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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27471 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Since @Hawaii98 complains about insufficient quantity of quality commentary, I've taken it upon myself to cover one of the topics proposed by @greyenlightenment, namely the doxxing of Based Beff Jesos, the founder of effective accelerationism. My additional commentary, shallow though it may be, got out of hand, so it's a standalone post now: E/acc and the political compass of AI war.

As I've been arguing for some time, the culture war's most important front will be about AI; that's more pleasant to me than the tacky trans vs trads content, as it returns us to the level of philosophy and positive actionable visions rather than peculiarly American signaling ick-changes, but the stakes are correspondingly higher… Anyway, Forbes has doxxed the founder of «e/acc», irreverent Twitter meme movement opposing attempts at regulation of AI development which are spearheaded by EA. Turns out he's a pretty cool guy eh.

Who Is @BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement? [archive.ph link]

Quoting Forbes:

…At first blush, e/acc sounds a lot like Facebook’s old motto: “move fast and break things.” But Jezos also embraces more extreme ideas, borrowing concepts from “accelerationism,” which argues we should hasten the growth of technology and capitalism at the expense of nearly anything else. On X, the platform formally known as Twitter where he has 50,000 followers, Jezos has claimed that “institutions have decayed beyond the point of salvaging and that the media is a “vector for cybernetic control of culture.”

Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.

My main objective is to provide the reader with convenient links to do own research and contribute to the debate, so I rapidly switch from Beff to a brief review of new figures in AI safety discourse, and conclude that the more important «culture war» of the future will be largely fought by the following factions:

  • AI Luddites, reactionaries, job protectionists and woke ethics grifters who demand pause/stop/red tape/sinecures (bottom left)
  • plus messianic Utopian EAs who wish for a moral singleton God, and state/intelligence actors making use of them (top left)
  • vs. libertarian social-darwinist and posthumanist e/accs often aligned with American corporations and the MIC (top right?)
  • and minarchist/communalist transhumanist d/accs who try to walk the tightrope of human empowerment (bottom right?)

In the spirit of making peace with inevitability of most discussion taking place in the main thread, I repost this here.

edit: not to toot my own horn, but

Is anyone else checking here less and less often because equal quality commentary seems increasingly available elsewhere?

I am checking here less and less often because A) with my current concerns and the way wind blows, Western culture war is largely irrelevant B) there's little for me to contribute in addition to all that has been said and C) I've concluded that my ability at making commentary is better used for making an impact.

edit 2: I also mildly dislike the fact that standalone posts need approval, though I can see how that follows from the problem/design choice of easy anon registration.

Why do they call it effective accelerationism? Are they deliberately making fun of effective altruism with that name, or are they using the word "effective" unironically in some way?

George Hotz talks about it here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DdZmZJHEVUc?si=g7z3yB_V_pvqc6-q

To paraphrase: no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it. No don’t start a charity to give away 100 malaria vaccines, start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

no we aren’t going to give food away, there is just going to be abundant food that’s so cheap that nobody can’t afford it.

This is already the case, but now everyone complains about food waste. Can't win!

Food waste you mean carbon sequestration? Do your part, don’t eat that tart!

But seriously is anyone really complaining about food waste? I personally haven’t really heard that.

People complain about food waste, and though they have a point, I think it's ultimately a trivial problem. Food being wasted us a byproduct of our civilization producing so much food so cheaply that we can afford to waste it. But, to bring the subject back to malaria vaccines, I am not worried about future generations having so many malaria vaccines that they can afford to fill landfills with them.

But seriously is anyone really complaining about food waste? I personally haven’t really heard that.

People complain about it all the time where I live, and it is actually a real environmental issue. I know that I feel bad whenever I waste food, for one. That said it isn't like there are many people championing food waste, so there's not much of a debate.

How is food waste an environmental issue? It's all biodegradable organics.

Modern industrial and petroleum-based agriculture is absurdly wasteful. For every calorie of energy the modern agricultural system produces, 13 calories were spent growing it and distributing it ( https://css.umich.edu/publications/factsheets/food/us-food-system-factsheet - this data is somewhat old but if you have better I'd love to see it ). Historical farming methods tended to have ratios like 1:5-10 as opposed to 13:1, but nobody really notices that we're technically massively less efficient at turning energy into food due to the abundance of energy provided by fossil fuels. We're currently expending those fossil fuels at breakneck speeds, and in many cases using farming methods that contribute to environmental degradation and loss of soil quality as well. It'd be dishonest to just shove those costs into the energy equation, but I think there's a real and serious issue there that a lot of people have spent a lot of time talking about.

