curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If dogs could talk would they need to be smarter
yes, dogs can't play sports (even if they had the right physical form factor) or compose music as well as humans despite neither requiring language. buffalos can communicate, and do, the ability to understand complex communications wold require intelligence, and even if they had that minimal intelligence that doesn't get them to toolmaking, let alone physics or military planning. is this a bit?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
you're kinda right, and I think it's happening on both sides. And not in a 'hurr both side r the same and bad' sense, but a - wow, almost everyone on social media who has an opinion on this can be perfectly divided into "previously liked musk/right wing-ish/thinks twitter is fine and musk is doing good" and "previously disliked musk/left wing-ish/thinks twitter is crashing hard and musk is doing awful". I'm actually surprised at how much that's true.
Even then though, just saying 'it's because u hate musk' isn't enough, there are more complex causes even in cases of obvious and blatant bias.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
gulps down bait
Even if/given that it is modern society-degenerate-prison brainwashing, most people still do masturbate. Most conservatives I know jerk it to porn just like the liberals do. There's no point in making stuff up about it, the libs aren't gonna lose because you claimed conservatives doesn't jerk off, it just means you have a flawed understanding of social dynamics and are less equipped to solve whatever issues there are
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
... sure, and humans minus hands wouldn't get anywhere, same for humans without eyes, humans without mouths, humans without livers, humans without an epidermis, or humans without collagen, but it's quite clear that intelligence is a more significant, harder to evolve factor than language or any of those. Plus, as neural networks hint at and should be somewhat clear, intelligence means that language is relatively easy to get to, whereas w/o intelligence language is not that useful because nothing too interesting can be said!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Again we can separate out 'is degenerate, is disgusting, is perverted, should be condemned, mixes the meanings of sexual acts' from 'is straight'. If a guy enjoys having a domme put a vibrating toy up his ass, that doesn't seem 'not-straight' in the sense of 'wants to have sex with men'. Even if a guy enjoys the feeling of the thing, it really isn't obvious why it's "a pseudo phallus" that matters, if e.g. he isn't playing into that in the masturbation fantasy.
What if he regularly engages in anal sex with men, but not because he is attracted to men per-se but just because he finds that they are more capable of stimulating him physically in certain ways? Is that not gay either?
I mean - what does "gay" actually mean here? I'm sure there's at least one straight person in history who is as straight as anyone, and naturally uninterested in men as anyone (although it's not clear how 'natural' desire is for bisexual people, so this may be a meaningless statement), but regularly engages in gay sex for some weird idiosyncratic reason. Not that that's a meaningful fraction of people, but it is possible. So can't 'gay' mean multiple things - 'desires sex with men', 'has sex with men'? And - from this distinction, sure anal penetration is like sex with men, but - let's say lesbians 'have sex' and involve a dildo, does that make the woman straight?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
the clearest evidence of bait was "edit: I’m just speaking the truth of my lived experience, please stop invalidating me"
I gave several examples of literal apocalypses though
Again, it's entirely possible for massive technological change to make apocalypses possible. There clearly is a difference between 'god will fire lighting boom everyone for not being religious enough' and 'the billions of dollars and millions of man hours of the smartest people on the world are being invested in AI, what if it works'.
There is an absolutely unbroken line of apocalyptic dreamers who prefer their fantasy to dealing with the reality of the world
Given that EA spends more time and money on malaria nets than AI risk, this is clearly not an accurate statement about them. More generally, that doesn't actually make AI risk false.
