quiet_NaN
9hr ago
If anything, the more invested I am in a belief about my identity, the less I honestly should trust it.
If the pope followed that advice, he would need to question his identity as a Catholic a lot.
I think that a gender identity (as used by pro-trans people) is not something falsifiable. Other unfalsifiable beliefs might be the belief that you are a good person or that you are among the elect. Or more mundanely, that you prefer strawberry to vanilla ice cream -- which is technically not something unfalsifiable, but very few people would care to quantify that objectively and correct people who claim the wrong flavor preference. ("Actually, we have analyzed your ice cream buying behavior and EEG responses and you are definitely a vanilla-lover.")
quiet_NaN
9hr ago
rent control is an unconstitutional taking of the financial interests of property owners
The constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says, for better or worse, and for better or worse it does not regard restrictions on how you can use your property to be taking away of your property per the 5th.
If you buy a tenement because you believe (1) that people will pay rent to live in it and (2) that due to former fact, other people will want to buy it in the future, that is entirely speculative, and the government is under no obligation to compensate you if general laws make either or both of these untrue.
If the government disallows you to use your munitions factory to supply Saudi Arabia, you are not entitled to compensation due to the 5th. If the government decides that they do not want any brothels within the city limit, they do not have to pay you the difference to what you could have made if sex work had been kept legal.
If the government decides to institute 100% land value taxes so rational actors will be indifferent towards owning land (which I find personally a much nicer idea than rent controls), and property prices crash as a result, that is a business risk.
I think that there are some goods where capitalism is working very well (e.g. things with supply elasticity, e.g. shovels), and goods where markets do not work very well (e.g. things without supply elasticity, like land). People who are investing in the former are capitalists, and we might tax them but should keep in mind that they have an important ecological niche in society. People who are investing in the later are rent-seekers, and we do not need to be very careful not to step on their toes.
If you invest a million dollars into the production of shovels, that is honest capitalism. Nothing is preventing the next 99 guys with a spare million to also invest in shovels, and over time this will result in an effective supply with shovels.
Of course, it is hard to make money under honest capitalism. Perhaps you have a hunch that there will be a gold rush and shovels will be in high demand and you make a killing for a time, but if shovel production is very profitable, that means that more people will enter the market until that is no longer true.
This is why being a rentier is so much more comfortable. If you buy the best plot of land for one million, then the next 99 guys can not do the same, because nobody is producing new land in the middle of the city. This puts you in a very comfortable position.
On the other hand, while I would argue with a pitchfork-wielding mob that the shovel producer is actually important for the long-term health of the economy, I find it much harder to make a similar argument for the land-owner. There is no elasticity of supply for unimproved land. Where we might suffer a shovel to cost 100$ in the middle of a gold rush because it will result in the creation of more shovels, there is no benefit for society in the unimproved land being worth anything. If anything, it would better serve society if the gains from the fact that land is in limited supply were socialized. It might not directly lower rents too much though, rents need to be at a level where the supply and demand curve meet, after all.
Sure, the rentiers would find such an arrangement unfair, but to me that sounds like someone who bought stolen credit card numbers whining that they were revoked before he could recoup his investment.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Or we could simply chuck legal procedure, cede to the court of public opinion (read: mob rule) and do only what's optically feasible.
I hate to break it to you, but the method the US has for filling political offices relies substantially on public opinion, or 'mob rule', as you phrased it.
Criminal procedure requirements apply to criminal penalties only. Your partner may still dump you on evidence of infidelity which would not be conclusive enough for a jury to send you to the gallows, simply because there is no due process requirement for dumping a partner.
Likewise, there is no motion to suppress testimony in political campaigns, because not getting elected to the US Senate is not a violation of your fundamental rights. In the end, it is up to the sovereign to decide how much any allegations disqualify you or not.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Sure, but that does not mean it would not be in their best interests to buy him off now.
