07mk
9hr ago
Given the rate at which things are going, it seems likely that whatever will be done about academia won't actually be done until 2040 at the earliest. The demand for medical and engineering research seems likely to be high enough such that, with the advent of AI and the self-discrediting of academia over the next 14 years, that lots of medical and engineering research will happen in non-academic institutions, allowing for collateral damage to be minimized as the research can still continue at those places. Having that research be done through proprietary or intellectual-property-protected means is probably the biggest downside.
There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.
07mk
10hr ago
"Cosplay is not Consent" was a common phrase in cons since at least early 2010s, which was around when I was going to cons. As best as I can tell, like many things happening around harassment around that time, it seemed that the sign wasn't necessary, but was rather deemed so by people who found it useful to do so.
07mk
10hr ago
How do you create the former without the risk of the latter? And if the latter does eventuate, how do you remove it without making the tower once again vulnerable to fads and markets?
This is sufficiently abstracted away as to make it pretty much impossible to make meaningful answers to these questions, but one core that's missing is academia being tied to things that are real. Whether you call that "empiricism" or "truth" or "fact" or "science" or whatever, this connection is fundamental to the value that academia offers society/humanity/civilization/etc., and the current state of academia is the result of academics and their leaders for at least the past few decades taking a machete to that connection with abandon.
It's hard to say what controls could have been put in place and how they could have been enforced to make sure the ivory tower's fads don't turn against being tied to reality. But I believe that any way of saving the ivory tower from its many self-inflicted wounds (or hypothetical ways in which they wouldn't have inflicted them on themselves in the past) would need heavy emphasis on enforcing this, since without that connection, the ivory tower provides almost no value to society beyond being a daycare for young adults.
07mk
5d ago
... can you please pick a principled position? You might learn something, if you actually made a single falsifiable claim and tried to honestly discuss it, rather than throwing out a general shitstorm of "my outgroup is bad" without ever committing to a single coherent position.
The purpose of a system is what it does. Or, to speak plainly, please do not feed the trolls. Or, to speak even more plainly, don't wrestle a pig in the mud; you both get dirty, and the pig enjoys it.
07mk
5d ago
Thanks, the shift from 2013-2014 to 2023-2024 does indicate that young adults are being more disciplined in terms of eating out compared to to 10 years ago. To be fair, the whole "Avocado toast" argument is like 10 years old as well, so the same sort of phenomenon could have been happening 10 years ago. But it certainly seems that gen Zs do have grounds to complain to millennials that their relative financial struggles aren't due to relative food irresponsibility.
And if we presume 0-24 is mostly reflective of 18-24, that's actually a really striking outlier. Perhaps the youngest adults have trouble adapting to being responsible for their own food and make large mistakes in their first 6 years which they learn from fairly quickly.
07mk
5d ago
It's hard to get much out of one snapshot like this compared to, say, comparing this against the stats from 2013-2014 and shifting the age groups by 1. 0-24 is one I'd like to see broken up further, since that includes every child but also people up to 6 years into adulthood.
It's certainly interesting that eating out as a proportion of eating in general keeps going down almost monotonically as the age group goes up. I can see the point that older people tend to spend less time socializing at bars and restaurants and more time at their homes which also tend to be more comfortable. But also, older people tend to be more wealthy, and restaurant food is much more expensive than home-cooked ones, and so it's not a priori obvious that this is the force that would have won out.
It's also almost shocking to me that a whopping 50% of 25-34 and pretty close to it of 35-44 food-eating is done away from home. That's likely around 10 meals a week, which is 2x per weekday. Lunch at work accounting for 5 of those makes sense, and then perhaps another 2-3 for an occasional dinner, but the median or mean person in these age groups hitting 5+ extra dinners/breakfasts/brunches (on top of assuming eating lunch at work all 5 days) when, among adults, these are likely the lowest-paid, least-wealthy groups (discounting the child-including 0-24 for now) is somewhat surprising to me. It indicates to me that there's a lot of fat to be cut (no pun intended) in a median/mean 25-44 year-old's food budget.
