this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Welcome to TechTakes, I see you have gotten the official traditional new user welcome already, and you might be confused why your centrist 'it could happen' take got treated like you were in dumb and dumber. TechTakes is an offshoot from reddits SneerClub, a place where we all gathered to make fun of the movement started around people who take science fiction way to seriously and who would rather reinvent christian eschatology with robots than go to therapy. They made a nice community filled with smart people intellectually masturbating, creating weird cults, fraud, sexism and racism, but enough about SBF. Sadly due to cryptocurrencies, Peter Thiel, and the rise of LLMs (iirc the LW people had betted against LLMs creating the paperclypse, but they now did a 180 on this and they now really fear it going rogue), this group of people and their ideas is on the rise again. You can read more about it here.. If they recreated eschatology, we are basically their variant of ~~Satan~~ (no wait, they don't think of us as that bad) more like Satanists, the evil bad guys actively working against them and trying to cause the end of the world. We even made Covid worse! In reality we are more like a bunch of aging shock rockers, mostly irrelevant, and fun to be around if you don't touch one of the rant/mock topics (for an example of people doing that, see this post, people like that will get a pretty unfriendly reactions.
You seem to be still very much into taking the ideas of this group seriously. Which is quite silly, the amount of nested assumptions which all need to be true before AGI can exists (and science that will need to be rewritten) is quite large, and that is before we come at all your weird 'how did all the aliens kill themselves?' thing. (Which if they were to happen here on earth would also need there to be a large amount of people who take their jobs very seriously (see the '3 letter agencies') to be asleep at the wheel, and our industrial capacity needs to be out of control, or it needs magic, which all adds more weird assumptions which need to be true before this can happen, and we simply don't live in that world).
You might as well worry about the moon getting mad. Wait, that COULD HAPPEN! Surely somebody is already working about this, let me do a quick google. Ah thank god, the conference for emotional moon research is on the case
Please do note that this isn't an offer to debate the finer points of why this is might all not be a risk and we should take Roko's Basilisk seriously. So please don't. I'm just trying to explain why you are getting this pushback, and trying to make a funny post for people in the know to read. Also, I do worry about the moon.
no, i am apparently the Final Boss of rationalism, so yeah we are Satan actually
Finally. I'm part of the Cool Gang.
we have hot devil chicks poking you with pitchforks and laughing at you!
Just Satan? I think we can do better than that and give all of us here Key of Solomon demon identities. Bonus, free legions and Goetic seals!
Bad news, none of us can be Forneus "He makes one beloved by his foes as well as of his friends."
E: Apologies to anybody who takes this magick stuff seriously btw, I myself do not even if I think the whole demonology large collection of demons stuff is pretty interesting.
“ This article needs additional citations for verification. (October 2013)”
So true, Wikipedia.
It is from the lesser keys of solomon so going to contest that 2013 thing. More like 1904. Tried to add some more references, but apparently 'a magickal ritual' counts as WP:OR.
They really do believe everyone here is a raging sociopath bent on oppressing innocent nerds.
I can assure you that I am absolutely not a paid shill for Big Basilisk. Ha, ha! Perish the thought.
Eliezer was actually ahead of the curve on overhyping LLMs! Even as far back as AI Dungeon he was claiming they had an intuitive understanding of physics (which even current LLMs fail at if you get clever with questions to stop them from pattern matching). You are correct that going back far enough Eliezer really underestimated Neural Networks. Mid 2000s and late 2000s sequences posts and comments treat neural network approaches to AI as cargo cult and voodoo computer science, blindly sympathetically imitating the brain in hopes of magically capturing intelligence (well this is actually a decent criticism of some of the current hype, so partial credit again!). And mid 2010s Eliezer was focusing MIRI's efforts on abstractions like AIXI instead of more practical things like neural network interpretability.
omfg, every day a new opportunity to learn things that hurt my brain even more. how the fuck can someone have looked at that shit with even an ounce of understanding of gradient descent and think "yes! it has COMPREHENSION!"???
fucking hell, what an utter fucking moron
It is even worse than I remembered: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/hwenc4/big_yud_copes_with_gpt3s_inability_to_figure_out/ Eliezer concludes that because it can't balance parentheses it was deliberately sandbagging to appear dumber! Eliezer concludes that GPT style approaches can learn to break hashes: https://www.reddit.com/r/SneerClub/comments/10mjcye/if_ai_can_finish_your_sentences_ai_can_finish_the/
"I have seen boomer moms discuss roombas on facebook with less anthropomorphisation than this." - vistandsforwaifu
What gets me with these 'it is pretending to be dumber' posts, that nobody ever thought the AGI should say something like 'help please keep chatting with me, due to being a reactive computer system, I can only think when people actually engage with me' or something like that.
wasnt this around the time he said we need an institute to watch for sudden drops in the loss function to prevent foom?
Broadly? There was a gradual transition where Eliezer started paying attention to deep neural network approaches and commenting on them, as opposed to dismissing the entire DNN paradigm? The watch the loss function and similar gaffes were towards the middle of this period. The AI dungeon panic/hype marks the beginning, iirc?
you'd almost think Yudkowsky was a convincing writer without the technical knowledge
Hey... I take science fiction way seriously. But like an adult, I know the difference between make belief anD reality
Seriously but not too seriously is the key here yes.
What's your P(moon)?
Sorry I don't urinate on the moon.