domain:alexepstein.substack.com
faceh
8m ago
It would be a bit funny if they design a machine that is provably a 1:1 simulation of a human brain, switch it on, and get an error message to the effect of "Cannot Execute Commands: This unit is not ensouled."
sun_the_second
13m ago
Yes, the law against suicide is a violation of self-ownership as well. We just let it slide because killing yourself makes even less sense to most in the first place than killing your unborn child, so few are threatened by the law. Also obligatory "what are they gonna do, arrest my corpse?".
Drugs we ban because no one wants to become a degenerated drug addict, yet people do, so we infer that people need help staying away from drugs. Also, the problem of violent junkies.
But at the end of the day it is only a lizardman's constant who is pro-life on basis of "saving human lives" (and can be argued with about what a human life is and how far should we go saving them). The rest, I assume, are using abortion bans as a tool to enforce their preferred monogamy-for-life-for-the-purposes-of-procreation social model. I see no point arguing. I wish women were as gung-ho as right-wing men about buying guns and chanting "no step on snake".
stuckinbathroom
21m ago
Christians are essentially slightly misguided Muslims who Allah will save anyway
I’m intrigued; is this claim endorsed by any prominent mainstream Islamic theologians?
AFAIK, the sole requirement for conversion to Islam is sincerely believing in the Shahada, viz. that there is only one God and Muhammad is his messenger. Do Christians get partial credit for believing the first half? If so, what about Jews?
sciuru
29m ago
What else could be useable?
Somewhat speculative, but non-invasive recording of brain activity seems like a promising underutilized modality. When sufficiently discreet devices reach the market -- say, for controlling your phone -- they would be worn anyway, continuously throughout the day, so just add a few more lines about personal data collection in a license agreement. To get labeled data, make an app which prompts humans with various signals and records their reaction. Gamify, pay if needed, etc. Seems scalable.
promotor
30m ago
The result was a gender battle, but it was childless cat ladies ("gen Z boss and a mini") and blue-haired institutionalists (e.g. librarians and teachers) versus, well, everyone else. It wasn't necessarily that Americans wanted Trump to win, they wanted that coalition to lose.
I've watched this PSA from 1946 annually since 2014. I think it provides a pretty good rubric for what happened. Americans repudiated the increasingly slippery slope towards despotism.
Bleep
31m ago
so an agent of the federal government dropped him an envelope in the park which said "go after women with this joke"?
no, that's not what happens; what happens is Fuentes flies his derp flag and collects people and then he gives the contact information to the feds of all the suckers which are attracted to the flag
it's why this accusation of "controlled opposition" is such a goofy claim and little more than attack right gatekeeping because the speaker thinks Fuentes&Co. is counterproductive to some of their shared causes
the 'potential patterns in the world' are all reducible to data in one way or another
I mean is it? Quantitative Realism doesn't exactly seem self evident.
I've consistently pointed AI hype believers to their own metaphysical assumptions and this is the crux of it.
Are we just pattern matching engines or does agency have another source and is that in anyway connected to our experience of consciousness?
I think when people believed that larger gizmoes we don't fully understand would give us the answer to this question, they were deluding themselves, and I'm somewhat dissapointed that I was right since we are still without answers. But at least the possibility that we have a soul, ghost or another manner of special thing that automata don't is still secure.
Now the real test will be this: if Musk can convince enough people to use Neuralink and get their brain patterns recorded 24/7, and if someone trains transformers on that, what will be the outcome? Can we Chinese room our way to general intelligence?
I don't know, but it seems like the most logical way forward, since access to immense unpolluted datasets is no longer a possibility.
Bleep
36m ago
the state isn't claiming ownership of the unborn when they say you can't kill them anymore than they claim ownership of any random adult when they say other adults can't murder them
and the state already claims ownership of your own body even if there is no two body problem, from laws against suicide to laws against consumption of drugs, etc.
it is only this issue where we carve out the exception; seriously, the privacy right concoction used in Roe v. Wade is unhelpful to individuals in any other context
Bleep
44m ago
No they won't. There is a sizeable grifting industry which are jilted because Trump shut off a big spigot which they had been worthlessly living off of for decades. They have been attempting to mobilize others to also feel like they were "jilted" by Trump giving them their biggest win ever, but it has so far failed spectacularly.
