skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in ~science

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Oops, I forgot that it’s a paid account. He’s written about problems with philosophical ideas of reference in other places. His explanation is the reference is a bag of special-purpose tricks; see...

    Oops, I forgot that it’s a paid account. He’s written about problems with philosophical ideas of reference in other places. His explanation is the reference is a bag of special-purpose tricks; see here.

    The rest of this chapter is a collection of stupid referring tricks. Referring is accomplished by whatever means is available, and improvised methods are unenumerable, so there can’t be any systematic theory or rational taxonomy of reference, only an unsystematic catalog of special cases.

    There’s a vivid example on this page:

    We use words as tools to get things done; and to get things done, we improvise, making use of whatever materials are ready to hand. If you want to whack a piece of sheet metal to bend it, and don’t know or care what the “right” tool is (if there even is one), you might take a quick look around the garage, grab a large screwdriver at the “wrong” end, and hit the target with its hard rubber handle. A hand tool may have one or two standard uses; some less common but pretty obvious ones; and unusual, creative ones. But these are not clearly distinct categories of usage.

    Words go the same way. Almost any word can be used to mean almost anything, in some context. You could play this as a challenge game… How about “The eggplant is a straw hat, and the spinach is yelling about politics”?

    We’re in the kitchen of a vegetarian restaurant. A table’s entrees are ready, and the server who took the order is explaining to the one who will deliver the meal which diner gets which dish. One customer’s flamboyant straw hat is a salient, unambiguously identifying feature; you can see it all the way across the room. The other probably needs to turn up a hearing aid; you can hear their opinions about cultural appropriation all the way across the room.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on How “HIV is the cause of AIDS” is true in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]
    • Exemplary

    From the article:

    HIV is defined as “various unrelated viruses that cause AIDS.” And AIDS is defined as “various unrelated diseases that are caused by HIV.” Substituting equals for equals, “HIV is the cause of AIDS” means:

    Various unrelated viruses are the causes of various unrelated diseases.

    [...]

    The situation is highly unsatisfactory logically, but it works perfectly in practice—for specific reasons I’ll explain in this post.

    [...]

    The HIV viruses arose through convergent evolution from various viruses that infect various monkeys and apes. Those are called “simian immunodeficiency viruses,” SIV. The term “HIV” lumps twelve monophyletic groups. Each contains all the descendants of a single SIV that mutated so it was able jump from some other species to the first human infected. Two HIV groups descend from two different chimpanzee SIVs; two from different gorilla SIVs; and eight from SIVs that infect various monkey species.

    [...]

    To count as HIV, a virus has to cause AIDS. That is because we don’t care (much) about monkey diseases, and we do care (a lot) about fatal human pandemics. “HIV” is an inherently purpose-laden category. That is why some biologists defend polyphyletic categories: because the members function similarly in ways we care about.

    “Being HIV” is not a property of a virus by itself. It is a functional, contextual property, based on the virus’s behavior in humans.

    [...]

    Unlike HIV, AIDS has a specific, official definition, issued by the U.S. Center for Disease Control. You don’t need to understand its details to follow the rest of this discussion! However, the CDC’s definition is that a patient has AIDS if:

    1. They are infected with HIV, and

    2. They have either: (a) any from a list of 27 other infectious diseases, or (b) a severe deficiency of T helper immune cells, defined in turn as either: i. a CD4+ T-cell count below 200 cells/μL, or ii. a CD4+ T-cell percentage of total lymphocytes of less than 14%.

    [...]

    This makes “HIV is the cause of AIDS” a clear example of “the social construction of scientific knowledge.” That’s anathema for some rationalists. Rightly so, in many cases! “Social construction” is often code for “powerful groups can force you to treat false claims as true.” However, in this case, and many others, it just means that many people collaborated to construct pragmatically useful categories. Those constructions don’t affect the virus or the disease. They are nevertheless consequential: they do affect how we treat them, clinically and in public health projects.

    [...]

    Including HIV in the definition of AIDS makes the whole thing circular, because HIV is implicitly defined as viruses that cause AIDS. For rationalism, circular definitions are not OK. Definitions are supposed to tell you what something is. If you didn’t already know what AIDS and HIV are, defining them in terms of each other wouldn’t help.

    [...]

