netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
That stat doesn’t say anything about the five year trick. Or about Poles. Wait, it’s not even limited to migrants! This is like using the African-American unemployment rate to say that black immigrants are actually planning to quit. That’s not true for the U.S. and I would like to see better data for the U.K.
But let’s assume that 10.7% of Pakistani migrants are in fact arriving, cleaning bedpans for five years, then quitting to live off the King’s largesse. Why aren’t native-born Brits doing the same thing? To me, that suggests it’s not actually a good deal for anyone raised to expect a first-world standard of living. That’s exactly the kind of arbitrage @MadMonzer is talking about.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Most people don’t do everything “in order to work.” They work in order to live here, or raise their kids, or buy that new car, or whatever. What makes migration special?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Inflammatory claims require evidence. Drive-by insults at entire categories count.
Given the sheer number of warnings and bans you've accrued over the last six months, you ought to be aware of this. One week ban, again.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
In the interest of avoiding a spiral of "uh-huh"/"nuh-uh"...
More effort than this, please.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
How?
British customs laws were rarely particular in their enforcement. Judges could issue “writs of assistance” compelling bystanders to help with searches. This was an obvious moral hazard, and Americans remained bitter about it for decades. Here’s an article talking about it as part of an argument over probable cause jurisprudence, and here’s explaining how it got into the Bill of Rights.
The pockets rule removes particularity, pitting it directly against the Founding Fathers’ intent. It makes it easier for petty tyrants to impose an inconvenience on anyone they don’t like. That’s a poor choice.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
4d ago
Good post.
I do think your three questions are a little incomplete.
- Will we keep making consistent AI progress?
- Does sufficient AI progress translate to sufficient general progress?
- Will/can we align sufficiently-progressed AIs so they don’t turn us all into paperclips?
- How will aligned AIs be distributed amongst competing interests?
Even if (1) we stop making progress at 2x human, (2) that progress is limited to domains AI is already decent at, and (3) our new flood of intelligent, inorganic service workers is perfectly aligned…we can still get a wide range of results. My interests are not your interests are not Elon Musk’s interests. Maybe we agree 99% on things like “scarcity is bad,” but we aren’t going to be in lockstep. There has to be a negotiation step where we figure out how much our lead is worth. In a hard takeoff, it’s worth everything. In a softer one, it could buy nothing at all before rivals catch up.
In my opinion, the most likely branches include limited adoption: most competitors rejecting or failing to adopt an effective technology, giving a large advantage to a handful of more risk-tolerant ones. I find this most concerning for defense, a fundamentally conservative industry with some of the worst consequences for competition. The most risk-tolerant governments are not the ones I want to see gaining an edge!
This is kind of the crux of the AI 2027 project Scott shared recently. Not coincidentally, it also claims to have good answers to (1), though I didn’t really dive into their reasoning. I’m curious about your thoughts on Kokotajlo’s scenario.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
I have been keeping an eye out for Vlad Taltos books every time I go to a used bookstore for…years now. Still haven’t found the first one of any subseries.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Once upon a time, this is what I got out of Wheel of Time. It didn’t matter if the prose was florid or the plotting glacial. The sprawl was the point. I wasn’t reading it to find out what happened in each finale, but to watch the setting evolve, further selling the illusion of another world.
I would argue that this is the ethos behind most of the great fantasy doorstoppers, even the ones like ASOIAF which stumble into the mainstream. “Journey before destination,” hmm?
Buuuuuut I’m not going to pretend that these satisfy your third sentence. For a superior ratio of wit to word count, allow me to make two suggestions.
Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse is an iconic, delightful bit of English absurdity. Every other page offers some combination of words previously unseen in the language. The comedy works both in the short term, via dialogue and gags and ever so many puns, and in the long term, thanks to incredible brick jokes and a fundamentally silly premise. Great fun. The full text is available here, though I thought it benefited from a print copy.
I’ll also recommend Levels of the Game by John McPhee as a more serious sort of cleverness. It’s a synthesis of two biographies and a play-by-play tennis match. Since both players are near the absolute peak of their sport, the physical competition is recast as a psychological one. I can’t do it justice without explaining how little I expected to care about tennis, and how compelling I found it anyway. You can read some (all?) of it here.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
6d ago
Did “they”?
Post about specific groups or specific people. If you can’t do so without waging the culture war in the fun thread…don’t.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Which is why I have no objection to that version.
You can be a bit snide, you can complain about melodrama, you can accuse someone of playing the snowflake. Do enough of those at once, and it becomes more important to bring the receipts.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Speaking from experience, they’re the glue that holds a lot of things together.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
7d ago
Not gonna watch videos until I’m back at home, but thanks for the links.
How are you assessing Reisner’s reliability? If he were distorting numbers—or selectively reporting, or remaining conspicuously silent—how would you know? It’s easy to spot the most shameless partisans, but that leaves out a lot. I suppose I’m assuming that anyone who spends this much time covering a subject will develop something resembling an opinion.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
Imagine if Count of Monte Cristo had ended with a botched assassination and getting thrown back in prison. Then Dantes slums it for years before a Crime and Punishment finale. Sequel hook, maybe, but surely infuriating to readers.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
I’ve never understood small lasers. They always felt like a terrible heat/damage ratio. And the range!
What’s the intended use? Or are they just there to fill slots for cheap?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
Alright, alright.
If you think raising the kids is chilling, you’re going to consistently undervalue potential partners and mock their contributions, so you might be single for a long time.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d ago
Well, I feel confident they weren’t assigned e at birth.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9d ago
If you think raising the kids is chilling, you might be single for a long time…
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9d ago
I think your analysis is roughly correct, but the framing is bizarre.
Is my job proxy war? Im pretty sure my employer doesn’t believe I “deserve” wages for nothing.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9d ago
I will resist the urge to meet sarcasm with sarcasm and point out that this isn’t reassuring to someone struggling with the number of contradictions.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9d ago
it seems more straightforward just to accept that Christ is speaking non-literally
I hope you can see why drawing a box around all the confusing, falsifiable bits and saying “yup those are the metaphors” might be unsatisfying.
Sure, a random Reddit comment might as well have negative value. Even though it’s citing a respectable commentary, it could be confused or lying, and I can’t exactly check at the moment. Can you offer anything to better represent “modern scholarship?”
Okay, but is there an economic difference?
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