I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
Some suggestions (note that I endorse the first the most):
- Overcoming Bias (by Robin Hanson), which has been around for ages and is very rationalist-relevant (it was in fact the birthplace of the Sequences!)
- Marginal Revolution (by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok)
- Wait But Why (by Tim Urban)
- Ribbonfarm (by Venkatesh Rao)
Also, I'm happy that you've made this website in the first place! I am subscribing to read the Slate Star Codex archives, since I considered reading them during the SSC-ACX gap (June 2020 - January 2021) but never really made it all the way. Also, I suggest that you make the "Success" dialog more prominent.
Thanks for the feedback, just updated it with your suggestions! Will send out first posts next week. Currently working on allowing for more granular control of which posts you want, eg only send posts in past year, or only posts of type x, or send y posts in a week, etc.
Kevin Drum commented on this, and I have to agree with Kevin's assessment...
"Let me say from the start that I think this is kind of nuts. I'd personally put the overall risk of extinction from everything combined at about 0.1% or so. But that's just me. I'm an eternal optimist, I guess."
>Apparently there's a group of AI experts who are absolutely obsessed with extinction and have spent more than 1,000 hours thinking about it. These people seem to have thought themselves into a frenzy and they're obviously driving up the average a lot.
Wow, I wouldn't have come up with that interpretation if I tried really hard. We should trust people who spend more time on things more than people who spend less time in general. Otherwise, our way of doing science and policy implodes!
Just want to flag that the report highlights a divergence between "domain experts" and "historically accurate forecasters", which goes like this:
1. The median expert predicted a 20% chance of catastrophe and a 6% chance of human extinction by 2100. Superforecasters saw the chances of both catastrophe and extinction as considerably lower than did experts. The median superforecaster predicted a 9% chance of catastrophe and a 1% chance of extinction.
2. The gap between forecasts of experts and superforecasters was not uniform across topics. Experts and superforecasters were furthest apart on AI risk—and less so on the risk of nuclear war.
Asked this question in one of the threads, but I'm also curious about what the broader board population thinks.
Who do you consider a "AI Doomer?" If one person says "AI development should be banned" and another person says, "Regulators should require AI products be subject to testing standards before deployment - and periodically thereafter - to confirm they work as intended, and should require developers to ensure that AI-generated outcomes are explicable" are they both "Doomers?" Just the ban proponent? Neither (since neither of them are stating a belief that AI is going to kill us all)?
I'd personally limit application of the "AI Doomer" to perspectives along the lines of "humanity will go extinct if we don't ban AI," but a lot of the pro-AI circles also trend pretty libertarian, so I think the actual usage may be be more expansive, in much the same way that some people in our corner of the world consider zoning to be "tyranny," "food regulations "basically fascism" and so on.
It's in the name. "If ignored, [Thing] could be our doom." Anyone who thinks unchecked climate change will wipe out humanity is a doomer. Anyone who thought an unchecked Y2K bug could lead to societal collapse was a doomer. Any Pompeiian who was worried about Mount Vesuvius erupting was a doomer.
The difference between a Doomer and whatever the alternative is is whether they think something can be disastrous, or just unpleasant. (I guess the second ones are Gloomers? I'm calling them Gloomers.)
Is it "if ignored [thing] could be our doom" or "if ignored [thing] will be our doom?"
Probably just a typo but the climate change example used a "will" and the Y2K example used a "could" so I wnated to clarify.
I'd challenge that a doomer should have to breach some threshold of belief that the doom *will* happen. Otherwise anyone who acknowledges the existence of any X risk at all would be a "doomer" about it, simply on the basis of the acknowledgement. Which would make almost all of humanity "nuclear proliferation doomers" or "large asteroid impact doomers," etc.
Probably a matter of taste. I draw the line at "could". If you think civilization is at any level of risk, you're a doomer.
And yes, almost all of humanity is a nuclear asteroid doomer. Although I guess we could add a second required layer of "we have to do something"; most people think there's nothing to be done about nuclear asteroids, and don't spend any effort on it. But I'd say they don't get called doomers just because nobody dislikes their opinion enough to do so.
