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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

I fail to see a universe where AI has total comparative advantage over humans in all things

I do too, but the old "wine and cloth" arguments' conclusions are only ironclad if you ignore both non-labor factors of production and negative productivity.

Non-labor: perhaps "3 guys who bring my coffee+tea+biscuits" have a comparative advantage over 3 hunks of motors and processors doing the same, but if the 3 robots need 2 kWh to do my day's menial tasks whereas the 3 guys need 6000 kcal (7 kWh) per day to stay alive, the robots might still be cheaper. Energy isn't perfectly fungible, there's all sorts of other costs to consider in both cases, etc, but my point is that the fact that humans can always find something productive to do is offset by the caveat that our productivity doesn't just have to exceed zero, it has to exceed a hard floor.

Negative productivity: human productivity doesn't always exceed zero! If reliability (in either positive or normative senses) is required for a job, the negative expected value of potential mistakes and crime can exceed the positive value of the work being done. Even the most haughty CEO-aristocrat has to also be wondering "will humans accept a social structure where the overwhelming majority of them have the status of serfs", for example, right? And if the answer isn't "definitely", then 3 potentially-pissed-off serfs might be too much more of a security risk than 3 potentially-hackable robots. If the upside to human labor is "my biscuits might be seasoned with their delicious salty tears" and the downside is "my tea might be seasoned with rat poison" then the CEO's valuation of human labor might be negative.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

triggering a surface burst instead of the normal air burst.

Limiting its destructive power at that!

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

You don’t transition because you have the internal experience of the opposite sex - you transition because you have distress at having the experience of your natal sex.

This both not at all universally the definition trans advocates use and in fact a minority opinion(see truscum discourse) as well as a phrasing that obscures more than it enlightens. What is distress? What are the experiences of a natal sex and how do you differentiate them from those of the complimentary sex having only experienced one of them(or in the case of prepubescent children neither of them)? Memes are powerful things, anyone in the wrong side of a social media pile on can attest to their ability to induce distress.

Trans people don’t believe they are actually changing their sex, which is which the term “transsexual” was abandoned in favour of “transgender”.

I was tempted to just respond to this part because it's all the is really necessary for the local debate. So why the push for trans women in women's sports? If we're all in agreement the males and females are and remain different and these differences are the obvious motivating factor for the different leagues(as well as the vast majority of the sex based discrimination tolerated and mandated in our societies) then what possible ground could you be standing on?

But hormones are not purely aesthetic and feminisation/masculinisation of the brain is actually scientifically observable - not only on MRI scans but also on test scores, e.g. post HRT, visuo spatial ability is enhanced in FtMs, while verbal working memory is enhanced in MtFs

I do not contest that hormones have huge impacts on many things we care about. All the more reason to be careful with them. And to make my position more clear, I have no actual problem with consenting adult trans humanist practices, if men want to take hormones to be more feminine, bolt tits on any part of their body or hell, more exotic stuff, more power to you. What I reject is appropriating a place in society that was not carved out for you and the attempt to colonize my mind and the mind of my kin with your memes. It is not normal to do these things, and that's fine abnormality is fine, but there is such a thing as normal that should be maintained. It's the path most likely to lead to good ends, deviating from it should be done with full knowledge of the consequences and I am very unimpressed with the signposts.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

The AI doesn't even have to be super-intelligent, it just has to be good at its job.

I think this is one of the creepiest possibilities - that no matter how hard well-aligned independent agentic AGI is, we have to make it soon, because we need something which can think intelligently enough about the A-Z of possible new technologies to say "you'll need defenses against X soon, so here's how we're building Y", independently enough to say "no I'm not going to tell you how Y works yet; that would just let a misanthrope figure out how to build X first", while being trustworthy enough that the result of building Y won't be "haha, that's what kills you all and gets you out of my way" ... and if we don't get all that, then as soon as it's easy enough for a misanthrope to apply narrow "this is how you win at Go" level technologies to "how do we win at designing a superplague" or whatever, we're over.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

“Getting a sex change” is also an old timey term for gender reassignment surgery, so I’m seeing more of a general move from sex towards gender when it comes to trans discourse. Definitions are generally fuzzy and shift over time anyway and nature doesn’t care for human’s need to categorise everything into neat little boxes.

