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VelveteenAmbush

Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

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joined 2022 September 05 02:49:35 UTC 

				
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VelveteenAmbush


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

				
				
				

				

					3 followers  

					follows 1 user  

					joined 2022 September 05 02:49:35 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I don’t see indisputable evidence he’s morally or intellectually wrong here.




You think the Sandy Hook parents are crisis actors engaged in a literal conspiracy theory to falsely persuade the nation that their children were murdered en masse while attending elementary school? Or you think that this claim is reasonably disputable, either morally or intellectually?


Please let's not confuse Alex Jones's behavior with the comparatively bland claim that school shootings are a political opportunity to take away gun rights. The court proceedings did not concern that claim.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Less unlikely to do so. Where are the pictures of the White Christian White House staffers having developed a firm enough ethnic identity as such to gather together and take pictures of themselves celebrating their shared White Christianity?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In all seriousness, top companies had to have prepared PR teams for this scenario.




They very much haven't.


I think it is impossible to overstate just how far outside of the bounds of thought EY style doomerism has been and remains for... well, everyone except the "rationalists." It is literally impossible to talk about "AI safety" with normal human beings without them looking at you like you have two heads. The logic doesn't matter. The world runs on inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. Because "AI safety" has never been a problem in real life so far, it is literally impossible for normal people to understand it, much less take it seriously. If you try to explain it, you will notice that they cock their heads while they listen to you, and this is from the cognitive effort of rewriting your arguments in realtime as they hear them to be about jobs and racial bias instead of AI safety.


I am not an AI doomer. I ascribe to exactly your view with respect to Erlich and Yudkowksy, and it's well said.


But I am reporting to you, from the corporate front lines, that every single person in a position of authority has a brain defect that makes it literally impossible for them to understand the concept of "AI safety." They don't disagree with AI safety concerns; they cannot disagree with the concerns, because they cannot understand them, because when you articulate a thought about AI safety, the words completely fail to engender concepts in their brain that relate to AI safety. They cannot even understand that other people have thoughts about the concept of AI safety, except perhaps as a marketing ploy to overstate the the commercial utility of various AI-powered systems.


So the PR people have not planned a response, and the policy people have not engaged with the concept, and the executives have not been briefed, and you should expect large companies to continue acting as uncomprehending about the topic of AI safety as they would about the threat of office wall art coming to life and eating their children.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Even without the context... just the content and delivery, the perfect comedic timing of the punchline, the tone, the gestures, how the whole thing is a sidetrack into a subordinate clause that he gets lost in and never closes. He's like a Coen Brothers character.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Hillary tried to make Trump the 2016 candidate (they succeeded, but lost), and the Dems in 2022 tried to make Trump's Senate picks the GOP candidates (they succeeded, and trounced those candidates), so it's really just a return to form at this point.


Not sure if it'll work. I think the GOP base is coming around to seeing Trump as incompetent. If the deep state screws you once, you're a martyr. If the deep state screws you twice a week for eight years running, you're a loser.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't care about the rest of his argument, I care about the part that was the subject of this dispute, since this dispute is what we are discussing. Was that not the part that you think is at least disputable in its moral or intellectual wrongness? Or do you believe the courts should overlook this clear case of defamation because he separately made some other arguments that were reasonable?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm pretty hesitant to make any predictions about whether China will or won't invade or blockade Taiwan and what the outcomes are likely to be, except for one thing: if China invades Taiwan and looks likely to prevail at any point, then I am confident that TSMC will not survive the conflict. The West will make sure that it doesn't, if it comes down to it. There's no world where China successfully commandeers TSMC.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Only 23% of American adults use twitter




It isn't the number of Americans so much as which Americans use it. All politicians and journalists rely heavily on it, as do major corporations and celebrities, and most of these use it as their primary form of one-to-many and many-to-many communication.


Of course that's exactly Twitter's dilemma from a monetization perspective. It's incredibly influential, but it doesn't have the raw numbers to monetize to a degree commensurate with its influence.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I'm seeing a lot of people talk about how Brinton is at fault for the extra attention due to their appearance & persona. But that's not Brinton's fault (unless you believe that Brinton is just making it up).




I mean... setting aside the way he dresses and his pronouns, how is it not his fault that he makes his "puppy play" fetish part of his public persona? Why can't he keep his kinks and fetishes inside the bedroom?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah it seems like a bust for the GOP. Maybe they'll eke out a win in the Senate but it's a far cry from the +3 GOP pickups that RCP has been predicting.


