toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
5mo ago
Third, they are facilely _un_cynical in a way that grates on Irish people - I have yet to get through a conversation with a Brazilian without them telling me about their "dream of Europe" in such a gormless way as would make a beauty pageant contestant squirm.
Do Irish people object to the this because they think the Brazillian is bullshitting, or do they object because they suspect the Brazillian is being honest?
toadworrier
9mo ago
The Korea thing interests me. I always thought that was a pretty left-wing country by rich-world standards. But I guess it's all about the deltas. Maybe Koreans are all for unions, but as a result they've been so powerful that everyone is sick of them now (kind of like Britain under Thatcher).
toadworrier
11mo ago
Gender ideology asks people to assert things that aren't actually true and to accept this untruth promulgated through public institutions,
The same is true for affirmative action. Which is how we got into this mess.
toadworrier
1yr ago
indictment of the American right, that there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.
Doing that sort of shit on abortion clinics certainly has saved any babies. If anything, it's done the opposite.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Do you think "Trump Banged Pornstar (at least) Once" is really a secret worth paying millions to keep? I'm half surprised he didn't pay her to make a movie about the incident.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Me.
Institutions matter.
toadworrier
5mo ago
I am always wary of non-profits.
I agree with this, but also remember the original mission. OpenAI got it's initial dose of mind-share, talent and OPM because it was supposed to save the world from centralising AI in the hands of a winner-take-all company.
IMHO that was a dumb strategy for achieving a valid goal from the beginning, but a straight-out for-profit company would have been completely opposite to the mission.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Because artists want to do what is cool among their peers.
toadworrier
1yr ago
Yes, it does.
But the US judiciary also has explicit doctrines (the most famous is Chevron) that give enormous deference agencies administering statues. That's what makes it uncharacteristically submissive against the administrative state while being pretty robust against actual legislation.
Other countries also allow parliaments to delegate a lot of their power to agencies, and courts are pretty timid about the delegation itself. But they do a more serious job of reviewing the agency decisions in the light of their enabling legislation. This is not some extraordinary activism, it's just common sense. It is America that has a weirdly deferential doctrine.
toadworrier
3mo ago
Makes sense for a genuine civil liberties organization, because every political faction wants to violate someone's civil rights some of the time and so the civil rights will do well to practice its independence by calling everyone out on their misbehaviour. So I would expect FIRE to do it in the modern age more than the ACLU.
toadworrier
3mo ago
Both the IRA and PLO were left-wing militias.
toadworrier
4mo ago
I wonder what the deeper implications for human cognition are. I don't think there are people who can keep 25k words in their working memory, that seems to be much smaller, but we certainly don't usually forget the start of a novella by the time we reach the end. Is there a lot of caching and summarization going on?
Yes, there is in effect a lot of "caching and summarization" going on -- although that's probably our 2023 ooga-booga, not-quite-wrong way of talking about something else. LLMs really only have their context window and it's feedback as a short-term memory. Which is fine for text translation, but is asinine if you want anything like a thinking engine. Goldfish with a notebook.
We and LLMs can both compress long stories into gists, but the LLMs just forget about it and repeat the work on every iteration. We remember the gists and use them as context on every iteration.
toadworrier
5mo ago
Adversary reveals himself through his accusations
I didn't know this was a common idea? Is there some background reading for it?
toadworrier
10mo ago
while roughly zero Americans can pronounce (or know about) "Tadeusz Kościuszko.")
Well I'm from Australia, where we also know nothing about him and can't pronounce his name. But we mispronounce it often, and with awe, because we have a fucking mountain named after him. Thus his name even reverberates in our greatest heroic poem:
And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high,
Where the air is clear as crystal, and the white stars fairly blaze
At midnight in the cold and frosty sky,
...
toadworrier
11mo ago
They are in somewhat of a win-win situation, because even if their constitution gets rejects, they'd be left with the status quo-which they'd be happy with. The main task for them is to get through it without somehow re-energising the opposition.
toadworrier
1yr ago
No, he can simply withdraw from India and leave that money on the table. This is what Google eventually did in China, and was better for it.