This "large part" of the base can't stop modest abortion protections from being added to state constitutions in deep red states, so claiming after they were handed the biggest win they've ever had they're suddenly owed something like a nationwide abortion ban even if it cost Trump his entire mandate is pretty incredible to be honest.
The pro-lifers should be upset they got nothing after giving hundreds of millions to the useless GOP and a pro-life grifter class for decades. Focusing their ire on Trump after he got Roe v. Wade overturned is misplaced.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
48m ago
Just a note, the reason that age range is specified is very significant. (1) The topic was, “why so many dead children below 13”. That’s what the NYT article is about. (2) A replier got an award for saying, “this article is bad because it doesn’t write anything about Hamas’ history of child soldiers, like 10yo lobbing grenades.” (3) The only way to read (2) as relevant — and certainly the intended meaning of the reply — is that Hamas continues to employ these child soldiers, or did recently. Otherwise, there is no reason for the criticism, because it doesn’t allow us to make sense of why there’s so many children dead below 13. (4) There is no evidence for this implied assertion. (5) He refused to provide evidence when asked. (6) When I looked, I could find no instance in the past two decades, neither any statement by international bodies indicating that Hamas employs child soldiers below 13.
If the replier simply wanted the NYT to mention Hamas’ very rare use of <13 kids more than twenty years ago, that’s fine, but it has zero relevance at all to either the story or the topic. So it isn’t even coherent to argue that the news reporting is flawed because it doesn’t mention something irrelevant. This is normally fine, but this sentence was highlighted in the award, so I said I found that surprising. Incoherent arguments are fine, but it’s silly to award them.
If his argument is that, “even though literally no one says Hamas employs <13 soldiers, we should believe they are because they very rarely did it 20 years ago, so NYT must write about it”, that’s an argument that would need to be explicitly made. And it would be a terrible argument, because there are a number of international organizations whose express purpose is to document cases of child soldiers, not to mention the large amount of videographic footage that Israel has in the war. Or maybe his argument is that, even though the topic is about the health of kids in Gaza, they should always note the Hamas did bad things twenty years ago to their own children. That’s more coherent, but it’s also just whataboutism.
Better land (and climate) per farmer. Land farmed in the old world was either owned by aristocracy or very marginal.
Going to the new world was like being handed the best farmland the richest nobles had, literally for free. Of course the farms were productive.
Imagine everyone in Italy died from the black death and you could set up shop in the Po delta for free, would you be more productive than in some cold German marsh, the Scottish highlands or the Scandinavian inland?
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
The alternative would be to not hold funds hostage. You want bike lanes, pass a law making bike lanes and fund them. As a completely separate thing. What happens often is that the money for I.e highways is contingent on X miles of bike lanes. Or school funding rests on the enactment of policies like trans rights and trans students in women’s restrooms.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
1hr ago
Not a problem! I’m happy to continue the conversation at any time if you ever want to.
EdenicFaithful
Dark Wizard of Ravenclaw
1hr ago
So, what are you reading?
Still on Future Shock, Galactic Patrol and Crystallizing Public Opinion. Taking another stab at Freinacht’s 12 Commandments.
LiberalRetvrn
1hr ago
Lately I've noticed a Muslim talking point that Islam appreciates Jesus more than any other religion, and that Christians are essentially slightly misguided Muslims who Allah will save anyway. I get the impression that for a lot of these gen Z trad groypers, it's the anti-degeneracy part of religion that they care about, not the specifics of the theology. Hating on Muslims also seems to have become a little uncool in the alt-right, since it would put them on the same side as Israel.
