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...
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, ...
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 ca...
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 ...
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...
Not a reductionist materialist perspective perse, but one idea I find plausible is that 'agent' makes sense as a necessary separate descriptor and a different mode of analysis precisely because of the loopiness you get when you think about thinking, a property that makes talking about agents fundamentally different from talking about rocks or hammers, the Odyssey, or any other 'thing' that could in principle be described on the single level of 'material reality' if we wanted to
When I try to understand the material universe and its physical properties, the ...
Thanks for the response. I hope my post didn't read as defeatist, my point isn't that we don't need to try to make AI safe, it's that if we pick an impossible strategy, no matter how hard we try it won't work out for us.
So, what's the reasoning behind your confidence in the statement 'if we give a superintelligent system the right terminal values it will be possible to make it safe'? Why do you believe that it should principally be possible to implement this strategy so long as we put enough thought and effort into it?
Which part of my reasoning do yo...
Is it reasonable to expect that the first AI to foom will be no more intelligent than say, a squirrel?
In a sense, yeah, the algorithm is similar to a squirrel that feels a compulsion to bury nuts. The difference is that in an instrumental sense it can navigate the world much more effectively to follow its imperatives.
Think about intelligence in terms of the ability to map and navigate complex environments to achieve pre-determined goals. You tell DALL-E2 to generate a picture for you, and it navigates a complex space of abstractions to give you a res...
I think the answer to 'where is Eliezer getting this from' can be found in the genesis of the paperclip maximizer scenario. There's an older post on LW talking about 'three types of genie' and another on someone using a 'utility pump' (or maybe it's one and the same post?), where Eliezer starts from the premise that we create an artifical intelligence to 'make something specific happen for us', with the predictable outcome that the AI finds a clever solution which maximizes for the demanded output, one that naturally has nothing to do with what we 'really ...
I haven't commented on your work before, but I read Rationality and Inadequate Equilibria around the time of the start of the pandemic and really enjoyed them. I gotta admit, though, the commenting guidelines, if you aren't just being tongue-in-cheek, make me doubt my judgement a bit. Let's see if you decide to delete my post based on this observation. If you do regularly delete posts or ban people from commenting for non-reasons, that may have something to do with the lack of productive interactions you're lamenting.
Uh, anyway.
One thought I keep coming ba...
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 arg... (read more)