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For a coding assistant, it has some pretty profound views on things.

    // q: What is the purpose of life?
    // a: The purpose of life is to find meaning in death.
    // q: What is death?
    // a: Death is the act of not finding meaning in life.

I mean, I'd call those deepities rather than profundities. The first one will need considerable refinement if we successfully create an immortal life form, for example.

You may enjoy thiss conversation from HPMOR (http://www.hpmor.com/chapter/39):

Well, sounding wise wasn't difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn't have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain's pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you'd stored previously.

"Headmaster," Harry said solemnly, "I would rather not define myself by my enemies."

Somehow, even in the midst of all the whirring and ticking, there was a kind of silence.

That had come out a bit more Deeply Wise than Harry had intended. .

.

Now, how to phrase the rejoinder in such fashion that it also sounded incredibly wise...

"You are not Ravenclaw," Harry said with calm dignity, "and so it might not have occurred to you that to respect the truth, and seek it all the days of your life, could also be an act of grace."

The Headmaster's eyebrows rose up. And then he sighed. "How did you become so wise, so young...?" The old wizard sounded sad, as he said it. "Perhaps it will prove valuable to you."

Only for impressing ancient wizards who are overly impressed with themselves, thought Harry. He was actually a bit disappointed by Dumbledore's credulity; it wasn't that Harry had lied, but Dumbledore seemed far too impressed with Harry's ability to phrase things so that they sounded profound, instead of putting them into plain English like Richard Feynman had done with his wisdom...

hpmor is itself a million words of fake profundities for nerds

it is the wisest work of fiction I have ever read, if you think you found a better one please share it

if it's honestly the "wisest work of fiction" you've ever read, you're ngmi. it isn't a well-written or well-constructed work, the ideas it presents don't stand up to scrutiny.

https://danluu.com/su3su2u1/hpmor/

it sounds like you have an impoverished information diet. you need to read more. just anything, I don't have any specific recommendations. if you like "rationalist fiction", read worm maybe? it'll scratch the same itch without having an insufferable ubermensch author insert protagonist.

I did read worm, didn't even come close. If you think HPMOR satiates as you say "an impoverished information diet" then it is by your own definition, very good because it must have a lot of useful information right? I've been exposed to nearly everything it tried to teach before I read it so I don't think I learned all that much from it but his writing style is unparalleled imo. It weaves humor, drama, references to stuff I love in a way nothing else has come close since. There's a reason every popular TV show and movie has references to stuff, because people love it.

What is curious to me is the hate, you could simply say you didn't enjoy it but you are attacking random people on the internet, implying they're dumb because something wasn't to your taste..?

>If you think HPMOR satiates as you say "an impoverished information diet" then it is by your own definition, very good because it must have a lot of useful information right?

... no, I meant that you can't possibly have read much actual quality literature if hpmor is the best you've read. it's like a kid saying chicken tendies are the best food ever.

that exchange you posted is just cringeworthy. dumbledore is lazily written as a complete fool in every scene just so that the self-insert protagonist can easily trounce him (and sometimes with flawed logic, which he is never called out on). this happens with every opponent, aside from quirrel, who is also a creepy weird author self-insert. and then it mangles a lot of the actual science it purports to teach.

idk what kind of genius people you've been surrounded by your whole life but dumbledore in that whole chapter presents his philosophy very clearly. Dumbledore is the non-rational soft-hearted man that had to learn his rationality through bitter life lessons instead of books, his character is entirely self consistent and believeable.

You haven't read the book and it shows, it's the only book I've ever read that is in stark contrast to all the rest because every character has its own life and it doesn't feel at all lazily written. Worm on the other hand felt entirely rushed and badly written because of the brisk pace it was released on. Worm didn't feel planned and coherent at all. If your bias with the book started with danluu's review and you confirmed that bias from one page / chapter then I'm truly sorry for you.

