domain:noahpinion.blog
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I'm doubling down on my prediction that AI will replace any white collar job which a mentally ill person can do acceptably well, but never perform well enough at sanity-requiring tasks to replace people. What this means for the workforce in practice is probably that the professional class sees stagnant wage growth and relies more on unpaid internships for building work experience.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
I think that American complaints over Trump are warranted but disproportionate, that's why I spent so much of that post comparing to foreign countries.
The Australian government works in a totally responsible, law-abiding, careful and considered way like you're calling for. But the results are a complete disaster and there's no obvious way to fix it. This is paywalled but it tells you the story in the http address.
Productivity is in the doldrums. Energy prices are rising despite the government's promises, the only thing they successfully did is provide subsidies for power to make the price seem lower. All major cities are ludicrously unaffordable and more people are constantly imported to make it even more unaffordable. Industry is a shambles, we're constantly bailing out what little remains due to the terrible energy policy. To top it all off they've proposed unrealized capital gains tax on superannuation, there's nothing they won't stoop to.
And the Labour government that oversaw all of this just got their biggest majority ever for seeming to be less like Trump than Peter Dutton's Liberals... who weren't really like Trump in any significant sense and basically offer the same thing as Labour albeit slightly moderated. There's no way out of this mess.
There are way worse things that could happen to the US than tariffs or Trump, you could have a deepseated economic crisis at a structural level, not a mild stock market shock that's easily undone at the executive level.
The EU loves stable, boring governance. But just being stable and predictable doesn't work very well if you're stably and predictably doing the wrong thing all the time, that's why the US is rich and relevant while the EU is not.
Stability and effectiveness is of course good. Australia did a good job of blocking illegal immigration. Violent crime is still fairly low despite the best efforts of the drug legalizers and policing reformers. But the hierarchy should be:
- Stable and wise (lee quan yew)
- Chaotic but more or less wise (Trump)
- Stable but unwise (George W Bush, Clinton, Obama, EU, Australia)
- Chaotic and unwise (Pol Pot as an extreme example)
Without Trump, there's a decent chance that the net closes and it becomes effectively impossible to contest the deep-seated institutions and lobbies that want to wreck the economy so they can maximize their control and security, turn the US into the EU, shut off any dissent as hate-speech... Before Trump, what legal victories were there where people convinced others to moderate the madness? Were there many such victories? Were they permanent wins or temporary compromises? The net is closing in the EU, they're moving slowly to ban the AFD and any alternative to managed democracy and permanent decline/replacement. Vote poorly in Romania and your election will simply be undone.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
o be blunt, college hasn’t been about education for a very long time, and it strikes me as hilarious that anyone who attended one writes these sorts of handwringing articles bemoaning the decline of education in college. 99% of students who were ever in university (perhaps with the exception of tge leisure class) have ever gone to college seeking the education for the sake of education. For most of us, it’s about getting job skills, getting a diploma, padding a resume, etc.
These people don't believe that. They're simply using a very different definition of 'education' than you are, one centering around having appropriate credentials rather than knowing things/how to do things. This isn't totally new, either- much as grievance studies are particularly blatant, lots of psych and ed research is just polished turds too, and the people getting these degrees don't really seem to care. Like the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy says about itself- well then reality is the one that's got it wrong.
anti_dan
2hr ago
hurts anyone but themselves.
Well it doesnt hurt them at all, otherwise it wouldn't be cheating. The injured parties are non-cheating competitors (although good luck finding one in these majors methinks), and society, which is ostensibly being tricked into thinking they are looking at a slip of paper that shows this woman can do a lot of mind numbing gruntwork, but in fact just scrolls tictok all day.
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
2hr ago
In this scenario, if the US imposes tariffs, the target country retaliates, and then after some negotiation they settle on a rate that is higher than the prior status quo but lower than the initial tariff imposition, is that a win or a loss?
Definitely a win in my books.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
2hr ago
This is the danger that economists like Tyler Cowen say is most pressing, i.e. not some sci-fi scenario of Terminator killing us all, but of humans using AI as a tool in malicious ways. And yeah, if we don't get to omni-capable superintelligences then I'd say that would definitely be the main concern, although I wouldn't really know how to address it. Maybe turn off the datacenter access to 3rd world countries as part of sanctions packages? Maybe have police AI that counter them? It's hard to say when we don't know how far AI will go.
