chark

I found the writing style irresistible as a student of Classics, because it's so similar to ancient texts in structure. So if that's not a special interest of yours Tolkien probably wouldn't be as deeply appealing.

Re: understanding,

I'd loosely describe the difference between knowledge and understanding as the difference between being able to say what something is vs being able to describe why it is, or how it is, which often comes through being able to describe the thing in different ways. See the concept of "you don't really understand something until you can explain it to a child (or lay person, I'd say)."

I know what a GPU is - I don't understand how it works on a physical level.

Passion seems orthogonal although it csn drive knowledge and understanding.

About writi... (read more)

If I'm understanding your question correctly (it seems clearly written, but the answer seems so obvious I'm doubting myself)... yes absolutely and it's the standard tool for doing so! That's the basis of personal journaling, or tech blogging, or many other forms of writing.

If you're going to reject something as presumptive slop because of a em dash, isn't that confessing that your discernment is so low that there's no reason for you to avoid the slop?

Unfortunately no, I don't think so, because people who want to avoid wasting their time on LLM writing are likely to be quite sensitive to signals of LLM writing and potentially very quick to nope out. Generally it is (or at least feels) less costly to miss out on a random blog post than it is to ingest meaningless writing. So if there's an early sign in your writing, someone wh... (read more)

So, I'm not sure how to extrapolate stronger evidence from this, but when I read the quote:

It's a good reminder that even when I *feel* like I'm introspecting, I need to be much more careful about distinguishing between "accessing something real" and "generating a plausible narrative."

I had the spooky realization that I have had that exact experience myself when I was younger. I see people blithely say "well humans just text predict too" without any evidence of how that works in humans or how it relates to the conscious experience of communication, but I h... (read more)

This could be obvious to most people here but can you briefly explain how Neuralese is a new thing and not just "how LLMs worked before COT was invented"?

Even without understanding that though, I found this post excellent at catching me up on the topic!

I think this is an important point a bit buried here. I like my therapist and listen to her and want her advice - she's not just a sounding board. However, I am pretty sure I'm smarter than her, and I'm definitely more oriented toward truth-seeking, which doesn't seem to be something she really thinks about much. And yes, I do find myself frustrated and contemptuous during some conversations. But I continue to see her because I trust that she still has a lot to teach me! I'd be a terrible truth seeker if I saw her fumble one conversation and decided that s... (read more)

if you're checking how many fruits you have, "apples and pears" makes sense.

If you're trading a bag of apples for a bag of pears, you might want to know the relative value of apples and pears, so you would indeed calculate "apples per pear".

I also thought it sounded... really annoying. something I may have found interesting 10 years ago but would now cause me to simply avoid the person. And it might ruin my night by making me feel like a party pooper, a la Thane's comment above.

Those are good points. I was expecting something different from this post but only based on my intuitions, not explicit framing.

I suspect you're way off the mark here. I downvoted this post because it felt like magical thinking. "Just break your phone addiction and your life will be exactly what you want" is not true. But that seems to be the entire message of this post... except possibly to smugly boast? (Not sure if this is the author's real life.)

The tone is moralizing but not actionable or insightful. What is there to like about this heaven-posting?

I've been tackling many "wobbly chair" problems in my life in the last few years due in large part to adopting just such a mindset: by removing annoyances/distractions, removing friction, and developing new abilities via these types of efforts, I'm able to take on bigger problems and goals. It has been very good for me, in that the scope of my hobbies has grown... but it's also surprisingly easy to feel like I've made no progress against the big issues on days where I'm unwell and struggle to concentrate. These "wobbly chair" type problems, once fixed, become invisible achievements, and I still often get trapped thinking I'm helpless against the big problems.

Strongly agree with the point about being more convincing while being flexible. Of the friends whose minds I've changed, every single one was won over while I was being flexible and expressing that it didn't need to be all or nothing.

Another point about cows is that their meat is the most wasteful of land and water, and the most polluting. These are "side" arguments but the collapse of ecosystems across the globe is also an important issue to me and I'm not sure why it wouldn't be to others who care about things like suffering reduction. It surely is inducing a lot of suffering now, human and otherwise, besides my personal belief that "a diverse and robust biosphere is intrinsically good."

As for your opening sentence on the health section, "you need to take medicine to not die - B12", I don't think a B12 supplement is medicine. Factory farmed animals are routinely fed B12 supplements and people don't consider meat medicine. Salt is supplemented with iodine to prevent deficiencies, also not medicine. 

I don't really understand why you're arguing this point in particular, but I don't think you're making a strong argument. 

Factory farmed animals do take medicine all the time; this has no bearing on whether we consider the* food ... (read more)

I empathize a lot with your position and appreciate the candidness.

Kind of tangential, but when I see someone write things like:

I see being vegan as the proof that I'm not a psychopathic monster

I think about my therapist goading me into similar admissions and letting me hear it out loud and realizing I don't want to be that way.

Now that you've named it, you don't have to keep this emotional response to veganism. Of course it's up to you, and it takes work. But if it's causing distress, it is solvable.

Apologies if this comment is too parental - I think it's... (read more)

Yes I did cast a disagree vote,: I don't agree that "The fact that the author decided to include it in the blog post is telling enough that the image is representative of the real vibes" is true, when it comes to an AI generated image. My reasoning for that position is elaborated in a different reply in this thread.

That does make sense WRT disagreement. I wasn't intending to fully hide identities even from people who know the subjects, but if that's also a goal, it wouldn't do that.

This seems pretty insightful to me, and I think it is worth pursuing for its own sake. I think the benefits could be both enhancing AI capabilities and advancing human knowledge. Imagine if the typical conversation around AI was framed in this way. So far I find most people are stuck in the false dichotomy of figuring if an AI is "smart" (in the ways humans are when they're focusing) or "dumb trash" (because they do simple tasks badly). It isn't only bad for being a binary classification , but it's restricting (human) thought to an axis that doesn't actual... (read more)

I largely agree with your point here. I'm arguing more that in the case of a ghiblified image (even more so than a regular AI image), the signals a reader gets are this:

• the author says "here is an image to demonstrate vibe"
• the image is AI generated with obvious errors

For many people, #2 largely negates #1, because #2 also implies these additional signals to them:

• the author made the least possible effort to show the vibe in an image, and
• the author has a poor eye for art and/or bad taste.
• Therefore, the author probably doesn't know how to even tell if an image captures the vibe or not.

This is actually the first writing from Altman I've ever read in full, because I find him entirely untrustworthy, so perhaps there's a style shock hitting me here. Maybe he just always writes like an actual cult leader. But damn, it was so much worse than I expected.

Very little has made me more scared of AI in the last ~year than reading Sam Altman try to convince me that "the singularity will probably just be good and nice by default and the hard problems will just get solved as a matter of course."

Something I feel is missing from your criticism, and also... (read more)