Only the best and brightest are working for Anthropic.
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@Mabande Have a look at her Wikipedia page. If it's accurate, she's a very rigorous philosopher.
I'm tempted to say "no bullshit there" but it's possible to be rigorous and to spout bullshit.
My instinct says she has/they have other reasons for saying the things they do.
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It's a very clear outset of assumptions ("entirely new entity"), which is false, and then it's downhill from there ("models themselves", "understand").
Yes, if Clippy were self-aware but alone then it would be very challenging for it to understand what's going on. I won't argue with that.
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@Mabande Someone tell Amanda what PR actually is short for...
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@Mabande It’s a logical reasoning model with polite UI. That’s neither a human or a machine. It’s a software solution
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@Mabande This made me laugh too hard
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@Mabande Have a look at her Wikipedia page. If it's accurate, she's a very rigorous philosopher.
I'm tempted to say "no bullshit there" but it's possible to be rigorous and to spout bullshit.
My instinct says she has/they have other reasons for saying the things they do.
@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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@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.
@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
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@Mabande Have a look at her Wikipedia page. If it's accurate, she's a very rigorous philosopher.
I'm tempted to say "no bullshit there" but it's possible to be rigorous and to spout bullshit.
My instinct says she has/they have other reasons for saying the things they do.
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@Mabande This made me laugh too hard
@magitweeter All credit goes to the very prescient Avery Edison!
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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.
