faceh
20d ago
Yes, I'm just saying that the software is maintained by a company that may not make the best decisions for the end-users because incentives aren't quite aligned.
faceh
1mo ago
I'm now curious as to how much of this has started seeping into Law Review and Bar Journals, or if the standards there are still high enough and the reviewers still attentive enough that they'd get caught before publication.
faceh
1mo ago
Its going to have a direct impact on a particular segment of the population, though.
They're going to feel more a pinch, which will indeed reverberate out, but it'll be their belts that will have to be tightened.
faceh
2mo ago
Yep.
I think we can rigorously define certain behaviors that we don't ever want to become 'acceptable' but there are a lot that will be borderline at best. "Make everybody feel satisfied working 16 hour days 7 days a week" seems far beyond the pale, I don't even know how you'd argue FOR that ideal.
The Brave New World outcome where everyone is in a chemically-induced state of satiation is seeming less likely to me, but the version where Molochian incentives push us all into a very unfortunate part of the payoff matrix seems probable.
(As as aside, this is why I see the AI alignment problem as important. If the AI is 'friendly' but isn't actually in tune with what makes humans/humanity thrive, it'll come up with solutions that are subtly miserable.)
faceh
2mo ago
That's basically my understanding of it as a layman outsider.
Financial Markets are so large and complex and useful information is so dispersed that one trader can notice e.g. an arbitrage opportunity between the price of tea in China vs. Australia that allows them to front-run the market. Or perhaps they catch some more esoteric correlation like how when the tea shipments to a particular Chinese province are delayed, productivity drops by 15% or some such.
And the problem then is how do you bring enough capital to bear quickly enough to seize the opportunity without alerting other actors, and, ideally, turn it into a repeatable (algorithmic) bet to pump money out of the system.
faceh
4mo ago
This strategy seems pretty dependent on never becoming somebody who the IRS might eventually target.
That is, if your income grows over time, you have a real chance of becoming a big enough fish that they'll find it worthwhile to target you. And if they can target you for years or decades of back taxes, that's a pretty heavy hand they can bring slamming down.
Tax liens are not fun to deal with.
faceh
6mo ago
It's about the best they can muster under current circumstances.
I would just wait to see if there is any indication of a phase 2 to the plan.
faceh
6mo ago
So why would it be confusing that Hamas might YOLO in a similar situation where they are fighting against an inevitable outcome?
faceh
6mo ago
The smart phones didn't destroy the physical, real time connection, though. Not by mere dint of existing, that is.
I think a lot of factors contributed to that, and smart phones provided an alternative to such physical connections that managed to capture the masses as those physical connections deteriorated.
faceh
6mo ago
I can be sympathetic to that view, although I'd say social media is the real problem there.
But I don't see how you can suggest that smartphones, and the ability to have a computer with access to the near-sum of total human knowledge, hasn't been a boon for mankind in general, creating tons of value across the planet.
I might prefer to live in a world where Social Media was banned or never invented, wouldn't say the same for smartphones in general.
faceh
6mo ago
I just categorically disagree that this logic holds as a means to not care about the future.
I can say, that if the records existed, I, personally would like to search my genetic ancestry back 1000 years (at least!) and learn a bit about every single human being whose genes ended up in my genome.
And, we pretty much have the necessary technology such that, in 1000 years, someone in the future could look up information about YOU and thereby 'remember' your existence well beyond 2 generations out.
And there are certainly things you can do now to bump up the odds that someone will remember you further out.
Yes, that doesn't 'matter' to you once you're dead, but taking this nihilist position doesn't give you any reason to prefer any outcome over any other!
So hey, I won't try and convince you that one outcome matters over the other. I'll continue working to marginally increase the chances that the outcomes I prefer come about. From your logic, it's no more a waste of time to do that than to live for the present.
In short, accepting that life is ephemeral is one thing, but choosing to live as though the future won't exist is, if you believe what I do, a COPE.
Anyhow, I leave you with some distilled Hopium: Isaac Asimov's 'The Last Question.'
faceh
8mo ago
faceh
8mo ago
but in the end all I care about is that people acknowledge that there's somebody out there who will choose the blue pill through no fault of their own
I can acknowledge that there's a chance such a person exists in the game.
If the blue side can acknowledge that there's a chance that such a person does not actually exist in the game, since we don't have that information at the time we make the decision.
But if we've acknowledged such a person exists, it suggests that we should be designing our systems specifically to keep these people VERY FAR AWAY from any buttons that might hurt them or others.
And I think the uncomfortable implication, which blue-pickers will have to deal with, is that there may be a lot of these people who THINK of themselves as rational and intelligent, and will insist on being included in future decisions too.
(Yes, this is going towards an analogy about voting, in real life)
If your theory is:
I believe it to be virtually guaranteed that, given a poll size of a few billion people, there are a few small children who have answered the poll by accident and gotten involved. But putting that aside, people are just really dumb.
