SnapDragon
1yr ago
Experimenting with giving ChatGPT-4 a more structured memory is easy enough to do that individuals are trying it out: https://youtube.com/watch?v=YXQ6OKSvzfc I find his estimate of AGI-in-18-months a little optimistic, but I can't completely rule out the possibility that the "hard part" of AGI is already present in these LLMs and the remainder is just giving them a few more cognitive tools. We're already so far down the rabbit hole.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
BTW, if you want to read a good example of pre-Yudkowsky rationality, I recommend The Demon-Haunted World. Carl Sagan did a lot to help me learn how to think clearly, in my formative years.
SnapDragon
3mo ago
Citation needed...? It's a little hard to ask the pig. And even if true, should I care overmuch that the pig "feels stressed" for the last hour of its life? Humans go through worse (to say nothing of how animals die in nature!). If you want me to care about animal welfare, you should focus on the part that really matters - the life the pig lived - rather than the lurid, but ultimately unimportant, details of its death.
SnapDragon
3mo ago
"Brutally" slaughtering a pig in "disgusting" "industrial" conditions? Those are very subjective words. The pig doesn't care that it's not being given a dignified sendoff by its loving family at the end of a fulfilled life in a beautiful grassy glade with dandelions wafting in the breeze. Humans fear death; animals don't even understand the concept. As long as we kill them quickly, I really don't give a shit how it's done.
Which isn't to say I don't have concerns about factory farming. The rest of the pig's life may be filled with suffering, and (IMO) we're rich enough, as a society, to do better. My morality-o-meter is ok with sacrificing, say, 0.01% of value to humans to improve the life of pigs by 500%.
I happen to believe that most of what our modern legislators do IS net-negative
If you think all regulations can be monolithically grouped into a giant "is bad" category...
If the difference between "bad regulations" and "good regulations" don't matter...
I have no idea how you're extracting these arguments from what I said. (shrug)
Comments like these are pretentious and unnecessary.
For the record, I wasn't trying to be mean-spirited (just "funny"), but I see it could come off that way.
SnapDragon
7mo ago
So, I mostly agree with you - I wouldn't expect IDF to manufacture evidence, either (that's the sort of thing that plays right into their detractors' hands). But it's weird how on-the-nose the dialogue is. "Oh gosh, we're the ones that bombed the hospital, oh no." We can put aside that I wouldn't expect these people to even admit to themselves that it wasn't Israel's fault. I expect real intelligence in the real world to be noisy and full of irrelevancies and requiring expert analysis to even figure out its implications. Recording a straightforward admission like this would be hitting the covert-ops jackpot.
SnapDragon
8mo ago
Well, sure, in a vacuum most people gravitate towards censoring speech they don't like. That doesn't mean it's a good idea. We shouldn't structure society around people's natural destructive impulses; we should structure society around what allows humans to flourish. And we've known for centuries that that is a free and open exchange of ideas. Not because there are no ideas which are genuinely harmful! But because humans and human organizations are too fickle, ignorant, and self-interested to be trusted as arbiters of which ideas meet that standard.
SnapDragon
8mo ago
Funny to see Kim Campbell in that list. Amusingly, you're literally correct about her being PM 30 years ago; but her entire reign lasted 4 months, and the only reason she's remembered at all is that in the next election her party went from 156 seats in parliament to 2. (Yes, TWO. T as in Total, W as in Wipe, O as in Out.) Which was really Mulroney's fault, but she was the scapegoat.
SnapDragon
10mo ago
I can confirm that this was not how Google-circa-2010 thought. A user having to redo a search was correctly treated as a negative signal. There was a joke along the lines of "we're the only site on the Internet that tries to get users off of it as fast as possible". I think even modern Google (which, IMO, has completely lost its moral compass and belief in free speech) wouldn't make an entry-level mistake like that. They're the leaders in the search market for a reason.
You're right about the constant A/B testing, though. And sometimes it's sliced by user, so you can't just try again in a new tab. Unless it's Incognito, and even that might not be enough - let me tell you about today's sponsor, NordVPN...
SnapDragon
11mo ago
Ah, perfect, thanks for the link. That looks like exactly the same thing; I completely missed it because I didn't care about Woman King in the slightest. 99% is as hilariously unbelievable as El Presidente winning an election with 105% of the votes. So, it really does look like RT is willing to just blatantly lie about certain - ahem - "culturally relevant" movies, and that casts doubt even on other scores that aren't obviously fake. Maybe I can keep clicking through to the "all audiences" score, but who knows how long they'll allow that? Looks like it's time to drop RT for good and go to Metacritic ... which also uses an opaque aggregation algorithm, but at least I haven't caught them in an obvious lie yet!
