You all ready to talk about the vaccines yet? Last time I was here I was told that skipping the shot(s) was irrational because the effects of COVID would be worse than any potential side-effects.
C) Card Game: Predictably Irrational - Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions.
D) Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
E) Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected or that changed your perspective on the universe.
F) Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Just thought to drop this somewhere public in case this something anyone cares about, but since substack displays archived post in a somewhat circuitous way I made a collection of ACX posts in chronological order a little while back: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/astral-codex-ten-posts-in-chronological
I haven't bothered to update it since posting yet and Scott turned on the Previous/Next post buttons shortly after I posted it so it kinda lost some utility but there ya go.
From CNN: "42% of CEOs say AI could destroy humanity in five to ten years"
"Sonnenfeld said the survey included responses from 119 CEOs from a cross-section of business, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy, the leaders of IT companies like Xerox and Zoom as well as CEOs from pharmaceutical, media and manufacturing."
Looks like there is a "fire alarm for AI" after all. Of course, no "orderly exit from the building" is forthcoming even so, but it's been amusing to observe the progression of this meme from wacky obscure contrarian forums to the top of mainstream.
This is a total throwback to a discussion in an earlier open thread about penis stealing. I’ve been pondering it. I am convinced what they really meant was not that that their organs disappeared from between their legs, but that they were suddenly unable to have an erection which is effectively stealing your penis also makes a lot more sense
Hey everyone, there was a website I've seen a few people mention here that I've lost URL to. It's all about health conditions and how to address them in layman's terms. This is a very vague description, but I think it was ran by someone in the rational adjacent community. It is not WebMD or any of the websites that show up when you google anything health related. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, thank you in advance.
Hi! Thanks everyone who responded to my questions about marriage! Now that I think I have a framework for solving that, I am wondering how to systematically attack depression.
I kind of feel like I am dreaming all the time even though I’m awake, and I cannot conceptualize that the future will be better than the present, nor formulate a desire and enact it. It is sort of like my entire mind is just TV static and sometimes I drop into some kind of catatonia where my body refuses to move at all or I go very numb while driving and straddle for several seconds before my limbic system half-heartedly decides that because I would probably survive a crash at 25 miles per hour I should probably drive in the lane. What does it mean that there is no oversight over the universe and everyone’s suffering is totally arbitrary and basically unbounded? What do you do if you do not think there is intelligent design beyond optimization algorithms and non-existence is your most preferred state?
How does this usually get solved? What does it mean to have a positive outlook on your own future and how do you acquire this? I think the Richard Dawkins atheists have some kind of answer to this, but it requires you to espouse their value system which is not really possible after you think about the implications of the science they’re talking about for five minutes. I think a better mode of relation is possible, but those people are deluded, and I am wondering if anyone who’s followed their road of insight past the depression has a nicer system. I think Joscha Bach has some ideas about this but he doesn’t seemed to have totally solved the depression bit. I think Sarah Perry solved this by quitting carbs.
My partner wants to start a new career. She's currently a lecturer + atmospheric modeller at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her education is all in physical geography, though she's published on bayesian modelling so obviously numerate. She can code but she doesn't want to be a full-time coder, though some coding would be fine.
What industry needs enough people like this that they'd consider hiring someone with her background? What terms should she use in a search?
"A Pentagon whistleblower has claimed the Vatican is aware of the existence of non-human intelligences and helped the US retrieve a downed UFO from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini at the end of the Second World War.
David Grusch, 36, served 14 years in the Air Force and is a decorated Afghanistan combat officer who worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
His role was to act as the NRO's representative when dealing with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The task force was specifically set up to investigate UFOs.
He has spoken out to say the US has run a top secret UFO retrieval program for decades and claimed the 'Vatican was involved' in the first ever UFO crash.
Grusch said the first recovery of a UFO was in Magenta, Italy in 1933 and it was held by Mussolini's Italian government until 1944-1945 when Pope Pius XII tipped America off about it."
Yes! It wouldn't be a world-spanning decades-long conspiracy without us Papists getting involved, now would it? 😁
I have no idea if this is the same UFO guy who was recently in the news but the levels are getting too confusing for me: are we on truth-disinformation-counter-truth-deliberate distraction-UFOs are real-that's what the Deep State wants you to think Level 99 now or what?
EDIT: Oh, I love this bit:
"Dailymail.com has contacted the Vatican for comment. "
I wonder what unfortunate son-of-a-gun in which Dicastery is going to have *that* one slung across the desk? 😁
There are running shoes with some cushioning, some with lots of cushioning, and some with none at all (e.g. barefoot shoes, sandals). Does anyone know of any good scientific evidence that any of these different types of shoes are effective at preventing injury in runners?
In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit.
But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious: Several were entirely fabricated.
The lawyer in question had gotten the help of another attorney who, in scrounging around for legal precedent to cite, utilized the "services" of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT was wrong. So why do so many people believe it's always right?
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes security evangelist Mark Stockley and Malwarebytes Labs editor-in-chief Anna Brading to discuss the potential consequences of companies and individuals embracing natural language processing tools—like ChatGPT and Google's Bard—as arbiters of truth. Far from being understood simply as chatbots that can produce remarkable mimicries of human speech and dialogue, these tools are becoming sources of truth for countless individuals, while also gaining attraction amongst companies that see artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) as the future, no matter what industry they operate in.
The future could look eerily similar to an earlier change in translation services, said Stockley, who witnessed the rapid displacement of human workers in favor of basic AI tools. The tools were far, far cheaper, but the quality of the translations—of the truth, Stockley said—was worse.
"That is an example of exactly this technology coming in and being treated as the arbiter of truth in the sense that there is a cost to how much truth we want."
Hiring opportunity from the Alignment Research Center --
ARC is hiring theoretical researchers:
"ARC is based in Berkeley, California, and we would prefer people who can work full-time from our office, but we are open to discussing remote or part-time arrangements in some circumstances. We can sponsor visas and are H-1B cap-exempt."
"...we have more of a need for people with a strong theoretical background (in math, physics or computer science, for example), but we remain open to anyone who is excited about getting involved in AI alignment, even if they do not have an existing research record.""
"Our current interview process involves:
3-hour take-home test involving math and computer science puzzles
30-minute non-technical phone call
1-day onsite interview
We will compensate candidates for their time when this is logistically possible.
We will keep applications open until at least the end of August 2023, and will aim to get a final decision back within 6 weeks of receiving an application."
"Salaries are in the $150k–400k range for most people depending on experience."
Anyone have any beliefs which they know are ill-founded and irrational but are tempted or half inclined to accept all the same? With me it is a feeling that the more skint I feel the more likely I am to win the lottery with the weekly fiver I spend on it. I know it is an absurd idea, and common sense and experience says it is nonsense, but there we are.
I'm not a gambler, besides a small amount spent on the lottery. But sometimes I wonder if chronic gamblers aren't driven at least in part by the same irrational belief that as their funds decrease their chances of a win rise, in some form of natural justice, even though each bet has no causal relation to the bettor's remaining funds, if any, nor any "memory" of previous bets (except maybe in some card games where a pack of cards is dwindling).
I get to visit Berkeley this month. Anything there you think would be especially interesting to an average ACX reader, like meetups or something? I'm mainly interested in computer/tech stuff. Also I'm a foreigner so it doesn't have to be unique to Berkeley, stuff that are considered generic in US are fine as well.
TIL about the Bielefield conspiracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy) - a German internet meme about a German city not existing. You ask someone if they've ever been there or knows anyone who has, and if they say "yes", then clearly they're in on the conspiracy (or were duped themselves), and if they say "no", well... QED.
The town 'resolved' this in 2019 by offering a million Euro bounty for proof of its non-existence then when nobody claimed the bounty, they decided that since there's No Evidence for their non-existence, they must exist after all. (And then they dropped a rock with a QR code into the park to commemorate it)
... I can't tell if all those logical fallacies cancel out into good logic or not.
I am wondering if there is something like an anti- placebo effect. If you are extremely pessimistic about recovering, you may not feel any improvements to your health even though the medicines are working. Clinical trials account for placebo effects but there is no way to account for the reverse
Also has there been any research on placebo effects like are there a small set of people who are more prone to placebo effects irrespective of disease, are highly optimistic.
