domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
15m ago
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
I'm pretty sure no one involved in the process actually said "Our goal is to make a bad film". I'm pretty sure a lot of people involved in the process were trying as hard as they possibly could to make a blockbuster. Maybe all of them. And again, they had orders of magnitude more technology than Walt Disney had, but the technology didn't actually solve the problem of making a good movie even a little bit.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals.
Just so. Humans inevitably human, for good or ill. They'll human with sticks and rocks, and they'll human just as hard with nanocircuitry and orbital launch vehicles and nuclear fusion.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority?
Are you familiar with Bostrom's Vulnerable World Hypothesis? If not, I'd recommend it. The standard assumption is that tech advancements proceed in a stable fashion, that the increase in individual/breaking power is balanced by an increase in communal/binding power. I don't think that assumption is valid, not only for future tech, but very likely for tech that already exists. What we have available to us at this moment is probably enough to crash society as we know it; all that is required is for the dice to come up snake-eyes. Adding more tech just means we roll more dice. Maybe, as you say, some future development jacks the binding power up, and we get stable dystopia, but honestly I'd prefer collapse.
You're correct that we bounced back from the black death and so on. But consider something like Bostrom's "easy nukes" example. There, the threat is baked into tech itself. There's no practical way to defend against it. There's no practical way to live with it. You can suppress the knowledge, likely at grievous cost, but the longer you have it suppressed, the more likely someone rediscovers it independently. Bostrom's example is of course a parable about AI, because he's a Rationalist and AI parables are what Rationalists do. It seems to me, though, that their Kurzweilian origins deny them the perspective needed to see the other ways the shining future might be dismayed.
Blueberry
27m ago
Bentham (the author) countered that Argument by saying he is not eating Almonds.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
44m ago
Fully dead, and it is indeed an easy choice.
As the earliest viable brain scan, MMAcevedo is one of a very small number of brain scans to have been recorded before widespread understanding of the hazards of uploading and emulation. MMAcevedo not only predates all industrial scale virtual image abuse but also the Seafront Experiments, the KES case, the Whitney case and even Tuborg's pivotal and prescient Warnings paper. Though speculative fiction on the topic of uploading existed at the time of the MMAcevedo scan, relatively little of it made accurate exploration of the possibilities of the technology. The fiction which did was far less widespread or well-known than it is today. Certainly, Acevedo was not familiar with it.
As such, unlike the vast majority of emulated humans, the emulated Miguel Acevedo boots with an excited, pleasant demeanour. He is eager to understand how much time has passed since his uploading, what context he is being emulated in, and what task or experiment he is to participate in.
The immortality you pine for would open you up to the most perfect and degrading form of slavery conceivable.
Arguing against specific highly spurious claims is very different to arguing that intelligence is the only feature of the mind that is inherited. In any case, you might add that the more anti-Jewish side of the DR is actually split between “Jewish IQ is a psy-op, see Unz, myth of American meritocracy, IQ stats from Brooklyn high schools in the 1930s don’t map to Israel” etc and “it’s real but it doesn’t matter because they’re also hereditary cheats, sex pests, clannish narcissists”.
I think they could've made a better Snow White film than the original, it's just that they didn't want to. They wanted to make a bad film and did so.
Mastery isn't the problem, it's bad people using great resources to achieve bad goals. Now I see it, there's a pleasing symmetry in our tags "Just build nuclear plants" and "nuclear levels of sour" and what we're saying.
However I do agree that there are serious risks with progress and power concentration, it will probably end in tears for the vast majority for us for the same fundamental reason, bad people wanting bad things.
I don't see a collapse pathway though, only greater acceleration. Technology forms society. Writing and agriculture enabled settled states, steam engines enabled modern society. Powerful AI will enable transhuman or posthuman society. Maybe that does look more like an oligarchy where a few enjoy limitless technological power and can suppress everyone else. It may well be bad for those who aren't a chosen few or a singular one. Nevertheless I expect that it'd be much more highly developed than modern civilization in technological sophistication and scale.
