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what is with the set of people who will just glaze powerful people constantly, no matter the circumstance?

Jensen is gonna be ok without you trolls. relax.


The admiration of people who contribute to society is much more understandable than the ever-present seething about the fact that they are admired.

Equally confused by the people who grovel at their feet and quicky jump to their defense. Jensen is in the class of people who could run you over with their car, not stop, and barely be inconvenienced by the outcome. Why should society defend someone whose money does that job better?

Yeah I would like to see where that factoid comes from. Maybe it means they explore as many branches from the root position as an amateur, but they explore each branch way deeper and more accurately

After some digging it goes back to Adriaan de Groot (in 1946).

[1] (2011) has a summary in the introduction:

   de Groot presented chess players of varying skill, including some of the best players of the time, with an unfamiliar position and asked them to think aloud as they analyzed the position and chose what move they would make. de Groot found that, contrary to popular belief, the strongest players did not think further ahead than weaker players. World-class Grandmasters (GMs) searched at a similar depth and considered a similar number of options as mere chess experts. 
As [1] is also a somewhat reproduction of the original study, you can take it directly.

    Six Grandmasters, five International Masters, six Experts, and five Class A players completed the think-aloud procedure for two chess positions. Findings indicate that Grandmasters and International Masters search more quickly than Experts and Class A players, and that both groups today search substantially faster than players in previous studies. The findings, however, support de Groot’s overall conclusions and are consistent with predictions made by pattern recognition models.
Section 3 Table 2 is probably most interesting, they had 2 board positions and 2 groups sectioned:

Masters (2350+) | Intermediates (1800-2200)

(Mean values only, i tried inlcuding stddev but it was hard to read)

Positions Evaluated (A): 145.3 | 138.6

Positions Evaluated (B): 216.6 | 190.6

---

Max Depth (A): 11.7 | 9.4

Max Depth (B): 14.1 | 12.0

---

Mean Depth (A): 4.1 | 3.3

Mean Depth (B): 4.9 | 4.2

What i found interesting was that the "intermediate" group had a higher number of "base moves" they evaluated (eg Pos A: 5.6 | 8.6).

The previous studies (de Groot and another rperoduction from 1998) had "Nodes visited" for position A at 51.6 | 34.3 and 48.3 | 40.1 so similarly close together as the new ones, but much lower. (depending on your definition on "similarly close together")

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011...


Sadly the people behind ycombinator think helping this administration crush woke youth, and spying on us with flock cameras, is more important that preventing fascism or corporotocracy.

Neither you nor the author are saying how you were deceived. I think neither of you are being genuine

Both just apologists for obvious scumbags


I a common monument is: "I need to wash my car. The car wash is 100 meters away. Should I walk, or drive?"

The general public has heard of this, tried it on free tier AI, and uses it as an example of how dumb AI is.

Anthropics cheapest tier paid AI, on lowest effort, gets this right.


Sure, they fix these embarrassing things as fast as they get pointed out.

Today I gave a free tier AI a photo of a burning ship posted on Twitter, and asked it to confirm it was an oil tanker. It said no, it was a bulk grain carrier, and gave a specific ID. I pointed out that the bulk grain carrier it had identified was painted black, not red (like most liquid carriers) like the one in the photo (as well as other obvious differences).

That is just one example. The free tier models continue to make very dumb mistakes all the time. Maybe the top secret models, too dangerous for the public, are able to distinguish a black ship from a red one. Who knows.


Using the paid anthrotpic models daily, it has not been my experience that they are just fixing public examples of foolishness, but are generally getting smarter. For example I have my own private, obscure bike racing physics test I use that the newer low tier models pass now.

Before fable, the top tier models didn't pass it. Now even Haiku at low effort does.


I'd be interested to see the physics specifically, do you have a link?


I also have near zero concerns about that, but I worry that we will wipe ourselves out by social and economic chaos caused by AI.

So I'd just ask everyone, don't get too greedy. Its better to be powerful in a world where people can live good lives than lord over a barren wasteland.


> I also have near zero concerns about that, but I worry that we will wipe ourselves out by social and economic chaos caused by AI.

Since people exercise their skills and brains less, deferring to AI, AI will only reduce our IQ.

Since people will spend more time talking to their AI bot than fostering social skills, AI will only reduce our social intelligence.

A dumber, less social world, is far less likely to be a successful world, even if the tools available are unprecedented.


> A dumber, less social world, is far less likely to be a successful world, even if the tools available are unprecedented.

