VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
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User ID: 411
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
standard human hardware
The entire concern is rooted in disagreement over how much of our human hardware is in fact standardized.
Oh man, I'd love to bet against you on this, assuming you aren't just talking about polygenic embryo selection which already exists. AGI is almost here, probably less than a decade to go; I'd even give >50% odds of <5 years. Even if we had comprehensive genetic engineering available tomorrow, it'll take at least 15-20 years before it could start to affect the fabric of society.
(I'm not actually going to bet for various logistical reasons, but I'd love to.)
But I appreciate and agree with your concern about the prospect of personality adjustment conditioned on the availability of genetic engineering technology.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I mean, the GOP is out of power. The party out of power naturally takes a more reactive posture.
Trump wasn't great at setting and pursuing the agenda for the GOP, but I have hope that DeSantis will be better at it.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I enjoyed Steve Sailer's commentary on the gas stove controversy. His theory is that this is really a climate change move, but needs to be dressed up as a health move to get the public to accept it. He sees this as a fumbled attempt to orchestrate academic "research," the media and regulators in that sequence to build momentum for a ban -- fumbled because the regulator spilled the beans too early, before the Cathedral finished its sermon.
Do I read correctly that you think its possible to make something thats clearly art of our current elite and also beautiful?
I think so. The new Moynihan Train Hall is maybe the best example, drawing accolades from elites and normies alike (extension to Penn Station on which I wrote a treatise about a conservatism founded on this specific kind of greatness). One World Trade Center (the "Freedom Tower") was controversial but probably also qualifies, although isn't new anymore. I would say the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once is both a great movie and an elite favorite. On statues specifically I do not know, because I don't follow the topic carefully and only the controversial stuff makes the headlines.
What did you have in mind with "looks cheap"? Are there really people who would say e.g. the Lincoln memorial looks cheap?
Cladding. Elite architects think cladding "looks cheap" even though it makes buildings more appealing to mainstream sensibility. That's just one example.
No, the Lincoln Memorial doesn't look cheap; the pejorative there would probably be implications of fascism or white supremacy. When Trump issued an executive order that federal buildings should be designed in neoclassical style, the American Institute of Architects responded in part that "Rather than pre-qualified architects receiving the chance to design uniquely-contemporary federal structures for the cities they serve, all future government buildings would instead be reminiscent of the monumental, white construction that has defined Washington, D.C., since its inception, as well as the structures built-in ancient Rome and Greece, and more recently, in Hitler’s Third Reich." I think that's reflective of the genre.
"Reactionary" here means basically the same thing I did with "fascist", and the association with bad old times is somewhere between made up and self-fulfilling, so it cant be the cause of the dislike.
It isn't the cause of the dislike. The cause of the dislike is barberpole theory and elite fashion. The excuse for the dislike is this latter litany.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
But national sovereigns don't internalize the costs of their mistakes or reap the rewards of their enterprise like private proprietors do.
Life is generally better for the head of state and leading members of government when the government is popular than when it isn't, and good stewardship of national resources and policy is generally an effective path to popularity.
It does not explain the value of assigning such entities sovereignty over such areas in the first place.
Maybe it would be helpful (both here and generally in your commentary) if you made more of an effort to state your thesis directly instead of only implying it by criticizing other comments for what you view as the negative space of your unstated thesis.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
National sovereignty is just an extension the same game theory that insists upon the existence of private property. There's nothing irrational or arbitrary about it. Even the specifics of drawing the national lines are a fairly straightforward exercise in carving the space of people's interlocking loyalties at the joints.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I think you're right that the artistic design space is high-dimensional enough that in theory there'd be any number of vectors orthogonal to popular beauty that one could embrace to assert your position at the top of the barberpole while still producing something beautiful... but being as they're orthogonal, you can strive toward those vectors while also including a directionally inverted component of the popular beauty vector. After all, if you can create a piece with hidden nuance appreciable only by your fellow elites, isn't it still a bigger flex to do that with art that the masses will also find revolting? And it's also true that the theory doesn't tell us what specific style the anti-beauty will take -- the SF Federal Building, the Toronto subway sketches and the MLK Embrace statue all achieve their hideousness in unique ways, and all seem to strive toward various other indicia of elite art -- but if the question is why elite art selection tends to embrace hideousness rather than which particular type of hideousness it will settle on, then the theory seems to do pretty well.
Theres plenty of people floating around telling us that things shouldnt be beautiful because thats fascist: consider taking them seriously.
