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The whole thing was a scam

garymarcus.substack.com

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Re: The whole thing was a scam

#111

Post by TacticalCoder »

knollimar wrote: post #100
atmosx wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap or not doesn’t matter. Sir Winston Churchill supposedly asked Lady Astor whether she would sleep with him for five million pounds. She said she supposed she would. Then he asked whether she would sleep with him for only five pounds. She answered,"What do you think I am?" His response was, "We've already established that; we're merely haggling over price."- Marcus Felson, Crime and Everyday Life, Second Edition,…

I think it does matter and this quote is always flaunted like it's some deep insight but it intentionally ignored nuance. An amount you can comfortably retire on is way different than $5. We love to pretend humans have unflinching morals but they don't

> I think it does matter and this quote is always flaunted like it's some deep insight but it intentionally ignored nuance

There are people that wouldn't do it no matter the amount. Not for billions. Not for a trillion. And that's why no matter how rich the other party, there are people to whom they simply aren't rich enough.

"No" is the most powerful word in the dictionary. And when some people say no, they really mean no. And no amount of money can change that.

And most filthy, corrupt, bribed politicians and corrupt public servants out there know that fully well: they feel filthy and miserable because they know there are people out there with moral and ethics.

Additionally, there are people who honestly really don't give a fuck about money (it's not my case): so they'll say no not because of particularly high moral or high ethics, they'll say no just because they enjoy their simple life.

Honestly it's a sign of low moral and low ethics to believe that anyone can be bought out and that it's just about the amount.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#112

Post by knollimar »

DANmode wrote: post #107
knollimar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it does matter and this quote is always flaunted like it's some deep insight but it intentionally ignored nuance. An amount you can comfortably retire on is way different than $5. We love to pretend humans have unflinching morals but they don't

“We” also love to pretend that every, (or even most), humans who could break laws, or common moral boundaries in order to cash out actually do that . I think that’s a fallacy, too.

Agreed; an equally flawed assertion.

In my view we have some unflinching morals, some more flexible ones, and some you don't adhere to at all, and which is which tends to differ between people.

I personally don't believe in non-religious ontological good because of this aspect of human nature.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#113

Post by phtrivier »

mpalmer wrote: post #77
phtrivier wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a short and quick blog post. Bloggers used to do that once in a while (before twitter made it the only allowed mode of expression to please the advertisers.) Other posts from G.Marcus are much longer. Go read them, but be prepared for some "adversarial thinking" if you strongly believe in the scaling hypothesis. Might border on "bubble popping ". You're all for free speech and the free market of idea, so it won'…

LOL. Are you mistaking writing critique for some childish form of disagreement on the issues?

I think, in the middle of all the grandiose proponents of "AGI is coming any time soon", "AI is going to cure cancer", "LLMs will fix climate change", "ChatGPT will bring back your estranged lover", etc... Some critique has to be a bit harsh. "The data center has no clothes", in a way ?

I agree that the author gets a bit childish when he goes into name dropping of people who used to disagree with him and don't any more - there's probably some background drama that I'm not particularly interested in.

Still. I believe having both Gary Marcus and Dwarkesh Panel in a timeline, in chronological fashion, whiteout and algo to tell me who's right, is one of the perks of substack.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#114

Post by tombert »

juleiie wrote: post #101
tombert wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said it a million times, but I'll repeat it. There are a lot of conspiracy nuts like Alex Jones, and the amusing thing to me is that there is a conspiracy of elites who are exerting large amounts of unelected control of the government, and who are actively working to keep you down to enrich themselves, and it's not even a secret. We call these people "billionaires", and at this point they don't even bother hidin…

Some people just don’t want to hear it no matter what. Not because they are unusually stupid or inherently evil but because they feel severely hurt by the societal changes and left out. Anything that gives a hint of hope of reverting things to be the way they were is justified and no price is too high. They can steal as long as they are our thieves. To get through to these people you have to validate their deep fears…

> To get through to these people you have to validate their deep fears. Not just say - shut up, you are stupid, vote for me.

Everyone says this kind of stuff, but honestly I don't think I agree. Everyone says that you have to be nice to these people to attract them, but that doesn't seem to have been the case for people like Trump or any of the other demagogues that have popped up in the last decade or so.

These people are decidedly huge assholes. Trump is the most easily offended person I have ever seen, and whenever anyone ever goes against him he will go on his stupid Twitter clone and give a diatribe about how they're not true Americans and they're radical left and they're traitors and a bunch of other bullshit.

