P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
6d ago
"Knowledge oligarchy" implies the people who know How Things Work will be better off than the ones who don't. That's true now and it will be for a while longer, but mature AI simply renders human intelligence obsolete. The computer is faster than you and smarter than you and way cheaper than you; you simply won't be able to compete, and even trying means wasting effort that could have gone into... whatever does matter in this new world. Social status games, probably.
Like, the vast majority of people used to be involved in agriculture. Over the past couple centuries there's been a precipitous drop in general farming acumen. So is there now a 'farmer oligarchy?' Not even close. In fact, the skill set of the people who do farm is enormously different from the farmers of the past -- the only people keeping that tradition alive are irrelevant hobbyists and idealogues.
So, yes, systems will become more opaque to humans trying to understand them personally, but why would you ever do that? In practice they'll be much more transparent, because you'll just ask your own AI to figure it out for you.
P-Necromancer
8d ago
Well, this is why it's good to get a second opinion. Thanks. I guess all this culture warring really has made me too sensitive.
Ah, well, maybe I'm just not sensitive enough. I'm bad at noticing patterns like that if I don't know to look for them -- I didn't even realize almost all the villains and almost none of the heroes in the new Star Wars trilogy were white men until I heard someone point it out.
But I do have a related criticism that a barely-industrialized world clashes with modern libertine sexual and gender politics. Magic or no magic, it makes no sense to pretend that gay relationships and casual sex are "just normal" in a society that's barely above subsistence level.
Oh, this one I noticed. But yeah, I think it's just table stakes for modern low brow fantasy -- that or some caricature of oppression the protagonist has to overcome, though that's thankfully less common. The latter is maybe more realistic in some sense, but it means we're spending a whole lot more word count on the subject than if society is just inexplicably already perfectly in tune with modern progressive attitudes. It bothers me way less than the economics, and I can't really explain why. Just personal interest, I guess.
So I guess I agree that the worldbuilding just doesn't hold up under even casual scrutiny. Still, I do appreciate the rational way the MC goes about trying to figure things out in the time loops. It's got the nice quality that the plot is mainly driven by lack of information, not bad decisions (or at least, not unrealistically bad ones).
Oh, I agree. If it weren't otherwise good I wouldn't be so upset about the lost potential. But for a story to actually be rational it has to be rational all the way through, or it just unravels from there. I'm not totally against giving it another shot at some point, regardless of my complaints, but so far there's always been something I've wanted to read more.
I'll have to check it out!
... I was going to warn you it's still pretty early days, but I just checked and its at nearly 700 pages. Definitely flew right by. Still, biggest problem right now is there's not enough of it, which is a good problem to have. Fast updates, too.
P-Necromancer
8d ago
(I'm going to try to keep this more or less spoiler free, so sorry if anything's too vague.)
The school actually doesn't play that big a role in the story after the first several chapters; perhaps in a broad sense it's inspired by Harry Potter, in that most people writing in English today have probably read it and it is about a young man learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up, but it's a tenuous connection. It certainly feels nothing alike. Way, way more focus on world building and a world that (more or less) makes sense, a much more developed magic system (the story is reasonably restrained about when it decides we need to know all those details, but they certainly exist), and it is really primarily about learning magic, exploring a magical world, and growing up (mentally, at least). (And not petty social drama, poorly designed fake sports, or school life -- even as a kid I got frustrated at how bad Harry Potter was at keeping the focus on the things I wanted to hear about.)
The main conceit is the time loop; every month, time resets. Everything and everyone go back where they were before and (almost) everyone loses their memories of the intervening time, but not our protagonist. So, fantasy Groundhog Day Month. But while Groundhog Day is primarily concerned with the time loop itself (it was a much more novel idea back then, granted), MoL uses it as a vehicle to exhibit an intricately designed world, to section off a short stretch of time to explore how everything fit together in that moment. At first it all feels pretty painfully generic: run-of-the-mill D&D style fantasy world, one-note characters (of whom our protagonist likes roughly zero, so you only see them when they decide to come annoy him), disconnected and uninteresting events, and a very straightforward goal. But by going through that month again and again, we slowly uncover the rich detail that was hiding under the surface of all of those things, how many of them were just reflections of our protagonist's limited perspective and immaturity, and how he grows as a result.
