TemulentTeatotaler's recent activity
-
Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
-
Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentSure! The same can be expanded to smartphones that may have lithium sourced from child slavery, the ethics of automating away jobs that may benefit consumers, harm workers, and consolidate power...Sure! The same can be expanded to smartphones that may have lithium sourced from child slavery, the ethics of automating away jobs that may benefit consumers, harm workers, and consolidate power in the most wealthy, etc. Or the neoliberal dillemma of whether exploitative (Apple gets the big cut) but arguably mutually beneficial situations (e.g., factory jobs like Foxconn being sought after/offering opportunities, but extremely hard) are ethical.
A lot of it is beyond my knowledge or ability to address outside of the obvious, which is that we should be honest about what happens and always try to do better for people.
But when I say hazardous I am trying to set that apart from "has caused harm." A hazard is something that has an inherent risk which may be manageable or not. Nuclear power and industrial chemicals are hazards, which, with responsible handling, don't cause harm. Whether there is a meaningful chance of rogue AI, or whether the human-direct and LLM-assisted astroturfing/scams can be managed is hard to know.
-
Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentThanks, I don't doubt that, though I'm not familiar enough to have much of an opinion! Just saying history is messy and that the witch hunts or inquisitions are at least human sacrifice adjacent....Thanks, I don't doubt that, though I'm not familiar enough to have much of an opinion!
Just saying history is messy and that the witch hunts or inquisitions are at least human sacrifice adjacent. The focus shifted to Christianity, but if anything the partially(?) religious nature of human sacrifice in the Aztecs clashes with the original statement that "...every religion has taught the importance of hope, faith, charity, submission, kindness, forgiveness, forbearance, fairness..."
Overall I agree with OP about the most clear threats of AI being moral ones, of misuse.
-
Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentWhat do you think brains are doing? Regardless, since the 1950s "AI" has been the umbrella term that things from perceptrons to logic/symbol manipulation to LLMs fall under, and it's a necessarily...But they aren’t doing “intelligence”, they’re doing advanced statistics.
What do you think brains are doing?
Regardless, since the 1950s "AI" has been the umbrella term that things from perceptrons to logic/symbol manipulation to LLMs fall under, and it's a necessarily broad one because "intelligence" is broad.
Is a 5 year old intelligent? Yes and no. A dog is more intelligent than a toad but maybe not when they don't understand glass doors. A highschooler be smart if they could solve novel math problems better than contestants in the Math Olympiad, but now that LLMs can do that you'd be misleading if you conferred them with the same expected intelligence that the highschooler would have. That feat may or may not generalize to less standard/more creative math skills or other skills we'd associate with a talented human highschooler.
Strong and weak AI--coming more from philosophy--used to be the way to distinguish between what is now more descriptively called general and narrow (or super) intelligence, but it's all AI in the way a Seattlite is a Washingtonian is an American. Kindasorta.
Before the LLM craze, the most common use of AI was in gaming. Billions of times a year "cheating" or "overtuned" was used to describe nothing more complicated than finite-state machines, like the bots of "co-op vs. AI" in League of Legends, and no one was confused. Sometimes things like spreadsheets or A* searches stop being considered AI.
All the controversy about scooping/pseudo-plagiarism aside: what do you call a system that can solve [part of] the Navier-Stokes equation if not intelligent? What is a better description?
We also frequently anthropomorphize things. It can be hazardous but it's also often incredibly useful and expressive. When we create metaphors to understand concepts we're doing something like that-- a useful approximation that sometimes is dangerous because it gives a compelling but specious understanding.
In the past there was some research contrasting very clinical descriptions of animals in the study to more human ones. "C2 struck C6 at 11:55" vs "Nom Chompsky bit Nim Chimpsky out of grape envy." It's been far too long, but the gist was the anthropomorphizing ones led to better outcomes.
Dan Dennett's intentional stance is a more extensive look at treating things as having intentional/rational agents. "Stockfish is setting a trap for black's queen..."
Stockfish is not human. It doesn't have anything vaguely similar to an animal's motivations or emotions. But it's often a very helpful framing.
