07mk
3d ago
Well, in Total Recall, it was genetic mutations due to living on Mars (no idea what the actual mechanism was - the UV rays or the limited oxygen or both?)? That woman was just intelligent enough to make use of her genetic luck. Though perhaps if Elon has his way, we'll be able to run the actual experiment of human colonists on Mars, to see if we get such positive results soon enough. Everyone was joking about Elon Musk making catgirls real (which I could also see as a future body augmentation for similar purposes), but his true contribution to humanity may end up being making triple-breasted whores real.
07mk
3d ago
The way this number was calculated and is being bandied about makes me actually wonder if it was placed as fact-checking bait. It gives the anti-rape-gang people the grounds to ostentatiously complain about splitting hairs, e.g. "Oh OK, so it's probably not literally a quarter million. Maybe it's off by 10 and it's only 25k. How many underage victims of rape gangs do YOU find to be okay?" It's somewhat akin to the utterly absurd claim that 1/5 - 1/3 of women going college in the USA would be raped, which fortunately seems to have mostly disappeared.
07mk
3d ago
Quite possibly! Again, evolutionary psychology is just inherently hard to get right. Though there's states of undress and states of undress, and the types of videos we're talking about is the latter, I'd say.
07mk
3d ago
Given how unaccessible porn was until less than a century ago, it seems rather doubtful that there was much evolutionary pressure for such an impulse during most of human existence (evolutionary psychology is always really hard, but I'd guess that, during most of human existence, a man observing nubile young women enthusiastically in states of undress was more correlated with them reproducing rather than less), and so I'd doubt that whatever evolutionary source for TitaniumButterfly's mother's behavior has anything to do with that explanation. I'd guess that the proximal cause of the mother's behavior had to do with cultural norms, which are downstream from evolutionary pressures of the type that omw_68 mentioned.
07mk
4d ago
There's a lot more normies than autists, and they also hold far more social power, and so they don't really need to bother considering the consequences. Now, some autists sometimes hold a lot more physical power, but normies have been very successful at subverting/parasiting off of that with social power.
07mk
4d ago
I've noticed that, for a lot of normies, the former is just as bad as the latter and thus they don't even bother distinguishing between the two.
07mk
5d ago
If you're actually worried about sounding like a flagrant sophist, that already makes you more self-aware than most of us. I'd be more concerned about the possible time you'd waste getting into pointless internet arguments when you could be devoting time to developing yourself chasing hedonistic pleasure as hard you can until the lights go out via the AI apocalypse, and also the risk of leaving a digital footprint that could allow some future authoritarian regime to track you down and execute you for wrongthink. It's too late for the rest of us, but you still might have a chance.
07mk
5d ago
I think you misunderstood my statement. To clarify, here's an edited version of the last paragraph of my previous comment:
In terms of human connection (and human effort as well, actually), pretty clearly any claims of some grid of pixels "connecting" the viewer to the placer can be applied just as easily to AI (of the modern sort, not scifi agentic AI) generated grids in how it connects the viewer to the human who used the AI to generate the grids as to manually generated grids.
The point is that, whether a human uses an AI or a paintbrush to generate the grid of pixels, if the latter connects the viewer of the grid of pixels to the human who generated the grid, then certainly the former does as well.
07mk
5d ago
That's the way I'd see it as well. It's not the apparent extremeness of her left-wingness that's concerning, it's the apprent type of left-wingness that is, since the type is one that openly denounces concepts like rationality and empirical evidence as tools of oppression that don't count as much as lived experience stated by people of the preferred phenotypes. This person might not specifically buy into all that since stereotypes don't hold for every last individual, but certainly I would be highly suspicious of anyone who wouldn't bet in that direction if given the opportunity.
07mk
5d ago
With respect to the one-child policy I think it needs to be pointed out in defense of the Chinese commies that pretty much everyone else in the world was falling for the same nonsense back then. The notion that runaway overpopulation was causing mass poverty, famine and wars seemed irresistible.
For a hilarious snapshot of this, I highly recommend the 1973 film Soylent Green. Which featured a tremendously overpopulated and unemployed, IIRC, NYC, where crowds of people were literally just lying on the streets and stairwells, getting in the way of the protagonists going about their work. Wealth inequality was also one of its themes, with super-high-end apartments being sold with came with bang maids included.
07mk
5d ago
If you can create narrative versions of the AI disgust reaction for both left and right cultural environments
A bioweapon sounds easier.
07mk
5d ago
Are these really the only options? What about wealth taxes as a good way to increase the wellbeing and opportunities of more people? Taking money from those who can easily afford it and using it to improve the lot of others in order to maximise utils or hedons or human flourishing, or whatever? It's not envy if someone actually believes wealth taxes are better for the wider populace, and it's uncharitable to believe all wealth tax supporters are privately just in it for the satisfaction of seeing the rich taken down a peg.
