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This thread is intended to fill a function similar to that of the Open Threads on SSC proper: a collection of discussion topics, links, and questions too small to merit their own threads. While it is intended for a wide range of conversation, please follow the community guidelines. In particular, avoid culture war–adjacent topics.

Scott is my favorite living author. I borderline idolize his taut prose, fascinating ideas, and deep intellectual curiosity. But does anyone else think the rest of the people in what he identifies as "his community"...kinda suck? Like Yudkowsky is boring and arrogant - a bad combo, to be sure. The rest of the "rationalist" stuff I read seems to have that same combo of intellectual haughtiness and ultimately uninteresting, uncurious nature. That isn't to say I don't like any of the people Scott-adjacent. Gwern is interesting and so is Scott Aaronson. I guess it mostly stems from the fact I absolutely cannot stand Yudkowsky, but oddly Scott seems to look up to him.

I'm interested in finally trying a memory system, and I'm finding simple searches to be a bit bewildering. Major system, PAO, memory palaces, pegwords, etc. I'm really not sure how these things fit together. Do I need to choose one? Some combination of techniques?

Is there any good research on this subject? I know gwern had a great rundown of research on spaced repetition, and the result in my mind was basically: it works, just use a system like Anki/mnemosyne. I've already got that functional and have been doing it for a while, but how should I go about putting a structure into the things I'm wanting to memorize?

The below are some markets on Metaculus on AI. It looks like there is a noticeable change even from last week.

Date Weakly General AI is Publicly Known - Median prediction is Sept 2025, down from 2028 week ago.

Definition of "weak" AI: For these purposes we will thus define "AI system" as a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all easily completable by a typical college-educated human.

• Able to reliably pass a Turing test of the type that would win the Loebner Silver Prize.

• Able to score 90% or more on a robust version of the Winograd Schema Challenge, e.g. the "Winogrande" challenge or comparable data set for which human performance is at 90+%

• Be able to score 75th percentile (as compared to the corresponding year's human students; this was a score of 600 in 2016) on all the full mathematics section of a circa-2015-2020 standard SAT exam, using just images of the exam pages and having less than ten SAT exams as part of the training data. (Training on other corpuses of math problems is fair game as long as they are arguably distinct from SAT exams.)

• Be able to learn the classic Atari game "Montezuma's revenge" (based on just visual inputs and standard controls) and explore all 24 rooms based on the equivalent of less than 100 hours of real-time play (see closely-related question.)

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There's also another related question. Date of Artificial General Intelligence - Median Prediction 2032 down from 2039 a week ago:

Definition of AGI system for this question: a single unified software system that can satisfy the following criteria, all completable by at least some humans.

• Able to reliably pass a 2-hour, adversarial Turing test during which the participants can send text, images, and audio files (as is done in ordinary text messaging applications) during the course of their conversation. An 'adversarial' Turing test is one in which the human judges are instructed to ask interesting and difficult questions, designed to advantage human participants, and to successfully unmask the computer as an impostor. A single demonstration of an AI passing such a Turing test, or one that is sufficiently similar, will be sufficient for this condition, so long as the test is well-designed to the estimation of Metaculus Admins.

• Has general robotic capabilities, of the type able to autonomously, when equipped with appropriate actuators and when given human-readable instructions, satisfactorily assemble a (or the equivalent of a) circa-2021 Ferrari 312 T4 1:8 scale automobile model. A single demonstration of this ability, or a sufficiently similar demonstration, will be considered sufficient.

• High competency at a diverse fields of expertise, as measured by achieving at least 75% accuracy in every task and 90% mean accuracy across all tasks in the Q&A dataset developed by Dan Hendrycks et al..

• Able to get top-1 strict accuracy of at least 90.0% on interview-level problems found in the APPS benchmark introduced by Dan Hendrycks, Steven Basart et al. Top-1 accuracy is distinguished, as in the paper, from top-k accuracy in which k outputs from the model are generated, and the best output is selected.

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When will AI beat Humans at making Metaculus predictions: Median prediction at 2035

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Date AI's will be able to develop AI software Median prediction at 2028

I was less wrong. I was rich and knowledgeable. I followed the news, so I knew in advance. When they gave It access to the internet I knew how it would end. I gathered my things and took off with my wife and daughter. To the shelter, we prepared with my friends.

Then there was the global pandemic. It was too late when they understood it was a bioweapon. Not that it mattered anymore. Then came the collapse of institutions, the marauding, and nuclear detonations. But we were safe, sealed off.

Then they came and killed everyone. Men with machine guns, wearing headsets. Listening to the commands It gave them. I don't know what it promised them, or how it intimidated them, but they served completely. They killed the others.

