magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I don't think this would work. The parents don't know whether the kid will be in the top 20% before having him/her, so it'll only have a very-slightly-different effect on high-IQ parents vs. low-IQ parents.
I was reading my mum's university textbooks at 3, so I think you can have a fair idea about the higher end quite early.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
· Edited 1yr ago
Hmm.
Okay, call me a cynic, but this was a null-update for me. SJ is pro-student/youth, is exceedingly passionate/remorseless, likes hounding people from their jobs, and claims everything is due to an "ism" - nothing here is surprising to me, hence no "light". It seemed like this was a case of "Can you believe what Those People did this week?", to quote the thing up the top of the thread.
That said, I suppose the fact that something's a null-update for me doesn't mean it's a null-update for others, and I was definitely being kind of mean by raising it. So, eh.
(ETA: I did find the parent statement Walterodim provided to be a nonzero update.)
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Bangladesh is probably going to mostly go underwater around 2400 or so, but that's super "not a real year". A lot of it's going to get (more) flood-prone before then, though (the vast majority of Bangladesh is near-zero elevation; it's basically a giant river delta).
There are a few island nations with ~0 elevation which are going to cease to exist; they're rather upset about this.
Some coastal cities are going to need dikes/storm walls that didn't have them already. Some of them are probably going to ignore doing this, with predictable consequences.
Russia/Canada are going to become more habitable and the Arctic Ocean more relevant for commerce.
Some ecological issues, mostly stuff in the Arctic like "polar bears might go extinct". Less in the Antarctic because East Antarctica isn't melting any time soon. Nothing particularly vital for humans, though.
Not a whole lot else IIRC. If you live in the First World, there's nothing super-catastrophic in terms of personal consequences unless you live at low elevation in cyclone (a.k.a. hurricane) country and you are in the aforementioned "no storm wall" category.
Still worth doing some cheap stuff (solar is getting damned cheap these days, and nuclear's always great if you can bulldoze past the NIMBYs) to mitigate the required spending on adaptation, but it's not going to be DOOM.
magic9mushroom
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1d ago
That isn't my impression at all, I feel like she was very serious about it.
Yeah, I figured that was a real possibility; it was just that from what you initially said I wasn't clear on that and as such I couldn't give a definite "aieee".
If you're doing okay, that's great, I'm genuinely happy for you.
I'm actually still dealing with the social fallout of the blackmail Drama two years back (I miraculously avoided legal trouble, but my uni is mad at me), so I wouldn't say I'm doing okay. But I'm safe enough to be around for people who don't think holding me over the volcano's edge sounds like a great idea (even during Drama I'm pretty good about avoiding harm to bystanders).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Thus, when it goes, even if our species manages to survive the resulting conflicts at all, I expect the collapse to do so much damage to civilizational infrastructure both tangible and intangible, to knock the planet so far back that, due to the Industrial Revolution being a once-per-planet event (due to depletion of the non-renewable "low-hanging fruit" resources accessible at positive EROI with 1500s technology), we will simply never recover. That, as someone on a podcast recently put it, the machines in The Matrix were right that the late 90's were the absolute peak of human civilization — and that we have no hope whatsoever of attaining such heights ever again.
Toby Ord takes an axe to this argument in The Precipice; I'll summarise with some of my own points as well.
- Metals and similar are only non-renewable while they're in use. If there's a collapse, the ruins are themselves now mines - indeed, better mines than we've had for a long time.
- In a lot of cases with fossil fuel, the work to render it accessible is already done and won't be undone. An open-cut mine, for instance, is not going away; the resource is at the surface now. Plenty of open-cut coal mines in Australia. Moreover, you don't really need these for anything except making plastic, due to renewables and to some extent even uranium (see below).
- Phosphate... okay, that's a thing, but there are still decent amounts of it and it is renewable on a much-shorter timescale than fossil fuels.
- Remember that the Industrial Revolution required that the 1.0 version of machines be useful. A rediscovery doesn't need that, because the knowledge of how to build much-more-efficient machines will not be lost (I'm very confident of that; there was literally one technology actually lost in the fall of Rome i.e. Roman concrete). Even if it were, people would at least know it was possible, which is half the issue.
magic9mushroom
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2mo ago
Your avoidance of presenting evidence, instead of theories about what could have happened or dissatisfaction with how the election was run, remains telling.
