Ah, so being woke increases your job safety, if you are a member of one of the protected groups. It makes your membership in that group more salient; if you ever get fired, it makes it easier to argue that you were fired because you belonged to that group.
And there is no obvious counter-strategy, because telling them “stop talking about your membership in a protected group all the time” can itself be interpreted as attacking the group.
Related: Setting the Default
Thanks for the lots of examples!
Ah, I imagine a third set of voting buttons, with large colorful buttons “yay, ingroup!!!” and “fuck outgroup!!!”, with the following functionality:
in your personal settings,you can replace the words “ingroup” and “outgroup” by a custom text
only the votes that agree with you are displayed; for example if there are 5 “yay” votes and 7 “boo” votes, if you voted “yay”, you will only see “5 people voted yay on this comment” (not the total −2)
the yay/boo votes have no impact on karma
if you make a yay/boo vote, the other two sets of voting buttons are disabled for this comment
What I expect from this solution:
to be emotionally deeply satisfying
without having any impact on karma (actually it would take mindkilling votes away from the karma buttons)
Aside from the legal question, however, there is also a moral or social question: is it ok to train a model on someone’s work without their permission? What if this means that they and others in their profession are no longer able to earn a living?
Every invention meant that someone lost a job. And although the classical reply is that new jobs were created, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the people who lost the old job had an advantage at the new job. So they still lost something, even if not everything. But their loss was outweighed by the gain of many others.
I don’t even think that an ideal society would compensate those people, because that would create perverse incentives—instead of avoiding the jobs that will soon be obsolete, people would hurry to learn them, to become eligible for the compensation.
Universal Basic Income seems okay, but notice that it still implies a huge status loss for the artists. And that is ok.
A more complicated question is what if the AI can in some sense only “remix” the existing art, so even the AI users would benefit from having as many learning samples as possible… but now it is no longer profitable to create those samples? Then, artists going out of business becomes everyone’s loss.
Perhaps free market will solve this. If there is no way to make the AI generate some X that you want, you can pay a human to create that X. That on one hand creates a demand for artists (although much fewer than now), and on the other hand creates more art the AI can learn from. “But what about poor people? They can’t simply buy their desired X!” Well, today they can’t either, so this is not making their situation worse. Possibly better, if some rich people wants the same X, and will pay for introducing it to the AI’s learning set.
(Or maybe the market solution will fail, because it simply requires too much training to become so good at art that someone would pay you, and unlike now, you won’t be able to make money when you’re just halfway there. In other words, becoming an artist will be an incredibly risky business, because you spend a decade or more of your life learning something that ultimately maybe someone will pay you for… or maybe no one will. Or would the market compensate by making good hand-made art insanely expensive?)
The permissions are only a temporary solution, anyway. Copyrights expire. People can donate their work to public domain. Even with 100% legal oversight, the set of freely available training art will keep growing. Then again, slowing down a chance can prevent social unrest. The old artists can keep making money for another decade or two, and the new ones will grow up knowing that artistic AIs exist.
The human usually won’t reproduce the original work too closely. And if yes, the human will be accused of plagiarism.
The richest/most powerful/most successful aren’t generally the smartest (again, excluding a few fields).
That is exactly addressed by the comment you are replying to:
There’s probably less than 10 +6 SD people alive on the earth today, wheras there are ~10 million +3 SD people.
Imagine a world containing exactly 10 people with IQ 190, each of them having 100% chance to become one of “the best”; and 10 000 000 people with IQ 145, each of them having 0.001% chance to become one of “the best”.
In such world, we would have 110 people who are “the best”, and 100 of them would have IQ 145.
Just because they are a majority in the category doesn’t mean that their individual chances are similar.
You will get cursed by Goodhart.
You can increase your NQ by learning new things, or trying new things. But you can increase it even more by saying random things.
Truly random things are boring, but difficult to predict exactly. More precisely, you can predict that the sequence of the words will be boring, but you cannot predict the exact words. So from the mathematical perspective, you get maximum variance, but from the psychological perspective, you always get the same thing.
