quiet_NaN
15hr ago
Seldom have I heard a story where I had so little sympathy for any side. It makes the characters in the alligator river story seem like paragons of morality by comparison.
Like, if a kid tries to steal from your sons bag, perhaps don't call him a racial slur? Unless he is like 14, even calling him a "little shit" would probably be in bad taste.
And if you observe some Karen calling a kid a racial slur after he has just tried to steal from her kid's bag, perhaps leave it at a "shut the fuck up, you racist bitch", and don't escalate to social media?
And if you repeat racial slurs while someone is pointing a camera on you, and you are not already openly a KKK member, nor are Donald Trump, don't be surprised if the shitstorm hits you.
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
Your explanation is certainly the steelman for fundraising in such cases, but to expand your (kinda) Cold War metaphor, there is such a thing as geostrategy. If crying "help, we are fighting commie rebels" leads to being drowned in US$, then a lot of countries will find commie rebels to fight.
Is the marginal dollar of the 750k$ sum really more helpfully spent on her than on the next person in a similar situation? How do you prevent the people to get into similar situations just for the payout?
For Ukraine, the case is different. No country in the world thinks "Look at Ukraine, getting all that sweet NATO gear. I wish we would get invaded by Putin so we can benefit from international aid like Ukraine has, perhaps we should try a border provocation or two." The thing is that even with the military aid, getting invaded by Russia is still horribly net-negative for Ukraine, and nobody envies them at all.
My impression is that the median donor is not thinking "spending 10$ here is the best way I can use disposable income to bolster my preferred groups, this is the hill it makes most sense to fortify". Instead, it is likely all emotive. "This story makes me feel enraged. The only impact I care about is to make my outgroup feel enraged in turn, and I am getting my emotive worth for my donation here."
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
This is fair, I should have thought more carefully about how I said that. Let me walk back my assertion. I don't have anything against crowdfunding in the general sense of, essentially, microtransactions or patron models for goods and services. It is the crowdsourcing of "charity," political or otherwise, that rubs me wrong. This is preusmably related to my general distrust of "charities" generally; I am definitely of the view that most "charitable" organizations are in fact enormous grifts, too.
Your sentiment seems very defensible. Such "charity" is the polar opposite of EA, in fact. All about tugging on people's heartstrings. Now I wonder if there is also the signaling aspect of it.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
In most Asimov stories and novels, the robots appear to be human intelligence at best. The plot of most robot short stories revolves around humans debugging robots which try to follow the Three Laws with limited cognitive capacity.
There are two stories I recall where a non-robotic AI can be reasonably thought to be smarter than the average human, one is the galactic AC in "The Last Question", the other is another short story about an Earth-bound administrative AI which ends up plotting to reduce the power of individuals who are opposed to it. There is also a standard humanoid robot running for president, but that is hardly taking over the world.
The instance you think of are likely the robots in one of the later books from the space detective series, which actually links that series to Foundation. But the edge which the robots develop -- and which allows them invent the Zeroth Law -- is not superintelligence, but
The events in the Foundation series strongly imply that the descendants of these robots are still not superintelligent.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts.
STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture. Electrons don't have gender identities, the set of integers is not "Aryan". At the most, the prevailing ideology might force affirmative action on the faculty (thus increasing dead weight) and force the academics to pay lip service to the ideology.
These are likely the fields that you mean when you say
Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.
The more you stray from STEM, the more the heart of a field is subject to ideological capture, until you get to fields which are pure ideology, like Grievance Studies.
Now, I think that is it useful to keep the Humanities around and give them a bit of tenure, but that has to be justified in its own terms, simply packing them with STEM and saying "universities produce great benefits for society" does not seem very honest.
--
I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.
