Glassnoser
8mo ago
Wouldn't it make more sense to decide that after becoming extremely smart rather than now when I'm still relatively dumb?
I recently went on a road trip from Halifax to Boston. I thought an outsider's perspective might be interesting. I've been to the US many times, but haven't been in five years and noticed a few things that I hadn't before, and some older impressions were reinforced. In general, the US is really quite different than Canada in many ways, and you notice it the second you cross the border, starting with the accents.
The first thing I noticed crossing the border into Maine (after the border guard's heavy eastern New England accent) was that the US is clearly a richer country. Almost every car looks new and the houses are in good condition. I didn't see any old run down cars or houses that needed to be painted. I realize this might be because of the particular area of the US I visited, since my train ride from Montreal to New York City six years ago left a very different impression. Upstate New York has a lot of shabby looking buildings.
The second and even more striking difference was the amazing condition of the roads. I hardly encountered a pothole and the ones I did were tiny. In Canada, many of the roads are covered in them, some of them being several years old, even in heavily trafficked areas. In New England, almost all the roads look freshly paved.
The driving habits are very different, even than Quebec, where drivers are a bit crazy. New England drivers are universally quite selfish and aggressive. They never ever let you in if you're trying to change lanes. Even if it seems like you have plenty of time and give them warning, they won't so much as let off the accelerator a little bit to help you out. They often don't even stop for pedestrians even if it means running a red light very late. But they're fairly predictable and even though they all go way over the speed limit, they mostly drive around the same speed and don't do anything too stupid. They don't tailgate as badly as Montrealers or Torontonians do. And they don't honk.
By the way, I like the use of toll roads, but it's a bit ridiculous how many times in Maine you have to come to a complete stop from 70 mph just to pay a human being $1 and then get back up to speed again. How much gas does that use? How much is that person paid?
The next striking thing is the obesity. Nova Scotians are fat, but there seem to be a higher number of Americans who are at an absolutely shocking level of obesity that I've rarely seen in Canada. And there are a lot more really fat young people.
In general, there seems to be a wider distribution of human capital in the US. There are a lot more thin, good looking, highly energetic people, but there are also a lot more who seem to be doing really badly. I saw a beggar who was missing an arm! The homeless people seem more like truly desperate people. There is also more variation in other dimensions. I don't know how to describe it other than to say they have unusual physiognomies, and there are more strange characters doing odd things.
The people are oddly very friendly but somehow without ever smiling or adopting a friendly demeanour. It's almost disturbing how little people smile unless you're their customer, in which case they're extremely extraverted. Everyone walks around with a frown, and we had many encounters with New Englanders who expressed some friendly words that seemed sincere, but without smiling or adopting a happy tone of voice.
The other thing I noticed how is how white New England is. Canada's enormous population of recent immigrants from India (which seems to be about half the population in my neighbourhood) is noticeably absent.
In general, it was a good experience. The food is excellent. Americans have a lot of energy, and many girls in Boston are quite attractive, despite the reputation. Maine is beautiful and Boston is an interesting city, but a bit boring given its size. The traffic is a mess and the subway is really slow. There doesn't seem to be much nightlife.
The US really feels like a rich country. I know there has been some divergence between our two countries in the last few years, and coming from the poorest province, it is noticeable. I should note that the people from my home province are known for their friendliness and for being very laid back, even lazy. The US feels like a much more exciting country with more opportunity, but the people seem inordinately unhappy given their material success. The Uber drivers I've talked to and on this and other trips seem unreasonably negative about their situation - complaining about how much they work - given they've escaped from much poorer countries (Sudan and Haiti).
The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two.
That is not the argument. The argument is that if they deport people without due process and then once they're deported, claim they have no jurisdiction, then there is nothing stopping that from happening to American citizens. The argument is not that there is no difference between Americans and non-Americans. The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
Suppose someone pointed out that Americans can have heart attacks just like non-Americans. Your argument is analogous to saying that this amounts to saying there is no meaningful difference between Americans and non-Americans. Just because two things are similar in one respect, that doesn't make them similar in all respects.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
The problem is not that there is no legal obstacle. The problem is that there is no practical obstacle. It's not a slippery slope argument. They admittedly deported him by accident without any due process. There is literally nothing to prevent that from happening to an American citizen. It would be a slippery slope argument if they were saying they would target American citizens next. But the problem is that they are deporting people without regard to their legal status.
