erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
5hr ago
erwgv3g34
1d ago
erwgv3g34
1d ago
let the number fall below nine if someone dies or retires.
Bad idea. Imagine there had been eight justices during Bush v. Gore, and the vote had been split 4-4. What would have happened?
erwgv3g34
1d ago
From Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Well, I agree that the design of well-functioning political systems is hard. Singapore might be the best-governed country in the world, and their history is approximately, “Lee Kuan Yew gained very strong individual power over a small country, and unlike the hundreds of times in the history of Earth when that went horribly wrong, Lee Kuan Yew happened to know some economics.”
Nazi Germany was not defeated by individual high-ranking Germans heroically and altruistically sacrificing themselves to assassinate Hitler, and Goering, and Himmler, and so on down the line until the Third Reich was unable to function due to a lack of leadership. It was defeated when America and Britain and Russia coordinated together to overwhelm the Wehrmacht military.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's Twitter account:
The corporations and factions driving to build superhuman artificial intelligence, and our subsequent extinction, could be shut down with less effort than World War II; and the Allies did not then say, "Oh, that's hard, guess we should lie down and die then."
If China decides they would also prefer not to die along with everyone else -- or that they're not willing to go to war with a genuinely terrified US/UK about what the Allies genuinely believe to be omnicide -- it could be done with less effort than the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
(I'd be more worried about Europe signing on than China, actually? Europe is easy to convince to regulate, hard to get to take any regulatory problem actually seriously. China hasn't particularly seemed unfriendly to the notion of world treaties on AI; I'd hope that a treaty which treated China symmetrically with all other signatories, and offered them no insult suggesting otherwise, would be well-received. But I mention China anyways because it's the scapegoat always dragged up to explain why the West can't possibly destroy the world any more slowly.)
(Also to be clear, there isn't actually any point in unilateral relinquishment by one country if ASI research just moves elsewhere. It's international action or bust; you have to stop ASI everywhere. That's enabled by the narrowness of the GPU supply chain; and ultimately backed by the willingness of terrified Allies to use military force to destroy any stolen GPUs, lest the blockage against ASI be broken and everyone on Earth die.)
Anyway. Not actually as hard as WW2. The reason we'll die is if people don't see it coming, not because nothing could actually be done if we saw it coming.
And from Eliezer Yudkowsky's other Twitter account:
"But if they believed the theory that says they've got a huge chance of wiping out humanity, why are they working for AI companies --?" BECAUSE THEY WERE SELECTED TO BE PEOPLE WHO'D DO IT ANYWAY! Most of us who understood (and built) that theory DID NOT TAKE THE MONEY!
If there's a terrible thing to be done, but doing it gets you money and status and bragging rights in the short term -- and you get to feel big and important and like you'll get to be in the room where it happens -- if personally enacting the big disaster feels better than being powerless --and you can reach for a dozen excuses about "someone else would do it anyway", excuses that only need to convince yourself instead of a court judge -- then SOME PEOPLE WILL GO FOR IT! It is NOT A MYSTERY THAT AI COMPANIES EXIST!
SOMEBODY will try to do a horrible thing if there's a lot of immediate rewards for it and they think they won't immediately go to jail! They always will! Every time! The only question is whether everyone ELSE, the rest of civilization, manages to shut them down or not!
There is no anomaly here in need of explanation. All humanity's history of horrors and disasters has always been like this, including plenty of disasters that predictably took down the perpetrators with them.
Is that a full and detailed story of this particular band of disaster-spawners' detailed psychology? No, and I don't know all the details for a fact, and you really shouldn't care. If for some reason it actually mattered, I could talk your ear off about all my sad icky guesses for hours. But it would be pointless inside baseball.
It's just not surprising. There is nothing strange about this situation to be explained.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Wokeness originated in America, largely as a response to the black underclass, and then infected Europe and the Anglosphere through the universities and social media. Is it a coincidence that you saw Black Lives Matter protests in the UK?
Reagan thought if you could reduce taxes, that would force the government to curb its spending, because it would have no money to fund itself. "Starve the beast", was the slogan.
Didn't work. Turns out, the government can just keep going deeper and deeper into debt. Then, once Reagan is gone, it can raise taxes again. Seems obvious in hindsight.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
"People are that incompetent" is a much more realistic explanation than "people are secretly pretending to be incompetent as part of a genius Machiavellian plan to achieve their goals".
erwgv3g34
2d ago
No bunker in the world is going to stop a nanoswarm from disassembling the Earth into raw material for a Dyson sphere.
But most importantly, what does this say about politics now where promising $1.35 trillion in direct payments to voters is presented as the conservative campaign message. How much further into the slop can we possibly descend, and how we can ever pull ourselves out of it? Maybe the Dems can just promise 5,001 dollars or something.
In a democracy, the guy promising to do the responsible thing will always lose to the guy promising more gibs (whether the gibs comes in the form of lower taxes or increased spending is immaterial as long as there is a deficit). This has been known since ancient Rome. Solving this is a coup-complete problem. Until that day comes, all we can do is agitate for our gibs, and try to deny gibs to our enemies.
