sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
2d ago
On his death, there were many in the Right who believed he could serve as the martyr that would finally force the Right to "get serious". This meant very different things to different people from retaliating for cancel culture, to aggressively implementing Trump's immigration agenda, to turning the US into an outright dictatorship and instituting the Day of the Rope. In the end, none of this happened since his death got bogged down in endless conspiracies.
No, none of that happened because...why would it? Politicians who want conservative policy are generally already doing their best to implement it, though sometimes their best isn't very good. It alienated some left-wingers and moderates to see celebration of the assassination be relatively mainstream in left-wing spaces, but it's not something that was going to cause a huge shift in either public opinion or politician's opinions on any specific issue. Being a left-wing assassin is already illegal. There's been more of a crackdown on antifa groups - probably the Autistici/Inventati Collective wouldn't have gotten designated as a terrorist group (and officially dissolved 4 days ago) if it wasn't for Kirk's death - but most antifa activity is already either clearly illegal or clearly legal and also antifa doesn't actually matter that much.
sodiummuffin
3d ago
Regardless of what improvements can be made to daycare regulations, "childcare subsidies but only if you pay for someone else to do it" is distortionary and produces economic inefficiency. Even if you hypothetically fixed regulations so hard that paying for daycare was always cheaper than even the worst-paying jobs, it would still be paying people trading off between "more money so we can save up for a cruise" and "getting to spend time with my kids instead of in an Amazon warehouse" to take the non-utility-maximizing option.
Making the childcare subsidies less distortionary is not "more government" in any meaningful sense, especially since it's coming out of the same fund so it is literally the same number of tax dollars being distributed. And of course until such hypothetical improvements are made we get the current situation where daycare for a couple children often costs more than the entire take-home pay for one of the parents, but the government will pay people to use it.
And in a fair fight it's very obvious that daycares win economically because one person taking care of ten children frees up nine workers.
I think you are underestimating the overhead inherent in things like property costs, having a formal organization where people can sign up their kids, and compensating for the lower trustworthiness of multiple for-pay non-parent carers. Regarding the last I'm reminded of the statistic that non-relatives in the home are massively over-represented in abuse, while obviously some parents are abusive or neglectful it's less common. Not to mention the simple fact that more carers means a higher chance that at least one is bad. So if you're having strangers take care of your children there's an incentive to pursue overhead-increasing safety measures and expensive signaling like "all carers have a college degree in Early Childhood Education" or "daycare seems very well-maintained and high-class" to reduce risk, regardless of regulatory requirements. In any case, whether it can be made dramatically cheaper or not, subsidizing it over unpaid childcare is fundamentally paying people on the margin to choose it even if it would otherwise be the worse choice.
We have a much better way of measuring whether it cancels out than the number of children per carer: the number of dollars. If some of the dollars instead go to "the construction workers who built the daycare building" and "the daycare administrators who handle the legal issues and overhead of taking care of other people's children" that doesn't represent an increase in efficiency. If anything having a lower carer to child ratio will on average correspond to lower quality (not to mention differences like how on average carers care less than parents do), so if daycare costs more than Alice's job pays she is paying more for lower quality. Rather than deciding on Alice's behalf that daycare must be more efficient because it has more children, we can let her compare her wages to the cost of daycare (not to mention other factors like how much she likes her job) and decide for herself. Except that, by subsidizing paid childcare, we distort this comparison and end up paying her to take the economically less efficient option. Equally subsidizing childcare whether she does it herself or pays a daycare to do it removes this distortion, letting her once again decide for herself based on her individual situation which is the best option.
sodiummuffin
3d ago
So if Alice and Susie are paid to take care of their own children they are welfare leeches, but not if Susie is paid to take care of Alice's child and Alice is paid to take care of Susie's child?
If Alice is paid less than the cost of daycare for working, would do a better job than the daycare, and would prefer spending time with her own children to spending time at work, then working that job is not economically efficient. Subsidizing paid childcare is thus an obvious example of creating economic inefficiency, and the stay-at-home parents who get screwed by their exclusion have understandably been complaining. (Subsidizing childcare in general isn't necessarily inefficient because the average person creates net-positive externalities which parents aren't paid for because it's illegal and impractical to sell your children into slavery or take out loans against their future earnings. Thus the job of creating people suffers from underinvestment.)
