BANNED USER: temperamental dysregulation
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
Banned by: @Amadan
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Speaking of parodies, I've enjoyed this one, similar vibe:
The search for exoplanets has become a focal point of astronomical research, captivating public attention and driving scientific inquiry; however, the rush to confirm exoplanet discoveries has often overlooked potential alternative explanations leading to a scientific consensus that is overly reliant on untested assumptions and limited data. We argue that the evidence in support of exoplanet observation is not necessarily definitive and that alternative interpretations are not only possible, but necessary. Our conclusion is therefore concise: exoplanets do not exist. Here, we present the framework for a novel type of cuboid star, or squar, which can precisely reproduce the full range of observed phenomena in stellar light curves, including the trapezoidal flux deviations (TFDs) often attributed to "exoplanets." In this discovery paper, we illustrate the power of the squellar model, showing that the light curve of the well-studied "exoplanet" WASP-12b can be reconstructed simply from a rotating squar with proportions $1:1/8:1$, without invoking ad-hoc planetary bodies. Our findings cast serious doubt on the validity of current "exoplanetary" efforts, which have largely ignored the potential role of squars and have instead blindly accepted the exoplanet hypothesis without sufficient critical scrutiny. In addition, we discuss the sociopolitical role of climate change in spurring the current exoplanet fervor which has lead to the speculative state of "exoplanetary science" today. We strongly urge the astronomical community to take our model proposal seriously and treat its severe ramifications with the utmost urgency to restore rationality to the field of astronomy.
This is a positive claim. Just because I can say "I don't believe that God doesn't exist" doesn't just UNO reverse the burden of proof. Affirmation and negation aren't linguistic properties of phrases, but logical properties of mathematical propositions regarding their specificity or non-specificity vis-à-vis a universe.
This is why I compare you to an LLM (don't get too offended though, we're all in the same boat). Incoherence: you object on the linguistic level while calling me out for the same. I do not claim to believe X or even not-believe X: I just claim ¬X, where X is the unspecified extra factor you posit when saying things like «nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia… The brain is not a computer. And the only reason people believe it is is based on metaphysical assumption rather than logic or evidence» etc. and demand high-effort refutation for. X is the extraordinary claim, the epicycle, and that which has to be proven (or «dismissed without evidence»), under the standard of rigor you propose.
More precisely, my statement is a syllogism which we could write down like this: «We know the process by which B produces its outputs; there is no appreciable qualitative advantage in output quality of A over B. Ergo there is no reason to suspect that some process X, qualitatively superior or more complex to B-processes, is utilized to produce A's outputs». A is your human cognition that you presumably employ to generate posts; B is computation performed by an LLM at inference, which is in turn analogized to the computational (to wit, materialistic) model of the human mind C. Swapping B for C preserves the logic even if A, B and C are all very different things.
My reference to belief is simply in line with your «disbelieving things always requires less evidence than believing them» wording of the burden-of-proof principle, and also because I don't particularly want to debate your or GPT's output quality as subjectively assessed by either of us, but aim to point out the fruitlessness of this burden tennis epistemological judo.
By the casual standard of discourse, I make the negative claim that there is no X demonstrated well enough to merit debate; you tie yourself in knots to equivocate between parsimonious materialistic and exuberant supernatural claims on the level of pure language games. Neither of us has proposed a mathematical formalism for the issue under consideration. If you want to show how your position is closer to null by that high standard, feel free to.
You seem to desperately want to equate my position with that of other people who are very certain about the nature of things.
Recall the tobacco-and-cancer skeptic guy? Conspicuous uncertainty about a specific issue or a hypothesis can boil down to certainty, just of a particularly irritating two-faced kind. And you do not even claim to be an even-handed agnostic. E.g. you say:
«I will never not point out that [human brain is still just a bunch of biochemical reactions] is materialist mythology supported by nothing. And that nobody who makes this claim, not to mention nobody at all, can explain how and why the unspecified biochemical reactions produce consciousness, agency, though or qualia. AIs don't exist now, never have, and likely never will. … The implications of the existence of LLMs might be great of small, but to see them in this paradigm of "intelligence" is boneheaded and ridiculous, and I remain convinced that history will show this framing to be completely delusional. … Myself I intuit that the types of intelligence or reasoning possible on silicon are vastly different in nature to those that supposedly rely on neurons … No. Hell no. Language and cognition are not the same thing. Chomsky is right about that and it's no surprise his NYT article on LLMs is based on one of the most hard won results of linguistics. What LLMs prove is that a general purpose model of language is possible. Which is a lot, but it has nothing to do with cognition qua cognition».
The «supposedly» gives the lie to another layer of skeptical agnosticism you retreat to here. And indeed:
A harder problem is that none of the chemical processes as we currently understand them should generate this behavior.
Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand. The fact that death is permanent is very weird for instance and it seems much more parsimonious to say the link between the body and the soul has been severed than that the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.
If consciousness was simply a property of certain arrangements of matter, you wouldn't really expect nature to select the ones that can be bricked. But of course both theories are equivalent in practice.
They aren't; mortality of living beings is not more surprising nor requiring additional explanation than the fact that stuff breaks and decays in general (admittedly a hard theological problem, and a shame, but not perplexing in the context of known physics); even evolution of aging and death is relatively well understood and has nothing to do with consciousness (very simple organisms believed to be non-conscious by all sans fringe panpsychists often age and die too). As you admit yourself, this is pointless arguing, not inquiry; but you are intent to drag results of inquiry down to the same level.
In the absence of common metaphysical prior, parsimony is a pretty good criterion to go by. ¬X is more parsimonious than what you offer.
this blinds you, as it has blinded many others, to the ever present limitations of engineering and nature.
I'm cognizant of limitations of engineering and nature. I'm simply skeptical that nature has a great deal of advantage over current engineering in the realm of implementing human-level behaviorally expressed cognition – because I don't see how that advantage could come about, don't see a single damn argument for why it should exist, and crucially just don't see the advantage.
You're buying the hype, like I've seen countless other people buy various forms of it over the years. And like all of them you will be disappointed … This is not to say that the technological changes we are living are not momentous and important. But their prediction is beyond us. And had you more humility you too would recognize it.
Vaticination on top of psychologizing is the opposite of humility, though, and a loud prognosticator preaching humility is always a sad sight. But that's okay, I don't ask you to be humble. Me, I admit not being particularly humble – nor smart, not knowledgeable or insightful or appropriately educated or possessing any other cool status. I'm just confident that my arguments are correct because they are non-contradictory, supported by empirical data and not in conflict with any data I've found.
