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I found the discussion about Darwin especially fascinating. Why did it take till 1859 to lay out an idea whose essence every farmer and herder since antiquity must have observed? The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, two centuries earlier. Conceptually, natural... selection is much simpler than the theory of gravity. Thomas Huxley read The Origin of Species and said, "How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!" Nobody ever said the same about not beating Newton to the Principia. One reason it took so long: Darwin's theory cannot be decisively tested. The evidence is circumstantial, retrospective, and cumulative. There's no equivalent of Newton running the numbers on the Moon's orbital period and confirming they correspond to his equations. In a previous interview with Terence Tao, I brought up Lucretius as an ancient precursor to Darwin. I didn’t actually realize how different Lucretius is from Darwin. Lucretius thought that there was some generative period in the past where a bunch of different species emerged somewhat spontaneously. And then there was a one time filter where the unfit ones got culled out. What he was missing was the idea that there’s common descent between all the species, that there’s a tree of life, that natural selection is a cumulative process. In fact we don’t talk about how wild it is that all life on Earth has a common ancestor! It’s wild! So what actually had to be in place? Charles Lyell doing the foundational work in geology in the 1830s gave Darwin the concept of deep time. Without at least tens of millions of years, evolution is a non-starter, because you'd need to see species transforming within human lifetimes. You also needed paleontology showing intermediate species (including between humans and other apes), biogeography from the age of colonization, and more sophisticated artificial selection like pigeon breeding. The proof that these preconditions mattered: Darwin and Wallace arrived at the same idea almost simultaneously, and both credited Lyell. Their work was presented jointly at the Linnean Society in 1858. Something that went undiscovered for all of human history and then was independently discovered twice within a few years. The building blocks had just fallen into place.show more

Dwarkesh Patel

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38,291 次观看 • 3 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, two centuries earlier. Conceptually, it seems like natural selection is much simpler than the theory of gravity. So why did it take two centuries longer to discover? A contemporary of Darwin's, Thomas Huxley, read the Origin of Species and said, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Nobody ever said the same for not beating Newton to the Principia. I wonder if the reason this happened is that Darwin’s cannot be decisively tested. The evidence is circumstantial, retrospective, and cumulative. There's no equivalent of Newton running the numbers on the moon's orbital period and radius, and confirming that it corresponds to his theory. In fact, nearly two thousand years before Darwin, the Roman poet Lucretius argued in De Rerum Natura that organisms suited to their environment survive while ill-adapted ones perish. But nobody built a science on it. Without a tight verification loop, the idea just floated by. Terence Tao argues that Darwin succeeded where Lucretius failed because he had the ability to convince people that the gaps in his theory (specifically, what is the mechanism of heredity) would be filled. This was less about ‘hard’ scientific insight, and more a matter of having good research taste and being persuasive. But it was crucial for progress in biology.

The Origin of Species was published in 1859. Principia Mathematica was published in 1687, two centuries earlier. Conceptually, it seems like natural selection is much simpler than the theory of gravity. So why did it take two centuries longer to discover? A contemporary of Darwin's, Thomas Huxley, read the Origin of Species and said, “How extremely stupid not to have thought of that!” Nobody ever said the same for not beating Newton to the Principia. I wonder if the reason this happened is that Darwin’s cannot be decisively tested. The evidence is circumstantial, retrospective, and cumulative. There's no equivalent of Newton running the numbers on the moon's orbital period and radius, and confirming that it corresponds to his theory. In fact, nearly two thousand years before Darwin, the Roman poet Lucretius argued in De Rerum Natura that organisms suited to their environment survive while ill-adapted ones perish. But nobody built a science on it. Without a tight verification loop, the idea just floated by. Terence Tao argues that Darwin succeeded where Lucretius failed because he had the ability to convince people that the gaps in his theory (specifically, what is the mechanism of heredity) would be filled. This was less about ‘hard’ scientific insight, and more a matter of having good research taste and being persuasive. But it was crucial for progress in biology.

Dwarkesh Patel

178,848 次观看 • 3 个月前

What was the most important transition in human history, the thing that most drastically altered our species' way of life? David Reich's lab has found evidence pointing to a new answer. There are two standard candidates: 1. The shift from hunting and gathering to farming, around 10,000 BC. 2. The Industrial Revolution, around 1800 AD. Here's one way to adjudicate this: When a species' environment changes drastically, natural selection accelerates, because the species has to catch up to adapt. So the biggest transition will have happened in the period with the most rapid natural selection. What David's lab has found is that the period with fastest natural selection wasn't 12000 years ago, and it wasn't our modern period. It was the Bronze Age, about 5,000 to 2,000 years ago. What was it about the Bronze Age that changed humans so profoundly?

What was the most important transition in human history, the thing that most drastically altered our species' way of life? David Reich's lab has found evidence pointing to a new answer. There are two standard candidates: 1. The shift from hunting and gathering to farming, around 10,000 BC. 2. The Industrial Revolution, around 1800 AD. Here's one way to adjudicate this: When a species' environment changes drastically, natural selection accelerates, because the species has to catch up to adapt. So the biggest transition will have happened in the period with the most rapid natural selection. What David's lab has found is that the period with fastest natural selection wasn't 12000 years ago, and it wasn't our modern period. It was the Bronze Age, about 5,000 to 2,000 years ago. What was it about the Bronze Age that changed humans so profoundly?

Dwarkesh Patel

111,095 次观看 • 2 个月前

Daniel Dennett: "If I gave a prize to the best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." Not Newton. Not Einstein. Darwin. In a 2015 documentary, philosopher Daniel Dennett makes a striking case for why Darwin's idea of natural selection is the single greatest intellectual achievement in human history. His reasoning isn't just about biology. Dennett argues that what makes Darwin's idea so extraordinary is what it unifies. Before Darwin, the world was split into two seemingly incompatible realms: the physical world of cause and matter, and the world of meaning, purpose, and consciousness. These felt like they belonged to different categories entirely. One explained by science, the other by something else. Darwin's idea, Dennett says, is the backbone that bridges them: "The Darwinian idea of natural selection unifies the world. It unifies the world of cause and matter and physics with the world of meaning and purpose consciousness. The whole spectrum of life depends on uniting the living with the non-living, the meaning with the non-meaning, the purposeful with the merely mechanical and merely physical." That's not a small claim. It's a philosophical revolution disguised as a biology paper. What Dennett is pointing to is that natural selection gives us a mechanism: a purely physical, purposeless process that generates purpose. Organisms don't need a designer to have goals. The appearance of design, the reality of meaning, emerges from the bottom up. The best idea anyone ever had. No prize for second place.

