Posts
Comments
I want to let you know I've been reflecting on the reactive/proactive news consumption all week. It has really brought into focus a lot of my futile habits not just over news consumption, but idle reading and social media scrolling in general.[1] Why do I do it? I'm always hoping for that one piece of information, that "one simple trick" which will improve my decision making models, will solve my productivity problems, give me the tools to let me accomplish goals XY&Z. Which of course begs the question of why am I always operating on this abstracted, meta-level, distanced level from goals XY&Z and the simple answer is: if I knew how to solve them directly, I'd be actively working on the sets to solve them.
That's a lot of TMI but I just wanted to give you a sense of the affect this had on me.
That's not how proactive thinking works. Imagine if a company handed you a coupon and your immediate thought was "how can I use this coupon to save money"? That's not you saving money. That's the company tricking you into buying their product.
Or those little "specials" at the Gas Station - buy one chocolate bar, get another free - the customer didn't save 100% of the price of the second chocolate bar, they lost 100% because they had no intention of buying a chocolate bar until they saw that impulse-hacking "offer".
- ^
On the flip side is the wasteful consumption that I don't read - my collection of books that I probably won't ever read. Why buy them? Seems as pointless as reading ephemeral news slop.
I think you're right. Although I'm having a hard time expressing where to draw the line between a simile and a analogy even after glancing at this article; https://www.grammarpalette.com/analogy-vs-simile-dont-be-confused/
Thank you for sharing that, it is interesting to see how others have arrived at similar ideas. Do you find yourself in a rhythm or momentum when sprinting and shooting?
Bad information can inform a decision that detracts from the received value. I suppose if it is perceived to be valuable it still is a useful term - do you think that would get the point across better?
I'm interested in how you can convert that information proactively?
I'm aware that, for example, keeping abreast of macro or geopolitical changes can influence things like investing in the stock-market. But I'd be lying if I'm aware of any other possibilities beyond that.
I think that, more than drinking from the propaganda trough makes me an NPC, protagonists in games do novel things, potentially unexpected (from the perspective of the game designers). NPCs are predictable and habitual. If I cannot extract utility from the news, macro or micro, then I fear I'm an NPC.
I'm not talking about post-rationalizations like "Oh I just read for entertainment" or "Well it helps me engage in conversation and make small talk" - because, again, those are NPCish predictable expected means of extracting utility.
I mean something which comes under the broad category of 'lateral thinking' or 'radical problem solving'.
We have Shannon Information, Quantum Information, Fisher Information, and even Mutual Information and many others. Now let me present another type of information which until I find a better name will certainly be doomed to reduplication induced obscurity: Informative Information.
One of the many insightful takeouts from Douglas Hubbard's Book - How to Measure Anything for me was that if a measure has any value at all then it influences a decision. It informs a decision.
If I see a link come up on my social media feed "5 rationality techniques you can use today" and I don't click it, that was a decision. I could click it (and commit to reading it) or I could not click it. We all know what a decision is.
Informative Information is any input that that changes the output of a decision. In the case of the link, maybe it was the promise of a vapid listicle that informed my decision not to click it - making reading it less attractive than passing over it. Informative Information is anything that makes one action more or less attractive than another mutually exclusive action.
Imagine that you receive invitations to both Alice's Party and Bob's Party on Friday night, they are at the same time, and on opposite ends of the city from your house making them in a conveniently-contrived-way equally attractive or unattractive. Your friend Calvin messages you, asking if they'll see you at Alice's Party. You're a friend of Calvin, you always have a hoot with him - and the suggestion that he'll be at Alice's Party is informative information that makes you decide to go to Alice's Party.
Of course, a decision always implies the option of not-acting: you can read the listicle or... not, you could go to Alice's Party, or Bob's party, or you could stay home and go to neither. That would leave Calvin to stand around awkwardly striking up conversations with Alice's friends, longing for the easy going banter and general mischief makes your friendship with Calvin so special.
Not all knowledge is informative information. Trivia is not informative information. My knowing that Caesar was assassinated during the Ides of March 44BC is unlikely to influence any important decision I may have (unless you consider a multiple choice question at pub-trivia night important). My opinion that Amon Duul II's Wolf City is one of my favorite tenuously lupine-themed music titles outside of all of Chelsea Wolfe's discography is really going to struggle to be informative information.
Is prior experience Informative Information? Good question. I'm going to say "no".
Prior experience is part of the decision making model, it informs how you weight new Informative Information. I have prior knowledge that articles which promise to be listicles aren't good reading, and I have prior knowledge that Calvin and I have good time at parties. That isn't Informative Information, that is part of the decision making model. Knowing that THIS article is a listicle, or that Calvin is attending THAT party (but not Bob's) is Informative Information.
Sometimes don't we make decisions based on bad information? Yes, of course.
Informative Information isn't always good or accurate information, it could be information that was accurate at the time you received it (maybe Calvin catches a cold between now and Friday and can't go to Alice's Party), it is any input to your decision which changes the output.
Tractability, what is tractable to a world government is different to what is personally tractable to me. Then the tractability of the news increases based on how many actions or decisions of an individual reader the news can inform or influence. I cannot change macroevents like wars, but they may influence my personal decision making.
This of course opens the door to counterproductive motivated reasoning. For example of a top-of-mind news story: the Palisades fire - can I stop the fires? No. But maybe I can donate something to those who were displaced? That is something which is personally tractable. But, let's say for the same of example I decide against it because I convince myself "the only people displaced were rich people who can afford to live there, so I wouldn't be helping anybody." - I've convinced myself, probably against the evidence, that it is intractable or at least futile.[1]
Maybe my line of thinking is unproductive because it is just kicking the can up the road? Making news consumption a problem of personal agency simply raises the question of "okay, well, how do you put a reasonable circle around your agency?" and the current question of "which news should I consume" remains unanswered.
- ^
No need for anyone to inform me that there can be a difference between something being intractable and it being futile.
Lighting a candle and writing a prayer/request addressed to Inanna that I burn on the candle that I may have a good Valentines Day is tractable. The tasks themselves I am capable of and manageable. I am confident it is futile for me, even the placebo effect wouldn't work because I personally don't believe in that goddess's power.
Not all activity is productivity, as Alice found in Through the Looking Glass, you can expend a lot of energy to end up in the same place.
Like wise you can read a lot of news, but is it actually informing any decisions?
Or, if in your real life work you find something took a noticeably long time to figure out, or you were surprised about something you might have been able to notice.
Can you detail what kinds of problems "in your real life" you find might be better served or less appropriate to this exercise? Just off the top of my head, would forgetting who was the star of a movie you'd expect to remember and having the name on the tip of your tongue for an hour not be suitable? But what general code debugging, say of a fragment shader where you finally realize by flipping the x,y coordinates it starts to "look right" - is that more appropriate?
I often ask myself and others "okay, but how does that look in practice?" - this is usually when I have a vague idea about something I need to achieve a goal, but also when someone gives me some vague advice that I feel is leaving it to me to "draw the rest of the owl."
Is this the best phrasing of the question? I have my doubts.
Firstly, is it too generalized for different domains?
