site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Are there examples of actual geneticists speaking about limits of linear regression PGI?

actually understand how intelligence works to make changes that go that far from natural designs

Depends on what you mean by "that far".

There's a decent amount of funding in genetics and neuroscience

there isn't, say, IQ genetics study with sample of 10 million with full genome sequencing.

that being that smart might not actually be physically possible

Because what? Smaller animals significantly outperform larger animals with same brain size, their brains are more tightly packed. Why wouldn't be elephant sized brain with density of sparrow be smarter? Cooling might be a problem, though.

(wrote in a hurry) IQ is basically defined to be a normal distribution. 250 iq is 10 standard deviations above the mean, and the probability of being >= that is like 1 in 10^23. We can't sample from the distribution of 10^23 humans, and even if we could it's not obvious what distribution to pick or why, so even in theory I'm not sure what 250 would mean.

10^10 data points is still a lot of data. I think it would be enough to crack nonlinearity to process to human twice further from baseline than existing best individuals. It's unknown nonlinearity, but not cryptographically secure nonlinearity.

not cryptographically secure nonlinearity

AGI is ... also "unknown linearity", and arguably in the exact same sense. The data points mostly duplicate each other and test the effects of small incremental changes. It takes a while to build intelligence out of tiny changes, as the history of the planet suggests

The data points mostly duplicate each other and test the effects of small incremental changes.

I do not think given random two individuals of 160 IQ are mostly duplicates of each other.

If industry could profit from engineering 300 IQ humans as they can profit from LLM AIs, we would have it by now. .... i think "we" will have ASI sooner.