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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 4th, 2024

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  • There are tons of statistical methods to get reasonable conclusions without an RCT. Some things can not be detected with an RCT, because the experiment is just impossible to run, so sometimes you need methods to do causal identification with observable data. Here you do not even need causal identification methods for observational data. You just need to do some descriptive statistics for a large group of people well to find interesting patterns. Whether this aging pattern in the mid-40s is causal it coincidental is not important at first. The pattern itself is interesting.





  • Depends on what you do with it. Synthetic data seems to be really powerful if it’s human controlled and well built. Stuff like tiny stories (simple llm-generated stories that only use the complexity of a 3-year olds vocabulary) can be used to make tiny language models produce sensible English output. My favourite newer example is the base data for AlphaProof (llm-generated translations of proofs in Math-Papers to the proof-validation system LEAN) to teach an LLM the basic structure of Mathematics proofs. The validation in LEAN itself can be used to only keep high-quality (i.e. correct) proofs. Since AlphaProof is basically a reinforcement learning routine that uses an llm to generate good ideas for proof steps to reduce the size of the space of proof steps, applying it yields new correct proofs that can be used to further improve its internal training data.