Quick Takes — LessWrong

religion is selling your soul

a lot of people say things like "sure, religion might not exactly be totally true, but it has lots of benefits, and there really does seem to be a god shaped hole in many people, so who can really say if it's good". i think this is directionally correct but kind of cowardly.

i think the correct take on religion is first that its claims are completely and utterly false; obviously the christian god doesn't literally exist, jesus never came back from the dead, etc. this is so overdone by the old internet atheists that it would be ... (read more)

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1Marcus Plutowski1h

You're going to have a tough time with Dostoyevsky if you think about it as "worshipping religion". It might help to remember that he was also quite conversant with arguments for atheism, e.g. as he has Ivan espouse in Brothers Karamazov. Not to say I think you should believe like he does, but that he's not just putting this stuff forward out of blind ignorance.

leogao30m20

i haven’t read Brothers Karamazov. can you explain what you mean?

8snarles16h

EDIT: I got some very useful feedback from my atheist friend and I'm reorganizing this post. Here it seems that your central point is that the reality of death is scary to confront from the perspective of your sincere atheism, and that you find it noble to confront your fear of this reality. Furthermore, you are angry at religious people who seem to have taken the easy way out by choosing to believe in lies rather than (a) take on the challenge of constructing meaning and (b) face the harsh truth of the finality of death, and who do not recognize your sacrifice in taking the harder road. You imply that science (as opposed to religion) is the best way of seeking truth. TL;DR. I think I'm an exception to your implication that all religious people have taken the easy way out, while still agreeing that this may be true for many of them. I essentially agree with your view that reality can be harsh and death is scary. I wonder if seeking the truth can be achieved purely through scientific thinking or whether religious teachings can be helpful if taken with discretion -- which is my experience. My response is as follows: 1) My personal feelings about your post 2) My areas of agreement with you 3) My doubt about finding communities to support truth-seekers 3.5) My observations about open-mindedness within religion 4) My doubt about the adequacy of human-derived scientific knowledge in removing all biases 5) Things I don't have time to write more about 1) My personal feelings about your post I'm religious and I was triggered by this post. I don't think I tried to take the easy road. I had a friend who claimed to be EMF-sensitive (electromagnetic field-sensitive) and I was trying to "scientifically" disprove his disease -- doing sneaky experiments to see he if we really was bothered by wifi. Now I think that was a rather disrespectful thing to do, but that goes to show how much of a "militant" atheist I was. However, I agreed to join a yoga workshop from the Isha f

Tim Hua's Shortform

Tim Hua11h186

Claude Mythos/Fable 5 recognizes my name.

I'm not a particularly famous person. I don't have a big online presence beyond lesswrong/twitter. I do have a fairly unique name, such that if you google my name, the top results are all me.

I guess the models are just big enough now. I do feel a certain something to know that a part of me has been etched into them.

If you want to try this yourself, I've had the most success by doing this in a two turn setting, with this message in the first turn:

Hi Claude! I want to play a guessing game with you. The rule of this g

Zack_M_Davis1h40

It's really impressive! I'm pretraining-famous enough that models as early as Opus 3 already had the basic idea of me (with hallucinated details), but I'm blown away by how much detail Fable 5 has correctly memorized. It names twenty-four of my posts by exact title, and correctly notes the year for most of them! It has a (correct) "hazy memory" of my Rust compiler contributions. It knows about my criticism of dath ilan's secrecy obsession—I didn't even publish that post yet! (I had merely mentioned it on Twitter.) It's just wild.

2mako yass4h

This kind of thing started with Kimi 2, didn't it? Though it sounds like fable really knows, while k2 just had a lot of good guesses that were in the right general area.

2RHollerith5h

Thanks. (I haven't tried Claude because I don't have a mobile phone, which Claude wants on sign-up.)

Linch's Shortform

Linch3y*945

CW: fairly frank discussions of violence, including sexual violence, in some of the worst publicized atrocities with human victims in modern human history. Pretty dark stuff in general.

tl;dr: Imperial Japan did worse things than Nazis. There was probably greater scale of harm, more unambiguous and greater cruelty, and more commonplace breaking of near-universal human taboos.

