Suppose that, in the years before telescopes, I came to you and said "the planets are other worlds, like ours, and a bunch of them have moons."

Suppose you should believe, without evidence such a theory, as opposed to one of the many equally plausible but wrong theories that were going around at the time such as: "other planets will have different kinds of men on them" or "other planets have vegetation and life on them" or "other planets have rocky surfaces and air on them".

And suppose that subsequently, evidence should be discovered proving that you, and you alone were correct.

Then you will be lauded throughout the world.  People will declare you a thought-leader, an influencer a visionary of the future.  Undoubtedly, wealth and fame will attract themselves to you.  History books will sing your praises for centuries to come as "the man who knew other planets had moons."

In one small, dark corner of the internet, however, you will encounter a strange group of people.  These people have beliefs like "claims should be based off of evidence." And those people will use a different word to describe you: lucky.

To criticize an idea on the grounds that the evidence for that idea isn’t conclusive is insane — that’s a problem with your body of evidence, not the ideas themselves!

What does this sentence even mean?  The problem isn't the idea, it's that there's not enough evidence for it... sounds like the problem is with the idea.

There are no new ideas only new datasets

Currently all LLMs are terrible at computer-use.  Part of this is an ergonomics problem (GPT agent is frequently blocked from viewing websites and I still don't trust it enough to e.g. give it my street address and credit card number).  But when I give graphically demanding task that is 100% doable in the browser, it still falls absolutely flat on its face.

What is needed for RL to succeed is something like: an internet-scale dataset of graphically demanding tasks with objective success criteria.  Sooner or later someone is going to put together a dataset like "here are all 150k games on steam with a simple yes/no that tells us whether or not the AI beat the game."  And when that happens, I strongly suspect RL will suddenly start working.

Alternatively, companies like figure are planning to deploy 1000's of robots in the real-world with more or less the same idea: create a huge training set of actual physical reality (as opposite to just text + multimedia).  

Once a proper dataset is in place, I expect we will not see slow-gradual progress indicated by the METR chart, but rather a huge all-at-once leap (on par with when we first started properly applying RL to math).

Most Americans use ChatGPT if AI was causing psychosis (and the phenomena wasn't just already psychotic people using ChatGPT) it would be showing up in statistics, not anecdotes.  SA concludes that the prevalence is ~1/100k people.  This would make LLMs 10x safer than cars.  If your concern was saving lives, you should be focusing on accelerating AI (self driving) not worrying about AI psychosis.

tend to say things like “probably 5 to 25 years”. 

Just to be clear, your position is that 25 years from now when LLMs are trained using trillions of times as much compute and routinely doing task that take humans months to years that they will still be unable to run a business worth $1B?

thank you for clarifying.

Those all sound line fairly normal beliefs.

Like... I'm trying to figure out why the title of the post is "I am not a successionist" and not "like many other utilitarians I have a preference for people who are biologically similar to me, I have things in common with, or I am close friends with.  I believe when optimizing utility in the far future we should take these things into account"

Even though can't comment on OP's views,  you seemed to have a strong objection to my "we're merely talking price" statement (i.e. when calculating total utility we consider tradeoffs between different things we care about).  


Edit:

to put it another way, if I wrote a post titled "I am a successionist" in which I said something like: "I want my children to have happy lives and their children to have happy lives, and I believe they can define 'children' in whatever way seems best to them", how would my views actually different from yours (or the OPs)?

I genuinely  want to know what you mean by "kind".

If your grandchildren adopt an extremely genetically distant human, is that okay?  A highly intelligent, social and biologically compatible alien?

You've said you're fine with simulations here, so it's really unclear.

I used "markov blanket" to describe what I thought you might be talking about: a continuous voluntary process characterized by you and your decedents making free choices about their future.  But it seems like you're saying "markov blanket bad", and moreover that you thought the distinction should have be obvious to me.

Even if there isn't a bright-line definition, there must be some cluster of traits/attributes you are associating with the word "kind".