astrolabia
8mo ago
I agree with everything you wrote in this reply. But your reply seems to have nothing to do with your message I originally replied to. Why were you mentioning the cost of tokenization?
astrolabia
8mo ago
Why are you talking about the footprint of a tokenizer? Tokenization is cheap compared to actually evaluating the LLM.
astrolabia
8mo ago
Thanks for clarifying your position. I suppose if I thought that ChatGPT was a one-off, I might have a similar position to yours. In my view, however, there's been a pretty consistent, smooth, and somewhat predictable trajectory that whole time, and has continued since ChatGPT. If every almost single remaining eval being almost saturated from ChatGPT till now doesn't look like "anything to write home about", I don't know what could.
astrolabia
8mo ago
I'm hoping you'd providing arguments or evidence about the likelihood of different outcomes. I'm not sure what calling something a null hypothesis means other than being a bald assertion that it's likely.
I'll go first: rapid recent improvements in AI continuously over the last 12 years and massive R&D efforts going on make it likely that substantial improvements will continue.
astrolabia
8mo ago
Seems like you're just begging the question here. Why is that the correct null hypothesis?
astrolabia
8mo ago
There are just as many people committed to cracking eggs at all costs as there people who will claim that puberty blockers gave their cancer cancer.
I don't think that's true. Or at least, my impression is that almost every elementary through high school teacher in north america who talks about the issue gives the impression that it's basically possible to successfully transition.
All I can say is that we should let people make their own choices, and if they're hard and risky choices, do our best to ensure they're exposed to the facts they need.
I don't think I'm willing to bite the libertarian bullet here. E.g. I don't want my kids to have the option to do heroin, even if it's paired with a pamphlet explaining the real likely outcomes. However, I don't even think that that's a viable option. Seems like our options are: ban and demonize heroin, or legalize it and subsidize its use (as was recently done in British Columbia).
Same with transitioning kids: I don't see how we ever get to a world where it's both legal and the pros and cons are presented honestly. So I think I'd rather throw the few kids who could conceivably benefit from it under the bus and ban it for everybody.
astrolabia
8mo ago
Sounds like we agree on basically everything. Except I want to reserve the right to value things independently of whether they cause secondary problems. E.g. I'd fight to stop secretly torturing people even if the practice didn't cause secondary problems.
astrolabia
8mo ago
I basically agree with you about values and freedom. I guess my main fear is around the information environment we provide re: "This is the closest we can get you today." I'm not an expert but I get the impression that many (maybe most?) people who attempt to transition are deeply mislead about both the best and worst-case outcomes. I just don't expect any modern Western institution to be able to honest about what wretched results most transitioners end up having, nor about what most people honestly think of them.
Relatedly, Blanchard wrote about how his MtF patients could usually see that the other MtF patients clearly did not pass, but believed that they themselves did.
I think you could make similar arguments about the information environment surrounding lots of other early life choices, or educational choices such as pursuing arts degrees. But most of those are less catastrophic and irreversible. I guess at least Western society now does a pretty good job of showing the downsides of joining the army.
astrolabia
8mo ago
how to accurately determine if a child is trans
It seems like this would require defining what it means to be trans... any suggestions?
Those people ought to just be ignored and will simply lose their credibility over time if giving puberty blockers to kids proves itself to be fine.
Seems like you're begging the question here. If people think something is wrong in principle, then it won't be "fine" by their lights even if it doesn't cause secondary problems.
astrolabia
9mo ago
My guess is that part of the idea is to route around management. Presumably do-nothing employees are already known to their managers, but have been receiving some sort of protection for years.
astrolabia
10mo ago
One reason to be part of a pension like the NHS is that it puts you in an alliance with a large constituency who might plausibly have enough political power between them to keep the gravy train going down the road.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Neither wants to consider that getting off his ass and doing things will solve his problems, or at least make them manageable.
Seems like doing both that and addressing whatever seems to be a larger problem is possible, and in fact, laudible? Yes many people ignore their own problems too much while ineffectually preening about global problems, but I guess I'd also hate the world where no one had the impulse for public service. OTOH, now that I think about it, that might look like a libertarian paradise if there were still kickstarter-like coordination mechanisms.
astrolabia
11mo ago
Got it. But what's the new, non-outdated consensus?
astrolabia
11mo ago
Right. But what's the new consensus? That AIs will take all our jobs, including the police and military, and we'll all live happily off UBI while contributing nothing, and no one's ever going to take our stuff away?
astrolabia
11mo ago
The AI doomers are only an extreme example of how completely antiquated the old view is.
Can you elaborate? What do you think the doomer position is?
Is this a bit? Yes collecting a dataset is tons of work, but tokenizing it is trivial.
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