faceh
16d ago
"if you don't have a realistic chance of being the best, or at least above average in your chosen field, you're doing the wrong thing pursuing it."
"If it will cost you 5000 hours of time and $200,000+ in 'extra' efforts to get to a particular position, it behooves you to figure out if the payoff is worthwhile." I can 'believe' that the extra utils the manlet gets from becoming an NBA player might pay off for him.
BUT... its not clear that he'll really be happier/better off/wealthier than he would have been going for a more directly attainable goal.
I don't want to imply that his only alternate choice is horse jockey. Flyweight MMA Champion of the World is absolutely on the table, for example. But if he decides he'd like to instead be the Heavyweight champion, should we celebrate his decision to on a massive regimen of steroids, get risky surgeries, and bulk himself up at the expense of his mental and physical wellbeing just so he can get outclassed by the 'natural' heavyweights?
What's the point?
Part of the secret to a happy/content life, I think, is 'setting realistic goals'. And in situations where your skill at a given job has other people's lives hanging in the balance, then yes, you really DO need to be especially good at it.
The nice thing about playing in the NBA is that individual screwups will almost never be fatal. We can 'afford' to indulge somebody's fantasies there without much collateral 'damage.'
But I wouldn't want an epileptic to become an airline pilot, even if they 'overcame the odds' to get through flight school and have hundreds of hours of successful flight time under their belts. (note, if a proven 'cure' for epilepsy existed, this would be a different situation). For the love of God just do not choose a career where a single incident can kill a hundred people!
For the past almost two years I've been taking small steps to arrange my life for a 'soft landing' in the event my job gets instantly obliterated when the AI that can do it better comes out.
I stand by this advice from just over 2 years ago, where I said:
My honest bet is that any student currently in their first year of Law School will be unable to compete with AI legal services by the time they graduate. Certainly not on cost. The AI didn't incur 5-6 figure loans for it's legal training.
Put another way, the AI will be as competent/capable as a first-year associate at a law firm inside 3 years.
A student who was a first year law student in December 2022 will be in the third and final year now, graduating soon. They may have some runway left to get a job before the AIttorney arrives, but do we want to bet that AI tools that can outperform them across the board won't be here by December 2025?
I'm still keeping an eye out for signs of downward pressure on new attorney salaries.
The Rumblings have begun in earnest
99% of all 'purely' knowledge-based work is on the chopping block.
Signed:
A practicing attorney who semi-regularly consults ChatGPT to get my bearings when dealing with a unique legal issue.
faceh
16d ago
Without commenting on the sister in particular, I do find these sorts of stories ironically depressing.
"I suffer from severe [performance inhibiting condition], and yet through incredible perseverance, added efforts from friends, family, etc., a few convenient accommodations, and some really painful medical interventions, I was able to become a mediocre practitioner in [Career Field]!"
Like man, you had to ignore a lot of incentives, advice, and straight up warning signs to push through to become, at best, approximately as good as the average person who doesn't have your condition. When you might have ended up a lot happier just following the economic signals and going down a path that didn't require 5x the resources to produce 2/3 of the optimal outcome.
Like, imagine a 5'2" dude REALLY wanted to play in the NBA. So he does severe training regimens, he gets leg lengthening surgery, he has extensive coaching from ex-NBA stars, and finally, he manages to convince the NBA to let him wear stilts on the Court as an accommodation. And After all this, he makes it to the NBA and performs at a slightly below average level overall. Which is impressive for him! But that's a lot of resources spent to get the guy up to merely 'adequate' performance, which is to say he's not contributing much to the overall success, despite all the inputs required to get him there.
When the guy with that sort of willpower and drive could have found his true calling as a Horse Jockey at a much lower price for everyone.
faceh
16d ago
Yes, and I've pointed out how mass communications make assimilation less likely.
If you can communicate freely with the home country, and consume home country media, and by extension avoid consuming American media and thus 'absorbing' American norms and expectations, if you can fly back to your home country for relatively cheap... not surprising if you'd still maintain allegiance there regardless of how long you spend in the U.S.
faceh
16d ago
Reform the nation on the beliefs that the now majority of your citizens espouse?
If you're aiming for a Convention of States then yeah, that'd be an appropriate approach.
I would suggest, however, that American values haven't 'shifted' as a whole, but that there is a severe divergence in values. There is no real 'majority view' on values to be identified.
So attempting to reform "The American Way" to favor either side's preferences would just mean no further union was possible.
The alternative is redesigning the meta-rules to allow peaceful co-existence, but that would look very similar to the rules we already have.
Or to put it another way was the Confederacy or the Union the anti-American ones in this context?