People like John McCain and Mitt Romney tried to meet people where they are and negotiate, and both of them failed to win the presidency. Trump went on stage, rambled a bunch of incoherent nonsense about how Mexico not sending their best or trying to brag about having a giant cock and he's been elected twice now.

I'm not convinced that being polite to these conservatives is actually the right path forward. I tried being polite to my grandmother when we would discuss these things and instead of reflecting on her believes she's fully fallen down the QAnon rabbit hole and has actively said to me that my wife should be deported.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#115

Post by mentalgear »

woah wrote: post #80

Seems pretty unimportant and inconsequential though because LLMs don't work anyway because they aren't logic-based symbolic AI, right?

I know you trying to mock Marcus, but the reality is that all the big LLM providers have been shifting to integrating symbolic reasoning into their models for over a year now since they noticed that scale-alone is a dead-end. Also DeepMind's AlphaFold, which won the nobile price, is neuro-symbolic AI - so I think both of those points very much justify Marcus's long criticism of pure subsymbolic LLM "AI" as a path to real causal reasoning.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#116

Post by timacles »

pton_xd wrote: post #23
afthonos wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that’s not accurate at all, and in case you are genuinely confused: 1. Anthropic should be free to sell its services under whatever legal terms and conditions it wants. 2. The Pentagon should be free to buy those services, negotiate for different terms, refuse to buy those services, and terminate contracts subject to any termination clauses. You may or may not agree with what the Pentagon wants to do, but if thin…

1. Agree 2. Agree > The problem is that the Pentagon is trying to bury Anthropic as a company, calling it a danger to the United States because it exerted its non-controversial right in (1). My take is that the DoD very much wanted to continue using Claude. However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. The DoD took this as a personal offense (how dare this guy, does he know who we are…

That is way too reactive for these people

It is more likely the plan purposely gave Anthropic terms it knew it would not accept to give a certain public perception. OpenAI was always going to be the recipient, but for reasons unknown, they could not make the deal directly, and had to create the perception that they had no choice.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#117

Post by saghm »

DANmode wrote: post #107
knollimar wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it does matter and this quote is always flaunted like it's some deep insight but it intentionally ignored nuance. An amount you can comfortably retire on is way different than $5. We love to pretend humans have unflinching morals but they don't

“We” also love to pretend that every, (or even most), humans who could break laws, or common moral boundaries in order to cash out actually do that . I think that’s a fallacy, too.

I imagine the number of people who would do it if they theoretically knew they had no chance of getting caught is different than the number of people who actually do it. I don't disagree with your conclusion about how many people do, but knowing how many people would lie, cheat, steal, or murder their way to wealth but don't due to sufficient deterrent is useful knowledge in how to structure a society.

To be clear, I'm not making any claims about whether this is a large proportion or not, because I have absolutely no idea (and I have doubts this would even be possible to calculate with even a remote degree of confidence purely via philosophical discussion). If anything, some sort of study that provides evidence that this number is lower than expected would be a strong argument against typical "tough on crime" policies that are often popular with people who express concern about human nature in this regard.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#118

Post by stinkbeetle »

addandsubtract wrote: post #94

This is only a surprise to HN, because all the other threads about the corrupt US regime have been flagged before. I guess now is a good time as any to start paying attention. Who would've thought that attention is all you need?

When you say "HN", do you mean you? Who else was surprised? The place is full of people constantly commenting about how bad the US is, how corrupt the government is, how terrible CEOs (particularly Altman) are, late stage capitalism, etc., etc.

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#119

Post by croes »

> In capitalism, the market decides.

> In oligarchy, connections and donations decide.

> but after Brockman had donated 25M to Trump’s PAC

Sounds like they paid Trump and the government, can it get more capitalistic?

Oligarchy and capitalism don’t contradict each other

Re: The whole thing was a scam

#120

Post by afthonos »

pton_xd wrote: post #98
beej71 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, Amodei refused to budge on relinquishing final say over Claude usage. And that's 100% acceptable and legal. They have the right to do that. And DoW can then turn around and say "no deal". And that's 100% acceptable and legal. So Hegseth going above and beyond and lashing out on the People's behalf like a butthurt child is unwarranted at best, and should definitely be illegal if it's not already.

I agree, my point is simply that Hegseth lashing out over Amodei's refusal is more plausible than a grand conspiracy to move to OpenAI (while simultaneously locking themselves out from Claude).

I do agree with this.
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