Yair Halberstadt

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Why our politicians aren't Median — LessWrong

Nov 3, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

Scott asks why, if the Median Voter Theorem is true, American politicians aren't all middle of the road, and barely distinguishable from each other. Elegant as this proof may be, it fails to describe the real world. Democrats and Republicans don’t have platforms exactly identical to each other and to the exact most centrist American. Instead, Democrats are often pretty far left, and Republicans pretty far right. What’s going on? He suggests a number of reasons.
Humans are (mostly) metarational — LessWrong

Oct 9, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

At least in the early days of LessWrong this community was mostly focused on all the ways Man's reasoning failed him, the myriad ways we are irrational. What foolish humans, making mistakes even trivial mathematics can show you are wrong!Evolution aims to maximise number of offspring. But people don't have a direct drive for that because encoding that into a human brain is too complex.
Book Review: Righteous Victims - A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict — LessWrong

Jun 24, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

I originally entered this to the ACX Book Review competition. Since it has not been selected as a finalist I'm now free to post it here. In truth it's a followup to my review of Morris's history of Israel's War of Independence. In the wake of the October 7th attack on Israel and Israel’s response, everyone seemed to agree that one side of the conflict was the epitome of evil, the reincarnation of the Nazis, with warfare in their blood and a pure unfiltered hatred of the enemy in their minds.
Sci-Fi books micro-reviews — LessWrong

Jun 24, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

I've recently been reading a lot of science fiction. Most won't be original to fans of the genre, but some people might be looking for suggestions, so in lieu of full blown reviews here's super brief ratings on all of them. I might keep this updated over time, if so new books will go to the top.
Surviving Seveneves — LessWrong

Jun 19, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

Contains spoilers for the first couple of chapters of SevenevesHighly speculative on my part, I know very little about most of these topicsIn Seveneves Neal Stephenson does the classic sci-fi trick of assuming that exactly one thing in the universe is different, and seeing where that takes us. In his case that one thing is the moon has somehow exploded. And where that takes us is the complete destruction of the earth.
Can stealth aircraft be detected optically? — LessWrong

May 2, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

5th generation military aircraft are extremely optimised to reduce their radar cross section. It is this ability above all others that makes the f-35 and the f-22 so capable - modern anti aircraft weapons are very good, so the only safe way to fly over a well defended area is not to be seen. But wouldn't it be fairly trivial to detect a stealth aircraft optically?
Falling fertility explanations and Israel — LessWrong

Apr 2, 2024 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt

From robin Hanson, via TheZvi:The following 8 social trends plausibly contribute to falling fertility:More gender equality - More equal gender norms, options, & expectations, have contributed to fewer women having kids. Higher parenting effort - Expectations for how much attention and effort parents give each kid have risen. Long stiff career paths - The path of school & early career prep til one is established worker is longer & less flexible.
How Many Bits Of Optimization Can One Bit Of Observation Unlock? — LessWrong

Apr 26, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Yair Halberstadt |Thomas Sepulchre

Eliminating GThe standard definition of channel capacity makes no explicit reference to the original message G; it can be eliminated from the problem. We can do the same thing here, but it’s trickier. First, let’s walk through it for the standard channel capacity setup. Standard Channel Capacity SetupIn the standard setup, A cannot depend on O, so our graph looks like… and we can further remove O entirely by absorbing it into the stochasticity of Y. Now, there are two key steps.
Remarks 1–18 on GPT (compressed) — LessWrong

Mar 20, 2023 | lesswrong.com | Cleo Nardo |Bogdan Ionut Cirstea |Dragon God |Yair Halberstadt

Status: Highly-compressed insights about LLMs. Includes exercises. Remark 3 and Remark 15 are the most important and entirely self-contained. Let T be the set of possible tokens in our vocabulary. A language model (LLM) is given by a stochastic function μ:T∗→Δ(T) mapping a prompt (t1…tk) to a predicted token tk+1. By iteratively appending the continuation to the prompt, the language model μ induces a stochastic function ¯μ:T∗→Δ(T∗) mapping a prompt (t1…tk) to (t1…tk+1).