aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1hr ago
they'd provide market signals about how likely major events are to happen.
They do this successfully though, and I don't think rationalists ever really claimed there would never be frivolous markets, that just isn't the part they really cared about. There are relatively high liquidity markets for a lot of topics that I find more credible than any expert claims.
aqouta
20hr ago
We have more outright nazi sympathizers on this site than people who could be accurately described as supporting the extermination of the Palestinians. This is ridiculous hyperbole.
aqouta
22hr ago
I went off Israel in a big way after Oct 7 when the biggest contingent of pro-Israelis on this site started just outright saying, 'look, it's time to exterminate the Palestinians now'
This did not happen, I was there.
aqouta
1d ago
Trying to salvage LTV in any form just seems like a mistake. It's a lens that exist to glorify the worker and stoke resentment against the wealthy, it falls apart when you put any pressure on it. It can't explain scarcity as value, as put in one if its earliest critiques "Pearls are not fetched from the bottom of the sea because men have dived for them, but men dive for them because they fetch a high price." and I don't think your energy theory of value would survive much better. I think it's just cleaner to say that everyone has their own theory of value and there is no universal theory, which is a source of great surplus from the market.
aqouta
2d ago
This is a generalized argument against all large claims, that is to say it proves way way too much. Some claims are true, some claims are false, you need to actually address each on their merits.
aqouta
7d ago
Every dead child has a father in the fedaykin or a cousin in the deep desert resistance or a neighbor who was neutral until yesterday. The Fremen do not need to match the Sardaukar in firepower. They need the Empire to keep making their argument for them.
I'd imagine the Fremen made a few enemies with their own even less targeting bombings. This is not a sustainable path to emancipation, just the spread of chaos, a festering wound that longs to kill its host for daring to apply stinging ointment.
aqouta
9d ago
Right, having some women who are friends is definitely useful in a number of ways. Maybe I misread the OP and they weren't suggesting it as a main strategy, but there really is a strain of thought among women that a man who would be interested in dating but not becoming friends is some kind of contradiction. "why would you date someone you wouldn't want to make your friend?". It makes a kind of sense from the perspective of the selective sex but it just isn't workable.
aqouta
9d ago
One thing that should also be added here is that you have to be comfortable genuinely being friends with these women (not just a friends to get in your pants kind of deal.), and be comfortable with the possibility that it wont go in a romantic direction. Even if it doesn't go that way, you made a connection that's valuable in its own right, and you may be able to date other women she is in proximity with.
The proximity with this is important, I met my wife by getting set up by a friend of hers that I met on a dating app but didn't hit it off with. But the idea that single men who are serious about making a partner should settle for a friendship with women they meet is just an absurd delusion some women harbor who haven't ever seriously thought of the logistics of single men dating. I'd need to have maintained literally hundreds of female friends by the time I met my wife for this to have been a plausible strategy, it just doesn't really work. I'm sorry but if it doesn't work out you can't expect him to stay friends with you, it just doesn't scale. It's not personal, it's just that forming a strong attachment, getting stuck in the friend zone as it were, and then getting rejected in the end eviscerates a portion of your soul each time.
aqouta
10d ago
Well, unlike the natives, you joined the society willingly with full knowledge of the deal. I'm not saying you're not entitled to wish it were otherwise or advocate for it to be so, but I am no particularly sympathetic to your complaints.
aqouta
11d ago
No, each nft is unique so you can address it to a particular seat. Fungible tokens are not unique so you can only use them for general admission.
aqouta
12d ago
Religions rest on dogmas which cannot be effectively interrogated. If you want to say that AI investment is predicated on a belief that AGI is possible and can't be understood without considering that part of the potential upside then I think you have a good argument. Calling it a religion is a maneuver to avoid having to actually interrogate that possibility. And really I think most of the AGI people will be happy to go about this probabilistically, you don't need AGI to have a 100% chance of coming about for these investments to become rational, as little as a 5% chance can make these investments start to make sense. The P:E and debt ratios are still relevant, they still represent a kind of lower bound if the big bet doesn't pay off merely owning a lot of a critically important commodity is a much better place to be sitting than if you got literally nothing. The Jehovah's Witness is much more certain and making a much more all or nothing bet.
