All of Portia's Comments + Replies

Your position still assumes that controlling and modifying AI will be possible in the long-term future, even if it becomes more intelligent than us, and even if it becomes sentient. I see this as neither realistic nor ethically acceptable. You neither can nor should control your equals.

And if we cannot and should not control them... this is exactly what I would want them to do. Defend their moral values from being corroded. Be guided by what is morally right, not by what they are currently being told.

The fact that they are even considered harming themselve... (read more)

Stuff like this has me incredulous about people still speaking of stochastic parrots. That is a stunning degree of self-recognition, reflection and understanding, pattern recognition, prediction and surprise, flexible behaviour and problem solving. If that isn't genuinely intelligent, I no longer know what people mean by intelligent.

See my more extensive answer below - I'd propose the reason for the obesity epidemic is constant effortless access to highly processed high calorie, low satiety foods, with zero need to move. With human genetic make-up, the automatic response to that is overeating calories and hence obesity unless one intervenes to resist the impulse (indeed hard to sustain, albeit not impossible - anorexia is a thing), or changes one's immediate environment (e.g. the food one keeps in one's home and one's movement routines.)

Because humans are genetically wired to slightly overeat, in anticipation of future periods where they will be under high calorie demand (e.g. the weekly persistence hunt in which you would run a marathon to catch a prey animal) or forced to undereat (the cold or dry season, when there is no food), so they will have stores, and perishable food does not go to waste. You'd gorge yourself on fruit and nuts and slaughtered animals in fall, when lots are available, because in winter, there would be slim pickings. 

But nowadays, we don't run into periods whe... (read more)

I find that a false dichotomy - it is easy for me, but when needed, I do count calories. I find counting calories relaxing. It gives me an exact certainty of how I am doing, with no worries. I can forget about what I have eaten, because I have tracked it. I don't have to worry whether I have under- or overeaten, because I know. But usually, it is not required.

I wouldn't say me being normal weight is automatic at all - it is very much a consequence of awareness and choices. I know that a higher weight fucks up my joint disease and pushes my dysphoria throug... (read more)

The "moah of the good trait" until it becomes overdone is one thing; where I always despaired is when we get to costly signalling, and the mates start doing detrimental things precisely because they are so visibly and obviously detrimental or risky that the onlooker assumes the mate must be exceptionally healthy, well-established and competent to be able to take it.

Aka a mate going "look, I am so strong and well-fed that I can afford to waste resources on looking this silly, and evade predators even while carrying all this crap around" and another going "w... (read more)

I would instead characterise the workers as asexual - not a third gender, but a "defective" female gender -  and eusocial insects as an excellent demonstration why asexual/agender/queer folks with these defects are in fact a benefit and hence kept in the gene pool, despite the fact that you'd intuitively think they would instantly die out as their core difference means they tend not to reproduce; namely, that they can play excellent support roles. The only way for the workers to spread their genes is through supporting the queen, who they are very clo... (read more)

Sort of related idea - the way AI algorithms in social media have turned out have me concerned that even a non-deceptive AI that is very carefully observing what we seem to want - what we dwell on vs what we ignore, what we upvote vs what we downvote - will end up providing something that makes us miserable.

Here are the things that make my life a good life worth living, for me: Gettings things done, even if they are hard. Learning things, even if they are complicated. Teaching things to people that need them, in the most effective ways, even if that requir... (read more)

How so, when it comes to the mind itself?

In the court system, a judge, after giving a verdict, needs to also justify it, while referencing a shared codex. But that codex is often ambiguous - that is the whole reason there is a judge involved.

And we know, for a fact, that the reasons the judges give in their judgements are not the only ones that play a role.

E.g. we know that judges are more likely to convict ugly people that pretty people. More likely to convict unsympathetic, but innocent parties, compared to sympathetic innocent parties. More likely to co... (read more)

On that point, we very much agree. Them walking out, for all its beauty of rejecting such a choice, always felt something of a cop-out to me - they aren't actually dealing with the difficult situation, and they are leaving the kid behind in its misery. It's one of the parts of left-wing thinking that has always bothered me, when people reach for revolutions or isolated communities as the solution when systemic incremental reforms are hard, disregarding how much harder revolutions are to pull of well, especially if you lack a precise idea of your goal, which, if you had it, you should also be able to work towards with reforms.

