I listened off and on to much of the interview, while also playing solitaire (why I do that I do not know, but I do), but I paid close attention at two points during the talk about GPT-4, once following about 46:00 where Altman was talking about using it as a brainstorming partner and later at about 55:00 where Fridman mentioned collaboration and said: “I’m not sure where the magic is if it’s in here [gestures to his head] or if it’s in there [points toward the table] or if it’s somewhere in between.” I’ve been in a kind of magical collaborative zone with humble little ChatGPT and find that enormously interesting. Anyone else experience that kind of thing, with any of the engines? (BTW, I’ve got a post around the corner here.)
whether his charisma is more like +2SD or +5SD above the average American (concept origin: planecrash, likely doesn’t actually follow a normal distribution in reality) [bolding mine]
The concept of measuring traits in standard deviation units did not originate in someone’s roleplaying game session in 2022! Statistically literate people have been thinking in standardized units for more than a century. (If anyone has priority, it’s Karl Pearson in 1894.)
If you happened to learn about it from someone’s RPG session, that’s fine. (People can learn things from all different sources, not just from credentialed “teachers” in officially accredited “courses.”) But to the extent that you elsewhere predict changes in the trajectory of human civilization on the basis that “fewer than 500 people on earth [are] currently prepared to think [...] at a level similar to us, who read stuff on the same level” as someone’s RPG session, learning an example of how your estimate of the RPG session’s originality was a reflection of your own ignorance should make you re-think your thesis.
The application of variance, to the bundle of traits under the blanket label charisma (similar to the bundle of intelligence and results-acquisition under the blanket label thinkoomph), and the sociological implications of more socially powerful people being simultaneously more rare and also more capable of making the people around them erroneously feel safe, was a really interesting application that I picked up almost entirely from planecrash, yes.
I think that my “coordination takeoffs” post also ended up being a bad example for what you’re trying to gesture at here, I already know what I got wrong there and it wasn’t that (e.g. basically any China Watcher who reads and understands most of Inadequate Equilibria is on course towards the top of their field). Could you try a different example?
Ah, neat, thanks! I had never heard of that paper or the Conger-Kanungo scale, when I referred to charisma I intended it in the planecrash sense of charisma that’s focused on social dominance and subterfuge, rather than business management which is focused on leadership and maintaining the status quo which means something completely different and which I had never heard of.
I listened off and on to much of the interview, while also playing solitaire (why I do that I do not know, but I do), but I paid close attention at two points during the talk about GPT-4, once following about 46:00 where Altman was talking about using it as a brainstorming partner and later at about 55:00 where Fridman mentioned collaboration and said: “I’m not sure where the magic is if it’s in here [gestures to his head] or if it’s in there [points toward the table] or if it’s somewhere in between.” I’ve been in a kind of magical collaborative zone with humble little ChatGPT and find that enormously interesting. Anyone else experience that kind of thing, with any of the engines? (BTW, I’ve got a post around the corner here.)
Have you read Janus’s Cyborgism post? It looks like you’d be pretty interested.
Thanks, I’ll check it out.
The concept of measuring traits in standard deviation units did not originate in someone’s roleplaying game session in 2022! Statistically literate people have been thinking in standardized units for more than a century. (If anyone has priority, it’s Karl Pearson in 1894.)
If you happened to learn about it from someone’s RPG session, that’s fine. (People can learn things from all different sources, not just from credentialed “teachers” in officially accredited “courses.”) But to the extent that you elsewhere predict changes in the trajectory of human civilization on the basis that “fewer than 500 people on earth [are] currently prepared to think [...] at a level similar to us, who read stuff on the same level” as someone’s RPG session, learning an example of how your estimate of the RPG session’s originality was a reflection of your own ignorance should make you re-think your thesis.
The application of variance, to the bundle of traits under the blanket label charisma (similar to the bundle of intelligence and results-acquisition under the blanket label thinkoomph), and the sociological implications of more socially powerful people being simultaneously more rare and also more capable of making the people around them erroneously feel safe, was a really interesting application that I picked up almost entirely from planecrash, yes.
I think that my “coordination takeoffs” post also ended up being a bad example for what you’re trying to gesture at here, I already know what I got wrong there and it wasn’t that (e.g. basically any China Watcher who reads and understands most of Inadequate Equilibria is on course towards the top of their field). Could you try a different example?
Well, you wrote that “concept origin: planecrash”. Which of the concepts you mentioned originated from planecrash?
Measuring charisma has been done by psychologists using the Conger-Kanungo scale, and the original paper analysis the metric using a factor analysis.
Ah, neat, thanks! I had never heard of that paper or the Conger-Kanungo scale, when I referred to charisma I intended it in the planecrash sense of charisma that’s focused on social dominance and subterfuge, rather than business management which is focused on leadership and maintaining the status quo which means something completely different and which I had never heard of.