domain:eigenrobot.substack.com
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9m ago
Sorry but I get a strong feeling you have never been exposed to any university system other than modern American liberal arts colleges. What I have seen around Europe typically was that learning happens during exam crunch time and coursework is either just recommended or has relatively little effect on your end grade. If you are doing a “hard” degree then for many major exams you are also responsible for subjects of previous semesters as well so you have to stay on top. This works perfectly fine. I don’t think American students are any lazier than their counterparts in continental Europe, I think they just got conditioned heavily by the only education they have ever experienced.
Also no I liked maths a lot and I have an engineering job using a decent amount of trig-calculus level maths regularly. But I also observed how nonsense the maths requirements were for most degrees.
Incidentally I found it amusing you chose the student using chatgpt to write personal introduction for an “ Ethics and Technology class” as a particularly egregious example. I have never been exposed to an ethics class that wasn’t total non-sense taught by dimwit professors. Just all around busywork. We were either forced to take such classes because of vague ideas about how it would make us more ethical or something or people did so for easy elective credits. The whole faculty had a jobs-program feeling to it. It would be absolutely my top course to cheat through with an LLM.
FistfullOfCrows
10m ago
Here's one. Make it illegal for the government to store any data about a citizen including meta-data, which is not publicly accessible to that citizen. While you're at it make it illegal for companies to "share" data with the government in a non public way unless it's with subpoenas. (And subpoenas for all data for everyone who ever searched for google.com in google's search box doesn't count)
Also if you've been a really good boy for a set amount of time have the capability to request deletion of said data, (granularly)
SnapDragon
10m ago
Yeah, it's a good question that I can't answer. I suspect if all humans somehow held to a (not perfect but decent) standard of not driving impaired or distracted, signaling properly, and driving the speed limit or even slower in dangerous conditions ... that would probably decrease accidents by at least 80% too. So maybe self-driving cars are still worse than that.
you have degenerated into kanging and chimping
"You" as in me, or the forum? Because I agreed with the conclusion here. In general I dont necessarily mean that youre wrong about this stuff, more that a) its very predictable what direction youll go and b) you dont give a lot besides that direction. I agree that what I remember from you about the chinese-AI overlap was better. I did exaggerate.
They feel like Main Characters of history, who are destined to win for narrative reasons and therefore can afford arbitrary foolishness in the midgame
I do in fact have some stock on pre-boomer-racism that is more or less that. But part of that is that its not the "midgame" because I dont think the game ends, either as a whole or for whites specifically. Which might be related to AI scepticism. It doesnt impact medium-term prediction that much.
Now we see a test of naked American authority
I see what you mean. I can just say thats not how people here in europe think of it, and that in itself should influence how we read the reaction.
just a demand to shut up
I dont want you to shut up. Ideally Id want you to start posting about other topics as well again, since these two arent really my focus, but if these post were more substantial in relation to the gloating, that would be an improvement as well.
FistfullOfCrows
14m ago
I'd be down for that only if the jury can vote to recommend this law to be stricken down, then the govt is forced to put it into a proposition so the public gets to vote the law out. No amendment, no copy paste this article into that article. Removed.
FistfullOfCrows
18m ago
All you need to do to be much safer than average is not do those things
All you need to be much safer than average is not live near certain low iq/low conscientiousness/high time preference populations, and yet if you attempt to do that it's the second coming of the apocalypse and the libs cry foul to the moon.
Perhaps we need segregation for the roads, have an AI and Emergency vehicles only lane. Anyone else caught driving there unless they are gunning it for the hospital gets cited/jailed.
would be allowed to house students in conditions no better than those junior enlisted in the army experience(food would have to be absolutely identical down to coming in boxes labeled 'not suitable for prison use')
Why? Is the cruelty actually the point this time? Because I see absolutely no gain here.
Palatable meals (produced at scale at a stable location) are not expensive, especially not when compared to education. Barracks bunk beds might benefit unit cohesion, instill obedience/submission and be easier to supervise/police, but that's far less necessary for the next generation of academics, and the trade-off in privacy and independence is absolutely not worth the price difference.
I'd go the other way. Kill mandatory "all-you-can-eat" meal plans (also makes the "freshman twenty" less of a thing) and mandatory on-campus dorm life. Have private businesses operate the dorms and cafeterias (plural, they need to compete) and let students live off-campus the moment they want.
