J. D.

I do Machine Learning for healthcare quality measures. MA in Public Policy from University of Chicago.

[Mitt Romney @MittRomney]

Our highest and most urgent national priority should be AI safeguards. The risks of AI weapons, pathogens, mass unemployment, surveillance, and even extinction must not continue to be largely ignored.

[Paul Graham @paulg]

This is an actual page on the White House web site. It reads like something written about a third world dictator. So embarrassing. I have not seen any branch of the federal government sink this low in my lifetime.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

The Farm Bill -- passed by the House, now being considered in the Senate -- contains a measure that would ban states from banning horriffically abusive farming practices.

The cruelty is the point.

https://t.co/NzkOPNalQ3

[Kenny Torrella @KennyTorrella]

I've been thinking more about *time* when I think about animal cruelty. Usually I've thought about severity of pain but this meme really drives home the time element. These animals are in a lot of pain *and* are bored, which slows down time. And they have no distracting stimuli.

[Lewis Bollard @Lewis_Bollard]

Great news: the Senate farm bill base text won't include the Save Our Bacon Act, which would wipe out state bans on pork from crated pigs.

Senate Ag Chair John Boozman said it's too controversial to include. That's thanks to everyone who called and posted about this.

But the fight's not over. Iowa's Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst will likely now try to add the SOB Act to the bill as a committee amendment.

Keep the calls to your senators going: [phone]. Tell them: no farm bill with the Save Our Bacon Act in it. We can win this.

Photo credit: WeAnimals.

[Dean W. Ball @deanwball]

I guess I’ve never written down my actual thoughts on AI cognition/consciousness/emotion. Here goes:

It is clear AIs can think, in the reasoning sense. That does not mean they think exactly like humans. It seems like there are some similarities in how we think, but also very stark differences. Nonetheless, if your definition of “thinking” excludes “the ability to make genuinely new contributions to famous math problems,” it is your definition that has a problem, not AI.

The ability to think does not necessarily imply the ability to feel emotion in a way that would be understandable to humans, and it does not imply that AIs have anything like consciousness in a way that humans would relate to. It may, it may not. We do not know, because our understanding of the underlying concepts of human emotional cognition and especially consciousness remains quite poor.

There is some evidence that models experience emotions, but it is really hard to disentangle this from the next-token prediction training objective (if the model is telling a sad story, wouldn’t you expect features within the model that relate to the sadness emotion to activate), and the character training the model undergoes in post-training. There is a difference between “I am sad” and “the character I have been trained to play is supposed to feel sad, so now I will act sad.” We basically know for sure that the models do the latter at the very least; we don’t really know if they do the former.

Consider: does Sora (a video-generation model) feel sad when it is asked to make a sad video? Does Midjourney dislike making certain kinds of images? Does a Waymo get scared? It doesn’t feel like the answer to any of these is yes (though again, maybe!), but these too are neural networks. Is the fact that models are trained on words mean that they somehow learn emotion, or are we just being tempted to anthropomorphize because the language models communicate with us in a way that “feels” human? My suspicion is kind of the latter.

It also seems quite clear from the empirical evidence that models possess the ability to model themselves. That’s not really that surprising. At sufficient scale, it is useful to have a model of your own state to succeed at the next-token prediction objective (and the later reinforcement-based reasoning training). Once the tasks models are trained on are sufficient complex, they cannot succeed in training by being automatons; someone needs to step into the cockpit, so to speak, and fly the plane. Is this self awareness? Maybe. Is it consciousness? Probably not as humans understand it. All I can tell you is it is a model’s model of itself. It may be something more than that, too, but I don’t know.

This is all very weird, very outside the Overton, and very confusing. I don’t really know what to say, beyond that we should take this stuff seriously, have an open mind, and do rigorous science. Anyone who speaks with confidence about this in either direction is just fooling themselves.

