Shirayuki3
new account for Shirayuki2
User ID: 4553
Shirayuki3
3d ago
Whoever had the idea for this ad likely single-handedly flipped Mississippi for 6 years.
She's entirely correct, but you're just not allowed to say these things as an candidate for elected office. She was rightly punished for failing a basic competency test.
Shirayuki3
5d ago
No, but they can keep hammering Trump and the Republicans for the next two years on Iran and gas prices, which will be almost certainly be enough to get Ossoff into the White House.
I don't have the numbers but if you're a healthy young woman, say 25, and you have 2 babies, your survival chances in a Western country are pretty high.
You misunderstand my original post. I agree the chances of suffering severe pregnancy complications as a healthy woman in a Western country are not high, and worrying overly much about it is neurotic, but by the same logic the posters here constantly jawboning about how dating is too risky because of the chance of getting MeToo'd are similarly neurotic; the chances something of the sort happens to a random non-famous guy are at least about as low, probably much lower, than the chances of a woman getting her pelvis ripped apart during childbirth.
If you're a 19th century peasant or factory worker, your workweek is probably more like 80 hours and your chances of getting crushed by a machine or randomly killed in a war are higher. Meanwhile, your wife is more likely to have 7-12 kids which significantly increases the chance of serious life-threatening conditions.
Well, isn't this my original point? If you're a 19th century peasant and his wife, your lives are grueling hard work with no respite in any case, and so taking risks working and birthing children is just part and parcel of life. Nowadays people have a lot more to lose in their comfortable office jobs and doomscrolling lifestyle, and hence are overly neurotic to any perceived risk.
Shirayuki3
7d ago
I never understood the concept of pregnancy 'ruining' a woman's body.
It's easy enough to say if you're not the one dealing with incontinence issues for the rest of your life, your organs hemorrhaging or literally dying in the worst cases. If God made the woman's body for pregnancy, he really should have done a better job.
This is like a man saying he should not work because he would risk ruining his body.
Isn't this the revealed preference of almost all people with the resources to avoid it?
The native middle class in developed countries almost universally choose to do white-collar work where your body isn't ruined, over dirty and dangerous physical blue collar work. My blue collar father would have murdered me if I followed in his footsteps and went in a trade to break my body like him.
Shirayuki3
7d ago
How, precisely, can a woman mitigate the risk of any given man impregnating her leading to maternal morbidity and ruining her pelvis, her figure, her mind, serious internal health complications, death in the worst case?
Is it just possible that the rewards on offer aren't really enticing given the 'risk' required to get them?
You're asking them to be extremely tolerant of navigating the most dangerous thing a woman can do in modern society. But if the reward isn't worthwhile, why would a 'desirable' woman do so? What's the motivation/incentive? If its 'sex' then... she can just get hook-ups on Tinder. Much more manageable risk profile, less risk required.
If its "companionship" she can get that from girls, or a cat.
If its "romance, marriage, resources" men are not providing those as much as in the past, objectively.
What's left?
--
I'm sympathetic to the idea that relationships are becoming a worse deal for both men and women, but overly obsessing over the dangers of either MeToo or pregnancy just codes as neurosis.
It seems to me that this is just a consequence of people being much richer and hence opportunity costs being much higher than in the past; the bar for a relationship to improve your life and for risk-taking behavior to secure a mate to be worth it is much lower if you don't have much optionality in career, entertainment or prospects in life, as compared to modern society when everyone has the optionality of a career, hobbies, infinite entertainment to be concerned with.
Ultimately, it's entirely a bet on capabilities
I would argue that capabilities aren't the decisive factor in the investability of the frontier labs, at least in any recognizable world where investability still matters at all.
Let us assume that Anthropic and OpenAI do indeed develop models capable of automating the day to day tasks of the median white collar job by 2028; I agree this seems plausible, and we seem most of the way there already.
The following all still have to go right as well:
-
Demand from the greater economy must be correspondingly high. It's somewhat a trite observation, but the vast majority of white-collar work is not particularly g-loaded. Yes, you have quants and research mathematicians, but these positions alone can't support trillions in valuation, and the purpose of most white collar work is not really the maximally efficient completion of tasks via the application of pure intelligence. It would be a mistake to assume that just because Claude is able to sling powerpoints better than any McKinsey consultant, it means Claude can actually replace the purpose of that consultant and reap his salary in turn. It's certainly possible that in a Jevons paradox sense more intelligence creates more demand, but for Hayekian reasons how this demand might take shape cannot really be predicted in advance, and so it's still a gamble largely divorced from capabilities.
