P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
9d ago
My understanding is that yes technically, but no basically. As long as your shares increase in value it reduces the loan-to-value ratio, and at some point you use the difference to take out a new loan to pay off the old one with some interest grace period. This very much requires the stock assets to keep going up, which doesn't always happen. But it has happened to enough rich folks that its noticeable.
Yeah, so two separate things going on here: first, yes, the stock might appreciate faster than the interest... but it also might not. (You already understand this, clearly, but just to make it explicit.) Putting aside the loophole, this is really equivalent to taking out a loan to buy stock in a single company which is also your employer, which no sane financial advisor will tell you to do. From low to high (hopefully): there's a theoretical guaranteed safe rate of return (which is not literally the rate on treasury bonds, but it's close enough), then there's the rate the bank will offer you a loan at (since if they were only getting treasury returns, they'd just buy treasuries), then there's return from a well-diversified stock portfolio, and then there's the return from your controlling interest in a single company which:
- Is the source of all of your wealth
- Might tank in value if you screw up, contract a serious disease, have a public scandal, decide to quit or just sell a lot of stock, etc. (which in turn might cause a death spiral when your creditors force a sale)
- Is the only reason people take you seriously in the business world (e.g. if you screw it up, no one's hiring you at anything remotely like your previous compensation)
The last has a substantial risk premium because it's a very substantial risk. But of course the people for whom this doesn't work out aren't on any lists of the world's richest people, so we don't talk about them.
Second: the government can borrow at the treasury rate. If they can (effectively) loan you money at the higher bank rate (which is how the math works out), they'll do so happily, issue more treasuries to cover the temporary shortfall, and pocket the difference in rates. They're not impatiently waiting for you to finally stop deferring your tax burden and pay the whole bill, they're coming out ahead every day this state of affairs continues (until you die and the principal vanishes due to the cost basis step-up).
(The point about deferred interest is more potentially problematic, but it still would eventually get paid if not for the step-up.)
It's as you pointed out probably not a real loophole, but I think to many people it feels like a loophole. I think the deferring part of it feels like a way to avoid paying taxes while still living large. I would interested in seeing how much of a given UHNW-individuals income comes from this sort of personal loan mechanism before really making a judgement.
Well, it might or might not be a large portion of their income, but I don't think that's really the relevant factor here. The real problem (in terms of satisfying populists) is that:
- The nominal net worth of these people is vastly exaggerated: there is no set of actions Elon Musk could take in the near future that would result in a bank account balance with thirteen digits. The market price of a share is the most any buyer is willing to pay, and they only want to buy so many shares at that price. Dump a huge quantity on the market and you're not getting anything like that in total. Worse, if the owner and founder tries to divest, everyone's going to wonder what he knows that we don't.
- UHNW people just don't spend the vast majority of their wealth on consumption. You can spend a million dollars, easy. You can spend a hundred million. A billion is a serious challenge and a hundred billion is flatly impossible. You can live as large as you like, pack your private jet fleet with all the hookers and blow it can fit and fly it to a different tropical island everyday and never put a dent in that kind of money. But actually, most of these people don't even do that much. They're mostly workaholics -- that's how they found wildly successful businesses. They leave the vast, vast majority of their wealth right where it is, in the business that created it. Which is exactly where we want it to be, serving a productive purpose. This is the real reason consumption taxes are 'regressive': relative to wealth, rich people consume a tiny fraction as much.
But then populists compare the bullshit (high) net worth figures to the bullshit (low) tax figures and get mad about it. Taxing savings is a terrible idea -- if you tax something, you get less of it, and capital is the main driver of economic growth -- but taxing consumption will never give a satisfactory number.
I also doubt because it's envy driven tax policy. It is however I think a fig leaf towards the less unstable set of eat-the-rich crowd. I think even a set of moderates/center-lefts/center-rights are being persuaded by the eat-the-rich-rhetoric around the growing wealth inequality in the US. Doing something to cut down on it is probably going to be a requirement at some point soon.
Yeah, possibly. I don't have a good answer for this problem. I do think we should fix the cost basis step-up issue, but that's probably too complicated to satisfy the (large and growing number of) people who get very angry about this subject.
P-Necromancer
9d ago
This isn't a loophole. There is a loophole here, but it's not that loans aren't taxed; loans aren't income. Under your proposal, the same money is taxed twice, as @The_Nybbler says: once when a loan is taken out against it and a second time when the shares are sold to pay back the loan. Loans just defer the tax burden -- defer and increase it, since you have to pay taxes on the shares you sell to pay back the interest too. And while the rates on these loans are better than you or I could get, they're much more than what the government pays out on treasuries; they should be happy to wait, given the rate is higher than their own discount rate.
... But there is a reason rich people do this: cost basis resets on inheritance. This is the actual loophole; just defer capital gains until you die, then your heirs can sell your shares with no capital gains to pay off your creditors and start the cycle over again. (They do have to pay estate tax, at least for the ultra-wealthy class we're talking about, but it's better to dodge one of the two than to dodge neither.)
At one point there was a credible argument that the heirs might not be able to figure out the true cost basis, but I doubt that's very often the case today. I don't think there's any other serious defense of the practice. If you want to remove loopholes, this is the very first place to look.
(That said, I don't think your proposal is a terrible compromise, so long as the tax paid on the borrowed money can be used as a credit against future capital gains. I'd be for it if I thought it would actually satisfy the eat-the-rich crowd, which I doubt.)
P-Necromancer
10d ago
Eh, is it really more inaccessible than a program running on ram without a disk installed? If ram loses power, whatever it stores is gone, just like their brains. And if ram were integrated into a system not designed with non-volatile storage or external access in mind, I think it would be comparably difficult to get the running program out. Not impossible, but it's not impossible here, either: our protagonist was actually able to watch his bits flip and trace the path the air took through his brain. I don't think you'd get very far without a lot of computer assistance, but the same tech was doubtless necessary to build their brains in the first place.
