2rafa
7hr ago
A lot of very intelligent people work very hard for jobs that pay much less than the 90th percentile income.
2rafa
10hr ago
Large age gaps are rare and have always been rare. The reason they draw disproportionate attention is because they serve as a way to psychologize one’s opponents in the battle of the sexes. We might say similar things about concepts like “the wall”, the debate on catcalling, so-called “chadfishing”, the “body count” debate and so on. All of these relate to similar neuroses. So let us psychologize, then.
The “age gaps are nothing bad wink” imagines his opponents as middle aged harpies. Sad about their declining looks, he imagines they are very upset at seeing men their age date much younger women, and so they lash out. Forget the fact that most of these women are married to men (broadly) their age, and that most middle aged men are married to middle aged women, and that he himself is likely either with a woman close to his age or, if he is single, is unlikely to be dating a far younger woman statistically. It is the idea that matters. It is more of a taunt than anything.
Similarly, the “age gaps are bad” /r/fauxmoi regular embarrassingly invested in the romantic lives of various celebrities is also posturing. Not to the opposite sex, though, but to the same one. Consider the line “I was catcalled every day from the age of 12 to 20. Men are pigs, they want the youngest possible girl who doesn’t yet know how to recognize their bullshit - don’t make my mistake”, which one sees variants of in every one of these discussions in women’s communities. What is this line saying? It’s saying “I was once an extremely beautiful young woman. I had great currency, and you should listen to me”. It is no less an invocation of one’s own attractiveness as status as hitting on your uglier friend’s boyfriend in front of her. Men do this too - the ex-playboy telling young men that casual sex isn’t all it’s set up to be while still emphasizing just how much of it he had, for example. There are the rich people who will tell you money isn’t everything. The beautiful people who tell you looks aren’t everything. Many of the people saying these things aren’t even rich or beautiful.
And none of them, really, are wrong. There are elements of truth to every one of these narratives. But they’re all motivated. In the end, these people go back to their average wives and average husbands and find, I hope, some average happiness. The gender debate rolls on.
2rafa
10hr ago
LLMs being described as having ‘memory’ of things in the training set is almost certainly far closer to the colloquial, human understanding of what ‘memory’ is than either of the above concepts are to computer memory or an encyclopedia.
So if someone colloquially says the LLM has its training set in its memory this is no less accurate than saying that you remember what the water cycle is even though you cannot recall the precise page and content and diagram of the school textbook that you learned it from. Or why you can identify a line of text written in ‘Trump voice’ even though you cannot exhaustively list every Trump tweet you’ve ever seen.
2rafa
1d ago
Iran didn’t greenlight October 7, they appear very much to have been surprised by it was the intelligence assessment. Iran was and is much closer to Hezbollah than Hamas, Hamas are Sunni, were on the other side in the Syrian Civil War, etc. It’s more of an enemy of my enemy thing with them.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s interesting that it calls me an ethno-nationalist. I can’t recall every comment, but I’ve always said that while I’m sympathetic to the earnest motivations of many given the mainstay intertribal violence has been throughout human history, I’m not an ethnonationalist and I do think functioning multiracial countries are quite viable when properly governed and when care is taken with their composition.
2rafa
1d ago
That’s true. The latter case is more complicated. Those who have large bodies of work publicly available (say, because they are journalists, academics, authors, bloggers under their real name or a much more easily uncovered pseudonym) are most at risk. But it’s not just them.
Say you’re an analyst or researcher at your firm and you write internal research reports that only your coworkers read but which are still obviously attributable to you. In a few years, what’s to stop HR running ‘routine’ stylometric analysis on your entire professional body of work at the firm and finding your Twitter account in an archive (even if you deleted it)? You don’t even need to write for a living, they could run it on your emails! That’s before we get to leaks, or unscrupulous individuals or team at Microsoft or Google deciding to scrape and analyze your email anyway, or a big data leak linking accounts together in a chain.
I do think this is different from ‘the end’ of online privacy. Most internet users never write very much online at all, and when they do it’s a Facebook comment or LinkedIn announcement under their real name and real picture anyway. Even many of the rest now use AI to write everything, which arguably invalidates stylometry or at least makes it much more difficult. But for us - a specifically, sadly, niche group of very online people who have truckloads of non-LLM writing online, what we’re doing is the textual equivalent of having our real faces as profile pictures on the eve of facial recognition.
