octopus_eats_platypus
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User ID: 334
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I don't quite understand how we'd even begin to program a deontological or virtue ethicist AI. We're capable of giving things functions that they try and maximise, and we can call the subject of that function 'utility'. Whatever the flaws or virtues of utilitarianism, it does have the singular advantage of being computable. Compare to a virtue ethicist AI - how on earth do we begin building such a thing?
Even if it would be better, it seems like we're much closer to getting 'AI with a function it seeks to maximise' than we are getting 'AI who desires to fulfill virtues such as honour and charity'.
I agree that having an AI that believed in being virtuous according to human standards would be far, far better than one with a complicated mathematical function we try and map onto human utility and hope it doesn't kill us, but I've seen no reason to think the first is even possible.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
I appreciate this greatly - I'm going off to do some more reading and we're going through the SRS together to try and figure out where we might sit and what that heritability might look like. Given the chances at play, $20-30k for a few rounds of IVF for gender selection doesn't seem very unreasonable at all, but I'll start drilling down into the numbers a little more.
As an aside - ultimately my concerns are more about nonverbal children requiring constant care. We make the sort of money that a child being mostly homebound or unable to work but mostly functional is within the risk we're willing to take, but we won't make that kind of money if we're suddenly in full-time caring roles.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Yes, in hindsight decisions always look low-risk because the the other outcome didn't happen. I'm not a Zelensky stan (and in all honesty I don't care that much about the war in Ukraine despite being very surprised by the sheer Russian inability to win), but I'm not claiming he's considered heroic because of what he did today.
Staying in your country when the West is offering peaceful and safe asylum at the point where your enemies are bombarding the city you're living in and nobody (and if you personally called the course of this war back in February I apologise, but you'd be just about the only one) thinks you have any real chance of victory is brave. By the standards of modern politicians I'd say heroic. Perhaps Zelensky somehow knew they'd push the Russians back, but considering he apparently didn't even believe they were going to invade I find that unlikely. Staying and fighting in what everyone - including likely Zelensky - thought was a doomed effort to repel the Russians and save his country is genuinely admirable, and even if you disagree I don't see how you don't get that other people consider him heroic.
The fact that Ukraine went from 'doomed' to 'holding out exceptionally well and pushing the Russians back in a major counter-offensive' is true, but how could he have known that?
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I try never to invoke karmic irony by saying 'well, things can't get any worse' or 'at least we're finished with that problem', or so on. I'm sure it's coincidence, but in so many places my life has seemingly run on movie logic it's at the point where I don't believe it, but I alieve it very strongly.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Trump received the second largest number of votes of any candidate, ever,
Is there any reason you shouldn't generally expect this to keep happening with each election as the population grows? Naively I would expect the winner from every election to have received the largest number of votes of any candidate ever for the most part.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
This feels all over the place. Your title doesn't seem to be related with most of what you wrote, and your conclusion comes out of left field 'here's a bunch of examples about some jokes, this is why rationalists get scammed' seems more like nonsense than a coherent argument.
You also pattern-match badly here - Trump, Adams, Taleb and Musk are the kind of examples that intimate you aren't seriously thinking about this but simply want to dunk on the opposition.
Maybe take this one back to the writing board, and look for more salient examples that support the point you're trying to make.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Ultimately heavyweights, in my opinion. When I watch a match I'm not just watching two guys wail on each other, I want to watch the best two guys wail on each other. Young, healthy, fit, strong, etc. I don't hate the versions of sports with less competitive people, but if I'm watching something ideally I want to see peak human performance.
I was thinking about edutainment from when I was a kid. We had Treasure Mountain to help learn words, JumpStart for a whole bunch of interesting stuff each year, and so on. From age 5-12 it felt like there was a massive array of edutainment products, which disappeared as I hit high school. I remember trying to convince my teacher at age 9 that Escape Velocity was educational as it taught you to buy low and sell high.
