I don't like that I'm starting to understand Magical Realism
11,864 karma · joined July 28, 2012
I feel we're riding a knife's edge and there's a hurricane brewing in the gulf of absurdity.
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Incidentally, I feel like this is why it is so hard to actually learn from history. You can read about the 1918 'Spanish' Flu, but you think "we're smarter now". etc.
LLMs may set a record for time between specialized/luxury goods and commodity.
There may be a price floor, but it's not very high.
In My Opinion.
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Ever think about why restaurants pay someone to wash the dishes?
In my house, I have a machine that does that.
In a restaurant, the machine is too slow, and not compatible with the rest of the system of the restaurant.
Until we hit singularity, AI has to be compatible with the rest of the system.
Big companies are made of teams of teams.
The little teams don't really get to make purchasing decisions.
If there's a free alternative, little teams just have to suck it up and try to make it work.
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Also consider that many of these expenses are born by the 'cost center' side of the house, that is, the people who don't make money for the company.
If you work in a cost center, the name of the game is saving money by cutting expenses.
If technology goes into the actual product, the cost for that is accounted for differently.
That is, you have some context, ie the prompt and any other text, and the LLM produces a plausible continuation or alteration of that prompt and text.
My intuition leads me to a thought like: To progress, the context must compress into a fractal representation.
I feel very confident that someone smarter and MUCH better paid than me is already working on this.
In Tesla's case, the board knows that the valuation of the company is wildly irrational, and they feel that the valuation is tied to the CEO.
Some of the controls were 'born' in a world of hardware interlocks, and so the engineers used the frame of mind where hardware interlocks exist.
Some time later, the interlocks were replaced with software controls. Since everything had worked before, all the software had to do was what worked before.
But it is VERY difficult to challenge all of your assumptions about what "working" means.
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This is also a good reminder that work is done by people and teams, not corporations. That is - just because somebody knows the fine details, that does not mean that the corporation knows the fine details.
> An inspection of the aircraft’s wreckage found that about one-third of the fluid in the hydraulic systems in both the nose and right main landing gears was water, when there should have been none.The context for satisfaction is different for every individual human. Some parts of the context are shared (to various degrees). These 'shared contexts' we might call rationality, or science, or society, or religion.
Another part of the problem is that satisfaction is recursive.
We may evaluate something based on:
1. Correctness
2. Completeness
3. Satisfaction
For instance, if you are only aware of Electromagnetism, then Maxwell's equations are correct, complete, and satisfying. And then some jerk discovers neutrons.
Anyway, this whole comment may fit into your first three points; or it may help someone understand a failure to communicate.
Using only one metric is THE classic way to misunderstand a system.
> Society is broken for those at the bottom, and if their numbers grow too large, it will become broken for everyone.
It's difficult to capture my intention and perspective in a short comment. In my personal belief, if the future is going to be better than the present, we need to share resources more fairly.
However, money is an imperfect representation of resources. For instance, the extremely wealthy may eat more food or more quality food, but not anywhere near a proportionate excess. They may have a bit more housing, but generally not proportionate to their excess income. Etc etc etc for most things.
This is not excuse, or justification.
What I am saying is that focusing on the excess wealth can become a distraction.
I believe that the majority of harm relating to income inequality does not come from the inequality itself, or even excess resource (food, housing, etc) consumption.
I believe that the majority of harm comes from actions taken while attaining and defending wealth.
It's regulations bent and broken while growing a business.
It's not the housing per se, but the housing must retain value.
It's not the stock portfolio per se, it's the tax loopholes exploited.
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Excess wealth is a correlation to harm. Beyond that, I feel that care must be taken.
Beware of easy narratives and blame.
CEO pay relative to median employee pay has soared since the 1970s. That is, a CEO may be paid $10,000,000 vs the median employee at $70,000 (arbitrary numbers), where before 1970 the numbers may have been $150,000 and $20,000
Using only one set of numbers can be deceiving though. For instance, through mergers and acquisitions, there may be One CEO where there were previously 10. So you might be able to see this by comparing Total Executive Pay - ie the whole C-suite to Total Non-Executive Pay.
Also, many companies have become more efficient as measured in revenue per employee over time, so another good set of numbers might be Total Executive Pay vs Gross Revenue.
How does Executive Pay look in these contexts?
I'm sure someone has done the work, but I have not had luck googling it, and I definitely don't trust a LLM to get this one right.
Everything you know is wrong.