The character work is... actually just good, without qualification. So with the qualification that almost every character is literally incapable of learning or growing in any durable way because they're reset every month, it's impressive. All the more so because of how hard it is to find any decent characters at all in stories quite so autistically obsessed with detailing an intricate magic system. Part of that is just focusing on the protagonist, who can learn and grow, but it accomplishes a surprising amount through evolution of our understanding of characters that can't undergo actual evolution inside the time loop. I don't want to oversell it, nothing here is groundbreaking, but it's a plus instead of the minus it really should have been by all rights.
The overarching plot is fine-to-good, I'd say. It keeps the pressure up, which isn't easy given the premise, and there are enough twists and turns to keep you engaged. And, like everything else, there's a lot more going on with it than it seems at first. Still, it feels pretty distant most of the time, and for the vast majority of the word count it's just motivation to accumulate ever more knowledge and power. Which is fine by me, that's what I'm here for. It has the standard progression/incremental game hook of number-go-up and getting to do bigger, cooler things as the story progresses, finding shortcuts and new avenues to explore in the time loop -- all pretty basic, but fun. Like, a big goal early on is learning the teleport spell, because that allows us to reach places we couldn't before and to get to critical areas sooner in the loop. And with that power we can save the life of someone recommended as a mentor for another sort of magic we need to do something else, and so on.
Pacing is... eh, let's say 'deliberate.' The whole story is around three thousand pages. I wouldn't call any of it filler -- and in fact I enjoyed it enough I wish there was more; I've re-read it twice -- but it definitely takes its time and you've got to be ready to meet it on its own terms. I don't mind it, but I can certainly understand why someone would. I think it would be relatively easy to put down and pick back up later when you're in the mood, but I read it straight through all three times.
And, like I've said, the best part is the world building and magic, with satisfying mechanics and connections and almost fractal complexity.
On the whole... maybe this is an out-there take, but it kind of feels like Project Hail Mary to me (the book much more than the movie), in that it's focused on learning about and interacting with complex systems, understanding how they fit together and how they might be re-combined to accomplish a new objective. It's lonely in the same way at first, and less lonely later on in the same way too (though that is a bit of spoiler). And they both have an element of piecing together past events from limited clues, though of course that's handled very differently. Otherwise... Outer Wilds? For reasons that should be obvious if you've played it (which everyone should).
P-Necromancer
9d ago
Huh, I actually hadn't noticed that; I did enjoy (most of) the characters. Was it really so blatant?
No, what turned me off Years of the Apocalypse (somewhere around the end of book 2; haven't touched it since) was the author's near-total incuriosity towards economics, which was becoming an increasingly large part of the story. There was a line -- and I'm still floored someone could actually write this -- claiming that industrialization increases the cost of household goods. Like, you show the natural land being stripped bare for resources -- where do you think it all goes? Where do the cartoonishly evil (naturally) industrialists get all their money if not by selling the massive quantities of stuff they produce? It's not like people were limiting their consumption out of ecological consciousness before (lol), they just couldn't afford it. So... who's buying all this stuff, then?
I just don't see how you can design a functional world with such a broken perspective on how society functions-- Well, you can't, actually, and that becomes obvious once you start paying attention. It's not like this is some background detail, the on-going industrial revolution is central to the plot, and the author apparently has done no research into how industrial revolutions affect society or even seriously thought about it. It's just the laziest sort of anti-capitalist screed about how greed is destroying the world -- any proper Marxist would be embarrassed to write something so uninspired and thoughtless.
It is otherwise pretty good -- if it weren't I wouldn't have suffered through that as long as I did. The best time-loop fic since Mother of Learning (at least in the fantasy-progression genre)... Well, I'll reluctantly admit that's true, but MoL was a lot better. That particular niche-within-a-niche is just sadly under explored. (Though I'm liking Throne of TIme a lot so far!) Still, it's enjoyable on its own merits when it keeps the focus on anything else.
P-Necromancer
13d ago
Er, isn't Harris supposed to B? @Primaprimaprima asked @magicalkittycat why they were unwilling to give up their (leftist) perspective on trans issues if they don't actually matter. My point is that
Harris couldn't sleep at night if she won a cynical victory by throwing her trans immigrant sisters under the bus
Could certainly be the case, but her cynically playing up trans issues she doesn't really care about so the republicans waste their time on a meaningless battlefront doesn't make sense, because that 'meaningless' battlefront hurt her chances in the election. It could well be that republican politicians don't really care about trans issues and they only push them to win elections, but that wasn't what I thought you were suggesting.
