Actually, I wonder if we might try something more formal. How about if we get a principle that if a poster sees a comment saying “what’s that term?” the poster edits the post to define it where it’s used?
Astynax
Karma: 99
Apparently clarity is hard. Because although I agree that it’s essential to communicate clearly, it took significant wrapping my head around it to digest this post, to identify its thrust. I thought I had it eventually, but looking at comments it seems I wasn’t the only one not sure.
I am not saying this to be snarky. I find this to be one of the clearer posts on LessWrong; I am usually lost in jargon I don’t know. (Inferential gaps? General intelligence factor g?) But despite its relative clarity, it’s still a slog.
I still admire the effort, and hope everyone will listen.
Conservatives are already suspicious of AI, based on ChatGPT3′s political bias. AI skeptics shd target the left (which has less political reason to be suspicious) and not target the right (because if the succeed, the left will reject AI skepticism as a right-wing delusion).
(IDK what most people think abt just abt anything, so I’ll content myself with many aren’t ready to accept.)
Secularism is unstable. Partly because it gets its values from the religion it abandoned, so that the values no longer have foundation, but also empirically because it stops people from reproducing at replacement rate.
Overpopulation is at worst a temporary problem now; the tide has turned.
Identifying someone with lots of letters after his name and accepting his opinions is not following the science, but the opposite. Science takes no one’s word, but uses data.
If A says B thinks something and B says, No, I think that’s crazy, B is right. That is, mind reading isnt a thing.
What matters about the 2020 US election isnt Trump. It’s whether we know how to get away with fraud in future elections and whether we’ve taken steps to prevent it. Uh-oh.
Rage at people on the other team who want to join yours is a baaaad idea.
I speak as someone who teaches college freshmen.
On the one hand, I see AI writers as a disaster for classes involving writing. I tried ChatGP3 last night and gave it an assignment like one I might assign in a general studies class; it involved two dead philosophers. I would definitely have given the paper an A. It was partly wrong, but the writing was perfect and the conclusion correct and well argued.
This isn’t like Grammarly, where you write and the computer suggests ways to write better. I didn’t write my paper; I wrote a query. Crafting the query took me almost no time to learn, and here it is: cut-and-paste the assignment into the prompt, and add the phrase “with relevant citations, and a reference section using MLA format.” OK, now you can do it too!The reason I think this matters is that both effective communication and rational thinking in the relevant field—the things you practice if you write a paper for a class—are things we want the next generation to know.
On the other hand, a legal ban feels preposterous. (I know, I’m on LW, I’m trying to rein in my passion here.) A site that generates fake papers can exist anywhere on the globe, outside EU or US law. Its owners can reasonably argue that its real purpose isn’t to write your paper for you, but for research purposes (like ChatGP3!), or for generating content for professional web sites (I’ve seen this advertised on Facebook), or to help write speeches, or as souped-up web searches, which is essentially what they are anyway.What has worked so far as technology changed was to find technical solutions to technical problems. For a long time colleagues have used TurnItIn.com to be sure students weren’t buying or sharing papers. Now they can use a tool that detects whether a paper was written by ChatGP3. I don’t know if eventually large language models (LLMs) will outpace associated detectors, but that’s what’s up now.
I’d guess it’s overabundance of working-class workers relative to the need. But recently I’m seeing claims that the elite are overabundant: for example, there aren’t enough elite slots for the next generation, so Harvard’s acceptance rate has gone from 30-odd% to around 1%; and would-be middle-class young people are having to stay with mom and dad to save on rent while working long hours. How can there be an oversupply of all different classes of workers? If it’s that automation makes us all way too efficient, shouldn’t that make us rich and leisured rather than overworked and desperate?
There is also a tremendous amount of make-work.
My uni has 2 new layers of management between professor and president (was 2, now it’s 4) since 1998. Recently we noticed a scary budget shortfall. They decided to reorganize. After reorgnization...kept those extra 2 layers.
My doc’s office joined a big corporation. It was ACA (Obamacare). They would have had to hire another clerical worker to handle the extra paperwork.
