2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
7hr ago
I wasn’t arguing against the ‘business as usual’ strategy at all, for what that’s worth - after all, that’s what I’m doing.
But I was curious about the additional or different preparations you’ve made / steps you’ve taken that you referenced. The changes to plans.
As I understand it there are really only four English-language newspapers that have ‘thrived’ since the big collapse.
The first is the New York Times, which built a very successful online subscription business on a highly diversified model, almost the newspaper equivalent to a full service MMO that has PvE, PvP, housing, crafting, LARPing, whatever. So the NYT signs people up for puzzles and games, for the weddings and modern love sections, for the book reviews, for the extensive cooking section, for the boomer liberal commentary, and for regional and national news, all of which are well staffed, and then that all feeds into the same pot, they cross-sell you on everything even for the things they let you subscribe to separately, and then they upsell you to the $400/year ‘All Access’ subscription.
The second and third are the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal, which superceded all the regional and local business papers and became de facto central reporting for financial markets where information is key to arbitrage, any client conversation, etc. They sell subscriptions directly and through third-party platforms like Refinitiv and Bloomberg, have lucrative events businesses, and go niche enough in terms of reporting that there aren’t free alternatives online if you want to read specific reporting on sub-niches in like investment grade credit funds or competition in the custodian business etc, it’s not something that CNN or the BBC news website can replace. They also still have a very large highly-paid audience which means both digital and print advertising continues to generate some income because luxury brands like to advertise with them.
The last is the Daily Mail which replaced a lot of the tabloid / gossip mag business not just in the UK but across the US and the rest of the Anglo countries and works on an extreme economy of scale with digital ads and an optional extra gossip premium subscription and a very large social media presence. The globalization of celebrity culture and media was helpful here, as is Page Six and the National Enquirer making some strategic mistakes that allowed the DM to take marketshare.
—
Beyond them you have legacy big regional papers like the Chicago Tribune, WaPost, LA Times, SF Chronicle that mainly survive as passion projects of rich men willing to lose money for long periods of time, I don’t think any are consistently profitable.
What medium or long term planning is it changing for you? It’s not like a big drought or a tsunami or even a civilizational breakdown (or major war) where you can theoretically prepare if you have the means. I know people who are prepping, some at considerable cost, but they’re prepping for some kind of fantasy The Road type future which now seems unlikely. ASI will be far more powerful and wide reaching, its power will stretch beyond geography and the limits of our own civilization. Even the example you give (say, deciding not to commit to an expensive degree or career move) doesn’t necessarily make sense. If none of it matters, maybe you decide to do that masters in philosophy or take the job in some remote and low paid location anyway, just for fun.
As for human endeavor, I think things will be fine (absent x risk, which it now seems is impossible to control and so with which we are at the mercy of fate) if everything is automated. There will always be interesting things to do - think of the amateur woodworkers making flimsier furniture than IKEA, but having a great time doing so. Most of us will never be (close to) the best at anything, so ‘the best’ going from being a human to an AI doesn’t affect us in the same way that it does Terence Tao.
2rafa
12hr ago
What would you do with the knowledge we're going to be raptured, or that an asteroid has a 30% chance of hitting the Earth in a few years?
Go to the pub and wait for it all to blow over?
2rafa
12hr ago
Are they actually working less (starting work at 11 instead of 9, leaving at 2 instead of 5 or 6) or are they just doing (or ‘generating’) more to fill in the space? The thing about a lot of white collar work is that in substantial part it was already pretty fake (a consultant’s 10 page deck from 1985 became a 600 page deck in 2023 because research/word processing/powerpoint got easier, but they’re still about equally useful), so AI just changes the provenance of the bullshit.
2rafa
12hr ago
What’s to stop, uh, let’s call them ‘people who don’t vote Republican’ just getting married for the free $10k? Even if you say ‘you must have been legally married for five years’ there’s no central registry unlike European countries, meaning it’s ripe for fraud plus plenty of anti-Republican underclass groups like Somalis actually have high rates of marriage.
2rafa
12hr ago
That’s the thing though. As the other response says, ‘knowing’ (not really, but let’s say ‘having an idea of the scale of’) what’s coming doesn’t really help you in any way.
2rafa
21hr ago
I think in terms of psychological impact this kind of thing just isn’t important to most people. We’re going from a world where 99.9[99]% of people don’t contribute intellectually to the advancement of the human race to a world where 100% don’t. That affects the tiny minority who genuinely aspired to be in and believed they could be in the former group (even they were mostly destined for disappointment, AI or not), but not really everyone else.
2rafa
1d ago
Everything you say is true but it doesn’t change the fact that
(1) Even if the social democratic leadership has pivoted marginally rightward on immigration, the actual functionaries, MPs and think tank types believe the same things about immigration as they always have. Same is true for Labour in the UK or indeed the Democrats in the US.
(2) Even if they don’t pivot leftward politically, a durable socdem coalition is still not going to do right wing things on immigration (restricting naturalization further, more deportation, tougher on crime) and block them from happening for at least a number of years, so demographic change will continue.
(3) Leading social democrat and left aligned (so likely coalition member) politicians have already come out against flagship policies like lowering the age of criminal responsibility (which mainly targeted immigrant gangs). So they’re clearly bullish.
2rafa
1d ago
Yeah this is basically what the Sweden Democrats just did in coalition with the Swedish center-right, and not only did their support collapse, so did the center-right’s and now the left who implemented mass immigration in the first place will come back to power.
2rafa
1d ago
In this case it’s close enough that it would be difficult, especially if it was repeated nationally.
The CDU/CSU coalition ruled out working with the far left [successor to the ruling party of East Germany], which in effect means a situation in a German election where the AfD get more than about 35-40% of seats, given parliamentary thresholds, just results in repeat elections until either they fall below that line or get a majority, or until the center right work with them.
And in both Austria and Sweden the center and hard right have been in coalition together, so it’s likely to happen in Germany eventually.
2rafa
5d ago
Chris Benoit could have saved himself the trouble, stopped early in his familicide-suicide, and been well underway enjoying a born again journey by now.
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.
2rafa
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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
6d 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.
Crime was skyrocketing in the 1970s and 1980s and the vast majority of teenage runaways who went missing did so of their own accord and were not victims of serious crime. The interstate highway system, cheap oil and cars, buses and an economy where an unskilled worker (including a woman one) could support themselves and find employment in most places made it easier than in previous generations (I suspect ‘running far away from home’ and building a life as a teenager in 1870 was actually quite expensive and very difficult if one had no money or connections, even a lot of menial domestic work required references and people to vouch for you).
It makes sense, in that context, that the police focused on crimes that were definitely committed and victims they could identify and in most cases (that weren’t homicide) speak to.
More options
Context Copy link