Tiled With Pentagons

(Epistemic status: I hope for your sake that this whole post is near-incomprehensible to you. Nonetheless it'll make more sense if you've read "33. Your Heart Will Go On" and "37. Seven-ish Emotions From My Culture".) (With thanks to Mutemath.) There's a very specific emotion that you personally may not be able to feel. If you can, you'll know it after I've described it, and I feel for you. It's one of those things where (e.g.) you ask if anyone's ever been so hungry they were nauseous, and you get answers of either "yeah, I hate it when that happens" else "no, what the heck?!"s and horrified stares. It goes like this, that nameless feeling: you think about something you love, or something you want very badly. Your mind's eye can't stop staring at it, unblinkingly. It's so beautiful, so real, so alive to you, but so far away. You're tearing up? Oh, no, you're tearing up, and something hurts deep in ...

(Epistemic status: only partially worked out, lots of handwaving, still not something I've seen talked much about explicitly anywhere.) (With thanks to JSW, PR, RG, MR, and JM, among others, who asked for this. If you asked me for this out of the list, it's for you.) Food and drinks have flavors [citation needed]. In fact, they have lots of flavors - careful tasting of an ordinary bottled barbecue sauce presents sweetness and tartness and savoriness, and beneath those, tomato and molasses, and beneath those - if you get that far - mustard seed and paprika and onion powder and "some kind of fish sauce???". (It's Worcestershire sauce.) Some flavors blend nicely, like onion and garlic, while others clash, like onion and pineapple. But then some very different flavors pair just fine, like apples and cinnamon, or vanilla and nearly anything you'd find in a dessert. And even onion and pineapple go together just fine in the greater context of a salsa, or even a pizz...

If you've talked with me for long enough, you know that I cleave to that ancient and honored tradition of putting numbers to my probability estimates. Be it guesses at whether my flight will be on time, how likely I think I am to get accepted for a job or grant, or how confident I am in my prediction of someone's taste in candy, I'll happily pause for a moment or three, do a little Focusing on numbers, poke my mental model, and spit out a number. The weird thing about my estimates is, they don't tend to be round tens of percents. Often, they aren't even simple ratios of small whole numbers - 3s and 93s and 35s abound. So what's up with that? Am I just posing? Wonderfully, no! I like to think about probabilities in terms of successive coin flips - that is, something like surprisal, or log-probability. So when I spout an "87", I'm thinking that it'd be as surprising as seeing three successive heads rather than anything else - meaningfully odd, bu...

Upton's Law: "it is very hard to get a [person] to understand something when [their] livelihood depends very much on their not understanding it." We see this all around us - short-sighted carbonaceous fuel moguls, anyone in your least favorite police force or army, patent trolling and other rent-seeking, and (of course) just about anyone working in ad tech or at a scaling lab. It's not that they don't care about the negative externalities they generate - they have simply put themselves in a frame of mind where those bad secondary effects touch but lightly on the conscience. Why, though? How can people do that to themselves? A secret: not everyone can, for any given such source of harm. We must look, as always, to selection effects. (Twice.) On the one hand, consider what happens if the harms that someone generates in earning their living weigh on them heavily. One way or another, they'll be gone and replaced with someone who'll likely be better-suited to i...

For a while, I didn't quite understand what people meant when they talked about "LLM hallucination". "Oh," said I, on first hearing the term. "You mean the thing where image-recognition transformers can be induced to see things that are blatantly not there through adversarial input?" As it turned out very quickly, that's not what that term meant at all. Rather, it referred to a phenomenon where an LLM might produce all sorts of reasonable-looking factual-seeming text in an attempt to answer some particularly thorny prompt. "That's not hallucination," I replied. "That's confabulation." Thankfully, more recently more people have joined me in debucketing proper hallucination - invention from whole cloth, or inappropriate regurgitation of memorized snippets of text or images, or inaccurate "recognition" - from confabulation. But what's confabulation? It's not lying. It's not being mistaken. It's not...

(With no apologies at all to Frank Belknap Long.) The Tindalosian fox (V. tindalosi; V. vulpes tindalosi is now considered obsolete), also called the topologist's fox, the hyperfox, or the false-kumiho, is a para-sapient species of the Vulpes genus and one of the most widely distributed members of Carnivora, having spread into orthogonal and ideatic spaces nearby to Earth at a steady but extremely slow pace starting around 250kya from throughout the red fox (V. vulpes)'s holarctic range with at least three punctuating events in recorded history, though unlike the Rift Valley Event (peak: 2 kya), both the Salish Coast Event (peak: 11 +/- 3 kya) and the Hamheung Event (peak: 5 +/- 2 kya) were only recognized as such much later with the advent of the same modern nooscopy necessary to tell the Tindalosian fox from the otherwise generally indistinguishable red fox, its much more common cousin species. V. tindalosi is best known for its two most notably unusual abilities of calculat...

(With thanks and apologies to JSW.) (Epistemic status: Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future; nonetheless, I shall not be stopped from pondering my orb. Also, I got Claude to write the title. It felt apposite. Thank you, Claude.) Seems like everyone who thinks they're anyone has takes on timelines, p(Doom), and vaguely gearsy mechanisms of action, all wrapped up into a big sad and/or deluded bundle of prediction. In the interest of doing my work in public, here's my crack at that. To get the boring numbers only mostly pulled out of my tail out of the way, my p(Doom) is somewhere between 65% and 90% on any given day. I think there's about a 6% chance of AGI by 2030; conditional on that, I think we're nearly certain (~98%) to fall into some flavor of ruin as a global civilization. I think there's something like an 82% chance of AGI by (say) 2055; conditional on that, I think it's more likely than not (~60%) that we fall into similar classes of...