magic9mushroom
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User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Gosh, with this one neat trick, there will be no chance at all of the Chinese government setting it up so that certain trusted agents sure look like they have renounced their citizenship credibly and are now deeply embedded!
Do note that this would still force them to put work into making an agent before sending him over, rather than being able to only put work into flipping an expat after he's successfully got a relevant position.
Which means the answer to this:
"Hello, you have now gotten all your family back home exiled, imprisoned, or executed. Love and kisses, the CCP".
...is basically "anyone deterred by this is someone who can be extorted into working for the CPC and thus is de facto a sleeper agent; this isn't a bug, it's a feature".
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
By all means, screen for CCP connections, but don't emphasize "Chinese" over "CCP!"
All Mainland Chinese (except babies I guess) have the risk factor of "has been brought up in a totalitarian state's education system" and most have the additional risk factor of "has family in the power of a notorious hostage-taker".
The Jews fleeing the Nazis have some important distinguishing characteristics - they had a reason to despise the country they fled, they weren't brought up in the Hitlerjugend, and they didn't have the hostage problem because generally they brought their families and AIUI Hitler mostly didn't do that kind of trick anyway. Refugees from China are indeed a better deal, but that's a trickle, not the flood we currently have.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Private industry has incentives not to let their tech be stolen and not to hire people who will steal it.
Some of the harm is internalised. Not all of it is, which means the incentives aren't as strong as (and thus often produce less-safe responses to tradeoffs than) society would like.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
coal mines with groundwater that needed to be pumped out;
As I've said before: "flooded mines" isn't an independent variable. If you dig a mine beyond the depth of the water table, it will flood. This is true in all locations and had been a major limit on how deep mines could be dug since Roman times. The independent variable is whatever's creating a demand for coal big enough to make dealing with the flooding worthwhile.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Maybe sometimes in the future there will be a need for government to lock some portion of the population into concentration camps.
I mean, yes? Prisons are this. And I've noted that this might unfortunately be necessary with some portions of the Chinese diaspora in the event of WWIII.
"Locking people up" wasn't the horrible part of the Holocaust. It was the "for lousy reasons" and "gassing them" parts that made it one of the larger atrocities in recent history.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I'm also pretty nonplussed by "body count". There are red flags related to it (HIV and stepkids are obvious; I'd also consider a nonzero count of "times cheated on partner" without an extremely-good explanation to have too high a risk of ending in Extreme Drama) but the count itself is not very relevant.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Welcome to theMotte.
What proponents call "human biodiversity", and Wikipedia calls "scientific racism", is pretty commonly accepted here; I'd estimate that 85% or so of regulars here would answer "do you think there are statistical differences between races in relevant cognitive traits" with "yes". The blurb about welcoming diverse attitudes is true enough - even among that 85%, there's the full spectrum from "I think only a couple of outcome disparities look genetic, and support some degree of special treatment for those on the wrong side of those disparities, because it's not like they chose to have shitty genes; I just think that a failure to get equality of outcome does not, in fact, automatically imply rampant racism" all the way over to "literally has a username referencing the Schutzstaffel" - and due in part to that vast difference of opinion, and in part to this place simply being one of the few highbrow places in which it can be discussed, it's discussed, uh, quite a bit.
Why do I mention this? Well, because due to both of those things, the social justice thought police, if they notice your membership here, are likely to scream from the rooftops that you're a heinous racist. Of course, I deplore the tactic of cancellation and the ethos of guilt by association, and admire anyone willing to defy such would-be censors, but it would be improper not to let you make an informed decision, and my read on you is that you currently are not on track to make one.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I was arguing against inculcating in society "no lockdowns ever again". You don't get to inculcate that on the scale of the Holocaust and then just ignore it when something necessitating lockdowns comes calling.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Because I said "ex nihilo"? I was making a distinction between "modify an existing biochemistry in various ways" and "invent a wholly-new biochemistry" (the latter is far harder), not talking about research methods.
...maybe you thought I meant in silico? I didn't.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
As Yudkowsky impolitely notes, it's not like AI aid means you can't also do experiments.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
One thing I will note here is that Australia is not as far gone; we have two major parties, and both are hardline anti-riot regardless of valence. I think part of it is that the SJ rioters are in the Greens, not the centre-left Labour Party which is one of our "two parties", and as such the latter is totally fine with cracking down on SJ riots. I think another part is that social media mostly riles people up against US targets rather than Australian ones. There's a notable constituency for "it'd be nice if Trump got shot", but obviously that doesn't mean a great deal with the Pacific in the way and it mostly doesn't extend to Australian rightists.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Vaccine-resistant smallpox would not be anywhere near 99% mortality; smallpox is deadly, but not that deadly (even if everyone got it). I mean, we did live with it in the Old World since the Iron Age or so.
