Samuel Watson

data science education

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@perrymetzger Totally disagree. You’ve been willing to say that you find doom scenarios to be extremely unlikely. This is not substantively different from saying your P(Doom) is less than 1/1000 or whatever.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@SBingfa @scottstts Completely wrong. Until recently, no one knew how to make use of a large compute budget to even make progress on these kinds of problems.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@MbProfesora @HPluckrose No, she’s right. You haven’t actually said anything material in the entire thread. If her content is so objectionable, you should be able to produce a concrete objection.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@grayson_flood @mattyglesias The implication of which is that the bill is seeking to couple two largely separate issues.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@markvalorian What? “Organic surrounding play” doesn’t determine outcomes in sport in any case. If a player misses a shot by a millimeter, even after a beautifully executed run-up, it’s no goal.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@ShamanicFallout @LordBenne @mookiealexander You’re missing the core objection. Observers are asserting that they consider the rule to be against the spirit of the game in certain situations. That kind of discourse is also common in American sports and often leads to rule changes.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@kareem_carr At the outset, the consensus expectation was that the whole project would fail to materialize anything interesting at all.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@tzituteiwinston @zdeborova Right but the post she’s responding to is the one that conflates those two things. She’s distinguishing them.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@TomPMarshall @zdeborova You accuse the OP of straw-manning while summarizing her statement in a way which is both absurd and diametrically opposed to what she actually said.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@stephenbeckner @allTheYud @robbensinger That’s backwards also. If you are claiming that something is categorically impossible, you have to back that up with evidence.

My own view, which I haven’t stated yet, is that it’s a hard problem and everyone who is 100% confident either way is overconfident.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@JFPuget Sounds to me like you have no rebuttal for any of those four very straightforward observations I made.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@JFPuget Not defending Eliezer’s post, by the way. Just pointing out that this takedown is shoddy and reflective of an obtuse reading of the post.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@JFPuget 3. This objection is the reason for the word “exact”. The influence of the power supply is limited to whether it’s sufficient to effect the algorithm.

4. A person executing an algorithm is certainly possible — we teach children to add integers by summing columns and carrying.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@stephenbeckner @allTheYud @robbensinger In other words, our disagreement is not about consciousness and AI. It’s about the idea of a definition.

What I am pointing out is that you can either support a claim with evidence or define it to be true, but doing both at the same time is logically incoherent.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@stephenbeckner @allTheYud @robbensinger Your definition of consciousness is so unusable that you can’t even stick to it yourself. You’re using the term the way everyone else uses it (i.e., no a priori substrate dependence) and drawing a conclusion that you clearly intend to be non-tautological.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@stephenbeckner @allTheYud @robbensinger Said another way, if your position is that machines are not conscious because your definition of consciousness precludes it, you have not actually made any object-level claim whatsoever.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@stephenbeckner @allTheYud @robbensinger I don’t buy this argument.

We could also collectively decide to define consciousness as that which happens in the southern hemisphere only. In the northern hemisphere it is merely simulated.

Of course, no one is going to accept that this makes sense.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@KBukele1367 @micah_erfan Every human right has been trampled throughout history. So that last part is completely irrelevant.

[Samuel Watson @SamuelSWatson]

@Jacobtheclipper I recommend getting in touch with a toddler for help learning which one is the elbow. While you’re at it, you could also ask about head, shoulders, knees, and toes.