zoogeny

It would be nice if there was a listing of exactly what was included somewhere.

I am very ambivalent on this post. On one hand, I agree that excessive defensiveness stinks up a code base. On the other, I am a huge fan of local reasoning. Especially in the world of LLMs, I don't want to rely on my, my teammate's or my LLM agent's ability to know every single code path that results in `Allow` begin called.

Of course, this really comes down to the type system and the fact that non-nullable pointers are missing.

The one definite thing I would say, swallowing the error and just trying to do a reasonable thing is the most wrong thing here. At the least, there ought to be an ERROR log, even if one was trying to be defensive against outright panics.

On my first run I aced all of the sections until the last and then I got some really weird ones (e.g. zenzizenzizenzic). When I ran it again I got 95% new words and I fumbled a couple in the earlier rounds but did a bit better on the final section.

No cheating, only one or two guesses both rounds in the final section. No idea how the scoring works.

I ran through it twice, first time 91 second time 90, score: 69,500. Midwit confirmed.

I'm not following your logic here. Are you basing your predictions on the predictions of CEOs?

If I understand you correctly you are saying, CEOs predicted X and they were wrong. Now CEOs are predicting Y, and since they were wrong about X you predict they are also wrong about Y.

But Y's success seems independent of other people's ability to predict X?

I believe that the statement `a.x = 100;` is invalid since Record types are immutable.

That is, the situation you are afraid of should be impossible.

I think I mostly got this, but just to test it, it would be like in Typescript where I might say:

    type Foo = { x: number; }
    type Bar = { x: number; y: number }
    type FooBar = Foo | Bar;
    function baz(x: FooBar) {
      if ('y' in x) {
        // compiler now knows x is a Bar
      }
    }

In this case, the variable `x` has a property that is determined by the compiler based on control flow. i.e. it isn't explicitly carried by the type of `x`.

> More generally than just Java, nullability is often a property not of a type but of a variable.

This is a tangent, but I'm not sure I follow this. Can you give an example to make this clear?

> Unless you break the hypothetical by adding some alternative option C

That is kind of the point, isn't it? That my hypothetical scenario isn't realistic.

Let's imagine two worlds. A world where individuals refuse the false dichotomy and search for option C. And the world where someone accepts the false dichotomy and justifies evil.

I would argue that anyone that advocates for the justification of evil is actually using motivated reasoning. It breaks my original premise "Company A founds itself on doing 0 harm to Area X". Clearly they didn't and their embracing of evil shows that their principles mean nothing.

As a moral test, ask yourself: If I said "you must kill 99 people otherwise I will kill 100", would you feel morally justified to kill those 99 people? If your answer is "yes", then you are manipulable by those who want you to commit evil on their behalf. They don't have to commit any murders, just convince you that you have no other choice.

I think the big lesson of this that hasn't yet been learned: it literally doesn't matter how moral Amodei or anyone else is at Anthropic. When push comes to shove, the US government can step in and take it away.

They will either play ball with the US government on the US government's terms or they will be replaced or destroyed.

It is a misconception for them to believe they can dictate the terms of this technology.

Credit where credit is due I suppose. I'm still concerned over the direction this is going but at least Anthropic is listening.

I think we are very disconnected on the topic of conversation here. Somehow you've confabulated my point with an attack on the prisoners dilemma or races to the bottom?

The person I was responding to made the point that if you want to minimize evil in the world, sometimes you have to add evil to a lesser degree. As in my example, if I do 9 points of evil but prevent 10 points of evil then according to OP I've added value to the world in the form of the 1 point of evil I have reduced.

I responded that this can lead to an escalation trap. This assumes that we would all prefer less evil in the world, right? So how do we get out of the escalation trap? Repeated application of the maxim "always do a bit less evil than the worst possible competitor" will not lead to a minimization of evil overall, only a creeping increase in the total amount of evil in the world.

How are you equating this to me arguing against the existence of races to the bottom?

We have 10,000+ years of human civilization at this point. There must be some other active ethical maxim operating other than "choose the lesser of two evils" to explain why there is so much cooperation amongst humans. Evidence is not on the side of the preeminence of races to the bottom.

You should investigate the repeated prisoners dilemma.