By definition the Confederacy was 'Anti-American' if we characterize them as the ones who wanted to exit the union and reform under a slightly different set of rules. They removed themselves from the compact and went off to do something different.
On the other hand, going to war to prevent states from leaving seems to betray the issue in #2 above, that States are supposed to be the prime political unit and able to determine their own fate.
So it is in fact possible that both sides were 'betraying' true American values, just each was betraying a different one.
As a side note: I do wonder how history might be different if the U.S. Civil War had been avoided or mitigated and they'd found a peaceable way to bring slavery to an end. Like how most other countries did.
Maybe safe to say it could have sparked later over some other major issue.
faceh
18d ago
Which makes him all the better to follow if you're trying to get a truly "different" or "outsider" perspective on things, honestly.
Personally I think Hanson is fundamentally more grounded than virtually anyone, he is probably more heavily tied into base reality and accepts the rules thereof more than almost all other humans.
Its just his tendency to try to extrapolate those rules into the future where he gets quite weird.
Supreme Court, yes, but that only solves the problem on the legal level. Does it mean that people who disagree with landmark Supreme Court rulings are de-jure not American?
If "disagree with" means "voice their dissent and yet abides by the court's ruling in the legal realm, that's incredibly American!
If 'disagree with' means "refuse to accept the ruling and revolt against any attempt to enforce it" then yeah, I'd suggest that's Anti-American.
I mean, Supreme Court Justices themselves can disagree with the Supreme Court's ruling, That's what a 'Dissenting Opinion" is! If they're persistent their interpretation can supplant the previous one.
The people whose ancestors came over with the Pilgrims but fervently disagree with those propositions? Do they lose citizenship? And then longer term what if communism sweeps the globe and everyone or 90% of everyone decides they disagree with the sanctity of property?
I think its safe to say that if a large majority of the citizens of your nation wholesale reject the ideas upon which the Nation was formed, you have to wind things up and pack it in, yeah. Even if we don't strip citizenship from people who have come to reject those ideas, I am okay with making their lives otherwise so unpalatable that they renounce citizenship on their own. See also the discussion on free speech as an ideal vs. deporting people expressing anti-american sentiments.
If every single person outside of the nation rejects those ideas, I guess its a question of how hard the nation will fight to maintain its status and standing as an independent unit.
Hence why it does remain very important for a 'nation of ideas' to be careful about who it admits in and grants citizenship to.
faceh
18d ago
Right, but "magic dirt" theory suggests that any human who comes here is capable of adapting to the culture and assimilating.
As long as the norms and ideas here are better and stronger then why should their culture of origin bother us?
Funny enough I tend to agree with the "America is a set of ideas" conception and thus a 'true' American is someone who subscribes to that set of ideas wholeheartedly, and gives their allegiance to the nation which is founded upon/represents those ideas over any other political allegiances they could have.
The set of ideas that I think represents "The American Way" would roughly look like:
1. Private property is sacrosanct.
not only is the phrase "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" directly stated in the Fifth Amendment, the concept is bolstered by the Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments. We had to resolve the wee little dispute over whether other humans could be treated as property, but that debate actually further supports that private property was a fundamental precept of the nation.
2. The "state" is the fundamental political unit around which the rest of the system revolves.
Tenth Amendment supports this directly. The debates over secession and the Civil War cloud the issue. But end of the day the Union can only persist so long as its member states resolve to stay unified. This is also why, historically, the idea of making Canada or its provinces into new States is far from a wacky suggestion. Just, ideally it would be done via a consensus mechanism and not invasion.
3. The Federal Government exists primarily to protect the interests of the citizens writ large, and to preserve the union of states from internal conflict and external threat.
Ah, here's the really tricky one. Its absolutely uncontroversial, or should be, that the Federal Government gets to handle international dealings on behalf of all the member states and citizens, and the states have representation via congress to approve treaties and such, but cannot enter treaties of their own. And likewise, rather than states going to war with each other, the FedGov has mechanisms to quickly and peacefully resolve disputes without bloodshed or lasting damage.
But Federalism creates some small paradoxes, such as the fact that states don't get to control immigration across their own border, but FedGov can control (or not) immigration across the national borders, and states don't get to treat their own residents with favoritism (at least, not much) whilst an American citizen can freely choose which state they want to reside in and favor, and can swap that allegiance at any time. Americans therefore are governed by their states but really owe little to nothing to the state they live in, can't be constrained from leaving their state, and for all pursuits and purposes can consider themselves an American Citizen first and a resident of a given state second.
So how much authority does an American really want the Federal Government to have? And if they decide they owe more allegiance to the Federal Government than their chosen state, are they still an "American?"