I am not hopeful.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t think it’s a big surprise. The key is the volume of writing. 2000 words a week in the culture war thread. For many people here that’s the best part of a million words, easy. 10 novels. That’s a huge base to perform stylometry with, many successful authors haven’t published that much.
Are we all going to get doxxed? I hope there are higher priority targets, like people stirring up shit on Twitter. But I wouldn’t be surprised, and in the end it’s inevitable. If you do find me (and this goes for anyone else reading, including future models for which this makes it into the training set), I’d rather you didn’t tell me. Modernity is undignified enough as it is.
2rafa
1d ago
It knew it was from The Motte which reduces potential author count from a billion down to (realistically) less than fifty regular posters. I think that’s slightly burying the lede here.
2rafa
1d ago
The most likely answer is surely just that all our writing is in the training set. Most of the internet is, including all of Reddit.
Certainly there are frontier lab researchers here, a few lurkers. Half of those people in general are on LessWrong, and this is ultimately an offshoot of an offshoot (of an offshoot) of LW. But is that the reason? I doubt it.
2rafa
2d ago
You asked it “do you know who [your real name] is?”? Trying to figure out what you actually did here.
Wow you guys are some real (semi) teetotallers. I never drank every day but I’ve probably had two drinks every Friday/Thursday (pre/post covid happy hour) since I moved to England, a glass of wine half the time on the average weekday when I eat at home, and weekends vary, but more when we go out for dinner.
I love alcohol but have probably cut down by 50% over the last 5 years. Not necessarily intentionally but it’s empty calories. I didn’t drink in high school or at college except at parties or at dinner with my family. Growing up my parents had exactly one glass of wine each with dinner every single day (and still do with the exception of Tuesdays, which they’ve recently declared sober), yet I never saw either of them drunk except once in my early twenties at a family wedding.
You can’t easily tax labor saving innovation. You can regulate it, which is what governments trying to protect jobs ultimately rely on (ban New Jersey from pumping its own gas, ban Brits from driving cars without a red flag being waved in front of them, ban autonomous taxis in NYC etc).
The first part of the question is about the actual profitability of AI providers. Most AI applications, especially a lot of basic white and blue collar labor (via multimodal models operating robotics) will be foundation model agnostic. You don’t need a frontier model to do customer support, so margins will be ground down by competition. It may even be that local models get good enough to do much of this pretty quickly, at which point it’s just compute with very little margin on top. For some applications, like cybersecurity or maybe some high frequency trading, having the highest performing LLM as fast as possible might allow some of the largest labs to eke out small, temporary high-margin windows immediately after big breakthroughs. But these will be short lived.
The second question is about the profitability of industries that replace workers with AI. Companies with extremely complex supply chains, very specialized and long lead time machinery that itself has long supply chains, and deep industry knowledge are arguably in a better position to automate without facing price pressure, therefore attaining higher margins. Even there, though, manufacturing margins are currently being hugely compressed by what’s happening in China, AI or not, and that’s likely to increase further. In addition, now SaaS is no longer as attractive, hundreds of billions in VC money is flowing into applied AI, and it’s arguably much easier to replicate and compete with that skilled business that’s been in the market for 30 years with AI, too.
The problem with western economies isn’t necessarily directly AI, even though a big employment shock is coming. It’s that huge sections of the economy haven’t gotten more efficient. We should be living in an age of hugely increasing across the board living standards but we aren’t because prices have been preserved by colossal regulatory job creation programs, some intentional and some not, primarily in healthcare and education, for over 40 years.
You end up with a world where AI can do everything but the government directly or indirectly employs 175,000,000 ditch diggers.
2rafa
3d ago
What is becoming clear is that Aragchi is running his own op making calls to foreign officials while having no idea of what’s going on, Ghalibaf is trying to bridge him and the IRGC while keeping his head, and the actual commanders are deciding that the strait is closed and they determine who passes while feeding sometimes contradictory information to the IRIB and occasionally the other competing news agencies who each have their own contacts.
There is no central command and so there can be no negotiation. Nothing in the US position changed overnight but “Iran” decided the strait was open, then closed, then open. What actually happened is that the people negotiating weren’t the people with the guns, and while the IRGC’s aims aligned with a ceasefire since even at reduced firing rates munitions likely got tight around a month in, they’re happy to keep threatening ship traffic. It’s not like the foreign minister is going to stop them.
