yams
I was gifted a (broken) K2600 in 2017, and am thrilled to learn of this new source of narrative continuity in my life. I’ve chalked it up to a simple name collision for the past near-decade.
That said: I don’t take the K2000 to be an especially complicated or lovely-sounding instrument among those in its reference class (MS2000, Jupiter, Virus, Yamaha SY/ES). And, indeed, it hasn’t stood the test of time in terms of a proliferation of emulations, etc. Still, definitely a canonical instrument and excellent factoid (for me especially!).
I think it’s incorrect to characterize this as a counter-salvo. What’s the alternative? Surprise citizenship verification for all Anthropic customers rolled out immediately?
Doesn’t read like malicious compliance; they just pulled the compliance lever they had, which happened to do some collateral damage.
I think this is part of why they characterize it as a mistake in their tweet (in addition to ‘diplomacy’); they’re unsure if the government understood the implications of their own ruling.
I think some of this is also incentives from the customer side. Some number of customers want to be able to say things aren’t AI, without actually caring about the ground truth. Eg if you pay copywriters by volume, they have a strong incentive to use AI. And, if you don’t start checking until it’s ubiquitous, you risk losing your whole labor force once you do start checking, and the lower quality services are often cheaper, to boot.
Nobody actually says ‘I want to pay a third party to lie to my customers about my labor practices’; the CEO is just disincentivized from looking at the options on the market closely enough to tell the difference, and orders that the company go with the cheaper option.
[from experience, not at any AI safety org]
After reading three entries, it does look like the criticism section tends to include information about how their empirical claims have held up.
Extremely cool project!
Can you talk more about your methodology for deciding to include particular thinkers?
I’m also curious how ambitious you are with this. After reading a few entries, I wish this could become a standard resource deployed in educational settings, but I notice that it’s actual form isn’t really amenable to wide-scale adoption in various ways (eg the over-representation of Our Guys relative to historical figures), and it also seems unlikely to become popular without some kind of press push (although maybe you’re planning one?).
I’m noticing a pretty significant imbalance in the comments section, but the post having positive overall karma (despite, I assume, receiving many downvotes).
Can more people sympathetic to Zack’s position please chime in, either in a top-level comment or in one of the threads where Zack is currently ~solo-defending himself against ~a dozen people, or else chime in under this comment with what’s keeping you from doing so? [eg fear of retaliation, or ‘Zack seems to have it handled’ or whatever else]
I have hypotheses for the discrepancy, but curious if a naive appeal might move the needle.
Oh, cool thought! I was thinking it’s just more straightforwardly Anglo-Saxon, except for the areas with strong French influence, owing to the waves of German settlement.
was also rhyming with the ‘southern English is closer to colonial-era English than modern British English’ fun-fact that I often hear floating around.
Also he was British, and I think the class divide in etymology is stronger there than it is here, and would have been stronger at the time than it is now.
Your rewrite seemed ‘Southern’ to me, so probably there’s still some class effect (although it also seemed ‘old-timey’).
Quick search indicates that Churchill is the originator of the sentiment, which makes more sense (earlier, more general-audience, maybe useful for a politician to subtly signal some nationalism, etc).
ACX on the Frankfurt School is, perhaps, the best summary of the Frankfurt School of its length that exists anywhere.
Few quibbles:
Weird to write about the Frankfurt school without mentioning Freud. The split in their influence is probably 60⁄40 Marx/Freud, so this seems like a big omission. Maybe Freud is too big a can of worms for Scott (or the secondary author he read) to introduce him here, and you can tell enough of the story without him. Ultimately I think this choice was reasonable.
I think Scott conflates the form and purpose of their work too much. That is, you can do witchy art criticism of the kind they ~invented without yourself being a Marxist, and this method/approach is perhaps more influential than their actual Marxism (since they spent more words on it, except for Marcuse). As Scott points out early on, many of those influenced by them would decry the affiliation. I claim this is usually because they’re taken to be either too Marxist or not Marxist enough by those who adapt their method without adopting their politics (which is most of those influenced by them).
