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And to make things even more complicated, sometimes there is a problem that indeed could be solved by 10 seconds of thinking, but behind it there is another problem which is taboo to mention, which cannot be solved so easily. So everyone involved ends up pretending that the 10-second solution is insufficient to solve the original problem, because it is their only way out of "we cannot implement this solution" and "but we also cannot explain why".

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To give an example from my experience, once I was given a task to organize entrance exams for a university. There were many thousand candidates; they couldn't even fit into the school building on the same day, so the testing took several days, I think always one group in the morning and one group in the afternoon. The questions were all of the "choose: a, b, c, or d" form, and it was still an enormous amount of work to check all the tests. (This was a few decades ago when computers were a new thing, so all those tests were checked manually.)

But the main problem was that the questions and answers have always leaked. With thousands of students in the building and testing taking multiple days you couldn't really prevent it, because all that was needed was to send a few fake candidates whose task was to grab the problems or make a photo on an early day, then they could solve the problems in their free time, and sell the answers to students who took the test on a later day. Those students just memorized the answers like this: "acbdcadb..." or used some simple code to make a tiny cheat sheet (two bits per answer do not require much space).

So far the best solution was to do A and B versions of the test, so that the students sitting next to each other would get different versions, which prevented them from checking each other's answers, and made memorizing the answers slightly more difficult. (Even this was frequently defeated by students exchanging their question sheet with someone in a different row, so that they both had the same version as their neighbors. There were too many students and too few teachers to check all of this.)

My solution was simple: instead of doing versions A and B, I did 4 different versions every day, and different 4 versions the next day, and so on until the end of exams. So the first day, the first row got alternating A, B, A, B..., the second row got alternating C, D, C, D..., the third row A, B again, etc. So exchanging the questions with someone one row away from you didn't help you get the same questions as your neighbors. (Two rows would be more conspicuous. Also, the students did not expect this; which probably would be less true the following years.) The fake candidates now had to collect four versions of the problems... and even that didn't help them, because the next day it was versions E, F, E, F... for the odd rows, and G, H, G, H... for the even rows.

How could I make so many variants with so many questions? Wasn't that much more work than usual? Well, it was more work, but not an order of magnitude more work. I asked teachers to prepare more questions than usual, but no specific numbers, just "make as many as you comfortably can". Then, every variant was randomly selected questions, and even the answers a, b, c, d were shuffled randomly. That means, even if two variants got the same question, in one of them it could be question #7 and the correct answer was "b", but on another it was question #13 and the correct answer was "c". So you couldn't defeat this system by memorizing the letters "acbdcadb..."; you would have to actually learn the questions and the right answers. And there were more questions than usual.

To make evaluating the tests easier, my program that prepared the tests also prepared for each variant tiny strips of paper with the right answers that you could put next to the test, and just check whether the answer match or not. So evaluating the tests was actually easier than the previous years.

And... it was a huge success, all people involved in evaluating the tests got a bonus, and a few people congratulated me on the successful organization of something they believed would be utter chaos.

And... the next year my system was abandoned; the university returned to the original way of doing entrance exams, and the debate about improving the exams became a taboo.

As far as I know, although I can only guess here, it is because the answers were actually regularly leaked by some very high-status employees of the university, and my experiment has ruined their nice side business for one year. So they invented bullshit reasons about why this isn't a good way to do exams (the people who did them with me agreed that the reasons were bullshit, e.g. "because it is much more work" but everyone who actually did the work agreed that it was less work than usual), and thus the debate was officially concluded. "You see, we tried your experiment, but it failed."

So, some problems cannot be solved simply because there are important people who don't want them to get solved. But the official answer is still that your solution wouldn't work. Trust the experts!

As I have already explained, I consider your comments to violate the norms I want on Less Wrong around kindness and curiosity. On balance, I consider the degree of unkindness and incuriousity sufficient that it outweighs any loss to anyone of not seeing your criticisms. I'm willing to make some amount of trade-off between different norms for the benefit of myself and readers, but you cross the line of what I judge to be productive.

Obviously you seem to disagree. And that seems fair, we disagree on what we think the norms should be! 

I think this is likely the crux. You seem to prioritize criticism above other things, in particular criticism to show what you believe to be the truth. That's admirable, but you are extreme in your approach in ways that violates other norms I hold in greater balance and am enforcing. I think your approach is on net worse because rather than convince, it drives away those who disagree with you rather than help them see the truth you want them to, and so it is ineffective for large classes of readers, including specifically me and the other authors you've clashed with. That is, I think your comments are antihelpful even if that's not what you intend, and since they fall into that category, they are now banned on my post until such time as I see evidence that I would believe your comments would be net helpful. 

Obviously some readers do find your comments helpful. They've said as much. That I disagree that on net users benefit from your comments if why you are banned. 

Again, I actually really want your criticisms, but until such time that they can be delivered in a way that results in productive conversations that help people, including myself, move towards finding the truth, I will keep you banned on my posts.

Given that AI companies have a strong conflict of interest, I would at least want them to report this to a third party and let that third party determine whether they should publicly acknowledge the capabilities.

Funding large-scale projects seems like a perfect job for financial markets. Maybe society should figure out the detailed reasons why financial markets don't invest (more) in science, and fix these issues, one step at a time.

