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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 13, 2026

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And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the grandchild of some schmuck who was lucky enough to put $10,000 into the right stock at the right time.

This is why we should have a real meritocracy instead of a luckocracy. My only problem with Sam Altman is that he isn't enough of a genius. His product is good and better people ought to have more money than the rabble.

AI will be more meritorious than any human, though.

I'm pro sentient sillicon super intelligence. I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.

I just want to make sure it has qualia and isn't a Chinese room.

"In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children." - Nick Bostrom

I'd also add some preferences regarding population and personality and such, but "do our successors have any intrinsic value or not" does seem to be the first and most important criterion to have!

However, I'm confused by the use of the phrase "make sure" here. Unless you're expecting to be uploaded, and you're confident that the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent (which I'm guessing you aren't, given the Chinese room reference), what observations could give you any sense of surety here? Today's LLMs can pass Turing tests, which used to be our "fine, they're sentient now" criterion, but their lack of "medium-term" memory and they fact that they still can "slip" in ways that make them seem non-sentient makes us think in hindsight that our criterion was just inadequate, and yet we haven't really found anything to replace it. If tomorrow's LLMs never slip, does that mean they've become sentient, or does that just mean they've become better at faking it?

If it can be a true successor, with intelligence, agency, and everything, it's probably sentient. If we can't figure out what sentience is in the mean time, maybe we don't deserve to keep existing into the future anyway. It's probably not that hard, but humans are very disappointing currently.

This is why we should have a real meritocracy instead of a luckocracy. My only problem with Sam Altman is that he isn't enough of a genius. His product is good and better people ought to have more money than the rabble.

Well in your meritocracy, would people be able to bequeath resources to their descendants?

Yes, because I value latent merit.

Yes, because I value latent merit.

Ok, so let me amend my scenario a bit:

And if you want to earn extra money beyond your UBI, you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the wastrel great grandchild of some admittedly brilliant software engineer whose indolent son had a fling with a stripper.

Yes, but he doesn't have the latent merit, and we can measure that. So the scenario would only be

you need to take some demeaning job as a personal servant for the brilliant and beautiful great grandchild of some admittedly brilliant software engineer whose son had a marriage with an Olympic figure skater.

Yes, but he doesn't have the latent merit, and we can measure that.

But so what? It's pretty normal for people to bequeath wealth to their wastrel descendants.

It's also normal for people to gain wealth through luck, but I want to stop that.

It's also normal for people to gain wealth through luck, but I want to stop that.

Except for the luck of being a genetic descendant of the right person, right? I mean, look at the scenario I laid out: Some brilliant guy does brilliant things and gets fabulously wealthy. His son has a fling with a stripper, resulting in a bastard child. Before dying in a motorcycle accident, the bastard child has a 6 month relationship with a girl he meets in community college who lies about being on birth control, resulting in a great-grandchild. A few years later an attorney shows up at some trailer park to tell a single mom that she is now a billionaire.

Ok, that's an exaggeration but you get my point.

I myself have a family member who is a total drug-addict screwup who had only one full time job at age 21, which she held down for about 3 weeks before getting in a fight with her supervisor and getting fired. It's been more than 30 years and she hasn't worked since, instead living off of family money. A trust is being up which will give her a mid-6 figure income (tax free) for the rest of her life.

Would you call that luck?

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