Even if EA and lesswrong were - entirely - irrational and religious cults around AI risk, that wouldn't make AI risk false. And there are stupid, illogical cults around AI - there was and still is a lot of popular scifi larp about "the singularity", "mind uploading", etc. This doesn't make the AI go away.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Probably, but to elaborate - the relationship between musk's one-off tweets and implemented twitter changes has been pretty random, and esp with the blue rollback and his general odd decisions idk what'll happen really.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Timelines will be settled on, politics will change, a solution will be found
Have you read any yud or lesswrong writing on AI safety? They put a lot of effort into addressing the exact concerns you've laid out, in a way that you don't seem to acknowledge. But leaving that - why though? Why will the competent people find a solution? It's clear how we are able to find a solution to, e.g. nuclear weapons, religious conflict, etc. But AI will be - it's argued - not a simple mechanism we can intelligence and coordinate around, but smart on its own. As a random example - what is the political solution to "AIs now control the global economy"? The AIs are going to be the one "finding solutions", not "human politicians". You can't psychologize your way around a gun to your head, and no amount of "you're just scared its ok the grownups will handle it" will physically prevent the complexity of AI!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You seem to mean something other than 'gay is when you're attracted to men' here, "gay" in a vague sense of "feminine, submissive, powerless, sad, degenerate". Disagreeing over definitions like this is more an argument that gay in the latter sense has some moral force, and that gay in the former sense doesn't, as opposed to actually disagreeing over definitions. It's better to directly state and argue for that, as opposed to saying 'this is the word meaning'
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Certainly some women don't masturbate. Some men don't masturbate! Peoples' actions are wildly contingent on both social norms and individual decisions, motivations, etc. The wrong part was 'women I've met don't masturbate/sex toy', which is just false in any normal modern american/western context.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I can believe none of them talk about it around you/men in public generally, but they certainly do it. ref - "I have never met a woman that owns a sex toy or masturbates"
No way, every woman you know definitely owns vibrators and masturbates secretly
nobody claimed this, and everyone who was told they claimed it clearly stated it wasn't true. But certainly some of those women have sex toys, and many of them masturbate!
For some reason blue tribers have some obsession with claiming that definitely everyone is sexually degenerate/adventurous as they are and any claims otherwise are false/lies/social pressure/shame
I'm not really a 'blue triber', and acknowledging the sexual degeneracy of even the 'conservatives' is important even in the case one opposes sexual degeneracy, so you can understand the situation. If you want to stop sexual degeneracy, believing conservatives are more or less pristine of it will make it virtually impossible to understand anything or take any useful action!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Your argument is to handwave me at the vast canon of AI scribbling
What I mean is that ... questions like "we've solved lots of problems before, AI will be fine" and "there will be a disaster, we will notice it, and then politicans will solve it" are things that people have written dozens of essays debating. It's like talking to someone here about race and genetics here and just saying "races aren't real. it's a distribution, not a category. and stereotyping is bigoted". Everyone here has heard that before, and hundreds of people have written up hundreds of paragraphs about why it's false. Maybe it's still true in some way, but that point is best made by addressing those arguments in some way, not just saying them.
I've read the big ones, and they are as unconvincing as they are hysterical.
Yeah, how so precisely? Again, it'd be much more interesting to read about why yud's arguments are wrong than "hurr its a cult you are being manipulated accept my social pressure instead of theirs"
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
By this logic, because all humans are partially consequentialist, and in general are messy and make mistakes, no humans can credibly precommit to anything. And in a comparative sense, a human-who-claims-to-be-a-consequentialist can precommit to anything just as much as a human-who-claims-to-be-a-deontologist (note that 99% of humans claim to be neither, and do not care at all about those distinctions, yet manage to organize fine), and this is what we see in practice - large EA orgs, and large orgaizations of claimed utilitarians, seem to organize better than comparison orgs of normies in charity or philosophy.
Your argument goes like 'society was wrong and people lied about nuclear war, and used that to manipulate people - so that must be what's happening now'. Which ... sure, that can happen - it constantly happens - but the reason people even have a desire to avoid x-risks is because it is important to avoid disasters when disasters exist, and disasters sometimes exist.
This is like saying - "you're worried about high crime? people in the 1900s were worried about racialized crime destroying society, and they were wrong, and racist. Therefore crime doesn't matter". You can't write off the entire idea of 'bad thing happening' because people misuse the idea!
We'll hand over decision making powers to dumb machines in order to make money, and we'll fuck ourselves up in the process. That's the risk, not a god-level intelligence AI deciding it wants to get rid of its monkey masters and tile the universe with NFTs.