Now, you can argue that the puzzle pieces for a grand unified theory are there, and it would simply take a theoretical physicist with an IQ two SDs above the smartest person alive today to figure it out, but that is not a very good sales pitch to the larger society -- fund physics so that you get a 1 in 20 chance that we will find an equation which will make physicists really happy but may or may not have much practical use.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think they mean that the AI was not used to create media for consumption by an audience, thus threatening the livelihood of artists or authors. An AI which only outputs dry spreadsheets is presumably seen as less of a threat, because accountants have little clot in the SF ecosystem.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Perhaps not human-on-human exactly, but with the main characters having roughly human-level intelligence and probably also some human-like drives. A story about an ant from the perspective of that ant, which likely can not even tell the other ants from its colony apart, and might reasonable operate on "walk on trail. pick up food. walk towards colony." will probably not be very engaging for humans. And a story about an ASI written from the perspective of the ASI would be utterly incomprehensible, worse than if I picked up a book on a random mathematical field and began to read it in the middle.
So most SF AIs are actually human level, and sometimes little more than human characters wrapped in tinfoil. C3PO, Data from TNG, positronic robots in Asimov, Murderbot, HAL 9000, Marvin.
If SF authors concede that ASI is possible, they mostly make it verboten and thus irrelevant through some Butlerian Jihad (Dune).
The major exception which comes to mind are the Culture novels, which are told from the perspective of the human pets kept by the ASIs which form the Culture.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that anyone halfway sane who gets pregnant while being in a non-exclusive relationship would go out of her way to carefully select the father and then have the fatherhood confirmed through DNA testing. The alternative, "I just stopped taking the pill and continued to fuck my lovers, and it does not matter who is the father because we are all one big happy polycule" seems rather terrible.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous.
This seems like a strong categorical claim.
Consider
-
A, B and C are in a pairwise sexual, mutual and otherwise exclusive relationship.
-
A and B are married, but also work in porn and both have sex on the set with other people.
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A and B are married, and sometimes they agree to invite a stranger to their bedroom and both fuck them.
It is far from clear to me how all of the above lack something which happily married monogamous people have.
I am sure that there are claims of the form "X couples can form a special bond in a way that people in other forms of relationship can not", which someone somewhere has made for X being "lesbian", "same-race", "dominant-submissive", "straight", "enlightened", "Christian", "black", "child-producing", and so on.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that there is nothing wrong with holding the POTUS to a higher standard than some random satire website or social media shitposter. If a top Democrat had been making such a joke, then the GOP would likewise try to make political hay with performative outrage.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Yes, based on my priors, if you had told me that Trump had outraged Catholics by comparing himself to an important character of the RCC, I would have been surprised to learn that he has merely settled for being the pope.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
One common criticism of Pascal's Wager is that, even if you buy the argument, it only serves to persuade you that you should believe God exists, and there's a clear gap between thinking "I should believe God exists" and thinking "God exists." I mention it, because Pascal himself addressed this point shortly after introducing the Wager. And his answer is LARPing. Once you're convinced you should believe in God, then start acting as if He exists. "LARP" as a person who believes in God. If you do it thoroughly enough for long enough, Pascal argues, you'll start to actually believe it.
If there is a counter-pole to the rationality project, then this is it. Where rationalists talk endlessly about biases and how they distort our perceptions, and how we are shaped by evolution to lie to ourselves so that we can better lie to others, and how we can trick our faulty wetware into creating a half-way accurate map of the territory, on the other shoulder you have a little horned Pascal whispering: "or you could just embrace your nature and reject the notion of truth. Pretend to believe what is convenient for you to believe, and the mask will become the face soon enough."
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think that almost nobody in Western Europe, in their heart of hearts, really believes that Europe will fall to Putin if he manages to turn Ukraine into Belarus 2.0.
If his special military operation had gone differently, Europe would not have mounted a counter-attack to free Ukraine. The preferred phrasing is "Europe is willing to defend Ukraine to the last Ukrainian soldier".
From a point of view of maintaining the rule based international order, it makes sense to punish defectors like Putin as long as it is costing us little (compared to WW3) to do so. (Yes, we did let him get away with Chechnya, but that is his backyard, while Ukraine is his front yard. The IRBO states very clearly that the only country which is supposed to get away with intervening where-ever they like is the US.)
