Hi. I'm Gareth McCaughan. I've been a consistent reader and occasional commenter since the Overcoming Bias days. My LW username is "gjm" (not "Gjm" despite the wiki software's preference for that capitalization). Elsewehere I generally go by one of "g", "gjm", or "gjm11". The URL listed here is for my website and blog, neither of which has been substantially updated for several years. I live near Cambridge (UK) and work for Hewlett-Packard (who acquired the company that acquired what remained of the small company I used to work for, after they were acquired by someone else). My business cards say "mathematician" but in practice my work is a mixture of simulation, data analysis, algorithm design, software development, problem-solving, and whatever random engineering no one else is doing. I am married and have a daughter born in mid-2006. The best way to contact me is by email: firstname dot lastname at pobox dot com. I am happy to be emailed out of the blue by interesting people. If you are an LW regular you are probably an interesting person in the relevant sense even if you think you aren't.
If you're wondering why some of my very old posts and comments are at surprisingly negative scores, it's because for some time I was the favourite target of old-LW's resident neoreactionary troll, sockpuppeteer and mass-downvoter.
This sounds like maybe the same phenomenon as reported by Douglas Hofstadter, as quoted by Gary Marcus here: https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/are-llms-starting-to-become-a-sentient
Could you please clarify what parts of the making of the above comment were done by a human being, and what parts by an AI?
Sure, but plausibly that's Scott being unusually good at admitting error, rather than Tyler being unusually bad.
It's still pretty interesting if it turns out that the only clear example to be found of T.C. admitting to error is in a context where everyone involved is describing errors they've made: he'll admit to concrete mistakes, but apparently only when admitting mistakes makes him look good rather than bad.
(Though I kinda agree with one thing Joseph Miller says, or more precisely implies: perhaps it's just really rare for people to say publicly that they were badly wrong about anything of substance, in which case it could be that T.C. has seldom done that but that this shouldn't much change our opinion of him.)
The language used by some of the LLMs in answering the question seems like pretty good evidence for the "they one-box at least partly because Less Wrong is in their training data" theory. E.g., if you asked a random philosopher for their thoughts on the Newcomb problem, I don't think most of them would call the predictor "Omega" and (less confidently) I don't think most of them would frame the question in terms of "CDT" and "EDT".
Pedantic note: there are many instances of "syncopathy" that I am fairly sure should be "sycophancy".
(It's an understandable mistake -- "syncopathy" is composed of familiar components, which could plausibly be put together to mean something like "the disease of agreeing too much" which is, at least in the context of AI, not far off what sycophancy in fact means. Whereas if you can parse "sycophancy" at all you might work out that it means "fig-showing" which obviously has nothing to do with anything. So far as I can tell, no one actually knows how "fig-showing" came to be the term for servile flattery.)
The Additional Questions Elephant (first image in article, "image credit: Planecrash") is definitely older than Planecrash; see e.g. https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1036583-reaction-images for an instance from 2015.
They're present on the original for which this is a linkpost. I don't know what the mechanism was by which the text was imported here from the original, but presumably whatever it was it didn't preserve the images.
I'm curious as to whether the "pretend it's a completely different person" schtick was just for fun or whether there was a deeper purpose to it (e.g., encouraging yourself to think about past-you as an entirely separate person to make it easier to rethink independently).