All of jaspax's Comments + Replies

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.

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... (read more)

Huh! Measure the speed of the ball coming off of the ramp was one of the first things that I thought of, but I assumed that that came too close to a full "dry run" to count. I think the lesson to be learned in this case is to first try it and see if someone stops you.

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.)

7johnswentworth
I mean, "roll the ball down the ramp and stop it at the bottom" is explicitly ruled in, at the beginning.

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.

2bc4026bd4aaa5b7fe
This is absolutely a fair point that I did not think about. All of David's examples in the book are left-ish-leaning and I was mostly basing it on those. My goal with that sentence was to just lampshade that fact.
8Charles M
The whole technique of asking peoples' opinion and repeating it back to them is extraordinarily effective with respect to currently in-fashion gender ideology.  "What is a Woman" did just that; let people explain themselves in their own words and calmly and politely repeated it back.  They hung themselves with no counter argument whatsoever.  Now, whether they ever actually changed their mind is another thing. I think you could do the same in the climate change context, though it's not quite as easy.

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 ... (read more)

3mruwnik
Jehovah's Witnesses are what first came to mind when reading the OP. They're sort of synonymous with going door to door in order to have conversations with people, often saying that they're willing for their minds to be changed through respectful discussions. They also are one of few christian-adjacent sects (for lack of a more precise description) to actually show large growth (at least in the west).

Nit: your last word should be "credible", not "credulous".

1Logan Zoellner
fixed

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

... (read more)
3Max H
(Also, FYI for others: this comment is close to violating my bolded request not to post object-level conclusions or speculations publicly. I'll let this one slide since it's mostly just an initial reaction, but I may ask that similar comments be deleted.)
1Max H
I may be underestimating the background knowledge and effort required, yes. Understanding the rules of poker and Texas Hold'em in particular is pretty essential for this exercise, so it might be worth writing a longer introduction and explanation that provides some of the required background knowledge. Though, this is the kind of thing I expect GPT to be a great help with, and so for those unfamiliar with poker, this is also a good test of a different set of skills: using AI tools to get up to speed quickly in an unfamiliar domain. Here's what GPT-4 said in response to your comment: I think it's pretty good! If anyone wants to learn more, I suggest pasting the description (or other, longer descriptions available online) into ChatGPT and querying interactively. Note, I used GPT-4 for the version above, not sure how well the free version does on something like this. Bing might do really well with this, since it can query external / up-to-date info on the web.

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.

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply

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... (read more)

[This comment is no longer endorsed by its author]Reply
2RobertM
This seems like an unusual misreading of Eliezer's post, which is quite explicitly about the potential bounds of future systems' performance, and not about the performance of the current system.  There is no implication that the current system is superhuman (or even average-human) in the dimensions that you specified.

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

2Martin Randall
I doubt that 30-40% shares the view that these children should be prevented from performing this song at this concert, but I agree that it's probably more than 5% locally. Reading the news further, it looks like the school board agreed to let the kids perform a substitute rainbow-themed song from the Muppets only after positive emails from parents in the class. So obviously there are people willing to say "that's ridiculous" in this case.
7Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
I don't think I quite intend "authority figures should shut down people making appeals to unpopular opinions." I more intend something like "probably literally every opinion is sufficiently unpopular that at least 4% of the population will get unhingedly angry about it, and society needs insulators between people, such that they can escape that 4% at least, and authority figures are among the structures that successfully insulate."

The point is not what Reddit commenters think, the point is what OpenAI thinks. I read OP (and the original source) as saying that if ARC had indicated that release was unsafe, then OpenAI would not have released the model until it could be made safe.

8habryka
This reads to me as clearly referring to the reddit comments as evidence that "if ARC had recommended against deployments lots of people [redditors] would have been quite concerned".

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.)

2Templarrr
It is indeed similar! I've found it after I've posted this one and it was really fun to see the same thought on the topic appear to different people within 24h. There are slight differences (e.g. I do think that every member of "pile of mask" isn't independent but actually just a result of different projection of higher dimension complex so there is neither possibility nor need for the "wisdom of crowds" approach) but it is remarkably close.

