Well, for what’s worth, I can write a symphony (following the traditional tonal rules), as this is actually mandated in order to pass some advanced composition classes. I think that letting the AI write a symphony without supervision and then make some composition professor evaluate it could actually be a very good test, because there’s no way a stochastic parrot could follow all the traditional rules correctly for more than a few seconds (an even better test would be to ask it to write a fugue on a given subject, whose rules are even more precise).
Bezzi
The video was recorded in 2016, 10 years after his 2006 injury. It’s showing the result of 10 years of practice.
Ok, fair enough. But he started playing in concerts long before 2016, and the first recorded album was released on February 2007. Apparently he was selected as the 2007 Independent Artist of the Year by the LA Association of Independent Artists, which seems still quite impressive for someone starting to play less than one year before (is this a real association? I’ve never heard of it before).
Yeah, other people already pointed this out. I blame writers who cannot do math here. I know people in the humanities that would happily define a “math genius” anyone capable of correctly calculating an integral.
Anyway, even taking for granted that he’s just a crank who draws some cool triangles, it’s still quite impressive that an head injury could turn a normal guy into a math crank.
Ok, maybe I shouldn’t have used the same words used by clickbait youtube videos.
Anyway, he seems more interested in drawing triangles than studying math textbooks, so I don’t expect him to produce novel insigths. On the other hand, plenty of people are very good at math but never produce any technical writing on scientific journals. If banging your head can bring you from 50° percentile to 90° percentile in math attitude, that’s still pretty big news even if you don’t literally become a math genius (his story seems to strongly imply that his past self wouldn’t have been able to pass those math classes).
You are very welcome to investigate! I don’t deny that all of this is very perplexing. But it is at least plausible (in the sense of “not requiring to break laws of physics”) than a head injury could have a one-in-a-million chance of modifying your brain in strange ways.
Consider that this guy holds public concerts since 2007, we have no way to deny that he can actually play piano (albeit in a strange, untrained way). The only way for this to be a scam would be for him to have trained alone in complete secret for something like 10 years.
Also, he claims to “see” music in a way that reminds me of one historical anecdote about Mozart (he also claimed to “see” whole symphonies compressed into points, waiting only to be unraveled).
Apparently someone did exactly this in 2009. Could someone more familiar than me with the relevant literature have a look?
Have you ever played piano?
The kind of fluency that we see in the video is something that a normal person cannot acquire in just a few days, period. Even if he didn’t literally play perfectly the first time, playing perfectly after one month would still be incredibly impressive. You plain don’t become a pianist in one month, especially without a teacher, even if you spend all the time on the piano.
Also, this guy is apparently still not able to read sheet music and still doesn’t know anything about music theory. It’s difficult to explain in non-technical terms, but his music is exactly the kind of music that I would expect from an incredibly talented person who knows nothing about music theory.
Enhancing intelligence by banging your head on the wall
I think the thing you’re missing is you’re still exposed to crashes because of some maniac doing something extremely risky and hitting you.
Yes, but this is true even when I’m not driving. An out-of-control car could crash into me even when I’m walking or sitting inside a bus (and in some cases even when I’m at home).
Anyway, thanks, I’ll look into this paper.
This is the same chart linked in the main post.
Again, I am not here to dispute that car-related deaths are an order of magnitude more frequent than bus-related deaths. But the aggregated data includes every sort of dumb drivers doing very risky things (like those taxi drivers not even wearing a seat belt).
Since I’m quite confident to have a particularly cautious driving style, I am not very interested in the total number of fatal car accidents, because lots of people driving recklessly make it skyrocket (I’m not relying entirely on self-judgement here; anecdotally, at least four times I gave a ride to a friend and they mocked me for my overly cautious driving).
To make a comparison, take this document on cancer incidence (chart on page 2). Lung cancer is the most frequent cancer of them all, so you should be more worried about lung cancer than every other cancer, right? Wrong, unless you smoke, since people who have never smoked only make up 10-20% of all lung cancer cases (it follows that you should be 5x less worried about lung cancer if you aren’t a smoker, I presume).
I’m now trying to find data on the number of car fatalities not involving people doing stupid things like texting or speeding. I thought that taxi drivers were a good proxy for cautious drivers, but I was very wrong and now I don’t know what else to use as a proxy.
Table 10 also shows that some 30% of taxi drivers involved in crashes weren’t wearing seat belts (they’re apparently not legally required to in NSW! news to me), which is a pretty big clue that taxi drivers aren’t the paragon of careful driving one might assume.
WTF!?
Ok, I suppose I have to update my priors on taxi drivers (man, they even write “There is considerable anecdotal evidence that taxi drivers around the world drive in a manner the rest of the public considers to be unsafe”).
