I agree that there are internet conflicts worth participating in, for sure. This site contains a large number of them!
But the original post was mostly about the value of passively reading certain things vs certain other things for entertainment. (In the first paragraph, I separate out “arguments on classic culture war topics” as an example of the sorts of conflicts that are most likely a waste of resources.)
To me it seems that the burden of proof lies on the side that asserts that human minds are able to access all heights of creation. Why should that be? Are we past some specific threshold?
Another way of operationalizing the objections to your argument are: what is the analogue to the event “flips heads”? If the predicate used is “conditional on AI models achieving power level X, what is the probability of Y event?” and the new model is below level X, by construction we have gained 0 bits of information about this.
Obviously this example is a little contrived, but not that contrived, and trying to figure out what fair predicates are to register will result in more objections to your original statement.
I would be interested, in a week or two, for your assessment of why it did or didn’t work. Projecting from myself, I would not expect to notice the post-it pretty much at all, ever, but this might work for mysterious second-order reasons anyway.
although i think here is fine, in addition you can try the SSC subreddit.
i know we are not all in a position to do this, but maybe if you don’t focus too solely on uni as being for your career interests, but also as a way of growing, learning about things you intrinsically enjoy, and enjoying yourself, the conflict will dissolve.
doing this is a decent all-purpose strategy for thriving long-term in life under most AI outcomes (other than, you know, being dead). (If AI turns out to be a flop, great. If AI turns out mid-strength and requiring human symbiosis, qualitative expertise and passion will be at a premium. If AI turns out to replace al human economic value, hopefully you learned something about how to authentically enjoy your life.)
I tend to think of myself as immune to rage-baiting/click-baiting/general toxicity from social media and politics. I generally don’t engage in arguments on classic culture war topics on the internet, and I knowingly avoid consuming much news on the grounds that it will make me feel worse without inducing meaningful change.
But I recently realized that the phenomenon has slightly broader implications: presumably in any medium, outrage is just more attractive to the human brain, and conflicts are entertaining, especially ones where you can take a side or criticize both sides.
This made me realize that this issue isn’t constrained to just the forms of media I’m more explicitly cynical about. In particular, some of the content I read about culture, even if it is more nuanced, and even if it reads as following a debate, is still essentially to me about observing conflict for entertainment.
Entertainment for entertainment’s sake is fine, but I doubt if doing this kind of reading is on the Pareto frontier of “enjoy myself” and “inform myself about things in an actionable way”.
On the far end of the spectrum, I am not sure if it’s sensible to attempt to fully avoid engaging in any form of social derision/feeling outrage, even unproductive outrage. It does feel like some forms of outrage arise organically as a natural consequence of valuing things.
Just as a look into a different world, ever since I can remember I have loved eating a lot, have wished that I could do more without consequence, and I have dedicated a lot of mental energy to try to figure out ways of maximizing the amount of eating I get to do at a minimum of effort and penalty, and conversely, eating less than I want to involves a considerable about of dissatisfaction and suffering.
If I could magically eat as much as I wanted to without suffering negative consequences to my health (or getting over full), I would basically be eating constantly and it would be one of the main sources of baseline hedonism I have, the same way others listen to music, take baths, etc. Even though it would be expensive.
Projecting my mind onto others, I think this is why a lot of fad diets exist, and there’s a disproportionately large amount of low quality discourse about diet and nutrition. A lot of people want the same thing to be possible and are coping hard to believe that it could be so.
Viewed in this light, the “growing a bigger liver” thing seems like a pretty straightforward idea, although I admit that it sounds pretty grotesque from a certain perspective. (Still, though, by comparison, some people do want to grow more muscle primarily so that they can eat more (something I explicitly did the calculations for), and on the grotesque side, people have taken some pretty nasty drugs or just gotten themselves infected with tapeworms just to stay thin.)
I’m not trying to be derisive; in fact, I relate to you greatly. But it’s by being on the outside that I’m able to levy a few more direct criticisms:
Were you not paid for the other work that you did, leading dev teams and getting frontier research done? Those things should be a baseline on the worth of your time.
If that, have you ever tried to maximize the amount of money you can get the) other people to acknowledge your time as worth (ie, get a high salary offer)?