The tools are not “going rogue” ... If you prompt an LLM with an objective of retrieving a file from a server and give it unlimited resources and a shitty sandbox, of course one of the methods it might generate could be, essentially, hacking. And if you blindly trust the output of LLMs without supervision, you’ll end up doing hacking.
The concern isn't that a responsible individual would do X, it's that, given what we can assume about the progression and accessibility of the technology and who may be using it, there may be some risk. There are multiple mutations that all have to happen to get cancer (growth, spread, mutation rate, resources, evasion, etc.), and the risk of some similar sort of things going wrong in some harness is what leads to a "rogue" AI. None of them are likely, there may be a risk.
What chance of something Very Bad happening is enough for it to be worth considering? People do that every time they take a shower or drive, whether they register it or not, the odds are just good and they feel safe until they aren't.
I remember seeing when we hit five-sigma confidence for anthropogenic climate change some years back and thinking... if it was unreasonable to want particle physics levels of confidence for something as complicated as "the climate", were we just supposed to throw are hands up?
Forget OpenAI. Pretend they clean up their act tomorrow and are perfect angels. A year from now a North Korea that already has nationally backed hacker groups has access to comparable LLMs that they want to be stealthy cybercriminals. Are they going to be responsible? If the flawed attempt at a controlled environment that led to the Huggingface hack wasn't detected for three weeks and not without an LLM-assisted investigation, or even on the first couple passes, how likely is it they'll realize if something will go wrong? Given a corpus including all our spy novels, sci-fi apocalypses, and LessWrong posts about how an AI really ought to go about making the most
paperclips₩, how likely is it that one of the agents will propose a hack or social engineering as a good starting point to get the assets to really scale up?I don't know how hazardous the development of LLMs are. I will say that I've been surprised at how much has happened in the last few years (with folks like Yann LeCunn not being optimistic), and that I'd feel a lot better with a good international effort at regulation.
-
Comment on Where do we go from here? (Regarding AI) in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentThe actions you'd most associate that with would be in Central and South America. The Tlaxcala, who also practiced human sacrifice, were the main force that enabled Cortés to defeat the Aztecs....Christianity not only abolished animal sacrifice, but also ended the human sacrifice...
The actions you'd most associate that with would be in Central and South America. The Tlaxcala, who also practiced human sacrifice, were the main force that enabled Cortés to defeat the Aztecs.
Yet the Spanish and Portugese practiced auto-da-fé where they ritualistically tortured and burned people alive for being heretics. This is somehow not human sacrifice?
The Great Leap forward was terrible, and so was the Taiping rebellion led by Hong Xiuquan the "brother of Jesus Christ" that killed 20-100 million / 5-25% of the population. The Holodomir was terrible and so is Putin's weaponization of blasphemy laws and the Russian Orthodox Church / Patriarch Kirill's "Holy War" in Ukraine in which children's oncology wards have been targetted.
The Holocaust took place in a Christian majority country. The party had a mix of policies and opinions from, like Himmler's weird paganism/mysticism and ban of atheism in the SS, but there was significant Christian symbolism and membership.
There are plenty of religious people who are wonderful and whose lives are improved by their faith. There are plenty of atheists who lead good lives and find their morality in things like humanism or Enlightenment principles. Any individual should be treated as an individual.
If you want to look at a population level and ask what policies are religiosity linked to, at least in the U.S. it is the opposite of people who care about the starvation from defunding USAID, deaths from unscientific policies like RFK Jrs, climate policy, etc. Maybe it's different in other places?
-
Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentThere are a few other studies on the topic. Most I've seen suggest being polite typically works better, but it isn't true across languages, consistent across models, and it can be compensated for....There are a few other studies on the topic. Most I've seen suggest being polite typically works better, but it isn't true across languages, consistent across models, and it can be compensated for.
Our study finds that the politeness of prompts can significantly affect LLM performance. This phenomenon is thought to reflect human social behavior. The study notes that using impolite prompts can result in the low performance of LLMs, which may lead to increased bias, incorrect answers, or refusal of answers. However, highly respectful prompts do not always lead to better results. In most conditions, moderate politeness is better, but the standard of moderation varies by languages and LLMs. In particular, models trained in a specific language are susceptible to the politeness of that language.
