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So from what I can see, this was just one trial per (prompt, model) pair? That seems pretty brittle; it might be more informative to look at the distribution of scores over eleven responses each or something, especially if we don't care so much about the average as whether a user can take the most helpful response after several queries.
far more than a highly effective not non-technical MBA would be
Is this meant to have only a single negation? I'm not sure how the sentence as written works in context.
Currently thinking about the idea that an idea or meme can be dangerous or poorly adapted to a population, despite being true and coherent in itself, due to interactions with the preexisting landscape resulting in it being metabolized into a different, wrong and/or toxic idea.
A principle in engineering that feels similar is “design for manufacturability”, where a design can be theoretically sound but not yield adequate quality when put through the limitations of the actual fabrication process, including the possibility of breaking the manufacturing equipment if you try. In this case, the equivalent of the fabrication process is the interaction inside people's minds, so “design for mentalization”, perhaps?
I think it would be helpful to have more context around the initial question, then. Do I infer correctly that your model of the phenomenon under discussion includes something like “there exists broad media consensus around which jobs literally can ever versus literally cannot ever be done (in a sufficiently competent and socially accepted way) by machines[1]”? Because I'm not sure such a consensus exists meaningfully enough to come to a boundary conclusions about, especially because to the extent that there is one, it seems like the recent spate of developments has blown up its stability for a while yet. It would've made more sense to ask what jobs machines can never do twenty years ago, in which fields like writing and visual art would have been popular examples—examples where we now have clear economic-displacement unrest.
As for the specific example, the “I'm terrified!” quote by Rabbi Joshua Franklin in this other CNN article about a GPT-generated sermon seems like it's in the general vein of “machines will steal jobs”. I'm not sure whether the intent of your question would consider this truer counterevidence to the first example (perhaps because it's an article published by a major mass media organization), cherrypicking (perhaps because it wasn't positioned in such a way as to get into the popular mindset the same way as some other jobs—I don't know whether this is true), or irrelevant (perhaps because you're pointing at something other than the trend of mass media articles that I associate with the “machines will steal jobs” meme).
There's also a separate underlying filter here regarding which jobs are salient in various popular consciousnesses in the first place, and I'm not sure how that's meant to interact with the question either…
I'm using “machines” rather than “robots” here primarily because I think pure software replacements are part of the same discursive trends and are substantially similar in the “human vs automation” tradeoff ways despite physical differences and related resource differences. ↩︎
There's some sources that put a substantial dent in your example. A recent one that's relevant to current AI trends is an experimental GPT-backed church service (article via Ars Technica) in Germany as part of a convention of Protestants, but some years ago there was already Mindar, a robot Buddhist preacher (article via CNN) in Japan, via a collaboration between the Kodaiji temple and a robotics professor at Osaka University.
Putting this in the OT because I'm risking asking something silly and basic here—after reading “Are Bayesian methods guaranteed to overfit?”, it feels like there should exist a Bayesian-update analogue to Kelly betting: underfitting enough to preserve some property that's important because the environment is unpredictable, catastrophic losses have distortionary effects, etc., where fitting to the observations ‘as well as possible’ is analogous to playing purely for expected value and thus turns out to be ‘wrong’ in the kind of iterated games we wind up in in reality. Dweomite's comment is part of what inspired this, because of the way it enumerated reasons having to do with limited training data.
Is this maybe an existing well-known concept that I missed the boat on, or something that's already known to be unworkable or undefinable for some reason? Or what?
That's what I did, though with do on 1 and mi′ on 0 (treating it as 10). I'm not sure what similarity metric is most relevant here, but in case of near-collisions, small additions of supporting rhythm or harmony could help nudge some sequences apart; swing time would give added contrast to even vs odd positions, for instance. Anyway, it sounds like this might not generalize well across people…
Aside: this is a time when I'm really appreciating two-axis voting. The vote-signal of “that's mildly interesting but really doesn't seem like it'd work” is very useful to see in a compact form, even though the written responses contain similar information in more detail.
