Razied

Karma: 1,732

Razied 1 Aug 2023 19:04 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Rosencrantz ’s comment on: Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning
But if you are right that you only respond to a limited set of story types, do you therefore aspire to opening yourself to different ones in future, or is your conclusion that you just want to stick to films with ‘man becomes strong’ character arcs?
Not especially, for the same reason that I don’t plan on starting to eat 90% dark chocolate to learn to like it, even if other people like it (and I can even appreciate that it has a few health benefits). I certainly am not saying that only movies that appeal to me be made, I’m happy that Barbie exists and that other people like it, but I’ll keep reading my male-protagonist progression fantasies on RoyalRoad.
Greta Gerwig obviously thinks so: when she says: “I think equally men have held themselves to just outrageous standards that no one can meet. And they have their own set of contradictions where they’re walking a tightrope. I think that’s something that’s universal.”
I have a profound sense of disgust and recoil when someone tells me to lower my standards about myself. Whenever I hear something like “it’s ok, you don’t need to improve, just be yourself, you’re enough”, I react strongly, because That Way Lay Weakness. I don’t have problems valuing myself, and I’m very good at appreciating my achievements, so that self-acceptance message is generally not properly aimed at me, it would be an overcorrection if I took that message even more to heart than I do right now.

Razied 1 Aug 2023 18:22 UTC
11 points
0
on: Barbieheimer: Across the Dead Reckoning
I watched Barbie and absolutely hated it. Though it did provide some value to me after I spent some time thinking about why precisely I hated it. Barbie really showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male-appealing story is “Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong”. I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough (evidence: most isekai stories), if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I’m not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it’s something like “Woman thinks she’s not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect”. And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think the women in my life seemed to enjoy it. But that archetype just doesn’t resonate with me at all.
The apparent end-point for the Kens in the movie is that they “find themselves”. This was (to me) a clear misunderstanding by the female authors of what the masculine instinct is like. Men don’t “find themselves”, they decide who they want to be and work towards climbing out of their pitiful initial states. (There was also the weird Ken obsession with horses, which are mostly a female-only thing)

Razied 26 Jul 2023 23:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread—July 2023
I’m fairly sure that there’s architectures where each layer is a linear function of the concatenated activations of all previous layers, though I can’t seem to find it right now. If you add possible sparsity to that, then I think you get a fully general DAG.

Razied 26 Jul 2023 14:44 UTC
4 points
0
on: The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor
Their paper for the sample preparation (here) has a trademark sign next to the “LK-99” name, which suggests they’ve trademarked it… strongly suggesting that the authors actually believe in their stuff.

Razied 23 Jul 2023 23:41 UTC
14 points
9
on: Please speak unpredictably
There are a whole bunch of ways that trying to optimise for unpredictability is not a good idea:
1. Most often technical discussions are not just exposition dumps, they’re a part of the creative process itself. Me telling you an idea is an essential part of my coming up with the idea. I essentially don’t know where I’m going before I get there, so it’s impossible for me to optimise for unpredictability on your end.
2. This ignores a whoooole bunch of status-effects and other goals of human conversation. The point of conversation is not solely to transmit information. In real life information-transfer is a minuscule part of most conversations: try telling your girlfriend to “speak unpredictably” when she gets home and wants to vent to you about her boss.
3. People often don’t say what they mean. The process of translating a mental idea into words on-the-fly often results in sequences of words that are very bad at communicating the idea. The only solution to this is to be redundant, repeat the idea multiple times in different ways until you hit one that your interlocutor understands.
Humans are not Vulcans, and we shouldn’t try to optimise human communication the way we’d optimise a network protocol.

Razied 22 Jul 2023 14:02 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Open Thread—July 2023
I think you might want to look at the litterature on “sparse neural networks”, which is the right search term for what you mean here.

Razied 19 Jul 2023 2:32 UTC
4 points
−6
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: Meta announces Llama 2; “open sources” it for commercial use
I’m really confused about how anybody thinks they can “license” these models. They’re obviously not works of authorship.
I’m confused why you’re confused, if I write a computer program that generates an artifact that is useful to other people, obviously the artifact should be considered a part of the program itself, and therefore subject to licensing just like the generating program. If I write a program to procedurally generate interesting minecraft maps, should I not be able to license the maps, just because there’s one extra step of authorship between me and them?

