CronoDAS

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It actually is literally priceless, because you can't buy it with money. ;)

Doesn't an LLM, at least initially, try to solve a problem very much like "what word is most likely to come next if it was written by a human"? The Internet might contain something close to the sum of all human knowledge, but that includes the parts that are wrong. Making GPT "better" might make it better at making the same kind of mistakes that humans make. (I've never tried, but what happens if you try to ask ChatGPT or other LLMs about astrology or religion - subjects on which a lot of people believe things that are false? If it equivocates, is it willing to say that Superman doesn't exist? Or Santa Claus?)

What do you mean by demons? Literal supernatural creatures, a metaphor for psychological anxieties, or something else entirely?

In practice, the odds of a potato becoming President are "a round-off error away from zero". Human brains don't do floating point arithmetic with enough precision to handle that kind of question. :/

A silly question, related to the "potato" example:

Which is more likely, a potato becoming US President, or a US lottery jackpot worth at least $20 million ends up with the winning number being the numerically smallest possible number?

More seriously, just how improbable are "social" impossibilities, such as the potatio example, when you compare them to well-understood things like lottery tickets? I've asked a question like this before, with the social impossibility being the Pope sincerely converting to Islam. Weird shit does happen, though......

A related point that probably bears making/repeating:

Part of the justification for statutory rape laws is that some people are in a position in which they have so much power over someone that any request from them could be inherently coercive. Some specific examples in which statutory rape may apply even when the victim is a mentally competent adult:

  • Prison guards and prison inmates
  • Military officers and lower ranking soldiers
  • High school teachers and 18 year old students

I think your definition of "dominates" is a little too strict. In your "don't pick the wrong integer" game, "don't bet" isn't dominated simply because it is possible to lose the bet, regardless of how good the odds are and how good the relative payoffs are. Min/max-ing strategies (do the thing that minimizes how bad things are in the worst case) aren't dominated by strategies that are willing to tolerate risk, but they do leave free money on the table if they have less than perfect certainty that the table isn't booby trapped.

I don't know how to say "if you don't maximize expected utility you won't have the maximum expected utility" without turning it into a tautology, but a strategy that turns down every good bet (for a reasonable definition of "good") simply because losing is possible seems to be doing something wrong.

Two (related) morals of the story:

  1. A really, really stupid strategy can still meet the requirements for being a Nash equilibrium, because a strategy being a Nash equilibrium only requires that no one player can get a better result for themselves when only that player is allowed to change strategies.

  2. A game can have more than one Nash equilibrium, and a game with more than one Nash equilibrium can have one that's arbitrarily worse than another.

There are two counter-arguments to the Gods of Straight Lines that I know of.

One is the Doomsday Argument, which is a rabbit hole I'd rather not discuss right now.

The other is that the Singularity was canceled in 1960. In general, progress follows S-curves, not exponential curves, and that S-curves look exponential until they level off. We can assume that Moore's Law will end eventually, even though something like Moore's Law still holds today. Certainly CPU clock speed has leveled off, and single-threaded performance (for algorithms that aren't or can't be parallelized) has been improving much more slowly than in the past.

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