omw_68
2d ago
Yes, it's scary, especially since Hoffer developed his analysis by observing Communist and Nazi movements. Algorithms are supercharging all of that as well. Not good!
Yeah, in a way we might be better off as a society if super-realistic immersive games (and other adult entertainment) get developed and a large percentage of the population ends up with holodiction.
omw_68
2d ago
Thanks for posting this, it reminds me of a study I once read about terrorism which concluded that terrorism doesn't work in the sense of effecting political change, and people join terrorist organizations for a sense of belonging.
the bored
This one makes me nervous given the possibility of mass unemployment due to AI combined with potential UBI.
omw_68
2d ago
In-as-far as that works (I wish it wouldn't) it's because bystanders look at the 2 sides, notice that one tribe is going to win, and then find themselves joining the winners.
To a large extent, I agree with this analysis. Or to put it another way, the idea is to create the appearance of consensus which then becomes reality. And in fact, if you're an average Irish person, even if you are privately pro-Israel, chances are you aren't going to say anything. And if the continued existence of Israel were the decision of the Irish legislature, Israel would be in big trouble.
So yeah, I think that what I've called "terrorism lite" can be be effective. That being said, I see two serious problems with the strategy:
First, in order create the appearance of consensus, there needs to be minimal opposition. So for example, in Philadelphia the other day there was some kind of boycott bike-ride which targeted a number of pro-Israel (or perhaps just Jewish-owned) businesses. In response, large numbers of pro-Israel types descended on the community to counter-protest; to patronize these businesses; and so on. At least in the US, bystanders can see that this is a contested issue so there is much less incentive to join the anti-Israel types.
Second, Israel's leadership (correctly) perceives the anti-Israel movement as an existential threat. So that any amount of sanctions, boycotts, and so forth might hurt Israel but they won't persuade Israel's leadership to make the kind of concessions the anti-Israel crowd wants in order to dismantle Israel. Which means that the only real way of eliminating Israel in the foreseeable future is a military invasion which is pretty unlikely given that Israel has nuclear weapons and a very strong conventional military.
All that being said, I would expect the anti-Israel crowd to keep doing what they've been doing. Because from the perspective of an individual anti-Israel activist, it's more about virtue-signalling; feeling righteous; and acquiring status within the progressive community.
omw_68
2d ago
Sure -- those could be other people doing the same thing, or people already in the market trading up and taking on a manageable mortgage.
Which means that it's difficult to say what the influence of these cash buyers is on affordability.
omw_68
2d ago
It's not hard to believe at all if you reason from observation instead of from science fiction -- we don't know of any sentient species that lives more than a few centuries; maybe there's a reason?
My observations are that (1) some species on earth exhibit negligible senescence; (2) medical interventions have had a big impact on human lifespans; (3) it's possible to design and build machines which last indefinitely; (4) the components of a human body are nothing more than very complicated machines; (5) human engineering has done an amazing job of improving on nature; and (6) vastly increased lifespans are not like warp drives in the sense of going against the known laws of physics. Rather, they are like flying in the sense that we know it's physically possible for some species.
And keep in mind, you are ruling out vastly increased lifespans not only for humans but for substantially all species anywhere.
but you need to also think about the probability of somebody wanting to do this -- if it's low enough, it doesn't really change things much unless intelligent life is really quite common in the galaxy.
Sure, and I think the probability is quite high given the Malthusian mathematics of the situation. But even if it's on the low side, that's enough to propel a colonization wave.
Of course -- but if one were building a machine capable of self replication, deliberately building it to do so in an uncontrolled manner seems extremely unwise
It's not too difficult to think of designs with super-duper careful checks in place to prevent these sorts of dangers. Besides, it's extremely reasonable to hypothesize that at least a few species (or factions within species) will do something unwise.
It depends how easy it is to build these machines, doesn't it?
You only need to build one. And we know it's been done once already by nature. And we know that we are making very rapid progress even now on Earth. Perhaps it's not trivial, but it seems very unlikely to me that it's so hard that no species (or faction within a species) succeeds in doing it once.
omw_68
2d ago
Boomers might be changing this, but typically I think a great many house purchases come from people just moving to roughly equivalent places for work, better schools, location preference, etc
Well if those people are paying cash, they are dependent on finding buyers to supply that cash, right?
omw_68
2d ago
Space is really big and the lifespan of every known creature is extremely short as compared to the timescales inherent to interstellar travel -- science fiction is fiction.