Razied 13 Jul 2023 14:30 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: mishka’s comment on: Elon Musk announces xAI
The word “curiosity” has a fairly well-defined meaning in the Reinforcement Learning literature (see for instance this paper). There are vast numbers of papers that try to come up with ways to give an agent intrinsic rewards that map onto the human understanding of “curiosity”, and almost all of them are some form of “go towards states you haven’t seen before”. The predictable consequence of prioritising states you haven’t seen before is that you will want to change the state of the universe very very quickly.

Razied 13 Jul 2023 14:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Tapatakt’s comment on: Elon Musk announces xAI
Not too sure about the downvotes either, but I’m curious how the last sentence misses the point? Are you aware of a formal definition of “interesting” or “curiosity” that isn’t based on novelty-seeking?

Razied 13 Jul 2023 13:07 UTC
13 points
12
on: Elon Musk announces xAI
According to reports xAI will seek to create a “maximally curious” AI, and this also seems to be the main new idea how to solve safety, with Musk explaining: “If it tried to understand the true nature of the universe, that’s actually the best thing that I can come up with from an AI safety standpoint,” … “I think it is going to be pro-humanity from the standpoint that humanity is just much more interesting than not-humanity.”
Is Musk just way less intelligent than I thought? He still seems to have no clue at all about the actual safety problem. Anyone thinking clearly should figure out that this is a horrible idea within at most 5 minutes of thinking.
Obviously pure curiosity is a horrible objective to give to a superAI. “Curiosity” as currently defined in the RL literature is really something more like “novelty-seeking”, and in the limit this will cause the AI to keep rearranging the universe into configurations it hasn’t seen before, as fast as it possibly can…

Razied 3 Jul 2023 15:01 UTC
7 points
−2
on: Monthly Roundup #8: July 2023
A theory of the popularity of anime.
Much like there have been ten thousand reskins of Harry Potter I’ve been waiting for more central examples of English-language cultural products to take that story archetype and just run with it. There is clearly a demand.
Well then Rejoice! The entire genre of Progression Fantasy is what you desire, and you need only browse the Best Of RoyalRoad to see lots of english-language stories that scratch that particular itch. In fact, I find these english stories immensely superior to anything in anime or manga.

A particularly good example is the recently-finished 12 book series Cradle, whose books ranked at #1 on fantasy Audible for the past few years.

Razied 28 Jun 2023 15:02 UTC
20 points
7
on: Nature: “Stop talking about tomorrow’s AI doomsday when AI poses risks today”
Overall, a headline that seems counterproductive and needlessly divisive.
Probably the understatement of the decade, this article is literally an “order” from Official Authority to stop talking about what I believe is literally the most important thing in the world. I guess this is not literally the headline that would maximally make me lose respect for Nature… but it’s pretty close.
This article is a pure appeal to authority. It contains no arguments at all, it only exists as a social signal that Respectable Scientists should steer away from talk of AI existential risk.
The AI risk debate is now no more about any actual arguments, it’s now about slinging around political capital and scientific prestige. It has become political in nature.

Razied 26 Jun 2023 0:41 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: AI #17: The Litany
That’s not a math or physics paper, and it includes a bit more “handholding” in the form of an explicit database than would really make me update. The style of scientific papers is obviously very easy to copy for current LLMs, what I’m trying to get at is that if LLMs can start to make genuinely novel contributions at a slightly below-human level and learn from the mediocre article they write, pure volume of papers can make up for quality.

Razied 25 Jun 2023 20:24 UTC
10 points
6
in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Did Bengio and Tegmark lose a debate about AI x-risk against LeCun and Mitchell?
- “This has been killing people!”
- “Yes, but it might kill all people!”
- “Yes, but it’s killing people!”
- “Of course, sure, whatever, it’s killing people, but it might kill all people!”
But this isn’t the actual back-and-forth, the third point should be “no it won’t, you’re distracting from the people currently being killed!”. This is all a game to subtly beg the question. If AI is an existential threat, all current mundane threats like misinformation, job loss, AI bias, etc. are rounding errors to the total harm, the only situation where you’d talk about them is if you’ve already granted that the existential risks don’t exist.