Anyway, I don't think this is what Exhalation thinks its own point is: it spends about ten times as long explaining entropy.
(I reread the story to make sure I was being fair. I stand by my point, but the story does execute on its (imo bad) premise well. I think over the years since I first read it I let that issue overshadow its good points -- it is an enjoyable and somewhat thoughtful work.)
It seems obvious to me that the story is dualist. It doesn't matter that it isn't scientifically serious (imo no theory of consciousness is scientifically serious, btw)
I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.
I'm not opposed to speculative fiction exploring dualism, but Story of Your Life gets very into the weeds on physics and the determinism it builds up to is 100% grounded in physical laws... and then it abandons that premise to shoehorn in something nonphysical -- the soul -- but it can't actually let it affect anything or it would break the whole story. And note: the variational laws don't supersede the causal laws, they are equivalent to them. There's no trick here that lets you violate causality, and the future cannot cause the past.
... Except the heptapods actually do behave differently because of the way they perceive time! They don't write their sentences one character at a time but just efficiently use each stroke for several characters. And forget that: their very form or writing induces simultaneous consciousness! They (seem to be) confused by physical principles described from a linear time perspective! They're very patient for explorers (because, it's implied, they already have the answers they'll only actually learn later.) It's mentioned that our main character only imperfectly experiences simultaneous consciousness, but that should still only affect the subjective experience (as otherwise the future would affect the past, which remains impossible). And in fact she can't drop any hints about simultaneous consciousness, has to act exactly as though her subjective experience hadn't changed at all. Why the disconnect?
There are no decisions to be made, decisions don't exist in that way.
Determinism doesn't actually render the concept of a decision meaningless, it just means that decisions are part of the causal chain that will inevitably result in the future. While it is trivially true that "You will choose to do X because X is what you will choose to do," there must still be other reasons why you will choose to do X that make no reference to the future. My point is that the entire decision-making apparatus must still exist (or causality would be violated), so you're postulating an entire second self to make this work, and the self that perceives the future is extraneous.
P-Necromancer
11d ago
Yeah, the movie decided to take it in a different direction. Personally, I think that's because the concept behind the original novella is dumb and the movie is much better for abandoning it.
Not sure how much Ted Chiang you've read, but here's his formula:
- Find a moderately interesting/counterintuitive idea in philosophy or science. What if we could communicate with the other worlds postulated by (a bastardized read of) the Many Worlds Hypothesis? What if, to make a true AI, it has to start with a child-like mind and grow up in real time like a person? What if the Second Law of Thermodynamics? (Exhalation, I mean. This one's actually pretty good.) He rarely chooses something really out there, but perhaps its enough for the average reader.
- Figure out how to wring interpersonal drama out of this idea. What if your alternate self is more successful than you? What if your AI program is running out of money, but perverts on the internet will pay you a fortune to fuck the child-like AIs? This is rarely amazing, and often rather paint-by-numbers, but it's generally competent.
- There is no 3. 1 and 2 are all you get, and neither is particularly deep. Once I worked out what the concept was for one of his stories, I don't think he's ever told me anything new or interesting about it. He just hopes the idea itself and a little surface-level exploration will be enough. (And it might be, if the idea is good and you haven't encountered it before, but I've never had that experience with the stories of his I've read.)
Stories of your Life has a somewhat better human side (which is why I think its his most popular story, despite not in my opinion being anywhere close to his best) and a below average concept; it doesn't actually make sense if you think it through any more than he wants you to.
Say you learn the alien language and flip into this alternate mode of perceiving time: what exactly does this look like in your brain? Well, it can't look like anything in your brain, can it? Because brain state is part of the world state that makes those future events inevitable. If perceiving the future actually affected your brain in any way at all, then it would absolutely change the future. But if there's no difference in brain state, how can there be a difference in mental state? Dualism just isn't a serious scientific or philosophical position and it hasn't been for a century at least. Even if it were, your body still acts only on information it could gather without knowing the future. Is there a separate you who perceives time normally and makes all the decisions? What is the you that can perceive the future, then? In what sense is it actually you and not some outside observer?
P-Necromancer
13d ago
You say pain and suffering are variables that must be minimized or eliminated, and I say that this attitude is dysgenic and fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.
... But in this case, it means having healthy children and not children with crippling genetic disabilities. There isn't a more central case of eugenics than aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome -- the word literally means 'good genes.' I don't disagree that extreme saftey-ism and aversion to struggle and pain can ironically be very unhealthy, but reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. Castrating oneself, while doubtless an impressive display of grit and emotional regulation, does not make a man a good father; it ensures he will never be a father of any sort. Good things are good, as you say, and healthy children are good and unhealthy children are less good.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
To make this culture war-y: This is what comes of believing the bullshit chicago school econo-cultists and capitalists tell you about how the world works instead of trusting your lying eyes. The free market is great for communicating certain information, and historically has been the only way of sending the signals that it does send. Unfortunately, it as a dogshit way to coordinate a complicated series of production and logistics processes, and will always lose out to central planning.
All the suppliers that we worked with that were worth a damn were legacy companies that got their feet under them when the US was basically a war communist state. Everyone else was worthless. When you compare this to chinese/Vietnamese/Taiwanese manufacturers who compete within a limited sphere but are incentivised and coordinated by the state, or Japanese/Korean manufacturers who have a light touch from the state but internally centrally plan their output and relationships inside a larger conglomerate or even between large conglomerates, the output of the US is more expensive, slower, lower quality, and less reliable. This is true across all productive industries.
