domain:ymeskhout.substack.com
Tiber727
18m ago
Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).
I was personally just making up high numbers, but over the long term (meaning I make no prediction about if it will be 5 years from now or 500), I do believe these things to be true.
But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.
That's easy to square. Capitalism created the pollution, particularly during the industrial revolution when pollution was largely ignored, then government (not capitalism) intervened to force companies to change. Having government push companies to reduce pollution is their preferred policy and was enacted, if not to the extent that they want.
Reading your link, it sounds to me like they believed that if they killed this bill they could get a new, more aggressive version pushed. Progressives letting the perfect be the enemy of the good is nothing new.
Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.
The reason I'm a Democrat but not a progressive is because I think that progressives are somewhat good at identifying problems (if oversensitive) but bad at solving them. It's the same personality trait that lead to becoming an environmentalist that lead to every other cause du jour.
I don't think brainstorming solutions to problems is bad, I just think they tend to weight real-life problems high and problems with their hypothetical alternatives low. They aren't central planning for the sake of central planning, they're central planning because it is the most obvious instrument that could potentially do all the things they feel must be done.
Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.
True, I was not thinking of fuckcars. I think I'd only really heard the name once. A quick scan seems to me that their primary issue with cars is the number of people who die in car accidents. I disagree, but that does sound like a motivation that cars are harmful rather than a motivation that because they don't like cars that nobody should have them.
2rafa
29m ago
Wild animal suffering is one of the most discussed topics in ethics, it’s not like it’s a dead zone for academic philosophy.
Hieronymus
53m ago
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom.
It’s hard for me to see this as other than a placebo ideology – an ideology against any common ideas, a standard against standards. It has no unifying power except that of money. Upward mobility for immigrants is a great thing. But it is not the only thing, and it shouldn’t replace the American heritage.
I remember a clip of a TV interview with a black Alabaman and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the George Floyd protests. He was counter-protesting demands that Confederate monuments and symbols be torn down. He had been adopted by a white family; their heritage became his heritage, and he was defending it. He’d become a true member of a family into which he was not born. But it’s not as though he had somehow ceased to be black. I think about this often as an analogy for immigration.
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it; I don’t think I could or would have done the same in their shoes. Or consider the spirited embrace of Columbus Day in some Italian-American communities, because it emphasizes the intersection of the Italian and American heritages.
We could do worse than to prioritize those immigrants willing to respect the culture and heritage of the society they are joining.
anon_
57m ago
Bob Jones is gonna come in extremely handy in the current administration v university dustup.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
And if we embrace that conclusion, does that tell us anything about what we think about morality for human beings? You may, if you wish, insert some science-fictional speculation here about whether it would be good for humans to be pampered by more powerful beings, perhaps artificial intelligence, in the way that we have the capacity to pamper rescued animals. Is our own case different from that of the animals?
I think it would be great to have nigh limitless wealth and power. If I want adventure, excitement and risk, there would be all kinds of ways to enjoy myself with elaborate, exotic video games. I think that an aesthetic critique of a post-singularitarian future has crept into people's conceptions, people imagining a kind of skinnyfat, sedentary, drooling heroin addict with tubes in his arm and a VR-headset fused to his skull in a perpetual high. Or a glorified pet micromanaged by Windows pop-ups.
That need not be the case. If it goes well (a very big if), it could be the exact opposite. Perfect, posthuman fitness. Motion and energy beyond anything anyone has ever experienced, variety of experiences beyond our conception. Pure organic joy. Reality remade physically as if it were mere code. De facto deities with ever-shrinking limitations.
The difference between a Tasmanian devil and a human is that the latter is worth more and provides. Humans contribute to humanity whereas most animals do not. There's no obligation to defang lions for the sake of deer because deer aren't doing anything for us. I think that real morality is about reciprocity and potential reciprocity rather than suffering.
