curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
I don't think that's a huge component, no. Many countries are now trying to reverse it and failing, and countries that've tried to lower it in the past (china?) don't seem to be doing much worse than comparable ones that didn't (other east asians). What specific such efforts do you think are relevant?
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards
It's the opposite for me! We did a bunch of math, about a trillion trillion individual units of math, showing the math a few trillion words, and now the math can talk. This is what a hard physicalist would predict - intelligence can come from mechanical causation! It's exactly what esotericists didn't predict - it didn't come from divination, spiritual revelation, didn't come from finding the lost tomes of ancient civilizations, it didn't come from enlightenment, it came from physics and math.
It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
I don't think it's mysterious that behavior is changing simultaneously as the modern world completely reshapes the environment humans live in! Africa has phones, birth control, porn, and money too.
Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI
Nope, it's because we've developed a ton of advanced technology and it's doing a lot of weird things at the same time!
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
In 2016 it seemed like we were tantalizingly close to a world where self-driving cars were commonplace. I remember people arguing that young children probably wouldn't ever have driver's licenses because autonomous vehicles would completely dominate the roads by the time they were old enough to drive. Now here we are, almost a decade later, and this reality seems further away than it did in 2016.
You can order a self-driving taxi in SF right now, though.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
The whole premise behind science fiction is that it might actually happen as technology advances. Space travel and colonizing other planets is physically possible, and will likely happen sometime in the next million years if we don't all blow up first. The models are now much better at both writing and college mathematics than the average human. They're not there yet, but they're clearly advancing, and I'm not sure how you can think it's not plausibly they pass us in the next hundred or so years?
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
Their actions indicate that they don’t take the whole thing seriously.
then you would be advocating for the government to seize control of OpenAI’s datacenters effective immediately
They (as in LW-ish AI safety people / pause ai) are directly advocating for the government to regulate OpenAI and prevent them from training more advanced models, which I think is close enough for this
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
It is hard to not see this as a deliberate business-model hack. Start as a research oriented non-profit so you can more easily acquire data, perhaps investors / funders, and a more favorable public image
I don't think this is it. Investors would greatly prefer to invest in a for-profit company, and they had to hack around the nonprofit structure to. I don't remember hearing about how OpenAI had an easier time getting access to data than other AI cos due to its nonprofit status. And while they've gotten some use out of the nonprofit status, I don't think it was large enough to matter, and may have been entirely counteracted by people criticizing them for acting like a for-profit while being a nonprofit. I think they weren't really expecting how much capital frontier AI development would require, and sort of genuinely believed in the premise of a nonprofit creating AGI because of how important AGI is.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
I feel like posters would have a bunch of interesting cultural commentary and tangents based on the story. It's a big story because it's drama you can gawk at involving notable people that a bunch of people already disliked, not because it's important or anything.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
How have we not discussed the nuzzi/RFK drama yet?
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
out of the hundreds of millions of phones sold, i'm confident several have! here's one on youtube: https://youtube.com/watch?v=RTjy2eFHzRc
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
$common_brand phones in general? All sorts of people, for all sorts of reasons, have taken them apart and carefully looked at the insides. If there was a significant amount of explosive material, it would've been noticed.
My phone, specifically? I don't, of course. Just like I don't know that I don't have a stalker who's about to murder me, and I don't know the CIA doesn't have cameras in my house! Both of which seem more plausible.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
I don't think it's unsustainable, we could use solar for all our current energy consumption if we had to.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
whoops deleted
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
As I said to the other commenter, I'm not defending utilitarianism!
Okay, here is one possible answer: gut feeling, instinct and heuristics. I may choose to hold dog owner
I agree the dog example isn't a very practical one. This is why I brought up the speed limit and vaccine examples, which are actual decisions of this type our society is currently making. I don't think we should decide speed limits on gut feelings and instincts. Or what the proper rules of war are.
The veil of ignorance is, imo, fine but uninformative. If I think, as a matter of fundamental good, the strongest should do what they will and the weak will suffer what they must, or that kings should rule by divine right and subjects should obey, I can simply believe that behind the veil of ignorance too. The veil of ignorance basically says "if everyone's main ends are benefit and pleasure for themselves, and everyone's human experience matters roughly equally, then we should have equality", and that's as true as 1+1=2, but the "veil" argument hides the importance of the assumptions.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I wasn't defending utilitarianism, my implication was that what you thought was utilitarianism in the initial comment was, in fact, a willingness to acknowledge difficult but necessary moral choices. People who die in car crashes and slowness of travel are, literally, fungible, in the sense that society is actively making decisions that exchange one for the other. A decision must and will be made, and whether via utilitarianism, base instincts, or some other method, the two valuable things will be measured and compared.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I think this is a good example of how attacking 'utilitarianism' is used as a shield to avoid difficult moral choices. Society simply has made and will always make difficult choices involving people living and dying. People die, or are severely disabled by, vaccine side effects somewhat regularly. These people are, of course, different people than the people who would've died of the disease itself. But since they're many fewer of the former, we recommend vaccinations. Around forty thousand people will die in traffic accidents next year. Many of them won't be at fault. We could massively lower that number by simply significantly reducing speed limits, yet we choose not to, because we like getting to places quickly. Yet we could also raise the speed limit even more, and get to places even faster, in exchange for more deaths! Utilitarianism or not, people are making these decisions and will make these decisions, based on the tradeoffs between lives and lives, or lives and other useful things.
