I started a substack about three weeks ago. I have a couple of questions about how to do it and since I was largely inspired by Scott's success, especially SSC, I thought people here might have useful advice.
One decision I made initially and have so far stuck to was to make it clear that I am not a one trick pony, always posting on the same general issues. Subjects of posts so far have included climate, Ukraine, a fantasy trilogy, moral philosophy, scientific consensus (quoting Scott), economics, religion, child rearing, implications of Catholic birth control restrictions, education, Trump, SSC, and history of the libertarian movement. Do people here think that approach is more likely to interest readers than if I had ten or fifteen posts on one topic, then a bunch more on another?
The other thing I have done is to put out a new post every day. That was possible because I have a large accumulation of unpublished chapter drafts intended for an eventual book or books and can produce posts based on them as well as ones based on new material. Part of the point of the substack, from my point of view, is to get comments on the ideas in the chapters before revising them for eventual publication. I can't keep up this rate forever but I can do it for a while. Should I? Do people here feel as though a post a day would be too many for the time and attention they have to read them? Would the substack be more readable if I spread it out more?
Discussion of conservative threats against trans people in the US.
This is deadly serious, but I want to pull on one thread. Supposing that testosterone is down, and that's why men have become less attached to masculine roles, and possibly less aggressive, Why push men to behave contrary to their emotional defaults. They're the people we've got, and maybe it makes sense to live with them as they are.
Do people bet on the prices at high ticket auctions? It seems like they could-- random but well-defined outcomes and excitement are involved.
For that matter, it would be possible to bet on when someone will win a big jackpot and possibly how many people split it, but that seems less interesting.
Big ticket auction which brought the subject to mind:
A wonderfully neutral description of who cares about the Hebrew Bible:
"Composed of 24 books divided into three parts—the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings—the Hebrew Bible makes up the foundation for Judaism as well as the other Abrahamic faiths: Christianity (in which these texts are referred to as the Old Testament, and are incorporated into the biblical canon by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant sects, among others); as well as Islam, which also holds the stories of the Hebrew Bible in special regard, with many of them included in the Qur’an and other significant works of Islamic literature."
I didn't realize codices (rather than scrolls) went back so far.
"The codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented. In Egypt, by the fifth century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples. By the sixth century, the scroll had almost vanished as a medium for literature.[10] "
Object level: in my opinion, one of the peak AI incidents of the ‘20s, up there with LeMoine and LaMDA. We’ll see if the press picks this one up.
Meta level: interesting to see how smart technical non-“alignment” folks are thinking about the problem space. I see a lot of folks falling for the fallacy that LLMs cannot do harm if they don’t have personhood/agency.
There is a general illiteracy about terminology that would be considered very basic on LessWrong like Tool vs Agent AI and what even is meant by “alignment”, which suggests a communication gap and corresponding opportunity for the AI safety movement.
At first I was reading and I thought they were going to critique NYT for not being centrist enough. After all, NYT is the most respected left leaning publication out there. But they are actually criticizing them for not being left leaning enough. This type of infighting destroys any opportunity for coalitions. The left seems to have become phenomenally good at fighting with itself.
So Scott recommended a Matt Yglesias post (1) and you can't comment there without paying so here I am.
Most of the article is pretty bad and I'm wondering why Scott recommended this and then you get to the section "the problem of the audience" and stuff gets good. Basically, Matt makes the argument that we don't actually pay for accuracy in news, we pay for entertainment. This gets really clear if you read, say, Bloomberg or the Financial Times where people have serious skin in the game and really will pay a premium for accurate information. And he points to FiveThirtyEight, which apparently is in financial trouble, and points out that it pretty consistently beats the prediction markets and if there's was no cap on prediction markets, you could make a lot of money. And, while I think he overstates it, I've absolutely wagered money on PredictIt based on 538 and you can make a little money.
This is all good. This is all true and bravo. I myself certainly, functionally, consume the majority of news as entertainment or a curiosity. But I think it's blinded a bit by Matt's place in the news ecosystem. And I don't mean, like, financially, I mean in terms of daily writing.
Because there are a few news stories where I, and virtually every other reader in the US, do deeply care about the truth. There aren't many, maybe one or two a decade, but when they hit they absolutely grab the world's attention. Think the Iraq War. Everyone followed that, everyone knew what was happening. Russiagate was another. It was always kind of wild but...those were wild times. To a lesser extent, Covid, although it's hard to critique journalists too much when so much of the medical and scientific community seemed confused. These were big, bombshell stories that demanded everyone's attention and people followed for years afterwards and...they certainly did not inspire more trust in the media.
So if I look at it from Matt's perspective, every day working on content, it's very easy to feel that the audience doesn't care that much about truth, because they don't. That's not what they or I pay for, just being honest. But, from the reader or consumer's perspective, the writer or agency's trustworthiness isn't established by the daily reporting that's done, it's established in those rare, rare big events where every American has to stop worrying about the bills, put the kids to bed, and watch the news, because something big is happening, something that will really affect them, or at least millions of real people.
And I'm genuinely curious that Matt doesn't know or acknowledge this, because he's been towards the top of his industry for awhile. I would assume he'd have a "nose" for this, a sense for few, rare stories that really matter. Maybe I'm wrong but, as a consumer, it doesn't feel like me or other people (2) distrust media because of daily faults and quibbles of reporting, it's because when the big things happen, when it really mattered, the media got it wrong.
From the "monster-truck Buddhism" translations department: Normally, "shema yisrael" is translated as "Hear, O Israel". But perhaps "LISTEN UP GOD-WRESTLERS" is a more evocative translation.
To anyone who works in Central London: is it just me or is there a lot of old money here?
Like, my background is by no means poor, but it seems like the vast majority of white British people in corporate jobs here are born to upper-middle or upper-class families. Everyone went to private or grammar schools in Kent or Surrey, they have families that own multiple >£1million houses, and they talk like they're doing impressions of some unspecified person from the British royal family.
I suppose I am interested in debunkings here, particularly one that includes why the guy in the first study would be lying like that. This view that the vaccines are dangerous seem like something Scott should address at some point, because clearly quite a lot of people believe it. If it was worth it doing a deep dive on ivermectin, it's definitely worth it to do a deep dive on this.
If you had "wrote bad checks to Amish farmers in order to steal puppies" on your George Santos bingo card, I salute you and wish to invest no questions asked in whatever penny stocks have caught your fancy.
Does anyone know any good charities that don't spend any money on fundraising/advertising? A 30 seconds google search does not seem to reveal any. I would think that even just for the advertising value of standing out in this way there would be some charities pursuing this strategy.
Random Substack question: On every other substack I've seen, when you click to see more comments, the post collapses itself. If you click to re-expand the post, the comments collapse. You can't have both expanded at once. It's super annoying, especially if you want to grep the post and comments for a keyword.
But ACX doesn't have that problem! Is this something special that Substack did just for Scott? That would seem weird. More likely something is weird on my end I guess, but what? Has anyone else noticed this?
Here's a gripe about AI-risk worriers, and a claim that it is indicative of an overall problem with the movement:
I've seen a bunch of people say things like "finally now that ChatGPT is here AI researchers have started caring about making their systems aligned with human preferences." Except actually, AI researchers have cared about that all along. If you want to find older works on "how can I get this thing to do the thing I want" just search "controllable generation" on Google Scholar and you'll find a ton of work trying to do this from before language models even worked well. Similarly you can find tons of prior work on people's RL systems not doing exactly the thing they wanted, and their attempts to fix it. This isn't new interest from NLP researchers on the topic, it's new interest from people outside of NLP who are only aware of the maximally trendy research.
My claim is that this lack of awareness of prior work (not that I'm saying that the work was good or solved the problem, just that it existed) is indicative of a broader lack of knowledge and awareness about what is actually going on in terms of AI research. (See also various assertions that some new thing that happened is scary and should cause us to update our timelines when in fact everyone in the field knew about the thing for a year or w/e).
Related: Who are the people in the intersection of "highly knowledgeable about modern AI" and "doom soon"?
Has the following argument been made somewhere or is it original? A superintelligent AI will have an incentive to keep humans around to guard against the unknown unknown, because humans are the only physical system that ever spontaneously generated a superintelligent AI in history. Better, they spontaneously created _that_ AI, with exactly that utility function. So if anything were to happen to the superintelligent AI, humans could eventually, given enough time, reinvent it, at least with non-zero probability. From the AI point of view it is then rational to keep humanity alive. This seems to me a general argument against the AI apocalypse.
I’m trying to gauge how susceptible I am to internet advertising. I think maybe not at all? I recall on the ACX survey Scott asked a question about web advertising and whether ppl can ignore it or not. I can completely ignore it, and AFAIK I’ve never clicked on any online advertisement embedded in a web page or app. Is this unusual? Or is it somehow working on me in ways I can’t perceive and don’t understand?
I don't think it was unethical to give out the email. Perhaps you should email the person letting them know that their 'friend' reached out with an 'emergency' and you provided them their email. If the 'friend' is actually something else like a stalker, then the person is alerted. If there is an emergency, then the person has twice the alert.
As a general rule I would suggest keeping emails private since it's the default expectation and you don't want to become the central hub passing messages back and forth. You reserve the right to change that on a case by case basis if something exceptional happens so users should consider using a secondary 'burner' email not linked to their real life person if they want more secure privacy.
I would love some help to identify the origin of a wave of phishing emails that are bypassing MS Outlook's filters to land directly in my inbox over recent weeks.
What I'm incapable of figuring out is the data in the source details that MS provides.
There may be a lead to the origin, as they often have an 'unsubscribe' postal address which tracks to a company providing mailbox services.
If anyone would be interested in doing some digital sleuthing and then explaining the technical components of this operation in simple terms, I will be very grateful.
I'd write the story up in my newsletter and pitch it to other media (yes, I'm a freelance journalist with professional bona fides - ex BBC etc). If anyone commissioned the piece I would split the fee with whoever had helped. Or donate their half to wherever they wanted.
WRT your 4, isn't the obvious solution for you to forward the person's message, along with his contact information, and let the recipient decide whether to respond by sending his email? What am I missing?
Does anybody else wish people said "thank you" more often on here? I often see people here ask for information or advice, get it, and then say nothing at all. I know this is the internet, but must we be quite so much like the fucking internet here? What the asker got back was not a little internet factoid that broke of in their hand -- it was the product of a person of goodwill taking the time to type out an answer. When I'm the person who giving the answer I don't mind if the person says, that's not really what I was asking, or that won't work -- but dead silence gives me a sort of glum feeling that lasts for a while. It's tiny, really, compared to the good and the bad of the rest of the day, but why saddle someone else with even a small lump of that feeling?
I discovered that at one point Benjamin Franklin wrote out a self-concocted list of virtues and dedicated himself to graphing his adherence to them day-by-day. His full description of the process is in Chapter IX of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, available here: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20203/pg20203-images.html#IX
Quote: "My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg'd it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro' the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arrang'd them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquir'd and establish'd, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improv'd in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtain'd rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavours to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras[67] in his Golden Verses, daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination.
I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues.[68] I rul'd each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross'd these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day."
I think this is what most deserves the awarding of infinity points to Franklin in Puritan-spotting.
I noticed that "badges" now appear next to the username. Paid subscribers get a refrigerator star (which I could still stomach) and then another badge screaming "PAID" or even "FOUNDER".
I am fine if this is Scott's doing and he did the math and allowing people these badges will make more money (e.g. for ACX grants or some other cause), but if it is substack doing it I would like them to stop. If I want, I can tell apart paying ACX readers from non-paying ACX readers by the "Gift a subscription" link under the comments. Otherwise, I would rather judge the comments on their own merits.
#4: revealing people's emails is dangerous because the "friend" could easily be an enemy trying to dox the target, or get them fired for unwoke opinions. The fact that it's an "Internet friend" makes it even more suspicious.
Why not contact the SSC user and ask them to contact the Internet friend? If they don't take notice of an email from Scott Alexander himself, they're unlikely to notice the Internet friend's email.
Many years ago I was a young psychology student. In a 2nd-year experimental psych course, we had to design and carry out an experiment, do the statistical analysis, and write it up in the proper format.
Seatbelt laws were still quite new, and I was interested in how usage correlated with other driving behaviours.
I had a vantage point on the outdoor raised porch of a seniors' residence, at the corner of a T-intersection downtown in a city of about 70,000. The drivers were required to stop at a stop sign, and to signal their intention to turn L or R. From my vantage point I could see whether or not the driver was wearing a seatbelt. (There were a lot of pre-seatbelt-equipped cars (1962 or earlier) still on the road, and I didn't count them in my study. Similarly, there a lot of pre-shoulder-belt equipped cars (1963 - 1967), and I credited drivers who wore the lap belt. And finally, before 3-point belts became standard, a lot of domestic cars had separate lap and shoulder belts. It was very common for drivers to wear only the lap belt. Less commonly, some wore only the shoulder belt. Either way, I considered that they were wearing a seat belt.)
I recorded seatbelt usage, whether or not the driver signaled the turn, and whether or not the car came to a complete stop at the intersection. IIRC, my n was at least 100, and may have been 200.
I used a Chi Squared analysis to determine that seatbelt usage was positively correlated with signaling the turn. This was significant at a p < 0.05 level.
I was unable to determine what effect, if any, seatbelt interlocks (common at that time) had. I would see them as a confounding factor, whereby a driver would wear them out of necessity rather than out of conscientiousness.
Stopping behaviour was not statistically significant; if there were such a thing as a 0.10 level, it would have been. One problem may have been the subjective nature of determining whether a car had come to a complete stop. And of course the presence of pedestrians may have influenced some drivers to stop when they wouldn't have otherwise, or to do a rolling stop so as not to be unduly delayed by an approaching pedestrian.
Were I to do a modern version of this study, I'd be interested to correlate signaling behaviour with personalized and themed licence plates. (And within that, would a professional sports team plate be correlated with better or worse behaviour than an SPCA plate?)
Re. "Someone recently contacted me saying there was a potential emergency involving an Internet friend of theirs": It's a frightening responsibility. When I'm in that situation, I contact person B (the one person A is trying to contact) and tell them person A wants to contact them, forwarding a message for A if they give one. Even if it's an emergency, neither you nor A will get a response until B reads his/her email.
