astrolabia
10mo ago
Yep. I think it'll also eventually be illegal to raise a kid without allowing your parenting to be scrutinized in detail. I think the main reason it isn't today is because it'd be too expensive, not because it'd be politically untenable.
astrolabia
3mo ago
I'm hoping you'd providing arguments or evidence about the likelihood of different outcomes. I'm not sure what calling something a null hypothesis means other than being a bald assertion that it's likely.
I'll go first: rapid recent improvements in AI continuously over the last 12 years and massive R&D efforts going on make it likely that substantial improvements will continue.
astrolabia
1yr ago
taking away rights or privileges or respect or acknowledgement or etc. from people who have spent a long hard time and earning it, and trying to do that ussually involves a lot of kicking and screaming and destruction
You would think so, but didn't we just watch this happen to straight white men, and Europeans more generally, with basically no effective pushback? Some days it seems as simple as
- Comedians joke about it
- Thinkpieces recontextualize it
- Comedians mock the stupidest examples of pushback
- A few people get cancelled for pushing back
And soon after, countless formal and informal corporate, academic, personal, and government policies change to enforce the new policy. In a way it's impressive how liberal democracies can coordinate to change which groups they marginalize without much violence or state-directed propaganda.
astrolabia
7mo ago
Maybe we're talking about different things. I'm thinking of Obama talking about red lines in Syria, then not doing anything about it. Or Putin hinting about using nukes over foreign involvement in Ukraine and then not. I agree one can also go too far and be easily baited.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Men are orders of magnitude stronger than women
No, they're not 100x stronger. Did you mean multiple standard deviations stronger?
astrolabia
2mo ago
I agree that alignment is easy in the sense of getting models to understand what we want, but it's far from clear that it's easy in the sense of making models want the same thing. RL models reward hack all the time.
What on earth makes you think instrumental convergence "doesn't actually happen"? It happens all the time, e.g. by reward hacking or sycophancy! It's almost the definition of agency!
Neuralese is a myth? What is that supposed to mean? RL on soft tokens is an active area of research and will almost certainly always work better (in the sense of getting higher rewards) than using hard tokens everywhere.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Thanks for clarifying your position. I suppose if I thought that ChatGPT was a one-off, I might have a similar position to yours. In my view, however, there's been a pretty consistent, smooth, and somewhat predictable trajectory that whole time, and has continued since ChatGPT. If every almost single remaining eval being almost saturated from ChatGPT till now doesn't look like "anything to write home about", I don't know what could.
astrolabia
3mo ago
Seems like you're just begging the question here. Why is that the correct null hypothesis?
astrolabia
1yr ago
I was thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
but that's fair, it might just have been motivated cognition. But given that Scott has independently reached unpopular contrarian opinions on his own so many times, and doesn't address the downsides of gender-defined-by-fiat head on, it's almost the same phenomenon as dishonesty imo.
astrolabia
9mo ago
I don't think any human society comes close to crossing that line when it comes to alcohol
Not even remote native communities with super high alcoholism rates, and where lots of kids get fetal alcohol syndrome?
alcohol has proven its ability to coexist alongside the development of advanced human societies over the course of several millennia.
Yes, but not native american societies. And there's plenty of evidence that Eurasians have had some serious selection pressure to help them deal with alcohol (and alcoholism is still a huge problem in Europe + North America).
astrolabia
10mo ago
I don't think it was culture war - probably just well meaning people with tentative grasp of current tech and the normal bureaucratic tendency to expand your authority.
This does seem to match much of normal culture war behavior, though, just without the step of demonizing the people who oppose one's naive overreach.
Urban professionals have made it clear that importing migrants for their personal comfort matters.
I think this is unrealistically conspiratorial. I am an urban professional, and it's clear to me that refugees and anyone coming from say, Haiti is not a net contributor to my or any of my countrymen's comfort [EDIT: on average]. But I don't talk about it often for fear of being fired or ostracised.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Did you read the linked post? He's making the claim that it's a bigger harm in terms of genetic interests.
Can you expand on what you mean by "majorly sus"? Is the idea that the fact that he'd raise a hypothesis that could also be used to argue for taking crimes against women relatively less seriously, that's evidence that he's misoginystic?