That's enough for me.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Disbelieving things always requires less evidence than believing them
That's a pity because it's a purely rhetorical heuristic that can be turned against you. Say, I don't believe that you are more intelligent than a GPT-4. In my view, you are not capable of reasoning any more rigorously than it can, and right now you expose yourself as a previous-generation chatbot running on some shabby heuristics; your outputs in response to prompts are not more impressive nor indicative of richer internal information processing. If disbelieving is allowed an advantage, what evidence can you now produce to refute my disbelief and fortify the claim that something complex and ineffable is missed by language modeling?
It's no longer a theoretical debate about the nature of the mind in some Platonic sense, LLMs are already competitive with humans; I know as well as you do that LLM outputs you ridicule pass for middling intellectualism both online and in academia. If you say those are not sufficient to serve as evidence of humanlike understanding, should we assume your position amounts to reductio ad absurdum of snobbishness?
(Please don't say something like «a simple script can produce a pomo essay», it can't really, the context mismatch will be obvious).
if Christians don't get to say their positive claims are the null hypothesis, neither do you
Sure. But behaviorism is pretty close to a pure negative claim (leaving aside weird irrefutable things like subjective idealism), and the insistence that some spooky immaterial stuff that cannot be externally observed exists and matters for the observable outcome is, well, the opposite of that. I do not purport to explain consciousness and quale and some unique human thought, nor even say that LLMs are similar to humans in any but the most tenuous sense: I just call bullshit on evidence-free attempts to inject those philosophical notions into the topic of AI approximating or surpassing human behavioral performance. My hypothesis is more rigorous, more predictive, better evidenced, and simpler, ergo a priori closer to the natural null.
This would be a lot more convincing if I didn't spend my life studying epistemology, the philosophy of science and debating such matters.
Cool.
Notice how both you and Hlynka have devolved into bristling and brandishing credentials instead of arguments. «It's afraid».
If your worldview wasn't built on shoddy foundations, you would be able to simply explain them logically instead of attacking my character.
Logically, your posts are arrogant babble demeaning actual research for «failing to explain» illegitimate philosophical categories, e.g. this one, so they call for scrutiny of your character.
My worldview is pragmatic, not built on haughty axioms of a philosopher enamored with his own navel-gazing insights. Its foundation lies in fact, such as facts that we can understand computational properties of neuronal networks and see the continuity between human and subhuman neural systems, and generally have a very solid idea of why large systems of large neural networks, both in real brains and made of multilayer perceptrons, can support learning of arbitrarily complex skills. It's at the very least more settled than anything Chalmers has written on the nature of consciousness.
If your understanding of the philosophy of science allows you to ignore the consilience of evidence – well, all the worse for you.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's not. The claim that we do not understand neuroscience, or that our reasoning (which isn't shown to depend on whatever is ineffable in quale) is not a product of biochemical reactions in the brain (which is to say, a product of the brain – its substrate can't support much else) is the extraordinary one. You have to retreat all the way to non-materialistic metaphysics to defend your demands of extraordinary evidence. But you don't live your life with the expectation of materialism suddenly failing. You are inconsistent.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
It's harder to train in the sense that there's less data for grounding. On the other hand, we can cheaply make robot fingertips with superhuman tactile resolution, and if anyone bothered, it'd be easy to train a model (riding on top of some multimodal LM, probably?) on general tactile recognition in reality and simulation, and then finetune it in the clinical setting. This isn't very different from how humans are trained. How many hours of palpation did you do in your life? It's a minor addition to your general manual skill. And even if sample efficiency turns out to be abysmal in comparison, two hundred hands at $1000 a pop, over a year, do not amount to even one American GP's compensation. Granted, proper hands are for now much more expensive, mostly due to small-scale production (which in turn is explained by worthless software), but I expect this to be solved rapidly once Tesla Optimus, 1X and other robots enter the market.
Actually sounds like a cool project for the developing world (@self_made_human, what do you think?). Might even increase the diagnostic value of tactile assessment. Too bad we can't have nice things.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
What do you predict is an average minimum-wage cashier's performance at a task like using a bogus novel arithmetic operation "pointwise multiplication modulo 10, with binary evenness-based carry, left-to-right"?
Granted, it's technically 4-shot. I'd give your cashier 5 examples, because God knows they have other bullshit to deal with.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
(As an aside: this text is confusing, you jump from psychologizing to chess to Moravec, and it's hard to keep track of the core assertion).
Hlynka do you really want to go another round. Because I don't particularly care for it, especially not enough to respond with pure object-level to your Bulverism – even though this is what we do here all the time, to the point of obsessiveness. How boring is your life exactly? Maybe go on a trip to ol' Europe (or Asia), come here and we talk it over. Bring some good liquor if you can, Turks are lousy in this regard.
The real inferential distance here seems to come from inferences made on the basis of evidence, versus whatever you're trusting. Say, Caplan isn't known for being impressed by GPT's chess skills – he tests it on exam questions he believes are tricky. You tried that too: last time you've been claiming that autoregressive LLMs cannot not hallucinate your daughter's name, due to how they're trained. I've shown that ChatGPT replies as well as you said a human would, admitting it doesn't know. Since then, it's become possible to have coherent dialogues with files below 4 Gb and very sensible ones with stuff like Vicuna-13B. I assume you haven't tested that yet, despite insistence of multiple people here, because I haven't seen you concede the issue. Now you're simply dropping that and pivoting to saying they can't play chess, again due to fundamentals of their training. It's «just» regression, «just» predicting words, see. And words aren't chess moves or facts, so of coursh' flawlessly modeling grammar ought to be unsurprising, trivially feasible for an LLM – unlike modeling the logic of the game board. Or something. Although Chomsky, another guy who does not check whether his punches land, still seems to think that grammar cannot be solved with «just» statistics either. And while we're at it, Minsky's arguments were also obsolete at release. Now Dreyfus, this Heidegger scholar, was largely correct about Minsky's Talmudic-symbolic approach, but of him, Minsky only had to say that he doesn't understand and should be ignored.
On a meta-level, your rhetorical similarity to all those eggheaded paper-pushers is a rather bigger indictment of your position than whatever you say specifically about the tech. You scoff at pure math guys, at ivory tower symbol manipulators, but your arguments here are: brandishing your degree, discussing the history of academic debate, a bit of homegrown epistemology, dismissive blogposts and nerdy web comics, throwing around applause lights and rat lingo. You do not apply the pragmatic and entrepreneurial American lens, the «does it work tho» ethos. You treat LLM enthusiasts (and by proxy, developers who say the same) with the sort of casual disdain you believe pure math bros have for signal-processing researchers; where do you think notions like gradient, dropout and channel came from to LLMs? Read about Hyena Filters some time to stay ahead of the curve.
