dr_s

Karma: 2,488

dr_s Feb 1, 2025, 10:43 AM
2 points
0
on: Superintelligent AI will make mistakes
I mean, yes, humans make mistakes too. Do our most high level mistakes like “Andrew Wiles’ first proof of Fermat’s Theorem was wrong” affect much our ability to be vastly superior to chimpanzees in any conflict with them?

dr_s Feb 1, 2025, 10:39 AM
8 points
6
in reply to: Jáchym Fibír’s comment on: Tetherware #1: The case for humanlike AI

consciousness is inherently linked to quantum particle wavefunction collapse

As someone with quite a bit of professional experience working with QM, that sounds a bit of a god of the gaps. We don’t even know what collapse means, in practice. All we know about consciousness is that it seems like a classical enough phenomenon to experience only one branch of the wavefunction. No particular reason why there can’t be more “you” out there in the Hilbert space equally convinced that their branch is the only one into which everything mysteriously collapsed.

dr_s Feb 1, 2025, 9:05 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Multicore’s comment on: Thread for Sense-Making on Recent Murders and How to Sanely Respond
Which other people have described the situation otherwise and where? Genuine question, I’m pretty much learning about all of this here.

dr_s Jan 31, 2025, 8:44 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: AaronF’s comment on: Fertility Will Never Recover
What? If every couple had only one child, the population would halve at each generation. That’s what they mean. Replacement rate requires more than just one child.

dr_s Jan 31, 2025, 8:43 AM
2 points
3
in reply to: Dentosal’s comment on: Fertility Will Never Recover
I mean, the whole point was “how can we have fertility but also not be a dystopia”. You just described a dystopia. It’s also kind of telling that the only way to make people have children, something that is supposedly a joyous experience, you can think of is “have a tyrannical dictator make it very clear that they’ll make sure the alternative is even worse”. Someone thinking this way is part of the problem more than they are of the solution.

dr_s Jan 31, 2025, 8:38 AM
12 points
8
on: Fertility Will Never Recover
I honestly think “find the elixir of immortality within a couple of generations” is not what I’d call a pragmatic plan to solve this. Personally I don’t think having 2 or 3 children would necessarily be such a curse in a different kind of world. A few obvious changes that I think would help towards that:
- short of immortality, any extension of youth helps. Part of the problem here is that by the time we feel like we’ve got our shit sorted out, we’re almost too old to have children;
- artificial wombs. Smooth out the risks of pregnancy and eliminate the biological divide between men and women in this deal;
- houses, houses, houses. Children need space. People want to give their children space. “Shit sorted out” almost always includes buying a house. Build more fucking houses. Have priorities;
- a less neurotic culture around children. We kept raising the bar about what it means to be a good parent and then we’re surprised so many people see it as way too stressful and hard for them. Make more independence to children not only legal when it’s not, but normal. That has the double benefit of being known to actually really help the psychological growth of those children and of leaving more free time to the parents. Are there risks? Yes, but all life comes with risks, they can be mitigated in other ways, and these risks I feel are likely perceived way more than statistics would justify;
- get our priorities straight about work. Look, yes, productivity is important and all. But effectively our society tells people that if you want to work towards developing a new sports betting app, that’s £80,000 per year; if you want to work towards making sure the city doesn’t fall to dysentery by keeping it clean, that’s £30,000 per year; and if you want to have and raise the next generation, a £100,000 lump sum for 18 years of work would be the wildest thing we can think of. Obviously this is not even on the same scale. Pay a straight up parental sabbatical for people at peak reproductive age (say, 25-35), see what happens. A time to do mostly parenting and nothing else, maybe some easy part time work on the side. Does that mean losing some peak productive years? Yes, of course. Would that productivity be best used for society making sure all the middle management is properly middle managed in the umpteenth marketing company?
The problem is honestly that this issue is so polarized. So doing anything about it is now associated with being with the religious right wing (or worse, the racist right wing specifically worried about white people being out-bred), which then means that the actually more liberal and rational parts of the centre-right, centre and left abhor touching it and have to pretend there’s no problem. The Amish thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think the way forward in this sense would be to spin it: not “you must have children for the sake of humanity’s future!”, but “our inability to allow people to have children is actually ruining their potential happiness”. There’s already some efforts in that direction but they feel quite half assed, and I think the left in particular focuses too much on the economic aspects only without seeing that there’s a bit more at play.

