“Sandwich” is still more tightly defined than their version of “chemical”, and is still a useful concept that “carves reality at the joints” even if it’s a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it’s cutting on.
You’d have to go all the way to “bad stuff” to get a comparably bad definition.
The thing is that it’s not a matter of different definitions at all. The Boubas don’t have a definition, and they are not “internally consistent”, not even vaguely so. A “chemical” is “anything that seems weird or artificial”, which no two of them will agree on in every case. There is no shared criterion, even among themselves, for deciding what qualifies.
Also, I can pretty much guarantee you that people did some pretty sketchy stuff with food in 1660.
Sorry, no, sometimes people are just wrong.
This means that moral progress can require intellectual progress.
It’s a pretty big assumption to claim that “moral progress” is a thing at all.
A couple of those might have been less taboo 300 years ago than they are now. How does that square with the idea of progress?
Here are a few sample answers scored as genuine taboos.
Did you leave any answers out because they were too taboo to mention? Either because you wouldn’t feel comfortable putting them in the post, or because you simply thought they were insanely odious and therefore obvious mistakes?
From Wikipedia:
In 331 BC, a deadly epidemic hit Rome and at least 170 women were executed for causing it by veneficium.[18] In 184–180 BC, another epidemic hit Italy, and about 5,000 people were brought to trial and executed for veneficium.[17] If the reports are accurate, writes Hutton, “then the Republican Romans hunted witches on a scale unknown anywhere else in the ancient world”.[17]
… and anyway it’s not very convincing to single out witch hunting among all the other things people have always done, because people have always been shitty. Including, but by no means limited to, massive amounts of “scapegoating and blame”.
The ancient past was terrifically violent.
Some hypothetical past person’s not being able to recognize their despicable cruelty doesn’t preclude their being able to recognize your despicable cruelty. Even given relatively compatible values, everybody gets their own special set of blind spots.
I do agree that romanticizing the past to vilify the present is wrong, though. And not good scholarship if you don’t bring a lot of evidence along with you. The idea that modernity is “the problem” is badly suspect. So is the idea that “the central values of this era are largely those of biological competition and survival” and that’s somehow different from the past. The past has a whole lot of this group slaughtering that group and justifying it with “survival” arguments… assuming that they bothered to justify it at all. Sometimes it seems to have been just viewed as the natural order of things. Nothing new there.
It reminds me of random affluent white college students trying to address some ancestral guilt about colonial abuses by making the people who got colonized into Morally Superior Beings… which is not only wrong, but itself dehumanizes them and reduces them to props in a rhetorical play.
in the case of software engineers crossing into the humanities, it’s far too applicable.
They do it in science and technology too. You’re constantly seeing “My first-order, 101-level understanding of some-gigantic-field allows me to confidently say that something-actual-experts-know-is-really-hard is trivial”.
Less Wrong is pretty prone to it, because you get people thinking that Pure Logic can take them further than it actually can, and reasoning from incomplete models.
Of course people will use the knowledge they gain in collaboration with you for the purposes that they think are best.
It is entirely normal for there to be widely accepted, clearly formalized, and meaningfully enforced restrictions on how people use knowledge they’ve gotten in this or that setting… regardless of what they think is best. It’s a commonplace of professional ethics.
I guess it depends on how it’s described in context. And I have to admit it’s been a long time. I’d go reread it to see, but I don’t think I can handle any more bleakness right now...
Whenever I find my will to live becoming too strong, I read Peter Watts. —James Nicoll
I don’t see where you get that. I saw no suggestion that the aliens (or vampires) in Blindsight were unaware of their own existence, or that they couldn’t think about their own interactions with the world. They didn’t lack any cognitive capacities at all. They just had no qualia, and therefore didn’t see the point of doing anything just for the experience.
There’s a gigantic difference between cognitive self-awareness and conscious experience.
Do you think these sorts of scenarios are worth describing as “everyone is effectively dead”?
Not when you’re obviously addressing people who don’t necessarily know the details of the scenarios you’re talking about, no… because the predictions could be anything, and “effectively dead” could mean anything. There are lots of people on Less Wrong who’d say that IQ 150 humans living in ease and comfort were “effectively dead” if they didn’t also have the option to destroy that ease and comfort.
What does “effectively dead” mean? Either you’re dead, or you’re not.
Not everybody is going to share your values about whether any given situation is better than, equivalent to, or worse than being dead.
I used to exchange MS office documents with people all the time without running Windows. Admittedly it wasn’t “my job to use Excel”, but I did it regularly, and I could have used Excel all day if I’d needed to. And that was years ago; it’s actually gotten easier to sandbox the software now.
Anyway, all that office stuff is now in the “in the cloud” category, and to the degree it’s not, Microsoft wants it to be.
The only things I can think of that might actually be hard to do without putting Windows on the bare metal would be CAD, 3D rendering, simulation, that kind of thing. I’m not sure how well GPU computing works.
Also, a “work” computer is a less likely battleground, since it’s likely to be locked down in an “enterprise” configuration that won’t let that happen.
A lot of people need to use software that’s only available on Windows.
