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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Many businesses don't even know how to use excel or adobe correctly. I work in one such business. There's just no interest in doing new things, everyone is paid by the hour. And apparently the quality of our products and user experience (this is relating to authors in the publishing industry) is well ahead of our peers, who are much larger and wealthier. They are presumably even less organized than we are. I suggested using AI-generated images for our more abstract book covers - but got shot down for a fake reason. Nobody wants change. This may well be different in other fields, notably tech. However, I suspect it is true for most sectors.
I subscribe to Yudkowsky's school of thought where self-driving cars will not be seen before the apocalypse because our regulatory institutions are so incompetent and slow. I think widespread white-collar job automation won't happen within our dwindling lifespans because society is not run by intelligent energetic, innovative thinkers. It's run by people with Essence of Baby-Boomer, people who just prefer doing things as they used to be done, people who don't comprehend that there could be a faster way to do things, even if they just look for the excel tool designed for their purpose. Our website doesn't load fairly often and looks like it was made in 2004, despite our failed attempt to modernize it. How hard is it to set up a modern website that lets people reliably order books? Not very hard in the universal sense of human capacity, very hard for us.
If there is any risk of unemployment, I imagine many jurisdictions will manipulate requirements and definitions to prevent machines being used to replace politically influential constituencies. HR doesn't do much functional work today but they have political power, power to influence people. It's easiest to stop new things from happening, to use delaying tactics or raise objections. See the OSS's wonderful guide to institutional sabotage, which seems to have been widely adopted: https://twitter.com/CityBureaucrat/status/1450240118195986437
It seems so easy to raise some specious reason why AI couldn't be used for this job, or to cherrypick some failure and pounce upon it. People have never made egregious failures before! The EU for instance demands that all AI decisions be legible and explainable, which is basically impossible due to the fundamental nature of the technology.
I cannot imagine how this ends well for Western civilization. How can our governing institutions, which have failed all but one of their tests, manage to get this right? They failed on nuclear energy, on waging idiotic wars in the Middle East. They failed on China (publicizing our plan to lure them to liberal democracy via free trade and openness is like bluffing after showing your hand), they let China develop its industries when it was weak and challenge them now that they're strong, ceding the initiative completely. They failed on climate change - if it is a serious matter then we should've gone nuclear decades ago and since it isn't then we shouldn't be squandering trillions on renewables. Gain of Function - big fat failure. Not knowing for sure whether masks do anything to airborne pandemics - big fat failure.
The only thing our leaders managed to do right was not killing everyone with a nuclear war and that might well be a lucky chance given how irresponsible they were. How can they possibly get AI right? It's not a simple matter like 'not choosing to destroy the world in great power war'.
/images/1677911876674946.webp
That reminds me of one of my wife's previous employers. Everything about the product she managed was a mess, the development team was incompetent, lazy and rife with personal bickering. The code was the worst spaghetti shit ever created by mankind and the architect too incompetent and full of himself to be propose any revisions, even though it's was so bad that further development was practically impossible. The dedicated sales person was stupid and highly sensitive about it and regularly made enemies of friends and refused to do her work.
Senior managment was aware of the problems but was so anemic that it took them three years to even begin to act on it despite acknowledgeding the problems and believing them to be urgent. (Although when they did act they did actually take good steps to improve things).
I initially thought that surely this product could only be competitive due to some bizarre regulatory capture in a part of Sweden but no. She went to a sales conference with the most advanced and prestigious customer organisations in the US and they were amazed by the product and sold very lucrative contracts... God help us.
Want to guess the industry?
Tax software?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Are you implying that there is some other civilization that does things better?
This thing is probably the most blackpilling thing about today's world.
Who profits from GoF research? There is no big business or government interest, there are no massive profits, this thing goes on so few thousand people can publish peer reviewed articles no one will ever read and burnish their citation metrics.
Few thousand people with concrete names, faces and addresses.
And no one cares.
Not governments, not billionaires, not celebrities (to say nothing about general normie population). Not any "protestors" "activists" or "rebels". All people, including the most rich, powerful and influential ones who can nevertheless die together with billions of ordinary peons when the next oops happens.
And oopses like this are happening pretty much regularly.
Imagine a ship, old times sailing ship. Ship where midshipman one day decided to drill a hole below the waterline, just for fun, just becuase he could. And everyone - captain, officer, crew and passengers - just watches and says: not my problem.
If you need hard evidence that humanity as a whole deserves to die, this is it.
Well the Chinese do some things better but other things worse.
There was another actual-officially-confirmed Covid lableak too, in Taiwan actually: https://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/covid-lab-leak-in-taiwan/
I mirror your notion about deserving to survive. The universe we see is so enormously rich and vast. Just one star is worth so much for so long. Our whole civilization relies upon a sliver of 0.000000045% of the Sun's power that reaches us, which goes through all kinds of circuitous routes in plankton, fish, agriculture and coal before it gets to us. If it gets to us at all. Our Sun is peanuts compared to the O-type giants, nothing compared to the black hole at the centre of the galaxy or whatever comprises 'dark' matter. There's nigh-endless energy and resources available to us. If only we showed a little seriousness about capturing them, if only we considered things more carefully, if we organized ourselves more efficiently... I read Bostrom's Astronomical Waste and it's enormously moving. The stakes are so enormous and our effort to survive and prosper is so pathetic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link