I often think of the possibility that ML is right now our best and maybe only chance to avoid some massive economic downturns due to a whole hell of a lot of chickens coming home to roost all at the same time.
I will ignore the AI doomer arguments which would suggest protracted economic pain is preferable to complete annihilation of the human species for these purposes.
I am in a state of mind where I'm not sure whether we're about to see a new explosion in productivity akin to a new industrial revolution as we get space-based industry (Starship), broad-scale automation of most industries and boosted productivity, and a massive boost in human lifespans thanks to bio/medical breakthroughs... OR
Maybe we're about to see a global recession as energy prices spike, the boomer generation retires and switches from production and investment to straight consumption or widespread unrest as policies seek to avert this problem, international relations (and thus trade) sour, even if there's no outright war, and a general collapse in living standards in virtually everywhere but North America.
How the hell should one place bets when the near-term future could be a sharp downward spike OR a sharp exponential curve upwards? Yes, one should assume that things continue along at approximately the same rate they always have. Status quo is usually the best bet, but ALL the news I'm seeing is more than sufficient to overcome my baseline skepticism.
But the possible collapse due to demographic, economic, and geopolitical issues seems inevitable in a way that the gains from Machine Learning do not.
The problem, which you gesture at, is that this world is going to be very heavily centralized and thus will be very unequal at the very least in terms of power and possibly in terms of wealth.
ALREADY, ChatGPT is showing how this would work. Rather than a wild, unbounded internet full of various sites that contain information that you may want to use, and thus thousands upon thousands of people maintaining these different information sources, you've got a single site, with a single interface, which can answer any question you may have just as well.
Which is great as a consumer, except now ALL that information is controlled by a single entity and locked away in a black box where you can only get at it via an interface which they can choose to lock you out of arbitrarily. If you previously ran a site that contained all the possible information about, I dunno, various strains of bananas and their practical uses, such that you were the preferred one-stop shop resource for banana aficionados and the banana-curious, you now cannot possibly hope to compete with an AI interface which contains all human-legible information about bananas, but also tomatoes, cucumbers, papayas, and every other fruit or vegetable that people might be curious about.
So you shut down your site, and now the ONLY place to get all that banana-related info is through ChatGPT.
This does not bode well, to me.
And this applies to other ML models too. Once there's a trained model that is better at identifying cavities than almost any human expert, this is now the only place anyone will go to get opinions about cavities.
The one thing about wealth inequality, however, is that it's pretty fucking cheap to become a capital-owner. For $300 you can own a piece of Microsoft. See my aforementioned issues about being unsure where to bet, though. Basically, I'm dumping money into companies that are likely to explode in a future of ubiquitous ML and AI models.
Of course, if ML/AI gets way, WAY better at capital allocation than most human experts, we hit a weird point where your best bet is to ask BuffetGPT where you should put your money for maximum returns based on your time horizon, and again this means that the ONLY place people will trust their money is the the best and most proven ML model for investment decisions.
Actually, this seems like a plausible future for humanity, where competing AI are unleashed on the stock market and are constantly moving money around at blinding speeds (and occasionally going broke) trying to outmaneuver each other and all humans can do is entrust one or several of these AIs with their own funds and pray they picked a good one.
I don't think there is any kind of good faith equivalency there
I'm not sure there's much 'good faith' to be had anywhere in the pronoun debate.
There's very little way to tell the difference between sincere/trolling/mentally ill if we already grant that a person's pronouns are based solely on their mental experience of their own identity, not any externally verifiable signal. You can't tell if someone is 'making it up' or not because you can't really get a peep into their true thoughts unless, perhaps, you get to know them extremely well.
Privileging a persons' inner 'reality' over the actual observable reality that we can confirm with our own eyes is a recipe for conflict. I can never be fully certain if the 'facts' someone is trying to assert are honest beliefs or an attempt to fool me into taking some course of action, when the facts are dependent solely on what's in their head. This also goes for people who claim particular emotional responses to a particular stimuli! Trust CAN be built, mind you.