TowardsPanna
1hr ago
On another occasion I was assigned to a GP who was an Indian woman. I went in for one physical and it was one of the most demeaning experiences of my life. Refused to make contact, would barely look at me. She ignored my concerns and fixated on a single skin thing that she immediately referred to an associated specialist for a 10 minute outpatient procedure that billed my insurance as a "surgery". I'm sure she is very good at gaming the system to make number go up, but I'm never booking another appointment with someone who considers me an untouchable, and if I could press a button to have her denaturalized and deported I'd hit it twice.
Are you Indian? Or did she just take you for a lower class person from another race and hate you for it?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
ATGMs have countermeasures, you can have active defences or redesign armour to resist them better. Drones have countermeasures, you can cover the tank in add-on armour like we see in Ukraine. Or redesign the tank to be more well-rounded in its armour rather than so frontally-focused. You can add ECM, some microwave widget, have defensive drones.
But you can't redesign heavy shock cavalry in the same way. You can add more armour but the horse biology and blade technology hasn't advanced significantly for ages.
During the Franco-Prussian war cavalry charges did occasionally work but at great cost. Since there were no further advances in cavalry but great advancements in rifles, artillery and machine-guns (and accompanying tactics, indirect fire and entrenchment) then traditional shock cavalry was foreseeably obsolete.
Likewise, if drones turn into autonomous AI death swarms with tandem warheads, doubled range and halved price while tanks remain fundamentally in the 1980s, then it would be all over for heavy armour. But that won't necessarily happen since we know the tank has all these opportunities to adapt that cavalry lack.
CanofWorms
1hr ago
Have you looked into real estate? Rental properties can offer a better return than the stock market and are a good way to diversify.
Giving you an answer you dislike or disagree with is not the same thing as not giving you an answer.
I argued, and I have continued to argue in this thread, that agentic behavior and general applicability are core components of what it is to be "intelligent". Yes a a pocket calculator is orders of magnitude better at arithmetic than any human and stockfish is better at chess, that doesn't make either of them "intelligences" does it?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
they could easily disable a camera in their cell
What if you conceal it in a mirror or somewhere non-obvious? Neither Epstein nor the average prisoner is a secret agent with bugfinding tools.
Another option is to put the camera in the hall outside positioned so it can see inside the cell.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
Yeah, the distinction there is pretty subtle, and I can't think of a case in which it's ever actually mattered. Maybe we'll see that in the lawsuits over White House press pool access: is there a relevant act of Congress establishing that at all? But it generally seems to be considered to apply to the government as a whole.
gattsuru
2hr ago
With the caveat Rasmussen and N=1000.
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
I have come to find most vegans, including my past self, as annoying as you: there is a lack of real reflection as to what the goals of the movement are, and if the individual actions that vegans advocate are actually effective at accomplishing those goals. Total cessation of animal suffering is as impossible as it would be totalitarian (some vegans advocate for GMOing away all predators).
I'm going to take this as an invitation to go off on a tangent, I think.
I have run into reflections on the idea of using genetic engineering to eliminate predation in the past. Predation plausibly causes suffering, at least for prey animals. If you could modify all carnivores to become herbivores, should you do it?
There's an interesting tension I see sometimes around what the goal of environmental conservation should be. In many cases we seem to instinctively idealise 'the wild' or natural conditions. The goal of conservation is to minimise human impact on the environment and return animals to something as much like their natural environment as possible. But as with vegans, or some EA types, we sometimes see a different idea - that the most ethical goal is rather to minimise suffering, including animal suffering.
These two goals seem in tension. The wild includes quite a lot of suffering. Which goal should win out?
I was recently watching a documentary about a wildlife rescue in Tasmania. The hosts visited a man who runs a sanctuary that rescues, raises, and breeds injured or endangered animals. He releases some of those animals back into the wild, while some stay in the sanctuary for all their lives. It occurs to me to wonder what some of those animals would have preferred. It seems plausible that, if a Tasmanian devil could talk, it might prefer to stay in the sanctuary, where it has safe and clean places to sleep, has food provided at regular intervals for minimal effort on its part, and even has breeding opportunities orchestrated for it. If it makes sense to talk about a Tasmanian devil's quality of life, this devil's quality of life seemed to go down as a result of being released into the wild. So, having built animal-utopia, should we push animals out of it? Why?
