sohois
9hr ago
themotte's current codebase is rdrama I believe. That Zorba opens by suggesting the current thing is a dead-end likely indicates there isn't room for more collaboration there
sohois
12hr ago
I'll echo what arjin posted below and say that your answer seems to vacillate between technological features and sociological design. I'm sure ruqqus and bluesky all had features and ideas they thought differentiated them from their competitors, but it's one thing to say that and another to prove it.
Like with this example:
What if we added our own /m/gaming, /m/technology, and /m/humor, all with politics strictly banned but largely open beyond that, for example?
What does it actually mean to have politics banned? I assume myself and the majority of motters do understand what people mean when they say they are "tired of politics in video games", but turning that tacit understanding into actionable rules is difficult, and as soon as you start adding in a wider range of people that's going to break down. Like you would inevitably get moderators that ban economic topics because of the crossover with politics, and users complaining about people bringing up e.g. Sony's decision to end disc suport because they consider it a political issue.
If the plan is to recruit only users that are open/smart/conscientious/whatever enough to post on the motte and give them more communities to post in, then fine, but at that point you've just reinvented rdrama with all the same user acquisiton issues.
sohois
14hr ago
Would they work?
I'm going to sidestep most of the questions you have posed and just say no, they wouldn't work because attempts to replace reddit (or other established social media sites) never work. When moderators threw a fit a few years ago and some shut down their subreddits, no one moved to new options they tried. Ruqqus, voat are the only other ones I can even remember. A ton of people moved to bluesky from twitter, and now it's still slowly dying, trapped in an extremism cycle. And of course this place and rdrama both appear to have done little but stem the bleeding. Perhaps the stats show differently, but I don't feel like there's ever been any growth.
sohois
1d ago
The following
They were both largely wrong about what begat capitalism / AI; Marxism was very insistent on labor value theory, and LW used to be very focused on symbolic AI/GOFAI/FOOM
Unless AI takeoff has already occurred, I'm not sure why you're declaring them wrong about this.
Inevitably, all such movements end up being co-opted by those very same Molochian dynamics, while never having actually done anything to prevent the Event or improve the chances of the Event leading to abundance (Mao, Stalin vs frontier lab regulatory capture and degrowth ideological capture).
We appear to be in the foothills of AI safety deployment. Governments are just now starting to act on AI. The big companies have deployed some resources for regulatory capture, but I've yet to see anything come of it, and there are just as many influential figures dedicated to ensuring zero regulation (i.e. Marc Andreesen)
And yet neither Marxism nor AI safety has ever achieved anything that might facilitate a more favorable outcome for the Event, whether it truly is imminent or not, and mostly have just made everything worse
Again, the event which hasn't happened yet. If you're making the argument that early LW stuff influenced people to eventually found OpenAI/Anthropic, then fair enough, but this is also a world away from saying "AI safety has [n]ever achieved anything"
It's a fundamentally different position from Marxism, where we have a whole host of negative examples of communism in action.
sohois
1d ago
Are you a time traveller? You're making an awful lot of 'settled' statements about AI safety that seem to have no relation to its current state
sohois
4d ago
Because that is within his potential remit, while the hard maths of alignment is well outside his potential remit
sohois
4d ago
Yudkowsky, MIRI, and related orgs sure, but why would Scott, a psychiatrist who happens to be interested in ratsphere ideas, be responsible? That's like saying a random Trump voter should already have solved the Iran crisis.
But at least on the former, I would agree with post by RandomRanger above that it's not clear what value creating a benchmark 10 years ago would even have in the current environment. I'm pretty sure that MIRI were working on solving alignment itself, rather than working on hypothetical benchmarks for potential future AI technologies. Unless there is a demonstratable link, why would you ask them to do that?
sohois
4d ago
Scattered thoughts on this:
- Marshall's failure to get behind the KMT and defeat the CCP really could be the greatest blunder in American history
- As with AI 2027, this seems like it was written primarily as a PR piece, something to appeal to politicians, decision makers, etc., rather than as a completely serious forecast. And as with AI 2027, I expect there to be a lot of people who either don't understand this or don't agree that this was how it was written, and start nitpicking things obviously intended to appeal to Washington rather be maximally truthful. Case in point: in the comments, Scott says they deliberately didn't use "UBI" as they were advised it would turn off Republicans
- Looking at it as a forecast, I think I'd agree with OP here and give it no real chance of success. Politics is too fractured, China is too untrustworthy, and there are too many dangerously retarded people like Marc Andreesen arguing for the other side. I don't think Trump is necessarily a point against; in fact, I would argue that "only Trump could go to China (to regulate AI)". You have to have a leader with strong control over his own party, who doesn't give a shit about the attacks of his enemies to get this through. But this feels like something Trump 1 could have done, back before he wasn't nearly so senile.
- Although I stressed above that this was written for a political audience, I'm a bit disappointed they weren't more imaginative in their economic predictions. I can't really comprehend their future in which 100% of industries are really quite rapidly fully automated and constantly growing, while at the same time there is still standard capitalism with some redistribution. Who are the buyers in this market? How is cash moving around the system with sufficient velocity, particularly when it comes to more third and second world countries that might have far more difficulty arranging fair redistribution?
That's nice. I kind of assumed aevann would have bullied you guys for not adding in the possibility of pet battles and shit awards
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