Zane

Karma: 565

Zane Mar 28, 2024, 5:58 PM
1 point
0
on: [SP] The Edge of Morality
...why did someone promote this to a Frontpage post.

[SP] The Edge of Morality

ZaneMar 27, 2024, 9:38 PM

−1 points

2 comments2 min readLW link

Zane Mar 13, 2024, 1:59 AM
1 point
0
on: Intuition for 1 + 2 + 3 + … = −1/12
If I’m understanding correctly, the argument here is:
A) ${lim}_{x \to \infty} (\sum_{n = 1}^{\infty} (n e^{- \frac{n}{x}} cos (- \frac{n}{x}))) = - \frac{1}{12}$
B) ${lim}_{x \to \infty} (n e^{- \frac{n}{x}}) = n$
C) ${lim}_{x \to \infty} (cos (- \frac{n}{x})) = 1$
Therefore, $\sum_{n = 1}^{\infty} (n * 1) = - \frac{1}{12}$ .
First off, this seems to have an implicit assumption that ${lim}_{x \to \infty} (\sum_{n = 1}^{\infty} (f (x, n) * g (x, n))) = \sum_{n = 1}^{\infty} (({lim}_{x \to \infty} f (x, n)) * ({lim}_{x \to \infty} g (x, n)))$ .
I think this assumption is true for any functions f and g, but I’ve learned not to always trust my intuitions when it comes to limits and infinity; can anyone else confirm this is true?
Second, A seems to depend on the relative sizes of the infinities, so to speak. If j and k are large but finite numbers, then $\sum_{n = 1}^{j} (n e^{- \frac{n}{k}} cos (- \frac{n}{k})) \approx - \frac{1}{12}$ if and only if j is substantially greater than k; if k is close to or larger than j, it becomes much less than or greater than −1/12.
I’m not sure exactly how this works when it comes to infinities—does the infinity on the sum have to be larger than the infinity on the limit for this to hold? I’m pretty sure what I just said was nonsense; is there a non-nonsensical version?
In conclusion, I don’t know how infinities work and hope someone else does.

Zane Feb 22, 2024, 6:11 PM
2 points
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on: Job Listing: Managing Editor / Writer
I think I could be a good fit as a writer, but I don’t have much in the way of writing experience I can show you. Do you have any examples of what someone at this position would be focusing on? I’m happy to write up a couple pieces to demonstrate my abilities.

Zane Jan 15, 2024, 8:40 PM
4 points
1
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
The question, then, is whether a given person is just an outlier by coincidence, or whether the underlying causal mechanisms that created their personality actually are coming from some internal gender-variable being flipped. (The theory being, perhaps, that early-onset gender dysphoria is an intersex condition, to quote the immortal words of a certain tribute band.)
If it was just that biological females sometimes happened to have a couple traits that were masculine—and these traits seemed to be at random, and uncorrelated—then that wouldn’t imply anything beyond “well, every distribution has a couple outliers.” But when you see that lesbians—women who have the typically masculine trait of attraction to women—are also unusually likely to have other typically masculine traits—then that implies that there’s something else going on. Such as, some of them really do have “male brains” in some sense.
And there are so many different personality traits that are correlated with gender (at least 18, according to the test mentioned above, and probably many more that can’t be tested as easily) that it’s very unlikely someone would have an opposite-sex personality just by chance alone. That’s why I’d guess that a lot of the feminine “men” and masculine “women” really do have some sort of intersex condition where their gender-variable is flipped. (Although there are some cultural confounders too, like people unconsciously conforming to stereotypes about how gay people act.)
I completely agree that dividing everyone between “male” and “female” isn’t enough to capture all the nuance associated with gender, and would much prefer that we used more words than that. But if, as seems to often be expected by the world, we have to approximate all of someone’s character traits all with only a single binary label… then there are a lot of people for whom it’s more accurate to use the one that doesn’t match their sex.

Zane Jan 12, 2024, 11:28 PM
8 points
−2
in reply to: Rafael Harth’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Fair. I do indeed endorse the claim that Aella, or other people who are similar in this regard, can be more accurately modelled as a man than as a woman—that is to say, if you’re trying to predict some yet-unmeasured variable about Aella that doesn’t seem to be affected by physical characteristics, you’ll have better results by predicting her as you would a typical man, than as you would a typical woman. Aella probably really is more of a man than a woman, as far as minds go.
But your mentioning this does make me realize that I never really had a clear meaning in mind when I said “society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes.” When I try to think of ways that men and women should be treated differently, I mostly come up blank. And the ways that do come to mind are mostly about physical sex rather than gender—i.e. sports. I guess my actual position is “yeah, Aella is probably male with regard to personality, but this should not be relevant to how society treats ?her.”

