DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
Tell me about it.
User ID: 745
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Allowing that this is valid: where did those Jews go, in your opinion?
I understand the «not a deliberate extermination, typhus/starvation due to Allied bombing etc.» Revisionist cluster somewhat (and «deliberate extermination not to the extent claimed» cluster I understand better). But the question of total death toll is different. In the end, there are some fairly good records on pre- and post-war demographics. People had to go somewhere.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
it was being used in production and it had reasonably competent moderation features
I actually love how this site works (thanks to you of course, but it seems rdrama has all that core functionality too). It's a leagues better UX than vanilla oldreddit. After adding that custom CSS to cut out whitespace and changing to Win98 theme, I'm almost feeling young again.
Dramatards did a great job.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I'd love to have the equivalent of internal NSA security audit tho.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
the war on the Donbass front seems to be largely fought by separatist forces who are much more highly motivated and have their backs to the wall
Then it's very clever of Russia to throw the remaining male population of those areas into combat: with continued Western support for Ukraine, they'll keep lining up against that wall and falling there.
I think the collapse of Russian war effort and probably government can come with little fanfare and forewarning, certainly no nuclear option.
On this note, what do you think about Kadyrov's retirement announcement?
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
If not Trump, then who?
That's a terrible line of thought. «If not Putin then who?!» for 20 years straight is how Russia got into this mess. Authoritarians like to exploit the sense of existential anxiety, the limbic, system-1 dread: it makes the electorate desperate to hold tight to the closest semi-viable thing they can feel, let it even be a straw; and then the aspiring Führer's only remaining task is to always be close. It's not a hard one too. The second part of Putin's formula is «never swap horses while crossing the stream». The stream never ends.
Trump's no Putin or Xi or Erdogan or even Orban, but he's certainly circling the same attractor.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I'll grant that you only live once [citation needed], however Americans have presidential elections every four years, with dozens of grifters to choose from in the primaries, and there is such a thing as the optimal stopping theorem. Stopping too early can be catastrophic.
I understand the desperation. Trump was the only one in a long while who threw the right-wingers a bone. But 2016 anti-establishment sentiment, roused by decades of cruder deceit, was demanding meatier concessions.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
No, this is not availability bias, this is calling out a crude rhetorical trick with an obvious example, and also a reasonable heuristic. A platform based on the purported indispensability of some clearly unexceptional man makes him suspect beyond his other shortcomings. There always is a «then who», often a step away from the Great Leader. In Putin's case, Medvedev had been portrayed as a bumbling liberal seat-warmer, but he had presided over arguably the most prosperous and nicest period in all of Russian history, and one of the less contentious military triumphs. Why would he deserve less credit? If he deserves equal credit, why would it be catastrophic to stick with him instead? (And yes, of course he was a seat-warmer. That's part of the point).
Exactly how do Trump and Putin get put in the same category?
There are meaningful similarities in presentation, if nothing else. However, I am referring to the fact that «If not Trump, then who?» is literally one name-swap away from the slogan Если не Путин, то кто? (If not Putin then who?) which was, in this exact form, the symbol of faith of nascent Putinism.
In fact we could say that Trump is worse than Putin a priori, if we leave Putin's consequences out of it. Trump's only unique selling feature now is his brand, and even that's not clearly positive because a) half the country loathes him and b) he has not converted his appeal into a competent team and network that'd allow him to pursue his policies, and is clearly satisfied with toothless adulation from the rallies and online fandom. Everything he has done (like appointing Justices) would have been done by another Republican in his seat. I believe that from a red triber's perspective, DeSantis is unironically a better bet, because he's not that despised and is a savvier operator, while sharing many of core ideas of Trumpism.
Some suggestions:
-
It would be nice to have the user's own comments differentiated somehow, e.g. with a vertical bar or collapse button of another color, to readily see parts you've participated in when scrolling. (Or am I blind?) Also, where's my cumulative good boy score.
-
We could use a general Unfinished Conversations thread, to continue specific old discussions from Reddit. E.g. I wanted to give a high-effort response to /u/Lykurg480 there but now would rather proceed here. It'd also serve to incentivize the transition of fence-sitters («hey so I responded on the other side, you're totally Wrong btw, but will not elaborate in the AEOville, ciao» – less flippantly but...)
-
I actually agree with dramatards that some tasteful multimedia support would be nice, at least for OPs. The culture and moderation would preclude excesses, probably.
