self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I think Wikipedia, while certainly a laudable institution and probably a significant contributor to the global economy, if someone managed to quantity that, is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs, especially the ones hooked up to the internet.
Yes, I'm aware that a lot of their knowledge base comes from Wikipedia. They're still perfectly capable of finding things on the wider internet and using their own judgement to assess them.
Now, you do have to account for certain biases hammered into initially neutralish models, but I have asked Bing about politically controversial topics like HBD, national IQs, and gotten straight and accurate answers, even if there were disclaimers attached.
Anyway, Wiki can undergo a lot of enshittification before it ceases to be useful or a value add, not that I hope that happens. It's also in the Creative Commons, so it won't be too hard to fork, especially if you use the better class of LLM to augment human volunteers.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
Jesus Christ that's a remarkably bad take, all the worse that it's common.
Firstly, the Chinese Room argument is a terrible one, it's an analogy that looks deeply mysterious till you take one good look at it, and it falls apart.
If you cut open your skull, you'll be hard pressed to find a single neuron that "understands English", but the collective activation of the ensemble does.
In a similar manner, neither the human nor the machinery in a Chinese Room speaks Chinese, yet the whole clearly does, for any reasonable definition of "understand", without presupposing stupid assumptions about the need for some ineffable essence to glue it all together.
What GPT does is predict the next token. That's a simple statement with a great deal of complexity underlying it.
This is an understanding built up by the model from exposure to terabytes of text, and the underlying architecture is so fluid it picks up ever more subtle nuance in said domain that it can perform above the level of the average human.
It's hard to understate the difficulty of the task it does in training, it's a blind and deaf entity floating in a sea of text that looks at enough of it to understand.
Secondly, the fact that it makes errors is not a damning indictment, ChatGPT clearly has a world model, an understanding of reality. The simple reason behind this is that we use language because it concisely communicates truth about our reality; and thus an entity that understands the former has insight into the latter.
Hardly a perfect degree of insight, but humans make mistakes from fallible memory, and are prone to bullshitting too.
As LLMs get bigger, they get better at distinguishing truth from fiction, at least as good as a brain in a vat with no way of experiencing the world can be, which is stunningly good.
GPT 4 is better than GPT 3 at avoiding such errors and hallucinations, and it's only going up from here.
Further, in ML there's a concept of distillation, where one model is trained on the output of another, until eventually the two become indistinguishable. LLMs are trained on the set of almost all human text, i.e. the Internet, and which is an artifact of human cognition. No wonder it thinks like a human, with obvious foibles and all.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
I'm about as sincere as it gets. Jews are based.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1mo ago
The dude retweeted the video himself. I think it's far more likely to be an extension of his questionable findom practices instead of Da Jews.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4mo ago
This pure rhetoric and hyperbole that is not worth addressing. I can only wish you well when you conquer your hangups and decide to move to Japan.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4mo ago
Look, I'd be just as against opening the floodgates of immigration to Indians as you are.
The worst part of being an Indian in India is being surrounded by other Indians, in much the same way the worst part about poverty is having to live with poor people. Indians have the dual misfortune of being both Indian and poor (usually).
Canada is a clear example of taking things too far. When you're excusing diploma-mills in the country that exist solely to provide a convenient pretext for people to come on a 'student' visa and then start driving taxis with their Punjabi uncle, you're doing skilled immigration wrong.
On the other hand, Indian immigrants in the US and UK are clear success stories. They are usually the richest demographic, often fighting Jews and the Chinese for pole position, and remarkably well assimilated and lacking criminal tendency. Whatever mechanism allows for this to happen is a good one, and at least in the UK, Indian migrants are far more respected than their Pakistani and Bangladeshi subcontinental brethren. They have not imported the same bad habits from their homeland.
When we lived in a major city, we had similar experiences with Indian doctors we visited. There is just this overwhelming sense they don't care. They don't have any duty to service. Any investment in outcomes. There is a script, they get paid, what more do you want? My wife constantly struggled with lingering issues that several Indian doctors (why were they so dominant?) just made scattershot prescriptions for, before finally getting in with an Asian American doctor who was actually invested in solving her problems.
I can't really argue that your personal experiences haven't happened. I can argue that they're not representative. I've been treated by Indian doctors most of my life, and I wouldn't say they were uncaring automata in it for just the amount of money they can squeeze out of you. I necessarily know more doctors, Indians, and Indian doctors than you do, and I think my opinion is more likely to hold true at scale.
