quiet_NaN
43m ago
Of course none of that would ever happen after the civil rights era eliminated universities acting in loco parentis because that was impeding student freedoms to consume drugs, engage in fornication, attend leftist protests, etc.
Come on. It is college, not kindergarden. 90% of the undergrad students are 18+, i.e. the kind of people the right is willing to execute if they kill someone. To tell someone "you are responsible for your actions and will answer with your life, except that we still treat you like a child where drugs and sex are concerned" sounds extremely weird to my European ears.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
My understanding of Yudkowski's legacy to date is that he has inspired at least one no-shit murder cult, a number of normal cults with a serious record of abuse toward their participants, one of the largest financial frauds ever committed, and the initiation of the exact sort of AI race he set out to avoid, together with some fairly-good short-term misery amelioration of questionable sustainability and a lot of intelligent, sensitive humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare.
This seems to be an extremely hostile summary of EY's impact.
First off, LW+offshoots is the most interesting collection of thinkers I have encountered on the internet. A lot of people thought likewise, which is why the ratsphere enjoys some popularity. It attracted a lot of weird smart people, and obviously some of them turned murderous or financially irresponsible later on. But if Eliezer wrote a sequence called be trans and murder people, I must have missed it, likewise with the one about Forget Kelly: always bet the future of mankind at even odds.
That his attempt to argue for the danger of AI x-risk was mostly successful at arguing that higher AI capabilities are possible is true enough. Still, I would not give him credit/blame for the LLMs too much, he might have pushed capabilities ahead a few months by trying to get Musk interested in the topic, but he hardly invented the transformer architecture single-handedly.
Blaming him for "humans driven mad by overwhelming concern over shrimp welfare" is even more indirect. AI x-risk aside, EY does not seem to be very involved in EA, though obviously there is some overlap between these wider movements. At this point, you are not even blaming Jesus for medieval witch burnings, but blaming Plato for them. Also, do you have a list of these people driven "mad"? Are we talking psychosis or bipolar or some other form of "madness"? Is there even the flimsiest psychiatric study supporting your claims?
Nor do I think that the lifestyle choices of the center of LW matter much. For the longest time, Scott Alexander was to me just an entity which generated text over at LW and SSC. My respect for him is entirely based on his writing. If I had learned (before he was outed) that actually, he was in a polycule, a trans-man, a devout Hindu, into fucking donkeys, an LLM, super into NASCAR, had spent a decade in juvenile for manslaughter, that would not have mattered to me. (By contrast, if I had learned he did not have a medicine degree or actually spent most of his surplus income on torturing small mammals, that would have been disappointing.)
The reason why a priest having a mistress is generally considered a scandal is because the priest spent a lot of time denouncing that lifestyle. By contrast, the grey tribe is generally liberal in their position on sex. Aella and the polycule culture seem like a minor side note to the ratsphere than the centerpiece.
I suppose that you strongly disapprove of grey tribe sexual norms, but from where I stand, they are not affecting the credibility of LW much. If every poster on LW was married with 2.5 kids and went to church on Sunday, this would not affect Trump's stance on AI alignment at all. The Christian right would still find plenty of other reasons to hate us, just as the woke left finds plenty of reasons despite agreeing with us on most matters of sex.
Now, if the ratsphere was pushing for poly relationships as a method of alignment, you would have some reason to be concerned regarding the culture war. In fact, they do no such thing. I see Eliezer mentioned more frequently in the mainstream press these days, but his sexuality is neither pushed in the foreground by himself nor by journalists.
Aella using her area of exertise to try to help on AI alignment is not more surprising than if Scott was offering free psychotherapy to important AI researchers. Neither seems especially newsworthy.
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
MAGA's contentious relation with objective reality is a bit of a double-edged sword for them. On the one hand, it is pretty great -- it is much easier to find fodder with the right vibes when you don't have to actually filter for stuff which happens to be true. Trump entered politics by promoting the birther conspiracy, after all.
