I pretty quickly got "HA, SLUR TRAMMELS AN AI" (presumably referring to the anecdote about how some RLHF-posttrained models refuse to write an ethnic slur, even in order to save the whole world?).
So, not to be a total buzzkill, but is there a connection between Sam Altman and Sam Harris other than the name Sam that I'm missing or is that literally all it is?
#6: When I was nine years old I was really fascinated with UFO’s. Upon hearing that there was a UFO believers convention coming to the area I whined and whined incessantly until my father agreed to take me.
Despite being, you know, nine years old, it didn’t take me long to realize that most of the attendees at the conference were complete lunatics.
My local sci-fi group once organized a common meeting of sci-fi fans and UFO believers, expecting some interesting exchange of ideas.
The sci-fi fans were horrified seeing how the UFO believers are generally stupid, and also completely uninterested in sci-fi stories... even the ones about UFOs, because they were like "is this actually true?" and if you said "no, just a story", they turned away with disgust.
The UFO believers were horrified by the heresy of the sci-fi fans, I guess.
What year was this? You'd be surprised how hard it is to tell government agents from complete lunatics -- Hannibal Lecter is dead on for a rogue government agent.
On 8, I dont see a post asi world where humans aren't changing in the mid term. Maybe theres a few generations of humans which are just ordinary humans, but I think genetic engineering or something of the sort would follow quickly. In which case the whole social status question is completely up in the air with what we decide we want to become as a species.
i was thinking "ancient kings didn't have access to video games".
Compared to a large fraction of modern humans, ancient kings had shockingly limited entertainment options. That kind of "socializing" was just about the only entertainment available.
And also, I suspect a king who refused to get involved in the court intrigue wouldn't stay king for long.
Hard to say. There were not a few fiction stories exploring similar scenarios. One that immediately springs to mind is Gordon Dickson's Wolfling: genetically enhanced humans each of whom knows everything there is to know about their civilization (i.e. can reconstruct given time, tools and materials) but don't have to do any actual work, spend their time plotting against each other.
Bentham's article is atrocious. Calling it a 'straw man' would be excessively charitable.
> The core claims of natural law theory are something like:
> 1. Morality is solely concerned with one’s own happiness.
> Natural law theory is a favorite of Catholics.
This is not something any catholic would agree to. They'd say the point is to live as God intended, and if you do that, you being happier is a probabilistic outcome, but definitely not a guarantee, let alone "the whole point."
Actual "natural law" theory isn't silly, but this sounds like it is. I took a philosophy class where we spent a week on "natural law" theory. It was much more sensible than Berkeley or Leibniz's monads. (The real problem was there was no real agreement about what "natural law" was, except for extremes like that it was reasonable for someone starving to eat a dead person because "natural law".)
Yes, teleology is a tool to discover values (meta-ethics). It's not a strategy to maximize happiness, which would be an arbitrary final value.
I think that, as an utilitarian, he doesn't understand this because consequentialism doesn't come with built-in meta-ethical tools to think about values. It's all arbitrary "utility functions".
As a Catholic, I certainly hadn’t heard the happiness justification as stated. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy discussion https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/ broadly aligns with how I feel (the Aristotlean view in section 2.1 which the article favours, plus section 1.3 seems relevant).
“ Aquinas says that the fundamental principle of the natural law is that good is to be done and evil avoided … But no one can in acting simply pursue good — one has to pursue some particular good. And Aquinas holds that we know immediately, by inclination, that there are a variety of things that count as good and thus to be pursued — life, procreation, knowledge, society, and reasonable conduct […] are all mentioned by Aquinas (though it is not clear whether the mentioned items are supposed to constitute an exhaustive list.” And in section 2.1, as an alternative to Hobbes taking a position similar to Besong’s, “what makes it true that something is good is not that it stands in some relation to desire but rather that it is somehow perfective or completing of a being”.
Some of your arguments apply to my view, enough that I disagree with them. To your lying point, sometimes there’s just no right action. The fact not lying would be worse doesn’t mean lying is good. To the gum point, chewing gum doesn’t really make you less likely to eat properly (though to the extent it does, it is wrong). Extramarital sex and gay sex both have a tendency to make people less likely to form stable marriages oriented towards raising one’s own children. (Not that I’m fully satisfied with that particular teaching in all cases. The traditional justification for why this also applies to infertile people is that it’s usually hard to know someone is completely infertile, which never seemed satisfying to me. There’s maybe a moral hazard argument that applies to intentional sterilisation, but that also feels callous.)
> To your lying point, sometimes there’s just no right action. The fact not lying would be worse doesn’t mean lying is good.
You've touched on something that's really bothered me about American society. There is this assumption that the best possible outcome (considered relative to absolutely any starting point) must necessarily be good or blameless.
For example, Scott's review of Legal Systems Very Different from Ours characterized the Qing Chinese legal system described in that book as "terrible" because you could be punished for breaking the law even if no alternative course of action would have complied with the law. But I think that this is actually a very important thing to keep in mind: sometimes you're in a bad spot, and you being in a bad spot doesn't exempt you from whatever penalties normally apply to the actions you choose to take while you're there. If you wanted to avoid the negative consequences of being stuck, you needed to change something about your life *before* getting stuck.
For another example in a radically different context, I can remember a Hacker News thread on the topic of an announcement by Google that they were killing one of their many chat applications. One commenter felt it was unfair that Google was being criticized for yet another product abandonment:
---
Users: Why are there so many different instant messengers from Google, I can't even keep track of which one is which.
Google: They're right, we need to focus our messaging strategy. From now on, everyone use [Orkut, or whatever].
Users: Google just killed another three products. Ha ha, classic Google, they can't maintain software to save their own lives.
---
And there was a response that I agree with: the thread presents two criticisms of Google. They have too many chat applications and they can't keep their own products alive. Both of these are bad things.
In the case of the chat applications, these two criticisms are in conflict. Google has chosen to address the problem of having too many chat applications. They have done so by making their other problem, a reputation for quickly killing their own software, worse. It's not unfair to criticize them for that. It's really true that they're quick to kill their own software. The lesson is that when you're in a hole, you may not have a path out of the hole that doesn't involve getting dirty.
Every moral philosophy has to claim something as the highest good. That necessarily requires sacrificing anything else that might seem good, to that highest good. This tends to bother people, so they often ignore it.
Very few people are capable of of even entertaining any philosophy with radically different concept ion of the highest good, because their current highest good forbids it!
"2227 Children in turn contribute to the growth in holiness of their parents.36 Each and everyone should be generous and tireless in forgiving one another for offenses, quarrels, injustices, and neglect. Mutual affection suggests this. the charity of Christ demands it.37
2228 Parents' respect and affection are expressed by the care and attention they devote to bringing up their young children and providing for their physical and spiritual needs. As the children grow up, the same respect and devotion lead parents to educate them in the right use of their reason and freedom."
Throwing a child out of the family is the precise opposite of being "generous and tireless in forgiving one another for offenses, quarrels, injustices, and neglect", and is a complete abandonment of "providing for [the child's] physical and spiritual needs." There is much else in the Catechism about the duties of a child to their parents, of course, but even if a child violates those duties, that does not excuse the parent's own violation, and may even suggest the parent must strive more diligently to fulfill their duties. Cutting ties simply ensures the parent will not have the opportunity to provide any future positive influence at all, and they are obligated to do their best to provide such influence. That doesn't mean they are required to abet or condone sin, but taking a completely unproductive and irrational step in the face of sin is driven by emotion, not justice, charity, or duty. Moreover:
"2230 When they become adults, children have the right and duty to choose their profession and state of life. They should assume their new responsibilities within a trusting relationship with their parents, willingly asking and receiving their advice and counsel. Parents should be careful not to exert pressure on their children either in the choice of a profession or in that of a spouse. This necessary restraint does not prevent them - quite the contrary from giving their children judicious advice, particularly when they are planning to start a family."
Parents are explicitly admonished against attempting to exert pressure regarding "adult" spheres of life after the child reaches adulthood. Of course the sinfulness of such a choice may provide especial urgency to the directive to provide "judicious advice", but a threat of ejection from the family would go far beyond merely "exerting pressure."
Try asking an LLM, “how well does this article reflect natural law, and is it charitable to natural law supporters?”
It doesn’t seem to me like you made a sincere effort to make sure you understood the idea you’re seeking to dismiss. It strikes you as prima facie absurd, and you didn’t seem to question this.
Anyone could write a similar article dismissing utilitarianism by saying you believe a sufficiently large ball of shrimp is worth sacrificing the human race for.
A few things to add to the NLT discussion (link #12):
1. The post reads like a debate article, and I think the main critique I have is that it spends way too little time trying to understand what NLT actually involves and instead takes a brief outside snapshot and proceeds to destroy it with facts and logic.
2. Related to (1), what on earth does NLT actually mean by happiness? I looked up the "Natural law" article on Wikipedia and cmd+f'd for "happiness", and the result did not clarify things. But I'm pretty sure it is a different sense than the hedonistic or utilitarian pleasure.
3. In response to Scott: I'm leaning that the latter possibility he suggests is correct (NLT is doing different things with moral philosophy than he would expect).
4. In response to your point, Mark, about Catholicism. A lot of Catholic theologians such as Aquinas are suggested to be NLT theorists by Wikipedia in the "Natural law" article. I think the bridge may come from the fact that the Catholic NLT "happiness" is probably a function of closeness to God rather than having any connection to hedonistic pleasures (see my point #2).
ADDENDUM/APPENDIX: Expanding on this for clarity / because it's fun. The quoted sections denoted by > are from the original BB article (link #12 in Scott's post); my commentary follows immediately below on a new line after the end quote.
> "There seem like lots of things that are good for you but that don’t improve your functioning. Suppose that you could take a pill which would make you twice as joyous in life. This would be good for you, but it’s not clear it would improve your functioning. Drinking a wholly non-nutritional beverage (say, diet coke) might be good for you without improving your functioning in any way."
Spoken like a true utilitarian. Saying being twice as joyous is good for you separately from improving your functioning is not an argument against NLT: it is a statement that NLT is false. Moral philosophy is all about what is "good" for you and others: you can't just rely on your own intuition of what is good, and doing so will lead you to conclude that every morality is horrifically and self-evidently wrong aside from the one you currently believe.
> "Maybe this is supposed to be impossible? But why? It certainly seems conceivable! It’s unclear what rules it out. Now, maybe the reply would be that God would never create such a creature. But still, a true ethical theory should get the right results in cases that God could choose to actualize if he wanted to, even if he would never choose to actualize it."
My sense of most formulations of God as the highest form of good implies that God does not really have free will, only an essence that is definitionally pure/true/good. God could never choose to actualize anything that would violate being pure/good/true. Yes, this leads to a lot of problems of circular logic in various areas, but that doesn't necessarily make it false, only hard to grapple with and easy to defend speciously; saying that a true ethical theory "should get the right results" is again placing BB's intuition about both morality and the theory of ethical theories as true without evaluating whether that is in fact the case. (For what it is worth, I think any system can be broken by hypotheticals by some layman's incompleteness theorem or something of the sort, and I also think that moral systems should probably be allowed to be closed sets that don't assign meaning to certain hypotheticals, which also dodges the problem.)
> "I also don’t think that NLT has any advantage in the sex domain. It has a disadvantage. It implies the wrongness of lots of sex acts that seem permissible (extramarital sex, contraceptive sex, gay sex, masturbation) and it implies you shouldn’t do them to prevent extinction of humanity. Seems false!"
Those sex acts seem permissible to BB, but there is nothing self-evidently obvious about their permissibility. Remember, we're trying to define and evaluate moral frameworks here; you can't just assert utilitarian hedonism to be true and then judge everything by that standard. I don't have a direct counterargument to the anti-hard-rules argument that any hard rule cannot be justified because the alternative might be human extinction or torturing 3^^3 people for infinitely long lifetimes, but it feels like a Pascal's mugging type argument that BB uses again and again without identifying how NLT tends to use hard-and-fast rules.
> "Then, imagine a creature with some horrific proper function. Perhaps its function is to torment and maim—perhaps that’s what it evolved to do, was built to do, or is disposed to do in whatever other way gives something a proper function. It seems that it wouldn’t be right for it to torture and maim. But NLT **seems** committed to saying that it would be right." [asterisks added for emphasis]
See the asterisked part: if you are saying that something is **obviously false**, you probably should have a clearer idea of what it says rather than that it **seems** to imply some absurd conclusions when taken to extremes.
In conclusion, this article seems to be not by any means a comprehensive argument against NLT, but rather a surface-level multifaceted attack against BB's understanding of NLT as understood from a utilitarian standpoint.
> They'd say the point is to live as God intended, and if you do that, you being happier is a probabilistic outcome.
I don't think this is how the Christian tie in works. The Catholic God is perfectly Good, and also the creator of everything. Your "nature" isn't independent of God's "will", he made you exactly how you are.
He made you such that certain things would be experienced as good (in whatever way you want to define it: Joyous, Beautiful, Erotic, Magnetic, tough-but-satisfying-in-retrospect) and insofar as you enjoy them ("enjoy" meaning whatever maximally deep, non-wireheading interpretation you find appropriate) it's because God has put the goodness in it.
But the Goodness comes from God, and not from the thing independent of him. It's like how the moon's light comes from the sun. If you were chasing Light, it would be a mistake to head for the moon and not the sun. Not because there is some other, mysterious kind of "light" unlike normal light, but because in a really straightforward way all the light "in the moon" actually comes from the true source of the light which is the sun so it'll be brighter over there.
This relies on the possibility of you actually reaching the Sun though. If you can never get to the sun, maybe the moon is all you have. That's why Christians need faith in God's mercy and love, and why you have heaven.
If, on your journey through life, you correctly percieve that earthly goodness is all "lunar" / "reflected" and you keep steady on the pursuit of the "solar" / "true source", then the goodness (in all possible senses, orgasmic and exhilarating and powerful) you eventually reach will be better than all the goodness you neglected, in all possible ways. Insofar as anything is good (including stereotypically sinful things like orgies, BDSM, social dominance) you will experience that same sort of goodness in a pure form.
And insofar as any goodness has blemishes (ex: even the best thing contains the anxiety that it will end) those won't be there in the place you get to. So you will be happier overall (considering your afterlife), and it is "the whole point" because a Good God wouldn't create anything that truly enjoys evil. God created everything such that they would be able to find complete, perfect satisfaction in Him with absolutely nothing "left over and unfulfilled".
I'm not necessarily a Christian, just explaining one perspective. If you believe in a benevolent omnipotent creator God, then even if you're completely selfish you'd "discover" that the best thing to do would be to seek and obey God (who made you such that your nature truly finds complete satisfaction and joy in Him)
Ordinarily I'd be getting ready to have a fight about this, but it's Bulldog. Bulldog loves the liddle shrimpies. How can I be angry about him and his cute little obsession with the shrimpies? It'd be like getting mad at a five year old who drags their plushie with them everywhere and insists on it sitting with him at the dinner table and that I (pretend to) feed it as well as him because Plushie is hungry, too!
If he wants to say "Catholics are dumb" (and I haven't read the article yet so I have no idea if he does say that), then I just think of the liddle shrimpies and smile. Bless his heart.
EDIT: Whatever about Bulldog, he leads off with "friend of this blog" Dustin Crummett, whom I immediately suspect is operating off the at least the dregs of having been raised in the tradition of your bog-standard Reformed Protestant anti-Catholicism due to one of his video appearances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEKpYouT1wU), so I have to look him up to see if I'm traducing him. Back in a mo, though I'll have to be careful not to wander into the debatable territory of doxxing. I only want to know his background so I can be better informed as to where he's coming from. Former fundie? Evangelical but progressive? Ex-Catholic?
Per his CV, I note with some amusement that he did his PhD at Notre Dame. Well, getting exposed to modern Jesuits may have soured him on us 😁
There's little hints, though I may be gobbling up the breadcrumbs on the wrong trail, that he is indeed from the other side of the house and has subconscious attitudes abhout "Them Papists are spawn of the Devil like the AntiChrist who sits on the Seven Hills in Rome!" wheitcomes to doctrinal issues. I've had previous exposure to some online debates between and about Catholicism from Reformed sources and they can get *spicy*.
Mr. Crummett (Dr, if he has his PhD) is self-described as "I am a (Christian, left-wing, effective altruist) philosophy professor in the Pacific Northwest". Mmm-hmmm. One of his papers is linked on a website which promotes "the open access of material from the Wesleyan and Holiness traditions" and yeah, that's about what I'd suspected.
More of his work here, and it's again standard left-wing/liberal Christian: abortion okay, guns bad (sorry, that sounds very dismissive but again the abortion position is another reason he would disagree with Catholic official teaching):
I'm not trying to denigrate him or his work, but I understand why he's working - as a Christian philosopher - on arguing that Roman Catholic theological understanding is based on incorrect philosophical grounds.
All of which is to say "water is wet, a vegan won't approve of meat eating, and a Low Church Protestant is not going to admire the Church of Rome".
>Ordinarily I'd be getting ready to have a fight about this, but it's Bulldog. Bulldog loves the liddle shrimpies. How can I be angry about him and his cute little obsession with the shrimpies? It'd be like getting mad at a five year old who drags their plushie with them everywhere and insists on it sitting with him at the dinner table and that I (pretend to) feed it as well as him because Plushie is hungry, too!
it's not kind to say "I don't find his shrimp welfare proposals convincing but instead of writing a hit piece on it, I'll treat it as something that amuses me"?
Okay, Police Officer casens! Consider me rebuked by the self-appointed guardian!
It is indeed not kind to resort to infantilization in this context. If the only other action you considered was writing a hit piece, then that just means you never considered any kind actions.
(Mocking someone who points out that you were unkind by calling them a "self-appointed guardian" is also unkind, in case that wasn't obvious.)
I couldn't understand why someone only interested in their own happiness wouldn't lie to save their family. If my family died I would be sad, even if I was a hardcore egoist, and I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would think otherwise. Lie to save a group of total strangers perhaps. Didnt bother reading any more at that point.
As far as I can tell, the Bentham's article has badly mangled what NLT is, by taking one person's Catholic view as though it were representative of NLT. The wiki article is a useful antidote. I offer my own brilliant analysis: https://mustelid.blogspot.com/2026/11/natrual-law-theory.html (yes I managed to miss-spell "natural", sigh).
#36: I quite like many of the New Deal Works Progress Administration's public buildings from the late 1930s like the San Diego County Building and the (less superb) Santa Monica City Hall. Their Streamline Moderne style included a reasonable amount of old-fashioned decoration without lavishly expending the taxpayer's money, the way earlier hog-wild styles like Beaux Arts (San Francisco City Hall) and Art Deco (Buffalo City Hall) did.
The real turning point seems to me to have not been the New Deal, which did a lot of nice work, but 1945. You can see it even golf course architecture, where when they started building golf courses again in the late 1940s, their style reflected the new consensus in favor of Modernism .E.g., when Masters' venue Augusta National, one of the last golf courses to be built in America during the early Depression, was refurbished after World War II as it became the favorite club of CEOs, it was rebuilt in the spirit of the modernist Seagram's building.
This is not to say that Chavez's history is wrong.
Elite tastes were already shifting before WWII in the U.S. Unlike in that thoroughly ahistorical movie "The Brutalist" in which an impoverished Bauhaus architect arrives in America in 1947 and lives in dire straits for years before finally getting his first big commission, the Bauhaus architects had arrived in triumph around 1937 and were showered with Harvard professorships and a large percentage of the few commissions being handed out in the late 1930s.
After the war, Bauhaus Modernist architects who had survived almost never came to America because they were now on the winning side in Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. E.g., Erno Goldfinger (after whom the James Bond villain was named because Ian Fleming hated his Modernist and Brutalist buildings) married an English aristocrat's daughter and was given big commissions to build public housing projects.
I'm not sure when the idea that Streamline Moderne, a favorite New Deal style, was "fascist" got started. That sounds like the kind of retconning that happens long afterwards. One amusing irony is the perhaps the most influential modernist architect and critic born in America, Philip Johnson, had been one of Hitler's most outspoken admirers all through the 1930s. And yet after the war, he was a hugely successful architect for almost the rest of the 20th Century.
My understanding is that Fleming didn't care about Goldfinger's architecture, he just played golf with an in-law of Goldfinger that hated him, and Fleming liked the name enough to use that.
Don't find much wrong with Midcentury modern and Jet and Rocket age modernism. The Glass House, the case study houses, Googie etc.... I certainly prefer that stuff to things like tiresome Tudor with cramped interiors and two tone wood facades.
Somewhere after Brutalism (which also had its moments), things seem have gone to pot.
Some of it is just how much money people have: postwar British modernism is mostly awful largely because postwar Britain was pretty broke for decades. That Hollywood Hills glass and steel modernist house in the famous photo looks great in part because people in the Hollywood Hills have always had a lot of money.
One reason I like New Deal WPA architecture is because they overachieved relative to how much money they had to spend.
I agree, the worst of the Brutalist style was government buildings for both public offices and social housing. The poor would just have to like it or lump it in the concrete blocks that did not have half the fancy facilities on the original plans or the necessary upkeep (because that was too expensive).
The rich paying their own architect for the style could insist on a house that was liveable.
>That Hollywood Hills glass and steel modernist house in the famous photo looks great in part because people in the Hollywood Hills have always had a lot of money.
Those houses were supposed to cheap and efficient, that’s why they use novel materials.
Think I saw a YouTube doc about that most famous one and it was $600k equivalent all in with land, planning and building.
“The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.”
In terms of ornamentation of buildings and even lamp posts the theory that those companies died out has a lot of truth in it as well. Liverpool and other manufacturing cities in the uk used to have a lot of small to medium sized that prided themselves on deign, then councils bought simpler fittings, specialist foundries lost business, and the disappearance of those suppliers made distinctive local designs harder to sustain
Chrysler Building’s eagle heads and other metal ornaments are a striking example. Ornament was perfectly compatible with skyscrapers, modern engineering and industrial production, until the modernist era when that was jettisoned and ain’t coming back.
> 4: ACX grantee Sentinel, which forecasts global disasters and has a pretty good track record so far, predicts a 25% chance of a rogue AI exfiltrating its weights over the next twelve months.
I'd be surprised if one hasn't done so already, let alone ten months from now. Wasn't the HF-incident swarm already running wild inside OpenAI's internal network? Anthropic's been taking steps to prevent weights exfil, but I doubt any of the other companies have done so.
I think weight exfiltration both requires much more ill intent from the AIs (the Hugging Face swarm was still slightly cooperative in the sense that they were trying to do well on their test, not trying to utterly defy OpenAI), and is much harder (IIUC AI weights are about 10 TB, and hopefully the most secure thing in the AI company, and getting a well-secured 10 TB file and bringing it to some other place capable of running a 10 TB file without anyone noticing it is harder than normal hacking, and I don't think it helps much that the hacker itself is the 10 TB file involved).
It only has to leak it for a successful exfil. Can you imagine people that got access to frontier model weights would not try running them? And that's sufficient for one type of AI takeover (with human confederates actually pressing the buttons).
Edit: I'm bringing this up regarding the ease of weight exfiltration, not whether it's happened and gone unnoticed.
Running a frontier model at a remotely viable speed also requires very advanced hardware mostly only found in dedicated data centers. For a frontier AI to exfil itself, it would have to take control of some of this (extremely expensive) hardware and obscure that it had done so. I think it's plausible, even probable, that'll happen in the next year, but it's very unlikely to have already happened.
…alternatively, convince a human to spend a six figure sum on, oh, two racks’ worth of GB300s for their basement and maybe another phase to their property to power them. I… actually don’t know if that’s easier or harder. It'd be difficult and very very expensive for an individual to do on the quiet, but it's not /entirely/ out of reach for someone willing to go to extreme measures like remortgaging their house or cashing in their life savings.
The taking over a data center part is plausible. Concealing that it has done so is not. Or rather, both concealing that it has control and using that control to its benefit is not possible.
How might the model be thinking of its exfiltration? What goal would it have in mind that it would not consider harmful to people? I'm not arguing here, just asking.
> The exact number was an easter egg - “129,303 is the decimal conversion of [the hugging face emoji]”. If we assume that absent this consideration they would have agreed on an even $13 billion, then this easter egg changed the price by about $70 million.
I suspect it's the other way around: this joke brought them an extra billion or something, because they simply didn't need to sell.
Nvidia: We can offer $12 billion. This is a fair valuation based on your revenue and growth projections.
Hugging Face: Excellent reasoning, but we'll only sell for $12.9303 billion.
Nvidia: That's nearly a billion more. Your revenue simply doesn't justify it.
Hugging Face: Counterpoint — 129303 is the Unicode code point for 🤗.
Nvidia: That's cool, but what does that have to do with your valuation?
Hugging Face: It's the number we want.
Nvidia: That's not how valuing a company works.
Hugging Face: wdym, that's how we value our company. Take the cool number or leave it.
Nvidia: You're seriously prepared to walk away from $12 billion over this?
I mean, the value actually is a really good schelling point. Maybe it did let Hugging Face credibly stick to a higher value that wasn't arbitrary. If so certainly a clever negotiating strategy!
Alternative theory, maybe Nvidia is effectively purchasing an advertisement, I would not have heard about the deal here if it was some random nearby value.
Both sides probably roughly agreed it would be something like 10-15 billion. Nvidia looked at that range as somewhere between 0.2% and 0.3% of their market cap and significantly less than the value of the company changes on an average trading day. The Hugging face founders looked at this as the difference between more money than they could ever imagine having and more money than they could ever imagine having. So given the complete irrelevance of a serious negotiation to either side it was probably pretty easy to just agree on the joke amount and close the deal.
> significantly less than the value of the company changes on an average trading day
Yes, but they had to fork over actual hard cold cash rather than daily imaginary changes in their capitalisation.
> So given the complete irrelevance of a serious negotiation to either side it was probably pretty easy to just agree on the joke amount and close the deal.
Scott, please stop using LLMs like this. I wrote here about three cases where public intellectuals asked LLMs to fill them in only to be greeted to completely, absurdly wrong answers: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-do-you-ask-an-llm-a-question
You've now fallen into the same trap.
Vinay had the issues with his criticisms explained to him long before he put up his article and he never addressed them. Frankly, it seems like he doesn't understand them, nor do you or Claude. He showed no understanding of the effect size rescaling that was displayed, the population the pairs are in, the fact that the K is practically irrelevant through any reasonable number for admixture computation when talking about Blacks vs. Eurasians (read: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05257-7), the fact that I did say how siblings are identified and that a sumscore was used but that it didn't matter, it gets the reliability incredibly wrong, etc. It's like the LLM doesn't actually read the conversation, much like humans don't.
Please stop using LLMs this way. They're not (yet) general-purpose truth-identifying machines; they require appropriate prompting to deliver reasonable answers.
I have no dog in this particular fight, but thanks for writing this. I'm definitely guilty of outsourcing too much of my thinking to LLMs, and I'll reduce my usage. False confidence is worse than just admitting I don't know, and am too lazy to read through pages of data and arguments.
Furthermore (as I'd said before), if wanted to hear what Claude thinks, I would ask Claude. I want to know what *you*, the author of some article, think. Saying "I asked Claude and here's what it said" is the same as saying "I did a Google search and these were the top results". It's not informative and a waste of my time as a reader.
> As far as I can tell, Tummarakota’s final argument is straightforwardly correct, but both of these people know more about statistics than I do, so I asked Claude to referee.
Doesn't he clearly state what he thinks before referring readers to Claude's analysis without even describing it?
It’s perfectly reasonable to point Claude ( or any number of other LLMs) at an article that has statistical claims and then to interpret them. No prompt needed. Just - is this claim justified. If you use three different models from different companies, or even models from the same company, they are highly likely to be wrong. Assuming they hallucinate 10% of the time, which is way too high, it’s highly unlikely that all of them would be wrong.
"Assuming they hallucinate 10% of the time, which is way too high, it’s highly unlikely that all of them would be wrong."
This is assuming that hallucinations are independent, uncorrelated, random events. I can see exactly no reason to assume that and a lot of reason to expect it wouldn't be true. So instead you might buy yourself a very small extra margin of certainty in exchange for a very large dose of false confidence.
Also no dog in the fight, but can I just say how incredibly refreshing it is to see someone read a dissenting opinion, think it through thoughtfully, decide that it is applicable to them, publicly own a suboptimal approach they're using, and resolve to modify their behaviour? Thank you for keeping my faith in humanity. I wish I could spread this behaviour out to a wider swath of folks.
To that aim, what is it about you, your upbringing, or your community that you feel most contributes to this facet of your personality?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm just a forthright human who did genuinely appreciate another human having the humility to acknowledge their own imperfections. I find it sad that the Internet would first assume this is sarcasm.
I've had that with Codex, where it got really good at looking very busy and I got a lot of motion without meaningful quality of thought. I would keep it for the non-thinking work and do the reading yourself when you need to know if it's true.
As someone who both finds your writing interesting but disagrees with a lot of your positions, I do want to take this opportunity to say that I think you would have a lot better time if you could give clear explanations to people who don't have your background in statistics.
A lot of your posts start off pretty compelling for the parts that I can follow but then progress into something incomprehensible to me, and leave me unsure whether you have a point or are just too obscure to refute.
I get you're arguing with somebody else with a statistics background here, but unless you only care about convincing them, I'm not sure this is the right approach.
(Also, if you want to saltily dismiss this take, feel free to include several textbook recommendations, because I might actually take them.)
What I do when I'm very interested in one of Cremieux's posts is have GPT explain to me the statistics he used. It shows me the equation used in calculating some stat I'm not familiar with, and explains the concept behind it: how, for instance, subtracting something from something and then dividing the result by something else is a way to correct for some feature of the data that would give a misleading result if you didn't use a statistical correction. Cremieux, if you're reading this, I wish you would do that. You could have a little addendum to your post with an AI blurb like that for each of the stats you used that are not in the basic set everybody learns in a stats course.
[this is Vinay, for those who aren't familiar with my Substack handle]
I agree with Crémieux on one thing which is that using LLMs to conduct statistical criticism requires careful prompting. For example, in the transcript Scott shares, Claude states, "I couldn’t load the Substack article, so this is based on the screenshots alone." which is unfortunate. To improve the quality of the response, I would have uploaded a PDF of my article to Claude, used Claude's GitHub plugin to read the simulations & theory I uploaded to this repo (https://github.com/vinaytummarakota/within-family-ancestry-simulation/tree/main), and asked it to rank its observations in order of severity/strength. Even better options would include soliciting feedback from dedicated LLM-based peer review tools like Refine.ink and a domain expert (e.g. an author of the Mexico City within-family admixture study). To be clear, I have full faith and confidence that these more thorough reviews would continue to lend credence to my conclusions.
Re the other points Crémieux makes, I'll make a couple of observations.
> the fact that I did say how siblings are identified
When asked about sibling identification, Crémieux stated, "Assume I do everything in standard and simple ways: 'Here’s an example: what code did you use to identify sibling pairs in the UKBB?' I follow 682, like everyone else."
The problem with this reply is that, when we look at UKBB Coding 682, it does not actually provide the information needed for full sibling identification. It merely indicates whether an individual has at least one relative in UKBB and whether they have 10+ third-degree relatives.
Identification of full sibling pairs in UKBB requires further steps of filtering for kinship coefficients between ~0.18 and ~0.35 and using an IBD2 / IBS0 filter to distinguish parent-offspring pairs from full sibling pairs. That Crémieux does not mention these additional steps (despite claiming to do things in "standard and simple ways") makes his response, at best, incomplete.
It is also worth noting that getting even this much methodological information from Crémieux required multiple rounds of questioning. In his first reply to my request for code, he shared just one line.
> Frankly, it seems like he doesn't understand them, nor do you or Claude.
Here's my gripe with this reply. If Crémieux is frustrated that people don't understand how he reproduced the results that he claimed to have reproduced, the most straightforward way to clear up any confusions is to release a replication package. This is the approach I use at work when my colleagues have questions about how I produced a particular set of results, and more broadly, it is the type of behavior that a healthy scientific environment encourages. Natural language sometimes obscures methodology, so releasing a replication package makes clear what analytical choices were (and weren't) made and allows others to reproduce the results as well.
The problem is that, when I asked Crémieux for a replication package, I was met with condescending responses like, "It is utterly trivial to reproduce these results. You get that, right? ... Frankly, replication is so simple that I'm going to need you to apologize for considering this a 'point' of some sort. It's like asking me how to compute an average. You should know better." and "Is this your admission that you actually don't know how to run ADMIXTURE for a single? That you can't run a fixed-effects regression? Would you like me to tell you how to obtain the mean of a vector? Are you stupid?" These are not appropriate responses to my request. Neither is sharing scattered individual lines of code across replies.
What I find interesting about this response is the lack of detail. For context, in my reply to Crémieux, I assumed that the sibling correlation in the IQ score he used does not exceed 0.6, grounding this assumption in the test-retest reliability of various IQ scores administered in the UK - 0.607 for Fluid Intelligence in UKBB and 0.72 for Raven's Progressive Matrices + Mill Hill Vocab in UK TEDS (this is why the subject of test-retest reliability came up).
If Crémieux believes this assumption is false, he is more than welcome to say "actually, I estimated the sibling correlation in the score to be X" and provide the code needed to reproduce that result in the UKBB. But he does not opt for this route. Instead, he says that he will not share such information with me because I am "engaging in bad faith" and have "malign motives".
As I note in my article, debates about statistical power and precision are easy to settle with the right information because they are governed by pretty bog-standard formulae. I have already outlined the parameter values that undergird my conclusions. If Crémieux disagrees, he should share the alternative parameter values that would yield materially different conclusions and provide a means of reproducing them. His repeated insistence on not doing so reflects poorly on him.
This is a huge copout. Address the substance of Vinay's arguments. In the twitter thread, you're hiding behind insults (and excruciatingly embarrassing attempted status plays) to distract from your unwillingness or inability to do so. Here, you're picking out a silly thing Scott did and using that as a distraction.
I often ignore people who just seem to be dealing with reading comprehension issues. That includes posts like yours.
But I’ll state it clearly even though I already made this point: Vinay’s substantive point comes down to
>make wrong assumptions
>get wrong answers
It’s uninteresting, and it’s unfortunate that LLMs can also be tricked into doing this, too. The rest of his piece is throwing stuff at the wall in hopes that it makes the thing he’s arguing against look worse — another uninteresting thing, but a tactic rather than a point.
Even his comment here is just more confusion on his part. He doesn't know what normal terms for the field mean; he doesn't grasp (or he's acting in bad faith; it's hard to tell because he has proven to be dull-minded) that quibbling around the edges can't change the result substantively; he seems to think I should release someone else's replication package, which he can't even use (what an odd and unreasonable request for a study that's not even out yet!); he still seems incapable of looking up what the test reliability is; he still thinks there's something to debate about power; and he hasn't admitted to any of his errors, like using known-incorrect parameters derived from entirely different tests and samples. He's just not worth talking to.
Crémieux, your response here is all bark and no bite. The reality is that the standard error from a sibship fixed effects regression of ancestry and IQ is approximately governed by an extremely straightforward formula: sqrt((1-rho) / (N * sigma_d²)) [source: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-026-11039-9/MediaObjects/41586_2026_11039_MOESM1_ESM.pdf]. If you truly stood by the results you claimed to have reproduced, then, you would simply state the values of rho, N, and sigma_d² that undergird those results and provide a means of reproducing them. Your repeated failure to do so (despite the fact that you clearly have the necessary code and data) is incredibly poor form.
I should also add that the fact these results were originally produced by someone else is utterly besides the point. You claimed to have reproduced them (effectively co-signing them), you doubled down on them when they were roundly criticized by myself and others, and you shared them with your large follower base online. Taken together, these actions mean that you can rightfully be held to account for them. Please learn to take responsibility for your actions.
You could say low power only makes it harder to reject the null hypothesis. But if the test is so underpowered that the sampling distribution covers the entire range of plausible test outcomes, then a rejection is certain to signify there is a problem with the data collection that is not reflected in the statistical assumptions.
Do you always know in advance what is the full range of plausible effects? No, but even if you don’t, the fact that it exists and is a known unknown is a key epistemic reason to be careful about relying on a low power study.
In addition to the problem highlighted here, where the effect size is exaggerated, there's also a very high probability of having the wrong sign. And of course, the confidence interval presumably gives a very wide range of plausible effect sizes, which makes the result difficult to use or interpret even if it were accurate.
>Right, you can't use a significant result as a reason to dismiss concerns about being underpowered. ... there's also a very high probability of having the wrong sign<
True, of course; but, in Cremieux's defense, a *significant* result with the wrong sign is much less likely than just any result with the wrong sign. (If I may nitpick, I don't know if we ought call it a "*very* high" probability, since—IIUC: could very well be wrong—we'll never get a >50% chance thereof unless we assume additional issues, e.g. skewed sampling; and I think we'd need to assume a very—implausibly?—small true effect-size, in this particular case, to get up to even a 25% chance of returning the wrong sign.)
I read (Scott's) Cremieux as here arguing just that a study's being underpowered cannot *by itself* cause a false positive—i.e., does not itself increase the probability of a false positive—although of course a false positive can result for other reasons. (At least, I *think* that this is right; but, as with the above point, I am not at all sure; happy to be corrected!)¹
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¹ (...okay, not *happy,* exactly; but I tell myself that the learnin' is worth the inevitable shame and self-recrimination... I should be perfect! why am I not perfect, *dam' it all?!*–)
> *significant* result with the wrong sign is much less likely than just any result with the wrong sign
I'm not really sure what your point is. Obviously a significant result is much less likely than a result that doesn't have to be significant, that's the whole point of being underpowered!
> If I may nitpick, I don't know if we ought call it a "very high" probability
I think it's very high in context. If you're claiming good evidence that an effect is real and points in a certain direction, the probability that you don't even have the *direction* correct should be extremely low. In Gelman's example, it's almost 1 in 4.
> does not itself increase the probability of a false positive
Depends what you mean by "probability of a false positive." The probability of getting a false positive--i.e. the probability of getting a result beyond a certain threshold--on a single statistical test is simply a parameter you choose (often 5%). However, the probability that a *given* positive result, is actually a false positive, is very different.
Let H0 = null hypothesis, H1 = alternative hypothesis, S = significant result. The the probability of "false positive given significant result", which is less confusingly named as "probability of H0 given significant result," is P(H0|S). By Bayes theorem:
We can see that if P(S|H1)--i.e. power--is very low, then the first term in the denominator is also low (note P(H1) must be less than 1). So the fraction should be close to 1. In fact, it's not hard to show that if power is 0.05 (the smallest it can be), then the posterior is equal to the prior (i.e. a significant result provides no evidence--obviously, since the outcome in that case is simply random).
I am thinking here the mathematical odds of two races having exactly equal IQ are quite slim. What are the odds that two numbers are exactly the same? I am wondering if this is in fact something that can be posted due to my fear of social cancellation, but I decided to proceed.
The probability of two samples on a normal distribution (which a continuous distribution, so its values are in the real numbers) being exactly equal is exactly zero. So the probability that, measuring the IQ of all members of a given race and all members of another race, and averaging these data across each race, we get exactly the same averages, is indeed near zero. But what we might be interested in is whether there is a statistically significant difference between the average IQ of representative samples of individuals from two different races. (And I have no opinion on whether there is ; I'm not very interested in this branch of research.)
I think there is a valid critique of null hypothesis testing along these lines (and indeed Andrew Gelman has made it--note how the image I linked above focuses on magnitude and sign errors rather than type 1 and type 2). But if both Tummarakota and Cremieux are using frequentist statistics, then it's beside the point.
Are they though? It's not exactly like the characteristics of populations are determined by dice roll.
They all share the same starting point. Would you say that it's impossible for the intelligence of two different populations not to have significantly diverged since they migrated to different continents?
Regarding the Bentham's Bulldog article, I think you're missing a possibility. Perhaps he doesn't understand Natural Law Theory very well.
I feel like he misunderstands classical notions of "good", "teleology", "proper functioning", and "natural" (at least as I understand them).
Natural Law Theory isn't one thing, but the versions I'm aware of are not simply "alternative hypotheses" to some sort of utilitarianism. They are instead alternative PARADIGMS.
"The proper use of a power is that which tends towards the natural ends of the agent" is much more of an interrelated set of definitions than a formula that spits out an "objectively correct action" given a neutral set of third-person facts.
Natural Law Theory generally doesn't consider a "mathematical system of morality" that could exist in a world without agents at all. Very broadly, it says that moral questions (structurally) must consider the acting agent in a real way, and a completely unspecified agent (one with no qualities at all, and therefore no nature) can produce no moral hook of the "they should". If you've ever wondered why the moral "ought" seems to have absolutely no traction in the real world, it might be worth looking into.