Well, we might cite lots of instrumental reasons, like wanting these animals as part of the wild ecosystem long-term, or even practical ones, like not having the resources to look after all animals all the time and wanting instead to rotate animals through care on the basis of need. However, in practice I think we have some sort of teleological belief. It is right for Tasmanian devils to hunt on their own and make their lives independently in the wild. It is, for lack of a better term, their nature. It is thus in many circumstances morally better that a creature be exposed to risk and suffering than that it not be.
And if we embrace that conclusion, does that tell us anything about what we think about morality for human beings? You may, if you wish, insert some science-fictional speculation here about whether it would be good for humans to be pampered by more powerful beings, perhaps artificial intelligence, in the way that we have the capacity to pamper rescued animals. Is our own case different from that of the animals?
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
The text of the First Amendment specifically binds Congress:
Since it's a statute at issue, Congress is implicated; Congress can not delegate the power to throw out people for speech to the Secretary of State if they do not possess that power in the first place. But yes, unlike the Fourth (or the Second, LOL), "the right of the people" isn't implicated and e.g. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez doesn't apply directly.
Limitations on issued (or renewed) visas for foreign nationals on the basis of their speech seems rather borderline.
Indeed, which why this case will probably end up at SCOTUS.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3hr ago
I think animals have moral worth and emotional experiences that are "cognate" to those humans experience, and am still not a vegan or even a vegetarian. In part this is because I think that some nontrivial percentile of experiences that farmed animals have are actually better (by their value function) than those of wild animals, and we have the capability in principle to make it so for all farmed animals in expectation. For this reason, I do choose to pay a premium for animal products from superior farming conditions where it is feasible to do so.
As a related thought experiment, if I imagine aliens encountered pre-industrial humanity and "domesticated" it in a Truman show sort of setup where humans could live healthy, fulfilled and danger-free lives until age 60 and then would be culled for meat, I don't think the "culled for meat" part is the one that would morally offend me about the setup, and the parts that would offend me are more applicable to our imminent glorious AI future than they are the case of our livestock.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3hr ago
the First Amendment protects citizens and probably permanent residents, but possibly not those on temporary visas.
The text of the First Amendment specifically binds Congress: "Congress shall make no law...", while other amendments say "the right of the people...". Courts have generally read the First pretty broadly with respect to free speech protections. Excluding the no-longer-binding Schenck, I can't think of too many cases the speech advocates have lost. On the other hand, I can't see anyone reading it as preventing a ban on literal propaganda from foreign enemies. Limitations on issued (or renewed) visas for foreign nationals on the basis of their speech seems rather borderline.
I don't think the Founders intended to require letting in visitors who call for, say, the violent overthrow of the US government --- citizens doing so are already barred from security clearances, for example, without too much fanfare.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
3hr ago
But how much do they want that?
Enough to support politicians and policies which will result in people being forced to do it.
anti_dan
3hr ago
One thing I often find annoying about this sort of conversation is we are often talking about someone's internal state of mind. I find that irrelevant. See also trans/gay and "groomer." When your outward actions are indistinguishable from the person that thinks the thing I think they think, they have to bring the chits. This is true whether you are a teacher talking to 13 year olds in private about how anal is great and they don't need to share this conversation with their parents, or whether you are a legislator voting for an arcane and complex regulatory system that will commandeer 1/10th of the economy instead of a simple flat tax.
Edit: And by the way, the suspicion gets worse because you, Mr. Legislator, always want the arcane and complex regulatory system whether it is carbon, or medicine, or banking... Very suspicious.
anti_dan
3hr ago
A) Global Warming is true and humans contribute: 99%
B) That is bad: 95% (addendum to B) How bad? Coastal areas become flooded. Increased deaths due to heat. Increased frequency of natural disasters. Risk to food production due to unstable weather. We're talking potentially millions of deaths.
C) That due to the severity estimates of B, if proposed policies won't work, increased attention must be given to come up with policies that will.
Those number are just bonkers, and makes reasonable people want to just write off environmentalists (if true).
