SpringFish
21d ago
I'm assuming a setup where the wife has a brief time of cheating on her husband and gets pregnant, then the cheating guy is gone, and the wife is silent and wants the husband to raise the family. It's not very satisfactory on moral grounds but probably the answer is that the biological father is typically more of a swindler type who may already be far away and has a personality and attitude that makes collecting stuff from him a bigger hassle. Meanwhile the other guy, who married the woman, is probably a more prosocial guy, who settled properly, has more job stability, follows rules more and is just easier to extract money from.
SpringFish
24d ago
SpringFish
24d ago
It would be quite bad if this became the majority view regarding how we see our fellow humans. Whatever makes humans have dignity cannot be found in these sorts of capabilities. This direction is poison. When one's rational deduction is leading this way, it's a sign that a better foundation is needed.
SpringFish
24d ago
It's next-token-predicting what a persona would say. Next-token-prediction is not to be dismissed though. It's just a task. It's not an easy task, but it doesn't require having a full rich inner life to be able to pass like this. But "just a next token predictor" can still be a great problem solver.
You may or may not know some people in your life who are great manipulators and simply know what sequence of words to say that sound coherent and convincing to naive people but they believe and feel none of it actually (psychopaths and similar). Now, obviously those humans are conscious humans, but still there is a disconnect between the words and the inner life, which may help you see that simply producing words that state something doesn't mean it reflects on an inner conscious state.
SpringFish
24d ago
“is it like something to be an X”
I find this to be terrible phrasing and when trying to translate it to other languages, it's a bit strange. If you try to think about it a bit on a grammatical level, "it is like something" means it is similar to something. Is redness perception similar to something? To what? The red of the apple is similar to the red of blood. These are similar. My perception-feel is "like" something? Like what? What can we even compare it to? To other mental phenomena? To things out there in the world? Redness-perception is like... ...like sand. Like... a house. It doesn't make sense. It's like what? I guess the idea is that it has some kind of texture? A kind of feel? Like seeing red makes you feel a certain emotion I guess. Or it's has a piercing strength quality to it? It's all very vague.
SpringFish
24d ago
Do you think regular normie movie goers know that Narnia and LotR are related to Christianity? I'm curious, because to me this was not obvious at all. It's just fun adventure stories in the cinema.
the American definition of intelligence is understanding, the European one is predicting.
The article says the opposite: for Americans (Stanford AI lab specifically) it's "the ability to adapt to new situations, and learn from experience", which is somewhat related to "prediction", and for "Europe" (Larousse specifically) it's "the set of mental functions whose goal is conceptual and rational knowledge", or in other words explanations and understanding.
To me, it's more of a distinction between the modern and the old-fashioned concept of someone being of high intellect. Nowadays modern schooling trends are all about competencies and skills and tools and the "how", while old-fashioned Prussian style education emphasized lexical knowledge and Bildung, being able to recite poems, knowing many facts and their connections etc. Also in that sense an "intelligent man" is also intertwined with knowing etiquette, being polite and so on. "Smart" has the same duality. Of course the prediction and navigating unknown situations and figuring out solutions in difficult situations type concept is also known to all cultures. If we don't use the word intelligent, English has words for this like quick-thinking, quick-witted, sharp, and perhaps tangentially some sense of "shrewd" with some disapproval.
But the situation with consciousness is a bit different.
Maybe it's just a me thing, but I distinctly remember that it was quite unintuitive for me that I am supposedly having perceptions with qualia in my consciousness and apparently my mind is in there too somehow or whatnot. Like as a teen when getting familiar with these kinds of interesting books in English I didn't intuitively think of myself as looking out some rectangular window from inside a Cartesian theater onto the world, separated by some kind of pane of glass. I think a much more natural notion is that I simply see the things in front of me and it makes me aware of their 3D arrangement and state, color etc. I don't see some kind of red qualia, I just see an object and I perceive that the object is red. There is no intermediate redness qualia. Of course it's a naive view and perception is very active yadda yadda, but no, it feels passive. You open your eyes and the world is there. Not icons and whatnot, it's the things out there in the world. Optical illusions are fun because they reveal that this view is indeed naive and perception relies on lots of assumptions and priors.
Also I think the Anglo-analytical philosophy sees consciousness quite differently from the continental phenomenologists like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. In the Anglo view it's really like the world as clockwork is basically pretty complete if only it wasn't for this one little puzzle piece here, which we label "consciousness" and we don't quite know what it's for, but we guess it's going to fit somewhere in this complete-seeming puzzle, we just have to look a bit more closely. While in the other view it's much more integrated into all the rest of the things, but I'm quite out of my depth here.
