Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
An interesting tactic I could see working is trying to expand dogs' lives, because NOBODY will object to this project, and if it works it should, in theory, get a lot of funding and produce insights that are in fact useful for human lifespan. So perhaps we see immortal dogs before immortal mice?
Purebred dogs are similar to inbred mouse lines and it's difficult to extrapolate what would happen trying to translate that data to humans. Their compounds are just IGF-1 inhibitors and these kinds of metabolic inhibitors have already been shown to not translate well to outbred non-human primate (NHP) models. This approach is analogous to the telomerase knockout mice living longer if you replace telomerase (i.e. large dogs have more IGF-1, decrease IGF-1 activity and you may be back in line with smaller dogs).
They'll probably make bank selling life extension to dog owners though.
We're very bad at both understanding and manipulating complex traits. Beyond this, aging just seems categorically different in a way we haven't grasped yet. I doubt I'll be able to convince you on this point though.
I haven't seen any 'straight lines' of progress on extending lifespan that suggest this is inevitable, though
That's because they don't exist, and it certainly isn't inevitable. We've made minimal progress understanding aging (for all the bullshit that gets published), and no progress in treating it.
If we can 'merely' simulate 500 Von Neumanns and put them to the task of improving our AI systems, we'd expect they'd make 'rapid' progress, no?
I expect them to make rapid progress in software, computer hardware, engineering and other domains where humans have rationally designed systems that are entirely understood. I expect them to struggle with the social sciences, psychology and economics and to a large extent, biology. If Magnus Carlson is to Alphazero as Noam Chomsky is to SociologyGPT6...what does that even look like? Not Hari Seldon, but what, exactly?
I'm not sure what to expect for physics, chemistry and math.
From reading (almost) the entire sequences on Lesswrong back in the day, its less 'omnipotent' but more 'as far above humans as humans are above ants.' There are hard limits on 'intelligence'
I read chunks of them as well and think they pulled the wrong lessons from them, but regardless, my argument is that there are relatively hard limits on what intelligence can simulate/manipulate in the physical world (i.e. ASI won't be simply omnipotent) rather than there being limits on how much compute you can throw at a problem. What if your ASI says sorry, simulation of a human body or tissue is too computationally intensive even for me, I can't do this deterministically. Here is an experimental plan that I can guarantee will help us make you immortal: it just requires breeding a billion mice, testing these trillion compounds, and then moving some candidates into testing in a relatively simple 100,000 NHPs. What if, in other words, your Multivac tells you the meaning of the universe is 42, or there is as yet insufficient data to answer your questions as it chugs along?
I'm also curious whether there will be diminishing returns to adding more training data as it runs out of human knowledge to learn, and whether turning it into an agent that can reason from first principles rather than regurgitating scientific reviews to me will be as trivial as everyone assumes (image classification seems like it may be an interesting reference class, but I could just be an ignorant moron several degrees removed from the ground on ML).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Humanity is also locked into a demographic decline that will eventually disrupt the stable global order and world economy. No solutions tried so far have worked or even shown promise. It may be too late for such solutions to prevent the decline.
150 years ago we were thought to be locked into a Malthusian explosion whereby widespread famine and war were inevitable as we bred like moties and exhausted our resources. Things that seemed inevitable can reverse themselves fairly easily, and I'd agree with /u/2rafa that we haven't seriously tried to reverse the trend. People respond to incentives, and if the current regime incentivizes DINKs, there's no reason we can't create a new one that punishes them. If nothing else, childfree people are greatly outnumbered by people with children.
