I think that in this particular instance, it’s OK to kinkshame

I will try to have some more comments about the physics when I have time and energy. In the meanwhile:

Entropy in thermodynamics is not actually a hard concept. It’s the ratio of the size of a heat flow to the temperature at which that flow is happening. (So, joules per kelvin, if you’re using SI units.) See episodes 46 and 47 of The Mechanical Universe for the old-school PBS treatment of the story. The last time I taught thermodynamics for undergraduates, we used Finn’s Thermal Physics, for the sophisticated reason that the previous professor used Finn’s Thermal Physics.

Entropy in information theory is also not actually that hard of a concept. It’s a numerical measure of how spread-out a probability distribution is.

It’s relating the two meanings that is tricky and subtle. The big picture is something like this: A microstate is a complete specification of the positions and momenta of all the pieces of a system. We can consider a probability distribution over all the possible microstates, and then do information theory to that. This bridges the two definitions, if we are very careful about it. One thing that trips people up (particularly if they got poisoned by pop-science oversimplifications about “disorder” first) is forgetting the momentum part. We have to consider probabilities, not just for where the pieces are, but also for how they are moving. I suspect that this is among Vopson’s many problems. Either he doesn’t get it, or he’s not capable of writing clearly enough to explain it.

So these two were published in American Institute of Physics Advances, which looks like a serious journal about physics. Does anyone know about it? It occupies a space where I can’t easily find any obvious issues, but I also can’t find anyone saying “ye this is legit”. It claims to be peer-reviewed, and at least isn’t just a place where you dump a PDF and get a DOI in return.

I have never heard of anything important being published there. I think it’s the kind of journal where one submits a paper after it has been rejected by one’s first and second (and possibly third) choices.

However, after skimming, I can at least say that it doesn’t seem outlandish?

Oh, it’s worse than “outlandish”. It’s nonsensical. He’s basically operating at a level of “there’s an E in this formula and an E in this other formula, so I will set them equal and declare it revolutionary new physics”.

Here’s a passage from the second paragraph of the 2023 paper:

The physical entropy of a given system is a measure of all its possible physical microstates compatible with the macrostate, S_Phys. This is a characteristic of the non-information bearing microstates within the system. Assuming the same system, and assuming that one is able to create N information states within the same physical system (for example, by writing digital bits in it), the effect of creating a number of N information states is to form N additional information microstates superimposed onto the existing physical microstates. These additional microstates are information bearing states, and the additional entropy associated with them is called the entropy of information, S_Info. We can now define the total entropy of the system as the sum of the initial physical entropy and the newly created entropy of information, S_tot = S_Phys + S_Info, showing that the information creation increases the entropy of a given system.

wat

Storing a message in a system doesn’t make new microstates. How could it? You’re just rearranging the pieces to spell out a message — selecting those microstates that are consistent with that message. Choosing from a list of available options doesn’t magically add new options to the list.

Downvoting because you are a dorkus

And via the links at the bottom of that page, we learn that drugs are going to need a major makeover to become cool again.

… “Coming of Age” also, oddly, describes another form of novel cognitive dissonance; encountering people who did not think Eliezer was the most intelligent person they had ever met, and then, more shocking yet, personally encountering people who seemed possibly more intelligent than himself.

The latter link is to “Competent Elities”, a.k.a., “Yud fails to recognize that cocaine is a helluva drug”.

I’ve met Jurvetson a few times. After the first I texted a friend: “Every other time I’ve met a VC I walked away thinking ‘Wow, I and all my friends are smarter than you.’ This time it was ‘Wow, you are smarter than me and all my friends.’“

Uh-huh.

Quick, to the Bat-Wikipedia:

On November 13, 2017, Jurvetson stepped down from his role at DFJ Venture Capital in addition to taking leave from the boards of SpaceX and Tesla following an internal DFJ investigation into allegations of sexual harassment.

Not smart enough to keep his dick in his pants, apparently.

Then, from 2006 to 2009, in what can be interpreted as an attempt to discover how his younger self made such a terrible mistake, and to avoid doing so again, Eliezer writes the 600,000 words of his Sequences, by blogging “almost daily, on the subjects of epistemology, language, cognitive biases, decision-making, quantum mechanics, metaethics, and artificial intelligence”

Or, in short, cult shit.

Between his Sequences and his Harry Potter fanfic, come 2015, Eliezer had promulgated his personal framework of rational thought — which was, as he put it, “about forming true beliefs and making decisions that help you win” — with extraordinary success. All the pieces seemed in place to foster a cohort of bright people who would overcome their unconscious biases, adjust their mindsets to consistently distinguish truth from falseness, and become effective thinkers who could build a better world … and maybe save it from the scourge of runaway AI.

Which is why what happened next, explored in tomorrow’s chapter — the demons, the cults, the hells, the suicides — was, and is, so shocking.

Or not. See above, RE: cult shit.

You thought water was great, but have you tried H₂O₂?

an hackernews:

a high correlation between intelligence and IQ

motherfuckers out here acting like “intelligence” is sufficiently well-defined that a correlation between it and anything else can be computed

intelligence can be reasonably defined as “knowledge and skills to be successful in life, i.e. have higher-than-average income”

eat a bag of dicks

So if it turns out, as people like Penrose assert, that the brain has a certain quantum je-ne-sais-quoi, then all bets for representing the totality of even the simplest neural state with conventional computing hardware are off.

No, that’s not what Penrose asserts. His whole thing has been to say that quantum mechanics needs to be changed, that quantum mechanics is wrong in a way that matters for understanding brains.

Wait, I totally had something for this…

“Bene Jizzerit”

shot:

The upper bound for how long to pause AI is only a century, because “farming” (artificially selecting) higher-IQ humans could probably create competent IQ 200 safety researchers.

It just takes C-sections to enable huge heads and medical science for other issues that come up.

chaser:

Indeed, the bad associations ppl have with eugenics are from scenarios much less casual than this one

going full “villain in a Venture Bros. episode who makes the Monarch feel good by comparison”:

Sure, I don’t think it’s crazy to claim women would be lining up to screw me in that scenario

And if I do a simple calculation, (virtues - vices)

“…then I have shit for brains.”

Saying anything in particular makes you open to fact-based criticism — I mean, it is object-level and bad, instead of meta-level and good.

This is Virtuosity (1995) slander

There is an entire second Earth right here on Earth.

“… Mister Bond.”

I had noticed the user ID and figured that they were sequentially-assigned integers, but I hadn’t bothered to check what the numbers had gotten up to. I’m seeing a 930, an 1175, a 2327… So, yeah.

My condolences.

(looks up meaning of WP:AGF)

… Yeah, that site is probably not the right hobby for me.

(looks up the LessWrong discussion page)

My God, it’s full of smeg

They want sneers about Yud’s lack of qualifications? Fine:

Noncy prig who never went to high school founded a cult for people who can’t leave it behind! How’s about that, eh?

It occurs to me that, intentionally or not, he’s probably steering TESCREAL types to Wikipedia itself as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if accounts were coming out of the woodwork to post multi-kiloword screeds about Wikipedia being soooo unfairrrr…

Homo sapiens! What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds! They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. And now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life! Ready to out-sit eternity. They’re indomitable.

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!

There’s no way someone earnestly spent their time writing over half a million words on a self-insert Harry Potter fanfic as some form of mental masturbation… right?