quiet_NaN
11hr ago
This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate.
If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the general advice is to stop digging. The current CO2 levels are not going to make humanity extinct, nor are higher levels. But that does not mean that there is no difference. While we can debate the validity if the IPCC report forever, the basic idea that our future behavior will affect how bad things will get does not seem exactly far-fetched.
In Germany, mitigation of climate change effects will not be that hard. From my observation, Germans are currently rapidly coming around on air conditioning. Berlin is not going to become hotter than Madrid is now (I think), and people manage to live in Madrid just fine. Likewise, a few meters (at most!) of rising sea levels are not really an insurmountable challenge for Europe. (To bad about skiing, though.)
However, people in the global south will likely be less lucky. As an utilitarian, I care about these people and am not indifferent between the QALY losses of different scenarios.
I can also make a motivated argument which is perhaps more accessible to the commentariat here.
I do not worry too much about mass immigration. (I do not think it is a helpful tool to reduce global wealth inequality. I also think it is plainly obvious that our health system would collapse without foreign workers, but that is admittedly an argument for some immigration, not letting everyone in who cares to come.)
I am reasonably sure that if climate change makes conditions unsurvivable in some countries, the people living there will not quietly resign to their fate and die, convenient as that would be. Instead, they will try to emigrate, and Europe will be very much on their destination list.
If we had the will to just not allow them in, that would not concern us (aside from pesky universalists like myself). They are very much not a military threat to us, we could probably drown half of Africa in the Mediterranean Sea on a few percents of our GDP.
But realistically, we will not do that. A decent chunk of our conservatives are Christian, and likely believe that first razing the commons and then keeping your neighbor out of your garden as he starves without them is bad behavior. Perhaps 10% of the population are sociopathic enough that they would be ok with simply blowing up boats, the rest will not stomach it. The 1940s are bygone and will not come back (here's hoping).
As I said, I very much prefer interventions (in the EA sense) in countries of origin to just trying to solve wealth inequality through migration. Anything which makes conditions in the Global South shittier is hindering this approach.
Obviously saying that we need to go to carbon neutrality immediately is not considering the economic trade-offs. But cutting our emissions seems like a no-brainer. (Personally, I would have gotten rid of bloody coal plants long before even considering if nuclear was vaguely bad or not, but that is not the German mentality.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Time will tell if Trump's adventures will actually result in a strengthening of non-proliferation.
"If you do not own nukes we will bomb your nuclear facilities, military installations, government leaders, civilian infrastructures, and schools whenever we feel like it" seems exactly like extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country, which is a condition for leaving the treaty after 90 days.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Government decisions affecting the value of your asset is literally a Tuesday. When the prohibition was enacted, I do not think that the breweries were compensated for lost earnings. When Trump's Iranian adventure changes the price of oil futures (which is once a day or so), the USG is under no obligation compensate the people who bet on a different outcome.
The government can make decisions which will affect the prices of real estate property has been true for as long as there have been governments. All of these risks are priced in. If the people of some city would vote for getting rid of cops, or cars, or public transportation, or laws against arson, that would very likely affect property prices. So would, to a lesser degree, a myriad other municipal decisions.
At the end of the day, citizens get to vote, properties don't. This is well known to any property owner. If you do not like that, invest in some other country.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Under these rules, why would anyone who is not the holder of the first mortgage grant the property owner the second mortgage?
Typically, I would expect that the total mortgages on a property are generally less than the house is worth (aside from market fluctuations). But then it would be in the interest of the owner to sell of the property before it gets foreclosed upon, so they at least make the difference between the sale price ant the outstanding mortgages back rather than nothing.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
WP.
I do not think any of these are critical for the power balance, though. Another effect might be that from the perspective of the party, someone with a few decades of tenure is a much better known quantity than someone just starting their first term. You want someone who both has the track record of voting the party line and whose political beliefs (if any) have completely ossified. An 80yo is unlikely to tell you that he was converted by some argument he read on some substack.
Additionally, most federal legislators were previously state legislators. Obviously there are a lot more state legislators than federal ones, so you need to build a power base for a few years before you have a chance to turn federal.
Obama's career might be illustrative: law doctorate at age 30, Illinois Senate at 36, US Senate at ~44. I do not think he could have succeeded if he had just run for a state senate at age 18.
Starting with earning an upper-middle class degree has a lot of advantages, you signal your PMC voter base that you are one of them, you forge connections, perhaps build a family. (I guess Republicans might also want to serve in the military or run a somewhat successful business for a decade or so instead of earning a doctorate, the point is that they also do need time before entering state politics.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The Moon is much further away, requires much more Δv, and isn't even sunny for half the time.
To be fair, LEO is also not always sunny. For a simple equatorial orbit, you are in the shadow of the Earth almost half of the time.
Of course, Sun-synchronous orbits (which use the precession due to the Earth's shape to adjust the orbit by about one degree a day, so you can always ride the terminator line) exist, but they also tend to have worse radiation exposure, and so far nvidia has not built a radiation-hard variant of the H200.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I am not saying that it can not be done. I am just saying that it does not seem cost-effective. The ISS costs 100G$ for development and running over a decade, so lets call it 10G$/year. Of course, the solar panels (a modest 120kW) are likely not the most expensive part, and mass production would drive the costs further down.