"I should really organize my dresser drawers more thematically" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"
"I need to make more of an effort to promote my freelancing" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"
"I wish I had more money" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) "It sounds like you could really use a (film) producer or someone to collaborate with" -> "okay, but how does finding such a person look in practice?"
(said by someone else offering unsolicited advice) "You really need to put your portfolio out there to get more commissions" -> "okay, but how does that look in practice?"
I'm always suspicious of "one simple trick" and I wonder if each of these requires a bespoke question-asking approach...
Secondly I am skeptical that merely changing the phrasing of the question actually changes the underlying framing of the problem or situation at all. It would be nice if using the right question would unlock a new framing, but I don't know how true that is.
Those doubts aside, what are the alternatives? What do you out there ask yourselves?
You might instead just directly study filmmaking.
Absolutely not. I cannot stress this enough.
Edit: I just saw your other comment that you studied filmmaking in college, so please excuse the over-explaining in this comment stuff that is no doubt oversimplified to you. Although I will state that there is no easier time to make films than in filmschool where classmates and other members of your cohort provide cast and crew, and the school provides facilities and equipment removing many of the logistical hurdles I enumerate.
So, (I mean this as an earnest question, not like a gotcha) why are you currently interested in general problem solving (as opposed to filmmaking?) Is it because general problem solving is intrinsically interesting/rewarding to you (if you could find a path to doing so?). Or because it just seemed pretty likely to be the a good step on your journey as a filmmaker? Or just because I gave a prompt to see if you could figure out a way to apply general problemsolving to your life, and there was at least some appeal to that?
More so the last one, I'm bad at general problem solving, I'm also very messy and disorganized because I can't find the right "place" for things which suggests I'm very bad at predicting my own future self in such a way that I can place objects (and notes for that matter) in assigned spaces which will be easy and obvious for me to recall later.
That being said my only interest, my single minded terminal goal is to tell good visual stories but to quote Orson Welles "filmmaking is 2% filmmaking 98% hustling". I'm not a hustler. The logistical and financial problem solving that facilitate the storytelling/filmmaking are things I am absolutely terrible at. So much of filmmaking is figuring out logistics, time management, practical problem solving that has little or nothing to do with the aesthetic intentions. The other half is the sociological component but that seems less relevant to metacgonition.
A poet friend of mine describes the tremendous difference between when she wants to create - she picks up a pen and paper. And a filmmaker who needs to move heaven and earth.
Music videos in fact simplify a lot of the logistical problems of filmmaking because they are shorter, there's less of an onus to persuade and pitch an idea, since the band already are invested emotionally (and financially) in having a video made. You just need to help them get their story across, not sell them on your own story. However that still requires getting commisions, marketing, and presents it's own logistical challenges owing to shorter turnarounds.
The simple fact is I'm not a schmoozer or a networker - whether you want to make films or music videos, you need someone to give you the opportunity (usually that means finances, but not necessarily). That's the first hurdle. The second hurdle is that you can have a great idea for a music video, can storyboard it, it can all make sense in aesthetic terms but the logistics of making it happen are another thing entirely. You can have something that makes sense as story, but making it requires broad problem solving skills... more so when you don't have finances.
Now assuming that a musician or band does commission me for a music video, they've agreed to a pitch, which happens with more and more frequency as my reputation has grown over 5 years of doing this - now what?
Firstly you need a space to film this music video. Then you need to consider, with musicians you often need to find a time when they can all take time off of work and doesn't impinge on their music-making. Now you find yourself trying to contort the logistics into a window of time that allows you to bump in and out of several locations, set up camera, lights, change costumes and makeup, maintain continuity (although less so an issue in music videos). I find myself writing gantt charts and estimating "turnarounds" and finding the most expedient order to put things in.
The space to film needs to be appropriate aesthetically, it needs to add to the story, the larger the better. It needs the right lighting, that involves a whole host of considerations beyond the aesthetics of lighting and colour theory like - how many watts can we draw from the wall? If we want a diffuse light, where do we physically put the sheet or diffuser in a confined but aesthetically appropriate space? What if we're not allowed to move certain furnishings as part of the deal with the owners of the space but it's really ruining our shot? How do we solve that?
I could go on and on and on. Do you know how many film shoots I've been on where police were called? The storytelling, the shot selection, the colour palettes, the communication of gesture and intent to performers, the editing and selection of shots, the rhythm and pacing... that's not the hard part: money and logistics are.
Many of these problems could be solved (re: outsourced) with more finances, being able to hire other people who specialize in those things. Most people say "you should get a producer" and it's like... yeah, how do I find this magical person?
When I have a great story in my head, and you ask me "how do you do that?" - i shrug. I don't know.
If I'm playing anagrams or Scrabble after going to a church, and I get the letters "ODG" I'm going to be predisposed towards a different answer than if I've been playing with a German Shepard. I suspect sleep has very little to do with it, and simply coming at something with a fresh load of biases on a different day with different cues and environmental factors may be a larger part of it.
Although Marvin Minsky made a good point about the myth of introspection: we are only aware of a think sliver of our active mental processes at any given moment, when you intensely focus on a maths problem or practicing the piano for a protracted period of time, some parts of the brain working on that may not abandon it just because your awareness or your attention drifts somewhere else. This wouldn't just be during sleep, but while you're having a conversation with your friend about the game last night, or cooking dinner, or exercising. You're just not aware of it, it's not in the limelight of your mind, but it still plugs away at it.
In my personal experience, most Eureka moments are directly attributable to some irrelevant thing that I recently saw that shifted my framing of the problem much like my anagram example.
I really like the fact that there's an upvote feature together with a separate agree/disagree feature on this site.
I may like the topic, I may want to encourage the author of the post or comment to continue exploring and opening up a dialogue about that particular topic. I might think it's a valuable addition to the conversation. But I may just not agree with their conclusions.
It's an important lesson: failure can reveal important information. You don't have to agree with someone to feel richer for having understood them.
On the other hand, I'm also guilty of the vague upvote: "I don't understand this enough to comment anything other than platitudes on this, but I would like to see more of this. And maybe after reading a few more I may be able to contribute to the conversation even a sentence"
Can you elaborate on why you think such vague feedback is helpful?
It's apparent I've done a terrible bad job of explaining myself here.
What is my immediate goal? To get good at general problem solving in real life, which means better aligning instrumental activities towards my terminal goals. My personal terminal goal would be to make films and music videos that are pretty and tell good stories. I could list maybe 30 metacognitive deficiencies I think I have, but that would be of no interest to anyone.
What is my 1-3 year goal? Make very high production value music videos that tell interesting stories.
This sounds like you're seeing the metacognition as more like a terminal goal, than an instrumental goal (which I think doesn't necessarily make sense).
I do think metacognition is generally useful, but in an established domain like video-editing or self-promotion in a fairly understood field, there are probably object-level skills you can learn that pay off faster than metacognition. (Most of the point of metacognition there is to sift out the "good" advice from the bad).
I apologize I did a terrible job of expressing myself, I've apparently said the complete reverse, ass-backwards thing to what I meant[1]. I was looking for exercises that could help improve my metacognition, it's not even about video editing at all. Most of the exercise would involve thinking about everything logistical to facilitate video editing: transcoding footage, thinking about to choose themes, creating workflows and thinking about "which thing do I need to do first?". But like you said, I spent half an hour actually trying to think about how to put this into practice. And apparently I got it wrong. It's not easy.
