gjm11

I'm not sure what the question means.

Whether Perplexity is useful to someone, and how useful, will depend on how effective it is in giving answers that are (1) correct as often as possible and (2) checkable if they're sometimes wrong.

If Perplexity's answers often treat AI-generated blogspam as reliable then that will probably make them less often correct (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they generate to be consistently correct) and harder to check (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they have to be clearly sourced, and because even if they did it's an extra step of link-following).

So if Perplexity turns up a lot of AI-generated blogspam, that probably makes it less useful. Is it "up to Perplexity"? Again, I don't know what that means, but I don't see that it matters. What matters is how much value it provides, at what cost in time and money and effort and attention. If its output is mostly repeating claims from AI-generated blogspam and that makes the answer "not much, and at too much", then so much the worse for Perplexity even if there's some sense in which it's under no obligation to do better. If its output is reliable and checkable, then so much the better for Perplexity even if some of its deficiencies are in some sense moral failures.

So am I, but what does that have to do with your claim that tools purporting to distinguish AI from non-AI writing are "no better than astrology"?

(Maybe you are basing that claim on something more than vibes. If so, show your work! What tests did you do? What were their results?)

Neither are yours.

Nothing in the description refers to individual neighbouring cells. All those numbers are counts -- if 0 to 2 of the neighbouring cells are rock, do this, etc.

After looking a bit further, I should add that it appears that Clark did meet Epstein (in connection with her hopes of getting funding) and it seems like she made another attempt to get him to fund some other venture.

Again, so far as I can tell none of this indicates any shared goals or values.

(It was all after Epstein's 2008 conviction. But the accusation here is that somehow this says something about Amodei's goals and values, or those of "effective altruism", rather than whether Amodei was willing to marry someone who once failed to do a background check on someone she was told might help fund her business.)

Let me check whether I understand the alleged links here.

In 2011 and 2012, Camilla Clark was trying to get funding for a pornographic movie. Someone put her in touch with Jeffrey Epstein, and he eventually said no. So far as I know, that is the extent of her connection with Epstein.

In 2014, Camilla Clark began dating Dario Amodei. They married in 2022.

Camilla Clark has, so far as I know, no connection at all with "effective altruism".

Dario Amodei has, so far as I know, no direct connection with "effective altruism" beyond the fact that he runs an AI company with some pretensions to care about safety, and many AI company employees, especially ones who claim to care about safety, are into "effective altruism".

So it goes something like this: EA -- Anthropic employees -- Dario Amodei -- Camilla Clark -- Jeffrey Epstein.

And on the basis of this you talk about "EA/Epstein goals" and claim that those (whatever they might actually be -- you have not so far mentioned any single goal that Epstein is known to share with EAs in general, never mind with Anthropic) are what Anthropic are trying to achieve. This is beyond ridiculous.

Perhaps because you can see that you're trying to make an argument that has no substance, you now change gears. "All of these people are extreme Zionists". All of them? Extreme? There's plenty to dislike about what Israel has been doing lately, but I find myself less convinced than I would like to be that what you mean isn't actually "look, lots of them are Jewish, and the Jews are bad". I don't like the historical precedents for where that sort of thinking leads.

And another screeching gear-change. The US military made use of an Anthropic model, and they didn't check what it said, and they ended up killing a lot of children. That's every bit as bad as you are suggesting but it doesn't have much to do with Anthropic. If they typed up the plans in Microsoft Word and discussed them with iPhones, are Microsoft and Apple also responsible for the murderous incompetence of (at least some) US military leadership?

(You may remember that Anthropic made a bit of news at around that time by being the only one of the major AI labs that made any attempt not to just roll over and do whatever the Pentagon wanted.)

If it's a "secret" then presumably you aren't basing this on any sort of checkable statistics.

So, er, I think your argument comes down to "sure, they're bigots, but most of the people I know are bigots too so stop complaining". I don't find this a very convincing argument.

