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Eliezer Yudkowsky (Eliezer_Yudkowsky) · 2006-11-22T20:00:00.000Z · comments (47)
Forget about science. Most people can't use computers really.
What Most Users Can Do
(Skill level 1), [60% of users]
- Little or no navigation required to access the information or commands required to solve the problem
- Few steps and a minimal number of operators
- Problem resolution requiring the respondent to apply explicit criteria only (no implicit criteria)
- Few monitoring demands (e.g., having to check one’s progress)
- Identifying content and operators done through simple match
- No need to contrast or integrate information
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_9789264258051-en
gunnar_zarncke on Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the BrainNote that vasodilators can reduce the blood flow to the brain because they potentially work on all blood vessels, not only those in the brain.
gunnar_zarncke on Some Things That Increase Blood Flow to the BrainThe subtext is that I'd like to have them if the author has them available. It sounded like it's applied/used by the author. Also, it's a frontpage post and the LW standard on scholarship is typically higher than this.
I'm fine with romeostevensit's reply that it's from a shallow google dive, but would have preferred this to be a QuickTake or at least an indication that it's shallow.
Granting that LLMs in inference mode experience qualia, and even granting that they correspond to human qualia in any meaningful way:
I find both arguments invalid. Either conclusion could be correct, or neither, or the question might not even be well formed. At the very least, the situation is a great deal more complicated than just having two arguments to decide between!
For example in scenario (A), what does it mean for an LLM to answer a question "eagerly"? My first impression is that it's presupposing the answer to the question, since the main meaning of "eagerly" is approximately "in the manner of having interest, desire, and/or enjoyment". That sounds a great deal like positive qualia to me!
Maybe it just means the lesser sense of apparently showing such emotions, in which case it may mean no more than an author writing such expressions for a character. The author may actually be feeling frustration that the scene isn't flowing as well as they would like and they're not sure that the character's behaviour is really in keeping with their emotions from recent in-story events. Nonetheless, the words written are apparently showing eagerness.
The "training loss" argument seems totally ill-founded regardless. That doesn't mean that its conclusion in this hypothetical instance is false, just that the reasoning provided is not sufficient justification for believing it.
So in the end, I don't see this as a dilemma at all. It's just two possible bad arguments out of an enormously vast space of bad arguments.
mary-chernyshenko on Failures in KindnessWhat you say doesn't matter as much as what the other person hears. If I were the other person, I would probably wonder why you would add epicycles, and kindness would be just one possible explanation.
richard_kennaway on Many people lack basic scientific knowledgeIf the subtitle of the report is as quoted, they’re even wronger than that.
mateusz-baginski on AI Alignment MetastrategyFor people who (like me immediately after reading this reply) are still confused about the meaning of "humane/acc", the header photo of Critch's X profile is reasonably informative
mateusz-baginski on Open Thread Spring 2024
I have the mild impression that Jacqueline Carey's Kushiel trilogy is somewhat popular in the community?[1] Is it true and if so, why?
E.g. Scott Alexander references Elua in Mediations on Moloch and I know of at least one prominent LWer who was a big enough fan of it to reference Elua in their discord handle.
I read the beginning and skimmed through the rest of the linked post. It is what I expected it to be.
We are talking about "probability" - a mathematical concept with a quite precise definition. How come we still have ambiguity about it?
Reading E.T. Jayne’s might help.
Probability is what you get as a result of some natural desiderata related to payoff structures. When anthropics are involved, there are multiple ways to extend the desiderata, that produce different numbers that you should say, depending on what you get paid for/what you care about, and accordingly different math. When there’s only a single copy of you, there’s only one kind of function, and everyone agrees on a function and then strictly defines it. When there are multiple copies of you, there are multiple possible ways you can be paid for having a number that represents something about the reality, and different generalisations of probability are possible.
yair-halberstadt on From the outside, American schooling is weirdThe way the auditing works in the UK is as follows:
Students will be given an assignment, with a strict grading rubric. This grading rubric is open, and students are allowed to read it. The rubric will detail exactly what needs to be done to gain each mark. Interestingly, even students who read the rubric often fail to get these marks.
Teachers then grade the coursework against the rubric. Usually two from each school are randomly selected for review. If the external grader finds the marks more than 2 points off, all of the coursework will be remarked externally.
The biggest problem with this system is that experienced teachers will carefully go over the grading rubric with their students, and explain precisely what needs to be done to gain each mark. They will then read through drafts of the coursework, and point out which marks the student is failing to get it. When they mark the final coursework they will add exactly one point to the total.
Meanwhile less experienced teachers don't actually understand what the marking rubric means. They will pattern match the students response to the examples in the rubric, and give their students a too high mark. It will then be regraded externally and the students will end up with a far lower grade than they had expected.
Thus much of the difference in grades between schools is explainable by the difference in teacher quality/experience. This is bad for courses which are mostly graded in coursework, but fortunately most academic subjects are 90% written exams.