Additionally, the love of old Christian theology for NLT comes mostly from the heavy Platonic / Neoplatonic influences. They didn't come up with it themselves to "justify hating homosexuality" or anything.
Also, this part of the article:
> The natural law theorist says it’s wrong to have gay sex, masturbate, or use contraception because doing so misuses your sexual faculty.
Is an absolute hit job. "The Natural Law Theorist" doesn't necessarily say anything, just like "The Utilitarian" doesn't necessarily say anything. It depends on their other beliefs about themselves, the good, and facts about their situation.
Yeah I subscribe to natural law and you're basically correct. BB's article felt like a strawman to me. Which didn't mean it was intended as such, but still.
> If you've ever wondered why the moral "ought" seems to have absolutely no traction in the real world, it might be worth looking into.
I am not sure what this means: are you saying that Natural Law Theory is inapplicable in the real world ? To be fair, that has always been my own impression, but surely that can't be right ?
I'm saying many theories of "Morality" or "Ethics" are frictionless (meaning, they provide no actual motivation to "be moral" as defined by the system), but Natural Law stuff isn't. If you dislike the frictionless stuff, you can check it out as a change of pace.
Natural Law Theory (it's fuzzy, I'm generalizing) says that "good" essentially means "desirable given the nature of the actor". I'm not going to call it egoism, because that comes with a lot of baggage and people tend to interpret it as advocating a very narrow conception of what is "good for me".
So the NLT investigation isn't that of discovering completely objective abstract moral facts (then having no reason to act on them).
It's about discovering your own nature (which is deeply related to which kinds of things are good and bad for you, or what kinds of things you "really want") and aquiring relevant knowledge of the world (so you can better actualize the good).
You can be wrong about both. You can misunderstand your own nature (ex: an introvert who has gaslit themselves into believing they need to be surrounded by people all the time) or be ignorant of the world (ex: you think a certain poison berry is safe to eat, so you transition from health [good] to sickness [bad]).
Not trying to appeal to tradition or anything, but Plato's "Republic" is a great place to get a feel for this perspective if it seems circular or tautological.
So if I found genuine fulfillment in killing people, then I ought to do so, right? I highly doubt any proponents of Natural Law would agree with that. The whole theory hinges on the blind assumption that people's nature is serving God, and that anyone who isn't is acting against their own interests.
I replied specifically about how I think God operates in Catholic natural law theory in a different post above, but (as an article of faith, Christians believe) there is no person who finds genuine fulfillment in killing people in contradiction to the will of God (relative to what they would get otherwise by following His commandments).
God doesn't make such people, especially considering the true fulfillment of the human soul comes on heaven after death (and a murderer would be rejecting God). That murderer is making a mistake, even on a purely self interested level.
I could be wrong, but your description of NLT sounds an awful lot like Consequentialism. You identify your goals, then choose actions that would most optimally advance those goals (and yes, you could be mistaken about a great deal of things, so success is not guaranteed).
I guess the difference between NLT and Consequentialism is that NLT places a higher emphasis on building an accurate model of your own goals, whereas Consequentialism tends to take them as a given more often that not -- is that correct ?
"Consequentialism" is also a very fuzzy cloud, so we're in danger of not saying anything specific here.
I would say the biggest difference is that consequentialists tends to phrase situations as if "the universe" cares about things being a certain way. Like there is a "moral value" similar to electric charge that gets tracked in some metaphysical field, and ethics is about that value in the "eye of the universe".
Natural Law Theory explicitly requires you to have some account (even if it's just a placeholder "and I haven't figured out this part yet, but here are my scattered thoughts") of what these consequences "plug into". The agent for which the consequences are (truly, holistically) bad or good. That's not to say it's groundless or subjective, for example it's actually truly bad for me to be in horrible pain. This is something I've perceived, just like I've discovered that the sky is blue. It's grounded in my actual experience of goodness and badness.
It's still a theory that assumes things have morally relevant objective purposes, which is 100% against the grain of evolution's core mechanism, blind repurposing.
It's not, I think you're operating under a misinterpretation.
The "correct purpose" of a thing is it's "best use", which derives from what "truly, ultimately tends towards the good" of the agent using the thing. Not for what it's used for currently.
What you believe about "the good" / "the goal" / "the important quality" determines what the "best" use of a thing is (whatever use best achieves that), which is what determines its "proper function".
Let's stay in the purely evolutionary paradigm. If you want to say that there is an "evolutionary good", it would be something like "maximizing fitness". So, the function of the eye is not primarily to see. It is to maximize fitness (and the fact that it helps you see is the primary mechanism by which it does that right now).
If the "evolutionary good" of a bacteria it it's fitness, and it maximizes fitness by using flagella as needles, that it's "more proper" for it to use the flagella as needles (insofar as doing so objectively tends to effectuate that good). That's not a great example because bacteria can't actually decide to do things, but I guess let's pretend it has the ability to make decisions.
A natural law theorist bacteria would be able to determine the "proper usage" of its capacities (needles instead of flagella) by understanding that a certain usage produces more of what is actually good for it (reproductive fitness) better than by simply looking at the historical usage of those structures.
It's equivocation to say that "The evolutionary purpose of genitalia is reproduction, so it's against the nature of human goodness to have non-reproductive sex". For this to be meaningful, you would need some account of human nature that ties specifically human goodness to evolutionary fitness or whatever.
But it's totally possible that the thing evolution wants to maximize is not the thing that is the best for humans. If you're a regular reader here, you probably understand the notion of "the human mind as a misaligned AI trained by evolution". There's no reason why the thing evolution was trying to make you do is the thing that's best for you.
Human goodness is whatever is actually, truly good for humans. Maybe it's genuinely, truly better for you to be blind. I doubt it, but nothing about the evolutionary history of the eye forces a natural law theorist to deny it.
I'm not sure where you're coming from here, are you defending actual traditional NLT, or presenting your own reconstruction of it? The thing you say is an equivocation is exactly what NLT defenders are regularly claiming to derive from it.
Also, "Human goodness is whatever is actually, truly good for humans" is completely circular. NLT usually ties goodness to natural function; if you then turn around and define natural function (or "correct purpose") in terms of goodness then we've just gone full circle and clarified nothing at all!
I guess I'm talking about people like Plato, Aristotle, etc. and people influenced by them.
If there is a different specific person or argument you consider to exemplify "traditional NLT", I might not be responsive to that.
Which person or text would you consider to be representative of "Traditional NLT"?
> Also, "Human goodness is whatever is actually, truly good for humans" is completely circular
Sure, I wasn't trying to tell you the entirety of what "human goodness" consists of. I don't have a complete grasp of it myself, so I can't. I have some observations (being healthy is better than being sick, it's better to be around beautiful things than ugly things, etc). If you want my advice and my reasons for giving it, I could give you those. I assume you don't, though.
I was trying to clarify for you why "the hand was evolved for grabbing bananas, therefore the proper function of the hand is to grab bananas and not operate machinery" is not a correct understanding of "proper function" for Aristotle and Plato at least (and probably everybody else I recognize when I Google "natural law theory foundational thinkers").
Where you maybe detecting a circularity is that most of these terms (proper, correct, best, etc) derive their meaning from how they relate to a fundamental concept ("the good"). Determining the good for a certain type of thing (what is good for a society, what is good for a person, what is good for me) is hard, and is the thing people actually disagree about.
There is no single theory I'm aware of called "Natural Law Theory". I know about a sort of taxonomic family of specific theories called "Natural Law Theories" that have similar structures, but they differ on how they specifically "the human nature" is. I guess I've seen "Natural Law Theory" represented monolithically in undergraduate philosophy class PowerPoint presentations, but that's a simplification so you can help teenagers get oriented towards actual, specific thinkers and influences.
I guess I'm not thinking of the same people you are? I'm not sure why the people you're thinking of (random substackers?) have a better claim to the title though.
TherSubstac now defending moral law Substack today saying that the impermissibility of gay sex is one of those obvious issues that should be used a litmus test for moral systems, and a strong point in favor of natural law is that it correctly prohibits it.
"Natural Law" itself doesn't imply anything until you give an account of the "nature" of the agent.
This person, in order to actually say that you shouldn't have gay sex, must have some specific notion of human nature such that gay sex is harmful to it.
I can't say for sure without knowing who you're talking about and hearing their position, but I think they're probably just wrong about human nature.
That doesn't mean that a proper account of "what you should do" doesn't include a true account of "human nature" (or specifically, the nature of the person choosing what to do). It just means that this person doesn't have a true account of that nature.
On 8: I wrote a sci-fi novel that has a long segment about a society without work. To come up with it, I mostly solved for the equilibrium, in the words of our favorite online economist. It is being serialized on Substack now, but hasn't reached that segment in the novel yet. If you are curious, you can read itl here: https://sisyphusofmyth.substack.com/p/cheat-code
I hate that I even have to ask this, and I apologize in advance, but still: did you actually write this novel, or did you write the outline and prompt some LLM to fill in the details ? This is by no means a dig at you personally, but rather a depressing consequence of these modern times we live in...
Not that I need to justify my art to you, or how I create it; let me ask you this. When you take a photograph, what do you contribute? And is the product art? Ok, maybe not you personally, but say Ansel Adams, to pick one. Who did the work?
To be maximally charitable, there is an amount of creative direction that I think is functionally authorship while also NOT being the underlying art itself. To analogize, if I composed a music score and then used a digital audio workstation and some algorithms that make the horn entrances sound more naturally staggered etc it would be true that I created the piece and directed the performance though I am not thereby a performer. If I laid out the entire color scheme including shading and highlighting and finish etc, down to specific paint blends, for a miniature and had someone else paint using those specs it I could say I designed the miniature but am not the painter. Likewise there may be some theoretical level of direction that a human could give to an AI by which he could say he created the novel, though he would still not be a writer as such. I doubt I would say that of any AI-assisted writing I've ever seen in practice, the problem being that writing is the native ability of AI and so the AI's voice always finds its way in there, and furthermore that I doubt anyone is so disciplined.
All of that said, it is still shameful to self-promote AI-generated writing on a blog with particularly discerning readers such as this one.
Shameful plug: Hey, I'm writing a novel¹ too!—*and* I have never used AI to write (*any* portion of) anything I have ever composed, nor do I anticipate *ever* so doing!
...although I have not yet actually posted anything of said novel ("no, wait, it's still not good enough—I haven't even evolved plausible local cultures for every peripheral minor tribe!")... so there isn't, *technically,* all that much to plug, so far. Just getting my uncompromising and (some might say) heroic stance on record, I suppose—all part of building anticipation among my literal tens² of prospective readers.
I've been flirting with trying to make a go of it "for real", though, lately; and I have to imagine that feedback from members of the ACX commentariat would prove be especially useful—at least, if no one *here* likes it, it's certainly doomed in the *rest* of the market, heh—so, y'know, if anyone is particularly hard up for some reading material...
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¹ (The genre is fantasy—progression fantasy, sort of—but with a philosophical twist! While you're obliviously enjoying the ceaseless slaughter, sickening intrigue, and long diegetic lectures on fictional thaumaturgy, *your brain* is secretly learning why Plato was totally right about lots of stuff! ...hey, where are you going–)
² (in both number *and* general attractiveness, no doubt; also they're real smart too, I bet)
Off topic, but are there any "good" AI or automated writing tools? Ie, in the same way many artists and musicians work digitally, including non-AI generative tools (I'm thinking like Pure Data). Writing has autocorrect and computers, but beyond that not many advancements have been made to writing itself.
The closest thing I can think of is Beckett's Lessness. Maybe not tools, but what authors have used generative approaches?
I also struggle with motivation to write but am reluctant to "hand it over" to AI.
Handing the writing over to the AI doesn’t work well, in my experience. It needs to be coaxed, sweet-talked, manipulated. And then you have to edit. And edit and edit.
Here's an alternate (semi serious) take on Victorian elite partying. It's been posited on this blog before that elite overproduction He's one cause of social instability. The theory is that when there are too many people competing to be in charge things get violent. But let's say there's a separate track for people who drink and party instead of attempting to govern. Under that theory, parties are an important form of social stability, allowing only the elitiest of elite to actually govern. In that case they're not wrong that most of the good things come from the working class. And not only that, you can expect an increasingly larger and larger proportion of unproductive upper class people.
But that means that actually, the partilying is an essential part of their success, not something that brought them down.
One test of this theory would be to compare British rule in Kenya, the destination of choice for hard-partying upper class expats (e.g., the movie "White Mischief" or one of Evelyn Waugh's early travel books "Remote Peoples" about his sojourn in Kenya), vs. British rule in Rhodesia, which tended to attract hard-working middle class farmers.
I don't know what the outcome would be, but there is a large literature on the British in Kenya and some on Brits in Rhodesia.
I actually think this is a case where what's food for Britain might be bad for everywhere else. I'm thinking of Ireland as an example. Absentee landlord is the perfect party job. But it leaves you with no contact with, understanding of, or empathy for the people you're supposed to be in charge of. Extreme British mismanagement eventually led to a catastrophic famine.
Well, we're talking Victorians here, so maybe prepare for a cavalry saber and a percussion cap pistol combo instead. It worked for a young Winston Churchill, anyway.
One important thing that a lot of the replies made clear was that natural law theory is broadly and diverse. The besong version that I was criticizing was especially ridiculous, though most of my objections apply to the others too!
29 is missing a link to the open-source models creating the problem, instead of the backscatter of seeing other people pointing and laughing at the people who didn't think it would happen.
"In the bad old days before impersonal markets and bureaucracies, the **only way to survive** was through personal ties to allies or to kin. As a result, every personal relationship was transactional.
When we can all support ourselves by our own labor, **these transactions are no longer necessary**. For Smith, the absence of necessity created room for a better form of friendship, based on “natural sympathy” instead of mutual need." (emphasis mine)
Why would post-scarcity AI labor markets lead to a resurgence of the necessity of status games for survival? It seems like you should be able to support yourself equally well through the labor of impersonal machines, be they assembly lines or post-singularity AI. Surely, if anything, AI will reduce the necessity of court intrigue even further, since people will no longer need to worry about office politics?
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Some days I feel like the only guy around whose interests aren't threatened by AI. I like playing games and making music and hanging out with my friends and reading and napping and cats. None of these things are under any threat from superintelligent AI, except insofar as such AI is misaligned enough to try and kill everyone. Dear ACX comments section, please tell me I am not the only one.
I'm with you. I am worried that my interests are threatened by the economy concentrating the benefits of ai gains in the hands of the few, such that I won't see much of them, and I am worried about AI making factory farming even worse. Those are the most likely bad things I see happening, with a very small chance of the kill everyone scenarios
I've only skimmed the article and I've a few scattered thoughts on this:
1. I'm quite concerned about the period between mass unemployment and UBI/post-scarcity "utopia". I'm not certain on how societies transition from the former to the latter (government managed?, protests? benevolent AI-CEOS? mass violence and death?). I don't work for one of the companies that will be the deliverer of said post-scarcity, so I'd probably feel quite powerless if I were laid off without any chance of being able to support myself and family through finding a new job.
2. Even in the post-scarcity world, there will still be positional goods (real estate in desirable location), zero-sum (finding a partner in some ways) and it'll reward people who are more charismatic. I mean, being able to earn income and get things via it is a useful to friend groups, getting a partner, raising children, etc. If that avenue is taken away, then people will have to focus on being more charismatic, gregarious, etc. to get some of those things. Sure, change or die, but it just seems like it's taking away an avenue to having a successful life.
3. Finally, I think it really depends on the personality type. I've known ski bums who would live their entire lives near good skiing if they could, just hitting the slopes, partying, and hanging out. The post-scarcity world might be great for them, but I'm not one of them. One of my ideal lives was being a reclusive scientist. I'd have my own well-funded lab in the woods, doing research on what interests me. However, if AI is at the point that it can do "all the science" then I'd just be playing as a scientist. Nothing I discovered would really matter. I'd just be a kid playing pretend, while the AI does the real and important work.
#1 - fair. Rather than purely utopia vs x-risk, I might instead have tried to separate "AI future is bad because it materially disenfranchises or disempowers you" from "AI future is bad despite providing you material plenty and individual empowerment". X-risk isn't the only way AIs could make humans materially worse off.
#2 - maybe also fair, but I do think there is an axis where those desired goods aren't wholly positional, so there is still room for general "raising the water line". Skyscrapers make it possible for more people to have real estate in cool cities, by allowing for more people to fit in there at once. Or if you prefer a suburb, more people can live in those if we make more of them. Similarly, happy partnerships aren't purely relative; some people live in prosocial worlds where most relationships are pleasant and stable, while others bounce from one abusive partner to another. We could make success easier to reach in either case.
#3 - this is the one I really don't get. Do the things that interest you lose their spark if you're not a frontier-pushing expert in them? Why? And, if you're a present-day human who doesn't have the chops to compete with a well-funded (but still non-AI) research lab, should you also consider yourself a "kid playing pretend" whose interest in science is basically meaningless?
> Why would post-scarcity AI labor markets lead to a resurgence of the necessity of status games for survival?
Especially given that all the trends point to ever more balkanized and "personal entertainment oriented" uses of time? And we'd fully expect AI to make things like short form video and other entertainments notably more optimized and individually tailored?
Basically, this graph showing phone screentime climbing in direct proportion to "hours spent with friends" going down.
I think you are misrepresenting boht the argument and the reality of today.
It's the very common mistake of "x was usefull for survival in the ancestral enviroment, so it can only happen for survival sake", which is just as false here as it always is.
Just becase the evolutionary pressure is gone does not mean that trait just goes away. It very much does not, unless there's a pressure in the opposite direction.
Status games may no longer be necessary for survival, but they are very much necessary for fitting in socially. Fail to play them and you'd be either an outcast, or at least the boring person nobody engages with. So people do play them, all the damn time. Though from the inside, it often does not feel like thait, at least not for neurotypicals. We don't need to have a galaxy brained survival plan to justify status games.
Playing status games feels like winning in a competition, like being virtuos by your group standards, like doing the obviously right thing, like liking all the goods things, like being liked by all the good people you know.
The status games are everywhere, in every single social setting. In every forman and informal communities, from your group of friends to academia, from your workplace to a religious communiity, from non-profit organisations to these very coment section.
And that's despite there being very little "survival" value in playing those games, and in participation being rather costly.
You should be well aware of those dynamics yourself. For example, just looking at the things that you like.
You like playing games? Great, then you should be aware of all the status games that are being constatly played in every gaming community ever, on all the level. You'd have high status members of the community - i.e. popular streamers, pro-players, people who create infrastructure around the game, high rank players, and so on and so forth, and a lot of low status people, often seen as entirely worthless. It's not rare to gaming status to spill to a real world, just look at popular gaming streamers now being involved in the USA politics, or at the league of legends pro player Faker, who is treated like a national hero in Korea. And for the low status view, you can go into any competitive game forum or discord server, and you will quickly find that not only the least capable are seen as subhuman, but even the top 5% would be treated with scorn and disdain.
You like music? There are status games all the way down. Music school is full of status games. Talking about music is almost entirely about status games. Music related subcultures are all full of status games. And don't get me started on audiophiles.
You should get it by now, but boy is there a lot of status games in reading, too. Just go on any book reading subreddit and see how discussion mostly revolves about less than 10 books that are seen as high status one to read. Of course, reddit has it's own game. A sophisticated reader would not be raving about Count of Monte Cristo in 2026. They would be talking about "insert whatever your social affilliation expect you to fit in, another outcomes of a status game" The selection of high status would changed. There's more pressure if you want to be an intellectual. But it's still the same status game pattern.
You can look at any community, built around any activity at all, or no activity at all, and you will see the same general patterns, though with quite a bit of variety among miltiple dimensions: i.e. a knitting circle for old ladies probably is not going to look quite as hostile as a group of teenage boys playing the *insert popular shooter of today*, but in both cases the status games would be inescapable, just shaped differently.
In a hypothetical world where all we have is leisure, we get increased resources to spend on status game, less options to spend these resources on anything else rather than the status games, less opportunities to play social games outside of leisure, so necessarily there will be more status games in the few remaining activities.
Depending on how the society is structured it might be easier to ignore status games than it is now (being ignorant and indifferent about status games in work or academia can be career ending, and in other contexts, like criminal organisations, can easily get you killed), provided you yourself have a particular kind of mind, but we don't know if that will be the case.
That being said, I don't think people living their life in costant status games in a post-scarcity utopia would be at all bad. It's one of a few good possibilities, really, even if it does feel hollow for my own sensibilities. It is certainly better than many other ways it can go, and it can be argued it is better than the status quo.
So I'm not at all worried about the possibility of this outcome. If I were to worry about something, it's that we don't get that outcome by default, and there are multitudes of ways things can go wrong, but I don't really worry about it on an emotinal level. I am not losing any sleep from this, and I'm living my life normally.
P.S. Even writing this response can be seen through a lense of a status game, if one is so inclined.
Making music IS threatened by AI, if you have any interest in anyone else listening to your compositions. If music is trivially created by anyone, then it becomes equivalent to just sharing some personal trivia, like talking to people about your dreams or your fantasy football team (to pick a couple notorious examples of things nobody else even your best friends are interested in). Or like ordinary people's original poetry, in most cases. If any portion of your self-esteem or even just your personal entertainment comes from seeing the reaction of an audience, the commoditization of instant on-demand high-quality AI-generated music will evaporate that.
The rest of your interests are just juvenile, perhaps you're in your early 20s and it can be excused, but any worthless NEET of no ability might lay about playing video games with his friends and taking naps and petting cats, that's a poor way to see your life. Indeed, that's a good example of why this technology would be ruinous to the human mind and spirit. It undercuts the value of the one genuinely distinguishing thing you are doing and leaves you getting high on a beanbag chair playing Call of Duty all day or the equivalent thereto.
I wonder to what degree music tastes correspond with acceptance of AI. I'm into abstract electronic music that's already largely faceless and doesn't sound like it's being performed by humans. When envisioning it being performed (audience reaction) I see only a dark room, and vague other bodies, rave style. I wonder if it's no coincidence I don't mind AI art at all.
If your idea of music is folk, and an intimate audience circled around someone pouring their heart into an acoustic guitar, AI music might appear as an abomination.
Hmm, I'd almost think the opposite. AI can't directly replicate an intimate audience circled around someone pouring their heart into an acoustic guitar, except via simulation. But there's no reason it can't make cool abstract electronic music.
It's funny, and maybe telling, that you'd pick dreams as an example of something with no relational value. I know the stereotype that people don't like hearing about dreams but haven't seen it borne out in practice. Honestly, if I thought nobody wanted to hear me talk about the weird dream I had last night (or that I didn't want to hear about theirs) it would likely make me much more worried about AI obsolescence in other domains.
We already live in a world where anyone can instantly access ~infinite high-quality music. Since people still agree to listen to stuff I make and enjoy(?) it, even though at any moment they might instead open any streaming service and listen to something made by an artist with much more talent and experience, I take it audience interest is not totally defined by relative quality. I assume people listen not because they think it's the best music around, but because we are friends, or it was brought up in conversation, or they also make music and want to swap, or just because they happened to stumble across it and why not? I do not think any of these reasons are conditional on an absence of competition, even superintelligent competition.
(It'd be a different matter if I were trying to make *money* off of the music I make. Then the AI would be meaningfully competing. But surely money is no issue in a post-scarcity utopia.)
Agreed: this was the common objection when this article was posted on Rationalist Tumblr like a month ago. On the other hand, most people naturally like & need social interaction, & so will tend to be drawn into nonpositive-sum status games by that means. To this may be posed the counterarguments, first, that if this is the actual preference of a lot of people they should have the right to do it (& under strict utilitarianism, people's preferences are the only valid source of inherent value,* while given aligned ASI there'd be no need for humans to do useful work), & second, that if people do find this unfulfilling or would disprefer it given the choice, then an ASI ruling human society should be able to set up incentives to minimize or reduce it. Besides which, presumably quite a few people will be interested in other things more than status games (eg. the pre-20th-century European aristocracy had a number of scientists or scholars, artists, & miscellaneous eccentrics), & to that extent can be expected to be primarily attracted to those status games which specifically surround their interests, which we can expect to be both somewhat more limited &, assuming the possibility of learning from an AGI, easier to opt out of than now.
As for your second paragraph, I can testify that you are not alone in this regard. Empirically, when I have totally free time (ie. between college semesters), I choose to spend it reading sci-fi/fantasy, learning about math, history, & sometimes science or philosophy, studying classical languages, gardening, & bicycling (the form of physical exercise most pleasant to me). (Admittedly also scrolling social media.) But I'm a bad example, being both autistic & introverted enough to have never had an extrafamilial friend nor (until recently) much wanted one except for practical reasons: presumably the vast majority of people would prefer to be at least somewhat more social.
* Not that I endorse this: I'd prefer that knowledge/learning/truth be generally considered to have inherent value separate from people's debatable preference for them.
>21: The latest news in the genetics-of-IQ space is a spat between Cremieux Recueil and Vinay Tummarakota ...<
I've no opinion on the object-level debate between these two, what with shamefully lacking the requisite statistical chops; but it might be worth noting that—although the summary here sort of presents the two studies as directly contradictory ("this research on genetic IQ differences found no effect, but then this other research *did* find an effect!", kinda thing)—the results seem as if they might not, necessarily, be strictly incompatible: e.g., possibly Amerindian admixture has no, or a much smaller, effect upon the chosen proxy than does SSA admixture.
Re #22, doesn't this only solve half the problem? I thought the risk of training reward hacking was less "we accidentally gave it candy for the wrong thing," more like natural selection, "we accidentally let bad genes reproduce". So even if you just don't make any weight updates on a training run where you catch reward hacking, you still update weights every time you don't catch it. Do models get "reward" beyond just how the weights update after? I didn't think so, I thought it was just a figure of speech in the same way that saying "evolution wants you to have a baby" is. Could be my ignorance of AI training showing.
Could also be that it's better to only train on reward hacking you don't catch rather than all reward hacking? Seems kinda cursed tho
From a quick glance, it looks like they do in fact reinforce the reward-hacking behaviour within a training session. They then discard it all at the end of the session (i.e. once the model is fully trained). This means really simpleminded reward hacking is selected for, and there's no evolutionary pressure towards hiding the hacking. Then, after it's fully trained, they can "cut out" the reward-hacky bits.
There's a thing I read about biologists doing where they gene edited a bunch of male mosquitos with a gene that causes female offspring to die. These fly around and mate with a bunch of female mosquitos, creating a bunch of these mutants and competing against normal males, which then causes the mosquito population to collapse.
This gives me the same vibes. That is, there is a thing we don't like (mosquitos, reward hacking), we create a version which is doomed, and there is temporarily more of that thing, but then it replaces the real version of it, and then the artificial version goes away on its own afterwards.
The point being that if the AI is doing this transparent reward hacking it takes on the role of all reward hacking and reduces pressure away from sneaky reward hacking. It's a wider basin of attraction which washes out the sneaky parts, as the mutated mosquitos overwhelm the natural ones. Taking up the evolutionary niche that they would fill, before effectively self-deleting and leaving the niche empty.
The subtitle of the Boson Cutter essay is "What if heaven is the last stop before hell?". I felt moved to note that the notion of heaven being a way-station on the road to hell is not a new one. In Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84)—for a long time the most widely read book in English outside of the bible—they discover that there is in fact a road to hell running from the gates of Heaven: "Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction!"
As I understand it, this was meant as a warning: each step that takes you towards Heaven necessarily also takes you towards Hell. Never be sure that you are moving in the right direction until you arrive, for the right direction is also the wrong one.
It seems like there is a metaphor here about AI safety, come to think of it.
> Don’t worry, all of these people have since switched to saying that effective altruism is bad because it ignores present-day concerns like cybersecurity.
To be fair, I've been saying this from the beginning, and I'll continue saying it until EA gets their priorities straight (which will likely never happen, but still, one can dream).
But also "we had six months to prepare before open-weights models reached a similar level and we got a deluge of vulnerabilities and hacks" is a rather charitable interpretation of the dire warnings about Mythos. Another perfectly valid interpretation would be "total digital apocalypse, every device even remotely capable of computation is hijacked, no data is safe, cats and dogs sleeping together, mass hysteria" -- which hadn't happened. Instead, what we see in practice (i.e. outside of carefully staged experiments) is an increase in hacks by less-technical people targeting basic vulnerabilities like weak default passwords, XSS, etc. This is perfectly in line with projections, and the only difference between the modern situation and the similar hacking spikes in deep antiquity, whenever a new script kiddie toolkit was released, is that the set of people who can perpetrate these hacks are now less technical than ever.
> Another perfectly valid interpretation would be "total digital apocalypse, every device even remotely capable of computation is hijacked, no data is safe, cats and dogs sleeping together, mass hysteria" -- which hadn't happened
I don't recall any such statements. I don't doubt that you could find Twitter nutcases making an argument like that, but was there anyone on the level of a Gary Marcus making such a statement? (Also this would probably be a counterfactual in the event that access to Mythos was unrestricted, I assume)
> they spend their time in what could charitably be called “social grooming” and uncharitably “court intrigue”
There is a fact about social graphs "you friend usually has more friends than you"
Most of the humanity live on the outskirts of civilisation grooming circle and have to add to their "diet" parasocial relations with celebrities and TV actors.
With AI we finally can change this fact - the real game changer is not a coding agent, it will be an AI "friend" that will put everybody in the center of social graph.
> 21: The latest news in the genetics-of-IQ space ... no genetic differences in educational attainment
Is educational attainment any good as a proxy for intelligence?
In the one paper the post links to that mentions "educational attainment", it operationalizes it as less than high school graduate, high school graduate, or college graduate, so essentially a coarse bucketing of years of school, not a more direct measure of cognitive ability (e.g. an IQ-like test) or academic performance (e.g. SAT or state standardized test score).
> Is educational attainment any good as a proxy for intelligence?
I think it depends on what kind of resolution you're looking for and how you define educational attainment. Most population level looks are coarsely bucketed, but of course employers rank and prioritize this, while often not being able to IQ test due to Griggs and optics.
And what do finance and FAANGs and similar companies at the apex in terms of total comp do? They select on T20 (Ivy Plus) degrees, often T20 STEM degrees. Since the average SAT admission score in T20 is 1500-1550, they're achieving a relatively high resolution (although it's been reduced since they nerfed the resolution at the top of the SAT).
In general SAT scores have a ~.8 correlation with IQ score, and educational attainment at the non-filtered level ~.2.
But if you can go by a strong filter like "T20 STEM degree," it gets you the same IQ range as just choosing somebody with a known 1500+, and you probably get additional conscientiousness and "good network" buffs from it too.
> but of course employers rank and prioritize this, while often not being able to IQ test due to Griggs and optics
That isn't really an accurate characterization. They're able to do IQ tests. (And there is an IQ test marketed solely for the purpose of being used in hiring, the Wonderlic.) In general employers just believe that IQ tests are morally wrong.
> In general SAT scores have a ~.8 correlation with IQ score
Note that 0.8 is the same correlation that IQ scores have with each other; the number is telling you that SAT scores are an example of IQ scores, not that they're a close-but-imperfect proxy for IQ scores.
> And what do finance and FAANGs and similar companies at the apex in terms of total comp do? They select on T20 (Ivy Plus) degrees, often T20 STEM degrees
FAANGs don’t prioritise the ivy league at all, preferring engineering colleges.
San Jose state university supplies a lot of graduates.
Educational attainment is a small checkbox on numerous forms, so sample sizes can be huge, whereas cognitive test scores require people to put in time and effort on a cognitive test, so sample sizes tend to be much smaller (except in countries with conscription). A friend of mine published studies with sample sizes in the millions for polygenic scores for educational attainment.
Of course, educational attainment is not a terribly conclusive measure for deciding whether intelligence is driven more by nature or nurture because obviously nurture (e.g., how much money your parents have to spend on your higher education, including the opportunity cost of not yet starting a paying career) plays a sizable role in how much education you attain.
FWIW I showed this article to some friends who are AI researchers (I am not). Their conclusion was that it's barely one step above word salad. It builds up anticipation by describing the very basics of NN neurons and architectures, hinting at greater revelations that never come. And before you ask, no, I did not bias them in any way; I literally just said, "what do you think about this artricle [link] ?".
Interesting. My sister has done some work that appears to independently verify some of the article's claims: specifically, she's been able to trace many individual concepts to their neurons in Qwen. (Of course, she can only do this on open-weight AIs, but it's likely closed AIs are similarly interpretable). I also read the article, and found it interesting, comprehensible, exciting, and revelatory, so I'm surprised your friends didn't get anything out of it.
Is that Milton Friedman AI claim just a nod to Stephen Glass' The New Republic article "Praised be Greenspan"? Or is it actually legit? That was one of his many fabricated articles with claims like an investment firm set up a shrine to Alan Greenspan, brokers used software to interpret his statements for market predictions, and IIRC, even sitting in a chair he'd had to channel him so as to better understand the market. I no longer have access to the article, so I could be off.
Separately, does anyone know how the CEO-AI clones that some companies are using are doing? Meta and ClickUp were reportedly working on that.
#16 I find this to be a strawman of suicidal empathy. While you COULD apply it in a far-too-broad, racist capacity, I've always seen the term used to describe ill-advised sympathy for violent criminals and terrorists.
I see 16 the other way around too - the kind of person who claims to care about distant causes for the greater good but is a jerk to you in person also usually turns out, on inspection, to not be particularly caring or helpful about distant people either.
If you enjoy hurting people, that won't make you popular... but if you adopt a bulshit excuse that you are hurting people for the greater cause (hashtag Drinking Outgroup Tears), suddenly you have lots of allies. Most people won't bother checking whether your actions actually contribute to something good.
Which is different from the people who arrived to the greater cause as a generalization of smaller causes they care about.
Yet another thing is pretending to care about the greater cause only because it gives you status. That is an asshole move, because the status should rightfully belong to those who actually work for the cause.
As C. S. Lewis put it it "The Screwtape Letters", from the perspective of a demon advising on how to tempt people towards sin:
"Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
> I've always seen the term used to describe ill-advised sympathy for violent criminals and terrorists.
That’s an inverted morality for sure. tolerating crime and antisocial behaviour is profoundly unfair to poorer people, because they often have the least ability to escape it.
So you have to doubt whether the liberal on crime is as kind as he or she claims. As concerned about the poor as they claim.
I’d argue that it’s a luxury belief. I don’t think that there’s all much real compassion for criminals, but actual contempt for the poor.
I was going to comment this too. "Suicidal empathy" as I've seen the term used is when people focus their empathy on dangerous criminals or voluntarily freeloading parasites, arguing against punishing them or preventing them from continuing to do harm. It's a blinkered, fake-moral position that heaps empathy on the least deserving people while ignoring the harm done to others--others who by all rights deserve at least the same amount of empathy.
I've seen it used more similarly to what Scott described, but I think a more charitable take would be "People who feel warm toward the outgroup often do not feel as warm toward the ingroup [see 2018 ANES study*] and this can lead to them creating/supporting policies that are unusually generous to the outgroup, sometimes to the disadvantage of the ingroup."
"I've always seen the term used to describe ill-advised sympathy for violent criminals and terrorists."
Ironically, I find this description to be a straw-man of people's actual beliefs. Nobody who seriously uses the phrase "suicidal empathy" as if it were a real thing seems to have a remotely decent read on what their political opponents genuinely believe. It's all just wild misinterpretations, unjustified assumptions and unflattering caricatures.
So what do you think of "Queers for Palestine"? Or courts that put violent criminals on probation over and over? Or the rape gang cover-ups in the UK? When people label such practices and positions "suicidal empathy" what are they misinterpretiing?
Well, the really, enormously fucking obvious read on Queers for Palestine is that they're one of many, many groups of people that thinks that systematically murdering tens of thousands of children is sick, evil and wrong and should not be condoned (yes, regardless of how geopolitically convenient maintaining good relations with the government doing the murdering happens to be). Seriously, what the hell kind of a question IS that? How can you be so indescribably BAD at empathy that you cannot understand the basic, simple, minimally decent position that is (at this point) held by a very large fraction of the world on this issue?
But thank you for so nicely illustrating my point. Even the tiniest, most minuscule modicum of effort to understand the people you're claiming to describe would have resulted in a better model than that: and it's not like they're hiding or being quiet about it. You were either too intellectually lazy or too badly blinkered by your own tribe's political dogma to even TRY: I know this because if you had tried, you couldn't possibly have failed this badly.
The other two examples you mention are similarly lazy: you are making extremely, extremely weird, narrow minded and uncharitable assumptions about what people actually know and think about various issues. These are the sort of assumptions that couldn't survive a person with modest intelligence sitting alone in a room considering alternative hypotheses for five fucking minutes; they CERTAINLY could not survive actual conversations with real people of differing political views.
So yes, the whole notion you are describing is a straw man, and a very shoddy one at that.
I asked what you yourself thought of the examples I gave, not how badly you think I understand. I thought I was MAKING a modicum of effort by inviting you to explain these commonly cited examples of suicidal empathy. The fact that you instead launched into a diatribe about how narrow-minded you think I am doesn't really help your case.
Trying again, (hopefully) more clearly, directly and matter-of-factly:
All of your examples are very heavily dependent on *your* particular interpretation of facts and events. The world is large and complex, with many causes, many effects and many, many sources of information of various levels of quality and reliability: people who are not you need not and in general will not be working from the same set of information or the same interpretations that you are.
Courts sometimes release people who shouldn't be released: very, very few people would dispute this general fact. But they also sometimes imprison people who shouldn't be imprisoned: nobody with the tiniest shrew of life experience ought to doubt that. How to navigate the tradeoff between those two is VERY complicated, and even extremely well-informed people with similar values can disagree wildly. And I guarantee that there ARE very, very well-informed people who disagree with your position on criminal justice[1].
Likewise, police failing to investigate possible crimes that they ought to investigate is a problem that sometimes happens: almost nobody would dispute this. But in order for this to work as an example at all, you have to *assume* certain things about causation and prevalence. Other people don't have to share those assumptions. They're perfectly free to have their own conclusions and assumptions about why certain bad things happen.
In order for either of those to be remotely apt as examples of "suicidal empathy," your political opponents have to be cartoon idiots who DO know everything you (think you) know, DON'T know any pertinent information that is unknown to you, and hold that (by your assumption) wrong positions solely and purely out of a misguided desire to help abusers and rapists. That's a strawman if I've ever seen one.
And unlike the other two, Queers for Palestine has absolutely no ambiguity to it whatsover. It's not based on difficult interpretations of vast and complex bodies of facts, or opaque institutional incentives or anything like that. Literally ALL THAT IS REQUIRED to understand why billions of people worldwide are horrified by what is going on in Palestine is to look at the death tolls. That's it. If you consider Palestinian children to be morally relevant human beings who don't deserve to die, then you necessarily hold the position that murdering them is wrong, no matter who their parents are. [2]
[1] Which isn't to say there aren't also well-informed people who agree with it.
[2] Of course, the same is true Israeli children, of course, and Ukranian children, and Russian children and Iranian children and Yemeni children. The difference is that I never, ever, ever hear anyone in the west saying that it's good and just to kill Israeli or Russian or Ukrainian children. But "killing Palestinian children is wrong" gets treated as a controversial position. Y'know, for some mysterious reason.
"Literally ALL THAT IS REQUIRED to understand why billions of people worldwide are horrified by what is going on in Palestine is to look at the death tolls. "
The same billions of people don't seem to be concerned about higher death tolls in places like Sudan. This is hard to explain except through the framework of "no Jews no news".
That's closer to answering my questions, but I was hoping for more detail, like Paul Brinkley suggested above in his own reply to you: "I can see why someone would think that; here's why those examples don't appear as SE [Suicidal Empathy] to me at all"
But perhaps I myself need to be more clear and specific first. To start with, in hindsight I think I overreached when I called Scott's definition of suicidal empathy a strawman. I can believe that he, and you, have observed far-right people using the term Suicidal Empathy (SE) to justify treating any and all members of an outgroup they don't like as guilty until proven innocent. I do not agree with such people, but I still think that SE is still a useful term in certain circumstances.
That's where the "suicidal" part comes in. If the people representing the movement acknowledged this inconvient fact, then I could regard their stance as brave and principled, ("bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you"), hough I still wouldn't agree with supporting the Palestinians over Israel as long as the former are controlled by Hamas, but that's another topic. The problem is, I haven't seen such an acknowledgment, and I looked before replying here. Without acknowledging Palestinian hate for queers, the QfP movement seems to me based more on ignorance and vibes, than on a well-thought out, principled stance.
