domain:city-journal.org
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
9hr ago
Most people here, including me, are not.
Yes, I'm quite conscious of this distinction! And this appears to be something of an inborn preference (or at least, it's a preference that's sedimented relatively early in life). So I didn't presume that I would be able to "persuade" anyone.
Porque no los dos?
At the species level, at the level of the collective, we can allocate resources to everything. My post was more about asking why, at the individual level, space colonization becomes such a powerfully attractive symbol for some people and not others.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
9hr ago
Xenocide is probably my favorite book in the series, based solely on the strength of the Han Qing-Jao story. I think it's the best thing Orson Scott Card has ever written, and while the other half of the book isn't as good (it's still good), that still averages out super high.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
9hr ago
I read (some) books more than once because I love them and enjoy them just as much the second time. Sometimes more, because I will notice new things about the text I hadn't previously. It's not pointless to me, because I read for the enjoyment of the book, not just for novelty. Novelty is nice, but not a requirement. It doesn't even necessarily enhance the experience, as there are plenty of books I enjoyed reading the first time less than I would have enjoyed rereading something else.
I would also say your argument about opportunity cost can easily cut the other direction: if I read a new book, and I dislike it (which certainly happens), I have paid an opportunity cost versus just rereading a book I already liked. So either way, it seems to me that there is an opportunity cost to be paid.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
9hr ago
Earth is large, but finite. Eventually you'll squeeze all the novelty out of it.
If you are suggesting that this is possible for any one person, I would be extremely surprised if you believe it. There is such a vast amount to be experienced and learned even within one town, to say nothing of a larger city, a whole country, bordering countries, or faraway countries--and this is just in the natural world and not even considering the variousness of people--that there isn't any way for a singular individual in one lifetime to "squeeze the novelty" out of it all, unless one is very very quickly given to boredom or incuriosity. I understand though that this is a matter of personal disposition.
Quantumfreakonomics
9hr ago
If Terrance Tao wants my support for his academic research, he can start by writing a substack comprehensible to a STEM undergrad explaining what the deal is with inter-universal Teichmüller theory. Until then, have fun in the private sector buddy. Meta is hiring.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
9hr ago
If they can do interstellar warfare, they should be capable of ASI or at least mass-cloning of geniuses with the same biology. Maybe they have 'ethics' that block those two and they're trying invade-the-galaxy, invite-the-galaxy for political reasons?
But how likely is it for an advanced civilization to have such a flawed system of govt?
JTarrou
9hr ago
The tree needs to go, dig up the dirt, salt the hole and burn anything still crawling.
There are no good branches. APAB.
JTarrou
9hr ago
Anything that harms "higher" education, the NGO complex and the politically captured "scientists" is good by me. This guy checks all three.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
10hr ago
Ten years ago, I read a lot of books multiple times, because I found them to be highly enjoyable experiences and finding new stories that interested me (mostly on fanfiction.net) took a lot of effort. For example: IIRC, I read Time Braid six times and The Three Musketeers four times.
Nowadays, though, I feel obsessed with novelty (mostly on royalroad.com) and re-read books only rarely. I don't know why my tastes have changed.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10hr ago
If it helps you to perservere, Xenocide and Children of the Mind both are not quite so slow.
Also the mystery reveal as to why the piggies killed the guy is pretty kino.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
OK, how about losses or profits? Or 20008? I cited pubic law because it's funny, the other two are actually real examples from what I was getting it to do.
the Prime Minister's name is "Morrison" not "Morison"
I highly doubt Google docs could do tasks that require contextual understanding without some kind of LLM.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
10hr ago
Follow-up small scale question: what is the motivation for you (or indeed anyone) to read a book more than once?
I am a fairly voracious reader-for-pleasure but I have never had any desire to re-read any book ever in my life. It seems not just pointless but actively opportunity-costly because you could be reading a new book?
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
10hr ago
You say "they aren't selling $200 worth of inference for $20" I say "Are they selling $2 of inference for $20"?
Why don't we try and look into this? People have tried to estimate OpenAI margins on inference and they come away with strong margins of 30, 55, 75%. We don't live in a total vacuum of information. When trying to work out their margins on inference, I base my opinion on the general established consensus of their margins.
they need wildly good margins on inference if they believe they'll never be able to cut the other fixed and variable costs
The demand for inference is rising, Openrouter records that demand for tokens rose about 30x in the last year as AI improves. Grow big enough and the margin on inference will outweigh the costs.
They are getting paid to do it
It's effectively free, they're 'selling' it for $1 per agency for a whole year. OpenAI is doing the same thing. Why are you trying to correct me on something you won't even check?
There is a significant difference between making a loss as you expand your business rapidly and try to secure a strong position in an emerging market and 'subsidized by 1-2 orders of magnitude'. No evidence has been supplied for the latter case and it's unbelievable.
Amazon wasn't making a profit because they were continuously expanding and investing in their retail business, not because the actual business was unprofitable. Investors were happy to tolerate them not making profits because they were growing. Uber wasn't making a profit but there were no 10x subsidies. We can see this immediately in how taxis weren't costing $20 while Uber was costing $2 for the same trip.
gattsuru
10hr ago
I get that Trump wanted to shut down "woke" research, but he could have done that without cutting overall funding (just mandate that the NIH can't fund transgender research, shutdown the diversity grants, etc.).
Could you? One of the morbid bits to this saga has been how often people have pointed to what they saw as clearly misaimed anti-DEI efforts that must have been motivated by an LLM or a bad grep, and then oops.
