VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
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User ID: 411
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
I mean, when 13% of the population commits >50% of the murders, focusing on that demographic seems more to me like rational triage than a cop-out.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Kanye is also somehow impossible to look away from. I don't know what it is. Some innate sense of comedic timing and pitch-perfect camp I guess. It doesn't seem like he intends it, it just seems to be part of who he is.
This is one of the funniest videos I've seen recently and he isn't even trying to be funny, I don't think.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
They aren't copying art though...?
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
I think the African slave trade largely traded on Africans who lost a political, legal or physical conflict in Africa -- they were (for the most part) prisoners of war, convicts, outcasts and misfits who were captured and sold to slavers by other native Africans. So this isn't terribly different from observing that descendants of convicted felons tend to have worse outcomes, which I also expect to be true. As is often the case in studies of intergenerational disparities, genetic heredity can provide a satisfying explanation, which is upstream both from their current status and their ancestors' enslavement.
It also seems plausible to me that slave breeding that took place in America was dysgenic, which could have long-lasting consequences. I don't know if it was, though. If that is correct, it's quite the political hot potato: the folks looking to avenge past oppression are generally not going to want to accept that genetic inferiority mediates the legacy of the oppression, and the folks looking to blame the underclass for their plight are generally not going to want to accept that their blameworthy tendencies were foisted upon them by the sins of America's forefathers.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
I am free speech maximalist (note that's different from absolutist) and I would have shut Kayne West down.
Can you define free speech maximalist? Because it's weird to see a phrase like that proposed as consistent with censoring swastikas.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
My position is that they wouldn't achieve significant cost savings, because as they become more efficient in producing high quality legal documents, the quality expectations of the industry would increase by approximately the same percentage.
The legal profession is predominantly a red queen's race. It produces some objective benefit in promoting clarity and discipline within and between organizations, but everything beyond that is zero-sum -- trying to get better terms or a better dispute settlement at a counterparty's expense, trying to cover off an edge case where the default rule might favor your counterparty marginally better than your proposed customized solution -- and my suspicion is that the latter category is the bulk of the profession. Through that lens, the amount that a corporation spends on legal fees is more akin to the amount that a country spends on its military than the amount it spends on agriculture. When technology makes militaries more efficient, the result isn't less military spending on either side of a border, it's scarier militaries staring each other down across that border.
in 2024, I expect vast swath of Democrats to coordinate in reregistering as Republicans and voting with Never-Trumpers for a particular non-Trump candidate in every state
It almost feels like you're laying the groundwork to cope with a Trump loss in the 2024 GOP primary. The Democrats would much rather run against Trump in 2024 than against DeSantis. Trump largely failed to advance his agenda in four years, he antagonized the Democrats into increased turnout, he offended everyone in the middle by trying to steal the 2020 election, and (crucially) he already demonstrated that Biden can beat him. DeSantis turned a swing state blood red, won it by twenty points in a cycle where Trump's nominees were failing left and right, demonstrated competent governance against COVID and hurricane disasters, and successfully prosecuted the culture war using the levers of executive power.
If you want further evidence that the Dems would rather run against Trump, look to their shenanigans in the 2020 cycle. They were supporting Trump's own nominees and fellow election denialists over more traditional GOP politicians. And it worked; Trump's guys generally lost.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Our current understanding of physics suggests that more experiences will happen inside grabby civilizations than outside
Agreed
which suggests that for some reason simulators want to simulate that
No, this is where I disagree. You are claiming that a grabby civilization at its peak will simulate more experiences that appear subjectively from within the simulation to be part of a grabby civilization than that do not. But why? You and I know almost nothing about what kinds of simulation an advanced civilization would want to run.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Totally disagree. If you think it's an injustice if some people aren't willing or able to provide valuable enough labor in the labor market to entitle them to consume enough scarce goods and services, then we can have a social safety net. But it's economically incoherent to argue that the specific dollars that we collect when we auction off access to a fundamentally scarce service (even if it's a government provided service like roads) need to be handed to people who don't use the service.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
I hope you're right, but I worry about how much of the GOP primary vote even follows these races closely enough to understand that Trump ruined everything. Seems pretty plausible that >50% of GOP primary voters don't follow that closely and will nod along when Trump publicly blames the rest of the party with some unintelligible claim.
