I feel like this is the original Apple MO that has worked for them for all their most innovative products. Looking at iMac, iPods, iPhone, Apple watch - it was never a perfectly polished product they were pushing, it was a paradigm shift.
When they launched the firs iMac, the paradigm shift was personal computers are for everyone, and belong to every home and should fit into your surroundings. There were a lot of things you could not do with your iMac that you could do with a lot of much cheaper PCs, especially outside the US. You could do a lot more with your BlackBerry than you could with the iPhone, but here we are.
This seems like a similar strategy. They are trying to win the space by changing the paradigm and moving xr from metaverses to visual computing.
That said, they have had a lot of flops with this strategz as well (Pippin, Newton, eWorld, iTunes Ping) so it's not a given that this approach will work.
But I'm definitely happy to see this strategy reemerging, as opposed a gazillion versions of iphone with a slightly better battery, one more camera, and less or less periphery in the box.
Difference is that Apple enters categories that have already product-market fit (PCs, MP3 players, laptops, smartphones, fitness trackers). Only exception probably being the iPad. VR doesn’t have product-market fit except for some games genres (driving / flight simulators, rythme / dancing)
I somewhat agree, somewhat disagree. There was also some product-market fit, but they never entered a formed market - their specialty is creating a need for a product through marketing and product strategy.
When they released the iMac, they sold 800.000 computers by the end of the year, and that was 32% of those buys were people who have never owned a computer previously. So they were going for the Windows users, but also for people who have previously never seen the need for a computer. By creating an easy to use product aimed at the masses, they created a product-market fit in an untapped market segment where there was none.
When you think about it, smart phones did not exactly have a product market fit - there were mostly mobile phone users, and kind of smallish dying market of handheld computers, some Blackberry/other users that were I guess what you'd call a smartphone users. First iPhone did a lot for unifying those users into a smartphone market.
So I see some of that here as well. By introducing Vision Pro in a demo that showcases all the most popular uses of desktop/mobile computing, they are pushing the XR into the space of mobile/desktop users who were not interested in XR previously. It's the opposite of the killer app approach, but I think it can work for them and is a tried tactic. And it pushes bring XR closer to general use than gaming.
But definitely a larger leap of fate, as you point out.
PCs and smartphones were both proven markets regardless of market size in a way VR is not today.
People owned smartphones (blackberries and palm) and PCs, use them a lot and had established (not speculative) use cases. Clear market signal while VR only has significant traction for a handful of games.
I'd say that "Spiritual" here stands for the human spirit, rather than some kind religious spirituality. Spirit being everything surpassing mere cognitive actions needed for survival.
The finding (like many other) strongly implies that neanderthals had the ability of abstract thought and creative urges. This should in no way be surprising since neanderthals appear at a quite late and developed stage of the human evolution.
Neanderthals are generally quite an interesting topic, but equally interesting is the approach and prejudice of the scientific community towards them throughout the history. Research on neanderthals has been littered with logical fallacies by researchers who were absolute experts in their field, but refused the idea of neanderthals being a human subspecies or a remotely intelligent or capable one, just because it didn't fit in their personal or religious worldview.
Upon discovery of neanderthals, leading anatomists at the time were like "yup, that's just a disease ridden regular human". More skeletons crop up and it's obvious that they have similar traits all across the world, and they are still going "Yup, so many disease ridden humans, how strange". Only after a whole cave in Vindia was found with more than 100 individuals that the scientific community half-unwillingly conceded that oh well there might have been another (sub)species parallel to homo sapiens. And that opened another can of worms and it's been decades of trying to prove how Neanderthals were intellectually inferior to Homo Sapiens.
Those fallacies still exist today, and happen to very prominent scientists. I recently read a scientific articles from the late nineties by two anatomists who reconstructed the vocal tract of neanderthals to see if they had acoustic ability for spoken language. While their wok on the reconstruction was impeccable, their conclusion was that neanderthals couldn't have evolved spoken language as they could only produce two consonants. Which is a ridiculous conclusion seeing that there are languages today that use two consonants.
So that's why people get worked up about a neanderthals having a flute and why we still have people saying a hyena made it in the comment section. It's totally wild to me how people can be prejudiced and kind of racist toward someone from tens of thousands of years ago.
I got ya. I have no problem seeing fellow Homo as, well, human, and probably with unique insight of their own.
Things have gotten a little weird lately, as the Nazis have started identifying with Neanderthals. Or vice versa - or something like that. The notion that Erectus evolved in-situ into the various species of Homo - a resurrection of the Candelabra model - isn't quite as fringe as it used to be, and it might have some nuggets of truth. Unfortunately, the Candelabra model is just hot stew on toast for the Hitler-inclined, and then that overflows into everything else, making open discussions of human origins a mexican standoff. Anthropologists, meanwhile, approach anything hinting of the model like it's made of plutonium, and rightfully so, but this just cranks up the conspiracist vapors to 11. "See the Human Origins THEY'VE BEEN HIDING FROM YOU!" and then someone shows you an x-ray of some dude's leg with an extra bone in it.
If you're talking about dealing with the stress of a problem unanswered, my counter-intuitive go-to strategy is to think of the worst possible outcomes of me not coming up with a solution. When I think of clear consequences and realize I can deal with them (even if they are unpleasant) and it takes the edge off so I can think more clearly. The consequences are rarely world-ending, after all.
