youzicha

とても不器用だけど。生きることが

[raginrayguns]

okay is there anyone that knows more provability stuff than me that could take this question?

For FairBot, we have

PA ⊢ F(X) ↔ □X(F)

... right?

This seems obvious. It's a specialization of the model agent definition on page 11 of the paper to φ(q)=□q.

But like... okay, we've got the FairBot definition as a program on page 7... then we construct some PA formula that behaves like that. And so we must have a theorem of PA saying this is the behavior, right?

How to, like, say this.

Or is the disconnect that he missed that we then also have

PA ⊢ □(F(X) ↔ □X(F))

?

[youzicha]

(medium confidence:) I think this is probably just the fact that the "modal" setup already abstracts away a bit from actual computer programs. Like, the program on page 7

can't actually be written, because the question of whether PA proves some formula or not is undecidable. But if you have such a subroutine, then you could easily prove that the program works according to the forumula, and then you could further encode that proof as a an object in PA (the necessitation rule). So I think the issue is not really how to add the extra box, but more how to write the program/prove the boxless formula in the first place.

[playwrongs]

Part of me does wonder a bit why the Pre-Raphaelites and their descendants had such a hard-on for rendering things. Take the architectural paintings of Henry Roderick Newman, an American Pre-Raphaelite (yes, there were a few of those);

Tumblr may crush the quality of those, so I’m going to zoom in on a few details here—

He has individually rendered every discolored, separate tile on the facade of the Duomo in Florence…

And this relief of Isis is divided into discrete blocks of stone. He’s drawn every outline.

Now, the effect is very crisp and sharp and beautiful, but I feel like this is a great way to drive yourself to madness! What was the point of working like this? How long did it take Newman to complete each of these? I mean, dear god.

[the-grey-tribe]

Drawing bricks sounds easier than actually drawing whole buildings, or, god forbid, people. I can't draw faces or hands to save my life, but bricks? Easy peasy.

[youzicha]

I think Victorians admired detailed architectural drawings in general. One of the books that made John Ruskin the foremost art critic in England was The Stones of Venice, three volumes and 1,400 pages with lots of drawings of the individual stones of the buildings. And they really admired hard work; Whistler's Nocturnes caused a minor scandal for being painted too quickly.

I guess maybe the most famous pre-Raphaelite painting of all is John Everett Millais's Ophelia.

It looks very nice, right? Colorful. How long do you think it took to paint?

I was quite surprised to learn that Millais worked 11-hour days for five months to render the vegetation, plus a few more months for the figure. "Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect."

[youzicha]

Goodnight Punpun creator Inio Asano says the manga scene’s attitude towards AI is one of the reasons he put Mujina Into the Deep on hiatus -

Inio Asano recently appeared on the WEEKLY OCHIAI talk show, where he discussed the use of generative AI in the manga industry.

“Right now, publishers are not in a position where they can overtly say that they allow AI use,” Asano comments. “It’s a strange situation; You’re not allowed to use it precisely because you’re a professional.” He explains that, while there are several reasons why Mujina Into the Deep was put on a hiatus until 2027, the manga scene’s current attitude towards AI is one of them. “In the current state of things, mangaka are not allowed to use AI. But using AI actually drives up the quality by a mile. So doesn’t that mean it would be best to not draw the manga now? Maybe they suddenly lift the ban [on AI] next year, so it might be better to start drawing after that happens. I’m currently on standby in that sense,” Asano says. 

[youzicha]

 In the Odyssey, Athena is said to enhance Odysseus’ appearance magically: ‘He became black-skinned (melagkhroiēs) again, and the hairs became blue (kuaneai) around his chin.’ On two other occasions when she beautifies him, she is said to make his hair ‘woolly, similar in colour to the hyacinth flower’. Now, translating kuaneos (the root of the English ‘cyan’) as ‘blue’, as I have done here, is at first sight a bit silly: most translators take the word to mean ‘dark’. But given the usual colour of hyacinths, maybe – just maybe – he did have blue hair after all? 

anime adaptation when?

[aorish]

i think in practice when people say they want open borders what they really want is political unification. ok what they want is to be able to move freely between countries and work abroad as easily as they can between cities in their home country. but i really mean that unification is the solution that gives them what they want.

[raginrayguns]

Yes! I've gotten into so many arguments with the "every independence movement is good" attitude i see on here… you are literally advocating for a new border!!

you need a good reason for independence, for example how Taiwan can point to Hong Kong to show that unification with the current regime would result in the end of real elections and the persecution of anyone that's expressed a political opinion in the last 20 years. And, in fact, look at when support for eventual Independence (green line) jumped in Taiwan, according to a poll:

Also a jump in the blue line, indefinite status quo.

Online discourse about this is conducted at a low level. Someone once asked me if I supported Hawaiian independence. The best I can get at the reasoning was that I must either uniformly in favor of or uniformly against the independence of every... island in the Pacific ocean? I don't know.