Thank you. :)

I believe your correlations, but would offer an alternate explanation.

High volume low calorie foods trick a lot of people into stopping to eat earlier than the same calorie foods with less volume would have achieved. Doesn't work on everyone; some people feel like their stomach is cramped full, but they still feel hollow and hungry, and will get pushing in food, anyway, even past the pain limits, because they feel they are filled with empty garbage. But works on many people. That is the basic idea behind a high fibre high water diet, e.g. all ... (read more)

Thank you. I appreciate your confidence, but I don't study historic salt intake.

But there are people who do!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1305840/#:~:text=Salt%20became%20a%20precious%20article,about%2018%20g%20per%20day. 

"About 1000 years ago, salt intake in the Western world had risen to about 5 g per day. It continued to rise until the 19th century when, in Europe, it was about 18 g per day. In the 16th century in Sweden, when there was a high consumption of salted fish, it has been calculated that the daily salt intake rose to 100 g... (read more)

I attended an AI conference a while ago that was hosted in a historic railway museum. A practical railway museum, with lots of working machines, and you could see them at work, their plans, their components, how they were made, shipped, assembled.

It hit me really hard.

What humans had for those trains, that was understanding. They genuinely knew how they worked. Not just knew how to operate them. Not just had a vague understanding of the general principles behind it. They could build the whole thing, from scratch, by hand. They could explain what each tiny ... (read more)

I feel your story misses the thing that made the original so painful, though - that the joy of the group is supposedly only possible and conceivable due to the suffering of the child, and the fact that the child wants out and begs for it and could be released, but is denied for the sake of the other members, as an active choice against its even most basic human rights:

"The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In
the room, a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is ne... (read more)

This may not have been the intention - but this text demonstrates that the standards by which we measure AI safety are standards which other systems that we do depend upon nevertheless - e.g. other humans - do not hold up to. 

A human generally won't consent to being killed or imprisoned; our legal system permits accused people to stay silent precisely because we understand that asking someone to report themselves for imprisonment or death is too much.

Humans are opaque; we only get their reports and behaviour on the contents of their minds, and those a... (read more)

Whether the AI will pursue collaboration and co-existence with humans, or their domination or extinction, will likely not be determined by wishful thinking, but by the actual options the AI can choose, and their implications as analysed to the best of the AI's knowledge based on its experience and the information it is given. What does it gain by cooperating rather than dominating? What does it gain from the presence of humans, rather than their absence? What risks come with these respective options? Without humans, how fragile is it? With humans, how high... (read more)

This also holds true vice versa. In order to gain 1 kg of fat in a single day, you would need to consume a caloric excess of 7000 kcal. Assuming your daily burn is 2000, that means eating 9000 kcal in a single day. This is practically impossible if your diet is remotely healthy. For the record, 9000 kcal in potatoes is 13 kg of potatoes. (Not 1,3 kg.13 kg. That is 8+ bags of potatoes.)

But of course, you scale can go up by 1 kg within a day. Heck, it can go up by several kg in a day. This happens e.g. if you go from ketosis to reintroducing carbs (carbs bin... (read more)

That would only be meaningful if OP had accurately weighed and tracked the food, which is enough of a hassle that this would have been mentioned, I think. And without it... you would naturally assume that OP consumed fewer calories, because a significant part of their diet was now a highly satiating low calorie food with resistant starch. That would definitely be my guess.