Hard for me to believe that for every species, it's impossible to use technology to substantially extend lifespans. And even assuming that, it's extremely hard for me to believe that it's infeasible for all species to reach a nearby star system simply using generation ships.
And like I said, the mathematics of Malthus make it practically inevitable that someone would try.
I depends on your probes, doesn't it? Complex mechanical devices tend to have a pretty limited lifespan too -- if we hypothesize for the moment that self-replicating machines are not also science fiction,
Well there is an existence proof for self-replicating machines with human level intelligence -- humans ourselves. And we are able to sustain ourselves as a species notwithstanding the limited lifespans of individual humans. And this is the result of blind evolutionary pressures. It's reasonable to believe that a planned process could do a lot better -- in the same way that we have vehicles which travel far faster than any Cheetah.
it still costs a lot more to have your probes hanging around replicating in every system they visit for hundreds of millions of years than not.
Not at all -- the difference is negligible because they are making use of resources which are just sitting around in the systems they visit. If they can self-replicate and travel well enough to explore the galaxy, it would be trivially easy to leave a few in each visited system.
Keep in mind that the cost of doing all of this (exploring the galaxy with Von Neuman probes) is just the cost of building one and only one such probe. After that, the extra cost of maintenance; of leaving behind garrisons or contact machines or whatever in any visited system is negligible.
omw_68
2d ago
Yes, I agree with this for most people. I'm different and special though.
In all seriousness, I've actively invested for about 25 years and slightly outperformed the market in that time
To be clear, I was expressing a lack of confidence in myself, not in you. I do think that if a person is intelligent and disciplined and studies the market carefully, there do exist short-term inefficiencies to be found and exploited.
And for what it may be worth, I've made medium and long term investments based on my own independent analysis and done reasonably well.
omw_68
2d ago
For all the people who said Jensen doesn't matter, time to put your money where your mouth is.
I have never expressed an opinion on this issue but my best guess is that no, he doesn't matter all that much. That Nvidia's success was mainly about being in the right place at the right time. I guess that means I should buy Nvidia stock however (1) I still think there's an AI bubble; and (2) I try to keep short-term trading to a minimum and I see trading on breaking news as short-term trading. I believe in the old saw that the most successful brokerage accounts are the ones where the owner has either forgotten the password died.
Good luck, though.
omw_68
2d ago
The pro-Palestine movement in its current form has surely not been around for as long as opposition to slavery was before the relevant constitutional amendments were passed in the US
It seems to me that this is an apples-to-oranges comparison. According to AI, the organized abolitionist movement in the US started in 1830 and the anti-slavery amendment to the US constitution was passed in 1865. Of course opposition to slavery in general goes back hundreds and hundreds of years.
The Palestine Liberation Organization was founded back in the 1960s. Of course there were boycotts of Israel from the very beginning (and in fact before the founding of Israel), with the Arab boycott of Jewish activity in Palestine starting in December of 1945. Anti-Jewish activity in Palestine, of course, is almost as old as time.
I'm not sure what is meant by "pro-Palestine movement in its current form," but it's difficult to see how what is going on today is fundamentally different from past efforts to rally anti-Israel sentiment; to push for boycotts; and so on.
In any event, it's worth noting that ending slavery in the United States required a successful military invasion. Of course military invasions of Israel have been tried, without success. Given that (1) Israel has nuclear weapons; and (2) it's Jewish citizens know that they face a truly existential threat, it seems unlikely that such an invasion will succeed any time soon.
omw_68
2d ago
This is not inherently a bad move. It's worked quite well for Islamists who want to enforce their blasphemy code. This seems to have no impact on the view of Muslims on the left because, perversely, the more specific a form of dysfunction to a group the more that group has to be defended or ignored lest the racists use it. I understand why someone would assume they'd continue to humiliate themselves in the same manner over Palestine.
Yeah, I think that in general, what I have called "terrorism lite" can be somewhat effective. When it comes to Israel though, there are a couple of obstacles I see:
First, there is a decent number of passionate pro-Israel types floating around. Which makes it much harder to create the illusion of consensus which then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Second, there is approximately zero chance that the government of Israel will ever be swayed by sanctions, boycotts, social pressure, etc. into making the sort of concessions necessary to dismantle the country. As has been pointed out, Israel has a problem but not a dilemma.
So yeah, probably thuggish behavior won't ultimately accomplish anything.
omw_68
2d ago
For me, that actually is a concern, but no one else seems to care.
