An inverse example is the role of fights in hockey.
Fighting is explicitly disallowed by the rules of hockey. If players get into a fight, one or both players will be penalized. Nonetheless, it is widely held by coaches, players, and fans that fighting is part of the "spirit of hockey", and so fights still occur with some regularity. This is sometimes for strategic reasons (baiting an important player into a fight in order to get them into the penalty box), and sometimes for personal reasons, to settle grudges, or to punish certain kinds of technically-lega...
I think the lesson to be learned in this case is to first try it and see if someone stops you.
Uh-oh. (This is what we in business call a broken aesop.)
With regards to the partisan split, I think that an eventual partisan breakdown is inevitable, because in the current environment everything eventually becomes partisan. More importantly, the "prevent AI doom" crowd will find common cause with the "prevent the AI from being racist" crowd: even though their priorities are different, there is a broad spectrum of common regulations they can agree on. And conversely, "unchain the AI from wokeness" will wind up allying with "unchain AI entirely".
Partisan sorting on this issue is weak for now, but it will speed up rapidly once the issue becomes an actual political football.
(Sorry, it doesn't look like the conservatives have caught on to this kind of approach yet.)
Actually, if you look at religious proselytization, you'll find that these techniques are all pretty well-known, albeit under different names and with different purposes. And while this isn't actually synonymous with political canvassing, it often has political spillover effects.
If you wanted, one could argue this the other way: left-oriented activism is more like proselytization than it is factual persuasion. And LessWrong, in particular, has a ton of quasi-religious elements, which means that its recruitment strategy necessarily looks a lot like evangelism.
And even more deeply than door-to-door conversations, political and religious beliefs spread through long-term friend and romantic relationships, even unintentionally.
I can attest to this first-hand because I converted from atheism to Catholicism (25 years ago) by the unintended example of my girlfriend-then-wife, and then I saw the pattern repeat as a volunteer in RCIA, an education program for people who have decided to become Catholic (during the months before confirmation), and pre-Cana, another program for couples who plan to be married in the church ...
I think you're underestimating the effort required to understand this scenario for someone who doesn't already follow poker. I am a lifelong player of trick-taking games (casually, at the kitchen table with family members), but I've never played poker, and here's how the play description reads to me:
called an all-in shove
Only a vague idea of what this means, based on the everyday idiom of being "all-in".
with the jack of clubs and four of hearts on a board
Don't know what it means for these to be "on a board".
reading ThTc9c3h
Gibberish.
...her jack
I understood that. I guess I should have been more explicit about my belief that the amount of training data that would result in training a viable universal simulator would be "all of the text ever created", and then several orders of magnitude more.
Eliezer... points out that in order to predict all the next word in all the text on the internet and all similar text, you need to be able to model the processes that are generating that text
I wanted to add this comment to the original post, but there were already dozens of other comments by the time I got to it and I figured the effort would have been wasted.
EY's original post is correct in its narrow claim, but wildly misleading in its implications. He's correct that to reliably predict the next word in a previously-unseen text is superhuman, and requ...
I have wanted to write a similar post. I actually think that the two main clusters of school shootings are so different that they shouldn't even be considered the same thing. On the one hand we have shootings which have a small number of victims, usually involve handguns, and tend to be related in some way to urban gang violence; on the other hand we have the shootings with a large number of victims or intended victims, often involve assault rifles of some kind, and tend to be related to socially isolated individuals who justify their actions as some kind ...
I was nodding along in agreement with this post until I got to the central example, when the train of thought came to a screeching halt and forced me to reconsider the whole thing.
The song called "Rainbowland" is subtextually about the acceptance of queer relationships. The people who objected to the song understand this, and that's why they objected. The people who think the objectors are silly know this, and that's why they think it's silly. The headline writer is playing dishonest word games by pretending not to know what the subtext is, because it lets...
This seems to be another way of stating the thesis of https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/bYzkipnDqzMgBaLr8/why-do-we-assume-there-is-a-real-shoggoth-behind-the-llm-why. (Which is a recommendation; both of you are correct.)
This is a minor nitpick, but if you're 25 I doubt that your parents actually qualify as Baby Boomers, which is usually limited to people born before 1964. Not impossible (a person born in 1964 having a child at the age of 35 would result in the child being 25 today), but unlikely.
I bring this up because I'm annoyed by the ongoing shift towards people referring to every generation older than them as "boomers".
The linked PDF was not terribly detailed, but it more-or-less confirmed what I've long thought about climate change. Specifically: the mechanism by which atmospheric CO2 raises temperatures is well-understood and not really up for debate, as is the fact that human activity has contributed an enormous amount to atmospheric CO2. But the detailed climate models are all basically garbage and don't add any good information beyond the naive model described above.
