Quantumfreakonomics
No bio...
User ID: 324
Quantumfreakonomics
2hr ago
This would be one of the most successful astroturfing campaigns of all time. If China was behind it, don’t you think they’d be putting a lot more emphasis on,”you know, all these data center chips come from Taiwan. Why are we subsidizing Taiwan’s defense only for them to suck all of our water?”
Quantumfreakonomics
6hr ago
We did have a thread about this a few weeks ago.
A big problem for the AI companies is that, while the main issues with data centers can be solved with more infrastructure buildout (more power generation, more transmission lines, more water plants), it turns out that people don't like infrastructure buildout either!. Its true that the footprint of the data centers themselves are quite small in the grand scheme of rural American land use, but once you start building cross-county high-voltage power lines, gas turbines, gas pipelines, and water lines, you end up stepping on a lot of landowners' toes.
The power issue is not trivial. The 2024 Situational Awareness paper predicted that in a permissive regulatory structure, AI power demand in 2030 would be 100% of total US electricity generation in 2024. We would need to double electricity production in six years to keep up. That breaks things. That generates meaningful pollution. This scenario will almost certainly not play out (for reasons which at this moment must be all too obvious), but it is true than many AI techbros want this to play out.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I mean, that's a trivial way for what I said to be true, but even the original work is of quality that rounds to zero. Zero is not meaningfully lower than something that rounds to zero.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
The state of Arday’s subfield (sociology of education) is so bad that Arday’s entirely fraudulent work is not of meaningfully lower-quality than the median output.
After leaning more about his work and its context, I would like to retract my previous statement. To paraphrase Bismarck, the integrity of sociology of education research is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I think it’s relevant that this happened in Europe. America had its reckoning with race-studies scholars of questionable quality a few years ago. The threat of being called-up to Capitol Hill for sworn testimony and having your university’s federal funding cut seems to have put the fear of God back into university administrators. They would be scared to engage in this blatant of a cover-up on this side of the pond.
Ghent University sociology professors ought to be careful what they wish for right now.
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
But maybe I'm just biased because I can't imagine a pretty feminine woman like Zendaya ever really being a school shooter.
Quantumfreakonomics
4d ago
Someone needs to do an old-school Glenn Beck-style chalkboard conspiracy diagram connecting everyone in the SF effective altruism/AI community. Daniela Amodei (Dario’s sister) is married to GiveWell and Open Philanthropy founder Holden Karnofsky. Im not sure what this means, but I’m sure it means something.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Laughing my ass off at the idea of ChatGPT translating some Korean grunt's journal entry as, "you're right, today's victory not only ensures the survival of worker's communism, but ten thousand years of Kim Il Sung."
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Usually when one wants a rock moved one hires a local firm. This local firm owns or rents an earthmover. At no point do you have to worry about whether Caterpillar Inc. will charge a licensing fee or have an opinion on whether or not the rock ought to be moved.
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
I'll say it. Jason Arday did the only truly honorable thing he could do in this situation. Western truthseeking institutions can only benefit if the socialy-expected response to being exposed as a complete academic fraud becomes to seek Canadian healthcare.
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
Why does making faces and doing silly walks make a conventionally attractive woman even more attractive? The effect goes beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching.
Actually it doesn't go beyond the well-established TikTok practice of dancing and lip-synching. The Instagram algorithm (I don't use TikTok) has essentially solved female attractiveness. Not that it was ever a secret what men find attractive. There's just not much alpha in taking the extra step up from low-cut shirts and flirtatious poses unless one wants to be an OnlyFans model influencer.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
What was won?
We got the marketplace of ideas back.
If you want something less abstract, there is now a general consensus among serious people that demographic performance differentials (whether or not they are genetic or environmental in origin) are real. The idea that all measured gaps are artifacts of testing bias or an unjust economic system did not withstand public scrutiny.
Quantumfreakonomics
10d ago
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
edit: my post just got removed from /r/books again! And this time I removed all references/use of llms and links, which is what the moderator told me got me removed last time. Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
It's not a conspiracy theory. Reddit moderators will remove posts simply because they don't like them. "AI slop" is just the newest excuse. Previously it was "bad faith", "trolling", or "we can't moderate posts this spicy". It isn't an invitation for you to remove the LLM-generated text or demonstrate your earnestness. They are telling you to shut up.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
The law that can be named is not the true law and the follow-up Against Truth give you a good feel for his style, strengths, and weaknesses (no, it is not actually good to be against truth). I'm partial to Douglas Murray, gruesome toady and The world’s first matcha labubu genocide, which is unfortunately behind a partial paywall.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
I’m quite fond of the “My Father’s Instant Mashed Potatoes” review on ACX because it is about a simple but often ignored truth: the food that people ate in the 70s, 80s, and 90s was absolutely terrible. It was cheaper because it sucked.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
I remember a video of someone heckling Kamala Harris about Gaza, but he used the authentic Arabic pronunciation so I had no idea what he was saying.