SnapDragon
11mo ago
Note that in this case, Rotten Tomatoes shows you the all audience score, not a verified score. That movie was also the subject of woke controversy due to race and gender swapping a bunch of characters, so a lot of the negative scores probably come from people who were unhappy about those changes. This isn't an apples-to-oranges comparison.
Oh, good catch! I didn't even notice that (showing how insidious that "verified audience" marker is). For some reason I thought Peter Pan & Wendy was another theatrical release, but apparently it went straight to Disney+, so there are no verified reviews. So it's a lot less comparable to TLM than I thought.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Yup, and "he" was also commonly used as a gender-neutral pronoun. But this subtle linguistic point has the unfortunate quality of looking problematic, so it attracts ignorant activists. I haven't seen the word "niggardly" used in a long time, either - I suspect that even people who know what it means self-censor, because it's just not worth attracting that kind of attention when it's low-cost to just use a different word. Thus language drifts on...
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I am already getting tremendous value out of GPT4 in my work as a programmer. Even if the technology stops here, it will change my life. I have still never ridden in an AV. I reject your analogy, and your conclusion, completely.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I want to be clear that this is coming from somebody who once liked his writings. I didn't worship him. I didn't learn much from him. But he has always had a fun and unique writing style.
But believe me, there's no confusion here. Capital-R Rationality may be something that crystalized around LessWrong and the Sequences, but the concepts of rationality are hardly new; we're building on a legacy of humans struggling to explain the Universe that has been built over thousands of years. Yudkowsky wrote some entertaining essays, some of which are insightful (and some of which are silly, particularly when he veers into fields of science he doesn't know well). You could credit him with collecting and indexing a few good ideas. But he's very bad at practicing what he preaches - Scott, for instance, is far better at actually making and testing predictions than Yudkowsky. I suppose cult leaders don't usually lower themselves to the level of scrubbing the temple floor.
As for AI Safety, no. No, no, no. There's absolutely no defense for his egotistical claim in the April Fool's post. Futurists have been discussing AI safety since at least Asimov's Three Laws. What do you think AI researchers did before him, shrug and go "hmm, I wonder if making this neural net behave is something I should study sometime"? Maybe I can trace one particular flavour of the "edifice" to his writings - superintelligence-goes-FOOM-breaks-out-of-black-box-and-builds-nanotech-in-a-bio-lab - but AI safety as a whole would still exist and look pretty much the same without him. Arguably, it would be healthier, with the many people with different intelligent perspectives not being drowned out by his singular view and stubborn insistence that he knows the unknowable future.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
Sounds like some sort of insanely well read but very dim intern that you can always ask to do anything through a computer or something. Very weird but probably very useful in a Jarvis-from-Iron-Man sort of way.
Yeah, that's a pretty good description of it! I'm definitely still the brains of the outfit. But it's getting closer to the "Hollywood UI" ideal where you use your computer by talking to it rather than by remembering the correct syntax of a Unix command.
I'm concerned that this tech is still very much on lock in from giant corporations. Microsoft's Office integrations all seem to rely on spying on everything you do and those training costs are still too prohibitive for FOSS to remain competitive. I sure hope that changes.
No argument here. I personally trust Microsoft a little more than Google, but still, I'm really hoping this tech gets democratized sooner rather than later. (I've heard Alpaca, which is small enough to run on a PC, is pretty good, but "pretty good" might not cut it.)
SnapDragon
1yr ago
VERY strong disagree. You're so badly wrong on this that I half suspect that when the robots start knocking on your door to take you to the CPU mines, you'll still be arguing "but but but you haven't solved the Riemann Hypothesis yet!" Back in the distant past of, oh, the 2010s, we used to wonder if the insanely hard task of making an AI as smart as "your average Redditor" would be attainable by 2050. So that's definitely not the own you think it is.
We've spent decades talking to trained parrots and thinking that was the best we could hope for, and now we suddenly have programs with genuine, unfakeable human-level understanding of language. I've been using ChatGPT to help me with work, discussing bugs and code with it in plain English just like a fellow programmer. If that's not a "fundamental change", what in the world would qualify? The fact that there are still a few kinds of intellectual task left that it can't do doesn't make it less shocking that we're now in a post-Turing Test world.