And if you want to safe money, start cutting at the admin building.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
36m ago
Forcing students who has absolutely no interest and need to do some mid-level maths courses for half baked pedagogic reasons was one of the biggest cheating incentivizers when I was a student. Remember a hot business studies chick in my dorm slept with half the econometrics track guys to get them to do her maths homework. I guess that is some sort of “preparation for life”…
Pasha
Defend Kebab
40m ago
Yes. I believe if you do a proper classics study in those unis even today the experience isn’t that far off according to a friend who did so a while ago. One of the most inspirational uni life stories I have ever come across is Bismarck’s actually. 3.5 years of non-stop drinking and partying and sword dueling topped with insane half a year crunch to graduate. Great recipe to create great men.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
43m ago
Waymo is an order of magnitude better than Tesla FSD.
Corvos
49m ago
What good is an essay?
When you wanted to explain an idea you had to people you don't know, you sat down and wrote this essay. Maybe that's the joke, but in all seriousness, this is the good of an essay. It's a way of conveying your thoughts in a timeless and self-contained fashion.
They are also a way of helping yourself think. Have you read Paul Graham on essays? https://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html
Unless you are defining essays very strictly as 'five part theses of twenty pages as written by humanities students'. I am quite prepared to believe that essay writing is taught badly.
Tree
1hr ago
Thanks, it’s an under-appreciated state of affairs I like to harp on. We may be the descendents of winter people who always had to anxiously stack their grain, but we now live in a land where no one even remembers what true hunger feels like. Most financially literate people understand that it is irrational to insure your TV or phone against breakage, yet claim it is reasonable to insure anything bigger. Even your house burning down does not threaten your existence in any way, there is no need to preemptively hyperventilate by giving some slimy salesman thousands of dollars per year.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1hr ago
Oh yeah I have not seen those posts, but I do get why it can be a little annoying.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
If (1), (2), and (3) are true, then something like UBI can be seriously considered and we can all live in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism.
This is similar to a point made on LW a few weeks ago, as a critique to the national security framing of ASI.
Almost none of the people who are likely to build ASI are evil on a level where it would matter in the face of a technological singularity. At the end of the day, I don't care much how many stars are on the flags drawn on the space ships which will spread humanity through the galaxy. Let Altman become the God-Emperor of Mankind, for all I care. Even if we end up with some sick fuck in charge who insists on exclusively dining on the flesh of tortured humans, that will not really matter (unless he institutes a general policy of torturing humans).
Who is the first to build AI matters only if
(1) AI alignment is possible but difficult, or
(2) AIs will fizzle out before we get to post-scarcity.
Of course, both of these are plausible, so practically we should be concerned with who builds AI.
FistfullOfCrows
1hr ago
Christianity before it was coopted by the roman empire was a jewish thing, specifically a cult of one man's teachings. All the rest of the revisions later are made to paper over that.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays
Making an organised group of wokestupid shrieking harpies mad enough at you is probably the least unlikely way to flunk out of an Ivy League university nowadays. But in general selective universities don't flunk people for academic underperformance - they give them a grade (2:2 at selective British institutions, as far as I can see a 3.9 GPA at a top US non-engineering university is now a concealed fail) that signals to any employer paying attention not to hire this guy for cognitive ability.
jkf
1hr ago
This would work if you are planning to force everybody to ride with the robots -- in reality the ones who are causing most of the crashes are the least likely to adopt self-driving cars anytime soon; criminals and poor people. So rolling out (hypothetical) "average driver" safety-level FSD cars on an optional basis would replace the safer drivers (rich, sane people) with something somewhat worse, while leaving the ones actually causing the accidents still out there tooling around.
tl;dr -- for me to be interested, they need to be better than me -- I don't care if they are better than the average driver. The average driver is pretty bad.
Voyager
1hr ago
This isn't a steelman. A steelman defends a position on its object level merits and makes no claim on the actual motivations of the supporters. But this is "they oppose this because they suspect bad motives from Trump", explicitly framed in terms of motivations.
A steelman would be "here are some arguments for a principled immigration policy that would reject Afrikaners and allow [groups the episcopalians had no objection to]". But after all, this discussion isn't primarily about the object level policy, it's about double standards/racism. "They are actually objecting to perceived double standards/racism" on the other side is a defense of the people involved.
Tree
1hr ago
I see, I did not mean to question your taste in family values thots.