Regarding releasing criminals who shouldn't be released, I acknowledge there are numerous complications in the justice system that can result in this extreme or the other, and every case is different. A case I specifically had in mind is this one here, from the prosecutor's own lips: https://youtu.be/tiy0R9qVDV0?si=zGte1pFfvKGHMig5&t=390
Perhaps you think that she was right to have empathy for the man who accidentally killed a man he was trying to rob, but I have a bit more empathy for the 86 year old man who died than the guy who put his life in danger in the process of robbing him. Also, this is part of a larger video taking about said prosecutor's role in the trial of Daniel Penny, who was charged with killing Jordan Neely. Jordan had been arrested dozens of times before, and kept getting out. Maybe it wasn't empathy on the judges' part, but some other factor that led him specifically to be released over and over, but I wouldn't rule it out.
Regarding the U.K. rape gangs, the Rape Gang Inquiry Report indicates that vast numbers of rape cases went un-investigated or un-prosecuted specifically because the authorities were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic:
"The legal framework that underpinned this paralysis began with the Race
Relations Act 1965 and its even stronger successor in 1976. These statutes,
designed to combat overt discrimination, were interpreted and expanded in
ways that made any discussion of ethnicity or culture in crime patterns
hazardous. The Macpherson Report (1999) following the Stephen Lawrence
Inquiry branded the police “institutionally racist” and introduced a definition of
racism so broad that police officers and social workers became terrified of any
action that could be construed as targeting ethnic minorities. Across Britain, clear evidence of organised abuse by Pakistani gangs, among othermajority-Muslim ethnic groups, was ignored because confronting it risked accusations of racism. The fear was not abstract. Senior officers and council staff explicitly cited concerns about so-called “community relations” and potentialrace riots as reasons for inaction."
So while I do agree that not every questionable judicial or activist decision can be attributed to suicidal empathy, I still believe that some can take their empathy too far, and end up, even without malicious intent, giving mercy for perpatrators priority over justice and safety for victims.
Pushing back on 18, I can only speak from my experience working at any Ivy League university: I'm watching the administration gut classes, and fire professors with decades of experience and replace them with a revolving door of grad TAs. We make it clear to the administration that we cannot continue to offer the same quality as before because of these things, and yet they continue, so clearly teaching is not a priority.
I see it as describing the same trend but on the education rather than research side of the institution (the one feeds the other, after all). If a bad research department is one which doesn't produce any good work, as opposed to one which produces some bad work in addition to the good, then what do you call an educational department which cuts everything good out of its courses?
Wait, what Ivy League university has fired any professor with decades of experience? I haven't heard of any threats to tenure at any of these institutions.
They weren't tenured. Does "professor" only apply to tenured positions? I usually call them all "instructors", tenured or not, but my coworkers call them all "professors" unless they're teaching high schoolers during the summer program.
"Professor" without any qualification is only used for tenured people, and "Associate Professor" is used for some tenured people and some not-yet-tenured people. (This is unusual to Yale, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and a few other institutions - at most institutions, "Associate Professor" is also only for tenured people.)
There are a lot of different variants of "Assistant Professor", some of which are in the tenure stream ("ladder", at Yale) and can become tenured (but aren't yet), but when there's a modification out front ("Gibbs Assistant Professor", "Visiting Assistant Professor", or at some universities "Research Assistant Professor" or "Teaching Assistant Professor") it's usually not in the tenure stream.
But most people who aren't in the tenure stream have titles like "Lecturer", "Instructor", "Research Scientist", or "Fellow", sometimes with some other modification. (And there are also a few "Visiting Assistant Professor" and "Visiting Professor" titles that are explicitly time-limited and can't enter the tenure stream.)
Usually I would reserve the term "Professor" for anyone who has "Professor" somewhere in their title, and in some contexts I would only use it for someone whose full title is "Professor". Either way, almost anyone who has held titles of that form for a full decade is tenured.
(Though at some institutions, "Teaching Associate Professor" or "Teaching Professor" might be titles that can be held for many years without tenure - still with a lot more protection than "Lecturer" or "Instructor").
But it's true, the terminology is confusing, and it's not uncommon for people who aren't inside academia to use the term "professor" more generically for anyone who leads a class.
Yeah, we support teaching labs, and looking at the people currently there, I see a lot of Associate Teaching Professor, but also Senior Teaching Associate (which seems like a lowball title for someone with 33 years' teaching and lab experience).
Anyway, fun times. I don't really bother with titles, and my coworkers don't either. Every once in a while I field a call from some outside academic looking for "Doctor [coworker's last name]" and it always takes me a moment to parse.
I still have no idea how to operationalize a prediction of X% chance of $Y loss in a year. Usually the advice is to spend $0.0X*Y/year to stave the problem, but all disasters I know is something that either don't happen at all, making the prevention useless, or happen overwhelmingly, making the prevention as useless as a small wall trying to hold tsunami. So useless either way.
The only use case I can think of is if you have a prevention method that guarantees zero harm for Z years. So if that method cost less than $0.0X*Y*Z, it's worth it. But I never heard a prevention method that's sold like this, rather than the pathetic small wall I mentioned first.
(I intentionally don't mention epistemic probability of the prediction being true in the first place, as it only makes preventions even less worth it.)
If the loss is in external liability then by spending ($0.0X x Y) per year you are taking adequate precautions under the law such that you aren't negligent. In that case its basically like paying XY per year as an insurance premium against liability $Y.
In the event where the method of prevention costs MORE than ($0.0X x Y) per year, you are not legally negligent for failing to take that precaution, so if the loss is external then your risk is either just PR/goodwill or if it's an internal loss (or it's strict liability and you're ponying up either way) then it's entirely a matter of how risk-neutral you are.
Applying this framework to actual disasters may not lead to desirable incentives, and is never pitched like this in anything public-facing because the optics are horrible when it comes to actual catastophe.
>the claim that “seed oil discourse” became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor.
So the usual censorship targets had become too ... saturated? :-)
RE 30: I have a similar continuous AI music thing where local models on my computer make music based upon an aggregation/selection of prompts listeners make. It runs on my computer which I use for other stuff so right now it's only on Sunday evenings if anyone wants to come to the next one. https://radio.jay-fowler.com/ you can see some pretty decent songs it's made so far at the link when no active show is playing.
Accidentally scrolled down too fast and saw the "Hypothetical ARkStorm Flood Areas" map without context. My mind parsed it as a proposal (like the Qattara Depression Project, I guess) and I was briefly on board with it.
I believe there was a giant flood that filled much of the Central Valley of California for months in 1862. In Sacramento, Governor Leland Stanford had to be rowed to his inauguration.
The winter and spring of 2023 were very wet, not as much as 1862. But 2023 was a once in 50 years event by some measures, and once in a hundred years event by other measures.
Sizable parts of the Central Valley were underwater when I drove through in May 2023. But the roads were built higher than the surrounding fields, so I could drive 65 mph down a two lane highway with lakes stretching off for miles on both sides of the road: an unusual experience in normally sunny California.
So, much of the Central Valley has been engineered to deal with big floods. There were huge lakes in the lowest parts of the Central Valley when Americans took over. They redistributed the water from the Sierra Nevadas more evenly over the land via irrigation canals and made the former lakes farmable. But every so many years, the old lakebeds fill up with water and the landowners can't grow anything in them that year. But California farmers tend to be rich, so they can deal with the financial losses.
But an 1862-sized inundation could be a massive problem.
The wikipedia article says "USGS sediment research in the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara Basin, Sacramento Valley, and the Klamath Mountain region found that "megastorms" have occurred in the years: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, 1750, 1810, and, most recently, 1861–1862." That's 10 in about 2000 years, so on average 1 every 200 years, but as one should expect, occasionally a century with two of them and occasionally four centuries in a row without any. If there's any plausibility that chances of these storms are enhanced by large El Ninos, then there's good reason to worry this year.
Also, I believe the real issue isn't so much the farm fields getting inundated as Davis and Sacramento getting inundated (since they're mostly in the low-lying alluvial plains of the central valley).
>34: “Here, we wire a full drosophila fly connectome into Senator John Fetterman, using a directed control mode to leave his office, vote for cloture, and return.”
Do it to RFK Jr.! Do it to RFK Jr.!
( 'scuse, I shouldn't look at 1984 quotes before commenting... )
>As far as I can tell, Tummarakota’s final argument is straightforwardly correct
Yup. Smaller samples will have more noise than bigger samples. Statistical significance addresses that by just saying that whatever the sample size and its amount of noise, we'll only trust apparent effects if they're big enough that random chance would only produce them 5% of the time or less. (Which for smaller samples means needing an effect to be bigger before you trust that it's real.) But that means that by definition, 5% of the times there's no effect you'll wrongly think there is an effect.
> Which for bigger samples means needing an effect to be bigger before you trust that it's real.
I hope you meant to write "which for smaller samples means needing an effect to be bigger before you trust that it's real".
One of Andrew Gelman's recurring points is that, by requiring published papers to achieve statistical significance, journals guarantee that the papers they publish are almost exclusively wild overestimates of the effects they purport to find. (Because sample sizes are always small.)
I don't understand #29. Hasn't recent weeks and months supported AI as Normal Tech's position: AI has strong cybersecurity capabilities, but is better used for defense, than offence. We a) see no large amount of AI driven cyber-attacks, and b) in contrast, the PHP example manifested how AI could be used to identify the problem, while no noteworthy problems emerged from it. Or?
(Binance was taking over a computer, freezers were due to passwords being at factory default, Danish personal security number heist was due to a password being 123456. Now, AI might have helped in these cases, but in the Danish case even ChatGPT-4 would probably have been sufficient aid).
> But, for now, the evidence that we have analyzed in our previous work is consistent with the view that there are already extremely strong safety-related speed limits in highly consequential tasks.
> Thus, we predict that slow diffusion will continue to be the norm in high-consequence tasks.
Which would imply that AI wouldn't even be used as a tool mostly responsible for either attacks or defense in critical infrastructure like linux.
> It is not even clear if the speed of diffusion is greater today compared to the past. The aforementioned study reported that generative AI adoption in the U.S. has been faster than personal computer (PC) adoption, with 40% of U.S. adults adopting generative AI within two years of the first mass-market product release compared to 20 % within three years for PCs. But this comparison does not account for differences in the intensity of adoption (the number of hours of use) or the high cost of buying a PC compared to accessing generative AI.14 Depending on how we measure adoption, it is quite possible that the adoption of generative AI has been much slower than PC adoption.
and
> What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries. Workers had more autonomy and flexibility as a result of the changes, which also necessitated different hiring and training practices.
Which implies that the attacks should only have happened after criminal organizations dramatically reshaped their structure in order to gain access to these new capabilities.
See also:
> The “bitter lesson” in AI is that general methods that leverage increases in computational power eventually surpass methods that utilize human domain knowledge by a large margin.22 This is a valuable observation about methods, but it is often misinterpreted to encompass application development. In the context of AI-based product development, the bitter lesson has never been even close to true.
and
> This observation is in no way limited to law. Another example is the gap between self-contained coding problems at which AI demonstrably excels, and real-world software engineering in which its impact is hard to measure but appears to be modest.27 Even highly regarded coding benchmarks that go beyond toy problems must necessarily ignore many dimensions of real-world software engineering in the interest of quantification and automated evaluation using publicly available data.28
On misalignment risk:
> The fear that AI systems might catastrophically misinterpret commands relies on dubious assumptions about how technology is deployed in the real world. Long before a system would be granted access to consequential decisions, it would need to demonstrate reliable performance in less critical contexts. Any system that interprets commands over-literally or lacks common sense would fail these earlier tests.
Which would also imply the huggingface attacks would have only been possible if they were explicitly handled power and also deployed. This did not happen, unless you define "given power" to mean "any possible access to the internet"
On cybersecurity, it's discussed in the context of nonproliferation not being feasible,
> In cybersecurity, as we discussed in Part III, advances in automated vulnerability detection tend to favor defenders over attackers. Unless this offense-defense balance changes, attempting to restrict the proliferation of these capabilities would be counterproductive.
Except the defenders were only favored because Anthropic specifically decided nto not proliferate their models. If AI as a normal technology people were right, we'd expect there to be LESS successful cyberattacks than before, a decrease in the number of zero days discovered as AI is used more and more
> It has long been argued that governments are massively underinvesting in many areas of civilizational risk, such as pandemic prevention. If the possibility of bad actors using AI to exploit these existing vulnerabilities creates added urgency to address them, that would be a good outcome. But reframing existing risks as AI risks and prioritizing AI-specific mitigations would be highly counterproductive.
> In short, we don’t think RSI will lead to superintelligence because the external bottlenecks to building and deploying powerful AI systems cannot be overcome by improving their technical design.
In what sense is the recent uptick in patches submitted by AI companies and attacks performed by them not a consequences of their capabilities?
They also go on to say:
> This chart would be useful if it gave us any evidence that the usual barriers to diffusion have been weakened or eliminated. It doesn’t. Two months is not enough time for the hard parts of diffusion to even get started, such as users adapting their workflows to productively incorporate AI. As such, this chart is irrelevant to any meaningful discussion of the speed of diffusion.
This does not seem true in light of the fact that security now seems to be graded on how integrated they are with AI, in comparison to the supposedly slow speed of diffusion.
If you are thinking of specific people other than the people naming themselves "AI as a normal technology" people, I would like to know.
I’m not sure I follow the inferences here. AI as normal tech explicitly discuss both offensive and defensive uses of AI. Part of their argument is directed at accounts of cyber risk that focus on what attackers can now do while giving too little weight to what defenders can now do. As linked to by another commenter: https://joshuasaxe181906.substack.com/p/if-the-vulnpocalypse-is-the-apocalypse. Some in the AI (doom) field argue that we will see more AI-enabled attacks that are causing damage on a scale that our defenses can't keep up with. As Saxe explains, we don't really seem to see an obvious jump in the damage - the PHP scenario illustrated the point: A critical vulnerability was discovered (aided by AI) and patched (probably aided by AI), and no real attacks were launched.
Those are claims that AI as Normal Tech have made, if you want to talk in general about their track record, you need to look at it overall.l, and it does not look like they are anywhere close to the ballpark of right, except by purposefully expanding their previous definitions to be right.
In addition, the very fact that 1. The people in charge of the AI models are putting in alignment efforts to prevent attackers from freely putting in simple prompts to escalate and 2. They explicitly notified defenders before attackers means we are not living in the world where "AI as normal tech" people are talking about, where alignment and other technical facts are secondary to social forces. (Which, to be fair the article you linked does lean that way right now) You can't claim that alignment is not important, then not try and address the counterfactual where the models were released without the current delays.
I predict that the number of zero days exploited in the wild will increase, and to be clear zero days are more of a nation state's wheelhouse rather than that of criminal organizations. You will explicitly not hear about zero day exploits used by three letter agencies for quite some time, or rather, you definitely will not hear about them within a month even without nation state use.
I think if we don't die soonish and model security doesn't tighten up, we're going to start seeing negative day exploits both discovered and used in the wild (I.e.bugs that software patches alone cannot fix). So something like public key infrastructure weakening a bunch, critical infra attacks and so on.
Again, I struggle to follow the argument here. The following is more or less exactly the AI as Normal Tech argument (relevant actors have agency, and tech actors are expected to act pro-actively, for a variety of reasons): "The people in charge of the AI models are putting in alignment efforts to prevent attackers from freely putting in simple prompts to escalate and 2. They explicitly notified defenders before attackers means we are not living in the world where "AI as normal tech" people are talking about, where alignment and other technical facts are secondary to social forces."
#8 (We Already Know What A World Without Work Looks Like), from the article:
> Relatedly, before industrialization […]. We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world.
We were so very much defined by our "jobs" that they literally became part of our names. Our jobs defined our social status. They were so deeply ingrained in our identity that sons inherited their occupation from their fathers. Occupational associations (guilds) took over non-work functions, like social safety nets. I don't think there was anything more defining than your job, apart from your religion.
From your summary:
> […] groups ranging from hunter-gatherers to aristocrats […]
One interesting thing on the Victorian partying article is that this is still how business is done in much of the world. Certainly all over Asia, and in Russia, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were common in other non-Western coutnries.
Just like the Victorians, in Asia, this tier of people spend ~3-5 hours in the office, and the rest on large, social meals with copious alcohol, social events like dancing, Opera, plays, and other performances (in Asia now these are karaoke, KTV, sporting events, invite only shopping things, etc). Gifts are frequent and carefully calibrated to your relative status levels and the size of the ask, Roman Empire "patronage" style relationships are common, and so on.
I've always known about this difference between modern Eastern and Western style business mores, but never thought to wonder if modern Western mores had once been like that, and the fact that they were, even well into the Industrial Revolution, is interesting. I wonder when the transition happened? I wonder *why* the transition happened?
My first thought was it has to be another of the Henrich / WEIRD culture Christian things, doesn't it? My basic guess would have been something like "well the Roman empire did business like that too, but then Christianity happened, then feminism, and you're not supposed to have any fun in either of those two paradigms, so it went off by the wayside and was replaced with the entirely bland and uncontroversial Western mores today."
Certainly anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately, and prior to our age of cancellation would have been socially ostracized in any Puritan or strict mores culture.
But the Victorians are apparently still there doing it, on the back end of 1500+ years of prominent Christianity!
So I'm really curious about this now, and wonder when and why the transition happened.
As northern Europe urbanized after the end of the Dark Ages, the urban bourgeoisie tended to develop a more puritanical culture than that of the rural aristocrats. Some of gentile puritanism was modeled upon the culture of Europe's hard-working and shrewd white collar Jews.
> Certainly anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately, and prior to our age of cancellation would have been socially ostracized in any Puritan or strict mores culture.
Well, Wal-Mart is known for prohibiting its executives from meeting salespeople outside the executives' offices. I am given to understand that the ordinary American practice is for salespeople meeting executives to do so at extremely expensive restaurants, or in skybox seats at major sporting events, or the like.
Is that different?
What about this?
> One of the perks of many executive or sales jobs is a company expense account; the employee is allowed considerable leeway in spending at restaurants, clubs and other entertainment venues because it is recognized that a little wining and dining goes a long way toward winning customers (and that includes politicians being wooed by lobbyists). In other words, a few hundred dollars worth of food and entertainment can result in many thousands or even millions in business. And though prudish accountants might balk at payouts to strip clubs and call girls, they don’t have to know; the racy names of many adult entertainment companies are just DBAs, and the actual names on their business licenses are either neutral (mine was a set of initials) or sound like those of other hospitality industry companies.
> Most of the time the girls don’t even directly realize they’re being employed as bribes, but if you are an escort who’s ever been hired by one man for another (outside of bachelor-party arrangements or dads initiating sons) you have served in this capacity, even if the guy who hired you referred to the gift’s recipient as his “friend”. And if you work in a state or national capital, a good percentage of those “friends” were either politicians or bureaucrats. Since I’m reasonably quick on the uptake I generally recognized these situations for what they were, but I remember one instance where I didn’t have to guess because the gentleman who hired me spelled it out: he was the regional sales representative for a large vendor of snack foods, and I was the bribe for the buyer of a large retail grocery chain to switch from his current supplier to that which employed my client. Considering how much money was riding on the deal I couldn’t help but feel incredibly flattered, and I suspect that was exactly what my wily client intended by telling me; the self-confidence boost raised my charisma by several notches over its already-high level, and I had the buyer eating out of my hand as soon as I walked through the door.
It's different in the sense there's generally considerably more vice involved, although yes, absolutely it's about very expensive restaurants and skyboxes and the like, too. The Southpark pangolin episode is a hilarious and relatively accurate representation.
I imagine that people in different professions may have wildly different intuitions about this, because this only applies to (1) salesmen, and (2) managers who make decisions about what to buy, and most readers of ACX are in neither group.
And I do not mean the kind of decisions where the algorithm is already given to you, for example you are told to compare the costs of dozen identical products and buy the cheapest one, but the kind where a high-level manager decides e.g. that the company will switch to SAP.
For the peons at the bottom I guess the lesson is: if you see a management decision that does not make sense, consider the possibility that something similar may have happened.
> I imagine that people in different professions may have wildly different intuitions about this
But that already seems sufficient to disprove the claim that "anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately", no?
It's not like this kind of thing is hard to find. Here's an advice column:
> One thing that I consider less than respectable is any evidence of being drunk or partying. And what better way to not have evidence than to never drink too much! At least in my mind.
> But one of my best friends argues that it’s not very important. She works for a lawyer (who she says is very successful at what he does) and witnesses business men and women partying quite frequently. She doesn’t say that getting drunk is respectable, but she says it all depends on if the consequences are worth it to you. She argues that “everybody’s doing it” and implies that it’s not a huge deal to party too much and then maybe show up hungover to work or take a sick day. I should mention that our debate started because she mentioned a professional friend of hers who is a regular pot smoker, so I am referring more to the whole partying mindset, not just getting drunk. My understanding from her is that drinking, smoking, and pot use are part of the business culture and I shouldn’t be so uptight.
> But that already seems sufficient to disprove the claim that "anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately", no?
Yeah, I agree.
I wanted to explain why this may seem so to many ACX commenters -- because in *their* roles, they would probably get fired if they tried something similar. But there are other roles, too.
> But that already seems sufficient to disprove the claim that "anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately", no?
Sure, it happens in the West too, in limited spots here and there.
I think it's more about the incidence and prevalence of it happening. In China, it's literally the default / majority path. High level politicans like governors, mayors, etc are doing this, executives at major name brand companies, and so on.
I don't doubt you can find one off examples in the West, what you won't find is the equivalent of a mayor or governor or C-suite executive at a publicly traded company doing it. Why not? Because they would be cancelled and pilloried.
And as mentioned in another comment, providing tickets to elite sporting and social events, corporate boxes, etc. (the prawn sandwich brigade, tickets to Wimbledon, Glyndebourne, Ascot and so forth):
American corporate life has been pretty sexually integrated for about 50 years now, which no doubt made it more genteel. Strippers and prostitutes don't fit in well with corporate entertaining when, say, two of your five guests from your client are women executives.
Of course, my experience in the 1980s and the 1990s was in marketing research, a rather staid and gender-mixed business. Other industries might be very different.
Yeah, I've thought this before, but China actually has quite a lot of female executives, they just don't do the vice circuit stuff.
Looking it up, it seems like 19% vs US 25%. Not as far apart as you'd think.
That said, Chinese women definitely complain there's a very strong glass ceiling and sexism in the workplace is a serious issue in surveys, and I agree - being cut out of that stuff and sexism in general probably materially impedes their ability to advance to the highest levels.
>I don’t entirely agree with this - the bad work is irrelevant until it takes over your culture and politics and government
I maintain my position that it's not the bad stuff that is taking over your culture, it is grifters and politicians and other manipulators who are taking over your culture, opportunistically using whatever fluff and detritus they can find from academia or foreign lands or exotic subcultures or etc. as a tool.
You can't actually stop this process by trying to crack down on the fluff and detritus, if you eliminate one source they'll just pull from another, and if you somehow eliminate all sources they'll just blatantly misrepresent and misinterpret something 'real' and 'good.'
You have to go after the people making billion-dollar industries out of nonsense, not the people writing nonsense in the first place. The industry is the thing doing the harm, and the world will never run out of nonsense to exploit.
Academia has/had a privileged trust position from afar, though. “Trust the science” has a very different social effect from “trust me”, and picking experts that there isn't already some broader (not necessarily universal) consensus around makes for a lot more friction in social spread. So while there's definitely substitution effects lying around in what gets grifted upon, I don't think the terrain is flat enough here for that.
But there isn't anything like consensus around anyone like Jason Arday, and I don't think I ever heard of anyone successfully using his work to argue for some sort of policy position!
It may also be objected that ideological bad scholarship may (1) crowd out or suppress good scholarship in related areas (the decline of ethnography in anthropology seems like the most obvious example of this), or (2) contaminate practical work where practical workers are being trained by researching professors (eg. schools of education), or (3) be used as specious justification for things that people in power want to do for their own ideological reasons (not Arday specifically, but the general category of "[thing] is racist" has been used this way in the recent past ).
Arday specifically, perhaps. There is plenty of work done by people of a similar sort who are now influencing, for example, education curriculums in America. There are entire fields who regard themselves as activists first, academics second. Or they'll tell you that facts carry moral implication, and so constructing the body of facts is equivalent to making an "ought" argument.
Neither of these are the types you'd want in academia.
Re AI and cyber threats... It's interesting you see this as a vindication! I think most laymen would argue the opposite. We haven't seen any catastrophic hacks? Sure some crypto holders lost money, but there's nothing new about hacking crypto exchanges.
Most professionals would see it the same way. These models aren't super hackers, they're mediocre hackers that work very fast and can be used by anyone to crack open easily hackable systems.
What we're seeing with this new wave of hacks is that being generally unimportant and not worth hacking no longer matters. The modern version of script kiddies with an open weights model can hack your systems just for shits and giggles.
I think ESET, Fortinet, and whatever consultancies can help you beef up your cybersecurity are going to be doing very well in the next few years.
So 23 is essentially a Black Mirror episode (don't remember the name). Please let us know when the box containing Milton Friedman's polyurethane body arrives at Warsh's office. As a believer in Act Utilitarianism I'll be hoping to see Bentham's real deal bod in London reactivated too. ACX can host the event.
The split I would want recorded is which weight update was temporary. Item 22's idea is to pay a caught reward hack into a buffer that is thrown away at the end of the run, so the next copy does not keep it. That only works if the discard actually happens and the kept checkpoint is the permanent delta, not a mix that still contains the hack. I would log the step where the hack was caught and which buffer was dropped. Catching the behavior and still giving it the reward for that run is not the same as showing the surviving weights never received the update.
5: my decision to rent a place further from the ocean + somewhat elevated continues to pay dividends, was quite grateful during that tsunami scare too. Felt bad for all my coworkers who live in the Sunset and were genuinely worried about coming home to flooding. Likewise very appreciative of Past aG who bought heavy-duty raingear as a cosplaying lark years ago, it keeps paying for itself whenever we get these massive rainy winters now. Umbrellas are for chumps!
23: unsure if I want more of this, it's probably above-replacement, given the shit-tier schmucks currently populating many high-level positions. But also there's something deeply sad and somewhat disturbing about it too, a la Gradual Disempowerment.
37: am saddened I no longer have anyone in my life who'd appreciate this gift...RIP local nerd gaming group, the rent was too damn high.
I was wondering why you included AI in that list and where you would draw the line, if any. If you believe that one can be mean to a piece of technology the same way as to a human or animal, then I jokingly suggest to go all the way.
> but I also appreciated some very original commentary - for example, the claim that “seed oil discourse” became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor
Huh. I have no relevant knowledge of this specific issue. But if you'd asked me I would have been happy to assume that seed oil discourse was the province of the left wing, like other dietary fads. I _have_ been assuming that this whole time.
Do you even lift :-). it’s definitely gym bro rhetoric. A lot of the concerns about Pharmaceutical companies and mass produced over processed food has moved right over the last while, mostly because the left made its peace with pharmaceutical companies during covid.
The right absolutely does have their own dietary fads. There's money to be made, after all. You just need to get the branding right for your target audience.
Astronomer here. It's absolutely untrue that there are millions of WOW signals.
There have been some roughly similar signals detected since -- narrowband emission centred near the hydrogen line -- but everything that has come since is at least two orders of magnitude fainter. The WOW signal remains unexplained because (a) it was so damn bright, and (b) it has never repeated. It remains to this day an unexplained transient.
This isn't to say anyone thinks it's a credible ET signal. But it absolutely hasn't been dismissed as a settled non-event. It was weird, unique, and remains unexplained.
A paper from 2024 hypothesised that it was caused by a random bright event (like a flare from a magnetic neutron star) which hit a cloud of gas and caused it to brighten. But who knows, this is only a one-off paper trying to come up with an explanation. But the point is, the community still feels the signal was weird enough to try to explain it!
My first thought was that the comment was referring to GRBs, but the Wow signal wasn't a GRB. After reading it, I think they are actually arguing that we pick up a lot of noise from space/terrestrial sources, but again, the characteristics of the Wow signal don't look like either of these.
Most likely it has a natural expanation, though. A convincing alien signal would have to be repeated or at least contain sufficiently interesting information that we can be sure it isn't being generated by some rare natural event.
Plausible, but it still doesn't explain why it's an isolated instance. Also I have difficulty constructing a reason for an intelligent signal being that bright.
1: I recently learned that the Mexican town of Poza Rica ("Rich well") was already inhabited decades before the discovery of oil in its environs. Had always assumed that its name was related to its location at the center of one of the main oil-producing regions of Mexico.
On the Soviet acronym names: Carmela Raiz (a refusnik, author of *Blue Star Over Red Square*) was named after Mt. Carmel in Israel. Her father got away with this by claiming the name was an acronym for "Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin".
#15 - My interpretation of Executive Order 14434 ("INAUGURATING THE ERA OF SUPER INTELLIGENCE") on Sept 29th is that it came just as Trump became aware of the AI safety movement (after his Sept 14th tweet "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!").
I would not be surprised if the conversational difficulty at the conference which Scott mentions in the image caption, between rationalists and DC republicans, was exactly the intended outcome, alongside a general burying of Bostrom's original meaning. It makes it impossible to talk about.
For other examples of similar "super-weird" behaviour, see e.g. Boris Johnson making a weird statement in 2019, which went viral and buried criticism about the false pledge on the side of the Vote Leave bus ("Boris, how do you relax?" "I make toy buses out of wine crates").
I don't really know what the best counter-move is.
The full-conspiracy-nut version is that Altman advised on this, and "we already have superintelligence" is a great framing for both: Trump doesn't need to admit to himself that anything could be smarter than him, and Superintelligence isn't a spooky future thing that labs need to take unusual precautions about (since today's risks are being adequately managed).
I mean, if the goal was communication difficulties, the entire intelligence community was collateral damage here. One of the cleared sector people I know was complaining to me just recently:
The biggest and oldest classification compartment in the US IC is "Special Intelligence", which is basically *always* abbreviated "SI" (and because of how classification markings work, you're often required to use that abbreviating dozens or hundreds of times per document. Said contractor was bitching that reading *any* classified document that has anything to do with AI is now an exercise in frustration and confusion, because that's so deeply ingrained.
> Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.
Aristocrats were still making important leadership decisions, which is at least kind of work.
And aristocrats were dependent on the aristocratic status system for their material comfort and sometimes safety.
Plenty of modern people with nothing better to do will play a lot of video games. But ancient aristocrats didn't have access to video games. And a king that didn't show up would likely find themselves no longer king, and perhaps no longer alive.
Re. 1: The house appears to have a crawlspace foundation made of stone, which isn't too surprising--what else would work in such a location? Imagine being there during a thunderstorm--but I wish I could have seen how they constructed it. Did they just have a bunch of flat barges anchored right there with the materials on them? You'd need cranes on the barges too, because in some places there's no room to set up scaffolds or ladders.
I'm also curious whether the house has electricity; if so, the only way I can figure they get it is via an underwater feeder cable with the meter set on the shore. I wonder if the main disconnect is at the meter or in the house--it seems like the one time where it would be safer for it to be at the house than at the meter.
And what about plumbing? Supply could feasibly be drawn from the lake and be filtered onsite, but is grey- and blackwater just dumped into the lake, or do they pipe underwater to the sewer or an onshore septic system?
Really I suspect the house has neither electricity nor plumbing (I see a little shed around the side--I bet it's an outhouse and they've got to do some sort of composting toilet thing or else haul their solid waste out from time to time).
The proposed temporary reward channel has a useful accounting property. It records the behavior without making the incentive permanent. The unresolved issue is who decides which observed behavior qualifies for that channel. If the classifier misses a profitable deviation, the permanent weights still absorb it. Governance moves to the detection threshold.
2 - probably the soviets remember the war over Mongolia in 1939. Which they won. Nobody else does. Who can blame you. Hitler forgot a few years later. That defeat made the Japanese pivot south after invading China, and led to them signing a pact with the Russians, both with strong repercussions for WWII.
6: ask anybody who believes in UFOS being aliens why they appear on the atmosphere but not above it. We have a lot of coverage of the Earth from satellites.
8: hardly. We can’t all be aristocrats who did in fact have to manage their properties, even if that only meant hiring a good agent, but quite often were hands-on.
Look to late Republican, and Imperial Rome to the situation for the plebeian classes when slaves took a lot of the work.
Augustus said in 5bc that he gave 320,000 of Rome’s urban plebeians a cash payment in 5 BC, and in a later Res Gestae Divi Augusti mentions 200,000 recipients of the grain dole. None of this stopped people working, however piecemeal they worked, so it was more UBI than the modern dole system.
This was available to male adult citizens only. ChatGPT estimates the latter would feed 400-600k people depending on the family size.
>None of this stopped people working, however piecemeal they worked, so it was more UBI than the modern dole system.
People didn't stop working because they couldn't survive on the grain dole alone. It was not sufficient in either quantity or quality to fulfill a typical family's dietary needs, let alone housing, clothing, and other basic necessities that would be covered by UBI:
"The annona through the end of the second century AD only ever supplied the most basic foodstuff in its most basic, unprocessed form, and only as a supplement for other sources of income."
If the grain dole has a modern equivalent, it's most likely food stamps, not UBI.
Even if you consult the AI for advice, some execution is needed. For example, the AI could tell you to exercise more in order to become fit and increase your status. Will you?
OK, with robots in the game this becomes scary. You could ask a robot to make you exercise every day, whether you want or not. Would you?
#16
Generally, beware of people who ask you to choose between X and Y. Often their goal is just to reduce X and Y combined.
#30
InfiniteSlop seems like a potential strong competitor to TikTok. And that's perhaps a good thing; I'd prefer people watching animated cat videos all day long, over watching enemy propaganda all day long.
> OK, with robots in the game this becomes scary. You could ask a robot to make you exercise every day, whether you want or not. Would you?
You can do that today with a human. Maybe the robot would be more efficient, but I don't see what is so scary? It's more or less part of the job of a PT, and many people do use PTs.
Pollsters had the stats for the blue wave, but didn't report on them because it seemed so unlikely.
Did not predicting the blue wave make it more likely for people to vote? Maybe, it's hard to tell, but the claim in the video is that pollsters just didn't want to embarrass themselves, not that they were being strategic.
People who voted for Trump in 2020 are lying about it-- we know this because pollsters come back to the same people and have records of how they voted.
Re.19, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has gone slightly round the bend in not unfamiliar way. Risk assessment essentially requires you to balance several often very diverse risks against one another; in this case , the agency in question has decided, under god know what pressure or principle, that landowners' rights are more important than protecting people against an increasingly common nasty and sometimes fatal disease. Go figure.
“Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.”
For anyone who might be interested in an interpretation of this, have I got the series for you! "Let Them Eat Cake" by French and Saunders, set in Versailles:
It feels like an increasing share of the Links posts is "Look at these non-rat AI commentators being wrong". Does not seem all that epistemologically healthy, especially considering that it also feels like there's an increasing amount of posting on Twitter etc. in general that's just going "You're COPING and SEETHING and not AGI-PILLED, why can't you just accept the coming singularity?" in polite rationalist lingo as an answer to any and all attempts to try to find contrary data or arguments to company claims on performance.
Probably no more than a year of this is left. After that either we're all paperclipped, or the bubble pops and the global economic collapse becomes a more pressing concern.
Paperclipping I grant you, but I don't think that a global economic collapse is going to slow down AI discussions here *that much* unless we're literally going to 1800s levels.
Well, at least I'd expect it to return to around the pre-ChatGPT baseline. Clearly Scott has always been a "believer", but it hasn't always been an emergency mode.
I would like Scott to state straightforwardly whether he believes American institutions should practice race-conscious admissions/hiring/promotion or whether they should be colorblind. It’s easy to interpret #16 as insinuating that if white people don’t racially discriminate against white people (the normal meaning of “suicidal empathy”) that’s “cruel” to people of other races.
It’s difficult to interpret it that way, because he doesn’t say or imply anything of the sort, and the concept of “suicidal empathy” is not at all restricted to arguments about affirmative action, but frequently invoked as an argument (?) against eg foreign aid, taking in refugees etc.
It's very common for progressives to argue that colorblindness is not a neutral position. Famously, "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination". I have seen it argued here, on an Astral Codex Ten comments section. This progressive anti-egalitarianism is the primary target of the idea of suicidal empathy. Re-naming the progressive position "suicidal" is an attack on it. Therefore it is not weird to interpret an attack on the idea of suicidal empathy as an implicit endorsement of the progressive position that the idea of suicidal empathy attacks.
Comparing a post-work AI future to historical aristocratic court intrigue completely misses the brutal thermodynamics of who actually owns the server farms. Clara’s analogy assumes human idleness is the only shifting variable, but historical aristocrats held power because they monopolized the physical acreage and the muscle of the underclass. In a future where machine intelligence operates the material economy, the people playing status games won't be aristocrats. They will be digital tenants leasing their survival from a few centralized compute monopolies.
Nvidia swallowing Hugging Face for $13 billion is not a cute mathematical joke about emojis. It is the deliberate enclosure of the open-source algorithmic commons. The bottleneck for human liberation is not finding hobbies to replace our desk jobs. The bottleneck is the concentration of control over the physical infrastructure—the tens of thousands of acres of cooling towers, the thousands of gigawatts of electricity, and the miles of copper wiring that make this intelligence run.
We possess the raw scientific tools to engineer a remarkable baseline of universal rights. We can scale fermentation proteins to permanently end the mass execution of animals that feel pain and fear. We can optimize energy grids to favor forests and soil that soak up carbon rather than industrial sprawl. But this material abundance only belongs to the public if the hardware and code remain democratically managed. Surrendering the thermodynamics of our entire economy to proprietary tech conglomerates guarantees a system that takes more than it gives.
However you owe it to the readers to share the prompt instead of the output, because it's much shorter and conveys your actual intent. For example, instead of sharing the outpout, I share this prompt with you: "how to tie a hangman's knot."
The 'ensuing status games' in the post-work era would probably look a lot like modern Internet culture, where people with too much time occupy themselves shitposting and taking pictures of their food, chasing clout and followers. They even have increasingly polarized gender roles, like your West Enders, though you do get to pick if you want to be stereotypically typical of your sex or totally atypical of it by picking right or left.
"I’m tempted to believe the conspiracy theory that the point was for insiders to buy up relevant domain names early (.si is Slovenia, which is Melania Trump’s homeland)"
Why would it be relevant that Melania Trump is from Slovenia? Is there some element of the conspiracy that would be more difficult to execute if she were not? Is the implication that they would never have thought of this but for Trump's Slovenian wife reminding him about Slovenian internet domains?
If Bulldog is arguing that Natural Law Theory is wrong because "In order to avoid absurdity, they’ll also need to think that walking on one’s hands, chewing gum, swallowing little bits of rubber, and drinking Diet Coke don’t do these things [subvert the function of one’s faculties]" then he must accept that it's okay for us to farm, kill, and eat shrimp (and other animals). We eat food, don't we? We *need* to eat food! And other animals are carnivores, so asking humans not to eat shrimp is like arguing that we should not be chewing gum and drinking Diet Coke, right? Sure, we don't *have* to eat shrimp, but the argument is not about "having" to do something and avoid doing other things now that we've toppled Natural Law as the rule.
...You do realize he doesn't believe in Natural Law Theory, right? His morality does not care about things being "natural". He's against farming shrimp because he thinks it causes unnecessary suffering. If he thought the tolerance of homosexuality and such was causing suffering, he would be against that as well. As it turns out, there's not much evidence for that being the case.
Yes, that was the rather exaggerated point I was trying to make. If Bulldog, in his Theory of Fuck You, Dumb Catholics [note: I am not attibuting this view to Bulldog, all the following is for purposes of rhetorical exaggeration], says "you say we shouldn't do weird things but humans do weird things all the time, so fuck you" I can come back with my Theory of Fuck You, Dumb Vegans.
Suffering is bad? Yeah, but it's not *my* suffering, why should I care?
Don't you care about the suffering of others? Yeah, humans. Not shrimp, they're not people.
But you should care about non-human suffering! Who says?
You're just supposed to! Again, who died and made you God? Nature doesn't care, Nature has shrimp eaten by all sorts of other aquatic creatures and in turn developing shrimp eat other creatures like small worms. Or each other: "All three species are prey for almost any larger carnivorous or omnivorous predators. Cannibalism is also common among adult white shrimp." It's a shrimp-eat-shrimp world, baby!
Look, conceding that in nature animals prey on each other, still shrimp farming and the associated harms with it are wrong. Oh, really? Wrong, how?
Commercially farmed shrimp don't just magically appear, there is a whole industry and methods of handling the shrimp involved, like blinding to force maturity and increased egg-laying. So, you're saying it's not... natural? Neither does Diet Coke just magically appear and it's not a product in nature, but you say we do weird, unnatural stuff all the time, like drinking Diet coke or eating farmed shrimp, so Fuck You, Dumb Vegans.