I'm very interested in doing the digital nomad thing, but I'm concerned about finding an online job because my skills may be difficult to convey to an employer, and I feel there are a lot of people to compete with who also want these limited online jobs. I have a tested IQ of roughly 150 and I have been paid, respectively, something like 30 an hour to write and between 10-100 an hour to paint. I'm in something like the umpteenth percentile of creative output and skill in multiple domains, but all those markets are contracting with AI and they're not reliable enough to give me peace of mind long-term. They're more like windfalls. I have most of a generic business degree completed now, which inclines me also toward the middle-income HR type fields where layoffs are happening in online roles.
My questions are A) does anyone have experience with a similar situation, or just digital nomadism broadly (I'd love to hear your thoughts even if you don't,) and B) does anybody want to hire a digital assistant who can write you a novel and paint your portrait, lol. Maybe C) should I just drop everything and do a coding bootcamp. I have the cash.
Down below an Australian is wondering about the tipping culture in the US. It’s a perennial theme on regional Reddit to bemoan the export of this part of American culture. It’s not something that worries me about American cultural dominance.
What does is the export of American racial politics. This is from the guardian
The guy is obviously American and has a relatively good point about Brigerton. The problem is his defense of the black cleopatra in Netflix. Money quote (as Americans say).
“but this supposed “blackwashing” was too much for some – and not just the usual suspects. Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, complained: “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.” One Egyptian lawyer even sought legal action to block Netflix in the country for its promotion of “Afrocentric thinking”.
“Cleopatra’s precise pigmentation is up for debate: she was descended from the Greek-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty. But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway. “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?” asked Tina Gharavi, the show’s director. “And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter.”
Not only is the American writer here ignoring the present day Egyptian minister but ignoring him based on American ideologies, while claiming the opposite. It’s the Americans who are imposing the idea of whiteness. On Egyptians.
To begin with Cleopatra’s lineage didn’t “ intermarry with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years”, this isn’t common for conquering aristocrats in general and this dynasty was particularly inbred. I imagine the author is arguing in bad faith here, as he probably knows that.
Now. look at what the Egyptian minister said
“Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black”
And what the director accuses him and Egyptians of saying
“And why do some people [Egyptians] need Cleopatra to be white?”
The Egyptian minister says “light skinned” and the American says white. So not only do the Americans here believe they can impose their version of history other societies, they are blind to the contextual differences of who is white or not. It’s a term with limited currency even in Europe, where primarily identity is ethnic not based on skin colour.
I'm a lover of classical music and I sometimes get into discussions with people over whether we can "separate art from the artist" in cases where the art is beautiful but the artist is problematic for some reason (ex. Wagner was an anti-semite, Picasso a womanizer, etc). The question may be better phrased as "to what extent does the moral responsibility of the individual require consideration of the artist's personal character when choosing to engage with their art?"
I started drafting some hypothetical scenarios to help me sort out my own thinking on this. Here are a few of them:
Scenario 1 - The Private Discovery
Theo discovers an old vinyl record in his grandfather’s attic among items brought back from WWII. The record contains a symphony composed by Hitler. Overcome by curiosity, Theo plays the record and is profoundly moved by the beauty of the music. He occasionally listens to the symphony privately, each time finding it as impactful as the first.
Scenario 2a - The Public Performance
Theo, a renowned conductor, decides to perform Hitler’s Symphony publicly. He believes the performance will do more good than harm. He does not disclose the composer's identity, hoping the music can be appreciated independently. The performance is well-received, but when the truth about the composer is revealed, controversy ensues.
Scenario 2b - The Informed Listener
Samantha, a devoted concert-goer and friend of Theo, decides to attend the concert with full knowledge of the symphony's unsettling origins, but decides to focus on the music. She is deeply moved by the symphony's beauty and decides that she would probably attend future concerts where that piece was being performed.
Scenario 3 - The Living Artist
Theo encounters the work of a living artist who, despite making racist comments, creates beautiful, thought-provoking music. Theo is moved by the music and decides to include one of the artist's compositions in his concert repertoire. This choice directly supports the artist financially and boosts their reputation.
Scenario 4 - The Posthumous Revelation
Theo has always admired a famous composer whose work promotes peace and unity. After the composer's death, it is revealed that he led a secret life filled with various horrid deeds. Theo, who has conducted the composer's works many times, continues to appreciate and perform them, believing the works' messages aren't invalidated by the composer's personal life.
In which of these scenarios, if any, has the character acted unethically? Why?
Can high-functioning autistics get married? Are their marriages usually bad? Should they avoid marriage?
I have high-functioning autism, and am graduating high school next year, and I am trying to verify marriability. (I asked a similar question last week, thanks to everyone who gave advice! I am using it now!) I think I have mild to major depressive symptoms when I realize I might not get married, and also because I have a very obsessive personality (which I think people find unnerving). I once became deeply obsessed with this other girl this one time (she was probably on the spectrum too), and realized that this is basically a function of my mind that really doesn't care about the input and can be exploited with attention. I think I could fall in love with a rock or a tree with practice (but why on earth would that be a good idea?). It seems like a good idea to get married to a human woman. I also realized that my motivational system assigns this huge weight to getting married/being in a romantic relationship, and I keep thinking about that girl all the time even though she hasn't spoken to me in a year and I have no idea how to stop this. How do people usually stop this?
Wouldn't it make sense for China to drop/resolve its border dispute with India, and instead team up with India on a vague anti-Western alliance? I think from a purely strategic point of view, China probably jumped the gun a bit in starting territorial disputes with literally every single one of their neighbors- maybe not the sagest strategy. India is still not really an ally of the West or America, and China and India have both been pushing their membership in the 'BRICS' alliance or grouping thingy. Modi, to my knowledge, has not been very loudly anti-China (I think mostly because he doesn't want to lose a humiliating border war). They have mutual concerns about American sanctions, dollarization, and general Western pushiness, and being anti-colonial seems like a very strong common grievance. Also, being anti-colonial, anti-America and anti-the West in general seems like a strong unifying theme for a lot of other developing countries in Latin America, Africa and ex-Soviet countries- so they could lead an anti-Western bloc.
Strategically, shouldn't China bury the hatchet with India, and pivot to a friendly anti-Western relationship that incorporates Russia, Brazil, and other developing countries? Maybe it wouldn't last forever, but just from a pure IR strategy perspective it seems better than, like, border skirmishes with melee weapons over irrelevant territory. I don't want this to happen at all, but if I were China or India this would seem to be a pretty smart move?
Curious if anyone has any updated thoughts on Net Neutrality. Now that's it's been several years since it was "the thing" on the internet for a bit.
My understanding is that it is mostly unprotected and also mostly unviolated. How true are those two things? If they are true, does that mean that, while an important principle, it's one that mostly doesn't need explicit protection? Or is it actually being violated and I didn't even notice? Or is it actually more protected than I thought?
Is there any lesson we should learn from the difference between the _extremely_ strong claims that were made at the time vs. the relatively boring reality of how things turned out?
I've heard that wildfires in North America are increasing in number. This is always blamed on global warming, but to what extent might it owe to growth in the human population?
Every time a human visits an area of the wilderness, there's some small chance they will start a wildfire, usually by mistake but sometimes in a deliberate act of arson. The person might flick a lit cigarette butt into the grass, fail to fully put out a campfire, or have some problem with their car that spreads fire to dry vegetation nearby.
As the populations of humans in North America increase, it stands to reason that the number of humans visiting wilderness areas will also. Statistically speaking, this also means the number of wildfires will rise.
Ross Douthat is cracking me up today in a panel discussion of the Trump candidacy:
“What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?”
“That his second term was foretold in the Necronomicon, written in eldritch script on the Mountains of Madness and carved deep, deep into the white stones of the Plateau of Leng.”
It’s paywalled of course but if you haven’t used up your five free articles for the month it worth a look, for the laughs if nothing else.
Anyone here tried http://bewelltuned.com/ ? Was it helpful? Any place where I can see more commentary/discussion on it, or just learn about the people behind it?
