Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Women are the dark matter of history. We know that they were always there. We can assume that they must have had opinions and motivations, and that they took actions in accordance with these motivations. But they didn't write much, so it is easy to simply whitewash them out of history, or alternatively to adopt a feminist reading of history that projects modern sensibilities centuries or millennia into the past in order to fill the gaps.
Still, I can't discount the possibility that revolutionary France was unique here. Charlotte Corday was 24 when she stabbed Jean-Paul Marat to death in the bathtub. You don't see pretty young women doing that kind of thing in other times and places.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.
Let’s check 18 U.S. Code § 2256(8)
(8) “child pornography” means any visual depiction, including any photograph, film, video, picture, or computer or computer-generated image or picture, whether made or produced by electronic, mechanical, or other means, of sexually explicit conduct, where— (A) the production of such visual depiction involves the use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; (B) such visual depiction is a digital image, computer image, or computer-generated image that is, or is indistinguishable from, that of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or (C) such visual depiction has been created, adapted, or modified to appear that an identifiable minor is engaging in sexually explicit conduct.
I think that definition is way too expansive, but that’s the definition that our elected representatives came up with. As written, it is definitely a federal crime to create deepfakes of Stacy from English class getting railed and texting them to your bros. Some of these provisions are oddly specific. I don’t have time do dig into the legislative history right now, but I suspect they were added recently in order to cover this exact thing.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
We know that it is physically possible to have mosquito-sized flying machines capable of short-range independent operations. We have an existence proof. They’re called mosquitoes.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
It's really tiring seeing people ask AI questions that are worded in a tricky way that most humans would screw up, then using this as proof that AI is way dumber than humans. I'll be honest, I had to read that question four times to understand it. It's the logic puzzle version of the Stroop Effect.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Fired Superalignment Researcher Drops Four-and-a-Half Hour Podcast With Dwarkesh Patel, 165-Page Manifesto.
Leopold Aschenbrenner graduated valedictorian at Columbia in 2021 at the age of 19. He then worked for the FTX Future Fund before the fiasco, then wound up at OpenAI on the Superalignment team. In April of this year, he was fired, ostensibly for "leaking". In Leopold's telling, he was fired for voicing security concerns (not to be confused with safety concerns) directly to the board. At post-coup OpenAI, being the kind of guy who would write a manifesto is a massive liability. Private interpretation of the Charter is forbidden.
Leopold's thesis is that AGI is coming soon, but that national security concerns, not alignment, are the main threat. A major theme is how easy it would be for the CCP to gain access to critical AI-related capabilities secrets via espionage given the current state of security at frontier AI labs. I was a bit confused at the time of the firing as to what Eliezer meant by calling Leopold a "political opponent", but it is very clear in retrospect. Leopold wants to accelerate AI progress in the name of Western dominance, making America the "compute cluster of democracy". He is very concerned that lax security or a failure to keep our eyes on the prize could cost us our lead in the AI arms race.
What comes through in the podcast in a way that doesn't from the manifesto is how intellectually formidable Leopold seems. He is thoughtful and sharp at all times and for all questions. Admittedly I may be biased. Leopold is thoroughly Gray Tribe ingroup. He has been on Richard Hanania's podcast, and mentions Tyler Cowen as one of his influences. It is tempting to simply nod along as the broad outline of the next 5 years is sketched out, as if the implications of approaching AGI are straightforward and incontrovertible.
The one thing that is notably missing is are-we-the-baddies? style self-reflection. The phrase, "millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones", is uttered at one point. It makes sense in the military context of the conversation, but I really think more time should have been spent on the political, social, and ethical implications. He seems to think that we will still be using something like the US Constitution as the operating system of the post-AGI global order, which seems... unlikely. Maybe disillusionment with the political system is one of those things that can't be learned from a book, and can only come with age and experience.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
If we're going to just be giving money away, give it to the workers, not to excess elites.
It's not really going to elites. It's going to middle-class young women. They are both the beneficiaries of the loans (being the ones getting worthless humanities degrees) and the ones who's salaries are being paid with the loans (being the ones working in education and education administration).
The industries of choice for middle-class young women are 1. Education, and 2. Health Care. A few rhetorical discussion questions:
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Where does government money seem to be flowing these days?
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Which industries are being ravaged by cost disease?
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What demographic forms the base of the Democratic Party?
I am not sure at the moment which way causality flows, but I do not believe these things are unrelated.
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists by David Stove. It's pretty crazy how everyone just sort of nodded along as Popper's falsificationism became the dominant idea in philosophy of science, but hardly any scientists act as though they actually believe in it, because it's absurd.
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