That gives "Eternal September" a new meaning... 

The view that Heisenberg advocates - reductionism had reached a limit, and a new paradigm was needed - was a highly influential school of thought in the 1960s. In particle physics, there is a mathematical object called the S-matrix (scattering matrix), which tabulates scattering amplitudes (the quasiprobability that if these N particles enter a collision, these other M particles will be what comes out). Quantum electrodynamics (a theory with electrons and photons, let's say) is a prototypical quantum field theory in which the S-matrix can be calculated from the stipulation that electrons and photons are fundamental. For the weak interactions (later unified with electromagnetism), this reductionist method also works. 

But for the strong interactions, field theory looked intractable, and a new philosophy was advanced that the S-matrix itself should be the central mathematical object in the theory. Remember that quarks were never seen by themselves, only protons, neutrons, and a hundred other types of "hadron". The idea of nuclear democracy was that the S-matrix for these hundred seemingly equi-fundamental particle species, would be derived from postulates about the properties of the S-matrix, rather than from an underlying field theory. This was called the bootstrap program, it is how the basic formulae of string theory were discovered (before they had even been identified as arising from strings), and it's still used to study the S-matrix of computationally intractable theories. 

These days, the philosophy that the S-matrix is primary, still has some credibility in quantum gravity. Here the problem is not that we can't identify ultimate constituents, but rather that the very idea of points of space-time seems problematic, because of quantum fluctuations in the metric. The counterpart of the 1960s skepticism about quarks, would be that the holographic boundary of space-time is fundamental. For example, in the AdS/CFT correspondence, scattering events in Anti de Sitter space (in which particles approach each other "from the boundary", interact, and then head back to the boundary) can be calculated entirely within the boundary CFT, without any reference to AdS space at all, which is regarded as emergent from the boundary space. The research program of celestial holography is an attempt to develop the same perspective within the physically relevant case of flat space-time. The whole universe that we see, would be a hologram built nonlocally from entanglement within a lower-dimensional space... 

The eventual validation of quarks as particles might seem like a sign that this radical version of the holographic philosophy will also be wrong in the end, and perhaps it will be. But it really shows the extent to which the late thoughts of Heisenberg are still relevant. Holographic boundaries are the new S-matrix, they are a construct which has made quantum gravity uniquely tractable, and it's reasonable to ask if they should be treated as fundamental, just as it was indeed entirely reasonable for Heisenberg and the other S-matrix theorists to ask whether the S-matrix itself is the final word. 

Ugh, I was using LW's custom reaction emoticons to annotate this comment, and through a fumble, have ended up expressing a confidence of 75% in the scenario that AI will "otherwise enforce on us a pause", and I don't see how to remove that annotation. 

I will say that, alignment aside, the idea that an advanced AI will try to halt humanity's AI research so it doesn't produce a rival, makes a lot of sense to me. 

Ted Cruz mentioned how his daughter was using ChatGPT when texting him. I wonder how many of these senators and CEOs, and their staffers and advisors, are already doing the same, when they try to decide AI policy. I guess that would be an example of weak-to-strong superalignment :-) 

Heisenberg versus quarks is one of the best lifelong physics thinkers, encountering one of the most subtle topics in physics. When he says

The questions about the statistics of quarks, about the forces that hold them together, about the particles corresponding to these forces, about the reasons why quarks never appear as free particles, about the pair-creation of quarks in the interior of the elementary particle -- all these questions are more or less left in obscurity.

... he is raising all the right questions, and their resolution required a field theory with completely unprecedented behaviors. The statistics of quarks required a new threefold quantum property, "color"; the forces that hold them together were described by a new kind of quantum field, a strongly coupled Yang-Mills field; the particles corresponding to those forces are the gluons, and like quarks, they never appear as free particles, because of a new behavior, "confinement". 

The deeper story here is a struggle of paradigms in the 1960s, between the old search for the most elementary particles, and the idea of a "nuclear democracy" of transformations among a large number of equally fundamental particle species. We now see those many particle types as due to different combinations of quarks, but at the time no-one understood how quarks could literally be particles (for the reasons touched on by Heisenberg), and they were instead treated as bookkeeping devices, akin to conserved quantities. 