A question that's been popping into my head lately: is AI going to break the internet?
I have in mind a future where:
- every online discussion gets overrun with convincing AI bots that crowd out real human participants
- email spam filters get overrun by ever-more sophisticated AI, including AI that mimics real human correspondents, like specific people the email account holder knows
- social media accounts come to be seen as mere fodder for AI voice and video mimicry used for scams, and people increasingly try to minimize their online presence
- corporate and government tech security proves to be no match for AI, and systems of all kinds are increasingly taken offline altogether
In my most starry-eyed utopian moods, I imagine a future where the internet is just abandoned altogether and people return to living in the real world, more or less sequestered from an internet that devolves into an AI ghetto, a sort of "Disneyland with no children," to borrow Bostrom's phrase, except very stupid and inane.
The average person seems to associate justice with equality, at least relative to my own sense of justice. Equality, beyond the baseline required to live a dignified life, seems irrational. Why might that be?
People don’t seem to think it’s unfair that some sports teams win again and again, while others haven’t had a title in 100 years. Or that a player might be benched the entire season. Or that Messi is soccer’s GOAT and is disproportionately remunerated for it. Society doesn’t seem to care that there isn’t a female Messi. Or that basketball “discriminates“ against short people. Or that most sports exclude the obese. Most of this seems tolerated because it’s rational. If the objective is to win, you will build the best team and pay what you need to pay, and do what you need to do to win.
Yet, when a team of people build a company, we have different expectations. Companies can’t just want to win. They must do good things for society outside of their core competency, like become carbon neutral or improve diversity. Employees inside companies shan’t be treated as super stars or be “benched”. Everyone has to be made feel they have a more or less equal chance of making it to the top. If a given demographic predominantly represents required skillset, companies are expected to fight the distribution and scout outside of the obvious places. People who work for high paying companies/industries are perceived as an undeserving and often low morality elite.
It seems more people understand intuitively that they can never be Michael Jordan. But it’s harder to appreciate why we didn’t get to become Beyoncé or Bill Gates. Maybe people think that if they just were in the right place at the right time, they could be almost anyone, unless of course being someone requires certain genetics; with the exception of intelligence, personality, and other more ambiguous traits.
I genuinely think we would all be happier if we accepted a lot more things in life work like professional sports, even if we hide it behind a veil of equality. It just seems like a collective delusion that leads to cognitive dissonance when we are confronted every day with a reality that doesn’t follow.
Hey everyone, I wrote this piece called "The Future is Happening to Me" about, what else, AI. But specifically it focuses a bit more on current, pre-AGI, generative paradigms and how even they may pose challenges to our communities and conceptualizations of self. I'm curious what others think, and I'd welcome any comments/criticisms.
Anybody know Houston? I'll be there this week and want to see neighborhoods/ towns that are good examples/ results of the region's (lack of) housing regulation and zoning. All ideas welcome. Thanks!
This is the weirdest most specific question I've ever asked here. I ordered some freeze-dried chicken bits as treats for my cats. They are dry, odorless little chunks, but on the package it says that after you feed them to your cats you should "wash you hands, the cat dish, the utensils you used and the counter with hot, soapy water." Apparently these things are freeze dried raw, and handling them is basically handling raw chicken, which is actually something I never do because raw meat grosses me out, and raw chicken is both gross and additionally really does carry a risk. I'm not worried about the treats hurting the cats, I'm worried about them making me sick. I'm inclined to just throw them out. Is that reasonable, or is there some reason to be less concerned than I am?
So Reddit is in protest today because the company increased the cost of the API to third party app developers. In particular the third party app Apollo is being hit by very large and economically disastrous fee increases, and have decided to close down.
The protest involves the different sub reddits being temporarily silent - mostly they have been made private by their moderators. It’s a two day protest for most, but some sub Reddits have decided to go silent for good.
It will be interesting to see how the latter will work out. To my mind, even if the admins - employees of Reddit - don’t open up the closed subs then somebody will eventually create a new one on the same theme. I really don’t see the point of that strategy - in any negotiation you should keep the most powerful threat you have until you have tried other strategies, like the two day stoppage to begin with, if that is even allowed.
To be fair they all voted on it, in the respective subs. The full shutdown seems fairly extreme and unworkable to me.
The have proved an 80 year old conjecture of Erdos on the asymptotic behaviour of the Ramsey number r(4, t). Finite geometry plays a crucial role in their work and it diverges significantly from the purely probabilistic attempts so far. Here is my blog post on their construction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04007"
I would like some advice on which crowdfunding platform would best suit me, and if any at all.
For quite a long time since discovering Civilization I've wanted to make my on strategy game, and after starting working as a programmer more than ten years ago I took tentative steps towards this. On and off throughout the years I've accumulated scattered notebooks with all sorts of notes, bits and bobs of code, and generally I've clarified the idea of that I want to put together.
Now I have a pretty good picture of what the core of the game should be and how it should work, and it's quite unique from what I can gather. But I'm not sure if just the idea, no matter how fleshed out, is enough to get started on crowdfunding, I mean, all I have is a detailed description of the game, features, mechanics, and gameplay examples, most of the game code I wrote was too long ago to be relevant. Work has sapped my will to code outside of the job for a few years now, even though my interest in the field has not changed and I pick up coding when I find something really interesting like my latest attempt was using Spivak's ologs to build a zettelkasten note taking system but after a month's worth of weekends I shelved it, I like writing in notebooks better is what I told myself.
I've recently began picking up on the idea of the game again, mainly because tools like GPT and Midjourney could help with the complexity of such a project, and even though I subscribe to the adage that perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away, and I tried to strip the game to the core, implementing it would still be very challenging.
I can't take a sabbatical to get something working in a year or so, I work on Eastern European programmer's salary, not rockstar unicorn, and I've got mortgages.
So I'm thinking crowdfunding, but only having what is basically the idea, and also being literally nobody (my github is in clinical death, and my "greatest" achievement was publishing an Android game while learning Python some nine years ago) I feel like I need another perspective on this. I thought about asking this on Reddit but over the years I've developed quite the anxiety about putting myself online, I don't know what about Scott's community puts me at ease enough, I guess the individual familiarity developed over years of lurking, so here I am.
I see the crowdfunding options as either the Kickstarter model or the Patreon one and I'm not sure which one would be best suited, or even which specific service, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
ps: I don't mind discussing the game, I omitted it since this is already too long and it's too much self promoting
I can see obvious reasons you'd ban an athlete from betting that their team would lose, but why do we ban athletes from betting that they're going to win?
You acquire a tool capable of destroying multiple existing industries overnight by drastically improving human well-being within a domain. People in those industries will regard you poorly since you essentially destroyed their livelihood. Do you share your findings with the world regardless? From your perspective, the net good this tool can accomplish outweighs the downsides. What considerations and accomodations should be taken for those negatively affected by the release of this tool?
Everything seems so... confusing, in the realm of AI and the dangers it presents to humanity, to say the least. I wonder what’s the best way for one to start learning about main underlying aspects of this journey? Where to start ? Dos and don’ts... ? Tips and tricks. Thank you all for your great insights and supportive approach. Have a wonderful week ahead. A
The last time I posted a terribly unscientific survey in here, I quoted your answers a lot in my Bachelor thesis on emotions. This time I'm just hoping to add a footnote to a presentation in a class, so please, if you have a couple of minutes (2-10, depending on your answers), could you fill out the following survey? (It's not market research or such crap)
Anyone else interested in aquaculture here? Im doing my PhD in regional studies focusing on technological innovation in salmon farming. Do reach out if you are working on anything interesting
Is there a way to develop anti-autonomous hardware or software to prevent AI from becoming autonomous?
Can we develop a set of ANI's (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) coupled with a executive ANI to to act as an adversary to the powerful AGI?
Also, the Launching Lightspeed Grants (Apply by July 6th) seems like a great idea.
What's the argument against AI Alignment for superintelligence being in-principle impossible?
Maybe we can align it so that there is 99.999% chance it won't become misaligned, but it seems impossible for alignment to be 100%. Over a long enough timeline, misalignment will always happen. So, if this is true then what is the acceptable level of misalignment risk? 99.99999999999% or 1e-100%?
