thejdizzler
10d ago
We know for a fact that the electron transport chain of mitochondria relies on quantum tunneling to move electrons between complexes and MRI doesn't seem to effect that very much, so I wouldn't be surprised if an MRI had no effect on conscious experience (although I couldn't tell you, I've never had one).
I don't buy the claim that we can simulate biological neurons perfectly with their ML counterparts. We can barely simulate the function of an entire bacterial cell, which for context, is about as big as a mitochondria. Can we approximate neuronal function? Sure. But something is clearly lost: what else would explain the great efficiency of biological versus human systems in terms of power consumption.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Relevant paper: https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.110.024402
Relevant other links: https://jacquesmattheij.com/another-way-of-looking-at-lee-sedol-vs-alphago/, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.23.057927v1.full, https://www.rintrah.nl/a-universe-fine-tuned-for-biological-intelligence/
thejdizzler
10d ago
I don't think it's unlikely that humans are far more optimized for real-world relevant computation than computers will ever be. Our neurons make use of quantum tunneling for computation in a way that classical computers can't replicate. Of course quantum computers could be a solution to this, but the engineering problems seem to be incredibly challenging. There's also evolution. Our brain has been honed by 4 billion years of natural selection. Maybe this natural selection hasn't selected for the exact kinds of processes we want AI to do, but there certainly has been selection for some combination of efficient communication and accurate pattern recognition. I'm not convinced we can engineer better than that.
I don't think we are going to see eye to eye on this at all because I don't think current AI models are good at writing. There is no flow, there is no linking together of ideas, and the understanding of the topics covered is superficial at best. Maybe this is the standard for writing now, but I don't think you can say this is good.
I challenge you to post two examples of writing you find good in a reply below, one from AI, and one from a human. I bet you I will be able to tell which is which, and I also guess that I will find neither good nor compelling.
thejdizzler
10d ago
Sure, might be true for stuff like books/art/music. I might argue that this has been happening for a long time, without AI, due to the centralizing effects of globalization and the internet. Why pay to listen to Joe Shmoe and his band play at a local bar when you can listen to the best of the best on your phone at any time?
In terms of customer service though, the slop is not good enough. It's not 80th percentile, it's 10th percentile. Maybe it can get better, but I don't really think so based on how these models are built. AI is just pattern recognition on a massive scale, it can't actually think. The best it's ever going to be in customer service is the equivalent of an Indian in a call center reading off a script. That's not good enough.
thejdizzler
10d ago
I have to wonder when people like you post stuff like this about AI (and my past self-included) have actually used these models to do anything other than write code or analyze large datasets. AI cannot convincingly do anything that can be described as "humanities": the art, writing, and music that it produces can best be described as slop. The AI assistants they have on phone calls and websites instead of real customer service are terrible, and AI for fact-checking/research is just seems to be a worse version of Google (despite Google's best efforts to destroy itself). Maybe I'm blind, but I just don't see this incoming collapse that you seem to be worried about (although I do believe we are going to have a collapse for different reasons).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Just wanted to agree with the second part. Monogamy allows us to focus our energies on cultural outputs on things other than being a coomer. Which is straight good. This obviously way more difficult in harem/polygamy situation (because of time constraints), and in a situation where you never mate (not having a partner is bad for mental and physical health).
Yes! I'm in the middle of the SST progression. Just did 3 x 20 min last week, planning on doing 2 x 30 min tomorrow.
In complete agreement!
