In general I believe that many (most?) people take it too far and make incorrect inferences—partly on priors about popular posts, and partly because many people including you believe this, and those people engage more with the Simulators crowd than I do.
sometimes putting a name to what you “already know” makes a whole world of difference. [...] I see these takes, and I uniformly respond with some version of the sentiment “it seems like you aren’t thinking of GPT as a simulator!”
I think in all three of the linked cases I broadly directionally agreed with nostalgebraist, and thought that the Simulator framing was at least somewhat helpful in conveying the point. The first one didn’t seem that important (it was critiquing imo a relatively minor point), but the second and third seemed pretty direct rebuttals of popular-ish views. (Note I didn’t agree with all of what was said, e.g. nostalgebraist doesn’t seem at all worried about a base GPT-1000 model, whereas I would put some probability on doom for malign-prior reasons. But this feels more like “reasonable disagreement” than “wildly misled by simulator framing”.)
Yeah, agreed that’s a clear overclaim.
In general I believe that many (most?) people take it too far and make incorrect inferences—partly on priors about popular posts, and partly because many people including you believe this, and those people engage more with the Simulators crowd than I do.
Fwiw I was sympathetic to nostalgebraist’s positive review saying:
I think in all three of the linked cases I broadly directionally agreed with nostalgebraist, and thought that the Simulator framing was at least somewhat helpful in conveying the point. The first one didn’t seem that important (it was critiquing imo a relatively minor point), but the second and third seemed pretty direct rebuttals of popular-ish views. (Note I didn’t agree with all of what was said, e.g. nostalgebraist doesn’t seem at all worried about a base GPT-1000 model, whereas I would put some probability on doom for malign-prior reasons. But this feels more like “reasonable disagreement” than “wildly misled by simulator framing”.)