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I posted this comment well over a year ago, and I think it holds up:
...
That strikes me as a remarkably arbitrary line in the sand to draw (besides being conveniently self-serving) - you can apply this to literally anything that is not 100% one-sided harmless improvement.
What is the relation of child-having to being more
spiritualgrounded and invested in the human race (the human race, not just their children)'s long-term wellbeing? I'm perfectly interested in the human race's wellbeing as it is, and I've certainly met a lot of shitty parents in my life.I hope this isn't too uncharitable but your argument strikes me less as a noble God-given task for families to uphold, and more as a cope for those that have settled in life and (understandably) do not wish to rock the boat more than necessary. I'm glad for you but this does nothing to convince me you and yours are the prime candidates to hold the reins of power, especially over AI where the cope seems more transparent than usual. Enjoy your life and let me try to improve mine.
(Childless incel/acc here, to be clear.)
I mean technically yes, as an Ace as well I have some interest in generally keeping the species alive. But at the same time, it hits different when it’s your own kin. I’m rather close to nieces and nephews, and when I think about their personal futures, the entire thing just hits different. I want my nephews to personally have the option of a good life full of nice things, love and happiness. Which changes how I answer very important questions. I am much more interested in curbing crime for example when I think about my nieces walking the streets of any major city. Or about guns for the same reason — I want my kin to be able to protect themselves from the evils that exist. I also don’t want to think about my nephews and nieces being taken to a story hour to be read to by a drag queen with a very strong interest in children.
In the abstract, it’s easy to justify letting people behave any way they wish in publiC. Of course that’s because in the abstract it harms no one. Until the public has to deal with the fallout or protect themselves from those who take their liberty too far.
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Note, of course, that parents can also fall into stupid mental traps and failure modes. The position is they are just somewhat less so, as being invested in abstractions is not the same as being invested in something concrete. High-minded ideals can lead one down ridiculous paths- see EA's concern for shrimp.
In my experience, such positions tend to themselves be cope, that one finds excuses for being a selfish hedonist ("Oh, I'm not having kids for the environment," totally has nothing to do with being a perpetual adolescent who can barely take care of themselves and have no interest in the world at large). People of every stripe and position will find reasons to justify that their choices are Good and Right, and will work to reshape reality to ensure that.
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Okay. I'm a father. Full steam ahead I say. I graciously donate my "I'm straight and have functioning sperm" vote to Sam Altman.
Do expect your kids to have jobs if we build machines that can do everything better and cheaper than humans?
Are jobs good in themselves?
Either these machines are going to be so great that there is no use human labor can be put to that satisfies human wants (which sounds utopian to me) or there will still be productive uses of human labor to satisfy human wants (i.e. jobs).
You're a survival machine, your sense of purpose comes from overcoming obstacles impending your survival. Maybe the machines will just take over and provide a stimulating environment of constant low-level warfare which is what we evolved for.
Who knows, it's possible. Maybe you're going to be turned into biodiesel, or reengineered into a better pet. Unknowable.
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The important thing is for our civilization to have an incentive to keep us around. Once we're superfluous, we'll be in a very precarious position in the long run.
Is being stuck in an old folks' home utopian?
For some (many? most?) people likely yes. The thing that is bad about being in an old folks home, today, is the "old" part. If I were free to spend my time however I wished at my current age, that would be pretty great!
And yet my experience with old people is that they fight tooth and nail not to be dropped at a home, and the ones there lament not being able to stay at their real homes or with family.
Preferable to dying in a street, but not what I'd call 'utopian'.
OK, but in a world where robots do all useful work there's no reason you couldn't be at home with your family! I took the point about the old folks home to be a concern about a kind of listlessness or malaise with lacking something productive to fill ones days with.
The biggest problem with current care homes isn't loneliness, listlessness or malaise. It's that the care home has almost no incentive to care about the wellbeing of its residents, especially those without vigorous younger relatives to advocate for them, and therefore generally ends up mistreating them for convenience.
The residents aren't paying, or if they are, it's usually their legal guardian using the funds on their behalf (people active enough to manage their own banking are generally active enough not to go into a home). The residents don't have the physical vitality to cause problems if nobody gets round to feeding them for a few hours. The residents can't leave.