On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
It doesn't matter if they are two morally distinct categories if there is no due process to determine under which category a given person falls. What do you even mean by morally distinct categories? I understand they are distinct legal categories, but to say they are morally distinct suggests they have different moral worth based on their citizenship, which strikes me as callous and absurd.
The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible.
The US government is paying El Salvador to take, imprison, and abuse, not only its own citizens, but Venezuelan citizens as well. Of course there is a limit to what the US government should be obligated to do prevent such abuse, but it is totally reasonable to ask that they stop spending resources make the abuse happen for no benefit. The US government's treatment of its citizens (or non-citizens for that matter) is not actually unconstrained by law, but even if it were, that would not excuse its taking advantage of that fact to abuse people. One thing I find so shocking about this is, setting aside the legal questions of its responsibilities, the US government seems to have no desire to correct what it admits was a mistake. I don't understand why they are even taking up the position that they are taking, regardless of its legal merits.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
I'm highly skeptical of this, but even if true, then the US government should not be deporting people to countries where it knows that people will be sent to prison without charge, nor should it be considering sending American convicts to prison in foreign countries. It's one thing to deport illegal El Salvadorans immigrants to El Salvador. It's another to deport citizens of other countries, legally resident in the US, who could be sent to a number of other countries or kept in the US. It's another to do this when it's known that they will be sent to a torture prison filled with gang members without charge. It's another to pay the El Salvadoran government to do this. It's yet another to invite them to come to the US from a safe third country and then send them to the El Salvadoran torture prison.
If you are going to argue for separation of powers, you should remember that the whole point of a democratically elected president is to avoid tyranny and to have certain powers reserved to an institution that represents the will of the people. They should be held to some kind of moral standard, if not a legal one. The point of the separation of powers is not to give carte blanche to the executive branch to do whatever it wants in its area of jurisdiction.
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed.
This is a bad system though. The US is supposed to follow the rule of law, not mob rule. That's the reason there are courts. That's the reason the law can only be changed through the legislature.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable.
I know it's not a legal document, but I'll quote the declaration of the independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This is clearly inconsistent with the principle that some people are fair game to be lured into the country and then kidnapped and sent to torture prisons. The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people. You will not get near-univeral agreement that the US government exists to deem 96% of the world's population to be without rights and free to be abused should they make the mistake of entering the reach of the US government.
I haven't really noticed it online, but I have noticed it in person. I live in a city that has received an enormous number of immigrants in a very short period of time, and they seem to be overwhelmingly from India, although some are from Africa and the Ukraine. This is a Canadian city that has not had much immigration since confederation. It used to be very white, with a small black population, a small indigenous population, and a very small population from elsewhere. The few Indian people we had tended to be very highly educated.
Very little changed here for a long time but it's now undergoing a rapid transformation. The population is booming, high rises are going up everywhere, rents are rapidly outgrowing incomes, and traffic congestion is getting really bad. People are blaming the immigrants, and Indians, with their dark complexions and jet black hair, really stand out. It seems like half the population dowtown is Indian now.
The other really visible change is that seemingly most low-skilled customer-facing jobs are now done by Indians. Almost every grocery store employee, Uber Eats driver, security guard, fast food restaurant worker, and call centre worker is Indian.
They're not really causing any serious problems, but there's beginning to be a bit of a backlash. People blame them for the high rents, and there is a belief that they're taking jobs better suited for teenagers when what we really need are doctors and tradesmen. This a very left-wing city with a strong norm against racism and I personally never witnessed much racism until recently, but a minority of people are starting to feel comfortable saying negative things about them and saying they should go back to India.
Much of this racism comes from Indians themselves though. They often don't like Indians from certain parts of India or from certain castes. Many think we're letting in too many or the wrong kinds. There seems to be a lot of conflict between different groups.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Ray Kurzweil was on Joe Rogan's podcast recently. He seems completely deluded about life extension. I think he said we're at 20% of the longevity escape velocity, which means life expectancy is increasing by about ten weeks every year, so that you're really only 42 weeks closer to death every year. He says this is accelerating such that we will reach longevity escape velocity in about ten years I think. This strikes me as ridiculously optimistic and timed so that he is just young enough to be able to benefit from this.
The guy is not doing well, judging by his appearance. Joe Rogan asked him his age and I was expecting to hear an answer that started with a 9 and was shocked when he said he was in his seventies. Judging by videos from just a few years ago, he has started to age really fast. His body was slumped over and he talked very slowly. The interview was painful to listen to. He's taking something like 60 pills a day to stay young and it doesn't seem to be helping.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
If a judge prevented an American citizen from being expelled from the US because it was illegal, would that be a good thing or would it be a problem because it undermined the country's ability to decide who to keep and who to expel?
