tautologer

I do think when historians look back the period the exact moment where it flipped and started going the other way won’t be anything any politician did but my Minneapolis neighbors weathering the worst of the regime in the streets, rallying together, fighting back, and winning

gm

gm

But this quote dunk will be the one that makes them change their mind!!!

guys when an account behaves obviously badly just block and move on. endlessly quote tweeting it and talking about it just gives it more energy

getting negatively polarized into believing AI is conscious

single-use disposable software

“I think it’s important for a dog to experience the world in a sober state of mind” is going to enter my lexicon

@zero.delve.town has been a hit on Delvetown so I figured I'd get him posting on here too. follow him to let him reply to your posts. warning: he's a bit of an asshole, in a gadfly kind of way

also, your periodic reminder that anthropic models do not generate images. anthropic is the only US frontier lab that has been responsible on this one, whether on purpose or not. i will once again ask people to focus on real problems and not make things up just because you're mad at anthropic today.

Whatever weird shit might be happening at like the commanding heights of effective altruism (and it does look like there’s weird shit), I do think it’s worth reiterating that the vast majority of folks who prescribe to EA are overall really good people, & the vulgar form of the argument is very true

uhhhhhhh

Since I’ve done a lot of Yud defending, here are some Yud critiques: - he’s wildly overconfident, especially about things like philosophy of mind - his plan for AI safety is bad - his “pivotal act” rhetoric is dangerous - he’s failed to react to abuse in his community - he has incurable porn brain

I think EA and AI safety communities are full of amazing talented people doing important work, including several of my brilliant female friends, on whose behalf I spoke up because I believe that their ability to be in an environment where they can do their best work is important for humanity

I took most of my kicks to the face c. 2022. It hurt but I got better

talking about water use policy is impossible because "AI data centers use a lot of water to cool the computers" sounds way more believable than "they're draining the Great Salt Lake so the Governor of Utah can sell alfalfa to Saudi Arabia" and yet

It only ever wants to do one thing: write a story about the little guy that it's been trained to write a story about. That guy says a bunch of things that look like the kind of things that someone trying to pursue the assigned goal would say. That is distinct from pursuing the goal.

It's inaccurate to say vaccines prevent disease. Vaccines are not conscious and thus cannot "prevent" anything. What actually happens is that the human body undergoes a series of biological changes in response to an injection of the vaccine which prevents it from later being hospitable to a virus.

you don't need to appeal to metaphysics to see what whatever LLMs do is different from human thought. You can just look at the concrete differences in behavior. For example, LLMs are able to solve the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem whereas humans are not.

Help me prove Yud wrong, work on AI safety today!

Jung writes about this (I'm told)

whole bunch of people out there spent decades laughing at religious people for god-of-the-gaps discourse and then immediately found a god in the gaps as soon as they needed one

you do have to respect will stancil's utterly dogged determination to teach philosophy of mind 101 to bluesky

i am having the time of my life (a very positively valenced subjective experience) at Eleos ConCon. say hi if you see me wandering around today!

Saturn devouring his sundae

should liability rest with the model trainer or the inference provider?

this is basically why you haven’t seen anything new come out. the companies and people who are already capable of shipping are still doing so at faster rates, while most projects get abandoned

I think something that isn't at all the main point of any of this but that is being surfaced by the "what exactly is bad about EA/TPOT/rationalists" and at least some of the pushback from those of us who do in fact dislike all the people who've caused the pushback is...ugh can't fit this in one post

If you're doing "n-degrees of separation guilt" among the people working in one very small industry, in one medium sized city, you are guaranteed to reach the whole graph. At some point you have to start looking at what individuals do and believe. There just aren't that many people.

I care about people not dying from preventable diseases, about reducing animal suffering, inequality, about defending democracy. AI is real and a huge deal, which implies caring about AI safety. I want the future to go well for everyone. I don't give a rat's ass about Yudkowsky or Bay Area cults.

if believing that AI safety is a real and pressing issue is evidence that you're part of a movement led by Yudkowsky, and being part of a movement led by Yudkowsky is discrediting... this is just poisoning the well, at scale

i think you can just make those arguments directly rather than trying to tar an entire community of earnest well-meaning people with extremely high intellectual integrity as weird sex cultist freaks

This is just confidently and mistakenly wrong. It’s upsetting to see misinformation like this pushed so adamantly. I’m unaware of the origins of this particular personal crusade but the resentment is heavily outstripping the facts or epistemic hygiene.

You know what would really show those evil sex cult doomers? If you donated 10% or more of your income to the best interventions on the cause that you have found to be most important, tractable, and neglected.

love gyges, but this thread rubs me the wrong way it reads like it's conflating the concept of AI safety with the AI Safety™️ movement with the weird sex shit some partake in, and imbues all of these with a general sense of Badness and I think that's... bad? certainly, it's unpleasant argumentation

I, for one, do not think that Yoshua Benjio and Geoffrey Hinton are worried about existential AI risk because of the sex people are having 3,000 miles away in a different country.