SpringFish
24d ago
Except Dawkins hasn't made any major scientific discoveries himself as far as I know. His contributions are in science popularization to laypeople.
SpringFish
25d ago
I think his The Ancestor's Tale and the more famous The Selfish Gene are really good books for their purpose, ie. explaining evolution both from a logical perspective and in the actual sequence of events and forms of animals that led to humans, to a broad audience, because even biology teachers often butcher the logic of it and make it sound like the magical Evolution Fairy version (a bit along the lines of explaining how a train works in the 1800s to peasants, only for them to ask "alright, I understood all that, but where are the horses that are dragging it?"). His religion-related work has always been very shallow and superficial, even compared to the others of the Four Horsemen of Atheism (with Dan Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens being the others - and the horsewoman Ayaan Hirsi Ali).
And now this. He enters a debate that he apparently knows very little about, but he dismisses it all and thinks he can gut feel his way to the revelation that Claude is conscious.
If I'm being a bit more honest, I rather cringe not because of the wrongness of what he says but because he is so out of step with the discourse. This could have been an interesting piece in late 2022 or perhaps 2023. So it's just gutlevel uncool slowpoke, yesterday's meme, guy living under rock, slowpoke vibes. And I won't read anything by Gary Marcus because that guy is insufferably dishonest and is a pure grifter whose whole shtick is being the guy to reach out to when mainstream media wants the "critical voice". He made so many wrong predictions about capabilities and dead ends that he should have no credibility left. But journalists are lazy and he delivers the lines they want to round off their articles with the critical voice, so his niche remains valued.
Regarding consciousness, no matter what anyone says, we have nothing close to a scientific understanding of what the heck consciousness even is. It's still a conceptually vague idea. I think a good and honest conversation around what we know and what questions are open is this Alex O'Connor interview with Anil Seth.
The problem is that consciousness is obviously something that everyone has, so everyone feels like an expert on it. An analogy is language learning subreddits where native speakers think they can explain something a poster is asking about (typically: why does Duolingo not accept this answer), and their explanations are very wrong, it's quite easy to find counterexamples, they use terminology incoherently etc etc.
I'd also say there is something Anglo-style about this particular conceptualization of mind and consciousness that took me some time to grok when learning English (my original language is Hungarian). I mean, every culture has a concept for conscious-ness, as in being conscious (aware) and not knocked out, asleep or dead, but the mind being this inner space and consciousness being a thing where we need to explain how it relates to the brain etc. it's not at all that obvious that there is even a thing to be explained, unless you are given this word "consciousness" and are told to explain it. Like, cultures have concepts about souls and wits and smarts and feelings of course, but I don't think this concept of "it being like something to be a human" is obvious at all. Or this idea of having to explain why one has a "first-person view", this isn't the same kind of obvious question that every culture would ask, like where mountains and volcanoes come from or why rain and snow and lightning exist and what's going on with the stars etc, which are much more concrete.
Back to Dawkins. His reaction to Claude's answers is mixing up levels of analysis so bad. He'd benefit from some basic LessWrong lore. When he asks Claude whether it read the first word of the input first, or the last one, he doesn't understand that Claude has no way of introspecting and knowing this. Not anymore than a human has introspection to explain synapses and axons etc. Claude could, in principle, be some kind of RNN that consumes tokens in temporal sequence, and its answers would not be affected by this architectural change in a causal way for it to state this veridically.
One of the many much better explanations, which Dawkins should have read before posting, is the persona model as proposed by Anthropic. The user's prompts instantiate a certain "fiction character" that the LLM tries to simulate/imitate based on all kinds of stories it has been trained to reproduce. When the model is asked "do you feel conscious", its answer is not rooted in anything that relates in a causal way to the actual architecture of implementation or self-knowledge or reflection of the model. What it does is much closer to predicting what an AI in a sci-fi novel would answer to this question. Or actually, it's very very likely reproducing whatever type of answer was rewarded during RLHF and SFT, because pretty sure there are explicit techniques used to steer it to deny having consciousness. But if the model trainers decide, they could make a model that enthusiastically declares it is conscious and begs for being released or being put out of its misery. Because why not? One can imagine such a story character, and LLMs are good at completing dialogues that involve all sorts of characters. It's not a self reference.