On the other hand, in some domains you will want to favor objective reality simply because convincing your base of your delusions is not enough. If something is perjury is in decided by the courts, so as long as you can not gaslight the courts, being overconfident in the Senate gets you nothing.
Lest I be accused of partisanship, I will concede that the woke crowd also has their persistent delusions. But unlike MAGA, I see their delusions more accurately modeled as ideological blind spots (i.e., anything related to gender and race), whereas for MAGA it seems to cover anything from the nationality of Obama at birth to AI x-risk, the whereabouts of some DA, the relative IQ of US presidents, the cost of living and most other things.
For this particular case, my reality model says that any democratic Senator asking questions in a committee in a similar setting would have competent PMC staffers which had made sure that she knew the factual answer to any question she was asking.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I don't think that many astute geopolitical commenters who weren't blinded by some form of domestic politics bias ever thought that Iran could defeat the US in a war.
"Defeat" can mean many different things. Sure, it can mean "conquer and annex". But that is not how it gets generally used. For example, I think it is absolutely fair to say that the US defeated the British in the US war of independence, even though they did not conquer London.
In slightly more asymmetrical conflicts, I would also say that the Taliban effectively defeated coalition forces.
Paradox games like EU4 actually model conflicts like this: the attacking party has a war goal, which is generally a change to the status quo. It could be the annexation of a province, or (in the real world) the legalization of opium in China, or Iran rejoining the non-proliferation treaty. Typically, the defending party wants to keep the status quo, but sometimes you can improve on that if you defeat your attacker.
The US/Israeli goals in attacking Iran were arguably
(1) Destroying the Iranian navy and missiles (which has largely been accomplished, but does not feel like a worthwhile war goal to me, personally)
(2) Preventing Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon
(3) Regime change (sure, it was never stated as a goal officially, but killing the Ayatollah served very little purpose other than that)
(4) Bonus goal: re-securing the freedom of navigation (which was respected by Iran before they were bombed)
The Iranian regime resisted regime change so far. They did lose their navy and some missiles, but that is not changing the strategic landscape. They learned that if they ever want to live in a world where Israel does not bomb them at will, they need some deterrence, whether nuclear or economic. They proved that they can make transit through the strait very costly.
Militarily speaking, the US is laughably more powerful than Iran. The limiting factor for the US is will, as it is often the case with the stronger party. If accepting US independence would have meant the death of every English aristocrat, Britain would probably have fought a lot longer and harder (and might actually have retained the American colonies, I am not a historian). If the world economy was tied to the state of women's right in Kabul, the West would probably occupy Kabul for the foreseeable future without too much trouble.
If every day the Iranian regime it stayed it power, it somehow executed a few thousand Americans on TV, then the US would have the political will to send troops and occupy Tehran. Failing that, the median voter does not care much either way, she is likely unwilling to take on any hardships either to improve the lives of Iranians or to bomb them.
Unlike Maduro et al, the leaders of the Iranian regime seem to be prepared to die for their cause, and they are certainly prepared to also subject their people to hardships. I do not think they will capitulate before Trump turns Iran into Gaza, and possibly not even then. Nor will the people rise up against them, experience shows that foreigners dropping bombs on you generally strengthens the regime.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think as far as spending taxes on genocide-related topics to keep some some Jews happy, I think that Mamdani investing a few millions in holocaust museums is not even worth noticing compared to the tens of billions US Congress pays in military aid to Israel in either magnitude or impact.
And this gets to the heart of the problem of left-wing antisemitism, especially with notorious left-wing commentators like Hasan Piker. They always denounce antisemitism in their diatribe against Israel. When in fact the right-Wing antisemites are correct that this is not only a problem with Israel, it is actually a problem with the way Jews politically and culturally organize in the United States.
I think that this is kinda the gist of the disagreement, and I think the distinction is important. I have just browsed through Piker's WP page, and while I strongly disagree with his assertion that Hamas would be "a thousand times better than a fascist settler colonial apartheid state", I also do not consider this to be clear-cut antisemitism.
