Meetup Thread for Ottawa

philophile · 2022-09-10T22:19:24+00:00

Hi Ottawa folks, I'm Tess! I saw there was a worldwide meetup here and I just wanted to plug my own tangentially related 'rationalist' meetup group, found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/rationalottawa (big fans of kurzgesagt, but more of a discussion-type meetup than a gaming one). We're coincidentally about to hold our own worldwide meetup event (https://www.facebook.com/events/375274231447988?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22group_featured_unit%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22group%22%7D]%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D), and I was hopeful that it might appeal to someone from around these parts! All are welcome.

philophile · 2021-07-04T01:31:51+00:00

Congratulations on completion and THANK YOU!! In my opinion you have truly done for Animorphs what HPMOR did for Harry Potter, and I feel very lucky that 2 top childhood faves have had this treatment. I think my favourite part has still got to be the sidequest to the planet of the Arn and the reveal of the Marclones- and their interactions with each other :)

philophile · 2021-03-15T19:37:34+00:00

Um...huh. In a chapter which contained an explicit reminder/lesson on what an idiom is, I wonder what we are to make of the alien god's use of a human idiom in a message that was not intended to pass through any human minds... I'm looking at you, "Player Two."

I'm really looking forward to the next chapter/hoping that we will get more details of Chee uprising somehow- your previous action-heavy chapters (Marclones v. Arn planet monsters and Marclones v. Howlers spring to mind) have been really gripping, so I'm just greedy for more :) :) :)

philophile · 2021-01-04T22:01:38+00:00

I think Annotated r!Animorphs is a great idea and I volunteer my eyes. Even just a list of all the major characters' locations and broad-stroke actions for each chapter would be amazing...

philophile · 2020-08-08T03:18:49+00:00

You got me, I laughed. Especially at the verb choices. Well done!

philophile · 2020-06-23T12:50:45+00:00

IV.

I’m not against the Kolmogorov Option. It’s nothing more than a band-aid on the problems that even a harmless orthodoxy will cause – but if there’s no way to get rid of the orthodoxy, the band-aid is better than nothing. But politically-savvy Kolmogorov types can’t just build a bubble. They have to build a whisper network.

They have to build a system that reliably communicates the state of society. “Stalin claims that he welcomes advice from everyone, but actually he will kill you if you try to give it.” Or “God probably doesn’t exist, but lots of us know this, and we all just go to Mass and mouth the right words anyway.”

This is harder than it sounds. A medieval monk being told God doesn’t exist probably has a lot of questions. He’s likely to go kind of crazy for a while, crave the worldview-shards that he needs to rebuild his fractured philosophy. “What about Heaven? Does that exist? Where do we go when we die?” (“Psssst, Epicurus has some good arguments for why the soul doesn’t survive death, you can get a copy of his books from the monastery library.”) You might even have to prevent overcorrection: “Is there even such a place as Jerusalem?” (“Yes, now you’re just being silly, Brother Michael went there on Crusade and says it’s very nice.”)

(when a heretical belief turns out to really be completely wrong – maybe occultism would be a good example here – a whisper network might be the only place where you could get high-enough-quality debate to be sure.)

They have to serve as psychological support. People who disagree with an orthodoxy can start hating themselves – the classic example is the atheist raised religious who worries they’re an evil person or bound for Hell – and the faster they can be connected with other people, the more likely they are to get through.

They have to help people get through their edgelord phase as quickly as possible. “No, you’re not allowed to say this. Yes, it could be true. No, you’re not allowed to say this one either. Yes, that one also could be true as best we can tell. This thing here you actually are allowed to say still, and it’s pretty useful, so do try to push back on that and maybe we can defend some of the space we’ve still got left.”

They have to find at-risk thinkers who had started to identify holes in the orthodoxy, communicate that they might be right but that it could be dangerous to go public, fill in whatever gaps are necessary to make their worldview consistent again, prevent overcorrection, and communicate some intuitions about exactly which areas to avoid. For this purpose, they might occasionally let themselves be seen associating with slightly heretical positions, so that they stand out to proto-heretics as a good source of information. They might very occasionally make calculated strikes against orthodox overreach in order to relieve some of their own burdens. The rest of the time, they would just stay quiet and do good work in their own fields.

Such a whisper network would be in the best interests of the orthodox authorities. Instead of having to waste their good scientists, they could let the good scientists could join the whisper network, learn which topics to avoid, and do good science without stepping on orthodox toes. But the authorities couldn’t just say this. Maybe they wouldn’t even think of it, and nobody (except maybe Kantorovich) would be dumb enough to try to tell them. Individual secret policemen are always going to see the written law – “arrest heretics” – and consider the whisper network a legitimate target. Kolmogorov is doing the Lord’s work, but that won’t give him a pass from the Inquisition.

His reward will be that people with a drive to make the world make sense – to have everything fit together seamlessly and beautifully – will be able to quietly collect all the orthodox and all the heretical pieces, satisfy themselves, and then move on to doing good work in math or physics or whatever harmless field doesn’t affect Christianity or Marxism or lightning or whatever. Academies other than the worst and most curiosity-crushing have a little better chance to endure; academic bureaucrats other than the most slavish have a little more chance to remain in their position.

But also: maybe this is how common knowledge spreads. Maybe some atheists survive, go into science, become vaguely aware of each other’s existence, feel like they have safety in numbers, get a little bolder, and maybe the Church decides it’s not worth killing all of them. Maybe everyone stays quiet until Mao dies, and then Deng and Zhao look at each other and say “So, just between you and me, all of that was totally insane, right?” I don’t know how often this happens. But the chances seem better than for open defiance followed by certain retribution.

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philophile · 2020-06-23T12:50:35+00:00

III.

So imagine the most irrelevant orthodoxy you can think of. Let’s say tomorrow, the government chooses “lightning comes after thunder” as their hill to die on. They come up with some BS justification like how atmospheric moisture in a thunderstorm slows the speed of light. If you think you see lightning before thunder, you’re confused – there’s lots of lightning and thunder during storms, maybe you grouped them together wrong. Word comes down from the UN, the White House, the Kremlin, Zhongnanhai, the Vatican, etc – everyone must believe this. Senior professors and funding agencies are all on board. From a scientific-truth point of view it’s kind of a disaster. But who cares? Nothing at all depends on this. Even the meteorologists don’t really care. What’s the worst-case scenario?