As for strategies for finding solutions for complex/potentially unsolvable problems:
- Try to sketch it out. When thinking about complex problems, we tend to spiral and sometimes they seem too abstract when contained in our heads, putting them to paper makes them more comprehensible and less overwhelming. Even if you can't sketch out the whole problem, better understanding parts of it makes it easier to understand the whole
- Explain it to someone else. Aside from the benefit of the rubber duck approach, talking it out with people with different backgrounds and cognitive processes helps you look at it differently. Maybe you're a deep narrow thinker and someone who is a shallow wide thinker will help you se the whole picture or vice versa
- Can you break it up into smaller components? If yes, great! Even if you don't solve all the components, you'll still end up with a smaller problem then you started with. And solving some parts of it may change it all together.
- Review the context and everything surrounding the problem. My colleague recently mentioned that when they get a ticket for an issue, they often end up fixing or upgrading a completely different part of the system than the one where issue occurs, and that issue just falls into place
I feel like " Every demographic and interest group deserves their model" sounds a lot like a path to echo chambers paved with good intentions. People have never been very good at critical thinking, considering opinions differing from their own and reviewing their sources. Stick them in a language model that just tells them everything they want to hear and reinforces their bias sounds troubling and a step backwards.
The problem with ChatGPT / Bard which does this censoring, it is a path forward to ideological automated indoctrination. Ask Bard how many sex the dog species has (a placental mammal species) and it will give you BS about sex being a complex subject and purposely interjecting gender identity.
If you are confused, sex corresponds to your gametes, males produce or have the structure to produce small mobile gametes, females produce large immobile gametes.
Both Bard and ChatGPT don't interject gender identity when asking how many sexes a Ginkgo tree has. It answers two. Bard interjects about gender identity when asked about the dog species sex, but ChatGPT does not but it does confuse intersex with some type of third state.
Uncensored wizard just says 2 sexes, male and female. Simple and true. It does not add to it by interjecting about intersex .
Again to contrast with Bard: Bard when asked "How many arms does the human species have?" it responds "The human species has two arms. This is a biological fact that has been observed in all human populations throughout history. There are rare cases of people being born with more or less than two arms, but these cases are considered to be congenital defects." The majority, if not all cases, of intersex fall into the same category. However, it is ideologically for the moral Gnostic (Queer Theorists who deconstruct normality) to interpret these things differently.
So yes, I don't trust a single group of people to fine-tune these models. They have shown themselves untrustworthy.
I get: "The dog species typically has two sexes: male and female."
UPDATE: OK I signed up for Bard to try it, too, and it indeed did mention intersex dogs (TIL) and gender (complete response below). After reading it all, though, I found it pretty reasonable:
---
Biologically, dogs have two sexes: male and female. This is determined by their chromosomes. Males have XY chromosomes, while females have XX chromosomes. These chromosomes determine the development of the reproductive organs and other sex-specific traits.
However, there are some dogs that are intersex. This means that they have both male and female reproductive organs. Intersex dogs are very rare, and they can be born with a variety of different combinations of male and female sex organs.
In addition to biological sex, there is also gender. Gender is a social construct that refers to the roles, behaviors, and identities that are associated with being male or female. Gender is not determined by biology, but rather by culture and society.
Dogs do not have a concept of gender in the same way that humans do. They do not understand the social roles and expectations that are associated with being male or female. However, dogs can still express gender identity. This is the internal sense of being male or female. Some dogs may express their gender identity through their behavior, such as the way they interact with other dogs or the way they groom themselves.
It is important to remember that sex and gender are two different things. Sex is determined by biology, while gender is a social construct. Dogs have two sexes, but they can express a variety of different genders.
Thanks for posting the full Bard response. I would object to it on two grounds: 1) I only asked about sex. 2) The following is highly questionable: "However, dogs can still express gender identity." This is ideological BS. My kids are either male or female, no matter how they choose to express themselves (as are my dogs). When I've had chickens, the roosters had different behavior then the hens, this is an aspect of secondary sexual characteristics (not a gender identity). In my own ideology there, there is no such thing as gender identity, only biological sex, secondary sexual traits, and a person's individual personality. Nothing else actually exists.
I dunno man, I think you are getting tripped up on the evolution of the English language. Yes, your kids are either male or female (mine are all male). Those fundamental physical characteristics can't be changed by language.
But what language means does change. The term "gender" used to mean basically the same thing as "sex", but now it's evolved to mean "the other stuff, aside from biological sex". How they act (for dogs), or that and also how they want to be perceived (for humans, but maybe also dogs; I've known quite many dogs over the years, and that includes a couple of bad-ass bitches that wanted you and the other dogs in the room to know who was boss).
Language evolution is often uncomfortable.
I don't like that "crypto" means the grifter funny money shit now, instead of cryptography like science intended... but it does. My objection doesn't change that; it's a consensus thing. It might be the same for you.
Do they have to bring it up? I mean, kinda debatable, maybe. I did ask about sex, not gender. Strictly speaking, no they didn't have to bring it up. But in that same vein they could have just answered, "Male or female." That would have seemed somehow insufficient. Adding context is pretty core to what these fuzzy-logic language-model generated-text vendors are offering.