Even sex doesn’t have an easy binary scientific definition (how do you categorise intersex individuals?) and so best to precisely detail what you’re saying. I personally think it’d be better to use terms like “chromosomal sex” and “phenotypic sex” - the former you can’t change, the latter you can to some degree. Then you have gender which relates to phenotypic sex but is mostly irrelevant to your chromosomes - we didn’t even know they existed until the late 19th century.

I don’t agree with some of the philosophy behind trans activism but our goals are largely aligned, and obviously I will be more sympathetic to an ideology that supports my existence than one that does not.

Gestures wildly at Europe

In what sense? I live in a European country and transgender HRT, along with many surgeries, are available through the public healthcare system. One of my trans friends got put on blockers and transitioned as a minor. Sure it’s not as easy as the US where you have informed consent, and the public healthcare system has hideous waiting lists (in general), but the medical consensus here is still to treat gender dysphoria with transition.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

That sounds plausible, and even detransitioners talk about it, but it's an open question what it all sums up to in the grand scheme of things. For example, how come it inevitably turns out that 90% of women in communities like this turn out to be trans? How come trans bros hardly ever show up?

Hormones aren’t magic and while they will nudge you some percentage towards the neurochemistry of the opposite sex depending on age, they can’t undo years of male/female socialisation or drastically change an existing personality. If I had transitioned as a minor, I probably would have ended up with more of a “typical” female personality and I’d be on tumblr/TikTok instead.

Mary's Motte and the case against progress

It difficult to see how these are not moral improvements. Indeed even the more modern rights revolutions fighting various quarter-, eigth- and sixteenth-slaveries have been mostly on target.

If you cannot understand the moral calculus of your forebears, it's a sin of pride to pronounce that calculus wrong. To say that your forebears are wrong and have that be more than a farce, you need to understand why they thought what they thought and be able to point to a mistake (of fact or of reasoning). Else, you have no way of really knowing whether you're simply a fool who denies the existence of that which is beyond his ken. Mere replacement in the public consciousness is no substitute; that proves memetic fitness, not correctness.

I'm dubious, for instance, that you actually understand the moral questions posed by slavery. Can you name the two developments which most changed the moral calculus of forced labour between 1400 and the present day?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Even the most haughty CEO-aristocrat has to also be wondering "will humans accept a social structure where the overwhelming majority of them have the status of serfs", for example, right? And if the answer isn't "definitely not", then 3 potentially-pissed-off serfs might be too much more of a security risk than 3 potentially-hackable robots. If the upside to human labor is "my biscuits might be seasoned with their delicious salty tears" and the downside is "my tea might be seasoned with rat poison" then the CEO's valuation of human labor might be negative.

Metaphorically speaking, I feel like those salty tears might be just that delicious that it'd be worth the risk. The pleasure of having the submission of a regular human who was produced and born the old fashioned way is something that simply can't be replicated with AI, and it could end up being the most high status resource due to how much slower humans are to produce compared to AI, and also the expenses involved. It's still a dystopia, of course, and likely they could cut down the human population by 90%+ and still have enough servants to go around.

One scenario where AI could replace this would be some combination of amnesia + VR tech where the rich people pop themselves into a fully immersive world after erasing their memories of actual reality, thus allowing themselves to genuinely believe that they're being served by real humans while actually being served by VR. I think this wouldn't be attractive to most of the elites compared to having the real deal, and it also would be dangerous to themselves, since being lost in a virtual world would leave an opening for another elite to come along and take their stuff and/or kill them by developing their own AI to circumvent their AI defense systems.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Even sex doesn’t have an easy binary scientific definition (how do you categorise intersex individuals?)

Overwhelmingly, they still function as either one or the other sex, and if you want to get philosophical, "both" is still a binary option.

Gestures wildly at Europe

In what sense?

The Cass Review, evidence reviews from Sweden, Finland, and Norway, accompanying policy changes stating that puberty blockers are only appropriate in the context of clinical trials, and statements from the French Academy of Sciences, and people working at it's Belgian equivalent (though no policy changes there yet).