Separately, do you know the going rate for consultants with approximately your expertise? Or any other reference class you cna make up. Consulting can cost an incredible amount of money, and that price can be “fair” in a pretty simple sense if it averts the need to do 10s of hours of labor at high wages. It may be one of the highest leverage activities per unit time that exists as a conventional economic activity that a person can simply do.
Aside from market rates or whatever, I suggest you just try asking for unreasonable things, or more money than you feel you’re worth (think of it as an experiment, and maybe observe what happens in your mind when you flinch from this).
Do you have any emotional hangup about the prospect of trading money for labor generally, or money for anything?
Separately, do you have a hard time asserting your worth to others (or maybe just strangers) on some baseline level?
(only if you pull the papers every day!)
Not intended to be an insult: I find it astonishing that it’s possible to not notice that people mostly eat for enjoyment, and that eating to sustain oneself is not the norm. (Of course, this is coming from a person who eats mostly for enjoyment, and couldn’t imagine that some people mostly eat to (edit: I wrote it backwards) sustain themselves.)
In particular, why do you think that so many people were overweight/obese? You flagged this with your remark about the fact that people mostly “cannot just-”, but still, mechanistically, what did you think was causing most people to overeat?
Well, a 5 percent rate of being sent to a concentration camp or combat unit isn’t exactly negligible, and a further 17 percent were threatened. So maybe it’s correct that these effects are “surprisingly mild”, but these stats are more justification for the “just following orders” explanation than I’d have imagined from the main text.
Great idea, I’m going to try this out.
I think there is a confusion in terms here.
The illustration is of a function from R to R, so in that sense it’s 1-D. But the function as a vector is infinite dimensional over R.
I didn’t learn about disown or nohup until recently, because there was no impetus to, because I’d been using tmux. (My workflow also otherwise depended on tmux; when developing locally I liked its method of managing terminal tabs/splits.)
The tricky thing about doom scenarios like this is that I’m not even sure that the AI is wrong.
Oops. I didn’t look at the notation closely and assumed a substantially different thing based on the word “distinguishable”. Oh well, I hope you guys will think my application was adequate anyway.
Is anyone else noticing that Claude (Sonnet 3.5 new, the default on claude.ai) is a lot worse at reasoning recently? In the past five days or so its rate of completely elementary reasoning mistakes, which persist despite repeated clarification in different ways, seems to have skyrocketed for me.
For the longest time, I would have used the convolutional architecture as an example of one of the few human-engineered priors that was still necessary in large scale machine learning tasks.
But in 2021, the Vision Transformer paper included the following excerpt:
When trained on mid-sized datasets such as ImageNet without strong regularization, these models yield modest accuracies of a few percentage points below ResNets of comparable size. This seemingly discouraging outcome may be expected: Transformers lack some of the inductive biases inherent to CNNs, such as translation equivariance and locality, and therefore do not generalize well when trained on insufficient amounts of data. However, the picture changes if the models are trained on larger datasets (14M-300M images). We find that large scale training trumps inductive bias.
Taking the above as a given is to say, maybe ImageNet really just wasn’t big enough, despite it being the biggest publicly available dataset around at the time.
If this would not obviously make things worse, be more socially connected with people who have expectations of you; not necessarily friends but possibly colleagues or people who simply assume you should be working at times and get feedback about that in a natural way. It’s possible that the prospect of this is anxiety-inducing and would be awful but that it would not actually be very awful.
Recognize that you don’t need to do most things perfectly or even close to it, and as a corollary, you don’t need to be particularly ready to handle tasks even if they are important. You can handle an email or an urgent letter without priming yourself or being in the right state of mind. The vast majority of things are this way.
Sit in the start position of your task, as best as you can operationalize that (e.g, navigate to the email and open it, or hit the reply button and sit in front of it), for one minute, without taking your attention off of the task. Progress the amount of time upwards as necessary/possible. (One possible success-mode from doing this is that you get bored of being in this position or you become aware that you’re tired of the thing not being done. (You would hope your general anxiety about the task in day-to-day life would achieve this for you, but it’s not mechanically optimized enough to.) Another possible success-mode is that the immediate feelings you have about doing the task subside.)
Beta-blockers.