2rafa
4hr ago
I don’t think this was some kind of psychosis and think under existing laws, she should probably go to jail for a very long time and is likely guilty of murder
That said, I think in general that filicide (of young children) is probably a form of murder we should have more nuanced opinions about as a society, though that doesn’t mean it’s not murder and doesn’t mean perpetrators should go free. Perhaps that appears at first too radical. Here’s what I mean:
A century ago, something like this might have been swept under the carpet by the local police and prosecutor, the mother quietly confined to an asylum with her husband’s approval, provided he didn’t want to subject himself and the family to the humiliation of a trial and press frenzy.
There are two purposes of the justice system, vengeance / recourse for victims and protection for wider society.
Clancy’s ex husband clearly forgives her for the murder and has supported her innocence in this trial. He is the only surviving injured party, other than the grandparents of the child, who also seemingly support her. This leaves the second purpose, and the main reason why we lock murderers up. If Clancy is confined to a psychiatric institution she will be no great threat to the outside world, so this does not appear in question.
So why the farce and drama of a trial? To distinguish between two slightly different kinds of prison? For men, psychiatric institutions may be much nicer than high security prisons, but I’m not even sure this is the case for women.
2rafa
4hr ago
Despite both parents now working parents (including mothers) spend far more time with their children than they did a century ago. The countries with lowest TFR like Korea and Singapore have these crazy striver cultures where parents have to devote every second for 25 years to maximizing their child’s performance, which makes parents miserable even as they feel they have no choice but to do it so their kid doesn’t fall behind the next guy’s kid.
I don’t know what the easy solution is. Maybe mass automation means your kid’s prospects don’t really matter. Maybe we just offer free, unlimited 24/7 daycare vouchers. Maybe the Chinese figure out domestic robot nannies and parents of young children can finally sleep through the night.
2rafa
6hr ago
I don’t think all the personal insults were necessary. You have been around here long enough that you have been very, very wrong many, many times. And right sometimes. So have I. The posts are mostly still there. Neither of us have exceptional predictive ability, I am humble enough to admit that. I don’t lecture cab drivers, even when they tell me to buy shitcoins at the peak (or gold, as they did earlier this year).
Here is my summary of the argument so far. I make a point that while Dario might be a San Francisco EA liberal who would like China to become a kumbaya liberal democracy like California, I don’t think he’s a zealot, I don’t think he’s willing to die to fight China, and I don’t think his revealed preferences, words or actions suggest someone for whom the above is the case. You argue, based on his statements, some quotes etc, that he hates the Chinese government, the CCP, and Chinese institutions, seeks their overthrow, and believes he has or will shortly has the means to do so, and that he is willing to do whatever it takes to execute, and that this probably makes him (you imply, but don’t state, to be fair) the most dangerous person in the world to the Chinese.
2rafa
11hr ago
I don’t appreciate being accused of either cope or gaslighting, but fine. Let’s look at the actual data. There are no orbital strikes on data centers. For all of Yud’s bleating, we’re not bombing Chinese GPU clusters. The actual powers that be care more about Chinese involution on electric car prices than they do about Chinese progress in AI. Anthropic - Dario Amodei himself continues to sell frontier (or at least commercial frontier) model access freely at massive scale to mainland Chinese enterprises, and therefore the Chinese state, via thinly veiled Singapore outposts among others. He lobbied against the US government’s export block, and continues to employ Chinese researchers (do you disagree here?) including those who certainly still have extensive familial and social ties to the mainland, even if he has fewer than Musk.
Judge a man by his actions and his words, then.
You read the tea leaves of Amodei’s effective altruism Gates foundation mosquito net vibe blog posts and public statements, lightcone this and that (Self Made Human, with or without AI, is better at this kind of writing, I won’t patronize you by suggesting you aren’t, although I’m pleased you’ve kept your idiosyncrasies). None of this features a single original thought, or anything that would indicate an unusually (among already intelligent people, not relative to population median) intelligence. Amodei’s resumé is impressive, but not exceptionally so in his class. Plenty of people have PhDs from Stanford. As a researcher or scientist, he was thoroughly unimpressive, he cannot even be mentioned in the same breath as Bengio, Sutskever, LeCun. His main contributions at OpenAI were restating the obvious and some wordcel bullshit on scaling and alignment (meaningless, concrete problems could have been a LessWrong blog post). He played no role in the development, engineering or execution of this epoch defining technology. Unlike Altman, he is not even a particularly ruthless, strategic or manipulative businessman (a respectable skillset on its own), he just has a very greedy and social climbing wife who used her not inconsiderable charms to woo investors and force her boyfriend and later husband into the right rooms. His vocabulary is limited in these texts or quotes (strongly correlated with verbal IQ when writing in one’s native language, which he is), his references are basic and surface level. This isn’t me being a snob, but absent more objective psychometric testing our only way of differentiating between the merely quite intelligent (like most successful corporate executives) and the very intelligent is relying on metrics like this.