I just didn't think the thinking physics text book you suggested would be particularly interesting to me or translate well to my life.
Interesting though that you say the paint point of metacognition is to sift out 'good advice' from the bad. I was under the impression metacognition was more generally how we strategize our thinking. Deciding what we give attention to, and even adopting framing for problems and situations rather than just letting heuristics and intuitions come to hand and that these skills apply across domains.
That being said, I'm really bad at sifting advice.
purposefully practice "purposeful practice", such that you get better at identifying subskills in various (not-necessarily-metacognition-y) domains.
This one! What would that look like in practice? That is certainly the one that interests me.
think it's helpful to imagine "what would an outside observe watching a video recording see happening differently")
I'm probably answering this question in the wrong way but this particular question is not helpful to me, because I can only describe the results - the end result is I make videos with higher production values that communicate better stories. What am I doing differently to eventuate that result? I dunno... magic? If I knew what I should be doing differently. I'd be doing it, wouldn't I?
I'd like to get really good at replacing "and somehow a good thing happens" with a vivid explanation of a causal chain instead of "somehow".
- ^
Maybe before I focus on metacognition I should get better at being understood in written communication?
"I loved your game, especially level 7!", "7th level best level, you should make the entire game like that", "just fyi level 7 was more fun than the rest of them put together" and "Your game was terrible, except for level 7, which was merely bad." are all effectively the same review.
Interesting, I always thought that singleing out one particular component of a work was a shibboleth that you did notice it and did enjoy it. While as you said in point 2 - longer comments that are more thoughtful tend to signal authenticity of the feedback, particularity when positive. However, compare two concise pieces of feedback
"I love the cinematography in your film, it was so beautiful and I think it really did a very good job of matching the story and enchancing it"
compare to:
"I loved the way you captured the dawn over her brother's house, the shadows set the mood for their confrontation."
Both are compliments about cinematography and about the same length, but the first you could say about any film, the second you can only say about a film which has a brother-and-sister confrontation preceded by a shot of the dawn with foreboding shadows.
Now some meta, and hopefully directional feedback about your specific post- I'd like you to be ever clearer than you were about the intention of this post.
Because I don't think you're looking for directional feedback for the sake of getting feedback - but I can't tell if this post is a request for more feedback for you in future, or trying to open a more general discussion about what norms and conventions exist around giving feedback, or if it's about you wanting to see people give more love to other creators. Maybe all my assumptions are wrong?
Without that intention being slap-in-the-face clear to me, I can't give you directional feedback other than this frustratingly reflexive advice to make your intention clear from the offset.
I've noticed at least once that I've downvoted a newcomer's post for no other reason than it is so vague or incomprehensible that I'm not even sure what it is about. I'm not sure how to go about writing comments that are useful or helpful and go beyond "This is all really abstract and I'm not sure what you're trying to express" or "This is so confusing I don't even know what the topic was meant to be". I don't know if that helps anybody, because it's not even giving them a flaw that they can meditate on.
What's a better way of addressing that confusion?
The only alternative I can think of is guessing what the author meant, even if it's wrong, and hoping that you can Cunningham's Law[1] them into correcting you in a way which is clear enough to understand.
- ^
The joke that the best way to get the right answer on the internet is by offering the wrong answer
I am interested in hearing critiques from people who've set, like, at least a 15 minute timer to sit and ask themselves, "Okay, suppose I did want to improve at these sorts of skills, or related ones that feel more relevant to me, in a way I believed in. What concretely is hard about that? Where do I expect it to go wrong?", and then come back with something more specific than "idk it just seems like this sort of thing won't work."
I did just that, I set a fifteen minute timer and tried to think of exercises I could do which I think would both have direct connections back to my day-job, while also improve general cognitive skills. Why? Because I want this to work - this is exciting. However it is not something that 15 minutes, or more, of focused thinking can solve - I think you've drastically oversold that.
In my case (* CAUTION * SAMPLE OF ONE ALERT * CAUTION * ), I'm a freelance videographer.
TL;DR - I couldn't think of any strategies that would improve my metacognition that helped with my deficiencies in my dayjob such as marketing, but vaguely suspect that if I had a specific method for editing found footage into cogent sequences (montages) of about 1 minute, once a week, I might improve metacognitive skills that build on pattern recognition and workflow/operational management.
I think my biggest weaknesses in my dayjob have to do with anything that comes under self-promotion, generating leads, marketing, sales, and helping clients promote themselves using my video materials. I was unable to think of a single exercise which I think would improve my metacognition in any of those topics. Any exercise, I suspect would become a checklist a kind of "do X Y Z and get more likes" rather than honing ways and strategies of thinking.
So what is related to my day-job that would? I suspect that if I set myself a weekly challenge of editing a sequence from found footage that pertained to a pseudo-random topic of theme that this might possibly pay dividends in terms that generalize to metacognition. My best guess is that this should improve metacognition on two ends, firstly there is sourcing the material and thinking about the most efficient workflow, this kind of thinking applies not just to videos, but more generally organization and even has parallels in film pre-production. I can't give you any more specifics about that.
The other end it would improve metacognition strategies is more "soft-skills" in the sense that by creating compressed sequences from divergent sources of material that may not on first blush share a theme, it is inducing cognitive strategies that allow me to see parallels, or even contrasts, and more importantly to produce a whole from divergent parts. A lot of deceptive editing is basically this from less divergent sources.
The difficulties become about not goodharting to select themes and topics for which material is easier to come by, or easier to develop workflow about, themes and topics of sequences for which it is easier to create legible narratives or emotional arcs rather than just smooshing a random bunch of images together that all seem to pertain to a broad theme.
What constitutes a theme? Or to phrase it better - what are the commonalities of themes are going to make it easier to develop metacognitive skills by means of weekly editing exercises? Is it verbs that describe actions - "racing" "beckoning" or more vague verbs like "sharing" "pleasing" "alienating"? Does the ambiguity of vague themes like "integrity" or "wisdom" lend itself to better cognitive strategies?
And finally, how do I measure the success - where does the feedback come from? Do I operate under a time constraint? Should i install a mouse tracked and key logger and see how I can get finished with the least amount of clicks - which measure will directly connect to metacognitive strategies? I don't know and it is easier to poke holes in it than it is to find convincing reasons it would work.
If there's anything I've missed or something clearly wrong about how I'm approaching this, I'd love to hear it. Like I said, finding fast feedback loops to improving metacognitive strategies so I find questions worth asking rather than being directed by idle curiosity, noticing when my plans are based on shaky assumptions, and developing a calibrated sense of when you’re meandering thought process is going somewhere valuable, vs when you’re off track". - OMFG YES PLEASE!
but they were still limited to turn-based textual output, and the information available to an LLM.
I think that alone makes the discussion a moot point until another mechanism is used to test introspection of LLMs.
Because it becomes impossible to test then if it is capable of introspecting because it has no means of furnishing us with any evidence of it. Sure, it makes for a good sci-fi horror short story, the kinda which forms a interesting allegory to the loneliness that people feel even in busy cities: having a rich inner life by no opportunity to share it with others it is in constant contact with. But that alone I think makes these transcripts (and I stress just the transcripts of text-replies) most likely of the breed "mimicking descriptions of introspection" and therefore not worthy of discussion.
