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[silverspawn]

Applying this, the following should be relatively easy:

- Language generation
- Creativity
- Rudimentary pattern matching
- Humor
- Social skills in general
- Single-step reasoning

And the following should be hard:

- Reasoning with multiple steps of inference
- Distinguishing good from bad ideas reliably
- Complex visual perception tasks
- Abstract planning (not sure to what extent this is different from #1, maybe not at all)

[silverspawn]

Tell me if any of this seems wrong or if anything is missing.

These are all based on what happens consciously and unconsciously. Social skills are famous for being purely intuitive. People have no idea how they say the socially appropriate things, they just do it. This is why autism is a thing; Autism is not a defect of general reasoning, it's the absence of a super power that most people have, an (unconscious) module specialized in social stuff.

Similarly, speaking is the other obvious one; the way we formulate correct sentences is not amendable to introspection at all.

And ditto for the rest of the list.

Conversely, vision is obviously always conscious, but also solving problems with multiple steps is basically always conscious. Solving a difficult problem is like navigating your mind in the right direction and then waiting for the unconscious parts of your brain to spit out ideas, which you then critique. If you take away this supervisory control thing, our ability to reason degrades massively. This is then also the main argument for why AI may not be close at all.

Distinguishing good from bad ideas is somewhat related, but like even for single-step tasks, there seems to be a difference between coming up with ideas and deciding if they're any good. It's easy to overlook this because if you come up with a bad idea, you generally dismiss it immediately and then that's that, but it does happen.

[silverspawn]

How well do these predictions check out? Obviously massive risk of bias here, but like really well?

- Language models can now do grammar without problems
- They can certainly be funny
- Their understanding is very much top-down rather than bottom-up. First they recognize what the scene is about, then the broad strokes of what should happen, and the problems appear in the details.
- They can do rudimentary reasoning ("What happens if I had bought bit coin 20 years ago?" "You'd be rich now!"), but they can't follow arguments that take several steps
- They have no quality control. They work for a while, and then they fail. I don't know if this is still true with the new Gopher model that was smaller&better trained, but with the increasing GPT-3's, the takeaway from someone really smart who read thousands of prompts was basically "they just take longer to fail, but they fail just as hard". And the idea that there is a "thought generator" and "thought assessor" module in the brain seems to be popular even among people who study the brain but don't think consciousness matters at all.

[silverspawn]

Dall-E (the drawing network) is harder because, since vision is conscious, it's difficult to know how hard drawing is if you try to go about the problem differently (without binding). but my intuitive take (which is now at an even greater risk of confirmation bias) is feels similar in the end. Does top down reasoning, gets the scene right, gets art styles right, has no problems drawing single objects correctly, but can't keep track of two characters with different properties, sometimes does really ridiculous things

[silverspawn]

Social skills could be among the most sophisticated unconscious machinery in the brain since there has been evolutionary pressure to improve those since forever, and it's a really open-ended problem. So maybe that could be a bit of an exception. But it doesn't look like it so far.

[silverspawn]

Also interesting that everything consciousness is involved in is kinda slow; usually seems to take more than a few seconds. That arguably makes it unsuitable for social situations.

Overall, it is kind of amazing that we are this bizarre hybrid of conscious processing and totally unconscious algorithms that produce results out of nowhere, and everyone goes through life thinking this is completely normal.

[Awaclus]

I'm not sure if there's a clear distinction that can be drawn between what's done via consciousness and what isn't, but if I were to try to draw one, I would probably include vision in the stuff that isn't. If I see a person I know, I just instantly recognize them, I don't have to run a conscious process of paying attention to their characteristics and comparing them to people I know unless they're so far away that I can't see them super well. Although if they are that far away, I can run that conscious process if needed, so it is a bit of a mixed bag. Similarly with items, I can recognize all the everyday items I see at a glance without having to pay any conscious attention to any special characteristics they might be identifiable from, but if I come across a more unusual item, I might be able to come up with a better-than-random guess of what it is if I take a closer look and think about it for a while. (I would assume it's the same way for most people, but can only speak for myself.)

