quiet_NaN
17hr ago
he still outperforms pretty much all of the rest of our expert class.
As a member of the expert class (in the broadest sense), I must object. Trump is not one of us. He does not deal in facts, he deals in narratives. Few people are prouder than he is of his ignorance.
Nor is it clear that he outperforms anyone, let alone the experts. I mean, MAHA did more for measles awareness than the CDC ever did before, but that was likely not intentional. The medicine Nobel for the Paracetamol-autism link is yet another one which the woke Scandinavians deny him.
Free trade is what made the US the economic powerhouse it is today, but perhaps Trump can outperform the free market with his tariffs.
To an outside observer, the Iranian thing looks pretty bad -- botched coup, expensive air war, antagonizing rather than decapitating the regime, etc. But sure, there is a chance that the deal he will make will be much better than the Obama deal and he will get the war Nobel.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
If you are working on sufficiently powerful technology with dual-use applications, then you work for the War Department. There is no option for you to continue your preferred work while licensing only peaceful civilian applications of your product.
There is an ideology which assumes that the political leadership knows best what is good for the people, and that the industry should be subservient to their will.
There is another ideology which is based on the weird conception that people have rights, including the right to to form groups to do stuff in a way which might displease the government.
Most polities will happily strong-arm any and all resources into their survival if they feel their existence is being threatened. But with the former ideology, it is the rule, not the exception.
If you are trying to convince the government that you are not a security risk, do not hire people like this and present them as neutral experts. (No seriously, what the actual fuck were they thinking?)
Oh no, a pink-haired woman. The horror, the horror. She seems a "security risk" in that she likely did not vote for Trump. Surprisingly, that does not make her a North Korean spy.
Anthropic obviously believes that MAGA will not retain total control of the government for long, and that it is therefore not in their best interests to do a lot of ring-kissing.
If you aren't okay with the government using your technology, then don't build it.
Or you could just find a government which is not run by some mafia don in collaboration with some wannabe fascists who reflexively shout "NATIONAL SECURITY!" whenever they don't get their way. It seems unlikely that the Swiss government would use force you to allow them to use your LLM to pick Iranian schools to bomb, for example.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think the USG has claimed that there would be no toll for ships to be paid to Iran.
To pass the moving average threshold of the question, you would need 420 ships to transit within a week. At the moment, 2000 ships are stuck. The US has substantial assets in the region and should not take weeks to clean a passage.
Israel vs Hezbollah causing Iran to close the strait again is not a confounder, it is the most probable outcome. When people talk about the peace deal failing, that is exactly the outcome they are thinking of, I imagine. Hormuz is not an irrelevant side clause of the peace deal, it is arguably the most important short term objective for the US.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Agreed. Obligatory acoup.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
depopulate
That is a pretty strong claim. Per WP, there were 31 IDF soldiers, one demolition worker and two Israeli civilians killed in the war. On the Lebanon/Hezbollah side, there have been over 3700 killed. From the IDF Gaza conduct, I would assume that at least half of them are civilians.
Now I get that this disparity is because Israeli missile defense is rather good, not because Hezbollah is peaceful.
But "depopulate at will" carries a sense of urgency, "we need to act now before most of our population is dead". Palestinians have send rockets towards Israel to little effect and Israel has responded by bombing them with much greater efficiency for longer than I have been alive. It is just the locals on both sides expressing their religions or something. The rational response for Israel would be to shrug and just accept it as a minor inconvenience for the failure to make peace with the Palestinians and settling in the West Bank.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Polymarket gives a 28% chance that the strait will be open by June 30. If the peace deal is signed on Friday and implemented on Saturday, then that market would resolve to yes after a few days, so it seems fair to say that the market is skeptical that the deal will hold.
I mean, the US, Iran and Pakistan agreeing that an agreement was reached is certainly a new stage, but it seems likely that the deal will still fall through. In particular, Israel can just veto the deal by continuing to bomb Lebanon at the cost of some MAGA goodwill towards Israel which may not be that valuable after the mid-terms.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
If I were in the position of Altman and also uninterested in the utility of humans other than myself, the threat of death would not be enough to deter me, sadly.
Suppose that my odds for ASI are that p(paperclips)=90%, p(Altman aligned)=9%, p(humanity aligned)=1%.