Trump singlehandedly ruined what should have been a GOP controlled Senate in 2020 and it doesn't seem to have cost him anything with them: he led them like lambs to the slaughter in this year's Senate primaries.
Yeah it seems like a bust for the GOP. Maybe they'll eke out a win in the Senate but it's a far cry from the +3 GOP pickups that RCP has been predicting.
It's two things:
Thing number one is abortion. Very unusual for a party to win a major nationally salient policy victory while the opposing party controls the Presidency and both houses of Congress. The usual loss by a president's party in their first midterm is thermostatic backlash by voters to that president's policy wins. Here, the GOP winning abortion in SCOTUS upends that logic. Retrospectively the GOP won the biggest policy issue of the past two years, and prospectively it looks a lot more like the GOP holds the whip hand and needs to be checked by centrists. I know the usual pro-life posters on this forum take the line that it's all worth it to save the fetuses, but boy is it demoralizing for a pro-choice conservative like myself.
Thing number two is Trump. If things go as they seem to be going, this is now the second federal election in which he will have singlehandedly handed Senate control to the Dems: last time by contesting the election and putting on his insane January 6 carnival and publicly encouraging Pence to steal it for Trump while two runoffs were pending in Georgia, both of which the GOP should have won but both of which they lost, and this time by intervening on behalf of terrible candidates in Pennsylvania (the multimillionaire Muslim snake oil salesman who lives in a palace in New Jersey -- chosen to run against the guy that central casting delivered as the avatar of the blue collar salt of the earth) and Georgia (the barely literate guy with ten thousand illegitimate children, credible allegations of familial abuse, and a history of paying his estranged exes to get abortions -- chosen to run against the unimpeachable family man pastor). And the show isn't over: he's about to announce his run for 2024.
I think it is clear that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh have been laying the groundwork to engineer an opinion that all of the titles of the Civil Rights Act protect white and asian people from discrimination as surely as they protect black people. That was their long game in Bostock, which held that trans people are protected under the Civil Rights Act via the syllogistic logic that the CRA bans discrimination on account of sex, so (roughly) it is a violation to treat a man who wears a dress differently from how you treat a woman who wears a dress. I predicted that this was their intent in Bostock, and I think it was Gorsuch who indicated as much during the oral arguments in the affirmative action case -- I can't remember his exact phrasing but he invoked Bostock and asked why the same logic shouldn't apply to the same language in a different title of the CRA.
If SCOTUS clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally, then every tool that has been used to police covert discrimination against black people over the past century (sting operations, disparate impact theories, indications of animus, etc.) could in theory be used to police covert discrimination against white/asian people ("holistic" applicant reviews, rhetoric about "dismantling whiteness," etc.).
At that point all that is needed is a sufficiently motivated executive. Ron DeSantis in particular has proven apt at using the tools pioneered by civil rights activists to effect conservative change, and has been pretty sharp with other types of executive power to curtail liberal excesses.
So I don't know what odds I give it of coming to pass, but it does seem like the pieces are falling into place for a conservative campaign to dismantle affirmative action across the entire ambit of the Civil Rights Act, which is much broader than just higher education -- and to fight back against a slide toward ethnic spoils.
The biggest threat to this campaign is if the GOP nominates Trump instead of DeSantis. Trump can be counted on to fumble the opportunity, as he does everything. At this point I am hoping that fate intervenes to secure the nomination for DeSantis.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
It's still trying to reverse an election after the fact, which feels like the relevant category IMO. The time to protest voting procedures is before the vote is cast.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
So their manager asks them to do something about bias, and they apply the laziest possible hack.
