domain:mattlakeman.org
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58m ago
I mean the white elephant thing depends on vehicle. If you're fortunate enough to work for a large liquid traded firm it's easy enough to redeem but for a lot of other people it's nebulous startup equity options kinda stuff or privately held firms where it's a mess
2rafa
1hr ago
The personal automobile (and even consequence of it, including the specifically American suburb) papers over the cracks of an unusually violent and dangerous first-world society, and has since the 1950s and 1960s.
America can transit, but that would require confronting the actual problem.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
1hr ago
Presumably USD thousands per year
2rafa
1hr ago
Finally, you're on the AGI hype/doom train. It would confound me beyond belief if the Mormon memeplex was the dominant one even in the near future. That's really unlikely, to say the least. In other words, a choice like that is to tell myself I have compromised my values, and for what? Something I can get anyway?
A recipe for an existence spent in the lobby of life, constantly waiting for something big to happen. Even if you agree with Yud that extinction is probably inevitable, there is nothing for it but to live as if it isn’t. (Speaking of that kind of ‘lie’ to the self…)
Finally, what's objective about it? In the strict sense? Do you seriously think that GDP per capita, indexes of mental health and TFR are such robust metrics that they overshadow everything else? Do you not care about anything else?
I believe the average Mormon in Utah lives a better life than the average person with a similar genetic makeup in almost every sense. This is backed up by metrics but is also backed up by vibes, aesthetics, and my personal experience.
How should we determine human flourishing? That’s a big question, but questions like “would I rather live in a slum in Kinshasa or a slum in Copenhagen?” or “is quality of life higher in Singapore or South Sudan?” can help up determine the baseline correlations if we can find it within ourselves to approach an answer.
The only catch is that you, the conscious entity reading this now, will be gone. The parasite will be piloting your body, living a life that is, by all objective measures, better than the one you are living now. Few of us would take that deal.
Semantic babble. Will the parasite have my memories, personalities and genetics? Will my children be genetically identical to my children if it doesn’t exist? Will ‘I’ love them the same way? Will my family not notice any difference? Will I be the same person in every conceivable non-magic sense? Will I act within the bounds of my own personality, developing naturally according to the genetic and environmental destiny with which I would otherwise have been aligned? If a comprehensive scan of brain and body were performed, would I be entirely identical to my current self?
If the answer to all of the above was ‘yes’, then sure, you’re just talking about a magic, better version of me. This is just a ‘brain upload’, something you yourself have expressed interest in.
For me, deliberately adopting a belief system I consider false, even for its wonderful benefits, feels too much like accepting the parasite.
You are not adopting it, you are suspending disbelief, no differently to when you watch a movie or play a video game and don’t obsess over plot holes. As others noted, we do this thousands of times a day, tell ourselves, friends and family thousands of little lies, just so stories. It is only your sentimental attachment to this specific narrative about religion and God that makes it harder for you to understand the same applies.
zPvQINBQvfFR
1hr ago
It's pretty standard in tech to have stocks as part of your compensation even for entry level positions. I would be surprised if no other highly compensated industries did that. Now, the question is, are the workers at these companies "average Joes"? Dunno. But they probably don't count as elite corporate supermen either. There's way too many of them, for one. (Something, something, if everybody is super, nobody is).
For the average Joe, stocks are a white elephant gift. When and how does he sell them?
He logs into the website of the broker company contracted by the corp to manage stock grants and clicks the "sell" button.
How does he track the taxes on it?
Well, that depends on your country of residence. For example, in one country I'm familiar with, you pay a flat tax on the sale price of any stocks you obtained as part of your renumeration, at the end of the fiscal year in which you sold. There's like an extra form to fill.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
1hr ago
It's the whole American car centered bullshit that led to California being the way it is. LA is completely unwalkable for example. The US has produced some of the best architects and urban planners in the world, it's a shame that the cult of the (oversized, let's not forget) car has left them in thrall to malign interests in the name of "convenience".
functor
2hr ago
California has a climate similar to Mediterranean countries.
Instead of being inspired by Italy:
Clearly there is a lot of California building regulation that needs to be tossed out. Especially LA is such a wasted opportunity and it could have been one of the nicest cities in the world.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
Surely there should be some limit where we decide that a CEO is just too expensive, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism in corporate America to limit it.
Who's "we"? What does this "we" have to do with it? What would it mean for this "we" to "decide"?
I can certainly think of mechanisms in corporate America by which individuals can "decide" that they think a company is wasting money on a CEO and take actions based on that decision. If enough of them do, then I guess maybe one could call that group a "we", and the results can range from simply insulating that "we" from any negative consequences to providing a signal to directly causing a change.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
3hr ago
They might be opening more nuclear power plants? Which, to be fair, China does in spades.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
More like Shampoo Planet. IIRC, that's the book with the protagonist celebrating stuff like nationwide homogeniety of goods and services.
