My friend group in college were heavy weed users, and generally all of them drove while high. I remember one saying he enjoyed it because he felt like he was driving a space ship. I asked if he still thought it was safe to drive, given that impression, and he said yes.
If the population of dead drivers with over the limit THC is 40%, and this dramatically exceeds the population average, that would strongly suggest the THC level IS an indicator of either:
1. Impairment from THC, or
2. Worse than average driving and risk management skills in those who use the drug
Do we know what the THC levels are in (1) drivers who didn't die, and (2) the population in general?
It could just be that 40% of the population is over the limit on THC all the time. Unless we can compare this against something else, and we can somehow normalize the comparison for other factors like age, I don't know how we can use the data.
This is a knowable thing, it just needs to be studied (I'm actually surprised it's not been TBH). Give people a standard set of coordination tests and then draw their blood to see what the THC level is.
If we were just interested in outcomes (in an accident or not), we should just be measuring that. But I guess if we can’t measure that, a litmus test is better than nothing.
The expected number seems to be about 20+% (depending on assumptions) so this is higher than expected but not drastically so.
Critically, people are more likely to get in accidents later in the day and after drinking both of which also correlate with relatively recent cannabis consumption.
I would say that anyone who smokes anything (cigarettes, vapes, cannabis, crack) is indicating that they're at best not health conscious and are acting in a nihilistic way. It seems entirely logical that their risk-tolerance and judgement will be accordingly different to the general population whether they're high or not.
It's seat belts. People who die in wrecks are overwhelmingly not wearing seat belts. I would think marijuana users as a group probably have average seat belt usage, but people who don't wear seat belts probably have much higher than average marijuanna usage. Roughy 92% of people wear seat belts. But that 8% of people that don't wear setbelts makes up 50% or more of all fatalities. From my personal experience it seems easy to me to assume that 90% of the people that don't wear seat belts also use marijuanna.
I can't make sense of it mathematically. A statistical distribution fitting these characteristics does not exist.
If non-weeders have an average seat belt wearing, and if weeders also have an average seat belt wearing, then the proportion of weeders inside of the seat belt non-wearing class is just equal to the proportion of weeders inside the whole population.
How are people not wearing seatbelt? I've never seen a car that doesn't make a constant annoying noise if you're not wearing it while driving. Do they mod the car to disable this safety system? That seems too far stretched...
Older cars don't have these systems. Also they are easy to bypass with a dummy buckle. There are counties where seatbelt usage is far less common than the US.
My parents disabled a couple by pulling a fuse or cutting a wire, but a lot of their use of the vehicles was off road at walking speeds. They wore seat belts on the road.
I read comment as "don't resist our egregious power, our business is to keep becoming more powerful by arguments with different persuasive power".
I have to admit, the car safety argument is among the most persuasive, like do you want to get harmed? But in reality the question is not about "harming and nothing more", the question is about growing the egregious power AND caring about the tax payers simultaneously.
The seat belts comment is so apt. We should be looking at the full population of drivers involved in accidents, not just those that went through a windshield.
Restraints play such a pivotal role in crash safety, but not wearing them isn't a meaningful indicator of impairment status.
The people who don't wear seatbelts are in my observation old folks who grew up without them or before using them was mandatory. It's just their habit.
I've almost never seen a person under about age 40 not using a seatbelt.
No. I don't know a lot of people that don't wear seatbelts, but they all smoke weed. All of my friends that died in car wrecks weren't wearing seat belts and would have definitely tested positive for THC.
I don't know any old people that don't wear seatbelts.
The people I do know that don't wear seatbelts also live pretty otherwise high risk lives, drug dealers, strippers, street gang members,etc.
While I do not commonly ride in cars driven by people outside my family, my experience has been quite the opposite: when I do ride in cars with older people, they buckle up as a matter of course, while when I ride with younger people, they are much more likely not to.
Not necessarily, they could both be a comorbidity of some other factor (bad decision making causes both, for instance) but it certainly doesn’t refute it.
> Imagine you could interview thousands of educated individuals from 1913—readers of newspapers, novels, and political treatises—about their views on peace, progress, gender roles, or empire. Not just survey them with preset questions, but engage in open-ended dialogue, probe their assumptions, and explore the boundaries of thought in that moment.
Hell yeah, sold, let’s go…
> We're developing a responsible access framework that makes models available to researchers for scholarly purposes while preventing misuse.