But somebody's probably would be if past experience is any indicator. I've never had an experience where an Indian went one millimeter outside of the minimum of their job description to service a customer.
I don't know if you ever noticed, but here I am, on this site, often handling out medical advice for the price of free. We could play games of Chinese Cardiologists all day if we had to. I know I've done more than the bare minimum for more people than I can count.
I've seen very little self awareness from Indians about what they are really fleeing from, or what makes them different. And to whatever degree self_made_human thinks he "knows" America and wants to live here, it just seems like an embarrassing strain of weebism to me. He imagines there is some mechanism by which he could come here, but that very same mechanism wouldn't play a part in destroying America, just the same way I'm certain 1m Americans would seriously fuck up Japan.
The mechanisms that would bring me there would be the same mechanisms that have brought existing Indians to America. And most people have positive opinions of those there. One mechanism that has worked for other Indian doctors is (hopefully temporarily) not an option for me at present. Another has been swung shut.
We strongly disagree on whether the status-quo is a good thing or not, and I don't expect to change your mind in that regard. I object to the status quo moving in a direction I think is worse for the country, and for skilled immigrants.
In fact, I respect your right to want to keep America the way it is, and preserve its culture. I think that I'm culturally American more than anything else, you can call me a Texaboo if you like, but can you deny that the average weeb loves Japan? Maybe I have more faith in the spirit of America than you do, it has assimilated tens of millions, it can take a million more, especially if they're a million like the ones who came before.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Errr.. I didn't actually realize that was publicly visible. I was trying to put that in the internal mod log, and levity is one way of handling that job, which can be thankless at times. It was more of a joke than anything else, I genuinely do not have a strong opinion on the matter.
It's right below. Given that nobody pays me for the job, an in-joke suffices.
I'm not the strongest advocate against single-issue posting. My usual approach is to simply minimize the thread, since I make it a point not to block anyone at all, no matter how odious/tedious they might be, and quite a few people are more so than SS. However, as a moderator, I do my best to follow the guidelines I signed up to enforce, and being neutral on SIP means I don't particularly care either way.
Is he SIPing and scaring the hoes? Seems obviously true to me. We probably have the highest tolerance for witches around, but we want multiple kinds, not just someone making this particular cauldron their bandwagon.
Is that against the rules as written? Yes. As interpreted by someone who doesn't have strong feelings either way too? It was.
I suppose I can't get away with "just following orders" can I? Though this is tangentially in favor of the Jews.
Because I figure we're about halfway to the point where "just post a youtube video about goat noises or something" suddenly becomes "ackshually we have to feel like they're good posts with sufficient effort" or whatever.
Demands for effort are maximal on top level posts in the CWR thread, or standalone posts on the front page.
I would presume funny goat noises belong in the Friday Fun Thread, and I haven't seen anyone get policed for lack of effort there.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Look dawg, the rules here stress extending charity to the outgroup. Not an infinite amount of charity, but certainly more than is implied by:
Liberals exist in a world without cause and effect, and conservatives do.
Which would fall afoul of it if the rest of your comment didn't.
And then we happen to have:
Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.
Which is precisely what it says on the tin. I'm not sure what your understanding of causality is, but as far as I'm concerned, it's the bare minimum required to be functional human being who acquired a degree of mental maturity greater than a neonate. While I, mod hat off, agree that there are gaping holes in their reasoning, and, mod hat back on I get that you're being hyperbolic, but that only makes you fall afoul of our guidelines on:
Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.
You've got enough AAQCs under your belt to know that such drive-by culture-warring is against the spirit of what we do here. I ask that you don't do this again. Neither side, be it your ingroup or your outgroup, has such a clear monopoly on truth and clear thinking that you can make such claims. Certainly if you do wish to make those claims, we expect more from you.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Even before he started his beef with me, I was frankly confused by many of his posts that were nominated and accepted as AAQCs.
A lot of it came off as incoherent rambling, he was often incapable of writing clearly to save his life. When his post on "Marvin's Marvelous Minutiae" came out, I had an aneurysm reading it, as I've said elsewhere, it was in the "not even wrong" tier as far as I'm concerned.
