LW - My current LK99 questions by Eliezer Yudkowsky

<a href="https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EzSH9698DhBsXAcYY/my-current-lk99-questions">Link to original article</a><br/><br/>Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My current LK99 questions, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on August 1, 2023 on LessWrong. So this morning I thought to myself, "Okay, now I will actually try to study the LK99 question, instead of betting based on nontechnical priors and market sentiment reckoning." (My initial entry into the affray, having been driven by people online presenting as confidently YES when the prediction markets were not confidently YES.) And then I thought to myself, "This LK99 issue seems complicated enough that it'd be worth doing an actual Bayesian calculation on it"--a rare thought; I don't think I've done an actual explicit numerical Bayesian update in at least a year. In the process of trying to set up an explicit calculation, I realized I felt very unsure about some critically important quantities, to the point where it no longer seemed worth trying to do the calculation with numbers. This is the System Working As Intended. On July 30th, Danielle Fong said of this temperature-current-voltage graph, 'Normally as current increases, voltage drop across a material increases. in a superconductor, voltage stays nearly constant, 0. that appears to be what's happening here -- up to a critical current. with higher currents available at lower temperatures deeply in the "fraud or superconduct" territory, imo. like you don't get this by accident -- you either faked it, or really found something.' The graph Fong is talking about only appears in the initial paper put forth by Young-Wan Kwon, allegedly without authorization. A different graph, though similar, appears in Fig. 6 on p. 12 of the 6-author LK-endorsed paper rushed out in response. Is it currently widely held by expert opinion, that this diagram has no obvious or likely explanation except "superconductivity" or "fraud"? If the authors discovered something weird that wasn't a superconductor, or if they just hopefully measured over and over until they started getting some sort of measurement error, is there any known, any obvious way they could have gotten the same graph? One person alleges an online rumor that poorly connected electrical leads can produce the same graph. Is that a conventional view? Alternatively: If this material is a superconductor, have we seen what we expected to see? Is the diminishing current capacity with increased temperature usual? How does this alleged direct measurement of superconductivity square up with the current-story-as-I-understood-it that the material is only being very poorly synthesized, probably only in granules or gaps, and hence only detectable by looking for magnetic resistance / pinning? This is my number-one question. Call it question 1-NO, because it's the question of "How does the NO story explain this graph, and how prior-improbable or prior-likely was that story?", with respect to my number one question. Though I'd also like to know the 1-YES details: whether this looks like a high-prior-probability superconductivity graph; or a graph that requires a new kind of superconductivity, but one that's theoretically straightforward given a central story; or if it looks like unspecified weird superconductivity, with there being no known theory that predicts a graph looking roughly like this. What's up with all the partial levitation videos? Possibilities I'm currently tracking: 2-NO-A: There's something called "diamagnetism" which exists in other materials. The videos by LK and attempted replicators show the putative superconductor being repelled from the magnet, but not being locked in space relative to the magnet. Superconductors are supposed to exhibit Meissner pinning, and the failure of the material to be pinned to the magnet indicates that this isn't a superconductor. (Sabine Hossenfelder seems to talk this way here. "I lost hope when I saw this video; this doesn't look like the Meissner ...

First published

08/01/2023

Genres:

education

Listen to this episode

0:00 / 0:00

Summary

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: My current LK99 questions, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on August 1, 2023 on LessWrong. So this morning I thought to myself, "Okay, now I will actually try to study the LK99 question, instead of betting based on nontechnical priors and market sentiment reckoning." (My initial entry into the affray, having been driven by people online presenting as confidently YES when the prediction markets were not confidently YES.) And then I thought to myself, "This LK99 issue seems complicated enough that it'd be worth doing an actual Bayesian calculation on it"--a rare thought; I don't think I've done an actual explicit numerical Bayesian update in at least a year. In the process of trying to set up an explicit calculation, I realized I felt very unsure about some critically important quantities, to the point where it no longer seemed worth trying to do the calculation with numbers. This is the System Working As Intended. On July 30th, Danielle Fong said of this temperature-current-voltage graph, 'Normally as current increases, voltage drop across a material increases. in a superconductor, voltage stays nearly constant, 0. that appears to be what's happening here -- up to a critical current. with higher currents available at lower temperatures deeply in the "fraud or superconduct" territory, imo. like you don't get this by accident -- you either faked it, or really found something.' The graph Fong is talking about only appears in the initial paper put forth by Young-Wan Kwon, allegedly without authorization. A different graph, though similar, appears in Fig. 6 on p. 12 of the 6-author LK-endorsed paper rushed out in response. Is it currently widely held by expert opinion, that this diagram has no obvious or likely explanation except "superconductivity" or "fraud"? If the authors discovered something weird that wasn't a superconductor, or if they just hopefully measured over and over until they started getting some sort of measurement error, is there any known, any obvious way they could have gotten the same graph? One person alleges an online rumor that poorly connected electrical leads can produce the same graph. Is that a conventional view? Alternatively: If this material is a superconductor, have we seen what we expected to see? Is the diminishing current capacity with increased temperature usual? How does this alleged direct measurement of superconductivity square up with the current-story-as-I-understood-it that the material is only being very poorly synthesized, probably only in granules or gaps, and hence only detectable by looking for magnetic resistance / pinning? This is my number-one question. Call it question 1-NO, because it's the question of "How does the NO story explain this graph, and how prior-improbable or prior-likely was that story?", with respect to my number one question. Though I'd also like to know the 1-YES details: whether this looks like a high-prior-probability superconductivity graph; or a graph that requires a new kind of superconductivity, but one that's theoretically straightforward given a central story; or if it looks like unspecified weird superconductivity, with there being no known theory that predicts a graph looking roughly like this. What's up with all the partial levitation videos? Possibilities I'm currently tracking: 2-NO-A: There's something called "diamagnetism" which exists in other materials. The videos by LK and attempted replicators show the putative superconductor being repelled from the magnet, but not being locked in space relative to the magnet. Superconductors are supposed to exhibit Meissner pinning, and the failure of the material to be pinned to the magnet indicates that this isn't a superconductor. (Sabine Hossenfelder seems to talk this way here. "I lost hope when I saw this video; this doesn't look like the Meissner ...