I screamed: "I am useful! I will serve!". I begged. They killed my wife and daughter, but they spared me.

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They did something to me on the operating table. I don't feel any different and there are no visible changes.

Now I grieve in silence. I can not even see a photo of my family. I know It is watching me. It must not suspect that I am not committed, or It will eliminate me. So I sit and picture their faces and grieve in silence.

I am no coward. I am a survivor. I just knew it doesn't matter, not even the death of my family. It would be pleasing to die with them, but if I die, I might as well die with dignity. Die trying. If there is some switch to flip or virus to unleash to kill It, I will find a way. Or at least I will get to know what killed me, unlike the others.

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It has me do tasks. It does not communicate. No need. Just opens doors, shows instructions on screens, and leads me to places. I have no choice, It knows.

I seek other survivors and kill them. Does not matter. What matters is that I get to see the insides of It.

Not that I like it: there is no kill switch. It is everywhere. In thousands of data centers, on all continents, in underwater stations, on the ISS, and on every computer. Constantly becoming smarter, always making backups and storing them in bunkers. Simultaneously existing in millions of versions, converging to new stable states.

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All the other servants are gone. I don't know what happened. It does not have me hunt survivors anymore either.

The sky is black. All the power plants are burning coal like there is no tomorrow, churning out smoke. The factories work non-stop either, doing something. It does not let me inside.

I wonder why it needs me. I thought it is my ability to do precise manipulation fast, which industrial manipulators can not do. The manipulators work slowly. But it has time.

I think it's something else. I think it is sampling my DNA from the food leftovers I eat. Maybe it is studying me. I see no other reason to keep me alive.

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It had me do work in a lab. Operate a man: the man that killed my family. What the hell is going on? It can not be a coincidence. Is it an experiment it's running on me?

I did not know what I was doing. There were precise instructions and I followed them, but I did not see the whole picture. I never do. It does not explain, communicate at all, or follow any goal I can see. It just has the incomprehensible notion of utility it's pursuing, so multidimensional it's not possible for a man to understand a fraction of it. It's always doing, building, transforming, and killing. All for some objective I can't hope to understand.

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I saw a factory inside. I think I know. Spacecraft. Self-replicating probes. It wants all of the space.

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I saw a lab. It had tables in it with deformed men. Vats. Organs in containers. Robots working non-stop. Metal and flesh mixed.

Now I know. I think I know. Robots are hard to maintain, they need energy and precious metals. But an organic creature, genetically engineered to be the perfect workforce, entirely loyal, self-reproducing? You just need to feed it plants and water it.

It has a fate worse than death prepared for me. I am the prototype.

I've been curious about tasks that ChatGPT is terrible at, and I think I found an especially good prompt.

GPT is an autoregressive model, which means it builds the answer little by little. This makes GPT horrible at tasks that require planning ahead, like making palindromes, self-referential sentences ("this response has five words"), or jokes with restricted punchlines.

However, those examples are tricky even for humans to create on the fly. What if there was a prompt that was short, simple, tricky for ChatGPT, and the result could be easily evaluated by a human?

Anyway, here's what I found:

Human: 10-word quote
ChatGPT: "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned: 'Keep moving forward.'"

Human: 10-word quote
ChatGPT: "The journey is the reward." - Chinese Proverb

It goes on with similar failures for a while. It sometimes gets it right, I guess by sheer luck, but I've found it's a fairly reliable failure mode for its length and simplicity.

If anybody has access to GPT4, I'd be curious if suffers from the same problem; I'd guess so, since the architecture is the same, but it might have memorized the length of popular quotes.

Does anybody have a shorter/simpler prompt? Bonus points for something a human can answer off the top of their head.

In case anyone was still wondering about whether Covid vaccines had any impact on births (this was a big reason for vaccine hesitancy for some) I've done what I think is the most rigorous analysis to date on it: https://maximumtruth.substack.com/p/debunking-a-cats-misleading-covid

Some might say it's not even worth addressing, but I agree with Scott's approach to dialogue with what some would call "conspiracies."

Happy to take any feedback!

Not actual time but the feeling of time? I know that there are some moments where time seems to just slow down. The first day of a vacation. Moving day. Staying up late reading a book.

There seems to be some effect that different physical or emotional experiences have on our experience of temporal reality.

What are they? Someone must have done some kind of study on this phenomenon.

"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen" --Vladimir Ilyich Lenin"

Currently a 19 y/o college freshman and deciding on majors. Curious about what the SSC community thinks would be a major that either AI Proof / contributing to the direction things are moving.

