doglatine
10d ago
A medium-sized private school in the provinces of England. Sadly, these places have mostly gone woke, and dropped Ancient Greek for Spanish, Rugby for football, etc.
doglatine
10d ago
Mastery of Latin, Ancient Greek, and (to a lesser extent) contemporary languages is something that can't be faked or bullshitted in the same way as argumentative essays. Being able to translate Thucydides or Cicero requires significant time investment in learning large amounts of vocabulary and complex grammatical rules, as well as cross-textual and historical knowledge. Because elite-status in the humanities used to be gated behind being able to do these things, it served as a selection mechanism for the humanities that meant that 95%+ of people couldn't cut it, and the humanities had a way of choosing a genuine cognitive elite.
doglatine
10d ago
At the risk of repeating the same points I make every time Tiger Moms come up, I think the traditional elite Anglo work model (largely neglected in the US and UK since WW2) remains the gold standard for producing top-quality elites. A strong emphasis on polymathy, including physical excellence; deep language skills as the no-bullshit zone of the humanities; debate and public speaking as a proving ground.
This is the kind of education I benefited from, and to which I attribute most of my virtues (my vices, on the other hand, I take full personal credit for). Sadly, as a parent I've found it's almost impossible to buy these days; the kind of solid upper-tier English private schools I attended in my youth are now rarae aves, and at best offer slightly more personalised and 'nurturing' versions of what you'd find in any American or European state school. Probably you can still get the old recipe at the right boarding schools, but those come with their own headaches.
I think the definitive piece written on this is Nadia Asparouhova's Tribes of Climate. Introductory quote:
For someone who doesn’t work in climate, trying to figure out which opportunities to pursue – carbon removal, renewables, energy storage and transmission – is a dizzying array of options, with no way to sort or rank their importance. But it seems to me that climate is better understood not as a singular list of technology and policy action items, but as an assortment of climate tribes. Tribes tell us why these opportunities are interesting and help us make better predictions about how they will unfold.
I recommend reading the whole article in full. FWIW, I identify as what Asparouhova calls an "Energy Maximalist" - I regard climate change as a genuine but convenient crisis point that provides incentives for us to transition from the local minimum of fossil fuels to the global minimum of cheap renewable energy. Consequently, for most of the climate activist world, I'm the most despicable class of heretic. This is true despite my acceptance of the general catechism of contemporary climate activism - (i) the earth is warming (ii) it's mostly our fault (iii) this is bad (iv) we can do something about it (v) we should do something about it.
doglatine
18d ago
I'm no financial analyst but I'm inclined to say yes, keep buying. I really think that despite the AI buzz and hype, most of the business world still hasn't priced in just how economically impactful AGI (and the path towards it) is going to be over the course of this decade. But you might also want to buy gold or something, because I expect the rest of this decade is also going to be very volatile.
doglatine
18d ago
Yes, thanks for the expectations-tempering, and agree that there could still be a reasonably long way still to go (my own timelines are still late-this-decade). I think the main lesson of o3 from the very little we've seen so far is probably to downgrade one family of arguments/possibilities, namely the idea that all the low-hanging fruit in the current AI paradigm had been taken and we shouldn't expect any more leaps on the scale of GPT3.5->GPT4. I know some friends in this space who were pretty confident that Transformer architectures wouldn't never be able to get good scores on the ARC AGI challenges, for example, and we'd need a comprehensive rethink of foundations. What o3 seems to suggest is that these people are wrong, and existing methods should be able to get us most (if not all) the way to AGI.
doglatine
18d ago
They have a public dataset and a private one, and compare the scores for both of them to test for overfitting/data contamination. You can see both sets of scores here, and they’re not significantly different.
Of course it’s always possible that there has been cheating on the test in some other way, and so François Chollet has asked for others to replicate the result.
doglatine
18d ago
Wake up, babe, new OpenAI frontier model just dropped.
Well, you can’t actually use it yet. But the benchmarks scores are a dramatic leap up.. Perhaps most strikingly, o3 does VERY well on one of the most important and influential benchmarks, the ARC AGI challenge, getting 87% accuracy compared to just 32% from o1. Creator of the challenge François Chollet seems very impressed.
What does all this mean? My view is that this confirms we’re near the end-zone. We shouldn’t expect achieving human-level intelligence to be hard in the first place, given all the additional constraints evolution had to endure in building us (metabolic costs of neurons, infant skull size vs size of the birth canal, etc.). Since we hit the forcing-economy stage with AI sometime in the late 2010s, ever greater amounts of human capital and compute have been dedicated to the problem, so we shouldn’t be surprised. My mood is well captured by this reflection on Twitter from OpenAI researcher Nick Cammarata:
honestly ai is so easy and neural networks are so simple. this was always going to happen to the first intelligent species to come to our planet. we’re about to learn something important about how universes tend to go I think, because I don’t believe we’re in a niche one
doglatine
26d ago
I’m always impressed walking around the produce section of French and Italian supermarkets at how you can smell the tomatoes from 20ft away.
doglatine
27d ago
I don’t think there’s a huge moral difference between having sex with 100 men in a day (which is admittedly unusual) and 100 men in a year (which is comparatively common). In both cases you’re treating sex as a trivial thing.