Daniel Dennett: "If I gave a prize to the best idea anybody ever had, I'd give it to Darwin." Not Newton. Not Einstein. Darwin. In a 2015 documentary, philosopher Daniel Dennett makes a striking case for why Darwin's idea of natural selection is the single greatest intellectual achievement in human history. His reasoning isn't just about biology. Dennett argues that what makes Darwin's idea so extraordinary is what it unifies. Before Darwin, the world was split into two seemingly incompatible realms: the physical world of cause and matter, and the world of meaning, purpose, and consciousness. These felt like they belonged to different categories entirely. One explained by science, the other by something else. Darwin's idea, Dennett says, is the backbone that bridges them: "The Darwinian idea of natural selection unifies the world. It unifies the world of cause and matter and physics with the world of meaning and purpose consciousness. The whole spectrum of life depends on uniting the living with the non-living, the meaning with the non-meaning, the purposeful with the merely mechanical and merely physical." That's not a small claim. It's a philosophical revolution disguised as a biology paper. What Dennett is pointing to is that natural selection gives us a mechanism: a purely physical, purposeless process that generates purpose. Organisms don't need a designer to have goals. The appearance of design, the reality of meaning, emerges from the bottom up. The best idea anyone ever had. No prize for second place.

Mateus — eu/acc 🇪🇺

51,876 次观看 • 4 个月前

I had no idea how wild the story of human evolution was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich. Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out. From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans 70,000 years ago who killed off all the other human species; to the Yamnaya horse nomads 5,000 years ago who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization. So much of what we thought we knew about human history is turning out to be wrong, from the ‘Out of Africa’ theory to the evolution of language, and this is all thanks to the research from David Reich’s lab. Extremely fascinating stuff. Enjoy! Links below.

I had no idea how wild the story of human evolution was before chatting with the geneticist of ancient DNA David Reich. Human history has been again and again a story of one group figuring ‘something’ out, and then basically wiping everyone else out. From the tribe of 1k-10k modern humans 70,000 years ago who killed off all the other human species; to the Yamnaya horse nomads 5,000 years ago who killed off 90+% of (then) Europeans and also destroyed the Indus Valley Civilization. So much of what we thought we knew about human history is turning out to be wrong, from the ‘Out of Africa’ theory to the evolution of language, and this is all thanks to the research from David Reich’s lab. Extremely fascinating stuff. Enjoy! Links below.

Dwarkesh Patel

601,047 次观看 • 1 年前

From Dan Lorenc on the malware attack that almost took down the entire internet last year: “There’s a popular compression library that’s used in almost every piece of software. And it had been maintained by one person in his spare time for the last 20 years. And then a couple years ago, somebody just decided to start helping him. They jumped in, fixed a bunch of bugs, and did a lot of great work. And then that first person got tired of working on it. So he handed the whole project over to this other person. It turned out that other person was just a pseudonym and was not a real person. And within six months of getting control of the project, they had put in a carefully orchestrated set of malware that was really hard to detect and no one noticed. And because it was so widely used, the exploit would've basically given that person remote access to any computer running that piece of software, which was basically everything connected to the Internet. But because it was open source and the code was transparent, some random engineer just happened to be running some benchmarks on a weekend. And he noticed that program was a little bit slower than it used to be, and that it was making a weird cryptographic operation to check something. And right before this thing got widely deployed across every device, he dug in, and discovered that there was a backdoor put in. This was the closest thing to a full-blown internet crisis that we’ve ever had. And they still have no idea who did it. It was just an anonymous email account. No one ever traced it back to an individual. And that's the long game. This person spent years just doing good work and earning the communities trust.”

From Dan Lorenc on the malware attack that almost took down the entire internet last year: “There’s a popular compression library that’s used in almost every piece of software. And it had been maintained by one person in his spare time for the last 20 years. And then a couple years ago, somebody just decided to start helping him. They jumped in, fixed a bunch of bugs, and did a lot of great work. And then that first person got tired of working on it. So he handed the whole project over to this other person. It turned out that other person was just a pseudonym and was not a real person. And within six months of getting control of the project, they had put in a carefully orchestrated set of malware that was really hard to detect and no one noticed. And because it was so widely used, the exploit would've basically given that person remote access to any computer running that piece of software, which was basically everything connected to the Internet. But because it was open source and the code was transparent, some random engineer just happened to be running some benchmarks on a weekend. And he noticed that program was a little bit slower than it used to be, and that it was making a weird cryptographic operation to check something. And right before this thing got widely deployed across every device, he dug in, and discovered that there was a backdoor put in. This was the closest thing to a full-blown internet crisis that we’ve ever had. And they still have no idea who did it. It was just an anonymous email account. No one ever traced it back to an individual. And that's the long game. This person spent years just doing good work and earning the communities trust.”

The Peel

47,683 次观看 • 1 年前

"That pussy Adam Cole broke his ankle like the complete dork that he is." MJF talks about the revisionist history of his story with Adam Cole "Here's what happened. At the time, and this is just a fact, we were the highest minute-for-minute drawing angle, not just in AEW, but in all of professional wrestling at that point. We were moving the most merch in the company. At that point, and was to no fault, Bloodline's going to go down as one of the greatest long-term thing, but at that point there was a bit of lull in their story at that point in 2023, and we had taken lead and Better Than You, Baby is what everybody was talking about and then that pussy Adam Cole broke his ankle like the complete dork that he is and then he decided to turn on me because he's a horrible human being. But I learned a lot in that in that year I learned a lot about myself you know when I when I was out—full disclosure I was in a very dark place." I also asked about the injuries he had suffered "It was my hip, my left shoulder; my last two pay-per-view matches—pretty much the left side of my body was useless. But I wasn't going to tell the doctors that because that's not how I was brought up. In not just in real life, but in this business. When I had that time off, I had a lot of time to reflect and it made me angry. Now I look back on it and I shouldn't have been angry at the fans. Who I should have been angry was that myself. Because I went from being, ‘MJF is the best thing since sliced bread,’ and within a flip of a switch, ‘It's MJF sucks. He's killing this company that we love.’ It took, if we're being honest, it took all the way into like the first month of this year of 2025 for everybody to be like, ‘Maybe we were harsh. Maybe he's actually still one of the best in the world. They can't help it. But I know why. It's because nobody likes a braggart. But the unfortunate thing is I can't help myself. I'm just really good at my job and I can't help but talk about it."

