domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
AnonymousActuary
5m ago
ChatGPT suggests this: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/patrick-collison/.com
Speaking as someone who is against the draft, I am also against forcing women into performing an equivalent sacrifice.
We're in the age of automation and exponential productivity growth. Surely the solution is simply to guarantee security and flourishing for everyone. I cannot imagine any version of the world where solving that engineering problem is actually harder than convincing millions of women to sacrifice their security.
For goodness sake, we're already most of the way there!
As for being conquered, I'm willing to bet everything on NATO. A planet-spanning military alliance that spends more on weapons than the rest of the world combined will not be overcome so easily. China might get Taiwan back, but they're not going to land troops in San Francisco any time soon. In the long run, AI will change the nature of the game in a way that makes population dynamics obsolete long before any power rises that can credibly challenge NATO.
roystgnr
28m ago
The idea of technological determinism (of which "when technological changes to economics says we don't need these people, ethics will evolve to agree" would be an example) is still a pretty controversial one, I think, for lots of both bad and good reasons.
Marx was a huge early booster of technological determinism, and other ideas among Marx's favorites were so genocidally foolish that we should default to being skeptical in individual cases, but it's not proven that every idea of his was a bad one. He also didn't apply the idea very successfully, but perhaps that's just not easy for people whose foolishness reaches "death toll" levels.
There are some cases where trying to apply the idea seems to add a lot of clarity. The emergence of modern democracies right around the time that military technology presented countries with choices like "supplement your elite troops with vastly larger levies of poor schlubs with muskets" or "get steamrollered by Napoleon" sure doesn't sound like a coincidence. But, it's always easier to come up with instances and explanations like that with hindsight rather than foresight. Nobody seems to have figured out psychohistory yet.
There are also some cases where trying to apply the idea doesn't seem to add so much clarity. Africans with mostly spears vs Europeans with loads of rifles led to colonialism, chalk one up for determinism, but then Africans with mostly rifles vs Europeans with jets and tanks wasn't a grossly more even matchup and it still ended up in decolonization. These days we even manage to have international agreement in favor of actually helpless beneficiaries like endangered species. Perhaps World War 2 just made it clear that "I'm going to treat easy targets like garbage but you can definitely trust me" isn't a plausible claim, so ethics towards the weak are a useful tool for bargaining with the strong? But that sounds like it might extend even further, too. To much of the modern world, merely keeping-all-your-wealth-while-poor-people-exist is considered a subset of "treating easy targets like garbage", and unless everybody can seamlessly move to a different Schelling point (libertarianism might catch on any century now), paying for the local powerless people's dole from a fraction of your vast wealth might just be a thing you do to not be a pariah among the other people whose power you do care about. If population was still booming, the calculation of net present value of that dole might be worrisome (let's see, carry the infinity...), but so long as the prole TFR stays below replacement (or at least below the economic growth rate), their cost of living isn't quite as intimidating.
That theory sounds like just wishful thinking about the future, but to be fair a lot of recent history sounds like wishful thinking by older historical standards.
This is all wildly speculative, of course, but so is anything in the "all-powerful and perfectly obedient machinery" future. I stopped in the middle of writing this to help someone diagnose a bug that turned out to be coming from a third party's code. Fortunately none of this was superintelligent code, so when it worked improperly it just trashed their chemical simulation results, not their biochemistry.
ThenElection
33m ago
Women date and, to a lesser extent, marry and reproduce with lots of untrustworthy men. That doesn't mean that the men they don't date are trustworthy, but it does suggest that trustworthiness isn't the primary blocker. And if you're a man who can't get a date and wants one, it's better to focus on changing other aspects of yourself than some fuzzy concept of trustworthiness. Those other aspects being those that fall into the broad category of attractiveness, almost tautologically.
erwgv3g34
39m ago
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 is probably the single worst law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Lizzardspawn
42m ago
That they are foreigners.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
51m ago
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested.
This seems like it's veering towards a No True Scottsman sort of thing. As in "if women don't want to be around you, it's clear they're not at ease in your presence, which is what trustworthiness means, therefore you weren't trustworthy to begin with". We can generally infer "trustworthiness" by how people act in other areas of their life, if they follow the rules and don't cheat, etc. Of course men could behave differently in contexts that involve women, but we'd generally expect a pretty strong correlation. Yet there are plenty of men who are trustworthy in other areas often don't find much success in love.