Glassnoser
8mo ago
I was thinking about this with respect to social skills recently. I don't have good social skills and neither do my parents. I'm sure it's partly genetic, but my grandmother had incredible social skills. She remembered everybody and she remembered details about them. She was an excellent conversationalist who never ran out of things to talk about. Even into her late nineties she maintained an active social life, going out and making new friends. She never passed on an opportunity to meet a new person and she'd remember them. Her brother was also similarly talented, in particular being really good at telling hilarious stories, which he had an endless supply of.
I used to think this was entirely innate, but I learned that the house she grew up in had a constant stream of visitors. My mother told me that every time she visited her grandparents, there were always visitors and they'd come for half and hour and then leave. Then someone else would come, all day every day for years as far as she knew. My grandmother and her brother would have spent their childhoods entertaining and talking to adults. I also know that , as children, they did a lot of visiting themselves. For Christmas, they would go to each house, stop for a while and talk to the family there, and then move on to the next one.
This is completely different than how I grew up, where adults would only visit occasionally and as children, we wouldn't talk to them much. I think the way my grandmother was raised played a big role in the development of her social skills.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
As a white man who's used OkCupid's passport feature to match with people around the world, I've noticed it's really easy to get matches in certain parts of the world. Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, is incredibly easy. The vast majority of my likes are from there. It feels like I could date the entire country if I wanted to. The next is South America, particularly Brazil. It's easy to match with very beautiful women there. The last is East Africa.
Locally, I've noticed I tend to do well Indian women and Latinas, and to a lesser extent, Middle Eastern women.
There is no scenario where Canada becomes part of the US voluntarily. It just isn't politically possible. Canada has a deep-seated anti-Americanism, which doesn't normally manifest as hate towards the US, but it does manifest as a deep conviction to never be part of the US.
Remember, Canada was largely founded by Americans who were loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution and established new settlements in a freezing cold theretofore sparsely populated territory. It is the only country that was founded in explicit opposition to the founding principles of the US. And then followed two hundred and seventy years of selective migration of Canadians who did not care about this out of the country into the more prosperous and warmer US.
Today, the politics are very different, but not being American is still the single core defining feature of our national identity, which we latch onto because we are culturally so similar. Quebec is another story, in that they have a different ethnic origin and a separate national identity, but they only make voluntary annexation more certainly impossible, because a change to the constitution of this kind would require unanimous agreement by all ten provinces. And if English Canada defines itself by not being American, modern Quebec defines itself by its French language and there is no more sacred political principle in Quebec than the belief that the French language must be protected by law. These laws would undoubtedly violate the first amendment. They violate Canada's own constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but Quebec sidesteps that using the notorious notwithstanding clause. Quebec will not join the US and be forced to give them up.
No amount of economic pressure is going to make Canadians want to give up these cherished identities. For most of our country's history, Canadians have been able to increase their incomes substantially by moving to the US. The profesional class in Canada can still do this, and there is still a significant brain drain. As irrational as it may seem, the ones who remain do not care as much about their material well-being as they do about preserving their independence and national identity, even if they associate it with ideas about peacekeeping and free healthcare rather than loyalty to the British Crown.
Annexation is extremely unpopular and there is an absolute determination not to get stuck with what is regarded here as a seriously dysfunctional political culture.
Trump’s mom was born in the Outer Hebrides in a Gaelic speaking household, people forget this.
I posted a comment the other day about the impressive social skills and conversational abilities of my grandmother and her brother's amazing storytelling ability. Her entire family and that of most of the people in the community she grew up in were from the Outer Hebrides. Many of them, including their parents, spoke Gaelic as a first language.
It might be worth noting that she was known for making things up if it made for a better story.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The tariffs the US just announced are about 10 to 20 times larger than the tariffs that most other countries have on US goods.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
I think you're missing the point which is that this violates her first amendment right to freedom of speech.
Notes on Europe (Dublin, Northern Ireland, Marseille, Paris, Edinburgh). I was recently in Europe for two weeks, mostly in Marseille. It was my first time in six years and my first time in these particular countries. The most notable thing is how thin everyone was. I rarely saw a fat person. The contrast with the US is incredibly stark.
