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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   4828 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

  • The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
  • The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
  • Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
  • Israel has at least one satellite with undisclosed purpose and capabilities that uses free space point-to-point optical communication. If true, that means that the Jews have secret space lasers.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years.

Forgive my ignorance, but what would this imply?

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

Not commenting on this directly, but I remember back at $UNIVERSITY (a top 100 school) listening to a math professor discuss career prospects for math majors. On one hand, they could go into academia, get paid peanuts, but get all the fame of publishing their work. On the other, they could work for The Nation's Top Employer Of Mathematicians, get paid well to work with really really smart folks on hard problems, but have to suffer in 10-20 years when someone else published the same results in open academic literature that they couldn't ever talk about, and never get credit for.

Or they could go into finance, but that mostly just paid well and was boring from a research perspective.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

I find "Omicron was a lab leak" to be >10%. But given that it emerged in South Africa, the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

I don't consider bears shitting in the woods to be a conspiracy theory.

the idea that it was developed intentionally by people who knew what they were doing gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

I mean University of Cape Town is ranked 160th best in the world, putting in in the same ballpark as Tufts and Northeastern. There's definitely sufficient competence there to do something like this. Hell, at the not-even-ranked-in-the-top-2000-in-the-world university I went to I could name at least 3 professors who could pull that off with the knowledge and facilities they have available to them.

But given that it emerged in South Africa

Why do you take this as fact?

"Emerged in South Africa" is likely correct: the first probable case was identified in Pretoria, SA on 2021-11-04, and the first confirmed/sequenced samples were also from SA and Botswana that same week. There weren't any confirmed cases outside of SA until 2021-11-24, so I think "originated in South Africa" is pretty likely.

Sure but how many other African states were doing any sequencing? Or even any substantial testing? It’s quite possible that the variant was evolving in Africa for a long while until it was discovered in South Africa. Also if you were a super duper shady institution releasing modified viruses into the wild you would probably not release in your own country and not even somewhere it can be detected quickly. So black Africa is a perfect candidate

gives the South Africans credit for more competence than they possess.

I’d thought SA had more than a bit of competence left, just not enough to go around and a government that didn’t care if it was functional or not.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

James Clapper? And even if you think that's history, he got away with no consequences, publicly, so now they all know it's safe. How is this sub-10%?

For each of the following, I think there's a nontrivial chance (call it 10% or more) that that crackpot theory is true.

Emphasis mine. Original words mine too but the emphasis was from this time.

The joke with that one was that it's an open secret that certain officials (and yeah I was also thinking about James Clapper) can lie to congress without repercussions, but it's still conspiracy-flavored to point it out.

Poor reading skills mine; thanks for not making the correction as snarky as it deserved to be.

I think my eye jumped straight to the "Omicron was a biological anti-weapon" conspiracy theory and just assumed you were going for wacky 10%-or-much-much-less improbabilities ... but now I've also read your reply justifying that one, and though it still doesn't push my needle above 10% you're clearly not just brainstorming /r/writingprompts material here.

The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work. However the idea of neural networks for semantic classification or machine translation or similar has been known for a very long time, so I could totally see them trying to use the (quite meh) state of the art at the time with a lot of compute.

Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.

Probably over 10%? A lot of people, including people with power, say things that are various degrees of lies.

The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work.

It's an offshoot of the widely-reposted AI Twitter claim that 'we could have trained GPT-2 in 2004' (or with 2003 levels of supercomputer compute). And that might well be true, idk. Here's one of the biggest sources.

What's less believable is that nobody involved in this hypothetical effort at the NSA decided to just get rich in the private sector after coming up with technology decades ahead of the competition.

Guess i was wrong! I'd actually read that post before, seems I forgot.

Sometimes my "real" justifications build on a lot of accumulated knowledge and ideas, and writing those all out would take longer than I wanted, so I don't, and substitute for something shorter instead. Sometimes the shorter thing is wrong, though. So my 'real' reason for saying .1% was something about how mathematics and coordination and coming up with ideas is hard, and as we observe society develop we're seeing the best of everyone we have slowly stumble into being more and more correct, and it's almost impossible to beat that privately on something as big as 'GPT' because you have to do all of the research work that tens of thousands of the brightest machine learning researchers did in public over the past few decades. Like, the manhattan project was secret, but it used all of the best people we had and wasn't secret forever. The NSA can keep some cryptographic techniques secret, but not the entire concept of cryptography secret.

[Omicron]

<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.

For a random variant I'd agree. But omicron was really weird in a lot of ways though, and I'd actually put this one at more like 30% (and 80% that something weird and mouse-shaped happened).

  1. Omicron was really really far (as measured by mutation distance) from any other sars-cov-2 variant. Like seriously look at this phylogenetic tree (figure 1 in this paper)
  2. The most recent common ancestor of B.1.1.529 (omicron) and B.1.617.2 (delta, the predominant variant at the time) dates back to approximately February 2020. It is not descended from any variant that was common at the time it started spreading.
  3. The omicron variant spike protein exhibited unusually high binding affinity for the mouse cell entry receptor (source)
  4. Demand for humanized mice was absurdly high during the pandemic - researchers were definitely attempting to study coronavirus disease and spread dynamics in mouse models.

The astute reader will object "hey that just sounds like a researcher who couldn't get enough humanized mice decided to induce sars-cov-2 to jump to normal mice, and then study it there. Why do you assume they intentionally induced a jump back to humans rather than accidentally getting sick from their research mice". To which I say "the timing was suspicious, the level of infectiousness was enormously higher in humans which I don’t think I'd expect in the absence of passaging back through humanized mice, and also hey look over there a distraction from my weak arguments".

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