astrolabia
1yr ago
I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.
astrolabia
11mo ago
Her message was a good sign! It sounds like a classic shit test. It's just a final check to see if you can stand up for yourself before she decides to date you. If she wasn't into you anymore, she would have just ignored you or waited for you to press the issue. She was provoking you to see if you'd show backbone.
A better answer would have been: "You're an adult, and you weren't that drunk. Don't play games.". I know this would feel like a 180 from your normal personality, but that's the point!
I once was on a relaxed second date with a very hot girl who was a little out of my league, hanging out in my room. I had had experiences like yours in the past and was expecting something similar. Almost on cue, the next time I tried to get her attention to talk, she ignored me to type on her laptop for 5-10 seconds. When she finally answered, I did something very unlike my normal personality: I warmly but firmly said something like, "You're being disrespectful, you need to leave for tonight." I said that I want to see her again but not any more tonight. She didn't even seem all that upset, and was a little shocked, but also almost pleasantly surprised. She came over again the next day and we had an intense affair until I moved away for school.
I know I must sound like an incredible ass, and you shouldn't take my word for it, but I'm normally an easygoing guy to the point of being overly passive. But I (finally) realized that you only have to show a backbone once or twice to make a girl feel comfortable around you indefinitely - but they usually won't feel comfortable until they've seen you do it - hence the need for shit tests.
astrolabia
2yr ago
You've seen children suffering from rabies?
astrolabia
2mo ago
Can you help me understand this claim more concretely? E.g. if an LLM had just successfully designed a bridge for me, but then I modified the design to make it not useful in some way, for some kinds of changes it wouldn't be able to tell if my change was good or not? But a human would?
astrolabia
9mo ago
I have considered it
I'm only going to evaluate the implications of ... products they actually have
It seems like you have not, in fact, considered the possibility of models improving. Is this the meme where some people literally can't evaluate hypotheticals? Again, doomers are worried about future, better models. What would you be worried about if you found out that models had been made that can do your job, and all other jobs, better than you?
astrolabia
2mo ago
I'm still confused what you're claiming. Who is claiming that cognition is entirely reducible to statistical inference? In any case, are the LLM companies somehow committed to never using anything but statistical inference?
astrolabia
2mo ago
I agree that alignment is easy in the sense of getting models to understand what we want, but it's far from clear that it's easy in the sense of making models want the same thing. RL models reward hack all the time.
What on earth makes you think instrumental convergence "doesn't actually happen"? It happens all the time, e.g. by reward hacking or sycophancy! It's almost the definition of agency!
Neuralese is a myth? What is that supposed to mean? RL on soft tokens is an active area of research and will almost certainly always work better (in the sense of getting higher rewards) than using hard tokens everywhere.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Is this a bit? Yes collecting a dataset is tons of work, but tokenizing it is trivial.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Seems like you're just begging the question here. Why is that the correct null hypothesis?
astrolabia
4mo 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
5mo ago
Got it. But what's the new, non-outdated consensus?
astrolabia
5mo 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
7mo ago
Fair enough, but I give him partial credit for asking for a withdrawl, though I don't know any details.
astrolabia
7mo ago
Yes, I agree. I am just saying that looking dangerous is also usually necessary to get good deals.
astrolabia
7mo ago
Oh, I stand corrected.
astrolabia
9mo ago
I still don't understand what you think the biggest problem is - the current manageable ones, or future, potentially unmanageable ones?
astrolabia
9mo ago
I agree it's not a foregone conclusion, I guess I'm hoping you'll either give an argument why you think it's unlikely, even though tens of billions and lots of top talent are being poured into it, or actually consider the hypothetical.
I can't think of a single task that AI could replace.
Even if it worked??
astrolabia
11mo ago
I don't get it - I agree that a more serious accusation would be unrecoverable, but she just said "I'm unhappy that you made out with me".
I'm also not sure what you're talking about in the second paragraph - this guy has already demonstrated all of the 'decent human being' virtues in spades.
And then maybe she’d deign to give him another shot again, but if she didn’t it just means he wasn’t able to do the bare minimum of manning up and passing the shit-test with a high enough grade.
Yes, that's what I'm claiming. I think it's actually not-totally-crazy behavior, either. It's similar to guys teasing each other partly to show that they can handle a bit of pressure / aggression.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I expect it to become formidable because Vitalik is
I don't think d/acc holds up - it's just so unlikely that man-machine hybrids can remain competitive without a massive deliberate slowdown of development of machine intelligence.
However, I agree that d/acc will remain formidable, because ambitious smart young men need something to work on to distinguish themselves, and an excuse to work on the most economically valuable thing they can, which is AI development. And it's plausible enough to provide such an excuse.
I think any serious proposal for pausing AI development has to be paired with a massively multiplayer, high-status, well-paying make-work plan for the hungry junior AI developers of the world.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Yes, consequentialism are rule-following are special cases of each other. You got me. The usual meaning of the word refers to situations in which they differ, i.e. any rule other than "maximize utility".
astrolabia
1yr ago
I'm really not trying to play gotcha games. I guess we are playing definition games, but I guess I'd say you have to choose which you prioritize: The well-being of everyone, or following rules. If you follow rules only for the sake of the well-being of everyone, then I guess I'd call you a consequentialist. I'm not trying to be clever or counter-intuitive.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree that even adaptation can be successfully adapted to by an adversary. My claim is merely that adaptive agents (e.g. consequentialists) will eventually outcompete agents that operate according to fixed rules (consequentialists). In your example, the adversaries are adaptive. If they followed fixed rules, they would be poor adversaries.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Why is she friends with them?
I like your advice overall, but I don't know how I could ask this particular question without making the other person feel like it's an attack.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Oh, thanks for clarifying, I didn't realize Hughes was talking about West Indian blacks, I was thinking more like Bangladeshis.
I think I prefer the way your homeland does it. Every time I see someone in the west complaining about or shaming others for offering well-intentioned advice, it just looks like shooting the messenger and poisoning the well. I would happily accept 100 wrong or offensive advices in exchange for 1 that helped me.
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