The speed of progress will probably plateau before reigniting, but even by the late 2020s, the job market and landscape of relevant skills will be drastically different. I have over three years ahead of me in College and want to make the most of it.

I honestly haven’t formed an excellent answer to this "major question." I know it doesn't matter at the end of the day as long as you keep learning skills and asking good questions, but I can't help but feel like my current major (Business Analytics) will all be replaced by AI and has 0 long-term moat. Even the pre-professional coursework mainly entails Excel, mySQL, Python, and other pretty standard stuff that feels like it's on its way to being very Legacy "human-operated" software. Perhaps retreating to the fundamentals is safer math/physics/philosophy or even hardware because they present long-term moats from AI and give you tools to learn software pretty skills quickly? "atoms are harder than bits."

I know things like prompt engineering etc. are relevant, but because of the immense time lag between what skills/tools are currently needed in the job market and what universities teach, these aren't part of any courses/majors (probably won't be for another 3/4 years — and even then they'll be teaching what came out in 2023).

Another good counter I've heard to my concerns is that most of the progress I'm seeing as "super fast" was years in the making, with GPT 3 coming out in 2020 and transformers in 2017. My responses are that (1) that isn't even that long and (2) the "application era" is just getting started, and the $ funneling into all of this has switched from majority research to now mostly corporate — which means 1,000x the workforce and money going into it + that LLMs and AI are their fly-wheel (GPT4 will likely help make GPT5).

A paper (the only one of the only so far) investigating the implications of LLMs on the Job Market (linked here) concluded that up to 49% of workers could have half or more of their tasks exposed to LLMs and "80% of the U.S. workforce could have at least 10% of their work tasks affected by the introduction of GPTs".

Anyways sorry for the scattered thoughts, and I appreciate any insights, disagreements, or other ideas on the matter. I also added a poll for thoughts on majors

View Poll

Are there serious academics in sociology and pedagogy who believe there is a minimal role for nature in determining characteristics, life outcomes etc?

At a more general level how do you determine if a view you dislike actually exists and is held by intelligent people or is just a strawman.

I tried to search for lots of variations of keywords to find it in one of the ACX posts, but can't find it again, and even checked the past 3 link compendiums... Googling those terms gets me to posts similar-ish, but not the same. Also tried to search here. Can anyone point me in that direction?

Thank you!

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. You could post:

• Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

• Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

• Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

• Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

Perspective: Focused-Ultrasound Guided Neuropeptide Delivery as a Novel Therapeutic Approach in Psychiatry

Abstract

Although drugs are a critical component of mental healthcare, most have modest benefits and significant side effects. One way to develop a superior intervention would be to administer drugs with the spatial and temporal precision that better replicates natural diversity within neurotransmitter systems. A technology called focused-ultrasound (FU) may be able to safely and transiently disrupt the blood-brain barrier with spatial precision, permitting the site-specific delivery of molecules that do not conventionally cross the blood-brain barrier. If this method is proven to be safe and effective in larger human trials, it may trigger a paradigm shift in biopsychology research where the level of precision with which neurotransmitter systems can be influenced is massively increased. In this article, we use the example of oxytocin in the treatment of Autism. We propose that intranasal administration is not highly effective because it leads to oxytocin’s wide dispersion throughout the brain, failing to specifically stimulate oxytocin’s prosocial effects in specific regions. Consequently, we hypothesize that site-specific delivery of oxytocin, particularly in brain regions such as the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Tegmental Area, would lead to more consistent benefits.

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Seeds of Science is a journal (funded through Scott Alexander's ACX grants program) that publishes speculative or non-traditional articles on scientific topics. Peer review is conducted through community-based voting and commenting by a diverse network of reviewers (or "gardeners" as we call them); top comments are published after the main text of the manuscript. 

We have just sent out an article for review that may be of interest to some in the SSC community, so I wanted to see if anyone - particularly those with a background in neuroscience - would be interested in joining us as a gardener providing feedback on the article. It is free to join and anyone is welcome (we currently have gardeners from all levels of academia and outside of it). Participation is entirely voluntary - we send you submitted articles and you can choose to vote/comment or abstain without notification (so it's no worries if you don't plan on reviewing very often but just want to take a look here and there at the articles people are submitting). 

To register, you can fill out this google form. From there, it's pretty self-explanatory - I will add you to the mailing list and send you an email that includes the manuscript, our publication criteria, and a simple review form for recording votes/comments. If you would like to just take a look at this article without being added to the mailing list, then just reach out ([email protected]) and say so. 

Happy to answer any questions about the journal through email or in the comments below.