He says upfront that they were weird and mystical for obscurantist reasons, and for intellectual-lineage German reasons, and later criticizes them as though their true form of belief were more-or-less as mystical as it might naively appear. I think the mistake is kind of obvious here (not saying there’s no mysticism, but your attitude toward how mystical they are shouldn’t subsume your interpretation of them, any more than Kant’s mysticism should subsume your interpretation of him—probably less).
Benjamin is far and away the most mystical of them, to such an extent that many readers cite his comparative mysticism as The Reason they (dis)prefer his work vs others in the school. I think that the mysticism critique is focused on quotes from him is evidence for the weakness of the point as generalized to the whole school.
Probably the Frankfurt school would just bite the bullet and say ‘film and radio were bad, television was worse, social media was even worse’. But they wouldn’t want to simply return to interwar Central Europe, since they’d view it as a time that possessed inherent ideological contradictions necessarily leading to the current moment. So it’s not about Retvrn. They thought things were getting worse culturally, but they thought of this worsening as a more-or-less natural succession of events that probably couldn’t have been avoided, and certainly can’t be straightforwardly undone.
It’s a mistake to think of the deconstructionists as centrally left; they were (mostly) preceded and succeeded by leftists, but were adamant that their project was apolitical, anti-everything, non-constructive, and I think it’s really hard to pull anything like a political project out of it (except in the Frankfurt-ish sense that ‘everything is political’ or whatever). Deconstructionists is a more narrow group than ‘postmodernists‘ (which included, eg, post-Marxists, post-feminists, and other obviously political things), but I think Scott has them at least partly in mind when he uses the term post-modernists (he names Derrida!).
It’s a little strange to imply they originated the conflation of the political and aesthetic (or, maybe more precisely, the belief that politics and art influenced one another—that one could learn something about a culture by their aesthetic works). It’s true that this was a central part of their project, but this was also a big part of the Enlightenment! (Eg the metric calendar and goddess of reason stuff, not to mention all of the literal art).
The Frankfurt School would likely endorse those carrying their torch making very different value judgements with respect to individual pieces of art, because different works function differently at different historical moments, and it’s been 100 years.
This is a 9⁄10 post but, like all posts, would buckle under the weight of its inherent contradictions were they brought to light. Scott Alexander is as good a writer as it’s possible to be while ‘communicating in a Newspeak that has been robbed of its true representational power.’
(this last paragraph is, mostly, a joke)
John I think you should read this post with your ‘if I had a regular experience of oxytocin’ goggles. This is a very vintage, pre-oxytocin-revelation JSW post. I thought we weren’t doing these anymore.
[could be that it’s just really hard for you to run that simulation, or even know when it would be beneficial to run, in which case my tone may be too flip!]
I agree with both of these things (although I’m not sure I would say MATS failed, rather than ‘it’s going worse than one might hope, and feedback loops are one major reason for that’).
So what did you mean by ‘getting people with that sort of research taste’? Like, somehow incentivizing people in that small group of 10-20 or so to spend more time evaluating grants?
Fieldbuilders are trying this already (eg courting experienced scientists in other fields, building bridges to academia, etc). It’s not really clear to me how well this works (or how often research taste generalizes cross-field, since it’s a heavily context-dependent skill).
Further, the most likely kind of person to poach successfully from another field is an MLE, and they’re more likely to pursue various ML approaches that I expect our OP would consider ‘unambitious’.
MATS, at least through 2024 (and maybe still; I don’t know), put a lot of emphasis on trying to help people develop research taste. I think results were sort of mixed, because this is an extremely difficult thing to teach, or even describe in a way that someone who doesn’t feel motivated to learn it already will understand.
My understanding is that ‘ambitious’ proposals are often highly illegible, such that only a few dozen humans are equipped to seriously evaluate them (even with substantial effort), and those people often have strong opinions that weigh unfavorably on their appraisal of proposals, as well as having directions they’re more excited about that weigh heavily on their time.
Like, when I imagine the people I’d like to see evaluating the proposals, it’s sort of the same 10-20 people I wish were doing everything, because research taste is extremely scarce, and perhaps the most important resource in grant making.
