07mk
10hr ago
I don't see how it could possibly generate subtitles instantly on the fly for a music video with a runtime of three minutes?
I think your explanation about the AI lying and confidently misrepresenting evidence in this case is almost certainly true. But I don't see how the runtime of the music video would matter for this. If the AI were analyzing the music video - which I don't think it did - it would be analyzing the bits that make up a video file after downloading it from wherever it is, in which case it just needs to process the bits that make up the file, and the speed of that would be dependent on many factors, but certainly not limited by how long the video is. A human might be limited to maybe half the time at the shortest if they watched the video at 2x speed, but I don't see any reason why an AI couldn't transcribe, say, all recorded audio in human history within a second, just by going through the bits fast enough.
07mk
13hr ago
Insofar as this is possible, (I believe Searle disagrees that it is), then the room does speak Chinese because it's just a brain.
I'm not sure how one would argue that it's not possible. Is the contention that there's something ineffable happening in neurons that fundamentally can't be copied via a larger model? That seems isomorphic to a "god of the gaps" argument to me.
07mk
1d ago
We don't know the "ground truth" either, though. All the information that we parse, such as touching the Earth or seeing the moon in the sky or through a telescope are basically hallucinations created by our brains based on the sensory input that we take in through detection mechanisms in our cells. We have to trust that the qualia that we experience are somewhat accurate representations of the "ground truth." Our experience is such that we perceive reality accurately enough such that we can keep surviving both as individuals and as a species, but who knows just how accurate that really is?
LLMs are certainly far more limited compared to us in the variety of sensory input they can take in, or how often it can update itself permanently based on that sensory input, and the difference in quantity is probably large enough to have a quality of its own.
07mk
1d ago
Where I agree with the idea behind the Chinese Room is exactly that. Yes, the agent can answer questions about the things it’s supposed to be able to answer questions about well enough to fool an onlooker asking questions about the subject it’s been trained to answer. But if you took the same agent and got it off script in some way — if you stopped asking about the Chinese literature it was trained to answer questions about and started asking questions about Chinese politics or the weather or the Kansas City Chiefs, an agent with no agency that doesn’t actually have a mental model of what the characters it’s matching actually mean will be unable to adapt.
Perhaps I'm not as familiar with the Chinese Room experiment as I thought I was. I thought the Chinese Room posited that the room contained mappings for literally every single thing that could be input in Chinese, such that there was literally nothing a Chinese person outside the room could state such that a response indicated a lack of understanding of Chinese? If the Chinese Room posits that the mappings contained in the room are limited, then that does change things, but then I also believe it's not such a useful thought experiment.
I personally don't think "understanding," at least the way we humans understand (heh) it, is a necessary component of intelligence. I'm comfortable with calling the software that underlies the behavior of imps in Doom as "enemy artificial intelligence," even though I'm pretty sure there's no "understanding" going on in my 486 Thinkpad laptop that's causing the blobs of brown pixels to move on the screen in a certain way based on what my player character is doing, for instance. If it talks like a duck and walks like a duck and is otherwise completely indistinguishable from a duck in every way that I can measure, then I'll call it a duck.
07mk
1d ago
Your tests have the exact same "problem" as the Turing Test, though. There's no way to tell if the bot actually "understands" Japanese just because it is able to produce Japanese words that are understandable to Japanese people after interacting with Japanese people a bunch. There's no way to tell if the bot actually "understands" physics just because it responds to an equation with symbols that a learned physicist would judge as "correct" after interacting with a bunch of physics textbooks or lectures or whatever. It could just be updating the mappings within its Chinese room.
One might say that updating the mappings in its Chinese room is essentially another way of describing "understanding." In which case the Turing Test also qualifies; if the chatbot is able to update its mappings during its conversation with you such that it appears to you as indistinguishable from a human, then that's equivalent to a bot updating its mappings through its conversations with Japanese people such that it appears to Japanese people as someone who understands Japanese.
07mk
1d ago
If you're claiming that random crying fits are caused by hormones, it just seems to me that you're just saying that the part at the beginning of that paragraph:
women supposedly being men’s equal in mental strength, emotional resilience, seriousness as adults
is actually not true, for a biological reason.
07mk
1d ago
Has anyone chained themselves to their desk? Or better yet, to one of these mystical “servers” containing so much sensitive personal data? We saw more effective civil disobedience over Gaza than we are seeing over our own government.