Now, it is possible that subsidizing daycare but not stay-at-home parents served a beneficial purpose despite the obvious economic inefficiency. The average first-world person has net-positive externalities but lots of people do not. I assume that is what some of the backlash against "welfare-queen"-enabling policies was, not just enabling people to be net-negative to societal productivity but paying them to create more people who will likely also be net-negative in a fashion that is obviously unsustainable because somebody has to actually pay taxes. Proposals to increase the fertility rate often take the form of reducing taxes rather than direct payments for this reason. However the new proposal would require that the spouse be working 35+ hours a week, which might be sufficient to make it net-positive despite it cutting out at higher income levels.
sodiummuffin
8d ago
Fundamentally, nerds are more likely to hold non-mainstream political views because they are more likely to have picked up their political ideas from the internet, from other nerdy sources like political books, or from nerd peers who got their views from nerdy sources. Non-nerds are more likely to have gotten their views from sources like school, TV news, or non-nerd peers. Because non-nerd sources were more centralized they were more likely to be controlled by the political memeplexes that were already the most powerful, like mainline Democrats/Republicans, and not include niche or taboo views. The internet, on the other hand, favors views that are well-optimized for grassroots virality (with a secondary advantage for being good at taking control of website moderation, though this can also spark backlash). There may be psychological reasons why people favor the exact views they do, but first and foremost any analysis should keep in mind the viral nature of ideas.
Of course, this dynamic is changing as more of the population is heavily online, though there is inertia both on the individual level (people tend to stick with the views they are already committed to) and the group level (views that are already dominant in a social group have an advantage). Increasingly the nerd/non-nerd division is not between online and offline but between more and less nerdy websites (ordered something like political-blogs>Tumblr>4chan>Reddit>Twitter>Tiktok, though some of the biggest political blogs might have a less nerdy audience). As a result, niche and taboo views are increasingly popular among non-nerds, though the kinds of views which gain popularity on Tiktok are different from those that gain popularity from long-form political blogs. Furthermore, the internet provided a space for the development and refinement of once-niche views which in turn managed to seize control of (or at least influence) more mainstream institutions like news outlets and political parties. So even people who still get their views from the news and mainstream institutions tend to just be downstream of whatever internet memeplexes have managed to take over those institutions. This includes the linked article, which is essentially an extension of an internet flame-war where the ideology which now runs NPR is using it to take shots at those tech CEOs who have been converted by enemy ideologies.
sodiummuffin
26d ago
Most of them were involved in fundraising that, if done competently, involved a due diligence component. So either they were incompetent, or chose to interact with the publicly convicted sex offender anyway.
I think it's the latter. The AI research community is deeply entwined with both rationalism and Effective Altruism, and the latter is a rehash of utilitarianism with a peculiar utility function. Artificial super intelligence, if correctly formed, presents infinite utility. If that is true, then literally anything can be justified if it moves the future toward that end.
If Dario's wife was asking him for funding because 'AI justifies anything', she would presumably have asked for AI funding rather than trying to fundraise for a completely different company. Meanwhile Eliezer Yudkowsky is connected to Epstein because he accepted a phone call during a MIRI fundraiser...and then they turned down his $300,000 donation offer after doing due diligence. Here is a comment from him describing the interaction:
Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.
Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.
In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.
This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.
So the only example in your list of people of Epstein funding AI is the money he gave to MIT Media Lab and MIT AI Lab, which is connected to academic AI research but not to internet-rationalism or effective altruism. Also I suspect their policies towards accepting donations has much more to do with MIT-wide policies than anything to do with AI specifically. The only internet-rationalist organization is also the one that got a donation offer and turned it down. Rather than anything to do with rationalism, EA, or utilitarianism, I think this just reflects AI being one of the fields that Epstein thought was cool.
sodiummuffin
29d ago
Most people die for normal reasons, like terminal illness. If you convert a significant fraction of those deaths into MAID deaths, it is unsurprising if MAID deaths end up outnumbering abnormal causes of death like getting shot. This is pretty irrelevant to the question of how many MAID deaths are bad. (People disagree on exactly which MAID deaths qualify as bad, but "terminal cancer patient in pain chooses to die a couple weeks early" is pretty popular and "person who could have lived a long happy life successfully pursues MAID based on some bullshit condition because it gives institutional approval for suicidal tendencies" is not.) On one hand the raw number of MAID deaths doesn't indicate abuse of the system, on the other hand a high percentage of reasonable MAID deaths doesn't tell us whether or not there is a significant amount of abuse, since you would expect the normal deaths to be the majority regardless.
Come on dude. EA organizations make and publish analyses of effectiveness all the time, it's their whole thing. Here is an EA blog post about bednet misuse I found in a minute of searching. As it mentions, Givewell commissioned Rethink Priorities to research use of bednets in fishing:
Imperfect use is already included in cost-effectiveness:
And of course there is a ton of research, including randomized control trials, showing distributing bednets is effective:
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