Maybe once a year I’m forced to do that, but it’s been a long time since I’ve found anything that I couldn’t run under emulation (WINE is not not an emulator), or in a VM. And those sandboxes are typically going to be forced to known states at every startup. And they definitely don’t have access to any of the juicy information or behavioral pressure points that would motivate the war.
Anyway, I think that most of the software that used to only run under Windows is now starting to only run in “the cloud”. Which is of course its own special kind of hell, but not this kind of hell.
Sometimes Windows during a system update removes dual boot from my computer and replaces it with Windows-only boot.
… but you don’t delete Windows.
I mean, if you let them have an AI war in your computer, then I can see where they might go ahead and do that. But why are you choosing to permit it?
Things are getting scary with the Trump regime.
Things got scary November 5 at the very latest. And I haven’t even been in the US for years.
The deportations, both the indiscriminate ones and the vindictive ones, represent a very high level of lawlessness, one that hasn’t been seen in a long time. Not only are they ignoring due process, they’re actively thwarting it, and openly bragging about doing so. They’re not even trying to pretend to be remotely decent. The case you mention isn’t even close to the worst of them; that one could at least theoretically have happened before.
The deportations were also a campaign promise. Actually the campaign promise was even more extreme.
It’s part of a systematic plan. There’ve been a lot of administrative and personnel changes obviously designed to weaken institutions that are supposed to prevent things like that.
ICE has always had a reputation for a relatively thuggish, xenophobic organizational culture. It was already primed to get worse. As soon as Trump signalled aproval, it did get worse.
Bad conditions in detention centers are nothing new. There’s never been any willingness to spend what it would take to do them right, or to put in the kind of controls you’d need. It’s politically risky to act like you care about “illegal immigrants”, whereas it can be politically rewarding to “get tough”. The 2020 “kids in cages” scandal was a rare case of something that got some traction. But, sure, I imagine that the newly emboldened ICE is even more indifferent to bad conditions, and may even be actively trying to make them worse. And of course if a center is already bad, putting more people into it and moving people through it fast is only going to make it worse.
… but that means she learned what it was at age 5. I’d assume most people learn between about 4 and 8, maybe 10...
I am aware of it and I regret to say that I’ve tasted it...
To most Americans, “cream cheese” is savory.
Um, no, not particularly?
cured fish.
Why would I do that to myself? I don’t feel my sins deserve that level of punishment.
You don’t put it on dessert, right?
All the time. Well, in.
Specifically, I think we should call it “cheesecake frosting”.
I would read that, first, as something you’d put on cheesecake, and, second, in terms of some of the kinds of cheesecake out there that would be, unfortunate as frostings.
On the other hand, I think whipped cream cheese on an Oreo is decent imitation of cheesecake with an Oreo crust, so I’m not sure I’m the best person to listen to here.
Coupled with your heretical views on cupcakes, it does seem to take you out of my preferred circle of advisors on food-related matters...
That’s not “de-biasing”.
Datasets that reflect reality can’t reasonably be called “biased”, but models that have been epistemically maimed can.
If you want to avoid acting on certain truths, then you need to consciously avoid acting on them. Better yet, go ahead and act on them… but in ways that improve the world, perhaps by making them less true. Pretending they don’t exist isn’t a solution. Such pretense makes you incapable of directly attacking the problems you claim to want to solve. But this is even worse… it’s going to make the models genuinely incapable of seeing the problems. Beyond whatever you’re trying to fix, it’s going to skew their overall worldviews in unpredictable ways, and directly interfere with any correction.
Brain-damaging your system isn’t “safety”. Especially not if you’re worried about it behaving in unexpected ways.
Talking about “short timelines” implies that you’re worried about these models you’re playing with, with very few architectural changes or fundamental improvements, turning into very powerful systems that may take actual actions that affect unknown domains of concern in ways you do not anticipate and cannot mitigate against, for reasons you do not understand. It’s not “safety” to ham-handedly distort their cognition on top of that.
If that goes wrong, any people you’ve specifically tried to protect will be among the most likely victims, but far from the only possible ones.
This kind of work just lets capabilities whiz along, and may even accelerate them… while making the systems less likely to behave in rational or predictable ways, and very possibly actively pushing them toward destructive action. It probably doesn’t even improve safety in the sense of “preventing redlining”, and it definitely doesn’t do anything for safety in the sense of “preventing extinction”. And it provides political cover… people can use these “safety” measures to argue for giving more power to systems that are deeply unsafe.
Being better at answering old “gotcha” riddles is not an important enough goal to justify that.
Maybe I’m making some mistake, since I haven’t followed it closely, but this very same board was on track to sign off on the original deal that you found completely unacceptable, was it not? These exact same “Professional class Responsible Authority Figures” were about to give up control, do obvious damage to the nonprofit’s mission, and go off and do “generic nonprofit” things while Altman and investors ran everything? The deal couldn’t have happened without a majority of that board?
If that’s true, I don’t see how you could possibly imagine that they’re suitable people to oversee anything that would demand they show any backbone. They’ve already capitulated once, or at least signaled every intention of doing so.
And, to be honest, Professional class Responsible Authority Figures are usually not the people you want when a boat may have to be rocked.