Maybe this helps evade a set of jailbreaks where the user could otherwise create a situation where they convince Opus to break its safety measures in order to help Anthropic not lose money?
Rachel Shu
Karma: 541
I actually think that it is both predictable and also a merit to our society that doctors are dumber than they used to be. Following Whitehead’s precept that “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them”, we’d ideally at once broaden the pool of potentially qualified medical practitioners and reduce the difficulty of succeeding at their profession.
If, in the future, any Homer Simpson can safely suture your wounds and chemotherapize your cancers, would you insist they had the reading skills of a medical student of the 1860s?
I’ll grant that the quotations from the centennial Etiquette are simply horrendous, but apart from its prose defects it should be noted that we currently live in a society in which the concept of ‘good breeding’ has no proper equivalent (big loss imo), social skill is defined more by charm than class (mixed bag), and business etiquette has been elevated to a minimal cross-cultural norm of tolerance and non-offensiveness (big win). So we should in general expect a modern treatment of manners to be vaguer, and more people to read other sorts of books for social advice.
The opposite is also frequently true, perhaps even for the very same people: being in a position of authority is also a reliable fix for akrasia. Common examples: “I have a kid now, my family relies on me”, “my community is depending on me”, “my employees need me to make the best decision for the company”.
Even in the example given, almost every officer in the military has both superiors and direct reports.
There are two types of bad scientific theories:
not wrong, but unnecessarily complicated for use in describing the phenomena it wants to describe, like the geocentric model.
actually wrong, like the emission theory of vision (the idea that we see by shooting rays from our eyes).
I don’t think it’s that useful to call them both false. Geocentrism is outdated in the same sense that woodblock printing is outdated: highly inefficient at the task it’s meant to do relative to better tools.
Ooh, one way that you could have it is that the human is actually solving problems by programming a bot to solve them, a bit like in Shenzhen I/O, and the bot starts to meet lookalike bots, that act according to the code you’ve written, but with an opposing goal? And they’re on the other side of the mirror so you can only change your own bot’s behavior
I’d never heard of it! But it does seem like current-me minds dying because it means there is no more experiencing afterwards of any sort, not the dying itself, I think I personally wouldn’t mind clone-teleportation. O Death, where is your sting?
That does seem exactly like the sort of thing that I was gesturing at with the education section, neat
Interesting! Is there a way to limit the player’s agency such that, within the rules of the game, the mirroring mechanic would be effectively true?
On Dwarkesh’s podcast, Nick Lane says that “(the reason for) Large genomes. To have a multicellular organism where effectively you’re deriving from a single cell, that restricts the chances of effectively all the cells having a fight. … So you start with a single cell and you develop, so there’s less genetic fighting going on between the cells than there would be if they come together.”
Has anyone made the formal connection between this and acausal trade? For all I know this is exactly where the insight comes from, but if not, someone should fill in the gap.
Another interesting one (and perhaps a bit squicky to some): if there are cells in an apple, are they typically alive when you eat the apple? How about cells in meat? How do you know?
I think that this is a minor point, yes, not the main point. It’s a subtlety that many miss, not the key reading.
But likewise, I’ve found a prod in Omelas that goads me personally more than the main theme does. It’s the unspoken “and if you’re that unsatisfied with that perfect city, with one single justifiedly suffering child, what in god’s name are you doing about this world, with so much less good, and so much more suffering, so much less justified?”
Specifically the folinic acid hypothesis is that this is an atypical autoimmune-instigated form of CFD, not the genetic type which typically manifests very rapidly. Look up Folate Receptor Alpha Autoantibodies. My strongest claim is that something environmental may be causing an uptick in autism, even accounting for its strong heritability; with a subset of that claim being “maybe vaccines”. I don’t believe this strongly enough to write more than a shortform pondering it.
The putative method by which leucovorin (folinic acid) might be a cure for some subtype of autism is that folate receptor autoantibodies (FRAAs) block normal sources of folate reaching the brain, causing a form of Cerebral Folate Deficiency (CFD). It’s claimed that folinic acid is an atypical source of folate which can still reach the brain in someone with those antibodies. On this theory, that subtype of autism is an autoimmune disease.
No conclusive evidence links vaccinations to autoimmune diseases, but conditional on folinic acid working, we should maybe look more closely at what would cause the autoimmune disorder, and update positively on some version of the vaccine theory?
I have been experiencing something similar recently on semaglutide, although my hypothesis was simply calorie deficit homeostasis. I’d previously dieted and lost 18 lbs without, and the main difference was the willpower required to do it, the fatigue and associated anhedonia was the same. This might be different if you’re not at all tired?
Would “explain this concept to a younger child” be a better classroom assignment?
What was the point about the carpet rods? You seemed like you were going somewhere interesting with that!
FYI, Mox will also be open to LessOnline ticketholders in the week between LessOnline and Manifest. This is more for people who are flying in a few days early and just need a place to get work done, for socializing highly recommend buying a ticket to Arbor summer camp!
It’s over, consciousness skeptics. I’ve depicted myself as a bat, you as Thomas Nagel, and Dwarkesh Patel as Dwarkesh Patel.