As I indicated my problem isn't so much with an individual wanting to be called something other than the obvious (hence, nicknames!) but with being expected to buy into the larger game this represents. A game that, I remind you, doesn't have any prescribed rules and whatever rules do exist, haven't been discussed or agreed to, and yet violation of which can be punished via social means.
You want to be polite and assume that you won't be pilloried for rejecting 'made up' pronouns, but there's literally nothing that makes your boundaries the ones that matter. They're already inserting stuff like "Xe/Xim/Xir" into the lexicon.
So I'll object to the game itself every time someone tries to get me to play it, unless and until we have the discussion regarding the rules.
But end of the day I anticipate that they want the rules to remain fluid and convoluted, since being able to hold them to any standard would diminish their ability to use this game to push for social outcomes that they want and to punish defectors, which is the nature of the true meta-game being played. Or so I believe.
Much simpler for me to engineer my personal social group to avoid people who make a big deal of pronouns than to openly accept and appease every person I encounter, including on the internet, for no personal benefit.
Ding ding ding.
We're got some sad, maybe terrifying precedents of what will happen when a huge portion of males reach 'maturity' without romantic or sexual success.
They fall back on reliable distractions (current iteration being video games and anime), and opt out of social activity entirely. They make money solely to spend it on these trivial pursuits, and they shy away from doing the difficult work of self improvement, much less the work of improving the world around them.
I've made the point before, if your male population has no 'buy in' to the health of society/a nation at large, you can't very well expect to call upon them to leap to said society's defense if needed, or to sacrifice themselves for the good of people who otherwise don't give a shit about them.
I don't think it's even that ODD for some huge portion of men to be functionally cut out of polite society in general. Gangs are fueled by this. I do think it's odd for this many of them, at THIS young of an age, to have already thrown in the towel.
How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?
Yeahhhh. Seems pretty obvious that the perps in almost every case are people who have determined (correctly?) that they have very little to lose, and also very little to look forward to on their current life trajectory.
This is why Stephen Paddock was and is such an anomaly, since he seemed to have his life 'together' for most pursuits and purpose, though his personal life was very fraught with struggle, it must be admitted.
There's probably some other "X factor" in there that causes them to lash out rather than simply collapse into a stupor of video games and drugs and degenerate gambling on the stock market.
But the rise in suicide, the rise in rates of depression, opioid overdoses, the increase in dissatisfaction with life, the general purposelessness that seems to be permeating whole generations... it all likely has a similar root cause with those few who decide to go on rampages.
faceh
1yr ago
At a bare minimum, the birthrates have collapsed... indeed to below replacement. A naive projection of this trend would mean some kind of decline is inevitable because of this, alone.
It's entirely possible to chalk a lot of this up to liberal democracy, or, perhaps, the wealth and freedom this brings to the average citizen.
Material conditions have improved, but a lot of basic stats regarding human happiness have declined, and unless people start having more kids or we crack the aging problem, in 50 years we aren't going to have the manpower needed to maintain the services we depend on.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Tiktok is a source of this issue but more like a warning sign. Such an app wouldn't, one would argue, be able to take such strong root in a healthy culture.
The problem with a 50% winrate is that it isn't satisfying. The problem with ELO is that you can see it go up and down and it might demoralize you. The problem with hidden ELO is that you start feeling the algorithm working behind the scenes. A 50% winrate feels like a slog. It burns people out and they stop playing.
I made be a weird outlier, but I find a 50% winrate perfectly acceptable and satisfying as long as the matches feel fair and the competition is close.
I neither want to feel like I'm effortlessly cruising to victory nor like I'm struggling just to keep pace. Okay, there are times I'd like to go on a power trip and just crush everyone, but that's not the same kind of satisfaction as a hard-fought victory.
