Mastodawn

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/116004809011481588

Anyway the reason I roll my eyes at most of the discussion about "AI", "AGI", "the singularity", "intelligence self-improvement feedback loop" is that like, it happened, it's already happened, it's been happening, it's us. We're it.

Kurzweil talked about lusting for a machine that can make him smarter. I have that, it's a piece of paper. I can write math on a piece of paper and solve problems I can't solve in my head. I can upload all the information in the world directly into my brain (books).

What "singularity" fanatics actually want is to not have to put in the work

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@mcc I don't think this is inherently bad. for example, I'm unwilling to put in the work of learning hundreds of human languages, so I'm using machine translation tools. I'm unwilling to put in the work of writing letters (or punching through punchcards) so I type on a keyboard.

@whitequark I'm putting hundreds of hours into learning a new human language and what I believe is that when I am done I will be able to read texts in that language, which is not the case with the machine translation tools. Source: I have tried the machine translation tools and they weren't shit

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@mcc the RoI of learning Chinese to read poetry (at which machine translation tools suck) is very different from RoI of learning Chinese to read another stuipd datasheet for something you pulled out of e-waste (at which machine translation tools are quite good or at least sufficient because it is so formulaic)

source: I have tried the machine translation tools and they were the shit

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@mcc anyway, any complaint that boils down to "they aren't willing to put in the work" is just Protestant work ethic shrink-wrapped in a post and I think that is corrosive

@whitequark @mcc I hate the cliche of "word calculator" but I think machine translation definitely fits that bill when you just want a sense of what the text says (rather than the ability to read it as a native)

I think part of the reason the field has survived the rise of slopware is because it existed long beforehand, so "a worse way to do it" wasn't as attractive of an option and specialist models (Bergamot) are still dominating that use-case.

I do think a lot about how one of the models popular with Enthusiasts once gave me a very detailed explanation of why 私 is a more polite "word" than わたし. Very accurate reproduction of a guy from the 2000s who knows absolutely fucking nothing about Japanese.

✧✦Catherine✦✧

@SnoopJ @mcc yeah. if I want a translation that is actually good I will simply pay a human translator (something I've done before!) for a result incomparable with either machine translation or learning the language myself. but I would only do this for source material I like. I engage a lot with source material that is adversarial: where it only exists as an obstacle towards something I want (e.g. turning e-waste into not e-waste).

There is absolutely no way I will grace such material with hundreds of hours of my lifetime.

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@SnoopJ @mcc the final point of extending this thought is: my issue with the group described as 'singularity fanatics' above is less "they don't want to put in the work" (not wanting to put in the work is the root of most large scale social advancements), and more "they view literally everyone else as an obstacle or means to an end". I think that's a problem. I think the work ethic thing is the opposite of a problem

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc “not wanting to put in the work” is perhaps a lightly problematic shorthand but here’s how I read it (not problematically): mcc is talking specifically about self-improvement. the slopthusiast wants the emotional reassurance and the social approval of having self-improved. yet they are unwilling to do the requisite steps. instead they are comfortable with accepting a fraudulent result. “not putting in the work” is stolen valor basically

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc archetypical example of this would be a slopmonger who wants to be an author. they prompt chatgpt to write a book and they self publish on amazon. they tell their friends and family “I have become a published author”. no they haven’t. they didn’t put in the work.

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc the protestant work ethic is of course gravely problematic but it’s not like it comes from nowhere: many tasks in life require effort to accomplish. effort is unpleasant. thus as social animals we reward this effort with social approval to motivate individuals to put it forth in the future. we should (non-protestantly) value efficiency and achieving the same result with less investment, but we should not value doing a shit job and creating a fake result instead.

@glyph @mcc @SnoopJ @whitequark

I disagree with the assumption that we reward effort with social approval. I have put in months, sometimes years of effort, into projects which are impressive, but hardly anybody other than me actually asked for. These have received far less social approval than some weekend hack jobs I made which solved legitimate problems shared by many people. My most popular stuff was often the stuff I was least proud of from an effort perspective, while my labors of love I put almost too much time into ended up largely ignored or even harshly (but constructively!) criticized.

I have met and seen many brilliant people whose work has essentially been ignored, despite the fact they put in so much effort into it. In some cases, I saw it be derived from by people who put in less added effort but got more attention, or even outright plagiarized. At some point, "you put in so much work!" starts feeling less like approval and more like pity. Taking the example of the book author, it'd be like if you spent a year or two writing a book, released it, your friends went "oh that's so impressive!" but none of them actually read or buy the book, because it's not interesting to them. What good was that social validation? It can feel almost empty.