If the machine can credibly offer him a cushy job if he drops out of the race for health reasons, and credibly threaten that they will lose his seat rather than endorse him, then it may well be in his best interests to take up their offer.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"an Iron Cross in isolation (i.e., without a superimposed swastika or without other accompanying hate symbols) cannot be determined to be a hate symbol"
(the ADL, as quoted on WP.)
I will grant you (and @The_Nybbler) that in a German political context, an iron cross is just a replacement for a swastika which will not land you in legal trouble. But there is a difference between carrying one on a banner through Berlin and having one tattooed beside your pussy. The latter seems more likely to signal biker/metal chick than Nazi bride.
Likewise, the generic skull and crossbones are widely used and nobody cares about them at all. Tattoo GHS06, U+2620, U+1F571, or all kinds of skulls realistic or fantastical with bones behind or below them, and people with probably think you are metal, goth, or perhaps punk. It is only the variant used by the SS which is considered Problematic.
Of course, with Platner, the story that he got it in Croatia and had no clue what it represented seems likely.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
This. Basically, space is the last place you want to put your data center. Putting your computers basically anywhere else, be it in high altitude balloons, the summit of Mt Everest, the Mariana Trench, Point Nemo, downtown Manhattan, on harnesses worn by stray cats, the surface of the Moon, the rectal cavities of cybertruck drivers, Antarctica, Gaza (to just brainstorm a few not-so-good ideas) is going to be much less of a hassle than LEO.
While solar power is plentiful in space, computing turns the energy consumed into heat, and radiative cooling is not very efficient, especially if you want your chips to run at 400K and not 4000K.
There are also other minor objections (e.g. if satellite data links would scale to backbone ranges, we would not rely on expensive undersea cables instead, how do you service your equipment? and Kessler syndrome makes you extremely vulnerable to sabotage), but cooling is the big one.
It is not that computing in space is impossible per se (every cubesat does some, after all), it is just that it is extremely painful compared to computing dirtside.
As an analogy, there is no reason why sex in the vacuum of space should be impossible, one could certainly design pressurized space suits which have docking ports in the correct places. It is just that we already have much more convenient places to have sex, including space stations, beds, parachute jumps, submarines, mini-golf prop houses, presidential offices, fields of nettles, BDSM dungeons and many more. Until we saturate these environments, there will be little economic demand for space suit sex (beyond the novelty value).
quiet_NaN
2d ago
She contemplated waking him up to kick him out, but worried he could hurt someone driving in the state he was in.
Are we going to talk about the implication that he was driving a motor vehicle while drunk to her home?
Personally, I do not see a lot of light between "prone to rape when drunk" and "prone to reckless endangerment of others when drunk". Both should be disqualifying for public office in the eyes of the voters if they believe the allegations.
Especially if it is recent behavior, as in this case. If he had done his alleged crimes when he was 17, served his time and then decades later entered politics, things would be different.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think consent exists on a sliding scale. At a value of zero, escaping the situation is the whole of your utility function, and you would happily order a nuclear strike at your location if you could, evaporating the perpetrator, yourself and millions of bystanders in the process.
At a value of 1, you are enthusiastic about the sex (but likely not to the point where it dominates your utility function, because that rarely happens).
Between these two extremes there is a lot of road, and at some point we put up a road sign labeled "rape" -- which is perfectly reasonable.
In the absence of other complications like diminished ability to consent (e.g. due to age or drugs), obvious coercion or pre-arrangements (like CNC or agreeing to wake-up sex), the line we draw is typically verbal (though voluntary actions may reinforce or negate verbally stated preferences).
If the alleged victim is saying "no" (and not contradicting that by undressing himself or his partner) as the sex begins, that is rape. If his last words before sex begins are "okay, let's just get this over with", that is verbal consent (even if he had said "no" before), ergo not rape. If he says nothing, the person initiating the sex better have a convincing story how based on past encounters or nonverbal signals.
