blakestacey @ blakestacey @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

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James Gleick on "The Lie of AI":

https://around.com/the-lie-of-ai/

Nothing new for regulars here, I suspect, but it might be useful to have in one's pocket.

They gave him a thread in which to complain about being banned... Are these people polyamorous just because they don't know how to break up?

From the comments:

Finally, I dislike the arrogant, brash, confident, tone of many posts on LessWrong.

Hmm, OK. Where might this be going?

Plausibly, I think a lot of this is inherited from Eliezer, who is used to communicating complex ideas to people less intelligent and/or rational than he is. This is not the experience of a typical poster on LessWrong, and I think it's maladaptive for people to use Eliezer's style and epistemic confidence in their own writings and thinking.

From Gwern's "solution":

Ophelia goes mad and forgets being in love with Hamlet

Dafuq?

One of the most striking aspects of the Dracula interpretation of SD is that SD turns out to be alluding to it indirectly, by making parallel allusions—the opening chapters of Dracula allude to the same parts of Hamlet that SD does! This clinches the case for SD-as-Dracula, as this is too extraordinary a coincidence to be accidental.

Yes, two different stories both alluding to the most quoted work in English goddamn literature can't be a coincidence. It's not like the line "there are more things in Heaven and Earth..." has been repeated so often that even Wolfe's narrator calls it "hackneyed"... Hold on, I'm getting a message, just let me press my finger to my imaginary earpiece....

I would say myself that Wolfe's alluding to a line rather than quoting it exactly serves to call up the whole feel of Hamlet, rather than a single moment. It evokes the Gothic wrongness, the inner turmoil paired with outer tumolt, the appearances that sometimes belie reality and sometimes lead it. You could take this as suggesting that Susie D. is the Devil in a pleasing shape. Or, with all the Proustian business, and the lengthy excursus about historical artifacts hanging on as though the past lies thick in the present and refuses to lift... Perhaps the secondary Hamlet allusion behind the obvious one is "the time is out of joint". Maybe Suzanne is a notional being, an idea tenuously made manifest, a collective imaginary friend or dream-creature leaking out into our reality. She looks the same from one generation to the next, because the dream of the girl next door stays the same. Perhaps the horror is that our reality is fragile, that these creations are always slipping in, and we only have a stable daylight world because we refuse to see them.

Also, the illustration sucks.

I hate it when a website demands that my password contain at least two sentient characters.

Does anyone else just ... not have nostalgia for any time period? Like, middle school was shit, high school was shit, and then 9/11 happened. Where in the span of my life am I supposed to fit in a motherfucking golden glow?

I have fond memories of individual bits of media, but the emotions there are wrapped up with the time period when I discovered them, or revisited them, which could have been years or decades after they first came out.

And if we were talking about "the underlying theory of machine learning", you might have a point.

The key component of making good sneer club criticism is to never actually say out loud what your problem is.

I wrote 800 words explaining how TracingWoodgrains is a dishonest hack, when I could have been getting high instead.

But we don't need to rely on my regrets to make this judgment, because we have a science-based system on this podcast instance. We can sort all the SneerClub comments by most rated. Nothing that the community has deemed an objective banger is vague.

An anti-recommendation from another thread:

Having now refreshed my vague memories of the Feynman Lectures on Computation, I wouldn't recommend them as a first introduction to Turing machines and the halting problem. They're overburdened with detail: You can tell that Feynman was gleeful over figuring out how to make a Turing machine that tests parentheses for balance, but for many readers, it'll get in the way of the point. Comparing his discussion of the halting problem to the one in The Princeton Companion to Mathematics, for example, the latter is cleaner without losing anything that a first encounter would need. Feynman's lecture is more like a lecture from the second week of a course, missing the first week.

Come to the Sneer Attractor, we have brownies

"... And litterin'."

Every task you outsource to a machine is a task that you don't learn how to do.

And school is THE PLACE WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO LEARN THINGS, JESUS H. FUCK

I’ve seen some outright blatant crank shit (as opposed to the crank shit that works hard to masquerade as more legitimate science) pretty highly upvoted and commented positively on lesswrong (GeneSmith’s wild genetic engineering fantasies come to mind).

Their fluffing Chris Langan is the example that comes to mind for me.

gwern: It's not "AI slop" if I wasted hours dicking around with MidJourney to make it.

rsaarelm: People don't appreciate the beauty of Substack's built-in slop generator.

gwern: "I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations." Have you appreciated the depth of my artist's statement?

I've never tried a Pyrex roux before. I'll have to give that a shot. Often, I use our Pyrexen to rehydrate textured vegetable protein. Scoop a couple cups from the giant box in the pantry, add a couple teaspoons of stock concentrate (e.g., the Better Than Bouillon veggie and roasted garlic flavors), add water until the granules start floating, stir, microwave 30 seconds, stir, microwave another 30 seconds. Then it's ready for skillet-frying with whatever spices and other flavorings seem appropriate in the moment. Chili powder, red pepper flakes, cumin, oregano and a dash of cocoa powder makes for a good Tex-Mex flavor profile that can sub for ground beef in tacos, enchiladas, etc. Soy sauce, mirin and sugar or agave is a straightforward teriyaki. It's pretty versatile stuff.

The Totole "Granulated Chicken Flavor Soup Base Mix" is another good flavor boost.

Blockquote glitch?

From the comments:

If Said returns, I'd like him to have something like a "you can only post things which Claude with this specific prompt says it expects to not cause

<issues>

" rule, and maybe a LLM would have the patience needed to show him some of the implications and consequences of how he presents himself.

And:

Couldn't prediction markets solve this?

Ain't enough lockers in the world, dammit

Of course, commenters on LessWrong are not dumb, and have read Scott Alexander,

It's like sneering at fish in an aquarium

Here's my recipe for blueberry bread that I make for parties and such.

And here's my experimental recipe for yu hsiang eggplant (still in progress; this was my most recent attempt).

"They don't need to develop protocols of communication that facilitate buying castles, fluffing our corporate overlords, or recruiting math pets. They share vegan recipes without even trying to build a murder cult."