curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
In part a good point. But I'm friends with plenty of 'ordinary' non-elite people (lol!), and the general vibe I got wasn't catastrophe. I think it was well within the norm of 'bad things that happen sometimes', and as an example I think the great recession was worse.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There is a mountain of evidence masks did nothing.
Yes, I'm implying the competent country would design masks that worked.
Maybe the solution to doing well with covid is “don’t have a bunch of fat old people”
I did a whole thing about this a year or so ago, obesity is much much less of a risk factor than age. Old and thin people still died a lot, 20 year old fat people didn't.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Do you have a more data-oriented source on the economic claims here? My sense is that if immigration pushes down wages in a few specific sectors, the benefits are diffuse enough that the income for the natives in that sector decreases. But people who work for wages are >50% of the working population, so the harms in terms of lower wages from immigration aren't actually 100x as concentrated as the benefits anymore. And (poorly justified guess) this either washes out or is net beneficial because the immigrants are providing useful services and the population of wage workers isn't, like, doubling.
Also note that if we were taking in as many skilled immigrants as unskilled, this wouldn't be an effect at all - because all skill classes would increase in proportion. And ... I'm not actually sure if that's even false? If you combine illegal and hispanic immigration with the disproportionately skilled immigration from india, asian countries, etc.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Guess i was wrong! I'd actually read that post before, seems I forgot.
Sometimes my "real" justifications build on a lot of accumulated knowledge and ideas, and writing those all out would take longer than I wanted, so I don't, and substitute for something shorter instead. Sometimes the shorter thing is wrong, though. So my 'real' reason for saying .1% was something about how mathematics and coordination and coming up with ideas is hard, and as we observe society develop we're seeing the best of everyone we have slowly stumble into being more and more correct, and it's almost impossible to beat that privately on something as big as 'GPT' because you have to do all of the research work that tens of thousands of the brightest machine learning researchers did in public over the past few decades. Like, the manhattan project was secret, but it used all of the best people we had and wasn't secret forever. The NSA can keep some cryptographic techniques secret, but not the entire concept of cryptography secret.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's a hilarious thing to get mad about, though. Ukraine war? Wokeness? AGI? no, philosophy of personal identity and computation.
Even if it's important, it's something that 99% of even the smartest people are horrendously confused about whatever your perspective is, so it shouldn't be shocking that a random forum guy is.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If someone wishes to open a brothel with exclusively syphilitic whores, while I think that's a fucking terrible idea, I don't see why it should be made illegal, as long as they weren't lying to their customers (who should also know what they're getting into
It's because they don't know what they're getting into, and will also spread the disease to others. They're stupid, both in an objective sense and also subjectively in terms of their future preferences. Rational agents wouldn't use the syphilis brothel! A nation made entirely of intelligent and rational ideal agents would've already fully eliminated every STD of significance by at first spontaneously agreeing to, and then nationally coordinating, a set of practices for testing and condom use. It's not actually a difficult problem if everyone involved can consistently follow simple rules and tolerate minor modification to their behavior in the long-term interest of the group. They can't, though, and sex seems to make people deviate from theoretical rationality an awful lot more than usual (or, in terms I prefer - be retarded), so the state should step in.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Fair. Sometimes I make claims much weaker than my actual beliefs if they're enough to prove my point. I'm pretty sure a 'competent country' could have prevented 90%+ of covid deaths with no behavioral changes whatsoever other than minor things like masks, better ventilation, uv sterilization, and vaccines. But those asian countries still had significant behavioral changes that I'm arguing are unnecessary, even if less than here." And the standard for competence is somewhat high
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I literally said "it's still fine to think gays are evil" in the next sentence, man, I'm not being subtle here. The point is even then, the right response isn't "prevent harm".
He said "most of the assisted reproduction", it doesn't specify that it should be banned for gay people. Personally I think it should be banned for everyone.
