This is very similar to last week with that mind reading startup thing. Please read the paper before commenting.
This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”.
The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model.
The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.
I want to bring some attention to a spectacular sleight of hand that occurs at minute 4 of this podcast:
"The way that I formulate the argument, just to get us started here, is that acts, the things we do, have ends. We act for an end. They have a purpose.
And that it is wrong to deliberately frustrate an act from attaining its end, from attaining its purpose."
I will draw your attention to the three instances of "end", first we have the noble, tautological, "have ends", actions have ends; then, following close behind we see "an end", we act for an end, those ends have been made into one now, singular end; and finally, "its end", the act, as an entity unto itself, has an end you mustn't interrupt.
The imaging stuff is cool but the homepage is making me wince.
There's a compelling argument to be made that the level of detail in "mind reading" they are gesturing at is plain unrecoverable with hemodynamics. There's an irreversible loss of dimensions that occurs the instant you start recording blood instead of spikes on the neural circuits themselves, and it's not at all clear that what a VC reading the words "telepathy" is imagining even survives that transformation.
What you have is food delivery data for a neighborhood, this can tell you a surprising amount, including when they might throw a party. What it can't tell you, however, is who wore the best outfit and what was talked about over dinner. The information simply does not survive across the interface.
There is a spectacular canyon between "informed interpretation" and "mind reading"
I think that’s part of the point. Execution at its core is mastering the art of projection onto a lower dimensional space.
Taking anything from up in the mind out into the real world, be it a physical action, a speech, an artwork, requires you to make decisions about what’s load bearing and what’s not.
So the more practice you get translating your thoughts into words (or another medium), the better you get at executing.
If you read the thinking you can quite literally see it say "I can't just agree with all they are saying, I should find something for a constructive response". I wager that the anti-sycophancy sections in the system prompt have gotten unbalanced with the "helpful agent" parts.
I imagine that the right balance will be hard to strike well given that at the end of the day we're asking the machine to have tact, and we don't quite know how to put that into an instruction yet. "Please push back when it feels right but in other cases read the room and be less rigorous" is something that plenty of humans struggle with as it is.
Articles like this should approach topics on consciousness with more humility than is displayed here.
We don’t even agree on a good definition of what’s going on inside our own heads yet, what gives you the confidence to say that what goes on inside an LLM can’t be conscious?
I have a pet peeve with the concept of "a genuinely novel discovery or invention", what do you imagine this to be? Can you point me towards a discovery or invention that was "genuinely novel", ever?
I don't think it makes sense conceptually unless you're literally referring to discovering new physical things like elements or something.
Humans are remixers of ideas. That's all we do all the time. Our thoughts and actions are dictated by our environment and memories; everything must necessarily be built up from pre-existing parts.
No matter how intricate and detailed an object is, it will appear similar to any other blurry mess if it's viewed through a shoddy lens.
I think your point stands for upper level work; however, at medium to lower levels, your counterfactual starts to weaken. The ideas have always been there, but it's the ability to express them--well enough to notice their presence--that is not.
The point has always been the act of writing itself. What you write about is almost irrelevant; it’s that you spent the time writing, that you had ideas in your head, and that you squeezed them onto the page.
You have strong dedication towards taking things literally.
The issue is not that it's limited or unlimited, but rather about expected token usage across a user cohort. When you set a usage limit on something like Claude, or a gym, or a tutoring center, you need to do two things at once; set the limit high enough to attract the aspirations of your intended client base ("oh good this gym lets me go every day of the month if I want to"), but priced accurately enough so that you actually turn a profit on the average usage across most users (you ended up going 20 times the first month, but settled into 15 times a month after).
If there was suddenly a drug that you could take that would, while you slept, make your body walk to the gym and workout, so that you could max out that usage, the gym would be entitled to adjust either the pricing, the limit, or prohibit going to the gym while on the drug, given that they can't actually sustain all their members going every day.
As a correction, I've done some reading and when I said tragedy of the commons, what would fit better is a "congestion externality in a club good".
It’s not a literal sublet to someone else, it’s subletting your tokens to another tool.
At its core it’s a tragedy of commons situation. Using a third party tool like OpenClaw is augmenting your usage far beyond what was anticipated when the subscription plan was made.
Same deal for unlimited storage on drive until people started abusing it.
The fact that you read my comment and decided to clarify and double down is immaculate for my point.
Have you taken any class ever on disenfranchising events in history?
Also worth mentioning for those in these neighboring threads, the impulse to blame dysfunction during hard times on a particular minority of society has a name, you can read more about it here
Presuming that you yourself have "graduated" (what from is unclear), it's particularly audacious that you make this claim because it shows rather cleanly how poor a marker of quality an education is.