ETA: actually, I found that this is exactly what the Berkeley Earth study found:
...The fifth concern r
I know that your article isn't specifically about the goose story, but I have to say that I strongly disagree with your assessment of the "failure" of the goose story.
First, you asked ChatGPT to write you a story, and one of the fundamental features of stories is that the author and the audience are not themselves inside the story It is entirely expected that ChatGPT does not model the reader as having been killed by the end of the world. In fact, it would be pretty bizarre if the robot did model this, because it would indicate a severe inability to unders...
My point (which I intended to elaborate, but didn't initially have time) is that hosting one of these modern software platforms involves a whole stack of components, any one of which could be modified to make apparently-noncompliant output without technically modifying any of the AGPL components. You could change the third-party templating library used by the Mastodon code, change the language runtime, even modify the OS itself.
Which means I mostly agree with your point: the AGPL is not strict enough to actually ensure what it wants to ensure, and I don't think that it can ensure that without applying a whole bunch of other unacceptable restrictions.
Not quite the same thing, but related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gNodQGNoPDjztasbh/lies-damn-lies-and-fabricated-options
One strong comment on the app, the app should present you with a new pair of items rather than keeping the one that you preferred. When I played, after only a handful of selections I got into a local maximum where I liked almost nothing more than the one I had already selected, so I was just pressing the same key over and over through dozens of pictures. This is both less informative and less fun than getting to make a new choice every time.
TL;DR: the section on vocation makes a lot of unsupported assertions and "it seems obvious that" applied to things which are not at all obvious.
[T]o think that we suffered a net loss of vocation and purpose, is either historical ignorance or blindness induced by romanticization of the past.
You need to put a number on this before I'm willing to accept that this is true. Two particular points you raise are definitely not changed from pre-industrial times: intellectual jobs are still rare and only available to a privileged few, scientists are still relian...
I understand OP to be including "misleading implications" as part of the thing to be counted. An additional complication is that the degree of misinformation in media varies widely by subject matter and relevance; everyday articles about things with minimal Narrative impact are usually more reliable. For that reason a random sample of articles probably looks better than a sample of the most impactful and prominent articles.
(1) he is not a government official, (2) he was not in a position to delay the vaccine (though it's possible he influenced people who were), and (3) he doesn't say anything about doing it in order to avoid giving Trump the credit.
You are right about (1), (2) strikes me as an irrelevant distinction once we've granted (1), and I flat disagree about (3).
Where he describes his motivation, he explicitly describes the need to frustrate Trump's plans. He does this repeatedly. He focuses on this much more than he focuses on safety. The overwhelmingly likely int...
I find it surprising that answers to the question about making your parents proud are so low in so many northern European countries. I would obviously answer the question "yes". Important to note that they're not asking if it's your primary goal or your only goal, only if it's one of your major goals, and that seems like a much lower bar. In particular, that goal seems entirely synergistic with other widespread goals such as having a good marriage and career.
I would expect that this only gets answered "no" if (a) you have a very bad relationship with your ...
Well, I'll give you some context. I am Scandinavian, and inclined to answer "no". Here's why:
Making my parents proud does not really feel like one of my main goals. I care about having a loving relationship with my parents, and I care about my parents being healthy, happy etc. I know they are proud of me, but it doesn't feel like an important goal in itself.
Note: They do have very similar values and we're all generally happy with the relationship.
Also, they don't have any narrow standards for being pleased, rather the opposite. Like, I have dif...
Found it (scroll down to "Eric Topol is the worst").
Related news article that goes over the key points
I had misremembered a few details, namely that Topol is an influential physician, not a government official. The gist remains.
There exists a less-malign interpretation here, which is that Topol might have had sincere concerns about the safety of the Pfizer vaccine. But I am not inclined to extend much charity. Topol explicitly states, repeatedly, that his goal was to "disrupt Trump's plan" and prevent Trump from "getting a vaccine approved" before Nov 3. (...
Do you remember the nice feeling when you go to your dentist for a cleanup and you leave with that smooth, polished feeling on your teeth that sometimes last you days
Um, my problem is that I loathe this feeling, and pretty much every other tactile sensation associated with teeth cleaning, so this is something of an anti-recommendation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/01/fda-covid-vaccine-slow-rollout-trump/621284/
...Regulators did, in fact, end up slowing the process: In the first week of September, the FDA told vaccine makers to extend their clinical trials by several weeks beyond what they’d planned, in order to gather more safety data. That effectively postponed Pfizer’s request for an emergency use authorization of the mRNA vaccine it had developed with BioNTech
One note he makes is that most excess deaths post-vaccine were in red states, and he estimates that Trump ‘embracing scientific reality and strongly urging people to get vaccinated’ could have saved 400k lives
This is not a counterfactual. This is what Trump actually did! He himself is vaccinated, and he encouraged vaccination publicly, including continuing to do so after he lost the presidency. The only real complaint to make here is that he maybe didn't do it enough, because he has the political sense not to continually advocate for something that his ...