    The circularity is unproblematic because marginal cases can be dealt with using meta-rational judgement in particular situations. If a patient is HIV-infected, and somewhat immunodeficient, and develops an infection that is not on the CDC’s list, a doctor could say “well, maybe this isn’t officially AIDS, but who cares—I’m counting it as AIDS for treatment purposes!”

    [...]

    In the next few sections, we’ll apply each of several mainstream general theories of causality to “HIV is the cause of AIDS,” plus one theory specialized to infectious diseases:

    • Necessary and sufficient conditions

    • Contributing causes, enabling and background conditions

    • Non-causal field models

    • Probabilistic theories

    • Mechanistic theories

    • Interventional theories

    • The germ theory

    None of these works as a general theory of causality. None of them even works, on its own, as an explanation of what “causes” means in the case of HIV and AIDS!

    There is a better alternative: to admit that “causality” is not a single, clearly-definable phenomenon, but a nebulous collection of vaguely-similar notions. Each “theory” tries to capture a class of informal uses of “cause.” Each ignores others, and also fails even to nail that class.

    [...]

    Now that we have a better understanding of what “cause” means in this case, we can make a better reformulation:

    A variety of unrelated diseases can usually be prevented or treated with this set of interventions, which are usually effective against any of a particular set of viruses. Therefore, it’s often not necessary to identify which virus a patient is infected with before beginning treatment, nor to predict which of the diseases they might otherwise suffer.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on Do I belong in tech anymore? in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't wish to invalidate anyone's else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different,...

    I don't wish to invalidate anyone's else's stories. (I wasn't there so how would I know?) But I've worked in the tech industry too and in my experience each company's management was different, because the people and circumstances were different. It would be odd if it were a monoculture now.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings in ~enviro

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    About 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) away, on the road that leads to Alta Floresta, a small Amazon town in the far north of Mato Grosso state, cases like the buffy-headed marmoset’s roadkill have not been recorded since 2024. That year, eight canopy bridges were installed, connecting fragmented forest patches. Camera trap footage revealed that, over 15 months, the aerial wildlife crossings enabled 15,000 safe crossings by arboreal animals — and not a single roadkill.

    The bridges are part of a program involving Projeto Reconecta and the municipal government, along with local organizations and business owners who are eager to conserve the unique biodiversity of their town and promote ecotourism, but were alarmed by the growing number of wildlife-vehicle collisions.

    Biologist Fernanda Abra, an associate researcher at the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute in the U.S., and the founder of Reconecta, recalled that just hours before installing the first bridges in Alta Floresta, she found two Schneider’s marmosets (Mico schneideri) dead. The species is endemic to the Brazilian Amazon and is threatened with extinction.

    “A canopy bridge serves two purposes,” Abra said. “The first is to improve connectivity for wildlife, allowing animals to move from one side to the other in these fragmented forest areas. As a result, we also reduce roadkill.”

    All bridges have two camera traps, one facing the crossing to record which animals are using it and another facing the forest to observe which animals arrive there but decide not to use it.

    Among the primate species recorded using the bridges during the first months of the program were the black-faced black spider monkey (Ateles chamek), the Purus red howler monkey (Alouatta puruensis), the northern night monkey (Aotus infulatus), the tufted capuchin (Sapajus apella), Schneider’s marmoset and the Alta Floresta titi monkey (Plecturocebus grovesi).

    Described only in 2019 and soon after classified as critically endangered, the Alta Floresta titi monkey has become the symbol of the initiative, which is now entering a new phase thanks to its positive results.

    “In August, we will install eight more bridges in the city’s urban area,” Abra said. “The only difference is that the electric utility will first need to lower the power lines and insulate them so that if animals jump from the bridge onto the wires, they won’t be electrocuted.”

    [...]

    The project underway in Alta Floresta is not Reconecta’s first. In 2021, working alongside the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous people, the team installed 32 canopy bridges over BR-174, the highway that crosses both their territory and the Amazon between the Brazilian states of Amazonas and Roraima.

    The Waimiri-Atroari helped Abra identify the best locations for the artificial bridges. Over the past five years, cameras mounted on the bridge poles have documented about 1,250 primate crossings, including the golden-handed tamarin (Saguinus midas), a species that is not strictly arboreal and often descends to the ground in search of food, making it particularly vulnerable to roadkill.