Here's my own personal take of what it takes to be successful with women:
- Be attractive, and don't be unattractive. This is like 50-75% genetic, but you can put in an effort to change yourself or at least present yourself in the best light. Physical attractiveness is the bedrock that everything else is built off of and if you have it then everything will be far far easier. If you don't, then it will be much harder.
- Have the right personality. There's a lot that of factors here, but in a nutshell it's that you want to be the guy who is "fun at parties", i.e. charismatic, funny, confident, spontaneous, has social proofing, that sort of thing.
Being "reliable" isn't a bad thing, but I wouldn't say it's an overriding concern most of the time. Perhaps a lack of reliability could be seen as sufficiently negative that a girl who would date a guy wouldn't want to marry him, but I've never seen it be a proactive concern beyond that.
This is certainly not ideal when it comes to having (especially many) kids. The biological window is limited (not only for women). But it is a perfectly rational choice of action for women if you want to mitigate the risk of having a terrible husband who will not treat you well.
But that's my point. This desire for safety is antisocial.
And before we start arguing that this is an unreasonable or special demand, let me remind you that men can still, to this day, be forced to fight and die for society.
If you want your society to continue to exist, you're going to have to sacrifice some comfort and take some risks to make sure that there is a next generation of your people. Or we can just live in anarchy and have no loyalties to each other until we get conquered by more sensible people. I so far see no reason to believe there is an alternative.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
56m ago
I stopped going to Starbucks when they changed their concealed carry policy years ago (2013). Still get Seattle's Best occasionally at restaurants when that's all they serve. Chick fil a is the only place I go for the hope of anything resembling service.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
We never figured out how birds or bees fly for our own flying machines
I like this analogy. I wonder why I haven't heard it more often when people talk about LLMs being glorified autocomplete.
The hard work is already done, we already found the breakthroughs we need and now just need to apply more inputs to get massively superhuman results
I really don't think it's just a scaling problem in its entirety. I find it plausible that scaling only gets us marginally more correct answers. Look at how disappointing ChatGPT 4.5 was despite its massive size.
I believe by 2027 the doubters should be silenced one way or another.
If you're going by Scott's 2027 article, it says that little of real note beyond iterative improvements happen until 2027, and then 2027 itself is supposed to be the explosion. Then they claim in some of the subarticles on that site that 2027 is really their earliest reasonable guess, and that 2028 is also highly plausible, but also 2029-2033 aren't unreasonable.
The issue with FOOM debates is that a hard takeoff is presumed to always be right around the corner, just one more algorithmic breakthrough and we could be there! I feel like Yud is set up in a position to effectively never be falsified even if we get to 2040 and AI is basically where it is now.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
Yes, but that does not mean the opposite people are not also successful.
Corvos
1hr ago
An appreciable number of women (at minimum) go for guys who observably aren’t reliable and don’t have their shit together.
Crowstep
1hr ago
Because our welfare system is set up in such a way that they only need to work for five years before being entitled to live off the taxpayer indefinitely. And the statistics suggest that, as low-skilled immigrants from third world countries, they are much more likely to end up doing so than say, Polish graduates.
pigeonburger
1hr ago
This is just laughably not true. It's not quite on-par with advice like "just be yourself!", but it's not far off.
I would say it's true. It's just that "trustworthy" is a bigger concept to unpack than it looks like. Being trustworthy is not like dateless guys thinking they're a catch because they're a "feminist ally" or because they think that it's all so easy not to be an asshole and that if they had a girlfriend/wife they wouldn't be abusive to her and wouldn't cheat on her, etc...
Those people are not trustworthy, they're untested. It's easy to think you'd never ever cheat, if you've never had the opportunity to, if you've never been on the receiving end of an attractive woman signaling she'd be up for no-strings-attached sex.
Being trustworthy means being reliable and having your shit together, and making women at ease in your presence.
In the current year, a Cambridge supervision costs £45.86 for a 2-undergraduate group (the most common), so £23 per student. A science student gets 60-80 supervisions a year, an arts student slightly less. So a total cost for supervisions of c. £1400, or about 10% of breakeven tuition. (There is a lot of uncertainty about what the breakeven tuition at Oxbridge actually is - as at all UK universities, overseas students cross-subsidise domestic ones).
