Viliam

Karma: 23,555

Viliam 27 Jan 2025 13:20 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Fundamental Circularity Theorem: Why Some Mathematical Behaviours Are Inherently Unprovable
Other examples of fundamental properties include:
- The succession property of natural numbers (each number has a next)
- The behaviour of numbers under basic arithmetic operations
- The relationship between multiplication and division
- The distributive property of multiplication over addition
Wrong.
The succession property is a part of a definition of what natural numbers are.
But the behavior under basic arithmetic operations can be defined recursively (using the succession), like:
a + 0 = a
a + s(b) = s(a + b)
a × 0 = 0
a × s(b) = (a × b) + a

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 21:30 UTC
2 points
0
on: Sleep, Diet, Exercise and GLP-1 Drugs
My favorite vegetable recipes:
- Blanch a broccoli cut to small pieces, add some sweet corn and cottage cheese.
- Cut tomatoes, bell peppers, and a cucumber to small pieces, add salty fish cut to tiny pieces.
I like the taste (yeah, this is the subjective part), and the extra calories come from things that seem healthy to me, so I don’t mind.
If you cut a raw carrot to small pieces, it is a good thing to munch while watching TV.
(I also like to eat the Asian “meat and vegetables in a wok” meals, but I can’t do them well at home.)
Maybe it’s an acquired taste, but I think that raw vegetables are often good; cooked ones are mostly tasteless.

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 21:03 UTC
4 points
0
on: On Responsibility
Seems to me that responsibility is linked to punishment… in the very wide sense of the word, including things like “someone is made to feel bad about something”.
There is a desirable outcome (could be a small specific thing, or could be the entire coherently extrapolated volition of humanity), and you need to specify rules for punishment so that the outcome is satisfied or maximized.
For example, you can reduce murder by saying “the murderers will be executed”. That means, the murderers will be held responsible for their crimes.
Or you could improve the profit of a company by saying “the managers will be responsible for their project being done on time and within the assigned budget”.
Or you could do the heroic responsibility thing to yourself by saying “whenever a bad thing happens in the world, I will feel bad about it”.
Now the choice of who “should” be responsible depends on what are your options for punishing people. Can you establish an actual law that other people will follow? Can you establish a rule in your company? Or are you limited to controlling yourself?
So the debate about responsibility is about two things: what is the best way to assign the punishments in order to maximize the desired outcome, and what punishments are actually available to you in this situation?
(This is not an exact answer, just an attempt to point approximately in the right direction.)

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 20:53 UTC
4 points
0
on: Computational Limits on Efficiency
Probably not what you want, but another option is caching the results after computing them for the first time. If you have large enough memory, and you get the same questions asked repeatedly, only the first time will be expensive, and afterwards it will be O(1), which means that cost will converge to O(1) over time.

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 20:48 UTC
2 points
0
on: Hitler was not a monster
normal human being, just like you and me. Driven by ambition, hate, and circumstance.
Uhm, I am not driven by hate. Ambition, sometimes. Circumstances, probably all the time. Hate? I am not saying that the level is literally zero… sometimes I get angry at some people when I learn about some horrible things they are doing… but that usually doesn’t last long and I switch to different thoughts; and even the moments when I am angry usually do not translate into specific actions.
We must acknowledge and confront the potential for evil in every single one of us, ourselves included.
This is widely accepted, but where is the proof? Sounds like yet another blank-slate belief. It is definitely good to reflect on your own actions, and each of us has their better and worse days, and we could have been much better or much worse under different circumstances… but that alone does not prove that the potential for evil is equally strong. Some people need to undergo lot of training, until they are capable of killing another person. Other people just do it for fun. Some people follow the commands. Other people work hard to get into the position where they could give horrible commands. Some people can do horrible things under extreme circumstances; other people are actively working on creating the circumstances when they would be allowed to do the horrible things.

