domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
YE_GUILTY
12hr ago
Related, from before this latest flareup in the Singal War: Nate Silver on "Blueskyism," (briefly: being horrid exclusionary scolds) which he considers to be the left's greatest weakness at present.
PreformancePertension
12hr ago
Sounds like we're creating a lot of new jobs at Google figuring out how to automatically track a user's tax jurisdiction before they get shown an ad. I only vaguely remembered that there were a lot, but now that I look, I find out that Missouri has ~1,400 individual tax jurisdictions. Completely bananas.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
12hr ago
This is starting to read like a Python skit.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
12hr ago
Eliminate pennies and nickels. Keep dimes and half-size half-dollars, and replace quarters with gold-colored quinters, $.2 pieces. Coins are the only arithmetic most people use, and it’s worth it to me to have them.
Alternately, return to pieces of eight: 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 of a dollar. It’s what stocks incremented in for most of Wall Street’s existence, it’s good enough for me.
Add the $200 featuring Alan Greenspan, one of Rand’s disciples.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12hr ago
How much research did you do on the downsides before you ate that meal? Did you spend a considerable time to be sure you know all of them, assign proper probabilities and weights to every single one, and properly value each and every single one of them according to the best of current scientific knowledge, and then also assign a proper probability and weight to the fact that the current scientific knowledge may be imperfect or plain out false, and add that risk to the calculation too? Or did you just think "yolo, one burger won't kill me, here I properly evaluated the risk and step into this with my eyes fully open now!"? If you did the latter, you are like about 100% of other people and you are fooling yourself. If you did the former, you are like about, within any reasonable rounding, 0% of other people and all other people would call you "weird" if they knew. And that's just a puny burger which, yes, most likely won't kill you (unless the luck selected you to be the random victim of the Burger Serial Killer, which is also a possibility - did you account for it in your evaluation of risks?)
I think you're conflating two very different things here: "lying to yourself" versus "being a computationally bounded agent operating under uncertainty."
Nothing you've described about the burger scenario is a lie. Seriously, none of it. The only way it might be is if I had a strong suspicion burgers were far more unhealthy than I was acknowledging, but refused to do the research because I was afraid of the results. That would be lying. Not doing exhaustive research isn't.
Information comes at a cost. You also have to spend the opportunity cost of time spent processing that information. Taken to its limit: are you sure that opening your eyes isn't bad for you? With arbitrary confidence? What if rolling out of bed gives you a stroke? Did you read the literature on the link between sedentary lifestyles and DVT risk? If you did, did you run a replication? Did you pre-register your claims?
We are, unfortunately, computationally bounded entities. We have to prioritize. You recognize that, which makes it all the more absurd that you even raise it in the first place. The topic we were debating was lying, which is not the same as failure to instantiate the idealized form of perfect rationality.
Of course it isn't obvious to you. That's the whole point.
This is profoundly unhelpful. If you're postulating that there must be some kind of lie lurking in my worldview that I'm willfully or accidentally blind to, and that it's effectively unfalsifiable from both of our perspectives, why bother asking? You can't trust my answer either way.
But fine, I actually did something about this, even before I swe your comment. I fed several hundred of my comments into two LLMs and asked them to carefully review them for evidence of lies I'm blind to. The best candidate they found was that I hadn't signed up for cryonics without doing my own cost-benefit analysis, just reading other people's. Fair enough, though I'd call that laziness rather than self-deception, and I'll probably fix it at some point. Nothing else stood out. If you have a better method for interrogating myself for falsehood, I'm all ears.
Do you think that you are actually aware of The Truth?
When have I ever claimed to be a universal Truth detector? I'm a goddamn Bayesian (or trying to be), so of course I'm aware of the importance of accounting for uncertainty. It's entirely possible that I hold false beliefs. In fact, it's practically guaranteed.
The thing is, if I knew where I was wrong, I would just correct myself. And spending "each available moment of time" self-scrutinizing is daft and counterproductive for agents that want to do other things with their time. I'm such an entity. But I do spend a ridiculous amount of time intentionally trying to learn things and examining my understanding. I'm the kind of person who enjoys learning for the sake of learning, and appreciates having my errors shown to me. Why else do you think I'm hanging out on this forum?
What I do is consider the value of truth, accounting for the unavoidable tradeoff between accuracy and relevance. Does it matter if the 12th digit of Pi is odd or even? Not in the least to me. Even five post-decimal digits are enough to calculate the circumference of the universe down to a hydrogen atom.
Does it matter what the risk of AI extinction is? Or the evidence for HBD? On the most appropriate antipsychotic for the obese? Believe it or not, I try to do my due diligence on things that actually matter.
