Alt account. Don’t follow me on twitter. Do follow me on substack.
GenericModel
Karma: 73
Yes, but one may also say that Augustus founded an empire lasting 400 years, and possibly single-handedly extended the duration of Roman success for a while. But I see what you’re saying.
Seven Perspectives on LLMs
Would be nice to have a reason for strong downvote, but of course no obligation! If you can’t give a reason without jumping into political debates, then don’t worry about it. Otherwise, I’m very open to criticism.
In the UK, they don’t have freedom of speech, and up to 30 people a day (meaning 12,000/year) are arrested for the crime of posting or sharing “grossly offensive” content online.
In the US, we have freedom of speech enshrined in law—you can’t be arrested for saying politically inconvenient or offensive speech—but that freedom doesn’t protect you from the decisions of private companies. So if you’re a dickhead online, you can still be prevented from being hired, or lose the job you currently have.
Press Freedom Index here: Note the relative positions of the UK and the US :)
EDIT: Not trying to start a bad argument here, but if you’re allowed to say on-the-one-hand, I shall say on-the-other.
https://www.lesswrong.com/w/arguments-as-soldiers I think you should consider what would happen to this website if it functioned the way you desire, without judgment on quality of writing.
I am sorry, I would like to engage on giving you detailed feedback but I am not really able to do that, because I have other things I need to do with my time. I hope that is understandable.
More generally, this is kind of “rules of engagement” you agree to when you put something out there. I’m not denigrating you by providing this criticism, in fact it is meant in a positive spirit (I promise <3). But I’m not able to provide detailed notes like a lecturer on every post that I don’t like, and no-one else on LessWrong is obligated to do so either, right? They engaged with it enough to either up-or-downvote it, and that’s something. But a karma system is designed to separate posts people think are good from posts people don’t think are good.
If you’re asking me, that post is not super good. A different reader, a different audience, may disagree. I think you show promising signs of someone who could be a good writer. I don’t want to discourage you! This sort of analogical thinking, seeing X in Y, it’s all great.
But for someone to want to read it you must also work on the craft of showing me why I should care. Showing that you respect me enough as a reader to spare me from typos, to explain why an analogy is useful (in a way that I will find satisfying), to make your sentences enjoyable to read. I know I can work on that, we all can. :)
I mean it seems like the person who posted that managed to have interesting back-and-forths with people in the comments?
I agree there are some absolutely terrible commenters on LessWrong, and to be honest, I think they should be tolerated less than they currently are. But this post did have interesting debate, right? People just thought it was wrong.
Ah okay I have just looked at your profile. Perhaps you are thinking of this post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SHryHTDXuoLuykgcu?commentId=cgT4ipPPQ6HcG6H8p. I just read it and unfortunately I do not think it was downvoted because of disagreements with LessWrong. I’m not much of a downvotey kinda guy myself, but I think it’s pretty reasonable to downvote this. If you want my honest feedback:
The metaphor seems kind of tortured to me.
I don’t find the analogy very insightful or revealing.
There are a decent number of typos.
The paragraphs and sentences are too long.
EDIT: To be more charitable, FWIW I do understand the impulse when something you really liked gets downvoted to criticize the readers and say that they just must not be smart enough to understand it. I have done this too, see here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZRToRRSirgwNeLLuL/goedel-s-ontological-proof#gruZ5HzqnxneaKgTZ. But it is an impulse that as a writer one should try to fight against, as criticism (even self-criticism, if necessary) is the only way to improve.
Would you be able to link me to an example?
I don’t have too much to add to this, honestly. But this is a super high-effort comment which was a joy to read, so I’ll give some commentary (mostly not arguments though).
I think the metaphysics of S5 are weird indeed, but I probably end up thinking it’s okay. But I could be convinced either way on this, very weakly-held. I think your points here are good considerations about this. I think my comment thread with @jessicata raised interesting questions about metaphysics of S5, and whether we should believe that perfect-essential necessity is a property realizable at all. Though I do disagree with her, but her arguments were fantastic.
I guess my main disagreement is that, well, I would say I am a more “mathematical reader” of this argument (I also authored this post, but in how I evaluate it). However, I do think it is sensible to think about what else we could interpret the second-order predicate P to mean, and so whether this argument “proves too much.” Especially if one doesn’t have a huge amount of logic-background to understand it, this can give you a first-order reason to argue against it. Although, again I probably agree with you that most such objections tend to be sort of subtly misguided, probably due to lacking mathematical background.
