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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Gpt-4 has been released!. Looks like the cat is finally out of the bag. The CW implications of large language models are obvious and have been discussed here, so I figured I would drop a few fun facts.

Also, here's a peek at LessWrong freaking out.

The full technical report gives some fascinating information. Here are some highlights:

  • GPT-4 can pass a bar exam and score a 5 on several AP exams.

  • GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.

  • GPT-4 can accept images as inputs and generate captions, classifications, and analyses.

  • GPT-4 is capable of handling over 25,000 words of text, allowing for use cases like long form content creation, extended conversations, and document search and analysis.

Of all of these, passing the bar exam is the one that sticks out. We'll have to see how much it still hallucinates, but this is clearly a water mark, at least for the legal profession.

I'll go ahead and stake a perhaps dramatic but I believe warranted claim - the culture war is about to get ugly. Creating ads, propaganda, and bots to argue politics has never been easier. Whichever side moves first on scaling and implementing these language models to persuade humans to their camp will own the future.

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Will there be any employment left for human beings?

At the moment, paid, meaningful work is pretty much a white privilege. The Last Psychiatrist wrote about in '13.

Yeah, future where we're all going to be like blacks - hardly employable, grudingly tolerated pets of the powers that be is a quite likely one.

Ya think FDA will allow you to experiment with I dunno, brain interfaces or embedding AI systems into yourself so you could get off the dole?

Why, that'd be unsafe and irresponsible.

Maybe in countries that don't prosecute people for selling raw milk.

At the moment, paid, meaningful work is pretty much a white privilege.

For a section of the white population; those who have the marketable skills that are in demand (see the current hand-wringing over the tech company lay-offs, and others writing reassuring articles that it's okay, it's just trimming the fat of all the hiring during the pandemic and the useless people, but real engineers are always in demand).

That Last Psychiatrist piece annoys me, probably because I'm from the section of society where people are welders, and it's a good, respectable trade:

You're telling me a guy pulled a 9 to 5 for a decade... and now "claims" he "can't"? It's not my ideal life plan, but if he decided at 45 to quit being a welder so he could downgrade by two thirds to the $15k a year baller lifestyle, well, I prefer my grog made of Zaya rum but I'm not going to begrduge this guy the well liquor if that's the ship he wants to sail.

No, dickhead, people who do hard manual labour don't decide that "welp, I'm 45, I'd prefer to laze about for the next thirty years so I'll pretend I can't work anymore". Mostly they keep working until they can't work, because their body really does wear out. And very few of them do nice, tidy, 9-5 hours. If somewhere in your house springs a leak, do you decide "Can't call a plumber, it's after 5 pm so they've clocked off!" No, you'll try ringing round and see if you can get a guy to call out sometime, anytime soon (because often they're very busy, being in demand for all kinds of jobs).

The welder who "gamed the system" at 45 at least caused his kid to observe him as a worker for the formative first 8 years of the kid's life. It counts for something, it is not nothing. Possibilities exist. That guy may be a jerk, but he is not the problem.

Do some people game the system? Yes, of course. Just like educated white guys who like to pretend they're the Hunter Thompson of mental health professionals and write their hot takes. I don't know any welders who retired at 45, I wonder if Mr Big Brain here even does know anyone who works with their hands? I know plenty of people who worked themselves into the ground, or had legitimate health reasons for retiring early. Man, I had no idea that living off social welfare was so easy, I could have done it when I was 45 and lived high on the hog! Allegedly!

I agree about the "never worked" cohort, but again - that's complicated. There are some people who never worked because they're incapable of holding down a job, because they're too weird or they have untreated mental problems (not even outright crazy, never diagnosed with a disorder as a kid and left to sink or swim through school and life) or some other reason. Again, yes of course there are people gaming the system with fake illnesses and scamming their way through life. Humans do that kind of thing.

Here's the advice you need to give your kid: either you find a knowledge based productive skill, from plumber to quantum programmer, or you will be living off the state, regardless of what company you think you're working for.

Excellent advice - were it not for the snide bit earlier about the welders (and plumbers, presumably, and other tradespeople) who scammed the system by pretending they could no longer work the 9-5 job and decided to live off the public purse so they could laze about.