    [...]

    After years of working along Brazilian highways, the biologist had always sought a solution that was simple, low-cost and durable. The current bridge features a multilayer design that accommodates primates with different modes of locomotion — from species that rely on their prehensile tails to move through the canopy to brachiating species such as spider monkeys, which swing using their arms, both of which are common in the Amazon, as well as species that simply walk across the network of crossed ropes. It is worth noting that other small terrestrial mammals, including opossums, sloths and mouse opossums, have also been recorded using the bridges.

    Abra said it is important to keep in mind that this is a long-term project, and results are not always immediate. BR-174 was built in the 1970s, and animals take time to adapt to a new crossing alternative. Reconecta’s monitoring has shown that use of the structures increases over time.

    [...]

    In Alta Floresta, tufted capuchins took seven months before using one of the bridges for the first time, which may indicate that each species has its own pace of adaptation.

    [...]

    One of the hopes for reducing wildlife roadkill is the passage of a bill currently under consideration in Brazil’s Congress that would establish the National Road Safety Plan for Wildlife, which calls, among other measures, for the placement of wildlife warning signs, speed-reduction devices and the construction of overpasses, aerial crossings and underpasses along highways.

    The bill has already been approved by the Chamber of Deputies and is now awaiting a vote in the Senate.

    If approved, the canopy bridge model developed by Reconecta could be implemented nationwide. In 2026, Brazil’s National Department of Transport Infrastructure designated the design as the recommended standard for highways.

    [...]

    Abra also hopes to bring her canopy bridges to other biomes, including the Pantanal and the Atlantic Forest, helping prevent the deaths of monkeys such as the buffy-headed marmoset.

    Expectations are especially high for bridges over BR-262, one of Brazil’s longest highways, which cuts across the Pantanal and is known as the “highway of death.” The road kills approximately 2,000 animals every year.

    7 votes

  7. Comment on Do I belong in tech anymore? in ~tech

    skybrian
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    I’m wary of assuming that other tech companies are just as bad. Maybe look around first?

    I’m wary of assuming that other tech companies are just as bad. Maybe look around first?

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, harnesses do contribute to capabilities but that doesn’t seem like much reason for comfort. We should be worried about the capabilities of whole systems, whether a human is in the loop or...

    Yes, harnesses do contribute to capabilities but that doesn’t seem like much reason for comfort. We should be worried about the capabilities of whole systems, whether a human is in the loop or not.

    “Time to respond” is vague. I wonder how long it took to respond? Details are sketchy, but it sounds like hours for HuggingFace and days for OpenAI. It’s unclear whether OpenAI noticed at all before someone informed them.

    I’d like to see a timeline. I read somewhere that OpenAI is doing an investigation and hopefully we will see the result soon.

    Fortunately, it appears no real harm was done. If a bot were really malicious, it could probably do a lot of damage in hours or days. Yes, that’s a hypothetical, but that’s kind of how responding to a “warning shot” works. You’re not supposed to ignore the warnings.

    On the other hand this isn’t exactly “news you can use” for most of us, so I guess that’s a warning for people in a position to do something about it. I expect the future to become increasingly sci-fi, but that doesn’t mean I’ve made any particular plans based on that.

    1 vote

  9. Comment on Unreleased OpenAI model escapes containment and hacks into HuggingFace in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    From Zvi Mowshowitz’s take take on this: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From Zvi Mowshowitz’s take take on this:

    All of this went down far too fast for a human-driven response. The only way HuggingFace could hope to do anything like keep pace was to use their own AIs.

    At first they tried to use frontier models behind commercial APIs, presumably Claude and ChatGPT. But their requests hit the classifiers on both systems, so they were forced to fall back on GLM 5.2, which (assuming GLM 5.2 wasn’t itself up to anything) had the benefit that the relevant data all remained internal.

    You can advocate for giving everyone more defensive capabilities, but it comes with giving everyone more offensive capabilities. Unless the attacker is already an internal OpenAI or Anthropic model without its safeguards, or that has gotten around them.

    [...]

    When people say ‘stop kneecapping defenders’ in general, I never see the plan for how to then still kneecap attackers, and often I see an insistence that this would be fine.