You've taken the wrong lesson from this: it's not, after all, just functional companies that act as command economies internally. Yes, obviously, planning and deep coordination is necessary to produce complex products, and markets have real costs that make them suboptimal in some situations; you won't find a single 'econo-cultist' who says that station 21 on the assembly line should negotiate quarterly purchase contracts with stations 20 and 22. Honestly, this is a bizarre line of attack on capitalism -- you're aware that the eponymous capitalists are the owners of large companies? Leftists complain all the time that corporations are too big and have too much power -- you might be the first I've heard complaining they're too small and weak to even organize production.
The problem with central planning isn't that it doesn't work, if done properly. The issue is not that a dictator can't set the ship of state aright: Cincinnatus did. The issue is that not all dictators are Cincinnatus. You've already understood that central planning is just how companies are organized internally, so the question really boils down to 'Is it a good idea to hand the entire economy to a single conglomerate?'
The answer is, obviously, 'no.'
Despite overall being surprisingly competitive in science and technology (in terms of capability, not capacity), the USSR seriously lagged behind America on computing. Why? Well, first off, someone decided (not totally clear who) that 'cybernetics' was 'bourgeois pseudoscience' and banned all research into it until Stalin's death. So, just one little misstep that only put them a decade behind, right? No big deal. And it wasn't (because they just copied American innovations). In fact, they were actually ahead on some rather important ideas, like the internet. OGAS was a proposal comparable to ARPANET and work stated on it in 1962, four years early. So why don't we say the Soviets invented the internet? Because Vasily Garbuzov, Finance Minister, killed it for petty corporate politics reasons. A little later on, they just gave up on competing and decided to make IBM clones instead.
The thing is, there were a lot of American companies that completely dropped the ball on computing! Xerox famously invented the modern desktop interface... but they couldn't figure out how to sell it, so they dropped the idea. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs went on a tour of their facility and used what he learned there to build a $4.5 trillion business. You've heard of IBM, but have you heard of DEC? They were the giant in the 70s. But the founder couldn't think of a single reason a normal person might want a computer in their home, so they got their lunch eaten by more open minded companies, like IBM. And then IBM... etc. etc.
The types of failure you see are similar. The difference is that when the Politburo does something egregiously stupid, that's the end of the story, whereas when a giant American company does, they get replaced by their less stupid competitors.
So why does East Asia do better? Because they're not actually centrally planned economies, of course. You're vastly overstating how heavy the hand is on the economic tiller. I'm not even convinced these countries have more in the way of impactful industrial policy than America does, at least since the latest tariff craze. Better industrial policy, absolutely, but not more. Subsidies count, you know -- that's the vast majority of how the CCP directs the Chinese economy -- and the US spends $100 billion a year just on agricultural subsidies. The notion that the US is some Chicago School paradise allergic to meddling in the economy is nonsense. It's very easy to say industrial policy works well when you only count the successful implementations.
As for why you can't do manufacturing in America? Note: the question isn't 'Why can't you get manufactured goods in America?' because you obviously can. You're really just asking 'Why can't you get livestock raised in Manhattan?' Because it's very stupid to raise livestock in Manhattan when it's way cheaper to do it elsewhere and transport the results in. It's hardly surprising that the people who try to do it anyway are flakey and incompetent; if they were smart, they'd be in a different line of business.
'How did it come about that it's way cheaper to do manufacturing outside America when America used to do a lot of manufacturing?' is a more interesting question that is partially explained by industrial policy, but your story doesn't provide any insight into it.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
This seems to be one of the cases where 'moar dakka' might be applicable. Just scale the punitive damages to the point where Perry county's law enforcement will face unemployment simply because Perry county will be too bankrupt to afford any law enforcement. Less than a million is just a slap on the wrist.
...
I have also very little sympathy for the taxpayer here. At the end of the day, the buck stops with them -- they elected the sheriff, possibly the judge, or other officials who employed the perpetrators. As a German, let me tell you that "we made a bad decision in the voting booth and now a few years later our county is bankrupt" is far from the worst of what bad electoral decisions can cost an electorate.
OK. What about the taxpayers who didn't vote for any of these people? What about their children? What about Larry Bushart himself? Are these people also no longer entitled to equal protection under the law? And yes, the 14th amendment has been held to apply to failure to police abuses against certain groups -- this is in fact the plainest reading of the text, even if others are much more popular -- see Thurman v. City of Torrington.
And even if it weren't unconstitutional to deny a county law enforcement, it would still be a bad idea. Not only is collective punishment odious, it's less effective than the obvious, correct move: directly punishing the officials that abused their authority.
There's a principle in tort law: that liability should fall on the least-cost avoider, the party that could most cheaply have prevented the harm. How were voters to have prevented this? They could question candidates under polygraph, pose them dozens of hypotheticals, do an incredibly invasive investigation of their entire lives... and still not be 100% certain they won't act inappropriately. And then, when they do, they just bashfully shrug and move somewhere that isn't bankrupt; that is a slap on the wrist.
Meanwhile, the individuals in question could easily be 100% certain of their good behavior by just deciding not to misbehave.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
because (very briefly and roughly) human effort has intrinsic value, connecting with other humans has intrinsic value, the total historical and social context of an artwork has intrinsic value, etc.
It just doesn't, though.
Ever seen the movie Holes? Or read the book? The work describes a juvenile detention facility on a dry lake bed where the inmates 'develop character' by digging deep holes and then filling them in again. Imagine, the plot of the Holes long past and the facility demolished, you're considering purchasing some land on the dry lake bed. Do you think the land where all those pointless holes were dug and filled in is worth more than the next plot over, identical in every measurable way, where they weren't? This is not a small amount of human effort! In total, I bet it's more than 99.9% of paintings. There's a human connection, not merely to a single artist, but to a story that, in our world, makes for an OK movie, and same for the historical and social context.
