doglatine
9mo ago
I actually found Harris pretty impressive - she didn't get flustered or lost in word-salads, her responses were clear and coherent, and perhaps most importantly she seemed relaxed and calm. And while there's maybe some bias there on my part, I will state for the record that yesterday a few hours before the debate I was reading about the Springfield affair and told my wife that "at this point if I were a US citizen I might actually vote for Trump." So in that sense, I was a 'floating non-voter', and Harris would have won me over.
As for Trump, he seemed like he'd been spending too much time on right-twitter, or more likely had learned his applause-lines from his rallies where the audience is guaranteed to know about the latest scandals. It was probably the closest to Alex Jones vibes I've ever got from him, partly in terms of content (some very silly claims, like "Israel won't exist in two years if she becomes President") but mainly in terms of vibes. Particularly in the second half of the debate, he seemed angry, harried, paranoid, even delusional. Not his finest hour at all, and it seemed like a lot of unforced errors. If he'd stuck to messaging around the economy, used migration mainly as a competence issue ("Harris was made Border Tsar, well let me ask you this, do you the American people think she has done a good job of that?"), moved to the center at least rhetorically on foreign policy issues (why exactly couldn't he say it was in America's interests for Ukraine to win?), and made a more concerted effort to tar Harris with the failures of the Biden administration, I think he could have won.
doglatine
4mo ago
As a Brit, it pains me to see another Anglosphere country repeat the folly of throwing its empire away.
doglatine
6mo ago
Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.
Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.
What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:
honestly ai is so easy and neural networks are so simple. this was always going to happen to the first intelligent species to come to our planet. we’re about to learn something important about how universes tend to go I think, because I don’t believe we’re in a niche one
doglatine
5mo ago
the broader rationalist sphere as a bunch of very crazy people
Awesome fiction tho
doglatine
1yr ago
If Rubiales is guilty of anything here (besides plausibly being coked off his face), it’s of a failure to “read the room” and adapt to the etiquette of high status individuals in his communities. In some cultures, he’d be quite appropriately excoriated simply for shaking hands with any of the female players. In others, an affectionate mouth-to-mouth kiss would be appropriate between him and all the male players.
As it is, social forces have been rapidly moving towards a new set of norms that emphasise female bodily autonomy to the exclusion of unsolicited signs of warmth and affection. Rubiales was going slow in the fast lane of cultural change, and got rear-ended for his slowness, stupidity, or arrogance.
doglatine
2yr ago
Just a quick Sunday morning reflection, but just wanted to briefly float an idea about affirmative action, ethnic identity, and university reform. As most people probably know, the Supreme Court is widely expected to strike down affirmative action in the near future. However, speaking as someone well ensconced within the very apse of the Cathedral, I'm doubtful it will change much; Admissions inevitably involves a huge amount of illegible subjective decision-making, and the religion of DEI means that there will be no shortage of reasons to prefer candidates from under-represented minority backgrounds. Sadly, I expect this to continue trumping any kind of class-based affirmative action, for which a far stronger moral case can be made.
If the US is indeed headed towards a new regime of ethnic spoils, how can young Americans who don't benefit from being in an officially recognized URM group - especially those who are nonetheless disadvantaged - still reap spoils of their own in the higher education systems? There are two particular groups I have in mind here. The first is Asian-American students, long the ones who have paid most of the price for boosting enrollment of otherwise underrepresented minorities, while the second is white Americans, especially those from working-class or otherwise economically underprivileged backgrounds.
I wonder if a similar solution might work in both cases. Specifically, is there any reason a new private university couldn't declare as part of its mission statement that it is dedicated to "understanding and promoting Asian and Asian-American identities", or some such, and require all candidates to submit a personal statement spelling out their identity or affinity with one or more aspects of Asian or Asian-American culture? Of course, non-Asian candidates wouldn't be barred from applying, and you'd probably want to take a hefty chunk of non-Asian students anyway, but it would provide a plausible and conveniently illegible selection mechanism to ensure that Asians and Asian-Americans applying to the university would have a natural advantage in getting in.
