Spyke

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Claude 3 notices when a sentence about pizza toppings doesn't fit with its surrounding text. Whole internet including Tim Sweeney and Margaret Mitchell concludes that it's probably self-aware now.

me when the machine specifically designed to pass the turing test passes the turing test

If you can design a model that spits out self-aware-sounding things after not having been trained on a large corpus of human text, then I'll bite. Until then, it's crazy that anybody who knows anything about how current models are trained accepts the idea that it's anything other than a stochastic parrot.

Glad that the article included a good amount of dissenting opinion, highlighting this one from Margaret Mitchell: "I think we can agree that systems that can manipulate shouldn't be designed to present themselves as having feelings, goals, dreams, aspirations."

Cool tech. We should probably set it on fire.

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"hey wait, EA sucks!"

My optimistic read is that maybe OP will use their newfound revelations to separate themselves from LW, rejoin the real world, and become a better person over time.

My pessimistic read is that this is how communities like TPOT (and maybe even e/acc?) grow - people who are disillusioned with the (ostensible) goals of the broader rat community but can't shake the problematic core beliefs.

The cosmos doesn’t care what values you have. Which totally frees you from the weight of “moral imperatives” and social pressures to do the right thing.

Choose values that sound exciting because life’s short, time’s short, and none of it matters in the end anyway... For me, it’s curiosity and understanding of the universe. It directs my life not because I think it sounds pretty or prosocial, but because it’s tasty.

Also lmfao at the first sentence of one of the comments:

I don't mean to be harsh, but if everyone in this community followed your advice, then the world would likely end.

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LW: CRISPR Will Make Me A Genius - "I don’t have a formal background in biology. And though I learn fairly quickly and have great resources like SciHub and GPT4,"

From the comments:

Effects of genes are complex. Knowing a gene is involved in intelligence doesn't tell us what it does and what other effects it has. I wouldn't accept any edits to my genome without the consequences being very well understood (or in a last-ditch effort to save my life). ... Source: research career as a computational cognitive neuroscientist.

OP:

You don't need to understand the causal mechanism of genes. Evolution has no clue what effects a gene is going to have, yet it can still optimize reproductive fitness. The entire field of machine learning works on black box optimization.

Very casually putting evolution in the same category as modifying my own genes one at a time until I become Jimmy Neutron.

Such a weird, myopic way of looking at everything. OP didn't appear to consider the downsides brought up by the commenter at all, and just plowed straight on through to "evolution did without understanding so we can too."

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To what extent did Eliezer Yudkowsky invent the Effective Altruist movement?

Eh, the impression that I get here is that Eliezer happened to put "effective" and "altruist" together without intending to use them as a new term. This is Yud we're talking about - he's written roughly 500,000 more words about Harry Potter than the average person does in their lifetime.

Even if he had invented the term, I wouldn't say this is a smoking gun of how intertwined EAs are with the LW rats - there's much better evidence out there.

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Rationalist org bets random substack poster $100K that he can't disprove their covid lab leak hypothesis, you'll never guess what happens next

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Under "Significant developments since publication" for their lab leak hypothesis, they don't mention this debate at all. A track record that fails to track the record, nice.

Right underneath that they mention that at least they're right about their 99.9% confident hypothesis that the MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. I hope it's not uncharitable to say that they don't get any points for that.

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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 17 March 2024

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#3 is "Write with AI: The leading paid newsletter on how to turn ChatGPT and other AI platforms into your own personal Digital Writing Assistant."

and #12 is "RichardGage911: timely & crucial explosive 9/11 WTC evidence & educational info"

Congratulations to Aella for reaching the top of the bottom. Also random side thought, why do guys still simp in her replies? Why didn't they just sign up for her birthday gangbang?

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My Dinner With Andreessen

HN:

Also - using soylent, oculus and crypto to paint Andreesen as a bad investor (0 for 3 as he says) is a weird take. Come on - do better if your going to try and take my time.

Reading comprehension is hard. The article actually says "Zero for three when it comes to picking useful inventions to reorder life as we know it, that is to say, though at no apparent cost to his power or net worth." It's saying he's a good investor in the sense of making money, but a bad investor in the sense of picking investments that change the world. Rather telling that the commenter can't seem to distinguish between the two.

Good article, excited for part 2.

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a scrawny nerd in a basement writes

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But if there isn't a clearly defined end goal/utility function, then how can will I fit this information into my rationalist fanfic world model?

/unsneer though the comment was overall sobering to read, it's good to know that not everyone on that site is insane.

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Sequence classic: "I don’t think you could get up to 99.99% confidence for assertions like “53 is a prime number.”

The cool thing to note here is how badly Yud here misunderstands what a normal person means when they say they have "100% certainty" in something. We're not fucking infinitely precise Bayesian machines, 100% means exactly the same thing as 99.99%. It means exactly the same thing as "really really really sure." A conversation between the two might go like this:

Unwashed sheeple: Yeah, 53 is prime. 100% sure of that.

Ellie Bayes-er: (grinning) Can you really say to be 100% sure? Do not make the mistake of confusing the map with the territory, [5000 words redacted]

Unwashed sheeple: Whatever you say, I'm 99% sure.

Eddielazer remains seated, triumphant in believing (epistemic status: 98.403% certainty) he has added something useful to the conversation. The sheeple walks away, having changed exactly nothing about his opinion.

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here in Top Pedophiles Of Twitter, my "friend" thinks about race so very little that he shit-tests every new person he meets with a racial slur

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I really like this question, I couldn't possibly get to the bottom of it but here's a couple of half-explanations/related phenomena:

  • The simple desire to own the libs. They understand what freedom and personal responsibility is, but also really, really want to DEBATE ME BRO with someone that they don't like.
  • Legitimate paranoia that one day somebody is gonna 1984 them, so they're morally responsible for constantly pushing social boundaries.
  • Virtue signaling, like the post alludes to.

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i guess sneerclub must just hate understanding things. yes, that must be it.

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https://xkcd.com/610/

I think a lot of rats have this idea that they arrived at their views and values solely by thinking really hard (and being really really smart). Which means that anyone who doesn't share their same basic views is simply a mouthbreathing NPC who doesn't have any curiosity in "the way the world works" - when in reality, people just have a lot of other shit on their minds, and tend to care about less abstract problems than [insert sci-fi trope here].

It's funny that the commenter talks so much about how people should just try to understand things, and in the same breath fails to try to empathize with people who think differently.