Okay, that's a pretty serious age gap. Probably explains a lot.

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".

3MSRayne
Yes, my parents are objectively boomers. My mother was born in 1960 and my father in 1953.

Congrats on getting all the way to The End. You may take a bow and enjoy our applause. We hope there will not be an encore.

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

... (read more)
2ProfessorPublius
I agree on not terribly detailed. It's more of an "I checked, and Climate Change is correct" than a critical analysis. [I'll reread it more carefully in a few weeks, but that was my impression on a first reading, admittedly while drugged up after surgery.] Perhaps I'm looking for the impossible, but I'm not comfortable with the idea that climate is so esoteric that no one outside the field can understand anything between CO2 traps UV at one extreme ... and the other extreme consisting of the entire model with conclusion that therefore the planet will warm by x degrees this century unless we eliminate fossil fuels. That alone has not satisfied many who ask - and it shouldn't. I have more respect for my students (math-based but a different field) who search for more detail than for those who accept doctrine. I can explain fusion on many levels: from hydrogen-becomes-helium to deuterium-and-tritium become helium to this is the reaction cross section for D-D or D-T or D-He3 and ____ MeV are released in the form of ____ .... Similarly for the spectrum from lift/drag to the Navier–Stokes equations ..., and similarly for dynamic stability of structures. I am disappointed that climate scientists cannot communicate their conclusions at any intermediate level. Where is their Richard Feynman or (preferably) Carl Sagan?
2qjh
That's a strange conclusion to draw. The simple climate models basically has a "radiative forcing term"; that was well estimated even in the first IPCC reports in the late 80s. The problem is that "well-estimated" means to ~50%, if I remember correctly. More complex models are primarily concerned with the problem of figuring out the second decimal place of the radiative forcing and whether it has any temperature dependence or tipping points. These are important questions! In simple terms, the question is just whether the simple model shown breaks down at some point. I don't think actually reading the literature should convince anyone otherwise, the worst charge you could levy is one regarding science communication. I mean, I don't think anyone from the climate community would dispute the fact that the early IPCC reports, which were made before we had access to fancy computers, did actually predict the climate of the 21st century so far remarkably well: https://www.science.org/cms/asset/a4c343d8-e46a-4699-9afc-983fea62c745/pap.pdf The other aspect is that the ~50% (ballpark) uncertainty in the forcing, back then, allows for good near-term projections but the projections diverge after more than a couple decades, and we really want to have a better handle on things with a longer time horizon. Finally, you can see that sea-level projections weren't quite as good. Detailed modelling is a bit more important there.

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... (read more)

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.

There could be an argument that hosting it behind a proxy counts as modification.

2jefftk
They define modification in the license: Since hosting it behind a proxy only requires making an exact copy, I don't think that argument would work.
4Duncan Sabien (Deactivated)
Also: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NjZAkfio5FsCioahb/investigating-fabrication 

Additionally: separate mens' fashion from womens' fashion if possible.

1Jan
Hmmm good point. I originally made that decision because loading the image from the server was actually kind of slow. But then I figured out asynchronicity, so could totally change it... I'll see if I find some time later today to push an update! (to make an 'all vs all' mode in addition to the 'King of the hill')

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.

2jaspax
Additionally: separate mens' fashion from womens' fashion if possible.

I think my strongest disagreement here is that the category of "disagreeable" does not cleave reality at the joints, and that the category "non-routine cognitive" contains a lot of work which is not, in fact, intellectually or spiritually fulfilling in the way implied.

1Mo Putera
Is that disagreement enough to change the (predicted) truth value of Jason's claim though?  I'll admit to being biased here. I live in a rapidly-developing middle-income country; the difference in opportunity between my generation and my parents is nearly as vast as between 1910 and 2009 in Gordon's statistics. To me, while I agree wholeheartedly that Gordon's categorization doesn't cleave reality at the same joints Jason's does, it's still ~irrelevant in that it doesn't change my mind on the directionality of Jason's claim.

