Run-on refers primarily to topic drift, not word count. You can have a fairly short run-on sentence where the end of the sentence is talking about something different than the beginning. Frequent use of “and” between clauses is a clue.
Roger Scott
Karma: 10
I don’t think children have any more difficulty learning to speak English than other languages. The difficulty comes in learning to spell in writing and, to a lesser extent, learning to pronounce written words when writing. Btw, there’s actually much more regularity in English spelling/pronunciation than may appear, and than is routinely taught. Much of the “weirdness” is the result of historical processes which are fairly regular in themselves, once you know the rules.
Given that the default, non-quotation text is not, in general, describing sounds in the environment, why do you think a reader would interpret unquoted text as environmental sounds rather than as simply more of the author’s description of goings on in the scene? I can see that presenting spoken words in some format that allows or encourages their interpretation as environmental might be artistically useful, I just don’t see that removing the quotation marks from otherwise-quoted dialog accomplishes that.
Does it seem likely that a trait that has survival significance (in a highly social animal such as a human) would be emergent? Even if it might have been initially, you’d think selective pressure would have brought forth a set of genes that have significant influence on it.
There are many orders of magnitude between hundreds and millions. Also, perch are near the top of the food chain, while these mirror life forms would be near the bottom.
Putting aside for the moment the fact that even “intelligence” is hardly a well-defined and easily quantified property, isn’t it rather a giant leap to say we even know what a “better” personality is? I might agree that some disorders are reasonably well defined, and those might be candidates for trying to “fix”, but if you’re trying to match greater intelligence with “better” personality I think you first need a far better notion of what “better” personality actually means.
I think the “second” question about second order effects was really the main question here. If the intentional beneficial effects don’t quite add, that’s no great tragedy, but if combining multiple edits produces unexpected changes, some of which are bad, that’s kind of a deal killer. I don’t find the chart you reference to be very convincing, since it only lists a handful of characteristics that are sufficiently common to have names and have been studied in such an analysis. For every one of those there are likely countless less frequent and/or more subtle “bad” variations whose correlation with the things we’re trying to fix we have no idea of. Informally, don’t you have to wonder why, if a small number of edits would seem to lead to a clearly superior genome, natural selection hasn’t happened upon some of those combinations already? How can we know what combinations were “tried” earlier in our evolution with long-term negative consequences?
How is it that some tiny number of man made mirror life forms would be such a threat to the millions of naturally occurring life forms, but those millions of naturally occurring life forms would not be an absolutely overwhelming symmetrical threat to those few man made mirror forms? This whole analysis seems to be assuming that the man made mirror forms will have some grossly asymmetrical advantage.
Given only finite time, isn’t one always omitting nearly everything? If you believe in dishonesty by omission is everyone not dishonest, in that sense, nearly all the time? You can argue that only “relevant” information is subject to non-omission, but since relevance is a subjective, and continuous, property this doesn’t seem like very useful guidance. Wherever you choose to draw the line someone can reasonably claim you’ve omitted relevant (by some other standard) information just on the other side of that line.
It seems like this discussion might cover power imbalances between speaker and listener more. For example, in the border agent example, a border control agent has vastly more power than someone trying to enter the country. This power gives them the “right” (read: authority) to ask all sorts of question, the legitimacy of which might be debatable. Does deep honesty compel you to provide detailed, non-evasive answer to questions you personally don’t believe the interlocutor has any business asking you? The objective of such interactions is not improving the accuracy of the border agent’s worldview and it is unlikely that anything you say is going to alter that worldview. It seems like there are many situations in life where you have little choice but to interact with someone, but the less you tell them the better. There’s a reason witnesses testifying in a courtroom are advised to answer “yes” or “no” whenever possible, rather than expounding.
In software engineering things often become “accidentally load bearing” when people don’t respect interfaces. If they go digging around in a component’s implementation they learn things that happen to be true but are not intended to be guaranteed to be true. When they start relying on these things it limits the ability of the maintainer of the component to make future changes. This problem is exacerbated by under-specified interfaces, either when formal specification mechanisms are underutilized or, more often, due to the limits of most formal interfaces specification mechanisms, when important behavioral aspects of an interface are not documented.
I don’t think you even need to go as far as you do here to undermine the “emergent convergence (on anti-human goals)” argument. Even if we allow that AIs, by whatever means, develop anti-human goals, what reason is there to believe that the goals (anti-human, or otherwise) of one AI would be aligned with the goals of other AIs? Although infighting among different AIs probably wouldn’t be good for humans, it is definitely not going to help AIs, as a group, in subduing humans.
Now let’s bring in something which, while left out of the primary argument, repeatedly shows up in the footnotes and counter-counter arguments: AIs need some form of human cooperation to accomplish these nefarious “goals”. Humans able to assist the AIs are a limited resource, so there is competition for them. There’s going to be a battle among the different AIs for human “mind share”.
Not only that, but if your goals is to create a powerful army of AIs the last thing you’d want to do is make them all identical. Any reason you’re going to choose for why there are a huge number of AI instances in the first place—as assumed by this argument—would want those AIs to be diverse, not identical, and that very diversity would argue against “emergent convergence”. You then have to revert to the “independently emerging common sub-goals” argument, which is a significantly bigger stretch because of the many additional assumptions it makes.
Isn’t multi-epoch training most likely to lead to overfitting, making the models less useful/powerful?
If it were possible to write an algorithm to generate this synthetic training data how would the resulting training data have any more information content than the algorithm that produced it? Sure, you’d get an enormous increase in training text volume, but large volumes of training data containing small amounts of information seems counterproductive for training purposes—it will just bias the model disproportionately toward that small amount of information.
Why wouldn’t people (and maybe even AIs, at least up to a point) be applying these ever-advancing AI capabilities to developing better and better interpretability tools as well? I.e., what reason is there to expect an “interpretability gap” to develop (unless you believe interpretability is a fundamentally unsolvable problem, in which case no amount of AI power is going to help)?
That still leaves the question of how the reader is to distinguish a sound (speech) from a description of sounds.