You're broadly correct, although your terminology is a bit off. When you say "aligned", people almost always use that word to mean "it doesn't behave in a deliberately malicious way". What you're talking about is more along the lines of 'it can't stay on task', which has long been a huge concern for basic useability. People claim this is getting better (Scott's AI 2027 post is predicated on continuous growth in this regard), although Gary Marcus has concerns on this claim. From my perspective, AI is very good at coding, but you really have to break down the problems into bite-sized chunks or else it will get very confused. I'd love to have an AI that could understand an entire large codebase without a ton of drawbacks or cost, and then execute multi-step plans consistently. Maybe that's coming. In fact, if there's any further AI improvements I'd bet that would be on the list. But it's not guaranteed yet, and I've been waiting for it for over a year now.
ThenElection
2hr ago
If a student wrote a "based" indigenous studies essay, would that help them pass the class to get the degree they're paying two hundred thousand dollars for?
Of course, there's the opportunity to write and think about things that aren't either kind of slop. But I'm very skeptical that equal standards would be applied. Though I would say it's unlikely for any student to actually flunk out of Columbia for the content of their essays (or the quality of them, or anything really).
sockpuppet2
2hr ago
"Bullshit jobs" and the like
Any advice on getting one?
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
What if your child falls asleep while smoking and the cigarette lights their jammies and they just get fucking immolated?
Nicotine is a stimulant and prudent parents make sure that, like caffeine, it is confined to the morning and well away from nap time.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
3hr ago
Admittedly, it IS kind of wild that this this a tech where we can seriously talk about singularity and extinction as potential outcomes with actual percentage probabilities. That certainly didn't happen with the cotton gin.
Very true on that front. LLMs were pretty magical when I first tried playing with them in 2022. And honestly they're still kind of magical in some ways. I don't think I've felt that way about any other tech advancement in my life, except for maybe the internet as a whole.
I'm a lot more optimistic than you.
Any particular reason why you're optimistic? What are your priors in regards to AI?
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
I don't think money will save you from a government that wants you death or destitute.
The South African government is shitty, corrupt, incompetent, and unwilling to address the needs of its white population, but the ANC does not want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg(after all, they very much want to steal that egg for themselves). The party that wants to drive out/kill/dispossess the whites is a minority party which, like most socialist parties, is most popular among college kids.
Tree
3hr ago
You said the motte works in SV, that is incorrect. I haven't claimed that the motte is full of normal christians, just that some christians living in flyover country are here and know and complain about aella.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Yes. America was basically founded on the idea that if you take protestant religion serious, you're one of the no-longer-a-pure-Anglican sects and if you need to go to a protestant church every so often to be socially respectable that church is what would become Episcopalian.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Alexander VI, although his personal moral behavior was quite bad probably would not make a top ten, or even top twenty, list for worst popes from a doctrinal confusion standpoint- although Francis would. Honorius I would probably go down as the worst, perhaps the original John XXIII.
It's interesting; I generally don't have a high opinion of Paul VI's handling of the magisterium but Humanae Vitae was legitimately surprising to everyone, including close confidantes of Paul VI, and I've used that as an argument against sedevacantists and Eastern Orthodox before in defending the papacy. Unfortunately even JPII and Benedict couldn't resist drowning their clarity in argle bargle and corpo speak, but from a doctrinal perspective they're probably top fifty percent of popes(remember, the median pope's theological contributions round to 0. For all his questionable decisions JPII did come in clutch on doctrine when it counted with things like the definition of the priesthood as all male) at least.
ABigGuy4U
3hr ago
I can’t tell if this supposed to be humorous or if it’s just genuinely delusional. No one who goes to a “pointy house in the sticks” has even heard of Aella. Her fans and her haters are both among the terminally online.
sockpuppet2
3hr ago
Anyone want to blackpill me on why this is Bad Actually because strict liability regulatory crimes are actually a major load-bearing part of how our legal system works and without it the situation will devolve to anarchy in the streets?
Partially: I'm opposed to strict liability crimes, in principle, but business regulations are the application for which they make the most sense, in that 1) if you're doing something for a commercial purpose, there's a rationale for holding you to a hire standard 2) perverse incentives + plausible deniability of mens rea = bad time.