...experiments conducted across three languages (English, Hindi, Spanish), five models (Gemini-Pro, GPT-4o Mini, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, DeepSeek-Chat, and Llama 3), and three interaction histories between users (raw, polite, and impolite). Our sample consists of 22,500 pairs of prompts and responses of various types, evaluated across five levels of politeness using an eight-factor assessment framework: coherence, clarity, depth, responsiveness, context retention, toxicity, conciseness, and readability. The findings show that model performance is highly influenced by tone, dialogue history, and language. While polite prompts enhance the average response quality by up to ~11% and impolite tones worsen it, these effects are neither consistent nor universal across languages and models. English is best served by courteous or direct tones, Hindi by deferential and indirect tones, and Spanish by assertive tones. Among the models, Llama is the most tone-sensitive (11.5% range), whereas GPT is more robust to adversarial tone. These results indicate that politeness is a quantifiable computational variable that affects LLM behaviour, though its impact is language- and model-dependent rather than universal.
-
Comment on Kraken | Official trailer in ~movies
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentShark NATO? I hope we learn the real kraken all along was improper civil engineering and fjord management.Baltic regional defense initiative for kraken
Shark NATO?
I hope we learn the real kraken all along was improper civil engineering and fjord management.
-
Comment on AI populism's warning shots in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentI might be wrong, but I don't think @Grumble4681 is defending "nearly every successful progressive movement resorted to violence"? They're saying your initial response to that, while providing...I might be wrong, but I don't think @Grumble4681 is defending "nearly every successful progressive movement resorted to violence"? They're saying your initial response to that, while providing data, implied an authority or broadness that wasn't warranted.
Data is great, but if it isn't contextualized with the complexity of a topic or the weight of evidence it can easily be used to mislead or to shut down further conversation.
You can reach a local minima, where the data that is easily available is insufficient. An example would be WEIRD populations in psychology. The mistake isn't showing how college kids behaved in contrived settings, it was attempting to generalize any of it, at least without heavily emphasizing the limitations.
As a process I think science almost always trundles along to being less wrong. Metascience has done it's best to handle the many very subtle forms of bias, and things have gotten better to the point of reasonably questioning how much of historical data should just get tossed out.
But it's also easy to see, from snapshotting different points in the past, just how wrong you would be from arguing from the best data, ala "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing."
An argument I've seen in the past is that some topics are almost impenetrable, and for those art, philosophy, or anecdotes act as a survey that can leave you more informed than the data. You might not know the rates or trends of arson or assault, but you leave with an awareness of how sub-violent voter intimidation has played out. You carve out awareness of "positive" and "negative" freedoms, like if women/minorities not using voice chat in games because of what people say to them is depriving them of their own free speech*.
I prefer data-driven arguments, and appreciate someone willing to make them or strongman an opposing view. That said, I think it's also good to be aware that academia can be oppressive/alienating.
Implicit in saying someone should present their own data/study is that this is the correct way of engaging in the discussion, which requires a particular temperament and education. A former housemate was involved in direct action activism that uncomfortably bordered on threats/violence (smear posters put up outside of workplaces/schools for a slumlord). Is that experience relevant or something that should be ignored in lieu of research? Maybe it's less useful in making claims [on some topic], but you have to keep in mind that that's how a lot of people engage, so if the goal of a conversation is more than just talking to or convincing like-minded folks other camps need to be considered.
It also tempts people to try to act like topic experts, looking up confirming studies for an hour or so but having no meaningful ability to understand the state of the field or assess the quality of the studies involved. I catch myself doing that more often than I should, with the excuse that I'll at least be improving the quality of the discussion. Sometimes you aren't, though, you're using rhetoric as a cudgel and making convincing but specious claims.