Now, we hoped originally—think back to the beginning of the Obama administration—that social media and the internet would have that property, and it turns out not to. But what if we could try again with the knowledge of how many things could go wrong, and that this is a different technology? I don’t know if it would work, but it’s worth a try.
This is just not a top mind on geopolitics, the future of humanity, etc. I am humble enough to know I may be very wrong, but there doesn’t seem to be much here. These are all platitudes. There is no huge malice toward China, just some generic neolib angst about ‘authoritarian regimes’ and being upset that capitalism didn’t bring democracy. Amodei doesn’t seem to really know anything. His optimism is vague, his thoughts unstructured, he rambles, he cites Obama. And that brings us to the crux of the whole discussion, which I also mentioned above, which is what the actual plan is here. Right now, Anthropic is not independently undertaking anti-China actions to our knowledge. If anything, the US government (the primary actor in anti-China cyber activity) was angry with Anthropic for not offering advanced model access that may have enabled this until quite recently, unlike OpenAI and others. Is Dario going to unilaterally engage in cyber ops against the CCP? Is it just about telling the ASI “liberate the people of China from gommunism by any means necessary”? If it is, Amodei is entirely superfluous, because someone else in the State Dept will input that prompt. If it isn’t, nothing in any of the writing we’ve discussed suggests or even hints that Amodei has a more complex or developed strategy, or the understanding of China that would inform one.
2rafa
23hr ago
AI is culture war in a way (although contempt for it often seems bipartisan) but for now, we don’t really know how any of this plays out. You can write science fiction like Scott and dress it up as prediction, but that feels insincere. Interesting things are going to happen, yes. Beyond that, we know little.
2rafa
1d ago
Frankly, I think both you and @DaseindustriesLtd overstate the extent of Amodei’s control over Anthropic’s day to day operations, which include alignment. He mainly interfaces with the rest of the company, according to most reporting, via his only real report, Avital Balwit, who is like 25 years old and who I doubt the grognard AI engineers spend much time obeying. Brin and Page probably exercise more direct control over (current!) Google than Amodei appears to over Anthropic.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the continent gets too hot, mostly, especially as you go inland, even quite far north. Summer in Vienna or Moscow is awful, an avalanche of heat. Tatarstan is much better on that subject, at least.
2rafa
1d ago
What do you do with 5000 silos? “If Claude 10 ASI agent hacks Chinese military intelligence (whether directed or autonomously), we’ll nuke you”? The technology that is being built will barely even be under the control of nation states, except legally (and therefore, when it comes to true x risk and extremely rapid self-improvement, largely hypothetically). By the time the White House has identified some kind of problem (after what, Anthropic’s researchers noticed it, after it happened, after they escalate to legal, after Dario makes a sheepish call to Trump?) the really scary stuff has long happened. At that point, of course, you can still unleash the missiles, but you’re just killing millions out of spite, not to do anything. Enough GPUs will survive a nuclear apocalypse for inference anyway, even if it takes a while for new training, and there’s no telling if the CCP would be in power after reciprocation.
Fukuyama was right. There are (still) no credible alternatives to the capitalist liberal democracy paradigm.
Gwern is also notoriously dismissive of Xi and of Chinese AI progress.
Again, this isn’t about Gwern or Fukuyama, both of whom are very well read people, and both of whom actually have occasionally heterodox views of the kind ‘the academy’ (or generic midwit liberalism) would either balk at or at least raise eyebrows at. There are plenty of people with probably very substantial intelligence who essentially believe in this universalized western liberal democracy view of history, Mark Carney is one example that immediately comes to mind. There used to be some here in the old days (depending on exact definition there still are one or two). Dario’s writings do not come across this way. Maybe it’s easier to fool people when you can ask a decent LLM what a good counterargument is to that annoying commenter on the internet, but fortunately we have pre-AI Dario writings and they didn’t get more or less interesting.