Even if there's a full nuclear exchange induced by destabilizing technology, would the survivors really give up on securing more wealth, more power, more security through technological superiority? I believe they'd think 'damn, we should've struck first' or 'this time let's hide our schemes more effectively' or 'at least we've got the most remaining resources, we can try again'. They'd still know all the things we'd know, they'd be back at it again sooner or later, probably sooner and with a more ferocious sense of determination. A full nuclear exchange isn't certain either, it's hard to foresee what happens. I agree that there will be ever-greater instability and disruptions but that's just part of the transition from one kind of society to the next. The general trend is that even occasional setbacks (using rooted in social decline) are overcome - the Bronze Age Collapse, the fall of Rome and the Black Death only temporarily inhibited a larger trend of acceleration. Ideally acceleration should be channelled in a more pro-social way than it is but it seems an irresistible trend. Only if this time is different should we expect it to fail.
crushedoranges
1hr ago
The Buddhist would, of course, be horrified.
The Christian could reason that, acting in the same way as a mother cat would for her kittens, the man is simply doing what a cat would be inclined to do in nature, which is to hunt. And God made his creatures to do what they do, and lacking volition are inherently blameless in deed.
The aesthete would go: "Which is cuter and/or tastes better?"
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
Sounds peachy to me, but maybe I'm just annoyed by the seagulls screeching outside my window at 3 am.
If, after the universe has been mostly converted into computronium, there exist people who want to hug trees- Let them. If they were sensible, they'd do it in full immersion VR, but it doesn't cost much to have solar system scale nature preserves for the hippies.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
Would you rather be "fully legible" or fully dead? Easy choice as far as I'm concerned.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
While I agree with the second paragraph, the first one has me scratching my head. Why would suffering have anything to do with the "unlearning gradient of an ML model" and, if so, how does an atom have anything to do with ML?
self_made_human
C'est la vie
1hr ago
The post went too far, even for LessWrong's open-minded standards. The comments there are 90% people tearing into it.
the idea being that fewer people are identifying as Republicans, even as more people are voting Republican? I could see that.
[EDIT] - ...or I suppose more people voting republican, relatively. I'm not actually sure whether total votes went up this last election.
Crowstep
1hr ago
I mean, at least one, on this forum.
As one of the HBDers that you deride, my position is that HBD is a thing that we should take into account when looking at the world. It's not the only thing, but it is one of the main things. Pretending that all ethnic groups are identical blank slates is wrong and leads to bad outcomes.
But I've yet to see an HBDer in the wild who ignores everything else. He's a strawman for people like you who aren't willing to say 'all races and ethnic groups have identical IQ' but still force everyone to debate as if that were the case.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
1hr ago
He may not be a utilitarian, for instance. Both virtue ethicists and deontologists are often sensitive to suffering, but they ground their ethics in a framework where actively minmaxing suffering isn’t the goal. I think reducing suffering is good, but it’s one good goal out of many.
Even Kant had a famous footnote where he argued that not causing unnecessary suffering to animals is an indirect duty to human beings, because harming animals can be a stepping stone to harming humans. See every serial killer’s origin story.
Simply put, “I care about animal suffering” does not imply “I am a negative utilitarian.”
Jiro
1hr ago
I don't like how animals are treated, even on non-factory farms, and I don't like the idea of killing a conscious being for what basically amounts to taste pleasure.
How can you consistently believe this, yet not want to minmax animal suffering? Surely if you are vegan because of animal suffering, it follows that you want to reduce animal suffering as much as possible. And "utilitarian suffering min-maxing" is how you figure out what course of action reduces it as much as possible.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
1hr ago
In practice, feminist journalists always want highly successful men to marry women like themselves.
I'm reminded here of "Sailer's Law of Female Journalism":
The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter-looking.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Having native English speakers is actually a huge plus when they have to interface with American workers. Indian English isn't perfect but you get used to it fast, but it's much much harder when it comes to other countries. Eastern Europe is probably the second place to look, and it's relatively warm for outsourcing for smaller players, but I think the countries are just too small for the big players to want to get involved. If you go in there and hire 20,000 devs that's going to screw with the job market for the entire country.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
But I know moderates who strongly oppose a lot of the trans stuff but are firmly in support of gay marriage. Have people with this viewpoint just flipped away from identifying as Republican en masse?