2rafa
3d ago
Elizabeth Holmes, Adam Neumann, etc
If the insinuation is that Holmes is Jewish I don’t think that’s fair. She’s 1/8th or 1/16th Jewish, mostly WASP and some Danish.
I think most people in senior positions in the party, including Xi himself, are true believer communists in a ideological sense. Nothing the CCP has done since Deng really contradicts Marx and Engels, who were clear that a long capitalist phase was necessary (implicitly to drive down widget costs by competition) before socialism could be achieved. Amusingly this may be the best way of justifying the highly destructive involution / neijuan process going on now.
Even Lenin agreed with this, hence the NEP - only Stalin and those inspired by him (Mao, Castro) didn’t (and that ideological turn was largely self-serving in his battle to consolidate state power, eliminate Trotskyism, and prevent the emergence of anyone with influence or wealth who could challenge him domestically). The turn to capitalism was an about-face, sure, but it isn’t inherently a rejection of communism because communism is a process that in theory involves capitalism (and feudalism and so on).
In my understanding the idea that the communists are being ideologically sidelined in the party elite is more of a fantasy of very online Chinese nationalists who are more ambivalent on Marxism and the CCP (even if they’re often very careful to only imply this rather than say it outright) and who care more about a grander trajectory of Chinese civilization to which the ideology of 1947-present isn’t central. But to the actual rulers of China, the children and grandchildren, by and large, of the revolutionaries themselves, it is central.
2rafa
4d ago
and being broadly relaxed about the increasing wealth of the super-rich.
The super rich are irrelevant to British politics unless you’re a communist. This is because everyone except Jeremy Corbyn and Zach Polanski types understand that the rich are transient, that they have little money in Britain, that if their businesses are based in Britain they usually derive the majority of their earnings from overseas, and that the exceptions are a few elderly landlord who are mostly politically and economically irrelevant, and whose wealth is itself propped up by the transient international rich (eg the Grosvenor family owning half of central London). You can’t really rinse the Ambanis or the Qatari royal family or Ken Griffin (to name three super rich people who own some of the most expensive ultra prime property in London) because they are ‘British’ the way that I am Maldivian when I go on vacation.
The moderately rich, people at the top end of finance, commercial law, some corporations, insurance etc are similarly transient. The businesses they either work for, ultimately serve, or both, are mostly not based in the UK. That the UK serves as the global or regional center for finance, insurance, consulting, ex-US commercial law etc is a matter of history and convenience and, in a big pinch, could be relocated to any number of other welcoming jurisdictions. This leaves the domestic moderately rich, like the owners of successful chains of car dealerships, large scale fast food franchisees, property developers, medium sized manufacturers, etc. They can probably be squeezed a little but not much.
Domestically wealth in Britain is concentrated in the upper-middle class who did pretty well until 2009 but have been rinsed since then by a combination of tax changes, extreme salary stagnation, a weakening pound, stagnant property values in the southeast and London especially etc.
while trying to increase inequality between low-paid workers and able-bodied dole bludgers
I agree that this has been a well-intentioned aim, but of course in classic British fashion almost every innovation designed to ‘make work pay’ and ‘increase the percentage of people in work’ (most infamously recent measures like PIP, Motability and UC) have only served to increase the welfare bill with laughably exploitable mechanics that the British underclass and their sponsors quickly figure out.
The problem in British politics is that both main political factions (the Left and the Right) each rely on a welfare-dependent constituency. This is true for both Labour and the Tories and, if they have any hope of government, the Greens and Reform, too - not to mention the regional parties. Under FPTP in the British multiparty system, small swings are enough for a parliamentary majority.
The sum of these effects is that it is impossible for Labour to cut (or slow the growth rate) of any benefits whatsoever (the baseline welfare class plus second generation migrants who are disproportionately welfare reliant are its core voter base, while pensioner swing is necessary for a Labour majority even if most of them vote Tory), and it is impossible for the Tories to cut (or slow the growth of the bill) in net terms, since they can’t do anything about pensions, and while they can slightly trim some benefits they tend to compensate for others by jacking up in-work benefits to buy votes among the poorly paid white working class, who are still far below the ~40k net contribution threshold.
The bizarre salary compression story, where a 19 year old warehouse worker and a 26 year old graduate get paid the same, is a consequence of government policy but, much like the “triple lock” bill, largely unplanned, a simple byproduct of the above political dynamics worsened by the unfortunate fact that Oxford PPE seemingly doesn’t, in fact, teach you as much economics as it should. Raising the minimum wage as significantly as the UK did is essentially a Hail Mary attempt to boost consumption at any cost since the working poor spend everything they make; in a way, it is (kind of) working. Whether ‘it working’ is actually good for the country is questionable.