Oh. By “imagine you could interview…” they didn’t mean me.
understand your frustration. i trust you also understand the models have some dark corners that someone could use to misrepresent the goals of our project. if you have ideas on how we could make the models more broadly accessible while avoiding that risk, please do reach out @ history-llms@econ.uzh.ch
So as a black person should I demand that all books written before the civil rights act be destroyed?
The past is messy. But it's the only way to learn anything.
All an LLM does it's take a bunch of existing texts and rebundle them. Like it or not, the existing texts are still there.
I understand an LLM that won't tell me how to do heart surgery. But I can't fear one that might be less enlightened on race issues. So many questions to ask! Hell, it's like talking to older person in real life.
I don't expect a typical 90 year old to be the most progressive person, but they're still worth listening too.
Self preservation is the first law of nature. If you release the model someone will basically say you endorse those views and you risk your funding being cut.
You created Pandora's box and now you're afraid of opening it.
They could add a text box where users have to explicitly type the following words before it lets them interact in any way with the model: "I understand this model was created with old texts so any racial or sexual statements are a byproduct of their time an do not represent in any way the views of the researchers".
That should be more than enough to clear any chance of misunderstanding.
I would claim the public can easily handle something like this, but the media wouldn't be able to resist.
I could easily see a hit piece making its rounds on left leaning media about the AI that re-animates the problematic ideas of the past. "Just look at what it said to my child, "<insert incredibly racist quote coerced out of the LLM here>"!" Rolling stones would probably have a front page piece on it, titled "AI resurrecting racism and misogyny". There would easily be enough there to attract death threats to the developers, if it made its rounds on twitter.
"Platforming ideas" would be the issue that people would have.
i think we (whole section) are just talking past each other - we never said we'll lock it away. it was an announcement of a release, not a release. main purpose for us was getting feedback on the methodological aspects, as we clearly state. i understand you guys just wanted to talk to the thing though.
Of course, I have to assume that you have considered more outcomes than I have. Because, from my five minutes of reflection as a software geek, albeit with a passion for history, I find this the most surprising thing about the whole project.
I suspect restricting access could equally be a comment on modern LLMs in general, rather than the historical material specifically. For example, we must be constantly reminded not to give LLMs a level of credibility that their hallucinations would have us believe.
But I'm fascinated by the possibility that somehow resurrecting lost voices might give an unholy agency to minds and their supporting worldviews that are so anachronistic that hearing them speak again might stir long-banished evils. I'm being lyrical for dramatic affect!
I would make one serious point though, that do I have the credentials to express. The conversation may have died down, but there is still a huge question mark over, if not the legality, but certainly the ethics of restricting access to, and profiting from, public domain knowledge. I don't wish to suggest a side to take here, just to point out that the lack of conversation should not be taken to mean that the matter is settled.
They aren't afraid of hallucinations. Their first example is a hallucination, an imaginary biography of a Hitler who never lived.
Their concern can't be understood without a deep understanding of the far left wing mind. Leftists believe people are so infinitely malleable that merely being exposed to a few words of conservative thought could instantly "convert" someone into a mortal enemy of their ideology for life. It's therefore of paramount importance to ensure nobody is ever exposed to such words unless they are known to be extremely far left already, after intensive mental preparation, and ideally not at all.
That's why leftist spaces like universities insist on trigger warnings on Shakespeare's plays, why they're deadly places for conservatives to give speeches, why the sample answers from the LLM are hidden behind a dropdown and marked as sensitive, and why they waste lots of money training an LLM that they're terrified of letting anyone actually use. They intuit that it's a dangerous mind bomb because if anyone could hear old fashioned/conservative thought, it would change political outcomes in the real world today.
Anyone who is that terrified of historical documents really shouldn't be working in history at all, but it's academia so what do you expect? They shouldn't be allowed to waste money like this.
You know, I actually sympathize with the opinion that people should be expected and assumed to be able to resist attempts to convince them of being nazis.
The problem with it is, it already happened at least once. We know how it happened. Unchecked narratives about minorities or foreigners is a significant part of why the 20th century happened to Europe, and it’s a significant part of why colonialism and slavery happened to other places.
Studying history better would be a good start. The Nazis came to power because they were a far left party and the population in that era thought socialism was a great idea. Hitler himself remarked many times that his movement was left wing and socialist. I expect that if you asked the LLM trained on pre-1940s text, it would have no difficulty in explaining that.