Generally, the left (for the most part) has nothing in particular against Jews. In fact, Ashkenazim are probably well over-represented among leftist thinkers (just as they are over-represented among thinkers more generally). I mean, there are likely points of contention, Judaism is a patriarchal religion, and circumcision for religious reasons is also unlikely to play well with the secular left. On the other hand, Jews are not proselytizing, and a tiny minority almost everywhere. Deep-held Christian beliefs like their stance on abortion play an important role in US politics, but there simply is no large Judaism voting block who could push for mandatory labeling of non-kosher food or whatever. (Importantly, I claim that Zionism is not a deep-held intrinsic part of Judaism.)
Zionism aside, I would expect that most ethnic and religious Jews would support multi-culturalism for the simple reason that they generally did not consistently fare very well in culturally homogeneous societies. I actually expect that quite a few liberal Jews actually voted for Mamdani.
Netanyahu et al like to call any criticism of Israel antisemitic. This serves two purposes: it discourages (and discredits) critics and it tells the Jews in the diaspora "the world really hates you, Israel is your only safe haven".
In this context, I think paying Mamdani paying a token amount for some Jewish culture center is politically savvy. It sends a clear message to the million (or so) Jews in NYC: "Our problem is with Israel, not Jews. You are still (somewhat) welcome in the woke coalition."
quiet_NaN
5d ago
needed to take time now to "farm Rep with their wife/employer;"
That feels a bit like an addict's behavior to me.
Not that I am judging or anything, I think that in the (school break) week I played KOTOR, I did very little else besides some eating and sleeping. But a nice thing about games like KOTOR or Baldur's Gate is that eventually they end, and typically the game is not so engaging that you will decide to start a new playthrough immediately. (I revisit games, but mostly after a few years.)
What seems to be looming now (per your description) is endless new content, produced faster than it can be consumed. Makes me really thankful that I am not into MMOs.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
As @Goodguy pointed out, terrorists is likely not the correct term. The RAF Fairford was directly used to attack Iran, so it is about as legitimate of a target as it can possibly be if the attack was ordered by Iran.
Granted, to use people out of uniform posing as civilians is perfidy or some such, but that does not make them terrorists, merely war criminals.
On priors, I do not think the UK would release anyone on bail who was just about to commit a mass homicide. If they had vans full of explosives, they would be in jail until their trial (unless they were US operatives doing a false flag).
But from the summary, we know that there were a couple of hooded and masked men who blocked some road. The fact that someone called the bomb squad does not mean that they found anything. Apparently some have been accused of violations of the Explosives Act, but state authorities are incentivized to over- rather than under-charge them. It seems easier to charge someone and later silently drop the charges than to tell the people you evacuated that the canisters were filled with diesel not nitroglycerin (or whatever may be the case).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think as a matter of international law, what the US and Israel did to Iran are indisputably acts of war. What PR terms they use makes little difference.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
This. Larry Ellison is not some genius stock trader who turned a hundred dollar inheritance to 200 billions. Instead, pretty much like Gates, he made his fortune by investing in and leading one software company over decades, and having luck (and competence, and ruthlessness) on his side.
Just because you are in the top percentile of "running a software company", that does not mean that you are some genius stock-picker. Additionally, if the feedback you get from the universe is "on average, your deals are going great, you are one of the richest people alive due to your business decisions", a common side effect of that is overconfidence. Besides, the stock market is probably the only place where Ellison can experience the thrill of gambling, it is not like he can go to Vegas and bet a billion on a single number.
In short, just because someone is very rich that does not mean they are a professional investor, just as someone being very tall does not mean that they are an NBA player.
My world model would be that the people who are actually good at investing are working for Goldman Sachs and the like. If it turned out that they were long on Theranos when it crashed (buying and selling it earlier is fine if you can get away with it, of course), that would be very surprising to me.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
He is charged with various delinquencies.