Industrial agriculture is actually a tremendously bad deal when you look at the level of raw energy we put into the system and what we get out of it when compared to other options, and food wastage is made worse because the costs of that waste are magnified by the sheer inefficiency of the system that produced it. Sure, an apple you throw away because it had a worm in it or went off isn't that big of a deal, but when that apple was produced by the modern day industrial system of agriculture you're wasting a lot more energy than you were in the past.

Finally, a lot of food is wasted for reasons that a lot of people don't like (corporate profitability, aesthetics, etc). I believe you live in Australia - if you're interested in learning more on that particular aspect, I recommend checking out The War on Waste https://iview.abc.net.au/video/DO1624H001S00

(edited solely for spacing/readability)

I don't really see the problem here. Like, why is the energy input/output ratio the relevant metric? Obviously modern agriculture is going to involve more energy usage since we now have tractors and stuff and we didn't use to. But that's also why we are now able to feed 8 billion people. Energy is there to be used - and what's a better use for it than feeding the world?

I don't believe there is another viable option to "industrial agriculture" when it comes to producing the amount of food we need. And if your problem is that it uses natural biofuels, I don't agree, but that's an argument for getting the required energy from other sources rather than for scrapping all the combine harvesters.

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According to the chart, the lion's share of this modern energy expense on food is storage, services, transportation and processing. But do we not save energy on the convenience? It makes some sense that we spend more calories on growing food because we use few people and many machines, as opposed to 90% of people plowing their own (or not exactly their own, but details) share of a field. But is the freed manpower accounted for?

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start a company to make the malaria vaccines cost $0.01 each and make them abundant.

That sounds great, but the problem is that you now have to invent a new economic system to replace capitalism. If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford? What's my incentive there to invest in a company where, no matter how much product they produce, no matter what volume of sales, they're just about covering their operating costs and I'm making back pennies instead of dollars on my investment?

Dismantling and replacing capitalism is going to be the way more difficult problem than finding out how to make cheap cheap goods and services.

the idea is the volume makes up for the lower price.. the McDonald's business model.

But you can't just price everything at pennies. McDonald's may have a Eurosaver menu, but they also have the full-price products.

I'm poking at this because it sounds great and if achievable, who could object to cheap drugs? But the nuts and bolts don't seem worked out. So where is every garage pharma getting all the energy and ingredients and plant and transport and so on? Oh something something AI has solved the problems of pulling rabbits out of hats something something. Everyone has their own personal robot slave, maybe a couple of them. We're all cellar alchemists turning lead to gold.

Take the step of "and the AI is magic" out, and how do you keep it from collapsing into a pixie dust glitter of wish-fulfilment?

If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return! What do you mean I can't sell them for $50, I have to sell them at a price the very poorest can afford?

Unfortunately for you, a malaria vaccine production facility only costs $20 in this post-scarcity utopia. If you tried charging $50 for a single dose, I'd just start my own company (blackjack and hookers optional). At that scale, I don't need to attract investors and even the utter basics of running a company like "tracking sales" or "accepting payments" might not be worthwhile.

We currently have pseudo-post-scarcity availability for a few substances:

  • Salt is the root of the word "salary", but most restaurants will have a month's supply of it just sitting on their tables that you can use as your whims dictate.
  • Water use isn't even tracked in residential Vancouver. You just pay a flat rate because measuring it isn't worth the bother

It would be great if we could add hundreds of other items to that list.

I think this kind of extreme deflation will be challenged by governments using it to just print money.

Maybe compare it to Tylenol? I didn’t realize it before having kids, but Tylenol is a life saving medicine as a fever reducer, and costs effectively nothing.

I don’t think GeoHot is laying out a full business plan here, just speaking in broad terms, and I do generally agree with him.

If every malaria vaccine costs $0.01 to make, yippee! I can sell them for $50 and make a huge return!

And when they’re abundant and cheap like Tylenol, other people will sell them for 49.99, 49.98, 49.97, […], 0.01. Nobody will want your $50 malaria pills just like nobody wants $50 Tylenol.

At that scale, I don't need to attract investors and even the utter basics of running a company like "tracking sales" or "accepting payments" might not be worthwhile.

We've seen what happens when you don't bother tracking basics (coughFTXcough) 😁

But see, that's what I'm talking about. "At that scale" where any Tom, Dick or Harry can start churning out malaria pills without, it would seem, needing to worry about sourcing and paying for ingredients, machinery, plant, etc. then we are talking a whole new economic system.

We've seen what happens when you don't bother tracking basics (coughFTXcough) 😁

Let's stick with my example of salt.

Imagine that an accountant went up to a restaurant owner and asked:

  • How much additional table salt does the average diner use?
  • Is there a difference between breakfast/lunch/supper?
  • Which specific menu items induce higher or lower salt use?
  • Can you predict salt use based on the features of a group?

