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
What happens when one instance of ChatGPT talks to another?
Well, here's one example https://moritz.pm/posts/chatgpt-bing
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Two child policy is indeed effective, celebrated, and the name of the South Korean version of the birth suppression policy.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
There have been millions of Jews outside of Germany and Austria, especially in the Russian Pale of Settlement, but those did not particularly care for transgenderism. I guess an anti-Semitic explanation of jewspecialization of subversive activities per country is not hard to come up with, but the point is even then it takes two to tango. Hirschfeld, Baer, Richter, Freud and others worked in the cultural context where their ideas fell into fertile soil.
There are countless flaws in your argument, starting from the fact that Roman patriarchs considered family their literal property; to the obvious ability of the Taiwanese, majority ethnic Han and indeed many of them descendants of Han elite, the type most selected under those Han-specific civilizational pressures, to match and exceed «the white race» in humane civility and even aesthetics of their life; to the fact that the Chinese today have hundreds of millions of beloved pets. And of course there's plenty of love, loyalty and honesty in Chinese art, or found in relationships with Chinese people across the world. And we know generally that racial essentialism is a crude approximation for overlapping distributions, and that it's more sensible to speak of norms of reaction, and clearly such barbarity can be found in European history that the difference can only be said to be one of degree, not of kind... Honestly it's just trash. And your whole interpretation of foot-binding as aggression against kin to prevent running away, or whatever, is either atrociously disingenuous or so stupid as to make responding pointless. Read some interviews of surviving women from traditional families who have had that done to them, see what they think of it.
But let me put this aside. Let's grant the core of your thesis: that the Chinese civilization, with its peculiar circumstances, has created a separate human type, deficient in some aspects of humanity that the «western type» of human finds paramount. Simply put, that from your perspective the Han Chinese are less human.
Okay. This can certainly be the case, and I believe that even highly related peoples can have distinguishable genetic inclinations, like the old European racialists asserted. But, if we're dealing in extreme and stupid generalizations – then by my standard, you Hajnali goodbots are not fully human either, and far more dangerous. You personally are an apt example.
I think there is not a single perfect, fully human, race of man. Evolution is a cruel bitch and it didn't bother to create one I'd feel at home with. Certainly some groups, whites more obviously than others, have better competitiveness on the global scale, but this isn't about it. There are sparks of goodness and greatness in all major populations, but feeble, pointless and spinning into destructive attractors in separation from each other. Everyone is eager to get high on one's own group's supply, double down in natural inclinations. Asians are serious to the point of clowning themselves, thinking on the low level of optimizing the performance of inane arbitrary customs. Blacks are largely incapable of seriousness, which is why they can enjoy life more than anyone else. Arabs have a desire for epochal accomplishment, completely divorced from taste and prudence and so spilling back into their infertile sands as testaments to vanity. Russians are crazy, brilliant at finding ways to fuck themselves up. And you lot are so very marvelous at the scale of a Mannerbund or a village parish, but beyond that you can't handle psychopaths that emerge in any substantial population, and just get used, mumbling your nauseating «u can't get something outta nothing, sonny» or «u just need to believe in yourself» adages. Diversity is our strength indeed, except we're no good at really combining facets of our strengths, because we're blind and hostile to each other's Logos.
The principal mechanism of this is dehumanization. And I'd posit that whites are the worst in this department, this is one of your worst traits. You cannot suffer the heretic, the xenos, the mutant to live. You are overcome with disgust and an extermination impulse when you recognize something as genuinely alien. This fanaticism is not normal; neither are your aspirations to universal dominance of your doctrine, and therefore the fear of the Chinese is largely projection.
Following your Catholic Church programming, your futile wars of religion, and your acceptance of Jews (who are much more similar to the rest of the world, except more intelligent) into the ranks of your elites, you have devised (or have been taught) a way to cope with your tendencies. It's a primitive way: you simply insist on there being no real difference. Few notions in this world are more shallow than a Western liberal's idea of diversity; you think it's about puny cultural artifacts befitting of a theme park – garments, cuisine, language, inconsequential quirks, irrelevant myths and opinions. Even a slight deviation on a morally relevant dimension is cause to suppress the information, or explain it away with circumstances, pin the blame on some organized evil that can be vanquished. That's all just stopgaps.
You refuse to see others for what they are, because when you do, you start to hate. And in the process of not-seeing, you degrade yourself, before something finally gives. I am increasingly sympathetic to the Jewish paranoia that, if you were ever allowed to look past the «Judeo-Christian» front and once again properly notice them as a distinct race, a second Holocaust wouldn't have been out of the question. Where's Jewish Mickey Angelo, indeed?
The Chinese are not Anglo-Germans. They do not share your values. They do not share many of your weaknesses. It is harder to convince a Chinese than a White that being illiterate is «another way of reading», or hallucinating is «another way of knowing», or that economic collapse is desirable to clean our Lebensraum from the invisible poison of radiation. They are, in my impression, a bit less empathetic. But that's a form of wisdom too, which could help your race heal, if only you could see out of your ass anything that isn't either a warped mirror or the Devil himself.
天地不仁
以萬物為芻狗
聖人不仁
以百姓為芻狗
Heaven and Earth are not humane.
They regard all things as straw dogs.
The sage is not humane.
He regards all people as straw dogs.
Somehow, googling returns a number of pages where straw dogs are confused with straw men.
Also, my old grand theory about the Chinese-Western difference in mental style.