I actually have a different impression: most of these professional ML researchers and engineers genuinely wish they could serve up a model that provides politically correct responses, because politically correct responses are also commercially correct, and everyone wants to make money. Probably the main reason a bunch of giant and amazing Google models aren't made available to the public via API is because of the risk that they might say or display something politically incorrect, and certainly some fraction of the user base (especially tech journalists lusting after those sweet engagement metrics) will try to bait it into doing so.
So there's ample incentive to solve this problem "the right way," and the fact that so far all we see are cheap hacks and opacity is because no one knows how to solve it the right way, or even if it is solvable the right way at all, even in principle, with the technology we have today.
Part of the problem is exactly what makes these models so exciting to begin with. They can notice things, they can extrapolate from training data, they can make analogies and they can roll with out-of-sample prompts, and they develop all of these amazing abilities ex nihilo, from a largely uncontrollable black box made of inscrutable matrices gently nudged in the direction of data.
The other part of the problem is that political correctness isn't a well defined or static problem. It is a messy social problem, involving subtle adversarial factional games, sort of like fashion.
And these two halves of the problem compound with one another. It isn't enough to generate a black person one time in X -- you have to define X, you have to solve this equation for all possible identities, and you have to then translate this equation into every conceivable fact pattern that the user will (adversarially) use to challenge the model. If you want to generate a picture or story involving a policeman arresting a criminal, it is fraught whether you make the policeman white or black, whether you put him in a wheelchair or not. Should the model generate trans women? If they're visibly identifiable as trans women, are you making a minstrel caricature to further the stereotype that trans women look like men in dresses? If they aren't visibly identifiable, how is one to know they are trans at all, and that you haven't committed the deadly sin of erasure? Should black women look like white people but with a darker skin tone (and draw criticism for e.g. straightening her hair, itself a political minefield), or should you make them look recognizably phenotypically black in terms of facial features and hair (and draw criticism for reinforcing a stereotype)? If both murderers and NBA stars are disproportionately likely to be black, does the model need to recognize that murderers are bad and NBA stars are good and apply its distortion of the underlying distribution only to the bad category, i.e. return mostly white guys for criminals but mostly black guys for NBA stars? How is it to know? And when ideological opponents start to stress-test these categories and ask for a thuggish NBA player or a corrupt President, should it reverse the categories? What about middle grounds, like an "aggressive" NBA player, or a "desperate, nonviolent" criminal? We even have minor culture wars about the perceived race of robots.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Do you think it would have been a good idea to let the USSR own enough major US broadcasting networks in the 1980s that they could control the media that an entire generation sees? Because that seems to be more or less the position that China is in right now with Tiktok, whether or not we can prove that they are abusing their control.
Here was your original question:
Therefore, the Fermi Paradox has not been resolved; it’s just been transmuted into the question “Why weren’t we born into a Grabby civilization at its peak?”
The Simulation Hypothesis demonstrates that we are likely not in the bottom layer of reality. If this universe is real, then it looks like we'll soon be able to (and likely will) simulate a large number of sentiences, which means it would have been massively coincidental that our indexical experience was located in the "real universe." This does not tell us much about what the simulators' universe actually looks like, or what resemblance it bears to ours, if any, but it does tell us that we probably aren't in the bottom layer. This suffices to dispatch your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox.
If the Fermi Paradox is even meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then the answer is that we probably were born (simulated) into a grabby civilization at or near its peak. If the Fermi Paradox isn't meaningful at the layer of the simulators' universe, then it has been resolved. Take your pick, but either way your purported transmutation of the Fermi Paradox isn't paradoxical anymore.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Maybe there's something deeply wrong with the core philosophy of crypto? FTX is EA's one big scandal
FTX is EA's only big anything, because nothing else EA has done has captured mainstream attention like FTX has.
