It’s “whataboutism” in the sense we’re interrogating focus. Why do you think white ethnonationalists spend so much time asserting “white lives matter?” Because there’s only so much air in the room, and they know giving air to one cause deprives another.

I think it’s worth wondering why people spend so much time discussing Israel/Palestine and so little discussing other issues that are at least as large from a “people impacted” perspective. Obviously there’s also an African infantilization (that is to say, racist) double standard here — we simply don’t expect Africa to have human rights. But I would say there is certainly also an Israel double standard, and it is antisemitic in the same way saying “well of course Sierra Leone is a hellhole, there’s no news there” is racist.

You are not a news outlet. But you choose what you’re spending your time and effort on. And it is this. I think many people don’t interrogate why they get so involved and what their opinions actually mean in terms of what their focus accomplished and what it broadcasts.

I apologize for choosing you as the vehicle for this message; I don’t mean to attack you personally. There are a ton of people doing this and your message was as good as any other to demonstrate my point.

Higher expectations is reasonable! Would you say two times higher? Ten times higher? A hundred times higher?

As a baseline, how much have you posted about Sierra Leone and the human rights abuses there in the last year?

Your second point is entirely correct; see also self-hating gays in the Log Cabin Republicans.

I think the shield for your first point is pretty narrow these days. About a decade ago that point held a lot more salience, but as my “new antisemitism” link discusses, the position has been adopted so vigorously by antisemites that I think it is indeed very close to antisemitic unless deployed extremely carefully.

Yes, criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. But since this canard is so often invoked by idle and ignorant spectators, with no real understanding of Israeli or Palestinian politics, inserting themselves into a fraught and unhappy situation, usually specifically to criticize or delegitimize only Israel… it’s tough to see how that isn’t a special standard applied only to Israel. Or, worse, it’s invoked by real antisemites hoping to get bystanders on-side with actual antisemitism by cloaking it as criticism of Israel.

As a concrete example of this new antisemitism – in 2017, Hamas altered its charter, which was wildly and outright antisemitic, to specifically state that it doesn’t actually want to kill all Jews as previously stated, but only the occupiers of Palestine. Given their actions, the huge amount of specifically anti-Jewish sentiment in Gaza, and even the incredibly virulent language in their old charter, do you think they actually changed their minds about Jews? Or are they simply cloaking their antisemitism in a package that more people might agree with these days? A new kind of antisemitism?

How in the world did this person call anyone an antisemite? Are you responding to the right post?

Nothing they do will ever cause the international outrage any other country’s actions would cause.

Israel has 45.9% of all UNHRC condemnations ever passed, passed at it. Do you believe Israel is committing 45.9% of all human rights atrocities on Earth right now?

You are right Israel is measured by double standards, but it’s not that its actions produce less outrage than other countries’ – they produce far more. This is new antisemitism.

It’s not actually necessary to rake Israel over the coals more than other countries. Doing so is a double standard. Sierra Leone has roughly the population of Israel; If you aren’t holding it to task for its human rights abuses as much as you are Israel, you are engaged in that double standard.

I was reading about new antisemitism the other day and I thought it was interesting.

Most canny antisemites have turned to the old (and formerly totally fine) canard “criticizing Israel is not antisemitic” to shield their actual antisemitic criticism. Not wanting to call Hamas a terrorist organization is a perfect example. They’re only terrorizing Israel, which isn’t inherently antisemitic! /s

But yeah it’s really everywhere now. Sometimes it’s mask off as in this incident. But frequently it’s mask on.

It was tulips all along, but stupider.

Your day is coming soon, cryptocurrency.

Wow where in the world did this come from

Where to begin! The famines? The oppression? The lack of liberties? The persecution of queer people, or, indeed, any thought viewed as slightly aberrant? The megalomaniacal madman who keeps his people in chains while he lives the life of the ultra-rich? The gasping, desperate poverty of his subjects? Their inability to leave the country? The militarism? The backwardness?

Oh, wait, what we like?

Uh…

It’s entirely not irrelevant. Even if you create a program to evolve pong, that was also designed by a human. As a computer programmer you should know that no computer program will just become pong, what an idiotic idea.

You just keep pivoting away from how you were using words to them meaning something entirely different; this entire argument is worthless. At least LLMs don’t change the definitions of the words they use as they use them.

I’m giving up here but evolution did not “design” us. LLMs are designs and created with a purpose in mind and they fulfill that purpose. Humans were not designed.

If you truly believe humans are simply autocompletion engines then I just don’t know what to tell you. I think most reasonable people would disagree with you.

Humans have actual thoughts and emotions; LLMs do not. The neural networks that LLMs use, while based conceptually in biological neural networks, are not biological neural networks. It is not a difference of complexity, but of kind.

Additionally, no matter how many statistics, CPU power, or data you give an LLM, it will not develop cognition because it is not designed to mimic cognition. It is designed to link words together. It does that and nothing more.