For me, a Doomer is someone who puts AI x-risk within the next century at higher than one in a million, more or less. I'm not in favor of any AI regulations at this point, but I'd reserve the Doomer label for those who focus on the supposed threat of human extinction by AI.
>> For me, a Doomer is someone who puts AI x-risk within the next century at higher than one in a million, more or less.
Wouldn’t that render many AI advocates themselves *also* Doomers? “Unaligned AI is an x risk” isn’t exactly an uncommon perspective in those circles, at least from what I’ve seen.
In that case someone who (a) advocates for AI research and (b) believes “unaligned AI is an x-risk so alignment is important” would nevertheless be an “AI Doomer” if they thought the chance of an unaligned AI nevertheless slipping through was 1/500,000.
Granted, definitions can be whatever people want, but it seems like an odd usage if I can simultaneously advocate for AI and be an “AI Doomer”
Yeah, I would consider anyone who considers alignment important to prevent x-risk to be a Doomer.
Now, I'm attempting to answer your OP, but I don't think it's particularly important to define who is and who isn't one. I use the term Doomer below because it seems like the online world I read is splitting into two camps with, say, Scott and Zvi on one side and Tyler Cowen and Marc Andreeson on the other.
>it seems like an odd usage if I can simultaneously advocate for AI and be an “AI Doomer”
Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that most AI Doomers are Futurists who are or were very pro-AI but who view Alignment as the big filter to get through. Some of them have become so pessimistic that they might not be pro AI anymore. I don't think many (any?) of them are outright Luddites in general. Genuine anti-AI Luddites are more worried about losing their jobs tomorrow (For example, The Writers Guild of America). Or people worried that the AI is going to steal the election somehow. Those people are not Doomers because they aren't worried about x-risk.
Doomer is an arbitrary term—and functionally it's an ad hominem attack. And as you pointed out the goalposts for doomer are likely to move depending on the opinions of the person with their ax to grind. I think a better question would be: what percentage of people that there's a significant chance that AI will cause an extinction event for humanity?
As we've seen with COVID, the term "COVID minimizer" has migrated from the GBD folks and their ilk all the way to encompassing T Ryan Gregory—who up until recently was one of the leading COVID and infectious disease alarmists on Twitter.
Doomer is an ad hominem attack in that it appeals to feelings or prejudices rather than the intellect. It's used to negatively stereotype a person or group of people rather than a way of directly engaging with or addressing their arguments.
Doomer may not be a particularly nasty label, but it's a label all the same. Supposedly, we're all rationalists here, and we're supposed to argue things rationally rather than emotionally. I say "supposedly" because I've seen a lot of people on these threads confuse emotional arguments with rational discussion. While I admit I haven't been a saint on some of these threads—having let my sarcasm get the better of me sometimes—I've tried to focus on arguments and data rather than attaching dismissive labels to people. The use of ad hominem labels is an unsophisticated method of arguing one's point—at the risk of being ad hominemy it's sort of juvenile. I think you (and we ) can do better than fall into that trap.
But having said that, I think a lot of AI experts vastly overrate the threats of AI. And I've never heard a logically consistent scenario that would lead to the extinction of humanity. They seem to be channeling their fears rather than working through scenarios.
Some people from Metaculus have asked for clarification on some of my 2023 prediction questions. In order to say everything as publicly as possible so nobody gets an advantage, I'm putting it here:
>> 1. Will US CPI inflation for 2023 average above 4%? Are you comparing CPI at the end of 2023 vs the end of 2022, the average CPI inflation across 12 months (CPI Jan 2023 vs CPI Jan 2022, CPI Feb 2023 vs CPI Feb 2022, etc.), or something else?
Let's say https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ will be the canonical site. If they don't update in time, it will be some other measure of year-on-year inflation.
>> 2. In 2023 will there be more than 25 million confirmed COVID cases in China?
You mean happening in 2023 right? Not if the total number will reach 25 million in 2023.
Yes.
