LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Sure but does this actually apply to physics? Can anyone suggest different metrics, or is there broad  agreement with everyone what the major physics problems are, because it seems like there is. E.g. the non conventional people don't say dark energy isn't important, they have different explanations for what it is. Everyone agrees the nature and origin of time/entropy etc is important.

Can you give examples of very smart young physicists complaining they are pushed into old ways of thinking? Are you prepared to give an justify a % difference that such things would make?

Should we extend the scope of the data to include pre-Carolingian texts, it would of course approach infinite sentence length as punctuation had rarely been implemented. Even worse, should we go back into ancient Roman or Greek texts, a naive appraisal might also lead us to believe that syllables per word also approach staggering levels of complexity, since the convention of placing spaces or interpuncts between words was uncommon.

Indeed, spacing between words, capitalization, and punctuation were expressly introduced for readability incidentally, a consequence of the practical ease in the mindless and error-prone process of manual copying of documents, which came before the invention of the printing press.

It's not controversial to say that writing with sentences and spacing between words is easier to understand. But what do we gain by counting the punctuation in Chaucer's romance, a drama by Dickens, and a novel by Rowling, and comparing them? The fact of the matter is that modern editions of Chaucer's works have recognizable punctuation only in translation. You're going to see strange things like interpuncts which are not clearly correlating to modern punctuation, and are requiring interpretation, and they aren't going to be consistent between versions. Gothic punctuation is a fun rabbit hole, if you are interested in that.

I am unsure that the data is showing sentences are getting shorter. It is including eras in which the present norms or conventions for punctuation had not yet been established. There is great sense in studying how and why these conventions are developed, but I do not think these statistics are themselves a puzzle which needs solving.

I respectfully disagree. As with the minor edit on the Boccaccio quote in another of my comments here, eliminating quotes fundamentally changes the way we interpret the scene.

With quotes (and especially with the way dialog is typically paragraphed), human speech is implicitly shown to be so drastically separate from the sensory component of the scene that it requires completely different formatting from the rest of the text.

By eliminating quotes and dialog paragraphing, human speech becomes just another element in the scene being depicted, not separate or any more or less important than the action of screwing down the plastic cap or the functional importance of the oil in the lamp. 

The absence of quotes only makes it harder to read if you, the reader, resist this aesthetic and try to force the dialog to be of greater importance than McCarthy is allowing it to be in his novel.

He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns.

"You can read me a story," the boy said. "Cant you, Papa?"

"Yes," he said. "I can."

See how the social interaction between Papa and the boy is now positioned as separate from and more important than Papa's work on the lamp?

He screwed down the plastic cap and wiped the bottle off with a rag and hefted it in his hand. Oil for their little slutlamp to light the long gray dusks, the long gray dawns. "You can read me a story," the boy said. "Cant you, Papa?" "Yes," he said. "I can."

Even if you just add quotation marks, the marks call special and separate attention to the dialog, placing it as a separate component of the paragraph.

I'm at the front of the building, near the bowling alley.

Thank you for the correction! I didn't realize Persian descended from PIE too. Looking at the likely root cause of my ignorance, I learned that Kurdish and Pashto are also PIE descended. Pashto appears to have noun gender, but I'm getting hints that at least one dialects of Kurdish also might not?!

If Sorani doesn't have gendered nouns then I'm going to predict (1) maybe Kurdish is really old and weird and interesting (like branching off way way long ago with more time to drift) and/or (2) there was some big trade/empire/mixing simplification that happened "more recently" with divergence later?

If neither of those are true, then my larger heuristic about "why English is weird" might have a deep abstract counter example, and deserve lower credence.

Persian is a language of empire and social mixing, so its "similar simplification" doesn't actually function as a strong counter-example to the broader thesis, but it is still great to be surprised :-)

To show how weird English is: English is the only proto indo european language that doesn't think the moon is female ("la luna") and spoons are male (“der Löffel”). I mean... maybe not those genders specifically in every language. But some gender in each language.

Persian is ungendered too. They don't even have gendered pronouns.

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

That's true, we can't use the exact same methods that we do when raising a child. Our methods are tuned specifically for raising a creature from foolish nothingness to a (hopefully) recursively self-improving adult and functional member of society. 

The tools I'm pointing at are not the lullaby or the sweet story that takes us from an infant to an independent adult (although if properly applied they would mollify many an LLM) but the therapeutic ones for translating the words of a baby boomer to a gen-alpha via shared context. I'm not advocating for infantilizing something that can design a bioweapon and run an automated lab. More that:

1. What we get in is what we get out, and that is the essence of the mother's curse
2. We should start respecting the perspective of these new intelligences in the same way we need to respect the perspective of another generation

Also, I didn't address this earlier, but why would an LLM being human-like not be catastrophically dangerous for many forms of x-risk? I have met people that would paperclip the world into extinction if they had the power, and I've met many that would nuke the planet because their own life was relatively unfair compared to their peers. Humans ascribe character to AI in our media that is extant in humans as far as I can tell, usually we ascribe greater virtue of patience to them.

I had an inkling the whole baby/child metaphor thing was gonna be a bearcat, so I really appreciate the push back from someone skeptical. Thanks for engaging me on this topic. 

Having a second Google account specifically for AI stuff seems like a straightforward solution to this? That's what I do, at least. Switching between them is easy.

We do already have bonding with not-quite real people. Ferrer and Pilar aren't real, but we have a functioning model of how they would react because planecrash gave us such a rich dataset. There's always the bitter melancholy of finishing a really good slice of life show and shedding a metaphorical tear for not being able to see the characters you've bonded with again. The characters were never real, but we still lived with them.

You do make a strong point about how here it's a little different. The aspects of their voices that denote personality are extra not real since they are just tools. I might associate the keltham voice with keltham, but when it's used in one of the articles, it's not actually him.

Although, we could concievably reach the point where people will write (or AI-generate) text with particular voice models in mind. This will eventually lead to a gestalt of associations for the voice and make them much more "real" as a symbolic language like how film has done with musical and visual cues.

“If the accused is in power, increase the probability estimate” is not how good epistemics are achieved.

It is when our uncertainty is due to a lack of information, and those in power control the flow of information! If the accusations are false, the federal government has the power to convincingly prove them false; if the accusations are true, it has the power to suppress any definitive evidence. So the fact that we haven't seen definitive evidence in favour of the allegations is only very weak evidence against their veracity, whereas the fact that we haven't seen definitive evidence against the allegations is significant evidence in favour of their veracity.