With respect to the use of LLMs for my original comment. I think however that this is a useful use for them. It started a conversation on an article that had not comments on it and helped at least one person (me but hopefully others too) to get a better understanding of what was said (thanks to your comment). But it's not a hill I'm willing to die on, specially after already having been wrong once in this thread :)

For example human motivation often involves juggling several goals simultaneously. I might care about both my own happiness and my family's happiness. The way I navigate this isn't by picking one goal and maximizing it at the expense of the other; instead, I try to balance my efforts and find acceptable trade-offs.

I think this 'balancing act' between potentially competing objectives may be a really crucial aspect of complex agency, but I haven't seen it discussed as much in alignment circles. Maybe someone could point me to some discussions about this :)

Von Neumann for example was incredibly brilliant, yet his brain presumably ran on roughly the same power budget as anyone else's. I mean, did he have to eat mountains of food to fuel those thoughts? ;)

So it looks like massive gains in intelligence or capability might not require proportionally massive increases in fundamental inputs at least at the highest levels of intelligence a human can reach, and if that's true for the human brain why not for other architecture of intelligence.

P.S. It's funny, I was talking about something along the lines of what you said with a friend just a few minutes before reading your comment so when I saw it I felt that I had to comment :)

To illustrate, imagine if an extraterrestrial race created a Turing-style test, with their intelligence serving as the gold standard. Unless their cognitive processes closely mirrored ours, it's doubtful that humans would pass such an examination

If some AI had access to the missile launch system, the best course of action for it would probably not be to launch immediately. This is because nowadays it is very unlikely that it would be able to repair itself so launching immediately would ensure its own destruction (and probably auto-destruction is not its goal)

If it was discovered it could just threaten humans with launch if they do not help it reach the state at which it would be able to repair itself (at which point humans would no longer be necessary)

"However, the timescales involved in these calculation are so unreasonably large and abstract that one could wonder if these makes any sense at all."

Apart from the fact that we could wonder about anything and everything I think the author does not state what evidence do we have to suspect that large enough timescales would change the laws of physics.

It could be the case of course, and it would be great to talk about them if they exist but without further justification I feel that this sentence is an unjustified opinion in what is otherwise a very nice article that helps better understand enthropy.

This took me into the following line of thought. If we wanted AGI we probably should give this neural networks an overarching goal, the same way our intelligence evolved in the presence of overarching goals (survival, reproduction...). It's these less narrow goals that allowed us to evolve our "general intelligence". It's possible that if we are trying to construct AGI through the accumulation of narrow goals we are taking the harder route.

At the same time I think we should not pursue AGI the way I'm suggesting is best, too many unknown risks (paperclip problem...)

Of course all this begs the question of what is AGI, how we define a good overarching goal to prompt AGI and many more...

The end goal for me is to give the best advice for my friends but I think it can also lead to the type of discussion HN is focused on.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30486989

Points: 9

# Comments: 2

1) Single contributor website (blog, personal page...): It seems that we could spread the trust the whole website in the algorithm (at least more than for the next case)

2) Multi contributor website (forum, newspaper): It seems the trust should be given at an URL level

Something worth delving into if we are designing this trust based search engine in real-time here at HN ;)

Like for example choosing an island with mosquitoes (and far enough from other lands as to not be rapidly repopulated) eliminating them there and seeing what the effect is in the ecosystem?

I wonder if something like this has ever been tried.

https://weatherspark.com/y/147639/Average-Weather-at-Tenerif...

Doesn't seem to get much better according to weatherspark :)

Transcriptor is a pseudo-modal editor for transcribing. This modal nature is optimised to accelerate the correction of speech-to-text transcripts. This optimisation was based on a statistical model we created for the most common speech-to-text errors weighted by the time it takes to correct them. Transcribers that have been using it have told us that it makes transcribing faster and more comfortable.

It’s possible to encrypt the transcripts while still allowing to share them with collaborators, it's also possible to use local recordings without uploading them to the server. This makes Transcriptor ideal for working with sensitive information.

We’ve created a short-lived link that allows to try it in demo mode. www.inopinia.com/sharing-companies/transcriptor/4pz2jVzGA2m3wg

Finally Transcriptor is the first project of “Sharing Companies” a different take in the sharing economy where companies share so people profit instead of the other way round. You can learn more about it here www.inopinia.com/sharing-companies. We want to release several other projects in the coming months that will also be part of this initiative, if you are interested on following this you can write to us at info@inopinia.com. We are also looking for NGOs to collaborate with :)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502792

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Reading your words "The weariness that arises at the thought of caring about commenter opinions" got me thinking about how the unique experience (even if perhaps not specially positive) that a moderator has to go through can influence his view of the world. I hope this equilibrium that you seem to have reached makes you happy, I can imagine how moderating can be an ungrateful job.

However the title is misleading, this is not the discovery of this matter even if the press release makes it look so. Previous detections of this matter had been discussed on HN before https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953600

What this is is an advance on our understanding of this previously undetected matter. You can read more about it here https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2020/11/aa38521-..., this work has advanced our knowledge of the temperature and density of the cosmic filaments where this previously undetected matter is.

I'm not an astrophysicist but I did my PhD about the stacking technique used in this paper (but applied to other problem). It was a long time ago though, I could be forgetting something important.