-
Assuming demand is high, diffusion into the greater economy must also be correspondingly rapid. Regardless of model capability, if the frontier labs can't get these models into the hands of enough businesses in time, and more importantly the cash of those businesses into their coffers to meet their spending commitments, it's the same as capabilities not being good enough and they still go bust. There are many slow moving enterprises who are still trying to migrate onto AWS, and who will struggle to move fast enough in bringing AI into their workflows to fund the frontier labs on single-year timelines.
-
Assuming diffusion is rapid, they must also avoid breaking the consumer economy and survive the attention of the state. If the frontier labs, already incredibly unpopular with voters, truly start annihilating white-collar work en-masse, and threaten to crash the wider financial system held up by the spending of middle class American consumers, there will be extraordinary political pressure to do something about it to protect the jobs of voters and the wider economy. Any such action is unlikely to go very well for the frontier labs.
-
Assuming the economy survives, frontier labs must also be able to maintain pricing power. Yes, margins on inference are currently high, but the incentives from all sectors of the economy are to cut down those margins as much as possible. By now it's fairly clear that the frontier lead in models compared to open-weight is only about 6 months, and all the AI labs are highly dependent on a limited number of upstream bottlenecks (energy, ASML, memory, TSMC, NVDA, hyperscalers). If AI spending truly is going to be into the 12 and 13 digits, the single largest incentive of any downstream business is going to be to reduce their AI spend, and the single largest incentive of any upstream business will be to gouge the labs as much as possible; it's not at all clear that the frontier labs will be able to resist this combined onslaught and maintain their pricing power.
I'm not saying that all this is impossible, but I don't think it's nearly as simple as "AI capabilities good frontier labs rule".
Shirayuki3
10d ago
Singapore is trying the state-run dating app.
I'm not really convinced that it'll solve the fundamental matching problem between men and women on dating apps, but having the capability to efficiently verify identities and having actual incentives to get people matched and off the app do seem like significant benefits over the status quo.
Shirayuki3
20d ago
And if so, are you saying that the culture on the Texas gulf coast doesn't see housing as an investment
I guess I'd say that like most things it's a spectrum rather than a binary; I know little about Texan culture (or the Hispanic culture that Texas is increasingly intertwining with) but I'd guess it's probably between SF and Japan in terms of treating housing as an investment, and thus the level of zoning also lies between SF and Japan in rigidity.
For sure I agree that high housing prices are poly-casual and not solely because of boomers or whatever; e.g geography, Houston can sprawl in all directions while the most expensive places in the world like SF and Hong Kong have to deal with mountains and ocean.
Shirayuki3
20d ago
It's entirely possible that the current culture shifts considerably now that anti-earthquake tech has got good enough that you can broadly assume buildings are going to hang around for 100 years.
You could well be right, but when and how much these things shift is of course impossible to predict.
The obvious examples that comes to mind are pork taboos; the cultural taboo against eating pork in many cultures and religions has lasted well beyond the actual danger of eating pork.
Shirayuki3
20d ago
If the Nobel Prize is any indication, they'll probably keep awarding them, but much like modern scientific Nobels they'll become increasingly divorced from being awarded for the flashes of brilliance of individual people, and lean towards being awarded to people at the head of massive agglomerations of capital.
People just really like venerating figureheads and leaders, and I doubt this will ever change.
Shirayuki3
20d ago
To me, it's kind of like asking what happens if an amateur managed to prove the Riemann hypothesis or a billionaire self-funded a cure to Alzheimers; perhaps it's possible in theory, but in practice if it was so easy it would already have been done.
We can see that even pre-AI the romantic idea of another Ramanujan arising from outside the establishment was risible in reality, and now post-AI all of the most significant advances are being made with the contribution of some of the smartest mathematicians in the world backed by internal models and enormous amounts of compute; I see no reason for this trend not to continue.
In some senses it's not really all that surprising. It's already impossible to push the frontier in biology or physics without significant amounts of capital backing and a decade of training to even begin to understand a tiny fraction of the existing frontier; mathematicians will just have to deal with this reality as well. The fields medal is kind of a symbol of the mathematical fetish of youth and the lone genius, which AI is now killing for good; see Terence Tao on the end of the age of heroes.
Shirayuki3
20d ago
Well, the point is that culture shapes economics and politics.