-
We could also strap on a library, a book club, a gym, an Urbit Star, a Matrix chat, an Ygdrassil Network support and a kitchen sink. Seriously though, we need more fallbacks. And public keys in bios.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Well, how close is that to an actual distribution of political pundits in the US, or any other group of which Rogan's political guests ought to be an ethnically unbiased sample?
should we be concerned that one particular ethnic group is exercising this much influence over one of the most watched political podcasts in the world?
I chuckled.
Incredible that in 2022 we still have those sorts of videos on Yutube.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
There's no point to being coy about it. If you don't like THE MAN and want to resist him, it's very useful to know how he can most easily stamp on your face. This is easiest to learn by watching some poor fool get stamped in your place.
Of course THE MAN can anticipate this logic and expend unreasonable effort, to give the impression of easily stamping on some problematic hard face and save himself trouble in the future. And that's sort of what the Count is proposing with his ideas for mass media coverage. But that's hard to pull off convincingly against a distributed target.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Agreed, upvoted, considered high-quality. But what is «Quality»? (We could add any number of voting dimensions really, while we're at it. Even nonsense ones, «bananas» or something, or little hearts and diamonds like on gaudy old forums. Zorba, don't take this seriously).
I admit being that guy who frequently uses downvote button as a disagreement button.
That's because this place does not even more effort and eloquence in peddling bad takes. Reddit maybe (let normies cut their teeth on mock debates), not The Motte. Basic literacy and politeness are requirements for participation, not virtues. This is not a Powerful Takes Magazine to boast of your VQ and radicalism; a well-polished turd should be getting two downvotes at once. And if a take is good (by my account), then I usually don't disagree all that much, it's just a... respectable difference in opinion.
But on the other hand, a genuine high-quality post may not get an upvote if I disagree with it and wish its ideas would have less influence acquired by peer pressure. If there was a button to signal instead «this is a substantial effort on a crucial topic, this deserves engagement, but ultimately seems wrong-headed and worthy of a comparably well-written takedown» – then there'd be many posts upvoted on this dimension by me. And it's equivalent to rating the post [-1; 1].
And perhaps my own posts would come to score more on this metric. If nothing else, it's a interesting hypothesis to test, personally.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Vote economy with new points distributed periodically and bonuses to AAQC winners?
(Something something quadratic voting).
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Ilforte, belatedly reporting in.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Why not just request a full export from Reddit directly? You get a link to an archive which contains comments.csv file; it's exhaustive.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
suspiciously "fun"
Think of the Dramanauts watching us, they can only cringe so hard.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
One way to steelman this is to consider that it's a natural process of art returning to its ancestral roots – in a more professional, more specialized world. What worth are visionary utopias conjured by writers (or dramas pointing at some possible utopian outcome)? We have experts, activists and politicians and special services, also payment processors and investors and the rest of the market for that; it's blatantly undemocratic to aid some weird Idea Guy in using his verbal skill to disseminate his non-vetoed ideas, no doubt introducing harmful biases and potentially exposing us to existential risks. Words are power; power ought not to be wielded irresponsibly.
What use are stories, then? Palatable consumable vessels to reinforce ideology which was developed by people trained in ideological domains; warning of evil, reminding us of the attraction of good. Stories are stylized allegories, parables, and myths of the tribe, but the tribe's ethos does not originate in the stories. Imagine if we allowed speechwriters to engineer state or corporate policy, spin doctors to decide the ultimate direction of the spin – preposterous. It's only proper show of humility for an author to simply wrap the approved, taught doctrine from the pulpit in prettier words or images. Perhaps women are naturally better at this than men by such an extent (whereas men are better at autistic daydreaming; though men used to make okay moralist writers). But even if not, this job's not so hard that we'd lose a lot of value by using the award ceremony itself to make the same point as award-winning works.
To group trivial identitarian narcissism together with exploration of group-specific abstract aesthetics under the label of pandering is to make pandering uselessly broad a concept – unless we indulge in some mental gymnastics to define a group that is being pandered to in the latter case. Maybe your group is people who think they don't need social sanction to peddle their homegrown visions for society. Here's a dangerous one.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Specifically serving a disfavored group, or writing letters about how dumb racists are, seems pretty anti-racist to me.
This whole idea only works when accepted as part of a bundle, together with their definition of racism (power+prejudice) and their definition of power – that involves some identity gerrymandering and jumping through hoops, but ends up pointing at white people as those wielding systemic power at the expense of non-whites, men at the expense of women, cis at the expense of trans and queer.