For what it may be worth, I care as well. Probably I will make a small investment, though, as a sort of lottery ticket.
omw_68
2d ago
Right now, I think we should pivot to becoming artists, curators, athletes, piano players, researchers, etc.
I imagine that the government would start offering more and more grants for people to engage in these activities. Already there is a National Endowment for the Arts. In Israel, lots of people currently get stipends just to study the Talmud all day long.
omw_68
2d ago
The extinction scenario is irrelevant in any cultural or economic context; discussion of it is meaningless unless you are counting on joining Yud in one final moment of ecstatic vindication before oblivion.
Thanks for posting this, it's pretty unusual for me to literally laugh out loud when I read something online. But yeah, I basically agree. Although in some of Yud's scenarios, everyone just falls over dead without knowing what's happening. So you don't even get that "I told ya so" moment.
Many white collar jobs are already invented. This includes both millions of public and private sector jobs. Since the end of the Second World War and the development through the 20th century of manufacturing automation and the emergence of computing hundreds of millions of jobs have been artificially invented by a combination of regulation and direct and indirect government spending in sectors like education, healthcare, finance, law, actual public employment working for government and non-government (but funded directly and indirectly by it) and quasi-government organizations, old age care and more.
I basically agree with this, especially if you include "invented" to include situations where society is wealthy enough to address problems which previously were ignored.
Here's an example: Lots of people make a living being substance abuse rehab counselors. Basically they are former addicts who came up through the rehab system themselves and now they get paid to chat with people who are struggling with their own addiction problems. Probably if you are trying to quit drugs, it's useful to have a weekly chat with a former addict who has been trained to encourage you. But in the past, there were no drug rehab counselors, society simply couldn't afford it. Heck, there weren't even government-funded rehab centers.
So yeah, I could easily see that in the future, the government will pay for people to get much more of this sort of attention. I mean, it would be nice if every struggling drug addict could have a daily meeting with a rehab counselor as opposed to a weekly meeting. That multiplies the demand for rehab counselors by a factor of 7.
At the same time, the band of one’s working life has narrowed out of the average human lifespan - we start working full time much later (often in our mid twenties instead of mid teens) and retire at a similar age while living much longer. This and the above are quasi-deliberate state policy to maintain a broad level of employment, and the incentives for this will continue to be present.
Yes, I agree with this completely. All the programs which keep people out of the workforce -- guaranteed student loans; social security; disability, etc. -- could be (and probably would be) expanded pretty dramatically.
It seems extremely unlikely that tens of millions of high status people around the world - and the PMC is the demographic that largely invented and controls AI, in terms of background class - will accept a status on the level of an unemployed single mother in the trailer park living off Universal Basic Income. They will invent new games of status and ensure they are rewarded for them
This seems like a reasonable prediction, but the issue I see here is that it wouldn't necessarily be so easy to coordinate the development of new status games, at least in terms of remuneration. One possible outcome I see is that Mr. PMC and Miss Trailer Park get the same UBI but they spend it on very different things. One goes to Las Vegas 3 or 4 times a year while the other goes stargazing in the Chilean desert. It's even possible that PMC types compete for status by spending less money. Think about the situation with food intake. Now that everyone of all social classes in the West has access to near-infinite amounts of calories, upper class people distinguish themselves by consuming less than do lower class people.
In any event, I agree that the status games would continue, I'm just not so sure it will result in fake jobs and more money for PMC types.
The incentives of mass UBI + full unemployment are extremely poor from a governing perspective.
After seeing the Covid-era riots, I agree with this completely. To paraphrase Neo from the Matrix, we're going to need fake jobs. Lots of fake jobs.
To smart people like those here, many of these will seem laughably fake because they are (although many of our jobs already are). But most will accept them quickly. In many ways, they will be no more fake than many of the jobs that already exist today!
Agreed. This seems like the best solution to me.
omw_68
2d ago
In a way, this is Jensen's fault for not arranging the board in such a way that they can't fire him. Elon or Zuck would never have this problem.
I'm speculating a little bit, but I would guess it's a lot harder to get financing if you set things up this way. Certainly if I were investing in a startup, I would see it as a red flag if things were arranged so that the founder retained 51% of the voting rights.
omw_68
2d ago
(3) is probably the main source of disagreement -- I think interstellar colonization attempts are highly improbable due to the physics of the thing.
Can you be more specific as to why?
with possible edge cases where a highly advanced civilization has literally no alternative but to flee their home system -- seems improbable too though?