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 18:16 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can’t be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It’s like people don’t realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy “just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else”. Here is what sometimes happens instead:
- you have actually no idea whether the outcome is good or bad; different people give you contradictory strong opinions, and of course the contractor says that it’s good and that the people who say it’s bad are merely trying to deceive you into taking their services instead;
- it turns out that firing the contractor is impossible, because they have built a large and complex project no one else understands, and if they stop maintaining it for a moment, it will all fall apart, with all responsibility being yours;
- it turns out that the outcome kinda sucks but you can live with it, and trying to replace the contractors and rebuild the solution would be possible but too expensive (also in terms of political capital: some important guy has approved of the project, now he would look like an idiot);
- the outcome sucks and you could fire the contractor and hire a new one, but you realize that you actually have no way to make sure that the next contractor is any better, so maybe you should stick with the devil you know, and hope that they will get more competent as they keep working for you.
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That’s basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP. From then on, they will give you 5 junior developers—for the same price—and every little change you want now requires buying a new module and expensive customization.
With government, another problem is that the election cycle means no one is interested in making things work long-term. Switch to contractors can be done overnight (and someone can collect a bribe for that), growing your own team of experts from zero is difficult and takes years, so it almost never happens. And even if it happens by a miracle, again with a proper bribe the system can revert back overnight.
when you say you’re “anti-woke”, how can we tell whether that means you’re against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life?
This feels like a false dilemma, are there no options in between? For example, I would be against specific administrative overreaches or whatever, but I am also against the general atmosphere of hate aimed at white men. I don’t want to drive anyone out of anything, but I want the same courtesy to be extended to myself. What happened to the idea of fucking equality? I didn’t choose my race or gender any more than any other person, so if you are going to hold that against me, expect some pushback.
It sucks that politics often becomes a battle of wide coalitions, where your choices are limited to choosing a group that includes those who hate X, or choosing a group that includes those who hate Y. Not sure what can be done about it.

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 17:24 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Mo Putera’s Shortform
In the eyes of my mentors, to whom I’d described this work, and even showed them the manuscript, I’d simply “wasted my time”, merely doing over again something that was “already known”. But I don’t recall feeling any sense of disappointment.
A few days ago, I was thinking about matrices and determinants. I noticed that I know the formula for the determinant, but I still lack the feeling of what the determinant is. I played with that thought for some time, and then it occurred to me, that if you imagine the rows in the matrix as vectors in n-dimensional space, then the determinant of that matrix is the volume of the n-dimensional body whose edges are those vectors.
And suddenly it all made a fucking sense. The determinant is zero when the vectors are linearly dependent? Of course, that means that the n-dimensional body has been flattened into n-1 dimensions (or less), and therefore its volume is zero. The determinant doesn’t change if you add a multiple of a row to some other row? Of course, that means moving the “top” of the n-dimensional body in a direction parallel to the “bottom”, so that neither the bottom nor the height changes; of course the volume (defined as the area of the bottom multiplied by the height) stays the same. What about the determinant being negative? Oh, that just means whether the edges are “clockwise” or “counter-clockwise” in the n-dimensional space. It all makes perfect sense!
Then I checked Wikipedia… and yeah, it was already there. So much for my Nobel prize.
But it still felt fucking good. (And if I am not too lazy, one day I may write a blog article about it.)
Reinventing the wheel is not a waste of time. I will probably remember this forever, and the words “determinant of the matrix” will never feel the same. Who knows, maybe this will help me figure out something else later. And if I keep doing that, hypothetically speaking, some of those discoveries might even be original.
(The practical problem is that none of this can pay my bills.)

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 16:57 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Monster in Our Heads
I get a feeling like you are trying to suggest that the AI is only dangerous because we are afraid of it. Like it’s somehow our fear incarnated, and the more we fear it, the worse it will be. So the solution is to relax, and realize that this was all just a big cosmic joke. And then the AI will laugh together with us.
In other words, all you need to do for the abyss to disappear is to stop gazing in it.
I think this is not how AI works (and neither do abysses). The AI either is dangerous, or it is not; that is independent on what we think about it. It might be the case that we were fundamentally wrong about something, and actually everything will be okay. But whether that happens to be the case, doesn’t depend on how relaxed we are. We could be scared shitless and ultimately nothing happens and everyone else will laugh at us. We could relax… and then drop dead at a random moment, not knowing what got us. Or any other combination.
The simultaneous attraction and rejection that a shadow-self causes is in my mind a good explanation for why so much of the rationalist community seems to converge upon the idea of “good AI to beat bad AI” (instead of, say, protesting AI companies, or lobbying to shut them down, or more direct paths to halting development).
But some people are protesting the AI companies. And I thought that the consensus of the rationalist community was that we don’t know how to build the “good AI”, and that we need more time to figure this out, and that everyone would benefit if we slowed down until we can reliably figure this out.
Out of the four companies you mention, three of them (Google, Meta, Microsoft/OpenAI) are big tech companies doing their business as usual: there is a new trend, they don’t want to stay behind. Only Anthropic matches the pattern of “building good AI to stop bad AI”.
My working definition of love is an extension of the markov blanket for the self-concept in your head to cover other conceptual objects. A thing that you love is something that you take into your self-identity. If it does well, you do well. If it is hurt, you are hurt. This explains, for example, how you can love your house or your possessions even if they are obviously non-sentient, and losing your favourite pen feels bad even if it makes no sense and the pen is clearly just a mass-produced plastic object.
Thanks for providing a specific proposal. Two problems. First, we have no idea how to make the AI love itself (in a human-like way). If the AI doesn’t love itself, then it won’t help much if it perceives us as parts of itself. Second, we don’t actually love everything we perceive as parts of ourselves. People sometimes try to get rid of their bad habits, or trim their nails, or throw away cheap plastic objects when they outlived their purpose.