This kind of behavior would require actually committing to have one's own skin in the game, quite literally. That is not something most people who do white collar work are accustomed to or desiring of. If they lose their comfy government jobs, maybe they have to go on welfare or whatever at the worst case - though that seems likely to be rare, and I'd guess the median and modal result is finding a less desirable job that pays less/offers less security/offers less status. If they storm the DOE or chain themselves to their desk, the worst case is getting killed while being arrested, and I'd guess the median and modal result is spending some time in jail or even prison. The proportion of people who work comfy white collar jobs who believe so much in their principles that they would risk the latter when the former is right there as an option seems likely to be very small, from my experience living among such people.
07mk
1d ago
Strategically incomplete articles that use their own lack of rigour to say there's nothing to see are a pet peeve of mine. I know that it's impossible to prove that the reporter knew about that peace deal, but loudly focusing on a point of ignorance is hardly any better.
I disagree. It's actually significantly worse. A reporter has the responsibility to know these kinds of things. If they write a lie by omission because they're ignorant of what they're omitting, then they're failing in their duties, and they're doing so in a way that allows themselves to feel like they're not failing. If they consciously omitted something in an intentional effort to mislead the audience, then at least they'd be aware that they're being manipulative and dishonest and have to acknowledge that they're looking at a liar every time they look in the mirror. And maybe that could compel some sort of change in behavior due to how it makes them feel (though probably not). But if they leave themselves ignorant, then they can freely spread lies without ever believing that they're being anything less than entirely truthful.
07mk
1d ago
others might be unconstitutional by current precedent but who knows what SCOTUS will do, and if SCOTUs rules one way then that would, in practice, expand the power.
Thanks, this explanation in particular makes a lot of sense to me.
07mk
2d ago
The thing you're missing is that Congress kept delegating rule-making authority to "independent agencies" under the executive, while also creating rules the executive branch had to follow while exercising the delegated authority. The fear from those who are concerned by this move is that Trump will keep the delegated rule-making authority, while ignoring the rules for exercising that delegated authority.
I see, so the way you're describing it, it seems like it's the chickens coming home to roost. Definitely concerning. I can't say I blame him for doing this, though. It sounds like he just picked up a hundred dollar bill off the floor that all the other POTUSs before him just walked past, out of respect for norms or whatever. I see the OP's point now, though, that he's loading a weapon that his enemies could wield in the future. Perhaps he figures that that long-term downside risk is worth it for the power he'll get to wield in his final 4 years in office (and perhaps his life, given his age). Probably irresponsible for a party leader, but pretty in character for him, by my lights.
07mk
2d ago
I'm familiar with the concepts and metaphor you mention here. Could you outline how that applies to this situation? The Constitution is just a piece of paper, much like Executive Orders by the POTUS are - they only mean things insofar as people behave as if they mean things. The POTUS can ignore the Constitution, and his underlings can ignore the POTUS's EOs, and in either case, they'll face consequences only to the extent that people who have the power to inflict consequences on them choose to exercise this power. Is the contention here that Trump is such a cult of personality that this particular EO wouldn't hold up in court or any Constitutional scrutiny, but Trump's underlings will just follow it anyway? If so, it seems that the danger is in Trump being such a cult of personality, rather than any particular EO he might write.
07mk
2d ago
It seems like trump is massively expanding the scope of executive power versus judicial/legislative power to the point where any president with more than 41 votes in the senate can do essentially whatever they want, with the sole exception of raising non-tariff taxes.
I'm not a Constitutional scholar, and much of this thread goes over my head, but this is one point in particular that I don't understand: how is it possible for the executive, through an executive order, to expand the scope of executive power? Either the executive has the power to declare and enforce whatever this EO declares, in which case he's just practicing power he had by nature of being the executive, or the executive lacks that power, and this EO is just unconstitutional or otherwise invalid, to be struck down by courts or by Congress impeaching him.
I'd always thought EOs were essentially pieces of paper with funny markings on them that the executive likes and his underlings are supposed to pay attention to if they want to please the boss. If the POTUS has the power to bootstrap the executive branch to dominating the other branches of government merely through an executive order, then that seems like a major loophole in the Constitution, which makes me think I'm missing something.
07mk
3d ago
I noticed this kind of thing as well recently while trying to learn about something I had little clue about, via ChatGPT. I was curious about how important the positioning of the laces on the football was during a field goal/extra point attempt in American football, since I'd heard that the holder needs to put the laces on the outside, i.e. facing away from the kick, and facing towards the goal. It made intuitive sense to me, that the laces being on the surface where the kicker's shoe touches the ball probably adds more randomness than is desired, but I was wondering if the laces facing to the side would affect the kick, particularly in the aerodynamics of how the ball might curve as it flies in the air. And no matter how many iterations of questioning I did, any requests to analyze how laces facing to the side might affect the aerodynamics of the ball in a negative way for accuracy would either get variations of the same tip about the laces having to face away from the kicker or get "confused" with analysis about the football itself being held sideways on the ground (obviously not good for field goals or any attempts to kick the ball high). It seemed that the generally common knowledge among football fans about the laces facing away was about all that the model was trained on, with respect to this particularly niche topic.