"That pussy Adam Cole broke his ankle like the complete dork that he is." MJF talks about the revisionist history of his story with Adam Cole "Here's what happened. At the time, and this is just a fact, we were the highest minute-for-minute drawing angle, not just in AEW, but in all of professional wrestling at that point. We were moving the most merch in the company. At that point, and was to no fault, Bloodline's going to go down as one of the greatest long-term thing, but at that point there was a bit of lull in their story at that point in 2023, and we had taken lead and Better Than You, Baby is what everybody was talking about and then that pussy Adam Cole broke his ankle like the complete dork that he is and then he decided to turn on me because he's a horrible human being. But I learned a lot in that in that year I learned a lot about myself you know when I when I was out—full disclosure I was in a very dark place." I also asked about the injuries he had suffered "It was my hip, my left shoulder; my last two pay-per-view matches—pretty much the left side of my body was useless. But I wasn't going to tell the doctors that because that's not how I was brought up. In not just in real life, but in this business. When I had that time off, I had a lot of time to reflect and it made me angry. Now I look back on it and I shouldn't have been angry at the fans. Who I should have been angry was that myself. Because I went from being, ‘MJF is the best thing since sliced bread,’ and within a flip of a switch, ‘It's MJF sucks. He's killing this company that we love.’ It took, if we're being honest, it took all the way into like the first month of this year of 2025 for everybody to be like, ‘Maybe we were harsh. Maybe he's actually still one of the best in the world. They can't help it. But I know why. It's because nobody likes a braggart. But the unfortunate thing is I can't help myself. I'm just really good at my job and I can't help but talk about it."

Sean Ross Sapp of Fightful.com

31,538 次观看 • 7 个月前

The Matrix didn’t lie. 1999 was the peak of human civilization. It was the perfect point in time when technology was advanced enough to augment and improve human life but not so advanced that it was used to surveil and control. Technology was still in service of the individual. After 2001 and The Patriot Act, everything changed. “I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this (1999): the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You've had your time. The future is *our* world, Morpheus. The future is our time.” - Agent Smith (The Matrix) Pay attention to what Smith said. Reread it. As soon as the technology started being in service of technology (agent smith is an AI), and NOT in service of humans, and humans GAVE THEIR POWER AWAY, it became the civilization of the machines, not the humans. TLDR: Hoard physical media. PS5 DRM bad.

The Matrix didn’t lie. 1999 was the peak of human civilization. It was the perfect point in time when technology was advanced enough to augment and improve human life but not so advanced that it was used to surveil and control. Technology was still in service of the individual. After 2001 and The Patriot Act, everything changed. “I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this (1999): the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus, evolution. Like the dinosaur. Look out that window. You've had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.” - Agent Smith (The Matrix) Pay attention to what Smith said. Reread it. As soon as the technology started being in service of technology (agent smith is an AI), and NOT in service of humans, and humans GAVE THEIR POWER AWAY, it became the civilization of the machines, not the humans. TLDR: Hoard physical media. PS5 DRM bad.

Autism Capital 🧩

279,695 次观看 • 2 个月前

.Elon Musk (worth $250B) answers why he’s still working: I think it's a good question you asked, because it goes to, like, at a foundational level, what is my philosophy, and why does it lead to this conclusion? So the reason is that when I was a teenager, I had, like, an existential crisis to try to figure out what's the meaning of life. There doesn't seem to be any meaning. For me, at least the religious texts, and I read all of them that I could get my hands on did not seem convincing. Then I started reading the philosophers. Be careful of reading German philosophers as a teenager. It's definitely not going to help with your depression. So reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as an adult, it's much more manageable. But as a kid, you're like, “Whoa.” So then I was like, “Man, I'm just struggling to find meaning in life here.” And then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask. The question is not, “What's the meaning of life?” In The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth it turns out is a big computer, and its goal is to answer the question, “What's the meaning of life?” And Earth comes up with the answer “42”. This is where the 42 number comes from. And 420 is just ten times 42. In that book, which is really sort of a book about, it's an existential philosophy book disguised as humor. They come to the conclusion that, no, the real problem is trying to formulate the question. And to really have the right question, you need a much bigger computer than Earth. And so maybe one way, I think, of characterizing this would be to say, “The universe is the answer. What is the question? Or what are the questions?” The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. The more we can expand consciousness, become a multi-planet species, ultimately a multistellar species… we have a chance of figuring out what the hell is going on. And so this is why I think we should have more humans and both biological and digital consciousness. And why we should become a multi-planet species and a multistellar species is so that we can understand the nature of the universe. And then in order for that to occur, then we have to make sure that things are good on Earth. We don't want Earth to disappear, so sustainable energy is important.

.Elon Musk (worth $250B) answers why he’s still working: I think it's a good question you asked, because it goes to, like, at a foundational level, what is my philosophy, and why does it lead to this conclusion? So the reason is that when I was a teenager, I had, like, an existential crisis to try to figure out what's the meaning of life. There doesn't seem to be any meaning. For me, at least the religious texts, and I read all of them that I could get my hands on did not seem convincing. Then I started reading the philosophers. Be careful of reading German philosophers as a teenager. It's definitely not going to help with your depression. So reading Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, as an adult, it's much more manageable. But as a kid, you're like, “Whoa.” So then I was like, “Man, I'm just struggling to find meaning in life here.” And then I read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And basically what Douglas Adams was saying is that we don't really know what the right questions are to ask. The question is not, “What's the meaning of life?” In The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth it turns out is a big computer, and its goal is to answer the question, “What's the meaning of life?” And Earth comes up with the answer “42”. This is where the 42 number comes from. And 420 is just ten times 42. In that book, which is really sort of a book about, it's an existential philosophy book disguised as humor. They come to the conclusion that, no, the real problem is trying to formulate the question. And to really have the right question, you need a much bigger computer than Earth. And so maybe one way, I think, of characterizing this would be to say, “The universe is the answer. What is the question? Or what are the questions?” The more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, the better we can understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. The more we can expand consciousness, become a multi-planet species, ultimately a multistellar species… we have a chance of figuring out what the hell is going on. And so this is why I think we should have more humans and both biological and digital consciousness. And why we should become a multi-planet species and a multistellar species is so that we can understand the nature of the universe. And then in order for that to occur, then we have to make sure that things are good on Earth. We don't want Earth to disappear, so sustainable energy is important.