From the point of depleting the stockpiles of weapons and recruits of a potential adversary, supporting Ukraine is likewise great. Perhaps Putin is genuinely uninterested in extending his sphere of influence over Eastern Europe and just wants to control what he considers Russia, just like it would have been possible that Hitler only wanted control of the territories with a German majority in Austria and the Sudetenland, but either is hard to know beforehand without being able to read both his mind and the mind of his successors.
If Putin instead had tried his regime change op in Poland, the European reaction would have been on quite a different level, because Poland is NATO. My guess is that at least 80% of the NATO countries would be willing to send troops to their death in Poland, and the ones who do not will functionally quit NATO. Article 5 is a promise, and if you defect from that promise, then NATO is dead and Putin is free to attack European countries one by one. (Of course, given what we saw in Ukraine, it seems unlikely that he would win the war for Poland against European forces even without US support, but that just makes it that much easier to commit to fight.)
With regard to guaranteeing what remains of Ukraine, the question for me is if it would make sense to allow whatever will be left of Ukraine into NATO. There are quite a few pros and cons to that. On the one hand, Ukraine is the one country which has serious combat experience fighting Russia, and they are indeed positioned well to strike for Moscow, so a NATO Ukraine would force Russia to deploy a lot of defensive troops in that area if she ever becomes serious about starting the next world war. On the other hand, Russia seems to have a bee in her bonnet about getting Ukraine heim ins Reich, and if there is a 10% chance that Ukraine in NATO will lead to global thermonuclear war, then that is not worth it in expected QALYs or from a European geostrategic point of view.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
These are problems which could, in principle, be solved by spending US taxpayer money.
Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.
This presumption is based on the fact that it is common knowledge that in modern warfare, whoever can field more weapon systems will have an advantage. So a state (e.g. the US) which is working under a strong presumption of not having to switch to wartime economy might never the less invest to shorten the critical path to start mass-producing weapon systems in earnest.
Arguably, developing new weapon systems is part of this. For peacetime capabilities, developing a new weapon system and then building a few of them is likely worse than just using that budget for building the previous generation of weapons. But when you enter a big war and your defense budget increases by a factor of 20, R&D will be obviously a critical path, and not having done it beforehand will greatly diminish your capabilities.
Likewise for production. Keeping enough machines around so that half your working population can manufacture munitions is not effective when in all likelihood, these machines will just gather dust. But hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly. Perhaps this means keeping a lot of machines which build machines which build missiles around, or subsidizing certain key dual-use industries to keep them on-shore.
Of course, the US would face certain hurdles when trying to spend more money on manufacturing without being themselves in a shooting war, all the rules about having bidding processes, NIMBY/environmental lawsuits et cetera might still delay things. But compared to civilian manufacturing (i.e. the US on a whim deciding to invest 10% of the GDP into manufacturing hard disks onshore), I would still expect that military manufacturing -- especially of single-use items like missiles -- could be scaled up very quickly.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Surely articles written by an actual human, no matter their political bias, are universally better than AI slop of any particular bias?
I think that "written by a human" is currently a required condition for a decent article, not a sufficient one. Human slop is not necessarily better than AI slop -- for example, AI systems can generally spell. A LLM-written article based on multiple news articles with some minor hallucinations sprinkled in might actually be less terrible than one written by a human who is psychotic or pushing a fringe world view.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I agree that giving nukes to Ukraine is not on the table, and while you can never be sure with Trump, I don't think he would go for that particular brand of craziness.
I think that the main thing the US could do is to just send more of the same. Quantity has a quality of its own, after all, and conventional missiles are likely materiel-constrained, not personnel-constrained. If my math is correct, the US is currently spending 3/1000th of its GDP (175G$/27T$ in about two years -- though I don't know how much of the 175G$ figure is Hollywood accounting). If they decided to triple that figure, that still would not crash their economy, but might create a headache for the Russians.