>> 3. In 2023 will Google, Meta, Amazon, or Apple release an AR headset?
Is the definition of AR that the user can see through it, i.e. that the screen is transparent, and therefore MR headsets where the user can see the environment through cameras don't count?
I will defer to Dan Schwartz from Metaculus, who wrote this question, but if he doesn't weigh in, then my interpretation is that any headset which allows AR capabilities counts, including if that happens through projecting the outside world onto an internal screen through cameras.
>> 4. In 2023 will a cultured meat product be available in at least one US store or restaurant for less than $30? Could it be a special offer that lasts for a limited amount of time? Do giveaways count? Does imported meat count? Does partial cultured meat count and if so is any percentage ok? If it's part of a menu do we divide the cost of the menu by the number of dishes or does the whole cost count?
I'm going to rule that promotions where it stops being available later won't count, but that if it's available just like any food, and some sale of the same sort that other foods sometimes get causes it to be on sale for below $30, I'll allow it. Imports are fine. Partial cultured meat is a good question; I'm going to rule that animal meat+cultured doesn't count, but plant-based-meat+cultured does if the cultured significantly changes the taste or texture or something. I'm going to rule that you have to be able to purchase it with less than $30 in your pocket, so if it's part of a package meal that costs more than $30, it doesn't count.
>> 5. In 2023, will SpaceX's Starship reach orbit? Does a transatmospheric orbit count or does it have to be at an altitude of more than 100km?
I'm not an expert on the definition of orbit. Google suggests an orbital spaceflight is one "in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit." I will consult with people who know more about orbits but try to generally use this definition.
>> 6. Will the Shanghai index of Chinese stocks go up over 2023? Are you referring to the SSE Composite Index? Because there are others, such as the SSE 50.
Yes, SSE Composite.
>> 7. On January 1, 2024, will an ordinary person be able to take a self-driving taxi from Oakland → SF during rush hour? Is the person being selected from a waitlist ok? You're saying "self-driving taxis in SF only operate at night" in your clarification, but these are waitlist only (as per a commentator).
I think the plain text of the question gives me one hour from the time I start worrying about this to make the trip, so if I have to worry about waitlists more than one hour before, no.
>> 8. In 2023 will a successful deepfake attempt causing real damage make the front page of a major news source? What's a major news source? E.g., would this count? What about TV news shows or radio programmes or news sites in general that don't exactly have "front pages"?
CBC seems major. I would count anything linked from the front page of their website, ie cbc.ca. Realistically this is a bad question because of articles like this where the deepfake itself isn't of major interest but is being used to make a wider point about deepfakes. I will probably be forced to count it anyway.
“ >> 5. In 2023, will SpaceX's Starship reach orbit? Does a transatmospheric orbit count or does it have to be at an altitude of more than 100km?
I'm not an expert on the definition of orbit. Google suggests an orbital spaceflight is one "in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit." I will consult with people who know more about orbits but try to generally use this definition.”
100km is the internationally accepted minimum altitude of space, and you more or less cannot remain in a stable orbit lower than that. In any case I doubt you’d event try to put Starship on an “orbital” trajectory there so it’s probably moot.
Obviously the Starship actually completing one or more orbits would seal the deal.
For a suborbital flight, I would say you should only count it if the flight is on an orbital trajectory at some point in the mission but intentionally deorbits via retro burn.
Maybe you could count if the rocket follows a full mission profile but (intentionally) does not go orbital.
What do I mean by this? Most often, launch vehicles going to orbit fire their engines multiple times - first a boost to apogee and then a restart and “circularization burn” to raise the perigee into a stable orbit.
Now a so called “direct insertion” where you do only one burn is possible (though less flexible) and I believe Falcon 9 uses this at least some of the time. That said, to do all the things Starship is supposed to do, it definitely needs the capability to restart its engines (probably multiple times) in space. This is not a trivial problem, so I would argue it needs to be demonstrated before you really call the rocket “orbital”.
