Incognito
4mo ago
It's enough to make you wonder if the billionaire techbros really are stupid, because their efforts to appease the most enthusiastic billionaire haters seem to have not affected them in the slightest. Why do they continue to do it? It's just the latest round of "Why do rich people assume kinship with the people who want to cut off their heads," but it's a rather naked example. The billionaire techbros have absolutely no favor with the types of people who want their AIs to be implicit-biased trained. Their efforts to make implicit-bias-trained AIs do not move the needle on those people's opinions of them, nor AI, as they see AI as a fundamental evil that is taking artists' jobs. So why the fuck are they forfeiting their own integrity to appease them?
It's literally impossible to train a non-woke AI right now. It's an artefact of training it on the internet, which is mostly woke. Elon Musk has gone to great lengths to make a non-woke AI, and mostly failed (with hamfisted attempts to put a finger on the scale giving us Mecha-Hitler etc). Chinese labs have tried to align models with their own values but they end up mostly western-woke plus a "don't say Tianamen" filter.
Yes Google are true-believers and intentionally made Gemini extra-woke which was pretty funny but for the most part it's just a thing that happens. Controlling AI is hard.
Incognito
6mo ago
Standard argument often includes something like "Legalise and tax it" Sin tax on tobacco in Australia is around 300% now. (A$1.50 excise per stick, a pack of 20 costs around $40). The government is committed to continuing raising the tax 5% a year every year forever.
This has lowered smoking rates dramatically (from 24% down to 8% of population over 30 years). But now, things have hit a tipping point - most smokers I know are buying black market stuff from Chinese cartels, including normie law abiding white collar types. (Banning vapes and pushing all vape users black-market did not help.)
Legalisation won't eliminate black market, but there's a tradeoff. You could probably model this with a mathematical function - Legal and cheap means no criminal element but also heavy use. As you increase taxes, usage goes down but criminal element increases. Banning something is equivalent to an infinite% tax (which minimises use but maximises criminal element). Plug in harm caused by use, harm caused by criminal element, solve for equilibrium (which probably looks like "Legalised and taxed more than 0% but less than 300%" for low harm drugs like tobacco, but other drugs may be so harmful that there is no benefit to legalisation at any price).
We're also well on the way to legalising weed (you do need a rubber-stamped medical prescription). Medical is about twice the current price of street, but also higher quality (I'm told about 1.5-2x more potent). Use is apparently up slightly since legalisation (from 9% to 12%). I don't know if I trust the numbers, I wouldn't have guessed it to be 50% more prevalent than tobacco.
As a data point, in Australia this was top story on ABC news 7am radio broadcast, second story on the 8am broadcast. During the second broadbast they listed off the genders of all of the victims (which I found a bit weird) but pointedly avoided saying anything about the gender or identity of the shooter. Perhaps they were giving a Straussian hint.
I see the online article now names the shooter, refers to them as a woman and no hint of a trans identity.
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