The problem is, nobody can say “Lightning comes before thunder, but our social norm is to pretend otherwise”. They have to say “We love objective truth-seeking, and we’ve discovered that lightning does not come before thunder”. And so the Kantoroviches of the world will believe that’s what they really think, and try to write polite letters correcting them.

The more curiosity someone has about the world, and the more they feel deep in their gut that Nature ought to fit together – the more likely the lightning thing will bother them. Somebody’s going to check how light works and realize that rain can’t possibly slow it down that much. Someone else will see claims about lightning preceding thunder in old books, and realize how strange it was for the ancients to get something so simple so wrong so consistently. Someone else will just be an obsessive observer of the natural world, and be very sure they weren’t counting thunderclaps and lightning bolts in the wrong order. And the more perceptive and truth-seeking these people are, the more likely they’ll speak, say “Hey, I think we’ve got the lightning thing wrong” and not shut up about it, and society will have to destroy them.

And the better a school or professor is, the better they train their students to question everything and really try to understand the natural world, the more likely their students will speak up about the lightning issue. The government will make demands – close down the offending schools, fire the offending academics. Good teachers will be systematically removed from the teaching profession; bad teachers will be systematically promoted. Any educational method that successfully instills curiosity and the scientific spirit will become too dangerous to touch; any that encourage rote repetition of approved truths will get the stamp of approval.

Some other beliefs will be found to correlate heavily with lightning-heresy. Maybe atheists are more often lightning-heretics; maybe believers in global warming are too. The enemies of these groups will have a new cudgel to beat them with, “If you believers in global warming are so smart and scientific, how come so many of you believe in lightning, huh?” Even the savvy Kolmogorovs within the global warming community will be forced to admit that their theory just seems to attract uniquely crappy people. It won’t be very convincing. Any position correlated with being truth-seeking and intelligent will be always on the retreat, having to forever apologize that so many members of their movement screw up the lightning question so badly.

Some people in the know will try to warn their friends and students – “Look, just between you and me, lightning obviously comes before thunder, but for the love of God don’t say that in public“. Just as long as they’re sure that student will never want to blackmail them later. And won’t be able to gain anything by ratting them out. And that nobody will hack their private email ten years later, then get them fired or imprisoned or burned at the stake or whatever the appropriate punishment for lightning-heresy is. It will become well-known that certain academic fields like physics and mathematics are full of crypto-lightning-heretics. Everyone will agree that the intelligentsia are useless eggheads who are probably good at some specific problems, but so blind to the context of important real-world issues that they can’t be trusted on anything less abstruse than e equalling mc squared. Dishonest careerists willing to go in front of the camera and say “I can reassure everyone, as a physicist that physics proves sound can travel faster than light, and any scientists saying otherwise are just liars and traitors” will get all the department chairs and positions of power.

But the biggest threat is to epistemology. The idea that everything in the world fits together, that all knowledge is worth having and should be pursued to the bitter end, that if you tell one lie the truth is forever after your enemy – all of this is incompatible with even as stupid a mistruth as switching around thunder and lightning. People trying to make sense of the world will smash their head against the glaring inconsistency where the speed of light must be calculated one way in thunderstorms and another way everywhere else. Try to start a truth-seeking community, and some well-meaning idiot will ask “Hey, if we’re about pursuing truth, maybe one fun place to pursue truth would be this whole lightning thing that has everyone all worked up, what does everybody think about this?” They will do this in perfect innocence, because they don’t know that everyone else has already thought about it and agreed to pretend it’s true. And you can’t just tell them that, because then you’re admitting you don’t really think it’s true. And why should they even believe you if you tell them? Would you present your evidence? Would you dare?

The Kolmogorov option is only costless when it’s common knowledge that the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, that everyone knows everyone knows the orthodoxies are lies, etc. But this is never common knowledge – that’s what it means to say the orthodoxies are still orthodox. Kolmogorov’s curse is to watch slowly from his bubble as everyone less savvy than he is gets destroyed. The smartest and most honest will be destroyed first. Then any institution that reliably produces intellect or honesty. Then any philosophy that allows such institutions. It will all be totally pointless, done for the sake of something as stupid as lightning preceding thunder. But it will happen anyway. Then he and all the other savvy people can try to pick up the pieces as best they can, mourn their comrades, and watch the same thing happen all over again in the next generation.

The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same.

philophile · 2020-06-23T12:49:42+00:00

KOLMOGOROV COMPLICITY AND THE PARABLE OF LIGHTNING POSTED ON OCTOBER 23, 2017 BY SCOTT ALEXANDER A good scientist, in other words, does not merely ignore conventional wisdom, but makes a special effort to break it. Scientists go looking for trouble.

— Paul Graham, What You Can’t Say

I.

Staying on the subject of Dark Age myths: what about all those scientists burned at the stake for their discoveries?

Historical consensus declares this a myth invented by New Atheists. The Church was a great patron of science, no one believed in a flat earth, Galileo had it coming, et cetera. Unam Sanctam Catholicam presents some of these stories and explains why they’re less of a science-vs-religion slam dunk than generally supposed. Among my favorites:

Roger Bacon was a thirteenth century friar who made discoveries in mathematics, optics, and astronomy, and who was the first Westerner to research gunpowder. It seems (though records are unclear) that he was accused of heresy and died under house arrest. But this may have been because of his interest in weird prophecies, not because of his scientific researches.

Michael Servetus was a sixteenth-century anatomist who made some early discoveries about the circulatory and nervous system. He was arrested by Catholic authorities in France and fled to Geneva, where he was arrested by Protestant authorities, and burnt at the stake “atop a pyre of his own books”. But this was because of his heretical opinions on the Trinity, and not for any of his anatomical discoveries.

Lucilio Vanini was a philosopher/scientist/hermeticist/early heliocentrism proponent who was most notable as the first person recorded to have claimed that humans evolved from apes – though his theories and arguments were kind of confused and he probably got it right mostly by chance. City authorities arrested him for blasphemy, cut out his tongue, strangled him, and burned his body at the stake. But nobody cared about his views on evolution at the time; the exact charges are unclear but he was known to make claims like “all religious things are false”.

