goldfish crackers ©

ime so far a lot of the leverage seems to come from a combination of good writing skills, domain expertise and intuition for process/architecture. i'd guess the skills that make people good writers will become more valuable over time.

(Oh, shoutout to Andy Clark too)

Honestly this whole thing has been like a wrecking ball to most of 20th C. analytic philosophy of language imo. The Churchlands came the closest to getting it right afaict, maybe Quine to the extent he was hostile to the existing attempts to formalize intensional semantics.

Yeah as someone with leftwing politics it's really depressing. We're leaving the wealthy and the cultural right to have more-or-less uncontested influence over one of the most politically consequential technologies ever created because we got affectively polarized against computing. Shameful shit.

A graph showing AI capability as a function of time, with human performance also shown.

This understates the current situation (the data is out of date) but it gives you some idea.

hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/202...

Are your barely trained 22 year olds better at software engineering than Opus 4.6?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Citation verification is much easier than citation generation.

1) Failure rates on many tasks are human-level or better now.
2) The rate of progress so far has been more-or-less in line with the crazier hype scenarios.

I think that's almost never true (see P vs. NP in CS and "context of discovery" vs. "context of justification" in philosophy).

Sure, tech amplifies capability, and depending on how that capability is used the results will be good or bad.

I'm just responding to your comment about usefulness. AI is extremely useful to both good and bad actors alike. I don't think anyone knows what the net benefit will end up being.

imo what you are seeing is a combination of the "radioactive toothpaste" effect (where people capitalize on hype to sell shitty products) and capability misjudgement driven by the pace of progress. You should expect this kind of thing even (especially) if the technology is genuinely revolutionary.

I've mostly given up trying to get people to understand that SWE isn't exceptional wrt automation susceptibility. They’ll find out soon enough anyway.

Even cooler imo: it matters which number system you use. Arithmetic over the real numbers is decidable, unlike over the natural numbers*. Naively you might expect reals to be at least as difficult to decide as the naturals, but it's not true.

*terms and conditions apply

philsci-archive.pitt.edu/23224/

I think it's partly that people are generally pretty terrible at thinking about representation. Often mathematical representation is unfavourably contrasted with some unspecified "real" kind of representation, which in practice just ends up being linguistic representation.

I basically agree with this. I do worry about what happens when you make some but not all parts of the legal system orders of magnitude more efficient. If the cost of litigation drops enormously but we're still nervous about AI on the adjudication side, presumably a lot of things will break.

there is going to be a major incident

This is true, but it also just doesn't matter if they're corrupt or not. You have to destroy them regardless. You are no longer in the liberal context and fascists are not entitled to the protections of the liberal order they overthrew.

I exposed NJ's Jewish invasion Inside Canada's Indian invasion

watching a guy with 8.8M subscribers put out this propaganda: there's a transnational far-right power grab and you're not ready for it

yeah... it's pretty distasteful. you can point to certain analogies, but just making the comparison without qualification is really bad.

ontological duck typing ftw

AOC, because by 2028 anti-republican sentiment will be insanely high. But Vance wins the debates and the American media pounce on every one of AOC's rhetorical flubs, suggesting that she's too dumb/inexperienced/naive to do the job. AOC probably has better ads and non-traditional outreach though.

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Democracy, is in fact, Liberal Democracy, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Liberalism plus Democracy. Democracy is not a system of government unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning Liberal sys

this started a holy war, so let me state a very plain and direct argument for this

the democratic primary is when we decide if we get to have things be good or mid

the general election is when you decide if you dislike nazis

This reminds me of the time people on here were arguing that LLMs couldn't "really" represent anything because all representations had to be parasitic on human experience. Different issue (semantics vs. consciousness), but similar fallacy in both cases.

(sorry for the spam but I have Opinions about this)

Dennet’s consciousness stuff is good but a little vague in ways that are unhelpful imo (that said: “Quining Qualia” is a good place to start). Highly recommend his stuff on free will (“Elbow Room”) and ontology (“Real Patterns”) though.

(I also want to mention the weird fact that, between the Churchlands, Kathleen Akins and Peter Watts, a lot of the philosophical ideas that seem to be most useful for making sense of this moment come out of British Columbia. Make of that what you will.)

I had a similar experience, except it was reading the Churchlands in a philosophy class. There’s this condescending “you computer nerds would see past the hype if you knew any philosophy” attitude everywhere, but afaict the most nimble adopters of AI are some of the most philosophically informed.

The MSS might be able to give you guys a copy if you ask president Xi nicely.