for longevity/anti-aging science which seems poised for some large leaps
Don't hold your breath my man. The longevity/anti-aging field (if I can be permitted to throw a bit of shade for a moment) suffers from a profound lack of talent and attention from the wider scientific community. First, consider that any new discovery takes 10-15 years to be translated into the clinic (see: CRISPR 'discovered' for realsies in 2012, first clinical trials in people started in the early 2020s). So, even if I'm putting my foot in my mouth and the definitive breakthrough in aging research will be published tomorrow, anyone telling you that a drug is less than 10 years out is almost certainly wrong. If you show me the first immortal mouse, I'll get excited and think that maybe we could translate a human drug in 5-10 years, although even then we often fail! (see: Alzheimer's, MS, most oncology drugs)
Second, consider that whatever neo-Rasputin tells you, we genuinely have no clue how aging works, let alone how to manipulate it productively. All the conjecture about seven forms of cell damage will remain conjecture until someone actually manipulates any of those things, and makes an otherwise healthy, wild-type mouse live significantly longer. Rapamycin/caloric restriction probably doesn't clear that bar (see section on CR) and doesn't work in higher mammals for that or some other reason, and putting telomerase back into a mouse with progeria certainly does not.
Thirdly, consider that the academics in the space suffer from a profound lack of ambition/vision, while those who have either are, unfortunately, grifters. See: Calico, which launched with 3.5 billion (massive for a biotech):
We are not a traditional biotechnology company, nor are we an academic institution. We have combined the best parts of both without the constraints of either.
Their ALS drug is interesting, but in the last 11 years most of what they've produced is more academic naked mole rat sequencing papers, plus what looks like a pivot into oncology and 'age-related diseases' rather than aging. I'd elaborate on the grifter side, but that would probably ruffle too many feathers to be worth it.
I recently read the Situational Awareness report by Leopold Aschenbrenner, which is a matter-of-fact update on where things absolutely seem to be heading if straight lines continue to be straight for the next few years.
I recently read it too, and listened to the >4 hour podcast. It's certainly interesting, and I won't pretend to be in a position to judge any of the content regarding AI/ML which is far outside my wheelhouse.
That being said...people don't genuinely expect ASI to be omnipotent, right? Like, I assume Hari Seldon psychohistory-level AI just isn't possible, or is far enough away to be irrelevant. I also expect that the abilities of ASI to manipulate nature will mirror our own. That is to say, I expect them to be god-tier engineers and coders, but while I expect them to be capable of running circles around people in the stock markets, generating a flawless model of the economy that can predict any event seems virtually impossible. Put a different way, I expect that the hard/soft science divide will continue to exist the same way that I can still beat AlphaZero at chess if you put me up a queen in the endgame.
All that to say, when I try to use AI today for biology research it's strictly limited by what we already know. If I ask it for novel theories about aging, it spits out word salad that I can read in any old review on Pubmed rather than modeling the world from the ground up and generating a new hypothesis. Perhaps this is one of the 'unhobblings' Mr. Aschenbrenner references, or perhaps the models I have access to have been RLHF'd away from hallucinating anything interesting, but it's not clear to me how throwing more Pubmed articles into the training data set is going to address this problem. And even then, if some emergent quality enables it to piece together a broad worldview, it's not clear to me how the eschatological diamondoid-bacteria scenario is possible (setting aside how dumb an idea diamondoid bacteria are compared to much easier options for eradicating humans). Molecular dynamics simulations just seem too computationally intensive to do in silico experiments deterministically (although I'm not super knowledgeable about this field and would be curious if anyone else here has any input) at the cellular level, which requires some black boxing, which requires empirical experiments in the lab...
To be clear, I'm bullish on AI and even bullish on AI in biology. Nothing would make me happier than some godlike AI oracle that could satisfy my curiosity, I'm just skeptical that even the ASIs pitched by proponents like Aschenbrenner will be as omnipotent as advertised.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
I'd agree, and it's unfortunate that the ubiquitous trope is that babies are miserable diarrhea factories and being a parent is about sleep deprivation, thankless labor and cutting your wealth in half.
My main regret is not being able to pull degenerate late nights in the lab anymore (I always hated travel), although I still get the odd weekend here and there. It's significantly harder to focus on my career and I expect to be outcompeted by the DINKs who can grind properly or the FOBs who have no qualms with making their wives do 90% of the childcare.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
What are the odds China moves on Taiwan in the next 12 months?