Right, and I think whatever the harm is, it's better to have more people who can experience things (and more rolls of the dice for higher-quality people, etc)
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I'd rather have a 50% of being sexually abused as a child than counterfactually not exist, frankly. I think most people, if they were honest, would agree. This makes banning gays from having assisted-reproduction children ... extremely stupid, imo, and the morality that leads you to believe it must be prevented extremely suspect. (Its' still fine to think gays are evil or whatever, that can coexist)
Reading the paper, doing the set of experiments for one of the problems cost $800-1.4k. Extremely affordable!
This isn't as impressive as 'LLMs good at abstract math' would be, though. This is basically making a million copies of a smart 14 year old, telling them each to randomly tweak programs in ways that seem interesting, and running an evolutionary process on top of that for programs with high scores on some metric. As opposed to taking a LLM and teaching it 1000 math textbooks and then it spontaneously proving new theorems. Which is a thing that this paper, notably, very much doesn't do. But, you know, another paper totally might in 5 years, the field's moving quickly.
But the discovered functions are less triumphs of machine thought and more like random blobs of if statements and additions with a bunch of simple patterns (eg fig 4b, 5b, 6b). Even that's quite useful.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Speaking of plainly, do you mean "the site encourages him to be bombastic about covid because it doesn't push back", or something else? Not immediately obvious
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You can look at it in terms of DALYs, or just 'even weighting every life equally, sixty more years is 60x as valuable as one more year'. I prefer to look at it in terms of what one does with that time - productive work done, depth and complexity of experience, et cetera, and young peoples' time is certainly even more valuable by that metric. At the same time, I think lockdowns were more 'dumb and avoidable' rather than 'awful terrible catastrophe'. It was dumb, wasted a bunch of effort, but it was fine, and like 75% of the population thought it was a good idea and actively went along with it at the time. And modern society wastes plenty more effort and time than at the best of times, so whatever. Half of everything is broken and evil, to react with terror and rage to a particular instance while not noticing the rest is simply mistaken, and if you notice it all the "OMG THEY ARE FASCISTS WTF" no longer seems particularly useful. We're all fascists by that standard.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. We could've also done challenge trials on masks, different types of masks, different ways of instructing people how to use masks, ultraviolet sterilization, etc. And probably at least half of covid deaths could've been prevented with the level competence that's present in the best SV companies.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
My reply didn't address whether or not it was fascism, I was replying to him saying covid didn't kill anyone.
I (of course) don't at all agree that covid lockdowns were fascism. And, like, I'm not anywhere near as psychologically opposed to proper Fascism as you'd guess, so I'm not saying that because I like lockdowns, they're just totally different things. But saying lockdowns are fascism is pure 'i don't like it so it's the same as everything else i don't like'. I didn't address it in my OP because, well, it's like arguing with a BLM protestor about how IQ has a strong genetic component that varies by race, it's not going to be a productive conversation unless you put a truly heroic level of effort and persuasion into it.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't even disagree! But my claim, if true, disproves every single claim about how the ruling class is uniquely corrupt because of epstein. It doesn't say anything about our political system or elites beyond that some of them are human and fallible.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
fascist policies enacted to stop transmission of an illness that doesn't kill people
Lockdowns aren't on the pareto frontier of policy options for even diseases significantly deadlier than covid imo, just because rapid development and distribution of technological solutions is possible, but ... covid killed one million people in the united states. Yes, mostly old people, but we're talking about protecting old people here. No reason to pretend otherwise.
You provide no substance here; the story of Carlson's supposed texts is old and baseless. Dominion sliced apart internal communications and arranged them to falsely portray things like Carlson hating Trump
The texts were:
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” he texted an unidentified person.
“I hate him passionately. ... I can’t handle much more of this,” he added.
“We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” he wrote in another text message, referring to the “last four years.” “But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.”
Even for this, I agree it's possible he was just really mad at Trump and is usually pro-trump even in private, and that was his defense. People say a lot of things, in a lot of contexts, and cherrypicking can do almost anything. But ... on the balance, those are very strong statements. What makes you call it baseless?
