Glassnoser
5mo ago
How do you prove you don't have another job?
Won't this have averse selection? The best employees will be the most likely to take this offer while those who stay will be those who know they can't get easily hired elsewhere.
The supply of doctors in the US is artificially constrained which means you can increase the supply of doctors while lowering salaries.
Up until that point you have no flexibility. You can’t leave your job or your life is over. You can’t choose where you live. If you get fired your life is over.
Why can't you change jobs? Every doctor in my family has done so at least once. Don't many doctors work for themselves at their own clinics?
Glassnoser
7mo ago
What's frustrating about Indians is their ubiquity combined with poor English skills. Tech forums are full of Indians answering questions with broken English that is painful to read and decipher. Call centres are staffed with Indians, many of whom mumble with thick accents and bad grammar.
Glassnoser
1mo ago
This isn't even the full story. The full version includes possible sexual assault, possible lying about sexual assault, minor physical violence, inappropriate emotional outbursts, more cheating, more erratic behaviour, and more crazy dating experiences.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Minimally, it should be able to tell the president to at least ask El Salvador to release him and to stop paying to have him imprisoned.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
I think you're underestimating the extent to which people can fail to accept that Trump's trade policies are the cause of any bad economic effects and the extent to which they can fail to accept that the bad economic effects are even happening.
One lesson I think we should be learning but that doesn't seem to be sinking in yet is that we're actually pretty bad at creating benchmarks that generalize. We assume that, because it does really well at certain things that seem hard to us, that it is highly intelligent, but it's been pretty easy so far to find things it is shockingly bad at. Progress has been impressive so far but most people keep overestimating its abilities because they don't understand this and they focus more on the things it can do than the things it can't do.
There have been a lot ridiculous claims within the last couple of years saying things like it can replace junior software developers, that it is just as intelligent as a university student, or that it can pass the Turing test. People see that it can do a lot of hard things ane conclude from that that it is basically already there, not understanding how important the things it still can't do are.
I'm sure it will get there eventually, but we need to remember that passing the Turing test means making it impossible for someone who knows what he's doing to tell the difference between the AI and a human. It very much does not mean being able to do most of the things that one might imagine a person conducting a Turing test would ask of it. AI has been tested on a lot of narrow tasks, but it has not yet done much useful work. It cannot go off and work independently. It still doesn't seem to generalize its knowledge well. Guessing what subtasks are important and then seeing succeed on those tests is impressive, but it is a very different thing than actual proven intelligence at real world problems.
Glassnoser
8mo ago
It wasn't actually a bad economy though.
Glassnoser
10mo ago
If they just randomly search people's phones, the fine is so devastating that people might be very afraid of getting caught even if there is a low probability.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
One of the many problems with this is that if investors think that tariffs will be reversed in two years, then you won't accomplish any reshoring. You'll just slow down the economy for two years.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
GDP per household is $224,000 per year.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
Using the Poisson distribution, I think it's somewhere around 3-7% depending on how you do it. So it's very fishy.
Is this a deliberate pun?
I use AI a lot at work. There is a huge difference between writing short bits of code that you can test or read over and see how it works and completing a task with a moderate level of complexity or where you need to give it more than a few rounds of feedback and corrections. I cannot get an AI to do a whole project for me. I can get it to do a small easy task where I can check its work. This is great when it's something like a very simple algorithm that I can explain in detail but it's in a language I don't know very well. It's also useful for explaining simple ideas that I'm not familiar with and would have to look up and spend a lot of time finding good sources for. It is unusable for anything much more difficult than that.
The main problem is that it is really bad at developing accurate complex abstract models for things. It's like it has memorized a million heuristics, which works great for common or simple problems, but it means it has no understanding of something abstract, with a moderate level of complexity, that is not similar to something it has seen many times before.
The other thing it is really bad at is trudging along and trying and trying to get something right that it cannot initially do. I can assign a task to a low-level employee even if he doesn't know the answer and he has a good chance of figuring it out after some time. If an AI can't get something right away, it is almost always incapable of recognizing that it's doing something wrong and employing problem solving skills to figure out a solution. It will just get stuck and start blindly trying things that are obviously dead-ends. It also needs to be continuously pointed in the right direction and if the conversation goes on too long, it keeps forgetting things that were already explained to it. If more than a few rounds of this go on, all hope of it figuring out the right solution is lost.
