2rafa
maybe it will all turn out fine
User ID: 841
2rafa
14hr ago
I’m not generally a fan of reading the tea leaves of suicide notes but I think it’s best to interpret these - even if we literally accept their reasons for suicide as true (and I think generally this is the case when intelligent people kill themselves, that is to say that their stated reasons are usually their actual reasons even if they are bad reasons) - as borne of fear rather than existential crisis, and that fear is ultimately tied to material circumstances. There is a lot society can and will need to do, if it survives, to repair our sense of meaning as it’s redirected away from work.
2rafa
14hr ago
I think we’ll invent a new entertainment form of ‘challenge math’ or something where the idea is you try to figure out a proof you haven’t been exposed to competitively even if AI has the answer, and it’ll be like a game. Either way, I really don’t think this is reason to end it.
2rafa
14hr ago
There is meaning in a sense of pride and accomplishment, but as that infamous post suggests, that can be fully simulated.
2rafa
14hr ago
Yeah, rich people also aren’t coordinated, most don’t have bunkers, they’re highly divided by ideology, and most have some loyalty to some non-super-rich groups (for reasons of tribe, faith, nation, ethnicity, political belief and so on). This plus the speed of the true singularity will make the requisite coordination almost impossible.
The ‘permanent underclass’ thing is a legacy of Great Recession (‘Humans Need Not Apply’; Elysium) or even dotcom bust era (as in the case of Marshall Brain’s Manna which I think was 2002) AI fiction where self driving cars and self checkouts and robotic nurses and cashier screens at McDonalds automate low paying service jobs while the rich and upper middle class prosper, without overall productivity seemingly increasing much, which means the poor basically live off worse-than-section-8 level welfare forever. This was nonsensical even if one agreed with those predictions (automating a lot of these low level service jobs would be a huge productivity uplift that would make things like welfare much cheaper to provide and afford those on it a much higher quality of life), but of course it turned out that actually white collar work was the easiest thing to automate (before truckers in many cases, even!).
It also features impossibly misaligned incentives, since the ‘bottom of the rich’ would know they were next in line for the permanent underclass at any time, something that eventually cascades until there’s what, only one man left out of the permanent underclass? That doesn’t really make sense.
I don’t think democracy or what now passes for it can really survive AI, and I question whether that’s a particularly bad thing anyway, but I expect that any non-extinction scenario eventually plays out as abundance almost impossible for us to imagine today (like a wild animal subject to constant hunger, thirst, sickness, fear, predation, injury, etc ‘imagining’ life in a nice Northern European zoo), such that twenty first century distinctions become irrelevant. I also think AI plays the role of the zookeeper in this scenario, and so the idea that it lets Elon Musk control star systems just because he happened to be very rich and powerful in the years before it took control seems about as likely as the zookeepers letting the big elephant eat all the others’ food just because it happens sometimes in the wild.
2rafa
15hr ago
Right, they envisioned it being because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall - ie capitalism being so maximally efficient that it turns in on itself - which is actually untrue (capitalism is more efficient than the alternatives but not maximally so; rates of profit ie margins are actually quite high in historical terms right now).
2rafa
16hr ago
I suspect that the main sources of meaning will continue to be things like religion and family / childrearing / marriage that code as trad.
2rafa
16hr ago
the argument is that markets are more efficient at resource allocation than central planning, not that they’re very efficient.
When Musk bought Twitter and now operates it with 20% of the staff it had, or when Google increases headcount by 1000% in a decade despite operating primarily the same product, this isn’t maximum efficiency. Managers establish fiefdoms. Individual employees care more about themselves than maximizing shareholder returns. Incentives are not fully aligned.
2rafa
18hr ago
I don’t think mass automation AI future proves communists correct. Not only because the timely invention of AI required capitalism (yes we don’t have the counterfactual, but I’d say it seems likely) but even more importantly because the only way any kind of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ economy can work is if unlimited ‘ability’ is provided by AI and unlimited ‘need’ can be absorbed by it.
I don’t see why mathematicians would be so upset. 99% of professional mathematicians have never contributed to the field of mathematics in any real way.
There are two arguments about AI and employment.
