faceh
1yr ago
Sure, if we also ignore any timelines on the the expected event occurring, and ignore whether we have the ability to impact the expected utility outcomes here. We're not JUST talking about the probability of humanity going extinct, although yes, that factor should loom larger than any other.
The flip side of AI doomerism is the belief that if we get a friendly AI then that's an instant win condition and we get post-scarcity in short order. i.e. heaven.
Funny enough, though, people don't seem to argue as vehemently that the risk' of creating a benevolent is basically zero, they seem to think that that's the default assumption?
faceh
1yr ago
If you took a 200 IQ big-brain genius, cut off his arms and legs, blinded him, and then tossed him in a piranha tank I don't think he would MacGyver his way out.
Is he able to talk? Because if so, I'd bet there's a good chance he can come up with a sequence of words that he can utter that would either cause you not to want to throw him in the piranha tank, OR would cause a bystander to attempt to rescue him.
The existence of an information channel is a means of influencing the outside world, and intelligence is a way to manipulate information to achieve your instrumental goals. And spoken language MAY be a sufficiently dense method of information transmission to influence the outside world enough to find a way out of the Piranha tank.
Indeed, if he said the words "I have a reliable method of earning 1 billion dollars in a short period of time, completely legally, and I'll let you have 90% of it" you might not just not throw him in, but also go out and get him top-of-the-line prosthetics and cyborg-esque sight restoration in order to let him make you rich.
As long as you believed he could do it and was trustworthy.
Which is basically the scenario we're facing now, with AIs 'promising' incredible wealth and power to those who build them.
I'm not sure there's ever going to be a full solution, since detection can be so difficult. Although if all game information was kept completely server-side, and the player was just receiving a datastream (like Google Stadia or Amazon Luna) it would fix a lot of the issue.
But I also place a pretty high premium on owning and controlling my own hardware, so I dislike this solution.
Another option would be a persistent, cross-platform, cross-game reputation system tied to player IDs, where proven instances of cheating would follow the player between games and games can do their best to match players with good reputations to each other.
But THAT will of course be abused for other purposes too so... I really don't know.
Oh yeah, the other problem is that cheating can be dialed up or down too. So even if someone isn't using a full-on aimbot, they can still use tools that make them just a tiny bit more accurate on average while still looking like 'natural' gameplay. So cheats can be fine-tuned to a much higher degree than detection can be.
Bring back couch-based multiplayer and LAN parties, so cheaters can immediately be nut-tapped upon detection.
faceh
1yr ago
This can achieved by having multiple accounts and switching based on your level of intensity.
Sure, there's plenty I can do 'manually' to try to fix the issues I'm speaking of. The big one is I just play games with people I already know.
Genuinely, I think I'd be satisfied if all games just included a 'casual' and 'ranked' mode by default, so I can hop into ranked if I ever feel like going all out and seeing how good I can REALLY be.
But I'm still going to point out my issue with the current state of game design.
And if I'm being fully open, my core problem with multiplayer online games these days is rampant cheating, since I can't even feel like the hard-fought matches were fair.
faceh
1yr ago
Agreed. although when they disparity is too great it can be very hard to notice what you're doing 'wrong' when no matter what you try you get stomped.
Because at the apex of skill level in certain games the players can pull of stuff that genuinely looks impossible.
That said, getting absolutely roflstomped by a high level player can be extremely amusing as you sit there in awe of their effortless dominance.
faceh
1yr ago
Yep.
I think the general solution that works well enough is to simply separate out 'casual' and 'ranked' mode, with the expectation that in casual mode you'll get matched with people of wildly different skill levels and competitiveness and thus the game isn't going to be able to keep your winrate consistent
The bigger problem to is how ubiquitous cheating has apparently become, so that you can't be sure that any given match was 'fair' and thus the whole concept of playing multiplayer online with randos gets soured.
I mean, I'm explicitly asking to be matched against people who will give me a challenge without forcing me to pull out ALL the stops in order to compete, and will fight fair in any event.
It's like a boxer cutting weight to go down a weight class. I still want a real fight, but I don't want to have to focus on optimizing my performance along every possible metric to stand a chance of winning.
The problem, insofar as there is one, is that Elo is a metric, not a target. And like all metrics measuring things people want, it immediately gets treated like a target. Which doesn't really make it lose its value as a metric because it's very hard to fake, but it does make people miserable.