One of my relatives was put into a rehab clinic for physical recovery after an injury at the age of 90+. When we went to visit him, we discovered him shivering in a frigid room. He hadn't been fed for a day, because nobody had got round to it. And if we hadn't visited, who would have known?
There are many, many ways for a rather overstretched institution to abuse people for profit or convenience without causing them enough damage for outsiders to notice, especially if they're frail and expected to die soon anyway. Presumably these places are inspected, but there are lots of ways to get vulnerable people to smile for the inspectors when you have them at your mercy for the rest of the time. It doesn't even require active malice, just neglect.
People are naturally concerned that the position of the non-robot-owners in a world where robots do all the jobs (and enforce public order) will be comparable.
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Fair. Maybe a better analogy would be: You and your whole family are in an old folks home, and the country and all jobs are now being run by immigrants from another, very different, country. You fear that one day (or gradually through taxation) they'll take away your stuff and if they do, there'll clearly be nothing you can do about it.
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Precisely this. Does civilization serve man, or does man serve civilization?
The phrase "Disneyland with no children" comes to mind.
Civilization came into existence because it enhanced group survival.
It's pretty ironic that it's probably also going to end it. Once the deep state is efficient machines and not inefficient apparatchiks, things might get pretty funny.
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Being useful and free to withdraw your services is leverage. Having no leverage is bad in itself.
What is it you are envisioning needing this leverage to do?
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I so enormously doubt "everything better and cheaper". But some things sure.
Machine looms and mechanized agriculture have put almost everyone out of their jobs. A large majority of people used to work in agriculture or cloth making. It was a black hole for labor and human effort.
And yet now clothing and food are extremely cheap and I have a job. Not a job growing food or working a loom. But a job.
If AI does some things better and cheaper then great news, prices are going to get cheaper. That's a good thing. I hope things that are very expensive to me are very cheap for future generations. Like clothing for us vs pre-industral revolution.
Surely there could be a point where technology advances enough that computers do everything better, no?
Currently, computers are better at chess than humans. Still, nobody wants to watch the computer world championship and many people want to watch the human world championship. In some jobs it's not just about being better. Maybe more such jobs will exist in the future?
Yes, because Deep Blue is never going to open with Bongcloud.
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That’s like at most 1% of jobs.
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Sure. And at that point we are discussing hypothetical scifi futures. Like in Accelerando when the Hello Kitty artificial intelligence explains to newly created people that things like monster trucks are free and they can have as many as they want.
But I'm not very concerned about all human labor being made irrelevant soon. Maybe some portion of it. And that won't be very conformable for some people. Like English clothing makers when machine looms were first made. A hard time, but society did not collapse or suffer permanent unemployment. They only had to slaughter a small number of people to stop them from destroying clothing factories. And clothes are now a tiny fraction of the cost. I'd say a clear net good. I'm hoping when HR drones are replaced with software we can figure out how to deal with them more peacefully than British soldiers dealt with Luddites. I have been told that Excel put most accountants out of business and we navigated that without bloodshed and social upheaval.
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This is the midwit argument.
A better argument is that AI will create an even more extreme power law distributions of return to human capital and cognitive performance. You'll see software firms that used to need 100s of developers to work on various pieces of the codebase turn into 10 elite engineers plus their own hand-crafted code LLM. That same firm used to have 100+ sales people to cover various territories, now it just has a single LLM on 24/7 that can answer all the questions of prospects and only turns them over to an elite sales team of 10 when they get to a qualified position.
All of a sudden, we're at 30%+ unemployment because the marginal utility of the bottom 30% of cognitive performers is literally negative. It's not that they can't do anything, it's that whenever anyone thinks of something for them to do, there's an LLM on the way already.
I think we're actually starting to see this already. Anec-data-lly, I'm hearing that junior devs are having a really hard time getting jobs because a lot of what they used to do really is 90% handled by an LLM. Senior devs, especially those that can architect out whole systems, are just fine.