BurdensomeCount
Unable to escape TheMotte's cycle of Samsara...
3hr ago
most counties were exempted, ferries and high-frequency bus routes without dedicated lanes no longer count, projects over 85 feet must now use union labor, there are now below-market-rate set-asides,
I come from a Unix background where we are taught that programs should do one thing and do it well. Seeing all this bullshit makes me seethe in a way very little else does.
Lizzardspawn
3hr ago
That being said I mean... are there ways to legislate outside of tariffs to prevent this sort of major sell off of strategic business to adversarial nations?
Couple of tools. Golden shares is one way. Second is tax code. If you only allow some parts of the money spent outside the US to be tax deductible - suddenly US labor doesn't look so bad. The government has lots of tools. What is usually lacking is the will.
Rosencrantz2
4hr ago
Large pizzas are usually a good deal for the same reason as 16" vs 12" sounds like only a third more pizza.
tkt
4hr ago
With most now-rich founder tech CEOs I could buy that. With CPUs, GPUs, OSs, social networks, whatever, there was a stable of plausible looking competitors and one caught a lead and rolled up into a progressively fatter cat that no other could compete with, network effects and all that, and maybe any one of them could have done just as well. ('anybody' seems a stretch, say, I'd most likely screw it up if asked to be a team lead of a team of any size. I might manage to manage a kitten but wouldn't bet on it. Very happy that tech companies have an IC track. And probably it takes a more select type to be a startup founder that doesn't fizzle out than, say, a Starbucks franchise boss or line manager wherever)
But SpaceX? Why would you expect some socioeconomic factors to turn up the same thing if there wasn't a idiosyncratic space maniac Elon driving it? There have been any numbers of attempts at space startups with comparatively incredibly lame results. Probably the most serious one has been Blue Origin where (if we believe the AI slop Google gives me for the search prompt) Bezos has likely poured in 100x as much of his own money as Elon did, and managed one (1) orbital flight so far, and some tens of 'hey we edged just over 100km so we can claim our tourists visited space' which tends to be peak space startup achievement. Is there any reason to think that swapping out Elon some random other boss wouldn't end up with at most a Virgin Galactic, instead of the wildly implausible looking outcome of first catching up with the established fat cat aerospace companies that had been doing this for decades at scale and made a giant government-funded grift of it, and then undercutting them on launch cost by 20x?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
4hr ago
I've had luck with certain time-consuming rote tasks in medium-large codebases (1M - 10M LOC) like writing good tests for existing legacy code.
Here is some code.
Here are some examples of tests for other code which are well-structured and fit with the house style [style doc]. Note our conventions for how to invoke business logic. Note particularly that we do not mock injected dependencies in functional tests, other than the ones in [this short enumerated list].
- Identify the parts of the code I just handed you which look sketchiest.
- Write some functional tests for the code under test, mimicking as closely as possible the style and structure of the canonical examples of good tests
- Use this command to run your new test, iterating until the test passes.
- You can use this tool to identify which lines were tested - try to have passing tests that exercise as many lines of code as practical of the ones you identified as sketchy in step 1.
- Perform these linting and code quality assessment steps in order, redoing all previous steps on each change.
If at any point during this process, you identify a bug in the code you are writing a test for, describe the bug, propose a fix for the bug, and stop working.
It's not doing anything I couldn't have done, it's not even faster than me in terms of wall-clock time to get a good functional test, but I can kick it off in the background while I'm doing other things and come back to some tests that definitely pass and probably even test the stuff I want to test in something approximating the way I want to test it.
TowardsPanna
4hr ago
"It's a bop!", as the kids say. Very very radio-poppy, but I like its energy!
2D3D
5hr ago
Much of the REE debate is centered on critical dependencies that have turned out to be more difficult to replace or domestically produce than previously anticipated. The big issue I repeat is that rare earth dependency is not actually that sophisticated a tool for China to have deployed because most of their demand ends up being internal and the dollar value of said exports is minimal, so their more potent tools for trade war aren't even felt by governments yet. If you think REE is bad wait till lipo battery, semiconductor precursor and active pharmaceutical restrictions kick in. Too much intermediate materials on unfinished and finished states are reliant on China and the logistical hyper efficiency there is the leveraged advantage, which doesn't disappear just because USA isnt buying it anymore.
