sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.
If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.
In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.
It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Instead, he started messing around with the service itself
No he didn't.
By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.”
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them. Starlink continually updates this to match the situation on the ground, presumably with some allowance for contested areas. Occasionally Ukrainian advances have outpaced Starlink employees knowing about the situation and updating the geofence, particularly during the period being referred to when they made rapid advances. "Appeared to be" is the giveaway to be maximally skeptical even if you don't already know about the incident in question. "The media very rarely lies" but "appeared to be" here functions as journalist-speak for reporting Twitter rumors without bothering to mention whether those rumors were true. The New Yorker doesn't feel the need to verify the factual accuracy of the claim because he's not saying that appearance was true, just referring to the fact that it seemed true to thousands of people on Twitter who already hated Musk for his politics and jumped to conclusions after hearing about some rapid Ukrainian advances having their Starlink service cut out. The only plausible story of political interference (aside from sending the Starlink terminals at all) has been the claim he refused to disable Starlink geofencing for proposed Starlink-piloted suicide drones striking Crimea, out of fears of escalation.
alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable
The article doesn't mention it but of course he has said exactly why he wants a settlement: he is concerned about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia escalating into nuclear war and posing a major risk to humanity. His way of thinking here should be more understandable to this forum than most, since he has taken considerable inspiration from the same intellectual environment as LessWrong/Effective Altruism/Scott Alexander. His underlying motive is the same as his motive for Tesla/SolarCity (global warming), SpaceX (mitigate existential risk by making humanity a two-planet species), OpenAI (mitigate AI risk by having the developers take the risk seriously), NeuraLink (mitigate AI risk through interfaces between AI and the human brain), and Twitter (mitigate political censorship and the risks that enables). Not to mention sending the Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the first place, though that was more small-scale than his usual concerns.
He didn't try to personally negotiate a settlement because he sent the Starlink terminals and felt that gave him the right to, he would have done it anyway. He did it because, having made more money than he could ever personally use, he has been working to defeat what he perceives as threats to humanity. You might criticize his arrogance in believing he is capable of doing so, but Tesla and (especially) SpaceX have accomplished things that conventional wisdom considered impossible so it is perhaps understandable that he thought it was worth trying. There is obviously nothing wrong with criticizing him, I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but I wish people actually engaged with his reasoning rather than being like this article and rounding him off as Putin sympathizer or whatever.
During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the [Deus Ex protagonist], which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.
I just skimmed the latter part of the article but this bit stood out. We get a "seemed to" and it's implied he...believes in a specific conspiracy theory because he once changed his Twitter avatar to the protagonist of an iconic videogame in which a bunch of conspiracy theories are true? But at the same time trying to claim Deus Ex as an anti-capitalist game that he is implied to be missing the point of? If Deus Ex is so leftist why does using it as a Twitter avatar signal a specific conspiracy theory rather than signaling leftism, not to mention signaling neither?
Industrial farming of animals requires feeding them, and thanks to thermodynamics this is dramatically less efficient than growing food for humans directly. (Theoretically you can raise some grass-fed cattle on grassland that already exists without clearing new land but this does not scale and still kills the cattle themselves. Note that labeling beef as "grass-fed" does not mean they get their food exclusively from pasture, it includes feeding them hay which itself has to be harvested.) You don't need to throw up your hands and act like there's no way to know if there's more animal death/suffering required for beef or bread, various rough estimates like this are enough to show the intuitively obvious answer is correct.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
This is just "The Pyramid and the Garden". People aren't good at properly adjusting for the level of cherrypicking and degrees of freedom possible when you have thousands of people scouring a large world for evidence matching their pet theory.