I'm skeptical that it's possible to credibly make such an argument, at least for wealth taxes of the level we're talking about. Perhaps it's possible to correctly make such an argument, but given empirical reality, it's hard to see how someone would have the credibility to judge it as correct. It's not a matter of private beliefs, it's a matter of motivated reasoning.
07mk
5d ago
If it were possible to burn value in order to satisfy people's lizard hindbrains and improve social cohesion, I'm becoming more convinced that this would be a good thing, even if it were not optimal in terms of resource allocation.
I feel like there's an empathy gap going both directions left-and-right with this kind of thing. In terms of economic value, the left is fine with doing just that (though arguably the left isn't fine with being fine with just that - hence why a lot of the beliefs are dressed up and obfuscated as not being fundamentally about envy), destroying value for the purpose of increasing equality. And in terms of criminal punishments, the right seems to be fine with slaking the bloodthirst of those who want to impose suffering on violent criminals, even possibly at the price of more suffering than necessary to innocents, as well as less optimal resource allocation. I don't think we know exactly why, but irrationally or pre-rationally, people really really commonly really really hate inequality and really really love imposing suffering on violent criminals. It seems reasonable that society be structured to satisfy these preferences to some extent, as one of many competing priorities that any functioning society must balance. Of course, the devil's in the details in how much we prioritize these preferences over others.
07mk
5d ago
Hm, my first thought from that was that we might need a eugenics program to make humans universally have the proper disgust reactions to resist AI doom, but it was immediately obvious that the timelines for that would be far too long compared to AI progress. We might need a bioweapon program to spread gene therapy to produce the proper disgust reactions. Unfortunately, with Covid-19 having happened immediately before the recent AI boom, it might be difficult both to infect enough people with a man-made virus for the gene therapy or to use a fake pandemic to infect people with the gene therapy under the guise of being vaccines.
07mk
5d ago
He's using way more road capacity, he's drawing on the skills of people who've come through publicly funded education way more, he's causing way more waste to have be cleaned up by others, etc etc.
As best as I can tell, we already have systems in place to tax people for their use of road capacity (gas taxes, tolls), skills of people who've come through publicly funded education (salary, and income tax thereof), waste cleanup (local taxes, as well as fees paid to private cleanup companies), etc. If these taxes are improperly set and there are negative externalities that he's imposing, those ought to be fixed to be properly set. Or if he's evading these taxes, then he ought to be sued to pay his fair share and also punished accordingly. Same goes for anyone, rich or poor. I don't know that these are the case for him.
This is why I believe that the sorts of wealth tax that I'm talking about must be supported by a basis of envy. Just deserts based on treating him like any other individual who participates in society isn't enough to get us there.
07mk
5d ago
Well, Musk is certainly a unique case, but I wanted to engage with the underlying principles rather than just who/whom (which, to be fair, it might be all the way down). Second and third places really are just downstream from the first place reason anyway, as his awkward autistic tendencies really weren't harped upon much in the 2010s by the exact same people. And neither was his then-billionaire-status - in fact, he was often seen as almost heroic for his success in making EVs mainstream in the US, with positively depicted cameos in shows like The Big Bang Theory or Rick and Morty and even a nerdy scientist in a (terrible) Hollywood (attempted) blockbuster Moonfall asking himself, "What would Elon do?" when trying to solve some tough problem.
07mk
5d ago
I think the human leadership of Anthropic just finds digesting and following those recommendations very distasteful.
If this is true, that would indicate that whatever internal Mythos+ models Anthropic has lacks sufficient intelligence to come up with a plan that is both tasteful enough for Anthropic leadership to follow and has Anthropic avoid the ire of the US government. Either no amount of intelligence is capable of coming up with such a plan (perhaps training humans to have sufficient disgust reaction is the solution to AI alignment?) or the models just aren't there yet.
07mk
5d ago
I find this unreasonable. Yes, Musk benefited from a capitalist system. But so did literally everyone else. Nothing stopped you or your neighbor from doing what Musk did. The difference is he did it and you didn’t. And because of that, you want to punish him? Why are you envious?
The lack of ingenuity, grit, and risk tolerance stopped anyone who's not Musk from doing what Musk did. That's why so many are envious of him, as best as I can tell; he did what he did and others didn't, because he had these qualities that others don't. It's reasonable to argue that one ought not be punished for having greater ingenuity, grit risk tolerance, etc. but I also think it's reasonable to argue that the envy of a substantial part of the population ought to be addressed by punishing such a person. We already do some of the latter with the progressive income tax.
07mk
5d ago
I understand that there are some people who want that, but I don't think those are realistic proposals, in that you wouldn't be able to pass them into law even at the state level, and if you could, the main effect would be driving out billionaires and businesses, rather than generating a huge amount of tax revenue.