(But of course republican politicians aren't telling people trans issues are an irrelevant distraction from the things that matter, even if that's what they truly believe; they're trying their absolute hardest to keep the focus on them, because they help win elections.)
Though I don't think it's trivial that she "would obviously have been better off giving the issue up" even cynically; it may very well be the case that she was stuck in a catch-22 where abandoning trans issues would have alienated as many leftists as endorsing them did moderates. (Obviously the far leftists weren't ever going to turn red, but they could have abstained, and, even more importantly, the activists cadre could have turned on the campaign in a very damaging way.)
OK, 'not trivial' I'll grant. It's not impossible things would have played out that way. But I still kind of doubt it. I said just 'giving up' the issues, not coming out with a full-throated denouncement (which might or might not have helped, but would have been a lot more risky). If she just mouthed platitudes about human rights and categorically refused to allow herself to get pinned down to any particular policy proposal, it's hard to see how that could have hurt. There are some issues you can't afford to shrug at, but while trans activists are surprisingly influential pound-for-pound, they never had that much reach. Did anyone even know she voiced tepid support for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicts before republicans dug it up? I don't think it won her many votes at all, even in the form of solidly blue voters who would have otherwise stayed home.
P-Necromancer
14d ago
This could be true if contesting X costs B less than A, but that's certainly not true here: trans issues are losers at the ballot box for democrats and everyone knows it. 'Kamala supports free gender-affirming care for illegal immigrant convicts' was disastrous for her campaign. She certainly didn't bait right wingers into attack her on that point as some devious stratagem to waste their efforts, they dug and dug to find a statement that could be interpreted in that way because they knew it was a winning issue for them. She, very simply, would obviously have been better off giving the issue up -- her especially, given she skipped right over the primary.
P-Necromancer
20d ago
They may propose policies which incidentally help, such as making it easier to build nuclear reactors, but the actual purpose is always something else. In combination with stuff like what I wrote above, I can only conclude that climate change is not a priority for the right.
While this is true, I think it's barely less true of the left. The left is a lot more willing to say their policies have the explicit purpose of fighting climate change... But that's because that's an applause light on the left, not because it's true. The only realistic solution is stratospheric aerosol injection. It costs basically nothing, demands no seismic shifts in anyone's way of life, and can even trivially undo the warming that's already occurred -- the 'serious' proposals for CO2 sequestration are, generously, in the trillion-dollars-a-year-for-a-century range. For half a degree of cooling. And that's after we zero out emissions with trillions more spent and likely severe reductions in quality of life for half the globe and stunting the development of the other half too.
The biggest downside -- that we'd be in a lot of trouble if industrial society totally collapsed -- is, uh, kind of redundant. I can't imagine a situation where industrial society could totally collapse without us already being in a great deal of trouble. Billions of deaths are guaranteed regardless, so maybe we should focus on not letting that happen? The other downsides are just as uncompelling: It might affect weather, but we don't know how (and if it proved disastrous, we could just stop). It would... make the sky more cloudy? There are other, more specific objections to specifically sulfates, they're 1. not the only option, just the example of the phenomenon nature has provided us and 2. also not that bad.
Seriously, if we'd just started doing this in the 80s, global warming would be a footnote, a factoid about a minor problem we used to have like ozone layer depletion. The idea it'd be a live issue in the culture war is laughable; if you brought it up, 95% of people wouldn't have a clue what you were talking about. (Environmentalism surely still would be, but it would all be about habitat destruction and peak oil.) The cost is a rounding error in the budget of any developed nation, the required international cooperation, while not none, isn't particularly onerous, and the effect can be easily tuned to our requirements.
And what has the drive to reduce emissions accomplished? Well, it hasn't actually reduced emissions -- slowed their rate of rise, sure, but just holding steady (which we're still not near) isn't good enough; the only way to achieve a stable climate with this approach is to zero out (net) emissions altogether, which is a fantasy. Even the UN gap report on the effects of the US leaving the Paris Agreement, which assumes it would have met its targets (it wouldn't have) predicts a 0.1 degree impact over the next 75 years. That's what you're complaining about?
