TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
What a silly shitshow. Thanks for writing it out, that was a fun read.
My question is why doesn't the board or president or whoever just launch a crackdown on pro-Palestinian protestors? Students have almost no political power in universities -- they're customers, not constituents. Most of them have political views that are only thinly-held, so just start issuing expulsions for some of the ringleaders and the rest will likely get over the whole thing. If they don't, keep issuing expulsions. Columbia has enough prestige that it won't realistically run out of students willing to go there. Faculty might be a trickier matter and some might protest out of principle, but if the students aren't protesting then that would probably take the wind out of their sails.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
I haven't heard anything one way or the other in terms of building coherent multi-scene videos. This, from my experience, means that it's probably pretty terrible at doing this. If it wasn't, people would be aggressively showing it off.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
/r/singularity has been blowing up with Veo's progress in video, with something like this or this being examples.
Clearly a ton of progress has been made here, but I'm still wondering when these will move from merely being able to generate silly short videos to demonstrate "progress", to actually being able to be part of robust production pipelines. Stuff like artwork is much more simple, and still isn't quite ready for primetime (i.e. fully replacing artists).
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
23d ago
Interesting point. I'd say your position is certainly at least plausible. The downside is that it's yet another "hard to say for certain" take. Add it to the pile with all the rest, I guess.
To push back a bit, I'd say that even if it ended up being basically true that intelligence beyond human-level wasn't good for much, wouldn't it still be useful to "think" far faster than humans could? And wouldn't it still be useful to be able to spin up an arbitrary number of genius AIs to think about any problem you wanted to?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29d ago
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested.
This seems like it's veering towards a No True Scottsman sort of thing. As in "if women don't want to be around you, it's clear they're not at ease in your presence, which is what trustworthiness means, therefore you weren't trustworthy to begin with". We can generally infer "trustworthiness" by how people act in other areas of their life, if they follow the rules and don't cheat, etc. Of course men could behave differently in contexts that involve women, but we'd generally expect a pretty strong correlation. Yet there are plenty of men who are trustworthy in other areas often don't find much success in love.
Here's my own personal take of what it takes to be successful with women:
- Be attractive, and don't be unattractive. This is like 50-75% genetic, but you can put in an effort to change yourself or at least present yourself in the best light. Physical attractiveness is the bedrock that everything else is built off of and if you have it then everything will be far far easier. If you don't, then it will be much harder.
- Have the right personality. There's a lot that of factors here, but in a nutshell it's that you want to be the guy who is "fun at parties", i.e. charismatic, funny, confident, spontaneous, has social proofing, that sort of thing.
Being "reliable" isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's an overriding concern most of the time. Perhaps a lack of reliability could be seen as sufficiently negative that a girl who would date a guy wouldn't want to marry him, but I've never seen it be a proactive concern beyond that.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29d ago
We never figured out how birds or bees fly for our own flying machines
I like this analogy. I wonder why I haven't heard it more often when people talk about LLMs being glorified autocomplete.
The hard work is already done, we already found the breakthroughs we need and now just need to apply more inputs to get massively superhuman results
I really don't think it's just a scaling problem in its entirety. I find it plausible that scaling only gets us marginally more correct answers. Look at how disappointing ChatGPT 4.5 was despite its massive size.
I believe by 2027 the doubters should be silenced one way or another.
If you're going by Scott's 2027 article, it says that little of real note beyond iterative improvements happen until 2027, and then 2027 itself is supposed to be the explosion. Then they claim in some of the subarticles on that site that 2027 is really their earliest reasonable guess, and that 2028 is also highly plausible, but also 2029-2033 aren't unreasonable.
The issue with FOOM debates is that a hard takeoff is presumed to always be right around the corner, just one more algorithmic breakthrough and we could be there! I feel like Yud is set up in a position to effectively never be falsified even if we get to 2040 and AI is basically where it is now.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29d ago
tee hee =)
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
29d ago
The antimodernist narrative is too broad. It typically takes the position that the past was uniformly better than the present, and that it linearly decayed towards the present day. Then antimodernists use this as a cudgel to attack almost anything they don't like about the modern world (HR, woke, college education, etc.)
I'm more of a fan of Arctotherium's take about a really specific aspect of modernity being the root cause, rather than modernity broadly being at fault.
I can agree on the broad strokes here, but the marriage + baby boom that happened in the 50s is a pretty evident counterexample. The Industrial Revolution was mostly played-out by that point and there were plenty of creature comforts and trappings of modernity, yet the marriage rate ticked up by quite a bit. Any story on birthrates or gender relations that is just a broad trend of the modern world sucking, and which doesn't take into account the booms that happened in the 50s is woefully incomplete IMO.
My take is a bit different from yours. It's that second-wave feminism in the late 60s and 70s let women earn their own keep, which meant marriage became far less of a necessity for basic survival. This made women choose men more for "love" than provisioning, which made us regress to our biological roots. Women all naturally want a high-value man and so they broadly chased after the same small percentage of guys (in other words, women's standards went up). These lucky few men got their pick of the lot and could treat women like barely-sentient fleshlights. The dating market effectively got worse for everyone except the lucky few guys, and now women broadly hate men since their opinions are formed on the small % that have the least incentive to commit. This led to a collapse in marriage rates, which ended up collapsing birth rates as well.
as a man, be trustworthy and the whole reproduction thing will come pretty easily
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
I find this unlikely. It might happen in a few years if current progress continues but this year is too early. If I arbitrarily set the threshold of a "film" at >75 minutes long, and set some baseline quality standard of say >50 on Metacritic, and stipulate that principle photography must be done entirely through AI (humans doing minor touch-ups would be fine), I think people would be very hard pressed to do that in the very short term. The scaffolding and pipelines don't really exist yet to make that feasible.
In fact, I'm writing this one down in my list of predictions that won't happen to keep track of.
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