-
Comment on Donald Trump posted on Truth Social this morning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" as his threatened attacks on Iranian infrastructure loom ahead of deadline in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentNah, Robert Armstrong coined it a month before that to describe the trade policy, and more generally the pattern of making a problem, backing off after consequences, then claiming victory and the...Nah, Robert Armstrong coined it a month before that to describe the trade policy, and more generally the pattern of making a problem, backing off after consequences, then claiming victory and the initial idiocy as strategy. It had a quick adoption.
-
Comment on LLMs can unmask pseudonymous users at scale with surprising accuracy in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentAs a 14 year old girl living in Florida who enjoys turntablism and hastening the evolution of mole people, it is a worrying eventuality. Deanonymization isn't exactly new, but we have seen...As a 14 year old girl living in Florida who enjoys turntablism and hastening the evolution of mole people, it is a worrying eventuality.
Deanonymization isn't exactly new, but we have seen better/easier tools get adopted by scammers and bad actors pretty quickly. I think there are interesting possibilities for defensive use but I don't have a lot of hope for it to be widespread, and a lot of the harm that can be done from mass surveillance doesn't need to care about any given individual.
-
Comment on Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentJargon can be messy, but the point I was going for was that I think neuroscience sits around the level I think most people care about-- giving insight about suffering to inform ethical positions....Jargon can be messy, but the point I was going for was that I think neuroscience sits around the level I think most people care about-- giving insight about suffering to inform ethical positions. I don't really care about metaphysics or the "why" of consciousness. It's cool, and I'll enjoy Blindsight with the rest, but a true understanding of consciousness may be as inaccessible as a full picture of the universe and it wouldn't matter to me.
You called this "evil", which isn't exactly agnostic. Why? Would it be if it was mouse cells? A blackbox recreation of a neuron? We've been doing this sort of thing with rat cells for decades.
If Google/NPCs start screaming are you locked into consciousness being so completely inaccessible that anything outside of an arms-length of shared evolutionary history with humans is out of luck? Or instead do we have to treat any and all signs of distress/preference as potential harm?
Why do you have whatever views you do about treatment of a foetus? Do octopodes with their very different brain suffer, or just have nociception? Would it be good or bad were we to engineer/breed "pain-free" livestock (barring more ethical alternatives we aren't choosing)?
There are hard and important questions and, unfortunately, we have no other better tool than ourselves to try to answer them. I'm not convinced using our collective experience/reports as a basis can't go a lot further than most people give it credit for.
...it becomes circular to say that a measurement of memory is a measurement of experience itself.
Besides being the thing I care about, self-reports are samples that correspond to experience. There are lots of things we model statistically, indirectly, or understand top-down. We don't have to have access to the neutrino to infer its existence or qualities.
There are things we understand about the brain/consciousness now that were impossible in the past. Who knows what comes up when you start having neural prostheses, higher resolution scans, or deep analysis of all we know about different abnormal brain states? Personal view is it's very premature to write it off as the "hard problem".
Not going to reply anymore, but cheers.
-
Comment on Why we struck Iran in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI get that, and really am not comfortable having an opinion on most geopolitics because it's so far beyond what I understand or have any influence on-- checking out is fine. I also had a friend...I get that, and really am not comfortable having an opinion on most geopolitics because it's so far beyond what I understand or have any influence on-- checking out is fine. I also had a friend growing up whose extended family were tortured under Pinochet, and am aware of Operation Condor and a lot of the rest of our shady history.
But not all events are the same. Killing a terrorist in response to the largest attack on U.S. soil isn't openly assassinating dozens of heads of state. Killing politicians you don't like is increasingly on the table and we already had that happen up in MN.
The world would look very different if PNAC/neocons hadn't invaded Iraq. Millions are dead, even if you only see them on the news. Iran would look wildly different without our coups, or maybe just the U.S.-backed pressure of UAE/Israel and withdrawal from the nuclear deal.
-
Comment on Why we struck Iran in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentOsama wasn't the head of state and the highest religious authority of a country of 90+ million. A better comparison would be Trump killing Qasem Soleimani in his first term after using Iraq...Osama wasn't the head of state and the highest religious authority of a country of 90+ million.