But despite being a moderator, I don't handle the AAQCs, and the other mods have far more fondness for the man than I do and saw something in him I don't. That earned him a lot of leeway and n-th chances, and his permaban was when even the people positively inclined towards him got fed up with his antics and inability to improve.
My own mod log has hilarious examples from my own arguments with Hlynka, such as a "ban both the chucklefucks if they do it again" from @Amadan. But unlike Hlynka, I am capable of acknowledging error and not doing the same damn thing over and over again, and I stuck to my promise to studiously never engage with him, since I knew that if I did, he'd piss me off enough into violating forum rules about decorum. Hell I even recuse myself from enforcing mod actions against him when I became a mod, because no matter how much they were justified, the optics would be bad. Caesar's moderati must be above reproach and all that.
The best I can say about him is that his anecdotes about military/PMC life were occasionally interesting, but he annoyed the hell out of me with his pugnaciousness, inability to accept being wrong even when corrected with evidence and backup from people who know what they're saying (I'm a dilettante in the field of ML, I just read things), and general incorrigbility.
At least I know I won't miss him, sad as the loss of a regular can be.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I have certainly heard of "Americans". My annoyance is at the claim, by KMC, that such a claim is restricted to the subsection of the citizenry that are of European origin, and so phenotypically similar that it's not immediately obvious if they're pure 100% German, 30% Irish and 70% Italian, or anything in between.
I have no objection to people imagining some undifferentiated jumbled Caucasian American as the default when they hear "American", they're still barely a majority in the country after all.
There are people who have forgotten their ethnic origins, people who nobody wishes to interrogate about them, and people where it's not immediately obvious if they have any divergence from Default American™ as it existed in 1950. That doesn't mean that African-Americans, Indian-Americans and every other visibly obvious minority can't be called American, or that the typical white dude is somehow "more American". Just within whites, there are millions who identify as Italian-Americans or Irish-Americans.
"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up. Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
will kill
*will try
I wish them the best against someone who has an ASI at their beck and call.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I am a very happy monkey when surrounded by the fruits of modernity.
About the earliest point in time I can see myself stomaching is maybe 7 or 8 years back, so I can whack myself on the head and pick a better med school, while not missing out too much on creature comforts like the internet and smartphones. My childhood is a story of being bored out of my mind, and seeking to remedy that, and it's only recently gotten much better.
In terms of potential demigod Singleton controllers:
Altman, Zuck, Musk, Dario, yada yada. Anyone who has a massive AI division or promising startup and also the leverage necessary to tweak the preferences of the incipient AGI within. Mere wealth, while nice to have, isn't nearly as good as being able to tell your high-powered ML PhDs what to do.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.
You're new around these parts aren't you? Which isn't a crime at all, we could certainly use new arrivals, but just about anyone who has been here for more than a few weeks knows my clear stance on the CW aspects of the topic, such that I don't feel an explicit need to rehash them.
Besides, like I said, any long discussion of (ideally) high quality is de facto acceptable in this thread, or else I wouldn't have had glorified travelogues make AAQCs. Not that this one doesn't have CW implications, the part about GPT-4's stellar performance in the USMLE making me obsolete as a doctor is only half in jest. Or maybe a quarter. It'll get you too.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I despise the idea that the Captain must go down with their ship. What's that going to achieve? Sure, their duty might incorporate sticking around as long as possible to arrange an evacuation, but when that's done, they don't have any responsibility to feed the fishes.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I don't particularly care Hlynka, if this Thanos snapping managed to take both of us, you included, I'd consider it a net positive!
But I fail to see what the difficulty of Turing-testing random pseudonymous accounts on a text-based forum has anything to with it. Last time I checked, we're both operating according to the laws of physics and biology. Your analogy of how ML works is simply painful.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
unless you're in the camp that thinks that human consciousness is basically just a really complex statistical model running on a biological computer
As someone vocally in that camp, I invite you to demonstrate any other model for what human consciousness could possible be. And it doesn't even matter if the AI is "conscious" if it's intelligent and capable of using that intelligence to forward ends not aligned with our goals.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
Simply: lots of work by libs is a sort of gay conversion therapy for straight people. Pride parades, public school education, pride month, trans day of visibility etc. all exist to glorify homosexuality and, explicitly to help straight people easily “come out of the closet” as gay.