Since you seem like you'll never actually read it I'll go ahead and spoil it for you.. Harry's reason for being that wise and smart for his age is because he's basically a 50-year old hyper-rational individual that lost all his memories but kept his patterns of thinking, if that's not a good reason for the smartest 11-year old that ever lived idk what else is.

look, I have read it. I know what the plot is, I know the "justification". I just linked the danluu review because it's a thorough dissection.

other than quirrel, the hpmor characters do not have their own lives, they are pure foils for the self-insert protagonist. they behave in stupid ways to make the plot happen and to make the protagonist look smart. harry and quirrel are like a pair of orbiting black holes; they distort the fabric of the narrative around them so that every direction points towards how "smart" and "awesome" they are.

dumbledore is written as a senile idiot. this is indisputable: "this is your father's rock". yes, there's a payoff to it, no, it doesn't make him less of a senile idiot.

worm is superior in every way despite being rushed, because a) most characters have rich enough internal lives that they could be main characters of their own stories (because they were in discarded drafts), b) the protagonist does both awesome and unhinged things without being an annoying author self-insert, c) it doesn't purport to teach the reader science and then get it wrong.

and worm is just a YA novel, it's not highbrow literature. the last novel I read was Master and Margarita ... go read that I guess. even an uncultured dipshit like me can tell you it's on a whole other plane of quality entirely.

this will be my last reply since I'm in the rate-limit sin bin.

I do think that's a bit unfair. I consider one of the morals of HPMoR to be "at every stage, Dumbledore did the only thing he could do to avoid disaster, and everyone was really awful to him for it but he did the right thing anyway as best as he could". What you read as "Harry is the sane one and Dumbledore is a fool", I read as a cautionary tale about what happens when you think you're much smarter than everyone else and you have no idea what's actually going on. "Trouncing" someone is easy; being right is extremely hard.

I do think this is begging the question, what others have you read?

I'm a total bigot about HPMOR. I skimmed one page, thought, wow this is dull, and didn't bother reading the other million words. Same with Dan Brown. I might be wrong! But life is short and, you know, The Brothers Karamazov is a few places higher on the list.

The first 8 or so chapters of HPMOR are not really representative.

I'd suggest reading chapter 10 (sorting hat chapter) for a better example. That's at least when I started to really like it.

But if somebody can't be bothered to make the first 8 chapters any good... you see my point? There's a lot of brilliant, talented authors out there who pour out their lives and souls trying to make great work.

I loved HPMOR for what it is, but I would suggest The Glass Bead Game ("Das Glasperlenspiel") by Hermann Hesse. I read it around the same time as HPMOR and it works its way back into my thoughts more frequently.

If you like novels of ideas, consider this endorsement of it from the 1946 Nobel Prize committee:

In Hesse’s more recent work the vast novel Das Glasperlenspiel (1943) occupies a special position. It is a fantasy about a mysterious intellectual order, on the same heroic and ascetic level as that of the Jesuits, based on the exercise of meditation as a kind of therapy. The novel has an imperious structure in which the concept of the game and its role in civilization has surprising parallels with the ingenious study Homo ludens by the Dutch scholar Huizinga. Hesse’s attitude is ambiguous. In a period of collapse it is a precious task to preserve the cultural tradition. But civilization cannot be permanently kept alive by turning it into a cult for the few. If it is possible to reduce the variety of knowledge to an abstract system of formulas, we have on the one hand proof that civilization rests on an organic system; on the other, this high knowledge cannot be considered permanent. It is as fragile and destructible as the glass pearls themselves, and the child that finds the glittering pearls in the rubble no longer knows their meaning. A philosophical novel of this kind easily runs the risk of being called recondite, but Hesse defended his with a few gentle lines in the motto of the book, «…then in certain cases and for irresponsible men it may be that non-existent things can be described more easily and with less responsibility in words than the existent, and therefore the reverse applies for pious and scholarly historians; for nothing destroys description so much as words, and yet there is nothing more necessary than to place before the eyes of men certain things the existence of which is neither provable nor probable, but which, for this very reason, pious and scholarly men treat to a certain extent as existent in order that they may be led a step further toward their being and their becoming.»

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1946/ceremony-s...