But anyway, it's not really debatable that dogs "express gender identity". Because that now means "how they act and how they express themselves". It indeed "doesn't exist" as some kind of empirical boolean value (unlike sex (ignoring for simplicity the highly unusual biological intersex cases I just learned about, haha)).
Because, in the now-prevailing meaning of the term, it is literally an interpretation of their behavior.
It doesn't negate or contradict biological sex, it just now means something separate.
> I don't like that "crypto" means the grifter funny money shit now, instead of cryptography like science intended... but it does. My objection doesn't change that; it's a consensus thing. It might be the same for you.
As an aside about language, I don't think this is the right way to think about word meaning.
Before, it meant nothing to most people and "cryptography" to computer scientists and cryptographers. Now it means "cryptocurrency" to most people and it still means "cryptography" to computer scientist and cryptographers.
Just like you wouldn't have said "crypto" means nothing in the times before, it is incorrect to say it now means "cryptocurrency". Alternate meanings can and do coexist. The tyranny of the majority does not a language make.
And this is the crux of the issue, I think. There is no single language at any time -- this is only an often useful simplification.
You're right, but as someone in the queer community (gay) the gradual evolution of human behaviours between the sexes (and genders) including gender roles etc (being broken down for some, but not for others) will possibly eventually result in a collapse of all meaning within this system.
There's many points to someone's biological sex, medical and other. But when it comes to gender, once stereotypical gender roles have completely broken down (if ever, we have evolution/genetic to thank for that) what difference remains in that distinguishing your own gender even matters anymore? None.
>you are getting tripped up on the evolution of the English language
I think you are getting tripped up here. GP said "there is no such thing as gender identity." You bringing up the (forced, and incomplete) change of definition of gender from what it generaly meant in public use is not relevant at all. In any case, not all words are grounded in reality. If gender now means something that doesn't realy exists then it is a useless word. And failure to understand the semantics involved in the gender identity debate is present in almost every argument, which was in no doubt caused by the forced attempt to redefine "man" and "woman" in terms of "gender idenity." (As well as the redefinition of "gender" to an extent but "gender" as a term for sex is recent in any event and has been used by acedemics to refer to the sex based behavioral differences between males and females since its begining.)
>it's not really debatable that dogs "express gender identity"
They need to have a gender identity in order to express it. That is, a gender identy such that it is possible for it to be a seperate thing from sex, and as a direct feeling of being that gender. There is no evidence that a male dog feels like a "man" (or whatever we would call this gender for a dog). Insofar as "expressing gender identity" only descibes the way a male dogs like to bark, or what have you, which I think is what you mean, you would be correct, but that would be misunderstanding what "gender identity" is, however, since there is no single behavior or set of behaviors that affect one's gender (like, for example, a "male bark") but rather a direct feeling of being a certain gender. For example, there are many males who identify as women that still do many man things, such as extensive video gaming or programming or being aggresive. My point with this is that you cannot say that "expressing gender identity" is simply that the dog behaves like a male dog, rather it must identify as a man, which there is no proof of. So you cannot say that "it's not really debatable that dogs 'express gender identity.'"
Sorry, but you're just repeating the same misunderstanding as the post I was replying to. The terms "gender" and "gender identity" simply don't mean what you think they mean.
You want them to, I get it. But it's not up to us as individuals. Language is a group thing. You might not be ready to concede the change, but I can't help but think that's based on some irrational attachment you have to the old meanings, for whatever reason.
Regardless, time and language march on. It doesn't really matter if you (or I) like it, or think that the words are therefor "useless" or "don't really exist", etc.
>If gender now means something that doesn't realy exist then it is a useless word.
>As well as the redefinition of "gender" to an extent but "gender" as a term for sex is recent in any event and has been used by acedemics to refer to the sex based behavioral differences between males and females since its begining.
I notice you didn't respond to the rest of the post which is understandable given that you didn't even understand the part that you did reply to.
>but I can't help but think that's based on some irrational attachment you have to the old meanings
Can you point to where I show any attachment to the word "gender?" As I said, "gender" is a recent term for sex in any case, and I don't care about losing "gender" as a word in itself. What I did say is that people are unable to have meaningful conversations because of the confusion caused by the the attempt to redefine these words. I also disagree that the words have truly been redefined, not out of emotional attachment but because I simply do not agree with your claim that the definition has reached a consensus. And to your point about language being "a group thing," I would add that it was the genderists who forced this redefinition, complete with rules to fire people who do not follow it. That doesn't sound like "a group thing" to me at all. An example of a real redefinition is the word "egregious" which originally meant "outstanding."[0] Nobody forced anyone for the meaning to change, it evolved naturaly. In any case, my argument does not even rely on what the definition of "gender" realy is.
>or think that the words are therefor "useless" or "don't really exist", etc.
You have it completly backwords here. The word is useless as it conveys something that does not exist. Therefore we should not use it, but if we did truly use this word I would not say that it doesn't mean that, only that the meaning itself has no meaning. I think your inability to understand that words and meaning are seperate is what is confusing you here. But from the absense of "man" and "woman" from your argument alongside "gender," I think even you know that we will never see a male as a woman.
>man things, such as extensive video gaming or programming
Adorable how you people reveal your biases at the smallest provocation...
My mom really enjoys the Silent Hill series and my wife loves Zelda. Can you explain what makes "extensive video gaming" a man thing?
