Matt Post

Machine translation research for big tech and big academia and director of the @aclanthology. Tweets here are mostly personal.

[Paul Schofield @pschofie79]

Had you told me in 2016 that some day you’d be able to take a screenshot of a tweet directly from the Copy Link Button, I never would have believed you. What a time to be alive.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@CalebPeffer What first principles do you have in mind? What you mention is indeed a source of my skepticism, but it runs a lot deeper than that, and I don't think it is blinding me to persuasion.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@theberschtones You can relitigate anything! I try to word these in a way to invite pushback, but don't always succeed. This is a good connection to our earlier discussion.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

This is a good reminder that the mainstream media reports on events that are unusual in some dimension (green bananas), that the cumulative effect of this is to invert the average person's understanding of reality, that the median reporter is a conformity-driven normie who is not aware of this and whose main goal is to be liked by his peers, and that there is a huge institutional demand for a certain kind of "racism" that vastly exceeds the supply.

[CBS Mornings @CBSMornings]

A CBS Mornings Exclusive: The University of Mississippi freshmen who captured the viral video of two white students making monkey gestures and sounds outside their apartment door speak out for the first time. The students and one of their mothers tell @Jerickaduncan how they feel now that one of the students involved has voluntarily withdrawn from the school.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@alfarojoshua3 I stopped even earlier, at "silicon is knitting itself"

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@theberschtones Impressive work

[Matt Post @mjpost]

AI aside, special requests that are accompanied by an implied expectation of compliance have always rubbed me the wrong way.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

The real modern test is to have the engineer issue an agent command and then see what they do while waiting for the response

[Panat @ptaranat]

writing code in an interview is now larping in the literal sense. like you are straight up live action roleplaying a historical reenactment of what it was like to be a software engineer.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@theberschtones lol yes, I knew I could count on you to be online enough for this one

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@DangoDenno @pegobry_en Thank you! https://t.co/aXs3MVhlVS

[Matt Post @mjpost]

Yeah you've really got to be discerning when you use this especially if you are young and learning. I also think of it analogously to video chats, where there is the temptation to engage in behavior you think is off camera, until the time it's not, which suggests cultivating the habit of behaving like you're in person at all times.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@cshbell @matthew_loftus It's my actual thinking, but also if I turn out to be wrong (in the doomer tradition of adding to the heft of an argument with numbers pulled out of the air, I put it at 10%), no one will remember :)

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@DangoDenno @pegobry_en Do you have a link? I would *love* to read more of this.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@matthew_loftus I think it's because they don't know anything https://t.co/q6DgFKHykA

[Jon Stokes @jon_stokes]

The argument from authority here works b/c ppl see this & go, "this guy knows a lot about AI!" But it shouldn't work, because what you should ask yourself is: "what does he know about taking over all of human society?" This is the lesson of Hinton's failed radiology prediction.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@matthew_loftus The most realistic concern is that AI amplifies the capabilities of bad actors, lowering the floor on technologies that can then be used by people against Ian Malcolm's warnings. Why the doomers focus on ridiculous scenarios like "boiling away the oceans" is beyond me.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@AndyMasley I am not sure that I am not just arguing from personal incredulity, but among other aspects, there is something about the combination of confidently-shared fantastical scenarios (boiling away the ocean) that makes me dismissive.

[Matt Post @mjpost]

@austinc3301 @jessesingal The linked essay reminds me of this old review of overpriced audio cables, where the conclusion comes first and the argumentation is conjured up to support it, with results that are obvious to everyone except those who want to buy the cables. https://t.co/pDN4uQrALD

[Matt Post @mjpost]

Ok, I followed the link, and it is just more of the same. Vague, "low-effort", a promise to avoid specifics, just breezy dismissals designed to deflect anticipated criticism. I read a few paragraphs and am annoyed at all the nested parentheticals and qualifying footnotes and genre jargon ("cruxy"). I have already observed no fewer than five probabilities. These are signs of sloppy, disorganized thinking that strongly suggests to me what I'm going to read, and arriving at the standard set of impossible scenarios, I've lost interest. I find the best writing in these spaces to be unconvincing and this is far from the best, I'm sorry to say.