What is the most powerful technology being developed or will be developed in the next 100 years that isn't an existential risk?
Ideas:
Also, we could develop specialized hardware made of osmium, rhodium, iridium, and maybe astatine to stop an AGI from trying to copy its software onto other substrates. A Substrate-speciifc AGI architecture.
Another idea is iteratively making newer architectures more interpretable according to some kind of interpretability standard. Each algorithmic advancement make architechtures more interpretable.
So with all the AI concern at the moment I've been experimenting with Bing Chat.
Honestly it kind of freaked me out. In fairness it was in creative mode, but still, it lied to me and claimed it could "watch" an online short film before summarising its plot (I picked that because it's a fairly random film I was involved with personally, but I know is online, but I thought it was very unlikely it would know much about it).
It said it would take a "few minutes" to process it. When I tried to check in early (after 5 mins) it said it was "still processing".
Eventually, after 10-15 mins, it "summarised" the film. It had clearly made the story up based on the short synopsis I know it had already found. Even when I told it it was completely wrong, it made up an elaborate reason it had confused specific plot points which made no sense. I'm 99.999% sure it didn't actually find and process the film and simply misunderstand it, based on its synopsis (and I'm not sure Bing can process audio/visual content anyway? Which was why I was experimenting anyway incidentally, through another interaction it had claimed it could so I was testing it).
The thing that bothers me the most is making me wait 10 minutes, and sticking to that. It refused to answer early. The only way to have done that was to set some sort of timer and check against it. That's pretty psychologically manipulative right?
Yes I know you can't anthropomorphise it or hold it to human moral standards. It's what it's capable of that bothers me. How you get to that level of manipulation from feeding data into a loss function is kind of beyond me.
(Apologies if this is somewhat long and rambling, but I'm trying to express a lot of emotions and reactions at once).
I have a general question (for Americans mainly, though anyone else can respond) about a few aspects of American culture. The context is that I am Australian and for the most part I, like many Australians, consider myself *basically* American in most cultural ways. You know, our movies and TV are mostly American, most English online discussion is American, and our general values are (I think) almost the same. So, for me at least, America seems "normal", just like here except for a handful of different words and spellings and some different laws.
And except for a few cultural practices that I find downright bizzare, like some alien culture with incomprehensible pagan rituals or something. There are a few of these, but I'll restrict it to 3 for now. It's hard to specify exactly what question I'm asking, but generally it's something like "can anyone explain these and how they make sense?" Or to operationalise more specifically: can any Americans explain (1) what it's like to live with these social practices and how you accept or perceive them as normal when on the surface they seem so weird (2) how these practices fit seemlessly into a modern individualistic society when they (at least the first two) seem in tension with it (3) some examples of other similar cultural practices that are common in Australia, that I can map these onto.
Think of this as an exercise in some sort of comparative anthropology or something.
The first is tipping. I don't understand this at all. It basically doesn't exist here, except as something a very small number of people do. It seems in tension with the whole idea of capitalism which I thought America was the ideal of. Prices (as the basis of an efficient economy) set by the market, rational self-interest, the rule of law--oh and there are strong informal social norms requiring vaguely specified charity to be added to every transaction of a certain type. What? I've seen it described as "expected" in America. Is it really expected or is that misleading? What happens if you don't tip? How do you know who you're expected to tip and who you're not? Do you tip a pizza delivery guy? A taxi driver? A plumber or electrician? Or is it only waiters and waitesses? What if all the waiter does is hand you a coffee, do you still have to tip him? What if you go regularly to a place and you hate the waiter there, he's awful, do you tip him anyway because otherwise he might deliberately give you bad food or service? So it's like socially legitimised protection money? I can't comprehend any of this!
The second is college fraternities (and sororities, and whatever other equivalents there are, and if there are non-college versions, those too). I can barely believe these really exist but apparently they do. Why do they exist? What purpose do they serve? How are they tolerated (with their collective obedience, and their secret knowledge, and their hazing, and their mystical pagan rituals) in an otherwise free and rational society, let alone at the centres of (supposedly) rational learning? America is often described as a particularly Christian western country, and how does that co-exist with widely accepted, elite institutions with literally pagan practices (based on Greek mysteries apparently)? I'd seen them referenced in movies and thought little of them but one day I looked them up on wikipedia and felt like I was reading about a bizzare ancient civilisation. I remember seeing a critic of George W Bush say he was in a secret society called the Skull and Bones Society, and I dismissed it as an insane conspiracy theory, before later discovering that it really exists, Bush really was part of it, and IT REALLY IS CALLED THE SKULL AND BONES SOCIETY! I want someone to tell me this is all a giant media hoax because the alternative is accepting that the world's most powerful country, supposedly built on Christian and Enlightenment ideals, is largely run by people who have made sacred oaths to organisations with secret handshakes, blood sacrifices, and magical incantations. Wtf?
The third is less bizarre than the other two, but it's what we call "big-noting" yourself: talking up how awesome you are. Supposedly this is socially accepted in America. Really? Doesn't America have any concept of modesty as a virtue? I suppose some of this is an unavoidable result of a presidential system: candidates have to say "I am the best person to lead the country, I am smart and strong and moral" without the luxury of the modesty-preserving deflection "I am part of a team, don't praise me praise my colleagues etc". But can people really say "I aced that exam/match/audition/interview, I did this, I achieved that, I'm awesome" without people responding "wow, you're an obnoxious bastard who needs to learn some damn politeness and humility"? This isn't in tension with an individualistic society but certainly seems in tension with a Christian one.
P.S. Part of what's motivating this question is a general anxiety in Australia about where we really belong, who we should be aligned with, with the three main options being Britain/Europe, America, and the Asia-Pacific region. For the most part, my position is firmly "America", with the issues raised here being what's standing in the way of fully embracing that.
P.P.S. Just in case it isn't clear, by "America" I mean the United States, and possibly Canada if the things I mentioned apply there as well.
Does anyone know ALL of ChatGPT? I doubt it. I suspect it is highly hacked together over time, like any large software. In other words, no **one** person knows ChatGPT.
You all ready to talk about the vaccines yet? Last time I was here I was told that skipping the shot(s) was irrational because the effects of COVID would be worse than any potential side-effects.
LW/ACX Saturday (6/17/23) Effective Woo and the Insignificance of Statistics
Hello Folks!
We are excited to announce the 30th Orange County ACX/LW meetup, happening this Saturday and most Saturdays thereafter.
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2023
Time: 2 PM
Conversation Starters:
Text: Are Woo Non-Responders Defective? - by Scott Alexander Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Are_Woo_Non-Responders_Defective.mp3?dest-id=586545
Text: All Medications Are Insignificant In The Eyes Of God And Traditional Effect Size Criteria Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Are_Woo_Non-Responders_Defective.mp3?dest-id=586545
Follow Up: Attempts To Put Statistics In Context, Put Into Context Audio: https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sscpodcast/Attempts_To_Put_Statistics_In_Context_Put_Into_Context.mp3?dest-id=586545
C) Card Game: Predictably Irrational - Feel free to bring your favorite games or distractions.
D) Walk & Talk: We usually have an hour-long walk and talk after the meeting starts. Two mini-malls with hot takeout food are easily accessible nearby. Search for Gelson's or Pavilions in the zip code 92660.
E) Share a Surprise: Tell the group about something unexpected or that changed your perspective on the universe.
F) Future Direction Ideas: Contribute ideas for the group's future direction, including topics, meeting types, activities, etc.
Just thought to drop this somewhere public in case this something anyone cares about, but since substack displays archived post in a somewhat circuitous way I made a collection of ACX posts in chronological order a little while back: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/astral-codex-ten-posts-in-chronological
I haven't bothered to update it since posting yet and Scott turned on the Previous/Next post buttons shortly after I posted it so it kinda lost some utility but there ya go.
From CNN: "42% of CEOs say AI could destroy humanity in five to ten years"
"Sonnenfeld said the survey included responses from 119 CEOs from a cross-section of business, including Walmart CEO Doug McMillion, Coca-Cola CEO James Quincy, the leaders of IT companies like Xerox and Zoom as well as CEOs from pharmaceutical, media and manufacturing."
