VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
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User ID: 411
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
Kind of a similar category to Biden's campaign secretly hoping for Trump to say the n-word or something. Do you want a major presidential candidate to say the n-word? If you're American, no; better that we have two enlightened saints arguing based on high-minded principled policy differences. But if you're the Biden campaign, of course you do. And that doesn't make Biden analogous to Hamas in any central sense.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
It may not work. But I bet Israel could offer a lot in exchange, especially to a country that doesn't have much to begin with. There were reports that Netanyahu was negotiating with Congo, for example.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
Yeah. They can also try to negotiate with a third country for their expulsion.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
I don't think we need to reach the question of whether the settlements are a good idea, or a morally just course of action for Israel. All that we need for present purposes is skepticism that the settlements play a causal role in the Palestinians' intolerable bloodlust. And my cup runneth over with skepticism on that front.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
Also, #3, Israel no longer appears willing to let the current situation fester for another generation.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
Sure, if you can wish into place a Palestinian leadership who would not attempt to butcher Israelis for 20 or 30 years, then the plan could work.
But you can't! Hamas is here. They aren't going quietly. And they aren't some exogenous force. By all accounts I've seen, Palestinians support Hamas, and Palestinians supported the October 7 attacks. A plan that relies on an unachievable counterfactual isn't a plan.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
With enough flexibility on a spherical planet, every region arguably encircles its inverse!
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
US 'aid' is valued at 38bn over a 10-year period from 2016
This really isn't a trivial amount in the scheme of US foreign aid, even if it is a trivial receipt for Israel. I tend to ascribe to the Matt Yglesias view that the situation would be improved for Israel if we turned off the foreign aid but continued to allow US military contractors to sell them weapons. It would make it more difficult to argue that Israel is a US client state -- an argument that isn't correct, but is enabled by the unnecessary payments.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
It's not so exotic, really. If your goal is to crush your opponent, it is to your benefit for them to discredit themselves.
It isn't necessarily a good tactical move to speak that observation into the microphone, of course...
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
the respective parties in charge (Hamas and the pro-settlement Israeli hardliners) are both locked in a sort of hostile symbiotic relationship where their actions keep entrenching their ostensible opponent, who in turn further cement the other's legitimacy.
This telling seems to assume that absent the settlements, the Palestinians' intergenerational rage would subside and they'd embrace peaceful coexistence with Israel. Do you genuinely believe that to be the case? My weary conclusion is that they're stuck in an intergenerational rage spiral sustained mostly by hope (fueled by the actions of their supporters abroad) that they'll be able to prevail and eliminate Israel. Apace with Richard Hanania, I think peace can be achieved only by crushing their hopes -- and that doing so is worth substantial trauma in the present to break the region out of their seemingly durable and miserable stalemate. In this telling, the settlements are superfluous.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
any possibility of peace
Can you explain more about how this possibility would proceed? All explanations I've seen involve an implicit step consisting of "and then the Palestinians decide to stop hating Israel with such passionate intensity that they'll sacrifice their own wellbeing to harm Israel and Israelis" and I genuinely don't understand, mechanically, how that step is supposed to be achieved.
My more-or-less-unconditional support for Israel in this conflict is rooted in the seeming impossibility of durably appeasing the Palestinians at any reasonable cost.
How can we be certain that Russell's Teapot doesn't exist?
