This was my first time taking this, looking forward to the results!
β-redex
Karma: 209
I know of Robert Miles, and Writer, who does Rational Animations. (In fact Robert Miles’ channel is the primary reason I discovered LessWrong :) )
Don’t leave me hanging like this, does the movie you are describing exist? (Though I guess your description is a major spoiler, you would need to go in without knowing whether there will be anything supernatural.)
The Thing: classic
Eden Lake
Misery
10 Cloverfield Lane
Gone Girl: not horror, but I specifically like it because of how agentic the protagonist is
2., 3. and 4. have in common that there is some sort of abusive relationship that develops, and I think this adds another layer of horror. (A person/group of people gain some power over the protagonist(s), and they slowly grow more abusive with this power.)
Somewhat related: does anyone else strongly dislike supernatural elements in horror movies?
It’s not that I have anything against a movie exploring the idea of “what if we suddenly discovered that we live in a universe where supernatural thing X exist”, but the characters just accept this without much evidence at all.
I would love a movie though where they explore the more likely alternate hypotheses first (mental issues, some weird optical/acoustic phenomenon, or just someone playing a super elaborate prank), but then the evidence starts mounding, and eventually they are forced to accept that “supernatural thing X actually exists” is really the most likely hypothesis.
These examples show that, at least in this lower-stakes setting, OpenAI’s current cybersecurity measures on an already-deployed model are insufficient to stop a moderately determined red-teamer.
I… don’t actually see any non-trivial vulnerabilities here? Like, these are stuff you can do on any cloud VM you rent?
Cool exploration though, and it’s certainly interesting that OpenAI is giving you such a powerful VM for free (well actually not because you already pay for GPT-4 I guess?), but I have to agree with their assessment which you found that “it’s expected that you can see and modify files on this system”.
The malware is embedded in multiple mods, some of which were added to highly popular modpacks.
Any info on how this happened? This seems like a fairly serious supply chain attack. I have heard of incidents with individual malicious packages on npm or PyPI, but not one where multiple high profile packages in a software repository were infected in a coordinated manner.
Uhh this first happening in 2023 was the exact prediction Gary Marcus made last year: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/artificial-intelligence-language
Not sure whether this instance is a capability or alignment issue though. Is the LLM just too unreliable, as Gary Marcus is saying? Or is it perfectly capable, and just misaligned?
I don’t see why communicating with an AI through a BCI is necessarily better than through a keyboard+screen. Just because a BCI is more ergonomic and the AI might feel more like “a part of you”, it won’t magically be better aligned.
In fact the BCI option seems way scarier to me. An AI that can read my thoughts at any time and stimulate random neurons in my brain at will? No, thanks. This scenario just feels like you are handing it the “breaking out of the box” option on a silver platter.
Why is this being downvoted?
From what I am seeing people here are focusing way too much on having a precisely calibrated P(doom) value.
It seems that even if P(doom) is 1% the doom scenario should be taken very seriously and alignment research pursued to the furthest extent possible.
The probability that after much careful calibration and research you would come up with a P(doom) value less than 1% seems very unlikely to me. So why invest time into refining your estimate?
There was a recent post estimating that GTP-3 is equivalent to about 175 bees. There is also a comment there asserting that a human is about 140k bees.
I would be very interested if someone could explain where this huge discrepancy comes from. (One estimate is equating synapses with parameters, while this one is based on FLOPS. But there shouldn’t be such a huge difference.)
Indeed (as other commenters also pointed out) the ability to sexually reproduce seems to be much more prevalent than I originally thought when writing the above comment. (I thought that eukaryotes only capable of asexual reproduction were relatively common, but it seems that there may only be a very few special cases like that.)
I still disagree with you dismissing the importance of mitochondria though. (I don’t think the OP is saying that mitochondria alone are sufficient for larger genomes, but the argument for why they are at least necessary is convincing to me.)
I disagree with English (in principle at least) being inadequate for software specification.
For any commercial software, the specification basically is just “make profit for this company”. The rest is implementation detail.
(Obviously this is an absurd example, but it illustrates how you can express abstractions in English that you can’t in C++.)
I don’t think the comparison of giving a LLM instructions and expecting correct code to be output is fair. You are vastly overestimating the competence of human programmers: when was the last time you wrote perfectly correct code on the very first try?
Giving the LLM the ability to run its code and modify it until it thinks its right would be a much fairer comparison. And if, as you say, writing unit tests is easy for a LLM, wouldn’t that just make this trial-and-error loop trivial? You can just bang the LLM against the problem until the unit tests pass.
(And this process obviously won’t produce bug-free code, but humans don’t do that in the first place either.)
Not all eukaryotes employ sexual reproduction. Also prokaryotes do have some mechanisms for DNA exchange as well, so copying errors are not their only chance for evolution either.
But I do agree that it’s probably no coincidence that the most complex life forms are sexually reproducing eukaryotes.
I barely registered the difference between small talk and big talk
I am still confused about what “small talk” is after reading this post.
Sure, talking about the weather is definitely small talk. But if I want to get to know somebody, weather talk can’t possibly last for more than 30 seconds. After that, both parties have demonstrated the necessary conversational skills to move on to more interesting topics. And the “getting to know each other” phase is really just a spectrum between surface level stuff and your deepest personal secrets, so I don’t really see where you would draw the line between small and deep talk.
One situation I struggle with on the other hand is when I would rather avoid talking to a person at all, and so I want to maintain the shallowest possible level of small talk. (Ideally I could tell them that “sorry, I would rather just not talk to you right now”, but that’s not really socially accepted.)
It was actually this post about nootropics that got me curious about this. Apparently (based on self reported data) weightlifting is just straight up better than most other nootropics?
Anyway, thank you for referencing some opposing evidence on the topic as well, I might try to look into it more at some point.
(Unfortunately, the thing that I actually care about—whether it has cognitive benefits for me—seems hard to test, since you can’t blind yourself to whether you exercised.)
I think this is (and your other post about exercise) are good practical examples of situations where rational thinking makes you worse off (at least for a while).
If you had shown this post to me as a kid, my youth would probably have been better. Unfortunately no one around me was able to make a sufficiently compelling argument for caring about physical appearance. It wasn’t until much later that I was able to deduce the arguments for myself. If I just blindly “tried to fit in with the cool kids, and do what is trendy”, I would have been better off.
I wonder what similar blind spots I could have right now where the argument in favor of doing something is quite complicated, but most people in society just do it because they blindly copy others, and I am worse off as a result.
This alone trumps any other argument mentioned in the post. None of the other arguments seem universal and can be argued with on an individual basis.
I actually like doing things with my body. I like hiking and kayaking and mountain climbing and dancing.
As some other commenters noted, what if you just don’t?
I think it would be valuable if someone made a post just focused on collecting all the evidence for the positive cognitive effects of exercise. If the evidence is indeed strong, no other argument in favor of exercise should really matter.
I think the reacts being semantic instead of being random emojis is what makes this so much better.
I wish other platforms experimented with semantic reacts as well, instead of just letting people react with any emoji of their choosing, and making you guess whether e.g. “thumbs up” means agreement, acknowledgement, or endorsement, etc.