Hey! Just asking you because I’m not sure where else to direct this energy at the moment.

I spent a while trying to understand the argument this paper was making, and for the most part I think I’ve got it. But there’s a kind of obvious, knee-jerk rebuttal to throw at it, seen elsewhere under this post, even:

If producing an AGI is intractable, why does the human meat-brain exist?

Evolution “may be thought of” as a process that samples a distribution of situation-behaviors, though that distribution is entirely abstract. And the decision process for whether the “AI” it produces matches this distribution of successful behaviors is yada yada darwinism. The answer we care about, because this is the inspiration I imagine AI engineers took from evolution in the first place, is whether evolution can (not inevitably, just can) produce an AGI (us) in reasonable time (it did).

The question is, where does this line of thinking fail?

Going by the proof, it should either be:

• That evolution is an intractable method. 60 million years is a long time, but it still feels quite short for this answer.
• Something about it doesn’t fit within this computational paradigm. That is, I’m stretching the definition.
• The language “no better than chance” for option 2 is actually more significant than I’m thinking. Evolution is all chance. But is our existence really just extreme luck? I know that it is, but this answer is really unsatisfying.

I’m not sure how to formalize any of this, though.

The thought that we could “encode all of biological evolution into a program of at most size K” did made me laugh.

but there’s no reason to think we can’t achieve it

They provide a reason.

Just because you create a model and prove something in it, doesn’t mean it has any relationship to the real world.

What are we science deniers now?

So, if just stop oil were peeing on people like… you are, I guess, you would be happy with that?

I know it feels really good to be angry and indignant, but I mean it, what have you done? Have you organized anything? Have you inspired people to take action?

You don’t have to agree with Just Stop. But the topic of conversation has come up. We’re talking about it. What will you do to save humanity from the sheer cliff it’s about to drive over?

I’m afraid “doing nothing” isn’t going to cut it here, man.

That’s great, man. Maybe they’ll write that on your underwater tombstone.

What did it raise awareness for? Nothing’s happened.

Human history and culture are leverage. The fact that people care about them is why they’re valuable.

Take a sledgehammer to an oil exec’s front door

Yeah, go for it. I support you.

it must be action that causes something useful to the cause,

Public attention can spur recruitment waves for the targets you really care about. If any campaign is to be effective, you need people to know who you are.

I’m taking it seriously. Are you not taking it seriously?

are taking publicity away

And this is being published where?
Here’s my challenge to you: every time you see Just Stop Oil pop up, post these articles. Get people excited about actually doing something.

They give the opportunity for climate change deniers to lump all climate change activists together with these idiots

Deniers are too far gone. You spray paint stone henge, they complain about the lichen. You splash color on a ferrari dealership, they complain about the small business owners. You bomb an oil rig, they say that violence never solves anything. They’re already not on our side.

Climate activists have chained themselves to trees, to construction equipment, to the property of the companies they protest. THAT is serious action.

You know we need more people doing stuff like this, right?

Not “climate activists.”
You.

Have you been inspired to chain yourself to oil infrastructure? To accomplish something real?

And did you make the news?

Oil companies are manipulating these people into being against climate change?

You’re welcome to work on that plan.

Not enough people are AWARE that it’s a THING.

I mean, considering how little has happened?
Don’t we need radicals at this point?

Isn’t it said that violence is the language of the unheard?

instead of education, politics, green energy investment, decentralization of financial power, etc etc etc.

When did An Inconvenient Truth come out again? Like, can I get a temperature check on the polite and respectful progress we’ve made since then?

No bad publicity.

This comment reminds me of when Bitcoin became the world’s dominant currency.

Do you mean the voice of Mario…?

I do not want an AI voice to puppet his corpse for the next 150 years.

I also noticed that they were talking about sending arguments to a custom function? That’s like a day-one lesson if you already program. But this was something they couldn’t find in regular search?

Maybe I misunderstood something.

All right, I guess I’m here to collect then. We doin’ paypal or what?

I was equivocating singular words and entire sentences on purpose.

If you can recombine sentences in interesting ways, into paragraphs that are your own ideas, that isn’t plagiarism. Why would “people can’t construct unique sentences either” be a rebuttal if that’s not what plagiarsm is?

Instead it studies the prior work of humans, finds patterns and combines these in unique and novel ways.

You’re anthropomorphising.

LLMs are little clink-clink machines that produce the most typical output. That’s how they’re trained. Ten thousand inputs say this image is of a streetlight? That’s how it knows.

The fact an LLM knows what a Lord of Rings is at all means that Tolkien’s words, the images, the sounds, are all encoded in its weights somewhere. You can’t see them, it’s a black box, but they live there.

Could you say the same of the human brain? Sure. I know what a neuron is.

But, LLMs are not people.

All of that is besides the point, though. I was just floored by how cynical you could be about your own supposed craft.

A photograph of, say, a pretty flower is fantastic. As an enjoyer of art myself, I love it when people communicate things. People can share in the beauty that you saw. They can talk about it. Talk about how the colors and the framing make them feel. But if you’re view is that you’re not actually adding anything, you’re just doing more of what already exists, I really don’t know why you bother.

Nobody has seen every photo in the world.

Okay, assume someone has. Is your art meaningless, then? All of photography is just spectacle, and all the spectacles have been seen?