cubefox

Karma: 1,413

cubefox 26 Nov 2024 11:30 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: Sinclair Chen’s comment on: Sinclair Chen’s Shortform
Ethics is a global concept, not many local ones. That I care more about myself than about people far away from me doesn’t mean that this makes an ethical difference.

cubefox 22 Nov 2024 20:24 UTC
3 points
0
on: I Have A New Paper Out Arguing Against The Asymmetry And For The Existence of Happy People Being Very Good
This seems to just repeat the repugnant conclusion paradox in more graphic detail. Any paradox is such that one can make highly compelling arguments for either side. That’s why it’s called a paradox. But doing this won’t solve the problem. A quote from Robert Nozick:

Given two such compelling opposing arguments, it will not do to rest content with one’s belief that one knows what to do. Nor will it do to just repeat one of the arguments, loudly and slowly. One must also disarm the opposing argument; explain away its force while showing it due respect.

cubefox 18 Nov 2024 21:28 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Leon Lang’s comment on: Leon Lang’s Shortform
Tailcalled talked about this two years ago. A model which predicts text does a form of imitation learning. So it is bounded by the text it imitates, and by the intelligence of humans who have written the text. Models which predict future sensory inputs (called “predictive coding” in neuroscience, or “the dark matter of intelligence” by LeCun) don’t have such a limitation, as they predict reality more directly.

cubefox 17 Nov 2024 16:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: Trying Bluesky
This still included other algorithmically determined tweets—from what your followers had liked and later more generally “recommended” tweets. These are no longer present in the following tab.

cubefox 17 Nov 2024 15:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: Trying Bluesky
I’m pretty sure there were no tabs at all before the acquisition.

cubefox 17 Nov 2024 14:59 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: dirk’s comment on: Trying Bluesky
Twitter did use an algorithmic timeline before (e.g. tweets you might be interested in, tweets people you followed liked), it was just less algorithmic than the “for you” tab currently. The time when it was completely like the current “following” tab was many years ago.

cubefox 17 Nov 2024 3:42 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: Trying Bluesky

The algorithm has been horrific for a while

After Musk took over, they implemented a mode which doesn’t use an algorithm on the timeline at all. It’s the “following” tab.

cubefox 17 Nov 2024 0:50 UTC
3 points
−1
in reply to: Maelstrom’s comment on: Alexander Gietelink Oldenziel’s Shortform
In the past we already had examples (“logical AI”, “Bayesian AI”) where galaxy-brained mathematical approaches lost out against less theory-based software engineering.

cubefox 15 Nov 2024 14:46 UTC
3 points
0
on: Seven lessons I didn’t learn from election day

Cities are very heavily Democratic, while rural areas are only moderately Republican.

I think this isn’t compatible with both getting about equally many votes. Because much more US Americans live in cities than in rural areas:

In 2020, about 82.66 percent of the total population in the United States lived in cities and urban areas.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/269967/urbanization-in-the-united-states/

cubefox 15 Nov 2024 13:58 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Leon Lang’s comment on: Leon Lang’s Shortform
It’s not that “they” should be more precise, but that “we” would like to have more precise information.

We know pretty conclusively now from The Information and Bloomberg that for OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, new frontier base LLMs have yielded disappointing performance gains. The question is which of your possibilities did cause this.

They do mention that the availability of high quality training data (text) is an issue, which suggests it’s probably not your first bullet point.

cubefox 14 Nov 2024 18:09 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dalcy’s comment on: Darcy’s Shortform
Ah yes, the fork asymmetry. I think Pearl believes that correlations reduce to causations, so this is probably why he wouldn’t particularly try to, conversely, reduce causal structure to a set of (in)dependencies. I’m not sure whether the latter reduction is ultimately possible in the universe. Are the correlations present in the universe, e.g. defined via the Albert/Loewer Mentaculus probability distribution, sufficient to recover the familiar causal structure of the universe?

cubefox 14 Nov 2024 9:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dalcy’s comment on: Darcy’s Shortform
This approach goes back to Hans Reichenbach’s book The Direction of Time. I think the problem is that the set of independencies alone is not sufficient to determine a causal and temporal order. For example, the same independencies between three variables could be interpreted as the chains $A \to B \to C$ and $A \leftarrow B \leftarrow C$ . I think Pearl talks about this issue in the last chapter.

cubefox 13 Nov 2024 11:48 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s Shortform
If base model scaling has indeed broken down, I wonder how this manifests. Does the Chinchilla scaling law no longer hold beyond a certain size? Or does it still hold, but reduction in prediction loss no longer goes along with a proportional increase in benchmark performance? The latter could mean the quality of the (largely human generated) training data is the bottle neck.

cubefox 13 Nov 2024 3:05 UTC
11 points
6
in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: o1 is a bad idea
“Misinterpretation” is somewhat ambiguous. It either means not correctly interpreting the intent of an instruction (and therefore also not acting on that intent) or correctly understanding the intent of the instruction while still acting on a different interpretation. The latter is presumably what the outcome pump was assumed to do. LLMs can apparently both understand and act on instructions pretty well. The latter was not at all clear in the past.

cubefox 12 Nov 2024 23:03 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: eggsyntax’s comment on: eggsyntax’s Shortform
Interesting. Question: Why does the prediction confidence start at 0.5? And how is the “actual accuracy” calculated?

cubefox 11 Nov 2024 23:41 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Jeremy Gillen’s comment on: Darcy’s Shortform
I think I ger what you mean, though making more assumptions is perhaps not the best way to think about it. Logic is monotonic (classical logic at least), meaning that a valid proof remains valid even when adding more assumptions. The “taking advantage of some structure” seems to be different.

cubefox 10 Nov 2024 12:36 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Stephen Fowler’s comment on: Stephen Fowler’s Shortform
Note, the quantity you refer to is called entropy by Wikipedia, not Shannon information.

cubefox 10 Nov 2024 12:01 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: Cole Wyeth’s Shortform
Is this a reaction to OpenAI Shifts Strategy as Rate of ‘GPT’ AI Improvements Slows?

cubefox 10 Nov 2024 11:52 UTC
5 points
3
in reply to: lc’s comment on: lc’s Shortform
We arguably have already colonized Antarctica. See Wikipedia.

A similar point would be: There is no permanent deep sea settlement (an underwater habitat), although this would be much easier to achieve than a settlement on Mars.

cubefox 8 Nov 2024 14:49 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: The Case Against Moral Realism
Yudkowsky has written about it:

(...) In standard metaethical terms, we have managed to rescue ‘moral cognitivism’ (statements about rightness have truth-values) and ‘moral realism’ (there is a fact of the matter out there about how right something is). We have not however managed to rescue the pretheoretic intuition underlying ‘moral internalism’ (...)