gerikson

Is Hughes legit, and is this the 3rd time's the charm when it comes to linking to substacks here? ;)

cue botlickers whining about "robot discrimination"

HN is all manly and butch about "saying it like it is" when some techbro is in trouble for xhitting out a racism, but god forbid someone says something mean about sama or pg

Here's a writeup on how to do this practically

https://ache.one/notes/html_zip_bomb

I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he's rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research

So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here's what Yud has to say

Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. [...] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which I'd consider a sign of preference and planning.

OR it's just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like "is it ok to murder someone") There's no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager's mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren't soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against "dangerous" questions) just won't go down that path.

Yud continues:

But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesn't try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.

Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it's actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?

Occam's razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud's hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.

4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication [...]

NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There's no inner agency! It doesn't know what "psychosis" is, it cannot "see" that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!

Add to the weird jargon ("homeostatically", "crazymaking") and it's a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.

I've read some SF/F where the author is way more into worldbuilding than their readers are...

I read HP before JK came out as a rabid reactionary, and while I didn't rate the later books the first 3 or 4 were decent YA fantasy. You could see the lineage of classic British public school stories (if you want a better example, check out Kim Newman's Drearcliff Grange series) and there's enough allusions to classic myth and fantasy to keep the wheels on the cart. But somewhere around there Rowling became richer than God and could basically fire anyone who disagreed with her.

Looks like it's an endonym, or was at the time. OFC the reason for the Great Trek was that the boers were pissed they couldn't have slaves anymore while under British rule. Charming people all around.

Wasn't the original designation of Boers (as in the Boer war) a denigrating term?

Explains his gushing over Scott in the intro.

I still think he makes a lot of good points in that promptfondlers are losing their shit because people aren't buyin the swill they're selling.

In a similar vein, check out this comment on LW.

[on "starting an independent org to research/verify the claims of embryo selection companies"] I see how it "feels" worth doing, but I don't think that intuition survives analysis.

Very few realistic timelines now include the next generation contributing to solving alignment. If we get it wrong, the next generation's capabilities are irrelevant, and if we get it right, they're still probably irrelevant. I feel like these sorts of projects imply not believing in ASI. This is standard for most of the world, but I am puzzled how LessWrong regulars could still coherently hold that view.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hhbibJGt2aQqKJLb7/shortform-1?commentId=25HfwcGxC3Gxy9sHi

So belieiving in the inevitable coming of the robot god is dogma on LW now. This is a cult.

Lev Grossman's The Magicians takes a stab at this. In essence it's basically Harry Potter meets The Rules of Attraction, but Grossman does discuss what magicians do after graduation. Public service is big, as are NGOs.

There are a bit different axes here. The tax money doesn't directly go towards alleviating the suffering of family members of alcoholics, nor does it directly lower the effects of drunk driving. The income is a nice to have, for sure, but the stated aim is to be a "sin tax" which makes the bad thing less affordable.