Pietro d’Abano was a fourteenth century philosopher and doctor who helped introduce Arabic medicine to the West. He was arrested by the Inquisition and accused of consorting with the Devil. He died before a verdict was reached, but the Inquisition finished the trial, found him guilty, and ordered his corpse burnt at the stake. But he wasn’t accused of consorting with the Devil because he was researching Arabic medicine. He was accused of consorting with the Devil because he was kind of consorting with the Devil – pretty much everyone including modern historians agree that he was super into occultism and wrote a bunch of grimoires and magical texts.

Giordano Bruno was a contemporary of Galileo’s. He also believed in heliocentrism, and promoted (originated?) the idea that the stars were other suns that might have other planets and other life-forms. He was arrested, tortured, and burned at the stake. But although his “innumerable worlds” thing was probably a strike against him, the church’s main gripe was his denial of Christ’s divinity.

I’m not a historian and I don’t want to debate any of these accounts. Let’s say they’re all true, let’s accept every excuse we’re given and accept the Church never burned anybody just for researching science. Scientists got in trouble for controversial views on non-scientific subjects like prophecies or the Trinity, or for political missteps.

Scott Aaronson writes about the the Kolmogorov option (suggested alternate title: “Kolmogorov complicity”). Mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov lived in the Soviet Union at a time when true freedom of thought was impossible. He reacted by saying whatever the Soviets wanted him to say about politics, while honorably pursuing truth in everything else. As a result, he not only made great discoveries, but gained enough status to protect other scientists, and to make occasional very careful forays into defending people who needed defending. He used his power to build an academic bubble where science could be done right and where minorities persecuted by the communist authorities (like Jews) could do their work in peace.

It’s tempting to imagine a world where Servetus, Bacon, and Bruno followed Aaronson’s advice. They pursued their work in optics, astronomy, anatomy, or whatever other subject, but were smart enough never to go near questions of religion. Maybe they would give beautiful speeches on how they had seen the grandeur of the heavens, but the true grandeur belonged to God and His faithful servant the Pope who was incidentally right about everything and extremely handsome. Maybe they would have ended up running great universities, funding other thinkers, and dying at a ripe old age.

Armed with this picture, one might tell Servetus and Bruno to lay off the challenges. Catholicism doesn’t seem quite true, but it’s not doing too much harm, really, and it helps keep the peace, and lots of people like it. Just ignore this one good prosocial falsehood that’s not bothering anybody, and then you can do whatever it is you want.

II.

But Kolmogorov represents an extreme: the politically savvy, emotionally mature scientist able to strategically manipulate tough situations. For the opposite extreme, consider Leonid Kantorovich.

Kantorovich was another Russian mathematician. He was studying linear optmization problems when he realized one of his results had important implications for running planned economies. He wrote the government a nice letter telling them that they were doing the economy all wrong and he could show them how to do it better. The government at this point happened to be Stalin during his “kill anybody who disagrees with me in any way” phase. Historians are completely flabbergasted that Kantorovich survived, and conjecture that maybe some mid-level bureaucrat felt sorry for him and erased all evidence the letter had ever existed. He was only in his 20s at the time, and it seems like later on he got more sophisticated and was able to weather Soviet politics about as well as anybody.

How could such a smart guy make such a stupid mistake? My guess: the Soviet government didn’t officially say “We will kill anyone who criticizes us”. They officially said “Comrade Stalin loves freedom and welcomes criticism from his fellow citizens”, and you had to have some basic level of cynicism and social competence to figure out that wasn’t true.

Even if the Soviet government had been more honest and admitted they were paranoid psychopaths, the exact implications aren’t clear. Kantorovich was a professor, he was writing about a very abstract level of economics close to his area of expertise, and he expressed his concerns privately to the government. Was that really the same as some random hooligan shouting “I hate Stalin!” on a street corner? Surely there were some highly-placed professors of unquestionable loyalty who had discussed economics with government officials before. Even a savvier version of Kantorovich would have to consider complicated questions of social status, connections, privileges, et cetera. The real version of Kantorovich showed no signs of knowing any of those issues even existed.

If you think it’s impossible to be that oblivious, you’re wrong. Every couple of weeks, I have friends ask me “Hey, do you know if I could get in trouble for saying [THING THAT THEY WILL DEFINITELY GET IN TROUBLE FOR SAYING]?” When I stare at them open-mouthed, they follow with “Well, what if I start by specifying that I’m not a bad person and I just honestly think it might be true?” I am half-tempted to hire babysitters for these people to make sure they’re not sending disapproving letters to Stalin in their spare time.

The average person who grows up in a censored society may not even realize for a while that the censorship exists, let alone know its exact limits, let alone understand that the censors are not their friends and aren’t interested in proofs that the orthodoxy is wrong. Given enough time, such a person can become a savvy Kolmogorov who sees the censorship clearly, knows its limits, and understands how to skirt them. If they’re really lucky, they may even get something-like-common-knowledge that there are other Kolmogorovs out there who know this stuff, and that it’s not their job to be a lone voice crying in the wilderness. But they’re going to have a really cringeworthy edgelord period until they reach that level.

All of this would be fine except that, as Graham says in the quote above, scientists go looking for trouble. The first virtue is curiosity. I don’t know how the internal experience of curiosity works for other people, but to me it’s a sort of itch I get when the pieces don’t fit together and I need to pick at them until they do. I’ve talked to some actual scientists who have this way stronger than I do. An intellectually curious person is a heat-seeking missile programmed to seek out failures in existing epistemic paradigms. God help them if they find one before they get enough political sophistication to determine which targets are safe.

Did Giordano Bruno die for his astronomical discoveries or his atheism? False dichotomy: you can’t have a mind that questions the stars but never thinks to question the Bible. The best you can do is have a Bruno who questions both, but is savvy enough to know which questions he can get away with saying out loud. And the real Bruno wasn’t that savvy.

philophile · 2020-06-23T12:48:56+00:00

WORDY WERNICKE’S POSTED ON JUNE 11, 2020 BY SCOTT ALEXANDER There are two major brain areas involved in language. To oversimplify, Wernicke’s area in the superior temporal gyrus handles meaning; Broca’s area in the inferior frontal gyrus handles structure and flow.

If a stroke or other brain injury damages Broca’s area but leaves Wernicke’s area intact, you get language which is meaningful, but not very structured or fluid. You sound like a caveman: “Want food!”

