07mk
2hr 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
4hr 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
5hr ago
If you can create narrative versions of the AI disgust reaction for both left and right cultural environments
A bioweapon sounds easier.
07mk
6hr 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
6hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
8hr 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
9hr 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
10hr 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
11hr 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
20hr 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
23hr 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
23hr 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
1d 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)?
07mk
1d ago
From what I can gather, the consensus on the left side of the political spectrum in the USA is that it's a great injustice that there exists a trillionaire in a world where there exists poverty. Now, there are a lot of implicit beliefs and values mixed up in such a judgment, such as the false notion that it would be possible to fix world poverty or even USA "poverty" with a trillion dollars in cash and that it would be possible for Musk to convert his net worth into a trillion dollars in cash (at its limit, people literally seem to believe that Musk has a bank account somewhere with 13 digits on its balance, claiming that he's "hoarding" the wealth, as if that wealth isn't actually in the form of various companies that are functioning to produce and sell things right now). It seems like it's mostly driven by a hatred of inequality and a desire to collect one's pound of flesh.
Which I think is perfectly reasonable. One of the many reasons Musk is able to have such a high net worth is the fairly dependable capitalist system that we all uphold and partake in, and demanding that he pay the government a fee for the sole reason to appease our envy, even at the cost to overall prosperity and wellbeing of humanity might not be ideal, but it's not unreasonable.
But, as many people have pointed out, Musk - and any billionaire - has most of his assets in productive companies, and the productive nature of those companies is what makes them so valuable, and so liquidating them to put more money in the government coffers would both be logistically very difficult and also likely destroy a lot of value. If the government were to take shares away from Musk to take partial ownership of his companies, that would also likely destroy a lot of value, both because some of the value is tied to Musk being the owner and because the government is likely to have lower ownership skills than the typical private owner. Furthermore, since Musk's - and, again, almost any billionaire's - net worth is defined mostly by the market price of shares of his companies, which are volatile, it's difficult to even figure out the correct value of his net worth to use for any sort of wealth tax.
So I'm left wondering what sort of wealth tax could be implemented, in a way that doesn't destroy too much value while still being meaningful enough to appease the envious (though some may argue that the limit does not exist for that one). It would probably have to take some sort of rolling average of net worth over a period of time, the tax would have to be something like in the form of non-voting shares, and perhaps we'd need to create a ton of new government bureaucracy jobs to manage the logistics of all of that. In effect making almost any company above a certain value automatically partially nationalized. It would have to be progressive without some sharp cutoff point so that there's no single value that any company owner is motivated to keep under. We'd also likely need to have laws around giving shares to family members in order to skirt around the wealth tax - either that or just accept the creation of essentially an aristocracy where successful company owners keep sharing their wealth with more and more family members while still being de facto owners in order to minimize their wealth tax burden. Along with a bunch more government jobs to enforce this.
Of course, I heavily doubt that any of the collected money would have meaningful impact on solving poverty. On net, with the additional government costs and the reduced income tax collections from the employees of these companies, it might actually leave less money to fight poverty than just the current system as-is. But that's not the point, the point is to take money away from really rich people.
I'm not an economist, so I'm probably missing a lot of things. Does anyone have any good ideas for how the USA could implement this without causing too much economic harm? Would be especially good if it could stand up to Constitutional scrutiny as well (of course, the Constitution can always be changed or ignored, but both tend to create a lot more friction and pain than otherwise).
07mk
1d ago
Might be confusing it for some of his other bangers.
“It was simply a matter of outsmarting them. You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.”
"When I'm in command, every mission is a suicide mission."
07mk
2d ago
Model playtester for Anthropic or SpaceX would probably be a lot of fun. Former for the cutting edge stuff, latter for the uncensored stuff.
Regardless of whether or not they intend to actually build them, I'd suspect that the people paying top dollar for these sets care just as much about the sets having every piece as an actual building hobbyist does, if not more.
07mk
6d ago
I'm pretty bad at making predictions, especially about the future, but a lot of people in AI seem to think that the odds of AI development leading to human extinction is at least in single digit percentage odds, which is high enough to be concerning. Communists could likely build rockets and simulators, but I'm skeptical that such tech progress is likely in a Communist-run world before we're brought back to some post-apocalypse situation or just boring stasis in some barely tolerable dystopia. Certainly I'd bet that inventing immortal consciousness that can suffer for eternity seems far more likely in an AI bro world than a communist one. In the latter, the suffering would only last about a lifetime, and in the real world.
07mk
6d ago
AI bros also have lower downside, though. Communists winning would likely only result in deaths in the order of 10s-100s of millions, maybe a billion or two, but likely not more. AI bros winning could mean literally every last human dead, or perhaps even worse, their consciousness stuck in eternity in a hell simulator.
I think AI bros still win out in terms of expected value, though.
07mk
7d ago
Steam is only successful because of the availability of servers on which to run it and the proliferation of personal computers allowing everyday people to play video games on them, which they pay Steam for the license of. I'm sure somewhere in the chain of events leading to the production of servers and consumer PCs, one can find some sort of unethical or exploitative behavior by some supplier or vendor somewhere, and so Gabe Newell is clearly an unethical billionaire.
More to the point, you can play this 6-degrees-of-Kevin-Baconunethical-production with anything, and so the entire concept is just a fully general argument that's meant to be pulled out of the quiver and deployed as needed when convenient.
07mk
7d ago
If there's any age it should be set at, it should be one where a substantial number of people are no longer able to be meaningfully employed.
Things are going to get really interesting when AI reverses the direction of this and brings it down from 67 to roughly 20 (ironically the highest current age at which someone finds jokes about 6-7 to be funny), as the only form of employment available to anyone becomes the original form of employment. Then again, improving cosmetic surgery and sun protection might mean that the age goes back up and/or just remains stable before going up to the 100s.
I think you misunderstood my statement. To clarify, here's an edited version of the last paragraph of my previous comment:
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.
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