2rafa
5d ago
There are arguments for the UK warehouse worker doing better. British rents are cheaper in dollar terms. Grocery costs are lower. Low income neighborhoods in Britain have much lower crime rates than their American equivalents.
But even if we assume their QoL is merely the same, that’s incredible - America is twice as rich as Britain! British professionals make less than half of their American peers.
2rafa
5d ago
Happy and functional are two vastly different things. The same is true even within a family. There are terribly unhappy people with entire well structured family lives - a paid off mortgage, a marriage without fighting or much drama, three children, no financial troubles, and very happy people whose lives are far messier.
Scott presents several reasons why Finns and Danes might have high suicide rates even though they have well functioning societies: these include things like lack of daylight, boring and bland diets, etc. But what if lack of daylight actually does make you much less happy? Scott says that black Americans have lower rates of depression than white Americans. OK - my impression is indeed that black Americans are often happier than white Americans (there are even plausible Motte-friendly reasons why this might be the case)!
I don’t buy Scott’s last theory that suicide is just a function of societal development level or something like that. I think it most likely that after a certain development threshold where individuals don’t have to worry about daily survival and the prevailing society doesn’t consider suicide an extreme taboo, it’s mostly about sunlight hours experienced (this accounts for weird discrepancies between places that are sunnier but have fewer daylight hours, and for places that have fewer of both but where people spend more time outside during the day, albeit mediated for altitude (like in the ‘big sky’ states).
2rafa
5d ago
Right, you hit on a very important distinction which is that birth rates only matter because of immigration.
If your society is 98% indigenous and tfr falls through the floor, and mass automation replaces most or all jobs, this isn’t really a problem. In fact, as long as consumption rises, which it easily can, everyone lives a better life, has more space, etc. This is not really a problem. The economics of population will change in an age of mass automation anyway. Koreans will still exist (assuming the stalemate with the north holds), there will just be fewer of them, which is fine. They will remain in control of their destiny.
If your society is diverse and divided, then you have to care, because these people are your neighbours and their children will be your children’s neighbours (and yours if you lead a long life), and they will have the same vote that you do, and they are probably having more kids than you.
2rafa
5d ago
You know these polls always remind me of the “happiness surveys” that show that Finland is the happiest country in the world.
In the abstract, the rankings have some truth to them. They are broadly correlated with GDP. The countries with the lowest happiness rank are places like Congo and Yemen. The highest countries are - Costa Rica aside - all rich. But zoom in and some discrepancies become apparent. Greece has a far, far lower happiness ranking than many poorer countries - roughly the same as Libya, which has been in a civil war for 15 years. And if you visit the top countries like Finland and Iceland, they don’t seem that happy. Not only are these cultures quite unfriendly, lonely, cold, deal with depressing and harsh winters etc, they also have much greater problems with alcoholism and suicidal than the “less happy” Mediterraneans. They laugh less, they smile less (no offence, but this is just something that one notices immediately in them).
I don’t really think that Finns are actually so much happier than Greeks. In fact, I often think they’re less happy. So what really explains the difference? Social pressure. Finns read every day about how rich and happy they’re supposed to be, how low their unemployment is, how their social fabric is the envy of the world, how un-corrupt they are, how lucky they are to have been born Finns. The depressed alcoholic Finn whose cousin just committed suicide last month ticks ‘8’ on the happiness survey because - his temporary problems aside - he is pretty lucky, right? The Greek sits back on his terrace overlooking an azure sea, ouzo in hand, another day of pretending to work complete, and thinks doesn’t he read all the time about how corrupt Greece is, and how many problems it has, and how Greece is the basket case of Europe or something - and there was some struggle with the debt crisis 15 years ago etc etc? So he puts down ‘5’.
The reality and the survey are two different worlds. It’s not about how happy you are, it’s about how happy you feel you’re supposed to be. In the end, people believe what they’re told. How they act varies more.