This is terribly sad for India - not because it needs Twitter, but because it needs free speech. But the Indians are going to have to learn that the hard way (and they will only do it very slowly, I'd say two centuries minimum).
toadworrier
1yr ago
5% of the population are South Asian migrant workers. Perhaps 20% are Iranians. ... The Emiratis are not concerned. Why? Because they’re still in charge.
Sounds right, but it might be short sighted. History has all sort of twists and turns and regimes always eventually change. If that catches them napping, they'll find the largest civilisation on Earth champing at the bit to take revenge for the millennium of humiliation.
toadworrier
5mo ago
My gut feeling is that this is primarily the work of opportunistic scumbags rioting for the fun of it, for which a fairly small protest which got out of hand was merely the catalyst
Does Ireland's history mean that there's a population of such scumbags who are unusually competent and causing trouble?
toadworrier
5mo ago
Now that the dust seems to be settling, it looks like a coup by the more nonprofit-focused boardmembers and executives against the guys like Sam and Microsoft who wanted to build a company with real shareholder value.
If true, then this sounds like the board doing it's job. Even if the result of this is to entirely kill OpenAI, that would still be closer to the mission than what had been going on. That said, I'm still waiting to see what the real result will be.
toadworrier
10mo ago
They lose money, but not necessarily influence, as they can leverage the loss of money for concessions in other areas, such as Chinese access into other infrastructure or concessions to allow Chinese-only installations
This is what I thought the belt-and-road was for. Pretend loans, that are actually payments to buy influence. But no, apparently the Chinese actually ask for their money back, and do so much more insistently than the IMF etc.
I'm particularly familiar with Sri Lanka. That stuff you might have heard of about the place failng organic farming was BS. That nonsense was government copium because they couldn't buy fertilizer, because they ran out of dollars, because the Chinese had lost patience.
The result was that China's friends in power got literally run out of town while protesters jumped into the presidential swimming pool. The new president is nobody's friend, but is now going cap in hand to the IMF.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Their goal isn't to persuade or influence the cosmopolitan tribe its to cripple it and slowly destroy it.
This is a correct analysis, but Canada is far from that yet. The protests have not crippled Trudeauism, they have upped the ante. Trudeau abused his power at the time, and has now abused it again by standing up phonies to whitewash it. This game might end in failure if the next election replaces the regime with an angry and effective alternative. Or else it might just confirm that the regime's right to power is above Canadian democracy.
It could go either way, but I suspect the median Canadian voter prefers to sleepwalk into dictatorship. The denial tastes so good. That's on them, the truckers have done as well as anyone could.
toadworrier
11mo ago
Not wrong, but this could have been said, with equal truth at any time in the last 100 years.
Most of those civil servants are pretty ordinary centre-lefties. It is exceptional, and disturbing that an extremist is not only at high level but is so bold about it.
toadworrier
1yr ago
In other countries that plan likely goes through without interference from the courts.
I'd be surprised. But it's more likely that governments would just pass legislation, since Parliaments are less independent of the executive. It's not 100% -- e.g. in Australia minor parties tend to have the balance of power in the Senate. But in general you don't see executive orders being used as an end-run around Parliament.
What you do see is ministers being granted enormously broad powers by existing legislation. These powers are broad enough that they don't need help from the judiciary to get away with acting arbitrarily. Although when they but up against the constitution, the courts might conveniently forget that the constitution exists.
Consistent Agents are Utilitarian: If you have an agent taking actions in the world and having preferences about the future states of the world, that agent must be utilitarian,
So is Eliezer calling me a utilitarian?
Your heading talks about consistent agents, but the premise that follows says nothing about consistency. [Sorry if you are just steelmanning someone else's argument, here "you" is that steelman, not necessarily /u/JhanicManifold].
- If there is no such function V(s), then our agent is not consistent, and there are cycles we can find in its preference ordering, so it prefers state A to B, B to C, and C to A, which is a pretty stupid thing for an agent to do.
There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.
Australian Covid hysteria quietly died in Christmas of 2021. The governments ruined the Christmas of anyone travelling across the border, only for Omnicron to come and sweep the country. Within a few months nearly everyone had had the disease and found it to be no biggie.
Politicians quietly rolled back all the mandates etc. But in Canada they were still doing it and were only talking about changing things when the Truckers hit.
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