domain:forecasting.substack.com
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I (non-native English speaker) found ChatGPT's critique helpful with a recent application letter. I will grant you that it was a bit more formal than your choice of text, though -- I did not talk about drinking anyone's bathwater, time will tell if that was the correct choice or not.
Most of its suggestions were minor stylistic things (using a gerund instead of an infinitive in certain phrases, avoiding repetition of word constructs) which seemed to me to be improvements.
I will grant you that an application letter is probably a more central example of most of its training data than that perv diary entry -- it is a continuous text, for one thing. Also, unlike that diary entry, I did not start out with a (presumably well-formulated) draft in a foreign language which I translated to English and then asked GPT to correct my English without access to the original (which from what I can tell is what happened with the diary). Instead, I wrote me thoughts down in English, sometimes awkwardly, and relied on it to put them into a smoother form.
Mantergeistmann
2d ago
So what would it do to the abortion debate? Would robo-abortions be illegal (since you clearly wouldn't oh god i forgot about fetishes I'm going to bleach my brain have created a pregnancy with a robot unless you intended to have it carried through to term)? But then what does that say, that the sanctity of a robo-vat-fetus is more legally "alive"/protectable than one in a human womb? But somewhere out there is a future where, if it isn't made illegal, some youtuber is repeatedly aborting his pregnant robot for the hate-clicks.
And I think that's the worst sentence I've written in my entire life, but I'm still young. Even without longevity, I'm sure there's time for me to write worse.
aldomilyar
2d ago
I think it's more the raising of children that's the bottleneck at the moment.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I've heard (but not confirmed) that removing one suicide method (eg. putting fences on a bridge) reduces the total number of suicides by the marginal amount blocked by that intervention. In other words, there are bridge-jumping-suicidal people and pill-taking-suicidal people, but not suicidal-by-any-method people that would substitute one method for another.
I am very doubtful about that. Some of the suicides are likely by goal-oriented people following a long-term plan (e.g. in a MAID-like context), and for these I would expect substitution effects.
Even for spontaneous suicides, I think that there is some minor substitution effect. If a person had the worst day of their life and would jump off a bridge if not for the fact that it was fenced, I would expect at least a 20% chance that another convenient method (access to a tall building, a firearm, drugs) will present itself and be taken before they feel less suicidal.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
A Price Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
An Air Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
That's pretty easy to just state ipse dixit. But there's something missing that I would call "reasoning". So far, when we've tested your reasoning, it has led to many more questions that you've consistently refused to answer.
once the Price Press exists
That's not how Constitutional grants of authority work. At all. Honestly, if this is your understanding of the Constitution, there's probably not much more value in me continuing this discussion.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
That seems possible as applied to state government expenditures (likely subject to federal rules like the one in question, subject to future court rulings).
We never did get a ruling on California's attempt to boycott several red states, which at least seems related. But in a world in which the court accepts Wickard, I suspect the feds would win both the domestic and foreign state expenditures questions if it makes it to court.
roystgnr
2d ago
I follow JimDMiller ("James Miller" on Scott's blogs, occasionally /u/sargon66 back when we were on Reddit) on Twitter, and was amused to see how much pushback he got on the claim:
If I can predict what I doctor will say, I have the knowledge of that doctor. Prediction is understanding, that is the key to why LLMs are worth trillions.
On the one hand, it's not inconceivable that LLMs can get very good at producing text that "interpolates" within and "remixes" their data set without yet getting good at predicting text that "extrapolates" from it. Chain-of-thought is a good attempt to get around that problem, but so far that doesn't seem to be as superhuman at "everything" as simple Monte Carlo tree search was at "Go" and "Chess". Humans aren't exactly great at this either (the tradition when someone comes up with previously-unheard-of knowledge is to award them a patent and/or a PhD) but humans at least have got a track record of accomplishing it occasionally.
On the other hand, even humans don't have a great track record. A lot of science dissertations are basically "remixes" of existing investigative techniques applied to new experimental data. My dissertation's biggest contributions were of the form "prove a theorem analogous to existing technique X but for somewhat-different problem Y". It's not obvious to me how much technically-new knowledge really requires completely-conceptually-new "extrapolation" of ideas.
On the gripping hand, I'm steelmanning so hard in my first paragraph that it no longer really resembles the real clearly-stated AI-dismissive arguments. If we actually get to the point where the output of an LLM can predict or surpass any top human, I'm going to need to see some much clearer proofs that the Church-Turing thesis only constrains semiconductors, not fatty grey meat. Well, I'd like to see such proofs, anyway. If we get to that point then any proof attempts are likely either going to be comically silly (if we have Friendly AGI, it'll be shooting them down left and right) or tragically silly (if we have UnFriendly AGI, hopefully we won't keep debating whether submarines can really swim while they're launching torpedos).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
And yet, environmentalists act as if they have 100% confidence, and they commonly reject market solutions in favor of central planning. The logical deduction from this pattern of behavior is that the central planning is the goal, and the global warming is the excuse. It is not bad argumentation to say to the environmentalist, "you are just a socialist that wants to control the economy, and are using CO2 as an excuse" because a principled environmentalist would never bother raising a finger in America. They'd go to India and chain themselves to a river barge dumping plastic or go to Africa and spay and neuter humans over there. If you are trying to mess with American's cars, heat, and AC, its because you dont like that Americans have those things, because other concerns regarding the environment have been much more pressing for several decades at this point, and that isn't likely to change.