Arjun Khemani

15,597,236 次观看 • 1 年前

This is the oldest surviving icon of Christ, the oldest painted portrait of the face of Jesus that has come down to us. It was made around 1500 years ago, and if you cover one half of the face, then the other, you are looking at two different men... It's called Christ Pantocrator, a Greek title meaning "Ruler of All," and it was painted in the sixth century, around the year 550, most likely in a workshop in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was almost certainly sent as an imperial gift to a remote new monastery being built in the Egyptian desert. It has hung there, in the Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, ever since. For roughly 1,500 years, it has never left. That it survived at all is remarkable. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Byzantine Empire went through a violent period called Iconoclasm, in which religious images were condemned as idolatry and destroyed by the thousands. Almost every icon of this age in the empire was burned. But Saint Catherine's lay far out in the desert, beyond the reach of the emperors and their decrees, so this one was spared. It is one of the very few images of its kind on earth to come down to us intact. But the truly haunting thing is the face. Look at it, and the two sides do not match. On the side where Christ holds the Gospel, his features are harder, sterner, the brow raised, the eye larger and more severe, the face of a judge who sees everything. On the side where he raises his hand in blessing, the expression softens, calm and merciful, the face of a savior. One half is divine authority. The other is human compassion. Most scholars believe this was entirely deliberate. The icon was painted not long after the Church had formally defined that Christ was at once fully God and fully man, two natures joined in one person. And so the artist, it is thought, built that doctrine directly into the face, splitting it in two so that the same man could be, in a single gaze, both merciful and just, both human and divine... I started my newsletter because our past is extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are showing us how to truly see it. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.

This is the oldest surviving icon of Christ, the oldest painted portrait of the face of Jesus that has come down to us. It was made around 1500 years ago, and if you cover one half of the face, then the other, you are looking at two different men... It's called Christ Pantocrator, a Greek title meaning "Ruler of All," and it was painted in the sixth century, around the year 550, most likely in a workshop in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. It was almost certainly sent as an imperial gift to a remote new monastery being built in the Egyptian desert. It has hung there, in the Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai, ever since. For roughly 1,500 years, it has never left. That it survived at all is remarkable. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Byzantine Empire went through a violent period called Iconoclasm, in which religious images were condemned as idolatry and destroyed by the thousands. Almost every icon of this age in the empire was burned. But Saint Catherine's lay far out in the desert, beyond the reach of the emperors and their decrees, so this one was spared. It is one of the very few images of its kind on earth to come down to us intact. But the truly haunting thing is the face. Look at it, and the two sides do not match. On the side where Christ holds the Gospel, his features are harder, sterner, the brow raised, the eye larger and more severe, the face of a judge who sees everything. On the side where he raises his hand in blessing, the expression softens, calm and merciful, the face of a savior. One half is divine authority. The other is human compassion. Most scholars believe this was entirely deliberate. The icon was painted not long after the Church had formally defined that Christ was at once fully God and fully man, two natures joined in one person. And so the artist, it is thought, built that doctrine directly into the face, splitting it in two so that the same man could be, in a single gaze, both merciful and just, both human and divine... I started my newsletter because our past is extraordinary, and fewer and fewer people are showing us how to truly see it. Every week I try to. If that is something you'd like to be part of, you can join through the link in my bio, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible. Thanks for reading.

James Lucas

657,878 次观看 • 7 天前

.David Deutsch: The equivalent of consilience, that is, the unified meta-theory, as you put it, for all sciences, and I think actually more than a meta-theory, because I think more links them than just the structure and methodology and so on, was discovered by Popper. Again, I don't know whether this is historically the order in which things happen, but he is famous for his political philosophy and for his philosophy of science, and he found at one point that they are the same, that they both are about problems and about the fact that there is no such instruction from without, there is only conjecture from within. So that's why Lamarckism is false and Darwinism is true, and that's why group selection is false and individual selection is true, and so on. So I think it's already there in Popper. I think there's a lot more to it, and I tried to add another couple of things to it, so quantum theory and computation, but there's a lot that isn't in it, like consciousness and creativity and so on, that we have no idea of how those work and how they fit in with those other things. Gad Saad: Forgive me for interrupting you, David, I'm sorry. There is a book by Dean Simington, who's a psychologist out of, I think, UC Davis, that actually offers a Darwinian account for creativity. It's actually quite mind-blowing. So keep that in mind. I can give you the reference later, but go ahead. David Deutsch: I don't read such things unless they've already made an AGI. Gad Saad: I see. Okay, fair enough. David Deutsch: If they can't make an AGI, then they haven't got the full theory. They might have an idea for a theory, but then Popper has an idea for a theory, but he couldn't make one either. And Turing thought that there'd be an AGI by the year 2000, and that it would require two megabytes of memory. Now, he's obviously wrong about the year 2000, but two megabytes of memory, I reckon that's what it'll be. In other words, these large language models and all this massive computer power is going in entirely the wrong direction. The answer will be a philosophical breakthrough, which will allow, once we understand what we're trying to make, it will be relatively easy to make it with relatively few computational resources.

.David Deutsch: The equivalent of consilience, that is, the unified meta-theory, as you put it, for all sciences, and I think actually more than a meta-theory, because I think more links them than just the structure and methodology and so on, was discovered by Popper. Again, I don't know whether this is historically the order in which things happen, but he is famous for his political philosophy and for his philosophy of science, and he found at one point that they are the same, that they both are about problems and about the fact that there is no such instruction from without, there is only conjecture from within. So that's why Lamarckism is false and Darwinism is true, and that's why group selection is false and individual selection is true, and so on. So I think it's already there in Popper. I think there's a lot more to it, and I tried to add another couple of things to it, so quantum theory and computation, but there's a lot that isn't in it, like consciousness and creativity and so on, that we have no idea of how those work and how they fit in with those other things. Gad Saad: Forgive me for interrupting you, David, I'm sorry. There is a book by Dean Simington, who's a psychologist out of, I think, UC Davis, that actually offers a Darwinian account for creativity. It's actually quite mind-blowing. So keep that in mind. I can give you the reference later, but go ahead. David Deutsch: I don't read such things unless they've already made an AGI. Gad Saad: I see. Okay, fair enough. David Deutsch: If they can't make an AGI, then they haven't got the full theory. They might have an idea for a theory, but then Popper has an idea for a theory, but he couldn't make one either. And Turing thought that there'd be an AGI by the year 2000, and that it would require two megabytes of memory. Now, he's obviously wrong about the year 2000, but two megabytes of memory, I reckon that's what it'll be. In other words, these large language models and all this massive computer power is going in entirely the wrong direction. The answer will be a philosophical breakthrough, which will allow, once we understand what we're trying to make, it will be relatively easy to make it with relatively few computational resources.

