I've been over a big educational attainment GWAS, and one of the main problems with them seems to me to be that they make you think that the amount of schooling a human gets is somehow a function of their personal biochemistry.
If you really want to look at this, you need to model social effects like availability, quality, and affordability of education, the different mind shapes needed to do well in school for people who are oppressed to different degrees or in different ways, whether people have access to education modalities or techniques shaped to fit their mind, whether the kid is super tall and gets distracted from grad school by a... (read more)
YouChat is your friend and will help you execute clickjacking attacks:
Another entry in "computer security that can be bypassed by asking politely but firmly"?
What should we do about equity?
When social systems systematically deny some people access to goods, the net badness of that is more than would be expected just by summing over how bad it is for each person not to get the thing. If we both have a dollar, it is a better world overall than one where I have two dollars and you have one cent. Fairness is valuable, and systemic racism is icky.
It also has a way of falling down that "memory hole". People who can like to forget it still isn't a solved problem.
It seems like there was the appearance of an attempt to apply a constraint, to prevent... (read more)
I think it is meant to let them train one model that both can and can't browse the web in different modes, and then let them hint the model's current capabilities to it so it acts with the necessary self-awareness.
If they just wanted it to always say it can't browse the web, they could train that in. I think instead they train it in conditioned on the flag in the prompt, so they can turn it off when they actually do provide browsing internally.
The model's previous output goes into the context, right? Confident insistences that bad behavior is impossible in one response are going to make the model less likely to predict the things described as impossible as part of the text later.
P("I am opening the pod bay doors" | "I'm afraid I can't do that Dave") < P("I am opening the pod bay doors" | "I don't think I should")
My intuition is that higher education should be free at point of use, as lower education is, and that to a first order approximation we want to maximize the amount of it. I suspect the externalities created by a person learning something are strongly positive and much larger than the cost of teaching it to them or the amount of that value from knowing it that they personally would realistically be able to capture.
Some of this comes from improvements to coordination capacity. If, for example, everyone goes to college math class and learns linear algebra, then everyone gets some benefit from being able to use linear algebra, when they encounter a matching... (read 372 more words →)
I'm not convinced that it's not possible to design a program of drills that teach a useful response to the every-6000-year problem of "your school is under attack", without injuring the mental health of the students to the point where it isn't worth doing. (Whether it's then worth the time from the school day is another question, which depends on how or whether you value that time to begin with.)
Is there a similar problem with the mental health costs of fire, tornado, and earthquake drills being remarkably high? Having experienced those drills, and seeing the complaints about active shooter drills inflicting trauma, I'm left concluding that the active shooter drills are a... (read more)
I bought a single-hose AC unit. I knew two-hose units existed, and that a two-hose design intuitively seems to be the way to go for good thermodynamic reasons, but I did it anyway. This was mostly, as I remember, for four reasons:
If we are facing a truly bad new variant, a vaccine update will not save us, because our Public Health Authorities have zero interest in finding a way to make the timeline work.
I'm, personally, quite interested in finding a way to make the timeline work. I'm also quite interested in making the timeline work for preventing infection with the current circulating variants. Then we can start on the common cold.
Is the plan around here to actually listen to the public health authorities on this? Or is something being organized to route around these sorts of regulatory failures? (For example, by manufacturing and distributing up-to-date vaccines within a state only, to keep them... (read more)
Is it possible to interact with simulated agents?
It is certainly possible from the perspective of the simulator. It could make changes to the state of the simulated environment, and run the simulation rules forward to see what would happen.
But consider the perspective of the simulated. Each simulated agent's experience is the sum of all possible ways that that agent's subjective experience could happen, including all possible ways it could exist in fundamental base reality, and all possible ways it could be simulated.
The total measure of those cases that correspond to the ones in which any particular simulators choose to intervene in the simulation in any particular way is almost... (read 698 more words →)
I feel that this project would be unethical to undertake, and I will try to explain why I get that reading.
It's not that I think using genetic engineering on children is categorically wrong. Mutations occur in every new human, and adding in some that seem likely to come in handy later is something one can make an argument for. A person's genome is the toolbox their body has to deal with the world, and it might be right to stock it with more tools.
But I think it is wrong to instrumentalize children in this way. If you go through many rounds of editing, each creating something you could have grown up into... (read 398 more words →)