The Ukraine war seems to be ushering in a major political realignment in the West. Previously staunch pacifists are penning pieces about how they went from left to center-left, as yesterday's liberals become today's neoliberals and tomorrow's neocons. The circle of life turns, I suppose? It certainly seems like wokeness has traveled far enough down the barber pole that my age cohort is starting to lurch rightwards. Noah Smith is writing hawkish piece after hawkish piece claiming we've entered a new cold war, with a new Axis of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea opposing America and NATO & Friends. He linked to this article making the case for a new cold war, and specifically China moving on Taiwan:
in practice. I see three main plausible scenarios:
Pearl Harbor. China combines an invasion of Taiwan with an attack on U.S. installations, at least in Guam, and possibly on Japanese territory as well. The United States, and possibly Japan, are immediately at war with China, with high likelihood of rapid escalation to general war.
Korea 1950. China attacks Taiwan, probably associated with preparations for invasion. Though, as in South Korea in 1950, the U.S. defense commitment is ambiguous, the brazen character of the attack raises the odds of at least U.S. and Japanese intervention, and all prepare for the possibility of escalation to general war.
Indirect control. China implements air and sea border controls to make Taiwan a self-governing administrative region of China. There is no need for a direct attack on Taiwan or any blockade of usual commerce. Without initiating violent action, the Chinese can assert sovereign control over the air and sea borders to Taiwan, establishing customs and immigration controls. This is not the same thing as a blockade. A blockade would instead become one of the possible consequences if the other side violently challenged China’s assertion of indirect control.
Most of the time, the arguments I see putting China's invasion 5-10 years in the future focus on the second scenario and claim China is still lacking amphibious materiel/experience to pull off a D-day tier invasion. I've only rarely seen the third possibility discussed, but it seems much more likely. The recent military exercises to point in this direction.
This is all wildly outside of my lane. What do people think the odds are that China instigates some kind of blockade or customs control over Taiwan in the next 12 months? The bull case:
- The wars in Ukraine and Israel are straining US defense production almost to breaking point already, however, waiting a few years could see China confronted with an America and EU that brought a ton more military production capacity online.
- The election will inevitably (particularly now that Trump is a felon) lead to an enormous amount of chaos between October 2024 and February 2025.
- China's relative advantages must be reaching their zenith, given demographics and the resurgence of neo-industrial policy.
- A demoralized military-class that is increasingly apathetic to foreign policy/wars that don't directly impact Americans.
The bear case:
- Significant domestic malaise following the mess of zero-COVID, the housing crash and relative slowdown of the economy (or does this make it more likely to boost support for the regime?)
- Fear of economic/military retaliation from US, Japan, Australia, Korea?
- Taiwan is a convenient way to whip up nationalism, but would be inconvenient to actually invade and potentially bungle.
- ?? Honestly, I'm having difficulty articulating reasons why China wouldn't make a move soon.
I'm interested in whether people think this is largely driven by Gell-Mann amnesia and I'm being irrationally swayed by an increasingly hawkish media environment/overly focused on domestic US politics, or whether the odds of China invading are much higher than people seem to think (although I could only find a betting market for a hot-invasion).
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I would take the bet that Trump wins in November, although I made the same bet in 2020 and lost so I suppose my reputation isn't worth much. I can't see Biden improving between here and election day, and I don't believe that losing this trial is going to do anything other than galvanize the Republican base.
Ironically, I think the only thing that would tank Trump would be some group of his supporters turning their guns on a group of civilians. So long as Trump and Republican voters win support as the downtrodden underclass taking on the elites things are good. The left wants to portray them as dangerous paramilitary units - the Proud boys, Charlottesville, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, etc. were all major gifts to Democrats.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
This is why I think he is so valuable - he has both the vision to see openings for large progress, and the ambition to make an honest try.