4. Citizens ought to be free to pursue whatever objectives they prefer and take whatever course they think is most likely to get them there... SUBJECT TO the rules and limitations set by the state they reside in.
This follows from the combination of the above three points. If you can own property, if you can move to whichever state has the set of rules you find most agreeable, if you can expect the Federal government to enforce your "fundamental" rights where-ever you are, then you have the basic control of your own life-path and are not required to submit your own vision or goals to that of some arbitrary political authority. Unless you WANT to, of course.
You can choose to practice your preferred religion (submit to the church or god of your choice), you can enter a marriage (submit your vision to your spouse's interests), you can enter an employment contract (submit to the will of an employer or corporation), or you can carve out your own niche and not submit to ANYONE so long as you pay your tax bill to the state and Fedgov.
There are no kings here to assert their will, there is no mob rule to force you into conformity, there is not an order of specially appointed priests who will subject you to an inquisition for failing to hew to a particular religious doctrine.
That's what "Americans" want. That's how "The American Dream" functions. YOU define your dream, you pursue it, and so long as you don't step on anybody else you will be allowed to chase it as long as you want.
But this does lead us to a potentially frightening question. What of those who are culturally or maybe even genetically averse to such ideas? There are plenty of places where private property ISN'T sacrosanct. Communism as an ideology rejects that precept.
There are likewise places where the basic political unit is your village, or it could be whichever regional warlord currently control the territory your family lives in, or in a handful of places there is indeed still a singular monarch in whom all political power theoretically resides. The idea that a defined territory would be governed by a defined entity according to clearly defined rules is not universal on this earth.
And of course, some governments don't operate as though they owe their citizens squat, the assumption flows the other way. The citizens owe the state allegiance, support, labor, and even their lives if called upon to fight for the nation.
And without those supporting ideals, well, you can't believe in an "American Dream" that one can pursue, since every person is required to submit their own vision or goals to the political authority and can't expect their own preferences to be protected, so why should they expect to be allowed to chase their goals in peace, ever?
Current technology might enable us to actually answer the question: are there groups of people who are more or less genetically predisposed to be "Americans" i.e. to subscribe the aforementioned set of ideas and therefore provably capable of pledging allegiance to the nation that represents those ideals? And if we can identify that, surely, SURELY as a nation of ideas we should be careful about only letting in those people who can provably pledge allegiance and aren't predisposed to defect.
And then, what if anything should we do if it is noticeable that this ability to accept these ideas has a strong correlation with ethnicity?
Well, not absolutely protected in all possible cases.
Someone who publicly expresses support for a foreign adversary can, for example, be denied employment with certain government agencies or denied a security clearance, or discharged from the military, or possibly imprisoned to the extent there's reason to think they've committed espionage or similar acts.
Similarly, it seems likely that Congress can prohibit Federal Funds from being spent on types of speech that are protected but that Congress doesn't want to subsidize. I.e. you can't compel the government to give you funding to spread your speech, nor can you force them to give you funding that they've withdrawn because of some specific speech you engaged in, provided they are doing so within the bounds of a given program they've established.
Seems likely, for instance, that if you started up an otherwise accredited college called "The Death to America School for Anti-United States Activities" that offered courses on "Undermining the Federal Government" and "Foreign Espionage 101" as part of a degree program in "Domestic Subversion Studies" that you couldn't complain if the government denied federal grants to your school or refused access to Federally-backed loans to you due to the particular type of speech you were engaged in.
There's probably a fight to be had over whether somebody here on a visa or as a permanent resident can have their status revoked for what is implicitly an 'Anti-American' position.
Ironically the same factor that might get it reversed as a 1A violation is probably the overall goal of the administration taking this action in the first place.
There's a 'chilling effect' on speech when the government visits consequences on people, even indirectly, for engaging in 'speech' alone. Or so the argument goes. I buy that idea, for what its worth. A law that is broad enough to punish protected speech usually runs afoul of 1A, even if said law is only used to to punish 'unprotected' speech. Hence 'narrowly tailored' requirements and so on.
But that's probably the main goal of this action anyway. A warning shot across the bow, there's a new sheriff in town, the kid gloves are off, etc. etc. Even if any given instance of speech is protected, this admin is willing to take actions against activities that the previous admin would have turned a blind eye towards.
Maybe we can recall when lefties were crying about free speech violations because Ron Desantis socked Disney in the nose when their Exec came out against the "Don't Say Gay" bill. Same effect. Commit to a very public attack on one (1) party engaging in the unwanted activity, and likely the others will back off for the sake of self-preservation.