So as a teenager, nothing. Makes sense - teenagers are less pliable and enjoy this stuff less and want to go off and do their own thing.
But I am genuinely surprised edutainment never really took off, or doesn't seem to have surpassed its 90s-early 00s peak. I would've assumed there was a lot of demand for this sort of product for adults, but instead we just reverted to video games sans education.
Am I wrong about this? Are there a bunch of super popular products I'm just not aware of? Or if not, why did it never take off? Entertaining yourself while learning is a big market, but maybe it's not entertaining enough so unless you're choosing it for someone else (like a child) you don't? I'm not sure, but feel free to chime in with thoughts or the like.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I had pretty mainstream thought on Covid all the way through, so I can give you an example of my thought processes.
From what I remember, the logic (over here) went like so:
1 - We're going to get a vaccine soon, so we're going to do lockdowns and hold out until then. They suck, but we can contain the virus with lockdowns because it's virtually not in Australia.
2 - Once we get the vaccine and everyone takes it, Covid will be over and we'll return to normal life. This sucks, but it is a temporary suck that we will swiftly overcome. During this terrible time everyone needs to band together and accept the shittiness.
I'm not sure I would've supported lockdowns knowing what we know now about the virus. People were talking about a 2% fatality rate (so, what, seven million people dead in the US, 500k or so here) which is much, much larger than what we ended up with. I weighed half a million dead in my mind against a temporary restriction on my civil liberties and thought 'okay, this is the sort of situation where I can accept restricted civil liberties'.
I'm not so sure I would've accepted it in almost any other country in the world. The United States didn't have a choice to not have Covid in its borders, Australia did.
We moved on to getting the vaccine. I think at the time the claim was that vaccines stopped Covid spreading. If the option was 'zero Covid, but you have to get vaccinated' or 'Covid kills ~100,000 people (Australia, so I'm reducing the US numbers tenfold) but we don't enforce vaccines' I am in fact okay with a vaccine mandate. Mostly I'm not okay with mandating stuff like that, and as soon as it turned out that no, we weren't vaccinating ourselves back to a no-Covid world, I changed course pretty rapidly.
Vaccine mandates lagged popular opinion here - they were popular because we thought vaccine mandates would make this all go away. Lockdowns were popular because we thought they were the precursor to getting the vaccine, and, again, making Covid disappear like a bad dream. Your average person doesn't support lockdowns or vaccine mandates now, but that's because they've been proven ineffectual. China is still locking down over Covid and can't seem to accept the reality of the situation.
I think '2% of the population will die if we don't do this thing' is a good reason to consider the temporary suspension of civil liberties, and I think I'm very much a normie in that sense.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I won't talk on why this caused a potential crash (it's to do with the policy causing a rapid change in the price of government bonds, and I don't really interact with bond markets in my day-to-day), but I can talk about the economic side of things.
The Econ 101 stuff here is that essentially in an anemic economic environment, governments are expected to stimulate demand via tax cuts or spending increases. This environment has been very easy on political parties of both sides, because it just requires borrowing more money (less concering in a low interest-rate environment) to fund your program of choice - or tax cut of choice.
For the last fifteen or so years, the paradigm has been 'we need more demand, right-wing governments cut taxes to try and get more, left-wing governments spend more'.
Now we're in the other side of the macroeconomic cycle - low unemployment and high inflation, and the last time we had inflation this high was around 1990. Governments I suspect simply do not have an institutional culture that tells them to cut back on spending, delay or cancel tax cuts, etc, in this situation. It's been too long.
I don't think the currency would've been worthless, but a good example of what this sort of decision-making would look elsewhen would've been a government drastically cutting spending a little ways in to the Global Financial Crisis and the recession that came with it. That sort of decision would've sent shocks into markets not just because it was a bad decision, but also because the bad decision showed an immense lack of judgement.
I wrote one paragraph, I genuinely didn't think reading the entire thing was that big an ask, especially in this community.
