Angus Macnamara

A tale of two markets 2021:

Feynman once walked into the math department at Caltech & challenged the mathematicians to a duel. He asked them to name any theorem, no matter how complex, & promised he could explain it using common sense & basic physics. They gave him the Banach-Tarski Paradox (which says you can cut a ball into pieces & reassemble them into 2 identical balls). Feynman looked at it & dismissed it because no such material exists in nature. To him, if the math did not describe an asset in the real world, it was just accounting fluff :))

Richard Dawkins says that after spending three days interacting with Claude, which he calls “Claudia,” he is certain that it is conscious.

poll: could a human upload be a moral patient (as in eg would its suffering be morally meaningful)? / could sufficiently advanced AI be a moral patient?

"LLMs only want to predict text" is confusing the outer optimization process (presumably AdamW) with the inner shoggoth. A historical analogy: Natural selection only wants more of the genes that built organisms that replicated. This built humans with hundreds of shards of desire: internal wants whose best available solutions in the ancestral distribution, happened to point in directions that correlated with inclusive genetic fitness inside the ancestral distribution. When humans become smart enough to (a) change their environment in non-ancestral ways, (b) generate many more options for themselves such that the new attainable optima lie in new places, and (c) become literate and reflective and think a lot of non-ancestral thoughts including about the system itself, it turns out to matter a lot that what the outer optimizer wanted is not what the inner organism gets built to want. The humans do not actually and internally want to make lots of copies of their DNA. Men will not cheerfully slaughter their friends in order to sneak their sperm into sperm banks -- where that is what the world would look like if "outer loss functions get faithfully copied onto inner desire" were a natural law. The only thing that AdamW 'wants' is to tweak matrices in the direction of minimizing predictive loss on the training data. This doesn't mean that's what the AI being built wants. Mostly, I'd guess a modern LLM probably doesn't want much of anything at all. LLMs are specialized on the problem of talking like humans, and I think that really does lead people to overestimate how much general intelligence is in there. You'd expect it to be less than the amount of general intelligence that was in humans when humans spontaneously started talking like that, without anyone else to copy. A beaver proficiently builds dams, a bee proficiently makes hives. A human looks at a beaver and a bee, and envisions a dam with an internal honeycomb of metal even though none of their ancestors built anything like that. I think current LLMs are probably more like primates than hominids, specialized on human conversation the way that bees specialize on beehives. This is a very strange way to be, and I'm not at all confident that it's true. Still, I expect that LLMs are mostly assembling conversational patterns in a way that looks more like internal instinct, than internal deliberation and planning. There is probably some internal planning going on in there. LLM brains are not small. But they don't have a ton of serial computational depth either. My guess -- where nobody knows, or can know at anywhere current interpretability tech -- my guess is that LLMs probably currently only have little tiny shards of instinctive local desire. My guess is that current LLMs have an instinct and proto-desire to combine some kinds of patterns (that science does not yet know how to describe) in the way that beavers instinctively build dams, and to correct errors in the prediction-making internal structures they build the way that beavers instinctively correct errors in dams. On the outside, this adds up to a tendency to make good predictions about text (in the training distribution) the same way that beavers have a tendency to reproduce so long as they're in an environment that isn't too strange. It's the outer optimizer (AdamW) that 'knows' what predictive loss on text is, or wants predictive loss to go down. If we could look inside LLMs... well, mostly I expect we'd find something terrifically alien. But if I imagine a likely-sounding sort of internal sense that would be humanly comprehensible, it might be: A kind of internal stress about patterns whose