Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
America was already attacking German submarines in the Atlantic before Pearl Harbour
Hitler's speech declaring war on America is quite interesting, in much the same way as Osama Bin Laden's Letter to the American People. Having it all laid on the table like that makes you realize why some people hate us.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
EA had 46 billion dollars in committed funding in 2021, and was growing at 37% per year, according to 80000hrs.
Look at the date. How much of this "commitment" was from SBF?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
By definition, one party in a lawsuit is always wrong, so imposing sanctions or liability on being wrong is a dangerous game.
Lawyers can get sanctioned for filing frivolous lawsuits, but that's a higher standard than filing meritless lawsuits.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
There's an argument that we have to stop the slippery slope to banning real meat as soon as possible. I'm not sure how well it holds up.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
DeSantis seems to think connecting lab-grown meat to "elites" and the "World Economic Forum" is winning rhetoric. We on the inside know that those aren't great descriptions of "rationalist nerds", but this is the same rhetoric that red-tribe conservatives used about SBF. To Joe Shmoe of Nowheresville Baptist Church, those secularist eggheads are all the same.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
The Bipartisan Consensus Against... Lab-Grown Meat?
This was not a tweet I expected to see today:
Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron [DeSantis], but I co-sign this.
As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers.
-Senator John Fetterman
Lol. LMAO even.
I am not a person that cares much about the suffering of animals, especially not the ones that taste good. Still, strictly speaking, the suffering is not an integral part of the process. If it could be removed, all else being equal, that would not decrease my utility in any way. I am agnostic on lab-grown meat. If it tastes good, is cheap, and is of comparable healthiness to legacy meat, I will eat it.
I can't help but be reminded of the law of undignified failure. Cultured meat has been a staple of the tech-futurist utopian memeplex for years, if not decades. Gallons of digital ink have been spilled discussing the feasibility and/or inevitability (or lack thereof) of cultured meat on places like the Effective Altruism Forum. Skimming through the top results, I don't see, "what if the proles hate our guts so much that they ban cultured meat out of spite?" on anyone's "factors to consider". It's also a harsh lesson that even the most positive-seeming improvements have to face-off against reliance interests who want things to stay the same. There is a lobby for everything.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
How bad is long-term use of ibuprofen really? Is taking 200mg twice a day going to wreck my GI tract or kidneys? What about only on workdays? What if I'm also on an ACE inhibitor?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.
It's truly astounding how many bad ideas and practices Hegel is responsible for. His "influenced" list is a who's who of the worst of the worst in philosophy. @non_radical_centrist below rightfully bemoans the "difficult to parse" style of certain philosophers, and there is perhaps no greater offender than Hegel. Kant isn't particularly concise, but pull up The Phenomenology of Spirit next to The Critique of Pure Reason, and the difference is night and day.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Middle-class Americans have enough disposable income that it isn't worth the inconvenience to scoop up minor discounts like these. People with higher marginal utility for money and less marginal utility for time will differ of course.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
This seems like a textbook case of the law of undignified failure. The classical AI doom scenerios assumed that people would be smart enough not to build AI-powered killbots. If AI-powered killbots were floated as a load-bearing assumption of the classical AI doom case, then people would simply retort that we could just not build AI-powered killbots. The point of the classical AI doom case is that the problem is robust to minor implementation variance, not that AI-powered killbots are safe.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
You got me. My use of the word "justice" there was a poor choice. The word is used in a legal context as a colloquialism for "desirable outcomes". There's a fair bit of play in the joints of course, but you don't need a definition of justice that would satisfy Socrates to see that removing the idea of moral culpability from the legal system would result in a world much lower in ≈everybody's preference ordering than the one we have now.
“You will say to me then, 'Why does He still find fault? For who resists His will?'”
Indeed. Paul's answer falls short. As does everyone else's. Perhaps one day I will try my own hand on the question, though I suspect I lack the writing skill and attention span to make it coherent (not to mention the philosophical heft). I do have some ideas though.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Or that the conduct is different if different people are doing it?
I challenge any gay man to have sex with his husband by inserting his penis into his husband's vagina.
More seriously, I've never read Lawrence, and don't particularly feel like subjecting my eyes or brain to tortured legal reasoning at the moment. Is it written in a way that would allow a state to criminalize anal sex in general without regard to the sex of the persons?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
especially Gorsuch reducing a professional to a stammering mess.
Kneedler is the government's third-string solicitor general. If they thought this case was important, they would have put Fletcher or Prelogar on it.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
People seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a set of deterministic “statuses”, and then there is a different set of non-deterministic free-will “choices”, but actually it’s all deterministic (modulo some weird quantum mechanical stuff).
Free will is essentially a legal fiction. It is incredibly useful, but it isn’t actually true. Yudkowsky’s decision theory paper uses the phrase “surgery on a world model” when describing how one considers counterfactuals. I think that is a good way to put it. In some sense it is impossible for someone who is homeless at any given time to have not been homeless, because in the physical universe that exists they are in fact homeless, but this isn’t very useful when designing a legal system that creates actual justice.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
They're trying to model it off of the Surgeon General's warning on cigarettes, which are obnoxious, but balanced out by the fact that smoking literally causes 5-20% of all deaths in the United States.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Massive L for our system of government. Who the hell wants to ban porn? And yet, it happened.