I'm not saying that grit isn't real. Heck I'm reminded of this cycling study where they had people do some max power efforts, a longer VO2 max effort, and then the same max power efforts. Most people had around the same max power the second time around, meaning they weren't able to push themselves effectively on the VO2 max stuff. Rather, I'm saying that the way that you sustainably develop grit looks a lot like the kind of training that you should be doing anyway, and much less like just being yelled at by a guy that you're not trying hard enough. There is nothing that has made me want to quit a sport more than my coach telling me I wasn't trying in the middle of a race where subjectively I was burning all cylinders.
thejdizzler
1mo ago
I played a lot of sports when I was younger. From about the age of 11 on, I was doing about nine to twelve hours of aerobic exercise a week. Initially this was swimming, but I transitioned to running in high school, and then later took up cycling to complete the triathlon trifecta. I still do all three of these sports, am very glad that they were such a large part of my formative years, and frankly, I would like to get back to the kind of hours that I was putting in a few years ago: dedicating yourself to sport is one of the most meaningful things you can do in today’s society. These sports have taught me many things: patience, discipline, fortitude, and even kindness. They continue to cultivate these virtues even today, and will probably always be part of my life.
However not everything that sport inoculated in me was positive. Every coach I had, from middle school swim club onward, was drawn to a conception of mental toughness, or “grit” that made it difficult to understand where improvements came from, or to have a healthy relationship with competition in general. When races went poorly, poor training, physical conditions, or distractions were never at fault. Rather, I was made to feel that there was something defective in my brain or character. That I was, to quote Severus Snape, a weak person. Not only is this position a philosophically bankrupt form of the worst kind of Cartesian mind-body dualism, it also fails to offer any actual avenue to improvement. Willing yourself not to slow down doesn’t actually work when you’ve completely overshot your sustainable threshold pace ten minutes into a thirty minute race.
So how does one actually improve mental toughness in racing? There are a couple strategies. The first is to simply not put yourself in a situation where you need to be mentally tough. This means starting out a more intelligent pace that will lead to a slower accumulation of exhaustion and allow you to finish the race without having to rely on mental toughness. This was the real issue for myself and many of my teammates in college: we overestimated our fitness, went out too fast and had to rely on “grit” and “toughness” which couldn’t make up for the extra accumulated muscle fatigue from overshooting our capacity.
The second solution is to recognize that mental toughness is trained in much the same way as physical toughness: by doing training sessions that are physiologically, and psychologically challenging, and progressing these over time. By targeted exposure to the kind of pain that you would be likely to experience in a race, that pain becomes both physically, and mentally easier to deal with. You can push yourself more because it “feels” easier to do so because you’ve practiced it. And that practice looks a lot like the kind of training you are already doing to prepare for the race physically.
However, the two things aren’t exactly identical, or there wouldn’t be such an “epidemic” of mental weakness on high school and college cross country teams. The key distinction, I think comes from how we would break up intense training sessions, or workouts, as they are colloquially referred to.
In college, we ran an 8k (5 miles) on grass about every other weekend. Our weekly Tuesday night workout was about this same distance, but split up into intervals anywhere from 400m to 2 miles. The longer repeats tended to be much faster, but with more rest proportionally. We sometimes did even longer and slower intervals on non-race Saturdays, but these were never close to the 8k distance. Physically, these intervals made a lot of sense: they allowed us to get in the kind of stimulus (neuromuscular and metabolic) that was essential for improvement in the 8k but without the toll on the body that running a full 8k all-out every Tuesday would have required. Psychologically, it was a different story. My best 8k time was around 25 minutes, but the longest of these intervals was only around 10, providing very little opportunity to learn how to cope with the mentally taxing final 5 minutes of the race. There was also little opportunity for progression week to week: the total length of the workout didn’t get any longer from week to week, and neither did the average interval length.
Contrast this to how my current Tuesday workouts are structured. I would start the season with just a simple 10 minutes and my target half-marathon pace. The next week I would progress in total volume to 3 x 5 minutes, but compensate for the increased intensity by making the workout psychologically easier by splitting up the 15 minutes into intervals. But the next week I would progress psychologically by doing 2 x 7.5 minutes instead, as the longer intervals are harder mentally. And so on and so forth until I got to about an hour of work at half-marathon pace, which would be sufficient mental preparation for that kind of race.