I think the 'problem,' then, with most matchmaking algos is that they aren't so good at optimizing for close wins except at the very highest levels, and only in games like Chess where random factors effecting outcomes are minimized.
Basically, if you get a couple 'lucky' wins you get paired with people who will absolutely stomp you and that is demoralizing. If you get stomped badly enough you're paired with people who are probably not so good and you win handily, which increases your morale but isn't as satisfying as eking out a hard-fought win. Win too hard and you get launched up back to the big leagues to be smashed.
Maybe 1/4 of the matches you play, if that, are genuinely close to your actual skill level. Thus, the 'quality' of every match, in terms of its enjoyability, varies immensely even if your win rate is consistent.
This yo-yo effect is what I find frustrating. I'd like to play against people whom I feel challenge me when I'm playing at my general 'best' without exerting myself to try to keep pace.
If AI can optimize for that better I'd say "AWESOME." If that means I end up playing against AIs that are optimized to give me that experience, I'd be rather annoyed.
faceh
8mo ago
I am really curious as to whether you think that is actually, in the reality we currently inhabit, going to work out for them, if we assume that the Government of Texas doesn't believe that any crime has been committed.
How do you imagine an attempt to physically take him into custody would go, and are you already assuming that the FedGov would be willing to roll armored vehicles and/or Apache Helicopters up to the Governor's mansion?
I mean, recognize that it's still an absolutely miniscule portion of the deaths that occur in the United States on a yearly basis. <100 mass shooting victims (for the strictest definition of 'mass shooting') per year in a country of 350+ million... it requires a microscope to detect that blip.
It looks slightly scarier if you consider all firearm homicides, disregard deaths from 'old age' and consider that it's the sort of thing that can randomly end your life even if you're young and healthy.
And yet, the biggest threat in the "death from random happenstance" category is still car accidents. And considering that you can also get grievously injured and survive it strikes me as far more reasonable to be worried about getting T-boned in an intersection than gunned down at the mall.
The single change I made that most reduces my risk of untimely demise was shortening my commute every day so I minimize my time on the road, especially my time driving at speed.
So genuinely ask yourself, if you don't go around constantly anxious about a car accident, on what possible grounds do you go around anxiously worrying about a mass shooter?
Note, of course, it's still probably sensible to wear your seatbelt.
Ultimately, being truly afraid of mass shootings requires buying into the authoritarian narrative that you're at massive risk of victimization unless you surrender your means of defense. It's pure availability bias, not an ACTUAL threat you should prioritize.
But yes, pick up some CCW training and a good holster because responsible carry can save you or others from many other threats aside from mass shooters, and allows you to take a more 'active' role in your community's defense if you wish.
As far as policies go, we need to strike a balance between safety and individual autonomy.
I've offered a compromise position for a long time now: Ban registered Democrats from owning guns.
I don't see anything wrong with restricting the gun ownership rights of those who don't believe in gun ownership rights, and they should leap at the chance to get ~30% of the population to give up firearms. By their very own logic this is a step in the right direction.
I somehow doubt they'd take up the offer.
I've given a lot of thought to the issue of how you can set up a foundation with your name on it and expect it to stay aligned with your intentions over the course of decades. It's hard, way too many failure modes and attack surfaces you'd have to anticipate and design countermeasures for.
Even in the best case scenario, all it really takes is the last person who knew you when you were alive to die or retire and get replaced by someone who has no connection to you and no respect for your ideals, and then there's no mechanism for forcing adherence to your goals. They turn the ship in a different direction and sail on unabated.
No matter how rigorously you define your terms and how stringent you make your instructions, over time your org will be Ship-of-Theseused into something with the same name and generally the same stated purpose but controlled by actors who may be actively hostile to your desired legacy.
You can hand-pick your successors, but once you're gone there's little guarantee those successors can manage to handpick good successors without serious entropy setting in.
The example that strikes me the most is the Ford Foundation which controls a $16,000,000,000 endowment, and has the stated purpose:
To reduce poverty and injustice, strengthen democratic values, promote international cooperation, and advance human achievement.
