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 -
They've cracked Stratego in June, I was making some noise about it back then, but much like BYOL-Explore and some other papers that catch my fancy, it didn't impress anyone else. It only took them half a year to get that into a traditional journal. I wonder what else they have had cooking for this span of time. Well, they'll be sure to boast of it soon, what with NeurIPS and all.
I think LLMs are cumbersome parlor tricks compared to the potential of agents, a transitional technology. But they do have the advantage of being intrinsically toothless (whatever orthodox Yuddites say about mesa-optimizers hiding within), so I think with the fear of AI misalignment we'll see them as pizza dough for general-purpose personal assistants in the nest few years (assuming, as usual, that things go remotely well).
Ah, good catch.
Agreed that LLMs don't seem to have "agentic potential" today, although I can imagine a future where AGI is basically really powerful LLMs attached together with some really simple scaffolding, where we all agree that the LLMs are the dynamo and the scaffolding is just some scripts moving embeddings between LLMs based on their instructions or whatever. Which is not to say that imagining a future is worth much.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link