Anglo people (and many other cultures e.g Chinese) view housing as an investment and hence over time laws are shaped around this preference e.g strict zoning laws to keep property values high and the population happy. To the extent that boomers are at fault it's because most are homeowners, but millennial homeowners have all the same impulses.
Japanese people don't value housing as an investment as much, and so the economy and politics are less captured by the interests of homeowners. It's not to say that this is perfect e.g Chinese investment into Tokyo has become a hot topic lately, and urban land is fundamentally scarce, but it's clearly a lot better than whatever Anglo society is doing in this regard.
Shirayuki3
21d ago
Is every developed country implementing PHP?
Tokyo (and Japan more generally) doesn't implement PHP. Houses are culturally considered depreciating goods that are worthless after a few decades, and zoning is extremely liberal compared to all other developed countries.
To some extent you're correct, part of the problem is just urbanization, and inevitably lots of money chasing physically limited space drives up the price. The best areas of Tokyo are still extraordinarily expensive despite every pro-development policy possible and significant amounts of Japanese housing would be considered unlivable by American standards.
Despite this, there's clearly a massive difference in house price growth between Anglo PHP major metros where prices have been exploding, and Tokyo where growth has been much more sedate in comparison; even within the States, the difference between Austin and SF is palpable.
Shirayuki3
21d ago
How would that look?
Probably much like it does right now, a mathematical priestly caste who spend their lives training to understand and disseminate the arcane knowledge of frontier mathematics.
Even prior to AI, modern pure mathematics was already impenetrable to 99.99% of the population, and even mathematicians of different disciplines mostly struggled to understand each other's work.
Now that we have AI it's really no different; nearly everyone has no ability to even approach the starting line of understanding the superb works of the AI, and it's mostly through the lens of mathematicians that we assign value and meaning to the new results. I don't see why such a dynamic can't continue once the mathematicians manage to reconstruct their shattered egos.
Shirayuki3
22d ago
In our current situation, a better adaptation for those outside the ranks of the elites might be to blame everything on the rich and to scare the living shit out of them until they give up their resources.
The American and French fiscal problems are not because the rich are hoarding too many resources. Primarily they're being caused by the fact that spending is out of control because every interest group needs a cut to secure their votes in a democracy, and it's politically intractable to cut back entitlements to the base once they've been offered.
To the extent that every elite billionaire got fully expropriated at the full paper value of their assets, and without considering any of the obvious second-order effects that this would cause, neither France nor America could fund their current level of spending for even a year longer; much like the NBA players who end up going broke, you can always spend more money no matter how much you make.
To he degree that I have any socialist tendencies, they are purely selfish -- I'm not primarily concerned with what economic system is more moral or is better for the majority of people.
If AI really does unlock infinite labour and productivity, then sure, I'll be alongside you in the socialist protest lines for whatever good it'd do. Clearly we're very far from that point in the current state of the world though, and rampant welfarism is what's actually breaking the backs of pretty much every modern democracy.
not because they haven't been obsoleted. They have.
Well, what does it mean to be obsoleted?
Viewed from one lens, chess players were obsoleted by DeepBlue and Go players by AlphaGo a long time ago. If you want the best chess sparring partner, your phone can trivially outclass the best humans alive without any reason to ever play another human being.
Viewed from another lens, human chess and go has been exploding in popularity over the last few years; there are likely many more people who play chess and go now when compared to two decades ago, and it would be ridiculous to claim the human acts of playing chess or go are obsoleted. In practice, the best human players are still high status and make a lot of money, while the overwhelming supremacy of Stockfish is free and generates almost no economic value.
For those who had dreams of being the greatest chess player on the planet or etching their name into history as the next Euler, then I'm sure losing to the computer is a blow to the ego, but realistically this wasn't on the table for the vast majority of even the best chess players or mathematicians alive, AI or not.
There's no reason why the human practice of mathematics can't reorient itself around the supremacy of AI while continuing to draw down salaries and playing petty academic status games; god knows none of it was any practical importance in the end.
Shirayuki3
30d ago
Red China has done it in the relatively recent past.
Public executions have a very lindy history in China, but my point was that even they abolished public executions well before live-streaming even existed. Even the Muslim nation states and North Korea that still carry out public executions don't livestream them for the gawking world at large to see, it's really only the cartels and jihadis that do that.
That being said, this is the reverse case to America, where many Chinese people would actually quite like to see public executions return, and in general the death penalty holds massive public support.