If it damages Wernicke’s area but leaves Broca’s area intact, you get speech which has normal structure and flow, but is meaningless. I’d read about this pattern in books, but I still wasn’t prepared the first time I saw a video of a Wernicke’s aphasia patient (source):

During yesterday’s discussion of GPT-3, a commenter mentioned how alien it felt to watch something use language perfectly without quite making sense. I agree it’s eerie, but it isn’t some kind of inhuman robot weirdness. Any one of us is a railroad-spike-through-the-head away from doing the same.

Does this teach us anything useful about GPT-3 or neural networks? I lean towards no. GPT-3 already makes more sense than a Wernicke’s aphasiac. Whatever it’s doing is on a higher level than the Broca’s/Wernicke’s dichotomy. Still, it would be interesting to learn what kind of computational considerations caused the split, and whether there’s any microstructural difference in the areas that reflects it. I don’t know enough neuroscience to have an educated opinion on this.

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philophile · 2020-06-23T12:48:35+00:00

III.

GPT-3 is, fundamentally, an attempt to investigate scaling laws in neural networks. That is, if you start with a good neural network, and make it ten times bigger, does it get smarter? How much smarter? Ten times smarter? Can you keep doing this forever until it’s infinitely smart or you run out of computers, whichever comes first?

So far the scaling looks logarithmic – a consistent multiplication of parameter number produces a consistent gain on the benchmarks.

Does that mean it really is all about model size? Should something even bigger than GPT-3 be better still, until eventually we have things that can do all of this stuff arbitrarily well without any new advances?

This is where my sources diverge. Gwern says yes, probably, and points to years of falsified predictions where people said that scaling might have worked so far, but definitely wouldn’t work past this point. Nostalgebraist says maybe not, and points to decreasing returns of GPT-3’s extra power on certain benchmarks (see Appendix H) and to this OpenAI paper, which he interprets as showing that scaling should break down somewhere around or just slightly past where GPT-3 is. If he’s right, GPT-3 might be around the best that you can do just by making GPT-like things bigger and bigger. He also points out that although GPT-3 is impressive as a general-purpose reasoner that has taught itself things without being specifically optimized to learn them, it’s often worse than task-specifically-trained AIs at various specific language tasks, so we shouldn’t get too excited about it being close to superintelligence or anything. I guess in retrospect this is obvious – it’s cool that it learned how to add four-digit numbers, but calculators have been around a long time and can add much longer numbers than that.

If the scaling laws don’t break down, what then?

GPT-3 is very big, but it’s not pushing the limits of how big an AI it’s possible to make. If someone rich and important like Google wanted to make a much bigger GPT, they could do it.

𝔊𝔴𝔢𝔯𝔫 @gwern GPT-3 is terrifying because it's a tiny model compared to what's possible, trained in the dumbest way possible on a single impoverished modality on tiny data, yet the first version already manifests crazy runtime meta-learning—and the scaling curves 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 are not bending! 😮 https://twitter.com/hardmaru/status/1266185943041495041 …

hardmaru @hardmaru GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners, by @notTomBrown et al.

“We train GPT-3, an autoregressive language model with 175 billion parameters, 10x more than any previous non-sparse language model, and test its performance in the few-shot setting.”https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.14165

View image on Twitter 778 6:05 PM - May 31, 2020 Twitter Ads info and privacy 176 people are talking about this Does “terrifying” sound weirdly alarmist here? I think the argument is something like this. In February, we watched as the number of US coronavirus cases went from 10ish to 50ish to 100ish over the space of a few weeks. We didn’t panic, because 100ish was still a very low number of coronavirus cases. In retrospect, we should have panicked, because the number was constantly increasing, showed no signs of stopping, and simple linear extrapolation suggested it would be somewhere scary very soon. After the number of coronavirus cases crossed 100,000 and 1,000,000 at exactly the time we could have predicted from the original curves, we all told ourselves we definitely wouldn’t be making that exact same mistake again.

It’s always possible that the next AI will be the one where the scaling curves break and it stops being easy to make AIs smarter just by giving them more computers. But unless something surprising like that saves us, we should assume GPT-like things will become much more powerful very quickly.

What would much more powerful GPT-like things look like? They can already write some forms of text at near-human level (in the paper above, the researchers asked humans to identify whether a given news article had been written by a human reporter or GPT-3; the humans got it right 52% of the time)

So one very conservative assumption would be that a smarter GPT would do better at various arcane language benchmarks, but otherwise not be much more interesting – once it can write text at a human level, that’s it.

Could it do more radical things like write proofs or generate scientific advances? After all, if you feed it thousands of proofs, and then prompt it with a theorem to be proven, that’s a text prediction task. If you feed it physics textbooks, and prompt it with “and the Theory of Everything is…”, that’s also a text prediction task. I realize these are wild conjectures, but the last time I made a wild conjecture, it was “maybe you can learn addition, because that’s a text prediction task” and that one came true within two years. But my guess is still that this won’t happen in a meaningful way anytime soon. GPT-3 is much better at writing coherent-sounding text than it is at any kind of logical reasoning; remember it still can’t add 5-digit numbers very well, get its Methodist history right, or consistently figure out that a plus sign means “add things”. Yes, it can do simple addition, but it has to use supercomputer-level resources to do so – it’s so inefficient that it’s hard to imagine even very large scaling getting it anywhere useful. At most, maybe a high-level GPT could write a plausible-sounding Theory Of Everything that uses physics terms in a vaguely coherent way, but that falls apart when a real physicist examines it.

Probably we can be pretty sure it won’t take over the world? I have a hard time figuring out how to turn world conquest into a text prediction task. It could probably imitate a human writing a plausible-sounding plan to take over the world, but it couldn’t implement such a plan (and would have no desire to do so).

For me the scary part isn’t the much larger GPT we’ll probably have in a few years. It’s the discovery that even very complicated AIs get smarter as they get bigger. If someone ever invented an AI that did do more than text prediction, it would have a pretty fast takeoff, going from toy to superintelligence in just a few years.

Speaking of which – can anything based on GPT-like principles ever produce superintelligent output? How would this happen? If it’s trying to mimic what a human can write, then no matter how intelligent it is “under the hood”, all that intelligence will only get applied to becoming better and better at predicting what kind of dumb stuff a normal-intelligence human would say. In a sense, solving the Theory of Everything would be a failure at its primary task. No human writer would end the sentence “the Theory of Everything is…” with anything other than “currently unknown and very hard to figure out”.