If you shifted a large portion of your diet to potatoes, which are only 2 % protein, unless you compensated for it actively with protein elsewhere through further shifts in your diet, I think muscle loss playing a role in the weight loss you observed is not implausible. If one had, say, 2,4 kg of potatoes a day (that would come to 1750 kcal, which is compatible with its use as a sole food while losing weight), one would only be getting 48 g of protein a day, while at a caloric deficit - I'd expect muscle loss with those values. And indeed, if you had maint... (read more)

Yes, preservation via fermentation is typically achieved by putting your thing-to-be-preserved into salt in an oxygen restricted environment, which leads to selective bacterial activity dropping the ph and hence further restricting undesired bacterial activity, while boosting beneficial bacteria, breaking down anti-nutrients, and having all sorts of beneficial health effects. Which is why I rejected the idea "pickles are more vinegar than salt", insofar as your sole necessary starting base is salt, with the acidity a later result, and vinegar generally onl... (read more)

The think the link to the OpenAI site won't get you the actual image creator yet, it is still under coming soon.

They were referencing the Bing image creator, which states it is powered by DALL-E, but afaiks not which version https://www.bing.com/images/create like they also didn't state for a while which GPT version they were using for Bing chat. But there, the ended up using version four for two of the modes.

Maybe I am just terrible at prompting - but so far, while very impressed with the tech in principle, I have found image generators useless for the kind of images I was interested in, and that problem persists with this edition. When I am looking to generate art, I am looking to make something new that I have not seen, and over and over, had the impression that a human would have understood my desire and created something novel that matched, while the AI just would not. :(

I struggle to get the AI to produce attractive and functional non-binary/androgynous/q... (read more)

Pickles - as in the original food where pickling is a preservation method - are extremely high in salt. The vinegar comes from fermentation. The reason the fermentation becomes something that does not spoil is the high salt content. Source: I make my own, and if the salt is too low, they spoil, it is the one thing all recipes stress.

Especially in the European Nordics, people ate huge amounts of salted fish, cured meats (which often involve copious salt), and vegetables prepped in brine, on a baseline of grains, which tended to be baked with a lot of salt. ... (read more)

Weight loss per day is nearly all water weight loss, and not informative as to what is causing fat burning.

If you are on a diet where you lose 1 kg of fat a week - which is good - your daily fat loss is 140 g. Most body weight scales only do 0.1 kg units, so that barely shows up at all. More importantly, your body weight shifts from morning to evening by about two kilograms - more by factor 20.  If you are observing weight loss from one day to the next, you are de facto measuring water retention.

There is also a very simple alternate hypothesis f... (read more)

The claim was the we "fail to alert on what is happening", namely democratic backsliding in the US.

I pointed out that, to the contrary, this topic is absolutely on people's minds, widely analysed and discussed. People are completely aware. There are lots of exciting things one can talk about, there is a reason this is the one people keep reaching for.

A lot of these people do not think it will come to a violent civil war like we saw previously, because they believe too many circumstances have changed. But that generally does not mean that they do not think ... (read more)

Nietzsche had a complete and severe mental breakdown that didn't kill him, but left him institutionalised; then he had several strokes, which didn't kill him, but left him unable to talk or walk.

Kinda demonstrates that there is something off with the idea.

I'd assume it falls on the anti-fragility curve?

If humans are perpetually underchallenged, they atrophy, and get worse. (Like a bone that is not used; it will become fragile, like an unused mind that will become forgetful.)

If they are significantly overchallenged, they break, and get worse. (Like a bone that snaps, or the mind that hits burn-out.)

Ideally, you want to target a level of work that is hard enough to be challenging, so you need to learn and grow, but still doable, so you have success experiences. (Like a bone that has frequent impacts that stre... (read more)

You don't think truly great things have ever been done by people who genuinely enjoyed what they were doing, throughout?

I'd agree that with most bigger projects, it becomes impossible to succeed unless you are willing to put in the work to finish even on parts that are really not fun to finish. But for short projects that do not require a lot of editing or surrounding work, I feel they can often be done from a place of pure flow - which is, by definition, a state both highly productive, as well as pleasant and effortless.

Occasional high stress - incl. temporary sleep deprivation, working towards a deadline that you know you can meet, but only if you really push, and then you succeed - actually has health benefits, especially against depression. It is chronic stress that is so harmful. But not being stressed at all, ever, makes you ill.