07mk
5d ago
Then all the alignment talk is a dead-end or red herring. "Make sure AI shares our values" means what, precisely, if it's "this thing is as conscious as a brick and while we can write pretty scripts to make it pretend it's a real boyfriend who loves you for your wild, daring, passionate, unconventional self it's just a talking doll"?
It means something like, "make sure that when it pretends it's a real boyfriend or when it's used to code your next iPhone app or when it's used to design new scientific experiments or etc., it behaves in a way that is consistent with something that shares our values." I'm not sure what the "conscious as a brick" has to do with this; whether or not AI is conscious or has free will or agency are very interesting questions, but they're mostly irrelevant to issues of AI alignment, which has to do with AI behavior.
"Let's code the brick so clever or dumb but devious people can't talk it into writing 'how-to' instructions for a global plague" is more honest about aims but less sexy than "let's teach our successor intelligent species to cherish our timeless human values so it will love and honour us as its parents" which is what the current alignment chat sounds like to me.
If the latter is what the alignment chat sounds like, I think it must be a result of manipulation on the part of people who expose the chat to you. I've seen pretty much no talk in AI alignment that could reasonably be paraphrased as anything like that.
I have no problems with "it's dumb but dangerous". I have a whole skip full of problems with people going on about it as if it will become super-intelligent and then agentic and then develop its own aims.
But it's not dumb and dangerous; it's (definitionally) generally intelligent and dangerous. And specifically dangerous because it's not dumb and is generally intelligent. Now, whether AGI will lead to ASI and how likely that is is an empirical question, though I'm personally convinced by arguments that it's pretty darn likely. But whether the AI is generally intelligent or superintelligent, that has nothing to do with whether or not it's agentic or develops its own aims.
The point is that a tool (or, for that matter, anything, including biological organisms) need not have agency or have aims or goals of its own or anything that we would characterize as "free will" or "consciousness" or "sentience" to do things that detrimental to humanity, and the fact that the tool is generally intelligent in this case means that we currently lack a way to have meaningful level of confidence that the behavior of the tool will be within the bounds of what the tool-user considers reasonable bounds. When dealing with current generally intelligent things - i.e. other humans - we have so many things in common with them - certainly physically and biologically and most likely culturally as well - that we don't have to explicitly spell out every little thing, and we can make fairly reliable predictions about how things we spell out to them will get translated to action. We lack such things for AI as of yet, and so we lack an intuition or a particularly reliable way to figure out how AIs will fail or misunderstand our intent.
The danger is not the machine, it's the people who set it up in such a way that it can then wander off down byways of "this isn't what I meant when I told you to do this" without it needing to understand anything in any meaningful way, and that's the trouble we're already seeing with "the thing is thinking in ways we don't understand and can't follow and wandering off on its own byways" reports.
Well yes, ultimately the people who created the tools and/or wield the tools are responsible, not the tools themselves. Guns don't kill people (but they sure help), I do. The problem is that the people who create, manage, use, etc. the tools lack the capability to set it up in such a way that we can be confident that it won't wander off away and run KillAllHumans.exe without letting anyone know. The easy solution that presents itself is to just not use the tool if you can't set it up with that level of safety. One major problem is that AI is so darn useful that it's hard to get the political will to suppress the supply from providing to the demand. The other big problem is that we lack en enforcement mechanism to make sure that no one sets up this tool, and as such, entities that choose to set up and use the tool anyway could gain power over us and make our lives hellish before all our lives are snuffed out by the un-aligned ASI.
This is the dilemma that's being discussed and debated about right now in the AI alignment chatting.
07mk
5d ago
If somebody believed that there would be terrible consequences for the human race unless everyone took a 50g zinc tablet, could they be anything but a traveling zinc salesman, or a fellow, uh, traveler?