And the point of OP's thought experiment is to make you think about that. If the choice was 'no cars' or '1 random child dies per year', obviously we're picking the latter, because it's much better than what we have now. If the choice is 'no cars' or '5% of the population dies per year', we'd very quickly ditch cars. I believe you'd make those decisions too, if you had to! So you do recognize that tradeoffs exist, and that tough decisions must be made. And the question then is, how? why? what for?
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
I didn't really believe the story initially just on base rates of wild twitter claims that end up being true. I thought it was plausible, though - rural cultures separated from ours could easily not view cats as a 'cute cuddly pet' but as more of an edible or farm animal, and there are almost a million Haitians in the united states, so I think that it's significantly more likely than not that one Haitian has killed someone's pet, and very plausible that some have eaten pets. (Of course, this means the cat-eating tells us precisely nothing about how problematic Haitians are as immigrants). And in the rufo video, I'm pretty sure that's not a store-bought whole chicken, because that's just not what they look like, although it probably wasn't a cat either. I feel like this in particular doesn't change my views much, in that I think something like that probably/plausibly happened depending on details but any individual case probably didn't. "no bones or fur around the meat", only evidence being cat going missing and her suspicion, and other context clues feel to me like this is fake, but dunno.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Spending more than you tax just hides the tax in inflation! Trump's tax cut just arbitrarily redistributes from the kind of workers who don't take overtime to the kind who do. This is silly. But it, like 'no taxes on tips', is a gimmick that appeals to voters in a way that 'i will lower your taxes by 2.73%' doesn't.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
prescient! as was parent's hannibal lecter mention.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
People conflate 'the whole thing from conception is a fed honeypot' with 'it's a big group and a few of the members are informants'. The two are very different! In most cases the existence of the group is organic and the members and leadership really believe in it, but since they flirt with political violence law enforcement is interested in watching them.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Funny video. IMO some of the accounts he's identifying as fake are fake, but a lot of them are just real people who are kinda dumb and are imitating each others' weird writing styles. Seems probable that some things involving the Chilokian guy are fake, but that's not really that surprising imo, people sometimes make fake identities on the internet and photoshop videos and edit photos, and now that AI exists they use those too!
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
It is a good post. But we've all read posts like it before, and have either internalized the message or don't want to. Abstract housing policy may not be gripping, but it is new!
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Why do something that's new and very hard to implement when you can just raise income taxes
Because the goal isn't just to raise the funds, the goal is to get votes for raising funds, and get attention within the party / progressive ecosystem! An unrealized gains tax just sounds more interesting than a number increasing from 44 to 47.
There are also other object-level reasons, like how borrowing against your unrealized gains avoids capital gains tax. They're not really convincing imo, but the progressive policy ecosystem (not claiming conservatives are better) is already teeming with bad ideas that don't even accomplish their stated goals, so there's not much to explain about another one.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Tbh, I think the attempt to find a subject matter-neutral definition is pointless, and it's fine for 'cancel culture' to just mean when a group 'cancels' someone for poor reasons in ways that have negative consequences. If someone you know IRL regularly promotes pedophilia and isn't super clear about whether or not they'd actually engage in it themselves, it's fine to suggest that others stay away from that person. Whereas if someone IRL regularly promotes traditional conservatism, then it's absurd to suggest others stay away from that person. There's no difference in 'coordination of disassociation' between the two, but just by my gut the second is 'cancel culture' and the first isn't, and that's fine. I think this is closer to the way people actually use 'cancel culture'.
If someone in your gaming clan groomed a minor, so you dm your friends to have your friends ban them from any other groups they're admin in, that is "cancel culture" by your definition (grooming a minor over the internet is speech!), but I don't think the definition should include it. Or in another example, say you're running a regular rationalist meetup, and you hear from other rationalist community members that an infrequent attendee has been stalking/harassing other community members and has generally become unstable. You look at some of the evidence they sent, and in part because of your experience the last time you let such a person come anyway, you ban the person from your meetups indefinitely. This is, by your definition, cancel culture. But I think it's good, because such pruning is necessary to have fun events. This does not feel, to me, like cancel culture. But attempts to kick people out for being conservative or racist look exactly like that! Someone will claim racism necessarily harasses and harms minorities, sexism makes women not want to attend, and so banning the person is just pragmatic. (although because blah blah witches, the overlap between the two groups is much higher than you'd expect by chance) And when they do it, it's cancel culture, and a very central example! The reason we care about cancel culture is because it is/was common and is bad. There's no reason to adopt a formal definition that includes reasonable behavior as well.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
What evidence exists for this that doesn't support the simpler and more obvious theory that dems support higher taxes and taxes on the wealthy to fund redistribution, and this is an increased tax on the wealthy so they support it?
At that point we might as well full moldbug and pay those workers as much to hand-carve stone into beautiful statues while AI runs the roboport by itself.
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