This is a failure of theory of mind.
As a general rule, when there's a situation where person A insistently tries to solve problem B with method C rather than more-effective method D, the conclusion "A is secretly a liar about wanting to solve problem B and just wants to do method C for other reason E" is almost always false, outside of special cases like PR departments and to some extent politicians. The correct conclusion is more often "A is not a consequentialist and considers method D sinful and thus off the table". "A thinks method D is actually not more effective than method C" is also a thing.
So, yes, a lot of these people really are socialists, but they're also environmentalists who sincerely believe CO2 might cause TEOTWAWKI. It's just, well, you actually also need the premise of "sometimes there isn't a perfect solution; pick the lesser evil" in order to get to "pursue this within capitalism rather than demanding we dismantle capitalism at the same time", and a lot of people don't believe that premise.
FistfullOfCrows
2d ago
Just have the robot waifu be able to bear children. Then we wouldn't need ELON money to have 30 children. If anything, this might actually fix the demographic collapse
Edit: I replied to a child of a comment, thinking it was a direct reply to me. Oops.
I'm not sure which Texas law you're refering to? I consider it an effect, and not a cause. Did the deleted comment imply that everything is downstream from a new Texan law? I admittedly can't defend such a position, I'm just pointing out a pattern with the belief that no explanation makes it any less concerning.
'harmful to minors' is so subjective that whoever has the most power can make it apply to everything that they're against. The label has not had anything to do with what is literally harmful to minors for like 20 years now.
Anyway, Steam and Itch.io have already been hit by censorship (though Itch seem to have gotten some of the games back). ID laws are already gaining traction. I've already had purchases refuted by Paypal because of reasons which are false, but the sort of false where people are afraid of arguing against them because it will make them appear immoral. This is either censorship from many different causes in rapid succession, or it's a coordinated attack on human freedom by somebody with enough power to get multiple countries and multiple major payment processors on their side.
a story where Shinji agrees to undergo conversion therapy in order to cure his homosexuality
Good news: I am very interested in your comment. I'm taking notes.
Bad news: A psychiatrist is very interested in your comment. And the notes are on NHS mental health branded stationery.
Truly, I have been ignorant of the depths of depravity, I am happy to concede that I'm using these models the wrong way now.
I genuinely can't see myself using any LLM in this manner, but I consider it an entirely legitimate and harmless use case. I'll go hang out with Voltaire when he says that he doesn't understand what would compel you to do this, but we'll defend your right to try. You have done a great service. We are all more informed, and perhaps slightly more damned, for your efforts.
rae
2d ago
I’m afraid that comment removed the last shred of credibility you might have had. Either you are trolling or are very, very confused.
In case it’s the latter: next token prediction allows for surprisingly sophisticated outputs despite the simplicity of the training. This is because of the sheer scale of both parameters and data. LLMs can have hundreds of billions of parameters and are trained on trillions of tokens. These raw models are powerful but hard to control, so they are almost always fine tuned with a much smaller dataset. But yes, these abilities (generating correct python scripts, playing chess) arise purely from next token prediction and the sheer scale of these neural networks, without the need for an “intermediate layer”.
Historically you wouldn’t have been alone in being skeptical; even five years ago this was controversial, see the Scaling Hypothesis by Gwern five years ago back when this was debated.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Panicking about Texas laws in ways that make it clear the panicked did not read it is a thing that happens all the time and is not unique to porn bans.
Jiro
2d ago
I believe I still remain ignorant as to whether you think the establishment of a Price Force is authorized by your reasoning.
A Price Force is not sufficiently like either the army or navy to count, so it isn't authorized. Yes, the government could lie and say that it is.
There is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Press
But there's a freewheeling rule which says that an already existing press gets freedom of the press. So once the Price Press exists, freedom of the press applies to it. Laws or orders that shut it down are unconstitutional.