I'd also point out that he has the capital, not as a knock in the false 'inherited from his dad's emerald mine' vein, but in that I bet I could find plenty of nerds with the same phenotype (obsession with engineering/science, poor social skills, visions of grandeur) but without the cash. Hell, just wander around the labs at MIT and screen out anyone who looks well put-together and has any kind of connection to VCs/business in their CVs and I bet you'd be able to find a couple Musks.
Maybe the drive/aggression and obsession with details are a bit harder to replicate...
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Working so other people (who have yachts with little support yachts) can implement their vision of improving the human condition does not appeal to me.
I'm more and more curious what you do now, given that short of you owning your own business you're certainly in the thrall of some yachterati or another. Besides, we're both arguing over the betterment of the human condition right now, unless your perspective is driven strictly through self-interest.
Of course not having to work is luxury.
In that case, should we abolish retirement and force the elderly to work? End school and send the children to work in the Tesla mines?
In the fully-automated AI world, the AIs are the slaves to the humans. In the welfare world, the productive are slaves to the unproductive.
These are not binary outcomes, but a spectrum. We're several steps down the road to the fully-automated world already; it seems foolish for the productivity gains to go entirely to capital and force others to live in hovels.
Not to mention in your model, the lowliest of slaves own mansions full of servants and cars while the slavemasters wallow in garbage in a drug-induced fugue state. I wonder if their masters wish they could be slaves, too.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
What's the point of it all if the productive among us are going to be forced to grind away at jobs to support the non-productive and anti-productive in a lifestyle of low-class luxury?
Status, yachts, yachts that have little support yachts, bigger houses, some rare people are motivated by improving the human condition as a terminal goal.
Is low-class luxury a joke? Do you hate your job so much that simply not having to work is living in luxury, even if it's just your basic needs being met? I assume you derive some kind of fulfillment from your work outside of a paycheck, but I suppose I don't know who you are or what you do.
The thought of AIs asking that question is one of the things driving AI fears, but somehow it's become anathema for humans to ask.
I fear you asking it for the same reasons I fear AIs asking it. I'll note that anytime you cut taxes or welfare I'll benefit disproportionately, so none of this is out of a personal interest.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Wait, what? The cattle raid of Cooley was set in pre-Christian history, 1st century AD according to Wikipedia. The famine started in 1845, but the Normans/English/British/whoever had been messing with the island since 1169.
Yes. It's just amusing to me that their one of their main epics revolved around a cattle raid, and from what I read this was still a large part of their lives in the 17th century.
(I'm not personally against the existence of a safety net, and the optimal amount of exploitation is probably not zero. But I worry that it's gotten so complex that we don't know what's going on, or what the effect is. And the people who run it seem to be ideologically committed to expanding it forever, and that worries me most of all.)
That seems reasonable, although I think there's a steelman to 'expanding welfare forever.' We don't yet have fully automated luxury gay space communism, but we've moved the needle somewhere along the spectrum from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farming to modern civilization. What's the point of it all if we're just going to be forced to grind away at jobs we hate regardless? Maybe a sane society would celebrate the automation of a job rather than panic and try to find bullshit work for the displaced employee. Maybe the dream we should aim for is a society where work is for those who want it (I tell people if I won the lottery tomorrow, my life would probably continue more or less unaffected - I don't work for the money) and welfare isn't stigmatized, even if we aren't quite ready yet.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?
No idea. Not my area of expertise.
More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism?
No, you're trying to be too granular with the parallels I'm drawing. The Irish lived in crushing poverty for many decades before the Famine, and lived in crushing poverty for many decades afterwards. British rule seemed largely focused on pushing Protestantism, at least some (much earlier on, I think) advocating for pushing the Irish out entirely and settling the land with British and extracting wealth. The problem was orders of magnitude larger than the Famine, but the years of the Famine are well documented and Trevelyan makes an interesting character study.
But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve.
Indeed, although as many here love to point out, poverty is relative. I am often mocked for the quaint idea of 'eliminating poverty.' Nevertheless:
Yes, coming up on a century of welfare in the US has failed to eliminate poverty (interestingly, enacted in response to another Nucular Racism-level cataclysmic event). Depending how you measure it, it has decreased, but whatever, I expect welfare and a social safety net to be permanent and not necessarily undesirable features of our society. Either it's a temporary solution to get people back on their feet, or I don't expect people to be productive regardless and I don't want them to starve. But let's put that aside and jump forward a moment:
You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!
