All of ceba's Comments + Replies

ceba20

Proving their intelligence to who? Who would even care? How likely is it that any coordinated action would be taken to save starving orcas? If its highly likely, is this fact legible to them? 

It might seem to them that however many intelligent animals we've aided, we might just have harmed as many (intentionally or otherwise), or more.

Have humans ever taken large scale coordinated action to help an animal population that wasn't redressing some harm done to them by humans?

2Knight Lee
Suppose you lived together with 10 family members in the wilderness. As you explore the world and hunt for food, you observe large shiny objects floating by above you, with mysterious little creatures standing on them looking down on you. You've heard stories about these strange creatures. Your grandmother says that she was once trapped in a mudslide and thought she would die, but one of the shiny objects landed near her, and the creatures slowly dug her out. But she heard that another family far away was once attacked by these strange creatures, and most of them died. Now suppose one year, there is no food anywhere, and you and your family start to starve to death. You see the mysterious shiny objects drift by overhead. What do you do? It seems hard to believe that superintelligent orcas will reliably deduce, with 100% consistency, that the most reasonable action here is to completely ignore these shiny objects as you starve to death.
ceba10

if I want to find the maxima of a function, it doesn't matter if I use conjugate gradient descent or Newton's method or interpolation methods or whatever, they will tend to find the same maxima assuming they are looking at the same function.

In general, those methods find local extrema. They don't tell you how many there are, or where the next closest point is once you've found one of them. A loss landscape might have several local minima. Which one you find depends on where you start. 

Why shouldn't there be different minds that are at comparable minimum values, but not very close on the loss landscape? 

ceba*10

I like this.  But I have questions. I hope for discussion, not answers. 

Which people are most likely to get access to this tech first? is it likely that access will ever spread significantly beyond this group?

How does one raise a super child? 

If they require different support from other children, whose resources are available to provide it? 

Would there be some institution connected to the biotech company that would maintain a relationship with families or are they just selling a limited service?

What roles/responsibilities are the super ... (read more)

ceba30

Claude's initial justification for not completing the string doesn't make sense to me, but you didn't acknowledge this. Is this because I've misunderstood Claude?

common knowledge: Claude completing the string would be evidence that text containing the canary was included in its training data. This is the Canary's purpose. 

Claude's argument: I should be cautious with string's content, if reproducing it makes it less effective in the future. 

At some point, we have to take the (small!) risk and check. It can't get less effective than this.