For a test that can give certainty to claims there’s something more than that going on somewhere in the LLM. Since the OP only indicated ~90% confidence.

Otherwise it’s hard to see how it can be definitely considered ‘consciousness’ in the typical sense we ascribe to e.g. other LW readers.

Is there a definitive test? Or any prospects of such in the foreseeable future?

Such that a well informed reader can be completely confident it’s not just very fancy pattern recognition and word prediction underneath…

I already think that "the entire shape of the zeitgeist in America" is downstream of non-trivial efforts by more than one state actor. Those links explain documented cases of China and Russia both trying to foment race war in the US, but I could pull links for other subdimensions of culture (in science, around the second amendment, and in other areas) where this has been happening since roughly 2014.

This theory likely assigns too much intention to too large of a structure. The cleavage lines are so obvious in the U.S. that it wouldn’t take much more than a random PSYOP middle manager every week having a lark on a slow Friday afternoon, who decides to just deploy some of their resources to mess around.

Although it’s possible policy makers know this too and intentionally make it very low hanging fruit for bored personnel to mess around and get away with only a slap on the wrist.

The core issue, in any society, is that it’s thousands of times easier to destroy trust than to rebuild it.

Plenty of libertarians understand that some percentage of the population will degenerate when given limitless opportunities to do so. Though they usually don’t have an answer for what to do with the resulting millions of semi-deranged adults other than isolation/prison/etc...

It’s more the speed and extent that it has occurred within a short time is probably what’s surprising.

What exactly is the counterargument here?

There are a boundless number of reasons for or against anything, because real world things happen in an infinite dimensional space of possibilities… so just a listing some opposing points for those in the parent doesn’t add much.

How does this relate to the degree of integration into an economy?

You can eat just fine in any developed country via picking up odd jobs here and there. But clearly a managing director at JP Morgan overseeing an important desk is at a qualitatively different level.

Does the median immigrant ‘integrate into the economy’ to any notable extent in months or weeks?

I can easily imagine someone with already a high rank, reputation, merit, etc., in their home country doing so by say immigrating and quickly landing a job at JP Morgan Chase in a managing director position and proceed to actually oversee some important desk within a short timeframe.

But that is the 99.99th+ percentile of immigration.

What is the actual argument that there’s ‘not very many’? (Or why do you believe such an argument made somewhere else)

There’s hundreds of asteroids and comets alone that have some probability of hitting the Earth in the next thousand years, how can anyone possibly evaluate ‘p(doom)’ for any of this, let alone every other possible catastrophe?

Or perhaps on the flip side there is a ‘super genius underhang’ where there are insufficient numbers of super competent people to do that work. (Or willing to bet on their future selves being super competent.)

It makes sense for the above average, but not that much above average, researcher to choose to focus on their narrow niche, since their relative prospects are either worse or not evaluable after wading into the large ocean of possibilities.

This seems always "fuzzily true"?

e.g. Which atom of the store are you measuring to?

The store has many quadrillions of atoms spread across a huge volume of space, relative to atom sizes, and there is no ultimate arbiter on the definitive measuring point.