Social situations, too, are not a clear-cut case, I think. I can rely on my unconscious social situation processing if I don't have the time to think through what to say, but if I do have the time, I can do a way better job doing it consciously. I think most others have a higher threshold for moving over to their conscious processing for social situations than I do, but everyone still does e.g. when they have to do a presentation or a speech, or write an important letter etc.

[silverspawn]

I'm not sure if there's a clear distinction that can be drawn between what's done via consciousness and what isn't, but if I were to try to draw one, I would probably include vision in the stuff that isn't. If I see a person I know, I just instantly recognize them, I don't have to run a conscious process of paying attention to their characteristics and comparing them to people I know unless they're so far away that I can't see them super well. Although if they are that far away, I can run that conscious process if needed, so it is a bit of a mixed bag. Similarly with items, I can recognize all the everyday items I see at a glance without having to pay any conscious attention to any special characteristics they might be identifiable from, but if I come across a more unusual item, I might be able to come up with a better-than-random guess of what it is if I take a closer look and think about it for a while. (I would assume it's the same way for most people, but can only speak for myself.)

Ok, saying "vision is always conscious" was too too broad of a brush, but the visual field is always conscious. You don't sometimes see and sometimes are blind, you are always seeing.

True that vision has additional unconscious processing mixed in. They even have interplay, like sometimes you look at an item and don't recognize it, until you suddenly do, and then it looks different to you. And actually now that I think about it, this interconnection could be extremely complicated since both the conscious and the unconscious aspect have been around since forever and evolution had lots of time to tinker with it.

Ok, so take vision from conscious to a mix, but certainly *not* to unconscious! The fact that you have a visual field is extremely important. I think the problem is that it's hard to imagine not having it, and that's why one is prone to underestimate the effect.

[silverspawn]

(or the other mistake that ML people make is to think it's epiphenomenal, like the visual field just is the sum of a lot of unconscious processing -- but this is of course precisely the kind of thinking I'm arguing against.)

[silverspawn]

Social situations, too, are not a clear-cut case, I think. I can rely on my unconscious social situation processing if I don't have the time to think through what to say, but if I do have the time, I can do a way better job doing it consciously. I think most others have a higher threshold for moving over to their conscious processing for social situations than I do, but everyone still does e.g. when they have to do a presentation or a speech, or write an important letter etc.

Also true, but you often don't have time, and you can do pretty well on the purely unconscious mode.

[silverspawn]

There definitely is also an effect of evolution optimizing sensory input to be "easy  going" so to speak, like the visual field needs to be such that you can have it be there around the clock without being tiring, distracting, or unnerving. The more you think about it, the more amazing it is how well this works since all this unconscious processing ought to change what you see all the time, yet it appears continuous and stable 99% of the time.

[Awaclus]

Ok, saying "vision is always conscious" was too too broad of a brush, but the visual field is always conscious. You don't sometimes see and sometimes are blind, you are always seeing.

True that vision has additional unconscious processing mixed in. They even have interplay, like sometimes you look at an item and don't recognize it, until you suddenly do, and then it looks different to you. And actually now that I think about it, this interconnection could be extremely complicated since both the conscious and the unconscious aspect have been around since forever and evolution had lots of time to tinker with it.

Ok, so take vision from conscious to a mix, but certainly *not* to unconscious! The fact that you have a visual field is extremely important. I think the problem is that it's hard to imagine not having it, and that's why one is prone to underestimate the effect.

Well, I have experienced not having it (those aren't my strongest memories as it would turn out, but I have a lot of them to make up for it). When you are on the brink of losing consciousness or just barely regaining it after having lost it, it is possible to not have all of your senses working even though some of them still are. I tend to lose my sight before my hearing, and vice versa when regaining consciousness. In movies when someone is stereotypically regaining consciousness and they can distantly hear their friends talking while the screen is still black and then the screen fades in, that's not too inaccurate in my experience, except the period with hearing but no sight is a lot longer for me, and it's not so much the case that the voices sound distant or blurred, the voices still sound exactly the same, I just can't understand what any of the words being said mean.

[silverspawn]

the voices still sound exactly the same, I just can't understand what any of the words being said mean.

That's the opposite though, right? This is losing the unconscious processing but retaining the conscious part.

