weverka

Karma: 109

weverka Dec 25, 2022, 3:50 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
How much extra energy external energy is required to get an energy flux on Mercury of a billion times that leaving the sun? I have an idea, but my statmech is rusty. (the fourth root of a billion?)
And do we have to receive the energy and convert it to useful work with 99.999999999% efficiency to avoid melting the apparatus on Mercury?

weverka Dec 23, 2022, 12:33 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
DK> “I don’t see how they are violating the second law of thermodynamics”
Take a large body C, and a small body H. Collect the thermal radiation from C in some manner and deposit that energy on H. The power density emitted from C grows with temperature. The temperature of H grows with the power density deposited. If, without adding external energy, we concentrate the power density from the large body C to a higher power density on the small body H, H gets hotter than C. We may then use a heat engine between H an C to make free energy. This is not possible, therefore we cannot do the concentration.

The Etendue argument is just a special case where the concentration is attempted with mirrors or lenses. Changing the method to involve photovoltaic/microwave/rectenna power concentration doesn’t fix the issue, because the argument from the second law is broader, and encompasses any method of concentrating the power density as shown above.

When we extrapolate exponential growth, we must take care to look for where the extrapolation fails. Nothing in real life grows exponentially without bounds. “Eternity in Six Hours” relies on power which is 9 orders of magnitude greater than the limit of fundamental physical law.

weverka Dec 22, 2022, 5:50 AM
6 points
0
in reply to: localdeity’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
thanks for showing that Gwern’s statement that I am “bad at reading” is misplaced.

weverka Dec 22, 2022, 5:10 AM
3 points
in reply to: Arenamontanus’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
The conservation of etendué is merely a particular version of the second law of thermodynamics. Now, You are trying to invoke a multistep photovoltaic/microwave/rectenna method of concentrating energy, but you are still violating the second law of thermodynamics.
If one could concentrate the energy as you propose, one could build a perpetual motion machine.

weverka Dec 21, 2022, 2:21 PM
4 points
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
>Kokotajlo writes:Wouldn’t that be enough to melt, and then evaporate, the entirety of Mercury within a few hours? After all isn’t that what would happen if you dropped Mercury into the Sun?
How do you get hours?

weverka Dec 21, 2022, 1:52 PM
5 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
The sun emits light because it is hot. You can’t concentrate thermal emission to be brighter than the source. (if you could, you could build a perpetual motion machine).
Eternity in Six Hours describes very large lightweight mirrors concentrating solar radiation onto planet Mercury.
The most power you could deliver from the sun to Mercury is the power of the sun times the square of the ratio of the radius of Mercury to the radius of the sun.
The total solar output is 4*10^26 Watts. The ratio of the sun’s radius to that of mercury is half a million. So you can focus about 10^15 Watts onto Mercury at most.
Figure 2 of Eternity in Six Hours projects getting 10^24 Watts to do the job.

weverka Dec 21, 2022, 2:11 AM
2 points
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: What 2026 looks like (Daniel’s Median Future)
I have read Eternity in Six Hours and I can say that it violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics through the violation of the Constant Radiance Theorem. The Power density they deliver to Mercury exceeds the power density of radiation exiting the sun by 6 orders of magnitude!

weverka Dec 20, 2022, 6:22 PM
1 point
on: Can you control the past?
You should have a look at the conference on retrocausation. And it would also be valuable to look at Garret Moddel’s experiments on the subject.

What we owe the microbiome

weverkaDec 17, 2022, 7:40 PM

2 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

(forum.effectivealtruism.org)

weverka Dec 9, 2022, 9:55 PM
−5 points
0
in reply to: Ethan Caballero’s comment on: How is the “sharp left turn defined”?
you draw a right turn. The post is asking about a left turn.

weverka Dec 9, 2022, 9:53 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Ethan Caballero’s comment on: How is the “sharp left turn defined”?
You drew a right turn, the post is asking about a left turn.

weverka Dec 8, 2022, 8:04 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: shirisaya’s comment on: Playing shell games with definitions
Yes it is. When I took Feynman’s class on computation, he presented an argument on Landauer’s limit. It involved a multi-well quantum potential where the barrier between the wells was slowly lowered and the well depths adjusted. During the argument, one of the students asked if he had not just introduced a Maxwell’s demon. Feynman got very defensive.

weverka Dec 8, 2022, 7:56 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: MikkW’s comment on: Why I’m Sceptical of Foom
Why assume Gaussian?

Playing shell games with definitions

weverkaDec 8, 2022, 7:35 PM

9 points

3 comments1 min readLW link

weverka Dec 7, 2022, 2:36 PM
1 point
0
on: What are the major underlying divisions in AI safety?
Is it likely to do more good than harm?

weverka Dec 4, 2022, 3:42 PM
3 points
0
on: Godzilla Strategies
Most AI safety criticisms carry a multitude of implicite assumptions. This argument grants the assumption and attacks the wrong strategy.
We are better off improving a single high-level AI than making a second one. There is not battle between multiple high-level AIs if there is only one.

weverka Dec 2, 2022, 1:04 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Cervera’s comment on: AGI Impossible due to Energy Constrains
>What would you have said?
Your comment is stronger without this sentence.

weverka Dec 2, 2022, 5:02 AM
−4 points
AF
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: [Preprint] The Computational Limits of Deep Learning
Gwern asks”Why would you do that and ignore (mini literature review follows):”
Thompson did not ignore the papers Gwern cites. A number of them are in Thompson’s tables comparing prior work on scaling. Did Gwern tweet this criticism without even reading Thompson’s paper?
What links here?
- gwern's comment on What 2026 looks like by Daniel Kokotajlo (Dec 26, 2022, 4:53 AM; -8 points)

weverka Dec 1, 2022, 1:17 PM
1 point
−2
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: AGI Impossible due to Energy Constrains
Reliable? Your hard disk will be unreadable before long, while the human brain has developed ways to pass information down over generations.

weverka Dec 1, 2022, 1:14 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Cervera’s comment on: AGI Impossible due to Energy Constrains
>I dont think you are calibrated properly about the ideas that are most commonly shared in the LW community.
This is chastising him for failure to abide by groupthink.
The rest of your comment makes a point that is undermined by this statement.