fasterik

6 ms·

31.
by fasterik 20d ago
Sure, but staking a claim in that debate is taking a position on what is and isn't conscious.
32.
by fasterik 20d ago
Blaise Agüera y Arcas is a computer scientist at Google. But I agree, it's an opinion piece and it's not the Economist's job to grade it as a philosophical essay. Generally, I think the Economist is a high quality publication
33.
by fasterik 20d ago
It claims that there is no objective fact about whether something is conscious. From the second paragraph: >Consciousness is, in other words, a model or a belief, not an inherent property. It is a belief about what kinds of entities hav
34.
by fasterik 20d ago
It's hard to read this article and keep track of all the philosophical confusions at once. Whether or not something is conscious (has subjective experience) is independent of whether humans care about it. Whether or not something is a
35.
by fasterik 29d ago
An auteur is just the "author", the primary creative force behind a project. Sustained success is orthogonal to that and depends on the person. Francis Ford Coppola didn't make anything of note after the 1970s, but he was sti
36.
by fasterik 29d ago
What you're describing is the inability to maintain quality over a career, which is a separate issue from whether auteurs exist. Often it's because fame and success remove the constraints that were forcing the work to be tight and
37.
by fasterik 1mo ago
What "interest group" are you referring to, and how do you know that it's not individual users with a legitimate good faith disagreement?
38.
by fasterik 1mo ago
It's not that surprising if we remember that the model is trained to be a generically useful next-token predictor, not necessarily an agent or a chatbot. It needs to know about the environment it's embedded in and what assumptions
39.
by fasterik 1mo ago
You could be right, but you're making a lot of assumptions about how complexity, scientific understanding, and explanations scale. One of the features of a good scientific discovery is that it often simplifies and compresses things
40.
by fasterik 1mo ago
I think this is exactly what we should expect. LLMs are engineered to produce the most likely output given the training data. When you give it a generic design task, you're going to get a distillation of design cliches and tropes from
41.
by fasterik 1mo ago
Curtis Yarvin honestly wouldn't have crossed my mind as a philosopher. I think of him as a political pundit. If I were thinking of right-wing philosophers, I would think of Burke, Hayek, Nozick, etc. I might disagree with some of their
42.
by fasterik 1mo ago
I don't see why pointing out improvements in quality of life is "propaganda for the status quo" or precludes talking about political power and economic security. We can and do talk about both all the time.
43.
by fasterik 1mo ago
Propaganda for what, exactly?
44.
by fasterik 1mo ago
When I read "a lot of philosophy is bullshit" without qualification I read it as an anti-intellectual statement either dismissing academic philosophy as a discipline, or confusing philosophy for self-help/mysticism. In some s
45.
by fasterik 1mo ago
That seems like an extrapolation to a pretty extreme conclusion. I don't see anything in the article that says anything like that. It's an appreciation of how much objective standards of living have improved over the past few cent
46.
by fasterik 1mo ago
$2400 a month is $29k per year, pretty affordable at the U.S. median household income of $83k. It's not uncommon for people living in big cities to spend a larger portion of their income on rent. And don't forget that many people
47.
by fasterik 1mo ago
00, 01, 10, 11 are separable states, meaning that a pair of particles in one of those states can be described as two separate one-particle systems. For example, 01 means that the first particle is in the state 0 and the second particle is i
48.
by fasterik 1mo ago
It's not obvious at all from your comment, since you didn't qualify "a lot" or mention which topics in philosophy you think are legitimate.
49.
by fasterik 1mo ago
It really depends on what you mean by philosophy. Academic philosophy? Ancient philosophy? Pop philosophy? Self-help content? For a list of topics that aren't bullshit, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good starting point.
50.
by fasterik 1mo ago
John Carmack made a similar point: "Software is a just a tool to help accomplish something for people - many programmers never understood that. Keep your eyes on the delivered value, and don't over focus on the specifics of the to
51.
by fasterik 1mo ago
Psychosis is the inability to distinguish what is real. This seems closer to something like embodied cognition or body schema extension. There are documented cases where the brain adapts to tool use (e.g. a mechanical grabber) by modeling i
52.
by fasterik 1mo ago
>If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed. I don't have an opinion about Dunning-Kruger either way, but I wanted to point out that this is a pre-replication crisis mindse
53.
by fasterik 1mo ago
Saying that AI is "matrices" is like saying human cognition is "neurons." Maybe true at some level, but it's a low-level implementation detail. The important part of a language model is the function that maps tokens
54.
by fasterik 1mo ago
I used to be much more of an open source fundamentalist than I am now. For me, it's more about trust than source availability. There are closed source projects that I have high trust in, and there are open source projects that I don&#x
55.
by fasterik 2mo ago
For the purposes of learning something new, I don't find traditional note-taking or the idea of "knowledge management" all that useful. I find the best way to learn is to do projects. Sometimes the project might be creating a
56.
by fasterik 2mo ago
Yes that makes sense, and I think I mostly agree with you. The point about metaphors is a good one, but what I would say is that often the most precise way to communicate something is through a metaphor. If the goal is to convey a mood or a
57.
by fasterik 2mo ago
Arguably, a royal portrait is a misinterpretation of the prompt, since it's just asking for a specific facial feature. But I guess you could look at it as a bit of artistic license.
58.
by fasterik 2mo ago
>Whether its dealing with, e.g., "beside the rock" or "in the array", it's doing the same kind of inferential activity. Are you sure about that? Presumably the spatial concept of "inside" and the comp
59.
by fasterik 2mo ago
For childhood education sure, we don't really need high tech solutions there. But what about training the next generation of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers? Even decades ago, computer algebra systems and numerical solvers st
60.
by fasterik 2mo ago
Because the degree of realism in a video is determined by implicit knowledge of concepts like "in front of", "behind", "next to", "inside", "outside", "between", "occluded by&

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