If you really want to be lenient I guess you could count a launch where they achieve a successful full duration burn on stage 2 but it stays suborbital intentionally. But I don’t like that and I don’t think the planned profile of the test flight would have counted.
I'd also probably count it if it were on a trajectory with an apogee above 100 km and a perigee no worse than -100 km; that would demonstrate performance close enough to orbit as makes no difference, but give them a guaranteed reentry over open ocean if everything goes dead half an hour after launch.
>> >> 3. In 2023 will Google, Meta, Amazon, or Apple release an AR headset?
>> Is the definition of AR that the user can see through it, i.e. that the screen is transparent, and therefore MR headsets where the user can see the environment through cameras don't count?
>> I will defer to Dan Schwartz from Metaculus, who wrote this question, but if he doesn't weigh in, then my interpretation is that any headset which allows AR capabilities counts, including if that happens through projecting the outside world onto an internal screen through cameras.
Agree with Scott, we should interpret "user can see through it" to refer to the capability, not the literal transparency of the material. Mixed Reality (MR) devices that do this with cameras would count.
This is a bad question because if MR headsets count then it should have resolved before it was even asked thanks to Meta’s Quest Pro, which released in 2022.
Following on from the "Americans created 'Italian' food" piece, here's Max Miller of "Tasting History" re-creating the Pompeian 'pizza' from the recently discovered fresco:
I'm re-reading Albion's Seed for the first time in a few years. This passage triggered my Gell-Mann amnesia alarm bells:
"The Puritanism of eastern England was not all of a piece. Several distinct varieties of religious dissent developed there, each with its own base. A special strain of religious radicalism which put heavy stress upon the spirit (Antinomianism) flourished among Puritans in eastern Lincolnshire. The more conservative and highly rationalist variant of Calvinism (Arminianism) found many adherents in London, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire."
I'm no expert on the different strands of the Reformation, but I've always understood Arminianism as being diametrically opposed to Calvinism, not a variant of it.
Maybe I'm wrong and Fischer is right? How much should this make me distrust the book as a whole?
I think the confusion is that both Calvinism and Arminianism arise out of what were (are?) the Reformed churches of the time, and that it's debatable if Arminianism was a movement within the broader Calvinist grouping or something entirely separate.
They did eventually come to an official breaking apart and setting up as opposed camps, but within the specifically English context of the later Dissenters, probably they're best viewed as a strain of Calvinism or at least a breakaway group of Calvinists.
This is all pure ignorance on my part because I can't keep the finer points of which Reformed churches are what between France, Switzerland, the Netherlands etc.
Diarmuid MacCulloch's "Reformation" is helpful here; the Dutch split arose out of the conflict between the hardline Calvinists and those led by Arminius who had been trained in Calvinist orthodoxy but was questioning the theology. The English version were something different, at least according to MacCulloch:
"Many clergy and laity in England would have been horrified to think of themselves as Puritans, but they still regarded their Church as part of the international Reformed consensus; they were highly distrustful of the new tendency in divinity, and the new Archbishop Abbot shared their distrust. During the 1610s they gave avant-garde conformists a foreign name in allusion to the disputes about predestination that were currently tearing apart the Dutch Reformed Church – ‘Arminians’.
This was not so much because the English ‘Arminians’ were interested in the issues about salvation and predestination that preoccupied the Dutch. Although many of them did reject what they saw as a Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and there were friendly contacts between Dutch and English Arminians, the English party was more concerned with promoting ceremonial worship, use of the sacraments and a high view of clerical vocation (shockingly to many they had no hesitation in regularly calling ministers of the Church of England ‘priests’). None of these issues had any parallel in Dutch Arminianism. The Arminian label was a symbol that England was witnessing a rebellion against European Reformed orthodoxy as serious as that of the Arminians in the Netherlands. Some also nicknamed the developing Arminian clique ‘the Durham House set’, since from 1617 Richard Neile was Bishop of Durham, and Durham House, his London residence in the Strand, became an unofficial headquarters for the group, the shadow equivalent of Archbishop Abbot’s Lambeth Palace across the river Thames."