A few weeks ago, people were posting questions from the LSAT on Twitter which they described as especially difficult. Invariably, I found them all to be really easy. This seems to fit with something I've struggled to understand which is why do most people seem cognitively normal most of the time, but as soon as anything becomes just a little abstract, they seem utterly incapable of understanding it? It doesn't usually come up, but if you try to teach someone really basic math or if you try to point out a logical error in an argument, they suddenly lose the ability to understand the most basic and obvious things, most of which shouldn't even need to be explained. They should be intuitive. I guess basic reading comprehension and using logic just happen to be rare abilities, even among people who seem to be able to do other things that seem very cognitively demanding.
I do think that there should be some restrictions on the right to vote based on being able to get say a 170 on the LSAT because I see so many insane opinions being expressed which if acted on would lead to horrible consequences, and they're usually rooted in people not having an understanding of something really basic like how supply and demand work. I don't think education is a solution to this because it's not just that they've never studied economics. I don't think they are even capable of understanding how supply and demand work.
I have a lot of experience trying to teach people math and arguing with people over abstract ideas. There are a lot of simple logical truths which are intuitive to an intelligent person that you cannot get the average person to understand even after hours of explaining to them. Most people are just not capable of rational thought.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
There is no guarantee of this happening. Progress in AI could stagnate. I don't agree that very many jobs can be automated with today's technology. We may be close, but progress is already slowing down. There are a number of problems limiting progress that might not be overcome. Returns to scaling are starting to plateau, we're running out of data, and Moore's Law is coming to an end. It is definitely possible that we will find solutions to these problems and I know some think they've already found them, but nothing is guaranteed.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Presumably many lawyers could have done that. Wouldn't it make more sense to pay them for the time and effort expended?
Glassnoser
7mo ago
I wrote a comment expressing some confusion about what point you're trying to make. Then I deleted it and read Yudkowsky's Tweet and things are much clearer. I only say that to point that your comment is very confusing out of context and I don't think you've done a good job of summarizing his argument.
His actual argument is that modern society is lacking in something poor people in the past had in abundance and therefore, despite the 100-fold increase in material wealth, some modern people are still quite poor in a way ancient people would recognize because they're lacking something they had in abundance. He specifically mentions people having to grovel and smile all day at work.
What I think this gets wrong is that people do have the power to avoid those jobs. If you don't like faking a smile at a customer, you can work in a warehouse or on a construction site. If you don't like having a boss, you can freelance in many different fields. You can work as a taxi driver. You can find a nicer boss.
These jobs are also not that different than how people lived in the past. Most people didn't live on their own farms, working for themselves. They usually worked on a farm owned by someone else, or they worked as a servant. Some people even worked in towns and dealt with customers.
So we can observe how people trade off these things and see how much they value them. And it turns out that most people put up with a lot of stuff that seems awful so that they can live in bigger houses and own nicer cars. Not everyone does this. Lots of people value their freedom enough to work low-paying jobs that offer flexibility.
As for your argument that NIMBYism prevents more poverty, I don't agree. When given the choice, people tend to move to really big densely populated cities. They have a choice, so if their quality of life were worse in the city, they wouldn't move there. Yes, some things are worse there. We are not yet so rich that you don't have to make your life worse in some way that poor people in the past didn't have to deal with, but it's still an overall increase in the quality of life, despite the traffic congestion and annoying people.
Consider that you can at any time go join an Amish community and live like you're in the 18th century, but with a few conveniences of the modern world. But almost no one chooses to do this.
Glassnoser
8mo ago
It's not a good interview. Trump is a very boring person to listen to. It would be more interesting if someone who knew more about politics and economics would interview him and challenge more of his assertions, but that might just get hostile and he might refuse to answer. He used every opportunity to go off topic and avoid answering direct questions.
Glassnoser
8mo ago
The vast majority of my excessive drinking was before 21. 21 was actually around the age I decided I should prioritize my health and not drink too much. I was much more mature than I was just a few years earlier. Also, if 18 year olds can get access to alcohol, it makes it a lot easier for 16 year olds to get access to it. My friends and I drank way too much in high school and we mostly got our alcohol from older siblings.
I totally agree that it's ridiculous that people over 30 are getting carded. This is not a thing in Quebec, but in the rest of Canda, they're way too strict about it. There's no law requiring them to do it though.
Glassnoser
10mo ago
I used to post there occasionally, though not often. I largely abandoned Reddit about a year ago after my account was permanently suspended for some little thing I can't even remember and they started cracking down on ban evasion and a lot of subreddits started shadow banning accounts with low comment karma which made my alts almost unusable.
Glassnoser
10mo ago
What do you mean by "parents' basement studies"?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The side that believes more strongly in its case will pay all the legal fees.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
All voters know is that they're not corporations.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
One problem with this is it helps those who want us to conflate wokeness with basic decency.
We are taught about it as one of the reasons for the War of 1812, when the US tried and failed to conquer what would become Canada.
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