astrolabia
9mo ago
That's a fair point. Here's work along the lines that you're requesting: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.06924
astrolabia
9mo ago
The important thing is for our civilization to have an incentive to keep us around. Once we're superfluous, we'll be in a very precarious position in the long run.
Is being stuck in an old folks' home utopian?
astrolabia
9mo ago
I have considered it
I'm only going to evaluate the implications of ... products they actually have
It seems like you have not, in fact, considered the possibility of models improving. Is this the meme where some people literally can't evaluate hypotheticals? Again, doomers are worried about future, better models. What would you be worried about if you found out that models had been made that can do your job, and all other jobs, better than you?
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
I beg you to consider the possibility that progress in AI development will continue. The doomers are worried about future models, not current ones.
astrolabia
9mo ago
Do expect your kids to have jobs if we build machines that can do everything better and cheaper than humans?
astrolabia
9mo ago
testosterone supplements are only useful if you are totally committed to being very serious about working out
I don't know much about it, but my understanding is the opposite - that hormones + no exercise is much better for putting on mass than no hormones and lots of exercise. At least, I saw a study to that effect one time, and it's certainly the case that male teenagers put on muscle much faster than even relatively athletic females. But please don't take my word for it.
astrolabia
9mo ago
Yes, sounds like we are on the same page, and OP is psyching himself out.
I said my wife is "ostensibly progressive" because she has a conservative personality, she just happens to have been raised and schooled in a progressive, feminist echo chamber. (Today's beloved conservative position is often yesteryear's progressive overreach). She just can't bear to be against the consensus, and I think instinctively knows that arguing with me is likely to move her away from the consensus, so literally can't discuss politics for more than 2 minutes without getting too upset to weigh arguments. I find this frustrating and sad, and she talks as if it's devastating to her to be with someone who has the wrong opinions, but it doesn't actually come up unless one of us brings it up.
I actually think it's reasonable for her to refuse to argue issues on their merits with me, because I'm just a much better arguer than her. She's right to fear that I could argue convincingly for just about any position, right or wrong. For this reason I've told her that it's fine for her to disagree with me on anything without being able to articulate why, especially when it comes to joint decision-making.
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
9mo ago
I wouldn't kick yourself. After all, if it was so obvious that EU growth would lag, wouldn't those stocks have been even lower-priced?
astrolabia
9mo ago
‘Farmer’ is a job that’s literally never going away. Subsistence farming communities aren’t dependent on an industrial civilization having an inexplicable soft spot for them
It's already reduced by about 50x, and I'd claim that subsistence farming isn't really feasible in much of North America, or won't be soon, because of high land taxes on all the good farmland.
there is no one on earth who doesn’t need what they produce.
If I were a cartel, I'd rather have at least semi-industrialized farmers on my land than subsistence farmers. "Subsistence" means you don't produce much more than you need to subsist, which means you can't produce much taxes for the local cartel / government.
I don't know why you think this is an either/or, though - there are other insular Amish-like groups with high fertility that are also fully modern when it comes to production, e.g. the Hutterites and Mennonites.
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
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.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Yes, I agree.
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
10mo ago
From the point of view of the powers that be, this seems like a great argument in favor of muzzling LLMs.
astrolabia
10mo ago
in the name of "ethics", been barred from driving trips already serviced by trains
I agree that this is ridiculous, but I'm also not sure how I'll make a living when machines can do everything I can cheaper, better, and more reliably.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Wow:
the 1865 act (the "Red Flag Act"), which required all road locomotives, which included automobiles, to travel at a maximum of 4 mph (6.4 km/h) in the country and 2 mph (3.2 km/h) in the city
astrolabia
10mo ago
It sounds like you agree completely with zataomm?
astrolabia
10mo ago
I have to pick my battles. I spent some political capital pushing back on the particular progressive rot infesting the institutions I'm part of. Bringing up immigration in professional settings apropos of nothing seems like a bad use of everyone's time.
I'm not proud of not bringing this up, but I'm saying that this is a very different phenomenon than keeping quiet because I'm secretly glad that my country is being ruined by mass immigration because it benefits me in the short run. And I think my colleagues who champion mass immigration are doing it mostly for altruistic or signaling reasons, not because it improves their position materially.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Whoops, edited for clarity. I meant on average.
astrolabia
10mo ago
Isn't it clear that these proximate causes are mostly Schelling points for coordination? The same people rioting have also been upset by thousands of other smaller incidents. Same for the Floyd riots.
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.
The main LLM developers don't share methods or model weights. But they claim that if they didn't make enough money to train the best models, no one would care what they say.
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