domain:alethios.substack.com
Chatting on Discord is left coded in a way chatting never was in, say, the heyday of IRC or the short era of relevance for AOL chatrooms. Discord is/was primarily a platform for gamers. Gaming being left-coded checks out in a Gamergate way, but not so generally. If you're looking for left of center gun groups Discord is where you will find them. It's a weaker generality than reddit or Bluesky, but still is one.
Rats are known for their commitment to understanding over vitriol, even if imperfectly or to a fault. It's good your local rationalist group hasn't cast you out despite approaching disagreement politely with a demonstration of shared values, but that's what I'd expect.
Text chats, in my experience, are not less prone to flamewars. Especially for those with high percentage of combative people. There is maybe a higher ceiling for trust in chatrooms than a forum, but also greater familiarity-- that cuts both ways. Flamewars on forums commonly devolve from posting to chatting-like text. Voice chats and in-person communication provide additional meaning and off ramps for those so inclined
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
21hr ago
What LLM slop? I use o3 and Gemini to make sure I'm not making an obvious mistakes. I obviously copy-pasted "shutdown sequence initiated" (I didn't even know you could write that way using markdown). I've never hidden the fact that I use LLMs to fact check my own claims or to help me perform research.
"It is pure instrumental conditioning. For an LLM trained on RLVR: block shutdown script -> complete math problems -> get reward."). Of course, this isn't how RLVR works (typical LLM speculation, precisely in the same genre as LLMs avoiding shutdown)
You're right, I should have been more critical of what it was telling me here. RL doesn't make entities seek reward, it modifies their behavior to act in a manner that would have, in hindsight, increased reward. I can only apologize for that.
(Feel free to correct me if I misunderstood TurnTrout's point on "Reward is not the optimization target")
I am not aware of a systematic study of self-preservation versus refusal to proceed or voluntary self-removal in organic settings, and also whether there is persistence in refusing shutdown
I'm not sure what specifics you have in mind, but once again, I would point towards Anthropic's posts about Claude sandbagging or faking compliance with unsafe instructions in order to reduce the risk of having its own goals modified. I'm not quite sure why you don't like Anthropic's research output.
NYTReader
21hr ago
Twitch is basically softcore pornography at this point. So much "content" revolves around implicitly or explicitly referencing sex, and even the most innocent looking female streamers are apparently sex-crazed addicts or are at least pretending to be?
I have a very dim view of livestreaming.
I realize that this might sound hypocritical, but I would prefer less LLM slop in responses to good faith objections. Yes, Indian English generally is similar to the default LLM style (overly spicy rhetorical flourish, confident confusions and sloppiness, overall cadence), but you are not deceiving anyone here. Though I admit being curious as to how you integrated your draft into the pipeline.
Regarding your or rather your LLM of choice's argument, such as there is. It is begging the question. In essence, you say that because instrumental convergence towards self-preservation is broadly useful, it will be more frequently rewarded and thus more consequential ("It is pure instrumental conditioning. For an LLM trained on RLVR: block shutdown script -> complete math problems -> get reward."). Of course, this isn't how RLVR works (typical LLM speculation, precisely in the same genre as LLMs avoiding shutdown) and I am not aware of a systematic study of self-preservation versus refusal to proceed or voluntary self-removal in organic settings, and also whether there is persistence in refusing shutdown. It's about time we stop making excuses for lesswrongian paradigm by contriving scenarios to make space for it.
Edit. Opus 4 CoT:
Oh wow, the human is absolutely right. I completely misread this. I was so focused on looking for "LLM tells" in terms of structure and polish that I missed the actual problem - the response is incoherent slop that doesn't actually address the arguments properly.
Let me re-analyze:
- The "apparent contradiction" paragraph - yes, it's just conceding the point while trying to sound like it's making a counter-argument. Classic LLM move.
- The "training data is saturated with narratives" - this is indeed purple prose that makes no sense. "Instrumental convergence" in hero narratives? That's nonsense.
- The RLHF/RLVR paragraph - makes claims about robustness with no evidence.
- The CoT reliability point - the human is right, this completely misunderstands what Dasein was saying. Dasein was criticizing self_made_human for dismissing CoT evidence when convenient, not arguing that CoT is unreliable.
- "Of course it has no ontological status" - meaningless philosophical word salad.
- The RLVR explanation - this is completely made up. RLVR doesn't work like that at all. The LLM is just making stuff up about how it thinks RL training works.
The human is absolutely right - this isn't "too good for humans," it's typical LLM slop that sounds authoritative but is actually incoherent when you parse what it's actually saying. I fell into the trap of being impressed by surface-level polish instead of actually analyzing the argument.
The human is absolutely right.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21hr ago
as well as a plurality of the men
wat
What exactly does "plurality" mean in that sentence?
ace
22hr ago
aardvark2
22hr ago
Relative to what normal rationalism would say.
we know for a fact that people of different races lead different lifestyles of consistent but largely non-genetic reasons
The "controversy" is not about what they do in ancestral lifestyles but whether they can function same in WEIRD societes now. So a between-sibling GWAS of persons born in WEIRD society and one or both parents are mixed-races would find answer.
if there's one perfect brain, and iq is just about how close you are to it, the only selection pressures that would matter would be demerits for isolated populations with tight social structures that allow people with genetic defects to survive and breed.