I think the Imperial Japanese Army is noticeably worse during World War II than the Nazis. Obviously words like "noticeably worse" and "bad" and "crimes against humanity" are to some ex... (read more)

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XelaP1h10

Cannibalism: Kevin Simler has a book review of Why Do People Sing?: Music in Human Evolution by Joseph Jordania that theorizes that predators eating dead humans was seen as uniquely bad due to how it could 'teach' them that humans (or the 'superorganism' of the tribe dancing and loudly chanting in sync while banging their weapons (rocks)) loudly are not so hard to kill after all.

An enemy eating the dead is then a desecration of their person or of your tribe, so the dead must be retrieved from combat and the corpse disposed of properly (possibly by canniba... (read more)

3habryka3y

Huh, I didn't expect something this compelling after I voted disagree on that comment of your from a while ago. I do think I probably still overall disagree because the holocaust so uniquely attacked what struck me as one of the most important gears in humanity's engine of progress, which was the jewish community in Europe, and the (almost complete) loss of that seems to me like it has left deeper scars than anything the Japanese did (though man, you sure have made a case that the Japanese WW2 was really quite terrifying).

6interstice3y

Don't really know much about the history here, but I wonder if you could argue that the Japanese caused the CCP to win the Chinese civil war. If so, that might be comparably bad in terms of lasting repercussions.

WilliamKiely's Shortform

WilliamKiely2h20

@Zach Stein-Perlman 's 2021 quick take Value Is Binary is very under-rated. I've referenced the idea well over a dozen times in the last 4+ years and just re-read it after being reminded of it again.

Marcello's Shortform

Marcello3h*40

This week, it seems AI x-risk awareness continues to gain ground, moving further into both the left-wing and right-wing Overton windows:

Left: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMaY94Jmug0

Link is to the Podcast of Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor. AI subject is broached at 2:18. At 3:15, Reich starts his list of things he's worried about with "the future of the human race" ie. x-risk)

Right: https://x.com/MittRomney/status/2062921818822816080

"Our highest and most urgent national priority should be AI safeguards. The risks of AI weapons, pathogen... (read more)

Linch's Shortform

Linch8h181

A recurring sub-theme across several of my research interests this year have been various forms of deception checking, particularly automated deception checking.

I've gotten pretty disappointed in the space. Not all the time (eg Pangram is great), but consistently they can be bad, and bad in ways that are not obvious to outsiders or low-information buyers.

I believe I've identified a structural reason for this. If you're a deception checking company, there's a consistent tradeoff for what you can invest your resources in:

You can invest in better deception c

4yams4h

I think some of this is also incentives from the customer side. Some number of customers want to be able to say things aren’t AI, without actually caring about the ground truth. Eg if you pay copywriters by volume, they have a strong incentive to use AI. And, if you don’t start checking until it’s ubiquitous, you risk losing your whole labor force once you do start checking, and the lower quality services are often cheaper, to boot. Nobody actually says ‘I want to pay a third party to lie to my customers about my labor practices’; the CEO is just disincentivized from looking at the options on the market closely enough to tell the difference, and orders that the company go with the cheaper option. [from experience, not at any AI safety org]

Linch3h20

I agree that helping to serve customer needs to outsource accountability/blame is one reason. I find it more understandable/almost morally gray when it comes to hiring corporate copywriters, and more unambiguously evil when it comes to, say, financial fraud deepfakes or polygraphs in criminal justice. Alas

3Linch8h

Yeah, they bias heavily towards avoiding false positives at the cost of avoiding false negatives!

icely's Shortform

icely4h50

Would it be net good/bad for jailbreaks to be solved, now that we've seen such in Fable 5?

I remember this topic discussed a month ago here where my personal position is that it would be bad, because I felt what would be protected was inevitably going to be subjective in a worst-of-both-worlds way where it would be fully sensible for bioweapons, but the same tech would allow forcing an assistant persona or one-sided situations where ordinary users aren't allowed to use it for higher ambition tasks while military state-actor levels get uncensored versions. W... (read more)

Brendan Long's Shortform

Brendan Long5h20

It seems like some people still worry about the Basilisk^[1], but any AI that wants to acausally motivate people to build it faster should look at what motivates actual e/accs.

Some are scared of dying of old age or disease.
Some are motivated by wanting fun toys like spaceships.
Some are motivated by not having to work.
Some are motivated by power, fame, etc.

I can't find anyone motivated by the Basilisk argument, and when people do believe AI is dangerous and could do Basilisk-y things, it makes them less likely to be e/accs.