I suppose that's a reasonable inference, but I also think he does raise a good question and point to a genuine mystery. More generally, if academics can't raise wrong-sounding ideas without being cancelled, then there's not much point in having them or listening to them. So I guess I implore you to ask if there is any venue or method by which someone could discuss disgusting-sounding ideas that would lead you to actually try evaluating their claims.
astrolabia
11mo ago
Dude, she accused me of molesting her.
This is consistent with what I was saying - my point is that she's being obviously unreasonable!
She's also a fucking sperg
I also might be wrong about this, but my understanding from being a bit of a sperg myself is that things like the rules of attraction + most emotions are similar to everyone else, but with a layer of neuroticism and poor social skills on top.
Even if that's a thing women do, she wouldn't.
I personally spent way too long thinking that sufficiently smart women wouldn't require, or play, these kinds of games - thinking something like "If they are so un-self-aware as to play the normal BS social games, I'm not sure I want them anyways". I've also known a few amazing women that were self-aware enough to understand their own reactions, but even they still had the same requirements for attraction as the others. I think your dating experiences would make way more sense if consider that even sperg women have similar romantic responses and impulses as normal women.
astrolabia
1yr ago
To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late.
What do you think preparing looks like, if not fighting for civil liberties and maintaining our ability to coordinate politically without being targeted? To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.
Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?
astrolabia
1yr ago
knowing he was crazy
Seems like you're vindicating Maiq by holding this against them. If they had never seeked professional help, they could have argued that they didn't know he was crazy.
astrolabia
9mo ago
a somewhat-effeminate underemployed head-in-the-clouds armchair intellectual
I loved your post and agree with your advice. But as a guy who had a sort-of-similar trajectory, this still sounds totally fixable! I know you said you're struggling with physical health, and I haven't used testosterone myself, but is there a reason you're not trying to simply become literally high-T?
I’m too redpilled on women and too unable to play along with the female style of unfocused political venting to have much chance of a successful relationship with the kind of progressive woman
My wife is the picture of ostensible progressivism, and it certainly causes tension, but it's not fatal. I always thought the red-pill message was that politics aren't usually dealbreakers even if they're stated to be - you can simply change the subject, agree and amplify, or simply be a compelling enough package that she'll find ways to make it work from her end. I know it's easier said than done, but it sounds like you have the basic ingredients at hand!
astrolabia
1yr ago
Canada has a much larger native population than the USA, about 5% of the total population now, who have similar life outcomes to america's blacks. They also receive a huge amount of bespoke welfare. So I think that's some evidence against your theory.
astrolabia
10mo ago
From the point of view of the powers that be, this seems like a great argument in favor of muzzling LLMs.
I think by "ethnic spoils", OP is referring to the situation where most ethnic groups use their influence on government simply to deliver more resources to themselves. The word spoils here is used only in the sense of resources, as in "to the victor goes the spoils". India, Brazil, Iraq, Lebanon and most other multi-ethnic democracies have fairly dysfunctional governments in part because each politician is supposed to only serve their own ethnic interests.
Wokeness in Canada elevates this kind of activity to a virtue, and e.g. in job searches, it's considered a positive to have advocated for your own race's interests politically or institutionally. This is one way to show "commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion".
astrolabia
1yr ago
less offensive to call a woman a chestfeeder than to remind a man that he doesn't have breasts, and cannot breastfeed
Oh, I thought it was to avoid reminding women who are breastfeeding but identify as male that they do have breasts. Which always seemed like it must be a rare request. Like how many women feeding their baby using their breasts, who certainly can feel what's happening, still get psychic psychic relief from not acknowledging that it's a breast?
astrolabia
9mo ago
This is a reasonable argument, but there's a big different between having robots that can do something things for us (like digging ditches) while humans can still do other things better, versus having everything being done better by machines. In the current world, you get growth by investing in both humans and machines. In the latter world, you get the most growth by putting all your resources into machines and the factories that make them.
astrolabia
9mo ago
How is someone supposed to warn you about a danger while there's still time to avert it? "There's no danger yet, and focusing on future dangers is bad messaging."
astrolabia
9mo ago
Do expect your kids to have jobs if we build machines that can do everything better and cheaper than humans?
I agree with everything you wrote in this reply. But your reply seems to have nothing to do with your message I originally replied to. Why were you mentioning the cost of tokenization?
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