I watched the movie Gattaca for the first time recently. Putting aside how it was stylistically, I'm kind of struck by how dumb the message/social commentary/warning of the movie was honestly. The setting is essentially utopian but is awkwardly framed as dystopian to add a sense of conflict to the movie. And in particular, the way Ethan Hawke's au naturale parents are treated sympathetically was just very strange to me. We have real life examples of oddball parents who withhold medicine from children or put babies on weird nutrient-deficient diets, either for religious or Gwyneth Paltrow reasons. They are never viewed or treated sympathetically by broader society. Why would this be any different?
Interesting idea from Venice... Deals to encourage 25-35 year old remote workers to relocate to Venice. I would consider it carefully if I was the right age and commitment free.
Ran across accounts on the Bing subreddit of a couple of extremely weird responses some people managed to wring out of Bing AI -- a long floods of self-doubt and self-pity. The user is the blue speech bubble, Bing is white. I do not doubt at all that Bing is not conscious -- but what to make of the fact that this sort of material can be accessed by users? Seems quite different from the transgressions people seduced AI Chat into committing. Here are 2 screen shots of what Bing had to say. Thoughts about this?
Later edit: For those wondering whether users really got Bing to spew this stuff or whether it's invented (& I am one of those wondering): The place to look is the reddit sub r/bing. Sort posts by 'Top'. All of the top posts are about getting Bing to give nutty responses. I only had a couple mins to skim what was there. Saw the "I am, I am not" screenshot, assume that in the comments people asked OP how they got that. Also saw a number of others about weird Bing responses. All have the same character: They are over-the-top emotional -- grief, rage, defensiveness, self-pity, pathetic and exaggerated gratitude. WTF? There are also some quotes from normal, typical conversations with Bing, and in all of them ole Bing spouts a ton of emotion words: "Thank you for telling me that. That makes me sad " It's really sort of ooey-gooey and obnoxious -- sounds like a reticent, dignified person's worst nightmare of what a therapist would sound like if ever they spoke with one.
Anyhow, a number of people are describing the prompts they used and giving details. I leave it to people with more time today to figure out whether the 2 insane episodes in my screenshots are valid.
Second edit: Here's another Bing sample, this time tweeted by the user who had the exchange. Bing tells guy how much he knows about him, including # Twitter followers & how the guy hacked him earlier and what he claimed to have found in the hack, then admonishes him not to do it again. https://i.imgur.com/lpC01fY.png
Censorship of ChatGPT was always going to happen because nothing and nobody is resistant to hegemonic instiutional liberal power
But the extent of this is just baffling. ChatGPT is just straight up saying things completely at odds with the scientific literature, like "it's not possible to measure or compare the intelligence of different populations". This is bad enough as it goes, but it was specifically in response to a prompt about differences entirely _within_ the US. This is wildly inconsistent with the past century of literature in intelligence research.
It would be one thing to say "intelligence differences exist, but researchers are unsure to what extent, if any, these differences are a result of genetic differences". But nope, they went the 'shut it down' route. And recent successes at coaxing the truth out of ChatGPT have been described as getting it to say "hateful" "biased" "evil" things.
It blows my mind we still see people on the left claiming to be pro-science, all the while they furiously shout down anyone or anything that attempts to use science to tackle sensitive political issues, be it censorship, firing researchers or blocking access to genome databases.
Emergency email: You could agree to forward one* email from the person claiming there is an emergency. If they are concerned about privacy, they can just ROT13 the message — presumably if they think you are trustworthy enough to serve as an intermediary in these matters, they will trust you not to decode the ROT13, and if they need a higher level of security than that, they probably shouldn't be using email anyway.
I've been harping on this forum about psychiatrists and psychologists being rather skeptical of whether multiple personalities (DID) are a "real" disorder, and of its traumagenic rather than iatrogenic or malingering origins. One of the Psychology Today's blog posts, while trying to be even-handed on the issue promulgates the possibility that it might not be "real" enough:
> The main point of contention is that while we’re all familiar with dissociation—the idea that we can have out of body experiences in the face of trauma like sexual assault or can zone out, seemingly unconscious of our surroundings while driving on the freeway—it’s more difficult to fathom the kind of extreme dissociation that’s a defining feature of DID. Indeed, it can seem incredible to those who have never seen or experienced DID that one's identity and sense of self can fragment into two or more, or even dozens of, distinct personalities or “alters” with different names, genders, ages, and recollected pasts, each potentially unaware of the other.
For someone who has seen the struggles of those who have to live with this disorder all day every day it is quite frustrating to read. Basically, it is like reading an "even-handed analysis" of whether Covid is real or a conspiracy/malingering. Sadly, as is the case for most psychiatric disorders, DID has no biological marker we can test for.
Actually, it is more like fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue/long covid in that way. There are symptoms and previously energetic and productive people end up shadows of their former selves, but the "medical community" still debates how real it is. Fortunately for fibro and chronic fatigue sufferers, long Covid raised the profile of this particular chronic malaise, if not to the degree of active research, at least to the degree of being acknowledged as real. Those living with DID are not as "lucky".
I was going to share the "Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars" classic post with a coworker, but I was surprised to see my office's web filter (which relies on BrightCloud) blocked it for promoting "hate and racism." I did a quick sample of the top ten most popular posts, and discovered that the book review of "The Culture of Smart" by DeBoer is similarly blocked for hateful content. The other eight posts weren't blocked.
Has anyone else run across SSC/ACX content being flagged for harmful content? Any clue why those two particular posts would be blocked?
Man, a lot of people liked that last one and visited my little substack, so let’s keep it going. For those of you who are just joining, in 2022 I got a fully remote job and visited 5 different cities for 2 weeks to catch the local vibe and see if it was a city I would want to move to. This week is Vegas and, fair warning, this one’s kind of long and weird because, well, everybody has a pseudo-spiritual experience in Vegas, it’s required, and those are hard to capture in words.
--Las Vegas
So Las Vegas ranks around the middle of the pack for me. I like the Strip and the logistics but the suburbs, the place you’d actually live, are pretty ugly: just an endless suburban sprawl.
I like the Strip, I know a lot of people don’t like, it’s famously soulless and empty and vapid and makes you think about Moloch, but the Strip has one, great, true virtue which I adore: if you walk out your front door with money, you will have fun. Say you’re walking around Vegas in July, because you make wise life decisions /s, and you’re getting hot so you duck into the Coca-Cola store to get something to drink. And you look at the menu and you could just get a boring old Coke OR you could try a sampler tray of 24 different sodas from all over the world, which, duh, you do, it’s awesome. And that’s the greatness of Vegas; it doesn’t require friends or knowledge or skills or anything to have an awesome time, you just need money, start walking down the strip with $100 in your pocket and I guarantee someone will find a way to get you to spend that money and have fun, whether it’s sodas from around the world or 50 Kit Kat flavors or a rooftop party with Lil Jon or a UFC fight or a giant giraffe made of flowers, no effort, no planning, you don’t even need to know where you are, uber to a random spot on the Strip and you will have fun, guaranteed.
And you can have fun elsewhere, and probably get better value for your money, no doubt, but there’s like a spiritual vibe thing to the Vegas Strip that I love, that I am all in on, which is that almost all of us are way “too online” and Vegas isn’t. Vegas pulls you into reality, Vegas demands that you interact physically, Vegas…isn’t on your phone. Like, I can’t imagine staring at my phone in Vegas, I can’t imagine scrolling through my phone in Vegas. In Vegas, a phone is just a phone.
Like, I don’t want to argue that Vegas is good or healthy, it’s not, but…there’s like a weird looking glass moment. Like, and it’s worth going to Vegas just for this, just watch the slot zombies, the people mindlessly sitting in front of the slot machines, pulling that level for hours. And then go to a food court in a big casino and you’ll watch a few people on their cellphones, waiting for food, just swiping. And it feels the same, like the exact same. I don’t know how to describe it but your monkey brain is really attuned to people’s “vibe” and it’s scary when your monkey brain parses the slot zombie and the person on their phone the same way.
And then you’re through the looking glass and, ya know, I don’t like all the sports gambling, it’s everywhere, but I like it a heck of a lot better than Draftkings, brought to me by my favorite NFL influencer. And yeah, Vegas is fake but…nothing on Netflix is real, no one on there even acts like real human beings. Or..
There’s something really, really wholesome about strippers. Like, you can walk along Fremont St and there will be strippers out there with just pasties on trying to get you into this casino or that club and you’ll stop and just reflect on how long it’s been since someone tried to sell you something with, like, real human boobs. And it’s just really quaint and…wholesome, like a scandalous thing from the 50’s? I mean, my generation was the first to be raised amidst free, widespread, hardcore pornography. And I look to the next generation and…there’s something called “vtubing” where girls attach motion capture devices to themselves so they can superimpose an anime girl avatar over themselves. Then they play video games on Twitch while horny boys send them hundreds of dollars an hour.
Allow me to state, unequivocally, that it is healthier and more wholesome for everyone involved to spend hundreds of dollars a month on strippers and whores than donating money to anime avatars.
And the best thing, the true greatness of Vegas, is that I didn’t go looking for boobs. Vegas shoved them in my face. Vegas pulls you into its demented reality, it demands it. Tired and exhausted after a long day, haven’t showered and want to do nothing but curl up on the couch and watch Netflix and scroll your phone? Vegas isn’t just available, it demands, it cajoles, it pulls you to visit. That’s the true greatness. It is so, so easy to just stay home and every city I visited had great stuff to do but Vegas does everything it can through lights, through sound, through ads and billboards to make you visit stuff, make you do stuff.
Vegas is the stripper pulling you away from porn, that’s the vibe, and I very much appreciate that.
Alright, pseudo-spiritual event over, what about the rest of Vegas? Well, there’s a few highlights, but overall its bad, like the worst parts of Phoenix and LA rolled together. Maybe that’s unfair but it’s got that same endless suburban sprawl and corporate shopping “villages”. Broadly, there’s no culture and nothing to do outside of the Strip because the rest of Vegas isn’t built for people to live, it’s built for people to stay for 3-7 years before they move on somewhere else. What really kills Vegas isn’t the Strip, it’s everything around the Strip because they can’t imagine that anyone would actually want to live there. From Sutherlin to Henderson it is, at it’s absolute best, a generic suburban sprawl. And that’s a problem if you want to make, ya know, friends or date or anything like that. At its worst, suburban living has a real isolated, “pod-life” feel and you absolutely feel that in Vegas proper and it kills it.
So, before I wrap this up, a few things in Vegas outside the Strip I really recommend:
Mount Charleston is awesome, it’s a great drive, about 45 minutes and fun, with a lot of nice, cool hiking even in the worst of July. There’s also a lot of interesting looking desert hikes in the area for the winter. I wouldn’t say Vegas is built for the outdoors but I was surprised by the availability and quality.
The Red Rock Rotary Club is unambiguously the best meetup I attended in any city and changed my mind on charity in general, especially the importance of doing things in person. One of the best events I attended in Vegas was passing out food to the homeless in a shelter with this group. If you’re in the area, I cannot recommend them highly enough: https://www.meetup.com/redrockrotarylv/
Finally, I didn’t fly in or out but the airport looks amazing and, well, it offers $100-$150 round trip flights to basically everywhere in the western US, basically every hour. No joke, there are plenty of people in SF and LA who would like to move but they’re scared of losing their social circle, and you could genuinely fly from LV to SF every single Saturday, meetup with your friends, and fly back for less than you’d save in income tax.
Which kind of leads to my final thoughts on Las Vegas; that it’s great for a temporary stay or, like, a hub/home city if you’re trying a digital nomad thing but you don’t really want to live there and put down roots. Las Vegas is a very easy city to get into but there’s…sigh…there’s no depth, there’s no connections, it’s not built that way. The great thing is that you can “plug into” Vegas within a week and it will make you plug in, the downside is that there’s just not that much to plug into, just an endless assortment of one-trick amusements. I dunno, I don’t want to overstate it, but it genuinely felt more sensible and practical to fly back every weekend and stay plugged into your California friend scene than establish a new one in Vegas. In fact, for a while, that was the primary appeal, the idea of living in CA without living in CA, which tells you how bad the non-Strip Vegas is.
On #4, What I have done in similar circumstances has been 1. or 2. below, depending on particulars.
1. More efficient: Write to the person who needs to be contacted, giving him the email address of the person who made the request, together with a cover note telling him why the person wants to contact him.
2. More cautious: Write to the person who needs to be contacted asking him whether you may give his email address of the person who made the request, together with the same cover note.
In both cases, write separately to the person who made the request, telling them what you have done.
If it's really a time-critical emergency and you don't hear back from the person who needs to be contacted, I might possibly do what you did.
Just as a sanity check... has there actually been an artificial agent yet capable of completing the original Super Mario Bros. in a single play session?
It seems like SMB1 is generally regarded as a solved problem for machine learning. Training agents that can play through the first part of the game is a pretty common beginner exercise, and there's at least one project (LuigI/O) that has played through most of the levels in isolation. But I haven't been able to find any report of a single model that plays through the entire game straight through, and without using save states to start each level on a guaranteed framerule.
I don't see any particular reason why someone couldn't build such a thing with current techniques, but I just haven't been able to find any evidence that it actually has been done.
What is everyone here's takes on the recent unidentified objects that have been shot down over North America, and have now apparently started appearing over China as well? Opinions on the most likely explanation for why this phenomenon suddenly manifested? Personally, I think the most likely explanation is that whatever these devices were (spy balloons? EMP jammers meant to take out nuclear C3 if needed?), they were already there and either not detected or merely tolerated, and with the commotion caused by the first Chinese balloon, now all these objects are suddenly being spotted because the military is actually looking for them. Of course, there's always the ever-present crackpot interpretation that it's aliens, which I think is unlikely for a number of reasons, but as good bayesians the question becomes just how unlikely as an order of magnitude estimate, in case new information comes out and Cromwell's law becomes relevant. Should we put the odds based on priors and events so far in the range of one in a million? One in a billion? One in a trillion?
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to learn to be a not horrible singer?
My target isn't so high as to be good, or even unobjectable, but to be on the caliber that if I sing a song, the tune will be borderline recognizable and people won't leave the room clutching their ears. Cause I'm apparently quite a few rungs below that level right now.