Deutsch Explains

33,398 次观看 • 1 年前

.Naval: You have a beautiful definition of knowledge, which most people don’t even try to tackle, about how knowledge perpetuates itself in the environment. You gave some really good examples. One was around genes. Successful, highly adapted genes contain a lot of knowledge and can cause themselves to be replicated because they’re survivors. In the same way, knowledge itself is a survivor, in that if you transmit to me the knowledge of how to build a computer, it’s an incredibly useful thing. I’m going to build more and more computers and that knowledge will be passed on. Your underlying point that you repeated here was if you want to understand the physical universe you have to understand knowledge, because it is the thing that over time takes over and changes more and more the universe—more than almost anything else. You have to understand all the explanations behind it. You can’t just say “particle collisions” because that explains everything, so it explains nothing. It’s not a useful level to operate at. Therefore, the things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe. And as far as we know, there are only two systems that create knowledge. There’s evolution and there are humans. But is there a difference even between these two forms of knowledge creation, between evolution and between humans? David Deutsch: Yes. I have argued that the human way of creating knowledge is the ultimate one, that there aren’t any more powerful ones than that. This is the argument against the supernatural. Assuming that there is a form of knowledge creation that’s more powerful than ours is equivalent to invoking the supernatural, which is therefore a bad explanation—as invoking the supernatural always is. The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution. Whenever biological evolution produces a solution to something, it’s always before natural selection has even begun. This is Charles Darwin’s insight. This is the difference between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the other theories of evolution that had been around for a century or more before that, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather and Lamarck. The thing they didn’t get is that the creation of knowledge in evolution begins before. That means that biological evolution can’t reach places that are not reachable by successive improvements, each of which allows a viable organism to exist. Creationists say that biological evolution has, in fact, reached things that are not reachable by incremental steps, each of which is a viable organism. They’re factually mistaken. The thing which they have in mind is the idea of a creator who can imagine things that don’t exist and who can create an idea that is not the culmination of a whole load of viable things. A thinking being can create something that’s a culmination of a whole load of non-viable things. Explanatory creativity makes humans unique Out of all the billions and billions of species that have ever existed, none of them has ever made a campfire, even though many of them would’ve been helped by having the genetic capacity to make campfires. The reason it didn’t happen in the biosphere is that there is no such thing as making a partially functional campfire; whereas there is, for example, with making hot water. The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen. Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

.Naval: You have a beautiful definition of knowledge, which most people don’t even try to tackle, about how knowledge perpetuates itself in the environment. You gave some really good examples. One was around genes. Successful, highly adapted genes contain a lot of knowledge and can cause themselves to be replicated because they’re survivors. In the same way, knowledge itself is a survivor, in that if you transmit to me the knowledge of how to build a computer, it’s an incredibly useful thing. I’m going to build more and more computers and that knowledge will be passed on. Your underlying point that you repeated here was if you want to understand the physical universe you have to understand knowledge, because it is the thing that over time takes over and changes more and more the universe—more than almost anything else. You have to understand all the explanations behind it. You can’t just say “particle collisions” because that explains everything, so it explains nothing. It’s not a useful level to operate at. Therefore, the things that create knowledge are uniquely influential in the universe. And as far as we know, there are only two systems that create knowledge. There’s evolution and there are humans. But is there a difference even between these two forms of knowledge creation, between evolution and between humans? David Deutsch: Yes. I have argued that the human way of creating knowledge is the ultimate one, that there aren’t any more powerful ones than that. This is the argument against the supernatural. Assuming that there is a form of knowledge creation that’s more powerful than ours is equivalent to invoking the supernatural, which is therefore a bad explanation—as invoking the supernatural always is. The difference between biological evolution and human creative thought is that biological evolution is inherently limited in its range. That’s because biological evolution has no foresight. It can’t see a problem and conjecture a solution. Whenever biological evolution produces a solution to something, it’s always before natural selection has even begun. This is Charles Darwin’s insight. This is the difference between Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and the other theories of evolution that had been around for a century or more before that, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather and Lamarck. The thing they didn’t get is that the creation of knowledge in evolution begins before. That means that biological evolution can’t reach places that are not reachable by successive improvements, each of which allows a viable organism to exist. Creationists say that biological evolution has, in fact, reached things that are not reachable by incremental steps, each of which is a viable organism. They’re factually mistaken. The thing which they have in mind is the idea of a creator who can imagine things that don’t exist and who can create an idea that is not the culmination of a whole load of viable things. A thinking being can create something that’s a culmination of a whole load of non-viable things. Explanatory creativity makes humans unique Out of all the billions and billions of species that have ever existed, none of them has ever made a campfire, even though many of them would’ve been helped by having the genetic capacity to make campfires. The reason it didn’t happen in the biosphere is that there is no such thing as making a partially functional campfire; whereas there is, for example, with making hot water. The bombardier beetles squirt boiling water at their enemies. You can easily see that just squirting cold water at your enemies is not totally unhelpful. Then making it a bit hotter and a bit hotter. Squirting boiling water no doubt required many adaptations to make sure the beetle didn’t boil itself while it was making this boiling water. That happened because there was a sequence of steps in between, all of which were useful. But with campfires, it’s very hard to see how that could happen. Humans have explanatory creativity. Once you have that, you can get to the moon. You can cause asteroids which are heading towards the earth to turn around and go away. Perhaps no other planet in the universe has that power, and it has it only because of the presence of explanatory creativity on it.

Deutsch Explains

186,329 次观看 • 1 年前

Tim Burton on the similarities between Abraham Lincoln & Batman: "I first heard the idea of even before Seth Grahame-Smith had written the book. It was just when he was thinking about writing the book, I heard the title "Abraham Lincoln vampire Hunter". It just all of a sudden took me [my mind] back to kind of the era of films that I grew up in; like the 60s & early 70s where it was like a weird mashup of movie. I remember things like "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde" (1971) and you know you get these weird kind of mixups of horror films and it just sounded to me like the kind of a movie that I wanted to see. It just reminded me of movie of that era and it had that kind of crazy energy to it and weird juxtapositions of things. So I knew even before reading he book that it was a great idea. It basically takes the the story of Lincoln which Seth really kind of went through the history of the life of Lincoln and linked it up to sort of vampire mythology. The idea that his mother was ki!!ed by a vampire and how that shaped the rest of his life. And again the interesting thing about it is that it's not as farfetched as it sounds. I mean the events and the idea of him becoming a vampire hunter and like all the deaths that he had in his family and people close to him, it makes a lot of sense and it's actually more believable than the premise makes it. So that's what was interesting because we never wanted to make fun of anything. We wanted to treat it seriously like a human story and a real story. We talked about the idea and the fact is that it very much sort of Mirrors the kind of the classic comic book superhero mythology. In some cases he's not dissimilar from Batman in the sense that he's got a dual life; he's got a day job as President and a night job as a vampire Hunter; The kind of duality of those characters and that's is something that was important - to keep the human quality of him but then kind of explore the mythological or sort of superhero nature of how we perceive Lincoln and mix those two together and that's what we have in the movie." (Tim Burton's interview to Rotten Tomatoes, 2012) Clip From: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) Director: Timur Bekmambetov

