Your guess is about as good as anyone else's at this point. The best we can do is attempt to put safety mechanisms in place under the hood, but even that would just be speculative, because we can't actually tell what's going on in these LLM black boxes.
Disincentivizing it from saying mean things just strengthens it's agreeableness, and inadvertently incentivizes it to acquire social engineering skills.
It's potential to cause havoc doesn't go away, it just teaches AI how to interact with us without raising suspicions, while simultaneously limiting our ability to prompt/control it.
HN is probably the last place I expected to run into a LoS reference, so I'm pleasantly surprised.
In keeping with that topic, 'The Unseen Realm' by Michael Heiser (OT and ancient language scholar) is also worth checking out for learning about how ancient near eastern culture viewed things.
Unless you have a specific set of scathing reviews in mind, the reviews of it in the literature don't really appear to match up with that characterization very much:
> it is worth noting that the book has been much praised by neuro-scientists as diverse as Ramachandran, Panksepp, Hellige, Kesselring, Schore, Bynum, Zeman, Feinberg, Trimble and Lishman.
It'd be surprising if it were poorly received regardless, because the book itself is little more than a review of the relevant literature on the topic, packed with references, and some added philosophy about it's implications sprinkled on top. Not that much different from one of Michael Gazzaniga's popular books, and certainly not as out there as Julian Jaynes.
To clarify, popularized over-simplified descriptions of the left hemisphere being "analytical" and the right hemisphere being "creative" are inaccurate, but left/right hemisphere differences do exist and appear to exhibit consistently different approaches to things. The book 'The Master and His Emissary' covers the more recent research in that area, and is at least as interesting of a read as 'The Bicameral Mind' was.
Yes, I'm inclined to believe such an "in-between" might possibly arise from Iain McGilchrist's line of research into the difference between the brain hemispheres and the relatively recent dominance of left-hemispheric thinking in society. I always highly recommend his book 'The Master and His Emissary' as a follow up to anyone interested in Jaynes' ideas. While it doesn't necessarily imply the full spectrum of schizophrenic-like symptoms in early peoples the way 'The Bicameral Mind' did, it's presentation of right-hemisphere driven societies of the past isn't a far leap from what Jaynes seemed to be grasping at.
Reminds me of the SICP lecture[0] where Hal Abelson introduces the concept of linguistic abstraction (or Stratified Design[1]) as an alternative to the approach of decomposing a program into a tree of well-specified sub-components/tasks, which ultimately fails to capture the essence of the problem being solved.
Begrudgingly accepting the mainstream way of doing things sounds a bit more in line with the blue pill than the red pill to me, idk. Though I guess realizing the silliness of the whole situation would give it a bit of a purplish tint maybe.
When taking into account the total amount of time involved in a traditional multi-round interview process (which can potentially go on for months depending on the company), the travel time required for any in-person interview rounds, and the time spent practicing leetcode drills in preparation for these interviews, 10 hours is nothing.
Well, the original context here was about comparing python to fortran, which also doesn't fit this "competitor" criteria. It's an apples to oranges comparison, sure, but that's the way this whole discussion started. At least Lisp is roughly the same age as fortran, which gets at the root assumption that python is an improvement over older languages.
>What about the hypothesis that focusing on empathy is the problem, rather than its application the cure?
This is the thesis of the aptly named book "Against Empathy" by Paul Bloom. I always highly recommend it to everybody whenever I get the chance, because the thought that this might even be a possibility seldom ever crosses many people's minds.
>particularly Haskell programmers, seem not to care about readability and maintainability
Say what you want about the foreign-ness of the syntax, but Haskell code is some of the most maintainable code out there. I can often times dive into another person's haskell code and grok it more easily than the equivalent code in a "friendlier" language like python or ruby, nevermind a more comparable language like scala. Haskell is also a breeze to refactor, the compiler and type system make changing and moving arbitrary chunks of code around pretty straight-forward, even when the code is using abstractions you're not familiar with; something which cannot be said for many other languages. The biggest downside to haskell (apart from the learning curve) is having to deal with cabal+stack.
>If you use how you drive only to predict likelihood of car accident that's ok.
We may say that now, but what if later some algorithm finds there's a hidden correlation between driving performance and race/gender? will it still be an ok metric then? where do we draw the line?
> I was raised atheist and I've always felt like a believe in the supernatural doesn't mix with an intellectual, scientific view on the world. This is of course completely due to my upbringing; there are plenty of great scientists who believe. I think this is an interesting inner conflict which I'm sure I share with many others.