Looks like there is a "fire alarm for AI" after all. Of course, no "orderly exit from the building" is forthcoming even so, but it's been amusing to observe the progression of this meme from wacky obscure contrarian forums to the top of mainstream.
This is a total throwback to a discussion in an earlier open thread about penis stealing. I’ve been pondering it. I am convinced what they really meant was not that that their organs disappeared from between their legs, but that they were suddenly unable to have an erection which is effectively stealing your penis also makes a lot more sense
Hey everyone, there was a website I've seen a few people mention here that I've lost URL to. It's all about health conditions and how to address them in layman's terms. This is a very vague description, but I think it was ran by someone in the rational adjacent community. It is not WebMD or any of the websites that show up when you google anything health related. If anyone knows what I'm talking about, thank you in advance.
Hi! Thanks everyone who responded to my questions about marriage! Now that I think I have a framework for solving that, I am wondering how to systematically attack depression.
I kind of feel like I am dreaming all the time even though I’m awake, and I cannot conceptualize that the future will be better than the present, nor formulate a desire and enact it. It is sort of like my entire mind is just TV static and sometimes I drop into some kind of catatonia where my body refuses to move at all or I go very numb while driving and straddle for several seconds before my limbic system half-heartedly decides that because I would probably survive a crash at 25 miles per hour I should probably drive in the lane. What does it mean that there is no oversight over the universe and everyone’s suffering is totally arbitrary and basically unbounded? What do you do if you do not think there is intelligent design beyond optimization algorithms and non-existence is your most preferred state?
How does this usually get solved? What does it mean to have a positive outlook on your own future and how do you acquire this? I think the Richard Dawkins atheists have some kind of answer to this, but it requires you to espouse their value system which is not really possible after you think about the implications of the science they’re talking about for five minutes. I think a better mode of relation is possible, but those people are deluded, and I am wondering if anyone who’s followed their road of insight past the depression has a nicer system. I think Joscha Bach has some ideas about this but he doesn’t seemed to have totally solved the depression bit. I think Sarah Perry solved this by quitting carbs.
My partner wants to start a new career. She's currently a lecturer + atmospheric modeller at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her education is all in physical geography, though she's published on bayesian modelling so obviously numerate. She can code but she doesn't want to be a full-time coder, though some coding would be fine.
What industry needs enough people like this that they'd consider hiring someone with her background? What terms should she use in a search?
Okay, I know it's the "Daily Mail" but bear with me, this one is too good to pass up.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12189773/Pentagon-whistleblower-says-Vatican-aware-existence-non-human-intelligences.html
"A Pentagon whistleblower has claimed the Vatican is aware of the existence of non-human intelligences and helped the US retrieve a downed UFO from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini at the end of the Second World War.
David Grusch, 36, served 14 years in the Air Force and is a decorated Afghanistan combat officer who worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
His role was to act as the NRO's representative when dealing with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. The task force was specifically set up to investigate UFOs.
He has spoken out to say the US has run a top secret UFO retrieval program for decades and claimed the 'Vatican was involved' in the first ever UFO crash.
Grusch said the first recovery of a UFO was in Magenta, Italy in 1933 and it was held by Mussolini's Italian government until 1944-1945 when Pope Pius XII tipped America off about it."
Yes! It wouldn't be a world-spanning decades-long conspiracy without us Papists getting involved, now would it? 😁
I have no idea if this is the same UFO guy who was recently in the news but the levels are getting too confusing for me: are we on truth-disinformation-counter-truth-deliberate distraction-UFOs are real-that's what the Deep State wants you to think Level 99 now or what?
EDIT: Oh, I love this bit:
"Dailymail.com has contacted the Vatican for comment. "
I wonder what unfortunate son-of-a-gun in which Dicastery is going to have *that* one slung across the desk? 😁
Max Miller has another fun history/cooking episode up:
The 1853 Dinner In A Dinosaur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zphAG_iBWR0
Thanks Melvin. Will check it out.
There are running shoes with some cushioning, some with lots of cushioning, and some with none at all (e.g. barefoot shoes, sandals). Does anyone know of any good scientific evidence that any of these different types of shoes are effective at preventing injury in runners?
Podcast about AI (note: I have not listened to this so I don't know if it's good, bad or indifferent):
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/podcast/2023/06/trusting-ai-not-to-lie-lock-and-code-s04e12
"Trusting AI not to lie: The cost of truth
In May, a lawyer who was defending their client in a lawsuit against Columbia's biggest airline, Avianca, submitted a legal filing before a court in Manhattan, New York, that listed several previous cases as support for their main argument to continue the lawsuit.
But when the court reviewed the lawyer's citations, it found something curious: Several were entirely fabricated.
The lawyer in question had gotten the help of another attorney who, in scrounging around for legal precedent to cite, utilized the "services" of ChatGPT.
ChatGPT was wrong. So why do so many people believe it's always right?
Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Malwarebytes security evangelist Mark Stockley and Malwarebytes Labs editor-in-chief Anna Brading to discuss the potential consequences of companies and individuals embracing natural language processing tools—like ChatGPT and Google's Bard—as arbiters of truth. Far from being understood simply as chatbots that can produce remarkable mimicries of human speech and dialogue, these tools are becoming sources of truth for countless individuals, while also gaining attraction amongst companies that see artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) as the future, no matter what industry they operate in.
The future could look eerily similar to an earlier change in translation services, said Stockley, who witnessed the rapid displacement of human workers in favor of basic AI tools. The tools were far, far cheaper, but the quality of the translations—of the truth, Stockley said—was worse.
"That is an example of exactly this technology coming in and being treated as the arbiter of truth in the sense that there is a cost to how much truth we want."
Hiring opportunity from the Alignment Research Center --
ARC is hiring theoretical researchers:
"ARC is based in Berkeley, California, and we would prefer people who can work full-time from our office, but we are open to discussing remote or part-time arrangements in some circumstances. We can sponsor visas and are H-1B cap-exempt."
"...we have more of a need for people with a strong theoretical background (in math, physics or computer science, for example), but we remain open to anyone who is excited about getting involved in AI alignment, even if they do not have an existing research record.""
"Our current interview process involves:
3-hour take-home test involving math and computer science puzzles
30-minute non-technical phone call
1-day onsite interview
We will compensate candidates for their time when this is logistically possible.
We will keep applications open until at least the end of August 2023, and will aim to get a final decision back within 6 weeks of receiving an application."
"Salaries are in the $150k–400k range for most people depending on experience."
Anyone have any beliefs which they know are ill-founded and irrational but are tempted or half inclined to accept all the same? With me it is a feeling that the more skint I feel the more likely I am to win the lottery with the weekly fiver I spend on it. I know it is an absurd idea, and common sense and experience says it is nonsense, but there we are.
I'm not a gambler, besides a small amount spent on the lottery. But sometimes I wonder if chronic gamblers aren't driven at least in part by the same irrational belief that as their funds decrease their chances of a win rise, in some form of natural justice, even though each bet has no causal relation to the bettor's remaining funds, if any, nor any "memory" of previous bets (except maybe in some card games where a pack of cards is dwindling).
I get to visit Berkeley this month. Anything there you think would be especially interesting to an average ACX reader, like meetups or something? I'm mainly interested in computer/tech stuff. Also I'm a foreigner so it doesn't have to be unique to Berkeley, stuff that are considered generic in US are fine as well.
TIL about the Bielefield conspiracy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielefeld_conspiracy) - a German internet meme about a German city not existing. You ask someone if they've ever been there or knows anyone who has, and if they say "yes", then clearly they're in on the conspiracy (or were duped themselves), and if they say "no", well... QED.
The town 'resolved' this in 2019 by offering a million Euro bounty for proof of its non-existence then when nobody claimed the bounty, they decided that since there's No Evidence for their non-existence, they must exist after all. (And then they dropped a rock with a QR code into the park to commemorate it)
... I can't tell if all those logical fallacies cancel out into good logic or not.