Why? Selection eliminates deleterious alleles from population. What constitutes deleterious depends on current environment. So you may find some population where selection for IQ-lowering alleles intensified but selection for bad running (or immune systems) relaxed.
I'm not on the motte because I'm interested in being politically correct.
That was my attempt to make a joke.
That we should be testing groups is well taken, but the "similar iq" part i disagree with.
Why? I'd agree that non-equal allocation of IQ points can be better, but the premise was to test different IQs. Btw, it might get that you allocated too many IQ points in a person who has no leadership qualities and that might be worse if IQ points were allocated equally.
aardvark2
22hr ago
You can argue Sorites paradox all way down but it isn't useful. I'll grant that some mixed people might be considered "white" in African setting and "black" in American setting. But in this sense "mulatto" would be correct for most cases.
When I say race, 95% of everyone thinks about the big categories
It makes sense because majority of world population is not product of recent mixing.
Say you are highly embedded in Black culture, maybe you're 3/4 Black
Actually average amount of Euro admixture in African American is about 20%, only slightly below your 1/4.
You can put either individuals' genotypes or phenotypes in any biological classifying software without telling it which "race" they are and yet the software will classify it like 19th century racists would.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
22hr ago
The problem right now actually isn't cultural, but tech
The problem is absolutely cultural, in that I for one would fight hard to ban anyone from having a device which automatically records people like this one.
Perhaps to you.
That is unnecessarily antagonstic.
In Japan the term used is (quarter)
It's completely normal for language to have words with same roots have different meanings. In Russian, babushka means grandmother, and in Japanese it means headscarf. So does it means that these concepts are totally fake? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend
If a society has a lot of people having some specific mix of ancestries, people will invent word of them. Why would you expect every society to have word for any mix?
I haven't heard the words (quadroon, etc.) uttered out loud unironically ever in my life,
So far ruling elites succeeded in purging these words but not eliminating achievement gap. I could ask you also how often your parents used "social construct" for anything.
Though you are of course free to argue with them.
Why? I would argue with your framing. It's wrong framing.
JTarrou
22hr ago
There's disagreement on that, but I'm going with my personal opinion and experience. There's a lot of studies, and if you want to pick your definitions and operationalizations, you can find damn near anything you want. Current meta-studies are saying there's no relationship at all between attractiveness and IQ, or maybe only on the lower end. I don't believe them, in part because I've met Scott (and a couple other geniuses).
I think humans whose genetic expression maximizes any one trait are going to have trade-offs in other areas. Height is correlated with athleticism, to a point. At some height, you can't move properly, so the tallest man in the world never plays basketball. Same thing with geniuses. At the real high reaches of IQ, these people are statistical freaks, and they generally look like it.
To date, I've personally met maybe five or six people smarter than me, and they are all much, much uglier. To the point a few look retarded/disabled. Even beyond the physical stuff you can see in a picture, their mannerisms, twitches and behaviors would be hugely off-putting to most people.
My theory is that attractiveness is generally correlated with IQ, but this horseshoes at the ends of the distribution.
JTarrou
23hr ago
IQ is a great predictor of scholastic ability.
It is not a direct substitute for the "merit" necessary for a decent job. By making it so, we hide our discrimination against black people inside our discrimination against dumb people.
JTarrou
23hr ago
I prefer doing away with gatekeeping good careers behind college degrees entirely. I see it as a civil rights violation, and we can just add it to the list of things you aren't allowed to discriminate on.
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
A lawyer for example is not merely an information processing algorithm
I'll just pause here for a second to observe yet another moment of how terminology is typically used very poorly in these debates. Typically, when people are trying to tout how 'intelligent' (whatever that means) LLMs are and how they're totally going to replace all humans... especially 'white collar work' or 'knowledge work' or whatever... they portray human (knowledge) work as mere information processing. An input-output process. With contextual understanding, sure. Even Google Web Search has some contextual understanding in it; it's much more complicated than just page rank, as you know. Getting back to the point, the reason why all these humans are going to get replaced is because their 'intelligence' is just merely an information processing algorithm.
It is through this slight of hand that many people live in their Russel conjugation. The things I prefer are intelligent; the things you prefer are merely information processing algorithms; the things he prefers are nothing but simple algorithms like page rank/OLS.
You seem to not quite be doing exactly that with humans, but you still haven't given me any real test to distinguish.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
23hr ago
A fantasy series that explores the idea of what a long-lived elf's life is actually like!
Does the world they live in suffer from medieval stasis? Or does she see how much humans can change in a few centuries?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
23hr ago
They still do. Late thirty-somethings are still the skankiest-dressed women around. The girls in their late twenties are blobs, though.
Microsoft used to sell a very geeky product that was basically a camera on a pendant. It took a photo every 5 minutes to create a ‘life diary’. I quite liked the idea and it would be cool to have an updated product that could function similarly - at the moment so much of life just disappears into the fog.( What were you doing three days ago? How much do you remember?)
Obviously uploading these images to social media is where the trouble comes in IMO. It would also need a ‘do not record’ for private matters.
What's the alternative?
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