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... (read more)

8jasoncrawford
Here's some quantification, from Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. In 1910, 47% of US jobs were what Gordon classifies as “disagreeable” (farming, blue-collar labor, and domestic service), and only 8% of jobs were “non-routine cognitive” (managerial and professional). By 2009, only 3% of jobs were “disagreeable” and over 37% were “non-routine cognitive”. See full chart below. I did not say or mean that agricultural is non-vocational. But I think it is not the ideal vocation for 50+% of the workforce. Vocation is not the same as choice, but when you have choice, you are more likely to find your vocation. That is the point.

"I want gas stoves to be restricted so that gross people who live in suburbs can't have them."

This might be the single worst take I've ever seen on LW. I'm sorry I can't be more constructive here, but this is the kind of garbage comment I expect from the dregs of Twitter, not this site.

1CraigMichael
It was intended to be tonge-in-cheek, but okay, point taken. 

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.

1ProfessorPublius
Excellent point on the selective subject matter placement of articles with misleading implications. Thank you. I should have thought that through.

The per-person numbers are almost certainly due to women entering the workforce and thus getting counted in the numbers for the first time. Decline in fertility also has some effect (though probably smaller), as there are now fewer non-working children per adult.

As a literal answer to your question: the stats do account for the working poor, but the working poor are a pretty small part of population as a whole and so don't skew the statistics as much as you apparently think.

I oversold my original statement due to having remembered a slightly more sensational version of events. Nonetheless I stand by my interpretation of the tweets; others can read them for themselves and make up their own minde.

(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... (read more)

3gjm
He says he's glad he frustrated Trump's plans. It looks to me as if by "Trump's plans" he means "Trump's plans to push vaccines out before they have been adequately tested, in order to win votes", and as if (at least as far as his explicit utterances go) he wants to frustrate those plans because he thinks pushing vaccines out before they have been adequately tested is dangerous and/or confidence-harming. I should maybe say explicitly: I am making no claim about whether in fact Trump, or his administration, had any such plans, nor exactly what their motivations were if they did. I am just looking at what Topol's stated motivations were, and they do not look to me the way you say they look to you. I agree that it is possible that his real motivations were more political than his stated motivations (many people's often are), but since IIUC you are saying that Topol bragged about doing what he did in order to avoid giving Trump the credit I think it matters what his stated motivations were. And not once do I see him saying anything that's more like "we should do this because otherwise Trump might win the election" than like "we should do this because otherwise we will be deploying the vaccines before they are known to be safe, and before the public will trust that they are known to be safe". Here are all the things in that MIT Technology Review article that tell us (by quoting or otherwise; unless I've goofed, things with quotation marks around them are alleged to be Topol's actual words) what Topol said. * (article text) Topol [...] aimed to prevent Trump from greenlighting a vaccine before scientists could prove it to be safe and effective. To Topol, developing an effective vaccine against covid-19 is “the biggest event in our generation” and one that should be evaluated on the basis of scientific data, not political implications. * Article explicitly claims Topol's concern is that political pressure is leading to bad medical decisions. * To prevent such a sce

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

1Ericf
You could also say "no" if: 1. You don't have "goals in life" 2. Your parents are dead 3. You don't care what your parents (or anyone else) thinks (a fairly common feeling among Autism Spectrum folx) 4. You are focused on one or two important things (goal: get a promotion / get an A in this class / etc.), and nebulous "make my parents proud" things aren't as important. 5. You interpret the question as referring to both or all your parents, but one or more of the previously mentioned reasons apply to some of your parents, so while you might want to make "my mom" proud, that doesn't apply to "my dad" or "my stepmom" and therefore you don't consider "my parents" a unified entity.

Found it (scroll down to "Eric Topol is the worst").