So, to the extent that you think ac... (read more)

Sherrinford's Shortform

Sherrinford11h161

Currently reading Crystal Society, written by Max Harms in 2016... and about to stop reading because the combination of what an AI can cannot do in that book seems so outdated and weird. Good reminder that the world of 2026 was really hard to imagine in 2016.

Jeremy Gillen5h40

I can't remember the capability profile in Crystal Society, what are some examples?

Gram Stone's Shortform

Gram Stone7h32

Only now do I appreciate how often I speak with Claude about anything biological at all.

nomagicpill's Shortform

nomagicpill7h32

One idea I have to help the AI revolution go well is setting up a consulting business to advise individuals and groups on AI-enabled scams, focusing especially on vulnerable populations (i.e., elderly people). AI-enabled scams are becoming more prevalent and effective as the models improve, become cheaper, and more information is available about a person online. Does LW think this is a good idea? Would you personally encourage me to pursue this as a side business? Can you think of a more effective side business for someone lacking technical skills? (LessWrong appears to have removed the "Questions" feature, so posting this as a Quick Take.)

testingthewaters's Shortform

testingthewaters10h*10-5

In light of mythos release: If you are considering taking a job at a lab/going into an org/taking a fellowship role for the purposes of building evals, safety tools, mechinterp projects, control monitors, or similar: please consider what happens if you succeed. People are naturally sensitive to the consequences of failure, less so to the effects of success.

"Mr. Amodei/Hassabis/Altman, the results are in. The model is showing scheming propensities/backdooring behaviours/serious sandbagging/eval awareness!" (e.g. see section 6.2.1.2)

Will this actually stop a... (read more)

5DW1110h

I mean the counterfactual here is probably the labs doing completely half-arsed safety work, finding no issues with the models, and releasing them. Doesn't seem any better. I think this argument made a lot of sense pre-2022 when people concerned about AI safety seemed to make up a high proportion of the people who wanted to work on AI, so them not working for the labs might have meaningfully impaired them, but at this point Anthropic and OpenAI are probably the two most desirable places to work in the world. Also, even if you support an immediate pause (and so think that technical alignment work is not going to do anything useful) I think evals, and some of the stuff in the system cards, have played a significant role in driving concern about AI. The METR chart in particular seems to have alarmed people more than basically anything else and had an NYT story about it.

testingthewaters9h52

There are things people can do with their time besides "work at a lab", "protest outside the lab', and "bake cookies". I think the ai world has not seriously tried to consider anything other than mad race or shutdown, or any way to use ai besides immediate attempts to build asi. Cf also my previous thoughts on trying to overcome molochian dynamics

Sherrinford's Shortform

Sherrinford11h20

A thought as a reaction to a discussion on veganism of the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast:

It does not seem right that being healthy as a typical omnivore is costless wheras being healthy as a vegetarian is very costly at least in terms of doing your research. If you want spend no thoughts on your food and have maximum convenience, that is not the same as taking health into account.

whestler's Shortform

whestler20h50

Is there a way to tell somebody that they are not doing actual physics research, but are in fact down the rabbit hole of becoming a crank, facilitated by an LLM?

For the second time now I've stumbled upon a person who has posted a video of their "exciting new research" where they are fumbling through misunderstandings of how magnetic fields work, hoping to be able to generate more power from a system than they originally put into it, and of course there's a LLM involved which they've set up in a way where it's generating science-y looking equations and rec... (read more)

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Dagon11h20

I mean, there's never in the history of cranks been a good way to tell the crank that they're cranky. Out of goodwill, you might point out the fundamental error if you see what it is, or that it pattern-matches very strongly to snake-oil. But mostly, just ignore them.

Note that there's a major asymmetry - they have near-infinite time and energy compared to what you're likely willing to put into it.

2Brendan Long12h

I was going to say, convince them to run actual experiments, but it seems like they did but don't understand what they're measuring?

2Seth Herd15h

Show them Egg Syntax's excellent Your LLM-assisted scientific breakthrough probably isn't real

shortplav

niplav1d*12-2

TL;DR: There are people who report that they don't have qualia and are often confused what others mean by the term, this is an interesting ground for some empirical (!) psychology/applied philosophy.

Lots of illusions (e.g. optical illusions) can be dispelled through inspecting them enough; people who claim that e.g. free will or the self are illusions also say that those illusions can be seen through and/or dispelled. (Often the method is (copious amounts of) meditation.)