A dog is more sentient than an LLM in the same way that a human is more sentient than a toaster.

LLMs do not “teach,” and that is why learning from them is dangerous. They synthesize words and return other words, but they do not understand the content presented to them in any sense. Because of this, there is the chance that they are simply spouting bullshit.

Learn from them if you like, but remember they are absolutely no substitute for a human, and basically everything they tell you must be checked for correctness.

Lol… come on. Your second source disagrees with your assertion:

Via all three analyses, we provide evidence that alleged emergent abilities evaporate with different metrics or with better statistics, and may not be a fundamental property of scaling AI models.

You are wrong and it is quite settled. Read more, including the very sources you’re trying to recommend others read.

The two types of loops you equivocate are totally different; saying that a computer executing a program, and an animal living, are actually the same, is very silly indeed. Like, air currents have a “core loop” of blowing around a lot but no one says that they’re intelligent or that they’re like computer programs or humans.

You’ve ignored my main complaint. I said that you treat LLMs and humans at different levels of abstraction:

No; you are analogizing them but losing sense of their differences in the process. I am not abstracting LLMs. That is all they do. That is what they were designed to do and what they accomplish.

You are drawing a comparison between a process humans have that generates consciousness, and literally the entirety of an LLM’s existence. There is nothing else to an LLM. Whereas if you say “well a human is basically just bouncing electro-chemical signals between neurons and moving muscles” people (like me) would rightly say you were missing the forest for the trees.

The “trees” for an LLM are their neural networks and word vectors. The forest is a word prediction algorithm. There is no higher level to what they do.

That’s a fair assessment but besides the point: A thermostat has an internal state it can affect (the valve), is under its control and not that of silly humans (that is, not directly) aka an internal world.

I apologize if I was unclear when I spoke of an internal world. I meant interior thoughts and feelings. I think most people would agree sentience is predicated on the idea that the sentient object has some combination of its own emotions, motivations, desires, and ability to experience the world.

LLMs have as much of that as a thermostat does; that is, zero. It is a word completion algorithm and nothing more.

Your paper doesn’t bother to define what these T-systems are so I can’t speak to your categorization. But I think rating the mental abilities of thermostats versus computers versus ChatGPT versus human minds totally absurd. They aren’t on the same scale, they’re different kinds of things. Human minds have actual sentience. Everything else in that list is a device, created by humans, to do a specific task and nothing more. None of them are anything more than that.

LLMs already do quite a few things they were not designed to do.

No; they do exactly what they were designed to do, which is convert words to vectors, do math with them, and convert it back again. That we’ve find more utility in this use does not change their design.

What if “the internet” developed some form of self-awareness - would we know?

Uh what? Like how would it? This is just technomystical garbage. Enough data in one place and enough CPU in one place doesn’t magically make that place sentient. I love it as a book idea, but this is real life.

What about feedback and ability to self-modify?

This would be a significant design divergence from what LLMs are, so I’d call those things something different.

But in any event that still would not actually give LLMs anything approaching: thoughts, feelings, or rationality. Or even the capability to understand what they were operating on. Again, they have none of those things and they aren’t close to them. They are word completion algorithms.

Humans are not word completion algorithms. We have an internal existence and thought process that LLMs do not have and will never have.

Perhaps at some point we will have true artificial intelligence. But LLMs are not that, and they are not close.

They have no core loop. You are anthropomorphizing them. They are literally no more self-directed than a calculator, and have no more of a “core loop” than a calculator does.

Do you believe humans are simply very advanced and very complicated calculators? I think most people would say “no.” While humans can do mathematics, we are different entirely to calculators. We experience sentience; thoughts, feelings, emotions, rationality. None of the devices we’ve ever built, no matter how clever, has any of those things: and neither do LLMs.

If you do think humans are as deterministic as a calculator then I guess I don’t know what to tell you other than I disagree. Other people actually exist and have internal realities. LLMs don’t. That’s the difference.

By telling me you are.

If you ask ChatGPT if it is sentient, or has any thoughts, or experiences any feelings, what is its response?

But suppose it’s lying.

We also understand the math underlying it. Humans designed and constructed it; we know exactly what it is capable of and what it does. And there is nothing inside it that is capable of thought or feeling or even rationality.

It is a word generation algorithm. Nothing more.

we can be expressed as algorithms

Wow, do you have any proof of this wild assertion? Has this ever been done before or is this simply conjecture?

a thermostat also has an internal world

No. A thermostat is an unthinking device. It has no thoughts or feelings and no “self.” In this regard it is the same as LLMs, which also have no thoughts, feelings, or “self.”

A thermostat executes actions when a human acts upon it. But it has no agency and does not think in any sense; it does simply what it was designed to do. LLMs are to language as thermostats are to controlling HVAC systems, and nothing more than that.

There is as much chance of your thermostat gaining sentience if we give it more computing power as an LLM.

I think it’s hilarious you aren’t listening to anyone telling you you’re wrong, even the bot itself. Must be nice to be so confident.