Alyssa Vance @alyssamvance Twitter profile

Pinned Tweet

Alyssa Vance

6 months

I'm logging out and taking an indefinite break from Twitter, which has many cool people, but sadly has become a haven for literal Nazis. Happy to chat at alyssamvance @gmail .com or on Signal (203-850-2427), or Discord. Thanks to everyone who followed me or posted good content :)

16

0

128

Last Seen Profiles

@EmerichNogueira

@CMj61575031

@Sassyonthat

@CalvinRidley1

@miumiu

@MiRo0531

@cookieMg5

@tyyzeee

@PaintNiteBuff

@bumbumsg

@2004Flamesfan

@AlexWeister

@CoachJustin10

@payseramore

@NICKIMINAJ_GT

@j_nightmare

@MPPCNURCA

@SusanKare

@antoine_mensah

@DoNatoBomb

@aboukaiiz

@NxtUp_MylesJ

@mie_nr

@VBursaspor1

@sweetenerlouiss

@Sakuyanino

@FechtelRos74364

@dul_turkporno

@fegarpe79

@6bp__

@em_nizzy

@bailing80

@ymym_o_o_

@beckywalker306

@ohmygodjev

@mydemn01

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

The "traditional family" was never very traditional

259

2K

12K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Why don't companies have sports teams, like colleges? Many people get super into sports as kids, then when they graduate college, they lose a favorite hobby. I bet the Coke vs. Pepsi, Ford vs. GM and Apple vs. Microsoft games would get big audiences!

248

271

4K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

TIL that there is a cure for cavities

Lumina Probiotic

Strategically adjust your oral microbiome with Lumina Probiotic. Replace harmful bacteria with a strain that causes less damage and enjoy the benefits.

www.luminaprobiotic.com

72

251

2K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

9 months

The US medical practice of "you aren't allowed to know the price, and then we will bill you, two years later, for whatever amount we retroactively make up" is horribly abusive and should be illegal

54

135

2K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

72

84

2K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

My strongest political belief isn't really liberal or conservative. It's that most people, laws, and institutions in the modern US are absurdly risk-averse, and that we're all suffocating in the name of 'safety'.

85

156

2K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Copilot/ChatGPT won't eliminate coding jobs; every time code has gotten easier to write, demand for code has grown even faster. A ton of programming in 1982 would be trivial now

55

99

2K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Modern CPUs are so fast that light can only travel about 2-3 inches between each clock tick. That's one reason why chip clock speed leveled off

19

186

1K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

9 months

Just read about teenagers being "encouraged to show leadership". How the hell could I have "led" anything at age 16? I couldn't open a bank account, visit the park, write a blog, have a friend over for lunch, or buy a gallon of milk.

203

33

1K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

IN MICE

Study finds mushrooms magnify memory by boosting nerve growth

Researchers from The University of Queensland have discovered the active compound from an edible mushroom that boosts nerve growth and enhances memory.

medicalxpress.com

32

38

1K

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

This is just embarrassing. Did you know that ChatGPT can't understand the word "not", because large language models filter stopwords from their training data like it's 1992? 🙄

AI Like ChatGPT Are No Good at ‘Not’ | Quanta Magazine

Today’s language models are more sophisticated than ever, but they still struggle with the concept of negation. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon.

www.quantamagazine.org

37

124

970

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

8 months

Art by DALL-E. The prompt is just 'Draw "Well, well, well, if it isn't the consequences of my own actions."'.

42

32

858

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Car alarms should be illegal. So should gas leaf-blowers, unmuffled motorcycles, and huge amplified car stereo systems. Noise pollution is real and bad

87

34

798

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

This is a very pretty graphic, but I suspect it'd be much less popular if it said "we should ban cars, central heating, air conditioning, and hot water, for everyone, permanently", which is mathematically what it amounts to

Timothée Parrique

@timparrique

1 year

Degrowth as a transition from a growth economy to a post-growth economy.