En masse such worlds had successes in the past - renaissance, industrial revolution.

It's something else what I can't describe but it's the zeitgeist that was different when world recorded new successes. Look at CS revolution that led to PC and web of nineties and noughties, they didn't think about the result product , or how to steer thousand engineers to build something - amazing things were born in a very small teams, many times authored by a single person, who was deeply invested into the field and knew what he was doing.


In no era has the dominant technology encouraging the youth outsource their thinking to a magical box.

Our intelligence has been decrease since the 1970s via the reverse flynn affect. This is only going to exacerbate that decline.


> Since people exercise their skills and brains less, deferring to AI, AI will only reduce our IQ.

IQ is almost entirely hereditary so "using your brain" has no impact on it unless you're using it for mating.


> IQ is almost entirely hereditary

Do you have a credible source? Average IQ being much lower in poor countries (85-90 in many African countries) is usually explained away as an education problem, rather than being "inferior genes". Of course I understand that this explanation might be more for social/political reasons than scientific ones, because the alternative is racism, but I was still under the impression that nobody knew how much genes vs the environment contribute to IQ. Yet your statement seems quite definitive.


There's no such thing as "average IQ by country" as a statistic accessible to researchers. The work to create it has never been done; the resources that claim to provide it are essentially fraudulent.


Counterpoint: no it isn't. The high percentage heritability estimates, which are all quite old at this point, haven't survived modern methodological improvements that deconfound population stratification, assortative mating, and family environments. Modern estimates range from as low as the teens into the upper 30s.


have you seen who's in charge of the US? it's here my friend.


> where people can live good lives than lord over a barren wasteland.

you'd be surprised at how some people prefer to lord over barren wasteland than to have less power.



Not everyone agrees. As Satan said in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."


Yes, the social chaos from the post-factual society is already here. And the frantic job cutting.

And also the end of the open internet, replaced by slop addiction walled gardens.

And of course accelerating climate change with full throttle fossil fuel use to power it all. https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to...


"don't get too greedy" - I don't know if the people that should hear that would ever actually hear it. Or have ever heard it at any point in history.


>So I'd just ask everyone, don't get too greedy.

Oh no. I have some bad news for you.

We're creating unlimited power before solving unlimited greed.


This was back on OPUS 5 but I asked it to look into some logs and see if the new version of our release had fixed the issues we had tried to fix. It told me that release wasn't up on dev yet.

"Claude, I released it myself, its up there, just analyze the logs"

"Ok, I'll analyze the logs but it isnt" -crunches for a while- "the issues aren't fixed, but that's because the new version isn't up there"

I think I yelled at it one more time about how I know what was released before "we" figured out that the last release had failed in a way our release system reported as success, but was crash looping on start up and so the old version was still around and working as back up.

Sorry claude.

Now fix that release status check.


They started with reels! Bikes came after.


IIRC, they specifically started with freewheels because they arent that different from a reel in how they work.


There is no nerfing, look at the data before coming up with a theory as to why the nerfing that isn't even happening is happening.

fuck


There is a wide gulf between catastrophe and killing us all, and its not just that these people are weird, they seem to be complete clowns, tossing out % predictions about incalculable future states like spock in star trek. Total clown show.


Yes, I wonder who the clowns are:

1. Researchers that have forgotten more about this technology than the average HNer will ever learn

2. Random HNers that think that suddenly they understand the problem better than researchers that have spent their lives on it

This is just anti intellectualism in a different coat, and it's not much different from people denying environmental scientists talking about climate change or biologists talking about vaccines.

But everyone here thinks they are the smart protagonist and certainly they would never hold a position so silly!


Anti-intellectual? Because they don't believe claims that are backed up only by untested hypotheticals?

If we're going to have whistleblowers emerge declaring a 10% chance we all die because of AI, we're going to need more than vibes. Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.


> Real experts can explain their position plainly. That has not happened here.

It has, over, and over, and over. There is literally a book on it. https://ifanyonebuildsit.com/


I read Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies in 2014. It was interesting, but not terribly persuasive. Does If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies contain arguments that would be new to me after reading Superintelligence?


I would personally expect so, but your mileage may vary. Controlling for the fact that you didn't find the former persuasive, my first thought would be that the latter might help. Among other things, it is much more specific and detailed in various ways, not least of which being informed by an additional 11 years of history. The former was not written in a world of pervasive AI, or with current AI architecture in mind; the latter has that context.


