domain:ryandv.substack.com
GoofyGoose
1d ago
Science is naturalist, rather than materialist. To a naturalist, the existence of non-material entities or phenomena does not invalidate science. There might still be laws that govern those entities; independently of our ability to learn those laws.
Science appears materialistic because of a desire for parsimony and the extraordinary success of materialist theories. But the principles of science do not depend on a materialist world.
phailyoor
1d ago
A 10 minute walk is chill but a 10 minute walk carrying tons of groceries in my bare hands is not chill
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
The problem of "towering luxury apartments" can't be fixed by building more. Nor can the problem of filling places with people. Nor can parking; transit is so bad that the only way to get people to take it is to make driving worse, and the only way to do that is to allow driving infrastructure to become highly oversubscribed.
Corvos
1d ago
You are both trying to achieve diametrically opposite things. Clearly, it's not possible for CEOs to be seriously concerned about downside risk so that they are responsible stewards, whilst also making them feel safe and detached enough to comfortably take serious risks.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
Is there a tactful way to ask your boss to lay off something? My boss, a smart guy whom I respect, has become obsessed with LLMs. Literally every conversation with him about work topics has become one where he says "I asked (insert model) and it said..." which adds no value to the conversation. Worse, he responds to questions with "have you tried asking AI?". For example the other day I asked him if he knows why multiple TCP streams are faster than one (when you would naively think they would be slower due to TCP overhead), and he asked if I asked AI. Which of course I didn't, because I actually wanted to know the answer, not get something plausible which may or may not be correct. And he's like that with every question posed lately, even when we had legal documents we had questions on he was like "did you try feeding it to Gemini and asking?"
It's frankly gotten incredibly annoying and I wish he would stop. Like I said, I actually have a lot of respect for the man but it's like he's chosen to outsource his brain to Grok et al lately. I suspect that my options are to live with it or get a new job, but figured I'd ask if people think there's a way I can tactfully address the situation.
Skeletor
1d ago
Tubi is where I learned that there's a series of like twelve movies about a possessed bong that kills people, and ten more about an evil gingerbread man that kills people, and they have crossovers and shit. I've seen movies on there worse than what I'm convinced I could make on my own with no money or experience.
I've watched a kaiju movie so cheap it used painted cardboard boxes and someone's collection of model 1950's classic cars to make the city. They used a model steam locomotive to represent an urban elevated train, complete with a 19th century looking engineer who I think is just there because it's his model and he screams stuff like "Whoa Nelly!"
And these are all relatively modern American productions. That's not even going into like weird decades-old Italian B-movies about hot women who fuck snakes and turn into monsters and shit, etc. etc. It's a goldmine. They even have famous RedLetterMedia stinkers. I've seen Suburban Sasquatch and Last Vampire On Earth on there.
Tubi is manna from heaven for people who like weird stupid bullshit.
He already has the downside risk of losing his job. You're not supposed to invest in a company you work for unless you don't mind losing your job and your stock at the same time; diversification is a thing and investing in your own company would be opposed to diversification.
Or, more or less equivalently, a tradition of letting shareholders pierce the corporate veil and personally sue the CEO in civil court for securities fraud or breach of fiduciary duty in the event that the share price declines too much
That's a great way to make sure companies never do risky things. Also, to be fair, he should be able to sue the bureaucracy of his own company and the voting stockholders when they get in his way, since he faces personal liability when they fail.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
On October 1, four members of Caricom (the Caribbean Community)—Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and St. Vincent (total population 900,000)—implemented full freedom of movement. Under this arrangement, a citizen of any of those four countries can reside and work indefinitely in any of the other three countries, without a visa or a work permit.
This arrangement is an extension of existing freedom-of-movement provisions for all holders of bachelor's and associate's degrees and workers in certain other skilled professions. The other members of Caricom are expected to join the full implementation eventually.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Sure, the source is hostile.