Review: The Lathe of Heaven

dr_sJan 31, 2025, 8:10 AM

23 points

0 comments8 min readLW link

dr_s Jan 23, 2025, 8:04 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Don’t ignore bad vibes you get from people
I mean, the problem of “my brain gets bad vibes too easily” is more general. Prejudice is a very common manifestation of it, but it’s something that can happen in other ways, and in the limit, as mentioned, you get bad vibes from everyone because you’re just paranoid and it isolates you. I think this is more an issue of you trying to get a sense of how good your intuition is in the first place, and possibly examine it to move those intuitive vibes to the conscious level. Like for example there are certain patterns in speech and attitude that scream “fake” to me, but it feels like I could at least try describing them.

dr_s Jan 18, 2025, 11:05 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: The benevolence of the butcher
Thanks! I’ve actually seen some more recent posts that got pretty popular outlining this same argument, so I guess I’m… happy… that it’s gaining some traction? However happy one can be to see the same prophecy of doom repeated and validated by other people who are just as unlikely to change the current trajectory of the world as me.

dr_s Jan 14, 2025, 11:41 AM
4 points
1
in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Passages I Highlighted in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien
Possibly perfectionism? I experience this form of creative paralysis a lot—as soon as I get enough into the weeds of one creative form I start seeing the endless ramifications of the tiniest decision and basically can just not move a step without trying to achieve endlessly deep optimisation over the whole. Meanwhile people who can just not give a fuck and let the creative juices flow get shit done.

dr_s Jan 14, 2025, 11:31 AM
6 points
4
in reply to: Lao Mein’s comment on: Passages I Highlighted in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien
I think that’s a bit too extreme. Are all machines bad? No, obviously better to have mechanised agriculture than be all peasants. But he is grasping something here which we are now dealing with more directly. It’s the classic Moloch trap of “if you have enough power to optimise hard enough then all slack is destroyed and eventually life itself”. If you thought that was an inevitable end of all technological development (and we haven’t proven it isn’t yet), you may end up thinking being peasants is better too.

dr_s Jan 7, 2025, 11:01 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: quila’s comment on: quila’s Shortform
I think some believe it’s downright impossible and others that we’ll just never create it because we have no use for something so smart it overrides our orders and wishes. That at most we’ll make a sort of magical genie still bound by us expressing our wishes.

dr_s Jan 6, 2025, 9:23 AM
4 points
2
in reply to: quila’s comment on: quila’s Shortform
I feel like this is a bit incorrect. There are imaginable things that are smarter than humans at some tasks, smart as average humans at others, thus overall superhuman, yet controllable and therefore possible to integrate in an economy without immediately exploding into an utopian (or dystopian) singularity. The question is whether we are liable to build such things before we build the exploding singularity kind, or if the latter is in some sense easier to build and thus stumble upon first. Most AI optimists think these limited and controllable intelligences are the default natural outcome of our current trajectory and thus expect mere boosts in productivity.

dr_s Jan 4, 2025, 8:53 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: Benquo’s comment on: Preference Inversion
I don’t know about the Bible itself, but there’s a long and storied tradition of self mortification and denial of corporeity in general in medieval Christian doctrine and mysticism. If we want to be cute we could call that fandom, but after a couple thousand years of it it ends up being as important as the canon text itself.

dr_s Jan 4, 2025, 6:54 PM
9 points
3
in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: The Online Sports Gambling Experiment Has Failed
I think the fundamental problem is that yes, there are people with that innate tendency, but that is not in the slightest bit helped by creating huge incentives for a whole industry to put its massive resources into finding ways to make that tendency become as bad as possible. Imagine if we had entire companies that somehow profited from depressed people committing suicide and had dedicated teams of behavioural scientists and quants crunching data and designing new strategies to make anyone who already has the tendency maximally suicidal. I doubt we would consider that fine, right? Sports betting (really, most addiction-based industries) is like that. The problem isn’t just providing the activity, as some kind of relief valve. The problem is putting behind the activity a board of investors that wants to maximise profits and turns it into a full blown Torment Nexus. Capitalism is a terrible way of providing a service when the service is “self-inflicted misery”.

