was
1yr ago
There's a difference between pointing out that Jewish people are like 50%+ of University Presidents, and asking whether it makes sense for those same individuals to advocate for Affirmative Actions whereby Asian students get downranked, and posting Nazi symbols.
was
1yr ago
Yes, let's make sure Twitter gets bankrupted / regulated out of existence, that'll show those censors!
To be clear (copied from another post of mine):
"If I were Musk and you posted that on Twitter, I wouldn't care. Nobody knows who you are and I agree the image is largely harmless. Maybe some NYT journalist compiles the '500 incidents of anti-Semitism' but it can largely be shrugged off since only the disproportionately-loud chattering class cares what the NYT says.
If you're Kanye West and have been actively in the news for being anti-Semitic, recently required my intervention to un-ban, and have been posting progressively "edgy" things, then you're damn right I'm going to ban you to maintain the commercial viability and existence of my platform."
was
1yr ago
I guess this is how conversations go when both sides frame things uncharitably?
was
1yr ago
By two counts:
-
Mainstream ideas on content moderation would be to remove anyone that posts some sort of swastika. I would only ban a person with significant publicity who singlehandedly could cause a large advertiser exodus.
-
Mainstream ideas on what causes "experience degradation" expands over time, e.g. first swastikas, then failure to use gendered terms, etc. I would optimize for the experience of the, say, 1 S.D. above-average tolerant person rather than the 1 S.D. below-average tolerant person.
The corollary of point 2 is that sites get more tolerant over time in my view (as people become desensitized to seeing mildly offensive views), but less tolerant over time in the current paradigm.
was
1yr ago
I'm not trying to maximize free speech Y-intercept; I'm trying to maximize free speech AUC over time.
If it's 1995 and your goal is to allow for maximum degrees of freedom in human sexuality / sexual identification, you first amplify only homosexuality (mildly to moderately unacceptable relative to the population's current position); only once that's accepted do you amplify transsexuality. If you skip step 1 there's a huge negative reaction that works against your goal.
P.S. Thank you for framing it as a question rather than other commenters who just made a bunch of assumptions.
was
1yr ago
What's the over / under on whether (conditional on actually being guilty), Hunter Biden is actually investigated, convicted, and serves a sentence comparable to what a "regular Joe" would serve?
I would give something like 1:1000 -- or about the likelihood that the true "alt-right" has some sort of overwhelming awakening and victory (if a Mitt Romney or even Ron DeSantis-type Republican were magic-wanded into the Presidency tomorrow, I do not think he or she would push for much beyond some media noise).
On a related note, what would other people give as the odds ratio of the "alt-right" gaining some sort of overwhelming victory in the next 10 years? To me it seems like this would require some extreme sequence of events, for example DJT is assassinated by the FBI [1] and an overwhelming evidence trail comes to light.
[1] Dear Secret Service, I am not advocating for this to happen, it is a purely hypothetical scenario.
was
1yr ago
Uncharitably, the other side of the table sounds to me like "I get to feel superior on some edgy corner of the internet, and then whine about it as my side continually loses battle after battle in the culture war".
was
1yr ago
I disagree that posts can be judged in isolation.
If I were Musk and you posted that on Twitter, I wouldn't care. Nobody knows who you are and I agree the image is largely harmless. Maybe some NYT journalist compiles the "500 incidents of anti-Semitism" but it can largely be shrugged off since only the disproportionately-loud chattering class cares what the NYT says.
If you're Kanye West and have been actively in the news for being anti-Semitic, recently required my intervention to un-ban, and have been posting progressively "edgy" things, then you're damn right I'm going to ban you to maintain the commercial viability and existence of my platform.
