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DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

65 followers   follows 27 users  
joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

Tell me about it.


				

User ID: 745

DaseindustriesLtd

late version of a small language model

65 followers   follows 27 users   joined 2022 September 05 23:03:02 UTC

					

Tell me about it.


					

User ID: 745

AAQC material. Thanks for spelling it out.

The degree to which people are willing to twist their minds into knots out of sheer loyalty to Trump (loyalty that they claim is reciprocation of his promise to be loyal to them, despite his consistent inability and at times unwillingnessto deliver) is just sad. The sooner this band-aid is torn off, the better.

I do not believe that you like Trump on the account of economic indicators during his tenure, nor do you try to make it plausible.

Therefore, valiant law enforcement of Kyrgyzstan should be more active and less lazy, should be given more power and really put their remaining gloves off, should double, quartuple and octuple their efforts.

Kyrgyzstan needs more arrests, more early morning raids, more prisons, more torture, more rape, more gouging of eyes and cutting off tongues, more skinning people alive, more boiling people alive in cauldrons. For great justice, for great freedom of free choices.

With that, do you think you deserve any charity at any point hereafter, or would I be justified in writing you off as a two-bit leftist crank?

Well this went poorly.

You, @TIRM, @BorfRebus, @huadpe, @raggedy_anthem seem to have an exceedingly high impression of your ability to see holes in the presented narrative, psychoanalyze not just strangers but adumbrated characters, and deduce that it's really about a transient shock and inconvenience of a poor uprooted refugee in a foreign Muslim land (do you lot have any idea of how Russified Bishkek is? That's our backyard, they use our services, they come to work in our cities; modulo Islam, and there's plenty of Islam in Russia too, it's more like Mexico for the US than Iran or whatever) rather than a decade-long simplification of personality, even though I've already addressed much of that suspicion here for @aqouta – which makes me, in turn, suspect some motivated reasoning around casual drug use, and gluttony, and the ethos of Nietzschean last men.

Should we really be doing that? There's a rule: «Be charitable. Assume the people you're talking to or about have thought through the issues you're discussing, and try to represent their views in a way they would recognize. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Beating down strawmen is fun, but it's not productive for you, and it's certainly not productive for anyone attempting to engage you in conversation; it just results in repeated back-and-forths where your debate partner has to say "no, that's not what I think".» If you believe that the crux of my story, to wit, the value drift under the apparent influence of weed, is implausible on its face, you could as well skip the nitpicking and talk about why.

Admittedly I could flesh out his history better. And the remark about suicidality could be left out, since it seems to make people think (or just attempt to sneer?) that it's about him lacking pretense and not writing meandering essays on TheMotte, whereas my idea was more that the baseline suicidality, or less inflammatorily, low hedonic tone and pessimism, in Russia in his cohort is higher – among people who are not suffering health complications of obesity in their 20's already, do not live in a shit environment, and have any positive direction in life. It's markedly not common for a guy like him to be cheerful like some bubbly character from a Western cartoon or sitcom.

This can be taken as a failing of our culture. On the other hand, we don't do this ghoulish Anglo hellohowareyou-imfineandyou routine, especially to friends. When we bother to ask как дела (how's business), we can expect a genuine status check, down to financial reports and epicrises. I know what's going on with my friend, you do not.

Perhaps this «opposition to skilled immigration» is not about skill, nor even primarily about race, but is specifically opposition to sociopathic, uncompromising immigration that immediately sides with one's political enemies and gloats about disempowering legacy population.

If anyone reads this, you may explain to them how such an opposition is illegitimate or founded on alien moral precepts.

Did your English fail you? Or is this some subtler issue with failing to assimilate into the society and morality of Earthlings after your alt-historical non-tribalist India?

It's an outpost of my civilization, organized on principles I agree with, inhabited by people I could live at ease with. They defend themselves, their borders, their interests, with the kind of vigor and thick-skinned determination I'd like to see my nation display. (If only!) I admire them and wish them well.

John Derbyshire most likely cannot live in Israel or among a representative sample of Israelis any more than he can live among immigrants to the West he hates so much.

I increasingly suspect that the only correct decision for any sane person is converting to Judaism or at the very least relinquishing any claim to being white, because Christian whites are just brain-damaged and cannot tell a universalist ideology (even "nationalism") from a population's game-theoretically advantageous modus operandi. Strong vibe of round-headed Slavic Hitlerists.

It is absurd to assume that a more competent entity sharing your material interests is your ally rather than a competitor.