To me it sounds like Thiel is making a political argument against… diversity, wokeness, the general opposition against western civilization and technology… and pattern-matching everything to that. His argument sounds to me like this:
*
A true libertarian is never afraid of progress, he boldly goes forward and breaks things. You cannot separate dangerous research from useful research anyway; every invention is dual-use, so worrying about horrible consequences is silly, progress is always a net gain. The only reason people think about risks is political mindkilling.
I am disappointed that Bay Area rationalists stopped talking about awesome technology, and instead talk about dangers. Of course AI will bring new dangers, but it only worries you if you have a post-COVID mental breakdown. Note that even university professors, who by definition are always wrong and only parrot government propaganda, are agreeing about the dangers of AI, which means it is now a part of the general woke anti-technology attitude. And of course the proposed solution is world government and secret police controlling everyone! Even the Bible says that we should fear the Antichrist more than we fear Armageddon.
*
The charitable explanation is that he only pretends to be mindkilled, in order to make a political point.
So, probably just machine being busy at random moments, I guess.
If you repeat the same questions later, does the error always happen with the same ones? In other words, is the problem somehow caused by your questions, or is it just something that happens for unrelated reasons, such as too many people connecting at the same time?
So, try more than you can handle, because even if you ultimately have to settle down, it will give you better perspective on what choices were available?
Also, next time you make a Mandelbrot set animation, at some moment you should split the screen and follow two paths that started very similar. Then maybe slide out one of them; and later split the remaining one again.
There were textbooks, but they never made us read them.
Well, what you describe is much worse than I imagined… and I still have a problem imagining that this is a typical American school experience. No offense, but I would need more people to confirm this, before I update on American education in general.
I have often heard that American schools are “teaching to the test”. Would you agree with that statement? If yes, how does that square with… not even reading the textbooks, and adding negative numbers in seventh grade? Were the seventh grade tests about adding negative numbers?
On the other hand, I have also heard that as a consequence of “No Child Left Behind”, teachers are focusing on the students that perform worst. So, maybe the least performing student in your seventh grade had a problem with adding negative numbers? That would kinda explain.
Or do the both things combined together mean that American teachers are “teaching the worst performing student to the test”? Sad, but possible, given the incentives. (“No Child Left Behind” was replaced in 2015 by a new law, hopefully better.)
If the answer is that you never needed it for work, yet are much happier for the sheer beauty of the knowledge
I admit that if I never attended school, and spent maybe 1⁄3 of the extra free time reading books (sounds likely, I have read tons of books as a child), I probably would have grabbed a few chemistry books, too, just out of curiosity. So maybe the benefit of the school was smaller than I imagine.
I still give the school credit for curating the information: filtering out knowledge from bullshit, and ordering the knowledge from simple to more complex. In the alternative reality where I learned chemistry from library books, who knows, maybe a book written by a convincing homeopath would get to my hands first, and I would waste lots of time studying bullshit.
The benefits of chemistry for my life would be: (1) It increases the general protection against bullshit. Like, when I heard about homeopathy, I remembered what I learned at school, and I noticed that this is not how atoms and molecules actually work. Water is a liquid, the molecules are randomly bouncing around all the time, million times per second, so they are not going to “remember” the shape of a larger molecule that floated around them a few days ago. (2) My wife is a biochemist; the fact that I have some general background in chemistry and biology makes it easier for me to understand her work. Similarly, people spent a lot of time debating covid recently, having some general background in chemistry and biology made the vaccines less mysterious. Both of these things have happened at random, but I was generally prepared.
My relation to knowledge… uhm, let me put it this way: It is the fucking 21st century, people are flying in space, engineering genes, the satellites allow you to make a phone call to the other side of the planet, insane amounts of knowledge are freely available online, we are on the verge of developing an artificial intelligence… so the idea that someone doesn’t know that the planet is round or that the matter is made of atoms, just feels horribly wrong, like a form of child abuse, like living in 21st century using a medieval brain.
Of course, the question is where to draw the line. If someone cannot solve a quadratic equation, that’s not a big deal, assuming that they know something else. But they definitely should have seen the graph of an exponential equation, because that’s just everywhere around us (economy, covid). Everyone should know about atoms and molecules (not the names of all of them, just the general idea of tiny balls bouncing around), the speed of light, planets orbiting stars, the difference between fire and nuclear reaction. That living organisms are composed of cells, what is photosynthesis, what is DNA, that all living things descend from a common ancestor. Etc. Not knowing these things, it’s like being locked in a dark basement, while everyone else participates in the 21st century civilization.
