Corvos
5hr ago
I understood you to be making four separate claims, here and below:
- Humans are just LLMs on top of a multi-modal head.
- We have discovered how human intelligence works.
- We have discovered how human consciousness works.
- This proves that all human experience is the product of naturally-occurring accidents of genetics, with all the implicit consequences for philosophy, religion, etc.
If you'll forgive me, this seems to be shooting very far out into the Bailey and I would therefore like to narrow it down towards a defensible Motte.
Counter-claims:
- It is very unlikely that human brains operate on a deep-learning paradigm that resembles anything we use now. I'm the last guy to overstate our level of neuroscientific understanding (my disappointment with it is why I left the field) but we understand pretty well how individual neurons interact with each other on a physical basis: how they fire based on the signals they receive; how that firing affects the propensity of nearby neurons to fire; how relative firing time influences the strength of connections between neurons. It just doesn't look anything like a deep learning network for the reasons I gave above. Importantly, this isn't equivalent to Chomsky dismissing computational linguistics: Chomsky deliberately made his field entirely theoretical and explicitly dismissed any attempts to look at real languages or neural patterns, so when he was beaten on a theoretical level he got the boot. In comparison, the physical basics of neuroscience (and ONLY the physical basics) are pretty well nailed down by experimental electrode measurements. You mention the existing models of backpropagation in biological circuits but AFAIK they're very clunky, can't actually be used to learn anything useful, and don't drop nicely out of what we know about actual neurons. It's just neuroscientists trying not to be left behind by the new hotness. I'll take a look at a cite if you have one handy, though, it's been a while.
- Next-token prediction does impressively well at mimicking human intelligence, especially in abstract intellectual areas where the availalbe data covers the space well. I think we can agree on this. LLMs perform very well on code, writing (ish), mathematics (apparently), legal (passed the bar exam), etc.
- Next-token prediction does less well at the generation of new knowledge or new thought and cannot yet be said to have replicated human intelligence. In general, I found that GPT 4 failed to perform well when asked to use topics from field A to assist me in thinking about field B. On a lot of subjects AI reflexively defaults to rephrasing blog posts rather than making a deeper analysis, even when guided or prompted. I am also not aware of any work where an LLM makes itself significantly more intelligent by self-play (as AlphaZero did), so I don't think we can regard it as close to proved that statistics 101 + compute alone is the secret to human intelligence. It might be! But at the moment I don't think you can defend the claim that it is.
I think other people have covered qualia and philosophical questions already, so I won't go there if you don't mind.
Corvos
6hr ago
Don Quixote was basically a spoof about a man who read a lot of Star Wars novels, thought that Jedi were real, and then decided that he was one…
Amusingly literary opinion seems to switch between:
…and that’s cringe
vs.
…and that’s awesome
at regular intervals
Corvos
10hr ago
Just so we don’t get lost, I am not asserting that the Chinese policy was good. I am asserting that I do not agree with the reverse policy of ‘earth is big, we can have loads more people with no problems’.
In the specific metaphor I used, the ‘house’ is the Earth, or at least the nation. America is very big but lots of other countries aren’t, and the nice bits where people want to live are often much smaller. You can deal with that by having more density or fewer people, and really, why choose to create Coruscant when you can create Naboo? A lot of the Shire is based on Tolkein’s wandering in the countryside around Oxford, but that area is now entirely suburbs that stretch across the whole plain as far as the eye can see. This was a choice.
I’m not talking about the government literally putting people in my house, I’m saying that one way or another I have to share space and resources with your 8 billion plus and under those circumstances saying ‘we’re nowhere near carrying capacity so what’s the worry?’ seems irresponsible.
The optimal density / number of people != the maximum possible number of people. So I have no problem with the goal of controlling population numbers, only with the targets and methods. A two-child policy would have worked much better for China.
Corvos
11hr ago
100% up for this. Preferably with a small lore button on the tooltips so you can read more if interested.
Corvos
11hr ago
To be pedantic it’s ‘deity’.
‘Diety’ is when the difficulty is so high you’re losing weight from stress :P
Corvos
11hr ago
To cook feels to me fundamentally healthy. It is satisfying.
Whereas to me it is tedious and unfulfilling. If I were doing it for someone else that might be different, but it’s just spending an hour of my life (I’m clumsy so prep and cleaning takes forever) to accomplish something that lasts a few hours at best. And the result is inferior to any restaurant.
From a neuroscientific perspective, we are almost certainly not LLMs or transformers. Despite lots of work AFAIK nobody’s shown how a backpropagation learning algorithm (which operates on global differentials and supervised labels) could be implemented by individual cells. Not to mention that we are bootstrapping LLMs with our own intelligence (via data) and it’s an open question what novel understanding it can generate.
LLMs are amazing but we’re building planes not birds.
In general, these kinds of conversations happen when we we make significant technological advancements. You used to have Tinbergen (?) and Skinner talking about how humans are just switchboards between sensory input and output responses. Then computer programs, and I think a few more paradigm shifts that I forget. A decade ago AlphaGo was the new hotness and we were inundated with papers saying humans were just Temporal Difference Reinforcement Learning algorithms.
Corvos
2d ago
The gates slam shut if they detect you trying to walk through without paying. I've occasionally been in a rush and slapped down my card without checking if there was money on it - having the gates knock you back in an instant is a pretty big shock.
Corvos
2d ago
It's good writing, I just find his tendency to see a cloud for every silver lining a bit off putting.
