Or as a possible more concrete prompt if preferred: “Create a cost benefit analysis for EU directive 2019⁄904, which demands that bottle caps of all plastic bottles are to remain attached to the bottles, with the intention of reducing littering and protecting sea life.
Output:
key costs and benefits table
economic cost for the beverage industry to make the transition
expected change in littering, total over first 5 years
QALYs lost or gained for consumers throughout the first 5 years”
In the EU there’s some recent regulation about bottle caps being attached to bottles, to prevent littering. (this-is-fine.jpg)
Can you let the app come up with a good way to estimate the cost benefit ratio of this piece of regulation? E.g. (environmental?) benefit vs (economic? QALY?) cost/drawbacks, or something like that. I think coming up with good metrics to quantify here is almost as interesting as the estimate itself.
I have the vague impression that this is true for me as well, and I remember having made that same claim (that spontaneous conversations at conferences seem maybe most valuable) to a friend when traveling home from an EAGx. My personal best guess: planned conversations are usually 30 minutes long, and while there is some interest based filtering going on, there’s usually no guarantees you vibe well with the person. Spontaneous encounters however have pretty variable length, so the ones where you’re not vibing will just be over naturally quickly, whereas the better connections will last longer. So my typical “spontaneous encounter minute” tends to be more enjoyable than my typical “planned 1-1 minute”. But hard to say how this transfers to instrumental value.
I made a somewhat similar point in a post earlier this year, but much more superficial and less technical. So it was nice to read your deeper exploration of the topic.
Did this already happen? :)
Almost two years after writing this post, this is still a concept I encounter relatively often. Maybe less so in myself, as, I like to think, I have sufficiently internalized the idea to not fall into the “fake alternative trap” anymore very often. But occasionally this comes up in conversations with others, when they’re making plans, or we’re organizing something together.
With some distance, and also based on some of the comments, I think there is room for improvement:
the Gym membership example is a tricky one, as “getting a gym membership to go to the gym” is, for many people, also kind of a fake option, as they get the membership and pay for it, but still end up not going to the gym anyway. That example works for people who are more likely to go to the gym than to work out at home. But if you would in expectation exercise no more at the gym than you would at home, then paying a gym membership is not helpful.
Maybe an example that applies to more people would be studying at the (university) library vs studying at home? The former works better for many. So studying at home would potentially be a fake alternative. Just because you could in principle study for 10 hours a day at home, doesn’t mean you actually end up doing that.
I was and still am a bit unhappy about the “Option A—Option B—Do nothing” diagram. Somehow it’s harder to read than its simplicity would suggest.
The AI generated title image doesn’t really convey the idea of of the post. But back then, AI image generation was still more limited than today, and it was difficult enough to even get that image to look acceptable.
But besides that, I think it holds up. It’s a relevant concept, “fake alternatives” seems like a good handle to represent it, and the post is short and focused.
For people who like guided meditations: there’s a small YouTube channel providing a bunch of secular AI-generated guided meditations of various lengths and topics. More are to come, and the creator (whom I know) is happy about suggestions. Three examples:
They are also available in podcast form here.
I wouldn’t say these meditations are necessarily better or worse than any others, but they’re free and provide some variety. Personally, I avoid apps like Waking Up and Headspace due to both their imho outrageous pricing model and their surprising degree of monotony. Insight Timer is a good alternative, but the quality varies a lot and I keep running into overly spiritual content there. Plus there’s obviously thousands and thousands of guided meditations on YouTube, but there too it’s hit and miss. So personally I’m happy about this extra source of a good-enough-for-me standard.
Also, in case you ever wanted to hear a guided meditation on any particular subject or in any particular style, I guess you can contact the YouTube channel directly, or tell me and I’ll forward your request.
I’m a bit torn regarding the “predicting how others react to what you say or do, and adjust accordingly” part. On the one hand this is very normal and human and makes sense. It’s kind of predictive empathy in a way. On the other hand, thinking so very explicitly about it and trying to steer your behavior in a way so as to get the desired reaction out of another person also feels a bit manipulative and inauthentic. If I knew another person would think that way and plan exactly how they interacted with me, I would find that quite off-putting. But maybe the solution is just “don’t overdo it”, and/or “only use it in ways the other person would likely consent to” (such as avoiding to accidentally say something hurtful).
My take on this is that patching the more “obvious” types of jailbreaking and obfuscation already makes a difference and is probably worth it (as long as it comes at no notable cost to the general usefulness of the system). Sure, some people will put in the effort to find other ways, but the harder it is, and the fewer little moments of success you have when first trying it, the fewer people will get into it. Of course one could argue that the worst outcomes come from the most highly motivated bad actors, and they surely won’t be deterred by such measures. But I think even for them there may be some path dependencies involved where they only ended up in their position because over the years, while interacting with LLMs, they ended up running into a bunch of just ready enough jailbreaking scenarios that kept their interest up. Of course that’s an empirical question though.
Some other comments already discussed the issue that often neither A nor B are necessarily correct. I’d like to add that there are many cases where the truth, if existent in any meaningful way, depends on many hidden variables, and hence A may be true in some circumstances, and B in some other circumstances, and it’s a mistake to look for “the one static answer”. Of course the question “when are A or B correct?” / “What does it depend on?” are similarly hard questions. But it’s possible that this different framing can already help, as inquiring why the two sides believe what they believe can sometimes uncover these hidden variables, and it becomes apparent that the two sides’ “why”s are not always opposite sides of a single axis.
An argument against may be that for some people there’s probably a risk of getting addicted / losing control. I’m not familiar with to what degree it’s possible to predict such tendencies in advance, but for some people that risk may well outweigh any benefits of arbitrate opportunities or improvements to their calibration.
