What use of the word "reasoning" are you trying to claim that current language models knowably fail to qualify for, except that it wasn't done by a human?
This feels like we're playing word games which don't actually let us make useful claims about reality or predictions about the future. If we're talking purely about the model internals, without reference to their outputs, then your claim is wrong because we don't have a good enough understanding of the model internals to confidently rule out most possibilities. (I'm familiar with the transformer architecture; indeed this is why I asked what definition of the word reasoning the OP cared about. Nothing about transformers as an architecture for _training model weights_ prohibits the resulting model weights from containing algorithms that we would call "reasoning" if we understood them properly.) If we're talking about outputs, then it's definitely wrong, unless you are determined to rule out most things that people would call reasoning when done by humans.
I might be able to learn more by chatting with you.
I think that the trained transformer has fixed weights and therefore cannot learn.
I think learning is one aspect of reasoning, and is demonstrated by challenges like navigation or puzzle solving where learning that one route to a solution is impossible is important.
I also think that the single forward pass of the model means that cyclic reasoning isn't feasible and that conditioning output by asking the model to "think" even when that thinking is done on the single forward pass means that logical processes are ruled out. The model isn't thinking in that case, the probabilities of the final part of the output are conditioned by requiring a longer initial output.
Obviously false for any useful sense by which you might operationalize "world model". But agree re: being a black box and having a world model being orthogonal.
What do you mean? All standard engineering offers (and probably most non-engineering) roles at FAANG are negotiable; in fact, Netflix might be the least flexible - or at least used to be, because they tried to hit what they thought would be "top of market" for you, and would be much harder to budge unless you had an actual competing offer for more than they thought your market value was. (Might be less true today, since they've moved to having actual internal "levels", but idk.)
Your persistent refusal to acknowledge that Scott did not want to go from a world where his patients Googling his real name did _not_ immediately lead to his blog, to a world where it _did_ immediately lead to his blog, and that was his primary (and valid) objection to having his real first and last name put into print, is baffling.
My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name. I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.
> My response to that is: it's good to want things. He doesn't get to ask the world to forget his name.
Is this anything other than a naked assertion of force, that might makes right? He couldn't stop it, therefore it's fine that it happened to him? (Also, it's extremely... something... to describe "he asked a journalist to not print his name on the front page of the NYT" as "asking the world to forget his name", as if his real name was already the primary referrent by which he wielded his influence, and he wanted to shield that power from scrutiny. This was obviously not the case, and is _still_ not the case despite the article, which is why nobody has actually made a compelling argument for why including his name in the article was _good_ rather than _something Cade Metz had the power to do_. I in fact don't particularly think that Cade Metz did it to deliberately hurt Scott, I just think he's a blankface who didn't care that his usual modus operandi would sometimes hurt people for no good reason and was unable to step out of his frame enough to actually check whether what he was doing made any sense, in that instance.)
> I actually talked to therapists when this whole story broke out, and none of them said this "patients must not be able to Google your blog" thing was an actual thing. People just believe it because they like Scott Alexander and believe whatever he tells them.
That you describe it as "patients must not be able to Google your blog" makes me not particularly trust the reports of those therapists. I, too, talked to some therapists, who thought that Scott's concerns were reasonable. Not that there was an overriding professional duty, sure, but that wasn't the claim, either. I dunno, man. The attitude you have towards this really seems like, "well, getting slapped isn't that bad, and you're not strong enough to stop him... maybe stop complaining?" What good thing happened when Cade Metz put his name in print? If you want to adopt a principled stance against pseudonymous writing online, do that. But don't pretend that Scott's failure to keep a pristine separation between his real name and his entire history of online writing somehow makes it so that the NYT printing his name is merely the maintaining the status quo ("ask the world to forget his name"), rather than dramatically expanding the circle of people for whom his identity was deanonymized.
If it's an assertion of force, it's by Scott against the reporter, who needed only Google to find Scott's name. People don't get to demand that reporters un-know common knowledge just because publicity is unwelcome.
His reaction to this incident as being a sort of targeted hit piece towards him specifically was utter paranoid nonsense and just really made him look full of shit from an outside perspective. Further, authors of the piece received countless death threats from a mob of angry redditors with no real insight other than "someone got doxxed?!?! HOW DARE THEY!!!" (a narrative which I personally fell victim to before reading the actual article). Scott did nothing to remedy this situation and perhaps even fanned the flames a good deal.
More people should read the article, if anything because it provides interesting insight into Sam Altman's shady behavior.
Have you ever had random people harass you and threaten violence towards you in heavy numbers? No amount of resolve will keep that from being a deeply stressful situation.
I don't doubt it's not fun, but I also don't think that either you or Mr Metz really give a shit. Rather, you like to bandy about this harassment as proof that your opponents are evil (of course, when it's your opponents being harassed, then that's a sort of divine punishment, and hence also proof that they're evil). If it were any other way, then you wouldn't particularly bring it up in reference to scott, since there isn't much of anything scott can do about other people committing harassment. Furthermore, you might express a degree of sympathy for his efforts to avoid harassment by not having his dox published in the nyt, rather than indignantly expounding on your god given right to publish whatever you feel like.
What a deeply confused criticism of rationalists, who are possibly the only meaningful social group in existence to celebrate changing their minds in response to new evidence.
That's an empirical claim, not a "base principle" (whatever that is). And, uh, yeah, I agree that I am not re-examining my beliefs in response to a bunch of random unsupported accusations by people who are demonstrably not familiar with the thing they're attacking. You should update your beliefs in response to evidence, not in response to social attacks.
Again, this is exactly what we're talking about. You expressed a belief about "rationalists" and the history of people changing their minds about things, I suggested maybe you should reexamine that belief, and you said nope absolutely not. (In a condescending way.) This is the kind of engagement that is being critiqued in this thread.
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