site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

15
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

If you can spin up a new Terrence Tao clone for $0.05 per hour, then no human who is not more capable than Terrence Tao in some dimension can earn more than $0.05 per hour. I would create enough Terrence Taos do do all the mathematics I want, and then create some more to do my accounting. The opportunity cost is the cost of the hardware it would take to run such a model, and hardware costs are already falling exponentially even without AI electrical engineers.

Automation increases society's capacity to pay people for work, but not the economic need to do so. The robots are being built and maintained by robots. The "critical point" I describe comes when anything that a sub-120-IQ can do, can also be done by a robot for $0.05 per hour.

"A fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0" is exactly what I'm talking about. Experientially, this looks like slowly raising the minimum IQ it takes to earn enough to survive until almost all people are excluded, and population massively shrinking as a direct result.

Increased labor productivity: advanced chess obituary. There comes a point where Human + AI is worse than AI alone. Rather, it's an anomaly when a human is able to meaningfully assist an AI to accomplish some task.

I would create enough Terrence Taos do do all the mathematics I want, and then create some more to do my accounting.

How much mathematics do you want to be done?

economic need

What do you mean?

"A fall in the expected marginal productivity of labour to 0" is exactly what I'm talking about.

No, it's a separate issue. We don't have to imagine a utopia of massive abundance, where there is cheap AI everywhere, in order to have a situation where the expected marginal productivity of a dangerously large proportion of humans falls below 0.