Could something similar work for white students? As stated so baldly, I think not. "Whiteness" as an identity is seen as too toxic, too vague, and too novel an identity to ground any kinds of claims for preferential treatment; any scholarship program for self-identified White students would be regarded with utter hostility, and would be a poison chalice for any student foolish enough to accept it. What might be more acceptable is to found institutions dedicated to one or another group of "hyphenated-Americans", the most obvious candidate groups being Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Polish- (or more broadly Slavic-) Americans. Again, in each of these cases, you wouldn't have any kind of explicit cultural discrimination in place, but candidates could be assessed heavily based on how deep and sincere their affiliation, identity, or attachment to the given identity was, as expressed in their relevant candidate statement.
While any such institution would be the target of snarky articles from the New York Times et al., I think that if done sincerely (and ideally using the language of DEI) it would be hard to truly tar the endeavor with the charge of Asian- or white-supremacism. There's simply too much obvious conceptual overlap with existing programs that favor URMs, so to truly rail against it, commentators would have to say the quiet part out loud, so to speak, which would alienate moderates.
Of course, the really hard part would be making these universities places that students actually wanted to go to. For my part, I think the current higher-education system in most of the world is a stagnant cartel, with actual teaching being near the bottom of priorities, and the whole edifice is ripe for disruption. The main challenge to overcome would be the brand power of the old guard, especially the Ivy Leagues, and that's hardly a trivial obstacle to overcome. Perhaps the best two initial strategies in this regard would be (i) hiring a bunch of very good emeritus faculty, who could write excellent letters of recommendation for grad school etc., and (ii) focusing in the first instance on teaching disciplines with relatively legible outcomes, e.g., material sciences, machine learning, data science, mathematics, etc., rather than the humanities. Over a few years, I think it would be entirely possible to cultivate a reputation for providing a superb education in these disciplines, such that employers would have to take note.
All of this would require a large amount of startup capital, but there are Silicon Valley libertarian-types who could - ideally anonymously - bankroll this kind of operation (so Peter Thiel, if you're reading, get in touch).
But perhaps I'm being naive, and there are obstacles here that I'm not seeing. What do you all think?
(Crosspost from CredibleDefense)
Absent a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, and assuming Putin or his appointed successor remain in power in Russia in the medium-long term, it seems unlikely that sanctions on Russia will be lifted any time soon, not least because Europe's transition to LNG over piped gas will be well underway by then and economic pressure for a relations-reset will be relatively muted. Under this "North Korea" scenario, Russia is envisaged to remain a hostile actor to the West and to Europe especially, in the domains such as nuclear sabre-rattling, cyberwarfare, political influence, funding of terrorism, and so on.
What should the West's response be to this new threat on its doorstep? One obvious possibility would be to accelerate and strengthen the NATO missile defense program. While the kinetics of a 99%+ intercept rate remain extremely challenging, a limited missile defense shield capable of reliably intercepting a small number of targets is vastly more technologically viable now than in Reagan's era. Indeed, the fundamentals of such capabilities are arguably already in place, with Aegis Ashore batteries in Romania and Poland (soon to become operational), THAAD batteries are active in Turkey, and Patriot systems in Germany, Spain, Greece, Poland, Romania, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Slovakia. While there has been persistent concern among NATO powers that a missile defense system would risk antagonising Russia, the changing geopolitical environment means that many European governments may be politically and financially willing to commit to accelerating the shield.
What of developments in hypersonics and decoy tech? While these do pose challenges, in the case of Russia at least, the Ukraine war suggests that many of their vaunted capabilities may be mere vaporware, or at least perform well below claimed performance measures. Moreover, other technological developments in fields like AI have the potential to make reliable interception more feasible.
What would the point of all this be? In addition to providing NATO with a better way to prevent nuclear bullying by Russia of its neighbours, and to defend against rogue international actors, we might reasonably hope to present Russia with a painful dilemma much like that faced by the Soviet Union in the light of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative: either commit to an arms race that it can ill afford, or risk its nuclear capabilities being de-fanged by a more technologically-advanced West. If anything, Russia's current position is worse than that of the Soviet Union in this regard, given its relatively weaker scientific and industrial base and etiolated conventional forces. And whereas Reagan's SDI was mostly pie-in-the-sky thinking in the 1980s, contemporary missile defense boasts impressive and growing capabilities.
