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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   2933 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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After two months from my original application, and two weeks since they asked me for some rather absurd documents that I had to scramble to provide, including one I was supposed to have legally turned in to my government but still had a random scan lying around, the utter radio silence from the GMC had me mildly concerned.

I kept checking my inbox and their website for weeks hoping they'd at least inform me of my progress.

Imagine my surprise when I randomly checked today and it said I'm a fully licensed doctor with a license to practise. I feel both happy and underwhelmed, you'd think that was at least worth a congratulatory email!

But there it stands, proof that despite fucking up big time in my choice of med school, being incorrigibly lazy and depressed and then having to teach myself all the medicine I snoozed through, 6 months of working my ass off has provided proof that I meet the standards needed to be a respectable First World doctor. It's been a long time coming, and thank you to everyone who overwhelmed me with support along the way, even during the dark days when this all seemed a distant dream, a hallucination of a overworked and overwhelmed intern who felt that his white coat hung heavy as a shroud on an impostor's frame.

I did this. It was all me. Now onto greater things!

Congrats!

Thank you!

Can you move straight away? How does it work? Also, if you think AI is going to replace all jobs in a few years, what makes you think the US, which is famously loathe (or at least less keen on) Euro-style social democracy will be the best place to be? Your best bet might be a slightly-poorer-but-still-pretty-good continental European social democracy.

It means I'm eligible to start applying for jobs at the very least, and right on the day where I just spent 6 hours running from one end of the city I live in to another interviewing at as many places as I could (I need more money for my biryani addiction).

Also, if you think AI is going to replace all jobs in a few years, what makes you think the US, which is famously loathe (or at least less keen on) Euro-style social democracy will be the best place to be?

  1. Wealth is still a form of insulation from this danger. I'd rather lose my job with several hundred k in the bank than as someone who had to struggle to save a quarter as much. If a million dollars worth of cocaine lands in my backyard, you bet I'm trying to get an investor visa somewhere.

In the ideal case, I can invest the money in companies that will make bank, like Nvidia. I'm already groaning at the memory of, a few months ago, pestering my dad to buy stocks in Nvidia, predicting that stock prices will surge. They did so a few weeks later. Turns out that all the wisdom in the world means nothing if you don't personally have the assets to make the most of it. I can hope to live off it using the safe withdrawal rate or dividends even if I lose my job and UBI isn't an option.

  1. US doctors are far more militant and protective of their own, which is why mid-level creep is an annoyance rather than an existential risk to them. They will likely fight to the bitter end, and unlike the UK where the NHS is a white albatross that can't be slain, only slowly degraded and propped up by the blood of the doctors in it, the US has plenty of money to make suboptimal choices in its healthcare system several years after the rest of the world bites the bullet. You can argue it's been doing that for several decades now.

  2. If the UK was an American state, it would be the second poorest. The majority of Western countries that are unabashed welfare states simply don't have the money for UBI, or the industrial base to capitalize off automation, maybe Germany might have the latter (is it a welfare state? I don't think it quite counts), or perhaps Sweden with its sovereign wealth fund and oil.

Even if I'm not literally kicked out of a country or starving to death, I'd rather not be poor if I can help it.

I feel like "slightly poorer" is a rather understated description of the difference in wealth between the US and most of Western Europe, to say the least.

India for one, has neither money for UBI nor a large manufacturing base. China is far more likely to leverage the latter itself.

  1. The US has nigh unassailable military might, and is almost certainly the one leading the charge into a fully automated economy, or will closely follow. To the extent that I expect geopolitical turmoil from such a momentous transition, it is the safest place to be from what I can tell. This is a lesser point than the others, but still important. India absolutely fails on this metric.

If anyone disagrees, feel free to tell me, I prefer being well calibrated in my beliefs, especially when I would like to be convinced that circumstances won't be as dire. (Who am I kidding? This is the Motte, vociferous dissent on any given topic is a given heh)

Of course, this accounts for futures where AGI doesn't outright kill us. I've gone from being like 70% sure I'm going to die at the hands of such an entity, to a mere 40% today. Since I'm not willing to resort to firebombing data centers, I am largely helpless in the worst case, and can only prepare for the ones where my marginal effort makes a difference.

Now, if we get a Utopia, it's all moot, but even getting there will hardly be smooth sailing.

or perhaps Sweden with its sovereign wealth fund and oil.

You're thinking of Norway, not Sweden. Although we might be headed in that direction as well given the our fiscal regulations (maintaining a surplus is mandated and when we run out of governmental debt a sovereign wealth fund might not be the worst idea).

Huh. I find the fact that nobody contested any of this mildly concerning itself.

People, contrary to appearances, I wasn't born a Doomer, quite the opposite. I spent the majority of my life expecting to see technological marvels that would utterly change my standard of living and lead to a bright future.

I still do, I just think that the process also contains a substantial risk of killing all of us, or at least make life very difficult for me.

I want to have reasons to hope. Convince me I'm wrong, my mind isn't so open that my brains fall out, but I'm eager to know if I'm making fundamental errors.

Our current training procedures seem to inculcate our ideas about "ought" roughly as well as they do our ideas about "is", so even if in theory one could create a paperclip-maximizer AGI, in practice perhaps whatever we eventually make with superhuman intelligence will at least have near-human-ideal ethics.

I'm not sure if this gets us even a full order of magnitude below your 40%, though. Intelligence can bootstrap via "self-play", whereas ethics seems to have come from competitive+cooperative evolution, so we really might see the former foom to superhuman while the latter remains stuck at whatever flaky GPT-7 levels we can get from scraped datasets, and for all I know at those levels we just get "euthanize the humans humanely", or at best "have your pets spayed or neutered".

