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RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
12m ago
Perhaps 99/100 alien civilizations succumb to silly governance. But if they're capable of reaching us then we should assume they're actually competent.
An actually competent civilization is nothing like ours. Actually competent civilizations would go all in on eugenics the moment they came up with it, cloning too. Actually competent civilizations would spend surplus wealth not on subsidizing boomers or makework jobs but on building out infrastructure, investment, R&D. They'd do things we wouldn't even think of but would make sense in retrospect, they take all the low-hanging fruit and the high-hanging fruit too.
A popular sci-fi writer doesn't actually hold universal deep wisdom, he just produces fiction we find interesting. 'Nobody can figure out how to program common sense' is a fun, self-congratulatory fictional idea. But it's not actually true. It was based on an old paradigm and has been disproven recently, irregardless of how much people might want it to be true.
There are all these potential objections like 'what if optimizing for IQ results in a nation of 'gifted' child prodigies who burn out in adulthood'? Sounds like a clever objection but there's no actual truth behind it in and of itself. You could adjust your education strategy for this, test, iterate, improve...
'Maybe all this AI stuff is just a great big bubble' is another tale people want to be true. Maybe it is true, perhaps there's some hard wall that scaling, algorithmic improvements, synthetic data and so on just can't surpass. I wouldn't bet on it.
No, you cannot avoid hangwon and gaokao if you have designer babies.
Why not? You could structure the economy such that it wasn't just a few chaebols who dominate everything. You could give affirmative action to applicants with siblings. There are any number of things that a country could do. They could give the top students in exam a harem and tell him to produce 50 kids.
A powerful alien civilization has no need for us as contributors. A few billion low IQ humans are quantitatively and qualitatively inferior to whatever they could cook up with local resources. They would be rightly wary of disrupting their hyperefficient status quo with foreign blood.
If aliens are here, they're doing research to better understand social dynamics because if there's even marginal gains in better understanding the universe, they'll take that cost.
FistfullOfCrows
19m ago
Shit test the students on their opinion of the US as a force for good and weather they hate "straight white men" [tm].
ResoluteRaven
32m ago
Only temporarily. The next Democratic administration will simply praise all the universities that stood up against "the war on science" and move them to the top of the pecking order, while those that bent the knee will be shunned and see their funding cut in a mirror image of what's happening now.
ResoluteRaven
37m ago
And what would they do? Move to China, lol? They're too self-interested for that, and China censors even more things they'd be inclined to make noise about. Move to allied nations, maybe Australia in Tao's case? It's not such a strategic loss given their political alignment with the US.
Most who choose to leave will move to Europe, but a few (early career, mostly foreign-born) will find what China can offer them appealing. There's an outside chance that the EU will get off its ass and become a geopolitical rival to the US, but even if they remain aligned it's risky to outsource your brainpower and key industries, TSMC being the most obvious example.
The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
That doesn't make him any worse at math. Such beliefs are common in people like Tao from living in a high-IQ bubble their whole lives. You can listen to Richard Feynman claiming that anyone can do physics at his level through hard work alone (apologies for the silly background music). If we were to fire every professor who believed in the blank slate and replace them with true believers in meritocracy, we'd end up with just the inhabitants of this forum. And while the folks here are pretty bright and may include the vice president, I don't think any of us are solving the great mysteries of theoretical physics anytime soon.
odd_primes
41m ago
Personally I mostly use LLMs as a semi-intelligent rubber ducky, or for generating low-complexity boilerplate code that I don't want to write. It can be useful to bounce ideas off a LLM instead of interrupting one of my coworkers.
It is very annoying to get a lengthy email that is clearly AI generated. Generally they are very low information density and just waste the recipients' time.
The one useful application I have found for that kind of text generation is for dealing with risk and compliance people. For some reason they love reams of bullshit paperwork, and LLMs are very good at giving them nice sounding fluff. It's amazing to be able to throw in a list of bullet points and have it expand that out into something they find sufficient.
thrownaway24e89172
Death is the inevitable and only true freedom
46m ago
They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
I don't think this is true. They believe in a different kind of meritocracy, specifically one that focuses on the skills needed for social climbing rather than the nominally productive goals that meritocracy usually implies. "Equity" and "equality" are mere tools to be used to gain social standing, whether by elevating oneself or eliminating one's competition.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
53m ago
And yet somehow it seems everyone just takes it for granted, of course it's targeted government punishment coming down over personal wrongthink they say, Tao's beliefs are definitely relevant to the cuts.
No, this is not quite correct. Everyone is acknowledging that even if the government were punishing Tao in particular (and they are not, they are targeting the university in general), then Tao has already voided his right to principled protest. In terms of defense in depth, Tao's motte was already invested with demolition charges, by his own rotten hand.
If you don't want to fall prey to politics, don't let your institution get stacked by political actors.
Most long lived institutions have to learn this. Universities used to understand it. And then they didn't. Here's the outcome.
It doesn't matter that Tao's smart, it doesn't even matter that his work is useful to humanity. Universities aligned themselves with one side of the friend-enemy distinction, that side lost, therefore they must suffer. There is no other way that this can go. This isn't me saying that it is good that this happens, merely that it is a law of nature.
Next time, fight the militants that are trying to use your university for political ends and win. Defeat has consequences.
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