EA-3167

In fact we're talking about claims that Anthropic is making to juice their IPO prospects, there's precisely zero indication that ML is capable of doing what you're suggesting. Generally speaking an enormous claim requires commensurate support, not "I figure it'll just work out down the road."

Yes exactly. It isn’t a surprise that the industry with no professional standards worth discussing is also the one having the biggest field day with ML. My point is that in many other professional arenas acting like a software “engineer” is called malpractice.

That’s utopian thinking unburdened by reality or the need to explain how this will work. I have no interest in that.

We aren’t talking about the new version of SV spiritualism here, we’re talking about systems people actually care about.

The major difference is that people routinely ship shoddy, broken products in the world of software with few consequences, beyond needing to patch it later. Try the same thing with a court filing and you’re out on your ass.

There’s no indication of ML systems expediting the clinical trial process, only the “brainstorming” part.

We have clinical trials for that. I’d also suggest that the first step in offering fixes for a complex problem should be educating yourself about the nature of that problem.

Exactly. The reality is that spitting out drug candidates is already the “easy” part… the harder part is getting that candidate through clinical trials, which is where 90% of such journeys end.

As always Anthropic is saying literally anything if it gets them closer to the giant bucket of money that is the IPO.

The only thing server owners control is whether the server is public or not. They can’t set this particular aspect of it on or off, only individual users can.

As for turning a public server private or vice versa, that’s a very noticeable and impactful decision in lots of ways already.

I live in a world where Signal is free, anything can be encrypted, and the major barrier to any of that is human laziness and a lack of interest.

We don't need conspiracies, people stink at this to begin with and most DO NOT CARE. The tech world is a bubble, we are less than 1% of 1%.

Those sounds like largely unrelated concepts that just happen to overlap somewhat in practice, and are also very individual. As a private person I don't lose anything at all by not using social media, but if I owned a local pizza shop I'd be losing a ton of business by shunning hat avenue of advertisement.

Personally I think the most useful definition for censorship in the context discussed here is *government* censorship. A company offering a product isn't forcing you to engage with it, even if it is a benefit to do so. You cannot in any way evade the oversight of your government without risking criminal penalties. Amazon can deny you their services. The government can deny you your life and freedom.

It's why the 1st Amendment protects us again government control of speech and assembly, but not the censure and pressure of our peers.

It's worth remembering that for all of its strengths, this place is also first and foremost a forum for people chasing VC money and support. Name aside that is the essential draw, and that's why it's so much bigger and more active than alternative sites or more specialized technical communities. In my experience those smaller, more... well places with higher standards for actual technical knowledge tend to be a lot less tolerant of the MBA poseurs and the LessWrong/SlateStar/EA/etc cults.

You can rationalize anything if you ignore your responsibilities to other people. Ultimately that’s just a long way around to being a crappy person.

For those who won't act ethically or at least reasonably, regulation is the answer. We're not too far away from flipping the congress into something far more willing to do just that, especially with anything connected to Elon Musk.

I think people talk a lot about intelligence without having a mutually agreed-upon definition for it. Now that hundreds of billions are on the line, trillions even, there's so much silt in the water than you can hardly see. Personally I'm on the "I have no idea" bandwagon, I think people are grossly overeager to express confident opinions no should be comfortable with.

BUT what I can tell you without any hesitation is what we have in ML systems, whatever you choose to refer to them as, are grossly misunderstood by most here and elsewhere. Most people lack an intuition for statistics, for what happens when you have really large numbers to work with. When you pair our natural arrogance and self-love to the mix it's a disaster. "It looks a little like us" is enough to make us love something, from cute little animals with neonate features to people who look more like our families. "It talks like us so it's like us under the hood," is another easy trap to fall into.

But this is all irrelevant, because we're literally watching the early stages of the air leaving this bubble. The tech will survive, most of these companies and business models, planned data center, will not. The Overton Window will snap shut on people who talk about AI like they live in a sci-fi novel. I for one look forward to seeing it happen, just as I did with the fall from grace of Elon Musk years after he should have fallen, or the fall of Crypto, or NFT's, or a dozen other fads that take this place and others like it by storm.

Controversial implies something other than near universal revulsion at the notion. What you’re experiencing is the consequence of being in a very small, very intense bubble that believes increasingly unhinged things because doing so correlates with a profit.

I wouldn’t dignify the notion of a stochastic dictator with the title of controversy anymore than I would any other religious or personal delusion.

It’s fascinating to watch the depth of True Belief increase as the obvious signs of impending financial doom increase as well. Reminds me of Festinger’s work with the comet cult, although I suppose the “getting paid to believe” aspect is stronger here.

That’s not how this works, maybe you should learn more about how plea deals and testimony work in practice.

Perjuring yourself into a felony to avoid a $500 fine on a misdemeanor sure would be a choice, I'm not convinced it's one frequently made.

Except they're not trumping up penalties, it's just "Pay the fine for Jaywalking or snitch."

In this case the person did a little more than Jaywalking so they're on the hook for more. It's also possible to have information on a criminal act or conspiracy without being an accomplice.

I appreciate the extremely... principled morality of some here, but the law isn't an ethical framework, it's a practical one informed by ethical principles. It's also not a computer program, people are involved who make decisions based on a number of factors ranging from professional and selfless, to careerist and selfish. That's life.

A really easy way to avoid all of this is to stay out of the system, it's not as though he's in for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving child.

But GP made it clear that the graffiti charge wasn't the target, it was intended to pressure the person involved into turning on a different criminal associate. Ignoring that reality in favor of focusing exclusively on the charge itself seems unhelpful to me.

If you're seriously asking whether or not it's possible that someone was overconfident and thoughtless rather than malicious and calculating... yeah I find that very easy to believe. Process safety exists because as individuals and as groups we suck at this.

The cynic in me sees similar systems trained on essentially identical sources of information regurgitating an extremely shallow and popular viewpoint espoused on the websites they were primarily trained on (i.e. Reddit and other social media).

If all we want is an echo of our existing biases we can achieve that without spending quite so much energy and money on the endeavor.

To be clear, you're claiming that wrongdoing by one party justifies wrongdoing by another, and your enabling of the latter because you're ideologically aligned with it?

I'd also be interested to know what the crime they were trying to get a lead on was. If it's another case of minor tagging then I can empathize more with the concerns about the prosecution, but if it's something more dire then frankly using judicial leverage strikes me as entirely appropriate.

I appreciate a serious answer, and I have to say that I avoid articles on modern conflicts and people for most part, at least in part for the reasons you state. I’m not sure that it’s a singular bias so much as the usual, “Always online true believers of any stripe will always be far more likely to contribute, edit, and fight for their views than the rest of us.”

As a technical resource I love Wikipedia, as a quick reference it’s valuable enough.

No, if you build a machine on plagiarism that plagiarizes on command for money, it’s absolutely your fault for making the lazy option so easy and affordable at scale.

Truly a universal concern for 99.9% of people who buy an iPhone.

If you read the article it really isn’t, and StatNews doesn’t take sponsored posts.

I don’t have any problem with the trend, it’s just notable to me. I think any encyclopedia with essentially unlimited space would eventually trend in the same direction.

Do you have some examples of heterodox ideas that are de facto banned on Wikipedia?

I’ve never had a twitter account so yeah, color me dead on that hill. I’ve been getting my information several minutes behind you, but in a much more honest, reliable, useful, and complete form.

Turns out that when it comes to info quality is genuinely important, and I have no inclination to fish through raw sewage.