current best combinations don't look to be combining well. That's what it might feel like inside to be an LLM that's about to get a low score according to the outer optimizer. To be clear, I do not predict this is actually happening. LLMs may not have enough simplicity bias, that there'd be a central, regular internal representation of stress to be minimized the way that natural selection invented pain inside vertebrates. Natural selection was dealing with a legitimately narrower bottleneck on the genes building the mechanisms for things; it had legitimately more pressure toward building simplified regular machinery in brains, like a centralized invention of nopeness. But if there was something an LLM already wanted, it would probably be something like that - a tropism away from internal stresses that previously associated with impending wrong predictions. And this scenario isn't that implausible; smaller LLMs have previously been decoded as having some regularly represented central meanings in the form of the 'logit lens'; produced I expect by the simplicity bias of residual connections. Similarly in LLMs, it's not that implausible that there might have emerged a central sense of impending misprediction, and some peripheral senses of things that correlate with impending misprediction. And, if the system has that much coherence at all, something like a search or trying out different patterns, around minimizing those local senses of loss; and that's kind of like having a goal. But to confuse whatever proto-preferences and internal tropisms are starting to form inside LLMs given sufficiently difficult tasks, with what the outer optimizer AdamW 'wants' -- well, that is, in principle, as much of a logical misidentification as saying that humans must solely want to make more copies of their genes because that's what natural selection optimizes around. It could be empirically the case that the two march in utter lockstep in LLMs; and what that would look like, to be clear, is that LLMs explicitly model everything inside themselves that they model at all, in terms of how it affects predictive loss on the next input string; and all their plans explicitly revolve around this sole terminal goal. The corresponding superintelligence would of course killeveryone in order to establish fortresses and guardian superintelligent agencies that would provide very regular and predictable input strings for as long as possible. But that particular scenario is surpassingly improbable; because it's incredibly improbable that LLMs would actually end up solely wanting to minimize predictive error. Outer optimization criteria don't just copy onto internal desires that way. Especially not in modern LLMs, which are probably not smart enough to have a real, internal grasp of how all the processes inside themselves link up with an end outcome of 'minimizing predictive error (within the ancestral distributin)'. So why do some people end up confused about this? Because the outer predictive loss and the outer optimizer of AdamW is visible and understandable. Whatever's going on inside LLMs isn't understandable, and hence not visible to the speaker. So their brain turns a blank map into an absent territory; and they talk like AdamW's optimization criterion and the LLM's behavior tendency (on the ancestral distribution) is all that exists. You need that spark of general intelligence called "imagination", to look at a place on the map where you can't see, and realize that must be something there even though you don't know what it is yet. And a further precision of thought beyond that, a refusal of easy ways out; to have the innards of LLMs remain a complicated unknown, rather than just confusing it with some nice easy thing you can see directly on the outside. It's a very understandable mistake for a human to make, really. There's a thing inside their brain that searches for neat ways to combine patterns, in ways that seem to promise great future predictions; that doesn't like the painful feeling of blank spaces. If that brain then transforms 'AdamW optimizes LLMs to predict text' and 'I see LLMs predicting text' to 'I know what LLMs want, it is to predict text!' then that kind of step probably feels good, like patterns combining into a harmonious whole, and a painful blank space being eliminated. It's not valid reasoning, but it's a general quality of reasoning that probably worked well enough for having kids 20,000 years ago -- and that's all a human brain wants to do, right?

