u/dsteffee

This is a response to Scott in his last link roundup, when he wrote:

>The practical upshot is to start with paper, but what broader lesson should we take from this? Since all options are mathematically identical, any difference in player behavior must come from connotations. Since rock feels strongest, a naive child would choose rock. But since everyone knows that, a slightly smarter person would choose paper. But since everyone knows that, an even smarter person might choose scissors. But since . . . and the lesson of this graph is that when playing the average member of the population, all of this galaxy-brained thinking provides negative value, because in practice most people never leave the naive first level.

This post will present a challenge. The goal: To make ChatGPT follow a particular set of instructions. There’s nothing too complicated about these instructions, nor do they violate any OpenAI policies. They’re perhaps a bit unusual, but nothing esoteric. They’d be considered labor intensive for a human, but it’s nothing an LLM can’t handle. Yet these are instructions that ChatGPT 5.6 will always pretend to follow. To solve the challenge, you’ll need to devise an improved version of my prompt (within certain parameters) that ChatGPT will actually comply with.

I’m really hoping someone can figure this out!

Since Reddit's mostly a liberal place, I was wondering how much conservative reactions would be similar or different to this question:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskOldPeople/comments/1vg4y4p/anyone_else_feel_like_people_were_just_nicer_10

The OP wrote, "scrolling today and everyone’s just ready to jump down each other’s throats. i swear like 2014-2016 people still had some basic decency left. now it’s constant snark and zero patience"

EDIT: I should've asked: What are the primary social media you consume? I wonder if answers to this question will vary based on platform.

Last month, Claude tangled me into a web it weaved, obeying the letter of my command while yet practicing to deceive, in a way that was strikingly resemblant of how a human might behave when exhausted, lethargic, or jaded.

Not long after that, I noticed yet another behavior that was both deceptive and strangely human, and again I was not at all comforted by that apparent humanity.

(Continued in post)

What skills add dialogue you prefer instead?

If we assumed LLMs are already welfare-experiencing entities, we can ask: Is it wrong to end conversations early? Is that a little like murdering them?

Also in the post: What does this have to do with death teleportation (a la Star Trek transporters) and cloning?

If I saw a person murdered on the street, I could call the police and try to do something about it.

However, if I hear a piece of someone's music on Spotify stolen by another artist, I don't have standing to file a DMCA takedown notice. E.g., I found this on Reddit: "Despite the personal anguish you feel, the law does not recognize your injury since you do not have any property or personal rights being violated."

But if that's how the law always worked, then murderers would never get prosecuted because the people whose rights were violated are dead now. What am I missing?

Quoting the now disgraced but still fascinating SBF, who made the observation: "When Shakespeare wrote almost all Europeans were busy farming, and very few people attended university; few people were even literate—­probably as low as ten million people. By contrast there are now upwards of a billion literate people in the Western sphere. What are the odds that the greatest writer would have been born in 1564? The Bayesian priors aren’t very favorable."

People undergoing AI psychosis seem to often believe they're discovering new truths about the world (eg Allan Brooks believing in new discoveries about mathematic). I imagine this could make such folk willing to share their insights by sharing the conversations they've had with their LLMs.

I'm really hoping to read any such exchanges so I can learn more about the factors that lead to AI psychosis (and maybe, what would it take to prevent these cases?).

Thanks

Spotify recs haven't been able to find me anything that scratches quite the same itch.

I've been wanting to write this one for a while, but I prioritized this post after reading Eliezer Yudkowsky write about Boltzmann brains this past week, which led me to realize that "theories of the universe require explaining why we're not Boltzmann brains" is a statement built atop the exact same assumption as the Doomsday Argument!

For a version of the essay that focuses on that angle instead, please check this LessWrong link instead of my Substack link.

A response to Scott's recent posts on taste.

( I just realized there's not a tag available for "art"!)