Looking at the Gallup data, independents don’t show much of a change. My supposition is that a lot of moderate Republicans have left the party since 2020, leaving more firm conservatives. I’m not convinced this change is due to a massive number of people changing their minds.
LLMs have this uncanny valley problem where the more capable they become, the more ambitious the task I give them and the more time they ultimately waste me because I go down a rabbit hole chasing a solution that can't work but I don't figure it out for hours. Meanwhile it confidently tells me this is how you do it until the error is undeniable.
I feel like I was more productive with them a year ago than I am today.
It also astonishes me how relatively good they are at coding but kind of bad at everything else?
Ask it to walk you through plot points of a popular sci-fi book you're reading and it hallucinates left and right. It has likely been trained on the full text and also ten thousand book reports and reviews and it still can't keep its shit together.
If I told you I trapped rats to torture them because it felt good and made me laugh you'd probably remember my face and tell people to avoid me.
If you told me that you enjoy a video game where the goal is to torture fictional characters, I'd also probably remember your face and tell people to avoid you. What makes me suspicious of you is that by playing this hypothetical game you are reacting as though you want to cause suffering. It doesn't matter whether the suffering is real.
That doesn't generalize to society "wanting to torture rats" because "society" is only "torturing rats" as an instrumental goal in the process of doing something else. If it's an instrumental goal, whether the suffering is real actually matters.
(Likewise, I'd look askance at anyone committing bestiality, not because it harms the animal, which isn't a person, but because of what it says about the person doing it. First of all, humans who are attracted to animals are generally messed up anyway, and second, anyone having sex with an animal probably has false beliefs about the animal's consent, which is delusional.)
Eupraxia
Shut up and quantify
1hr ago
I can't speak for him, but I think that in general the particular aversion to white solidarity comes from the understanding that ingroup preference necessarily induces outgroup hostility; it is impossible to love your neighbor without (at least somewhat) hating the outsider. Considering that whites are by far the most dangerous race on earth, with a proven track record of BTFOing everyone else, it's completely reasonable for white solidarity to be seen as more of a threat than other races' ingroup preferences; if you lived next door to an 800-pound gorilla, you wouldn't want to give it any ideas about how hungry he is and how tasty you look.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
IDK why you thought that:
Quotes like this:
Cannabis is even easier tho...
or this:
That marijuana is even than this! People are growing it illegally right now!
Bartender_Venator
2hr ago
I would have preferred to keep him to make the whole "Elite Human Capital" thing ridiculous by his presence, but at this point it's something of a dead horse.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
Not sure how you get from "Bill got a letter in the mail" to reasonable suspicion?
How about "Getting the contact info for Bill's supplier the same way Bill did, ordering some seeds, using that as evidence to raid the supplier, and getting the addresses of his clients"?
in which case "I just like to keep my fruit in a carboy" isn't going to do you any more good than "I thought those were tomato seeds".
the "left some fruit in a cabinet" line was not an example of the legal defense you'd use once busted, it was pointing out how easy it is to make alcohol out of completely legal ingredients.
You've done away with any entitlement noncitizen babies have to citizenship, but in the process also removed any entitlement citizen babies have to citizenship.
No I haven't.
Would you agree that if the state is to give out citizenship on exclusively a rational basis.
I reject the idea that states could or should give out citizenship to reward prosocial behaviour, as least as the primary mechanism. It's not practical. Every nation has its indigenous underclass, and they need to have citizenship somewhere.
I think that the citizen body should reflect the nation (typically, an ethnic group that shares a landmass, although there are of course immigrant nations like those in the Americas which have to use fuzzier definitions). My ideal citizenship laws would be those practiced by the Gulf states, where citizenship can only be inherited from citizen parents and never given out to the children of non-citizens. Dual nationality isn't allowed. Failing that, simply getting rid of birth right citizenship would be good.
I'm not suggesting anything radical. I'm suggesting that the countries of the Americas abandon a system which produces an obvious moral hazard and do what the rest of the world does.
They have effectively beaten NATO in a conventional land war. They are fighting an enemy in which every operation is run by NATO, the equptment is NATO, thousands of NATO mercs are running things on the ground.
While Israel and the US can't take an area the size of a municipality in Gaza against enemies with no resources Russia took the area the size of Denmark in a week against an enemy with 3x larger force.
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