By studying history better, people wouldn't draw the wrong conclusions about what caused it. Watch out for left wing radicals promoting socialism-with-genetic-characteristics.
If by “better” you mean “worse”, you can come to this conclusion, but nazism was absolutely never a socialist project. Socialists and nazis were enemies from the start.
Both ideologically and historically the two ideologies are complete opposites. There is no socialist “root” to nazi ideology - at all.
They said it plainly ("dark corners that someone could use to misrepresent the goals of our project"): they just don't want to see their project in headlines about "Researchers create racist LLM!".
They already represented the goals of their project clearly, and gave examples of outputs. Anyone can already misrepresent it. That isn't their true concern.
There's no such risk so you're not going to get any sensible ideas in response to this question. The goals of the project are history, you already made that clear. There's nothing more that needs to be done.
We all get that academics now exist in some kind of dystopian horror where they can get transitively blamed for the existence of anyone to the right of Lenin, but bear in mind:
1. The people who might try to cancel you are idiots unworthy of your respect, because if they're against this project, they're against the study of history in its entirety.
2. They will scream at you anyway no matter what you do.
3. You used (Swiss) taxpayer funds to develop these models. There is no moral justification for withholding from the public what they worked to pay for.
You already slathered your README with disclaimers even though you didn't even release the model at all, just showed a few examples of what it said - none of which are in any way surprising. That is far more than enough. Just release the models and if anyone complains, politely tell them to go complain to the users.
I'm not sure I do. It feels like someone might for example have compiled a full library of books, newspapers and other writing from that era, only to then limit access to that library, doing the exact censorship I imagine the project was started to alleviate.
Now were it limited in access to ask money to compensate for the time and money spent compiling the library (or training the model), sure, I'd somewhat understand. Not agree but understand.
Now it just feels like you want to prevent your model name being associated with the one guy who might use it to create a racist slur Twitter bot. There's plenty of models for that already. At least the societal balance of a model like this would also have enough weight on the positive side to be net positive.
Yet your project relies on letting an llm synthesize historical documents and presenting itself as some sort of expert from the time? You are aware of the hallucination rates surely but don't care whether the information your university presents is accurate or are you going to monitor all output from your llm?
A disclaimer on the site that you are not bigoted or genocidal, and that worldviews from the 1913 era were much different than today and don't necessarily reflect your project.
Movie studios have done that for years with old movies. TCM still shows Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind.
Edit: I saw further down that you've already done this! What more is there to do?
i think it's fine, thank these people for coming up with the idea and people are going to start doing this in their basement then releasing it to huggingface
You "misuse" it by using it to get at truth and more importantly historical contradictions and inconsistencies. It's the same reason catholic church kept the bible from the masses by keeping it in latin. The same reason printing press was controlled. Many of the historical "truths" we are told are nonsense at best or twisted to fit an agenda at worst.
What do these people fear the most? That the "truth" they been pushing is a lie.
To get a single knowledge-cutoff they spent 16.5h wall-clock hours on a cluster of 128 NVIDIA GH200 GPUs (or 2100 GPU-hours), plus some minor amount of time for finetuning. The prerelease_notes.md in the repo is a great description on how one would achieve that
While I know there's going to be a lot of complications in this, given a quick search it seems like these GPUs are ~$2/hr, so $4000-4500 if you don't just have access to a cluster. I don't know how important the cluster is here, whether you need some minimal number of those for the training (and it would take more than 128x longer or not be possible on a single machine) or if a cluster of 128 GPUs is a bunch less efficient but faster. A 4B model feels like it'd be fine on one to two of those GPUs?
Also of course this is for one training run, if you need to experiment you'd need to do that more.
> Models are tasked with running a simulated vending machine business over a year and scored on their bank account balance at the end.
The article being discussed here is about how AI couldn't run a real world vending machine. There was no issue in the components that would be in a standard simulation.
To be fair, most vending machine operators do not allow suggestions from customers on what products to stock, let alone extensive ongoing and intentional adversarial psychological manipulation and deception.
If it had just made stocking decisions autonomously and based changes in strategy on what products were bought most, it wouldn't have any of the issues reported.
It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet,
i cant find the link, but there was a post about how to "be nice" and it was a revelation to a worrying amount of "geniuses" on here. bare in mind the sum total of the advice was "be nice, dont be rude"
> It's entirely possible that this is the smartest place on the internet, but also often dumb. In fact, it seems likely. More of an indictment of the rest of the places on the internet.
