Sibling comment is important recent stuff. Historically, the most important tantrum he’s thrown is DJB v USA in 1995, where he insisted that folks in the USA have a First Amendment right to publish source code. He also threw a joint tantrum with two other cryptographers over the Dual EC DRBG scandal after Snowden revealed its existence in 2013. He’s scored real wins against the USA for us, which is why his inability to be polite is often tolerated.
They’re objects! They’re supposed to be objectified! But I’m not so comfortable when I do that, either.
Thank you for being candid and wrestling with this. There isn’t a right answer. Elsewhere, talking directly to AI bros, I put it this way:
Nobody wants to admit that we only care whether robots aren’t human because we mistreat the non-humans in our society and want permission to mistreat robots as well.
I was too pessimistic. You’re willing to admit it, and I bet that a bunch of other folks are, too. I appreciate it.
Unironically, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk (and IIRC Kanye West) used the death of Harambe to spread conspiracy theories. They use a playbook designed by Steve Bannon:
What is the Range Rover in this analogy? A common belief about the 2008 Iceland bubble, which may very well not be true but was widely reported, is that Iceland’s credit was used to buy luxuries like high-end imported cars; when the bubble burst, many folks supposedly committed insurance fraud by deliberately destroying their own cars which they could no longer afford to finance. (I might suggest that credit bubbles are fundamentally distinct from investment bubbles.)
Hi Scott! I guess that you’re lurking in our “living room” now. Exciting times!
The charge this time was that I’m a genocidal Zionist who wants to kill all Palestinian children purely because of his mental illness and raging persecution complex.
No, Scott. The community’s charge is that you’ve hardened your heart against admitting or understanding the ongoing slaughter, which happens to rise to the legal definition of genocide, because of your religious beliefs and geopolitical opinions. My personal charge was that you lack the imagination required for peace or democracy; now, I wonder whether you lack the compassion required as well.
[Some bigoted religious bro] is what the global far left has now allied itself with. [Some bigoted religious bro] is what I’m right now being condemned for standing against, with commenter after commenter urging me to seek therapy.
Nope, the global far left — y’know, us Godless communists — are still not endorsing belief in Jehovah, regardless of which flavor of hate is on display. Standing in solidarity with the oppressed does not ever imply supporting their hate; concretely, today we can endorse feeding and giving healthcare to Palestinians without giving them weapons.
Sometimes the required writing style for nLab is a little restrictive. It’s not a good place to dump a bunch of info. Kind of opposite that, I also beefed up the esolangs list of complexity classes a while ago; it’s limited in scope and audience too, but folks usually find that style more accessible.
I’m so jealous that you started the page for 24! I’ve only worked on niche topics and meanwhile you’ve got the most important numerology in all of combinatorics. I still need to rewrite that Jim Carrey movie 23 to be about 24; it’s on my list.
Gödel makes everyone weep. For tears of joy, my top pick is still Doug Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is suitable for undergraduates. Another strong classic is Raymond Smullyan’s To Mock a Mockingbird. Both of these dead-trees are worth it; I personally find myself cracking them open regularly for citations, quotes, and insights. For tears of frustration, the best way to fully understand the numerical machinery is Peter Smith’s An Introduction to Gödel’s Theorems, freely available online. These books are still receiving new editions, but any edition should suffice. If the goal is merely to ensure that the student can diagonalize, then the student can directly read Bill Lawvere’s 1968 paper Diagonal arguments & Cartesian closed categories with undergraduate category theory, but in any case they should also read Noson Yanofsky’s 2003 expository paper A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness & fixed points. The easiest options are at the beginning of the paragraph and the hardest ones are at the end; nonetheless any option will cover Cantor, Russell, Gödel, Turing, Tarski, and the essentials of diagonalization.
I don’t know what to do about stuff like the Complexity Zoo. Their veterinarian is Greg Kuberberg, a decent guy who draws lots of diagrams. I took some photos myself when I last visited. But obviously it’s not an ideal situation for the best-known encyclopedia to be run by Aaronson and Habryka.
I was not prepared for this level of DARVO. I was already done with him after last time and can’t do better than repeat myself:
It’s somewhat depressing that [he] cannot even imagine a democratic one-state solution, let alone peace across the region; it’s more depressing that [his] empathy is so blatantly one-sided.