The moment we decide we actually want to solve the problem, SAI will reduce global temperatures by 1.0 degrees within a year or two. Until then, I can only conclude that no one really does want to solve it.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Claude would get you there; that's how I found the one I linked, opentimestamps. They have a client that wraps git('s gpg function), generates the timestamps automatically, and submits them (for free) to a service that defrays blockchain overhead by bundling together many user's timestamps into a single transaction (as the hash of the list of hashes is sufficient to demonstrate they all existed at the time they were pushed to the blockchain).
I haven't personally verified each piece works the way they say, but it's opensource and this isn't really a complicated or expensive operation; I'd be surprised if it didn't work. (And you could have AI check it over if you didn't trust the community to do so.)
Still, yeah, there's an accessibility barrier. AI could probably walk a non-technical person through the setup, but 99.9% of them wouldn't even know to ask. An archive site is more discoverable.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Oh, apologies, I think I misunderstood your point. This method establishes a time lapse is real in that it demonstrates the various intermediate versions existed at the stated times. (They could all be made ahead of time, but each piece must have existed prior to its timestamp.) It doesn't prove those intermediate versions weren't made with AI. (It would have if the author in question could prove they had a substantially identical draft in 2019, but that's not terribly useful going forward.) In terms of 'proving' the work isn't AI, it really only makes it less convenient, not impossible. The same is true in principle of art time lapses (which are generally accepted as evidence), but it's probably easier to fake for written work, given your git commits are going to be a lot less granular. I suppose you could include your vim undofile (or equivalent) in the repo, which would be harder to fake convincingly.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Sure, I guess? It just seems inferior to the blockchain method, which requires zero trust and has no risk of exposing your work. I'm also not sure how easy it would be to prove ownership over an archived website at the time of archival -- well, you could just put a digital signature on the page, I guess. I suppose the edge is that it's easier to explain how this proves the timeline to nontechnical people? And maybe cost, though I'm not sure about that given opentimestamp's batching strategy; both are free to the user, anyway.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
This is a solved problem. Just put the commit hashes on a blockchain as you make them.
Of course, there's (by design) no way to do it after the fact; you need to have anticipated you might be challenged on the timeline and set this up in advance. Doubt many people are actually doing this in tech, let alone writing. Certainly no one was worried about proving their novel wasn't written by AI in 2019, though this process does have other uses, like establishing authorship (or at least that you had access to the intermediate versions at the time).
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Likewise, there's not even an attempt to hide the corruption anymore. I can not even imagine how much more blatant he could get that this is attempted bribery. People can play the whataboutism game of former admins if they want, but at least those had the shame to hide it behind closed doors a bit.
This is a neat bit of rhetorical framing, but is that actually better? I think it's much worse to disguise your political bribes as prosocial programs. Medicaid is about a trillion, and not just once; every single year! Medicare is 1.2, social security 1.5; this bribe doesn't seem obviously worse to me. Likely better, as the lack of means-testing should mean a greater portion of it would end up getting saved instead of immediately consumed. That doesn't make it good, but I don't think it's whataboutism to discuss this political bribe in the context of other (ongoing! larger!) political bribes.
(The most direct comparison is of course Biden's student loan forgiveness program, which was also a ridiculous pre-midterm lie. But that was small potatoes compared to the bribes that actually did and continue to happen.)
Now, you might object, the old-age programs were founded by democrats but mostly benefit republican voters! (I'm not sure whether this actually true; Republicans are more common in this age range, but it's possible the democrat subset benefits more for one reason or another. But it might well be, and let's say it is for the sake of argument.) So how can I call that a political bribe? Well, the republicans have had numerous trifectas since, and not once have they repealed the programs. The bribe doesn't benefit democrats because republicans elected to match it. This is the worst possible case for everyone (who isn't getting bribed): enormous expense and no political edge (not that a political edge would be worth that kind of money).
This program, though, I believe is so blatant (and so very Trump) that I don't think the democrats will get suckered into matching it. Oh, maybe if it worked they would, but it won't; Trump has no credibility on this point, as you say. So on the whole, I think this is better for the nation than if Trump promised double school budgets (also around a trillion) or whatever.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Talked to them about it more recently? Never been part of Trump's coalition, so maybe I'm not the right person to answer this, but I'd have said something similar right after the initial airstrikes.
The real sin of ineffective interventionism against genuinely deserving targets -- of which the IRGC is a prime example -- is the ineffectiveness. If they'd actually pulled off regime change to someone comparable to the Shah, it'd have been a boon to America, the region generally, and most of all the Iranian people; it's hard to outdo gunning down 45,000 protesters in less than a year. Maybe that really was never the goal -- Trump never claimed it was, but I don't pay a lot of attention to what Trump says. Maybe that was never really plausible, but it seemed like it might be at the time: it happened in Venezuela, and that was without Mossad's help.
