intimidated

> Safety teams within the company pushed to slow things down. These teams worked to refine ChatGPT to refuse certain types of abusive requests and to respond to other queries with more appropriate answers.

I wonder what this struggle means for the future of ChatGPT censorship/safety.

> Going further, the researchers removed visual neurons from the box jellyfish and studied them in a dish. The cells were shown striped images while receiving a small electrical pulse to represent collision. Within about five minutes, the cells started sending the signal that would cause a whole box jellyfish to turn around.

> “It’s amazing to see how fast they learn,” said Jan Bielecki a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Physiology at Kiel University in Germany, also an author of the paper.

Could someone please explain this bombshell?

Did visual neurons learn all by themselves in a dish? And how did the researchers know that the visual neurons would interpret "a small electrical pulse" as a collision? (I'm surprised visual neurons "know" what a collision is.)

This sounds strategically sound until the realization that you've given very compelling justification—legal or not, it doesn't really matter—for others to now commit preemptive violence against people like you.

Great, insightful reply. Thank you.

> But free loader molecules that could infiltrate a metabolism and contribute nothing, but use it only for their own self-replication would also thrive.

Could you please explain the "mechanical" distinction between molecules that contribute to self-replication and molecules that contribute nothing during replication?

What does it mean to contribute?

You might not agree with the spirit of this an endeavor, but I have a yes/no question for you:

If you were to wear your most clever, most creative writing cap, could you make a convincing case entirely contrary to your beliefs? I'm not asking whether you could write a convincing case against racial affirmative action, because I know you could handle that just fine.

Instead, could write a convincing case that the group you're talking about owes some collective debt to the rest of society, rather than the other way around?

> One, when non-white, non-men raised the alarm about LLMs previously, they got much less media coverage than Hinton, et al, are getting.

Mainstream (e,g. CNN, BBC) and mainstream-adjacent (e.g. Vice, Vox) journalists have spent years pushing the "AI will harm POC" framing. AI companies are endlessly required to address this specific topic—both in their products and in their interaction with journalists alike.

Dr. Hinton is getting a lot of coverage right now, but this is the exception, not the rule.

I am extremely not Mormon, but we don't have any reason to believe Mormons are more likely to be sexual abusers than Jews, Muslims, or Hindus.

It's probably more politically safe to claim Mormons are more likely to be sexual abusers, but I wouldn't feel any less safe leaving my children with a Mormon family than with a Jewish family, a Muslim family, or a Hindu family.

> "Deterrence" has generally been found to be a pretty well-rooted myth.

I'm interested in learning more. Do you have some good resources you could point me to?

Countless districts have a de-facto ban on fascist books—and all of their books about racial politics likely lean the same ideological direction.

I don't see how this is any different.

> But a computer owner should be able to decide what goes on on their computer (even google or Facebook).

How do you feel about the Civil Rights Act?

That's a keen insight about books. Thank you.

I could very well be wrong, but I don't think this is quite accurate:

> Black people were locked into specific neighborhoods, and were generally not allowed to own their homes and instead locked into rapacious "contracts" for their houses

Redlining meant certain areas were deemed hazardous to investment. Maybe the "deeming" was accurate; maybe it wasn't. It certainly made loans more difficult for anyone in a redlined area (of any race).

But it didn't mean Black people weren't allowed to own homes. Many millions did and do.

My parents moved to the United States nearly penniless from India. I am very privileged thanks to them; they were not privileged, especially not when they first arrived. All of the arguments about generational wealth are compelling at first exposure, but they ignore the control group: Poor as dirt, strange-smelling, English-deprived immigrants like my parents.

I don't think it's healthy to blame white people for depriving an area of themselves. Proximity to white people isn't a human right.

As you were writing your reply, I edited my post.

Media in India have indeed taken a right turn the past decade, veering steadily away from their western counterparts.

I initially included the word "media" because, just like most places on Earth, journalists in India have far more say than normal people, and RSS's loudest opposition comes from media types.

Sridhar Vembu is an incredibly thoughtful man.

His support of RSS should give you pause—either Sridhar Vembu is a monster, or RSS isn't as monstrous as its opposition insists.

Which is more likely:

1. These censorship policies will be used to save the world from 99% certain destruction at the hands of a maniac.

2. These censorship policies will be used to crush evidence that [GROUP X] is overrepresented in [FAVORABLE SITUATION Y] due to [FAVORABLE TRAIT Z], thus legitimizing policies unjustly punishing [GROUP X].

Even if you think this censorship is righteous and good, how will you deal with folks no longer trusting the scientific basis of what you claim? Why should anyone believe there is no genetic difference between [GROUPS D and E] when you're confessing that you'd never admit it?