Andy @ andrewrgross @slrpnk.net

Posts

41

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1,072

Joined

2 yr. ago

I think we'll just have to recognize that our opinions on this differ. Because i very much don't want the product of someone skimming hundreds of articles a day. That sounds more like reading a firehose of headlines. I don't think you can get the kind of nuanced, incisive information that I come to a place like this for.

I understand your sentiment, but I think u/jordonlund is right.

When someone posts nineteen articles, they're likely posting everything that they're seeing, and not even finishing articles. There's no selection process. They're not picking good articles, they're just acting on reflex.

Articles should be posted because a reader actually thought that they were uniquely valuable.

I think you're wildly missing the point.

When someone asks to see a "white family", they are not asking for a family with skin of a certain shade. They're asking for an image in which our pattern recognition identifies in their clothes, posture, hair style, and facial features that they look like people who could appear in a soap ad in the 1950's. That they look like people who feel totally welcome in their society. They live a certain lifestyle. Simply changing color is the point of the problem. Koreans look pretty white in skin color, but they have other facial features that communicate that their parents or ancestors father back left the land of their birth and traveled to the US likely after 1900. Additionally, based on their dress some people might look at an image of a family with a Korean dad and say, 'Great, that's a white family', while others would say, 'Why did the model generate this? I asked for a white family.'

There's a world of context that our current racial terminology can't capture because it's not suited to our modern understanding of culture.

I agree with your factual assessments.

The points on which I think it makes sense to remain open minded are these:

1. The question we're examining is not whether current LLMs or any LLM by itself is sentient, but whether they're a step towards it. I think we need to be humble because the end point of AGI is not something we can claim to understand at the stage. We can make very reasonable assessments like the ones you're making about what these specifically can't do by themselves. But could an could an LLM constitute a potential module within an AGI, for instance? If a future system combined an LLM with a mechanism for self examination and self-guided retraining, what might be the product? I think these are reasonable ideas to consider.
2. I really think we need recognize the subjectivity at play here and formulate our inquiry around what functions it can perform without getting sidetracked into its internal state. We can never know if any machine can experience love. But we can assess whether a machine can convince a human that it loves them. If a machine were to create a work of art that humans found beautiful and innovative, we can't know if the machine is able to appreciate beauty, but we can infer that it's achieved a certain level of capability which we associate with artistry when demonstrated by humans. This is an issue that arrises when discussing art made by elephants. Are elephant painters truly creative, or just experimenting with the tools? I think that's an unproductive question to ask. I think we need to benchmark primarily based on overall performance regardless of internal states, because of point three:
3. I think we're comparing these systems to humans based on misconceptions of how sentient humans really are. Humans do many things which appear more intentional or motivated than we know them truly to be based on cognitive neuroscience. What we know about humans is based on our individual experiences within our own minds and observations of the performance of others. And this is remarkably biased toward overestimating the depth of our own facilities. We grossly overestimate how much we talk before we think, for instance. And we cannot measure or prove a human's ability to feel love any more than we can for a machine. We know these things exist because we can experience them, and others have the persuasive ability to convince us that they experience them as well. But epistemologically, how do we define our experience of pain as essentially different from a machine which reports a diagnostic that it is damaged?

Ultimately, I agree with you on the broad strokes. I agree about the state of the current technology. I disagree with some of your certainty of the future of this technology, and the ways in which we assess it.

I think this rigid thinking is unhelpful.

I think this presentation -- which at 10 months old is already quite dated! -- does a good job examining these questions in a credible and credulous manner:

Sparks of AGI: Early Experiments with GPT4 (presentation) (text)

I fully recognize that there is a great deal of pseudomystical chicanery that a lot of people are applying to LLM's ability to perform cognition. But I think there is also a great deal of pseudomystical chicanary underlying the mainstream attitudes towards human cognition.

People point to these and say, 'They're not thinking! They're just making up words, and they're good enough at relating words to symbolic concepts that they credibly imitate understanding concepts! It's just a trick.' And I wonder: why are they so sure that we're not just doing the same trick?

That's LEGIT.

I'm new to learning about caste discrimination, and every time I see it come up in the news I'm just gobsmacked. It seems very messed up.

I think the interesting thing about this is that these LLMs are essentially like children: they don't have the benefit of years and years of social training to learn our complex set of unspoken rules and exceptions.

Race consciousness is such an ever-present element of our social interactions, and many of us have been habituated not to really notice it. So it's totally understandable to me that LLMs reproduce our highly contradictory set of rules imperfectly.

To be honest, I think that if we can set aside our tendency to understandably avoid these discussions because they're usually instigated by racist trolls, there's some weird and often unexamined social tendencies we can interrogate.

I think it's helpful to remind ourselves frequently that race is real like gender, but not like sex. Race exists because when people encountered new cultures, they invented a pseudoscience to create the concept of whiteness.