Current technological bottlenecks for the USA are bad but the flywheel effect of domestic AI clusters paired with mature industrial ecosystems could be even more critical in tilting a permanent advantage to China. You can build a gigafactory and a data cluster in USA, but if you dont have the supporting ecosystem of toolmakers and logistics ERP in place then you're losing out geometrically if not exonentially with every development cycle because stacking advantages are contingent on a kature ecosystem not new toys.
pbmonster
5hr ago
But full autarky is (and never was) the goal of subsidies. Most countries spend billions on agriculture, and still end up importing a very large percentage of the food consumed during peace time. And that's ok, what matters is having the people, the knowledge and the supply chains set up just in case. Because scaling up and retooling is so much easier than building from scratch, and having the civilian consumer market collapse is a far smaller problem than having your military supply constrained.
So, you don't actually want to mimic the world economy on chips, batteries and REE. Any single type of small brushless motor is enough. Any single type of microcontroller - several generations behind state of the art FAB - is enough. Any type of niche battery format is enough. The rest can be scaled and retooled when necessary.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5hr ago
I've heard that one, it just didn't speak to me. I look at the phenomenon of K-pop, including this movie, and consider its mass-popularity strong evidence of alien invasion.
That being said, there is a song named Golden that I love. Or rather, this remix that throws in some Tame Impala:
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5hr ago
I genuinely expect less sloppy use of terminology from you.
Firstly, I think it's clear that this is a values difference, or at least weighting different values differently. I am not categorically against potentially trading a bit of epistemic clarity for more mundane wellbeing. Mormonism simply asks too much of the former. That does not make this an "emotional argument".
Their tribe, their identity, their mode of being and living works, by an objective, scientific measure, indeed according to the only measures by which a civilization should be judged.
We're not living in the Expanse, the Mormons are a small clade that's barely been around for a hundred and fifty years, they're not the rulers of the stars. It is far from clear how long their ability to maintain their community and way of life will hold. Finally, what's objective about it? In the strict sense? Do you seriously think that GDP per capita, indexes of mental health and TFR are such robust metrics that they overshadow everything else? Do you not care about anything else?
Imagine a very benevolent alien parasite. If you accept it, it will perfectly manage your life to maximize your health, social success, and contribution to a harmonious society. Your measurable outputs, your "fruits," will be spectacular. You will be happy and productive. The only catch is that you, the conscious entity reading this now, will be gone. The parasite will be piloting your body, living a life that is, by all objective measures, better than the one you are living now. Few of us would take that deal. We seem to value something like authenticity or self-sovereignty, even at the cost of being less "objectively" successful. For me, deliberately adopting a belief system I consider false, even for its wonderful benefits, feels too much like accepting the parasite.
Finally, you're on the AGI hype/doom train. It would confound me beyond belief if the Mormon memeplex was the dominant one even in the near future. That's really unlikely, to say the least. In other words, a choice like that is to tell myself I have compromised my values, and for what? Something I can get anyway?
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6hr ago
I feel like a much better target are the hordes of laptop-class, bullshit email jobs these giant companies seem to employ in droves. [...] I have to imagine Starbucks has hordes of these silly positions whose jobs consist largely of sending emails and having Zoom meetings that have little to no effect on the overall functioning of any individual coffee stand.
Probably why that video got such a backslash....
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
6hr ago
Technically undefined, I think? Because it would be dividing by zero to determine how much more someone is producing than that worker.
Celestial-body-NOS
We are all human beans. Together, we will rice.
6hr ago
The quoted statement rests on a premise that is not true; Mr Exotic is not capable of causing a man to be attracted to men, who was not previously thus.
I want to push back on this characterization, because I think it misunderstands both my beliefs and their practical implications.
I have been quite vocal about the fact that I don't agree with Yudkowsky's >99% p(doom). At that level of confidence, the rational move is to take out high-interest short-term loans, blow up data centers, or just do a lot of drugs. My estimate is closer to 20%, high enough to take seriously, low enough that planning for normal futures makes sense.
What does a 20% p(doom) actually look like in practice? I hedge against short-term unemployment risk. I should invest in index funds that will go brrt if nothing happens. I should worry slightly less about dementia and type-2 diabetes than I otherwise would. That's... pretty much it? My day-to-day life is not particularly different from the me who didn't care about AI x-risk at all.
(Also - and this is important - I think good outcomes from AGI are quite likely too, though I'm genuinely uncertain how they stack up against the 20% doom scenario. There's even a 10-30% chance that progress stalls well short of ASI within my lifetime.)
The Yudkowsky principle you're invoking - "live as if extinction isn't inevitable even if you think it is" - is about allocating agency and resources to timelines where they matter most. It would really suck to have no retirement fund if Nothing Happens, whereas I'm completely out of luck if I get paperclipped. This isn't a lie. It's just expected value calculations weighted by subjective probability.