Of course, it didn't happen.
I know some people are still calling this a triumph, but not me. At this point I think it's clearly Trump's greatest blunder, and that's a competitive position. Are your coworkers still clinging to hope?
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
The trouble with this is that people tend to be stupid and stubborn, so "surely people won't be stupid and stubborn enough to bring massive consequences down on themselves for no benefit" just isn't going to be universally true
This is an interesting point; not sure I agree with it.
A while back I read a post elsewhere (somewhere with dramatically lower average post quality) suggesting laying razor wire along the border. Another poster decried that proposal as evil. Razor wire inflicts terrible injuries; does merely attempting to cross the border justify such horrific punishment? ... But razor wire isn't invisible. I don't even think it's plausible that anyone, however stupid or poorly educated, could fail to understand what running into razor wire would do, given a chance to inspect it. (Animals, on the other hand, might be that stupid; not saying this is a good idea.) Realistically, how many potential migrants would actually injure themselves on the wire? A few, maybe, doing a poor job cutting their way through. Approximately zero just charging into it. What if instead it were just a wall? Would that proposal be similarly evil due to the head trauma potential migrants might experience if they chose to ram into it head first? Surely even that poster wouldn't have the temerity to suggest as much.
But at the same time, I do agree people can be stupid and stubborn, especially if only a small number need to for disastrous consequences to follow. I think the relevant distinction might be whether there's another person in the loop? Charging a machine gun nest might feel like a better bet than charging razor wire, because the gunner might decide not to fire for any number of reasons but the wire can't decide anything. And social reasoning is comparatively, so even if the gunner is in fact very likely to fire, maybe it's more likely for stubborn/stupid people to make the wrong call?
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
I mean, are these people incapable of thinking through the consequences of their demands? No way to tell. But what about the people pushing NY's new '3D printer' law (that actually applies to all CNC machine tools)?
(See @gattsuru's excellent rundown here for context.)
It passed the legislature and got signed into law! Is it your position that none of that was serious either? Crippling manufacturing in an entire state just as a form of chest thumping? We've all heard the line about cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, but I've never met someone who's actually done it! Presuming they're incapable of thinking through the consequences of their actions is the more charitable interpretation!
Realistically, I don't actually think the politicians* (or their staffs, at least) are incapable. I think they successfully reasoned out that their constituents will like this law and they just don't care about its other effects, which they can surely blame on billionaires/republicans as per normal. But that just kicks the problem up a stage. Why would their constituents like this law if they're capable of thinking through its effects? Which is not to say that none of them are, just that the smart money is apparently betting the ones who can will be drowned out by the ones who can't.
*There are industry voices pushing for it too, but they have different motives. For them, crippling manufacturing is the goal. They want a regulatory moat; they can't actually supply the demanded technology (because it's impossible), but with a little luck they can leverage their loyalty to convince the committee their solution works and hopefully freeze out their less enthusiastic competitors.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Yeah, there is still competitive pressure pushing down, which might be enough. My point is just that margin doesn't tell us whether it is.
Market pressure is a tragedy of the commons, recall: it works because any seller that doesn't 'defect' and lower prices gets out competed by the ones that do, even though they'd all be better off if they stood firm at the monopolistic price. Tragedies of the commons are hard to solve -- and we've got a variety of tools to prevent these particular one from getting solved, of varying efficacy -- but it's still not impossible.
Margins are usually an OK measure of efficiency (certainly not perfect), but here they're useless. No clue what to use instead.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
I agree with your point overall, but this:
health insurance companies have rather low margins (typically ... 2-5% ...)
Doesn't mean what you'd think it means. Per the ACA, health insurers have a legally mandated minimum loss ratio (ratio of payouts to revenue collected) of 80%. If they don't payout enough to 'justify' their premiums, they're forced to refund the excess, which obviously they never want to do because if the customer is willing to pay that much, which they proved they were by paying that much, refunding it is just leaving money on the table with no upside. The remaining 20% has to be split between operating costs (which will inevitably bloat due to principal agent problems and internal politics) and profit, so 5% might be close to the ceiling of what's possible. Which makes it meaningless as a metric.