I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, becoming a zinc salesman is costly evidence that they truly believe that zinc will sell like hotcakes in the future, due to everyone wanting to avoid those terrible consequences. Getting any work in the zinc industry or just investing lots of money into it would also serve the same role.
However, it's hard to figure out, even by the person himself, if their belief of the value of zinc tablets was what led them to become a zinc salesman or if their desire to become rich, possibly by becoming a successful zinc salesman, was what led them to believe in the value of zinc tablets.
On the other hand, everyone knows that a zinc salesman is not credible when it comes to informing you about the value of taking zinc; as such someone who believes that it's his ethical duty to convince everyone to take zinc every day, lest there be some terrible consequences for the human race, would understand that becoming a zinc salesman would reduce his capability to fulfill his ethical duty. And, in fact, he may be best served doing the opposite: credibly make un-hedged bets against the zinc industry; by doing this, he proves to anyone willing to pay attention that he considers every human taking zinc every day to be of such great importance that he will consider his own personal bankruptcy a worthy cost to pay for it. Or that he believes that mass zinc-taking will be proven to be such a great benefit/prevention of harm to humanity that there will be enough grateful humans who will fund his lifestyle after he goes bankrupt.
However, short positions on zinc also provides a costly signal that he believes that zinc sales will go down in the future, which can reasonably look like it reflects a lack of belief in the actual value of zinc.
07mk
5d ago
First thing is that's not even true, a MLB player can be sold against his will to another team. It happens all the time, and it not possible for him to refuse.
This isn't true, though. MLB players can choose to have no-trade clauses in their contracts with their teams. An MLB player who "can't refuse" a trade is an MLB player who already consented to being "sold" to another team by his choice to sign the employment contract that didn't include the proper no-trade clauses that would have given him the right to refuse.
07mk
5d ago
And the dreams/fears seem to revolve around "We will create super-intelligence, and then the thing magically becomes alive just like us, so just like us it will have goals and aims of its own, and we have to make sure it is well-instructed in How To Be Nice Liberal and then it can take care of us like pampered pedigree cats as it colonises the known universe".
I think the talk about "becoming alive" or "having goals and aims of its own" doesn't reflect the fears/concerns of Anthropic or of anyone who thinks like Anthropic with respect to fearing an AI apocalypse. The concern is that super-intelligence need not be alive nor have any goals or aims of its own to be a humanity-ending danger. Because almost any task an intelligence is handed could be divided into sub-tasks, and we as only human-level intelligent beings can't be expected to reliably predict what a superhuman-level intelligence will choose in terms of its sub-tasks, we have no way of knowing that human extinction isn't one of the side-effects of one of the sub-tasks an ASI uses as a step to accomplish whatever task it was handed. Humans have biological limitations as well as intelligence that is both human-like as well as human-level, which makes it so that humans that would make similarly apocalyptic decisions usually get filtered out before they can get enough power to implement them. The concern is that an ASI, lacking such limitations as humans, as well as having an intelligence that's both vastly greater than that of humans and vastly different to that of humans in ways that we can barely understand, wouldn't get filtered out before it can implement apocalypse, all without being alive or following anything that could be considered a goal or will of its own.
07mk
11d ago
A Vtuber I watch who was born after HL1 played HL1 for the first time this year, and she liked it enough that she went right into HL2 and then the episodes, despite not being a big singleplayer FPS person. It's nice to see affirmation that the classics really are that good sometimes.
07mk
12d ago
Per a quick Grok, 90-95% of ever-married Americans have premarital sex. The median partner count is about six for a 42 year old man. That's six rolls of the dice, and if you roll under 5 on a d20 you can't ever run for office. And you can't really know how you rolled until you've already staked your whole life and fortune and reputation on the run.
Perhaps it's better that the electoral system filters out unlucky people. Then again, this is probably a very lossy and inefficient way of filtering such people out; a more direct approach would be to just make every candidate play one round of Russian Roulette together.