A photoshoot for a fashion company reuses a "legal documents" prop from the shooting of a television drama as "office documents", the same company sells fashion that is vaguely leather-daddy inspired and didn't segregate it from photoshoots with children, and you conclude that "we are ruled by satanic pedophiles". (And they are deliberately embedding evidence about this in fashion photoshoots for some reason.) If you lived in a tribe of a few dozen people and happened to personally notice two coincidences like that about a single person, maybe that would be reason to be suspicious. But you don't, you live in a society of hundreds of millions where thousands of people spend time hunting down and broadcasting stuff like this for your perusal. As a result this doesn't even really tell us about Balenciaga's marketing department, let alone "society". But people's brains don't adjust like that, so give them a few coincidences like this and they'll either come to believe false things or dismiss it out of hand as a conspiracy theory. And then the ones who do the latter are still vulnerable to the same mistakes in reasoning when packaged in ways that don't register as "conspiracy theory", especially ones spread by mainstream media sources.
sodiummuffin
18d ago
PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.
Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country
I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
If baby-killing is based on whether it can be kept alive outside the mother using current technology, does this imply that the invention of full artificial wombs would turn disposal of embryos by IVF clinics into baby-killing? For that matter, would it turn the death of sperm or eggs into baby-killing, since theoretically each sperm can survive if you can stick it into an artificial womb with an egg and have it become a child? Is it baby-killing to shed skin cells if the latest technology can turn them into embryos and then develop them outside a human body?
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Option c: blacks are 5x as much "overpoliced" or white criminals are 1/5 as likely to be caught and convicted.
Studies based on the National Crime Victimization Survey show a close match between the racial demographics of criminals as reported by those claiming to have been victimized and the racial demographics of those arrested for those crimes. The 13/53 figure is specifically based on murder and is thus technically not covered since murder victims cannot be surveyed, but violent crimes in general are included and show a similar but somewhat lesser disparity. (Generally the racial disparity is larger the more violent and severe the crime is, so murder has a larger disparity than violent crime in general, which has a larger disparity than crime in general. So while the crime victimization survey also doesn't cover crimes without victims, those have a smaller disparity to begin with, and white criminals with victims answering the National Crime Victimization Survey don't seem to be getting away with it more.)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Yes
Why would morality track technological development in this way? You could already make an embryo survive by sticking it in a woman, that might even be cheaper than the hypothetical artificial womb even in the future where such technology exists, but for some reason its existence the moral relevancy of embryos?
No. No living organisms of the species homo sapiens were harmed
This is based entirely on the definition of "organism", why would such a distinction have any moral relevance? Both are equally unthinking/unfeeling and both are similarly capable of developing into a human if given extensive support. (And braindead humans are organisms too, are they included?)
species homo sapiens
Why is species what matters? An embryo with a dozen cells has moral relevance in a post-artificial-womb world but a sapient alien or a member of Homo Erectus pleading for his life wouldn't?
In my opinion, there is definitely enough research out there by now that you can confidently release something like a Cass Report without anything new.
The CASS report predominantly based its conclusions on the lack of high-quality research, a point it reiterates often, not on high-quality affirmative evidence against treatment. There is some such evidence - for instance see this Reddit comment I wrote about puberty blockers and the indications that they both lock children onto the transgender pathway and permanently damage brain development - but like all evidence on the issue it isn't very good. In the absence of evidence that a treatment is safe and effective, the burden is traditionally on those advocating for the treatment to prove that it is. However, even aside from new studies actually providing information, "gender-affirming care" now has both established practice and a political ideology behind it, so abolishing it in any sort of permanent and widespread way seems likely to require more evidence. Without new evidence you might see some governments abolish or discourage it specifically for children, but others will continue to feed a fraction of every new generation into the trans pipeline and even places that get rid of it could easily flip back in a generation. The medical consensus turning against it would be a much more effective and stable solution, and something like a high-quality randomized control trial showing gender transition failing to outperform the control group would be a big step in that direction.