I'm actually writing from experience there! That's how my memory still mainly encodes the few main home telephone numbers from when I was growing up (that is, I remember the imputed melodies before the digits in any other form), but it's possible they were unusually harmonious. I don't think it was suggested by family, just something I did spontaneously, and I am not at all sure how well this would carry more generally… it may also be relevant that I had a bunch of exposure to Chinese numeric musical notation.
Assigning digits to scale degrees feels like an interesting alternative here, especially for the musically-inclined.
I did in fact go back and listen to that part, but I interpreted that clarifying expansion as referring to the latter part of your quoted segment only, and the former part of your quoted segment to be separate—using cryptocurrency as a bridging topic to get to cryptography afterwards. Anyway, your interpretation is entirely reasonable as well, and you probably have a much better Eliezer-predictor than I do; it just seemed oddly unconservative to interpolate that much into a transcript proper as part of what was otherwise described as an error correction pass.
We have people in crypto[graphy] who are good at breaking things, and they're the reason why anything is not on fire. Some of them might go into breaking AI systems instead, because that's where you learn anything.
Was there out-of-band clarification that Eliezer meant “cryptography” here (at 01:28:41)? He verbalized “crypto”, and I interpreted it as “cryptocurrency” myself, partly to tie things in with both the overall context of the podcast and the hosts' earlier preemptively-retracted question which was more clearly about cryptocurrency. Certainly I would guess that the first statement there is informally true either way, and there's a lot of overlap. (I don't interpret the “cryptosystem” reference a few sentences later to bias it much, to be clear, due to that overlap.)
If you weren't already aware, look up “circuit bending” if you want to see a grungier DIY/hacker-style subcultural activity around producing interesting sounds via ad-hoc manipulations of electronics.
Tiberium at HN seems to think not. Copied and lightly reformatted, with the 4chan URLs linkified:
It seems that the leak originated from 4chan [1]. Two people in the same thread had access to the weights and verified that their hashes match [2][3] to make sure that the model isn't watermarked. However, the leaker made a mistake of adding the original download script which had his unique download URL to the torrent [4], so Meta can easily find them if they want to.
I haven't looked at the linked content myself yet.
Long before we get to the “LLMs are showing a number of abilities that we don't really understand the origins of” part (which I think is the most likely here), a number of basic patterns in chess show up in the transcript semi-directly depending on the tokenization. The full set of available board coordinates is also countable and on the small side. Enough games and it would be possible to observe that “. N?3” and “. N?5” can come in sequence but the second one has some prerequisites (I'm using the dot here to point out that there's adjacent text cues showing which moves are from which side), that if there's a “0-0” there isn't going to be a second one in the same position later, that the pawn moves “. ?2” and “. ?1” never show up… and so on. You could get a lot of the way toward inferring piece positions by recognizing the alternating move structure and then just taking the last seen coordinates for a piece type, and a layer of approximate-rule-based discrimination would get you a lot further than that.
I wonder whether, when approving applications for the full models for research, they watermark the provided data somehow to be able to detect leaks. Would that be doable by using the low-order bits of the weights or something, for instance?
I mean in the paragraph “If anyone wants to check it out, the app can be found at: https://cyborg-psychologiy.com”. I suppose I should have said “the main pseudo-link”. 🙂 What you gave in this last comment points to the blog post, not (directly) to the app.
The main link might be broken due to an extraneous ‘i’.
Without knowing what implications this might have, I notice that the first two points against “People might neglect real romance” are analogous to arguments against “People won't bother with work if they have a basic income” based on a “scarcity decompensation threshold” model: avoiding getting trapped in a really bad relationship/job by putting a floor on alternatives, and avoiding having so little confidence/money that you can't put in the activation energy to engage with the pool/market to begin with.
I wonder if anyone's tried targeting the avian furry market with these, since those would seem to be the most obvious class of “people who might not mind looking like a duck”. I can't seem to get a good grip on that intersection via search engines, mostly because I get a lot more results related to the non-protective masks more visibly associated with that group.