If I do nothing, either someone else builds ASI or I die of old age. Waiting longer before trying for ASI might be good for alignment, but will be bad for me personally if I die before that. Perhaps I get a 15% probability to experience a post singularity utopia like billions of other humans.
If I push forward with my ASI, I have a 9% chance to become God Emperor of the light cone. This is a much nicer outcome for me, because I can shape the universe to my whims, and make sure that socks in sandals do not exist or that most inhabitants are lesbian furries or whatever my aesthetic and moral preferences might be. If I am willing to sacrifice a few percents of my shot at an eternal life for that by building ASI when it is less likely to be aligned, I will probably also be willing to sacrifice a percent of it on the off chance that humanity will decide to kill me to deter me selfishly threatening their survival.
On reflection, I agree with you and @SnapDragon though that the torment nexus disincentive is a cure which is worse than the disease. I trust a humanity-aligned ASI that it will come up with better disincentives. For example, it could just frustrate Altman's general preferences for defecting. Every sentient being will have at least two feet and they will be clothed by socks and sandals, and whole galaxies will be colonized without any lesbian furries in them. And cooperating could be rewarded by giving the people who could have defected some say in the future.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Sure. This administration is great at making huge announcements which then fall apart in the court system because it turns out that not everything Trump feels he should have the authority to do is something he can actually do. Getting banned by the USG and then getting the ban reversed in court would definitely add to the hype.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Different Bad Things are different not only in their probability but also in how actionable they are. Your approach applies to things which are not actionable. The probability that the sun blows up tomorrow is not worth worrying about, because there is nothing humans could do which would make a difference. By contrast, a lot of problems humans worry about -- from ASI and global warming to cancer or getting attacked by a bear in the woods -- are actually Bad Things where humans can make decisions which will affect the badness of the outcomes.
The US is not the land of fully unregulated capitalism, nor has is ever been. To a true believer in the free market, if would seem almost as oppressive as Soviet Russia. The list of goods and services whose sale is either forbidden or severely regulated is long. Humans. Human meat. Fentanyl. Sex. Fissile material. Fragmentation grenades. Leaded gasoline. Handguns. Dental services. Loans. Food. Animals. CFCs. Ebola samples. Parts of protected animal species. "If the government makes us pay for the privilege of burning fossil fuels, that is the end of capitalism in America" is a sentiment excusable from a guy living in 1850. For someone living today, it seems strange to claim that all the regulations amassed since WW2 are fine but CO2 emission certificates would be the end of the world.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think that Musk and Altman have just convinced themselves that throwing the dice on ASI is worth it for them personally. They might not even be wrong there, putting the creators of ASI into the torment nexus even if ASI remains human-aligned as an acausal disincentive for recklessly betting humanity for personal gains is not widely explored as a strategy, sadly.
I think the USG is acting against Anthropic because Amodei is less of an idiot whisperer than is colleagues, but because his company pissed off the DoD by having limitations on use of their LLMs.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The problem for Bulgarians [...] is that [...] many of the natives [...] blur into a continuum with the Roma population [...]
I would argue that the actual problem is the racists HBD-proponents who decide to improve the local community life by abusing or attacking people based on their perceived ethnicity.
There is a lesser problem where people use appropriate heuristics based on perceived ethnicity, but this is small fries in comparison. If I were a Bulgarian, I would have a problem with people threatening me because they mistake me for a Roma. If they decide to check every banknote I pay with using UV light I could live with that.
An (Ashkenazi) American Jewish guy I know (who is far more the Trotsky or Woody Allen phenotype than the Levantine Warrior one) was accosted by some people in a small town in East Germany where he was visiting for a wedding by people who assumed he was a migrant of some sort. People are not that good at differentiating races.
Of course, the kind of Germans who would actively accost migrants will likely consider it a happy accident if they end up beating up a Jew instead. (Though more recently, I guess it is also possible that some on the far right admire Israel for what they did in Gaza.)
quiet_NaN
6d ago
As to No immigration or Democracy I will gladly side with No Immigration. Dictatorship just isn’t that bad and it’s mostly American propaganda that makes you fear it.
A dictatorship is like deciding to dismount the brakes on your car to save weight before a road trip, or sharing a needle with a stranger. There is certainly a possibility that it will not be a big deal and you get Park Chung-Hee. There is also the potential for unlimited disaster.