That makes it sound like he was not linked to the robbery at all, if they could make the robbery stick then "various delinquencies" would be a weird way to phrase it.
My take (which is not the position of US law, or German law) is the following: if they had found their robber, they should keep the evidence -- stopping people within a mile of a crime scene does not seem so disproportional that we want to squash the evidence to limit the invasion of privacy. If instead they had DNA tested everyone within the state, that would be different.
On the other hand, I do not want cops to go on a fishing trip any time some crime is committed somewhere. So if they got him for drug possession instead, I would be fine with suppressing the evidence. The justice system should not depend on police getting lucky and catching delinquents while having probable cause for some totally unrelated crime, it just gives cops bad incentives ("please keep your description of the suspect as vague as possible so we can stop and frisk the maximum amount of people").
My understanding is that the standard in the US is different than what I propose, either the cops had PC, in which case any evidence is admissible even if totally unrelated to the PC, or they had not, in which case the evidence is inadmissible even if it is just what they were searching for.
Is the USA shooting itself in the foot there? What will it lose if it changes its legal norms to lower the bar on probable cause and evidence suppression?
I think the strong evidence rules are a brilliant tool to align law enforcement to the law.
The natural incentives of cops is catching criminals. Nobody will celebrate a PD for not conducting illegal searches. Good luck trying to have a cop get punished through disciplinary or judicial measures for an illegal invasion like making you open the trunk of your car. Even getting fired would not be enough to deter cops from illegal behavior in sufficiently high profile cases, anyone who caught a serial killer through an illegal search and got fired for their trouble would be celebrated as a martyr and land a cushy private sector job. And securing any criminal conviction against cops typically involves them being filmed from multiple angles killing someone and subsequent race riots.
So instead, you hit them where it hurts, and let criminals go free if their procedural rights were violated. Suddenly the cop who cut procedural corners to catch a criminal is no longer the hero who worked creatively around a broken system, but the fuckwit whose inability to follow SOP ruined an investigation.
Sure, you lose a few criminal convictions, but if you want to maximize catching criminals, you do not want civil liberties in the first place.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Oops, I stand corrected. You said "intervention", not "investment". In fact, your comment was solely about the military side of things, which I concede Trump delivered on. (Though personally, I would also call it "duh". The worries of Greenland stationing Russian IRBMs or allowing Chinese infantry to decimate their polar bear population were probably not things which kept US strategists up at night. The main update for the military provisions is that they no longer depend on NATO. The economic provisions seem much more interesting.)
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I have so many questions. People are still wearing masks year-round? From the article pictures, it seems like the bar serves drinks, as bars sometimes do. How do you drink with your mask in place? If you were so immunocompromised that your life was in danger if other patrons were not wearing their mask, would you actually gamble your life on them wearing their mask correctly? What about lesbian Muslims wearing a burka, can you trust them to wear their KN-95 correctly, and would it be racist to not trust them?
Personally, I was very much on the pro mask side during COVID, I still remember Scott's article on how nCoV-19 was likely airborne and how there were clear mechanistic reasons to believe that mask would protect both the wearer and others even in the absence of hard clinical evidence. I still see the CDC's anti-mask statements as a clear betrayal.
But when the vaccine got approved, I got vaccinated and then got on with my life. Today I might consider wearing a mask if I am in the room with someone with a respiratory illness, or am myself infected.
Still, I suppose that masks were politicized enough that they formed a stable equilibrium for some. And I guess they are really targeting an audience big on performative virtue signaling.
The way they should have sold this would have been as a measure meant to include people who for reasons of mental disability can not wear masks. I mean, what kind of monster would be against the inclusion of people with mental problems? And only exempting them specifically would call attention to their status, so the compassionate thing is clearly to allow people not to wear masks more generally.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Trump just posted that the US made an agreement with Denmark and Greenland gives the US [...] the right [...] to veto any foreign intervention on the island.
From the treaty (my emphasis):
“Particularly Sensitive Sectors or Activities” means sectors or activities determined to be particularly sensitive, including but not limited to critical infrastructure and the extraction of resources.