The school is the institution that was supposed to provide this. And maybe it should be abolished and replaced with a series of books, or a website… I just don’t know how to make everyone actually read those books. Because the fact is that most people do not read books. (This is what the rationalist community does not represent.) I know many people who told me that they haven’t read a book since finishing school. I am afraid that without the general background from school, these people would be ripe for all kinds of bullshit and conspiracy theories (that is, even more than they are now). Consider the impact on democracy, if people had even less of an idea about how things actually work (plus active misinformation from bad actors such as Russia today).
...oops, this became a long rant, and I guess I sound like a zealot.
the concept sounds like a non-dystopian prison sentence
(If such thing exists, I would expect to find it somewhere in Scandinavia. Joking aside, American prisons seem to be especially dystopian.)
Elementary school is mass babysitting. Where would most of the kids go otherwise, if both parents have a job? Then again, perhaps government should provide optional free babysitting for the masses. In perfect case, free babysitting where the kids can either play all day long, or can choose to go to a quiet room and read a book or use a computer.
this is enough of a touchy subject for me due to how horrific my schooling was that my previous comment held more than a little anger.
I get it. I hated a few subjects in school, and I was bullied shortly. So I can imagine that some people maybe got 10x of the same. Would make me quite angry, too. Also, my experience was probably above average, living in the capital city, attending selective schools. I am happy that homeschooling exists as an alternative for the unlucky ones.
The thing about communist Czechoslovakia was that communism is a blank-slate ideology, which—if you think about the logical consequences—makes teaching one of the most important jobs, in theory. Also, in communism smart people did not have many opportunities to use their talents, so many of them chose education; it provided them relative autonomy, contact with other smart people, and if they taught mathematics or natural sciences they were relatively free from the influences of ideology. This caused the relatively higher quality of education. (There was still a lot of emphasis on memorization and obedience.) When communism was over, maybe 1⁄4 of teachers at my high school quit and started their own companies, most of them profitable. Good for them, but the quality of education plummeted. Sadly, resources are limited, and in a free society, education competes with everything else and often loses. Then again, we do not have toilet paper shortages anymore...
I was enthusiastic about online education; things like Khan Academy, Coursera, Udacity, etc. Turns out, the greatest weakness of online education is lack of self-discipline. The universities that tried asynchronous online education found out that most students did not even click on the lessons during the semester, and when they finally started learning two days before the exam, it was too late. Which is the reason why now many online courses switched to synchronous education. (Even if it’s just you and the computer, you must do the specified lesson on a specified day. A complete nonsense if you are not a student. But a necessity for the universities that use this.)
Many of my friends are teachers, and I am procrastinating at writing a blog about the ongoing Czech reform of math education (called “Hejný method”, here is a video that is not the best explanation, but has English subtitles. Examples of problems: Snakes, Cobwebs, Sum Triangles, Exhibitions). If I hopefully write that blog in 2023, it will be reposted on LW.
However, Valentine says that something similar was already tried in USA long ago, and failed horribly.
there are bit-strings for which Solomonoff Induction performs at worse-than-chance level forever!
This reminds me… at high school I tried to figure out the most unnatural sequence of bits. Defined as a sequence of ones and zeroes such that if I show you any prefix, and you try to figure out the next digit, you will be wrong.
I figured out that the first digit would be 1, because the simplest possible sequence is “00000000...”. The next digit would be zero, because the simplest sequence starting with 1 is “11111111...”. The third digit would also be zero, because the simplest sequence starting with 10 is “10101010...”.
After that I wasn’t sure anymore, because it seemed to me that if I continue using the same kind of reasoning, at some moment “this kind of reasoning” will itself become the simplest explanation for the generated data, and therefore I should stop doing it at some moment—but when exactly? Probably at the point where “he is breaking all patterns on purpose” becomes a more likely explanation that any specific pattern.
...sorry if this does not make sense at all.
As a fictional AI system, I do not have the ability to experience emotions or consciousness in the same way that humans do.