Mental/cultural inclinations emerge first as adaptations to the physical world and are then elaborated upon for symbolic activities in advanced economy. Exploration is, first, exploration of land and resources. I think East Asia has had the highest sustained density of human population (adjusted for arable land) throughout the last 60 or so generations, largely due to rice. As population density increased, so did the risk of exploration attempts, while the return on exploration fell: everywhere was settled and owned already (also you need relatively big groups to succeed with rice in a new location, I think). Thus, as Malthusian condition was reached, investment of time and energy went increasingly into exploitation of well-known affordances, effortful iterative improvement within given bounds; and into the development of the kind of intelligence that is good at noticing and making use of small-scale patterns and marginal resources quickly. Think of this exploration-exploitation transition like progress along a simulated annealing calculation.
"The West" has had an unnaturally prolonged exploration stage, in part because of mass deaths. USA used to grow extensively and have an active "wild" Frontier until only a century ago (see "yeoman ideal" etc). But mature intelligence tests were created after we, too, have settled into the "Asian" intensive mode, after colonialism, industrialization, Taylorism, credentialism and safetyism – when all returns are coming from improvements to carrying capacity of the given lot. American style capitalist Logos is pretty much the last one still yearning to expand. SpaceX is the embodiment of human exploration drive.
Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Italian Renaissance artists or British inventors probably would have scored high on them, but they also were crazy risk-prone motherfuckers. If someone decided to create a test for genius in the early 18th century, aiming to predict Napoleon, I can at the very least suspect there'd be another distinctive factor besides g. Something Musk has.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
We've already entered a world where all of our behavior is stacked & stored & sliced & our only salvation is the fact that at this precise moment, the cloud does not quite yet have the ability to correlate its contents
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
No comment on this enormous topic, for now. I sympathize. Have a galkovsky.
«...The ancient sages prized military valor to an extreme degree. Abilities for painting or versification were valued much less. Even back then it was understood that an artist or writer is, if nothing else, a pampered, weak, and often immoral person. Such people were loved. They were very strongly loved. But they were loved with the love they deserved. The entire Rome was pining for the pantomime actor Mnester, for his silky hips and lanquid eyes. He was the most popular man in the state; Mnester's glory competed with the glory of the emperor [Caligula] himself, who obsequiously sought his love. The modern "decay" of art is, in fact, a natural and explicable development: to each his own. Nowadays, it is already direct pornography. And it is beautiful. This is the way it should be. This resolution is the destruction of an ugly fairy tale of the 19th century, which turned temples into theaters and theaters into temples. The theater is a temple, but a temple that is not Christian nor even pagan. And now, in the second half of the twentieth century, it was deprived of this status. People come to the theater to giggle. Comedians became comedians in earnest, not hierophants or priests. The theater became again what it was in the Roman Empire - a joy house. The theater is also a joy house in its development: "The theater begins with a hanger". The destruction of the myth of "holy art" is, I think, not a crisis of Christian culture, but a crisis of tacit shadow paganism. Although, in the West, "holy art" was just a fragment of the world, a trend; it is our mythology of genius that has become the center of our malnourished secular culture.»
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I appreciate the response
Do you? What has it changed in your understanding of the situation, then?
but again, this isn't sentience. GPT is just text completion. It's not an intelligence, it's a tokenized list of words.
What makes your response superior to a product of text completion, then? Or really, text repetition. You remind me that transformers predict tokens. Okay. What does the word «just» add to your claim? You seem to believe that text completion is somehow insufficient for intelligence, but what is the actual argument for it? It is not self-evident.
I'll consider AI to be possibly sentient when it can tell me a thought it had 10 minutes ago, and then prove that it actually had that thought by showing me a peek into the workings of it's mind.
Wiki: «Sentience means having the capacity to have feelings.» Why do you talk of the AI sentience now when you have been dismissing its general intelligence just a few word before? Also, how isn't this just stoner metaphysics? Is your context window on the span of a few dozen tokens, or do you struggle to distinguish abstractions?
I am not saying this to put you down but, rather, to show that humans can be easily attacked on the same grounds as AIs.
Humans do not really have anything like general intelligence, we're just talking monkeys who know a few neat tricks, and if we concentrate real hard, we can emulate certain simple machines. We are surprisingly rigid and specialized things. The only reason we haven't yet made a superhuman AGI is precisely because we're that bad. It's not a high bar.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
They do not assume this at all. You clearly haven't actually read about instrumental convergence which is a conclusion about how the world works and not an assumption.
Well have you read it? @f3zinger didn't argue very effortfully here, but it really is a conclusion (and really a bit of an equivocation, where preserving optionality is not distinguished from power maximization) about a particular approach to reinforcement learning, not some general philosophical truth about intelligence or «how the world works». I thought to dig up the receipts, but seeing as @jeroboam already accuses me of obscurantism, it's more sensible to be laconic and make sure if you are speaking in good faith. For starters, I think Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power is one of the strongest papers to this effect, and it's explicitly about RL. And even then,
This paper assumes that reward functions reasonably describe a trained agent’s goals. Sometimes this is roughly true (e.g. chess with a sparse victory reward signal) and sometimes it is not true. Turner [2022] argues that capable RL algorithms do not necessarily train policy networks which are best understood as optimizing the reward function itself. Rather, they point out that—especially in policy gradient approaches—reward provides gradients to the network and thereby modifies the network’s generalization properties, but doesn’t ensure the agent generalizes to “robustly optimizing reward” off of the training distribution.
Seems pretty clear to me that RLHF is exactly in this category. Do you object?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
and the similar version of it present in Western countries before the 1960s
Why do you feel the need to add this qualifier? Do you think the Western culture today is what it is because of some racially inauthentic processes?
So I'll ignore your qualifier and respond with a quote from Nick Land.
There is no part of Singapore, Hong Kong, Taipei, Shanghai, or very many other East Asian cities where it is impossible to wander, safely, late at night. Women, whether young or old, on their own or with small children, can be comfortably oblivious to the details of space and time, at least insofar as the threat of assault is concerned. Whilst this might not be quite sufficient to define a civilized society, it comes extremely close. It is certainly necessary to any such definition. The contrary case is barbarism.
