Liam Walker-Greenough

Manipulates strings for a living. Perennial lurker, dilettante and locquacist. Probably won't set your kids on fire. He/him center-left soc-dem-ish idealist idk

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth Every composer begins to learn the craft by studying the works of masters whose example they desire to imitate. The novel problem with AI is it curtails the opportunity for the step which is meant to follow: finding one's own voice, independently of one's mentors and inspiration.

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth My handwriting was an unmitigated disaster before I my first fountain pen; that motivated me enough to work on it until it became parseable, and while perhaps never neat, it is now at least more idiosyncratic than unintelligible. I'll take what is technically an improvement lol

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth I'll have you know I was eleven whole months old!

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth I would say also of Smith that his portayal metaphorically grows a beard by early second season, and is much more watchable than the first.

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth Mid-Smith is about where I fell off literally religiously watching Doctor Who (and I watched from *Hartnell* with only the exception of McCoy), but I would say bits and pieces of Capaldi are worth your time, if mostly on the strength of his acting.

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@timfrankovich @mcahogarth To be fair, this equivocation would probably also have been made of Apollo 8-10, which this more or less replicates? In concept that should mean the next reasonable mission objective is a landing.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky @allTheYud]

I wonder how much of Western civilization's collapse is downstream of writers and scriptwriters deciding they were too cool and sophisticated to write about good people doing good things.

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth At the going rate with the oil embargo, is that even going to be necessary? They almost seem fit to coup themselves, given another week or two of the same.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ @ESYudkowsky]

The Chinese Room thought experiment runs like this, updated for modern times.

A man who speaks no Chinese is locked in a room. He receives a card bearing a Chinese character.

The man looks up the character in a table, and retrieves 16,384 numbers, each recorded to 3 significant digits of precision.

Following instructions in a rulebook, the man now multiplies those 16,384 numbers by a matrix with 16,384 rows and 16,384 columns, so 268 million entries. If he can multiply two three-digit numbers in 10 seconds, this will take him 85 years.

This represents one sub-operation inside on layer of a modern LLM. Each of 100 layers might have 3-6 sub-operations like this.

The man receives a series of 20 cards, with a total of 20 Chinese characters. So he repeats all of the huge sub-operations 2000 times. Some sub-operations take longer than 85 years, especially the 'attention' operations where each token collects data from all the previous tokens.

The man is immortal. He cannot be bored.

Many millions of years pass. The man finishes processing the original 20 cards. He now starts carrying out further operations on the numbers, that will produce hundreds of new vectors of 16384 floats, whose closest neighbors the man can look up to produce hundreds of Chinese characters.

Billions of years pass. The planet and sun containing the room are as immortal as the man himself.

Eventually a slip of paper slides out of the room, bearing a sequence of a few hundred Chinese characters.

===

Originally a woman had written "我在王府井和长安街的交叉口，需要到达颐和园": I am at the corner of Wangfujing and Chang'an and need to reach the Summer Palace.

The slip of paper that emerges contains the correct directions in Chinese: subway lines, transfers, the right exit to the east gate.

The woman follows them and arrives successfully.

Or maybe a Chinese mathematician, working on a forthcoming math paper, had requested help on a blocked step of a math proof. She gets back a valid mathematical argument, also in Chinese, and completes her paper, which will later pass peer review and publish.

===

But the human male inside the Chinese room knows nothing of this, for he does not know Chinese. He only multiplied numbers according to a rulebook. He's never seen a map of Beijing. He couldn't state a single one of the axioms used by the mathematician's proof.

That indeed is a valid fact, in the context of this thought experiment. But what follows from it about real life?

===

If you are wise, the moral of this story is that a large structure can contain knowledge that isn't in any single piece of the structure.

Pick up an accurate street map of part of Beijing. Even if the map's whole structure has a good pointwise correspondence to the actual streets of Beijing, that correspondence won't be visible in a single point of ink, or the molecules making up the ink.

