Category: Minds
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LaMDA, Turing Test, sentience
A chatbot from Google called LaMDA made the headlines last weekend. It seems it convinced Blake Lemoine (someone at Google) that it was sentient. While, like the majority of real AI researchers[0], I do not actually think it is sentient, the transcripts make it plain why it caused this belief. When Alan Turing originally described…
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Arguments, hill climbing, the wisdom of the crowds
You ever had an argument which seems to go nowhere, where both sides act like their position is self-evident and obvious, that the other person “is clearly being deliberately obtuse”? I hope that’s common, and not just one of my personal oddities. Ahem. In the current world of machine learning (yes these two things are…
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Blasphemy, LARPing, mandatory vaccination
Back in the olden days, when Lord of the Rings was new, my brother introduced me to LARP — live action roleplay — which in his case meant Fools And Heroes, a swords-and-sorcery themed game with foam-rubber weapons and vampires dusted with flour[0]. In Fools And Heroes, there is a pantheon of gods. My brother…
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Truthiness & COVID denial by the dying
Enough people believe enough odd things that I was not surprised when I learned of COVID deniers; not just because the same happened a century ago with Influenza, but also my own former (as a teenager, now embarrassing) sincere belief in the occult. Indeed, even when it comes to people denying the existence of COVID…
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Sufficient technology
Let’s hypothesise sufficient brain scans. As far as I know, we don’t have better than either very low resolution full-brain imaging (millions of synapses per voxel), or very limited high resolution imaging (thousands of synapses total), at least not for living brains. Let’s just pretend for the sake of argument that we have synapse-resolution full-brain…
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Hypothesise first, test later
Brought to you by me noticing that when I watch Kristen Bell playing an awful person in The Good Place, I feel as stressed as when I have to consciously translate to or from German in real-life situations and not just language apps. Idea: System 2 thinking (effortful) is stressful to the mind in the…
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Thought crime in 2084
A new meaning to the words “Thought crime”: a crime for which the only evidence is a scan of your brain.
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One person’s nit is another’s central pillar
If one person believes something is absolutely incontrovertibly true, then my first (and demonstrably unhelpful) reaction is that even the slightest demonstration of error should demolish the argument. I know this doesn’t work. People don’t make Boolean-logical arguments, they go with gut feelings that act much like Bayesian-logical inferences. If someone says something is incontrovertible,…
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Baysean Brexit
I’ve decided to start making written notes every time I catch myself in a cognitive trap or bias. I tried just noticing them, but then I noticed I kept forgetting them, and that’s no use. If you tell me Brexit will be good for the economy, then I automatically think you know too little about…
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