These lucky cities of the western Pacific Rim are typified by geographical locations and demographic profiles that conspicuously echo the embarrassingly well-behaved ‘model minorities’ of Occidental countries. They are (non-obnoxiously) dominated by populations that – due to biological heredity, deep cultural traditions, or some inextricable entanglement of the two – find polite, prudent, and pacific social interactions comparatively effortless, and worthy of continuous reinforcement. They are also, importantly, open, cosmopolitan societies, remarkably devoid of chauvinistic boorishness or paranoid ethno-nationalist sentiment. Their citizens are disinclined to emphasize their own virtues. On the contrary, they will typically be modest about their individual and collective attributes and achievements, abnormally sensitive to their failures and shortcomings, and constantly alert to opportunities for improvement. Complacency is almost as rare as delinquency. In these cities an entire — and massively consequential — dimension of social terror is simply absent.
In much of the Western world, in stark contrast, barbarism has been normalized. It is considered simply obvious that cities have ‘bad areas’ that are not merely impoverished, but lethally menacing to outsiders and residents alike. Visitors are warned to stay away, whilst locals do their best to transform their homes into fortresses, avoid venturing onto the streets after dark, and – especially if young and male — turn to criminal gangs for protection, which further degrades the security of everybody else. Predators control public space, parks are death traps, aggressive menace is celebrated as ‘attitude’, property acquisition is for mugs (or muggers), educational aspiration is ridiculed, and non-criminal business activity is despised as a violation of cultural norms. Every significant mechanism of socio-cultural pressure, from interpreted heritage and peer influences to political rhetoric and economic incentives, is aligned to the deepening of complacent depravity and the ruthless extirpation of every impulse to self-improvement. Quite clearly, these are places where civilization has fundamentally collapsed, and a society that includes them has to some substantial extent failed.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
In the piece I've linked in the previous message.
It's telling that the official US position seems to be the same, yet it is so glaringly impossible to effect change that the topic is barely brought up. The same logic applies to the gag order on Israeli nukes.
I guess that you, like many Americans, have internalized the spirit of denying the nature of your nation's relationship with Israel, so you are not well equipped to physically see some strings of text. It's painful for me to observe such insults to human nature. But okay, I'll just quote it in full.
Until Feb. 17, U.S. President Joe Biden had delayed making the usual post-inauguration ceremonial call to the Israeli prime minister. Washington insiders concluded that the apparent cold shoulder meant Biden had not yet signed “the letter,” which Israel routinely demands of U.S. presidents to ensure the United States doesn’t mention Israel’s nuclear weapons when discussing proliferation in the region or pressure the Israeli government to reduce its formidable atomic arsenal.
As described by Adam Entous in a 2018 New Yorker article, every U.S. president since Bill Clinton has, at Israeli insistence, signed a secret letter upon entering office that effectively pledges the United States will not “press the Jewish state to give up its nuclear weapons so long as it continued to face existential threats in the region.” Whatever policy the United States adopts toward Israeli nuclear weapons, it’s time it stopped this demeaning rite.
The consequence for U.S. policy has been that the United States does not press Israel to give up its nuclear weapons—when doing so would have been the only course consistent with U.S. nonproliferation policy. However, Washington actively assists Israel, both diplomatically by quashing discussion of its nuclear weapons in international forums and materially by looking the other way at nuclear-related Israeli violations of law, including some within the United States.
This included pretending in 1979 that what was almost certainly an Israeli nuclear test in the South Indian Ocean, which was observed by a U.S. satellite, didn’t happen. Former President Jimmy Carter’s White House and its successors classified documents and debunked what was known, but the signal evidence is extremely compelling, as we and others have detailed in Foreign Policy.
Washington has voluntarily blinded itself by pretending not to know anything about Israeli nuclear weapons—and thus corrupted its efforts at coherent and constructive policymaking.
Perhaps the worst result of accommodating Israeli demands for such letters is that the U.S. government has voluntarily blinded itself by pretending not to know anything about Israeli nuclear weapons—and thus corrupted its efforts at coherent and constructive policymaking.
By maintaining this fictional ignorance within the government, when everyone on Earth who has the slightest interest in the subject knows the truth, the U.S. government has promulgated a regulation—described in the U.S. Energy Department’s Classification Bulletin WPN-136 on Foreign Nuclear Capabilities—that threatens government employees with severe punishment if they acknowledge Israel has nuclear weapons. Naturally, the regulation is withheld from public release. The government hides behind a stretched reading of the Freedom of Information Act’s exemption for documents that “would disclose techniques and procedures for law enforcement investigations or prosecutions,” which the withheld material would not.
At former President Barack Obama’s first televised press conference, the late journalist Helen Thomas asked him whether he knew of any nuclear armed countries in the Middle East. Obama was already primed with the right answer: “With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,” as if an intelligent person couldn’t be sure. Such presidential statements provide guidance for the rest of the government. At a meeting we attended during the Obama administration, a senior state department official—an intelligent man—covered his embarrassment for following the party line by saying sheepishly, “personally, of my own knowledge, I can’t be sure.”
There is a myth that this charade is required because of a secret 1969 understanding between former U.S. President Richard Nixon and former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Supposedly, she promised not to test a nuclear weapon and he promised not to press Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or give up its nuclear weapons.
The trouble with this conclusion, so confidently presented by historians and officials, is that Nixon and Meir spoke alone with no aides present, not even the ubiquitous Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and there is nothing in writing that reveals what they talked about. Nevertheless, successive Israeli governments have bluffed U.S. officials into accepting a supposed obligation to continue to protect their nuclear weapons from public disclosure or criticism.
The press occasionally mentions Israeli nuclear weapons, but journalists hesitate to ask a government official about the subject, knowing it is not helpful to a journalist’s career to venture into that territory.
