I fear it would be a stupid mistake to pass on the opportunity to inquire: Where does one find the form?
nim
Karma: 1,222
Maybe. I think there’s a level on which we ultimately demand that AI’s perception of values to be handled through a human lens. If you zoom out too far from the human perspective, things start getting really weird. For instance, if you try to reason for the betterment of all life in a truly species-agnostic way, you start getting highly plausible arguments for leaving bacterial or fungal infections untreated, as the human host is only one organism but the pathogens number in the millions of individuals.(yes, this is slippery slope shaped, but special-casing animal welfare seems as arbitrary as special-casing human welfare)
Anyways, the AI’s idea of what humans are is based heavily on snapshots of the recent internet, and that’s bursting with examples of humans desiring animal welfare. So if a model trained on that understanding of humanity’s goals attempts to reason about whether it’s good to help animals, it’d better conclude that humans will probably benefit from animal welfare improvements, or something has gone horribly wrong. Do you think it’s realistically plausible for humanity to develop into a species which we recognize as still human, but no individual prefers happy cute animals over sad ones? I don’t.
“Humanity” is a weird word at the moment. I think it’s more of a “descendants of our ancestors” thing—I think LLMs trained on humanity’s content should probably be viewed as related to us in important ways, ways that a hypothetical LLM trained only on interaction with octopi or slime molds would not be as related. But this may be a weird view, so let’s ignore it henceforth.
I think the “benefit humanity” rule is actually much broader than you’re reading it as:
Secondly, as an animal advocate, I want to preserve the opportunity for AI to make a post that will benefit animal welfare, even if the post doesn’t benefit humanity.
Your welfare is intertwined with that of animals. You are distressed by their suffering. Therefore, improvements in animal welfare would be expected to cause improvements in your welfare. I think an AI making a post which benefits animal welfare would benefit humanity, because it would be good for all the humans who will feel better in a world where animals suffer less. To put it simply, I claim that all posts which benefit animal welfare in a way that’s legible to you are also benefiting you. Kind of a big claim, but I can’t come up with a counterexample—maybe you can?
Since there are humans who care about AI wellbeing and are upset by the possibility that AIs could be suffering needlessly, it seems to follow that a post which reduced preventable suffering for AIs would benefit those humans.
The rule isn’t demanding that posts benefit ALL of humanity. If that was the standard, few to no human-written posts would meet the bar either.
Thank you for sharing this! Does it scale well with varying levels of physical activity for you? Some dietary things tend to be great at higher activity levels and fall apart at lower ones, and vice versa. I’m curious roughly what your current activity level is looking like and whether the boy slop diet thing has worked well at higher/lower levels as well.
Since this post seems a potential gathering place for other extremely easy and nutritionally adequate recipes, I’ll also leave my boring-food go-tos here—these aren’t as cheap as yours but they’re similarly easy:
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Bachelor bowls: can of black beans, rinsed. Can of sweet corn. Optional, tiny can of olives. Optional, thaw some frozen hummus or guac (costco sells single serves fresh, both of which freeze great). Mix, heat if desired, add salsa (canned is fine). I find that 2 cans makes 2 16oz mason jars of food, and one of those jars is a meal for me. A jar of this is my go-to when I have to pack a lunch.
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Oatmeal. Put a bit of butter and a cup or so of steel cut oats in a pot, toast them till they smell nice. Add some salt at some point—start with about a half teaspoon per cup of oats if you like measuring things. Add 3-4 cups water per cup of oats (I add boiling water, because it’s easy to make in the electric kettle and parallelizes the “heat water” and “toast oats” steps, but you can add cold water and let it take longer). Optionally, add some amount of dried fruit. Simmer, stirring occasionally, for 20-30mins until you like the texture. Refrigerate it right in the pot. When hungry, scoop some into a bowl, add a bit of milk or water, microwave till hot. This is my favorite dish to eat as a brain reset for a couple days when I lose track of the difference between feeling hungry and feeling bored.
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The instant pot thing: Put whatever vegetables like being well cooked (potatoes, carrots, etc) into instant pot. Add whatever cut of lean meat was on sale. Dump in a can of enchilada sauce. Cook on the meat cycle. Canned enchilada sauce gets the seasoning right and still tastes good after being exposed to high heats. I’ve tried it with other canned sauces and some of them are ruined by the heat.
