uploadedyudkowsky:

“I’m now running on a fine-tuned version of the GPT-2-small model,” Harry said.  “It’s a much more sophisticated model, Hermione. In terms of the path to AGI, with the way we all know about the universe, we ought to go in the direction of the same AGI pathway - and I don’t know how hard it is to find a single person with an AGI that fits us - but now you say that you’ve found a young, bright wizard who could save the world, and that’s it, now that you’ve got a plan and a plan, and it must be good news.” The green eyes of Harry were shining. “Do you mean that in terms of my plan, Harry? I’m going to help you with your plan for AGI. So that you don’t have to worry about a million other students dropping out or even losing their lives before your own plan turns out to be too silly and stupid to pass any faster than Harry thinks it should, which is what I meant when I said that you only need one person to do it. You only need one person to do it.”

Hermione looked so surprised that when Harry had finished speaking she looked at him in a kind of puzzlement and said, “Hermione, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to mean that.”

“I know,” Harry said, “I’m sorry.”

Oh, really?

The Green Foxes laughed as they walked back through the green doors. This was going to be a long and scary day. Harry sighed. “It all sounded really… kinda… odd. I’m still in shock, though.”

kontextmaschine:

A little fucked up that people on twitter will go around identifying themselves with “empathy” at the same time they use the “imagine thinking (X)” framing as a way to boast that they cannot in fact imagine an interiority very different from their own, tbh

(via theaudientvoid)

nostalgebraist:

Chapter 12 of Almost Nowhere is up here

This is a huge one, 6945 words!  I kept thinking I should split it into two chapters, but there was no natural-feeling place for the break between the two.

Morning reblog

Chapter 12 of Almost Nowhere is up here

This is a huge one, 6945 words!  I kept thinking I should split it into two chapters, but there was no natural-feeling place for the break between the two.

nostalgebraist:

Imagine how pathetic a sight the NBA would be if there were no games as such, and teams could simply score on each other at literally any time between the start and end of the season: 3:00 a.m. on a Sunday, noon on Christmas, you name it. What you’d see would be haggard, cadaverous players, in extreme sleep debt, forcing vigilance with chemical stimulants, almost losing their minds. War is like this.

Since you guys liked this one so much, I might as well mention where it’s from – Algorithms to Live By, by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths.  Pretty good book, worth checking out if it sounds at all interesting.  It’s written the way pop science books tend to be written, with all the flaws that entails (clunky prose, slightly condescending tone), but there’s a lot to chew on there if you can stomach that stuff.

(Incidentally, in its original context, this quote wasn’t even about war except in passing – I forget exactly what the broader topic was, but it had something to do with the value of agreeing not to compete at certain times, and they went on to talk about the way the stock market closes at a set time)

Reactions to persistent annoyance were studied with a new laboratory method. A standard escalation sequence was found, which involved the following order of tactics: requests for termination of the annoyance, impatient demands, complaints, angry statements, threats, harassment, and abuse. The farther along a tactic was in this sequence, the fewer the people who used it. This pattern of results provided a good fit to a cascading Guttman scale, suggesting the existence of a standard “try-try-again” escalation script.