FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
8d ago
I mean, if genes/IQ is real, it's probably small but compounding, a factor on a thousand stacked decisions, like a random walk biased upward or downward, second or even third order. In that case, most causes of bad things happening in their life would seem to be largely unrelated to IQ, since every step has a better causative explanation than IQ, but IQ would still be the determinant of where the chain ended up. (Admittedly, that's very hard to falsify.)
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Thus all progress depends on the incompetent politician. ... Hang on.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
There was never a need for a "casus belli", Trump can just do things. He can just ignore the supreme court. What's supposed to keep the country working is not "presidents don't assume dictatorial powers" but "the other organs stop him". This will simply be an opportunity to discover if it works.
The question to me hinges on this: did the people who say that AGI seems fundamentally impossible then consider that the sub-AGI systems that we today possess were possible? Right now I can go on Twitter and pick up a two-page detailed instruction booklet written in plain English that, if I feed it into a commercially available chatbot, will empower this chatbot to, through a deductive process that at least reads surprisingly similar to human research, form a remarkably accurate answer as to where a photo was taken, where the originators of this chatbot had never at all considered this possibility and did not build the chatbot for this purpose. In the course of doing so, the chatbot will autonomously search the internet, weigh evidence, and execute optical comparisons of photos evincing high-level understanding of visual features. Would anybody who currently says that AGI is sci-fi have admitted this technology could exist? Or would they have said it was, as it were, "at least 100 years off"?
Sure, we don't understand how the models do it so it's easy to say "I thought we didn't have a research path to that skill, and actually we still don't." But empirically, it seems to me that enough skills have been "flaking off general intelligence" - turned out to not be "general intelligence" bound after all - that to me the whole concept of general intelligence is now in doubt, and it seems at least plausible that more and more "AGI-complete skills" will continue to flake off and become practically solved until there's nothing left to the concept. Certainly at least the confident claim that this won't happen is looking very shaky on its feet right now.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
Small correction, the term "scissor statement" was coined by Scott Alexander in his 2018 short story Sort By Controversial.
"At this rate of growth, the entire lake will be this algae in a few days". "Ludicrous silliness!"
The point is we don't have a clue where the sigmoid will level, and there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to think it'll level at the human norm considering how different AI as a technology is to brains. To be clear, I can see reasons why it'll level below the human norm; lithography is a very different technology from brains and it does sure look like the easily Moore-reachable performance for a desktop or even datacenter deployment will sigmoid out well below the human brain scale. But note how that explanation has nothing to do with human brains for reference, and if things go a bit different and Moore keeps grinding for a few more turns, or we find some way to sidestep the limits of lithography like a much cheaper fabrication process leading to very different kinds of deployment, or OpenAI decide to go all in on a dedicated megatraining run with a new continuous-learning approach that happens to work on first, second or third try (their deployed capacity is already around a human brain), then there's nothing stopping it from capping out well above human level.
FeepingCreature
1mo ago
I think that anyone who wants to can have a 3D printer at home. Inasmuch as "we'll all have 3D printers at home" has failed, it has failed due to lack of interest, not lack of technological development.
It's a tech bubble from a market size perspective, not a technology perspective.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
I think the real answer here is "do not under any circumstances allow a party to win all three organs of government."
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
I read it as more like, sophistry may be employed against inconsequential or subjective matters like religion freely, as there's no harm to it; but if you try to argue with reality, reality is gonna win.
It's so weird to me, because it's like a minimum coup. Not even a minimum viable coup, because it clearly isn't. It's not doing your enemy a small injury, it's like slapping your enemy in the face with the broad of your sword, then running away. Are you trying to start shit or not? It's like they themselves didn't know if they wanted to start shit or not. Like a child's drawing of a coup: all the parts are there, the march, the violence, the fraudulent scheme, but they're just executed with zero skill or coherence, basically at random. I think that's why it causes so much division. It's like your neighboring country rolls a tank over the border, but it's made of cardboard, plops out one sad shell and falls apart. Now you don't even know if you're supposed to be at war.
It's a coup done by a person who just doesn't know how to do one. So do you let it count?
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
But it does still provide a non-tariff trade barrier (i.e. is a protectionist policy) against potentially more competitive imports.
I mean, I just feel like... every regulation, including fraud and food safety, is a protectionist policy against potentially more competitive imports, isn't it? If you have too much arsenic in the imported orange juice or whatever, then if the customer would usually not notice this immediately and correct course, then the restriction on selling the orange juice is, from a pure market perspective, a trade barrier against competition. I think at some line, and arguably "champagne from Australia" is across that line, you have to say "no, fraud is not legitimate competition actually."