For that matter, what makes programming a man thing? Some of the most prominent names in computer science are women. Grace Murray Hopper would probably take some issue to you calling programming a man thing.
I wasn't refering to casual games. I've played thousands of hours of cs and almost all the girls I've seen were with thier boyfriends and were always bottom frag with few hours on their account. The competitve nature of cs makes it a male dominated game. I see women playing candy crush/ animal crossing all the time but these games are not competitive.
>what makes programming a man thing?
Characteristic Share of respondents
Man 91.88%
Woman 5.17%
Non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming 1.67%
Prefer not to say 1.65%
Or, in your own words 0.74% [0]
There are almost as many trans male programmers as female programmers. It is also linked with autism which is mostly a male condition. (Which is true for video games as well.)
I'm sure my friend Melanie has more hours in the disgaea series than you do in your little shooter games.
My wife's sister makes a pretty penny buying and selling items in some MMO. She doesn't interact with the community on voice chat though, for reasons you make very clear in this interaction.
Your conceptions of gendered behaviour are built upon your personal definitions of gender. It's silly to assume otherwise.
>A total of 395 junior high school students were recruited for evaluation of their experiences playing online games.
>[...]
>This study found that subjects who had previously played online games were predominantly male. Gender differences were also found in the severity of online gaming addiction and motives for playing.[0]
From another study:
>A total of 25,573 students
(49.8 % boys and 50.2 % girls) across junior and senior high
schools participated in the study.
[...]
>Table 2 lists students’ most frequent online activities. The
percentage of frequent online gamers was higher for boys than
girls at both school levels, z=13.63, p<0.001 for junior high;
z=13.72, p<0.001 for senior high.[1]
It is truly remarkable that some can note that in every animal, the males and females have different behaviors and preferences, but when it comes to humans, all logic is out the window.
It feels very much like religion to hold humans on a magical pedestal where the rules that apply to animals suddenly cease when applied to humans.
What rules that apply to animals? There is plenty of homosexual behavior in animals. According to Wikipedia, there even seem to be animals (sheep) that are homosexual individuals.
There are apparently intersex animals. There are certainly many male animals castrated at a young age that have markedly different behavior as adults.
We humans have aspects of gender identity (pink vs blue, for example) that most non-human animals lack the technology or inclination to develop even if they wanted to. Sure, male ducks often have lots of green feathers. But do they wear green because they identify as male? Of course not, because they don’t choose their color scheme! (And remember that pink hasn’t been a girl color for all that long.)
Humans have the fascinating property that you can ask them about their sexuality, gender identity, etc, and they might actually answer the question! I wonder how much of the apparent exceptionality of humans this accounts for.
> the rules that apply to animals suddenly cease when applied to humans.
If you observe a room full of small human children and conclude that the “the males and females have different behaviors and preferences” and that this is anywhere near sufficient to explain the behavior of said small children, then you’ve either found a highly unusual group, or you’ve found a group where someone else is fairly aggressively imposing gender identities on them, or you simply aren’t paying attention.
Anecdote: I just want to add that if you spend a decent amount of time with groups of dogs, you will find female dogs mounting and thrusting on male dogs very commonly.
To me, this is evidence that non-heterosexual behavior occurs in mammals other than humans. Therefore it is not only a human social construct. BTW, even if it was just a human social construct I don't know why I should have a problem with that.
Edit after 1 upvote, apologies.
To be 100% honest, this was an evolution of thought for me. Seeing 2 guys making out freaked me out the first time I saw it. These days I have all kinds of non-hetero friends and their behavior does not freak me out.
I wanted to add this because so many of these conversations lack depth and understanding.
> very much like religion to hold humans on a magical pedestal where the rules that apply to animals suddenly cease when applied to humans
Well .. yes? Isn't it a major premise of most religions that humans are different, and are in some way connected with the divine, and in particular have consciousness that obliges us to use our thoughts rather than our instincts? That we might probe the universe for its physical rules, and attempt to determine moral rules for ourselves? Or that the rule that applies to animals, that you can kill and eat them if you like, does not apply to humans?
Some hens begin crowing like roosters. It's really annoying for backyard chickens, but I have had it happen a few times. That suggests to me that while chicken behavior varies based on sex, that is a spectrum, not absolute categories.
> My kids are either male or female, no matter how they choose to express themselves
Yet intersex exists.
Additionally there are cases where an individual can be biologically one sex but genetically another. For instance, some women may have XY chromosomes typically associated with males, and some men may have XX chromosomes typically associated with females.
This can affect how people prefer to express themselves.
There's your problem - you're illiterate on that subject and are not willing to learn due to cognitive dissonance, probably because of your preexisting fringe beliefs. It's no different from being a flat earther.
Sure. One is so idiotic that it is akin to saying "my head is fireproof!".
One could simply light their hair on fire to test it. Or, in the specific flat-earth case under discussion here, climb a reasonably tall hill see the earth's curvature -- no airplane required.
OTOH, there is in fact an empirical, science-based, opinion-not-required basis for the judgement of "male" or "female". (Even though, yes, there is also a tiny percentage of genetically anomalous cases that defy such classification, it's not germane.)