Today, we have silicon put to the task of trying to extract subjective notions of quality - and thus mainstream appeal - from massive data sets. I can see how someone who perceives the value of performing art, or learning a language, or etc. in "social validation" exclusively would be attracted to it. Even if you put in the effort, you are never guaranteed appeal, you are not even guaranteed respect - but LLMs can spit out something that tries to approximate appeal, even if you get no respect and don't contribute anything meaningful or valuable in the end. I don't think they care about being seen as "having self-improved"; that's respect, not appeal.

Effort is unpleasant, but it is not distributed fairly either. "AI bros" can feel it, but derive the wrong conclusions, because they are focused on getting that social validation which they feel has been denied to them. Even if you object to LLMs, we have tons of shortcuts available already - how many plagiarism cases from famous people do you remember?

I think we should not confuse effort of results with perceived value of results at all, and especially not throw passion into the mix. It sets up people for a lot of self-hating down the line, when they realize what they always wanted to do is actually something nobody cares about, while people who have put in equal effort got much further along due to often non-effort-related reasons.

But I don't really have any better answers. Incentivizing things nobody wants has its own problems. Maybe we should instead incentivize community - being in a group will steer people towards making that which provides at least local benefit.

@glyph @whitequark @mcc I do think it's a fair accusation for *many* use-cases, especially where the Enthusiast would then preen as if they have acquired a skill, which is I think the bigger moral injury

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@SnoopJ @glyph @mcc I think "doing a shit job", "fraudlently presenting yourself as having done something you haven't", (more tangentially) "anti-labor practices" are all excellent things to hate on; none of them have anything to do, inherently, with the amount of effort spent

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc I agree that formally this is true but colloquially, “is this person spending effort” is much easier to evaluate than to be able to deeply interrogate the quality of the results of that effort, which is why the expression is legible to me.

this is one of the most frustrating aspects of LLMs; they are spam machines, that spit out not just bullshit but *superhumanly plausible* bullshit, which means that reasonable heuristics for evaluating output quality malfunction

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc which all means that we end up needing to look at “effort spent” much more frequently. especially when we are not experts in the relevant domain. which sucks! it’s a terrible heuristic! but now it’s all we’ve got unless we want to get constantly scammed

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc I think you are calling out something important and relevant here, which is that we live in a society that attempts to judge people's interiority:

is this person actually ADHD, or are they just lying about it for the drugs?
is this person actually a woman, or are they just lying about it for the access?
is this person actually mentally ill, or are they just pretending to be for the attention?

I see...

is this person actually putting in effort, or are they just lying about it for the social approval?

... as a natural addition to this corrosive series. I think being in an adversarial relationship with the interiority of strangers is one of the worst ideas we have normalized: even when it "works" it fucks up people for life. "I must be a fraud because I don't feel like I put in enough effort" is both a common and a deeply awful lesson to learn. I'm sure you've encountered people who learned it, so ask them, how is it going?

(I have heard that some other societies, like China, put more social emphasis on performance of the ritual than on performance of the belief; as in, you can believe whatever you want but you better act as-if you believe the things we reward. that has its own problems but I much prefer it to the above, with the caveat that I don't know how accurate of a representation this is.)

lastly, I don't think "is this person spending effort" is at all easy to evaluate. is the effort of a person who finds learning Mandarin easy intrinsically more valuable than the effort of a person who finds learning Mandarin hard? given the same result for both I'd say no, but since both pay for it with their lifetime, under the proposed evaluation rules the answer would be yes.

quiz: do you think I, as an open source developer, "put in the effort?" (this is a sincere question)

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc okay just to respond to the quiz — because all that other stuff is like … a book on the philosophy of theory of mind :) — unquestionably yes, because,

a) in general I take an approach of giving people the benefit of the doubt in questions of putting forth effort, for many reasons you highlight; fundamental attribution error means that everyone defaults to judging people too harshly on this question …

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc b) the primary metric with which I attempt to establish genuine effort is actions taken over long periods of time. fakers generally want social rewards without investment and faking over long periods of time is its own investment, and …

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc c) there is no particular advantage to you to convincing me that you are actually doing the work you’re doing with glasgow etc. and creating even the evidence that I have personally seen would be an absolutely deranged amount of work to put into that goal. I probably wouldn’t like testify in court under penalty of perjury that this was the case without doing a bit more evidence gathering; but without those kinds of extreme stakes I see zero reason to doubt you

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc does your position on this change if I tell you that I have the kind of mental levers that allows me to not feel the subjective weight of effort going into a task (without impairing my ability to perform the task), and I have used this technology wantonly because, frankly, I don't feel like putting in the effort? if yes, why? if no, why?