If anything "lack of high-quality research" understates the case. There is not a single randomized control study of gender transition, in either children or adults. It's incredibly easy for non-RCTs to give false results even if you do a reasonably good job, and most don't do even that. Read through something like Scott's Alcoholics Anonymous post or his ivermectin post and imagine how much worse it would be if only the non-RCT subset of the studies he looks at were available. That's why fields like nutrition, where long-term randomized control trials are impractical, are so terrible despite far more quantity and quality of research than a small field like gender dysphoria.
As an example, here's an excerpt from the Cass Report I've looked into previously:
The systematic review on interventions to suppress puberty (Taylor et al: Puberty suppression) provides an update to the NICE review (2020a). It identified 50 studies looking at different aspects of gender-related, psychosocial, physiological and cognitive outcomes of puberty suppression. Quality was assessed on a standardised scale. There was one high quality study, 25 moderate quality studies and 24 low quality studies. The low quality studies were excluded from the synthesis of results.
Here is the meta-study being cited, the classification into high/moderate/low quality was not done by the Cass Report but by the meta-study. Note that many of the studies only looked at physical outcomes like "is puberty suppressed". At the time trans activists complained about the CASS report excluding a lot of studies, but among other things that includes studies that only investigated whether puberty blockers stop puberty and made no attempt to investigate whether stopping puberty provided any psychological benefit. This is the single supposed "high-quality" study. It isn't a randomized control study, it compares patients who have been given puberty blockers to ones who just started the assessment process. (It also compares to a "cisgender comparison group", such comparisons tend to be even more worthless.) Among other potential problems, this means the results are very plausibly just regression to the mean or benefits from the other mental-health care provided. If you think the parents of children with worse self-reported "internalizing, suicidality, and peer relations" are more likely to seek treatment than the parents of children who are currently doing fine, which the study itself shows, then improvement over time is the expected result even if you don't do anything. Plus they did do other things, it specifically mentions "the care provided in the present study also involved the offering of appropriate mental health care". It also mentions that the "control" group has an average age of 14.5 years and the treatment group 16.8 years. And that's the only "high-quality" study the meta-study could find on puberty blockers, here are the reasons given for why it considered the other studies to be even worse.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
He is likely referring to this from pages 11-12 of the GPT whitepaper:
GPT-4 can also be confidently wrong in its predictions, not taking care to double-check work when it’s likely to make a mistake. Interestingly, the pre-trained model is highly calibrated (its predicted confidence in an answer generally matches the probability of being correct). However, after the post-training process, the calibration is reduced (Figure 8).
In any case, the articles you quote are oversimplified and inaccurate. Predicting text (and then satisfying RLHF) is how it was trained, but the way it evolved to best satisfy that training regime is a bunch of incomprehensible weights that clearly have some sort of general reasoning capability buried in there. You don't need to do statistical tests of its calibration to see that, because something that was truly just doing statistical prediction of text without having developed reasoning or a world-model to help with that task wouldn't be able to do even the most basic reasoning like this unless is already appeared in the text it was trained on.
It's like saying "humans can't reason, they're only maximizing the spread of their genes". Yes, if you aren't familiar with the behavior of LLMs/humans understanding what they evolved to do is important to understanding that behavior. It's better than naively assuming that they're just truth-generators. If you wanted to prove that humans don't reason you could point out all sorts of cognitive flaws and shortcuts with obvious evolutionary origins and say "look, it's just statistically approximating what causes more gene propagation". Humans will be scared of things like spiders even if they know they're harmless because they evolved to reproduce, not to reason perfectly, like a LLM failing at Idiot's Monty Hall because it evolved to predict text and similar text showed up a lot. (For that matter humans make errors based on pattern-matching ideas to something they're familiar with all the time, even without it being a deeply-buried instinct.) But the capability to reason is much more efficient than trying to memorize every situation that might come up, for both the tasks "predict text and satisfy RLHF" and "reproduce in the ancestral environment", and so they can do that too. They obviously can't reason at the level of a human, and I'd guess that getting there will involve designing something more complicated than just scaling up GPT-4, but they can reason.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
The reason people thought there was a "client list" to begin with was because of people using "Epstein list" to refer to the lists of everyone who ever flew to a party hosted on his island or were mentioned in the court documents in any context.