But when you look at where they actually spend the money, it is pretty indistinguishable from any other standard lefty activist organization.
Underscored by this excerpt from the Wiki:
This divestiture allowed Ford Motor to become a public company. Finally, Henry Ford II resigned from his trustee's role in a surprise move in December 1976. In his resignation letter, he cited his dissatisfaction with the foundation holding on to their old programs, large staff and what he saw as anti-capitalist undertones in the foundation's work.
So yeah, the direct descendant of the guys who set up and funded the Foundation quit because it was falling afar from it's original mission and was becoming anti-capitalist using funds provided by some of the most famous Capitalists of all time.
Took less than 50 years. I can barely imagine how one could ensure your legacy lasts 200 years without losing focus... short of founding a religion with fanatical adherents. I suppose you could pay to train an LLM that will spout your values and is given an endowment of its own to ensure it has server time secured for itself in perpetuity.
The whole problem is that if your foundation controls significant wealth, that will attract all kinds of parasites and scavengers to the 'free calories' and nature will then take its course once there are none remaining to defend the bounty.
Seriously.
I've been asking blue-choosers who they think they're saving by picking blue.
That is, who is choosing blue, OTHER than the people who think they're saving someone by picking blue?
And if the only people who are picking blue are the ones trying to save someone, they are now the only ones in need of saving. They all jumped off a bridge thinking they would save someone, when there was nobody who needed saving prior to them jumping.
Its a self-fulfilling prophecy which can easily be sidestepped by choosing red.
If you can posit a person who picks blue for some innocent reason other than a desire to look like a moral person or the desire to save someone else, then you've got the beginnings of an argument.
Otherwise, you're just creating risk where no risk needed to exist.
Literally, if I were a Supervillain playing the game, I would be trying to maximize death toll by convincing some people to choose blue. I'd lie and say I was choosing blue then mercilessly defect.
"I am choosing red and you should too" provides zero reason to lie.
faceh
1yr ago
I guess I gotta drop a post from elsewhere here:
The population of females aged 18-29 in the U.S. is approximately 23.3 million (as of 2016)
Remove the obese ones (Almost 40%, apparently, so we’ve already DRASTICALLY cut down the field).
Remove the lesbians.
Remove the prostitutes, porn stars, strippers (Onlyfans counts for these purposes).
Remove the single mothers.
If you care to, remove the ones with an N-Count above, say, 5.
I’m inclined to also account for the prevalence of certain mental illnesses, but lets leave that aside for now.
Maybe we even choose to leave in the ones who have incompatible political views.
And then tally up the ones who are left that are NOT currently in committed, long-term relationships.
Suddenly the number of ‘marriagable’ women who might be geographically accessible to most men looks a LOT more constrained. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.
I can put numbers to each of the above if that helps.
Like, the statistics bear out two things:
-
The average woman is pickier than ever while bringing fewer things 'to the table' for the male than ever.
-
Women are ALSO more likely than ever to terminate the relationship, EVEN AFTER many years of marriage and multiple children.
So there's a relatively small pool of marriageable woman who are what would be considered 'wife material', and every single male, from ages 18-50, is competing for this pool. So men are exposing themselves to the same old risks (woman leaving at any time) for less possible reward.
All that a male can do is work as hard as possible to increase his competitive advantage and thus his odds of success. Which is something of a red queen's race since all other guys are competing just the same.
He can't do anything to increase the number of marriageable women, can he?
So it certainly does imply that women's behavior is at issue here.
I'm not sure there is any way to make the trans community really happy
I'll say that I don't think it's the trans community in particular that is causing the controversy. Definitely appears to be the subset of extremely online SJW types who insist that only TOTAL WAR against TERFS is acceptable, and no matter how many other talented people actually put work into the game, the fact that it puts any money into JKR's pocket is an attack on trans people.
