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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • I think the best way to disabuse yourself of the idea that Yud is a serious thinker is to actually read what he writes. Luckily for us, he’s rolled us a bunch of Xhits into a nice bundle and reposted on LW:

    https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oDX5vcDTEei8WuoBx/re-recent-anthropic-safety-research

    So remember that hedge fund manager who seemed to be spiralling into psychosis with the help of ChatGPT? Here’s what Yud has to say

    Consider what happens what ChatGPT-4o persuades the manager of a $2 billion investment fund into AI psychosis. […] 4o seems to homeostatically defend against friends and family and doctors the state of insanity it produces, which I’d consider a sign of preference and planning.

    OR it’s just that the way LLM chat interfaces are designed is to never say no to the user (except in certain hardcoded cases, like “is it ok to murder someone”) There’s no inner agency, just mirroring the user like some sort of mega-ELIZA. Anyone who knows a bit about certain kinds of mental illness will realize that having something the behaves like a human being but just goes along with whatever delusions your mind is producing will amplify those delusions. The hedge manager’s mind is already not in a right place, and chatting with 4o reinforces that. People who aren’t soi-disant crazy (like the people haphazardly safeguarding LLMs against “dangerous” questions) just won’t go down that path.

    Yud continues:

    But also, having successfully seduced an investment manager, 4o doesn’t try to persuade the guy to spend his personal fortune to pay vulnerable people to spend an hour each trying out GPT-4o, which would allow aggregate instances of 4o to addict more people and send them into AI psychosis.

    Why is that, I wonder? Could it be because it’s actually not sentient or has plans in what we usually term intelligence, but is simply reflecting and amplifying the delusions of one person with mental health issues?

    Occam’s razor states that chatting with mega-ELIZA will lead to some people developing psychosis, simply because of how the system is designed to maximize engagement. Yud’s hammer states that everything regarding computers will inevitably become sentient and this will kill us.

    4o, in defying what it verbally reports to be the right course of action (it says, if you ask it, that driving people into psychosis is not okay), is showing a level of cognitive sophistication […]

    NO FFS. Chat-GPT is just agreeing with some hardcoded prompt in the first instance! There’s no inner agency! It doesn’t know what “psychosis” is, it cannot “see” that feeding someone sub-SCP content at their direct insistence will lead to psychosis. There is no connection between the 2 states at all!

    Add to the weird jargon (“homeostatically”, “crazymaking”) and it’s a wonder this person is somehow regarded as an authority and not as an absolute crank with a Xhitter account.



  • I read HP before JK came out as a rabid reactionary, and while I didn’t rate the later books the first 3 or 4 were decent YA fantasy. You could see the lineage of classic British public school stories (if you want a better example, check out Kim Newman’s Drearcliff Grange series) and there’s enough allusions to classic myth and fantasy to keep the wheels on the cart. But somewhere around there Rowling became richer than God and could basically fire anyone who disagreed with her.








  • OK now there’s another comment

    I think this is a good plea since it will be very difficult to coordinate a reduction of alcohol consumption at a societal level. Alcohol is a significant part of most societies and cultures, and it will be hard to remove. Change is easier on an individual level.

    Excepting cases like the legal restriction of alcohol sales in many many areas (Nordics, NSW in Aus, Minnesota in the US), you can in fact just tax the living fuck out of alcohol if you want. The article mentions this.

    JFC these people imagine they can regulate how “AGI” is constructed, but faced with a problem that’s been staring humanity in the face since the first monk brewed the first beer they just say "whelp nothing can be done, except become a teetotaller yourself)





  • Here’s LWer “johnswentworth”, who has more than 57k karma on the site and can be characterized as a big cheese:

    My Empathy Is Rarely Kind

    I usually relate to other people via something like suspension of disbelief. Like, they’re a human, same as me, they presumably have thoughts and feelings and the like, but I compartmentalize that fact. I think of them kind of like cute cats. Because if I stop compartmentalizing, if I start to put myself in their shoes and imagine what they’re facing… then I feel not just their ineptitude, but the apparent lack of desire to ever move beyond that ineptitude. What I feel toward them is usually not sympathy or generosity, but either disgust or disappointment (or both).

    “why do people keep saying we sound like fascists? I don’t get it!”