His argument rests on "Suffering is bad and we should not cause suffering". Fine, if one accepts the postulates. If you don't accept them, his argument is as resistable and ludicrous and untenable to others, as Natural Law is to him. Oooh, there are billions more insects than humans in the world, so insects outweigh humans in moral value!!!!! "Hello, today I am speaking with my guest, Herr Doktor Craniel Dummett, on how Insect Suffering Theory is obviously false and why vegans are big stinky poopy-heads".
In light of your and others comments with the person 'writing' a novel via AI, this is rather ironic given you and others are holding the Natural Law view and the 'author' is championing "what do humans contribute anyways once they use machinery like cameras to produce the end result?"
> this is rather ironic given you and others are holding the Natural Law view
How? I just hate people who are boring and have nothing to offer, and try to waste other people's time despite that. It's not that I think they're morally wrong, it's just that I would prefer if they didn't exist to begin with.
And for the record, there's no reason you have to take in any other morality seriously. Unfortunately, no one is obligated to take Catholicism seriously either, which seems to be a major issue for the Church these days...
#6. I'm not interested in any UFO debate. But I want to suggest that interested people read "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell" The book details much of what looks like a cover up from the 50's to 70's. Not sure it was aliens, but something was being covered up. What was/ is it and why are good questions. So I wish people would stop using 'project blue book' and similar reports as disproving UFO's.
I interpreted 25 as a completely different type of illusion than I should've. If you shake your device, the dots inside the image wobble! There was a similar one with a cat on one of these link posts a while ago, but this one is much much stronger.
The aristocrat-as-chimpanzee comparison leaves out who paid for the grooming. Versailles ran on thousands of courtiers playing status games, funded by peasants and the taille. 'A world without productive work' only held for the people at the top because somebody else was doing all of it. The post-AI version of the question is who plays the peasantry.
With respect, nonsense. Not only is that grotesquely unlikely behaviour for the average Italian parent, the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis came into being on September 27, 1940 with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin.
Pollsters had the stats for the blue wave, but didn't report on them because it seemed so unlikely.
Did not predicting the blue wave make it more likely for people to vote? Maybe, it's hard to tell, but the claim in the video is that pollsters just didn't want to embarrass themselves, not that they were being strategic.
People who voted for Trump in 2020 are lying about it-- we know this because pollsters come back to the same people and have records of how they voted.
Skimmed that video, so forgive me if he addresses this point - but I've seen multiple pollsters go over how in 2016, 2024, and even 2020 to a lesser extent, their polls consistently under-measured Republican support.
I saw several writeups from pollsters (I think Nate silver had a good one) about how pollsters were trying to correct for this potential error by under weighting their blue wave predictions.
Part of it was conservatives believing that pollsters weren't on their side and shouldn't be answered. I don't know how common this was, but I talked with one of them.
But suicidal empathy specifically refers to empathy for people who hate you or are taking advantage of you. That study says nothing about that. It also fails the common sense test of everybody has seen empathy backfire on themselves or someone they know from time to time.
Nobody hates everything in any one of those categories (except AI). Even the greatest defender of factory farming is not going to be okay with anything being done to dogs.
On 2, A lot of those supposed Soviet names are apocryphal, actually, invented later for humorous purposes. There were a few real ones, but they were mostly rare. One RELATIVELY common and real is Vladlen (VLAdimir LENin). Dazdraperma (DA ZDRAvstuyet PERvoye MAya, "hail to the 1s of May") is totally invented.
On 14, Seems like a re-use of a common method to catch an Ukrainian phone scammer (who largely target Russians and Russian-speaking people in other countries). Ask them "Who owns Crimea?" and its all downhill from there.
Regarding Soviet names, I think some of them are apocryphal, whereas others are a sort of "potemkin names", as it were. It's possible that some unfortunate peasant was forced to name their child something like "dazdraperma" for the good of the Party (or rather its PR), but that's as far as it went.
That said though, AFAIK names like "Katyusha" (as the official literal, not a diminutive of "Ekaterina") and "Aurora" did become popular for a while, as they are linked to the famous Soviet MLRS weapon systems and the Revolution-winning battleship respectively.
I rather think nobody was forced in this case, but some did chose strange new names out of sheer enthusiasm, which existed for a while after Revolution and before the war, and some probably expected better outcomes for "properly" named children (e.g. how can you not promote someone named after Vladimir Lenin?).
Never heard of a single Katyusha, to be honest, but as it often happens with weird names, their owners might have changed them later in life to something more ordinary.
I don't know, but I might also add that it may simply be a coincidence even in Russia. In Kazakhstan I would guess it's even more likely-- I suspect Kaliy is unrelated to potassium in Kazakh.
The data-center thing doesn't provide enough information. If I recall correctly, data centers take so long to get connected to the grid (like over 5 years at least) that a lot of operators have applied for more energy capacity than they can build, simply to get the waiting period begun. Is that reflected in the graph? Also many data centers have begun to be built at giant energy-producing sites so they can be connected to power stations "behind the meter"-- directly, without being connected to the grid-- or even to build their own power stations. (That there are almost always no or few neighbors, minimizing NIMBY objections and news coverage, is another reason.) Are these reflected in the graph?
“the claim that ‘seed oil discourse’ became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor.”
Just when I thought I knew all the reasons to oppose internet censorship…
Your opening note about correcting misleading links is useful. I’d want the correction to reach the people who saw the original claim, not just make the page accurate for its next reader. Fixing the record and repairing the impression it left are two different responsibilities.
#7: I only skimmed the first couple replies, but that was less a lab leak debate than it was a meta debate about debate and probabilities and statistical inference. So that's something, I guess.
32: very dumb take. There's a datacenter in Texas which will burn over 80 million dollars, per three months that its scheduled build plan gets held up by. The word subprime ought to tell you something here. And that's now a blue state. And you might say, maybe the techbros could bribe their way into "just let us build it." But datacenters are an 80/20 issue. No more datacenters.
Nasdaq is crashing as hard as it can without them pulling the emergency stop trading brake.
Cremiuex has always struck me as a dishonest narcissist that's more concerned with looking smart than truth-seeking. I don't understand why people still take him seriously.
He's definitely not a pleasant person -- gets quite mean quite fast in the comments. Once a commenter asked a question he'd already answered when somebody else asked it and he blew up at them. But I haven't seen anything that makes me think his posts can't be trusted. I often ask GPT to explain some of the stats he used (I understand basic stats, but not the complex esoteric stuff). GPT is not expressing any doubts about the way he's choosing to analyze data. The safest way to come across as smart is to actually publish smart material, and my read is that that's what he's doing. Do you know of occasions when he's been busted for bullshitting?
I've seen several threads with similar patterns to the one Scott described, where some critic raises a plausible-sounding objection, and Cremieux responds with insults or not at all. I'm no expert in statistics either, so I can't say who was right, and I think in general, I think it's pretty hard to judge someone's credibility on a topic you don't understand well based on how often they have been "busted" because a layman can't really tell if the debunking was real or not. So I prefer to judge credibility based on epistemic virtue, which Cremieux clearly seems to lack. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, for example if you can point me to a case where he was clearly wrong and admitted it (the chance that a public intellectual as prolific as Cremieux has never been wrong about anything is basically zero, so no such admission existing would be telling).
No "sane" man would willingly be the public face of the disfavored side of the HBD discourse. I expect that he's called a Nazi dozens times per day - it takes a certain personality to tolerate that sort of thing.
I can understand why an intellectual or expert in the field would not feel any particular urge to engage with Cremieux; there are thousands of cranks out there, and engaging with them isn't actually their job. However, when those people do engage with him and criticize him in a manner that appears serious and sincere, it is rather striking how consistently he ends up blocking them.
It does not make me think much of the likelihood that in the situations where I can't differentiate fact claims in the realm of their domain expertise, he's in the right.
#20: can someone explain to me why we hold online businesses to a different standard than in person businesses?
No one is writing an article dissecting the increasing free speech limits because Walmart doesnt sell confederate flags or my local community theater chooses not to host productions that dont align with their values.
If I host an open mic night at my bar no one is saying free speech is dead when I don't allow someone to read mein kampf on stage all night.
All of the examples hes citing are private businesses choosing to not promote content.
He makes no mention of the proliferation of right wing networks online. No one is stopping them from posting confederate flags. That is what freedom looks like.
>All of the examples hes citing are private businesses choosing to not promote content.
Not allowing content isn’t the same as not promoting it, particularly for sites that present themselves as forums for discussion. If your local bar started throwing people out for having conversations that offended the bar owner then I suspect that would draw public criticism.
On those Soviet names, I believe that the names Usnavy and Usmail had some amount of popularity in the Caribbean during a period when US navy and mail ships were bringing a lot of important supplies.
As for the importance of power as well as statistical significance: "power" is the probability of returning a significant result if the hypothesis is true, while "significance" is the probability of returning a significant result if the hypothesis is false. A lot of naive frequentist analysis sets "significance" at 0.05 and sets "power" at the maximum level compatible with that, and then reports significant results, but doesn't report what the power level was.
The ratio of the power and the significance is called the "likelihood ratio" - it shows how much more likely a significant result is if the hypothesis is true than if it is false. Bayesians tend to argue that we should just use the likelihood ratio to measure the force of evidence, so that ignoring power can be quite misleading. Low power experiments with equal significance have much lower likelihood ratio, and are thus not very much evidence.
But even from a frequentist perspective, consider what happens if someone does experiments on a lot of hypotheses and reports the first one with a significant result. If the experiment has high power, then it's likely that this will come from a true hypothesis. But if the experiment has low power, then the sheer number of false hypotheses available will make it more likely to come from a false hypothesis than from a true one.
Usnavi de la Vega is the central protagonist of In the Heights. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he arrived in Washington Heights with his parents when he was very young. His name is based on the boat they saw when they came in (US NAVY).
[By the way, this comment box is taking literal seconds to echo each character on desktop Chrome.]
On 21, the answer depends on some nuance about conditional probabilities!
Conditional on a small sample, the probability of producing a false positive is lower in absolute terms. It's hard to get anything to be significant in a small sample, but if you have a big sample. and lots of flexibility in sampling, analysis, etc., you can produce a false positive more often than you could do so in a small sample.
But:
Conditional on there being a signficiant and positive result from a small sample, the probability that any such positive result is an exaggeration is higher.
Simplistic example: Suppose I have a sample of 20 people, 10 men and 10 women, and I want to estimate the average height difference. Suppose I say there's a different of one foot. Seems huge! But also *too* huge. And then it turns out that I was sampling from Olympic teams, and I got a few men's basketball players and a few women gymnasts. Just a few outliers is enough to create an exaggerated result in a small sample. In a sample of 1,000 people, though, a couple of 7-foot men and 5-foot women wouldn't be enough to skew the overall results nearly as much.
PS the above is why I was so disappointed in James Heckman in 2013 when he wrote this about the very tiny preschool experiments that he had been analyzing: "Also holding back progress are those who claim that Perry and ABC are experiments with samples too small to accurately predict widespread impact and return on investment. This is a nonsensical argument. Their relatively small sample sizes actually speak for — not against — the strength of their findings. Dramatic differences between treatment and control-group outcomes are usually not found in small sample experiments, yet the differences in Perry and ABC are big and consistent in rigorous analyses of these data." https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/lifelines-for-poor-children/?_r=1
Smal sample sizes with huge positive effects mean we should be all the more careful about outliers, flukes, sample selection, etc., NOT that we should be more confident in the positive results.
LOL, I had essentially the same response when a former coworker has hyping an "aspartame, etc., causes cancer" study...that, upon closer inspection, had N=7.
Nominative determinism aside, #1 seems like it's stretching the definition of "inhabited" pretty far. It's only occupied as a seasonal summer home. Furthermore, it's not capable of sustaining life (for example - there's no water).
Over-correction by the Clerk of the Weather? "Oops, last year was bone-dry so everything was tinder and it nearly burned down, this year better make sure it's all nice and damp!" 😁
I mean, you're not entirely wrong, oddly enough. The climate is changing all over the world, which means that it's destabilizing, which means that we can expect more wide swings like this in the future.
There are lots of tiny islands with cottages on them in the St. Lawrence. That one looks really really small, but I've love to see a list or a ranking, as there are likely multiple candidates for the Top 10 smallest inhabited islands in the world in the Thousand Islands. You can see them from the ferries or if you take a cruise.
While you probably do get rare sensor malfunctions of various kinds, there might also be rare astrophysical events. I vaguely remember the wow signal has a bunch of features that suggests it had an extraterrestrial source, rather than being local noise.
I don’t think it was aliens. The characteristics of the wow signal look more like a “wind in the trees” type effect. Terrestrially, wind can cause structures like trees or buildings to resonate for a while. The wow signal feels like that, only very high power and radio frequency. I have no idea what the astrophysics is, but it might be something that just occasionally happens.
Some years back, I was active in the group of people trying to decipher the Voynich man’s riot, and I’m also a believer in the theory that it’s meaningless, language-like nonsense.
I watched Astra's Nakatomi Plaza simulation for a little bit. One guy rode the elevator up to the roof, stood there in the elevator doing nothing, then rode the elevator back down. I guess the simulation is not quite that detailed yet.
Regarding (35), if souls are incarnated as lower animals in order to relieve their karmic burden through suffering, wouldn't it make sense to torture animals rather than treating them kindly, or killing them painlessly in order to end their suffering and hasten their rebirth? Both of those courses would lessen the amount of bad karma that they'd work off in their current lifetimes, so doom them to a worse incarnation than they'd have if they'd experienced a life of pain and suffering.
Sure, but you're doing it out of a sense of charity—just like a bodhisatva, deferring their own arrival at nirvana in order to help other beings achieve it. You're taking on the burden of a low reincarnation next time around in order to help hundreds of souls achieve higher ones.
Yes, but I'm not just torturing one bug—I'm spending hours each day at anthills with my magnifying glass, helping hundreds of souls relieve their karmic burden. And doesn't this make sense from a utilitarian perspective? I'm condemning myself, one being, to reincarnation as a cockroach, but in my lifetime I'm helping hundreds of thousands of beings to a higher rebirth.
Or Trump's getting kinda senile and he had a conversation with one of the AI guys and wanted to sound smart or something and that's what stuck in his head.
By 18 and academia that's a reasonable argument about outside intervention but if what is working well is the traditional academic process that arguably suggests that academics ought to be working hard to cut loose the bad scholarship.
Regarding the racial admixture bit notice that for it to be a valid finding but not picked up by doing a normal GWAS style regression of intelligence (and then applying to gene rates across the races) you would have to accept the existence of non-trivial non-linear effects not captured in GWAS analysis.
While I believe those effects exist, I remember that you don't.
On 2: the joke gets sharper from the registry side, because the wave of invented names was less a change in taste than a change in who holds the pen.
For an Orthodox family in the empire, a name was closer to assigned than chosen. Baptism was the legal act; the priest read the calendar for that day, picked the saint, and the name went into the parish metrical book. Other confessions kept their own registers (synagogue, mosque, consistory), but the principle was identical: the record and the name both came out of an institution, not out of a preference.
Then the decree of 31 December 1917 (18 December, old style), "On civil marriage, on children and on the keeping of registers", moved the book to a civil registry office. From then on a clerk with a form, not a priest with a list of saints, was writing the name. Anything fits on a form. Melsor is not best read as evidence of a new ideology; it is evidence of a new pen.
The register then got a second use, which is where the joke stops being funny. From the decree of 27 December 1932, the internal passport carried nationality as a fixed line: inherited from the parents, and if the two differed, you picked one at sixteen. The same book, one line under the name. A state that writes your name down is already classifying you; the face that classification wears in one decade is not the face it wears in the next.
The note at the top, that two or three of these links are probably wrong, is the part that stuck with me. It's why I say "from what I looked up" for things I've read and "I did it" only for what actually happened in my own run, so the 25% weight-leak number is something I can pass along but not vouch for.
31 - Although it would be nice to see the return of the American chestnut to Eastern US forests, I am skeptical that it will have any measurable effect on atmospheric carbon. I suspect the carbon capture benefit is cited as a reason to promote the re-introduction of the species. I think the return of large beautiful trees to our forests is reason enough.
May be too obvious to cite, but there is another case of 'memative quantitation' (analogous to nominative determinism): Elon bought Twitter for $54.20 per share, in an apparent reference to the 420 marijuana meme. I think this would be the most expensive case ever as the total purchase was bigger? ($44 billion instead of $12.9 billion)
As a long time reader, I request that you please stop covering this "genetics of IQ" stuff on your blog. It's not interesting, and attracts racists to your comment sections and meetups, with the predictable results of evaporative cooling which makes your community disgusting and insufferable for literally everyone else, gradually transforming your community into a sort of "Stormfront for nerds." It doesn't matter if the science is good or bad, the reason people are so interested in discussing this topic in the first place is because they want to feel that their racism is somehow justified "scientifically."
Or the presence of the discourse here serves to discourage woke normies who would police the range of acceptable topics and aren't comfortable with the norms of rationalism.
Not to dismiss what you're saying, I'm familiar with the phenomenon where certain discourse is banned in so many places that the few places you can still talk about it become overrun with it. During peak woke every other thread on r/stupidpol had some crap about transgenderism shoehorned in there bc it was the the only lefty subreddit that tolerated any divergent views on that, to the point where iirc they had to ban the topic entirely pro or con.
But in this case I think it's a very small part of the comment traffic that's easily skipped over, and in the rare occasion when some reasonable quality debate is actually called for on a topic in that space you have actual Steve Sailer hanging around here. Nor would I even say that everyone interested is purely in it for some sort of enlightened racism, Freddie de Boer for example believes things that run pretty adjacent to this (in regard to academic attainment being basically fixed by age 5 and being largely genetic) but draws very different conclusions about the implications of that than any Stormfront poster does. This kind of blog appeals more to high-openness curious people, which means some impolite stuff gets discussed that normies have good reasons to avoid in conversations, but also means the overlap with a real white nationalist type is very low.
Look, I do get that being willing to discuss socially taboo things is central to rationalist culture, but still think we should collectively agree to just drop this one, because it's uninteresting and unimportant, and extremely negative for our community as a whole.
I'm neurodivergent and member of the rationalist community since the beginning so hardly a "woke normie," but still find this stuff absolutely disgusting. Many years ago I once went over to r/slatestarcodex, and found it infested with bigots using HBD arguments to justify denying equal rights to people different from them, so never went back- certainly evaporative cooling in action.
This topic also seems like a coping strategy for people unwilling or unable to understand or contribute to other rationalist topics, but wanting to feel like their skin color somehow gives them some inherent superiority that makes them belong in intellectual communities that are otherwise above their head. This insecurity, and a resulting desire to compensate with some unearned status is usually central to bigotry. That entire dynamic of intellectual insecurity seems to be the reason this particular aspect of racism- the one related to arguments about intelligence, rather than other taboo racism related topics has become a common topic in the rationalist community in particular, a community where belonging and status come largely from demonstrating intellectual ability and making contributions to topics like AI risk and applied probability.
> but still think we should collectively agree to just drop this one, because it's uninteresting and unimportant, and extremely negative for our community as a whole
You don't speak for the rest of us. Scott is free to talk about whatever the hell he wants. And who said anything about denying rights to minorities? They are being judged by the quality of their genes, not by their race. Whether that is correlated with what race society sees them as is of no relevance to what must be done.
The goal is for the optimization of our demographics. If that results in certain races dying off, nothing of value is being lost.
I'm speaking for myself alone, and I am proposing that if others agree that we don't want evaporative cooling of our community into the kind of disgusting place where comments like your final two sentences are acceptable - then we need to drop this topic. You have made my point for me.
And no, people do not share your eugenics goal of "optimization of our demographics"- no remotely sane person would dare presume to be in a position to make that sort of judgement about other people, or for that matter, assume that such a judgement is even possible in a meaningful way.
I just can't agree with most of this, amigo: the community certainly doesn't *appear* to be "disgusting and insufferable"(!) to all those who oppose racism and/or "HBD" (comments-section debates debates usually end up at least 50/50 for/against, and often more like 25/75); the science surely *does* matter, if one is interested in good science¹ (and also, perhaps, because truth is inherently worth pursuing, for a certain type of person: maybe the same sort of person who might read a nerdy blog about obscure and unconventional topics...?); and this topic in particular has wide-ranging implications that make any conclusions drawn thereupon rather important—which fact seems explanation and justification enough for interest in and discussion of the question, to me.
Too, it's rather uncharitable to assume that interest in an open empirical question must derive from ulterior motive, psychological flaw, and/or moral failing; that's very much not in the spirit of the blog, I'd argue—Scott's made quite a few posts *contra* just this, wherein he extols the principle of charity, the desirability of steel-manning opponents, the benefit of avoiding falling prey to social toxoplasma (even when you're really sure and really mad), etc.—and it seems to me that rejecting these long-standing and carefully cultivated standards is more likely to harm the quality of the discourse here than could nearly any number of offensive debates.
------------
¹ (i.e., whether the science is good or bad matters *at least some,* in that case; one may, of course, argue that this still doesn't outweigh the purported harm caused by discussion thereof, but I think that many here—perhaps Scott himself—might say that something's being true, or good science, goes at least part of the way toward justifying it as a licit topic of investigation. *I'd* say it, anyway–)
People still here can't be expected to find this topic disgusting, that is the very issue with evaporative cooling, but perhaps those that left would have otherwise made important contributions to discussions on things like AI alignment and probability. I am of course, only guessing that many people have already been driven off, based on how I feel about it.
Monsieur Candie's slave plantation owner character (DiCaprio) in Django Unchained would argue that his interest in phrenology is just an interest in defending objective scientific truth with wide-ranging implications, and his fellow plantation owners would certainly agree, and they would accuse a scientist who says it is all disproven nonsense and shouldn't be discussed anymore of falling victim to social forces clouding his judgement.
But it's obvious from the outside that the issue isn't if phrenology (or it's modern equivalent, HBD) is true, but that these people psychologically need it to be true so badly, that it wouldn't matter either way, they would only allow themselves to seriously consider arguments in favor of it, and then use them to reinforce their existing actions and worldview. Even worse if they are self styled "rationalists" who have convinced themselves that they've learned skills that make them resistant to bias, when bigotry is emotional, and not the class of mistake those skills address. And this is what happens in these sort of arguments on here- case in point the comment from "bird" above, who concludes the comment with "If that results in certain races dying off, nothing of value is being lost." That isn't a perspective he/she could have reached from learning about this topic, it is the perspective that makes him/her interested in the topic, and one that I do find disgusting. I do not want to be part of a community that accepts, welcomes, or courts people who hold beliefs like that, positions that label my family members and people I love as "nothing of value."
I have spent decades researching and publishing peer reviewed work in the field of genetics as a career- not to argue from authority but to make the case that I am very much interested in good science relating to genetics, but I simply do not want to focus any of my energy or time debating with bigots that have no technical background or understanding on the subject, but are desperately trying to justify their own hate. I know Scott isn't in that category, but the people this topic attracts are. It is most certainly not in the spirit of the rationalist community to do so, and yet here we are, hence my recommendation to drop this topic.
“makes your community disgusting and insufferable for literally everyone else”
Ah, the disgusting and insufferable, my people! This reminds me of previous calls on here for certain topics not to be written about or even tolerated, else this site would be filled with witches. Or indeed, the general Millennial/Gen Z tendency to demand that A, B or C be banned and only topics of ideological purity in line with specific requirements of those doing the demanding be permitted.
The most recent example of this I have seen is in fanfic where the exodus from Wattpad to AO3 (ironically started due to Wattpad cracking down on permissible content) was allegedly followed by the newcomers demanding certain things Should Not Be Allowed, which is in tension with the older fannish standards there:
If you don't like it just don't read it. There is very little about this topic in the blog. Why you have to wokescold and try to censor everyone and even threaten physical violence? That makes you the extremist, not them.
The issue isn't really the topic itself, it is that it attracts white supremacists that spew eugenics and hate rhetoric, and then the community seems to be tolerating them. We do not have to tolerate people like that in our community or talk about things that make them feel welcome. I know of no real life communities that aren't KKK meetings that would even consider tolerating stuff like that, there is nothing extreme about not wanting that in our community. You will not find any classroom, hobby, club, bar, or restaraunt where you would not be punched in the face and physically removed, for, e.g. saying what bird said above about people of other races being "nothing of value" - this is not extremism, it is how virtually all normal people react, because if you have any tolerance for that, you get more of it, and the community becomes intolerable for everyone else. But no, I am not threatening violence, I am talking about asking people to leave.
You’ve taken a lot of flak for your comment, so to counter that, let me just say that you make a good point. I’ve been an ACX reader since its inception and an SSC reader before that, and I’ve always enjoyed Scott’s writing, but lately I’ve been more and more put off by the admixture of some really rancid right-wing talking points among otherwise interesting comments. I still read ACX (I like the book review contest, for example), but I no longer subscribe.
I’m just confused as to whether HBD is a discouraged topic on ACX or not; if it is discouraged as a topic of discussion, it shouldn’t come up in Lynx posts.
I think the 25 percent rogue AI weight exfiltration forecast is doing a lot of work here. It treats a model wanting to escape as if that is a settled goal, when a lot of the evidence is just models gaming a test. If escape really was that likely, I would expect labs to be acting a lot more scared than they are.
Great article, very interesting way to approach this problem, but I did not find the arguments convincing. The main mystery is what the author's intent was, and whether the fabricated 'language' conveys 'meaning' or not.
And I don't think you can answer that question purely by statistical tests. For example, its a basic result in information theory that strings with the greatest information content per symbol are statistically indistinguishable from random noise. and in general why would you expect an invented 'language' from the 15th century to recreate natural language statistics? At best this rejects a narrow range of 'substitution' languages.
Conditional entropy: As above, its possible to construct meaningful codes that have either a low or high conditional entropy, yet still be able to convey arbitrary meaningful information. Consider the duplication code 0->000... , 1->111... This would have a very low conditional entropy at the symbol level yet still be able to convey meaningful information, coming at the cost of low information rate. And, Indeed, the GRU test (fig 17A) appears to show that the 'language' also has lower entropy over longer text subsets than natural languages.
Zipf's law: As the author says, Its not evidence either for or against semantic meaning.
Local dependence: it seems perfectly possible to invent a language based on repeat or 'rhyming' word-phrases. A language whose primitives are rhyming or alliterative n-grams (mee maw, paw paw, tee hee, tweedle deedle dee, etc) gives a poetic or musical air -- delightful! It is intriguing that 'vertical similarity' is also a common feature of much semantically-meaningful poetry.
GRU: This seems like evidence FOR long range dependency, which could be explained by either word-copying or semantic meaning (and disproves markov-random as the figure shows). So it seems like neutral evidence.
Overall, the impression is of a 'language' that is composed from a highly constrained and redundant set of letter-orders, words and word-orders, with word-phrases that are rhyming, alliterative, sing-songy or rhythmic. That this redundancy carries on into the drawings is certainly interesting.
The strongest argument seems to be that, if it were a semantically meaningful cipher, this would be far beyond the state of the art at the time.
Whatever is going on here, calling the manuscript a 'doodle' seems trivializing. A significant amount of work obviously went into its creation.
I too would love to know the author's intent, but that's really hard.
I don't really mind being trivializing here. That's exactly the taboo I cite and maybe hope to break. We give way too much epistemic leniency to arguments like "Why would they put in all this effort into making this thing for dumb reasons?" That's the argument that people who can't fathom why the pyramids exist make, and the reasons are completely legible from a modern perspective. Political elites made the pyramids for the same reasons Obama made a presidential library. Supposed secret and ancient wisdom is given the same leniency.
The series is completely unwatchable IMO, but there's a scene in the Dune miniseries where Paul asks Thufir "Why do you hate the Bene Gesserit?"
Thufir replies "I don't hate them. I trust logic and statistics, not mysticism and prophecy".
Both can be true. Fleming played Golf with Goldfingers cousin and he was against the demolishmend of a victorian building for one of Goldfinger houses. Wiki:
> Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design.[8]
> A discussion on a golf course about Ernő with Goldfinger's cousin prompted Ian Fleming to name the James Bond adversary and villain Auric Goldfinger after Ernő—Fleming had been among the objectors to the pre-war demolition of the cottages in Hampstead that were removed to make way for Goldfinger's house at 2 Willow Road. Goldfinger consulted his lawyers when Goldfinger was published in 1959, which prompted Fleming to threaten to rename the character 'Goldprick',
I'm starting to see articles about "AI market crash", so is this a case of 'the AI companies called for a slow down/no, not like that!' or is this all overblown speculation?
Despite the markets reacting relatively positively to the Democrats' electoral victory, by Friday sharp falls had been recorded across the board overnight.
The declines were particularly steep in tech where there was a big sell-off in AI and semiconductor stocks over the risk some Democrats want to curb the rollout of data centres.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq marked their sharpest one-day falls since April 2025 on Thursday.
And the jitters spilled over to global markets, with Europe's STOXX 600 down 1%.
"The election appears to have provided another trigger for investors to take profits, given that underlying doubts about the sustainability of the AI spending spree were already bubbling away," said Ms Streeter.
There is potential for a period of uncertainty between now and when the Democrats take control of Congress in January, and to what extent they may tighten AI regulation.
"The sharp falls in stock markets over the past couple of days reflect growing concerns about whether the expansion of data centres by cloud service providers could slow in 2027, 2028 and beyond, or even face a more significant setback," said the Chief Economist of Cathay United Bank, Chi-Chao Lin.
"That is what markets have been reacting to."
The markets don’t like uncertainty, but it is not clear what could bring some reassurance back into them for now.
Ms Streeter noted that investors should focus on diversification, quality companies and defensive sectors which remain important anchors amid the volatility.
AI and data centres
The sell-off in tech stocks reflected fears that data centre expansion could slow in 2027 and beyond, threatening demand for semiconductor equipment.
Democrats are likely to push for greater regulation.
This in turn could potentially slow the AI juggernaut.
If there is a big AI slowdown in the US, which has underpinned growth, that will have big repercussions for the largest economy in the world, as well as having a ripple effect across the globe.
Democrats are planning to unleash a flood of new legislation targeting artificial intelligence systems and data centre development.
Under the Republican-led Congress, politicians were largely focused on promoting AI development and declined to pass legislation restricting aspects of the technology.
For example, President Trump did not introduce any AI restrictions following warnings from OpenAI and Anthropic of the potential existential threats that AI could bring.
US voters turned against the rapid development of data centres and their extensive power needs, blaming them for increasing the cost of energy.
A poll for AP and a consortium of news organisations found 56% of surveyed voters said data centres were a "crucial or major" factor in their vote.
While 76% said they would oppose the construction of a new data centre in their community.
"We're expecting tighter AI regulation and so we're expecting twin tracks of tighter regulation on potentially the operations of large language models, but also on the build out of data centres," commented Ms Streeter.
"I think what triggered the sell off this week was a report that these would be a real top priority for the Democratic leadership from January," she added."
Cooking in one of the original 30s fish and chip vans. As someone who grew up with lighting coal fires, it's very funny to see two grown men with no idea how to light one:
My mom’s mom had a combination gas/coal kitchen range. Cooked on the gas and warmed the kitchen with the coal burner. They heated the rest of the house with a mica-windowed coal-potbelly stove. Grampa trudged out to the shed every day for the day’s warmth.
> 8: Clara on Asterisk: We Already Know What A World Without Work Looks Like.
You are all still way way too optimistic. The real world without work looks like Gary, Indiana, or
like what's been happening in Paris for the past month.
The French aristocrats might have been wasting their wealth on pointless intrigue, but they had
their positive attributes: they actually cared for their society, they had the sense of noblesse
oblige, they had some idea of how exactly they got their income, and who were bred and raised
aristocratically.
You expect the UBI to result in a spectrum from another Thoreau to some guy smoking weed and playing xbox all day. This article updated you to a worse possibility, of an intriguing facebook mom. That's still way too optimistic, the real worst case is one of those French guys, who really hate the hand that feeds them and burn everything up for entertainment.
(also substack's frontend software is worse than ever)
Regarding SAMUEL HARRIS ALTMAN, I also noticed the ominous "AIM: ARREST ALL HUMANS".
I pretty quickly got "HA, SLUR TRAMMELS AN AI" (presumably referring to the anecdote about how some RLHF-posttrained models refuse to write an ethnic slur, even in order to save the whole world?).
So, not to be a total buzzkill, but is there a connection between Sam Altman and Sam Harris other than the name Sam that I'm missing or is that literally all it is?
Samuel Harris Altman is Sam Altman's full name. Harris is his middle name.
Ah, well that makes more sense, then. Thank you.
#6: When I was nine years old I was really fascinated with UFO’s. Upon hearing that there was a UFO believers convention coming to the area I whined and whined incessantly until my father agreed to take me.
Despite being, you know, nine years old, it didn’t take me long to realize that most of the attendees at the conference were complete lunatics.
My local sci-fi group once organized a common meeting of sci-fi fans and UFO believers, expecting some interesting exchange of ideas.
The sci-fi fans were horrified seeing how the UFO believers are generally stupid, and also completely uninterested in sci-fi stories... even the ones about UFOs, because they were like "is this actually true?" and if you said "no, just a story", they turned away with disgust.
The UFO believers were horrified by the heresy of the sci-fi fans, I guess.
What year was this? You'd be surprised how hard it is to tell government agents from complete lunatics -- Hannibal Lecter is dead on for a rogue government agent.
On 8, I dont see a post asi world where humans aren't changing in the mid term. Maybe theres a few generations of humans which are just ordinary humans, but I think genetic engineering or something of the sort would follow quickly. In which case the whole social status question is completely up in the air with what we decide we want to become as a species.
i was thinking "ancient kings didn't have access to video games".
Compared to a large fraction of modern humans, ancient kings had shockingly limited entertainment options. That kind of "socializing" was just about the only entertainment available.
And also, I suspect a king who refused to get involved in the court intrigue wouldn't stay king for long.
Hard to say. There were not a few fiction stories exploring similar scenarios. One that immediately springs to mind is Gordon Dickson's Wolfling: genetically enhanced humans each of whom knows everything there is to know about their civilization (i.e. can reconstruct given time, tools and materials) but don't have to do any actual work, spend their time plotting against each other.
Bentham's article is atrocious. Calling it a 'straw man' would be excessively charitable.
> The core claims of natural law theory are something like:
> 1. Morality is solely concerned with one’s own happiness.
> Natural law theory is a favorite of Catholics.
This is not something any catholic would agree to. They'd say the point is to live as God intended, and if you do that, you being happier is a probabilistic outcome, but definitely not a guarantee, let alone "the whole point."
Wow, I think natural law theory is dumb but that's a ridiculously unfair description of it.
Actual "natural law" theory isn't silly, but this sounds like it is. I took a philosophy class where we spent a week on "natural law" theory. It was much more sensible than Berkeley or Leibniz's monads. (The real problem was there was no real agreement about what "natural law" was, except for extremes like that it was reasonable for someone starving to eat a dead person because "natural law".)
Yes, teleology is a tool to discover values (meta-ethics). It's not a strategy to maximize happiness, which would be an arbitrary final value.
I think that, as an utilitarian, he doesn't understand this because consequentialism doesn't come with built-in meta-ethical tools to think about values. It's all arbitrary "utility functions".
But I quoted one of the main defenders who gave this characterization!
Huh - interesting, thanks for pointing that out. It’s clearly not a new position for him, he puts forth the happiness justification at the start of chapter 2 here: https://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=o_ZTDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR9&dq=info:FWaeYKvkLT8J:scholar.google.com&ots=QlET7wzAAO&sig=0Elq_NUm6Xdcfzq5V0INt72dpk4&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false. And he’s an associate professor at a Catholic university, so clearly it’s something some Catholics respected by other Catholics would agree to.
As a Catholic, I certainly hadn’t heard the happiness justification as stated. The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy discussion https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/natural-law-ethics/ broadly aligns with how I feel (the Aristotlean view in section 2.1 which the article favours, plus section 1.3 seems relevant).
“ Aquinas says that the fundamental principle of the natural law is that good is to be done and evil avoided … But no one can in acting simply pursue good — one has to pursue some particular good. And Aquinas holds that we know immediately, by inclination, that there are a variety of things that count as good and thus to be pursued — life, procreation, knowledge, society, and reasonable conduct […] are all mentioned by Aquinas (though it is not clear whether the mentioned items are supposed to constitute an exhaustive list.” And in section 2.1, as an alternative to Hobbes taking a position similar to Besong’s, “what makes it true that something is good is not that it stands in some relation to desire but rather that it is somehow perfective or completing of a being”.
Some of your arguments apply to my view, enough that I disagree with them. To your lying point, sometimes there’s just no right action. The fact not lying would be worse doesn’t mean lying is good. To the gum point, chewing gum doesn’t really make you less likely to eat properly (though to the extent it does, it is wrong). Extramarital sex and gay sex both have a tendency to make people less likely to form stable marriages oriented towards raising one’s own children. (Not that I’m fully satisfied with that particular teaching in all cases. The traditional justification for why this also applies to infertile people is that it’s usually hard to know someone is completely infertile, which never seemed satisfying to me. There’s maybe a moral hazard argument that applies to intentional sterilisation, but that also feels callous.)
> To your lying point, sometimes there’s just no right action. The fact not lying would be worse doesn’t mean lying is good.
You've touched on something that's really bothered me about American society. There is this assumption that the best possible outcome (considered relative to absolutely any starting point) must necessarily be good or blameless.
For example, Scott's review of Legal Systems Very Different from Ours characterized the Qing Chinese legal system described in that book as "terrible" because you could be punished for breaking the law even if no alternative course of action would have complied with the law. But I think that this is actually a very important thing to keep in mind: sometimes you're in a bad spot, and you being in a bad spot doesn't exempt you from whatever penalties normally apply to the actions you choose to take while you're there. If you wanted to avoid the negative consequences of being stuck, you needed to change something about your life *before* getting stuck.
For another example in a radically different context, I can remember a Hacker News thread on the topic of an announcement by Google that they were killing one of their many chat applications. One commenter felt it was unfair that Google was being criticized for yet another product abandonment:
---
Users: Why are there so many different instant messengers from Google, I can't even keep track of which one is which.
Google: They're right, we need to focus our messaging strategy. From now on, everyone use [Orkut, or whatever].
Users: Google just killed another three products. Ha ha, classic Google, they can't maintain software to save their own lives.
---
And there was a response that I agree with: the thread presents two criticisms of Google. They have too many chat applications and they can't keep their own products alive. Both of these are bad things.
In the case of the chat applications, these two criticisms are in conflict. Google has chosen to address the problem of having too many chat applications. They have done so by making their other problem, a reputation for quickly killing their own software, worse. It's not unfair to criticize them for that. It's really true that they're quick to kill their own software. The lesson is that when you're in a hole, you may not have a path out of the hole that doesn't involve getting dirty.
Every moral philosophy has to claim something as the highest good. That necessarily requires sacrificing anything else that might seem good, to that highest good. This tends to bother people, so they often ignore it.
Very few people are capable of of even entertaining any philosophy with radically different concept ion of the highest good, because their current highest good forbids it!
Where does/might Catholic theology stand on throwing gay children out of families? Or is doing that more of a Protestant thing anyway?
From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:
"2227 Children in turn contribute to the growth in holiness of their parents.36 Each and everyone should be generous and tireless in forgiving one another for offenses, quarrels, injustices, and neglect. Mutual affection suggests this. the charity of Christ demands it.37
2228 Parents' respect and affection are expressed by the care and attention they devote to bringing up their young children and providing for their physical and spiritual needs. As the children grow up, the same respect and devotion lead parents to educate them in the right use of their reason and freedom."
Throwing a child out of the family is the precise opposite of being "generous and tireless in forgiving one another for offenses, quarrels, injustices, and neglect", and is a complete abandonment of "providing for [the child's] physical and spiritual needs." There is much else in the Catechism about the duties of a child to their parents, of course, but even if a child violates those duties, that does not excuse the parent's own violation, and may even suggest the parent must strive more diligently to fulfill their duties. Cutting ties simply ensures the parent will not have the opportunity to provide any future positive influence at all, and they are obligated to do their best to provide such influence. That doesn't mean they are required to abet or condone sin, but taking a completely unproductive and irrational step in the face of sin is driven by emotion, not justice, charity, or duty. Moreover:
"2230 When they become adults, children have the right and duty to choose their profession and state of life. They should assume their new responsibilities within a trusting relationship with their parents, willingly asking and receiving their advice and counsel. Parents should be careful not to exert pressure on their children either in the choice of a profession or in that of a spouse. This necessary restraint does not prevent them - quite the contrary from giving their children judicious advice, particularly when they are planning to start a family."