The real problem with our team at MIT (where I went to school) was not lack of character, confidence, or belief in oneself, but poor training. Mental strength in racing does not come from some inner reservoir of “will” but from treating the brain as a muscle that needs to be developed in the same was as one’s body through the principles of overload and progression.
I think this has some implications for other areas of my life as well. If I'm giving a presentation at work about my research, I’m going to be much more confident in my work if I’ve spent the time to carefully collect data it and think through the details of the experimental design. If I doubt my own work, bullshitting can only conceal so much of that from the audience. With Spanish, conversations with natives and my reading ability get better when I spend time in the language. If I haven’t read all week, of course my speaking ability is going to suffer. There is no substitute for putting in the time, bro: this idea of willing things to be so through sheer “grit” and “determination” cannot die fast enough. Confidence comes from competence, there are no shortcuts.
(Mods not sure if this is better suited to Wellness Wednesday, but thought it was relevant to culture war because of mind-body dualism, grit talk).
thejdizzler
1mo ago
Awesome! Glad to hear it!
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Good advice. I think I'm honestly too open to giving people chances whereas the dates I've been on where it worked out (at least short term) things just clicked fast.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Careful you don't feel too inferior or I'll eat you too!
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Only oysters and clams and mussels and scallops. Shrimp are too developed for me.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
God only allows humans to eat meat after the Noahide covenant. Before that animals are reserved for burnt offerings. Adam is almost certainly a vegetarian, at least while he lives in the garden. Thus eating meat is another sign of our fall away from grace.
Beyond Christianity there is the inconvenient fact that my lying eyes (and other senses) tell me that animals are like me and experience pain and pleasure and have some form of consciousness. I don't think it's correct to eat human babies for meat, even though they are objectively less conscious than me, nor do I think it's okay to eat retards, who will never be as conscious as me. Without some arbitrary human/animal distinction (which is one of the flaws of christianity IMO) I don't think you can justify one and not the other, at least in my opinion.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
I know sleep is going to be compromised when I have kids. This is fine, and other areas of my life will just have to suffer for a while. I just don't see a need to do this for relatively superficial social reasons.
Car I'm also willing to buy/share when/if I get married. It's not a good investment now, and I have a zipcar membership when I absolutely need it (for a hike or something).
The vegan restaurants issue is not an issue. Because I eat shellfish, there is always something for me, at least around here. What I've done in the past is cook vegan every time my girlfriend is over. She appreciates the cooking even if she isn't vegan herself. In marriage I'll probably continue to do the same. Worst comes to worse I'll have to learn how to cook some amount of meat. Kids are not going to be vegan, at least at first. There are too many open questions about nutrition at that age that I'm not looking to have an argument about.
I think this is a problem with the institution of the Church in the West. There are so many propositions that you have to accept based on blind-faith, many of which I think are incorrect. It doesn't need to be this way. You can have a lot of doctrinal flexibility in your religious community while still maintaining a strong moral core of belief.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
I am vegan for ethical reasons. Not open to changing this, although I am open to compromises on specific animal products (i.e. will eat eggs if we keep chickens ourselves). I am happy to do all the cooking myself.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
I've done Volo, it's a lot of fun!
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Personality flaws: The biggest straight-up flaw I have is insecurity. I care too much about what others think, and don't see my own value. I also am quite judgmental, but I don't see this necessarily as a straight up flaw, rather as something I need to keep better to myself. Other things that might be seen as flaws: pretty strict about sleep and exercise, don't own a car for environmental (but also economic) reasons (I have a zipcar membership so this doesn't have to be a problem), I'm also pretty irreverent to authority/ to any particular "team".
