astrolabia
1mo ago
What a payoff, thanks for asking, @butts!
This guy reminds me a lot of a younger version of myself. I suppose stoicism is a skill - I certainly attempted to reach inner peace with a combination of weed and videogames at some points, but was driven to try at life by a desire for women. It sounds like this guy was "scared straight" from engaging with the world.
This guy honestly sounds accomplished to me in his own way. He really learned to tend his own garden! I wouldn't trade my life for his, but if I was a NEET, I can't think of a nicer setup.
I wonder if his parents could have done anything differently, or if this is just the way it goes sometimes.
astrolabia
2mo ago
Relatedly, there was a poster here who once explained that the main rationale for the separation of church and state was not to improve governance of the state, but to protect the church from the corrupting influence of power. Blew my mind at the time but makes total sense now.
astrolabia
1mo ago
You've almost exactly described elite STEM PhD programs!
astrolabia
3mo 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
3mo 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
1mo ago
the incentive to be truthful and honest is minimal.
Except to the extent we can avoid doom through correct perception and action.
astrolabia
3mo 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
2mo ago
This is amazing, it's like Borges' Library of Babel.
I think if I were Amazon, I think I'd have a hard time drawing a line between actual content and low-effort slop. Though honestly that sounds like a great use for LLMs.
astrolabia
2mo ago
It really is remarkable the strength of claims that otherwise smart people will make about the impossibility of AI doing something. As evidenced by IGI's reply, I think usually if someone has gotten this far without updating, you shouldn't expect a mere compilation of strong evidence to change their minds, but just to prompt the smallest possible retreat.
I had an amazing conversation with an academic economist that went along similar lines. I asked why his profession generally wasn't willing to even entertain the idea that AI could act as a substitute for human labor, and he said "well it's not happening yet, and making predictions is beyond the scope of our profession". Just mind-boggling.
To empathize a little, I think that people intuitively understand that admitting that a machine will be able to do everything important better than them permanently weakens their bargaining position. As someone who hopes humanity will successfully form a cartel before it's too late, I fear we're in a double-bind where acknowledging the problem we face makes it worse.
astrolabia
8mo ago
I agree with most of this, but I feel like some male shit-talking and joking, at least in a group setting, also has an element of faux-combat. Constantly challenging each other is a form of play-fighting, but it's also a test - someone who regularly can't come up with a comeback or simply shuts down will eventually lose status and become more likely to be simply dominated by the others.
astrolabia
8mo ago
Trump doesn't like war in and of itself, but he hates being seen as "weak" far, far, FAR more. Avoiding situations that "make us look weak" is the amorphous basis of his entire foreign policy.
Aren't these almost the same thing? The way you avoid wars is by being seen as strong and, crucially, as willing to fight if necessary. Countries that appear weak, or appear strong but unwilling to fight, are the ones that end up being attacked.
astrolabia
2mo ago
Let's say you overlooked telling it about some fairly critical detail... It's not going to be able to figure that out on its own.
Right, but neither would a human, unless they also had more direct access to the problem somehow. But that's what agentic scaffolding is for.
There's also more general issues with agentic systems specifically and how quickly they seem to fall victim to noise and hallucinations without human supervision
Even with tens of thousands of experts spending billions of dollars and R & D for a decade to solve these problems?
but I'm more on the fence as to whether this can be ameliorated.
Seems like you're retreating to "I'm not sure"?
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
11mo ago
Isn't it clear that these proximate causes are mostly Schelling points for coordination? The same people rioting have also been upset by thousands of other smaller incidents. Same for the Floyd riots.
astrolabia
2mo ago
none of it is going to happen in the way the AI safety movement predicts
Care to elaborate? What kinds of things do you think are going to happen differently than the AI safety people think?
astrolabia
4mo 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
1yr ago
I too would love it if rationalists were forced to bite the bullet and say something like "yes, racism (in some senses) is rational". However, I'd say that most of them are simply deliberately silent on these issues because they know that dissenting would wipe out their credibility and force them to become a full-time advocate on an issue that they don't particularly care about. For example, James Damore.
I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues. I commend Zack M. Davis for calling them out on this and being brutally honest, but he has a horse in this race.
Also, what did Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu do wrong? They put their jobs on the line to talk about the truth. They didn't go so far as to explicitly say that racism (in some senses) is fine, but they pull their punches less than anyone who hasn't been banned entirely.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Why are you talking about the footprint of a tokenizer? Tokenization is cheap compared to actually evaluating the LLM.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Wow:
the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city
astrolabia
5mo 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
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
3mo 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
9mo ago
I beg you to consider the possibility that progress in AI development will continue. The doomers are worried about future models, not current ones.
astrolabia
1yr ago
One of the scariest things from my point of view is watching some Jewish progressives I know choosing, after a period of internal struggle, to take the side of Hamas. I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side. And I would have been surprised to see them abandon pretty much their whole progressive social networks and worldview under any circumstances, even to defend themselves. But it seems like many of them chose to thread the needle by simply becoming "one of the good ones".
I thought Dradis was just saying that Westerners could honestly and accurately speak and reason about problems with Eastern Europe without sounding racist, so they were able to effectively deal with reality and achieve their goals.
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