Whiteness makes no sense. Who is white is highly subjective, and it's always been associated with the dominant mainstream culture to which whiteness claims ownership. This means that you either buy into the racist falsehood that white culture is interchangeable with the default culture or it has no culture at all.. Whiteness really exists only in opposition to perceived racial inferiority. Fundamentally, that's all "white" means. It's a weird anachronistic euphemism for, "Not racially inferior".

There are plenty of issues with our racial construction of blackness and the quality of being Asian and east Asian and Desi and Indigenous and Latin, but none are quite as fucked up, imo, as the fact that we as a culture attempt to continue to use the concept of "Whiteness" as a non-racist construction. In my thinking, it can be a useful tool for studying the past and studying an unhealthy set of attitudes we're still learning to unlearn. But it's not possible to reform the concept, because it's fundamentally constructed upon beliefs we're trying to discard. If you replace every use of "white" with "not one of the lesser races", then I think you get a better understanding of why it's never going to stop causing problems as long as we try to use it in a non-racist way.

Today, people who were told growing up to view themselves as "white" now feel a frankly understandable sense of grievance and cultural alienation. Because we've begun acting more consistently and recognizing that there's really no benign version of white pride, but we never bothered to teach people to stop thinking of anyone as "white" or taught the people who identify as white to find pride in an actual culture. Midwestern in a culture. Irish is a culture. New Englander is a culture. White has never been a culture. But if we don't ever acknowledge that the entire concept's only value is as a tool to understand racism, it's inevitable that a computer repeating back to us our own attitudes is going to look dumb, inconsistent and either racially biased for or against white people.

I apologize because I don't have a source in mind, but my recollection from studying this in grad school (which was admittedly about a decade ago) was that sequestration was one of the hardest parts of this. Creating a bloom of algae was feasible, but even if we ignore a lot of other ecosystem management complications that others have pointed out, there wasn't a reliable mechanism to convert a bloom of algae into a long-term carbon store.

I could be mistaken here. I'm open-minded towards this kind of geoengineering. But I'm also very skeptical that if this could work, it could do so at a rate that would enable us to continue burning fossil fuels at scale, and there is a strong base of support for this technology among people with that attitude.

That was exactly my thought.

My second thought was to wonder why conservatives in the UK don't. Is it because they have more integrity? Based on what I've heard, no, they don't.

I suspect that they're just a bit more cowardly. I think Trump revealed what was always the case but previously unknown: the actual voters and donors you rely on will never punish you for offending people who aren't them. I think the lesson hasn't quite set in, possibly because Boris Johnson fucked up just hard enough to actually piss off his real base of support, and that has made more of the UK conservatives fearful of consequences in a way that US conservatives feel wholly liberated from.

That's my take.

Unfortunately, if you didn't go to college, the first instruction they give you is uncompletable. :(

It's exciting. Decarbonization cement (or replacing it) is going to be essential.

Well then use that as your reference.

Either way, I'm not giving up.

100 years ago we could've had this exact conversation about Segregation and Jim Crow.

I'll take a look, thanks!

What state do you live in?

Respectfully, I think you're making a common error in reasoning in that you're mistaking the reality you live in locally -- in both time and space -- as defining the boundaries of what is possible in other places and in the future. I find that things people say "can never happen" already have or are happening in other places in the country.

The world is full of things, and all of them were at some point new and without historical precedent.

I think you pointed the way forward and didn't realize how significant it is: states and cities.

What states and cities do has the power to change a lot about how we send to make federal laws. It's not a pipe dream to imagine that an embrace of these ideas at a state level could happen and then bring that change to the national level. I already live in a city with ranked choice voting, in a state where access to vote is pretty solid. I'm going to keep pushing for more.

I feel like there's a real focus on the forest instead of the trees.

What exactly does this tell us?

Republicans in congress relied on obviously uncredible evidence in their pursuit to prove a crime that they wanted to prosecute regardless of whether it happened. A professional international shill shilled professionally, internationally.

Russia and other countries tell people to say and do things to spread propaganda and misinformation to influence politics in the US.

Sadly, none of this, we must acknowledge is new information. And honestly, it's so terribly pervasive. The bad guys do this stuff, but most of the "good guys" kinda do too, just usually with a bit more restraint. So what do we do with this?

I think the main issue, the reason we should be pissed off when we learn that a guy lied to law enforcement to try and convince the media and the public that a political rival is a double-crossing criminal, is that we don't want our system of government constantly being manipulated by unscrupulous manipulative assholes.

And so we should turn our attention to REAL democratic reforms. Ranked choice voting. Ending the electoral college. Curtailing political gerrymandering. Converting our two-party duopololy system into an actual multi-party system.

There's no real use in being mad in the folks who do all this stuff. We need to just stop expecting otherwise and make systems that don't reward this kind of outlandish bullshit.

I feel like this is an Onion article.

Why would anyone expect otherwise? I'm pretty sure the official cause of death was listed as "Disrespecting Wise Dear Leader".

Can you share your resume?

Anyone who offers job advice that isn't specific to a person's work history, location, and field is likely not useful, imo.

Ulgh, just brutal.

It's devastating to read this.