domain:alexepstein.substack.com
swift
2hr ago
Fortunately, ChatGPT will also allow the professors to dodge: just ask the machine to mark a computer-written exam.
FeepingCreature
2hr ago
I think that anyone who wants to can have a 3D printer at home. Inasmuch as "we'll all have 3D printers at home" has failed, it has failed due to lack of interest, not lack of technological development.
It's a tech bubble from a market size perspective, not a technology perspective.
gus
2hr ago
food would have to be absolutely identical down to coming in boxes labeled 'not suitable for prison’
Apparently tons of people have seen these yet there’s zero pictures of them on the internet. A ton of those same military folks say it’s because if food might have bones the prisons don’t want to take a chance on it.
Hieronymus
2hr ago
No one is denying the relevance of Christianity’s Jewish roots. The Old Testament is important, and Jesus as the Jewish Messiah is a central doctrine of Christianity. But gentiles were included from a very early date.
I want to riff on hydroacetylene’s examples, keeping in mind that the Battle of Milvian Bridge, when Constantine began to move toward Christianity, happened in 312.
Acts 10–11 covers the Jewish church’s acceptance of gentile converts, and Acts 15 relates the decision not to impose the Mosaic law on them. Even if you do not accept Acts as history, it demonstrates the presence of gentile converts who did not practice the Jewish law at the time the book was written. It may be from the 60s, because it doesn’t include Paul’s death, but I think that some liberal scholars have it as late as the early second century.
The Didache is a super interesting document of early Christian teaching and practice. It has a ton of Jewish influence, but it also takes pains to distinguish Christians from non-Christian Jews (ch. 8) and to include gentiles (14:3). Its date is hotly disputed; it is most likely from the first century, but at the latest from the middle of the second.
The church fathers cover a long span of time, but they begin in the late first century. The earliest group is called the apostolic fathers (as distinct from the apostles themselves), and they take it as a given that the church includes gentiles.
SerialStateLineXer
3hr ago
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 was good at math! Why did nobody tell me about this opportunity?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
3hr ago
That’s obviously a much real problem than what the article is complaining about. But I can’t help myself from thinking that it might be good if this leads to the destruction of the extremely time consuming rituals around academic publishing. So much word salad academese jargon. LLMs are clearly extremely good at transforming relatively simple sentences into correctly worded monstrosities so none of that can act as a smartness proxy anymore. So maybe real humans writing clearly and to the point will make a comeback?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
3hr ago
Look, if I was suddenly able to rewrite federal laws- universities accepting federal funds(including for loans) 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').
US navy nuke school has single dorm rooms. So does Sandhurst. It looks like the bits of the military that do academically rigorous training appreciate that students need more creature comforts than soldiers in boot camp. Per @pbmonster below, in (American) boot camp the cruelty is the point - the drills perform sadism deliberately, they weren't all born that way.
SnapDragon
3hr ago
Any particular reason why you're optimistic? What are your priors in regards to AI?
Same as you, I don't pretend to be able to predict an unknowable technological future and am just relying on vibes, so I'm not sure I can satisfy you with a precise answer...? I outlined why I'm so impressed with even current-day AI here. I've been working in AI-adjacent fields for 25 years, and LLMs are truly incomparable in generality to anything that has come before. AGI feels close (depending on your definition), and ASI doesn't, because most of our gains are just coming from scaling compute up (with logarithmic benefits). So it's not an existential threat, it's just a brand new transformative tech, and historically that almost always leads to a richer society.
You don't tend to get negative effects on the tech tree in a 4X game, after all. :)
quiet_NaN
4hr ago
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.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr 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
4hr ago
Waymo is an order of magnitude better than Tesla FSD.
Corvos
5hr 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
5hr 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
5hr ago
Oh yeah I have not seen those posts, but I do get why it can be a little annoying.
quiet_NaN
5hr 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.
IMO there are two serious barriers to widespread 3d printer adoption:
The latter could be considered a technological problem. Wood mills are much nicer but too loud and too messy, but there might be paths forward.
More options
Context Copy link