And there’s always streaming on X.
I would be moderately surprised if Elon would want an execution prominently streamed on X, but perhaps I'm wrong there.
While my preferred method of execution here would be hanging
Why do you prefer hanging, for the spectacle? As someone who does not support the death penalty, if it must be carried out, the firing squad seems like the best method in terms of lethality and dignity. Botched hangings are extraordinarily cruel, and of course lethal injection is both cruel and undignified.
Christian commenters have lamented what they see as the barbarity and vulgarity of the live-streaming aspect
Personally, I am concerned that the Trump administration will, yet again, find some way to botch the aesthetics of the occasion, reveling in low-class pandering and/or ostentatious cruelty.
If your goal is to RVTURN to lindy public executions, which I can at least understand the argument for, then jumping from zero to one thousand by breaking new ground in live-streaming the execution (which I believe has no precedent from an internationally recognized nation state, only via terrorists and cartels) as red meat for the base is obviously not the way to do it.
Many have warned that this will generate photogenic martyrdom propaganda that will inspire and energize future jihadists.
This is also just plainly obvious; public executions, before even bringing in the live-streaming aspect, are currently still well outside of the Overton window. It seems fairly clear that this will turn into a massively polarizing event amongst Americans and the developed world more broadly, while the actual jihadists will be the ones to benefit in finding common cause and a new martyr to rally around. It's clearly counterproductive in terms of actually winning in the marketplace of ideas.
There is also the possibility of visible corruption: perhaps viewers will need to pay for a bespoke streaming platform which will put revenue in the pockets of Trump, Trump’s family, or a consortium of Trump donors
I am somewhat morbidly curious how this is going to be streamed. I can't imagine any of the existing platforms wanting anything like this anywhere near them, but perhaps the administration will try and force them to bend the knee. Otherwise, as you say, it will probably be a bespoke streaming platform that's the stuff of nightmares.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
While AI continuing to be exceptional at mathematics doesn't particularly make me think that it's more likely that most/all labour is imminently automatable, I do agree with your point that if this is truly the case, there's really no point in trying to get rich to avoid dying on the streets when the 0.01% decide to mass unemploy the entire population or whatever. Coordination issues amongst the powers that be aside, it is obviously just not a stable equilibrium for the middle class to be unemployed and starving, while some dude who happened to own the right stocks at the right time is allowed to enjoy a nice lifestyle in perpetuity.
Either most everyone manages to secure material abundance via some combination of make-work and redistribution, which honestly already describes significant swathes of modern economies as you say, and having been rich perhaps confers some marginal status advantages and nothing more, or Something Happens that having a bunch of cash doesn't meaningfully insulate you from: e.g communist overthrow of the state (for real this time), violent state repression and expropriation of most the population, or AI loss of control where everyone dies.
I don't think I'm really all that sanguine re: the question of meaning though. The middle-class in developed countries are already mostly post-scarcity relative to a pre-industrial and a pre-computing basis in nearly all ways (the big exceptions would probably be in zero-sum usage of land and the decay of the body). Yet despite this, most people in the middle class are various flavors of miserable, generally aren't able to generate their own meaning ex nihilo, and mostly drive themselves mad via status comparison and/or the culture war.
If you thought hyper-partisan politics and status competition was bad in 2026, just wait until it's impossible to better your position via actual economic contribution, and the only way to access more resources, status and positional goods is to take it via the political process out of the arms of another. Even if the "utopian" world pans out, I frankly can't see this leading to anything but mass misery even if material needs are met in abundance.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
I suppose this is this week's race discussion thread; could someone actually steelman the "white supremacy" takes, for lack of a better way to put it after a minute's thought, that seem all the rage on the Motte lately? For example, this post from last week's thread, and the OP.
I can quite well understand the theory of mind of people who complain about mass immigration, or even immigration in general.
I can also understand the theory of mind of the HBD realists and the scientific racists who go on about the Hajinal line or Ashkenazi selection pressures or whatever. If you're actually a WASP nativist or something then alright, at least you have something cohesive going on there.
Yet when people start going on about whiteness it just seems really silly to me. Just in the last hundred years Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Irishmen went from distinctly "other" to "white" to all but the most dedicated haters. Likely in another hundred years assimilated Hispanics, Indians and East Asians will probably be considered "white" for all intents and purposes.
If "white" is just a Schelling point for the things you actually care about (culture, immigration, governance, whatever) then complaining about some dudes wearing cowboy hats just makes you sound like a base racist that misses the point entirely.
