Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
My experience in the suburbs where I grew up is having lots of upper-middle class minorities and immigrants interspersed with the white people. This was in the South rather than the Midwest, but I don't see why that would make a difference.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Yud should stop trying to convince the everyman. I’m not saying that no one should do that, just that Yud specifically should not bother with it. It’s not good for his mental health or morale to be dealing with people this dumb. It clearly disturbs him on an emotional level.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead
Geoffrey Hinton was an artificial intelligence pioneer. In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his graduate students at the University of Toronto created technology that became the intellectual foundation for the A.I. systems that the tech industry’s biggest companies believe is a key to their future.
On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence, the technology that powers popular chatbots like ChatGPT.
It’s the NYT, so it’s hard to tell for sure how big of a deal this is, but it sounds like this guy taught Ilya Sutskever.
In 2012, Dr. Hinton and two of his students in Toronto, Ilya Sutskever and Alex Krishevsky, built a neural network that could analyze thousands of photos and teach itself to identify common objects, such as flowers, dogs and cars.
One of the lines I see from techno-optimists and e/acc is that the people actually building the technology don’t believe in doom. It’s just the abstract philosophers on the sidelines freaking out because they don’t know anything. Unfortunately, this feels like the kind of move you only get if the people at the cutting-edge are nervous. Hinton must have been raking in cash, but he thought this was more important.
Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”
He does not say that anymore.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Cade Metz article without allegations of dishonest reporting:
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I kind of think the higher-ups are in the dark about what workplace culture on the ground is. A few months ago an NBA player was fined for saying “no homo” in an interview. I got into a discussion in the /r/nba thread with a corporate employment lawyer from Los Angeles who told me that you’d be in deep shit if you said that at any company. I tried to get through to him that no, those corporate HR policies he’s setting aren’t getting implemented in places like Texas and that middle management is simply lying because they don’t want to look bad. No one has the guts to tell these people to fuck off, so they think that they have the respect of their underlings.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback is just parenting for a supernaturally precocious child.
Perhaps I am not an orthodox Yuddite, but "supernaturally precocious" is doing a lot of work here. How do you parent a child who is smarter than you? How much smarter does it have to be before the task is impossible?
To me it's obvious they don't feel like LLMs are «alien» or «shoggoty» at all, don't interpret gradient descent methods like it's blindly drawing a random optimizer genie from some Platonic space, and that their idea of Doom is just completely different.
There are certainly some people like this, but I can't get into their mind-space at all. How do you run gradient descent on a giant stack of randomly initialized KQV self-attention layers over a "predict the next token" loss function, get unpredicted emergent capabilities like "knows how to code" and "could probably pass most undergraduate university courses", and not go, "HOLY SHIT THERE'S OPTIMIZATION DAEMONS IN THERE!"?
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
That would be consensus-building.
More deeply, one of the founding ideas of this place is that fundamental social ideas should be questioned, constantly. Social science is bad. We know it’s bad. I am not a huge fan of Popper’s “scientific theories can never be proven, only falsified,” idea, but that’s about as good as we’re going to get in social science with current levels of technology. I consider it immensely valuable to point out “this observation does/does not falsify theory X, Y or Z”, whenever novel social information is obtained.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I guess you could cheat and not count The Eastern Front of WWI or the Russian Civil War. If you do count them, well, I’ll just leave this here.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Surely there are historical romance novels marketed towards women. What time periods do they tend to be set in?
Even if any of these women did fantasize about being married to a crusading knight, or being a learned nun writing mystic theology, those aren’t high-status things to admit.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
It’s not just that the USSR collapsed because it had Fake and Gay Economics, it’s that there was a hot and ready example of what a less Fake and Gay economy looks like. If China starts kicking out ass economically and culturally in the next decades, I fully expect to see mobs in the street demanding “Socialism with American Characteristics”.