This blog post is about something else, but buried in it is the number of clergy for various US denominations. Whether the denomination is growing or shrinking, the administrators’ numbers explode. https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/5910/Many of us have produced dissertations or technical papers that will likely never be used for anything. And there are way more people whose job it is to produce science. Yet scientific innovation continues to decline (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04577-5). I think it’s easy to miss how shocking this is. We have way more people working with way better equipment, with previously unavailable computer support, not just in the West but all over the world. We should have invented flying cars, the Terminator, and the flux capacitor by now. How much of a researcher’s time is spent on innovation, and how much on grants, paperwork, and publicizing?
I don’t know why we have so much work that didn’t need to be done before. My guess is there was always pressure to do this but now we’re rich enough we can afford to pour money into things that don’t produce benefit. But it’s just a guess.
IDK where else to say this, so I’ll say it here. I find many LW articles hard to follow because they use terms I don’t know. I assume everyone else knows, but I’m a newbie. Ergo I request a kindness: if your article uses a term that’s not common English use (GT3, alignment, etc.), define it the first time you use it.
I miss the old forums. (LW is on the way to this, but the format is a little more social-media.) When I moved from reading novels, and discussing things on threads, to social media posts, my concentration was shot. Maybe coincidence, but when I dumped FB (I never did Twitter) my concentration improved slightly as I recall. Point is that it seems that reading longer things helps me concentrate longer, and reading 5-second things does the opposite. FWIW.
I’m going to assume others have done an adequate job describing how to convince a rational being using reason (and I think they have). So I’ll come from a different direction: how to convince a human.
What convinced me, back when, was two things:
* A long poem I found, in elementary/middle school, describing what heroin would do to your life. I think it was factually accurate. The modern equivalent might be Faces of Addiction, showing just how drugs wreck people. https://rehabs.com/explore/faces-of-addiction/ These drug users don’t look healthy, or happy with the way things turned out.
* A cartoon book that was actually on a different topic, but one of the characters was an ex-LSD user. We saw one of her flashback: a young woman looking with horror at the mirror, where she “saw” her flesh melting off and leaving a skull. I didn’t ever want to experience that!As an adult, I heard from a gf how she did shrooms and hallucinated spiders crawling all over her. I would do anything to not experience that! Fortunately, all I have to do is not do shrooms.
I think another equivalent might be going to an NA meeting. Talk to some people whose lives were ruined by addiction. Yeah, it’s self-selected, but one reason is that the people who do street drugs and tell you how great their lives became, don’t seem to exist.We don’t get convinced (usually) I think by reason, but by the stories we fill our heads with. Especially if you’re already discounting overwhelming evidence already.
I hope I can reference God here, too. I think drug use is partly a way to transcend the mundane, achieve heaven/nirvana/whatever. (And escape pain.) But history suggests there are other ways that work better. Almost anything would. :)
There is definitely a correlation! I have a handicapped child. His goals involve snacks and entertainments. His neurotypical brother’s goals involve friends and getting schoolwork done (and snacks and entertainments). My goals involve making the world a better place, relating to God, loving my family, and—snacks and entertainments. :)
And a more severely mentally handicapped person may have a goal simply of “I don’t like to be upset.” I’m thinking of a particular person, but I don’t know her that well.
Having a handicapped family member helps me break through some ways of thinking that seem reasonable if I assume everyone’s like me.
Confused about something—about smart people not being nicer. That fits with my theory of how the world works, but not with my observation of children and teenagers. The smart kids are (usually) way nicer to each other. My 12-y-o observed this as he went from (nasty) 2nd grade to (nice) gifted program to middle school, with the middle school being a mix of nicer smart kids and more poorly behaved, poorly performing students. This also matches my personal experience, my wife’s experience, and what we see in pop culture.
Now, you could say smart kids just find it more useful to be less randomly nasty, but whatever the reason, the proof of the pudding’s in the eating, right?
This is only one country (USA). Maybe there’s something about our culture that makes it so.
Do we grow out of that? I don’t know many adults who are needlessly nasty, even if they’re not good people. Maybe even the less smart kids eventually get that there’s no point.