But as @FiveHourMarathon points out, he self-identifies as a Christian. 14% of US adults believe that we are living in the "end-times" and that Jesus will return to Earth.
If someone was arguing for "punching Nazis", the motte would not give him a pass because he only meant that figuratively and is obviously not in favor of punching any real people, unless he provided context which made this very plain, because there is a background of a culture which believes that literally punching Nazis is a fine thing to do.
If Thiel had called Greta Sauron, priors would strongly indicate that he is very unlikely to believe that she is really the Maia who had the one ring forged. By contrast, if he speculates about her being the antichrist, and one in seven or so Americans would entertain the possibility that a human being living today could be the antichrist, it seems much more plausible that he is being literal.
Again, I lack the context, perhaps his four lectures on the antichrist were really only using theology as a metaphor to make a point about worldly technological progress. It would still feel like Jesus packing his parable of the sower into a four-part lecture series called Agriculture 101, but it is possible.
TheLoser
1d ago
Literally every problem you mentioned could be fixed by building more. More houses so people don't pile into single family homes, more transit, more shopping centers. It seems the problem with LA is shitty development, not development per se.
TheLoser
1d ago
The streets cannot support it, and barring a radical shift in the entire city council's (and let's be frank, populace's) attitudes toward law enforcement, no amount of transit overhaul will fix the problem.
So it isnt YIMBYism that's the problem, it's pervasive soft on crime attitude that's the problem. How does that indict the YIMBY cause?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
After the LeMond-Fignon battle there hasn't been a French winner of the TDF.
They didn't schedule the final stage as a time trial again until 2024, which I was honestly a bit surprised at.
Neuroscience doesn’t cover qualia. The hard problem is that there is no known mechanism for material reality to interact with or produce subjective thought and experience. To produce specific neural patterns, yes, but not to produce subjective experience.
Lots of materialists attempt to resolve this by saying that neural patterns are subjective experience, but this doesn’t actual solve the problem, it just declares it not to exist. Humans clearly do have subjective experience and we have no idea how that might relate to electricity produced by bags of salty water (cells). The fact that altering the cells changes the subjective experience still doesn’t tell you the mechanism by which one produces the other.
If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
I think you are confusing empiricism and materialism. If angels exist then materialism - the idea that physical particles and waves are the only phenomena in the universe - is wrong. You might or might not be able to make empirical predictions about how angels and ‘spiritual matter’ behaves, but that is not materialism or physics. And there is no guarantee that spirit would be amenable to this approach - ‘social science’ has broadly failed because human behaviour at scale is not a phenomenon that yields well to empiricism, being non-consistent over both time and space.
It's certainly possible they were strategically pretending not to understand. If the assumption is reasonable (and "that doesn't mean someone who produces zero value" is reasonable), strategically pretending not to understand is a way to derail the conversation and is just plain dishonest. You can just respond to the whole thing including the implicit assumption--yes they can say "I didn't mean that", but then they're the one being dishonest since they obviously did. If you really expect that response you can say "even assuming you mean 1000 times an average worker, that still doesn't make sense because...."
Your standard encourages useless nitpicking. The things that normal people say are full of implicit assumptions and expecting them not to use any just makes things worse for everyone. It isn't helpful to not let people say "the sun rises in the east" because there are places where it rises in the west.
johnfabian
1d ago
I think Churchill just wanted summary executions of 50,000 top Nazis without a trial. [...] I wonder if the Churchill [approach] would have actually been healthier than the [Nuremberg trials].
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
Quite the opposite, really. Churchill of course wanted those involved in the Holocaust and Nazi war crimes tried and executed, but he was very hostile to any sort of indiscriminate mass revenge against senior German officers and officials.
In fact there was an episode during the Tehran Conference in November 1943 where Stalin made a "joke" about how they could just kill 50-100,000 of the most senior German leaders to prevent another war, and FDR responded (in a more humourous tone) that maybe 49,000 would be enough. Churchill, knowing of the Katyn massacre and much more cynical towards Stalin than the somewhat naïve FDR, stormed out and had to be convinced to come back and resume the conference.