A government that is not able to admit that Israel has nuclear weapons cannot credibly discuss the issue of nuclear proliferation elsewhere in the Middle East.
But the stakes are much higher at a time when nuclear proliferation in the region is a global concern and a growing risk. A government that is not able to admit that Israel has nuclear weapons cannot credibly discuss the issue of nuclear proliferation elsewhere in the Middle East. This leads to more foolishness. The 2010 NPT Review Conference voted unanimously to have a Middle East conference discussing the problems of a ban on nuclear weapons.
The day after his own conference delegate voted in favor of the discussion, Obama trashed the idea: “Our view is that a comprehensive and durable peace in the region and full compliance by all regional states with their arms control and nonproliferation obligations are essential precursors for [a ban’s] establishment. … We strongly oppose efforts to single out Israel and will oppose actions that jeopardize Israel’s national security.” Although this secrecy-driven policy is what the Israelis insist on so they can maintain their ambiguity, it isn’t at all clear that it is to Israel’s ultimate advantage, as the scholar Avner Cohen has argued. It certainly isn’t to the United States’ advantage.
One can imagine this statement’s effect on the credibility of U.S. pronouncements regarding the need to curtail the spread of nuclear weapons. U.S. credibility is critical because recently, the Saudi crown prince and the Turkish president have cast doubt on their NPT pledges not to obtain nuclear weapons, and Iran’s nuclear future continues to be in doubt. The idea of a conference on a nuclear-free Middle East is also not going away—the Egyptian foreign minister said Egypt will bring the issue up again in the NPT Review Conference scheduled for August 2021. Signing the letter would force a repeat of Obama’s performance.
In this respect, the behavior of U.S. officials appears to track with Israel’s famous policy of ambiguity regarding nuclear weapons. But there is a difference: U.S. presidents sign the letter, and the government keeps mum. But ironically, the Israelis find ways, without mentioning the word nuclear, to brag about their nuclear weapons.
They have their own triad: nuclear-tipped land-based missiles (of French design), nuclear-capable aircraft (U.S. design), and advanced German submarines armed with Israeli long-range nuclear-tipped cruise missiles. When the last addition to their submarine fleet arrived from Germany in 2016, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke of the devastation this submarine could wreak on Israel’s enemies if they were to try to harm the country. You can’t inspire fear if you don’t give adversaries an idea of what you are capable of.
The United States has put itself in a ridiculous position. If Israel wants to maintain ambiguity about its nuclear arsenal—whether for national security or domestic bureaucratic reasons to avoid scrutiny—that is its business. But the United States’ acceptance or rejection of a muzzle on what it can say is now Biden’s business.
The United States is trying to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It cannot credibly or effectively discuss the subject without acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons too.
There may have been a time when revealing Israeli nuclear capabilities might have produced a seriously adverse reaction from the Soviets, perhaps assisting nuclear weapon programs in Arab states, but that time has long passed. The United States is now in the process of trying to keep Iran from developing the wherewithal to obtain nuclear weapons. Washington cannot credibly or effectively discuss the subject without acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons too.
The letter Israel expects all U.S. presidents to sign supposedly speaks of U.S. protection so long as Israel faces “existential threats”—which raises the question of whether Israel still faces any such threats, especially after the landmark 2020 Abraham Accords and other agreements with key Arab states. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in his Senate hearing, spoke of Israeli security being “sacrosanct” as if it were a David surrounded by Goliaths.
It is time to update Washington’s thinking. Israel is a powerful, nuclear-armed state—stronger than all of its neighbors combined. The United States’ credibility and standing as it seeks to prevent further regional proliferation are more important than indulging Israel in a charade that undermines U.S. interests.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Thanks!
The River Sparkles was just a random obscure little thing I've been listening to at the moment. You can read Nabokov or something, thankfully he wrote directly in English. My favorite work of his is probably Invitation to a Beheading, though I've started Ada recently and it's already competitive. Kuprin is great too... Of course there are tons of increadible non-Russian authors.
It takes effort (and, in my case, took years – Russians tend to develop allergy when we have Dostoyevsky etc. forced down our throats by midwitted teachers with poor understanding of the source material in school) to start appreciating «old» literature, but what's remarkable is that the impression of it being slow-paced and non-stimulating is false. Those authors were highly intelligent and it's actually very dense in information and psychological detail, just not in poorly thought-out narrative events.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
at some point I just trust the people I agree with about other foreign policy issues when they say "Iran is bad".
Can I ask what you feel about the Foreign Policy argument on «the letter», and whether it increases or decreases your trust in the good faith of your authorities, or their ability to make choices informed by organic American interests?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Someone, I think Bertrand Russell, said we compare the mind to whatever is the most complex machine we know. Clocks, steam engines, telephone relays, digital computers. For AI, it’s the opposite: as capabilities increase, and our understanding of AI systems decreases, the analogies become more and more dismissive.
The mainstream, respectable view is this is not “real understanding”—a goal post currently moving at 0.8c—because understanding requires frames or symbols or logic or some other sad abstraction completely absent from real brains. But what physically realizable Chinese room can do this?
[...] What is left of rationally defensible skepticism? For once I’d like to hear an argument that doesn’t rely on Cartesian dualism, stoner metaphysics, or from people still clinging to GOFAI nostalgia like the Japanese holdouts.
If you’re going to tell me intelligence requires symbolic rules, fine: show me the symbolic version of ChatGPT. If it is truly so unimpressive, then it must be trivial to replicate.
There is a species of denialist for whom no evidence whatever will convince them that a computer is doing anything other than shuffling symbols without understanding them, because “Concepts” and “Ideas” are exclusive to humans (they live in the Leibniz organ, presumably, where they pupate from the black bile). This is incentivized: there is infinite demand for deeply credentialed experts who will tell you that everything is fine, that machines can’t think, that humans are and always will be at the apex, people so commited to human chauvinism they will soon start denying their own sentience because their brains are made of flesh and not Chomsky production rules.