The AI doom scenario isn't paperclips or co-opted nukes, it's an economic shock to an already fragile political system that crashes the whole thing and we decide to start killing each other. To be clear, I still think that that scenario is very, very unlikely, but "killer robot overlords" is 100% Sci-Fi.
Are there really swarms of "junior devs" out there writing code so menial that their whole job can be replaced by an LLM? This is just totally discordant with my experience. Back when I started they threw an active codebase at me and expected me to start making effective changes to a living system from the get. Sure, it wasn't "architecting whole systems", but there is no way you could type the description of the first intern project I built years ago into an LLM and get anything resembling the final product out.
These systems that claim to write code just aren't there. Type in simple code questions and you get decent answers, sure. They perform well on the kind of thing that appears in homework problems, probably because they're training on homework problems. But the moment I took it slightly off the beaten path, I asked it how to do some slightly more advanced database queries in a database I wasn't familar with, the thing just spat out a huge amount of plausible but totally incorrect information. I actually believed it and was pretty confused later that day when the code I wrote based on the LLM's guidance just totally did not work. So I am incredulous that there is really any person doing a job out there which could be replaced by this type of program.
The junior devs graduating college over the past 5 years are drastically less capable than before. There are fully diploma'ed CS majors who do not understand basic data structures. Yes, this is a problem.
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Yes, or close to it. Used to be stack overflow was full of them trying to get real devs to do their work for them.
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Thanks for the kind words.
Yes, that is one possibility (ie the tech advances enough that it kills some but not all jobs so those at the top become Uber rich and those at the bottom UBI). Of course that ignores the possibility that the situation you describe is a mid point; not the end.
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Surely this is the worst argument against AI? Shouldn't we burn the backhoes and go back to digging ditches by hand to ensure employment opportunities for our children?
This is a reasonable argument, but there's a big different between having robots that can do something things for us (like digging ditches) while humans can still do other things better, versus having everything being done better by machines. In the current world, you get growth by investing in both humans and machines. In the latter world, you get the most growth by putting all your resources into machines and the factories that make them.
What growth is there without consumers (i.e. people)?
You just need at least 1 consumer, right? Maybe the future is just one person who owns the entire Earth or perhaps even the universe, the sole producer and customer that dictates what is and isn't by his control of all the AI-powered robots. Well, I imagine even if someone had amassed the power to accomplish this, they would find such an existence rather lonely.
This, I think, points to the one job that AI and robots can't ever replace humans in, which is providing a relationship with a human who was born the old fashioned (i.e. current) way and grew up in a human society similar to the human customer did. I've said it before, but it could be that the world's oldest profession could also become the world's final profession.
But also, if we're positing ASI, it's quite possible that the AI could develop technology to manipulate the brain circuitry of the one remaining human to genuinely believe that he is living in a community of real humans like himself. I believe this kind of thing is often referred to as a "Lotus-Eater Machine," after some part of the Odyssey. If this gets accomplished, then perhaps all of humanity going down to just one person might be in our future.
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Well this is some crazy shit. Why do you believe in a make pretend fantasy to start with?
I'm quite confused. What is the 'make pretend fantasy'? The one nearly irrelevant reference to Christianity in my post, only referenced as a side disagreement with Musk's lifestyle choices? That's the only 'belief' I mentioned in my post and pretty an unrelated aside. Does any passing reference to Christianity force you to blindly zero in on it?
The rest of the post is basically just a restatement of what others have said downthread: Altman is childless, and possibly detached from the future of bio-humanity, and certainly not as publically 'attached' to it as Musk.
This was my experience with that user, yes, and he wasn't interested in hearing what anyone had to say on the matter either.
But now he's gone.
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You were told, repeatedly, that you were on your last chance, and yet your last several warnings were mod-noted with "Permaban next time." Yet you weren't, because, well, you seemed to be making a good faith effort to dial it down... for a while. But your comments remain mostly low effort and shitty. So much so that after being here for months, we still have to manually approve your posts because you can't get out of the new user filter. This isn't because you have some brave iconoclastic point of view that's too much for the Motte; there are other edgy, lefty posters who establish themselves as decent posters.