OTOH, this might not be enough to force Russia to negotiate in earnest, wars are not always won by the side with the larger budget, after all.
And I also don't see Trump doing this. Given his animosity towards Zelenskyy and his friendliness with Putin, I think the most he will do is keep the military aid to Ukraine at the Biden level.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".
I would argue that this is mostly orthogonal to which side has more of a cult of personality. Historically, I think most cults of personality are closer to falling in line -- believing that that guy is just the right man for the job -- than falling in love -- believing that that charming guy is actually a very decent person.
Sure, Obama had some cult of personality, but he was equally the figurehead of an ideological movement. If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant. By contrast, Trump has much more slack. The evangelicals who voted for him to get Dobbs certainly did not love him as a faithful Christian. He was a sinful tool for them, but he was the tool which got the job done. And the dissatisfied poor people did not vote for him because they precisely shared his philosophical beliefs about tariffs. They were simply dissatisfied with how the DC elites ran things, and correctly noticed that these elites really hated Trump, and correctly figured out that they could piss off these elites maximally by electing him. (Immigration is the other motive, and one where Trump's hands are likely tied. Opening the borders is something which his base would not forgive him -- like Hitler converting to Judaism or Stalin declaring himself a Tsar. So I guess that all movements are some fraction ideology and some fraction cult of personality, only that modern left-wing movements are stronger on the ideological side.)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I agree that the topic of bombing Ecuador was probably not a well chosen example by Scott, because few Americans truly care what non-Western country their air force is bombing today. It will not affect them in the same way as declaring a trade war on the rest of the world will. Still, I think that Obama or Clinton would have had to spend a lot of political capital to bring the Democrats and MSM on board with it (unless there was a "bomb Ecuador" lobby who had already laid the groundwork, of course). Perhaps a Democratic president can get away with one or two whimsical decisions on that level per term, but certainly not with three per year.
Biden deciding to run again was a disaster, and the Democrat's leadership was absolutely asleep at the wheel to not stop him well in advance. Rallying behind Harris -- while clearly not a winning move in retrospect -- can be seen as the Democrats trying to make the best out of a terrible situation they had maneuvered themselves into.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Currnetly [sic] you have cases where people who score a literal zero in exams can teach math
To be fair, (decimal) zero was an important mathematical concept invented in India
To be fair, from what I could parse from the comments on that reddit link, it seems possible that they are using some scoring system where the mean is zero, e.g. you can score negative, so minimum score of zero would imply "at least average".
Given only this information, I don't think we can conclude how much India is putting their hand on the scales here.
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It could be that this entrance exam is taken by people with a wide variety of degrees which do not enable them to complete a math PhD, that the standard deviation of the scores is 20, and the interview process is basically just approving them.
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It could also be that the people sitting the Entrance exam all hold a Master's degree in math, that the standard deviation is 200 and that the interview process is weeding out a lot of people.
I am slightly against attributing too much of the difference between castes to HBD based on priors. My baseline for the HBD hypothesis are the Ashkenazi. The idea is that if you were a Jew in medieval Eastern Europe, intelligence lead to reproductive success -- if you were smart enough to become a Rabbi, you would probably increase the frequency of your genes in the population. By contrast, a very smart Christian probably became a priest, a profession associated (at least in the RCC) with below-average long term reproductive success.
By contrast, I do not believe that European aristocracy was likewise selected for intelligence. A cunning baron who schemed his way into becoming a count probably did less for the frequency of his genes than one who just fucked his servants, though I admit that this changes a bit if one only considers the gene pool of nobility.
Like the Ashkenazi and European Nobility (to some degree), and unlike most of the rest of society in medieval Europe, the caste system of India was strongly endogamous. This is a very double-edged sword, on the one hand, it prevents the selection effects from diluting, but on the other hand, it removes the possibility of getting advantageous genes from selected outsiders.