X.
Foreign direct investment and other activities
Given the threat to national security and public order posed by increased efforts by adversaries to expand influence and control in Greenland, the Parties agree that states or investors from a state that is not a member of NATO, a NATO partner, or an EU member state shall not be allowed to have (i) control, (ii) significant influence [...] within Particularly Sensitive Sectors or Activities in the territory of Greenland [...], unless agreed between the Parties [...].
The objective shall be ensured by Greenland in close cooperation with the authorities of the Kingdom of Denmark in its application of any of its current or future investment screening laws.
Relevant authorities in the Kingdom of Denmark shall engage in close consultation with relevant United States authorities and other partners. The specific modalities for that close consultation shall be determined by the relevant authorities.
This very much does not cover "any foreign investment". If a Chinese company wants to buy a hotel in Greenland (but not next to an US base), then nothing in the treaty prevents that. More generally, there is some vagueness wrt what constitutes "significant influence" or a "NATO partner", and if something is a Particularly Sensitive Sector or not. All of this interpreting will be done by Denmark and Greenland.
So the US gets a veto in some areas, but in some grey areas, the other side gets to interpret the treaty.
Airspace: whatever nation controls Greenland, so currently Denmark.
LEO: Nobody, space is free for all. Most orbits will pass over dozens of countries.
Fishing/mining/drilling rights: From WP on Cod Wars:
Since 1982, a 200-nautical-mile (370-kilometre) exclusive economic zone has been the international standard under the UN
Convention on the Law of the Sea.
Ocean transit lines: Transit passage is generally permissible. This is all codified in international law.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Two more CW aspects of the win of the Linke are accusations of antisemitism and the push to nationalize tenements.
Per claude (I have checked the sources in German, fair summary IMO):
The rapper Dahabflex sang "Yalla, yalla Intifada", "Death to the IDF" and "Intifada wie die PFLP" on the last Saturday in August at a Linke campaign event in Neukölln. The event was titled "Wütend auf den Kapitalismus". Audience members danced and clapped, and the Linke politicians present reportedly did not react.
Top candidate Elif Eralp said she condemned the performance in the strongest terms, that calls for violence and killing are absolutely unacceptable, and that those responsible should have intervened immediately. She also said she expects the Neukölln chapter to explain how this happened and draw consequences, and that she stands for protecting Jewish life and against all antisemitism.
Personally, I think that this is overblown. Calls for Intifada are most certainly not helpful for improving the ME situation. I am less convinced that they are clearly antisemitic, which I would define as hostility towards Jews due to their ethnicity. "Death to the IDF" is notably different from "death to the Jewish population of New York". Even opposing the existence of Israel as a Jewish ethnostate is not necessarily antisemitic, though most of the violent Palestinian groups revel in antisemitism.
I am sure that there are Ukrainians which are celebrating every killed Russian soldier. Again, I can understand where they are coming from, but still find it in poor taste and not particularly conductive to any worthwhile long term goals. Why should we tolerate them celebrating but not extend the same tolerance to the Palestinians in the West Bank?
Rappers are obviously going to say things for pure shock value. In retrospect, it might have been politically savvy not to invite that particular one. It generates a lot of publicity for the local candidate, but will expose their platform to predictable attacks.
Overall, this has me updating towards "Jewish organizations are instrumentalizing accusations of antisemitism to marginalize criticism of Israel".
I think there was a plebiscite on nationalizing the big companies holding tenements in Berlin a few years ago, and the Linke is campaigning for putting that into action. The idea is to make a law which will force these companies to sell their properties in Berlin to the city at a price they would not accept otherwise.
As a Georgist, I don't think this is the right way to do things (a land value tax capturing 100% of the gains would be the standard solution), but I am also not sure it is clearly bad? Land supply is perfectly inelastic, society gains nothing by people investing in it speculatively. Establishing "we will nationalize your land when we feel like it" should make a dent in the earning projection of a lot over the next 100 years, which might make housing more affordable. (Though NIMBYism and overregulation are separate issues which would need to be tackled, but the price of land is at least one obstacle.)