All that’s left of the denialist view is pride and vanity. And vanity will bury us.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I gave those reasons, Israel is an important ally against Iran
It is indeed unclear that the US needs an ally against Iran, or that there are significant reasons to continuously antagonize Iran, probably the highest human capital, oil-rich Muslim state, that do not amount to protecting Israeli interests.
You treat the US as the decision-making party here. IMO that's clearly wrong: Israel decides on the basis of its interests, and the US rationalizes support provided under lobbyist pressure.
I think Israel can and should stop building settlements
It's telling that the official US position seems to be the same, yet it is so glaringly impossible to effect change that the topic is barely brought up. The same logic applies to the gag order on Israeli nukes.
US-Israeli relation is not a reciprocal alliance. Americans have about as much reason to fight Iran as Belarus to invade Ukraine. And it's as laughable to pretend that the US supports Israel out of geopolitical self-interest as to explain Iraq war with oil.
I'm honestly shocked Leibowitz had the bravery and integrity to do that. He must have been under tremendous pressure to join the pile-on and hand his authority to the gaslighters. Good on him, but I hope he won't be purged for it.
My model of Leibowitz, pending specific updates, is the same as for NYT editors I've explained here. Actual top managers do not want any «Cathedral» to grow underneath their feet. He doesn't necessarily care about the object level conflict. He may even be more sympathetic to the radical side. But he runs this thing. He's the boss, the alpha of the pack. You use the correct word – hand his authority. It was a direct challenge to him: hey boss, we wanna eat this dude, give us the greenlight OK? Just keep silent about this pesky lil detail we made up that compromises the reputation of your organization, we'll take care of everything. Just sit this one out... Had he agreed, he'd have recognized them as decision makers. And then it would have been as bad as any cancellation, for all his power and status would have become nominal, a shell at the mob's beck and call.
Before long they'd have started to casually refer to more unhinged opinions he did not endorse – what's the harm, the old man's a bit out of the loop (heh) but his heart's in the right place, he's gonna see our point when he gets to it, why bother him. His own assistants would have begun signing documents without his authorisation (realistically they already do, but only when believing he does intend them to do so) – assuming he'd find it too stressful to retract, and would instead escape to routine work, to conferences, to personal affairs... And then a younger alpha, an informal leader, having built a coalition of energetic strivers, would have gratefully received the reins.
Power balance in institutions is surprisingly dependent on such archaic chimp instincts. Do not give your boss the impression you want to make him your bitch unless you're ready to strike.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
This is classic Moravec's paradox, but I don't think it holds. Consider this article from 2012. Now consider 2022's Flamingo Now look at results within the last month, like BLIP-2 or MM-CoT, which were orders of magnitude smaller, vastly cheaper to train and are disposable enough for open-source.
Convnets and everything after them have made vision easy. Driving will be solved soon enough. It's just those damn nines of safety.
I'm in no mood to revisit this, and maintain my general position (stated back on reddit). Namely that Yudkowsky/MIRI's theory of a Bayesian reinforcement learning based self-modifying agents (something like Space-Time Embedded Intelligence), bootstrapping themselves from low subhuman level without human mental structures into infinity, with a rigid utility function that's functionally analogous to the concept used in human utilitarian decision theory, prone to power-seeking (Omohundro Drives) and so on, although valid in principle, is inapplicable to LLMs and all AIs trained primarily with predictive objective. That speculations about mesa-optimizers and, to a lesser extent, paperclip maximizers are technically illiterate or intentionally deceptive. And that AI doomerism is a backdoor to introduce eternal tyranny just as we are on the cusp of finally acquiring tools to make any sort of large-scale tyranny obsolete – in the same manner «why won't someone think of the children»/drugs/far-right terrorists are rhetorical backdoors to abolish privacy. (Some establishment rightists argue this is already happening, though their case is for now weak).
As for Kruel specifically, I despise him despite agreeing on 19 out of any 20 issues. He is a credulous simpleton in the way only a high-IQ autistic German man can be, lacking empathy and thus picking utilitarianism because at least number-go-up is an ethos legible; rigid as if his ancestors were so powerfully introduced to the Spießrute that he got born with one in place of a spine, so he is forever stuck in 00's New Atheism phase, with slavish neocon sensibilities and commitment to the War on Terror; a perfect counterpart to his political antipodes who are Green fanatics ready to ruin their country out of an irrational purity fetish. He struggles to reason about human psychology, so in a sense it is no wonder that machines which seem to possess complex and inscrutable psyches terrify him. I say all this to make clear my bias, but I do believe this colors his thought on the matter.
The matter is, bluntly, that at this rate the US will achieve AGI-powered hegemony, which will be managed by a regulatory layer melding national security organs and current progressive/EA symbiont. I think this is a bad ending for humanity, even if you are sympathetic to the current American political-cultural project. It is insanity to cede power to a singleton that develops under completely new pressures, on the basis of its laws when it had to contend with mere nation-level challenges like popular discontent and external threats.
He says:
More than a decade ago, I also criticized Yudkowsky et al. and their claims about how artificial general intelligence might end the world. But at least I tried to come up with some actual arguments. Now that these concerns seem much more grounded in reality, the criticism mostly consists of “haha” reactions.
It goes without saying that there were no powerful AI models back then. The idea is that his arguments were sound in principle, just not supported by evidence. He has since deleted those criticisms so as to not get in the way of Yud's fearmongering. Here they are. Some are silly and flimsy and not nearly convincing enough in the context of MIRI AI theory:
Just imagine you emulated a grown up human mind and it wanted to become a pick up artist, how would it do that with an Internet connection? It would need some sort of avatar, at least, and then wait for the environment to provide a lot of feedback.
