UHouston Superfan

biggest fan of Houston

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

“Competes with those causes.” Does anyone seriously think if we found a new species of mammal, that would degrade our respect or level of care for current mammals? What is the social force pushing people to be so purposely idiotic?

[Josh Albrecht @joshalbrecht]

Anthropic friends! Does this not seem crazy to you?

There are real humans and animals that exist and suffer. Advocating for "model welfare" directly competes with those causes.

Y'all are literally named "anthropic"!

Does this not strike you as deeply wrong?

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

@perrymetzger @grok You are just incorrect, I’m sorry. There are perfectly suitable definitions of phenomenal consciousness for anyone who wants them. As good definitions of chair or table. Factual questions about consciousness won’t be answered by pretending to do philosophy about definitions

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

Why is it that people ignorant of philosophy always want to talk about “needing definitions”? They must have watched a movie somewhere where this was what good philosophy was; otherwise it’s impossible to explain

[Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger]

I am not deeply interested in getting into an argument about consciousness, because I think most people have no idea what it means or how to define it, even if they think they do.

However, the extremists on the “shrimp are conscious, AI is conscious” side have done a bad job explaining why (by their non-definitions) a brick isn’t conscious and Microsoft Excel isn’t conscious.

(And indeed, I have noticed that there is a tendency in certain EA circles to worry about things like whether subatomic particles are conscious. I wish I was joking, but I have literally seen such discussions.)

If your argument for why something possesses this mysterious consciousness fluid that you can’t define can be applied equally well to bags of salt, electrical transformers, and a 1980s stand-up “Frogger” arcade machine, I am not entirely sure why we should care about it.

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

It is a little surprising just how many mathematicians were in it for the social status and not the truth

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

@daviddufty @magnushambleton Any probability estimate? Even to within, say, 1000 orders of magnitude?

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

I’m a bit worried that this response won’t be rhetorically successful because it’s *too good* — like yes, Pinker has been wildly irresponsible and this catalogs that exhaustively, but publicly embarrassing him will make him dig in and get defensive.

[Liron Shapira @liron]

Here we f***ing go https://t.co/6BI7uR44CC

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

I’m doing socially-approved-of ad hominem because I’m smart as well as cool! :)

[Josh Barro @jbarro]

I'm sorry, this piece did nothing to disabuse me of the idea that I should downrate the importance of arguments from "rationalists" because they are huge weirdos https://t.co/Uabmcgx2mk

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

@AdamThierer @tylercowen Well yeah if you don’t look at the other sentences!

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

It would be interesting to write a book about this particular rhetorical move — it might actually be The Worst Argument in the World

[Caitlin Johnstone @caitoz]

I refuse to even think about claims that chatbots are conscious beings whose rights must be protected until I live in a society where all humans are treated as conscious beings whose rights must be protected.

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

Weird phenomenon: someone makes a motte-defense statement, leaving a Bailey out there to criticize, but people feel like they need to criticize the Motte still!

[POLITICO @politico]

“We believe the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology.”

In a conversation for the first edition of Decoded, a new daily newsletter and podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talked with POLITICO’s @BrendanBordelon about trade-offs, AI safety, and how his company is different from Anthropic.

Subscribe to Decoded for the full conversation with Sam Altman: https://t.co/YHJJsDOQVh

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

@timnitGebru Pretty funny to say the journalists are also parroting, when that’s supposed to be your evidence that they aren’t conscious lol

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

How could a professional philosopher possibly say this? There has to be some extreme social pressure some individuals are feeling right now, it’s just bizarre to act this way

[robkoons @robkoons]

An AI system is not a concrete thing. It’s an abstract, mathematical object. Saying that a sufficiently complex AI system might be conscious is like thinking that the number pi might be conscious

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

I feel like a good sign of political polarization is when it’s a virtue to just multiply the number of arguments in favor of a position. They don’t need to be good, but novelty counts for something for some reason.

[Ted Lieu @tedlieu]

The below is not accurate. An artificial neural network is deterministic, not arbitrary. It generates the same output to the same input every time. Because it’s math.

What makes AI models arbitrary is that AI companies stick in random number generators. That’s not consciousness.

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

Map territory confusion while citing the map territory confusion

[Lachlan Phillips exo/acc 👾 @bitcloud]

Just so no one is confused:

Yes you could make a mathematical model of a human brain.

In just the same way you make a mathematical model of the weather.

You cannot make a mathematical model of an LLM because it's literally a mathematical model.

The map is not the territory - and in the case of LLMs, there is no territory. It's 100% map.

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

Something interesting going on sociologically here

[Jordan Fish @jwordfish]

Now more than ever:

Your Brain Does Not Process Information and it is Not a Computer

https://t.co/3MaxCjEy2X

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

An NVIDIA chip running an LLM is a physical object doing things in the world. It just so happens that those things are very neatly modeled by mathematical programs. But don’t think for a second that those two are identical!

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

It really would help a lot of people to realize that a computer is *a physical object whose behavior is modeled by a mathematical function* and not the function itself!

[Alvaro Jenkins @AlvaJenks]

idk I think the burden of proof (or, if you like, the burden of persuasion) lies with those who think a concatenation of many matrix multiplications produces consciousness

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

Interesting to fail to make a software/hardware distinction while saying the metaphysics is obvious

[djbear. @djb3ar]

They are code
They are quite literally a bunch of zeros and ones
They have no feelings
They only follow the instructions made by the coder

You are schizophrenic

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

There’s this bizarre anti-Americanism at the root of a lot of anti-immigration rhetoric where they see Americans as totally unexceptional and replaceable and it just isn’t true

[Rod Dreher @roddreher]

Read this.

[UHouston Superfan @sleepovercutie]

@nkulw Bill gates has been supporting higher taxes on capital income for a very long time?