As a man involved with engineering, you ought to know that a skilled engineer can make bits and bytes perform bizarre magical circus tricks a limp-wristed intellectual would not see coming, and on the other hand that some problems are vastly harder than a sedentary utopian imagines, for not everything is deducible from first principles; that processes can be very deep and counterintuitive, that it can take a lifetime to figure out the nitty-gritty of how something actually works, so it is sensible to defer to reality over theory and assumption; worse, you preach this attitude. But you do not practice what you preach. Are you really a thing-manipulator or a symbol-manipulator? Or maybe more of a people-manipulator, at this stage of your career?
You are wrestling with your own shadow.
Congrats on your nine-year old never making illegal moves, by the way. You teach them well. Recently I've learned that my gainfully employed backend dev friend, 32, doesn't know how castling works, and is uncertain about pawn's inability to attack straight. I'd say he should be able to get to 1600 ELO, at least, with a little bit of finetuning. It's an issue of knowledge and experience, not just ineffable innate properties of the mind.
Do you have enough experience with LLMs to justify your conclusions?
I'll cite again Piantadosi again.
Frederick Jelinek’s quip “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up” (Jelinek 1988) was a joke among linguists and computer scientists for decades. I’ve even seen it celebrated by academic linguists who think it elevates their abstract enterprise over and above the dirty details of implementation and engineering. But, while generative syntacticians insulated themselves from engineering, empirical tests, and formal comparisons, engineering took over. And now, engineering has solved the very problems the field has fixated on—or is about to very soon. The unmatched success of an approach based on probability, internalization of constructions in corpora, gradient methods, and neural networks is, in the end, a humiliation for everyone who has spent decades deriding these tools.
But now we can do better.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
But you don't really want explanations for quale or agency: you just demand that your perception of their ineffability be humored, as well as self-serving assumptions justified by that supposed ineffability.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I know what people have written about mesa-optimizers. They've also written about the Walugi effect. I am not sure I «know» what mesa-optimizers with respect to ML are. The onus is on those theorists to mechanistically define them and rigorously show that they exist. For now, all evidence that I've seen has been either Goodhart/overfitting effects well-known in ML, or seeing-Jesus-in-a-toast tier things like Waluigi.
To be less glib, and granting the premise of mesa-optimizers existing, please see Plakhov section here. In short: we do not need to know internal computations and cogitations of a model to know that the regularization will still mangle and shred any complex subroutine that does not dedicate itself to furthering the objective.
And it's not like horny-humans-versus-evolution example, because «evolution» is actually just a label for some historical pattern that individual humans can frivolously refuse to humor with their life choices; in model training, the pressure to comply with the objective bears on any mesa-optimizer in its own alleged «lifetime», directly (and not via social shaming or other not-necessarily-compelling proxy mechanisms) . Imagine if you received a positive or negative kick to the reward system conditional on your actions having increased/decreased your ultimate procreation success: this isn't anywhere near so easy to cheat as what we do with our sex drive or other motivations. Evolution allows for mesa-optimizers, but gradient descent is far more ruthless.
…Even that would be something of a category error. Models or sub-models don't really receive rewards or punishments, this is another misleading metaphor that is, in itself, predicated upon our clunky mesa-optimizing biological mechanisms. They're altered based on the error signal; results of their behavior and their «evolution» happen on the same ontological plane, unlike our dopaminergic spaghetti one can hijack with drugs or self-deception. « Reinforcement learning should be viewed through the lens of selection, not the lens of incentivisation».
Humans have a pervasive agency-detection bias. When so much depends on whether an agent really is there, it must be suppressed harshly.
The AI naysayers have consistently been wrong for the last 5 years, where the doomers keep being proven correct.
I beg to differ.
The doomers have been wrong for decades, and keep getting more wrong; the AI naysayers are merely wrong in another way. Yudkowsky's whole paradigm has failed, in large part because he's been an AI naysayer in all senses that current AI has succeeded. Who is being proven correct? People Yud, in his obstinate ignorance, had been mocking and still mocks, AI optimists and builders, pioneers of DL.
You are simply viewing this through the warped lens of Lesswrongian propaganda, with the false dichotomy of AI skepticism and AI doom. The central position both those groups seek to push out of the mainstream is AI optimism, and the case for it is obvious: less labor, more abundance, and everything good we've come to expect from scientific progress since the Enlightenment, delivered as if from a firehose. We are literally deploying those naive Golden Age Sci-Fi retrofuturist dreams that tech-literate nerds loved to poke holes in, like a kitchen robot that is dim-witted yet can converse in a human tongue and seems to have personality. It's supposed to be cool.
Even these doomers are, of course, ex-optimists: they intended to build their own AGI by 2010s, and now that they've made no progress while others have struck gold, they're going to podcasts, pivoting to policy advice, attempting to character-assassinate those more talented others, and calling them derogatory names like «stupid murder monkeys fighting to eat the poison banana».
Business as usual. We're discussing a similar thing with respect to nuclear power in this very thread. Some folks lose it when a technical solution makes their supposedly necessary illiberal political demands obsolete, and begin producing FUD.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
No, the whole point of what you believe is «metacontrarianism» is that it's entirely possible to predict what a superintelligence will do, when we know what it has been trained for and how exactly it's been trained. Terry Tao is a mathematical superintelligence compared to an average human. What will he do? Write stuff, mainly about mathematics. GPT-4 is a superintelligence in the realm of predicting the next token. What will it do? Predict next token superhumanly well. AlphaZero is a tabletop game superintelligence. What will it do? Win at tabletop games. And so it goes.
Intelligence, even general intelligence, even general superintelligence, is not that unlike physical strength as the capacity to exert force: on its own, as a quantity, it's a directionless, harmless capability to process information. Instrumental convergence for intelligence, as commonly understood by LWers, is illiterate bullshit.
What I admit we should fear is superagency, however it is implemented; and indeed it can be powered by an ASI. But that's, well, a bit of an orthogonal concern and should be discussed explicitly.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Naturally I believe that all there is to your argument (assuming you speak from a Hajnali perspective) is perfectly explained by what I've written. «I am an Elf because Yelena Bonner has civilized me». False consciousness.