dr_s Jan 3, 2025, 8:13 PM
7 points
2
in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”
I definitely think this is a general cultural zeitgeist thing. The progressive thing used to be the positivist “science triumphs over all, humanity rises over petty differences, leaves childish things like religions, nations and races behind and achieves its full potential”. But then people have grown sceptical of all grand narratives, seeing them as inherently poisoned because if you worry about grand things you are more inclined to disregard the small ones. Politics built around reclamation of personal identity, community, tradition as forms of resistance against the rising tide of globalising capitalism have taken over the left. Suddenly being an atheist was not cool any more, it was arrogant and possibly somewhat racist. And wanting to colonise space reeked of white man’s burden even if there probably aren’t many indigenous people to displace up there. So everything moved inwards, and the writers followed that trend.

dr_s 3 Jan 2025 20:03 UTC
20 points
5
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”

This is exactly the kind of thing Egan is reacting to, though—starry-eyed sci-fi enthusiasts assuming LLMs are digital people because they talk, rather than thinking soberly about the technology qua technology.

I feel like this borders on the strawman. When discussing this argument my general position isn’t “LLMs are people!”. It’s “Ok, let’s say LLMs aren’t people, which is also my gut feeling. Given that they still converse as or more intelligently as some human beings whom we totally acknowledge as people, where the fuck does that leave us as to our ability to discern people-ness objectively? Because I sure as hell don’t know and envy your confidence that must surely be grounded in a solid theory of self-awareness I can only dream of”.

And then people respond with some mangled pseudoscientific wording for “God does not give machines souls”.

I feel like my position is quite common (and is, for example, Eliezer’s too). The problem isn’t whether LLMs are people. It’s that if we can simply handwave away LLMs as obviously and self evidently not being people then we can probably keep doing that right up to when the Blade Runner replicants are crying about it being time to die, which is obviously just a simulation of emotion, don’t be daft. We have no criterion or barrier other than our own hubris, and that is famously not terribly reliable.

dr_s 3 Jan 2025 19:51 UTC
6 points
2
on: Comment on “Death and the Gorgon”
Since Chat GPT came out I feel like Egan really lost the plot on that one, already when discussing on Twitter. It felt like a combination of rejection of the “bitter lesson” (understandable: I too find inelegant and downright offensive to my aesthetic sense that brute force deep learning seems to work better than elegantly designed GOFAI, but whatever it is, it does undeniably work ), and political cognitive dissonance that says that if people who wrongthink support AI, and evil billionaires throw their weight behind AI, therefore AI is bad, and therefore it must be a worthless scam, because it’s important to believe it is (this of course can to some extent work if you persuade the investors of it; but in the end it’s mostly a hopeless effort when all you have is angry philosophical rambling and all they have is a freaking magical computer program that speaks to you. I know which one is going to impress people more).

So basically, yeah, I understand the reasons to be annoyed, disgusted, scared and offended by reality. But it is reality, and I think Egan is in denial of it, which seems to have resulted in a novel.

dr_s 1 Jan 2025 19:35 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: Why I’m Moving from Mechanistic to Prosaic Interpretability
That sounds more like my intuition, though obviously there still have to be differences given that we keep using self-attention (quadratic in N) instead of MLPs (linear in N).

In the limit of infinite scaling, the fact that MLPs are universal function approximators is a guarantee that you can do anything with them. But obviously we still would rather have something that can actually work with less-than-infinite amounts of compute.

dr_s 30 Dec 2024 12:56 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Daniel Tan’s comment on: Why I’m Moving from Mechanistic to Prosaic Interpretability
Interesting. But CNNs were developed originally for a reason to begin with, and MLP-mixer does mention a rather specific architecture as well as “modern regularization techniques”. I’d say all of that counts as baking in some inductive biases in the model though I agree it’s a very light touch.

dr_s

Re­view: The Lathe of Heaven

Review: The Lathe of Heaven