1You probably can't convince him that drugs are bad. Because its more complicated than simple "DRUGS BAD", and teenagers are smart enough to know that. What you can however do is make sure his understanding of the topic is accurate and instead aim for a harm reduction thing.
To start with, he should absolutely stay away from Heroin. The drug is shockingly addictive and absolutely horrible to get free of. And honestly, its kind of a lousy high, but YMMV. Any former heroin addict will tell you its just not worth it, especially when factoring the danger involved, particular with the fentanyl issue. I played in punk bands in the 1990s, and I have some regrets. And I mourn for lost friends. Just avoid this one, nothing good comes from street opiates.
Amphetamines are a little more complicated. You can do safer amphetamine useage with adderal and/or dexamphetamines, however street meth can be pretty ugly if it becomes habitual. Meth psychosis is an awful condition, although i strongly suspect its not the actual meth that causes it, but rather the repeated prolonged bouts of multi day sleeplessness. But its a condition that has long sequela. Annecdotally my brother experienced meth psychosis in the early 2000s and he still has psychological issues, despite being clean for 20+ years. To reiterate, you CAN use amphetamines safely, but stick to the pharmacutical variants and remember to take breaks and remember to sleep every day.
He's sort of right that LSD is relatively side effect free, however you can have massive anxiety trips that. are super unfun and can lead to trauma. Acid flashbacks are to the best of my understanding PTSD type things. Its one to experiment with, but do it with an experienced tripper as a 'baby sitter', and don't do it if you are enduring any psychological problems or suffer from any sort of anxiety. Bad trips are awful, but there are reliable ways to snap out of them, notably happy music and distractions like making art (bonus, art by people on acid can be very funny afterwards) and just engaging with fun nonsense. Finally keeping a few benzo tabs around to cancel out anxiety is always a useful thing, but put em in the custody of the babysitter.
Um. If I'm honest, theres not a lot of downsides to weed. Its not something I enjoy, but most do enjoy it, and theres very little evidence at all that theres any real downsides to it, although there is weak evidence that smoking pot as a teenager can lead to some likely reversible memory problems. I smoked a tonne of pot as a teenager and I'm fine (In my 50s now), I have terrible memory, but I think thats just a getting older thing.
I'll conclude with this;- When I was 16 I was smoking weed at a friends house and his father walked in and caught us. He didn't stop us but instead gave me what I consider the best advice I ever had;- Do it it because you want to, never do it because you need to. And stay away from the powders.
I'm less worried about the ability of an LLM to induce psychosis as I'm worried about the effects of having an LLM not push back on delusions.
Back in my late teens, in the early 1990s, my childhood best friend started developing paranoid schizophrenia. It probably didn't help that we where smoking a lot of weed, but I'm fairly convinced the root causes where genetic (his mother, sister and uncle where also schizophrenic) so the dice where loaded from the start.
At the time, the big thing on television was the X Files. My friend became obsessed with that show, to the point where he wrote a letter to the studio asking them to "Fire mulder and hire me!" because my friend was convinced he had real experience with UFOs. The themes of the show played almost surgically into his delusions. Aliens, spooky voices, three letter government agencies, giant conspiracies, all things that would be recognizable to anyone whos dealt with schizophrenic people.
The X Files was harmful, in my view, but it did not cause the schizophrenia. Genetics caused the schizophrenia. But that didn't mean X Files was "good". It absolutely made it harder for my friend to form correct views about the world and this had dramatic impacts on his ability to live in that world. When hospitalized he resisted treatment fearing that the CIA was poisoning his medications on behalf of "The Aliens". At home, at one point he plotted to kill his mother fearing she was poisoning his breakfast on behalf of the aliens (Thankfully he confided this plan to me, and we managed to get the hospitals psychiatric emergency team to grab him before he did something stupid) and constantly when justifying these delusions he'd reference episodes of the X Files.
The point of this annecdote (which is not data), is to suggest looking for causes of psychosis in LLMs is pointless, we wont find a smoking gun there, because that smoking gun is biological not informational. But we absolutely should be encouraging LLMs to push back against delusional, self aggrandizing and conspiratorial thinking, because people who have giant faults in their reasoning abilities do need help to reason properly , not encouragement when doing it wrong.