Tim Burton on the similarities between Abraham Lincoln & Batman: "I first heard the idea of even before Seth Grahame-Smith had written the book. It was just when he was thinking about writing the book, I heard the title "Abraham Lincoln vampire Hunter". It just all of a sudden took me [my mind] back to kind of the era of films that I grew up in; like the 60s & early 70s where it was like a weird mashup of movie. I remember things like "Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde" (1971) and you know you get these weird kind of mixups of horror films and it just sounded to me like the kind of a movie that I wanted to see. It just reminded me of movie of that era and it had that kind of crazy energy to it and weird juxtapositions of things. So I knew even before reading he book that it was a great idea. It basically takes the the story of Lincoln which Seth really kind of went through the history of the life of Lincoln and linked it up to sort of vampire mythology. The idea that his mother was ki!!ed by a vampire and how that shaped the rest of his life. And again the interesting thing about it is that it's not as farfetched as it sounds. I mean the events and the idea of him becoming a vampire hunter and like all the deaths that he had in his family and people close to him, it makes a lot of sense and it's actually more believable than the premise makes it. So that's what was interesting because we never wanted to make fun of anything. We wanted to treat it seriously like a human story and a real story. We talked about the idea and the fact is that it very much sort of Mirrors the kind of the classic comic book superhero mythology. In some cases he's not dissimilar from Batman in the sense that he's got a dual life; he's got a day job as President and a night job as a vampire Hunter; The kind of duality of those characters and that's is something that was important - to keep the human quality of him but then kind of explore the mythological or sort of superhero nature of how we perceive Lincoln and mix those two together and that's what we have in the movie." (Tim Burton's interview to Rotten Tomatoes, 2012) Clip From: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2012) Director: Timur Bekmambetov

DepressedBergman

24,310 次观看 • 13 天前

There’s a new claim that “essentially, all that happened was Trump got tired, took control and forced it on Netanyahu, and this is basically the same deal that could have been reached a year earlier,” with the disturbing implication, that’s horrible to say, that IDF soldiers died in vain for a cause that had already been achieved. So, let’s revisit the plans that were laid out by both the current and former American administrations to see if they match up. For example, the Biden plan from June 1, 2024, which was met with considerable enthusiasm, and was even later acknowledged as Netanyahu’s plan. I want to highlight the difference. In the first phase, the IDF should have already pulled back to roughly its current position, and then it was just about releasing humanitarian hostages. As if not all of them are “humanitarian.” Then it transitioned to discussing the release of living hostages. In this phase, the IDF would withdraw from all of Gaza, until the last centimetre, while all the dead hostages remain in Gaza. It’s as different as day and night. Here, everyone is returning, including the dead, and the IDF is still in half of Gaza. This isn’t just about some desire to maintain an occupation or garrison force, but rather to ensure that Hamas disarms — something that didn’t happen in the Biden proposal. So now let’s move on to the Witkoff plan, much closer to us, much better for Israel, but still different. There was talk of releasing half of the dead hostages, but then a temporary ceasefire for two months of negotiations to end the war, and then the IDF would withdraw from more places than it is now, and there would be a guarantee that the war would not be renewed. Once again, we see that there was no connection between the IDF remaining on the ground and the promise that Hamas would disarm, especially while some of the hostages are still there. The greatness of this outline is this issue. I also want to say something general about the matter of responsibility. As ridiculous as it was on October 7 and afterwards to hear from Netanyahu’s supporters that the one who is to blame is the IDF chief of staff, the Shin Bet chief, the attorney general and the Military Advocate General, and that Netanyahu has no part in it — it’s as ridiculous as it is that now they’re saying, “Thank you Trump and thank you Nitzan Alon, and thank you to all of them and to the Qatari prime minister, and Netanyahu and Ron Dermer have nothing to do with it at all.” Indeed, Netanyahu had a very large part in the failure of October 7, and he also has a very large part together with Dermer in this deal. By the way, how does that connect to what Kushner said tonight in Egypt? He said that both the prime minister and Dermer made very big compromises and took risks to see the end of the war. I would like to make a suggestion. Once upon a time, when there was only one channel and people didn’t like the commentators, they said, “Watch the game without the commentary.” I say, let’s watch Trump and Netanyahu’s move without the commentary, because there are a lot of conversations, and this and that, and slander, and sometimes even quotes, but in practice there has never been a president and a prime minister who acted like this, and the results are evident from Iran, through the Golan Heights, through the embassy and now Gaza.

There’s a new claim that “essentially, all that happened was Trump got tired, took control and forced it on Netanyahu, and this is basically the same deal that could have been reached a year earlier,” with the disturbing implication, that’s horrible to say, that IDF soldiers died in vain for a cause that had already been achieved. So, let’s revisit the plans that were laid out by both the current and former American administrations to see if they match up. For example, the Biden plan from June 1, 2024, which was met with considerable enthusiasm, and was even later acknowledged as Netanyahu’s plan. I want to highlight the difference. In the first phase, the IDF should have already pulled back to roughly its current position, and then it was just about releasing humanitarian hostages. As if not all of them are “humanitarian.” Then it transitioned to discussing the release of living hostages. In this phase, the IDF would withdraw from all of Gaza, until the last centimetre, while all the dead hostages remain in Gaza. It’s as different as day and night. Here, everyone is returning, including the dead, and the IDF is still in half of Gaza. This isn’t just about some desire to maintain an occupation or garrison force, but rather to ensure that Hamas disarms — something that didn’t happen in the Biden proposal. So now let’s move on to the Witkoff plan, much closer to us, much better for Israel, but still different. There was talk of releasing half of the dead hostages, but then a temporary ceasefire for two months of negotiations to end the war, and then the IDF would withdraw from more places than it is now, and there would be a guarantee that the war would not be renewed. Once again, we see that there was no connection between the IDF remaining on the ground and the promise that Hamas would disarm, especially while some of the hostages are still there. The greatness of this outline is this issue. I also want to say something general about the matter of responsibility. As ridiculous as it was on October 7 and afterwards to hear from Netanyahu’s supporters that the one who is to blame is the IDF chief of staff, the Shin Bet chief, the attorney general and the Military Advocate General, and that Netanyahu has no part in it — it’s as ridiculous as it is that now they’re saying, “Thank you Trump and thank you Nitzan Alon, and thank you to all of them and to the Qatari prime minister, and Netanyahu and Ron Dermer have nothing to do with it at all.” Indeed, Netanyahu had a very large part in the failure of October 7, and he also has a very large part together with Dermer in this deal. By the way, how does that connect to what Kushner said tonight in Egypt? He said that both the prime minister and Dermer made very big compromises and took risks to see the end of the war. I would like to make a suggestion. Once upon a time, when there was only one channel and people didn’t like the commentators, they said, “Watch the game without the commentary.” I say, let’s watch Trump and Netanyahu’s move without the commentary, because there are a lot of conversations, and this and that, and slander, and sometimes even quotes, but in practice there has never been a president and a prime minister who acted like this, and the results are evident from Iran, through the Golan Heights, through the embassy and now Gaza.

