This is blatantly wrong. Restricting the lives of other people just to gain a little more cachet for you and your fellow urbanites. Clear defection, clear evil.
Aiyen
Karma: 824
How is that a response?
What is the specific difference between “regurgitated” information and the information a smart human can produce?
The human mind appears to use predictive processing to navigate the world, i.e. it has a neural net that predicts what it will see next, compares this to what it actually sees, and makes adjustments. This is enough for human intelligence because it is human intelligence.
What, specifically, is the difference between that and how a modern neural net functions?
If we saw a human artist paint like modern AI, we’d say they were tremendously talented. If we saw a human customer support agent talk like chatGPT, we’d say they were decent at their job. If we saw a human mathematician make a breakthrough like the recent AI-developed matrix multiplication algorithm, we’d say they were brilliant. What, then, is the human “secret sauce” that modern AI lacks?
You say to learn how machine learning works to dispel undue hype. I know how machine learning works, and it’s a sufficiently mechanical process that it can seem hard to believe that it can lead to results this good! But you would do well to learn about predictive processing: the human mind appears similarly “mechanical”. When we compare AI/ML to actual human capabilities, rather than to treating ourselves as black boxes and assuming processes like intuition and creativity are magical, AI/ML comes out looking very promising.
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/what-is-the-iq-of-chatgpt
I would like to leave this here as evidence that the model stated above is not merely right on track, but arguably too conservative. I was expecting this level of performance in mid 2023, not to see it in January with a system from last year!
Have you tried this before? It sounds potentially helpful, but there’s nothing about what you’ve achieved with this method, only why it might work.
This is true, but it doesn’t answer the question of why not to simply use nuclear blackmail on such states. And the answer to that is that the US wants to limit the destruction of war. Nuclear blackmail is great, right up until someone calls your bluff. But then it helps to have conventional forces if you do not wish to have massive losses to local civilians, local infrastructure, and one’s own prestige.
“There are many animals which have what are called dominance contests. They rush at each other with horns—trying to knock each other down, not gore each other. They fight with their paws—with claws sheathed. But why with their claws sheathed? Surely, if they used their claws, they would stand a better chance of winning? But then their enemy might unsheathe their claws as well, and instead of resolving the dominance contest with a winner and a loser, both of them might be severely hurt.” -Professor Quirell
Or to be more explicit, anything less than total war is a dominance contest between factions, not a no-holds-barred attempt to win. Nuclear weapons are useful for deterrence, but if there is a situation in which neither side is willing to simply back down, but both also want to limit the destruction, then a conventional military becomes very helpful.
Citation very much needed. What, specifically, do you disagree with?
Do you believe that the human mind is magical, such that no computer could ever replicate intelligence? (And never mind the ability it has shown already from chemistry to StarCraft…)
Do you believe that intelligence cannot create better tools than already exist, such that an AI couldn’t use engineering to meaningful effect? How about persuasion?
Do you believe that automation taking over the economy wouldn’t be a big deal? How about taking over genetics research, which is often bottlenecked by an inability to consider how genes interact, precisely something a computer could help with? Or is learning how to alter our very cores no big deal?
Do you have a specific argument against the plausibility or significance of a singularity? Or is this simply pattern matching to a cult without any further thought? Because “this sounds weird; it must be wrong” simply doesn’t work. Flight, nuclear power, genetics-all sounded more like science fiction than any real world possibility.
Fair enough, but it is equally incomplete to pretend that that’s an argument against the possibility of singularity-grade technology emerging in the foreseeable future.
By analogy, there have been many people who had crazy beliefs about radioactivity: doctors who prescribed radium as medicine, seemingly on the grounds that it was cool, and anything cool has to be good for you right? (A similar mentality led some of the ancient Chinese to drink mercury.) Atomic maximalists, who thought that anything and everything would get better with a reactor strapped to it, and never mind the price of uranium, the need for radiation shielding or the fact that reactors are heavy due both to the need for cooling and power generation systems and the simple fact that they benefit greatly from economies of scale. Not the sort of thing that you necessarily want to bolt onto every car and aircraft! Atom-phobes who were convinced that any attempt to utilize nuclear power would automatically become the next Chernobyl.
All of these were crazy, cult-like beliefs. Yet the insanity of people who turned poorly-understood scraps of nuclear theory into unreasoning optimism or pessimism does not have a single thing to say on the reality of radioactivity. Atomic bombs and nuclear reactors still work, no matter how foolish the radium suppository crowd of the early twentieth century was. And they still have sharp limits, no matter how crazily enthusiastic the “atomic cars in twenty years” crowd was.