Eric Topol

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. (... (read more)

2gjm
So when you said the only discrepancies between that and reality were that (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. My reading of Topol's tweet is not "I tried to make sure Trump didn't gain votes by making vaccines happen faster" but "I tried not to let the Trump administration exert pressure to make vaccines faster in order to gain votes". (Those two things are fairly similar. The first difference between them is in what they regard as the default if no one exerts any pressure. The first: if no pressure, vaccines roll out quickly; pressure is exerted to get them rolled out slowly. The second: if no pressure, vaccines roll out slowly; pressure is exerted to get them rolled out quickly. The second difference between them is in who is alleged to be acting from political motive.) Topol's tweets (and other things) quoted in the article are all, on the surface at least, making the argument that rushing the vaccines out would do net harm, most importantly by reducing confidence in their safety. Since in fact a lot of people didn't get vaccinated on safety grounds (even with the release timetable that actually happened) it's hard for me to see that as very unreasonable. Of course it's possible that Topol's words are dishonest, that his real motivation was all political, that the same goes for e.g. the other medical people who signed his open letter to Pfizer, and that all of them were happy to let thousands die if it harmed Donald Trump electorally. Politics is a hell of a drug. But since there's a pretty plausible less-malevolent explanation -- they really thought that waiting a bit would reduce real and perceived side-effect risk, and they thought that there was political pressure to rush things that needed countering -- and since we are agreed that slowness is the FDA's default

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.

3Brendan Long
You get used to it after a while and it feels normal. It only feels weird when "completely clean" isn't the default.
1npostavs
Huh. I literally have no idea what feeling this is referring to.

ChatGPT also doesn't try to convince you of anything. If you explicitly ask it why it should do X, it will tell you, much like it will tell you anything else you ask it for, but it doesn't provide this information unprompted, nor does it weave it into unrelated queries.

https://nypost.com/2022/09/12/it-seems-clear-dems-pressured-the-fda-to-delay-the-covid-vaccine-to-hurt-trump/

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

... (read more)
3gjm
Thanks. I would be interested to see those screenshots. Without some similar smoking-gun moustache-twirling, it's not clear how to distinguish "regulators were cautious as a pretext for not giving Trump a win" from "regulators were cautious because that's what regulators do, and this was a thing being rolled out to millions of people". E.g., the Atlantic article observes that using EUAs for vaccines at all was previously unheard-of because the numbers of people potentially affected are so large. The 60-day period that was used doesn't seem absurdly overcautious to me, though I am not in any way an expert on vaccine side effects. Nothing in those two articles looks to me like good evidence for nefarious intent behind whatever level of caution the FDA adopted. Of course it's possible that some regulators were cautious for "good" reasons (wanting to make sure the vaccines were safe, wanting to make it harder for people to think they weren't) and some for "bad" reasons (not wanting Trump to get electoral gains from the vaccines). It's possible that some were cautious for both sorts of reason. It's also (I think obviously) possible that the Trump administration's motives were similarly-but-oppositely mixed. Knowing what we know now about (1) the actual safety and effectiveness of the vaccines and (2) the extent to which people avoided them because of safety concerns, it's not clear to me whether getting them out sooner would have been good or bad overall. More to the point, at the time it wasn't known how safe and effective they would turn out to be, and it seems plausible to me that (a) cutting the wait-and-look-for-side-effects period would in fact have led to a better outcome but that (b) it wasn't a good idea in expectation at the time, since there might have turned out to be worse side effects than there actually were.

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 ... (read more)

4gjm
I don't understand the last paragraph. Who, exactly, could have released "the vaccine" in September or October but didn't? At the time of the 2020 US elections, the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna and AstraZeneca were all still in their Phase III trials. (Actually, I'm not sure all of them had even started their Phase III trials.) Are you saying that the companies developing the vaccines were leaned on by antitrumpistas and pressured to schedule their trials later to make sure nothing got released before the US elections? If so, I'd like to see some evidence. (The more obvious explanation would seem to be that they did things as quickly as internal and external bureaucracy permitted, which did after all end up being quite a lot quicker than usual.) Or are you saying that the best explanation for their choosing not to seek an EUA for their vaccines before even beginning Phase III trials is some kind of pressure not to do anything that might make Trump look good? Again, if so, I'd like to see some evidence. (The more obvious explanation would seem to be that they didn't want to release a vaccine that either was harmful or was suspected to be.) Or what?