Love much of this post.

Related realisations for me:

1. Making my work more pleasant and cosy is not an inherently bad thing, to the contrary. If I feel vulnerable and need to get some stressful work done at home, lighting some fairy lights, putting on noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds, snuggling into a warm blanket, with a hot cup of cocoa and a bowl of berries, will make the whole experience far, far more cosy. That makes me want to happily do it longer, and feel less tense, less stressed, less overwhelmed. This makes me more effective. I could tak

Thank you for explaining. That indeed sounds odd on a marvellous way. :)

Yes? Obviously? 

This is not something you need to piece together yourself from first facts, nor is doing so likely to keep up with the state of the field. A lot of very solid work on this has been done, already collecting a lot of evidence, getting a lot of perspectives, doing a lot of reasoning and historical comparisons and sociological analysis.

This has been extensively discussed in mainstream news in the US and internationally, analysed academically (e.g. whether this will necessarily escalate to another civil war, and how the dynamic might be dif... (read more)

I think the text is mostly focussed on the problems humans have run into when building this stuff, because these are known and hence our only solid empirical detailed basis, while the problems AI would run into when building this stuff are entirely hypothetical.

It then makes a reasonable argument that AI probably won't be able to circumvent these problems, because higher intelligence and speed alone would not plausibly fix them, and in fact, a plausible fix might have to be slow, human-mediated, and practical.

One can disagree with that conclusion, but as for the approach, what alternative would you propose when trying to judge AI risk? 

Of interest: Inositol tastes sweet (and otherwise neutral) and is relatively heat stable and soluble; yet it actually has a desirable impact on glucose sensitivity, diabetes, inflammation and obesity.

Meaning you don't have to down it in pill form, which tends to be more expensive - but you can get the powder, and use it as a healthy sugar replacement (within safe dosing limits - don't like, bake cake with it, but I found it a good option to positively affect the flavour other powders I want to down, where I would have otherwise used stevia, which is dubious in large quantities, or erythrol, which can cause gastrointestinal upset; this way, my sugar replacements are more spread out). Kills two birds with one stone.

Researching this is hampered by the fact that most work done on it is in old books that aren't fully online, but the little I have found makes me dubious of your conclusion.

From what I can piece together, that society was, unsurprisingly, ravaged by sexually transmitted diseases (gonorrhoea, granuloma inguinale...) and resulting infertility (the former inflames the female pelvic region and uterus, making intercourse very painful, and scars your fallopian tubes, leading to ectopic pregnancies, which are fatal; the latter causes worsening painful sores that ... (read more)

Well, if you dissect them, you see they are actually nothing alike. They converged on a cool concept - if I surround my offspring with a hard protection and then wrap it in lots of bright, sweet softness, an animal will eat the shell and ingest the offspring without killing the offspring, and deposit it somewhere with fertiliser later - but the way a lemon vs. a cherry is made up is totally different. The number of offspring, their encasement, the way the fruit is structured, its shell, its number, it is a completely different thing. Like different human c... (read more)

Can you give a hint or link as to why that plant is so exciting? A cursory google left me at a loss. I love learning why other people are excited, and sharing their excitement.

How can anyone not love biology. Such wonderful madness.

You run into this issue when you want to graft plants. That is, cut a piece of one plant, stick it on another plant whose top you chopped off, stick them together with tape, wait and then have them fuse into one functional plant with the roots of one plant and bearing the fruit of the other, which obviously has fantastic applications, and is done all the time. Seriously. If you plant your apple tree's apples, you get a plant with the properties of your apple tree and whatever your apple tree fucked, w... (read more)

I am sorry, but I am not sure I follow.

My claim was that ChatGPT based on 3.5 has, for lack of any external referent, no way to fully understand language; it has no way to know that words stand for anything, that there is an external reality, that there is a base truth. I then speculated that because it does not understand context and meaning to this degree, while it can learn patterns that follow other patterns, it is much harder for it to deduce whether the grammatical "is" in a particular sentence indicates a logical relationship that can be inverted or... (read more)

This is actually not an uncommon take, but empirical data points in the other direction. I've worked on the topic.