By all means point out how Ziz’ cult was influenced by singularitarian ideas here. Even point out how the great opportunities and risks that a singularity might bring are a risk factor for cult-style mistakes. But don’t pretend that that prevents advanced technology from existing. Nature simply doesn’t care how we think about it, and isn’t going to make AI impossible just because Ziz had foolish ideas about AI.
While true, that’s not actually relevant here. While LW does not have perfect agreement on exactly how morality works, we can generally agree that preventing vaccine waste is a good idea (at least insofar as we expect the vaccine to be net-beneficial, and any debates there are largely empirical disagreements, not moral ones). Nearly all consequentialists will agree (more people protected), as well as deontologists (it’s generally desirable to save lives, and there’s no rule against doing so by utilizing vaccines that would otherwise end up in the trash) and virtue ethicists (saving lives is virtuous, and it’s hardly a vice to help prevent waste; if anything it’s the virtue of frugality).
Insofar as we expect the vaccine to be beneficial (yes there’s a potential debate there, but that’s a different topic), saying that there’s a lot of moral weight here is perfectly reasonable. Consider a phlogiston theorist and a modern chemist looking at a bonfire: they might not agree on the precise nature of fire, but they can certainly agree that there’s a lot of fire present. So too here.
Strongly upvoted for clarification and much greater plausibility given that clarification.
“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.”
Typically the material covered in a given day was a repeat, nearly word for word, of the previous day’s lecture, or the previous month’s. Seventh grade mathematics spent over a month on adding negative numbers, despite the fact that pretty much everyone already knew how to, and that if someone had somehow managed to avoid understanding how despite the same lecture being given every day, presumably they would need some other method of instruction than repeating it again. While this could, perhaps, be considered trying to teach a few days’ worth of material over months and years, that is so far from what any sane person would do if they actually wanted students to learn that I think it’s fair to disagree with saying that American schools aim to teach. If the Czechoslovakian system was better, well and good. I can actually believe that; for all the faults of the Eastern Bloc, it was reportedly quite good at education, and I learned a decent amount studying on my own from an excellent Russian textbook called алгебра и начало анализа.
There were textbooks, but they never made us read them. We typically did not have time to do so, with study time instead going to the aforementioned mostly-useless lectures and equally repetitive and useless homework.
“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.”
Most of this seems like a good case against schooling. Your experience with chemistry is a fair point, but how much value have you gotten out of your chemistry knowledge, and if the answer is a lot, due to a job or the like, wouldn’t you have studied it when you needed it? If the answer is that you never needed it for work, yet are much happier for the sheer beauty of the knowledge (admittedly plausible; there are many things in life that may not be immediately necessary to know, but are still incredibly fun to understand), and would never have studied it unless forced, that is a valid point in favor of compulsory schooling. I submit that it is outweighed by all the downsides, but that is a valid point. At a minimum we can agree that the American schooling system ought to be more like the Czechoslovakian one.
“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).”
That is a good point, and quite plausible. To be perfectly honest, I have a hard time imagining a non-dystopian elementary or high school; the concept sounds like a non-dystopian prison sentence. It is very interesting to talk to someone who apparently went through a plausibly non-evil school system.
“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.)”
If she enjoys it, fair enough, though I would strongly recommend keeping an eye out for the possibility that it’s a poor use of her time or may become so, even if she’s happy so far. But if she’s learning (and Khan Academy and Duolingo will see to it that she is) and happy, it sounds like things are going well.
“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.”
That is an interesting idea. It seems implausible that public school could have reasonable incentives, given the inherent isolation of government programs from market forces and meaningful feedback. However the existence of a high status equilibrium for teachers resulting in at least a strikingly less horrific system is possible, and might explain why the Czechoslovakian educational system was apparently much better.
I would also like to thank you for the very polite tone of your reply. I am also trying to be polite and respectful, but 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. Despite this you responded extremely well.
“Schools at least try to teach you.”
I am curious where you went to school. That was not my experience, and I was in an unusually good school district by American standards. Some of my friends had noticeably worse experiences than I did. Are you conflating the nominal purpose of a school with its real-world actions? Alternatively, did you go through a good enough school system that it might be worth replacing a great many existing “educational” systems with yours as a stopgap along the way to school abolition?
“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.”
Exactly! Surely that is precisely how it ought to be? Forced learning is a difficult thing to justify, and when a job teaches you something, it is incentivized to help you learn it in short order. Note that I am not calling for removing the option to learn and/or take classes, just removing the requirement. Likewise I am not calling for the forced imposition of child labor, just wondering if children who want to work should have the right, and questioning the idea that it’s so much worse than forced schooling when by many metrics it’s better.