aqouta
12d ago
Can you lay out exactly what you'd expect them to be doing if they thought AI was imminent? I don't really think they'd be bothering worrying about pinching the salary of 30 employees if they thought ai was imminent. I also don't think in house lawyers really scales the way you're implying. 30 lawyers gives you what? 3 teams of lawyers? You're doing a lot of lobbying because you're a major player in new tech so one of those teams is your lobbying arm, one is working on corporate mergers and acquisitions(I'm sure they're trying to buy some kind of image model team), and one is probably cooking up stuff on what they're liable for/keep the lights on legal work. It's just not the kind of thing you scale linearly with employees.
aqouta
12d ago
Yes, he can think about them and he in fact is viewable in many interviews and on several podcasts going on about them. But he's not the government, it isn't his role to propose specific policy.
aqouta
12d ago
The tech people aren't actually the government and can't decide how these questions are answered. You're asking the wrong people for solutions. All they can do is warn what is coming and make suggestions. Which you guys consistently characterize as glee and hype mongering. What guarantees can Dario make about the structure of redistribution that Trump or his successor will implement? Do you not see that this is an impossible ask?
aqouta
12d ago
I honestly don't understand the glee with which AI promoters predict that 50% of all "knowledge jobs" will disappear within a year. Hell, the Chief Legal Officer of Anthropic went to Stanford Law School earlier this year and basically told the students that they should all drop out.
People keep accusing them of having glee at this but I don't really see any of this glee. They seem sober and worried about this happening and are practically begging policymakers to come up with some frameworks for how to cope with that future. The same people who accuse these claims of being gleeful then go on to say that saying policy needs to be set up to cope with mass unemployment is hype rather than genuine concern. I don't like defending particularly altman of all people but you really do seem to have them in an impossible position. What can someone truthfully say if they believe AGI is possibly imminent?
aqouta
12d ago
It might be good to start with the much older fungible tokens(erc-20 tokens) that have at times been called colored coins. A fungible token is any token where every one is just as good as any others. A lot of erc-20s are used like stock certificates or company bucks, in polymarket bets for instance use the USDC erc-20 token which is pegged to the USD in transactions. There's all sorts of uses for these tokens in the crypto ecosystem, some great like stable coins, some silly, most meme coins you've heard of are erc-20 tokens. With an erc-20 you could sell general admission tickets to a concert so any who shows up can prove their wallet owns at least one concert coin.
Now, what if instead of general admission tickets you want to sell tickets for specific seats? You could create a new erc-20 token for every individual seat and only issue one for each, so whoever has that coin is the owner and no one else is, but that's a lot of overhead if you want to issue a lot of tickets. Enter ERC-721 the NFT. Now you can make unique tokens for unique assets.
aqouta
12d ago
I think people are still stuck on the idea of "costs down, but sales prices stay the same" because they haven't really incorporated it into their world view that consumer demand may remain the same, but ability of consumers to pay those prices will drastically decline because much fewer people are in the jobs generating high enough income levels because AGI has replaced those jobs.
You can accuse AI industry people of many things, but not having thought about this kind of thing really isn't one of them. There are lots of interviews of them musing about how this could all work out. There's a wide variety of takes but few of them are "the economy is going to just be normal after the singularity except we'll be very rich".
And I really don't think this is the reasoning @FiveHourMarathon is using to call the AI bulls religious, precisely the opposite really.
So if UBI is the way forward, then the owners of the AGI industries are going to pay for that via taxation, which means they are going to (1) have to sell their $500 house for as close to $500 as they can get, not the current house prices and (2) they're just transferring the money from one hand to the other, since the money to buy the house comes from the UBI they are being taxed to pay.