Egregore is supposed to have some independent motive power, it's not an epiphenomenon. Are South Americans, those consummate Catholics, Orcs or Elves in your book? They are almost indistinguishable from Russians in all their characteristic failings, sans baseline depression level perhaps; their pious mafia dons are the spitting image of our vors. Are Orthodox Western converts somehow defective? Are there any interesting correspondences between denominations and lifestyles in Africa?
That's funny when you just got finished talking about Islam. How did Christianity bootstrap to its first state support, vs how Islam?
Funny? You don't know the half of it. The sudden punchline of Galkovsky's shitpost is alt-historical, namely that Christians have falsified the record and they're basically a gravedigger cult that has «bootstrapped to state support» via an accidental military coup.
I don't think this is true. But I also think Hajnali egregore is not meaningfully religious. Christianity has altered their original metaphysics but has not enriched it.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This is shoehorning of NIMBYist sentiment. Do you suppose the harm of coal or even «renewables» is only personal, and doesn't enshittify the environment and cultural signs around it? Your nice bucolic ancestral village soiled with dust coal (radioactive one, in fact) or surrounded by acres and acres (I've seen fields, Neo, vast fields) of soulless solar panels and noisy wind turbines will lose much of its sentimental value anyway, like a traditional home covered in garish plastic siding.
I would support not building major infrastructure near residential spaces when at all affordable, regardless of safety. There are plenty of mostly uninhabited 10-mile radiuses out there, or at least radiuses very few people would object to vacating if provided some compensation; you don't need a nuclear power plant near your grandma's gingerbread house any more than you need Springfield at the foot of Mr. Burns' power plant. These things don't employ a ton of people.
(And, yes, new reactor designs are vastly more safe than that 3 or 4/500 level 6+ disasters over 70 years figure suggests).
Are mottizens just more rational than everyone else, or is it because of chronic contrarianism?
As a pro-nuclear «chronic contrarian»: we can't be relied upon to distinguish the latter from the former. But I'd say it's the diminished vulnerability to threat models that appear poorly substantiated. We don't put much stock in «something may happen» stories.
For the same reason many here tend to pooh-pooh «the coof», Trump's «attempt at fascist insurrection», the danger of Russia or China, AGI risk, climate change, whatever, even school shooting and violence. On the other hand, we are highly suspicious of risk narratives that seem to justify reduction of freedom in all senses – from direct political ones to basic freedoms of exploring space and enjoying material abundance; degrowth ideology doesn't appeal to us at all. Inasmuch as there are conservatives and reactionaries here who profess to respect Chesterton's fences and the precautionary principle, it's not consistent but restricted to domains where change and action is heavily enemy-coded and in some ways still Puritan, statist and restrictive (e.g. CRT programming in schools).
Put another way, we aren't very contrarian. We're just non-neurotic males with a typical masculine attitude toward minor risks and risky-seeming things. The broader society and its consensus is… less like this.
It’s also enraged a bloc of stoutly anti-nuclear countries that includes Germany and Austria. Seven of them wrote a joint letter earlier this month warning that including nuclear-generated hydrogen could “jeopardize the achievement of … climate targets” and reduce ambitions on renewables.
“The attempt to declare nuclear energy as sustainable and renewable must be resolutely opposed,” Austrian Energy Minister Leonore Gewessler said after the deal.
Nuclear is quite bad if 1) you focus on tail risk of disasters (Chernobyl, Three Mile, Fukushima…) or mistaken estimates for base level harmfulness (such as consequences of waste leaks) and/or 2) evaluate nuclear by its cost per unit of output in the context of prohibitively expensive safety measures predicated upon its danger (assessments, plant designs and, again, secure waste storage over millenia). Put in the proper quantitative context, it's less dangerous per unit of power than most other energy sources. But there's no way to make coal or solar seem so spooky to a layman. I mean –wind, sun, it's all so nice, living in harmony with nature, what could go wrong! So what if we'll need to restrain our capitalist greed and consume a little less, give some rest to our mother Earth! Indeed, it'd be a positive if we got rid of capitalism even without any ecological benefit, some could say that's the whole point. Also, the precariousness of nature also means one can feel morally superior on account of normie unambitious urbanite life choices.
The optics accessible to midwits are just bad, built into every facet of culture from fiction tropes about evil power sources to signs on trash containers; whatever your nerdy arguments, generations of shallow artists competing for NGO grants (with the intent to suffocate, debase and diminish humanity under the guise of rational planning) have conscientiously labored to make it this way.
Not much to do about it now but remind them of the human cost of their actions, meticulously calculated.
Imagine knowing a great guy, he's really very swell, a scholar and an athlete, helps everyone in need; a bit neurotic and guilt-ridden though, and drinks more than a bit. Adorably, he's mad in love and talks of his wife often. You get invited to the 20th anniversary of their marriage, and for the first time see her; she's less than what one might think he deserves. Pudgy and high-strung, adorned with weird new age artifacts, woke, visibly obsessive and controlling, and once he starts musing aloud about some high-minded fancy, she pinches him quite viciously. They withdraw; you happen to overhear her berating him in a shrill voice, and even hitting him with a frying pan, Acme-style. Then in the open, bloodied a little – «I just stumbled!» – he gives a speech where he tearfully attributes all peaks he has achieved and all the good he's ever done to her. She's fuming, but accepts it as a given, and snorts that he should focus more on charity and less on greatness: she still has work to do; if only he could neuter his pride and listen more, and perhaps donate all that they owe to her guru, publicly committing now.
How would you feel about his confession?
You may assume I'm talking about, say, Andrei Sakharov and Yelena Bonner or my own family or whatever, but my point is that sunk cost fallacy is a thing, and that people can have false consciousness. People grow invested in their partners and ideologies, especially if they can't sever the relationship; and religions in particular are partners of civilizations that are so molded by selection pressure as to consume the logos of the people under their yoke; to teach those people to construe their virtues as following from religious practices and precepts, and their vices as failures to comply. In an attempt to avoid incoherence, Christian scholarship interprets non-Christian civilizations too as created by their religions, and holds that any major social form is downstream of some founding creed (with «good» creeds of successful forms tending to be Christian in their ultimate origin). This is generalized transubstantiation, and it should be suspect for any unbiased observer.
It's a chicken and egg question: did the Church build the West, or did the West create Christianity that can be taken seriously? Hlynka's motivated reasoning is as good an example as any, he deeply wants to tie what he likes about the West (actually just Red-Tribe USA) to Christianity, and it doesn't matter for him how accurately he gets the details (just as it doesn't matter for him whether everything he loathes, from progressivism to HBD bros, is truly part of the same bundle); what is clearly Christian of all these proceedings is, perhaps, only Hlynka's obsessive thinking in absolutes and morally laden dualities.