“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.” This is true, and a fair point. But a situation that creates little to no to negative value is bad, even if there’s enough slack to make it less bad than it could conceivably be. And a situation that creates meaningful economic value is at least potentially worthwhile (again, I suspect a minority of children would choose to work, and none of them should be forced to. But the option should potentially exist, and morally it’s plausibly better than an “education” that tends not to be actually educational.)
“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.”
Alright. But A: That can coexist with working (maybe you keep all your money and let your parents worry about the mortgage and grocery budget) and B: 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.
How is this different from adults having jobs?
To be clear, there are plenty of good reasons why one might not want children to work. You might want them to be able to enjoy childhood without the burden of a job, you might want them to focus on learning to be more productive later. But “the people paying them are motivated by profit” is equally true of adult jobs.
“Oh right, the whole world doesn’t have education as a right.”
Are you trying to argue from existing law to moral or practical value? That would be easier if the whole world hadn’t had slavery and monarchy until fairly recently.
“That both destroy magic doesn’t mean the destruction is it to the same degree.”
That’s a good point. But jobs ideally produce value. School often doesn’t, and “learning” in a toxic setting specifically makes it harder to learn later. That’s a harm specific to school; most jobs do not have it.
“And school has its own magic. Jobs tend to have way less magic of their own.”
I’m glad it was magical for you. That’s far from universal. The largest problem with schooling is the compulsion. If you enjoyed it or benefited from it, well and good. But those who didn’t should not have been forced into it. The alternative to compulsory schooling doesn’t have to be no option to go, it can be letting people choose.
Upvoted for preregistration.
That ignores systematic problems with schooling, which even good schools will tend to suffer from:
Teaching by class risks both losing the kids at the bottom and boring the kids at the top, whereas individual study doesn’t have this problem.
Teaching by lecture is much slower than learning by reading. Yes, some students benefit from audio learning or need to do a thing themselves to grasp it, but those capable of learning from reading have massive amounts of time wasted, as potentially do the kinesthetic types who should really be taking a hands-on approach.
Teaching a broad curriculum forces vast amounts of time and effort to go towards subjects a student will never use. Specialization avoids this. Broad curricula are sometimes justified on the grounds that they’ll give a student more options later if they don’t know what they want to do, or on the grounds that they make the student “well-rounded”. However, the first justification seems extremely hollow in the face of opportunity costs and the tendency of aversive learning to make the victim averse to all learning in the future. The second, meanwhile, seems hard to take seriously upon actually experiencing “well-rounded” education or seeing its effects on others: it turns out people just don’t tend to use ideas they’re not interested in that were painfully forced into their minds.
Also relevant, though you could fairly note that the best schools will not suffer from these as much:
Public schools do not tend to benefit much from good performance nor suffer from bad. They are not incentivized to do a good job and thus tend not to.
Political and educational fads can result in large amounts of schooling going towards pushing pet ideas of the administrators, rather than anything that is plausibly worthwhile. This can even be worse than a simple waste of time: I’ve seen multiple classmates develop unhealthy guilt due to forced exposure to political propaganda.
You are correct that some schools are much better than others. But there are serious systematic problems here, and some schools being somewhat less bad doesn’t change that fact.
How is this any different from school, except that you could get paid rather than your parents losing money to pay the teachers? There are many valid arguments against child labor (though also many valid arguments that the child should be allowed to decide for themselves), but nearly all of them apply to schooling as well. School eliminates the time of childhood magic, actively makes it harder to be curious (many jobs would not have this effect) and you don’t even get paid.
I don’t know how common loss of attention span is, but certainly reduced interest in learning occurs extremely often.
Also, potential evidence that more damage occurs than is commonly recognized: in the modern world, we generally accept that one needs to be in one’s late teens or even early twenties to handle adult life. Yet for most of human history, people took on adult responsibilities around puberty. Part of the difference may be the world becoming more complex. But how much of it is the result of locking people up in environments with very little social or intellectual stimulation until they’re 18?
The world looks exactly like one would expect it to if school stunted intellectual and emotional maturity.
I would think that it’s valid, but a smaller effect than getting taught a bundle of random things in a gratuitously unpleasant way resulting in those who have been taught in school having a deep-seated fear of learning, not to mention other forms of damage. Prior to going to school, I had an excellent attention span, even by adult standards. After graduating high school, it took two years before I could concentrate on anything, and I still suffer from brain fog.
“Men care for what they, themselves, expect to suffer or gain; and so long as they do not expect it to redound upon themselves, their cruelty and carelessness is without limit.”-Quirinus Quirrell
This seems likely, but what is your evidence for it?