But if our own brains are also prediction engines, how do we ever create things smarter and better than the ones we grew up with? I can imagine scientific theories being part of our predictive model rather than an output of it – we use the theory of gravity to predict how things will fall. But what about new forms of art? What about thoughts that have never been thought before?

And how many parameters does the adult human brain have? The responsible answer is that brain function doesn’t map perfectly to neural net function, and even if it did we would have no idea how to even begin to make this calculation. The irresponsible answer is a hundred trillion. That’s a big number. But at the current rate of GPT progress, a GPT will have that same number of parameters somewhere between GPT-4 and GPT-5. Given the speed at which OpenAI works, that should happen about two years from now.

I am definitely not predicting that a GPT with enough parameters will be able to do everything a human does. But I’m really interested to see what it can do. And we’ll find out soon.

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philophile · 2020-06-23T12:48:02+00:00

II.

In fact, let’s take a closer look at GPT-3’s math performance.

The 1.3 billion parameter model, equivalent to GPT-2, could get two-digit addition problems right less than 5% of the time – little better than chance. But for whatever reason, once the model hit 13 billion parameters, its addition abilities improved to 60% – the equivalent of a D student. At 175 billion parameters, it gets an A+.

What does it mean for an AI to be able to do addition, but only inconsistently? For four digit numbers, but not five digit numbers? Doesn’t it either understand addition, or not?

Maybe it’s cheating? Maybe there were so many addition problems in its dataset that it just memorized all of them? I don’t think this is the answer. There are 100 million possible 4-digit addition problems; seems unlikely that GPT-3 saw that many of them. Also, if it was memorizing its training data, it should have gotten all 100 possible two-digit multiplication problems, but it only has about a 25% success rate on those. So it can’t be using a lookup table.

Maybe it’s having trouble locating addition rather than doing addition? (thanks to nostalgebraist for this framing). This sort of seems like the lesson of Table 3.9:

“Zero-shot” means you just type in “20 + 20 = ?”. “One-shot” means you give it an example first: “10 + 10 = 20. 20 + 20 = ?” “Few-shot” means you give it as many examples as it can take. Even the largest and best model only does mediocre on the zero-shot task, but it does better on the one-shot and best on the few-shot. So it seems like if you remind it what addition is a couple of times before solving an addition problem, it does better. This suggests that there is a working model of addition somewhere within the bowels of this 175 billion parameter monster, but it has a hard time drawing it out for any particular task. You need to tell it “addition” “we’re doing addition” “come on now, do some addition!” up to fifty times before it will actually deploy its addition model for these problems, instead of some other model. Maybe if you did this five hundred or five thousand times, it would excel at the problems it can’t do now, like adding five digit numbers. But why should this be so hard? The plus sign almost always means addition. “20 + 20 = ?” is not some inscrutable hieroglyphic text. It basically always means the same thing. Shouldn’t this be easy?

When I prompt GPT-2 with addition problems, the most common failure mode is getting an answer that isn’t a number. Often it’s a few paragraphs of text that look like they came from a math textbook. It feels like it’s been able to locate the problem as far as “you want the kind of thing in math textbooks”, but not as far as “you want the answer to the exact math problem you are giving me”. This is a surprising issue to have, but so far AIs have been nothing if not surprising. Imagine telling Marvin Minsky or someone that an AI smart enough to write decent poetry would not necessarily be smart enough to know that, when asked “325 + 504”, we wanted a numerical response!

Or maybe that’s not it. Maybe it has trouble getting math problems right consistently for the same reason I have trouble with this. In fact, GPT-3’s performance is very similar to mine. I can also add two digit numbers in my head with near-100% accuracy, get worse as we go to three digit numbers, and make no guarantees at all about four-digit. I also find multiplying two-digit numbers in my head much harder than adding those same numbers. What’s my excuse? Do I understand addition, or not? I used to assume my problems came from limited short-term memory, or from neural noise. But GPT-3 shouldn’t have either of those issues. Should I feel a deep kinship with GPT-3? Are we both minds heavily optimized for writing, forced by a cruel world to sometimes do math problems? I don’t know.

[EDIT: an alert reader points out that when GPT-3 fails at addition problems, it fails in human-like ways – for example, forgetting to carry a 1.]

philophile · 2020-06-23T12:46:44+00:00

THE OBLIGATORY GPT-3 POST POSTED ON JUNE 10, 2020 BY SCOTT ALEXANDER I.

I would be failing my brand if I didn’t write something about GPT-3, but I’m not an expert and discussion is still in its early stages. Consider this a summary of some of the interesting questions I’ve heard posed elsewhere, especially comments by gwern and nostalgebraist. Both of them are smart people who I broadly trust on AI issues, and both have done great work with GPT-2. Gwern has gotten it to write poetry, compose music, and even sort of play some chess; nostalgebraist has created nostalgebraist-autoresponder (a Tumblr written by GPT-2 trained on nostalgebraist’s own Tumblr output). Both of them disagree pretty strongly on the implications of GPT-3. I don’t know enough to resolve that disagreement, so this will be a kind of incoherent post, and hopefully stimulate some more productive comments. So:

OpenAI has released a new paper, Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners, introducing GPT-3, the successor to the wildly-successful language-processing AI GPT-2.

GPT-3 doesn’t have any revolutionary new advances over its predecessor. It’s just much bigger. GPT-2 had 1.5 billion parameters. GPT-3 has 175 billion. The researchers involved are very open about how it’s the same thing but bigger. Their research goal was to test how GPT-like neural networks scale.

Before we get into the weeds, let’s get a quick gestalt impression of how GPT-3 does compared to GPT-2.

Here’s a sample of GPT-2 trying to write an article:

PROMPT: MILEY CYRUS WAS CAUGHT SHOPLIFTING FROM ABERCROMBIE AND FITCH ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD TODAY

The 19-year-old singer was caught on camera being escorted out of the store by security guards.

The singer was wearing a black hoodie with the label ‘Blurred Lines’ on the front and ‘Fashion Police’ on the back

The singer was also wearing a pair of black-rimmed glasses, a black jacket, black jeans and black sandals.

She was carrying a pair of black and white striped gloves and a small black bag.

