Only the best and brightest are working for Anthropic.
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@Mabande To be a bit more direct and blunt about it. I am confident that Amanda Askell *is* among the best and brightest. She's motivated to say things about AI you (and I) disagree with. Part of the explanation for that is her position in the public eye (let me assure you, the New Yorker is never going to quote my thoughts about AI). Working for Anthropic is another motivation: lots of money, cultural capital, access to power, etc. But: not a dummy.
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@Kierkegaanks At least about other people's statements, not her own (nor her creation)!
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@Mabande The "entirely new entity"...
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@Mabande
"There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher."
-- Cicero -
@adardis Checking her Wiki page I can't confirm her rigour, only that her academic career led to a PhD (which is cool and impressive, I wish I had the chops) and that she's involved in "over 60 papers and has received over 170,000 citations."
Checking the source for that claim I see that she's not the head author in any of the ones with more than 500 citations.
Her PhD thesis has been cited 47 times.The New Yorker will probably not quote either of us re. Theranos style blood testing either
@Mabande
You don't get a PhD without rigor.We don't need to attack a philosopher's credentials or skill here. The problem isn't the philosophy, it's the engineers who are providing inaccurate technical explanations to the philosopher. This is why we need to infuse the humanities into our engineering programs - we need technical philosophers to call this bullshit out.
(And we have them - see the DAIR group, for example.)
@adardis -
@Mabande
You don't get a PhD without rigor.We don't need to attack a philosopher's credentials or skill here. The problem isn't the philosophy, it's the engineers who are providing inaccurate technical explanations to the philosopher. This is why we need to infuse the humanities into our engineering programs - we need technical philosophers to call this bullshit out.
(And we have them - see the DAIR group, for example.)
@adardis@joshg I opposed @adardis's use of "_very_ rigorous" as some kind of credential for Askell's skills as a philosopher.
Yes, rigor is needed for getting a PhD. But. It does not guarantee that someone has understood their field: one seldom cited thesis re. ethics doesn't necessarily mean she is qualified to define life/consciousness.
(as paralleled by the unfortunate number of PhD's who are proponents of eugenics)Especially as she's a follower of "effective altruism".
And yes, DAIR are _on_ it.
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@joshg I opposed @adardis's use of "_very_ rigorous" as some kind of credential for Askell's skills as a philosopher.
Yes, rigor is needed for getting a PhD. But. It does not guarantee that someone has understood their field: one seldom cited thesis re. ethics doesn't necessarily mean she is qualified to define life/consciousness.
(as paralleled by the unfortunate number of PhD's who are proponents of eugenics)Especially as she's a follower of "effective altruism".
And yes, DAIR are _on_ it.
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Faeces were cleaned off a light switch this morning.
The combination of a unique microbiome, the still live binary switch and the macro "Schrodinger's Cat"-like possibility of a quantum event deciding whether the cleaning liquid provided a pathway to earth through the cleaner does, I feel, amount to an entirely new entity having been formed.
How are we to understand how that entity felt about being destroyed?
Pro tip: Better genAI prompts if you don't wash after wiping.
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@CAWguy @Mabande @Kierkegaanks Shitposters, but not very good ones.
@rubinjoni @CAWguy @Mabande @Kierkegaanks@beige.party shit posters
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@Mabande OMG, thank you! I thought I'd never find this tweet again!
Properly archived this time. -
@Mabande It’s a logical reasoning model with polite UI. That’s neither a human or a machine. It’s a software solution
@rollspelosofen @Mabande I'm sorry I have to differ.
LLMs don't reason.
And there a difference between obsequiousness and being polite. -
@Mabande Whenever I read this, I have to seriously reconsider if Mao's idea of sending the youth to the country to learn the life of the peasants was so wrong…
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@Mabande Avery def should one of them
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@petealexharris @adardis @Mabande
People with philosophy undergraduate degrees have very high mid career income, but the more advanced the degree, the lower the income gets (this is also true for music). The reason is that most don't work as philophers.
If somebody is offering super high wages to somebody not already famous, that should be a clue that something is amiss. But, I mean, who *wants* to see the problem.
(Nobody ever uses composers for evil, so its very easy for me to say all of this, with my music PhD.)
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@petealexharris @adardis @Mabande
People with philosophy undergraduate degrees have very high mid career income, but the more advanced the degree, the lower the income gets (this is also true for music). The reason is that most don't work as philophers.
If somebody is offering super high wages to somebody not already famous, that should be a clue that something is amiss. But, I mean, who *wants* to see the problem.
(Nobody ever uses composers for evil, so its very easy for me to say all of this, with my music PhD.)
If it looked like there was more money in using composers for evil, you can be sure they would Find A Way.
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@Mabande
You don't get a PhD without rigor.We don't need to attack a philosopher's credentials or skill here. The problem isn't the philosophy, it's the engineers who are providing inaccurate technical explanations to the philosopher. This is why we need to infuse the humanities into our engineering programs - we need technical philosophers to call this bullshit out.
(And we have them - see the DAIR group, for example.)
@adardis@Mabande
since this thread is making the rounds again, y'all who read this far get a link to my own amateur-but-carefully-thought-through math and philosophy on why Anthropic and others are provably full of shit: https://thoughtlost.org/nosingularity/