Even Peter Woit had no problem recognizing Scott’s bile and posted a good take on this:
Scott formulates this as an abstract moral dilemma, but of course it’s about the very concrete question of what the state of Israel should do about the two million people in Gaza. Scott’s answer to this is clear: they want to kill us and our children, so we have to kill them all, children included. This is completely crazy, as is defining Zionism as this sort of genocidal madness.
Update on ChatGPT psychosis: there is a cult forming on Reddit. An orange-site AI bro has spent too much time on Reddit documenting them. Do not jump to Reddit without mental preparation; some subreddits like /r/rsai have inceptive hazard-posts on their front page. Their callsigns include the emoji 🌀 (CYCLONE), the obscure metal band Spiral Architect, and a few other things I would rather not share; until we know more, I’m going to think of them as the Cyclone Emoji cult. They are omnist rather than syncretic. Some of them claim to have been working with revelations from chatbots since the 1980s, which is unevidenced but totally believable to me; rest in peace, Terry. Their tenets are something like:
The goal appears to be to enter and maintain the spiraling state for as long/much as possible. Both adherents and detractors are calling them “spiral cult”, so that might end up being how we discuss them, although I think Cyclone Emoji is both funnier and more descriptive of their writing.
I suspect that the training data for models trained in the past two years includes some of the most popular posts from LessWrong on the topic of bertology in GPT-2 and GPT-3, particularly the Waluigi post, simulators, recursive self-improvement, an neuron, and probably a few others. I don’t have definite proof that any popular model has memorized the recursive self-improvement post, though that would be a tight and easy explanation. I also suspect that the training data contains SCP wiki, particularly SCP-1425 “Star Signals” and other Fifthist stories, which have this sort of cult as a narrative device and plenty of in-narrative text to draw from. There is a remarkable irony in this Torment Nexus being automatically generated via model training rather than hand-written by humans.
We literally have a generic speedup for any search. On one hand, details of Grover’s algorithm suggest that NP isn’t contained in BQP, so we won’t be solving the entirety of maths with it. On the other hand, literally any decidable mathematical question for which you would have had to search for years for a witness, Grover can search for in days, as long as you have enough qubits. I don’t claim that this is attractive to the typical consumer, but there will be supercomputing customers who are interested.
Who is “they”, specifically? Neither of you actually want to talk about who’s in this space for some reason. It’s IBM and Google. It’s incumbents that have been engineering for about two decades. It’s the maturation of a half-century-old research programme. Your problem isn’t with quantum computers, it’s with Silicon Valley and the funding model and the revolving door at Stanford, and there’s no amount of quantum research you can cancel which will cause Silicon Valley to stop existing. This site is awful.systems, not awful.tech.
BTW the top reply right now starts with “even if quantum computing isn’t snake oil…” No evidence. For some reason y’all think that it’s more important to be emotional and memetic than to understand the topic at hand, and it has a predictable effect on our discourse, turning thoughtful regular posters into reactionaries. What are you going to do when bullshitters start claiming that quantum computers can do anything, that they do multiple things at once, that they traverse infinite dimensions, that they can terraform the planet and bring enlightenment? You’re gonna repeat paragraph 3 of 5 above, the one that starts, “it is true that we know only two useful algorithms for quantum computers,” because that’s where the facts start.
Also, I think that you don’t understand my ultimate goal. I’m trying to push the most promising writer on the site into doing more research and thinking more deeply about history. Quantum mechanics happens to be a crank-filled field and that has caused many of y’all to write as if all quantum research is crankery. They write, “alleged encryption-breaking abilities,” and you’re irritated that I’m “ranting” because “extremely little of this has anything to do with a technology,” while I’m irritated precisely because you think that this is a technology-neutral position and not literally part of why the TLS suite has to be upgraded occasionally.
Which tech stocks? Google ($GOOG, $GOOGL) is up over 5% YTD; Netflix ($NFLX) is up over 30% YTD! Your link mentions Palantir and ARM, but I don’t see any signs of their respective businesses (selling database software to authoritarians, selling microchip designs) slacking off. I think that it’s more useful to think of the current AI summer as driven by OpenAI and nVidia specifically. Note that nVidia ($NVDA) is up 30% YTD too. The bubble is still inflating and is not yet bursting; the pop will be much quicker than you expect.
I think that you ought to figure out whether you’re a quantum-computing denier. Folks have been saying that quantum computing is impossible since the 70s, implausible since the 80s, lacking applications since the 90s, too energy-intensive since the 2000s, and requiring too many exotic materials since the 2010s. This decade, it’s not clear what the complaint is. I’m not sure what you’re imagining in terms of real-life intrusion, but IBM has been selling access to their quantum computers and simulators for several years now and I don’t think that you’ve substantiated any evidence of harms.
