Shrike
4hr ago
pausing unavoidably causes less capex spend
Why would this be the case, in your telling? Why wouldn't AI companies pivot towards customer compute build-out?
Shrike
6hr ago
Is Amodei making more or less money now than when he resigned from OpenAI complaining about safety?
Shrike
7hr ago
Can you be a bit more clear about this? Who intentionally works hard never to associate with who?
Shrike
12hr ago
I will just add that a hugely underrated aspect of belief formation is your friend group and social circle. (Thankfully a professor of mine mentioned this to me relatively early in my life, and I have been blessed in some other respects as regards my career and geographic placement).
Who you are around shapes who you are, including your beliefs and your moral values. Your friends and whoever you spend time interacting with control your own personal Overton Window. Certainly many people are capable of withstanding the compulsive power of Overton Window but it's not generally a bet you want to take or a position you want to place yourself in. Bad company corrupts good morals. And you make a choice as to whether or not you spend time with bad company.
Shrike
12hr ago
Imagining being an Anthropic employee but putting "do not give me AI psychosis" into my personalized prompt so I never have to worry about it.
Shrike
12hr ago
what exactly is the benefit of blowing up tankers when Iran is already under blockade?
Tankers are used to store and transport oil, which is a major Iranian cash export. By destroying them, Iran's adversaries reduce Iran's post-blockade economic potential.
It also threatens existing oil fields in a somewhat indirect manner. Shutting down an oil well is a potentially irreversible process, so best practices are to maintain an existing oil rich area is to keep pumping oil. But Iran only has so much oil storage, and the blockade was forcing them to store excess oil in tankers. Every time the US strikes an Iranian oil tanker, it constrains Iran's future economic prospects, and my guess is that it squeezes Iran's already tight storage capacity.
Shrike
14hr ago
Surely the people at AI companies don't spend a lot of time conversing with AI, right?
Shrike
14hr ago
Supposing that we 100% accept this as true, the result here is not that we should assume AI companies are being sincere and honest; the result that we should assume is that AI companies are intentionally making the AI capabilities that they have seem more frightening (and capable) than they really are, because the precise concern of AI alarmists is that the alarm is raised too late.
Thus there is an ideological incentive for AI companies run by "AI concerners" (let's call them, instead of doomers) to
- Overstate the capabilities and dangers of their models, and
- Kneecap competitive models
- Monopolize the market and institute a nanny surveillance state to ensure that nobody anywhere uses products besides theirs
The fact that this dovetails with their economic interests, of course, just means that there are multiple forces pushing them to be deceptive and/or self-deluded.
Shrike
17hr ago
I also think the primes have a vested interest in putting a stick in the eye of open-source models, regulating them out of existence or at least sidelining them. There's been a recent trend of adopting bespoke models based on open-source offerings: Harvey, Thomson Reuters, and of course Palantir's data sovereignty activism, and a common thread here is saving costs.
For Anthropic and OpenAI, 80% of revenue reportedly comes from 1% of their customers. Thus, well-funded organizations with big spending training their own models is a potentially existential threat to the primes' business model.
Shrike
1d ago
If the Dems hold both houses, or even get enough Republicans to flip on the votes in question, they could defund the war. Literally attach riders to budget legislation saying no funds can be used in X region after Y date.
That probably would work, albeit slowly, and I wonder if by the time the new Congress seats if they won't be distracted by other outrages of the day (AI?) and/or cowed into submission by scary intelligence briefings.
There's a bunch of other things they could do like actually invoking the War Powers Act
I think there is hesitancy about doing this because they don't want SCOTUS to rule the WPA unconstitutional, granting POTUS more power.
Shrike
1d ago
Do you actually think that the Democrats will give Iran nuclear weapons? Like, pass a law gifting them weapons from the US stockpiles, or something?
If not, what concretely do you think the Democrats will do? Winning the midterms does not make them President.
Shrike
1d ago
Oh, I'm not saying anachronisms based on "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for Cain and Abel", but rather "100kya doesn't match up with the dates for farmed fields existing".