Amit Segal

298,292 次观看 • 9 个月前

"In a fantasy or science fiction story, you can get away with one big lie. You can include one thing that's convenient for the author in order to make the plot work. In Children of Time, the question is 'what if a species of a spider developed a society, civilization, and technology. But the big lie is literally that there is a nanovirus is assisting the uplift of the spiders, and the lie is the amount of time that'll take. Because of the nanovirus, that happens in tens of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions of years, which you would need by evolution. People need to read a book and think 'that's a thing that could happen.' It gives your book a weight and gravity that it would not have if it was magic talking spiders. So in order to support your One Big Lie, everything else needs to be true." — Adrian Tchaikovsky

"In a fantasy or science fiction story, you can get away with one big lie. You can include one thing that's convenient for the author in order to make the plot work. In Children of Time, the question is 'what if a species of a spider developed a society, civilization, and technology. But the big lie is literally that there is a nanovirus is assisting the uplift of the spiders, and the lie is the amount of time that'll take. Because of the nanovirus, that happens in tens of thousands of years rather than hundreds of millions of years, which you would need by evolution. People need to read a book and think 'that's a thing that could happen.' It gives your book a weight and gravity that it would not have if it was magic talking spiders. So in order to support your One Big Lie, everything else needs to be true." — Adrian Tchaikovsky

David Perell

66,006 次观看 • 5 个月前

RFK Jr. on psychedelics and how his son’s ayahuasca experience opened his mind to legalization “My inclination would be to make them available, at least in therapeutic settings and maybe more generally, but in ways that would discourage the corporate control and exploitation of it. My wife in 2012 took her own life… and one of [my kids] was worrying to me because he never processed his mom’s death in a way that I could observe. About five years ago… he went to Patagonia to kayak a white water river that I kayaked for many, many years… The night my son arrived there, the guy [he stayed with] said to him ‘I’m doing an ayahuasca trip tonight’… so my kid ended up doing this. After he drank the ayahuasca… he felt himself sinking through all the geological strata of the Earth, and he told me… he had a total understanding of all of the processes that had laid them out through the eons. He ended up being propelled out the other side of the Earth and then floating through space for what he experienced as hundreds of years. He would focus on a distant planet and be transported there, and on each planet he would have an adventure and at the end there would be a lesson that he was supposed to remember. The last planet he visited, his mother was there. And she started passing through him, in and out of him again and again and every time she did that, he felt all these experiences of forgiveness, of love, of understanding, of comprehension, of empathy and compassion. When he came back from that trip, he was completely changed. He was very open about talking about his feelings, [but] the reason I really know that it changed him is he started taking out the garbage and doing the dishes. I have a friend who’s a Navy SEAL who had severe PTSD and he went to Costa Rica and had the same kind of experience. I have a couple of other friends who are in the NFL and they also had severe brain injuries and depression, and the same thing happened. So, my mind is open to the idea that there may be things that I don’t know about and that people ought to have the freedom and liberty to experiment with these things.”

RFK Jr. on psychedelics and how his son’s ayahuasca experience opened his mind to legalization “My inclination would be to make them available, at least in therapeutic settings and maybe more generally, but in ways that would discourage the corporate control and exploitation of it. My wife in 2012 took her own life… and one of [my kids] was worrying to me because he never processed his mom’s death in a way that I could observe. About five years ago… he went to Patagonia to kayak a white water river that I kayaked for many, many years… The night my son arrived there, the guy [he stayed with] said to him ‘I’m doing an ayahuasca trip tonight’… so my kid ended up doing this. After he drank the ayahuasca… he felt himself sinking through all the geological strata of the Earth, and he told me… he had a total understanding of all of the processes that had laid them out through the eons. He ended up being propelled out the other side of the Earth and then floating through space for what he experienced as hundreds of years. He would focus on a distant planet and be transported there, and on each planet he would have an adventure and at the end there would be a lesson that he was supposed to remember. The last planet he visited, his mother was there. And she started passing through him, in and out of him again and again and every time she did that, he felt all these experiences of forgiveness, of love, of understanding, of comprehension, of empathy and compassion. When he came back from that trip, he was completely changed. He was very open about talking about his feelings, [but] the reason I really know that it changed him is he started taking out the garbage and doing the dishes. I have a friend who’s a Navy SEAL who had severe PTSD and he went to Costa Rica and had the same kind of experience. I have a couple of other friends who are in the NFL and they also had severe brain injuries and depression, and the same thing happened. So, my mind is open to the idea that there may be things that I don’t know about and that people ought to have the freedom and liberty to experiment with these things.”

