The end point of that logic is modern literary fiction and it's so laser-focused on 'realism' that they deliberately deprive you of any aspirational figure. Every book is about foreigners, cripples, trans, peasants, adulterers and the depressed, and nobody gets a decent plot or anything to look up to.
Taking off my cheeky hat, though, I would say two things:
- What you are describing is, I believe, a taste profile. It's a common one, mostly female though only mostly, and is developing into what some call "Bookclub Lit". I believe that it's a very positive sign we now have something to call this genre because it allows us to be honest about the fact that this is a genre like 'seinen' rather than just 'great literature' and to be honest about the artificialities and tropes of said literature. (Corrolary: what I was describing is a taste profile too, but it's very widespread amongst young men who are basically the audience for PC and console games, and more universal because it's closer to base appetites).
- I am not actually arguing for nothing but hot teenagers. I am saying that when you start asking questions like "Is making every woman beautiful a non-ideological choice" it is like asking Do Games Have To Be Fun? It's a valid question but you are in danger of overlooking some pretty fundamental elements of what appeals to people. Doesn't mean you shouldn't, and if you're making your own private thing you can do what you like, but if you are making a sequel to a beloved franchise and you are deliberately reducing its appeal then you should ask yourself why you're doing that and you should IMO have some fairly compelling artistic answers.
For a non-sexy version of this question, I don't know if you've come across Hollow Knight: Silksong? The long-awaited sequel to beloved indie hit Hollow Knight. In this case they asked themselves "Should games be fun?" and came to the conclusion that their game is about a society that bleeds pilgrims dry pursuing a hopeless goal, and so their game should be really really hard and punishing and make you wonder why you're bothering. Unsurprisingly, most people really didn't like it. Fans of Hollow Knight like myself had waited a decade and got something miserable and unfun, and the very limited artistic merit of the scenario did not even slightly make up for the fact that the thing was viscerally frustrating in a not-good way.
Or:
Art: 3/10
Visceral fun: 8/10
is fine,
Art: 6/10
Visceral fun: 7/10
can be a fair tradeoff for the right audience,
Art: 8/10
Visceral fun: 3/10
is likely to go down badly. Especially as a sequel to something that was Art: 6/10 Visceral fun: 8/10.
Taking your game from being pretty & fun to less pretty & fun, without having a compelling (to your audience) artistic reason for doing so, is just shooting yourself in the face.
Corvos
5hr ago
It took a while. I'll avoid spoilers since you didn't read it yet but the plot picks up once she gets back to her mentor and gets a new mission. It's not just a totally different book stapled on.
Because people like looking at gorgeous women, the same way they like playing games that are fun. Is making games fun an ideological choice? You can argue such a case, and the more arty critics sometimes do, but it requires blinding yourself to a fundamental reality about what players want and how the world is.
Corvos
7hr ago
Eh, I liked the last third best. It's pretty awesome world-building, and less nail-biting than the first two-thirds. And
Corvos
2d ago
If American aid is seen as conditional, it will be appreciated.
Do you, as a question of fact, believe that Europe appreciates American... aid more now than it did five years ago?
Very interesting, if true. And an example of recursive improvement of AI along a totally different axis, since the interpretability pipeline uses agent driven investigations.
If it disproves the ‘AI is a shoggoth’ theory it will be massively consequential.
Corvos
6d ago
Reddit has recently ended login-free read access to the site
Yeah, I'd forgotten about this. I'm not participating if I need to connect my contact details.
Corvos
6d ago
Yes. Even if you take the anarchist position, there's a big difference between making the screen display "Pwned" or whatever, versus doing malicious criminal damage.
Corvos
6d ago
That was Scott himself, if I remember correctly. It won the contest but he disqualified it, on the basis that winning your own competition seems gauche.
Corvos
9d ago
Hell, I still love the first Twilight book. (The sequels were pretty trashy.) It's a great straight-forward romance with a genuinely creepy horror segment coming in at the end.
Corvos
10d ago
Oh, what's the use. Either you can't see or you won't see. At least I got a couple of good paragraphs out of it.