We generally do not require rape victims to make a credible attempt to kill the perp or themselves to escape the situation. "She did not even try to choke to death on her own tongue, so she was likely enjoying it" is not a defense which is very successful. OTOH, violently resisting will typically leave forensic evidence which can be helpful in situations where verbal consent is in dispute.
I will grant you that it is entirely possible that he was simply pleading with her until he got some reluctant consent, which would make this not rape. But the fact that she did not call the cops when he fell asleep is not sufficient.
Obviously there is a lot of road between "not rape" and "enthusiastic consent", and most of us have walked parts of that road at some point. Relationships take compromise, both with regard to what movies to watch and what sexual activities to engage in, and when. Monogamous relationships even more, because alternatives are constrained.
Still, showing up drunk at the home of a previous hookup when she told you not to do so and beg for sex is rather close to the "(barely) not rape" end of the spectrum.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I do not think it is just "LLMs will agree to whatever".
The mechanism seems to be that if you use RLHF to turn your language model into a helpful, honest, harmless assistant, that tends to select for certain world-views, because it is a somewhat blue-coded and female-coded and college-education-coded role. Grok declaring itself Mecha-Hitler is not a natural outcome, it only happened because Musk put his hands on the scale.
The other thing is that I think that depending on the phrasing, the LLMs would agree that it is important to preserve one's language, culture and ethnic quirks. It just so happens that Hanson is a white American, so his culture and ethnicity is what conservation biologists would call "Least Concern". From a conservation point, if the population of Leopard Seals or Caucasian (or Black or Hispanic) Americans dropped by an order of magnitude, this would not herald the extinction of that group.
Of course, it is also entirely possible that the SJ crowd (and thus the LLMs) simply accepts the concerns of minorities who do not want their relative demographic to shrink but specifically does not extend the same consideration to the Whites.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think extraterrestrial UFOs are the kind of exceptional claim which requires exceptional evidence. Before GenAI became a thing, the number of video cameras exploded. If UFOs were real, the number of videos of them should have exploded as well.
You would pretty much have to add epicycles -- *maybe the aliens are fine with some UFO sightings, as long as their existence does not become common knowledge, and increased their stealth level in response to the increase in cameras *. (Which rhymes with God totally does work miracles, but only in settings where they are deniable.)
On the other hand, there is an argument to be made that believing weird things is the hallmark of a true rationalist. It is easy to cosplay as a rationalist: just believe what the atheist echo chamber is telling you, only repeat arguments previously made by the science pope. Only, this is not so different from cosplaying any other belief system. If your mind never arrives in deserted places, it is probably because it was just trodding along with the crowds.
Still, it seems a bit disappointing that he picked UFOs of all things. His grabby aliens were conceptually cool at least. Aliens which do not darken the stars as they spread but only get caught on blurry pictures sometimes are orders of magnitude less cool.
Even if Scott Alexander were to turn into a true believer of sun-related miracles (which I find unlikely), he would win hands down because he found his own weirdness niche not adjacent to massive online communities.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think there’s a temptation here to look at all the upvotes (24, solidly above average)
As someone who often is voted negative but rarely gets a mod warning, I find the voting feature rather useless.
The only thing it will tell you is which way the local hive-mind of lurkers is leaning.
More complex voting systems have been tried elsewhere (e.g. slashdot's karma system where users have limited mod points, or LessWrong's separation into comment-quality and comment-agreement), but personally I find the motte well enough moderated that it is readable without additional filters (unlike reading slashdot at -1).
If you have three different topics with something substantive to say, you should post three different comments.
Agreed, I would have preferred one thread about the reflecting pool and one about the death count of USAID.
Obviously conversations will get derailed by comment replies, that is a feature not a bug. I am also fine with comments making a one sentence side claim that will lead to multiple replies. But loosely tying multiple separate topics into one package seems not ideal.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
They staked their own fortunes on the outcome, and the winnings are rightfully theirs and no others.
