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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2734 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 10, 2024

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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How does one find purpose/meaning? That is, what gives you a "reason to get out of the bed in the morning"? Particularly when "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" seem particularly aimed your way.

(More specifically, with neither the usual standbys of "faith and family," and while being too anhedonic for hedonism?)

Edit: to put it more simply, how do I find a reason to keep struggling through another 30+ years of miserable, pointless, futile existence, rather than just skipping to the end?

In my case, I think the near future is probably going to be really fucking sick. AGI. Full immersion VR. Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy. Immortality in one form or another. The best fucking movies, video games, books and music you can imagine, delivered custom made and nigh instantly on demand

As far as I'm concerned, there's no other period in time I'd rather have been born, and even as someone who is rather depressed and gritting his teeth to pull through more days a year than he'd like, especially when so much of my hopes and dreams have been sabotaged by circumstances outside my control, I still have so much to look forward to that even at my lowest I have no real desire to "skip forward to the end". They'll cure my depression and ADHD sooner rather than later. And even if I get paperclipped, we're far too close to the end of an era for me to bear missing out on that closure.

At any rate, the human body and mind was designed to keep trucking through far worse. Most depressed and unhappy people don't kill themselves. Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill. It is what it is, but will probably get better.

I think most of that tech-optimism you lay out is unfounded to the extreme (except the VR bit, but that's just more escapism). If "AGI" is even possible at all, it's not happening this century. Aging and lifespan has been so deeply ingrained into us by countless evolutionary trade-offs to a degree that pretty much any "life-extension" project is almost certainly doomed to failure, let alone "immortality." "Colonizing the solar system and then the galaxy." Not with chemical rockets, are we doing that any time soon. We're not going to figure out the brain well enough to cure depression or ADHD. There will be no "singularity," no "end of an era," not even the "closure" of "paperclippingm," just slow civilizational decay.

Even if you don't have a "reason to live" (and I cherish life for its own sake), you'll find that you keep on rolling, if only slightly downhill

I've been doing that for ~20 years now. It's never getting better.

If "AGI" is even possible at all, it's not happening this century.

Have you seen Claude 3? It's going around answering PHD-level questions in a bunch of different fields. https://twitter.com/idavidrein/status/1764675668175094169

Five years ago we had none of this. The whole field of chatbots was a joke: https://youtube.com/watch?v=6rEkKWXCcR4

If you weren't predicting five or six years ago that we'd have AI this capable, how can you possibly say 'it's not happening this century'? You think you can predict 75 years into the future?

Claude 3 (Sonnet, not Opus) gave a PhD-candidate-quality answer to a qualitative applied math question I asked it, so I tried a couple related quantitative questions. The easiest was basically Calc-3, and it made a sign error, and trying to get it to correct that error (it only even admitted it on my third try) made it go completely off the rails.

Formatting its math responses in LaTeX without being asked was pretty cool, though. And it was clearly ahead of GPT4 and Bard, which beat the snot out of GPT3.

If you weren't predicting five or six years ago that we'd have AI this capable

What "capable"? LLMs are a meaningless parlor trick — of little significance, and not any kind of step towards "general intelligence." "The whole field of chatbots" is a pointless distraction.

Not with that attitude. I mean, even if you regard the entire field and its weird inbred offshoots as parlor tricks of little significance (the former I would agree with, the latter I find highly debatable even now, for one it vastly simplifies routine code writing in mine and my colleagues' experience) - aren't you at least a little interested in how the current "AI" develops, even it its current state? In the workings of quite literally alien "minds" whose "thought processes", though giving similar outputs, in no other way resemble our own? In the curious fact that almost all recent developments happened by an arcane scientific method known as "just throw more compute at it lmao"? I don't mean to impose my hobby horse on you but I legitimately think this shit is fascinating, anyone who dismisses it out of hand is very much missing out, and I'm massively curious about future developments - and I say this as a man who hasn't picked up a new hobby since he put his hands on his shiny new keyboard when he turned 12 years old.

