This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Critical Social Justice in the Era of Large Language Models
https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/critical-social-justice-in-the-era
Many anticipate that AI will have the ability to engage in novel and complex philosophical reasoning or contribute to scientific progress. While AI has yet to achieve this level of sophistication, models like ChatGPT demonstrates an impressive ability to generate meaningful text. I am skeptical about the usefulness and meaningfulness of articles from certain disciplines falling under the banner of Critical Social Justice. Finding connections between abstractions or interpreting text through a postmodern critical lense isn't particularly difficult. Nor does it lend itself to error or falsification. I think traits that allow CSJ scholarship to be hoaxed will put it at risk of domination by AI-generated articles. Scholars in the future will be highly prolific, but all their work will be generated trough computers. This will become a sort of open secret. All this scholarship produced will not advance humankind because CSJ scholarship is, at best, rather useless, and, at worst, socially harmful. In other disciplines more tethered to reality, AI generating acceptable papers would mean genuine progress.
Referencing my comment from last month my interaction with chatgpt has convinced me that we are actually very far from general AI. I think the current approaches are deadends, we need to find a different way and this new breakthrough could happen tomorrow or it could happen in 500 years, with equal probability.
That's unfair, it really struggles comprehending that words are comprised of individual letters. It's opaque to the alphabet by the nature of what it can see and learn from. I asked it to generate anagrams and it was absolutely hopeless at it. It gave me nonsense like 'overwrite is an anagram of obverse'. When I really coaxed it for an anagram of obverse and observe, it gave me rubbish like 'oversbe' and 'beovers' but recognized they weren't words. It couldn't get verbose, which was really ironic seeing as it was incredibly verbose in its descriptions.
It also could not answer a question about perfect numbers, it could not find the pattern between 8128, 496 and 28 no matter how I coaxed it. I doubt a human would've made that error after being prodded and poked toward seeing the answer.
But I don't talk about the other 50 university challenge questions it got right. I don't talk about the fairly creative and reasonable ideas it came up with for how to redesign vehicles. Teething problems like the perfect number issue and your time zone issue could surely be solved by increasing the power a thousandfold - that's what GPT-4 will be doing. At least it's likely that's the case. The anagram problem or 'word ending in i' problem requires a different kind of data processing but it's not really that important. You don't need to be able to identify anagrams to be functionally intelligent and achieve things in the real world.
If we have an intelligence that's 95-98% human-level, with superhuman speed and knowledge, we're not that far from AGI.
We've been seeing, and can predict, that there are plenty of tasks which can be done by machines at the 95%-98% level, but which can't be done better than that by machines because the 95%-98% are the low hanging fruit and the remaining few percent requires much more intelligence. (Self-driving cars are one of these, but it's been known for far longer than this.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link