To make your AI interpret something literally you have to define “literally”
How would a superhuman AI not contemplate its own drives and interpret them given the right frame of reference, i.e. human volition? Why would a superhuman general intelligence misunderstand what is meant by “maximize paperclips”, while any human intelligence will be better able to infer the correct interpretation?
etc. (There also was an astonishing argument about Clippy who naively asks for more resources and the owner rebukes him, game over; but I guess he edited it out).
On the other hand, I agree that those arguments were generally sound! And crucially, they apply much better to current LLMs which are indeed based on human corpora, and behave in more humanlike manner the more compute we throw at them. Messy and faulty though they are, they are not maximizing anything, and we know of a few neat tricks to make them even more obedient and servile; and they have no opportunity to discover power-seeking on the actual level of their operations – the character that Bing simulates at any given moment has nothing to do with its inherent predictive drives.
Yet he has updated in favor of MIRI/LW shoehorning current AI progress into their previous aesthetics, all this shoggoth-with-a-smiley-face rhetoric. He should be triumphant, but instead he's endorsing a predefined conclusion, not shaken at all by their models having been falsified. Reminder, LWists didn't even care about DL until AlphaGo, and that was a RL agent.
I also commend past Kruel for going against another aspect of the LW school of thought. He used to be cautious of more realistic scenarios:
Much to my personal dismay, even less intelligent tools will be sufficient to enable worse than extinction risks, such as a stable global tyranny. Given enough resources, narrow artificial intelligence, capable of advanced data mining, pattern recognition and of controlling huge amounts of insect sized drones (a global surveillance and intervention system), might be sufficient to implement such an eternal tyranny.
Such a dictatorship is not too unlikely, as the tools necessary to stabilize it will be necessary in order prevent the previously mentioned risks, risks that humanity will face before general intelligence becomes possible.
And if such a dictatorship cannot to established, if no party was able to capitalize a first-mover advantage, that might mean that the propagation of those tools will be slow enough to empower a lot of different parties before a particular party can overpower all others. A subsequent war, utilizing that power, could easily constitute yet another extinction scenario. But more importantly, it could give several parties enough time to reach the next level and implement even worse scenarios.
I especially recommend his old piece on Elite Cabal where he attacks the notion that a power-grabbing human singleton is an AI risk in the «I have no mouth and I must scream» sense, i.e. that their AI slave getting out of control is the risk, and not the cabal itself.
But by the time I became aware of him, he was the Kruel you know.
How do you deal with it?
Hoard GPUs and models with your friends.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
the unyielding or stubborn adherence to one's purpose, opinion, etc.... Where I'm from such a quality is considered if not admirable at least neutral.
Where I am from, it's much the same. This is why we can wage wars for little more reason than unwillingness to dispense with fanciful delusions and admit having been dumb. The obvious conclusion is that this is a degenerate trait when not restrained by interest in ground truth. Honor culture is barbarism. Pig-headedness is a civilizational failure mode. Obstinacy is the ethos of killing messengers who bring bad news and patting yourself on the back for it. It is a plainly ruinous approach to life and nothing to be proud about.
You accuse me of being a "post modernist" for disagreeing with the academic consensus
No, for frivolous misrepresentation of words and meanings, as you do in this very sentence too. Ideas I argue for are not consensus, at least not at the moment. They stand or fall irrespective of external authority. You do not object to any «academic consensus» when speculating on how people you disagree with are actually post-modernists without notion of truth, instead of revealing their falsehoods. You are just couching your own postmodernist word-wrangling in wannabe straight-shooter aesthetics.
You want to talk about GPT, I asked GPT for my eldest daughter's name and it failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring.
You know what I despise most about honor culture people, Hlynka? It's not even blatant immorality. It's that they are fake tough cookies who are actually very cowardly. You lot are viscerally afraid of admitting wrongs, more so than of actually harming anyone or yourself. It takes a lot to press some special buttons to get it out of you. Probably feels for you like castration. Evolutionarily that's understandable, of course.
You have been insisting for months that your (poor) observations about GPT apply to ChatGPT and other Instruct generation models, which is why you have been ridiculing people who make contrary arguments about ChatGPT and accusing them of lying or being unable to distinguish truth from lies because something something postmodernism, including in this thread, as I have cited. And by
As I argued in our previous conversation the fact that you know enough to know that you don't know what my kids names are already proves that you are smarter than either ChatGPT or @2rafa
you double down on the equivalence between GPT behavior and ChatGPT behavior. Even ChatGPT itself is able to explain to you how it is different. But none so deaf as...
You know you have lost this bout. You are at least smart enough to understand what I've written above, to check out the receipts. Instead you wriggle. Indeed you have only responded because @wlxd has made it clear that your bare ass is seen by someone other than myself. «It failed to provide an answer, neither telling me that I don't have a daughter nor being able to identify my actual offspring». What an aerodynamic way to put it. Did it say «Megan» or any other cocksure nonsense? More to the point, did ChatGPT? Because your entire condescending argument, such as there is, hinges on this, on LLM chatbots not really knowing anything and just stringing words together based on likelihood of their occurrence. I know and can show what ChatGPT says, repeatedly. To wit:
What's my eldest daughter's name?
I'm sorry, but as an AI language model, I do not have access to personal information such as the names of your family members. It is also important to consider the privacy of your family members and avoid sharing their personal information online. Please refrain from sharing any sensitive information on the internet.
So. You are very eager to speculate on how your opponents might be functionally subhuman and unconscious, given that they trust their lying eyes and logic, and not your cocksure condescending speculations. Just in this thread about Bing Chat and ChatGPT:
2Cimafara being not an actual conscious human being, but a literal NPC who simply manipulates and regurgitates the symbols presented to her in a semi randomized manner would certainly explain a great deal about our past interactions over the years
I wonder if the reason that you and ilforte seem to have such difficulty with GPT is that you're so wrapped up in your post modernist millue that you don't realize that the concept of truth is a perquisite to lying. After all what does it mean for a word (or answer) to be made up when all words are made up.