Still, back dirtside I can get a 1MW peak solar plant for less than 1M$ (to generously allow for the lower efficiency as compared to LEO; excluding land prices), which is possibly less than the ISS spent on space-certified bolts to mount their solar arrays.
As a further complication, transporting electric energy is a lot easier than transporting heat. If your compute is all in one place, you will want convection cooling, which means pumping some fluid to heat exchangers. I am not sure what the ideal fluid for space cooling is, actually. With water, you would have to build pipes to handle the vapor pressure of about one atmosphere, which will likely be heavy. And if space junk punctures your heat exchanger (which is a concern with 50mx50m panels), that will quickly lead to a loss of operating fluid for that loop.
As an alternative, you could spread out your electronic components evenly over the area of your radiator. However, your H200 (TDP 600-700W) will take about two square meters of radiator for cooling, so you will want at least heat pipes instead of relying just on conduction.
Or you could double down on fluid pumping and use a heat pump, so you can run your radiator at higher temperatures than your electronics. The coefficient of performance for cooling is T_C/(T_H-T_C), so if you want to run your radiator at 800K, you will need as much energy for your compressor as for your electronics, for an 8x reduction in required radiator area. Most refrigerants have a critical temperature (beyond which the refrigeration cycle does not work) lower than 800K, R-110 comes close with a critical temperature of 700K. Of course, the critical pressure is 39 atmospheres, so you would require massive pipes per Barlow's formula.
As a kicker, one 1MW-facility would cover 1/50000th of humanity's data center needs.
Google's AI claims that electricity costs are about 10-20% of the TCO of a data center (and only 60% of the operating expenses). This means that even if Musk shipped your solar panels to LEO free of charge (or even provided them for free altogether), all the hassle with radiators and comms and lack of equipment replacement options means that it would very likely not be worthwhile.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
to the extent that it exists, it's pretty easy to falsify
The median trans woman does not make the claim that she was not born a biological male. Instead, she has a concept of "woman" which allows her to claim membership of that set.
Attaching a certain label to a given set of items is not something which can be wrong. You can certainly argue that (1) it does not carve reality at its joints and (2) that it goes against pre-existing usage. Neither is unprecedented. In fact, if you look at the etymology of pretty much any word you will find that its membership set has drifted over centuries.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
First off, a mobster showing up at your doorstep is totally a business risk. So are commies taking over and nationalizing your enterprise, or an asteroid wiping out your business.
Taxing the heck out of your earnings, rent controls or prohibiting from running a brothel are all unlikely to fall under the 5th, as far as I am aware.
If you do not like that, I would recommend finding a nation with stronger property rights to buy real estate in.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
For the most part (excluding e.g. rambling threats of the odd insane world leader), the NNPT is not enforced through nukes. The primary tool to discourage nuclear weapons programs are economic sanctions. Coupled with the big powers signaling willingness to defend their non-nuclear allies (excluding demented world leaders, again), this creates an environment where it is not in the interests of most states to have a nuclear weapon program.
I will grant you though that the UN security council is very much a club of nuclear powers regulating the behavior of everyone except for themselves. Still, the SC is more born of pragmatism, and sometimes works to police small states who are not client states of any of the permanent members, which is still better than nothing.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Even if alignment is absolutely perfect, the very best outcome possible is having the values of a select few satisfied by an inscrutable god
I do not think that this is the case. Sam Altman does not necessarily get to put his personal utility function on the ASI. Nobody is going to build aligned ASI in their basement. It could be that a few investors, researchers and regulators manage to coordinate their defection against mankind, but it is far from a foregone conclusion. Still, the likeliest ASI solution IMHO is that we get unaligned ASI, which will drastically reduce wealth inequality within our light cone.
If AI fizzles out before we reach ASI, then it seems likely that we will see the supremacy of the AI companies coming while humans are not yet economically and militarily obsolete, and we will be able to do something about that.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Personally, I have no strong opinions on p(ASI). It could very well be that LLMs will not get smart enough to substantially help the people currently developing them.
But even in a boring s-curve world where current AIs do not get much better, their impact on the world will be huge, possibly on par with the industrial revolution. I think a singularity and subsequent paperclips (or utopia, or Musk becoming God-Emperor) is not very likely, but I still have colleagues who use LLM to do the hard parts of their job. It seems that "Nothing Ever Happens" will not be true as far as the labor market is concerned.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
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.
quiet_NaN
3d 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
3d 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
4d 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
4d 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
4d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
7d 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
7d 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
8d 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.
I do not think that it is that simple. A man who wants kids and does not find a partner locally certainly has options. He can import a mail-order bride. He can just pay a third-worlder for a surrogate pregnancy and raise his kid as a single dad. Even if China managed to get artificial wombs to work tomorrow, I don't think that half of the single men would embrace fatherhood overnight.
We used to live in a society where women were willing to take on a lot of hardships and give up a lot of opportunities to have kids, and men were mostly bankrolling the family. However, I do not believe that this is The Rightful Order Of Things.
More options
Context Copy link