(I am not the one to whom you are responding but)
The point being made here is, what exactly does Thiel mean by “small-o orthodox”? Presumably he doesn’t mean Eastern Orthodox, else he wouldn’t have qualified with “small-o”. But then he must have in mind some other notion of “correct belief” (literally, ortho + doxia), and given his, shall we say, (in)famously libertine lifestyle, it’s not at all obvious what that “correct belief” is, nor how it accords with any conventional benchmarks of correct Christian belief, such as the aforementioned Nicene Creed.
Or maybe Thiel was just making a nerdy joke about how his Christianity is growing much faster than Orthodox Christianity.
Corvos
1d ago
If you specify that for this person the maximally moral impulses produce ‘max enjoyment’ ie max hedons, then tautologically not?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1d ago
For a person with maximum love for others and maximum love for wisdom, these things being chief enjoyments superseding all others, is there ever a scenario in which the most moral decision conflicts with the most hedonic desire?
quiet_NaN
1d ago
But one could make an argument that, because of the hard problem of consciousness, science is incompatible with dogmatic materialism/physicalism.
I am unconvinced of that. First, the hard problem of consciousness is much more a thing among philosophers than among the relevant domain experts (neuro-scientists).
Secondly, even if I grant you that people have souls which give them qualia, unlikely as that seems, there is no reason to suppose that they are forever beyond the reach of physics. If your conscious mind can interact with the real world, then whatever it is must couple to the matter in your brain. I am not saying that the obvious approach of accelerating conscious beings to near the speed of light and having them hit each other would necessarily yield results, but it also seems premature to say that it would not. After all, a few centuries ago, we had no idea how life worked on a physics basis either, and today we have a pretty good picture.
In short, one of the following must be true. Either the qualia proponents make no falsifiable predictions, in which case their claims are completely orthogonal to science, or they make falsifiable predictions, in which case these predictions can be tested and incorporated into a materialist view of the world. If it turns out that souls and angels and demons are real, then physicists will publish articles constraining the relevant parameters of archangel Gabriel in short order.
zeke5123a
1d ago
I’ll just pick on the first “rebuttal.” Thiel is making a Type I v Type II error point. Yes WW3 would be unjust. But so too will be the efforts by those saying “be afraid of WW3–give us these powers to prevent it.”
He then points to Thessalonians. In it, Paul is not saying he is proclaiming “peace.” Instead, Paul is quite literally saying TPTB will be saying “peace.” That is, it’s a prophecy. Thiel is saying the Antichrist will use the yearning for peace to usher in a fate worse than war.
Bartender_Venator
1d ago
This is a very mottizen reading in that I can't tell if it's bad-faith hostile or just so overly literalist it misses point by point and becomes fisking with a mis-sighted gun. A couple points:
Also, is Armageddon not a required part of the apocalypse and thus a good thing?
Armageddon is not the total destruction of human civilization, that's a casual use of the word. Armageddon is a gathering of the world's temporal forces for battle at a central point (Megiddo), at which point things will be Revealed.
Killing the top N followers of an enemy ideology is certainly what the Nazis would have done. Thiel must hate the ICC really badly when he would prefer a general precedent of "the victor gets to murder however many enemies they like". Also, {{Citation needed}}.
The Nazis would never stop with 50,000 top people, they went root and branch into the population. That's the point of Churchill's approach - you take powerful, symbolic, deadly vengeance against the most responsible, and from then the stain is cleansed and you don't create a machine of eternal revenge that locks up nonagenarians to this day. It's a Girardian end-the-cycle-of-violence thing.
The Dr Strangelove thing is an odd choice, but if you're familiar with the literature of the time, it seems to me that Thiel is referring (with an esoteric joke?) to the Faust myth and similar stories, which begins with the Protestant Reformation and culminates at the end of the 18th Century with Goethe. Goethe made Faust the paradigmatic literary figure of modernity in his time for a reason.
