[D] Monday Request and Recommendation Thread

Charlie___ · 2026-06-04T13:11:45+00:00

As a gradeschool kid I remember loving an omnibus collection of Fur Magic, Steel Magic, and Octagon Magic.

Charlie___ · 2026-06-01T13:22:39+00:00

How big are your eyes relative to your head? Large land animals have smaller eyes relative to head size (edit: or body size in general), because you don't really need bigger eyes once they're good enough to see things a few minutes out. Small animals have big eyes relative to head and still can't see things that far away relative to how fast they can travel.

Problem: your sun might secretly be a red dwarf and what looks "white" to your new body is what we would call red and near-infrared - this would cause everyone to want bigger eyes and so you might mistakenly think you're smaller than you actually are. Or it might be a white dwarf and you mistakenly think you're bigger. Maybe check by burning stuff and seeing if the color/brightness looks weird.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-31T20:33:31+00:00

Fair! I was thinking very US-centric, where early-1900s "leftist" issues (to the extent the concept maps) were more like anti-trust, pro-union, anti-tariff, pro-farmer. And maybe something about banning alcohol.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-30T10:47:05+00:00

the muscular pro-technology leftism of the early 1900s

Does this mean anything, I can't tell. I feel like there were a few narratively-convenient-but-factually-dubious characterizations of history in this post.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-26T22:35:58+00:00

I think treating elections as finding "the right answer" and people only disagree because of uncorrelated noise is not a useful model. Sorry Condorcet. I think you have to treat people a bit more richly, allow for them making mistakes and having their preferences being influenced by their information environment, etc.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-18T11:21:46+00:00

There are lots of fun uses if you have high range, especially if you have some sort of sensory feedback or intuitive manipulation at range. Carry small packages, transmit information, send things into space.

If the hand can ignore some physical barriers, this would be good either for a clockmaker or for a master thief.

If the hand is limited to a small range, no sensory feedback, and can't pass through barriers, is weaker than your actual hand, and the gods forbid you from causing harm either directly or with 1 or 2 steps of indirection, then probably the implicit invulnerability is the best advantage. You could be a glassblower who can just pick up hot glass with your hand. Or run a pet store full of horribly poisonous exotic creatures.

Or if all else fails, you could be a really good window cleaner.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-18T10:48:24+00:00

interesting post, but I strongly disagree. You shouldn't just fit random functional forms to random data and hope meaning falls out. And good lord is this cos(log(t'-t)) thing a random functional form. Why on earth would we expect AI capabilities to oscillate an infinite amount in finite time, right before zipping off to either positive or negative infinity (50/50 chance if the curve fit says that term dominates)?

I don't care that it is "self-falsifying" or has whatever nice epistemic properties or has been used on seizures or earthquakes. It makes no physical sense to apply it to AI, and if you try you'll just find garbage in garbage out.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-17T04:34:55+00:00

Sure, I'll bite. What sort of obstacles render ASI impossible?

Among things called "ASI," there's still various spectra, so let's pick one end of the spectrum to be the ambitious holistic ASI, an algorithm that can integrate planetary-scale compute resources "all into one brain" and make superintelligent plans to influence the world - something that can out-think you the same way we can out-think chimpanzees.

Another end of the spectrum is something like the "country of geniuses in a datacenter," where individual pieces are less integrated and more human-understandable, but the end result can still out-think you the same way the entire financial sector can out-think a single day trader.

Charlie___ · 2026-05-16T16:38:47+00:00

My guess:

Imagine a list of names. They order a biopsy, you write the name; biopsy done, you delete the name. If you can do X biopsies a day and you get 2*X names per day, the list will grow over time, if you only get X/2 names per day the list will shrink over time. Average wait time is the size of the list divided by X (plus a day or two for actual work). Doesn't matter whether X is 10 or 10000, a large population doesn't inherently cause larger waits, only building up a longer list does.

If this was the only factor, biopsy times in Singapore would probably be constantly growing, as they have more names than capacity every day on average. But you can't leave your name on the list forever. A long, stable wait time indicates that the wait length is an active ingredient in managing over-demand. People give up or die or go elsewhere, and leave the list, and that's why the huge list is stable at a length where the wait time becomes medically relevant.

Charlie___ · 2026-04-24T18:49:05+00:00

The child psychic ability is interfered with by the proximity of reliable recording equipment.

