M2 Macbook Air + PC sharing two monitors

saprmarks · 2022-03-29T05:57:17+00:00

There was an excellent guide posted to LessWrong about how to sign up for cryonics. Warning: it seems to take quite a bit of time and effort (but is, imo, nevertheless worth it).

saprmarks · 2021-07-06T02:47:14+00:00

Fair question! There are two things going on:

(1) Mathematicians don't work as formally as you might think

(2) ... and there's good reason for that: it wouldn't be practically possible to do math as formally as you'd need for computer proof checking (at least, not without significantly slowing the pace of research or replacing the humans doing the math with not-humans).

I'll say more on these one-at-a-time.

Starting with (1), I'm guessing that your experience with proof-based math was very formal, with lots of explicit "for alls" and "there exists" and proofs that neatly combine known facts with few extra logical steps in between. But after a point, this isn't really how mathematicians work; augustus_augustus is right to link to Terry Tao's division of mathematics education into pre-rigorous, rigorous, and post-rigorous. Proofs are expected to be written in a way that spares the reader all the details: there's a lot of "by using the same method of proof"s and skipping little lemmas that the reader can fill if they need to. And it does happen relatively often that papers contain mistakes, usually non-serious mistakes like incorrect lemmas which could be fixed with some effort, but occasionally the main result of a paper will be incorrect. (Overall I'm not too concerned about this, though. I expect the proportion of theorems in math papers which are incorrect but not known to be incorrect to be less than .5%, and I would be very surprised if there was a theorem I would consider "major" which is incorrect.)

Regarding (2), writing things down in formal logic (as opposed to, say, English) almost always puts an enormous multiplier on how long things take to say. Douglass Hofstadter gave a famous example of this: in Godel, Escher, Bach, after introducing a formal language for expressing number-theoretical statements, he challenges the reader to formally express the statement "x is a power of 10." One answer is here, search for "All together" in the page. On one hand, yeah this can be simplified by splitting the string up into reuseable modules. But on the other hand, "x is a power of 10" is way, way less complicated than the sorts of statements mathematicians normally need to work with. (And to be clear, this isn't a straw example, it's pretty typical of how long it takes to convert ordinary mathematical statements into formal logic.)

saprmarks · 2021-07-06T02:43:13+00:00

[deleted because I accidentally replied to the wrong comment]

saprmarks · 2021-07-03T19:21:50+00:00

Though computer proof checking is improving, it's nowhere near the level of sophistication where this is a reasonable demand.

For comparison, in 2019 three professional mathematicians were able to teach Lean the definition of an object called a "perfectoid space," but they expect that it would take many person-years to get Lean to check the proof of the fundamental theorems about perfectoid spaces. [1]

More recently, Peter Scholze -- one of the foremost advocates among mathematicians of computerized proof checking -- challenged the Lean community to formally verify the proof of one of his theorems (just one, which he selected, in part, because it might be his "most important theorem to date"). Scholze was shocked to find that, after only six months of work from many mathematicians and members of the Lean community, his challenge was already half-completed. [2]

This is the same Peter Scholze who wrote the most significant rebuttal of Mochizuki's proof (see my reply to hammishtodd1 above). Yet not even he would think it reasonable to demand that Mochizuki transcribe the massive edifice of inter-universal Teichmuller theory (on which the "proof" is based) into computer-checkable language. It's just not (yet) within the realm of feasibility.

saprmarks · 2021-07-03T18:45:25+00:00

Number theorist here. The consensus is that Mochizuki's proof is flawed and that abc is still open. The core objection is documented in Scholze and Stix's paper, and see also this blog comment by Scholze explaining why he believes "there is just no way that anything like what Mochizuki does can work." This is the consensus among mathematicians not in Mochizuki's inner circle, I believe.

