A quick note on how we use quotation marks: we sometimes use them for direct quotes and sometimes use them to paraphrase. If you want to find out if they’re a direct quote, just ctrl-f in the original post and see if it is or not.
This is some real slimy shit. You can compare the “quotes” to Chloe’s account, and see how much of a hitjob this is.
If you post on EA forum or LW, you can crosspost automatically to the other one by clicking one button on the publishing page. The sites are run by essentially the same people.
Hmmm, I wonder who benefits from keeping EA chained to an Eliezer Yudkowsky fan forum…
Hey, thanks so much for looking through it! If you’re alright with messaging me your email or something, I might consult you on some more related things.
With your permission, I’m tempted to edit this response into the original post, it’s really good. Have you looked over Yudkowsky’s word salad in the EA forum thread? Would be interested in getting your thoughts on that as well.
Thanks, I love these answers! I’ll drop a DM on matrix for further questions.
This rather economic recycling allows a living cell to absorb damage that would be catastrophic when you just assume that everything works forever just as you imagined. I don’t have a guess how much more energy would be expended in reassembly of diamondoids, @titotal might have an estimate, but i guess it’s some 1-2 orders of magnitude more
The DMS researchers were estimating something on the order of 5 eV for mechanically dropping a single pair of Carbon atoms onto the surface of diamond. I’m not sure how to directly compare this to the biological case.
EA as a movement was a combination of a few different groups (This account says Giving what we can/80000 hours, Givewell, and yudkowsky’s MIRI). However, the main source of early influx of people was the rationalist movement, as Yud had heavily promoted EA-style ideas in the sequences.
So if you look at surveys, right now a a relatively small percentage (like 15%) of EA’s first heard about it through lesswrong or SSC. But back in 2014, and earlier, Lesswrong was the number one onroad into the movement (like 30%) . (I’m sure a bunch of the other answers may have heard about it from rationalist friends as well). I think it would have been even more if you go back earlier.
Nowadays, most of the recruiting is independent from the rationalists, so you have a bunch of people coming in and being like, what’s with all the weird shit? However they still adopt a ton of rationalist ideas and language, and the EA forum is run by the same people as Lesswrong. It leads to some tension: someone wrote a post saying that “yudkowsky is frequently confidently, egregiousl wrong”, and it was somewhat upvoted on EA forum but massively downvoted on Lesswrong.
I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn’t be full destructive interference.
when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?
I’m not sure how you’d actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you’d need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I’m fully theoretical physics so I’m not too familiar).
What I think happened is that he got confused by the half mirror phase shifts (because theres only a phase shift if you reflect off the front of the mirror, not the back). Instead of asking someone, he invented his own weird system which gets the right answer by accident, and then refused to fix the mistake ever, saying that the alternate system is fine because it’s “simpler”.
My impression is that the toxicity within EA is mainly concentrated in the bay area rationalists, and in a few of the actual EA organizations. If it’s just a local meetup group, it’s probably just going to be some regular-ish people with some mistaken beliefs that are genuinely concerned about AI.
Just be polite and present arguments, and you might actually change minds, at least among those who haven’t been sucked too far into Rationalism.
Eliezer asks me to state my confidence that I won’t roll a 1.
I say I am 99% confident I won’t roll a 1, using basic math.
Eliezer says “AHA, you idiot, I checked all of your past predictions and when you predicted something with confidence 99%, it only happened 90% of the time! So you can’t say you’re 99% confident that you won’t roll a 1”
I am impressed by the ability of my past predictions to affect the roll of a dice, and promptly run off to become a wizard.
Yeah, I’ve been writing up critiques for a year or two now, collected over at my substack. I’ve been posting them to the EA forum and even Lesswrong itself and they’ve been generally well received.
Current physicist here: yeah, most physicists are in the “shut up and calculate” camp, and view the interpretations as fun lunchroom conversation.
I also think that collapse is unsatisfying, and I think yud did an adequate job in relaying the reasons why a lot of physicists are unhappy with it. The problem is that “collapse is unsatisfying” is not sufficient evidence to declare that MWI is true and that MWI nonbelievers are fools. The obvious point being that there a shitload of other interpretations which neither feature many-worlds or “real” collapse. The other point is that MWI is an incomplete theory, as there are no explanation for the Born probabilities. Also, we know we don’t have the full picture of quantum physics anyway (as it’s incompatible with general relativity), so it’s possible that if we figure out a unified theory the problems with interpretations will go away.
Nonlinear seem to think this post replying to the accusations about them will make them look like the heroes (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
warning: seriously nasty narcissism at length...
18+ Why Yudkowsky is wrong about "covalently bonded equivalents of biology" (titotal.substack.com)
This is my article on one of the dumbest and most obviously false claims Yudkowsky has ever made, about biology not using covalent bonds.
To what extent did Eliezer Yudkowsky invent the Effective Altruist movement? (forum.effectivealtruism.org)
I was wondering if someone here has a better idea of how EA developed in its early days than I do....
18+ My deep dive into yudkowsky's "diamondoid bacteria" claims and drexler-style nanotech in general (titotal.substack.com)
…substack.com/…/diamondoid-bacteria-nanobots-dead…...
18+ Friends Don’t Let Friends Learn Probability from Yudkowsky | Science After Sunclipse (www.sunclipse.org)
For convenience, I gathered a few comments of mine into a blog post.
Let's walk through the uncanny valley with SBF so we can collapse some wave functions together (hachyderm.io)
Rationalist check-list:...
18+ I was invited to an EA event on AI safety
The local Effective Altruism chapter had a stand at the university hobby fair....
Another twist in the Ziz saga (cw death/shooting) (www.tumblr.com)
I don’t think I posted this before, but if I did lemme know....
Sequence classic: "I don’t think you could get up to 99.99% confidence for assertions like “53 is a prime number.” (www.lesswrong.com)
LessWrong classics: “A Bayesian superintelligence, hooked up to a webcam of a falling apple, would invent general relativity by the third frame” (www.lesswrong.com)
this year's "hmm, actually this is bad" post: Eliezer Yudkowsky Is Frequently, Confidently, Egregiously Wrong (www.lesswrong.com)