Yeah. But we can surely design algorithms that consider ELO but also consider, I guess, the fact that ELO doesn't capture all the factors that might go into the outcome. In some games, weird random factors can impact who wins, or certain particularly cheesy strategies work really well unless you specifically counter them.
Chess doesn't have the problem, mind.
Maybe design the game to ask "Was the previous match fun for you?" and takes your feedback to figure out what level of competitiveness you actually enjoy.
I dunno.
faceh
1yr ago
I can grant that.
But the net result of making it harder for men to act as authority figures in general is to make it simultaneously harder for them to act as authority figures for a specific person.
So basically, if women want to make themselves independent of "males" so they're free to choose which male they want to depend on, it is fair to ask how that's working out for them.
faceh
1yr ago
As I recall we put down some towels, also the meal was crepes so not the messiest food ever.
There's some hope that robotics and automation are going to stave off the impact. Life extension/anti-aging tech will probably be too late for the most part.
If we get AGI then no point in trying to predict the world after that.
But more to the point, Gen Z is the smallest generation (in the west) yet. Even if they started popping out kids like particularly horny rabbits there will be a protracted squeeze waiting on those kids to become productive citizens. And they don't seem to be having kids. So that's whence my 'fifty years' vague estimate comes from.
Will we even have enough people with the capacity to keep an increasingly advanced civilization functional?
faceh
1yr ago
While that should be a goal, I think it's far more effective to start with something personal that you can commit to daily: physical exercise within a martial context. The results really do permeate every aspect of life; social capability, overall confidence, (controlled) risk taking, career performance. Not to mention basic health and energy levels (side note: the wealthiest guy I ever could call a friend ALWAYs would say "health over wealth. I'd trade it all to have my knees back").
This is effectively a statement of my overall mindset for my daily life.
I work and try to perform well because that's good, but I would never, ever sacrifice my health to keep my job.
As a military-adjacent dude (never served, but did contracting for a long time) I really see this in the actual badasses (combat arms, SoF dudes) who leave the service and still really train hard on guns. It's partially habit and partially them keeping up a readily available social network, but the ones who keep themselves in shape, do a combat sport, and do meaningful range drills really do walk around with that cliche "cool confidence" that's impossible to fake.
Yup, and interestingly I don't think I would ever recommend a guy go the military route solely for the fitness and confidence boost, but one can't deny that it would provide those benefits if you commit to it.
Genuinely, males 'evolved' to have a Männerbund that provides them the structure and an outlet for aggression against an acceptable opponent.
But in a world as comfortable as the one we live in, there's really no room for such an organization outside the military... except in the martial arts context. And even that can lead to an unhealthy place (see Andrew Tate) and yet I think without that we end up with a specimen of male that is of minimal use to anyone, not even himself, and knows this.
According to utilitarianism, making them falsely believe X is just as good as X being true.
Unless there would be an immense amount of disutility created from either people believing X, or from them eventually finding out X is false.
I think there are situations where lies are harmless, even if later discovered.
The utilitarian calculation need not rest on the assumption that the lie will remain intact indefinitely.
Well except this is the same "you value property above people?" arguments made in the riots from antifa to BLM, and who has to clean up the mess after the glass-smashing? The ordinary people that the glass-smashers claim to be representing.
Fair... except that destroying the Mona Lisa isn't directly demolishing the livelihoods of your fellow citizen.
Likewise, the glass-smashers weren't acting out in a response to a harm that was inflicted on THEM PERSONALLY. So there's a much tighter justification available to Helen.
Helen is motivated by the same basic, instinctual drives that caused Bad Guy to do what he did, and nobody comes out of this looking like the better person.
Right, but in the circumstances that Johnson managed to contrive, her position was basically "let the villain not just get away with murder, but thrive for his complete theft of wealth that was properly Andi's... and that he committed murder to maintain... or force him into a position that he can't readily wiggle out of."
Indeed, there's perhaps an argument that if Andi was the true genius behind Alpha's success, and thus the Billions of dollars in wealth at issue would have, by law, passed to Andi's only surviving heir Helen, that her actions at the end were her own attempted reclamation of wealth that she would have received anyway had it not been for the thief's actions.
If we accept the premise that Helen would have been rightfully entitled to everything Andi rightfully owned after Andi wrongfully died, then her act of destruction at the end was really only destroying things that were hers by right anyway. A way of preventing the thief from keeping the benefit of his ill-gotten gains, which historically has been an oft-used tactic ("If I can't have it then you can't either"), and destroying the Mona Lisa was her way of making it stick.