Alone, it's not clear how you can be like Kendi, i.e. consistently clamor for preferential treatment, and label yourself an antiracist.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I don't follow the war news; they seem to unfold roughly as I've foreseen on 24th, and specific timing and extent of events is not that significant. Russia has an inept army and dysfunctional leadership; it was not in any position to pick this fight against the hegemonic power via attacking Ukraine. Mobilization might change the tide for a while (and I expected it to happen in early March, which it did not, presumably for the same reasons of ineptitude and dysfunctionality), but supplying Ukrainian capacity for resistance and eventual counterattacks is trivial for NATO, so it wouldn't amount to much, and there's an effectively unlimited supply of Ukrainian men, starting in 2023 women too... For me, what matters more these days is stuff like visa processing guidelines.
Clearly, the best solution for Russia is the removal of Putin
For the longest time, many in Russian intelligentsia spoke of the «collective Putin», assuming that this forgettable guy («Who is Mr. Putin?» – remember that, ages ago?) is merely a front, a consensus-approved talking head for interlocked elite interests. Oligarchs, siloviki, mafias, even the (downplayed) «little old me» – liberal NGOs and the like – and the see-through product of TV magic running around puffing his cheeks pandering to the plebs, asserting that everything's going according to plan.
Well there are no longer independent oligarchs, nor NGOs, and it's not clear that the dude isn't just running the whole show as an old style autocrat. But it may not matter: there is nobody to remove him anywhere close to him, so the entire upper echelon of Russian leadership could as well be a distributed Putin. They are all neck-deep in this, and apparently the top enforcers are either true believers, perhaps more driven than Vladimir himself, or fear the consequences of defection more than the outcome of the war. It doesn't help that they, bound by blood as they are, really have no reason to expect lenience from the victors. We don't know how deep in the echo chamber they remain after all the news, but they have the capacity to maintain the echo chamber for a big enough share of Russian population (including, crucially, Interior Troops) to not worry about their own necks before the disintegration of Russia.
As for how the war will go – I'm pretty sure neither Ukrainans nor their backers are intent on returning to the uneasy post-2014 status quo. So after the success of repealing these Special Operation forces, we will see the escalating siege of Crimea, supplies of even more capable tech, and continued nuclear bluff, and Russian refusal to recognize the outcome of the war upon exhaustion of offensive and even defensive capabilities. The best case scenario for everyone at this point is self-Jucheanization of Russia, which will win maybe 6-10 years for the regime, until its resource base is expended and it collapses with relatively little noise (which is to say, some nuclear accidents, minor wars and something like 5M dead from infrastructure collapses). However, if things go well for them, Ukrainians and co. can opt to force the issue and strike deep into Russian territory, on grounds of demilitarizing the unrepentant and consistent threat to European security; it's also probable that Galeev types will succeed to solicit funds and political momentum in the DC for the Operation Liberation of Oppressed Peoples. At least that's their plan.
But that's more far-fetched for now.
Disclaimer: I have only started reading MacAskill. So far he seems worse than reviews like this indicate, but predictable from them.
Utilitarianism-longtermism-EA cluster is filled with smart and conscientious people. It's unfairly maligned and strawmanned, attacked with hot takes that are in fact addressed in their texts; what happens here is worse – the case for partiality is not even made. Obviously longtermists, wokes and trads compete for resources in the present, so they have to do politics, and politics mean pandering to the masses with emotional language, so their really pretty different moral systems find not-so-different expressions. Duh. And nerd-shaming is just a more primitive political angle.
The lack of charity can be defended by arguing, like I do, that refined and defensible longtermist positions are expected to collapse into grotesque totalitarianism, under the double whammy of minimizing-risks and ends-justify-means drives. We know how this happens to utopian projects in practice. It's not enough to claim that you've noticed the skulls either. Maybe you've noticed the wrong pile.
But there's a more direct critique. Simply put it's that we are entitled to be represented in the future – personally, or by proxy of our values and heirs; and EA-Utilitarian-longtermism does not serve this purpose well.
There are two main arguments for that.
