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FeepingCreature


				

				

				

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FeepingCreature


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 05 00:42:25 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Now they do of course, but in no ways that are predicted by the laws we understand.




I don't understand this. Everything the body does is hard to predict by the laws we understand. We don't understand consciousness, sure, but we also don't (fully) understand cell biology, DNA assembly, protein folding etc. either, and nobody is suggesting those require new forces or laws.




the extremely complex computer has been broken in a subtle way that can't be repaired.




How would this not also apply to death of the body? It seems to me postulating a separate soul does not meaningfully reduce complexity here. Most deaths are not a failure of the brain.




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.




Sure, but that's not a "death" thing. Once you know that organisms stop being able to procreate at a certain age, it seems necessary that they will die after, as nothing would select against it. The weird thing here is menopause, not death.




I believe the most honest thing to do here is to be humble and admit that we don't know how consciousness works




Sure, but we can place constraints well before we have operational understanding. Few people know how almost anything works; again, they don't see a need to postulate novel physics.


Anyways, I don't understand either why you see the need to add entities, nor what adding entities even gives you. What is the mind doing that physics clearly does not suffice for?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I expect AI to reduce safetyism because safetyism is, optimistically, a result of uncertainty and miscommunication. If you have poor eyesight, you wear glasses; if you have poor hearing, you wear a hearing-aid. My expectation is that many to most people will opt into prosthetics that give them improved social cognition: a feeling, in advance, for how something you're intending to say will be received. Alternatively, you can literally get the AI to translate vernacular, sentiment and idioms; this will be useful when leaving your peergroup. Furthermore, it will be much easier to stay up to date on shibboleths or to judge cultural fit in advance.


Humanity suffers from a massive lack of competence on every axis imaginable. We cannot now imagine how nice the post-singularity will be, but for a floor consider a world where everyone is good at everything at will, including every social skill.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Can you actually cite the evidence against, please?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As long as the rockets continue to fly, and land, and the competitors continue to largely not do that, or do that plainly worse, at some point you're asking me to disbelieve the evidence of my own eyes.


I don't believe in ideas, I believe in dollars per kg to orbit.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Those criteria are guided by my understanding of culpability in German law, where I live. Particularly the idea of a plausible model is founded in § 23 of the criminal law, where the presence of a crime requires that the particulars are suited to lead to success in principle. For instance, you are committing a crime by shooting at a plane flying overhead even if your gun is fundamentally too weak to shoot bullets that high, but not by attempting to curse the plane down via strategically buried nailclippings.


edit: Reread, correction: it is a crime but may go unpunished or be punished leniently.


I'm not sure how a judge would decide "burning a car leads to Bush not being elected", but I see it as more an expression of powerlessness, a substitutive behavior that is more an expression of psychological defeat than particular criminal intent aimed at overturning the election. In other words, the J6 protesters had hope of an outcome that favored them; an anti-Bush protester did not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.


You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
openrouter.ai has it available.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Speculation, but I find it suggestive: Strong men increase variation, weak men reduce it. ("Strong men explore, weak men exploit"?) So when things are going bad, you want a certain level of strong men to have a chance to hit a fix; when things are going about as good as can be expected, you want to reduce your strongman:weakman ratio to avoid breaking things. Such a model would also result in the observed men/times cycle if you selected for successful countries.


Phrased like that it sounds suspiciously like "thrive vs survive", which would fit with the "right = strong, left = weak" framing.


Is the reason America is so successful that it's got good strongman selection mechanisms via the presidency?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				The Many Ways that Digital Minds Can Know
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think one more aspect is reflectivity: the degree to which a system integrates knowledge of its own operation into its schema. For instance, a search engine that can show a "Google is down" page, or that lists the number of results, or that finds Google help pages on search as search results, has (basic) reflectivity. It seems plausible to me that a lack of reflectivity is a big part of what's holding LLMs back and causing hallucinations and the like: they may be confident or uncertain, but they cannot condition on their confidence.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The fact that we miss perfection doesn't mean we can't give various more or less well supported theories. To say "no explained reason" seems to suggest that all these highly detailed scientific edifices amount to nothing, which seems excessive: we don't know how cells work in totality, but we have surely at least made progress enough to put paid to any claim that they require new physical laws.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's no explained reason for lots of things that we don't invoke the need for new physics for. What makes qualia unique?


I think this is gesturing at the common philosophical stance "I see no way that materialism could even in theory give rise to qualia". That of course has the problem that it's equally difficult to see how any set of laws would give rise to qualia; as such, it's just hiding the confusion of qualia outside of physics.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Great, suffer then. That doesn't give you the right to impose suffering on others.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
But GPT-3 clearly has that understanding. I mean, obviously not always, but also obviously sometimes. By and large, GPT-3 does not actually tend to assert that chairs sit on people.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Both of those plans are unactionable, but "convince society to not build culture around" is maybe a bit more unactionable than "convince congress to change copyright." :)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
There's a difference between "I think lockdowns sort of made sense" and "science says that lockdowns don't make sense." (It's that one of those gets called out on not citing sources.)


If you say "there is evidence", you're gonna have to expect people saying "well show it then."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.




Personal opinion, no particular historical knowledge: the German army could have been so much worse. Consider the ordinary execution of genocides in history. The Holocaust was unique in organization and sheer scale of suffering, but at least the suffering it caused was, mostly, incidental and not the goal. If I'm de facto going to be the victim of a genocidal campaign, to be quite honest, there are worse options than the Nazis. There are even worse options in German history than the Nazis! Make my captor and executioner an honorable patriotic career soldier any day.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean sure, but on the other hand in some sense the immaturity (play etc.) is a valid purpose of humanity. What else are we striving for with the term "good times" if not a reduction in demand for useful things, leaving more overhead for playing games?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The gassing is kinda an important aspect. As a pro-lockdowner, if I thought the government would outright murder twelve million people (or, honestly, a lot less than that) in the name of a bad model of a disease, I would have had a very different reaction.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
LLMs cannot improve from self-play. Once we get that, I don't know what will happen, might be direct-to-singularity, might not, but that issue shouldn't be a problem anymore.


ChatGPT won't write trash Python when it's had a million years of experience with performance tests.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am fundamentally against companies upholding moral values. I think it's a societal declaration of bankruptcy and corrosive to democracy, and I think it should be outlawed. I want my companies to be amoral profit-maximizers. This idea we have that we can tame companies when we already have a nice, central mechanism for arbitrating moral questions (elections, rule of law) just ends up recreating democracy but worse in every way: less equal, less regulated, less principled, less consistent, more corrupt, more vulnerable to extremism, and so on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
People like looking at porn. We can quibble about the meaning of harm, but "People's desires going less fulfilled" is at least some kind of downside, and I think "without any harmful effects" overreaches. The absence is the harmful effect.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean, the pandemic is still ongoing. If COVID were suddenly gone, sure. And even then we might still expect excess deaths from long-term damage of the pandemic.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Right, but corporations that are staffed by humans aren't smarter than humans and can't become smarter than humans. "Being a corporation" doesn't remove the scaling limits that constrain the human brain in specific. If you remove that limiting factor, then yes, corporations are scary too.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Conversely, I've always interpreted coordination around medical emergencies, such as lockdowns, as one of the basic reasons to have a government to begin with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


those who thought like you are long dead




This does not match my experience. At the least, like you yourself said, the vision is fundamentally Christian - so it's hard to argue that universal resurrection and ascension into eternal paradise has no ideological staying power.