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Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

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Re: Interview with gwern

#191

Post by Quinzel »

nuz wrote: post #190
Quinzel wrote: post #9

I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story. Still, I like a lot of his writ…

I believe him.

You believe that someone who has the capacity and resources to do all this fancy computer and AI stuff lives on $12k USD a year? That’s hilarious.

I’m willing to bet he became a millionaire thanks to bitcoin.

Re: Interview with gwern

#192

Post by doright »

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…

> “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.”

Irrespective of the historical accuracy of the quote I've always felt this way in some form, having personally lived through the transition from a world where it felt like you didn't have to have an opinion on everything to one dominated by the ubiquitous presence of the Internet. Although not so much because I believe an advanced human civilization has destroyed itself in our current timeline, but because the presence of so many life-changing breakthroughs in such a short period of time to me indicates a unceasing march towards a Great Filter.

Re: Interview with gwern

#193

Post by A_D_E_P_T »

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.

"Goons." Nice.

Thing is: Are you absolutely sure that notion of human biodiversity is wrong? IQ is heritable, as height is heritable. You'll grant that there are populations that differ in their genetic potential for height -- e.g. Dalmatians vs. Pygmies -- so how is it that you dismiss out of hand the notion that there might be population-wide differences in the genetic potential for intelligence?

I can hear it now: "But IQ is not intelligence!" I agree to a point, but IQ -- and, strangely, verbal IQ in particular -- maps very neatly to one's potential for achievement in all scientific and technological fields.

The Truth is a jealous goddess: If you devote yourself to her, you must do so entirely, and take the bad along with the good. You don't get to decide what's out of bounds; no field of inquiry should be off-limits.

Re: Interview with gwern

#194

Post by sourcepluck »

michaelt wrote: post #168
sourcepluck wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm aware that it sounds like poverty. I'm just saying it's going to depend on the details. To people who live ordinary western lifestyles, everything outside of that sounds weird. - ramen =/= cheap pot noodle type things. Ramen restaurants in Japan attest to this. It'll depend on context what that actually means in this case. - 12k/year =/= no money, numbers like that make no sense outside of context. It depends on…

> 12k/year =/= no money [...] live in a hut with no rent, you grow food, you've no kids, no mortgage, no car, etc, these all matter. I agree that 12k goes a long way when you're a subsistence farmer, living alone in a collapsing hut in the middle of nowhere, with no health insurance. Nonetheless, that's sounding a lot like poverty to me.

> a subsistence farmer, living alone in a collapsing hut in the middle of nowhere, with no health insurance.

"no health insurance" is the only thing in your list there that isn't hyperbole or a twisting of what was said. But anyway, again, no-one is arguing about whether 12,000/year "officially" is or is not below the poverty line, except you, with yourself.

Did you read the part about him having savings in bitcoin that wouldn't sustain him forever, but nonetheless for many, many years? If the bitcoin was worth 500,000, for example, would you then say "oh, that's a totally acceptable way to live now!", or would you still be belittling their life choices, insinuating there was something bad or wrong with it?

Re: Interview with gwern

#195

Post by FeepingCreature »

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_?

Wasn't Middle-Earth repeatedly depopulated and ravaged by multiple continent-spanning wars?

Re: Interview with gwern

#196

Post by dewey »

keiferski wrote: post #140
michaelt wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seemed weird to me too. In my country, when TV series are interviewing anonymous people they use specific visual language - pixellated face, or facing away from the camera, or face clad in shadow. Having an actor voice the words is normal. But having an actor showing the anonymous person's face is an... unusual choice.

The voice was a real person’s, but the face/head was AI.

No it was not the real persons voice, it says it was a voice actor in the video.

Re: Interview with gwern

#197

Post by FeepingCreature »

ChadNauseam wrote: post #151
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.

Is #lesswrong an irc channel? I’ve never been there, but I can say I’ve never seen that discussion on lesswrong the website

Yeah on Libera (former Freenode).

I'm not gonna say that people there don't think that hbd is real, but it's not an everyday discussion topic. Mostly because it's kind of boring.

(Do spend five minutes on #lesswrong! We don't bite! (Generally! If you come in like "I heard this was the HBD channel", there may be biting, er, banning.))

Re: Interview with gwern

#198

Post by maujim »

nutanc wrote: post #21

Experimenting with creating semantic chunks of large podcasts. Got the following chunks, https://gist.github.com/nutanc/a9e6321649be5ea9806b4450b0bd6... Dwarkesh has 18 splits. https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/i/151435243/timestamps I got 171. So roughly 9 context discussions in one time stamp.

What did you use to create the chunks?

Re: Interview with gwern

#199

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Interview with gwern

#200

Post by arthurofbabylon »

This was a tough listen, for two subtly similar reasons.

The voice was uncanny. Simply hard to listen to, despite being realistic. I mean precisely that: it is cognitively difficult to string together meaning from that voice. (I am adjacent to the field of audio production and frequently deal with human- and machine-produced audio. The problem this podcast has with this voice is not unique.) The tonality and meaning do not support each other (this will change as children grow up with these random-tonality voices).

The conversation is excessively verbose. Oftentimes a dearth of reason gets masked by a wide vocabulary. For some audience members I expect the effort to understand the words distracts from the relationship between the words (ie, the meaning), and so it just comes across as a mashup of smart-sounding words, and the host, guest, and show gets lauded for being so intelligent. Cut through the vocabulary and occasional subtle tsks and pshaws and “I-know-more-than-I-am-saying” and you uncover a lot of banter that just does not make good sense: it is not quite correct, or not complete in its reasoning. This unreasoned conversation is fine in its own right (after all, this is how most conversation unfolds, a series of partially reasoned stabs that might lead to something meaningful), but the masking with exotic vocabulary and style is misleading and unkind. Some of these “smart-sounding” snippets are actually just dressed up dumb snippets.

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