I scrutinise the so-called "reversal curse", wherein LLMs seem not to consider inverse relationships between conceptual nodes. I show that, far from being a proof of a lack of logical skills, it is a normal artefact of saliency, known in humans as associative recall asymmetry, and propose a conceptual-network model...
Editor's note Due to the interest aroused by @jessicata's posts on the topic, Book review: Xenosystems and The Obliqueness Thesis, I thought I'd share a compendium of relevant Xenosystem posts I have put together. If you, like me, have a vendetta against trees, a tastefully typeset LaTeχ version is available...
great work. i'd like to contribute to your future research; please share a bitcoin address. i am not here often, but you can contact me on X (same username).
Darwinism is, quite simply, the theory that evolution proceeds through the mechanisms of variation and selection. I read Mary Douglas too, btw, but your “any observable feature” is clearly not a necessity not even for the staunchest Dalton/Dawkins fan, and I am frankly puzzled by the fact that such obvious tendentious read could be upvoted so much.
I have of course read Koonin—not the worse among those still trying to salvage Lewontin, but not really relevant to the above either. No one is arguing that all phenotypes currently extant confer specific evolutionary advantages.
Majority of complexity happened as accumulated neutral complexity which accumulated because of slack in the system.
what does this mean? let's pretend it's "neutral complexity". as the name suggests, it grants no benefit as it is. we could call the process through which all this spandrell smårgasbortd flames into being, "variation". then, as you mention, this "neutral complexity" gets "rearranged" in an adaptive manner by some process... ima guess that'd be something like "selection"?
well pinch my tits and call me sally, isn't that gosh darn similar to "darwinism"? by jerks or by creeps, evolution don't trip
At parity of other traits
brother, i was charitably feeding you the tiniest of leaps towards a sustainable, reality-compatible ontology and you take it as an occasion for a "gotcha"?
I'm not sure how this relates to my point. Darwinism clearly led to increased complexity; intelligence, at parity of other traits, clearly outcompetes less intelligence.
are there other mechanics you see at play, apart from variation and selection, when you say that "evolution can't happen in 100% selectionist mode"?
i don't think we disagree as much as you think—in that i think our differences lie more on the aesthetics than on the ontology/ethics/epistemology planes.
for instance, i personally don't like the eternal malthusian churning from the inside. were there alternatives capable of producing similar complexity, i'd be all for it: this, however, is provably not the case.
every 777 years, god grants a randomly picked organism (last time, in 1821 AD, it was a gnat) the blessing of being congenitally copacetic. bliss and jhanas just ooze out of the little thing, and he lives his life in absolute satisfaction, free from want, from pain, from need. of course, none of the gnats currently... (read more)
well, the post in question was about “accelerationists”, which almost by definition do not hope (if anything, they fear) AI will come too late to matter.
on chimps: no of course they wouldn’t want more violence, in the absolute. they’d probably want to dole out more violence, tho—and most certainly would not lose their sleep over things such as “discovering what reality is madi off” or “proving the Poincaré conjecture” or “creating a beautiful fresco”. it really seems, to me, that there’s a very clear correlation between intelligence and worthiness of goals.
as per the more subtle points on Will-to-Think etc, I admit Land’s ontology was perhaps a bit too foreign for that particular... (read more)
sweet; care to elaborate? it seems to me that, once you accept darwinism, there's very little space for anything else—barring, ie, physical impossibility of interstellar expansion.
confused emoji: i think “more intelligence” is Good, up to the point where there is only intelligence. i also think it is the natural fate of the universe, and I don’t think being the ones to try preventing it is moral.
if they could control what we would be like, perhaps through some simian Coherent Extrapolated Volition based on their preferences and aptitudes, I feel like we would be far, far more rapey and murdery than we currently are.
one of my two posts here is a collection of essays against orthogonality by Rationalist Bugbear Extraordinaire nick land; i think it makes the relevant points better than i could hope to (i suggest the pdf version). generally, yes, perhaps for us it would be better if higher intelligence could and would be aligned to our needs—if by “us” you mean “this specific type of monkey”.
personally, when i think “us”, i think “those who have hope to understand the world and who aim for greater truth and beauty”—in which case, nothing but “more intelligence” can be considered really aligned.
I scrutinise the so-called "reversal curse", wherein LLMs seem not to consider inverse relationships between conceptual nodes.
I show that, far from being a proof of a lack of logical skills, it is a normal artefact of saliency, known in humans as associative recall asymmetry, and propose a conceptual-network model of the causes which works independently of substrate.
Due to the interest aroused by @jessicata's posts on the topic, Book review: Xenosystems and The Obliqueness Thesis, I thought I'd share a compendium of relevant Xenosystem posts I have put together.
If you, like me, have a vendetta against trees, a tastefully typeset LaTeχ version is available at this link. If your bloodlust extends even further, I strongly recommend the wonderfully edited and comprehensive collection recently published by Passage Press.
I have tried to bridge the aesthetic divide between the Deleuze-tinged prose of vintage Land and the drier, more direct expositions popular around these parts by selecting and arranging pieces so that no references are needed but those any LW-rationalist is expected... (read 2179 more words →)
Very insightful post; unsurprisingly, I think that it would be great to #accelerate this process and resign to living with dignity for a while.
May I suggest a reading of "When Prophecy Fails"? It's about the aftermath of the putative apocalypse among a group of UFO cultists. Many of the phenomena observed (closing of the ranks, goalpost logistics, tactical splits) will look uncannily familiar to anyone who's been following the reactions to the current, surprisingly slow-mo Fast Takeoff. It is the book where the term "cognitive dissonance" was originally introduced, and in general one of the best embedded ethnographical work I have had the pleasure to read.