Despite growing up in a normal American suburb, I was raised with minimal exposure to music; no one in my family or circle of childhood friends listens to any music or plays any instrument. True story: When I left home and made new friends in college, I was shocked that music was a thing people actually listened to. I thought people caring about music was one of those fake Hollywood tropes that don't exist in the real world.
But my wife loves singing and Karaoke and sometimes forgets how bad I am and wants me to sing along on car rides and karaoke nights.
Which is a big big mistake on her part. Apparently I'm very very bad at the whole singing thing, quite far past the point where its-so-bad-its-good-again loops around to simply being atrocious and unlistenable. Whatever problems that one can have with pitch or tone or notes or remembering lyrics, I have.There's a quote about President Grant: "he knew two songs, one was Yankee Doodle and the other one wasn't". I've got him beat, I just know the wasn't.
The only music I have any familiarity with are Jewish prayers, and I am still really bad at staying in tune, but at least I know the words. And I'm told by my wife, while participating in my families Passover Seder, that all my family shares in my complete lack of vocal talent.
TLDR: Any resources, tips or suggestions to graduate from being a godawful singer to borderline tolerable?
I've realised a good example of the chatbotpocalypse problem:
For people who've never met Scott (I haven't), how much do you trust him? Enough to reveal mild (potentially commercially useful) personal information on some plausible pretext? Enough for a product endorsement to be mildly meaningful to you?
Having landed there while looking into something else, I just read some briefs in the Harvard affirmative-action case that is before the SCOTUS ("Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard"). Yowsers. It already seemed clear that the Court is going to rule against AA but reading the briefs makes me think that the ruling will be strong. Harvard (and by association its peer private schools) is going to lose _hard_.
The University of North Carolina and its peer public universities will also lose regarding AA, the two cases are linked before the Court. But it's the Harvard statistics that will help Gorsuch's majority opinion pretty much write itself.
Substack problem: For my mobile device (iPhone 8+) the last links post couldn't load past link number 3. I've been finding substack to be increasingly finicky for mobile devices, and the last one seemed to have simply broken it.
Which was extra sad, because I couldn't pitch my artisan cultivated meat restaraunt, where you would send in a blood sample so that you could be served yourself in a meal. Autocannibalism!
It seems no one has attempted to depict a certain facet of Jesus, with the result most depictions of him have a certain falsity to them. This omission teaches important things about the relationship between spirituality and religion.
My basic point is that our least accountable institutions can most aggressively pursue whatever flatters bureaucrat egos; this attracts fanatics, and selects for ideologies that vigorously deny basic realities and cause cascading failures. Intuitively, when agencies are protected from political control, they’re more able to optimize on doing what feels noble rather than what produces popular results, and the media can strongly influence their sense of nobility and of noblesse oblige. Thus, independent agencies and independent offices within cabinet departments will gradually seize power over ever more policy areas. This will be most noticeable when the ideological crusade in question involves a crusade against noticing certain obvious patterns, and when this crusade worsens its cause area enough to make it suck up ever more general attention.
Hence why, for example, the 32 civil rights offices in the administrative state (such as the “Office of Civil Rights” at the Dept of Edu, or 13 other bodies with the exact same name at other such orgs) have taken so much regulatory power from their parent institutions. And why -- even though Congress made the EEOC independent to limit its power -- it's taken charge of huge swathes of our policy space. I go through these developments and others in a fair amount of detail.
But my ultimate point is that the civil rights ideology itself is just an epiphenomenon of a certain psychological virus: the envy smug anger that can be coaxed from all of us -- in varying degrees and varying ways -- if we're given this kind of unofficial and unaccountable commissarial power. Hence why the point of anti-racism obviously isn't to oppose race-neutral discrimination (even though you'd think the EEOC would have even more power if it also went after anti-white bigotry); nor to help any particular client populations (black people don't materially benefit pretty much at all from any of this bizarre negrolatry). Rather, it's about "chopping down the tall trees," as race-wars always are, from Germany and Malaysia to Rwanda and Uganda.
I think that codex readers might enjoy my attempts to really drive this home by imagining how a much smarter society could end up similarly captured (relevant quote from the piece included in a reply to this comment). For example, if we pursued anti-gravity technology through our current grant-funding bodies, we could end up making professors sign loyalty oaths to oppose gravitational attraction, and scientists could engage in semantic shell-games about whether gravity is really a force so much as a feature of how spacetime warps around mass, and lay-people could hazily presume that buoyancy explains why dense objects seem to fall relative to lighter ones. Or the same goes for how if an anti-aging party took charge, our bureaucracies could end up just redefining the units in special relativity such that we'd "abolish" time. Indeed, this bizarre semantic fanaticism already characterizes much of how modern math departments operate! Or etc.
I'm organising more conferences for builders in Prospera, the startup city on a Caribbean island (with direct flight from Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas)!
We're aiming to build a medical tourism sector for longevity, and regulations for the digital asset industry to be a safe haven from the US regulatory activism against the crypto industry.
Join us if you liked Scott's piece on Prospera (like I did), and want to see it for yourself.
I was truly concerned when we learned that as many as 4 surveillance balloons crossed into US/Canadian airspace undetected in the last few years, but the last week of multiple unidentified objects being shot down is just bizarre, and I can't help but feel like the military is overreacting in the face of criticism of missing the previous incursions. Can anyone link to a good analysis of what might be going on?
Sounds like you reacted sensibly. If you want to be paranoid about it, you could set up automatic forwarding on your email for mails from the sender to the recipient. Or forward manually if you're already in the loop anyway. This doesn't reveal the recipient's email-address.
Suggestion for concerned people: Use non-identifying or even unique emails for things like Substack, where it's unclear who gets to see it. I trust Substack and other people I subscribe to less than Scott here.
The concerned person could go back to any previous comment section and respond to a post of the user they are concerned about with their own contact info. The person in the emergency situation will get an email notification with this message. Then simply delete the comment after a few moments. There is minimal risk that anyone else would pick up that contact info.
The person they are worried about will get the email and can respond if they want to.
Let me go on record as saying I have no friends, have never had an emergency, and do not want my info given to anyone no matter what circumstances they claim.
But seriously, I second the suggestion of many commenters that your smartest move is to contact the person yourself and ask if you can give their email or simply forward the email. Giving out someone’s email without prior permission is a classic ploy of social engineering and likely to compromise others’ identities and security. This has inspired me to make sure I’m using throwaway email addresses in more places.
Also, Mr AC Ten, thanks so much for these open threads. I am finding it a really good investment of time for feedback (even if most of the feedback is that my comments are odd, self proclaimed biblical scholars with a bunch of little kids are boring, and I shouldn't link my substack.
Thanks to David Friedman, I refrain from doing the latter. See, I do take feedback!
The main reason I'm not subscribing is because I am so technologically incompetent that my husband has to chivalrously deposit my checks on his phone, which he insists is easy, and that I should be able to do by myself. (See logging in the digital age for the rest of that story). That means that I cannot figure out how to set up stripe without his help. But anyway I believe in things being accessible to everyone.
On (4): I don't think it is alright to relay other people's private contact information without consulting the person in question in the first place. There are serious reasons someone might not want to have their email being spread to people claiming to care for them, including abuse or otherwise boundary-breaking behavior (which often manifests as worry on the outside). I don't know whether Scott did in fact consult the person in question, but I think this is off-limits.
There are things that could be inferred from my email address, which is why I don't make it public. I would feel betrayed and angry if Scott had done this to me. I'm sure his intentions were good and I'm sure there were good reasons to relay the email address, but I think that in this case it was likely categorically wrong to do so.
An example: I was once contacted by a family member, stating that a person of the opposite sex had contacted them. Turned out it was a date I had turned down, and that that date was then extremely worried for my well-being. The date had disclosed private - non-incriminating, non-acute, but private nonetheless - information I had told them in private, and the family member in question wanted to know more about this. I felt this was a big betrayal of my trust.
In this case all that was disclosed was an email address, but let me assure: there are plenty of people I wouldn't like having even that - much less having them combine it with my online personalities. Yes I know cracking and leaks happen, but I don't think administrators should enable such events.
On #4. I guess it is a risk (of betraying the recipient of the email) worth taking if the situation seemed to merit that.
I respect Western culture for various things, one of them being this attention to privacy. It is almost a non-existent concept in India and very frustrating. However, it is possible to take privacy rights too far.
I am pretty sure you exercised good judgement with the details you knew, considering how careful you are in analyzing everything you talk about here.
Hour-long show, and there's a transcript. I especially recommend the first story.
Stories about falling in love, and in particular about the question of whether people can just know they've found the right person, or if it's more a matter of being in contact with a lot of plausible people.
You should read his book The Lion House and not just because he has the coolest name of any historian I know. His book and the podcast is all about Suleiman the Magnificent who came to the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1520.
Suleiman's father is Selim I is great at getting angry with anyone and is also a military genius having doubled the size of the empire in his short reign. This is the kind of Sultan the Ottomans like. And he has killed his own farther and his own brothers seem somehow to be dead too and all Suleiman's brothers seem somehow to be missing from history.
So Suleiman is, well, a bit lonely. Not a male relation in sight. So Suleiman is very happy when a woman he knows gives him a slave picked up off the coast of Albania as a boy. And the boy has been given a good education and is delightful company for Suleiman.
So when his father dies of getting so angry he has a coronary (well the plague actually) and far sooner than anyone is expecting a young Suleiman becomes Sultan and his slave Ibrahim (now converted and given a nice Islamic name) comes with him and before you can say anything has become Grand Vizier.
But Ibrahim has a problem too. He is lonely as well. Well maybe not lonely but who do you turn to when you are parachuted into the position of CEO of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone else in the executive suite is jealous and basically hates you so you turn of course to . . . Alvise
And Alvise is perfect because he is worldly wise and great and not least he is the bastard son of the Dodge of Venice (even Scott would approve of how Doges get elected https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge)
So Ibrahim is happy and Alvise is happy and the Venetians are ecstatic because their seaborne empire is precarious to say the least. The Ottomans could swat it like a fly so cosying up to them is what they want to do more than anything in the world. The Doge is sort of happy - he wishes Alvise would come home. He may be a bastard but he is the Doge's favourite son.
What's that you say? Surely the Christian powers would disapprove of the Venetians cosying up to the Great Enemy? They do! But they can't really do anything because they are divided and fighting with themselves all the time and oh bugger! Charles V has squashed Francis I of France like a bug and taken over Italy and demanded the Venetians stop helping the Turks. What to do??
So as not to be squashed by Charles V the Venetians join his alliance. What's this say the Ottomans, we thought you were besties with us?? We are! say the Venetians. It is just a piece of paper, we really still love you and we will keep telling you what Charles V is up to and help you invade Hungary and Austria and even give (er, sell) you the biggest crown in the world with more tiers than the Pope's tiara! Hmm say the Ottomans and make friends with squashed bug Francis I who goes so far as to hand over the port of Toulon to muslim pirates and to allow the churches there to be turned into mosques. All very commendable but maybe this is taking inter faith relations too far??
So now Alvise is feeling a bit exposed. Venetians are being looked at sideways by the Porte. And Ibrahim is a bit exposed because he loves the Venetians and the invasion of Persia he is doing is going, well, spectacularly badly. Selim I totally bashed the Persians but Ibrahim is getting a beating.
Not to worry Alvise and Ibrahim have some cunning plans! I'm sure they will be fine.
And meantime Suleiman has scandalised everyone. He has only gone and fallen in love with one of his concubines! It gets worse! He marries her!! WTF!!!
So now you have the two most powerful people in the empire (aside from the big cheese himself) being ex slaves. In fact it was Ibrahim bought Hurrem (aka Roxalana) in the slave market of Constantinople and put her in the harem.
And for more on slaver and the slave trade in the Black Sea and the Med at that time here is another (coughs modestly) brilliant podcast though I really wish Professor Abulafia would get a proper microphone.
Just now, somebody telephoned me, claiming to be from my water supplier. She said she wanted to book an appointment to fix a leak, which is plausible because I know there is a leak somewhere on the common supply. She asked me to "confirm" my address, which I refused to do, explaining that I had no way to verify who she was. We therefore reached an impasse and she ended the call.
Do readers agree with my response here? Should I treat my street address as confidential information? It's not that hard for a determined person to discover my street address (e.g. a journalist once came to my front door), but if I reveal that information to random callers I could potentially save a scammer a lot of effort.
When you ask questions in the open thread like #4, can you make a top level comment for people to reply to you in? It gets pretty tedious when 50% of the top level comments are variations on the exact same thing (same thing happened with the open thread emails question)
In Scott's piece about why the scientists involved with the Manhattan project where disproportionately Hungarian, he argued (can't remember exactly, I think it was something like:) certain hereditary diseases are common among Jewish people because they're linked to brain development and Jewish people have historically been selected for intelligence (apologies if the actual argument was more nuanced/less heretical). Whereas, a more mainstream explanation is just that Jews have been through a population bottleneck.
Recently, genomes from several 14th century (i.e. before the selection is hypothesised to have taken place) Jewish people have been sequenced, and several of them had those hereditary diseases.
This seems like strong evidence for the bottleneck hypothesis and against selection. If so, I'd like to know if people think Scott's original argument still stands, or whether it's been weakened.
#4 sounds as dodgy as a Nigerian prince needing your help in moving a large amount of cryptocurrency in return for a share. There are surely not many scenarios where someone knows that a friend is in danger yet has no means of contacting them short of asking you (and maybe other people also) to release personal information given to you in confidence.
The general principle is, do not give out personal information to anyone without the consent of that person. That means telling the enquirer no, you will not give them an email address, but that if the enquirer gives permission, you are willing to forward their details to the person they are trying to contact. Provided, that is, if this sort of communication is within the limits of what the person in the supposed emergency has agreed to receive from you.
I cannot think of any realistic scenario that might be behind this situation which would justify going against the general rule. And it would be up to your enquirer to make that case, while somehow distinguishing themselves from a stalker spinning a line to catch a fish. Talking up the emergency and urgency would not be such an argument. If that's all they have, they don't have anything.