About Oppy’s objections I’m not as familiar. I think I agree with you that the entailment thing ends up being pretty strong here. Maybe strong enough to be a reason to reject that perfect properties exist (since they have to satisfy the implication rule), but in so-believing I also end up rejecting Oppy’s argument.
I think generate good quality posts about things that are unlikely to be disagreed with to begin with, or else frame it in such a “LessWrong-style” that people see that it’s clear you’re really trying to be rationalist. It may be necessary to overdo that style if you expect it to be disagreed with in order to elicit more upvotes. Present counterarguments, frame it as a story, make it more interesting than just “I think X which everyone here disagrees with, tell me why I’m wrong.”
Beyond people burying a post like that with downvotes because they disagree (which may happen, hard to say for sure), it’s also just not that great of a post, in my opinion.
Caesar Derangement Syndrome
Indeed!
Yes, yes yes, this is of course fine to reject the axiom I agree. But the metaphysics is where it actually gets good (I only did a maths degree and am leeching the metaphysics of it out of my system with posts like these lol).
I mean I think this is a plausibly reasonable account of when mathematical objects exist I guess, kind of a “structuralism” flavour to it, I’m actually somewhat sympathetic. I didn’t think of that objection!
Though I will note this is only one example of a potential object with perfect-essential necessity. I’ve linked the formalization which comes up with a logical model of these axioms (including all the necessity, perfect-essential necessity, etc) in a different thread on your original comment, if you’re curious!
If you’d like to stop back-and-forthing about metaphysics, seems reasonable. I’m sure we’ll make lots of progress if we keep going debating our priors about this! \s
I feel like the single particle universe clearly instantiates the logical system: ∃x (particle(x)).
Let me move to a different example, why do you think our universe instantiates PA? Or do you not? Why do you think it has to be instantiated physically to exist? E.g. It can be proven that Con(ZFC) is true iff a certain turing machine with 745 states halts. This can be done in the metatheory of PA, I’m relatively confident (though not certain) Do you think that our universe then either instantiates Con(ZFC) or doesn’t? Since PA exists? Seems like a weird ontology for maths to me, but I guess all ontologies for maths are weird.
Okay, noting that you made a stronger claim, that there is a universe where there is no sound logical system (i.e. P and not P are true in some possible universe), but I’m happy to move to this, sure.
What do you think it is about a Universe that is “making PA exist.” If tomorrow physicists found out there are <=10^googol particles in the universe, and 2^(10^googol) possible arrangements of states of the universe, or some other laughably huge number, would you then say “PA doesn’t exist in this universe?” Because PA proves 2^(10^googol) + 1 exists? I’m unclear about the ontology you’re assuming?
You think there are logically possible worlds without sound logical systems? I guess it depends on your interpretation of modal logic, but I interpret it as “logical necessity” or “logical contingency,” so we aren’t like breaking the rules of logic or anything...
EDIT: I will probably also defend this interpretation reasonably strongly.
Peano Arithmetic is (EDIT: necessarily) possible.
Peano Arithmetic has a perfect-generating property.
It is possible for that perfect-generating property to be (EDIT: necessarily) instantiated (it is instantiated in Peano Arithmetic).
Therefore it is possible for something to have the property of perfect-essential necessity.
To your other point, we are making the claim that perfect-essential necessity is perfect. I think “perfect-essential necessity is possible” is a bit weaker, but axiom 6 does also claim that. I thought we were discussing whether axiom 6 is strange because you think nothing has the property of perfect-essential necessity, which would be required to be able to call it perfect.
EDIT: No hostility intended, by the way, I’m just wanting to be clear that I’m addressing the correct point.
Also we do have a model of these axioms, to be clear, since it was formalized in Isabelle, routing through checking for the existence of a model. Here if you want to read it yourself :) https://www.isa-afp.org/entries/Types_Tableaus_and_Goedels_God.html
EDIT: I think the version I gave is kind of like a mix of Anderson’s or Fitting’s, not sure, I made the change myself. But they’re pretty similar anyway.
Note that the disagreement by @the gears to ascension is, as far as I can tell, technically correct (the best kind of correct) but in my opinion unnecessarily pedantic for a post that has explicitly said that it will be rounding things to first order.
EDIT: “as far as I can tell” because I am not sure exactly what they are taking issue with, not because I am confused about the details here.