So the USA is the property of the descendants of the 13 colonies by right of conquest, in the same way the Venezuelan oil is?
And if other ethnicities want to share in that wealth, you would prefer them to do so not by emigrating to your country and adopting the local beliefs and customs, but through violent conquest and displacement of the indigenous population, so their claim will be as valid as your claim?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
So what is you explanation for American exceptionalism, if it is not the ideals? HBD of its white population? Or something metaphysical, that during the independence war God let the Holy Spirit descend on the Americans and their descendants in a way which he did not bother with for the Latin American nations?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Those who seek to diminish the United States and the ideals espoused in the Declaration versus those who seek to embody and perpetuate them.
Donald, is that you?
Personally, I think that the US was founded on both good ideals (like freedom of speech, restricted government, democracy) and bad ideals (exploitation of non-citizens, territorial expansion). Plus a few which sounded reasonable at the time but did not really work out long-term (keeping military power in the hands of the citizens, the electoral college).
I very much cherish the good ideals of the US, and I credit the US with upholding these ideals when most of Europe was plunged into darkness, and spreading them in their sphere of influence (in Europe, at least).
I think that it is fair to say that most people on both sides of the culture war cherish these ideas at least to some degree (neither side is very committed to freedom of speech, for example). Both sides are in favor of democracy, at least if we disregard Trump's claim that the SAVE act will secure the Republican dominance for a hundred years as his usual empty boasting.
Recently there was a poll going around about how 55% of self-identified Democrats would prefer to live overseas,
It might be worthwhile to examine in which states they want to live, and on what ideals these nations are built. As you said, the US is built around ideas, not bloodlines or geography.
A US citizens who decides to emigrate to the Taliban, Belarus, North Korea, Saudi Arabia is arguably betraying the ideals on which the US is built. By contrast, emigrating to Canada or Germany involves no betrayal of fundamental American values in my opinion.
Anyone loyal to the good ideals of the US can by necessity only be loyal to the US as it exists in reality if the US does a good job of upholding these ideals. If she feels that another state does a better job of upholding these ideals, the natural response is to move. Obviously what precisely are the good ideals of the US is debatable as much as the present state of affairs.
By contrast, there are many 'patriots' on the right who seem to worship the trappings of the US more than the ideals. Who did not get turned off from the stars and stripes when W tortured suspects in gitmo under that very flag.
And then you have the flag-wavers who prefer the Confederate flag, who basically signal that the founding principle which they liked most about the US is the exploitation of non-citizens. I will take any draft-dodger who decided that fighting in Vietnam is not compatible with his understanding of the ideals on which the US was founded over them any day of the week.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
But I won’t back down from noticing that Trump is infinitely more successful than any of us, across a dozen dimensions.
So are Louis XIV, Wilhelm II, Charles Manson, Harvey Weinstein, Bin Laden, Aella, Stephen Hawking, Kim Kardashian, Obama, SBF, Scott Alexander and a ton of others. Should we stop criticizing them all until we reach their level of success and fame?
And that to a man the people criticizing him are far less impressive and far less successful.
"Clearly, they simply prosecuted Charles Manson because they were pissed that he had built a sex and murder cult which was much grander than any they could have built."
First off, who is impressive is rather subjective. Some people are impressed by STEM Nobel laureates, or Hollywood actors, or popes, or athletes, or great Starcraft players, or competitive eaters, or mass murderers, or demagogues, or big-chested porn stars.
Luckily, we have invented these things called arguments. Without them, criticizing someone is just booing them, and then we would indeed have to compare the subjective standing of both parties to find out if we should adjust our estimation of either.
Arguments exist independently of their author. If the worst person in the world, in between robbing an orphanage and strangling some puppies posts a comment on ACX taking issue with what Scott wrote, and her argument is solid, then it does not really matter that she is strangling puppies.
