ThenElection
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User ID: 622
Obvious in the sense of scoring 100% on Pangram, as well as subjectively.
But, yeah, that's exactly my point. Self-appointed experts still choose it; and HN's userbase has been in a steep decline for years and gleefully eats it up. But how is the human artist to make a living or even get recognition, between the Scylla of stupid experts and the Charybdis of stupid anons?
It's still pretty obvious to people, above room temperature IQ and who care, what is LLM-generated and what is not. That's not enough to lead to human work being preferred; and, from here, things only get worse.
ThenElection
1d ago
That's a bit too restricted: animal brains in general are extraordinarily skilled at learning what's necessary for success in their environments.
Phrasing it in terms of human brains make it seem some spectacular, rare success of evolution, and let's you rest on anthropocentric biases. But what about other primates? Dogs, rats, birds, cuttlefish? Some have radically different architectures than mammal brains, and yet they're extremely intelligent, moreso than humans, within the demands of their particular niche.
The question should be whether AI is able to match the intelligence of any animal that has a CNS. Can an AI be as smart as a pigeon? Currently, it's not, within the scope of the physical world and the rewards the pigeon is seeking. That's something that's interesting and under considered.
ThenElection
1d ago
ThenElection
1d ago
It's amusing that Yud's most notable accomplishment will have been advancing the end of the world by a couple years.
ThenElection
1d ago
For the art point, I don't see it. Even today, it seems falsified: work that's obviously heavily AI written has already won at least two significant literary awards. You might say that that doesn't represent particular brilliance on the part of AI beyond knowing how to flatter judges and the fads of the day, and I wouldn't even disagree, but if neither the elite nor the the hoi polloi can recognize and want to reject AI lit, what left is there? And that's with AI that has had essentially no work done to optimize it for the task of writing good literature.
Literature is just the first to fall; five years from now we'll have Shenzhen creating robots that can do the same for oil paintings.
What is the bull case, beyond drawing lines on a graph, for AI achieving superhuman, or even human, performance on tasks that are not quickly verifiable?
I am more uncertain about "superhuman" intelligence, but fairly confident on human intelligence (i.e. as best as the best humans).
My bull case: existing systems have a very significant flaw, in that they're very sample inefficient. They need way more data than a human brain does to learn the same things (don't tell me that a bunch of redundant sensory information counts as extra data). That's a fairly broad critique, applying not just to LLMs.
But we know that there exist systems--not just human but other animal brains--that are orders of magnitude more sample efficient. That suggests there is something fundamental missing from existing learning strategies.
But what existing LLMs do allow is a search over architectures and learning rules. Take a random ML paper off arXiv, and Fable will absolutely be able to implement a Jax Colab notebook for it. No one needs a PhD to do this.
Maybe they can suggest novel ideas, or better prune the combinatorial space of architectures and learning rules. That would speed things up. But that's not necessary: we can automate grad student descent, through brute force. Throw a couple trillion GPU hours at the problem, and if what allows human and animal brains to be as efficient as they are is efficiently implementable on GPUs, we will find it. And on the scale of years, not decades.
"if what allows human and animal brains to be as efficient as they are is efficiently implementable on GPUs" is the biggest question for me, but a negative answer to that just delays the inevitable. Admittedly pushing things a decade or two in the future: if GPUs are a dead end, we have our seasonal AI winter, until the switch to fancy neuromorphic hardware or neural organoids starts scaling.
ThenElection
1d ago
Somewhat ironically, the "get a ton of money at Anthropic" likely offers the most over alternative strategies for scenarios that are more like an AI fizzle or bust.
ThenElection
1d ago
I have embraced the Cassandra role, and the brief moment of payout will be enormous and entirely worth it. Like a thousand simultaneous continuous orgasms lasting for days as the end becomes clear.
ThenElection
1d ago
Isn't that what Scott is doing, essentially? Having a kid and enjoying life.
I think most people who think of doom as a likely outcome are not letting it drive their decisions: no one at this point thinks there's a chance that this kind of safety regime will develop and be effective. Instead, it's optimizing for scenarios where their individual actions might matter, e.g. permanent underclass scenarios (best get that SWE role at Anthropic to get your bag).