Tinted
1hr ago
If you chase off everyone who's emotionally vulnerable enough to be hurt, and also everyone who worried about hurting you to start with, you're left with the people who aren't either of those things.
Asymmetry isn't surprising under those circumstances. (And won't last if the same is also happening in the opposite direction. A much more complex question...)
NewCharlesInCharge
1hr ago
I suppose it comes down to whether or not there is a ghost in the machine.
If human intelligence is all neurons that can be modeled as a graph with weighted edges then we should be able to simulate it.
Maybe we do that and still can’t get human intelligence to pop out of the simulated brain and find that something is missing.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
AIUI American homesteads starting in the late 19th century were the most prosperous example of subsistence farmer ever in the history of the world, and the gap in per farmer productivity vs the old country opened up very early.
Was this an artifact of social equality? Of more land per farmer? Of better access to markets due to settlement patterns?
it_is_so_weird_to_be
1hr ago
Anecdotally, getting a water flosser device has greatly improved how my mouth and gums feel. I’ve never been a big flosser, have never had a cavity either. But that water pick thing is really nice.
TequilaMockingbird
1hr ago
Me from a couple months ago...
Speaking from inside the industry OpenAI hasn't been pushing the bar forward so much as they have been expanding access. To be fair this can be a lucrative buisiness model, Apple became the powerhouse that it is today by making "tech" accessible to non-techies. But Apple was also pretty open about this being thier model. Nobody expected thier Mac to represent the bleeding edge of computing, they expected it to "just work". Contrast this with openAI where they and thier boosters are promising
the moonimminent fully agentic super-intelligence but when you start peeling back the skin you find that the whole thing is a kludgy mess of nested regression engines with serious structural limitations.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
"The optimal number of in society is not 0" is about tradeoffs; it's not supposed to indicate you make no attempt to reduce X even when there's no cost to doing so.
The "all of them" response is not saying there's a tradeoff, it's not saying the optimal number of dead kids is non-zero; it's rejecting the tradeoff entirely, saying that no number of dead children is worth any gun control. Or would, if you took it literally. What it's actually saying is more like "we reject your framing, and fuck you". Which is much the same as what Fuentes is saying, except that women as a class are more sympathetic than gun grabbers.
twodigits
1hr ago
I've been missing sleep and household responsibilities since this was posted trying to find the right words to respond to it, but I think it's time to cut my losses. I appreciate your following up and clarifying your position in the face of the downvotes and dogpiling.
jkf
1hr ago
That's not what I'm talking about -- his inputs to the model are an aggregation of polls; he shows you them (for swing states) on the "Silver Bulletin Election Forecast" page.
Since each these is an aggregation of 5-6 polls with a sampling error in the area of +/-3%, the statistical error on Silver's aggregation should be well less than +/- 1% -- the fact that they all ended up more like +3D means that these polls are bad, and if he can't make the correction (due to lack of information, or lack of willingness to call out political bias) he shouldn't be using them.
He even had a framework for this! There was a whole post where he identified the worst herders -- removing these ones from his model would have been trivial, but he didn't do it. Leading to model inputs that were biased ~+3D -- which is the strongest argument that his 'coin flip' EC forecast was in fact a bad prediction -- how could it be a good prediction with such inaccurate input data?
most will just divert the conversation ("that never happens!") instead of biting the bullet
Or in other words, it's just the distaff/Blue counterpart to this.
The optimal number of murdered children in any society is still not 0 (and literally everyone accepts this- abortion is just more direct about it than others); what you're fighting over if you don't accept the argument works the exact same way from "the other" side is merely a question of how high that balance is, which causes are allowed to spend that balance, and for what reason. The pro-gun side's argument is that "complete disarmament would, counterintuitively, lead to more murder"; the pro-abortion side's argument is similarly utilitarian, so is the pro-trans one.
It's funny because the day after the election I was overhearing my colleagues talking, and somehow, the impression they had was that Trump winning is the proof that rich people can just buy elections in the US. I don't expect that canadians would know much about american campaign finances, but still.
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