I didn't use o1 with chain of thought, though, so maybe I'd get more info if I did, either with that or DeepSeek.
The "we" is, uh, I guess Charles Fourier and/or the Oxford English Dictionary in 1852. The word was invented, given a definition, and then people took that definition as a label.
Fair enough, so it seems to me that, to you, the original person who wrote the first entry of a word into some particular dictionary (OED in this case) is the ultimate authority of the word's definition, and no matter how people "in the wild," so to speak, use the word to communicate to each other doesn't affect it. It's essentially the equivalent of a tablet handed down from God at that point and forevermore.
There's nothing wrong with this perspective, even if I disagree. But much like how there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the 10 Commandments when it comes to how they live their lives, I hope you understand that there's nothing wrong that many people don't feel obligated to follow the OED or any similar authority when it comes to how they communicate with others.
I disagree "most of America" speak a different version of English from you; the part of America that's wrong about feminism does, and good thing I don't speak to them outside this site.
Given how general polling about people identifying as "feminists" in America goes - IIRC, every poll indicates that a majority of American women don't identify with the term, and the proportion of people who agree with some statement about men and women deserving equality or being equal is always far greater than the proportion of people who identify as feminists - I think you're likely living in a bubble.
That people take a word and try to convince others that the word means something else is the neverending creep of stupidity that, as you pointed out, interrupts the flow of communication between people.
I mean, that's precisely what you're doing in this thread though, right? You're the one trying to convince others that the word that they use to communicate to basically everyone else clearly is actually being used wrong.
07mk
7d ago
In that case, it seems that TheMotte - and, honestly, most of America - is a place where they speak a different version of English from you, where "feminist" refers to a certain strand of "sexist." As such, when you see "feminist" being analyzed, it should be clear that it's not referring to the same thing you are when you use "feminist." As long as everyone involved can communicate to each other using words that each other recognize and agree on the meaning of, I don't see any problem.
God didn’t hand us the tablet, we wrote it ourselves.
I don't want to argue this, but I'm curious who is "we" here, though? In my own descriptive model of word definitions, the "we" would be referring to just the sum total of how people, throughout their everyday lives, make noises (and write scribbles on paper or screen, etc.) at each other by flapping their mouths in order to convey things to each other, through which the noises become associated with meanings. You seem to believe in some sort of authority that gets to override this sort of emergence of meaning through behavior, and I'm not sure who specifically that authority is.
07mk
7d ago
They’re just not very reactionary and tend to be busy doing things instead of participating in online flame wars.
Well, besides online flame wars, these self-described "feminists" also tend to run actual policy and companies and write essays in mainstream publications and books. These are the people that the layman picture when they hear the word "feminist," even if they don't meet your or my personal standard for what constitutes a "feminist." And they are certainly far more influential in modern USA politics than feminists of your or my sort (though the recent election might be evidence that that is changing).
That there are people on Twitter posting sexists takes and arguing that it’s not sexist and getting a bunch of other people angry doesn’t change the fact they aren’t feminists and it’s wrong to regard them as such. If they get together in a group and say they’re feminists their numbers sadly don’t change the definition.
I disagree, but our disagreement here doesn't matter. God didn't hand us a tablet that says "the English word that starts with 'f,' ends with 't,' and has 'eminis' in between shall forever be defined as XYZ." If enough people use a word to mean something, and they all agree with how it's used, then people like you or me with unpopular definitions don't get to walk in and demand that they submit to our own idiosyncratic definition of the term.
In any case, again, this disagreement doesn't matter. You are free to believe in a prescriptive model of word definitions rather than a descriptive one. But what should be understood is that other people, including likely most on this website, see the word "feminist" as meaning something different from you, and they have zero problems communicating with each other this way. If this semantics issue is too much of a hump for you, I wonder if a mental trick of replacing "feminist" with a new made-up word "pheminist," where it's prescriptively defined as something like "person that people on TheMotte generally agree is being described when they use the word 'feminist.'" would be helpful. At the very least, that'd be a way to escape from feeling like you yourself are being scrutinized or discussed.