Zane Jan 12, 2024, 8:30 PM
2 points
−3
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
If a person has a personality that’s pretty much female, but a male body, then thinking of them as a woman will be a much more accurate model of them for predicting anything that doesn’t hinge on external characteristics. I think the argument that society should consider such a person to be a woman for most practical purposes is locally valid, even if you reject that the premise is true in many cases.

Zane Jan 8, 2024, 7:28 PM
5 points
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on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Previously, I had already thought it was nuts that trans ideology was exerting influence on the rearing of gender-non-conforming children—that is, children who are far outside the typical norm of behavior for their sex: very tomboyish girls and very effeminate boys.
Under recent historical conditions in the West, these kids were mostly “pre-gay” rather than trans. (The stereotype about lesbians being masculine and gay men being feminine is, like most stereotypes, basically true: sex-atypical childhood behavior between gay and straight adults has been meta-analyzed at Cohen’s d ≈ 1.31 standard deviations for men and d ≈ 0.96 for women.) A solid majority of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria ended up growing out of it by puberty. In the culture of the current year, it seemed likely that a lot of those kids would instead get affirmed into a cross-sex identity at a young age, even though most of them would have otherwise (under a “watchful waiting” protocol) grown up to be ordinary gay men and lesbians.
I think I might be confused about what your position is here. As I understood the two-type taxonomy theory, the claim was that while some “trans women” really were unusually feminine compared to typical men, most of them were just non-feminine men who were blinded into transitioning by autogynephilia. But the early-onset group, as I understood the theory, were the ones who really were trans? Your whole objection to people classifying autogynephilic people as “trans women” was that they didn’t actually have traits drawn from a female distribution, and so modelling them as women would be less accurate than modelling them as men. But if members of the early-onset group really do behave in a way more typical of femininity than masculinity, then that would mean they essentially are “women on the inside, men on the outside.”
Am I missing something about your views here?

Zane Jan 8, 2024, 5:57 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
Maybe the chance that Kennedy wins, given a typical election between a Republican and a Democrat, is too low to be worth tracking. But this election seems unusually likely to have off-model surprises—Biden dies, Trump dies, Trump gets arrested, Trump gets kicked off the ballot, Trump runs independently, controversy over voter fraud, etc. If something crazy happens at the last minute, people could end up voting for Kennedy.
If you think the odds are so low, I’ll bet my 10 euros against your 10,000 that Kennedy wins. (Normally I’d use US dollars, but the value of a US dollar in 2024 could change based on who wins the election.)

Zane Jan 7, 2024, 9:01 PM
1 point
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in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to research more than a thousand candidates across the country, and there’s probably only about 1 or 2 LessWrongers in most congressional districts. But I encourage everyone to research the candidates’ views on AI for whichever Congress elections you’re personally able to vote in.

Zane Jan 7, 2024, 8:53 PM
2 points
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in reply to: trevor’s comment on: AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
I’m not denying that the military and government are secretive. But there’s a difference between keeping things from the American people, and keeping them from the president. When it comes to whether the president controls the military and nuclear arsenal, that’s the sort of thing that the military can’t lie about without substantial risk to the country.
Let’s say the military tries to keep the keys to the nukes out of the president’s hands—by, say, giving them fake launch codes. Then they’re not just taking away the power of the president, they’re also obfuscating under which conditions the US will fire nukes. The primary purpose of nuclear weapons is to pose a clear threat to other countries, to be able to say “if these specific conditions happen (i.e. you shoot nukes at us), our government will attack you.” And the only thing that keeps someone from getting confused about those conditions and firing off a nuke at the wrong time is that other countries have a clear picture of what those conditions are, and know what to avoid.
Everyone has to be on the same page for the system to function. If the US president believes different things about when the nukes will be fired than the actual truth known to the military leaders, then you’re muddying the picture of how the nuclear deterrent works. What happens if the president threatens to nuke Russia, and the military secretly isn’t going to follow through? What happens if the president actually does give the order, and someone countermands it? Most importantly, what happens if different countries come to different conclusions about what the rules are—say, North Korea thinks the president really does have the power to launch nukes, but Russia goes through the same reasoning steps as you did, and realizes they don’t? If different people have different pictures of what’s going on, then you risk nuclear war.
And if your theory is that everyone in the upper levels of every nation’s government does know these things, even the US president, and they just don’t tell the public—well, that’s not a stable situation either. It doesn’t take long for someone to spill the truth. Suppose Trump gets told he’s not allowed to launch the nukes, and gets upset and decides to tell everyone on Truth Social. Suppose Kim learns the US president’s not allowed to launch the nukes, and decides to tell the world about that in order to discredit the US government. It’s not possible to keep a secret like that; it requires the cooperation of too many people who can’t be trusted.
A similar argument applies to a lot of the other things that one could theorize the president is secretly not allowed to do. The president’s greatest powers don’t come from having a button they can press to make something happen, they come from the public believing that they can make things happen. Let’s say the president signs a treaty to halt advanced AI development, and some other government entity wants to say, “Actually, no, we’re ignoring that and letting everyone keep developing whatever AI systems they want.” Well, how are they supposed to go about doing that? They can’t publicly say that they’re overriding the president’s order, and if they try to secretly tell major American AI labs to keep going with their research, then it doesn’t take long for a whistleblower to come forward. The moment the president signs something, then the American people believe it’s the law, and in most cases, that actually makes it become the true law.
I’d definitely want to hear suggestions as to who else in the government you think would have a lot of influence regarding this sort of thing. But the president has more influence than anyone else in the court of public opinion, and there’s very little that anyone else in the government can do to stop that.

