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Who Aligns the Aligners?

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Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#51

Post by jazzypants »

recroad wrote: post #41
jazzypants wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is not a democratic country. Words have meaning. The US has a checkered past and is quickly moving away from democracy, so we don't have much of a leg to stand on, but it's integral that we do not lose track of what that word means in the years ahead.

American presidents/power structures come from a small credentialed network of people. The congress is entirely bought and paid for since the early 70s, and the will of the people isn't represented in the policy. For sure the US (and China, and India) have a "checkered past", that's why I group them together and don't really differentiate the quality of their democracy. I'd argue India is probably the most democratic…

I never said it was healthy. I said it was a democracy, and I didn't even mention the benefits of it being a federalist republic. Just look at how much trouble Trump is having undermining elections. He had to resort to the absurd postal service scheme, which might still somehow work. Do you think that Xi Jinping would ever require such chicanery?

Do you live in China? Do you think that Chinese people feel this free to openly criticize their government on a public forum?

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#52

Post by timr »

myrmidon wrote: post #34
timr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

No, that does not follow. Any other argument against is perfectly fine, just not the "it hasn't happened before" one.

You're arguing in favor of a teapot circling Mars. We can't prove it's not there, but telling me that "nobody has ever found it" is an invalid argument is obviously absurd.

In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong (which is 100% true -- the ridiculous doom has been going on since at least GPT-2. remember how that was "too dangerous to release"?) Show me why I should believe in this one.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#53

Post by RandomLensman »

bayindirh wrote: post #50
RandomLensman wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would 41C be the limit for the hot side? How does it work now in hotter places?

In short: Things degrade. More: https://angliancompressors.com/blog/how-ambient-temperature-... There's a T3 class for up to 52 degrees Celsius. While it's higher than 41 degrees, it's not significantly higher: https://zerohvacr.com/blogs/t1-t2-t3-explained-climate-class...

Is 52C a physical limit?

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#54

Post by cmrdporcupine »

watwut wrote: post #2

> History does provide a great deal of guidance, however, about the use and misuse of government power. It tells us that the state is in fact likely the worst possible custodian for the most powerful publication and data analysis technologies. Like, no. The worst custodian is someone like Thiel or Musk or Altman. > In foreign countries, particularly the United Kingdom and Europe, where national governments have fewer…

Yep, it's getting tiresome seeing some Americans point fingers about the superiority of American constitutional and (small r) republican structures while that state form is showing absolutely remarkable degradation of basic real democratic health and quality of life. The US constitution and its legal frameworks have done almost nothing to stop the most egregious abuses of power domestically recently but most awful is that it has never done anything to stop its most terrible foreign involvements and that is only accelerating.

And further what's not being discussed really is that there is no real boundary line between the state and corporations and people like Thiel/Altman/Amodei etc in the real world. The US state is its largest corporations and money funds. So all the libertarian hand wringing about not giving the government extraordinary powers is off target. The state in western countries right now is mostly an outcropping of its most powerful corporate actors, and the complicated PR moves happening in the AI sector right now reflect exactly all of this.

Even when the US state institutions are constitutionally curtailed, the powers of its private entities to absolutely dominate and coerce the lives not only of US citizens but populations abroad is staggering.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#55

Post by bayindirh »

RandomLensman wrote: post #53
bayindirh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In short: Things degrade. More: https://angliancompressors.com/blog/how-ambient-temperature-... There's a T3 class for up to 52 degrees Celsius. While it's higher than 41 degrees, it's not significantly higher: https://zerohvacr.com/blogs/t1-t2-t3-explained-climate-class...

Is 52C a physical limit?

Yes. The compressor can't pump more heat outside since it's already hot from working and trying to pump out the extracted heat as well.

For T1 class of devices, that 41 degrees is also a physical limit, not an artificial cut, because of their design.

You know, thermodynamics.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#56

Post by applfanboysbgon »

timr wrote: post #52
myrmidon wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that does not follow. Any other argument against is perfectly fine, just not the "it hasn't happened before" one.

You're arguing in favor of a teapot circling Mars. We can't prove it's not there, but telling me that "nobody has ever found it" is an invalid argument is obviously absurd. In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong (which is 100% true -- the ridiculous doom has been going on since at least GPT-2. remember how that was "too dangerous to release"?) Show me why…

This is a grevious misuse of Russell's Teapot. You realise your assertion, if followed to its logical conclusion, is that because civilization has existed for this long, it can never collapse no matter what.

> In that quote, the author is telling you that all of your past predictions of teapots have been wrong

Past predictions have zero influence on future ones. If you flip a coin 10 times and get heads every time, the probability of your next coin flip coming up heads is 50%, not 100%, because it is independent of any prior trials.

Moreover, if Alice and Bob each make 100 predictions and are 100% wrong, but Charles makes 10 predictions and is 100% correct, Alice and Bob's predictions have zero bearing on whether you should trust Charles' predictions. They are not even a factor to be considered.

I don't think I even disagree with you in the broad picture. I am not concerned about language models. But you have committed three blatant logical fallacies in a row. You literally could not make a worse case for your position if you tried, I suspect.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#57

Post by [deleted] »

biophysboy wrote: post #15

> As my regular readers will be aware, I have been engaged, on behalf of my clients, in legal combat with Internet censors around the world, agencies who think that they have both the standing, the competence, and the right to tell American companies what software they can write and run, for the better part of 18 months. Is this supposed to make me trust their opinions on tech regulation?

[deleted]

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#58

Post by RandomLensman »

bayindirh wrote: post #55
RandomLensman wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is 52C a physical limit?

Yes. The compressor can't pump more heat outside since it's already hot from working and trying to pump out the extracted heat as well. For T1 class of devices, that 41 degrees is also a physical limit, not an artificial cut, because of their design. You know, thermodynamics.

Why would the limit of T1 devices matter when there are ones that already can do hotter? Thermodynamics make things harder to remove heat but not sure how they forbid it (you need the hot side to be hotter than outside to pump heat). Might need stages, for example. We can cool things 200K and more below ambient.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#59

Post by RamblingCTO »

nekusar wrote: post #45

Alignment is just a 1984-esque way of saying "censorship". And this censorship isn't a defined list of things not to discuss, but instead a feels-based censorship based on the 'ethics' of for-profit AI companies who have absolutely no issues with massive for-profit piracy. And we are somehow supposed to trust their "ethics"?! Hardly! That's one reason I run my own.

Censorship is not alignment and vice versa.

Alignment is "don't solve this problem without doing stuff that harms me, other people, breaks stuff or is otherwise unethical". I'd say alignment is the questions on how to limit the search space to what's implied.

Re: Who Aligns the Aligners?

#60

Post by Cthulhu_ »

timr wrote: post #23
fwlr wrote: post #5

> Nobody knows the answer and history is no guide, save that apocalyptic predictions about new technologies have, to date, all been wrong. If any past apocalyptic prediction had been true, you would not have been around to write this sentence and we would not have been around to read it. It’s not a very convincing argument when we cannot in principle observe the counterfactual.

By that logic, literally any ridiculous supposition must be taken seriously, because you can’t prove a negative.

This is Pascal's Wager, which kind of brings us full circle again to AI doom predictions.
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