Us Germans have experiences both with dictators and democratic leaders. If I have to choose, I will pick a democratic leader over the coin toss which is a dictator. The worst leader Germany ever had (by pretty much any metric) is mustache guy, with Wilhelm II having worked hard to earn a well-deserved second place.
You are anti-immigration, so you probably hate what Merkel did in 2015. I have lived through it, and I can assure you that it compares to what happened 1939-45 like a sparrow compares to an A380. I will strongly prefer a candidate from a party whose policies I do not share but who is committed to democracy to a candidate whose policies I favor but who would rule as a dictator.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that your analogy is good, but not perfect, because in sports there is actually a rather objective measure of performance. The sport stars who make millions will generally crush amateurs.
With sex workers, just like with with movie actors or wine bottles, there is no clear objective comparison between competitors. It is the realm of taste and fame, whose assignment is illegible.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
This strategy dates back to (at least) the civil disobedience of the civil rights movement (which was tremendously successful).
Basically, you want to be a nuisance. Public attention thrives on controversy. If you are standing peacefully in your assigned corner protesting whatever, people will just ignore you.
Ideally, the state will react widely out of proportion, thereby generating sympathy for your cause.
Ideally though, the cause comes first, and the civil disobedience comes later. I do not watch much Youtube, but I suppose for a lot of youtubers it is the other way round -- the recklessness is their brand, and they are happy to put it in the service of whatever cause.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Not really. "We" here is a reference to the kind of blue-collar worker @Goodguy was talking about (i.e. someone who puts a lot of their identity into being the kind of person who works hard in a physically demanding job), a demographic which is underrepresented here. If @hydroacetylene's "we" is accurate and he is indeed a regular blue-collar guy, he is providing the Motte with useful information we wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Ok, I missed that context.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think that with goods for conspicuous consumption, the price finding works a little different than for other goods.
Any vintner deciding to make fifty millions by just producing 100 bottles of a wine which is worth 500k$ a bottle will fail miserably, because the very fact that there are 100 bottles on the market will cap the price.
If anyone in SV is spending 30k$/weekend on an escort, that is obviously conspicuous consumption. The point is to signal that he can spend that much money. The identity of the escort is secondary, could be a former porn star, or Aella, the important thing is that his buddies have heard of her. If his buddy replies that he spend 10k$ on hiring an escort who is just as hot and smart as Aella, but much less famous, that has much less signaling value.
I think the bottleneck is not being hot and smart, it is being famous. There are thousands of actors in Hollywood who are pretty great actors. Most of them do not earn outrageous sums per movie, because a film-maker will have a hard time to persuade the audience that they are indeed good. The top tier actors will reliably draw a crowd because they have a large fan base, and being able to pay them millions is a good signal for the movie having a high production value, so the special effects will also be great.
When you said:
women with high enough IQ to comprehend and execute that plan, while also being willing to be prostitutes and prostitutes to nerds, are in short supply.
that rings to me like
Tom Cruise makes 100M$ per movie, so $ADJECTIVES actors like him are in short supply.
To which I would reply that obviously Tom Cruise is in short supply (likely intentionally as a business decision). However, all of that is due to him being famous. A nobody with his acting talent and looks entering Hollywood would probably land some roles, but would make absolute peanuts compared to him unless he got lucky and rose to the top, and anyone contemplating to go to LA and shoot movies or to SV and work as an escort would be served much better by anchoring on the median income of their peers than on the top earners.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
What's pseudo about it?
Agreed. Come on, we are supposed to be high-decouplers here. I can certainly hate everything Musk represents politically and still acknowledge that he had some amazing (if over-hyped) successes with SpaceX and Tesla.
I think it is safe to say that most sex workers are not intellectuals. But that is a correlation, not an invariant law of the universe.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
we see prostitutes in the same category as drug dealers, loansharks, and other dubiously legal occupations
Consensus building. I for one do not see them that way. I do not think there is anything bad about prostitution per se. About half the adult humans have a much stronger sex drive than the other half, and unfortunately are mostly interested in sex with that less interested half. A lot of ink has been spilled about the decline of romantic relationships, but for our purposes it is enough to assert that humanity was shaped by the uncaring forces of evolution and now finds itself in an environment way out of the training distribution.
