All of Joey Marcellino's Comments + Replies

Model at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rGuMXD6Lg2EcJpehM5diOOGd2cndBWJPeUDExzazTZo/edit?usp=sharing.

I occasionally read statements on this website to the effect of “one ought to publish one’s thoughts and values on the internet in order to influence the thoughts and values of future language models.” I wondered “what if you wanted to do that at scale?” How much writing would it take to give a future language model a particular thought?

Suppose, for instance, that this contest was judged by a newly trained frontier model, and that I had the opportunity... (read more)

I see the two main arguments of the book as 1) we should understand "gender identity" as a bunch of subjective feelings about various traits, which may or may not cohere into an introspectively accessible "identity"; 2) we can understand gender categories as a particular kind of irreducible category (namely historical lineages) to which membership is granted by community consensus, the categories being "irreducible" in that they are not defined by additional facts about their members. These stand or fall independently of whether we accept gender self-id, a... (read more)

That's a good question. I think BG's way of thinking about gender categories is potentially useful for racial/ethnic categories as well, particularly the bit about category membership as a conferred status. I think they'd probably agree with this. They don't really argue that we ought to have gender self ID; they explicitly assume this to be the case, and are more trying to show that it's coherent. I suspect if you asked them they would probably say that we ought not to have racial self ID, or that it ought to be much more limited than in the case of gende... (read more)

Sure, one can always embed a game inside another one and so alter the overall expectation values how one likes. That said, we still only want to play the meta-game if it had positive expectation value, no?

The conclusion seems rather to be "human metabolism is less efficient than solar panels," which, while perhaps true, has limited bearing on the question of whether or not the brain is thermodynamically efficient as a computer when compared to current or future AI. The latter is the question that recent discussion has been focused on, and to which the "No - " in the title makes it seem like you're responding.

Moreover, while a quick Google search turns up 100W as the average resting power output of a person, another search suggests the brain is only responsi... (read more)

What does quantum entanglement mean for causality? Due to entanglement, there can be spacelike separated measurements such that there exists a reference frame > where it looks like measurement A precedes and has a causal influence on the outcomes of measurement B, and > also a reference frame where it looks like measurement B precedes and has a causal influence on the outcomes of measurement A.

"Causality" is already a somewhat fraught notion in fundamental physics irrespective of quantum mechanics; it's not clear that one needs to have some sort ... (read more)

Just to (hopefully) make the distinction a bit more clear:

A true copying operation would take |psi1>|0> to |psi1>|psi1>; that's to say, it would take as input one qubit in an arbitrary quantum state and a second qubit in |0>, and output two qubits in the same arbitrary quantum state that the first qubit was in. For our example, we'll take |psi1> to be an equal superposition of 0 and 1: |psi1> = |0> + |1> (ignoring normalization).

If CNOT is a copying operation, it should take (|0> + |1>)|0> to (|0> + |1>)(|0> + |... (read more)