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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#171

Post by mitthrowaway2 »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #170
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sure hope nobody ever remembers you being confidently wrong about something. But if they do, hopefully that person will have the grace and self-restraint not to broadcast it any time you might make a public appearance, because they're apparently bitter that you still have any credibility.

Can I say a bit more about criticism on the side? I've learned to embrace it as a necessary step to self-improvement. My formative experience as a PhD student was when a senior colleague attacked my work. That was after I asked for his feedback for a paper I was writing where I showed that my system beat his system. He didn't deal with it well, sent me a furiously critical response (with obvious misunderstandings of…

Constructive criticism is a good thing, but in this thread you aren't speaking to Gwern directly, you're badmouthing him to his peers. I'm sure you would have felt different if your colleague had done that.

Re: Interview with gwern

#172

Post by indoordin0saur »

jessriedel wrote: post #165
indoordin0saur wrote: post #144

Great interview but I wasn't a fan of how they handled the voice. Whether a human voice actor or an AI "voice actor", it inserted cadence, emphasis and emotion that I have no way of knowing if it was Gwern's original intention or not. Reading the transcript of the interview would probably be better as you won't be mislead by what the voice actor added in or omitted.

> Reading a transcript of the interview would probably be better I might be reading to much into the "a" (rather than "the"), but to be clear: there is a transcript at the bottom.

You're right, corrected my comment.

Re: Interview with gwern

#173

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #166
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken and I warned my comment would sound vituperative. Again, the difference is that I'm not an AI influencer, and I'm not trying to make a living by claiming an expertise I don't have. I don't make "public appearances" except in conferences where I present the results of my research. And you should see the criticism I get by other academics when I try to publish my papers and they decide I'm not even wrong. A…

Please be aware that your criticism has teeth too, you just don't feel the bite of them. You say I "should see" that criticism you receive on your papers, but I don't; it's delivered in private. Unlike the review comments you get from your peers, you are writing in public. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate it if your peer reviewer stood up after your conference keynote and told the audience that they'd rejected your p…

I think I'm addressing some of what you say in my longer comment above.

>> Please be aware that your criticism has teeth too, you just don't feel the bite of them.

Well, maybe it does. I don't know if that can be avoided. I think most people don't take criticism well. I've learned for example that there are some conversations I can't have with certain members of my extended family because they're not used to being challenged about things they don't know and they react angrily. I'm specifically remember a conversation where I was trying to explain the concept of latent hypoxia and ascent blackout [1] (I free dive recreationally) to an older family member who is an experienced scuba diver, and they not only didn't believe me, they called me an ignoramus. Because I told them something they didn't know about. Eh well.

_____________

[1] It can happen that while you're diving deep, the pressure of the water keeps the pressure of oxygen in your blood sufficient that you don't pass out, but then when you start coming up, the pressure drops and the oxygen in your blood thins out so much that you pass out. In my lay terms. My relative didn't believe that the water pressure affects the pressure of the air in your vessels. I absolutely can feel that when I'm diving- the deeper I go the easier it gets to hold my breath and it's so noticeable because it's so counter-intuitive. My relative wouldn't have experienced that during scuba diving (since they breathe pressurised air, I think) and maybe it helps he's a smoker. Anyway I never managed to convince him.

As I never managed to convince him that we eat urchins' genitals, not their eggs. After a certain point I stopped trying to convince him of anything. I mean I felt like a know-it-all anyway, even if I knew what I was talking about.

Re: Interview with gwern

#174

Post by keiferski »

motohagiography wrote: post #148
keiferski wrote: post #56

By writing, you are voting on the future of the Shoggoth using one of the few currencies it acknowledges: tokens it has to predict. If you aren't writing, you are abdicating the future or your role in it. If you think it's enough to just be a good citizen, to vote for your favorite politician, to pick up litter and recycle, the future doesn't care about you. These AI predictions never, ever seem to factor in how actu…

I've been writing for decades with the belief I was training a future AI and used to say that the Turing test wasn't mysterious at all because it was a solved problem in economics in the form of an indifference curve that showed where peoeple cared whether or not they were dealing with a person or a machine. the argument against AI taking over is we organize around symbols and narratives and are hypersensitive to wan…

That is a good point, and fundamentally I agree that these big budget pop star machines do function in a way analogous to an AI, and that we're arguing metaphysics here.