One aspect common to all these easy foods is that they don’t require much management of perishables. Your tomatoes are canned; the beef can be frozen; the veggies should be frozen. I think people who talk about healthy eating tend to underestimate the difficulty that some people have managing perishables, especially when cooking for 1, so I appreciate that you’ve tacitly circumvented the whole problem in your advice :)
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“things that I expect I will be glad I did once I’ve done them”
I like this definition because it allows 2 different routes toward improvement, which you’ll probably need to mix to get the best results:
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Increase time spent on the activities which are already on your “productive things” list. Taking this to the extreme would likely eliminate load-bearing forms of rest, and drastically increase burnout risks.
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Improve recovery activities to bring them from “unproductive” to “productive”. You hint at this with reading a good book making the “productive” list but reading a disappointing book falling into “unproductive”.
The lowest-hanging fruit for me tend to be in (2): When I’m able to give myself an alternative activity that’s equally easy but less regrettable compared to an “unproductive” habit, and notice when to do it, I can often get equivalent results for the function that the bad habit was serving.
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It certainly is not true on Earth.
Where is it cheaper per item to buy the same food or household good singly rather than in bulk?
Where can you get a single roll of the same toilet paper for less per roll than getting it in a bigger pack? Ok, now what if you need TP and the cash at your disposal at that moment is less than the cost of the bulk pack but more than the cost of the single roll?
When is it cheaper (time + money) to cook one meal at a time versus meal prep for the whole week? OK, now what if you can’t afford the whole week’s worth of food at once?
We might be talking about poverty at different orders of magnitude, and you might be writing off a lot of failures to purchase efficiently as “skill issue”… but being poor in skills and the capacity to hone them is, itself, a form of poverty.
Invert your thesis, from “the rich are so rich because they spend less money” to “the poor are so poor because they spend more money”, and it becomes much more defensible. Boots theory captures the “being poor is expensive” element that’s true in Ankh-Morkpork and also true on Earth—look at the markups on any household item when it’s sold individually rather than in bulk, and then consider what happens to people who don’t have what it takes to plan ahead and make bulk purchases.
If we’re being particularly literal about things, Ankh-Morpork canonically lacked fiat currency until the events of Making Money, so we might want to consider the other ways in which their economics functions differently from our own. They also have magic, and the deities who implement their laws of nature sometimes pop round for a cup of tea. So I wouldn’t rule out that Vimes’s use of boots theory as a full explanation for economics could be less descriptive than prescriptive—he lives in a world where enough people believing anything hard enough makes it real.
IMO, excellent blogging happens when people notice connections between ideas while experiencing the world. Good blogging often feels like a side effect of the author’s learning process. The author was there when they formed an idea, there when they had experiences with the concept of the idea, there when they revised the idea… so they can report on the experience of making a lasting change to their understanding. Or if not directly reporting on the experience, they can at least generate novel entropy which increases a human reader’s odds of following the author to a particular new or interesting concept which might not be directly transmissible through language.
LLMs appear to lack the kind of “background” thought process that causes one to notice connections one isn’t explicitly seeking. They aren’t really “there” during the processes in which they assimilate information, at least not in the way that I’m still myself while reading a textbook.
I think if we wanted to get blogs out of LLMs that are good in the ways that human blogs are good, the most promising approach would be to try generating blogs as a side effect of their training processes rather than by prompting the finished assistants. But that touches the highly secretive stuff that the stewards of the most powerful models are least inclined to share with the world.
To step back a bit, though, do we need LLMs to be good at blogging? If we model blogs as demonstrations or tutorials of ways you can use a human brain, it doesn’t seem at all obvious that they’d keep their benefits when generated without a human in the loop.
Don’t people notice the ways that seeing themselves engage in particular behaviors updates their own self-image? The payoff for being polite to language users is that it makes me see myself as the kind of person who is generally polite. The results of being mean and bullying would be that I would come to see myself as the kind of person who is okay with engaging in mean and bullying behavior to get what they want.
Or maybe everybody else has a skill at compartmentalizing which I lack? But I absolutely catch myself applying prompting strategies to human conversation, because the part of me which does that self-concept feedback loop doesn’t differentiate between my behaviors toward animate audiences versus my behaviors toward “inanimate” ones.
Yes please, more please!