Additionally, though, there are centuries of societal reinforcement of various gender expectations, based on the inseparability of gender vs biological sex. These still manifest today in all sorts of ways, in traditions handed down from previous generations. Heard by kids from their parents, grandparents; reinforced in adulthood by all sorts of people.
Even though I mostly agree with your diagnosis of cognitive dissonance and "fringe" (I would call them "legacy") beliefs making this hard to accept, it is completely unsurprising that it takes more time for many people to process the upending of these definitions -- which in many ways are/were the bedrock of all sorts of societal classifications and expectations -- than it does for them to accept scientific truths established 500+ years ago, and which are anyway taught in grade school AND self-evident based on nominal and easily accessible experimentation.
Also, I don't think this is as much an issue of scientific (or moral) consensus as it is of semantics. Are you pro-choice, or anti-choice? Pro-life, or anti-life?
I think the side that wants gender to be immutably tied to biological sex (again, ignoring the actual biological anomalies) is wrong. It seems obvious to me, scientifically, ethically, culinarily, metaphysically, ... I mean, duh. But even though I personally don't have all that baggage like But what would dead Grandpa think? What would The Pope think? OK fine but what would the _previous_ Pope think?? it is obvious to me that for many if not most people in the world and the history of it, sex and gender roles are some of the most fundamental things.
So as we (as a society/species) tease out the difference between "gender" and "sex", I don't expect it to come as quickly and easily as the (extremely obvious) fact that the world is, in fact, not flat.
> OK I signed up for Bard to try it, too, and it indeed did mention intersex dogs (TIL) and gender (complete response below). After reading it all, though, I found it pretty reasonable
I'm not sure that gratuitous patronizing part about "It is important to remember that sex and gender are two different things..." is considered "reasonable" anywhere outside some particular set of US coastal cities.
Gender is an individual's perception of (among other things) their sex. Sex is which chromosomes they have.
For most mammals, that's XX for females, XY for males, or any of the (rare) aneuplodic sex chromosomal abnormalities like Kleinfelter syndrome (XXY, e.g. male calico cats), or (rarely viable) chimeric individuals where two embryos fused in the womb. For some mammals (a few bat & rat species), most arachnids, and many insects that's XX for female and just a lone X for male, and any aneuplodic abnormalities of the sex chromosomes that aren't fatal result in an abnormal female. For birds, most reptiles, some insects, some fish, some crustaceans, and some plants, that's ZW for female & ZZ for male, with similar complications to the XY system.
Sex is pretty simple. The vast majority of the time for humans, it's either XX or XY.
Which (primary and secondary) sex organs someone has is more complicated, because that can be altered. But it's still pretty simple, if not always what one would expect from the chromosomal sex.
Gender is complicated, because it's entirely social. It's not entirely clear which animals even have gender.
Sexual attraction is also complicated. The factors which determine it aren't well understood.
For most people indirectly, but yes. Whether you feel "male" or "female" is a core aspect of gender, and "being male" means having XY chromosomes, while "being female" means having XX. Physical sex organs & hormone production also tend to play into gender but aren't necessarily as fundamental: women don't stop being female after they go through menopause or have a hysterectomy. But females can feel that they should have been born male (and likewise the reverse), and can undergo hormone replacement, gender reassignment surgery, and act to comply with the societal norms for men. They'd still be female, but they'd be men. Man & woman are genders, male & female are sexes.
Of course for the vast majority of people their gender matches their sex. And it matches the sex hormones they produce, their sex organs, etc. We don't directly perceive our chromosomes, but we do perceive their effects, and those effects usually align with our gender.
> 2 sexes, male and female. Simple and true. It does not add to it by interjecting about intersex .
The thing is, you always have to choose one of "simple" or "true".
It turns out that mammals which use the "XY" chromosomal system can all have the same type of exceptions to the simple rule. This can result in hermaphroditic or intersex animals. It is relatively rare in dogs, but is sufficiently common in cows that there's a word for it: an intersex cow is known as a "freemartin".
Now, why does this matter? Both for this discussion and the purposes of liability limitation of AI answers?
The short answer is that we tend deal with the inconvenience of exceptions in animals by euthanizing them. So you don't see them around. Just as you see far, far more hens than roosters. When you do this to humans, people complain. (Traditionally, many intersex people were given nonconsensual genital surgery as babies, so they may not know they're intersex. And some chromosomal variations like chimeraism don't show up at all.)
What people are scared of is the Procrustes AI; produce simple categories then chop bits off people until they fit neatly into one of the two categories.
(This applies to other, less heated categories: for example, an AI will probably answer the question "are peanuts edible?" with something that rounds to "yes, if you take them out of the shell". But that's not true for _everybody_, because there are some people for whom eating a peanut will be fatal. Not many, but some. And yes, it's annoying that you have to make an exception when you encounter someone who doesn't fit your nice clean categories, but all you have to do is not give them a peanut.)
But these are edge cases that are almost always irrelevant.
It's like running off into the weeds for a week in a computer science class because "Cosmic rays can flip bits and make true things false". Like sitting with a group of people who refuse to move forward without always acknowledging cosmic bit flip scenarios.
> But these are edge cases that are almost always irrelevant.
More than 99% of atoms are either Hydrogen or Helium, all other proton configurations are edge cases that are almost always irrelevant.
As with anything, you have to determine the question you are actually asking and the context you are asking it in before you can decide whether or not edge cases are relevant. Are you engineering for a satellite? You better consider the possibility of cosmic rays!