Alternatively, their confidence levels of capitalism solving societal problems are low as a general rule, and in this particular instance capitalism literally has negative incentives to solving this problem. How does one monetize the ability to bring the global temperature of Earth down? How do you monetize clean air? The only thing I can think of are carbon credits, and Republicans oppose implementing such a system in the first place. Conversely, you make money by producing things which pollute the air as a byproduct, and putting in effort to mitigate pollution costs money for no monetary benefit.
But despite the failure of environmentalists to implement their preferred policies, capitalism has brought down carbon emissions in the US quite a bit. So this part is just them screaming that reality is wrong. And actually, its easy to use the market to monetize reducing carbon usage. You put a carbon tax at a per ton basis and then you cut taxes elsewhere to make sure that the carbon tax doesn't cripple the economy. Notably when such a proposal was made in Washington State, environmentalists were part of the coalition that killed the proposal. The fact that they have this specific bundle of beliefs appears problematic for your thesis. The central planning thesis is actually strengthened here.
This strikes me as comparable to saying that pro-life people should be shooting up abortion clinics. Your average environmentalist believes they have 0 influence on India's policies because they are not Indian, and India's government gives every impression they don't care. People believe lots of things they don't follow through fully on, even assuming the assertions that if they believe X they should do Y are reasonable. Do all the people complaining about western fertility have 10 kids?
Valid to an extent. But, what if this is just another irrational part of their bundle of beliefs. That being that being an environmentalist and anti-capitalist is also highly correlated with being...anti-white/western? Perhaps all these beliefs are in conflict for achieving each seperate stated goal, except as to the part where all the policies trend toward...more central planning.
That's incredibly boo outgroup. How many people out there actually hate that people have things, as a primary motivation?
Lots? There are a bunch of large subreddits dedicated to these beliefs like /r/fuckcars, and the mods of those are typically powermods that also control super large subs like /r/politics and /r/askreddit.
I'm still convinced that veganism isn't harmful for performance, at least in endurance sports.
I was strictly vegan for 11 years. The whole food plant based kind. I lost a lot of weight at first and then started gaining. I was running and lifting 3x a week so I was confused about the weight gain. I wasn't beer belly fat but I was pretty sure it didn't seem like typical muscle gains. My doctor wasn't sure, he said I looked like a muscular guy but we still ordered a DEXA scan.
My DEXA said I was 31% body fat!
More alarmingly it said my bone density z-score was -2.0 (!!)
That meant 97.7% of my age and sex adjusted peers had higher bone density than me.
Was that caused by 11 years of strict veganism? I don't know but I was totally convinced to experiment after that. I went omni after that and started drinking whey protein shakes. I noticed right off the bat I put muscle on almost immediately. Like over the next 3-4 months I felt my arms and legs get tighter in my clothes and started racking up PRs in deadlifts and squats and bench press.
But more importantly, repeated DEXA scans every year showed a recovery in z-score. From -2.0 to -1.3 to -1.0 this year. I'm still low, but it at least shows I'm gradually rebuilding bone density and also losing it less quickly than my peer group now. Whew.
This is obviously not rigorous but to be a fairly active vegan dude and have such a terrible z-score, like worse than what the median fucking American has who doesn't do any health related thing at all, it's hard not to finger the drastic dietary delta with the median American as the cause.
Pongalh
4hr ago
I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.
Would you say your family, tribe or ethnicity has helped you determine the answers to the above?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
4hr ago
We are looking at this from two different angles. My angle helps people. Your angle, which seems to prioritize protecting the LLM from the 'insult' of a simple metaphor, actively harms user adoption. My goal in using the parrot model is to solve a specific and very common point of frustration - the anthropomorphising of a tool. I know the parrot shortcut works, I have watched it work and I have been thanked for it.
The issue is that humans - especially older humans - have been using conversation - a LUI - in a very particular way their entire lives. They have conversations with other humans who are grounded in objective reality, who have emotions and memories, and therefore when they use a LUI to interact with a machine, they subconsciously pattern match the machine to other humans and expect it to work the same way - and when it doesn't they get frustrated.
