3 ms·

May come down to philosophical differences - but I'd prefer humanity to continue progressing, curing diseases, learning about the Universe, improving quality of

by Ukv 2y ago

May come down to philosophical differences - but I'd prefer humanity to continue progressing, curing diseases, learning about the Universe, improving quality of life, etc. as far as we can, as opposed to deciding at some point (or gradually) that we've had enough. Threshold for new advancements should not be whether we absolutely need it, but whether it does more good than harm - which I think is easily the case for LLMs and other machine learning models.

_heimdall 2y ago
> continue progressing Honest question here, hopefully it comes across that way but you never know with text. I've never quite understood "progress" as a goal. The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards and I often feel like its used more to mean "just keep changing stuff." How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? For me that's the challenge. I think I said it elsewhere in this thread, but people rarely know what "enough" means for them. To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff and consuming all along the way because we've zoomed in on the approach of always wanting things to be better rather than setting an expectation of what is good enough.
- Ukv 2y ago
  > The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards [...] How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? I'd claim you can in theory have a direction without an end-point - where even if some measure is at 9^99 there's always still 9^99 + 1. At the very least, you can definitely have a direction without setting an artificial end-point. May be that in reducing malaria cases/infant mortality rates we hit 0 and thus literally cannot go lower, and so hit a goalpost in that sense, but if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there". > To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend.
  - _heimdall 2y ago
    > Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend. Sure, and I'm not trying to say we haven't made significant impacts with technological advancements. We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away. Trends require a similar context. On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch). On 100 years we have almost certainly made significamt movement upwards on some metrics but others would have a significant trend downward. On a 1,000 year scale I think it'd be harder to find areas where we haven't trended upward significantly (I'm sure there are some, but I'd be surprised if there are many). That still leaves the question though, do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill of change and increased consumption?
    - Ukv 2y ago
      > We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away. What people fundamentally value will vary by their philosophy (increasing pleasure and decreasing suffering, searching for higher meaning in the Universe, etc.) but I'd claim the intermediary objectives tend to have a lot of overlap, with a shared set coalescing around (roughly) increasing humanity's knowledge and potential/capacity to act. For instance, gaining capability to deflect meteors puts us in a better position because getting wiped out by one would render accomplishing effectively anything else impossible - making it an intermediary objective common to pretty much all frameworks. > On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch) As compared to 1995, the average life expectancy has increased from to 64.9 to 73.5 and the portion of population living in extrmee poverty has decreased from 32.5% to 8.5% - seems significant to me, even ignoring scientific/technological advancements beyond that. True that averaging over a longer time period smooths out the bumps. > do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill To me, "treadmill" implies lack of progress. If we have the option to improve things (e.g: reduce cancer cases) and an option to not, I don't really understand the idea that we should default to the latter, only choosing the former if we "need" to. Only way I can really make sense of that policy is if at some level you actually think it's instead a downwards/net negative trend.

by Ukv 2y ago

_heimdall 2y ago

> continue progressing Honest question here, hopefully it comes across that way but you never know with text. I've never quite understood "progress" as a goal. The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards and I often feel like its used more to mean "just keep changing stuff." How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? For me that's the challenge. I think I said it elsewhere in this thread, but people rarely know what "enough" means for them. To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff and consuming all along the way because we've zoomed in on the approach of always wanting things to be better rather than setting an expectation of what is good enough.

Ukv 2y ago
> The word is directional, it needs a goalpost to move towards [...] How do you define that goal post, and if we got there would you be happy to stop there? I'd claim you can in theory have a direction without an end-point - where even if some measure is at 9^99 there's always still 9^99 + 1. At the very least, you can definitely have a direction without setting an artificial end-point. May be that in reducing malaria cases/infant mortality rates we hit 0 and thus literally cannot go lower, and so hit a goalpost in that sense, but if we're at 500 malaria cases and can reduce it further (without equal/greater degradations in other areas) then I don't see why we should ever be "happy to stop there". > To me that seems like and endless loop of changing stuff Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend.
- _heimdall 2y ago
  > Might agree about, say, website redesigns or fast fashion, but I consider humanity's position as a whole (such as standard of living) to be on a significant upwards trend. Sure, and I'm not trying to say we haven't made significant impacts with technological advancements. We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away. Trends require a similar context. On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch). On 100 years we have almost certainly made significamt movement upwards on some metrics but others would have a significant trend downward. On a 1,000 year scale I think it'd be harder to find areas where we haven't trended upward significantly (I'm sure there are some, but I'd be surprised if there are many). That still leaves the question though, do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill of change and increased consumption?
  - Ukv 2y ago
    > We do still gave to define how we'd even measure humanity's position though, without that we don't have direction and can't know if we're getting closure or further away. What people fundamentally value will vary by their philosophy (increasing pleasure and decreasing suffering, searching for higher meaning in the Universe, etc.) but I'd claim the intermediary objectives tend to have a lot of overlap, with a shared set coalescing around (roughly) increasing humanity's knowledge and potential/capacity to act. For instance, gaining capability to deflect meteors puts us in a better position because getting wiped out by one would render accomplishing effectively anything else impossible - making it an intermediary objective common to pretty much all frameworks. > On a 30 year scale I'd say we may have moved upwards (though significantly is a stretch) As compared to 1995, the average life expectancy has increased from to 64.9 to 73.5 and the portion of population living in extrmee poverty has decreased from 32.5% to 8.5% - seems significant to me, even ignoring scientific/technological advancements beyond that. True that averaging over a longer time period smooths out the bumps. > do we always need to trend upward on a never ending treadmill To me, "treadmill" implies lack of progress. If we have the option to improve things (e.g: reduce cancer cases) and an option to not, I don't really understand the idea that we should default to the latter, only choosing the former if we "need" to. Only way I can really make sense of that policy is if at some level you actually think it's instead a downwards/net negative trend.