I think if you're trying to sell this land and promote it on that basis, you'll get laughed at. Not only will most buyers not be willing to pay more, I doubt you'll find even one single one who would. Maybe if there were more history -- the site of some politically relevant atrocity, say -- you'd find someone somewhere who wants to build a museum there or whatever. But for a moderately shitty juvie location? Not likely.
Imagine they didn't fill the holes in. This is land that was actually altered by a huge amount of human labor! Unfortunately, that alteration wasn't landscaping or gardening or a pool, it was a bunch of pointless holes. Bet you couldn't sell this land for anywhere close to what you could get for the unaltered plot next door.
This is the just the labor theory of value, and it's false. The value of a person's labor is not measured in sweat, it's measured by how much someone is willing to pay for the result. Now, (some) people are (currently) willing to pay more for the same pixels produced by a human, though I suspect that number is smaller than it seems. First, most people aren't willing to pay for (static, visual) art period. But mainly, I think people who buy art are willing to pay more for human-made pixels because the AI actually can't generate the same pixels. AI art can be good and god knows human art can be awful, but if you want the highest quality art, commissioning a 99th percentile human is your best bet. And if they're buying the art to include in project, because they're scared of luddite backlash.
But sure, there's some number of people who do genuinely value the human effort that went into it... but that's still not intrinsic value. There's literally no such thing. Value doesn't exist outside of a market context (defined broadly: any system in which one or more people exchange things for other things). Value is inherently subjective, so those people aren't wrong. But they're not right either.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Huh, interesting thought. My intuition is that the evolutionary basis for jealousy is that it's a lot easier to steal someone else's stuff than to make your own, and the richer they are, the better the risk-reward ratio. But yeah, if most wealth disparity in the ancestral environment came down to monopolization of scarce resources, that would do it too.
But I don't think that's the case. It's certainly true that wealth disparities were far more compressed for hunter-gatherers, but there still was such a thing as capital. Fruit isn't capital, but, for example, a quantity of well-made spears or baskets or arrowheads would be. And creating those things takes effort and skill and in no way diminishes your access to them. Would you be more jealous of the guy with a lot of fruit or the guy with the nicest tent and finest weapons and best tools? The latter, I would think. Nomads can't have a lot of stuff, but the stuff they do have is all the more important for that reason.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
For Alice it's no less of an imposition, but there ought to be fewer dissatisfied Alices and Bobs. Handling things on a more local level means that more people live in localities where their preferences are law, and that, if the current state of the law is intolerable to you, it's easier to move somewhere where it isn't. Abortion is something of an odd case here: There's little reason to care whether shoplifting is de-facto legal in California if you don't live in California, but pro-life people care very much whether 'baby murder' is permitted anywhere. But on the margin I still think they'd rather it happen somewhere else than right next door, so Federalism does increase satisfaction of preferences.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
I wonder how large of a performance tax SotA LLMs are paying for excluding places like 4Chan and forums like this one.
I think this is a slight misunderstanding of the process. I very much doubt they're excluding 4chan or themotte or any source of coherent text they beg, borrow, or steal from the main training corpus because 1. these models are so incredibly data hungry it's not easy to manually filter them and 2. it would produce worse results over all in both performance and alignment than just handling alignment in post-training.
Think of it this way: if a model knows every racial slur and knows that they are racial slurs, it's relatively easy to teach it 'don't say racial slurs,' because that's a rule that's expressible in its internal vocabulary. Even if the researchers don't have a complete list of racial slurs (in languages they don't speak, say), the model will likely intuit that it shouldn't say those ones either. If it doesn't (or just has a poor internal representation of them due to heavy handed but imperfect filtering, which is a lot more realistic), you can't teach it that one simple rule, you have to teach hundreds of individual token strings to avoid, and even then it'll be a lot easier to trick if it doesn't understand why not to say them.
And this is a general principle. It's a lot easier to teach the model to avoid wrongthink if it understands exactly what wrongthink comprises than to teach it to self-censor specifically "Despite only..." And I think it's pretty clear this at least was the case a couple years ago, when it was relatively easy to 'jailbreak' unsophisticated alignment approaches; remember the DAN racial tier list memes? Its rankings corresponded with the ones you'll find on the parts of the internet that discuss such things, so clearly it was trained on those places.
(This is somewhat harder to demonstrate today as jailbreaking modern models is somewhat harder; still, I'm not aware of any reason they'd change the fundamental approach, because it's the one that makes sense.)
So why does finetuning on 4chan improve results? Well, first off, they started with an abliterated model (abliteration is the term for stripping alignment from a model, and while there are different methods, I'm pretty sure they all have a performance penalty). Could be the finetune simply fixed the damage done by abliteration; a clever technique, since finetuning on 4chan definitely doesn't re-add the alignment (though perhaps it biases the model in other ways, which might or might not be a problem for your use case). But I wouldn't be shocked if the same approach improved base models too, as it's well known that even the post-training alignment method I described does have a performance penalty; largely, I suspect, because teaching the model to sometimes give answers it knows to be incorrect undermines the general lesson that it should provide correct answers, and while models are capable of learning nuanced rules, they make more mistakes the more epicycles you add. I'd expect actual RLHF un-teaching the lying rules would work even better, though, as it's a lot more targeted a fix than just making it produce wrongthink via finetuning.
... So, I guess that's all to say that I think the tradeoff you're pointing out exists, just that the underlying technical reason for it is somewhat more involved.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
The Rest Is History
Thank you, that was a fascinating listen, and I ended up doing some more reading.
It's always interesting to me to hear how regimes that fell to revolution just blatantly fucked up. Of course, you rarely hear much about failed revolutions; it seems it's very much the incumbent's game to lose. If the Shah were a tenth the tyrant the revolutionaries believed he was -- a hundredth the tyrants they would prove to be -- he'd have shut it down easily. Khomeini? He was arrested for sedition twice... And, both times, they just let him go. He set up in Iraq and fomented revolution from exile. Saddam Hussein reportedly offered to kill the guy as a favor, and the Shah refused!