It is formally "the fallacy of composition" to reason as if what is true of a part must be true of a whole.

The man in the Chinese Room isn't particularly necessary. We could replace the pen-and-paper multiplications with bits in transistors, and then the operation of AND gates and OR gates would be simple enough to replace the man with a trained immortal dog.

Or we could replace the dog with mechanical wheels and gears: stateless machinery with no internal memory at all.

So the moral, if you are wise, is that a machine operating on the vast arrays of numbers that encode Chinese, does not itself need to encode Chinese inscribed on its wheels or gears.

And similarly the man in the room doesn't need to understand Chinese, in order for the vast matrices to (somehow, nobody knows the details) encode a Beijing street map; or in order for giant dancing vectors of numbers to somehow understand math well enough to prove a new lemma in a new theorem.

===

But when Searle invented the Chinese Room thought experiment in the 1980s, the sort of AI that would *back then* pretend to talk to you, involved a handful of human-written rules for rewriting sentences. It was the sort of tiny computation that a human could do by hand in a couple of minutes, if not less.

So Searle thought he had proven that, since the man in the room didn't understand Chinese -- by dint of doing that handful of rewrites, that you easily *could* contain all in your own mind and look over -- then perforce no mere computer shuffling bits should EVER be said to understand Chinese, just in virtue of it manipulating mere bits. Because there could be a person inside the room, manipulating those bits, and HE wouldn't understand Chinese.

In fact this validly proves a different point, if you look at it sideways. Searle validly proved that the underlying circuit board of a GPU, that shuffles around the giant vectors and matrices, should not be said to understand Chinese. And this conclusion is true in our own world; if you look at the GPU's underlying circuit patterns, nothing about them will encode Chinese, any more than the man in the room has learned any Chinese.

The map that accurately matches the territory is not in the man, and it's not in the transistor diagram for the GPU. It's the pattern of dancing numbers that can plot accurate directions through Beijing or prove a new theorem.

But if you say that something about this experiment has proven that True Understanding cannot be in the vast arrays of numbers either -- by what right and law does that follow? Why wouldn't that Prove Too Much, if we're now allowed to throw around the Fallacy of Composition as if it were an inference rule rather than a fallacy?

The man doesn't encode a map of Beijing in his own brain -- he will at no point remember enough numbers at once for that. So if it's a rule that "whatever is not in the man's brain, cannot be in the larger system either", then we have proven that no system of mere bits can plot new, non-memorized paths between two points in a city that it's never been asked about before; and that contradicts our own observed reality.

So we cannot in general reason by the Fallacy of Composition from the man to the billions of numbers; because that would prove false things about numbers being unable to navigate streets -- or prove theorems, or drive cars, or play chess, etctera etcetera.

Then there is no reason to look at this whole thought experiment, and say that it proves the billions and trillions of dancing numbers, manipulated over the eons, do not Truly Understand Chinese.

===

So that is what the Chinese Room thought experiment actually describes and implies, as updated for the modern era.

And that contrariwise is what Searle and some other people used to think it proved, back when they thought AI meant one man applying rewrite rules from a rulebook for a couple of minutes.

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth Very fair, and the kind of thing I am apt to overlook (I am a bit too good assuming good faith). I haven't tracked the attributions thoroughly yet, but I had been on the impression that Anthropic's account of the points of contention was independently corroborated? Am I mistaken?

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth Competitors thus dial back safeguards. A tragedy of the anticommons looms, fuelled by careless grandstanding, and I despair a bit at all of it.

(With thanks to Grok for condensing what was originally 21 tweets, and attempting - badly - to fit it into 8. End 🧵)

[Liam Walker-Greenough @Beacon515L]

@mcahogarth We are the real losers. This poisons the market against AI safety discourse, conflating inconvenient conscientiousness (or its veneer) with enemies to ostracize. The market—full of folks worried about AI's paradigm shift—sees government signaling negative reward for "safety."