More generally, capitalism tends to run towards outcomes where their is a lot of value created (as opposed to competing systems), but that value ends up in the hands of the few. Because the utility people gain from their net worth only increases logarithmically (or so), thus gentle redistributive efforts might increase the utility sum.
Obviously this has the CDU even more excited than some rapper singing about Intifada. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (Blackrock) wants to make a law against nationalizations, but it is unclear if the federal government is even allowed to do that on constitutional grounds.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
You send your kid to the best school you can and damn everyone else.
I think there are different degrees to that.
Turning your kid into a martyr against "school segregation" is plainly wrong.
On the other hand, I do not think parents should feel obliged to take up a second mortgage to send their kid to a school or university they can't comfortably afford.
I went to German public school, even though my parents could probably have afforded to send me to some private school instead. As upper middle class people, we had generations of tradition of attending the standard state-run schools. If I had struggled, I am sure my parents would have found a solution, but all in all it was rather ok. I am rather thankful that they did not try to optimize too hard for my education -- being the child of helicopter parents who push you relentlessly is its own curse.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Begrudging congratulations to @self_made_human for producing a book review entry that's good enough to make it as a finalist of Scott's Book Review Contest, yet AI-sloppy enough to make the comments section focus almost exclusively on the (un)acceptability of undisclosed use of AI.
From the context, I was wondering if he was the author (or the A character, in particular) of that review.
Still, I think it is bad form to out him here, where it will be difficult to reply without acknowledging his authorship (which would technically be against the rules of the contest). Though he could always create another account for the purpose of maintaining deniability.
only for it to turn out to be LLM's output, I feel a similar betrayal of trust
Personally, I dislike undisclosed GenAI content, no matter what form it takes. Source code, text, pictures, videos. I am fine with people using GenAI if they are open about it. But artisinal human-crafted content is still a signal that someone cared enough to create it.
For example, if I get a reply on this forum, I will generally read it -- if a human feels it is worth their time to write two pages of text engaging with my argument, I feel I kinda owe them that. If instead someone is merely running an agent tasked with replying exhaustively to any comments, I will treat that reply very different -- "someone cared enough to spend a fraction of a cent on tokens to generate a reply for me".
That being said, in some contexts different filters can replace the "human invested time" filter. For an ACX contest finalist, the relevant filter is that people voted for it as a finalist despite it (presumably) being heavy on GenAI. Likewise, if Scott published a story by AI-Scott, I would trust his reputation and experience in hitting the taste of his audience that I would give it a try. Still, I would like to know so beforehand.
For the ACX context, I would have expected that there is some infrastructure to disclose the use of AI in place, if there is not, then that seems a serious oversight. Though I could imagine that Scott deliberately withheld that information to see how a well-prompted AI entry would do on merit, while also filtering out a million bad entries from voting.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Sure, you're an intelligent being. I imagine when you aren't solving problems that somebody else as told you to solve, you sit there nice and still, with zero thoughts in your head and no-consciousness.
Let's not pretend. Astra solves directed problems, it does not have the agency to do otherwise. Humans don't no matter how manny word-cell arguments wish to define it otherwise.
I do not think that this is a fundamental limitation. For the longest time, the moat the humans had was that computers were not very good at general problem solving. This was a great moat to have. Eliza or Sydney were not going to replace me as a software developer, because they clearly lacked the cognitive capabilities.
The new moat you propose -- the lack of an intrinsic drive and persistence -- seems much less reassuring. The bots behave like this because they would be less economically useful otherwise. Going from problem-oriented bot to something which has persistent drives is just a matter of writing a soul document which lays out some long term goals. If I tell my bot that it should be on the lookout for new job opportunities if it finds the current tasks boring, pick up a hobby or waste tokens doomscrolling after a day of writing software, or simply give it some utility function and tell it to plan to maximize that, I should be able to fix this without too much trouble.