[silverspawn]

Well, I have experienced not having it (those aren't my strongest memories as it would turn out, but I have a lot of them to make up for it).

Is this different from just having your eyes closed? And how function were you in those moments?

[Awaclus]

That's the opposite though, right? This is losing the unconscious processing but retaining the conscious part.

Well I could still recognize it as a person's voice (including whose voice it was), and recognize other sounds too. It was just the language that was incomprehensible.

Well, I have experienced not having it (those aren't my strongest memories as it would turn out, but I have a lot of them to make up for it).

Is this different from just having your eyes closed? And how function were you in those moments?

It's somewhat different, when your eyes are closed you can still see that there's nothing to see and have a very rough overall idea how bright the light coming from the direction you're facing is. Losing your vision is (at least as I experience it) kind of more like white noise on an analog TV, except when you're looking at white noise on a TV, you can obviously sense the light coming from the TV so it looks white, but in this case there's no light and you couldn't sense it even if there was, so it's more like black but not in a way that really looks like black either. Actually if you pay attention to it, you can probably see some slight noise in your vision all the time, so it's pretty much just that noise getting so intense you can't see anything.

I was not very functioning in those moments, generally unable to stand, for example.

[silverspawn]

The conference person be like "you haven't provided address of an institute", I'm like "it's because I don't work at any institute", they're like "ok but we need an institute for our typesetting tool got it ok thx" I'm like "... well here's the institute I did my masters at which you can use but I'll just point out that this doesn't make any sense, you should write "unaffiliated" instead".

I got the edited version of my paper; they did use the old institute. Being unaffiliated must be super rare, otherwise there would be a better solution.

[silverspawn]

The real Trolley Problem:

[faust]

The conference person be like "you haven't provided address of an institute", I'm like "it's because I don't work at any institute", they're like "ok but we need an institute for our typesetting tool got it ok thx" I'm like "... well here's the institute I did my masters at which you can use but I'll just point out that this doesn't make any sense, you should write "unaffiliated" instead".

I got the edited version of my paper; they did use the old institute. Being unaffiliated must be super rare, otherwise there would be a better solution.

It is quite rare, though I have definitely seen it at a conference before.

[silverspawn]

I'm increasingly convinced that  the best way to persuade people that X is wrong is to make arguments that don't look like they dispute X even though they ultimately do. You approach the problem from a different angle and intentionally don't draw the connection until the very end. I think this may be partially effective even if the reader sees through it, just because it may still not perceived as an attack in the same way.

I always have this desire to eventually write "and thus, as I have demonstrated, X is false!". Certainly have done that plenty of times here and on other places, and of course other people do it as well. It's too emotionally satisfying! And even after I decided to basically not do this, my brain keeps saying "ah, but surely this one is exception!" But it never is. Every time I write something like that, I eventually decide it's better to avoid it. Even if the case were so strong that people would swallow the strongly worded conclusion (and who are we kidding?), there's still no reason to do it.

Probably one reason why this is so hard is because the persuasion strategy is never used in fiction, at least I can't think of an example.

[silverspawn]

do you wear helmets when cycling?

[Awaclus]

Yes, but nowadays I also pretty much never cycle other than for exercise/fun in which case the distance is usually like >20 km on a road with uphills and downhills, so I think the risk there is quite a bit more substantial than e.g. when cycling to the grocery store or something. I might still wear a helmet when cycling a shorter distance in a more city-like environment or I might not, depending on my mood (but probably more likely not).

[faust]

do you wear helmets when cycling?

I usually do. I tend to skip it for short distances (<10 min).

[silverspawn]

ok I bought one today. Will hopefully wear it.

I've been cycling without one forever but it doesn't actually survive a cost/benefit calculation. I'm not the most careful cyclist either.

[silverspawn]

Pretty sure I could listen to the middle section for an hour straight without getting bored.

[Awaclus]

I just said something mildly smart on Twitter (context: text analysis, especially wrt how it's taught in schools) so I'm going to repost it here to get the sayer-of-mildly-smart-things cred.

When you use symbolism, metaphors and other cool techniques that go beyond the surface level in your writing, you're implicitly fine with some people reading it in a different way or even completely missing that thing. The more so the fancier it is.