You're trying to maximize free speech Y-intercept; I'm trying to maximize free speech AUC over time.
was
1yr ago
Unfortunately I don't think bright lines exist for most things (i.e. most absolutist positions are untenable -- is spam free speech? there's no incitement of violence.) I think the left has historically been really good at amplifying something that's just far enough to change people's minds but nothing that's considered truly abhorrent (e.g. first gay marriage, then transgenderism; not the reverse).
was
1yr ago
The difference is that saving the environment requires a coordinated action, but saving a kid in India does not. Any modestly well-off person from the U.S. can do it. So the fact that they don't is a revealed preference (vs. just a consequence of tragedy of the commons).
EAs use this contradiction to convince people to do more (by pointing out what you would do for someone in front of you). I don't have this contradiction -- I wouldn't do shit for many people in front of me either.
And yes, I stand by my assessment of Barbara Fried. Instead of passing a drug test to demonstrate purity of body, upper-class welfare leeches must pass a similar test put together by a granting agency to demonstrate purity of mind.
Here's her bibliography: https://law.stanford.edu/publications/?primary_author=Barbara%20Fried&page=1
was
1yr ago
I say this as someone who's NOT vegetarian.
Cattle genomes are about 80% similar to man (that's not to imply that the results of its expression are linear). If we created an AGI that was 100X smarter than us and treated us like cattle -- what would our argument be? How could we convince it that it is acting in the wrong but we are acting in the right?
was
1yr ago
Yes, there's definitely some people that care.
But the vast majority just profess to care and their actions (i.e. revealed preferences) suggest otherwise.
was
1yr ago
The person you're responding to is so deep in their own fantasy scenario that they're already rolling out the gotchyas for something that they just straight made up lol.
"Let's assume a hypothetical scenario in which all smart people just punch themselves in the face once a day. Well if they're so smart, how come they keep punching themselves in the face once a day? Riddle me that, ace, riddle me that!"
was
1yr ago
The first argument is about the excess costs of healthcare--in his case he says his last hospital bill was $1,927 and concludes it is too much just because some others would have difficulty paying it. That is not adequate information because he did not describe the value of it. In fact, the author self-admittedly says "I’m allergic to almost everything on the planet", which means without the advances that have made modern healthcare possible he would either be dead or constantly uncomfortable (depending on the severity of his allergies). Being able to live a normal life instead sounds like pretty great value for two thousand bucks.
In the second argument he says that other things, like software, are priced based on the effort to make them. He contrasts this: "the price of a software contract is roughly correlated to the price it takes to produce the software [...[ In healthcare, the price of software licenses is frequently not tethered to the production costs in any way whatsoever [...] it doesn’t take more effect or work for them to create a product for a hospital with more beds." He concludes that this is evidence of grift in healthcare. This is another fundamental mistake: the price of software is correlated with the amount of marginal value it provides to the customer over to their next best alternative. It's just basic economics.
Given two large fundamental misconceptions in the first two arguments of the post I have elected to forego reading the rest of the article.
was
1yr ago
If the source of new users is primarily from reddit, how does moving after they ban us reduce the risk of dying from a lack of new users?
was
1yr ago
To explain this relationship further to the layman audience, let's say the interest rate (which is directly related to yield) on Treasuries is 0% (and for simplification, that's the only other investment option, and the market doesn't price in any potential for that interest rate to change), and you buy a $100 bond that promises to pay 2% interest over the next 30 years. You're buying the bond and anticipating getting $182 at the end of 30 years!
The day after you buy the bond, the interest rate on Treasures gets raised to 5%. Now, in order to get $182 in 30 years, someone can just buy $42 worth of Treasuries today. So your "bond" is now worth less than $42 -- because why would they buy your bond when they could buy the Treasuries instead?
was
1yr ago
It's not the lack of cash, it's the timing of it.
Directors of a company are criminally liable if they ask people to work knowing they have no means to pay them. Wednesday is March 15 (payday, for work done March 1 - 15). That means companies unable to make payroll #2 in March need to furlough or have layoffs before start of work Thursday.