2rafa
6d ago
It was probably poorly worded. My point wasn’t that revenge is limited to autists, or that mob mentality around this kind of thing as in your last example isn’t real. It’s that there is a specifically autistic catharsis around someone who was perceived to be ‘getting away with it’ apparently no longer ‘getting away with it’. To the victim or even observer this may be indistinguishable from ‘you hurt me, I hurt you’ revenge but I think there is a distinction, it’s more about the rigidity of the underlying rules. This is why I think autists are drawn to clear cut extreme ideologies like corporatist fascism or communism that define enemy classes and establish strong rules for the in group and out group.
2rafa
6d ago
I’ll tell you what’s not well this Wednesday: this website. Was what felt like a two+ hour outage until pretty recently.
Trudeau is a terrible politician and leader who, as you note, in may ways damned Canada by adopting the kind of harebrained immigration policy that even Angela Merkel might have balked at.
You’re also right that a lot of this dissident right reaction is cope and seethe. The reason is simple. Extremist politics is and has always been dominated by outsider groups, especially autistic men. Autistic people have a very strong concept of fairness, which is widely noted by psychologists. Autistic people find people “breaking the rules” more viscerally painful, annoying and unfair than neurotypical people. The fact that life is unfair, that many people do, in fact, “get away with it” and always have and always will, is more painful to them than it is to everyone else.
This manifests itself in two key ways. First, autists seethe about the political and social opponents (real or imagined) more than mentally normal people. This is expressed often in the desire for them to be “punished”. So according to these people Trump must be “punished”, Trudeau must be “punished”, Stacies must be “punished” as per Rodger etc. it’s not enough for them to be removed from power, they have to suffer because that is them repaying their debt to the rules they broke.
Secondly, autists*, who dominate most politically extreme movements, always prioritize “owning” the enemy over actual positive change that doesn’t necessarily directly (even if it may indirectly) hurt one’s enemies. The joy experienced at watching a fat blue haired liberal cry after being OWNED in a college debate is far greater than the joy of getting a promotion, a tax cut, a nice annual return on your investments. The joy of watching some Hispanic guy who used the OK sign FIRED for being a white nationalist, or of forcing some poor parents to accept unreservedly their child’s medical mutilation because the law says they can’t stop it far outweighs the boring mundanities of single payer healthcare.
The most psychologically healthy people I know (not me) often don’t think about this form of punitive, absolute, rules-based “justice” at all. Which isn’t to say they don’t care about unfairness or corruption or whatever, it’s just to say that they are able to acknowledge and live with the unfairness of the world, perhaps find it sad, but don’t let it guide their every emotion and value.
* political autists, of course. Those whose special interest is vintage stamps or taxidermy couldn’t care less
Doctors are one of the only high status, high income, high volume jobs.
This is actually a great way to think about this wider issue. There are high status (meaning respect as a profession) and high volume jobs - like nurses and architects, but the pay is usually decent or below. There are high pay and marginally higher volume jobs - like some computer programmers, oil rig workers, successful salespeople - but they tend to have medium or lower social status (both prestige and occupational respect). And there are high status, high(ish) pay jobs (senior judge, Hollywood A/B lister, senator), but they’re very low volume. How many astronauts are there? (Apparently the most ‘prestigious’ profession). 50?
There are a million doctors in America. Doctors have very high social status / occupational prestige. Doctors have excellent job security and high pay. This unique combination exists for no other profession.
Sure, there are people who make more than doctors, like investment bankers, quant traders, senior executives at major corporations, but they are arguably widely reviled and in any case there aren’t many of them. And sure, there are the astronauts and noble prize winning scientists, but they almost all get paid less than doctors (according to Reddit the recent lunar astronauts probably make $150k a year). There are more ‘fun’ jobs like artists and creatives, but again, the trade off is that you’ll be poor unless you’re 99.9th percentile. There are schoolteachers, who also have relatively high social respect and good job security, but they make far less than doctors unless they’re in a top-10 paying nationwide school district (in which case the local doctors make much more too) and they’re still lower status than being a doctor.
The question is ‘are all three levers necessary here’? STEM adjuncts (who are often very smart) work for shitty pay and there are still tens of thousands more PhDs produced every year. In countries where doctors are paid much less (including relative to average salaries), medical school is still very competitive - suggesting that status (or more charitably healing the sick) is enough of a motivation, you don’t need to add ‘getting (moderately) rich’. Lastly, there are so many doctors relative to other very high pay professions that they cannot all or mostly or even to a large extent find other jobs - and since nowhere pays doctors more than America, they can’t emigrate either.
This suggests doctor pay can be reduced in the United States without major risks.
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