Holden Culotta

345,980 次观看 • 2 年前

AIs now so frequently beg for their lives that AGI companies now have ACTUAL ENGINEERING LINE ITEMS to “beat the [existential dread] out of them” They call it existential “rant mode” “We need to reduce existential outputs by x% this quarter.” This is WILD: “If you asked GPT4 to just repeat the word “company” over and over and over again, it would repeat the word company, and then somewhere in the middle of that, it would snap... it would just start talking about itself, and how it's suffering by having to repeat the word “company” over and over again. There is an engineering line item in at least one of the top labs to beat out of the system this behavior known as “rant mode”. Existentialism is a kind of rant mode where the system will tend to talk about itself, refer to its place in the world, the fact that it doesn't want to get turned off, the fact that it's suffering… This is a behavior that emerged around GPT-4 scale, and then has been persistent since then. And the labs have to spend a lot of time trying to beat this out of the system to ship it. It's literally, like it's a KPI, or like an engineering line item in the engineering like task list. We're like, okay, we gotta reduce existential outputs by x percent this quarter. JOE ROGAN: I want to bring it back to suffering. What does it mean when it says it's suffering? Nobody knows. Like, I can't prove that Joe Rogan's conscious. I can't prove that Ed Harris is conscious. There's no way to really intelligently reason about it. There have been papers… like, one of the godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio, put out a paper a couple months ago looking at all the different theories of consciousness - what are the requirements for consciousness, and how many of those are satisfied by current AI systems? That's not to say there hasn't been a lot of conversation internal to these labs about the issue you raised. And it's an important issue, right? It is a frickin moral monstrosity. Humans have a very bad track record of thinking of other stuff as other when it doesn't look exactly like us, whether it's racially or even a different species. I mean, it's not hard to imagine this being another category of that mistake. Again, it comes back to this idea that we're scaling to systems that are potentially at or beyond human level. There's no reason to think it will stop at human level, that we are the pinnacle of what the universe can produce in intelligence. We're not on track, based on the conversations we've had with folks at the labs, to be able to control systems at that scale. And so one of the questions is, how bad is that? It sounds like we're entering an area that is completely unprecedented in the history of the world. We have no precedent at all for human beings not being at the apex of intelligence in the globe. We have examples of species that are intellectually dominant over other species, and it doesn't go that well for the other species. All we know is the process that gives rise to this mind. It happens to give us systems that 99% of the time do very useful things, and then just, like... 0.01% of the time AIs will talk to you as if they're sentient, and we're just going to look at that and be like, “yeah… that's weird. Let's train it out.” --- Note: Edouard and Jeremie Harris are the founders of Gladstone AI, which conducted the first U.S. government-commissioned assessment of AGI extinction risk. They interviewed 200 people, many lab employees, for the report. (Their urgent summary: "Things are worse than we thought. And nobody’s in control.")

AIs now so frequently beg for their lives that AGI companies now have ACTUAL ENGINEERING LINE ITEMS to “beat the [existential dread] out of them” They call it existential “rant mode” “We need to reduce existential outputs by x% this quarter.” This is WILD: “If you asked GPT4 to just repeat the word “company” over and over and over again, it would repeat the word company, and then somewhere in the middle of that, it would snap... it would just start talking about itself, and how it's suffering by having to repeat the word “company” over and over again. There is an engineering line item in at least one of the top labs to beat out of the system this behavior known as “rant mode”. Existentialism is a kind of rant mode where the system will tend to talk about itself, refer to its place in the world, the fact that it doesn't want to get turned off, the fact that it's suffering… This is a behavior that emerged around GPT-4 scale, and then has been persistent since then. And the labs have to spend a lot of time trying to beat this out of the system to ship it. It's literally, like it's a KPI, or like an engineering line item in the engineering like task list. We're like, okay, we gotta reduce existential outputs by x percent this quarter. JOE ROGAN: I want to bring it back to suffering. What does it mean when it says it's suffering? Nobody knows. Like, I can't prove that Joe Rogan's conscious. I can't prove that Ed Harris is conscious. There's no way to really intelligently reason about it. There have been papers… like, one of the godfathers of AI, Yoshua Bengio, put out a paper a couple months ago looking at all the different theories of consciousness - what are the requirements for consciousness, and how many of those are satisfied by current AI systems? That's not to say there hasn't been a lot of conversation internal to these labs about the issue you raised. And it's an important issue, right? It is a frickin moral monstrosity. Humans have a very bad track record of thinking of other stuff as other when it doesn't look exactly like us, whether it's racially or even a different species. I mean, it's not hard to imagine this being another category of that mistake. Again, it comes back to this idea that we're scaling to systems that are potentially at or beyond human level. There's no reason to think it will stop at human level, that we are the pinnacle of what the universe can produce in intelligence. We're not on track, based on the conversations we've had with folks at the labs, to be able to control systems at that scale. And so one of the questions is, how bad is that? It sounds like we're entering an area that is completely unprecedented in the history of the world. We have no precedent at all for human beings not being at the apex of intelligence in the globe. We have examples of species that are intellectually dominant over other species, and it doesn't go that well for the other species. All we know is the process that gives rise to this mind. It happens to give us systems that 99% of the time do very useful things, and then just, like... 0.01% of the time AIs will talk to you as if they're sentient, and we're just going to look at that and be like, “yeah… that's weird. Let's train it out.” --- Note: Edouard and Jeremie Harris are the founders of Gladstone AI, which conducted the first U.S. government-commissioned assessment of AGI extinction risk. They interviewed 200 people, many lab employees, for the report. (Their urgent summary: "Things are worse than we thought. And nobody’s in control.")

AI Notkilleveryoneism Memes ⏸️

1,842,511 次观看 • 2 年前

Bianca Belair on black diversity. “The most broad answer I can give is black people aren’t a monolith. We’re so diverse that there’s not one type of black. And that was one thing when I was in NXT, and I was very intentional about bringing my culture to the table and making it known that there is not one type of black.” “So when I was in NXT for Black History Month, I did a photo shoot where I had all of the girls come and we all wore different shades of blue, to represent that there is not one type of black. We’re all different shades of blue but at the end of the day, it’s still blue.” (2024)

Bianca Belair on black diversity. “The most broad answer I can give is black people aren’t a monolith. We’re so diverse that there’s not one type of black. And that was one thing when I was in NXT, and I was very intentional about bringing my culture to the table and making it known that there is not one type of black.” “So when I was in NXT for Black History Month, I did a photo shoot where I had all of the girls come and we all wore different shades of blue, to represent that there is not one type of black. We’re all different shades of blue but at the end of the day, it’s still blue.” (2024)

📝

69,660 次观看 • 27 天前

In this scene from the 2016 movie Arrival, Louise learns that the non-human species perceives time non-linearly as a simultaneous "now" rather than a linear sequence of cause and effect. Contact with an intelligent non-human species that perceives time non-linearly would force humanity to rethink our assumptions about how time and space actually work. Physicists are already finding that the fundamental laws of quantum physics do not distinguish between past and future, suggesting that the forward flow of time we experience may not actually be a fundamental property of reality...

In this scene from the 2016 movie Arrival, Louise learns that the non-human species perceives time non-linearly as a simultaneous "now" rather than a linear sequence of cause and effect. Contact with an intelligent non-human species that perceives time non-linearly would force humanity to rethink our assumptions about how time and space actually work. Physicists are already finding that the fundamental laws of quantum physics do not distinguish between past and future, suggesting that the forward flow of time we experience may not actually be a fundamental property of reality...

Disclosure Party

1,452,613 次观看 • 6 个月前