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
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
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.
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.
was
1yr ago
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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 guess this is how conversations go when both sides frame things uncharitably?
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
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
One cause of the IQ-denier (and extending beyond that, denial of racial differences in IQ distribution) fallacy / fantasy is assortative socializing.
Lots of top-tier VCs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time a founder gets to Series B, they've been pre-selected for high IQ (1).
Lots of CEOs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time they interview someone for an executive position, that person has already been successful and thus has been pre-selected for high IQ.
You don't even have to be that high up. If you're an engineer at Google, your friend group and work group are probably all people who are fairly high performing individuals. So you might notice that there are fewer black people in that group, but the black people that you do interact with probably feel about as smart as everyone else (2)
Conversely, in my experience, if one talks to ER doctors, cops, public school teachers, or other people who are exposed to relatively large and relatively random slice of society, and one is really careful not to use the words IQ and wait until they've had a couple drinks, each of them will readily attest that some people are just plain smart and some people are just plain dumb.
1 - Or at least high enough to come off as quite smart in a superficial conversation not in one's domain.
2 - Not really true when I talk to non-woke people, but for the woke, at least smart enough that it's easy for them to dismiss any differences as those of education or environment, etc.
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
I used to look at the declining number of Christians in the U.S. to conclude that people were becoming more rational.
Now I realize that religiosity has just transferred -- slavery was the Original Sin, racism is the Devil, and we are all guilty unless we Repent (become anti-racist) and Jesus (black people) alone can forgive us.
It's so tiring.
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
Remember when the Democrats had Biden look at the camera, break the fourth wall, and say "do I look like an extreme leftist to you?"
They know that as long as Biden has the looks and mannerisms of an upper-middle-class grandpa with a touch of dementia, most people will map him to "harmless and with good intentions".
In reality, Biden is a lifelong politician who has likely never worked an honest day in his life. All the things you cited reinforce that. The fact that his son Hunter is all sorts of fucked up to me also reinforces that (although only as part of a constellation of data points; it is far from conclusive by itself).
was
1yr ago
Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.
Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).
Android
Chrome
I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.
Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.
was
1yr ago
I will admit this isn't an effortpost:
As is common knowledge and more deeply discussed elsewhere in this very comment section (e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/62270?context=8#context), Google got "scooped" by ChatGPT not because they were beat on the technology side, but because they were beat on the productization side. Some are comparing this to Xerox PARC, where Xerox invented or incubated many elements of modern computer technology -- the GUI, the mouse, etc. -- but, being blind to their actual utility, got "scooped" by Apple and others and subsequently lost out on trillions of dollars of market value.
What's deeply, deeply hilarious to me is: during this entire time, Google management were so busy posturing, and their internal A.I. safety teams were so busy noisily complaining sexism / racism / phobias of various sorts (not so much human extinction), and they developed such a reputation for being a place to coast, that despite 130,000 elite-educated, overpaid people sitting around ostensibly unleash their brilliance, they're now in a position where Microsoft has a puncher's chance (realistically, maybe 5 - 10%) of catching up and even surpassing Google's decades-long search dominance. Even better, competing with Microsoft now means that Google might have to cannibalize a $100B / yr line of business, whereas Microsoft cannibalizing Bing means it sacrifices maybe a ham sandwich / year line of business.
I have to admit, I don't care about other people as a general rule.
I care about some people: my wife and kids, my parents and siblings, close friends, social circle, coworkers (in descending order). Outside of that I care about people based on the value they bring. That can be direct value, e.g. the mailman who delivers packages, or indirect value, e.g. the people working at USPS's sorting center.
But I don't care at all about the people who bring negative net value. The homeless guy drugged out of his mind? If he died tomorrow I literally wouldn't feel sad at all. The single mother welfare-leech churning out 4 kids? Nope. Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother (who I consider her the upper-class equivalent of a welfare-leech)? Gone. Just fucking Thanos snap hordes of inner-city gangs and Women's Studies majors away.
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do. Does human life have intrinsic value? Yeah, some. But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop? And at least that little kid in the slum has the potential to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, whereas the 65 year old homeless drunk who shows up to the ER every two weeks has no chance?
(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)
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.
More options
Context Copy link