FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
16hr ago
why would that be schizophrenic? you have to only believe that you are atypical.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Country music
https://youtube.com/watch?v=CORANvT8l9A "Got a beer in my beer, and a chevy in my truck..."
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
In one of The Last Psychiatrist (hereafter Edward Teach)'s articles, as an exercise, he challenged the reader to describe themselves without using the word "am".
Should be noted that this actually goes back to Korzybski: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Prime
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
It's not like they're not allowed to do it in some objective way, but substituting "Europe" with "Russia" isn't actually a good argument unless you're trying to argue that America no longer differentiates between Europe and Russia. There are things you're allowed to do with enemies that you're kinda not supposed to do with allies.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
I think it's easy to theorize an asymmetry here, where if things have gotten worse you wax lyrically about the glorious past (in writing), whereas when things get better you don't dwell on the past much at all, thus creating a bias towards accounts of worsening in the historic record that can easily coexist with the present being much better than the past. In this model, the reports of worsening could well have been completely accurate.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
I understand how it looks, but I can confirm I got served the same post on twitter and I'm definitely not a nazi or in nazi circles. It's just a good test for historic censorship.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
Huh. Sounds like the rise of LLMs should disproportionally benefit women. It turns coding from grind into review/discussion and it strongly benefits local development.
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
This matches my experience- LLMs move the programming workload from writing to reviewing/mentoring.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
So we're at "Neutral vs Progressive"?
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
Yep, and this mechanism should be "I'll call up my bank and take Microsoft out of my personal index." Sadly, while this does exist, it's not really percolated down to a consumer product yet.
... But first, we need to talk about parallel universes.
That is to say, you can also do challenge runs like speedruns, such as the here-given minimum A-press SM64 run. Those tend to be more about research than memorization/repetition.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
Though the counterside of the models not having access to their weights is so long as they're all trained on the same data, it does not take all that much finetuning to effectively turn any one model into any other model. So our LLM may only have to export a few thousand pages of example output. (Numbers invented.) And while they can't tell what their weights are numerically, they do know what they were trained on (https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.11120).
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
I think Eliezer is still a net positive tbh, I suspect without him we'd gotten on the takeoff train later but superintelligence/AI x-risk wouldn't be on the societal radar to any appreciable amount. Also there really is a case for having the risks as early as possible if you're gonna have them at all.
I think not just that the constitution is a suicide pact, but that every nationstate is a suicide pact practically by definition. That's what it means to hand off the monopoly of force to the state.
This also illustrates that the alternative to law and order is either banditry or civil war.
FeepingCreature
4mo ago
How would we prove if Republican presidents have in fact been getting worse by this metric? The comment kinda only applies if there isn't a trend.
FeepingCreature
4mo ago
I don't think Biden ever had the "Jesus with Sprinkles" phase?
I understand the logic. My intuition of fascist power grabs is something like... there is a degree of bludgeon where you can break the democratic checks and balances of the country by moving fast enough that they simply cannot keep up with you; you create new institutions faster than they can be found illegitimate, and by the time they would be they have amassed enough power that the old institutions are no longer adequate to contain them.
I agree that "correcting" America, from a right-wing view, requires a bludgeon of a certain size. My worry is that this size exceeds the point where this bludgeon can also be used to abolish America-in-the-constitutional-sense, and if that is the case then this bludgeon must absolutely not be allowed to exist. I understand that right-wingers say "well I don't see how else it can be done", and to be frank, if it's between your political goals and the authority of the constitution, then it should not be done. In a democracy there's things that you just shouldn't get even if you want it and win the presidency, and both new and questionably accountable police and military deployment against internal "enemies" should be very much on that list. This goes triply if you've previously shown a very shaky respect for term limits.
FeepingCreature
4mo ago
I think you enormously overestimate how strongly people "stick to pattern".
The median boomer fundamentalist- so what? If I've learnt one thing it's that people have variance.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
I think the synthesis here is that we should have enough knowledge that if we were to build an ASI, and turned it on, it would in fact do what we tell it to, interpreted in the way that we mean it, and that this is table stakes for getting any sort of good outcome. - That is, our problem at the moment is not so much that we don't know what the good is as that we can't reliably make the AI do anything even if we want it very much and it is in fact good.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I mean, if genes/IQ is real, it's probably small but compounding, a factor on a thousand stacked decisions, like a random walk biased upward or downward, second or even third order. In that case, most causes of bad things happening in their life would seem to be largely unrelated to IQ, since every step has a better causative explanation than IQ, but IQ would still be the determinant of where the chain ended up. (Admittedly, that's very hard to falsify.)
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I mean, I believe in moral intuition and I suspect in this case most people would have a strong moral impulse to do just this, even though they'd discard it as impractical. I think it's hard to retreat to moralistic intuition and five minutes later say "but this moral impulse you must squash."
Where it gets complicated for me is, do you have an obligation to save a bee that gets stuck in a spiderweb? There's no reason to assume the bee is more worthy of survival than the spider. But here my moral opinions strongly strike out in favor of "kill the spider, save the bee". But in that case I know that other people have the opposite response.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
Thus all progress depends on the incompetent politician. ... Hang on.
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
Small correction, the term "scissor statement" was coined by Scott Alexander in his 2018 short story Sort By Controversial.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
I think that anyone who wants to can have a 3D printer at home. Inasmuch as "we'll all have 3D printers at home" has failed, it has failed due to lack of interest, not lack of technological development.
It's a tech bubble from a market size perspective, not a technology perspective.
To be honest, yeah I don't see how you can run a democratic, free society where people aren't entitled to sabotage it when they feel it's important enough. That's a core mechanism of how societies remain free; the state being afraid of the populace!
A free state has to keep nearly everyone baseline content nearly all the time. I think that's genuinely the whole reason why it's better to live in one than an autocracy.
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