158

287

989

32

78

752

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

If inference time is linear in model size (big if), we can estimate GPT-4's param count by timing it. GPT-4 takes 12x as long as GPT-3 to generate these 400 tokens (~12 seconds vs. ~145), implying a param count of 175B * 12 ~= 2.1 trillion.

67

36

736

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

If you had a drop of water for each floating-point multiplication used to train PaLM, Google's new 540B parameter language model, it would just about fill the Pacific Ocean

17

39

699

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Amjad Masad

@amasad

2 years

@andreisavu That’s the plan!

7

0

43

5

51

636

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

"A clone of 2011 OkCupid" is the app that everyone wants to use and no one wants to make, and it has been since at least 2016

34

30

627

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

I wish there was a word for "rules with focused benefits and diffuse harms". Eg, suppose the fire code had a rule that stopped 3 fires a year, but cost $1.4B to implement. Socially, that's a huge loss. But it's hard to say "yes, your house should have burned to save everyone $6".

48

37

599

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

"Find a therapist" is useless advice >95% of the time, you're better off just saying "I don't know what to do" People want to believe "therapy" is the cure for any mental issue, just like antibiotics cure infections. Because that would be convenient. But this rarely happens

43

40

583

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Gilgamesh is one of the oldest works of literature, but new editions keep coming out because they keep finding more of it. Compare the first image (1998) with the subsequent ones (same section, 2021)

7

66

521

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

LSD should be legal, but IMO many people overrate it. It seems like a typical trip creates "insights" that can't be communicated and don't have much effect on the world afterwards

109

7

514

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

When the Web was as old as Ethereum is now, Yahoo was already serving ~150 million users a year. Nothing based on Ethereum or similar tech has anything like that level of mass adoption, and I don't currently know of any plausible candidates.

25

35

524

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Elon Musk is something like 99th percentile smart, but 99.9999th percentile on a mix of ambition, practicality, determination and risk tolerance

37

11

513

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Is there a name for the fallacy of "you include awful person X in your community because you see their contributions, but you don't see the contributions of the hundreds of others they drive away?"

46

61

509

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

"Preventing bad things from getting much worse is actually really important" - @davidshor

3

51

457

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

I'm turning 31 next week, I graduated college ten years ago now. It's insane to think of how a surgeon my age would *still* be "in training" in a residency program. Is this really necessary?

63

13

463

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Transformers can write text, but they can also estimate scores / do regression for any text you give them. Here's a quick demo I made (RoBERTa fine-tuned on Yelp review data)

18

34

459

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

My first Wikipedia edit in years

7

9

462

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

EA wants to be both "average workers give 10% of their income to help the global poor" and "billionaires fund high-risk high-payoff research to improve humanity's long term prospects", but these just aren't very similar things

23

14

459

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

PaLM was big news for Google a year ago, and I'm now fine-tuning an equally powerful model on my personal desktop for fun. Simply nuts

8

16

425

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

7 months

Wow, I got GPT-4 to go absolutely nuts. (The prompt was me asking about mattresses in East Asia vs. the West)

47

25

421

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Effective altruism is in a weird state where many 1) agree AI is the most important problem, 2) don't have a good plan for fixing it, 3) also don't want to dedicate themselves to a lower priority goal, so there's a lot of ineffectual flailing and good ideas left unbuilt

31

18

404

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I think Eliezer was wrong and that GPT-4 is the fire alarm for AGI, ie., an event that creates mutual common knowledge that AGI is coming and you won't look weird for talking about it

24

25

397

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Part of why more people are taking AI risk seriously is that safety advocates have spent years writing up their arguments in a lot of detail, while most skeptics have stuck to unpersuasive name-calling, arguments from psychoanalysis, and Twitter dunks

The basic reasons I expect AGI ruin — LessWrong

I've been citing AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities to explain why the situation with AI looks lethally dangerous to me. But that post is relatively lon…

www.lesswrong.com

42

38

397

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Dumb question: there seems to be a lot of debate on "do minimum wages lower employment". But isn't the right question "what minimum wage would lower employment"? Surely $1/hr would have no meaningful effect, and $100/hr would have some.