doglatine
1mo ago
doglatine
1mo ago
Good response! Yes, I agree FPV drones are unlikely to be decisive in a naval war. Insofar as China's dominance in drones raises concerns about a US-China conflict, it's what it suggests about China's wider industrial dominance. I think the most plausible 'long war' scenario here involves China imposing a blockade/maritime exclusion zone around Taiwan, triggering an ongoing and gradually-escalating naval conflict with the US. I agree that submarines will likely be very important here, and I also agree that the US has a pretty significant edge here. Where I expect China to dominate is in anti-ship missiles and light combatants like the Houbei class which will effectively exclude the US Navy from the SCS.
doglatine
1mo ago
My own view is that if the US and China go to war, and the conflict isn't resolved in the first couple of days, then the US will lose, largely due to the factors mentioned here. While I support Noah Smith's vision of the reindustrialisation of America, I think it will face a significant uphill battle. The share of the US population working in manufacturing has fallen from 30% in 1950 to around 8% today. While some of this reflects more capital-intensive manufacturing processes, there's no way for the US to compete with China without considerably increasing the number of people employed in the secondary sector; note that China has more manufacturing robots per worker than the US and still has around 30% of its population in industry.
This leads to the core problem, namely that white-collar labour is higher status than blue-collar labour, even controlling for salaries, and as a consequence of deindustrialisation, a larger share of the US population now thinks of itself as being entitled to a white-collar job (a form of Turchin's elite overproduction). The kids of accountants, teachers, doctors, and business professionals generally won't want to become welders or machine lathe operators, even if these careers offer a better salary. Consequently, price signals alone won't drive reindustrialisation; some social engineering will be required to boost the status of manufacturing labour, and I'm doubtful of the cultural feasibility of this.
doglatine
1mo ago
It could even have been a quid pro quo — “Donald, give me a list of people it would cost you political capital to pardon. I’ll pardon some of them, and then you pardon Hunter when you’re sworn in.”
doglatine
1mo ago
disasturbating
Fantastic word, never come across it before.
I would pardon Hunter and the Capitol rioters in the same batch, just to screw with everyone. It would also have been funny to pardon Trump at the same time, if only because I suspect Trump would be inclined to turn it down.
Love it, I would be entirely on board with this, though I'd note that as a Brit, I find the concept of Presidential pardons to be pretty odd, and in tension with the idea of legal equality of all citizens.
doglatine
1mo ago
My intuition is that films and TV have dropped off a lot more in the last 8 years than videogames, with some incredibly vivid and memorable successes very recently. While the Sweetbaby stuff has definitely tainted a lot of AAA games, the kind of games most affected are those that were mass-market slop anyway. I can’t think of many titles where it’s true to say “this would be great were it not for the DEI nonsense”.
doglatine
1mo ago
At the risk of sounding like a pervert, I associate that peach fuzz with some pretty good memories. In particular, a couple of my more innocent exes had some light fuzz, but because they were relative ingenues they hadn’t absorbed the cultural messaging around hair removal. So I associate it with a certain kind of wholesome unaffected young womanhood.
doglatine
1mo ago
Also true of music, but arguably not true of videogames. While most AAA games continue to be disappointing, dumbed-down, DEI-addled trash, there have been some spectacular successes in the last few years. BG3, Factorio, Disco Elysium, RDR2, Rimworld, Sekiro, Stellaris, Crusader Kings 2 & 3, Doom 2016 and Eternal, etc.. Nintendo also producing some of their best work on the Switch (Breath of the Wild/Tears of the Kingdom, Mario Odyssey).
doglatine
1mo ago
I've been getting VERY interesting in egregores and eldritch analogies lately, and I'll probably do an effortpost on them at some point, but in the meantime I'm trying to track down a brilliant rationalist-adjacent blog that did long-form essays about a bit of different egregores, some of which had Lovecraftian or Biblical names. My Google Fu is failing me - anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?
doglatine
1mo ago
I find a healthy bunch of Substacks scratches the same itch as social media while being less corrosive to the mind and soul.
doglatine
1mo ago
I agree this would be a huge victory for Russia - far more meaningful than the last bits of Donetsk/Luhansk/Zaporizhzhia. Cracking apart the European-American alliance has long been a primary geopolitical objective of the reactionary nationalist strain in Russian politics and an absolute precondition for other territorial ambitions. That said, it's going to be challenging for Russia to pull this off - Putin was doubtless hoping/expecting that the Anglo world would be more hawkish on Ukraine than the European world, but if anything the reverse is true, and there's no strong equivalent to America-first isolationism in most of Europe. Consequently, he can't split America from Europe by asking the latter "why are you paying for America's war-mongering?"
Basically all Western immigration systems are incontinent in the sense that they —
(1) allow the right for anyone arriving in the country (legally or illegally) to lodge a claim for asylum in accordance with the 1951 UN refugee convention
(2) provide guaranteed rights for new citizens to sponsor visas for non-citizen family members
(3) do not condition entitlements (benefits, voting rights, etc.) on any basis beyond citizenship; once you’re in, you’re in, and any attempts to restrict this principle can be resisted via the “second class citizen” meme.
On top of this, educational polarisation means that the people actually making immigration decisions (magistrates and civil servants) are almost guaranteed to be sympathetic to any and all asylum and immigration claims.
In short, the West is utterly fucked unless and until governments are willing to make radical breaks in international treaties and national constitutional law.
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