It’s also not very institutionally scalable.
(80 percent confidence; I’ve been around a lot of grant making and fieldbuilding, but haven’t been In The Room for an explicit funding decision regarding projects outside of the dominant, lab-supported ML paradigm of safety.)
I think this is, at least in part, historical. The Sequences are pretty self-help flavored, and I think lots of what was going on in the ecosystem was (incidentally?) piggybacking on broader self-help discourse in the early 2010s (same era that, eg, Jordan Peterson rose to prominence). LW was also part of a similar cultural sphere/wave to New Atheism, which was continuous with self-help discourse in part because the newly irreligious sometimes face adverse effects from the loss of their community and ontological framework, so prominent atheists often try to point people in directions that will help them reckon with that loss (parallel idea to Alain De Botton’s Religion 2.0 stuff).
There’s also the high rates of neurodivergence. I think neurodivergent people have a higher ceiling on the benefits they can reap from self-help material, are more likely to seek it out, and are also more likely to find specific individual interventions ineffective (since most self-help is targeted at neurotypical people afaict).
Finally I think self-help stuff is higher variance for most people. There seems to be a lot more variance in personal psychology than in, eg, how your muscles respond to hypertrophy or protein intake. The 80⁄20 of physical wellbeing is comparatively straightforward and the ‘standard advice’ is more reliably applicable to any individual’s situation. You just don’t need much literature to cover the basics, whereas reading the wrong piece of self-help can easily be neutral or net negative, which leads to a proliferation of takes.
I wouldn’t be surprise if one of your other explanations also turns out true, but this may be useful background :)
I think I get the spirit. I thought, from the way you phrased it, that you were making an empirical claim (eg: ‘I saw [x better thing] not happen because LessWrong something something’). But it sounds like you’re making a more conceptual argument (which I think has legs, but for different reasons than you do, and I think we disagree on the effect size).
Thanks for responding.
Can you say more about the two claims in your last sentence?
I would be worried that the hypocrite is intellectually dishonest or ~incapable of tracking reality, though. If they’re just being dishonest, why should you expect to have ‘consequential arguments’ with them later?
The broader public also does a poor job of enforcing their sense of who is and isn’t legitimate.
In contrast, someone with different values (but who is actually adhering to those values) at least has the basic machinery to follow through on their word, which means that, conditional on them professing to have their mind changed, it will have been changed (unlike the hypocrite).
In a real life scenario (I imagine we’re thinking of politics?), I support the hypocrite, but mostly because I don’t expect anyone to change their mind anyway (at least not for reasons that look like ‘having been convinced’), and my baseline expectation is for reptilian levels of dishonesty.
But maybe I’m misunderstanding the case you have in mind—can you say more?
Matters a lot who the researchers are. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the top researchers are 10-50x as valuable (even discounting once-in-a-career insights) as ‘worst researcher in good standing with the org‘. Researchers in this latter category are replacement-level, as evidenced by the speed at which these orgs have been able to scale.
Of course, even ~median lab employees are exceptional technical talent in some absolute sense; the tail is just very long, and the talent pipeline extremely competitive. Lots of ‘good enough‘ applicants waiting in the wings.
It’s also unclear if labor volume at the labs themselves is actually a serious bottleneck vs things like RL environments built externally, access to compute, etc. There are plenty of researchers at labs whose work basically never pays off, or who would rate their own productivity poorly. This just isn’t a situation where some specific class of laborers has an especially big moat they can leverage to slow capabilities progress.
I was thinking about the other comments and their technical correctness re conflating the economy and the stock market / how much that correction of your OP actually matters for your area of concern.
Im actually very confused about what [number associated with a business or sector] tracks most closely with [political power] or [potential political power]. Market cap doesn’t look like a crazy place to start, but my guess is that there‘s something better (and I agree with the point that market cap likely overweights tech for this purpose).
The actual word they use is ‘misunderstanding’, rather than mistake (this doesn’t change my point).
https://x.com/AnthropicAI/status/2065597531644743999?s=20