Meanwhile I think the reaction of most normies is "Finally, some high-quality escapism." It sells like gangbusters.
I think my favorite part of all this is how it has demonstrated that Reddit is neither representative of the tastes and preferences of the 'real world' at large AND it has minimal power to influence that real world. It is safe to ignore any controversy originating from that site.
faceh
1yr ago
Interesting, so your position is that large law firms would continue hiring law grads into minor positions at $235,000.00/year even if they can achieve significant cost savings (possibly losing some efficaccy) by utilizing an AI?
I feel this goes doubly for sexuality, too. Defining someone by who they prefer to have sex with feels reductive in the extreme. Yes, it is an aspect of their personality as an individual. No, they (probably) shouldn't be discriminated against for it. They also shouldn't require public recognition of it in order to feel fully validated and functional.
And it gets really absurd when they start naming concepts of sexuality that have been accepted for nigh-centuries as if they've discovered and elevated them for the first time. "Demisexual" meaning someone who doesn't form attraction from mere physical observation but from getting to know someone deeply? My friend that used to just be called 'not being shallow.' It is very, very unclear why this needs to be recognized as a unique sexuality that defines you as a person. Don't even get me started on "Sapiosexuality."
I happen to like ample-sized breasts on my possible sexual partners. I don't go around calling myself a 'mammosexual' who only feels attraction to persons with big breasts.
I call myself a 'boob man' and leave it at that. And I wouldn't bring it up in any conversation where it wasn't obviously relevant and appropriate. And it doesn't even go very far in describing my preferences anyway!
faceh
7mo ago
Men who are confused about this need to get good, not only for dating but because this is an important generalizable life skill A woman “playing hard to get” will let you in on the game. It’s mutual flirting and it will feel like that.
Of course when a guy like Andrew Tate says this and actively tries to teach males the skills to achieve these he gets hammered.
So I dunno where you expect them to learn the skills if the teaching of the skills is socially verboten, and the opposite message (believe women and take them at their word) is what saturates society.
From their fathers, maybe. But with an increase in the number of men growing up raised by single mothers, there really is no other place they can even see a role model demonstrate this for them.
I'll just draw a brief comparison to my "Skin in the Game" rant from a couple days ago.
We have here a massive contrast to the problem I pointed out with most elite institutions.
In this case, the particular man responsible for the failures put his own life on the line as part of the process.
So, regardless of what else you think of the guy, he didn't slough the consequences of his decisions off on someone else. If they got stuck and had to suffer for days of slowly dwindling oxygen supply, he was down there suffering with them (unless they killed him or he killed himself first).
Compare that to this little bit from the aforementioned rant:
The overarching issue is that no matter how much damage an elite causes through their decisions, no matter how foreseeable that damage was, no matter how incompetent and unsuited for their position they are, the system as it currently operates does not allow them to actually suffer in any way that matters. There's no 'feedback loop' or filter that catches bad elites early on and keeps them from advancing to positions of greater power or enacts harsh consequences when needed to dissuade others from misbehavior.
In this case, the CEO willingly put himself into a position where his own survival and comfort would be compromised if the comfort or survival of his customers, riding in his vehicle, depending on his decisions, was compromised. His incompetence, to the extent it impacted the outcome, would impact him as well.
The feedback loop and consequences in this case were pretty much instantaneous. We don't even have to go through a lengthy investigation and trial, nor wait for a vengeful family member to attack him. If the submersible imploded, he died. If they survived for days in agony, he suffered... then died.
And now he has filtered himself out of the system, so whatever bad decisions and processes he may have been following are shown to be defective, and the person pushing those decisions and processes has no more influence.
And, in theory, this should make future incidents of this particular type substantially less likely, so the system as a whole is stronger for his absence, although we can certainly mourn for the people he took with him.
faceh
1yr ago
I see it as more that "Mottizens" have a tendency to approve of someone attempting to argue an unpopular or controversial topic, from an unpopular position, and find it laudable when someone (who has otherwise shown a tendency for quality contribution) fights for a belief that they sincerely hold or at least can sincerely defend against an onslaught of skeptics.