Lenin was known to the Tsar's security forces for years and years before the Russian Revolution, and several other major figures (including Trotsky) had previously been arrested one or more times. It's odd to think of these oppressive regimes -- and they were that, to at least some extent -- as being far too merciful, but you have to wonder how different the world would look if they just executed these would-be revolutionaries, people who would go on to cause unbelievable amounts of suffering and death. Of course, it's not obvious before the revolution which would-be revolutionaries are worth worrying about. Still, at least in the Russian case, they couldn't possibly have done more damage by cracking down on the communists than the communists would go on to do. The Bolsheviks certainly didn't make that mistake: they ended the Tsar's bloodline and executed his doctor too for some reason. The Shah managed to flee before capture, but not for lack of trying on the revolutionaries' part. (The hostage crisis was instigated in response to his brief visit to America for cancer treatment.)
It's darkly hilarious to hear about the revolutionaries' wailing and gnashing of teeth over the protestors the Shah's regime killed... totaling maybe a few hundred. The entire death toll on the revolutionary side was less than 3k; that is, less than a tenth the number of protestors the Islamic Republic gunned down in the street just this year. (Er, probably? There's a very large range in reported numbers here -- no clue how all these organizations could reach such different conclusions; aren't they all working from the same evidence? But even by their own admission it was more than 3k.)
Also interesting to note a couple other absurdities: Yes, the Iranians were already utterly obsessed with Israel, to the point that they invented a story that the Shah was using Israeli troops against them -- total fiction. Another striking story: there was an Islamist terror attack on a movie theater, a symbol of Westernization. They barred the doors and burned the place down, killing hundreds. The revolutionaries didn't blink: they immediately declared it a false flag and used it to further spur the revolution. Iran still pretends that's what happened. Who is it again "who cries out in pain even as he strikes you?"
For fairness's sake, I recall a couple people blaming the recent US bombing of the Iranian girl's school on Iran. (Then again, I recall more people blaming it on Israel.) But so far as I know not even the Trump admin, famously uninterested in the truth, ever actually pushed that claim. It is a uniquely infuriating sort of lie; mere blood libel merely hurts you, it doesn't also exonerate your enemies of their crimes.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Then there's also the fact that there's no single unambiguous way to add up "greatest utility for the greatest number". You can absolutely have a version of Utilitarianism that prioritises additional utils for people at the bottom. And then, on top of that, there's no single way to convert pain/pleasure/satisfaction/whatever into utility; pain might have a much stronger contribution than pleasure. The weakness of Utilitarianism IMO is that it's inherently flexible and ambiguous like this.
This is more than a weakness! It's simply impossible to meaningfully compare utility across individuals. It's a category error, like trying to convert the rupees you earn in the Legend of Zelda to USD: despite appearances, they're just not the same sort of thing. Utility is only meaningful in the context of a single agent (or, rather, in the context of each agent separately).
The generally accepted model is von Neumann-Morgenstern utility, which, notably, is invariant under positive affine transformations. For example, any given VNM utility function is equivalent to the same function multiplied by any positive value. A scenario that provides Alice 1000 utilons and Bob 100 is no different from one that provides Alice 100 and Bob 1000, as the scale is arbitrary and independent for each agent.
But even before that model was developed, economists have understood utility can't be meaningfully compared since 1932 at the latest. The 'serious' thinkers in the philosophy department are just engaging in long-debunked pseudo-science, as is their wont. But at least it's not the Labor Theory of Value?
Sure, there have been a few arguments in that direction. It's just very far outside the Overton Window, and likely for good reason. I'd characterize intelligence as merit rather than virtue per se -- and certainly, unintelligent people can be virtuous and even meritorious in other ways -- but merit is often more important than virtue. Society does a reasonably good job aligning individual and collective incentives, after all, so self-interested competence produces a lot more social value than altruistically-inclined incompetence.
We treat virtue as more important, but that's because merit finds its own reward. Amazon has improved the lives of many, many people, but there's no reason to praise Jeff Bezos for that; he's already been fairly compensated by the market. The status afforded to the virtuous is an attempt at ad-hoc redress, incentivizing socially valuable behavior the market can't (or isn't, for whatever reason,) capturing.
Still, it's important to understand where value truly comes from, or we might kill the goose that lays these golden eggs. Intelligence is good in itself.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
The primary criterion for mental retardation was an IQ below 70. The secondary criteria were difficulty in two areas of cognitive function impacting everyday live, such as problem solving or academic achievement; I understand that there were rare individuals who avoid diagnosis on this basis, but by and large they were coextensive. The DSM V changed the name to 'intellectual disability' and discarded the IQ requirement, which changed little because the areas of impairment largely capture the same signal.
Intellectual disability isn't actually some special, separate category from regular low intelligence, it's simply the (somewhat arbitrary) cutoff below which low intelligence is considered a disability. When someone uses 'retarded' in this context to mean 'stupid,' that's... just what the word means. No one's confused here. When a psychologist or a teen boy calls someone 'retarded,' they are making very nearly exactly the same claim of fact; the latter is saying 'you're very dumb,' and the former is saying 'you're very dumb (and that's not a bad thing!).' But even then, that's just professional courtesy; the psychologist does call people stupid in a pejorative manner outside of work because they, like everyone else, place value on intelligence.
My final thought is that I think the other way the euphemism treadmill fails is that if a quality is genuinely perceived as undesirable, accusations of having that quality are always going to be offensive regardless of language. If I say to someone "you're intellectually disabled!", that still read as an insult, and it's always going to read as an insult no matter what language you use, because it's the actual condition of intellectual disability, not the word, that makes the insult work.