I'm on mobile, so I can't provide links a the moment, but simply googling any of the countries I mentioned + "puberty blockers" should yield some articles about it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

I completely agree with this. There is unfortunately a ton of this in the federal government.

For instance: the commerce clause, which seems to be used to justify just about anything that the government wants to do.

Wellness Wednesday for May 10, 2023

Okay... Today on the subway a ridiculously attractive girl literally started blushing when our eyes met, like, her cheeks and nose became very visibly red, and she wasn't wearing blush make-up, this also happened a few times over the past few weeks. Is that a muscles-dependent effect, or a "you're handsome" effect?

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

they can’t undo years of male/female socialisation or drastically change an existing personality

Socialization is kind of TERFy argument, and I simply don't buy it's much of a factor. Years of "more women in STEM!" initiatives have yielded basically no results. As for personality, I thought the whole point is that trans people fit better with the personality of the opposite sex. We simply shouldn't be seeing the kind of patterns I pointed out if that was the case.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

@self_made_human made the point downthread that “Yudkowsky's arguments are robust to disruption in the details.” I think this is a good example of that. Caring about simulated copies of yourself is not a load-bearing assumption. The Basilisk could just as easily torture you, yes, you personally, the flesh and blood meatbag.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

It absolutely is load bearing. Why should take my chances obeying the Basilisk, if I can fight it and anyone who serves it instead? I can always kill myself if it looks like my failure is imminent.

A Deep Dive into K-pop – Matt Lakeman

Jjijji = boobs in Korean. Jiji = dirty.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

This both not at all universally the definition trans advocates use and in fact a minority opinion(see truscum discourse) as well as a phrasing that obscures more than it enlightens. What is distress? What are the experiences of a natal sex and how do you differentiate them from those of the complimentary sex having only experienced one of them(or in the case of prepubescent children neither of them)? Memes are powerful things, anyone in the wrong side of a social media pile on can attest to their ability to induce distress.

There’s a lot of medical literature documenting gender dysphoria but I can tell you my own experiences: while I didn’t know what it was like to be female, I knew what it was like to gain the attributes of adult men by going through puberty, and that was a profoundly negative experience. I would constantly try to minimise those attributes by shaving every inch of my body, taping away my genitals, and fantasise about mutilating my penis so doctors would make me a girl. I had no awareness that transitioning was a thing; my body just felt wrong, and socially I was upset whenever I would be put into male roles. Whereas when I transitioned, the constant negative thoughts and obsession about the wrongness of my body traits slowly went away, and I could finally bear to look in the mirror without being absolutely disgusted.

What I reject is appropriating a place in society that was not carved out for you

What places in society aren’t carved out for me? I’m fine with sports being segregated based on hormone levels (present and during puberty), but I see any attempt at sex segregation to be outright harmful. Sending trans women to women’s prisons or not should be decided on a case-by-case basis, a petite passing trans woman is going to get sexually assaulted and likely raped by going to a men’s prison, while a large natal male sexual criminal who’s not on HRT but self-IDs as a woman is a different case entirely.

What else? I’m generally opposed to making things like scholarships and awards based on identity rather than merit. Women’s shelters? Same as prison’s - and I’m not sure they’d let in a 6’ trans man with phallo so it’s not just about biological sex. Women’s bathrooms? Toilets should be unisex tbh, but a passing trans woman will look more out of place in the men’s than the women’s.

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 7, 2023

Is anyone familiar with the YouTuber Ryan Chapman? He has a number of videos on socialism, fascism, etc, but I'm not sure what his ideological bias is. (I assume he has one, as most people do.)

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 7, 2023

I'm taking copious notes during 1:1 because I am indeed bad with kids' names and birthdays. But more importantly I want to be able get into their heads as you describe and motivate them by findng cool career building opportunities and stimulating work for them.

Some of the most pleasant surprises in my career happened when I was overworked, reached out to one of my ICs and said, "sorry, I know it's not really your area of expertise, but my hands are full and you told me you had some unused capacity this week. Could you help me and give it a go?"