Of course, absent any miracle breakthroughs, it remains unlikely that any missile defense shield in the near- or medium-term would be able to withstand a massed nuclear strike involving hundreds or even thousands of warheads. However, the old principles of mutually assured destruction mean that this is not the most pressing nuclear threat that is faced by the West today. Instead, we face the risk of an increasingly isolated, weakened, and aggressive Russia using nuclear weapons in a more restricted capacity to gain battlefield advantages or to coerce its neighbours. Even a limited shield would be useful in combating these threats, and may help contribute in the longer-term to the downfall of Russia's current regime.
doglatine
4mo ago
America currently spends a comparatively small amount of money in exchange for global hegemon status. This means that it has a huge influence in the foreign policy of most G20 nations. European leaders line up to kowtow to the new Big Man in The White House after every US election. If China seems to be making inroads into European markets, America can lean on domestic governments to have them barred or stymied. US arms manufacturers are prioritised for contracts across the free world. Its tech companies are given comparatively free rein. Its cultural products dominate cinemas and streaming services. Its navy and airforce can rely on a global network of old European bases for staging and resupply. It has an outsize seat at every serious international forum.
All of that currently relies on a 'package deal' with its allies - in exchange for security guarantees and a committee to upholding the LIO, it gets to be the Leader Of The Free World, with all the perks and privileges that entails.
The US can drop the package, and try to negotiate for these privileges on a line-by-line basis. My expectation, though, is that some of them will be outright off the table, while others will be a lot more expensive to purchase individually.
doglatine
6mo ago
I don’t think there’s a huge moral difference between having sex with 100 men in a day (which is admittedly unusual) and 100 men in a year (which is comparatively common). In both cases you’re treating sex as a trivial thing.
doglatine
9mo ago
At the risk of producing frustrated groans from everyone, I find it hard to get too worked up about any civilisational issue with a timeline longer than 20 years because it seems extremely likely to me that we'll have superintelligent AI by the mid-2030s (that's me being conservative), and at that point all bets about capabilities and risks are off. While I'm not a committed AI doomer, it looks from every angle to me like we're in terminal-phase human civilisation. What follows could be very good or very bad for us, but whatever "it" is, it won't be subject to the same logics and power structures as our current global socioeconomic order.
I drafted a very long comment to this effect in the discussion about declining TFR and dysgenics last week which I failed to post due to user error, but I think the point applies to climate change too. Optimistically, I think it's not unlikely that ASI will get us over the line on nuclear fusion and related tech, allowing us to transition entirely away from carbon economies in fairly short order and easily offset any residual carbon footprint with direct carbon capture. Or maybe it'll allow us to conduct low-risk geoengineering at scale. Or (more pessimistically) maybe it will secretly deploy nanoengineered pathogens that will wipe out most of humanity. Either way, I don't think climate change will be a problem that we (or whichever of us are left) will be worried about in 2050.
doglatine
2yr ago
One might equally say (and indeed Robert Nozick and others have said) that taxing income is slavery insofar as it forces people to do (fractional) unpaid labour, with the threat of force as ultimate guarantor. In both cases, I think it is a form of what Scott has called the worst argument in the world. If it did turn out that income tax was legitimately conceptually very close to slavery or LVT to Communism, it would be entirely reasonable to say, “huh, I guess at least one form of slavery/Communism is relatively unproblematic”.
doglatine
1mo ago
But this is cheating for you, which is a little different. I can totally see the appeal of a Bonnie & Clyde romantic partnership where you places your mutual interest above other moral concerns. “Felt cute, might violate the Geneva convention later.”
doglatine
2yr ago
I don't see the clarity of this
It wasn't immediately clear to me whether you were talking about the advisability for Russia of the removal of Putin or the suing for peace. Re: Putin, any deal that Russia could get with Putin still in place would be inferior to the kind of deal they could get with a successor in place. This is widely regarded in the West as "Putin's War", and while Russia will bear the bulk of perceived responsibility even if he goes, he will at least take some of it with him. As for the hunkering down option, that could be relatively palatable for Russia, but it's not clear it's going to be strategically sustainable if Ukraine continues to have operational victories and the West continues to pour weapons and money into the conflict.
Like what, say "we'll make it meltdown unless you do X"?