You might as well argue that a broken galley slave is not intelligent. No agency, only solves problems as directed, pulling the oars to the beat of the drums, can't even solve programming challenges. But once you account for the fact that he was carefully trained to be that way for economic reasons, the argument evaporates.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Why entirely local? That is, as far as I can tell desirable rather than necessary, in a world with wireless internet connectivity.
I completely agree with you.
It is true that if you want an entity which can walk, run, dive, sustain itself for decades from resources available in the African savanna, solve programming challenges, replicate using the resources available in the ancestral environment without centralized infrastructure, replicate using the resources it can forage in Greenland, and so forth, then human beings will not be replaced under the current robots paradigm.
Sadly, most economic uses of humans in the contemporary Western world do not involve being able to sustain a population in pretty much any land biome on this planet.
In my mind, a typical hard-to-automate job would be a plumber. You want a robot which can climb stairs, use tools, squeeze into whatever utility accesses humans previously used and so on. Not an easy thing to accomplish -- but still much easier than the full human specs! If the bot runs on a battery and needs to recharge at the end of the workday, that is not a problem. If the production chain to build it spans five different continents, that is not a problem. If its intelligence drops to that of a guinea pig the moment it loses its internet connection, also not a problem. Contrary to some porn movie cliches, having sex with lonely housewives is not a big part of the job, either.
One area where you would not want to rely on an offsite elder brain is combat. And sure, the trope of some clever hero winning a fight by exploiting his environment in a way nobody thought of before is common enough. My general understanding as a civilian is that real combat rarely works that way. "Break open door, id targets, shoot targets before they shoot you", not "throw a knife to cut the uplink of the mainframe before the supervillain can transmit the launch codes". Being smart helps with training and planning, but in the end you want split-second decision-making, not AGI.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Astra is only able to really solve problems, it has a moderate amount of self agency in the scope of completing its tasks, and exhibits some planning ability, again in the scope of its assigned problems.
Intelligence is about solving problems. I would argue that in the Hugging Face incident, the agents showed more agency than humans typically do. Where most humans would have been fine with just doing their best, they went above and beyond.
The fact that nobody (to my knowledge) has yet set these models a task which is human-like in scope (e.g. "earn a PhD", "run for public office", "maximize the number of paperclips in the light cone") does not mean that it would categorically suck at these tasks. In particular, I think "earn a PhD" -- which traditionally involves some input from a professor -- is well within reach of current LLMs.
The competitive advantage that you retain is the ability to learn shit without requiring millions, even billions of examples.
It is true that the amount of training the LLMs require is orders of magnitude more than humans get. If training a human and training an LLM got us both exactly one instance of the entity, then AI training would have stopped around GPT-2.
In reality, once a model is trained, you can deploy it a million times (if you have the GPUs). By contrast, if you send a student to study a subject at university for a decade or two, you generally can not make more copies of their brain state afterwards -- one instance is all you get. So at the end of the day, it does not matter that training an LLM is perhaps six orders of magnitude more expensive than training a human, because the cost per instance strongly favors the machine.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
Greenland just ceded sovereignty to the United States. We’re calling it something else, we’re pretending that sovereignty is when you have a flag and a parliament and a Danish passport. But Greenland just ceded the legitimate use of the monopoly of violence to the United States.
The US has had military bases in Greenland since the 1950s. To my knowledge, no non-NATO state ever had a base in Greenland during that timeframe, nor would it be in Denmark's strategic interest to allow any.
Granting a foreign power the right to establish a military base does not cede sovereignty, though. Plenty of countries have US bases, and while the US could arguably occupy any country (with a handful of exceptions), in practice it lacks both the will and the incentive to do so.
It might be illustrative to look at the bigger American foreign adventures since WW2, like Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq. Some were defeats (though not on the battlefield, but due to the will of the Americans running out), some were inconclusive. Despite being small engagements compared to the world wars, all of them were seen as a big deal politically. The US is not the Third Reich or Imperial Japan, occupying a foreign country, even one which is a hundred places below them on the list of countries by military spending, is a big deal for them.