I'd say Mottizens want to read the unpopular or controversial topics, and hear the unpopular arguments in their strongest form.
Since that is almost definitionally what "The Motte" is supposed to represent. Mottizens are then expected to be able to judge the arguments and update (or not) beliefs responsibly rather than based on the social consensus revealed by the upvotes on a post.
Which could indeed read a LOT like kneejerk contrarianism, but you're missing the part where the contrarianism has some effort behind it and is hopefully based on good faith belief which is being defended with the strongest available evidence.
Surely, surely you trust the users on this site to assess arguments on their merits and not just adopt the position with the most upvotes?
If Mottizens would only accept and upvote the most innocuous takes and ignore/punish stuff that seemed screwball, esoteric, or facially incorrect then what the hell would be the point of this forum at all?
And my general take is that Holocaust denialism/revisionism isn't so much a problem in and of itself as long as the person arguing it isn't trying to extend the argument to say "and therefore the Nazis weren't so bad" or, worse "and therefore we shouldn't worry about/take efforts to prevent future genocide attempts."
I notice that there's a correlation between holocaust denialism and Nazi apologism, so it is forgivable to conflate the two.
I am giving Scott the benefit of the doubt because it's Scott, but I am slightly annoyed that he doesn't actually clarify what he thinks counts as a 'lie.'
I think his central point here is this:
But people - including the very worst perpetrators of misinformation - very rarely say false facts. Instead, they say true things without enough context. But nobody will ever agree what context is necessary and which context is redundant.
They often say true things without enough context, then leave it to the reader to draw a false conclusion, which is a conclusion that the writer wanted them to draw anyway. Indeed, they often frame the 'true things' being said with their own opinion for context in order to ensure the reader is drawn to the conclusion they want them to reach without just saying it.
It looks something like this:
"Enraged Trump irresponsibly claims, without evidence, that he is being 'targeted' by an investigation into his charity's shady activities."
(I made this headline up, but you can find similar ones with minimal effort). Then the rest of the article will keep this exact tone and pick it's phrasing and framings to keep Trump squarely as the angry villain in the reader's mind, and omitting whatever might contradict this viewpoint.
Because okay, maybe Trump did say something along the lines of
"It's horrible that I'm being unfairly targeted for investigation because they don't like the causes my charity supports."
Is Trump 'enraged?' To the extent being angry is a matter of degree, him being 'enraged' can be true if he's 1% angry or 99% angry. Is it 'irresponsible' for him to make this statement when an active investigation is occurring? From a particular point of view, it could be. There's no hard-and-fast definition of what is and is not 'irresponsible' to say. Is this claim 'without evidence?' Well he didn't cite any, maybe he's got some maybe he doesn't, but this hardly matters to the story. Are his charity's activities shady? Again, point of view, and matter of degree. If they're not illegal and the funds are not misappropriated for non-charitable purposes, then 'shady' could just mean 'gives to causes we find distasteful.'
So there's no outright fabrication in the story, and yet, the story would lead the reader to believe (or confirms the reader's belief) that Trump is puffing mad because he's going to be found criminally liable for using his charity to fund underhanded and possibly criminal activity.
And one can dial up or dial down this effect simply by changing the adjectives used.
"Defiant Trump firmly claims that he is being 'targeted' by the politically motivated investigation into his charity's important activities."
And as long as the actual underlying details are never declared in the story, and the reader doesn't do their own research, then they form a belief based on implications and filling in (intentional!) omissions from their own head which won't quite match reality.
Have they been lied to? In my view yes. In that it would be extremely, extremely easy to report the 'simple truth' which describes the event in question:
"Trump claims he is being 'unfairly targeted' by an investigation into his charity's activities."
and fill in all known and relevant details in a similarly straightforward fashion, so that a reader doesn't have to fill in details that were intentionally left out, and can actually be confident they got the "whole story" before drawing any conclusions.