If a large comet is heading towards Earth, and some group thinks it won’t actual hit Earth, but merely pass harmlessly close-by, and they start talking about the sun’s reflections off the asteroid making life difficult for people with sensitive eyes… they are trying to get you to assume the conclusion.

Razied 24 Jun 2023 1:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: AI #17: The Litany
I don’t think we need superhuman capability here for stuff to get crazy, pure volume of papers could substitute for that. If you can write a mediocre but logically correct paper with $50 of compute instead of with $10k of graduate student salary, that accelerates the pace of progress by a factor of 200, which seems enough for me to enable a whole bunch of other advances which will feed into AI research and make the models even better.

Razied 24 Jun 2023 0:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: AI #17: The Litany
If we get to that point of AI capabilities, we will likely be able to make 50 years of scientific progress in a matter of months for domains which are not too constrained by physical experimentation (just run more compute for LLMs), and I’d expect AI safety to be one of those. So either we die quickly thereafter, or we’ve solved AI safety. Getting LLMs to do scientific progress basically telescopes the future.

Razied 23 Jun 2023 13:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: cwillu’s comment on: AI #17: The Litany
Fair point, “non-trivial” is too subjective, the intuition that I meant to convey was that if we get to the point where LLMs can do the sort of pure-thinking research in math and physics at a level where the papers build on top of one another in a coherent way, then I’d expect us to be close to the end.
Said another way, if theoretical physicists and mathematicians get automated, then we ought to be fairly close to the end. If in addition to that the physical research itself gets automated, such that LLMs write their own code to do experiments (or run the robotic arms that manipulate real stuff) and publish the results, then we’re *really* close to the end.

Razied 23 Jun 2023 2:02 UTC
3 points
3
on: AI #17: The Litany
If the question is ‘what’s one experiment that would drop your p(doom) to under 1%?’ then I can’t think of such an experiment that would provide that many bits of data, without also being one where getting the good news seems absurd or being super dangerous.
Not quite an experiment, but to give an explicit test: if we get to the point where an AI can write non-trivial scientific papers in physics and math, and we then aren’t all dead within 6 months, I’ll be convinced that p(doom) < 0.01, and that something was very deeply wrong with my model of the world.

Razied 10 Jun 2023 13:11 UTC
21 points
32
on: EY in the New York Times
Researchers and industry leaders have warned that A.I. could pose an existential risk to humanity. But they’ve been light on the details.
...
The letter was the latest in a series of ominous warnings about A.I. that have been notably light on details.
Has Cade Metz bothered to perhaps read a bit more on AI risk than the one-sentence statement in the safe.ai open letter? To my eye this article is full of sneering and dismissive insinuations about the real risk. It’s like the author is only writing this article in the most grudging way possible, because at this point the prestige of the people talking about AI risk has gotten so large that he can’t quite so easily dismiss it without losing status himself.
I think rationalists need to snap out of the “senpai noticed me” mode with respect to the NYT, and actually look at the pathetic level its AI articles operate on. Is quoting the oldest, most famous and most misunderstood meme of AI safety really the level you ought to expect from what is ostensibly the peak of journalism in the western world?

Razied 29 May 2023 19:59 UTC
3 points
−6
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: You now can enable reacts on your own posts! (and other react info)
Anyone writing an effortful response to the original post should be presumed to have good faith to some reasonable degree, and any point that you think they ignored was probably either misunderstood, or the relevance of the point is not obvious to the author of the comment. By responding in a harsh way to what might be a non-obvious misunderstanding, you’re essentially adopting the conflict side of the “mistake vs conflict theory” side of things.
Any comments which aren’t effortful and are easily seen to have an answer in the original post will probably just be downvoted anyway, and the proper response from OP is to just not respond at all.
To be clear, I think that the community here is probably kind enough so that these aren’t big problems, but it still kind of irks me to make it slightly easier to be unkind.