The Independent: The Epstein List: Full list of names revealed in unsealed court records
BBC: Jeffrey Epstein list: Who is named in court filings?
Newsweek: Jeffrey Epstein List in Full as Dozens of Names Revealed
Yeah of course it didn't exist, I personally saw the rumor of its existence develop from people saying "Epstein list" to imply things that the actual Epstein lists clearly did not imply.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
He meant that, if you have 1 heterosexual and 2 bisexuals of the opposite sex, everyone can still sleep with everyone else. If there's nobody else of the same sex being heterosexual doesn't affect the number of combinations.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.
The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)
Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?
If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
White nationalism doesn't just mean "pro-white", it is generally defined by its advocates as including a desire for the existence of white ethnostates. It's like conflating "cares about jewish people" and "zionist": many jews believe zionism harms jewish people instead of helping them (and doing it with white nationalism is even less accurate because zionism is currently more mainstream).
It's not just a matter of prioritization but of beliefs about the world. There are plenty of normal people who genuinely think that racial diversity benefits everyone, including white people. Furthermore, even within the realm of people who both know about HBD and think it potentially justifies government discrimination on the basis of race, most are not white nationalists. For instance white nationalists have termed Emil Kirkegaard an "IQ nationalist", though in the linked post he ends up concluding that explicit IQ nationalism would just amount to much the same thing as skilled worker laws, and the important thing is keeping out the far-below-average immigrants without IQ tests or racial discrimination being nessesary. Even if you go to a more populist community like /pol/, there are both white nationalists who think each race should get its own ethnostates, but also plenty of people who only have an issue with specific races like black people and don't care about racial separation otherwise. If your definition of "white nationalist" includes people who want to ban black immigration but allow mass-migration from Hong Kong, on the basis that they believe that such immigration would benefit everyone in the destination country including white people, it's not going to be very recognizable to conventional white nationalists.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Right, but the probability of success seems more than high enough to compensate. Not only is 50% blue better than 95% red, it's also easier because you only need 50% instead of 95%. It's especially high if communication is allowed, but even without communication "the most obviously pro-social option" is a natural Schelling point.
Now this is fairly fragile, it's plausible that with different question wording or a society with a more cynical default conception of other people (Russia?) or the wrong set of memes regarding game theory red would seem enough of a natural Schelling point to make aiming for blue not worth it. This would of course be a worse outcome, so if you did have access to communication it would make sense to rally people around blue rather than red if doing so seems feasible.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
You're comparing diagnoses per year for those 6-17 to number of children. You have to multiply the yearly figure by 12 for the whole time period. The U.S. population 6-17 is apparently 49,466,485, which would put the percentage who end up with gender-dysphoria diagnoses before the age of 18 at 1.02%.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
There's a timeline (from the anti-Atheism+ perspective) here. The two things that made it blow up was when Watson "called out" Stef McGraw and then when Dawkins responded to a blog post defending that calling out. The original negative responses to Watson's video were just some Youtube comments, Stef McGraw's blog post, and Rose St. Clair's video response. Stef was a student who posted a blog post disagreeing with the idea that the encounter was an example of sexism. Watson, giving a talk at the CFI Student Leadership Conference, mentioned Stef was in the audience, called out her "parroting of misogynistic thought", conflated fear of "sexual objectification and assault", and claimed people like her were scaring women away from atheist conferences:
Because there are people in this audience right now who believe this: that a woman's reasonable expectation to feel safe from sexual objectification and assault at skeptic and atheist events is outweighed by a man's right to sexually objectify her. That's basically what these people have been telling me, and it's not true.