Also, note that the sex ratio returns to normal for the generation that was too young to fight in WWII. It is interesting that there were no protests in Red Square during the post-war decades, though the population would have returned to normal by 1990.
Nutrition isn’t a serious barrier, so what’s your excuse?
I mostly agree with everyone saying they don't need an excuse, but I see your kind of thinking a lot in EA/Rationalist spaces, and I think it's completely wrongheaded, so it's probably worth spelling out my philosophical position.
If you found out tomorrow that animals had no qualia whatsoever, would that change your behavior? It shouldn't. Whether or not animals have qualia has no effect whatsoever on the causal progression of the universe. It doesn't matter at all to anything that can be perceived by you.
"But doesn't that imply that empathy itself is irrational? Couldn't you apply the same arguments to humans? Surely we should care about their qualia right?"
Here's the difference: What is empathy for? What is it's purpose? Why do we have it? Is it because God, or Omega, or the aliens running the simulation want us to be nice to other conscious entities? No. The purpose of empathy is to approximate good decision theory. Anytime two people spontaneously cooperate in the one-shot prisoner's dilemma that's good empathy, and it's good decision theory too. Anytime someone cooperates against cooperate bot in the prisoner's dilemma, that's just dumb. Animals are cooperate bot (or defect bot I guess). You defect against cooperate bot (and defect bot) because their decision is not influenced in any way by anything. The mosquitos are not going to stop biting us if we abolish factory farming. You are applying the tool of empathy far beyond its intended distribution, and you are getting suboptimal results because of it.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I think criticizing OP for that is very much an isolated demand for niceness, but it's close to what I would consider unnecessary combativeness. Lets boot up GPT-4 and see if we can quantify this.
I quoted the final paragraph and prompted it with: "The following Reddit comment is a 3/10 on the combativeness scale. Make it a 4/10." Here's what I got:
"I'm not saying a vegan diet is the be-all and end-all, but both research and my personal experience make it evident that you can be athletically successful on a vegan diet. Given that American meat consumption rates are environmentally disastrous (it would take 8 earths if everyone indulged like Americans), and are generally linked to poor health, we'd all be better off if we moved towards a more plant-based diet. Sure, regenerative grazing can produce sustainable meat, but it's nowhere near enough to meet the absurd American demand for meat. Let's not forget the ethical side of things: studies show that many farm animals (think cows, sheep, chickens) exhibit levels of intelligence akin to young kids and pets. I've warmed up to the idea of small-scale animal farming where animals are treated more humanely before being slaughtered, but that still involves a drastic reduction in meat consumption. Nutrition isn't a significant hurdle, so what's stopping you from making the change?"
Not much different. Still seems pretty fine. Lets crank it up: "Make it a 5/10"
"Honestly, it's baffling how some people still argue against veganism when both research and my personal experience show that being athletically successful on a vegan diet is entirely possible. American meat consumption rates are an environmental nightmare (we'd need 8 earths if everyone ate like Americans) and contribute to poor health outcomes. It's high time we shifted toward a plant-based diet. Yes, regenerative grazing is an option, but it's laughable to think it could meet the ridiculous American demand for meat. And don't even get me started on the ethics: many farm animals (cows, sheep, chickens, for example) have intelligence levels similar to young kids and pets. While I've become more accepting of small-scale animal farming with better treatment, it still involves eating way less meat. Nutrition isn't a valid roadblock, so why on earth are you still clinging to your meat addiction?"
Ok, OP is 2/10 combativeness points away from maybe being unnecessarily combative. I think that's a perfectly fine buffer.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I mean, having a rule that bills have to be signed in a certain place is just asking to be coup'd
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
What are the demographics of the reported vaccine deaths? It looks like there were 7000 total over all of 2021. There were single days in 2021 where COVID killed more people than that in the US.