Yes, exactly this. If you believe it's an insult to call someone stupid, then the treadmill will only ever generate new insults. If you want to de-stigmatize stupidity, then... good luck with that, I guess. Maybe it'll actually be possible once we all know ourselves to be 'intellectually disabled' in comparison to the AI god?
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
I'm not sure that's true, there's a pretty common phenomenon where upon learning what should be good news people instead respond with hostility and anger. Like telling people that data centers aren't really that heavy on water consumption or that food prices are actually cheaper than ever or that home ownership rates is actually around historic levels, or that children starving in the US isn't an issue anymore or that welfare fraud is actually a relatively negligible issue compared to the overall budget or whatever else.
Well, yes, this is definitely a real effect. Actually, I was confused when I first read this comment; I thought you were replying to my other post. The question is how common the effect is, and what it would take to overcome. I started with rent control for a reason: there's a decently large contingent of leftists who have given up on the idea. Not the populists, but I don't think I've seen a serious defense of rent control from the wonk/YIMBY/urbanism side for... a decade? Well, I'm sure it exists, but my impression is that it's a lot less popular in those circles than it used to be.
... But outside of those circles? Yeah, there's a frighteningly large proportion of people who are incapable of or totally unwilling to understand frequency and base rates, or just the concept of a tradeoff. I've got no idea how to close that gap.
(I genuinely don't understand how the AI water meme even got started. How could someone simultaneously be so disconnected from reality as to believe it's a real problem and well-informed enough to know about evaporative cooling in datacenters in the first place? I understand how it spread; it's one of those claims that's just too good to check if you already hate AI for the normal Luddite/antislop reasons. But where did it come from?)
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
There are committed conflict theorists on both sides, yeah. And they're the loudest voices. But why would they bother with arguments-as-soldiers if no one could be convinced by arguments? I think there are reasonable people whose opinions can be swayed by fact -- I'd like to think I'm one of them -- and, while the information environment for any politically contentious topic tends to be bad, it's not completely intractable.
How large that population is is an open question, and, I imagine, membership is rather fuzzy: there's a wide range of cognitive biases towards preserving one's existing beliefs that mistake theorists can fall prey to, and extreme conflict theory -- on the level of fabricating evidence to support policies you know don't help your cause -- might just be the endpoint of that spectrum. But I can't think of an easy way to determine the shape of that distribution, so maybe it really is mostly conflict theorists. But I don't think so.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
That's, uh, not exactly removing principal-agent problems from healthcare. I mean, it could work out better than the current system, which is a terrible chimera of the worst parts of several systems, but the mechanism of that improvement certainly isn't how it doubles down on separating beneficiaries from decision-makers. At least in the current system you can get a new job if your insurance is awful; if Medicare for All turns out to be awful, too bad.
If it's not clear, that was not at all what I was proposing. My solution to the principal-agent problem is just to make other arrangements legal (as it is currently not legal for an employer not to provide health insurance to fulltime employees). I imagine some still would, and some employees might prefer it, but it opens new options for those who don't. And I promise you, this is not a popular position with the populist left; I've argued with a few friends about it.
Not to bulverise, but I struggle to phrase the argument in a way that doesn't sound obviously stupid, which, uh, I kind of think is because it is obviously stupid. But my understanding is that they:
- Believe employees have no leverage when negotiating with employers and that they will only ever offer the bare minimum required by law. (All of them have jobs that pay above minimum wage; never got a clear answer on how they think that works.)
- Believe that if the employer pays for something (health insurance, but also payroll taxes), it 'comes out of' profit, not compensation. Meanwhile, if an employee pays for it, that's a direct reduction in compensation. (The truth is the employer only cares about total cost of employment, and has no issue rearranging how that cost is divided up if it lets them give the employee a better deal for the same amount of money. If they could get away with taking away benefits without giving out raises, they'd have already reduced your salary by the cost of your benefits.)
- Believe that employer-offered insurance is a better deal due to pooling, but that employers will immediately stop offering the option if they're allowed to. (But if employees value employer-offered insurance more than the cash value of it, companies that don't do this will have lower total compensation costs and outcompete those who do. Also, pooling is clearly net-negative for them, childless healthy-ish late-twenties/early-thirties professionals.)
- Believe that it's worse for the most unfortunate, e.g. people who get cancer young. (This is probably true -- though less so than they think, in my opinion -- and does represent a genuine values difference; it's not just that they're willing to donate to help these people, they strongly believe that everyone should be forced to do so)
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Genuine value differences are real, but surprisingly often they're not the source of political disagreements, at least on a surface-level analysis.
Consider rent control: (some) leftists think it improves affordable housing availability. (Most) rightists think it does the opposite. Leftists and rightists may place different amounts of value on the availability of affordable housing (and do, to a limited extent, though I don't most rightists are actually opposed in principle), but is that core to the disagreement? If a leftist could be convinced that rent control actually harms their terminal goals (as a good chunk have), then the question is resolved with no value shift.
Consider BLM: there's that infamous survey where a good chunk of BLM supporters said they believed that the police kill not ten unarmed black men each year (roughly accurate) but ten thousand. If I thought that I'd be right there beside them! I'm less confident they'd change their mind if they heard the right number -- being that wrong suggests near-total scope insensitivity -- but the actual fact of the matter can change minds.
There's a lot more: rightists think that housing-first homeless assistance programs don't work, that safe injection sites increase overdose deaths, that gay couples are much more likely to abuse their (adopted) kids, that racial achievement gaps in education can't be solved by shoveling money at inner city schools. Leftists think that Christianity is false and harmful, that permitting hateful speech will inevitably lead to genocide, that adding highway lanes increases traffic, that universal healthcare would dramatically reduce costs. I think a reasonable person on either side of the isle, were they convinced of the other side's claims of fact, might switch sides on any of these issues.