Sure, sex with a sex worker will never be maximally wholesome, it would always be more wholesome to find some partner who is just enthusiastic about sex with you. But this is the perfect (but probably unachievable) being the enemy of the good.
The same argument has been made about semaglutide, actually. "But would it not be much more wholesome if you changed your diet on your own and exercised?" Fuck that.
I see prostitution more on a moral level with theme parks, not meth labs. There are probably some hardcore cosplayers who view Disney parades -- where people simply walk around in some Mickey Mouse costume because that is their day job -- rather because they feel deeply drawn to become that character -- as an abomination. And others might say that theme parks are fine, but roller coasters are the devil's work, and humans should just be happy to experience 9.81m/s^2 towards a fixed direction as God intended, or might claim that most actually existing theme parks are ecological disasters and lead to animal suffering. Or decry the commercialism of all of it. But in the end, theme parks are not inherently evil. They simply offer the fulfillment of normal human drives (e.g. for excitement and adventure) for money. If capitalism can be trusted to deliver your daily bread, why should you not also trust it to deliver a fun day for your family?
Whenever we say "this thing is sacred, it shall not be traded for profane goods" (e.g. for sex, but also for the saving of a human life, or a kidney), that tends to create outcomes which are just further from the Pareto frontier.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I am not convinced. Per google, the most expensive bottles of wine cost about half a million. This does not mean that there is a supply shortage of wine, merely that weird things happen when the uberrich engage in bidding wars. If the median price for an escort in SV was 10k$, then I would conclude that there is indeed a supply shortage.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think the workaround for escorts is generally that you are not paying for the sex, you are paying them to keep you company, and it is hard for the state to prove if any sex takes place and if so if it was part of a transaction.
Also, rich people's vices do not have the social costs of poor people's vices, generally, and therefore are more tolerated. If some banker wants to do cocaine, that is mostly a victimless crime -- he is very unlikely to stab a guy to steal his wallet to pay for his next fix.
Lower class prostitution definitely has some externalities. A prostitute who receives her customers in her flat or walks the street of some neighborhood will definitely affect the quality of living of her neighbors even before you add pimps and organized crime. With high-end prostitution, these things are simply not a concern -- if the john is renting a fancy hotel suite, then the hotel will gladly deal with all the inconveniences their fornication imposes on the neighborhood.
Also, if we start prosecuting every sexual relation which was mediated by the expenditure of material goods, half the country would be in jail. There are probably cases of some guy getting laid despite owning only the clothes on his back, but as a general rule being poor will decrease your SMV. I am not sure if anyone has done a RCT on this, but if taking your date out for some fries salvaged from the McDonalds garbage bin resulted in as much sex as treating her to a three-course menu, half of the demand for fine dining would probably go away.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
It's obvious that aella has become obscenely wealthy and gained a ton of social status from her pursuits, but I'm still somewhat shocked at the sheer amount these women are making.
I work a pretty boring, standard corporate marketing job, and apparently these prostitutes are taking home almost my entire after-tax yearly income in one weekend.
So close. You are questioning if the escorts who earn big bucks really are worth their money, but don't stop to think if the same might be true for the tech bros who are paying the escorts.
If hiring expensive escorts is conspicuous consumption, then so is hiring expensive tech bros. Plenty of companies decide that paying their CEOs with stock options to the tune of 100M$ is worth the money -- likely for status reasons, some species of white elephants, then so is the CEO paying top tier escorts for a weekend. After all, what use is a astronomical salary if you do not spend it? Many guys end up spending a decent fraction of their paycheck on romance. Paying your ex-wife half of what you own -- or paying child support, for that matter -- generally ends up being more expensive than paying an escort, I think.
A lot of the goods of conspicuous consumption run into totally diminishing returns, where every doubling of the price gets you less value. Going from a 15k$ car to a 30k$ car will be a whole different experience. Going from a car worth one million to one worth two is probably not even going to be noticeable. Likewise, there is a difference between a four dollar wine and a two dollar wine, but if you spend 200k$ rather than 100k$ on a bottle you are most likely just enjoying the price tag. Likewise, I would likely not to be able to tell the difference between an evening with a 10k$ escort and a 100k$ escort (note to self: think about putting that experiment on gofundme). Both will be hot, cultivated and great at sex, I imagine. The differences will probably be completely beyond me, like "but the more expensive one is more focused on the philosophy of utilitarianism, while the cheaper escort is more into continental philosophy, which is less in demand by rich johns right now".