InfrequentPoster
Formerly Lurker
1hr ago
When you say
You know, maybe that would be good advice if the circumstances were different, but you have to remind yourself that picking up 30 year old women who have had multiple partners is signing up for a high divorce rate and possibly raising the children of others.
I think you are misreading what OP said:
find a man who sticks with you for several years (while you are on the pill, and proving he is not a cad), and finally, around 30, get married to a man you TRUST to support you and your children.
The "ideal" state described is not waiting till 30 and then figuring out who to pick. It is to pick around University and stick with your choice. The children (and marriage) wait until the woman feels safe both by herself (that is she has education and a job to support herself and potential children, if something were to happen to her bf/husband) and with her bf/husband. That is he proves that he is reliable etc.
This is certainly not ideal when it comes to having (especially many) kids. The biological window is limited (not only for women). But it is a perfectly rational choice of action fo women if you want to mitigate the risk of having a terrible husband who will not treat you well.
VinoVeritas
1hr ago
Has anyone had a Starbucks recently?
Back when I was in school the library had a Starbucks built into the entrance that was open 24/7 and always had a line out the door. It was like a license to print money. More than once in the middle of the night I would go with whichever girl was the flavor of the week when we were studying for whatever it might be, and I'd order something intentionally absurd for us both like a strawberry Frappuccino.
But mostly, I really, really try to avoid Starbucks. And today I was reminded why. I stopped by my local pastry shop not knowing they'd changed their hours and now don't open until 9, but fortunately it was like 8:53 when I showed up so I only had a few minutes to kill. On the radio, they mentioned that Starbucks was having some kind of nationwide protest about a rule-change, something to do with everyone having to wear plain black shirts or something to that effect. I thought, oh, there's a Starbucks a few hundred feet away in this parking lot. Why don't I, just for fun and for a bit of an anthropological survey, go and ask them about it for myself?
Holy shit it was bleak. The woman at the counter that greeted me was almost comically short and fat, like a cube. Her hair was greasy, thin, obviously unwashed, and would've benefited from a cut some months ago. She was curt, bordering on rude, asking what I wanted. When I told her I wasn't necessarily interested in ordering anything, but was very much interested in her thoughts on the 'strike' et al she gave me a stare that made a cow look intelligent. When she told me she didn't have anything to say about that, and would I like to order anything, I asked for a glass of water and if she'd mind if asked one of her colleagues instead. She directed me to the corporate number. She reitterated her lack of thought on the topic. She told me that Starbucks no longer offers 'free' water. She was totally, absolutely professional throughout the interaction other than the obvious current of 'fuck you' that permeated strongly.
What's the point of this post? I don't really know. My pastries from the actual coffee shop turned out to be great, everyone liked them. I haven't been giving Starbucks any money and will continue not to. I thought Starbucks was a shit-ass place full of soulless NPC's and I still do. Why did I go in there? What is the point of being curious when you already know what you're going to find? Welcome to Starbucks - we hate you and we're on strike because uniforms are oppression.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
tee hee =)
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
The antimodernist narrative is too broad. It typically takes the position that the past was uniformly better than the present, and that it linearly decayed towards the present day. Then antimodernists use this as a cudgel to attack almost anything they don't like about the modern world (HR, woke, college education, etc.)
I'm more of a fan of Arctotherium's take about a really specific aspect of modernity being the root cause, rather than modernity broadly being at fault.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Matthew Yglesias has a repeated line that the middle class should not be able to afford full-service dining (except as an occasional splurge purchase) in a country with a functioning labour market.
I think this might have some truth to it, but there is an element of cultural choice involved. Some cultures have different expectations of "full-service dining" — I'm thinking of how American ones tend to push table turnover, whereas other countries expect to serve each table maybe once per evening.
But there is some reasonable bound on "how much time we spend on each other." One could total up "hours wiping butts" versus total hours worked and see that yes, having the median worker work 40 hours, 10 of which are spent wiping butts, is probably not sustainable. Maybe it'd be at 60 hour weeks, but I'd really prefer more leisure time. There are some real culture choices to be made about the relative merits of time spent on arts, capital investments (building stuff!), research, and medicine — is medicine an end, or just a means to it. It's honestly a pretty open question I'd love to see more debate on, rather than neoliberal "we can have it all" platitudes.