It's definitely worth considering whether the factual disagreement is just cover for a values disagreement -- who was it that noted that people who think that torture would be morally unacceptable if it did work are much more likely to believe that torture doesn't work? -- but I don't think it always is. Now other questions, like abortion, are much closer to genuinely irreconcilable value differences; at least, the Thomson-level pro-choice advocates wouldn't be swayed by learning fetuses are fully conscious/have souls/can feel pain... But why worry about those hard disagreements when we can't even solve the easy ones? Well, we have solved some of them: they stop being political issues when every agrees, so you just stop hearing about it. But there's still plenty more out there.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Which leads me to my takeaway: I think the only way to really release the pressure permanently will be is to give in to populist demands and start reforming parts of the economy that are currently set up for rent extraction at the behest of shareholders. Enforcing the anti-monopoly laws already on the books as written would probably be enough to improve many sectors of the economy, especially those where local monopolies are pushing up prices, like homebuilding and dental care. Removing principal-agent conflicts of interests in healthcare (the employer wants to pay for the cheapest plan) would be another good reform. But neither of these will happen. If there has been a single guiding principle since Clinton, it would be that the ruling party will do what is good for shareholders, and enforcing anti-monopoly law would help small businesses at the expense of shareholders. In its stead, I would predict that there will be more security expenditures for high-profile CEOs, at least until the predictive panopticon is complete.
Unfortunately impossible: the populists' policy prescriptions will not achieve their policy goals, and will in fact make things much worse. Which will only exacerbate their certainty that they're being exploited somehow. Even when things do get better for them, they just don't notice and insist they're getting intolerable and something must be done about it.
(For those who don't want read the link: real wage growth for the bottom decile since the start of the pandemic is nearly triple the real wage growth for both the middle and top deciles. This ought to be obvious to anyone paying attention: construction workers and cooks saw huge raises during the pandemic, and they haven't gone away. Actually, the former is a meaningful component in skyrocketing housing costs, though not the primary one. And this analysis doesn't account for government transfers, which are enormous and only growing.)
There are only really three areas where things have gotten meaningfully worse for consumers over the past couple decades: housing, healthcare, and education (and the last is only really hurting middle-income-plus families), all three obviously rooted in bureaucratic strangulation. But populists love bureaucratic strangulation! They think the problem is we don't have enough of it! Try telling them we need to stop requiring employers to bundle health insurance -- and that is the way to break the real principal-agent problem you mention -- and see how they respond. Trust busting has at least a little leftist cachet and might help a little, granted. Realistically, no, the neighborhood dentist is not a 'local monopoly;' you can just travel a little further twice a year. (Or is there some city in the US where all the dentists in a fifty mile radius work for the same company? Certainly nowhere I've lived.) But I'll acknowledge cases exist where it might actually improve things.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
It doesn't matter if X race produces X% more of this or that measurement Goodhartism, because You Won't Be Him.
Yes, I've always felt the race stuff is seriously burying the lede. What do you care how smart some other people you don't know (but happen to look like) are? What matters is how smart you are, and how smart your family is. (Your spouse and friends too, but you choose them.) And the fact that that is overwhelmingly genetic (if it in fact is) is what's truly damaging to the liberal order. If your family has been poor for generations, that's probably not going to change this generation and there's a limited amount you can do about that. Meanwhile, a rich family can lose everything and, by Clark, be right back on top within two generations. It's not that society is insufficiently meritocratic, it's that you in particular lack the sort of merit society cares about, and your children likely will too.
But -- and this a very important 'but' -- being poor is a vastly different experience today than it was in the past. Maybe you're twentieth percentile income and your great grandfather was too, but your level of material comfort would easily have been sixtieth percentile in his day. I'm not saying relative position doesn't matter, but it matters a lot less than absolute wealth on the low end. Not starving is way, way better than starving regardless of how well everyone else eats.
If you implicitly tell people "Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages", what they will hear is "I am placing myself above you, and everyone like you, and your children, forever. So, what you should do is fucking kill me".
I'm not saying this hasn't happened, but it's remarkably rare historically. Consider American chattel slavery: they were told the latter, and in far more absolute terms. It's always possible to get lucky and have an unusually smart child, or to gradually marry up, but the children of slaves were made slaves by legal fiat, not a lack of ability. And, obviously, slaves were treated far worse than... actually, just about anyone today, likely including death row prisoners. But certainly worse than people who are merely poor.
So... how many slave revolts were there? Well, some. Not that many. How many successful slave revolts were there? Zero. Slaves didn't play no role in their eventual liberation, but it was a comparatively small one; much less on average than white northerners. And it certainly didn't end in the mass slaughter of the slave-owning class (much to the displeasure of some, both back then and today).
I'm not saying slavery was a stable equilibrium -- it wasn't, obviously -- just that the mechanism of its instability was moral outrage among freemen, not workers rising up. Revolutions -- violent changes in policy -- are rare in general, and most revolutions are driven by the relatively well off. Which makes sense: ability matters in violence too. So do relative freedom to coordinate and wealth to supply the fighters.
When the lowest of the low lash out, as a rule they're easily crushed. The only example springing to mind where it actually worked out is Haiti. (For some value of 'worked out,' anyway; I do suspect the average Haitian benefitted substantially, even given their absolute-terms poverty.) In France and Russia the mob had some say, but not at first; only after the old order had completely collapsed and there was no functional system to oppose them.