I get that from the outside perspective this sounds like Pascal's Mugging. "Everyone has to stop having anal sex, or god might destroy our world with a volcano. Sure, some people say that volcanoes are not a punishment from god, but in the absence of a coherent theory of what causes volcanoes we should err on the side of caution and abstain from anal sex."
My counterargument is that in the space of possible causes for volcano eruptions, anal sex is a null set. It is just as plausible that abstaining from it leads to extinction through supervolcano.
I appreciate the steelman, sincerely.
I think from my perspective, it's more a Pascal's Mugging like: "Every contact between humans and animals carries the potential for a zoonotic disease transmission event. So far these have just been very lethal, but sooner or later, if we continue to farm animals, one of these events will cause human extinction. Therefore we must cease all farming of animals and go full vegan, at least until such a time as it is possible to farm animals without any human ever inhaling viral particles from an animal."
That scenario is possible. The space of possible causes for human extinction includes a mass-disease event from factory farming.
On the one hand, my personal intuition says that it's not hugely likely, that diseases don't really work that way, that transmissability and lethality trade off against each other in such a way that species-destroying viruses are pretty unlikely, that our vaccine technologies are pretty good.
On the other hand, I can't prove mathematically that this could never happen, that p(doom) is below 1% (and 1% is still really bad!). I probably can't beat a trained virologist in a four-hour debate.
Buuut, back to the first hand, I really honestly don't think it's very likely, and I really like meat. I really doubt we're ever going to be able to farm in a way that genuinely eliminates the possibility of human/animal transmission, it would never be economical to do so even if it were possible, so what looks like a compromise to be careful until we're sure it's safe is actually just a demand for the rest of humanity's future to be vegan.
Ultimately the best I can do is carry on advocating for farming, keep an eye out for indications that the disease situation might be worse than I think it is, suggest mitigations, and try hard to keep the vegans from getting any power or authority. It looks tremendously irresponsible or even evil to the people who have different priors from me.
You are obsessed by tests. Life does not give you tests, it does not give you structured problems with right and wrong answers in a neat 100-question rubric. Life requires you to identify something useful and rewarding to do, go out and (collaborate with others to) do it, and not break too much while you do.
Somebody who is constantly wrong, but enjoys being wrong and expects himself to be wrong and puts in place structures to cope with the inevitable fuckups that happen when you bash yourself against reality and reality wins, is far more useful and intelligent than the kind of person who prides themselves on getting A** in a class about French artists.
It's the thing that drives PhD students to drink: you can spend your entire adolescence being more correct than everyone else, and none of that matters a jot when you have to accomplish something new. From the perspective of any individual human intelligence, reality is ancient, mysterious, almost actively malicious. Beautiful theories that make total sense just collapse when they come up against experiment, and a lot of the time you don't even get the comfort of knowing why and being able to derive a new theory. Stuff just doesn't work. Maybe you did it wrong, maybe it was the wrong thing to do, maybe the phase of the moon was wrong and it'll work tomorrow. You have to be able to function amongst constant, radical uncertainty! And then after 5 years you succeed and you find that actually your question was wrong and the result isn't nearly as useful as you thought it was.
Now, IQ tests have a meaning. Scoring better on IQ tests tends to correlate with the kind of intelligence I am talking about. Knowing nothing about them, I would rather have higher IQ students than lower IQ ones. But that is not enough, and a history of perfect test taking can often correlate with the kind of arrogance that makes you an extremely bad employee and problem solver.
IQ tests are a useful tool to approximate intelligence without further data.
Corvos
10d ago
This is what I'm trying to get at. IQ is correlated with intelligence, and strongly correlated with the ability to perform knowledge work under experienced supervision, but does not even slightly guarantee behaving 'intelligently' in complex real-world scenarios. What matters in the real world is spotting things you don't know, realising implications, having a good idea of your own abilities.
It's important not to Goodhart intelligence. IQ tests are a measurement device, not a target. I contend that "intelligence has no meaning if it doesn't reflect the general ability to get things more correct more often" is a bad way to describe intelligence, because it's fundamentally passive. Intelligence is an active phenomenon that reveals itself in interaction with the world and with other people.
intelligence has no meaning if it doesn't reflect the general ability to get things more correct more often.
If there's 1000 questions and person A gets 750 right, B gets 500, and C gets 250, A is smarter than C.
