Is this not being posted to substrack intentional?
EDIT: It's been published there in April
Except at Stanford and some other colleges you can’t, because of this thing called the ‘honor code.’ As in, you’re not allowed to proctor exams, so everyone can still whip out their phones and ask good old ChatGPT or Claude, and Noam Brown says it will take years to change this. Time for oral exams? Or is there not enough time for oral exams?
I'm very confused by this. How are LLMs the problem here? Sounds like you could have been googling answers, calling human helpers on your mobile for last decades?
And bring books / notes with you before that?
- Almost all feedback is noisy because almost all outcomes are probabilistic.
Yes but signal / noise ratios matter a lot.
Language is somewhat optimized to pick up signal and skip noise. For example "red" makes it easier to pick ripe fruit, "grue" doesn't really exist because its useless, "expired" is a real concept because it's useful.
It also has some noise added. For example putting (murderers and jay wakers) in a category "criminal" to politically oppose something.
Also not being exposed to the kind of noise that's present IRL might be an issue when you start to deal with IRL (sometimes people say something like "just do the max EV action" is a good enough plan)
I'm pretty sure this is some obstacle for LLMs, I'm pretty sure its something that can be overcome, I'm very unsure how much this matters.
The obvious follow-up question is why is there not epic capital flight by every dollar that isn’t under capital controls? Who would ever invest in a Chinese company if they had a choice (other than me, a fool whose portfolio includes IEMG)? Certainly not anyone outside China, and those inside China would only do it if they couldn’t buy outside assets, even treasuries or outside savings accounts. No reason to stick around while they drink your milkshake.
If I understand correctly basically all money is under controls - individuals can buy only 50'000 USD worth of foreign currencies per year.
It used to be possible to exchange more by exchanging yauns for casino chips, playing and exchanging winning chips for USD but ~2021 china cracked down on this (eg. sending someone to prison for 18 years for running an operation like that) and it's harder now.
This situation puzzles me. On the one hand, I feel a strong logical compulsion to the first (higher total utility) option. The fact that the difference is unresolvable for each person doesn't seem that worrying at a glance, because obviously on a continuous scale resolvable differences are made out of many unresolvable differences added together.
On the other hand, how can I say someone enjoys one thing more than another if they can't even tell the difference? If we were looking at the lengths of strings then one could in fact be longer than another, even if our ruler lacked the precision to see it. But utility is different, we don't care about the abstract "quality" of the experience, only how much it is enjoyed. Enjoyment happens in the mind, and if the mind can't tell the difference, then there isn't one.
It seems to me like your own post answers this question?
Any individual is unlikely to notice the difference, but if we treat those like ELO[1] ChatGPT tells me ELO 100 wins 50.14% of the time. Which is not a lot, but with 1 mllion people thats on average some 2800 people more saying they prefer 100 option than 99 option.
[1] Which might not be right, expected utility sounds like we want to add and average utility numbers and it's not obvious to me to do stuff like averaging ELO.
Another difference would be expectations for when the coin gets tossed more than once.
With "Type 1" if I toss coin 2 times I expect "HH", "HT", "TH", "TT" - each with 25% probability
With "Type 2" I'd expect "HH" or "TT" with 50% each.
The Biden Administration disagrees, as part of its ongoing determination to screw up basic economic efficiency and functionality.
Did this happen during the previous administration, or is it Trump administration?
you can always reset your personalization.
If persuasion is good enough you don't want to reset personalization.
Could be classic addiction. Or you could be persuaded to care about different things.
Sam Altman was publicly talking about this in 2024-02 (WSJ). I think this was the 1st time I've encountered the idea. Situational awaness I think was published ~4 months later, 2024-06 (https://situational-awareness.ai/ says "June 2024")
I think I can see how this might scale.
The way this looks to me is that if you're applying this consistently in an organization, you don't need to actually fully do all tasks that need doing. You need to be able to recurse 1 level (which if you actually do might involve going down a level... but you mostly don't need to go down 1 level, going down 2 levels is much more rare, etc.).
To use your example: low-level tasks should not be bubbling up to CEO level. If a controversy about naming a variable bubbles up from a code review to a CEO of a company with 100k people - clearly there has been a failure on multiple levels in the middle (even if the CEO is not up to date on the style guide for the language). The CEO might make the call but more importantly they need to do something about the suborganization before it blows up.
But I'd like to know if this is how Lightcone sees scaling of this principle.