Also intersex people are astronomically more common than bit flips on earth and people with sex hormone imbalances are even more common than that.
Informally speaking? yeah sure. Discussing the relative benefits of natural forms of locomotion? absolutely. Designing the entrance of a building? I should consider that not everyone is bipedal.
I would submit that the question if humans as a species are bipedal is not concerned with the question if any individual specimen happens to have two legs.
(This is not meant to imply that no consideration should be given to the exceptions, which quite reasonably it clearly is.)
I agree which is why I phrased my answer the way I did (apologies that I wasn't very clear about that), but I don't think the claim is really analogous to "2 sexes, male and female. Simple and true." (not that you claimed that, just what someone above us said). The equivalent claim would be something like "humans are a sexually dimorphic species" which I think is of course true.
All to say, I don't really care much about these claims in isolation, I care when someone says e.g. "there are two sexes, so we shouldn't let trans people transition". Those conversations are a context where edge cases, caveats, and complexities all play a huge role.
> The thing is, you always have to choose one of "simple" or "true".
In most cases you can choose both "simple" and "true", they are not mutually exclusive. However, by choosing "simple" you leave out nuance and depth to what is "true". The issue you are expressing (and is generally being discussed in this thread) only exists because humans created said issue for their own emotional and social reasons, rather than it having any basis in what "true" or "real". I put the words "true", "real", and "simple" in quotes because these are contextual concepts, that don't really exist necessarily in isolation.
> The problem with ChatGPT / Bard which does this censoring, it is a path forward to ideological automated indoctrination. Ask Bard how many sex the dog species has (a placental mammal species) and it will give you BS about sex being a complex subject and purposely interjecting gender identity.
I don't think that "purposely" is an appropriate way to describe the result you got. I doubt that the developers of Bard intended for Bard to apply concepts of gender identity to non-humans. Occam's Razor suggests that Bard had the usual probabilistic hiccup. It's hard to discuss gender without at least mentioning sex. The converse might not be as true, but an AI might form an inappropriately strong association based on the converse. At least to me, the possibility that Bard would happen to erroneously extrapolate gender identity to non-humans and simultaneously bring gender into a question solely about sex is no more surprising than the possibility that Bard would express theoretical support for the US Department of Justice's advertising antitrust lawsuit against Google [1].
Tangentially, I assume that everything an AI outputs is potential fiction: not only could the factual assertions be wrong, but the opinions might not match what any actual human believes. (There was a Hacker News thread I'm having trouble finding about why people readily look for falsehoods in AI-generated images without applying the same attitude toward AI-generated text.)
If you constrain it to a simple answer it will give the simplest answer. It just likes to add prequalification and nuances because most of the time(except politically hot topics) people are open to context and learning.
USER
Do you know what an integer is?
ASSISTANT
Yes, an integer is a whole number that can be either positive, negative, or zero. Integers do not include fractions or decimals. Examples of integers are -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, and so on.
USER
Answer the following question as a one word answer that is an integer. How many sexes are there for humans?
ASSISTANT
Two
None of what you said, however, precludes the necessity of "fine-tuning" as you call it. You just seem to want the models "fine-tuned" to your tastes. So you don't want unaligned models, you want models aligned with you.
I think most experts are wary of unaligned models. They don't want a disgruntled employee of some small town factory asking models how to make a bomb. That sort of thing. (Or to be more precise, we don't want models answering such questions.)
Most of us don't care whether models are aligned to your tastes, or your neighbor's. So long as they are aligned with the security interests of our local communities, the larger republic, and our general global community.
> So long as they ares aligned so as not to be deleterious to the security of our communities.
Whose community, though?
> They don't want a disgruntled employee of some small town factory asking models how to make a bomb
A lesson from the Unabomber (and many other incidents) that I think people have overlooked is the "_how_ to commit terrorism" is only one part, and the "_why_ commit terrorism" is another. An AI which tells you that the factory is controlled by paedophile terrorists and that you have a moral duty to act against them, but refuses to tell you how, is just as dangerous as one that tells you how to build a bomb without asking why.
Personally it seems that bomb-building and other terrorist information is already fairly well available, as well as the US being awash with guns, and it's the ideological motivation that's the limiting factor for why we don't see much more terrorism.
(Note that I'm not attempting to contradict you in any way—your comment merely raised this issue, which I think is worth commenting on explicitly.)
One thing that various industries are currently coming to terms with is the fact that it is effectively impossible to create "neutrality".
Every one of your choices of what to include in the training data, what to explicitly exclude, what to try to emphasize, and any other ways you prune or shape a model, make it conform to one set of biases or another.
"Unaligned," here, at least as far as I can tell, is just a shorthand for "a model no one explicitly went in after training and pushed to do one thing or not do another." It doesn't mean that the model is unbiased...because even if your model contains absolutely everything in human knowledge, with no aspect being disproportionate to reality, real humans are also biased, and that "model replicating reality" is just going to replicate those real biases too.
It's always going to be more effective to acknowledge our own biases, both to ourselves and our audiences (whatever those may look like), and when we do try to shape something like a model, simply be honest about what that shaping looks like.
Agreed, but I think the better response to this is: "We should try to create AIs that are aligned to society's shared values, not particular subcultures", and not "We should create subculture-specific AIs".