But also, it might not be better for you if your elected representative has better luck. Him having good luck could mean that him and everyone around him avoid the bullet, or it could also mean that he avoids the bullets while everyone else around him doesn't. So perhaps wed want him to be on the lucky end of the spectrum but not too much luckier than the people he's representing.
07mk
12d ago
Or is the idea: "YOLO, just deorbit it, and launch a new one"?
Gosh, I hope so. Imagine if sending objects into orbit became so cheap that just launching a new datacenter took roughly the equivalent amount of money and effort as shutting down a terrestrial server, fixing/replacing the broken part, and then turning it back on. By that point, the Futurama joke about landing on the Moon in less time than it takes to count down from 10 could be real. But that was the year 3,000, which still leaves a large range of time between now and then when rocketry will get that good.
07mk
12d ago
I don't know the numbers, but I suspect that even getting rid of all the space launches in the world combined wouldn't make a significant-enough dent in slowing/stopping anthropogenic global warming to be noticeable. And given how well attempting to stop AGW through reduction in carbon emissions have gone in the past 2+ decades when it was being tried very seriously, I'm skeptical that it's a useful avenue of attack. I also suspect that the technologies we will need to make human society continue to prosper given the global warming would likely be easier to reach thanks to technological innovations created for the purpose of spaceflight. E.g. if geoengineering turns out to be required, I can't imagine having better/cheaper rockets around to disperse chemicals or to monitor large swathes of the atmosphere wouldn't be helpful.
I also think that whatever governmental or other institutions would be required to coerce SpaceX engineers (and/or finance bros) to either being fruitful and multiplying or devoting engineering expertise to technologies deemed by you to be more socially useful than what they're doing now would destroy so much prosperity and trust in institutions that it would strongly reduce both the likelihoods of human survival beyond expansion of the sun and institutions that live for billions of years. If these institutions are able to be so effective at being authoritarian and tyrannical that no one can overthrow them or create meaningful alternatives for billions of years, that might work, but running an organization with that much control and competence seems likely a lot more - like, orders of orders of magnitude more - difficult than rocket science.
So no, I don't think these things are in conflict at all. For there to be a meaningful tradeoff, there needs to be an actual credible way to redirect effort in one scenario to effort in the other scenario without there being so much loss due to friction or other reasons as to negate any gains, and I don't see that either with spaceflight vs preventing/mitigating the harms of AGW or spaceflight vs eugenics (or just preventing population collapse).
07mk
12d ago
How about we work on making those things actually sustainable over the long term before we worry about interplanetary colonization.
I think we can do both, and that the latter doesn't substantially trade off the former. Perhaps if SpaceX, Blue Origin, NASA, and all other spaceflight-related organizations liquidated their spaceflight-related departments today and devoted all the proceeds into some effort to make our generic organizations last billions of years, we would have better expected value of having the capability of escaping the Earth when we need it (because the institutions standing up for billions of years would better allow for the technological and engineering progress). But I'm skeptical of that at all, and, even if it were the case, I'm even more skeptical that the difference would be significant.
07mk
12d ago
But why am I wasting my time here? You talk casually of time and multiverse travel. I politely conclude that you are not actually serious about this topic.
I'd contend that casually dismissing such things or billion-year timescales is proof of unseriousness. You're treating the survival of humanity as if it's some sort of fantastical concept not worth thinking about merely because it would happen very far in the future and also require immense, scifi/fantasy-level technology to prevent. When, in fact, neither of those makes the reality of that coming extinction any less real or any more fantastical. When the challenges that reality hands us is so extreme as to sound fantastical, humanity better be ready to step up with technology that's so extreme as to sound fantastical, or else humanity won't be around any more.
Yes, most likely, making a self-sufficient colony on the sea floor or Antarctica or some other Earth-based location as a prototype makes perfect sense, but the need to consistently make a profit is where the idea becomes decoupled from reality. Because the profit potential in any Earth-based colony will necessarily be missing the one BIG part of any space-based colony; the insurance against there being no economy at all due to there being no humans (or human-equivalent beings) at all to engage in economic activity.