First, it's that conventional morality is dependent on some form of reciprocity. Yet vanilla longtermism does not imply acausal trade, timeless Universe and all other sorts of weird Lesswrongian belief systems. The present and the future are not ontologically equal: we have power over the hypothetical them, and even if future people matter at all, saving a child drowning today seems to be agreed to be more important than saving a child who might come to exist tomorrow (if you have to choose). The past and the future, as far as we know, do not exist: causality only happens in the moment, and sans our engineering of persistent causal chains, there will be no reason for inhabitants of the future to reciprocate our goodwill by, say, continuing to care about things we have sentimental attachment for (or even our own frozen bodies waiting to be awakened. Indeed, MacAskill is hostile to cryonics, on grounds of preventing «value lock-in»). We, too, already display indifference and often contempt towards our ancestors. In all the history of European thought, only Chesterton spoke in passing of engaging with them as equals («tradition as the democracy of the dead»), and the founder of Russian Cosmism Nikolai Fyodorov alone called for their literal rescue. No matter what MacAskill owes the Future, we have little reason to expect that The Future will believe it owes anything to us. This moral issue is not negligible.
Second, continuing, it's this meme justifying the consumption of meat with an example of Nazi chicken. Or less opaquely: moralists often only want the deserving to get utility, and value utility received by the undeserving negatively.
Who is deserving? Maybe children, okay. Children are presumed to be without sin. Nonsense of course, they can be terrifying bastards (as anyone who's seen animal abuse by shittier kids can attest), but even granting this convention – children grow up into adults. And for a longtermist, there is no reason sans rhetorical to prioritize the childish phase over the longer adult one in a given future sentient. Suppose, MacAskill says, a child cuts himself (Levin in Scott's review deviously writes «herself») on the shards of a glass bottle you've dropped. What if that's a future evil dude though? I'd feel way less bad about his suffering. Now, what if it's the father-to-be of a guy who'll switch off your grandson's cryocapsule upon reading the latest research showing that ameobas experience quale more intensely than mid-21st century bigots and thus deserve the limited joule budget? He can trip on the pool of his blood and slit his throat on another shard for all I care. What if it's just a child who'll grow up to be some future superNazi, already taught to hate and ridicule everything you have ever stood for?
And in a way, this is exactly the type of a child MacAskill envisions, because he believes in Whig history (like a certain Devil) where subsequent societies tend to be more moral than preceding ones to the point of complete disconnect.
For example, Pagan Romans were monsters by his standards. Excepting maybe a few classicists, we must have a poor idea of the ancient Roman intuitive day-to-day morality. We'd be abominations to them, and not because of not owning slaves or respecting women or some such, but for reasons incomprehensible to us, orthogonal to our concerns. Like the terrifying flatness of our spirituality, our communities lacking ancestral gods and multigenerational familial cults; our supposedly lofty ideals and universal religions could be akin to eating bug slop after grandma's cookies in their eyes. Did we truly only gain in our ethical knowledge since then?
In any case, from an unbiased timeless perspective, I wouldn't be able to condemn Romans for trying to «value lock-in» their domain. They did not owe us anything; they owed everything to each other, their gods and values of their polities.
A society that'll consider us living people abominable can emerge. But I'd really like for a society that's trivially moral and aesthetically pleasing by my standards to exist as well. What's needed for that is not generic future people but specific aligned people, carrying specific ideas (probably grounded in their innate biases) that allow for the preservation of such a society, to exist as an uninterrupted line into eternity – maybe bending, evolving, but at every point being able to largely determine the next one. And they need some capabilities too.
Total human extinction is a big deal for a big-tech-adjacent upper-middle class longtermist in the Bay Area (who feels that only a deep purge of Earth crust would get to him specifically), but for me, the very likely extinction of my moral line is about as bad.
Horrible and self-centered as it sounds, this looks like a more sane and also mainstream moral position.
By the way, Locklin asserts, fairly or not:
Successful founders and VCs are often psychopaths. I think they’re used to working with psychopaths. [...] I suspect normies wouldn’t think this level of abuse is realistic, but silicon valley is filled with clownish, ridiculous levels of psychological abuse that are so extreme, a realistic portrayal would seem like a parody.
Not sure how this compares to the AGI misalignment risk (that is, the risk that comes from the existence of AGI not controlled and aligned by those SV types). Probably EAs do have to factor the «are we the baddies or enabling baddies?» somewhere in their moral calculus too. But not all baddies are visible to the polite discourse.
