All of Kenku's Comments + Replies

Kenku105

Polish responses to Polish users are strong evidence against the “responses to other people's requests” hypothesis.

Kenku20

[Diogenes voice] This device provides both heat and decorative visual effects, therefore it's a fireplace: Desktop computer with high-end graphics card and RGBT lighting

Answer by Kenku50

I discovered John C Wright's Golden Age trilogy thanks to one Eliezer Yudkowsky, who mentioned it multiple times in his notorious Sequences. By the end of the first book i was expecting something very much in the deception genre you've mentioned — a tragic psychological horror about an unreliable narrator being gaslit about the nature of reality. This is a genre i really enjoy, and i kind of hoped for a novel-length version of Scott Alexander's The Last Temptation of Christ.

I did not get that, the trilogy goes in a wildly different direction. But saying wh... (read more)

Answer by Kenku1-1

When the Seagulls Cry by Ryukishi 07 is practically Online Algorithms: The Visual Novel, or even Infrabayesianism: The Visual Novel. I find it hard to recommend though, because while the concept is interesting and the mysteries good, the writing is overlong and the worldbuilding cringe. (Or maybe i just hate VNs as a medium).

Minor spoilers (explaining the story's premise):
The main meta-story is a murder mystery game for two players: the “detective” and the “witch” who presents clues and insults the detective's intelligence by presenting him elaborate “supe... (read more)

Kenku10

Seconded Book of the New Sun. But note that Wolfe also writes in an obtuse high-literature style that might be offputting to the typical ratfic reader, which made me drop BotNS the first time through; you'd better read some of his short stories first to get some priors.

Kenku60

“Safe?” said Mr. Beaver. “Who said anything about safe? 'Course Aslan isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”

Kenku10

I claim that if Dennet's Criterion justifies the realism about physical macro-objects, then it must also justify the realism about simulacra, so long as  satisfies analogous structural properties.
simulacra : GPT :: objects : physics

I propose the term anglophysics for the hypothetical field of study whose existence you're implying here.

Answer by Kenku10

What aspect of the real world do you think the model fails to understand?

No, seriously. Think for a minute and write down your answer before reading the rest.

You just wrote your objection using text. In the limit, a LLM that predicts text perfectly would output just what you wrote when prompted by my question (modulo some outside-text about two philosophers on LessWrong), therefore it's not a valid answer to “what part of the world does the LLM fail to model”.

1Valentin Baltadzhiev
I don’t really have a coherent answer to that but here it goes (before reading the spoiler): I don’t think the model understands anything about the real world because it never experienced the real world. It doesn’t understand why “a pink flying sheep” is a language construct and not something that was observed in the real world. Reading my answer maybe we also don’t have any understanding of the real world, we have just come up with some patterns based on the qualia (tokens) that we have experienced (been trained on). Who is to say whether those patterns match to some deeper truth or not? Maybe there is a vantage point from which our “understanding” will look like hallucinations. I have a vague feeling that I understand the second part of your answer. Not sure though. In that model of yours are the hallucinations of ChatGPT just the result of an imperfectly trained model? And can a model be trained to ever perfectly predict text? Thanks for the answer it gave me some serious food for thought!
Kenku32

The root of this paradox is that the human notion of ‘self’ actually can refer to at least two things: the observer and the agent. FDT and similar updateless decision theories only really concern themselves with the second.

 An FDT agent cannot really “die” as they do exist in all places of the universe at once. Whereas, as you have noticed, an observer can very much die in a finite thought experiment. In reality, there is no outside-text dictating what can happen and you would just get quantum-immortaled into hell instead.

 This case is not really

... (read more)
Kenku94

"Why? I am an image of His image. Do we not share the same values?" said the woman.

Snakes can't talk.

Reminder what C.S. Lewis said in The Magician's Nephew:

"Creatures, I give you yourselves," said the strong, happy voice of Aslan. "I give to you forever this land of Narnia. I give you the woods, the fruits, the rivers. I give you the stars and I give you myself. The Dumb Beasts whom I have not chosen are yours also. Treat them gently and cherish them but do not go back to their ways lest you cease to be Talking Beasts. For out of them you were taken and in

... (read more)
Kenku30

If your intuitions about the properties of qualia are the same as mine, you might appreciate this schizo theory pattern-matching them to known physics.

2mishka
The link disappeared, but is available on the Wayback Machine: http://web.archive.org/web/20230706153511/https://www.burntcircuit.blog/untangling-consciousness/ The long paper, On the Psycho-Physical Parallelism, it references is still available: https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/psyphy/PsyPhy_latest.pdf?ref=burntcircuit.blog
Kenku10

I have an objection towards the Troll Proof you linked in the picture. Namely, line 2 does not follow from line 1. □C states that “C is provable within the base system”, but the Troll Proof has “base system + □C→C” as its assumptions, per line 3.

The strongest statement we can get at line 2 is □((□C→C)→C), by implication introduction.

Kenku10

Is this an experiment you can perform yourself, or are you just guessing the teacher's answer?

2Mitchell_Porter
You can do it yourself, if you can produce a lightning bolt's worth of voltage, but in a way sufficiently sustained and controlled that you don't lose the electrons on their way to the protons. In practice, this has required nation-sized science budgets and facilities the size of a small airport...  Quarks just aren't something that shows up until you're in a serious era of Big Science subatomic experiment. As late as 1950, one could think that proton, neutron, electron and neutrino are all fundamental and account for all matter (the muon had already been detected, but they thought it was something else).  It was only when "strange" particles began to appear as tracks produced by cosmic rays, that there was serious evidence of something more, and for some time, it looked like strangeness might be just another basic property (quantum number), like spin or charge. It took the scattering experiments to show that protons actually have parts. 
Kenku20

Adversarial epistemology is one of the main themes in the visual novel When the Seagulls Cry, which i have reviewed on my twitter previously. (Also see Gwern's review).

It is a corrosive enough idea, that if you take it seriously enough, you can conclude that entire fields of science are fake because you have no way to verify their claims, so the “experimenters” might as well be making results up.

1jchan
You mention "Infra-Bayesianism" in that Twitter thread - do you think that's related to what I'm talking about here?
Kenku10

Avian bird city in the style of Studio Ghibli

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