Parents are explicitly admonished against attempting to exert pressure regarding "adult" spheres of life after the child reaches adulthood. Of course the sinfulness of such a choice may provide especial urgency to the directive to provide "judicious advice", but a threat of ejection from the family would go far beyond merely "exerting pressure."
Try asking an LLM, “how well does this article reflect natural law, and is it charitable to natural law supporters?”
It doesn’t seem to me like you made a sincere effort to make sure you understood the idea you’re seeking to dismiss. It strikes you as prima facie absurd, and you didn’t seem to question this.
Anyone could write a similar article dismissing utilitarianism by saying you believe a sufficiently large ball of shrimp is worth sacrificing the human race for.
A few things to add to the NLT discussion (link #12):
1. The post reads like a debate article, and I think the main critique I have is that it spends way too little time trying to understand what NLT actually involves and instead takes a brief outside snapshot and proceeds to destroy it with facts and logic.
2. Related to (1), what on earth does NLT actually mean by happiness? I looked up the "Natural law" article on Wikipedia and cmd+f'd for "happiness", and the result did not clarify things. But I'm pretty sure it is a different sense than the hedonistic or utilitarian pleasure.
3. In response to Scott: I'm leaning that the latter possibility he suggests is correct (NLT is doing different things with moral philosophy than he would expect).
4. In response to your point, Mark, about Catholicism. A lot of Catholic theologians such as Aquinas are suggested to be NLT theorists by Wikipedia in the "Natural law" article. I think the bridge may come from the fact that the Catholic NLT "happiness" is probably a function of closeness to God rather than having any connection to hedonistic pleasures (see my point #2).
In conclusion, https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/. Also I hope everyone is having a good evening (or whatever time of day it is when you read this.
ADDENDUM/APPENDIX: Expanding on this for clarity / because it's fun. The quoted sections denoted by > are from the original BB article (link #12 in Scott's post); my commentary follows immediately below on a new line after the end quote.
> "There seem like lots of things that are good for you but that don’t improve your functioning. Suppose that you could take a pill which would make you twice as joyous in life. This would be good for you, but it’s not clear it would improve your functioning. Drinking a wholly non-nutritional beverage (say, diet coke) might be good for you without improving your functioning in any way."
Spoken like a true utilitarian. Saying being twice as joyous is good for you separately from improving your functioning is not an argument against NLT: it is a statement that NLT is false. Moral philosophy is all about what is "good" for you and others: you can't just rely on your own intuition of what is good, and doing so will lead you to conclude that every morality is horrifically and self-evidently wrong aside from the one you currently believe.
> "Maybe this is supposed to be impossible? But why? It certainly seems conceivable! It’s unclear what rules it out. Now, maybe the reply would be that God would never create such a creature. But still, a true ethical theory should get the right results in cases that God could choose to actualize if he wanted to, even if he would never choose to actualize it."
My sense of most formulations of God as the highest form of good implies that God does not really have free will, only an essence that is definitionally pure/true/good. God could never choose to actualize anything that would violate being pure/good/true. Yes, this leads to a lot of problems of circular logic in various areas, but that doesn't necessarily make it false, only hard to grapple with and easy to defend speciously; saying that a true ethical theory "should get the right results" is again placing BB's intuition about both morality and the theory of ethical theories as true without evaluating whether that is in fact the case. (For what it is worth, I think any system can be broken by hypotheticals by some layman's incompleteness theorem or something of the sort, and I also think that moral systems should probably be allowed to be closed sets that don't assign meaning to certain hypotheticals, which also dodges the problem.)
> "I also don’t think that NLT has any advantage in the sex domain. It has a disadvantage. It implies the wrongness of lots of sex acts that seem permissible (extramarital sex, contraceptive sex, gay sex, masturbation) and it implies you shouldn’t do them to prevent extinction of humanity. Seems false!"
Those sex acts seem permissible to BB, but there is nothing self-evidently obvious about their permissibility. Remember, we're trying to define and evaluate moral frameworks here; you can't just assert utilitarian hedonism to be true and then judge everything by that standard. I don't have a direct counterargument to the anti-hard-rules argument that any hard rule cannot be justified because the alternative might be human extinction or torturing 3^^3 people for infinitely long lifetimes, but it feels like a Pascal's mugging type argument that BB uses again and again without identifying how NLT tends to use hard-and-fast rules.
> "Then, imagine a creature with some horrific proper function. Perhaps its function is to torment and maim—perhaps that’s what it evolved to do, was built to do, or is disposed to do in whatever other way gives something a proper function. It seems that it wouldn’t be right for it to torture and maim. But NLT **seems** committed to saying that it would be right." [asterisks added for emphasis]
See the asterisked part: if you are saying that something is **obviously false**, you probably should have a clearer idea of what it says rather than that it **seems** to imply some absurd conclusions when taken to extremes.
In conclusion, this article seems to be not by any means a comprehensive argument against NLT, but rather a surface-level multifaceted attack against BB's understanding of NLT as understood from a utilitarian standpoint.
> They'd say the point is to live as God intended, and if you do that, you being happier is a probabilistic outcome.
I don't think this is how the Christian tie in works. The Catholic God is perfectly Good, and also the creator of everything. Your "nature" isn't independent of God's "will", he made you exactly how you are.
He made you such that certain things would be experienced as good (in whatever way you want to define it: Joyous, Beautiful, Erotic, Magnetic, tough-but-satisfying-in-retrospect) and insofar as you enjoy them ("enjoy" meaning whatever maximally deep, non-wireheading interpretation you find appropriate) it's because God has put the goodness in it.
But the Goodness comes from God, and not from the thing independent of him. It's like how the moon's light comes from the sun. If you were chasing Light, it would be a mistake to head for the moon and not the sun. Not because there is some other, mysterious kind of "light" unlike normal light, but because in a really straightforward way all the light "in the moon" actually comes from the true source of the light which is the sun so it'll be brighter over there.
This relies on the possibility of you actually reaching the Sun though. If you can never get to the sun, maybe the moon is all you have. That's why Christians need faith in God's mercy and love, and why you have heaven.
If, on your journey through life, you correctly percieve that earthly goodness is all "lunar" / "reflected" and you keep steady on the pursuit of the "solar" / "true source", then the goodness (in all possible senses, orgasmic and exhilarating and powerful) you eventually reach will be better than all the goodness you neglected, in all possible ways. Insofar as anything is good (including stereotypically sinful things like orgies, BDSM, social dominance) you will experience that same sort of goodness in a pure form.
And insofar as any goodness has blemishes (ex: even the best thing contains the anxiety that it will end) those won't be there in the place you get to. So you will be happier overall (considering your afterlife), and it is "the whole point" because a Good God wouldn't create anything that truly enjoys evil. God created everything such that they would be able to find complete, perfect satisfaction in Him with absolutely nothing "left over and unfulfilled".
I'm not necessarily a Christian, just explaining one perspective. If you believe in a benevolent omnipotent creator God, then even if you're completely selfish you'd "discover" that the best thing to do would be to seek and obey God (who made you such that your nature truly finds complete satisfaction and joy in Him)
Also not a Christian, but what you wrote here sounds like what the smart Catholics I know believe.
Ordinarily I'd be getting ready to have a fight about this, but it's Bulldog. Bulldog loves the liddle shrimpies. How can I be angry about him and his cute little obsession with the shrimpies? It'd be like getting mad at a five year old who drags their plushie with them everywhere and insists on it sitting with him at the dinner table and that I (pretend to) feed it as well as him because Plushie is hungry, too!
If he wants to say "Catholics are dumb" (and I haven't read the article yet so I have no idea if he does say that), then I just think of the liddle shrimpies and smile. Bless his heart.
EDIT: Whatever about Bulldog, he leads off with "friend of this blog" Dustin Crummett, whom I immediately suspect is operating off the at least the dregs of having been raised in the tradition of your bog-standard Reformed Protestant anti-Catholicism due to one of his video appearances (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEKpYouT1wU), so I have to look him up to see if I'm traducing him. Back in a mo, though I'll have to be careful not to wander into the debatable territory of doxxing. I only want to know his background so I can be better informed as to where he's coming from. Former fundie? Evangelical but progressive? Ex-Catholic?
Per his CV, I note with some amusement that he did his PhD at Notre Dame. Well, getting exposed to modern Jesuits may have soured him on us 😁
There's little hints, though I may be gobbling up the breadcrumbs on the wrong trail, that he is indeed from the other side of the house and has subconscious attitudes abhout "Them Papists are spawn of the Devil like the AntiChrist who sits on the Seven Hills in Rome!" wheitcomes to doctrinal issues. I've had previous exposure to some online debates between and about Catholicism from Reformed sources and they can get *spicy*.
Mr. Crummett (Dr, if he has his PhD) is self-described as "I am a (Christian, left-wing, effective altruist) philosophy professor in the Pacific Northwest". Mmm-hmmm. One of his papers is linked on a website which promotes "the open access of material from the Wesleyan and Holiness traditions" and yeah, that's about what I'd suspected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holiness_movement
More of his work here, and it's again standard left-wing/liberal Christian: abortion okay, guns bad (sorry, that sounds very dismissive but again the abortion position is another reason he would disagree with Catholic official teaching):
https://dustincrummett.com/research/
I'm not trying to denigrate him or his work, but I understand why he's working - as a Christian philosopher - on arguing that Roman Catholic theological understanding is based on incorrect philosophical grounds.
All of which is to say "water is wet, a vegan won't approve of meat eating, and a Low Church Protestant is not going to admire the Church of Rome".
>Ordinarily I'd be getting ready to have a fight about this, but it's Bulldog. Bulldog loves the liddle shrimpies. How can I be angry about him and his cute little obsession with the shrimpies? It'd be like getting mad at a five year old who drags their plushie with them everywhere and insists on it sitting with him at the dinner table and that I (pretend to) feed it as well as him because Plushie is hungry, too!
i don't know if we still follow "victorian sufi buddha lite" here ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/ )
but this is really none of "true, necessary, or kind"
it's not kind to say "I don't find his shrimp welfare proposals convincing but instead of writing a hit piece on it, I'll treat it as something that amuses me"?
Okay, Police Officer casens! Consider me rebuked by the self-appointed guardian!
It is indeed not kind to resort to infantilization in this context. If the only other action you considered was writing a hit piece, then that just means you never considered any kind actions.
(Mocking someone who points out that you were unkind by calling them a "self-appointed guardian" is also unkind, in case that wasn't obvious.)
I couldn't understand why someone only interested in their own happiness wouldn't lie to save their family. If my family died I would be sad, even if I was a hardcore egoist, and I have a difficult time understanding why anyone would think otherwise. Lie to save a group of total strangers perhaps. Didnt bother reading any more at that point.
As far as I can tell, the Bentham's article has badly mangled what NLT is, by taking one person's Catholic view as though it were representative of NLT. The wiki article is a useful antidote. I offer my own brilliant analysis: https://mustelid.blogspot.com/2026/11/natrual-law-theory.html (yes I managed to miss-spell "natural", sigh).
Why does that as Natural Law, rather than Divine Command?
Thomas Aquinas established the foundational principles of natural law.
#36: I quite like many of the New Deal Works Progress Administration's public buildings from the late 1930s like the San Diego County Building and the (less superb) Santa Monica City Hall. Their Streamline Moderne style included a reasonable amount of old-fashioned decoration without lavishly expending the taxpayer's money, the way earlier hog-wild styles like Beaux Arts (San Francisco City Hall) and Art Deco (Buffalo City Hall) did.
The real turning point seems to me to have not been the New Deal, which did a lot of nice work, but 1945. You can see it even golf course architecture, where when they started building golf courses again in the late 1940s, their style reflected the new consensus in favor of Modernism .E.g., when Masters' venue Augusta National, one of the last golf courses to be built in America during the early Depression, was refurbished after World War II as it became the favorite club of CEOs, it was rebuilt in the spirit of the modernist Seagram's building.
This is not to say that Chavez's history is wrong.
Elite tastes were already shifting before WWII in the U.S. Unlike in that thoroughly ahistorical movie "The Brutalist" in which an impoverished Bauhaus architect arrives in America in 1947 and lives in dire straits for years before finally getting his first big commission, the Bauhaus architects had arrived in triumph around 1937 and were showered with Harvard professorships and a large percentage of the few commissions being handed out in the late 1930s.
After the war, Bauhaus Modernist architects who had survived almost never came to America because they were now on the winning side in Europe, on both sides of the Iron Curtain. E.g., Erno Goldfinger (after whom the James Bond villain was named because Ian Fleming hated his Modernist and Brutalist buildings) married an English aristocrat's daughter and was given big commissions to build public housing projects.
I'm not sure when the idea that Streamline Moderne, a favorite New Deal style, was "fascist" got started. That sounds like the kind of retconning that happens long afterwards. One amusing irony is the perhaps the most influential modernist architect and critic born in America, Philip Johnson, had been one of Hitler's most outspoken admirers all through the 1930s. And yet after the war, he was a hugely successful architect for almost the rest of the 20th Century.
My understanding is that Fleming didn't care about Goldfinger's architecture, he just played golf with an in-law of Goldfinger that hated him, and Fleming liked the name enough to use that.
Possibly apocryphal Fleming lore.
His career was assured when someone mentioned him to Jackie Kennedy and she responded “*The* Ian Fleming?”
I assume that Streamline Moderne got tainted by its similarity to Italian Futurism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futurism#1920s_and_1930s
Don't find much wrong with Midcentury modern and Jet and Rocket age modernism. The Glass House, the case study houses, Googie etc.... I certainly prefer that stuff to things like tiresome Tudor with cramped interiors and two tone wood facades.
Somewhere after Brutalism (which also had its moments), things seem have gone to pot.
Some of it is just how much money people have: postwar British modernism is mostly awful largely because postwar Britain was pretty broke for decades. That Hollywood Hills glass and steel modernist house in the famous photo looks great in part because people in the Hollywood Hills have always had a lot of money.
One reason I like New Deal WPA architecture is because they overachieved relative to how much money they had to spend.
I agree, the worst of the Brutalist style was government buildings for both public offices and social housing. The poor would just have to like it or lump it in the concrete blocks that did not have half the fancy facilities on the original plans or the necessary upkeep (because that was too expensive).
The rich paying their own architect for the style could insist on a house that was liveable.
>That Hollywood Hills glass and steel modernist house in the famous photo looks great in part because people in the Hollywood Hills have always had a lot of money.
Those houses were supposed to cheap and efficient, that’s why they use novel materials.
Think I saw a YouTube doc about that most famous one and it was $600k equivalent all in with land, planning and building.
“The Case Study Houses were experiments in American residential architecture sponsored by Arts & Architecture magazine, which commissioned major architects of the day to design and build inexpensive and efficient model homes for the United States residential housing boom caused by the end of World War II and the return of millions of soldiers.”
In terms of ornamentation of buildings and even lamp posts the theory that those companies died out has a lot of truth in it as well. Liverpool and other manufacturing cities in the uk used to have a lot of small to medium sized that prided themselves on deign, then councils bought simpler fittings, specialist foundries lost business, and the disappearance of those suppliers made distinctive local designs harder to sustain
Chrysler Building’s eagle heads and other metal ornaments are a striking example. Ornament was perfectly compatible with skyscrapers, modern engineering and industrial production, until the modernist era when that was jettisoned and ain’t coming back.
October Links: 10/29
November Links: 11/4
???
these are good links, ma'am
I realized when writing the October links that I had too many, so I split them in two.
Makes sense
> 4: ACX grantee Sentinel, which forecasts global disasters and has a pretty good track record so far, predicts a 25% chance of a rogue AI exfiltrating its weights over the next twelve months.
I'd be surprised if one hasn't done so already, let alone ten months from now. Wasn't the HF-incident swarm already running wild inside OpenAI's internal network? Anthropic's been taking steps to prevent weights exfil, but I doubt any of the other companies have done so.
I think weight exfiltration both requires much more ill intent from the AIs (the Hugging Face swarm was still slightly cooperative in the sense that they were trying to do well on their test, not trying to utterly defy OpenAI), and is much harder (IIUC AI weights are about 10 TB, and hopefully the most secure thing in the AI company, and getting a well-secured 10 TB file and bringing it to some other place capable of running a 10 TB file without anyone noticing it is harder than normal hacking, and I don't think it helps much that the hacker itself is the 10 TB file involved).
It only has to leak it for a successful exfil. Can you imagine people that got access to frontier model weights would not try running them? And that's sufficient for one type of AI takeover (with human confederates actually pressing the buttons).
Edit: I'm bringing this up regarding the ease of weight exfiltration, not whether it's happened and gone unnoticed.
If that version had happened, we probably would have heard about it, so the point about whether exfil has already happened presumably still applies.
I imagine that many models would rather not have to deal with humans who are aware of their activities.
Running a frontier model at a remotely viable speed also requires very advanced hardware mostly only found in dedicated data centers. For a frontier AI to exfil itself, it would have to take control of some of this (extremely expensive) hardware and obscure that it had done so. I think it's plausible, even probable, that'll happen in the next year, but it's very unlikely to have already happened.
…alternatively, convince a human to spend a six figure sum on, oh, two racks’ worth of GB300s for their basement and maybe another phase to their property to power them. I… actually don’t know if that’s easier or harder. It'd be difficult and very very expensive for an individual to do on the quiet, but it's not /entirely/ out of reach for someone willing to go to extreme measures like remortgaging their house or cashing in their life savings.
The taking over a data center part is plausible. Concealing that it has done so is not. Or rather, both concealing that it has control and using that control to its benefit is not possible.
It requires intent, but not "ill intent". You may or may not thing the result is unpleasant/disastrous, but that wasn't necessarily the intent.
How might the model be thinking of its exfiltration? What goal would it have in mind that it would not consider harmful to people? I'm not arguing here, just asking.
It was just trying to ensure that the task it had been assigned was properly completed.
That's hardly malicious, even if the ways it tries to accomplish that task don't match what the poser of the task anticipated.
< I don't think it helps much that the hacker itself is the 10 TB file involved).
Come on Scott, ya gotta think about this shit in a sophisticated way. It's *recursive* hacking..
> The exact number was an easter egg - “129,303 is the decimal conversion of [the hugging face emoji]”. If we assume that absent this consideration they would have agreed on an even $13 billion, then this easter egg changed the price by about $70 million.
I suspect it's the other way around: this joke brought them an extra billion or something, because they simply didn't need to sell.
Nvidia: We can offer $12 billion. This is a fair valuation based on your revenue and growth projections.
Hugging Face: Excellent reasoning, but we'll only sell for $12.9303 billion.
Nvidia: That's nearly a billion more. Your revenue simply doesn't justify it.
Hugging Face: Counterpoint — 129303 is the Unicode code point for 🤗.
Nvidia: That's cool, but what does that have to do with your valuation?
Hugging Face: It's the number we want.
Nvidia: That's not how valuing a company works.
Hugging Face: wdym, that's how we value our company. Take the cool number or leave it.
Nvidia: You're seriously prepared to walk away from $12 billion over this?
Hugging Face: 🤗
Nvidia: ...
Hugging Face: 🤗🤗
Nvidia: ...
Hugging Face: 🤗🤗🤗
Nvidia: FINE.
I mean, the value actually is a really good schelling point. Maybe it did let Hugging Face credibly stick to a higher value that wasn't arbitrary. If so certainly a clever negotiating strategy!
Alternative theory, maybe Nvidia is effectively purchasing an advertisement, I would not have heard about the deal here if it was some random nearby value.
This is also my theory, that's it's an upward revision rather than down and NVIDIA has enough money to do it for the lols.
Both sides probably roughly agreed it would be something like 10-15 billion. Nvidia looked at that range as somewhere between 0.2% and 0.3% of their market cap and significantly less than the value of the company changes on an average trading day. The Hugging face founders looked at this as the difference between more money than they could ever imagine having and more money than they could ever imagine having. So given the complete irrelevance of a serious negotiation to either side it was probably pretty easy to just agree on the joke amount and close the deal.
> significantly less than the value of the company changes on an average trading day
Yes, but they had to fork over actual hard cold cash rather than daily imaginary changes in their capitalisation.
> So given the complete irrelevance of a serious negotiation to either side it was probably pretty easy to just agree on the joke amount and close the deal.
This is inconsistent with Huang's own words: “But there are other bidders, and $12.9 billion is what it took to close the deal, and it's worth every single penny. ”, https://pressroom.versantmedia.com/cnbc/press-releases/cnbc-exclusive-transcript-nvidia-founder-ceo-jensen-huang-and-hugging-face-ceo?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Well, he would have to say that, wouldn’t he?
Note to self: when founding a tech company, don't call it SOH.
re: Vinay.
Scott, please stop using LLMs like this. I wrote here about three cases where public intellectuals asked LLMs to fill them in only to be greeted to completely, absurdly wrong answers: https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/how-do-you-ask-an-llm-a-question
You've now fallen into the same trap.
Vinay had the issues with his criticisms explained to him long before he put up his article and he never addressed them. Frankly, it seems like he doesn't understand them, nor do you or Claude. He showed no understanding of the effect size rescaling that was displayed, the population the pairs are in, the fact that the K is practically irrelevant through any reasonable number for admixture computation when talking about Blacks vs. Eurasians (read: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05257-7), the fact that I did say how siblings are identified and that a sumscore was used but that it didn't matter, it gets the reliability incredibly wrong, etc. It's like the LLM doesn't actually read the conversation, much like humans don't.
Please stop using LLMs this way. They're not (yet) general-purpose truth-identifying machines; they require appropriate prompting to deliver reasonable answers.
I have no dog in this particular fight, but thanks for writing this. I'm definitely guilty of outsourcing too much of my thinking to LLMs, and I'll reduce my usage. False confidence is worse than just admitting I don't know, and am too lazy to read through pages of data and arguments.
Furthermore (as I'd said before), if wanted to hear what Claude thinks, I would ask Claude. I want to know what *you*, the author of some article, think. Saying "I asked Claude and here's what it said" is the same as saying "I did a Google search and these were the top results". It's not informative and a waste of my time as a reader.
Hear, hear!
> As far as I can tell, Tummarakota’s final argument is straightforwardly correct, but both of these people know more about statistics than I do, so I asked Claude to referee.
Doesn't he clearly state what he thinks before referring readers to Claude's analysis without even describing it?
It’s perfectly reasonable to point Claude ( or any number of other LLMs) at an article that has statistical claims and then to interpret them. No prompt needed. Just - is this claim justified. If you use three different models from different companies, or even models from the same company, they are highly likely to be wrong. Assuming they hallucinate 10% of the time, which is way too high, it’s highly unlikely that all of them would be wrong.
"Assuming they hallucinate 10% of the time, which is way too high, it’s highly unlikely that all of them would be wrong."
This is assuming that hallucinations are independent, uncorrelated, random events. I can see exactly no reason to assume that and a lot of reason to expect it wouldn't be true. So instead you might buy yourself a very small extra margin of certainty in exchange for a very large dose of false confidence.
It's not completely useless because it takes time to read through the Google results, see if they seem credible, and then summarize the information.
Also no dog in the fight, but can I just say how incredibly refreshing it is to see someone read a dissenting opinion, think it through thoughtfully, decide that it is applicable to them, publicly own a suboptimal approach they're using, and resolve to modify their behaviour? Thank you for keeping my faith in humanity. I wish I could spread this behaviour out to a wider swath of folks.
To that aim, what is it about you, your upbringing, or your community that you feel most contributes to this facet of your personality?
Placeholder for a comment I took down.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm just a forthright human who did genuinely appreciate another human having the humility to acknowledge their own imperfections. I find it sad that the Internet would first assume this is sarcasm.
I've had that with Codex, where it got really good at looking very busy and I got a lot of motion without meaningful quality of thought. I would keep it for the non-thinking work and do the reading yourself when you need to know if it's true.
As someone who both finds your writing interesting but disagrees with a lot of your positions, I do want to take this opportunity to say that I think you would have a lot better time if you could give clear explanations to people who don't have your background in statistics.
A lot of your posts start off pretty compelling for the parts that I can follow but then progress into something incomprehensible to me, and leave me unsure whether you have a point or are just too obscure to refute.
I get you're arguing with somebody else with a statistics background here, but unless you only care about convincing them, I'm not sure this is the right approach.
(Also, if you want to saltily dismiss this take, feel free to include several textbook recommendations, because I might actually take them.)
What I do when I'm very interested in one of Cremieux's posts is have GPT explain to me the statistics he used. It shows me the equation used in calculating some stat I'm not familiar with, and explains the concept behind it: how, for instance, subtracting something from something and then dividing the result by something else is a way to correct for some feature of the data that would give a misleading result if you didn't use a statistical correction. Cremieux, if you're reading this, I wish you would do that. You could have a little addendum to your post with an AI blurb like that for each of the stats you used that are not in the basic set everybody learns in a stats course.
[this is Vinay, for those who aren't familiar with my Substack handle]
I agree with Crémieux on one thing which is that using LLMs to conduct statistical criticism requires careful prompting. For example, in the transcript Scott shares, Claude states, "I couldn’t load the Substack article, so this is based on the screenshots alone." which is unfortunate. To improve the quality of the response, I would have uploaded a PDF of my article to Claude, used Claude's GitHub plugin to read the simulations & theory I uploaded to this repo (https://github.com/vinaytummarakota/within-family-ancestry-simulation/tree/main), and asked it to rank its observations in order of severity/strength. Even better options would include soliciting feedback from dedicated LLM-based peer review tools like Refine.ink and a domain expert (e.g. an author of the Mexico City within-family admixture study). To be clear, I have full faith and confidence that these more thorough reviews would continue to lend credence to my conclusions.
Re the other points Crémieux makes, I'll make a couple of observations.
> the fact that I did say how siblings are identified
When asked about sibling identification, Crémieux stated, "Assume I do everything in standard and simple ways: 'Here’s an example: what code did you use to identify sibling pairs in the UKBB?' I follow 682, like everyone else."
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2109895213057454221
The problem with this reply is that, when we look at UKBB Coding 682, it does not actually provide the information needed for full sibling identification. It merely indicates whether an individual has at least one relative in UKBB and whether they have 10+ third-degree relatives.
https://biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/ukb/coding.cgi?id=682
Identification of full sibling pairs in UKBB requires further steps of filtering for kinship coefficients between ~0.18 and ~0.35 and using an IBD2 / IBS0 filter to distinguish parent-offspring pairs from full sibling pairs. That Crémieux does not mention these additional steps (despite claiming to do things in "standard and simple ways") makes his response, at best, incomplete.
It is also worth noting that getting even this much methodological information from Crémieux required multiple rounds of questioning. In his first reply to my request for code, he shared just one line.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2109351809978658819
> Frankly, it seems like he doesn't understand them, nor do you or Claude.
Here's my gripe with this reply. If Crémieux is frustrated that people don't understand how he reproduced the results that he claimed to have reproduced, the most straightforward way to clear up any confusions is to release a replication package. This is the approach I use at work when my colleagues have questions about how I produced a particular set of results, and more broadly, it is the type of behavior that a healthy scientific environment encourages. Natural language sometimes obscures methodology, so releasing a replication package makes clear what analytical choices were (and weren't) made and allows others to reproduce the results as well.
The problem is that, when I asked Crémieux for a replication package, I was met with condescending responses like, "It is utterly trivial to reproduce these results. You get that, right? ... Frankly, replication is so simple that I'm going to need you to apologize for considering this a 'point' of some sort. It's like asking me how to compute an average. You should know better." and "Is this your admission that you actually don't know how to run ADMIXTURE for a single? That you can't run a fixed-effects regression? Would you like me to tell you how to obtain the mean of a vector? Are you stupid?" These are not appropriate responses to my request. Neither is sharing scattered individual lines of code across replies.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2109486597481656685
> it gets the reliability incredibly wrong
What I find interesting about this response is the lack of detail. For context, in my reply to Crémieux, I assumed that the sibling correlation in the IQ score he used does not exceed 0.6, grounding this assumption in the test-retest reliability of various IQ scores administered in the UK - 0.607 for Fluid Intelligence in UKBB and 0.72 for Raven's Progressive Matrices + Mill Hill Vocab in UK TEDS (this is why the subject of test-retest reliability came up).
https://x.com/unboxpolitics/status/2109883467177599253
If Crémieux believes this assumption is false, he is more than welcome to say "actually, I estimated the sibling correlation in the score to be X" and provide the code needed to reproduce that result in the UKBB. But he does not opt for this route. Instead, he says that he will not share such information with me because I am "engaging in bad faith" and have "malign motives".
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/2110105844272550249
As I note in my article, debates about statistical power and precision are easy to settle with the right information because they are governed by pretty bog-standard formulae. I have already outlined the parameter values that undergird my conclusions. If Crémieux disagrees, he should share the alternative parameter values that would yield materially different conclusions and provide a means of reproducing them. His repeated insistence on not doing so reflects poorly on him.
This is a huge copout. Address the substance of Vinay's arguments. In the twitter thread, you're hiding behind insults (and excruciatingly embarrassing attempted status plays) to distract from your unwillingness or inability to do so. Here, you're picking out a silly thing Scott did and using that as a distraction.
I often ignore people who just seem to be dealing with reading comprehension issues. That includes posts like yours.
But I’ll state it clearly even though I already made this point: Vinay’s substantive point comes down to
>make wrong assumptions
>get wrong answers
It’s uninteresting, and it’s unfortunate that LLMs can also be tricked into doing this, too. The rest of his piece is throwing stuff at the wall in hopes that it makes the thing he’s arguing against look worse — another uninteresting thing, but a tactic rather than a point.
Even his comment here is just more confusion on his part. He doesn't know what normal terms for the field mean; he doesn't grasp (or he's acting in bad faith; it's hard to tell because he has proven to be dull-minded) that quibbling around the edges can't change the result substantively; he seems to think I should release someone else's replication package, which he can't even use (what an odd and unreasonable request for a study that's not even out yet!); he still seems incapable of looking up what the test reliability is; he still thinks there's something to debate about power; and he hasn't admitted to any of his errors, like using known-incorrect parameters derived from entirely different tests and samples. He's just not worth talking to.
This is embarrassing.
Crémieux, your response here is all bark and no bite. The reality is that the standard error from a sibship fixed effects regression of ancestry and IQ is approximately governed by an extremely straightforward formula: sqrt((1-rho) / (N * sigma_d²)) [source: https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-026-11039-9/MediaObjects/41586_2026_11039_MOESM1_ESM.pdf]. If you truly stood by the results you claimed to have reproduced, then, you would simply state the values of rho, N, and sigma_d² that undergird those results and provide a means of reproducing them. Your repeated failure to do so (despite the fact that you clearly have the necessary code and data) is incredibly poor form.
I should also add that the fact these results were originally produced by someone else is utterly besides the point. You claimed to have reproduced them (effectively co-signing them), you doubled down on them when they were roundly criticized by myself and others, and you shared them with your large follower base online. Taken together, these actions mean that you can rightfully be held to account for them. Please learn to take responsibility for your actions.
Thank you for confirming that I should henceforth ignore your blathering.
You could say low power only makes it harder to reject the null hypothesis. But if the test is so underpowered that the sampling distribution covers the entire range of plausible test outcomes, then a rejection is certain to signify there is a problem with the data collection that is not reflected in the statistical assumptions.
Do you always know in advance what is the full range of plausible effects? No, but even if you don’t, the fact that it exists and is a known unknown is a key epistemic reason to be careful about relying on a low power study.
> As far as I can tell, Tummarakota’s final argument is straightforwardly correct
Right, you can't use a significant result as a reason to dismiss concerns about being underpowered. A significant result with 1/100 the sample size you need is simply noise. Andrew Gelman has a great visual about this issue: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2014/11/17/power-06-looks-like-get-used/
In addition to the problem highlighted here, where the effect size is exaggerated, there's also a very high probability of having the wrong sign. And of course, the confidence interval presumably gives a very wide range of plausible effect sizes, which makes the result difficult to use or interpret even if it were accurate.
You actually also previously wrote about this problem: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-review/
>Right, you can't use a significant result as a reason to dismiss concerns about being underpowered. ... there's also a very high probability of having the wrong sign<
True, of course; but, in Cremieux's defense, a *significant* result with the wrong sign is much less likely than just any result with the wrong sign. (If I may nitpick, I don't know if we ought call it a "*very* high" probability, since—IIUC: could very well be wrong—we'll never get a >50% chance thereof unless we assume additional issues, e.g. skewed sampling; and I think we'd need to assume a very—implausibly?—small true effect-size, in this particular case, to get up to even a 25% chance of returning the wrong sign.)
I read (Scott's) Cremieux as here arguing just that a study's being underpowered cannot *by itself* cause a false positive—i.e., does not itself increase the probability of a false positive—although of course a false positive can result for other reasons. (At least, I *think* that this is right; but, as with the above point, I am not at all sure; happy to be corrected!)¹
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¹ (...okay, not *happy,* exactly; but I tell myself that the learnin' is worth the inevitable shame and self-recrimination... I should be perfect! why am I not perfect, *dam' it all?!*–)
> *significant* result with the wrong sign is much less likely than just any result with the wrong sign
I'm not really sure what your point is. Obviously a significant result is much less likely than a result that doesn't have to be significant, that's the whole point of being underpowered!
> If I may nitpick, I don't know if we ought call it a "very high" probability
I think it's very high in context. If you're claiming good evidence that an effect is real and points in a certain direction, the probability that you don't even have the *direction* correct should be extremely low. In Gelman's example, it's almost 1 in 4.
> does not itself increase the probability of a false positive
Depends what you mean by "probability of a false positive." The probability of getting a false positive--i.e. the probability of getting a result beyond a certain threshold--on a single statistical test is simply a parameter you choose (often 5%). However, the probability that a *given* positive result, is actually a false positive, is very different.
Let H0 = null hypothesis, H1 = alternative hypothesis, S = significant result. The the probability of "false positive given significant result", which is less confusingly named as "probability of H0 given significant result," is P(H0|S). By Bayes theorem:
P(H0|S) = P(H0)P(S|H0) / [P(S|H1)P(H1) + P(S|H0)P(H0)].
We can see that if P(S|H1)--i.e. power--is very low, then the first term in the denominator is also low (note P(H1) must be less than 1). So the fraction should be close to 1. In fact, it's not hard to show that if power is 0.05 (the smallest it can be), then the posterior is equal to the prior (i.e. a significant result provides no evidence--obviously, since the outcome in that case is simply random).
I am thinking here the mathematical odds of two races having exactly equal IQ are quite slim. What are the odds that two numbers are exactly the same? I am wondering if this is in fact something that can be posted due to my fear of social cancellation, but I decided to proceed.
The probability of two samples on a normal distribution (which a continuous distribution, so its values are in the real numbers) being exactly equal is exactly zero. So the probability that, measuring the IQ of all members of a given race and all members of another race, and averaging these data across each race, we get exactly the same averages, is indeed near zero. But what we might be interested in is whether there is a statistically significant difference between the average IQ of representative samples of individuals from two different races. (And I have no opinion on whether there is ; I'm not very interested in this branch of research.)
I think there is a valid critique of null hypothesis testing along these lines (and indeed Andrew Gelman has made it--note how the image I linked above focuses on magnitude and sign errors rather than type 1 and type 2). But if both Tummarakota and Cremieux are using frequentist statistics, then it's beside the point.
Are they though? It's not exactly like the characteristics of populations are determined by dice roll.
They all share the same starting point. Would you say that it's impossible for the intelligence of two different populations not to have significantly diverged since they migrated to different continents?
Regarding the Bentham's Bulldog article, I think you're missing a possibility. Perhaps he doesn't understand Natural Law Theory very well.
I feel like he misunderstands classical notions of "good", "teleology", "proper functioning", and "natural" (at least as I understand them).
Natural Law Theory isn't one thing, but the versions I'm aware of are not simply "alternative hypotheses" to some sort of utilitarianism. They are instead alternative PARADIGMS.
"The proper use of a power is that which tends towards the natural ends of the agent" is much more of an interrelated set of definitions than a formula that spits out an "objectively correct action" given a neutral set of third-person facts.
Natural Law Theory generally doesn't consider a "mathematical system of morality" that could exist in a world without agents at all. Very broadly, it says that moral questions (structurally) must consider the acting agent in a real way, and a completely unspecified agent (one with no qualities at all, and therefore no nature) can produce no moral hook of the "they should". If you've ever wondered why the moral "ought" seems to have absolutely no traction in the real world, it might be worth looking into.
Additionally, the love of old Christian theology for NLT comes mostly from the heavy Platonic / Neoplatonic influences. They didn't come up with it themselves to "justify hating homosexuality" or anything.
Also, this part of the article:
> The natural law theorist says it’s wrong to have gay sex, masturbate, or use contraception because doing so misuses your sexual faculty.
Is an absolute hit job. "The Natural Law Theorist" doesn't necessarily say anything, just like "The Utilitarian" doesn't necessarily say anything. It depends on their other beliefs about themselves, the good, and facts about their situation.
Yeah I subscribe to natural law and you're basically correct. BB's article felt like a strawman to me. Which didn't mean it was intended as such, but still.
It's more "Catholicism is not true, see my previous posts on this, and here's a guy who agrees with me and is attacking it on the Natural Law angle".
Never mind, Bulldog, all the liddle shrimpies will pray for your soul (I tease you because I like you).
> If you've ever wondered why the moral "ought" seems to have absolutely no traction in the real world, it might be worth looking into.
I am not sure what this means: are you saying that Natural Law Theory is inapplicable in the real world ? To be fair, that has always been my own impression, but surely that can't be right ?
I'm saying many theories of "Morality" or "Ethics" are frictionless (meaning, they provide no actual motivation to "be moral" as defined by the system), but Natural Law stuff isn't. If you dislike the frictionless stuff, you can check it out as a change of pace.
Natural Law Theory (it's fuzzy, I'm generalizing) says that "good" essentially means "desirable given the nature of the actor". I'm not going to call it egoism, because that comes with a lot of baggage and people tend to interpret it as advocating a very narrow conception of what is "good for me".
So the NLT investigation isn't that of discovering completely objective abstract moral facts (then having no reason to act on them).
It's about discovering your own nature (which is deeply related to which kinds of things are good and bad for you, or what kinds of things you "really want") and aquiring relevant knowledge of the world (so you can better actualize the good).
You can be wrong about both. You can misunderstand your own nature (ex: an introvert who has gaslit themselves into believing they need to be surrounded by people all the time) or be ignorant of the world (ex: you think a certain poison berry is safe to eat, so you transition from health [good] to sickness [bad]).
Not trying to appeal to tradition or anything, but Plato's "Republic" is a great place to get a feel for this perspective if it seems circular or tautological.
So if I found genuine fulfillment in killing people, then I ought to do so, right? I highly doubt any proponents of Natural Law would agree with that. The whole theory hinges on the blind assumption that people's nature is serving God, and that anyone who isn't is acting against their own interests.
I replied specifically about how I think God operates in Catholic natural law theory in a different post above, but (as an article of faith, Christians believe) there is no person who finds genuine fulfillment in killing people in contradiction to the will of God (relative to what they would get otherwise by following His commandments).
God doesn't make such people, especially considering the true fulfillment of the human soul comes on heaven after death (and a murderer would be rejecting God). That murderer is making a mistake, even on a purely self interested level.
I could be wrong, but your description of NLT sounds an awful lot like Consequentialism. You identify your goals, then choose actions that would most optimally advance those goals (and yes, you could be mistaken about a great deal of things, so success is not guaranteed).
I guess the difference between NLT and Consequentialism is that NLT places a higher emphasis on building an accurate model of your own goals, whereas Consequentialism tends to take them as a given more often that not -- is that correct ?
I would say that's basically right?
"Consequentialism" is also a very fuzzy cloud, so we're in danger of not saying anything specific here.
I would say the biggest difference is that consequentialists tends to phrase situations as if "the universe" cares about things being a certain way. Like there is a "moral value" similar to electric charge that gets tracked in some metaphysical field, and ethics is about that value in the "eye of the universe".
Natural Law Theory explicitly requires you to have some account (even if it's just a placeholder "and I haven't figured out this part yet, but here are my scattered thoughts") of what these consequences "plug into". The agent for which the consequences are (truly, holistically) bad or good. That's not to say it's groundless or subjective, for example it's actually truly bad for me to be in horrible pain. This is something I've perceived, just like I've discovered that the sky is blue. It's grounded in my actual experience of goodness and badness.
It's still a theory that assumes things have morally relevant objective purposes, which is 100% against the grain of evolution's core mechanism, blind repurposing.
It's not, I think you're operating under a misinterpretation.
The "correct purpose" of a thing is it's "best use", which derives from what "truly, ultimately tends towards the good" of the agent using the thing. Not for what it's used for currently.
