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VelveteenAmbush

Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

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joined 2022 September 05 02:49:35 UTC 

				
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VelveteenAmbush


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong

				
				
				

				

					5 followers  

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					joined 2022 September 05 02:49:35 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				FTX is Rationalism's Chernobyl
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Agree with all of this, seems pretty clear (as much as anything is clear at this point) that Alameda Research was deep in the hole with bad trades and SBF decided to try to help them gamble their way out of the hole with FTX customer money.


I do think there's a genuine EA angle here though. SBF did not believe in declining utility of money because he was going to use it to do good in the world. Saving ten lives in the developing world is ten times better than saving one life, in much the way that buying ten fancy cars is not ten times better than buying one fancy car. SBF was willing to take this to the extreme, even biting the bullet on St. Petersburg Paradox in his interview with Tyler Cowen:




COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing?






BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, which is, I’m assuming these are noninteracting universes. Is that right? Because to the extent they’re in the same universe, then maybe duplicating doesn’t actually double the value because maybe they would have colonized the other one anyway, eventually.






COWEN: But holding all that constant, you’re actually getting two Earths, but you’re risking a 49 percent chance of it all disappearing.






BANKMAN-FRIED: Again, I feel compelled to say caveats here, like, “How do you really know that’s what’s happening?” Blah, blah, blah, whatever. But that aside, take the pure hypothetical.






COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence?






BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option.






COWEN: Are there implications of Benthamite utilitarianism where you yourself feel like that can’t be right; you’re not willing to accept them? What are those limits, if any?






BANKMAN-FRIED: I’m not going to quite give you a limit because my answer is somewhere between “I don’t believe them” and “if I did, I would want to have a long, hard look at myself.” But I will give you something a little weaker than that, which is an area where I think things get really wacky and weird and hard to think about, and it’s not clear what the right framework is, which is infinity.






All this math works really nicely as long as all the numbers are finite.




So yeah -- he sees literally no moral limits to this style of gambling in our finite universe.


This is both a worldview that (a) is distinctly consistent with EA, and (b) encourages you to double or nothing (including, as in the hypothetical, with other people's stuff) until you bust. And now he took one too many double-or-nothing bets, and ended up with nothing.


I think the honest response to this disaster is to say "yeah, I gambled with customers' money, and it was the right thing to do because I had a better than even chance of pulling it off, and I would have used that money to do good in the world so there's no declining value to each dollar. Sure, I gambled with other people's money, but wouldn't you dive in the pond to save the drowning child even if your expensive suit were borrowed from an acquaintance? Well that's what I did, with a lot of people's suits, and it was the right thing to do."


Of course, utilitarians don't believe in honesty -- it's just one more principle to be fed into the fire for instrumental advantage in manufacturing paperclips malaria nets.


Now, who knows -- maybe he would have committed the same kind of fraud even if he had never heard of EA and were just a typical nerdy quant. But, when your whole ideology demands double-or-nothing bets with other people's interests, and when you say in interviews that you would follow your ideology and make double-or-nothing bets with other people's interests, and then you do make double-or-nothing bets with other people's interests, and one of those bets finally goes wrong... yeah, I think one can be forgiven for blaming your ideology.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't care about the rest of his argument, I care about the part that was the subject of this dispute, since this dispute is what we are discussing. Was that not the part that you think is at least disputable in its moral or intellectual wrongness? Or do you believe the courts should overlook this clear case of defamation because he separately made some other arguments that were reasonable?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


If a depressed person said if you deny us medication or therapy then more depressed people will kill themselves, is this making a veiled threat or recognizing (what they see to be) factual truth?




Unironically, I think it's valid as their interpretation of factual truth if and only if they acknowledge that they're mentally ill. Because without that acknowledgment, then they maintain agency for their actions, and their decision to commit suicide is entirely on their own moral ledger. People who aren't mentally ill can get mad that other people are making them unhappy, but crossing the rhetorical line from unhappiness to suicide is just an abusive tactic in that context.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The threshold is defamation.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can't imagine this argument being persuasive to any but the most extreme libertarian -- the type who thinks that recreational fentanyl, consensual incest and consensual cannibalism should be legal. If that's you, then yeah, you're internally consistent, and I'm not sure what better argument to make against your position other than that your theory permits such self-evidently depraved outcomes as legalizing fentanyl, incest, cannibalism, and the killing of depressed but otherwise healthy 23-year-olds.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd. I'm entirely supportive of assisted suicide for the terminally ill and those with untreatable severe chronic pain, but this ain't it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


From the conservative perspective




Well, also from the jury's own unanimous perspective, and therefore from the perspective of the criminal justice system.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
They aren't copying art though...?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 27, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the respective parties in charge (Hamas and the pro-settlement Israeli hardliners) are both locked in a sort of hostile symbiotic relationship where their actions keep entrenching their ostensible opponent, who in turn further cement the other's legitimacy.




This telling seems to assume that absent the settlements, the Palestinians' intergenerational rage would subside and they'd embrace peaceful coexistence with Israel. Do you genuinely believe that to be the case? My weary conclusion is that they're stuck in an intergenerational rage spiral sustained mostly by hope (fueled by the actions of their supporters abroad) that they'll be able to prevail and eliminate Israel. Apace with Richard Hanania, I think peace can be achieved only by crushing their hopes -- and that doing so is worth substantial trauma in the present to break the region out of their seemingly durable and miserable stalemate. In this telling, the settlements are superfluous.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, they used another (consenting) actress's voice who happens to sound a lot like Scarlett Johansson.


Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.


That Altman referenced "Her" does not really bear on this. You can like or dislike the world portrayed in Her. Personally I found it a pretty uplifting vision of what a near-singularity future could look like, at least up to a few minutes before the ending. And you can like or dislike the voice that they demoed. Personally I can't stand it, and the sultry, flirty, overtly sexy affect really doesn't appeal to me. (But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.) But neither has anything to do with whether Scarlett Johansson has somehow been wronged. She hasn't.


In any event, my distaste for the voice apparently was widely enough shared that they nixed it. But that just reflects a decent product sensibility and indicates nothing about this incredibly stupid attempt at a gotcha by you or all of the anti-progress Redditors who are joining you in hate-jerking over this as we speak.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


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.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


And why should he?




Because the status quo is that our greatest geopolitical adversary controls the media programming that influences a generation of Americans. It's horrifying that we let this state of affairs persist, and the antithesis of America First.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All of the airlines would merge within a week under that regime, and then we'd all be paying monopoly rents to Amalgamated Airlines for the rest of our lives whenever we wanted to travel more than a hundred miles. And all of the other industries too. A 10% tax on deal consideration wouldn't even rate.