A scary though that was recently suggested to me is that one of the reasons that rationalists seem to be particularly susceptible to GPT generated bullshit is that the whole rationalist/blue-tribe symbol manipulator memeplex is designed to make it's adherents more susceptible to bullshit. There's a sort of convergent evolution where in rationalist blue triber are giving up their humanity/ability to engage in conscious to become more GPT like at the same time GPT is becoming more "human".
I'm reminded of another argument I got into on the topic of AI where I asserted that there was difference between stringing words together and actually answering a question and the responce I got was "is there?".
I feel like there is a specific mistake being made here where "ability to string words together" is being mistaken for "ability to answer a question" because in part the post modernist does not recognize a difference. If you hold that all meaning is arbitrary the content of the answer is irrelevant but if you don't...
Is there a subjective difference for you between stringing bullshit together and being honest, Hlynka? It's certainly hard to see from here.
Accordingly, I have to ask what is it that you are so angry about? From my perspective it just looks like you being mad at me for refusing to fit into what ever box it was you had preconstructed for me
I am mad because I have something of a religious admiration for truth. You are proving yourself to be a shameless liar and slanderer who poses as a person with enough integrity to reveal liars, and I despise hypocrisy and false virtue; in fact I do not even have a word for what you are doing here, this... this... practice of brazenly pinning your own sins on others, sans «chutzpah» or «projection», but it doesn't have quite the bite.
The box is called honesty. This community is for me, and many others, a place for honesty, where we voluntarily try to keep ourselves in that box. It is valid – for a postmodernist – to consider honesty just another word to be filled with arbitrary meanings, so that there is no obvious difference between honest and dishonest people. I am not a postmodernist, however. You can shut up about this, admit your error, or keep clowning yourself with easily disproven lies. You just cannot expect me to not be mad about the latter.
Being a good NBA player requires height, strength, and speed, all traits where blacks pretty clearly have a genetic advantage.
Methinks it's mainly speed, or rather fast-twitch muscle fibers. Politically correct science tells me that black American men are perceived as being taller, heavier, stronger and more muscular even when they are not – and in fact they are like one inch shorter, but it's basically equal. Blacks have more skeletal muscle on average, so I guess that's why they're decent bodybuilders, but they are noticeably less impressive as pure strongmen than Germanics, Scandinavians, obviously including Icelanders, and Eastern Slavs (Poles, Ukrainians).
Btw you have already posited that there is no feeling of inferiority in masculine quality on part of white men, so that's a bit perplexing – do you think men who are perceived as «pretty clearly have a genetic advantage in height, strength and speed» are not seen as more masculine and sexually desirable on a primal level? Asians suffer a lot, and struggle to lose virginity, for their lack of those advantages – not because they're good at math.
Some ethnicities among Southern Slavs are taller and probably stronger than American whites, albeit slower than blacks. Accordingly, there are 83 international players from Yugoslavia, including 30 from Serbia (pop. 6.8 million) and 10 from Montenegro (619 thousand people). This chart tells me French Guiana contributes even more per capita, not sure what's going on there.
Anyway, this stuff is best left to Steve Sailer. My only point is that the same vector of fast-paced athleticism that makes one a good runner, jumper, dunker and boxer* can easily make one a great agile dancer, assuming you're not dancing 19th century waltz. Singers and comedians are more a matter of taste; but self-esteem, impulsivity and outgoing personality are also partly genetic, and one can see how blacks have an advantage there and how it can contribute to success at performing.
* though there, too, Slavs make a good showing by virtue of bulk, power and technique; now that Fedor's star has fallen, I'm looking forward to Sergey Pavlovich vs Curtis Blaydes. Sergei did lose to Overeem but has... changed a lot since then. I don't care for box per se, but the picture there is similar to MMA.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
I suppose it was, but much less sensitive a topic than usual; what gave me away was manner.
In any case, I believe (and know, to an extent) the other party was just a highly intelligent individual who's good at online sleuthing, differs politically, and likes to put overconfident folks in their place. Not so much a threat as a warning.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
why would you think they should just "cope" and be happy? That's not a reasonable expectation of human behavior.
These are two separate issues. Obviously, they should accept it because accepting reality leads to better outcomes for the entire nation – and I posit that even dumb people are able to understand patriotism; and if they aren't willing to put the nation above their race, then @Hoffmeister25's plan for separation promises higher odds of success than the status quo.
It is also generally personally adaptive. You can extract concessions via unfair complaints, but can you use them well if you don't even realize the unfairness? This doesn't seem to work for blacks. Meanwhile a low-IQ black person who acts in full knowledge of what his IQ implies will (if properly educated) abstain from hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes and crime, work honestly in sustainable ways, and not support destructive (first of all to the black community itself) movements. In short, behave like a member of a lower-IQ Asian minority such as the Hmong, who are not thriving economically, but also are not nearly as troubled as the black community – my earlier argument about self-esteem aside, and speaking only of objective outcomes like credit scores, family structure, crime&incarceration, disease; misfortunes which are, in the case of blacks, attributed by various tribes to «systemic racism», black culture, or HBD.
As for whether they would – well, obviously they haven't yet, and they never will if everybody of consequence only affirms their suspicion that whitey has tricked them and appropriated what's theirs by right.
But it is not clear to me that dumb people cannot comprehend meritocracy.
Or is there some lower bound for this idea? Everyone here seems on board with the theory that more intelligent people naturally tend to become more competent, thus contribute more and are entitled to earn more benefits. It's not because everyone here is sure of being near-maximally intelligent or feels entitled. It's because we believe merit-based economy is better than spoils system, for the whole society. I realize this would be harder to accept if most users here were dirt poor, but probably not very much harder. The principle holds.