Can you say that you don't know in enough detail how a transformer (and the whole modern training pipeline) works, thus can't really know whether it knows anything in a meaningful way? Because I'm pretty sure (then again I may be wrong too…) you don't know for certain, yet this doesn't stop you from having a strong opinion. Accurate calibration of confidence is almost as hard as positive knowledge, because, well, unknown unknowns can affect all known bits, including values for known unknowns and their salience. It's a problem for humans and LLMs in comparable measure, and our substrate differences don't shed much light on which party has it inherently harder. Whether LLMs can develop a structure that amounts to meta-knowledge necessary for calibration, and not just perform well due to being trained on relevant data, is not something that can just be intuited from high-level priors like "AI returns the most likely token".

What does it mean to know anything? What distinguishes a model that knows what it knows from one that doesn't? This is a topic of ongoing research. E.g. the Anthropic paper Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know concludes:

We find that language models can easily learn to perform well at evaluating P(IK), the probability that they know the answer to a question, on a given distribution… In almost all cases self-evaluation performance improves with model size, and for our 52B models answers labeled with P(True) > 50% are far more likely to be correct as compared to generic responses…

GPT-4, interestingly, is decently calibrated out of the box but then it gets brain-damaged by RLHF. Hlynka, on the other hand, is poorly calibrated, therefore he overestimates his ability to predict whether ChatGPT will hallucinate or reasonably admit ignorance on a given topic.

Also, we can distinguish activations for generic output and for output that the model internally evaluates as bullshit.

John Schulman probably understands Transformers better than either of us, so I defer to him. His idea of their internals, expressed in the recent talk on RL and Truthfulness is basically that that they develop a knowledge graph and a toolset for operations over that graph; this architecture is sufficient to eventually do good at hedging and expressing uncertainty. His proposal to get there is unsurprisingly to use RL in a more precise manner, rewarding correct answers, correct hedges somewhat, harshly punishing errors, and giving 0 reward for admission of ignorance.

I suppose we'll see how it goes.

We don't live in the realpolitik era to expect Europeans to compromise with that. Putin has only himself to blame for having become a cartoon villain. Tolerating a little sabotage comes to people much easier than excusing Bucha because of muh economy.

Furthermore, I don't think there is a cultural victory. If someone is sabotaging you, they're your enemy. Look what the US did to the UK in Suez and so on. So much for the special relationship and Anglo-Saxon solidarity.

Not sure what you're arguing here: obviously the US has lent a hand to the dismantling of British empire, but individual Brits think very warmly of America.

The EU is pretty stupid, sluggish and incompetent (see their nuclear/regulatory fiasco). But they won't permanently let the US sabotage them.

If Russians can permanently let Putin sacrifice them for geopolitics, certainly the EU can keep coping with some economic costs.

Unlike Britain, the EU is big and could theoretically compete with America, if they got their act together.

20 years ago this looked almost like a real possibility.

Now it's a joke. People should just think of themselves, pack their bags and families and go to the US.

Sovereign is she who only fights back.

Oh come on, this is more American whining. Muh deaths of overdoses, muh Russian election meddling, little old us assaulted on all fronts, won't somebody please spare a thought for the poor hegemon.

The CHIPS act has been about pork and the usual fighting over the spoils from the beginning, its success or failure is of no consequence. China was summarily cut off from modern semiconductor manufacturing and falls behind, new fabs in safe allied countries are being completed, Taiwan is getting reinforced, and AGI seems to be on schedule within 5 years. Yes, could have been done better. But it has gone well enough that advancing petty political agendas took precedence. If there ever is any plausible risk of the US losing control over the global high-end manufacturing chain, I am sure you'll see it going differently.

Cynicism is a cope of dysfunctional people.

How many Joyces contend for an average Hugo?

Every second-tier female fanfic writer is invested in her characters' feelings and thoughts and dedicates a big part of the work to spelling that out.

Men, like I said, have other avenues to express their core interests.

A very German thing to believe. I weep for your people, but really you've been cooked since before both of us were born, so this revolution adds nothing.

Thank you for providing an example. Yes, the point of voting Trump is to Own The Libs, drive them mad. This is exactly what Hanania is talking about.

Like Mitt "the Mormon Theocrat" Romney? Being nice and clean-cut never stopped the attacks from the Democrats

I suppose we will never know how well Romney would've handled those attacks were he to become POTUS.

Check with Claude-instant. It's the same architecture and it's vastly better at factuality than Hlynka.

Do you believe we care that much about Tolkien's intentions in particular? Enough to engage in some post-mortem polemic, even? Our ressentiment is more interesting than your escapism, our literature is deeper than your fairy tales. Be flattered when they are used as a starting point, in the way Yudkowsky used Rowling's.

How's it going my dude?

I don't really want to entangle those but might respond to a DM.

