Richard Korzekwa

Mar 27, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Steven Byrnes |Thomas Sepulchre |Charlie Steiner |Richard Korzekwa

There is a particular fallacy I encounter often, and I don't know if it has a name already. I call it the salt in pasta water fallacy. In this post I will present the fallacy, discuss why I believe it is a fallacy, and give a concrete example of it happening. Salt in pasta waterThe archetypical example of the fallacy is the following claim: Adding salt to pasta water reduces cooking time.

Mar 1, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Dave Orr |Thomas Kehrenberg |Richard Korzekwa

When you look up the color temperature of daylight, most sources will say 6500K, but if you buy an LED with that color temperature, it will not look like the sun in the sky. It will seem bluer (or, less yellow-y). Yet, 6500K is arguably the correct number. What is going on? The answer is Rayleigh scattering. What we perceive as sun rays on the Earth’s surface has traveled through a lot of atmosphere, whereby a lot of the blue light has been scattered away, such that the sun rays look a bit yellowish.

Feb 15, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Rohin Shah |Richard Korzekwa

If one believes that unaligned AGI is a significant problem (>10% chance of leading to catastrophe), speeding up public progress towards AGI is obviously bad. Though it is obviously bad, there may be circumstances which require it. However, accelerating AGI should require a much higher bar of evidence and much more extreme circumstances than is commonly assumed.

Feb 10, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Matthew Barnett |Daniel Kokotajlo |Richard Korzekwa |Jacob Pfau

I applaud the effort, but I confess that I didn't read the post very carefully, because so many problems with this approach jumped out at me.

Feb 8, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Matthew Barnett |M. Y. Zuo |Adam Zerner |Richard Korzekwa

I think I've uncovered an error in Eliezer Yudkowsky's book Inadequate Equilibria that undermines a key point in the book. Here are some of my observations. First, let me provide some context. In the first chapter, Yudkowsky states that prior to Shinzo Abe's tenure as Prime Minister of Japan, the Bank of Japan had implemented a bad monetary policy that cost Japan trillions of dollars in real economic growth.