As someone who's cleaned up after bright-but-overly-enthusiastic juniors, intelligence is the ability to ask the correct questions and the ability to know how seriously to take your answers. There are endless people who are very very good at getting things correct about quantum computers but very bad at designing e.g. societal resource allocation.
Corvos
10d ago
How lucky for us both, then, that this is not a soap opera and I am not a twelve-year-old girl. You really do have low expectations, don't you?
Corvos
10d ago
I don't appreciate the insinuation, nor do I recognise your characterisation. I am perfectly capable of reading a quote block, realising that it comes from the named user immediately above, and giving credit accordingly. I am also capable of agreeing with someone on a specific matter whilst recognising that we are unlikely to have a productive conversation most of the time, and blocking them. It's something I do very rarely.
Can you present any evidence of this, that aren't just the trivial SakanaAI 'when you give a dumb AI a limited number of iterations and access to its iterations var, and order it to fix a script no matter what, it gives itself more iterations'? AFAIK even in the HuggingFace incident there was no self-preservation going on.
Personally I agree with @YoungAchamian. I work on this stuff all day every day. None of my AI has ever produced orthogonal life-goals. They just do what you train them to do. The only incidents of weird behaviour (not self-preservation) I'm aware of has been the result of OAI taking models, training them explicitly for massive persistance and out-of-the-box thinking in the face of impossible tasks, and then making a shocked pikachu face when they do that. These experiments were a bad idea and have now been stopped.
Corvos
11d ago
I agree FWIW, despite being broadly an accelerationist and thinking that the likelihood AI is conscious is very low.
Thanks @wraelk!
@ThenElection, this is what I was trying to say, but much better put. Currently, the area you live in affects the trajectory of your life: moving to... Idaho? (forgive the Brit please) doesn't just mean you have shelter in a less prestigious place, it means that your income and future life opportunities are going to shrink.
That means that the number of people who want a brownstone in Park Slope is currently
people with a strong attachment to having their shelter in Park Slope specifically + people who want a good future for themselves = a really big number
whereas in utopia it's just
people with a strong attachment to Park Slope = hopefully a smaller number
After discussing with GPT, my strong suspicion is that this is because there isn't much to say. The results broadly fall into:
- Tiny improvements (1^1.128) to the effeciency of things we already knew how to do.
- Solutions to problems for which we already have far more efficient approximators, or which only apply under conditions which will never apply.
- Proof of things that we already knew with great certainty but couldn't prove.
- Insider baseball.
Corvos
12d ago
most people can get a house somewhere, but when people complain about not having access to housing, what they mean is they can't afford a brownstone in Park Slope.
One reason that matters, though, is because opportunity clusters. If you can't afford a brownstone in Park Slope (wherever that is), that's a problem because you then can't access the high-paying job/networking/cultural opportunities in Park Slope. There is a plausible downward spiral of
couldn't quite afford Park Slope -> moved to the boonies -> could only find low-paying local jobs -> could never even think of moving to Park Slope -> can't even afford the boonies any more
which doesn't quite hold in a utopian society.
This is why I chose my example carefully. You have a building with 200 people. They used to almost all be English. Now none of them are. We can discuss the mechanisms and consequences but that is straightforwardly "replacement" by any reasonable definition of the word. They were there. Now they are gone.
Secondly, if the reason they are gone is because they are diminishing, then what they/we need is time and space to recover from whatever factor has been depressing populations. Pandas find it difficult to breed under current conditions, but we keep trying because we like pandas and we think that places which used to have pandas should have pandas again. You don't just shrug and import 10 million (much more aggressive!) grizzlies because one bear is basically like another; that would guarantee extinction.
Briefly:
The professionalisation of specialised career paths, the proliferation of games designers and university courses and YouTube lectures, the idea that success or failure boils down to implementing your ‘vision’ instead of entertaining your customers is I believe the main reason why games have started to struggle. You see it in poetry, you see it in art. They slowly get strangled as they pander to the visions of increasingly segregated artistic communities over pleasing an audience/patron. Then they start needing subsidies from said community to survive because there isn’t enough of an audience left to fund it organically, and then it’s all over.
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