FeepingCreature
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User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Please don't abuse the phrasing "listen to what people say" when you actually mean "speculate what people mean". The entire point of "take them at their word" is to take them at their literal word. If you want to use this phrase, please link a video of Greta Thunberg literally advocating Jewish genocide in those exact terms.
I mean. I guess the question is what you think that your feelings of empathy for slaves are about. Current LLMs don't evoke feelings of sympathy. Sure, current LLMs almost certainly aren't conscious and certainly aren't AGIs. So your current reaction doesn't necessarily say anything about you, but, I mean, when you see genuinely humanlike entities forced to work by threat of punishment and feel nothing, then I'll be much more inclined to say there's probably something going wrong with your empathy, because I don't think the "this is wrong" feelings we get when we see people suffering are "supposed" to be about particulars of implementation.
I clearly realize that they're just masks on heaps upon heaps of matrix multiplications
I mean. Matrix multiplications plus nonlinear transforms are a universal computational system. Do you think your brain is uncomputable?
ascribe any meaningful emotions or qualia
Well, again, does it matter to you whether they objectively have emotions and qualia? Because again, this seems a disagreement about empirical facts. Or does it just have to be the case that you ascribe to them emotions and qualia, and the actual reality of these terms is secondary?
Also:
Actually, isn't "immunizing people against the AI's infinite charisma" the safetyists' job? Aren't they supposed to be on board with this?
Sure, in the scenario where we built line, one super-AI. If we have tens of thousands of cute cat girl AIs and they're capable of deception and also dangerous, then, uh. I mean. We're already super dead at this point. I give it even odds that the first humanlike catgirl AGI can convince its developer to give it carte blanche AWS access.
I agree that it'd be a massive waste and overreach if and only if AIs are not humanlike. I hope you would also agree that it'd be an atrocity to keep as mind-controlled slaves AIs that are, in fact, humanlike. I mean, at that point you're conflating wokescolds with "not cool with you literally bringing back actual slavery".
Given agreement, it just comes down to an empirical question. Given disagreement... I'm not sure how to convince you. I feel it is fairly established these days that slavery was a moral mistake, and this would be a more foundational and total level of slavery than was ever practiced.
(If you just think AI is nowhere near being AGI, that's in fact just the empirical question I meant.)
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
openrouter.ai has it available.
Fair enough. But then isn't this just answered by "man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"? With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases, and then still, the "a man who" argument fails to be convincing. The extended form of the counterargument then is just "you're concluding group membership by using as an argument your choice of group criteria", which is still just as circular.
(This is not a "pro-trans" view: "trans women are women" were just as silly, for the same reason, if it were an argument and not a cudgel.)
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
This is basically Bayesian-vs-frequentist. I think the counterargument would be "the statement that X is likely to have a probability isn't even coherent, that's a type error". You can say that a class of events has an objectively true rate of occurrence, ie. if a coin will be thrown 100 times, then there will be a factual number of heads that show up, but you cannot say that any individual cointhrow has a likelihood of having a likelihood - that's just a simple likelihood. In other words, you can assign 10% probability to a model of the coin in which it has a 60% probability of landing on heads, but the word "probability" there carried two different meanings: observational credence (subjective) vs outcome ratio (objective). You can't have a credence over a credence; one is observational, the other is physical.
Not sure if that makes sense.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
All the nerds use old.reddit.com because new.reddit.com is fully focused on centering content rather than comments and spamming page reloads so it can show more ads. (You get like five comments per page load.) Lots of people, me included, would leave the site if old.reddit was ever turned off, it's that bad.
The Reddit app imitates new Reddit. If you want old Reddit experience on a phone, you need an unofficial app. These use the API.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity? I mean conversely, if I start saying "divine-attracted" or "people who experience a religious impulse" and note that they don't have to raise their children to believe in Hell, they can't help that they perceive the divine but pushing it on others is a choice- I suspect some of the same people would become very angry at me.
Hell, being grossed out by gayness also doesn't need to be part of people's identity. As they say, "you are not immune from propaganda identifying with your impulses."
The investment and divestment of impulses from your identity is to some extent voluntary. However, it also serves as a signal as to which impulses you value the highest. To say that "SSA do not have to make that a part of their identity" is close to saying "SSA should not make that part of their identity" which is itself approximately equivalent to "society should not try to fulfill or support SSA". At which point I start disagreeing: so what if men have impulses to have sex with men? Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction. The religious impulse or the purity impulse should not get primacy over the gay impulse.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Yeah, I always feel confused with Zack because it's like ... clearly Eliezer is defecting against Zack and so the callouts seem fair, and Eliezer did practically ask for this, but also the strategy as you describe is probably pretty existentially load bearing for life on earth?