To quote an earlier post of mine:
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law. Without this requirement, loss ratio is a good measure of efficiency; since a company will always try to minimize their expenses (the ones that involve sending checks to other businesses and don't benefit any employees, anyway), high loss ratios just mean there's adequate competitive pressure to keep them lean. But now? Who can say? The number is going to be >80% no matter how much or little competitive pressure they're under. If competition is insufficient, they'll just throw money at doctors and hospitals, because that's the only way they're allowed to raise profit/operating budget (via higher premiums). And if they were, it would look exactly like you're describing.
Is this actually the root cause of healthcare prices exploding? Probably not, but the argument-from-margins doesn't prove it isn't.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
I'd had the thought that video 'evidence' becoming worthless (as it could be trivially faked by anyone who felt like it) might actually be a blessing in disguise. We didn't evolve in an environment where it was easy to get reliable, graphic knowledge of things happening far away and it just seems to break some peoples' brains. We respond much more strongly to things we can see because historically, being able to see something meant it was happening within line of sight. If you consider which (non-fiction) videos were the most influential of all time, how many of them influenced things for the better? The moon landings, I guess.
I'm less gung ho about flooding online discussions with low quality bots, but I suppose the effect is similar. Turtling down so you don't get hacked, too.
Still, isn't it a bit ironic to turn to media to demonstrate we'd be better off if we spent more time in the real world? But I know why you did: I haven't lived your life but I have seen those movies. It's a useful touchstone, and it would be just as useful meeting a stranger in person as online. But we might not far away from an era where such touchstones cease to exist because everyone would rather just consume media generated on the spot to match their specific tastes. Definitely too early to say what the net effect of AI will be on society.
P-Necromancer
3mo ago
It might be right that it will overturn 'cyber' 'security' (my scare quotes). However, I am with Zvi in that I do not think there is a reason why this should favor defense. After all, an attacker could spend a whole lot on tokens while your defensive LLM is sitting on limited infrastructure -- at least if you are sufficiently paranoid not to hand the AI labs the key to your kingdom. And even if you trust the cloud, there is the problem that your budget might not have room for winning all LLM-vs-LLM token pissing contests.
This is the wrong mental model for cybersecurity. You can't think of it like a military engagement, where you compare the number and quality of the forces on each side to determine who wins. There's a fundamental asymmetry in that cybersecurity is the defender's game to lose. Just don't make any mistakes and victory is impossible for attackers. Unfortunately, humans are terrible at never making any mistakes, which is why in complicated real world systems, there seem to always be vulnerabilities to find. But it's actually very easy to design a toy system that no amount of genius security researchers will ever crack; not even ASI can find a flaw that doesn't exist, and the defender's ASI can ensure there are no flaws. Across-the-board capability increases do disproportionately benefit defenders. That will probably be very expensive and likely slow enough for some disasters to occur in the meantime, but it should be one-and-done. No need to keep burning endless tokens to defend every inch of the attack surface, just make sure every part of it is built correctly and you're good.
(Admittedly, this does depend on certain mathematical/cryptographic principles remaining intact, like the existence of trapdoor functions. But actually P probably just doesn't =NP, so this is another case of searching for a solution that doesn't exist.)
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
But DCC is exactly the kind of story an LLM can or soon will be able to churn out
I've got to disagree. Have you read any more recent stuff on RoyalRoad? For whatever reason, AI writing has exploded on there in the past couple months, and it's very easy to tell which authors are using it (even when they say they aren't). And not in a good way. I wish I could just get an LLM to pump out pulp to my specifications, but if anything I think the newest models have regressed on prose, and they were never even mediocre.
The problem -- and it's been the problem since R1 -- is repetitive structure and cliche. Most of these aren't awful, per se, the issue is that instead of getting one per thousand words -- already enough to get on my nerves -- the model will stuff three of them into a paragraph. Into every paragraph. It's unreadable.
Most of the authors on RoyalRoad aren't very good, that's for sure, but they know that and their prose is appropriately simple and unambitious as a result; it doesn't call attention to itself. LLM writing is probably better on a technical level, but it's nowhere near as good as it (seems to) think it is, so it refuses to get out of its own way.
(This might be a prompting or process issue? I can't be certain other authors with better techniques aren't just slipping under my radar. If someone thinks they have an example of actually good AI writing, I'm willing to give it a shot and change my mind if I agree. Like I said, I really wish this worked.)
