It's not that their argument is wrong or not worth discussing, it's that it is utterly irrelevant when the question at stake is whether the math is valid and useful or not. It's effectively whataboutism.
I don't even understand what your example blog post is arguing. That counting sheep makes shepherding easier hardly seems like a revolutionary insight.
That being said, I don't think that a lot of the people who are recently opposed to rationalism are doing honest philosophy either. Ten years ago, the trend online was to become a rationalist; these days, the trend online seems to be to accuse rationalists of being sex cult satanists that are not equipped with the magical power of "common sense". Out of these two options, I much prefer the rationalists. For while they may have a lacking understanding of some of the history of philosophy, their contrahents don't even pretend to have an understanding of the world that is grounded in anything but irrational fear and hatred.
The sheep bit is the whole rationalist glorification of "Bayesian thinking". Stones being beliefs and sheep the reality you observe and the process Bayesian thinking.
Scott Alexanders's blog description for example: P(A|B) = [P(A)*P(B|A)]/P(B), all the rest is commentary.
That seems like a false dichotomy. I don't think either describes the median online opinion. Loud reactionary voices tend to be confident and extreme and bad times promote reactionary views.
The divination sticks passage is quite ironic here. Markos' belief is explained through punishment for out-think, but rationalist communities aren't exempt from social conditioning either. Repeated exposure makes certain reasoning feel natural, while people who dislike it may leave. That's part of what I'm criticising, rather than choosing an opposing internet camp.
It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research (https://www.lesswrong.com/users/beth-barneshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/METR)
Every group has people susceptible to the same social pressures and of varying intelligence, and to claim yours is better at being less wrong, is a bit dangerous.
> It could be concerning that the same rationalist thinking might carry into safety research
Why? "Bayesian thinking" is really just empirical observation and statistics, which is the foundation of all modern research, security or otherwise.
Your comment does nothing but create a vague sense of unease (a hidden cabal of rationalists! they're even doing research!), without making any clear point. At least, I suppose, it's not 25,000 words long.
Well for one the main rationalist figure head argued with a straight face on how many people should be saved from getting dust in their eyes to justify torturing a person.
You've misunderstood the scare quotes. I meant the community's perception of "Bayesian thinking", rather than Bayesian inference itself. Calling your reasoning Bayesian doesn't establish that it is, much as {{person of particular religion}} calling themselves moral doesn't establish their morality.
I was in this camp until a few months ago, but LLMs have really gotten that good now that you can actually trust an agent with a ticket and it will do it cromulently. The code quality isn't any worse than if a junior did it. Sure, you'll sometimes want to refactor something, but then you can just tell the agent and it will do it for you.
I try to keep up with the tech, I also see what people do with it, but the amount of expensive computation you need to do very basic stuff just isn’t productive in any way. It’s random code generator with extra steps. Throw a junior at it, you’ll get a future senior. Throw a bot at it, you’ll get praised for your clever prompting, you’ll pay for tokens and have some slop in return. I can’t see how it’s productive to sustain a forever-junior?
Also, is “update your priors” some slang for “tell your parents”…? In that case, I can only say older folks are especially vulnerable to slop and I can’t imagine my parents would benefit from that tech.
Anyway, legitimate uses for chatbots are extremely niche, to the point I can’t really name even one such use…
"Update your priors" means to adjust your opinions as the circumstances that caused you to form them change [1].
> I can’t see how it’s productive to sustain a forever-junior?
Well, I've met enough developers throughout my career that were successful forever-juniors that I reckon it must be productive to somebody. And tokens may be "expensive computation", but those developers were more expensive still.
90% of everything was already slop. The simple matter is that in many fields, slop is enough to clear the bar, especially when that slop makes the unit tests light up in green.
> inb4 "humans aren't reliable either." You, person typing that very response
> out right now, you are part of the problem.
The problem being that we are adults, have to deal with real life, and can no longer pretend that running to mommy when we don't understand something gives us a "reliable" answer? You may next find out there is no Santa Claus.
Given how good PS5 emulators have already gotten, the goal may actually be to rip GTA 6 and then distribute pirated copies to play on PC. Which would be much worse for both Sony and Rockstar, given that they don't want to make an official PC release yet - so by the time they do, many PC gamers who would have otherwise bought the game at PC launch will have already finished it. Sales would tank.
Fujitsu MONAKA Server will be
made broadly available from
November 2026 to data center
operators, enterprises, and
the academic and HPC sectors
in Japan and Europe, as well
as to the defense sector,
contributing to national
security.
So, not in America. A sign of the geopolitical times? If so, a very unusual one to come out of Japan.
They already aren't really open, try asking an open model on advice for constructing a nuclear bomb. There's no available model that's even remotely near the frontier that doesn't have restrictive safeguards built in.
(Mind you, this may be for the better. I'm just saying that the safeguards driven by cybersecurity concerns aren't some new quality that wasn't there before.)
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