This post is just another crappy low effort post. I've specifically told you to stop writing posts whose entire content is just "Your beliefs are stupid."
It's also the last straw. I will not miss fishing your posts out of the queue and having to decide which of the dozen posts you wrote during a drunk-posting spree need to be modded. This was a dumb hill to die on, but so mote it be. Good bye.
While I've had my fair share of sometimes heated arguments with Frenchie and agree that the comment you're responding to is a low-effort contentless flame which at best will lead to nothing at all, the next part of your argumentation is just bad.
This is simply wrong. The new user filter feature is fundamentally chilling effect on views that go against the local mainstream and has a very predictable endpoint, already visible here. Fundamentally, low-effort "hot takes" like this (to name something you have encountered most recently) are not going away, but alternative viewpoints that go against that sort of content - most likely are.
The problem you're not seeing is that it's not the absence of a "variety of hot takes", it's that relying on the upvote/downvote mechanism for user absorption is guaranteed to fossilize a consensus based on some side of the very culture war this thread is about. I've had that argument with your colleagues on the site's telegram a number of times, and, as far as I can tell, there really isn't a counter-argument to present. Even if you're okay with having that particular kind of opinion dominate, you are still going to face a fall in quality of content, as is always the case in all echo-chambers that face no pushback.
Since I'm never going to be able to climb out of the new user filter you seem to laud, I doubt this comment will actually appear in the thread. But hopefully you'll at least see it...
I reject the characterization of my comment as a low-effort hot take. Considered in isolation, perhaps, but when seen in the context of a long conversation in which I also made a number of high-effort, sophisticated arguments in favor of my position, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize one particular comment that way. I’m extremely willing to defend my positions at length, which you can see, since you picked out a comment that was deep into a thread where I was doing so.
That's fine. If you believe that "Anyone affiliated with the Innocence Project deserves prison time" is a sophisticated, nuanced argument in favour of a certain position - it is your right to do so. I disagree and not simply with the position itself, but also with the prospects of such a comment leading to a reasoned discussion that could arrive at some interesting conclusion.
Here's a counter-example: "Executing all landlords in the world would be a good way to solve the housing crisis". It's a position that's a little juvenile and rather facile, but I am absolutely capable of writing a number of high-effort, good(ish) faith arguments for it by using utilitarian principles.
Do you think that the discussion writing something like this would lead to is going to be high level?
Look at the rest of the thread and my participation in it. Do you believe that I contributed nothing of intellectual value to it? Again, I’m not pretending that the particular comment you picked on was high-effort; however, I’m clearly quite capable of offering much higher-effort expansions of my position, which I did, in numerous parts of that same comment thread. That is the difference between me and someone who contributes nothing but low-effort swipes. If your belief is simply that no commenter, no matter how long-standing and high-quality-on-average, should ever be able to get away with posting anything low-effort, that’s fine, but it is not my position, nor does it appear to be the mods’ position.
Yes, absolutely! We see very high-effort and interesting threads branch off from arguments like that frequently here. I agree that you would also probably incite a lot of low-effort and/or uncharitable replies as well, but that doesn’t mean the post itself wouldn’t ultimately be worth it. If you genuinely do hold that belief, why not make an effortful post about it?
It very explicitly is not my belief, you misunderstood me. My point was that upvote/downvote system is bad at weeding out low-effort postings in general, because vast majority of people will not downvote a low-effort inflammatory statement that they agree with. I am with you as far as the idea that low-effort posting only becomes a serious concern when it dominates over higher-effort posting, and that is usually caused by people who pretty much exclusively post low-effort, ideologically-motivated comments.
I've done the very thing you suggested once 🫠. That's why I'm never going to be able to climbe out of a premoderation hole, lol
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The comment does appear in the thread after we approve it, which I have.
Look, I don't love the new user filter mechanism myself, and I have noticed that yes, liberals have a harder time climbing out of it because they get downvoted so heavily. That said, those who actually post reasonable and good faith arguments eventually get enough upvotes that they aren't being filtered, and it really doesn't take that much. The only people I can recall recently who posted regularly yet stayed in the new user filter persistently for months were AahTheFrench and Darwin/guesswho. Both of whom mostly engaged in trolling and shitposting.