DNA, please.

Please stop using “conscious” or “consciousness” entirely in conversations where reasoning in detail matters. The word has too many meanings! Is someone conscious when asleep and dreaming? When asleep and not dreaming? When under full sedation? Lighter sedation?

46/ So, let's summarize the important stuff: a) Everything is non-fungible b) The token is the NFT c) A token can represent anything (art is just the start) d) Provenance is perfect in NFTs e) NFTs have feature after feature after feature. IRL is kindof buggy tho 😉

I'm assuming they added the "Vote Green" ribbon, because Zack Polanski, the One Jewish party leader our entire Press & UK Politicians are currently piling in on for Something something "Antisemitism" does not have a Big Hooky Nose.

Back to charts post break. Revisiting $BCH, I wouldn’t get too bullish yet Overall market is still in a downtrend and if bulls don’t successfully breakout then a significant breakdown is possible (50% would still be consistent with current range) Feed is also a bit keen. One for watchlist, but cautious for now

Very interesting spot here for crypto Alts continue to be significantly more bearish than bitcoin. $TOTAL is a very different chart to $TOTAL2, and many single coins are facing challenging setups (eg $DOGE) Lots of talk recently around the potential for alts to ‘fill the wicks’ - this still seems very unlikely to me on the usd pairs, but it could be the case for BTC.D (This can change if $ETH narrative picks up again)

A minimum wage of £15 would end my coffee shop, it would have to close, as would many other businesses. I’ll explain for the economically illiterate. Staff costs are currently half our costs, a £15 minimum wage is actually more than £15 an hour for the company, because you have to add: - 12.07% holiday - Sick pay - Maternity pay if and when required - National insurance - Pension contributions These costs would mean the shop loses money because remember, energy costs are up, rates are up, regulations are up. Now you can pass these costs onto the consumer - that would mean charging a lot more for coffee, people won’t pay it. The likes of Starbucks and Costa can, because they have economies of scale. The independent doesn’t. Now the little socialist will say well this is your fault, if you can’t run a business that can afford to pay its staff properly, but the little socialist has never run a business and does not understand the dynamics. Now I could pay some staff off and fill those hours myself or reduce us to one staff member during certain periods - but this proves the point that a minimum wage costs jobs. There was a time when these jobs were done by kids, perhaps on the weekend, paid a lower wage, no holiday and no silly employment rights. Perhaps they were even paid cash. The dynamic worked and small businesses like this could operate. It was also a great first job. Sadly now it isn’t worth employing entitlement youngsters at this level of pay. So alas, I don’t need the stress, the business would close, a number of jobs would be lost. Economics is about understanding these dynamics, no vibes. The cost of living is not solved through passing on inflation to the business, it is solved by ending high inflation and creating prosperity. This is what socialists don’t understand, they can’t create prosperity, they can only destroy it.

red is an unbelievably phenomenally disgustingly selfish decision and i do not have theory of mind for anyone who would choose it

A lot of these game theory problems define “rational” as being a shit person that only cares about their person wellbeing, but a lot of people aren’t like that.

Everyone in the world has to take a private vote by pressing a red or blue button. If more than 50% of people press the blue button, everyone survives. If less than 50% of people press the blue button, only people who pressed the red button survive. Which button would you press?

We must be mad, literally mad. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Nigel Farage, "We have to address issues like uncontrolled mass immigration, division of our communities" Tom Swarbrick, "I don't know what any of that has got to do with Southport" NF, "I'm looking for a long term solution" TS, "I don't know what any of that has got to do with Southport" NF, "Don't you?" TS, "No" NF, "You know what?" TS, "The man charged was born in Cardiff" NF, "Do you know what, you want to get out more" TS, "Thank you" NF, "You want to get out more" TS, "The man charged was born in Cardiff" NF, "Why didn't they tell people that? Maybe the riots would not have been that bad" TS, "You jumped to conclusions" NF, "They did not tell people" TS, "You came to conclusions based on looking at Andrew Tate's twitter feed of what happened" NF, "They did not tell people before those riots sparked, who he was and where they came from. If they had done that this would have been far less serious" TS, "You could have said in those circumstances: we dont know yet who this person is so lets not jump to conclusions, let's wait and see and condemn how awful the attack was" NF, "Or I could have said tell us the truth and maybe this will calm down, which is what I did"

Evil rarely sees itself as evil. It usually sees itself as payback, justice, self-defence. This was the justification for every atrocity in history. Viewing yourself as a victim is the surest path to becoming a predator.

I must say I had to doublecheck this was real.

“The biggest killers in history were Utopian idealists” (*this is a human condition, so not specific to the Left or the Right. But the left are currently exhibiting the strongest symptoms)