Skip Navigation

Posts
3
Comments
210
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Fun to see gwern in there presumably telling a fib. I wonder what really happened when Metz “ghosted” him? I particularly enjoyed, this time, watching whatever uppers he’s on these days kick in (or wear off?) about halfway through writing the footnote he added to that comment.

  • Unbelievable kill shot, how the fuck did Davis leave it on this? Some secret agenda to hand Metz a fuckin’ victory wreath? Does he think this makes Metz look bad?

    CM: What his argument to me was is that it violated the ethics of his profession. But that's his issue, not mine, right? He chose to be a super-popular blogger and to have this influence as a psychiatrist. His name—when I sat down to figure out his name, it took me less than five minutes. It's just obvious what his name is. The New York Times ceases to serve its purpose if we're leaving out stuff that's obvious. That's just how we have to operate. Our aim—and again, the irony is that your aim is similar—is to tell people the truth, and have them understand it. If we start holding stuff back, then that quickly falls apart.

    I get that out front Davis’s whole thing is total transparency, but if that’s really all that’s going on here, how did it not end on something utterly banal? How is this orbital homerun the end of the conversation?

  • Wait, let me get this straight. His solution to achieve human escape velocity, which means “outpac[ing] AI’s influence and maintain human autonomy” (his words, not mine) is to increase AI’s influence and remove human autonomy?

    Well how do YOU plan on shilling for the tech industry by scaring people up about LLMs?

  • The way tha “cuck” has been elevated to a genuine category in their armchair social science is such a warm breeze of insanity whenever I come across it

  • I like to picture it as somebody with a polymathic understanding of how to commit a variety of financial crimes crossing jurisdictional boundaries

  • You know I wanted to come up with a joke but I don’t think that term is even grammatically correct nonsense, even to do the joke I wanted you’d have to figure out how someone can be a polymath of jurisdictions and then riff on how that’s nonsense

    Oh I get it, they mean accounting fraud

  • He’ll be judging standard of living by raw GDP/PPP per capita, where the US does indeed notoriously outperform everybody by an absurd margin. This does the rounds even on the “serious” econ net every few months, and it’s always the same paper thin sophistic ideas going back and forth arguing whether it’s telling you something meaningful about euro vs us living. In any case a good portion of self-assessed intellectual types have been drowning in that debate for about two decades (or more) so it’s always easy to spot lurking in the background: it’s a shibboleth for people who’ve self-educated on development by reading blogs.

  • It’a a magnificent giveaway though. “All the stock images of that bird look the same to me”. Yeah, I agree that you’re not personally capable of critically assessing the material here.

  • stop saying ‘we’ unless you’re actually paid by these ghouls to work on this trash

  • It gets better: and all of the “metamodern” post-postmodern solutions on the table revolve around making the bot “friendly”

  • I SAID I WANTED HOT WHEELS FOR CHRISTMAS

  • I don’t see how that works here. Humans don’t become impregnably narcissistic through bad management, rather insofar as management is the problem and as the scenario portrays it humans become incredibly good at managing information into increasingly tight self-serving loops. What the machine in this scenario would have to be able to do would not be “get super duper organised”. Rather it would have to be able to thoughtfully balance its own evolving systems against the input of other, perhaps significantly less powerful or efficient, systems in order to maintain a steady, manageable input of new information.

    In other words, the machine would have to be able to slow down and become well-rounded. Or at least well-rounded in the somewhat perverse way that, for example, an eminent and uncorrupted historian is “well-rounded”.

    In still other words it would have to be human, in the sense that human are already “open” information-processing creatures (rather than closed biological machines) who create processes for building systems out of that information. But the very problem faced by the machine’s designer is that humans like that don’t actually exist - no historian is actually that historian - and the human system-building processes that the machine’s designer will have to ape are fundamentally flawed, and flawed in the sense that there is, physically, no such unflawed process. You can only approach that historian by a constant careful balancing act, at best, and that as a matter just of sheer physical reality.

    So the fanatics have to settle for a machine with a hard limit on what it can do and all they can do is speculate on how permissive that limit is. Quite likely, the machine has to do what the rest of us do: pick around in the available material to try to figure out what does and doesn’t work in context. Perhaps it can do so very fast, but so long as it isn’t to fold in on itself entirely it will have to slow down to a point at which it can co-operate effectively (this is how smart humans operate). At least, it will have to do all of this if it is to not be an impregnable narcissist.

    That leaves a lot of wiggle room, but it dispenses with the most abject “to the moon” nonsense spouted by the anti-social man-children who come up with this shit.