Even Eliezer seems to have more or less given up, getting his utils mostly from investing his sense of psychological worth in doom.
ThenElection
1d ago
Let's grant that there is no world-conquest abilities resident in super human intelligence. It's not implausible; I'm uncertain.
But most of your examples still fail to account for AIs impact. All of the human value you still see can be just as well done by AI wearing a human skin suit. People demand real art made by humans? Humans say they're making real art, but use AI to create it: human washing. Lawyers and doctors offering human accountability? Sure, but they'll still delegate all non-customer facing functionality to AIs: human washing.
Human charisma to act as an interface ends up valuable, but that's not that rare (at least compared to deep medical or legal expertise). Charisma will take a cut, but AI providers will take an even bigger cut. And that's all driven by math and software, areas where AI will unambiguously dominate. Welcome to your Anthropic overlords.
ThenElection
1d ago
I quite like the first right of refusal part of this law
Isn't even this ripe for abuse? You have a big mortgage; you get foreclosed on; and your spouse or kid buys it at a steep discount. Or am I misunderstanding how it works?
For comparison, there's Katie Hill from 2019. She resigned due to a scandal involving leaked photos on a wife swapping site revealing an... affair? throuple? with a 22 year old staffer who reported to her. She even sports her own Nazi tattoo (NSFW).
Her sinecure is with a California homeless services nonprofit, as CEO.
(The homeless services nonprofit work is probably the most morally questionable thing she's done, in my book.)
ThenElection
2d ago
No; someone drunkenly getting a stupid tattoo because they think it looks cool is something that happens. It's less embarrassing than someone getting e.g. a Chinese characters tattoo that means something incoherent.
I don't have a clue about whether Platner actually knew or not; it's not something I have researched and never cared enough to. And, for most voters, that protestation of ignorance and stupid youthful mistake would be enough to give him the benefit of the doubt. Layer enough bad judgments on, though, and that benefit of the doubt disappears.
ThenElection
3d ago
I think it's quite likely he either didn't remember (the consent accident happened while he was totally wasted) or didn't think it was important info for voters (who doesn't send dick picks on the sly?) to know, so not quite a lie.
The core issue is that people can forgive a youthful mistake; I can definitely imagine perfectly fine people I know getting a Nazi tattoo when they were 20 or whatever. It makes the person seem more relatable, if anything. But a long pattern of bad judgments makes people start seeing you as the asshole they know in real life, not the dopey friend.
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I question the premise that the Democratic establishment had rallied behind Platner. This probably hinges on the question of what we mean by establishment and what we mean by defended. At best, it was begrudgingly. Many of Platner's remaining supporters, for what it's worth, have taken up the line "the Democratic establishment is stabbing Platner in the back so they can install their preferred moderate running dog as the candidate." And, cui bono? Collins would have preferred this come out two weeks from now.
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Democrats have plenty of comfortable sinecures that he'll have access to, if he plays nice. Media figure, think tank employee, a professor of feminist studies at the University of Maine. The world is his oyster; just not the Senate.
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Democrats can run a write in campaign, like Mukowski a few years back. Platner's negotiating leverage isn't that great, and since Maine has ranked voting, Democrats can plausibly pull off a win. Or certainly doom him to a loss.
My interpretation is that it's a reference to the open concept kitchen. The idea being that whoever is cooking (presumably the wife) can then talk to whoever is not (presumably the husband). The husband then has to flee to the bedroom to veg out.
Frank Lloyd Wright played a major role in this shift (mid century middle class people had fewer or no servants, and the biggest reason for maintaining a strongly separate room for cooking fell away), so "American" kind of makes sense, though I've not heard it called that before.
ThenElection
11d ago
ordinary lower-middle-class folks get to shut down SF City Hall for an entire day to oblige the wedding of their billionaire pals:
As a very limited defense, anyone can rent out SF City Hall for weddings. See https://www.sf.gov/private-events-at-city-hall ; it's even relatively affordable, for a San Francisco venue. (In fact, I got married in the same space! Despite tragically not being a billionaire pal of Gavin's, and having nowhere near the pull to get Nancy to officiate/get stock tips from.)
