campfireSmoresEaten
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User ID: 2560
campfireSmoresEaten
5mo ago
"A big one is the CIA and State Department. They've traditionally viewed right wing parties in Europe as the enemy, and made efforts to keep them from winning."
Could I have a source? Even if nothing concrete?
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
I also think that AI doomers are underrating the possibly beneficial things that super-powerful AI could bring. I mean, yeah, there's a chance that humans will be replaced by AI overlords, but there's also a chance that super-powerful AIs will have no desire to destroy us and instead will give us a bunch of good things.
How are you on this website without realizing how hard it is to control a superintelligent AI? Have you not thought about that? I think that you are thinking "AI can either be aligned to human values or not. Sounds like 50/50."
In fact, aligning a superintelligence to human values is extremely difficult and extremely unlikely to happen by accident. Human values are a very small slice of the possible spectrum of minds that could exist.
It kind of feels like people vastly overrate the degree to which they understand the arguments of AI doomers. Like they're just going by a few tweets they read. Twitter is not a good way to full understand a contentious subject.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
Too many eye-witness accounts of the Holocaust to be fake. Too many of them don't seem like the type to exaggerate, even if some of them were unreliable. Not plausible that they could all be lying. Also too high a proportion of people died whose names we know and whose life history we can track with certainty to be an accident.
The thing that makes the path forward plausible is people acknowledging the problem and contributing to the solution, just like any other problem that requires group action.
I don't think you actually live your life this way. You're just choosing to do so in this case because it's more convenient / for the vibes.
Think of every disaster in history that was predicted. "We could prevent this disaster with group action, but I'm only an individual and not a group so I'm just going to relax." Is that really your outlook?
If there was an invading army coming in 5 years that could be beaten with group action or else we would all die, with nowhere to flee to, would you just relax for 5 years and then die? Even while watching others working on a defense? Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort? Is the word 'altruism' such a turn-off to you? How about "honor" or "pride" or "loyalty to one's people"? How about "cowardice" or "weakling"? Do these words shift anything for you, regarding the vibes?
Edit: I'm not trying to be insulting, just trying to call attention to the nature of how vibes work.
People do pro-social things not just because of the fear of punishment for not doing them, but because they understand that they are contributing to a commons that benefits everyone, including themselves.
For the record, it wouldn't be that hard to solve this problem, if people wanted to. Alignment is pretty hard, but just delaying the day we all die indefinitely with a monitoring regime wouldn't be that hard, and it would have other benefits, chiefly extending the period where you get to kick back and enjoy your life.
Question: Are there any problems in history that were solved by the actions of a group of people instead of one person acting unilaterally that you think were worth solving? What would you say to someone who took the same perspective that you are taking now regarding that problem?
And the "Are the sacrifices involved in you contributing to help with the problem in some small way really so extraordinary that you don't feel like making a token effort?" question is worth an answer to, I feel.
campfireSmoresEaten
25d ago
But then there would be a huge retaliation from NATO that would make NATO's support for Ukraine look rather restrained by comparison (and maybe it kinda was).
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
There's nothing special about German manufacturing that can't be replicated at much lower cost in China (and with much stronger network effects to boot).
You might be right, but I wonder how sure of this we can be? Is there any reason why this might not be true?
I guess one thing I can think of is that China apparently can't copy TSMC or that Dutch Lithography company. Not yet anyway. Although I realize that's a somewhat different story.
campfireSmoresEaten
25d ago
My experience is that most people don't have a good enough understanding of how housing costs work to point blame at anything other investment funds for high prices.
campfireSmoresEaten
29d ago
Are Pakistani girls noticeably genetically distinct with regards to looks? Or is it just like saying white Canadian women are hotter than white British women?
So we have two questions, and we should probably focus on one.
- Is the problem real?
- Is there a way to contribute to a solution?
Let's focus on 1.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-phrase-no-evidence-is-a-red-flag
What do you mean "no actual evidence that the problem exists"? Do you think AI is going to get smarter and smarter and then stop before it gets dangerous?
"Suppose we get to the point where there’s an AI smart enough to do the same kind of work that humans do in making the AI smarter; it can tweak itself, it can do computer science, it can invent new algorithms. It can self-improve. What happens after that — does it become even smarter, see even more improvements, and rapidly gain capability up to some very high limit? Or does nothing much exciting happen?" (Yudkowsky)
Are you not familiar with the reasons people think this will happen? Are you familiar, but think the "base rate argument" against is overwhelming? I'm not saying the burden of proof falls on you or anything, I'm just trying to get a sense from where your position comes from. Is it just base rate outside view stuff?
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
You should be proud of how forward thinking you are.
Also:
Do not circumcise. It is a horrific abuse of the rights of a person who is, at the end of the day, not your property, and whose body belongs to himself. Think critically about the arguments proponents give in favor of the practice. Remember that most of the world considers it to be a bizarre and gruesome thing to do. Obviously I could share my full set of arguments for why I believe what I believe, if for some reason you wanted to discuss it.
There is a documentary called American Circumcision which I think is good, and which is available on Kanopy, a free streaming service that comes with any US library card.