The quark theorists won, once the gauge theory of gluons was figured out; but nuclear democracy (in the guise of "S-matrix theory", pioneered by Heisenberg) left its mark too, because it gave rise to string theory. They aren't even completely distinct paradigms; there are very close relationships between gauge theory and string theory, though not close enough that we know exactly what string theory corresponds to the quarks and gluons of the standard model. 

Incidentally, is there any meaningful sense in which we can say how many "person-years of thought" LLMs have already done? 

We know they can do things in seconds that would take a human minutes. Does that mean those real-time seconds count as "human-minutes" of thought? Etc. 

Liron: ... Turns out the answer to the symbol grounding problem is like you have a couple high dimensional vectors and their cosine similarity or whatever is the nature of meaning.

Could someone state this more clearly?

Jim: ... a paper that looked at the values in one of the LLMs as inferred from prompts setting up things like trolley problems, and found first of all, that they did look like a utility function, second of all, that they got closer to following the VNM axioms as the network got bigger. And third of all, that the utility function that they seemed to represent was absolutely bonkers 

What paper was this? 

scientifically falsifiable

How is it falsifiable?

I think it's very good to have people around who are saying "cut back on social media", "get off social media", as a counter to its addictive power. 

And yet... If I take the title literally, I am being told that I should quit social media entirely, as soon as possible, because in the near future, it will be so addictive that I will be literally unable to quit. 

When you first raised this idea, I asked what will happen to people who don't get out in time? In this post, we now have a concrete scenario. The protagonist doesn't die. They don't go mad. They don't become anyone's minion. They just... spend a lot of time irritated, spend all day watching videos, and lose touch with some real people. 

Well, that's nobody's ideal, but it's not actually worse than the human condition has been, for large numbers of people throughout history. "Lives of quiet desperation" I think have been pretty common in the agricultural and industrial eras. In terms of historical experience, it is actually normal for people to end up limping through life with some affliction that they never quite get over, whether it's injury, trauma, some familial or national destiny that they just can't escape... To learn that, in the information age, some people become unwholesome computer or media addicts, is just to write the next chapter of that. 

Let me be clear, I'm not quite urging apathy about social media addiction. It's just that I was expecting something more apocalyptic as the payoff, that humanity would be utter captives of the content farms, perhaps later to be herded into Matrix pods or assembled into armies of meme-controlled zombies. Instead, what you're describing is more like a chronic misery specific to the information age. 

It's like someone warning that if you abandon hunting and gathering, you'll end up standing around all day watching farm animals, or if you leave the farm for the big industrial city, you'll end up stooped and maimed by factory work. All that actually happened, but there were also huge upsides to the new order in each case. 

After all, there's actually a lot of good stuff that comes through social media. With a keyword search, I can find up-to-the-second information and perspectives, on something that is happening, including censored perspectives. I can follow the news about topics that interest only a very niche audience. I can eavesdrop on, and even participate in, all kinds of discussions that would otherwise be out of my reach. I can track down lost friends, find work, simply indulge my curiosity. 

Of course there are formidable downsides too. You can overindulge (I have a weakness for reaction videos), you can burn out certain faculties, you can forget your own life amidst a million distractions, and just as in real life, there are far worse things lying in wait: scammers, grifters, toxic personalities and communities, political botnets; and perhaps there are even architects of addiction who deserve death as much as any fentanyl dealer does. 

It's just that you haven't really made the case, that the social Internet will become nothing but a prison of blighted lives. Life in that space is much more like living in a city. There are risks and evils specific to urban life, and city dwellers must learn to avoid them, and lots of people fall prey to them. But there are also good things that can only happen in cities, and there are new good things that only happen online. 

I haven't mentioned the AI factor so far, but it is central to your scenario. My response again is that there are positives and negatives, and in some cases it may not even be clear which is which, The combination of AI and social media may lead to new symbioses that look horrifying to outsiders, but which have a merit and integrity of their own. As AI becomes more and more capable, the question of AI on social media just blends into the broader question of humanity's destiny in a world with AI, and ultimately, a world with artificial superintelligence. 

How often will a civilization with the capability to perform such a simulation, have anything to learn from it?