aqouta
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User ID: 75
Are you in contact with the rdrama folks? They seem to have similar ambitions on a similar architecture and if this kind of project is to succeed it seems a big advantage to start out with a large and varied userbase. And also them being... often objectionable... provides a kind of trial by fire of how we're going to handle tolerating interlocked communities with different norms.
aqouta
9hr ago
"Might" is a weak word. Historically, "join your enemies to reform them from within" has pretty much never achieved the desired aims; it seems straightforwardly true that Moloch has won in terms of incentives to push capabilities and accelerate.
Framing this as a simple enemies or allies distinction is sanding away anything useful. Like if the "enemy" was "war" then one might naively believe that creating an army is joining the "enemy". But if what is bad about war is the killing and oppression then you don't prevent that by disarming, only ensure that the people who win are less noble and less capably opposed.
It's already the case thst people accuse those like yud of being an uninvolved crank who doesn't understand the problem because he doesn't have experience building the models. Ai safety people would have less, not more influence if they abstained.
I think if you accept the premise that the world is truly doomed on such a short timescale, then having a few more years is better, actually, than trading billions of QALY's for some nebulous idea of influence that has had no empirical benefit.
Given the infinity of total annihilation any qaly calculation is swamped by even a tiny amount of leverage on probability of averting disaster. You'd need to set the capabilities frontier back some appreciable fraction of the sun's remaining lifespan for this to be a meaningful calculation. Fortunately I think having people in leadership positions of the labs gives us more than a tiny amount of leverage.
Perhaps. It would be easier to engage with this if you elaborated on why you think this is the case.
This is of course vague because you didn't yourself outline what these structural elements are. Seems like some vague notion of the necessity of action to avoid catastrophe. If "we'll be out competed by peer nations who liberalize" is too much of a stretch then we can point to calls to shut down the border lest the nation be dissolved or any number of other calls to action. The calling up of a militia to defend from Indian attacks. The point is that it's silly to compare any movement that wants to act for any reason to communism in order to rub its nose in that feces. You'd leave yourself completely paralyzed.
aqouta
20hr ago
Yeah, this is my point. Empirical evidence is that the sum total of AI safety's achievements is, against their own goals, to accelerate the founding of OpenAI/Anthropic and the AI race dynamic, while having made no progress on their actual goals (not even the authors expect Plan A to realistically happen).
After the transformers paper came out it was only a matter of time, this way at least the labs are full of safety people who might be able to prioritize alignment work. The alternative was optimistically we get a year or so more time but no influence.
Right now, we are at the equivalent stage of AI safety, where it is in vogue in certain intellectual circles; we have not yet seen what will happen with AI safety, but it shares many structural similarities to the Marxist movements a hundred years ago.
This prove too much. early liberal, proto-capitalist, thought also shared these structural elements.
aqouta
3d ago
You've managed to avoid having to actually contend with the arguments that they make by hallucinating a totalitarian drive that none of the people in the movement would even personally benefit from. How bilateral international treaties turn into a one world government is left as an exercise for the reader. This is weak stuff.
aqouta
3d ago
Do you or do you not think that AI safety people are primarily concerned with whether AI kills everyone? That's the contention. you claimed that they weren't, no you argue a different position.
aqouta
3d ago
aqouta
3d ago
Honestly all of us just think you guys are making yourself look plainly retarded by making obviously fallacious arguments. If I feel any embarrassment as a result of these posts it's that I'm vaguely associated with the sort of discussion forum with people who post like this. Somehow people whom I have explained the economics of inference too multiple times continue to falsely claim that inference is unprofitable and never will become profitable. And then there's the bulverism, "people who are concerned with ai safety just want regulations" have you ever met literally anyone involved in this field? Seriously? They're one of the highest concentrations of libertarians one could select for outside of an Ayn Rand fan club.
aqouta
4d ago
why waste the universe's time?
What? Is it going to run out? Might as well try.
aqouta
4d ago
it's simply impossible that there can ever be safety if we live in a world where AGI can be created via human hands.
AI Safety is what you do when you come to this as the plain conclusion under normal circumstances and then start thinking about how you might engineer extraordinary circumstances because the alternative is resignation to oblivion.
aqouta
6d ago
Eh, I think it's wrong to think about anyone as "the villain" besides the evil possession magic. Bear is deeply flawed, most centrally he's chronically passive and indecisive. In TLP terms he wants the company to want to pay him more but not to have to ask for it. The only action he ever took to get what he wanted was something he calculated as being totally unable to help, making a throw away wish. Then he's in the relationship he knows something is wrong but chooses to basically ignore it and just go with it because he's cartoonishly incapable of acting. All of that and more is true of him, but after he made the wish that he had no way of knowing would be interpreted monkey's paw style in the worst possible way there was nothing he really could have done besides killing himself. I'm not quite willing to raise "if you don't kill yourself to right a wrong you didn't intentionally commit" to the level of villain. He's a coward, but that's a forgivable sin.
aqouta
10d ago
are you only interested in her because she's green and malleable and can be moulded to what you want?