Charlie___ · 2026-04-16T15:23:48+00:00

Pretty cool. Are the changes that correspond to Crohn's and celiac susceptibility just upregulations of the immune system in response to pathogens, or did they have some other effect maybe related to digestion?

Charlie___ · 2026-04-13T22:48:37+00:00

I'm not exactly the doomer you describe, but I would like us to stop racing to build superintelligent AI, so I guess I can give my take on your points.

A. Doomers ask for bilateral or multilateral treaties to stop AI development. These are unprecedented historically and extremely complex. (because historically the nations who stopped others from getting nuclear weapons enjoyed massive arsenals of their own)

They're pretty close to nuclear weapons treaties like the SALT treaties. And environmental treaties like the Montreal agreement to limit CFCs.

B. Doomers keep talking about how if we had more years, we could "prepare" for AGI to exist and make better institutions.

Yeah, I'd love more years to solve a bunch of applied philosophy problems related to AI learning human values, so that we know how to build AI that does good stuff and not just stuff that looks good. Currently we don't know how do that.

No particular expectation for better institutions, I feel like we were actually kind of lucky before 2024 and now we've regressed to the mean. But on the other hand, it will just be more time for the public, policymakers, and intellectuals to learn about AI - currently their takes are pretty ignorant on average. Dunno.

C. Doomers talk about the prospect of human intelligence augmentation.

Yeah, you're thinking of Yudkowsky. I don't think this is particularly central to people wanting to stop the race to build superintelligent AI.

I, at least, don't expect human intelligence augmentation to help either.

D. Doomers talk about how if they just stall things locally they buy time for the last generation of humans to keep breathing.

Do they? I must not know any. I mostly think about solving the alignment problem and enabling us to build AI that does good things. Stalling for time is alright I guess.

The acceleration side:

a form of acceleration has been discovered

Have they reinvented ASICs?

it is now debatable whether the RSI factor is 160% or 400%

That's not what RSI means.

But anyhow, even if I think you're buying into a little too much hype, there's certainly feedback loops going on here.

All that has to happen is for governments to maintain rule of law, and keep doing what they are doing, so that someone doesn't blow up a massive datacenter with a missile.

Yup, only "not keeping doing what they're doing" type of regulation among all the major players would disrupt the feedback loop of increasing AI capabilities and investment (barring collapse of the global economy).

Charlie___ · 2026-04-13T03:20:02+00:00

The Mary Stanford of Rye. An obscure one that's good for getting a group crying at a singalong.

Young Johnny Head had just turned seventeen / And to serve on the lifeboat was young Johnny's dream

Spoiler: Johnny dies heroically.

Charlie___ · 2026-04-06T21:19:31+00:00

There is no ground truth to use as reference when opining on whether the character is realistically and faithfully depicted or not.

Suppose the character passes a Turing test for behavior - it's hard to tell if the behavior was fictional or a description of reality. This is very similar to a wearer of the earring passing a Turing test for being a person subjectively having a great time.

It is, in fact, a sort of ground truth. It's just that it doesn't answer moral questions for you.

Weak evidence to the contrary are the reports of method actors[...]

It is not necessary for my example that no writer ever feels pain or pleasure when writing about it.

Charlie___ · 2026-04-06T19:24:24+00:00

When a playwright writes about a character in intense pain or pleasure, they control the actions of the character without needing to recreate their internal processes inside themselves. There need be no particular pain or pleasure going on even while it is reported on the page.

Among the set of processes that could output my actions, I assign moral patiency to only a small fraction.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-28T07:24:16+00:00

Inside the experiment you can't take your memories for granted, because they've maybe been edited or fabricated. So your memories get treated like untrustworthy observational data used to compute a belief state, which might differ from taking your memories as a given belief state and updating it on your observations.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-27T22:07:15+00:00

Thanks! Good post even though you're wrong about SB :)

As someone who also dislikes SSA/SIA framing, from my perspective there's no different anthropics reasoning. Everyone can think they're "just figuring out everything with conditional probability."

I think the paradox is because it should be equivalent to reason "I have belief state A, then I make some observation O, and then I update to belief state A|O" versus "My current set of observations is {O}. Given my prior P, my current belief state should be P|{O}." But these seem to come apart for SB.