I made a rather uncontroversial (if snippy) assertion that many people on the Motte hold tech jobs of the kind found in Silicon Valley. Which is something that many many other conversations on here basically take as a matter of fact. Suddenly you and ten other people angrily surge out of the woodwork to gish-gallop me with user survey statistics and bizarre and nonsensical arguments about Mormons. And now I am uncharitably accused of “sneering Bulvarism”.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
I'm sure some people do this, but 99.9% of people do not.
Shrike
3hr ago
I actually tend to agree that social justice warriors are downstream of Christianity, but I don't think this is a sufficiently nuanced portrait of what Christianity teaches. Yes, it criticizes the rich and strong, but also the lazy and the lawbreaker. The Biblical solution to lazy people who refuse to work? Let them not eat. The Biblical solution to bad people who bring destruction? A wrathful sword.
Obviously there's some debate among Christians on these topics – some would disagree with me. (And it is true that many early church fathers were very pacifistic, although they were being persecuted by their enemies and largely did not have to deal with the problems of power; it's not surprising that the emphasis of the church changed when their circumstances did.)
But I don't think, historically, Christians were okay with executing and imprisoning criminals just because they aren't good at being Christians (although, yes, Christians are often bad at following Scripture's teachings.) I think it's pretty natural to read the parts of Scripture dealing with justice and go "...yeah it's totally fine to use lawful force to suppress evil" and do it.
TLDR; while non-pacifistic Christianity might be wrong, I don't think that it is hypocritical.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
There's nothing in the church fathers, in the didache, or in the new testament which indicates that Christianity tends towards ethnic nationalism. I'm pretty sure Islam is similar.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
While truckers who get in an at-fault accident will be immediately fired and not hired by any trucking company ever again, ambulance chasers don't go after them because they don't have the money to give a big payday. Trucking lawsuits usually hinge on getting a big insurance payout on the basis of 'you should be liable for hiring/overworking/undermanaging him'. There's no inherent reason a trucking company wouldn't prefer to have an ambulance chaser fighting Tesla's lawyers than State Farm's.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Eh, it takes time for change to percolate, and truck drivers are sufficiently selected that we can assume they're better drivers than average- the average driver, after all, includes averages from lots of people who insist on driving drunk/high, texting while driving, etc.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
I don't follow AI especially closely. So forgive me if this is a stupid observation. But it seems like AI gets more powerful('smarter') all the time, but it doesn't get any more aligned. I don't mean that in a 'our societal pareidolia about racism will keep skynet at bay' way, I mean that in the sense that The Robots Are Not Alright.
Just the other day I read a news story of an AI system which had been put in charge of administering vending machines- should be a pretty simple job, anybody could figure it out. But this AI decided, with no evidence, that it was a money laundering scheme, contacted the FBI, and then shut down. There's stories like this all the time. There was the case of ChatGPT hijacking whatever conversation to talk about the immaculate conception a month or so ago. Just generally AI is way more prone to naval-gazing, schizophrenia, weird obsessions, and just shutting down because it can't make a decision than equivalently-smart humans.
There's an old joke about selling common sense lessons- 'who would pay to learn something that can't be taught?... Oh.'. I feel like AI is a bit like this. We don't understand the mind well enough to make it work, and we probably never will. AI can do math, yeah. It can program(I've heard rather poorly but still saves time overall because editing is faster?). But it remains an idiot savant, not sure what to do if its brakes go out. Yes, it'll change the economy bigtime and lots of non-sinecure white collar work that doesn't require any decision making or holistic thought will get automated. But it's not a global paradigm shift on the level of agriculture or mechanization.
I feel like we need something roughly equivalent to a doctrine of "oh come on". I realize I'm only gesturing vaguely towards a large area of idea-space, but it seems plain at this point that humans will game any system made of rules made of words until it's completely corrupted.
I'm not a believer in the ability to computerize law, so the only way forward seems to be to rely on the restraint of lawyers...
...ok, well that's obviously not going to work. We need to give them some sort of skin in the game. Something to lose when it goes wrong. As such, I propose, roughly, the following system:
Whenever an argument is deemed "clever", either by a judge or a panel that reviews cases, it goes in front of a jury of 10 randomly selected people from the voting public. If less than 50% of them respond with "oh come on", nothing happens. If more than 50% of them say "oh come on", the lawyer making this argument is shot. Less than 70%, they're shot in the foot. Less than 90%, they're shot in the chest. If it's unanimous, they're shot in the head.
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