Taking them seriously means asking why they associate beauty with fascism, and I think barberpole theory provides an answer: fascism is low-class, and is just one of the many things that would-be elites signal their status by equivocating with beauty. We also hear that beauty is consumerist, looks cheap, is reactionary, means embracing an aesthetic of a white supremacist past, etc.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I guess it can! Maybe it finally has enough training to overcome whatever impediment hobbled previous incarnations' attempts.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
It reminds me of the mangled messes of limbs and flesh that Stable Diffusion occasionally generates when it's trying to draw people.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
it really struggles comprehending that words are comprised of individual letters. It's opaque to the alphabet by the nature of what it can see and learn from. I asked it to generate anagrams and it was absolutely hopeless at it. It gave me nonsense like 'overwrite is an anagram of obverse'. When I really coaxed it for an anagram of obverse and observe, it gave me rubbish like 'oversbe' and 'beovers' but recognized they weren't words. It couldn't get verbose, which was really ironic seeing as it was incredibly verbose in its descriptions.
There's a structural and idiosyncratic reason for this, which has to do with how text is processed before it goes in and out of the model. Basically it processes "tokens," which are chunks of words. Training text is "tokenized" before being fed in, and the model itself outputs tokens which are converted back to text before being printed. The specific tokenization scheme that it uses (as far as we know, based on prior iterations of OpenAI's large language models) is "byte-pair encoding," which has itself been optimized so that common words are a single token, and then common chunks of words are tokens, and then (way down the list) individual letters are tokens. BPE is designed to minimize the size of the tokenized training data within a vocabulary of (I think) ~65k possible tokens. So the trained model has no way of knowing that the word "overwrite" starts with the letter 'o', since most likely it sees one token for "over" and another for "write" and the encoding doesn't need to resort to tokens for the individual letters, and it does not know that the "over" token has any special relationship to the "o," "v" etc. tokens. Gwern hypothesizes that BPE encoding is why it also cannot rhyme, and I assume he's right although the specific mechanism for BPE creating that deficiency isn't as clear to me.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I think the core of this very real problem, which we see in architecture and subway art as well as public statues, boils down to two things: Scott's barberpole theory of fashion and the tragedy of the commons.
The barberpole theory of fashion holds that being fashionable requires distinguishing your aesthetic from the aesthetics of the masses. It naturally drives elite circles who define themselves on the basis of their aesthetic sensibilities (artists and architects) to equilibrate on an aesthetic that most people will find unsettling or discomforting.
And the tragedy of the commons manifests from individual artists, architects and public works decisionmakers prioritizing their personal status among their aesthetically elite circle over the interests of the people who will see the art. Each time they decide whether to erect some modernist abomination in place of something that will actually brighten the day of the people who see it, they are deciding whether to give themselves a large direct payoff at the expense of everyone else receiving a small diffuse harm.
I guess this is inevitable in a post-scarcity society. Showy wealth and extravagance is no longer fashionable basically for the same barberpole reason that it associates one with the wealth-craving aesthetic of the masses, so elites compete for adulation of their peers in a contest to most dramatically degrade public spaces with unpleasant art.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
Doesn’t seem like a sign of downfall to try out new styles even if this one turned out poorly.
Maybe try these experiments in Autodesk to see if they work before you cast them in immortal bronze and erect them eternally in a place of honor in the heart of the city.
The troll on my left shoulder wants to remark that perhaps she'd feel less exhausted all the time if she reconsidered her veganism.
But substantively... what do you expect from EA? It is not a movement of technical achievement, even though its ranks are full of tech people, because EA isn't about building, it's about extracting others' wealth and spending it.
Scott Alexander's travails in persuading people that the media is generally dishonest without lying speaks to the interpersonal innocence of his tech-centric community. These are people who work in collaborative environments, whose defenses are weak to the finer modes of interpersonal manipulation because their passions and competencies lie elsewhere and they are unaccustomed to having resources that other people want to take from them. So a community that exists centrally to extract wealth from that community is going to feature activists who are best at manipulating that community. And one of the strategies suited to that project is performative female vulnerability. Megans.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
The usual bit of orthodoxy is that "moral value" is unconnected to one's value to society, and that "moral value" is what really matters. Really matters for what? Putatively, everything: respect, dignity, worth, entitlement. Realistically, a narrower category: being spoken to and of politely, participating in welfare entitlements, enjoying legal protection against certain types of discrimination, and legal status as a human being.
Nick Cannon was forgiven via the soft bigotry of low expectations. Bostrom -- a white professor of philosophy at Oxford -- will be afforded no such grace. His email demonstrates that he spoke the Murray Blasphemy with full intent and understanding, and his response so far concedes that the email was his; he will be anathema from this date forth, to a degree that will corrupt even his associates if they do not renounce him.
He is totally screwed. How to manage the wreckage of the remainder of his life is a question of aesthetics and personal values rather than of instrumental advantage. Apologies won't save him, but neither will any other course.
He may or may not be able to retain his tenured position at Oxford. If he does, it will be a lonely one, with students and faculty competing with one another to build credit by performing his anathema.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
But we have domesticated dogs to our requirements.