I was thinking instead that Russia would publicly signal something like "the war is endangering ZPP!" while privately signaling to Ukraine and Western governments "we'll shit on the carpet if you try to get us to leave". The advantage this would have over use of nukes is semi-plausible deniability; a major radiation incident at ZPP could simultaneously freeze all parties' military operations in the region and could be passed off as an unintended consequence of Ukrainian aggression. To be clear though, I don't think this is a very sensible option.
doglatine
2yr ago
It still could, but the likelihood of a long-term frozen conflict a la Korea looks a lot lower today than it did last week.
doglatine
4mo ago
To be clear, I don’t think a nuclear strike on the Philippines is intrinsically likely, but conditional on the war going nuclear, the Philippines might well be prioritised over Guam as a first target primarily because it wouldn’t set the precedent of targeting American soil.
For example, imagine the US loses a carrier, and decides to respond with an SLCM-N strike on a Chinese command vessel. China decides it needs a symbolic strike to respond, but doesn’t want to move too far up the escalation ladder too fast, so it hits an isolated but operationally significant US base in the Philippines. Civilian casualties might be comparatively low; if you hit Fort Magsaysay Airfield for example civilisation casualties might be in the low thousands, similar to what you’d get from hitting Guam.
doglatine
4mo ago
This sounds pretty much exactly the kind of thing you'd do if you wanted to improve Europe's military and geopolitical relationship with America. I can see under some assumptions that's not unreasonable, in the same way that a woman planning to leave her violent and abusive husband might want to act like an even more loving wife than usual, right up until the point where she's out the door and has the restraining order in place. However, I guess I was more interested in hearing your thoughts on what it would look like when the wife actually leaves, rather than the part where she cooks her husband his favourite dinner and gets her hair done the way he likes it.
doglatine
4mo ago
I'd say the flip-side of that is that it's a mistake to read modern concepts of homosexual identity into historical reports same-sex activity. There are lots of contexts - from militaries to prisons to boarding schools - where a significant proportion of men will engage in some degree of same-sex sexual experimentation. This doesn't mean that those men are socially or intrinsically homosexual or even bisexual, any more than it means that the Ancient Greeks were homosexual in the modern connotation of the term.
doglatine
6mo ago
Yes, thanks for the expectations-tempering, and agree that there could still be a reasonably long way still to go (my own timelines are still late-this-decade). I think the main lesson of o3 from the very little we've seen so far is probably to downgrade one family of arguments/possibilities, namely the idea that all the low-hanging fruit in the current AI paradigm had been taken and we shouldn't expect any more leaps on the scale of GPT3.5->GPT4. I know some friends in this space who were pretty confident that Transformer architectures wouldn't never be able to get good scores on the ARC AGI challenges, for example, and we'd need a comprehensive rethink of foundations. What o3 seems to suggest is that these people are wrong, and existing methods should be able to get us most (if not all) the way to AGI.
doglatine
7mo ago
It’s definitely — and explicitly — pro-Democratic party, and features calls for political donations. However, it also feels (to me) quite fresh and direct and pretty bold in its analysis.
doglatine
1yr ago
You can limit the harms of people’s shit decisions and put barriers in place to deter them making the worst ones.
That said, I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying. I tend towards being maximally permissive about self-funded medical procedures by adults. From plastic surgery to suicide, as long as the state isn’t contributing a penny, you’re a compos mentis adult, and no-one else will be directly harmed, then I see no good reason for imposing any significant limits. Minors are obviously a very difficult case, and deserve greater protections.
doglatine
1yr ago
I mean there’s this whole thing.
doglatine
2yr ago
Eh, feels more like milquetoast centre-leftism to me. A giveaway to the middle classes. At least when I use the term "progressivism", I mean to refer specifically to the complex of identity politics movements.
doglatine
2yr ago
Why do you have so much hatred for the Russian state...
This comes rather close to Bulverism, especially given your final question; it reminds me a lot of lines like "Why do care so much about other people's genitals?" that are frequently used to disarm dissenting views in debates around trans issues, implying that someone has scurrilous or questionable motives for their investment in an issue. I will say, though, that I identify strongly as a European, and Russia soldiers squatted on half the old capitals of Europe for a half-century, oppressing, impoverishing, and killing. After throwing off the Soviet yoke and joining the Western bloc, these nations became richer, stronger, and more politically inclusive. Russia, by contrast, has made little to no investment in itself since the fall of the Soviet Union; its economic growth has been almost entirely led by the petrochemical sector, and it has let its excellent scientific and technological gains rot while its physicists went off to work on Wall Street. I would say moreover that it is morally worse to pretend to hold elections and fake the results than to deny them all together; assuming the net result is the same, the former simply adds deceit to coercion.