Airborne HIV would suck pretty horribly. I imagine there'd be more survivors, though, and it'd take much less time to recover once it died out. You need something like "airborne HIV with anthrax spores" to be worse. I won't say that that's impossible, but GoF and even deliberate weaponisation isn't going to get there since AFAIK there aren't any lifelong-infection viruses without an envelope (enveloped virus = negligible environmental persistence, because envelopes aren't all that stable); you'd need a development project aimed at de novo virus synthesis and to be targetting these properties, AIUI.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
Only if we assume that AI not only shares the broad goals of human civilization (expansion, growth, conquest of space).
Paperclip maximisers do, and are a notoriously easy-to-specify goal system.
This is a closed loop solution to the Fermi paradox.
You need the malevolent AIs to also commit suicide for dubious reasons for this to be a Great Filter, unless alignment is so hilariously easy that there aren't any.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
If you mean the Fermi Paradox, it's... complicated. If you're talking about the Great Filter, no, AI catastrophe cannot be the Great Filter because the AI itself still counts as being an alien civilisation for Fermi Paradox purposes.
To get AI being an answer to the Fermi Paradox, you have to go into Doomsday Argument territory, and also assume FTL. I laid out the case you can make here. Whether to take Doomsday Arguments seriously is dubious.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
The lockdown itself needs to be the subject of a sustained ‘never again’ campaign similar to the Holocaust, and future generations should be guilt tripped endlessly about what their ancestors did.
Really? I mean, come on, if the next thing to go pandemic (lab leak, bioweapon, or natural) has the mortality rate of septicaemic plague, there's just straight-up no alternative. You lock down, hard, and shoot violators on sight, or you all die. Pick one.
Maintaining bureaucratic delays in approving vaccines for a pandemic plague? Yes, NEVER AGAIN (and that one even could justify topping Fauci). Trying to institute Permanent Midnight and set a "new normal" of permanent lockdown? Yes, NEVER AGAIN. But what you're proposing here is crazy.
(To be clear, I got this on the volunteer page and rated it "Neutral", because being wrong isn't against the rules; if nobody dared to say anything they weren't sure about here, the place would be a lot less useful.)
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
If by "this" you mean "SARS-CoV-2" and "COVID", SJers tend to subscribe to the Whorf hypothesis that language affects culture and keep trying to exploit this.
If you mean "Wuhan Flu", because anti-SJers are very angry at the SJers who play Whorfian language games and want to spite them, possibly in the hopes of not having more Whorfian language games. Also, because naming diseases after places has been quite common until recently.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
So you're positing that there is a new species which rapidly becomes the largest source of biomass on Earth over the course of a decade or more
No, I'm positing that it does so faster than that. Algal blooms are fast; they're just limited by nutrients to small areas. Here, the entire ocean can support a max-density algal bloom.
And no, this wouldn't permanently wipe out the biosphere. Life would survive and eventually recover, because even without something evolving to eat it (and it would, although it'd likely take a while), it probably wipes itself out from lack of carbon and/or the oceans freezing over and eventually the dead algae on the seafloor get subducted, incinerated, and re-released as CO2 via volcanoes (and there are quite a lot of reservoirs of life that are shielded from "oh noes the CO2 is gone" on quite-long timescales). As noted, this probably wouldn't even be enough to wipe out humanity by itself (because we could build closed biospheres not subject to being leeched, and top up whatever leaks did occur with coal-burning power stations) - we'd lose most of humanity because we wouldn't remotely be able to build enough fast enough to support the current population, but we wouldn't quite be wiped out absent further disruption (e.g. chaos from all the starving mobs preventing/destroying the closed biospheres, industrial collapse leading to being unable to do maintenance, or killer robots showing up).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
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I have actually spent years learning biochem and have a minor degree of fame under my real name due to my precociousness in doing so. Biochem is not a spook and understanding of it is actually meaningful. It is... irritating to have some random just go "nuh-uh". If I could give you the kind of feel for biochem that would lead you to see all of this as obvious I would; I already gave you the quick rundown and you dismissed it.
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I think the policy of "ignore all dangers until they've happened at least once" is not a very good one even for normal dangers, and is practically a reductio ad absurdum in the case of apocalyptic dangers (because apocalyptic dangers kill off humanity, thus being impossible to look back on, it reduces to "ignore all apocalyptic dangers", which if any of them are real means you sleepwalk into them).