The act of typing out a story that is based on facts you have in your possession, then intentionally choosing to omit or minimize facts that would suggest a different conclusion to the reader, AND then adding in opinionated/biased language that is pushing the conclusion you want is, in fact, lying.
And yes, that applies to Infowars, MSNBC, WSJ, NYT, Fox News, and all the rest, regardless of political affiliation.
So I would be WAY less charitable than Scott is being if I wrote on this topic.
Of course, if Scott's doing a meta thing where he's posted this story without 'enough' context and slightly misleading interpretations of data and he's going to post a longer essay that builds on it, then bravo.
I would probably be much more inclined to get whichever Republican was most likely to lose nominated
I would probably consider the possible second-order effects here. If the Republican nominee is going to be weak, then seems likely that the Dem candidate might also be weaker than usual since the candidates on the Dem side will sense an opportunity.
Likewise, would you want there to be a general norm of outside-parties sabotaging the primary process of the parties so as to ensure the worst picks win every time?
Would it be good or bad for the nation (which, I presume, is where you live) if the parties consistently nominate weak candidates despite 'objectively' better options existing and entering the fray?
If this were an accepted tactic by the Democrats I would honestly consider it strong evidence for the GOP's "The Democrats are anti-American" thesis, since pushing weak candidates towards national offices will have the predictable effect of leading to weaker candidates running the national government, and what kind of actual patriot would ever want that for their country?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
In an ideal world, you would want your election for the most powerful role in the country to be a 'fair' showdown between the best possible candidates that can be mustered. Because the national election is supposed to ultimately be the culmination of a friendly competition to advance the good of the whole, and efforts to undermine that are inherently self-destructive, no?
Like, we wouldn't want the winner of the Super Bowl to be some mediocre team that happened to be good at sabotaging all the other teams behind the scenes, would we? They could hire thugs to kneecap star players and try to sneak drugs into their opponents' water cooler, and that would help them win! But that would kind of tarnish the whole affair, and be a poor reflection on the state of the sport of professional football. All participants are competing but are still better off if contests are decided by skill at the game and not backstabbery.
faceh
1yr ago
And on the policy side, I think there's a real possibility the sort of economically and scientifically illiterate people who want the Green New Deal by 2050 will see this as something to throw lots of money at in an effort to eradicate transform the current food industry.
All but guaranteed in the current political climate.
Animal welfare hasn't yet taken off as the new frontier in social justice, but once whatever the current thing is passes from mainstream appeal, they'll find a new one.
Indeed, I'll place a marker down, even though I don't ever expect to be called on it: I'd rate it at 90% chance that some U.S. state, likely Cali but could be somewhere else, actually bans consumption of at least one form of commonly consumed animal meat, likely pork but could be something else, inside the next 5 years.
Here's your reminder that Cali is already stepping in that direction:
Money will be dumped into this tech as well, and the more boondoggleish the tech is the more money can be grifted, so that just makes it more likely to get massive funding.
The problem is that just because an event is rare, it can still be high-impact when it does occur.
I tend to hate that the Blue Tribe talking point states that "WIDESPREAD" voter fraud is a myth.
Because it doesn't have to be 'widespread' to have a significant effect on outcomes. Even accounting for how ambiguous that term is. If 50,000 fraudulent votes are cast in one precinct, that might not count since it wasn't taking place elsewhere?
And the rarity of it occurring in the past is not sufficient evidence that it won't be widespread in the future, if conditions change.
Of course, the Dems spent years alleging Russian 'interference' with the 2016 election despite no direct evidence, so I also don't think they've demonstrated good faith on the issue anyway.
at least I do not wake up one morning and get told I have to move out within the next month.
If you set your asking price correctly, then this should be priced in.
You are robbing the entire owner surplus here.