But no, you don't understand, if you truly understand how they are criminals who will take whatever they can the only rational consequent is "Can they prove they didn't?"
... are they? I know some people in the Democrat Establishment. Mostly, they follow the law and the rules and try to do what's right. I don't think this is good evidence against election fraud, but it is strong evidence against them being moral mutants who hate truth and all that is good. Are my enemies innately evil?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
So it is a lot easier to actually raise kids without being bombarded by sexual imagery
Not my impression? Unless you never let them use the internet. And you should, a rapidly increasing fraction of all of life is taking place on it, denying a smart child access to wikipedia is almost a crime imo, and of course wikipedia alone has plenty of sexual images that a motivated teen will absolutely find if they have nothing else. Even if you just let them use google, plenty of women in rather little clothing are available via google images.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Yeah, but there are tens of thousands of 'elites', so the rate of any particular offense is still lower among them than it is among the lower classes.
I mean, ignoring AGI, which is going to be a whole problem -
the Western culture war is not going to last forever, which means it's going to end. And when it does, how will we look back on this mad time?
A reactionary would say what we're getting is a continuation of at least three hundred years of progressive advance, so it might last a while. Or, put differently, when the 'culture war' ends we'll just get gay-accepting partially-pronatalist liberal meritocracy, as opposed to something more racist or theocratic. When the libertarians won against the statists/socialists, in one sense the Right won, and in another sense libertarians were still quite progressive.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Unfortunately no, he's writing within a whole subcultural style common on the far-right, rather than being a fluke.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Strong disagree, Tor was more developed by researchers funded by the US government. STEM researchers just like making cool things, and the government funds a lot of 'cool things' in the hopes that a small number will end up being useful. The government, in general, employs millions of people, and only a very small fraction of them are involved in secret plots. https://old.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/anq680/was_tor_created_by_the_us_govt/
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Or - a small part of why governments have been so tolerant of bitcoin and ethereum is because the ledger is public, so it doesn't actually make it harder to trace criminals. Whereas they have cracked down on Tornado Cash, which wasn't as traceable.
I think much more significant reasons are 1) general regulatory apathy and 2) by the time crypto got big, it had a nontrivial and dedicated group of fans, incentivizing some congresspeople to push for crypto.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The NSA has known about using language models to generate text embeddings (or some similarly powerful form of search based on semantic meaning rather than text patterns) for at least 15 years. This is why they needed absolutely massive amounts of compute, and not just data storage, for their Saratoga Springs data center way back when.
0.1% that they were, like, 5 years ahead of the public state of the art IMO. So much of deep learning progress has been based on 'more compute', and moore's law in terms of FLOPS has been advancing for so long, that it just doesn't work. However the idea of neural networks for semantic classification or machine translation or similar has been known for a very long time, so I could totally see them trying to use the (quite meh) state of the art at the time with a lot of compute.
Unelected leaders of some US agencies sometimes lie under oath to Congess.
Probably over 10%? A lot of people, including people with power, say things that are various degrees of lies.
The Omicron variant of covid was intentionally developed (by serial passaging through lab mice) as a much more contagious, much less deadly variant that could quickly provide cross immunity against the more deadly variants.
<1%? My vague memory is that there were a lot of variants, and that in general 'virus mutates to spread more and be less harmful' is fairly common, so imo there's not that much reason to believe this.
And, indeed, it is generally protected speech under the first amendment - including at public colleges!
Part of the (in large part correct) justification for this is that strongly motivated political activism from all sides often comes along with calls for mass violence, and that criminalizing such calls would be an easy tool to shut down political speech one disagrees with.
Even without that, and even if you believe genocide is Always Bad, I still find it very personally valuable to let ideas circulate and grow and mutate and see what people advocate for and why without restrictions. Banning advocacy for various kinds of bad things stifles that.
I think a similar number of thin old people would've died. Especially since being thin makes them live longer, so they're older, they have to die eventually.
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