I want to emphasise the bit about Fyodorov. MacAskill says: “Impartially considered, future people should count for no less, morally, than the present generation.” and “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.” etc. Do they count more? Scott says this conclusion is inevitable going by the numbers. Compare to this excerpt («question on brotherhood», 1870-1880s):
...Thus, progress consists in the recognition by the sons of their superiority over their fathers and in the recognition by the living of their superiority over the dead, that is, in a recognition which excludes the necessity, and therefore the possibility, of uniting of the living (sons) for the raising of the dead (fathers), while in the raising of the fathers the actual superiority of the sons would be expressed, if only this can be called such; whereas in the elevating themselves over their fathers only their imaginary superiority is expressed.
Progress makes the fathers and the ancestors the defendants, while it gives the sons and descendants judgment and power over them: the historians are judges over the dead, that is, over those who have already suffered the ultimate penalty, the death penalty; and the sons are judges over those who are not yet dead.
Resurrection, being opposed to progress as the cognizance of the superiority of the younger over the older, as the displacement of the older by the younger, requires an education that would not arm sons against their fathers, but, on the contrary, would make the resurrection of fathers the main concern of sons, requires an education that would be the fulfillment of the prophecy of the last Old Testament prophet, Malachi, that is, an education that would be the mutual return of the hearts of fathers and sons to one another.
I think this is deeper than EA. So, the future is now. Forget Fyodorov's naive dreams of reversing entropy and populating the stars with everyone who's ever lived – in a century, pretty much nobody gave a rat's ass about cryopreserving people at scale (like me, EY is very angry about it). MacAskill never makes the obvious symmetric point that past people count too and, again, apparently would rather have nonillions of future people die so that better ethics «evolve».
Really not cool of us.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Seeing as cryonics is taken to be extremely cringe but wealthy people do want to live forever despite cringe (and are ruthlessly mocked for this in OP's link to Unherd, and from the left too, and from whichever other side, and in fact tend to pay lip service to the idea of death being good), I find your assessment lacking. There is some powerful ideological pressure against personal long-termism. Explaining it away with nerds being lame and inept is not good enough. EA is nerdy too, but they're already operating on a much bigger scale.
Ganz is an obnoxious guy. Zero charity, zero intellectual honesty, pure attack dog trained to never back down, and an instinctive, zoological elitist to boot (but cowardly when it comes to offending even the least of his fellow travelers: «uh I won't discuss Strauss, let's focus on Schmitt»... «eh, Dugina was probably killed by Putin, whatevs»). He tries to present his «bien-pensant humanitarian liberalism» or, rather, uncritical hegemonic cheerleading with an attempt to smuggle in some less discredited Marxist ideas through the cracks as mature wisdom born out of true morality; all dissenters are mercilessly deconstructed as poseurs and in the end, just fascists (he really, really likes the word). It's the first trick in any aspiring leftie essayist's book, he's just a bit more well-read in unorthodox (for them) lit than most.
That said: he's largely right about Russia Stans who consume shadows and figments of internal Russian propaganda. I've gotten in many arguments with them, and probably lost like 40% of my fake internet points inflow on themotte for disavowing the war that's ruining my country (or so it feels). They're ridiculous. But it's still easy to see where they're coming from.
This vicarious proxy war has highlighted just how much some people, just like in the 20th century but for other reasons, feel alienated by the Western liberal order in the West itself, unrepresented by its insitutions, and bitter about its poisonous nuances that exploited their good faith (like «anti-racism»...) Classical liberals of yesteryear; many reactionary outcasts like ethnic nationalists disaffected with erosion of their polities and happy indifference of the ruling class with regards to disintegrating families and collapsing birth rates; religious folks who take their faith to be something more than voluntary psychotherapy; and people like me, who want there to be an escape hatch. So there's a demand for some alternative – one backed with teeth and self-interest of players who have a more reliable stake than ideological commitment. Thus, China and Russia and Iran and Third Worldism, geopolitics and realpolitik, and cheerful shallow cynicism of being Against The Current Thing, chugging imported Eurasian sneer by the barrel like so much sour crude oil.
But of course this is the same reason for his own comrades to naysay Capitalism for centuries, and for him to casually fling shit at Elon Musk's endeavors. Like a much smarter socialist Cosma Shalizi has said:
That planning is not a viable alternative to capitalism (as opposed to a tool within it) should disturb even capitalism’s most ardent partisans. It means that their system faces no competition, nor even any plausible threat of competition. Those partisans themselves should be able to say what will happen then: the masters of the system, will be tempted, and more than tempted, to claim more and more of what it produces as monopoly rents. This does not end happily.
