Sutskever's response to Dwarkesh in their interview was a convincing refutation of this argument for me:
Dwarkesh Patel
So you could argue that next-token prediction can only help us match human performance and maybe not surpass it? What would it take to surpass human performance?
Ilya Sutskever
I challenge the claim that next-token prediction cannot surpass human performance. On the surface, it looks like it cannot. It looks like if you just learn to imitate, to predict what people do, it means that you can only copy people. But here is a counter argument f...
"Dwarkesh chose excellent questions throughout, displaying an excellent sense of when to follow up and how, and when to pivot."
This is the basic essence of why Dwarkesh does such good interviews. He does the groundwork to be able to ask relevant and interesting questions, ie. actually reading their books/works, and seems to consistently have put actual thought into analysing the worldview of his subjects.
The unambitiousness of modern geoengineering in general is dismaying.
For my Australian perspective: in the early 1900s there were people discussing how make use of the massive tracts of desert wasteland than make up most of the outback (ie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradfield_Scheme). None of this stuff could be considered today - one tree getting chopped down is liable to make the news: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-54700074
Hard to escape the conclusion that we should all go lie in a ditch so as to guarantee that no impact to anything occurs ever.
Stefánsson's "The Fat of the Land" is not really worth reading for any scientific insight today, but it's entertaining early 1900s anthropology.
I don't have much of an opinion on any specific diet approach, but I can tell you my own experience with weight loss: I've always been between 15-25% bodyfat, yoyoing around. This routine isn't ideal, so I too am a 'victim' of the weight gain phenomenon.
I have no satisfying answers for "why are we getting fatter" or "what makes caloric deficits so hard to maintain". I appreciate the diet blogging community that tries to tackle these questions with citizen science.
I assume you're familiar with Vilhjálmur Stefánsson's work if you are interested in low protein carnivore diets, but I was really was surprised to see how similar the 'ex150' sounds compared to the classic ~80:20 fat:protein experiments. These aren't really new ideas - although I'm sure there's a lot more information available on the details.
Anyway, dieting seems like something where while people on average fail, you do see some individual successes, so it's worth poking around the edges and giving things a go. It's always nice to see results from the coal...
Good post.
For Westerners looking to get a palatable foothold on the priorities and viewpoints of the CCP (and Xi), I endorse "The Avoidable War" written last year by Kevin Rudd (former Prime Minister of Australia, speaks mandarin, has worked in China, loads of diplomatic experience - imo about as good of a person that exists to interpret Chinese grand strategy and explain it from a Western viewpoint). The book is (imo, for a politician), impressively objective in its analysis.
Some good stuff in there explaining the nature of Chinese cynicism about foreign motivations that echoes some of what is written in this post, but with a bit more historical background and strategic context.
Yeah - it's odd, but TC is a self-professed contrarian after all.
I think the question here is: why doesn't he actually address the fundamentals of the AGI doom case? The "it's unlikely / unknown" position is really quite a weak argument which I doubt he would make if he actually understood EY's position.
Seeing the state of the discourse on AGI risk just makes it more and more clear that the AGI risk awareness movement has failed to express its arguments in terms that non-rationalists can understand.
People like TC should the first type of public intellectual to grok it, because EY's doom case is is highly analogous to market dynamics. And yet.
For example, a major point of disagreement between me and Eliezer is that Eliezer often dismisses plans as “too complicated to work in practice,” but that dismissal seems divorced from experience with getting things to work in practice (e.g. some of the ideas that Eliezer dismisses are not much more complex than RLHF with AI assistants helping human raters). In fact I think that you can implement complex things by taking small steps—almost all of these implementation difficulties do improve with empirical feedback.
EY's counter to this?
@Gerald Monroe On the question of Japan's unique lack of variation, I think it's unlikely to be decisive here. The 'monoculture' argument may have some merit, but even a genetically 'homogenous' population has plenty of variation - especially one 125m strong like the Japanese.
Fertility related traits are just so fundamental to genetic fitness that selection is guaranteed to wring out the higher fertility alleles where the environment allows.
Imo Japan is one of the more illuminating examples on this topic:
There's good reason to believe the fertility transition as a general phenomenon is subject to negative feedback, thus almost certain to be self correcting. Selection self-evidently favours high fertility culture and genes.
See this study for an attempt to model the effects:
Correlations in fertility across generations: can low fertility persist?
Martin Kolk, Daniel Cownden and Magnus Enquist
Published:22 March 2014
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.2561#d3e788,
"... Our models suggest a mechanism in which the recent fertility decline...