I don't know, do you think they're trying to say that if connected to one of the 250kW chargers they wouldn't be able to hit their maximum charging speed?[1]
Let's rephrase the question from the publisher side: when compiling a specification sheet, which sets of conditions do you choose to include? This is naturally a balance, where comprehensiveness and comprehensibility trade off, along with other factors like difficulty of testing. For a more extreme example, consider a world in which Level 3 chargers regularly showed up in capacities advertised to 1 kW granularity[2]: does the manufacturer take every data point between 1 kW and 350 kW and put in a massive table and graph (and hope that J. Random Carbuyer knows how to read it)?[3]
The Kia EV6 spec seems to base its independent-axis points on anchors of public perception of Level 3 chargers at the time of publication. 350 kW is the top capacity of Level 3 charger commonly available to my knowledge (this shows up in various factoids on the Web for instance), and 50 kW I think may be the lowest or among the lowest. The consumer is, yes, left to guess what the curve in between looks like, but those bounds are good enough to establish an intuition and make rough plans from. These also correspond loosely to two useful anchor edges of the situation envelope: “living in a proven electric-vehicle-friendly area where 350 kW chargers are likely to be built if they're not here already / wanting to know what kind of charge time I can expect if I make sure to go to the good station” and “living in an area where only weaker chargers are getting any traction thus far / wanting to know what kind of charge time I might have to budget for if I just choose any old place”.[4]
A specific motivational factor that I would imagine here is implied range of observation. This comes into play both on the factual level, with facts like “they've tested that this car works with a 350 kW charger at all”[5] and “they know that this charging time stays true for a 350 kW charger”, and on the social status and emotional comfort levels that derive from those, along the lines of “this manufacturer is up to date with the progress of charging technology and is likely to know what they're doing with the modern stuff”. The latter, while to some degree self-serving to the manufacturer, is not misleading provided that the design and/or test conditions did in fact exist.
Comparability is another motivational factor that I would anticipate here—that the consumer would want to see “how do cars X, Y, and Z behave under whichever charging conditions I'm currently holding in mind”[6]. However, there wasn't much evidence of this in the set of specs under discussion. Possibly this is because they come from different manufacturers, where I would expect comparability to be a stronger force for multiple specs from the same source.
So: there's reasons the 350 kW condition could be advantageous as a point to provide, and I see no pointed, strong reason that they would want to put a 250 kW row in as well. But that doesn't mean they can't, either! Alternate approaches do occur in your list of examples. Let's look at two of them:
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The VW ID.3 brochure is more technical-looking overall than the Kia spec sheet, and provides its DC3 (which I believe is the same as “Level 3 fast DC charging”) charge time based on slightly different charger capacities for the different battery options. I don't know why exactly, and I think this makes it require more mental steps to compare them, but assuming the reader will infer an inequality is a valid alternative and seems closer to what you're expecting.
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The Hyundai IONIQ page specifies the inequality explicitly: “>250kW”. Quibbles over the use of > vs ≥ aside, this again seems closer to what you're imagining above as far as picking a tier beyond which further benefit cuts out as the reference point to provide.
From a more speculative plausibility-modeling perspective, I see that you calculate (and I also calculate) an 86% ratio between the P3 peak measurement and the charger advertised capacity condition for both of those cars. Let's suppose that the charging capacity conditions in the spec sheet were in fact based on an anticipated benefit ceiling per above. I didn't see in the P3 report where exactly they were measuring the power usage, but that ratio could easily be explained by transmission losses between two different measuring points, safety headroom, or similar natural discrepancies. If we assume that Hyundai is taking into account a 50 kW granularity of advertisement of charger capacity, then for their Kona model, the ceiling to that granularity of 75 kW / 0.86 also matches the 100 kW figure in the consumer spec sheet—harmlessly leaving extra room in the same way as with the 350 kW anchor in the Kia spec, since maybe a 90 kW charger would be just as fast.
But that wouldn't explain the three cars where (after revision) the figures match better, so let's look at those one by one:
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The Fiat 500e… well, I actually can't seem to get at the spec page anymore after some kind of misgesture that causes it to redirect to the Fiat USA homepage, which doesn't list a 500e. I don't have time to figure out how to untangle right now, so that one's inconclusive for now.