I am wondering if there is something like an anti- placebo effect. If you are extremely pessimistic about recovering, you may not feel any improvements to your health even though the medicines are working. Clinical trials account for placebo effects but there is no way to account for the reverse
Also has there been any research on placebo effects like are there a small set of people who are more prone to placebo effects irrespective of disease, are highly optimistic.
I'm very interested in doing the digital nomad thing, but I'm concerned about finding an online job because my skills may be difficult to convey to an employer, and I feel there are a lot of people to compete with who also want these limited online jobs. I have a tested IQ of roughly 150 and I have been paid, respectively, something like 30 an hour to write and between 10-100 an hour to paint. I'm in something like the umpteenth percentile of creative output and skill in multiple domains, but all those markets are contracting with AI and they're not reliable enough to give me peace of mind long-term. They're more like windfalls. I have most of a generic business degree completed now, which inclines me also toward the middle-income HR type fields where layoffs are happening in online roles.
My questions are A) does anyone have experience with a similar situation, or just digital nomadism broadly (I'd love to hear your thoughts even if you don't,) and B) does anybody want to hire a digital assistant who can write you a novel and paint your portrait, lol. Maybe C) should I just drop everything and do a coding bootcamp. I have the cash.
You Are a Computer, and No, That’s Not a Metaphor
https://sigil.substack.com/p/you-are-a-computer-and-no-thats-not
Down below an Australian is wondering about the tipping culture in the US. It’s a perennial theme on regional Reddit to bemoan the export of this part of American culture. It’s not something that worries me about American cultural dominance.
What does is the export of American racial politics. This is from the guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jun/12/bridgerton-queen-charlotte-race-black-fantasies-king-george
The guy is obviously American and has a relatively good point about Brigerton. The problem is his defense of the black cleopatra in Netflix. Money quote (as Americans say).
“but this supposed “blackwashing” was too much for some – and not just the usual suspects. Egypt’s antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, complained: “This is completely fake. Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black.” One Egyptian lawyer even sought legal action to block Netflix in the country for its promotion of “Afrocentric thinking”.
“Cleopatra’s precise pigmentation is up for debate: she was descended from the Greek-Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty. But, the show’s makers argue, the dynasty may have intermarried with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years, at a time when no one was classified as “black” or “white” anyway. “Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister?” asked Tina Gharavi, the show’s director. “And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter.”
Not only is the American writer here ignoring the present day Egyptian minister but ignoring him based on American ideologies, while claiming the opposite. It’s the Americans who are imposing the idea of whiteness. On Egyptians.
To begin with Cleopatra’s lineage didn’t “ intermarry with local Egyptians over the preceding 250 years”, this isn’t common for conquering aristocrats in general and this dynasty was particularly inbred. I imagine the author is arguing in bad faith here, as he probably knows that.
Now. look at what the Egyptian minister said
“Cleopatra was Greek, meaning that she was light-skinned, not black”
And what the director accuses him and Egyptians of saying
“And why do some people [Egyptians] need Cleopatra to be white?”
The Egyptian minister says “light skinned” and the American says white. So not only do the Americans here believe they can impose their version of history other societies, they are blind to the contextual differences of who is white or not. It’s a term with limited currency even in Europe, where primarily identity is ethnic not based on skin colour.
I'm a lover of classical music and I sometimes get into discussions with people over whether we can "separate art from the artist" in cases where the art is beautiful but the artist is problematic for some reason (ex. Wagner was an anti-semite, Picasso a womanizer, etc). The question may be better phrased as "to what extent does the moral responsibility of the individual require consideration of the artist's personal character when choosing to engage with their art?"
I started drafting some hypothetical scenarios to help me sort out my own thinking on this. Here are a few of them:
Scenario 1 - The Private Discovery
Theo discovers an old vinyl record in his grandfather’s attic among items brought back from WWII. The record contains a symphony composed by Hitler. Overcome by curiosity, Theo plays the record and is profoundly moved by the beauty of the music. He occasionally listens to the symphony privately, each time finding it as impactful as the first.
Scenario 2a - The Public Performance
Theo, a renowned conductor, decides to perform Hitler’s Symphony publicly. He believes the performance will do more good than harm. He does not disclose the composer's identity, hoping the music can be appreciated independently. The performance is well-received, but when the truth about the composer is revealed, controversy ensues.
Scenario 2b - The Informed Listener
Samantha, a devoted concert-goer and friend of Theo, decides to attend the concert with full knowledge of the symphony's unsettling origins, but decides to focus on the music. She is deeply moved by the symphony's beauty and decides that she would probably attend future concerts where that piece was being performed.
Scenario 3 - The Living Artist
Theo encounters the work of a living artist who, despite making racist comments, creates beautiful, thought-provoking music. Theo is moved by the music and decides to include one of the artist's compositions in his concert repertoire. This choice directly supports the artist financially and boosts their reputation.
Scenario 4 - The Posthumous Revelation
Theo has always admired a famous composer whose work promotes peace and unity. After the composer's death, it is revealed that he led a secret life filled with various horrid deeds. Theo, who has conducted the composer's works many times, continues to appreciate and perform them, believing the works' messages aren't invalidated by the composer's personal life.
In which of these scenarios, if any, has the character acted unethically? Why?
Ted Kaczynski is dead, and there is a lot to unpack here.
> the Shakespearean tragedy of the brother. <https://news.yahoo.com/for-the-love-of-a-brother-001635118.html>
> how can an idea be guilty of guilt-by-association, and when does that guilt expire?
> and the manifesto itself: how much technology is too much.
Can high-functioning autistics get married? Are their marriages usually bad? Should they avoid marriage?
I have high-functioning autism, and am graduating high school next year, and I am trying to verify marriability. (I asked a similar question last week, thanks to everyone who gave advice! I am using it now!) I think I have mild to major depressive symptoms when I realize I might not get married, and also because I have a very obsessive personality (which I think people find unnerving). I once became deeply obsessed with this other girl this one time (she was probably on the spectrum too), and realized that this is basically a function of my mind that really doesn't care about the input and can be exploited with attention. I think I could fall in love with a rock or a tree with practice (but why on earth would that be a good idea?). It seems like a good idea to get married to a human woman. I also realized that my motivational system assigns this huge weight to getting married/being in a romantic relationship, and I keep thinking about that girl all the time even though she hasn't spoken to me in a year and I have no idea how to stop this. How do people usually stop this?
Wouldn't it make sense for China to drop/resolve its border dispute with India, and instead team up with India on a vague anti-Western alliance? I think from a purely strategic point of view, China probably jumped the gun a bit in starting territorial disputes with literally every single one of their neighbors- maybe not the sagest strategy. India is still not really an ally of the West or America, and China and India have both been pushing their membership in the 'BRICS' alliance or grouping thingy. Modi, to my knowledge, has not been very loudly anti-China (I think mostly because he doesn't want to lose a humiliating border war). They have mutual concerns about American sanctions, dollarization, and general Western pushiness, and being anti-colonial seems like a very strong common grievance. Also, being anti-colonial, anti-America and anti-the West in general seems like a strong unifying theme for a lot of other developing countries in Latin America, Africa and ex-Soviet countries- so they could lead an anti-Western bloc.
Strategically, shouldn't China bury the hatchet with India, and pivot to a friendly anti-Western relationship that incorporates Russia, Brazil, and other developing countries? Maybe it wouldn't last forever, but just from a pure IR strategy perspective it seems better than, like, border skirmishes with melee weapons over irrelevant territory. I don't want this to happen at all, but if I were China or India this would seem to be a pretty smart move?
Curious if anyone has any updated thoughts on Net Neutrality. Now that's it's been several years since it was "the thing" on the internet for a bit.
My understanding is that it is mostly unprotected and also mostly unviolated. How true are those two things? If they are true, does that mean that, while an important principle, it's one that mostly doesn't need explicit protection? Or is it actually being violated and I didn't even notice? Or is it actually more protected than I thought?
Is there any lesson we should learn from the difference between the _extremely_ strong claims that were made at the time vs. the relatively boring reality of how things turned out?