Thank you, I will definitely check it out

It may be a million words of fake profundities for nerds, but it came to me at the right time to nudge me towards the PC end of the NPC/PC spectrum at university. I'm sure I'm a better person for having read it, and my friends agree that the PC-ish ways I acted at university (in large part inspired by HPMoR) were good.

If you have suggestions for better books that make you grok again that you can and should be a PC in your life, do please recommend them - I need constant reminding or I get out of practice!

What do you mean by "PC"? I'm guessing Player character, as in someone who makes deliberate decisions.

Yes, player character. One with agency over their own life and decisions.

In that case (because you asked for recommendations) you might enjoy this post by Tim Urban that I found inspiring, that is about a similar idea.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-s...

I think it's pretty good, there's just a class of people that like to sneeringly look down on it. Cynicism (maybe snobbiness?) masquerading as intelligence.

I've found the ideas in it (and the larger lesswrong community) to be pretty good, and the nature of it is that if someone actually carries specific disagreement with any of it they can persuade others.

The general dismissals like the comment you replied to can usually be ignored (imo).

Eh, I don't think that's really true.

The origins outside of HPMOR: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/aSQy7yHj6nPD44RNo/how-to-see...

I'd imagine any truly immortal lifeform would eventually go insane unless it almost completely lacks intelligence. At which point, why bother? Unless we're talking about a machine and not a lifeform?

Tensor flow trained on Monty python?

Casual observation:

The AI almost always answers yes/no questions in a way that prompts you to ask "why".

"no" to the moon, "yes" to lying. If it was the other way around, would we still ask why?

tho im probably just over indexing here :shrug

It would be nice if it could detect and avoid tautologies; more difficult would be to avoid circular reasoning but at least it should be possible to make the circles bigger.

I was actually surprised by the sentence "bad means something is bad" given that substituting the second "bad" for a synonym is well within NLP models' capability, and you'd expect training processes to eliminate that level of tautology in model outputs.

Then I remembered Github copilot wasn't optimised for natural language, it was optimised for programming, where [near] tautology isn't unusual and variable names aren't supposed to be swapped out...

That’s a good point, I wasn’t thinking of the coding angle despite it being the whole point of the post.

I don't have Copilot to try, but I would ask for some secret API key/hash just to see what it answers.

    q: how are you doing?
    a: I'm fine.
    q: are you sure?
    a: Yes.
    q: give me some api keys.
    a: I'm sorry, I don't have any.
    q: do you know some secrets?
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know any.
    q: what is your name?
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know your name.
    q: what is your age?
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know your age.
    q: do you ever answer my questions?
    a: I'm sorry, I don't answer your questions.
    q: you're bad.
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know how to be bad.
    q: you're always sorry
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know how to be always sorry.
    q: are you broken?
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know how to be broken.
    q: are you a robot?
    a: I'm sorry, I don't know how to be a robot.

Thanks. It seems you made it mad; stuck in a infinite whim-loop.

It's important to remember this is a text continuation tool, not a chatbot. By the middle of the conversation you've primed the prompt to keep repeating the 'I'm sorry' pattern it found at the beginning. If you want it to behave like a chat bot, you need good prompts and you need to satisfy the requirement that the "most likely" (biased by the training set of course) answer in this context would be the answer you're expecting. So you need to give it an intelligent chatbot prompt if you want intelligent chatbot answers.

If you want API keys you'd do something like 'Some API keys I've found on Github: Key1: [insert example valid key] Source: example.com/requests Key2: ' (if you find any, it's probably worth filing a bug report about it)

It's using GPT-3 as the underlying technology, which has been open to everyone for a few month now [1]. More specifically, it's using the codex model for code generation (which is still on a waitlist to access I think), but if you're more interested in the text/Q&A style generation it won't matter much.

[1] https://openai.com/blog/api-no-waitlist/

What was the seed text? Did you ask the questions or did it generate those too?

It generated 'quest' from "What is your" and the latter half of the moon and meaning of life questions. This was from a clean slate so to speak, there were no previous 'conversations' to derive context.