To me, this doesn't seem improbable at all, it's a simple consequence of Malthusian mathematics and seems highly probable.
no longer makes sense either -- why would you "lay claim" to something that you can never visit?
Why not? It costs essentially nothing. Even if all you are doing is planting a big flag. Heck, even if you don't lay claim, why not just leave probes in the system to make contact with anyone else who shows up and report back if anything interesting happens? This would cost essentially nothing.
Messages... yeah maybe. I guess you need to include the odds of us finding the messages? Messages that are literally impossible to miss (on a millions of years timescale) would also be resource intensive to produce
Strong disagree. Leaving an unmistakable message would cost essentially nothing. For example, you could just leave an arbitrary number of probes in the system, have them watch for signs of intelligent life, and if they see them, physically visit any such beings and deliver a message face to face. This would cost essentially nothing.
omw_68
2d ago
For one thing I guess it means that there's a pool of buyers (current homeowners) who are not sensitive to interest rate or other affordability concerns when looking at houses
To some extent, this makes sense. But I think it depends on (1) the types of houses these people are buying; and (2) to what extent people are trading up, so to speak.
So for example, suppose an empty nest type couple sells their house in the NYC suburbs and uses the proceeds to buy a house in a retirement village in Tennessee. Arguably this isn't going to have a big impact on the affordability crisis. Similarly, if a young couple in the NYC suburbs sells their starter house and moves into something bigger now that they have a few children, chances are they are going to need some kind of financing.
I guess my point is (or one of my points is) that these broad statistics, e.g. that 23% of houses are paid for in cash, need more detail.
omw_68
2d ago
It's not possible to make such a trade be profitable because betting on volatility increasing has a carry cost.
Do you think you could give me a specific example of this? Thanks.
omw_68
3d ago
It's astounding how much more awkward I feel searching for certain topics these days, even with private browsing, just because I don't want to interact with Google's search AI about them
Yeah, that's an issue as well.
Although I remember a couple years ago, I had heard that a guy from my hometown had gotten busted for downloading inappropriate materials. I was curious to know if it was true so I did a search for his name plus a generic two-word phrase which applies to those types of materials and got a very stern warning from Google for doing a search which included that phrase.
omw_68
3d ago
Yes.
Ok, and how does that play into the affordability crisis, or whatever you want to call it?
omw_68
3d ago
I think so? A significant number of transactions are retired couples selling their expensive "growing family sized" house in a large city's suburbs to either move to a house better sized (and easier to take care of) for an aging couple, or moving to a nice place further away from the city to enjoy a quiet retirement. The second house is presumably more than covered in cash by the first one, since it's either smaller or further away from the city. The difference in price funds their retirement activities.
Yeah, I would guess that's a pretty common scenario. And that's just the sort of segmenting I would like to see with respect to the 27% figure.
omw_68
3d ago
While stock photos are usually altered, I have (ahem) sources who can confirm that these are women an average man is unlikely to pull naturally. Although I'd be cautious of mostly-ethnic brothels, you have to be citizen or PR to work legally. But it's not really enforced very well, you don't have to look far to find Chinese escorts who don't speak a word of English providing full service.
Thanks for posting this. I'm truly surprised at how inexpensive such services are. Now I am wondering how the hookers in Las Vegas (many of whom are VERY unattractive) make money. I'm tempted to look up the fees for legal brothels and gentlemen's clubs in Nevada, but I don't want that in my search history.
omw_68
3d ago
Isnt this basically selling A for cash, buying B using that cash? If youre moving from owned house to owned house, or downsizing, theres no reason to take on debt.
I'm not sure I understand your point here. Are you suggesting that a lot of cash buyers for houses are getting the cash from the sale of their previous property?
omw_68
3d ago
The average home buyer if 58 years old.
Again, I would like to see this broken down. Anecdotally, I am in my 50s and I just bought a vacation house in a beach resort area. Which brings up the average age but I'm not really competing with the sort of people who need to borrow money to buy a house.
High interest rates help the old at the expense of the young.
If you mean mortgage interest rates and you are strictly looking at buyers, then I agree, although I am not sure as to the size of the effect. With interest rates as set by the central bank, it's not as clear. And of course a lot of sellers are older people. For them, higher mortgage interest rates are arguably bad.
I agree.
Of course, in the long run anything is possible. But I'm pretty confident that Israel's government would accept being a complete pariah along the lines of North Korea before it would accept the concessions being sought by the anti-Israel movement.
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