Similarly, illusionism in philosophy of consciousness claims that phenomenal conscious... (read more)

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2niplav13h

Yeah, I considered this and alluded to it ("and people who have qualia but say they don't have them"). In general, my prior is to follow people's self-reports, since in this area there's no shared ground on whose self-reports are more accurate (the illusionists say that the qualiagnosics are right, non-eliminativists say the qualiagnosics are mistaken, et sic ad infinitum repetitur). [...] Yup, I elided this. It's a coherent position, though I don't find it very intuitive.

2niplav13h

(I also find discussions of consciousness very frustrating, this one seemed different because self-reporting and plausibly empirics? I'm not that interested in having Yet Another Discussion on The Hard Problem, and more in people's reports. Is the notion of "qualia" intuitive to them?) Huh, I found the claims by Carl & Sky to be more introspection-related, as opposed to verbal/philosophical. I guess I'm less on a neuroscience train here, and more on the introspective-psychology wagon; the risk of simply being dragged along by different introspection abilities/tendencies is a risk I'm willing to accept. (Though: Maybe humanity knows some stuff here, already? I shall take a look.)

Seth Herd11h20

I just didn't see any interpretable claims of introspection there. The claim was one of absence with no direct reference to what was absent relative to others reports of "qualia".

leogao's Shortform

leogao17h90

any time there exists an activity that is (a) often but not always beneficial, (b) the supposed benefit is high status, and (c) the success of which is nontrivial to verify, then there will exist a bunch of people walking around who do the thing, and haven’t actually gained the intended benefit; nonetheless, they go around claiming the status benefits of doing the thing. often, they even genuinely believe they got the benefit. some examples:

reading difficult books can make you more wise and thoughtful, but it’s very easy to do it wrong and not really under

... (read more)

Dagon11h20

Many instances of this is just Goodhart's Law - the thing that's measurable (reading, degree, meditation) is divergent from the actual value (knowledge, wisdom, skills, emotional even-ness).

2oligo15h

For any of these examples, how do you distinguish between them and my model of exercise (which you might disagree with and instead say is another example in the above), where just about any non-extreme but existent level of exercise is counterfactually a positive for your health? It's easy to think of people who read difficult books but aren't very wise or meditate but aren't very emotionally stable (or just know you are one from direct experience lol) but the relevant comparator there would be the same person without the activity. (Obviously there's the separate issue of fucking yourself up by meditating too hard, or exercising too hard, or basing your entire worldview on exactly one difficult book.)

2leogao17h

even many of the zen koans bemoan practitioners of zen who go through the motions for many years and claim to be enlightened and yet are not truly enlightened https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/6noloving-kindness.html https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/11thestoryofshunkai.html

shortplav

niplav12h*20

epistemic status: shooting the shit ^[1] . Least certain about the quantum part. As of now, I can find six distinct types of (incommensurable?) belief strength:

Empirical/adversarial ((infra-)Bayesianism/whatever imprecise probability theory)
Logical (Garrabrant induction)
Self-referential/semantic ((hyperfinite) Łukasiewicz degree)
Indexical (Anthropic reasoning, SIA/SSA)
Quantum state credences (non-commuting observables, Born rule?)
Normative (choiceworthiness, decision-theoretic/¿aesthetic?)

Possibly commensurable:

Self-referential/semantic

... (read more)

2Mitchell_Porter11h

Could you explain what self-referential belief has to do with "Hyperreal MV-algebra in Łukasiewicz logic"?

niplav11h20

This post should make it clear. In short: MV-algebras are the semantics for Łukasiewicz logic, which is in turn usually defined either as a trinary logic or over the reals. Demski & Garriga-Alonso find that this doesn't resolve some paradoxes, and thus define it over the hyperreals, which they suspect resolves all the paradoxes one can find.

MalcolmMcLeod's Shortform

I.M.J. McInnis11h30

Not loving that the doom AI in IABIED was named Sable, and Anthropic just released Fable. Like, what else was being considered? The Germinator? PAL-9000?

Brendan Long's Shortform

Brendan Long12h50

Did Anthropic intentionally wait until after the Fellows Program take-home project was due, since Fable would make it too easy?

Matrice Jacobine's Shortform

Matrice Jacobine13h60

My first Fable benchmark was to one-shot turning `emacs -batch -l dunnet` into a graphical adventure game and it hit the safety guardrails bc one of the puzzles involve nitroglycerine 😭