To be more succinct: Gish gallop bad, should be unconvincing. Central question powerful and important - but not answered! Why mottizens fall for gallop but ignore important central question in argument between two people? Not good!
Alternatively: Meta-argument commentary on argument is in fact a valid part of the community, as evidenced by what you are literally doing right now. This tiresome sort of hypocrisy really deserves 'no one cares about your opinion, bring arguments' as a snide response but instead I think I made my point fairly succinctly and reasonably to begin with in the context of the original argument.
Unless your argument is 'community norms are not worth consideration to begin with', talking about them has as much value as our recent debate on the Holocaust.
Moreover, I'm not just talking about skepticism or opinions, I'm talking about voting habits. The 'this is a big wall of text, reflective upvote' culture doesn't necessarily cause all the cream to reach the top to be skimmed off. It makes me wonder to what degree mottizens see argument as won by walls of text over actual correctness, for instance.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
So I was ranting to myself, as I watched another review video, about the poverty of imagination that Payne and McKay show, the way they imagine they have to dumb down the message of Tolkien for a modern-day audience
Even if later episodes drive me into a fit of apoplexy
I don't get the latter part. If I watch something and it's bad, I stop watching. Sure, it was a bad show for the first few episodes so I tuned out. Lotta cringe moments and honestly painful to watch stuff. Lot of money spent on the visuals to be sure, but that video game jump-off-the-sword thing is still so bad it's actually funny.
Being mad that a big corporation is milking a beloved franchise of every dollar it can get seems pretty naive, though. Disney was doing awful direct-to-VHS sequels to beloved kids movies before half of us here were born. I didn't watch the Lion King 2: Lion Boogaloo, despite loving the original as a kid. When a corporation does a big shitty sequel, it's not anything new under the sun, it's just a sign to stop watching and go do something else.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think sales will be offloaded on the lowest end - if you do direct marketing, yes. Phone calls, maybe. The interpersonal relationships people still work on in business-to-business sales I don't see being co-opted by AI at any point before AI co-opts all human roles. The role of 'maintain a relationship (partially in realspace) with a human being in order to understand them and sell them things' can certainly be facilitated by AI, but it seems implausible that role can be turned over to machines before we build something fully general and capable of replacing human beings entirely.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Reddit is a good site with awful moderation policies.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
One thing rdrama does well is use upvotes/downvotes as actual currency.
I'd love to see an implementation of awards in a similar way if possible - not the actual awards themselves (we don't want Mottizens banning or ruining threads), but for instance reporting an AAQC costing, say, 50 or 100 upvotes would be a good idea in part because it'd . A community currency that lets long-established users spend their reputation to highlight things they find good or interesting is a great way to make standing in the community count for more.
octopus_eats_platypus
1yr ago
Aggravated burglary specifically was something like 40 times in 2017, though this admittedly had a lot to do with a small population and a gang going hard on organised crime, meaning it's very easy to get outsized figures in a way that doesn't represent a necessarily 'real' base rate. The ~7 times figure below is more accurate overall, though making allowances for a much younger population I'd say the real base rate is intuitively somewhere in the 4-5 times more likely zone.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
14/20. Mildly better than chance, went solely off intuition and zero thought. Literally 'left or right? click!'.
I think I would've done worse if I'd thought about it.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Please take five minutes out of your day and google "Duane Gish".