38

16

398

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

10 months

Many have very conveniently forgotten that Altman himself was made head of Y Combinator at age 28, as a college dropout, with a resume consisting of a single failed startup. (And I don't think it was a bad decision!)

Pedro Domingos

@pmddomingos

10 months

How did two lightweights like Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley wind up on OpenAI's board?

28

12

177

15

7

395

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

One reason I'm a bit skeptical of the "AI eats the Internet, becomes a million times smarter" story is that the Internet's bandwidth is really not very large. ~100 H100 GPUs would saturate every transatlantic cable combined

NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU Datasheet

This datasheet details the performance and product specifications of the NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU. It also explains the technological breakthroughs of the NVIDIA Hopper architecture.

resources.nvidia.com

36

39

384

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Why is there such a strong link between being trans and the autism spectrum (and hence, it seems, futurism, the Rust programming language, and various other niche interests)? I've been researching it for over a decade, and I still don't know 🤷‍♀️

81

15

380

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

48% of AI researchers think AI has a significant (>10%) chance of making humans extinct 58% believe AI alignment (by Russell's definition) is "very important" Most think human level AI is likely within our lifetime

2022 Expert Survey on Progress in AI

Collected data and analysis from a large survey of machine learning researchers.

aiimpacts.org

26

84

372

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I might honestly feel less nervous about OpenAI if their platform were "screw caution, push on the gas as hard as we can", since that's at least honest. It feels sociopathic to talk about slowing down AI, then do weekly huge releases before anyone can even digest the last release

32

19

368

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

10

9

355

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

The Four-Stage Strategy: 1) “nothing is going to happen” 2) “something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it” 3) “maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do” 4) “maybe there’s something we could have done, but it’s too late now”.

12

70

353

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

26

22

344

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I have a new long post on Less Wrong, which aims to show that, over the next decade, it is quite likely that most democratic Western countries will become fascist dictatorships:

The Dictatorship Problem — LessWrong

(Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, not that of any movement or organization.) …

www.lesswrong.com

98

27

341

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

The AI Risk Four-Stage Strategy: 1) nothing is going to happen! 2) something may happen, but, we don't need to do anything about it 3) maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do 4) maybe there's something we should've done, but it's too late now!

23

35

334

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Probably the biggest thing countries can do to boost fertility is reduce education requirements for jobs. Globally, there's a very strong negative correlation between fertility and school years - it makes each child take longer & cost more, and you don't have kids when in school.

25

28

323

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

9 months

Ahem

David Pfau

@pfau

11 months

As we become inured to AI art, artists will focus more on making work that can't even be casually mistaken for AI. Grotesquely detailed hands. Entire paragraphs of microcalligraphy. Big smiles with mathematically precise rows of teeth.

16

1

99

15

6

320

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

New TIME cover (from )

26

31

317

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

My best guess is that school mass shootings are mostly a social contagion that spreads via the media? There were only three recorded (with >2 deaths) in the US pre-1960, although the US has always had lots of guns.

List of school shootings in the United States (before 2000) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

33

25

291

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Crippling our #2 enemy's military at the cost of 0.5% of this decade's defense spending is a fantastic deal for the US

19

10

308

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

This seems pretty silly? Any fertility number, extrapolated to infinity, gives you either Malthusian catastrophe or extinction, but trends also rarely continue for >1,000 years straight even after negative feedback loops.

Samo Burja

@SamoBurja

3 years

I think we have to start considering human extinction as a real possible outcome of demographic transition. Natural selection doesn't prepare species in advanced for hurdles they face, and there is little evidence to think there are human subpopulations resistant to it.

25

14

107

10

9

301

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

How long until AIs can make a ton of money by convincingly imitating a person on OnlyFans? Five years?

