drdeca

That’s not what moral relativism is.

Utilitarianism, for example, is not (necessarily) relativistic, and would (for pretty much all utility functions that people propose) endorse lying in some situations.

Moral realism doesn’t mean that there are no general principles that are usually right about what is right and wrong but have some exceptions. It means that for at least some cases, there is a fact of the matter as to whether a given act is right or wrong.

It is entirely compatible with moral realism to say that lying is typically immoral, but that there are situations in which it may be morally obligatory.

I think you are interpreting “absolute” in a different way?

I’m not the top level commenter, but my claim is that there are moral facts, not that in every situation, the morally correct behavior is determined by simple rules such as “Never lie.”.

(Also, even in the case of Kant’s argument about that case, his argument isn’t that you must let him in, or even that you must tell him the truth, only that you mustn’t lie to the axe murderer. Don’t make a straw man. He does say it is permissible for you to kill the axe murderer in order to save the life of your friend. I think Kant was probably incorrect in saying that lying to the axe murderer is wrong, and in such a situation it is probably permissible to lie to the axe murderer. Unlike most forms of moral anti-realism, moral realism allows one to have uncertainty about what things are morally right. )

I would say that if a person believes that in the situation they find themselves in, that a particular act is objectively wrong for them to take, independent of whether they believe it to be, and if that action is not in fact morally obligatory or supererogatory, and the person is capable (in some sense) of not taking that action, then it is wrong for that person to take that action in that circumstance.

An RT is visible in the feed when following someone. Public likes are visible when going to their account and viewing their list of likes. (When they put both in the feed, it’s just dumb.)

Private likes are different from bookmarks in that it shows how many likes the post got, but not the number of bookmarks.

“prompt topology”?

This all sounds like spiralism.

I’m also an introvert, I think, but I do feel I would be better off with more socialization than I’m getting.

Though, I’m also single, so, maybe I wouldn’t feel such a need if I were married? Idk.

This comment I'm making is mostly useless nitpicking, and I overall agree with your point. Now I will commence my nitpicking:

I suspect that it may merely be infeasible, not strictly impossible. There has been work on automatically proving that an ANN satisfies certain properties (iirc e.g. some kinds of robustness to some kinds of adversarial inputs, for handling images).

It might be possible (though infeasible) to have an effective LLM along with a proof that e.g. it won't do anything irreversible when interacting with the operating system (given some formal specification of how the operating system behaves).

But, yeah, in practice I think you are correct.

It makes more sense to put the LLM+harness in an environment which ensures you can undo whatever it does if it messes things up, than to try to make the LLM be such that it certainly won't produce outputs that would mess things up in a way that isn't easily revertible, even if it does turn out that the latter is in principle possible.

And? Do the arguments differ for LLM vs the other models?

I guess the arguments sometimes mention languages. But I feel like the core of the arguments are pretty much the same regardless?

What if making progress today is harder than it was then?

Hm, why T=-0.0001 instead of T=-1 ?

Also, I wonder, if you sampled a lot of text at temperature -1, and then trained a new model on that text, and then sampled the resulting model at T=-1 , would you get anything meaningful?

Oh man, I was going to try and find that to link to it. I can’t believe it was 10 years ago… I really enjoyed following that for a while. Thanks for making it.

I agree that that the criteria you gave is probably more relevant for the issue at hand, sure.

And, while definitions may not be super important (as you say), and while it is often fine to redefine a word within some context, I do think the definition I gave is probably closer to how people usually use the word “advertisement”.

My inclination is to stick on an adjective though, and refer to, say, “unwanted ads”, rather than say that the ads in a classified section “aren’t ads”.

If a definition can be changed in a way that makes it both simpler and removes an edge case, I think that is often (but not always) a sign that the change may be a good one.

(Though, that doesn’t imply that the best available definition won’t have any edge cases like this.)

