lechatonnoir

I mean... you can't think of any ways that AI could actually generate new value? Or more abstractly, of a way that Jevons' paradox can't apply in the case of AI?

i think by your logic, they only thing that they do that is condescending is to say that an interview is not guaranteed.

people are mentioning that they do this for a reason, which explains away that behavior, so yeah, it kinda does change the fact of whether they are being condescending.

it's kind of hard to tell what your position is here. should people not ask chatbots how to scrape html? should people not purchase RAM to run chatbots locally?

i think in this thread the goalposts were slowly moved. people were initially talking about success being predicted by having the excess necessary to comfortably take many shots on goal. it seems like we've granted that this $250k shot was a one-time thing.

it is true but irrelevant to the original topic that this is more money than the global poor ever see, and that this is more money that most people get to have. i don't think anyone was arguing that this represents zero privilege

I'm pretty sure there's no reason that Anthropic has to do research on open models, it's just that they produced their result on open models so that you can reproduce their result on open models without having access to theirs.

Hmm, that might be possible, but that's essentially not what I assumed. At the very least, they operate on the same hardware, so Autopilot is in some sense "intentionally bad" as a whole.

Well, yeah, I think it's a pretty socially unaware thing to say about yourself out loud, so that's a pretty strong filter there.

It's rather different for a community to say that's a standard they aspire to, which is a lot less ridiculously grandstanding of a position IMO.

I suppose you're right about that, so I can't make the argument go through by saying "mathematics" vs "philosophy". Maybe what I should say instead is that as some dialectics advance/technologies develop, subfields of both such things sprout up and have a lot of low-hanging fruit to pick, and in these cases, the new work will be descended from but not too-essentially informed by the prior work.

Like mathematical logic (in the intersection of math and philosophy) didn't have that many true predecessors and was developed very far by maybe only 5-10 individuals cumulatively, or information theory was basically established by Claude Shannon and maybe two other guys, or various aspects of convex optimization or Fourier analysis were only developed in the 80s or so, it stands to reason that the AI-related applications of various aspects of philosophy are ripe to be developed now. (By contrast, we don't see, as much, people on LW trying to redo linear algebra from the ground up, nor more "mature" aspects of philosophy.)

(If anything, I think it's more feasible than ever before, also, for a bunch of relative amateurs to non-professionally make real intellectual contributions, like noticeably moreso than 100 or even 20 years ago. That's what increasing the baseline levels of education/wealth/exposure to information was intended to achieve, on some level, isn't it?)

Well, on a meta level, I think their community has decided that in general it's better to post (and subsequently be able to discuss) ideas that one is not yet very confident about, and ideally that's what the "epistemic status" markers are supposed to indicate to the reader.

They can't really be blamed for the fact that others go on to take the ideas more seriously than they intended.

(If anything, I think that at least in person, most rationalists are far less confident and far less persuasive than the typical person in proportion to the amount of knowledge/expertise/effort they have on a given topic, particularly in a professional setting, and they would all be well-served to do at least a normal human amount of "write and explain persuasively rather than as a mechanical report of the facts as you see them".)

(Also, with all communities there will be the more serious and dedicated core of the people, and then those who sort of cargo-cult or who defer much, or at least some, of their thinking to members with more status. This is sort of unavoidable on multiple levels-- for one, it's quite a reasonable thing to do with the amount of information out there, and for another, communities are always comprised of people with varying levels of seriousness, sincere people and grifters, careful thinkers and less careful thinkers, etc. (see mobs-geeks-sociopaths))

(Obviously even with these caveats there are exceptions to this statement, because society is complex and something about propaganda and consequentialism.)

Alternately, I wonder if you think there might be a better way of "writing unconfidently", like, other than not writing at all.

Aside from the remark given in the other reply to your comment, I wonder what the standard is: how quickly should a community appear to correct its incorrect beliefs for them to not count as sheep?

> They don't really ever show a sense of "hey, I've got a thought, maybe I haven't considered all angles to it, maybe I'm wrong - but here it is". The type of people that would be embarrassed to not have an opinion on a topic or say "I don't know"

edit: my apologies, that was someone else in the thread. I do feel like between the two comments though there is a "damned if you do, damned if you don't". (The original quote above I found absurd upon reading it.)