Since starting Skepchick I've heard from a lot of women who don't attend events like this because of those who have this attitude. They're tired of being objectified, and some of them have actually been raped; quite a number of them have been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted. And situations like the one I was in, in an elevator, would have triggered a panic attack. They're scared, because they know that you won't stand up for them. And if they stand up for themselves, you are going to laugh them back down. And that's why they're not coming out to these events.
The call-out provoked some criticism on Twitter, and Watson responded with a blog post defending her actions and calling out some other people like Rose St. Clair and CFI intern Trevor Boeckmann. More criticism followed, such as Abbie Smith's Bad Form, Rebecca Watson blog post and McGraw's own response. This in turn provoked a bunch of blog posts supporting Watson's actions, such as PZ Myers's "Always Name Names!". In the comments for "Always Name Names", Richard Dawkins made his famous "Dear Muslima" comment mocking the idea that being asked to have coffee together at a conference was an example of sexism. (It is sometimes characterized as being a "don't complain because things are worse elsewhere" argument, but his other comment specifically said that wasn't his point and explained his reasoning.) This got too many blog posts to count calling him a misogynist and so on and got Watson to say she would boycott his work.
Often when Elevatorgate is summarized from the pro-social-justice side it's described as if Watson just made the comparatively mild original video and the atheism/skepticism community blew up at her, but what really got it going was how she responded to those like McGraw who disagreed. As well as ramping up her condemnation of the original interaction. (Something many of her supporters took even further, such as Amanda Marcotte arguing that Elevator Guy's invitation amounted to a rape-threat.)
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
If Russia invaded Alaska and said "if you shoot back at our soldiers we will launch nuclear weapons", letting them conquer Alaska would be better than a nuclear exchange. Nonetheless the U.S. considers "don't invade U.S. territory" a red line that they are willing to go to war with a nuclear power to protect. The proposal would be to establish the hypothetical anti-AI treaty as another important red line, hoping that the possibility of nuclear escalation remains in the background as a deterrent without ever manifesting. The risk from AI development doesn't have to be worse than nuclear war, it just has to be worse than the risk of setting an additional red line that might escalate to nuclear war. The real case against it is that superhuman AI is also a potentially beneficial technolgy (everyone on Earth is already facing death from old-age after all, not to mention non-AI existential risks), if it was purely destructive then aggressively pursuing an international agreement against developing it would make sense for even relatively low percentage risks.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
No. To quote a post I made in response to someone expressing the same concern:
Is the thing you're afraid of the idea that quantum immortality would involve something like a near-eternity of horrible lives where you're almost but not quite dead? Because if so, I think you're badly misjudging the probability distribution. Those situations are associated with quantum immortality only because they're so incredibly unlikely that if they happen it'll be obvious that quantum immortality is true - but by definition that means they are absurdly unlikely to happen! Something like "you get shot and almost die, but random quantum fluctuations cause a lump of graphite to spontaneously appear inside your chest and barely stop the bleeding" are unlikely on a truly cosmic scale, even under the logic of quantum immortality it only matters if it's the only future where you don't die. And that sort of quantum immortality would require it happen again and again, multiplying the improbability each time.
Even if quantum immortality is true, anything the slightest bit plausible will completely dominate the probability distribution. There is no reason that technology granting near-immortality is impossible, so in virtually every Everett branch where you survive the reason is just that the technology is invented and you use it. Which is generally going to correspond to a technologically advanced and prosperous society. Quantum immortality wouldn't feel like a series of staggering coincidences barely preserving your life, it would feel like living in a universe where everything went surprisingly well. Billions of years from now your society is harvesting energy from black holes and maybe occasionally during get-togethers with your friends you debate whether this outcome was unlikely enough that quantum immortality is probably true.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Is this just confusion about the Twitter staffer's unclear grammar? The "not" in that sentence refers to the "he's saying" part, not the "voted for him" part. Another way to say it would be "It's pretty clear he's referring to people who voted for him, not the rioters". The Twitter staffer was not denying that the rioters were a subset of the voters, he was claiming they were not the group Trump was referring to, because Trump was referring to the set of all Trump voters.
