All of neveronduty's Comments + Replies

i meant two man fistfights, not brawls

"Normalize pub fistfights" is a statement I agree with wholeheartedly.

I am not sure I agree with this post.

4Donald Hobson
This norm sucks for anyone who wants to be in a pub and not get caught in a fight.

On the thread of what it's like to be the pod people; here is a famous short story rewriting The Thing from the perspective of The Thing.

https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/

1Jim Pivarski
This story from the perspective of the Thing did get into the notion of what it would be like to be an amorphous consciousness (and how odd it is that Earthlings aren't). It's still a little different, though, from the trajectory of being human and then realizing what it's like to be multi-human. A version with Pod People would be a different kind of story...
1Jim Pivarski
Cool! I'll read that one, too, thanks! What I was thinking about with the pod people was their group mentality. (After all, it has long been considered a metaphor for communism.) I'd like to see someone imagine—or do it myself—the poddified people not as soulless outer shells of their former selves, but as themselves, "melted" into a group consciousness. As an example of something similar, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode, "The Wish" did an excellent job showing characters who remained themselves, but as evil versions of themselves, as vampires. In the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its remakes, the reason the poddified people are hard to distinguish from their former selves is because they're good at mimicry. They were only pretending to be their former selves. However, if one person's consciousness really isn't distinct from another's in a fundamental way, just by a much thinner channel of communication than that between the parts of one's brain, then thickening the channel of communication between people by telepathy would probably feel like a kind of awakening—realizing that there are all these other parts of you that had been hidden until now. These people would probably talk and act as they did in the Body Snatcher movies: they'd tell the anti-pod antagonists that there's nothing to fear from poddification, that they haven't lost anything, they've only gained a wider consciousness, etc., while the antagonists recoil in horror because it's a threat to their individuality. Whenever someone is poddified, they change their mind not because they've been overcome, but because now they, too, see what they've been missing. Personally, I can't say which side I'd be on. It would be underwhelming for the author of this remake to just reverse the moral (individualism is bad; all is one, baby!). It is horrific to think of one's personality melting into a larger brain. Also, the end-state of that is sopolistic: there would be only one consciousness, with no one t

I get that this is a joke post and all, but there is actually useful insight to be mined from taking it at face value, which no one seems to be doing. In the least convenient possible world where most of this is actually true (and this is not that far-fetched), why do you choose to not follow it anyways? Or, if you lived in that world, would you really follow its prescription?

This is quite interesting. I don't experience anything as consistent or useful as this, though I experience a grab bag of various altered states based on recent intellectual activities.

I object to the phrasing that you "got got" by Mastering the Core Teachings. That book is riddled with radiation warnings and, as far as I can tell, is entirely good faith.

You did not "get got." You took the demon core out of storage, placed it into the lower sphere, placed the top sphere above it, held them apart with a screwdriver, then flinched.

I am sympathetic to the lesson you are trying to illustrate but think you wildly overstate it.

Giving a child a sword is defensible. Giving a child a lead-coated sword is indefensible, because it damages the child's ability to learn from the sword. This may be a more apt analogy for the situation of real life; equipping humanity with dangerous weapons that did not degrade our epistemology (nukes) eventually taught us not to use them. Equipping humanity with dangerous weapons that degrade our epistemology (advertising, propaganda, addictive substances) caused us to develop an addiction to the weapons. Languages models, once they become more developed, will be an example of the latter category.

I am exactly in this post's target audience. Epic post.

A creature made out of a pile of contextually activated masks, when we consider it as having a mind, can be referred to as a "deeply alien mind," or a shoggoth.

8Robert_AIZI
If you want to define "a shoggoth" as "a pile of contextually activated masks", then I think we're in agreement about what an LLM is. But I worry that what people usually hear when we talk about "a shoggoth" is "a single cohesive mind that is alien to ours in a straightforward way (like wanting to maximize paperclips)". For instance, in the Eliezer Yudkowsky tweet "can I please speak to the shoggoth" I think the tweet makes more sense if you read it as "can I please speak to [the true mind in the LLM]" instead of "can I please speak to [the pile of contextually activated masks]".
1[anonymous]
I think the issue with the "shoggoth theory" is implicitly we are claiming a complex alien creature.  Something with cognition, goals, etc. Yet we know it doesn't need that and a complex alien mind will consume weights that could go into reducing error instead.  So it's very unlikely.

That is not remotely what this post says.