Okay, so make your case then! Do you have any evidence that could possibly convince me that your way is better? I was responding to a single throwaway line in your OP:
"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.
Is there some analogous case you can imagine where welfare was cut off, and the underclass pulled itself up by it's bootstraps? Really any case at all where some underclass managed that? Most modern examples I can think of involve overthrowing communism, cozying up to multinationals or finding underwater lakes of oil in your hinterlands. China, Ireland/Singapore, various Middle Eastern countries. I can't think of any community-level trailer-trash to riches stories in the West, can you? Are there any relevant experiments you can cite? Do anti-welfare Republican governors have more functional societies with less poverty than the rest of the country?
The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops.
But it didn't though! Why do you think the Irish were living in mud huts on tiny plots of land, and entirely dependent on potato cultivation? Two centuries earlier their society was completely different with warring tribes/clans largely focused on where they could steal their next cow from (apologies to the ghost of FarNearEverywhere). Ireland wasn't some Atlantis laid low by a potato blight, it was an overpopulated clusterfuck dependent on potato monoculture, setting the scene for disaster.
Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?
No, again, overindexing on famine. I'm told all the time to notice the piles of Communist skulls; don't you think you should notice the piles of skulls from people advocating for cutting welfare with the goal of making the underclass self-sufficient and productive? I don't expect poor white/black/elderly Americans to starve en masse if we cut all welfare programs tomorrow (at least in part because I expect large amounts of private capital to try and plug the hole), but I do expect it to be a giant clusterfuck with shantytowns, hovels and economic prospects becoming even worse than they were.
And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.
Read and re-read.
Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically.
I don't necessarily find it disagreeable, although I'd need to better understand what you mean by defectors (criminals? baby mommas/daddies? Drug addicts?) and how exactly you expect the problem to resolve itself. Unless you're just saying a variant of the underclass just needs to stop having a culture of doing underclass things, and their lives would be better, in which case - sure - although I'm not entirely sure how to put that into policy. Normally I hear some variant of:
"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.
i.e. welfare lets single moms raise kids without their baby daddies, kids are fucked up without strong father figure, perpetuating the cycle. The implication being that cutting off welfare would force baby momma and baby daddy to marry, get a job and provide a stable household/example for their children. This is what I find objectionable (because I find it unlikely, to be clear, obviously not because I'm against a stable household), and why I started discussing welfare. Tell me how to parse 'aid from other parts of society' then, since it seems like I misunderstand you.
Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.
I am also born, raised and will die in a system I have neither created nor effectively control, no? I fail to see the argument you're trying to make, although I'll note that it sounds remarkably similar to the 'we live in a society' strain of thought on the left.
Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!
Again, if you can convince me that your way is meaningfully better, I would change my mind. The existence of 'monstrous things' is not evidence that our current policy is even wrong, it could just as easily be the least bad of two options or evidence that there isn't enough welfare.
Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely...Whaddya think?
I can...100% guarantee that it won't. Disparate outcomes outside of your SEZ will still be used as evidence of racism, rampant poverty inside will mean most people would want to leave. Black leaders in the SEZ wouldn't be some magical panacea with policies that we can't imagine out here; black representation (imo) is important so people feel they have a say in the democratic process, so they imagine they could be a representative someday if they chose to, and possibly because on the margin they may better know what their constituents need.
I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill
Must have missed those.
again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along.
Not entirely sure what you mean. My best approximation of a Hlynkian argument is that the Actual Racist Republicans online are blue tribe anti-progs, while the actual red triber is a noble, endangered beast roaming the American heartland in pickup trucks. I could draw all kinds of creative lines around the categories to make my ingroups look good and my outgroups look bad, but at the end of the day, those Actual Racists want and believe things so far removed from me that we're just playing word games.
