Given recent discussion of short timelines & take off on LessWrong, AlignmentForm, and broadly, I've been quite worried. I want to be as skeptical as I can, but it’s hard to judge anything: I don’t know what information I’m missing from the timeline estimates I hear, and increasingly strange or concerning things are put out in public regularly. I can’t really say how likely short timelines are, but given what’s happening, it’s absurd to dismiss this as all collective delusion, and it seems something serious is happening.
Because of my information ...
When I first learned about social status as a concept, I somehow got the mistaken impression that any kind of status seeking is amoral. This caused me harm because I didn't want to violate any social boundaries, and trying to avoid violating status seeking behavior hobbles your ability to find and follow up on opportunities.
I think status seeking can be zero sum, and in such cases it should be avoided (like playing school with the intention of becoming valedictorian).
Status seeking can be positive sum while consisting of iterated zero sum games (like playi...
Your timeline was off, but I think your original comment will turn out to have had the right idea. Given the leaps from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 to Devin to Claude 3.5-Sonnet w/scaffolding, marginal seeming updates to models are turning out to be quite substantial in effective capability. It's hard to create evaluation harnesses for fuzzy, abstract things like the syntax complexity models can handle, and those abilities do transfer to using the models to automate their own post-training tasks, e.g. like what the self-alignment backtranslation paper's scaling...
Avoidant behavior is more interesting to think of in reverse: why do people do anything in the first place?
Procrastination (in a serial way, i.e. burnout) is due to a failure to respond to the normal incentives people act on in your situation. It can be solved by finding another motivation for the activity.
Emotional or cognitive pain is something we don't treat usually as a learning signal as we treat other sources of pain. This is troublesome since it underpins many self-destructive behaviors and all of our neurotic thinking. Sometimes, gut-wrenching dysphoria is a signal you've touched a hot stove (realizing you said something hurtful), and other times it's a major reaction to what's substantively a small insult.
After having been debilitated for a few days many times following the latter kind of pain, I think the right approach is to run head on into desen...
I used to get depressed about genetic determinism. It's a two-sentence thought that eliminates your perceived capacity for change.
However, while some predictive models can be built, and many things do revert to the mean – those are tendencies. You only get a pattern from a behavior that repeats. Some things don't. If you're looking for an overarching cause of life-outcomes, you necessarily cancel out individual variation.
No study on demographics that includes a section called "the one-off thing that happened to one guy once in defiance of what ...
Hide and cover clocks to stop procrastinating. There's no five minutes or five years "from now" that's not just "now" – but quantified time creates the illusion you perceive the future. This creates an emotional relationship to approaching deadlines. If you can't see time in your environment (at least when you want to work), the pain of experiencing "the future" immediately subsides but so does the idea you can put things off.
Useful links: Overcoming Bias, Dr. K, J Krishnamurti, Jeffery Kaplan
Writing polite but short emails that have a single intention is hard. The fewer words you use, the more can be wrongly inferred about the tone you hoped to convey. You want to save your recipient's time and energy and to do that consistently, but it's difficult to know if people will read something you didn't intend to say.
While Claude and GPT-4 often understand exactly what I mean when I feed them poorly written word salad that is both long-worded and not acceptable to send, they don't yet do a good job of removing what I want because of what seems to owe...
Another point worth mentioning: Isaac Newton allegedly had the ability to focus on his work for entire consecutive days at a time. This is highly unusual. The only non-chemical intervention I've ever heard of that can take a normal human mind to that ability is meditation. Though most people aren't willing to take their meditation practice to the level of intensity that does that, with proper instruction, it may have a more than marginal effect on prolonged concentration.
I'm coming at this from an absolutely insane angle, but I think I've figured out the important thing that those questions miss - or at least another way to put what's already been said. "Consciousness" cannot be described using positive definitions. This is due to an indexicality error. Your "experience" is everything there is - not in a solipsistic sense, but in the much more important sense that the notion of anything outside of experience is itself happening in experience. As this applies to the future and the past, every perception occurs in a totally ...
More Dakka On Your Expectations
After hearing my friend talk about his roommate’s brash decision-making from the despair at getting rejected by girls he liked several times, my friend mentioned that his roommate had asked out a total of three people since high school. Only three!
While there are more factors in the story involved, I’ve heard similar enough troubles that it seems worth saying: Three people is not a lot. Certainly not enough rejections to merit the magnitude of self-worth issues people can walk away with that few from.
If you had the expec... (read more)