981–990 of 1000 posts
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>let people express their own values in democracies, or will we just get much better at manipulation? Both are the same thing. Two sides of the same coin.
The distinction is between information flowing from people to power (elicitation), vs. it flowing from power to people (persuasion). These are not the same, even if they are closely related.
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When you can formalize it in Lean or some such, why would this be? I can understand the desire to separate out other forms of research from the human corpus. But theoretical math that is decidable/provable, I’m not sure I see the risks.
I just want to state that having "lean proofs" that build does not mean the actual real theorems we care about hold. Ultimately a human has to verify the lean encoded theorem statements that the lean proofs are checked against. For non-trivial theorems such as these, this is an arduous and tricky task where even a little mistake could be fatal.
Also in the case of these recent counterexamples turning up, we have good qualitative evidence that this pathway is effective.
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Nobody in this thread is trying to predict when the sigmoid is going to bend. Perhaps they should
A lot of HN posters thought it was already bending at GPT4o/GPT4.5. Turns out, it kept accelerating (at agentic tasks).
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If it doesn't help average people, why do millions of them pay for it?
So if millions of people pay for something it must be helping average people but if 10s of millions of average people express concerns about a thing than what? I would assume since you were happy to go with the will of the people when it supported your argument, you would be in complete support of actually regulating ai and addressing the many concerns of society at large? https://www.reuters.com/world/us/americans-f…
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The distinction is between information flowing from people to power (elicitation), vs. it flowing from power to people (persuasion). These are not the same, even if they are closely related.
I guess I wasn't clear enough, _generally_ democracy = manufactured consent by manipulation of people by 'power'
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There's a full fledged 'reasoning' step that basically expands your prompt. As long as you are not missing important information, how you word the prompt does not have any effect.
Isn’t that a huge simplification? Of course the way you phrase the prompt can carry semantic meaning, maybe subtly, but still. And sometimes that matters a little and sometimes a lot. I’ve stopped numerous agent sessions over the last few weeks to reword my initial prompt to get the agent off an unintended track.
The signal here is the action of stopping the agent “do something else, this is stupid”, not a tweak to the initial prompt.
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I guess I wasn't clear enough, _generally_ democracy = manufactured consent by manipulation of people by 'power'
Does AI make real opinion easier to hear, or fake opinion easier to spread? Even if you believe wholly in manufactured consent, how easy it is to manufacture matters.
The latter.
(caveat: we are talking about the vast majority of people, since you are on this forum your personal situation will be the opposite)
>Even if you believe wholly in manufactured consent, how easy it is to manufacture matters.
I believe it's easier.
(same caveat applies)
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In my opinion, after seein the Jacobian conjecture go, the Riemann hypothesis only has about a year left. I’m not sure if people just aren’t as aware, but the Jacobian conjecture practically was on par with those other great problems.
Whether or not it’s on par famously or difficulty level doesn’t predict whether the others will fall. They’re unique problems and math isn’t linear - the Jacobian it managed to find a counterexample and relied on other proofs that had been developed showing >3 case == 3 dimensional case. However, the Riemann may not fall in the same way because it may actually be true or the surrounding math isn’t quite ready to tack…
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> Part of this can be good (you talk about what they care about, where 90% of broadcast messaging might not apply) and part of it can be bad (manipulation.) Side note: it's manipulation either ways because you chose what to talk about, with a goal in mind.
Actually, no. "Manipulation" is a negatively loaded word, and you wouldn't use that word if f.ex. someone helpfully & truthfully helps others see they've misunderstood sth.
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I’m not talking about the actions we take or how we might perform at certain tasks, I’m talking about how our brains actually work. My point is that we have no idea how I’m able to imagine an apple and see it in my mind’s eye. It’s basically biological magic to us at this point. There are processes at work there that we don’t even have the language to describe.
Not only that, but we do it with a processor that is basically required to operate in a narrow temperature band below 40C, using a mere 86 billion neurons (although the equivalence with either machine-learning "neurons" or LLM parameters is not at all clear) operating on a few dozen watts; and with this we operate many other systems besides language processing. It's not clear that our reasoning process requires langu…
For now, caring about a topic (or having somebody you trust care for you) still gets you better information than asking an LLM.