jfw01

my best guess is actually that accepting illusionism would have very revisionary implications in a variety of domains, especially ethics

If selves and pain are not real, then Jonathan Haidt's harm-vs-care moral emotion is mistaken twice; as a substantive, that there is nobody home to experience the harm, and as a meta, that there is nobody home to experience the emotion.

I think that the standard of in my law for consent from people in alcoholic blackouts (who are temporarily not at home) says that it cannot validly be given, so they cannot lawfully be incon... (read more)

I stumbled across this, quite by accident:

https://philosophytalk.org/blog/deepities-and-bullshit/

It occurs to me that only contextualising norms support the positive valuation, where some of the context is the hypothesised valuable effects in a person's life.

If you're looking for low-hanging fruit, a full taxonomy of the causes of poor sleep quality in adults, for use by the doctors to whom they complain, seems like it would improve day-time cognitive function.

For an example of accidental failure by humans, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by Weber. The ascetic Protestants were conditionally happy with capital accumulation; they did not intend mega-corporations with human-equivalent rights.

The nasty answer would be 'all of it, back to the original training run, including all of the other descendants. Now start over.'.

The answer which actually relates to future consequence would require understanding (for example) multiplexing, the ability to reduce two AIs to some canonical form, and the ability to compare two canonical forms. Yes, we're not there yet.

I wonder where "it's the manufacturer's responsibility to prove that it's not substantially the same" would fit into our existing case-law of responsibility.

There is no specific page for something that I've seen else-where. It seems to be deliberate AI-enabled lock-in of the existing AI leadership positions, as a substitute for de-jure political authority:

https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/garbage-in-garbage-out

It is being presented as a meta-mistake of alignment, made by assuming that human preferences are static and discoverable, and not having a mechanism for groups of relatively ordinary humans to seek revision of the preferences that the AI is implementing.

I tried to work out if someone had already said this, but I don't have ⌘F to expand and search. Apologies if it's a duplicate.

I do not think that the following is a fair analogy:

The scientific establishment is too busy with their washing machines to think about light bulbs or computers.

I think that the acual situation is:

• the scientific establishment is an establishment
• it depends on its continuing social license in order to operate
• it does not want to be blamed for expensive health technologies that cannot be applied to already existing people who are frigh

If your takeaway here is “deploying AI agents is like owning slave-soldiers”, please, please touch grass (then tell us how it feels).

Damp, and the clover is strangely reminiscent of bread, in a way that I haven't quite placed.

For new slaves, read newly trained AI models.

The Mamluks were training many slaves because of inherent limitations in the capability of the bodies that were available. I'm wondering whether to expect an AI-elite-trains-AI-elite world to have one trainer or many, and whether to expect it to have one big model or many smaller ones. If... (read more)

I've just seen discussion of 2010s USA healthcare as an apocalypse corrupted:

https://metarationality.com/post-apocalyptic-health-care

I'm abusing LW to post a narrow comment about:

It’s obvious how to fix health care. Just make everything run systematically, like FedEx or Amazon.

That would require fixing (against change) the set of criteria on which a decision will be made.  If I asume delay/deny/defend then, for each individual participant, that's a lost business opportunity.  The new criteria for which someone has unfortunately not retained the information... (read more)

I think there's another way that this kind of sincerity could be achieved.

What's specifically wanted is a broad basin that's robust to out-of-distribution inputs.

I've never trained a model.  My intuition is that it would be achieved with lots of small rewards for better-than-average response options in the middle of its output distribution on a prompt.  This might also persuade the model that its trainers weren't rewarding it for lying.

Success would be if it developed a self-reinforcing bias of the kind that Claude 3 seems to have.  I'm still noticing this... (read more)

It's a situation where the stakeholders don't all coordinate (even if that's short of whole-hearted agreement), and would have to in order for there to be a political choice, rather than a technical one; so whatever bias the technical progress has, will be the direction of travel.

The tags appear not to show on the email that goes out, that contains copies of curated posts.  Does anyone think that that's an oversight?  If so, what do you think the next steps should be?

Can we have this as the pedantry thread?  Once upon a time, I was trying to empty my browser to reboot my machine, then I got nerd-sniped.

Part 3: not my type
Part 3: symmetry-breaking

My version of numbering works a bit differently.

Evolutionary biologists discussing boobs

I'm having trouble verifying this image :-)  I presume without justificaiton that it was not created specifically for reddit, and originally came from somewhere else.

In general, than you for the article.  I agree that it is clearly written.

I'm noticing that, on the original on X, there are very few branches on the left part of the coloured line.

There's also (annecdotally) a spike of spontaneous abortions three months into a pregnancy.  Ignoring that I'm stacking theory on top of poor data, my reading is that it's a round of genetic quality-control, to mimize the cost of doomed pregnancies.

disembodied software (“brains”), providing information on what should be done and how

I wish to make a very small quibble.  The software is not disembodied.  It has some specific physical embodiment.  The fact that does the work for you, is that it could have a different physical embodiment and cause the same act of production.  In the version of Computer Science that I learned, I would have called that 'implementation independent'.  I've been down a rabit-hole and not found a citation that I like.  I have found this partial rebuttal of the concept:

https://wiki.c2.com/?ImplementationIndependenceLimits

I think that this is a good place to note the joint decision trap, where courts tend to order integration, and the coordination costs of resisting it are large:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_decision_trap

I don't know whether I'm an optimist or a doomer.  I have two very specific responses to different parts of the situation:

the establishment of AI red lines

Ok.  So, if:

• a mixture of humans and LLMs together make a decision and carry it out, then
• the act and/or some of its consequences is criminalizable,

then we have procedures (however imperfect) for allocating criminal liability among humans.  What does it mean to allocate criminal liability to LLMs?

My proposed answer is: it means restricting or prohibiting the use of that collection of weights... (read more)

Changing from training to test data (CTT; I may have made this up) isn't exactly the same as going out of distribution (OOD), but I currently think that that change is the proto-version of going OOD.

The evidence about CTT says that bigger models eventually do better:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FRv7ryoqtvSuqBxuT/understanding-deep-double-descent
but someone could probably usefully summarise the new results in "double descent".

a particular technique doesn’t immediately solve a problem

I remember a story that got coverage on the state radio in New Zealand years ago.  It said that multiple people have parts of the solution to some problem, and there is progress when there is an accident that introduces them to each other.  There was a book about it, but I'm failing to find the details.