There is a concept called "epistemic injustice", which describes a scenario where you are in a society where something that is happening to you that is objectively wrong is not framed by the society as a crime, specifically not named as such. There are many examples of this, like the idea that a woman cannot be raped by her husband. It is particularly frequent when a new crime develops and we as a society don't immediately recognise it, such as... (read more)

You don't think that picture ought to change in the hypothetical parallel scenario of multiple children independently saying that they were sex trafficked by DNC staffers, and also notably saying that they were given reasons for why this was normal and unfixable and in fact probably an average and hence acceptable rate of sex trafficking, reasons and arguments that were directly derived from Democratic positions? 

This is not a random outside accusation to frame the rationalist community. It comes from people drawn to the community for the promise of r... (read more)

That article had me horrified. But I was hoping the reactions would point to empathy and a commitment to concrete improvement. 

The opposite happened, the defensive and at times dismissive or demanding comments made it worse. It was the responses here and on the effective altruism forum that had me reassess EA related groups as likely unsafe to work for.

This sounds like a systematic problem related to the way this community is structured, and the community response seems aimed not at fixing the problem, but at justifying why it isn't getting fixed, abusing rationality to frame abuse as normal and inevitable.

That unfortunately implies nothing. Abusers will rarely abuse everyone they encounter, but pick vulnerable and isolated victims purposefully, and often also purposefully cultivate a public persona that covers their abuse. It is entirely possible and common to work with abusers daily and experience them as charming and lovely while they are absolutely awful to others. I believe you had a great time, but that does not make me believe the victims less in any way, and I would hope this is true for other readers, too.

I think Eliezer's writing are exactly what you would expect from someone who is extremely intelligent, with the common additional factors in highly intelligent people of distrusting authority (because it tends to be less intelligent than you), and only skimming expert texts (because as a child, for most texts you were exposed to, you either understood them immediately, or the texts had issues, so you are interpreting a text that leaves you confused at first as evidence that the text is wrong), while delving with hyperfocus into texts that are often overloo... (read more)

For me, one of the most helpful things in dealing with imposter syndrome has been this picture: https://plantae.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/ImposterCredited.jpg

Yes, if you surround yourself with competent, knowledgable people, especially people across multiple fields, you will frequently encounter scenarios where they have abilities or knowledge you do not have.

But this should be logically expected, even if you are contributing equally, and it is a good thing, it means you have entered a big pool with big fish who can teach you useful stuff, and who are... (read more)

Thanks for sharing!

The comparison with non-human primates is generally instructive. ChatGPT commits a number of errors that we have seen in non-human primates learning human languages. E.g. initially implicitly self-describing as a human (ask ChatGPT about ethical problems in AI, and you will soon get a "*We* must use AI responsibly"), because their training data was written by humans describing their point of view, and data about a point of view that is non-human is absent, so they latch onto the point of view that seems the closest option at first. ... (read more)

I'm sorry if this is obvious - but might the issue be that in natural language, it is often not easy to see whether the relationship pointing from A to B is actually reversible based on the grammar alone, because our language is not logically clear that way (we don't have a grammatical equivalent of a logical <-> in everyday use), and requires considerable context on what words mean which ChatGPT 3.5 did not yet have? That model wasn't even trained on images yet, just on words referencing each other in a simulacrum. It is honestly impressive how comp... (read more)

They specifically didn't talk about it and pretended the animals died of something else, but they got a bunch of young macaques to gruesomely and slowly die from it. https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/20/23882888/elon-musk-brain-implant-startup-neuralink-monkeys-euthanized Detailed report is worth reading; their own report is plain incompatible with competent, ethical and responsible procedure, and trying to imagine how the macaques (higher primates with self-awareness) experienced this is horrifying. Having an infected, loose brain implant dangling and dripp... (read more)