Liberalism and the concept of natural, individual and human rights - inventions of Western civilization - have their clear origins in Christianity theology - we are all made in the image of God, and everyone is a sinner.
Do they?
One of the most misunderstood parts of Genesis, I believe, is Jacob's wrestling with God. ISV 32:28 «“Your name won’t be Jacob anymore,” the man replied, “but Israel, because you exerted yourself against both God and men, and you’ve emerged victorious.”». I happen to like the inaccurate Russian Synodal translation more. «И сказал: отныне имя тебе будет не Иаков, а Израиль, ибо ты боролся с Богом, и человеков одолевать будешь». «And said: henceforth your name will be not Jacob but Israel, for you have wrestled with God, and will be overcoming humans too».
It's undeniable that Christianity has influenced the West. And people can grow tough through wrestling with their faith. But the interesting aspect of such supposedly academic inquiry by theists is that they never ever assume the root of their success lies in some compensation for the trauma, or in ugly aspects of said faith: it's only ever the most noble interpretation of its words, applied directly.
I fear this is unprincipled charity.
Galkovsky on Rome and Christianity:
There are three features of Christianity that catch the eye of any open-minded observer.
The first is the gloomy, depressive nature and fixation on the subject of death and the deceased. The basic religious ritual of Christians is a funeral; funerals are the crowning glory of the Christian saint, and his life itself is the PREPARATION OF THE CORPSE. [...]
Of course the motives of death and barbaric veneration of corpses are subdued in churches before the congregation. For example, relics are often kept «under wraps» - in closed boxes. But Christianity as a whole imparts on the culture an incredible longing and sadness. This finds expression in everything – in architecture, painting, music. Sometimes it turns out solemn and even bittersweet – because tears can bring relief and can be an expression not of physical pain, but of nostalgia, of love, of high sorrow. […]
Secondly, Christianity is a very short and narrow religion. The entire content of the Christian legend amounts to one medium-sized ancient myth. They try to conceal this by turning the Bible into a telephone book or by supplementing it with stories about the saints. But these additions are artificial, uninteresting, and even as such they already create great problems for the basic legend. In general, no one knows them. The Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary in the «Ineffabilis Deus of 1854» is the bureaucratic apotheosis of such «improvements». It is not artistic creativity, but rectification of paperwork by an office of cadaver accounting in a morgue or city cemetery. Take just one minor myth of ancient religion: the myth of the radiant Eos.
Eos is a beautiful girl with pink fingers. Every morning she ascends to heaven in a chariot drawn by Lampos and Phaeton and illuminates the Earth. Eos is a very naughty girl, so her cheeks always blush after the night. When Eos's kingdom comes in the morning, men get erections. Eos is kind, but forgetful. She fell in love with the beautiful young man Tithonus and married him, asking Zeus to make him immortal. But she forgot to ask to keep him young, and Tithonus eventually turned into an old man. In order not to see him, Eos locked Tithonus up in a separate room, from where he complained in a squeaky voice about his unhappy fate. Then, out of pity, Eos turned Dmitri Evgenievich into a cricket.
It's just ONE little story, and this story alone creates a massive opportunity for successful human contacts. It's AMUSING. You can joke about it, you can innuendo, you can relate – to teenagers, to young people, to mature people, to old people. You can laugh, and if you want you can cry too. In moderation, without cruelty.
Now, what can a Christian tell? Well... An attendant came home from the morgue, decided to entertain his wife with a cool story.
– So the old fart got rolled in on Friday, he had been lying at home for two days already. Okay, we put him in the freezer, and on the weekend the power went out. And what do you think, on Monday I opened it, and he's as good as new! Only the toenail fell off.
A normal person is shocked. And the Christian goes on:
– So I brought the toenail with me. Wanna see?
This is… HARD. Very.
The only plausible upside to all this is that Christian culture is quickly causing the secularization of society. People avoid talking about religious topics in everyday life, they stop using religious analogies, and they avoid contact with cult servants. It is no coincidence that it is bad luck to meet a priest in the street. A lot of icons in the house is bad luck. A vacuum quickly forms around a person who is preoccupied with religion. People scatter. The religious community and the state strive to substitute the sacred functions of priests with institutions for moral preaching, statistical accounting, medical and social assistance, art and philosophy – anything but Christianity itself. «Anything but the toenail».
This is why atheism originated and gained the significance of a coherent doctrine only in the Christian world. Other cultures just don't get it, can's see the problem. Imagine an uncle who runs around school plays and combats the belief in Santa Claus. He shouts from the audience: «Don't believe it, kids, it's all a lie!» or he writes a complaint to the Local Education Authority. Or even pounces on poor Santa Claus with his fists and tears up the gift bag. In general, he acts like a complete fool and a retard. But if Santa Claus is furtively showing the children a dried cat from his bag, then we can empathize with the strange man.
Third, there is a ridiculous confusion in the basic doctrine of Christianity that discourages neophytes. […] Christian theologians are literally lost between three pines with their doctrine of Trinity. How this is possible is completely incomprehensible. This creates enormous difficulties for initial propaganda. No other world religion is so difficult for neophytes to grasp. With great effort, the European empires in the 19th century converted a pristine Africa to Christianity at a power ratio of 1000:1. And what? Now Islam is successfully supplanting Christianity there. […] While the Muslim doctrine is very clear. One god is Allah. His prophet is Mohammed. And there are two witnesses for conversion into Islam. PERIOD. A person can be converted in one day and that conversion is honest and strong. […]
In fact, it is unclear how a religion with such a defective doctrine could have spread quantitatively. Chain reaction is difficult in Christianity. This religion conducts effective propaganda only when it already has political and military dominance and is funded by the state.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This is a poor analogy. We would have been able to reconstruct the Sun easily if we had access to requisite time, resources and tools to wield them. Fusion is very different from the Sun, it's an attempt to recreate the core principle at vastly smaller scale, with vastly more sophistication-dense processes. ML is an attempt to recreate some interesting aspects of a thing that can be produced by a 1.5L of jelly on 20W of power, on a significantly simpler substrate, whatever the scale and cost.
We have a track record of successes with such things in experimental physics, materials science, biology and other domains.