To get back to your original point, I don't live in the US, I don't work in tech, yet I think unions are a scourge. The first, and main thing they do, is make it extremely hard to fire people. So the company stops hiring. Outside, unemployment rises, and the normal job market gets very brutal and cuttroat because all the good jobs have been cordoned off. The union employees work less and less for more and more, and then the entire industry goes bankrupt. Classic european industry life.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
Academics sound extremely lazy and whiny about trying out the most obvious solution: ditch all course-work based grading in favor of oral examinations and comprehensive graduation exams.
You mean like Oxford and Cambridge were doing back when Roger Bacon and Duns Scotus were alive and never stopped? The lindiest thing ever to lindy (apart from death, taxes, and revivalist movements calling out decadence and corruption in the Cathedral)?
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
It really is that simple: flight speed, payload and range isn't capped at some modest multiple above a falcon but by how much fuel you're prepared to burn and whether you're willing to use serious, atomic rockets.
The tyranny of the rocket equation is, indeed, exponential. Thus, we went to the moon with relative ease, haven't quite "been" to Mars yet, and no one is thinking that a singularity of shoving atomic rockets in the boot is coming to take us to Alpha Centauri in 2027.
Much of theoretical computer science is discovering hard limits on the universe of computation when it comes to scaling. Often times, that big ol' O hides a lot of stuff and is confusing to people. "Why, it seems so easy to run this program on my computer; it's like going to the moon; I just burn some carbon material, and it just works!" But then you just tweak one parameter, and it just breaks utterly.
At the time that we went to the moon, I don't know if people had worked out the theoretical limits of the full spectrum of hypothetical rocket fuels, but we went through a bunch when I was in undergrad. We ignored any sort of practical concern and just worked out, in theory, if you could pretty much perfectly utilize it, what it would get you. Fission, fusion, antimatter, whatever. Yes, we literally did antimatter. The conclusion? None of them give you all that much more in the face of the tyranny of the rocket equation. Certainly not if we're thinking galactic or cluster scale. More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
We sort of don't know yet how far this stuff will take us. The achievements to date are seriously impressive. Like literally going to the moon. But we kind of have no clue when the tyranny of some hard limit on computation is going to make itself known. Maybe we'll even go to Mars with ease; maybe we'll go even further. Who knows?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
I'm saying that the truly "average driver" as reflected in accident statistics does not really exist.
Sure, but I don't see why there needs to be. There's an X amount miles driven by humans, there's a Y amount of miles driven by AI, if y/$accideents >= x/$accidents then AI is "better than the average driver" even if there's no such individual person to benchmark against.
jkf
1hr ago
I'm saying that the truly "average driver" as reflected in accident statistics does not really exist -- the famous "paradox" about how 80% of people think they are better drivers than average is actually kind of true. There are a certain amount of really bad drivers out there, and quite a lot more who are pretty good -- and they would be scared shitless by driving with a robot who drove like them 80% of the time, but like a drunken maniac the other 20%. (which would be as safe as the "average driver", statistically)
IDK whether FSD is even that safe at the moment -- I don't think it's knowable right now due to lack of adoption and/or public testing. Seems worse to talk about than dancing angels to me, unless somebody wants to bring some stats -- but if you insist, wouldn't people be, like, using this in prod if that were the case?
As I recall Elon promised to FSD from San Francisco to NYC 5+ years ago -- why hasn't he done so by now?
wrt strict liability, there is a whole 60 page lawcomic arch about it.
I am mostly on board with Nathan there. Strict liability for regulatory offenses seems bad, and relying on luck / selective enforcement / prosecutorial discretion to keep people who collect a few feathers out of jail seems bad.
My main disagreement with that arch is DUI. For one thing, the offense is not hidden in some law about fishery regulations that nobody has read, you get told about it when you train for your driving license. For another, when driving a car we actually expect people to pay close attention to stay within the regulations which they were trained on. "Yes, I should have stopped on that left-yields-right intersection, but you see, I just assumed that there was no car coming from the right and did not look, so I clearly lack mens rea" or "Officer, my speedometer is broken. I thought I was within the speed limit" will not fly, then why should "I know that DUI is a crime, and I know that I had a few drinks, but I was under the impression that I was slightly under the BAC limit"?
A similar objection could be made to the argument against statutory rape. Everyone knows that people presenting as young adults come in two flavors, "jailbait" and "legal". Anyone who has sex with such a person without verifying their category is taking a calculated risk. There might be other arguments against that law, but the fact that the person committing the offense could not possibly have known rings hollow to me.
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