I agree many women seem to think suspiciously in these terms but it seems like a real theory of mind failure. Men by and large are not looking for the hassel of having to mould a partner into what they want besides a handful of fine adjustments at the end - I have taught my wife the proper way to load a dishwasher.
aqouta
13d ago
I'm a little confused. At least in the Chinese case in most major cities there are "Chinese schools" you can send the kids too that are most analogous to me of the "catholic school" I attended growing up which was a couple hours a week at the catholic school. Where they learn Chinese and cultural stuff. I'm slowly learning some Mandarin and our plan is that the kid(s) will attend Chinese school and be able to speak Chinese but that the language of the household will be English. I've never heard of the concept of a one parent language and it indeed sounds like insanity.
aqouta
17d ago
Path of exile 2, grinding up enough divs for a decent rare adorned roll, 40%+, have about 3k that I'm continually cycling through buying temple of chaos fragments for 3.9 div and selling them for 4 div. jewel is hovering around 6k div at the moment. Grinding expedition with aldur's sagas, not sure if the sagas as worth it post patch honestly, very feast or famine.
aqouta
18d ago
Eh, There's this kind of weird definitional game that's being played for what "winning" means. We've known that we have very little ability to nation build in the sense that we can use our military to get other nations to be governed the way we want them to be. Anyone paying attention to the other middle eastern adventures would have to conclude we cannot reliably do that. That this war was started with those aims was dumb and wasteful. But then there's this idea that Iran meaningfully "won" in some kind of conventional military sense which is just ridiculous. A whole lot of the arguments on this topic has been people with these two different definitions of "winning" hallucinating people who disagree with them.
If by "Iran won" you mean the US did not accomplish its war aims then absolutely, Iran won, and it seemed very plausibly they'd win from the get go. If you by "Iran won" you mean they have some kind of dominant military position then just no, they had the ability to take pain and sustain enough of a threat to close the strait.
I just don't really know what people are updating on in this conflict with respect to military might. The military executed its missions very well. The problem was our war aims basically required stoking something like an Iranian revolution to actually succeed which didn't happen.
aqouta
18d ago
My diagnosis wasn't based on the rough content of your post. I even mostly agree with the analysis of Trump and hegseth as contemptable individuals. I was engaging in the, admittedly often annoying, classic past time of discourse on the discourse. Why is dase crashing out so much more frequently? Yes, lib centrists are right about everything, especially Trump, but that hasn't changed. What has changed is the xitter algorithm.
aqouta
18d ago
@aqouta do you still think it was my brain that got fried, and not of everyone here who treated this war as business as usual and a cause for armchair chuckling about… all manners of tedious war nerd minutiae?
Yeah, basically. I'm unusure how any happening of the Iran war is supposed to interact with the social media induced brain frying hypothesis. Like if somehow the war had ended unambiguously on good terms for the US was this supposed to be evidence in my favor? If it had ended up even worse for the US how would interpretation of your behavior have been shown to be more wrong?
As you've blocked me on X and have been banned from this site I have not collected any evidence that could have updated me on this subject and so my opinion remains unchanged.
aqouta
18d ago
There's a lot of assertions in here that just aren't true and it all reads like slop.
The 2007-08 global financial crisis made obvious what had previously only been implicit. The rich did not care for those left behind, and when the costs of the crisis had to be paid, they made sure that the bill was not sent to them.
What about the financial crisis implied let alone made implicit that the rich don't care about us exactly? Are the rich a hand full of banking executives that return pretty marginal surplus value on bank stocks?
a world where the upkeep of one’s homes and cars and even domestic chores, from cooking to elder- and childcare, were shifted precisely to the people who no longer had steady jobs and were part of the class of malcontents.
Is the author trying to imply that the service economy is new as of the last few years? Car mechanics and maids are a new invention?
aqouta
25d ago
Some men have been much, much, much freer than I ever have been or ever will be
And some men are today as well! What does that have to do with anything? Why are you counting yourself as someone who would have been among the frontiersmen instead of the disease ridden factories or back breaking farm labor of that period? In time people might speak of the spirit and freedom of the startup entrepreneur of today who romantically earned no returns yet lived on VC money with a hope for striking it rich with a buyout. And you'd rightly point out that many of those startup founders failed with nothing to show for it or never got funded in the first place, but what do you think happened to most of the people on the frontier?
aqouta
25d ago
enter a parasitic profession like finance and drain your country dry.