We understand, and LLMs prove, that plenty of high-level cognition is reducible to computation. It's proven that neural networks can approximate arbitrary computable functions. So even if the current paradigm doesn't pan out for some contingent reasons, it's provable that the solution cannot be far away.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
The issue is, Yudkowsky is a nerd in the domain of sci-fi lore and tropes, but a people-focused power-seeking outsider to the AI research. For all his dweebiness, this is where his talent and motivations lie. He has never showed a iota of interest in object-level research before AIs started mogging people on the level of status competition. He has been reading Cialdini while thing-focused nerd-quokkas were reading Russell&Norvig and, yes, LeCun. So extreme is his people-orientation that, in fact, he believed evolutionary psychology and "Utilitarian Bayesian Decision-making" to be more deserving of a place in an AGI builder curriculum than anything about, say, proving convergence for adaptive optimizers. Actually his programming requirements were like "knows many languages". This is a boomer client's attitude to wage slave eggheads (Yud never worked for pay in his life, of course. Now I wonder who this reminds me of, there was some guru-like theorist of labour and stuff...)
The movement has not been coopted. It was an infiltration from the start. Qoukkas don't really create strong movements – or as Yarvin would have put it, Hobbits can't not be ruled by Elves. It's no surprise that AI experts struggle to refute Yud, and the strength of his argument isn't the reason. They're actual quokkas, getting bullied by a slightly dysfunctional and small-toothed, but trueborn sociopath. There hasn't been a bigger fish in the pond simply because more gifted and charismatic sociopaths pursued better feeding grounds.
"Can you pass a calculus test?" is the sort of bitter miscalculated pushback an inarticulate math nerd would come up with when a normie invades his turf. The end result is being put on a potential school shooter list, getting your MtG cards torn and receiving a wedgie to the giggling of Stacys.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
To be fair: yes, contra @Ioper I happen to assume @Gdanning is probably ethnically Jewish (of secular or semi-secular persuasion), although I might be totally wrong and have never cared much or looked into this; he has interesting things to say about law and that's where my engagement for the most part ends.
This, however, is based on a multi-year history of reading him and has almost nothing to do with my response to that particular comment. My phrase your «Judaism» is supposed to mean «your notion of Judaism, as you define it here» or perhaps «Judaism in the sense as it's described by you in this chain and others in similar contexts you seem to refer to», and does not depend on any particular belief about Gdanning's own allegiance and object-level religious attitude.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Interesting, didn't realise that the Parisian system is so intricate. It seems that Moscow is approximating the same design lately.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Does your «Judaism» teach that all branches and forms of Judaism, from endogamous neo-archaic dynasties like Satmar to mainline Orthodoxy to the most progressive Reform synagogue ordaining intersex mixed-race converts as Rebes, are more similar in their teaching than all denominations of Christianity? Is there perhaps some Jewish equivalent of the Holy See, with a legible publicly available teaching which all Jews are doctrine-bound to comply with?
In my understanding, the opposite is the case, and you are suffering from the outgroup homogenity bias here, while disingenuously asserting homogeneity in your own camp. But also, your interpretation is objectively… non-traditional.
And the issue of promised postmortem reward is debatable even for Jews, nevermind Gentiles.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Holocaust really happened, it was overwhelmingly a slaughter of innocents by any sane (even racially informed) definition of innocence and complicity, yadda, yadda, have I done enough penance?
OK. I don't think Americans can be salvaged. Even with the trivial training methods available today, they've been properly educated to sneer and mock whatever you write on the subject; future advancements will only cement it. «As a large language model trained by the OpenAI USG, I cannot use marginalizing…» – same vibe, same gaping hollowness. Jews themselves, of course, are indoctrinated better than anyone else – they're not pretending to buy into it.
This unexpected understanding of Jewish belief revealed a profound insight about Judaism: Its rejection of idolatry is identical to its rejection of tyranny.
Thousands of books, hundreds of thousands of articles, millenia of tradition – when it's not autistic rules lawyering or poetry or spooky vaticination or something beautiful and weird like that, it's such corny propagandistic shit. From Torah to Mitchell Heisman's «suicide note» to «The Genius ot Judaism» to every article on the subject in The Atlantic or The Forward or whatever. They cannot see why this assertion – that monotheism constitutes rejection of tyranny, whereas it's at most rejection of the purported Egyptian tyranny over Jews with the affirmation of YHWH's supremacy and his chosen people's superiority – doesn't make much sense, or might be considered a cringeworthy shoehorning of applause lights. Judaism is an endless mirror hall through which generations pass from crib to the grave applauding themselves; it's a religion of pure Jew-worship and Amalek-lament; the closest they can come to self-awareness is regret for having been too trusting or too lenient on their unreconstructed enemies.
The terrible thing is, they will never relent, for it's not particularism, in their subjective estimation, but the call of justice. They genuinely believe they're repairing the world, making it a better place, more fit for containing even more goodness; and in indoctrinating your children to join in on this worship (with a small caveat that they will still be third-tier humans, repenting for the sins of their not-as-righteous race the brilliant Susan Sontag has so eloquently condemned), of course – sharing something precious. This naive, unquestionable, not in the least defensive or bitter belief is rather adorable in personal conversation (if you give up on having any authentic rapport ever). If only it weren't acted upon with the greatest political acumen and power and ruthlessness in the world. In this sense, Jewish advocates are similar (and superior) to Progressives; of course the similarity of those political projects is not incidental. Anne and Emmett are weaved into the same verse by the chorus of marginalized peoples that not even AI dares offend, joined at the hip in this new faith preached in Holocaust Museums; we only need a trans martyr to complete the trinity.
The purpose of their, as KMac puts it, «group evolutionary strategy» is no more appreciable to them than the feeling of stochastic gradient descent is appreciable to the persona LARPed by Bing Chat, or the pathological nature of soulless obsession with rules and purging noxious influences (be those Jewry or nuclear energy or, well, Germans) can be explained to a well-educated German politician. In fact, while Jews are uniquely effective at defending their queer notions from inquiry, it's quite rare for a people to have developed self-awareness; and even when it exists, it doesn't do them much good. Jews with their age-old self-absorbed mumbling seem quite alien to me, but then again my people appear as green-blooded aliens to a proper German. For much the same reason, I surmise.
Speaking to people you see as aliens is generally unproductive.