33

13

294

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Quick reminder that Steve Ballmer has more money than all effective altruists combined, has donated almost none of it, and basically no one has criticized him for that

Steve Ballmer - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

32

11

281

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

I believe Scott Alexander called this the "worst argument in the world"

Robin Hanson

@robinhanson

2 years

War draftees are slaves. Ukraine has such a draft. US is heavily supporting Ukraine. Thus US is supporting slavery.

116

32

333

9

7

276

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I'm sure many have heard this, but for the record, "public health experts" treating e-cigarettes as basically the same as smoking is super bad and probably kills tens of thousands of people a year

10

11

271

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

""Serial entrepreneur" implies that starting startups is something people do casually, as a hobby. Starting a startup is not merely another project; it's more like having a second child. You wouldn't call someone who had two kids a serial parent." - Llama trained on Paul Graham

13

9

263

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

9 months

Medical intake form. Never watching TV is Not Allowed

15

9

269

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

9 months

This Llama fine-tuning repo was #1 on Hacker News yesterday. They claim an astounding 30x improvement in training time, but I'm pretty sure most of that is from sandbagging their benchmarks. THREAD:

GitHub - unslothai/unsloth: Finetune Llama 3.1, Mistral, Phi & Gemma LLMs 2-5x faster with 80% less...

Finetune Llama 3.1, Mistral, Phi & Gemma LLMs 2-5x faster with 80% less memory - unslothai/unsloth

github.com

4

24

267

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

8 months

It's been a good century for vaccines

7

65

268

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

11 months

There are many many points of disagreement, but anyone who says "lol people who *really* understand AI know humanity isn't in danger" shouldn't be taken seriously

16

15

257

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Me before reading: "this study, like ~every study, will detect no effect on all-cause mortality because that needs a crazy big sample size" After reading: "this study, like ~every study, detected no effect on all-cause mortality because that needs a crazy big sample size"

Robin Hanson

@robinhanson

1 year

"leaders of the most rigorous study of colonoscopy to date, NordICC, reported finding no evidence that colonoscopy saves lives."

15

108

13

9

251

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

I'm curious why someone who, as editor of Jared Kushner's tabloid paper, sent an undercover reporter to my 21st birthday party in my private apartment, then outed me as transgender on the front page for no particular reason, is considered qualified to teach journalism ethics.

Elizabeth Spiers

@espiers

3 years

@ajaxsinger I am required to make sure my students understand journalistic ethics, not just in the context of my class but in general. Journo ethics are classes by themselves.

3

0

11

13

241

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I'm all for humor, but dude, this is Seriously Not Funny. If the commander of USSTRATCOM tweeted about incoming missiles as a "joke", they'd be fired if not sent to jail.

Yam Peleg

@Yampeleg

1 year

@sama OK sama was trolling us. 😅

34

15

446

34

14

234

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Trying to fix global warming with voluntary poverty is not going to work, for many many reasons. There have always been those who see honor in poverty, like Christian monks, but it's never going to be a large majority of the world.

21

11

229

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

This should almost certainly be higher. Lots of hospital patients are very old, terminally ill, can't hold a coherent thought or get out of bed, are in extreme pain, and are kept alive temporarily by futile treatments. I don't want to die that way.

Who By Very Slow Decay

[Trigger warning: Death, pain, suffering, sadness] I. Some people, having completed the traditional forms of empty speculation – “What do you want to be when you grow up?”, “…

slatestarcodex.com

Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼

@Noahpinion

1 year

One out of every 30 deaths in Canada, and one out of every 22 deaths in the Netherlands, is a medically assisted suicide.

190

371

2K

23

12

231

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

It's funny how many people leap from "I don't see a way to stop X" to "X is good actually". I don't know how to stop hurricanes, but they are still bad!

19

18

231

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

This is silly. Half of the Chinese software industry only exists because it's mostly illegal to use Google, Facebook and other non-Chinese apps there. There's a reason why people in Brazil, India, Italy, Spain, etc. all use Google and not Baidu.