Finance is not parasitic. I'm very open to the idea that as a society we'd be better off if we found a way to subsidize very smart people into jobs with more high leverage externalities but finance as a field is actually quite positive sum. Having a bunch of smart people direct resource allocation to its most in demand use is actually hugely beneficial to the world. Imagine the vast amount of value lost if people with great ideas and potential weren't able to get capital allocated to their endeavors. The main people who think finance is some horrible negative sum industry in my experience are people who have never actually interfaced with it or worse, had front office sales roles.
aqouta
27d ago
looks like it's in the $600 range for a weekend with a cabin, definitely not trivial but basically in line with if not slightly cheaper than other destination festivals. cheaper than just tickets to lollapalooza in comparison which will run you $750 for the 4 day pass.
aqouta
27d ago
This is one of those things where if I had very little experience with children I might find a way to be outraged, but now that I've spent some time around them, have a sister with a couple, good friends with some and have gotten teasingly close to having my own I just have to imagine "is vibe camp somewhere I'd take young children unless I was totally bought in and willing to handle explaining nudity to them?" and the answer is probably no. But even if vibe camp was in my local area I probably wouldn't bother to go most years anyways. Who are all these parents taking their kids to vibe camp and having bad experiences? Who are you offended on behalf of?
aqouta
27d ago
Speaking of which, does anybody know why Opus 4.7/4.8 and Grok 4.3 were such downgrades from Opus 4.6 and Grok 4.2? I've three theories:
This could be for the same reason they regressed on vendbench. My understanding is that they pulled out a lot of the marketing/MBA training stuff because they determined it was making the alignment stuff worse, particularly deception. So probably it's more pure of heart in a way that make it worse at writing your type of fiction.
aqouta
27d ago
I understand what you're saying in that it's a black pill vision of reality. Where we can't continence progress because it might give people you hate and distrust some benefit that they'd inevitably use against you. Your worldview is a paranoid cancer that will make all progress impossible and eventually lead to us killing each other. There is no positive future for people who think improving productivity can only make things worse. You have determined that the future is bleak and if you get your way you will make it so.
You're in a war naive society and someone publishes a white paper: "people can use violence to take whatever they want from unarmed populations" You want no one to be dispossessed so you can join the capabilities army explicitly organized around preventing banditry or you can abstain. If everyone like you abstains what do you think the equilibrium on banditry will be? Certainly abstention can be defended under a number of philosophies but joining is a perfectly rational decision.
I'm responding to this scenario:
The reasoning here is faulty in the way I outlined. You're critiquing the assumptions you baked into your own scenario. I would personally inject a lot more nuance instead of these stark terms but I was willing to engage in your hypothetical. My P(doom) is much closer to 20% than the 100% you apply. 20% is still huge and easily worth mitigating with some bilateral treaties. It's you lot who seem to conflate bilateral treaties with like eternal tyranny despite no such tyranny coming from previous treaties.
I mean not exactly? Communists believe capitalism is inherently unstable and will eventually give birth to communism once buried under the weight of its contradictions or whatever. But they make no real promises of imminence. For that matter AI safety people mostly don't even commit to claiming certainty that LLM architecture will even get there, only that it could and we ought be prepared in case it does.
Not really true of Marxists. As far as I can tell Marx himself estimated the stakes at finite, maybe in the ballpark of alleviating serfdom or avoid depression. nuclear proliferation is a much better comparison. The comparison falls pretty flat in general here.
I don't know, kind of if you squint? I'll point out that at least the Yud brand is very happy to keep us at the status quo rather than trying to usher in the eschaton, it's the accelerationists who are really pushing for utopia. Certainly both have a vision of the good, but this is where I think liberalism, christianity, or basically any have this quality.
What horrible acts? Establishing bilateral treaties and, in the same vein of cartoonish libertarian discourse that equates having laws at all with infinite tyranny because noncompliance eventually escalates to violence, we might have to enforce the treaties with violence? This chain is incredibly unconvincing and conflicts violently with the previous clause because it's precisely the opposite group of people who want to do these "horrible acts" as who want to usher in the utopia.
In short this whole comparison looks incredibly forced. It looks a lot like out group homogeneity bias. And I have no earthly idea what your position actually is. You seem to simultaneously want to let it rip because you oppose safety people who want to slow down, while also distrusting the people pushing it forward? What would you actually advise the people worried about ai existential risk do?
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