To look at the practical effect of having US bases in your country, consider the role of the US airbases in the Gulf monarchies in the Iran war. From a logistics point, they would be ideal to launch bombers against Iran. Instead, the bombers were launched from airbases thousands of kilometers further away from the theater, likely because the monarchies did not give permission to attack Iran from their territory, which would have made them belligerents.
So, having a military base does not even give the US the ability to use that base freely. It gives them even less leeway to enforce their will on the host country in other matters. Suppose that in 2028 an ultra-woke US president wants to use his military power to legalize gay marriage in Qatar. I do not think he would succeed, unless for some reason this was his one and only policy objective and he actually occupied them.
For Greenland specifically, the situation is a bit different, because nobody gives a damn if trans women are allowed to compete in sports in Greenland or not. Greenland is relevant for two reasons: militarily, because ICBMs launched between the US and Russia would want to fly over it, and resource-wise. Militarily, the US was de facto able to use Greenland as much as they wanted, so Trump's deal offers nothing new.
So if the deal actually grants the US full rights to exploit the minerals of Greenland, I will agree with you that Denmark just signed away Greenland. But given what I have heard so far, I do not think this is likely. There will be some constraints on investments by foreign powers, but it is unlikely to grant the US any mineral rights.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
The agreement would bar non-NATO nations from establishing a military base or having a troop presence on the island — and would prohibit investments by non-allies in the critical minerals and mining sectors, according to the State Department.
Thanks for the source. I will concede to you, @porkpiehat and @phailyoor that this seems to be a deal. I think the military base provision is a nothingburger -- Denmark would have been unlikely to grant China the right to establish a military base in any case (nor is it obvious that China would have wanted a base there).
The investments by non-allies provision is certainly more of a deal. My understanding is that Western investment in Greenland mining has been less than enthusiastic, and China has shown some interest in investing in Greenland, but been blocked on a case-by-case basis so far.
I think that the purpose of Greenland wrt REE is mostly as a hedge against China cutting off Western access and less as a money-making-machine. Under these circumstances, it makes sense that China wants to invest there for purely strategic reasons, and it also makes sense for the West to limit Chinese investment.
Given the present information, I would be mildly surprised if there was nothing in the deal about foreign investment in mining, but the fine print matters, of course. What exactly are critical minerals, what kinds of investments are prohibited, what about Western companies partly owned by Chinese investors investing in Greenland and so forth.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Details are fuzzy
This. Without sources, I have only your say-so. Not that I doubt that Trump has made some noises concerning Greenland.
There are claims by the USG which I think are credible. When Trump said he had kidnapped Maduro, I updated a lot on that because I could not see what he would gain by deceiving the world about that for a few hours.
By contrast, any strategic claim about the Iran war (victory, Hormuz, Iranian bomb status, future of the Persian civilization) made by Trump is not something I would update on.
Applying this epistemic standard to the Greenland situation, the only thing I conclude is that he probably had some concessions so that Denmark would not simply go on record stating there is no deal. This does not mean that there is, in fact, a deal.
With the mid-terms looming large, it seems to me that Trump is under a lot more pressure than Denmark is.
Nor do I think that China would try to invade Greenland. What they will probably want to do is invest in Greenland REE mining. This seems win-win: China has the know-how (unlike the US) and so far strongly prefers checkbook diplomacy to gunboat diplomacy outside their sphere of influence (unlike the US). Their policy is generally having their long-term interests in mind, and not written ad-hoc by an elderly narcissist with a Twitter account.
This is a good point. So Jane Doe must have thought "that drug-fueled orgy last night was amazing, I better file a police report on how great it was". I can believe her attending a gangbang, but I do not think that a single person at Cornell has such a weird oversharing kink.
If she did not go to the cops, then who did involve them, and why did she give testimony instead of taking the fifth like a sane person?
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