Note from the future: I asked a bunch of LLMs for Terry Pratchett quotes on the human stomach, and while there’s no guarantee any of them are actual non-hallucinated quotes (in different conversations I got many different ones while no single one came up twice), I think they’re all pretty good:
”All he knew was that his stomach had just started investigating some of the more revolutionary options available to it.”
“The stomach is smarter than the mind, which is why it likes to make all the important decisions.”
″His stomach was making the kind of noises that normally precede the arrival of a self-propelled meal.”
“His stomach felt like it was trying to digest a live weasel while attempting to escape through his boots.”
“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. And the trouble with having an empty stomach is that it wants food all the time.”
“The stomach is an essential part of the nervous system. It tells the brain what it wants far more clearly than the brain manages to tell it.”
“The human stomach is an amazing thing. It can stretch to accommodate all sorts of things. In theory, anyway. It just doesn’t appreciate it when you try to prove it.”
There’s a nice board + online game called Codenames. The basic idea is: you have two teams, each team split into two roles, the spymaster and the operatives. All players see an array of 25 cards with a single word on each of them. Everybody sees the words, but only the spymasters see the color of these cards. They can be blue or red, for the two teams, or white for neutral. The teams then take turns. Each time, the spymaster tries to come up with a single freely chosen word that would then allow their operatives to select, by association to that word, as large as possible a number of cards of their team’s color. The spymaster hence communicates that word, as well as the number of cards to be associated with that word, to the rest of their team. The operatives then discuss amongst each other which cards are most likely to fit that provided word[1].
I’ve played this game with a number of people, and noticed that many seem to play this in “forward” mode: spymasters often just try to find some plausible word that matches some of their team’s cards, almost as if they were trying to solve the problem: if somebody saw what I saw, they should agree this word makes sense. Whereas the better question would be: which word, if my team heard it, would make them choose the cards that have our team’s color? And the operatives on the other hand usually just check plainly which cards fit this word best? But almost nobody asks themselves if the selection of cards I’ve picked now really is the one the spymaster had in mind, would they have picked the word that they did?
To name a concrete example of the latter point, let’s say the spymaster said the word “transportation” and the number 2, so you know you’re looking for exactly two cards with some word on them that relates to transportation. And after looking at all available cards, there are three candidates: “wheel”, “windshield” and “boat”. Forward reasoning would allow basically any 2 out of these 3 cards, so you basically had to guess. But with inverse reasoning you would at least notice that, if “wheel” and “windshield” were the two words the spymaster was hinting at, they would most certainly have used “car” rather than “transportation”. But as they did not, in fact, choose “car”, you can be pretty sure that “boat” should be among your selection, so you can at least be pretty sure about that one word.
Of course one explanation for all of this may be that Codenames is, after all, just a game, and doing all this inverse reasoning is a bit effortful. Still it made me realize how rarely people naturally go into “inverse mode”, even in such a toy setting where it would be comparably clean and easy to apply.
I guess explaining the rules of a game is another problem that can be approached in forward or inverse ways. The forward way would just be to explain the rules in whichever way seems reasonable to you as someone familiar with the game. Whereas the inverse way would be to think about how you can best explain things in a way such that somebody who has no clue about the game will quickly get an idea of what’s going on. I certainly tried to do the latter, but, ehhh, who knows if I succeeded.
Without having thought much about it, I would think that it’s a) pretty addictive and b) “scales well”. Many forms of consumption have some ~natural limit, e.g. you can only eat so much food, going to the movies or concerts or whatever takes some energy and you probably wouldn’t want to do this every day. Even addictive activities like smoking tend to have at least somewhat of a cap on how much you spend on it. Whereas gambling (which sports betting probably basically is to many people) potentially can just eat up all your savings if you let it.
So it would at least seem that it has much more potential to be catastrophic for individuals with low self control, even though that’s a different story than the average effect on household investment, I guess.
While much of this can surely happen to varying degrees, I think an important aspect in music is also recognition (listening to the same great song you know and like many times with some anticipation), as well as sharing your appreciation of certain songs with others. E.g. when hosting parties, I usually try to create a playlist where for each guest there are a few songs in there that they will recognize and be happy to hear, because it has some connection to both of us. Similarly, couples often have this meme of “this is our song!”, which throws them back into nostalgic memories of how they first met.
None of this is to disagree with the post though. I mostly just wanted to point out that novelty and “personal fit” are just two important aspects in any person’s music listening experience, and I think it’s unlikely these two aspects will dominate the future of music that much.
Downvoted for 3 reasons:
The style strikes me as very AI-written. Maybe it isn’t—but the very repetitive structure looks exactly like the type of text I tend to get out of ChatGPT much of the time. Which makes it very hard to read.
There are many highly superficial claims here without much reasoning to back them up. Many claims of what AGI “would” do without elaboration. “AGI approaches challenges as problems to be solved, not battles to be won.”—first, why? Second, how does this help us when the best way to solve the problem involves getting rid of humans?
Lastly, I don’t get the feeling this post engages with the most common AI safety arguments at all. Neither does it with evidence from recent AI developments. How do you expect “international agreements” with any teeth in the current arms race? When we don’t even get national or state level agreements. While Bing/Sydney was not an AGI, it clearly showed that much of what this post dismisses as anthropocentric projections is realistic, and, currently, maybe even the default of what we can expect of AGI as long as it’s LLM-based. And even if you dismiss LLMs and think of more “Bostromian” AGIs, that still leaves you with instrumental convergence, which blows too many holes into this piece to leave anything of much substance.