Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Interview with gwern

dwarkeshpatel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 262 posts

Re: Interview with gwern

#221

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

Having an obviously AI-generated header image on your blog post was cool two years ago, but now it is passé and marks you as behind the trends.

This is true only because publicly-accessible models have been severely nerfed (out of sheer panic, one assumes), making their output immediately recognizable and instantly clichéd.

Dall-E 2, for instance, was much better when it first came out, compared to the current incarnation that has obviously been tweaked to discourage generating anything that resembles contemporary artists' output, and to render everything else in annoying telltale shades of orange and blue.

Eventually better models will appear, or be leaked, and then you won't be able to tell if a given image was generated by AI or not.

Re: Interview with gwern

#222

Post by tptacek »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #220
tptacek wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we talking past each other? I'm saying: heritability is orthogonal to the question of whether a trait is determined by genetics. There are traits with no genetic component at all that are highly heritable, and vice versa. "Genetic determinism" doesn't mean "a guarantee that a group of genetically similar people will display a trait"; it means "the trait is causally linked to genes". The semantics matter, because…

Sure, heritability is orthogonal to the question of whether a trait is determined by genetics. But traits like IQ, height, and eye color are both (A) highly heritable and (B) substantially shaped by genetic factors. In casual online discourse, I believe that (B) is usually taken for granted, so it's glossed over, and when people say that any given trait is "heritable" they're also assuming that (B) is true for the tr…

When you say "substantially shaped by genetic factors", you should present evidence. It's easy to provide evidence for the heritability of intelligence (again, stipulating IQ), but as we've established, that begs the question of whether the genetic connection is correlation or causation. Environments are inherited, too.

There is growing evidence that group IQ heritability isn't evidence of genetic causation.

Re: Interview with gwern

#223

Post by eru »

keiferski wrote: post #68
eru wrote: post #65

The headline contradicts itself. Gwern is pseudonymous, not anonymous.

You can see this with many words – the most commonly known word gradually encompasses all similar ones. I don't know if there is a formal linguistic term, but I call it "conceptual compression." It's when a concept used to have multiple levels, but now just has one. It seems like an inevitable outcome in a society that doesn't care about using language accurately.

I'm not quite so pessimistic: just as often, we have concepts splitting in twain to show new distinctions.

Btw, the article gets it right and starts with 'Gwern is a pseudonymous researcher and writer.'

Headlines are seldom decided by the writers.

Re: Interview with gwern

#224

Post by [deleted] »

cle wrote: post #93
mapt wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With AI you need to think, long and hard, about the concept (borrowed from cryptography), "Today, the state of the art in is the worst it will ever be". Humanity is pinning its future on the thought that we will hit intractable information-theoretic limitations which provide some sort of diminishing returns on performance before a hard takeoff, but the idea that the currently demonstrated methods are high up on some…

There's a good chance you're right, but I think there's also a chance that things could get worse at some point (with some hand-wavy definition of "a while"). Currently the state-of-the-art is propped up with speculative investments, if those speculations turn out to be wrong enough, or social/economic changes force the capital to get allocated somewhere else, then there could be a significant period of time where ac…

[deleted]

Re: Interview with gwern

#225

Post by satvikpendem »

notahacker wrote: post #121
satvikpendem wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, my comment is not about AI, it is about the faulty construction of the argument in the sentence I quoted. X and Y could be anything, that is not my point.

My point is also not really about AI, my point is that pointing out that the same arguments that X implies Y could (and have been) applied to virtually every V, W, Z (where X and V/W/Z are both in the same category, in this case the category of "disruptive inventions") and yet Y didn't happen as predicted isn't ad hominem tu quoque fallacy or anything to do with hypocrisy, it's an observation that arguments about the…

> where X and V/W/Z are both in the same category, in this case the category of "disruptive inventions"

This is my point, it is not known whether those are all in the same category. The survivorship bias part is that we only know if something were disruptive after the fact, because, well, they disrupted. Therefore, you cannot even compare them like that, never mind the fact that all disruptive technologies are not the same, so you shouldn't be comparing between them anyway.

Re: Interview with gwern

#226

Post by dredmorbius »

Is there a podcast stream without DRM?

Neither mpv nor my browser can play the interview.

Edit: The YouTube link from an earlier submisison works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a42key59cZQ>.

Sad commentary when a YouTube link affords greater accessibility (I'm listening now via mpv) than a podcast URL.

Sigh.

Re: Interview with gwern

#227

Post by ComputerGuru »

Vecr wrote: post #219
trogdor wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only concrete things we know about gwern are that he's a world-renowned breeder of Maine Coons and that he is the sole known survivor of a transverse cerebral bifurcation. How do you know those things are true?

They aren't, he doesn't even live in Maine.

You clearly don’t know what a Maine Coon is…

Re: Interview with gwern

#229

Post by endtime »

Quinzel wrote: post #189
endtime wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met Gwern once, when he came to the NYC Less Wrong meetup. I don't think he was internet-famous yet. It was probably 12 years ago or so, but based on my recollection, I'm totally willing to believe that he lives very frugally. FWIW he wouldn't have looked out of place at an anime convention.

What did he look like?

I don't really want to do anything to deanonymize a guy who clearly wants to be anonymous. But I will say that at the time he had long hair.

Re: Interview with gwern

#230

Post by nutanc »

maujim wrote: post #198
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?

It's a new approach I am experimenting with.

https://gpt3experiments.substack.com/p/a-new-chunking-approa...

Post reply on HN