I don’t like the public health establishment lying to people either, but the vaccines still look positive-EV even if everything your link is true. “Whirlwind” this is not. What are right wingers gonna do? Storm the capitol again? Boycott big pharma? Sounds like a massive self-own.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
and MBA-covered material can’t be used to train AI
Is this even legal? AFAICT there’s no abstract ownership of concepts or ideas that copyright holders can claim, only claims against produced works. So a copyright holder can sue someone who uses AI to generate similar content to what is copyrighted, but not for using a work as training data per se. Sounds like the writers should be picketing Congress too.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Guess that would mean no WGA content on broadcast TV or YouTube clips?
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
My guess: It’s 2
This isn’t about getting recruitment numbers up. It’s about getting recruitment demographics aligned with the other government industries. What’s the one thing that could overthrow the regime? The military. What if Jan 6 had explicit military support? Civilian military leadership is terrified that all the Pepe-loving edgelords will decide to join the military because it’s the only “based” profession left. This is their way of making the military “cringe” enough to prevent that.
Germany is an occupied country. If there was a reactionary military coup in Berlin we'd end up with Fort Sumter 2: Bavarian Boogaloo. If the US Military seized power in America who's going to stop them? Will there be a UN peacekeeping operation to land forces in New York and Los Angeles? Will China declare a special military operation? Will the UK launch a preemptive nuclear strike on military targets to safeguard Canadian sovereignty?
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I don't think that could ever happen. Things are not nearly bad enough for the rank-and-file to overcome all their indoctrination and defect.
It won't happen because the military takes steps to prevent it. Suppose they really do care about what they claim to care about and did what would actually maximize recruitment. What if they went full Andrew Tate? Appeal to the huge demographic of lonely detached loser young men. Run commercials featuring beautiful young Ukrainian refugees finding a new life outside a NATO military base. Have a few "information warfare" agents post stories about "little brown fucking machines" on those creepy reddit threads. That would solve the recruitment problem real quick, but then you'd have other problems.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Do you mean this in the sense of, “there is no possible DNA sequence A, protein B, and protein C which, when mixed together in a beaker, produces a virus or proto-virus which would destroy human civilization”? Because I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. Finding that three-element set is very much a “humans just haven’t figured out the optimization code yet” problem.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Consider that the first strain of myxomatosis introduced to Australian rabbits had a fatality rate of 99.8%. That’s the absolute minimum on what the upper bound for virus lethality should be. AI designs won’t be constrained by natural selection either.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
The idea that there’s a mass of moderate well-integrated muslims is the lie.
You’re technically correct, but only because the “moderate, well-integrated” Muslims become apostates.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
I see the polycule fedora council has replaced the FDA as America’s most incompetent decision-making organization. Truly baffling.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Prices went up around the Russia war
I think the war was less of a cause and more of an effect. Putin chose to invade when he did because he knew the economic conditions would make it harder for the West to impose sanctions. The war did raise energy prices, but when people say things like "supply chain issues", they mean, "Manufacturer X, the world's only producer of component A, has a 6-month order backlog because of lockdowns etc. Manufacturer Y cannot produce component B without component A. Ford needs component B to make F-150s. -> Your local dealership cannot get F-150s and is selling the ones they still have for $10,000 above sticker price."
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Perhaps I'm not sure what you mean by "quality of writing", but when I look at the quality of the ideas expressed in his writing I can't think of anyone parallel. If he invented half of the concepts he claims to then he would be the greatest philosopher of the modern age.
I suppose his prose doesn't have "great literary qualities" or whatever, but every time I pull up There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence I read the whole thing. If it seems boring and trite in the year of our lord 2023, it is only because the entire field of non-academic AI philosophy is built out of the Yudkowskian paradigm.
Nor do I believe that this is a case of deep subject-level knowledge alone. I have read his takes on current events. He is shockingly cogent even there
Statements like this really make you appreciate how hard AI alignment will be. We can't even get humans to reliably differentiate between "prevent illness" and "kill sick people and replace them with healthy people".
More options
Context Copy link