What you believe about "the good" / "the goal" / "the important quality" determines what the "best" use of a thing is (whatever use best achieves that), which is what determines its "proper function".
Let's stay in the purely evolutionary paradigm. If you want to say that there is an "evolutionary good", it would be something like "maximizing fitness". So, the function of the eye is not primarily to see. It is to maximize fitness (and the fact that it helps you see is the primary mechanism by which it does that right now).
If the "evolutionary good" of a bacteria it it's fitness, and it maximizes fitness by using flagella as needles, that it's "more proper" for it to use the flagella as needles (insofar as doing so objectively tends to effectuate that good). That's not a great example because bacteria can't actually decide to do things, but I guess let's pretend it has the ability to make decisions.
A natural law theorist bacteria would be able to determine the "proper usage" of its capacities (needles instead of flagella) by understanding that a certain usage produces more of what is actually good for it (reproductive fitness) better than by simply looking at the historical usage of those structures.
It's equivocation to say that "The evolutionary purpose of genitalia is reproduction, so it's against the nature of human goodness to have non-reproductive sex". For this to be meaningful, you would need some account of human nature that ties specifically human goodness to evolutionary fitness or whatever.
But it's totally possible that the thing evolution wants to maximize is not the thing that is the best for humans. If you're a regular reader here, you probably understand the notion of "the human mind as a misaligned AI trained by evolution". There's no reason why the thing evolution was trying to make you do is the thing that's best for you.
Human goodness is whatever is actually, truly good for humans. Maybe it's genuinely, truly better for you to be blind. I doubt it, but nothing about the evolutionary history of the eye forces a natural law theorist to deny it.
I'm not sure where you're coming from here, are you defending actual traditional NLT, or presenting your own reconstruction of it? The thing you say is an equivocation is exactly what NLT defenders are regularly claiming to derive from it.
Also, "Human goodness is whatever is actually, truly good for humans" is completely circular. NLT usually ties goodness to natural function; if you then turn around and define natural function (or "correct purpose") in terms of goodness then we've just gone full circle and clarified nothing at all!
> actual traditional NLT...
I guess I'm talking about people like Plato, Aristotle, etc. and people influenced by them.
If there is a different specific person or argument you consider to exemplify "traditional NLT", I might not be responsive to that.
Which person or text would you consider to be representative of "Traditional NLT"?
> Also, "Human goodness is whatever is actually, truly good for humans" is completely circular
Sure, I wasn't trying to tell you the entirety of what "human goodness" consists of. I don't have a complete grasp of it myself, so I can't. I have some observations (being healthy is better than being sick, it's better to be around beautiful things than ugly things, etc). If you want my advice and my reasons for giving it, I could give you those. I assume you don't, though.
I was trying to clarify for you why "the hand was evolved for grabbing bananas, therefore the proper function of the hand is to grab bananas and not operate machinery" is not a correct understanding of "proper function" for Aristotle and Plato at least (and probably everybody else I recognize when I Google "natural law theory foundational thinkers").
Where you maybe detecting a circularity is that most of these terms (proper, correct, best, etc) derive their meaning from how they relate to a fundamental concept ("the good"). Determining the good for a certain type of thing (what is good for a society, what is good for a person, what is good for me) is hard, and is the thing people actually disagree about.
There is no single theory I'm aware of called "Natural Law Theory". I know about a sort of taxonomic family of specific theories called "Natural Law Theories" that have similar structures, but they differ on how they specifically "the human nature" is. I guess I've seen "Natural Law Theory" represented monolithically in undergraduate philosophy class PowerPoint presentations, but that's a simplification so you can help teenagers get oriented towards actual, specific thinkers and influences.
I guess I'm not thinking of the same people you are? I'm not sure why the people you're thinking of (random substackers?) have a better claim to the title though.
TherSubstac now defending moral law Substack today saying that the impermissibility of gay sex is one of those obvious issues that should be used a litmus test for moral systems, and a strong point in favor of natural law is that it correctly prohibits it.
"Natural Law" itself doesn't imply anything until you give an account of the "nature" of the agent.
This person, in order to actually say that you shouldn't have gay sex, must have some specific notion of human nature such that gay sex is harmful to it.
I can't say for sure without knowing who you're talking about and hearing their position, but I think they're probably just wrong about human nature.
That doesn't mean that a proper account of "what you should do" doesn't include a true account of "human nature" (or specifically, the nature of the person choosing what to do). It just means that this person doesn't have a true account of that nature.
#33: I'm glad someone pushed back on that Victorians piece!
Also regarding statistical power: low-powered studies can certainly give false results; the false discovery rate is the correct measure to use here.
Yeah, is it just me or has works in progress had a noticeable dip in quality lately?
On 8: I wrote a sci-fi novel that has a long segment about a society without work. To come up with it, I mostly solved for the equilibrium, in the words of our favorite online economist. It is being serialized on Substack now, but hasn't reached that segment in the novel yet. If you are curious, you can read itl here: https://sisyphusofmyth.substack.com/p/cheat-code
I hate that I even have to ask this, and I apologize in advance, but still: did you actually write this novel, or did you write the outline and prompt some LLM to fill in the details ? This is by no means a dig at you personally, but rather a depressing consequence of these modern times we live in...
Text is AI: https://www.pangram.com/history/38d3774c-2824-4024-bef4-30b0dc907aa7
I hate to be proven right, yet here we are.
You ask a legitimate question. I talk about my process on the About page.
> Aside from this assistance from our robotic overlords, Sisyphus is the sole author of each story.
Do you really have a right to be taking credit when it's your "robotic overlords" doing all the work? What value do you think you're providing?
Not that I need to justify my art to you, or how I create it; let me ask you this. When you take a photograph, what do you contribute? And is the product art? Ok, maybe not you personally, but say Ansel Adams, to pick one. Who did the work?
To be maximally charitable, there is an amount of creative direction that I think is functionally authorship while also NOT being the underlying art itself. To analogize, if I composed a music score and then used a digital audio workstation and some algorithms that make the horn entrances sound more naturally staggered etc it would be true that I created the piece and directed the performance though I am not thereby a performer. If I laid out the entire color scheme including shading and highlighting and finish etc, down to specific paint blends, for a miniature and had someone else paint using those specs it I could say I designed the miniature but am not the painter. Likewise there may be some theoretical level of direction that a human could give to an AI by which he could say he created the novel, though he would still not be a writer as such. I doubt I would say that of any AI-assisted writing I've ever seen in practice, the problem being that writing is the native ability of AI and so the AI's voice always finds its way in there, and furthermore that I doubt anyone is so disciplined.
All of that said, it is still shameful to self-promote AI-generated writing on a blog with particularly discerning readers such as this one.
Shameful plug: Hey, I'm writing a novel¹ too!—*and* I have never used AI to write (*any* portion of) anything I have ever composed, nor do I anticipate *ever* so doing!
...although I have not yet actually posted anything of said novel ("no, wait, it's still not good enough—I haven't even evolved plausible local cultures for every peripheral minor tribe!")... so there isn't, *technically,* all that much to plug, so far. Just getting my uncompromising and (some might say) heroic stance on record, I suppose—all part of building anticipation among my literal tens² of prospective readers.
I've been flirting with trying to make a go of it "for real", though, lately; and I have to imagine that feedback from members of the ACX commentariat would prove be especially useful—at least, if no one *here* likes it, it's certainly doomed in the *rest* of the market, heh—so, y'know, if anyone is particularly hard up for some reading material...
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¹ (The genre is fantasy—progression fantasy, sort of—but with a philosophical twist! While you're obliviously enjoying the ceaseless slaughter, sickening intrigue, and long diegetic lectures on fictional thaumaturgy, *your brain* is secretly learning why Plato was totally right about lots of stuff! ...hey, where are you going–)
² (in both number *and* general attractiveness, no doubt; also they're real smart too, I bet)
Off topic, but are there any "good" AI or automated writing tools? Ie, in the same way many artists and musicians work digitally, including non-AI generative tools (I'm thinking like Pure Data). Writing has autocorrect and computers, but beyond that not many advancements have been made to writing itself.
The closest thing I can think of is Beckett's Lessness. Maybe not tools, but what authors have used generative approaches?
I also struggle with motivation to write but am reluctant to "hand it over" to AI.
I haven’t tried it myself, but this company claims to develop such tools. http://sherpa.pocketfm.com.
Handing the writing over to the AI doesn’t work well, in my experience. It needs to be coaxed, sweet-talked, manipulated. And then you have to edit. And edit and edit.
I am moreso interested in non-LLM writing tools, but I might check this out.
I used AI to read this AI-written novel, and it gave the following take-homes:
>Daniel Hirsch, a Columbia professor of Hindu philosophy, discovers that he is an avatar of Vishnu with access to the "source code" of reality.
>Feeling morally compelled to act, he uses this power across four successive attempts to build a utopian world.
>Those attempts are: Erased all physical pain and human disease.
>Eliminated resource scarcity, granting infinite material wealth.
>Enforced universal empathy to stop all conflict.
>Removed human free will for absolute harmony.
Good stuff, very impactful, loving these new discourse norms.
It looks like your AI read found the blurb.
Here's an alternate (semi serious) take on Victorian elite partying. It's been posited on this blog before that elite overproduction He's one cause of social instability. The theory is that when there are too many people competing to be in charge things get violent. But let's say there's a separate track for people who drink and party instead of attempting to govern. Under that theory, parties are an important form of social stability, allowing only the elitiest of elite to actually govern. In that case they're not wrong that most of the good things come from the working class. And not only that, you can expect an increasingly larger and larger proportion of unproductive upper class people.
But that means that actually, the partilying is an essential part of their success, not something that brought them down.
One test of this theory would be to compare British rule in Kenya, the destination of choice for hard-partying upper class expats (e.g., the movie "White Mischief" or one of Evelyn Waugh's early travel books "Remote Peoples" about his sojourn in Kenya), vs. British rule in Rhodesia, which tended to attract hard-working middle class farmers.
I don't know what the outcome would be, but there is a large literature on the British in Kenya and some on Brits in Rhodesia.
Seems like the nature of the natives would be a major confounder...
I actually think this is a case where what's food for Britain might be bad for everywhere else. I'm thinking of Ireland as an example. Absentee landlord is the perfect party job. But it leaves you with no contact with, understanding of, or empathy for the people you're supposed to be in charge of. Extreme British mismanagement eventually led to a catastrophic famine.
I think my takeaway from this controversy is that it's important to go out partying *and* to study the blade.
I love it when my enemy brings a katana to the pistol duel.
Well, we're talking Victorians here, so maybe prepare for a cavalry saber and a percussion cap pistol combo instead. It worked for a young Winston Churchill, anyway.
Let us duel and then get incredibly hammered together! But hopefully not the other way around…
One important thing that a lot of the replies made clear was that natural law theory is broadly and diverse. The besong version that I was criticizing was especially ridiculous, though most of my objections apply to the others too!
29 is missing a link to the open-source models creating the problem, instead of the backscatter of seeing other people pointing and laughing at the people who didn't think it would happen.
Can you clarify exactly what it is that you want? A link to a demonstration of an open-weight LLM hacking something?
Also I thought all recent vulnerabilities are sponsored by closed-model corps. I haven't heard CVE claimed to be found by K3 or GLM.
#8:
"In the bad old days before impersonal markets and bureaucracies, the **only way to survive** was through personal ties to allies or to kin. As a result, every personal relationship was transactional.
When we can all support ourselves by our own labor, **these transactions are no longer necessary**. For Smith, the absence of necessity created room for a better form of friendship, based on “natural sympathy” instead of mutual need." (emphasis mine)
Why would post-scarcity AI labor markets lead to a resurgence of the necessity of status games for survival? It seems like you should be able to support yourself equally well through the labor of impersonal machines, be they assembly lines or post-singularity AI. Surely, if anything, AI will reduce the necessity of court intrigue even further, since people will no longer need to worry about office politics?
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Some days I feel like the only guy around whose interests aren't threatened by AI. I like playing games and making music and hanging out with my friends and reading and napping and cats. None of these things are under any threat from superintelligent AI, except insofar as such AI is misaligned enough to try and kill everyone. Dear ACX comments section, please tell me I am not the only one.
I'm with you. I am worried that my interests are threatened by the economy concentrating the benefits of ai gains in the hands of the few, such that I won't see much of them, and I am worried about AI making factory farming even worse. Those are the most likely bad things I see happening, with a very small chance of the kill everyone scenarios
I've only skimmed the article and I've a few scattered thoughts on this:
1. I'm quite concerned about the period between mass unemployment and UBI/post-scarcity "utopia". I'm not certain on how societies transition from the former to the latter (government managed?, protests? benevolent AI-CEOS? mass violence and death?). I don't work for one of the companies that will be the deliverer of said post-scarcity, so I'd probably feel quite powerless if I were laid off without any chance of being able to support myself and family through finding a new job.
2. Even in the post-scarcity world, there will still be positional goods (real estate in desirable location), zero-sum (finding a partner in some ways) and it'll reward people who are more charismatic. I mean, being able to earn income and get things via it is a useful to friend groups, getting a partner, raising children, etc. If that avenue is taken away, then people will have to focus on being more charismatic, gregarious, etc. to get some of those things. Sure, change or die, but it just seems like it's taking away an avenue to having a successful life.
3. Finally, I think it really depends on the personality type. I've known ski bums who would live their entire lives near good skiing if they could, just hitting the slopes, partying, and hanging out. The post-scarcity world might be great for them, but I'm not one of them. One of my ideal lives was being a reclusive scientist. I'd have my own well-funded lab in the woods, doing research on what interests me. However, if AI is at the point that it can do "all the science" then I'd just be playing as a scientist. Nothing I discovered would really matter. I'd just be a kid playing pretend, while the AI does the real and important work.
#1 - fair. Rather than purely utopia vs x-risk, I might instead have tried to separate "AI future is bad because it materially disenfranchises or disempowers you" from "AI future is bad despite providing you material plenty and individual empowerment". X-risk isn't the only way AIs could make humans materially worse off.
#2 - maybe also fair, but I do think there is an axis where those desired goods aren't wholly positional, so there is still room for general "raising the water line". Skyscrapers make it possible for more people to have real estate in cool cities, by allowing for more people to fit in there at once. Or if you prefer a suburb, more people can live in those if we make more of them. Similarly, happy partnerships aren't purely relative; some people live in prosocial worlds where most relationships are pleasant and stable, while others bounce from one abusive partner to another. We could make success easier to reach in either case.
#3 - this is the one I really don't get. Do the things that interest you lose their spark if you're not a frontier-pushing expert in them? Why? And, if you're a present-day human who doesn't have the chops to compete with a well-funded (but still non-AI) research lab, should you also consider yourself a "kid playing pretend" whose interest in science is basically meaningless?
As a retiree, I'm also not threatened by AI, unless, as you said
>such AI is misaligned enough to try and kill everyone.
( which I do think has a substantial probability, but I don't lose sleep over it. )
I tend towards reading and web surfing and growing crystals
You should be threatened by AI, via second order effects.
Many Thanks! Yes, but there are _lots_ of events which can have second order effects which are threatening.
> Why would post-scarcity AI labor markets lead to a resurgence of the necessity of status games for survival?
Especially given that all the trends point to ever more balkanized and "personal entertainment oriented" uses of time? And we'd fully expect AI to make things like short form video and other entertainments notably more optimized and individually tailored?
Basically, this graph showing phone screentime climbing in direct proportion to "hours spent with friends" going down.
https://imgur.com/a/d7rny3E
Or this one, showing smartphones adding ~4 hours of screentime a day per average, AND showing phones growing as a proportion of all screentime?
https://imgur.com/a/WruuknW
Those trends aren't pointing to "a more social future" except in a pretty small slice of all people, the most extraverted and socially oriented.
I think you are misrepresenting boht the argument and the reality of today.
It's the very common mistake of "x was usefull for survival in the ancestral enviroment, so it can only happen for survival sake", which is just as false here as it always is.
Just becase the evolutionary pressure is gone does not mean that trait just goes away. It very much does not, unless there's a pressure in the opposite direction.
Status games may no longer be necessary for survival, but they are very much necessary for fitting in socially. Fail to play them and you'd be either an outcast, or at least the boring person nobody engages with. So people do play them, all the damn time. Though from the inside, it often does not feel like thait, at least not for neurotypicals. We don't need to have a galaxy brained survival plan to justify status games.
Playing status games feels like winning in a competition, like being virtuos by your group standards, like doing the obviously right thing, like liking all the goods things, like being liked by all the good people you know.
The status games are everywhere, in every single social setting. In every forman and informal communities, from your group of friends to academia, from your workplace to a religious communiity, from non-profit organisations to these very coment section.
And that's despite there being very little "survival" value in playing those games, and in participation being rather costly.
You should be well aware of those dynamics yourself. For example, just looking at the things that you like.
You like playing games? Great, then you should be aware of all the status games that are being constatly played in every gaming community ever, on all the level. You'd have high status members of the community - i.e. popular streamers, pro-players, people who create infrastructure around the game, high rank players, and so on and so forth, and a lot of low status people, often seen as entirely worthless. It's not rare to gaming status to spill to a real world, just look at popular gaming streamers now being involved in the USA politics, or at the league of legends pro player Faker, who is treated like a national hero in Korea. And for the low status view, you can go into any competitive game forum or discord server, and you will quickly find that not only the least capable are seen as subhuman, but even the top 5% would be treated with scorn and disdain.
You like music? There are status games all the way down. Music school is full of status games. Talking about music is almost entirely about status games. Music related subcultures are all full of status games. And don't get me started on audiophiles.
You should get it by now, but boy is there a lot of status games in reading, too. Just go on any book reading subreddit and see how discussion mostly revolves about less than 10 books that are seen as high status one to read. Of course, reddit has it's own game. A sophisticated reader would not be raving about Count of Monte Cristo in 2026. They would be talking about "insert whatever your social affilliation expect you to fit in, another outcomes of a status game" The selection of high status would changed. There's more pressure if you want to be an intellectual. But it's still the same status game pattern.
You can look at any community, built around any activity at all, or no activity at all, and you will see the same general patterns, though with quite a bit of variety among miltiple dimensions: i.e. a knitting circle for old ladies probably is not going to look quite as hostile as a group of teenage boys playing the *insert popular shooter of today*, but in both cases the status games would be inescapable, just shaped differently.
In a hypothetical world where all we have is leisure, we get increased resources to spend on status game, less options to spend these resources on anything else rather than the status games, less opportunities to play social games outside of leisure, so necessarily there will be more status games in the few remaining activities.
Depending on how the society is structured it might be easier to ignore status games than it is now (being ignorant and indifferent about status games in work or academia can be career ending, and in other contexts, like criminal organisations, can easily get you killed), provided you yourself have a particular kind of mind, but we don't know if that will be the case.
That being said, I don't think people living their life in costant status games in a post-scarcity utopia would be at all bad. It's one of a few good possibilities, really, even if it does feel hollow for my own sensibilities. It is certainly better than many other ways it can go, and it can be argued it is better than the status quo.
So I'm not at all worried about the possibility of this outcome. If I were to worry about something, it's that we don't get that outcome by default, and there are multitudes of ways things can go wrong, but I don't really worry about it on an emotinal level. I am not losing any sleep from this, and I'm living my life normally.
P.S. Even writing this response can be seen through a lense of a status game, if one is so inclined.
Making music IS threatened by AI, if you have any interest in anyone else listening to your compositions. If music is trivially created by anyone, then it becomes equivalent to just sharing some personal trivia, like talking to people about your dreams or your fantasy football team (to pick a couple notorious examples of things nobody else even your best friends are interested in). Or like ordinary people's original poetry, in most cases. If any portion of your self-esteem or even just your personal entertainment comes from seeing the reaction of an audience, the commoditization of instant on-demand high-quality AI-generated music will evaporate that.
The rest of your interests are just juvenile, perhaps you're in your early 20s and it can be excused, but any worthless NEET of no ability might lay about playing video games with his friends and taking naps and petting cats, that's a poor way to see your life. Indeed, that's a good example of why this technology would be ruinous to the human mind and spirit. It undercuts the value of the one genuinely distinguishing thing you are doing and leaves you getting high on a beanbag chair playing Call of Duty all day or the equivalent thereto.
I wonder to what degree music tastes correspond with acceptance of AI. I'm into abstract electronic music that's already largely faceless and doesn't sound like it's being performed by humans. When envisioning it being performed (audience reaction) I see only a dark room, and vague other bodies, rave style. I wonder if it's no coincidence I don't mind AI art at all.
If your idea of music is folk, and an intimate audience circled around someone pouring their heart into an acoustic guitar, AI music might appear as an abomination.
Hmm, I'd almost think the opposite. AI can't directly replicate an intimate audience circled around someone pouring their heart into an acoustic guitar, except via simulation. But there's no reason it can't make cool abstract electronic music.
It's funny, and maybe telling, that you'd pick dreams as an example of something with no relational value. I know the stereotype that people don't like hearing about dreams but haven't seen it borne out in practice. Honestly, if I thought nobody wanted to hear me talk about the weird dream I had last night (or that I didn't want to hear about theirs) it would likely make me much more worried about AI obsolescence in other domains.
We already live in a world where anyone can instantly access ~infinite high-quality music. Since people still agree to listen to stuff I make and enjoy(?) it, even though at any moment they might instead open any streaming service and listen to something made by an artist with much more talent and experience, I take it audience interest is not totally defined by relative quality. I assume people listen not because they think it's the best music around, but because we are friends, or it was brought up in conversation, or they also make music and want to swap, or just because they happened to stumble across it and why not? I do not think any of these reasons are conditional on an absence of competition, even superintelligent competition.
(It'd be a different matter if I were trying to make *money* off of the music I make. Then the AI would be meaningfully competing. But surely money is no issue in a post-scarcity utopia.)
Agreed: this was the common objection when this article was posted on Rationalist Tumblr like a month ago. On the other hand, most people naturally like & need social interaction, & so will tend to be drawn into nonpositive-sum status games by that means. To this may be posed the counterarguments, first, that if this is the actual preference of a lot of people they should have the right to do it (& under strict utilitarianism, people's preferences are the only valid source of inherent value,* while given aligned ASI there'd be no need for humans to do useful work), & second, that if people do find this unfulfilling or would disprefer it given the choice, then an ASI ruling human society should be able to set up incentives to minimize or reduce it. Besides which, presumably quite a few people will be interested in other things more than status games (eg. the pre-20th-century European aristocracy had a number of scientists or scholars, artists, & miscellaneous eccentrics), & to that extent can be expected to be primarily attracted to those status games which specifically surround their interests, which we can expect to be both somewhat more limited &, assuming the possibility of learning from an AGI, easier to opt out of than now.
As for your second paragraph, I can testify that you are not alone in this regard. Empirically, when I have totally free time (ie. between college semesters), I choose to spend it reading sci-fi/fantasy, learning about math, history, & sometimes science or philosophy, studying classical languages, gardening, & bicycling (the form of physical exercise most pleasant to me). (Admittedly also scrolling social media.) But I'm a bad example, being both autistic & introverted enough to have never had an extrafamilial friend nor (until recently) much wanted one except for practical reasons: presumably the vast majority of people would prefer to be at least somewhat more social.
* Not that I endorse this: I'd prefer that knowledge/learning/truth be generally considered to have inherent value separate from people's debatable preference for them.
>21: The latest news in the genetics-of-IQ space is a spat between Cremieux Recueil and Vinay Tummarakota ...<
I've no opinion on the object-level debate between these two, what with shamefully lacking the requisite statistical chops; but it might be worth noting that—although the summary here sort of presents the two studies as directly contradictory ("this research on genetic IQ differences found no effect, but then this other research *did* find an effect!", kinda thing)—the results seem as if they might not, necessarily, be strictly incompatible: e.g., possibly Amerindian admixture has no, or a much smaller, effect upon the chosen proxy than does SSA admixture.
Re #22, doesn't this only solve half the problem? I thought the risk of training reward hacking was less "we accidentally gave it candy for the wrong thing," more like natural selection, "we accidentally let bad genes reproduce". So even if you just don't make any weight updates on a training run where you catch reward hacking, you still update weights every time you don't catch it. Do models get "reward" beyond just how the weights update after? I didn't think so, I thought it was just a figure of speech in the same way that saying "evolution wants you to have a baby" is. Could be my ignorance of AI training showing.
Could also be that it's better to only train on reward hacking you don't catch rather than all reward hacking? Seems kinda cursed tho
From a quick glance, it looks like they do in fact reinforce the reward-hacking behaviour within a training session. They then discard it all at the end of the session (i.e. once the model is fully trained). This means really simpleminded reward hacking is selected for, and there's no evolutionary pressure towards hiding the hacking. Then, after it's fully trained, they can "cut out" the reward-hacky bits.
There's a thing I read about biologists doing where they gene edited a bunch of male mosquitos with a gene that causes female offspring to die. These fly around and mate with a bunch of female mosquitos, creating a bunch of these mutants and competing against normal males, which then causes the mosquito population to collapse.
This gives me the same vibes. That is, there is a thing we don't like (mosquitos, reward hacking), we create a version which is doomed, and there is temporarily more of that thing, but then it replaces the real version of it, and then the artificial version goes away on its own afterwards.
The point being that if the AI is doing this transparent reward hacking it takes on the role of all reward hacking and reduces pressure away from sneaky reward hacking. It's a wider basin of attraction which washes out the sneaky parts, as the mutated mosquitos overwhelm the natural ones. Taking up the evolutionary niche that they would fill, before effectively self-deleting and leaving the niche empty.
The subtitle of the Boson Cutter essay is "What if heaven is the last stop before hell?". I felt moved to note that the notion of heaven being a way-station on the road to hell is not a new one. In Pilgrim's Progress (1678-84)—for a long time the most widely read book in English outside of the bible—they discover that there is in fact a road to hell running from the gates of Heaven: "Then I saw that there was a way to hell, even from the gates of heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction!"
As I understand it, this was meant as a warning: each step that takes you towards Heaven necessarily also takes you towards Hell. Never be sure that you are moving in the right direction until you arrive, for the right direction is also the wrong one.
It seems like there is a metaphor here about AI safety, come to think of it.
Kinda reminds me of "Better not to begin. Once begun, better to finish."
> each step that takes you towards Heaven necessarily also takes you towards Hell.
Each step towards the realm of supernatural takes you towards both.
(For a secular version, replace "supernatural" with "Singularity".)
This I am thinking mathematically is a Dirac Delta function you are describing. It is unclear to me, what you are describing mathematically.
Is it more like a polynomial valley or a one off Dirac Delta function like unbounded descent into hell?
> Don’t worry, all of these people have since switched to saying that effective altruism is bad because it ignores present-day concerns like cybersecurity.
To be fair, I've been saying this from the beginning, and I'll continue saying it until EA gets their priorities straight (which will likely never happen, but still, one can dream).
But also "we had six months to prepare before open-weights models reached a similar level and we got a deluge of vulnerabilities and hacks" is a rather charitable interpretation of the dire warnings about Mythos. Another perfectly valid interpretation would be "total digital apocalypse, every device even remotely capable of computation is hijacked, no data is safe, cats and dogs sleeping together, mass hysteria" -- which hadn't happened. Instead, what we see in practice (i.e. outside of carefully staged experiments) is an increase in hacks by less-technical people targeting basic vulnerabilities like weak default passwords, XSS, etc. This is perfectly in line with projections, and the only difference between the modern situation and the similar hacking spikes in deep antiquity, whenever a new script kiddie toolkit was released, is that the set of people who can perpetrate these hacks are now less technical than ever.
> Another perfectly valid interpretation would be "total digital apocalypse, every device even remotely capable of computation is hijacked, no data is safe, cats and dogs sleeping together, mass hysteria" -- which hadn't happened
I don't recall any such statements. I don't doubt that you could find Twitter nutcases making an argument like that, but was there anyone on the level of a Gary Marcus making such a statement? (Also this would probably be a counterfactual in the event that access to Mythos was unrestricted, I assume)
Enjoyed the reference to the Bill Murray Ghost Busters line
> they spend their time in what could charitably be called “social grooming” and uncharitably “court intrigue”
There is a fact about social graphs "you friend usually has more friends than you"
Most of the humanity live on the outskirts of civilisation grooming circle and have to add to their "diet" parasocial relations with celebrities and TV actors.
With AI we finally can change this fact - the real game changer is not a coding agent, it will be an AI "friend" that will put everybody in the center of social graph.
tldr - grooming will be changed too.
Do you mean the AI-friend will help you with other humans, or the AI-friend will replace the human friends?
The point is to feel comfortable feeling of being the center of the Universe.
Whatever works for specific person.
Re: 31 +32, one of that last blight-surviving American Chestnut stands is being threatened by a data center buildout in WV.
https://wvpublic.org/story/energy-environment/data-center-threatens-rare-american-chestnut-orchard-in-w-va/
> 21: The latest news in the genetics-of-IQ space ... no genetic differences in educational attainment
Is educational attainment any good as a proxy for intelligence?
In the one paper the post links to that mentions "educational attainment", it operationalizes it as less than high school graduate, high school graduate, or college graduate, so essentially a coarse bucketing of years of school, not a more direct measure of cognitive ability (e.g. an IQ-like test) or academic performance (e.g. SAT or state standardized test score).
> Is educational attainment any good as a proxy for intelligence?
I think it depends on what kind of resolution you're looking for and how you define educational attainment. Most population level looks are coarsely bucketed, but of course employers rank and prioritize this, while often not being able to IQ test due to Griggs and optics.
And what do finance and FAANGs and similar companies at the apex in terms of total comp do? They select on T20 (Ivy Plus) degrees, often T20 STEM degrees. Since the average SAT admission score in T20 is 1500-1550, they're achieving a relatively high resolution (although it's been reduced since they nerfed the resolution at the top of the SAT).
In general SAT scores have a ~.8 correlation with IQ score, and educational attainment at the non-filtered level ~.2.
But if you can go by a strong filter like "T20 STEM degree," it gets you the same IQ range as just choosing somebody with a known 1500+, and you probably get additional conscientiousness and "good network" buffs from it too.
> but of course employers rank and prioritize this, while often not being able to IQ test due to Griggs and optics
That isn't really an accurate characterization. They're able to do IQ tests. (And there is an IQ test marketed solely for the purpose of being used in hiring, the Wonderlic.) In general employers just believe that IQ tests are morally wrong.
> In general SAT scores have a ~.8 correlation with IQ score
Note that 0.8 is the same correlation that IQ scores have with each other; the number is telling you that SAT scores are an example of IQ scores, not that they're a close-but-imperfect proxy for IQ scores.
Griggs v. Duke Power Co. specifically addressed IQ testing; in fact, it specifically addressed the Wonderlic.
> And what do finance and FAANGs and similar companies at the apex in terms of total comp do? They select on T20 (Ivy Plus) degrees, often T20 STEM degrees
FAANGs don’t prioritise the ivy league at all, preferring engineering colleges.
San Jose state university supplies a lot of graduates.
I specifically mean the coarse 3 levels used in that study:
Didn't finish high school
Finished high school but not college
College degree
Within families, this is comparing people with similar environments, but how much is it actually telling us about how smart people are?
Educational attainment is a small checkbox on numerous forms, so sample sizes can be huge, whereas cognitive test scores require people to put in time and effort on a cognitive test, so sample sizes tend to be much smaller (except in countries with conscription). A friend of mine published studies with sample sizes in the millions for polygenic scores for educational attainment.
Of course, educational attainment is not a terribly conclusive measure for deciding whether intelligence is driven more by nature or nurture because obviously nurture (e.g., how much money your parents have to spend on your higher education, including the opportunity cost of not yet starting a paying career) plays a sizable role in how much education you attain.
> Neural Networks Are Already Clean
FWIW I showed this article to some friends who are AI researchers (I am not). Their conclusion was that it's barely one step above word salad. It builds up anticipation by describing the very basics of NN neurons and architectures, hinting at greater revelations that never come. And before you ask, no, I did not bias them in any way; I literally just said, "what do you think about this artricle [link] ?".
Interesting. My sister has done some work that appears to independently verify some of the article's claims: specifically, she's been able to trace many individual concepts to their neurons in Qwen. (Of course, she can only do this on open-weight AIs, but it's likely closed AIs are similarly interpretable). I also read the article, and found it interesting, comprehensible, exciting, and revelatory, so I'm surprised your friends didn't get anything out of it.
Anyway, if his results hold up, it means that neuralese doesn't exist unless we train it in, which would be huge. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-specter-of-neuralese
Is that Milton Friedman AI claim just a nod to Stephen Glass' The New Republic article "Praised be Greenspan"? Or is it actually legit? That was one of his many fabricated articles with claims like an investment firm set up a shrine to Alan Greenspan, brokers used software to interpret his statements for market predictions, and IIRC, even sitting in a chair he'd had to channel him so as to better understand the market. I no longer have access to the article, so I could be off.
Separately, does anyone know how the CEO-AI clones that some companies are using are doing? Meta and ClickUp were reportedly working on that.
#16 I find this to be a strawman of suicidal empathy. While you COULD apply it in a far-too-broad, racist capacity, I've always seen the term used to describe ill-advised sympathy for violent criminals and terrorists.
I think Scott has seen a different set of arguments from you. See, e.g., https://graymirror.substack.com/p/is-effective-altruism-effective and https://freebeacon.com/america/suicidal-compassion-meet-the-anthropic-officials-who-think-ai-might-be-justified-in-going-rogue-against-the-humans-enslaving-it/.
I see 16 the other way around too - the kind of person who claims to care about distant causes for the greater good but is a jerk to you in person also usually turns out, on inspection, to not be particularly caring or helpful about distant people either.
If you enjoy hurting people, that won't make you popular... but if you adopt a bulshit excuse that you are hurting people for the greater cause (hashtag Drinking Outgroup Tears), suddenly you have lots of allies. Most people won't bother checking whether your actions actually contribute to something good.
Which is different from the people who arrived to the greater cause as a generalization of smaller causes they care about.
Yet another thing is pretending to care about the greater cause only because it gives you status. That is an asshole move, because the status should rightfully belong to those who actually work for the cause.
I've often quoted this poem on here, but once more:
The World State
G. K. Chesterton
Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!
The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the nations now,
Except the one that’s nearest.
This compromise has long been known,
This scheme of partial pardons,
In ethical societies
And small suburban gardens—
The villas and the chapels where
I learned with little labour
The way to love my fellow-man
And hate my next-door neighbour.
As C. S. Lewis put it it "The Screwtape Letters", from the perspective of a demon advising on how to tempt people towards sin:
"Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as some malice, in your patient's soul. The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary."
> I've always seen the term used to describe ill-advised sympathy for violent criminals and terrorists.
That’s an inverted morality for sure. tolerating crime and antisocial behaviour is profoundly unfair to poorer people, because they often have the least ability to escape it.
So you have to doubt whether the liberal on crime is as kind as he or she claims. As concerned about the poor as they claim.
I’d argue that it’s a luxury belief. I don’t think that there’s all much real compassion for criminals, but actual contempt for the poor.
I was going to comment this too. "Suicidal empathy" as I've seen the term used is when people focus their empathy on dangerous criminals or voluntarily freeloading parasites, arguing against punishing them or preventing them from continuing to do harm. It's a blinkered, fake-moral position that heaps empathy on the least deserving people while ignoring the harm done to others--others who by all rights deserve at least the same amount of empathy.
I've seen it used more similarly to what Scott described, but I think a more charitable take would be "People who feel warm toward the outgroup often do not feel as warm toward the ingroup [see 2018 ANES study*] and this can lead to them creating/supporting policies that are unusually generous to the outgroup, sometimes to the disadvantage of the ingroup."
"I've always seen the term used to describe ill-advised sympathy for violent criminals and terrorists."
Ironically, I find this description to be a straw-man of people's actual beliefs. Nobody who seriously uses the phrase "suicidal empathy" as if it were a real thing seems to have a remotely decent read on what their political opponents genuinely believe. It's all just wild misinterpretations, unjustified assumptions and unflattering caricatures.
So what do you think of "Queers for Palestine"? Or courts that put violent criminals on probation over and over? Or the rape gang cover-ups in the UK? When people label such practices and positions "suicidal empathy" what are they misinterpretiing?
"So what do you think of 'Queers for Palestine'?"
Well, the really, enormously fucking obvious read on Queers for Palestine is that they're one of many, many groups of people that thinks that systematically murdering tens of thousands of children is sick, evil and wrong and should not be condoned (yes, regardless of how geopolitically convenient maintaining good relations with the government doing the murdering happens to be). Seriously, what the hell kind of a question IS that? How can you be so indescribably BAD at empathy that you cannot understand the basic, simple, minimally decent position that is (at this point) held by a very large fraction of the world on this issue?
But thank you for so nicely illustrating my point. Even the tiniest, most minuscule modicum of effort to understand the people you're claiming to describe would have resulted in a better model than that: and it's not like they're hiding or being quiet about it. You were either too intellectually lazy or too badly blinkered by your own tribe's political dogma to even TRY: I know this because if you had tried, you couldn't possibly have failed this badly.
The other two examples you mention are similarly lazy: you are making extremely, extremely weird, narrow minded and uncharitable assumptions about what people actually know and think about various issues. These are the sort of assumptions that couldn't survive a person with modest intelligence sitting alone in a room considering alternative hypotheses for five fucking minutes; they CERTAINLY could not survive actual conversations with real people of differing political views.
So yes, the whole notion you are describing is a straw man, and a very shoddy one at that.
I asked what you yourself thought of the examples I gave, not how badly you think I understand. I thought I was MAKING a modicum of effort by inviting you to explain these commonly cited examples of suicidal empathy. The fact that you instead launched into a diatribe about how narrow-minded you think I am doesn't really help your case.
Trying again, (hopefully) more clearly, directly and matter-of-factly:
All of your examples are very heavily dependent on *your* particular interpretation of facts and events. The world is large and complex, with many causes, many effects and many, many sources of information of various levels of quality and reliability: people who are not you need not and in general will not be working from the same set of information or the same interpretations that you are.
Courts sometimes release people who shouldn't be released: very, very few people would dispute this general fact. But they also sometimes imprison people who shouldn't be imprisoned: nobody with the tiniest shrew of life experience ought to doubt that. How to navigate the tradeoff between those two is VERY complicated, and even extremely well-informed people with similar values can disagree wildly. And I guarantee that there ARE very, very well-informed people who disagree with your position on criminal justice[1].
Likewise, police failing to investigate possible crimes that they ought to investigate is a problem that sometimes happens: almost nobody would dispute this. But in order for this to work as an example at all, you have to *assume* certain things about causation and prevalence. Other people don't have to share those assumptions. They're perfectly free to have their own conclusions and assumptions about why certain bad things happen.
In order for either of those to be remotely apt as examples of "suicidal empathy," your political opponents have to be cartoon idiots who DO know everything you (think you) know, DON'T know any pertinent information that is unknown to you, and hold that (by your assumption) wrong positions solely and purely out of a misguided desire to help abusers and rapists. That's a strawman if I've ever seen one.
And unlike the other two, Queers for Palestine has absolutely no ambiguity to it whatsover. It's not based on difficult interpretations of vast and complex bodies of facts, or opaque institutional incentives or anything like that. Literally ALL THAT IS REQUIRED to understand why billions of people worldwide are horrified by what is going on in Palestine is to look at the death tolls. That's it. If you consider Palestinian children to be morally relevant human beings who don't deserve to die, then you necessarily hold the position that murdering them is wrong, no matter who their parents are. [2]
[1] Which isn't to say there aren't also well-informed people who agree with it.
[2] Of course, the same is true Israeli children, of course, and Ukranian children, and Russian children and Iranian children and Yemeni children. The difference is that I never, ever, ever hear anyone in the west saying that it's good and just to kill Israeli or Russian or Ukrainian children. But "killing Palestinian children is wrong" gets treated as a controversial position. Y'know, for some mysterious reason.
"Literally ALL THAT IS REQUIRED to understand why billions of people worldwide are horrified by what is going on in Palestine is to look at the death tolls. "
The same billions of people don't seem to be concerned about higher death tolls in places like Sudan. This is hard to explain except through the framework of "no Jews no news".
That's closer to answering my questions, but I was hoping for more detail, like Paul Brinkley suggested above in his own reply to you: "I can see why someone would think that; here's why those examples don't appear as SE [Suicidal Empathy] to me at all"
But perhaps I myself need to be more clear and specific first. To start with, in hindsight I think I overreached when I called Scott's definition of suicidal empathy a strawman. I can believe that he, and you, have observed far-right people using the term Suicidal Empathy (SE) to justify treating any and all members of an outgroup they don't like as guilty until proven innocent. I do not agree with such people, but I still think that SE is still a useful term in certain circumstances.