Hillary, Sanders and literally anyone else would still get Tough on Chyna.
Sanders would have called Xi Jinping an enemy of ‘western civilization’ and significantly scaled up defense spending and the US military presence in East Asia? Interesting. You speak about Trump/Hegseth’s China views as if these people - despite being the prime enemies of UN EU institutional neolib Washington consensus world bank international organization Kennedy school types for the last decade, far moreso than China - are completely separate from Amodei, as if they just independently arrived at the same conclusion at the exact same time because of the inevitability of historical circumstance, Thucydides etc. Convenient if true, that these events are all independent superstructures on the same base, I think. As is the suggestion that Amodei would, in my hypothetical, rather abandon everything and become another EA blogger (cross posted mockingly here?) if he was forced (by the market, investors, the government) to sell to China, but was rescued by Trump and Hegseth.
Why would any self-interested American regime tolerate Chinese technological and military catch-up?
Because it is functionally unstoppable. Why did Britain not declare war on America in 1918, or 1945, or 1870 (the last time it would have been remotely feasible, perhaps) for that matter? By the way, this is the opinion of all the actual anti-Trump super rich and/or powerful neoliberal types I know, both in America and Europe, both young and old, that accommodation and a deal with China is necessary, that competition is futile. It is people of rather different beliefs pushing for a military confrontation with Xi. Conflating them is like saying that Macron surely wanted Trump to kill the Ayatollah, or that Trudeau surely relished his tariffs. There is no requirement for ideological coherence, but socialization, culture, education, class, background and geography bound distinct political groupings. Amodei does not belong to the recognizably hawkish neoconservative and pro-war, pro-conflict with China, Atlanticist framework of Thiel, of Karp. Max out defense spending, end woke, civilizational chauvinism, complex views on 20th century European philosophy. Fukuyama himself does not seek war with China; if anything, the End of History was about that conflict being already won. If it was, there is nothing left to do but wait.
2rafa
1d ago
I think the summer in Britain is much better than the summer in India, though. It might actually be the best summer in the whole world, in my opinion. I actually thought you’d only moved a year ago, but time is passing so quickly now, well…
I’m a very happy for your newfound happiness. I am skeptical your depression was ever as serious as you feared, but as someone who was there and who also randomly, arbitrarily overcame it for no real reason (I think I have probably written about it before) I understand. Still, winter is the real test.
Got it? Fukuyama Thought must be upheld. That's the great promise of AI. Dario is building the last Wunderwaffe for Francis. His references are very quaint. I can imagine him, in another life, as a professor in Princeton, fidgeting before a blackboard, citing Pinker (hip new book! recommended to curious young colleagues!) and waxing poetic about "liberal institutions" and the promise of South Africa post-apartheid.
Yes, this is exactly my point, which is why I’m sure I must be making it poorly.
This is boring, dull, milquetoast, whatever you want to call it undergraduate neolib essay writing of the kind that was played out when I was at college a decade ago. It was played out a decade before that, honestly. These are not the views of a man with opinions on geopolitics, they are the views of a man without them. They are the boilerplate, standard views you’ll find in any (Western) UN worker or think tank report writer or ESG consultant or World Bank graduate trainee. This is relevant. Even Scott has his strange ideological idiosyncrasies, Dario has none. Is that not curious? This is a relatively intelligent man, after all. Yet his views on democracy, geopolitics, liberalism, blah blah are those of the average summer intern at the European Union? They’re the views of the professor of your introduction to political science 101 class at a third-tier British university? No, I find that unlikely. Those in this rationalist space who care about geopolitics, and there are and were many, regardless of ideology, did not just ctrl-c and v 104 IQ midwit texts by Fukuyama and Pinker. If they agreed with the thrust, they had the good sense to dress it up. Bill Gates and Obama have more considered, more nuanced views than those expressed in Amodei’s limited writings.
He has notoriously bad chemistry with this admin, relative to all other lab CEOs.
The others have their autism under control, except for Musk, who I think is in genuine awe of Trump, wants his affection, and also agrees with him politically more than the rest.
And of course if you're a Zionist, you can be justifiably concerned about the decline of American hegemony and the loss of the only superpower backing your homeland.