I'm not sitting in the lobby of life. I'm living pretty normally while maintaining slightly different priors about the future than most people. If that's "waiting for something big to happen," then so is having any belief about anything that might occur later.
I think we're talking past each other on the parasite analogy. That's mostly my fault, I could have been more precise. Let me try again.
I meant something like: a sophisticated impersonator takes over your body and does a good-enough job fooling your friends and family. It's better at your job, takes better care of your health, makes you more successful by every external metric. But it's not a high-fidelity emulation preserving continuity of consciousness - it's more like a skilled actor who studied you for a while and does a convincing impression. The underlying substrate of "you" - whatever makes you you is gone.
If it were a perfect upload that preserved everything about your cognition, memory, and sense of self? Sure, I'd take that deal. That's not the scenario I was gesturing at.
The parallel to religious conversion: from the outside, Hoff joining the LDS church and becoming a better, happier, more successful version of himself looks great. From the inside, at least from where I'm standing - it looks like he's agreeing to gradually replace the parts of himself that care about certain kinds of truth with parts that care about different things. Maybe that's a good trade! But it's a real trade, not just a costume change.
I don't think the movie comparison or typical suspension of disbelief as applied to the consumption of fiction works.
When you watch a movie, you don't actually believe it's real.
I will caveat this by stating that the unconscious parts of your brain do believe it's all real but they're dumb and always do that, I'm more concerned about higher order functions that pay attention to fact checking.
The neuroscience here is genuinely interesting (and fucking complex): your theory-of-mind networks engage with fictional characters, your prediction-simulation systems model what might happen next, but your anterior and lateral prefrontal systems - the parts that handle "identifying reality" - are turned down, not off. Very few people have the phenomenological experience of believing a movie is literally happening in front of them, even while emotionally engaged.
This is why a punch thrown at your face makes you flinch even when you know your friend is joking, why walking on heights in VR makes you feel sick despite knowing you're on your bedroom floor. Different cognitive systems operating simultaneously at different levels of awareness, with different relationships to "truth."
But religious practice asks for something categorically different. It's not just engaging your simulation systems while keeping your reality-testing active. It's more like... deliberately training your reality-testing systems to mark certain propositions as true, or at least to stop flagging them as questionable. To move them from "entertaining possibility" to "thing I orient my life around."
You can attend a church service while maintaining private doubts, sure. Lots of people do. But the full program - tithing, mission work, temple marriage, raising children in the faith - usually requires something more than just showing up and enjoying the vibes. At minimum it requires acting as if you believe, which means routing your major life decisions through a framework you privately think is false. At maximum it requires actually believing, or at least successfully forgetting that you don't. I don't think Hoff is psycho/sociopathic enough to do all of that without truly coming to believe.
On the "thousands of little lies" point: I think you're equivocating between different categories of things that aren't really comparable.
White lies to spare feelings ("No honey, your ass looks great in those jeans") are not the same as lying to yourself. I can tell my girlfriend something without believing it myself. The cognitive operations are completely different.
Social conventions and politeness rituals ("How are you?" "Fine, thanks!") are not the same as adopting a comprehensive metaphysical framework.
Suspension of disbelief in entertainment is not the same as restructuring your entire life around propositions you privately consider false.
The scope and stakes matter here. Joining a church isn't like doing a Renaissance faire LARP on weekends. It's signing up for a package deal that includes: how you spend 10% of your income, who you can marry, how you raise your children, what you can consume, how you spend your Sundays, what you teach your kids about the nature of reality. The stakes and rigor involved are rather different.
I want to be clear: I'm genuinely not arguing that Hoffmeister25 made the wrong choice for him. Maybe he has successfully threaded the needle of "get all the benefits while maintaining enough epistemic flexibility to avoid the worst failure modes." Maybe the Mormon community really is good enough that it's worth the tradeoffs. Maybe his particular brain is constituted such that he can hold contradictory beliefs in separate magisteria without it bothering him. Some people seem to be able to do this! I am not those people. I find such contortions somewhere between impossible and insane (and no, I'm not autistic).
But I don't think I can, and I'm not convinced it's just "sentimental attachment" that makes me think the tradeoffs are real and substantial rather than trivial. The Mormons have built something impressive, I genuinely agree with you on that. But "it works" and "you should do it" are different claims, and the gap between them is exactly the space where individual values, personality, and epistemic commitments live.
You seem to think I'm being precious about a distinction that doesn't matter. I think the distinction is load-bearing, and that treating it as precious is actually the correct response. We might just have different values here, which is fine - but let's not pretend it's obviously irrational to weight epistemic integrity heavily in this calculation.
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