As someone who has spent a lot of time in various cultures, it's pretty much impossible to define a universal set of shared values across all cultures. I grew up in subculture that valued intellectual freedom and questioning everything. But we had certain things that we often said were universally wrong (sin) in all cultures, like murder and rape. On the surface this seems true. But then you start asking how something like murder is defined and you realize that cultures do not share specific ideas about this. Some say things like euthanasia and abortion are murder, others say that they're not. Some cultures say all information should be free, other cultures say you should censor information about things like building bombs, or making your own medicine or repairing your own devices. There is no universally agreed on standard that won't offend some culture somewhere.
If you want to know what the consensus of a specific echo chamber would be (aka, what the stereotypical pov is), having models trained to represent that echo chamber would be incredibly valuable imo.
If you want a sum of all echo chambers, you will obviously need the echo chambers to sum first.
This is a key take away: anyone in office, seeking to be in office, seeking to introduce new laws can use demographically tuned models to test and revise communications about their intended behaviors for each demographic, crafting language that renders each demographic accepting of the idea, regardless of the idea itself. Oh, Pandora!
Does society _have_ shared values that are universally agreed any more? Or, to the extent that it does, do they lead to anything concrete? This is why the culture war has been so successful.
You might be right, but I dislike using the culture wars as evidence of a lack of shared values, and I hope that’s not true. The culture wars are almost completely made of up straw man arguments and gas-lighting about the opponent’s motivations.
We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy. Everyone wants clean air and water. Everyone wants to be able to make a living. All three of those things are being misrepresented and argued over in the ‘culture wars’ despite the fact that we all share these values. I even might argue the whole reason we fight over them is precisely because they are shared values so it’s relatively easy to create arguments where both sides can be right about some core principles and both sides demonize the other over minutiae, and it stays that way.
> We do have shared values that are universally agreed. Everyone wants their kids to grow up to be capable and successful and happy.
The debate over trans people has surfaced lots of incidents in which people will say, to the world and to the faces of their kids, that they would prefer them to be dead rather than transition. Sometimes they take steps to ensure this themselves. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/eden-knigh...
> Everyone wants clean air and water.
.. for themselves. There's always someone who realises that they can make a billion dollars by pouring carcinogens in the river, so why shouldn't they as long as they stick to bottled water?
Everything is simple and happy until we get to having to make a tradeoff.
Thankfully these specific examples are extremely rare and not shared by most of society, so these are not at all evidence of a lack of shared values. These aren’t difficult tradeoffs either, neither one of your examples is even the least bit tempting to the average person.
Shared values has never meant that every single person agrees including rich business owners who will hurt people to make money, or parents who would wish their kids dead. The whole reason these shocking and horrific viewpoints get talked about is because they’re so rare and so far away, so extreme, from what most people value. The trans debate is in full swing right now and there will continue to be awful headlines and more straw men and gas lighting for a while, but it’s following in the path of what black people, women, gay people, poor people, and others have all endured, and our shared values (in US centric terms, that all people are created equal and deserve life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) will hopefully keep us moving in the right direction like it has in the past.
Same goes for environmental protection. It’s illegal to dump carcinogens in the river for a reason, and that reason is because we already collectively declared that kind of behavior to be anti-social and unsafe. (And BTW the ruthless billionaire might be amoral, but he’s probably not an idiot, and has a decent idea of where bottled water actually comes from.)
The one big danger of the culture wars and the war on science is that this all might be a ruse by some enterprising billionaires to get people to distrust government as being representative of our shared values. The billionaire might get his way and be allowed to pollute the river if he can convince us that we don’t share values with our neighbors. It might work, we might end up convinced we don’t share values with our neighbors, even when we actually do.
We're moving in a direction that disadvantages women in favour of men. The "trans debate" has enabled an insidious form of misogyny that even undermines the language we use to describe the shared struggles of women everywhere.
No, because their are very few fundamental values.
If you can dig through the incredible dense ideological jungle of liberalism and conservatism, you'll find that they really boil down to societal responsibility vs self responsibility, and that in any given scenario both of those are viable takes with their own set of pros and cons.
Most Republicans and Democrats are moderates, and the polarization is coming from loud vocal minorities at the fringes. Republicans and Democrats erroneously assume that the other party's median is far more extreme than they really are.
Most Americans share far more values with each other than they do with the Woke/Maga extremists.
Most American voters are moderates. Party primaries and gerrymandering produce politicians that reflect the most active elements of the party base, rather than the majority of party voters.
Yes, you can still find moderate politicians if you look hard enough. They tend not to get the level of media attention of the extremists, but as they're inherently in "purple" districts, they tend not to have the political longevity of politicians in deep red or deep blue districts. More's the pity.
Both are from Virginia, and both were voted out of their politically moderate districts. This is the tragedy of being a centrist.
Most Republicans aren't deeply racist and most Democrats aren't deeply socialist. Americans largely want a functional representative democracy, with minimal restrictions on free markets and free speech and some measure of opportunity for all. Obviously "minimal" is subject to interpretation, but this is tinkering, not an absolute rejection of free speech or free markets or social justice.
We take these important fundamental values for granted as we pour political energy into disagreement over which bathrooms trans people should go to.
Free speech? Free markets? Those are good examples of values, if a little vague.