Without a new user filter, we mods would wake up to a ton of "Kill All Niggers! Death to Kikes and Faggots!" posts spamming the board which we would then have to clean up. (This is not speculative on my part; you should see how very determined and noxious some of our long-term trolls are.)
If you have an alternate suggestions, propose it. Zorba has limited time to fix things and add features, but no one is under the illusion that our current setup is perfect. It's just the best we have managed so far.
A one-time manual approval flag.
Seconded. Just keep it as is, and let mods, if they think it suitable, approve users on a per-user instead of a per-post basis.
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Well, here's another example for you. Me 😊. I have zero chance of ever climbing out of the karma hole here. I'm not super worried about it, but, for the record, the reason for it is one (intentionally provocative) thread that did lead to a discussion challenging the standard beliefs. Was it super-valuable? Of course not, and your comment on that thread summed it up pretty well. Was it bad enough to warrant a permanent modfilter? I'd argue that it wasn't and there is plenty of examples of far worse things adding nothing but vitriol towards the outgroup.
While being upvoted.
New user filter as it exists certainly helps with that to an extent, but its primary effect is completely different. It was trivial for me to find an example perfectly illustrating my point from just scrolling through the modlog. Here you go, the comment is essentially saying "people vote for communists because they just want to kill niggers." Votes on it are +3/-1, the -1 probably coming from the moderator who ended up handing out a tempban (no complaint here, it was a right choice). Voters had no problem with it. Is that how the system is supposed to work?
If the goal is to avoid the things you mentioned, adjusting the filter to deal with that would be trivial. Simply adjust the filter to be 7 days + 50 comments (or some similar number) which will still filter random incoming trolls, without enforcing the echo-chamber and punishing going against the circlejerk. From my experience of working with coders on the same codebase motte is written on, something like that can be written and implemented in minutes. The question is only about what you want your system to accomplish...
No, most people don't even remember a post from months ago. I don't even remember you. The reason you haven't accumulated enough "karma" is that you've posted a few times today, and last time was a couple of posts 4 months ago, and before that, a couple of posts a year ago.
You are misunderstanding how the filtering works. We don't put a "permanent modfilter" on you because you make a bad post. All new users automatically have to have their posts manually approved. After a certain number of upvotes (I don't know what the algorithm is, only Zorba does) you come out of the "new user" filter. Now if you have acquired a reputation for being an asshole, so that a lot of people downvote you as soon as they see you post, yes, it will be harder to get out of that filter. As far as I know, you aren't one of those people. You just haven't posted enough.
Yes. The new user filter is only to keep out low effort trolls. Once you are no longer being filtered, it's the job of reports and mods to handle people who make bad posts. As you noted, that post resulted in a tempban. I would not get so upset about upvotes and downvotes. There are people who will upvote any post that talks about how much Jews or blacks or leftists suck, especially if the poster uses language the upvoter knows better than to use. We don't mod according to the popularity of a post.
Maybe @ZorbaTHut has thoughts on why we should/shouldn't do that. Though I will note that if the threshold were 50 comments, you would still be in the new user filter.
Fair enough, my apologies. I'm originally from /r/drama, just came here in passing a while back due to being friendly with a number of motte regulars. My example is not that interesting, what's valuable in it is how it illustrates the drawbacks of the system.
Pretty sure that it is not the case. Can't conclusively disprove it, but I am almost certain that it is, in fact, upvotes minus downvotes threshold, not just a number of upvotes. If it only counted upvotes, my original post would have been enough to clear it (while horribly received, it did accumulate some positive reaction).
But this is the very effect I am complaining about. The disincentive towards posting while knowing that it will take up to 12 hours for the comment to appear in a thread that is having an active discussion is huge. If that wasn't the case, I'd absolutely post more, and I assure you that I am not alone in that regard.
The question is whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. If discouraging people like me from posting is the system working as designed - then that's fine, I just think that it goes against the stated goals of the platform.
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I feel like that should have been "so Motte it be."
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Wow, such eloquent savagery. Well deserved. Thanks for the good work.
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