Yes, and handing over all the levers of society to very intelligent machines is bad. Why will the machines be dumb forever? Even if they are dumb at first, they'll become smarter, and quickly, because - see DL progress and theory of computation.
I don't think we're ever going to get superhumanly smart AI that can be its own agent with its own goals
Yeah, this is the main issue! Why? Even ignoring object-level arguments - look how rapidly technology has advanced over the past 200 years, does that just ... stop?
Yet celebrities have personal brands to protect, and rationally one expects the most famous ones to have teams perform some level of due diligence on what they are endorsing. Furthermore, expensive endorsement deals signal a basic level of liquidity and financial strength in the brand,
But the products aren't better. The Mr Beast burger isn't a better burger than a (ew) mcdonalds burger. Makeup endorsed by a random celebrity isn't better makeup than what people usually use. There are a lot of ways to do things that have partially-correct motivations yet are still wrong. The due diligence is usually only a bit above 'is this a popular product and not literally sex-ponzi-mlmcoin', and sometimes not even that. Is it 'rational' to buy Gwenyth Paltrow's Goop products? Purchasing those partnered products is in a broad sense, a mistake, and "is the heuristic rational or not" is ... kind of irrelevant, because the products themselves are generally worse, and more expensive, than the alternatives.
Kind of reminds me of The Rationality of Literal Tide Pod Consumption
Also, this doesn't affect your iphone point, but the $99/$199 iphone is tied to a phone plan ("starting at $35"/mo?), making it not that cheap.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Technology has increased the rate of change of everything, though. a million years of hunter gathering, 100k years of fire, 10k years of agriculture, civilization ... 300 years of industry, 60 years of computers... If AI doesn't happen, what does happen in 10k years, and why hasn't AI taken power from humans yet?
It's a system for building an army unconstrained by the humanizing effects of tradition and civilization
It's difficult to argue that the armies of historical civilizations, with deep traditions - pick any, mongols, romans, etc - were humanized? Peace and kindness and love over war and hierarchy and conquest isn't trad - it's the creed of progressives, albeit often poorly followed.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
we literally do have jetpacks and flying cars lol. They're just not that useful in general use-cases relative to existing technology.
The details would be a much longer post, but my take on AI is pretty much the same. Chips will get faster and faster, yes, models more complex, training algorithms smarter, but the data you use still has to come from somewhere.
how is AI in a different situation from humans here, humans have 'enough data' as it is
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
if we accept all of this, it'll take ~ 200 years for superhuman AGI to happen though? That still has the same outcome!
What data, exactly, would an AGI be trained against
human lives and writing? There are billions of them, and if it literally required a camera on a hundred million AR glasses, which it won't, that could easily happen.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
He's not exactly a schizoposter, schizoposters are more openly crazy, but he's def related. I haven't read his most recent thread - but his output before that was uniformly just nonsense, and there wasn't any truth or value in it whatsoever, not even in an 'adjacent to truth' sense. Not that there aren't 'edgy dissident' claims/accounts that are valuable, but they're outnumbered by nonsense by several orders of magnitude, and telling the difference takes effort. A similar account is @realhumanschwab, whose output is similarly nonsense and without value.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
A lot of them are ex-rationalists, and most of them dislike rationalists for standard progressive reasons, so it's just people who know about the rationalists dunking on them. But they do collect funny examples of rationalists being dumb, making it fun to browse
I'm not conflating good and humanized here. Ancient civilizations both had deep and profound traditions, and also slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people for no conceivable progressive reason, for glory and conquest and just mere power. But marxism is less violent, in both ideology and implementation, than - easiest demonstration - the mongols, or some of the wars of ancient china.
truly Progressive societies have not demonstrated a solution to war
Post-WW2 society does seem to have less war than ancient societies (... althouhg that's a weak claim, "post ww2", ww2 was recent!) - which is perhaps related to 'the glory of conquest and war' being a value modern progressives despise, which was not true in the past.
I mean skilled as in 'significantly above the average faang programmer'. I'm not claiming he's firing skilled people more than unskilled people, but you'd want to keep most of them.
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