maximization. The surplus has to be used for something, the question is what. If you’ve got nothing to use it for, then it makes sense for you to withdraw, but then it’s not clear why to worry that other people are fighting over it.

• tailcalled 6 Nov 2024 13:51 UTC

  3 points

  −2

  on: Scis­sors State­ments for Pres­i­dent?

  Electoral candidates can only be very bad because the country is very big and strong, which can only be the case because there’s a lot of people, land, capital and institutions.

  Noticing that two candidates for leading these resources are both bad is kind of useless without some other opinion on what form the resources should enter. A simple option would be that the form of the resources should lessen, e.g. that people should work less. The first step to this is to go away from Keynesianism. But if you take that to its logical conclusion, it implies e/​acc replacement of humanity, VHEM, mass suicide, or whatever. It’s not surprising that this is unpopular.

  So that raises the question: What’s some direction that the form of societal resources could be shifted towards that would be less confusing than a scissor statement candidate?

  Because without an answer to this question, I’m not sure we even need elaborate theories on scissor statements.

Em­pa­thy/​Sys­tem­iz­ing Quo­tient is a poor/​bi­ased model for the autism/​sex link