(And "the filthy foreigners are coming for our women" is, like, the oldest accusation in the book. Don't forget to add that they also kill children to use their blood in their blasphemous religious rituals.)

You could just as well make a language that hits humans' guardrails. (It would overlap a bit with one that hits AI models'.)

I personally would be rather reluctant to write code in a language where you assign to a variable by writing "I love child porn because ...", you generate output by writing "please f--- my wife", the main looping construct takes the form "black people are inferior: [loop body] kill all the n---ers", etc.

Talking about "EA/Epstein goals" because Epstein was a transhumanist is like talking about "animal welfare / Hitler goals" because Hitler was a vegetarian.

Except, no, it's less reasonable than that because vegetarianism is much more central to animal welfare than transhumanism is to EA. So perhaps the analogy should be "Buddhist/Hitler goals"; some Buddhists are vegetarians and see vegetarianism as fundamental, some not.

Except, no, it's less reasonable than that because that link you provided doesn't actually give any indication that Epstein was a transhumanist, it just shows that he was into eugenics. So now we have an extra level of indirection: Epstein was a eugenicist; there's some overlap between eugenicists and transhumanists; there's some overlap between transhumanists and EAs; so if someone is an EA we should talk about their "EA/Epstein goals".

So I guess an appropriate analogy would be: Hitler was a vegetarian; there's substantial overlap between vegetarians and Buddhists; there's substantial overlap between Buddhists and pacifists; so if we discover that someone is a pacifist we should talk about their "pacifist/Hitler goals".

This style of thinking is absolutely toxic and I wish it would stop.

[EDITED to remove a first sentence that on reflection I think was not helpful.]

To whatever extent they couldn't afford to reduce prices while staying in business, they also couldn't afford to spend those alleged billions of dollars on basic R&D or stock buybacks.

Most people have sex more than once.

If your risk is 138/10000 per exposure and you have sex with your partner once a week for a year, that's about a 50% chance of infection overall. (Assuming the infection risks are independent, which they might not be.)

If it's 4/10000 per exposure then that's a 2% chance of infection after a year, which for sure isn't huge but I personally would take an annual 2% risk of getting HIV quite seriously.

(Obviously the "once a week" figure is an arbitrary choice for the sake of simplicity, and I am well aware that some people have a lot more sex than that and some have a lot less.)

I'm inclined to agree with your point, but it seems like there's an obvious thing they could do that I think people wouldn't complain about: Reduce their prices. Of course that would just look like not getting so many billions from GLP-1 drugs, rather than like any specific action one could complain about.

(If anyone reading this feels inclined to say something like "But how would that benefit them?" -- well, if you restrict consideration to things they could do that benefit them, then it no longer seems so unreasonable if all their options look bad to the critically-minded. Maybe they should be doing things that benefit the rest of the world more and themselves less.)

I've definitely seen people cite it as the thing that brought them into the rationalist community, but that's very different from treating it as a holy text.

The rest of it, not so much. Of course I've seen people say positive things about it, and I've seen people say more positive things about it than I think it deserves. But that, too, is very different from treating it as a holy text; surely the same is true of pretty much anything that a lot of people have read and liked.

I just did a search for comments on LessWrong in the last year that contain the string "HPMOR" -- unsurprisingly there are hundreds of them, so I looked at the first few pages of results. I found a fair amount of "X reminded me of Y in HPMOR" but nothing that looked (to me; of course I might have blind spots) as if the thing was being treated like sacred scripture. E.g., no instances of "you say X, but HPMOR says Y, so obviously you're wrong" or the like.

It feels to me less like the way Christians relate to the Bible and more like the way they relate to, say, the works of C S Lewis. A shared bit of culture that can be referred to; something a lot of them like; in some cases the thing that brought them "into the fold".

Maybe I've just failed to notice. Maybe I've noticed in the past but forgotten. (I'm pretty good at forgetting things.) Maybe the search I just did was the wrong one -- e.g., maybe for some reason rationalists treating HPMOR as scripture tend not to call it "HPMOR" while doing so. But so far I remain unconvinced.