What was her other option? Go for a long-shot legal solution (that had already failed Andi) and then accept the eventual loss and ignore that her family's entire legacy was stolen out from under her?
I think this gets towards the importance of having some grounding in tradition and culture as some kind of guardrail against falling into inescapable pits like that.
We may have a varied and complex set of values, but there are some values that MAYBE we can agree to intentionally minimize since for reasons that may not be understood they simply did not survive through our own evolutionary history.
Which can likely be done whilst still recognizing the individual's freedom to dissent.
faceh
1yr ago
Yeah, I'm proposing a policy solution that might be politically viable, not one that currently exists.
You keep going to the Corporate merger thing, which I may even grant is on point. AIs increase the size in productivity terms if not headcount and complexity of firms in weird ways, I'm sure.
But by most counts less than <40% of all lawyers are employed in those huge firms and corporate environments.
more data here:
https://www-media.floridabar.org/uploads/2019/03/2018-Economics-Survey-Report-Final.pdf
It seems like you expect that the larger corporate merger firms will just keep growing in size to absorb the rest of the lawyers practicing elsewhere?
Because most lawyers aren't working on complex corporate law.
The average person's will won't get more complex. A home purchase agreement won't get more complex, and small-business contracts won't get much more complex.
Likewise, most civil suits involving two private citizens or small corporations won't get more complex.
I sure hope criminal defense and prosecution won't get more complex.
So going with your model, this is implying a future where almost all legal services are provided by a relatively small handful of huge and growing firms having to handle increasingly complex transactional law, with complexity increasing with the power of the AIs in use, ad infinitum.
faceh
1yr ago
This seems like an obvious fix, and would also maybe save us from tedious Election Night coverage that all the networks do with reporting every single miniscule change in the race over the course of hours and also racing to 'call' an election as quickly as possible. Would be nice to just be able to tune in once at like 11 p.m. when outcomes are known and just get a brief report reflecting said outcomes, and which are still in flux.
Although I admit that the 2016 election was amazingly high quality entertainment for me as the unexpected Trump win became apparent through the slow tally of the votes.
I'd guess, but I do NOT know for certain, there's probably some kind of rules around gov't transparency that requires results to reported as quick as possible, even piecemeal ones, so this probably will not change.
But as you say, avoiding these periods where some outcomes are known, some remain uncertain, and there are brief windows in which malicious actors can attempt to flip an outcome once they know how many votes they must fabricate would really shore up faith in overall election integrity.
I just doubt there's any way to ensure that all states get their counts done at approximately the same time, and having periods where some outcomes have been determined but not reported yet while waiting on others to catch up can make it look like there is something being hidden anyway.
faceh
1yr ago
No one's vote materially influences outcomes. A Democrat in Idaho has every bit as much influence as a Democrat in California.
Yes, you're making my point about moving even stronger.
why should they uproot their life to be governed by people who happen to share their party affiliation?
They shouldn't. They should be allowed to secede and be ruled by people whose politics they prefer, or nobody at all. That's clear to me at least. It solves for almost all political gripes at once.
But Democrats consider that idea (secession) verboten so in absence of that, why do you suggest that casting a pointless vote is a reasonable action?
faceh
1yr ago
For our purposes I'm pretending that Third parties have some influence when they put forth a candidate.
But if we go with the "all political candidates are inherently the product of the party machine" then it suggests one should REALLY focus on improving their own party's machinery rather than futzing with the opposition's.
Or focus on burning both down.
faceh
1yr ago
Anyone living in one of these states would be well within their rights to vote in the Republican primary.
They'd also be well within their rights to move to a state with friendlier politics or push their own party to field candidates who are more competitive in the above states in question, so as to make the available options better.
Not sure why "cast a fruitless vote in a primary consisting mostly of people I inherently disagree with" somehow comes across as the optimal choice for influencing outcomes.
I'm really not sure how one can conclude this tactic is actually effective at improving the situation.
Yes, and in most such communities, there are already "bad hombres" in control, and they spend an excess amount of time combating other bad hombres to stay on top of the pile.
Quokka-land isn't going to be more likely to have bad actors, indeed the whole reason quokkas exist is because they lucked into a habitat where they have no predators. The predators would have to be introduced from outside the community.
When's the last time that happened?
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