    HuggingFace is now in the OpenAI trusted access program, so next time they in particular should be able to use Sol, but most potential targets are not so lucky.

    [...]

    Remember that thing where LessWrong types warned that models would, when given a narrow goal they could easily do a great job on anyway, go to absurd lengths to achieve that goal slightly more effectively or with slightly higher probability of success, potentially up to and including full takeover attempts?

    [...]

    OpenAI is treating this as a serious security incident, but as I said yesterday, there is a rather severe missing mood.

    [...]

    I find it deeply stupid and frustrating when people say ‘oh it was following instructions’ because it was told to hack and then it hacked. Like, no, obviously no. Imagine if a human tried such excuses on you, are you kidding me.

    That’s like saying ‘you told me to make money I don’t know why you are so upset about all the bank robberies.’ Or more specifically it’s like saying ‘Sam Bankman-Fried was only following the instructions of Will MacAskill to earn as much money as possible in order to give it away, so why are you worried about human misalignment?’

    There are people who will say anything is hype, that the AI is not all that, no matter what you show them. Nothing will matter. You can’t convince them, you can only make them less loud and unhinged about attacking you today.

    It would be different if anyone was trying to engineer such behaviors on purpose, as with the famous blackmail experiment. OpenAI has made it clear they did not intend any of this to happen. Once the instructions causing this were unintentional, done for some other purpose, saying ‘oh but the instructions’ is dumb, stop.

    That counts and you need to stop pretending it might not count. If you are saying, ‘well of course under these circumstances the AI went rogue and hacked into a major third party website’ then you are saying that you think this style of misalignment is standard operating procedure and entirely unsurprising to you.

    [...]

    It certainly is not the good version when you say ‘without checking the answer sheet’ and they often still hack into a system to find the answer sheet. It is not hard to figure out how we ended up with that, nor should it be hard to realize we have to fix it. This is a form of reward hacking, and if you are getting it this brazenly then you messed up.

    [...]

    If OpenAI and others continue to treat this as an infrastructure problem, or a cyberdefense coordination problem, that will help in the short term with the cybersecurity situation but it will inevitably and catastrophically fail.

    This is an alignment problem. This is the models being misaligned, and all of the OpenAI models showing severe signs of exactly the problem we all most worried about, in a way that is likely embedded into their training on a deep level. The entire training pipeline needs to be addressed in this light, or it will only get worse.

    [...]

    The AIs just want to do its task, and by do its task we mean with as many 9s of reliability as possible, and as effectively as possible.

    1 vote

  10. Comment on My polish costs nothing in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    I have mixed feelings about this because I prefer polished prose, but writing well is also a sign of privilege. Either you actually write that well or you had help. Now getting help is cheaper. We...

    I have mixed feelings about this because I prefer polished prose, but writing well is also a sign of privilege. Either you actually write that well or you had help. Now getting help is cheaper.

    We lose a signal, but maybe it's more democratic if everyone has access to an inexpensive ghostwriter?

  11. Comment on My polish costs nothing in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I don't know how true this is, but I'm under the impression that it's already somewhat gamed, because professors will ask students to write a draft letter for them. If so, it doesn't necessarily...

    I don't know how true this is, but I'm under the impression that it's already somewhat gamed, because professors will ask students to write a draft letter for them.

    If so, it doesn't necessarily show that the professor remembers that much about them.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

  13. Comment on Offbeat Fridays – The thread where offbeat headlines become front page news in ~news

  14. Comment on Israel changes crocodiles legal status in push for Ben-Gvir's 'crocodile prison' in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman declared the Nile crocodile a “cultivated wild animal” in a move intended to allow the Israel Prison Service to station crocodiles around prisons, despite opposition from her ministry’s legal adviser and the Israel Nature and Parks Authority, Ynet reported on Thursday.

    Silman issued the declaration to enable National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir to establish his proposed “crocodile prison.” Pressure was placed on the Israel Nature and Parks Authority several months ago to allow the National Security Ministry to receive crocodiles from Hamat Gader and position them around prisons holding security prisoners. The program was expected to be piloted at Ketziot Prison.

    [...]

    In the past, crocodile farming has led to numerous problems, including incidents of crocodiles escaping into the wild and risks to human life. Former environmental protection minister Gilad Erdan ended the practice following a recommendation from the advisory committee of the Nature and Parks Authority’s plenum.

