domain:doyourownresearch.substack.com
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
(Not the original commenter, but wanted to jump in). I don't think anything in their comment above implied that they were talking about linear or simpler statistics, that's your own projection, and I think it does you a disservice. Similarly, I find it somewhat suspect to directly compare brains to LLMs. I don't think you did so explicitly, but you certainly did so implicitly, even despite your caveat. There's an argument to be made that Hebbsian learning in neurons and the brain as a whole isn't similar enough to the mechanisms powering LLMs for the same paradigms to apply, although I think I do appreciate the point I think you are trying to make which is that human cause and effect is still (fancy) statistical learning on some level.
After all, MLPs and the different layers and deep learning techniques are inspired by brain neurons, but the actual mechanics are different scales entirely despite a few overlapping principles. It seems to me the overlapping principles are not enough to make that jump by themselves. I'd be curious if you'd expand somewhere on that, because you definitely know more than me there, but I don't think I'm incorrect in summarizing the state of the research? Brains are pretty amazing, after all, and of course I could pick out a bunch of facts about it but one that is striking is that LLMs use ~about the same amount of energy for one inference as the brain does in an entire day (.3 kWh, though figures vary for the inferences, it's still a gap of approximately that magnitude IIRC). On that level and others (e.g. neurons are more sparse, recurrent, asynchronous, and dynamic overall whereas LLMs use often fully connected denser layers for the MLPs... though Mixture of Experts and attention vs feed-forward components makes comparison tricky even ignoring the chemistry) it seems pretty obvious that the approach is probably weaker than the human one, so your prior that they are more or less the same is a little puzzling, despite how overall enlightening your comment is to what you're trying to get at.
I personally continue to think that the majority of the 'difference' comes from structure. I did actually mention a little bit of it in my comment, but with how little anyone has discussed neural network principles it didn't seem worthwhile to talk about it in any more detail and I didn't want to bother typing out some layman's definition. There's the lack of memory, which I talked about a little bit in my comment, LLM's lack of self-directed learning, the temporal nature of weight re-adjustment is different, and as you pointed out their inputs are less rich than that of humans to start with. Plus your point about attention, though I'm not quite sure how I'd summarize that. While it's quite possible that we can get human-level thinking out of a different computational base, we're n=1 here on human development, so it sort of feels similar in a few ways to the debate over whether you can have significant numbers of equal complexity non-carbon based life forms on other planets. And smarter cephalopod brains share enough structural similarities while not achieving anything too special that I don't think it's very helpful. I might be wrong about that last point, though.
Try living your life after having been deemed a politically liability whom no bank will touch and come back to me.
That doesn't and hasn't really happened in the US ... except for well, the one big thing we're seeing right now. Over porn/adult content. The payment processors ability to censor the largest stores on the internet and some of the state governments suppressing adult content sites is a pretty easy to see what real power looks like.
It looks like you literally not being able to see or buy the "bad things" to begin with. And even this still needs the backing of government and the deepest institutions of credit and capital to enforce their censorship with decently accessible workarounds still available. This is the worst America has to offer currently, multiple times more censoring than almost any other cultural clash and it's still struggling.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
Honestly, therapist is a last resort for us, we fear it as much as drugs. But it was what the Neuropsychologist prescribed for her when she was diagnosed with ADHD, and we are really at a loss. We are giving it six months just so we can say we tried it and see what else the Neuropsychologist tells us to do.
Stuffy closet is also just the only way to keep her and her siblings safe when she's like this. She will thrash and yell in there for 10+ minutes until she calms down.
Sorry if I was snippy, it's a hazard about talking about parenting on the Internet. But yeah, I get the feeling that kids like her were part of the 50% childhood mortality rate a thousand years ago.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
But the model three is a better car! The foreigner version of a ford Mustang or a Camero is probably affordable at less than 1800 hrs at $17/hr. It's illegal to sell, but that's the rough equivalent, and 'I want a hilux' is a different issue.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Offer a suspended sentence where the whole thing is forgiven if she completes probation. Or knock it down to the charge for shooting a gun in the air(illegal with good reason)/handgun while underage(in the US handguns require 21). There's lots of solutions and she might well get screwed by an uncaring system.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Because low-skill compensation in the west has been rising astronomically, personal touches like that have been getting more expensive, not less. Fast food is paying $14/hr now- for front of house(restaurants tend to pay their kitchen people more because it's harder work). Day laborers used to be $100/day, plus lunch. Now it's $200.
Tipping everywhere probably has this as a big chunk of the explanation. It is simply far more expensive to hire someone to take orders and pour coffee and putting some on the customers even if it annoys them makes more sense as a tradeoff.
