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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#141

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

bondarchuk wrote: post #29
resiros wrote: post #12

>Wait if you’re doing $900-1000/month and you’re sustaining yourself on that, that must mean you’re sustaining yourself on less than $12,000 a year. What is your lifestyle like at $12K?" >I live in the middle of nowhere. I don't travel much, or eat out, or have health insurance, or anything like that. I cook my own food. I use a free gym. There was this time when the floor of my bedroom began collapsing. It was so ol…

Many many people in the US live on that kind of money, it's not uncommon at all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_the_United_States "Among individuals living alone: 19.1% lived in poverty." Poverty line (max yearly income) for single households: $14,580

It's not uncommon, but hopefully it offers some perspective to those commenters who say things like "this-or-that subscription fee should be trivial pocket change to the sorts of people who comment on HN".

Re: Interview with gwern

#142

Post by fwlr »

My favourite Gwern insight is “Bitcoin is Worse is Better”, where they summarize an extensive list of objections to Bitcoin and then ask if there’s a common thread:

    No! What’s wrong with Bitcoin is that it’s ugly. … It’s ugly to make your network’s security depend solely on having more brute-force computing power than your opponents, ugly to need now and in perpetuity at least half the processing power just to avoid double-spending … It’s ugly to have a hash tree that just keeps growing … It’s ugly to have a system which can’t be used offline without proxies and workarounds … It’s ugly to have a system that has to track all transactions, publicly … And even if the money supply has to be fixed (a bizarre choice and more questionable than the irreversibility of transactions), what’s with that arbitrary-looking 21 million bitcoin limit? Couldn’t it have been a rounder number or at least a power of 2? (Not that the bitcoin mining is much better, as it’s a massive give-away to early adopters. Coase’s theorem  may claim it doesn’t matter how bitcoins are allocated in the long run, but such a blatant bribe to early adopters rubs against the grain. Again, ugly and inelegant.) Bitcoins can simply disappear if you send them to an invalid address. And so on.
https://gwern.net/bitcoin-is-worse-is-better

Re: Interview with gwern

#143

Post by sourcepluck »

michaelt wrote: post #97
sourcepluck wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eating (good) ramen is being used here as evidence that he's doing poorly, or something? I don't get it. Ramen is delicious, and can be very healthy. I hereby politely demand that you explain what exactly you are insinuating about the wonder that is ramen. A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for…

Living on ramen by choice? Sure, you do you. But living on ramen + $12k/year + no healthcare + collapsing floor? That's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

I'm aware that it sounds like poverty. I'm just saying it's going to depend on the details. To people who live ordinary western lifestyles, everything outside of that sounds weird.

- ramen =/= cheap pot noodle type things. Ramen restaurants in Japan attest to this. It'll depend on context what that actually means in this case.

- 12k/year =/= no money, numbers like that make no sense outside of context. It depends on how much of it is disposable. You live in a hut with no rent, you grow food, you've no kids, no mortgage, no car, etc, these all matter.

- no healthcare =/= bad health. How many of the growing numbers of people dying from heart-related diseases in their 50s and 60s had healthcare? Didn't do much for them, in the end.

- collapsing floor =/= bad hygiene or something else actually potentially dangerous, as I said above, the nuisance this causes or doesn't cause depends on lots of actual real factors, it's not some absolute thing. It just sounds wild to people not used to it

Re: Interview with gwern

#144

Post by indoordin0saur »

Great interview but I wasn't a fan of how they handled the voice. Whether a human voice actor or an AI "voice actor", it inserted cadence, emphasis and emotion that I have no way of knowing if it was Gwern's original intention or not. Reading the transcript of the interview would probably be better as you won't be mislead by what the voice actor added in or omitted.

Re: Interview with gwern

#145

Post by tolerance »

Tenoke wrote: post #58
mola wrote: post #44

Everything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him. It is also kinda scary that so many people are attracted to this. It rhymes with how I feel about Ayn Rand. Her individualism always seems so misanthropic, her adherants scare me

Everything? He also writes things like this: "A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers." https://gwern.net/improvement

It’s possible that a person can enjoy things that cater to the advancement of “civilization” while being seen as someone indifferent to (or inclined away from) “humanity”. Ie, a materialist.