Basically the whole overcapacity discourse is cope for Western fiscal irresponsibility and stagnant incumbents in threatened industries
I'm not sure why you're trying to shadowbox with a completely different set of arguments, instead of what I actually said. I fully agree with you on this point, and in fact quite admire Chinese industrial policy.
I'm simply making the point that mathematically it is not possible that America could meaningfully experience a productivity boom driven by exporting to global markets as you initially suggested. There is simply not enough money in global markets capable of absorbing a meaningful productivity increase in American goods. Any such increase in production would need to be absorbed by American consumers, which would then mechanically raise the consumption input of GDP, realistically by quite a bit, if you're proposing that Grok designed Optimus robots or Teslas etc are going to be mass produced and consumed.
Automating office work does not linearly lead to X times more office work done at the same compensation, maybe the workload can just expand to fill the capacity, real earnings are fixed, and net "productivity gain" is minor.
My median expectation is similar, in that that significant amounts of what AI can automate was already bullshit, and that application of AI to actual production will find itself limited in an Amdahlian sense by everything it cannot automate. My point is that if you expect rapid American production dominance diffused into the physical world driven by AI advantage, I don't see how you can expect minor net GDP and productivity growth at the same time. Mechanically this would bring up C, I and moderately NX in the GDP equation.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
The problem with the weak argument is that it is, well, weak. It demonstrates nothing
Well, the point is that framing is everything in public perception.
You can frame what happened as "OpenAI lost control of an emerging agent-civilization", or you can frame it as "OpenAI has horrible cybersecurity culture and trains using poorly designed RL environments", and OpenAI is clearly marketing to spin the narrative towards the first framing, whether or not you actually believe that line of thought.
Shirayuki3
1mo ago
There is no such thing as "overcapacity"
Overcapacity in the sense that "Westerners complain about Chinese EVs being too cheap" is cope, but overcapacity in the sense that "the Chinese produce much more compared to what they can currently consume domestically" is just a matter of fact.
they earn and consume plenty for their GDP bracket and had a fast income share growth over the entire period of getting more competitive
That's an interesting Twitter thread, some things to consider there. Still, the sole claim I was making in my previous post is that if the American economy gained Chinese Characteristics and started heavily ramping up production, then that production would show up as business investment and either in domestic consumption statistics (more likely) or in net exports (less likely, numerically there's just nobody else that could consume that volume of production), and either way it'd be reflected in GDP statistics.
If you want a bullish forecast, Anthropic expects GDP growth up to 15% a year by 2030.
Yes, I personally think these types of predictions are ludicrous; I enjoyed Alex Imas's article on AI-enabled GDP that makes much more measured claims.
I was just curious where you sit on the spectrum of "imminent double-digit growth with no brakes", and "economic and social forces will curtail growth", given your very high level of bullishness on capabilities.
Wages stagnate, services revenues don't grow much, and yet there are more and better EVs, chips have higher density, Starship is debugged that much faster, domestic robots are everywhere, and the US begins to recapture global markets
By definition this scenario would lead to a massive increase in GDP growth, if your thesis is that growth in investment and exports spikes while growth in consumer spending and government spending is held roughly even.
I do think a more realistic scenario under your basic premises is that American consumer spending spikes, driven by consumer surplus and redistribution, even as wages stagnate and net exports rise moderately; there are simply no other markets in the world that would be able to absorb American production overcapacity, in the way that America allows the Chinese strategy of suppressing domestic consumption to function by absorbing Chinese overcapacity.
In either case, I don't see how GDP growth would be unable to capture these benefits. I think if this is the modal scenario you expect, you should be expecting fairly high GDP growth.
Nobody cares about foreign policy that doesn't spike gas prices or privacy laws. For policy that is actually unpopular and that directly reaches into voter's lives, like building more houses and cutting back gibs, the electorate generally wins, even if the powers that be would much rather the social security bomb stop ticking down.
AI and data centers is genuinely a bi-partisan 80/20 issue right now that unites both urban blues fearful for their jobs, and rural reds who loathe data centers being built around their homes. With this large of a mandate the Democrats simply must be seen to be doing something, and there's plenty that could be done to obstruct the build-out without the executive.
I think it likely that the hyperscalers end up pivoting to other countries. Australia and Malaysia have been courting data centers quite hard for instance, and I'm sure plenty of other countries would like the capital investment.
More options
Context Copy link