The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Lesswrongers go full panpsychism: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wCY4oNHpH2HGYGSoP/the-user-in-the-llm-might-be-a-moral-patient-too-a-strange
To try to TLDR this multilayered bit of crazyā¦ lesswrongers already theorize LLMs might be sapient and/or have morally meaningful internal experiences. Exceptā¦ LLMs obviously ābehaveā wildly differently when prompted differently and especially when put into different āagent harnessesāā¦ so the big brain follow-up thought is what if the different personas an LLM can exhibit are all different āpeopleā (for the purposes of utilitarian accounting and/or what their internal experiences are likeā¦ the exact ātheoryā can vary by lesswronger). The even more insane full galaxy brain follow-up thought: what if the userās input to the LLM is forming yet another āpersonā, like a copy/reflection/simulacrum of the user!
TLDR for the TLDR: What if not only the LLM was sentient/sapient, but also held a sentient/sapient simulacrum of the user inside!
Can we just revoke these peoplesā internet loicense please? Increasingly I empathize with the award winning and erudite medical doctors who get wheeled out on talk shows to argue with āBob, 57, drinks his own piss dailyā as a peer.