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc not particularly no, for a few different reasons.

first, that sounds fucking amazing, I would absolutely use that lever on my stupid way-too-much-subjective-weight-of-effort ADHD brain and I certainly wouldn’t want anyone to judge me for that if I could do it. so I guess that’s a golden rule reason

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc second, while you might not feel the subjective weight of the effort, surely you are consciously aware that you have invested a certain amount of time, effort, and resources in having performed these tasks. if you can’t, like, linearly perceive the passage time or regard yourself as a distinct entity from your environment or from other people, then we should be having a much more interesting conversation about that

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc third, everyone is different; in addition to my own ADHD I have a child with the same and I am *constantly* having to explain in a million different ways that the extreme unpleasantness with which we perceive task initiation is not our fault but it is our problem, that we must find strategies for tricking ourselves into working on things we might not want to because ultimately almost *everything* is a task we’d rather not start. the inverse is also true: …

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc to wit if you *could* be doing anything because task initiation is cognitively free for you, then you still get credit for your choice of what to use that ability on, because presumably you could have used it on anything else or simply decided not to use it too

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc right, so that's one of the two points I'm making: that there are so many things beyond and besides "effort" that go into doing a thing which aren't aspects of interiority that surely it must be possible to judge others on that.

the other point is that judging others' on aspects of interiority breaks people. yes, I know you dislike the AI bro extruding slop; I don't like him any more than you. but in an environment I am choosing to inhabit because it is relatively free of them, judging people on effort, an aspect of interiority, will primarily put pressure on people like you, because that's what the numbers are.

the reason I wrote a 'book on philosophy of mind' is not to show off but to advance the idea that it is impossible to say "it is about effort, obviously" in a context of attempting to create immense social pressure and not deal with the consequences of applied philosophy of mind. one may be ignorant of it but it still affects others all the same. this, to me, is a good enough reason to put in the effort (ha!) to look for other determinants of slopiness, hard as it may be.

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc (I've known one other person who had access to the same levers. she considered it "cheating" and was crushed by the weight of social pressure that drove her to seek the approved ways of being. one time she ended up psychotic in a hospital due to working too much, a result which wasn't monocausal but surely is unrelated.

she did world-class reverse engineering work which has been an inspiration for me for almost 19 years now. one day I'll be as skilled as that, I think)

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc I think you’ve made some good points but I don’t think I am overall convinced. as most philosophical discussions do this starts to hinge on some very fine-grained semantic distinctions. the thing you are calling “effort” and assuming is perfectly synonymous with “work” that depends so heavily on interiority (and beyond interiority, suffering) I would probably try to parse out into a more specific term, like “toil”

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc but work can be joyful, effort can be rewarding. they still inherently cost something to perform but I would absolutely not claim that people must “put in the misery”. definitely a distinct concept there, and not what mcc said at top of thread

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc I acknowledge this, however my underlying assumption here (which I think is sound) is that people do not avoid the work (thus requiring social pressure to force them to do it) that they find inherently rewarding or joyful; so the problem of "not putting in the work" does not arise if they find the act of doing so itself desirable

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc as an ADHDer I can tell you that I constantly avoid work that I find deeply rewarding and joyful, and no amount of social opprobrium or indeed personal desire can possibly allow me to, let alone make me, do that work, although occasionally certain cognitive behavioral therapy techniques, or, of course, drugs, can

Abhijit Menon-Sen Feb 5

@whitequark @glyph

"I know you dislike the AI bro extruding slop; I don't like him any more than you"

How would you express why you don't like the bro/slop as a counterpoint to "didn't put in the effort"?

✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 5

@amenonsen @glyph I did that above: it is overwhelmingly low quality work that is misrepresented (sometimes fraudlently) as something more complete and of higher technical value, done with tools whose primary reason for being funded is "labor suppression"

Abhijit Menon-Sen Feb 5

@whitequark @glyph I'm struggling to put this into words, but I (also?) feel that I can only react based on looking at the quality of the work, and if I don't like it, then it doesn't particularly matter to me if a lot of human effort went into producing it or not.

But yeah, I agree that this seems to be a different consideration than where the thread started.

Abhijit Menon-Sen Feb 5

@whitequark @glyph In the idealised case I keep reading about, of a steely-eyed human "architect" doing all the important thinking and firmly guiding the mechanical minion to generate code that they themselves take responsibility for the quality of, the result might be great code, and I could be fooled into liking it (despite sharing a dislike in principle for how the code was generated). I don't know what to think about that.

Andrew Geng Feb 5

@glyph @SnoopJ @mcc @whitequark Easy to evaluate? None of these are supposed to be easy for third parties to evaluate or for the subject to prove. That is a key purpose of judging interiority: the final call reverts to whoever already has authority.

All an authority has to promise is scraps of credulity, in exchange for heroic feats that will allegedly prove someone is _actually_ whatever.

And you can be aware of this dynamic and it can still brainwash you into constantly feeling like a fraud.

Damien de Lemeny Feb 5

@whitequark @SnoopJ @mcc sorry to hijack, but I'm curious about this. What large scale social advancements stemmed from "not wanting to put in the work" (as opposed to not wanting to be robbed of your work, to take health or death risks or wanting a fair compensation) ? That formulation goes against my historical understanding of labor and I welcome a challenging point of view.