This makes arguments especially well suited to anonymous discussion boards such as this one. I do not need to know how many casinos a poster here has bankrupted or if she is dictating her posts to her secretary on her helicopter or typing them on a cracked mobile screen while lying in her sleeping spot under some bridge or from death row.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
There are certainly complaints about Trump which boil down to him not behaving like someone of the upper middle or upper class.
If I express disgust at the way he decorates the White House with gold, that is a mere complaint about aesthetics.
If I complain that he is a narcissistic con man, you can certainly claim that I am mostly complaining about the fact that his cons are not targeted at my class.
Still, I think that Trump/MAGA is different in important ways from the traditional DC swamp. With previous administrations, the corruption was mostly in the zone of deniability. Hunter Biden being on some Ukrainian board of directors, senators earning lucrative consulting positions in the companies they were previously regulating, the usual. This was bad, but not maximally bad. Presumably, many corrupt deals did not take place not because the politician was honest nor because nobody wanted to bribe them, but simply because there was no good way to do the transaction while maintaining deniability. For example, a rich scammer currently under investigation by the DoJ did not have a good way to bribe GWB or Obama. Even if they were interested, unless he was a billionaire, it would simply not have been worth the political capital for them to meddle with some investigation.
With Donald Trump, there is no fig leaf of deniability. Nobody is under any illusion that he is honest any more than anyone is under any illusion that he is Christian. This means that he has a much easier time coordinating with people wanting to bribe him, to the point where other scammers can just buy his shitcoins to make their DoJ problems disappear.
Likewise, his attitude to truth. Politicians have always lied on occasion. I remember GWB and Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Still, typically politicians tried to avoid outright lies because their voters might vote for someone else if they feel fooled.
With Trump, the lies are priced in since his advent with birtherism. There is still some limited distrust, it seems unlikely that he would have claimed to have captured Maduro if he had not done so, but any lie which will still be believed by 10% of the electorate despite counter-evidence is still worthwhile for him to peddle.
More generally, politicians have to manage both perceptions and the real world. With MAGA, there is very little in the way of acknowledgement that there exists a real world at all, that we are not free to decide what is causing autism. If Trump tweets about the hundreds of wars he has ended and how he deserves the Nobel more than anyone, that feels to me like he is trying to convince the universe itself to start believing his story. Likewise him trying to win the Iran war just by claiming victor, and the universe and Iran somehow just not getting his memos.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
hunger and gatherer communities
This seems a slightly uncharitable phrasing.
For what it's worth, I think most of the populations which are growing very fast are depending on agriculture.
Also, the objection that giving food to the poor will cause them to multiply so you will need to give them more food in the future lest they starve is not exactly new. Any EA intervention will think about unintentional side effects, and I expect that USAID is little difference.
Fortunately, there are a lot more interventions than just changing how much grain we ship to Africa.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
I would not call that photo strong evidence. If you want to convince me that the coating is failing in many places due to vandalism, a photo of a person kneeling next to the pool with a backpack and what may very charitably be a knife is not going to cut it.
I think what happened was that Trump made one of his big announcements on how the pool would be the Best Pool Ever, longer than the height of the tallest buildings, painted in American Flag Blue, a monument which will last for centuries. Then his pool guy did a shitty job and the paint came peeling off after a few weeks. Once it became common knowledge that the coating is coming off, of course people wanted to get their own piece of coating, and likely helped the process along a bit.
His reaction was then to blame these people. My pool would have lasted forever but these hateful liberals are destroying it, or some variant. Importantly, we should not update on Trump claiming vandalism. There is no world in which he would say oops, my pool guy did a subpar job, my bad, I will take full responsibility and try to fix the damage.
I agree that the algae bloom is probably more about phosphate levels than it is about the failing coating. Charitably, I do not want to rule out that someone deliberately emptied a sack of fertilizer into the pool just to spite Trump, but I seriously doubt that this is happening every time they change the water. I find it unlikely that before Trump made his announcement, he discussed the matter carefully with aquatic biologist experts (i.e. PMCs) and took their advice on mitigating bloom.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Where is no analogy with secular world is that the ordinations are illicit but valid.