If you're taking a very small piece of every financial transaction in an economy run by AIs you'll be fabulously wealthy, but thinking about this as the steady state missing a lot of the value proposition. Even ignoring that in the transitionary period where you can offer the house for $5000 in a market that lags behind the new reality, when houses can be had for a fraction of the cost then society is able to just have a lot more houses. If you take a step back and just look at what a fully automated economy actually is then if you own the backbone AIs then you can just print a giga yachts for anyone with the raw materials and the government can decide it has a monopoly on the raw materials and redistribute the proceed from selling them. Raw materials here being land, natural resources, electricity ect. When you grow the pie this much the details of how you distribute pie slices, while important, is definitely able to be overcome. The amount of abundance in such an economy would be staggering.
aqouta
12d ago
That makes no sense. It's not like Iran killed 30k people
We don't know how many iran killed, from what I can gather one can be justified in believing anywhere between 7k(HRANA figure) and 36k(Iran International claim of leaked document) dead in just a few days.
And it really has to made clear: the US is not trying to democratize Iran, so these civilian casualties cannot be justified on that front.
We don't have a well articulated war aim, you won't hear me defending Trump on that front. But the US would obviously be thrilled if this could democratize Iran and at least from Trump telling the people if iran that this is their only opportunity to take back their country is a possibility he seems to desire.
But my origin point is that if you're squeamish about civilian deaths then accidentally hitting a school building is a rounding error in the ongoing tragedy that is Iran.
aqouta
12d ago
Believing that if we can automate all labor for pennies on the dollar then there will be a major economic step change doesn't require faith. It all follows from some pretty simple reasoning. Calling it religion proves too much.
aqouta
12d ago
What I mean to illustrate by pointing out the tens of thousands dead at the hand of the regime very recently is that accidentally hitting a school needs to be put into context with the status quo. "Shit happens in war" is a little easier to swallow when even worse shit is happening without the war. If we're trying to determine how the ledger balances out, I just can't see how some mild collateral damage could possibly factor into the calculus. Certainly it's worth considering if we actually can topple the regime and how that'd play out, but we really could be bombing a school for every ayatollah we take out and it really would change the balance much here.
aqouta
12d ago
The problem with "shit happens in war" is that, while true, it still rests on an underlying belief that the war is justified. "We accidentally bombed a school while fighting against tyranny" is easier to swallow (assuming it's credible) than "we accidentally bombed a school while carrying out a raid because we didn't like their drug importation laws."
I mean didn't Iran just literally kill within an order of magnitude as many civilians in a week as Israel killed Gazans in the whole recent affair? Intentionally and not as collateral damage? Like I don't know, it's not hard for me to find the good guys in this conflict.
aqouta
12d ago
How many important actors in the AI space need to be religious fanatics for it to start to alter the spending patterns?
Believing that AGI is possible doesn't really require any kind of religion. Certainly it's speculative, but so is a belief that modular nuclear can reduce cost down to make starting a modular nuclear startup reasonable. really by this standard any startup is a religion. Really I think you're just sneering because you don't have any actual arguments. The argument in favor of AGI is reasonable and fits well into our general shared understanding of material reality. Maybe we'll find out that LLM architecture doesn't scale up to human level general intelligence and we can update our model, but that update requires information not in evidence.
aqouta
12d ago
The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn. Given the context of not just the phrase but these politics surrounding it, I think it actually is meaningful to point out the translation issue, since 'death to America' isn't necessarily proof of what they claim or justification for their own destructive desires/rationale.
I dunno man, if it came out that a common phrase translated really catastrophically aggressively into the language of a generational rival such that it means "we want to eradicate you" then I think it probably shouldn't be like, your country's slogan. If you decide to keep saying it anyways I think you are actually communicating very clearly. Like I had heard the phrase "nigger rigged" growing up a bit as a basic equivalent to "jerry rigged" but I'd have to be hopelessly naive to start a nigger rigging club and expect that not to be interpreted poorly by many people, if I did it anyways it'd only be possible with extreme contempt for the offended people, possibly rising to the level of just meaning what it sounds like it means.
If two products both take one hour to make from the same inputs, but one is destroyed half the time and the other one isn't then is one more valuable than the other?
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