Links for 2023-01-30
Basics of Rationalist Discourse: a list of short, simple sentences comprising the basics of rationalist discourse https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XPv4sYrKnPzeJASuk/basics-of-rationalist-discourse-1
“ChatGPT (and others) generate very fluent (but not always truthful) text. Some worry that teachers, news-readers (like you!), and society in general will be swamped with AI-generated content. That's why we built DetectGPT, a method for detecting if text comes from an LM.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1618820358043475969.html
Anthropic, an A.I. Start-Up, reportedly raising $0.3b @ $5b valuation (up from $0.7b @ $4b 2ya in 2021) [The New York Times] https://archive.is/iQjK8
Prompt injection is a U-shaped scaling phenomenon https://twitter.com/EthanJPerez/status/1617981081663442944
“…the U-shaped scaling curves are the most interesting part of this scaling prize. In fact, that any of the examples turned out to be U-shaped is a major blow to the Hans paradigm…” https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DARiTSTx5xDLQGrrz/inverse-scaling-prize-second-round-winners?commentId=uxDZrteecpC46htDn
Real estate agents say they can’t imagine working without ChatGPT now https://edition.cnn.com/2023/01/28/tech/chatgpt-real-estate/index.html
“This year is 80th birthday of the McCulloch-Pitts neuron. Remains the fundamental idea behind all neural networks. Such a simple mathematical model, yet has scaled to incredible results across many orders of magnitude of compute.” https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~./epxing/Class/10715/reading/McCulloch.and.Pitts.pdf
“We found that almost no respondents currently report probabilistically. Perhaps more surprisingly, most respondents who claimed to report probabilistically, in fact, do not.” https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/01/21/we-found-that-almost-no-respondents-currently-report-probabilistically-perhaps-more-surprisingly-most-respondents-who-claimed-to-report-probabilistically-in-fact-do-not/
Why the Gulf stream can't collapse https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnVWUIhQ8dE
Virus exposure and neurodegenerative disease risk across national biobanks https://www.cell.com/neuron/fulltext/S0896-6273(22)01147-3
“some of the very real tradeoffs between supporting Ukraine and getting ready for a Taiwan fight...There is one company, Williams International, that builds turbofan engines for most cruise missiles...it can take at least 18 to 24 months to implement investments in some factories to develop capacity to meet surging demands.” https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1618374374259822599.html
For centuries, China accounted for 25-30% of global GDP, but that changed rapidly as new centers of economic power emerged. https://chinapower.csis.org/tracker/china-gdp/
Colonialism did not cause the Indian famines: “Failure of the Monsoon caused the Deccan famines. The Raj learned lessons. The results were famine codes, canal construction, railways, sanitation, cholera control ... a sharp fall in death rates from 1901.” https://historyreclaimed.co.uk/colonialism-did-not-cause-the-indian-famines/
The difference is that Turkey doesn't care, and Russia knows it doesn't care. Fear of escalation begets escalation by allowing your opponent to influence your behavior in their favor through escalatory rhetoric.