I think the unnessesary "and" might be adding more ambiguity to an already ambiguous sentence, would it have been clearer if he said "He's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not the terrorists"? Of course it also comes from whatever the grammatical term is for the thing where you omit the verb-phrase in the second half rather than repeating it from the first half, it would have been clear if he said "It's pretty clear he's saying the "American Patriots" are the ones who voted for him, not saying the "American Patriots" are the terrorists"). For instance:
https://www.usingenglish.com/forum/threads/omitting-a-verb-when-it-appears-the-second-time.170698/
Sheet 1 of the attached file shows the data on the male students and Sheet 2 the female students.
And then all the people replying to you are confused because they don't understand that you're interpreting the "not" as meaning "the rioters are not Trump voters" and think you mean that referring to a superset necessarily must be referring to each individual subset.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
The stuff about Epstein potentially working for Israeli intelligence (or U.S. intelligence) seems fairly plausible to me, though I haven't followed the case that closely. The idea of a secret "client list" that the police retrieved from his documents but haven't released or been leaked across multiple administration (coincidentally matching the "Epstein list" meme that developed for other reasons) is much less so, especially when people respond to the continued non-release by assuming "it must incriminate high-level politicians on both sides" over "it doesn't exist". Israel is fully capable of storing their own blackmail documents. If he was a blackmail tool they probably wouldn't be "clients" anyway, it would be "turns out that girl you had a one-night-stand with was under the age of consent".
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Despite being based on GPT-4 Bing is apparently well-known for performing dramatically worse. There have been some complaints of GPT-4's performance degrading too, presumably due to some combination of OpenAI trying to make it cheaper to run (with model quantization?) and adding more fine-tuning trying to stop people from getting it to say offensive things, but hopefully not to the extent that it would consistently fail that sort of world-modeling. (If anyone with a subscription wants to also test older versions of GPT-4 it sounds like they're still accessible in Playground?)
I don't think it's plausible that all the examples of GPT-4 doing that sort of thing are faked, not when anyone shelling out the $20 can try it themselves. And people use it for things like programming, you can't do that without reasoning, just a less familiar form of reasoning than the example I gave.
sodiummuffin
2yr ago
Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex.
Using "gender" to refer to this instead of "gender roles" or "gender stereotypes" conflates it with the idea of "gender identity". The idea of "gender identity" claims that people have some inherent deeply-rooted "true" gender separate from both their bodies and what societal roles they fulfill or stereotypes they match. This then comes with a whole set of ideas about "misgendering", about "deadnaming" if the non-binary identification accompanied a request for a name change, etc.
Note that actually basing it off gender roles would be completely different, for one because it would be based on society rather than the individual. Nobody advocates calling every woman in the military "he" even though the job is a male gender role. Similarly someone might believe in stereotypical correlations such that he's surprised to see a female programmer of a white NBA player, but that doesn't mean he thinks those people are actually becoming male or black, not even partially.
Liveblog of the podcast with the details from someone skeptical about the allegations (she's only done the part with the first accuser so far):
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808514093323587854.html
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808604076650660238.html
The highlights would be the Whatsapp messages. Like this one after the day when Neil Gaiman allegedly sexually assaulted her on her first day as a nanny:
And this one a few days later after the weekend when he allegedly "anally penetrates her, she says, without asking and without using a condom and she says he uses butter as a lubricant.":
Or these messages to Neil, also from shortly after the alleged anal rape:
Or these after he messaged her about her supposedly telling people he raped her and she planned to MeToo him:
Or the general description of the year of messages following her meeting Neil, a relationship that supposedly started with him sexually assaulting her on the first day they met and anally raping her the second day:
In summary:
EDIT: Liveblog of episodes 3 and 4:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808683675984302279.html
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1808707805915889918.html
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