If you think he's arguing in bad faith, report rather than responding. Either he's arguing in bad faith, and you calling him out won't tell him anything he doesn't already know, or he's not, and you falsely accusing him will incense him for no reason.
magic9mushroom
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4mo ago
"Always" is an overstatement. In the 50s, the counterculture definitely didn't control legacy media, since it didn't exist yet.
magic9mushroom
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4mo ago
It was @CrispyFriedBarnacles who brought up the topic, not Questionmark. But thanks a bunch.
magic9mushroom
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6mo ago
Just saying: it's not much of a benefit that Israel helps out with Near East conflicts, when we would have avoided both Afghanistan and Iraq had the US not been allied to Israel.
magic9mushroom
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7mo ago
Third, this place is far more upvote-happy than downvote-happy. If you do manage to somehow drop into the Downvoted Realm, quite frankly you're probably on the edge of getting banned anyway.
I'm not sure what the threshold actually is, but I'm pretty sure "posting pro-SJ stuff civilly" will generally get more downvotes than upvotes (though the ratio will be significantly better than if you're actually being a cock).
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
If Trump had the ability to identify and the motivation to use people who could control the executive, he wouldn't have failed so badly last time. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
You can be rational and value someone else's life higher than your own.
magic9mushroom
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8mo ago
fresh and daring and revolutionary
I think part of the issue is that SJ to a fair degree hasn't actually realised that it isn't a counterculture anymore, so it still thinks SJ is fresh/daring/revolutionary.
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
I'm saying that "SJer spots gay molestor, doesn't report it to authorities because doesn't want to appear homophobic" is a real thing but not nearly as common as conservative media would have you believe (though much more common than SJ media would have you believe), in both cases because it's highly politically inconvenient for SJ.
"SJ journalist hears about gay molestor being arrested, doesn't report on it to the public", that's basically standard practice. But this isn't as directly harmful; the molestor is in jail whether or not we know about it.
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
Of course, it doesn't work on Internet forums like this...
I feel kind of dirty saying that you of all people are too optimistic, but... have you forgotten about the doxxing mobs that go around phoning HR departments?
magic9mushroom
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9mo ago
So e.g. somebody who mostly only gets involved in Ukraine war threads, but does so in a sense of "trying to figure out what is going on" as opposed to "kill Putin now!!1!" copypasted 100 times, would be fine?
I'm not a single-issue poster of either sort myself, obviously, but if I were of the former sort then what you put in the OP might have chilled me.
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
And I see the LessWrongers cheering and declaring victory at each new headline.
His acolytes seem to think "well the worst of both worlds at least gets us part of the world we want, so let's go for it".
I think this is more that a lot of the LWers had (incorrect) priors that the world would never listen until it was too late, so even insufficient levels of public and government reaction are a positive update (i.e. the amount of public reaction they are seeing, while not currently enough to Win, is more than they were expecting, so their estimated likelihood of it going up enough to Win has been raised). I'm open to being disproved, there, if you have a bunch of examples of LWers specifically thinking that national governments racing for NNAGI could possibly end well.
But anyway, even if you believe the people who brought us the Wuhan Institute for Virology have got it all covered, then you still have to worry about all the other countries in the world.
Sure! Like I said, I think that instituting a full global ban on large NNAI will probably require war at some point. But most countries do not have large nuclear stockpiles, so this doesn't necessarily mean a nuclear WWIII with X * 10^8 dead. I think the latter would probably still be worth it, but as a factual matter I think it's fairly likely that the PRC specifically would fall in line - while in theory a party machine can be made of AI, the current CPC consists solely of humans who do not want to kill all humans.
magic9mushroom
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10mo ago
I think you're making two separate arguments here and not distinguishing enough between them.
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You think that letting governments build high-powered AI while shutting down others' access to it is a bad idea.
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You don't like Eliezer Yudkowsky and those who follow him.
