TitaniumButterfly
No bio...
User ID: 2854
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yeah, we need more people. And, that problem can be fixed with a software update.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Well, in the media this has been thoroughly debunked, is the thing. I've seen several 'fact checks' about it in the last day or two. So SS up there is right to point it out.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Wonder if there's a business opportunity in plausibly-deniably selling equipment for that purpose.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
So, my church doesn't have an official position on this, but the unofficial one I've seen in a lot of places is that if 'true' GAI happens it'll be used as a puppet by demons.
This makes sense on a secular level if we translate demons to something like Scott's take on Moloch. Naturally-emergent suboptimal (or downright deleterious) local minima / pernicious local attractors in the possibility space of ways-of-being, of niches.
But I don't see why it needs to be either/or.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
The other thing is, I'd rather have these social problems solved by unions than the state, so my position is kind of all over the place.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
You know, I was raised in a union family and firmly believe that unions were necessary and enormously beneficial back in the day. Sometimes, I assume, they still can be and are.
But I had a union job at one point. As an entry-level guy, they wanted some absurd amount of my paycheck. I'd have been working a couple months out of the year for them. Ended up leaving the job and the union.
Soon thereafter this union put its workers on strike for, IIRC, over a year. The demand was higher wages and a few other things. I saw people striking out in front of that place for a long, long time. Replacement labor was hired. At the end of it all, the union caved entirely, across the board, except for a couple of provisions which did nothing for the workers but benefited the union itself.
I think the reality is that unions are functionally obsolete. We didn't use to have strong protections for labor in terms of workplace safety, social welfare, healthcare accessible to the poor, reasonable human needs like lunches, breaks, and so on -- but now we do. If workers aren't making as much as they want, that's generally a market problem, not a regulation/union problem. And unions only have leverage inasmuch as labor is unwilling to agree to the baseline compensation (in whatever form) that employers are offering. The union I was in was toothless because, actually, a whole lot of people were willing to do those jobs at that pay and under those conditions. And that was completely reasonable.
So, my personal experience is that unions make things much more expensive and don't actually provide much value except in special cases of skilled labor which for some bizarre market failure reason (probably also related to overregulation) isn't making as much as it should. And that's before we get into the costs of protecting people who really deserve to be terminated, or the ties to organized crime.
In general, I don't see how unions aren't just making everything worse for everyone.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Hey, glad to hear it. I've been pulling for you. I'll sleep just a little better tonight.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Well, you seemed to be proposing a solution, and my point is that it wasn't a valid one.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Whoever does that would need to spend the rest of their life in something like a witness protection program, and probably their family too, maybe even out to cousins and so on. The incentives are not aligned to solve the problem.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yes, it is so. Can't speak to your example because I don't know anything about it but fixating on a really unusual edge case is unwise here.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
There are several parts of your comment to which I could respond, but we're fundamentally coming at this in different reference frames and it would take an entire overhaul to communicate the things I want to. All I can say is that I used to see it your way, and now I don't, and basically feel about your perspective the way you feel about mine. Also that we've had different experiences, and mine have me as entirely convinced as I can be, I think.
It would be rude to throw out a bunch of examples knowing full well that I don't intend to try to discuss them since, as I just said, that'd be pretty fruitless. So I won't.
But I do want to ask again, and let me rephrase here. Gonna ramble a bit.
Let's talk about concepts. Patterns. From a strictly reductionist standpoint, all that exists is the quantum waveform, and no part of it can be severed from the whole. It's normal to regard concepts like 'justice' or 'joy' as abstract, somehow qualitatively different from concepts like 'elk' or 'door'. But again, strictly speaking from a reductionist standpoint, none of these things actually exist. Or if you don't care for the quantum thing, let's say that all that exists is fundamental particles and energy. You can take what we call a door (or an elk) apart particle by particle -- at what point does it stop being that thing? Was it ever that thing, or are concepts like 'door' and 'elk' entirely artifacts of conscious minds? Does our categorization of a thing make it into what it is? If there were no conscious life in our universe, would there be planets? Or only the configurations of matter that we call planets? If there were humans (but without consciousness), would they still be humans?
At its root, theism is the perspective that these concepts, these 'gods', exist independently of our perception of them. An easy example which people often go to for other reasons is, do numbers exist independently of us, or is their existence intrinsic to (perhaps emergent from) the universe?