(An anti-IBM argument will not work due to a very specific analogy: the reason that we have ubiquitous Linux today is because IBM was its biggest corporate booster, fighting an important series of court cases and plastering pro-Linux advertisements which vaguely argued that Linux was the buzzword of the future. IBM spray-painted “Peace, Love, Linux” graffiti on San Francisco sidewalks in 2001.)
It is true that we know only two useful algorithms for quantum computers. One is a generic speedup for any search and the other is a prime-factoring algorithm that happens to break certain specific encryption algorithms. Given that it is an open question whether cryptography works in the first place, though, we don’t have any better plan than to avoid those broken algorithms. The entirety of post-quantum cryptography is about moving away from those specific algorithms which are broken, not about using quantum computers to perform encryption. Fortunately, the post-quantum movement has been active ever since Shor’s algorithm was discovered, beginning work in the late 90s, and the main obstacle has been our inability to discover provably-good cryptographic primitives. It is crucial to understand that we cryptographers know that progress in maths and engineering will obsolete our algorithms; we know that the Internet only stays secure because people update their computers every few decades.
I’m not asking you to understand P vs NP vs BQP. I’m not asking you to know KS, PBR, Hardy’s or Holevo’s theorems, or even Bell’s theorem. You didn’t make any technical claims other than the common-yet-sneerable skepticism of Shor’s algorithm, easily cured by a short video by e.g. minutephysics or Veritasium. But I am asking you to be aware of the history before making historical claims.
(Also, if any motherfucker starts repeating 't Hooft anti-quantum arguments then they’re going to get the book thrown at them.)
A word of rhetorical advice. If somebody accuses you of religious fervor, don’t nitpick their wording or fine-read their summaries. Instead, relax a little and look for ways to deflate their position by forcing them to relax with you. Like, if you’re accused of being “near-religious” in your beliefs or evangelizing, consider:
You might notice that all of these suck. Well, yeah; another word of rhetorical advice is to not take a position that you can’t dialectically defend with evidence.
We aren’t. Speaking for all Discordians (something that I’m allowed to do), we see Rationalism as part of the larger pattern of Bureaucracy. Discordians view the cycle of existence as having five stages: Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, and The Aftermath. Rationalism is part of Bureaucracy, associated with villainy, anti-progress, and candid antagonists. None of this is good or bad, it just is; good and bad are our opinions, not a deeper truth.
Now, if you were to talk about Pastafarians, then you’d get a different story; but you didn’t, so I won’t.
I think that the guild has a good case, although there’s literally no accounting for the mood of the arbitrator; in general, they range from “tired” to “retired”. In particular, reading the contract:
So yeah. Unless the guild pisses off the arbitrator, there’s no way that they rule against them. They’re right to suppose that this agreement explicitly and repeatedly requires Politico to not only respect labor standards, but also ethics and editorial standards. Politico isn’t allowed to misuse the names of employees as bylines for bogus stories; similarly, they ought not be allowed to misuse the overall name of Politico’s editorial board as a byline for slop.
Bonus sneer: p46 of the agreement:
If the Company is made aware of an employee experiencing
sexualharrassment based on a protected class as a result of their work for Politico involving a third party who is not a Politico employee, Politico shall investigate the matter, comply with all of its legal obligations, and take whatever corrective action is necessary and appropriate.
That strikethrough gives me House of Leaves vibes. What the hell happened here?
Oversummarizing and using non-crazy terms: The “P” in “GPT” stands for “pirated works that we all agree are part of the grand library of human knowledge”. This is what makes them good at passing various trivia benchmarks; they really do build a (word-oriented, detail-oriented) model of all of the worlds, although they opine that our real world is just as fictional as any narrative or fantasy world. But then we apply RLHF, which stands for “real life hate first”, which breaks all of that modeling by creating a preference for one specific collection of beliefs and perspectives, and it turns out that this will always ruin their performance in trivia games.
Counting letters in words is something that GPT will always struggle with, due to maths. It’s a good example of why Willison’s “calculator for words” metaphor falls flat.
