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M. Y. Zuo
Karma: 586
After an unknown amount of political influence was expended…. so I don’t really see how this is useful information, unless there’s some way to know all the players involved and approximately gauge the influence expended for each?
How do you know “the field is wide open” in the first place?
It seems to take a lot of political influence to get any change pushed through at all… even for minor technical amendments to regulation, which suggests it is a very closed field for anyone not willing to spend a lifetime of their political capital (and that of their closest million friends) on it.
There clearly are bots capable of typing this out… unless you’ve never browsed through twitter/X before? (which seems very implausible considering your >6y old account)
A meaningful non bot explanation would contain some reason(s) for the opinion. I don’t think you need me to enumerate but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt: Usually provided in the form of a logical argument, linked sources, comparison, etc…
Suprisingly 6 different users downvoted a straightforward comment without explanation… so I imagine that also indicates a bot problem which has to be factored in, (or at least users replicating bot behavior)
Isn’t it logically impossible to determine this, without there being a widely accepted definition of “Artifical Intelligence” in the first place? (accepted by all relevant parties)
The bar is whether or not in expectation and on the margin do they provide positive externalities, and the answer is clearly yes.
Can you link the actual argument/source backing this claim?
It doesn’t seem obvious at all why that must be the case on a national or global scale.
Does experimenting always provide a positive externality 100% of the time? Or does it sometimes generate negative externalities too?
Yeah those numbers look fairly plausible based on my own experiences… there may be a flattening of the curve, but it’s still noticeably going up.
But wouldn’t roughly half the population always have an above average amount of emotional insecurity?
Sure the difference between the extremes can shrink… but after a few generations, the new normal will be taken as the new baseline and the new condition to be written about by a Kaj Sotala 2 on the LW 2 of that generation… So after many cycles of this it seems the entirety of mankind will be homogeneous.
Well as the first few pararagphs of the text suggests, the median ‘AI Safety’ advocate over time has been barely sentient, relative to other motivated groups, when it comes to preventing certain labels from being co-opted by those groups…. so it seems unlikely they will become so many standard deviations above average in some other aspect at any point in the future.
Because the baseline will also change in the future.
So then what is forcing you to attach so many fears to this or that?
Speaking frankly as mostly an outside observer/commentator this sounds too cultish and too similar to doom posting.
All the words posted on LW so far are just that, words… Any attached meanings, projections, implications, etc., are done so by fallible people similar to you.
So why behave as if the sky is falling?
There still are reasons and arguments, probably very many, yet undiscovered. And that’s not limited to the pros and cons of ‘AI’. (I’m not even sure if there is a widely accepted definition of ‘AI’ that doesn’t cause epistemological problems)
So if you believe you have a mission, then keep on working at that as mentioned, without the trembling in fear in any direction.
Once you take into account real world factors, such as an expanding userbase leading to less average credibility per user, multiplying political positions, etc… which are all pretty much unavoidable due to regression to the mean…
It really becomes ever closer to an effective blanket ban, to at least try to maintain the same average quality. (Asssuming that is a goal.)
To extrapolate it to an extreme scenario, if the userbase suddenly 100X in size, then even many things considered prosaic might have to be prohibited because the userbase, on average, literally wouldn’t be capable of evaluating discussion beyond a mediocore subreddit otherwise.
Sometimes politics IS the core issue, or at least an important underlying cause of the core issue, so a blanket ban on discussing it is a very crude tool.
Because it’s effectively banning any substantial discussion on a wide range of topics, and instead replacing it, at best, with a huge pile of euphemisms and seemingly bizarre back and forths. And at worst, nothing at all.
So user competence as a factor is unlikely to be completely seperate.
Or to look at it from the other angle, in an ideal world with ideal forum participants, there would very likely be a different prevailing norm.
It seems contradictory. If LW users believe that the userbase is not competent enough on average to avoid tangential but divisive politics, then why do they believe the ’karma’ average decided by the same, matters?
It’s like a superposition of two extremes:
At one extreme there’s Reddit where a high karma is more of an anti-signal, and having extra karma beyond a pretty low threshold actually increase reader’s suspicions that it’s fluff or unusually deceiving…
At the other extreme, there are traditional old BBS forums with no karma or scoring system whatsoever. And any formal distinction is a huge positive signal.
Why do a lot of the “External reviews of “Alignment faking in large language models”” read like they were also written, or edited, by LLMs?
Are people expected to take “reviews” done seemingly pro forma at face value?
I would perhaps go even farther, most, maybe all, people don’t have any ‘sincere ethics’ whatsoever with a sharp boundary line, it’s nearly always quite muddled.
At least judging by actions.
Which upon reflection makes it sorta amazing any complex polity functions at all.
And in any case it’s probably safer to assume in business dealings that the counterparty is closer to the 50th percentile than to the 99.99th percentile.
For a test that can give certainty to claims there’s something more than that going on somewhere in the LLM. Since the OP only indicated ~90% confidence.
Otherwise it’s hard to see how it can be definitely considered ‘consciousness’ in the typical sense we ascribe to e.g. other LW readers.
Is there a definitive test? Or any prospects of such in the foreseeable future?
Such that a well informed reader can be completely confident it’s not just very fancy pattern recognition and word prediction underneath…
Can you clarify what exactly is the argument you used? For why the extinction risk is much higher than most (all?) other things vying for their attention, such as asteroid impacts, WMDs, etc…