I’m having a disconnect. I think I’m kind of selfish too. But if it came to a choice between me dying this year and humanity dying 100 years from now, I’ll take my death. It’s going to happen anyway, and I’m old enough I got mine, or most of it. I’m confident I’d feel the same if I didn’t have children, though less intensely. What is causing the difference in these perspectives? IDK. My 90-year-old friend would snort at the question; what difference would a year or two make? The old have less to lose. But the young are usually much more willing to risk their lives. So: IDK.
How to get past Haidt’s elephant and listen
At one point, IIRC, I thought pain, or at least exhaustion, was meritorious. My mother and grandmother sure did. They’d have contests!
Later, I saw thru that. Play is more productive than work for the same task. Go for the joy. That sort of thing.But think about it from the perspective of someone with chronic illness, or severely overworked, or in a great deal of emotional pain (death of a spouse or child, or other reasons). You’ll have heard the analogy of spoons (https://www.healthline.com/health/spoon-theory-chronic-illness-explained-like-never-before). Such a person must plan out the amount of effort she’s able to put forth in the day, and allocate it to what she finds most important. And suffering pain does take it out of people.
I’m not ill, but I am getting old (first time I have ever said that!), and I am being gentle with myself now. If there’s something that is really unpleasant, I let myself take major breaks before or after or both.
Yet I still tell students: your work should be joy to you.
I think both sides are right.
I will definitely check out the “proofs for young earth” thing. A related issue is patching a problem: SA and Africa look like they fit together, and at the current rate of drift they haven’t had time to separate in 10K years (haven’t checked this, but surely it’s right), so maybe they separated 6K years back in a single day. If C14 is really low in things we think are 10M y old (I’m making this up but it fits), maybe they’re a few thou years old and a few thou years ago there was very little C14 around.
Simple proofs of the age of the universe (or other things)
When Alice rejects a bad poem, that’s a true-positive.
I think you meant true-negative?
It’s kind of aside, but I think this about safety systems in general. Don’t give me a backup system to shut down the nuclear reactor if the water stops pumping; design it so the reaction depends on the water. Don’t give me great ways to dispose of a chemical that destroys your flesh if it touches you; don’t make the chemical to begin with. Don’t give me a super-strong set of policies to keep the function-gained virus in the lab; don’t make function-gained viruses. Wish they’d listened to that last one 3 years ago.
Admittedly it may be too late in a lot of ways. We can’t make it so if our civilization founders we can prevent mass starvation; not starving depends on modern farming. And we probably can’t make it so we can just pull the plug on AI if it starts going all Skynet: the companies or nations that don’t pull the plug may be able to bankrupt those that do. Sometimes survival of the fittest sucks.
Terms I don’t know: inferential gaps, general intelligence factor g, object-level thing, opinion-structure. There are other terms I can figure but I have to stop a moment: medical grade mental differences, baseline assumptions. I think that’s most of it.
At the risk of going too far, I’ll paraphrase one section with hopes that it’ll say the same thing and be more accessible. (Since my day job is teaching college freshmen, I think about clarity a lot!)
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”Can’t I just assume my interlocutor is intelligent?”
No.
People have different basic assumptions. People have different intuitions that generated those assumptions. This community in particular attracts people with very unbalanced skills (great at reasoning, not always great at communicating). Some have autism, or ADHD, or OCD, or depression, or chronic fatigue, or ASPD, or low working memory, or emotional reactions to thinking about certain things, or multiple issues at once.
Everyone’s read different things in the past, and interpreted them in different ways. Good luck finding 2 people who have the same opinion regarding what they’ve read.
Doesn’t this advice contradict the above point to “read charitably,” to try to assume the writer means well? No. Explain things like you would to a child: assume they’re not trying to hurt you, but don’t assume they know what you’re talking about.
In a field as new as this, in which nobody really gets it yet, we’re like a group of elite, hypercompetent, clever, deranged… children. You are not an adult talking to adults, you are a child who needs to write very clearly to talk to other children. That’s what “pre-paradigmatic” really means.
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What I tried to do here was replace words and phrases that required more thought (“writings” → “what they’ve read”), and to explain those that took a little thought (“read charitably”). IDK if others would consider this clearer, but at least that’s the direction I hope to go in. Apologies if I took this too far.