Thank you for putting in the effort required to review this. Post like this help a lot in interpreting hyped literature. I am also skeptical myself whether LLMs are the path to AGI, and likely would have counted the paper as an additional (small) datapoint in favour of my conclusion if not for your detailed summary (I did not read the original paper myself and had no intention to, hence only 'small' data point).
"There’s a common assumption in many LLM critiques that reasoning ability is binary: either you have it, or you don’t."
I agree, and would even push it further: I think the crux of the whole issue is our lack of good understanding of the concept space we refer to with words such as "reasoning", "thinking", "intelligence" or "agency".
I do have a hunch that we have some inherent limitations while trying to use our own "reasoning"/"intelligence"/etc to understand this space itself (something like Gödel's incompleteness theorem), but I do not have a proof. Than again, maybe not and we will figure it out.
Whatever the case is, we are not good at it right now. I imagine an analogy for this if we had the same (lack of) understanding for moving around in physical space:
Car-3.5 is invented, and is being used to carry things from one location to another. Some people claim it cannot "move on its own", as Car-3.5 could not move over hill #1 or muddy field #1, so it is just a road following engine, not a general artificial mover. Car-4 is created, with stronger engine, being able to climb over hill #1, Car-o1 has better transmission and wheels, being able to cross muddy field #1. It still cannot cross hill #2 or creek #1, so some people claim again, that it cannot actually move on its own. Other people show that just increasing engine power and doing tricks like adjusting wheel structure will help overcome this, and even most humans would be unable to cross hill #2 or creek #1, we would just go along the roads and use the tunnel or bridge to cross these, just as Car-o1 does it. Are we not general movers after all either? Do we need to increase only engine power and get some scaffolding in place for creek crossing to get a something that can move at least as well as a human in all spaces?
Replace the "Car-" string with "Humanoid_robot-", and think about it again. Change back to "Car-" but imagine this is the thought process of a horse, and think about it again.
We do not know which of the three variant describes our situation best.
Well, the disturbed protagonists in the Culture series (as in: books, and in the whole of the fictional universe) are usually not from the "Culture" (one particular civilizations within the whole fictional universe), but outsiders hired to act as agents.
In books about the Culture sci fi universe such things are described a couple of times. E.g. in the novel "Use of Weapons" the "crew" (the ship is fully automated, so more like permanent passengers) of a ship deliberately weaken their immune system to basically get a seasonal cold just for the experience, which otherwise could not happen due to their genetically enhanced immune system.
Is the data reliable? I just did a search on PornHub, xHamster and iXXX for the following keywords:
violence, incest, rape, torture
Results:
Pornhub returns a warning "Your search could be for illegal and abusive sexual material...etc" (it is a longer description), returning no videos for 'violence', 'incest' and 'rape'. It does return results for 'torture' though.
The cases is somewhat similar for xHamster and iXXX, except they do not return any special message for the first three, but also do not return any results. They do work fine with violence though.
It does seem there is some official or unofficial policing.
Any opinion on this regarding being a somewhat good solution?
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Q3huo2PYxcDGJWR6q/how-to-corner-liars-a-miasma-clearing-protocol
In my personal experience, LLMs can speed up me 10X times only in very specific circumstances, that are (and have always been) a minor part of my job, and I suspect this is true for most developers:
Based on above, I suspect that most people who report 10X increase in software development either:
This is only true if you restrict "nobility" to Great Britain and if you only count "nobles" those who are considered such in our current day. This is a confusion of the current British noble title (specifically members of "Peerage of Great Britain") with "land owning rentier class that existed before the industrial revolution". For our discussion, we need to look at the second one.
I do not have specific numbers of UK, but quoting for Europe from wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobility#Europe):
"The countries with the highest proportion of nobles were Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth (15% of an 18th-century population of 800,000[citation needed]), Castile (probably 10%), Spain (722,000 in 1768 which was 7–8% of the entire population) and other countries with lower percentages, such as Russia in 1760 with 500,000–600,000 nobles (2–3% of the entire population), and pre-revolutionary France where there were no more than 300,000 prior to 1789, which was 1% of the population (although some scholars believe this figure is an overestimate). In 1718 Sweden had between 10,000 and 15,000 nobles, which was 0.5% of the population. In Germany it was 0.01%.[46]
In the Kingdom of Hungary nobles made up 5% of the population.[47] All the nobles in 18th-century Europe numbered perhaps 3–4 million out of a total of 170–190 million inhabitants.[48][49] By contrast, in 1707, when England and Scotland united into Great Britain, there were only 168 English peers, and 154 Scottish ones, though their immediate families were recognised as noble."
Based on above, I think expecting 1% to be landed rentier is a conservative estimate for 18th century for whole Europe. Even if we go with one tenth of this, expecting 0.1% of the population to retain this (which would imply that their population dropped while all other classes increased dramatically), would mean about 68 thousand people in the UK, and over 700 000 in whole Europe.
AND they are expected to live off from rents of land. I doubt that living of land rents is true for the majority of the 1500 current British nobles you referred to.
Not fully. Most of the nobility is gone. Only like 0.01% remains maybe what could be called "rentier", or even less compared to what had been before.
You lost me at "Bywayeans generally save up enough to move out of their parents' houses around age 9". Likely you will lose most people at "ancap".
But these are only minor things, and I can imagine that it would be possible to pull up some plausible explanation or just to revise one or the other, and keep the core message. I think the main issue with your description Byway are in these:
"...even though Bywayeans are smarter than Earthlings..."
"Bywayeans have a lot of energy..."
"...they love working and innovating..."
These imply that they are already better then us, and would run the world better even in the structure we have on our real Earth.
The message of Dath Ilan is that they and us are the same people, with the same genetic heritage, hence intelligence and vices. But they can still do better, just by having better institutions/methods for cooperation, hence, we can get better too! If you give special power to the inhabitants of your alternate Earth, it may explain why are not stuck in the same mire as we are, and imply we cannot learn from their success.
Adding context/(kind-of) counter argument from reddit (the link has a link to the main article and contains a summary of it):
https://www.reddit.com/r/CredibleDefense/comments/1ll7ypj/article_i_fought_in_ukraine_and_heres_why_fpv/
I think the comments are also worth a read. I want to share one particular comment here, which I think has a good explanation/hypothesis regarding the situation: