Sesquipedalist

• Sesquipedalist 10 Aug 2026 13:07 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: The world will be full of “sci-fi” things, and ev­ery­one will be unim­pressed and disappointed

  Computers have been commonplace to ubiquitous for around forty years now. That’s four decades of experience showing us that machines can do things that humans can’t. We take it for granted that a computer is better at math^[1] than we are, that it can ‘remember’ more clearly than we do, that it can access huge swathes of information that we can’t. On top of this, fiction has taken these strengths and exaggerated them, so that many (most?) people would believe that a computer can enhance a photo to be able to accurately reproduce a face from a few indistinct pixels, or that it can in some sense think and plan ahead, or ‘move beyond its own programming’.

  Most people don’t really grasp how different ‘general intelligence’ is to the niche domains that computers have excelled in to date. How is an AI agent any different from Clippy? How is a system beating the Go champion any better than the one which already defeated the Chess champion twenty years before? We are just bad at estimating how much intelligence is required for a given (reasonably complex) task.

  Then there is the fact that humans have been the uncontested most intelligent thing that we have encountered for pretty much our branch’s entire evolutionary history^[2], so there is a strong inherent bias against thinking that other things could equal or exceed our intelligence^[3].

  So, in my opinion, people will remain sceptical and dismissive of advances in AI right up until the moment that they can no longer deny that the thing talking to them from their device is way smarter than they are, and on an individual basis people will probably waver, vacillating between being impressed and then retreating into scepticism for a while before they are fully convinced.

  1. ^

     As in, it can calculate significantly faster and hold more digits in memory at once.

  2. ^

     Possibly other than encounters with other types of humans, but that wouldn’t affect the point I’m making.

  3. ^

     This is an assumption but it seems reasonable to me.

• Sesquipedalist 12 Jun 2026 13:07 UTC

  5 points

  1

  on: Ce­lene’s thoughts on consciousness

  What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a colour television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

  I think the ability hypothesis is pointing out that Mary has propositional knowledge of colour but lacks procedural knowledge, and the acquaintance hypothesis is supposed to point towards what you are looking for in this essay; qualia. But, as you said, the explanatory quote you provided doesn’t exactly help.

  What if, instead of Mary being released or given a fancy new tv, she is simply given a color wheel? It has no writing or other symbols, only the full spectrum of colors detectable by the human eye. She is an expert already so she will immediately know what it is, but could she tell you which side is blue? Would she associate the side that we call ‘red’ with ‘hot’?

• Sesquipedalist 20 May 2026 11:32 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Gavin Runeblade’s comment on: My hobby: run­ning de­ranged surveys

  This is an interesting take on post-scarcity. I haven’t read Biting the Sun, but from a quick look at the synopsis I can see how it (and your comment) echoes some of the things I’ve been thinking about.

  From many different fields of study, approaching the problem from many angles, the optimal amount of stress is not zero. It is also not low. The optimum is moderate.

  Is it really stress that these studies are measuring? I think of it more as struggle. Of course, stress is often correlated with struggle, but it doesn’t always have to be. I think the crux is that most of us need to feel like we are contributing to our society in some way, or at least that we are able to stand independently, and without some kind of struggle our accomplishments feel hollow. There are a lot of things that we can struggle against, though, and not all would be vanquished with an end to scarcity. Climbing a mountain would still be as satisfying, as would being the best football player in the town, or solving a really difficult puzzle.

  What it comes down to, I think, is exactly the kind of thing which video games have been trying to optimise ever since they were invented; game balance. For a task to feel worthwhile it needs to be difficult, but not so hard that you give up on it.

  I also believe that she got humanity correct in the story, and the overwhelming majority will devolve into endless orgies and drugs

  The overwhelming majority? I am more inclined to think that these kinds of hedonistic pursuits would be a phase which people pass through as they mature, but as they lack that feeling of meaning most people would come out the other side looking for something more (with the option to dip back in to that hedonistic outlet whenever they want to). Unless, of course, the drugs in question are able to evoke that sense of meaningfulness within us, like LSD can.

  That’s functionally no different than being the AI’s pet.

  Whether or not we could be viewed as the ‘pet’ species of an AI probably comes down mostly to our capacity for self-determination. As long as we can over-rule the AI we should be okay, although if we get into the whole ‘superintelligent AI convincing us to care about non-issues so we can use our veto and feel empowered without actually conceding any power on things which it considers important’ there’s not really much hope for us. It’s worth remembering that many religious people derive satisfaction from their lives even though they genuinely believe that a god or gods are the ones truly in control of what happens to them.

• Sesquipedalist 11 Feb 2026 16:56 UTC

  1 point

  −2

  in reply to: npostavs’s comment on: Stone Age Billion­aire Can’t Words Good

  I agree, it looks like a parody skit to me.

• Sesquipedalist 16 Oct 2025 12:57 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: The Most Com­mon Bad Ar­gu­ment In Th­ese Parts

  Interesting. I thought that was a typo and you meant ‘guff’; (UK slang—nonsense, humbug) which seemed to make perfect sense in context.

• Sesquipedalist 27 Mar 2015 14:04 UTC

  0 points

  0

  on: Tak­ing con­trol of your hap­piness and productivity

  I just wanted to point out that the article says “People who see outcomes, both good and bad, to be due to their own doing are said to have a strong internal locus (the left side of the below scale).” but the scale shows the internal locus on the right.

• Sesquipedalist 4 Mar 2015 10:59 UTC

  0 points

  0

  on: Meetup : LessWrong Scotland

  Hi,

  I am brand new to LW (this is my first comment!) and have only just started reading the sequences. I’d love to meet up with some fellow rationality-enthusiasts, but am not likely to be able to make this meet-up (I will negotiate with my other half, you never know).

  Any future gatherings in Edinburgh would be most welcome, though. Keep me informed if any are being arranged.