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The Mini Cooper SE brochure presents the figure you cite in a different place from the Kia and Hyundai spec sheets. Taking the yellow horizontal bars as the if-then separator, the preconditions are just Level 1/2/3, and the “up to 50 kW” text is below the “Level 3” bar, in the corresponding result cell. Note specifically that this doesn't say “if you connect it to a charger that advertises a maximum of 50 kW, the peak power drawn will be 50 kW”! If that turned out to be false, you could even make a reasonable case that this statement were more misleading from a consumer perspective (with some wishy-washiness around whether the consumer should be assumed to be aware of natural discrepancies per above). I didn't see a part of the P3 report that described attempting those conditions, so I don't know how the Mini Cooper would physically perform there.
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The Tesla Model 3 page does something similar and is subject to a further vertical integration constraint: the heading of that cell doesn't say “Level 3” but rather says “Supercharging Max”, where I believe Supercharging refers specifically to Tesla's charging methods and facilities. Presenting a front in which the consumer has less discrepant information to reconcile from different suppliers is one of the benefits of vertical integration, and it seems reasonable that Tesla would take advantage of that.
From a broader communications-analysis perspective, I think the intended audience of the P3 report is different. If I look at the front page of the P3 website, it does not seem designed to provide a Consumer-Reports-like publication to me, and their “About” page implies a B2B/intra-industry context with “We advise our clients strategically in the areas of technology strategy, business process optimization and organizational development.”. So aside from the promise vs observation and independent vs dependent axis confusions, there's a big difference in communication context there.
I actually think it is plausible that it would not! I don't know the details of how e.g. voltage negotiation, reference points of power measurement, or safety handling around transients work for high-capacity electric vehicle charging, but in general I would expect the effective tier requirement for the charger to be higher than the power delivered to the battery, with the uncertainty mostly revolving around how much higher. But I don't think this is necessary for my argument that their spec sheet is constructed reasonably; I think my primary position holds even if we assume that the same maximum charging speed would be reliably attained by a Kia EV6 connected to a 250 kW charger. ↩︎
A rough glance around the Web suggests that something like 50 kW granularity of ‘tiers’ of Level 3 charger is common. ↩︎
Longer datasheets with more specialized and technical audiences do do this sort of thing, though! Electrical components with current versus voltage curves, or power consumption versus clock speed, for instance. ↩︎
Level 2 and Level 1 charging times are sufficiently far off, and their environmental prerequisites sufficiently far off as well, that they correspond to distinct behavior types and distinct rough planning regimes (at work / at home overnight rather than gas-station-style top-ups). This is presumably the motivation behind the level categorization in the first place. ↩︎
You could consider this redundant with other marketing messages surrounding interchangeability of charging stations, but for anecdote, I personally observed a relative several years ago fretting over whether a higher-capacity USB flash storage device might require more experience or finesse to operate properly than a lower-capacity one, and I would be unsurprised if analogous forces came into play for a large chunk of the target market of household electric vehicles. (The route is even more plausible in this case, if I'm allowed to speculate; what if, say, a 350 kW charger puts out a within-spec but sharper voltage rise time than the previously tested 250 kW one, and this pushes the envelope of part of the charging circuit in an unanticipated way?) ↩︎
From a marketing-ease standpoint, the conditions the consumer anchors on could well be based on whichever sheet came up first, and the reading-mechanical strictness could even get to the point of “scan the sheet for a specific number and give up or feel frustrated if it's not there”, though neither of these are necessary. ↩︎
On the Kia EV6 page you link first, I think the position of the 350 kW value you quoted being part of the initial conditions rather than an expected draw is pretty clear. The interpretation I'm pointing at is “if connected to a charger with a capacity of 350 kW, the expected time is approximately 18 minutes”—the 350 kW is on the LHS of the conditional as signaled by its position in the text. By comparison to nearby text, the entry immediately above the one you quoted states 73 minutes under the condition of being connected to a Level 3 charger (the same fast-DC type) with a lower capacity tier of 50 kW, and other entries above that one display corresponding “if provided with” → “duration will be” pairs for weaker and easier-to-install charging pathways, down to household AC taking the longest duration. This would make no sense under an interpretation of each of the wattage values all reflecting the battery's internal acceptance rate. Note that the text as you quoted it is not visible to me as a straight-running block of plain text in the page linked; instead, “DC Fast Charge Time (10-80% @ 350 kW via Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment) Level 3 Charger” is the opening line of an expandable box whose body content is “Approx. 18 min.”, and that interaction/presentation provides more clarity to the conditional structure.