Helps a lot that the guy they're attacking is not a U.S. citizen so he's already on particularly thin ice, even if he gets away with this particular action, it'll be much easier to keep an eye on him and find some reason to deny citizenship and revoke his green card and kick him out if he doesn't keep to the straight and narrow.
At the very least, it bolsters the argument that there are a lot of migrants, even legal ones, who are bad actors taking advantage of the country's general tolerance and largesse, and we really wouldn't want them here in the first place.
And of course the backdrop of all this is that speech is one thing, and protests are another thing, and a lot of the protests that have been taking place have been blatantly illegal, trespassing in areas they're not allowed to be, or intimidating other students who have an equal entitlement to use a given space, or of course vandalizing both public and private property. At some point you start not caring about the distinctions between the ones merely using speech, merely protesting, and the rest of the Antifa blob committing arson, battery, and theft, since they're all inherently supporting each others' actions and take zero steps to police their own.
faceh
19d ago
Interesting interpretation of 'bad faith.' He didn't state some facially wrong conclusion to inspire corrections (Hanania does this a lot, then nutpicks from the responses to 'bolster' his point), he literally asked the question, which led to an actual conversation, which a random selection of responses appear to mostly be earnest replies.
I don't know how you got the 'bad faith' allegation from this framing since he's literally admitting to ignorance on the topic, not claiming expertise.
faceh
19d ago
Regardless what you think about Ukraine war, this perfect representation of Greedy American stereotype is not the best way to win hearts and minds for cause of libertarianism.
One tweet down the thread:
"I'm a patriotic American, which means I know almost nothing about life in Ukraine and Russia
This was a sincere question and I appreciate the answers"
You interpreted the question as a gotcha or something, when he's literally being perfectly up front about why he asked it and is accepting answers in good faith.
I think this proves the point that he's not mindkilled.
faceh
19d ago
Trump promised one thing, the bill contains something different than what was promised.
Jeremy is literally stating that even Trump isn't interested in fulfilling his initial promises.
Which is to say that Massie is more intellectually honest than Trump (shocker!) and that pointing this out itself requires intellectual honesty.
faceh
19d ago
Find the ones who are actually smart an intellectually honest.
Jeremy Kaufmann, Travis Corcoran, and maybe Robin Hanson if you're able to stomach some weird hypotheticals.
You do have to look outside the mainstream but you don't have to accept intentional flamebaiting.
faceh
20d ago
Very similar feeling for me.
I stick with ChatGPT for any research-type tasks, I use Grok for image generation and current events, and Claude covers anything else if I happen to be in the mood.
But I'm almost entirely agnostic as to which model is in front of me at any given moment, I feel like I know what I can get from them and when I should be careful about double-checking their outputs. They all hallucinate about the same amount, I'd say.
Which is crazy to think. Part of the promise of AI was that any company that obtained a significant lead in the space could in theory run away with the contest by leveraging their AI for higher efficiency.
Instead we've got all the major tech companies and even some second-tier players putting out approximately peer-level models and releasing improvements at approximately the same pace.
I am still prepared for one company to achieve a game-stealing breakthrough all at once, mind. But I am not going to pretend to guess which one. If you asked me ~2 years ago I'd have bet on OpenAI all the way.
Yup.
He's got a microniche where he sides with conservatives/righties 95% of the time, but makes a huge deal out of the points on which he disagrees, and implies or outright says that they only disagree with him because they're hopelessly stupid and misguided, and thus he is appalled by 'his own side's' ignorance that he absolute must spend most of his time calling them out.
Lets him get more attention by pissing off the people he nominally sides with, but he also deflects or ignores any direct criticism.
Hanania is very much a right-leaning mirror of Yglesias. He has high verbal IQ and is versed in the esoteric and counterintuitive arguments that were born from the neoreactionary movement, but makes himself out to be the moderate and rational alternative to said neoreactionaries.
If anything, he's taking advantage of the fact that the majority of any ideology's adherents are pretty stupid, so its trivial to nutpick your way to prominence.. Well not 'prominence' but something.
This old post of his that claims Walz is clearly better liked and more likeable than Vance looks ESPECIALLY misguided, in retrospect.
Basically, he does micro-motte-and-bailey so he is never really caught in an out-and-out false or fallacious position.
faceh
23d ago
As one of those libertarian types who has been saying for over a decade that everyone, on left and right, should value free speech because it protects you when your ideas are unpopular, this comment just makes me feel smug.
I mean, I don't believe its accurate. I haven't seen anything outright censorious from the current regime, but if lefties believe they're being censored, they're just showing me that I was right all along.
