see also my eaforum at https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/dirk
dirk
Karma: 253
Bioshok3 said in a later tweet that they were in any case mistaken about it being 10k H100s and it was actually 100k H100s: https://x.com/bioshok3/status/1831016098462081256
I don’t think having a negative emotion about something is strong evidence someone’s opinions weren’t drawn from an external source. (For one thing, most people naturally have negative reactions to the breaking of social norms!)
Also, I don’t see anywhere in jimrandomh’s comment that he made any claims about the thing you’re talking about? He was exclusively discussing word choice among people who had negative reactions.
I’m interested! I’d probably mostly be comparing it to unaugmented Claude for things like explaining ML topics and turning my post ideas into drafts (I don’t expect it to be great at this latter but I’m curious whether having some relevant posts in the context window will elicit higher quality). I also think the low-friction integration might make it useful for clarifying math- or programming-heavy posts, though I’m not sure I’ll want this often.
Arguably habitica, as a gamified task-manager, is an attempt to do #2 here (by way of directly giving in-game rewards for IRL positive habits)
I don’t think the placement of fault is causally related to whether communication is difficult for him, really. To refer back to the original claim being made, Adam Scholl said that
My guess is that this seems so stressful mostly because Anthropic’s plan is in fact so hard to defend… [I]t seems unsurprising (and good) that people might sometimes strongly object; if Anthropic had more reassuring things to say, I’m guessing it would feel less stressful to try to reassure them.
I think the amount of stress incurred when doing public communication is nearly orthogonal to these factors, and in particular is, when trying to be as careful about anything as Zac is trying to be about confidentiality, quite high at baseline. I don’t think Adam Scholl’s assessment arose from a usefully-predictive model, nor one which was likely to reflect the inside view.
I’m told (by the ‘simple parameters’ section of this guide, which I have not had the opportunity to test but which to my layperson’s eye seems promisingly mechanistic in approach) that adjusting the
stylizeparameter to numbers lower than its default 100 turns down the midjourney-house-style effect (at the cost of sometimes tending to make things more collage-y and incoherent as values get lower), and that increasing theweirdparameter above its default 0 will effectively push things to be unlike the default style (more or less).
I think communication as careful as it must be to maintain the confidentiality distinction here is always difficult in the manner described, and that communication to large quantities of people will ~always result in someone running with an insane misinterpretation of what was said.
No? Caring is an emotion, to me; it might affect your actions but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it does.
Edit: E.G. you might emotionally care, but intellectually think changing the situation would make it worse on net; you might care about multiple conflicting things another of which takes precedence; you might just not have much of an opportunity to do anything (e.g. they live somewhere else and you can’t do anything over the internet, their problem is something unfixable like a loved one dying, etc.); etc. (I also wouldn’t take the expression of sympathy to require expressing desire to change the situation? Like, you wouldn’t want to express approval while trying to be sympathetic, but you might say, like, “I’m sorry” or “that really sucks” or whatever.)
Huh, the division I usually make is that empathy is feeling their same feelings and sympathy is caring about their problems; it hadn’t occurred to me to think of either as requiring more action than the other. Not sure whether it’s your version or mine that RobertM meant, but it seems worth highlighting as a potential point of miscommunication.
I don’t really think any of that affects the difficulty of public communication; your implication that it must be the cause reads to me more like an insult than a well-considered psychological model
Sonnet 3.5 got it on the first try, whether or not I cropped the names out:
Your # 2 sounds like an argument not-infrequently made by proponents of computationalism, which is quite a commonly-held position here on LessWrong. Not sure if it exactly matches but you might enjoy their positions in any case.
Another minor annoyance I’ve since noticed, at this small scale it’s hard to to distinguish posts I’ve upvoted from posts I haven’t voted on. Maybe it’d help if the upvote indicator were made a darker shade of green or something?
It doesn’t directly impact the truth of the facts they claimed, no—but the facts are produced by the same process that produces the studies. It’s easy to check whether or not a study exists; less-clearcut domains aren’t necessarily more reliable.
Loving the discussion of casting vs stamping! Very interesting info, and you’ve explained it clearly :)
With regards to its “help” understanding why Uniqlo didn’t decline, it is, as I demonstrated above, equally good at providing plausible-sounding explanations for why Uniqlo did decline. Here, again, is ChatGPT:
Several factors likely contributed to the perceived decline in quality at Uniqlo, reflecting broader trends in the fashion industry and specific business strategies the brand has pursued.
1. Cost-Cutting and Scale: As Uniqlo expanded globally, the need to maintain competitive pricing while increasing production volumes may have led to compromises in material quality. To keep costs low and meet growing demand, the company might have shifted to cheaper fabrics and production methods, sacrificing the durability and feel that initially attracted customers.
2. Fast Fashion Influence: Although Uniqlo markets itself as a provider of “lifewear” rather than fast fashion, its business model has increasingly incorporated elements of fast fashion, such as frequent new collections and quick production cycles. This shift often prioritizes speed and cost-efficiency over quality, resulting in garments that are less durable.
3. Supply Chain Pressures: Like many global retailers, Uniqlo has faced pressure from fluctuating raw material costs, labor costs, and logistical challenges. To mitigate these pressures, the company may have opted for lower-quality materials or reduced quality control measures in manufacturing processes.
4. Shifts in Consumer Expectations: As consumers have grown accustomed to low prices and frequent turnover in their wardrobes, brands like Uniqlo might have adjusted their offerings to meet these expectations, leading to a focus on affordability and trendiness over long-lasting quality.
5. Strategic Decisions: Uniqlo’s parent company, Fast Retailing, has focused on aggressive expansion and maintaining high profitability. Strategic decisions to prioritize these goals over maintaining the brand’s initial quality standards could have influenced the decline. The emphasis on rapid growth might have overshadowed the commitment to quality that once defined the brand.
Did you verify what ChatGPT told you before you repeated it as fact?
You assumed that the studies existed at all. This is not a safe assumption to rely on when you are dealing with LLMs.
Just because an LLM said it doesn’t mean it’s true: an illustrative example
If you find yourself terminally valuing something that is not someone’s experienced valence, then either one of these propositions is likely true:
A nonsentient process has at some point had write access to your values.Maybe I’m misunderstanding your point, but this seems straightforwardly true for most people? Evolution, which wrote ~all our values, isn’t sentient, and most people do terminally value some things other than experienced valence (e.g. various forms of art, carrying out the traditions of their culture, doing things correctly according to some-or-other prescriptive system, etc); these may well be reified heuristics, but they’re not experienced as instrumental.
I’m confused about SAE feature descriptions. In Anthropic’s and Google’s demos both, there’re a lot of descriptions that seem not to match a naked-eye reading of the top activations. (E.G. “Slurs targeting sexual orientation” also has a number of racial slurs in its top activations; the top activations for “Korean text, Chinese name yunfan, Unicode characters” are almost all the word “fused” in a metal-related context; etc.). I’m not sure if these short names are the automated Claude descriptions or if there are longer more accurate real descriptions somewhere; and if these are the automated descriptions, I’m not sure if there’s some reason to think they’re more accurate than they look, or if it doesn’t matter if they’re slightly off, or some third thing?