I think it works better to define whether or not something is advertising based on, rather than whether the viewer wants to see it, instead by whether those putting the media where it is intend for viewing it to be (as far as they can make it) a requirement for something else.

Though, I’m not sure that even that should be considered a requirement. It seems to me like the things businesses paid money to get put on the million dollar website, should count as “ads”. I don’t see why we should define “ads” to refer exclusively to objectionable ads.

> and showing it to people who don't want to see it.

So, do superbowl ads not count as ads because a non-negligible portion of the viewership wants to see them? Or are you saying that there needs to be a non-negligible fraction of the viewers who don’t want to see it for it to be an ad?

Eh? They can grow skin cultures that are good enough to help burn victims. Not, like, with all the pores and follicles being there, but it is skin…

Technically a HTTCPCP status code I think?

What? I think we all have some idea of how pixels work.

Isn’t whether or not something is propaganda determined by the intent of those producing or distributing it?

If the intent of someone including two men kissing in a movie is to promote approval of homosexual relationships, OR is to promote the idea that men kissing doesn’t imply homosexuality, then that’s propoganda, but if the intent is just “the movie sells better if there’s a scene pandering to yaoi fangirls”, or “the screenwriter found something that happened with two guys they know to be compelling”, then it isn’t propaganda,

right?

There are thought experiments where the various Planck units (or, times some small power of pi or 2pi) pop out quite naturally.

The theoretical entropy for a Schwartzchild black hole is nicely expressed using the Planck area.

So…

No. Your assertion that they have no value in theory, is wrong.

(Also, like, angular momentum is quantized in multiples of hbar or hbar/2 or something like that.)

It may be true that they aren’t a good system of units for actual measurements, on account of the high uncertainty (especially for G).

But, there is a reason why it is common to use units where G=c=hbar=1 : it is quite convenient.

Well, who votes for politicians? The public. Are all members of the public therefore culpable?

Voting isn’t a means by which every voter’s preferences are amalgamated into a coherent set of preferences.

Voting is better than the available alternatives, but one person voting for something better doesn’t make the outcome of the vote be that better thing.

Sorry, I think I replied to your previous comment too quickly without reading it carefully enough.

I was trying to defend my previous comment, and didn’t adequately consider your point.

Right, there’s clearly a problem, and I think even a systemic problem. I just don’t think it follows that literally every officer is therefore culpable. I think I would say that probably almost every police union leader is culpable.

I like to think that what the “can’t prove a negative” phrase originated from was someone grasping at the difference between Pi_1 and Sigma_1 statements . For a Pi_1 statement, one needs only a single counterexample to refute it, but to verify it by considering individual cases, one has to consider all of them and show that they all work (which, if there are infinitely many, it is impossible to handle them all individually, and if there are just a lot, it may still be infeasible) . Conversely, for a Sigma_1 statement, a single example is sufficient to verify the claim, but refuting it by checking individual cases would require checking every case.

My favorite slogan is “Slogans are always bad.” . It can be interpreted in a lot of different ways that make a lot of sense, and that’s why I repeat it often, without clarifying what I mean by it.

Suppose you have a system where 1 actor is bad, and 500000 actors are “good except that they protect that one guy”, and then the one guy dies of a freak heart attack, and then all but one of the 500000 are replaced with “good actors” except that they defend the guy who remains from the 500000.

Are they bad actors?

Of course. Did part of what I said suggest I thought otherwise?

I guess the part about the “when you quantize it after fixing the gauge in a way that loses the manifestness of the Lorentz invariance, if you aren’t in the critical dimension, supposedly you don’t keep the Lorentz invariance” part could imply otherwise? If that part is wrong, my mistake, I shouldn’t have trusted the source I was reading for that part.

I was viewing that part as being part of how you could be right about Lorentz invariance being something derived nontrivially from the theory.

