The piece isn’t all that great, but I like this quote:
You can flatter your audience over and over every day by showing them proof of how insane the people they despise are becoming. You can tell them what they want to hear about how everyone else is just hearing what they want to hear. You can even build an entire new media business model on this.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-stewart-made-tucker
Fascinating resolution to a longstanding disagreement, and a big success for adversarial collaboration.
Do larger incomes make people happier? Two authors of the present paper have published contradictory answers. Using dichotomous questions about the preceding day, [Kahneman and Deaton, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 107, 16489–16493 (2010)] reported a flattening pattern: happiness increased steadily with log(income) up to a threshold and then plateaued. Using experience sampling with a continuous scale, [Killingsworth, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 118, e2016976118 (2021)] reported a linear-log pattern in which average happiness rose consistently with log(income). We engaged in an adversarial collaboration to search for a coherent interpretation of both studies. A reanalysis of Killingsworth’s experienced sampling data confirmed the flattening pattern only for the least happy people. Happiness increases steadily with log(income) among happier people, and even accelerates in the happiest group. Complementary nonlinearities contribute to the overall linear-log relationship. We then explain why Kahneman and Deaton overstated the flattening pattern and why Killingsworth failed to find it. We suggest that Kahneman and Deaton might have reached the correct conclusion if they had described their results in terms of unhappiness rather than happiness; their measures could not discriminate among degrees of happiness because of a ceiling effect. The authors of both studies failed to anticipate that increased income is associated with systematic changes in the shape of the happiness distribution. The mislabeling of the dependent variable and the incorrect assumption of homogeneity were consequences of practices that are standard in social science but should be questioned more often. We flag the benefits of adversarial collaboration.
While the author doesn’t ultimately accept the argument that consciousness is first and foremost social, I’m very much reminded of Marvin Minsky’s similar perspective, which I’ve always found pretty compelling: that there were clear evolutionary advantages to developing the ability to model others’ minds, and that once we had that capability, the ability to model our own — ie consciousness — came along as a free bonus.
GPT-4 does an awfully good job of modeling humans’ minds, or at least seeming to; on what grounds can we say that it doesn’t model its own?
I would like at least to begin here an argument that supports the following points. First, we have no strong evidence of any currently existing artificial system’s capacity for conscious experience, even if in principle it is not impossible that an artificial system could become conscious. Second, such a claim as to the uniqueness of conscious experience in evolved biological systems is fully compatible with naturalism, as it is based on the idea that consciousness is a higher-order capacity resulting from the gradual unification of several prior capacities —embodied sensation, notably— that for most of their existence did not involve consciousness. Any AI project that seeks to skip over these capacities and to rush straight to intellectual self-awareness on the part of the machine is, it seems, going to miss some crucial steps. However, finally, there is at least some evidence at present that AI is on the path to consciousness, even without having been endowed with anything like a body or a sensory apparatus that might give it the sort of phenomenal experience we human beings know and value. This path is, namely, the one that sees the bulk of the task of becoming conscious, whether one is an animal or a machine, as lying in the capacity to model other minds.
https://justinehsmith.substack.com/p/no-minds-without-other-minds
I don’t buy the argument — well, there’s not really an argument there at all — but wow is that some spectacularly gymnastic prose.
You know, secretly, even if you’re pretending not to, that this thing is nearing exhaustion. There is simply nothing there online. All language has become rote, a halfarsed performance: even the outraged mobs are screaming on autopilot. Even genuine crises can’t interrupt the tedium of it all, the bad jokes and predictable thinkpieces, spat-out enzymes to digest the world. ‘Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.’ Online is not where people meaningfully express themselves; that still happens in the remaining scraps of the nonnetworked world. It’s a parcel of time you give over to the machine. Make the motions, chant its dusty liturgy. The newest apps even literalise this: everyone has to post a selfie at exactly the same time, an inaudible call to prayer ringing out across the world. Recently, at a bar, I saw the room go bright as half the patrons suddenly started posing with their negronis. This is called being real.
Whoever you are, a role is already waiting for you. All those pouty nineteen-year-old lowercase nymphets, so fluent in their borrowed boredom, flatly reciting don’t just choke me i want someone to cut off my entire head. All those wide-eyed video creeps, their inhuman enthusiasm, hi guys! hi guys!! so today we’re going to talk about—don’t forget to like and subscribe!! hi guys!!! Even on the deranged fringes, a dead grammar has set in. The people who fake Tourette’s for TikTok and the people who fake schizophrenia for no reason at all. VOICES HAVE REVEALED TO ME THAT YOUR MAILMAN IS A DEMONIC ARCHON SPAT FROM BABYLON’S SPINNING PIGMOUTH, GOD WANTS YOU TO KILL HIM WITH A ROCKET LAUNCHER. Without even passing out of date, every mode of internet-speak already sounds antiquated. Aren’t you embarrassed? Can’t you hear, under the chatter of these empty forms, a long low ancient whine, the last mewl of that cat who wants to haz cheezburger?