Quantumfreakonomics
16d ago
This was a three-person race not too long ago. Mallory McMorrow was the best candidate on paper. Every neoliberal Twitter poaster loved her, but her campaign was done in by a series of forced and unforced errors, most revealing of which was the discovery that she doesn’t actually like Michigan, preferring New York or California (shocker).
I’m not convinced that Stevens would do better in November than El Sayed. A lot of people in Dearborn simply would not vote for such an openly pro-Israel candidate.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
There is a great new Substack article about the populist backlash to AI data centers by Jasmine Sun. She also did an interview with Ezra Klein for those of you who like audio content.
I like the article because Sun speaks fluent Silicon Valleyish while also taking the time and effort to visit and talk to the people on the ground in the rural Midwest instead of condecending at them from the coasts. She asks an important question: why precisely do people hate data centers so much?
Looking only at the statistics, AI land use and water use issues are fake. Nowhere is running out of land, and nowhere (West of San Antonio at least) is running out of water. Are the people in these communities stupid? Do they not know how to shut up and multiply?
It turns out that a lot of the fear and anger stems from a combination of distrust and PTSD from deindustrialization. An interesting example is Janesville, Wisconsin, a town with a giant concrete slab in the middle of it where the GM plant used to be.
“Small communities don’t have the legal budget to negotiate well. You’ll never hold a company to a contract,” said Cathy, who feared Janesville once again tying itself to a single big employer—especially one in a “high-risk industry” like AI. City officials were promising to lower wheel and property taxes on residents, but that assumes everything goes right. What if the project gets abandoned? How does Janesville avoid “another GM plant scenario”?
Fascinating. The collapse of the auto industry in 2008 was apparently so bad that it is better to prevent industrial development alltogether in order to avoid the risk of another collapse. It almost makes sense until you think about it for 30 seconds.
"I ask the three what they envision being built here instead, but don’t get much of an answer. I suspect that Adam is partly right—maybe this is a choice between a hyperscale data center and a concrete slab. And Alyssa, Cathy, and Kaycee would rather pick the slab."
Some of the objections Sun hears in other towns fare a bit better.
In 2017, the Village of Mount Pleasant, Racine County, and State of Wisconsin offered over $4 billion in tax incentives and infrastructure investments to win a bidding war for a Foxconn plant. In return, Foxconn promised Mount Pleasant—population 26,000—a $10 billion investment that would create 13,000 jobs making flat-screen TVs. The village eminent domained the land and prepared infrastructure. But Foxconn kept downsizing their plans, citing high labor costs. By the end of 2024, just over a thousand jobs had been created. Mount Pleasant was saddled with over $183 million in debt that Foxconn and Microsoft are still servicing.
The memory of the Foxconn fiasco is still raw. We heard it referenced in conversation after conversation as a flaming symbol of corporate failure.
This is the steelman of the anti-data center position. People are worried that the big companies proposing data centers are going to Foxconn them and not deliver the supposed benefits.
My conversations make me wonder if the technical content of data center deals is mostly beside the point. Closed-loop cooling systems? “I don’t believe them.” Paying millions in taxes? “I don’t believe them.” Creating a thousand jobs? “I don’t believe them.” I hear a reflexive skepticism of every claim.
Rather, the way that AI companies engage with communities—forcing NDAs, dangling billion-dollar promises, pushing environmental externalities far away from AI’s wealthy user base—resembles a classic story about dark money in politics. Your politicians are being bought by billionaires and gigantic corporations to screw you over. It’s not Skynet: it’s the oligarchy.
One of the things that comes across especially clear in the Ezra Klein interview is just how unprepared the AI companies were for the backlash. They didn't realize how sketchy it comes across to insist on NDAs with local officials when negotiating deals. They thought, as a straightforward application of Coase's Theorem would tell you, that any bumps in the road could be ironed out by handing over a big bag of money. It turns out that people don't work that way. It feels like a bribe, and Americans do not like being bribed.
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
Now this is a real question: is it ethical to shoplift from Whole Foods to collect on a debt if Amazon owes you money and refuses to pay?
Quantumfreakonomics
17d ago
It will be interesting to see if the Mamdani administration prefers shortages, or if they prefer lines. Each way has its pros and cons.
Quantumfreakonomics
18d ago
Dragonball Z was instrumental in teaching kids how the real world works. The guy who beat everyone up gets best girl, the autist is stuck with his childhood sweetheart, the short guy has to marry a robot, and the old guy that owns his own island is a giant perv.
Quantumfreakonomics
20d ago
I also noticed this surprisingly major border dispute a few years ago. Growing up in the United States, this was never mentioned in school. Occasionally we had maps with a dotted line through Morocco and small-font text that said "Western Sahara", but this was never remarked on in class.
I’m starting to see this as a big L for Singerite utilitarianism. Anthropic and OpenAI were both founded for an ostensibly charitable purpose. Some of this is cynical posturing, but I think most of the key people genuinely feel like they have an obligation to be charitable with the windfall from the technology they are building. A normal company fulfills their social obligation for charity by sponsoring local little league teams, the regional food bank, parks, and schools, but since Anthropic (and to an extent OpenAI) are Singerite utilitarians, they see local feel-good projects like these as “ineffective” altruism.
More options
Context Copy link