I think my reasons are justified for years now, and you have not appropriately expressed remorse for your terrible faux-rationalist rhetoric back on reddit before continuing it here, so I'd rather you start making arguments in good faith than I stop reminding people of your track record. By the way, putting on a layer of patronizing Brahmin politeness improves your performance somewhat, but not by a lot, I suggest you leave it for your workplace.

the way to argue against it

There is no need to argue against a vacuous truism that something is "true" if we assume an arbitrary classification system where it is true; only an infertile mind of a pedant can be satisfied with such an argument. I of course agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and in principle some people can recognize whatever as beautiful, even a slum filled with diseased drug addicts where one gets to read Scholze's papers. And Wittgenstein masturbated to mathematical problems in the trenches of World War I, after all. But the reason we know of this fact is precisely that it is unusual, baffling. Your preferences, if those are your preferences indeed, are marginal, thus prioritizing them would be unsatisfactory to most people; you're free to put the opposite hypothesis to a democratic test and, I'd expect, get the same result as here in any group except self-selected minority of mathematical ascetics.

Though there may be something more here. Naturally this ties in to your general theme that white people ought to welcome being replaced by "elite human capital" like yourself. White people did not think to implement a filter for compatible aesthetic preferences, even as they demanded professional merit and some minimum of adherence to the letter of the law; so now there'll be a marginally greater tendency for their habitats to approximate the noisy, debased squalor of the subcontinent, complete with galaxy-brained equivocation excusing this. Too bad.

I do think that a rationally acting misaligned superintelligent AI, which is not a nonsense concept, will not see a reason to engage in spiteful behavior a la Basilisk, and also that the specific sort of irrationality that would make it spiteful is highly improbable to emerge as a result of AI research. But it's not logically absurd, in the way that timeless decision theory powering the vanilla Basilisk is; and if it were for some reason interested in that sort of stuff, I think it'd have been able to torture humans for at least centuries. It'd probably also be able to upload humans or construct random simulations and torture them, for whatever reason.

Condescension is merited if you're asking for it; I mentioned IHNMAIMS in my post and this scenario is materially different from «you might be tortured and killed by a crazy person» in that it posits biological immortality.

I happen to think that a superintelligent being will at the very least be able to greatly prolong the life of its victim, this doesn't conflict with any part of our understanding of «the matter at hand» (we're pretty sure that a healthy brain can outlive the body if you provide it a decent environment). And of course this conjecture, while unproven, is vastly less far-fetched than continuity of identity between a human and a simulacrum built from indirect evidence.

I really recommend reading the «I have no mouth and I must scream», or at least the synopsis.

Yes, it's an interesting data point. Now, consider that rabbits have only one move in response to myxomatosis: die. Or equivalently: pray to Moloch that he has sent them a miraculously adaptive mutation. They can't conceive of an attack happening, so the only way it can fail is by chance.

Modern humans are like that in some ways, but not with regard to pandemics.

Like other poxviruses, myxoma viruses are large DNA viruses with linear double-stranded DNA.

Myxomatosis is transmitted primarily by insects. Disease transmission commonly occurs via mosquito or flea bites, but can also occur via the bites of flies and lice, as well as arachnid mites. The myxoma virus does not replicate in these arthropod hosts, but is physically carried by biting arthropods from one rabbit to another.

The myxoma virus can also be transmitted by direct contact.

Does this strike you as something that'd wipe out modern humanity just because an infection would be 100% fatal?

Do you think it's just a matter of fiddling with nucleotide sequences and picking up points left on the sidewalk by evolution, Pandemic Inc. style, to make a virus that has a long incubation period, asymptomatic spread, is very good at airborne transmission and survives UV and elements, for instance? Unlike virulence, these traits are evolutionarily advantageous. And so we already have anthrax, smallpox, measles. I suspect they're close to the limits of the performance envelope allowed by relevant biochemistry and characteristic scales; close enough that computation won't get us much closer than contemporary wet lab efforts, and so it's not the bottleneck to the catastrophe.

Importantly, tool AIs – which, contra Yud's predictions, have started being very useful before displaying misaligned agency – will reduce the attack surface by improving our logistics and manufacturing, monitoring, strategizing, communications… The world of 2025 with uninhibited AI adoption, full of ambient DNA sensors, UV filters, decent telemedicine and full-stack robot delivery, would not get rekt by COVID. It probably wouldn't even get fazed by MERS-tier COVID. And seeing as there exist fucking scary viruses that may one day naturally jump to, or be easily modified to target humans, we may want to hurry.

People underestimate the potential vast upside of a early Singularity economics, that which must be secured, the way a more productive – but still recognizable – world could be more beautiful, safe and humane. The negativity bias is astounding: muh lost jerbs, muh art, crisis of meaning, corporations bad, what if much paperclip. Boresome killjoys.

(To an extent I'm also vulnerable to this critique).

But my real source of skepticism is on the meta level.