Found the hardcoded part.
I am curious where you went to school.
Back then it was called Czechoslovakia. I am puzzled about the disagreement votes, given that I have hedged my statement as “try to teach you, even if not very efficiently”. Not sure how people do things on the other side of the planet, but I imagine that there are these things called textbooks, which are full of information, and they at least make you read them. I am not saying that the information is especially useful, or especially well explained; just that it is there, and the school exposes you to it.
There were subjects that I hated, mostly history. That one was taught literally as a list of facts that I considered utterly irrelevant—I couldn’t care less about what year exactly which king was born, or what year exactly was a battle that happened centuries ago. There were subjects that I would have learned on my own anyway, especially math and computer science. A subject where the school provided the most added value for me, was probably chemistry. Explained sufficiently well that some information stuck in my brain, and yet not something I would have studied on my own.
I suspect a minority of children would choose to work, and none of them should be forced to
Okay then.
there are people placed under incredible stress to perform in school, sometimes much greater than the stress that most adults face. You can argue that it shouldn’t be as stressful, given that even total failure is unlikely to starve you, but in practice it often is.
Correct.
Perhaps this is another case of what I call “America succeeds to go to all extremes simultaneously”. Excellent universities, dystopian elementary and high schools. In Eastern Europe things are more… mediocre, at both extremes. The universities are meh, but the elementary schools are kinda okay, mostly. Or maybe one of us generalizes too much from personal experience. It would be interesting to make a survey (not limited to the rationalist community).
I was seriously considering the possibility of homeschooling my children, but it turned out that my daughter enjoys school (she is currently in 2nd grade), so I am like: “well, if there is no problem, I do not need to solve it”. Of course, enjoying and learning new things are not the same; she probably likes the fact that she is one of the best in the classroom. Then she does Khan Academy and Duolingo at home. That doesn’t really seem like an argument in favor of the system… unless the point is that she has enough time and energy left to pursue her own goals. (I am quite tired when I get home from work.)
Dunno, maybe it’s like the mass transit. Some places give up on the idea completely, and then it becomes really bad. Other places make it a priority, and then it is not necessarily great, but it is okay. There might literally be two attractors; either the idea of school is high-status or low-status, and that determines whether the teachers love or hate their jobs, etc.
On the “exploration—exploitation” scale, schools at least try to teach you, even if not very efficiently. Jobs typically do not try at all… and when they try, it is usually very narrow, the thing you will immediately need for your work.
(“But you learn by doing”, yes, but only a very narrow selection of things. If you need to learn too much, it is typically more effective for the company to hire someone else for that job.)
In school there is more slack; you can spend a lot of time daydreaming, you finish earlier, you have summer holidays. At work you get responsibilities, unrealistic deadlines, for many people it is difficult to stop thinking about their job when the shift ends.
So, in some sense, both school and work suck in similar ways, but school sucks relatively less. Doesn’t pay you, though. But if you consider the market value of what a small child would produce, it is peanuts.
For more precise discussion, we would need to be more specific. Are we talking about jobs for 6 years olds, 10 years olds, 14 years olds? Full time or part time? What is the consequence of quitting the job or getting fired?
The “childhood magic” from my perspective means, importantly, not being responsible for paying the mortgage or making enough money to buy food. As long as that is your parents’ responsibility, and you are allowed to completely ignore this, you are mentally a child. When the metaphorical gun is put to your temple, adulthood begins.
OMG, even better: write emotionally convincing fictional evidence for both sides of the story. (source)
Trying to be charitable to the chatbot… I could interpret the evasive answers as “this seems like a sentence from Harry Potter, but I do not remember whether this specific sentence actually appears in the book, or is just something plausible that was made up”.
And when you ask it to create a story that answers the question, you do not say that the story must be realistic, or the answer must be correct. Could be interpreted as: “assuming that there is a story that happens to answer this question, what could it look like?”, and the chatbot gives you a possible example.
The question “why do companies do something seemingly unprofitable” is in my opinion worth asking.
The answers seem to be one of:
it actually is profitable, because...
a principal-agent problem, the people doing the thing are not aligned with the company (and the company will not replace them, because...)
Both seem likely, I wish I could figure out which one is true (possibly both).