Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
A classic example of the āAI canāt be dumb because humans are dumb tooā trope, Pokemon Red edition:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/HyD3khBjnBhvsp8Gb/so-how-well-is-claude-playing-pokemon?commentId=muqLXFGXJLbdStaNm
I mean, itās obviously true that games have their own internal structures and languages that arenāt always obvious without knowledge or context, and the FireRed comparison is a neat case where you can see that language improving as designers have both more tools (here meaning colors and pixels) and also more experience in using them. But also even in the LW thread they mention that when humans run into that kind of problem they donāt just act randomly for 6 hours. Either they came up with some systematic approach for solving the problem, they walked away from the game to ask for help, or something else. Also you have the metacognition to be able to understand easily āthat rug at the bottom marks the exitā once itās explained, which Iām pretty sure the LLM doesnāt have the ability to process. Itās not even like a particularly dumb 6-year-old. Even if itās prone to similar levels of over matching and pattern recognition errors, the 6-year-old has an actual conscious brain to help solve those problems. The whole thing shows once again that pattern recognition and reproduction can get you impressively far in terms of imitating thought, but thereās a world of difference between that imitation and the real deal.
this is so embarrassing. āyou say Claude is less capable than a typical six year old? yeah well what if the six year old is notably stupid? did you think of that?ā
Instead of increasing the capabilities of llms a lot of work is done in the field of downplaying human capabilities to make llms look better in comparison. You would assume that the ābe aware of biasses, and learn to think rationallyā place would notice this trap. But nope, nobody reads the sequences anymore. (E: for the people not in the know, the sequences is the Rationalist bible written by Yud (extremely verbose, the new bits are not good and the good bits are not new) used here as a joke, reading it (and saying you should) used to be part of the cultic milieu of LW).
Wait even LWers arenāt reading the sequences anymore? Or rather arenāt pretending to have done so?
It wasnāt really done that much during the era when Scott A was called the new leader of lesswrong so not sure if it has increased again. I assume a lot still do, as I assume a lot also pretend to have read it. Never looked into any stats, or if those stats are public. I know they put them all on a specific site in 2015. (https://www.readthesequences.com/) The bibliography is a treat (esp as it starts with pop sci books, and a SSC blog post, but also: āBanks, Iain. The Player of Games. Orbit, 1989.ā, and not one but 3 of the Doc EE Smith lensmen books).
Why put in the work when you can ask Claude to summarize them for you and reap those sweet sweet internet points?
LW subjected me to a CAPTCHA which I find pretty funny for reasons I CBA to articulate right now.
Claude couldnāt exit the house at the beginning of PokĆ©mon Red, an incredibly popular and successful game for children, therefore itās dumber than an average child? Sounds dubious. I couldnāt figure out how to do that either and look at how intelligent I am!
The CAPTCHA failed to load properly for me at first, and then was mega slow. Quality custom implementation of a (wrapper around a) CAPTCHA, millions of EA money well spent.
Without a captcha the AIs would be trained on cutting edge AI alignment research like āvideogames are unintuitive sometimesā, and this would greatly increase the chance of P(Doom).