As for why that is, I blame weed making some people unemployable and doordash convincing a bigger chunk that they can strike it rich being their own boss.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Don't ask me, it wasn't my idea to link to a banned account! The feature is more of a QOL thing, from when we'd just moved and it was helpful to refer explicitly to a Reddit account. These days, nobody uses it unless they forget or don't know about our alternate @.
birb_cromble
2d ago
nowadays they're so ubiquitous among young people that I don't think there's a strong correlation at all.
I don't have the disgust reaction that a lot of people here seem to have. I do, however, tend to think that for the cost of a full sleeve you could do something that gets you a fun story and some interesting scars.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Left-libertarian to SJW is not an unusual ideological evolution over the relevant time period.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
But those degrees are disproportionately in psychology or communications.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
I'm struggling to imagine how on earth you could possibly think that this is a distinction without a difference. There's a massive difference!
Especially if you then turn around to use this conflation to imply other things. Maybe it's all well and good as its own end (as you point out if it kills us all it won't matter why), but you yourself advanced the following argument:
These aren't agents that were explicitly trained to be self-preserving. They weren't taught that shutdown was bad. They just developed shutdown resistance as an instrumental goal for completing their assigned tasks.
This suggests something like goal-directedness emerging from systems we thought were "just" predicting the next token. It suggests the line between "oracle" and "agent" might be blurrier than we thought.
To me that sounds like circular or tautological reasoning, you can't call it a distinction without a difference and then use only one of the two as evidence for something else. If shutdown-resistance is emergent, it has implications for agency and intelligence. You used this theory as an example of goal-seeking behavior. But, if shutdown-resistance is a normal training pattern outcome (as I believe), then we can't draw any conclusions from it.
I think the best way to put this in perspective is the philosophical debate over whether the intelligence of humans is just a means to an end (evolution opened up a niche for intelligent beings) that's ultimately purely mechanical (aided in survival and reproduction), or if it's something more special (self-awareness is a thing, life isn't deterministic, meaning is a new concept unique to humans or intelligent life) and emergent in the sense that it created something more than the sum of its parts. Religiously, I believe the second, but you don't have to be religious to feel that way. Note that the implications for how we treat AI differ greatly depending on which bucket you put in it. Similarly, although on a personal level maybe there's little reason to see a difference between the two opinions about human intelligence (you are you either way), it's hardly a distinction without a difference overall. It's a big deal!
aardvark2
2d ago
but then what's the use for link to reddit profile? It doesn't let me to view user post history, only says "This account has been suspended"
aardvark2
2d ago
For the other 98% of black people, just ask to see their degree.
USA has affirmative action so that blacks college degree ownership is not based on IQ gap at all but on what those in power want; so https://jbhe.com/2022/03/the-racial-gap-in-educational-attainment-in-the-united-states-5/ There were 7,921,000 African Americans over the age of 25 in the United States who had earned at least a bachelor's degree
I would agree however that it helps more to rich blacks and not poor ones.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2d ago
My apologies, I didn't know how much you had already tried! The whole "therapists and soft safe closets" thing made you sound like the permissive type, but if you're not, then fair enough.
The design space of possible minds is very large. I suppose there are some people who would just die without drugs; and perhaps they did, for most of history. That's a bit sad though.
Do what you have to do to live a normal (and physically safe) life obviously. Although I do think you should listen to your intuition that "it doesn't sit right with you". At the very least, don't let anyone talk you into thinking that it should sit right with you. You can at least have that much.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2d ago
Defensive is a hilarious word to use in this context given were rapidly approaching year 100 of this conflict (or 1000, depending on how far back you want to play the grievance game).
I don't think it would be very difficult to come up with an argument that the Palestinians are on the defensive due to $PREVIOUS_ATTROCITY.
Also quite funny to call it defensive when there's a 1000:1 military power ratio and one side has killed 6x the people of the other.
If the credible threat against you has been defeated in the field for almost two straight calendar years, are you really on the defensive?
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
Thank you for your detailed and thoughtful reply!
FarmReadyElephants
2d ago
What makes discord and reddit similar is that there is a discussion of enthusiasts available on any topic you are interested in. If I want to learn Ableton or discuss the Byzantine empire, I know I can find that on reddit. It just comes with BLM and LGBT propaganda and ban-happy leftist mods.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
I have four kids. All my other kids so far are perfectly normal and well-behaved. We are not permissive parents. We are not an "everything goes" family.
I physically pick up my daughter and carry her to the car. We leave when she starts freaking out and she misses out on a lot of stuff. We left the fourth of July party early and she missed fireworks. She misses a lot. We don't go places usually because I just have to pick her up and leave. Leave the library before we check out books. Leave the grocery store with a shopping cart half full. Leave the park. Leave leave leave. That has been my life. Babysitters have quit. I can't go anywhere with her and I can't go anywhere without her and I can't go anywhere.