Samo Burja

@SamoBurja

1 year

Silicon Valley's remaining moat is lobbying Washington to ban alternative and even superior software products from China.

7

6

92

7

8

227

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I don't think "cis" vs "trans" is really a binary. Rather, people have a bell curve of gender preferences of different strengths, and if transitioning gets easier then people with weaker preferences will rationally choose to do it

47

14

227

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

A three-year study where one group magically had zero car crashes would need a sample size of 5,000,000 to detect a difference in all-cause mortality! It's really hard! (80% chance of p < 0.05)

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Me before reading: "this study, like ~every study, will detect no effect on all-cause mortality because that needs a crazy big sample size" After reading: "this study, like ~every study, detected no effect on all-cause mortality because that needs a crazy big sample size"

13

9

251

6

23

222

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

25 years ago, they invented a better version of Advil, which targets the same receptor but with fewer side effects. It still requires a prescription for basically no reason.

Celecoxib - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

8

16

222

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Scott Aaronson will be going on leave from teaching, and joining OpenAI to work on AI alignment!

OpenAI!

I have some exciting news (for me, anyway). Starting next week, I’ll be going on leave from UT Austin for one year, to work at OpenAI. They’re the creators of the astonishing GPT-3 and …

scottaaronson.blog

4

19

224

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

7 months

The "Great Replacement" already happened over a century ago. Any chance for America to be a "pure" nation - a single population with a common origin, and their biological descendants - was gone by, like, 1850

16

38

221

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Next month, I'll be starting as a senior data scientist with David Shor's group Blue Rose Research, using machine learning to help Democrats win elections. I'll also be moving back to the East Coast. Very excited to get started 😁

16

1

219

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

The average wage in Manhattan is ~$200,000 a year. ~1/6th of workers in Manhattan are in finance, where the average wage is ~$630,000 a year. The average wage in other NYC boroughs is around $60,000, for the US as a whole $70,000.

9

14

217

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

"Other people are so lucky. They all have problems I know how to solve. I only have problems that I don't know how to solve." - me to myself, some years ago

5

21

216

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Reminder that: 1) ~12 American kids a day die in car crashes 2) Their lives are not worth less because people think they don't deserve a headline on national TV 3) Saving some of them would be much easier than trying to repeal the 2nd Amendment 4) ~95% of gun deaths are handguns

12

9

201

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

10 months

There definitely isn't. OpenAI has zero obligation to make a profit or maximize shareholder value. They made this very clear!

Jude Gomila

@judegomila

10 months

If there is a mass customer leaving event from openai due to this unexpected removal of sam. Is there legal basis for shareholders to remove the current board and bring back Sam, Greg. I would think this board move is destroying future and current shareholder value.

2

1

9

6

8

202

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

"I will never tire of reminding people that snake oil is closely related to fish oil - now recommended for cardiovascular problems, joint pain, mental health issues etc - and it probably worked just as well. It got a bad reputation because people started selling fake snake oil...

8

17

199

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

WWI and WWII were very, very bad. This is Germany's population by age and gender in 1946

10

6

194

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

9 months

A world where robots take all the jobs is a world where robots can build your house and your car for next to nothing. Imagining robots taking all the jobs, but the world as a whole being no richer than it is now, is incoherent

27

8

185

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

8 months

A spectacular example of motivated reasoning is people who hear about IQ, and then say "this proves we must restrict immigration!", not "this proves we must make a new visa category for the ~500 million people with IQs above 120!"

15

2

194

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Reminder: It is legal to literally hire professional kidnappers to kidnap your own children, it's called "gooning" "The practice is regulated in the U.S. state of Oregon, where restraints, hoods, and blindfolds are disallowed."

Gooning - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

14

8

176

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

11 months

This is a Dell Dimension 8400. It was built nineteen years ago. It has one (1) CPU core. Can it solve ImageNet? We'll find out....