Then I am going to insist that if blue meets its threshold. and these people survive, we're going to have to take steps to forbid them from being involved in such decisions in the future for the sake of everybody else.
I remind you, my theory is that the vast majority of people are both intelligent enough and self-interested enough to pick red/survival when presented with the choice in a vacuum.
Yours is that there are dummies who will do stupid things like pick blue without thinking.
If I accept your theory, we are now left with the question of what to do about those dummies.
Yes, although you don't need charity if there are some rules of decorum and perhaps a moderator to prevent things devolving too much.
I kinda want both sides to be going for the throat, but things have to be temperate enough to allow arguments to be heard and understood, not two people shouting past each other.
faceh
9mo ago
I'd be surprised that this case has hung around this long, but I imagine it was getting appeals at EVERY STEP where each appeal can add a year or so by itself.
faceh
10mo ago
It think the issue is that this will be subject to a power law distribution, not a normal distribution.
It won't be the case where if a guy is at least moderately attractive/charismatic, puts in constant efforts and is reasonably intelligent he will on average land a six figure job by 27. It's going to be more like a 20% chance he lands a massively high paying job, another 20% he lands something paying high-five to low-six figs, and like a 60% chance he ends up in a standard job paying 'enough' but not extravagantly. (Figures are blatantly asspulled at this point, can look for actual figures later)
There's just so many pitfalls that can prevent a guy from breaking through to true wealth early on.
And of course consider that a guy who busts his ass to this extent in his early life might actually hamper his dating chances during that time because he won't be nearly as fun for women since he works all the time.
So what you're proposing sounds like it could be a recipe for creating the older, established guy who leverages his wealth in his late 30's to play around with the younger women he couldn't get when he was younger.
Now, I agree it's a good ideal to strive for, but I'm pretty sure that the only way there's actual change in norms is to reign in female behavior somehow.
faceh
10mo ago
I'm saying that compared to virtually any other demographic white women are more liberal on average, with this especially notable amongst the college-educated ones.
faceh
11mo ago
The solution is generally to tune the LLM on the exact sort of content you want it to produce.
faceh
11mo ago
Which is why I'm confused as to why this does not apply to a human memory, other than that just being the Court's distinction between human hardware and electronic systems that they apply.
And then, even accepting your point:
the fact that we can get it out demonstrates that it is in there.
Then presumably putting sufficient controls on the system so that it WILL NOT produce copyrighted works on demand solves the objection.
We also run into the 'library of Babel" issue. If you have a pile of sufficiently large randomized information, then it probably contains 'copies' of various copyrighted works that can be extracted.
So an AI that is trained on and 'contained' the entire corpus of all human-created text might be said to contain copies of various works, but the incredible, vast majority of what it it contains is completely 'novel,' unrelated information which users can generate at will, too.
faceh
11mo ago
Torturing them for sick pleasure is not.
Can you expound on this, though.
If raising an animal with the explicit intent of cutting their life short for your own sustenance is 'legitimate,' why does it matter if you engage in torture or abuse during said short life?
faceh
1yr ago
There would be little point in having it ask you things unprompted, which is why it was never trainee to do so!
But that's an element of 'human' conversations, I think! "Prompting" the conversation party with a tangentially related topic which they wish to discuss further even if the other side hasn't expressed direct interest in it. The so called 'picking your brain' aspect.
To narrow my point a bit, at least one objective of conversation is for each party to have some greater understanding of a given topic out of it. If a professor and student have a conversation, for instance, the professor at least wants to gain a better understanding of the Student's grasp of the subject of the course and maybe adapt their own approach to teaching it, even if the student has nothing to add to their knowledge of the subject.
That is NOT what it feels like is happening when you interact with the GPTs.
Hence, my comparison to feeling like a toddler. "What are clouds made of? How do trees grow?" even though my questions are comparatively sophisticated, it still feels like I'm not able to hold up "my end" of the conversation with the other party.
Yeah, the part that really got to me was that it can be conversant on literally any topic, even if it might be outdated in knowledge or eventually refuse to answer about certain topics. And generally speaking it knows much more than I do on any of said topics.
So the pedantic philosophical question that comes to mind, for me, is whether you can really be said to be having a 'conversation' with an entity that already knows anything important you might tell it, and can answer any of your questions easily, whilst having no need to learn anything from or about you?
It becomes a wholly one-sided 'discussion' because the AI will never ask you questions about things it needs to know, and the chances of you having information it might find useful to add to it's corpus is vanishingly small. Can you have a 'dialogue' with an entity that understands any topic you might pick more comprehensively than you do?
So I end up feeling like a toddler talking to his parents and asking various questions about the world, and having absolutely nothing to offer them in return.
The fact that California is on the border and has such huge population of illegal immigrants tends to support the narrative that there's a border 'crisis.'
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