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Sure. Both parties do their best to make the election outcome not reflect the will of the people, and both parties whine about how their loss does not reflect the actual sentiment of the population because the other side did that. Gerrymandering and making it maximally inconvenient for demographics who lean towards the opponent to vote while making it maximally easy for your demographics to vote (think "we will make you wait in line for hours" vs "there is a bus to pick the elderly up from care homes and ferry them to the voting booth") are time-honored strategies.
However, both these strategies and the exaggerated whining about them are of limited badness. The effects of gerrymandering on the outcome of a particular election can easily be determined with sixth-grade math, there is little dispute what the outcomes would have been if the districts were drawn differently, or the difference between seat distribution and popular vote. Likewise, wrongful claims of voter suppression are of limited badness, because they can not persuade the people who voted that their vote did not count, only that their candidate would have done better if the other voters were not suppressed.
By contrast, saying "the totals do not reflect the will of the people because of election fraud, i.e. either your vote did not make it into the totals, or the other side just stuffed the ballot with fake votes to win" is much more corrosive. The main selling point of democracy is that it offers people a way to change their government without all the bother of violently overthrowing it. Telling someone that the ballot box is broken is the same as telling them to use the cartridge box instead.
From the link, it seems that Stacey Abrams mostly did the former, whining about voter suppression. While some might be persuaded to rise in armed resistance despite their vote being counted because they think that there is some Black voter whose vote was suppressed, I feel the danger of that is limited -- the actual nucleus of such a resistance movement would have to be the suppressed voters, so if there are hardly any there is no movement.
By contrast, denying the legitimacy of the Biden election is a basic tenet of MAGA. It is not just a cope from the base (which we certainly have about 2024 on the left, like "Musk stole the election for Trump"), it is what a Republican congressman has to claim to believe to be in good standing with his party.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
A 1% chance isn’t zero chance.
Yes, but it is not a 1% chance. 1% chances are fine. By contrast, this is astronomical. Suppose that that in the bluest neighborhood on the planet, there is a chance of 99.9% that anyone will vote Democrat, far exceeding the margin of even one party states. Still, the odds of none of 13000 voting for the GOP would be merely 2 in a million. It is utterly implausible.
In this case though, I think that the better explanation is an utterly stupid way to update the votes (by bunches per candidate), not the most incompetent voting fraud in history.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Really? That seems terrible. Leave it to the Americans to look at their electoral college system and decide that there is still room for horrible procedural improvements.
Voting is not very hard to do right, it can (and should be done) with just paper and a ballot box. If a citizen is concerned about voter fraud, they should be free to observe the ballot box during the whole voting process and then observe the counting process. Once you have finished counting your district, then and only then will you send a preliminary result on. We do it like that in Germany and it just works. Anything more technological is a terrible idea, because it will be very hard to persuade people who have no clue about computers that their vote was counted correctly, and it will be even harder to persuade the people who are very knowledgeable about computers.
If it takes all night to count the votes, that is fine, you will not be penalized on the democracy index for that.
Funny, if I think a foreign entity illicitly gains access to US classified information through human sources to gain an advantage in the ME conflict, the possibility foremost in my mind is not a pink-haired SJW gave intel to Hamas.
Everyone is a security risk. Immigrants might still have ties to their country of origin. Religious people subscribe to a system of ethics which is not coextensive to US criminal law, and even non-theists might have moral codes which limit their compliance with lawful orders. Anyone might succumb to propaganda about how the US would be better as a commie or fascist state. Anyone involved in the culture war might believe that winning is more important than following the law. Women may be susceptible to love scams, men to hot women who are mysteriously into them. Anthropic is worth almost a trillion dollars, it seems reasonable to assume that the black market value of their models would range at least in the tens of billions. Many people who could not be lured to China by a million or ten might think about defection for this kind of money.
Anthropic has strong financial incentives to stop the weights of their models from leaking. I doubt that a flash drive with all their internal documentation and model weights is gifted to every employee as part of the onboarding process.
More options
Context Copy link