As in economy, so in ideology, so in everything: in the absence of challenge, monopolists optimize for their own convenience and rent extraction, and signs of decay are swept under the rug – until your science becomes a cargo cult, your enlightened humanism amounts to a fight for spoils and your dissenters begin rooting for foreign imperialistic empires because they want more democracy and can't get it at home.
Can a dog comprehend this terror of staring at hegemony in the general case, as a bad end? Or just whine when he's getting kicked by an unpleasant master, and cuddle to one who smells nice?
Ironically I can't see what he has written on literal Gramscian hegemony because he's hidden it behind a paywall. But it's probably nothing surprising.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
I think there's very little will to use the nuclear option, and a great capacity for coping (in fact, in autocracies cope/cop capacity matters more than state capacity). If Ukrainians and their Western partners allow for a tolerable framing for this – e.g. «isolated terrorist incidents perpetrated by unknown Banderovtsi elements, leading to local insubordination and emergence of self-proclaimed unrecognized republics» instead of, like you say, an undeniable invasion – we may not even see the appropriate conventional response. Sans nukes, this is not so different from what happened in 2014 to the other side.
Of course this all depends on the continued degradation of Kremlins. Cutting your losses, evacuating loyalists from occupied territories, hunkering down and making a demonstrative nuclear show (say, in Russian Arctic) as a warning would be very reasonable of the regime. But they're not being reasonable.
Strelkov is clowning around:
On the account of the brilliant operation (clearly according to plan and even ahead of schedule) of transfering of the towns of Izyum, Balakleya and Kupyansk to our respected Ukrainian partners, the territory controlled by the military and civil administration of the Kharkov oblast of Ukraine has significantly decreased. Within the framework of strengthening MCA and fruitful utilization of the freed personnel of state authorities, FSB and police, I suggest transferring a part (not less than three border districts) of Belgorod oblast to Kharkov oblast of Ukraine. Our partners there now can fire almost as freely as on the other side of the border, and there is no fundamental difference for the inhabitants... but then we will be able to say with good reason that there are no hostilities on the territory of the Russian Federation. Please consider my proposal as a patriotic initiative and my sincere contribution to the intra-Ukrainian reconcilement.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
As @arjin_ferman observes, this is in line with my more pessimistic scenarios. What is AGI, people ask? Why don't they just click the link? But to be fair, it took me a little while to discover the actual definition, here («WITH PRAGMATISM AGAINST POPULISM & STAGNATION», lmao):
'general purpose AI system' means an AI system that - irrespective of the modality in which it is placed on the market or put into service, including as open source software - is intended by the provider to perform generally applicable functions such as image and speech recognition, audio and video generation, pattern detection, question answering, translation and others; a general purpose AI system may be used in a plurality of contexts and be integrated in a plurality of other AI systems;
It's trivial to realize how this applies to large language models like the GPT series, to say nothing of multimodal systems. We don't have to get even to GATO sorts of multitask training. If anyone thought the cooling effect will only start close to what we intuitively recognize as human performance: think again.
I advise people to notice how synchronized the push against individual agency enhancement is, and it's not, contra the insistence of quokka-economists, explained by innocuous market reasons like economies of scale and data moats. In the US, you have the EA movement with their longtermism, fearmongering, advocacy for «compute governance» and «pivotal acts», and independently from that – politicized corporate AI safety/fairness divisions that'll probably be used to distinguish «responsible actors» and delegitimize smaller ones on the next legislation cycle (like with Oscars: not everyone can afford the demanded diversity package). In the EU, you have this regulation circus building on pop of earlier anti-American big tech rackets masquerading as customer protection. Of course Bostrom's hand is traceable to both sides of the pond, via WEF in the Old World and LW cluster in the New. In Russia... well, if we'll have Russia still on the map in two years, they'll do good if they don't start burning their remaining ML talent for witchcraft; they're also shut out of international markets and can't acquire new compute. Japan is «LOL», as @gwern (not with us I assume) puts it – they don't do any AI R&D worth mentioning, aren't sovereign, and will meekly follow Western lead. In China, as gwern again points out, the newest American export regulations will increase the relative (although not absolute) capacity of central government and big tech, which are already paranoid and illiberal to the highest degree:
The second-order effects here would seem to confirm Chinese autarky and trends towards secrecy, and further, to shift power from Chinese academia/small businesses/hobbyists/general-public to Chinese bigtech and thus, the Chinese government. If you've been following along, the big megacorps, especially in the wake of the attempted US execution of Huawei, have been developing their own DL ASICs for a while with an eye towards exactly this sort of scenario. [...]
