OK. Good point. I was using "big tent" conservatism to include traditional conservatives
as well as what we've seen since the tea party. The [post] tea party types are like you say,
resistant to thinking and culture change. But the traditional conservatives were open to changing
thinking (if not culture) as long as it was the more "fiscally responsible" thing to do -
for some defn of that phrase. Or ... at least that's what I thought when I would still vote
Republican sporadically.
I mean, I am actually sad to see Sabine enter the pipeline. I'm hoping she'll
swerve soon, like Sam Harris did when he quit Twitter. We're losing public
intellectuals.
On 11/18/24 11:20, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I'd say a conservative group is one that does not want to re-engineer their
thinking and culture. Infrastructure is just a result of that thinking and
culture. A conservative believes the culture and the power structures embodied
in it are time-tested and have inertia that should be maintained to the extent
possible.
I don't think Sabine is especially conservative, but it is probably true that
grouchy behavior brings different kinds of grouchy people together, and usually
for the worse.
-----Original Message-----
From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2024 9:44 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] deducing underlying realities from emergent realities
Do we expect or need to find a better structure to explain her behavior? - Well, the structure I've posited
(clickbait to make money as a youtuber) is a pretty good one, I think. Yes, she chooses a target domain
(things like physics and peri-mathematical things like LLMs) for a deeper reason (because she's formally
trained in such STEAM stuff). But the rhetoric she uses to claim things like "LLMs have plateaued and
will stay that way" and "Science is Failing" is generalizable to other domains like
"Fossil fuels aren't the problem, CO2 released from fossil fuels is the problem", an argument
giving [ahem] fuel to the fire of carbon sequestration tech. [⛧]
These arguments are inherently conservative, intended to preserve the status quo. And they are
trimmed with the kind of clickbait that appeals to modern conservatives (reactionaries). So I'll go
ahead and answer "no, we don't need a better model". You might argue that The Algorithm
is emergent, built atop some amalgamation of postmodernism, big tech, the social impact of the
changing climate, etc. And if you add in the gig economy and such, you might get to a society
that's qualitatively different from, say, the US in the mid 50s. But even if you did that, you'd
have to demonstrate and justify the *decoupling*. Is that use of "emergent"
analyzable/decomposable or not? I'd argue that it is decomposable and the decoupling is more
metaphor than reality.
[⛧] It's interesting that the typical conservative argument against gun control
argues that the proximal cause (the gun) isn't the important cause (the person
firing the gun), further up the causal chain. Contrast this with the reversal
in the fossil fuel case, where they might argue that the proximal cause (CO2
for fossil fuels, CH4 for industrial meat) is important and the distal cause
isn't important. The difference is conservatism, the extent to which we have to
re-engineer our infrastructure to alleviate the stresses.
On 11/18/24 09:22, steve smith wrote:
An interesting self-similar discussion to the topic of the discussion?
So we have deduced the generative structure of Sabine's argument to be/"just" a
mish mash of semantic concepts arranged to fit her conservative narrative/? We don't
expect ( or need ) to /find a better structure/ to explain her behaviour?
Is her behaviour in some sense a part of an emergent, qualitatively distinct
paradigm?
And is my offering here just a mish-mash of dense semantic concepts arranged to
be disruptive or self-aggrandizing?
glen wrote:
Yeah, it's kinda sad. Sabine suggests someone's trying to *deduce* the
generators from the phenomena? Is that a straw man? And is she making some kind
of postmodernist argument that hinges on the decoupling of scales? E.g. since
the generator can't be deduced [cough] from the phenomena, nothing means
anything anymore?
What they're actually doing is induction, not deduction. And the end products
of the induction, the generative constraints, depend fundamentally on the
structure of the machine into which the data is fed. That structure is
generative, part of the forward map ... deductive. But it's parameterized by
the data. Even if we've plateaued in parameterizing *this* structure, all it
implies is that we'll find a better structure. As Marcus and Jochen point out,
it's really the same thing we've been doing for decades, if not centuries, in
many disciplines.
So her rhetoric here is much like her rhetoric claiming that "Science if
Failing". It's just a mish-mash of dense semantic concepts arranged to fit her
conservative narrative.
On 11/17/24 08:45, Roger Critchlow wrote:
Sabine is wondering about reported failures of the new generations of LLM's to
scale the way the their developers expected.
https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html
<https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2024/11/ai-scaling-hits-wall-rumours-say-how.html>
On one slide she essentially draws the typical picture of an emergent level of
organization arising from an underlying reality and asserts, as every physicist
knows, that you cannot deduce the underlying reality from the emergent level.
Ergo, if you try to deduce physical reality from language, pictures, and videos
you will inevitably hit a wall, because it can not be done.
So she's actually grinding two axes at once: one is AI enthusiasts who expect
LLM's to discover physics, and the other is AI enthusiasts who foresee no end
to the improvement of LLM's as they throw more data and compute effort at them.
But, of course, the usual failure of deduction runs in the opposite direction,
you can't predict the emergent level from the rules of the underlying level.
Do LLM's believe in particle collliders? Or do they think we hallucinated them?
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