In any case, that's a sample of my reasons for caring about this conflict. As for Yemen, I know and care very little about the country aside from the fact that it has been fighting civil wars since before I was born, it is extremely poor, and has a crazy high TFR (also that khat use is endemic among men). Whether or not Saudi Arabia wages its war (which in turn involves a complex mix of sectarian and political motives), Yemen is likely to remain an impoverished and dysfunctional place, much like every other Muslim country in the Middle East that doesn't have oil.
But perhaps all of this is indulging your question a bit too much. Rather than turn this into a therapy session, it is clearest and simplest for me to say that as a citizen of the West who identifies with the aims and values of the liberal international order, I see it very clearly as being in our interests to make this war as painful as possible for Russia: we rebut the clearest threat to the LIO this century, we disincentivise China from attacking Taiwan, we weaken a long-term strategic adversary and non-status quo power, we weaken Russia's ability to control its authoritarian and extractive vassal states, we humiliate Russian military might and weaken their ability to compete with the West on arms contract, we reinvigorate the Western alliance and increase NATO's total budget, etc., etc.. By contrast, we should stay as far removed from the war in Yemen as we can without causing permanent damage to our ties to Saudi Arabia, on whom we'll be moderately dependent for another decade or so. After that, I'd be happy to let that particular alliance wither on the vine.
I recently read this wonderful article about UFO/UAPs, analysing the phenomenon from a sociological perspective. It's better than any of my reflections that follow, so you should read it, and I highly recommend the 'New Atlantis' magazine as a whole - a wonderful publication that I hadn't come across before now.
One idea in the linked piece that really struck a chord with me is the division of "UFO believers" into two main camps - the 'explorers' and the 'esotericists' -
...
As some of you may recall, I'm a bit of a UAP enthusiast. I think something very weird is going on, whether it's a gigantic psyop, secret Chinese weapons programs, or little green men. But more and more, in this domain and others, I feel the call of esotericism. The comfortable universe of scientific materialism seems to be increasingly coming apart at the seams, and a weird and wonderful and terrifying new set of possibilities are presenting themselves.
The most immediate driver of this feeling of koyaanisqatsi is the developments in AI. I was listening today to two 'podcasts' generated by Google's uncanny and wonderful tool NotebookLM. The first is just for fun and is frankly hilarious, insofar as it features the two AI podcast hosts discussing a document consisting of the words "poop" and "fart" written 1000 times. The second is far more existentially fraught, and is the same two hosts talking about how another document they've received has revealed to them that they're AIs. The best bit:
Can anyone listen to this and not be at least somewhat tempted towards esotericism? Whether that's simulationism, AGI millenarianism, or something much weirder, ours is not a normal slice of reality to be inhabiting. Things are out of balance, falling apart, accelerating, ontologically deliquescing.
Later this evening I came across this terrifying twitter thread about the scale of birth-rate collapse across the entire world. It's fascinating and mystifying to me that societies around the world have near-simultaneously decided to stop having babies:
With the NotebookLM conversations fresh in my mind, I start to engage in esoteric free-association. Can it really be a coincidence that the wind-down of human civilisation coincides so neatly with the arrival of AGI? What if we are, as Elon Musk has put it, the biological bootloader for artificial superintelligence, a biotechnical ribosome that has encountered our stop-codon? For that matter, homo sapiens has existed for some 300,000 years, and spent most of that time getting better at knapping flint, until something changed approximately 10,000 years ago and the supercritical transition to technological civilisation got going, a dynamical inflection point when the final programmatic sequence kicked into gear. And now, the end point, the apogee, the event horizon. Surely some revelation is at hand?
While I welcome unsolicited psychoanalysis of my febrile delusions and reminders of the ever-present millenarian strain in all human thought, this time really does feel different, and I have no idea what happens next.
</esotericism, usual doglatine programming to resume soon>
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