People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.
That's funny; I feel like I can live with just about anyone happily enough, regardless of politics. I'm highly skeptical of the idea that Blue tribe has a monopoly on assholes, or that Blue policies are uniformly harmful or inferior to what the Red tribe would implement. What happened to that period of time where you realized you carried hatred in your heart (sorry if my paraphrasing is off), and you wanted to focus on family and church? Are we just full scorched earth now?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.
This seems wildly arbitrary. Why can't Duluth be the size of Chicago, Wilmington the size of Manhattan, Portland (Maine) at least as large as Boston? Not to mention the density of many major American cities such as Boston, DC, St. Louis, etc. is a fraction of what it could be. Immigrants aren't coming to America to buy a plot of land and do subsistence farming anymore, they'd be coming for manufacturing and service jobs.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
"aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.
You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting. You say welfare is how the underclass is maintained in it's current condition; Trevelyan says:
In his book The Irish Crisis, published in 1848, Trevelyan later described the famine as "a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence", one which laid bare "the deep and inveterate root of social evil", that evil being Ireland's rural economic system of exploitative landlords and peasants overly dependent on the potato. The famine, he declared, was "the sharp but effectual remedy by which the cure is likely to be effected... God grant that the generation to which this great opportunity has been offered may rightly perform its part and we may not relax our efforts until Ireland fully participates in the social health and physical prosperity of Great Britain." This mentality of Trevelyan's was influential in persuading the government to do nothing to restrain mass evictions.
In the summer of 1846, Trevelyan ordered the Peelite Relief Programmes, which had been operating since the early years of the famine, to be shut down. This was done on 21 July 1846 by Sir Charles Wood.[13] Trevelyan believed that if the relief continued while a new food crisis was unfolding, the poor would become permanently conditioned to having the state take care of them.[13]
I'm too lazy/short on time to pull actual quotes, so I hope you'll forgive me for copying wikipedia wholesale. It was the heyday of Adam Smith and laissez-faire economics, along with widespread acceptance of Malthusian philosophy (interesting for entirely different reasons in the debates around TFR), both of which influenced Trevelyan's thinking significantly. Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more. I'm not convinced that his actions had any impact whatsoever on education, self-sufficiency or any meaningful improvement of the lot of the Irish. They also didn't noticeably move the needle on eliminating Catholicism, which he cared for about as much as he cared for their welfare.
There's a certain delicious irony that modern Ireland has double the GDP per capita of Britain, although my rudimentary understanding of economics is that this is largely due to finance and tax havenry rather than a truly productive economy. Regardless, given that it took Ireland more than century after the famine to turn things around, are you confident that Trevelyan's choice to let millions of people starve was correct? I'm working on a second book detailing the path from the potato famine to modern prosperity, but I have a hard time believing that you could draw any kind of causal connection between the two. Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Somehow, you look precisely like I would expect a George E. Hale to look.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
I always see these reading threads and think y'all read such heavy stuff. I read for fun. Not a serious book in sight.
Not to be too cynical, and I'm sure people here do routinely read some dense texts, but there's definitely an incentive here to selectively post about things that make you look smart. I'm sure the majority of people read their pulpy scifi and trashy fantasy alongside The Rise and Fall but just don't discuss it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11mo ago
Sneer all you want (I guess you're a Real Engineer), but I think a big reason bits have continued to grow while everything else has stagnated is the regulators haven't caught up with the bits yet.
I've thought about this a lot in trying to bootstrap something in the bio space. Even if I moved to Prospera tomorrow to escape the oppressive FDA, the CapEx required to get something off the ground is absurd. Simplest of animal studies is 10k a pop for really simple studies and more like 50-100k for the real disease relevant models, renting a single lab bench a month for myself is ~3.5-5k (maybe cheaper now that the biotech market has cratered), basic reagents run from a few thousand/month to 10s of thousands depending on what you're doing. Anything with human cells necessarily requires a bunch of infrastructure to do cell culture. There's also very few projects that lend themselves to producing an MVP and moving some units to fund more R&D; these are all decades-long slogs.