The first and primary one is about mass unemployment. This is a real issue but people obsessed by it also need to understand, as I think @self_made_human increasingly does, that basically all of the surge in white collar labor since 1970 consists of fake make-work very thinly disguised by the laws of classical economics. The invention of the computer literally automated almost all white collar labor as it existed in, say, 1920, and yet instead of an unemployment crisis we just gave ourselves fake titles and decided to spend all day having meetings and making PowerPoint slides. The format in engineering and medicine was very slightly different but vast amounts of both professions, their demand and their provision were and are make-work too. I go to the doctors office and a GP diagnoses the way AI can in 20 seconds or a competent and cheap nobody who could use a search engine could do in 5 minutes even 25 years ago. If society survives the AI X-risk, we will emerge into a world of such unfathomable abundance that it will be trivial to provide every human, certainly in the rich world but eventually the whole world, with a comfortable material life. Dying from an AI engineered virus or a drone war or something is far more likely than starving because AI replaced all jobs and the owners of capital are too tightfisted to share.
The second and more interesting one is about meaning. The mathematician, even though he never meaningfully contributes to the field, imagines that he might. This is why AI makes him depressed. It’s the lack of hope that kills you, but is it? I mean, is it really? Meaning is invented, we’ve spent thousands of years inventing rather arbitrary forms of meaning. We can invent more. We can have kids. We can touch grass. We can compete against each other, if we want to, in games and competitions. Academia is already one such game. If mathematicians still want to play it, all they have to do is change the rules.
I guess I’m more sanguine on this than most. I increasingly converge on one observation, which is that it’s extinction or utopia. Other scenarios (weird AI hell) are plausible but increasingly unlikely. Compute always wins, the bitter lesson is always true, so the only question is whether it destroys us entirely (or someone uses it to) - accidentally or deliberately are really irrelevant - or whether it liberates us from material want entirely.
2rafa
20hr ago
Be honest. How much of the above did you actually write? I’m reserving judgment. I’m just curious.
2rafa
1d ago
I don’t think substack’s interface functionally replicates the best aspect of traditional forums. Part of the reason this community has survived for 10+ years now is because it moved from Scott’s comment section, which is very transient and best suited to short form (ie blog-commenter-style) comments, to Reddit. Obviously Scott still has a very active comment section, but beyond the occasionally interesting anecdote I don’t find much value in it and I read it only occasionally, it isn’t really suited for long discussions.
The ideal forum is designed for medium-sized text segments. Longer than a Tweet or an article comment, shorter than another tedious 4000 word essay by a Substack dilettante. The forum (in both nested and classic formats) is best for this length of post, which I find preferable.
Before around 2011 when Reddit became much more popular. Reddit essentially replaced tens of thousands of smaller online communities about every niche hobby, interest, career or identity / culture / faith community that you could possibly imagine, which is what @ArjinFerman is saying. The heyday of this world was probably around 1995 to 2007, which was when large numbers of people were online, web hosting was an established industry and premade forum packages and standards allowed a semi-competent person with a little coding knowledge to relatively easily set up and host an online forum.
What killed forums? Reddit, of course, most primarily. But also Twitter and Facebook to a great extent. Reddit is by far the central culprit because it eliminated the three biggest points of friction for online forums:
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The (minor but still extant) skill (or, alternatively, cost) required to set up the forum, find a host etc, then market it to a small initial user base. As time went on various middleware was created that made this slightly easier, but nothing was ever as easy as the current platforms. The same thing happened to voice chat - Ventrilo and TeamSpeak servers for each community were replaced by dedicated game voice chats (that let pick up or assigned groups or teams communicate) which were in turn replaced universally by Discord.
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Hosting costs, which often had to be begged from users (people who created and moderated niche internet forums were often shut-in or unemployed and therefore quite poor) who sent money via questionable online money transfer platforms as they existed back then. Only the largest forums had viable ad hosting platforms back in the day, and before the ubiquity of Google Ads it wasn’t even that easy to set up an ad infrastructure as a hobbyist with a medium sized site.
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User acquisition. Look at this forum, the only people who find it now are those bored enough to scroll through every last link on Scott’s current board, or maybe three people a year who stumble across the subreddit and wonder where we’ve gone. On a forum, you don’t just need to attract users, you also need them to spend 5 minutes signing up, to give you their email, create a username, and then for them to keep coming back. Reddit automates all of this - one account, every forum, all the updates on one homepage and in one app.