Are the Zionists selling American secrets to the Chinese or terrified of their rise? Sometimes both, perhaps, but I don’t think China will determine the outcome of that conflict.
This isn't Donroe Doctrine, in Policy on AI Exponential he devotes substantial space to "checks and balances" within democracies, which is a curious choice if you want Don's favor.
Let us imagine an alternative scenario. 4 years of Hillary, or indeed 4 years of Bernie Sanders (he turned into a liberal in office, or before really). Mitt Romney is now President in his second term. China policy is largely unchanged (a couple of large Utah business concerns do a lot of business there, and the CCP very quietly allowed in some more Mormon missionaries). Do you think Dario Amodei unilaterally refuses to sell Claude to the Chinese, unlike all his competitors? Does he go on a one-man crusade while Sam Altman and Jensen Huang run a GPU-and-GPT roadshow through every second and third tier city in China?
I doubt it.
2rafa
2d ago
If the Chinese had democratic elections they’d vote to invade Taiwan. Putin was legitimately very popular, at least until very recently. Warmongers and authoritarians win legitimately all the time.
Dude It’s Summer (in the British Isles). Come back in December when it gets dark at 2.30 and you haven’t seen the sun in six weeks and talk to us about the color of happiness. This is like when you’re happy on vacation.
2rafa
2d ago
The vast majority of both Filipino and Ukrainian emigrants are female. In the latter case this may have also been true even before the war, I think.
Is there any record of Amodei having hostility toward China that predates the first Trump admin’s pivot against Chinese trade? It’s manifestly obvious that his pivot against China is him trying to keep his contracts and export licenses by aligning himself with the current administration. Who cares more about China, Trump or Amodei?
Painting Amodei as an American ultranationalist ideologically hostile to China is ridiculous. EA was never particularly hostile to China. AI 2027 will go down in history as an embarrassingly timed piece that failed to anticipate Chinese models catching up as rapidly as they have. Many made that mistake, though, including you.
Dario is the poster boy of Eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire, like it or not.
The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where all technology ‘Designed in California’ was ‘Made in China’ until the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victory in 2016? The eternal San Francisco liberal empire that lobbied heavily against tariffs even as parts of it embraced his message on crime and taxes? The eternal San Francisco Liberal Empire where every other guy has a Chinese wife with an affluent and family back in China (it’s not easy to afford $400k Stanford tuition for your daughter as a regular Chinese family)? The eternal liberal San Francisco empire at the end of history, where defense spending was taboo and anti-ESG until 2022, where plane loads of Apple engineers departed weekly for Chinese factories, where many of the most sensitive and leading American software and hardware companies heavily recruited Chinese engineers one masters, PhD or undergraduate degree out from mainland China, who often returned there after learning the trade?
The US position on China shifted because of Trump and a relatively small number of people in the largely East Coast defense establishment who care about stuff like Taiwan and who never really liked the Red Chinese. It had nothing to do with San Francisco, which was and remains deeply economically and culturally integrated with China, more than any other western city other than perhaps Vancouver. And as for Amodei himself, Jewish-Italian progressive liberal autistic programmers are not a core anti-Chinese or nationalist demographic in the United States. They never have been and never will be. I can believe that Lutnick really wants to compete with China. There are plenty of elderly neocons and paleocons and just anti-communists and (let’s be real) racists who do. But Amodei? No, nothing in his demographic profile suggests this is a deeply held ideology.
The final redoubt, really, of this argument (once you strip out desperately sucking up to Trump until the IPO gets out of the door) is that Amodei said some vaguely EAesque things about democracy and authoritarianism and other boring liberal platitudes. These are Trudeauisms or Blairisms or whatever you want to call them. They exist in that meaningless void, that ideological interregnum from 1991 to 2016 when people clapped politely at these kinds of empty statements. Dario Amodei is not willing to die to fight China (and as you note, in any conflict he would be a high priority target, so this is no empty consideration).
2rafa
3d ago
Why do you think Amodei wants to destroy China? Most EAs never cared much about China. There were even pro-China people, this is after all a movement about maximally lifting people out of poverty or saving lives at the lowest cost or something. US competitors are as much or more of an ASI risk, including that run by Altman, who he seemingly hates. Does he hate Xi more? Seems unlikely. Why? Fanatic China haters typically belong to other demographic, ideological etc categories.