How many will be able to secure funding from VCs (who may themselves have funds tied up in SVB) before Thursday?
was
1yr ago
I think that no Nazis really exist anymore (obviously there are some people -- it rounds to zero) so that there's really nobody left to forgive. Certainly the concept of being genocided doesn't need to be forgiven?
was
1yr ago
The Motte was the only reddit page I was visiting frequently -- I am glad to be off that site and thus no longer supporting it by contributing to their user / view counts.
was
1yr ago
It's more a historical thing. 25 years ago, when startups were less of "a thing", a lot of traditional banks didn't approve a startup account because the below looks really weird if you're used to servicing traditional businesses.
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Someone with no commercial history or credit
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Who wants a credit card
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Then who one day deposits millions of dollars
-
And the next months dollars get sent out and the bank balance goes down
-
With minimal consistent income
These days it's more that you ask some random person in the startup world, VC, or lawyer, and they go "yeah, a plurality of the people I know use SVB" and that's not where you spend your precious hours as a founder trying to differentiate your company so you just go with the flow.
Though, next week every single founder is going to be taking money out of First Republic, Citizens, Fifth Third, Capital One, BNY Mellon, etc. and wiring it straight to JPM. I suspect there will be a broader bank run.
My goal is to reproduce while maximizing happiness AUC. Maximizing happiness means:
a. The people I love continue to love me back.
b. I get to do cool things for as long as possible
c. The absence of extreme suffering (for me and those I care about).
From there, this is an iterated Pascal's matrix:
a. Either AGI happens within my lifetime or not
b. Either the AGI is "good" or "bad"
c. Either fundamental social contracts (i.e. the concept of "property", murder is rare) break down within my lifetime or not
(A) If AGI does NOT happen within my lifetime and social contracts persist: accumulate a reasonable amount of capital quickly, reproduce, and do what I want to do
(B) If AGI does NOT happen within my lifetime and social contracts collapse: move myself + family somewhere remote, be able to sustain ourselves, and own some guns
(C) If AGI DOES happen, it's GOOD, and social contracts persist:
- Best course of action: Accumulating a reasonable amount of capital quickly and ideally owning some portion of that AGI (i.e. having the rights to some of the value generated) is the best course of action.
(D) If AGI DOES happen, it's GOOD, and social contracts collapse:
- Best course of action: Doesn't matter what I do.
(E) If AGI DOES happen, it's BAD, and social contracts persist:
-
Presumably this is a scenario where AGI can do anything it wants to do in the virtual world (e.g. win the stock market), but has limited ability to reach into the physical (e.g. build physical robots to carry out its plans) because the physical world still involves humans coordinating with each other.
-
Best course of action: move somewhere remote, be able to sustain oneself, and own some guns
(F) If AGI DOES happen, it's BAD, and social contracts collapse:
- Best course of action: move somewhere remote, be able to sustain ourselves, and own some guns. I probably won't have a long life but will be longer than if I'm in the city.
Taken in total: I think I have a pathway towards generating enough capital (e.g. $10M or so) in the next two years. After that I plan to buy a remote farm and lots of guns, some equity in the major AI companies (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple), and an apartment in the city (I can travel to / live in for enjoyment if things are going well).
I presume it will take me at least five years to learn how to farm properly. So all in all, this is a reasonable course of action if social contract breakdown is > 10 years away.
I'm assuming for AGI = BAD, that the AGI just doesn't care about us. Society breaks down, supply chain collapses, it builds whatever it wants to build, but we're not actively being hunted down. If it's actively wanting to hunt us down nothing I do will matter -- but in the "farm + guns" plan there's the side-benefit that maybe I can blow my brains out and entropy will make it exceedingly annoying to re-create a virtual version of me to be tortured for all eternity.
I am free speech maximalist (note that's different from absolutist) and I would have shut Kayne West down.
Twitter provides a platform for much more free speech than, say, the NYT or Reddit.
Famous people posting swastikas on Twitter -- the steelman version of his picture is that he's telling Jewish people they should forgive Nazis, which seems to be a totally nonsensical position -- is a great way to get the platform shut down.
In this instance, removing one person's ability preserves the platform's availability for many others.
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