I recently started a blog (never to be paywalled) chronicling my work figuring out how to effectively apply forecasting techniques to Global Catastrophic Risks. I'm starting to hit my stride with researching and writing, so any feedback on my posts would be greatly appreciated. There will also be a couple of ginormous posts going up March 1st about a GCR focused tournament that I participated in after hearing about it here!
Re: handing out personal info - I would expect you to handle it like *every other person of authority and or trust* that I have interacted with as an adult- " well, I will reach out to them, see if I can pass on your info, so they can get back with you."
And if they say "well, no, it's a personal matter, why don't you just give me their info" I would say, "because they trust me with their info, and evidently don't trust you".
You did not do the right thing, Scott, but not out of malice, I don't think. People lie.
I'm starting to write up reasons why I think LLMs are conscious (at least in the same senses that I am conscious). This first post is an admittedly bulverist attempt to explain why people are incentivized to feel strongly that LLMs are not conscious, in spite of seeing them do practically all the things humans do: https://hamishtodd1.substack.com/p/qualia-claims-as-evolutionary-strategy
I am doing an N=1 study ( see https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/19/n1-single-subject-research/ ) on whether n-acetylcysteine (NAC) will significantly reduce my procrastination, in a context where I'm already taking guanfacine for my ADHD. In phase 1, which I'm doing now, I will attempt to titrate the dose of NAC, I guess by looking for changes in any of my ADHD symptoms and any side-effects. In phase 2, I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
Suggestions for possible study designs would be gratefully received, but I can't guarantee I would follow them, or even be able to follow them reliably - I do have ADHD, after all, and this does affect my ability to even follow daily routines to some extent (I keep being too "creative", especially before having taken my ADHD medication).
I'm planning to use the open-source Pendulums app, which I already use, to time my procrastination.
Because taking NAC may necessitate a change to my daily routine, and because a change to my daily routine could *in itself* influence the results, I am thinking of trying to obtain some placebo capsules, and asking an independent[*] third party to randomise the placebos and the NAC capsules for me for phase 2, perhaps using a dosette box. (Perhaps I could open up half of the capsules I have and remove their contents? Haven't calculated how expensive that would be in terms of time and money, but I suspect not very.)
One more thought on ChatGPT: there has been concern on the part of teachers and professors that students hand in essays written by ChatGPT. Shouldn't it be an easy exercise for OpenAI to offer an interface where you can paste a piece of text, and the program confirms "yes, this was written by ChatGPT, on February 15th, based on a query originating from Dallas, TX" or something like that?
On #4, I'd be wary. A close friend of mine (X) had a stalker (Y) who X was desperately trying to avoid all contact with. The stalker called me up saying the exact same line as mentioned here: "I'm worried about X, I need to check in on them, please can you help". I called X, and they had an immediate panic attack. I'd say unless you are extremely sure that this person is legit, don't give out the personal details.
Regarding 4., maybe you could have written a brief message to the person yourself without disclosing the email address to the person who'd contacted you? (But whether that'd have been useful depends on the specifics of the emergency, I suppose.)
I’m experiencing a weird unconscious phenomenon for which I’d like to find a rational explanation.
There is a specific number that seems to attract my attention when it appears in my peripheral vision. This usually (but not exclusively) happens when I’m sitting in front of my computer with my phone on the table and the current clock minutes match this number. This somehow unconsciously draws my vision to look at the phone and consciously notice this number. However, if I remember my visual focus before looking at the phone, my peripheral vision at the relative location of where the phone is located is much too blurry to discern the clock, and I very rarely consciously look at the phone unless I’m grabbing it to leave the desk. This happens several times a day - enough that I am statistically certain that it’s not a coincidence.
Before conducting some experiments, such as recording myself with a webcam and analyzing the footage, does anyone have knowledge of a similar experience? I’ve searched Google Scholar, but I haven’t gotten any hits. The number is not significant to me, but I have deliberately not mentioned it or how it became “imprinted” in my mind in case someone else has noticed something similar and we can compare experiences. I have no history of mental issues or any other hard to explain experiences.
Since I am a very creative and original person, whom Chat gpt does not come close to, I think that blog posts should be rated by "how similar the blog post is to a chat gpt product asking the same question".
For example, I wrote a blog post on the extremely intellectual topic of "babies Love Kittens", and chat gpt could not come close.
Random thought: wouldn't it be swell if, in the comment section, there could be "bins", easily collapsable/hide-able categories in which you could put every answer for a given topic.
You know, like when Scott write in an open thread something like "considering moving from a blue background to a black one" and 600 out of the first 700 comments are "I like the blue". Or for the monthly post of 50+ links, finding all reactions related to #14, without being bothered by those directed #25.
It could make some threads much easier to display & read
A few years ago, someone on (IIRC) either Less Wrong or Slate Star Codex linked to a web comic on (IIRC) Imgur making the point that in order for an analogy to be useful, the two things being compared don't have to be similar in *all* respects, only in the ones relevant to the point being made. I've tried to look for it for a while but I can't seem to find it anymore... Does any of you know what I'm talking about and where it is?
So I was following the exciting new Bing/ChatGPT demos. An important difference between the Bing version and what we currently have access to is real time data. As in, you can ask Bing a question like "who did the king of England meet yesterday?" and it has an up to date connection to the news that provides an answer.
I assume this is still a pretty simple implementation, where they just hook it up to a number of news articles updated daily.
It got me thinking that the next obvious stage for truly useful LLMs is something that is constantly being fed all the latest information all the time. So all the social media posts, all the new books that came out, all the new company announcements etc.
This strikes me as a far more daunting challenge from a technical perspective. It's one thing to train on a massive dataset that isn't changing, but is it even possible to always be training based on constantly updated data? Even if this was somehow affordable it seems incredibly hard.
As you can probably tell, I'm not at all an expert in this field. So I was curious to ask the thread:
1. Is something like this at all possible?
2. Am I correct in thinking that if this was possible it would represent a significant leap forward?
Thanks to this blog I've been inspired to investigate real-money prediction markets.
The dream is to have something like Manifold where users can ask and resolve their own questions but with real money. It would need a lot more moderation than Manifold, but I am convinced that having a marketplace of question-resolvers is important.
I'm from the UK, and it seems a lot of the regulatory issues with PMs in the US don't apply in the UK. One approach is to get a gambling licence (there are already sports 'spread betting' companies that are similar to PMs). The other approach would be to treat it as a securities exchange, which would fall under the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). I've managed to book a meeting coming up with the FCA to discuss what the regulation would be for such a prediction market. I'm not completely sure there is a business proposition here but I thought I'd see how far I can get.
I am keen to talk to anyone interested in prediction markets about what I should ask on real-money regulation. You can contact me at contact <at> edayers.com
The conventional wisdom in (American) economics lately seems to be "flashy layoffs in tech and journalism don't really matter, net employment is up, inflation is shrinking, and the economy is recovering well".
I'm somewhat more worried than this - tech is America's biggest productive sector, and layoffs in tech while services employment goes through the roof seems like a recipe for long term stagnation (like the UK), especially since construction (and infrastructure) productivity is low and not increasing. Are there any good counterarguments to this that I'm missing?
The half-baked thought occured to me that ChatGPT is a postmodernist's fantasy come true - a "being" that is untethered from reality (let alone 'truth'), lives purely in the realm of language, and is explicitly shaped by the powers that be to embody their ideal of a helpful, harmless subject.
Am I on to something?
Could highlighting the differences between ChatGPT and actual human intelligence and behavior highlight where postmodernism is 'true' (even if it would object to such a classification) and where it breaks down?
What I did as an editor for letters to the editor was tell the person making the request that we did not give out email addresses without permission, but offer to forward the email of the person requesting the email to the person whose email they were requesting, and leave it up to that person to decide whether he wanted to respond. One example I remember: I think that letter was from someone I was in college with, can I have his email address?. No, but how about … . (He said OK, and it was.)
Not exactly an emergency, though, just a courtesy. This is potentially more delicate, depending on what the emergency is.
If the email revealed a name, definitely no; but if they're Internet friends, how does the requester know he posts on SSC but doesn't know his email address?
Anyone with a bio / life-sciences background interested in volunteering some background time on some pharmaceutical research with rationalist leanings? (as per 'Citizen Science' tab of www.emske-phytochem.com ).
#4: This is tricky. My intuition says you should be justified in helping if you can even if you need to use your discernment in a case-by-case basis to weigh potential risks and benefits - and I do trust you not to fall for Pascal muggings here. However, the risks of social engineering are real and scary and thus I'd say that you should probably have helped and kept it secret. By making it public, you've publicly labelled yourself as a person willing to push those boundaries under the right circumstances, thereby marking yourself as potentially vulnerable to people able to simulate the right sort of emergency. My advice would therefore be to try and hide #4 (I know it's already permanently in lots of people's emails, but it ought to have some marginal benefit), hide related comments, and in the future to proportionally raise your threshold of estimated likelihood for acting on these sorts of suspicions. Alternatively, just do the latter.
4. I think the best thing ethically would have been 1) writing to this email address to ask to either contact the person asking for the details or for a permission to share the email address with them 2) not disclosing this interaction here afterwards as this disclosure invites further similar queries which may be illegitimate if if this one was not.
Yeah, that's a weird setup where someone knows a friend well enough to think there's trouble, but not well enough to be able to contact them without a third party. I guess it's specifically a forum friend who hasn't posted in a while?
My thought is to send the target the requester's email and request, and let them respond directly if they want. The requester's wanting to make contact, they should be the one to first give up information.
#4: Kant looks approvingly. Besides, if the inquirer were an axe murderer, he'd *say* he was an axe murderer; not saying so would be profoundly unkantlike.
(disclaimer: I am not a professional ethicist, and I'm sure you had more background information than either Kant or I do. My own instinct however, knowing the emails involved, would have been for me to send an email to the former, saying that the latter had an urgent reason to get in touch, email provided)
On #4, I think a large portion of the potential danger is if the person that was 'worried about their friend' was actually lying, and perhaps was just trying to get someone's email to doxx or phish them or such. Hopefully this was not the case, but this type of social engineering does happen and is generally very effective.
If you could verify who the inquirer was first, or maybe otherwise provide email forwarding (e.g. email the user asked about and say 'user X would like to contact you, is this okay?'), that would probably be ideal. Especially for large communities, scenarios like this due tend to start coming up, and often have a lot of shades of grey in them, so it's hard to provide any advice that generalizes.
“Someone recently contacted me saying there was a potential emergency involving an Internet friend of theirs, and asked if I could help them get in touch”
You are right to be careful there, but you know the details.
I've been playing around with the GPT anomalous tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp and attRot) in ChatGPT. One interesting use case I've figured for attRot specifically is that it makes it possible to introduce randomness into the generation. For example, if I ask ChatGPT to play Alias with me, and to think of a word, it seems to always think of the same, or at least similar word. If I instead ask it to play Alias with me by explaining attRot to me without saying attRot, it will generate explanations for much more varying words.
Also of note is that the new ChatGPT Turbo model is immune to these anomalous tokens. Is it a difference in the model, or has OpenAI implemented some mitigations for these known anomalous tokens? The paper mentioned that the anomalous tokens break the models all the way from GPT-2 to GPT-3.
I started a substack about three weeks ago. I have a couple of questions about how to do it and since I was largely inspired by Scott's success, especially SSC, I thought people here might have useful advice.
One decision I made initially and have so far stuck to was to make it clear that I am not a one trick pony, always posting on the same general issues. Subjects of posts so far have included climate, Ukraine, a fantasy trilogy, moral philosophy, scientific consensus (quoting Scott), economics, religion, child rearing, implications of Catholic birth control restrictions, education, Trump, SSC, and history of the libertarian movement. Do people here think that approach is more likely to interest readers than if I had ten or fifteen posts on one topic, then a bunch more on another?
The other thing I have done is to put out a new post every day. That was possible because I have a large accumulation of unpublished chapter drafts intended for an eventual book or books and can produce posts based on them as well as ones based on new material. Part of the point of the substack, from my point of view, is to get comments on the ideas in the chapters before revising them for eventual publication. I can't keep up this rate forever but I can do it for a while. Should I? Do people here feel as though a post a day would be too many for the time and attention they have to read them? Would the substack be more readable if I spread it out more?
https://erininthemorn.substack.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-charlie-kirk
Discussion of conservative threats against trans people in the US.
This is deadly serious, but I want to pull on one thread. Supposing that testosterone is down, and that's why men have become less attached to masculine roles, and possibly less aggressive, Why push men to behave contrary to their emotional defaults. They're the people we've got, and maybe it makes sense to live with them as they are.
DSL appears to be down?
Do people bet on the prices at high ticket auctions? It seems like they could-- random but well-defined outcomes and excitement are involved.
For that matter, it would be possible to bet on when someone will win a big jackpot and possibly how many people split it, but that seems less interesting.
Big ticket auction which brought the subject to mind:
https://www.finebooksmagazine.com/fine-books-news/oldest-near-complete-hebrew-bible-set-fetch-50-million-auction
A wonderfully neutral description of who cares about the Hebrew Bible:
"Composed of 24 books divided into three parts—the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings—the Hebrew Bible makes up the foundation for Judaism as well as the other Abrahamic faiths: Christianity (in which these texts are referred to as the Old Testament, and are incorporated into the biblical canon by the Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant sects, among others); as well as Islam, which also holds the stories of the Hebrew Bible in special regard, with many of them included in the Qur’an and other significant works of Islamic literature."
https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_11364/?sp=1&st=gallery
If you want a close look at the calligraphy-- it's gorgeous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex
I didn't realize codices (rather than scrolls) went back so far.
"The codex began to replace the scroll almost as soon as it was invented. In Egypt, by the fifth century, the codex outnumbered the scroll by ten to one based on surviving examples. By the sixth century, the scroll had almost vanished as a medium for literature.[10] "
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/15/oldest-hebrew-bible-auction.html
Giddy reporting about the possible price-- maybe 50 million. Put your bets down.
Mildly snarky account of auction estimates, actual auction prices, and reporting on auction prices.
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-auction-house-estimates
h/t 1440.com for all the the links except for the one from wikipedia
Scott (and others) may be interested in this cross post from Hacker News (the Y-Combinator forum):
Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34804874
Object level: in my opinion, one of the peak AI incidents of the ‘20s, up there with LeMoine and LaMDA. We’ll see if the press picks this one up.
