FeepingCreature

Karma: 1,422

FeepingCreature 22 Sep 2023 13:35 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Memory bandwidth constraints imply economies of scale in AI inference
Sure, but surely that’s how it feels from the inside when your mind uses a LRU storage system that progressively discards detail. I’m more interested in how much I can access—and um, there’s no way I can access 2.5 petabytes of data.

I think you just have a hard time imagining how much 2.5 petabyte is. If I literally stored in memory a high-resolution poorly compressed JPEG image (1MB) every second for the rest of my life, I would still not reach that storage limit. 2.5 petabyte would allow the brain to remember everything it has ever perceived, with very minimal compression, in full video, easily. We know that the actual memories we retrieve are heavily compressed. If we had 2.5 petabytes of storage, there’d be no reason for the brain to bother!

FeepingCreature 22 Sep 2023 13:21 UTC
9 points
5
on: The AI Explosion Might Never Happen

But no company has ever managed to parlay this into world domination

Eventual failure aside, the East India Company gave it a damn good shake. I think if we get an AI to the point where it has effective colonial control over entire countries, we can be squarely said to have lost.

Also keep in mind that we have multiple institutions entirely dedicated to the purpose of breaking up companies when they become big enough to be threatening. We designed our societies to specifically avoid this scenario! That, too, comes from painful experience. IMO, if we now give AI the chances that we’ve historically given corporations before we learnt better, then we’re dead, no question about it.

FeepingCreature 17 Sep 2023 18:14 UTC
5 points
2
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Memory bandwidth constraints imply economies of scale in AI inference
Do you feel like your memory contains 2.5 petabytes of data? I’m not sure such a number passes the smell test.

FeepingCreature 5 Aug 2023 10:08 UTC
10 points
1
in reply to: qvalq’s comment on: “Is There Anything That’s Worth More”
The more uncertain your timelines are, the more it’s a bad idea to overstress. You should take it somewhat easy; it’s usually more effective to be capable of moderate contribution over the long term than great contribution over the short term.

FeepingCreature 20 Jul 2023 13:07 UTC
17 points
6
on: Contra Contra the Social Model of Disability
This smells like a framing debate. More importantly, if an article is defining a common word in an unconventional way, my first assumption will be that it’s trying to argumentatively attack its own meaning while pretending it’s defeating the original meaning. I’m not sure it matters how clearly you’re defining your meaning; due to how human cognition works, this may be impossible to avoid without creating new terms.

In other words, I don’t think it’s that Scott missed the definitions as that he reflexively disregarded them as a rhetorical trick.

FeepingCreature 20 Jul 2023 5:28 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Dipanjan’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
As a subby “bi”/”gay” (het as f) AGP, I would also love to know this.

Also, I think there’s some bias toward subbiness in the community? That’s the stereotype anyway, though I don’t have a cite. Anyway, being so, not finding a dommy/toppy AGP might not provide as much evidence as you’d expect.

FeepingCreature 20 Jul 2023 5:25 UTC
16 points
3
in reply to: Lavender’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
I don’t think it’s that anyone is proposing to “suppress” dysphoria or “emulate” Zach. Rather, for me, I’m noticing that Zach is putting into words and raising in public things that I’ve thought and felt secretly for a long time.

FeepingCreature 19 Jul 2023 5:56 UTC
12 points
2
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

If a gender identity is a belief about one’s own gender, then it’s not even clear that I have one in a substantial relevant sense, which is part of the point of my “Am I trans?” post. I think I would have said early on that I better matched male psychological stereotypes and it’s more complicated now (due to life experience?).

Right? I mean, what should I say, who identifies as male and wants to keep his male-typical psychological stereotypes? It seems to me what you’re saying in this post fits more closely with the conservative stereotype as the trans movement as “something that creates transgender people.” (Implied, in this case, “out of autogynephiles.”) I mean, if we say some AGPs who cannot transition are so unhappy that they kill themselves, all the usual utilitarian logic still applies, it just puts the ontology in doubt. And also means that as someone who wants to—like, not inherently identify as male but keep the parts of himself that would be identified as male (aside from appearance), I should stay away from the trans movement at all costs?

Also doesn’t it put the Categories in a kind of reverse dependency? We’ve defined “trans mtf” as “the category of people who are women despite having a male body” and “the category of people allowed to transition”. And Scott said we should allow people to be in the category because it makes them happy. But if it makes (edit: some of) them happy because they are allowed to transition, then this model is bizarre; the “female identity” part just sort of hangs on there out of path dependence.

FeepingCreature 18 Jul 2023 17:32 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: jessicata’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
As an AGP, my view is that … like, that list of symptoms is pretty diverse but if I don’t want to be a woman—not in the sense that I would be upset to be misgendered, though I would be, but more for political than genderical (?) reasons—I don’t see why it would matter if I desire to have a (particular) female bodytype.

If I imagine “myself as a woman” (as opposed to “myself as myself with a cute female appearance”), and actually put any psychological traits on that rather than just gender as a free-floating tag, then it seems to me that my identity would be severely less recognizeable to myself if I changed it along that axis. Several parts about me that I value highly are stereotypically masculine traits—and isn’t that what gender is? (Is it?) So I still think there’s a very bright line here. Similarly, when you say

They might think of themselves as having a female gender identity because society will accept them more if they do.

I don’t get this at all. This just seems to be at direct odds with the idea of an identity. Isn’t it supposed to be a belief about yourself? “I want to be whatever you approve of the most” may be a preference, but it doesn’t seem like it can be an identity by definition, or at least any definition I recognize.