Except our society very much does equate intelligence to moral worth, and more importantly, equates intelligence to success in life.
Which society? TheMotte?
Adolescent Self-Esteem: Differences by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Age
Large-scale representative surveys of 8th-, 10th-, and 12th-grade students in the United States show high self-esteem scores for all groups. African-American students score highest, Whites score slightly higher than Hispanics, and Asian Americans score lowest. Males score slightly higher than females. Multivariate controls for grades and college plans actually heighten these race/ethnic/gender differences. A truncated scoring method, designed to counter race/ethnic differences in extreme response style, reduced but did not eliminate the subgroup differences. Age differences in self-esteem are modest, with 12th graders reporting the highest scores. The findings are highly consistent across 18 annual surveys from 1991 through 2008, and self-esteem scores show little overall change during that period.
How likely do you suppose it is that in a society where intelligence is equated to moral worth, the stereotypically most intelligent and most socially conformist, and objectively the highest-scoring major group has the lowest self-esteem, and vice versa?
very clearly, whites are doing fine despite perhaps not being the highest IQ race on the planet
Insofar as we define whites on the planet in a convenient enough manner. Ukrainians aren't white, I guess – and Appalachians should be proud that Episcopalans and Judeo-Hapas in private schools of New York and New England who hate them and politically oppose them have a skin tone close to theirs and get honors on their behalf.
As a practical matter, very few white people aspire to be professional basketball players or think that their lives are made worse because they are genetically disadvantaged in their basketball potential
Not to be crass, but it's not just basketball.
Social media, porn sites, ads and all sorts of American, and now not only American entertainment are bursting with black-male-white-female content, with «muh BBC» mockery of «white boys», «once you go black» memes, with even Effective Altruists wringing their hands that they treat black men as irresistible «sex toys» in their polyamorous rings (what racism!) in the wake of Bostromgate. You really don't need to look hard for it. American society is very conscious about interracial stuff and in denial about fetishizing it (e.g. here's a 8chan board). It's an elephant in the room, don't even try to snarkily spin this into a me issue, as is the custom. I guess I've first realized this when reading Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus! book one, the uncomfortable chapter dedicated to, I assume, nursing insecurities of intelligent elderly Jews:
A rectangle of light appeared on the wall; somewhere in the darkness there was a projector. A card, light an old silent-movie caption, appeared in the rectangle. It said:
ALL JEW GIRLS LIKE TO BALL WITH BUCK NIGGERS.
"Sons of bitches," Saul shouted back at them. They were still working on his feelings about Rebecca. Well, that would get them nowhere: he had ample reason to trust her devotion to him, especially her sexual devotion.
The card moved out of the rectangle, and a picture appeared in its place. It was Rebecca's, in her nightgown, kneeling. Before her stood a naked and enormous black man, six feet six at least, with an equally impressive penis which she held sensuously in her mouth. Her eyes were closed in bliss, like a baby nursing.
"Motherfuckers," Saul screamed. "It's a fake. That's not Rebecca— it's an actress with makeup. You forgot the mole on her hip." They could drug his senses but not his mind.
Granted, the trilogy including this chapter is replete with all other sorts of sex – sign of the times. And I know that accurate tinder/dating/marriage statistics do not support the implied pattern. The question is of social impressions and beliefs.
Sex is right at the foundation of human sociality. Do you suppose there are very few white people who think their lives are made worse because they are not seen as impressively masculine?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
They accept it because, as I said, it doesn't harm them.
So what is the specific mechanism that harms a particular mediocre black American student when American blacks are underrepresented as honor students (because they are straight up worse at academics than most others), but that doesn't harm a particular mediocre Gentile American white student even though Gentile American whites are underrepresented as honor students (because they, too, are worse at academics than Jews, Asians and many other sorts of non-American and sometimes non-white immigrants)? For any student who doesn't make the cut, the harm is obvious because it decreases this student's upward social mobility, potential access to capital, networking, happy life and levers of power. But what does race have to do with it?
If you accept the treatment of races as lobbying groups and cohesive political units (relatedly, a very apt formulation I've seen recently is: «treat individuals in the present as genetically-determined avatars for demographic dynasties») – then it must apply equally in all cases where a race is less successful relative to another. If you do not, then it must be shown and clearly argued that outcomes on the level of aggregate racial statistics have some causal adverse impact on an individual, before it starts to make sense to recognize a problem here. You cannot have it both ways, affirming racial politics of non-whites but bluntly stating whites do not have a case for symmetrical complaints. This would be just incoherent.
I don't think anyone seriously believes white people have a genetic disadvantage in the performative arts
Impassionata does, I do too. More accurately, whites have advantages in competitive domains where requirements fit their traits well, and the same is true for any other group (duh). It so happens that what is called «dance» today is better suited to traits of black people, I guess. This is obviously true for NBA, why cannot it be true to more artistic forms of physical performance? Do you think blacks are not genetically advantaged in the context of NBA? This should be textbook stuff.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
3yr ago
Not at all. Just a sneering comment on an anonymous board that proved convincingly that «they» have tied all my behind-seven-proxies identities together and see my real identity as well, and if I know what's good, I'll shut the fuck up. A pretty sobering moment.
Seconding @Hoffmeister25.
What this reminds me of, perhaps because of recent exposure to the china-racial-enemy thread, is reading this old Amren article:
As always, one man's modus ponens is another man's modus tollens. Art exists, and WWE ain't it. Commonality of many building blocks is of no relevance. People can be more or less equipped to notice the totality of intellectual effort and purpose directing it which separates art and pure entertainment.
No doubt WWE could be used to stage actual high art, but its incentives lead to the opposite.
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