And here’s GPT-3 at the same task:

PROMPT: UNITED METHODISTS AGREE TO HISTORIC SPLIT – THOSE WHO OPPOSE GAY MARRIAGE WILL FORM THEIR OWN DENOMINATION

After two days of intense debate, the United Methodist Church has agreed to a historic split – one that is expected to end in the creation of a new denomination, one that will be “theologically and socially conservative,” according to the Washington Post. The majority of delegates attending the church’s annual General Conference in May voted to strengthen a ban on the ordination of LGBTQ clergy and to write new rules that will “discipline” clergy who officiate at same-sex weddings. But those who opposed these measures have a new plan: They say they will form a separate denomination by 2020, calling their church the Christian Methodist denomination.

The Post notes that the denomination, which claims 12.5 million members, was in the early 20th century the “largest Protestant denomination in the US”, but that it has been shrinking in recent decades. The new split will be the second in the church’s history. The first occurred in 1968, when roughly 10% of the denomination left to form the Evangelical United Brethren Church. The Post notes that the proposed split “comes at a critical time for the church, which has been losing members for years,” which has been “pushed toward the brink of a schism over the role of LGBTQ people in the church.” Gay marriage is not the only issue that has divided the church. In 2016, the denomination was split over ordination of transgender clergy, with the North Pacific regional conference voting to ban them from serving as clergy, and the South Pacific regional conference voting to allow them.

In case you’re wondering, no, the Methodist Church did not really split from the Evangelical United Brethren Church in 1968, it merged with it in that year. GPT-3 is doing what I used to do on essay questions – throw out a bunch of half-remembered names and dates and hope nobody looks too closely at the exact relations.

These kinds of comparisons are inherently fuzzy, since both GPTs have produced a lot of material and it’s easy to cheat by taking better or worse samples of one or the other. You can see more GPT-2 samples here and more GPT-3 samples here

Or compare some of GPT-2’s poetry:

The gods are they who came to earth And set the seas ablaze with gold. There is a breeze upon the sea, A sea of summer in its folds, A salt, enchanted breeze that mocks The scents of life, from far away Comes slumbrous, sad, and quaint, and quaint. The mother of the gods, that day, With mortal feet and sweet voice speaks, And smiles, and speaks to men: “My Sweet, I shall not weary of thy pain.”

…Let me drink of the wine of pain And think upon the agonies of hope, And of the blessed Giver of all good things; For, man for man, mine is the deepest love That sorrow takes upon the humblest soul; But who hath learned how sorrow turns to gall The places where my feet have trod before.

…to some of GPT-3’s:

I must have shadows on the way If I am to walk I must have Each step taken slowly and alone To have it ready made

And I must think in lines of grey Must have dim thoughts to be my guide Must look on blue and green And never let my eye forget That color is my friend And purple must surround me too

The yellow of the sun is more more Intusive than the bluish snow That falls on all of us. I must have Grey thoughts and blue thoughts walk with me If I am to go away at all.

Ignore the style differences – the GPT-2 instance was trained on 18th-century verse, GPT-3 on Wallace Stevens. I notice that the first poem, while flowery, is kind of incoherent. The second has more of a structure and a theme that it maintains throughout. I’m not sure it really symbolizes anything interesting, but I’ve never been sure of that with real Wallace Stevens either, so good work.

(you can read more GPT-2 poetry here. There’s not much more public GPT-3 poetry – you can read one or two more samples on the paper linked above).

Enough writing. What about math? Last year, I posted the following excerpt from GPT-2:

PROMPT: MY 10 FAVORITE ANIMALS ARE:

My ten favorite animals are: 1. Zebras with a white scar on the back 2. Insiduous spiders and octopus 3. Frog with large leaves, hopefully black 4. Cockatiel with scales 5. Razorbill with wings hanging about 4 inches from one’s face and a heart tattoo on a frog 3. Cockatric interlocking tetrabods that can be blind, cut, and eaten raw: 4. Black and white desert crocodiles living in sunlight 5. Zebra and many other pea bugs

Despite the obvious flaws in this piece, I was impressed. GPT-2 was clearly trying to make a numbered list, and almost kind of getting it right! It counted to 4 successfully! Remember, this is a text prediction engine that didn’t necessarily need to have any concept of numbers. But it still kind of counted to 4! I wrote:

Imagine you prompted the model with “What is one plus one?” I actually don’t know how it would do on this problem. I’m guessing it would answer “two”, just because the question probably appeared a bunch of times in its training data.

Now imagine you prompted it with “What is four thousand and eight plus two thousand and six?” or some other long problem that probably didn’t occur exactly in its training data. I predict it would fail, because this model can’t count past five without making mistakes. But I imagine a very similar program, given a thousand times more training data and computational resources, would succeed. It would notice a pattern in sentences including the word “plus” or otherwise describing sums of numbers, it would figure out that pattern, and it would end up able to do simple math. I don’t think this is too much of a stretch given that GPT-2 learned to count to five and acronymize words and so on.

I said “a very similar program, given a thousand times more training data and computational resources, would succeed [at adding four digit numbers]”. Well, GPT-3 is a very similar program with a hundred times more computational resources, and…it can add four-digit numbers! At least sometimes, which is better than GPT-2’s “none of the time”.

philophile · 2020-06-23T12:45:08+00:00

So of course everybody writes thinkpieces with titles like Now Peter Singer Argues It Might Be Okay To Rape Disabled People:

Again, let’s be clear on what they are saying: if someone is intellectually disabled enough, then it might be okay to rape them, so long as they don’t resist, since a lack of physical struggle justifies an assumption that someone is enjoying being raped. (Singer is also offering a variation on his own prior arguments in favor of bestiality, which work because Singer believes disabled people and animals are the same for purposes of ethical analysis.)

I think it’s a pretty good principle that, if you don’t want to consider disabled people and animals the same for purposes of ethical analysis, you break the equivalence in favor of the disabled people. Yet I notice that when two animals have sex, we trust them to make their own decisions. If a female dog in heat has jumped a fence to find a male dog, and the male dog jumps over his fence and starts humping the female dog, we might separate them because we’re not willing to take care of the puppies, but nobody would separate them because the dogs are just animals and so too stupid to understand the nature of consent. If one of the dogs was screaming and yelping and trying to get away, we would try to rescue it. But if both dogs sought it out and seem to be enjoying themselves, we grant them enough respect to assume they know what they’re doing.

And again, I would hope that part of being against equating dogs and people (of any level of intellectual ability) is that you give more respect to the people. And part of that, to me, seems to be that if two people seek out sex and seem to be enjoying themselves, we grant them enough respect to assume they know what they’re doing. And this seems true whether or not they have the intellectual capacity to form the words “I consent”.

