Viewing profile — helicalmix

I think it's totally fair to be skeptical, but it's also not rare to have interventions that are astoundingly effective. Antibiotics and vaccines may not be completely free lunches…

The transformer paper was published in 2017, and within 8 years (less so, if i'm being honest), we have bots that passed the Turing test. To people with shorter term memories, pass…

> So healthier customers means their profit is 5% of SMALLER_NUMBER. I don't think this is completely true right? Rather, it's more accurate to say that customers that are seen as …

can you explain this statement to me more? I think i'm missing something

hmm...doesn't this possibly incentivize ozempic subsidies even more? If you know a "customer" of yours (an individual employee) is only going to be with you until they either chang…

this is not intuitive to me. In your description, it feels like capital more closely resembles carrots then whips? also, the person's only source of wages isn't going to be specifi…

https://www.nycp.com/elements/HA1/1345 Basically, in business and life, if you're too in love with craftsmanship of a specific function, but can't relate that well to the general g…

hm, maybe we're misinterpreting each other's main point. My reply was to some person who said that AI was akin to astrology, i.e. absolutely fake bullshit, which is bonkers to me. …

sorry, maybe i'm not completely understanding what you mean by "in consumer products". reading your argument on reddit, it seems to me that you don't consider 3d printing a success…

> It may feel like a normal conversation but is a Chinese Room on steroids. Can you prove that humans are not chinese rooms on steroids themselves?

> Sure, 3d printing has its place (mostly in making plastic parts for things) but it's hardly the revolutionary change in consumer products that it was touted to be. Instead, it's …

i feel like a common consumer fallacy is that, because you don't interact with a technology in your day-to-day life, it leads you to conclude that the technology is useless. I guar…

which hype cycles are you referring to? and, after the dust settled, do you conclusively believe nothing of value was generated from these hype cycles?

sure, but we're not discussing the outsourcing of human companionship in this context. we're discussing the capabilities of current technology.

this is a different thesis than "AI is basically bullshit astrology", so i'm not disagreeing with you. Understanding atomic energy gave us both emission-free energy and the atomic,…

> GPT-4o being able to describe actual events in real time is interesting, it's yet to be seen if that's useful. sure, but my experience is that if you are able to optimize better …

i legitimately don't understand this viewpoint. 3 years ago, if you told me you could facetime with a robot, and they could describe the environment and have a "normal" conversatio…

This feels like an uncreative statement though, as there are many different ways to use this data. For example, what if an engineering manager needs to convince finance for headcou…

This is a silly example, because Ilya's umbrella isn't front-end code. To answer your question though, yes, if Ilya was Head of UX Engineering and his front-end code wasn't up to p…

My tongue in cheek response is that you are correct, because a century ago, WWII didn't happen yet. Can you provably demonstrate that education quality was better a century ago? I'…

Have you considered that it's possible that both you and Scott are particular good at reasoning, and it's everyone else that is much worse at this stuff? You're pointing out a bunc…

Haha yeah, I've been to rationalist meetups too, and have come to the same conclusion that I don't like them very much. Too much IQ stroking for my tastes. Scott specifically thoug…

Oh, that's a good point, and I think you're idea is a better behavior model vs. the "stick with prior" idea. What if the conclusion forces behavior though? For voting, you can abst…

> This is the correct Bayesian action: if I know that a false argument sounds just as convincing as a true argument, argument convincingness provides no evidence either way. I shou…

One counterexample for why I think it's not always the best approach is that there are sometimes disproportionate rewards for being right when everyone else is wrong. Doing so, how…