I'm aware of the book, it feels like vibes to me, and is unconvincing. Too many offramps between here and there.


You said "Real experts can explain their position plainly.". The experts have explained their position plainly. If you disagree, you should be able to explain your position plainly; "feels like vibes to me" is not an explanation, it's a feeling.

If you want to argue that there's something invalidating the arguments, by all means do. But it's really tiring to get many variations of "nobody's made the case for it!" or "there's no evidence for it!" or "vibes!".


My position is that there are too many off-ramps between us and the proposed inevitability. And the argument is not symmetric. The null hypothesis is that the world continues to function. The burden of proof is on the authors of the book to show that human destruction is an inevitability as the result of this technology, and they have failed to show that.

This is cited in multiple reviews of the book in reputable publications. The book simply fails to compel belief.


These people are more like creationists, in that they assume that their intended conclusion is true, and then argue backwards from that.


That doesn't explain the many former AI researchers (including Yudkowsky) who quit the field because they came to believe it is a potent danger: they didn't choose to become AI researchers because they started with an assumption that AI research is too dangerous to be allowed to continue.



It's not my job to re explain AI safety from scratch to every uninformed take on the internet. Authority serves a useful purpose.

Having humility and delegating a topic to people that understand the topic better than you is not a bad thing, and certainly preferred to this state.


The writers for Star Trek spent a lot more time thinking about interstellar travel than I do, but I'm not going to go to them for advice about building a rocket ship.

The Rationalists are a philosophical/pseudo-religious organization in the same way the Daoists are. Just spending a lot time thinking about something doesn't make them right, it just makes them internally consistent with their chosen axioms. That is useful: if you agree with the axiomatic beliefs of such a movement, you can probably defer a lot of reasoning about the conclusions of those beliefs to the authority figures within that movement. But it doesn't change the probability of the axioms themselves being true, any moreso than the Pope saying so affects the probability of God existing.

AI Is Important And Potentially Dangerous is an axiomatic belief in the rationalist circles that are relevant to AI safety, in the same way that God Exists is axiomatic to Catholicism.


That's a fascinating assumption, and I wonder how you got to it, because it doesn't match anything I've ever seen. Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside. You are assuming their belief is religious and axiomatic, rather than very carefully reasoned about for decades, iterated on, discussed, debated, tested, and refined.


> Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside.

The converse is also true: Most groups look more heterogeneous from the inside than the outside. Again, to use the Christianity example: it takes a fair bit of inside baseball to figure out how various different sects and denominations are any different, but if you ask one of their priests, they'll be sure to tell you how Baptists and Episcopalians couldn't be more different.

It's a symptom of normalizing to an Overton window. From inside a church the belief that Jesus was just a guy who talked to God might seem an extreme fringe belief to someone who believes that Jesus is fully God, but from the outside we can lump them together as axiomatically holding that God Exists, because we have an Overton window ranging from "God doesn't exist" to "Allah talks to me everyday, and she gave me my promotion".


"Most groups look more homogeneous from the outside than the inside."

But that doesn't mean that they really are all that different in the end. It reminds me a of joke as told by Emo Philips that I think is quite apropos:

==-==-=

A man was walking across a bridge when he saw someone about to jump. He ran over and said, "Don't do it! There's so much to live for!"

"Like what?" the person asked.

"Well, are you religious?"

"Yes."

"Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?"

"Christian."

"Me too! Protestant or Catholic?"

"Protestant."

"Me too! What denomination?"

"Baptist."

"Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?"

"Northern Baptist."

"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative or Northern Baptist Liberal?"

"Northern Baptist Conservative."

"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Covenant or Northern Baptist Conservative Council?"

"Northern Baptist Conservative Council."

"Me too! Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879, or Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912?"

"Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1912."

The man stepped back, eyes narrowing, and yelled, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed the other off the bridge.


It's good game theory. You're much more likely to be able to bully a Northern Baptist Conservative Council of 1879 members into joining your cult than anybody else.


That not exactly a withering criticism of the rationalists because most people who have any opinion about AI believe that AI is important and potentially dangerous.


In a circus troupe, clowns are a critical role, and are an important, if silly, job. In the AI jobpocalypse, we should all be so lucky to have any job.


you have the anthropic mindset. the new aristocracy, or rather, kleptocracy.


Really? Forgotten more than we know? So what can they tell us about how this technology works then? It seems a lot of it, besides the actual training engineering parts, is handwaving about "black boxes" and "divine benevolence" (a quote from Noam Shazeer).


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