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
My understanding is that yes technically, but no basically. As long as your shares increase in value it reduces the loan-to-value ratio, and at some point you use the difference to take out a new loan to pay off the old one with some interest grace period. This very much requires the stock assets to keep going up, which doesn't always happen. But it has happened to enough rich folks that its noticeable.
Yeah, so two separate things going on here: first, yes, the stock might appreciate faster than the interest... but it also might not. (You already understand this, clearly, but just to make it explicit.) Putting aside the loophole, this is really equivalent to taking out a loan to buy stock in a single company which is also your employer, which no sane financial advisor will tell you to do. From low to high (hopefully): there's a theoretical guaranteed safe rate of return (which is not literally the rate on treasury bonds, but it's close enough), then there's the rate the bank will offer you a loan at (since if they were only getting treasury returns, they'd just buy treasuries), then there's return from a well-diversified stock portfolio, and then there's the return from your controlling interest in a single company which:
- Is the source of all of your wealth
- Might tank in value if you screw up, contract a serious disease, have a public scandal, decide to quit or just sell a lot of stock, etc. (which in turn might cause a death spiral when your creditors force a sale)
- Is the only reason people take you seriously in the business world (e.g. if you screw it up, no one's hiring you at anything remotely like your previous compensation)
The last has a substantial risk premium because it's a very substantial risk. But of course the people for whom this doesn't work out aren't on any lists of the world's richest people, so we don't talk about them.
Second: the government can borrow at the treasury rate. If they can (effectively) loan you money at the higher bank rate (which is how the math works out), they'll do so happily, issue more treasuries to cover the temporary shortfall, and pocket the difference in rates. They're not impatiently waiting for you to finally stop deferring your tax burden and pay the whole bill, they're coming out ahead every day this state of affairs continues (until you die and the principal vanishes due to the cost basis step-up).
(The point about deferred interest is more potentially problematic, but it still would eventually get paid if not for the step-up.)
It's as you pointed out probably not a real loophole, but I think to many people it feels like a loophole. I think the deferring part of it feels like a way to avoid paying taxes while still living large. I would interested in seeing how much of a given UHNW-individuals income comes from this sort of personal loan mechanism before really making a judgement.
Well, it might or might not be a large portion of their income, but I don't think that's really the relevant factor here. The real problem (in terms of satisfying populists) is that:
- The nominal net worth of these people is vastly exaggerated: there is no set of actions Elon Musk could take in the near future that would result in a bank account balance with thirteen digits. The market price of a share is the most any buyer is willing to pay, and they only want to buy so many shares at that price. Dump a huge quantity on the market and you're not getting anything like that in total. Worse, if the owner and founder tries to divest, everyone's going to wonder what he knows that we don't.
- UHNW people just don't spend the vast majority of their wealth on consumption. You can spend a million dollars, easy. You can spend a hundred million. A billion is a serious challenge and a hundred billion is flatly impossible. You can live as large as you like, pack your private jet fleet with all the hookers and blow it can fit and fly it to a different tropical island everyday and never put a dent in that kind of money. But actually, most of these people don't even do that much. They're mostly workaholics -- that's how they found wildly successful businesses. They leave the vast, vast majority of their wealth right where it is, in the business that created it. Which is exactly where we want it to be, serving a productive purpose. This is the real reason consumption taxes are 'regressive': relative to wealth, rich people consume a tiny fraction as much.
But then populists compare the bullshit (high) net worth figures to the bullshit (low) tax figures and get mad about it. Taxing savings is a terrible idea -- if you tax something, you get less of it, and capital is the main driver of economic growth -- but taxing consumption will never give a satisfactory number.
I also doubt because it's envy driven tax policy. It is however I think a fig leaf towards the less unstable set of eat-the-rich crowd. I think even a set of moderates/center-lefts/center-rights are being persuaded by the eat-the-rich-rhetoric around the growing wealth inequality in the US. Doing something to cut down on it is probably going to be a requirement at some point soon.
Yeah, possibly. I don't have a good answer for this problem. I do think we should fix the cost basis step-up issue, but that's probably too complicated to satisfy the (large and growing number of) people who get very angry about this subject.