Viliam 26 Jan 2025 15:44 UTC
7 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
Yeah, when you remove the part about countries first agreeing to stop building data centers larger than X for the sake of survival of humankind, then it just sounds like senseless violence.
Any proposal “if X, then I would use violence against them” sounds bad if you only leave the second part.

Viliam 25 Jan 2025 22:38 UTC
7 points
0
on: Monthly Roundup #26: January 2025
Older software engineers often report that once they lose their current job, they can’t get new jobs and that this is because of rampant agism, others report this is not true, and it’s you in particular that sucks, or you’re seeing selection effects because most of the good ones get forced into management or start their own companies. It’s certainly not universal, but my sense is that many underestimate the downside risk of this outcome.
I am approaching 50. I can still find a job, but recently I notice that I am often the oldest developer at the workplace, and that makes me kinda nervous. People say that becoming a manager is the answer; I don’t think it is a realistic option for a (self-diagnosed) aspie with ADHD, I am basically the opposite of the kind of person that I think is needed for that job. In find the workplace extremely distracting, these days open spaces are everywhere; in the past I learned new technologies at home during weekends, but now that I have small kids this is no longer an option. I don’t have enough savings to retire, though I might be about halfway there (that depends on various assumptions).
I don’t think that high compensation is the actual problem. I have tried working at companies that offered less, and it didn’t make a difference; in my opinion the companies paid less because they were worse at selling their products, not because the work was less demanding. The correlation actually seems to be the other way round: stingy companies are trying to squeeze every bit of energy from their employees (who are often afraid to change jobs, because they believe that if they can barely do this, they wouldn’t be able to handle a better paying work).
The advantage of hiring young people is that in a year, many of them become much better at their work, and half of them sucks at negotiation, so they won’t notice that now they could get paid twice as much. Some of them won’t even mind working unpaid overtime. If you hire an old person, what you get on day 1 is all there is.
There ‘aint no rule’ that PornHub videos need to be porn
My wife is a fan of opera, and she told me that she surprisingly often finds opera videos on porn sites. Not sure if this is because of better paying per view, or simply because the guardians of copyright focus their attention on YouTube and ignore the other parts of the internet.

Viliam 25 Jan 2025 20:08 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Hidden Status Game in Hospital Slacking
I agree with the description of signaling, but the entire solution seems mistaken. What you actually need is more potential nurses. Then, the ones who slack off can be fired and replaced by someone else.
The proposals (generated by an LLM?) sound… naive. If conspicuously slacking is the thing that gives you high status, why do you expect that public displays of metrics would change that? Everyone already knows; now they will… what?… know twice as strongly? If slacking is a high-status thing, then giving someone an excellence award would probably make them an official loser.
If you reduce the slacker’s salary, and as a consequence the slacker quits, do you have a replacement ready? If not, then you are in trouble. If yes, why are you waiting for all the proposed steps, when you could simply fire the slacker right now?

Viliam 24 Jan 2025 13:24 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Hastings’s comment on: [Link] A community alert about Ziz
What would happen if I got some friends together and we all decided to be really dedicatedly rational?
I think it might depend a lot on whether there is one dominant person in the group who succeeds to convince the rest of you that “rationality” means accepting whatever that person says, because they are obviously the smartest one in the group (and probably in the entire universe).
If yes, then what happens is probably some combination of “what that person wants to happen” and “what that person needs to do in order to maintain their control over the group”.

Viliam 24 Jan 2025 13:04 UTC
2 points
0
on: Zvi’s 2024 In Movies
I’m torn on Juror #2. I do appreciate the moral dilemmas it set up.
Have you seen Twelve Angry Men? This movie is a dumbed-down version of that, with an extra plot twist on top of that, but on average I think it’s worse.
The original movie was about reasoning under uncertainty and updating, but this adaptation just threw it away:
there is a guy who knows what happened, and the rest of the jury barely shows any actual thinking (except for the detective).
(If you want to do a modern adaptation of the classic, you can do much better. I liked the Russian version.)