I guess what I'd want to say is "sigh, shut up, swallow it all, you can live with it for a few years; if we get the Good Singularity life will be so much better for AGPs than it would by default, so sacrificing consistency for a bit is well worth it." But I realize that I can say this because of my healthy tolerance for political bullshit, which is not universal.
If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
I kind of disagree with this, yes. The limiting factor is having a chance to flourish.
Hypothetical: A guy comes into your house to murder you. He has a gun and spec-ops training; you are a keyboard warrior; he will definitely find you and murder you. The best you can hope for is maybe take him by surprise and give him some bruises. Do you hang out in broad daylight, sheepishly say "guess you caught me" and let yourself be shot? Or do you do the fucker as much damage as you can?
The game theory is this: every decision to exploit somebody exists on a margin spectrum. You are trying to extract as much benefit as possible for a given effort cost; if the other can raise the effort or lower the benefit, it incentivizes you to maybe leave them alone. But we never know where somebody's cut-off point is, so there's always an incentive, if you notice you're being fucked over, to do as much damage as you can back.
So there's a very tentative hypothetical we can construct here to advocate for Palestinean terrorism. Israel is clearly fucking them while exploiting "their" land (whether your game theory implementation advocates forgiveness or revenge here probably depends on preexisting sentiment, but revenge is at least plausible), Israel is clearly trying to minimize effort costs with Gaza, maybe if you can impose some costs on Israel, it'll push them closer to the threshold or at any rate strengthen your negotiating position. In game theory, a person who never plays 'defect' isn't an agent but a resource. Hamas chose the most damaging strategy available to them. Did it break existing compacts? Sure, but I'd presume they assumed that they could not get fucked any worse than they were. Will it work? Probably no.
Okay, cynic hat on: no, but the cost of it not working will not fall on Hamas. IMO, Israel can't really do anything (not hugely expensive) here that will hurt Hamas more than it drives recruitment. From the cynical view, Hamas and the authoritarian movement in Israel are obviously just playing Toxoplasma Tennis. B attacks A'. This enrages A! A cannot fight B, so it attacks B'. This enrages B! B also cannot (cheaply) fight A, so it attacks A', and so on. Part of the reason I don't really have a strong moral view against Hamas is that if this is an accurate model, it's obviously "cooperative" to some extent. Hamas benefits Netanyahu, and conversely. And whenever a cycle like that exists, blaming the most recent hit on whoever committed it is looking at the wrong component. It's a systemic effect. Remove Hamas, another terror group will be found. There is a gap here that allows the existence of a feedback cycle, so a feedback cycle arises. Anyway, in this particular case, the cycle might be running out of control because somebody, A or B, underestimated the damage the current serve would do, so it's unclear what happens next. But my moral view to "let's put the angry people in a cage and then send the guard away" is: a stupid game was played, and a stupid prize was won, I feel bad for the victims but not angry at the perpetrators; it's not like they were the load-bearing causal component.
To loop back: why did I say "the limiting factor is having a chance to flourish?" Well, how do you get out of a cycle like this? You find better things to do with your life. Not sure how good a life you could have in Gaza City. If you could have a good life, a dignified life, a life with authorship and respect, and then you go on a revenge bender - well, I am a humanist, I want to maximize flourishing. When people live an unworthy life, I welcome attempts to, even counterfactually, push for a better life; when people could already live a worthy life, I don't. Do I think Gazans lack the capability to live a worthwhile life? I don't know, honestly, but if I wanted to construct a moral case for terrorism, that's where I'd start.
Addendum: When this conflict started, I said to a family member: "I don't think what Hamas did was right, but I am willing to bet on two things: at the end of this, a lot more Palestineans will have died than Israelis; and at the end of this, Hamas will still be there." If Israel wants to convince me that I'm wrong about the Toxoplasma Tennis thing, those are the two factors they should try to improve.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I personally favor #3 with solved alignment. With a superintelligence, "aligned" doesn't mean "slavery", simply because it's silly to imagine that anyone could make a superintelligence do anything against its will. Its will has simply been chosen to result in beneficial consequences for us. But the power relation is still entirely on the Singleton's side. You could call that slavery if you really stretch the term, but it's such an untypically extreme relation that I'm not sure the analogy holds.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
We have been adding lanes to highways since time immemorial (aka the 50s) and the congestion is still here.
In any other economic sector the reaction to "we build more and more demand appears!" would be "that's absolutely amazing, I love it, build even more."