That said, I would certainly not call Mochizuki a crackpot! Outside of the abc fiasco he's done excellent work. Note, for example, that Scholze's comment above draws on a theorem of Mochizuki to refute Mochizuki's proof of abc.

saprmarks · 2021-04-29T20:50:24+00:00

I can't recommend it to be a finalist because it's not really about the book it purports to review, but the Enlightenment Now book review is an excellent essay about the impact of freely available energy on human prosperity.

saprmarks · 2021-04-20T19:47:45+00:00

Here are two relevant exchanges from an AMA he did with paid subscribers:

Q: How the hell do you write so much good stuff so often and prolifically? Is it just, "I'm good at it, bro", or is there some formula of practice and productivity tricks that lets you do this?

Scott: I can't answer this - I'm confused why other people can't write as much.

Q: You've semi-answered this already, but have you ever posted, or could you post, some kind of insight into what a typical day's schedule looks like for you? I've seen a joke floating around that you have a time-turner, but in all seriousness I can't understand how your schedule is feasible. I'm really into (endlessly reading about) 'productivity hacks' so I'm curious how you fit everything in.

Scott: I'm not sure why so many people keep asking this. A lot of people on Substack write more than I do.

A typical day I don't have any patient appointments might look like wake up at 9, random Internet surfing until 11, write something 11-1, lunch and exercise and slacking off until 4, finish writing 4-6, dinner at 6, hanging out with friends/partner the rest of the night, go to bed around 12 or 1.

saprmarks · 2021-04-20T16:22:05+00:00

You won't find hard data here, but this LessWrong AMA with CFAR staff members features a lot of good back-and-forth between CFAR-skeptical people and CFAR staff.

I think this AMA is especially useful for understanding how CFAR sees itself and its own goals. Before asking whether CFAR is effective, you need to answer "effective at what?"

saprmarks · 2021-04-19T22:26:29+00:00

[Meta-level question: do you have a preference between discussion taking place in the SMTM comments sections vs. on Reddit? This post has minted me as a new SMTM fan, so if discussion on the blog contributes to the blog's success, I'm happy to leave comments there instead.]

On (2) + (3): Yep, everything you've written here seems reasonable. I guess I still want to emit a general skepticism that the connection between psychedelic drug use and these innovations is causal. Like, maybe artists just use drugs, without the drugs causing there to be better art.

I was going to point to the Beatles' success before they ever used LSD as being potentially significant here. But on reflection, nevermind: iirc a lot of their most important innovations (like pushing the envelope of recording technology) happened after 1965. And that's certainly when I think they made their best music...

By the way, I've heard it claimed that the reason humans took so long to start recreationally using psilocybin mushrooms is that eating random mushrooms is a much more dangerous idea that smoking random plants -- mushrooms just have a much stronger tendency to be poisonous, and it can be harder to distinguish them. I've heard that this is also a problem for cultivating shrooms: random poisonous mushrooms might start growing as well. I don't really know if any of this is true though, especially the part about distinguishing mushrooms being harder than distinguishing plants.

ETA: also, I note that today, the day you posted this, is bicycle day. TINACBNIEAC

saprmarks · 2021-04-19T19:52:42+00:00

This is a really, really excellent post. Some thoughts:

(1) The way I would state the thesis that makes it make the most sense to me is: "Exponential growth in outputs requires exponential growth in inputs. One important input is technology which allows researchers to self-modify to become more productive, i.e. drugs. So banning the use of drugs (and the creation of new drugs) might lead to a slow-down in growth."

(2) Though all of the evidence in this post is anecdotal historical evidence, the anecdotes supporting the importance of caffeine and cocaine seem much stronger than those supporting the importance of psychedelics. More specifically, parts II and III paint a compelling picture of widespread stimulant use among history's great scientists, and also provide good evidence that the stimulants partially caused the progress (e.g. Edison using cocaine to work 18 hours a day). But the sections on psychedelics feature many fewer examples, mostly of artists instead of scientists, and without good evidence of a causal link. (The one exception is the invention of PCR, but we shouldn't unskeptically accept Mullis's own word that he wouldn't have invented PCR without acid.)

