Links 43
Alex Tabarrok: “If you think the world isn’t changing in a very uncertain and discontinuous way you just aren’t paying attention.”
“When enthusiastic or challenged in conversation, Matt Yglesias’s speaking voice can reach a cartoonish tenor reminiscent of Jiminy Glick. His writing voice, however, remains flat. He is a ‘logic machine’ at the keyboard, according to friends. He is a parody of artificial intelligence, according to haters. ‘It’s the best time there’s ever been to be somebody who can write something coherent quickly,’ Yglesias says, over coffee. ‘I find it relaxing to work. I put things out. People yell at me. I will write again the next day.’”
Erik Hoel on LLMs and AI safety: “To give an analogy from my own field of neuroscience: there is a vocal and influential cohort of neuroscientists […] who all argue that the purpose of the human brain is to minimize surprise. This is sometimes called the ‘bayesian brain hypothesis.’ The theory holds that, at a global level, minimizing surprise is the function the brain is optimizing over. While it’s only one of several leading hypotheses about brain function, imagine, for the sake of argument, that the bayesian brain hypothesis is true. Now imagine aliens find a human brain and look at it and say: ‘Oh, this thing merely minimizes the surprise! It can’t possibly be dangerous.’ Does minimizing the surprise sound much more complex than autocompleting text? Or does it, in fact, sound rather similar? […] To say that a massive billion-parameter neural network is ‘merely’ trained to autocomplete text is true. . . but that has absolutely no bearing on whether it’s dangerous, or what it’s capable of.”
“David Mech, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms such as alpha and beta to describe the pecking order in wolf packs. But now they are decades out of date, he says. This terminology arose from research done on captive wolf packs in the mid-20th century—but captive packs are nothing like wild ones, Mech says. When keeping wolves in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals with no shared kinship. In these cases, a dominance hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but it’s the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison, not the way wolves behave when they are left to their own devices.”
An instructional video for British travellers from Helmstedt to West Berlin in Cold War Germany.