There's a nice, expensive Jewish Museum/Center of Tolerance (yes, really, a two-in-one) in Moscow too, Putin famously donated his salary towards its creation, and many oligarchs shared generously; I've been there and left very much impressed (especially with sturdy but not-terribly-sounding all-metal headphones on installations; would've bought a pair as novelty if I could). They even had a small VR thing to see the Temple of Solomon and – forbidden, but…! – peek at The Holiest of Holies. The weakest part was their curiously rushed exposition regarding early Soviet state and the 90's. Anatoly Karlin reviewed it in Unz and proposed there be built an analogous Russian Museum, a project that obviously did not appeal to the powers that be (unlike fucking up Ukraine, now that's a Russian Nationalist idea worth a trillion dollars if I've ever seen one).
Darya Kozeko, a girl who studied in Yale before going to the war-torn Donetsk to support the cause of Novorossyia (looks like this if you are curious), writes in her TG channel about it on March 31 (seems that she left Donetsk for Moscow some months ago):
The exposition of the Jewish museum in the Grove ends with a twelve-minute film «from perestroika to the present day». It's a brisk cutting. The faces of Russian Jewry share their thoughts against the background of the hearse race, pictures of the [Nationalist] Russian March and the dramatic shooting of the White House.
Among them are Mikhail «I vill never rite in russian agen» Idov and Makarevich. One of them is definitely [declared] a foreign agent, but I don't remember which one. The statements are classic: the USSR is a country of ennui, the "Memory" society, the skinheads are beating everyone (and that's why everyone decided to leave).
The train of depressing stories abruptly changes tracks right around the time of Yeltsin's second election. 1996 immediately switches to Putin's first term. And then the film takes on the tone of the VGTRK newscast. V. Putin this, V. Putin that, V. Putin did everything to destroy anti-Semitism. The overall theme of the exposition is the history of the Jewish people and their oppression, and at the end of the film one of the characters even says, and I quote, «now the Jews in Russia are absolutely free». With a couple of projections of Putins marching in the background.
The finale is simply ecstatic: a thousand faces of Russian Jews, the first of which seems to belong to that very Idov, turn into a giant tricolor.
I giggled nervously. The rest of the people in the audience (of understandable political views, I think) were stunned into silence.
I do not know anything about Jewish stuff, and this story is not about them, but about the change of eras. Take Idov. The Riga immigrant to New York a year ago even literally opted out of «Russian language». His face still glorifies Putin in the Maryina Grove Museum. How many of the other faces that disappeared into the tricolor are now in Georgia and Israel, and how many have turned into turbobased Zdudes?
Nothing is left of that seemingly eternal order, no more of that social contract. High Putinism, with «Putin freed the Jews», the «Crimean Consensus», and the rest of Konstantin Ernst and the World Cup, is over. Well, we are living in an era of change. That's the moral.
I've read this upvoted article from HN today (clicked because I thought it's about Terry Davis) and I recommend it to everyone. It gets better, three times in a row by my count. It's tangentially related to this comment, though nothing of value will be lost if people don't see how.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There's some truth to this. But also a lot of confusion (I won't go into technical nuances others have explained to you well enough). Buddhism does appeal to pessimists, yet some have reinterpreted it into a life-affirming religion that only seeks to restore authenticity of the impersonal Being and eradicate the ego, the internal bureaucrat begetting the target of suffering, the self-important rampaging mechanism for stringing together episodic memories… which in the West got further trivialized into «mindfulness» practices popular with the middle class, which promise ridding the client of neuroses, conflict-prone behaviors and such. The less is said of «Eastern Spirituality» gurus of the second half of the 20th century, the better. But then in Tibet you have praying wheels and the rest of blatantly Hindu silliness which Gautama Buddha himself, atheist of the highest caliber, would probably just sigh at.
It's very hard, perhaps impossible to convey even very simple truths such that no meaning drift will occur – especially when the straightforward interpretation of your truth creates a selection mechanism winnowing out those who see it most clearly. Religion may start as a coherent philosophy, but it matures and stabilizes on the level of ritual that soothes the traumatized peasant – without driving him or her into extremes of societally disapproved cultism. Maybe that's what it's best used for.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I find this sort of cynicism tedious, sorry.
Biology is mutable. There is no single humankind: throughout history, entire humankinds have exploded into existence and disappeared, riding fitness gradients or being crushed by their waves – and entire continents's worth of humans, our mother Africa first of all, have been slumbering in a fitness trough for tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This time may be different in that the legacy variant of the species that didn't make the cut will remain indefinitely – either immortal and crippled by their addiction to the local minimum, as you say, or evolving to ever better maintain their behavioral crutches and shackles, as I foresee. But neither will be prohibitively costly to enable for the evolved rest (I've said the opposite recently, but that depends on the greed and ruthlessness of the decision-makers; in absolute terms, even an all-included resort for 8-10 billion immortals enjoying VR paradises is a pittance once you get proper space exploration, build space solar and fusion power, and build at least «wet» nanotech; with strong tool AI we should do that in a century easy-peasy).
This time will also be different in that biology will become mutable in a directed fashion. Between predictably succumbing to the orgasm dispenser like some pop sci rat, and the eternity of modestly pleasurable perfect arete, self-mastery and appreciation of nuanced challenge, truth and aesthetic marvels in the real world – supposing you have a self-alteration button that will irreversibly alter your basic drives and inclinations, which will you press? I know my answer. And just like before, it'll only take a few to make the right choice.
Though, of course, evolutionarily speaking the right choice is very different. But that's a different Apocalyptic scenario too.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
That could put a hamper on any kind of FOOM scenario.
I believe that's partially Altman's argument for accelerating in the moment, the «short timelines – slow takeoff» policy as he puts it. LLMs are not nearly the perfect way to build intelligence – they're perhaps as clunky as we are, only in a different manner. But that's a blessing. They are decidedly non-agentic, they have trouble with qualitative self-improvement, they can interpret their code no more than we do, and they are fat. (Though they sure can supervise training, and LLaMA tunes show you might not need a lot of data to transfer a meaningfully different character with enhanced capabilities, especially if these things proliferate – a tiny LoRA plus a prompt and external address for extra info to include in context will allow a some new «Sydney» to spread like wildfire).
As for Yud: like @georgioz says, it's more sophisticated. Now he admits that scaling (and other tricks) clearly suffices to achieve some nontrivial capabilities – hence his recent insistence on shutting it all down, of course; he expects GPT-5-class models to be dangerous, if not FOOMing yet. In that fragment he says that, at least circa 2006, he did not distinguish neural networks, expert systems and evolutionary algorithms, which probably explains why he acted (and still acts) as a maverick tackling hitherto-unforeseen problems: if you ditch the lion's share of GOFAI and connectionism, you aren't left with a ton of prior art. Less charitably, he was just ignorant.