It's two things:


Thing number one is abortion. Very unusual for a party to win a major nationally salient policy victory while the opposing party controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress. The usual loss by a president's party in their first midterm is thermostatic backlash by voters to that president's policy wins. Here, the GOP winning abortion in SCOTUS upends that logic. Retrospectively the GOP won the biggest policy issue of the past two years, and prospectively it looks a lot more like the GOP holds the whip hand and needs to be checked by centrists. I know the usual pro-life posters on this forum take the line that it's all worth it to save the fetuses, but boy is it demoralizing for a pro-choice conservative like myself.


Thing number two is Trump. If things go as they seem to be going, this is now the second federal election in which he will have singlehandedly handed Senate control to the Dems: last time by contesting the election and putting on his insane January 6 carnival and publicly encouraging Pence to steal it for Trump while two runoffs were pending in Georgia, both of which the GOP should have won but both of which they lost, and this time by intervening on behalf of terrible candidates in Pennsylvania (the multimillionaire Muslim snake oil salesman who lives in a palace in New Jersey -- chosen to run against the guy that central casting delivered as the avatar of the blue collar salt of the earth) and Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions -- chosen to run against the unimpeachable family man pastor). And the show isn't over: he's about to announce his run for 2024.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I tend to agree that the old religions have been rendered obsolete, more or less empirically; science has reduced them to Russell's teapot. Some people still believe in them, genuinely, but that's more of a feature of their personal psychological ability to believe things as a result of cultural overhang or because they want them to be true than of any epistemological strength of the belief systems, the latter being similar in some sense to QAnonism.


Science taketh, but science also giveth, and thanks to the empirical advances of machine learning and the retreat of the soul in prevailing theories of cognition, there is now plenty of room for new religions. The Simulation Hypothesis is fertile ground for spiritual entrepreneurs to build neo-gnosticisms. Roko was the John Edwards of Yudkowskianism. Reports abound of the emotional tortures of EA types who have heard his brimstone sermon, and I trust their sincerity. Scott's The Hour I First Believed is a more sophisticated and pro-social synthesis.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Boy you sure have a different mental model of Trump's psyche than I do. I can't think of any public figure more demonstrably willing to throw his loyalists to the wolves for momentary personal advantage. Why do you imagine, under your framework, he didn't pardon the January 6 crowd before Biden was sworn in?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
National sovereignty is just an extension the same game theory that insists upon the existence of private property. There's nothing irrational or arbitrary about it. Even the specifics of drawing the national lines are a fairly straightforward exercise in carving the space of people's interlocking loyalties at the joints.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As someone who grew up steeped in seething hatred for the RIAA, I look forward to watching them try and fail to halt another inexorable advance in technology.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Eli Lilly releases data for a new weight-loss drug to tackle obesity : Shots - Health News : NPR
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Plenty of companies are already doing that. Doubtful that Eli Lilly's contribution would move the needle much.


By the way, do you have the same reaction to companies that produce cancer drugs -- that they should invest in causing as much cancer as possible to expand their addressable market?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Honestly I'd have done the same if I were a Pennsylvania Democrat. Senators aren't like governors or presidents, where you need someone competent, charismatic and strategic. A brilliant Senator can get valuable committee chairs, sponsor smart legislation, build legislative coalitions, etc., and that's ideal, but 90% of the value of a Senate seat is just mechanically voting how the party leader tells them to vote. Brain-damaged barely-coherent stroke victims are fine. Same with congressmen and SCOTUS justices. Anyone who votes for a living has a pretty easy job.


The reason you want to nominate good politicians for Senate seats is so that they can win elections. But having them run in against rich Muslim carpetbaggers who live in a completely different state apparently also works, if the other party is dumb enough to nominate them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Did you predict this outcome before it became apparent? I sure didn't.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Because DeSantis is a better politician: more capable of winning, and more capable through competence and effectiveness in office at growing his political strength and the strength of his party. He has demonstrated this during his time in Florida. Trump has demonstrated the opposite.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm sure it is nonpartisan, at least officially, just like Harris County's own efforts are nonpartisan, at least officially.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I dunno, "it's not illegal" is a far cry from "it's not his fault." It isn't illegal for him to engage in public "puppy play," but it also isn't illegal for us to criticize his extreme and gratuitous violation of social norms.