For HBD in the caste system, there would have to be different selection mechanisms in place in different castes. For the priesthood caste, it seems vaguely plausible that it at least selected against crass stupidity. For the warrior caste, my prior would be that the selection pressure was similar to European nobility, more brawns than brains. For traders, such an effect seems most plausible -- cunning might make the difference between just making ends meet and leaving a fortune to your descendants which will increase their reproductive success. For farmers, I don't exactly see anything which will select for them being stupid. If anything, a very smart European farmer might try his luck in a city (and thus cease to be a farmer, depriving that subpopulation of his genes) while a very smart Indian farmer was stuck being a farmer due to the caste system.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The Rightful Caliph has blogged over at ACX that The Populist Right Must Own Tariffs.
He is arguing that while tariffs are an "idiosyncratic obsession of Trump’s" which are not a load-bearing part of the MAGA platform, the fact that he can push through them is a consequence of his cult of personality and him being surrounded by yes-men who will not risk his anger by telling him an idea of his is terrible. So the tariffs in particular point to a broader failure mode of right-wing populism, which he contrasts with the ideological capture of institutions by the left.
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question, and the past ten years of national politics have been one long IRB-less experiment. The Democrats made a compelling case for their own inferiority during Biden-Harris, but the Republicans are lapping them pretty hard right now, and I’m prepared to declare statistical significance.
I’m not a fan of either the ideological cults of the left or the personality cults of the right. In the absence of an obvious third alternative, I don’t think there’s a better option than taking either the left or the right as a starting point, identifying them as the lesser evil, and trying to fix their failure modes along the way.
He is then saying that he prefers to salvage institutions captured by the left to Trump's approach of starting without institutional knowledge and just see how things go.
As usually, this is compellingly written. It did not make me update a lot on Scott's politics -- he had explicitly endorsed anyone-but-Trump for the presidential election, and extrapolating that he would not be a fan of the tariffs was not exactly hard. I like how Scott took this issue which has been discussed to the death on the object level, then took a step back and asked "but what is the deeper truth about that political system beyond the object level stupidity?"
As usual for Scott blogs about CW-adjacent topic, there is a lot of discussion going on at ACX.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
To reply to both you and @RandomRanger, I concede that CW about power. What I was arguing was that it is not primarily about the allocation of resources, money.
I would still argue that the term zero-sum has all the wrong connotations. It vaguely implies rational actors competing over finite resources to maximize some utility function, like me bidding on a coconut you are selling.
In most cases, CW is not like this. The energy spent on fighting the bathroom wars is wildly out of proportion of the actual importance of that issue over the natural state of affairs (if you can somewhat pass and behave normally, you are fine, if you can't pass and/or spy on people, you get treated as a sex pest). The point of fighting the CW is not to achieve a grand strategic victory for your side, but to be seen by your peers fighting the CW. It is mostly performative.
Often, the behavior displayed is not about scoring a win for your side at the expense of the other side (zero sum), but purely on punishing the other side (negative sum). Getting someone for some tweet by doxxing them is a classic CW past-time, after all.
Consider abortion. Depending on whose side holds the majority, some states might allow all abortions up to birth, and some might ban all abortions. I propose that this is a lot worse in satisfying the aggregate preference of the Americans than a compromise solution based on a term limit.
Israel/Palestine is theoretically zero sum (only one side can control a given square meter of land, after all), but in practice it is vastly negative for both sides.
If the point of the CW was to achieve strategic victories for your side, e.g. a power struggle, then one would expect that it would be mostly fought over stuff which actually mattered, and money would be a central angle. People would try to build broad coalitions which would gain them small policy victories. This is not what we are seeing. Instead, we see an outsized focus on small but very emotionally charged theaters, and a trend to prefer the humiliation of members of the other side to actual policy victories.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
This simply isn't how taxes work. The burden is split between buyers and sellers according to the relative elasticity of supply and demand.
While this is technically true, I think that it is directionally false. Some products are very cheap to produce and have a high profit margin. If Trump is adding tariffs to ransomware payments, then I would expect competent ransomware gangs to keep the price after tariffs the same, because that is based on what their victims are estimated to be willing to pay, not what what it costs to infect their system. (It you tax it at 10000%, it might no longer be profitable, though.)