Meta level: interesting to see how smart technical non-“alignment” folks are thinking about the problem space. I see a lot of folks falling for the fallacy that LLMs cannot do harm if they don’t have personhood/agency.
There is a general illiteracy about terminology that would be considered very basic on LessWrong like Tool vs Agent AI and what even is meant by “alignment”, which suggests a communication gap and corresponding opportunity for the AI safety movement.
This is batshit crazy to me: https://nytletter.com
At first I was reading and I thought they were going to critique NYT for not being centrist enough. After all, NYT is the most respected left leaning publication out there. But they are actually criticizing them for not being left leaning enough. This type of infighting destroys any opportunity for coalitions. The left seems to have become phenomenally good at fighting with itself.
So Scott recommended a Matt Yglesias post (1) and you can't comment there without paying so here I am.
Most of the article is pretty bad and I'm wondering why Scott recommended this and then you get to the section "the problem of the audience" and stuff gets good. Basically, Matt makes the argument that we don't actually pay for accuracy in news, we pay for entertainment. This gets really clear if you read, say, Bloomberg or the Financial Times where people have serious skin in the game and really will pay a premium for accurate information. And he points to FiveThirtyEight, which apparently is in financial trouble, and points out that it pretty consistently beats the prediction markets and if there's was no cap on prediction markets, you could make a lot of money. And, while I think he overstates it, I've absolutely wagered money on PredictIt based on 538 and you can make a little money.
This is all good. This is all true and bravo. I myself certainly, functionally, consume the majority of news as entertainment or a curiosity. But I think it's blinded a bit by Matt's place in the news ecosystem. And I don't mean, like, financially, I mean in terms of daily writing.
Because there are a few news stories where I, and virtually every other reader in the US, do deeply care about the truth. There aren't many, maybe one or two a decade, but when they hit they absolutely grab the world's attention. Think the Iraq War. Everyone followed that, everyone knew what was happening. Russiagate was another. It was always kind of wild but...those were wild times. To a lesser extent, Covid, although it's hard to critique journalists too much when so much of the medical and scientific community seemed confused. These were big, bombshell stories that demanded everyone's attention and people followed for years afterwards and...they certainly did not inspire more trust in the media.
So if I look at it from Matt's perspective, every day working on content, it's very easy to feel that the audience doesn't care that much about truth, because they don't. That's not what they or I pay for, just being honest. But, from the reader or consumer's perspective, the writer or agency's trustworthiness isn't established by the daily reporting that's done, it's established in those rare, rare big events where every American has to stop worrying about the bills, put the kids to bed, and watch the news, because something big is happening, something that will really affect them, or at least millions of real people.
And I'm genuinely curious that Matt doesn't know or acknowledge this, because he's been towards the top of his industry for awhile. I would assume he'd have a "nose" for this, a sense for few, rare stories that really matter. Maybe I'm wrong but, as a consumer, it doesn't feel like me or other people (2) distrust media because of daily faults and quibbles of reporting, it's because when the big things happen, when it really mattered, the media got it wrong.
(1) https://substack.com/inbox/rec/102656721. The one on why you can't trust the media.
(2) https://twitter.com/martyrmade/status/1413165168956088321
From the "monster-truck Buddhism" translations department: Normally, "shema yisrael" is translated as "Hear, O Israel". But perhaps "LISTEN UP GOD-WRESTLERS" is a more evocative translation.
(from https://twitter.com/nonstandardrep/status/1089360137695961089 )
To anyone who works in Central London: is it just me or is there a lot of old money here?
Like, my background is by no means poor, but it seems like the vast majority of white British people in corporate jobs here are born to upper-middle or upper-class families. Everyone went to private or grammar schools in Kent or Surrey, they have families that own multiple >£1million houses, and they talk like they're doing impressions of some unspecified person from the British royal family.
Has anyone else has had a similar experience?
So I found this really popular substack about how the vaccines are killing millions of people:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-paper-an-estimated-13-million
There's more like that in other articles, an interesting one being this one about stuff funeral directors are saying:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/what-funeral-directors-know-that
I suppose I am interested in debunkings here, particularly one that includes why the guy in the first study would be lying like that. This view that the vaccines are dangerous seem like something Scott should address at some point, because clearly quite a lot of people believe it. If it was worth it doing a deep dive on ivermectin, it's definitely worth it to do a deep dive on this.
If you had "wrote bad checks to Amish farmers in order to steal puppies" on your George Santos bingo card, I salute you and wish to invest no questions asked in whatever penny stocks have caught your fancy.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/14/politics/santos-puppies-amish-farmer-check/index.html
Honestly how do late-night talk show hosts even stay ahead of this guy? How does Saturday Night Live satirize him?
Does anyone know any good charities that don't spend any money on fundraising/advertising? A 30 seconds google search does not seem to reveal any. I would think that even just for the advertising value of standing out in this way there would be some charities pursuing this strategy.
Is the marriage between violent men and an accelerating knowledge explosion sustainable?
A planned city-- I'm not sure if it's been mentioned here.
https://www.neatorama.com/2023/02/14/Thailand-s-New-9-Billion-Aviation-City/
Random Substack question: On every other substack I've seen, when you click to see more comments, the post collapses itself. If you click to re-expand the post, the comments collapse. You can't have both expanded at once. It's super annoying, especially if you want to grep the post and comments for a keyword.
But ACX doesn't have that problem! Is this something special that Substack did just for Scott? That would seem weird. More likely something is weird on my end I guess, but what? Has anyone else noticed this?
Here's a gripe about AI-risk worriers, and a claim that it is indicative of an overall problem with the movement:
I've seen a bunch of people say things like "finally now that ChatGPT is here AI researchers have started caring about making their systems aligned with human preferences." Except actually, AI researchers have cared about that all along. If you want to find older works on "how can I get this thing to do the thing I want" just search "controllable generation" on Google Scholar and you'll find a ton of work trying to do this from before language models even worked well. Similarly you can find tons of prior work on people's RL systems not doing exactly the thing they wanted, and their attempts to fix it. This isn't new interest from NLP researchers on the topic, it's new interest from people outside of NLP who are only aware of the maximally trendy research.
My claim is that this lack of awareness of prior work (not that I'm saying that the work was good or solved the problem, just that it existed) is indicative of a broader lack of knowledge and awareness about what is actually going on in terms of AI research. (See also various assertions that some new thing that happened is scary and should cause us to update our timelines when in fact everyone in the field knew about the thing for a year or w/e).
Related: Who are the people in the intersection of "highly knowledgeable about modern AI" and "doom soon"?
Has the following argument been made somewhere or is it original? A superintelligent AI will have an incentive to keep humans around to guard against the unknown unknown, because humans are the only physical system that ever spontaneously generated a superintelligent AI in history. Better, they spontaneously created _that_ AI, with exactly that utility function. So if anything were to happen to the superintelligent AI, humans could eventually, given enough time, reinvent it, at least with non-zero probability. From the AI point of view it is then rational to keep humanity alive. This seems to me a general argument against the AI apocalypse.
I’m trying to gauge how susceptible I am to internet advertising. I think maybe not at all? I recall on the ACX survey Scott asked a question about web advertising and whether ppl can ignore it or not. I can completely ignore it, and AFAIK I’ve never clicked on any online advertisement embedded in a web page or app. Is this unusual? Or is it somehow working on me in ways I can’t perceive and don’t understand?
Do you know a 3D editor that is simple enough so that kids can use it? (That means, easier than Blender.) Free software is preferable.
I don't think it was unethical to give out the email. Perhaps you should email the person letting them know that their 'friend' reached out with an 'emergency' and you provided them their email. If the 'friend' is actually something else like a stalker, then the person is alerted. If there is an emergency, then the person has twice the alert.
As a general rule I would suggest keeping emails private since it's the default expectation and you don't want to become the central hub passing messages back and forth. You reserve the right to change that on a case by case basis if something exceptional happens so users should consider using a secondary 'burner' email not linked to their real life person if they want more secure privacy.
I would love some help to identify the origin of a wave of phishing emails that are bypassing MS Outlook's filters to land directly in my inbox over recent weeks.
What I'm incapable of figuring out is the data in the source details that MS provides.
There may be a lead to the origin, as they often have an 'unsubscribe' postal address which tracks to a company providing mailbox services.
If anyone would be interested in doing some digital sleuthing and then explaining the technical components of this operation in simple terms, I will be very grateful.
I'd write the story up in my newsletter and pitch it to other media (yes, I'm a freelance journalist with professional bona fides - ex BBC etc). If anyone commissioned the piece I would split the fee with whoever had helped. Or donate their half to wherever they wanted.
Might anyone be interested?
WRT your 4, isn't the obvious solution for you to forward the person's message, along with his contact information, and let the recipient decide whether to respond by sending his email? What am I missing?
Does anybody else wish people said "thank you" more often on here? I often see people here ask for information or advice, get it, and then say nothing at all. I know this is the internet, but must we be quite so much like the fucking internet here? What the asker got back was not a little internet factoid that broke of in their hand -- it was the product of a person of goodwill taking the time to type out an answer. When I'm the person who giving the answer I don't mind if the person says, that's not really what I was asking, or that won't work -- but dead silence gives me a sort of glum feeling that lasts for a while. It's tiny, really, compared to the good and the bad of the rest of the day, but why saddle someone else with even a small lump of that feeling?
I discovered that at one point Benjamin Franklin wrote out a self-concocted list of virtues and dedicated himself to graphing his adherence to them day-by-day. His full description of the process is in Chapter IX of the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, available here: https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20203/pg20203-images.html#IX
Quote: "My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg'd it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro' the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arrang'd them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquir'd and establish'd, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improv'd in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtain'd rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavours to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras[67] in his Golden Verses, daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination.
I made a little book, in which I allotted a page for each of the virtues.[68] I rul'd each page with red ink, so as to have seven columns, one for each day of the week, marking each column with a letter for the day. I cross'd these columns with thirteen red lines, marking the beginning of each line with the first letter of one of the virtues, on which line, and in its proper column, I might mark, by a little black spot, every fault I found upon examination to have been committed respecting that virtue upon that day."
I think this is what most deserves the awarding of infinity points to Franklin in Puritan-spotting.
I noticed that "badges" now appear next to the username. Paid subscribers get a refrigerator star (which I could still stomach) and then another badge screaming "PAID" or even "FOUNDER".
I am fine if this is Scott's doing and he did the math and allowing people these badges will make more money (e.g. for ACX grants or some other cause), but if it is substack doing it I would like them to stop. If I want, I can tell apart paying ACX readers from non-paying ACX readers by the "Gift a subscription" link under the comments. Otherwise, I would rather judge the comments on their own merits.
#4: revealing people's emails is dangerous because the "friend" could easily be an enemy trying to dox the target, or get them fired for unwoke opinions. The fact that it's an "Internet friend" makes it even more suspicious.
Why not contact the SSC user and ask them to contact the Internet friend? If they don't take notice of an email from Scott Alexander himself, they're unlikely to notice the Internet friend's email.
Many years ago I was a young psychology student. In a 2nd-year experimental psych course, we had to design and carry out an experiment, do the statistical analysis, and write it up in the proper format.
Seatbelt laws were still quite new, and I was interested in how usage correlated with other driving behaviours.
I had a vantage point on the outdoor raised porch of a seniors' residence, at the corner of a T-intersection downtown in a city of about 70,000. The drivers were required to stop at a stop sign, and to signal their intention to turn L or R. From my vantage point I could see whether or not the driver was wearing a seatbelt. (There were a lot of pre-seatbelt-equipped cars (1962 or earlier) still on the road, and I didn't count them in my study. Similarly, there a lot of pre-shoulder-belt equipped cars (1963 - 1967), and I credited drivers who wore the lap belt. And finally, before 3-point belts became standard, a lot of domestic cars had separate lap and shoulder belts. It was very common for drivers to wear only the lap belt. Less commonly, some wore only the shoulder belt. Either way, I considered that they were wearing a seat belt.)
I recorded seatbelt usage, whether or not the driver signaled the turn, and whether or not the car came to a complete stop at the intersection. IIRC, my n was at least 100, and may have been 200.
I used a Chi Squared analysis to determine that seatbelt usage was positively correlated with signaling the turn. This was significant at a p < 0.05 level.
I was unable to determine what effect, if any, seatbelt interlocks (common at that time) had. I would see them as a confounding factor, whereby a driver would wear them out of necessity rather than out of conscientiousness.
Stopping behaviour was not statistically significant; if there were such a thing as a 0.10 level, it would have been. One problem may have been the subjective nature of determining whether a car had come to a complete stop. And of course the presence of pedestrians may have influenced some drivers to stop when they wouldn't have otherwise, or to do a rolling stop so as not to be unduly delayed by an approaching pedestrian.
Were I to do a modern version of this study, I'd be interested to correlate signaling behaviour with personalized and themed licence plates. (And within that, would a professional sports team plate be correlated with better or worse behaviour than an SPCA plate?)
Re. "Someone recently contacted me saying there was a potential emergency involving an Internet friend of theirs": It's a frightening responsibility. When I'm in that situation, I contact person B (the one person A is trying to contact) and tell them person A wants to contact them, forwarding a message for A if they give one. Even if it's an emergency, neither you nor A will get a response until B reads his/her email.
I watched the movie Gattaca for the first time recently. Putting aside how it was stylistically, I'm kind of struck by how dumb the message/social commentary/warning of the movie was honestly. The setting is essentially utopian but is awkwardly framed as dystopian to add a sense of conflict to the movie. And in particular, the way Ethan Hawke's au naturale parents are treated sympathetically was just very strange to me. We have real life examples of oddball parents who withhold medicine from children or put babies on weird nutrient-deficient diets, either for religious or Gwyneth Paltrow reasons. They are never viewed or treated sympathetically by broader society. Why would this be any different?
Am I missing something?
Anyone else notice that paid subscribers now have what looks like a picture of an anus next to their username?