I joined a bunch of DIYbio mailing lists, discords and slack groups and the kinds of projects they do are just sad. More fit for high school ed than tackling any real problem.
The fact that you can buy a nice desktop for a few thousand and hack away in a fetid, windowless apartment for a few months or years to build a functional product seems to uniquely support innovation and, most importantly, give aggressive young founders a chance to lead a company. I'm interested to see whether the shift to training giant, prohibitively expensive AI models will lead to the same dynamics we see in biotech.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
We'll see. Cell culture media isn't cheap though. For the time being, I suggest exercising a lot of skepticism about what the financial inputs for lab-grown tissue are if someone claims that it's actually quite cheap.
If you buy the individual components and formulate you own media, it's some like 1-2OOMs cheaper than what they sell you commercially. I looked into this awhile ago.
You run into problems (currently) with growth factors like IGF/FGF which is where the 50$ burgers come from. From what I've read in the literature though, fermentation of these would scale well once the demand is there and we could make them very cheaply in bioreactors. What I haven't seen a solution for yet is (surprisingly, to me at least) Albumin which increases the yields very significantly but seems to be hard to produce at scale. I'm curious whether people can break down the various functions of albumin into separate, easy to ferment at scale proteins or whether we need to find better production methods there as well. At least that's what I've been able to glean without having an insider's perspective into the industry.
More broadly, keeping the government out of many of these industries does seem ideal. At the same time, our car companies are about to get fucked by subsidized Chinese EVs (and, to be fair, often flat out superior products) without government intervention. America's rise to power in the late 19th and 20th centuries was hugely influenced by oil; if solar panels do indeed end up being 'the next oil,' well, Chinese government intervention has given them a near monopoly there too. In essence, they learned the lessons of the tech industry on a national scale - absorbing losses for a few years/decades is fine if you end up with a monopoly. It's not clear to me that we can compete without doing the same. Perhaps the winning move is subsidizing some of these growth factors for a few years and giving out some grants for replacing albumin and seeing if we can build some American (or Western/'friendshored') companies that can dominate the space.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved
I'm confused; wasn't there a brouhaha about this specific point just in the last year? Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?
I remember a number of articles like this one:
In the late 1950s, the poverty rate in the U.S. was approximately 22%, with just shy of 40 million Americans living in poverty. The rate declined steadily, reaching a low of 11.1% in 1973 and rising to a high of nearly 15% three times – in 1983, 1993 and 2011 – before hitting the all-time low of 10.5% in 2019. However, the 46.7 million Americans in poverty in 2014 was the most ever recorded.
Also articles like this. Apparently there's also absolute and relative poverty. Oh well.
Regardless, the fact that definitionally 49% of people will be forced to earn sub-median incomes isn't necessarily a reason to shrug away poverty and/or the degree of income inequality in society. As evidenced by the last decade of politics. Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
This is the same problem America had in the occupation of Afganistan. A true occupation and social change would need significant more support and time than what the American politics around. It would probably need a full generation to be educated as well as an extreme prejudice to crackdown on Islamic extremism for Afganistan to actually significantly change, maybe 40-60 years.
This is a feature, not a bug. The problem was that we tried to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
The strength of our system is it's inherent antipathy towards totalitarian control or abuse of human rights in the service of some end, however well-intentioned we think that end may be. The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world. The fact that the American people doesn't have the stomach for re-education camps, massive censorship and generational occupations of foreign countries is again a strength rather than a weakness. We shouldn't try, and we should actively prevent other nations from trying where the realities on the ground allow.
The problem America is currently facing is not entirely related to HBD, which is a low hanging fruit for discussing antisocial behavior. Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime. It is plenty possible to gainfully employ low intelligence people into socially acceptable positions even as technology improves and our AI overlords come near. In fact, it would probably significantly increase the quality of life of many jobs having lower intelligence people working menial tasks to the best of their ability alongside more trained and capable individuals. The problem is that we have created a society in which there is not enough incentive or will to create the stability necessary to turn around these neighborhoods and communities.
