3,652 karma · joined May 23, 2008
What G.K. Chesterton said is that, if you can't make an affirmative case for the tradition's origins and show why the cause no longer applies, you should leave the tradition in place.
In the listed examples, rationalists celebrate this principle with examples such as the bitter cassava preparations of the Tukanoan people, which were very labor- and time-intensive. A much shorter processing would have eliminated the obvious, short-term toxicity of the plant, so someone scientific experiments to determine how much processing was actually necessary would likely end up damaging themselves and their reproductive prospects in ways that wouldn't show up for years or decades.
So there's evidence that the rationalist community actually appreciates tradition more strongly than the average person, and searches harder before discarding it.
I apologize if this list of counterexamples ran too long.
Reinforcement Learning (in LLMs) trains via gradient descent on a reward signal that's an imperfect proxy for the actual goal of the engineers doing the training. So, under mild optimization pressure, you get increasingly more of what you want, because that's the easiest way to increase the metric.
But as the optimization pressure increases, so do the ways to increase the metric by doing increasingly weird things. If the full action space grows sufficiently faster than the "things you actually want" subset, the amount of "things you actually want" goes to 0 under sufficient RL.
The impossibility of the tests-as-written is what prompted these models to "get creative" with their solutions, but the broken RLVR environments are what trained them to expect impossible tasks, and get creative with their solutions. Twitter user @skyesharkie published a brief expose at https://x.com/SkyeSharkie/status/2092122622834442581 a few weeks ago.
But the species would not survive, if for some reason we needed to voluntarily stop using faber-Bosch in order to do so—it would take some kind of supernatural event to convince everyone, and even then some countries would probably keep doing it.
By analogy, consider how you might respond if someone claimed that there's no possible danger from pocket-sized projectile launchers, because they would require some magic means of propulsion that didn't depend on a taut string attached to a long, flexible arm:
You could reply that atlatls can launch projectiles without using a taut string. Atlatls are not pocket-sized, but they are sufficient to establish that projectiles can be non-magically launched without a full bow. You could then go on to describe a sling, or derringer; and these would not be invalidated by your initial objection to the "magic" part.
First, and least important, consider that self-replicating, solar-powered factories aren't magic; they're algae.
Second, and more important, consider this fully non-magic route to doom:
- We continue putting AI in charge of more things
- It continues to get more capable, more eval-aware, and more prone to doing odd things, in service of goals that humans didn't intend to inculcate in it
- Eventually, enough of the economy depends on it that we couldn't turn it off, any more than we could turn off the faber-bosch process or cargo shipping
- AIs start doing something we can't survive, but less acutely than we couldn't survive turning them off. Everything else we try seems to work at first, but quickly loses effect
- Game over
But I still want to hear about the technical details of the model on HN, not the reasons Musk sucks.
It kinda worked, for a reasonable amount of stuff; but failed quite a lot of the time, and there's an extremely long tail of things that would have been pragmatically impossible to ever address with that method--indeed, without adopting an entirely new, unsupervised model of language, continuous in places where the old way was discrete.
Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.
> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.
That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.
We get a "your private data is now public" email, but knowing exactly what data turns that from a depressing statement on how much corporations value their customers' privacy into something actionable.
Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.
However, to be effective reasoners, we can't assign that hypothesis 0 prior probability; and once sufficient evidence has come in, our posterior distribution must shift.
I don't think there's any reasonable case for shutting down an early warning system which costs around the price of the new white house thunderdome every decade, and instead waiting to find out AMOC has collapsed when Scotland is hemmed in by year-round ocean ice and agriculture is impossible in Western Europe.
Stranded assets alone, in the latter case, will easily run to hundreds of billions. Knowing when to change crop profiles, reinsuance schedules, etc., would save much more.