Again, if they set their price accurately and account for all the value they can reasonably extract from the land, they should be capturing close to all of the 'surplus' available to them, OR there's simply nobody out there that would match their asking price.
then there is negotiating with the swarm of AI drones outside my house exactly how much my child's life is worth to me compared to their value of him in paperclips.
I guess I have a hard time accepting that someone would be so attached to a piece of land that they cannot express a price point at which they would gleefully part with it.
As opposed to parting with a human who is, from an emotional standpoint, of nigh-infinite value and not replaceable.
If you set your price high enough, you could use the sale proceeds to pay to have the entire property reconstructed in exacting detail at a different location, such that you would barely notice the difference.
But I also own things that I value much more than their market value in cash, which is positive surplus, so it balances out.
Can you name one such thing that can't be replaced by a good-enough reproduction if it were ever lost or broken? Do you have some unique pieces of art or some item that has sentimental value only to you?
Otherwise, why do you value such items more than a near-identical one you could just buy on the market?
To the extent these are reflective of any larger phenomenon it looks a lot what some commentators call the transition from a "high trust" society to a "low trust" one.
High trust meaning one where all members know and willingly follow "the rules" mainly out of some sense of social obligation rather than fear of punishment, where they honor their promises and cooperate at every opportunity.
vs. Low trust where members are constantly looking for a chance to defect for personal gain, and everyone KNOWS everyone else is looking to defect, and thus is on guard against that risk.
In high-trust societies you can sell vegetables with an honesty box for payment and expect most people will actually pay the right amount, despite there being effectively no chance of being caught if they don't.
Vs. A low trust society where stores put common household items behind glass due to how common shoplifting is. Just the other day I was buying a new phone and noticed all the displayed models were locked down so you couldn't interact with or examine them much. The salesman claims this was because too many people would snip the wire and steal the display phone. Frustrating.
High trust societies are theoretically better on the grounds that less effort and cost is expended on mechanisms for enforcing rules and thwarting defectors, and generally there is much less friction since you don't have to spend mental epicycles second-guessing your counterpart's motives.
In practice, no society runs fully on trust beyond a certain point, when the dollar amounts involved get high enough you can't expect a "handshake deal" to protect you, even with a friend.
Likewise, modern technology offers many options for enforcing rules that are cheap enough that you don't "need" trust in order to transact. Cryptocurrencies as a class attempt to solve this for currency and create the ability to engage in transactions with zero trust by either party. At least zero trust in each other.
But all-in-all, in a high trust society with iterated games, you would expect participants NOT to defect, cheat, or screw each other over in any scenario where they expected to have to deal each other on a repeated basis.
So we have some evidence here that formerly high-trust organizations that didn't implement fully robust anti-cheat mechanisms, relying on the good faith of their participants, are now having to grapple with the loss of trust and the now-apparent need to implement stricter enforcement mechanisms, to the detriment of all participants.
Is this actually a symptoms of a broader social trend where people are more prone to cheat than ever, or was this always occurring at similar rates its just now it is possible to detect and publicize these events more often?
I tend to suspect the latter but I've also observed many examples in my local community that make me concerned its the former, and we're in a slow, downward spiral where trusting societies are violated by repeated defections, which leads them to be less trusting, and inspires more people to act in ways that inspire less trust, since there is little/no gain for being honest when everyone else cheats.
I try very hard to locate and protect high-trust environments (for instance, my local gym sells water and protein shakes on the honor system) because I greatly prefer living in places where you can take other people at their word and don't have to constantly look over your shoulder. And the most distressing problem is that is usually only takes a bare handful of defectors to destroy said system for everyone.
So I would not be surprised if, on the margins, there are more people willing to cheat than even 20 years ago, and that leads us to a situation where trust has declined DESPITE most people still being fundamentally trustworthy.
Once again it is unclear to me how this is very different than a human who reads a bunch of scripts/novels/poems and then produces something similar to what he studied.
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