ThenElection
11d ago
He’s the white male Kamala Harris.
Among the California electorate, he's consistently run 7 or so points ahead of Kamala. That's still a touch below the average Democratic politician--Kamala always did extremely poorly, even among California Democrats--but he's a stronger politician.
ThenElection
11d ago
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It's worth noting that, whatever their other faults, Kerry and Hillary did survive the primary process and get nominated. If his model is "I have the most control over the outcome of the primary process; the general election will be decided on economic macrotrends," then it makes sense.
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The other Clinton was the ur-triangulator, and he was very successful, though the political climate now is sufficiently different that it's hard to draw useful generalizations from it.
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Newsom isn't optimizing for Democrat-as-President; he's optimizing for Newsom-as-President. It's impossible for him to sell himself as a principled left wing ideologue or a committed moderate reformer. Given his biography and character traits, maybe he's making the calculation that, win or lose, baldly embracing reptilian cunning and ambition is a better strategy for him than trying to win people over based on trying to sell another narrative.
ThenElection
11d ago
Leftists (meaning, here, Democrats and affiliated groups) are very eager to call out the Epstein class and variations of it that do center specifically on sexual immorality; this can be seen in everything from Reddit comments to statements by national Democratic politicians. Though it's less a belief in a conspiracy of sexual blackmail driving history and more a belief in the inherent corrupt perversions of the rich.
"Actual leftists" using your more materialist framing exist but have essentially no power.
Newsom is triangulating, not flipping. He opposes a state wealth tax that is actually on the ballot and has a real chance of passing; he supports a national wealth tax that is entirely theoretical and will not be passed anytime soon (hopefully...). This allows him to deflect future primary criticisms of him being in the pockets of billionaires by saying it's just the badly implemented and foolish state level tax he opposes.
He doesn't actually care about wealth taxes as a policy one way or another, except insofar as they help or hinder his way to the White House. But his current strategy balances the competing stories he's selling to donors and primary voters in a reasonable way.
ThenElection
13d ago
One of the strongest signs of intelligence is the ability to present views you reject in a way that resonates with actual adherents of the view.
I think the women who fangirl over murderers are literally insane.
People draw wild, overgeneralized inferences from this. Supposing 1% of women are sufficiently deranged to get turned on by and reach out to serial killers. In the modern media ecosystem, that serial killer would receive millions of contacts indicating interest. Usually, it's more like hundreds (and, notably, only for the particularly handsome; I'd be curious about the more typical serial killer numbers). A cute female serial killer would probably receive thousands.
A vanishing minority of both sexes think like that.
This had zero effectiveness in moving the needle on any cause he was pushing; he could have just as effectively taken a dump and made an MRA sculpture out of it.
On the systemic level, I'm sympathetic to your concerns. But they are pointed at something universal and timeless; fair or unfair as they are, they aren't changing now, tomorrow, or a thousand years in the future. The male sex will never be considered a victim sex or a sex worthy of public consideration. That's simply descriptive, not prescriptive.
That doesn't mean policy can't improve things for men, but it can't be on that basis. Get rid of credentialism; don't flood domestic markets with relative low wage competition; end the fad of preferential hiring of women for entry level positions. You can make arguments for those without asking people treat men as a victim sex; do that instead.
On the personal, non-systemic level, he will ironically probably receive orders of magnitude more romantic attention from a certain (unstable, disturbed) minority of women now, though he won't be able to take advantage of it.
The dream is that the brilliant, underappreciated artist is recognized by an expert, who elevates them and provides an audience. I don't think that happens except by occasional good luck, and most artistic "experts" are idiots, especially the ones who are legibly high status on the expertise hierarchy.
I suspect that after the embarrassing AI slop awards this year, most literary awards will start using Pangram or something similar as a first filter. Because, you're right, they do want to select humans. But it's just a matter of time until we have LLMs that are a bit better and less clockable.
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