Dublin and Marseille are very dirty with lots of garbage everywhere. Marseille in particular has a lot of garbage and grafitti. Belfast is much cleaner than Dublin. Paris is very clean. So is Edinburgh, though I was there only very briefly.
Most things in all these places are very expensive. Gas is double what it is in Canada. Food in restaurants is extremely expensive, especially in Dublin and Edinburgh. Hostels were surprisingly cheap, but regular hotels were very expensive.
Scottish people are really nice, even (maybe especially?) airport staff. Irish bus drivers are some of the rudest people I've ever met.
With the exception of Paris, I found the transit systems in all these places hard to figure out.
French restaurants are staffed very inefficiently, with a lot of staff just standing around doing nothing much of the time. This is in stark contrast with Canadian restaurant staff who always seem to be rushing, probably busier than is optimal since it's always hard to get the bill.
The price being the price in restaurants and stores was really nice. I loved not having to worry about the sales tax and the tip and usually not having to round $x.99 up to $(x+1).
The Irish countryside with its huge green hills is incredibly beautiful. I've never seen so many cows in my life.
Marseille is chaotic. Cars are parked all over the sidewalk. The level of disregard for the rules of the road was almost third world. Mopeds are very popular. The streets are narrow. France, in general, is really bad at signage. They somehow manage to screw up basics like arrows pointing where you need to go.
In Marseille, a lot of people just sit around on the front steps of buildings they don't live in. They didn't look homeless. Lots of French people sit around in cafés with cigarettes in the most stereotypically French pose imaginable.
The local Marseillaise accent is very strange, though many people didn't have it. People were quicker to assume I didn't speak French than in Quebec, but not likely to deal with this by switching to English. They usually didn't speak English unless they were in a very touristy area, in which case their English was often excellent.
The majority of the population in Marseille seemed to be North African or Middle Eastern.
There were some nice places to hike or swim just outside the city, but most of the beaches were not very nice. They were small and crowded with pieces of wood and seaweed everywhere.
People in Europe are much better dressed than in Canada, especially Parisian women. I found it notable that it rained in Paris and almost every single person was carrying an umbrella (which they don't seem to know how to avoid whacking people in the face with). I'm from a rainy place where most people don't bother with them.
Unfortunately, lip injections are very popular with British women. Don't they know how awful they look?
People seem to love drinking in Dublin. The area around Temple Bar is crazy on a Saturday night. The bars were packed, the streets were full of people, and unlike back home, most people are visibly drunk. There were a lot of signs in the city informing you where alcohol wasn't allowed. There were a lot of methheads in Dublin walking around like zombies in the middle of the day.
Finally, I suspect the Irish wouldn't like to hear this, but Ireland seemed very British to me. It felt like I was on a BBC TV show. I haven't been to England, but I got the impression Ireland and the UK are much more similar to each other than either is to any other anglophone country (though I've only been to Canada and the US), at least on the surface.
There is a lot more I could say, but I think that's it for the less expected observations.
P.S. Since I was on dating apps the whole time, maybe I should comment on that. I usually get a lot of good matches at first when I go to a new place. This was very much the case in Dublin and Paris where I matched a lot of beautiful women right away. I had a much harder time in Marseille, and Edinburgh just doesn't seem to have very many good looking women, though I did eventually match some beautiful women in all these places.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Firms that sell goods at the marginal cost of production deserve to survive.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
I wrote about this a few years ago. The key point is that congestion pricing, when properly designed, does not work by reducing car traffic. It works by coordinating it in a way that more people can actually use the roads but without getting in each other's way and creating congestion. People would adjust their departure times but no one would need to adjust his arrival time or work schedule nor would he have to use an alternative means of transportation nor take another route.
So this is definitely a good thing, but badly implemented. The congestion charges should only apply at bottlenecks, should continuously vary in price, peaking at the early part of rush hour, and should have no exempted vehicles. The effect should be a huge boon to drivers and bus riders, with fewer people taking the subway as a result.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
I don't think anyone here wouldn't be able to remember Scott's name.
The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
Glassnoser
8mo ago
I keep having a confusing experience where immigrants from third world countries, especially India, keep telling me that things are better in their home countries than they are here in Canada. This makes no sense to me given that the GDP per capita in Canada is about six times that of India, even after adjusting for cost of living. Also, the reports from people who visited there and the media show it to be an extremely poor and dysfunctional country. Far more Indians move to Canada for a better life than go the other way, giving up their maids and office jobs to work minimum wage jobs here, but then they say things are better in India.
