astrolabia
1yr ago
I wouldn't even call it "mind-killing", because of the impressive mental gymnastics required to avoid ever even considering the idea that there could be meaningful group differences. The bizarre hypotheses, type errors, or misdirections that my friends and colleagues come up with when I ask if there is even in principle a possible difference in group averages is constant source of surprising creativity in my life.
The fact that the NYT article even mentions the possibility (to immediately dismiss it) already puts it in the top tier of clear thinking on the issue in my experience.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I appreciate you trying to bring nuance to the conversation, but without some examples it's still not clear to me what sorts of things you disagree with HBDers about exactly. I think the most relevant question is the extent to which the gaps in intellectual achievement, employment in various professions, and crime rates could realistically be changed by policy interventions. Do you think you have a much different answer here than HBDers?
As far as I can tell, you're saying that heritable traits might be caused along the way by others treating people differently based on their phenotype, and if that differential treatment were to go away, the presumably so would the heritability. Is that a fair summary?
And as an aside, I find the name "phenotypic null hypothesis" to be a bad name for two reasons: 1) It's not descriptive, and 2) it seems to be playing a rhetorical game by calling itself the "null hypothesis". I prefer to discuss evidence for and against various claims rather than arguing about who has the burden of proof.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree with your points 1 and 2, but not 3. Knowing the distribution of all civilizations tells us the probability of other aliens, given that we are born early and don't see others. I agree it's surprising that we weren't born later, but given that we weren't, it's likely that there are others being born around the same time as us.
I do think your point 5 has merit, It's pretty similar to the simulation hypothesis. But in that case, it doesn't really matter what we do anyways.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I've tried this a few times, and here's how it went each time:
Me: Aren't you just imposing a new hegemony in your own interests? Classical liberalism / colorblindness is a good compromise that avoids turning everything into a political race-to-the-bottom, at least for a while.
Them: We're liberating everyone from white supremacy and patriarchy. If your beloved meritocracy functioned at all, why are there so few black, indigenous, or female leaders in our institutions? Surely you don't think people from these groups are inherently inferior...?
Me, unwilling to commit professional suicide: No, no, of course not...
The debate has organically evolved so that the only rejoinder in almost any discussion involves acknowledging an on-average superiority in many professional fields of white men, which is literally a hate crime in my western country. Including East Asian and Indian men in my answer just begs the question about the remaining groups and they know it.
I've noticed in the last few years that my interlocutors are becoming quicker to ask the Unanswerable Question in these kinds of discussions, or even pre-emptively announce their rejoinder to anyone who might suggest such an idea.
If anyone has a suggested reply that won't get them fired or un-personed, I'm all ears.
astrolabia
11mo ago
I get a lot of pleasure watching the AI Ethics folks pointedly refuse to even acknowledge that LLMs are getting more capable. Some of them have noted publicly that they're bleeding credibility because of it, but can't talk about it because of chilling effects.
It's also remarkable how the agreed-upon leading lights of the AI Ethics movement are all female (with the possible exception of Moritz Hardt, who keeps his head down). The field is playing out like you'd imagine it would in an uncharitable right-wing polemic.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Hmmm, I'm not sure I understand your point. To be uncharitable, this looks like exactly the sort of creative misdirection I was talking about. The NYT dismisses the possibility of different amounts of tax fraud between races for any reason. Whether or not it's genetic, or whether other factors might be more important, are separate questions, and are secondary to the question of whether the fraud detection algorithms are biased. Again, I'm saying that even acknowledging group average differences in behavior as a possible explanation for group average differences in outcome is already less mind-killed than most of my interlocutors.
Since I have you here, what do you mean when you say that a group-level difference could "outweigh" individual level variation? They're just two levels of variation, and nothing changes if one is bigger than the other - they're both still there.
astrolabia
13d ago
One of the scariest things from my point of view is watching some Jewish progressives I know choosing, after a period of internal struggle, to take the side of Hamas. I could see that something had to give when they started being attacked by what they viewed as their own side. And I would have been surprised to see them abandon pretty much their whole progressive social networks and worldview under any circumstances, even to defend themselves. But it seems like many of them chose to thread the needle by simply becoming "one of the good ones".
astrolabia
5mo ago
I think we can make a more concrete claim, which is that deontologists are doomed in the long run due to competition and natural selection. Their rules will consistently be used against them. Today it's asylum seekers, tomorrow it will be ultra-charming machines that will claim moral primacy over whoever has resources.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I'm not sure why you find that article reassuring. Wait until you hear about the shitty hardware that human brains run on, only 30 Watts! Yud isn't even saying that the current LLMs are all that dangerous, he's saying that we're pouring 10B/y and all the top talent into overcoming any limitations to making them as smart or smarter than humans. What would make you scared?
astrolabia
5mo ago
Can you give some examples of these crazy views and goals?
astrolabia
3mo 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
4mo 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
11mo ago
That’s a good thing, because it means that most people alive will get to see how the story ends, for better or worse.