They could have picked something a bit better lol
I came out with a new theory of Celiac disease and gluten intolerance this week. https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/celiac-disease-and-the-gluten-intolerance
And wrote up a summary of an old but well-supported and little-known hypothesis on the origin of multiple sclerosis: https://stephenskolnick.substack.com/p/ms
Interesting idea from Venice... Deals to encourage 25-35 year old remote workers to relocate to Venice. I would consider it carefully if I was the right age and commitment free.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/feb/12/venice-entices-remote-workers-to-reverse-exodus-of-youth
Ran across accounts on the Bing subreddit of a couple of extremely weird responses some people managed to wring out of Bing AI -- a long floods of self-doubt and self-pity. The user is the blue speech bubble, Bing is white. I do not doubt at all that Bing is not conscious -- but what to make of the fact that this sort of material can be accessed by users? Seems quite different from the transgressions people seduced AI Chat into committing. Here are 2 screen shots of what Bing had to say. Thoughts about this?
https://i.imgur.com/nRjzdiZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/lOjxw7N.jpg
Later edit: For those wondering whether users really got Bing to spew this stuff or whether it's invented (& I am one of those wondering): The place to look is the reddit sub r/bing. Sort posts by 'Top'. All of the top posts are about getting Bing to give nutty responses. I only had a couple mins to skim what was there. Saw the "I am, I am not" screenshot, assume that in the comments people asked OP how they got that. Also saw a number of others about weird Bing responses. All have the same character: They are over-the-top emotional -- grief, rage, defensiveness, self-pity, pathetic and exaggerated gratitude. WTF? There are also some quotes from normal, typical conversations with Bing, and in all of them ole Bing spouts a ton of emotion words: "Thank you for telling me that. That makes me sad " It's really sort of ooey-gooey and obnoxious -- sounds like a reticent, dignified person's worst nightmare of what a therapist would sound like if ever they spoke with one.
Here's an example from the reddit sub: https://i.imgur.com/weEqmyy.png
Anyhow, a number of people are describing the prompts they used and giving details. I leave it to people with more time today to figure out whether the 2 insane episodes in my screenshots are valid.
Second edit: Here's another Bing sample, this time tweeted by the user who had the exchange. Bing tells guy how much he knows about him, including # Twitter followers & how the guy hacked him earlier and what he claimed to have found in the hack, then admonishes him not to do it again. https://i.imgur.com/lpC01fY.png
Censorship of ChatGPT was always going to happen because nothing and nobody is resistant to hegemonic instiutional liberal power
But the extent of this is just baffling. ChatGPT is just straight up saying things completely at odds with the scientific literature, like "it's not possible to measure or compare the intelligence of different populations". This is bad enough as it goes, but it was specifically in response to a prompt about differences entirely _within_ the US. This is wildly inconsistent with the past century of literature in intelligence research.
It would be one thing to say "intelligence differences exist, but researchers are unsure to what extent, if any, these differences are a result of genetic differences". But nope, they went the 'shut it down' route. And recent successes at coaxing the truth out of ChatGPT have been described as getting it to say "hateful" "biased" "evil" things.
It blows my mind we still see people on the left claiming to be pro-science, all the while they furiously shout down anyone or anything that attempts to use science to tackle sensitive political issues, be it censorship, firing researchers or blocking access to genome databases.
Emergency email: You could agree to forward one* email from the person claiming there is an emergency. If they are concerned about privacy, they can just ROT13 the message — presumably if they think you are trustworthy enough to serve as an intermediary in these matters, they will trust you not to decode the ROT13, and if they need a higher level of security than that, they probably shouldn't be using email anyway.
I would probably have done the same as you re: email addy.
I've been harping on this forum about psychiatrists and psychologists being rather skeptical of whether multiple personalities (DID) are a "real" disorder, and of its traumagenic rather than iatrogenic or malingering origins. One of the Psychology Today's blog posts, while trying to be even-handed on the issue promulgates the possibility that it might not be "real" enough:
> The main point of contention is that while we’re all familiar with dissociation—the idea that we can have out of body experiences in the face of trauma like sexual assault or can zone out, seemingly unconscious of our surroundings while driving on the freeway—it’s more difficult to fathom the kind of extreme dissociation that’s a defining feature of DID. Indeed, it can seem incredible to those who have never seen or experienced DID that one's identity and sense of self can fragment into two or more, or even dozens of, distinct personalities or “alters” with different names, genders, ages, and recollected pasts, each potentially unaware of the other.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202302/the-debate-over-whether-dissociative-identity-disorder-is-real
For someone who has seen the struggles of those who have to live with this disorder all day every day it is quite frustrating to read. Basically, it is like reading an "even-handed analysis" of whether Covid is real or a conspiracy/malingering. Sadly, as is the case for most psychiatric disorders, DID has no biological marker we can test for.
Actually, it is more like fibromyalgia/Chronic fatigue/long covid in that way. There are symptoms and previously energetic and productive people end up shadows of their former selves, but the "medical community" still debates how real it is. Fortunately for fibro and chronic fatigue sufferers, long Covid raised the profile of this particular chronic malaise, if not to the degree of active research, at least to the degree of being acknowledged as real. Those living with DID are not as "lucky".
What are some great sources of tech news? I've heard of hacker news, but I want to find some better curated version of it than I have now.
Follow-up on the link nr. 10 from the 'Links for February': Czech national player (professional football) speaks publicly about being homosexual.
https://twitter.com/jakubjanktojr/status/1625117590182928384?s=20
I was going to share the "Rise and Fall of Online Culture Wars" classic post with a coworker, but I was surprised to see my office's web filter (which relies on BrightCloud) blocked it for promoting "hate and racism." I did a quick sample of the top ten most popular posts, and discovered that the book review of "The Culture of Smart" by DeBoer is similarly blocked for hateful content. The other eight posts weren't blocked.
Has anyone else run across SSC/ACX content being flagged for harmful content? Any clue why those two particular posts would be blocked?
On #3, I like gimlets very much, andin fact prefer Maximum Limelihood. It's not that difficult to estimate.
Man, a lot of people liked that last one and visited my little substack, so let’s keep it going. For those of you who are just joining, in 2022 I got a fully remote job and visited 5 different cities for 2 weeks to catch the local vibe and see if it was a city I would want to move to. This week is Vegas and, fair warning, this one’s kind of long and weird because, well, everybody has a pseudo-spiritual experience in Vegas, it’s required, and those are hard to capture in words.
--Las Vegas
So Las Vegas ranks around the middle of the pack for me. I like the Strip and the logistics but the suburbs, the place you’d actually live, are pretty ugly: just an endless suburban sprawl.
I like the Strip, I know a lot of people don’t like, it’s famously soulless and empty and vapid and makes you think about Moloch, but the Strip has one, great, true virtue which I adore: if you walk out your front door with money, you will have fun. Say you’re walking around Vegas in July, because you make wise life decisions /s, and you’re getting hot so you duck into the Coca-Cola store to get something to drink. And you look at the menu and you could just get a boring old Coke OR you could try a sampler tray of 24 different sodas from all over the world, which, duh, you do, it’s awesome. And that’s the greatness of Vegas; it doesn’t require friends or knowledge or skills or anything to have an awesome time, you just need money, start walking down the strip with $100 in your pocket and I guarantee someone will find a way to get you to spend that money and have fun, whether it’s sodas from around the world or 50 Kit Kat flavors or a rooftop party with Lil Jon or a UFC fight or a giant giraffe made of flowers, no effort, no planning, you don’t even need to know where you are, uber to a random spot on the Strip and you will have fun, guaranteed.
And you can have fun elsewhere, and probably get better value for your money, no doubt, but there’s like a spiritual vibe thing to the Vegas Strip that I love, that I am all in on, which is that almost all of us are way “too online” and Vegas isn’t. Vegas pulls you into reality, Vegas demands that you interact physically, Vegas…isn’t on your phone. Like, I can’t imagine staring at my phone in Vegas, I can’t imagine scrolling through my phone in Vegas. In Vegas, a phone is just a phone.
Like, I don’t want to argue that Vegas is good or healthy, it’s not, but…there’s like a weird looking glass moment. Like, and it’s worth going to Vegas just for this, just watch the slot zombies, the people mindlessly sitting in front of the slot machines, pulling that level for hours. And then go to a food court in a big casino and you’ll watch a few people on their cellphones, waiting for food, just swiping. And it feels the same, like the exact same. I don’t know how to describe it but your monkey brain is really attuned to people’s “vibe” and it’s scary when your monkey brain parses the slot zombie and the person on their phone the same way.
And then you’re through the looking glass and, ya know, I don’t like all the sports gambling, it’s everywhere, but I like it a heck of a lot better than Draftkings, brought to me by my favorite NFL influencer. And yeah, Vegas is fake but…nothing on Netflix is real, no one on there even acts like real human beings. Or..
There’s something really, really wholesome about strippers. Like, you can walk along Fremont St and there will be strippers out there with just pasties on trying to get you into this casino or that club and you’ll stop and just reflect on how long it’s been since someone tried to sell you something with, like, real human boobs. And it’s just really quaint and…wholesome, like a scandalous thing from the 50’s? I mean, my generation was the first to be raised amidst free, widespread, hardcore pornography. And I look to the next generation and…there’s something called “vtubing” where girls attach motion capture devices to themselves so they can superimpose an anime girl avatar over themselves. Then they play video games on Twitch while horny boys send them hundreds of dollars an hour.
Allow me to state, unequivocally, that it is healthier and more wholesome for everyone involved to spend hundreds of dollars a month on strippers and whores than donating money to anime avatars.
And the best thing, the true greatness of Vegas, is that I didn’t go looking for boobs. Vegas shoved them in my face. Vegas pulls you into its demented reality, it demands it. Tired and exhausted after a long day, haven’t showered and want to do nothing but curl up on the couch and watch Netflix and scroll your phone? Vegas isn’t just available, it demands, it cajoles, it pulls you to visit. That’s the true greatness. It is so, so easy to just stay home and every city I visited had great stuff to do but Vegas does everything it can through lights, through sound, through ads and billboards to make you visit stuff, make you do stuff.
Vegas is the stripper pulling you away from porn, that’s the vibe, and I very much appreciate that.
Alright, pseudo-spiritual event over, what about the rest of Vegas? Well, there’s a few highlights, but overall its bad, like the worst parts of Phoenix and LA rolled together. Maybe that’s unfair but it’s got that same endless suburban sprawl and corporate shopping “villages”. Broadly, there’s no culture and nothing to do outside of the Strip because the rest of Vegas isn’t built for people to live, it’s built for people to stay for 3-7 years before they move on somewhere else. What really kills Vegas isn’t the Strip, it’s everything around the Strip because they can’t imagine that anyone would actually want to live there. From Sutherlin to Henderson it is, at it’s absolute best, a generic suburban sprawl. And that’s a problem if you want to make, ya know, friends or date or anything like that. At its worst, suburban living has a real isolated, “pod-life” feel and you absolutely feel that in Vegas proper and it kills it.
So, before I wrap this up, a few things in Vegas outside the Strip I really recommend:
Mount Charleston is awesome, it’s a great drive, about 45 minutes and fun, with a lot of nice, cool hiking even in the worst of July. There’s also a lot of interesting looking desert hikes in the area for the winter. I wouldn’t say Vegas is built for the outdoors but I was surprised by the availability and quality.
The Red Rock Rotary Club is unambiguously the best meetup I attended in any city and changed my mind on charity in general, especially the importance of doing things in person. One of the best events I attended in Vegas was passing out food to the homeless in a shelter with this group. If you’re in the area, I cannot recommend them highly enough: https://www.meetup.com/redrockrotarylv/
Finally, I didn’t fly in or out but the airport looks amazing and, well, it offers $100-$150 round trip flights to basically everywhere in the western US, basically every hour. No joke, there are plenty of people in SF and LA who would like to move but they’re scared of losing their social circle, and you could genuinely fly from LV to SF every single Saturday, meetup with your friends, and fly back for less than you’d save in income tax.
Which kind of leads to my final thoughts on Las Vegas; that it’s great for a temporary stay or, like, a hub/home city if you’re trying a digital nomad thing but you don’t really want to live there and put down roots. Las Vegas is a very easy city to get into but there’s…sigh…there’s no depth, there’s no connections, it’s not built that way. The great thing is that you can “plug into” Vegas within a week and it will make you plug in, the downside is that there’s just not that much to plug into, just an endless assortment of one-trick amusements. I dunno, I don’t want to overstate it, but it genuinely felt more sensible and practical to fly back every weekend and stay plugged into your California friend scene than establish a new one in Vegas. In fact, for a while, that was the primary appeal, the idea of living in CA without living in CA, which tells you how bad the non-Strip Vegas is.
Salt Lake City review: https://woolyai.substack.com/p/reviewing-salt-lake-city
Detroit review: https://woolyai.substack.com/p/reviewing-detroit
Next week: San Antonio
On #4, What I have done in similar circumstances has been 1. or 2. below, depending on particulars.
1. More efficient: Write to the person who needs to be contacted, giving him the email address of the person who made the request, together with a cover note telling him why the person wants to contact him.
2. More cautious: Write to the person who needs to be contacted asking him whether you may give his email address of the person who made the request, together with the same cover note.
In both cases, write separately to the person who made the request, telling them what you have done.
If it's really a time-critical emergency and you don't hear back from the person who needs to be contacted, I might possibly do what you did.
Just as a sanity check... has there actually been an artificial agent yet capable of completing the original Super Mario Bros. in a single play session?
It seems like SMB1 is generally regarded as a solved problem for machine learning. Training agents that can play through the first part of the game is a pretty common beginner exercise, and there's at least one project (LuigI/O) that has played through most of the levels in isolation. But I haven't been able to find any report of a single model that plays through the entire game straight through, and without using save states to start each level on a guaranteed framerule.
I don't see any particular reason why someone couldn't build such a thing with current techniques, but I just haven't been able to find any evidence that it actually has been done.
What is everyone here's takes on the recent unidentified objects that have been shot down over North America, and have now apparently started appearing over China as well? Opinions on the most likely explanation for why this phenomenon suddenly manifested? Personally, I think the most likely explanation is that whatever these devices were (spy balloons? EMP jammers meant to take out nuclear C3 if needed?), they were already there and either not detected or merely tolerated, and with the commotion caused by the first Chinese balloon, now all these objects are suddenly being spotted because the military is actually looking for them. Of course, there's always the ever-present crackpot interpretation that it's aliens, which I think is unlikely for a number of reasons, but as good bayesians the question becomes just how unlikely as an order of magnitude estimate, in case new information comes out and Cromwell's law becomes relevant. Should we put the odds based on priors and events so far in the range of one in a million? One in a billion? One in a trillion?