Yes, there are research areas with neither blatant political abuse or outright woke goals. But the people who want to do the woke research can, as warned, lie: there’s far less signal than anyone thinks to a research’s quality from how sober the grant application.
odd_primes
10hr ago
Saagar from Breaking Points says he has a copy of the arrest documents and will release them today.
thejdizzler
10hr ago
Definitely not. Unlike in a lot of other areas of life there is actually quite a bit of transfer between different sports, especially in the endurance world. Alan Cousins actually (surprisingly to me) found that biking was 2/3 as effective as running at increasing running Vo2 max. This is insane and runs contrary to what I had been taught about specificity growing up, but makes sense from what we know about elite training (Cole Hocker who won the gold in the 1500 in Paris apparently bikes a shit ton), and from my own training (I am fastest at running when I supplement with monster bike time). Here's the Couzens post if you're interested: https://alancouzens.com/blog/specificity.html
Maybe not directly relevant to your post, but at least a tangent. Fitness from random things generally does carry over pretty well because it develops your core cardiovascular and muscular systems. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent "core" system with regards to intellectual pursuits so it's not surprising we don't see much transfer there.
Do we condemn Kolmogorov?
I don't condemn enemy conscripts. "The enemy" is not necessarily synonymous with "evil", and that's something lots of people have forgotten (the Nazis are a foundation of how the American Empire justifies its right to rule to itself, so it's kind of unavoidable)- if my enemy forces all of its constituent parts to, for example, wear a blue shirt or die, I don't blame anyone for putting the blue shirt on [whether or not they share all of my enemy's goals is irrelevant].
Yet, I don't think friendly forces are evil for killing them either- even in an environment where the enemy has intentionally frustrated identification of those who cause the enemy's cause (those who would rather die before ceasing to be the enemy), and those who would abandon those principles to not be dead (this includes those who only joined for the meals).
It is not, and cannot be, the enemy's fault that circumstances forced your uniform upon you; your only hope is that your own side advances its interests in such a way that your enemies do not decide to violently destroy you if and when they obtain the power to do so.
He does not necessarily deserve the consequences of being an enemy (contra traditionalist thought, where he does), but at the same time it is not immoral to destroy enemies (contra progressive thought, where it is), so I guess it depends on what you actually mean by "condemn".
phailyoor
10hr ago
I'm a bit more sympathetic to Tao: he lives and works in a milieu where not signing that letter would have made many of his colleagues and students (maybe even his wife) shun him;
"Letter? What letter? Oh there was an email? I must have missed it. Can you send it again I'll definitely put it at the top of my queue for sure."
Academics are absolute masters at ghosting and dodging, as everyone who has set foot in a school can attest to. And I'm 100% confident that there are plenty of other UCLA professors who didn't sign the letter. So given that he didn't just ignore it, he's fully responsible for the consequences of signing that letter.
Edit: I'm not going to bother checking the entire list, but the very first 2 professors in the math department aren't on the letter: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807214114/https://www.math.ucla.edu/people/ladder
TitaniumButterfly
10hr ago
Very well-said. The thing about inviting cleansing fire is that it's not exactly discriminate.
phailyoor
11hr ago
He did good finding that letter but Trace is definitely a huge tool for not posting the actual link - I believe this is correct: http://atripati.bol.ucla.edu/May2020AntiRacismLetter.htm
SnapDragon
11hr ago
It was at least somewhat justified by the bullshit tech the aliens had. (Which very conveniently could completely control all scientific experiments but not, you know, actually KILL anyone.)
The real problem with The Dark Forest (spoiler alert) was the concept that all of humanity, working for more than a century on a problem with existential stakes, failed to come up with a theory that, uh, most people interested in cosmology already knew about in the 70s as a potential answer to the Fermi paradox. (Also, the deterrent threat at the end doesn't even really work because it would send a message out only in the plane of the ecliptic. Sigh. I wouldn't mind the bad science so much if it weren't wearing the skinsuit of Hard Sci-Fi.)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11hr ago
It only takes about 5 bucks and a few minutes to use the API with a bring-your-own-key chat interface to pay as you go for Sonnet 4.
Very.
The problem with the 'technological approach' to human capital is that its embracers never actually get around to it. They insist on Just One More Master's Degree and reason that they can mass produce geniuses eventually so why worry about it. In contrast, Sex Is Fun(go ahead, dispute it if you want), and women like babies. We had an AAQC recently from a woman who wanted another baby and thought it was a horrible idea, she just wanted one anyway. Making young women take care of robotic babies designed to discourage them from motherhood raises the teen pregnancy rate.
But go ahead, try to mass produce geniuses through technology. That's what South Korea thinks it's doing(yes, hangwon is pointless zero sum competition. They don't know that). The single digit number of their young will attain impressive credentials if they don't kill themselves first. No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies. Or expect AI to replace us until they paperclip maximize in their own solar system until the collapse of the local civilization turns it into something like Golgafrincham or Magrathea or Frogstar B or in fact most of the rest of Douglas Adams' cautionary tales because no one can figure out how to program common sense. Maybe AI fueled economic bubbles is the great filter of the fermi paradox, or maybe uber-k selection until the kids kill themselves rather than subject their own children to 18 hours a day of school is the great filter. Either way, the alien civilizations which make contact with us will be empire builders that seek to integrate conquered races into (a lower tier of)their power structure; the other alien races would just wipe us out rather than landing.
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