LessWrong 2.0 Reader

But don't the non-diseased copies not just need to generally meditate, but to do some special kind of meditation where they forget the affirmative evidence they have that they don't have the disease?

Ah, I think I see where you're pointing at. You're afraid we might be falling prey to the streetlamp effect, thinking that some quality specifically about Western diets is causing obesity, and restricting our thoughts if we accept that as true. I agree, and it's pretty terrifying how little we know and how much conflicting data there is out there about the causes of obesity.

It might very well be that the true cause is outside of the Western diet and has little to do with it, and I could definitely see that being true given how much we've spent and how little we've gotten for research taking the Western diet connection for granted.

I think this kind of framing is kind of confused and slippery, I feel like I'm trying wake up and find a solid formulation of it. 

Like, what it does it mean, do it by yourself? Do humans do it by themselves? Who knows, but probably not, children that grow without any humans nearby are not very human. 

Humans teach humans to behave as if they are conscious. Just like majority of humans have sense of smell, and they teach humans who don't to act like they can smell things. And some only discover that smell isn't an inferred characteristic when they are adults. This is how probably non conscious human could pass as conscious, if such disorder existed, hm?

But what ultimately matters is what this thing IS, not how it became in that way. If, this thing internalized that conscious type of processing from scratch, without having it natively, then resulting mind isn't worse than the one that evolution engineered with more granularity. Doesn't matter if this human was assembled atom by atom on molecular assembler, it's still a conscious human.

Also, remember that one paper where LLMs can substitute CoT with filling symbols .......? [inset the link here] Not sure what's up with that, but kind of interesting in this context

They put too much emphasis on high frequency features, suggesting a different inductive bias from humans.

Could you fix this part by adding high frequency noise to the images prior to training? Maybe lots of copies of each image with different noise patterns?

Humans come to reflect on their thoughts on their own without being prompted into it (at least I have heard some anecdotal evidence for it and I also did discover this myself as a kid). The test would be it LLMs would come up with such insights without being trained on text describing the phenomenon. It would presumably involve some way to observe your own thoughts (or some alike representation). The existing context window seems to be too small for that.

Good point, Claude, yeah. Quite alien indeed, maybe more parsimonious. This is exactly what I meant by possibility of this analogy being overridden by actually digging into your brain, digging into a human one and developing actually technical gears-level models of both and then comparing them. Until then, who knows, I'm leaning toward healthy dose of uncertainty.

Also, thanks for the comment.

Oh great, thanks!

I would dissuade no one from writing drunk, and I'm confident that you too can say that people are penguins! But I'm sorry to report that personally I don't do it by drinking but rather writing a much longer version with all those kinds of clarifications included and then obsessively editing it down.

If you don't need 12 tubes of superglue, dollar stores often carry 4 tiny tubes for a buck or so.

I'm glad that superglue is working for you! I personally find that a combination of sharp nail clippers used at the first sign of a hangnail, and keeping my hands moisturized, works for me. Flush cutters of the sort you'd use to trim the sprues off of plastic models are also amazing for removing proto-hangnails without any jagged edge.

Another trick to avoiding hangnails is to prevent the cuticles from growing too long, by pushing them back regularly. I personally like to use my teeth to push back my cuticles when showering, since the cuticle is soft from the water, my hands are super clean, and it requires no extra tools. I recognize that this is a weird habit, though, and I think the more normal ways to push cuticles are to use your fingernails or a wooden stick (manicurists use a special type of dowel but a popsicle stick works fine).

You can also buy cuticle remover online, which is a chemical that softens the dried skin of the cuticle and makes it easier to remove from your nails. It's probably unnecessary, but if you're really trying to get your hands into a condition where they stop developing hangnails, it's worth considering.

You mean, "ban superintelligence"? Because superintelligences are not human-like.

The kind of superintelligence that doesn't possess human-likeness that we want it to possess.

That's the problem with your proposal of "ethics module". Let's suppose that we have system of "ethics module" and "nanotech design module". Nanotech design module outputs 3D-model of supramolecular unholy abomination. What exactly should ethics module do to ensure that this abomination doesn't kill everyone?

Nanotech design module has to be evaluatable by the ethics module. For that it also be made from multiple sequential LLM calls in explicit natural language. Other type of modules should be banned.