07mk
7d ago
As a feminist myself, I'd agree that that's not the type of stuff that I support as a feminist (in fact, I've spoken out against other feminists who espouse them). Unfortunately, feminists like you or me tend to be either rare or quiet (for me, personally, I chose to be the latter due to noticing that speaking out in the way you did in this comment tended to be met with extremely harsh abuse from other feminists), so I have to admit that comments like Quantumfreakonomics's or FCfromSSC's in this thread are entirely accurate when describing the general group of people who both call themselves feminists and who other people recognize as feminists. I've just had to learn to leave my ego at the door and not feel attacked when people talk about "feminists" supporting [thing I, as a feminist, oppose]. I think having relatively unpopular or at least less-loud (we could be a silent majority among feminists, and I actually suspect that that's the case!) perspective within a particular ideological group unfortunately tends to require this kind of thinking, and this forum in particular tends to have a high proportion of people with fairly idiosyncratic opinions that make them relatively unpopular or, again, less loud compared to the common, mainstream ones within any given ideology.
07mk
8d ago
My default presumption with anything of this sort, such as the supposed phenomenon of anti-gay activists/preachers/etc. being discovered to be gay that was all the rage 2 decades ago, is your #2. However, the strongest alternative IMHO is the final bullet point. I wouldn't emphasize the stuck-in-time one, though, but rather population clustering. A typical male feminist will tend to spend more time around female feminists than a typical male non-feminist does. And female feminists tend to have standards around rape/sexual assault/harassment/abuse that are quite a bit lower than those of female non-feminists, and more importantly, they tend to have standards that are a lot less legible, predictable, or consistent than female non-feminists. When standards are both lower and more random, it's more likely to accidentally cross it.
07mk
9d ago
One analogy I heard somewhat recently that I keep thinking about when seeing all this DOGE-related news is that, when you amputate an infected limb, there's almost undoubtedly lots of cells in that limb that are perfectly fine and perfectly functional, but it's just not viable to go in there and surgically (literally) remove only the bad cells and leave the good ones behind. Perhaps it might have been possible earlier on when the infection was small, but at some point, the infection became large enough such that, if we don't remove the limb along with the good cells, the host itself will die.
There are many issues with the analogy, such as the fact that the host in this case probably won't die and the fact that the good cells in the limb are humans with suffering, free will, a voice, and a vote, and the fact that whether the infection has gotten so bad that amputation is the only viable option isn't something we can determine with the same level of confidence as a doctor looking at an infected limb. But I think it's a reasonable enough position to have with respect to the current circumstances.
And I think it points to the fact that, if the "good" cells in a metaphorical infected limb wants to survive, then it's incumbent on them to take control over the infection within and take active steps to credibly signal that it's in control, if not rooted out entirely. I think the past couple decades of escalating DEI (I think the term "DEI" becoming a popular catchall term for this is more recent, but certainly the push for that exact sort of ideology has been around and quite strong at least since the 90s) is one part of this that shows the utter failure of many institutions, both within and out of the government, to make credible signals that they have the infection under control.
07mk
10d ago
Do you know how viable it would be for an AI model to be able to "reverse engineer" sheet music from an audio file? Knowing very little about music myself, my intuition is that one could train a model with lots of sheet music-audio file pairs and then feed it the latter to generate the former, but I could easily be missing some hurdle that would prevent this from being viable.
07mk
14d ago
I watched S1 a while ago, and I just couldn't understand the hype. The basic premise and mystery seemed interesting enough, but they didn't really explore enough to carry an entire show. The cast of characters could've carried it, but they just didn't, and I found myself just not caring about them, especially involving that romantic subplot with Christopher Walken's character. The strongest part was probably with that woman early on in the season exploring the premise as sort of the audience-surrogate rookie entering the job for the first time, but even that felt stronger on shock value than actually playing with the premise interestingly. In the end, I think I wished that S1 had been the first third of a season, setting up things for actual story that used the premise in a fun way.
07mk
14d ago
By the way, you can totally do that with current technology: take a hearing aid, set it to receive ultrasound. You'd still need to use some of your actual senses for receiving the input, like taking those ultrasound waves and translating them down to normal hearing range. That will unfortunately interfere with you hearing the usual sounds, and if you don't want that, you can use some of your less-used senses. Like, have it be a vibrating butt-plug or something. I'm sure one can train the brain to distinguish different vibration pitches after a while.
There's definitely a good porno plot in there somewhere about a world-class chess player who climaxes when hearing dog whistles.
07mk
14d ago
That's definitely true, which I forgot to mention in my previous comment. Parrying with a slender offensive weapon like a sword, in such a way as not to damage the blade, is cooler than parrying with a large defensive tool like a shield. Somewhat similar to how having a sword a shield is less cool than just having a shield for both defense and offense.
You can make YouTube videos go at arbitrarily high speeds just using a Chrome extension. I actually had an issue recently where an extension was causing the videos to default to 10x speed, which was both amusing and annoying. In any case, anyone with a link to a YouTube video has the ability to just download the video using basic non-AI tools, so the AI wouldn't be limited by the UI that YouTube presents human users.
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