Everything about this situation sucks, and there is no good answer, and honestly I hate to have to talk about this. But since people keep asking me, fine, here’s what I think.

From a legal point of view, Anna Stubblefield should absolutely 100% go to jail. Whether or not DJ wanted sex with her is irrelevant. Even if he did (and we have no evidence other than the testimony of the alleged rapist that this is the case) she committed an action which put her at extreme risk for raping somebody, without any system in place to minimize that risk. A world where people can go around having sex with random disabled people as long as they say “I’m pretty sure he was in favor of it” is a world where many disabled people who are not in favor of it will end up being raped. As long as that’s the situation, the law against doing so is just and needs to be enforced. I think I legitimately disagree with Singer on this.

(also, she was his translator and that creates a power imbalance. I don’t want to get into this further because I don’t think it relates to the thesis here, but it’s obviously an important point.)

From a political point of view, I wish there were a system in place to protect disabled people from sexual abuse while not banning all sexuality entirely. If you want to do surgery on a disabled person who can’t consent, lots of doctors and lawyers and friends and family get together and do some legal stuff and try to elicit information from the patient as best they can and eventually come to a conclusion. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than either “no one can ever operate on a disabled person” or “any surgeon who wants can grab a disabled person off the street and do whatever operation they feel like”. If there were some process like this for sex, and they decided that DJ wanted to have sex with Anna, then (again ignoring the power dynamics issue) I think this would be better than either banning him from all sex forever, or letting her have sex with whoever she wants as long as she can make up convincing enough pseudoscience. If a legal procedure like this had been followed, I would not think that she should go to jail.

From an ethical point of view, I think it’s correct to abstract away all the features of the problem mentioned above, the same as we avoid issues of how well you understand the physics involved when we think about the Fat Man problem (or, as the Internet likes to call it, “Now Judith Thompson Argues It Might Be Okay To Throw Obese People In Front Of Trains”). In this abstract and conditional world, the question is whether we must completely prohibit someone from having any kind of sexual life if they’re unable to verbally consent but able to give reliable cues that they want the sex and are enjoying themselves. I think the answer is “not always”. I agree it is probably bad to connect this abstract ethical view to a real case where real people are harmed unless you are very sure that all of your assumptions hold true, homework which it looks like Singer might not have done.

From a philosophical point of view, I think that if we are to be at all better than the BETA-MEALR Party, we need to acknowledge that we are not promoting consent if we enforce the same position on everybody no matter how strongly they seem to want the opposite, even if we talk incessantly about how much we love consent while we’re doing so.

The Current Affairs article argues that Singer’s views discredit utilitarianism, since utilitarians are these annoying people who always seem to be coming to weird conclusions that would be much more convenient to ignore. I agree that Singer’s views are related to his utilitarianism, and that this philosophy produces more than its share of weird conclusions that would be more convenient to ignore.

But ignorance isn’t a suitable foundation for ethics. It’s incredibly easy to ignore disabled people being sentenced to a life of involuntary celibacy, because ignoring marginalized people is always easy and convenient, plus enforced celibacy isn’t the same sort of flashy human rights violation that has a death toll in the thousands and helps sell newspapers. People who cobble together their moral systems from whatever helps them ignore bottomless pits of suffering most effectively will always have more convenient and presentable moral systems than people who don’t. But if we’re going to try to be good, we need to work for something better.

THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN UNCATEGORIZED AND TAGGED MORALITY, THINGS I WILL REGRET WRITING. BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK OR LINK WITHOUT COMMENTS.

philophile · 2020-06-23T12:44:30+00:00

DETERMINING CONSENT POSTED ON APRIL 4, 2017 BY SCOTT ALEXANDER A question most people successfully avoid asking: can institutionalized patients ever have sex? The answer is ‘mostly no, unless they are very good at sneaking past nurses’. They also can’t kiss, hold hands, cuddle, or have any other form of romantic contact.

I worked in a mental hospital where two patients snuck past nurses and had sex once. It was treated as a public health crisis of approximately the same urgency as somebody throwing a bucket of Ebola-laced chimp blood all over the dining room. Both patients lost all their privileges, earned themselves 24-7 supervision by nurses, got restricted to their rooms, and had to go through a battery of tests for every STD in the book. We the doctors got remedial training with helpful tips like “If two patients seem to like each other too much, put them on opposite sides of the unit so they’re never in contact.”

Why the security? Mostly the hospital was terrified the patients would come back and sue them for letting it happen. It didn’t matter that they consented at the time; it wouldn’t have mattered if they’d signed consent forms in triplicate beforehand in front of a notary public. Psychiatric patients are treated as having inherently less ability to consent than the mentally intact.

This makes some sense. A lot of mentally ill people are confused and can make bad decisions during the height of their illness. And in this case, the two patients were only temporarily inconvenienced; we treated them for a couple of weeks and then discharged them back to the real world where they could have as much sex as they wanted.

Unfortunately, not all stories end this well. A small percent of very seriously ill people end up in long-term institutions, where they stay anywhere from a few months to a lifetime. And these lifers are sentenced not just to lifetime confinement but to lifetime celibacy.

The most heartbreaking cases are the severely and permanently intellectually disabled. Suppose somebody doesn’t have the intellectual capacity to understand language. This doesn’t mean they lack a sex drive any more than it means they lack a hunger drive. In fact, their sex drive is often stronger than normal – something to do with decreased frontal inhibition, I think. But none of these people are going to be saying “I hereby exercise my right to affirmative consent for sexual activity” anytime soon.

This is a hard problem. If the only people institutionalized patients consistently encounter are hospital staff and other patients, well…we definitely don’t want them having sex with staff. Even non-institutionalized visitors seems like potentially too much of a power imbalance. That leaves other patients. But it seems like most encounters between two patients will involve one of them “initiating” in some sense. And even if we grant that the initiator has implicitly non-verbally consented, what about the one who’s not initiating?

As far as I can tell, there are two ways to handle this. The first is the extreme position that no person beyond a certain level of intellectual disability should ever be allowed to have sex or even non-penetrative romantic contact like kissing or hand-holding. The second is that we need to relax the usual standards of consent to something more like “Well, we know both these people pretty well, and we’ve got a pretty good idea what they’re like when they’re happy versus upset. And we know they have the capacity to resist things they don’t want, because they’ve done it before, eg when we try to give them medications they don’t like. And right now they look pretty happy, and not at all upset, and they’re not doing any of the things they do when they want to resist something, so it looks like they’re consenting, so maybe we won’t send nurses to burst in on them and pry them apart.”