What's your strategy for feedback? I'm thinking of asking for written feedback quarterly in the vein of "What are two things I could be doing differently to better serve you and the team?" but also asking for opinions on individual during our weekly 1:1s.

I don't like written feedback. F2F feedback is easier, because you can modulate it on the go. I try and give examples of things I myself wasn't happy with and proud of and ask if they have some different events in mind that they think beat my own self-evaluation.

Direct communication of deadlines and task assignments is something I'm not too worried about since I've never really felt guilty or awkward about it. I've personally always liked terse, direct managers because it keeps the interaction short so that I can go back to what I was doing. I think it also helps to know your people so that you can triage work to people who will enjoy it and anticipate pushback from people who might not. Any potential pitfalls I might be missing due to my inexperience, though?

Pushback is great. An IC that tells you, "fuck you, I won't do this task" is much better than one that doesn't do it silently, East Asian style.

Oh, one theory I quite enjoy using is situational leadership. Basically, as people mature as ICs, they go through four stages, each of which requires different leadership approach. This ladder is more dependent on the specific task than the specific person, if it's something new, you go back to the beginning, except you can run through it faster with more experienced ICs.

  • when they are super green, you provide direct instruction. Just break the task down into specific steps and feed it to them

  • when they have tasted success, you teach, adding "why" to "how" and praising their results

  • when they have learned from you, you push them out of the nest, no further instruction necessary, just moral support

  • when they are confident with the task, they already know they are good, no need to praise them for succeeding at specific tasks

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Or the fact that Congress seems completely unwilling to pass bills that have a single subject. Gotta tie everything together so that you can't block bad legislation without having unpopular knock-on effects! Bonus points if you make it so that the artificial consequence of your legislation is "the federal bureaucracy and the military shuts down", because there's basically no law so bad that a president will ever accept those consequences to veto it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Honestly, nerds of the type you’re speaking of hold very little power. The guy at the computer terminal building a new app or program or training an AI are doing it at the behest of business owners, financial institutions and in main, people with power over money. The agenda isn’t set at the level of the guy who builds, it’s set at the level of those who finance. No loans means no business.

As such I think if you were serious about AI risk, you’d be better off explaining that the AI would hurt the financial system, not that it’s going to grey goo the planet.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Yep.

Although the thing that always makes me take AI risk a bit more seriously is the version where it doesn't kill all the humans, but instead creates a subtly but persistently unhappy world for them to inhabit and that gets locked in for eternity.

Oh yes, the vast majority of cases of unaligned AI kill us, but in those cases at least it will be quick. The "I have no mouth and I must scream" scenarios are more existentially frightening to me.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

He seems like a character out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Some trans people do fit in better with the personality of the opposite sex, but some don’t; there is indeed a cluster of trans women that are attracted to women, into STEM, have interests typical of male nerds and are generally not very feminine. But AFAIK they tend to be high IQ contributing members of society and if transition improves their life and mental health, what’s the harm? The dysphoria can manifest differently but be just as real, and it’s better that they transition early than later in life when they are married and have kids, which was the average situation for female attracted trans women back in the 80s and 90s (see Blanchard’s research).

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023

Gotta tie everything together so that you can't block bad legislation without having unpopular knock-on effects!

If it were just about that, this would be less of an issue if legislation were not fundamentally driven by alarmism and impulse. What you are describing seems to boil down to a bundle of legislation comprising A and B(ad) being passed because rejecting it would mean that A can't be passed either; but assuming there isn't a sense of A being urgent/every day that we don't have A being a terrible loss, surely the common-sense response would be to reject the bill and wait until the proponents of A are willing to introduce it on its own.

Instead, though, my understanding always was that the bill-bundling in the US legislative is a consequence of the erosion of trust between different interest groups. Many legislative proposals are strongly championed by a minority and weakly opposed by a majority; and since nobody actually can trust a promise from anyone else in congress to support another bill they actually weakly oppose in the future in return for some favour now, the only way complex trades (where everyone gets something they strongly want in return for a bunch of things they are weakly against) can be executed is by making the entire transaction atomic (that is, bundling all components of the trade into an all-or-nothing legislative package).