I've heard that wildfires in North America are increasing in number. This is always blamed on global warming, but to what extent might it owe to growth in the human population?
Every time a human visits an area of the wilderness, there's some small chance they will start a wildfire, usually by mistake but sometimes in a deliberate act of arson. The person might flick a lit cigarette butt into the grass, fail to fully put out a campfire, or have some problem with their car that spreads fire to dry vegetation nearby.
As the populations of humans in North America increase, it stands to reason that the number of humans visiting wilderness areas will also. Statistically speaking, this also means the number of wildfires will rise.
Ross Douthat is cracking me up today in a panel discussion of the Trump candidacy:
“What matters most about him as a presidential candidate?”
“That his second term was foretold in the Necronomicon, written in eldritch script on the Mountains of Madness and carved deep, deep into the white stones of the Plateau of Leng.”
It’s paywalled of course but if you haven’t used up your five free articles for the month it worth a look, for the laughs if nothing else.
Anyone here tried http://bewelltuned.com/ ? Was it helpful? Any place where I can see more commentary/discussion on it, or just learn about the people behind it?
A question that's been popping into my head lately: is AI going to break the internet?
I have in mind a future where:
- every online discussion gets overrun with convincing AI bots that crowd out real human participants
- email spam filters get overrun by ever-more sophisticated AI, including AI that mimics real human correspondents, like specific people the email account holder knows
- social media accounts come to be seen as mere fodder for AI voice and video mimicry used for scams, and people increasingly try to minimize their online presence
- corporate and government tech security proves to be no match for AI, and systems of all kinds are increasingly taken offline altogether
In my most starry-eyed utopian moods, I imagine a future where the internet is just abandoned altogether and people return to living in the real world, more or less sequestered from an internet that devolves into an AI ghetto, a sort of "Disneyland with no children," to borrow Bostrom's phrase, except very stupid and inane.
The average person seems to associate justice with equality, at least relative to my own sense of justice. Equality, beyond the baseline required to live a dignified life, seems irrational. Why might that be?
People don’t seem to think it’s unfair that some sports teams win again and again, while others haven’t had a title in 100 years. Or that a player might be benched the entire season. Or that Messi is soccer’s GOAT and is disproportionately remunerated for it. Society doesn’t seem to care that there isn’t a female Messi. Or that basketball “discriminates“ against short people. Or that most sports exclude the obese. Most of this seems tolerated because it’s rational. If the objective is to win, you will build the best team and pay what you need to pay, and do what you need to do to win.
Yet, when a team of people build a company, we have different expectations. Companies can’t just want to win. They must do good things for society outside of their core competency, like become carbon neutral or improve diversity. Employees inside companies shan’t be treated as super stars or be “benched”. Everyone has to be made feel they have a more or less equal chance of making it to the top. If a given demographic predominantly represents required skillset, companies are expected to fight the distribution and scout outside of the obvious places. People who work for high paying companies/industries are perceived as an undeserving and often low morality elite.
It seems more people understand intuitively that they can never be Michael Jordan. But it’s harder to appreciate why we didn’t get to become Beyoncé or Bill Gates. Maybe people think that if they just were in the right place at the right time, they could be almost anyone, unless of course being someone requires certain genetics; with the exception of intelligence, personality, and other more ambiguous traits.
I genuinely think we would all be happier if we accepted a lot more things in life work like professional sports, even if we hide it behind a veil of equality. It just seems like a collective delusion that leads to cognitive dissonance when we are confronted every day with a reality that doesn’t follow.
Hey everyone, I wrote this piece called "The Future is Happening to Me" about, what else, AI. But specifically it focuses a bit more on current, pre-AGI, generative paradigms and how even they may pose challenges to our communities and conceptualizations of self. I'm curious what others think, and I'd welcome any comments/criticisms.
https://open.substack.com/pub/whogetswhatgetswhy/p/the-future-is-happening-to-me?r=1z8jyn&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Anybody know Houston? I'll be there this week and want to see neighborhoods/ towns that are good examples/ results of the region's (lack of) housing regulation and zoning. All ideas welcome. Thanks!
This is the weirdest most specific question I've ever asked here. I ordered some freeze-dried chicken bits as treats for my cats. They are dry, odorless little chunks, but on the package it says that after you feed them to your cats you should "wash you hands, the cat dish, the utensils you used and the counter with hot, soapy water." Apparently these things are freeze dried raw, and handling them is basically handling raw chicken, which is actually something I never do because raw meat grosses me out, and raw chicken is both gross and additionally really does carry a risk. I'm not worried about the treats hurting the cats, I'm worried about them making me sick. I'm inclined to just throw them out. Is that reasonable, or is there some reason to be less concerned than I am?
So Reddit is in protest today because the company increased the cost of the API to third party app developers. In particular the third party app Apollo is being hit by very large and economically disastrous fee increases, and have decided to close down.
The protest involves the different sub reddits being temporarily silent - mostly they have been made private by their moderators. It’s a two day protest for most, but some sub Reddits have decided to go silent for good.
It will be interesting to see how the latter will work out. To my mind, even if the admins - employees of Reddit - don’t open up the closed subs then somebody will eventually create a new one on the same theme. I really don’t see the point of that strategy - in any negotiation you should keep the most powerful threat you have until you have tried other strategies, like the two day stoppage to begin with, if that is even allowed.
To be fair they all voted on it, in the respective subs. The full shutdown seems fairly extreme and unworkable to me.
People in favour of UBI: why do you think that UBI is better than just a high indefinite unemployment benefit?
By Terence Tao
"Big breakthrough in Ramsey theory by Sam Mattheus and Jacques Verstraete: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04007
The have proved an 80 year old conjecture of Erdos on the asymptotic behaviour of the Ramsey number r(4, t). Finite geometry plays a crucial role in their work and it diverges significantly from the purely probabilistic attempts so far. Here is my blog post on their construction: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04007"
I would like some advice on which crowdfunding platform would best suit me, and if any at all.
For quite a long time since discovering Civilization I've wanted to make my on strategy game, and after starting working as a programmer more than ten years ago I took tentative steps towards this. On and off throughout the years I've accumulated scattered notebooks with all sorts of notes, bits and bobs of code, and generally I've clarified the idea of that I want to put together.
Now I have a pretty good picture of what the core of the game should be and how it should work, and it's quite unique from what I can gather. But I'm not sure if just the idea, no matter how fleshed out, is enough to get started on crowdfunding, I mean, all I have is a detailed description of the game, features, mechanics, and gameplay examples, most of the game code I wrote was too long ago to be relevant. Work has sapped my will to code outside of the job for a few years now, even though my interest in the field has not changed and I pick up coding when I find something really interesting like my latest attempt was using Spivak's ologs to build a zettelkasten note taking system but after a month's worth of weekends I shelved it, I like writing in notebooks better is what I told myself.
I've recently began picking up on the idea of the game again, mainly because tools like GPT and Midjourney could help with the complexity of such a project, and even though I subscribe to the adage that perfection is achieved when there is nothing left to take away, and I tried to strip the game to the core, implementing it would still be very challenging.
I can't take a sabbatical to get something working in a year or so, I work on Eastern European programmer's salary, not rockstar unicorn, and I've got mortgages.
So I'm thinking crowdfunding, but only having what is basically the idea, and also being literally nobody (my github is in clinical death, and my "greatest" achievement was publishing an Android game while learning Python some nine years ago) I feel like I need another perspective on this. I thought about asking this on Reddit but over the years I've developed quite the anxiety about putting myself online, I don't know what about Scott's community puts me at ease enough, I guess the individual familiarity developed over years of lurking, so here I am.
I see the crowdfunding options as either the Kickstarter model or the Patreon one and I'm not sure which one would be best suited, or even which specific service, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.
ps: I don't mind discussing the game, I omitted it since this is already too long and it's too much self promoting
If you, personally had to try writing a chess program that would beat the human world champion, how would you go about it?
Restrictions:
- you're allowed to spend a normal amount on hardware and stuff (say about $2000).
- no using existing chess programs or libraries (so no sending API calls to stockfish)
- you are allowed to use other resources (e.g. human-readable chess books or pytorch).
