This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
That's fine, I don't feel entitled to your time at all. I also can't predict what might trigger you, just like you cannot predict what would trigger me, nor does it seems like you would care.
The discussion was originally about labs overwhelmingly focused on LLMs and competing for top talent in all of ML industry so partially that was just me speaking loosely.
I do in fact agree with heads of those labs and most star researchers they've got that LLMs strikingly similar to what was found in 201 7 will suffice for the shortest, even if not the globally optimal route to “AGI” (it's an economic concept now anyway, apparently). But it is fair that in terms of basic research there are bigger, greener pastures of intellectual inquiry, and who knows - maybe we will even find something more general and scalable than a well-designed Transformer there. Then again, my view is that taste is to be calibrated to the best current estimate of the promise of available directions, and in conjunction with the above this leads me to a strong opinion on people who dismiss work around Transformers, chiefly work on training signal sources that I've covered above, as “not new science”. Fuck it, it is science, even if a bit of a different discipline. You don't own the concept, what is this infuriatingly infantile dick-measuring?
It's not so much that I hold non-LLM, non-Transformer-centric algo design work in contempt as I am irritated by their own smug, egocentric condescension towards what I see as the royal road. Contrarianism, especially defensive contrarianism, is often obnoxious.
More options
Context Copy link