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A good-faith survey of the current world basically rules out interventionist deities being active on Earth. Deism is quite plausible (note the identity of deism with the simulation hypothesis), but while it is plausible that such a creator might judge us after death, there is basically no way to tell what the grading rubric actually is. Maybe it's the Christian God. Maybe it's Allah who'll smite me for idolatry if I think Jesus is divine. Maybe God's a social justice warrior. Maybe God agrees with Jack LaSota. Maybe God is testing for ability to act rationally about X-risk. I dunno, and for the most part the big question mark cancels out to "this shouldn't affect how I live my life" (because for every rubric there's an anti-rubric which cancels it out; this is the problem with Pascal's Wager if you aren't privileging the "Christian God" hypothesis, because there might also be an anti-Christian-God who punishes Christians).
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I mean, yeah, obviously the solution to AI risk is to not build hostile superhuman AI. Just pointing it out.
@RandomRanger I figure this does double duty as a reply to you.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
The last one is very speculative; I have a suspicion it might be impossible. The middle one is somewhat less speculative; something akin to it is probably possible, but there are degrees of success and you're probably looking at more like "eats organic matter at a foot a day" than the "lol eats planet in minutes" sci-fi shit. The first one is proven possible by PNA, the aforementioned terribility of RuBisCO, and the wide variety of possible biomolecules only some of which are used. Anybody who knows second-to-third-year biochem knows that that design is 100% chemically and physically possible; the roadblock is the incredible difficulty of designing a full biochemistry ex nihilo (it'll be a while before anyone succeeds at this without AI aid, although I'd still rather nobody tried). I get that not everyone does know this, but seriously, this is uncontroversial in terms of "is this possible, given a blueprint?"; it is. That's why I said it's the best-case of "what the final form of bioweapons looks like"; they can be worse, but they can't be better.
shouldn't we prioritize making sure that doesn't happen again over "stop Skynet"/"Butlerian Jihad Now" type stuff?
I mean, I'd rather that 200 million people die next year from a pandemic over everyone dying 10 years from now. I'd rather that even if I'm one of the 200 million. I'm not seeing the issue.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
The AI community seems to care more about bioweapon risk, that's a big part of the whole AI safety rhetoric. But why should anyone care about whether AIs can synthesize bioweapons when the experts are already doing it so carelessly?
Nearly all of us also want GoF shut down, to be clear.
There is, however, some significant difference between "a vaccine-resistant smallpox pandemic", as bad as that would be, and the true final form of bioweapons that a superintelligent AI could possibly access.
The absolute best-case of what that looks like, as in "we know 100% that this can be done, we just don't know how yet" is an incompatible-biochemistry alga with reduced need for phosphate and a better carbon-fixer than RuBisCO (we know RuBisCO is hilariously bad by the standards of biochemistry; C4 and CAM plants have extensive workarounds for how terrible it is because natural selection can't just chuck it out and start over). Release this, it blooms like crazy across the whole face of the ocean (not limited to upwelling zones; natural algae need the dissolved phosphate in those, but CHON can be gotten from water + air), zooplankton don't bloom to eat it because of incompatible biochemistry, CO2 levels drop to near-zero because of better carbon fixation, all open-air crops fail + Snowball Earth. Humanity would probably survive for a bit, but >99% of humans die pretty quickly - and of course the AI that did it is possibly still out there, so focussing only on subsistence plausibly gets you knocked over by killer robots a few years later.
Medium-case is grey goo.
Worst-case is "zombie wasps for humans"/"Exsurgent Virus"; an easily-spread infection that makes human victims intelligently work to spread it. To be clear, this means it's in every country within a week of Patient Zero due to airports, and within a couple more weeks it's worked its way up to the top ranks of government officials as everyone prioritises infecting their superiors. Good. Luck. With. That.
It is possible for things, like normal GoF, to be extremely bad and yet still be a long way from the true, horrifying potential of the field.
magic9mushroom
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1mo ago
I can't help but think this is kind of a silly conversation. The Testimonium Flavianum is a known and obvious forgery, as @Jazzhands' link notes. It's ridiculous to take a forgery as evidence of anything about reality. Yes, it might have been altered from a Josephan original passage, but we don't have the Josephan original passage, and are basically taking wild guesses at what it might have said; this is okay-ish if all you care about is whether Josephus referred to Jesus at all, but anything further is trying to walk on clouds.
Can't find the original ABC (as in, the Australian state broadcaster) articles I read (I think I might have seen a bit on TV too, back when I watched TV) with trivial effort, but a minute's searching turned up a couple of links.
If you really want more, I can look for the originals, I guess. But yeah, it's reasonably-common (common enough, at least, for expats who aren't explicitly extorted to still fear it).
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