[atleastoptimal]

So many otherwise smart engineers, overrepresented on HN, have this weird mental block where they fail to take AI progress seriously. I think it's a fear that their status-defining skill could be commodified, so they adopt a mental framework that aims to dismantle the seeming legitimacy of any genuine leap in AI progress as some sort of mirage

[Davidzheng]

Not just engineers - I see people attributing it to strong priors that nothing happens but in my opinion it's more some form of psychological defense mechanism against understanding there will be an intelligence vastly superior to humans which is a deeply uncomfortable thought (to many).

[dullcrisp]

“Nothing ever happens” is like “you can’t beat the market.” It’s basically tautologically the strongest predictive model that we can have. A corollary is that something may happen, but it won’t be what you think.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

Interesting fact. Bryan Caplan is a economist who became famous for making bets on the future. He would take the "nothing ever happens" side of the bet, and he would almost always win. In 2023 he took the "nothing ever happens" side of an AI bet. Just 6 months later, he wrote:

"When the answers change, I change my mind [...] Base rates have clearly failed me. I’m not conceding the bet, because I still think there’s a 10-15% chance I win via luck... make no mistake, this software truly is the exception that proves the rule."

https://www.betonit.ai/p/gpt-retakes-my-midterm-and-gets-an

At this point, straightforward trend extrapolation suggests that AI continues to get better and better. Arguably, continued rapid AI progress is the "nothing ever happens" bet at this point. If AI progress stops, or slows dramatically, something will have happened.

[peyton]

Why should I trust these randos instead of Claude? I know Claude. I would hope Claude is smarter than whoever wants to make rules about my use of Claude. Replace Claude with Kimi, etc. if needed.

I don’t find a petition from people I don’t know who don’t care about me more compelling than my own direct experience with these models.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I suggest you give Claude a link to the petition and ask Claude what it thinks.

(I did so previously and pasted the response here, but it got auto-flagged for AI content.)

[txrx0000]

It's ironic that the top reply to a comment about quality of discourse on this site is an ad hominem. Most people here take AI progress very seriously judging by the number of posts on the front page about AI at any given time. And I think some engineers even explicitly want to commodify their "status-defining skill":

https://nitter.net/__tinygrad__

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>It's ironic that the top reply to a comment about quality of discourse on this site is an ad hominem.

You might find the Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy page interesting:

"Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument. The mere presence of a personal attack does not indicate ad hominem: the attack must be used for the purpose of undermining the argument, or otherwise the logical fallacy isn't there. It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments."

https://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

So for example, if I said: "The arguments for constructing an AI pause button are bad because they are being made by AI company employees", this would be a fallacious argument.

If I said: "HN users have this weird mental block where they fail to take AI progress seriously", that's not necessarily a fallacious argument, unless it's for the purpose of undermining an argument the HN user made.

[BugsJustFindMe]

> Most people here take AI progress very seriously

You have only an extremely weak basis for this claim and have essentially just made it up.

> judging by the number of posts on the front page

Posts reaching the front page is not a reliable way to measure what "most people here" believe.

> It's ironic that

It's not irony.