If you are rich and well-connected and can finance the lobbying and guanxi and paperwork, you'll be able to get access to compute, one way or another, while the small guys can no longer click 'buy' on nvidia.com or just negotiate their usual datacenter orders and will pay higher costs or go without. It's the same reason why things like GDPR always wind up hurting FANG less than the activists expect (and hurt small actors like NGOs or startups much more), why 'regulatory capture' exists and why big actors often actively lobby for more regulation. It's going to be much harder and more expensive to get Nvidia GPUs or to get proprietary hardware (can you buy a TPU from Google? no, you cannot), therefore, small actors like hobbyists will be systematically disadvantaged and many priced out.
The rest of the world (sorry fellow rest-of-worlders) is comprised of some shades of shithole and Western cryptocolony, wracked by climate disasters, brain drain and, crucially, global economic crisis triggered in no small part by the EU/American/Chinese COVID policies and now the war, extremely vulnerable even to half-hearted sanctions, and won't have the wherewithal to do ML research at scale.
Well, there are exceptions of course, hilariously two exceptions validating priors of Russian conspiracy nuts.
One is a dystopian surveillance state with legendary intelligence services and diplomatic acumen, a history of attempting and partially pulling off ludicrously illiberal tech regulations, but not (yet) any de facto obstruction on advanced AI research for smaller actors; the island where core DeepMind staff is physically located, and Stability.AI incorporated.
The other is a militarized ethnostate with infamously capable intelligence agencies, world-class lithography fabs, world-leading STEM&software talent, brazenly self-interested and defiant of international regulations, not beholden to NATO or really any other alliance, with a good track record in clandestine WMD development and non-signing of non-proliferation treaties and their equivalents.
So: USA, UK, Israel, maaaybe China if (and that's a big if) it doesn't immolate itself with its own bureaucracy and Special Military Operation in a few years. These three and a half – more like one and a half – actors will split the future of the light cone, the way it's going.
That's to be expected of course. Individual agency is a threat to big structures, always has been. Even allowing escape is a threat, an infinitely big threat when multiplied by longtermist numbers and existential anxiety. There used to be a great Motte-adjacent blog, 451somethingsomething, a few years ago, with a good article of the alienation the author felt when he noticed the vibe of eusociality and hivemindedness in the society around him, his own obsolescence as a stubborn independent cell. Not edgy, just desperate. That's kind of how I feel now.
Ah, the air of freedom. And no obscene input lag in the text box!
Somewhat low-effort and speculative, but better put it out there than forget. Just the other day I wondered about the implication of within-Hajnal line (actually applying more broadly across Europe) marriage pattern: that a meaningful and equal proportion of women and men never married and left little to no offspring. Strict monogamy ensures that for every incel or monk out there exists a counterweight in the form of old maiden or nun; differential mortality rates affect this but not critically. Even an undesirable woman won't stoop so low as to marry an undesirable man; and Prince Charming is already taken, and the Church would rather you don't bear his child. This is tragic and self-defeating in a sense, but it also accelerates evolution, by precluding the ability of lower-value genes to survive via daughters.
While Hajnal specificity is often explained just like that, with the role of religious institutions, it may also be related to ancient signatures of greater sexual selection pressure in European populations, which are hypothesized to be downstream from lower rates of polygyny. It's reasonable to suspect that this produces contemporary pro-White trends evident on, say, dating websites.
But there are other, less sexy views on how best to bias human evolution. E.g. Lee Kuan Yew characterized the good old times thus:
We (rather, you) may be returning to the norm for our species. Just as the West has disenchanted the world and succeeded with the Universal Cultural Takeover in the last few centuries, the globalized postmodernity is now de-Hajnalizing the West.
P.S. Some Twitter edgelord I've forgotten (not Uriah, bless his soul) had a thread on the «late stage civilization chick» or something to this effect, mocking a type of a conventionally attractive young woman ubiquitous across nations, populations, clubs and platforms: big butt (usually in tight jeans, with some beige top), duck face, tanned skin, long dark hair, empty stare. It's a deliberate look and not some biological change, of course. But it feels primeval, and a rebellion against the modern world and fragile European beauty ideals.Such women wouldn't appear out of place in a prehistoric tribal chieftain's harem.
More options
Context Copy link