Beliefs that might be seen as dealbreakers. Veganism. Certain women want men who are hunt and eat steak, and many others want their husband to be able to cook their favorite dishes, which usually contain meat. I'm open to comprise as long as it doesn't involve me eating meat or animal products, but this isn't always clear on the first date. Catholicism. For woke women it's usually over (how can you hate women and gay people so much). Truth seeking. This goes with the irreverence above. I will not swear forever allegiance to any institution or group that doesn't allow me to update my beliefs based on my experience in the world. This obviously causes problem with catholics (I believe revelation is incomplete and evolving), but also with lots of secular people. A lot of this comes down to keeping my mouth shut, but I have also been burned real hard when I've expressed these kinds of thoughts to people who I thought loved me.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
No specific time frame in mind for marriage, but I would like to have children before I'm 40. When I've dated people over the past few years it has been with an eye towards marriage, and when it becomes apparent that that is not on the table due to personality/ideological differences, the relationship ends pretty fast.
Thanks for the other advice! I'm finding the open-mindedness thing to be very hard. Woke and catholic women seem to find different parts of my beliefs/personality to be a deal breaker. Perhaps this is just that I'm a). not quite hot/chad enough b). haven't found a woman who likes me enough to look past that stuff.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
So dating. I'm at a bit of a crossroads. On one hand I want to get married and have kids, so in some sense dating is required for that. On the other, most people I seem to meet through dating apps are not really the kind of person I would like to spend my life with. I have two big requirements: open-minded and physically active, which surprisingly seems to cross out a lot of candidates. Things have been better organically, but those kinds of relationships kind of just "happen". I also subjectively feel extremely busy: I'm working on my PhD, studying for the DELE B2 Spanish Exam, running 50-70 miles a week, and hanging out with my friends. If the right person comes along I'm very willing to sacrifice some of these things, but I feel a bit like I'm wasting my time going on dates with girls from dating apps that I don't end up liking, rather than focusing on job/hobbies/community.
27M living in Baltimore, MD for context. I'm a non-strict vegan (shellfish+honey), and don't care if partner is also vegan. Catholic, but pretty critical of the narrow-mindedness of the church on dogma. Extremely fit endurance athlete. No problem with most drugs, but not a heavy user of anything.
What does theMotte think I should do?
thejdizzler
2mo ago
This is bad for me personally. Very bad. Goodbye F31 funding. Goodbye future career in the sciences.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik, and it seems that my post was too doomerish (judging from many other comments) to convey that. I share many of the perspectives that you write here as a Greer-sockpuppet. If I were to rewrite my original post reflecting this, I think I would probably reframe it terms of that perspective. Instead of the framing of "why aren't we more worried about these slow moving, natural, and impossible to stop problems", I would try and state instead: "why is the motte so concerned about things like AI/colonizing mars etc. when those things are energetically impossible pipe dreams?" I'm also not advocating we do nothing, but rather I see our resources (energy, but also human intelligence) as being misspent on futile treadmilling rather than "collapsing now to avoid the rush" as Greer might say. Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.
I would like to take the time to reply to a lot of those down thread, but I think, because of what you state in the first paragraph, there is not much point. We are looking at different the world through two completely different narratives. Inconvenient facts like declining EROI of every fuel source we are using and greater and greater dependence on fragile global supply change can be brushed away in the name of technological innovation or market efficiency. At the end of the day our system is predicated on infinite growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, and when we bump up against those limits there will be some kind of collapse.
thejdizzler
2mo ago
Also really dystopian. Would also explain the success of the new Chinese model. They don't give a shit about privacy.
I don't think this analogy works for literature/art. It's already extremely convenient to find a piece of art/music/literature to consume. It takes a couple seconds to download something from the kindle store, you can listen to anything on Spotify within a few seconds, and every painting ever made is on google somewhere. How exactly can you get more convenient than this? I suppose there's an untapped market for specific fan fiction/ slashfics for niche fandoms, but archive of our own and fan fiction.net are chock full of almost anything you would want to read in this regard. There's so much slop out there we don't need AI to make any more of it.
In terms of search and customer service, there is certainly room for convenience, but the AI that I have seen implemented in these fields is simply worse than previous algorithmic (or human) implementations. I'll change my mind when I see something better.
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