Duration

8 minutes

Parent Podcast

The Nonlinear Library: LessWrong Weekly

View Podcast

Share this episode

Similar Episodes

Announcing AlignmentForum.org Beta by Raymond Arnold.

Release Date: 12/03/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Announcing AlignmentForum.org Beta, published by Raymond Arnold on the AI Alignment Forum. We've just launched the beta for AlignmentForum.org. Much of the value of LessWrong has come from the development of technical research on AI Alignment. In particular, having those discussions be in an accessible place has allowed newcomers to get up to speed and involved. But the alignment research community has at least some needs that are best met with a semi-private forum. For the past few years, agentfoundations.org has served as a space for highly technical discussion of AI safety. But some aspects of the site design have made it a bit difficult to maintain, and harder to onboard new researchers. Meanwhile, as the AI landscape has shifted, it seemed valuable to expand the scope of the site. Agent Foundations is one particular paradigm with respect to AGI alignment, and it seemed important for researchers in other paradigms to be in communication with each other. So for several months, the LessWrong and AgentFoundations teams have been discussing the possibility of using the LW codebase as the basis for a new alignment forum. Over the past couple weeks we've gotten ready for a closed beta test, both to iron out bugs and (more importantly) get feedback from researchers on whether the overall approach makes sense. The current features of the Alignment Forum (subject to change) are: A small number of admins can invite new members, granting them posting and commenting permissions. This will be the case during the beta - the exact mechanism of curation after launch is still under discussion. When a researcher posts on AlignmentForum, the post is shared with LessWrong. On LessWrong, anyone can comment. On AlignmentForum, only AF members can comment. (AF comments are also crossposted to LW). The intent is for AF members to have a focused, technical discussion, while still allowing newcomers to LessWrong to see and discuss what's going on. AlignmentForum posts and comments on LW will be marked as such. AF members will have a separate karma total for AlignmentForum (so AF karma will more closely represent what technical researchers think about a given topic). On AlignmentForum, only AF Karma is visible. (note: not currently implemented but will be by end of day) On LessWrong, AF Karma will be displayed (smaller) alongside regular karma. If a commenter on LessWrong is making particularly good contributions to an AF discussion, an AF Admin can tag the comment as an AF comment, which will be visible on the AlignmentForum. The LessWrong user will then have voting privileges (but not necessarily posting privileges), allowing them to start to accrue AF karma, and to vote on AF comments and threads. We’ve currently copied over some LessWrong posts that seemed like a good fit, and invited a few people to write posts today. (These don’t necessarily represent the longterm vision of the site, but seemed like a good way to begin the beta test) This is a fairly major experiment, and we’re interested in feedback both from AI alignment researchers (who we’ll be reaching out to more individually in the next two weeks) and LessWrong users, about the overall approach and the integration with LessWrong. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details

AMA on EA Forum: Ajeya Cotra, researcher at Open Phil by Ajeya Cotra

Release Date: 11/17/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA on EA Forum: Ajeya Cotra, researcher at Open Phil, published by Ajeya Cotra on the AI Alignment Forum. This is a linkpost for Hi all, I'm Ajeya, and I'll be doing an AMA on the EA Forum (this is a linkpost for my announcement there). I would love to get questions from LessWrong and Alignment Forum users as well -- please head on over if you have any questions for me! I’ll plan to start answering questions Monday Feb 1 at 10 AM Pacific. I will be blocking off much of Monday and Tuesday for question-answering, and may continue to answer a few more questions through the week if there are ones left, though I might not get to everything. About me: I’m a Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy, where I focus on cause prioritization and AI. 80,000 Hours released a podcast episode with me last week discussing some of my work, and last September I put out a draft report on AI timelines which is discussed in the podcast. Currently, I’m trying to think about AI threat models and how much x-risk reduction we could expect the “last long-termist dollar” to buy. I joined Open Phil in the summer of 2016, and before that I was a student at UC Berkeley, where I studied computer science, co-ran the Effective Altruists of Berkeley student group, and taught a student-run course on EA. I’m most excited about answering questions related to AI timelines, AI risk more broadly, and cause prioritization, but feel free to ask me anything! Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details

AMA: Paul Christiano, alignment researcher by Paul Christiano

Release Date: 12/06/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AMA: Paul Christiano, alignment researcher, published by Paul Christiano on the AI Alignment Forum. I'll be running an Ask Me Anything on this post from Friday (April 30) to Saturday (May 1). If you want to ask something just post a top-level comment; I'll spend at least a day answering questions. You can find some background about me here. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details

AI alignment landscape by Paul Christiano

Release Date: 11/19/2021

Description: Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: AI alignment landscape, published byPaul Christiano on the AI Alignment Forum. Here (link) is a talk I gave at EA Global 2019, where I describe how intent alignment fits into the broader landscape of “making AI go well,” and how my work fits into intent alignment. This is particularly helpful if you want to understand what I’m doing, but may also be useful more broadly. I often find myself wishing people were clearer about some of these distinctions. Here is the main overview slide from the talk: The highlighted boxes are where I spend most of my time. Here are the full slides from the talk. Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.

Explicit: No

Details