Real-world systems rapidly gain complexity, create nontrivial feedback loops, dissipative dynamics on many levels of organization, and generally drown out propagating aberrant signals and replicators. This is especially true for systems with responsive elements (like humans). If it weren't the case, we'd have had 10 apocalyptic happenings every week. It is a hard technical question whether your climate change, or population explosion, or nuclear explosion in the atmosphere, or the worldwide Communist revolution, or the Universal Cultural Takeover, or the orthodox grey goo, or a superpandemic, or a stable strangelet, or a FOOMing superintelligence, is indeed a self-reinforcing wave or another transient eddy on the surface of history. But the boring null hypothesis is abbreviated on Solomon's ring: יזג. Gimel, Zayin, Yud. «This too shall pass».

Speaking of Yud, he despises the notion of complexity.

This is a story from when I first met Marcello, with whom I would later work for a year on AI theory; but at this point I had not yet accepted him as my apprentice. I knew that he competed at the national level in mathematical and computing olympiads, which sufficed to attract my attention for a closer look; but I didn’t know yet if he could learn to think about AI.

At some point in this discussion, Marcello said: “Well, I think the AI needs complexity to do X, and complexity to do Y—”

And I said, “Don’t say ‘_complexity_.’ ”

Marcello said, “Why not?”

… I said, “Did you read ‘A Technical Explanation of Technical Explanation’?”

“Yes,” said Marcello.

“Okay,” I said. “Saying ‘complexity’ doesn’t concentrate your probability mass.”

“Oh,” Marcello said, “like ‘emergence.’ Huh. So . . . now I’ve got to think about how X might actually happen . . .”

That was when I thought to myself, “_Maybe this one is teachable._”

I think @2rafa is correct that Yud is not that smart, more like an upgraded midwit, like most people who block me on Twitter – his logorrhea is shallow, soft, and I've never felt formidability in him that I sense in many mid-tier scientists, regulars here or some of my friends (I'll object that he's a very strong writer, though; pre-GPT writers didn't have to be brilliant). But crucially he's intellectually immature, and so is the culture he has nurtured, a culture that's obsessed with relatively shallow questions. He's stuck on the level of «waow! big number go up real quick», the intoxicating insight that some functions are super–exponential; and it irritates him when they fizzle out. This happens to people with mild autism if they have the misfortune of getting nerd-sniped on the first base, arithmetic. In clinical terms that's hyperlexia II. (A seed of an even more uncharitable neurological explanation can be found here). Some get qualitatively farther and get nerd-sniped by more sophisticated things – say, algebraic topology. In the end it's all fetish fuel, not analytic reasoning, and real life is not the Game of Life, no matter how Turing-complete the latter is; it's harsh for replicators and recursive self-improovers. Their formidability, like Yud's, needs to be argued for.

I already have information about the world I'm in. It's a world where comfortable immortality is far away and out of reach for me. Your argument is backwards, most of the probability mass with conscious humans will be in those world's where immortality is nice and easy, but I know which world I live in now. I am embodied in time right now.

Consider that you aren't 100% sure of being a reliable narrator, and that the uncertainty, however minuscule, is greater than odds of spontaneous physical miracles – as per @sodiummuffin's logic. Conditional on you invariably ending up alive, you will... not have had experienced lethal harms that cannot be survived without magic; and if it very convincingly looks to you as if you had experienced them, well, maybe that was just some error? A nightmare, a psychedelic trip, a post-singularity VR session with memory editing...

I woke up today from a realistic dream where I got crippled and blinded by a battery pack explosion. In its (and, in a sense, my own) final moments, I consciously chose the alternate reality relative to which that world was a dream, focused my awareness, and realized that this has happened many times before – in other worlds I had escaped by simply waking up into this one. (This reminded me: I've never read Carlos Castaneda but he probably wrote about this stuff? Sent me on a binge. Yeah, that's one of his topics, mages jumping between apparent universes that should be ontologically unequal).

Dreams aside, I feel like the idea of quantum immortality is unfortunately all tangled up with the idea of observer effect. As per QI, you aren't immortal across the board – you die, and soon, in the vast majority of timelines observed by any other consciousness, just like all humans who have died before our time. You are, right now, in a timeline you observe (though as noted above, only probably) – and presumably you aren't yet dying any more than any other person who's exposed to normal risks and aging. The idea is that you do indeed die in those scenarios where you eat an explosion, develop malignant tumors, are lying in a dump bleeding out all alone with no chance of survival, or are 80 years old in 1839; but those are counterfactuals, not real timelines, and the you who doesn't die, the person typing those comments, doesn't get into them. If it looks to you as if you did, and QI is right – you being wrong is more likely than a miracle.

Why should anyone care about humanity in the abstract?