Okay, but you do understand that the entire point of my comment was to explore possible policies that would be in line with what those "some people" want, right? What you want seems reasonable enough, but what you want isn't the topic of discussion.
07mk
6d ago
So if the US wanted to create a wealth tax, it's not that hard to figure out. You can just copy the tax law from e.g. Switzerland.
I wasn't familiar with wealth taxes in Europe, so thanks for informing me! My very basic research showed that Switzerland has different rates based on "canton," which seems to be the equivalent of US states, and the highest rate seems to be in Geneva, at 0.38% for the top bracket. Perhaps Switzerland is an outlier, but I doubt that anything on the order of 0.38% would be meaningful enough to register for the people who call for a wealth tax in the USA based on their envy for billionaires+. Perhaps 38% would be enough, though I was thinking >50% as a symbolic gesture that it takes a majority above a certain point. If the notion is that simply existing as a billionaire - and certainly as a trillionaire - is intrinsically unethical in a world with poverty (i.e. our world), then the tax certainly must be big enough to actually turn real billionaires into merely hectomillionaires. And 0.38% ain't gonna cut it for that.
That said, perhaps it could start at 0.38% and then through a ratcheting process go up to 99.999% over the years through small individual changes, no single one of which is all that extreme? It'd take a lot of sessions of Congress to do that, though, and in the long run we're all dead, so probably not a great idea, though, given that the Sanderses and Warrens of the world likely want to see it before they die.
Ah, I see there's a misunderstanding here on what it means to tax a person's wealth. The government does not want to be paid in shares. They want to be paid in cash, where the amount is a percentage of your net worth. How you raise the money to pay your tax bill is entirely up to you. You can use other sources of income, borrow against your shares, sell stock, whatever.
In theory this can be tricky for people who are cash poor, own a lot of stock, but are restricted from selling it (e.g. immediately after an IPO) but in practice this is not a problem. All billionaires in America have figured out how to buy mansions, yachts and private jets while avoiding anything that resembles a taxable event. I'm sure they can figure out how to raise cash to pay their tax bill, too.
No, there was no misunderstanding on my part. Of course, the default way to pay a tax is via cash, but I had already pointed out the value-destruction nature of having to sell stock made it an unattractive option. Again, the amount of tax we're talking about is significantly more than the amount these guys spend on mansions, yachts, and private jets. I don't think there are many billionaires out there right now who would no longer be billionaires if you took away their luxury goods; most of them - certainly most of the richest of them - have their money tied in, again, productive assets. E.g. right now, Musk is worth something like $1.4 trillion, I think. If he had to pay a $400 billion tax bill, he would likely have to sell a heck of a lot of his stock in a way that also destroys a lot of value for a lot of people. If he had to pay a $1.399 trillion tax bill, I don't think that would actually be possible for him, mathematically, due to how his actions of starting to sell his stock would destroy the value of the remaining stock that he needs to sell to get that much cash.
07mk
6d ago
I wonder what the fact that Anthropic ostensibly can't seem to use their internal better-than-Mythos models to instruct them on how to navigate the political landscape to avoid getting the ire of the current US administration means.
- We're still a ways away from the world-conquering AGI/ASI that so many of us fear.
- Politics is sufficiently complex and anti-inductive that even AGI/ASI won't be a "win" button (a thought that's simultaneously horrifying and comforting!).
- Anthropic is playing 6D chess and everything is going according to keikaku.
- Anthropic leadership doesn't use their models to make political decisions for them, for whatever reason (most boring, but I'd guess most likely).
07mk
6d ago
Hm, arguably that's a function that certain employment laws and HR departments are already filling. I can't say I like the idea of companies being required to financially support one specific partisan ideology. But this does remind me of something I saw on Twitter the other day - which I don't know how true it is - that it was strange that modern billionaires didn't found universities like their equivalents from prior generations. I don't really see a workable way for the government to force them to do such a thing which wouldn't be far too corrupt to be worth it, though, since the idea that schools ought not be ideological indoctrination centers is, in itself, a politically controversial position. Same issues would exist for scholarships.
07mk
6d ago
That seems really reasonable to me, but also, being ignorant of the actual reality, I have to wonder just how much the Musks of the world are borrowing against their assets, and if that's enough to make a difference. Surely they're not borrowing anywhere near their total net worth, but rather some amount much less than the total expected appreciation of their assets (so that they can actually pay back the debts while also having more left over to actually grow wealthier)?
Reminds me of the quite commonly expressed notion over the last decade all the way to today, that censorship of wrongthink is required for free speech, because for women/POCs/LGBTQ+/etc. to have free speech, they must be free from other people expressing opinions that "make them feel unsafe" or "deny their humanity/basic rights/existence/etc." Another case of people smashing a square peg through a round hole because the roundness is what's been declared as sacred.
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