Lex Spoon

I appreciate your taking on the core issues and summarizing them. Bravo! Being paywalled, the material is not freely available in general.

You tried to enumerate all views but did not list quite the perspective I had: I think we can take solace from previous encounters between vast intelligence differences, for examples mushrooms versus people. This is a variant of "alignment is not hard" that is more like "sufficient alignment is not hard". The "sufficient" part is very important. I completely agree with the IABIED perspective that AI alignment is hard, bu... (read more)

Oh, yes, for the case of learning your area. However, the name of an advisor is important for joining the academic good-folks network, and so is the superficial appearance of a paper looking correct for the conferences and journals you want to send it to.

I dislike it all tremendously, but if I could tell my younger self something to maybe do better in a research career, it would be to pay more attention to back-scratching and ingratiation.

As an older self, though, I may say that if you like studying something and like making certain kinds of things, then j... (read more)

For a similar reason, I have largely come around to using "AI" instead of "LLM" in most cases.  What people mean by AI is the total package of a quasi-intelligent entity that you can communicate with using human natural language. The LLM is just the token predictor part, but you don't use an LLM by itself, any more than you use a red blood cell by itself. You use the whole... artificial organism. "Inorganism"?

It seems like a goed starting point to simply start from how you would treat a human intelligence and then look for differences.

The term "LLM" r... (read more)

Kudos for a really interesting area of inquiry! You are investigating the nature of language revealing what is happening in the mind that led to uttering it, and how this impacts our relationship to LLM-generated text. It comes from either no mind, or from a whole new kind of mind, depending on how you look at it, and it's interesting how that affects how language works and how we should engage with it.

Some parts of the article depend on which form of LLM utterance we are talking about. It's true, as the article states, if you take a Google search AI help,... (read more)

I am not expert but have noticed that a lot of it is mind games. Branding. If you look at it that way, you can also see aspects of the US in a different light.

It stood out to me when the EU constitution got voted down many years ago. I thought that was sort of the end of it. And yet, the flags were still all over the place, and one person I talked to said what do you mean, the EU is already here. So the actual legal basis of--let's call it a brand--is quite separate from the reality of what legal force it has.

Curiously, the belief in something can give it ... (read more)

I agree on the broad strokes but am not sure about Christians specifically coming out on top. I understand using that example in the article, for reasons of familiarity, but it is interesting to think about which specific belief  communities win and lose in this era.

Above all, it just seems like a new world, and it seems unlikely that meme-species of the past are going to be the ones that thrive in the new world. Let's be a little more specific than that, though.

First, traditional religions are just on the decline in general. Pew reserach reports that... (read more)

I agree about the "finds important". Just be aware that it is slippery. Communities can and do redefine what is important in such a way that they circle around the insiders and keep out the outsiders.

An example from my life was to be in an educational technology lab where some of the professors were researching online schools. Once the Open University opened up in the UK, however, it and a few other ones were suddenly being roundly criticized by these same professors who were previously into the whole idea. The discussions struck me as a sort of search pro... (read more)

I was about to post something similar but will follow up here since your post is close, @Charlie Steiner .

@eggsyntax, the post is conflating two things: scientific validity, and community penetration. I think it will reach your target audience better to separate thes two things from each other.

I am going to imagine that most people in the scenario you picture are fantasizing that they will post a result and then all the scientists in an area are going to fawn over you and make your life easy from now on. This is what I mean by community penetration.

For tha... (read more)