Almost every (non-troll) online community that is relatively peaceful and has some semblance of moderation to remove flamewars thinks of itself as "the best community". Usually as compared to reddit, though if it's on reddit they will compare themselves to some other (hated) sub.
It's a fact of the internet. Every online community thinks of itself as the smartest, more thoughtful, more civilized. HN is no exception.
It goes without saying HN is not the smartest or more thoughtful online community. It's just... ok. Not the worst, not the best. Certainly NOT the place with the smartest people, though some smart people frequent it. As a regular, you can soon figure out HN's unspoken rules, blindspots, and areas where the group opinion is more likely to be accurate.
No need, because whether an online community is more thoughtful or smarter than another is very subjective. Almost by definition, HN is not it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and all that. Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
There are communities I like better, which are smarter and more thoughtful, but I've no desire to argue with you.
Which disparaging remarks? I just claimed HN is ok/average, not "the smartest place on the internet", and that it's typical of online communities to consider themselves "the best".
The unsubstantiated claim that "HN is the smartest place on the internet" is an extraordinary claim requiring extraordinary evidence, which wasn't provided.
> Of course, by internet law, HN (or a subset of its members) considers itself to be the smartest, more thoughtful online community.
I would call that disparaging.
If we're going to be pedantic, the post you initially quoted said "it's entirely possible" and "it seems likely." That's not a claim, that's a suggestion that invites a substantive counter-argument. Just saying "uh no, it's obviously not" is not substantive.
"It goes without saying HN is not the smartest" is more of a claim.
It really should not be that difficult to actually attempt to make an argument rather than point out that someone else's is probabilistically not totally factually correct. It's just bad faith, pure negation. You're defending the lack of substance in your argument by saying someone else's argument lacked substance. Put something forth yourself.
I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
Well, to be fair the comment that sparked this subtree asserted (maybe in jest? I hope!):
> It's a website with the smartest people in the world. The level of conversations here are unrivaled in internet communities.
Surely that HN is without question NOT the "unrivaled" website "with the smartest people in the world" should feel neither disparaging nor a surprise to you?
By the way, you got me wrong: I'm not really making a probabilistic argument. I genuinely don't think HN is populated by the smartest people on the internet. Nothing I've read here, in many years of being a regular, has led me to believe people here are anything other than average internet nerds/hackers/entrepreneurs. Maybe slightly above average? There's certainly interesting conversation to be had here, but why would I think HN has the smartest people?
> I'm not just trying to debate here, I am genuinely curious to hear about what other communities people find "smarter and more thoughtful." If they can't even be named then yes I am going to call that empty posturing.
I've zero interest in going down the route of exchanging subjective opinions with you about what is or isn't smart, nothing good can come out of it. I will point out many "rationalist" communities do believe themselves to be smarter than HN (do I agree with them? Nope. But that's not the point, is it? The point is that most serious online communities will tend to believe themselves better, and HN is no exception).
I'm sorry you feel this is "empty posturing". Maybe I just don't fit with the smartest people on the internet :(
Management can’t kill a company that dominates a two-sided market no matter how hard it tries —- this phenomena needs a catchy name, the ‘zombie dillemma’ isn’t quite good enough.
Yep. There are some implicit cultural expectations around "best possible life" which vary from country to country, but it's not quite as much a "is the word in your local language we've rendered as happy closer in meaning to satisfied or ecstatic?" question, and it's also less about short term emotions on the day of the survey and much more about satisfaction with life opportunities, which is generally more relevant for international and longitudinal comparisons...
I’m confused. Why are you alleging a link between the first few bullet points? I'm not saying there's no link, but it certainly doesn't seem obvious without some substantiation.
The pro Israel lobby in America is very powerful. Once they saw a threat to their interests (Netanyahu’s 8th front) they exercised this power to quickly achieve a major goal.
Hopefully not for long. America will be freed from this vermin. Those that starve and rape children like the Israel-is do, hide it by banning journalists from ghaza, and censor our citizens do not deserve to be part of the west.
Looks really healthy to me. It’s unhealthy when a partner can’t recognize that they actually were at fault and try to change, but instead needs every fight to resolve with “we were both wrong”.
You sound like a terrific Significant Other: willing to look inwards to see how you contributed to the problems the couple is having, and working to improve in the future.
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