I suspect allocation of returns is one such issue, but it looks solvable by having shares over patents, risk mitigation should work by diversifying the fund, same as current index funds. Diversification also mitigates the long-term/spiky nature of the investment, but if sporadic returns are still an issue they could be smoothed out by an insurance (it may be less of an issue if this is a long-term investment for retirement for example?).

Edit: or simpler: have the government issue bonds for funding (specific fields of) science, the government pays out coupons based on how much the bond is expected to increase GDP. The money to pay the coupons comes from the tax revenue increase generated by the (expected) GDP increase generated by the science bond sell.

The thread under this comment been yourself and Said seems to conflate two different questions, resulting in you talking past each other:
1. Can Aella predict that people will be offended by things.
2. Can Aella empathize with the offended people / understand why they are offended.

My guess would be that Aella can generally predict people's reactions, but she cannot empathize with their point of view.

The nearby pattern of internet bait that I dislike is when someone says "I don't understand how someone can say/think/do X" where this is implicitly a criticism of the behavior.

I think the reason I find these tweets of Aella's highly engaging and rage-baity is that they generally read as criticisms to me. Perhaps this is uncharitable, but I expect this is also how most others read them.

Thanks for the comment. Tl;dr I basically agree. It's a pedantic and unfair aside and not really related to the rest of the post, and I hereby retract it with apologies to the authors.

The point I was trying to make with 'gone forever' was:

• In the Platonic transformer, the internal state at every step is calculated (in parallel) for each token position (in practice the KV contents are cached, and even if recalculated they would be identical in the common case where the context is shorter than the max context length).
• At the end of all those forward passes, everything is thrown away except the token sampled from the logit output of the rightmost token.
• During the next forward pass, the internal state at each token position may differ from what it previously was, since in the general case the leftmost token has dropped out of the context (again, only really true of the Platonic transformer, and only when the context exceeds the maximum context length).
• Therefore, the internal states that previously existed (while generating the poem) are gone, replaced by recalculated states building on a different preceding context (same caveats apply, and the new states are likely to be very similar anyway).
• So the only causal path from those previous existing states to the current (during self-report) state is through the poem tokens (which is why I say, 'except insofar as the words of the poem provide clues to what it was').

The important difference with respect to humans is that, as you say, that internal state leaves traces in memory, whereas (pedantically) that isn't the case in the Platonic transformer.

Hopefully that's a clearer version of what I was thinking? Although again, it's incredibly pedantic and semi-false and I regret writing it.

Phenomenal consciousness not self awareness.

Is it claimed? There's no mention of "phenomenal"in the OP.

So what value is this fancy test actually supposed to produce, once you have it?

Comparison between schools, for starters. As an information for parents where to put their kids.

Today, there are many schools that inflate grades, because people use "good grades" as a proxy for "more knowledge". Which would be closer to the truth if we had better tests, but today it is too easy to cheat.

In absence of objective testing, the competition between schools is mostly about marketing. This is how you get schools that spend a lot of money on sports and various shiny toys, but provide mediocre education.

I have taught in different schools, so I know from personal experience that there is a huge difference between how much education the kids get in different schools. But even if a parent trying to get the best education for their child asks me, it is almost impossible for me to prove any of this; there is nothing legible to point at, other than say "trust me, that school is utterly dysfunctional, but they give every student good grades, and they have an army of lawyers to threaten any teacher who talks about what happens there, and the director is a charming psychopath who can convince most parents in a 1:1 talk that this is the best school ever, so the parents are happy to give him lots of money believing that they sacrifice for the good of their children". (Yes, I have a specific school in mind. Not in USA.)

I agree that cramming right before the test increases the score without increasing long-term knowledge.

But this...

a list of fifteen topics that he gave us. [...] comfortably covered every one of the eight questions we were asked.

...seems to be exactly the kind of a problem that I described. The problem is that the exam authors always choose 8 out of the same 15 topics -- as the teacher has noticed.

And presumably those 15 topics are just a small part of the entire curriculum... otherwise I don't see what would be the problem with the teaching telling students to learn, well, everything. (We don't call it cheating when the grammar teachers make students practice 26 letters before doing 1st grade exams.)

And, as I wrote, the problem could be easily fixed by choosing those 8 questions out of all possible topics, rather than the 15 selected ones. Or, even if you think that those are the 15 most important topics in the curriculum, make another list of less important topics, and then every year choose e.g. 5 of the "important" and 3 of the "unimportant" questions.

I learned that the only way to get a respectable percentage of decent or even passing grades was to announce tests well in advance, tell in some detail what material they would cover, and hold plenty of advance practice in the kind of questions that would be asked, which is called review. I later learned that teachers do this everywhere.

Ah, so the problem is that the teachers are the ones who prepare the tests. In which case, indeed, there is a massive conflict of interest here -- the teachers de facto indirectly grade themselves, and they can give themselves better grades by inventing worse tests. Of course! But then the actual problem is this conflict of interest, not testing per se. So the solution is not less testing, but independent testing.

The problem is not "teaching to the test", but "the teacher evaluates his or her own work".

And the independent testing is exactly a way to fight this... which is why I find it ironic that "teachers cheat when they test their own work" is in practice usually used as an argument against independent testing.