10

6

184

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

What OpenAI says: "... we are becoming increasingly cautious with the creation and deployment of our models ... a slower takeoff is easier to make safe, and coordination among AGI efforts to slow down at critical junctures will likely be important" What they do: LOOOOOL 🚀🚀🚀

Mark Kretschmann

@mark_k

1 year

BREAKING: . @Microsoft CTO announces: GPT-4 is coming next week! The model will be multimodal, including video features. #AI #ChatGPT #Bing

63

514

2K

7

10

182

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

10 months

If panic is almost never helpful, why do humans have a panic emotion? What purpose did it serve in the ancestral environment?

88

2

184

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

XKCD on AI risk

6

29

181

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

This is brilliant research into finding "anomalous tokens" in GPT, which are "unspeakable" (GPT can't repeat them back to you). It reads like an SCP Foundation entry

6

30

180

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

For anyone interested in this, check out this much more detailed blog post by my friend Matt Bell!

The nuclear family isn't working, what can we do instead?

The nuclear family was only broadly achievable for a brief period of time in American history, and the continued pursuit of it is causing a range of societal problems.

www.mattbell.us

6

31

174

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

8 months

"We must abandon all hope for a better yesterday." - Anna Salamon

7

17

174

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

@nickcammarata This has *not* been my experience. I've met a few people like this (arguably Cartesian dualism is the most common philosophical position worldwide), but they didn't have detailed knowledge of AI or neuroscience.

4

0

179

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Written by Paul Graham in 2009. I do wonder how much of this was accurate skills assessment, how much was dumb luck, and how much was self-fulfilling prophecy via Altman being put in charge of Y Combinator

9

6

170

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

8 months

This is a strawman. No one thinks intelligence is "unbounded", just that the bound is extremely high, like how modern civilization is compared to cavemen or chimps.

Harmless supernova fallacy

False dichotomies and continuum fallacies which can be used to argue that anything, including a supernova, must be harmless.

arbital.com

François Chollet

@fchollet

8 months

Folks think of intelligence as a unbounded scalar quantity. They may say, "AGI will have an IQ of 10,000, then 100,000, etc" -- and because a higher number would confer you with higher power over the world, "AGI" would have unlimited power. Hence the magical feats. None of this

13

11

170

18

6

177

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

@ptrschmdtnlsn Yeah the article is being very silly, obviously big LLMs don't do this

3

0

170

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

(Sulla was the first Roman general who marched on Rome. He staged a military coup, butchered six thousand political opponents, had himself made dictator, and forced reactionary constitutional changes, repealed less than ten years later.)

Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?

This week, we’re taking a break from the modern world to tackle the ‘runner up’ question from the first ACOUP Senate poll: How did the Roman dictatorship work and was it effective…

acoup.blog

Elon Musk

@elonmusk

1 year

@DavidSacks Perhaps we just need a modern day Sulla

843

443

4K

8

35

167

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

2 years

Eventually AI will get good enough to do everything a human programmer can do.... but by that point, we'll have bigger problems!

12

0

170

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

Uhhhh..... (This is anonymous and could be a troll! But it doesn't obviously contradict other facts I know)

17

10

167

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

In a world with eight billion people, virtually anything will happen somewhere. What you see in the press isn't representative

16

26

166

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

11 months

Wise words from Scott Aaronson

6

22

170

Alyssa Vance

@alyssamvance

1 year

I think history shows that four-dimensional-chess reasoning, of the kind "smart person X would never do dumb thing Y, so there must be an elaborate hidden plan", usually falls to the Occam's Razor of smart people just doing lots of dumb things

Autism Capital 🧩

@AutismCapital

1 year

The Caroline Diaries The entire Caroline Ellison diary news stinks like raw fish. Firstly, Sam *could* be trying to "discredit a witness" as the media is attempting to frame, but Sam could also be helping frame a narrative to reduce Caroline's exposure. The Caroline Diaries

13

15

168

5

7

169