Sphinxfire
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Sphinxfire has not written any posts yet.
Sphinxfire has not written any posts yet.
Nothing that fancy, it's basically just a way to keep track of different publications in one place by subscribing to their feeds. More focused and efficient than checking all the blogs and journals, news and other stuff you are trying to keep up with manually.
Oh, for sure. My point is more that the incredibly strong social pressure that characterized the dialogue around all questions concerning COVID completely overrode individual reflective capacity to the point where people don't even have a self-image of how their positions shifted over time and based on what new information/circumstances.
Even more sobering for me is how a lot of people in my circle of friends had pretty strong opinions on various issues at the height of the pandemic, from masks and lockdowns over vaccines to the origins of the virus and so on, but today, when I (gently) probe them on how those views have held up, what caused them to change their opinion on, say, whether closing down schools and making young children wear masks was really such a good idea, they act like they have always believed what's common sense now.
And these aren't people who generally 'go with the flow' of public opinion, they usually have a model of how their opinions evolve over time. But with this a lot of people don't seem to be willing to acknowledge to themselves what kinds of positions they argued even two years ago.
You using an RSS reader too?
I agree with the first answer, insofar as it's easy to lose sight of what's really in front of you when you start over-relying on labels to pre-structure how you look at the world - the labels themselves need to be objects of reflection. But still, I'll give you some labels and trust that you treat them critically.
Imo, German philosophy does have a valuable, and underappreciated, perspective to offer to the anglophone world when it comes to how one might conceive of rationality.
The classic 'sequence' would be Kant -> Fichte -> Schelling -> Hegel, and of course Nietzsche, who is also a post-Kantian via Schopenhauer. I can recommend Hegel in particular.
As... (read more)
The truly interesting thing here is that I would agree unequivocally with you if you were talking about any other kind of 'cult of the apocalypse'.
These cults don't have to be based on religious belief in the old-fashioned sense, in fact, most cults of this kind that really took off in the 20th and 21st century are secular.
Since around the late 1800s, there has been a certain type of student that externalizes their (mostly his) unbearable pain and dread, their lack of perspective and meaning in life into 'the system', and throw themselves into the noble cause of fighting capitalism.
Perhaps one or two decades ago, there was a certain kind of teenager... (read 509 more words →)
I don't think I've seen this premise done in his way before! Kept me engaged all the way/10.
"Humans are trained on how to live on Earth by hours of training on Earth. (...) Maybe most of us are just mimicking how an agent would behave in a given situation."
I agree that that's a plausible enough explanation for lots of human behaviour, but I wonder how far you would get in trying to describe historical paradigm shifts using only a 'mimic hypothesis of agenthood'.
Why would a perfect mimic that was raised on training data of human behaviour do anything paperclip-maximizer-ish? It doesn't want to mimic being a human, just like Dall-E doesn't want to generate images, so it doesn't have a utility function for not wanting to be prevented from mimicking being a human, either.
The alternative would be an AI that goes through the motions and mimics 'how an agent would behave in a given siuation' with a certain level of fidelity, but which doesn't actually exhibit goal-directed behavior.
Like, as long as we stay in the current deep learning paradigm of machine learning, my prediction for what would happen if an AI was unleashed upon the real world, regardless of how much processing power it has, would be that it still won't behave like an agent unless that's part of what we tell it to pretend. I imagine something along the lines of the AI that was trained on how to play Minecraft by analyzing hours upon... (read more)
I think you should try to formulate your own objections to Chomsky's position. It could just as well be that you have clear reasons for disagreeing with his arguments here, or that you're simply objecting on the basis that what he's saying is different from the LW position. For my part, I actually found that post surprisingly lucid, ignoring the allusions to the idea of a natural grammar for the moment. As Chomsky says, a non-finetuned LLM will mirror the entire linguistic landcape it has been birthed from, and it will just as happily simulate a person arguing that the earth is flat as any other position. And while it can be ""aligned"" into not committing what the party labels as wrongthink, it can't be aligned into thinking for itself - it can only ever mimic specific givens. So I think Chomsky is right here - LLMs don't value knowledge and they aren't moral agents, and that's what distinguishes them from humans.
So, why do you disagree?