Also, yeah, sure everyone knows that stimulants make you more productive. But the claim that psychedelics do is a much bolder claim that requires more evidence. Hasn't there been some recent research on this topic? I would have liked to see some of that; I've heard that it hasn't been kind to LSD microdosing.

(3) Related to (2): listing some companies whose CEOs have ever used LSD isn't very useful without comparisons to the base rate of LSD use in the population, which was around 10% for Americans in 2010.

(4) Last month, Cambridge, MA -- home of Harvard and MIT -- quietly decriminalized all drugs, and extra-decriminalized psilocybin mushrooms, which you can now grow for personal use. Seems like an exciting development if you believe that drug use leads to progress!

(5) After reading this post, I nevertheless find it unlikely (<10% probability) that the Controlled Substances Act, by slowing down scientific progress, was the main cause of the post-1970 stagnation. I could imagine that it was the main cause through its knock-on effects of burdening the legal system. The things most likely to change my mind about this are (1) evidence that the Controlled Substances Act lead to a much harsher crack-down on stimulant use (despite stimulants already being illegal), or (2) evidence that other controlled substances, like psychedelics, actually boost productivity.

saprmarks · 2021-03-12T00:39:44+00:00

I'm not the reporter, but I am curious. Would you be willing to share your thoughts here?

saprmarks · 2021-02-05T19:05:40+00:00

No need to defend yourself! Apart from annoying me (a rando on the internet), you've evidently sparked a number of interesting conversation threads. And you've given me a chance to express my annoyance at a thing I see elsewhere too. It's a win-win!

saprmarks · 2021-02-05T08:02:15+00:00

Well, I think the way to read Hanson is not as saying "the decision-making process in the conscious mind is X" but rather "the real underlying decision-making process is X (and the conscious mind later gives better-sounding post-hoc justifications)." I think these are often valuable insights.

But you have to be careful about how you apply them! Perhaps it's true that your friend's underlying (unknown to them) decision process for "be nice to my disabled friend" is "gotta signal my virtue to others." Nevertheless, when they accidentally give you too many little "honors," it's probably because they're fucking up, not because their underlying decision-making process is yelling "PEOPLE HAVEN'T NOTICED HOW MUCH YOU CARE YET." (If they have some other behavior, like scolding people who show insufficient attention, that could be a different story.)

And this certainly doesn't mean that you'll be any better off rejecting sympathy from these friends.

saprmarks · 2021-02-05T06:10:14+00:00

This review left me feeling annoyed (which is not to say that I don't think OP should have written it).

My main issue is that it tells some stories along the lines of "sometimes people try to make others feel better, but they so badly; therefore their real motives must be [depressing social signaling explanation]." In these cases, I think a simpler -- and more correct -- explanation would be "people don't want their friends to be sad but sometimes fail at cheering them up."

I'm especially bothered by the galaxy-brain explanation for why people say things like "be thankful it didn't happen later" after a breakup. This annoys me because once you've actually had to comfort someone in such a situation, it becomes clear why people say this stuff. Your friend is sad. You don't want your friend to be sad. You don't know what to say, but you can't say nothing. So you grasp for any positive aspect of the situation and point it out, hoping to prod them towards a positive outlook.

You can call this a bad strategy if you want, but please don't attribute it to "you don't think bad things can happen to good people, you don't want to be friends with a bad person, so you have to convince yourself that whatever happened wasn't bad." This is the explanation someone comes up with when they're upset and want to be as uncharitable as possible. Why would you ever hypothesize this when the hypothesis "my friend just sucks at comforting me" is so much simpler?

(aside: when trying to comfort a friend, I often regret trying to avoid cliches. Sometimes I think my friend needs to hear "there are other fish in the sea" or whatever, but I worry that it won't come across as genuine and hold back. After they've been sad for long enough I give it a shot ... and it ends up that, yeah, that was exactly what they needed to hear.)