I'm throwing all of this out there to hopefully help you see what I'm asking when I ask you: Which gods do you serve? Are there any patterns, gods, that you think should exist; which deserve to be prioritized over others? What do you value? And why?
All I have from you is that you think it's good (personally preferable?) for cultural continuity and memory to be cultivated, presumably until it's all wiped away in some kind of cosmic apocalypse beyond our ability to control. And no, I'm not planning on going anywhere with this. There's no 'gotcha' waiting for you around the corner. I'm just having a hard time seeing why you're saying what you're saying.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
why should I feel obligated to honor past commitments (e.g. not to make a profit) that I made to myself?
Well, for one thing, because people who know you see it this way are a lot less likely to transact with you.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
hybrid vigor
I don't think this is a major factor in humans. In fact there's plenty of reason to think the opposite might be the case, since different populations have evolved different complex sets of alleles to solve particular problems and a child with some of each is liable to end up without either being functional. A well-aligned mind is a difficult thing to code for.
But, there's also some reason to think it's true. Emil talks about that a little bit here.
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/04/is-mixed-race-breeding-bad-for-you/
IIRC he thinks that certain recessive alleles may be hurting cognition, and 'outbreeding' would help with that. But as I understand the situation, even where that's the case, it's still most advantageous to mate with someone as genetically close to you as possible given that they don't share your deleterious recessives.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Precisely this. Does civilization serve man, or does man serve civilization?
The phrase "Disneyland with no children" comes to mind.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I think there is a vast gulf between 'I don't want to have kids for whatever reason, and if a sufficient number of people feel the same way, I am fine with humanity slowly fading' and 'fuck all humans, launch the nukes'.
Yes, but crazy as it sounds I really think it's a matter of quantity, not quality. To be sure, one of those is a much more immediate threat. But both are threats.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Our minds are worldly, temporal information processing phenomena, yes. At least mostly, as we experience them. No disagreement there. The question is whether, if and when our minds die, there is anything of us left. I think so.
We have no idea what consciousness is, how it happens, or even why it should ever arise in the first place. Until that's sorted there's a ton of room for other perspectives. Soul of the gaps, sure. That accusation wouldn't trouble me.
Perhaps I could say that I think our minds are so loud in our conscious experience that we fall into the mistaken assumption that everything occurring in our consciousness is our minds. The only way to find out is to die. In the meantime I'm not in a rush to create perfect, immortal copies of my mind which have no internal conscious experience, let the last bio-humans die off, and call it a day.
But I want to repeat the question:
How sure are you that what we are can be digitized? What, specifically, is valuable to you, and worthy of cultivation? In symbolic terms, which gods do you actually serve?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Not gonna make an argument here because I don't think there would be a point, but I'll mention that you're doing a great job demonstrating my concerns about atheists.
Well, leaving it at that would be a cheap shot, so,
I don't think I'm my mind any more than I'm my body. Which is to say, yes to both, but there's more going on than that. Also, human beings are uniquely divine, and God is a man in heaven. Human existence and experience are uniquely important, and uniquely destined.
Believe it or not I'm open to the idea that at some point 'we' make the transition to non-organic substrates. I just don't know enough about what actually matters to rule that out. But when people are eager to make the jump to artificial bodies and minds (not that you actually advocated for this), they strike me as dangerously naive in terms of their assumptions.
How sure are you that what we are can be digitized? What, specifically, is valuable to you, and worthy of cultivation? In symbolic terms, which gods do you actually serve?
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
by all accounts it is not normal for a human being to care about species reproduction on the global level for you to call one who doesn't a "psychopath". It is not "necessary work", but a purely selfish genetic drive that doesn't work particularly well.
Disagree here. Someone who doesn't mind the extinction of the human race (and especially the worthiest parts of it) is deeply broken and shouldn't be trusted. I probably wouldn't use the word 'psychopath' but the sentiment remains the same. (And by 'the best parts of it' I mean human potentials. If aliens said "We're going to keep humans alive in a zoo but dial everyone down to 60 IQ and give them toys to keep them occupied", well, that wouldn't fly for me either.)
As to 'purely selfish genetic drive' I assume you mean selfish on the part of the genes? Feel free to correct me if not. But if so, I'm confused as to what alternatives you can imagine. Can someone not value aspects of human experience without immediate concern for specific genes?
I mean this politely because I'm glad you're taking the time to understand, but you didn't quite grasp what he was saying.