Thankfully opinion in Taiwan has not been rigidly determined by any such principle. The question is whether to be subject to the Chinese government, and opinion seems to be responsive to information about what that would actually be like.

[youzicha]

I think the EU is a counterexample that shows that there is not a one-way relation between unification and open borders. That is, the EU has achieved open borders between the member states (which is a great achievement), without needing unification between them. In fact, in Scotland and Catalonia, it at the same time served as an argument in favor of independence, because if the newly created countries could be EU member states they would get most of the open-border benefits they currently get from being part of the UK or Spain.

I think this is important because, while open borders are great, nationalism is terrible, so it would be great of one could both increase the amount of movement of people but at the same time fracture the nation-states into smaller less powerful entities. The "rule based international order" I think is promising in the same way—instead of achieving trade and defense benefits through a large empire, you have many small nation-states with trade agreements and defense pacts between them.

[nonevahed]

Back when prediction markets were just a matter of speculation, did Yudkowsky, Hanson and pals ever actually have serious rejoinders for the "it will cause wild insider trading and event rigging" problem?

[bambamramfan]

They pictured it at the high level, like whether there will be a war, the presidential election, or the price of oil. And if you have the power to manipulate any of those, why are you most focused on rigging a predictive market?

There was not a lot of discussion of "what if the markets become about what word will the president say at a teleprompter."

Relatedly, can we call "people breaking the law" a problem of PM? Like there are very concrete laws about not leaking that you are on a secret assassination mission just to win a bet. The punishment is and was real. It wouldn't have happened WITHOUT the market, but I can understand why predictors thought "that is illegal" was enough prohibition.

[centrally-unplanned]

The illegal part is only part of the story though - they absolutely thought about insider trading, and had a very firm, fully detailed response to it: "good!". They thought insider trading was, in a way, the point of the whole exercise - the market would financially incentize people to take their private information and make it public. It would generate knowledge via the price function.

The fact that the "true price" of the market would only be revealed 0.5 seconds before closing time as harried government employees scrambled to get their stablecoin transfers locked in was, honestly, an episode of real naivete from the early proponents. In their defense, they envisioned the tool as you say as being structured: controlled by deft hands, designed by thinkers for thinkers, with rules that encouraged their goal of knowledge production. But that is only a partial defense, as these were also the same people moving at breakneck speeds into crypto DeFi start-ups and wringing their hands about the tyranny of financial regulations. It was pretty perfectly predictable that the world they were asking to build their tool would use it to feed the mutual demand of grifters for marks and of marks for the illusionary hobby of being a grifters.

(But they were just writing a bunch of blog posts and white papers in the end, you can't hold em that hard to how everything has shaken out. Hanson is imo unrepentant and deserves more flak, but others have noted these issues as they developed and discussed them. And it isn't like prediction markets are all bad by any means.)

[youzicha]

Hanson did not just say "good!" though. He said that one could craft insider trading rules modeled on the rules for stock trades (CEOs can trade their own stock, but only in trades fixed in advance to negate their information advantage). Specifically, insiders should classify themselves as "well-informed traders", and the WITs can only trade among each other, or by pre-announcing their trades in advance so that the non-insiders have time to react.

[centrally-unplanned]

That sounds like the kind of structured markets I was mentioning were in the initial concept, right? But alas, I do not believe your White Paper Self is the only one that counts; your Twitter Self is also real. And Hanson is much less circumspect there:

I can't find the specific post I was thinking of, but I remember at one point he responded to specifically one of the actual cases of Trump admin insider trading with "this is good, the price is now more accurate". For a similar one, he remarks here that political staffers betting on their own campaigns is fine, and manipulating prices is good.

His stance IMO these days is that *firms* can have insider trading that is problematic on the stock market due to essentially principal-agent problems, but prediction markets generally do not have the same issues. And in practice, he spends 99% of his time describing insider trading regulations as a witch hunt and promoting the idea that people should stop worrying about it. I am not saying this as a dunk, he can think this. I am instead claiming that the above paper is an inadequate summation of what he is "trying to do in the world" on this topic.

[nonevahed]

Back when prediction markets were just a matter of speculation, did Yudkowsky, Hanson and pals ever actually have serious rejoinders for the "it will cause wild insider trading and event rigging" problem?

[bambamramfan]

They pictured it at the high level, like whether there will be a war, the presidential election, or the price of oil. And if you have the power to manipulate any of those, why are you most focused on rigging a predictive market?

There was not a lot of discussion of "what if the markets become about what word will the president say at a teleprompter."

Relatedly, can we call "people breaking the law" a problem of PM? Like there are very concrete laws about not leaking that you are on a secret assassination mission just to win a bet. The punishment is and was real. It wouldn't have happened WITHOUT the market, but I can understand why predictors thought "that is illegal" was enough prohibition.