The answer has never laid in ever more elaborate designs to disenfranchise particular members of the population. It's always been in building community.
A community is what helps stabilize, helps tighten up distributions, and wrestles most authentically with the general premise that we are social creatures and only as strong as our weakest link.
If you think you're going to build the perfect society by way of careful electorate curation, I have some unfortunate stories to tell you.
There seems to be a lot of confusion in this thread around the human mind's processing of voice sounds.
As with most (all?) things we do, exposure is king. This is how we don't die from trying to process infinite dimensional reality. The brain compresses, it prunes. Things seem similar if you don't have much need to distinguish them.
Unless you've listened to hours of either NotebookLM or Greene, you simply won't be able to participate in the distinguishing of these voices with much ability.
People are bad at distinguishing strange voices in a lineup, yes. That is, anyone in this thread who hasn't heard much of either the NotebookLM or Greene's voice would be a terrible witness.
However, the equation changes considerably when the voice becomes familiar. You can imagine it like going from CPU to an ASIC. The brain is rather good at telling when a voice is your friend or not, the evolutionary pressure should be clear. Therefore, the people most qualified to speak on this matter will be first and foremost Greene and his podcast fans. It's a matter of exposure.
I think the point is larger than any individual. It involves the environment in which you're located. Infrastructure changes require energy, lots of energy. Increasing quality of life for most things we've built in our world requires investing lots of energy at the state level. You reap the benefits of this by living in the state.
I think "reduce" has always been pipe dream by the de-growth sector. At its core I'm not convinced that humans can ever willfully engage in managed decline. When I say this I mean societies, large groups, cities, etc. Not individuals. De-growth has a serious scaling issue. It's fundamentally incompatible with the bedrock of why humans come together.
The conflation of Ehrlich with the LtG team is an extremely dead horse that people should stop beating. The Population Bomb (Ehrlich's 1968 book) was an entirely separate production, with separate teams, separate conclusions, and separate levels of academic rigor.
Furthermore, Ehrlich's PR stunt with Julian Simon of a bet during the peak of a commodity cycle was neither epistemologically sound nor a proof of absolutely anything other than markets do what markets do.
I challenge people who reach for the Ehrlich card whenever these growth conversations come up to reflect on what they're acting on and to recognize that the road of thought on LtG is dark and overwhelming. In fact, it ends at a destination that implies deep unflattering things about our fundamental capabilities as humans and role on this earth. It is natural, and human, to meet this with reactive fear. Keep this in mind as you read what follows.
I mention revisiting Limits to Growth because if you read the introduction[1] you would notice that they state their conclusions as follows:
1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. It is possible to alter these growth trends and to establish a condition of ecological and economic stability that is sustain able far into the future. The state of global equilibrium could be designed so that the basic material needs of each person on earth are satisfied and each person has an equal opportunity to realize his individual human potential.
3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success.
Furthermore, if you look at their 30-year update [2] published in 2002, you can get a few more notable quotes:
"We still see our research as an effort to identify different possible futures. We are not trying to predict the future. We are sketching alternative scenarios for humanity as we move toward 2100." (p. xvii)
and most telling:
"Our most important statements about the likelihood of collapse do not come from blind faith in the curves generated by World3. They result simply from understanding the dynamic patterns of behavior that are produced by three obvious, persistent, and common features of the global system: erodable limits, incessant pursuit of growth, and delays in society’s responses to approaching limits." (p. xviii)
The story Limits To Growth is trying to communicate is still pending and will be until ~2072. Nothing has failed and their nuanced commentary on the complexity of the issue has only aged well.
Haha, what a delightfully backwards way to look at things. This ranks closely with “humans are not part of the ecosystem”.
You should look into what carrying capacity means, and in particular how our access to abundant cheap oil enabled us to overclock our chip in a manner of speaking.
I encourage you to revisit what you know about the club of rome and what was actually published in the Limits to Growth paper. We have been disturbingly on track for a lot of the variables that were of interest back then in the “business as usual” model.
People tend to dismiss anything and everything around resource constraint thinking by doing the quick Ehrlich quip, and never really dig deeper into where people like Ehrlich ever got their ideas to begin with.
This is a tool to help researchers in figuring out what different parts of the brain are actually for with less experimenter bias contamination of “well we think maybe it’s about this so let’s show it video of x to see”.
The essence runs on having someone sit in a scanner for a couple hours watching all sorts of things, and then feeding that to a model that will then build its own representation of said data and try different things on it until it’s found what makes a certain part sing in the model.
The purpose is a generalized understanding of brain function, more or less the same way we’ve been doing it all these years. Expose brain to something, record it somehow, see if brains reaction in the recording helps you understand more about who we are and what cognition is.