FeepingCreature 18 Jul 2023 17:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer
Granted! I’d say it’s a matter of degrees, and of who exactly you need to convince.

Maybe there’s no point in considering these separate modes of interaction at all.

FeepingCreature 18 Jul 2023 17:21 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Blanchard’s Dangerous Idea and the Plight of the Lucid Crossdreamer

The relationship of a CEO to his subordinates, and the nature and form of his authority over them, are defined in rules and formal structures—which is true of a king but false of a hunter-gatherer band leader. The President, likewise.

Eh. This is true in extremis, but the everyday interaction that structures how decisions actually get made, can be very different. The formal structure primarily defines what sorts of interactions the state will enforce for you. But if you have to get the state to enforce interactions within your company, things have gone very far off track. The social praxis in everyday CEO life may genuinely be closer to a pack leader—particularly if they want their company to actually be effective.

FeepingCreature 17 Jul 2023 12:40 UTC
9 points
8
in reply to: Sinclair Chen’s comment on: A Hill of Validity in Defense of Meaning
I mean, men also have to put in effort to perform masculinity, or be seen as being inadequate men; I don’t think this is a gendered thing. But even a man that isn’t “performing masculinity adequately”, an inadequate man, like an inadequate woman, is still a distinct category, and though transwomen, like born women, aim to perform femininity, transwomen have a higher distance to cross and in doing so traverse between clusters along several dimensions. I think we can meaningfully separate “perform effort to transition in adequacy” from “perform effort to transition in cluster”, even if the goal is the same.

(From what I gather of VRChat, the ideal man is also a pretty girl that is overall human with the exception of cat ears and a tail...)

FeepingCreature 5 Jul 2023 20:17 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Adam Shai’s comment on: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning & AI risk (June 2023)?
I just mean like, if we see an object move we have a qualia of position but also of velocity/vector and maybe acceleration. So when we see for instance a sphere rolling down an incline, we may have a discrete conscious “frame” where the marble has a velocity of 0 but a positive acceleration, so despite the fact that the next frame is discontinuous with the last one looking only at position, we perceive them as one smooth sequence because the predicted end position of the motion in the first frame is continuous with the start point in the second.

FeepingCreature 4 Jul 2023 7:40 UTC
9 points
2
in reply to: sludgepuddle’s comment on: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning & AI risk (June 2023)?

excepting the unlikely event that first token turns out to be extremely important.

Which is why asking an LLM to give an answer that starts with “Yes” or “No” and then gives an explanation is the worst possible way to do it.

FeepingCreature 3 Jul 2023 17:45 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Douglas Hofstadter changes his mind on Deep Learning & AI risk (June 2023)?
I’d speculate that our perceptions just seem to change smoothly because we encode second-order (or even third-order) dynamics in our tokens. From what I layman-understand of consciousness, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t discrete.

FeepingCreature 1 Apr 2023 18:54 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Furcas’s comment on: Hooray for stepping out of the limelight
Yeah I never got the impression that they got a robust solution to fog of war, or any sort of theory of mind, which you absolutely need for Starcraft.

FeepingCreature 3 Mar 2023 11:09 UTC
24 points
3
on: The Parable of the King and the Random Process
Shouldn’t the king just make markets for “crop success if planted assuming three weeks” and “crop success if planted assuming ten years” and pick whichever is higher? Actually, shouldn’t the king define some metric for kingdom well-being (death rate, for instance) and make betting markets for this metric under his possible roughly-primitive actions?

This fable just seems to suggest that you can draw wrong inferences from betting markets by naively aggregating. But this was never in doubt, and does not disprove that you can draw valuable inferences, even in the particular example problem.

FeepingCreature 27 Feb 2023 8:12 UTC
9 points
0
in reply to: lc’s comment on: [Link] A community alert about Ziz
This is just human decision theory modules doing human decision theory things. It’s a way of saying “defend me or reject me; at any rate, declare your view.” You say something that’s at the extreme end of what you consider defensible in order to act as a Schelling point for defense: “even this is accepted for a member.” In the face of comments that seem like they validate Ziz’s view, if not her methods, this comment calls for an explicit rejection of not Ziz’s views, but Ziz’s mode of approach, by explicitly saying “I am what you hate, I am here, come at me.”

A community that can accept “nazis” (in the vegan sense) cannot also accept “resistance fighters” (in the vegan sense). Either the “nazi” deserves to exist or he doesn’t. But to test this dichotomy, somebody has to out themselves as a “nazi.”
What links here?
- Richard_Kennaway's comment on [Link] A community alert about Ziz by DanielFilan (4 Mar 2023 18:17 UTC; 13 points)

FeepingCreature 23 Feb 2023 18:36 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Writer’s comment on: AI #1: Sydney and Bing
Right, but if you’re an alien civilization trying to be evil, you probably spread forever; if you’re trying to be nice, you also spread forever, but if you find a potentially life-bearing planet, you simulate it out (obviating the need for ancestor sims later). Or some such strategy. The point is there shouldn’t ever be a border facing nothing.

FeepingCreature 22 Feb 2023 7:42 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: bayesed’s comment on: AI #1: Sydney and Bing
Sure; though what I imagine is more “Human ASI destroys all human value and spreads until it hits defended borders of alien ASI that has also destroyed all alien value...”

(Though I don’t think this is the case. The sun is still there, so I doubt alien ASI exists. The universe isn’t that young.)