A better comparison would be Trump killing Qasem Soleimani in his first term after using Iraq without their knowledge to lure him out. That seems to have fizzled out after they shot down their own plane. Or maybe because they didn't actually want to escalate with the global military hegemon, or other reasons beyond me.
-
Comment on Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentThe principle of symmetry wouldn't let me understand that people like cilantro, have same-sex attraction, or the rest of the vast spectrum of the human condition. Self-report is as valid a way of...The principle of symmetry wouldn't let me understand that people like cilantro, have same-sex attraction, or the rest of the vast spectrum of the human condition. Self-report is as valid a way of understanding consciousness as we've ever had, and if you discard it you may as well be committed to strong solipsism.
It's possible that it's all self-delusion and perfectly inaccessible. You can't categorically say you existed more than the current second, or that a tricksy demiurge didn't bury dinosaur bones to test you.
The question is how far can you go if instead you choose to take human self-report of experience as valid, since I think most people do that [when it's convenient].
We can only measure memory.
In principle, it should be perfectly possible to remember an event you were not conscious, in the sense of having an actual subjective experience, for.I skipped this in my reply since I wasn't sure if you were saying that you ought to be able to remember events when your brain's memory formation was impaired?
Are you saying that someone having some acute pain induced by something like capsaicin actively reporting how they're feeling on some scale is "memory"?
The regular use of memory is something that can be induced in lab settings. You can have someone fill in details about a childhood trip that they never went on. Memory formation can be inhibited, which may be helpful in anticipation of some traumatic event (a painful surgery).
The amount we understand about how the brain works is wild to compare to any other time in history. That includes, at the very least, the ability to understand a human/mammal/vertebrate/whatever's experience.
But consciousness, as in the pure subjective experience...
Behaviorism was very successful at understanding behavior. It just happened that there was more to the picture, and when extinguishing a response to a phobia didn't extinguish the fear you ended up with a pretty miserable person.
But, accepting self-report, neurology is at the level of interest. We care about pain and suffering. Physics doesn't have to care about relativity until we need good GPS. That's the level you can meaningfully talk about ethical concerns. There may be some Planck length of the atom of qualia that is forever inaccessible. It may also not matter.
All models are flawed, but some are useful. Not all topics need to involve the most low-level layers that conceptually exist. Economics works okay without mastery of psychology->biology->chemistry->physics->fancy physics->inaccessibly fancy physics.
At each layer you get new precision and can ask/answer new questions, but you add a lot of complexity and may lose generalizability, and eventually you'll always hit a wall.
Many things can also be understood indirectly. My eyes glaze over when astronomers I've known have explained how various indirect effects are used in complicated ways, but they seem to get it, at least.
I'm not the person to figure it out. I just think it's overly hasty to dismiss the possibility that data mining the human experience won't turn up some patterns, which in turn can make informed guesses (cybernetics, activity modulation w/rTMS or drugs, designer organoids, who knows). That understanding is used to say "X is linked to acute pain" or that phantom limb syndrome occurs when neighboring regions invade the inactive region and take over the sensory map. They're tested in the same way we accept anytime you ask someone how they feel.
-
Comment on Living human brain cells play DOOM on a CL1 in ~tech
TemulentTeatotaler (edited )Link ParentWe may never find some atom or laws of qualia, but I don't think we're stumbling in the dark. We can and have been making predictions about the inner life of other humans/animals since forever,...We may never find some atom or laws of qualia, but I don't think we're stumbling in the dark. We can and have been making predictions about the inner life of other humans/animals since forever, and understanding the relationship between body, brain, and mind since at least the 1860s with Broca's aphasia or the 1750s with L'homme machine wartime observations.
There are reasonable assumptions to be made. We accept self-report when people say how they're feeling, and that this often generalizes. Sometimes corrections have to be made for things like fallible memory, cultural differences (e.g., an Eastern patient caught quietly saying "it hurts, it hurts", deferring to the doctor more than the WEIRD baseline), deception (e.g., sympathetic lameness in a pet who wants to be treated better), and other sources of bias.