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
This isn't a loophole. There is a loophole here, but it's not that loans aren't taxed; loans aren't income. Under your proposal, the same money is taxed twice, as @The_Nybbler says: once when a loan is taken out against it and a second time when the shares are sold to pay back the loan. Loans just defer the tax burden -- defer and increase it, since you have to pay taxes on the shares you sell to pay back the interest too. And while the rates on these loans are better than you or I could get, they're much more than what the government pays out on treasuries; they should be happy to wait, given the rate is higher than their own discount rate.
... But there is a reason rich people do this: cost basis resets on inheritance. This is the actual loophole; just defer capital gains until you die, then your heirs can sell your shares with no capital gains to pay off your creditors and start the cycle over again. (They do have to pay estate tax, at least for the ultra-wealthy class we're talking about, but it's better to dodge one of the two than to dodge neither.)
At one point there was a credible argument that the heirs might not be able to figure out the true cost basis, but I doubt that's very often the case today. I don't think there's any other serious defense of the practice. If you want to remove loopholes, this is the very first place to look.
(That said, I don't think your proposal is a terrible compromise, so long as the tax paid on the borrowed money can be used as a credit against future capital gains. I'd be for it if I thought it would actually satisfy the eat-the-rich crowd, which I doubt.)
P-Necromancer
4mo ago
Eh, is it really more inaccessible than a program running on ram without a disk installed? If ram loses power, whatever it stores is gone, just like their brains. And if ram were integrated into a system not designed with non-volatile storage or external access in mind, I think it would be comparably difficult to get the running program out. Not impossible, but it's not impossible here, either: our protagonist was actually able to watch his bits flip and trace the path the air took through his brain. I don't think you'd get very far without a lot of computer assistance, but the same tech was doubtless necessary to build their brains in the first place.
Anyway, I don't think this is what Exhalation thinks its own point is: it spends about ten times as long explaining entropy.
(I reread the story to make sure I was being fair. I stand by my point, but the story does execute on its (imo bad) premise well. I think over the years since I first read it I let that issue overshadow its good points -- it is an enjoyable and somewhat thoughtful work.)
It seems obvious to me that the story is dualist. It doesn't matter that it isn't scientifically serious (imo no theory of consciousness is scientifically serious, btw)
I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.
I'm not opposed to speculative fiction exploring dualism, but Story of Your Life gets very into the weeds on physics and the determinism it builds up to is 100% grounded in physical laws... and then it abandons that premise to shoehorn in something nonphysical -- the soul -- but it can't actually let it affect anything or it would break the whole story. And note: the variational laws don't supersede the causal laws, they are equivalent to them. There's no trick here that lets you violate causality, and the future cannot cause the past.
... Except the heptapods actually do behave differently because of the way they perceive time! They don't write their sentences one character at a time but just efficiently use each stroke for several characters. And forget that: their very form or writing induces simultaneous consciousness! They (seem to be) confused by physical principles described from a linear time perspective! They're very patient for explorers (because, it's implied, they already have the answers they'll only actually learn later.) It's mentioned that our main character only imperfectly experiences simultaneous consciousness, but that should still only affect the subjective experience (as otherwise the future would affect the past, which remains impossible). And in fact she can't drop any hints about simultaneous consciousness, has to act exactly as though her subjective experience hadn't changed at all. Why the disconnect?
There are no decisions to be made, decisions don't exist in that way.
Determinism doesn't actually render the concept of a decision meaningless, it just means that decisions are part of the causal chain that will inevitably result in the future. While it is trivially true that "You will choose to do X because X is what you will choose to do," there must still be other reasons why you will choose to do X that make no reference to the future. My point is that the entire decision-making apparatus must still exist (or causality would be violated), so you're postulating an entire second self to make this work, and the self that perceives the future is extraneous.
Well sure, human intelligence is only obsolete to the extent artificial intelligence is available as a replacement. There are scenarios where it's not that widely available, but I don't think they're very likely (possibly besides AI killing us all). As we transition to a bread-and-circuses model for keeping the useless masses content (which we probably will because it will be cheaper and less risky than other approaches once AI drives the marginal cost of labor down far enough), direct AI access provides good bang-for-the-buck.
In terms of self actualization: people can self-actualize by doing things inefficiently -- say, playing chess without an engine -- but that doesn't make it not-inefficient. When I say 'obsolete' I mean 'devoid of instrumental purpose,' not necessarily any purpose. Though I suppose playing chess well without an engine, while not high-status in any absolute sense, is certainly higher status than playing it well with one, so maybe that is a flaw in my definition or reasoning.
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