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What the hell, buddy? I implore you to think through what kinds of scenarios where humanity ends you'd actually think were worth the aesthetics. A lot of the scenarios that seem plausible to me involve humans gradually being priced out of our habitats, ending up in refugee / concentration camps where we gradually kill each other off.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I'm right there with you. The big question in my mind is: will socializing with hyper-socially-intelligent AIs make people more or less socially retarded when interacting with other humans? I can see it going either way. Maybe it won't matter much - our future human friendships and marriages (if any) might simply explicitly be mediated by AI, and perhaps be better for it.
That sounds like a nice prompt for an "odd couple" comedy - an old married couple whose AI intermediary / life coach breaks down, and they're forced to interact bare-brained, so to speak, for the first time.
astrolabia
9mo ago
I agree that religion was de jure central to life for most of human history, but it's not clear to what extent its details actually made a difference. Certainly they do matter a lot in some contexts. But most of the things that you say they're central to, such as rebellions, schools, and marriage all existed before and after any given religion and, I claim, mostly don't depend on the details of religious texts.
As for "who gets to mate with whom", that's what the OP was discussing.
astrolabia
1yr ago
Have you seen Muana? The producers went to great lengths to involve the relevant ethnicity in the production. But the story is about a young woman who feels compelled to shirk her duties to her tribe, then questions authority, and goes on a mostly solo adventure to save the environment. The main character is basically Greta Thunberg.
To the extent that these different people actually have a different worldview, this must seem really subversive. Imagine a high-budget movie full of American celebrity actors, shot in America, with pitch-perfect cultural references, about how fulfilling it was to serve the state, written by the Chinese government.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree with all of this, but what do you say to those of us that think it'll be a fascist disaster, but think it might be our best hope anyways?
I'll note that on your side you have the brilliant Robin Hanson. But he also seems to be fine with handing off the future to machine descendants.
astrolabia
1yr ago
all she has to do is be realistic about what her value as a 36 year old woman like her is
I guess so, but maybe she just isn't interested in anything less than the best? This could make sense from an ev-psych point of view. If you have kids with a genetic dud, presumably your kids will also struggle more with mating, potentially creating a vicious cycle. I have no idea what the actual relationship between male attractiveness and long-term genetic ROI is, but I could imagine that in some environments, the expected genetic payoff of having kids with a bad enough mate could be close to zero.
This suggests an intervention that could get women to be interested in less-attractive men: censor or hide attractive but unavailable men from them, until her estimation of relative value of the available men goes up. Right now we have the opposite, with media showing unrealistically handsome and high-status men (i.e. James Bond or Tom Cruise) all the time.
astrolabia
1yr ago
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tens of billions of dollars of capital and lots of top talent spend the next 5-10 years making these systems more and more capable.
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They get deployed everywhere because they are way easier to work with than humans.
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Humans have little economic power.
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The world becomes more complex, and full of agents smarter than humans, working full-time to manipulate them.
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Humans are eventually stripped of power, just like we gradually came to dominate every species less smart than us.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I agree that this was a stupid troll. I thought Hanania was better than that, but I guess it was just a lapse of judgement.
astrolabia
4mo ago
You might be right, but what does the endgame look like? It seems like the issue of immigration in particular has the potential to undo most of the gains that progressives find important. I'm thinking of France, where it seems inevitable that there will be a de facto Islamic party in the near future. In that case it seems like both progressives and conservatives (except the immigrants) lose.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I think you're letting the SJW crowd conflate things in your mind. The existential risk people are mostly libertarian types aside from this issue.
astrolabia
1yr ago
if we condition on certain death, then yes, quicker is better. But I'd rather still try to survive even if I think the chance of death is high.
astrolabia
1yr ago
I'm not claiming all children are going to be murdered in less than 20 years. I also don't think I have tons of economic power right now, and I agree I already depend on complex machines that I already can't understand or control.
I'm saying we're probably giving up what little control we had over the future of human civilization. Maybe a good analogy is: we're inviting unlimited immigration from a country with unlimited population, willing to work 24h/d for cents per hour, and are far more capable, loyal, and dependable than almost any human. Once we start, we'll never be able to stop.
I agree with you about status and wanting to be loved, but I think you can both be right. Mass immigration is the perfect example - no matter how bad it makes life for the peasants, the problem is most easily solved by forcibly re-educating the peasants to say they love immigration. The governments really care about not letting anyone complain about immigration, and having people tell the elites that they appreciate their big-hearted care for refugees.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever, while the face says "unlike those intolerant right-wingers, I'm open-minded enough to appreciate boot culture and cuisine!"
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