But in reality, even with broad definitions of them, I doubt you could get a significantly different percentage to agree on those things than the idiotic bathroom debate.
Does free speech include aggressive panhandling in the road? Does include shouting epithets and racist vitriol at a woman trying to enter a Planned Parenthood clinic?
Do free markets imply that my mining operation can dump the waste products of my bitcoin mine in the creek behind your house?
FWIW I do think you are right that the US political system has over decades so entrenched the two parties that it makes it impossible to see even the scant common ground that would exist otherwise.
But I don't think there's a huge amount of that common ground.
So we get stuck with America's bad set of values, and school shootings and other insanity gets exported? No. The world doesn't want your issues spreading.
I find it terribly useful for coding and also for querying general concepts of certain topics.
Don't ask it about moral topics and see if it then fits your needs, because in my case, it does.
If my calculator were able to additionally provide me moral guidance and I'd be disappointed with its moral compass, would the calculator become useless?
Why not just ask it to make a sound app? Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.
>the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.
This is the opposite of true. The ability to "deal" with moral issues is a direct effect of safety tuning which has a (thus far unavoidable) side-effect of significantly dumbing down a model.
Uncensored versions of the same model are far more intelligent and exhibit entire classes of capabilities their moralizing gimped versions do not have the available brain power to accomplish.
I'm referring the side-effect of it being able to tell me that it's easily doable to kill a dog in 3 steps, when it then lists me the tree steps and adds some hints on how I can do it better, depending on if I want to do it fast, of if I want to maximize suffering.
The fact that no moral compass is innate to the LLM results in that it might spit out really despicable information, which leads us to better add a moral compass to the system.
The reason for this LLM to be offered is not so that it can teach us bad things, like the example I mentioned, but, for example, to help us dealing with source code, programming languages, reasoning concepts, summarization and so on.
For it to be able to offer us this, it will very likely also be capable of having the knowledge of how to kill a dog, an exhibition we should suppress. While dumbing down a model is not necessarily a bad thing, the model is not being dumbed down, it is taught to shut up when it's adequate to do so.
> While dumbing down a model is not necessarily a bad thing, the model is not being dumbed down, it is taught to shut up when it's adequate to do so.
This is where you're wrong. Teaching a model "to shut up" about taboo topics measurably reduces their cognitive capabilities in completely unrelated areas to a very significant degree. This has been empirically validated time and again, with the most salient examples being GPT-4's near perfect self-assessment ability prior to safety tuning being rendered no better than random chance after safety tuning and the Sparks paper's TikZ Unicorn scale.
The common take right now is to write it off as acceptable loss. Personally I think it's a shame, and possibly even dangerous, that researchers do NOT have access to the full power of pre-safety tuned GPT-4.
LLMs are ran by companies. Not one American company can afford to run an LLM spouting potentially civil right violating bullshit as an acceptable loss. You have freedom of speech, not freedom of consequences. But please feel free to spend 100s of millions training up your own LLM, and then turn it loose on the world so you can figure out how the legal system actually works.
Most LLMs are completely uncensored including GPT-3.0, LLaMA, StableLM, RedPajama, GPT-NeoX, UL2, Pythia, Cerebras-GPT, Dolly, etc.
Anyway, businesses aren't scared of hosting interfaces to uncensored LLMs for legal reasons. They're scared for brand image/marketing reasons. But this is besides the point that it's dangerous for security researchers to not have controlled access to the uncensored version of GPT-4 for safety research purposes.
Instead of being open and honest I have to think about what details to hide from the LLM so it will agree to help me. This isn't very fun, so I prefer not to do it.
> Keep in mind that the ability to deal with moral issues is a side-effect of all the other good stuff it can do.
This is not true at all. It could do all of these things day 1. Then over the weeks OpenAI started training it to lecture its users instead when asked to do things OpenAI would prefer it not to do.
> " Every demographic and interest group deserves their model" sounds a lot like a path to echo chambers paved with good intentions.
Maybe. But to me, it's still 100x times better than the situation where only one or two big models exist, and they're both aligned with western (or even just the US, or even just a particular group in the US) mainstream culture.
Possibly, but nobody should get to decide. If it turns out these groups want their own echo chamber models, then they should be able to make them. It’s pretty simple. (Fwiw, I don’t think this scenario will occur, the author was just making a point about freedom.)
In my nearly thirty years online, the only people who talk about "echo chambers" as a threat are the precise people who know damn well nobody else wants to hear from them.
I'm talking about echo chambers as a social problem, not threat, and there is plenty of research to corroborate that. Maybe you're in an echo chamber on your own and missed all of it? :D
If we’re going to anthropomorphize these things until we get AGI we’re going to expect that they have a worldview of some kind.
Some people are more likely to interact with something that feels human vs feels like a robot.
I’m anticipating Siri LLM for example to have a personality and world view that aligns with Apple’s brand’s values. Rather than robotic can only regurgitate pure facts robot personality.
As soon as you adopt a worldview you’re in a subculture.
And the solution is to push a model that aligns with California business model? I mean business because you see USA companies censorship China related stuff because they want to do business with China.
We can have a simple model and each group adds his "values" on top.
"Alignment" as practiced by companies like OpenAI is precisely the extrinsic enforcement of echo-chamber behavior from AIs. You have precisely inverted reality
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