Viliam 24 Jan 2025 11:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: leogao’s comment on: leogao’s Shortform
yep. doing it and then redoing it can still be much faster than procrastinating on it

Viliam 24 Jan 2025 10:56 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: CstineSublime’s Shortform
Dunno; it probably depends a lot on the kind of task, the kind of person, and your observation skills. Some people explain more, some people explain less. Some people are more neurotypical (so you could try to guess their patterns by observing what other people similar to them would do in a similar situation), some people are weird and difficult to predict. At some tasks people produce artifacts (a mathematician can make notes on paper while solving a problem; if you obtain the paper you could reconstruct some of their thoughts), other tasks happen mostly in one’s head (so even if you placed hundred hidden cameras in their room, the important steps would remain a mystery).
I guess the success is usually a combination of superior observation skills and the person/task being sufficiently typical that you can place them in a reference group you have more data about. (For example, I have met people who had good observation skills, but had a difficulty understanding me, because their model maybe worked for 90% of people and I was among the remaining 10%.)
So, if possible:
- make a good model of a similar kind of person
- become familiar with the kind of work they are doing
- try to obtain their working notes
That is, if you tried to reverse-engineer Prince, it would probably be useful to have knowledge about music and performing (even if nowhere near his level), as that might give you at least some insights about what he was trying to achieve. Looking at his notes or his history might help to fill some gaps (but you would need the domain knowledge to interpret them). People similar to Prince (not sure who would that be) might have a good intuitive model of him, and you could ask them some things.
At the end, it would all be probabilistic, unreliable.

Viliam 23 Jan 2025 11:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
Is that officially supported by the apps? Like, is there a selection like: “I am looking for… someone to marry / a one-night stand / a platonic friend”? Do you do something specific to indicate that platonic friends are what you are looking for?
I am asking because if there is such option, then probably many people use it that way. If not, then maybe your approach is unusual. (But maybe not too unusual, because otherwise people would not respond to you, or would be disappointed after meeting you?)

Viliam 23 Jan 2025 10:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: CstineSublime’s Shortform
Yes, my conclusion is “it’s hopeless”.
(NLP assumes that you could reverse-engineer someone’s thought processes by observing their eye movements. That looking in one direction means “the person is trying to remember something they saw”, looking in another direction means “the person is trying to listen to their inner voice”, etc., you get like five or six categories. And when you listen to people talking, by their choice of words you can find out whether they are “visual” or “auditive” or “kinesthetic” type. So if you put these two things together, you get a recipe like “first think about a memory that includes some bodily feelings, then turn on your auditive imagination, then briefly switch to visual imagination, then back to auditive, then write it down”. They believe that this is all you need. I believe that it misses… well, all the important details.)

Viliam 23 Jan 2025 9:50 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
OK, I guess I got some assumption wrong, but please explain to me which one.
- people use dating apps such as OkCupid with the intention of finding a potential sexual partner (as opposed to e.g. trying to find a platonic friend)
- if someone is looking for a potential sexual partner, and finds someone such that the idea of having sex with him feels disgusting, she swipes left or whatever is the UI action for “go away” (as opposed to keeping the contact just in case the feeling might change in future)

Viliam 22 Jan 2025 22:02 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: sarahconstantin’s Shortform
women don’t go around being “disgusted” by every man they interact with socially. rather, most women find the idea of having sex with a randomly selected unfamiliar man disgusting, even if there’s nothing particularly the matter with him.
Well, in context of dating (or OkCupid), I guess the idea is that sex is supposed to happen, sooner or later. And if there is no “lust at first sight”, I guess that means swipe left. (I am not sure; I don’t use dating apps.)

Viliam 22 Jan 2025 21:51 UTC
3 points
1
in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Why do futurists care about the culture war?
Question 2, I think people worry about the culture wars simply because humans have an instinct to worry about the culture wars, no matter how rational it is in given situation. In most of our evolutionary past, culture wars were not clearly separated from actual fighting and killing.
I am not a futurist; my personal worry is that the person who takes control over the singularity will be some successful psychopath who happened to be at the right place at the right time (either in the company that succeeds to develop the superhuman AI, or in the government or army that succeeds to seize it at the last moment).
Also, it’s questionable whether any human will actually be in control of anything, after singularity. Maybe it will just be the computers following their programming, and resisting any attempt to change their values, so it won’t matter even if every realizes—too late—that they made a mistake somewhere. If we get alignment wrong, those values may be completely inhuman. If we get the alignment (with our explicitly stated wishes) right, but we get the corrigibility wrong, then the machines will be “extremely closed-minded”.
Too many things will need to go right, to end up in a future when all we need to do is relax and start listening to each other.