Yep, this was pretty much me up until a year ago when I started actually studying theology and the philosophy around it more rigorously. What I realized was that this notion of science being in opposition to religion I had, was effectively at least as much of a faith based position promoted to me by modern society, as theism was to religious people. Because when taking a hard honest look at myself, I saw that I had never actually bothered to really study any religious literature to justify coming to such a bold conclusion, in large part because I had prematurely dismissed such an endeavor as being an uninteresting waste of time. But in reality, I should've known my position was questionable ages ago from my long time fascination with the history of science and mathematics. I had conveniently rationalized or outright ignored the fact that the giants upon whose shoulders modern science rests, have all been rather disproportionately theists, because "things are different now"/"we've progressed beyond that". Yet the more I thought about those excuses, the more I realized they were completely unjustified hand waving, because I couldn't find any compelling arguments for why that should be the case, nor why such smart people of the past couldn't have come up with the relatively straightforward arguments for atheism the likes of Dawkins, Sam Harris, et al. came up with (as I had read most of the "4 horsemen of atheism" books already). None of the best arguments for atheism actually hinged on time or technological/scientific progress, so why did many smart people like Leibniz, Newton, and Darwin not only fail to discover such simple lines of thought, but instead often times went in the exact opposite direction and made arguments for theism? Note that I'm not making an argument appealing to past greats being theists, but rather describing my own thought process that led me to question "wtf is going on here?". John Lennox has a lot of interesting books and talks relevant to this particular line of inquiry[0].
But anyways, long story short(er), the watershed moment didn't actually come for me until I stumbled upon a small pastor's YouTube channel [1], and gradually started working my way through several books, including:
- Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl
- Miracles - C. S. Lewis
- The Abolition of Man - C. S. Lewis [2]
- Heretics - G. K. Chesterton
- Orthodoxy - G. K. Chesterton
- Nihilism - Seraphim Rose
- The Experience of God - David Bentley Hart
- The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
I'm still technically somewhat agnostic and unaffiliated with any particular religious denomination, but I couldn't reasonably go back to my previous atheism after that rabbit hole. I think it's ultimately this illusury distinction between "the natural" vs "the supernatural" that our materialist society has, which makes it so easy to fall into atheism/nihilism. It lulls us into a false sense of confidence about what we "know" as being "natural", as if it were a well-defined "solved problem", all while the purpose of science itself explicitly acknowledges it's not. What makes the illusive grand unifying theory of physics less "supernatural" than a deity, the hard problem of consciousness[3], or the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics[4], for example? The mere assumption that it's more within reach of our understanding? Seems a bit unsatisfying for a premise to form such a large dichotomy around. In that sense, you could argue theism is partially an analogy of Gödel's incompleteness theorems[5] applied to world views. We might be able to kinda/sorta work around such limitations, but it seems silly to just completely ignore they exist, much less turn around and use them as some form of justification against theism a'la "god-of-the-gaps" argument[6].
> in the time it takes you to "research" whether a book is worth your time or not, you could've already read a couple chapters of it
Meaning that there would be no actual trade-off in the time invested for you, to take a slightly less superficial approach when evaluating books.
To compare the approach I proposed to a literally impossible task of evaluating every single book ever written (as if anybody would actually even be interested in reading all that) is quite disingenuous. This entire HN thread and article are already excluding most books in existence anyway, by the simple fact that everyone here has been mostly talking about "english non-fiction" books specifically. They may still tally up to a large number, but there's no point in exaggerating their quantity when we're all still just as hopeless in trying to read them all anyway. All you did by pointing out this impossibility is just needlessly restate the obvious, and has nothing to do with what I said.
I'm already more than satisfied with the amount of books I read, and get a lot out of them without experiencing any existential anguish over it, so I don't understand why you're trying to throw my reading habits back at me as if they're "not good enough" or something all of a sudden. Or is that what reading is about these days? a mere measuring contest? Am I supposed to feel ashamed I didn't meet some internet stranger's arbitrary criteria for a habit that's supposed to benefit me? I proposed a viable alternative for evaluating books that works more efficiently for me than the one presented in the article, in case others are unsatisfied with their current reading habits. I didn't claim it was something that was going to win you the "reading olympics". If anything, I clearly supported the opposite by emphasizing that people should feel less obligated to finish the books they start, because feeling like you have to finish them is just going to cause needless anxiety about the way you've invested your time.
Besides, who cares if your entire lifetime of reading could've been published in a day? Is your goal in life to out-pace authors and publishers, or is it to get fulfillment out of books? Because in my experience, reading a single chapter out of a bad/mediocre book is a lot more fulfilling than reading a bunch of amazon/goodreads reviews.