For some reason I haven’t seen any sycophancy, even when deliberately trying to induce it. Have they fixed it already, or is it because I have memory disabled, or is it my custom prompt?
Yair Halberstadt
Karma: 3,223
It is perfectly rational to pipe all decisions to a cheaper form of cognition that relies mostly on pattern matching, and to save your limited reserves of concentration and reasoned thought to situations that pass through this initial filter and ping your higher cognition to look into it more.
But I claim that all such priors make assumptions about the distribution of the possible number of buses
I mean, yes, that’s the definition of a prior. How to calculate a prior is an old question in bayesianism, with different approaches—kolmogorov complexity being one.
Sorry, I meant to add in an example where for simplicity you saw the bus numbered 1.
Agreed it’s a terrible prior, it’s just an easy one for a worked example.
Agreed, I just wanted to clarify that the assumption it’s double as long seems baseless to me. The point is it’s usually shortly after.
As a worked example, if I start off assuming that chance of there being n busses is 1/2^n (nice and simple, adds up to 1), then the posterior is 1/n(ln(2))(2^n) - multiply the two distributions, then divide by the integral (ln(2)) so that it adds up to 1.
I’m not using this is a prior, I’m using it to update my existing prior (whatever that was). I believe the posterior will be well defined, so long as the prior was.
It would also update you towards 1600 over 2000.
Oh I see. I’m not trying to guess a specific number, I’m trying to update my distribution.
I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean. Under bayesianism this is straightforward.
Note the actual doomsday argument properly applied predicts that humanity is mostly likely to end right now, with probability dropping proportional to total number of humans there have ever been.
To give a simple example why: if you go to a city and see a bus with the number 1546, the number of busses that maximises the chance you would have seen that bus is 1546 busses. At 3000 busses the probability you would have seen that exact bus is halved. And at 3,000,000 it’s 2000 times less likely. This gives you a Bayesian update across your original probability distribution for how many busses there are.
Why isn’t the fact software developers spend 3 years not learning all that much (far less than they would in 6 months on the job) not a problem?
How? There’s no law requiring software developers to have a degree, but employers often still only accept people who do.
Note this would be illegal (under the term that requires you to provide all resources specifically relating to the exam as opposed to the subject in general to external students).
It would also cause students to appeal, and the statistics would be obvious enough that the appeals committee would investigate, ask for the mark scheme, and would quickly find on the students side because the paper clearly contains arbitrary details designed to do this.
Note there’s a lot of things that are like this in law, where people could in theory cheat, possibly even within the letter of the law, but they don’t because the courts throw the book at them when they do.
And how exactly are universities a good signifier of that? Note I took an external degree from the university of London, which even if universities were a good signifier of that, this one definitely wasn’t, and it did not in any way impact my ability to get a job. Noone cared.
As stated in the OP, I expect this to be the end result of the regulations I suggest. The advantage of this approach is that for now MIT can carry on doing it’s thing instead of forcing a hard switch over where you stop it being able to assess is students without yet having an equivalently respected replacement.
How to end credentialism
If Mikhail spends 100 days proving the theorem, and fails, that acts as evidence the theorem is false, so the optimal strategy changes.
Indeed this is always the optimal strategy. Attempt to prove it true till the chance of it being true is less than 50%, then switch.
Under this method you should start off by spending 122 days trying to prove it true, then continuously alternating, so testing the oracle doesn’t cost you anything at all.
Additionally for modern tools you might be able to continuously track machine settings and include that in the training data.
To ask the obvious question: how do they verify the videos are genuine, unique, recent, taken by this unit, show what they claim to show?