If you only had access to a brain scan do you think you wouldn't be able to diagnose whether they're having pain based on that, or what sort of symptoms a stroke in a particular area might cause, along with the qualia that go along with that? Or that this predictive ability says nothing about our understanding of brain function or consciousness?
Currently things like transcranial magnetic stimulation can be used to to non-invasively modulate activity in the brain, and a quick look suggests it may work like expected:
Overall, TMS was associated with statistically significant effects on warm and cool sensory thresholds, cold pain thresholds, suprathreshold stimulus unpleasantness ratings, and wind-up pain.
We compared time courses of a subjective scale of pain induced by intradermal capsaicin injection in seven normal subjects ... rTMS over M1 induced earlier recovery from acute pain compared with the sham or control conditions.
Bayesian evidence of reduced pain scores and increased heat pain thresholds were found after active rTMS, with no changes occurring after sham rTMS.
-
Comment on <deleted topic> in ~life
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI think I found a PDF, if you're still interested. Google Scholar and Sci-Hub sometimes have paywalled articles. In a (very) quick look I'm not really seeing anything like the "online = twice as...I can't access the study...
I think I found a PDF, if you're still interested. Google Scholar and Sci-Hub sometimes have paywalled articles.
In a (very) quick look I'm not really seeing anything like the "online = twice as picky" claim or any focus on online behavior. Looks like MTurk surveys for some patterns in romantic interest over time (which is measured in events instead of days, which they acknowledge might be a bit skewed).
The closest might be table 6 for meeting context, the prevalence, and whether it led to affairs or long-term or short-term relationships?
Out of what group exactly?
Yeah, not sure what the pool of real life relationship candidates would be, or what culling would look like. Everyone you make two seconds of eye contact with? I was taught to never end a sentence with a proposition.
-
Comment on Seven million cancers a year are preventable, says report in ~health
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentFor at least a couple decades:For at least a couple decades:
In 1998, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (Centre International de Recherche sur le Cancer) of the World Health Organization classified alcoholic beverages as a carcinogen. Its evaluation states:[19]
There is sufficient evidence for the carcinogenicity of alcoholic beverages in humans. […] Alcoholic beverages are carcinogenic to humans (Group 1).
A 2001 systematic review did not find a clear safe level of alcohol consumption where there is no increased risk of cancer.[4]
-
Comment on "Tax us more". Nearly 400 millionaires and billionaires call for higher taxes on super-rich. in ~society
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentTo paraphrase a David Mitchell sentiment on tax avoidance, when you create a grey area where what you pay is based on your conscience what you've effectively done is create a tax on being a good...To paraphrase a David Mitchell sentiment on tax avoidance, when you create a grey area where what you pay is based on your conscience what you've effectively done is create a tax on being a good person.
More prosocial billionaires don't want to donate more. They want to force the Elon Musk's of the world to donate more, alongside them. If they didn't the saturation of wealth in the worst people would just accelerate, if anything.
-
Comment on More than 200 women allege drugging with a diuretic to make them urinate during interviews by senior French civil servant in ~news
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI think they mean it's been known since 2018:I think they mean it's been known since 2018:
The alleged assaults came to light in 2018, after a colleague reported Nègre allegedly attempting to photograph the legs of a senior official, prompting police to open an investigation. Officers found a computer spreadsheet titled “Experiments”, where he had allegedly noted the times of druggings and the women’s reactions.
In 2019, removed from the ministry and the civil service ... Awaiting trial, Nègre has been able to continue working in the private sector.
-
Comment on Timasomo 2025: The Showcase in ~creative.timasomo
TemulentTeatotaler Link ParentI remember the air garden game you were working on-- really like the whole cozy/natural aesthetic vibe you have! How did you go about making the tutorial? Was that done after the fact, or were you...I remember the air garden game you were working on-- really like the whole cozy/natural aesthetic vibe you have!
How did you go about making the tutorial? Was that done after the fact, or were you comfortable enough with the process to do it as you went along?
Sorry, I'd like to respond but I'll probably be slow with it.