I've argued for "hallucination" -> "Runge Spikes"; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43612517
"Runge Spikes" is still a metaphor, rather than a technically accurate description. Its strength is that it gets away from using a metaphor from human illness. Metaphors from human illness smuggle in an assumption that LLMs are faulty humans, rather than technology doing its thing.
Eliezer's essay "Disputing Definitions" is didactic writing, but one can also read it as a lament. He even uses the word "mournful". He ends his essay, like I started my comment, with making up two new words, intending to head off what he calls the "Standard Dispute". His version is tongue-in-cheek. His words are "alberzle" and "bargulum" and there is a time machine.
His essay is excellent, but how does an essay from 2008 need updating for the LLM era? He is lamenting both what is in the training data and what is missing from it. People dispute definitions. They fail to invent new words to head off these disputes.
My claim is that... (read more)
People often let language do their thinking for them. For example, consider the phrase "this has happened before". A discussion of artificial intelligence leading to technological unemployment will devolve into "this has happened before" versus "this time is different".
But "this has happened before" muddles together two different ideas that I call *restrep* and *maytip*. *Restrep* is what happens at the start of a second game of chess. The board is cleared and the pieces set out in the standard starting position. Reset and repeat. The second game may start with exactly the same opening as the first game. One guesses that the player who lost the first game will be the first... (read more)
My take on the conflict theory analysis is that the reserve army of brutal thugs is a valuable resource for avant-garde revolutionaries. Think 1917 Russian revolution. Its was a close run thing with a brutal civil war. Typically the avant-garde don't have the numbers. They may win power, but not have the numbers to hold on to it. They need to put boots on the necks of counter-revolutionaries. Since their tests for counter-revolutionariness have too many false negatives, they have to go large and put boots on the necks of the general population. Where do they find the feet to fill the boots? They release brutal thugs from prison to provide the... (read more)
You are over-simplifying Bayesian reasoning. Giving partial credence to propositions doesn't work; numerical values representing partial credence must be attached to the basic conjunctions.
For example, if the propositions are A, B, and C, the idea for coping with incomplete information that every-one has, is to come up with something like P(A)=0.2, P(B)=0.3, P(C)=0.4 This doesn't work.
One has to work with the conjunctions and come up with something like
P(A and B and C) = 0.1
P(A and B and not C) = 0.1
P(A and not B and C) = 0.1
P(A and not B and not C) = 0.2
P(not A and B and C) = 0.1
P(not A and B and not C) = 0.1
P(not A... (read more)
I started going barefoot in the streets of Edinburgh in February 2000. Eventually I wrote a little web page explaining myself. I didn't want to duplicate what was on the Society For Barefoot Living website, so I narrowed my focus to a single aspect. Twenty four years later, I still go barefoot nearly all the time. Rescuing the text to paste it here, I notice that it has stood the test of time very well :-)
Modern life involves much walking on hard surfaces, pavements, reinforced concrete floors, steel decking, and it is worth pondering whether shoes provide adequate cushioning. In modern shoes, your heel hits the pavement first, before the rest... (read 1222 more words →)
This reminds me of a passage in Richard Feynman's memoir "What do you care what other people think?". Four pages into the chapter Gumshoes, (page 163 in the Unwin Paperback edition):
Then this business of Thiokol changing its position came up. Mr. Rogers and Dr. Ride were asking two Thiokol managers, Mr. Mason and Mr. Lund, how many people were against the launch, even at the last moment.
"We didn't poll everyone," says Mr. Mason.
"Was there a substantial number against the launch, or just one or two?"
"There were, I would say, probably five or six in engineering who at that point would have said it is not as conservative to go with that temperature,... (read 356 more words →)
Consider the case of a reclusive mad scientist who uplifts his dog in the hope of getting a decent game of chess. He is likely to be disappointed as his pet uses his new intelligence to build a still and drink himself to death with homemade vodka. If you just graft intelligence on top of a short term reward system, the intelligence will game it, leading to wireheading and death.
There is no easy solution to this problem. The original cognitive architecture implements self-preservation as a list of instinctive aversions. Can one augment that list with addition aversions preventing the various slow-burn disasters that intelligence is likely to create? That seems an unpromising... (read 671 more words →)
From the perspective of 2023, censorship looks old fashioned; new approaches create popular enthusiasm around government narratives.
For example, the modern way for the Chinese to handle Tiananmen Square is to teach the Chinese people about it, how it is an American disinformation campaign that aims to destabilize the PRC by inventing a massacre that never happened, and this is a good example of why you should hate America.
Of course there are conspiracy theorist who say that it actually happened and the government covered it up. What happened to the bodies? Notice that the conspiracy theorists are also flat Earthers who think that the PRC hid the bodies by pushing them over the... (read more)
Bill died. He never liked having dumps done. Each year he would make excuses, put it off. "Next year." he would say. Only after Bill's death do people realise just how long this has been going on for: thirty years. They will have to restore Bill from a 30 year old tape. Is "restore" even the right word? How about "roll-back"?
Worse still, there was a big change in Bill's life 25 years ago when he had a mid-life crisis. He joined a personal growth cult, dropped old friends, made new ones. Some of his new friends can remember encounters with the old Bill of 30 years ago. They didn't like him and... (read 719 more words →)
There is logical gap. Earlier in the piece:
When a conflict theorist encounters a statement, they ask: “What is this statement meant to achieve in the world?”
But later:
Conflict Theory/ Post Modernism: Believe what is useful but ask first useful to whom?
The piece starts by looking at intentions. The statement is meant to achieve X. The speaker has a theory of how the world works and shapes what they say to persuade others to behave in ways that theory says will lead to X. But their theory is wrong; they succeed in persuading others and achieve Y instead. What the statement is meant to achieve is X, and we are focusing on X and... (read 372 more words →)