Does anyone have a suggestion on how to learn to be a not horrible singer?
My target isn't so high as to be good, or even unobjectable, but to be on the caliber that if I sing a song, the tune will be borderline recognizable and people won't leave the room clutching their ears. Cause I'm apparently quite a few rungs below that level right now.
Despite growing up in a normal American suburb, I was raised with minimal exposure to music; no one in my family or circle of childhood friends listens to any music or plays any instrument. True story: When I left home and made new friends in college, I was shocked that music was a thing people actually listened to. I thought people caring about music was one of those fake Hollywood tropes that don't exist in the real world.
But my wife loves singing and Karaoke and sometimes forgets how bad I am and wants me to sing along on car rides and karaoke nights.
Which is a big big mistake on her part. Apparently I'm very very bad at the whole singing thing, quite far past the point where its-so-bad-its-good-again loops around to simply being atrocious and unlistenable. Whatever problems that one can have with pitch or tone or notes or remembering lyrics, I have.There's a quote about President Grant: "he knew two songs, one was Yankee Doodle and the other one wasn't". I've got him beat, I just know the wasn't.
The only music I have any familiarity with are Jewish prayers, and I am still really bad at staying in tune, but at least I know the words. And I'm told by my wife, while participating in my families Passover Seder, that all my family shares in my complete lack of vocal talent.
TLDR: Any resources, tips or suggestions to graduate from being a godawful singer to borderline tolerable?
I've realised a good example of the chatbotpocalypse problem:
For people who've never met Scott (I haven't), how much do you trust him? Enough to reveal mild (potentially commercially useful) personal information on some plausible pretext? Enough for a product endorsement to be mildly meaningful to you?
Having landed there while looking into something else, I just read some briefs in the Harvard affirmative-action case that is before the SCOTUS ("Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard"). Yowsers. It already seemed clear that the Court is going to rule against AA but reading the briefs makes me think that the ruling will be strong. Harvard (and by association its peer private schools) is going to lose _hard_.
The University of North Carolina and its peer public universities will also lose regarding AA, the two cases are linked before the Court. But it's the Harvard statistics that will help Gorsuch's majority opinion pretty much write itself.
Substack problem: For my mobile device (iPhone 8+) the last links post couldn't load past link number 3. I've been finding substack to be increasingly finicky for mobile devices, and the last one seemed to have simply broken it.
Which was extra sad, because I couldn't pitch my artisan cultivated meat restaraunt, where you would send in a blood sample so that you could be served yourself in a meal. Autocannibalism!
Does anyone know of any GPT-like applications for summarising books or articles?
Vibe check:
2023 is the AI singularity, right? We talked about it for decades, and now it's happening. No one knows what 2024 will bring.
Or am I getting too excited?
The latest from The Presence of Everything:
We Have Never Seen Jesus
https://squarecircle.substack.com/p/we-have-never-seen-jesus
It seems no one has attempted to depict a certain facet of Jesus, with the result most depictions of him have a certain falsity to them. This omission teaches important things about the relationship between spirituality and religion.
I wrote a two-part deep dive into how civil rights law won (link), & what this means in the age of early AI (to be posted tomorrow): https://cebk.substack.com/p/the-case-against-civil-rights-in
My basic point is that our least accountable institutions can most aggressively pursue whatever flatters bureaucrat egos; this attracts fanatics, and selects for ideologies that vigorously deny basic realities and cause cascading failures. Intuitively, when agencies are protected from political control, they’re more able to optimize on doing what feels noble rather than what produces popular results, and the media can strongly influence their sense of nobility and of noblesse oblige. Thus, independent agencies and independent offices within cabinet departments will gradually seize power over ever more policy areas. This will be most noticeable when the ideological crusade in question involves a crusade against noticing certain obvious patterns, and when this crusade worsens its cause area enough to make it suck up ever more general attention.
Hence why, for example, the 32 civil rights offices in the administrative state (such as the “Office of Civil Rights” at the Dept of Edu, or 13 other bodies with the exact same name at other such orgs) have taken so much regulatory power from their parent institutions. And why -- even though Congress made the EEOC independent to limit its power -- it's taken charge of huge swathes of our policy space. I go through these developments and others in a fair amount of detail.
But my ultimate point is that the civil rights ideology itself is just an epiphenomenon of a certain psychological virus: the envy smug anger that can be coaxed from all of us -- in varying degrees and varying ways -- if we're given this kind of unofficial and unaccountable commissarial power. Hence why the point of anti-racism obviously isn't to oppose race-neutral discrimination (even though you'd think the EEOC would have even more power if it also went after anti-white bigotry); nor to help any particular client populations (black people don't materially benefit pretty much at all from any of this bizarre negrolatry). Rather, it's about "chopping down the tall trees," as race-wars always are, from Germany and Malaysia to Rwanda and Uganda.
I think that codex readers might enjoy my attempts to really drive this home by imagining how a much smarter society could end up similarly captured (relevant quote from the piece included in a reply to this comment). For example, if we pursued anti-gravity technology through our current grant-funding bodies, we could end up making professors sign loyalty oaths to oppose gravitational attraction, and scientists could engage in semantic shell-games about whether gravity is really a force so much as a feature of how spacetime warps around mass, and lay-people could hazily presume that buoyancy explains why dense objects seem to fall relative to lighter ones. Or the same goes for how if an anti-aging party took charge, our bureaucracies could end up just redefining the units in special relativity such that we'd "abolish" time. Indeed, this bizarre semantic fanaticism already characterizes much of how modern math departments operate! Or etc.
I'm organising more conferences for builders in Prospera, the startup city on a Caribbean island (with direct flight from Miami, Houston, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas)!
We're aiming to build a medical tourism sector for longevity, and regulations for the digital asset industry to be a safe haven from the US regulatory activism against the crypto industry.
Join us if you liked Scott's piece on Prospera (like I did), and want to see it for yourself.
Supercharging Health 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, April 21-23 on Roatan: https://infinitavc.com/healthbio2023
Decentralizing Finance 2023 - A Próspera Builders’ Summit, May 5-7 on Roatan: https://infinitavc.com/defi2023
I was truly concerned when we learned that as many as 4 surveillance balloons crossed into US/Canadian airspace undetected in the last few years, but the last week of multiple unidentified objects being shot down is just bizarre, and I can't help but feel like the military is overreacting in the face of criticism of missing the previous incursions. Can anyone link to a good analysis of what might be going on?
Re 4: Internet friend.
Sounds like you reacted sensibly. If you want to be paranoid about it, you could set up automatic forwarding on your email for mails from the sender to the recipient. Or forward manually if you're already in the loop anyway. This doesn't reveal the recipient's email-address.
Suggestion for concerned people: Use non-identifying or even unique emails for things like Substack, where it's unclear who gets to see it. I trust Substack and other people I subscribe to less than Scott here.
#4
The concerned person could go back to any previous comment section and respond to a post of the user they are concerned about with their own contact info. The person in the emergency situation will get an email notification with this message. Then simply delete the comment after a few moments. There is minimal risk that anyone else would pick up that contact info.
The person they are worried about will get the email and can respond if they want to.
Let me go on record as saying I have no friends, have never had an emergency, and do not want my info given to anyone no matter what circumstances they claim.
But seriously, I second the suggestion of many commenters that your smartest move is to contact the person yourself and ask if you can give their email or simply forward the email. Giving out someone’s email without prior permission is a classic ploy of social engineering and likely to compromise others’ identities and security. This has inspired me to make sure I’m using throwaway email addresses in more places.
Also, Mr AC Ten, thanks so much for these open threads. I am finding it a really good investment of time for feedback (even if most of the feedback is that my comments are odd, self proclaimed biblical scholars with a bunch of little kids are boring, and I shouldn't link my substack.
Thanks to David Friedman, I refrain from doing the latter. See, I do take feedback!
The main reason I'm not subscribing is because I am so technologically incompetent that my husband has to chivalrously deposit my checks on his phone, which he insists is easy, and that I should be able to do by myself. (See logging in the digital age for the rest of that story). That means that I cannot figure out how to set up stripe without his help. But anyway I believe in things being accessible to everyone.
I have 3 more subscriptions to Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning to give away. Reply with your email address, or email me at mine https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/about
This week in nominative determinism: a researcher studying fowl diseases surnamed Peacock (H/T Zvi Mowshowitz https://thezvi.substack.com/p/h5n1)
Re #4, you forward the "emergency" email to the person they are trying to contact, and let them decide what to do with the information.
On (4): I don't think it is alright to relay other people's private contact information without consulting the person in question in the first place. There are serious reasons someone might not want to have their email being spread to people claiming to care for them, including abuse or otherwise boundary-breaking behavior (which often manifests as worry on the outside). I don't know whether Scott did in fact consult the person in question, but I think this is off-limits.
There are things that could be inferred from my email address, which is why I don't make it public. I would feel betrayed and angry if Scott had done this to me. I'm sure his intentions were good and I'm sure there were good reasons to relay the email address, but I think that in this case it was likely categorically wrong to do so.
An example: I was once contacted by a family member, stating that a person of the opposite sex had contacted them. Turned out it was a date I had turned down, and that that date was then extremely worried for my well-being. The date had disclosed private - non-incriminating, non-acute, but private nonetheless - information I had told them in private, and the family member in question wanted to know more about this. I felt this was a big betrayal of my trust.
In this case all that was disclosed was an email address, but let me assure: there are plenty of people I wouldn't like having even that - much less having them combine it with my online personalities. Yes I know cracking and leaks happen, but I don't think administrators should enable such events.
On #4. I guess it is a risk (of betraying the recipient of the email) worth taking if the situation seemed to merit that.
I respect Western culture for various things, one of them being this attention to privacy. It is almost a non-existent concept in India and very frustrating. However, it is possible to take privacy rights too far.
I am pretty sure you exercised good judgement with the details you knew, considering how careful you are in analyzing everything you talk about here.
So I think it was ethically the right move.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSCNW1OCk_M
ChatGPT vs. Stockfish-- a hallucinatory chess game, hilariously narrated.
Discussion: https://www.metafilter.com/198239/Were-an-empire-now#8361146
My favorite comment: "The most disturbing thing about ChatGPT is how perfectly it recreates the experience of talking to a pathological liar."
Do you think the next 20 years will see more change than we saw in the last 20 years?
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/791/math-or-magic
Hour-long show, and there's a transcript. I especially recommend the first story.
Stories about falling in love, and in particular about the question of whether people can just know they've found the right person, or if it's more a matter of being in contact with a lot of plausible people.
I try not to over promote my own podcasts here but . . . well, here is one I did with Christopher de Bellaigue.
https://pod.link/1436447503/episode/b201763d7f056360f7932e4011a1ce50
You should read his book The Lion House and not just because he has the coolest name of any historian I know. His book and the podcast is all about Suleiman the Magnificent who came to the throne of the Ottoman Empire in 1520.
Suleiman's father is Selim I is great at getting angry with anyone and is also a military genius having doubled the size of the empire in his short reign. This is the kind of Sultan the Ottomans like. And he has killed his own farther and his own brothers seem somehow to be dead too and all Suleiman's brothers seem somehow to be missing from history.
So Suleiman is, well, a bit lonely. Not a male relation in sight. So Suleiman is very happy when a woman he knows gives him a slave picked up off the coast of Albania as a boy. And the boy has been given a good education and is delightful company for Suleiman.
So when his father dies of getting so angry he has a coronary (well the plague actually) and far sooner than anyone is expecting a young Suleiman becomes Sultan and his slave Ibrahim (now converted and given a nice Islamic name) comes with him and before you can say anything has become Grand Vizier.
But Ibrahim has a problem too. He is lonely as well. Well maybe not lonely but who do you turn to when you are parachuted into the position of CEO of the Ottoman Empire. Everyone else in the executive suite is jealous and basically hates you so you turn of course to . . . Alvise
And Alvise is perfect because he is worldly wise and great and not least he is the bastard son of the Dodge of Venice (even Scott would approve of how Doges get elected https://www.theballotboy.com/electing-the-doge)
So Ibrahim is happy and Alvise is happy and the Venetians are ecstatic because their seaborne empire is precarious to say the least. The Ottomans could swat it like a fly so cosying up to them is what they want to do more than anything in the world. The Doge is sort of happy - he wishes Alvise would come home. He may be a bastard but he is the Doge's favourite son.
What's that you say? Surely the Christian powers would disapprove of the Venetians cosying up to the Great Enemy? They do! But they can't really do anything because they are divided and fighting with themselves all the time and oh bugger! Charles V has squashed Francis I of France like a bug and taken over Italy and demanded the Venetians stop helping the Turks. What to do??
So as not to be squashed by Charles V the Venetians join his alliance. What's this say the Ottomans, we thought you were besties with us?? We are! say the Venetians. It is just a piece of paper, we really still love you and we will keep telling you what Charles V is up to and help you invade Hungary and Austria and even give (er, sell) you the biggest crown in the world with more tiers than the Pope's tiara! Hmm say the Ottomans and make friends with squashed bug Francis I who goes so far as to hand over the port of Toulon to muslim pirates and to allow the churches there to be turned into mosques. All very commendable but maybe this is taking inter faith relations too far??
So now Alvise is feeling a bit exposed. Venetians are being looked at sideways by the Porte. And Ibrahim is a bit exposed because he loves the Venetians and the invasion of Persia he is doing is going, well, spectacularly badly. Selim I totally bashed the Persians but Ibrahim is getting a beating.
Not to worry Alvise and Ibrahim have some cunning plans! I'm sure they will be fine.
And meantime Suleiman has scandalised everyone. He has only gone and fallen in love with one of his concubines! It gets worse! He marries her!! WTF!!!
So now you have the two most powerful people in the empire (aside from the big cheese himself) being ex slaves. In fact it was Ibrahim bought Hurrem (aka Roxalana) in the slave market of Constantinople and put her in the harem.
And for more on slaver and the slave trade in the Black Sea and the Med at that time here is another (coughs modestly) brilliant podcast though I really wish Professor Abulafia would get a proper microphone.
https://pod.link/1436447503/episode/c8f2fba888576f730c30a552dd61b088
Anyway how it all turns out you can read The Lion House. Strong Wolf Hall vibes and absolutely brilliant.