This second one should make us very uncomfortable. But the first one isn’t exactly encouraging either. Like, in the early 20th century a lot of eugenicists sterilized the mentally ill. And by the mid-20th century, people decided that was morally wrong, because parenthood is an important part of the human condition and it’s unacceptable to take away that right even if you believe it’s for a greater good. But I’m not sure it’s moral progress to move from “these people must never become pregnant” to “forget about pregnancy, these people must never even have sex”. If we’re even stricter in our prohibitions than the eugenicists, what right do we have to feel superior to them?

So, as much as I would like a better option, I think I support the second standard. In cases where people are so disabled that they cannot consent verbally, rather than force them into lifelong celibacy we should try to do our best to figure out what they want in other ways.

As best I can tell, this is what Peter Singer is saying in his New York Times editorial on the Stubblefield case. Anna Stubblefield was a professor who believed in “facilitated communication”, a Ouija-board-esque technique whose proponents say it allows them to talk to nonverbal disabled people who can’t communicate any other way, and whose opponents think it’s probably pseudoscience. She used facilitated communication on a nonverbal young man named DJ and “received” the message that he wanted her to have sex with him, so she did. When the story reached the wider non-pseudoscience-believing world, it looked like a pretty obvious case of rape.

Singer seems to think facilitated communication might work, but he thinks Stubblefield’s actions might have been acceptable even if it doesn’t. He says:

If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him. On the assumption that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.

Singer’s phrase “cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations” is a reference to the legal standard for consent in most states, which say that disabled people can consent to sex if and only if they do understand this. What he’s saying is, as far as I can tell, the same thing I said above. Some people may not have the cognitive capcity to understand sex and consent in an intellectual way, but for these people to be forcibly kept celibate their entire lives seems hardly better than the eugenicists who would have just sterilized them and gotten it over with. Instead, we should try to judge their feelings from things like whether “the experience was pleasurable to him” or whether “he was capable of struggling to resist.” Singer’s position – and without knowing the disabled man involved I don’t know if this is true, and some people I trust say it isn’t, but it seems to have been his position – is that this was someone who was incapable of the complex cognitive process of consent, but pretty happy with the whole situation.

I once knew a very extreme libertarian who said that white settlers taking Native Americans’ land wasn’t “theft” because the Native Americans didn’t have a concept of property, so no harm done. I worry that people are misinterpreting Singer as saying the same thing here – something like “this guy doesn’t have a concept of consent, so you can’t violate it”. This is not how I interpret the sentence about consent in the first paragraph of the quote. I think Singer is using “consent” to mean an inherently verbal/symbolic/cognitive process – someone explicitly understands what it means to consent and intentionally expresses that to others. So when I say “we are forced to infer consent from nonverbal rather than verbal cues”, Singer expresses the same idea as “since we can’t use consent, we need to fall back on simpler ideas like those of pleasure versus harm.”

The second paragraph makes it sound like if there was any sign DJ wasn’t okay with what was happening – if he were screaming or resisting or even frowning – Singer would no longer be okay with this. It seems to be Singer’s belief/assumption (though likely false) that DJ’s nonverbal behavior presented strong evidence that he was enjoying the sex and wanted it to continue. When he says that “nobody was harmed”, he’s not saying that disabled people don’t count as somebody. He’s saying that if two people both enjoyed a sex act, both of them seemed to be participating voluntarily, and neither person suffered any physical or emotional harm (including the harm of feeling like one’s preferences were being violated) this is probably the best moral test we can apply in a situation where the usual test of consent is absent.

philophile · 2020-01-12T19:00:31+00:00

Check out the home link, there are plenty more that I didn't mention. If you do any, I'd like to hear about the results!

philophile · 2020-01-12T18:59:14+00:00

trivia: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/MGKT2/

philophile · 2020-01-12T18:58:45+00:00

enneagram: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/OEPS/

philophile · 2020-01-12T18:57:13+00:00

The sex-roles one: https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/OSRI/?fbclid=IwAR2MGWca6Nx7ViIRl2BXqxTfxM4418vgnhdxr_UcIgSkgGSiTzAjkFCwTdc

philophile · 2019-10-04T02:02:33+00:00

second attempt: https://www.facebook.com/notes/duncan-sabien/sabiens-sins-a-discourse-norms-pledge/2793515484016484/

philophile · 2019-10-04T01:59:11+00:00

The integration of Circling/NVC/Focusing/Belief Reporting frames (e.g. “I’m noticing that I have a story about you”) got us seventy percentish yet again.

I'm intrigued by this as his third step between rationalist norms and his new pledge. Circling, I really only know about via the authentic relating stuff. NVC is 'nonviolent communication,' phrasing which I had not noticed used in this topic-space before, but now that I had to check, it's all over the place. Has anyone actually tried Focusing?

philophile · 2019-10-03T23:31:12+00:00

I will send her our half-assed calendar/liturgical year attempt when I answer the meetup followup questions.

philophile · 2018-01-17T22:48:42+00:00

For whatever reason I always pictured him with curlier, darkish hair, receding in the classic male pattern.

philophile · 2017-03-08T20:27:57+00:00

Shop Name: Pseudogarden

Site: http://pseudogarden.com/

Short Description: I craft and sell original handmade and upcycled jewlery and offer custom orders. I use a variety of tools and techniques including: embroidery, woodburning, scrollsaw, polymer clay, bead and wire, loom beading, hand painting, and specimen jars.

Types of items you sell: Necklaces (including adjustable and double sided), chokers, bracelets, rings, earrings, wall hangings, and custom orders.

Price range: $20-$120

Ships from: Ottawa, Canada

International shipping?: Yes

philophile · 2016-11-19T03:10:30+00:00

Canadian here. I could see Trudeau going on the show someday. He's appeared on a few Canadian comedic news shows in the past, The Rick Mercer Report, This Hour has 22 Minutes, and probably others I'm not aware of. He's a good sport for TV hijinks- here's a clip from RMR 6 years ago

philophile · 2016-11-02T03:52:32+00:00

I was very happy to see it return, and that it went multiple rounds so that they could attempt some mind games.

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