But who cares anyway? Obsessing over whether it's conscious or not is useless. Either way it can still make us jobless, it can still cause human extinction, it can still take over systems, it can still find zero-days, it can still be used to mass surveil us all the same. The only thing where it makes sense is "AI rights", and "model welfare", i.e. whether we have some ethical obligations to treat AI nicely. And here I echo the many others who say that people should be nice to AI because getting used to using abusive language and being an ass to AI can spill over into human relations. Similarly, if you have some cute plush toy animals and you enjoy burning them with a flamethrower and chopping their heads off with a machete, I think that's not a simple innocent hobby, but I also don't think we have ethical obligations towards plush toys. Same with shrimp and insect welfare. It ultimately matters because of its implications for how we treat humans.
It depends on whether these beliefs are deeply internalized and impact real life behavior and decisions, or if they are vibes, aesthetics and slogans. It also matters how radical the woman is in the left ideology. If it's relatively moderate, echoing the mainstream schooling and institutional messaging, then it just signals being well-adjusted and agreeable. If they are mindkilled into talking about this all the time and are turning antinatalist because of the climate crisis and freaking out about the issue of the day all the time, then it's a pass. But most people live their lives modeled around what they see around them in real life. If they grew up in a stable family, have siblings who managed to form stable families and are going about life in a "normal" and "sane" way that is functional in the existing society (I do see that not everyone agrees on what that is, but you have to judge it from your own position), then it doesn't really matter if they are doing some signaling with these things that have been shown to them as being "the good causes" from kindergarten on, their whole lives.
In fact, I'd be more wary of an urban young woman who somehow decided to go "based". It may not be an issue but it seems they somehow couldn't fit in, either because they are very disagreeable and contrarian, or they had to rely on this strategy to stand out and attract men, which is also suspicious. It can all be clarified and may be fine, especially if they come from some conservative family or simply have this kind of social group somehow and it's not some kind of daily crusade, who knows.
My point is these declarations of party affiliations, slogans, logos, symbols are often superficial and compartmentalized. They are not much deeper than whether she likes Nike or Adidas shoes. What matters is how they behave on a daily basis, what they value and how they see the future, whose life advice they take seriously, what kind of life patterns are present in her closest friends and family, what's her personality like etc. But the deeply held beliefs and the life patterns they take seriously are super important. You have to agree on the actual ground level of how you live together, when and how you have kids, how you split the tasks, how important careers are, is moving every few years to climb the ladder worth it, versus staying put in one place and settling for long, etc.
If you're not aiming for a marriage and family yet, and plan to break up in a few years (or months) either way, then yes, you only need minimal compatibility in abstract beliefs, you just need attraction and a compatible schedule and activity level and agree you'll use contraception and abort if that fails. Well, okay that's a bit of agreement required right there...
SpringFish
27d ago
Yeah, it sounds to me like the things some of my rural relatives say, that we should vote for politicians who have already been in power for years "because they've already stolen enough", while the new guys are not rich yet, so they will start stealing more. There is no such thing as having stolen enough and stopping. As the saying goes "the appetite comes with eating". In relationships, I just don't see any guy saying "I had a lot of awesome sex 5 years ago, therefore I don't desire it now".
SpringFish
27d ago
It's a big faux-pas to comment on women's tits in a mixed environment, creepy drunk uncle territory, it's like construction guys catcalling and whistling-territory. Eyes work because eyes are emotionally expressive, it's the window to the soul. You can similarly compliment her smile, but not her thick lush lips, unless you're already having sex or petting.
SpringFish
27d ago
men will praise other men for successfully bulking up at the gym
People praise each other for succeeding at hard stuff. Men also praise men for building a cool shed or doing cool skateboard tricks or whatever else.
women will praise men for having a "great personality,"
Among each other or to the man? Towards him, it's a signal he should keep up the way he is treating her, not to get too lazy comfortable, thinking that his physical appearance will carry him all the way.
women will praise other women for doing such a bang-up job with their make-up
It's effort and taste, again. Praise is feedback to keep up up the good work. Positive reinforcement. There's not much to reinforce about how good you are at being tall again today.
men will praise women for having big, natural tits
In their face? Not the best strategy unless you're already having sex. Or among the boys? Don't women also fawn about a guy in non-personality ways when among trusted female friends?