The Tesla Model 3 page states “max” for its 250 kW figure, whereas the P3 page is clear that the car “only achieves an average charging power of 146 kW” (emphasis mine), and the associated graph does show 250 kW being drawn at the initial charge state of 10%, then decreasing as the battery charge increases.
The Hyundai Kona and IONIQ pages are similar to the Kia EV6 page: the kilowatts are in the if-part of the conditional, and the measurements listed in the body cells to be relied on as outputs are the minutes.
The VW ID.3 brochure I also read as having the kilowatts in the if-part, though the text is laid out less clearly. Also, I only see your 125 kW figure mentioned in the context of the 77 kWh battery option whereas the P3 report specifies that they used one of the 58 kWh battery options.
In general, what information flow will the median consumer use? Not “do a bunch of division that's going to be wrong because of other variability in how batteries work”. “Show me how long it takes with this type of charger” is the information that's closest to their planning needs. The Tesla page is unusual here compared to the others, but “will a higher-capacity charging feed than X reduce my charging time” is a plausible second most relevant question and is answered better by the max than by the average (if you provide less than a 250 kW capacity, some part of the charge curve will take extended time by comparison to the nominal one).
“ForgeModLoader” has an interestingly concrete plausible referent in the loader component of the modding framework Forge for Minecraft. I believe in at least some versions its logfiles are named beginning with that string exactly, but I'm not sure where else that appears exactly (it's often abbreviated to “FML” instead). “FactoryReloaded” also appears prominently in the whitespace-squashed name (repository and JAR file names in particular) of the mod “MineFactory Reloaded” which is a Forge mod. I wonder if file lists or log files were involved in swinging the distribution of those?
Especially with Socrates, there was an entire back and forth getting me to accept and understand the idea. It wasn't just a wise sentence, there was a full conversation.
If that seems like a significant distinguisher to you, it might be of more interest if you were to demonstrate it in that light—ideally with a full transcript, though of course I understand that that may be more troubling to share.
So you mean different modes of subjective experience? That's quite relevant in terms of how to manage such things from the inside, yes. But what I meant by “predict” above was as applied to the entire system—and I model “intuitive feeling of normal” as largely prediction-based as well, which is part of what I was getting at. People who are raised with different environmental examples of “what normal people do” wind up with different such intuitions. I'm not quite sure where this is going, admittedly.
This was and is already true to a lesser degree with manipulative digital socialization. The less of your agency you surrender to network X, the more your friends who have given their habits to network X will be able to work at higher speed and capacity with each other and won't bother with you. But X is often controlled by a powerful and misaligned entity.
And of course these two things may have quite a lot of synergy with each other.
I don't think I understand what you mean. To the extent that I might understand it I tentatively think I don't agree, but would you find it useful to describe the distinction in more detail, perhaps with examples?
As an autistic person, I've always kinda felt like I was making my way through life by predicting how a normal person would act.
I would tend to say that ‘normal’ people also make their way through life by predicting how normal people would act, trained by having observed a lot of them. That's what (especially childhood) socialization is. Of course, a neurotypical brain may be differently optimized for how this information is processed than other types of brains, and may come with different ‘hooks’ that mesh with the experience in specific ways; the binding between ‘preprogrammed’ instinct and social conditioning is poorly understood but clearly exists in a broad sense and is highly relevant to psychological development.
Separately, though:
And I seriously had to stop and think about all 3 of these responses for hours. It is wild how profound these AI manage to be, just from reading my message.
Beware how easy it is to sound Deep and Wise! This is especially relevant in this context since the tendency to conflate social context or framing with the inner content of a message is one of the main routes to crowbarring minds open. These are similar to Daniel Dennett's “deepities”. They are more like mirrors than like paintings, if that makes any sense—and most people when confronted with the Voice of Authority have an instinct to bow before the mirror. (I know I have that instinct!) But also, I am not an LLM (that I am aware of) and I would guess that I can come up with a nearly unlimited amount of these for any situation that are ultimately no more useful than as content-free probes. (In fact I suspect I have been partially trained to do so by social cues around ‘intelligence’, to such an extent that I actively suppress it at times.)