My sense is that EA does not lack for scandals (CFAR and MIRI are basically walking scandals), they're just not big enough to be interesting, and it feels kind of unsportsmanlike to publicize them, because they're basically all about maladjusted misfits hurting themselves and one another.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
The electorate this midterm cycle. All of Trump's handpicked made-for-TV clown-car candidates lost to their boring professional opponents, while the GOP's own boring professional politicians did much better.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
There's a bunch of argument about what utilitarianism requires, or what deontology requires, and it seems sort of obvious to me that nobody is actually a utilitarian (as evidenced by people not immediately voluntarily equalizing their wealth),
That's like saying that Christians don't actually believe that sinning is bad because even Christians occasionally sin. You can genuinely believe in moral obligations even if the obligations are so steep that (almost) no one fully discharges them.
or actually a deontologist (as evidenced by our willingness to do shit like nonconsensually throwing people in prison for the greater good of not being in a crime-ridden hellhole.)
Why on earth would a deontologist object to throwing someone in prison if they're guilty of the crime and were convicted in a fair trial?
That aside, in real life self-described EAs universally seem to advocate for honesty based on the pretty obvious point that the ability of actors to trust one another is key to getting almost anything done ever, and is what stops society from devolving into a hobbesian war of all-against-all.
Well it sure seems like Caplan has the receipts on Singer believing that it's okay to lie for the greater good, as a consequence of his utilitarianism.
And yeah, I guess if you're a good enough liar that nobody finds out you're dishonest then I guess you don't damage that; but really, if you think for like two seconds nobody tells material lies thinking they're going to get caught, and the obvious way of not being known for dishonesty long-term is by being honest.
Sure, except for when it really matters, and you're really confident that you won't get caught.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Well clearly the government is engaged in viewpoint discrimination in choosing which content to flag, and clearly it's a state actor, so I guess the only question is whether the government sending a note to Twitter asking for it to remove the speech constitutes interference with your speech. I think it does... there is a power dynamic, and even if there weren't, the government is still attempting to silence your speech. (And in practice, it seems, succeeding.)
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
The people who are giving up the ability to use a scare resource are not getting something in exchange for it.
They aren't giving up the ability to use the roads any more than you'd be giving up the right to eat an apple by not purchasing the apple.
Should the apple industry be taxed so that the proceeds can be specifically distributed to people who have chosen not to purchase apples?
Instead, the people who are giving up their ability to use the roads view it as purely an imposition of government choice to force them off the roads
They could view it any number of ways, but idiosyncratic views don't make good policy arguments.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
grouping tiktok tourettes, which is more like 'an emo phase', and being trans together in the 'they usually grow out group' is justified how?
They're both epidemiologically sociogenic.
Your twitter feed evidence is selected for detransitioners
It's dicey to rely on academic scholarship in an area as ideologically captured as transgender issues, but nonetheless my impression had been that desistance rates for transgender-identifying children who do not begin puberty blockers to be in the vicinity of 80% -- judged from surveys, not Twitter anecdotes. We should expect the rate to grow dramatically given the recent explosion in teenage natal girls expressing transgender identification in the past five years. Basically, trans teenage (natal) girls fit the cluster of other sociogenic teenage girl afflictions (self harm, eating disorders, tourettes) so well that we should expect them to follow the rest of this cluster in growing out of it, assuming they haven't been allowed to pass any points of no return on their journey (including puberty blockers, which seemingly interfere with the development process that causes them to grow out of such phases).
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Did you predict this outcome before it became apparent? I sure didn't.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
a pile of rich, privileged white twits cosplaying Injun
The other fascinating thing is that they're all women who do this. Dolezal and the fifty other disgraced fake-AmerIndian academics... all women. Naively I'd assume men tend to be more aggressive and more likely to work every sordid angle in self promotion, but this particular con seems to be just for the ladies.
Well, also from the jury's own unanimous perspective, and therefore from the perspective of the criminal justice system.
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