Good to see the Yud tradition of ridiculous strawmanning of science continue.

In this case, the strawscientist falls for a ponzi scheme because "it always outputted the same returns". So scientific!

Thanks, I love these answers! I'll drop a DM on matrix for further questions.

This rather economic recycling allows a living cell to absorb damage that would be catastrophic when you just assume that everything works forever just as you imagined. I don’t have a guess how much more energy would be expended in reassembly of diamondoids, @titotal@awful.systems might have an estimate, but i guess it’s some 1-2 orders of magnitude more

The DMS researchers were estimating something on the order of 5 eV for mechanically dropping a single pair of Carbon atoms onto the surface of diamond. I'm not sure how to directly compare this to the biological case.

If you post on EA forum or LW, you can crosspost automatically to the other one by clicking one button on the publishing page. The sites are run by essentially the same people.

Hmmm, I wonder who benefits from keeping EA chained to an Eliezer Yudkowsky fan forum....

Hey, thanks so much for looking through it! If you're alright with messaging me your email or something, I might consult you on some more related things.

With your permission, I'm tempted to edit this response into the original post, it's really good. Have you looked over Yudkowsky's word salad in the EA forum thread? Would be interested in getting your thoughts on that as well.

Do you have any links to this, out of curiosity? I looked a bunch and couldn't find any successor projects.

what are the other ones?

I guess the rest of the experimental setup that recombines the photon amplitiudes. Like if you put 5 extra beam splitters in the bottom path, there wouldn't be full destructive interference.

when i’m thinking about splitter with pi/4 phase shift, i’m thinking about coupled line coupler or its waveguide analogue, but i come from microwave land on this one. maybe this works in fibers?

I'm not sure how you'd actually build a symmetric beam splitter: wikipedia said you'd need to induce a particular extra phase shift on both transmission and reflection. (I'm fully theoretical physics so I'm not too familiar).

What I think happened is that he got confused by the half mirror phase shifts (because theres only a phase shift if you reflect off the front of the mirror, not the back). Instead of asking someone, he invented his own weird system which gets the right answer by accident, and then refused to fix the mistake ever, saying that the alternate system is fine because it's "simpler".

My impression is that the toxicity within EA is mainly concentrated in the bay area rationalists, and in a few of the actual EA organizations. If it's just a local meetup group, it's probably just going to be some regular-ish people with some mistaken beliefs that are genuinely concerned about AI.

Just be polite and present arguments, and you might actually change minds, at least among those who haven't been sucked too far into Rationalism.

Obvious reminder: do not assume that anonymous tumblr posts are accurate. (this is the only post the tumblr account made).

Has anyone attempted a neutral unpacking of the mess of claims and counterclaims around Ziz and related parties?

I roll a fair 100 sided dice.

Eliezer asks me to state my confidence that I won't roll a 1.

I say I am 99% confident I won't roll a 1, using basic math.

Eliezer says "AHA, you idiot, I checked all of your past predictions and when you predicted something with confidence 99%, it only happened 90% of the time! So you can't say you're 99% confident that you won't roll a 1"

I am impressed by the ability of my past predictions to affect the roll of a dice, and promptly run off to become a wizard.

As a physicist, this quote got me so mad I wrote an excessively detailed debunking a while back. It's staggeringly wrong.