I can see obvious reasons you'd ban an athlete from betting that their team would lose, but why do we ban athletes from betting that they're going to win?
You acquire a tool capable of destroying multiple existing industries overnight by drastically improving human well-being within a domain. People in those industries will regard you poorly since you essentially destroyed their livelihood. Do you share your findings with the world regardless? From your perspective, the net good this tool can accomplish outweighs the downsides. What considerations and accomodations should be taken for those negatively affected by the release of this tool?
Boo
Everything seems so... confusing, in the realm of AI and the dangers it presents to humanity, to say the least. I wonder what’s the best way for one to start learning about main underlying aspects of this journey? Where to start ? Dos and don’ts... ? Tips and tricks. Thank you all for your great insights and supportive approach. Have a wonderful week ahead. A
The last time I posted a terribly unscientific survey in here, I quoted your answers a lot in my Bachelor thesis on emotions. This time I'm just hoping to add a footnote to a presentation in a class, so please, if you have a couple of minutes (2-10, depending on your answers), could you fill out the following survey? (It's not market research or such crap)
https://forms.gle/Wh9i6hVQxRVBfsd36
I will explain in a week (as a reply to myself here), and summarize my findings (maybe a bit later).
Anyone else interested in aquaculture here? Im doing my PhD in regional studies focusing on technological innovation in salmon farming. Do reach out if you are working on anything interesting
Is there a way to develop anti-autonomous hardware or software to prevent AI from becoming autonomous?
Can we develop a set of ANI's (Artificial Narrow Intelligence) coupled with a executive ANI to to act as an adversary to the powerful AGI?
Also, the Launching Lightspeed Grants (Apply by July 6th) seems like a great idea.
What's the argument against AI Alignment for superintelligence being in-principle impossible?
Maybe we can align it so that there is 99.999% chance it won't become misaligned, but it seems impossible for alignment to be 100%. Over a long enough timeline, misalignment will always happen. So, if this is true then what is the acceptable level of misalignment risk? 99.99999999999% or 1e-100%?
What is the most powerful technology being developed or will be developed in the next 100 years that isn't an existential risk?
Ideas:
Also, we could develop specialized hardware made of osmium, rhodium, iridium, and maybe astatine to stop an AGI from trying to copy its software onto other substrates. A Substrate-speciifc AGI architecture.
Another idea is iteratively making newer architectures more interpretable according to some kind of interpretability standard. Each algorithmic advancement make architechtures more interpretable.
So with all the AI concern at the moment I've been experimenting with Bing Chat.
Honestly it kind of freaked me out. In fairness it was in creative mode, but still, it lied to me and claimed it could "watch" an online short film before summarising its plot (I picked that because it's a fairly random film I was involved with personally, but I know is online, but I thought it was very unlikely it would know much about it).
It said it would take a "few minutes" to process it. When I tried to check in early (after 5 mins) it said it was "still processing".
Eventually, after 10-15 mins, it "summarised" the film. It had clearly made the story up based on the short synopsis I know it had already found. Even when I told it it was completely wrong, it made up an elaborate reason it had confused specific plot points which made no sense. I'm 99.999% sure it didn't actually find and process the film and simply misunderstand it, based on its synopsis (and I'm not sure Bing can process audio/visual content anyway? Which was why I was experimenting anyway incidentally, through another interaction it had claimed it could so I was testing it).
The thing that bothers me the most is making me wait 10 minutes, and sticking to that. It refused to answer early. The only way to have done that was to set some sort of timer and check against it. That's pretty psychologically manipulative right?
Yes I know you can't anthropomorphise it or hold it to human moral standards. It's what it's capable of that bothers me. How you get to that level of manipulation from feeding data into a loss function is kind of beyond me.
(Apologies if this is somewhat long and rambling, but I'm trying to express a lot of emotions and reactions at once).
I have a general question (for Americans mainly, though anyone else can respond) about a few aspects of American culture. The context is that I am Australian and for the most part I, like many Australians, consider myself *basically* American in most cultural ways. You know, our movies and TV are mostly American, most English online discussion is American, and our general values are (I think) almost the same. So, for me at least, America seems "normal", just like here except for a handful of different words and spellings and some different laws.
And except for a few cultural practices that I find downright bizzare, like some alien culture with incomprehensible pagan rituals or something. There are a few of these, but I'll restrict it to 3 for now. It's hard to specify exactly what question I'm asking, but generally it's something like "can anyone explain these and how they make sense?" Or to operationalise more specifically: can any Americans explain (1) what it's like to live with these social practices and how you accept or perceive them as normal when on the surface they seem so weird (2) how these practices fit seemlessly into a modern individualistic society when they (at least the first two) seem in tension with it (3) some examples of other similar cultural practices that are common in Australia, that I can map these onto.
Think of this as an exercise in some sort of comparative anthropology or something.
The first is tipping. I don't understand this at all. It basically doesn't exist here, except as something a very small number of people do. It seems in tension with the whole idea of capitalism which I thought America was the ideal of. Prices (as the basis of an efficient economy) set by the market, rational self-interest, the rule of law--oh and there are strong informal social norms requiring vaguely specified charity to be added to every transaction of a certain type. What? I've seen it described as "expected" in America. Is it really expected or is that misleading? What happens if you don't tip? How do you know who you're expected to tip and who you're not? Do you tip a pizza delivery guy? A taxi driver? A plumber or electrician? Or is it only waiters and waitesses? What if all the waiter does is hand you a coffee, do you still have to tip him? What if you go regularly to a place and you hate the waiter there, he's awful, do you tip him anyway because otherwise he might deliberately give you bad food or service? So it's like socially legitimised protection money? I can't comprehend any of this!
The second is college fraternities (and sororities, and whatever other equivalents there are, and if there are non-college versions, those too). I can barely believe these really exist but apparently they do. Why do they exist? What purpose do they serve? How are they tolerated (with their collective obedience, and their secret knowledge, and their hazing, and their mystical pagan rituals) in an otherwise free and rational society, let alone at the centres of (supposedly) rational learning? America is often described as a particularly Christian western country, and how does that co-exist with widely accepted, elite institutions with literally pagan practices (based on Greek mysteries apparently)? I'd seen them referenced in movies and thought little of them but one day I looked them up on wikipedia and felt like I was reading about a bizzare ancient civilisation. I remember seeing a critic of George W Bush say he was in a secret society called the Skull and Bones Society, and I dismissed it as an insane conspiracy theory, before later discovering that it really exists, Bush really was part of it, and IT REALLY IS CALLED THE SKULL AND BONES SOCIETY! I want someone to tell me this is all a giant media hoax because the alternative is accepting that the world's most powerful country, supposedly built on Christian and Enlightenment ideals, is largely run by people who have made sacred oaths to organisations with secret handshakes, blood sacrifices, and magical incantations. Wtf?
The third is less bizarre than the other two, but it's what we call "big-noting" yourself: talking up how awesome you are. Supposedly this is socially accepted in America. Really? Doesn't America have any concept of modesty as a virtue? I suppose some of this is an unavoidable result of a presidential system: candidates have to say "I am the best person to lead the country, I am smart and strong and moral" without the luxury of the modesty-preserving deflection "I am part of a team, don't praise me praise my colleagues etc". But can people really say "I aced that exam/match/audition/interview, I did this, I achieved that, I'm awesome" without people responding "wow, you're an obnoxious bastard who needs to learn some damn politeness and humility"? This isn't in tension with an individualistic society but certainly seems in tension with a Christian one.
P.S. Part of what's motivating this question is a general anxiety in Australia about where we really belong, who we should be aligned with, with the three main options being Britain/Europe, America, and the Asia-Pacific region. For the most part, my position is firmly "America", with the issues raised here being what's standing in the way of fully embracing that.
P.P.S. Just in case it isn't clear, by "America" I mean the United States, and possibly Canada if the things I mentioned apply there as well.
Does anyone know ALL of ChatGPT? I doubt it. I suspect it is highly hacked together over time, like any large software. In other words, no **one** person knows ChatGPT.
What's the craziest Christ myth out there? I wrote one about how he ended up in Japan, but hearing a lot more now too, from India to Egypt