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.

9Vladimir_Nesov
The models that are currently available are probably incapable of autonomous progress, but LLMs might be almost ready to pass that mark after getting day-long context windows and some tuning.
2Antb
A nuclear reactor doesn't try to convince you intellectually with speech or text so that you behave in a way you would not have before interacting with the nuclear reactor. And that is assuming your statement 'current LLMs are not agentic' holds true, which seems doubtful.

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... (read more)

1mrcbarbier
Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I do not know anything about this tradition and I would be very happy to learn about it, especially from a perspective that could generate analyses such as the one you paraphrase here. Your paraphrase from Schmemann resonates a lot with my understanding of Sperber's argument in Rethinking Symbolism, so you may enjoy that book. He devotes the first fraction of the book deconstructing this assumption that symbolism signifies like a language, i.e. as you put it, that "symbolic action must relate in some obviously analogical or didactic way to the thing being represented". And then he tries to offer an alternative theory which I find elegant.

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.

7Stephen McAleese
I'm not sure about software engineering as a whole but can I see AI making programming obsolete. My worry is that the next level of abstraction above Python is plain english and that anyone will be able to write programs just by asking "Write an app that does X" except they'll ask the AI that instead of asking a freelance developer. The historical trend has been that programming becomes easier. But maybe programming will become so easy that everyone can do programming and programmers won't be needed anymore. A historical analogy is search which used to be a skilled job that was done by librarians and involved creating logical queries using keywords (e.g. 'house' AND 'car'). Now natural language language search makes it possible for anyone to use Google and we don't need librarians for search anymore. The same could happen to programming. Like librarians for search, it seems like programmers are a middleman between the user requesting a feature and the finished software. Historically programming computers has been too difficult for average people but that might not be true for long.
1Bezzi
Strong upvote. I can sort of expect a future where the developer does not need to know C or Python or whatever programming language anymore, and can happily develop very human-readable pseudo-code at a super high level of abstraction. But a future where the developer does not know any algorithm even in theory and just throws LLMs at everything seems just plain stupid. You don't set up gigantic models if your problem admits a simple linear algorithm.

Probably because Putanumonit is straight. It's not that mysterious.

2the gears to ascension
that seems like it confuses the analysis though and some of these things seem like rationalizing being attracted to people in the first place. like, a lot of these things are real, but it sounds more like maybe the question is, under what conditions am I attracted to the people to whom I am attracted? and this advice all applies just as much to men.

Do you have any details about what's happened in Fargo and St. Louis? Just the other day I was wondering about the outcomes of these kinds of election reforms.

This had entirely the opposite effect on me, but was an interesting read nonetheless.

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... (read more)

1the gears to ascension
worker protection is currently not very effective though. being illegal doesn't prevent most of those things from happening unless you have union with your coworkers or money for a lawyer. making significant changes to coordination capabilities of a group makes big differences in societal outcomes. I agree that the current alternative is similarly quite bad though. I have no intent to argue that the situation is currently good, just that the reason people have not improved it is understandable and we need to protect the thing they are worried about.

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... (read more)

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.

1Astynax
I will definitely check out the "proofs for young earth" thing. A related issue is patching a problem: SA and Africa look like they fit together, and at the current rate of drift they haven't had time to separate in 10K years (haven't checked this, but surely it's right), so maybe they separated 6K years back in a single day. If C14 is really low in things we think are 10M y old (I'm making this up but it fits), maybe they're a few thou years old and a few thou years ago there was very little C14 around.

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... (read more)

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