Weird Al. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8tRDv9fZ_c
Firesign Theatre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAcHfymgh4Y
A bit more seriously: I'm excited about how much LLMs can teach us about psychology. I'm less excited about the dependency.
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Adding a bit more substantial comment:
Users of sites like Stack Overflow have reported really disliking answers like "You are solving the wrong problem" or "This is a bad approach".
There are different solutions possible, both for any technical problem, and for any meta-problem.
Whatever garnish you put on top of the problem, the bitter lesson suggests that more data and more problem context improve the solution faster than whatever you are thinking right now. That's why it's called the bitter lesson.
If you can increase the size of the context window arbitrarily, then there is no limit.
Accurate
Comprehensive
Satisfying
Moral relativism is like digging a latrine. Almost nobody wants to do it for somebody else, it's a chore to do it for one's self, but pretty much everyone appreciates when it's already done for them.
Anyway, I feel like 'liberalism' is under broad attack by both conservatives and progressives, largely because it is very unsatisfying right now.
Speaking for myself, liberalism is a way to understand the world. Liberalism in this sense does not especially imply progressivism or conservatism, and can be practiced by anyone. To re-phrase the Robustness Principle: "be opinionated in what you do, be open minded in what you accept from others".
I feel like the stronger you push your opinions into your understanding of the world, the harder it gets to actually understand what is going on in the world. As Colbert said: "reality has a well-known liberal bias". This statement makes more sense if run in reverse: "An open-minded understanding of the world is more likely to be durably and broadly true than a strongly opinionated understanding".
Unfortunately, it has become VERY difficult to talk about what is going on in the world right now, largely because a lot of disparate groups are pushing their opinions into their understanding very very hard. There are many people who currently disagree with their own in-group, but are restricted in what they can say because of social loyalty constraints. If you can't be the first person to speak up, consider being the second.
The absolute strongest superpower that humans have is the the ability to tell another story. Don't get stuck in the first satisfying story you hear.
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If you are satisfied with blame, try examining the situation closer. If you are satisfied that a whole political party is evil, try examining the situation closer.
Here are some questions:
What is the person or organization doing
socially
economically
emotionally
political as in policy objectives
political as in electoral strategy
political as in internal power structure - is the internal power structure sound or fragmented?
complete
accurate
satisfying (to anyone? to someone? to me?)
People don't believe crazy things because of correct facts, they believe them because of satisfying stories.
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May I humbly ask 2 things of you:
1. Please don't assume I'm saying or implying something beyond what I've said here. You may feel free to go beyond what I've said, just don't put it on me.
2. Please don't join a death cult. You can look up the characteristics of a high control group; a death cult is all that plus their definition of morality narrows over time, excluding more and more people. Death cults ramp up anger over time. It's very easy to fall into one right now, and they are not exclusive to either side of the political spectrum. It's better to endure a little moral dissatisfaction than to join a high control group.
Or browse by Title 14, Chapter 1, Subchapters F & G (Aka Title 14, Parts 89 - 139)
I'm not vouching for this link in particular, but you can also search for things like Part 91 operator, Part 135 operator, etc
https://l33jets.com/resources/blog/the-difference-between-pa...
The scary part: It is very easy for LLMs to pick up someone's satisfaction context and feed it back to them. That can distort the original satisfaction context, and it may provide improper satisfaction (if a human did this, it might be called "joining a cult" or "emotional abuse" or "co-dependence").
You may also hear this expressed as "wire-heading"
> 3. Family Counselor. Surprisingly often, I told organizations what other people inside the same organization were thinking, saying, or doing (and what customers or partners thought of that). The degree of insularity, siloing, and parochialism in large organizations is hard to overstate. I was almost like a counselor, helping internal teams see, understand, and appreciate their peers, and put what they were doing into a larger perspective that would have otherwise been overlooked.
For example some people may tend to catastrophize, or blow things out of proportion.
Those classes can call stored procedures or functions.
Those classes can be called BY stored procedures or functions.
You can call stored procedures and functions from server-side Java code.
So you can have a java app call a stored proc call a java class call a stored proc ...
Yes. Yes, this is why they call it Legacy.
In hindsight, it will be clear, and future generations (if any exist) will ask: "Why didn't you understand what was happening at the time"
My answer: Noise. Just because you can find someone who wrote down the answer at the time, doesn't mean that they really understood the answer, at least not to the extent that we will understand with hindsight.
Future history is contingent.