Re: Interview with gwern

#146

Post by Vecr »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #128
Vecr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you do intelligence without computation though? Brains are semi-distributed analog computers with terrible interconnect speeds and latencies. Unless you think they're magic, any infinite language is still just a limit to them. Edit: and technically you're describing what is more or less backprop learning, neural networks, by themselves, don't learn at all.

Yes, I'm talking about learning neural nets with gradient descent. See also the nice paper I linked below. >> How do you do intelligence without computation though? Beats me! Unlike everyone else in this space, it seems, I haven't got a clue how to do intelligence at all, with or without computation. Edit: re infinite languages, I liked something Walid Saba (RIP) pointed out on Machine Learning Street Talk, that sure…

What I don't know how to do is bounded rationality. Iterating over all the programs weighted by length (with dovetailing if you're a stickler) is "easy", but won't ever get anywhere.

And you can't get away with the standard tricky tricks that people use to say it isn't easy, logical induction exists.

Re: Interview with gwern

#147

Post by keiferski »

sourcepluck wrote: post #79
nl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. He's living in a place where the floor collapsed and eats (good) ramen. If it's 12k or 20k I'm not sure it makes a meaningful difference to the narrative.

Eating (good) ramen is being used here as evidence that he's doing poorly, or something? I don't get it. Ramen is delicious, and can be very healthy. I hereby politely demand that you explain what exactly you are insinuating about the wonder that is ramen. A floor collapsing and not bothering to replace it sounds more serious, sure, but that can mean a lot of different things in different circumstances. Imagine, for…

In America, ramen typically (or used to, at least) refers to cheap packages of noodles with extremely high amounts of salt. They are not healthy or considered anything other than “cheap” food. Hence the concept of "being ramen profitable."

https://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html

This is separate from Japanese-style ramen, which you can also easily get at many restaurants.

Re: Interview with gwern

#148

Post by motohagiography »

keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

I've been writing for decades with the belief I was training a future AI and used to say that the Turing test wasn't mysterious at all because it was a solved problem in economics in the form of an indifference curve that showed where peoeple cared whether or not they were dealing with a person or a machine.

the argument against AI taking over is we organize around symbols and narratives and are hypersensitive to waning or inferior memes, thereofre AI would need to reinvent itself as "not-AI" every time so we don't learn to categorize it as slop.

I might agree, but if there were an analogy in music, some limited variations are dominant for decades, and there are precedents where you can generate dominant memes from slop that entrains millions of minds for entire lifetimes. Pop stars are slop from an industry machine that is indistinguishable from AI, and as evidence, current AI can simulate their entire catalogs of meaning. the TV Tropes website even identifies all the elements of cultural slop people should be immune to, but there are still millions of people walking around living out characters and narratives they received from pop-slop.

there will absolutely be a long tail of people whose ontology is shaped by AI slop, just like there is a long tail of people whose ontology is shaped by music, tv, and movies today. that's as close to being swept up in an AI simulation as anything, and perhaps a lot more subtle. or maybe we'll just shake it off.

Re: Interview with gwern

#149

Post by haccount »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #84

This will come across as vituperative and I guess it is a bit but I've interacted with Gwern on this forum and the interaction that has stuck to me is in this thread, where Gwern mistakes a^nb^n as a regular (but not context-free) language (and calls my comment "not even wrong"): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21559620 Again I'm sorry for the negativity, but already at the time Gwern was held up by a certain, l…

Being an influencer requires very little actual competence, same goes for AI influencers.

The goal of influencers is to influence the segment of a crowd who cares about influencers. Meaning retards and manchildren looking for an external source to form consensus around.

Re: Interview with gwern

#150

Post by achierius »

Swizec wrote: post #138
mynegation wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?

> I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_? Not discovering sources of cheap energy and other raw inputs. If you look carefully at history, every rapid period of growth was preceded by a discovery or conquest of cheap energy and resources. You need excess to grow towards the next equilibrium.

1400s Age of Explanation? 1200s Mongol Conquest? BC 100s Roman conquests of the Mediterranean?

None match that thesis

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