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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • Obligatory note that, speaking as a rationalist-tribe member, to a first approximation nobody in the community is actually interested in the Basilisk and hasn’t been for at least a decade.

    Sure, but that doesn't change that the head EA guy wrote an OP-Ed for Time magazine that a nuclear holocaust is preferable to a world that has GPT-5 in it.

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    "The Subprime AI Crisis" - Ed Zitron on the bubble's impending collapse
  • Microsoft is making laptops with dedicated Copilot buttons.

    I think they'd rather burn their company to the ground, all the while telling their customers that they just needed to wait a little while longer, rather than admit that they got it wrong.

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    Some Quick and Dirty Thoughts on "The empty brain"
  • Well, we could argue that computers don't really "compute," either. What a computer does is measure the flow of electrons through a transistor, albeit billions of them. If the flow of electrons passes an arbitrary threshold on a certain transistor, then we call it a "1". If it doesn't, we call it a "0". The "computation" is just us interpreting the flow of elections into something more useful. It was explained to me that the "threshold" was over and under 5 volts, but I think if you put 5 volts into a modern transistor it would just fry it.

    Obviously, because our brains are made of cells instead of silicon transistors, we wouldn't "compute" the same way a transistor does. If we decide that computation is only something that transistors can do, then obviously the brain couldn't compute, but, for now, that line would be arbitrary.

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    Some Quick and Dirty Thoughts on "The empty brain"
  • His main major piece of evidence for this is a basic experiment, where he has a student draw two images of dollar bills - one from memory, and one with a real dollar bill as reference - and compare the two.

    Unsurprisingly, the image made with a reference blows the image from memory out of the water every time, which Epstein uses to argue against any notion of the image of a dollar bill (or anything else, for that matter) being stored in one’s brain like data in a hard drive.

    To be frank, it feels like I'm being told that the Riemann hypothesis is incorrect on the basis that 1 + 1 = 2

    Sure, maybe brains don't actually compute anything, but "Our memory is faulty" would be the first step in getting to the evidence, not the evidence itself, assuming "our memory is faulty" is even the direction we need to go.

    It could easily be argued, with just as much evidence, that our brains prioritized efficiency over accuracy with its algorithms and that's why it's harder to recall an accurate image of a dollar bill.

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