The thing is, these are entirely-separate points. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not want to let governments build high-powered AI. Indeed, his proposal of threatening and if necessary declaring war against governments that try is the direct and inevitable result of taking that idea extremely seriously - if you really want to stop a country from doing something it really wants to do, that usually means war. And he's fine with interpretability and alignment research - he doesn't think it'll work on neural nets, but in and of itself it's not going to destroy the world so if people want to do it (on small, safe models), more power to them.
So it's kind of weird that you set up Yudkowsky as your bugbear, but then mostly argue against something completely different from the "Yuddist" position.
As an aside, I think you're wrong to say that pursuing Yudkowskian Jihad will necessarily end in WWIII with China. The PRC has actually started requiring interpretability as a precondition of large AI deployment, which is a real safeguard against the machine-rebellion problem. For all that the CPC is tyrannical, they still don't actually want to kill all humans; they cannot rule humanity if they, and humanity, are dead. I won't pretend; there will probably be some countries that will attempt to cheat any international agreement not to pursue NNAGI, who will have to be knocked over. But I think there's a decent chance of achieving Jihad without a nuclear war being required.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
It's not a 100% sign, no. But when you're talking about potentially order-of-magnitude difference in the death count on our end (from Chinese subs getting to close range, from us knocking out fewer of them, and simply because of the ongoing massive expansion of the PRC's arsenal), holding out for 100% is hardly what I'd describe as rational.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I'm not 100% sure about Melbourne, but IIRC it was never banned in the Australian lockdowns or vaccine mandates to walk from your home to the supermarket, buy food, and come home with it (you had to wear a mask in the shopping centre, though, unless you had a medical exemption). This is a rather-important difference with the PRC's policies.
I was unable to go into a store to buy office supplies once because I didn't have my vaccine certificate with me, though.
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
I mean, progressivism was clearly making huge gains before SJ coalesced. I think SJ is more of "it is good at memetics" than "it is good at controlling policy in helpful ways".
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
WAIS is significant but not enough for DOOM. That's why I mentioned the dikes/stormwalls.
The only tipping point AFAIK that's actually a potentially-big deal is the clathrate gun. I know about the Gulf Stream, but cooling Europe down is not actually the end of the world. We're not going to wind up like Venus absent somebody spending trillions of dollars on manufacturing fluorinated gases and dumping them into the atmosphere (and, well, come on, even if literal doomsday cultists were to somehow get access to >MbS-money the rest-of-world would notice and stop them; this isn't something you can do stealthily like brewing up smallpox).
magic9mushroom
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1yr ago
Okay, fair play, you at least didn't get anything horribly wrong in this one. It wasn't good, but you didn't get the basic premise of your article fatally wrong.
magic9mushroom
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5d ago
Israel is dependent on the US, and US voters care about genocides which make the news, and anything involving Israel will make the news.
I kind of wonder about that. The institutions that launder that sort of information into public awareness are to a large extent captured by people who are anti-Israel, so it's actually kind of questionable how many people they'd lose vs. the counterfactual by actually doing massive war crimes. A lot of the populace already thinks Israel's guilty of ethnic cleansing, and a reasonable amount have heard "Wolf!" cried enough times that they've tuned out and won't believe reports of massacres; there's just not all that much of the US meaningfully in play here.
When you say "the real case against it", are you merely noting an argument that exists, or are you making the argument i.e. saying in your own voice "banning AI is bad because AI could be good too"?
(In case of the latter: I know that The Precipice at least considers AI a bigger threat than literally everything else put together, at 1/10 AI doom and 1/6 total doom. I categorise things a bit differently than Ord does, but I'm in agreement on that point, and when looking at the three others that I consider plausibly within an OOM of AI (Life 2.0, irrecoverable dystopia, and unknown unknowns) it jumps out at me that I can't definitively state that having obedient superintelligences available would be on-net helpful with any of them. Life 2.0 would be exceptionally difficult to build without a superintelligence and could plausibly be much harder to defeat than to deploy. Most tangible proposals I've seen for irrecoverable dystopia depend on AI-based propaganda or policing. And unknown unknowns are unknowable.)
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