That's entirely my point. We don't keep wild dogs as pets, so there are no dogs that would be wild but for our domestication. Daydreaming that the fat beagle lounging in the apartment all day has been deprived his romp in the Hundred Acre Woods is folly, because that option was never in the cards for that beagle. At best, he never would have existed in the first place.
If they're being kept like this? Better off never to have existed.
Fair position, albeit one I don't agree with. But they still haven't been "deprived of their own independent lives."
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
that shot of unconditional love and attention from creatures that have been deprived of their own independent lives
An independent life was never in the cards for these pets. If they couldn't be kept in shoebox apartments, they'd never have been bred and sold in the first place, or if they were, they'd be put down.
The question is whether these docile animals that loaf around apartments all day would be better off never having existed, not whether they'd be better off in the Hundred Acre Woods.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I reject your dichotomy: you can absolutely go to a plot-driven movie for the characters, if it has good characters.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
The college student? To be honest I don't remember much about her.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
No, but the American slavers were, and deserve the lion's share of the credit for American slavery existing as an institution. There's plenty of supply for slavery in the third world; the bottleneck is always the more developed country tolerating it and building infrastructure to support it. In any event, it wasn't the African slavers who would have been responsible for dysgenic slave breeding within America.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
You don't go to a movie like Glass Onion for compelling characters.
I did, because Knives Out delivered on that score. Blanc, Thrombey, Jamie Lee Curtis's character, and the lifestyle business lady were all endlessly entertaining. Even the cops were done really well, funny and possessed of interesting personalities despite their bit player roles. Marta was kind of an "empty angel," so pure of soul and good of spirit that there wasn't any room for personality, but everyone else made up for it, and even her role was played with charisma, to her actress's credit.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I dunno, I wholeheartedly agree that Glass Onion was crap -- and not just for politics, but also because there was no interesting story, there was no interesting murder mystery, there were no stakes, the spectacles in the final act served no purpose, it sold itself as a murder mystery and then disclaimed any intent to follow through, and overall consistently treated the audience with contempt. I could go on at length about all the ways the movie was shitty.
But I really liked Knives Out. It had an interesting plot, fun characters, the awful rich people were awful in very entertaining ways, and it hit a great medium between camp and drama. I also don't see its plot as being anti-rich. The patriarchal novelist earned his money, deserved his fortune, was admired by all, was a wise and benevolent figure. His horrible family were parasites on his wealth, their pretenses at business were revealed as pretenses, they were shitty to one another and to the man who created all of their wealth, and none of that works to impugn them if the original fortune isn't genuine and deserved. It had a pro-capitalist message: the wealthy guy became wealthy by creating a product that brought people joy, and built a business from it. The bad people were moochers, looters and ingrates of this well deserved fortune. Some of them were portrayed as politically right-wing, but others as left-wing. And the benevolence of the main character is established by her grit, hard work, good attitude and good moral character -- not as a product of race or victimhood, as it was in Glass Onion.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
3yr ago
I take the general libertarian point that the government ought not interject itself into the types of contracts formed between customer and service provider, but that ship sailed (airplane departed?) decades ago in air travel.
If one accepts that DOT should set the terms of carriage contracts, it does seem inadequate to me that the only recourse for a canceled flight is the refund of the fare originally paid. Many airlines will instead attempt to place you on another carrier without additional charge, but they have no legal obligation to do so. If they do not, you are left stranded and scrambling to find a last-minute flight, which is usually much more expensive than booking in advance, and can create additional costs (last-minute hotel arrangements, etc.). I can see a counterargument when the cancellation was truly out of the airline's control (weather), but certainly not as here where the issue was an antiquated logistics database that catastrophically failed.
Stepping down a level of abstraction, I shudder to imagine being unexpectedly stranded an an airport with children during the holidays. If it were to happen because my airline wasn't capable of building a reliable flight crew assignment database, I'd be furious. When twenty thousand flights are canceled, that means 1-2 million families are right now having violent revenge fantasies about Southwest airline management. Politicians respond to that kind of anger.
We wouldn't have a Twitter Files of Twitter either if Elon Musk hadn't taken over. Unless the forum is owned or infiltrated by ideologically unaligned people, and there's public demand for news of the collaboration, then it doesn't even register as a conspiracy and never gets public play at all; it's just science, industry and regulators sharing information, which in some capacity we all agree that they should.
Climate gadfly says "regulator, pls ban", regulator says "we would never take such a step without a strong empirical justification of harm," researchers see the opportunity for impactful "scholarship" in this area and produce it, news media see the regulatory statement and the existence of "scholarship" in the area and hype it, regulator waits for the crescendo and then bans it. All of the communication can even take place in broad daylight at various climate and air quality fora.
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