OpenAI via Microsoft makes its models effectively publicly available to with few or no limitations to Chinese businesses.
Anthropic doesn’t, in part to try to ingratiate themselves with the current admin that (not incorrectly) perceives them as more committed anti-Trumpers and effective altruists compared to Altman’s entirely mercenary nature.
[yes, all the big labs, big tech can get around it, and so can individual developers and small businesses with redistribution, but it is an even minor inconvenience.]
But the bigger picture is that Amodei actually has some minor fears about a Yud-level doom scenario. He’s not Scott level, but this guy lived in a group house with EA people for a decade. Altman doesn’t care, doesn’t know, doesn’t believe in X risk beyond a marketing tool. I actually don’t think Sam has a psychological conception of ASI, it exists as something other people discuss, or a business direction, but it has no eschatological significance.
When Amodei was sitting alongside Benioff hyping up his obsolete SaaS stack to investors / the press as AI proof because they did a big deal with him, you could tell the former was awkward, didn’t believe, was roped into this marketing exercise. This is a guy who was seduced and worn down into marriage by one of Eric Schmidt’s girls in her late thirties (after zero qualifications, another failed marriage and one bankruptcy, a nobody), his social skills are limited. He finds it hard to lie about his actual beliefs, clearly. It’s difficult for anyone who wants to pursue AI very quickly with no limits (not that it is realistic), be they Chinese or American, to convince him. Sam would just have sat at the press conference with a straight face and said AI will create far more jobs than it destroys.
You can’t really turn a guy like Amodei in that way, only remove him from power. In control of the right model at the right time, he might actually do some wacky shit, whereas Altman actually does want to be a rich guy on earth who makes it to his next botox appointment.
2rafa
5d ago
I agree. I’d put it this way - there were indeed senior Iranian politicians who agreed to the Obama deal sincerely, in the sense that they didn’t think they were tricking the enemy and didn’t intend for their country to develop nuclear weapons anyway.
However, the IRGC, which by this point fully ran the nuclear program, was largely governed by a hardliner faction, now fully in charge, who had every intention of fully continuing the program regardless.
2rafa
6d ago
11% or so are Jewish. This tracks generally with the 5x overrepresentation you see in many groups where most or all members are cognitively well above the IQ average but which are not, for cultural or communal reasons, ‘specifically Jewish’.
For example, I think around 10% of congress is Jewish, or was for a long time. I would guess things like Fortune 500 executives, leading authors, scientific researchers, more cognitively challenging specialty doctors etc are maybe also around 10% Jewish in the US. Hollywood might be more like 30% (albeit declining rapidly), and finance maybe 20%, but this is above the ‘default’ overrepresentation and reflects actual cultural preference (Jews have been very overrepresented as bankers, actors, publishers and theater impresarios for many centuries).
2rafa
12d ago
There are two main kinds of vigilante, one politically more ambivalent than the other. The first is the justicar, the knight, the semi-sanctioned or unsanctioned sheriff who corrects the mistake of a hopelessly and explicitly corrupt governing structure co-opted by explicitly political interests in a way that deprives the masses of justice. This is Batman. The second category is more explicitly right wing, the vigilante against anarchy-tyranny, against the criminal masses, against the mob. This is more explicitly right wing, Curtis Sliwa, Daniel Penny, that kind of thing.
The easy way to tell which kind of vigilante story it is is to ask yourself - “do the criminal villains in this story broadly and demographically represent the real perpetrators of most urban violent crime in the location in which this story is set?”. If no, it’s the former, if yes, it’s the latter.
2rafa
14d ago
Don’t you need to have a relationship with a college to do anything at Oxbridge? The University itself is just the overarching administrative body.
2rafa
14d ago
Cofnas’ views preclude winning over any credentialed progressives, even moreso than most right wing academics.
2rafa
15d ago
He probably thought he was fine after they hired him. His reporting on Arday was hardly more controversial than the widely publicized statements that got him cancelled years earlier…until Arday’s death.
How? The second principle of justice, that of a guarantee against recurrence, of the segregation of an antisocial individual from society, would not be satisfied. If he was locked away in an asylum forever with the consent of his victims’ relatives because they believed earnestly that he was psychotic, that would be fine with me.
As for the death penalty, I am no opponent of it. I would prefer death to life in prison myself.
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