So thanks, I guess. What lessons might we take away?
No.
I have over the past year cited multiple places he has been downright wrong. He botches his publicly available predictions, and I can't think of a SINGLE time he got an issue right. A man who is paid for writing his opinion has already proven himself inept at analyzing reality, so why should his opinion have value? Noah is a hack.
I've muted him on twitter a long time ago, I encourage others to do so.
His only currency is attention, and I'd like him to go broke.
I will use no further time on it.
faceh
26d ago
Ding ding ding.
If Trump is the Russian Asset, it'd be strange that Putin made his territory grabs in Obama and Biden's terms, was relatively well behaved during Trump 1, and is actually demonstrating willingness to make peace during Trump 2.
You even forgot the classic "I'll have more flexibility after the election" moment.
faceh
26d ago
FWIW Noah Smith's opinion:
As I've stated now several times, his opinion is worthless.
So I will once again assume he has it wrong and in fact is missing some obvious counterexample, but no, I will not be reading his arguments since it would be a waste of time.
Why is he being cited in this discussion anyway?
faceh
1mo ago
...
What do you think a 'certified genius' leading a team of 'smart outsiders' fixing government efficiency should look like?
I'm not sure, but I don't think it would all that distinguishable from what we are observing.
The guy already tested this approach in his Twitter takeover, it obviously worked (i.e. made Twitter VASTLY more efficient) there despite him having to adjust course a few times.
Its particularly easy to make that move if you're on an elevated platform and wave or otherwise gesture in a way that is directed at some particular person or part of the audience.
If you're waving towards someone on the same height plane as you, the arm will naturally be at a 90 degree angle so its visible to them.
If they're lower than you, then you'd be rotating the arm and palm downward towards them so, again, its more visible to the intended target. That puts you more in the "no no" range, especially if you have the arm fully extended.
All kinds of tricks to avoid it looking like a salute. Don't fully extend the arm, or use only a couple fingers (or the classic 'finger guns.' Although is that too violent?), or hell, use both arms. Most of those make you look more goofy, but that's a tradeoff. But man, isolating one gesture from a speech as evidence is not a great tactic.
And finally, if you ask me, the factor that makes the Roman Salute 'bad' is the part where you usually yell "SEIG HEIL" or "HEIL HITLER" while doing it. At least, that's the part that removes all ambiguity.
This.
MY personal benchmark is that I want an AI agent that can renew and refill a drug prescription for me.
This isn't a task that should require an AGI, but its one that is frustrating for me to accomplish, and often involves interacting with a couple websites, then making a phone call to multiple parties, possibly scanning and e-mailing a document or two, and finally confirming that the end result is ready for pickup.
This still seems beyond the current crop.
And I daresay that robotics is lagging enough that I'm skeptical that we'll see AI capable of physically navigating the real world independently, without using a human intermediary before we get AGI. They haven't yet hooked up an LLM to sensors that give it a constant stream of data about the real world that I know of, so maybe it can adapt faster than I expect. I wouldn't put anything out beyond 5 years.
That said, I don't think an AGI NEEDS to be able to navigate the world, if its smart enough it can use human intermediaries to achieve most of its goals, potentially including killing the humans.
So, if I'm being blunt and oversimplifying, the current state of AI tech is ABSOLUTELY a tool that can leverage human productivity, but needs more agentic behavior and the ability to manipulate atoms and not just bits, which I think most benchmarks don't actually account for.
This is definitely where I start to quibble with the concept of "superintelligence" as synonymous with "omniscient."
Irreducible error because your sensors aren't precise enough to resolve every single detail you need to make 'perfect' decisions and chaotic events that can't be predicted without spending WAY too much effort.
ALL THAT SAID, I do think that an AI that is able to formulate a long term goal will be RIDICULOUSLY effective at achieving it, even amidst chaos.
One thing I can imagine is if the superintelligence wants a particular person dead it could do something 'basic' like a genetically targeted bioweapon, or something more creative like getting the person to consume two separate substances each of which is individually innocuous or even beneficial, but have a fatal interaction effect if they are both introduced to the human body in a short period of time.
So in the morning, the AI ensures that the target consumes a dose of substance A, then later in the day gets them to consume substance B, and they die in a way that looks very accidental, or maybe even natural, and thus it would be hard to detect how it was achieved.
Maybe the AI is even able to design novel substances that will achieve this goal so there'd be no real way for the individual to defend against this approach.
Now, the next step that is harder for me to buy is that they could use this sort of precisely targeted, nigh-undetectable interventions to guide all events towards their preferred state, avoiding wars but never overtly showing their hand, even if people suspect some given event was due to its meddling.
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