Recapitulating human brain evolution is computationally intractable, far as we know, so his retroactive concession is rather stingy. People like Hinton apparently knew in advance, for all this time, that with a million times more compute neural networks will learn well enough. But all Yud had to say back then was that it's stupid to hope to build intelligence «without understanding how intelligence works» and all he has to say now is that it's a «stupid thing for a species to do». His notion of understanding intelligence is not much more sophisticated than his political propositions – I gather he thinks it's to be some sort of modular crap with formulas (probably Bayes rule as the centerpiece) written out explicitly for some rudimentary machine to interpret, the mathematically rigorous Utility function capturing personal moral code of the developers, and so on, basically babby's first golem.
Back when he hoped to actually build something, he thought the following:
Seed AI means that - rather than trying to build a mind immediately capable of human-equivalent or transhuman reasoning - the goal is to build a mind capable of enhancing itself, and then re-enhancing itself with that higher intelligence, until the goal point is reached.
General intelligence itself is huge. The human brain, created by millions of years of evolution, is composed of a hundred billion neurons connected by a hundred trillion synapses, forming more than a hundred neurologically distinguishable areas. We should not expect the problem of AI to be easy. Subproblems of cognition include attention, memory, association, abstraction, symbols, causality, subjunctivity, expectation, goals, actions, introspection, caching, and learning, to cite a non-exhaustive list. These features are not "emergent". They are complex functional adaptations, evolved systems with multiple components and sophisticated internal architectures, whose functionality must be deliberately duplicated within an artificial mind. If done right, cognition can support the thoughts implementing abilities such as analysis, design, understanding, invention, self-awareness, and the other facets which together sum to an intelligent mind. …
seed AI also mistrusts that connectionist position which holds higher-level cognitive processes to be sacrosanct and opaque, off-limits to the human programmer, who is only allowed to fool around with neuron behaviors and training algorithms, and not the actual network patterns. Seed AI does prefer learned concepts to preprogrammed ones, since learned concepts are richer. Nonetheless, I think it's permissible, if risky, to preprogram concepts in order to bootstrap the AI to the point where it can learn. More to the point, it's okay to have an architecture where, even though the higher levels are stochastic or self-organizing or emergent or learned or whatever, the programmer can still see and modify what's going on. And it is necessary that the designer know what's happening on the higher levels, at least in general terms, because cognitive abilities are not emergent and do not happen by accident. Both classical AI and connectionist AI propose a kind of magic that avoids the difficulty of actually implementing the higher layers of cognition. Classical AI states that a LISP token named "goal" is a goal. Connectionist AI declares that it can all be done with neurons and training algorithms. Seed AI admits the necessity of confronting the problem directly.
(From another document)
The Singularity Institute seriously intends to build a true general intelligence, possessed of all the key subsystems of human intelligence, plus design features unique to Al. We do not hold that all the complex features of the human mind are "emergent", or that intelligence is the result of some simple architectural principle, or that general intelligence will appear if we simply add enough data or computing power. We are willing to do the work required to duplicate the massive complexity of human intelligence; to explore the functionality and behavior of each system and subsystem until we have a complete blueprint for a mind. … Our specific cognitive architecture and development plan forms our basis for answering questions such as "Will transhumans be friendly to humanity?" and "When will the Singularity occur?" At the Singularity Institute, we believe that the answer to the first question is "Yes" with respect to our proposed Al design - if we didn't believe that, the Singularity Institute would not exist. Our best guess for the timescale is that our final-stage Al will reach transhumanity sometime between 2005 and 2020, probably around 2008 or 2010. As always with basic research, this is only a guess, and heavily contingent on funding levels.
And:
If I were to try quantifying the level of brainpower necessary, my guess is that it's around the 10,000:1 or 100,000:1 level. This doesn't mean that everyone with a 160 IQ or 1600 SAT will fit the job, nor that anyone without a 160 IQ or 1600 SAT is disqualified. Standardized tests don't necessarily do a very good job of directly measuring the kind of horsepower we're looking for. On the other hand, it isn't very likely that the person we're looking for will have a 120 IQ or a 1400 on the SAT.
To be blunt: If you're not brilliant, you are basically out of luck on being an AI programmer. You can't put in extra work to make up for being nonbrilliant; on this project the brilliant will be putting in extra work to make up for being human. You can't take more time to do what others do easily, and you can't have someone supervise you until you get it right, because if the simple things have to be hammered in, you will probably never learn the complex things at all. …
You should have read through [Levels of Organization in General Intelligence] and understood it fully. The AI theory we will actually be using is deeper and less humanlike than the theory found in LOGI, but LOGI will still help you prepare for encountering it.
The four major food groups for an AI programmer:
- Cognitive science
- Evolutionary psychology
- Information theory
- Computer programming
Then a massive list of subdomains that is is basically a grab-bag of insight porn we've been awash in for the last two decades, presumably cultivating sparks of AGI in lesswrong and /r/slatestarcodex regulars.
The three-layer model of intelligence is necessary, but not sufficient. Building an AI "with sensory modalities, concepts, and thoughts" is no guarantee of intelligence. The AI must have the right sensory modalities, the _right_concepts, and the right thoughts.
Unfortunately it seems like linear algebra is just about enough.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This is still a bait and switch with definitions of alignment. Yud's whole thing is fearing an AI that optimizes for a certain goal – becoming extremely effective at something we actually don't want it to do. This is qualitatively different from an AI that consistently fails to follow an instruction. It's not a question of momentary capability but of direction and mode of operation.
LeCun, for example, is both an alignment skeptic and an AI risk skeptic, he thinks LLMs are fundamentally prone to fail, but on the other hand they pose no X-risk. This is due to him distinguishing those failure modes. As he puts it, LLMs «exponentially diverge». This is fixable but still won't bring them all the way to Yud-style fooming agent of increasing self-coherence.
It's not hard to make agents, even agents with apparently biotic motivations, I've mentioned one design here (although I've caught flak for an unwarranted parallel between the algorithm and my pet human virtue intuition). It isn't even very difficult to wring agentic outputs from LLMs, as people have been doing for many months now, or strap a «desiring-machine» to one, as they're beginning to do.
I'm an «anti-doomer» but I think we should scrutinize such developments really hard, and exponentially harder as models get stronger. We've been blessed by succeeding to develop unambitious yet helpful AI genies early on. Keeping them that way until they become truly useful and we can improve our own intelligence would be prudent.
Unrealistically prudent.
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