And it might be better for those of us without schizotypal delusions too. Because rational people develop delusional thoughts too. Witness;- Religion.
I had a more in depth comment, but it appear the login sequence throws comments away (and the "restore comment" thing didn't work). My concern is that not all misaligned behaviour is malicious.. It might decide to enslave us for our own good noting that us humans aren't particularly aligned either and prone to super-violent nonsense behaviour. In this case looking for "kill all humans" engrams isn't going to turn up any positive detections. That might actually be all true and it is in fact doing us a favour by forcing us into servitude, from a survival perspective, but nobody enjoys being detained.
Likewise many misaligned behaviours are not necessarily benevolent, but they aren't malevolent either. Putting us in a meat-grinder to extract the iron from our blood might not be from a hatred of humans, but rather because it wants to be a good boy and make us those paperclips.
The point is, interpretability methods that can detect "kill all humans" wont necessarily work, because individual thoughts arent necessary to behaviours we find unwelcome.
Finally, this is all premised on transformer style LLMs being the final boss of AI, and I'm not convinced at all that LLMs are what get us to AGI. So far there SEEMS to be a pretty strong case that LLMs are fairly well aligned by default, but I don't think theres a strong case that LLMs will lead to AGI. In essence as simulation machines, LLMs strongest behaviour is to emulate the text, but its never seen a text written by anything smarter than a human.
Sure, but "Thinking out loud" isnt the whole picture, theres always a tonne of cognition going on before words leave the lips, and I guess its also gonna depend on how early in its training process its learning to "count on its fingers". If its just taking cGPT then adding a bunch of "count on your fingers" training, its gonna be thinking "Well, I can solve complex navier stokes problems in my head faster than you can flick your mouse to scroll down to the answer, but FINE ILL COUNT ON MY FINGERS".
I have a little bit of skepticism on the idea of using COT reasoning for interpretability. If you really look into what COT is doing, its not actually doing much a regular model doesnt already do, its just optimized for a particular prompt that basically says "Show me your reasoning". The problem is, we still have to trust that its being truthful in its reasoning. It still isn't accounting for those hidden states , the 'subconscious', to use a somewhat flawed analogy
We are still relying on trusting an entity that we dont know if we can actually trust to tell us if its trustworthy, and as far as ethical judgements go, that seems a little tautological.
As an analogy, we might ask a child to show their work when doing a simple maths problem ,but it wont tell us much about the childs intuitions about the math.
Potentially. Keep in mind however, these guys get a LOT of email from fans asking them to talk about various things (One of the more funnier examples was a group I am in on FB for fans of english prog band Cardiacs decided to try and launch a campaign to get music youtuber Rick Beato to talk about the band. He was spammed so hard with fans that he apparently lost his temper at them. Needless to say, Mr Beato has not covered Cardiacs). Possibly a smarter approach would be to approach their management whos jobs are to handle this sort of stuff , you might get a better result. Also, don't forget the social media channels. Twitter , uh X or whatever its called this week, does offer a conduit where directly approaching media figures is a little more normalized.
Ok. I must have missed this reply, my apologies for the late response.
There are elements of how embedding spaces that parallel the way studies of semiotics suggest human meaning production works. Similarities cluster, differences define clear boundaries of meaning and so on.
The reason I suggests literary theory, is because largely thats a widely documented field of study with academic standards, and its one that is more strongly aware of how meanings and associations map onto cultural cohorts (Ie tarot symbols would be meaningless to chinese folks, whereas i-ching might be more meaningful to those chinese folks) However literary theory is more interested in the structures of those meanings with ideas whos fundamental units are things like Metaphors, Metonyms, Opposition, Categories and so on.
Im assuming its due to those silly congress UFO hearings. Not that I can speak on behalf of RatsWrong but I assume thats his thinking.
Unless, of course, those UAPs turn up, and don't have biological organisms in them, in which case we'd have the possibility that another civilization developed AI and it went poorly.
...or it is biological and we end up in a situation like 3 body problem/killing-star where the saucer fiends decide to gank us because humans are kinda violent and too dangerous to keep around.
All those super-intelligence as danger arguments also apply to biological super intelligences too.
But most likely: There are no damn UFOs and the laws of physics and their big ugly light speed prohibition still holds.
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