I find this a very dubious assertion. It seems to me, both in terms of public assertion as well as mildly uncharitable questioning of their inner motivations, that the aim isn't to convert straight people, but to have people who are already gay (or at least not a zero on the Kinsey scale) to feel free to express their sexuality.
Would many activists prefer that their campaigns result in everyone turning bisexual or gay? Maybe, probably. Doesn't mean that's what they expect.
This is distinct from the odd grifter who painlessly claims to be gay for the sake of diversity points, since it's verboten to question them even if they've never sucked an actual dick in their lives, but even then they're more likely to claim to be trans or non-binary. While some activists might grudgingly tolerate this (or feel helpless to call it out according to the standards of self-identification they espouse), I don't think they approve of it per se.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I know an AAQC when I see one..
I'm making a point of saving this for later, in the event I want to fire a nuclear cannon of a reply to people performing apologetics on behalf of the Palestinians.
The only place where I'd even modestly disagree is in claiming that Zionism is justified today, in the sense that America and most of the West are good refuges for the Jews and have large, relatively close-knit communities who aren't at real risk of being pogrommed, current liberal tendencies included. Then again, having a patch of dirt and a flag always helps when asserting yourself, so it's not a major disagreement in the least.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I've long felt that something essential was lost from the post-WWII world when we decided to define riots, pogroms, ethnic cleaning and genocide as atrocities that the civilized world could never tolerate, rather than as social technologies that humanity developed to bring permanent resolutions to seemingly intractable problems.
There's good reason that Britain pacified Afghanistan in the 19th century with far weaker supply chains and less glaring technological disparities, while it and the rest of NATO left in the 21st with their tail tucked between their legs.
Violence is the voice of the unheard, but it's also a universal language. If you can't solve most problems with violence, you're not using enough, and quite often, or at least here, a more dispassionate analysis will show that a quick burst of brutal violence obviates the need for more down the line.
At any rate, I think Western countries are cowardly in large part because most of the wars they've fought of late don't matter, lacking the stakes of their populations being genocided or living conditions cratering.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
They spent half their life in Narnia and then were able to be more or less regular kids again to grow up and not look like isekai protagonists
I consider that itself to be nonsensical, so it's not doing Lewis any favors.
But is arguing about shitty worldbuilding in the Chronicles of Narnia really what any of us want to do haha?
Ah, I never liked Narnia. The whole franchise was too fucking twee and preachy to appeal to even childhood me.
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
To me, the "problem with Susan" seems to be that she's literally retarded. You spent half of your life in Narnia, and then claim it's some kind of funny game? When you can confirm for yourself by just opening that wardrobe?
Hell, even if you want to fit in with your peers, that is not the behavior of a sane person.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
Aww, can't a man enjoy himself sometimes? I'd like to think that almost all my posts are still net positive :(
But as you wish.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
While I'm not a utilitarian (I was credibly convinced that I was misunderstanding the position, I'm just a humble consequentialist with my own bespoke utility function), I completely agree with Singer here.
Babies are not sapient, not for months after birth. The majority of the harm in killing them is the waste of time, effort and grief on the part of the parents. When it's the parents doing the killing, it's morally neutral as far as I'm concerned, or outright laudable if the child has debilitating conditions that are incompatible with a normal life.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr ago
Given that my timelines are less than 10 years for a fully fledged technological singularity to be upon us, I see absolutely no way that we continue struggling with demographic collapse for the 20+ years it would take to be truly debilitating, short of something like a nuclear war, in which case we have bigger problems to worry about.
There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.
You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations (as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!).
As an Indian, I can only chuckle and pour myself a drink, who exactly is going to be demographically replacing us?
Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.
There seems to be an epidemic of low decouplers on the Motte, most obviously notable by their inability to entertain hypotheticals the moment they become controversial in the least. Perhaps it's always been that way, but it stands out to me and I've been here for years, if not right from the start.
And the Motte is better in terms of quality of discussions than any other place on the open internet that I'm aware of, just imagine how awful it is elsewhere!
At any rate, I agree with Singer that by most formalized standards of morality endorsed by most people, it's farcical that eating non-human animals is widely acceptable, while having sex with them isn't.
However, modus ponens and modus tollens apply, so my take is that it's okay to do both! As is sadly necessary for topics such as these, while I accept people wanting to fuck nonhuman animals, that doesn't mean I want to do so myself. The fact that this disclaimer is even needed is yet another sign that the low decouplers are multiplying.
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