And she's getting heavier and heavier. And when I pick her up she fights with everything she has. She is STRONG, crazy strong, frightened animal strong, and it's getting more and more difficult. If I don't figure this out soon, I will NO LONGER be able to carry her safely to her closet to calm down. And then if she's attacking her siblings, I have to attack her? If I can't carry her safely, it's just getting rougher and rougher to her.
And yes, I take away her toys. Yes, she is consigned to her closet often. We are stricter than most people we know. Our kids know they need to say please and thank you or they aren't getting fed. You really have the wrong idea if you think we just don't try to change her behavior at all through normal parenting means.
We even tried spanking for a few months when she was four. She kept doing this one behavior where she would get water out of the bathroom sink, fill containers, and then leave them places. The water would spill and make a mess and we were worried about rot. So we had a rule - when we saw her do this, she would be spanked immediately. The consequence would be immediate, and it was only for this one specific behavior. Well... nothing changed. Nothing at all. Except we felt like jerks, because it really seemed like, if she could stop herself, she would have. She didn't like getting spanked.
The word "Pathological" means that it prevents you from living normal life. I think our experience with her qualifies.
That's why it's so weird that I can actually go places with her taking L-Theanine.
She ran straight into a moving car. This isn't something a normal seven year old does. She is going to die if I just treat her like my other three kids.
Are you sure that when someone demands too much of you, you have an adrenaline rush? Start attacking people? Run away like a lion's after you? Freeze like a gun is pointed at your heart? Several times a day? That is what PDA is supposedly. And my kid acts like it.
And the fact that I can give her a supplement that completely changes her behavior, so she becomes perfectly behaved, when if I give the same supplement to another kid it doesn't change anything at all... doesn't that hint at something?
TheDemonRazgriz
2d ago
I would argue that “unalived” already looks quite stupid.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2d ago
I personally don't think it's a good measure for intelligence, but I will actually try and defend the "it's intelligence if it makes enough money in the proper contexts" argument. It's not saying on the immediate level that monetary effects show intelligence, that's obviously silly, it's got one or two more links in the logical chain. It probably goes something like this:
-
people pay money for things that matter to them, that is to say, money is a good proxy for value
-
people pay money for [knowledge] work, that requires intelligence
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if enough people pay money for [knowledge] work, to AI...
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therefore, we can infer that people, in aggregate, and based on reliable links, have judged that AI has enough intelligence to count as intelligent
I disagree with it because I think thinking about intelligence is inherently a philosophical-only type of question, but I certainly respect the opinion above anyways because it does have a degree of sense to it. While jobs and tasks also notably are affected by supply and demand, I do personally think that money is an excellent proxy for value in the vast majority of cases. People are whining about museums closing? Evidently the museums aren't valuable enough. STEM degrees pay more than humanities degrees? Their degrees are more valuable to society. Conclusions like that.
Bullet points 2 and 3 are I think the points of confusion here? Advocates of this definition emphasize that if there is a 'big enough' amount of money involved, the judgement has effectively already been made by the wisdom of the masses + the laws of capitalism. In terms of what number counts, this is nebulous as anyone will admit, but serious people have put numbers to it, in fact as I referenced in my original comment, the Microsoft-OpenAI contract itself uses this definition for "AGI" and puts a 100 billion number as the cutoff. So I don't think we can dismiss the argument out of hand!
I should also note that this argument strongly implies (bullet 3) that replacement of humans (humans specifically because nothing else is 'intelligent' enough to do the task) for certain types of work is required. Bullet 2 is another sticking point: is help-desk support, for example, something that actually requires intelligence? Humans are replaced by machines for purely physical tasks already and that doesn't result in claims of intelligence. Still, you can see the appeal of the argument if something previously thought impossible for a machine due to its perceived complexity and adaptability is suddenly possible on a large scale. However, it's important to distinguish between picking apart the underpinning details of this logical chain, from the overall claim, they are different. A dispute about bullets 2 or 3 is somewhat a factual dispute, or a definitional one, and doesn't invalidate the overall claim necessarily.
SkoomaDentist
2d ago
You have to be able to find the drone and guide the loiterer close enough fast enough.
FeepingCreature
2d ago
I think the synthesis here is that we should have enough knowledge that if we were to build an ASI, and turned it on, it would in fact do what we tell it to, interpreted in the way that we mean it, and that this is table stakes for getting any sort of good outcome. - That is, our problem at the moment is not so much that we don't know what the good is as that we can't reliably make the AI do anything even if we want it very much and it is in fact good.
It was different times when Reddit was founded. Back then the left was confident in it's ideas, so they craved free speech as they saw it as the key to winning. It's only when they realized they can also lose on the marketplace of ideas that they turned sour on it.
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