Agree - Gell-Mann amnesia sums up my experience with trying to get ChatGPT to be useful for a professional context so far. It is weak on accuracy and details.
My questions:
Seconded - I'd like to see more of this angle of analysis too. I assume the reason why the 'soft take-off' is underdiscussed is that tech people a) pay more attention to the news on AI, and b) see the future of this stuff viscerally and the endgame is what looms. I think that's not wrong, because the endgame is indeed transformative. But how we get there and how quickly it happens is a completely open question.
I work in the AEC industry (Architecture, Engineering, Construction) - 90%+ of people have zero idea about recent advances in AI. But on the other h...
I can anecdotally report that when I started consistently getting up immediately upon my alarm going off the subjective feeling of the first 5-10 minutes was far superior and I didn't feel much tiredness even with a relatively short night of sleep. I started doing this through setting my alarm to the maximum latest time possible and still allow me to get to work on time, and then noticed how much better I felt while doing this (previously I was a chronic snooze-button masher and felt pretty groggy waking up).
I have noticed in the WFH/office phases of the p...
So I looked into this, and the 'refine win condition' seems to be an actual technique that some of the best 3pt shooters do employ! I looked up some interviews with some of the best basketball shooters (Steph Curry and Ray Allen) and they mention playing little games with themselves while practice. They will do things such a define win condition as a swish instead of just making the shot, or employing some particular type of rhythm or footwork, or slightly altering the angle of their shot.
But on the other hand, they also mention plenty of repetitive drilli...
Thanks for the post - skill acquisition does seem like an area lacking attention from the rationalist community in general.
I wonder if these learnings would apply to sports. "Stop after win" doesn't seem like a productive idea if you are trying to get better at, say, shooting a 3pt shot in basketball - the traditional approach is "reps reps reps". Thoughts?
Ctrl+F "CFR" & "IFR" = 0 results. Apologies if you used different terminology here but I feel it is worth pointing out that CFR has cratered in many nations, even those with high case counts and high testing rates. The old assumption of ~.5-1% IFR seems to be thoroughly passed its use-by date. For highly vaxed populations current IFR is probably sub 0.1% overall, with the same qualifiers about age/morbidity profile etc.
Particularly of interest is Australia, which could be said to have had a lot of 'dry tinder' given the lack of pre-omicron deaths overa...
Huh, sort of strong +1 this. I do like listening to Rogan talk shit with friends, and I do like the way he brings ideas and knowledge out of interesting people, but I do not like him debating.
Yet Zvi made the debating eminently readable and both actually sounded sensible, which is a skill I do not have myself. If I'd written it then it would have been filled with the irritation I felt while listening to it. Zvi wrote it really well.
Other examples of drugs that also seem to work for weight loss are GLP-1 agonists, which are relatively new and potentially promising.
I keep seeing references to 'long covid' by smart people, usually in the context of "we need to confirm what the effects are" but have never seen any real evidence from obscure or mainstream sources that it's something worth thinking about much. Surely if it were a real and important thing it would be identified and proven as such by now?
At this moment it strikes me as something that's probably either bullshit or a minor consideration until further evidence emerges to the contrary, but smart people continue to mention it. What am I missing?
I think it can be argued that in the West that practical achievement and directed pursuit probably is like this at a core level - humans are capable extraordinary effort if the conditions (and pressures) are right. Parenthood is one of the things that is still like everything used to be - pushed to the edge of human capability because there isn't another option. I think for many other modern pursuits a common failure mode is indulging in the eases and luxuries of modern existence - no such option with parenthood or language immersion.
Related thought: sloga...
AFAIK the main effect from the PM's policy change seems to be around relaxing indemnity rules for GPs so that they could hand out AZ if they wanted to without getting sued by people who develop the blood clot disorder. Previously this was an issue due to the current ATAGI advice recommending against it.
I thought the PM's statement on this wasn't too crazy - the blood clot risks are objectively still very low and the ATAGI report contemplates the then near-zero covid in Aus as you note. I assume somebody in govt realised that at current and projected v...
Thanks for the article - very informative and exactly the kind of content I enjoy!
In 2017 Australia held a public survey on whether same-sex marriage should be allowed, the results of which were pledged informally to be enacted by the government. Public votes on specific issues are relatively rare in Australia, so the debate around the procedural merits of voting on this particular issue were quite active.
I recall the main arguments against conducting a survey were mostly procedural criticisms, that it is wastefully expensive to hold a postal survey when ...