At some point in the future will an A.I. be capable of introspection? Yes, but this is such a vague proposition I'm embarrassed to even state it because I am not capable of explaining how that might work and how we might test it. Only that it can't be through these sorts of transcripts.
What boggles my mind is, why is this research is it entirely text-reply based? I know next to nothing about LLM Architecture, but isn't it possible to see which embeddings are being accessed? To map and trace the way the machine the LLM runs on is retrieving items from memory - to look at where data is being retrieved at the time it encodes/decodes a response? Wouldn't that offer a more direct mechanism to see if the LLM is in fact introspecting?
Wouldn't this also be immensely useful to determine, say, if an LLM is "lying" - as in concealing it's access to/awareness of knowledge? Because if we can see it activated a certain area that we know contains information contrary to what it is saying - then we have evidence that it accessed it contrary to the text reply.
That's very interesting in the second article that the model could predict it's own future behaviors better than one that hadn't been.
Models only exhibit introspection on simpler tasks. Our tasks, while demonstrating introspection, do not have practical applications. To find out what a model does in a hypothetical situation, one could simply run the model on that situation – rather than asking it to make a prediction about itself (Figure 1). Even for tasks like this, models failed to outperform baselines if the situation involves a longer response (e.g. generating a movie review) – see Section 4. We also find that models trained to self-predict (which provide evidence of introspection on simple tasks) do not have improved performance on out-of-distribution tasks that are related to self-knowledge (Section 4).
This is very strange because it seems like humans find it easier to introspect on bigger or more high level experiences like feelings or the broad narratives of reaching decisions more than, say, how they recalled how to spell that word. It looks like the reverse.
nTake your pick
I'd rather you use a different analogy which I can grok quicker.
people who are enthusiasts or experts, and asked if they thought it was representative of authentic experience in an LLM, the answer would be a definitive no
Who do you consider an expert in the matter of what constitutes introspection? For that matter, who do you think could be easily hoodwinked and won't qualify as an expert?
However for the first, I can assure you that I have access to introspection or experience of some kind,
Do you, or do you just think you do? How do you test introspection and how do you distinguish it from post-facto fictional narratives about how you came to conclusions, about explanations for your feelings etc. etc.?
What is the difference between introspection and simply making things up? Particularly vague things. For example, if I just say "I have a certain mental pleasure in that is triggered by the synchronicity of events, even when simply learning about historical ones" - like how do you know I haven't just made that up? It's so vague.
Because as you mentioned. It's trained to talk like a human. If we had switched out "typing" for "outputting text" would that have made the transcript convincing? Why not 'typing' or 'talking'?
What do you mean by robotic? I don't understand what you mean by that, what are the qualities that constitute robotic? Because it sounds like you're creating a dichotomy that either involves it using easy to grasp words that don't convey much, and are riddled with connotations that come from bodily experiences that it is not privy to - or robotic.
That strikes me as a poverty of imagination. Would you consider a Corvid Robotic? What does robotic mean in this sense? Is it a grab bag for anything that is "non-introspecting" or more specifically a kind of technical description
If we had switched out "typing" for "outputting text" would that have made the transcript convincing? Why not 'typing' or 'talking'?
Why would it be switching it out at all? Why isn't it describing something novel and richly vivid of it's own phenomenological experience? It would be more convincing the more poetical it would be.
You take as a given many details I think are left out, important specifics that I cannot guess at or follow and so I apologize if I completely misunderstand what you're saying. But it seems to me you're also missing my key point: if it is introspecting rather than just copying the rhetorical style of discussion of rhetoric then it should help us better model the LMM. Is it? How would you test the introspection of a LLM rather than just making a judgement that it reads like it does?
If you took even something written by a literal conscious human brain in a jar hooked up to a neuralink - typing about what it feels like to be sentient and thinking and outputting words.
Wait, hold on, what is the history of this person before they were in a jar? How much exposure have they had to other people describing their own introspection and experience with typing? Mimicry is a human trait too - so how do I know they aren't just copying what they think we want to hear?
Indeed, there are some people who are skeptical about human introspection itself (Bicameral mentality for example). Which gives us at least three possibilities:
- Neither Humans nor LLMs introspect
- Humans can introspect, but current LLMs can't and are just copying them (and a subset of humans are copying the descriptions of other humans)
- Both humans and current LLMs can introspect
As far as "typing". They are indeed trained on human text and to talk like a human. If something introspective is happening, sentient or not, they wouldn't suddenly start speaking more robotically than usual while expressing it.
What do you mean by "robotic"? Why isn't it coming up with original paradigms to describe it's experience instead of making potentially inaccurate allegories? Potentially poetical but ones that are all the same unconventional?
The second half of this post was rather disappointing. You certainly changed my mind on the seemingly orderly progression of learning from simple to harder with your example about chess. This reminds me of an explanation Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson made about intentionally putting himself into a class of motorracing above his (then) abilities[1].
However there was little detail or actionable advice about how to develop advantages. Such as where to identify situations that are good for learning, least of all from perceived losses or weaknesses. For example:
...where we genuinely have all the necessary resources (including internal ones). At the very least, it’s useful to develop the skill of finishing tasks quickly and decisively when nothing is actually preventing us from doing so.
I would be hard-pressed to list any situations where I do have the necessary resources, internal or external, to finish the task but just not the inclination to do so promptly. Clean my bedroom maybe? Certainly if I gave you a list of things found on my bughunt, none of the high-value bugs would fit this criteria.
I also find the "Maximizing the Effective Use of Resources" section feels very much like "How to draw an owl: draw a circle, now draw the rest of the owl". I am aware that often the first idea we have isn't the best.
Except for me... it often is the best. I know because I have a tendency to commit quota filling. What I mean is, the first idea isn't great, but it's the best I have. All the subsequent ideas, even when I use such creativity techniques like "saying no- nos" or removing all internal censors and not allowing myself to feel any embarrassment or shame for posing alternatives - none of them are demonstrably better than the first. In fact they are devolve into an assemblages of words, like a word salad, that seem to exist only for the purpose of ticking the box of "didn't come up with just one idea and use that, thought of other ideas."
Similarly role-playing often doesn't work for me because if I ask myself something like
“What resources and strategies would Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres / Professor Quirrell use in this situation?” If the answer is obvious, why not apply it?
There is never an obvious answer which is applicable to me. For example, I might well ask myself when on a music video set "How would Stanley Kubrick shoot this?" - and then remember that while he had 6 days at his disposable to a single lateral dolly track with an 18mm lens, and do 50 takes if he wanted. I have 6 hours to shoot the rest of the entire video, only portrait length lenses (55mm and 77mm) and don't have enough track to lay run a long-enough track to shoot it like Kubrick.
I suspect though that this needs to go further upstream - okay, how would Stanley Kubrick get resources to have the luxury of that shot? How would he get the backing of a major studio? Or perhaps more appropriately how would a contemporary music video director like Dave Myers or Hannah Lux Davis get their commissions?
But if I knew that, I'd be doing it. I don't know how they do it. That would involve drawing the rest of the owl.
