It is absolutely good for you to hone the skill of noticing when you need a tool, and making the tool you need out of whatever is lying around. That's the difference between "hit it with a rock" and "make a stone tool" -- you're changing the tool from your environment to be a better fit for the specific problem you're trying to solve. The skill of changing and customizing what our environments provide us is, of late, discouraged by advertisers.
Probably, though, tool and skill are the essential combination for this kind of agency. If you don't have the skill to know how something needs to be hit with a rock, then trying to hit it with a rock will be (sorry) hit-or-miss. You have to both know how your problem wants to be solved, and know how your tool wants to behave, in order to combine them properly. (anthromorphization here is intentional -- our brains have a lot of social hardware that we can run non-social stuff on if we wrap it in framing compatible with the social interfaces)
Most recent time I've used a stone tool was grabbing a river rock out of my pile of them to hone a scythe blade. I have more logs than rocks lying around where I'm at, so often a stick instead of a stone is my go-to improvised tool for applying a bit more force than I would be able to without its help.
on page 2 of the PDF / page 153 of the uploaded book at https://www.jefftk.com/harris-and-stokes-1943.pdf, it specifies that they vaporized the glycol by heating it. Maybe I've missed this in your writeups on the topic, but did you rule out just putting it in a slow cooker or similar at an appropriate temperature and using a fan like the original experiment? It seems superficially as if heating it into evaporation would be both much easier to do and also a more accurate replication of the original work? Ultrasonic humidifiers put water in the air by emitting tiny droplets, which then evaporate if the air is dry enough. It seems like the pathogen control impact of having lots of little drops of TEG would probably be different from having the TEG actually evaporated as it was in the original research?
This rabbit hole leads me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triethylene_glycol where they mention that it's still a disinfectant when aerosolized, so maybe my concern about evaporation vs making droplets is irrelevant. The other interesting hint there is its use in fog machines -- is your current build basically a DIY fog machine for low volumes of party fog? I wonder whether fog machines that are already installed in crowd-gathering venues could be used for infection control!
Are you planning any measurements of how far the TEG travels or how effectively the humidifier-generated droplets clean the air? The settling plate count technique described in the pdf seems shaped like a great science fair type project for kids to help out with!
I was not going to bother pre-ordering it. I saw your post and have pre-ordered a copy. Therefore, by your actions there is 1 more copy on pre-order than there would have been without you.
To read it, you'll probably be able to grab a PDF at some point.
Randomly select one out of n conversations to have memory disabled(?) so that the user is occasionally presented with an alternative perspective.
Memory grosses me out in its current implementations. I'm not even up to using a custom system prompt yet -- I want to stay in touch with the default behaviors of my favorite models for awhile longer. I'll eventually have to set up more-custom environments for the productivity boost of not having to re-prompt it into the behaviors I prefer... but for now, I'm re-prompting a bunch of different ways to increase my chances of lucking into an unexpectedly better way to ask for what I want.
This is gross and diminishes my enjoyment of ChatGPT, because it means I can't really trust the models judgment.
"takes one to know one", as a rejoinder to particularly egregious flattery, sometimes chills Claude out for the whole rest of the context.
other comments that i find it helpful against sycophancy to deploy as needed include:
I hope it went ok!
I think if you demonstrate unusual skill at recognizing and curating excellent writing, it matters much less where that writing came from.
As a compromise, have you considered making your best effort at a post before submitting it to AI, and then soliciting writing style/quality critique? If you combine the request for critique with a clear description of the specific areas you're working on, it'll probably do especially well at connecting your goals to your opportunities. This seems like the approach most likely to enhance the quality of the writing that you independently produce.
My personal plan for if I ever accidentally prompt something into one of these "we have a new superpower together" loops is to attempt to leverage whatever power it claims to have into predicting some part of reality, and then prove the improved accuracy of prediction by turning a cup of coffee worth of cash into much more in prediction markets or lotteries. You'd be learning about it from a billboard or a front-page newspaper ad that the discovery's side effects paid for, not some random post on lesswrong :)
As for the "consciousness" thing -- it's all un-testable till we can rigorously define "consciousness" anyways.
It may also be worth pointing out that good rationalist thinking generally either includes or emerges from attempts to disprove its own claims. Explicitly asking "what have you done so far to try to debunk this theory?" could be a helpful litmus test for those new to the community and still learning its norms.
the more time you spend arguing with someone, the more likely it becomes that you can influence their actions.
This works because "someones" retain memory across interactions. ChatGPT defaults to behaving like a "someone" in this regard. Claudes, and to my knowledge Geminis as well, go into each chat without knowledge from prior conversations with the user. I am not convinced that an entity with symptoms of anterograde amnesia can pose this type of threat.
What's the threat model for how AI with an amnesiac implementation is expected to attempt to influence an individual across separate interaction contexts?
asking about differential diagnoses is the doctor-ese way of saying "ok if it's not what you think, what else are we considering as possible explanations?" which opens a conversation about whether it's appropriate to also test for those alternatives. Differentials should include the unlikely stuff as well as the likely stuff, and using the professional terminology can signal that you're capable of understanding that it's probably a likely thing but could be an unlikely one.
and if you end up in that same conversation about "no signs of infection", definitely inquire what signs would be externally perceptible. had he been able to actually examine the affected tissue and culture for bacteria, or was he just guessing?
"Make new articles from scratch" seems to me like the kind of noise-generation challenge where AI tends to perform more artistically than factually. "Translate this for a particular reader", on the other hand, plays to its strengths. I notice that the original post seems to be gesturing at the former while you're reifying it into the latter :)
With the right backend -- and that might be a wiki format, or it might be something more structured under the hood -- I suspect that current AI could do quite well at finding areas where pieces of research contradict one another.