151–160 of 262 posts
Interesting that there's no mention of human biodiversity (aka blacks are dumb), as if you spend five minutes on #lesswrong you'll notice that that's a big issue for gwern and the other goons.
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>> This is a bit stark: there are many great knowledgeable engineers and scientists who would not get your point about a^nb^n. It's impossible to know 100% of of such a wide area as "AI and CS". I think, engineers, yes, especially those who don't have a background in academic CS. But scientists , no, I don't think so. I don't think it's possible to be a computer scientist without knowing the difference between a regu…
Strong gatekeeping vibes. "Not even wrong" is perfect for this sort of fixation with labels and titles and an odd seemingly resentful take that gwern has being an AI influencer as a specific goal.
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Yes, I'm talking about learning neural nets with gradient descent. See also the nice paper I linked below. >> How do you do intelligence without computation though? Beats me! Unlike everyone else in this space, it seems, I haven't got a clue how to do intelligence at all, with or without computation. Edit: re infinite languages, I liked something Walid Saba (RIP) pointed out on Machine Learning Street Talk, that sure…
What I don't know how to do is bounded rationality. Iterating over all the programs weighted by length (with dovetailing if you're a stickler) is "easy", but won't ever get anywhere. And you can't get away with the standard tricky tricks that people use to say it isn't easy, logical induction exists.
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Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?
I don't follow gwern's work closely. But I do know he created an enormous dataset of anime images used to train machine learning and generative AI models [1]. Hosting large datasets is moderately expensive - and it's full of NSFW stuff, so he's probably not having his employer or his college host it. Easy for someone on a six-figure salary, difficult for a person on $12k/year. Also, I thought these lesswrong folks we…
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Car and motor vehicles in general get you to work and help you do your work. They don't do the work. I guess that's the difference in thinking. I'm not sure that it's acrually correct: I don't think we'll actually see "AI" actually replace work in general as a concept. Unless it can quite literally do everything and anything, there will always be something that people can do to auction their time and/or health to acq…
Compilers also do the work. As do tractors. That doesn't mean there's no work left to do.
AI maximalists are talking about breaking that pattern and having AI literally do the job and provide the service, cutting out the need for workers entirely. Services being provided entirely autonomously and calories being generated without human input in the two analogies.
I'm not convinced by that at all: if services can be fully automated, who are you going to sell ERP or accounting software to, say? What are people going to use as barter for those calories if their time and bodies are worthless?
But I can see why that is a saleable concept to those who consider the idea of needing to pay workers to be a cruel injustice. Though even if it works at all, which, as I said, I dont believe, the actual follow-on consequences of such a shift are impossible to make any sensible inferences about.
> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.” The link in th…
That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?
All you really need is a government or society that isn't conducive to technological development, either because they persecute it or because they just don't do anything to protect and encourage it (e.g. no patent system or enforceable trade secrets).
Even today, what we see is that technological progress isn't evenly distributed. Most of it comes out of the USA at the moment, a bit from Europe and China. In the past there's usually been one or two places that were clearly ahead and driving things forward, and it moves around over time.
The other thing that inspires the idea of a permanent medieval society is archaeological narratives about ancient Egypt. If you believe their chronologies (which you may not), then Egyptian society was frozen in time for thousands of years with little or no change in any respect. Not linguistic, not religious, not technological. This is unthinkable today but is what academics would have us believe really happened not so long ago.
> I love the example of Isaac Newton looking at the rates of progress in Newton's time and going, “Wow, there's something strange here. Stuff is being invented now. We're making progress. How is that possible?” And then coming up with the answer, “Well, progress is possible now because civilization gets destroyed every couple of thousand years, and all we're doing is we're rediscovering the old stuff.” The link in th…
That works in reverse too. While I am in awe of what humanity already achieved - when I read fictional timelines of fictional worlds (Middle-Earth or Westeros/Essos) I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_?
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Strong gatekeeping vibes. "Not even wrong" is perfect for this sort of fixation with labels and titles and an odd seemingly resentful take that gwern has being an AI influencer as a specific goal.
OK, I concede that if I try to separate engineers from scientists it sounds like I'm trying to gatekeep. In truth, I'm organising things in my head because I started out thinking of myself as an engineer, because I like to make stuff, and at some point I started thinking of myself as a scientist, malgré moi, because I also like to know how stuff works and why. I multiclassed, you see, so I am trying to understand exa…
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> I am wondering how getting frozen in medieval like time is even possible. Like, what are they _doing_? Not discovering sources of cheap energy and other raw inputs. If you look carefully at history, every rapid period of growth was preceded by a discovery or conquest of cheap energy and resources. You need excess to grow towards the next equilibrium.
1400s Age of Explanation? 1200s Mongol Conquest? BC 100s Roman conquests of the Mediterranean? None match that thesis
Age of exploration was powered by finding new sources of slaves and materials in the East (india, asia, also eastern europe to an extent)
The mongol conquest itself was capturing vast sources of wealth (easier to take from others than build yourself)
Same with Rome. Each new conquest brought more slaves and natural resources to the empire. It used this to fuel more expansion.
This leads me to believe that the content and the subsequent posts are for self promotion purposes only.