Combine these things and you have a recipe for the total fading away of the internet as it existed before the early 2010s. Only a few of the very largest old-school forums still exist in a relatively active form - places like Resetera/NeoGAF, LipstickAlley, Mumsnet, TattleLife, SomaliSpot, 4Chan, KiwiFarms, RPGCodex - and even they are mostly diminished from the height of their success. There are a few niche survivors like this, subject to unique circumstances.
2rafa
2d ago
Has there been any time ever when you haven’t blackpilled. I’m thinking now, and I don’t think I can remember one.
Not that you’re wrong, necessarily.
2rafa
2d ago
The Best Indicator of Hormuz Traffic Is The Price of Oil.
Why? Because big commodities trading houses and hedge funds have better data than you and better data than any vibecoded website. This isn’t Venezuela, this is a major waterway through which many companies are doing business everyday. They see what they are getting, what they are processing, where it’s coming from and what they’re paying.
Everyone in this entire region relies on oil. Even though Houthis generate billions of dollars a year from the oil trade. The reason for their intense drive to conquer the rest of Yemen also stems from their desire to control its oil supplies and restart various pipeline projects halted by the war’s outset long ago. Oil cannot stop flowing from the Middle East for the simple reason that nobody can afford to go without it.
2rafa
6d ago
I’m not going to defend the argument that there are hundreds, or indeed any, better sources. But it is surprising to me that the conclusion when the opinions of relatively reputable sector and geopolitical research analysts differs vastly from some vibecoded website is that it is the latter that must be more accurate. And it is true that regular reporting from oil analysts (who after all have regular conversations with executives at refineries, majors, shipping companies, commodities trading houses etc) suggests flows are much higher than what the Hormuz tracker website would imply. I also think the efficacy of supposedly accurate satellite based methods of tracking flows would appear questionable. Again, I’m not an expert, but I’m skeptical.
2rafa
6d ago
Let’s be honest, there are a lot of people (not limited to a political ideology, although concentrated on the far left and right, with a large number of more centrist doomers and preppers in between) who just want some major blow to happen to American hegemony so that something interesting might happen, domestic politics might be radically shook, etc etc.
Semi-astute political observers will note this is just a cross-party variant of the ‘heighten the contradictions of capitalism’ thesis beloved of lazy communists, namely that surely at some point everything has to blow up and then we can come to power. Who knows, maybe it will.
So no, America hasn’t suffered some devastating end of an imperial age blow (yet) in this conflict.
Nevertheless, as everyone keeps (correctly) telling you, simply restoring the prewar status quo but slightly worse (eg the Houthis are now emboldened and the Saudi-Emirati split doesn’t seem to be repaired even though that would be in America’s best interests, Iraq is still struggling to keep control of Shia militias etc etc) is not a successful outcome for a special military operation.
For example, if Putin agreed tomorrow to retreat to early-2022 lines of control in Ukraine, this would be transparently seen as an immense Ukrainian victory.
2rafa
6d ago
Yields are soaring in large part because of the AI rollout’s spiralling effect on all global credit markets, driving up borrowing costs for everyone, including sovereigns.
2rafa
7d ago
It actually makes it more likely, because while Russia will sometimes send skilled undercover operatives / agents on these kinds of missions, Iran’s modus operandi is to use hired, either via long strings of intermediaries or online platforms / encrypted chat, local petty criminals to unknowingly carry out operations in Europe. It’s possible these people knew very little.
2rafa
7d ago
Broadly I agree but there are all kinds of localized incentive. For example, say you work a professional job and live in Manhattan. There are obviously standard ‘trads’ in New York City but they tend to be lifelong members of conservative religious communities that you are either born into or won’t join unless you’re a giga-LARPer.
In that case, who are the conservative men? Basically, they’re supporters of Donald Trump (notorious hedonist), libertarian Palantir / Thiel / tech types, or secular urban/suburban ‘blue tribe’ men who just have some right-wing views because they were exposed to moldbug, BAP, /pol/ and or incel/looksmaxxing online content or streamers, ie negative views on women. Optimizing to attract these men (deliberate and open contrarians in a liberal environment) is likely not optimal. Meanwhile plenty of very much immodest women around you settle down with attractive, successful and kind men.