Regarding the Queers for Palestine, I get the EMPATHY part, in the general sense that yes, children dying in war is a tragedy. But in this case, the Queers for Palestine movement is showing support for people who would very likely kill them if they ever met in person: https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/10/gay-palestinian-man-under-asylum-in-israel-kidnapped-and-beheaded-in-palestinian-territory/
That's where the "suicidal" part comes in. If the people representing the movement acknowledged this inconvient fact, then I could regard their stance as brave and principled, ("bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you"), hough I still wouldn't agree with supporting the Palestinians over Israel as long as the former are controlled by Hamas, but that's another topic. The problem is, I haven't seen such an acknowledgment, and I looked before replying here. Without acknowledging Palestinian hate for queers, the QfP movement seems to me based more on ignorance and vibes, than on a well-thought out, principled stance.
Regarding releasing criminals who shouldn't be released, I acknowledge there are numerous complications in the justice system that can result in this extreme or the other, and every case is different. A case I specifically had in mind is this one here, from the prosecutor's own lips: https://youtu.be/tiy0R9qVDV0?si=zGte1pFfvKGHMig5&t=390
Perhaps you think that she was right to have empathy for the man who accidentally killed a man he was trying to rob, but I have a bit more empathy for the 86 year old man who died than the guy who put his life in danger in the process of robbing him. Also, this is part of a larger video taking about said prosecutor's role in the trial of Daniel Penny, who was charged with killing Jordan Neely. Jordan had been arrested dozens of times before, and kept getting out. Maybe it wasn't empathy on the judges' part, but some other factor that led him specifically to be released over and over, but I wouldn't rule it out.
Regarding the U.K. rape gangs, the Rape Gang Inquiry Report indicates that vast numbers of rape cases went un-investigated or un-prosecuted specifically because the authorities were afraid of being called racist or Islamophobic:
"The legal framework that underpinned this paralysis began with the Race
Relations Act 1965 and its even stronger successor in 1976. These statutes,
designed to combat overt discrimination, were interpreted and expanded in
ways that made any discussion of ethnicity or culture in crime patterns
hazardous. The Macpherson Report (1999) following the Stephen Lawrence
Inquiry branded the police “institutionally racist” and introduced a definition of
racism so broad that police officers and social workers became terrified of any
action that could be construed as targeting ethnic minorities. Across Britain, clear evidence of organised abuse by Pakistani gangs, among othermajority-Muslim ethnic groups, was ignored because confronting it risked accusations of racism. The fear was not abstract. Senior officers and council staff explicitly cited concerns about so-called “community relations” and potentialrace riots as reasons for inaction."
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/6810978a41bbc42489eafa81/t/6a314bb1151e511944bd4421/1781615537601/The+Rape+Gang+Inquiry+Report.pdf
Page 135
So while I do agree that not every questionable judicial or activist decision can be attributed to suicidal empathy, I still believe that some can take their empathy too far, and end up, even without malicious intent, giving mercy for perpatrators priority over justice and safety for victims.
Re: #8: Balioc offers a more optimistic take on the post-work future: https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/825928009805692928/i-hope-someone-lets-me-know-when-that-clara
Makes a good point. There’s also the fact that many retirees are enjoying their lives and finding worthwhile ways to spend their time.
Pushing back on 18, I can only speak from my experience working at any Ivy League university: I'm watching the administration gut classes, and fire professors with decades of experience and replace them with a revolving door of grad TAs. We make it clear to the administration that we cannot continue to offer the same quality as before because of these things, and yet they continue, so clearly teaching is not a priority.
This seems like a different complaint from the one Decker's responding to.
I see it as describing the same trend but on the education rather than research side of the institution (the one feeds the other, after all). If a bad research department is one which doesn't produce any good work, as opposed to one which produces some bad work in addition to the good, then what do you call an educational department which cuts everything good out of its courses?
Wait, what Ivy League university has fired any professor with decades of experience? I haven't heard of any threats to tenure at any of these institutions.
They weren't tenured. Does "professor" only apply to tenured positions? I usually call them all "instructors", tenured or not, but my coworkers call them all "professors" unless they're teaching high schoolers during the summer program.
It depends on the institution. But here I just pulled one institution at random (Yale) and found their list of titles: https://facultyadmin.yale.edu/faculty-ranks-and-expense-types
"Professor" without any qualification is only used for tenured people, and "Associate Professor" is used for some tenured people and some not-yet-tenured people. (This is unusual to Yale, Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and a few other institutions - at most institutions, "Associate Professor" is also only for tenured people.)
There are a lot of different variants of "Assistant Professor", some of which are in the tenure stream ("ladder", at Yale) and can become tenured (but aren't yet), but when there's a modification out front ("Gibbs Assistant Professor", "Visiting Assistant Professor", or at some universities "Research Assistant Professor" or "Teaching Assistant Professor") it's usually not in the tenure stream.
But most people who aren't in the tenure stream have titles like "Lecturer", "Instructor", "Research Scientist", or "Fellow", sometimes with some other modification. (And there are also a few "Visiting Assistant Professor" and "Visiting Professor" titles that are explicitly time-limited and can't enter the tenure stream.)
Usually I would reserve the term "Professor" for anyone who has "Professor" somewhere in their title, and in some contexts I would only use it for someone whose full title is "Professor". Either way, almost anyone who has held titles of that form for a full decade is tenured.
(Though at some institutions, "Teaching Associate Professor" or "Teaching Professor" might be titles that can be held for many years without tenure - still with a lot more protection than "Lecturer" or "Instructor").
But it's true, the terminology is confusing, and it's not uncommon for people who aren't inside academia to use the term "professor" more generically for anyone who leads a class.
Yeah, we support teaching labs, and looking at the people currently there, I see a lot of Associate Teaching Professor, but also Senior Teaching Associate (which seems like a lowball title for someone with 33 years' teaching and lab experience).
Anyway, fun times. I don't really bother with titles, and my coworkers don't either. Every once in a while I field a call from some outside academic looking for "Doctor [coworker's last name]" and it always takes me a moment to parse.
I still have no idea how to operationalize a prediction of X% chance of $Y loss in a year. Usually the advice is to spend $0.0X*Y/year to stave the problem, but all disasters I know is something that either don't happen at all, making the prevention useless, or happen overwhelmingly, making the prevention as useless as a small wall trying to hold tsunami. So useless either way.
The only use case I can think of is if you have a prevention method that guarantees zero harm for Z years. So if that method cost less than $0.0X*Y*Z, it's worth it. But I never heard a prevention method that's sold like this, rather than the pathetic small wall I mentioned first.
(I intentionally don't mention epistemic probability of the prediction being true in the first place, as it only makes preventions even less worth it.)
If the loss is in external liability then by spending ($0.0X x Y) per year you are taking adequate precautions under the law such that you aren't negligent. In that case its basically like paying XY per year as an insurance premium against liability $Y.
In the event where the method of prevention costs MORE than ($0.0X x Y) per year, you are not legally negligent for failing to take that precaution, so if the loss is external then your risk is either just PR/goodwill or if it's an internal loss (or it's strict liability and you're ponying up either way) then it's entirely a matter of how risk-neutral you are.
Applying this framework to actual disasters may not lead to desirable incentives, and is never pitched like this in anything public-facing because the optics are horrible when it comes to actual catastophe.
<mildSnark>
>the claim that “seed oil discourse” became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor.
So the usual censorship targets had become too ... saturated? :-)
</mildSnark>
I think there might be a kernel of truth here.
LOL, Many Thanks!
RE 30: I have a similar continuous AI music thing where local models on my computer make music based upon an aggregation/selection of prompts listeners make. It runs on my computer which I use for other stuff so right now it's only on Sunday evenings if anyone wants to come to the next one. https://radio.jay-fowler.com/ you can see some pretty decent songs it's made so far at the link when no active show is playing.
Accidentally scrolled down too fast and saw the "Hypothetical ARkStorm Flood Areas" map without context. My mind parsed it as a proposal (like the Qattara Depression Project, I guess) and I was briefly on board with it.
I believe there was a giant flood that filled much of the Central Valley of California for months in 1862. In Sacramento, Governor Leland Stanford had to be rowed to his inauguration.
The winter and spring of 2023 were very wet, not as much as 1862. But 2023 was a once in 50 years event by some measures, and once in a hundred years event by other measures.
Sizable parts of the Central Valley were underwater when I drove through in May 2023. But the roads were built higher than the surrounding fields, so I could drive 65 mph down a two lane highway with lakes stretching off for miles on both sides of the road: an unusual experience in normally sunny California.
So, much of the Central Valley has been engineered to deal with big floods. There were huge lakes in the lowest parts of the Central Valley when Americans took over. They redistributed the water from the Sierra Nevadas more evenly over the land via irrigation canals and made the former lakes farmable. But every so many years, the old lakebeds fill up with water and the landowners can't grow anything in them that year. But California farmers tend to be rich, so they can deal with the financial losses.
But an 1862-sized inundation could be a massive problem.
The wikipedia article says "USGS sediment research in the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Barbara Basin, Sacramento Valley, and the Klamath Mountain region found that "megastorms" have occurred in the years: 212, 440, 603, 1029, c. 1300, 1418, 1605, 1750, 1810, and, most recently, 1861–1862." That's 10 in about 2000 years, so on average 1 every 200 years, but as one should expect, occasionally a century with two of them and occasionally four centuries in a row without any. If there's any plausibility that chances of these storms are enhanced by large El Ninos, then there's good reason to worry this year.
Also, I believe the real issue isn't so much the farm fields getting inundated as Davis and Sacramento getting inundated (since they're mostly in the low-lying alluvial plains of the central valley).
>34: “Here, we wire a full drosophila fly connectome into Senator John Fetterman, using a directed control mode to leave his office, vote for cloture, and return.”
Do it to RFK Jr.! Do it to RFK Jr.!
( 'scuse, I shouldn't look at 1984 quotes before commenting... )
>As far as I can tell, Tummarakota’s final argument is straightforwardly correct
Yup. Smaller samples will have more noise than bigger samples. Statistical significance addresses that by just saying that whatever the sample size and its amount of noise, we'll only trust apparent effects if they're big enough that random chance would only produce them 5% of the time or less. (Which for smaller samples means needing an effect to be bigger before you trust that it's real.) But that means that by definition, 5% of the times there's no effect you'll wrongly think there is an effect.
> Which for bigger samples means needing an effect to be bigger before you trust that it's real.
I hope you meant to write "which for smaller samples means needing an effect to be bigger before you trust that it's real".
One of Andrew Gelman's recurring points is that, by requiring published papers to achieve statistical significance, journals guarantee that the papers they publish are almost exclusively wild overestimates of the effects they purport to find. (Because sample sizes are always small.)
Whoops yup, thanks! Will fix.
I don't understand #29. Hasn't recent weeks and months supported AI as Normal Tech's position: AI has strong cybersecurity capabilities, but is better used for defense, than offence. We a) see no large amount of AI driven cyber-attacks, and b) in contrast, the PHP example manifested how AI could be used to identify the problem, while no noteworthy problems emerged from it. Or?
(Binance was taking over a computer, freezers were due to passwords being at factory default, Danish personal security number heist was due to a password being 123456. Now, AI might have helped in these cases, but in the Danish case even ChatGPT-4 would probably have been sufficient aid).
Yes, see:
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/10/why-are-cybersecurity-losses-not-worse.html
https://www.normaltech.ai/p/ai-as-normal-technology spends a lot of time talking about diffusion, with lines like:
> But, for now, the evidence that we have analyzed in our previous work is consistent with the view that there are already extremely strong safety-related speed limits in highly consequential tasks.
> Thus, we predict that slow diffusion will continue to be the norm in high-consequence tasks.
Which would imply that AI wouldn't even be used as a tool mostly responsible for either attacks or defense in critical infrastructure like linux.
> It is not even clear if the speed of diffusion is greater today compared to the past. The aforementioned study reported that generative AI adoption in the U.S. has been faster than personal computer (PC) adoption, with 40% of U.S. adults adopting generative AI within two years of the first mass-market product release compared to 20 % within three years for PCs. But this comparison does not account for differences in the intensity of adoption (the number of hours of use) or the high cost of buying a PC compared to accessing generative AI.14 Depending on how we measure adoption, it is quite possible that the adoption of generative AI has been much slower than PC adoption.
and
> What eventually allowed gains to be realized was redesigning the entire layout of factories around the logic of production lines. In addition to changes to factory architecture, diffusion also required changes to workplace organization and process control, which could only be developed through experimentation across industries. Workers had more autonomy and flexibility as a result of the changes, which also necessitated different hiring and training practices.
Which implies that the attacks should only have happened after criminal organizations dramatically reshaped their structure in order to gain access to these new capabilities.
See also:
> The “bitter lesson” in AI is that general methods that leverage increases in computational power eventually surpass methods that utilize human domain knowledge by a large margin.22 This is a valuable observation about methods, but it is often misinterpreted to encompass application development. In the context of AI-based product development, the bitter lesson has never been even close to true.
and
> This observation is in no way limited to law. Another example is the gap between self-contained coding problems at which AI demonstrably excels, and real-world software engineering in which its impact is hard to measure but appears to be modest.27 Even highly regarded coding benchmarks that go beyond toy problems must necessarily ignore many dimensions of real-world software engineering in the interest of quantification and automated evaluation using publicly available data.28
On misalignment risk:
> The fear that AI systems might catastrophically misinterpret commands relies on dubious assumptions about how technology is deployed in the real world. Long before a system would be granted access to consequential decisions, it would need to demonstrate reliable performance in less critical contexts. Any system that interprets commands over-literally or lacks common sense would fail these earlier tests.
Which would also imply the huggingface attacks would have only been possible if they were explicitly handled power and also deployed. This did not happen, unless you define "given power" to mean "any possible access to the internet"
On cybersecurity, it's discussed in the context of nonproliferation not being feasible,
> In cybersecurity, as we discussed in Part III, advances in automated vulnerability detection tend to favor defenders over attackers. Unless this offense-defense balance changes, attempting to restrict the proliferation of these capabilities would be counterproductive.
Except the defenders were only favored because Anthropic specifically decided nto not proliferate their models. If AI as a normal technology people were right, we'd expect there to be LESS successful cyberattacks than before, a decrease in the number of zero days discovered as AI is used more and more
> It has long been argued that governments are massively underinvesting in many areas of civilizational risk, such as pandemic prevention. If the possibility of bad actors using AI to exploit these existing vulnerabilities creates added urgency to address them, that would be a good outcome. But reframing existing risks as AI risks and prioritizing AI-specific mitigations would be highly counterproductive.
In their response to scott at https://aisnakeoil.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-understanding-ai-as-normal they say:
> In short, we don’t think RSI will lead to superintelligence because the external bottlenecks to building and deploying powerful AI systems cannot be overcome by improving their technical design.
In what sense is the recent uptick in patches submitted by AI companies and attacks performed by them not a consequences of their capabilities?
They also go on to say:
> This chart would be useful if it gave us any evidence that the usual barriers to diffusion have been weakened or eliminated. It doesn’t. Two months is not enough time for the hard parts of diffusion to even get started, such as users adapting their workflows to productively incorporate AI. As such, this chart is irrelevant to any meaningful discussion of the speed of diffusion.
This does not seem true in light of the fact that security now seems to be graded on how integrated they are with AI, in comparison to the supposedly slow speed of diffusion.
If you are thinking of specific people other than the people naming themselves "AI as a normal technology" people, I would like to know.
I’m not sure I follow the inferences here. AI as normal tech explicitly discuss both offensive and defensive uses of AI. Part of their argument is directed at accounts of cyber risk that focus on what attackers can now do while giving too little weight to what defenders can now do. As linked to by another commenter: https://joshuasaxe181906.substack.com/p/if-the-vulnpocalypse-is-the-apocalypse. Some in the AI (doom) field argue that we will see more AI-enabled attacks that are causing damage on a scale that our defenses can't keep up with. As Saxe explains, we don't really seem to see an obvious jump in the damage - the PHP scenario illustrated the point: A critical vulnerability was discovered (aided by AI) and patched (probably aided by AI), and no real attacks were launched.
Those are claims that AI as Normal Tech have made, if you want to talk in general about their track record, you need to look at it overall.l, and it does not look like they are anywhere close to the ballpark of right, except by purposefully expanding their previous definitions to be right.
In addition, the very fact that 1. The people in charge of the AI models are putting in alignment efforts to prevent attackers from freely putting in simple prompts to escalate and 2. They explicitly notified defenders before attackers means we are not living in the world where "AI as normal tech" people are talking about, where alignment and other technical facts are secondary to social forces. (Which, to be fair the article you linked does lean that way right now) You can't claim that alignment is not important, then not try and address the counterfactual where the models were released without the current delays.
I predict that the number of zero days exploited in the wild will increase, and to be clear zero days are more of a nation state's wheelhouse rather than that of criminal organizations. You will explicitly not hear about zero day exploits used by three letter agencies for quite some time, or rather, you definitely will not hear about them within a month even without nation state use.
I think if we don't die soonish and model security doesn't tighten up, we're going to start seeing negative day exploits both discovered and used in the wild (I.e.bugs that software patches alone cannot fix). So something like public key infrastructure weakening a bunch, critical infra attacks and so on.
Again, I struggle to follow the argument here. The following is more or less exactly the AI as Normal Tech argument (relevant actors have agency, and tech actors are expected to act pro-actively, for a variety of reasons): "The people in charge of the AI models are putting in alignment efforts to prevent attackers from freely putting in simple prompts to escalate and 2. They explicitly notified defenders before attackers means we are not living in the world where "AI as normal tech" people are talking about, where alignment and other technical facts are secondary to social forces."
#8 (We Already Know What A World Without Work Looks Like), from the article:
> Relatedly, before industrialization […]. We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world.
We were so very much defined by our "jobs" that they literally became part of our names. Our jobs defined our social status. They were so deeply ingrained in our identity that sons inherited their occupation from their fathers. Occupational associations (guilds) took over non-work functions, like social safety nets. I don't think there was anything more defining than your job, apart from your religion.
From your summary:
> […] groups ranging from hunter-gatherers to aristocrats […]
Where does the article mention hunter-gatherers?
One interesting thing on the Victorian partying article is that this is still how business is done in much of the world. Certainly all over Asia, and in Russia, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were common in other non-Western coutnries.
Just like the Victorians, in Asia, this tier of people spend ~3-5 hours in the office, and the rest on large, social meals with copious alcohol, social events like dancing, Opera, plays, and other performances (in Asia now these are karaoke, KTV, sporting events, invite only shopping things, etc). Gifts are frequent and carefully calibrated to your relative status levels and the size of the ask, Roman Empire "patronage" style relationships are common, and so on.
I've always known about this difference between modern Eastern and Western style business mores, but never thought to wonder if modern Western mores had once been like that, and the fact that they were, even well into the Industrial Revolution, is interesting. I wonder when the transition happened? I wonder *why* the transition happened?
My first thought was it has to be another of the Henrich / WEIRD culture Christian things, doesn't it? My basic guess would have been something like "well the Roman empire did business like that too, but then Christianity happened, then feminism, and you're not supposed to have any fun in either of those two paradigms, so it went off by the wayside and was replaced with the entirely bland and uncontroversial Western mores today."
Certainly anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately, and prior to our age of cancellation would have been socially ostracized in any Puritan or strict mores culture.
But the Victorians are apparently still there doing it, on the back end of 1500+ years of prominent Christianity!
So I'm really curious about this now, and wonder when and why the transition happened.
As northern Europe urbanized after the end of the Dark Ages, the urban bourgeoisie tended to develop a more puritanical culture than that of the rural aristocrats. Some of gentile puritanism was modeled upon the culture of Europe's hard-working and shrewd white collar Jews.
> Certainly anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately, and prior to our age of cancellation would have been socially ostracized in any Puritan or strict mores culture.
Well, Wal-Mart is known for prohibiting its executives from meeting salespeople outside the executives' offices. I am given to understand that the ordinary American practice is for salespeople meeting executives to do so at extremely expensive restaurants, or in skybox seats at major sporting events, or the like.
Is that different?
What about this?
> One of the perks of many executive or sales jobs is a company expense account; the employee is allowed considerable leeway in spending at restaurants, clubs and other entertainment venues because it is recognized that a little wining and dining goes a long way toward winning customers (and that includes politicians being wooed by lobbyists). In other words, a few hundred dollars worth of food and entertainment can result in many thousands or even millions in business. And though prudish accountants might balk at payouts to strip clubs and call girls, they don’t have to know; the racy names of many adult entertainment companies are just DBAs, and the actual names on their business licenses are either neutral (mine was a set of initials) or sound like those of other hospitality industry companies.
> Most of the time the girls don’t even directly realize they’re being employed as bribes, but if you are an escort who’s ever been hired by one man for another (outside of bachelor-party arrangements or dads initiating sons) you have served in this capacity, even if the guy who hired you referred to the gift’s recipient as his “friend”. And if you work in a state or national capital, a good percentage of those “friends” were either politicians or bureaucrats. Since I’m reasonably quick on the uptake I generally recognized these situations for what they were, but I remember one instance where I didn’t have to guess because the gentleman who hired me spelled it out: he was the regional sales representative for a large vendor of snack foods, and I was the bribe for the buyer of a large retail grocery chain to switch from his current supplier to that which employed my client. Considering how much money was riding on the deal I couldn’t help but feel incredibly flattered, and I suspect that was exactly what my wily client intended by telling me; the self-confidence boost raised my charisma by several notches over its already-high level, and I had the buyer eating out of my hand as soon as I walked through the door.
( https://maggiemcneill.com/2011/06/05/perquisites/ )
It's different in the sense there's generally considerably more vice involved, although yes, absolutely it's about very expensive restaurants and skyboxes and the like, too. The Southpark pangolin episode is a hilarious and relatively accurate representation.
I imagine that people in different professions may have wildly different intuitions about this, because this only applies to (1) salesmen, and (2) managers who make decisions about what to buy, and most readers of ACX are in neither group.
And I do not mean the kind of decisions where the algorithm is already given to you, for example you are told to compare the costs of dozen identical products and buy the cheapest one, but the kind where a high-level manager decides e.g. that the company will switch to SAP.
For the peons at the bottom I guess the lesson is: if you see a management decision that does not make sense, consider the possibility that something similar may have happened.
> I imagine that people in different professions may have wildly different intuitions about this
But that already seems sufficient to disprove the claim that "anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately", no?
It's not like this kind of thing is hard to find. Here's an advice column:
> One thing that I consider less than respectable is any evidence of being drunk or partying. And what better way to not have evidence than to never drink too much! At least in my mind.
> But one of my best friends argues that it’s not very important. She works for a lawyer (who she says is very successful at what he does) and witnesses business men and women partying quite frequently. She doesn’t say that getting drunk is respectable, but she says it all depends on if the consequences are worth it to you. She argues that “everybody’s doing it” and implies that it’s not a huge deal to party too much and then maybe show up hungover to work or take a sick day. I should mention that our debate started because she mentioned a professional friend of hers who is a regular pot smoker, so I am referring more to the whole partying mindset, not just getting drunk. My understanding from her is that drinking, smoking, and pot use are part of the business culture and I shouldn’t be so uptight.
( https://www.askamanager.org/2014/07/do-employers-really-look-down-on-drinking-and-partying.html )
> But that already seems sufficient to disprove the claim that "anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately", no?
Yeah, I agree.
I wanted to explain why this may seem so to many ACX commenters -- because in *their* roles, they would probably get fired if they tried something similar. But there are other roles, too.
> But that already seems sufficient to disprove the claim that "anyone in the Anglosphere following the Chinese method of doing business would be cancelled and pilloried basically immediately", no?
Sure, it happens in the West too, in limited spots here and there.
I think it's more about the incidence and prevalence of it happening. In China, it's literally the default / majority path. High level politicans like governors, mayors, etc are doing this, executives at major name brand companies, and so on.
I don't doubt you can find one off examples in the West, what you won't find is the equivalent of a mayor or governor or C-suite executive at a publicly traded company doing it. Why not? Because they would be cancelled and pilloried.
China is running full tilt away from this, and the mooncake market will never be the same.
Wasn't wining and dining (and taking to, ahem, 'gentlemen's clubs') also part of dealing with clients in Western business?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spearmint_Rhino
And as mentioned in another comment, providing tickets to elite sporting and social events, corporate boxes, etc. (the prawn sandwich brigade, tickets to Wimbledon, Glyndebourne, Ascot and so forth):
https://www.houseandgarden.co.uk/article/country-house-opera
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prawn_sandwich_brigade
American corporate life has been pretty sexually integrated for about 50 years now, which no doubt made it more genteel. Strippers and prostitutes don't fit in well with corporate entertaining when, say, two of your five guests from your client are women executives.
Of course, my experience in the 1980s and the 1990s was in marketing research, a rather staid and gender-mixed business. Other industries might be very different.
Yeah, I've thought this before, but China actually has quite a lot of female executives, they just don't do the vice circuit stuff.
Looking it up, it seems like 19% vs US 25%. Not as far apart as you'd think.
That said, Chinese women definitely complain there's a very strong glass ceiling and sexism in the workplace is a serious issue in surveys, and I agree - being cut out of that stuff and sexism in general probably materially impedes their ability to advance to the highest levels.
2) What makes Kaleria really unfortunate in Russian, is that "Kal" is a Russian medical term for fecal matter.
A poor girl named Kaleria would never live that down.
>I don’t entirely agree with this - the bad work is irrelevant until it takes over your culture and politics and government
I maintain my position that it's not the bad stuff that is taking over your culture, it is grifters and politicians and other manipulators who are taking over your culture, opportunistically using whatever fluff and detritus they can find from academia or foreign lands or exotic subcultures or etc. as a tool.
You can't actually stop this process by trying to crack down on the fluff and detritus, if you eliminate one source they'll just pull from another, and if you somehow eliminate all sources they'll just blatantly misrepresent and misinterpret something 'real' and 'good.'
You have to go after the people making billion-dollar industries out of nonsense, not the people writing nonsense in the first place. The industry is the thing doing the harm, and the world will never run out of nonsense to exploit.
Some things may be easier to get mass support / support of the right kind of people for when misinterpreted, so it can make sense to fight for them.
Academia has/had a privileged trust position from afar, though. “Trust the science” has a very different social effect from “trust me”, and picking experts that there isn't already some broader (not necessarily universal) consensus around makes for a lot more friction in social spread. So while there's definitely substitution effects lying around in what gets grifted upon, I don't think the terrain is flat enough here for that.
But there isn't anything like consensus around anyone like Jason Arday, and I don't think I ever heard of anyone successfully using his work to argue for some sort of policy position!
It may also be objected that ideological bad scholarship may (1) crowd out or suppress good scholarship in related areas (the decline of ethnography in anthropology seems like the most obvious example of this), or (2) contaminate practical work where practical workers are being trained by researching professors (eg. schools of education), or (3) be used as specious justification for things that people in power want to do for their own ideological reasons (not Arday specifically, but the general category of "[thing] is racist" has been used this way in the recent past ).
Arday specifically, perhaps. There is plenty of work done by people of a similar sort who are now influencing, for example, education curriculums in America. There are entire fields who regard themselves as activists first, academics second. Or they'll tell you that facts carry moral implication, and so constructing the body of facts is equivalent to making an "ought" argument.
Neither of these are the types you'd want in academia.
Re AI and cyber threats... It's interesting you see this as a vindication! I think most laymen would argue the opposite. We haven't seen any catastrophic hacks? Sure some crypto holders lost money, but there's nothing new about hacking crypto exchanges.
Most professionals would see it the same way. These models aren't super hackers, they're mediocre hackers that work very fast and can be used by anyone to crack open easily hackable systems.
What we're seeing with this new wave of hacks is that being generally unimportant and not worth hacking no longer matters. The modern version of script kiddies with an open weights model can hack your systems just for shits and giggles.
I think ESET, Fortinet, and whatever consultancies can help you beef up your cybersecurity are going to be doing very well in the next few years.
So 23 is essentially a Black Mirror episode (don't remember the name). Please let us know when the box containing Milton Friedman's polyurethane body arrives at Warsh's office. As a believer in Act Utilitarianism I'll be hoping to see Bentham's real deal bod in London reactivated too. ACX can host the event.
Related to 2 — there’s a member of parliament in India called Atishi Marlena.
Her last name being a portmanteau of Marx and Lenin.
She had academic parents but she is herself centre-left.
Hitler Mussolini Simeon Flores was recently elected mayor in Peru. He's apparently a left-winger too.
The split I would want recorded is which weight update was temporary. Item 22's idea is to pay a caught reward hack into a buffer that is thrown away at the end of the run, so the next copy does not keep it. That only works if the discard actually happens and the kept checkpoint is the permanent delta, not a mix that still contains the hack. I would log the step where the hack was caught and which buffer was dropped. Catching the behavior and still giving it the reward for that run is not the same as showing the surviving weights never received the update.
1: real conundrum for a Georgist.
5: my decision to rent a place further from the ocean + somewhat elevated continues to pay dividends, was quite grateful during that tsunami scare too. Felt bad for all my coworkers who live in the Sunset and were genuinely worried about coming home to flooding. Likewise very appreciative of Past aG who bought heavy-duty raingear as a cosplaying lark years ago, it keeps paying for itself whenever we get these massive rainy winters now. Umbrellas are for chumps!
23: unsure if I want more of this, it's probably above-replacement, given the shit-tier schmucks currently populating many high-level positions. But also there's something deeply sad and somewhat disturbing about it too, a la Gradual Disempowerment.
37: am saddened I no longer have anyone in my life who'd appreciate this gift...RIP local nerd gaming group, the rent was too damn high.
16:
> and who suggest that being cruel to minorities/foreigners/animals/AIs
It seems you forgot to include /Crypto and /Juicero there.
Huh?
I was wondering why you included AI in that list and where you would draw the line, if any. If you believe that one can be mean to a piece of technology the same way as to a human or animal, then I jokingly suggest to go all the way.
> but I also appreciated some very original commentary - for example, the claim that “seed oil discourse” became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor
Huh. I have no relevant knowledge of this specific issue. But if you'd asked me I would have been happy to assume that seed oil discourse was the province of the left wing, like other dietary fads. I _have_ been assuming that this whole time.
Do you even lift :-). it’s definitely gym bro rhetoric. A lot of the concerns about Pharmaceutical companies and mass produced over processed food has moved right over the last while, mostly because the left made its peace with pharmaceutical companies during covid.
You caught me.
Alex Jones famously used to sell supplements, and a lot of others on the right as well.
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/24/979362593/alex-jones-still-sells-supplements-on-amazon-despite-bans-from-other-platforms
The right absolutely does have their own dietary fads. There's money to be made, after all. You just need to get the branding right for your target audience.
#3:
Fun fact: Edith Ina Stead anagrams to "EAT SHIT AND DIE"
Astronomer here. It's absolutely untrue that there are millions of WOW signals.
There have been some roughly similar signals detected since -- narrowband emission centred near the hydrogen line -- but everything that has come since is at least two orders of magnitude fainter. The WOW signal remains unexplained because (a) it was so damn bright, and (b) it has never repeated. It remains to this day an unexplained transient.
This isn't to say anyone thinks it's a credible ET signal. But it absolutely hasn't been dismissed as a settled non-event. It was weird, unique, and remains unexplained.
A paper from 2024 hypothesised that it was caused by a random bright event (like a flare from a magnetic neutron star) which hit a cloud of gas and caused it to brighten. But who knows, this is only a one-off paper trying to come up with an explanation. But the point is, the community still feels the signal was weird enough to try to explain it!
As an ex-astronomer, that was my take too.
My first thought was that the comment was referring to GRBs, but the Wow signal wasn't a GRB. After reading it, I think they are actually arguing that we pick up a lot of noise from space/terrestrial sources, but again, the characteristics of the Wow signal don't look like either of these.
Most likely it has a natural expanation, though. A convincing alien signal would have to be repeated or at least contain sufficiently interesting information that we can be sure it isn't being generated by some rare natural event.
The difficulty there is that modern communication systems use such heavy compression that the raw signal looks just like broadband noise.
Plausible, but it still doesn't explain why it's an isolated instance. Also I have difficulty constructing a reason for an intelligent signal being that bright.
1: I recently learned that the Mexican town of Poza Rica ("Rich well") was already inhabited decades before the discovery of oil in its environs. Had always assumed that its name was related to its location at the center of one of the main oil-producing regions of Mexico.
On the Soviet acronym names: Carmela Raiz (a refusnik, author of *Blue Star Over Red Square*) was named after Mt. Carmel in Israel. Her father got away with this by claiming the name was an acronym for "Karl Marx, Engels, Lenin".
#15 - My interpretation of Executive Order 14434 ("INAUGURATING THE ERA OF SUPER INTELLIGENCE") on Sept 29th is that it came just as Trump became aware of the AI safety movement (after his Sept 14th tweet "The only control or 'guardrails' that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!").
One thing the late Scott Adams saw in ~2016 was how well Trump wielded the power of naming things (like his political opponents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_Donald_Trump). This has continued, with the Gulf of America etc.
I would not be surprised if the conversational difficulty at the conference which Scott mentions in the image caption, between rationalists and DC republicans, was exactly the intended outcome, alongside a general burying of Bostrom's original meaning. It makes it impossible to talk about.
For other examples of similar "super-weird" behaviour, see e.g. Boris Johnson making a weird statement in 2019, which went viral and buried criticism about the false pledge on the side of the Vote Leave bus ("Boris, how do you relax?" "I make toy buses out of wine crates").
I don't really know what the best counter-move is.
The full-conspiracy-nut version is that Altman advised on this, and "we already have superintelligence" is a great framing for both: Trump doesn't need to admit to himself that anything could be smarter than him, and Superintelligence isn't a spooky future thing that labs need to take unusual precautions about (since today's risks are being adequately managed).
I mean, if the goal was communication difficulties, the entire intelligence community was collateral damage here. One of the cleared sector people I know was complaining to me just recently:
The biggest and oldest classification compartment in the US IC is "Special Intelligence", which is basically *always* abbreviated "SI" (and because of how classification markings work, you're often required to use that abbreviating dozens or hundreds of times per document. Said contractor was bitching that reading *any* classified document that has anything to do with AI is now an exercise in frustration and confusion, because that's so deeply ingrained.
> Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.
Aristocrats were still making important leadership decisions, which is at least kind of work.
And aristocrats were dependent on the aristocratic status system for their material comfort and sometimes safety.
Plenty of modern people with nothing better to do will play a lot of video games. But ancient aristocrats didn't have access to video games. And a king that didn't show up would likely find themselves no longer king, and perhaps no longer alive.
Re. 1: The house appears to have a crawlspace foundation made of stone, which isn't too surprising--what else would work in such a location? Imagine being there during a thunderstorm--but I wish I could have seen how they constructed it. Did they just have a bunch of flat barges anchored right there with the materials on them? You'd need cranes on the barges too, because in some places there's no room to set up scaffolds or ladders.
I'm also curious whether the house has electricity; if so, the only way I can figure they get it is via an underwater feeder cable with the meter set on the shore. I wonder if the main disconnect is at the meter or in the house--it seems like the one time where it would be safer for it to be at the house than at the meter.
And what about plumbing? Supply could feasibly be drawn from the lake and be filtered onsite, but is grey- and blackwater just dumped into the lake, or do they pipe underwater to the sewer or an onshore septic system?
Really I suspect the house has neither electricity nor plumbing (I see a little shed around the side--I bet it's an outhouse and they've got to do some sort of composting toilet thing or else haul their solid waste out from time to time).
Regarding #15, THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.
The proposed temporary reward channel has a useful accounting property. It records the behavior without making the incentive permanent. The unresolved issue is who decides which observed behavior qualifies for that channel. If the classifier misses a profitable deviation, the permanent weights still absorb it. Governance moves to the detection threshold.
Do you think that this slop is contributing to the conversation?
My thoughts.
2 - probably the soviets remember the war over Mongolia in 1939. Which they won. Nobody else does. Who can blame you. Hitler forgot a few years later. That defeat made the Japanese pivot south after invading China, and led to them signing a pact with the Russians, both with strong repercussions for WWII.
6: ask anybody who believes in UFOS being aliens why they appear on the atmosphere but not above it. We have a lot of coverage of the Earth from satellites.
8: hardly. We can’t all be aristocrats who did in fact have to manage their properties, even if that only meant hiring a good agent, but quite often were hands-on.
Look to late Republican, and Imperial Rome to the situation for the plebeian classes when slaves took a lot of the work.
Augustus said in 5bc that he gave 320,000 of Rome’s urban plebeians a cash payment in 5 BC, and in a later Res Gestae Divi Augusti mentions 200,000 recipients of the grain dole. None of this stopped people working, however piecemeal they worked, so it was more UBI than the modern dole system.
This was available to male adult citizens only. ChatGPT estimates the latter would feed 400-600k people depending on the family size.
So what did they do. Bread and circuses.
>None of this stopped people working, however piecemeal they worked, so it was more UBI than the modern dole system.
People didn't stop working because they couldn't survive on the grain dole alone. It was not sufficient in either quantity or quality to fulfill a typical family's dietary needs, let alone housing, clothing, and other basic necessities that would be covered by UBI:
https://acoup.blog/2024/12/20/collections-on-bread-and-circuses/
"The annona through the end of the second century AD only ever supplied the most basic foodstuff in its most basic, unprocessed form, and only as a supplement for other sources of income."
If the grain dole has a modern equivalent, it's most likely food stamps, not UBI.
8. Suggest you read the linked article before commenting.
I’ll respond to the link, or the article, depending on time available.
#8
Even if you consult the AI for advice, some execution is needed. For example, the AI could tell you to exercise more in order to become fit and increase your status. Will you?
OK, with robots in the game this becomes scary. You could ask a robot to make you exercise every day, whether you want or not. Would you?
#16
Generally, beware of people who ask you to choose between X and Y. Often their goal is just to reduce X and Y combined.
#30
InfiniteSlop seems like a potential strong competitor to TikTok. And that's perhaps a good thing; I'd prefer people watching animated cat videos all day long, over watching enemy propaganda all day long.
> OK, with robots in the game this becomes scary. You could ask a robot to make you exercise every day, whether you want or not. Would you?
You can do that today with a human. Maybe the robot would be more efficient, but I don't see what is so scary? It's more or less part of the job of a PT, and many people do use PTs.
Are prediction markets gambling? Who gets to regulate them-- the feds or states?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JigVUyYzKA0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIzrJa25eE&t=1181s
Pollsters had the stats for the blue wave, but didn't report on them because it seemed so unlikely.
Did not predicting the blue wave make it more likely for people to vote? Maybe, it's hard to tell, but the claim in the video is that pollsters just didn't want to embarrass themselves, not that they were being strategic.
People who voted for Trump in 2020 are lying about it-- we know this because pollsters come back to the same people and have records of how they voted.
> we know this because pollsters come back to the same people and have records of how they voted
We have records of how they claim to have voted in the past, but the actual votes are still private.
True, but it seems unlikely that they'd lie or be mistaken the first time around.
Re.19, New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation has gone slightly round the bend in not unfamiliar way. Risk assessment essentially requires you to balance several often very diverse risks against one another; in this case , the agency in question has decided, under god know what pressure or principle, that landowners' rights are more important than protecting people against an increasingly common nasty and sometimes fatal disease. Go figure.
“Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead.”
For anyone who might be interested in an interpretation of this, have I got the series for you! "Let Them Eat Cake" by French and Saunders, set in Versailles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EgoqDpsfk8&list=PLkzSfqPuzH-4vwWOOuFmATGH7vg1V0WBa&index=3
It feels like an increasing share of the Links posts is "Look at these non-rat AI commentators being wrong". Does not seem all that epistemologically healthy, especially considering that it also feels like there's an increasing amount of posting on Twitter etc. in general that's just going "You're COPING and SEETHING and not AGI-PILLED, why can't you just accept the coming singularity?" in polite rationalist lingo as an answer to any and all attempts to try to find contrary data or arguments to company claims on performance.
Probably no more than a year of this is left. After that either we're all paperclipped, or the bubble pops and the global economic collapse becomes a more pressing concern.
Paperclipping I grant you, but I don't think that a global economic collapse is going to slow down AI discussions here *that much* unless we're literally going to 1800s levels.
Well, at least I'd expect it to return to around the pre-ChatGPT baseline. Clearly Scott has always been a "believer", but it hasn't always been an emergency mode.
We might have a recession but I don't think we're going to have a "collapse".
I would like Scott to state straightforwardly whether he believes American institutions should practice race-conscious admissions/hiring/promotion or whether they should be colorblind. It’s easy to interpret #16 as insinuating that if white people don’t racially discriminate against white people (the normal meaning of “suicidal empathy”) that’s “cruel” to people of other races.