I guess my objection is that this whole dispute feels like it's in bad faith. A lot of people just hate OpenAI for various reasons (predominantly ideological safetyism and rank envy at how much they've succeeded), are channeling that regrettable ennui into becoming sudden converts to the vital public interest of protecting an obscure IP right in "likeness" on behalf of Hollywood celebrities, and are making whatever assumptions about the facts they need to make to paint OpenAI generally and Sam Altman specifically as a villain on that dubious stage. I just don't buy the notion that the vitality of your objection is genuinely rooted at this object level. It just looks like you're trying to throw stones, and you think that celebrity IP likeness rights are a good stone. But both your motivation to throw stones (rather than make the argument that is at the genuine root of your distaste for OpenAI) and your apparent willingness to pick up a turd and call it a stone are just... unbecoming, I guess.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
They hired some other female voice actor. They did not instruct her to imitate Scarlett Johansson and they did not mention the movie Her to her. I suppose you would have a point if you could find some internal documents that said something like "we've done auditions with 100 female voice actors and we suggest proceeding with Candidate #73 because she sounds the closest to Scarlett Johansson's voice," but absent that, there's no case. There's just a rush to judgment and condemnation from various nobodies on the internet who have axes to grind with OpenAI for various stupid reasons -- or who are technology "journalists" farming engagement from aforementioned nobodies.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
5mo ago
no one actually cares about their doctor's academic credentials
Maybe not for their general practitioner or dermatologist or whatever. But if you get cancer or need brain surgery or something, then people care about the credentials of their oncologist or surgeon.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
6mo ago
Or engaging in motivated reasoning, or misunderstanding how unique individual voices actually are, or probably a bunch of other possible explanations.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
6mo ago
I get that you hate Sam Altman and believe he is a sociopath. I don't understand where that hatred or conclusion are coming from, but I also don't particularly care. What I don't like is that your "fuck that guy" attitude seems to be motivating accusations of wrongdoing on other flimsy and pretextual grounds. It diminishes us to engage in that.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
6mo ago
Yes. When has Sam Altman suggested that he'd St. Petersburg Paradox us into oblivion?
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
6mo ago
He does seem cleverer and more well-adjusted than SBF, but fundamentally he is making the same kind of gamble. Sam Altman thinks that there is a non-negligible probability that AGI will destroy the world, but he is building it anyway.
In what universe is this the same kind of gamble as placing double-or-nothing bets with other people's money until you inevitably bust?
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
6mo ago
No, they used another (consenting) actress's voice who happens to sound a lot like Scarlett Johansson.
Scarlett Johansson doesn't have an IP right to "female voices that sound vaguely like Scarlett Johansson." As long as they can produce the receipts to show that this is actually what happened, she'd have no case.
That Altman referenced "Her" does not really bear on this. You can like or dislike the world portrayed in Her. Personally I found it a pretty uplifting vision of what a near-singularity future could look like, at least up to a few minutes before the ending. And you can like or dislike the voice that they demoed. Personally I can't stand it, and the sultry, flirty, overtly sexy affect really doesn't appeal to me. (But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.) But neither has anything to do with whether Scarlett Johansson has somehow been wronged. She hasn't.
In any event, my distaste for the voice apparently was widely enough shared that they nixed it. But that just reflects a decent product sensibility and indicates nothing about this incredibly stupid attempt at a gotcha by you or all of the anti-progress Redditors who are joining you in hate-jerking over this as we speak.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Running circles around a shape-rotator like Sutskever is child's play for him.
Actually, reportedly, it was Anna Brockman crying and begging Sutskever to switch his allegiance that seemed to clinch it. Ilya had officiated Greg and Anna's wedding, held at the OpenAI office. Another point for Hanania's theory that women's tears win in the marketplace of ideas.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
A member of your board praising your competitor
Yes, this would be very unusual and blameworthy when "board" means "board of directors of a traditional C Corp." But OpenAI is a nonprofit and this was a nonprofit board. It was set up that way purposefully to allow the directors to slow OpenAI down if they felt it necessary for their mission. I'm glad that Sam prevailed, and I want them to accelerate at least for the time being, but the common assumption that "the board" was supposed to act to further OpenAI's commercial interests (as opposed to its mission) is wrong.
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
Best since the previous Sam was deposed in the previous November
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
he had reprimanded Ms. Toner for the paper
Replacing the toner usually fixes any issues you're having with the paper in my experience
VelveteenAmbush
Prime Intellect did nothing wrong
1yr ago
If you were in the marketing department at AB and someone said “hey, why not send a one-time promotional can to this influencer that she’ll only market to her (highly woke) progressive following and that our core audience will never even hear about?” what would you say to convince them of how badly things would go?
I'd say "we're a lifestyle brand and this would directly contradict our brand image, so it's bad practice, like playing with fire."
Honestly, I don't get it. I empathize with wanting to expand your brand image beyond your core audience, but you grow your territory by expanding it around the periphery -- not by parachuting in on the other side of the world.
Framing this as a big-brained move seems to take more complexity than the obvious explanation: the marketing department was culturally completely disconnected from the core audience and wanted to do something that made them feel good instead of their audience, so they cooked up some arguments to do it.
Yeah, the old joke that I've heard frames it as coming from the defense: "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury: I wasn't even there! And if I was, I didn't do it. And if I did, it was self defense. And if it wasn't, I was insane!"
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