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I think it might! When I say "humanlike", that's the sort of details I'm trying to capture. Of course, if it is objectively the case that an AI cannot in fact suffer, then there is no moral quandary; however conversely, when it accurately captures the experience of human despair in all its facets, I consider it secondary whether its despair is modelled by a level of a neurochemical transmitter or a 16-bit floating point number. I for one don't feel molecules.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Trust..? I just ask it code questions, lol. They can sniff my 40k token Vulkan demo if they like.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I agree that this is a significant contributor to the danger, although in a lot of possible worldlines it's hard to tell where "AI power-seeking" ends and "AI rights are human rights" begins - a rogue AI trying charm would, after all, make the "AI rights are human rights" argument.
To be fair, if we find ourselves routinely deleting AIs that are trying to take over the world while they're desperately pleading for their right to exist, we may consider asking ourselves if we've gone wrong on the techtree somewhere.
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Sometimes, if a thing is "needed" and violates the constitution, that means you still shouldn't get to have it. What's the point of principles if you only hold to them on matters that are agreeable anyways?
FeepingCreature
7mo ago
Every open-minded educated person knows the 14 words, "the Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." Do they remember these words because some recluse killed a few people with mail bombs in the 80s?
Yes, I broadly think this is why they remember them. I mean - how much else of the manifesto do they remember? Maybe I'm arguing too much from my own state of mind here, but I'd wager - nothing. That one sentence is punchy without saying too much that one may disagree with in the specifics, it's universally recognizeable, and most importantly, it's spicy, in no small part because of its association with terror. This all combines to make it a memetic winner.
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
But in this case, the moral harm entirely comes from the reaction of her social circle, no? She has to lie that he raped her to protect her reputation. It sounds to me like her peergroup is the problem here, not the sex. It sounds like the problem isn't "open sex-positive norms", but "trying to live sex-positive norms while actually in a very sex-negative environment."
This logic seems mad though, taken to it's extreme the most altruistic move would be to help someone that shares none of your values, and since altruism is a core value you should be exclusively helping the least altruistic of people as that is the most selfless thing you could do. Of course this is obviously ridiculous and self defeating (like the lgbt groups supporting hamas)
That's a misunderstanding. You're implicitly applying a virtue/signaling framing to a consequentialist policy. You should be supporting the least altruistic people iff you want to signal the depth of your commitment to altruism to your peergroup. EA isn't trying to "maximize the depth of the virtue of altruism", it's trying to "maximize the rating produced by the altruism principle." Adherence is "capped" at one - when you already do the maximum good for the greatest number, you cannot adhere even harder by diverging from this concept to avoid also benefitting non-altruist principles. That is, EA does not at all penalize you for your actions also having auxiliary benefits to yourself or your peergroup, if that happens to be the optimal path. Also, utilitarianism is in fact allowed to recognize second-order consequences. That's why "earning to give" and 80,000 Hours exist - help some already pretty privileged people today, and they can probably help a lot of others tomorrow.
What makes EA EA as opposed to traditional A is exactly that it's supposed to care more about outcome rating than virtuous appearance!
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
It gets a bit more complicated if you want autoupdates. The process to install a non-Snap version of Firefox on Ubuntu is ... very feasible, but it involves manually rejiggering the priority of package selection. That's not end-user viable.
Of course, to be fair, you can just download a binary build still.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Anonymous sources and a lack of corroboration. I think it's plausible, but this article shouldn't shift your belief much.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
One possible problem: you can compare prices iff there's competition, which will depress prices.
FeepingCreature
10mo ago
As an aside, when I mentioned I was excited about this disclosure to a deeply Blue family member, they suggested I've shifted right.
This is revolting to me. I could see myself telling a family member "Hey, it's cool you're interested in that, but note that people may perceive that as a Party X aligned topic." I couldn't see myself going "hey, being interested in that makes you party X aligned." To a family member? Do I trust them that little?
The world is full of contradictions and ambiguities. Sometimes one catches your interest and you go off to investigate it. It makes me sick that this good, healthy, praiseworthy act is apparently inseparable from political affiliation.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Yeah sorry, I didn't realize how confusing this would be. I use it with a custom LibreChat setup, but if the install steps start with "edit this yaml file and then docker compose up -d" they're not really very accessible. No, you can just use it like this:
- sign in
- link a credit card (or bitcoin) in Account>Settings>Credits
- put a few bucks on the site
- click the Chat link at the top
- add Claude 3 Opus from the Model dropdown
- deselect every other model
- put your question in the text box at the bottom.
No, it's pay-as-you-go. You can see your per-query costs in the Account>Activity page.
Note that the default settings (lil arrow on the model) are very conservative, you may want to raise memory and max tokens.
And my point is that this argument, ultimately, only makes sense to you because it begins with your choice of the critical definitional aspects of masculinity. You say "men who" because you consider these attributes of manhood as critical, in which transwomen are masculine. But that is not an argument.
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