Because, the Polyakov action (and the Nambu-Goto action) are, AIUI, typically initially(at the start of the definition of the theory) formulated in a way that is not just Lorentz invariant, but manifestly Lorentz invariant,

and if there is no step in the process of defining the theory that isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, I would think that Lorentz invariance wouldn’t be a nontrivial implication, but something baked into the definition throughout,

so, for it to be a nontrivial implication of the theory, at some point after the definition of the classical action, something has to be done that, while it doesn’t break Lorentz invariance, it “could” do so, in the sense that showing that it doesn’t is non-trivial.

And, I was thinking this would start with the choice of gauge making it no longer manifestly Lorentz invariant.

I trust you have much more knowledge of string theory than I do, so I would appreciate any correction you might have.

Yes? It means the Lorentz invariance is automatic from the form of the expression, does it not?

Ok, so I looked into it a bit, and here’s my understanding:

The Polyakov action is kinda by default manifestly Lorentz invariant, but in order to quantize it, one generally first picks the light cone gauge, where this gauge choice treats some of the coordinates differently, losing the manifest Lorentz invariance. The reason for making this gauge choice is in order to make unitarity clear (/sorta automatic).

An alternative route keeps manifest Lorentz invariance, but proceeding this way, unitarity is not clear.

And then, in the critical dimensions (26 or 10, as appropriate; We have fermions, so, presumably 10) it can be shown that a certain issue (chiral anomaly, I think it was) gets cancelled out, and therefore the two approaches agree.

But, I guess, if one imposes the light cone gauge, if not in a space of dimensionality the critical dimension, the issue doesn’t cancel out and Lorentz invariance is violated? (Previously I was under the impression that when the dimensionality is wrong, things just diverged, and I’m not particularly confident about the “actually it implies violations of Lorentz invariance” thing I just read.)

There are no such experimental results satisfying the criteria I laid out. You may be right in objecting to the criteria I laid out, but, the fact remains that it does not satisfy these (perhaps misguided) criteria.

In particular, predicting something different from our best other theories in good standing, was one of the criteria I listed.

And, I think it’s pretty clear that the criteria I described, whether good or not, were basically what the other person meant, and should have been what you interpreted them as saying, not as them complaining that it hadn’t been falsified.

Now, when we gain more evidence that Lorentz invariance is not violated, should the probability we assign to string theory being correct, increase? Yes, somewhat. But, the ratio that is the probability it is correct divided by the probability of another theory we have which also predicts Lorentz invariance, does not increase. It does not gain relative favor.

Now, you’ve mentioned a few times, youtubers giving bad arguments against string theory, and people copying those arguments. If you’re talking about Sabine, then yeah, I don’t care for her either.

However, while the “a theory is tested on its own, not in comparison to other theories” approach may be principled, I’m not sure it is really a totally accurate description of how people have evaluated theories historically.

And, I think, not entirely for bad reasons?

Pardon, but, huh? I very much thought that Lorentz invariance was built into the assumptions of string theory.

Concluding from “A AND B” that “A”, while it does reach a conclusion that is distinct from the assumption, is not impressive.

If string theory does not bake SR into its assumptions, wouldn’t that make the way it is formulated, not manifestly Lorentz invariant? Don’t physicists typically prefer that their theories be, not just Lorentz invariant, but ideally formulated in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant?

Of course, not that it is a critical requirement, but it is very much something I thought string theory satisfied. Why wouldn’t it be?

Like, just don’t combine coordinates in ways that aren’t automatically compatible with Lorentz invariance, right?

If you formulate a theory in a way that is manifestly Lorentz invariant, claiming to have derived Lorentz invariance from it, seems to me a bit like saying you derived “A” from “A AND B”.

If string theory isn’t manifestly Lorentz invariant, then, I have to ask: why not??

I suspect what they mean is that there is no outcome of an experiment such that, prior to the experiment, people computed that string theory says that the experiment should have such a result, but our other theories in best standing would say something else would happen, and then upon doing the experiment, it was found that things happened the way string theory said (as far as measurements can tell).