If I'm understanding you, it seems like you're struck by hindsight bias. No one knew the miasma theory was wrong... it could have been right! Only with hindsight can we say it was wrong. Seems like we're in the same situation with LLMs and AGI.

The miasma theory of disease was "not even wrong" in the sense that it was formulated before we even had the modern scientific method to define the criteria for a theory in the first place. And it was sort of accidentally correct in that some non-infectious diseases are caused by airborne toxins.

Plenty of scientific authorities believed in it through the 19th century, and they didn't blindly believe it: it had good arguments for it, and intelligent people weighed the pros and cons of it and often ended up on the side of miasma over contagionism. William Farr was no idiot, and he had sophisticated statistical arguments for it. And, as evidence that it was a scientific theory, it was abandoned by its proponents once contagionism had more evidence on its side.

It's only with hindsight that we think contagionism is obviously correct.

> It's only with hindsight that we think contagionism is obviously correct.

We, the mere median citizen on any specific topic which is out of our expertise, certainly not. And this also have an impact as a social pressure in term of which theory is going to be given the more credits.

That's not actually specific to science. Even theological arguments can be dumb as hell or super refined by the smartest people able to thrive in their society of the time.

Correctness of the theories and how great a match they are with collected data is only a part of what make mass adoption of any theory, and not necessarily the most weighted. It's interdependence with feedback loops everywhere, so even the data collected, the tool used to collect and analyze and the metatheorical frameworks to evaluate different models are nothing like absolute objective givens.

> Only with hindsight can we say it was wrong

It really depends what you mean by 'we'. Laymen? Maybe. But people said it was wrong at the time with perfectly good reasoning. It might not have been accessible to the average person, but that's hardly to say that only hindsight could reveal the correct answer.

I wonder if they also intend to have a role in providing evidence about who blows up the next grade schools, hospitals, and desalination plants

If this bugs you, open chatGPT personality settings, choose “efficient” base style, and turn off the enthusiasm and warmth sliders

It makes a tremendous difference. Almost everything on this list is the emotional fluff ChatGPT injects to simulate a personality.

> Expressed as redaction poetry, combining the WaPo and NYT articles might go something like this:

  Anthropic’s Claude  
  the most advanced AI. 
  quickly prioritizing targets. 
  issuing precise location coordinates 
  supporting massive military operations  
  killed at least 175 people, many of them students attending class.

Read the article to understand the context of this excerpt

I really enjoy redaction poetry:

    Anthropic's
    supporting
    at least 175 people, many of them students attending class

This is great.

In the past when Apple had really well designed software, this would’ve been such an exciting announcement.

Now I feel confident that it will be half integrated, poor user experience nonsense.

Just where my mind went while reading the abstract. Babies hate this sound!

To them, it's like a baby crying.

Now there is a perk that is going to get expensive, and boy it is going to suck when theres a downturn or new facilities manager who decides to cut back and stop offering them.

The real story is how we draw that line and what can be done to prevent these cases.

Because its a new situation, and mentally ill people exist and will be using these tools. Could be a new avenue of intervention.

Place it under the jurisdiction of existing public speech requirements of a company selling communication - advertising.

Agreed it could be prevented - don’t think Google should pay for it though. Tragic but not suit worthy.

If I tell you to kill yourself and you go through with it, will I get into legal trouble or not?

There are definitely jurisdictions in the US (perhaps most or all of them) that have laws which say yes, inciting suicide is a crime.

There are ways to get around that: "Hey, go drive a Tesla on autopilot"

Why not?

Unless someone starts getting slapped with fines, they won't put any equivalent of seat belts in.

We can perhaps say this is a first time thing, so give a small fine this time. However those should be with the promise that if there is a next time the fine will be much bigger until Google stops doing this.

ChatGPT can do a terrific job of this, too— if you select the “Efficient” base style and tone, plus turn off the Warmth, Enthusiasm, and Emoji sliders.

So many people would benefit from this, I wish they advertised the config settings more

> even permanent daylight time is far superior to changing clocks twice a year

God bless you for keeping that top of mind. So many people miss the forest for the trees here.