If you want to say that now, instead of the future, is not the right time to invest lots of money into R&D into developing technology to insure humanity against the risks of relying on one planet for survival, then there's a good argument you can make there, though most likely I'd also disagree with such an argument. But that's a different argument than that physics prevents humanity from meaningfully populating space or that there's no economic sense in populating space.
Those seem like engineering constraints, but also, the economic constraint seems obviously wrong. Economics can only exist when there are people or other equivalent beings around to engage in it. We know with pretty high confidence that the Earth won't be habitable by any non-scifi non-fantasy living being within a few billion years due to the expansion of the Sun. So, from an economics standpoint, there's a great incentive to expand our population to space. It just seems like a sufficiently long-enough timeline that very few, if any, people with power and resources want to devote much of those into making it happen. And there's a game theory-type problem where no one wants to be the one to sacrifice all the money and time into the R&D only to have everyone else free-riding off their work.
Technologically, almost surely building a self-sufficient base on the sea floor would be easier than doing so on the Moon or Mars, but the latter acts as insurance in a way that a sea floor basis can't. Obviously the Sun making the Earth uninhabitable would likely have similar affects on the Moon and Mars, but it still decouples it somewhat, and also it lowers the risk for other planet-wide disasters. In the long run, for the survival of humanity, perhaps instead of capitalism, we'll need to invent a new system of economics that somehow provides a profit incentive to people for doing research and development into space engineering (and possibly time and multiverse travel, if those actually turn out to be possible in any meaningful sense - in the really long run, who knows how much universe in the future there actually is for humanity to expand to?).
07mk
13d ago
But I am a little confused why people hold up E33 as why the FF7Rs are mot good enough, especially since there is universal agreement that the FF7 combat, especially Rebirth, is great.
There's nowhere near universal agreement on that. I didn't play E33, but from the criticisms that I've seen, it's that E33 decided to keep the traditional turn-based RPG approach while adding the parry system to it, which proved that it was possible to make a turn-based RPG whose gameplay appealed to people. Which was in contrast to Square Enix's apparent approach with FF7R which was declaring that turn-based RPG systems like that of the original FF7 were dead and creating a real-time system that had aspects of the turn-based system stapled on. As someone who never enjoyed the original FF7 combat system - or any turn-based RPG - when I was playing FF7R, I often found myself wishing they'd just done that, since what they actually produced was the worst of both worlds, something that was unsatisfying in its real-time controls due to the reliance on ATB, while losing almost none of what made turn-based combat unfun with the heavy reliance on stats and gear/tactics.
07mk
14d ago
The funnest fact I know: Famously, "Si" is "yes" in Spanish and "Oui" is "yes" in French. But "Si" also means "yes" in French: "yes, in a no kind of way."
One of my favorite parts of Korean (and probably all East Asian languages) compared to the western ones is that yes means yes and no means no, and the listener is expected to do the job of figuring out the proper negative multiplying. So, if Bob didn't get the TV and decides to be honest, when Alice asks him "You didn't get the TV?" he just says, "Yes [I didn't]," not "No [I didn't]" like an American and not "Yes (special) [I didn't]" like a Frenchman. Because of course a positive word used to answer a question with a negative should imply affirming the negative, and having the rule be that just because the answer affirms a negative, the word that's used should be the negative one makes things needlessly confusing.
My pet theory is that a lot of people slot "negative" and "positive" into two wide swathes of things, such that using a negative word just places something into that "negative" swath, instead of seeing those things as modifiers, such that using a negative word causes the original thing to be negated, possibly to a positive state. And so the former types of people experience dissonance at double negatives or more, especially when using a positive word affirms an explicitly stated negative statement (all positive terms can affirm another negative statement, of course, but the fact that these words were actually spoken out loud and in recent proximity seem to be important parts of what causes the dissonance).