FeepingCreature
6mo ago
Personally, I mostly read forum quests and fanfic on my phone. I don't think there's anything special about books in particular.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
The normal way you beat a network effect is by providing an alternative that is sufficiently compelling to a subset of high-value users that they jump first and bring the rest of the network with them later.
You know what? Make a good fandom wiki! The current sites are a confused, ad-riddled mess, getting worse all the time, and Wikipedia has explicitly kicked them off. They're up for picking.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
As I understand it, there may be genuine self-induced brain damage in play, so probably no.
FeepingCreature
3mo ago
That's a good metric!
Not at all; it's an implication that you consider other subsections vulnerable to rape, that is, desirable. "Unrapeable" says "not even with zero effort or consequences would she get any".
If you're rating on a spectrum, you get "I would put effort into getting laid with this person" as the higher tier, but then there's a tier of "sure, would fuck if an opportunity arose". That's the "rape" tier; it's not saying you want to engage in rape, but that rape is the obvious-to-come-to-mind situation in which their attractiveness would overcome the thus-lowered effort barrier. If there was a rapist in the room, they would rape this person. They would not rape the lower tier - unrapeable - because it would be actively unenjoyable, net negative even if free. "Thanks, I'd rather masturbate."
A less edgy schoolyard way to phrase the same thing is "would pay to fuck", "would fuck if you paid me" and "not even if you paid me."
FeepingCreature
2mo ago
I genuinely don't understand how you can say it's plausible to happen at all, but sci-fi nonsense to happen likely. By and large probability is in the mind, and "sci-fi" is usually a claim about the reality part of a belief rather than the opinion. It'd be like saying "It's possible that it happens soon, but it's raving sci-fi nonsense for you to be worried about it."
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
No because Trump is an outlier. Trump-style populism relies on his charisma; it's not replicable at scale. Not even Trump could build a machine that produces Trumps; and his party is not interested in doing so at any rate.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
Conversely, if Kamala wins, does that mean you underestimated the power of Orange Man Bad?
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
Yeah I gave him a lot of credit, but the evidence he got online right brainfried is rapidly mounting.
FeepingCreature
5mo ago
Giving him 22 years for seditious conspiracy would make sense were he say, a National Guard colonel whose troops arrested the entire senate and occupied the building for days.
Okay, I honestly agree with the rest of the comment, but if there's anything that a state should have a death sentence for, surely it's that. Like, at that point it's not even a question of law and order but of naked self-preservation.
I guess the argument would be that life creates an incentive against killing the senate? Hard to say where the stand-off factor is there. This is not exactly a common occurrence, so maybe going all the way to maximal deterrence is fine actually.
FeepingCreature
8mo ago
I mean, I'm not proposing a model but an empirical observation. If the Republican machine could replicate trump to replace him they would have, considering how much they dislike him.
I don't think that "charisma matters in politics" is news. Plenty of American presidents have had mass appeal, just for instance Obama. But the Dems cannot produce Obamas anymore than the Reps can produce Trumps. If that's solved -- sure, but there's no reason to me to think that Trump moves us closer to solving it. American politics has had centuries to codify charisma and hasn't managed to do more than come across it in the wild.
The thing is, from the outside view (also partially as an Elon stan) I remember all these arguments about landing rockets - from Arianespace, half a decade ago. It always had an undertone of desperation - "well, it isn't proven that landing rockets is even possible", then "well, it isn't proven that landing rockets is even financially beneficial" - with the unstated "of course, if it is, we're just dead, so let's not think about that."
Somebody who's currently taking your lunch money has no need to document their balance sheet. The default assumption, IMO, is that reuseability is very profitable, and so is Starlink. I did some math on it a few years ago, and there's basically no half-way on that service; it's either ruinously cash negative or deliriously cash positive. Given that SpaceX is happily running a hardware-rich experimental launch program right now, I suspect the latter.
(I have no opinion on Tesla.)
FeepingCreature
11mo ago
Huh. I also cannot get any Google autocomplete for "trump shot", "trump assassina...", "trump secret s...", "trump inju..."... Google clearly knows of these topics, but they somehow haven't made their way into their search history model.
This is at least very fishy.
I mean, I believe in moral intuition and I suspect in this case most people would have a strong moral impulse to do just this, even though they'd discard it as impractical. I think it's hard to retreat to moralistic intuition and five minutes later say "but this moral impulse you must squash."
Where it gets complicated for me is, do you have an obligation to save a bee that gets stuck in a spiderweb? There's no reason to assume the bee is more worthy of survival than the spider. But here my moral opinions strongly strike out in favor of "kill the spider, save the bee". But in that case I know that other people have the opposite response.
More options
Context Copy link