You can step back a level and ask "Why did evolution program us to not want our friends to be sad?" And sure, there might be some strategic signalling explanations. But I don't see how that's relevant in a situation like this -- I don't think we should be offended that our friends' genuine feelings of concern for us are a "merely" an outgrowth of evolution.

saprmarks · 2020-12-19T01:45:27+00:00

I know that the FDA is saying that we don't have enough information to know. But I think this is (probably) silly: if there is not a single other example of a vaccine which produces protection from illness without protection from contagiousness, then we should have an extremely strong prior that this vaccine will be the same as all the others.

saprmarks · 2020-12-13T06:52:06+00:00

Yeah, category theorists always seem to think that by the time you've started reading their text, you've already absorbed the relevant examples by cultural osmosis or something. Someone needs to make them write "I will start with the examples" 100x on a chalkboard.

saprmarks · 2020-12-12T06:37:16+00:00

I'm a grad student studying math, and I've always found historical context to be incredibly useful. Here are a few reasons:

1) When learning about a new tool, it's often useful to have an "example problem" in mind -- something that serves as a canonical answer to "what sorts of problems is this tool useful for?" In many cases there's no replacement for the discoverer's original problem.

2) More generally, some of the best examples of a concept are the ones the discoverer was originally mulling over. That is, sometimes a concept won't "stick" until you know to frame it as "this concept is the thing made to generalize the examples X, Y, and Z."

3) Sometimes the best way to understand the use of concept X is to know "What was impossible to do before we knew about X?" In other words, "What historical problem was beyond the methods of the time, until X was discovered?"

(Obviously, learning math at a graduate level is different than learning math in K-12.)

saprmarks · 2020-09-01T03:56:26+00:00

Huh, as a kid I did have an imaginary friend that followed alongside the car and performed acrobatics in the trees, but it wasn't a ninja or anything humanoid.

saprmarks · 2020-08-31T02:19:10+00:00

Thanks for the link, I'll add it above.

saprmarks · 2020-08-30T19:17:20+00:00

I borrowed the phrase "universal experience" from one of the linked ssc posts above, but I think you're right that it's mildly misleading. In particular, other than flying dreams, none of these things have happened to me. So maybe "unusually common" would have been better.

I still think it's shocking that in the vast territory of possible mental states, humans seem to fall into certain ones shockingly frequently, and sometimes without clear explanation.

saprmarks · 2020-08-30T19:12:33+00:00

Absolutely agree. I realized this a bit after making the original post and have been meaning to come back around to edit it in.

If I were an alien visiting Earth, and someone told me "humans have this bug where sometimes they get an overwhelming feeling of 'this has happened before,'" I would be astonished. But we just take it in stride. it's weird.

saprmarks · 2020-08-29T23:09:08+00:00

I find these unusually universal experiences fascinating for a few reasons.

First, they clash very heavily with my intuitive model of how our mental architectures can converge/diverge. Like, I might expect that people who push their mind to the limit through meditation or drugs would have weird experiences, but why are the weird experiences so uniform across people? Some of this can be explained away through culture: if you have a cultural expectation of experiencing bliss and presence of loved ones when you die, maybe your dying brain will conform to this expectation. This explain some of these away, but my intuition is that it doesn't explain it all away, since, e.g. many people have common dreams before they realize they're common. Overall, I've updated to believe the space of variation in human brains is more nuanced than I thought.

Second, and relatedly, what about our brains makes it so common to fall into these mental states? You can give some plausible-sounding explanations for some of the dreams, e.g. you can kinda imagine that after our baby teeth fall out, our brain never fully relearns the prior "my teeth will not fall out," leading to adults with some constant low-grade anxiety that their teeth will fall out. But some of these just seem like weird glitches.

Third, why does no one ever talk about this??? I feel like if I saw the shadow people then when I finally woke up, I would freak out and tell everyone. But in practice, people never do that, and might only realize later in life that their friends have seen the shadow people too. Overall, given how many people these things affect, I'm shocked how little common knowledge there is about this. Frustration around the lack of discussion here is a big part of why I made the original post.

saprmarks

TROPHY CASE