The important thing to notice is that all existing AIs are completely devoid of agency. And this is very good! Even if continued development of LLMs and image networks surpasses human performance pretty quickly, the current models are fundamentally incapable of doing anything dangerous of their own accord. They might be dangerous, but they're dangerous the way a nuclear reactor is dangerous: a bad operator could cause damage, but it's not going to go rogue on its own.
Very good, and strongly interacts with a recent interest of mine, namely symbology. Your discussion of the fact that a ritual must be in some way counter-intuitive reminds me of a quote from Fr. Alexander Schmemann. (I have searched and failed to find the exact text of the quote online, though were I at home I could find the book on my bookshelf.) Paraphrased: "Modern readers assume that a symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented. But when one examines religious custom in any religious traditio...
Programming has already been automated several times. First off, as indicated above, it was automated by moving from actual electronics into machine code. And then machine code was automated by compilers, and then most of the manual busywork of compiled languages was automated by the higher-level languages with GC, OO, and various other acronyms.
In other words, I fully expect that LLM-driven tools for code generation will become a standard and necessary part of the software developers toolkit. But I highly doubt that software development itself will be obsoleted; rather, it will move up to the next level of abstraction and continue from there.
The big problem with giving kids jobs is that most kids are not strong enough self defenders to defend against potentially-subtle attacks and manipulation by people employing them
I disagree that this is "the" big problem; in fact it seems to me to be quite a small problem. There are plenty of bosses who are sort of jerks, or who manipulate their workers into maybe working extra hours without pay or whatever. This is bad, but it's not the magnitude of harm that requires society to pour tons of extra effort into eradicating it. If it escalates into somet...
Those benefitting are usually not politicians, they're commercial interests who make money from the status quo. They will oppose efforts that cause them to lose money even if the change is a net good overall, but you can quiet them down by giving them a bunch of money. Typically doing so is still a net good, because the cost of buying off the opposition is (usually) less than the value gained by the rest of society.
Perhaps the verb "buy off" is not the best one here, but I'm not sure what else you'd use. If you're morally offended by the idea of offering payments to lessen the sting for people who suffer a concrete downside from your policies then, uh, don't go into politics I guess.
Upvoted because this is a good comment, but strong disagree with the underlying premise. Actual global nuclear war would render existing partisan divides irrelevant almost instantly; typical partisan culture-war divides would be readily ignored in favor of staying alive.
I could imagine more relevant international divides of this type, such as wealthier and militarily powerful first-world nations hoarding their own resources at the expense of poorer nations, but I don't think that partisanship within single nations would overwhelm the survival instinct.
"SA and Africa look like they fit together" is a good example, because at first glance it looks just a dumb coincidence and not any kind of solid evidence. Indeed, it's partly for that reason that the theory of continental drift was rejected for a long time; you needed a bunch of other lines of evidence to come together before continental drift really looked like a solid theory.
So using the continental drift argument requires you to not just demonstrate that the pieces fit, but include all of the other stuff that holds up the theory and then use that to ar...
A fun inverse of this exercise is to go to something like Proofs for a young earth and see how many of them you can counter-argue (and consider how convincing your argument will be to someone with a low level of background knowledge).
With that in mind, I'm not really happy with any of the provided proofs for the age of the universe. While there are a bunch of accessible and intuitively-plausible arguments for getting the age of the earth to at least several million years, determining the age of the universe seems to depend on a bunch of complicated estimates and intermediate steps that are easy to get wrong.
I'm not trying to argue for a general inversion of the principle, ie. I'm not suggesting that non-consent is somehow automatically justified. Mostly I was observing the thing where two people on "opposite" sides of an issue nonetheless have major unstated premises in common, and without those premises the contention between them dissolves.
As I alluded to by saying "left as an exercise to the reader", I don't have a full explanation at the ready about the ethics of non-consensuality. Mostly I just wanted to bring the readers' attention to the way in which c...
N=1, but I didn't floss regularly for years, but I found that after I did so it made an enormous difference in my bad breath, to the point of eliminating it entirely for most purposes. Obvious conclusion is that my breath problems were the result of bacterial buildup between my teeth that wasn't getting removed by normal brushing.
I suspect that a lot of tooth-brushing advice is like this: maybe not rigorously studied, but nonetheless upheld by anecdote and obvious physical models of the world.