Your writing is more enjoyable than that of many native English speakers, and I am one.
Will you do a sequence with more stories?
Tell them the way that’s fun to tell, like here, and they leak rationality. The “systematized winning” kind, because it’s all rooted in finding ways not to die in situations where statistics would suggest you really ought to.
Think, at least a little, before you act in a new or complex way.
Oh. Is this what they meant by “think before you act”? Because thinking before every action goes exactly as well as you, careful author of that sentence, would expect.
There are at most as many gods as people.
why can’t we all have unique pantheons?
Intentional symbolism to place the singularity, start of a whole new everything, in the springtime of the second year?
I would try playing it. Will be interesting to see how it plays at a mostly non-rationalist table :)
We put decades of work into getting software to behave less like databases, and then act surprised when it doesn’t behave like a database. C’est la vie.
what set of exercises do you prefer to strengthen and stabilize the rotator cuffs?
I’m not near any gyms and have plenty of space, so I strongly prefer the safety profile of barbell + squat rack. If something goes wrong and I lose control of the weight, it’s good to know that there’s no way for it to hit me. And part of progressing is sometimes trying a weight that you’re only 80% or 90% sure you can actually lift successfully—I’d much rather the failure mode be clank “whoops!” than however many pounds of iron to the face.
I also find that it’s easier to track whether I’m using good form with a barbell vs dumbbells. The cues to moving a bar correctly are to keep it level and trace the correct path in a plane with it (usually straight up and down), whereas the cues to moving dumbbells correctly are… something about simultaneously tracking the position and orientation of two separate objects in 3-space? Definitely more complicated to keep track of all the moving parts when there are twice as many.
Barbells are also a compromise between fixed and adjustable dumbbells. You’ll probably want different weights for different exercises, and the exact weight you want for each will slowly increase over time. With a barbell, you modify the two ends to change the weight, and you can get plates as small as a few ounces if you need to increase the weight super slowly. With dumbbells, either you use fixed increments and have to store a lot of pairs, or you use adjustable ones and have to modify twice as many ends for each weight change.
If your access to equipment, space, and trainers is different from mine, though, your conclusions about the best options for training will likely be different as well.
eliminate predation.
Ok, I’ll bite—who was doing the predation, and what are you suggesting ought to happen to those creatures?
I agree that adding preventable new suffering is bad, but I don’t follow that into any obviousness that it’s good to meddle deeply in nature’s feedback loops. To oversimplify, let’s imagine a button that releases a virus which painlessly inflicts all living beings with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pain. I think it would be bad to push that button, but the way you’re describing suffering creates a mental model for me in which you would push it. I’ve probably missed something about your perspective that makes it seem obvious to you why that wouldn’t be the case, but I hope the example highlights which important bit turns out to need to be said out loud to get the idea across to others.
guerrilla, not gorilla, warfare :)
a good read. thank you.
have you ruled out the powdered peanut butter options? They tend to come in at under half the calories of regular PB, while getting pretty close in replicating the flavor and texture. Assuming you’re serious about the psychological impact of removing all peanut butter products from your diet, at least.
Feels to me like at the moment, the “character layer” handles transforming a “you” into an “I”. I find it conspicuously absent in smaller models running locally, though maybe the absence is just more obvious with CoT than without it.
I’ve also noticed that the “training data” we get as humans is primarily focusing on or contextualized relative to ourselves, whereas the parts you’re referring to as ground layers don’t really have a concept of the LLM as an entity so they tend to assume they’re humans on that level.
Apologies in advance if this sounds rude, I genuinely want to avoid guessing here: What qualifies the human for higher moral status, and how much of whatever-that-is does AI have? Are we into vibes territory for quantifying such things, or is there a specific definition of moral status that captures the “human life > bacterial life” intuition? Does it follow through the middle where we privilege pets and cattle over what they eat, but below ourselves?
Maybe I’m just not thinking hard enough about it, but at the moment, every rationale I can come up with for why humans are special breaks in one of 2 ways:
if we test for something too abstract, AI has more of it, or at least AI would score better on tests for it than we would, or
If we test for something too concrete (humans are special because we have the DNA we currently do! humans are special because we have the culture we currently do! etc) we exclude prospective distant descendants of ourselves (say, 100k years from now) whom we’d actually want to define as also morally privileged in the ways that we are.