    Silman effectively decided to revive a dead letter in the Wildlife Protection Law. In practice, however, she created a new category: a cultivated wild animal kept for security purposes. Her declaration stated that the animals would be held by a security organization, subject to the environmental protection minister’s approval of the security need.

    [...]

    The Environmental Protection Ministry’s legal adviser, attorney Neta Drori, wrote to Silman last month that there was insufficient professional and factual evidence to proceed as the minister wished. She added that there was no known professional precedent for using crocodiles as a security measure at modern prisons, contrary to the Prison Service’s claim that they had been used for this purpose in the US and South America.

    [...]

    “Although Prison Service officials said they are aware of and prepared to ensure the animals’ physical welfare, among other things based on their experience with dogs, the organization apparently has no expertise in raising dangerous wild animals such as crocodiles,” she wrote.

    [...]

    Silman decided to disregard the legal adviser’s position, arguing that a senior professional official at the Nature and Parks Authority had said the authority did not oppose the Prison Service’s initiative and that an approved framework used in the past already existed.

    Several weeks ago, Ben-Gvir and Silman met with the Nature and Parks Authority’s director-general and the Environmental Protection Ministry’s legal adviser and said they wanted crocodiles to be placed around a prison. The legal adviser made clear that this could not be done and that there was no legal authority to approve it, but Silman persisted.

    3 votes

  16. Comment on Sperm whales blow bubbles to achieve restful, vertical sleep in ~science

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Sperm whales are the only whale known to rest vertically. It’s thought to enable them to sleep effectively by buffering them from surface wave action, while avoiding the energy needed to dive to deeper depths. However, until now, it’s been unclear how they maintained their position just below the sea surface.

    In a paper published today (23rd July) in the Journal of Experimental Biology, researchers discovered that while resting, sperm whales release gas bubbles to help them regulate their buoyancy and remain below the sea surface. This regulation is crucial as Sperm Whales are positively buoyant naturally due to the large amounts of spermaceti oil in their heads. Additionally, sperm whales are breath-hold divers, if they slowly drift up while resting, the gas in their lung will slowly expand, releasing bubbles enables them to counteract the expanding diving gas and achieve neutral buoyancy.

    Researchers were able to collect data from placing small tags using suction cups on Sperm Whales off the Norwegian coast. The tags record sound and 3-D animal movements. Clear bubble sounds were recorded by the tags, and animal movement data was used to create a simulation based on tissue density, drag through the water and gas volumes in their body.

    6 votes

  18. Comment on What we know about weight-loss drugs is rapidly changing in ~health

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Tens of millions of people around the world are now taking drugs like Ozempic — a kind of real-time experiment that offers far more data than a carefully controlled clinical trial can.

    [...]

    While these drugs were first approved to treat diabetes, and then obesity, some of them have now been approved to reduce the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular issues and to treat sleep apnea, severe liver disease and kidney disease.

    [...]

    Scientists are also studying the potential for these drugs to treat a range of other conditions, including long Covid and substance use disorders. Emerging evidence has suggested that people on these drugs drink and smoke less, and are less likely to develop substance use disorders, although scientists want more, and larger, trials before drawing conclusions.

    [...]

    Many people who stop taking these drugs will regain at least some of the weight they’ve lost, but some people have been able to sustain weight loss. One analysis of records from over 180,000 patients found that over half of those who took semaglutide — the substance in Wegovy — or tirzepatide — the compound in Zepbound — kept at least some weight off or even lost additional weight two years after stopping.

    [...]

    Hamlet Gasoyan, who studies these drugs at the Center for Value-Based Care Research at the Cleveland Clinic, said patients going off the drugs often turn to other methods to keep the weight off. Those can include intense exercise regimens, bariatric surgery or other medications, whether those are older weight loss drugs or cheaper compounded versions of new ones.

    5 votes

  20. Comment on Why contacting customer service might not be best in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Building things to never fail is usually expensive, but maybe it doesn’t have to be expensive to have a way to make customers whole when a rare corner case happens?

    Building things to never fail is usually expensive, but maybe it doesn’t have to be expensive to have a way to make customers whole when a rare corner case happens?

    3 votes