But most products do not have a very high profit margin. Take non-brand electronics, such as a digital thermometer. The manufacturer of the cheapest acceptable thermometers typically has the ability to scale their production up, so through competition, the market drives the profit margin down. To absorb a 100% tariff, a manufacturer would have to cut their profit margin from 50% to zero. But if they had such a high profit margin, they would probably have long been out-competed.
Now, most non-brand digital electronic toys have a high elasticity of demand, customers might buy all sorts of things just in case because they are cheap, and would be much more reluctant to buy them at 10x the price. So in many cases, what the tariffs would do is simply to prevent a sale.
Trump's world model seems to be that sellers are generally ripping buyers off by taking dollars for what costs pennies to produce, and if he forces them to hand half of their profits to the US government, they will gladly do so because ripping of Americans will still be insanely profitable. I just don't think that he is right.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I think that the main difference between a Mars base and AGI is that we have quite a good understanding of the physical constraints of a Mars base.
While SpaceX might have changed the economics of rockets by recycling them, the underlying physics and engineering constraints have been known since ca. 1950. We know what exhaust velocities we can reach, what the delta-v requirements for travelling to Mars are and so on. Absent black swans such as "someone invents a portal gun", we know that the way our constraints work out is very unfavorable, with rather small error bars.
For artificial intelligence, we very much have no underlying theory. We are Daedalus in a world where it turns out that you can craft wings from feathers and beewax which enable a human to fly. While some have been warning that we might get the Bad Ending if we soar to high, the truth in that analogy is that we have no comprehensive theory of heavier than air flight, aerodynamics, composition of the atmosphere and all that. In that world, asking if a man with wings can reach the moon is a question whose answer is purely an error bar, we just don't know. We notice the skulls of the Naysayers before us who had declared that feathers will not stop a man from falling, then that people can only glide downwards, then that sure, by flapping their wings a lot, they can gain a few meters, but surely not more than 50m, and are reasonably reluctant that to declare that the Moon is forever out of reach. On the other hand, in the real world, most straight lines can not be extrapolated indefinitely. So we just throw our hands up in the air and confess we don't know.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
My own view is that of the much more cynical Rand and early Marx: property is what you can defend by force.
That is certainly a pragmatic definition. (I would amend it that getting others -- e.g. a state -- to defend your property on your behalf should also qualify.)
See, for example, Wikipedia on territorial waters:
From the eighteenth century until the mid twentieth century, the territorial waters of the British Empire, the United States, France and many other nations were three nautical miles (5.6 km) wide. Originally, this was the distance of a cannon shot, hence the portion of an ocean that a sovereign state could defend from shore.
The island of the Whisky War would not be considered property because none of the belligerents was willing to station a defensive force on it. And you can put all the flags you want on the Moon, or sell its surface by the square meter, but unless someone breaks the Outer Space Treaty by placing a gun there to defend their claimed property, none of that will matter.
The problem with that definition (which I will call ownership-A) is that it clashes with how the term "ownership" is used in societies where laws regulate such thinks, and where that term generally carries prescriptivist connotations (think "the rightful owner", I will call that ownership-B). The ownership-B relationship is of course contingent on a particular society and even individual.
Examples:
- A person who is keeping a sex slave owns-A their body, but of course nobody can own-B the body of another person in any non-terrible polity.
- Russia owns-A Crimea, but it will be a long time (at best) before most Ukrainians agree that it owns-B it.
- If someone steals a car and gets away with the theft, at the moment of the theft that car was un-owned-A, but certainly owned-B.
I find the lack of info a bit strange. Presumably, he was in the top ten candidates, so I would have expected newspapers to have a full dossier on him. Just because the Catholics might not care much for his politics in this moment, it does not mean that the rest of the world should adopt the same standards.
The Guardian has mostly his biographic data. BBC has a bit of commentary:
So he might be American, but probably is not MAGA-adjacent.
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