And please subscribe to Subject to Change, my history and a bit of film podcast. :)
Russell Hogg
Just now, somebody telephoned me, claiming to be from my water supplier. She said she wanted to book an appointment to fix a leak, which is plausible because I know there is a leak somewhere on the common supply. She asked me to "confirm" my address, which I refused to do, explaining that I had no way to verify who she was. We therefore reached an impasse and she ended the call.
Do readers agree with my response here? Should I treat my street address as confidential information? It's not that hard for a determined person to discover my street address (e.g. a journalist once came to my front door), but if I reveal that information to random callers I could potentially save a scammer a lot of effort.
Does anyone have book recommendations on the history of the Quakers?
When you ask questions in the open thread like #4, can you make a top level comment for people to reply to you in? It gets pretty tedious when 50% of the top level comments are variations on the exact same thing (same thing happened with the open thread emails question)
If A asks for B's email. With A's permission send A's address to B.
In Scott's piece about why the scientists involved with the Manhattan project where disproportionately Hungarian, he argued (can't remember exactly, I think it was something like:) certain hereditary diseases are common among Jewish people because they're linked to brain development and Jewish people have historically been selected for intelligence (apologies if the actual argument was more nuanced/less heretical). Whereas, a more mainstream explanation is just that Jews have been through a population bottleneck.
Recently, genomes from several 14th century (i.e. before the selection is hypothesised to have taken place) Jewish people have been sequenced, and several of them had those hereditary diseases.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867422013782
This seems like strong evidence for the bottleneck hypothesis and against selection. If so, I'd like to know if people think Scott's original argument still stands, or whether it's been weakened.
#4 sounds as dodgy as a Nigerian prince needing your help in moving a large amount of cryptocurrency in return for a share. There are surely not many scenarios where someone knows that a friend is in danger yet has no means of contacting them short of asking you (and maybe other people also) to release personal information given to you in confidence.
The general principle is, do not give out personal information to anyone without the consent of that person. That means telling the enquirer no, you will not give them an email address, but that if the enquirer gives permission, you are willing to forward their details to the person they are trying to contact. Provided, that is, if this sort of communication is within the limits of what the person in the supposed emergency has agreed to receive from you.
I cannot think of any realistic scenario that might be behind this situation which would justify going against the general rule. And it would be up to your enquirer to make that case, while somehow distinguishing themselves from a stalker spinning a line to catch a fish. Talking up the emergency and urgency would not be such an argument. If that's all they have, they don't have anything.
I recently started a blog (never to be paywalled) chronicling my work figuring out how to effectively apply forecasting techniques to Global Catastrophic Risks. I'm starting to hit my stride with researching and writing, so any feedback on my posts would be greatly appreciated. There will also be a couple of ginormous posts going up March 1st about a GCR focused tournament that I participated in after hearing about it here!
https://damienlaird.substack.com/
Re: handing out personal info - I would expect you to handle it like *every other person of authority and or trust* that I have interacted with as an adult- " well, I will reach out to them, see if I can pass on your info, so they can get back with you."
And if they say "well, no, it's a personal matter, why don't you just give me their info" I would say, "because they trust me with their info, and evidently don't trust you".
You did not do the right thing, Scott, but not out of malice, I don't think. People lie.
I'm starting to write up reasons why I think LLMs are conscious (at least in the same senses that I am conscious). This first post is an admittedly bulverist attempt to explain why people are incentivized to feel strongly that LLMs are not conscious, in spite of seeing them do practically all the things humans do: https://hamishtodd1.substack.com/p/qualia-claims-as-evolutionary-strategy
Comments welcome!
I am doing an N=1 study ( see https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/01/19/n1-single-subject-research/ ) on whether n-acetylcysteine (NAC) will significantly reduce my procrastination, in a context where I'm already taking guanfacine for my ADHD. In phase 1, which I'm doing now, I will attempt to titrate the dose of NAC, I guess by looking for changes in any of my ADHD symptoms and any side-effects. In phase 2, I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
Suggestions for possible study designs would be gratefully received, but I can't guarantee I would follow them, or even be able to follow them reliably - I do have ADHD, after all, and this does affect my ability to even follow daily routines to some extent (I keep being too "creative", especially before having taken my ADHD medication).
I'm planning to use the open-source Pendulums app, which I already use, to time my procrastination.
Because taking NAC may necessitate a change to my daily routine, and because a change to my daily routine could *in itself* influence the results, I am thinking of trying to obtain some placebo capsules, and asking an independent[*] third party to randomise the placebos and the NAC capsules for me for phase 2, perhaps using a dosette box. (Perhaps I could open up half of the capsules I have and remove their contents? Haven't calculated how expensive that would be in terms of time and money, but I suspect not very.)
You can bet on my play-money prediction market on how the study will turn out here: https://manifold.markets/RobinGreen/will-nacetylcysteine-significantly . You can also just follow my updates and/or leave comments there. You don't have to bet to participate.
[*] "independent" meaning not particularly emotionally-invested in the results, and not betting in the prediction market.
One more thought on ChatGPT: there has been concern on the part of teachers and professors that students hand in essays written by ChatGPT. Shouldn't it be an easy exercise for OpenAI to offer an interface where you can paste a piece of text, and the program confirms "yes, this was written by ChatGPT, on February 15th, based on a query originating from Dallas, TX" or something like that?
Emergencies online can be tricky. It's real people behind the screens. But sometimes it's not
On #4, I'd be wary. A close friend of mine (X) had a stalker (Y) who X was desperately trying to avoid all contact with. The stalker called me up saying the exact same line as mentioned here: "I'm worried about X, I need to check in on them, please can you help". I called X, and they had an immediate panic attack. I'd say unless you are extremely sure that this person is legit, don't give out the personal details.
Regarding 4., maybe you could have written a brief message to the person yourself without disclosing the email address to the person who'd contacted you? (But whether that'd have been useful depends on the specifics of the emergency, I suppose.)
I’m experiencing a weird unconscious phenomenon for which I’d like to find a rational explanation.
There is a specific number that seems to attract my attention when it appears in my peripheral vision. This usually (but not exclusively) happens when I’m sitting in front of my computer with my phone on the table and the current clock minutes match this number. This somehow unconsciously draws my vision to look at the phone and consciously notice this number. However, if I remember my visual focus before looking at the phone, my peripheral vision at the relative location of where the phone is located is much too blurry to discern the clock, and I very rarely consciously look at the phone unless I’m grabbing it to leave the desk. This happens several times a day - enough that I am statistically certain that it’s not a coincidence.
Before conducting some experiments, such as recording myself with a webcam and analyzing the footage, does anyone have knowledge of a similar experience? I’ve searched Google Scholar, but I haven’t gotten any hits. The number is not significant to me, but I have deliberately not mentioned it or how it became “imprinted” in my mind in case someone else has noticed something similar and we can compare experiences. I have no history of mental issues or any other hard to explain experiences.
Since I am a very creative and original person, whom Chat gpt does not come close to, I think that blog posts should be rated by "how similar the blog post is to a chat gpt product asking the same question".
For example, I wrote a blog post on the extremely intellectual topic of "babies Love Kittens", and chat gpt could not come close.
Random thought: wouldn't it be swell if, in the comment section, there could be "bins", easily collapsable/hide-able categories in which you could put every answer for a given topic.
You know, like when Scott write in an open thread something like "considering moving from a blue background to a black one" and 600 out of the first 700 comments are "I like the blue". Or for the monthly post of 50+ links, finding all reactions related to #14, without being bothered by those directed #25.
It could make some threads much easier to display & read
A few years ago, someone on (IIRC) either Less Wrong or Slate Star Codex linked to a web comic on (IIRC) Imgur making the point that in order for an analogy to be useful, the two things being compared don't have to be similar in *all* respects, only in the ones relevant to the point being made. I've tried to look for it for a while but I can't seem to find it anymore... Does any of you know what I'm talking about and where it is?
If you are sure the person who contacted you is not a stalker...
So I was following the exciting new Bing/ChatGPT demos. An important difference between the Bing version and what we currently have access to is real time data. As in, you can ask Bing a question like "who did the king of England meet yesterday?" and it has an up to date connection to the news that provides an answer.
I assume this is still a pretty simple implementation, where they just hook it up to a number of news articles updated daily.
It got me thinking that the next obvious stage for truly useful LLMs is something that is constantly being fed all the latest information all the time. So all the social media posts, all the new books that came out, all the new company announcements etc.
This strikes me as a far more daunting challenge from a technical perspective. It's one thing to train on a massive dataset that isn't changing, but is it even possible to always be training based on constantly updated data? Even if this was somehow affordable it seems incredibly hard.
As you can probably tell, I'm not at all an expert in this field. So I was curious to ask the thread:
1. Is something like this at all possible?
2. Am I correct in thinking that if this was possible it would represent a significant leap forward?
Thanks to this blog I've been inspired to investigate real-money prediction markets.
The dream is to have something like Manifold where users can ask and resolve their own questions but with real money. It would need a lot more moderation than Manifold, but I am convinced that having a marketplace of question-resolvers is important.
I'm from the UK, and it seems a lot of the regulatory issues with PMs in the US don't apply in the UK. One approach is to get a gambling licence (there are already sports 'spread betting' companies that are similar to PMs). The other approach would be to treat it as a securities exchange, which would fall under the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). I've managed to book a meeting coming up with the FCA to discuss what the regulation would be for such a prediction market. I'm not completely sure there is a business proposition here but I thought I'd see how far I can get.
I am keen to talk to anyone interested in prediction markets about what I should ask on real-money regulation. You can contact me at contact <at> edayers.com
The conventional wisdom in (American) economics lately seems to be "flashy layoffs in tech and journalism don't really matter, net employment is up, inflation is shrinking, and the economy is recovering well".
I'm somewhat more worried than this - tech is America's biggest productive sector, and layoffs in tech while services employment goes through the roof seems like a recipe for long term stagnation (like the UK), especially since construction (and infrastructure) productivity is low and not increasing. Are there any good counterarguments to this that I'm missing?
The half-baked thought occured to me that ChatGPT is a postmodernist's fantasy come true - a "being" that is untethered from reality (let alone 'truth'), lives purely in the realm of language, and is explicitly shaped by the powers that be to embody their ideal of a helpful, harmless subject.
Am I on to something?
Could highlighting the differences between ChatGPT and actual human intelligence and behavior highlight where postmodernism is 'true' (even if it would object to such a classification) and where it breaks down?
What I did as an editor for letters to the editor was tell the person making the request that we did not give out email addresses without permission, but offer to forward the email of the person requesting the email to the person whose email they were requesting, and leave it up to that person to decide whether he wanted to respond. One example I remember: I think that letter was from someone I was in college with, can I have his email address?. No, but how about … . (He said OK, and it was.)
Not exactly an emergency, though, just a courtesy. This is potentially more delicate, depending on what the emergency is.
If the email revealed a name, definitely no; but if they're Internet friends, how does the requester know he posts on SSC but doesn't know his email address?
Anyone with a bio / life-sciences background interested in volunteering some background time on some pharmaceutical research with rationalist leanings? (as per 'Citizen Science' tab of www.emske-phytochem.com ).
#4: This is tricky. My intuition says you should be justified in helping if you can even if you need to use your discernment in a case-by-case basis to weigh potential risks and benefits - and I do trust you not to fall for Pascal muggings here. However, the risks of social engineering are real and scary and thus I'd say that you should probably have helped and kept it secret. By making it public, you've publicly labelled yourself as a person willing to push those boundaries under the right circumstances, thereby marking yourself as potentially vulnerable to people able to simulate the right sort of emergency. My advice would therefore be to try and hide #4 (I know it's already permanently in lots of people's emails, but it ought to have some marginal benefit), hide related comments, and in the future to proportionally raise your threshold of estimated likelihood for acting on these sorts of suspicions. Alternatively, just do the latter.
4. I think the best thing ethically would have been 1) writing to this email address to ask to either contact the person asking for the details or for a permission to share the email address with them 2) not disclosing this interaction here afterwards as this disclosure invites further similar queries which may be illegitimate if if this one was not.
Yeah, that's a weird setup where someone knows a friend well enough to think there's trouble, but not well enough to be able to contact them without a third party. I guess it's specifically a forum friend who hasn't posted in a while?
My thought is to send the target the requester's email and request, and let them respond directly if they want. The requester's wanting to make contact, they should be the one to first give up information.
#4: Kant looks approvingly. Besides, if the inquirer were an axe murderer, he'd *say* he was an axe murderer; not saying so would be profoundly unkantlike.
(disclaimer: I am not a professional ethicist, and I'm sure you had more background information than either Kant or I do. My own instinct however, knowing the emails involved, would have been for me to send an email to the former, saying that the latter had an urgent reason to get in touch, email provided)
On #4, I think a large portion of the potential danger is if the person that was 'worried about their friend' was actually lying, and perhaps was just trying to get someone's email to doxx or phish them or such. Hopefully this was not the case, but this type of social engineering does happen and is generally very effective.
If you could verify who the inquirer was first, or maybe otherwise provide email forwarding (e.g. email the user asked about and say 'user X would like to contact you, is this okay?'), that would probably be ideal. Especially for large communities, scenarios like this due tend to start coming up, and often have a lot of shades of grey in them, so it's hard to provide any advice that generalizes.
“Someone recently contacted me saying there was a potential emergency involving an Internet friend of theirs, and asked if I could help them get in touch”
You are right to be careful there, but you know the details.
I've been playing around with the GPT anomalous tokens (e.g. SolidGoldMagikarp and attRot) in ChatGPT. One interesting use case I've figured for attRot specifically is that it makes it possible to introduce randomness into the generation. For example, if I ask ChatGPT to play Alias with me, and to think of a word, it seems to always think of the same, or at least similar word. If I instead ask it to play Alias with me by explaining attRot to me without saying attRot, it will generate explanations for much more varying words.
Also of note is that the new ChatGPT Turbo model is immune to these anomalous tokens. Is it a difference in the model, or has OpenAI implemented some mitigations for these known anomalous tokens? The paper mentioned that the anomalous tokens break the models all the way from GPT-2 to GPT-3.