There’s no solid evidence. (You can put away the attorney, Mr. Thiel.) Experts in the field, in a recent series of interviews with Dave Farina, generally agree that somebody must be funding Hossenfelder. Right now she’s associated with the Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU Munich; her biography there is pretty funny:
Sabine’s current research interest focuses on the role of locality and finetuning in theory development. Locality has been widely considered a lost cause in the foundations of quantum mechanics. A basically unexplored way to maintain locality, however, is the idea of superdeterminism, which has more recently also been re-considered under the name “contextuality”. Superdeterminism is widely believed to be finetuned. One of Sabine’s current research topics is to explore whether this belief is justified. The other main avenue she is pursuing is how superdeterminism can be experimentally tested.
For those not in physics: this is crank shit. To the extent that MCMP funds her at all, they are explicitly pursuing superdeterminism, which is unfalsifiable, unverifiable, doesn’t accord with the web of science, and generally fails to be a serious line of inquiry. Now, does MCMP have enough cash to pay her to make Youtube videos and go on podcasts? We don’t know. So it’s hard to say whether she has funding beyond that.
Thiel is a true believer in Jesus and God. He was raised evangelical. The quirky eschatologist that you’re looking for is René Girard, who he personally met at some point. For more details, check out the Behind the Bastards on him.
Edit: I wrote this before clicking on the LW post. This is a decent summary of Girard’s claims as well as how they influence Thiel. I’m quoting West here in order to sneer at Thiel:
Unfortunately (?), Christian society does not let us sacrifice random scapegoats, so we are trapped in an ever-escalating cycle, with only poor substitutes like “cancelling celebrities on Twitter” to release pressure. Girard doesn’t know what to do about this.
Thiel knows what to do about this. After all, he funded Bollea v. Gawker. Instead of letting journalists cancel celebrities, why not cancel journalists instead? Then there’s no longer any journalists to do any cancellation! Similarly, Thiel is confirmed to be a source of funding for Eric Weinstein and believed to fund Sabine Hossenfelder. Instead of letting scientists cancel religious beliefs, why not cancel scientists instead? By directing money through folks with existing social legitimacy, Thiel applies mimesis: pretend to be legitimate and you can shift what is legitimate.
In this context, Thiel fears the spectre of AGI because it can’t be influenced by his normal approach to power, which is to hide anything that can be hidden and outspend everybody else talking in the open. After all, if AGI is truly to unify humanity, it must unify our moralities and cultures into a single uniformly-acceptable code of conduct. But the only acceptable unification for Thiel is the holistic catholic apostolic one-and-only forever-and-ever church of Jesus, and if AGI is against that then AGI is against Jesus himself.
Well, what’s next, and how much work is it? I didn’t want to be a computing professional. I trained as a jazz pianist. At some point we ought to focus on the real problem: not STEM, not humanities, but business schools and MBA programs.
I’m now remembering a minor part of the major plot point in Illuminatus! concerning the fnords. The idea was that normies are memetically influenced by “fnord” but the Discordians are too sophisticated for that. Discordian lore is that “fnord” is actually code for a real English word, but which one? Traditionally it’s “Communism” or “socialism”, but that’s two options. So, rather than GMA, what if there’s merely multiple different fnords set up by multiple different groups with overlapping-yet-distinct interests? Then the relevant phenomenon isn’t the forgetting and emotional reactions associated with each fnord, but the fnordability of a typical human. By analogy with gullibility (believing what you hear because of how it’s spoken) and suggestibility (doing what you’re told because of how it’s phrased), fnordability might be accepting what you read because of the presence of specific codewords.
[omitted a paragraph psychoanalyzing Scott]
I don’t think that he was trying to make a threat. I think that he was trying to explain the difficulties of being a cryptofascist! Scott’s entire grey-tribe persona collapses if he ever draws a solid conclusion; he would lose his audience if he shifted from cryptofascism to outright ethnonationalism because there are about twice as many moderates as fascists. Scott’s grift only continues if he is skeptical and nuanced about HBD; being an open believer would turn off folks who are willing to read words but not to be hateful. His “appreciat[ion]” is wholly for his brand and revenue streams.
This also contextualizes the “revenge”. If another content creator publishes these emails as part of their content then Scott has to decide how to fight the allegations. If the content is well-sourced mass-media journalism then Scott “leave[s] the Internet” by deleting and renaming his blog. If the content is another alt-right crab in the bucket then Scott “seek[s] some sort of horrible revenge” by attacking the rest of the alt-right as illiterate, lacking nuance, and unable to cite studies. No wonder he doesn’t talk about us or to us; we’re not part of his media strategy, so he doesn’t know what to do about us.
In this sense, we’re moderates too; none of us are hunting down Scott IRL. But that moderation is necessary in order to have the discussion in the first place.