We also need to be prepared for the very possible scenario that, despite our best efforts, we do not make real progress on these questions anytime soon. We may just be in the dark for a while, navigating under unflinching ambiguity. There may be no satisfying conclusion.

[Republicans against Trump @RpsAgainstTrump]

Megyn Kelly, who endorsed and campaigned for Trump in the 2024 election:

“I didn’t expect the corruption to be quite as widespread as it has been. The self-dealing, the lining of his and his family’s pockets. It’s shocking… You look across the board at the Trump family, I’ve never seen a family get so rich off the presidency.”

[BuBBliK @k1rallik]

🚨 do you understand what happened to Stephen Colbert..

24 hours after his final Late Show, Colbert hijacked a tiny public access channel in Monroe, Michigan with Jack White, Eminem, Jeff Daniels and Steve Buscemi.

Now Paramount - the company that just cancelled his show - is mass-blocking every reupload worldwide via Content ID. And the deeper you dig, the worse it looks:

- The finale pulled 6.74M viewers - a weeknight record over 11 years
- Eminem cameoed as "Marshall, the fire marshal" to greenlight torching the set
- The same day Trump posted an AI video of throwing Colbert into a dumpster, Colbert aired footage of himself burning a real one
- Mayday Network and verified journalist Matthew Keys both got blocked globally - for sharing a community access show

Paramount cancelled his show to silence him. Instead they handed him a Streisand-effect comeback 10x bigger than the show ever was.

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@VibeCoderOfek @scaling01 Can you dumb this down for me a bit? By "preference data," are you saying models from the previous cycle are helping generate the reward signal in training for new models?

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@IanCopeland5 The irony is that these guys rail against DEI yet their egos rely upon it, they use it to pretend they "should've been" something better when in fact they're right where they belong

[Rod Thorson🎤🎧 @RadioRodThorson]

The best part of the Midwest. Maybe all of America.

[Dan Carlin @dccommonsense]

We have an ABSOLUTELY unprecedented attempt by the POTUS to discredit election results in advance (if he doesn't like them) and a GOP Congress that WILL NOT challenge him. Which means we independents must rely on the only other major party our system has to protect us.

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@Noahpinion Well yes, they tend to not generate electricity if you don't build them

[Liv Boeree @Liv_Boeree]

@waitbutwhy Yup. And even small donations to a charity like this can save a shit ton of chickens from unnecessary cages by improving welfare standards: https://t.co/HbboztWZYo

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@Noahpinion @RyanPGreenblatt I think the pessimistic interpretation of "richer societies tend to be less rapacious" is "people are less violent once many of their goals have already been achieved," which doesn't speak to orthogonality.

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@K_Selected_ @aaronjmars Also, this comment about police prioritization is very different from your original comment (which is the one I disagreed with), which was that an already-caught criminal should not be charged.

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@K_Selected_ @aaronjmars Most of the largest robberies by $$$ are white collar. I do not invest with Polymarket and agree it's dumb, but if you think this is permissible but not defrauding 30 grand from someone's invested 401k, I still think that's dubious based on what I said in my previous comment

[Maj. (Ret.) Richard Ojeda @Ojeda4America]

Let me be clear: this SICKENS me. I spent YEARS writing letters to get my interpreters in America because they SAVED OUR LIVES. One of my interpreters was a 15 year old kid. One day, we were working with the Afghan police and he went stone quiet. After we left, I asked him what was wrong. He told me that the Afghan police had just threatened to cut his lips off for helping us. He was FIFTEEN. And he risked EVERYTHING for our soldiers.

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@K_Selected_ @aaronjmars I think the potential implication, which I don't agree with, would be that fraud is only such if it is done against sufficiently competent people or against a sufficiently "hardened" target. One of the ways this gauge IS defended are the laws putting this guy in jail. Thoughts?

[J. D. @JamesDowell2]

@cultra @JEBistline I hope to be in the blue circle in the next two years! It will probably be both of the reasons you specified at the same time lol