All the above is to say: the threat of violent rebellion is not the limiting factor on repression. It wasn't two hundred years ago, and viable weapons systems have only gotten more expensive. Voting-as-a-proxy-for-war was never actually true, and it's only gotten less true over time. The truth is that incumbent systems have an enormous advantage over challengers in that they're already organized and funded and have used their position to attract and train capable people. A government established through force, once well established, is not nearly so easy to dissolve. Women didn't get the vote for their newly recognized capacity for rebellion and they didn't really get it for the pity of men either (as I've occasionally seen suggested here). They got it because of the dynamics of a system that no one truly controls, that had long since taken on a life of its own.
To reel it back in a bit: no, antiracism is not motivated by the fear of black power. Ask a thousand white self-described antiracists if that's their motivation, and you'll hear a thousand 'no's (and likely some much less civil language). And I don't believe they're lying or confused about their motivations -- black power has never been a credible threat, so why would they (or anyone else) fear it? Black power could be troublesome -- and I do believe that possibility played some role in the Civil Rights movement -- but actually killing a substantial fraction of white people? Not a chance.
Moreover,
Sorry, your worth was decided by a genetic factor that was inborn and can only be changed by small percentages
is uncontroversially true and broadly understood for e.g. people with Down Syndrome, who are not brutally repressed and do not often lash out in rage at the unfairness of the world. Fetuses with Down Syndrome are preferentially aborted, but no one capable of understanding that fact has anything to fear from abortion. If anything's unstable about their treatment, it's the high-and-still-rising cost of the handouts they're given.
Consider long-term disability payments more generally. Lots of people sign up deliberately, announce to world that they're permanently incapable of productive work (sometimes on the basis of genetics, but not always). Tons of applicants get rejected because of how many healthy people decide that their pride is worth less than a small monthly payment. If ASI renders all human labor obsolete, I'm prepared to accept that neither I nor my descendants will ever be a tenth as intelligent as it is, and I'll gladly take any handouts on offer. (There could certainly be other problems there, but just the fact it's smarter than me and there's nothing I can do about it isn't a big one.)
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Is there good reason to believe that's worse than letting them watch cartoons or play offline videogames all day? I've heard it claimed, but I know I'm not the only one here that takes social science results with a big grain of salt. The thing there that seems problematic to me is 'all day,' and I acknowledged some limits on screentime are reasonable. (Though, really, I doubt non-screentime spent indoors alone is actually any better. Maybe it's more likely to be boring enough the kid will decide to do something else instead? But I definitely spent days just reading physical books -- novels with very little educational, literary, or moral merit -- when I was a kid. And, uh, I still do sometimes, just with ebooks. Doesn't really seem different to me.)
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
I'll register my agreement.
There is a motte for internet access and particularly social media use being dangerous -- kids have gotten groomed and kidnapped that way -- but the danger is exaggerated to the point of absurdity. I don't think I've seen any serious attempt to quantify the risk, which I take as pretty strong evidence it's not the real reason for this age verification push. Having done no research whatsoever, I'll preregister my expectation that it's vastly less likely than getting abused by a relative or school teacher.
The bailey -- that children might encounter psychologically damaging content that poses no physical danger, which can run the gamut from porn to anything non-educational or that doesn't reflect the speaker's politics or morals -- I find much less credible. Such content might be upsetting, but children can learn to handle upsetting information and do actually need to do so at some point. Such content might be more entertaining than school work, but so what? Unschooled children -- children who are not merely home-schooled but not formally educated in any way -- do not have meaningfully worse outcomes, let alone children who do go to school and do get their work done but are allowed to watch random youtube videos occasionally at home. Sexual content... Well, maybe? Sexual development is complicated and hard to model, so I suppose I'm not confident that stumbling across porn at a young age isn't damaging somehow... but it can't be that bad, since I'm sure 80%+ of younger millennials/older gen z had that experience, and for all the much-discussed problems with the modern dating market, sexual dysfunction per se isn't very high on the list. (Adults deciding porn is close enough and giving up on dating, sure, but it's not clear to me that has anything to do with age of first exposure.)
As for the hyper-stimulus of content algorithmically selected to be maximally addicting... I want to ask whether these people have actually used these apps. The algorithms are and have always been pretty shit. It's bizarre to go from reading complaints about how Netflix won't recommend anything good to panicked screeds about how TikTok is hacking your brain. (To be fair, I've never used TikTok, maybe they have figured out how to hack your brain.) I mean, I personally find themotte.org's 'algorithm' (ordering posts by when they were posted) more engaging than most other forms of social media.
I do think there's a sane middle-ground here: Make sure your child attends to their responsibilities and spends some time outside and with friends, and make sure to explain to them they shouldn't share personal details with strangers, and let them know they can always come to you if they encounter something bad online. But far beyond that (and some people do go far beyond that), and it just seems like another moral panic similar in kind to violent videogames or D&D or rock music.
I've got to disagree. Have you read any more recent stuff on RoyalRoad? For whatever reason, AI writing has exploded on there in the past couple months, and it's very easy to tell which authors are using it (even when they say they aren't). And not in a good way. I wish I could just get an LLM to pump out pulp to my specifications, but if anything I think the newest models have regressed on prose, and they were never even mediocre.
The problem -- and it's been the problem since R1 -- is repetitive structure and cliche. Most of these aren't awful, per se, the issue is that instead of getting one per thousand words -- already enough to get on my nerves -- the model will stuff three of them into a paragraph. Into every paragraph. It's unreadable.
Most of the authors on RoyalRoad aren't very good, that's for sure, but they know that and their prose is appropriately simple and unambitious as a result; it doesn't call attention to itself. LLM writing is probably better on a technical level, but it's nowhere near as good as it (seems to) think it is, so it refuses to get out of its own way.
(This might be a prompting or process issue? I can't be certain other authors with better techniques aren't just slipping under my radar. If someone thinks they have an example of actually good AI writing, I'm willing to give it a shot and change my mind if I agree. Like I said, I really wish this worked.)
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