Do you have suggestions about other proxies for careful driving?
“Cautious driver” is not a real category. It’s not something my crash database can filter on.
Yes, obviously it is not a well-defined category, I mostly hoped that you could filter for taxi or similar.
Anyway, I am not claiming to be the best driver in the world (although I’m 100% safe at least w.r.t. drinking since I don’t drink at all), I’m just claiming to be at least as good as a taxi driver, and I would be really really surprised if it turned out that taxi drivers crash their vehicles with the same frequency as the general population.
The thing about human error is that you make errors ALL THE TIME. You, or other road users, should not die because of your errors. And the errors that tend to result in fatal crashes are not “I was drunk and on meth and speeding” (though those obviously do), the ones that more commonly result in fatal crashes are “I looked away from the road for a second to adjust my GPS and hit a pedestrian”.
Well, averting your eyes from the road and your hands from the wheel at the same time in order to touch the screen (rather than reaching a calm spot and stop the car first) is so obviously risky that I was lumping it into “idiots looking at their smartphones”.
Yes, I do know that even a minor distraction could be enough to crash your car. My point was that also bus drivers are humans and make errors all the time. I generally drive alone, in silence and with the phone turned off, in order to maximize my attention, and it doesn’t seem obvious that a random bus driver should have a lower probability to crash their vehicle than me (given that the average bus driver is also older than me and drives a huge vehicle which is surely more difficult to handle than my small car).
Do you have actual numbers on fatalities caused by cautious drivers?
My guess is that most people’s intuitive sense of the danger of cars versus trains, planes, and buses has been distorted by this coverage, where most people, say, do not expect buses to be >16x safer than cars.
Well, even after eyeballing this graph, I still don’t expect to be 16x safer on a bus than while driving my car.
My experience is that car crashes are covered at least by local news, and the overwhelming majority of car crashes I’ve heard of involved drunk drivers, ludicrous speed, or idiots looking at their smartphones instead of the road. A bus is safer than a car mainly because the average bus driver is more scrupulous than the average car driver.
Do we have data on car crash fatalities limited to public services like taxi? My best guess is that fatalities would decrease by an order of magnitude when you restrict to rule-abiding drivers.
Uh, this is somewhat surprising.
Do you mean that after your personal growth, your social circle expanded and you started to regularly meet trans people? I’ve no problem believing that, but I would be really really surprised to hear that no, lots of your longterm friends were actually trans all along and you failed to notice for years.
As I said in other comments, I am not locked in some strange conservative bubble keeping queer people out. For instance, I know at least three lesbians: one of them is a very obvious butch lesbian always dressed in male clothes, the other two are not so obvious but I still guessed they were lesbians quite early (say, around the third or fourth encounter in both cases). And I am surprised because this never happened with trans people, in the sense that I never caught the slightest hint that one of my longterm acquaintances could possibly be born with a different gender.
The problem with this analogy is that megacorps must at least pay lip service to the rule of law, and there’s no way a megacorp would survive if the government decide that they shouldn’t. Any company is ultimately made of people, and those people can be individually targeted by the legal system (or worse). What’s the equivalent for AGI?
Ok, but I still think it’s legit to expect some kind of baseline skill level from the human. Doing the deceptive chess experiment with a total noob who doesn’t even know chess rules is kinda like assigning a difficult programming task with an AI advisor to someone who never wrote a line of code before (say, my grandma). Regardless of the AI advisor quality, there’s no way the task of aligning AGI will end up assigned to my grandma.
I’ve mixed feelings about this. I can concede you this point about short time control, but I am not convinced about notation and basic chess rules. Chess is a game where, in every board state, almost all legal moves are terrible and you have to pick one of the few that aren’t. I am quite sure that a noob player consistently messing up with notation would lose even if all advisors were trustworthy.
It’s probably better to taboo “talking” here.
In the broader sense of transmitting information via spoken words, of course that GPT4 hooked to a text-to-speech software can “talk”. It can talk in the same way Stephen Hawking (RIP) could talk, by passing written text to a mindless automaton reader.
I used “talking” in the sense of being able to join a conversation and exchange information not through literal text only. I am not very good at picking up tone myself, but I suppose that even people on the autism spectrum would notice a difference between someone yelling at them and someone speaking soberly, even if the spoken words are the same. And that’s definitely a skill that GPT-conversator should have if people want to use it as a personal therapist or the like (I am not saying that using GPT as a personal therapist would be a good idea anyway).
If you are constrained to keep omnicidal maniacs in the same world as everyone else, this is obviously true.
But it doesn’t seem to be obviously true in every possible future. Imagine a world where every single sentient mind is wireheaded into their own personal paradise, interacting only with figments designed to maximize their preferences.