ThenElection
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User ID: 622
ThenElection
6d ago
How would Scott self-immolating have helped anything? It's not like he was sitting on some special knowledge that no one else in the universe had or that people couldn't read about in other blogs if they were inclined to. If he had explicitly pushed against the Overton Window on it, the Overton Window would have thrown him into the outer darkness. You push against the things you can shift, not sleeping tigers that are blocking the path.
Sometimes the Kolmogorov Option is the right one.
ThenElection
6d ago
I think we need more data to find a convincing explanation. We don't even really know when IQs diverged: has it been that way since time immemorial? Or maybe it was a process that took a millennium? Or maybe it was strong selection over a century or two (something with the Black Death providing a selective pressure for more effective immune systems?)
This doesn't seem like information that's been lost irrecoverably to history, either: looking at modern and ancient DNA likely would make it possible. There just would have to be a social and scientific willingness to open that Pandora's box.
ThenElection
6d ago
Reminds me a bit of Mankiw's Optimal Taxation of Height parody paper. IQ is observable, inelastic, and correlated with income, and so the government should collect IQ measurements and tax those with high IQ more.
ThenElection
6d ago
He was controversial; I vaguely remember a Gould polemic against the Bell Curve, back in the day (thought it was in the Mismeasure of Man, but that was published in 1981).
The difference was controversial meant "lots of people criticize you and imply bad things about you," not "you get blocked from all media organs for all eternity, as does anyone you're associated with."
Like most people who dive into this topic, at least from my perception, he probably hopes that the environmental factors, which can be more easily controlled than genetic ones, are very important.
Can they? Inequities have continued to exist despite countless social engineering efforts. If we just need to modify the environment more, that's pretty dispiriting: it's not easy and has failed.
On the other hand, if the cause is genetic, I can more easily imagine a fully egalitarian, rich world a century from now, with some new, effective gene therapy that we can put our efforts into making universally accessible.
ThenElection
7d ago
it is representative in that half the people you meet will be above that number, and half below.
No: it's representative in that in a random sample of people, half will be above that number and half below. But these things are heavily clustered. Thinking back to my immediate post-college years, 100% were above 18 miles. It's likely that the actual median for people I met was above 1000 miles.
There are lots of things to say about that, but the biggest is this: for the people who hold the greatest amount of economic, social, and political power in the world, the vast majority live far further than 18 miles from their mother.
ThenElection
11d ago
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Bunch of companies eliminate DEI
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Inevitably, some executive or employee will say or do something boneheaded, costing the company money
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Attribute that boneheadedness to the elimination of DEI
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Watch that anecdote spread like wildfire through media
ThenElection
15d ago
Code is a nearly solved problem, and I regularly see the leading models create correct output on the first try for things that haven't existed before, so long as you give them a reasonable spec.
That "reasonable spec" bit is a pretty big caveat, but the coding portion can be fully automated even today.
Maybe O'Reilly's "It's not exponential, it's sigmoidal"? https://web.archive.org/web/20240114184321/http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/sigmoidal-not-exponential.html
I feel like I've seen your snappier version elsewhere, though. Maybe it's an echo of "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."
The tricky bit seems to be that it's very difficult to know where you're on on a logistic curve until you're past the midpoint. Though with the limits of pre-training people started running into last year, the claim that we're on still clearly on the left side is more tenuous.
I don't think it makes sense to treat Altman as a PMC apparatchik, though I agree that the blog post is written in that dialect. He just doesn't want to scare the hoes, the hoes here being normie investors and consumers excited about being able to cheat on their homework easier. That dialect is meant to be comforting and create a sense of normalcy.
One thing to understand about the folks at OpenAI etc is that they've thoroughly drank the Kool-Aid. Any communication coming from them has to be assumed as adversarial, and looking for honesty about intention or scope, if that honesty would interfere with achieving that goal, is a fool's errand.
Phrasing it as the precursor to the "screw you over" step is kind of right, but potentially misleading. Altman isn't hoping for the conventional "take your money before riding off into the sunset laughing at the rube" kind of screwing; he's thinking about dominating the light cone and paperclipping it with his values.
ThenElection
17d ago
I wonder if there are populations where A can breed with B, ..., Y can with Z, and Z can with A, but A can't breed with M. In theory it seems possible.
In some sense, every species is a ring species, except through the temporal dimension instead of spatial ones. Leaves in the present can't interbreed, but there's a continuum through time connecting the leaves.
ThenElection
17d ago
What's the point of that subreddit? To poke fun at the people who like Luigi, or the people who hate Luigi? It just doesn't make sense to me.