Let me try to rephrase.
Each individual's IQ (really their g, which IQ measures decently for most purposes) is partly genetic and partly environmental. [EDIT: As I get to below, it's probably best here to understand 'environmental' as meaning 'random'.]
Say we want to define "genius" as starting at IQs of 140. Someone might naturally be at that level regardless of losing out on the potential environmental bonus. Someone else might genetically be somewhat below that level but still attain it because they got lucky on the environmental component. Either way they are 'geniuses' -- but one is substantially more likely to pass that trait on to their descendants, because they're that smart with or without the environmental portion.
With me so far?
Okay, so, imagine two populations. On average, one of them is smarter than the other. This one will produce more geniuses. The less-intelligent population may also produce geniuses, but these are more likely to be individuals who lucked out on the environmental factors. Put another way, some of them are genetically prone to genius, while others got lucky.
If you take the child of two geniuses from the first population, it's possible that those geniuses were also simply both lucky. But it's less likely than in the case of a child of two geniuses from the second population.
Does that make sense?
Now,
Because all children of geniuses will regress to the overall mean of mankind at the same rate. (assuming the same environment)
No, because there are substantial genetic differences between ancestral groups. The 'mean' in 'regression to the mean' is the mean of that child's ancestral group, and the more specific (say, only looking at the last few generations of ancestors) the more accurate. If an ancestral group has an average IQ of 110, the fact that people somewhere else have an average IQ of 85 doesn't somehow affect their children.
Also, I'm pretty sure that 'environmental' doesn't mean what you think it means here, but it's hard to say more without pressing you for details and either way it's too much to go into right now. I'll say that 'environment' includes all sorts of things like individual experiences and happenstance. Putting kids in the same house, school, and workplace doesn't result in identical kids. In fact at this level it would probably be more helpful for you to understand 'environmental' as meaning 'random' than anything to do with 'setting'.
That said, there are plenty of indications that even things we chalk up to as 'environmental' have their roots in heredity. Suppose someone gets in a fight in the wrong kind of bar and suffers some long-term psychological damage from what happens next. That's environmental, right? Could happen to anyone. But actually, even the tendency to be in such a situation is rooted in heritable personality traits.
I'd phrase my statement as : "Once you control for parents + environment, is the avg IQ of the parents' groups completely irrelevant?".
No, it's not. Parents carry all sorts of traits which may not be expressed in their generation (their individual phenotype) but still express in their children.
"Obama and Michelle's kids, can be expected to be as smart as a Chinese Obama and Chinese Michelle's kids".
As I understand the question, the answer is 'no' but I'll admit that I'm having a hard time understanding where you're coming from with the Obama thing.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
I'm not sure we can without any coherent framework around to distinguish between success and virtue.
From where I'm sitting, I think "Oh that's a satanist" and everything makes sense, and I can tell other people that and they get it too.
Saying that he's possessed is a bit more legible to the general public but still sounds anachronistic to most.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Does any passing reference to Christianity force you to blindly zero in on it?
This was my experience with that user, yes, and he wasn't interested in hearing what anyone had to say on the matter either.
But now he's gone.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Well, from experience, what you're going to find when you're done with the fast is that your body is intent on getting back to your pre-fast levels of fat. It will try to make this happen in both overt and subtle ways. Mostly just the urge to eat more often, or larger portions, than you did before. If you're not careful, this becomes the new normal and pretty soon you weigh more than you did at the beginning.
The only thing I've found that actually keeps me from gaining fat is lifting weights. There's a lot of broscience about this, and some real science too, but I can tell you it works for me.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Jayman's blog has a lot of more-recent information which you may find interesting. Be sure to check the sidebar for other stuff.
That said you're probably about to get chastised for a low-effort (and probably bad-faith) TLD and I can't say I disagree.
TitaniumButterfly
1mo ago
Yeah this conversation happened a couple of months ago and it's been... weird, continuing to follow Altman in the news and not sharing the sentiment with anyone. So I guess I was just waiting for a chance to do that. I see a lot of conversations about him and wonder, "Do any of these people know what he's like?" Speculation usually seems to run to his financial endgame, but I don't at all get the sense that he's in it for the money.
You can greatly accelerate the process of burning up your glucose with a workout or even a long walk. I like a roughly three hour hike with moderate elevation gain.
More options
Context Copy link