Or, as Alexander Fraser Tytler put it:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
During the Napoleonic wars, soldiers would volunteer for the forlorn hope (the first unit to assault a fortified enemy position) despite horrific casualty rates well in excess of 10%. Why? Because the survivors were guaranteed money and promotions.
Try to destroy the gun.
What would be the point? Even if you manage to destroy Anthropic's datacenters, that just means OpenAI kills everyone next week, or Google the week after that, or China six months later. The only way we survive is if, at a minimum, Washington and Beijing coordinate to shut down all frontier research.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
"Dies last" means "a few days later", tops. Not worth it. Might as well spend the money and time you would have used for the bunker having fun with friends and family before the end.
You haven't seen the Sankey chart yet.
How many campaigns ended because you came in a fluffer?
My own experiences bore this out. "193 unique campaigns" sounds bad, but fully two-thirds of those were abandoned during
A moment of silence for our fellow commenter, who died tragically while in the middle of writing his post.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Looking at the poor sexual and romantic choices made by women (made by people, arguably), the underlying cause in most cases is placing too much stock in physiognomic appraisals rather than too little.
I'd argue that this is a case of the opposite, it's just that the person choosing the romantic partner, whose radar for these things is broken for some reason. Everyone around are almost always able to tell immediately that the person is rotten, from barely more than a glance.
If only there were some third party with a vested genetic interest in the woman's well-being to whom the choice of romantic partners could be outsourced...
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Ninety percent of everything is crap, but that was true long before AI. You can look at user reviews to find the most popular games, then play the demo to see if it's worth committing to the game.
Yes, the vast majority of AI NTS games have been Netorase Phone clones with shitty writing, shitty art, shitty gameplay, and a shitty update schedule. So be it. You don't have to play them. You can just ignore them and focus on the gems. User reviews screen off use of AI assets.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
That's what you would do if the asteroid was going to hit in a few hours, not a few years. We need some way to live while we wait, and with uncertainty about whether the asteroid is really going to hit at all.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Freedom of association died with civil rights and freedom of speech died with woke. Might as well get some benefit from their passing.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
From "The Fifth Meditation on Creepiness" by Scott Alexander:
I've tried the Machiavellian liar routine a few times myself. "Oh, hey, you're Jennifer or Jessica or Julia or whatever, right? I appear to have totally by coincidence ended up at this table with you. Anyway, you seem kind of okay. Want to go out to dinner sometime? Saturday's no good because I have things to do that night." Meanwhile in my head I'm going over what we're going to name our children.
It's pretty hard to maintain and it's also really unpleasant and it also makes me feel like a horrible person and it also means that if I ever do get into a relationship with Jennifer or Jessica it will be based on deception and lies and probably continue that way ("It's our six month anniversary! Can I get her the beautiful personalized gift that will make her super-happy and so make me super-happy as a result, or would that be creepy and I should just get her some crappy half-dead flowers instead?"). Even if I pull it off, I will be doing an imperfect simulation of what a guy who really doesn't care much for her could do perfectly, and so I will be strictly inferior to him.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Yes, most people are not creative, but they don't have to be; if there is some non-negligible fraction of people who have a good idea for a game but are unable to code or draw, then we are going to see an explosion of content as soon as AI lets them overcome their barriers.
I certainly noticed a dramatic increase in my personal area of niche interest (netorase visual novels) with the advent of AI; great games that would have previously never been made, such as Stains of Blue and Blurring the Walls, suddenly became viable.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
From "SIAI: Donate Today and Tomorrow" by Eliezer Yudkowsky:
A benefit that everyone in your species shares equally, benefits all alleles equally, and hence is an evolutionary null-op; it produces zero genetic information. Luckily, human beings are adaptation-executers, not fitness-maximizers. There were no existential risks in the ancestral environment, nor any Friendly AIs, no way for an individual to harm or benefit the entire human species at once. Our psychologies are already inscribed, solely by those selection pressures that acted on our ancestors. The psychology of existential risk is likely to fit the "threat to the tribe" template, a problem that was around in ancestral times and that involved noticeable selection pressures.
(Unfortunately, "threats to the tribe" tended to be those evil Other Guys from the Tribe That Lives Across The Water, not hard-to-understand threats like recursively self-improving optimization processes. Which is why it's so difficult to keep people focused on boring old saving the world instead of fun politics. The sad truth is that if the Singularity were recognizably a Democrat or Republican project, we'd get a lot more funding.)
And from his post on the Deepmind vs. Sedol match:
Only 70,000 people watching this on YouTube? The human species really has tuned out to a surprising extent.
erwgv3g34
4d ago
When the history books are written, the black muslim Gambian will be a white christian MAGA chud.
It won't be in the history books at all. But the miniseries "inspired by true events" will have Ben Foster or some other actor good at playing unhinged creeps as the closeted, internet poisoned killer.
Reminds me of that time when Epic Bead Man got adapted into Bad Ass.
Real Version: A black thug gets beat up after harassing an old white man.
Hollywood Version: Two white skinheads get beat up after harassing an old Hispanic man.
erwgv3g34
7d ago
The great lesson of the Trump administration is that something is off the table only until it isn't.
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