Chaos. It's literally an op by rDrama to make people on Reddit of every "side" post angry comments to share and laugh at them.
ThenElection
18d ago
The end result of this is /r/FuckLuigiMangione: an entirely invented drama op that exists purely for lulz.
I won't deny it's given me some belly laughs, but I don't see how it could be good for society. It's not even hurting Reddit: it's volunteer engagement farming that gives them more opportunities to display ads.
Welfare/jobs. I can certainly imagine a set of institutional and political incentives of politicians and military bureaucrats that would result in billions of dollars being spent on something pointless. And people making spending decisions might not even know about the program. (Not making the claim that that's what's happening here.)
There's also a keeping up appearances factor, though I suspect usually nations would want to publicize the existence of an overwhelmingly dominant weapon.
Of course they did. China was rife with collaborators, motivated by a combination of self interest, ideology, and domestic politics. Wang Jingwei was Chiang Kai-shek's left wing arch rival within the KMT, who eventually ended up as China's Quisling. He was more than willing to praise Japan post Nanjing, and actually set up the capital there.
But I think those things, while correlated with their work culture, are also potentially separable from their work culture.
I'm not so sure.
The (East) Asian work culture is in part a model for economic labor: overall, it seems to be best suited for transitioning away from a low productivity regime to a high one, after which point it manages to stumble through okay but not exceptionally.
But it's also a social model. You hear about crazy hours etc., but those are in large part inflated, with large spans of doing nothing. What the hours do is bind the worker to a larger collective. Even aside from idle hands and all that, the social connections formed working act as a kind of behavioral safety net, particularly for men who would otherwise end up doing antisocial things. You have authority figures you have to answer to. You face shame for not meeting some minimal standards. You have to be presentable, and you have to develop the executive capability to at least physically turn up somewhere at a specific time. A large part of your limited social budget is forced to be spent with a more diverse group than total fuckups.
In America, those same people vulnerable to behavioral dysfunction put in their time doing marginal work before going home to (at best) isolated electronic activities or (worse) go out with people who will exacerbate their worst instincts. Or, increasingly likely, they won't work at all.
It's a kind of socialism that redistributes good behavior. In a world where behavioral norms are hurt far worse by the bottom 25% than helped by the top 25%, that's a massive win. (A variation of this argument applies to education as well.)
Is the social aspect separable? I don't know of a place where you can get the social benefits while moving to a better work model, though I'm all ears if you have an example in mind.
ThenElection
1mo ago
An amazing accomplishment by OAI.
On the economic level, they spent roughly $1M to run a benchmark and got a result that any STEM student could surpass.
Is that yawnworthy? No: it shows that you can solve human-style reasoning problems by throwing compute at it. If there was a wall, it has fallen, at least for the next year or so. Compute will become cheaper, and that's everything.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Agreed that casual marijuana use is widely accepted. But being a stoner is stigmatized. I know one couple who sent their teenage son to a ritzy rehab for it.
ThenElection
1mo ago
No one in the left elite professional classes supports alcoholism or drug abuse among themselves, no more than they want their daughters to go into sex work. It's still considered a personal failing, which at the very least needs to be covered up.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I had an interviewer laugh at me when I turned up to my first tech job interview in a suit.
ThenElection
1mo ago
It seems like certain psychedelics are doing just a reroll on your neural wiring. Ego death. Good if you're suffering from debilitating PTSD, risky if you're above average functional.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Caroline Ellison’s Tumblr
I missed this. Any choice juicy bits? Or just reminiscing on drug-filled orgies?
ThenElection
1mo ago
Escape with nobody having any clue what either of you looks like.
Drones have serial numbers, and their components have serial numbers. There's probably a dozen different identifiers baked into flight controller board.
So maybe no face information, but all the interactions involved in the purchase of the drone would be available. Maybe if you stole the drone, but even that would give away a fair amount of information about who you are. Or if you recovered the drone post assassination, but that's adding yet another possible failure point.
ThenElection
1mo ago
That's a really insightful observation about different approaches to tree pruning!... That's a really interesting hybrid approach! It makes a lot of sense... That's a brilliant analogy! It really captures the interplay... I agree about... That's a profound observation... [Your idea] is fascinating
RLAIF is the next frontier in DL.
Challenge: get Claude to say any idea is stupid or off base.
Most SS fraud is going to be concentrated in SSDI, which is like 15% of its budget. And although I bet there is a shocking amount of fraud in it, it's not going to be 100% fraudulent.
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