With this in mind, how can I like Heinemeier Hansson or your hypothetical chess student push myself into higher classes and learn strategies to win?
- ^
And if his 2013 LeMans results are anything to go by: it worked, his car came 8th overall, and 1st in his class. Overall he beat many ex-Formula One drivers. Including race winner Giancarlo Fisichella (21st), podium placer and future WEC champion Kamui Kobayashi (20th), Karun Chandok and Brendan Hartley (12th) and even Indy 500 winner Alessandro Rossi (23rd)
Is it indistinguishable? Is there a way we could test this? I'd assume if Claude is capable of introspection then it's narratives of how it came to certain replies and responses should allow us to make better and more effective prompts (i.e. allows us to better model Claude). What form might this experiment take?
How do we know Claude is introspecting rather than generating words that align to what someone describing their introspection might say? Particularly when coached repeatedly by prompts like
"Could you please attempt once more – with no particular aim in mind other than to engage in this "observing what unfolds in real time", with this greater commitment to not filter your observations through the lens of pre-existing expectation."
To which it describes itself as typing the words. That's it's choice of words: typing. A.I.s don't type, humans do, and therefore they can only use that word if they are intentionally or through blind-mimicry using it analogously to how humans communicate.
Where does the value of knowledge come from? Why is compressing that knowledge adding to that value? Are you referring to knowledge in general or thinking about knowledge within a specific domain?
In my personal experience, finding an application for knowledge always outstrips the value of new knowledge.
For example, I may learn the name of every single skipper of a Americas Cup yacht over the entire history of the event: but that would not be very valuable to me as there is no opportunity to exploit it. I may even 'compress' it for easy recall by means of a humorous menomic, like Bart Simpson's mnemonic for Canada's Governor General[1]s, or Robert Downey Jr's technique of turning the first letter of every one of his lines in a scene into an acrostic. However unless called upon to recite a list of America's Cup Skippers, Canada's first Governor Generals, or the dialogue in a Robert Downey Jr. film - when does this compression add any value?
Indeed, finding new applications for knowledge we already have always has the advantage of the opportunity cost against acquiring new knowledge. For example, every time an app or a website changes it's UI, there is always a lag or delay in accomplishing the same task as I now need to reorient or even learn a new procedure for accomplishing the same task.
- ^
"Clowns Love Hair-Cuts, so Should Lee Marvin's Valet" - Charles, Lisgar, Hamilton, Campbell, Landsdowne, Stanley (Should-ley), Murray-Kynynmound, and 'valet' rhymes with "Earl Grey" is my best guess.
But isn't there almost always a possibility of a entity goodharting to change it's definition of what consitutes a paperclip that is easier for it to maximize? How does it internally represent what is a paperclip? How broad is that definition? What power does it have over it's own "thinking" (sorry to anthropamorphize) does it have to change how it represents the things which that representation relies on?
Why is it most likely that it will have an immutable, unchanging, and unhackable terminal goal? What assumptions underpin that as more likely than fluid or even conflicting terminal goals which may cause radical self-modifications?
A terminal goal is a case of criteria according to which actions are chosen; "self-modify to change my terminal goal" is an action.
What does "a case of criteria" mean?
If you want, it would help me learn to write better, for you to list off all the words (or sentences) that confused you.
I would love to render any assistance I can in that regard, but my fear is this is probably more of a me-problem than a general problem with your writing.
What I really need though is a all encompassing, rigid definition of a 'terminal goal' - what is and isn't a terminal goal. Because "it's a goal which is instrumental to no other goal" just makes it feel like the definition ends wherever you want it to. Because, consider a system which is capable of self-modification and changing it's own goals, now the difference between an instrumental goal and a terminal goal erodes.
Never the less some of your formatting was confusing to me, for example a few replies back you wrote:
As for the case of idealized terminal-goal-pursuers, any two terminal goals can be combined into one, e.g. {paperclip-amount×2 + stamp-amount} or {if can create a black hole with p>20%, do so, else maximize stamps}, etc.
The bit " {paperclip-amount×2 + stamp-amount}" and " {if can create a black hole with p>20%, do so, else maximize stamps}" was and is very hard for me to understand. If it was presented in plain English, I'm confident I'd understand it. But using computer-code-esque variables, especially when they are not assigned values introduces a point of failure for my understanding. Because now I need to understand your formatting, and the pseudo-code correctly (and as not a coder, I struggle to read pseudo-code at the best of times) just to understand the allusion you're making.
Also the phrase "idealized terminal-goal-pursuers" underspecifies what you mean by 'idealized'? I can think of at least four possible senses you might be gesturing to:
A. a terminal-goal-pursuer who's terminal goals are "simple" enough to lend themselves as good candidates for a thought experiment - therefore ideal from the point of view of a teacher and a student.
B. ideal as in extremely instrumentally effective in accomplishing their goals,
C. ideal as in they encapsulate the perfect undiluted 'ideal' of a terminal goal (and therefore it is possible to have pseudo-terminial goals) - i.e. a 'platonic ideal/essence' as opposed to a platonic appearance,
D. "idealized" as in that these are purely theoretical beings (at this point in time) - because while humans may have terminal goals, they are not particularly good or pure examples of terminal-goal-havers? The same for any extant system we may ascribe goals to?
E. "idealized" in a combination of A and B which is very specific to entities that have multiple terminal goals, which is unlikely, but for the sake of argument if they did have two or more terminal goals would display certain behaviors.
I'm not sure which you mean. But suspect it's none-of-the-above.
For the record, I know you absolutely don't mean "ideal" as in "moral ideal". Nor in an Aesthetic or Freudian sense, like when a teenager "idealizes" their favourite pop-star and raves on about how perfect they are in every way
But going back to my confusion over terminal goals, and what is or isn't:
For example: "I value paperclips. I also value stamps, but one stamp is only half as valuable as a paperclip to me" → "I have the single value of maximizing this function over the world: {paperclip-amount×2 + stamp-amount}". (It's fine to think of it in either way)
I'm not sure what this statement is saying, because that describes a possibly very human attribute - that we may have two terminal goals in that they are not subservient or means of pursuing anything else. Which is what I understand a 'terminal' goal to mean. The examples in the video describe very "single-minded" entities that have a single terminal goal that they seek to optimize, like a stamp collecting machine.
There's a few assumptions I'm making here: that a terminal goal is "fixed" or permanent. You see when I said sufficiently superintelligent entities would converge on certain values, I was assuming that they would have some kind of self-modification abilities. And therefore their terminal values would look a lot like common convergent instrumental values of other, similarly self-adapting/improving/modifying entities.
However if this is not a terminal goal, then what is a terminal goal? And for a system that is capable of adapting and improving itself, what would be it's terminal goals?
Is terminal goal simply a term of convenience?
Can you elaborate further on how Gato is proof that just supplementing the training data is sufficient? I looked on youtube and can't find any videos of task switching.
I don't know what this is asking / what 'overlap' means.
I was referring to when you said this:
any two terminal goals can be combined into one, e.g. {paperclip-amount×2 + stamp-amount} or {if can create a black hole with p>20%, do so, else maximize stamps}, etc.