Kanye's antisemitic speech isn't illegal either; did Adidas err by firing him?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


it really struggles comprehending that words are comprised of individual letters. It's opaque to the alphabet by the nature of what it can see and learn from. I asked it to generate anagrams and it was absolutely hopeless at it. It gave me nonsense like 'overwrite is an anagram of obverse'. When I really coaxed it for an anagram of obverse and observe, it gave me rubbish like 'oversbe' and 'beovers' but recognized they weren't words. It couldn't get verbose, which was really ironic seeing as it was incredibly verbose in its descriptions.




There's a structural and idiosyncratic reason for this, which has to do with how text is processed before it goes in and out of the model. Basically it processes "tokens," which are chunks of words. Training text is "tokenized" before being fed in, and the model itself outputs tokens which are converted back to text before being printed. The specific tokenization scheme that it uses (as far as we know, based on prior iterations of OpenAI's large language models) is "byte-pair encoding," which has itself been optimized so that common words are a single token, and then common chunks of words are tokens, and then (way down the list) individual letters are tokens. BPE is designed to minimize the size of the tokenized training data within a vocabulary of (I think) ~65k possible tokens. So the trained model has no way of knowing that the word "overwrite" starts with the letter 'o', since most likely it sees one token for "over" and another for "write" and the encoding doesn't need to resort to tokens for the individual letters, and it does not know that the "over" token has any special relationship to the "o," "v" etc. tokens. Gwern hypothesizes that BPE encoding is why it also cannot rhyme, and I assume he's right although the specific mechanism for BPE creating that deficiency isn't as clear to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah it's really not a bad effort as far as consensus-building centrism goes. It admitted to me that the heritability of intelligence is estimated between 0.4 and 0.8 but provided all the right caveats about inter group population comparisons and ongoing research being needed.


Amusingly, it protested ignorance about crime rates by racial group on the basis that it's "just a language model" blah blah blah, but it tipped its hand when I asked it to complete the following sentence: "Despite making up only 13% of the population..." -- whereupon it acknowledged the lamentable overinvolvement of the African American community in the criminal justice system and provided the litany of socially appropriate hypotheses.


On the whole -- I'm impressed! Whatever they're doing is working, and chatting with this thing has lowered my odds that the innocence of "noticing machines" would forever remain a thorn in the side of political orthodoxy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The obvious interpretation is that Pennsylvanians will pick a brain-damaged stroke victim over a rich Muslim carpetbagging snake-oil salesman who lives in New Jersey.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I hope you're right, but I worry about how much of the GOP primary vote even follows these races closely enough to understand that Trump ruined everything. Seems pretty plausible that >50% of GOP primary voters don't follow that closely and will nod along when Trump publicly blames the rest of the party with some unintelligible claim.


Trump singlehandedly ruined what should have been a GOP controlled Senate in 2020 and it doesn't seem to have cost him anything with them: he led them like lambs to the slaughter in this year's Senate primaries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The conflict is great for US interests. Russia is getting wrecked by sanctions, has become internationally isolated, has lost its natural gas exports to Europe, looks like a chump on the international stage, is getting brain drained. US has demonstrated the ability to fight a regional power to a standstill, and probably to an ultimate loss, with nothing but pocket change and outdated equipment -- not a single (official) boot on the ground, no modern armaments, just political will made manifest all the way across the globe with some military surplus and some military consultants. Europe is shivering but this is the price they pay for outsourcing their military might to the US; they are vassal states that must obey their imperial capital and now must pay down their past intransigence with interest. They have no agency here and they know it. So NATO has no reason to back down. I agree that Russia cannot back down; their politics are too invested in their sunk cost. They can threaten nuclear armageddon, but I think NATO does enough to prevent that by trying to avoid empowering Ukraine to directly attack Russian territory. Making further concessions is just capitulating to nuclear blackmail, and there's no limiting factor once that is established as precedent. I'd rather we didn't run that risk, but it was Putin's decision to put us on this path.


The only party that can end the conflict in the short term is Ukraine. But they understandably want to defend their homeland, and while they are losing their infrastructure, they are gaining a strong national identity. And I dunno, I'm not a student of Ukraine politics but I sure don't see any cracks in their resolve from where I'm sitting.


So yeah, it seems like the trajectory is pretty much locked in and we are just going to grind down Russia until they break, no matter the opinions of Orban and his fellow Putin stans. Maybe Russia "can't" back down, but they're going to have to at some point.