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nostalgebraist:

taking a break from “ai discourse”

Over the last year or so, I’ve been writing a lot of long posts about AI timelines, AI risk, the limits of modern ML, and related issues.

People seem to enjoy these posts, and I’m proud of many of them. But the experience hasn’t been good for my mental health.

I’ve been spending way more time than I’d like thinking about these arguments in an obsessive manner – where I want to stop and think about something else, yet I somehow can’t.

—-

Part of the problem is that, this past year, I’ve gotten into the habit of reading LessWrong habitually – something I haven’t done for a very long time.

LessWrong is full of people afraid of near-term superintelligent AI, much more so than the rest of my social circle. (Even the parts of my social circle that read LW are much, much less AI-doomerist on average than the people writing most of the posts on LW.)

This created a sense that “whoa, everyone around me is suddenly way more terrified of AI!”, which felt like a scarily sudden and scarily unmotivated social shift, and made me feel obsessively driven to figure out where these fears came from and what evidence was supposed to justify them.

To some extent, I do think this shift is a real phenomenon that goes beyond LW, and was (very roughly) contemporaneous with me picking up LW again. But it’s also become clear to me that I’m driving myself crazy by reading LW, and letting “what LW posters think” seep into my assessment of “what people think, in general.”

—-

So, I’m going to stop reading LW for now. (Not just habitual reading, but reading posts on the site, period.) I’ll also avoid related sites like EA Forum, and personal blog posts containing the same kind of material.

I’m also going to try to talk about about AI risk and AI timelines as little as possible, whether online or in person.

I’ll still talk about these topics if there’s some overwhelming reason to, but not just as banter or because “someone is wrong on the internet.”

I’ll still talk about ML more generally, as long as the topic isn’t too close to big-picture prognostication about risk, timelines, and the ultimate power/limits of ML.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up for. With reading LW, I can probably keep it up indefinitely, since I spent years not-reading-LW in the past and feel none the worse for it. For the more general prohibition on AI discourse, I’ll keep it up at least until the end of the year, and then think about how I feel.

I’m re-instating this again. (3/18/23)

Almost Nowhere status:

1. I’ve booked the next week off work to write.  I’m cautiously optimistic about finishing the book by the end of that week.  No promises, obviously.

2. So far, I’ve written ~15k words since the last posted chapter.  I expect the total wordcount of the final chapters to be several times that, at least.

3. I decided to split one of the planned 6 chapters in two, so there’s going to be 7 now.  No change to the content, it’ll just read much nicer on the (virtual) page now.

Nothing and no one can stand in the way of Weiner getting his paws on the treasure, and along the way, as the words dance across the page, a hysterical, guffaw-inducing punchline around every corner, Weiner reaches new lows of humiliation and self-delusion.

triviallytrue:

txttletale:

gidianthe:

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they let you fuck jesus

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Trinfinity8 leads the way in using pure quartz crystal rods to directly deliver information to the body in a language it understands—math.

Should we see the joy experienced by the sharing of pet pics as an act of resistance, a small rebellion against a neoliberal economy? Or is it a palliative that keeps us from growing fractious and discontented, like the mindfulness programs so much in vogue with HR departments? Perhaps both, suggests Maddox.

discoursedrome:

brighterflowers:

literally the marshmallow test sounds like such a scam. “oh yeah we’ll give you two marshmallows later” no you won’t! you’ll forget the whole thing and get annoyed when I expect my marshmallows and then I will have eaten No Marshmallows

yeah I’ve heard this suggested as a possible explanation for people’s choice to eat the marshmallows immediately. It suggests that in principle we could control for that aspect of the scenario if only we found a way to precommit to giving the second marshmallow if the first wasn’t eaten. What I’m thinking, and this isn’t completely fleshed out yet so bear with me, is: what if we we implemented the marshmallow rules as an immutable smart contract on the Solana blockchain

(via kerapace)

Had an extended bad dream last night about an acquaintance writing a negative, dismissive review of Almost Nowhere.

This is only the latest piece of evidence for a fact that has long been clear to me: I am not psychologically prepared for people to actually read my novel. (Specifically, for people to read it in a finished state, without partly suspending their judgment.)

This is not just thin-skinnedness. (Though that is a lot of it.) I’ve been working on the book for so long that I’ve become used to it as part of my mental furniture.

It doesn’t feel like a thing I’m doing deliberately, an expression of my will. I’m aware of the book’s existence the way in the same way I’m aware that I have feet; I know what the book is like, what happens in it, in the same way I know what summer is like, and what happens when you get the flu.

It’s going to be a bizarre experience, reading the inevitable “meh” / “I liked it until X but then it sucked” / “I couldn’t stand character Y” / etc. reviews. They’re going to feel like category mistakes, more than anything.

(Even rave reviews of the completed work will be weird, in the same way, I guess.

But – if someone praises me for something which I created in a material sense, but which I didn’t psychologically choose to create – then I can simply say, “gee, thanks, but I don’t think I can honestly take credit for that one.” And feel like I’ve only been witness to an amusing misunderstanding.

Whereas, if someone blames me for the same thing, I’ll feel an instinctual need to rise to my own defense, combined with a crushing appreciation of the fact that no defense is possible.)

That’s all inevitable. Nothing to be done about it. Oh well…

Now that Frank is not posting anymore, I’m going to start doing my out-of-context quotes gimmick again.

For more recent followers, my “out-of-context quotes gimmick” just means posting quotations I find funny/weird/etc, without quotation marks or attribution, under the tag #quotes.

I did this for many years, and only stopped in the last few years because people kept thinking the #quotes posts were by Frank.

(Frank also frequently made her own #quotes posts – with made-up quotations, of course.)