Tangent: “Creative Commons” in that context refers to a whole set of possible licenses, which have substantial differences in what they permit. (Which I interpret as related to different authors having substantially different intuitions of what they consider acceptable informal free-use practice!) In this context, it sounds like what you're after is closer to informal permission (either for the specific use or broadly) or a full public domain declaration (sometimes formalized as CC-0), but if you do want to use a CC license then you should pick a specific one that you consider appropriate. Using the term “Creative Commons” in a vague way dilutes an important coordination symbol into the general haze of “do what you want so long as you can read the room”, and I would like to push back against that.
I read this as an experimental proposal for improvement, not an actively confirmed request for change, FWIW.
Do I understand correctly from your third paragraph that this is based on existing concrete observations of people getting confused by making an inference from the description of something as an infohazard to a connected truth value not intended by the producer of the description? Would it be reasonable to ask in what contexts you've seen this, how common it seems to be, or what follow-on consequences were observed?
I agree that it's not that long phonetically, but it's longer in tokens, and I think anything with a word boundary that leads into a phrase may get cut at that boundary in practice and leave us back where we started—put from the other side, the point of having a new wording is to create and encourage the bundling effect. More specifically:
- It seems like the most salient reader-perspective difference between “infohazard” and the concept being proposed is “don't make the passive inference that we are in the world where this is an active hazard”, and blocking a passive inference wants to be early in word order (in English).
- Many statements can be reasonably discussed as their negations. Further, many infohazardous ideas center around a concept or construction moreso than a statement: an idea that could be applied to a process to make it more dangerous, say, or a previously hidden phenomenon that will destabilize harmfully if people take actions based on knowledge of it. “if true” wants a more precise referent as worded, whereas “conditional” or equivalent is robust to all this by both allowing and forcing reconstruction of the polarity, which I think is usually going to be unambiguous given the specific information. (Though I now notice many cases are separately fixable by replacing “true” with the slightly more general “correct”.)
- If you want to be more specific, you can add words to the beginning: “truth-conditional” or “falsity-conditional”. Those seem likely to erode to the nonspecific form before eroding back to “infohazard” bare.
This is independent of whether it's worth smithing the concept boundary more first. It's possible for instance that just treating “infohazard” as referring to the broader set is better and leaving “true infohazard” or “verified infohazard” as the opposite subset is better, especially since when discussing infohazards specifically, having the easiest means of reference reveal less about the thing itself is good by default. However, that may not be feasible if people are indeed already inferring truth-value from hazard-description—which is a good question for another comment, come to think of it.
“fork hazard” is very easy to confuse with other types of hazards and would occupy a lot of potential-word space for its relative utility. May I suggest something like “conditional infohazard”, elliptical form “condinfohazard”?
More specifically:
Intuitively, it feels like p-common knowledge might inherently dilute each level more and more, in comparison to full common knowledge, since we stack p-belief operators.
Rounding upward when multiplying allows 1−ε to be a fixed point.
If you feel comfortable answering: what type of career are you able to sustain? When did you begin this career? If you did not already have your current set of occupational/professional contacts, how plausible would you guess it would be to come by them in the present day within your current lifestyle?
It strikes me that HPMOR's depiction of how the wizarding world handles dangerous secrets reflects an idea like this, in case that's useful as an attention seed.
I likely have little to say that's of use, but I'm curious what online tests these are now.
Little language note: “take the reins” (instead of “reigns”), please. (Interacts interestingly with “elephant in the brain” imagery, too.)
I agree that generic and vague ideas of status have an high ratio of abusability and passive distortion effects to insight—partly due to Strange Loop effects in which symbols around “status-seeking” themselves have status effects, as you describe in section III.
I also suspect that doing more of that sort of pontificating without more specifics can stop providing useful predictive power fast, but I wonder how much of this is due to the degree to which it's wound up “in the water supply” much like how SSC has described happening to CBT. The phenomena he describes as happening to CBT with lack of efficacy, and the way context of presentation matters, feel similar to the situation with status-based explanations in a way I don't have a good immediate description for.