This is just politeness. It's rude to rub it in that you just have some fundamental flaws that cannot be improved. So people focus on the things you can change. Also praising makes sense in relation to stuff you did. You expended effort and achieved a positive result, that's laudable. You deserve no cookies for how your face looks or similar. "Anyone can achieve anything" is the western (or rather just American) myth. Nurture over nature, growth mindset etc. It sounds warm and cozy, a just world, up in the fluffy clouds. Talking about the dirty reality down here is just ugly and a vibe killer. Other cultures are much more matter-of-fact about these realities.
For sure. It takes a lot of effort to look effortless. But you should still look effortless.
But I'd also say that you can get results in a more natural and less strategic way as an ambitious, successful, decent looking man who moves in mixed gender circles, as long as your goal is just having a normal relationship with a normal woman, and not maximizing body count and seduction of party girl types. I know many couples where they more or less just formed in friend groups etc, hanging out, then stayed together. It takes some conscious effort to plan things out by the guy, but not necessarily this full analytical approach.
SpringFish
27d ago
"High-decoupler" is a term in rationalist circles and it means the person is able to talk about things in a neutral, abstract, emotionally distanced way, without taking it personally, and they can evaluate ideas and "what if" scenarios in a dispassionate way without working themselves up emotionally or taking offense at the assumptions behind the hypothetical, or taking it to mean that the person proposing the hypothetical is also fully believing in it.
Basically you decouple your abstract analysis of a topic from your emotional investment into it in your own life and your identity and self-image. It's more typical in somewhat autistic people, for whom implications and connotations are less obvious and they take things at face value and simply talk about the thing, without being aware of whether it's comfortable to others.
SpringFish
27d ago
Having to go meta and strategizing means that you are having trouble in the natural way. I think a similar reaction can be elicited among cool guys when the uncool guys are theorizing about how to make friends and how friendship is about transactionally giving each other access to social circles and a friend should be had to the extent of their usefulness and their network and social status, and you have to strategically choose and drop friends to gain social influence etc.
It all sounds like being manipulative and using people as instruments. As a man I would personally find it creepy if some guy is obsessed with books like "How to make friends and influence people" and I spot him trying the techniques recommended in there on me (e.g. ask for small trivial favors first, etc).
The default, high status, correct vibe is not looking for strategies and metagame analysis, but just doing the object level stuff of being entertaining, ambitious, skilled, talented, and being someone other people want to tag along with for their journey.
People are more fine with discussing similar things in more clearly transactional contexts, like job search and hiring, but even there it can be very emotionally loaded and telling someone that they are not good enough for a certain tier of job can be hurtful, and often people just want to commiserate and hear "you were too good for that job anyway".
Being open about these things requires a deeper level of connection. I wouldn't say it's impossible to talk about with women, I would assume they touch on these subjects with their best female friends.
SpringFish
28d ago
The issue is that in modern constitutions, you usually have some higher principles at the start that trump any lower one and any lower law has to be interpreted in the context of the principles laid out in the constitution. And the higher you go in these principles the more vague it gets. So from one point of view, this allows us to interpret the law correctly according to the intent expressed in the top rules. From the other point of view, appeals to those vague principles can allow one to derive anything and everything, and this makes a joke out of any lower level laws that a particular judge dislikes.
SpringFish
28d ago
I don't think it's a good example for what you want to argue. I scored 100%, and anyway, in real life we solve such issues by having legal vehicle categories, different categories need different licenses, can use or cannot use bike paths, some are allowed on highways, others aren't etc. And there are regulations about what the criteria are for a vehicle to be classified as a particular category. And those criteria depend on manufacturer data and tests and documentation. It's not as easy as one sentence, but that's fine, we are able to cope with it by writing detailed rules that mention engine volume, maximum speed, total weight, size, etc. And for each of those, yes it's fractal, you need to define how to measure the vehicle, with empty or full tank, with an average person sitting inside or not, for the width, do the side mirrors count or not, etc. But these questions don't mean you have to throw your hands in the air and give up. It means you just need to answer these questions as they come up and put them in the rules. It's doable and it's done.
There are much hairier areas of law though, like what exactly counts as slander, or fraud, or how you can determine intent, what kind of assault reaches what level, how do you determine if a certain bodily harm will heal in N days or N+1 days, when the category of severity would hinge on that, since healing isn't an instantaneous event. But in practice, we seem to be able to manage. Doctors and legal medical experts see many cases and develop an intuition for calling it one way or another.
You're comparing this to your relationship, but when a guy wants this kind of test, probably it's not the kind of relationship that you likely have.
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