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography is potentially biologically addictive, is proven to harm human brain development, desensitizes brain reward circuits, increases conditioned responses, and weakens brain function."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Exposure to this content is associated with low self-esteem and body image, eating disorders, impaired brain development, and other emotional and mental illnesses."
"TEXAS HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES WARNING: Pornography increases the demand for prostitution, child exploitation, and child pornography."
Are these things even true?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
What happened in 2020 that was crazier than that?
American sports was completely canceled for 48 hours because a domestic abuser in the process of kidnapping a child and holding a knife was shot by police.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
In theory, they could get Columbia to completely cave and put out a sufficiently groveling statement that it triggers a respectability cascade, causing all the other universities to cave and put out groveling statements. This would be followed by major media outlets, and finally the White House.
It's unlikely, but theoretically possible. It would be less crazy than the stuff that happened in 2020.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
They all seem pretty tame to me. “Group of protesters tries to exclude person who disagrees with them from their protest,” isn’t exactly the kind of thing that made “mostly peaceful” a meme.
Yeah, it’s a shame that Universities cancel classes at the drop of a hat nowadays, but Kristallnacht this ain’t.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I wonder how much of this is just boredom? It’s a slow news cycle. The Iran stuff turned out to be a nothingburger. What are the politically-active class supposed to get riled up at this week, Trump’s courtroom farts? (I’m not kidding. That was the other option here.) The masses demand a current thing at all times. I mean really, endowment divesture? Would anyone care about this if there were a salient mass shooting anywhere in the country over the weekend?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
They got Starbucks locations to act as a public restroom for a few years. Not even that was able to stick.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
could this evolve into a full on ground war? It's not clear to me if Israel's military could be stretched enough to handle a conventional war on multiple fronts.
You’re asking if the Iranian army would be able to march 500 miles through two countries over open terrain despite Israeli-American air supremacy to invade Israel?
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
I love this subthread because it shows how absurd it is to read the New Testament as a consistent (much less inerrant) theological tome. Romans isn't "the gospel according to Paul", it's a pledge drive. He is asking for money, both for himself, and the Jewish Christians in Judea.
I hope to see you in passing as I go to Spain, and to be helped on my journey there by you, once I have enjoyed your company for a while. At present, however, I am going to Jerusalem bringing aid to the saints. For Macedonia and Achaia have been pleased to make some contribution for the poor among the saints at Jerusalem. For they were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have come to share in their spiritual blessings, they ought also to be of service to them in material blessings. When therefore I have completed this and have delivered to them what has been collected, I will leave for Spain by way of you. I know that when I come to you I will come in the fullness of the blessing of Christ.
I appeal to you, brothers, by our Lord Jesus Christ and by the love of the Spirit, to strive together with me in your prayers to God on my behalf, that I may be delivered from the unbelievers in Judea, and that my service for Jerusalem may be acceptable to the saints, so that by God's will I may come to you with joy and be refreshed in your company. May the God of peace be with you all. Amen.
Once you view Romans in this light, all the little oddities about Israel start to make sense. Paul wasn't particularly popular with Jewish Christians at the time. He was trying to regain his street cred.
Quantumfreakonomics
6mo ago
Oxford has shut down the Future of Humanity Institute.
This was Nick Bostrom's organization within the University of Oxford for those of you wondering what on Earth the Future of Humanity Institute is. FHI has been a powerhouse on the intellectual wing of the Effective Altruism/existential risk movement. Everything in "orthodox" AI thinking that didn't come from Yudkowsky came from FHI.
What happened? Why would a premier university shut down such an influential and respected organization? The easy answer is Bostrom's N-word email from 2023, but the timeline doesn't quite line up. The final report of the institute gives their side of the story, and they paint a picture of bureaucratic strangling, leaving the reader to put the pieces together.
"Starting in 2020, the Faculty imposed a freeze on fundraising and hiring. Unfortunately, this led to the eventual loss of lead researchers and especially the promising and diverse cohort of junior researchers, who have gone on to great things in the years since. While building an impressive alumni network and ecosystem of new nonprofits, these departures severely reduced the Institute. In late 2023, the Faculty of Philosophy announced that the contracts of the remaining FHI staff would not be renewed. On 16 April 2024, the Institute was closed down"
Obviously you don't impose a freeze on fundraising unless you want the organization to die. Funding was not the issue.
"Where we failed
Any organization embedded in a larger organization or community needs to invest to a certain degree in establishing the right kind of social relationships to maintain this embeddedness. Incentives must be aligned, and both parties must also recognize this alignment. We did not invest enough in university politics and sociality to form a long-term stable relationship with our faculty.
There also needs to be an understanding of how to communicate across organizational communities. When epistemic and communicative practices diverge too much, misunderstandings proliferate. Several times we made serious missteps in our communications with other parts of the university because we misunderstood how the message would be received. Finding friendly local translators and bridgebuilders is important."
Translation: They hated us, they hated our ideas, and they hated our autism.
As stated before, this is FHI's accounting of the events, but they sure seem upset.
NBA Star Rudy Gobert misses game 2 of playoff series against the defending champs to attend the birth of his child.
Thoughts? Yeah, the birth of one's first child is a big moment, but this is also the biggest moment of the last 20 years for his team (who gave up quite a lot to get him I might add). Apparently, he was expected to just make it back in time for tip-off, but weather delays pushed his flight back. I'd be pretty pissed if I was a Timberwolves fan tbh.
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