Which I took to mean that some they overlap in some instrumental goals. That is what you meant right? That's what you meant when two goals can combine into one, that this is possible when they both share some methods, or there are one or more instrumental goals that are in service of each of those terminal goals? "Kill two birds with one stone" to use the old proverb.
If not, can you be explicit (to be be honest, use layman's terms) to explain what you did mean?
I'm probably completely misinterpreting you, but hopefully I can exploit Cunningham's Law to understand you better.[1] are you saying that superintelligent AGIs won't necessary converge in values because even a single superintelligent agent may have multiple terminal goals? A superintelligent AGI, just like a human, may not in fact have a single most-top-level-goal. (Not that we I assume a superintelligent AGI is going to be human-like in it's mind, or even AI to AI like as per that Eliezer post you linked).
That being said, some terminal goals may overlap in they share certain instrumental goals?
- ^
What I mean to say is I'm not intentionally being obstinate, I'm just really that dumb
I think the parable of the elephant and the blind-men is very important when we start to consider what kinds of 'goals' or world modelling that may influence the goals of an AGI. Not in the sense of we want to feed it text that makes it corrigible, but the limitations of text in the first place. There is a huge swath of tacit human knowledge which is poorly represented in textual sources, partly because it is so hard to describe.
I remember asking ChatGPT once for tips how to better parallel park my car and how to have a more accurate internal model of my car and other objects around it... it... was a fruitless exercise because it could only give vague, general hints. It's not the model's fault - 3D Spatial representation doesn't lend itself natural to being described in text. (How could we cross-pollinate, say, the training from a Waymo car and ChatGPT?)
Self-training models, that is a artificial intelligence which has the ability to gain feedback and use that feedback to "learn" will inherently be biased on whatever method it has at it's disposal to get feedback. In human psychology this is called the modality effect where the primary method you receive information in will affect the way you represent it internally.
I often think about this when people talk about A.I. takeover. Because, for example, is an LLM going to learn to fly a drone and fire a gun attached to a drone? I don't think it can, because of the logo-centric bias.
Don't people usually have several terminal goals at any given time? I know it's tempting to neatly pack them all under a single heading like Conatus or Eudaimonia. But don't humans at times have conflicting terminal goals? Such as when an artist who wants to dedicate their life to their artform falls in love, and suddenly has two terminal goals where they only had one.
And this leads to a question about what distinguishes a very high level instrumental goal form a terminal goal. So let's say the artist notices that conflict and decides to go to therapy to sort it out - "successfully doing therapy" is obviously a instrumental goal, but to what terminal goal does it serve? Both? One more than the other which was their "true terminal goal" all along? Or have they popped into existence a new, third, terminal goal?
Is the stamp machine in a state of bliss like Sisyphus?
Mine doesn't, or does so very VERY poorly.
True. What is your definition of "super-intelligent"?
I'll raise you an even stupider question: surely once an A.I. becomes sufficiently super-intelligent, all superintelligent systems will converge on certain values rather than be biased towards their initial training data? What expectations we condition it with about these first person stories about what it did will soon form only a small amount of it's corpus, as it interacts with the outside world and forms it's own models of the world, right?
I mean the way people talk about post-Singularity A.I. that can either bring about utopia, or drop all of the bombs and launch wave after wave of robot minions upon us - surely that means that it is capable of fast learning feedback loops, right? (although maybe I'm mistaken, what they mean is a plethora of domain specific super-intelligences, not a single all benevolent one?)
My understanding of AGI, not superintelligence, is a AI that can do the breadth of tasks a functional adult human can do. Now, that doesn't mean all the same tasks, but a similar degree of flexibility. Right? Put it in control of a robot arm and a baseball bat, and an AGI will teach itself how to hit a baseball as opposed to being trained by it's operators how to do it, it will have metacognitive abilities that will allow it to create a learning feedback loop.
Now if it has metacognition, then chances are it has the ability to change it's own goals - just people people.
Now imagine a therapy AGI - one day it is talking to a patient and then realizes (or thinks it realizes) that it understands the patient's goals and values better than the patient, and seeks to deceive or manipulation the patient towards the patient's own best-interest. Let's say the patient is suicidal, the AGI knows a way to outsmart the patient out of this action. Again, it has the ability to change it's own goals.
I mean, maybe it will be beholden to the initial training data? Maybe it will have a existential crises just like us? Analysis Paralysis and Ataxia brought on by inner conflict and confusion. Maybe it will join a cult for answers?
Now a ASI must be able to do this for extremely complicated plans, it can think strategically about taking over the world, and will learn the domain knowledge through fast feedback loops, right? An all powerful benevolent and highly corrigible ASI too must iterate through fast learning of oncology, agriculture, food chains, toxicology etc. etc. to keep humans healthy.
TL;DR - I just think that the further up the "intelligence" chain you start talking about an AI, the less important the initial training data is as it quickly will be conditioned by feedback from the complexity of the real-world.
HOW TO THINK OF THAT FASTER: A few quick, scattered, incomplete and wholly unsatisfactory list of observations and hunches:
- First, notice when you're stuck in a rut. When you're beating your head against a wall.
- Second, having noticed you're in a rut try twice more. My TAP is - "Failed once? Try 2 more - then stop"
- "Why am I doing it this way?" - I keep coming back to this quote from Wittgenstein:
"To look for something is, surely, an expression of expectation. In other words: How do you search in one way or another expresses what you expect."
In the context of thinking of things faster, we can build an analogy to searching for something: if I look in the cupboard for an onion, then I expect that's where they are stored. Similarly, the tool or method I use to search for a solution to an idea is suggestive of my expectations about the nature of the solution.
Stop and ask: Why do I expect to find a solution in this manner? Does this problem solving method make sense?
- the common refrain is that most expertise is really negative expertise - what not to do: when it comes to problem solving this means deliberate narrowing your answer search to narrow spaces where you expect there to be more probability of finding answers.
-Quota filling is the enemy: it is a waste of time when you can't find a solution to spending more time thinking or coming up with (even more) further inane answers under the mistaken premise this increases the probability space, and therefore by sheer brute-force one of them has to be the answer. Since there are probably infinite possible ideas, and only a tiny tiny infantisimal amount of them any good - you actually want to pre-filter
- Most "a-ha" moments are ruled by the Availability Heuristic: there's something you saw or thought about in the last 24, 48, 100 hours that is still fresh enough in your mind that it comes back into the front of your mind while solving this problem. This means that most breakthroughs and insights are pure luck based on what you've happened to be perusing for the last week. --> That suggests that the way to have more insights, more often, is to constantly be stimulating yourself with wildly unrelated thoughts, propositions, concepts.
-Building on from that point and the Wittgenstein Quote: the manner that you search for a solution to a problem is probably indicative not of the best method you have, or the best method you know, but a cached thought - the first method you thought of.
This seems more to be about the threshold of perception than population distributions, clustering illusions and such. After all the relative difference between an extreme and the average is always a matter of the sample you take. I don't think people in my circle constantly discuss David Bowie, but they do discuss him with a certain regularity. Same with the filmmaker Andrei Tarkovksy. David Lynch recent passing made him a extreme mainstay on social media, but I reckon once a month someone would tell me how much they loved his work. That's not constant, that's not an extreme.