The parrot model on the other hand, tells the user 'Warning: This looks like the UI you have been using your whole life, but it is fundamentally different. Do not assume understanding. Do not assume intention. Your input must be explicit and pattern-oriented to get a predictable output.' The parrot doesn't get anything. It has no intentions in the sense the person is thinking of. It can't be lazy. The frustration dissolves and is replaced by a practical problem solving mindset. Meanwhile the fallible intern exacerbates the very problem I am trying to solve by reinforcing the identification of the LLM as a conscious being.
The beauty is, once they get over that, once they no longer have to use the parrot model to think of it as a tool, they start experimenting with it in ways they wouldn't have before. They feel much more comfortable treating it like a conversation partner they can manipulate through the tech. Ironically they feel more comfortable joking about it being alive and noticing the ways it is like and unlike a person. They get more interested in learning how it actually works, because they aren't shackled by the deeply ingrained grooves of social etiquette.
You're right that metaphors should be analyzed for fitness, but that analysis requires engaging with the metaphor's intended purpose, not just attacking its accuracy literally. A metaphor only needs to illuminate one key trait to be effective, but the parrot goes a lot further than that. It is in fact fantastic at explaining the spiky profile of LLMs. It explains why an LLM can 'parrot' highly structured Python from its training data but write insipid poetry that lacks the qualia of human experience. Likewise I could train a parrot to recite 10 PRINT "BALLS"; 20 GOTO 10, but it could never invent a limerick. It explains why it can synthesize text (a complex pattern matching task) but can't count letters in a word (a character level task it's not trained to understand). Your analysis ignores this context, seemingly because the metaphor is offensive to an aspirational view of AI. But you're attacking a subway map for not being a satellite image. The resolution is drastically reduced yes - this is a selling point, not a flaw. Cultural cachet drastically outweighs accuracy when it comes to a metaphor's usefulness in real world applications.
And do you want to know another animal with a clearly non human form of cognition? A parrot. How did you skip over crows and dolphins to get to octupi, animals with an intelligence that is explicitly not language based, when we are talking about language models? Unlike an octopus, a parrot's intelligence is startlingly relevant here (my mentioning of parroting was just an example of how a parrot has been used as a metaphor for a non-thinking (or if you prefer, non-feeling) pattern matcher in the past.) Using a LUI a parrot can learn complex vocalisation. They can learn mimicry and memorisation. They can learn to associate words with objects and concepts (like colours and zero). They can perform problem solving tasks through dialogue. Is it just because octupus intelligence is cool and weird? Because that just brings me back to the difference between evangelising llms and helping people. You want to talk up llms, I want to increase their adoption.
Shaming users for not having the correct mental model is precisely how we end up with people who are afraid of their tools - the boomers who work out calculations on a pocket calculator before typing them into Excel, or who type 'Gmail login' into the Google search bar every single day. As social media amply demonstrates, technical accuracy does not aid in adoption, it is a barrier to it. We can dislike that from a nerd standpoint, which is why I admired your point in my original post (technically correct is the best kind of correct!) but user adoption will do a lot more for advancing the tech.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
4hr ago
I would argue that the Trump administration is not abusing the statute, at least in the case of Khalil. The statute specifically allows for deporting people for protected speech, and Mahmoud Khalil -- a "student" who seemingly did not come to the US to study but rather to stir up trouble on campus for the purpose of affecting US foreign policy -- is the exact sort of person it was meant for.
I'd be fine for the statute to be declared unconstitutional on its face. I suspect it will not be, however; the First Amendment protects citizens and probably permanent residents, but possibly not those on temporary visas.
Among those few other intelligent species, there are honorable animals and dishonourable ones. Honorable animals are both intelligent and have moral worth. Dolphins are dishonorable. Orangutans are honourable. Chimpanzees are dishonorable. Elephants are honorable.
Among the meat animals, octopuses are morally neutral, although they are regular cannibals, and I have no qualms with eating an animal that eats its own kind. Likewise, pigs (including wild boar) are often honorable, but are also cannibals at high frequency, and if even they eat each other all the time, then so can I.
Most other meat (and other) animals are not intelligent, and so lack the same moral valence in either direction.
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