Thanks for a great comment! I had a sense something like this may be true, but never looked up the research.
On your second point, we have evidence that LLMs can think without speaking, i.e., they can do planning or reflection in the forward pass, and that’s current models and LLMs. It’s possible that in the future that will be even more common.
Great work! The slight pushback is on the chickpeas though! Be genuine, even if it can come off as quirky. I’m sure the staffer remembers the chickpea guy much more than 20 other meetings that week, and with some charisma that is now your hook (if you have chickpeas because you’re vegan and most places don’t offer it, that’s a great conversation that shows you have strong values and are compassionate, positive traits which give you an aura you will benefit from when presenting what you came for).
I think suit and no chickpeas can easily end up with looking like everyone else! Add your touch to that—my suits often have colorful pocket squares, or are paired with ties or colorful socks that tell a story from my past. That gets more doors open than just the off-the-shelf kind of look! A stain on it from my toddler will make it better still if I play my cards right and am not sitting across from a robot!
Important note though is that the signals must be real and come from a place of confidence! If you’re not vegan, the can of chickpeas will come off flimsy. Intentional discrete stain to talk about your kid will be disingenuous. A colorful suit that you can’t explain is worse than off the shelf one. It took quite some time for me to get to know what stories I want to tell with my look and quirks and come to terms with it myself.
I overall agree with the “People are doing gymnastics when just the straightforward thing works” and the “people, if given the facts reasonably, don’t need to be persuaded that AI extinction risk is bad, they conclude that easily” frames. I give Bayes points for making the bet that it’ll work and having reasonable results come from the bet—good work!
My disagreement comes with the “thus everything others are doing is cope/avoidance” framing. I think a good physicist entering the field should most likely go into interp work, a good economist is likely best suited to thinking through TAI impacts and figuring out what we should prepare for, and people with good people/oratory skills and situational awareness/understanding of the problem should talk to politicians. I think that if the field has not done what it has done, you would find it a lot harder to talk to politicians! AI frontier labs could say “well, there’s a lot we didn’t try yet, we don’t know if it’s dangerous” and you can instead counteract that with “look at all the stuff we tried, look at all the danger we found, look at how things fail” and feel confident in your claims. You can point to economist work (since recently, and increasingly) and say “these are models of what happens if the companies continue their work” and make a case for a pause/stop much better than without them, when accelerationist demagoguery can claim business as usual. Spectre is one failure mode, but myopia to ones preferred work is another. The problem is wicked, and affects many areas, and experts should do their expertise in different fields if we want to have a good shot to make it out.
The entrepreneur has a home-field advantage: he understands locals and has friends and a community. PE firms are at a disadvantage, and possibly the economy will shrink so it’s a bad time to buy. They took would need to find managers, if that was easy, the original owner could have found a successor among family of friends (if not his own), or sold his business to a local competitor. But all labor is short, all consumption is falling, buying a company is a fool’s game.
Well, we don’t have good ways to track “changing preferences,” so instead we ban the result—adults are not allowed to have relationships with minors. This stops people from trying to change the preferences of children (e.g., person X seducing children is changing their preferences to include the person X), but also other types of abuse. Having a policy focused solely on “preference changing” would be too narrow, but it is effectively included in the current law.
For safety I would go for a car made for the European market, as the testing is stricter and actually considers the damage your car can do to pedestrians and so increases overall safety, not just your own.
I would be somewhat surprised if Tesla is really the safest car around, but it’s possible. Is it about having a battery instead of a gas tank + other features? I also assume you don’t mean cybertruck but some of the car models?
My car is 13 years old, but I’ve seen newer ones still without touch screens. EU (I think) passed a law on phasing out smart screens in cars for things related to car operation so hopefully car manufacturers start making newer cars without the screens. I think the market is there. It’s a question of who’ll capitalize on it.
Besides smart features in cars where I agree with John, I have the sense that fruits and vegetables while no longer seasonal and cheaper and more abundant are of lower quality and producers tell me the same (I’m in an agricultural country with farmers as friends of friends). The need to produce more and lower costs means each individual tomato gets less nutrients, less time, etc, to produce more of them. The quote also mentions raspberries, and since my country was top global exporter before China took over and since I love them dearly I can promise that the best tasting ones are now almost impossible to find (although it’s possible that whatever you’re eating in the US has gotten better!).
It’s tricky with this topic (like with cost of living!) that data cannot capture immesurables and people miss them. Great job pointing them out, and I want to say that one that you missed is that some food was better tasting before commercial pressures (not most of it etc etc)
An amazing resource that every year helps me understand the layout of the field a bit better—thanks for all the hard work! Also thanks for the breaks with memes throughout, it helps :D
Happy to help think through the possible presentations of this going forward. Also, PIBBSS alumni may be a good group to have on standby to add to stuff like this, let us know if you would benefit from partnering up!
