Meta's Head of AI Has Some Interesting Beliefs About Dominance and Submission | Hacker News Reader

Meta's Head of AI Has Some Interesting Beliefs About Dominance and Submission

futurism.com

17 pointsandsoitis26 comments

I assume LeCun is arguing that the human desire for hierarchy is innate, but there is not one version of the hierarchy that is ‘natural’ (e.g. no individual or group is predestined to a higher or lower position in the hierarchies).

Yes?

Basically LeCun didn’t use the word “natural”, he just described that hierarchy exists (a descriptive statement). The other guy plugs in the word “natural”, and claims that LeCun is believing in a “natural” hierarchy (a prescriptive statement).

The article is dense, and not in a good way. “Evolution-ordained” blah blah blah, really?

Of course. But people will only read the headline.

Sounds like that to me too.

One the main things Jordan Peterson talks about is hierarchy. So to be welcomed by the center-left and others, one should probably steer clear of all discussion of hierarchy--other than to say it's bad, and a direct result of racism, sexism, bigotry or any of the other isms Ferris was uninterested in.

hierarchies and/or leaders exist because sometimes decision need to be made without debate.

What a grotesque smear disguised as news. This article is pretty clearly trying to say that “the head of AI at Meta” is a deviant freak without actually saying that.

Weird take, my dude. The article doesn't have anything to do with dominance and submission as a sexual kink (except perhaps as a tongue in cheek joke). Besides, like no one cares about that shit anymore and it hardly even constitutes deviant behavior in the contemporary world.

No. The article is pretty forthright in describing a relatively straightforward view on the part of LeCun that nature is primarily about dominance and submission and that human culture has inherited that structure as an inevitability. I'd argue that this is _at least_ simple minded and somewhat short changes both nature and culture.

Given that AI is supposed to change the face of the world in the next few decades, I'd prefer if its luminaries weren't so simpleminded.

"Has Some Interesting Beliefs" is being used as understatement.

"kept things extremely normal" is commonly used sarcasm.

The article ends with the author saying they're puzzled by LeCun's posts, and asking if the reader is too.

I do think the article definitely has a point of view. LeCun's beliefs about human society and nature aren't really that unusual and so the tone of the article is arguably a little hyperbolic. But I think its a pretty far cry from a pure character assassination.

It’s a pure character assassination because you’d never write this about someone you weren’t already willing to write a hit piece about.

I just don't see it. From my point of view LeCun's opinion is 1) newsworthy since he is a luminary and 2) worthy of critique in light of both the advancements in AI recently, their implications for society, and the relative superficiality of his comments.

I think we, as readers, should cultivate a little endurance for this kind of work. Yes, there is an opinion here, and yes, its expressed in a little bit of a fun way, but its a stretch indeed to think this is some kind of nefarious hit piece.

I think endurance is reasonable as a reader, but I also think this sort of discourse is of no value to anyone but the writer, and certainly not to us.

It’s a cool ranch dorito of an article. It tastes moderately good, has no real content, and leaves you a little worse off for consuming it.

The article is just describing what happened. It isn't denouncing Lecun, just describing the push back and response he got from other people.

Click bait sadly. Humans can have an innate need for hierarchy without there having to be a natural hierarchy among humans.

Why can’t iOS safari block websites more easily. Like right from the browser easy.

I guess you can read something without it needing to be “blocked”, if you don’t like the contents. If it’s a crap article, people will work it out.

It wasn't a smart tweet, but having recently run down the rabbit hole of Kripke and modal logic, a discourse on power that is more sophisticated than mere 20th century criticism seems as close as anything to a philosophical emergency right now.

If I hire an outsourced team, then mediate my interactions with them using slack and email, does it matter whether there is a person on either side of that conversation? Managing people means to extract value from their work, and a bot that watches a line (like the rate of paperclip production), and uses various tools to increase that line by supervising worker agents - this can absolutely be done by an expert system. Managing essentially reduces to solving optimization problems to sustain an equillibrium among factors and their tensions that produces value, so it's not intrinsically creative, but it's smart and it scales well. If you were working for a machine or not, how would you know, and if you were indifferent to that fact, does it make the machine intelligent? It's sort of a Black Mirror version of a Turing test thought experiment. Does it matter whether the leash on your collar is held by a person or a robot?

Anyway, I'm still less worried about super intelligent programs than I am about the low cunning of mediocre minds.

I wonder if Yann is aware of the fact that many, many leaders maintain dominance over groups stronger than them by sowing division among those groups.

Pretty obvious thing to miss, don't you think?

Behavioral modernity happened over 40,000 years ago, and probably over 50,000 years ago. We can see Chauvet cave paintings, Venus figurines and other evidence of behavioral modernity. The whole world of art-creating humans lived in non-hierarchical hunter gather bands until 10,000 years ago. Deep in the Amazon some still live like this, although a few centuries back many in North America and much of the world lived like this. Even a few hundred kilometers north of Stockholm. The initial hierarchical structures 10,000 years ago only covered a limited area.

If hierarchy and class division is an innate biological thing, why did humans not live like this through most of biological modernity?

There would have been social hierarchies within those hunter gatherer bands.

What is the hierarchy in a migratory 50 person hunter gather band? Who is the king or heir? There is no class system and there is no surplus produced, because there is mo reason to produce surplus.

Why exactly would an AI have a desire to submit but not dominate? It would be either both or neither.

I assume he means that models will be fine-tuned (or otherwise steered) by developers to have submissive behavior.

AI = Ennui

Lecun is high on the list of people in AI that are certain to be cancelled for not submitting to mainstream narrative. Average ETA ~5months for him. Sutskever is another one i suspect is also in the list, and possibly Mostaque

Woke people love kink!

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