Speaking of depression, you might like Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky. It's the story of an abandoned human colony that has fallen to medieval tech levels, and would be a standard 'impetuous princess teams up with wizard to save the kingdom' story except that the wizard is the last of the Earth anthropologists sent to monitor the colony. He's been alive for centuries waiting for contact from earth that hasn't come, he's clinically depressed in a world that has absolutely no way to understand such concepts, and he's going on the quest essentially as a way to take his mind off things. It really works as a story. The wizard's POV is sad but not whingy or dull, and the overall character interactions end up being really good. It's one of my favourite novellas.
Corvos
2d ago
As an intuition pump, imagine someone from the government comes round to your house and starts measuring its square footage, then tells you it's nowhere near carrying capacity and that you will be required to take in 10 people to use the valuable property more efficiently. (Yes, you can pick holes in the metaphor, but you see what I mean, right?)
I don't want to reach carrying capacity. I want to have a decent-sized place somewhere nice and leafy, not live in an anthill for my whole life. Not only is the supply of many nice things on this world (say, nice beaches) far below the carrying capacity of the planet as a whole, but I don't think that humans actually benefit from density. Cities as IQ shredders are memes for a reason, and I suspect that like pigs in cages, a lot of the modern behaviour people worry about on the Motte is downstream from our modern urban living conditions.
Very true. Thank you for supporting the null hypothesis.
I had a friend who was going for a Masters in Education and he proposed, in all seriousness, to find participants for his survey on "Barriers to Women in Science Education" by asking female friends if they knew anyone who would like to talk about it. I had to give him a real chewing out and walk him through how to do a survey that isn't pissing in the pool of Science. I dread to think what rubbish is getting produced in that area.
Corvos
3d ago
Maybe, but everything was fine till this flu season. My theory is that lockdowns drove down infections and it took a couple of years to get them circulating normally again, but I can’t back that up.
Corvos
3d ago
High heart rates being 150s/160s? I can do that in easy intervals (6x60run/120walk, for example). Was trying to do the couch to 5k before but stopped due to shin splints and worries about aggravating previous tachycardia.
Now trying again but a lower amount and slower rate of growth.
A more dynamic heart rate that can quickly and often switch gears according to situations is actually healthier, somewhat counterintuitively.
Sadly this isn’t me. My heart will go from 160 to 120s in a minute or so, but will be above 100 for three hours at least after a run.
Corvos
3d ago
Thank you, that’s interesting to hear. I was under the impression that waking HRH for a man in early 30s is meant to be 60-70 but perhaps I’m wrong or have high expectations. I had surgery for tachycardia last year and very low physical energy in general so I’m self-conscious about it. But perhaps I’m overthinking.
Corvos
3d ago
Since I’m spamming the wellness thread, has anyone had any success significantly changing their resting heart rate? If so, what did you do?
At the moment my RHR is ~58 at night, 75-85 in the day without recently eating or exercising. It’s my understanding this is significantly too high. Any advice?
Corvos
3d ago
Is anyone having a suddenly overwhelming flu season? I barely got a cold in the two years since the end of the Covid pandemic and now I’ve got sick three times in six weeks. Literally a quarter of my office (rotating) has been sick for the last month. Our ‘out of office’ slack channel looks like a record of the plague.
Corvos
3d ago
Neither have I but off the top of my head I think it's because Carlyle is a Great Persons guy and appreciates anyone with grit and zeal, while Moldbug is a systems guy and is mostly interested in the direction that society is moving rather than the individuals who think they are moving it..
Corvos
3d ago
While I agree with you about China and the dangers of a lopsided population pyramid, it's also true that we really don't want 8 billion people on a planet with limited temperate zones. I don't think it's fair to look at the problems that have resulted from trying to manage a delayed, sticky system that's tied deep into social and mental structures and where both surges and declines cause undesirable affects, then say 'see, this proves that having more children is never a bad thing'. The fact that pessimism has caused problems does not mean that blind optimism is desirable.
Corvos
3d ago
Sabotaging the ability of large nations to sabotage the shipping of small ones, I guess. Worst case I suppose shopping by sea becomes generally suicidal for everyone.
Corvos
3d ago
I don’t think this is true. When I was in academia, most of the replication crisis conversations were being had by the new PhDs. Partly because they had a vested interest in demolishing their elders’ work, yes, but also because they had chosen to become scientists and didn’t like the possibility of being pseudo-scientists instead, whereas their elders were largely comfortable with the status quo.
Corvos
5d ago
This is what happened during the Great Gatwick Drone Scare. The entire airport was grounded for more than 24 hours.
Corvos
5d ago
Just registering for the sake of completeness that I find sunlight in the morning hugely important. Sunlight is one of the most cheerful and vitalising stimuli we have, tied directly into a bunch of our natural circuits.
I think there may be a genetic or cultural component - it’s much more common in Asia to treat the Sun as an enemy. In my last office there was a running war between the European employees who wanted the blinds open and the Asians who wanted them all shut.
It's very well crafted but all the wit in the world can't disguise the fact that it's written by a clinically depressed neurotic. I too have sometimes looked down and seen the gaping maw of existential dread, but outside those temporary moments of madness I have very little patience for wallowing. I want to shake him.
I default to the 'HOLY CRAP, look what this thing can do' benchmark. If somebody's trying to show you scores, it's an incremental update at best.
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