Zane Jan 7, 2024, 7:56 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Ericf’s comment on: AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
I wouldn’t entirely dismiss Kennedy just yet; he’s polling better than any independent or third party candidate since Ross Perot. That being said, I do agree that his chances are quite low, and I expect I’ll end up having to vote for one of the main two candidates.

Zane Jan 7, 2024, 1:57 AM
2 points
1
in reply to: trevor’s comment on: AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
The president might not hold enough power to singlehandedly change everything, but they still probably have more power than pretty much any other individual. And lobbying them hasn’t been all that ineffective in the past; the AI safety crowd seems to have been involved in the original executive order. I’d expect there to be more progress if we can get a president who’s sympathetic to the cause.

Zane Jan 7, 2024, 1:46 AM
2 points
−2
in reply to: Caleb W’s comment on: AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates
Ah. I don’t think the writers meant that in terms of ASI killing everyone, but yeah, it’s kind of related.

AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates

ZaneJan 6, 2024, 8:18 PM

41 points

22 comments6 min readLW link

Zane Dec 16, 2023, 8:34 PM
1 point
0
on: “AI Alignment” is a Dangerously Overloaded Term
I think that Eliezer, at least, uses the term “alignment” solely to refer to what you call “aimability.” Eliezer believes that most of the difficulty in getting an ASI to do good things lies in “aimability” rather than “goalcraft.” That is, getting an ASI to do anything, such as “create two molecularly identical strawberries on a plate,” is the hard part, while deciding what specific thing it should do is significantly easier.
That being said, you’re right that there are a lot of people who use the term differently from how Eliezer uses it.

Zane Dec 7, 2023, 8:31 PM
1 point
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in reply to: habryka’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
I’m not sure what the current algorithm is other than a general sense of “posts get promoted more if they’re more recent,” but it seems like it could be a good idea to just round it all up so that everything posted between 0 and N hours ago is treated as equally recent, so that time of day effects aren’t as strong.
Not sure about the exact value of N… 6? 12? It probably depends on what the current function is, and what the current cycle of viewership by time of day looks like. Does LW keep stats on that?

Zane Dec 6, 2023, 9:42 PM
1 point
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on: Thoughts on teletransportation with copies?
Q3: $50, Q4: $33.33
The answers that immediately come to mind for me for Q1 and Q2 are 50% and 33.33%, though it depends how exactly we’re defining “probability” and “you”; the answer may very well be “~1” or “ill formed question”.
The entities that I selfishly care about are those who have the patterns of consciousness that make up “me,” regardless of what points in time said “me”s happen to exist at. $33.33 maximizes utility across all the “me”s if they’re being weighted evenly, and I don’t see any particular reason to weight them differently (I think they exist equally as much, if that’s even a coherent statement).
What confusions do you have here?
<obligatory pointless nitpicking>Does this society seriously still use cash despite the existence of physical object duplicators?</obligatory pointless nitpicking>

Zane Dec 3, 2023, 2:12 AM
1 point
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in reply to: Akash’s comment on: Deception Chess: Game #2
It takes a lot of time for advisors to give advice, the player has to evaluate all the suggestions, and there’s often some back-and-forth discussion. It takes much too long to make moves in under a minute.

Zane Nov 29, 2023, 8:37 PM
1 point
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in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Deception Chess: Game #2
Conor explained some details about notation during the opening, and I explained a bit as well. (I wasn’t taking part in the discussion about the actual game, of course, just there to clarify the rules.)

Zane

[SP] The Edge of Morality

AI Risk and the US Pres­i­den­tial Candidates

AI Risk and the US Presidential Candidates