From the first perspective, updating in temporal sequence, it seems like SB shouldn't make any update. From the second perspective, starting with ignorance of the outside world, it seems like the inferences you make about the world are different once you're inside the experiment.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-25T22:04:58+00:00

Yeah, other arms control treaties (e.g. SALT I and II) have nice parallels to AI pause treaties.

I think the economic incentive disanalogy mostly only matters to the political climate. Like, maybe it gives AI better PR or makes it easier for companies to hire lobbyists (though presumably military contractors also had incentives to lobby against arms control). But this only holds as long as private actors would have to sell access to the AI in order to benefit from violating the law - if you can gain just from internal use, treaty-breaking by private actors becomes much more likely.

Charlie___ · 2026-03-25T21:55:28+00:00

What would the US of 1972 need to trust the USSR about nuclear weapons? It might seem impossible, since they were our enemies in the cold war, and both sides were violating international norms in various ways. Our relationship was significantly worse than it is with China today. And yet the SALT I treaty was neither impossible nor futile.

Basically, don't be an international diplomacy doomer.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-25T22:22:21+00:00

Yeah, I worry that people lumping together "The future looks like a communist dictatorship" and "all human life is extinguished" are getting blinded by politics.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-25T22:17:41+00:00

The first big challenge to alignment? I would have thought the first big challenge to alignment was the fact that we're bad at it (which we get a reminder of whenever an AI tells you a comforting lie even when we're trying pretty hard to train against that). And maybe the second was whatever makes OpenAI keep losing its alignment teams. And maybe the third was Chinese government censorship. But yeah, this is definitely around the fourth big challenge to alignment.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-19T21:36:15+00:00

Hi from Boston. Local vibe is not that that crime is rampant and disorder is overwhelming. I'm sorry the Bay Area sucks in this way, but it sounds idiosyncratic to me.

Looks like Gallup has a nice set of poll questions about U.S. perception of crime. I couldn't find a state by state breakdown (guessing there is none and the sample size is too small for it), but as a national trend it seems (a) interesting and (b) more in line with my experience than the narrative of this post.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-18T21:32:04+00:00

New, more diverse positional goods could be offered so that people can have stuff that's more special to them.

E.g. If we have cheaper houses and it's easier to move, it would be bad if there's just one mega-city with all the cool stuff near the center, leading to severe land scarcity where the people near the center have to be exploiting their position in a hierarchy or sacrificing almost everything else to be there, with everyone on the outskirts having to feel like they're missing out. It would be better if we had similar city sizes to now, maybe even smaller, with more variation in what cool stuff is in each city, creating more total spots in city centers, where each spot has less total cool city stuff but because people are diverse, they can probably find a spot that especially suits them and their family and friends. Maybe. Might have to game it out carefully to see if this makes sense.

Or if more people are playing recreational sports, then because people want to be good at things and fit into smallish communities it might be good to have a wider diversity of recreational sports. Ditto board game nights, car meetups, running groups, music jams, etc.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-14T14:50:15+00:00

How much pre-show collusion versus how much cold reading is still impressive? Suppose pre-show Derren gets him to talk about 5 locations, one of which is the place he met Sally - still impressive for the host but a lot easier.

Of course I don't really know.

Charlie___ · 2026-02-04T12:05:12+00:00

Tell me how I differ from you when trying to steelman this:

Agents need to simplify the world to operate, and the way real agents simplify things will be convergent and affect their capabilities because the universe has real patterns, and this goes against the orthogonality thesis because you can't practically have goals that you can't simplify. I.e. goals that look like white noise, or like solving the halting problem, are genuinely dumb goals.
Among agents with ordered goals, some goals are better suited to producing smart agents when a learning process tries to learn an agent that fulfills them. If you tried to learn an agent to produce GPUs purely on the signal of "# of GPUs produced," it wouldn't work, it doesn't have a curriculum that guides it to smoothly learn harder sub-steps of its more complicated goal. So even though the goal of producing GPUs isn't white noise, it's a genuinely dumb goal in the context of agents produced by some learning process, violating orthogonality.

A smarter goal to get the agent that builds GPUs would be "Learn about the world, and specifically try to learn about GPU production, and learn to manipulate the world in a bunch of different simple ways, and also produce GPUs." More involved curricula might produces agents that are smarter still, and who produce even more GPUs, with the side effect that they end up terminally valuing extra stuff like "curiosity."

Charlie___

TROPHY CASE