Thanks Linch, agreed on these points. I suppose if no sadness for bats was shown I’d look at it as an “emotionless piece on tech” and that’d be fine, but something about “and these kill bats” kicked me out of that and into noticing “and humans too, right?” Thank you for the empathy, I am looking forward to reading the whole thing!
A part of me that lived through being bombed by F117 in my childhood and rejoicing at our military taking one down despite it’s stealth, cannot help but feel like the nerdy aspects of the post and comment (which excite me too) are more saddened by bats dying than the fact that these are weapons of war that kill sometimes civilians?
A quick add—preparing food is also an activity that many people enjoy! If you want to have people volunteer as a way of getting them engaged with field building, bring some knives and chopping boards, and have them make carrot/cucumber/celery sticks for the dips, or cut fruits into cubes for people to eat. Also, generally, fresh food > packaged processed food. There’s just something about biting into a grape that is not replicated by Ferrero Roche or whatever fancy thing you get. Also, fruits and veg are usually non-allergen, vegan, acceptable by most religions, and have water in them—great all around! Nuts are also great, but allergy is problematic, so keep them separate, and ideally outside.
Yeah, this is hard, and important to making an event like this fun!
A few random thoughts:
In leadership training a warm-up exercise was “I’ll sing this [nonsense tune with lyrics on the whiteboard, similar to singing Game of Thrones tune, but people don’t know the melody already] as loud as I can. Your goal as a group is to be louder than one of me.” The presenter was obviously a loud guy, but it normalized everyone shouting as he would do it first and we’d just aim to match in a way that felt normal even in the corporate office setting. I’ve ran this a few times even with quite strong cultural gaps and nors against me, and it worked every time.
This reminds me of Bring the Light which I assume was a warm up song with simple lyrics, still good meaning and fun to do (remotely at least! :) ). More like that!
Music in clubs is repetitive, and at least Serbian Turbo-Folk has very predictable rhymes—from one line’s content and ending you can guess the likely next line, allowing you to sing along to a song you never heard before!
I assume other cultures have songs like our Bećarac which have one person sing a line, everyone repeats, then they sing another line (usually a subversion of expectations theoug a pun or ending the line without a rhyming word because the rhyming word would have been naughty) and everyone repeats (with laughter). These can be also made on the spot alongside a canon of existing ones and are quite fun—kind of rap battles and disses of old, but much easier to craft.
Anyhow, best of luck, shame I’ll miss it, but I’ll catch it one year!
I deeply feel this, especially as I fear that my son has a chance of needing to cyborgize himself to compete in the new world more than I’ve had to (glasses and phone). I have a preference for him being human to non-human and I’m not sure what the future holds for him.
At the same time, I cannot speak for anyone else and your calculus will be different in different situations, but if the world ended tomorrow I’d still have loved the two years I spent with him and he’d prefer existence to not having existed for that time. If your timelines give you move than 2 years of life of a child, I think it’s worthwhile, unless you have high S-risks fears.
For completeness, I’ve also seen mil., bil. and tril. - but never with o at the end.
My past self is super guilty of this and for a decade now working on it—I’m a younger brother, and being unable to do a thing was a sure way to get someone else to do it (i.e. someone older), so I’d make myself unable to do it (through making myself tired, hurting myself in the process by doing it recklessly or other not-quite-conscious but actually beneficial to me strategies). It’s a pattern I noticed at 16, but didn’t fix until 23 or so, and I still find a part of me scheming to do similar stuff. An issue I have now is that my 2 year old has absolutely learned this—he wants to roll up his sleeves, he gives it a horrible effort, and starts crying at the failure, waiting for us to fix it. Instead I guide him to do it since he can do it with patience and effort, and he seems happy to do it, and for some things he just learned it and is now not having the pattern—but it doesn’t generalize, he does it for new challenges. It’ll just take time, but it really starts early.
IMO the part about Bureaucracy is likely not true 10k years ago, although it is (as you cite) 6k years ago. The Academia part is not clear to me as a parallel—becoming a priest was (I would expect) mostly a thing of actual belief, as people used to actually believe things, in ways that our Academia (the Eldritch kind) is not.
I agree, but posts by @Jan_Kulveit for example (despite being cyborg written) have ~always given me great value, and I do not notice newer ones giving me less value—I do notice them being more frequent and equally useful, despite LLM smell being present in some sentences. So writing like that is an example where it is actually a net positive and would be hard (or somewhat unfair!) to label everything in a box as heavily LLM made and ignore it.