I agree that modesty is the smart move, but more because a lot of liberal sexual modernity exploits and humiliates women for men, not because it makes much of a difference in finding a good husband.
The battle of the sexes is always more about the people having the conversation than it is about the subject matter. You can be glib and say this applies to literally everything, and it might, but it applies to few things more than this topic.
What I mean by this is something like ‘in almost every case, a given person’s sexual politics can be largely inferred from their sexual history’. This isn’t strictly true for actual politics (say the broader ‘culture war’), even if there are clear trends. But it is strictly true, in my experience without exception, for sexual politics. You can challenge me, and declare me wrong if I stumble, but I think that means my calibration isn’t perfect, not that the principle is flawed.
If you present a kind of person - say a woman who married her high school sweetheart who had two kids with him, found out he cheated and was having a kid with a mistress in her late twenties, and is now a single mom in her early thirties who got tattoos, has a dim view of men, and has a public instagram account, you can probably infer her sexual politics. If you present a man who didn’t get laid a lot in high school or early college, but found some men’s forum in his mid twenties, got more attractive, started lifting, and then had a ‘hoe phase’ in his early thirties before setting down with an Asian girlfriend and later wife, you can probably infer his sexual politics. If you present the second daughter of a conservative south asian family who divorced her arranged-marriage husband (they had no children) in her mid twenties and then married a wealthier white guy at 32, you can probably infer her sexual politics.
Another example: the sexual politics of a man who got laid a lot in high school are different - universally - to the sexual politics of a man who didn’t (the same is not true for women, where the exact timing of a hoe phase has a lesser impact). This is true even if ‘body count’, hotness, success etc are identical. This is far more granular than “promiscuity is good/bad”, it’s deeper than that, it’s about the worldview.
2rafa
9d ago
I guess right now the situation serves everyone except the customer. Taxi unions and cities don’t complain about technological unemployment, Waymo pads its margins, and Uber and the other companies don’t have to borrow billions at high rates to finance self driving fleets to compete with each other in a race to the bottom (which would follow full deregulation and which would drive down margins precipitously).
2rafa
9d ago
I don’t think this is true. I think it’s much more common in vibes based semi autocracies like Turkey and Russia. In America there seem to be plenty of Trump supporters who disagree with him on AI, or the Iran War, for example.
2rafa
10d ago
Isn’t it still illegal to actually let the car drive itself? You can’t go to the back of the car and fall asleep, you can’t even officially use your phone with both hands to watch movies or play games. You can’t even look out of the window and forget about what’s in front of you. (You can do these things in a Waymo, but not in your own self driving car).
2rafa
15d ago
Say you live in a very rural part of your country. The rural area has a small administrative center with a few stores, a clerk’s office, and a court. You live in a house within walking distance from all of them. The county has no suburbs per se, at least not of the classic kind. Is your living situation rural or urban?
Now say you live in a big freestanding house surrounded largely by parkland and fields at the outer edge of a major city. But, less than ten minutes’ walk (along a narrow country lane) from your house is a commuter railroad station with very regular service that can take you to the center of one of the world’s great cities in twenty five minutes. Is your living situation rural, suburban or urban?
I don’t know, it just feels kind of like we’re in a car and we’re heading for an opening
drawbridgebascule bridge and half the people are cheering and expect we’ll make it and half the people are terrified we’ll fall and are begging the driver to slow down, except that it’s too late to slow down and even if we wanted to the driver doesn’t.We are a species of desperate risk takers and gamblers, not all of us but enough of us to decide our destiny. The exact same thing that led our ancestors to cross continents on foot over generations, to walk across the world, to set out into vast oceans on flimsy rafts and find new lands, that leads people today to put it all on red or gamble their college fund on stratospherically far out of the money semiconductor options, to cheat on exams and to jump off skyscrapers with parachutes - this is why AI is unstoppable, and this is why Yud and Scott and anyone crying about p(doom) will fail.
Not because they are wrong, but because to act on their warnings would go against our very nature. We cannot do it. It is ‘full steam ahead and hope it works out fine’; we have boarded the raft.
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