[centrally-unplanned]

The illegal part is only part of the story though - they absolutely thought about insider trading, and had a very firm, fully detailed response to it: "good!". They thought insider trading was, in a way, the point of the whole exercise - the market would financially incentize people to take their private information and make it public. It would generate knowledge via the price function.

The fact that the "true price" of the market would only be revealed 0.5 seconds before closing time as harried government employees scrambled to get their stablecoin transfers locked in was, honestly, an episode of real naivete from the early proponents. In their defense, they envisioned the tool as you say as being structured: controlled by deft hands, designed by thinkers for thinkers, with rules that encouraged their goal of knowledge production. But that is only a partial defense, as these were also the same people moving at breakneck speeds into crypto DeFi start-ups and wringing their hands about the tyranny of financial regulations. It was pretty perfectly predictable that the world they were asking to build their tool would use it to feed the mutual demand of grifters for marks and of marks for the illusionary hobby of being a grifters.

(But they were just writing a bunch of blog posts and white papers in the end, you can't hold em that hard to how everything has shaken out. Hanson is imo unrepentant and deserves more flak, but others have noted these issues as they developed and discussed them. And it isn't like prediction markets are all bad by any means.)

[youzicha]

Hanson did not just say "good!" though. He said that one could craft insider trading rules modeled on the rules for stock trades (CEOs can trade their own stock, but only in trades fixed in advance to negate their information advantage). Specifically, insiders should classify themselves as "well-informed traders", and the WITs can only trade among each other, or by pre-announcing their trades in advance so that the non-insiders have time to react.

[m-accost]

Americans encapsulate this deep ennui, stemming from a loss of spiritual exemplars, with the phrase "The Three Nos", which is short for "No Bob Hope, no Steve Jobs, and no Johnny Cash"

[elucubrare]

iam senior, sed cruda deo viridisque senectus.

now old, but old age is green & [raw] for gods

(vergil, aeneid vi line 304, re: charon]

i'm bracketing "raw" there because "cruda" has a really interesting constellation of meaning - LSJ has "bloody," "raw (of food)," "unripe, immature, crude," and, citing this line, "Opp. to age, and the weakness arising from age, fresh, vigorous" & I think here it creates a really interesting opposition between the expectation of old age in humans and what vergil describes as the old age of gods - most of the connotations of "cruda" appear to be about potential and incompleteness. charon is able to pole the barge across the styx despite being old because he's physically strong, but that's not the full difference between an old god and an old man: a god, in his old age, isn't finished with life, as humans are.

or, to rephrase, humans are reaching an end - a completion - in old age, but gods are eternally unfinished, always becoming.

[youzicha]

After the first trial ended in a hung jury, and awaiting the upcoming retrial, Oscar Wilde

earnestly asked the writer Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, who had called at Oakley Street, whether "truly and honestly he had never liked young men, never wished to fondle and caress them," and he "seemed almost to doubt Tex's sincerity when he emphatically repudiated the very conception of such a thing."

I guess the forced secrecy prevented common knowledge of both gayness and straightness.

[youzicha]

Picture yourself in a town in New England With tangerine trees and marmalade skies...

[youzicha]

as an English teacher, I can attest that it is a heck of a thing to come across ["unalived"] in a student’s essay and explain, “This isn’t social media⁠—you can use the word ‘killed’”, only for the student to express discomfort with that (!), having internalized from the censorship algorithms that writing “killed” crosses a line.  I’ve also seen late Zoomers be shocked to find the word “regarded” in a reading assignment, because apparently that has become a euphemism on social media for a Word That Must Not Be Written (which itself started out as a euphemism)

Hm. Meanwhile, my kid (currently in first grade) has somehow been taught in school that "stupid" is a bad word at the same level as "fuck"—the "F-word" and the "S-word". He acts scandalized if I say it.

[kata4a]

higgledy piggledy urban designers employ (among other things) floodgates and dikes

thank you for all of these anti-diluvian measures to safeguard our waterlogged pikes!

[germanpostwarmodern]

Sovereign House (1966-68) in Norwich, England, by Alan Cooke Associates. Demolished.

[youzicha]

Who on this big round earth did ever savor a green or a sweet juicy purple gooseberry and didn't say: this stunning flavor makes stupid oranges feel ordinary! Other citruses also don't impress. Honestly, why go to Africa? What have they got in America? Or Europe, or the Orient? I say that they can all get bent! But Scandinavia's the greatest place there is. Only in Sweden are there Swedish gooseberries. —Carl Jonas Love Almqvist (1793-1866)

[youzicha]

Almqvist incurred large debts and then fled Sweden after (probably) attempting to murder his creditor, and when he wrote this he was living in unhappy self-imposed exile in Philadelphia.

The famous final line is, I think, deliberately tautological: at the time gooseberries were popular all over Europe and America, but the gooseberries you buy in Philadelphia aren't Swedish.

[requiem-on-water]

"The Soul's Journey" (2025) by Chiharu Shiota | Ph: Charles Roussel

[youzicha]