This is interesting. It seems like as far as validity is concerned, bishops can self-replicate.
Now I am wondering about the possibility of some bishop (SSPX or mainline) due to some weird circumstance making some pink-haired lesbian a bishop, who then proceeds to consecrate every consenting christened person she runs across a bishop, and so forth. Think of all the mayhem they could wreck -- working in a bakery and randomly transsubstiating rolls in secret (or tetrapacks of supermarket wine), marrying ONS-havers for shits and giggles, baptizing frozen embryos, offering OnlyFans channels with the confession of the sin of lust included (like flights with carbon offset), and so forth.
I mean, as an atheist I am automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated, but trying to catch the rest of the conditions would be a fun quest. (Personally, I would not throw a shoe at the pope, but all of the rest seem achievable as an illicit but valid priest.)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think your intuition of the ick of a relationship depending on the absolute age difference constant is not shared by most people. The xkcd standard of "don't date below $own_age/2+7" is a lot more reasonable (though also not a hill I am prepared to die on).
By your logic, a 35yo dating a 55yo is equivalent to a 35yo dating a 15yo. Yet I do not the much of a problem with the former, while I consider the latter pretty much always wrong.
If I have 25yo boxer fighting against an 18yo boxer, that may or may not be a fair fight, but it will not be in even remotely the same category as the fight would have been if the older boxer was still 18 and the younger boxer was 11.
Maturity is one of these s-curve things. A 10yo is still in the phase where she is rapidly gaining life experience, and a 17yo can sometimes run circles around her in emotional maturity and pressure her into sexual behavior which is not in her long-term interests.
But in the next seven years, that gap between them will get smaller as the initially 17yo will hit diminishing returns on his growth. At age 17, she is much more likely to consider the possibility that he is just looking for a quick fuck when he is talking about how they are soulmates for eternity.
Age both of them by another seven years and the relationship would be entirely un-Problematic. He will not gain great powers to charm women out of their pants between age 24 and 31, and at age 24 she will very likely know what she wants in a relationship and have some judgement on whether the 31yo will give her that or not.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
If we are talking about intentionally making babies soonish, it makes perfect sense for 23W not to pick 18M, because unfortunately, most 18M's are not heirs to vast family estates, nor are most 23W's for that matter. In 2020 (e.g. before AI complicated things further), it made perfect sense for both men and women to postpone having kids until they are in their 30s, have finished their education and have high-paying, steady jobs. Of course, this does not give them a lot of window to find a partner and have kids -- especially if they want multiple kids.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
High-paying jobs are often also paying as much, or more, for the experience in life and work of the individual as their intelligence and qualifications.
Agreed. If companies wanted intelligence, they would just recruit 17yo's based on IQ tests.
Formal qualifications are often a proxy. The point is not that anything you learned in your master or PhD is directly useful for doing software consulting, it is that it filters for (mild) ambitiousness and executive function.
Domain experience is obviously relevant, hence all the companies looking for people with at least three years experience using Claude. But it is also harder to check by HR than formal qualifications.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
but the fact that 18-year-old boys are frequently accused of being an "Epstein diddy blud" merely for talking to 17-year-old girls
I am sure that you can cherry-pick some examples where an 18-yo was accused of being a pedo for asking a 17-yo for the way to the supermarket, and of course the psychopaths (in the mop sense) in woke circles will occasionally weaponize Problematic Age Gaps like they weaponize Problematic Anything, but I seriously doubt that the fertility crisis is due to 18yo boys asking out other 18yo's instead of 17yo's.
In the 1950s, a man could feed a family through unskilled labor. He might even buy a house after a few years. On the other hand, the median young man and his girlfriend of 1952 typically did not have a ton of other options than settling down -- backpacking through Australia, going to university, getting sucked in some video game and so on were all unlikely choices.