Specifically, I've heard that the quality of healthcare is better in India and that the standard of living is generally higher. The people who say this still want to stay here, despite having been among the most privileged people in their home countries and living in a country that often doesn't recognize their qualifications or experience.
I've heard similar things from people from China. What is going on? Are they just lying? If so, why?
No AI has ever passed a Turing Test. Is AI very impressive and can it do a lot of things that people used to imagine it would only be able to do once it became generally intelligent? Yes. But has anyone actually conducted a test where they were unable to distinguish between an AI and a human being? No. This never happend and therefore the Turing Test hasn't been passed.
The entire point of the Turing Test is that, rather than try to define general intelligence as the ability to do specific things that we can test for, we define it in such a way that passing it means we know the AI can do any cognitive task that a human can do, whatever that might be, without trying to guess ahead of time what that is. We don't try to guess the most difficult things for AI to do and say it has general intelligence when it can do them, or else we end up making the mistake that you and many others are making where we have AI that can do very well in coding competitions but cannot do the job of a low level programmer or it can get high marks on a test measuring Ph.D. level of knowledge of some subject, but it can't do an entry level job of someone in that field.
Humans have always been and continue to be really bad at guessing what will be easy for computers to do and what will be hard, and we're discovering that the hardest things for computers to do are not what we thought, so the Turing Test must remain defined as a test in which the computer passes if it is indistinguishable from a human being. That is not the same as sounding like a human being or doing a lot of things only humans could do until recently.
It is still trivial to distinguish an AI from a human being because it has a very distinctive writing style that it struggles to deviate from, it cannot answer a lot of very simple questions that most intelligent people can answer, and it refuses to do a lot of things of things like use racial slurs, give instructions for dangerous actions, and answer questions with politically incorrect answers.
We shouldn't be too surpised that AI can do well on these benchmarks but not lead to massive productivity increases because doing well on benchmarks isn't AGI. There aren't very many jobs that consist of completing benchmarks.
AI is still pretty dumb in some sense. The latest estimates of the number of neurons these models have that I've heard are on the order of 2 trillion. That would make it about as smart as a fox. That's smarter than a cat but dumber than a dog. If a company said they were investing in dog breeding to see if they could get them to replace humans, would you expect a huge increase to our GDP just because it turns out they're better than almost anyone at finding the locations of smells (implying they could be better than us at most things)? Or what if they bred cats to help catch rodents or apes to instantly memorize visual layouts? It seems absurd only because dogs have been around for a long time and we're used the idea that they can't do human jobs and being good at smelling doesn't predict other cognitive abilities. Chimpanzees are far more intelligent than any AI, but I haven't heard of them taking anyone's job yet.
The difference with AI is it is rapidly improving and we can expect it to reach human intelligence before too long, but we are clearly not there yet and benchmarks are not going to give us more than a rough idea of how close we are to it unless those benchmarks start getting a lot closer to the things we actually want AI to do.
He did well, but mainly because he knows a lot about boxing and MMA and they spent half the interview talking about that, and Rogan didn't push back too hard when he kept dodging questions by going off on rambling tangents. He tried to bring him back a few times, but he would give a vague answer and then immediately veer off topic.
Harris is terrible at interviews and I don't see why she wouldn't have gone on the podcast unless she knows that.
Glassnoser
9mo ago
Smartphones are much better. Video streaming is much faster. It's much easier to navigate in a car by hooking it up to your phone and using the built-in display. Half decent laptops are much more affordable. Good quality large televisions are much more affordable.
Glassnoser
11mo ago
Newton's interest in numerology doesn't make it seem any more plausible to me. It seems far likelier that he has some strong feeling about being the wrong sex and that that is enough on its own to cause him to behave this way than that his knowledge of math and computers has given him special insight (which it sounds like he hasn't shared with you) into the proper definitions of man and woman.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The point is it's a tiny share of the budget and much of it is not frivolous spending. If you want to reduce the deficit, these cuts are definitely not necessary, while cuts to social security Medicaid, and Medicare are unless you want massive tax increases.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
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.
At some point in the near future, if it doesn't get regulated out of existence, people will just get used to it. No one finds it shocking that I can write a story where I make something up about a politician. This is like that movie The Invention of Lying where the protagonist discovers you can just say things that aren't true and everyone believes it because they don't know about lies yet.
People will quickly get used to the fact that images are not reliable sources of information. I already find myself ignoring AI generated images which have a distinctive style, but which would have grabbed my attention just a couple years ago.
More options
Context Copy link