TheAntipopulist

TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

And revealed preferences are showing that people don't actually care about this stuff much at all, that they only pretend to care to use it as a cudgel against the other side. To someone who genuinely thinks corruption is bad and should be stamped out as much as possible, that's horrifying.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

You're just venting.

And it seems by the parts of my reply that you ignored that you just don't want to talk about this topic.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Trump could absolutely make the job of anyone seeking to explode immigration harder by changing the law, i.e. passing legislation, not just executive orders.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

Trump has temporarily gotten it back to the levels that Obama had. He's done almost nothing in regards to helping ensure that will continue long-term.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

It specifically contrasted against Hunter Biden that Republicans spent years fishing for evidence against. It might not have done a line-by-line comparison against the rest of the claims, but nobody can really point to anything past administrations have done that have the same magnitude and blatantness as what Trump is doing.

If a news report came out that e.g. claimed that Biden was embezzling $100M dollars, would you similarly handwave it if it lacked a detailed comparison to what past Presidents had done?

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago · Edited 1mo ago

I think you need something to back that argument

That's... what the NYT article was about?

Is MAGA worse than you in that regard? I don't recall you criticizing Biden

I personally criticized Biden plenty, from his free pass to many levels of wokeness, to his defacto open-borders immigration policy, to his pardoning of Hunter Biden. I'm reading Original Sin right now, and plan on doing a book review at some point.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

What? My position is that Trump is far worse in terms of corruption, and that nobody really cares at this point -- MAGA will never care about Trump doing bad things (they'll just rationalize it afterwards no matter what it is), and the left sort of cares but doesn't see it as a particularly potent attack vector. The result is that this could easily become the new baseline of corruption that any President engages in if they want to, and that's a bad thing.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

I don't agree with this at all. Populists have hallucinated that there's massive amounts of corruption already going on, but in reality Trump is taking it to a new level of magnitude and blatantness.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

NYT has a primer on all the corruption that Trump has been engaging in:

There's a film about Melania that will pay $28 million directly to her. Did you know about this? I certainly didn't. This could have been a major scandal in past administrations, but at this point it barely registers at all.
The Trump meme coin has collected $320 million in fees. Noah smith has written about the coin a while ago, and since then Trump has invited coinholders to private events as a reward.
Justin Sun was accused of fraud by the SEC, but Trump put the investigation on hold after Sun bought $40 million in Trump coin
The luxury jumbo jet from Qatar that has been heavily featured in the news. In what I'm sure was a total coincidence, Trump announced a big AI deal with Qatar, KSA, and UAE that's almost certainly a big net-negative for the USA according to Zvi.
Trump's family are raking in cash head-over-heels by monetizing perceived access to the president, with Kushner, Trump Jr., and Eric Trump each individually dwarfing the amount that Hunter Biden ever received from doing similar activities, but basically nobody cares about that at this point.
Previous presidents have divested their business holdings prior to coming into office to head off allegations of corruption, and of course Trump never did, and basically nobody cares about that at this point.

Beyond this article, you could probably add a bunch more, like how White House aides are buying and selling stocks suspiciously timed around tariff announcements to make big profits.

The response to all of this from MAGA has been next to nonexistent. A handful of people have implied that maaaaaaaybe Trump shouldn't be doing this, but none of them remotely push the issue. When the left try to criticize this, most of MAGA either retorts with the broken record of Shellenberger arguments, or otherwise claims something Biden did was somehow worse, and Trump's corruption is implied to be good, actually. Isn't it wonderful living in an era when negative partisanship is the only political force that matters? Scandals and corruption used to be a thing that allowed the other party to come in and try to do better, but now they're used as a justification for the other side becoming even worse.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

If you're talking about a wealth tax or just seizing the money, almost no first-world country does that sort of thing for very good reasons.

If you're talking about subjecting the money to a similar tax rate that normal capital gains have, that's a lot less unreasonable, but universities have historically been granted exemptions since they fund a lot of basic science -- stuff that all of society benefits from, and almost nobody else wants to do. There's really not that much money in endowments relative to, say, what Medicare or Social Security churn through on an annual basis, and the sum long-term contribution to investing in science is much, much higher than it is to funding welfare for old people.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo ago

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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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo 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.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo 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.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo 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).

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 1mo 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?

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo 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.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo 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.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo ago

tee hee =)

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo 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.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo ago · Edited 2mo ago

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.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo ago

This is the danger that economists like Tyler Cowen say is most pressing, i.e. not some sci-fi scenario of Terminator killing us all, but of humans using AI as a tool in malicious ways. And yeah, if we don't get to omni-capable superintelligences then I'd say that would definitely be the main concern, although I wouldn't really know how to address it. Maybe turn off the datacenter access to 3rd world countries as part of sanctions packages? Maybe have police AI that counter them? It's hard to say when we don't know how far AI will go.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo ago · Edited 2mo ago

You're broadly correct, although your terminology is a bit off. When you say "aligned", people almost always use that word to mean "it doesn't behave in a deliberately malicious way". What you're talking about is more along the lines of 'it can't stay on task', which has long been a huge concern for basic useability. People claim this is getting better (Scott's AI 2027 post is predicated on continuous growth in this regard), although Gary Marcus has concerns on this claim. From my perspective, AI is very good at coding, but you really have to break down the problems into bite-sized chunks or else it will get very confused. I'd love to have an AI that could understand an entire large codebase without a ton of drawbacks or cost, and then execute multi-step plans consistently. Maybe that's coming. In fact, if there's any further AI improvements I'd bet that would be on the list. But it's not guaranteed yet, and I've been waiting for it for over a year now.

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo ago

Admittedly, it IS kind of wild that this this a tech where we can seriously talk about singularity and extinction as potential outcomes with actual percentage probabilities. That certainly didn't happen with the cotton gin.

Very true on that front. LLMs were pretty magical when I first tried playing with them in 2022. And honestly they're still kind of magical in some ways. I don't think I've felt that way about any other tech advancement in my life, except for maybe the internet as a whole.

I'm a lot more optimistic than you.

Any particular reason why you're optimistic? What are your priors in regards to AI?

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TheAntipopulist Formerly Ben___Garrison 2mo ago

I get your point about oil but I don't think it particularly applies to AI. Oil is a resource that runs out, we deplete it as we use it. AI would never run out in a similar fashion, in the worst case it would just stop being improved. And I highly doubt it would ever fully stop getting improved, as I presume there's basically always at least a few people working on any given field even in sectors that aren't hot. So with AI it's really just a question of will it live up to the expectations people have for explosive near-term improvements.

It's hard to really say whether AI is really intelligent. It's certainly a facsimile of intelligence, but whether it's actually "thinking" or just a stochastic parrot is an unresolved debate. If LLMs never evolve beyond next-token-predictors then AI may never reach human-level intelligence in most areas.

I fully agree that AI looks like it's in a bubble right now, as most investment is driven out of FOMO, not clear returns. It's just a question of 1) will intelligence scale near to actually give returns, and 2) if it doesn't, does a crash in valuation doom AI progress for a decade, or will it be like the dotcom bubble like you said?

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