(Update: after reading your contextualizing comment elsewhere I think this may be at a more skew angle to your post's intended topic than I originally thought, though I think the comparison I bring up may still be useful.)
Chapter 99 consists of the one sentence alone.
It reminds me of the way human children going through language learning will often latch onto words or phrases to repeat and play with before moving on. (Possibly annoying the adults around them in the process.)
That's part of the point, yes! My thought is that the parent question, while it's trying to focus on the amplification problem, kind of sweeps this ill-defined chunk under the rug in the process, but I'm not sure how well I can justify that. So I thought asking the subquestion explicitly might turn out to be useful. (I should probably include this as an edit or top-level comment after a bit more time has passed.)
This is part of what I was getting at in terms of meta-questions. There have been attempts to solve this, of which CEV seems to come up the most; I haven't personally found any of them strictly compelling. The parent question mixes the self-or-other-human thought experiment with the self-extrapolation part, but I wanted to see what the answers would be like without it—if it's testing for “does extrapolating yourself misalign you”, and if it means comparatively, then surely something like a control group should be in play, even if I can't sort one out in a more ordered fashion.
Mark “agree” on this comment if you would say that no, you do not consider yourself aligned with humanity.
Mark “agree” on this comment if you would say that yes, you consider yourself aligned with humanity.
To derive from something I said as a secondary part of another comment, possibly more clearly: I think that extracting “social approval that this post was a good idea and should be promoted” while conflating other forms of “agreement” is a better choice of dimensionality reduction than extracting “objective truth of the statements in this post” while conflating other forms of “approval”. Note that the former makes this change kind of a “reverse extraction” where the karma system was meant to be centered around that one element to begin with and now has some noise removed, while the other elements now have a place to be rather than vanishing. The last part of that may center some disapprovals of the new system, along the lines of “amplifying the rest of it into its own number (rather than leaving it as an ambiguous background presence) introduces more noise than is removed by keeping the social approval axis ‘clean’” (which I don't believe, but I can partly see why other people might believe).
Of Strange Loop relevance: I am treating most of the above beliefs of mine here as having primarily intersubjective truth value, which is similar in a lot of relevant ways to an objective truth value but only contextually interconvertible.
Strange-Loop relevant: this very comment above is one where I went back to “disagree” with myself after Duncan's reply. What I meant by that is that I originally thought the idea I was stating was likely to be both true and relevant, but now I have changed my mind and think it is not likely to be true, but I don't think that making the post in the first place was a bad idea with what I knew at the time (and thus I haven't downvoted myself on the other axis). However, I then remembered that retraction was also an option. I decided to use that too in this case, but I'm not sure that makes full sense here; there's something about the crossed-out text that gives me a different impression I'm not sure how to unpack right now. Feedback on whether that was a “correct” action or not is welcome.
Okay. I think I understand better now, and especially how this relates to the “trust” you mention elsewhere. In other words, something more like: you think/feel that not locking the definition down far enough will lead to lack of common knowledge on interpretation combined with a more pervasive social need to understand the interpretation to synchronize? Or something like: this will have the same flaws as karma, only people will delude themselves that it doesn't?
I think an expansion of that subproblem is that “agreement” is determined in more contexts and modalities depending on the context of the comment. Having only one axis for it means the context can be chosen implicitly, which (to my mind) sort of happens anyway. Modes of agreement include truth in the objective sense but also observational (we see the same thing, not quite the same as what model-belief that generates), emotional (we feel the same response), axiological (we think the same actions are good), and salience-based (we both think this model is relevant—this is the one of the cases where fuzziness versus the approval axis might come most into play). In my experience it seems reasonably clear for most comments which axis is “primary” (and I would just avoid indicating/interpreting on the “agreement” axis in case of ambiguity), but maybe that's an illusion? And separating all of those out would be a much more radical departure from a single-axis karma system, and impose even more complexity (and maybe rigidity?), but it might be worth considering what other ideas are around that.
More narrowly, I think having only the “objective truth” axis as the other axis might be good in some domains but fails badly in a more tangled conversation, and especially fails badly while partial models and observations are being thrown around, and that's an important part of group rationality in practice.