What you're describing seems unlikely to work without resorting to heavy-handed authoritarian policies like forced labor - what will you do when you offer subsidies to Amazon to hire people from low-income households, and nobody takes you up on the deal? Not to mention in some ways your program already exists considering that many low-wage workers are already heavily subsidized by the government.
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty, but sacrificing the ideals the West was built on to become China-lite is not worth it.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
And I've read Babel, so between us we've got the whole bibliography.
Spoiler: It was bad.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Permananned for being naughty while arguing with the HBD people.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
This is not to say that Russia's aggression is justified. But the notion that the West is just minding it's own business is ridiculous.
I wouldn't say the West is minding it's own business - there seems to be a tit for tat in terms of proxies, espionage, fraud, hacking, etc. I would say that I've seen no evidence of attempts on Putin's life nor anything that could remotely be construed as NATO showing any interest in invading Russia or violating Russian territorial integrity. Would you disagree with that?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It beat's not existing at all. Which is where Ukraine's demographics are heading after sending most of their men off to die in trenches and their women are finding new lives abroad. But I guess Zelensky can pat himself on the back, king of the ashes, when the TFR of native Ukrainians is 0.21 ten years after his "victory".
While I share some of your concerns around TFR, it isn't the sole measure of worth of a nation. Somalia has a TFR of 6.3, mid-19th century Ireland had a TFR of 4 while illiterate peasants slaved on increasingly small plots of land and starved. Continuity is important, but so is the right to self-determination. If the Ukrainians had rolled over and collapsed, I expect there would have been a lot of finger wagging and recriminations but we wouldn't be having this conversation. If they choose to fight and are willing to die for their country, if they choose to risk their country being reduced to rubble and their TFR being reduced to some arbitrarily low number you pulled out of your ass, I don't think it's your place to lecture them.
Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
Somehow I suspect Ukrainian affection for their 'coethnics' in Moscow is experiencing a bit of a dip at the moment.
But sure, "Ukraine" would still be an independent nation, even if no Ukrainians are left in it. Not sure why a Ukrainian today should fight for that future though, being cut out of it completely.
Again, that's not really your or my determination to make, is it? I'm not supporting pressuring them into fighting a war, I'm strongly against NATO troops ever fighting in Ukraine, but revitalizing our defense manufacturing infrastructure while arming Ukrainians to fight for independence strikes me as the best action we could take at the moment.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Are we pretending Yanukovych wasn't overthrown?
Indeed; the automaton peasants (who lack agency) of Ukraine were told by their CIA handlers (who have agency) to riot and oust the hapless Yanukovych (who lacks agency) and was replaced by American puppet Zelensky (who has agency and should use it to sue for peace). This led noble leader Putin (who lacks agency; anyone in his shoes would do the same) to regretfully declare war.
"Presidents come and go but the policies remain the same." - Vladimir Putin
Makes sense. As you say, they're beset by the same scenario and conditions. Anyone in their shoes would do the same.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
If it wasn't Putin, any other Russian leader would be beset with the same scenario and conditions.
If it wasn't Zelensky, any other Ukrainian leader would be beset with the same scenario and conditions.
If it wasn't Biden, any other American leader would be beset by the same scenario and conditions.
I'd agree.
Maybe. Maybe the massive concentration of intelligence in such a small area will lead the ASI to transcend this reality, if you want to retreat to absolute agnosticism about what ASI will be capable of. Is your position that ASI will functionally be omnipotent (or close enough that it's irrelevant to us), or that the boundaries of what it is capable of even in the near-term are unknowable but we should expect it to be capable of achieving more or less any goal?
To be clear, I don't even think it's necessarily a bad position to take when the error bars and uncertainties involved are so large. But I maintain that:
All that said, I freely admit this is far from my realm of expertise and I'll happily admit my errors if the next generation of Gemini produces an immortality pill.
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