Oh, I gotcha. Yeah, I'm never super sure how seriously to take even our best date estimates for [thing], in part because they keep getting shifted around. I have a friend who works in a geology-related field, and he says dating is heavily reliant on assumptions, too. I certainly don't think we have enough geological evidence to rule out "a farm" 100kya, but it does look like you're correct that farming is believed to be much much more recent than, say, stone tools.
But I brought it up more as an example of the sort of thing I find interesting to toy around with, not (obviously) a systematic and well-thought-out theory I have.
The initial "agriculturally developed Canaan looks like a land flowing with milk and honey to pastoral Israelite nomads" vs "but you have to learn some of their practices if you want to keep cultivating and harvesting it all" conflict alone
Wouldn't the Egyptians also be agriculturalists by the standards of the time? My understanding is that the Creation myth in Genesis is thought by some to be essentially a refutation of the pagan creation myths the Israelites were likely familiar with, and it makes me wonder if the Israelites saw the Egyptians in Cain.
(Although interestingly one could argue that Egypt is portrayed fairly positively in Genesis.)
Shrike
1d ago
There's this "historical evidence on Sparta was largely written down by Sparta's political opponents" factoid that I recall of note.
Sure, I think careful scholars are cognizant of that sort of thing.
Early writings on Christ are interesting because we both have early writings from Christians (who mostly didn't profit much by believing in Christ as per their own writings) and writings from neutral or hostile third parties.
I haven't read as much of the early writings from and on Christians as I would like, but from what I can tell the pro- and anti- Christian writings often read exactly as you would expect, e.g. the Christians are writing about church discipline, doctrine, and defending their beliefs as intellectually legitimate and their opponents are calling them gullible retards from first principles.
I get the impression that the main difference between second century theological debates about Christianity and Reddit today is that a lot of Christian arguments have remained the same (sans the ones aimed at the pagan gods), whereas "Christ was not the Son of God, merely a magician" or "Christ was not the Son of God since God would never come to Earth as a peasant" have fallen out of favor. "Christianity will destroy our way of life because they are opposed to infanticide and licentiousness" still has some traction though.
Shrike
1d ago
The debate at that link is mostly about what may have happened around 100kya, way too early for the Cain/Abel story to work without being full of anachronisms.
Setting aside the question of whether the archeological timeline is correct, isn't it true that in Genesis you only get to the more recent dates if you interpret ben as "son" and never "descendant"?
Cain vs Abel is a pretty good parable for the conflicts of around 10kya, though, between early agriculturalists and pastoralists.
A conflict that might be relevant to the Jews at the time Genesis was written.
Telling a story whose details aren't literally true in order to aid understanding of a deeper truth was like God's entire M.O.! What else would we expect? "Okay, before primordial nucleosyntheis, when the cosmic microwave background hadn't even red-shifted yet, the photons were ... are you following any of this? ... okay, forget it, just write down: 'Let there be light'."
Yes, I 100% agree with this.
I just think God is sneaky and capable of pulling off multiple levels of truth. In the afterlife we might all be like "oh wow that was all true in ways we didn't even think of evaluating."
Shrike
1d ago
How much other, non-Christian mystery hits the same threshold of evidence?
A decent question - while I am not familiar with any non-Christian mysteries from the premodern period with comparable documentation, I assume there are a lot of non-Christian mysteries with at least similarly persuasive levels of evidence, since I think the supernatural is real and encounters with it are not limited to the Christian tradition.
For instance, I don't consider Michael Shermer's poltergeist-y experience a "Christian mystery" and there's good evidence that it's it really happened (admission against interest, multiple witnesses).
Shrike
1d ago
I want to register that I think this is wrong. Catholics have as good or (I suspect) better networking in the halls of political power than Protestants, very strong institutions, and they are accepted on both sides of the aisle. If you are a member of a Protestant mainline denomination Protestants will quickly ask "PCA or PCUSA" (or whatever the equivalent is for that denomination) and with Catholics unless you go to Latin Mass or something, just being Catholic isn't necessarily a political tell.