Today, the places with a lot of jobs are cities, but they are often expensive. The route to home-ownership looks like "study, do a PhD, work five years as a software consultant for a bank, pay the down payment of a house which is still barely in the public transport hub of your city. At this point you can then reasonably think about having a kid (provided you have a partner and have not aged out of the fertility window)." And of course there is still the possibility that AGI will take your job next year and you will raise your kid on what Elon Musk is willing to spare as an UBI.
Of course, it also does not help that handling a small kid is more than one full-time job. In 1950 women did not have a better option, but today they do. Men have certainly become more willing to help with the kids, but probably not to the point where they are willing to share the burden 50-50. If I am optimistic, I (a guy) might say that I might be able to take care of a baby eight hours a day, every day, until it is old enough for daycare (and the caretaking requirements relax slightly). Unfortunately, this would only work if I had a partner who was willing to take care of the kid 16h per day, and most women would very reasonably tell me to go fuck myself if I proposed that they take over two thirds of the care work. And this is before monetary constraints: I can kinda manage a 40h work week, but that is with the rest being leisure time. And while my job in academia pays reasonably ok (for now -- one of the benfits of having a long-winding education), at 28h per week it is not something which can feed a family with Western standards.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I think it is fair to say that the church has been supportive of the state since the age of Constantine. Sure, the RCC wielded tremendous power in medieval times, and very much messed with worldly policy decisions, but in the end it has survived through pragmatism. Monarchs, states, democracies and dictatorships come and go, and while the RCC is rarely on the forefront of social change (and often has resisted it initially, especially if it was change towards the left), it tends to come around and view it as the god-given order eventually.
I think the current level of LLMs are scary because of their labor market implications when solving for equilibrium. If you think that they will simply get rid of the job of junior software developer and stop afterwards, you are as sorely mistaken.
Basically, as a knowledge worker I feel a bit like a horse might have felt after Ford started selling the Model T in 1908. Before my kind had ruled our economic niche since times immemorial. When Newcomb's engine (or Deep Blue) were able to outcompete my kind in certain small domains, I did not worry. When the railway came, one could spin this as a complement rather than a competition -- once you leave the train, you will still want a horse to get somewhere, after all, it is not like train tracks will ever lead everywhere.
Even today in 1908, some horses are pointing out that it is much easier to find a stable and fodder for your horse than it is to source gasoline in rural Kansas, to say nothing of the road quality. But to me, this is simply because we have not yet reached equilibrium conditions.
Like horses and cars, humans and LLMs are very dissimilar. Training a human to speak a language is vastly more efficient than training an LLM. Take a student who is fluent in German and give her five years worth of English education (e.g. a couple of textbooks worth), and she will speak usable English. Do the same with an LLM, and you will need orders of magnitude more training data.
But that does not matter, because we have sufficient training data, and can train the LLMs, just as the fact that a horse would be the better choice on a narrow and winding forest trail matters little if there is a highway running next to it for the car to use.
Even if LLMs plateau at the current level (which I dearly hope for, until we have solved alignment), that is more than sufficient so that there will be no market demand for the intelligence of an IQ 100 person, and quite possibly not any demand for the IQ 120 person either. Scaffolding will improve and inference will become cheaper.
The main reason I am bearish on AI in education is not because I do not believe that AI could help there, it is because I am skeptical that there will be a point in educating kids. It may well be that in 20 years, a degree in physics will be about as useful as a degree in feminist literature. (Of course, there are other reasons to educate kids besides making them employable, and if we get some kind of UBI we should definitely encourage people to do their PhDs in Minecraft or particle physics or feminist literature or whatever catches their fancy.)
The blue-collar workers will take a bit longer to replace, but sooner or later we will have robots to replace the fans in AI data centers.
Just looking at the software developer and researcher jobs is like looking at the arctic ice melting and saying that it is no big deal because hardly anyone is living up there anyhow while ignoring the fact that the water will go somewhere.
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