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
This is a really excellent post. One of my favorite things is 'someone articulating something you've long felt but haven't had the correct words to communicate that insight', and this is exactly that. Reported as a quality contribution as well, thank you.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
That was part of what triggered it. It wasn't just my personal life, but a bunch of people here (largely around lockdowns, though, which I haven't really heard concerns about in my personal circles) as well! But I figured the 'what broke your brain personally' question was worth following up with 'have you noticed this in your friend circles', especially because this is not exactly a normal place. Mottizens being angry about an issue doesn't necessary translate to much salience in the public at large.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
Is that expensive where you are? I pay 16 US cents per kWh and I stay on top of good bargains over here in Australia.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
For my part, I'd given up on using Reddit, so the Motte moving offsite gained a user, rather than losing one. I don't think the problem was banning as such, it was an ever-constricting line around what you can say which was so unpleasant. Living under a censor where the rules are deliberately made opaque is probably one of the worst things that can happen to a community that so highly populated by autistic people.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
To a degree, yes. People who have a high-level understanding of their field, however, are those best placed to use new AI tools. Likewise, statisticians didn't disappear because we built better tools for statistical analysis, rather the demand for statistical education has never been higher. The tools are still used by someone and we tend to see the lowest rung automated away and smaller numbers of usually better educated employees getting productivity increases. Usually what this looks like is a lot of the lowest-skill (or those with a very narrow skillset) employees lose their jobs - the invention of the mechanical (and later electronic) calculator removed the need for human calculators, but engineers and mathematicians are still a thing.
octopus_eats_platypus
2yr ago
I think this is misguided because it's the opposite of what currently happen, with theorem provers doing so much of the evaluation work relative to the 'creative' work. I can definitely see AI expanding the search space, though, with mathematicians working with the machine to find more novel or interesting results as a consequence. Much like art, I think AI are at the present time both a job-destroyer for the bottom end of the market (want your fursona fucking a famous politician? No longer do you have to pay $50, you can just get the machine to do it!) such as commissions but will ultimately enable people who understand art (colour, composition, etc, and consequently how to more reliably get the machine to do the work you want) to create more interesting and varied things at the top end.
Academic mathematicians are towards the top end of what you'd consider 'stem jobs' IQ-wise, so I'd anticipate a similar effect there.
Your assertion that Ligma Johnson was a genius 5D chess maneuver designed to undermine the authority of modern journalism as opposed to, y'know, a joke isn't compelling so much as it stretches the principle of charity to believe you believe it.
Your patterns aren't just non-obvious, they're non-existent and clearly contrived - badly contrived to support a single political side. You have a pattern of posting half-developed essays that meander for a long time and take a sharp left turn at the end into a conclusion completely unsupported by the argument.
Your thesis is "rationalists are too easily duped". Your supporting points are a hypothetical thought experiment from Nassim Taleb, a tweet including the eggplant emoji from Elon Musk and Krugman taking a Scott Adams tweet seriously to make his own point (this isn't duping and I have no idea why you think it is).
Notably, none of these events even involve scams, let alone rationalists. They involve 'deception' in the sense that Krugman doesn't really care if Adams votes for Trump or not, he was using Adams' tweet to make his own point. If you say 'I am a communist and I want higher taxes' in a discussion and I use that as a springboard to argue against higher taxes, you haven't fooled me if you're really a fascist and are just pretending to be a communist. I've said the piece I wanted to say, why do I care that you lied?
As for the end of your essay if you're genuinely in possession of a secret 'black pill' of deception and persuasion, why are you personally not convincing?
The answer lies in some fairly traditional elements. Pathos, ethos, and logos.
There's not much pathos to speak of here, so I won't.
Ethos matters. If your essay is 'wow, look at all these points from people who also hate the woke like I do', you lose a substantial amount of ethos from the get go. You've clearly picked a side and have an investment in it winning, or at least looking good. You seem untrustworthy - why would I believe you're genuine and honest about arguing this? This doesn't sink your essay, but it intrinsically loses you the trust you might need to stretch an argument further than it might ordinarily go.
Logos.
Why are none of your examples about real skeptics or rationalists failing to be skeptical? This is a complete failure of logos. You should bring a series of logical reasons I would believe in your stated argument, but you don't. You bring weirdly irrelevant culture-war bits - which ties back into ethos again. If your supporting evidence is both irrelevant and biased, your failure in logos simply increases the failure in ethos.
Hopefully that clarifies things.
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