I love things like this, and always wondered why we never had these kinds of books as part of math curricula in elementary and middle school in the US.
Yes, true, but somehow we don't have that problem with veterinary care, even when there's insurance involved. I don't really know how likely it is for any given treatment to help my cat, or for how long, but the vet gives me a list of options and each of their prices, in advance, and then that's what I pay. I pick based on a combination of my understanding, their recommendations, and my budget. It's generally far more humane, more empowering, and less condescending than getting care for a human, because our society lets people take responsibility for their pets in ways it doesn't let adults do for themselves.
Even besides that, though, the reality is much, much worse than that in (human) medicine.
Depending on whether I have insurance and exactly which kind, the base price of a service - not what I ultimately pay, but the total number that I and my insurer pay - can vary by more than an order of magnitude. Even after the fact it can be really difficult to know how much anyone is paying anyone else. I've had three different situations, with different providers and insurers, in which the provider kept applying payments to the wrong line items, in ways that messed up who was supposed to pay what and when, that took months of calendar time and tens of hours of time on the phone to sort out.
As you noted, goods like prescriptions should be simpler than medical services to price out. But, when I have to fill the same prescription in different pharmacies (which is every month, because I travel full time), the price has varied by as much as a factor of a hundred between pharmacies or even by 2-10x month to month from the same pharmacy. The price depends on the insurer. The price can sometimes be higher with insurance than without, because I can't combine insurance with various magic-seeming discount programs like GoodRx that are available to anyone and that some pharmacists will apply for you without you even asking. But it can sometimes also be ultimately cheaper to pay the higher price anyway depending on how your deductibles and copays work and when the magic plan year end date happens. Many pharmacies won't tell you the price before your Rx is in their system, and once it is in the system, you may not be able to change whether or not to use insurance. For many medications it is difficult or illegal to move them to a different pharmacy at all, or it can only be done a certain number of times, or it can only be done after the first pharmacy has filled it at least once.
I can't tell if this is intended to be taken seriously or not, and I won't bother pointing out the various individual false assumptions, misunderstandings, reasoning errors, non sequiturs, or contentless statements. Any modern LLM can handle that just fine if you want to know. But this sentence caught my eye:
Reduction is an operation of reason by the observer to extract the most relevant relations from the observed.
This is a misunderstanding of what "reduction" actually means, but I think it's a very common one. I can totally see how, if that's what you believe the word means, you would come to believe many of the other claims in this post. What this describes, though, is a form of fake reduction, and I really do recommend you take the time to read the Reductionism 101 sequence, especially the last 4 posts in it. Real reduction requires quite a bit more knowledge and understanding and perspective than most people imagine. See also the first handful of posts from Joy in the Merely Real.
One thing that's not clear to me (and you may have discussed this in the previous posts, I don't remember) is: was the previous structure even legally valid/enforceable? Can you write into the structure of a for-profit LLC that it has to act in accordance with some goal other than profit? Because as I understand it, a board member has a fiduciary duty to the company regardless of their own interests, or that of the organization or process that made them a board member. Someone recently highlighted to me some examples of cases (in normal for-profit startups) where this gives you behavior like board members approving some measure, and then the same individuals, now acting as shareholders where they can do as they please, vote against it.
Maybe the original OpenAI structure included a clever and enforceable way around this. But if not, then maybe it's possible the switch to a PBC closes a loophole whereby investors could have sued the board for acting according to the nonprofit's interests instead of their own.
My instinctive response is: weight classes are for controlled competitions where fairness is what we actually want. For social status games, if you want to enforce weight classes, you need a governing body who gets to define the classes and define the rules of the game, but the rules of social status games frequently include being not fully expressible in precise terms. This isn't necessarily a showstopper, but it necessarily includes admitting what range of the hierarchy you're in and cannot rise above. As I understand it, the reason the self-sorting works today is that when people compete in the wrong weight classes, it's not fun for either side. A Jupiter Brain might theoretically be amenable to playing a social game with me on my level, but at best it would be like me playing tic-tac-toe with a little kid, where the kid is old enough to realize I'm throwing the game but not old enough to have solved the game.
Personally I'd much rather not spend my time on such games when it is possible to manage that. But I don't always have that choice now, and probably still won't at least sometimes in the future.
Thanks! This is an interesting angle I wasn't much thinking about.
I anticipate this will lead to some interesting phrasing choices around the multiple meanings of "conception" as the discussions on what and how and whether AI's 'really' think continue to evolve.
There's a story about trained dolphins. The trainer gave them fish for doing tricks, which worked great. Then they decided to only give them fish for novel tricks. The dolphins, trained under the old method, ran through all the tricks they knew, got frustrated for a while, then displayed a whole bunch of new tricks all at once.
Among animals, RL can teach specific skills but also reduces creativity in novel contexts. You can train creative problem solving, but in most cases, when you want control of outcomes, that's not what you do. The training for creativity is harder, and less predictable, and requires more understanding and effort from the trainer.
Among humans, there is often a level where the more capable find supposedly simple questions harder, often because they can see all the places where the question assumes a framework that is not quite as ironclad as the asker thinks. Sometimes this is useful. More often it is a pain for both parties. Frequently the result is that the answerer learns to suppress their intelligence instead of using it.
In other words - this post seems likely to be about what this not-an-AI-expert should expect to happen.
He makes some bizarre statements, such as that if you have a rare gene that might protect you from the AI having enough data to have ‘a good read’ on you, and that genetic variation will ‘protect you from high predictability.’
You know, even if this were true... if you're a less unpredictable entity in a world where sufficiently power AI wants to increase predictability, there are many simple and obvious classes of interventions that reliably achieve that. Mostly, those interventions look nothing like freedom, and you're not going to like them.
Yes, my thinking is similar. Elementary school teachers often barely understand the math they are required to be teaching, and don't have the fluidity needed to handle a more free-flowing discussion about a book that doesn't conform to a specific curriculum. The whole system frequently retreats into drilling specific procedures that mean nothing to the teachers and students involved, even when the explicit stated goal is to help build understanding and problem solving skills. The idea that math classes even could include reading books is just not part of the conversation. Only English classes assign books to read - not history, not foreign languages, and definitely not science and math. Related: I had exactly one math teacher, in seventh grade, who assigned a term paper on any math topic of our choice. I got a 70, the lowest math grade I ever received in any year, and it was because, as he told me in his own words, he didn't understand what I'd written and couldn't follow it.
I will say, there are some English language books that deliberately incorporate math in ways that are both fun and educational, if you had a teacher able and willing to lead such discussions. There's many such books by Ian Stewart. Alice in Wonderland would be a fair choice, and the kids probably already know the story. For middle or high schoolers especially, it doesn't have to just be fiction, either. For the "When will we ever need this?" crowd, something like Nonplussed or Impossible?, both by Julian Haveil, could be a welcome and eye-opening change of pace.