SnapDragon
1yr ago
I'm assuming you didn't watch the GPT-4 announcement video, where one of the demos featured it doing exactly that: reading the tax code, answering a technical question about it, then actually computing how much tax a couple owed. I imagine you'll still want to check its work, but (unless you want to argue the demo was faked) GPT-4 is significantly better than ChatGPT at math. Your intuition about the limits of AI is 4 months old, which in 2023-AI-timescale terms is basically forever. :)
SnapDragon
4mo ago
I'm far from an expert (and I doubt anyone else in this thread is either), but I'm not sure I really agree with your "extremely dangerous" assessment. Lots of things have a 100% kill rate. Like, congratulations, they've reinvented rabies? A virus that represents a serious risk to society needs to combine a number of unlikely factors, and "killing the host" is probably the easy part. (Ironically, after a certain point, high lethality makes a virus less threatening - a virus's host needs to survive to spread it on!) To truly threaten civilization, you'd have to combine it with a long asymptomatic but highly contagious incubation period.
Of course, because the media are idiots, the article you linked mentions the "surprisingly rapid" death of the mice as if that's supposed to make it more, not less, scary. Ah, journalists, never change.
SnapDragon
5mo ago
Maybe shot 5 times? Or maybe 32 times? I suppose there's not much difference between the two.
SnapDragon
7mo ago
So, I guess your argument is that it doesn't feel icky because you claim he's lying when he says he's doing the icky thing, and his hidden motivation is more practical (and, well, moral)? That's still beside the point - the fact that Dems are completely fine with announcing a racist appointment is the problem, not the 4D chess Newsom might be playing.
Also, I actually do think Newsom would have chosen somebody completely unsuitable, with the right characteristics, if he'd had to. We've seen a string of skin-colour-and-genital based appointments already from the Dems, from Karine Jean-Pierre to Ketanji Brown Jackson to Kamala Harris herself. I'm sure there are more, but I don't pay that much attention. It would be coincidental if all these people, selected from a favoured 6% of the population, really were the best choices. It really does seem like this is just what you have to do to play ball on the Democrat side.
SnapDragon
9mo ago
| The AC example is striking, on the net it takes less energy to cool than to heat.
So, I was going to tear into you for what I thought was obvious physics nonsense. (Cooling, after all, goes against entropy, whereas heating is 100% efficient.) But after doing a little research I realized I didn't know what I was talking about - AC systems and heat pumps move heat around, and can do so more efficiently than simply pouring energy into the system. And, for whatever reason, it looks like AC typically has higher SEER ratings than heat pumps' HSPF (both being a measure of BTUs/Watt-hour). Whoops. I was about to be Wrong On The Internet.
Thought I'd post this reply anyway, rather than just being an anonymous person who learns something from your post but doesn't say anything. (Internet forums need more positive reinforcement...)
SnapDragon
9mo ago
Well, they can demand it, but it's society's support that allows that demand to have teeth. Like @Walterodim says, we need to get back to the point where you had no moral/legal obligation to comply when somebody else tries to control you.
You're right about the rest of the trans issues. I realize I was being a bit naive - bathroom/changing room access, for instance, is both important and far too common to litigate. Ending cancel culture isn't going to help us find a compromise between the two sides of that debate...
SnapDragon
9mo ago
Well, yes? An NFL player would be enough by itself, but it looks like he also started a charity foundation. He undoubtedly has strong sponsorship and college connections. Clearly the definition of "elite" is going to be subjective, but do you think a former NFL player is going to be turned away from a schmoozy high-status party?
Some people on The Motte seem to have really REALLY high standards. Maybe you're Silicon Valley CEOs slumming it with the rest of us. :)
SnapDragon
10mo ago
My username is a generic ratsphere pun that I don't use anywhere else.
Off topic, but I have to say it's a brilliant pun and makes me smile whenever I see it.
Good points. I don't think we really disagree, then. I happen to really enjoy entertainment that takes hundreds of people to produce (AAA movies and games), and there just wouldn't really be any way for those to exist without IP. But music and fiction aren't like that, and it would indeed be interesting if there were no limits on fanfic. (Would people still gravitate to the original author - or their descendants - to add the "canonical" imprimatur to particular stories, a la Cursed Child? Or would the "oral history" aspect win out? I wonder.)
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