But even if a future AI becomes like this, that doesn't prevent independent writers (like gwern) from still having a unique, non-assimilated voice where they write original content. The arguments tend to be "AI will eat everything, therefore get your writing out there now" and not "this will be a big thing, but not everything."

Re: Interview with gwern

#175

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #171
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I say a bit more about criticism on the side? I've learned to embrace it as a necessary step to self-improvement. My formative experience as a PhD student was when a senior colleague attacked my work. That was after I asked for his feedback for a paper I was writing where I showed that my system beat his system. He didn't deal with it well, sent me a furiously critical response (with obvious misunderstandings of…

Constructive criticism is a good thing, but in this thread you aren't speaking to Gwern directly, you're badmouthing him to his peers. I'm sure you would have felt different if your colleague had done that.

He did and I did feel very angry about it and it hurt our professional relationship irreparably.

But above I'm only discussing my experience of criticism as an aside, unrelated to Gwern. To be clear, my original comment was not meant as constructive criticism. Like I think my colleague was at the time, I am out to get Gwern because I think, like I say, that he is a clueless AI influencer, a cheer-leader of deep learning who is piggy-backing on the excitement about AI that he had nothing to do with creating. I wouldn't find it so annoying if he, like many others who engage in the same parasitism, did not sound so cock-sure that he knows what he's talking about.

I do not under any circumstances claim that my original comment is meant to be nice.

Btw, I remember now that Gwern has in other times accused me , here on HN, of being confidently wrong about things I don't know as well as I think I do (deep learning stuff). I think it was in a comment about Mu Zero (the DeepMind system). I don't think Gwern likes me much, either. But, then, he's a famous influencer and I'm not and I bet he finds solace in that so my criticism is not going to hurt him in the end.

Re: Interview with gwern

#176

Post by pazimzadeh »

mynegation wrote: post #85
demaga wrote: post #78

> 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_?

burning libraries probably doesn't help

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Wisdom#Destruction_by...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda_mahavihara#Destruction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Library_of_Constantin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_libraries#Hu...

Re: Interview with gwern

#177

Post by Vecr »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #173
mitthrowaway2 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be aware that your criticism has teeth too, you just don't feel the bite of them. You say I "should see" that criticism you receive on your papers, but I don't; it's delivered in private. Unlike the review comments you get from your peers, you are writing in public. I'm sure you wouldn't appreciate it if your peer reviewer stood up after your conference keynote and told the audience that they'd rejected your p…

I think I'm addressing some of what you say in my longer comment above. >> Please be aware that your criticism has teeth too, you just don't feel the bite of them. Well, maybe it does. I don't know if that can be avoided. I think most people don't take criticism well. I've learned for example that there are some conversations I can't have with certain members of my extended family because they're not used to being ch…

I actually either didn't know about that pressure thing [0], or I forgot. I suspect I read about it at some point because at some level I knew ascending could have bad effects even if you don't need decompression stops. But I didn't know why, even though it's obvious in retrospect.

So thanks for that, even though it's entirely unrelated to AI.

[0]: though I've seen videos of the exact same effect on a plastic water bottle, but my brain didn't make the connection

Re: Interview with gwern

#178

Post by southernplaces7 »

herculity275 wrote: post #48
mola wrote: post #44

Everything I read from gwern has this misanthropic undertones. It's hard to put a finger on it exactly, but it grits me when I try reading him. It is also kinda scary that so many people are attracted to this. It rhymes with how I feel about Ayn Rand. Her individualism always seems so misanthropic, her adherants scare me

I'm not entirely sure what you're referring to, but pretty much every major 20th century intellectual had misanthropic undertones (and sometimes overtones) - people who read/think/write an exceptional amount don't tend to be super people-loving.

That should depend on what you read. There's more than enough in the history of our species and in books about us to make someone love humanity too, at least conceptually if not in daily practice.

Re: Interview with gwern

#179

Post by okgreatniss »

natch wrote: post #125
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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.

It all feels like their only goal is circumlocutions over the subset of contemporary glyphs they know?

The physical principles remain regardless of how humans write them down.

Re: Interview with gwern

#180

Post by pcrh »

okasaki wrote: post #102

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.

I noticed a similar vein in SlateStarCodex. There's a strong vibe that "some people" are "naturally" more intelligent than others....
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