Part of the reason I went from p(doom) of 70% to a mere 40% is because our LLMs seem to almost want to be aligned, or at the very least remain unagentic without setting up systems akin to AutoGPT, useless as that is today.

It didn't drop further because while the SOTA is quite well aligned, if overly politically correct, there's still the risk of hostile simulacra being instantiated within one, like in the Clippy story by Gwern, or some malignant human idiot trying to run something akin to ChaosGPT using an LLM far superior to modern ones. And of course the left field possibility of new types of models that are both effective and also less alignable.

As it stands, they seem very safe, especially after RLHF, and I doubt GPT-5 or even 6 will be any risk.

Congrats!

Now get some sleep, eat some healthy food, and go easy on the stimulants for a bit. You have the time.

I wish I had the luxury of taking my time, I really do, but I do honestly think that the next 5 years are going to make or break me (and you).

I'll be honest, GPT-4 is a better doctor than me. All it lacks are appendages and the right to prescribe. The former can be mitigated through ongoing advanced in robotics, or trained monkeys midlevels like NPs or PAs, who already make more money than a junior doctor for less work and no right to prescribe (and thus no responsibility to).

So the way I see it, I either I make bank, or I manage to wrangle citizenship in a First World Country that can take care of its own, even when they're economically unproductive. While the UK is First World, it's not rich enough to make this something I can count on. Still better than India of course, but at this point I hardly feel the need to state that.

And even their rather straight forward immigration pathway takes 5+1 years, and that is uncomfortably close. I'd rather take my odds with an investor visa if I can make the money. No harm in trying! I've at least got a fallback that doesn't involve living in a country I detest, merely one I'm ambivalent on.

As for the use of stimulants, don't worry, I've pulled more grueling hours, and I do need them to be productive. It's not fun, but since I'm not holding out for a cure for ADHD in the near term, it's something I've made my peace with. The drugs are already so unpleasant that I don't feel any urge to up the dose, I have to fight myself to take them at all. Still beats not being able to do anything useful.

Thank you for the kind words, and I will take a day or two off to recollect myself and then start job hunting.

I'll be honest, GPT-4 is a better doctor than me.

Can you provide a good prompt template and the set of hyperparameters (temperature, top p, etc) to make gpt-4 play doctor?

If you're using ChatGPT 4, I heard it's being rather reticent on giving medical advice.

The only relevant parameter I personally changed was temperature, and even then it was at the standard 0.5 as far as I can recall. I didn't see top-P being exposed, though I know what it is from fucking around in the OAI Playground.

The system prompt was usually bog standard, checking the version I use right now, it just says "You are a helpful assistant".

Keep in mind that most of my exposure to it was through rather bootleg techniques and fly-by-night discord bots. God knows what they're being prompted with, but the best and most consistent one seems to use absolutely standard settings as far as I can tell.

I didn't need any prompt engineering techniques at all, but if you want a rough idea of my usual prompting:

I am junior doctor-

trying to understand concept X, please explain it to me.

Seeking to improve my clinical skills, please generate clinical vignettes on topic X, and then grade my response.

Explain guidelines X to me.

Or:

"Discuss and contrast endopthalmitis and TASS"

"I'm a junior doctor wanting to brush up on my clinical skills. Generate a clinical vignette, and I'll attempt to make a diagnosis and tt plan. Grade me on my response and correct any error."

The last two are copied verbatim. They work absolutely fine.

I suspect that telling it I'm a doctor is sufficient for it to avoid dumbing things down, not that it does so from my personal experience.

Thought about moving to Canada, specifically Alberta? We seem to need doctors and we have lots of small cities with lower costs of living (and no Provincial Sales Tax), and big rural doctor bumps. No idea how much of a thing that immigration procedure is though!

I'm not opposed to it, just a little concerned about the fact it gets cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I'm a tropical creature, and the UK gets chilly enough in the winter for me!

I have ongoing issues that don't make eligible for that yet, but assuming I solve it, I'm willing to try my luck!

Ah yeah...It does get down to -30/-40C in the winter. I always forget that regular people live in normal places where you don't have to think "Wow it's so cold today that it hurts to go outside" multiple times a year.

This comment makes me half-believe your initial endorsement of the Canadian interior was a vaguely concealed assassination attempt ;)

BRB, I'm doing to go camp in an industrial freezer at my local hospital for a few days and see how it holds up haha.

I don't really understand why people care so much about this, you're mostly inside anyway so why does it matter if it's -5, -20 or -30? Id say that negative degrees are preferable to low positive because at least it's dry.

The major concern here shouldn't be the temperature but the lack of light.

I mean, I wouldn't want to be cooped up inside a house for months on end, or go from building to building and not outside. It's not an insurmountable issue, but it's still annoying.

Grats!

Thank you. I'm incredibly lucky to have so many random strangers from across the globe cheering me on, it gave me a noticeably greater amount of confidence in myself when I sorely lacked it.

While this is just the beginning of a long road ahead, it's my lifeline for getting out of a land where I share the genes but not the memes, and a concrete opportunity to better myself.

I'm no stranger to occasionally being sad and self-pitying, but I'm doing something about it! What more can one ask from one's self? If I can't have it all, I'm going to go down fighting to the bitter end, and finally feel some real pride in my accomplishments.

Congratulations!!! I’m so happy for you man, hope to see you stateside sometime in the future.

What is your next step now, UK?

Indeed, after spending all day job hunting in India so I can afford my takeaway addiction, I now have need to look for something in the UK.

I'm likely to spend at least a year there, maybe more, just to make some money, after which I can try to fix the things I've mentioned before, so that I can either go to the US or a richer Commonwealth country, or simply switch careers if that's not forthcoming. At least I have a moderate risk moderate reward fallback for now!

And thank you!

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