More generally, you sound like a typical intelligent man who outgrew his playground and realized existence is a fucking scam, which I think is a fairly common problem (not to downplay its impact, I think many mottizens can empathize, me among them) and you've been given good suggestions downthread. Personally, being the rube I am, I just ducked right back into the playground upon reaching a similar burnout and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc. It's not exactly healthy and it does ring hollow sometimes, not gonna lie, but at least I'm no longer paralyzed by the sheer emptiness of the human condition and can ruminate focus on the actual problems I have.

aren't you at least a little interested in how the current "AI" develops, even it its current state?

No, because I don't see them as even quote-unquote "minds".

and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc.

Except I don't derive enjoyment from any of those (and antipsychotics mean I can't drink).

"Don't derive enjoyment" as in see no point and don't try, or as in do but it does nothing? I expect the latter (although I really struggle to imagine not enjoying at least some video game, there are so many in existence that at least one is, like, statistically guaranteed to tickle your fancy), but if it's the former, try actually forcing yourself to search for/do something even if you see no point, usually "seeing no point in anything" is a scam pulled on you by your dysfunctional grey matter.

Some years ago when I had a bad bout of depression to the point I didn't want to ever leave my house, I went out on a limb and made a "deal" with myself: whenever my friends occasionally called me out to drink or whatever, I would always comply, even if I don't feel like it, even if it's very inconvenient, even if only for an hour etc. etc. No excuses - you grunt and mumble, but get dressed and go out with hunched shoulders at some point in that day. To this day I distinctly remember that I fucking hated going out every time, imagining how boring it would be and how I would kill everybody's mood, but I never remember actually having some kind of a bad time once I was out. In fact I usually felt better afterwards.

If all else fails, doing anything at all (preferably with your physical body) is pretty much always better than the alternative. Your brain is your enemy at this point and you should treat it accordingly.

More generally, you sound like a typical intelligent man who outgrew his playground and realized existence is a fucking scam, which I think is a fairly common problem (not to downplay its impact, I think many mottizens can empathize, me among them) and you've been given good suggestions downthread. Personally, being the rube I am, I just ducked right back into the playground upon reaching a similar burnout and try to derive enjoyment from simple things - alcohol, vidya, etc. It's not exactly healthy and it does ring hollow sometimes, not gonna lie, but at least I'm no longer paralyzed by the sheer emptiness of the human condition and can ruminate focus on the actual problems I have.

This is the same conclusion that I've reached. I went from: "I should be a productive member of society and study something that will bring positive value and progress to the world", to: "Astrophysics and anime are good enough for me, even if my betters thinks that I'm a man-child, who cares?"

I am perfectly happy with being a productive member of society. I like helping people and being useful.

Unfortunately, I expect that humans will be obsolete in that regard, so you bet I'm willing to be content with mild hedonism and doing whatever I like. Nothing that fundamentally warps my psyche or is of the level of addictiveness as opioids or wireheading, but video games? The ones I like are abstracted away enough from Skinner Boxes that I make the unprincipled exception of being willing to play them forever.

"Astrophysics and anime are good enough for me, even if my betters thinks that I'm a man-child, who cares?"

Except, I don't have an "astrophysics and anime." There is no joy in life. What reason do I have to keep suffering it — because suffering is all there is — if not for some higher goal or purpose?

I understand and I do not have an answer. There have been times in which even my interests were not enough and I would have written the exact same words as you. These feelings are always there, underneath my conscious brain, I will probably bever be a "normal" person and if stretched, I would probably take my own life, I am just "lucky" enough that my despair is fluctuating so I can seem glimpses of hope. As for higher purpose, I gave up on that: I tried religion, meditation, therapy, becoming a workaholic... Nothing is satisfying in a fundamental way. I just concentrate on my daily action because the future fills me with horror and contempkating it it has not been a productive endeavour. I keep living as if everyday will be as banal and worthless as the this one, using my copes until they last. Try some cope, maybe you will find some solace in the scam that is existence, it is not guaranteed though.

If the same program can play chess, can answer maths questions, write fiction, poems, code websites and critique art... how is it not generally intelligent?

You seem to think you can predict 75 years into the future, would you care to back that up with any kind of reasoning, as opposed to scare quotes?

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