titotal

Apparently there's a new coding AI that is supposedly pretty good. Zvi does the writeup, and logically extrapolates what will happen for future versions, which will obviously self improve and... solve cold fusion?

James: You can just 'feel' the future. Imagine once this starts being applied to advanced research. If we get a GPT5 or GPT6 with a 130-150 IQ equivalent, combined with an agent. You're literally going to ask it to 'solve cold fusion' and walk away for 6 months.

...

Um. I. Uh. I do not think you have thought about the implications of ‘solve cold fusion’ being a thing that one can do at a computer terminal?

Yep. The recursive self improving AI will solve cold fucking fusion from a computer terminal.

Good to see the Yud tradition of ridiculous strawmanning of science continue.

In this case, the strawscientist falls for a ponzi scheme because "it always outputted the same returns". So scientific!

The "malaria nets" side of it has done legitimate good, because they didn't try to reinvent the wheel from scratch, stuck to actual science and existing, well performing charitable organisations.

global poverty still gets a good portion of the EA funding, but is slowly falling out of the movement because it's boring to discuss and you can't make any dubiously effective startups out of it.

years later was shown to be correct

Take a guess at what prompted this statement.

Did one side of the conflict confess? Did major expert organization change their minds? Did new, conclusive evidence arise that was unseen for years?

Lol no. The "confirmation" is that a bunch of random people did their own analysis of existing evidence and decided that it was the rebels based on a vague estimate of rocket trajectories. I have no idea who these people are, although I think the lead author is this guy currently stanning for Russia's war on ukraine?

The sole funder is the founder, Saar Wilf. The whole thing seems like a vanity project for him and friends he hired to give their opinion on random controversial topics.

The video and slides can be found here, I watched a bit of it as it happened and it was pretty clear that rootclaim got destroyed.

Anyone actually trying to be "bayesian" should have updated their opinion by multiple orders of magnitude as soon as it was fully confirmed that the wet market was the first superspreader event. Like, at what point does occams razor not kick in here?

For people who don't want to go to twitter, heres the thread:

Doomers: "YoU cAnNoT dErIvE wHaT oUgHt fRoM iS" 😵‍💫

Reality: you literally can derive what ought to be (what is probable) from the out-of-equilibrium thermodynamical equations, and it simply depends on the free energy dissipated by the trajectory of the system over time.

While I am purposefully misconstruing the two definitions here, there is an argument to be made by this very principle that the post-selection effect on culture yields a convergence of the two

How do you define what is "ought"? Based on a system of values. How do you determine your values? Based on cultural priors. How do those cultural priors get distilled from experience? Through a memetic adaptive process where there is a selective pressure on the space of cultures.

Ultimately, the value systems that survive will be the ones that are aligned towards growth of its ideological hosts, i.e. according to memetic fitness.

Memetic fitness is a byproduct of thermodynamic dissipative adaptation, similar to genetic evolution.

Solomonoff induction is a big rationalist buzzword. It's meant to be the platonic ideal of bayesian reasoning which if implemented would be the best deducer in the world and get everything right.

It would be cool if you could build this, but it's literally impossible. The induction method is provably incomputable.

The hope is that if you build a shitty approximation to solomonoff induction that "approaches" it, it will perform close to the perfect solomonoff machine. Does this work? Not really.

My metaphor is that it's like coming to a river you want to cross, and being like "Well Moses, the perfect river crosser, parted the water with his hands, so if I just splash really hard I'll be able to get across". You aren't Moses. Build a bridge.

ahh, I fucking haaaate this line of reasoning. Basically saying "If we're no worse than average, therefore there's no problem", followed by some discussion of "base rates" of harrassment or whatever.

Except that the average rate of harrassment and abuse, in pretty much every large group, is unacceptably high unless you take active steps to prevent it. You know what's not a good way to prevent it? Downplaying reports of harrassment and calling the people bringing attention to it biased liars, and explicitly trying to avoid kicking out harmful characters.

Nothing like a so-called "effective altruist" crowing about having a C- passing grade on the sexual harrassment test.

I think people are misreading the post a little. It's a follow on from the old AI x-risk argument: "evolution optimises for having kids, yet people use condoms! Therefore evolution failed to "align" humans to it's goals, therefore aligning AI is nigh-impossible".

As a commentator points out, for a "failure", there sure do seem to be a lot of human kids around.

This post then decides to take the analogy further, and be like "If I was hypothetically a eugenicist god, and I wanted to hypothetically turn the entire population of humanity into eugenicists, it'd be really hard! Therefore we can't get an AI to build us, like, a bridge, without it developing ulterior motives".

You can hypothetically make this bad argument without supporting eugenics... but I wouldn't put money on it.

Thanks, I love these answers! I'll drop a DM on matrix for further questions.

This rather economic recycling allows a living cell to absorb damage that would be catastrophic when you just assume that everything works forever just as you imagined. I don’t have a guess how much more energy would be expended in reassembly of diamondoids, @[email protected] might have an estimate, but i guess it’s some 1-2 orders of magnitude more

The DMS researchers were estimating something on the order of 5 eV for mechanically dropping a single pair of Carbon atoms onto the surface of diamond. I'm not sure how to directly compare this to the biological case.

If you post on EA forum or LW, you can crosspost automatically to the other one by clicking one button on the publishing page. The sites are run by essentially the same people.

Hmmm, I wonder who benefits from keeping EA chained to an Eliezer Yudkowsky fan forum....