I didn't find the results about cheating and shoplifting surprising, but that tracks with my friend group at the time. That said, I was curious about whether there's a gender discrepancy in shoplifting (there's not), and found a large 2002 survey which gives 11% as the lifetime incidence of shoplifting in the U.S.
Long before we get to the “LLMs are showing a number of abilities that we don't really understand the origins of” part (which I think is the most likely here), a number of basic patterns in chess show up in the transcript semi-directly depending on the tokenization. The full set of available board coordinates is also countable and on the small side. Enough games and it would be possible to observe that “. N?3” and “. N?5” can come in sequence but the second one has some prerequisites (I'm using the dot here to point out that there's adjacent text cues show...
My best guess is that there's a metaverse which consists of (at a minimum) every possible computation. While not technically provable or falsifiable, it does result in predictions which mean that circumstantially we should have an excellent guess whether or not it's true.
So far, it's true. It nicely explains the fine-tuned constants and QM and the discrete nature of the apparent finest (Planck-region) levels of reality. And yes, it also predicts that we will, on average, be overwhelmingly likely to live in one of the simplest possible universes supporting ...
I was thinking along these lines about a year back, and I started working on an ePub PWA (web-based) reader with some bells and whistles. The relevant whistle here is that you can highlight a word, passage, ... (read more)