My parents say that they mutilated me because no one ever suggested that they might not do that. It supposedly never occurred to them not to do it. You won't have that excuse.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
Pretty weird to talk about an entire political party as if it was one agent in the context of a bill like this. Is that how it works outside the US? In the US it's common for at least a few congresspeople to break party lines. Or at least I think it is.
campfireSmoresEaten
2mo ago
I will say that the details of October 7th seem like they were clearly designed to make it as hard as possible to respond with restraint.
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
Well, people who want to build more housing could secede from the government. That's the obvious solution when you have a minority of voters who feel very strongly that the majority is fucking them over.
It remains to be seen to what extent voters understand that development being illegal is the problem though.
campfireSmoresEaten
14d ago
"Reality being that AI is not going to become superduper post-scarcity fairy godmother or paperclipper"
Do you understand why people are not convinced that superintelligence won't happen just because AI is being used for military purposes?
The arguments around superintelligence have nothing to do with whether or not AI is being used for military purposes. It's completely tangential.
campfireSmoresEaten
26d ago
I think the vast majority of Americans of all stripes don't care about Brits playing Americans. If they care they care only very slightly and it's mixed with acceptance that Brits are just really good at acting.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
The story of the boy who cried wolf has two sides. It's not just a lesson for the boy not to lie, it's a lesson for the villagers too. Just because people who lie about wolves exist doesn't mean wolves don't exist.
Also most historians think the German atrocities in Belgium during the first world war did happen, even if they were exaggerated at the time.
What about Japanese war crimes? Did those never happen either? What about Unit 731? Why would the United States make up fake war crimes only to become complicit in them later by trading the data produced by the research in exchange for immunity?
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
You're just comparing human intelligence against other human intelligence. What about comparing human intelligence vs animal intelligence, or human chess players vs computer chess players? Does that give you pause for thought at all?
For bullet point 2: If you'll forgive the analogy, it's like saying "humans are intelligent and we still screw up all the time so I'm not that concerned about (let's say) aliens that are more intelligent than us and don't have any ethics that we would recognize as ethics." You're imagining that the peak of all intelligence in any possible universe is a human with about 160 IQ. How could that be? What if humans didn't need to keep our skulls small in order to fit through the mother's hips?
For bullet point 1: I don't think you have a basis to say that intelligence can't build on itself exponentially. Humans can't engineer our own brains, except in fairly crude ways. If there was a human that could create copies of himself using trial and error to toy around with its brain to get the best results, iterating over time, wouldn't you expect that to maybe be a different situation? Especially if the copies weren't limited by the size of the skull containing the brain and the mother's hips that the skull needs to fit through?
I also don't think it's required for the superintelligence to be able to come up with any super-nanotech or super-plague technology to beat us and replace us, although I expect it would. Humans aren't that formidable, superior tactics would win the day.
Bullet point 3 seems to imply that humans could never be much more advanced technologically than they are now, or that much more advanced technology wouldn't yield much in practical terms. Which are both wrong from both an inside and outside view. Through common knowledge and also through common sense.
What do feminism and air conditioning have to do with each other? Is it a reference to how women purportedly like different temperatures in the office than men, or something else?
campfireSmoresEaten
3mo ago
Why do you believe that humanity could never invent something capable of causing our extinction? Even if you think strangelets are safe, is there some rule that says they have to be? What about nanobots? What happens when you create an AI advanced enough to make itself more advanced?
"Nature doesn't work that way." Why? What does that mean? Why are you using the word "nature" and not "technology and its future"?
so what will they do?
How hard do you think it would be to decapitate or disfigure the regime without nukes? Like a heart attack gun, but for a country. Drones, lasers, hacking, etcetera. There are many ways to escalate, NATO only has to convince itself that just one of them doesn't require that much courage to pursue. The plans probably already exist, just as a framework, created as practice in the art of developing tactical plans rather than out of expectation that they would ever be used, but they do exist. I'm not saying this will happen, but if Russia does push NATO too far then these options will be seriously considered.
campfireSmoresEaten
27d ago
This is something like the third time someone has said something on this site that has made me want to link a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound only to find it's not on youtube...
They did a sketch called Switzerland During the War Years or something and it's a faux-documentary about the hardships experienced by Switzerland during the war. Someone complaining about the horror of running out of space in the attic for looted treasure received from trading with Germany. You get the idea.
Not sure how fair an assessment that is, but that's comedy for you.
campfireSmoresEaten
1mo ago
It's not the economy that makes owning a house unaffordable, it's the regulatory environment.
campfireSmoresEaten
3mo ago
Why is that stupid?
campfireSmoresEaten
4mo ago
Of course, if prediction markets were legal that would change all this.
I don't know if you're an American, but this is just not true. In non-US countries, people have been prosecuted for saying that the bible says that homosexuality is a sin in Canada and I think Finland, for saying that Muhammed was a pedophile, for telling jokes, for saying that Muslims girls are raped by their family members, for saying that Muslim girls are murdered by their family members in honor killings, for saying that Muslims want to kill us, for quoting someone else saying that Islam is a defective and misanthropic religion, for comparing Muslims to Nazis, for saying "Well, when one, like Bwalya Sørensen, and most black people in South Africa, is too unintelligent to see the true state of things, then it is much easier to only see in black and white, and, as said, blame the white."
More: For saying that white people pretend to be indigenous for political or career clout. etc etc etc
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