07mk
19d ago
One of the things I dislike about that sort of behavior here is that most discussion about things relating to status/victimhood tends to be completely suppressed in generic discussion settings by use of shaming and other status games. Being concerned about low status people who aren't part of the list that's been pre-approved by high-status people is, in itself, low status, and so the lowest status people who can't get on that list get no honest open discussion about their suffering. I'd prefer that The Motte (and also everywhere, but I place that wish in the same category of wishes I have for curing world hunger through feeding everyone unicorn farts) be one place where there could be some honest open discussion about that. But it inevitably attracts people who ostentatiously dismiss it only as concerns of those LOSERS, and YOU aren't a LOSER, ARE YOU? No, if you were a WINNER like ME, you'd just call the LOSERS LOSERS and move on, so why are you discussing it?
07mk
19d ago
The issue is that the "in discourse" is a load-bearing portion of what makes the heckler's veto negative. Because discourse is just consenting people talking, rather than imposing their coercive force on others. It makes sense that there are other standards when coercion is involved, and certainly perfection ought never be the standard. I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
07mk
19d ago
The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.
I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.
Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.
07mk
19d ago
I'm not sure what this has to do with the heckler's veto, which has to do with a 3rd party preventing 1 party from communicating to another consenting party by physically impeding the communication. This seems more akin to a tyranny of the majority kind of thing, which is also heavily misused (since, in a democracy, a majority must be tyrannical sometimes, almost definitionally) and I'm not sure really describes this situation accurately either, though it's more fitting.
07mk
19d ago
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships. As if there were some 3rd party judge or jury observing the proceedings who everyone is trying to convince, rather than the reality that it's just the other person or people who you need to convince. You can't rules-lawyer your way into someone apologizing to you, forgiving you, being grateful to you, liking you, liking someone else, disliking someone else, etc. You need to actually understand what it would take to convince that specific person and do what it takes to do it, including sacrificing values you might hold sacred, if that's what it takes. Or just understand that you can't do the convincing and stop wasting everyone's time and energy.
Though maybe that's my secular atheistic upbringing speaking, and in extremely religious societies where everyone follows the same religion, this rules-lawyering is both effective and healthy. Maybe that's why this tendency to rules-lawyer is so common; our brains might have evolved to survive in extremely religious societies where everyone can appeal to some god or another to convince others.
That's an optimistic view, which I've had for about 4-5 years, but I'm growing more concerned that a more pessimistic view would be correct. I have a baked-in assumption that GPUs will keep getting cheaper and faster, to the extent that it's likely just a matter of time before any loser can open a cereal box and get a random toy as a gift that has more compute than necessary to store and run Mythos/Fable, orders of magnitude faster than it is possible for Anthropic executives to run on their private instances right now. In such a future, obviously Mythos-level LLMs can't realistically have their access gated, not unless we believe that Anthropic has some "secret sauce" that makes replicating or even emulating their models impossible without it (which may be the case, but I don't think it is). So free or at least open/easy access to AIs at least as intelligent as Fable seems likely to become near ubiquitous, like how electronic light used to be mind-blowing less than 2 centuries ago but is such a bore now that the average person probably carries like 3 electronic things that make light as a side-effect while barely noticing.
But also, in such a world, presumably
Anthropic'sSpaceX's data centers that Anthropic rents will be that much more powerful, where, e.g. they'll run AI models that are so much more intelligent than Mythos that only having access to Mythos compared to what you could get for paying $100/month to Anthropic for the rest of your life is like choosing to be Forrest Gump-level intelligence in a world where paying a monthly subscription gets you access to Albert Einstein-level intelligence. If the relative gap is large enough, then the absolute increase in access to intelligence to everyone might be swamped out due to loss in positional status.How the political/culture/ideological/religious wars that will be fought around inequality in access to artificial intelligence should be interesting to see, in comparison to the ones fought around inequality in access to money or around inequality in access to natural intelligence.
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