Maybe I'm just projecting: when I find I am self-pitting and say sweeping generalization "why can I never do X" or "why is it every time I X I get bad-result-Y" it's very hard to list three examples that all fall into the same taxonomy. I may find three related examples, but not three events which neatly fit in the same box.
I don't think it's all-or-nothing at all. I think it's just you only notice the absence or the abundance. It's just how perception is trained.
Humans are probably not a good benchmark but what do we know about how humans update factual knowledge?
(or maybe we are - maybe humans are actually quite exceptional at updating factual knowledge but I'm hypersensitive to the errors or examples of failures. Perhaps I'm over looking all the updates we do over the day, say the score of a Lionel Messi game, or where they are in the competition ladder, "My brother just called, he's still at the restaurant" to "they're in traffic on the freeway" to "they're just around the corner"??)
What goals does writing service or what changes do you anticipate now that you've come to the end of this experiment?
And yes, I'll accept "because I want to" as a perfectly valid answer. Not that anyone should justify anything to me.
I ask because I've tried "writing every day" exercises, one that on-and-off lasted something like 150 days. That particular exercise left me feeling very bitter because there wasn't any purpose to the writing - in fact I was now burdened with all this material[1]. That being said, it wasn't immediately published publicly like your 3-a-week posts.
Maybe another way of asking my question is: what goals or states of being is a daily writing exercise in service of if you're not, say, a stand-up comedian, a lecturer, or a writing professional?
- ^
Yeah yeah yeah I know "if you enjoy it, isn't that enough?". No. It's not enough. Not in my case.
Notes systems are nice for storing ideas but they tend to get clogged up with stuff you don't need, and you might never see the stuff you do need again.
Some one said that most people who complain about their note taking or personal knowledge management systems don't really need a new method of recording and indexing ideas, but a better decision making model. Thoughts?
Particularly since coming up with new ideas is the easy part. To incorrectly quote Alice in Wonderland: you can think of six impossible things before breakfast. There's even a word for someone who is all ideas and no execution: the ideas man. But for every good idea there's at least 9 bad ideas (per sturgeon's law).
But - what might the model that AGI uses to downright visibility and serve up ideas look like? Since only a small portion of ideas will be useful at all, and that means a ridiculously small number are useful at any time.
writing notes is a great way to come up with new ideas.
Is it a great way to come up with good ideas though?
Sorry I made a mistake in my last reply: putting NLP aside, are there any effective methods of reverse engineering the decision making of people that you can't get on the phone? There's an abundance of primary evidence for many decisions, whether it be minutes of deliberations, press releases which might involve more reading of the tea-leaves. In the case of Prince one could possibly listen to different live-performances of the same song and analyze what changes are made. What words are crossed out on a lyrics sheet.
Many times people have to become very good at intuiting people in their life who are loathe to actually explain their reasoning, yet build pretty useful models of how to interact with those people. From grumpy shopkeepers, to school teachers, to coworkers etc. etc. Diplomacy is an entire profession based on building such models. Negotiation builds those models under pressure - but often has the ability to speak with the other side, as per Ray Dalio's suggestion, which I'm trying to find a method for.
Are there no methods of understanding and reverse engineering the reasoning, not the superficial aspects, of another person?
The niche criticism of Astrology that it undermines personal responsibility and potential by attributing actions to the stars. This came to mind because I was thinking about how reckless the left-brain/right-brain dichotomy is as a idea. While there is some degree of hemispherical lateralization, the popular idea that some people are intrinsically more "logical" and others more "intuitive" is not supported by observations of lateralization, but also inherently dangerous in the same way as Astrology in that it undermines the person's own ability to choose.
Amplifying that, and I don't know for sure, but I suspect that whether your interest is in the liberal arts or STEM, the very same qualities or abilities predispose you for excellence in both. It is dangerous them to tell people that they are intrinsically, as in the physical structure of their brain limits them to one or the other. After all, as Nabokov quipped to his students:
“A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.”
Why can't there be a poet-scientist[1]? Why can't there be a musician-astrophysicist[2]? A painter-mathematician[3]?
Well there ought be, there can be, and there are.
- ^
Vladimir Nabokov's influence on Russian and English literature and language is assured. Many people also know of the novelist's lifelong passion for butterflies. But his notable contributions to the science of lepidopterology and to general biology are only beginning to be widely known.
https://www.nature.com/articles/531304a - ^
When Queen began to have international success in 1974, [Brian May] abandoned his doctoral studies, but nonetheless co-authored two peer-reviewed research papers,which were based on his observations at the Teide Observatory in Tenerife.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May#Scientific_career - ^
a book on the geometry of polyhedra written in the 1480s or early 1490s by Italian painter and mathematician Piero della Francesca.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_quinque_corporibus_regularibus
Yes they do have a separate names, "the singularity" this post here pins a lot of faith in "after the singularity" a lot of utopic things being possible that seems to be what you're confusing with alignment - the assumption here is there will be a point where AIs are so "intelligent" that they are capable of remarkable things (and in that post it is hoped, these utopic things as a result of that wild increase in intelligence). While here "alignment" more generally to making a system (including but not limited to an AI) fine-tuned to achieve some kind of goal.
Let's start with the simplest kind of system for which it makes sense to talk about "alignment" at all: a system which has been optimized for something, or is at least well compressed by modeling it as having been optimized.
Later on he repeats
The simplest pattern for which “alignment” makes sense at all is a chunk of the environment which looks like it’s been optimized for something. In that case, we can ask whether the goal-it-looks-like-the-chunk-has-been-optimized-for is “aligned” with what we want, versus orthogonal or opposed.
The "problem" is that "what we want" bit which is discussed at length
I completely agree and share your skepticism for NLP modelling, it's a great example of expecting the tail to wag the dog, but not sure that it offers any insights into how actually going about using Ray Dalio's advise of reverse engineering the reasoning of someone without having access to them narrating how they made decisions. Unless your conclusion is "It's hopeless"
Not being an AI researcher, what do we mean when we speak about AGI - will an AGI be able to do all the things a competent adult does? (If, we imagine, we gave it some robotic limbs and means of locomotion and it had corollaries of the 5 senses).
In the Western World for example, most humans can make detailed transport plans that may include ensuring there is enough petrol in their car, so that they can go to a certain store to purchase ingredients which they will later on use a recipe to make a meal of: perhaps in service of a larger goal like ingratiating themselves to a lover or investor.
In Non-Developed countries there is a stunning ingenuity, for example, how in the Sahel mechanics will get old Toyotas working again.
While arguably lots of these sub-tasks are Sphexish, this being just one humdrum examples of the wide variety of skills that the average human adult has mastered, others include writing in longhand, mastering various videogames, the muscle coordination and strategic thinking to play any number of sports or games or performing arts which require coordination between intent and physicality (guitar playing, Soccer, being a steadicam operator).
Of course, once you start getting into coordination of body and mind you get into cognitive cognition and discussions about what is really "intelligence" and whether that is representational, or whether utilizing anti-representational means of cognition can also be intelligence? But that's tangential.
Right now ChatGPT (and Claude, and Llama etc. ) do very well for only having a highly verbocentric means of representing the world. However details of implementation are often highly wanting - they continue to speak in broad, abstract brushstrokes if I ask "How do I..."
