Gram Stone — LessWrong

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I’m working on a piece to enter into the discourse about poverty lines and vibecessions and how hard life is actually getting in America, and hope to have that done soon, but there’s a lot to get through.

I'm excited to hear this, and I wanted to plug economist Gary Stevenson, who I think has the best combination of models, communications, and platform out of everyone I've seen speak or write on this issue. He's from the UK and has a weak focus there, but he talks about the US aplenty and recognizes that this is a global problem that will only get worse.

Replying toOn the Aesthetic of Wizard Power

Gram Stone2mo

On the Aesthetic of Wizard Power

I found this kinda hard to grok but gonna throw in my two cents anyway. Seems like priests (sensu stricto) obtain power by creating a body of 'consensually true' 'expertise' and hijacking human prestige bias adaptations, not really corresponding to reality because all theistic hypotheses are false, but not totally arbitrary because the 'knowledge' is culturally inherited. When someone tries to establish a new consensus, we call it a schism. This seems like one meta level up from what kings do and I'm not sure is faithfully captured by the obscure vs. arcane distinction. This also doesn't directly contradict my vague impression that wars of succession are way more common than schisms... (read more)

Replying toA country of alien idiots in a datacenter: AI progress and public alarm

Gram Stone3mo

A country of alien idiots in a datacenter: AI progress and public alarm

I really like how many hypotheses you generated here.

A few months ago my GM pulled me in kind of in the way where you think you might get fired, he wants you to feel like you could hear a pin drop you know? He's in his early fifties. Then he showed me a huge order where he had to ship a whole bunch of stuff separately to different locations and he was trying to calculate the weights and shipping costs of all these separate packages going to separate locations, and the non-AI solutions were failing him, so he copypasta'd into ChatGPT and it showed all its work, and he's like "Look at this!", and I just told him that he was having an appropriate emotional reaction because he's old and almost everyone younger than him is a boiling frog or as clueless as he was ten minutes ago. That kind of stuff gives me hope.

Gram Stone3mo

Particularly I wonder how you would shed all that heat in a vacuum? I keep seeing arguments that the cold of space would make data centers easier to cool, but this totally contradicts my observation that all the spacecraft I've read about have dedicated systems to shed excess heat produced by electronic systems, as opposed to, say, having dedicated heating systems for life support and never having to worry about electronic systems generating excess heat because the cold of space just takes care of it? E.g. Apollo as I understand it mostly relied on the waste heat of systems dedicated to other functions, the Apollo 13 crew only had to worry about cold because they eliminated virtually all sources of waste heat simultaneously to conserve electricity. I think Apollo's only dedicated systems for cabin temperature control were actually cooling systems. And this totally wouldn't apply in the data center scenario.

Gram Stone4mo

I feel like this quickly glosses over the hypothesis that gestural language evolved first, or that they evolved simultaneously with significantly more sophisticated gestural behavior evolving earlier. I believe gestural language is much older than 500 ka (up to, let's say, 2 Ma), which is consistent with the fossil evidence on vocalization adaptations.

It's undeniable that some of the cognitive changes that occurred during human evolution affected motivation; in fact, in my view, I think proto-curiosity and proto-patience would have been favored by selection quite early. On the other hand, in my view, sustainable, scalable joint attention and behaviorally modern imitation learning (e.g. overimitation) are more complex and would have required more than... (read more)

Gram Stone4moQuick Take

MIRI got Guinan to read IABIED you guys https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1BJZz9MHSM/

Gram Stone5mo

It seems like a bad sign that, even with maximally optimistic inputs, your model never falsely retrodicts intelligence explosions in the past.

Replying toShould you make stone tools?

Gram Stone6mo

Should you make stone tools?

Not as immediately obvious as reflexively avoiding a branch, but on my model, you ought to think of language (first gesture, then speech) as an exaptation of cognitive adaptations for flintknapping. F5 in Old World monkeys is an interface between abstract goal representations and concrete action sequences, and F5 is believed to be the homologue of Broca's area in humans. Looks like F5 generates and interprets hierarchical act strings as such (i.e. regardless of modality). You can hill climb on hierarchy depth, breadth, goal maintenance duration, switching speed (goals are active until completed, losing track of a goal being premature goal inactivation), which lends credibility to this idea. I think of Broca's area as F5 with more atomic action categories + big model smell.

Replying toDo confident short timelines make sense?

Gram Stone7mo

Do confident short timelines make sense?

I agree with this as an object-level observation on the usefulness of MAV3D itself, but also have a Lucas critique of the Bitter Lesson that ultimately leads me to different conclusions about what this really tells us.

I think of EURISKO, Deep Blue, and AlphaGo/Zero as slightly discordant historical examples that you could defy, but on my view they are subtle sources of evidence supporting microfoundations of cognitive returns on cognitive reinvestment that are inconsistent with Sutton's interpretation of the observations that inspired him to compose The Bitter Lesson.

EURISKO is almost a ghost story, but if the stories are true, then this doesn’t imply that N clever tricks would’ve allowed EURISKO to rule the world, or... (read 1376 more words →)

Replying toOn "ChatGPT Psychosis" and LLM Sycophancy

Gram Stone7mo

On "ChatGPT Psychosis" and LLM Sycophancy

I view this from a heuristics and biases perspective. Mental health effects of LLMs seem well-explained as mediated by processing fluency as described by Schwarz et al. So it's in the halo effect, mere exposure, confirmation bias, availability bias, etc., cluster. If there is a meaningful uptick in mental illness that could be intervened upon, this view suggests some funny interventions like making LLM outputs harder to read with a blur or drop shadow, or chewing popcorn while interacting with LLMs. Also, Cognitive Reflection Test scores (which could change within lifetime, despite apparently being pretty stable) should negatively correlate with susceptibility to LLM-induced psychosis.

Gram Stone's Shortform

Gram Stone

7mo

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Origin Story

Gram Stone

7mo

I have received reputable reports from the Department of Redundancy Department that this long post is long—over 4000 words, in point of fact.

Human evolution is a topic that interests not just researchers specialized in paleoanthropology, but also other scientists and the general public. A number of conflicting hypotheses have been put forward to explain why humans have become strikingly different from other primates. Most scientists in relevant fields (such as paleoanthropology, paleontology, ecology, evolution and human biology) have never published their views on the drivers of human evolution in general, nor on which of the proposed hypotheses on the origin of specific human traits they find most substantiated. No recent summary of

... (read 3913 more words →)

What would be the shelf life of nuclear weapon-secrecy if nuclear weapons had not immediately been used in combat?

Gram Stone

Standard objections to counterfactual history notwithstanding, I could use some help from the tribe; in our history, nuclear weapons were invented during wartime and immediately used in combat. If nuclear weapons had been invented in peacetime, or had otherwise not been revealed in combat, how long would they have remained hidden from the public?