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 -
This may have come up before, but it's the first I've heard of it. Chalk this under "weak AI doomerism" (that is, "wow, LLMs can do some creepy shit") as opposed to "strong AI doomerism" of the Bostromian "we're all gonna die" variety. All emphasis below is mine.
AI girlfriend ‘told crossbow intruder to kill Queen Elizabeth II at Windsor Castle’| The Daily Telegraph:
My first thought on reading this story was wondering if Replika themselves could be legally held liable. If they create a product which directly encourages users to commit crimes which they would not otherwise have committed, does that make Replika accessories before the fact, or even guilty of conspiracy by proxy? I wonder how many Replika users have run their plans to murder their boss or oneitis past their AI girlfriend and received nothing but enthusiastic endorsement from her - we just haven't heard about them because the target wasn't as high-profile as Chail's. I further wonder how many of them have actually gone through with their schemes. I don't know if this is possible, but if I was working in Replika's legal team, I'd be looking to pull a list of users' real names and searching them against recent news reports concerning arrests for serious crimes (murder, assault, abduction etc.).
(Coincidentally, I learned from Freddie deBoer on Monday afternoon that Replika announced in March that users would no longer be able to have sexual conversations with the app (a decision they later partially walked back).)
I keep meaning to dick around with some LLM software to see for myself how some of the nuts and bolts work. Because my layman's understanding is that they are literally just a statistical model. An extremely sophisticated statistical model, but a statistical model none the less. They are trained through a black box process to guess pretty damned well about what words come after other words. Which is why there is so much "hallucinated information" in LLM responses. They have no concept of reason or truth. They are literally p-zombies. They are a million monkeys on a million typewriters.
In a lot of ways they are like a con man or a gold digger. They've been trained to tell people whatever they want to hear. Their true worth probably isn't in doing anything actually productive, but in performing psyops and social engineering on an unsuspecting populace. I mean right now the FBI has to invest significant manpower into entrapping some lonely autistic teenager in his mom's basement into "supporting ISIS". Imagine a world where they spin up 100,000 instances of an LLM do scour Facebook, Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc for lonely autistic teens to talk into terrorism.
Imagine a world where we find out about it. Where a judge forces the FBI to disclose than an LLM talked their suspect into bombing the local mall. How far off do you think it is? I'm guessing within 5 years.
I earnest disagree. If you check the GPT-4 white paper, the original base model clearly had a sense of internal calibration, and while that was mostly beaten out of it through RLHF, it's not entirely gone.
They have a genuine understanding of truth, or at least how likely something is to be true. If it didn't, then I don't know how on Earth it could answer several of the more knotty questions I've asked it.
It is not guaranteed to make truthful responses, but in my experience it makes errors because it simply can't do better, not because it exists in a perfectly agnostic state.
P-zombies are fundamentally incoherent as a concept.
Also, a million monkeys on a million typewriters will never achieve such results on a consistent basis, or at the very least you'd be getting 99.99999% incoherent output.
Turns out, dismissing it as "just" statistics is the same kind of fundamental error that dismissing human cognition as "just" the interaction of molecules mediated by physics is. Turns out that "just" entirely elides the point, or at the very least your expectations for what that can achieve were entirely faulty.
What do you mean by "incoherent"? Do you mean that the concept of a p-zombie is like the concept of a square triangle? - something that is obviously inconceivable or nonsensical. Or do you mean that p-zombies are like traveling faster than the speed of light? - something that may turn out to be impossible in reality, but we can still imagine well enough what it would be like to actually do it.
If it's the latter then I think that's not an unreasonable position, but if it's the former then I think that's simply wrong. See this post on LW, specifically the second of the two paragraphs labeled "2.)" because it deals with the concept of p-zombies, and see if you still think it's incoherent.
Those are the same thing. I think you cannot rigorously imagine FTL travel in our universe while holding the rest of our physics intact, and you cannot imagine FTL travel for any universe whatsoever similar to ours where "lightspeed" refers to the same idea. The notion of travel as moving x m per second is a simplification of the math involved; that we can write "the spaceship could move at 3 gajillion km per second" and calculate the distance covered in a year does not really entail imagination of it happening, no more than "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" does.
Incoherent concepts are incoherent exactly because they fall apart when all working bits are held in the well-trained mind at once; but illusions of understanding and completeness, often expressed as the erroneous feeling that some crucial section of the context was precomputed and you can just plug in the cached version, allow them to survive.
Qualia debate is gibberish; a P-zombie must compute a human-like mind to generate its behavior, there is no other way for our bodies to act like we do.
…Actually, let me explain. There is a causal chain between zombie-state A and A'. Links of this chain attend to themselves via mechanisms conserved between a person and a zombie. This condition is what is described as quale, consciousness etc. in the physicalist theory, and it is a necessary causal element of the chain producing the same outputs. It is irrelevant whether there exists a causally unconnected sequence of epiphenomenal states that Leibniz, Chalmers and others think implements their minds: a zombie still has its zombie-quale implemented as I've described.
I posit that it is not incoherent to say that zombie-quale don't matter, don't count and don't explain human consciousness, because muh Hard Problem. It is patently non-parsimonious, non-consilient and ugly, in my view, but it's coherent. It just means that you also claim that humans are blind with regard to their zombie-quale, physicalist-quale; that the process which generates our ones has nothing to do with the process which generates informationally identical ones in our bodies.
It is only incoherent to claim that a zombie doesn't have any quale of its own, that it's not like anything to be a zombie for a zombie. We know that physics exist [citation needed], we know that "physicalist quale" exist, we know they are necessarily included in the zombie-definition as an apparently conscious, genuine human physical clone. So long as words are used meaningfully, it is not coherent for something to exist but also not exist.
(Unless we forgo the original idea (actual physical and behavioral identity) and define zombie in a comically pragmatic manner like Weekend at Bernie's or something, by how well it fools fools.)
P.S. it seems philosophers distinguish "incoherent" and "metaphysically impossible" concepts. I'm not sure I agree but this is pretty deep into the woods.
I assume you're not counting Newtonian physics?
Not quite. Qualia debates are only gibberish if you are only looking at behavior. But qualia is posited to be experiential, not behavioral. Someone who acts like they have red qualia but doesn't and someone who does may have identical behavior (including whether they can talk about their having qualia!), but would differ in that one respect. I see no reason why this is incoherent.
This is just question begging; experiences are no more real than qualia, if they can't affect behavior by definition.
Not that they can't affect behavior, just that it's not necessary for them to affect behavior.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link