The answer would likely be something like "idk, maybe about 500 mg each because I bought a 10 kg bag ten thousand meals ago and it's half gone." In this case, the basics literally aren't worth tracking. (If the accountant was asking about steaks, on the other hand, the owner had better have those answers.)

...then we are talking a whole new economic system.

We're already 1% of the way to post-scarcity, and capitalism works just fine. I don't see any reason it would fail when we're at 50% or even 90% post-scarcity. It would simply focus on the remaining, scarce resources.

Yes, but Tylenol is not being sold at $0.01 a pill. Look at the hoops pharma companies jump through in order to keep medicines under patent, instead of becoming cheap generics.

To make things work where you get investors for your "it only costs $0.01 to make it and hence we can only charge $0.02 to sell it so your dividends will be $0.005", you will need to find some refinement of free market capitalism that we don't yet have.

Yes it is.

https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-extra-strength-acetaminophen-500-mg.%2c-1%2c000-caplets.product.100213623.html

That's 1000 for $9.99, 999 pills for 1 cent each and then 1 extra. Now, if you buy a smaller quantity it is more expensive, since you're paying them to make and ship around a smaller bottle, and there's probably also a bit of a premium for name-brand Tylenol if you don't know about generics (some of which is you paying them to advertise the existence of Tylenol to you), but here's a smaller quantity of brand-name Tylenol for something like $0.15 each.

https://www.amazon.com/Tylenol-Acetaminophen-Extra-Strength-Count/dp/B000052WQ7/

Not exactly an onerous burden.

Yes, but Tylenol is not being sold at $0.01 a pill.

It's being sold for $0.08 a pill.

Like, what the argument here? That capitalism prevents anything from becoming cheap, plentiful, and accessible?

That capitalism prevents anything from becoming cheap, plentiful, and accessible?

So far, yes. I want to see the working out when everyone can make 1 cent Tylenol in their kitchen.

Huh? Super cheap products require economies of scale. You absolutely can set up a factory churning out cheap Tylenol and sell tons of it for cheap. You're not going to be able to make small batches in your kitchen and sell them cheaply and it be economic, even if you magic away all the regulatory and supply chain hurdles.

Competition is still a powerful force when applied to big pharmaceutical corporations though. If Pharma Giant #1 and Pharma Giant #2 can both produce malaria vaccines for $0.01 per shot, the sale will go to the one that sets their price lowest. Since even a price of $0.02 per shot creates a big profit margin if you have enough volume, they get churned out, and humanity wins.

What a way to miss the point. What they seek is to make the free-market value of most things so minimal that we no longer bother to put a price on them in much the same way you're not being metered for the air you breathe, or at the least like how you don't have to pay a fee for running a tap in a restaurant even if you're not ordering in there.

It's not like Taylor Swift concert tickets being sold at a price far less than the market will bear, largely for the PR benefit of fans deluding themselves into thinking Taylor is looking out for them, so that you can make a killing off re-selling them for much more than you paid for them, if you're lucky or have a bot helping you scalp them.

This is, of course, completely orthogonal to whether or not that's feasible (I do think it is, at least for malaria vaccines), but that is what their goal is.

The world as we know it is already radically abundant compared to most of history. There are no end of things that people won't mind you taking in passing, with objections only rising when you show up with a handcart to grab all the "free" stuff.

you're not being metered for the air you breathe

Because nobody manufactures air on Earth (except Mother Nature). Creating a breathable atmosphere on the Moon is a different matter, and that would be charged for (at least according to Heinlein) and if you can't pay your oxygen bill, you will suffocate and nobody thinks that's wrong.

There's a reason I'm implicitly describing air on Earth as opposed to on a hypothetical lunar colony. My analogy is the inverse of what you're thinking, it's going from a commodity being scarce and worth rationing out to being "too cheap to meter".

Last time I heard about "too cheap to meter" it was nuclear power and we were all going to be living the abundant life with the clean energy generated by the nuclear power plants:

The phrase was coined by Lewis Strauss, then chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, who, in a 1954 speech to the National Association of Science Writers, said:

It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes electrical energy too cheap to meter, will know of great periodic regional famines in the world only as matters of history, will travel effortlessly over the seas and under them and through the air with a minimum of danger and at great speeds, and will experience a lifespan far longer than ours, as disease yields and man comes to understand what causes him to age.

So how did that one work out in reality, then?

Not a failure of nuclear power, but the idiots blocking it with onerous regulation. That's being reversed now, better late than never.

We don't manufacture iron ore either. We still buy and sell that - including when it's still in the ground.

Scarcity is the key variable.

X. Instead a hypothetical moon colony would nationalize the oxygen production industry, and if you don't pay your taxes you would be beaten by the police and then imprisoned.

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