For some people, one of such statements may be "What is written in the book of Mormon is a literal description of events that actually happened". For you, it may be a completely different statement.
Those people are engaging in far more motivated reasoning than I am (assuming I am). The difference between having unknown blind spots and knowingly adopting a belief system you privately reject is not one of degree, it's one of kind.
Hoffmeister explicitly stated he doesn't believe the Book of Mormon is historically true, then got baptized into a church whose central truth-claim is that it is historically true. That's not computational boundedness. That's not rational resource allocation. That's not honest uncertainty. That's adopting a belief system you privately reject for instrumental benefits, or at least acknowledging that the process might turn you into a person who cares less about the truth. That's what I'm calling lying to oneself, and it's genuinely different from the everyday epistemic compromises we all make.
Everyone has some motivated reasoning, sure. I believe I do much less of it than most, and when I do, it's by accident. But there's a difference between "I round off my exercise benefits slightly because I want to feel good about myself" and "I'm joining a high-demand religion whose foundational claims I think are false because I want community and a trad wife." The magnitude and stakes matter.
Do you think there's any belief system someone could join that you'd consider epistemically irresponsible? If Hoffmeister had said 'I don't believe the earth is flat, but I'm joining a Flat Earth society because they seem nice and I want friends,' would you defend that the same way? If not, what's the relevant difference?
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
Well, sure, the phrase "their optics suck" is ambiguous. I think it can cover either of "ICE are unsuccessful at shaking off an unwanted bad reputation" or "ICE are successfully cultivating a bad reputation", and I agree the latter seems more likely, though some people in this thread vehemently deny it even as other ICE-supporters embrace it. But it still seems fair to call that "their optics suck", it would just mean that their optics suck on purpose for some inane galaxy-brained reason.
Pongalh
12hr ago
You say 99% on their side, and yet his discussion of trans issues is way more than 1% of his output. IOW if you don't talk much about the other 99% of your issue positions how much do you really hold them?
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
12hr ago
Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
Based.
I don’t think any of this will actually make currency more useful than ubiquitous payment processors, so I don’t see the need for #3. But Ayn Rand would be funny enough that I’m on board with it.
That seems more a right-wing thing than a left-wing thing, IMO (cf the owned by facts and logic genre, which is heavily right-wing).
The Left does need to have opponents, but the point of an opponent isn't for him to be humiliated over and over again. It's to offer a target to express power over, and particularly symbolic/verbal power, because that's where the Left dominates now. The Opponent's role is to say something and then be expelled, as a symbolic ritual. The Right cares about the psychological humiliation and hierarchy you can inflict on an individual, while the Left cares about using someone as an example pour encourager les autres.
But, if you keep on expelling people, eventually those people will be gone. So you have to find a new Opponent to maintain the ritual, and that's how Jesse Singal ends up the witch.
No_one
12hr ago
porn is mostly banned except for the softcore "sub to my OF" type stuff)
Porn isn't banned. It's just hidden behind 'sensitive content' which, with the wrong setting, can be displayed automatically.
SnapDragon
12hr ago
Your travel analogy is awful - it is often very valuable to solve 80% of a problem. A better analogy would be if your travel agent offered you a brand-new cheap teleportation device that had a range of "only" 80% of the way to Hawaii, but you had to purchase a flight for the last 20%. Which would obviously be great! AVs are the exception here, since you need to actually solve 99% of the driving problem for them to be useful (telepresent drivers "stepping in" can help a bit, but you don't want to depend on them).
Uh, and I don't think $64 per licensed driver in America is going to buy them two Ford-F150s. You might want to check Car and Driver's math. (What is with people being unable to properly divide by the population of the US? Does their common sense break down when dealing with big numbers?) Amusingly, I've never seen GPT4+ make this magnitude of a mistake.
Anyway, we should (and will) be taking the next decade to put smart models absolutely everywhere, even though they sometimes make mistakes. And that's going to be expensive. The major risk of AI investment is definitely not the lack of demand. As OP mentioned, the risk really is the lack of "moat" - if you only have to wait a year for an open-source model to catch up with GPT, why pay OpenAI's premium prices?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
12hr ago
Hard disagree. All that does is launder into the premises that there is a good version of being a lunatic fringe that is frothing at the mouth for violence. It once again centers this notion that even the crazy lefties have their heart in the right place.
I reject this fully.
There's an even stronger selection effect. If your club gets banned by the city you have no choice but to follow them out of city limits to stay in the club. This club wasn't ever banned, so why go through the trouble unless you care a lot?*
Does X qualify as "explicitly right-wing" or do we see an exception to Robert's Law of Conquest as applied to the internet?
Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
I would consider myself a moderate X user. I check it 3-5 times a week. On the site, I follow some users who progressives consider unsavory characters, but the majority are normal interesting people, moderately annoying pundits, and domain experts. The max vitriol content is on the site, it's not hidden, but it's also not pushed in my face. Where I run into the uber based right content is usually because I signaled interested in a topic, like a big culture war murder story, and the algorithm asks just how based I really am for a time. (Not very.)
Conditions might now only require an organization be perceived as explicitly not left-wing to avoid conquest. "Any organization that cannot be made explicitly left-wing will see leftists leave for greener pastures."
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
12hr ago
I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.
Western societies in general suffer from a systems-level equivalent of an auto-immune disorder where the demand for witch activity far outstrips its supply.
Also, it is noteworthy that this case is literally "Burgers?". I guess life does imitate art.
erwgv3g34
12hr ago
The penny is due to be eliminated in 2026. I think that does not go far enough. Here is my proposal for reforming the cash system:
-
Eliminate all coins other than the quarter. Inflation has made pennies, nickels, and dimes worthless. Half dollars are extinct, and every attempt the government makes to introduce a dollar coin ends in failure because there is already a perfectly good dollar bill. But the quarter is still useful to pay for laundry.
-
Pass a law that businesses must advertise after-tax prices, not before-tax prices. The United States is stuck in a shitty equilibrium where businesses advertise a fake price but nobody can break out of it because if you advertise the actual price your prices look higher and you lose costumers. Other countries have arrived at the correct equilibrium of advertising true, after-tax prices. Since coordinating the move from shitty equilibria to good equilibria is what the government is for, let's do that. As a corollary, prices must be advertised as multiples of $0.25. If for some reason a price ends up indivisible by quarters (e.g. a 30% off sale on a product worth $1.25), then round.
-
Introduce a $200 bill. Inflation means that the $100 bill is no longer as useful as it once was. It is time to acknowledge this by creating a higher denomination note. Whose face should go on the bill? My preference would be Ronald Reagan, but if we absolutely must have a woman on the bill, let's go with Ayn Rand.
Thoughts?
Lizzardspawn
12hr ago
Driving away your opponent is not fun. The fun is keeping they/them alive and kicking while forcing them to watch you butcher their sacred cows
lurker
12hr ago
I feel like there is a useful distinction to be made between witches and witch hunters. The most commonly ascribed issue with witches is one of moral or spiritual corruption. Witches don't want to destroy witch hunters, they want to convert them into witches. Witch hunters on the other hand are all about accusing people of being witches and burning them at the stake to prevent their corruption from spreading.
I think that blueskies problem is with too many witch hunters and not enough witches.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
13hr ago
Agreed :(
sohois
13hr ago
Your first two paragraphs just appear to be quibbling over definitions. I don't really care what measurement scheme you use, abandon percentages if you find them useless. The point of the comparison is to show that the advancement in AI capabilities is on a completely different planet to AVs.
As for the comparison of investment, it seems trivial to point out that the difference in magnitude is due to the potential markets. If a company invented Level 5 self driving cars tomorrow, what would they get? You could take away human taxi drivers and truck drivers and some other logistics, and start taking a big chunk of the consumer car market. For a time at least, since other companies would be able to copy you pretty quickly. I'm assuming a lot of companies in that market plan to licence the technology for their revenues, rather than trying to take direct control. Certainly a big market, which likely explains a lot of the valuation for your Teslas and Ubers, but not unlimited.
The impact of a company announcing AGI tomorrow would be unimaginable, even if we assume a slow takeoff with limited recursive self-improvement.
More on (1), I'm coming to terms with the idea that maybe I should just buy a black bicycle helmet sleeve and sew the LED strips into that.
This way I don't have to worry about adhesion bullshit and also can do any arbitrary design rather than trying to fit the exact pattern of the helmet.
@gattsuru did suggest this but I was not ready to hear it at the time.
roystgnr
13hr ago
$16 billion on research through 2019. Their conclusion was that the whole enterprise was a money pit and that they'd never be able to climb out of. Car and Driver put this in perspective by noting that they could have given every licensed driver in America two brand new Ford-F150s and still have cash to spare.
Got a source for that?
$16B divided by 230M is under $70. That is more than enough for two sets of F150 wiper blades for every licensed driver in America, but only if we don't splurge on Rain-X.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
13hr ago
GNU Terry Pratchett.
This sounds like a Friday Fun Thread topic to me.
[citation needed]
Only the penny and the nickel cost more to mint than their fiat value.
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