Shrike
1d ago
Anyone who has been to Texas knows whites are a minority here in any medium sized and larger city.
What are you defining as medium-sized? On a very lazy Wikipedia check, College Station, Abilene, Amarillo, McKinney, are all majority white, although Wikipedia's numbers are a bit old so that may no longer be the case.
And (obviously) most "non-white" Texans are Hispanics, who are hardly an alien culture in the Southwest.
Shrike
1d ago
I think what you end up finding if you adopt this approach is that all of reality becomes, to varying degrees, less comprehensible. It also makes the cherry-picking problem much worse.
People who generally evaluate historical writings as more-or-less accurate +/- the usual human margin of error and bias and then put their finger on the scale when anything supernatural happens are arguably cherry-picking what they want to read, but at least they have a methodology to it and you can agree on a certain level of ground truth (e.g. most non-Christian historians don't deny that Christ or Paul existed, for instance).
Whereas if you just insist that all historical evidence is downright bad, any pretense of methodological criteria can quickly go out the window and people can just cherry-pick what they like. You might think that the end result here is merely being more reserved about making historical claims, but in real life I think it ends up in weird places like believing in Great Tartaria.
Shrike
1d ago
I wish I had a better handle on the current state of archeology (and Biblical studies!) but one of the things that I have found interesting from my understanding of the current state of things is that scientists have found evidence of a somewhat puzzling "intelligence explosion" in primitive man.
Genesis 4 can easily be interpreted as describing the same series of events (and also explains what happened to kick the intelligence explosion off).
My belief is that Genesis was written for its audience in a way that they would understand it, with the main goal being to establish an accurate anthropology and theology - a conception of man's place in the world and their relationship to God - but that this does not mean that it is "mythical" in the sense of being fictitious or made up. I don't think God describing something that happened to premodern tribesmen in a way that they can understand makes it "inaccurate" or "not literal."
Shrike
2d ago
AI really is going to be a big part of the future economy, it's not a bubble
Isn't both possible? I definitely think that AI is going to be a part of the future economy, but...houses were also going to be a part of the future economy in 2005. Specifically it seems plausible to me that OpenAI and/or Anthropic are over-invested and they can't figure out how to make a profit before their investor money runway runs out.
Shrike
2d ago
I have no idea if this is "all part of the plan" for Elon or anything, but I like the idea that his win condition is in NIMBYs making orbital datacenter construction profitable.
Feels like the faction goal of a competitive board game or something.
Shrike
2d ago
I've done airsoft and greatly enjoyed it. Wish I could find a paintball or airsoft place close by.
Shrike
2d ago
Yes. "Christ rose from the dead" is a very believable claim, just on the historical evidence - the rest of the core claims of Christianity are not particularly hard to believe if you believe that (e.g. if Christ rose from the dead then He certainly was not an ordinary human; thus believing that He is the Son of God, was born of a virgin, and are coming back again as He claimed aren't very difficult to swallow).
The one exception would be that while I tend to believe in a ~literal Garden of Eden, it's not really skin off of my nose if the Genesis account(s), not being written for 21st century scientists, was not intended to be interpreted as 21st century scientists would prefer to interpret them. (Notwithstanding this I toy with ideas that harmonize the Eden account with what 21st century scientists have deduced about the nature of early man, but that's more because I find it interesting than that I need to understand everything written in Scripture to believe in it.)
Which narrative is that?
I'm not sure this means chooky is wrong – training and inference are different tasks, and so don't (necessarily) run on the same datacenters/GPUs. So chooky could be correct that they are slowing down on unsustainable capex (training) but that doesn't necessarily mean that pausing unavoidably means less capex spend total, because you could pivot to building inference datacenters to serve customers with existing models, shifting from expensive R&D to increasing revenue via selling inference. Right?
Now, caveat – I don't know of the top of my head what the current datacenter build out looks like – how much of it is inference versus training, what's being financed directly by the primes versus third parties, etc. etc. I gather that you're not familiar with it either (and I'm not sure it's all public knowledge, anyway). So I am just thinking about the logical levers at play here.
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