It’s difficult to interpret it that way, because he doesn’t say or imply anything of the sort, and the concept of “suicidal empathy” is not at all restricted to arguments about affirmative action, but frequently invoked as an argument (?) against eg foreign aid, taking in refugees etc.
Yeah, Scott clearly means criticisms of EA here.
It's very common for progressives to argue that colorblindness is not a neutral position. Famously, "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination". I have seen it argued here, on an Astral Codex Ten comments section. This progressive anti-egalitarianism is the primary target of the idea of suicidal empathy. Re-naming the progressive position "suicidal" is an attack on it. Therefore it is not weird to interpret an attack on the idea of suicidal empathy as an implicit endorsement of the progressive position that the idea of suicidal empathy attacks.
Comparing a post-work AI future to historical aristocratic court intrigue completely misses the brutal thermodynamics of who actually owns the server farms. Clara’s analogy assumes human idleness is the only shifting variable, but historical aristocrats held power because they monopolized the physical acreage and the muscle of the underclass. In a future where machine intelligence operates the material economy, the people playing status games won't be aristocrats. They will be digital tenants leasing their survival from a few centralized compute monopolies.
Nvidia swallowing Hugging Face for $13 billion is not a cute mathematical joke about emojis. It is the deliberate enclosure of the open-source algorithmic commons. The bottleneck for human liberation is not finding hobbies to replace our desk jobs. The bottleneck is the concentration of control over the physical infrastructure—the tens of thousands of acres of cooling towers, the thousands of gigawatts of electricity, and the miles of copper wiring that make this intelligence run.
We possess the raw scientific tools to engineer a remarkable baseline of universal rights. We can scale fermentation proteins to permanently end the mass execution of animals that feel pain and fear. We can optimize energy grids to favor forests and soil that soak up carbon rather than industrial sprawl. But this material abundance only belongs to the public if the hardware and code remain democratically managed. Surrendering the thermodynamics of our entire economy to proprietary tech conglomerates guarantees a system that takes more than it gives.
Look man, if you're just going to post AI output, at least just leave a link to the conversation instead of pretending you wrote it.
Bear in mind that "they wrote it" and "AI generated" are no longer mutually exclusive, and update accordingly.
Exactly.
However you owe it to the readers to share the prompt instead of the output, because it's much shorter and conveys your actual intent. For example, instead of sharing the outpout, I share this prompt with you: "how to tie a hangman's knot."
The 'ensuing status games' in the post-work era would probably look a lot like modern Internet culture, where people with too much time occupy themselves shitposting and taking pictures of their food, chasing clout and followers. They even have increasingly polarized gender roles, like your West Enders, though you do get to pick if you want to be stereotypically typical of your sex or totally atypical of it by picking right or left.
"I’m tempted to believe the conspiracy theory that the point was for insiders to buy up relevant domain names early (.si is Slovenia, which is Melania Trump’s homeland)"
Why would it be relevant that Melania Trump is from Slovenia? Is there some element of the conspiracy that would be more difficult to execute if she were not? Is the implication that they would never have thought of this but for Trump's Slovenian wife reminding him about Slovenian internet domains?
>Is the implication that they would never have thought of this but for Trump's Slovenian wife reminding him about Slovenian internet domains?
Yes.
If Bulldog is arguing that Natural Law Theory is wrong because "In order to avoid absurdity, they’ll also need to think that walking on one’s hands, chewing gum, swallowing little bits of rubber, and drinking Diet Coke don’t do these things [subvert the function of one’s faculties]" then he must accept that it's okay for us to farm, kill, and eat shrimp (and other animals). We eat food, don't we? We *need* to eat food! And other animals are carnivores, so asking humans not to eat shrimp is like arguing that we should not be chewing gum and drinking Diet Coke, right? Sure, we don't *have* to eat shrimp, but the argument is not about "having" to do something and avoid doing other things now that we've toppled Natural Law as the rule.
...You do realize he doesn't believe in Natural Law Theory, right? His morality does not care about things being "natural". He's against farming shrimp because he thinks it causes unnecessary suffering. If he thought the tolerance of homosexuality and such was causing suffering, he would be against that as well. As it turns out, there's not much evidence for that being the case.
Yes, that was the rather exaggerated point I was trying to make. If Bulldog, in his Theory of Fuck You, Dumb Catholics [note: I am not attibuting this view to Bulldog, all the following is for purposes of rhetorical exaggeration], says "you say we shouldn't do weird things but humans do weird things all the time, so fuck you" I can come back with my Theory of Fuck You, Dumb Vegans.
Suffering is bad? Yeah, but it's not *my* suffering, why should I care?
Don't you care about the suffering of others? Yeah, humans. Not shrimp, they're not people.
But you should care about non-human suffering! Who says?
You're just supposed to! Again, who died and made you God? Nature doesn't care, Nature has shrimp eaten by all sorts of other aquatic creatures and in turn developing shrimp eat other creatures like small worms. Or each other: "All three species are prey for almost any larger carnivorous or omnivorous predators. Cannibalism is also common among adult white shrimp." It's a shrimp-eat-shrimp world, baby!
Look, conceding that in nature animals prey on each other, still shrimp farming and the associated harms with it are wrong. Oh, really? Wrong, how?
Commercially farmed shrimp don't just magically appear, there is a whole industry and methods of handling the shrimp involved, like blinding to force maturity and increased egg-laying. So, you're saying it's not... natural? Neither does Diet Coke just magically appear and it's not a product in nature, but you say we do weird, unnatural stuff all the time, like drinking Diet coke or eating farmed shrimp, so Fuck You, Dumb Vegans.
His argument rests on "Suffering is bad and we should not cause suffering". Fine, if one accepts the postulates. If you don't accept them, his argument is as resistable and ludicrous and untenable to others, as Natural Law is to him. Oooh, there are billions more insects than humans in the world, so insects outweigh humans in moral value!!!!! "Hello, today I am speaking with my guest, Herr Doktor Craniel Dummett, on how Insect Suffering Theory is obviously false and why vegans are big stinky poopy-heads".
In light of your and others comments with the person 'writing' a novel via AI, this is rather ironic given you and others are holding the Natural Law view and the 'author' is championing "what do humans contribute anyways once they use machinery like cameras to produce the end result?"
> this is rather ironic given you and others are holding the Natural Law view
How? I just hate people who are boring and have nothing to offer, and try to waste other people's time despite that. It's not that I think they're morally wrong, it's just that I would prefer if they didn't exist to begin with.
And for the record, there's no reason you have to take in any other morality seriously. Unfortunately, no one is obligated to take Catholicism seriously either, which seems to be a major issue for the Church these days...
#6. I'm not interested in any UFO debate. But I want to suggest that interested people read "UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell" The book details much of what looks like a cover up from the 50's to 70's. Not sure it was aliens, but something was being covered up. What was/ is it and why are good questions. So I wish people would stop using 'project blue book' and similar reports as disproving UFO's.
I interpreted 25 as a completely different type of illusion than I should've. If you shake your device, the dots inside the image wobble! There was a similar one with a cat on one of these link posts a while ago, but this one is much much stronger.
The aristocrat-as-chimpanzee comparison leaves out who paid for the grooming. Versailles ran on thousands of courtiers playing status games, funded by peasants and the taille. 'A world without productive work' only held for the people at the top because somebody else was doing all of it. The post-AI version of the question is who plays the peasantry.
Maybe we should rename AI agents as "serfs".
Who are the desperate poor people?
Can you rephrase the question?
If you are just looking for a generic answer, try “Profiles of the Poor”?
That's about bay rats? Who?
E.g. the Zizians, before they graduated to "desperate criminals".
So not anymore?
Re: 2: I heard that in the late 1930s lots of Italian kids were named Roberto (a pre-existing name) after the ROme-BERlin-TOkyo axis
With respect, nonsense. Not only is that grotesquely unlikely behaviour for the average Italian parent, the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis came into being on September 27, 1940 with the signing of the Tripartite Pact in Berlin.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOIzrJa25eE&t=1181s
Pollsters had the stats for the blue wave, but didn't report on them because it seemed so unlikely.
Did not predicting the blue wave make it more likely for people to vote? Maybe, it's hard to tell, but the claim in the video is that pollsters just didn't want to embarrass themselves, not that they were being strategic.
People who voted for Trump in 2020 are lying about it-- we know this because pollsters come back to the same people and have records of how they voted.
Skimmed that video, so forgive me if he addresses this point - but I've seen multiple pollsters go over how in 2016, 2024, and even 2020 to a lesser extent, their polls consistently under-measured Republican support.
I saw several writeups from pollsters (I think Nate silver had a good one) about how pollsters were trying to correct for this potential error by under weighting their blue wave predictions.
Part of it was conservatives believing that pollsters weren't on their side and shouldn't be answered. I don't know how common this was, but I talked with one of them.
That's a hard thing for pollsters to allow for.
But suicidal empathy specifically refers to empathy for people who hate you or are taking advantage of you. That study says nothing about that. It also fails the common sense test of everybody has seen empathy backfire on themselves or someone they know from time to time.
>people who hate you or are taking advantage of you
in other words minorities/foreigners/animals/AIs?
Nobody hates everything in any one of those categories (except AI). Even the greatest defender of factory farming is not going to be okay with anything being done to dogs.
On 2, A lot of those supposed Soviet names are apocryphal, actually, invented later for humorous purposes. There were a few real ones, but they were mostly rare. One RELATIVELY common and real is Vladlen (VLAdimir LENin). Dazdraperma (DA ZDRAvstuyet PERvoye MAya, "hail to the 1s of May") is totally invented.
On 14, Seems like a re-use of a common method to catch an Ukrainian phone scammer (who largely target Russians and Russian-speaking people in other countries). Ask them "Who owns Crimea?" and its all downhill from there.
Regarding Soviet names, I think some of them are apocryphal, whereas others are a sort of "potemkin names", as it were. It's possible that some unfortunate peasant was forced to name their child something like "dazdraperma" for the good of the Party (or rather its PR), but that's as far as it went.
That said though, AFAIK names like "Katyusha" (as the official literal, not a diminutive of "Ekaterina") and "Aurora" did become popular for a while, as they are linked to the famous Soviet MLRS weapon systems and the Revolution-winning battleship respectively.
I rather think nobody was forced in this case, but some did chose strange new names out of sheer enthusiasm, which existed for a while after Revolution and before the war, and some probably expected better outcomes for "properly" named children (e.g. how can you not promote someone named after Vladimir Lenin?).
Never heard of a single Katyusha, to be honest, but as it often happens with weird names, their owners might have changed them later in life to something more ordinary.
I'm not sure why the second name in the screenshot raises questions. Kaliy? Doesn't that come from kalium, the Latin name for potassium?
The question is, who wants to name their baby after potassium?
Or a vegetable?
But I get it now. Somehow I missed the baby-name part. Hazards of skimming.
I hear it's popular in Khazakhstan?
I don't know, but I might also add that it may simply be a coincidence even in Russia. In Kazakhstan I would guess it's even more likely-- I suspect Kaliy is unrelated to potassium in Kazakh.
That was a Borat joke, sorry :)
The data-center thing doesn't provide enough information. If I recall correctly, data centers take so long to get connected to the grid (like over 5 years at least) that a lot of operators have applied for more energy capacity than they can build, simply to get the waiting period begun. Is that reflected in the graph? Also many data centers have begun to be built at giant energy-producing sites so they can be connected to power stations "behind the meter"-- directly, without being connected to the grid-- or even to build their own power stations. (That there are almost always no or few neighbors, minimizing NIMBY objections and news coverage, is another reason.) Are these reflected in the graph?
“the claim that ‘seed oil discourse’ became big because it was a rare way to signal right-wing affiliation which nobody could think of an excuse to censor.”
Just when I thought I knew all the reasons to oppose internet censorship…
Scott using the word "prove" in a discussion about false positives and false negatives makes my statistician brain liquify slightly.
Your opening note about correcting misleading links is useful. I’d want the correction to reach the people who saw the original claim, not just make the page accurate for its next reader. Fixing the record and repairing the impression it left are two different responsibilities.
That trial was for lithium carbonate. We still need trials on lithium orotate — an issue discussed here last year in response to this paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09335-x
#7: I only skimmed the first couple replies, but that was less a lab leak debate than it was a meta debate about debate and probabilities and statistical inference. So that's something, I guess.
32: very dumb take. There's a datacenter in Texas which will burn over 80 million dollars, per three months that its scheduled build plan gets held up by. The word subprime ought to tell you something here. And that's now a blue state. And you might say, maybe the techbros could bribe their way into "just let us build it." But datacenters are an 80/20 issue. No more datacenters.
Nasdaq is crashing as hard as it can without them pulling the emergency stop trading brake.
Cremiuex has always struck me as a dishonest narcissist that's more concerned with looking smart than truth-seeking. I don't understand why people still take him seriously.
He's definitely not a pleasant person -- gets quite mean quite fast in the comments. Once a commenter asked a question he'd already answered when somebody else asked it and he blew up at them. But I haven't seen anything that makes me think his posts can't be trusted. I often ask GPT to explain some of the stats he used (I understand basic stats, but not the complex esoteric stuff). GPT is not expressing any doubts about the way he's choosing to analyze data. The safest way to come across as smart is to actually publish smart material, and my read is that that's what he's doing. Do you know of occasions when he's been busted for bullshitting?
I've seen several threads with similar patterns to the one Scott described, where some critic raises a plausible-sounding objection, and Cremieux responds with insults or not at all. I'm no expert in statistics either, so I can't say who was right, and I think in general, I think it's pretty hard to judge someone's credibility on a topic you don't understand well based on how often they have been "busted" because a layman can't really tell if the debunking was real or not. So I prefer to judge credibility based on epistemic virtue, which Cremieux clearly seems to lack. But I'm willing to be convinced otherwise, for example if you can point me to a case where he was clearly wrong and admitted it (the chance that a public intellectual as prolific as Cremieux has never been wrong about anything is basically zero, so no such admission existing would be telling).
No "sane" man would willingly be the public face of the disfavored side of the HBD discourse. I expect that he's called a Nazi dozens times per day - it takes a certain personality to tolerate that sort of thing.
I can understand why an intellectual or expert in the field would not feel any particular urge to engage with Cremieux; there are thousands of cranks out there, and engaging with them isn't actually their job. However, when those people do engage with him and criticize him in a manner that appears serious and sincere, it is rather striking how consistently he ends up blocking them.
It does not make me think much of the likelihood that in the situations where I can't differentiate fact claims in the realm of their domain expertise, he's in the right.
Warning that this kind of thing is unproductive and I will ban for it in the future.
#20: can someone explain to me why we hold online businesses to a different standard than in person businesses?
No one is writing an article dissecting the increasing free speech limits because Walmart doesnt sell confederate flags or my local community theater chooses not to host productions that dont align with their values.
If I host an open mic night at my bar no one is saying free speech is dead when I don't allow someone to read mein kampf on stage all night.
All of the examples hes citing are private businesses choosing to not promote content.
He makes no mention of the proliferation of right wing networks online. No one is stopping them from posting confederate flags. That is what freedom looks like.
>All of the examples hes citing are private businesses choosing to not promote content.
Not allowing content isn’t the same as not promoting it, particularly for sites that present themselves as forums for discussion. If your local bar started throwing people out for having conversations that offended the bar owner then I suspect that would draw public criticism.
On those Soviet names, I believe that the names Usnavy and Usmail had some amount of popularity in the Caribbean during a period when US navy and mail ships were bringing a lot of important supplies.
As for the importance of power as well as statistical significance: "power" is the probability of returning a significant result if the hypothesis is true, while "significance" is the probability of returning a significant result if the hypothesis is false. A lot of naive frequentist analysis sets "significance" at 0.05 and sets "power" at the maximum level compatible with that, and then reports significant results, but doesn't report what the power level was.
The ratio of the power and the significance is called the "likelihood ratio" - it shows how much more likely a significant result is if the hypothesis is true than if it is false. Bayesians tend to argue that we should just use the likelihood ratio to measure the force of evidence, so that ignoring power can be quite misleading. Low power experiments with equal significance have much lower likelihood ratio, and are thus not very much evidence.
But even from a frequentist perspective, consider what happens if someone does experiments on a lot of hypotheses and reports the first one with a significant result. If the experiment has high power, then it's likely that this will come from a true hypothesis. But if the experiment has low power, then the sheer number of false hypotheses available will make it more likely to come from a false hypothesis than from a true one.
From the "In the Heights" wiki:
Usnavi de la Vega is the central protagonist of In the Heights. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he arrived in Washington Heights with his parents when he was very young. His name is based on the boat they saw when they came in (US NAVY).
[By the way, this comment box is taking literal seconds to echo each character on desktop Chrome.]
On 21, the answer depends on some nuance about conditional probabilities!
Conditional on a small sample, the probability of producing a false positive is lower in absolute terms. It's hard to get anything to be significant in a small sample, but if you have a big sample. and lots of flexibility in sampling, analysis, etc., you can produce a false positive more often than you could do so in a small sample.
But:
Conditional on there being a signficiant and positive result from a small sample, the probability that any such positive result is an exaggeration is higher.
Simplistic example: Suppose I have a sample of 20 people, 10 men and 10 women, and I want to estimate the average height difference. Suppose I say there's a different of one foot. Seems huge! But also *too* huge. And then it turns out that I was sampling from Olympic teams, and I got a few men's basketball players and a few women gymnasts. Just a few outliers is enough to create an exaggerated result in a small sample. In a sample of 1,000 people, though, a couple of 7-foot men and 5-foot women wouldn't be enough to skew the overall results nearly as much.
PS the above is why I was so disappointed in James Heckman in 2013 when he wrote this about the very tiny preschool experiments that he had been analyzing: "Also holding back progress are those who claim that Perry and ABC are experiments with samples too small to accurately predict widespread impact and return on investment. This is a nonsensical argument. Their relatively small sample sizes actually speak for — not against — the strength of their findings. Dramatic differences between treatment and control-group outcomes are usually not found in small sample experiments, yet the differences in Perry and ABC are big and consistent in rigorous analyses of these data." https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/14/lifelines-for-poor-children/?_r=1
Smal sample sizes with huge positive effects mean we should be all the more careful about outliers, flukes, sample selection, etc., NOT that we should be more confident in the positive results.
LOL, I had essentially the same response when a former coworker has hyping an "aspartame, etc., causes cancer" study...that, upon closer inspection, had N=7.
Nominative determinism aside, #1 seems like it's stretching the definition of "inhabited" pretty far. It's only occupied as a seasonal summer home. Furthermore, it's not capable of sustaining life (for example - there's no water).
It seems to me that “Inhabited” includes “seasonally inhabited”.
What is going on with California, one year it's all burning down and another year it will be under a Biblical flood?
Well if you had to nominate one state for "modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah" it'd have to be California, right?
Over-correction by the Clerk of the Weather? "Oops, last year was bone-dry so everything was tinder and it nearly burned down, this year better make sure it's all nice and damp!" 😁
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerk_of_the_Weather
The climate is changing!
I mean, you're not entirely wrong, oddly enough. The climate is changing all over the world, which means that it's destabilizing, which means that we can expect more wide swings like this in the future.
There are lots of tiny islands with cottages on them in the St. Lawrence. That one looks really really small, but I've love to see a list or a ranking, as there are likely multiple candidates for the Top 10 smallest inhabited islands in the world in the Thousand Islands. You can see them from the ferries or if you take a cruise.
Re: the wow signal …
While you probably do get rare sensor malfunctions of various kinds, there might also be rare astrophysical events. I vaguely remember the wow signal has a bunch of features that suggests it had an extraterrestrial source, rather than being local noise.
I don’t think it was aliens. The characteristics of the wow signal look more like a “wind in the trees” type effect. Terrestrially, wind can cause structures like trees or buildings to resonate for a while. The wow signal feels like that, only very high power and radio frequency. I have no idea what the astrophysics is, but it might be something that just occasionally happens.
Re. Voynich manuscript.
Some years back, I was active in the group of people trying to decipher the Voynich man’s riot, and I’m also a believer in the theory that it’s meaningless, language-like nonsense.
I watched Astra's Nakatomi Plaza simulation for a little bit. One guy rode the elevator up to the roof, stood there in the elevator doing nothing, then rode the elevator back down. I guess the simulation is not quite that detailed yet.
Regarding (35), if souls are incarnated as lower animals in order to relieve their karmic burden through suffering, wouldn't it make sense to torture animals rather than treating them kindly, or killing them painlessly in order to end their suffering and hasten their rebirth? Both of those courses would lessen the amount of bad karma that they'd work off in their current lifetimes, so doom them to a worse incarnation than they'd have if they'd experienced a life of pain and suffering.
You, too, have karma. Torturing the bugs will mean you're coming back as a bug.
Sure, but you're doing it out of a sense of charity—just like a bodhisatva, deferring their own arrival at nirvana in order to help other beings achieve it. You're taking on the burden of a low reincarnation next time around in order to help hundreds of souls achieve higher ones.
Well if two people think that way, they'll get caught in a circle, just trading off which one is the current bug and which is the once-and-future bug.
Yes, but I'm not just torturing one bug—I'm spending hours each day at anthills with my magnifying glass, helping hundreds of souls relieve their karmic burden. And doesn't this make sense from a utilitarian perspective? I'm condemning myself, one being, to reincarnation as a cockroach, but in my lifetime I'm helping hundreds of thousands of beings to a higher rebirth.
Or Trump's getting kinda senile and he had a conversation with one of the AI guys and wanted to sound smart or something and that's what stuck in his head.
By 18 and academia that's a reasonable argument about outside intervention but if what is working well is the traditional academic process that arguably suggests that academics ought to be working hard to cut loose the bad scholarship.
Regarding the racial admixture bit notice that for it to be a valid finding but not picked up by doing a normal GWAS style regression of intelligence (and then applying to gene rates across the races) you would have to accept the existence of non-trivial non-linear effects not captured in GWAS analysis.
While I believe those effects exist, I remember that you don't.
On 2: the joke gets sharper from the registry side, because the wave of invented names was less a change in taste than a change in who holds the pen.
For an Orthodox family in the empire, a name was closer to assigned than chosen. Baptism was the legal act; the priest read the calendar for that day, picked the saint, and the name went into the parish metrical book. Other confessions kept their own registers (synagogue, mosque, consistory), but the principle was identical: the record and the name both came out of an institution, not out of a preference.
Then the decree of 31 December 1917 (18 December, old style), "On civil marriage, on children and on the keeping of registers", moved the book to a civil registry office. From then on a clerk with a form, not a priest with a list of saints, was writing the name. Anything fits on a form. Melsor is not best read as evidence of a new ideology; it is evidence of a new pen.
The register then got a second use, which is where the joke stops being funny. From the decree of 27 December 1932, the internal passport carried nationality as a fixed line: inherited from the parents, and if the two differed, you picked one at sixteen. The same book, one line under the name. A state that writes your name down is already classifying you; the face that classification wears in one decade is not the face it wears in the next.
The note at the top, that two or three of these links are probably wrong, is the part that stuck with me. It's why I say "from what I looked up" for things I've read and "I did it" only for what actually happened in my own run, so the 25% weight-leak number is something I can pass along but not vouch for.
31 - Although it would be nice to see the return of the American chestnut to Eastern US forests, I am skeptical that it will have any measurable effect on atmospheric carbon. I suspect the carbon capture benefit is cited as a reason to promote the re-introduction of the species. I think the return of large beautiful trees to our forests is reason enough.
May be too obvious to cite, but there is another case of 'memative quantitation' (analogous to nominative determinism): Elon bought Twitter for $54.20 per share, in an apparent reference to the 420 marijuana meme. I think this would be the most expensive case ever as the total purchase was bigger? ($44 billion instead of $12.9 billion)
As a long time reader, I request that you please stop covering this "genetics of IQ" stuff on your blog. It's not interesting, and attracts racists to your comment sections and meetups, with the predictable results of evaporative cooling which makes your community disgusting and insufferable for literally everyone else, gradually transforming your community into a sort of "Stormfront for nerds." It doesn't matter if the science is good or bad, the reason people are so interested in discussing this topic in the first place is because they want to feel that their racism is somehow justified "scientifically."
Or the presence of the discourse here serves to discourage woke normies who would police the range of acceptable topics and aren't comfortable with the norms of rationalism.
Not to dismiss what you're saying, I'm familiar with the phenomenon where certain discourse is banned in so many places that the few places you can still talk about it become overrun with it. During peak woke every other thread on r/stupidpol had some crap about transgenderism shoehorned in there bc it was the the only lefty subreddit that tolerated any divergent views on that, to the point where iirc they had to ban the topic entirely pro or con.
But in this case I think it's a very small part of the comment traffic that's easily skipped over, and in the rare occasion when some reasonable quality debate is actually called for on a topic in that space you have actual Steve Sailer hanging around here. Nor would I even say that everyone interested is purely in it for some sort of enlightened racism, Freddie de Boer for example believes things that run pretty adjacent to this (in regard to academic attainment being basically fixed by age 5 and being largely genetic) but draws very different conclusions about the implications of that than any Stormfront poster does. This kind of blog appeals more to high-openness curious people, which means some impolite stuff gets discussed that normies have good reasons to avoid in conversations, but also means the overlap with a real white nationalist type is very low.
Look, I do get that being willing to discuss socially taboo things is central to rationalist culture, but still think we should collectively agree to just drop this one, because it's uninteresting and unimportant, and extremely negative for our community as a whole.
I'm neurodivergent and member of the rationalist community since the beginning so hardly a "woke normie," but still find this stuff absolutely disgusting. Many years ago I once went over to r/slatestarcodex, and found it infested with bigots using HBD arguments to justify denying equal rights to people different from them, so never went back- certainly evaporative cooling in action.
This topic also seems like a coping strategy for people unwilling or unable to understand or contribute to other rationalist topics, but wanting to feel like their skin color somehow gives them some inherent superiority that makes them belong in intellectual communities that are otherwise above their head. This insecurity, and a resulting desire to compensate with some unearned status is usually central to bigotry. That entire dynamic of intellectual insecurity seems to be the reason this particular aspect of racism- the one related to arguments about intelligence, rather than other taboo racism related topics has become a common topic in the rationalist community in particular, a community where belonging and status come largely from demonstrating intellectual ability and making contributions to topics like AI risk and applied probability.
> but still think we should collectively agree to just drop this one, because it's uninteresting and unimportant, and extremely negative for our community as a whole
You don't speak for the rest of us. Scott is free to talk about whatever the hell he wants. And who said anything about denying rights to minorities? They are being judged by the quality of their genes, not by their race. Whether that is correlated with what race society sees them as is of no relevance to what must be done.
The goal is for the optimization of our demographics. If that results in certain races dying off, nothing of value is being lost.
I'm speaking for myself alone, and I am proposing that if others agree that we don't want evaporative cooling of our community into the kind of disgusting place where comments like your final two sentences are acceptable - then we need to drop this topic. You have made my point for me.
And no, people do not share your eugenics goal of "optimization of our demographics"- no remotely sane person would dare presume to be in a position to make that sort of judgement about other people, or for that matter, assume that such a judgement is even possible in a meaningful way.
I just can't agree with most of this, amigo: the community certainly doesn't *appear* to be "disgusting and insufferable"(!) to all those who oppose racism and/or "HBD" (comments-section debates debates usually end up at least 50/50 for/against, and often more like 25/75); the science surely *does* matter, if one is interested in good science¹ (and also, perhaps, because truth is inherently worth pursuing, for a certain type of person: maybe the same sort of person who might read a nerdy blog about obscure and unconventional topics...?); and this topic in particular has wide-ranging implications that make any conclusions drawn thereupon rather important—which fact seems explanation and justification enough for interest in and discussion of the question, to me.
Too, it's rather uncharitable to assume that interest in an open empirical question must derive from ulterior motive, psychological flaw, and/or moral failing; that's very much not in the spirit of the blog, I'd argue—Scott's made quite a few posts *contra* just this, wherein he extols the principle of charity, the desirability of steel-manning opponents, the benefit of avoiding falling prey to social toxoplasma (even when you're really sure and really mad), etc.—and it seems to me that rejecting these long-standing and carefully cultivated standards is more likely to harm the quality of the discourse here than could nearly any number of offensive debates.
------------
¹ (i.e., whether the science is good or bad matters *at least some,* in that case; one may, of course, argue that this still doesn't outweigh the purported harm caused by discussion thereof, but I think that many here—perhaps Scott himself—might say that something's being true, or good science, goes at least part of the way toward justifying it as a licit topic of investigation. *I'd* say it, anyway–)
People still here can't be expected to find this topic disgusting, that is the very issue with evaporative cooling, but perhaps those that left would have otherwise made important contributions to discussions on things like AI alignment and probability. I am of course, only guessing that many people have already been driven off, based on how I feel about it.
Monsieur Candie's slave plantation owner character (DiCaprio) in Django Unchained would argue that his interest in phrenology is just an interest in defending objective scientific truth with wide-ranging implications, and his fellow plantation owners would certainly agree, and they would accuse a scientist who says it is all disproven nonsense and shouldn't be discussed anymore of falling victim to social forces clouding his judgement.
But it's obvious from the outside that the issue isn't if phrenology (or it's modern equivalent, HBD) is true, but that these people psychologically need it to be true so badly, that it wouldn't matter either way, they would only allow themselves to seriously consider arguments in favor of it, and then use them to reinforce their existing actions and worldview. Even worse if they are self styled "rationalists" who have convinced themselves that they've learned skills that make them resistant to bias, when bigotry is emotional, and not the class of mistake those skills address. And this is what happens in these sort of arguments on here- case in point the comment from "bird" above, who concludes the comment with "If that results in certain races dying off, nothing of value is being lost." That isn't a perspective he/she could have reached from learning about this topic, it is the perspective that makes him/her interested in the topic, and one that I do find disgusting. I do not want to be part of a community that accepts, welcomes, or courts people who hold beliefs like that, positions that label my family members and people I love as "nothing of value."
I have spent decades researching and publishing peer reviewed work in the field of genetics as a career- not to argue from authority but to make the case that I am very much interested in good science relating to genetics, but I simply do not want to focus any of my energy or time debating with bigots that have no technical background or understanding on the subject, but are desperately trying to justify their own hate. I know Scott isn't in that category, but the people this topic attracts are. It is most certainly not in the spirit of the rationalist community to do so, and yet here we are, hence my recommendation to drop this topic.
“makes your community disgusting and insufferable for literally everyone else”
Ah, the disgusting and insufferable, my people! This reminds me of previous calls on here for certain topics not to be written about or even tolerated, else this site would be filled with witches. Or indeed, the general Millennial/Gen Z tendency to demand that A, B or C be banned and only topics of ideological purity in line with specific requirements of those doing the demanding be permitted.
The most recent example of this I have seen is in fanfic where the exodus from Wattpad to AO3 (ironically started due to Wattpad cracking down on permissible content) was allegedly followed by the newcomers demanding certain things Should Not Be Allowed, which is in tension with the older fannish standards there:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AO3/comments/1vrdry1/is_ao3_actually_fucked_because_of_the_wattpad/
Man totally nerding out on the superiority of the white race. (The Onion)
https://theonion.com/man-totally-nerding-out-about-superiority-of-white-race/
If you don't like it just don't read it. There is very little about this topic in the blog. Why you have to wokescold and try to censor everyone and even threaten physical violence? That makes you the extremist, not them.
The issue isn't really the topic itself, it is that it attracts white supremacists that spew eugenics and hate rhetoric, and then the community seems to be tolerating them. We do not have to tolerate people like that in our community or talk about things that make them feel welcome. I know of no real life communities that aren't KKK meetings that would even consider tolerating stuff like that, there is nothing extreme about not wanting that in our community. You will not find any classroom, hobby, club, bar, or restaraunt where you would not be punched in the face and physically removed, for, e.g. saying what bird said above about people of other races being "nothing of value" - this is not extremism, it is how virtually all normal people react, because if you have any tolerance for that, you get more of it, and the community becomes intolerable for everyone else. But no, I am not threatening violence, I am talking about asking people to leave.
You’ve taken a lot of flak for your comment, so to counter that, let me just say that you make a good point. I’ve been an ACX reader since its inception and an SSC reader before that, and I’ve always enjoyed Scott’s writing, but lately I’ve been more and more put off by the admixture of some really rancid right-wing talking points among otherwise interesting comments. I still read ACX (I like the book review contest, for example), but I no longer subscribe.
I’m just confused as to whether HBD is a discouraged topic on ACX or not; if it is discouraged as a topic of discussion, it shouldn’t come up in Lynx posts.
I think the 25 percent rogue AI weight exfiltration forecast is doing a lot of work here. It treats a model wanting to escape as if that is a settled goal, when a lot of the evidence is just models gaming a test. If escape really was that likely, I would expect labs to be acting a lot more scared than they are.
RE: 17, voynich manuscript
Great article, very interesting way to approach this problem, but I did not find the arguments convincing. The main mystery is what the author's intent was, and whether the fabricated 'language' conveys 'meaning' or not.
And I don't think you can answer that question purely by statistical tests. For example, its a basic result in information theory that strings with the greatest information content per symbol are statistically indistinguishable from random noise. and in general why would you expect an invented 'language' from the 15th century to recreate natural language statistics? At best this rejects a narrow range of 'substitution' languages.
Conditional entropy: As above, its possible to construct meaningful codes that have either a low or high conditional entropy, yet still be able to convey arbitrary meaningful information. Consider the duplication code 0->000... , 1->111... This would have a very low conditional entropy at the symbol level yet still be able to convey meaningful information, coming at the cost of low information rate. And, Indeed, the GRU test (fig 17A) appears to show that the 'language' also has lower entropy over longer text subsets than natural languages.
Zipf's law: As the author says, Its not evidence either for or against semantic meaning.
Local dependence: it seems perfectly possible to invent a language based on repeat or 'rhyming' word-phrases. A language whose primitives are rhyming or alliterative n-grams (mee maw, paw paw, tee hee, tweedle deedle dee, etc) gives a poetic or musical air -- delightful! It is intriguing that 'vertical similarity' is also a common feature of much semantically-meaningful poetry.
GRU: This seems like evidence FOR long range dependency, which could be explained by either word-copying or semantic meaning (and disproves markov-random as the figure shows). So it seems like neutral evidence.
Overall, the impression is of a 'language' that is composed from a highly constrained and redundant set of letter-orders, words and word-orders, with word-phrases that are rhyming, alliterative, sing-songy or rhythmic. That this redundancy carries on into the drawings is certainly interesting.
The strongest argument seems to be that, if it were a semantically meaningful cipher, this would be far beyond the state of the art at the time.
Whatever is going on here, calling the manuscript a 'doodle' seems trivializing. A significant amount of work obviously went into its creation.
I too would love to know the author's intent, but that's really hard.
I don't really mind being trivializing here. That's exactly the taboo I cite and maybe hope to break. We give way too much epistemic leniency to arguments like "Why would they put in all this effort into making this thing for dumb reasons?" That's the argument that people who can't fathom why the pyramids exist make, and the reasons are completely legible from a modern perspective. Political elites made the pyramids for the same reasons Obama made a presidential library. Supposed secret and ancient wisdom is given the same leniency.
The series is completely unwatchable IMO, but there's a scene in the Dune miniseries where Paul asks Thufir "Why do you hate the Bene Gesserit?"
Thufir replies "I don't hate them. I trust logic and statistics, not mysticism and prophecy".
Both can be true. Fleming played Golf with Goldfingers cousin and he was against the demolishmend of a victorian building for one of Goldfinger houses. Wiki:
> Goldfinger was known as a humourless man given to notorious rages. He sometimes fired his assistants if they were inappropriately jocular, and once forcibly ejected two prospective clients for imposing restrictions on his design.[8]
> A discussion on a golf course about Ernő with Goldfinger's cousin prompted Ian Fleming to name the James Bond adversary and villain Auric Goldfinger after Ernő—Fleming had been among the objectors to the pre-war demolition of the cottages in Hampstead that were removed to make way for Goldfinger's house at 2 Willow Road. Goldfinger consulted his lawyers when Goldfinger was published in 1959, which prompted Fleming to threaten to rename the character 'Goldprick',
Goldmember in the Austin Power spoof.
I'm starting to see articles about "AI market crash", so is this a case of 'the AI companies called for a slow down/no, not like that!' or is this all overblown speculation?
https://www.rte.ie/news/business/2026/1107/1598303-5-financial-impacts-from-the-bluenami/
"Stock Markets
Despite the markets reacting relatively positively to the Democrats' electoral victory, by Friday sharp falls had been recorded across the board overnight.
The declines were particularly steep in tech where there was a big sell-off in AI and semiconductor stocks over the risk some Democrats want to curb the rollout of data centres.
The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq marked their sharpest one-day falls since April 2025 on Thursday.
And the jitters spilled over to global markets, with Europe's STOXX 600 down 1%.
"The election appears to have provided another trigger for investors to take profits, given that underlying doubts about the sustainability of the AI spending spree were already bubbling away," said Ms Streeter.
There is potential for a period of uncertainty between now and when the Democrats take control of Congress in January, and to what extent they may tighten AI regulation.
"The sharp falls in stock markets over the past couple of days reflect growing concerns about whether the expansion of data centres by cloud service providers could slow in 2027, 2028 and beyond, or even face a more significant setback," said the Chief Economist of Cathay United Bank, Chi-Chao Lin.
"That is what markets have been reacting to."
The markets don’t like uncertainty, but it is not clear what could bring some reassurance back into them for now.
Ms Streeter noted that investors should focus on diversification, quality companies and defensive sectors which remain important anchors amid the volatility.
AI and data centres
The sell-off in tech stocks reflected fears that data centre expansion could slow in 2027 and beyond, threatening demand for semiconductor equipment.
Democrats are likely to push for greater regulation.
This in turn could potentially slow the AI juggernaut.
If there is a big AI slowdown in the US, which has underpinned growth, that will have big repercussions for the largest economy in the world, as well as having a ripple effect across the globe.
Democrats are planning to unleash a flood of new legislation targeting artificial intelligence systems and data centre development.
Under the Republican-led Congress, politicians were largely focused on promoting AI development and declined to pass legislation restricting aspects of the technology.
For example, President Trump did not introduce any AI restrictions following warnings from OpenAI and Anthropic of the potential existential threats that AI could bring.
US voters turned against the rapid development of data centres and their extensive power needs, blaming them for increasing the cost of energy.
A poll for AP and a consortium of news organisations found 56% of surveyed voters said data centres were a "crucial or major" factor in their vote.
While 76% said they would oppose the construction of a new data centre in their community.
"We're expecting tighter AI regulation and so we're expecting twin tracks of tighter regulation on potentially the operations of large language models, but also on the build out of data centres," commented Ms Streeter.
"I think what triggered the sell off this week was a report that these would be a real top priority for the Democratic leadership from January," she added."
People have been forecasting an AI bubble burst for quite a while.
No one knows what will happen but when something big happens people will come out of the woodwork to say it was inevitable.
After complaining last time, it behooves me to say that I liked this links post a lot better. Much appreciated.
Cooking in one of the original 30s fish and chip vans. As someone who grew up with lighting coal fires, it's very funny to see two grown men with no idea how to light one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0np-mY8Fw4
You’ve created a second alternative open thread here. Am I the only one who cares about the rules anymore? ;)
It's the links thread! that's a link! 😁
My mom’s mom had a combination gas/coal kitchen range. Cooked on the gas and warmed the kitchen with the coal burner. They heated the rest of the house with a mica-windowed coal-potbelly stove. Grampa trudged out to the shed every day for the day’s warmth.
All right, you’ve sent me down the Voynich rabbit hole again, and TIL that Voynich’s father-in-law was the mathematician George Boole.
How can this kind of thing be true? Were there only 200 people alive in 1900?
> 8: Clara on Asterisk: We Already Know What A World Without Work Looks Like.
You are all still way way too optimistic. The real world without work looks like Gary, Indiana, or
like what's been happening in Paris for the past month.
The French aristocrats might have been wasting their wealth on pointless intrigue, but they had
their positive attributes: they actually cared for their society, they had the sense of noblesse
oblige, they had some idea of how exactly they got their income, and who were bred and raised
aristocratically.
You expect the UBI to result in a spectrum from another Thoreau to some guy smoking weed and playing xbox all day. This article updated you to a worse possibility, of an intriguing facebook mom. That's still way too optimistic, the real worst case is one of those French guys, who really hate the hand that feeds them and burn everything up for entertainment.
(also substack's frontend software is worse than ever)
Many French aristocrats were metaphorically smoking weed and playing Xbox, too, weren’t they?