One thing that I find particularly striking here is that the percentage of articles with emotionally neutral headlines has absolutely plummeted. I would argue that a neutral stance should be the default for news articles, and news sources used to agree; it’s remarkable how rapidly that perspective has vanished.
…the sentiment of mainstream news media headlines has indeed become gradually more negative since the year 2000. What this means is that headlines with negative connotations, such as “Brazil Prison Riot Leaves 9 Dead”, are becoming more prevalent. In contrast, headlines with positive undertones, such as “A New Lens Restores Vision and Brings Relief”, are becoming less frequent.
Interestingly, when we partitioned news media outlets according to the ideological views they are widely associated with, we found that headlines from right-leaning news media have been consistently more negative than those from their left-leaning counterparts. Post-2013, the negativity of headlines in left-leaning news media appears to increase substantially. These trends might be partially related to a sharp uptick in news media usage of terminology that depicts prejudice (such as racism, sexism and homophobia) and political extremism (such as far right or far left).
When we further analysed the specific emotional undertones of the headlines, we discovered that the proportion denoting anger and fear has almost doubled in frequency over this period. Headlines embedded with anger and fear such as “Giving Poor Kids Free Meals at School Should Not Be Controversial. Tell That to Congressional Republicans!” or “Is rape epidemic in Sweden tied to influx of Muslim immigrants?” are becoming more prevalent. Sadness and disgust are also increasingly reflected in headlines, albeit to a lesser extent. In contrast, the proportion of emotionally neutral headlines is decreasing.
The Financial Times — hardly a hotbed of wild-eyed radicalism — publishes this solid essay on the risks of AGI.
When I got home, I thought about my four-year-old who would wake up in a few hours. As I considered the world he might grow up in, I gradually shifted from shock to anger. It felt deeply wrong that consequential decisions potentially affecting every life on Earth could be made by a small group of private companies without democratic oversight. Did the people racing to build the first real AGI have a plan to slow down and let the rest of the world have a say in what they were doing? And when I say they, I really mean we, because I am part of this community.
https://www.ft.com/content/03895dc4-a3b7-481e-95cc-336a524f2ac2
“Pure Reasoning in 12-Month-Old Infants as Probabilistic Inference”
Erno Téglás et al
Science
The actual story isn’t that great but I was fascinated by this graph. The curvy line goes down to species like bottlenose dolphins that are alert 24 hours a day, with only one brain hemisphere asleep at a time.
[EDIT – okay, seems like this is probably nonsense. See the link at the end]
Prehistoric Eloi! Pretty speculative though. Via C.
The idea that giant-brained people were not so long ago walking the dusty plains of South Africa was sufficiently shocking to draw in the luminaries back in England. Two of the most prominent anatomists of the day, both experts in the reconstruction of skulls, weighed in with opinions generally supportive of Haughton’s conclusions.
The Scottish scientist Robert Broom reported that “we get for the corrected cranial capacity of the Boskop skull the very remarkable figure of 1,980 cc.” Remarkable indeed: These measures say that the distance from Boskop to humans is greater than the distance between humans and their Homo erectus predecessors.
Who Were The Boskops And Were They Really Smarter Than Us?
Buuuuuut see also this critique:
Persuasion talks about events at Stanford earlier this month, when a speech by a federal appeals judge was heckled to a stop by angry students: A Shoutdown at Stanford – Persuasion
I share it here because the dean of the Stanford Law School, Jenny Martinez, wrote a spectacularly good response to the incident. It’s an excellent read, and I found the following moving:
There is temptation to a system in which people holding views perceived by some as harmful or offensive are not allowed to speak, to avoid giving legitimacy to their views or upsetting members of the community, but history teaches us that this is a temptation to be avoided. I can think of no circumstance in which giving those in authority the right to decide what is and is not acceptable content for speech has ended well. Indeed, the power to suppress speech is often very quickly directed towards suppressing the views of marginalized groups. We see this today, both around the United States and around the globe. And at key moments in history, robust protection for the rights of association and speech has been critical to the advance of social movements for historically marginalized groups…Thus, I believe that strong protection for freedom of speech is a bedrock principle that ultimately supports diversity, equity, and inclusion and that we must do everything in our power to ensure that it endures.
(emphasis mine)