Blueberry
2d ago
About a week ago, a user here posted that Epstein's status as a Mossad agent was pretty much an established fact at this point,
Just for the protocol: 4 weeks ago 2rafa effort-posted that it is very implausible that Epstein was propped up by Mossad or that Israeli Intelligence was using him to blackmail people:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345489?context=8#context
If you were Mossad and wanted to blackmail people ambivalent or hostile toward Israel into supporting it, you'd target rich Chinese, Indians, gentile Russians, and above all rich Sunni Muslims, particularly in the Gulf. You would not target Alan Dershowitz. The blackmail argument betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the basic purpose of blackmail. It also betrays an understanding of diaspora Jewish politics and Mossad's influence over it. Most critically, those rich Americans who were more skeptical of Israel do not appear to have associated much with Epstein (likely because that isn't really their crowd). Epstein bragged about working for intelligence agencies; that is the one thing you don't want your agent of blackmail to be doing.
gattsuru
2d ago
The Texas law is bad, but it only applies where at least a third of content on a site is under the 'harmful to minors' banner. Even accepting for how poorly that calculation is defined, there's little chance it'd apply to sites like itch.io or x twitter, and zero of it applying to Steam. It wouldn't apply to payment processors at all.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
It may suggest foul play rather than coincidence, but that foul play could more parsimoniously be "his lawyers bribed guards to let him commit suicide like he wanted" or similar. Murder is only the obvious theory if we accept the premise that Epstein was a prolific pimp with dirt on a metric ton of people in high places, and that is what OP's post pretty successfully disputes.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
The prison system broadly does not give a shit about the lives of inmates, guards are mostly on the take, and having done prison maintenance before the standards are extremely low.
I think allowing Epstein to kill himself would have cost less than $30k- and thats taking into account New York being more expensive than Texas.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
Not really, no. Prison guards are not America’s best and brightest, are mostly on the take, and do not consider sex offenders worth protecting.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2d ago
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
The hairshirt environmentalist is not at all uncommon. Just because something is uncomplimentary to the outgroup does not mean it is not true.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2d ago
The robot waifus are the sterilization. This is a problem that solves itself.
Outright conversion's edgy enough that I can get why it triggers a lot of censorship, but even fairly soft orientation play tends to run headfirst into problems with other models. I'm not sure whether that's downstream of the political side of things, or just a software problem with categories.
(caveat: I'm absolutely not clicking that link, so I don't know and don't want to know how edgy that Eva ai output is.)
Which is kinda funny. On one hand, it is a really outlier kink (eg, 1.8k submissions on e621, <500 on AO3)... when spelled out. As a mere implication, though, it's endemic everywhere from gay4pay to girl-on-girl-plus-cameraman, and some forms are such a cliche in fanfic spaces (cw: tvtropes) that it's baked into even pretty mainstream fandom-originated works.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
If the history of the Price Force is unrelated to the army and navy
Ok, then I'll just repeat what I wrote in the original comment proposing it:
Say, the Army probably has some folks who work on the economics of a place. Like, say you're occupying Iraq; they want to understand the economic situation and implement policies for various reasons. Let's just grow that. Maybe stand it up as its own Force. Maybe call it the Price Force, with the mission to control prices globally. Of course, this may have some incidental domestic component to the mission, as these things are all linked. Is the Price Force an "Army" and a "land Force"? Is it properly authorized by the Constitution, since it grew up inside of the Army historically? What if we instead happened to grow the Price Force out of a group of economists at the Navy, since it seemed like those guys were actually better at it than the Army guys at whatever point in time? Is the Price Force then a "Navy" and a "naval Force"?
Perhaps it does not matter which one its history grew up in, and all this establishes is that the Price Force is an ArmyOrNavy. Do we then move on to asking about its supercomputers to try to figure out which one it is?
That example was once we've decided it's an army or navy, we need to figure out which one it's more like. You don't do this from scratch.
? Once we decide that it's some quantum superposition? Are you referring to the "ArmyOrNavy Clause"? Where is that in the Constitution?
Price Press
There is no Constitutional grant of any such authority anywhere. We have specific Constitutional grants of authority. There is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Press; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a Price Force1; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish an Air Force; there is no freewheeling grant of authority to establish a quantum superposition ArmyOrNavy. There is a specific Constitutional grant of authority concerning Armies, specifically and individually. There is a specific Constitutional grant of authority concerning a Navy, specifically and individually.
1 - At least AFAICT. I believe I still remain ignorant as to whether you think the establishment of a Price Force is authorized by your reasoning. I still remain ignorant as to what we do, on your view, about its supercomputers or lack thereof. I still remain ignorant as to what we do, on your view, as to the current Army's supercomputers/other equipment that must be maintained. I guess our first step was to determine that the US Army is an ArmyOrNavy quantum superposition. And then step two is to look at its supercomputers/other equipment that must be maintained and conclude that it's a Constitutional Navy?
Pretty much nobody could sincerely claim that the Price Force counts. A huge number of people could sincerely say that the Air Force counts. The object level is important.
Creating the Price Press is something the government can do using its ordinary powers. The free press clause isn't granting it authority at all.
The free press clause only comes into effect when the government tries to shut it down.
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