I suppose also that some historic cultures adopted senicide rather than spend time wiping (elderly) butts, although to my modern sensibilities that's rather abhorrent, but perhaps a bit understandable in resource-constrained situations.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
I would definitely agree that risk aversion is behind the pitch of college and jobs to young women. Part of that is rational- the bottom whatever percent of both sexes is less appealing than it was in the fifties(and this goes for men too), and how are you supposed to make sure you find a commitment-oriented ‘good’ guy anyways? I predict that, contrary to the usual pattern, a dating app which vetted the applicants on basic questions(stable and full time employment, criminal record, etc) would have more women than men, at least if it wasn’t just a matchmaking service. Part of this is also irrational; there’s a cottage industry dedicated to convincing young women that the risk of being mistreated by men is much higher than it is, so don’t get too wound up about the commitment you desire.
I maintain that the risk of Mr and now-Mrs good enough marrying, provided that they’re basically compatible adults seriously intending to make it work, is very low, but that many people ignore one or the other or the third condition. There are simply fewer Mr and Miss good enoughs than there used to be, it seems like modern secular(here used in the sense of ‘in mainstream society rather than a subculture’ rather than to mean ‘non-religious’) dating worries more about vapid nonsense than about big picture compatibility, lots of people don’t have the serious intent of making it work no matter what, etc.
I don’t have a good solution on a society wide level.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Most people don’t do everything “in order to work.” They work in order to live here, or raise their kids, or buy that new car, or whatever. What makes migration special?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
One of the problems with UK immigration law is that substantive policy issues of general public concern that ought to be legislated are instead put into the Immigration Rules. This causes two problems:
- Regulations don't get the automatic deference from the Courts that statutes get. If Parliament changes the law, then legitimate expectations be damned. The only laws Parliament might not be able to make are retroactive criminal laws.
- The government can tinker constantly with the rules, so they do. Whether or not it should be legal, ratting on the implied contract with legal immigrants because you needed a quick response to a tabloid campaign is bad policy. Also every time you change the rules gives the Home Office another opportunity to screw up the implementation, most of which they take.
Thank you very much for this post. Your three-question analysis really helps highlight my differences with most people here on these issues, because I weight #2 being "no" even higher than you do (higher than I do #1, which I also think is more likely "no" than "yes").
That said, I'd like to add to (and maybe push back slightly) on some of your analysis of the question. You mostly make it about human factors, where I'd place it more on the nature of intelligence itself. You ask (rhetorically):
And my (non-rhetorical) answer is no, we shouldn't expect that at all, because of diminishing returns.
Here's where people keep consistently mistaking my argument, no matter how many times I explain: I am NOT talking about humans being near the upper limit of how intelligent a being can be. I'm talking about limits on how much intelligence matters in power over the material world.
Implied in your question above is the assumption that if entity A is n times smarter than B (as with, say, humans and animals) then it must be n times more powerful; that if a superhuman intelligence is as much smarter than us as we are smarter than animals, it must also be as much more powerful than us than we are more powerful than animals. I don't think it works that way. I expect that initial gains in intelligence, relative to the "minimally-intelligent" agent provide massive gains in efficacy in the material world… but each subsequent increase in intelligence almost certainly provides smaller and smaller gains in real-world efficacy. Again, the problem isn't a limit on how smart an entity we can make, it's a limit on the usefulness of intelligence itself.
Now, I've had a few people acknowledge this point, and accept that, sure, some asymptotic limit on the real-world utility of increased intelligence probably exists. They then go on to assert that surely, though, human intelligence must be very, very far from that upper limit, and thus there must still be vast gains to be had from superhuman intelligence before reaching that point. Me, I argue the opposite. I figure we're at least halfway to the asymptote, and probably much more than that — that most of the gains from intelligence came in the amoeba → human steps, that the majority of problems that can be solved with intelligence alone can be solved with human level intelligence, and that it's probably not possible to build something that's 'like unto us as we are unto ants' in power, no matter how much smarter it is. (When I present this position, the aforementioned people dismiss it out of hand, seeming uncomfortable to even contemplate the possibility. The times I've pushed, the argument has boiled down to an appeal to consequences; if I'm right, that would mean we're never getting the Singularity, and that would be Very Bad [usually for one or both of two particular reasons].)
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