That are leading figures of the climate movement, rationality/AI safety, and e/acc. Now, I may not be very up to date with e/acc, but lumping Andreessen with the "luddites" seems a questionable choice.
This is just reading comprehension. Thiel is not saying all three are luddites, he's saying that the reason Marc Andreesen cannot be the Antichrist is because he's not popular like the luddites are.
Blueberry
1d ago
I watched a video and the first YT comment was an epiphany about the Residential/Commercial/Industrial zoning in Sim City:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WNe9C866I2s
American zoning is even weirder than what I thought, discovering that the zoning from Sim City was not a weird oversimplification for the sake of gameplay but actually based on the USA was a shock.
Not just bikes:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnKIVX968PQ
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Theil's whole shtick is that he's using the narrative and mythopoetic archetype of the antichrist as a sort of lens to understand the dangers of the modern world. I actually think he's quite right that the sort of eschatological reasoning and arguments that many technologists make around AI map quite well onto Christian apocalypse narratives, and combining these two lenses can open up a greater understanding of how these narratives of the end of the world can hijack our thinking.
I mean, the criticism that ASI believers are just reinventing either god or the devil is not exactly new. In a way, it is pure Bulverism, "Eliezer has simply translated the ancient myth of the apocalypse for the technological age". It does not engage with his arguments at all.
I will grant you that once you have accepted that the AI safety people are just a silly doomsday cult, you can compare and contrast them with other silly doomsday cults such as early Christianity.
Yes, I have just the quotes without the broader context, for all I know, Thiel's lectures could not be on theology any more than Jesus' parable of the sower is about agriculture. Still, I think that if the antichrist is just a metaphor, he goes into incredible detail about the specifics. For example, he points out that the antichrist does not necessarily have to be a Jew -- which would be silly if there already was a common understanding with his audience that it is all just a metaphor, and no real person can be the antichrist.
Basically, if I read a version of the parable of the sower where Jesus goes into detail about soil acidity, bound nitrogen, rainfall and temperature patterns, and fertilizers, at some point I give up on trying to understand what the equivalent of the soil pH in the heart of man might be and conclude that he is talking about agriculture, after all.
With regards to 'ending all technology,' Thiel has argued at length along with others that the stagnation hypothesis is real, in that technology has already been massively stagnating by a number of metrics including total factor production, and that if we stymie technology anymore it will basically end technological society as we know it. Or, at the very least stop progress.
I think that compared to the 1970s, technological progress has slowed down a lot. But the cause is mostly diminishing returns. Moore's law only kinda keeps holding because the market exploded between the 8086 and today, so you can recoup your R&D costs from more customers. The discovery of the Higgs boson was immensely more expensive than that of the W and Z bosons. AI companies are burning through huge stacks of investor money to get moderate increases in model performance.
Technology stagnating will not mean the end of technological society. The fall of West Rome did not mean that people went back the the bronze age, after all. If technology stagnates to the point where kids will use the same computers as their parents used when they were kids, that is bad news for investors like Thiel, who depend on exponential growth (which in reality is often really and S-curve whose tail you have not reached).
Greta is not about stopping the research of new technologies, but about building more instances of very mature tech which work by burning fossil fuels. Eliezer is against frontier AI capability research until we make progress with alignment, which might take a few decades. However, in all the worlds where the current LLM paradigm will plateau soon, the costs are rather small, because current LLMs will not overcome the diminishing returns of most research fields. Without alignment, any AI which would be smart enough to overcome the general trend of stagnation would also be a potential x-risk for humans.
Agreed. Materialism is a prescriptive hypothesis about how the world is that can be disproven without invalidating the empirical process. Indeed, materialism as conceived in the 19th century has taken a certain number of knocks in the last hundred years with the discovery that the universe has a specific start point and that the location and behaviour of particles and waves is fundamentally undeterministic.
More options
Context Copy link