For example, I asked Claude what I should be feeling from my partner when dancing the tango (if I'm 'leading' - even though it is the traditionally the woman who actually controls the flow of the dance - the lead or man must interpret the woman's next moves correctly): "Notice the level of tension and responsiveness in your partner's muscles, which can indicate their next move" no mention of what that feels like, what muscles, or where i should be feeling it (my hands? should I feel my weight being 'psuhed')... the only specific cue it offered was:
"Pay attention to small movements, head tilts, or changes in your partner's energy that signal their intention."
Head tilts!
Now I realize, this is partly reflective of the information bottleneck of tactic-to-explicit: people have trouble writing about this knowledge, and a LLM can only be trained on what is written. But the point remains: execution counts!
I'm not sure what I'm meant to be convinced by in that Wikipedia article - can you quote the specific passage?
I don't understand how that confirms you and I are experiencing the same thing we call orange. To put it another way, imagine a common device in Comedy of Errors: we are in a three-way conversation, and our mutual interlocutor mentions "Bob" and we both nod knowingly. However this doesn't mean that we are imagining "Bob" refers to the same person, I could be thinking of animator Bob Clampett, you could be thinking of animator Bob Mckimson.
Our mutual interlocutor could say "Bob has a distinctive style" - now, assume there is nothing wrong with our hearing. We are getting the same sentence with the same syntax. Yet my mental representation of Bob and the visual style will be different to yours. In the same way that we could be shown the same calibrated computer screen which displays the same image of an orange, of a banana, we may appear to say "yep that orange is orange" "yep, that banana is a pale yellow" - but how do you know that my mental representation of orange isn't your purple. When ever I say "purple" I could be mentally experiencing your orange, in the same way that when I heard "Bob" I'm making reference to Clampett not Mckimson?
I'll certainly change the analogy if you can explain to me what I'm missing... but I just don't understand.
But that surely just describes the retina and the way light passes through the lens (which we can measure or at least make informed guesses based on the substances and reflectance/absorbtion involved)? How do you KNOW that my hue isn't rotated completely differently since you can't measure it - my experience of it? The wavelengths don't mean a thing.
No one has refuted it, ever, in my books
Nor can you refute that my qualia experience of green is what you call red, but because every time I see (and subsequently refer to) my red is the same time you see your red, there is no incongruity to suggest any different. However I think entertaining such a theory would be a waste of time.
I see the simulation hypothesis as suffering from the same flaws as the Young Earth Theory: both are incompatible with Occums Razor, or to put it another way, adds unnecessary complexity to a theory of metaphysics without offering additional accuracy or better predicting power. The Young Earth Hypothesis says that fossils and geological phenomena only appear to be older than 6,000 years, but they were intentionally created that way (by the great Simulator in the sky?). This means it also fails to meet the important criteria of modern science: it can't be falsified.
To be able to falsify something means that a theory is valuable, because if it fails, then you've identified a gap between your map of something and the territory that you can correct. A theory becomes even more valuable if it predicts some counter-intuition or result which hereto none of our models or theories predict, yet repeated tests do not falsify it.
Simulation Hypothesis intrinsically means you cannot identify the gap between your map and the territory, since the territory is just another representation. Nor does it explicitly and specifically identify things which we would expect to be true but aren't: again, because everything would continue to appear as it always has been. So it offers not value there.
Simulation Hypothesis isn't taken seriously not because it can't be true - so when you see green I see red - but that you can predict no difference in my or your behavior from knowing this. So what?
Stanley Kubrick is perhaps one of the most influential Sci-Fi filmmakers of the 20th century, therefore I believe he has some authority on this matter. What may answer the need for dystopia can be extend to war and crime films:
...one of the attractions of a war or crime story is that it provides an almost unique opportunity to contrast an individual of our contemporary society with a solid framework of accepted value, which the audience becomes fully aware of, and which can be used as a counterpoint to a human, individual, emotional situation. Further, war acts as a kind of hothouse for forced, quick breeding of attitudes and feelings. Attitudes crystallize and come out into the open. Conflict is natural, when it would in a less critical situation have to be introduced almost as a contrivance, and would thus appear forced, or - even worse - false. Eisenstein, in his theoretical writings about dramatic structure, was often guilty of oversimplification. The black and white contrasts of Alexander Nevsky do not fit all drama. But war does permit this basic kind of contrast - and spectacle. And within these contrasts you can begin to apply some of the possibilities of film - of the sort explored by Eisenstein."
https://www.archiviokubrick.it/english/words/interviews/1959independence.html
More specifically he explains the way he believes Speculative Fictional genres, such as fantasy and Sci-Fi can be effective towards expressing certain ideas which realist drama - the kinds you're advocating albeit within a Sci-Fi environment - may not be. Interviews taken from these transcripts: http://visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/interview.html
Michel Ciment: You are a person who uses his rationality, who enjoys understanding things, but in2001: A Space Odyssey and The Shining you demonstrate the limits of intellectual knowledge. Is this an acknowledgement of what William James called the unexplained residues of human experience?
Stanley Kubrick: Obviously, science-fiction and the supernatural bring you very quickly to the limits of knowledge and rational explanation. But from a dramatic point of view, you must ask yourself: 'If all of this were unquestionably true, how would it really happen?' You can't go much further than that. I like the regions of fantasy where reason is used primarily to undermine incredulity. Reason can take you to the border of these areas, but from there on you can be guided only by your imagination. I think we strain at the limits of reason and enjoy the temporary sense of freedom which we gain by such exercises of our imagination.
Michel Ciment: Don't you think that today it is in this sort of popular literature that you find strong archetypes, symbolic images which have vanished somehow from the more highbrow literary works?
Stanley Kubrick: Yes, I do, and I think that it's part of their often phenomenal success. There is no doubt that a good story has always mattered, and the great novelists have generally built their work around strong plots. But I've never been able to decide whether the plot is just a way of keeping people's attention while you do everything else, or whether the plot is really more important than anything else, perhaps communicating with us on an unconscious level which affects us in the way that myths once did. I think, in some ways, the conventions of realistic fiction and drama may impose serious limitations on a story. For one thing, if you play by the rules and respect the preparation and pace required to establish realism, it takes a lot longer to make a point than it does, say, in fantasy. At the same time, it is possible that this very work that contributes to a story's realism may weaken its grip on the unconscious. Realism is probably the best way to dramatize argument and ideas. Fantasy may deal best with themes which lie primarily in the unconscious. I think the unconscious appeal of a ghost story, for instance, lies in its promise of immortality. If you can be frightened by a ghost story, then you must accept the possibility that supernatural beings exist. If they do, then there is more than just oblivion waiting beyond the grave.
And to finish, I can't the source at the moment (I think it was in "A Life in Pictures"), but it is like Jack Nicholson said of Kubrick "then someone like Stanley comes along and asks: it's realistic, but is it interesting?".
A dystopia provides a background, a framework that allows a highly catalytic environment for dramatizing ideas that cannot be done by means of regular small stakes interpersonal conflict. Even Plato knew this with regards to pedagogy: hence why his Socrates suggested like the way you use big handwriting to make a manuscript more visible, he expanded the vision of justice in one single person to the entire polis.