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 -
OK, so they oversold what could be done with crude brain surgeries. But wireheading definitely works, there was that woman who rubbed her thumbs raw against the button. How is that not direct interaction with the brain? You switched from 'uniform failure' to 'they were overselling the practical benefits of the technologies that were widely deployed, even though this was due to ethical rather than purely technological reasons.'
Lobotomies also work, it's just that they aren't really helpful.
I never claimed that we could directly edit the source code of the brain right now (noting that source code is not quite analogous). But eventually something like that is going to be possible. I don't understand how you could possibly disagree with its plausibility. We could for instance add or remove certain genes that are strongly linked with aggression in an embryo for example. Add the warrior gene, get a more aggressive child. The source code is genes, we can edit genes. We don't quite understand what they all do and how they work together and it's easier to wreck than improve but we could definitely do these things.
Editing the brain 'in flight' would be rather harder but it's a physical object, it could be altered with sufficiently precise electrodes or other manipulations. Brain surgery is a real thing. This would just be an extension of brain surgery. Why are you so skeptical of this?
Furthermore, I linked that old paper about disabling parts of the brain with magnets. That is a kind of mind control, just not very useful. Cheap, precise, non-invasive, long-lasting, permitted by the ethics board... That's the missing part, there's no actual impossibility.
OK, it made a mistake? Shortening the barrel increases muzzle pressure but not peak pressure.
I use AIs a lot. They make mistakes in my projects, I suspect they might not be smart enough to do some of the most complicated tasks proficiently. Why should that mean they were not intelligent? Many humans also make mistakes. Give a basic, basic statistics/probability/science test to your national representatives, see how they perform. Half the British Parliament couldn't tell you the chance of two coins coming up heads. Few humans can make a 4X AI actually smart, it's very rare to see.
If AI weren't intelligent it wouldn't be able to get anything correct at all about hoop strength or do any maths or coding. If it weren't intelligent you wouldn't be using it at all. You wouldn't, couldn't use GPT-2 for your project because it would just babble nonsense at you. That's a true lack of intelligence, you'd need to squint to find its intellect. The original GPT-4 was a bit like this too, context limit too short for much serious work past a certain level of complexity (I tried), too many hallucinations. Sonnet 3.5 also had its own flaws, it got incoherent past a certain point and I'd just have to say 'ok it still doesn't work, come at this from another angle' or 'think outside the box' and it was painful getting anywhere.
But their inability then didn't mean they weren't intelligent, just that their intelligence was weaker.
Just because it doesn't fail in the same ways that humans fail, doesn't mean it's not intelligent at all. I don't claim that they are human, there are many aspects where they're clearly not. But some important aspects where they are like people and could reasonably be expected to have other human properties.
Again: I am absolutely not dogmatic about the following, just groping for description of my experience.
They seem smart enough to do almost anything, but only when actual crystalized smartness is arranged in a properly-aligned constellation around them such that the focal geometry works properly. As soon as the alignment is broken, they get real stupid real fast. From this I infer that they are not themselves intelligent; the constellation is where the intelligence is, they're only focusing it, or channeling it, or pumping it.
Actual intelligence would actively align itself, would internalize the constellation in a cohesive way. And the AI seems to do this, just to a very limited degree? Maybe, even probably, it'll do it better as the tech matures? Certainly I can imagine an AI actually built for the work I'm trying to do with it, which has in fact internalized these specific constellations to a degree indistinguishable from a human expert, and we just aren't there yet for 1900s-era tank cannon design simulations.
In any case, it's not that it's stupid; as you say, humans are stupid too. It's the way it's stupid, how stupidity spikes massively and unpredictably. The "channeling intelligence" model would seem to imply that this is going to be a chronic problem in the long term, but I'm just some dude bullshitting on the internet about my bottom-tier subscription shenanigans. I'm pretty excited to see how it goes.
Is a for loop intelligent, in any meaningful sense? are intelligence and automation synonyms, and it really is just a matter of scale? I would bet no, at least in terms of practical scale, but I'd readily admit that my position is largely held by inertia and that I'm standing to be corrected here. There's very plausibly going to come a point in the next year or two when the focal geometry auto-focuses in real-time and you can't find the seams any more, and the question becomes something you should probably just ask the machine itself and accept that the answer is the best you're going to get.
on to the more contentious part:
This statement is fundamentally wrong. Lobotomies do something; they aren't a sugar pill. They absolutely do not work, as in do the thing their developers and promoters claimed they did to get them accepted as a valid medical treatment. The difference, I think, ought to be instructive in a context where I am pointing out that your claims vastly exceed the empirical evidence.
And the field and the public at large overbought. And this pattern repeats itself everywhere throughout the history of psychology as a "science". You yourself are, I argue, overbuying the claim that "the brain is a computer". If the brain is a computer, it is a computer that we do not know how to do any computer-specific things with or to, and that is an observable fact.
We have heroin. how is heroin addiction not direct interaction with the brain? Show me how wireheading can be used to actually control people as one controls a machine, in any one of the millions and millions of ways that being able to control a specific person as one does a machine would be immediately and obviously useful. This is my understanding of your claim, and it is the claim I am disagreeing with. You said:
My understanding is that you are claiming the brain is a machine. I am asking you to show me a way that we can do machine shit with it. Smashing a machine with a baseball bat is not using it as a machine. Melting it into a brightly glowing puddle is not using it as a machine either. sitting it on a turntable and spinning it also is not using it as a machine. If the brain is a computer, show me code executing arbitrary operations, the way computers do. If the brain is a can opener, show me how you open a can of beans with it. And show me how you do these things against the will of the person currently occupying that brain, which is the obvious contrary hypothesis that is supposed to be refuted here.
It might be. I'll believe it when I see it. Until I can see it, I'm going to point out that this is a faith-based claim.
The mechanics of brain surgery are well understood in most cases, as they are an extension of the mechanics of regular surgery: stuff has been broken apart, you stitch it back together so it can heal. As noted above, this has not resulted in the development of mind surgery, despite a bunch of prominent scientists claiming it absolutely had, and then brain-damaging a bunch of people in a wildly irresponsible manner before common knowledge accumulated that they had lied.
Because vast evil has been resulted from people being insufficiently skeptical of "scientific" "materialism" that was neither scientific nor materialist, and lobotomies are the very least of it. Similar claims about this specific subject have caused significant individual and collective harms over the course of the last century, because trusted authorities asserted them in a confident voice and sufficient skepticism could not be mustered to dissuade them. A huge portion of the culture war has been directly driven by these sorts of claims.
You are presenting this:
...as a scientific, materialist claim. It is not scientific, and it is not materialist. That doesn't mean it is wrong, it means it can't actually be tested via the scientific method and the results observed. You think it ought to be true, that it is highly likely to be true, by inference from other scientific, materialist claims that have been verified, and that is well enough. But there not only is not solid, direct evidence that this is true, but there is solid evidence that it is not true: all the previous theories attempting to act productively on it that demonstrably failed when implemented, and the subsequent retreat into Determinism of the gaps.
I'll believe it when I see it. I used to be 100% on board with the idea that the brain was a computer and all that this would imply. But a big part of what made me on board with it was that I wanted to believe it was true, because I'd been sold all the shiny ideas and cool things we could do if it were true. Then I got the other half of the pitch, and my conclusion is two-fold: firstly, we do not actually have a solid basis to claim that the brain is a computer, and secondly, if the brain is in fact a computer, I very much hope I'm safely dead before they figure out mature brain-computer-science.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link