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M. Y. Zuo
Karma: 626
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
Why do a lot of the “External reviews of “Alignment faking in large language models”” read like they were also written, or edited, by LLMs?
Are people expected to take “reviews” done seemingly pro forma at face value?
I would perhaps go even farther, most, maybe all, people don’t have any ‘sincere ethics’ whatsoever with a sharp boundary line, it’s nearly always quite muddled.
At least judging by actions.
Which upon reflection makes it sorta amazing any complex polity functions at all.
And in any case it’s probably safer to assume in business dealings that the counterparty is closer to the 50th percentile than to the 99.99th percentile.
For a test that can give certainty to claims there’s something more than that going on somewhere in the LLM. Since the OP only indicated ~90% confidence.
Otherwise it’s hard to see how it can be definitely considered ‘consciousness’ in the typical sense we ascribe to e.g. other LW readers.
Is there a definitive test? Or any prospects of such in the foreseeable future?
Such that a well informed reader can be completely confident it’s not just very fancy pattern recognition and word prediction underneath…
I already think that “the entire shape of the zeitgeist in America” is downstream of non-trivial efforts by more than one state actor. Those links explain documented cases of China and Russia both trying to foment race war in the US, but I could pull links for other subdimensions of culture (in science, around the second amendment, and in other areas) where this has been happening since roughly 2014.
This theory likely assigns too much intention to too large of a structure. The cleavage lines are so obvious in the U.S. that it wouldn’t take much more than a random PSYOP middle manager every week having a lark on a slow Friday afternoon, who decides to just deploy some of their resources to mess around.
Although it’s possible policy makers know this too and intentionally make it very low hanging fruit for bored personnel to mess around and get away with only a slap on the wrist.
The core issue, in any society, is that it’s thousands of times easier to destroy trust than to rebuild it.
Plenty of libertarians understand that some percentage of the population will degenerate when given limitless opportunities to do so. Though they usually don’t have an answer for what to do with the resulting millions of semi-deranged adults other than isolation/prison/etc...
It’s more the speed and extent that it has occurred within a short time is probably what’s surprising.
What exactly is the counterargument here?
There are a boundless number of reasons for or against anything, because real world things happen in an infinite dimensional space of possibilities… so just a listing some opposing points for those in the parent doesn’t add much.
How does this relate to the degree of integration into an economy?
You can eat just fine in any developed country via picking up odd jobs here and there. But clearly a managing director at JP Morgan overseeing an important desk is at a qualitatively different level.
Does the median immigrant ‘integrate into the economy’ to any notable extent in months or weeks?
I can easily imagine someone with already a high rank, reputation, merit, etc., in their home country doing so by say immigrating and quickly landing a job at JP Morgan Chase in a managing director position and proceed to actually oversee some important desk within a short timeframe.
But that is the 99.99th+ percentile of immigration.
What is the actual argument that there’s ‘not very many’? (Or why do you believe such an argument made somewhere else)
There’s hundreds of asteroids and comets alone that have some probability of hitting the Earth in the next thousand years, how can anyone possibly evaluate ‘p(doom)’ for any of this, let alone every other possible catastrophe?
Or perhaps on the flip side there is a ‘super genius underhang’ where there are insufficient numbers of super competent people to do that work. (Or willing to bet on their future selves being super competent.)
It makes sense for the above average, but not that much above average, researcher to choose to focus on their narrow niche, since their relative prospects are either worse or not evaluable after wading into the large ocean of possibilities.
This seems always “fuzzily true”?
e.g. Which atom of the store are you measuring to?
The store has many quadrillions of atoms spread across a huge volume of space, relative to atom sizes, and there is no ultimate arbiter on the definitive measuring point.
How does someone view the actual outcomes of the ‘Highlighted Grants’ on that page?
It would be a lot more reassuring if readers can check that they’ve all been fulfilled and/or exceeded expectations.
I am not asking about ‘true’ general intelligence? Or whatever that implies.
If your not sure, I am asking regarding the term commonly called ‘general intelligence’, or sometimes also known as ‘general mental ability factor’ or ‘g-factor’, in mainstream academic papers. Such as those found in pedagogy, memetics, genetics, etc…
See: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%252C5&q=“general+intelligence”&btnG=
Where many many thousands of researchers over the last few decades are referring to this.
Here is a direct quote by a pretty well known expert among intelligence researchers, writing in 2004:
“ During the past few decades, the word intelligence has been attached to an increasing number of different forms of competence and accomplishment-emo-tional intelligence, football intelligence, and so on. Researchers in the field, however, have largely abandoned the term, together with their old debates over what sorts of abilities should and should not be classified as part of intelligence. Helped by the advent of new technologies for researching the brain, they have increasingly turned their attention to a century-old concept of a single overarching mental power. They call it simply g, which is short for the general mental ability factor. The g factor is a universal and reliably measured distinction among humans in their ability to learn, reason, and solve problems. It corresponds to what most people mean when they describe some individuals as smarter than others, and it’s well measured by IQ (intelligence quotient) tests, which assess high-level mental skills such as the ability to draw inferences, see similarities and differences, and process complex information of virtually any kind. Understanding g’s biological basis in the brain is the new frontier in intelligence research today. The g factor was discovered by the first mental testers, who found that people who scored well on one type of mental test tended to score well on all of them. Regardless of their contents (words, numbers, pictures, shapes), how they are administered (individually or in groups; orally, in writing, or pantomimed), or what they’re intended to measure (vocabulary, mathematical reasoning, spatial ability), all mental tests measure mostly the same thing. This common factor, g, can be distilled from scores on any broad set of cognitive tests, and it takes the same form among individuals of every age, race, sex, and nation yet studied. In other words, the g factor exists independently of schooling, paper-and-pencil tests, and culture.”
No one that I know based on first hand information, otherwise I probably would have included them as an example.
Most likely due the fact that people who succeeded at such have little reason to advertise it beyond a small circle.
So then what is the issue you want to discuss?
Neither of us can do more than offer our guesses and opinions on these two points.
Since I’m asking LW readers I imagine the default ‘degree of credence’ for any proof is something that the vast majority of LW readers will accept as the actual, bonafide, truth and are willing to acknowledge this when presented with it.
And predicting the future on a global scale, successfully, repeatedly, and precisely, has no correlated measures, if we assume precognition is impossible.
So we can conveniently sidestep this issue. Hence why I mentioned it…
I’m not sure there exists a formal operational definition of “general intelligence”, there’s no direct measurement possible
Then how can anyone prove, in the future, whether an AGI exists, or not?
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.