Thanks, this clarifies a lot. Glad to hear it's a sensible interpretation. Basically my whole understanding of American history is underpinned by Albion's Seed. If this was an outright mistake like I had assumed, I would have had to go through all my assumptions with a very fine toothed comb.
"The Vicar of Bray" is a satirical song from the 18th century and very good at showing the twists and turns in the Church of England from the early 17th to the early 18th century (reigns of Charles I 1625-1649 through to George I 1714-1727):
The Vicar of Bray - Lyrics
1. In good King Charles' golden time, when loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous high churchman was I, and so I gained preferment.
To teach my flock, I never missed: Kings are by God appointed
And damned are those who dare resist or touch the Lord's annointed.
(Chorus):
And this be law, that I'll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
2. When royal James possessed the crown, and popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down, and read the Declaration.
The Church of Rome, I found, did fit full well my constitution
And I had been a Jesuit, but for the Revolution.
(Chorus)
3. When William was our King declared, to ease the nation's grievance,
With this new wind about I steered, and swore to him allegiance.
Old principles I did revoke; Set conscience at a distance,
Passive obedience was a joke, a jest was non-resistance.
(Chorus)
4. When Royal Anne became our queen, the Church of England's glory,
Another face of things was seen, and I became a Tory.
Occasional conformists base; I blamed their moderation;
And thought the Church in danger was from such prevarication.
(Chorus)
5. When George in pudding time came o'er, and moderate men looked big, sir
My principles I changed once more, and I became a Whig, sir.
And thus preferment I procured From our new Faith's Defender,
And almost every day abjured the Pope and the Pretender.
(Chorus)
6. The illustrious house of Hanover and Protestant succession
To these I do allegiance swear -- while they can hold possession.
For in my faith and loyalty I never more will falter,
And George my lawful king shall be -- until the times do alter.
(Chorus)
So you can see that Puritan, Calvinist, etc. in the Church during the immediate aftermath of Henry's Reformation, through the reigns of Edward, Mary, Elizabeth and then James on, would have been very fluid categories with some, but not total, resemblance to the Continental models 😀 (and with clergy of various sympathies in official positions as bishops, so you had 'Puritan' bishop and 'Arminian' bishop in the Church of England).
I'm an outsider here, so I do see Arminianism as a variant of Calvinism, where it grew up within Calvinism and along Calvinist principles but the major disagreement is on predestination. I think Arminians would have identified as belonging to the wider Reformed, even if the Calvinists had rejected them.
Under the rule of the Parliamentarians, there wasn't the same force holding things together, so a lot of little groupings were free to do things their own way:
"From 1649 to 1660, Puritans in the Commonwealth of England were allied to the state power held by the military regime, headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell until he died in 1658. They broke into numerous sects, of which the Presbyterian group comprised most of the clergy, but was deficient in political power since Cromwell's sympathies were with the Independents.
With the abolition of the Act of Uniformity, even the pretense of religious uniformity broke down. Thus, while the Presbyterians were dominant (at least theoretically) within the established church, those who opposed Presbyterianism were in fact free to start conducting themselves in the way they wanted. Separatists, who had previously organized themselves underground, were able to worship openly. For example, as early as 1616, the first English Baptists had organized themselves in secret, under the leadership of Henry Jacob, John Lothropp, and Henry Jessey. Now, however, they were less secretive. Other ministers – who favored the congregationalist New England Way – also began setting up their own congregations outside of the established church.
Many sects were also organized during this time. It is not clear that they should be called "Puritan" sects since they placed less emphasis on the Bible than is characteristic of Puritans, instead insisting on the role of direct contact with the Holy Spirit. These groups included the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchists, the Seekers, the Muggletonians, and – most prominently and most lastingly – the Quakers.
The Puritan movement split over issues of ecclesiology in the course of the Westminster Assembly. In the course of the 1650s, the movement became further split in the course of a number of controversies. With no means to enforce uniformity in the church and with freedom of the press, these disputes were largely played out in pamphlet warfare throughout the decade."
Asking for a friend: Is there a point to fixing small mistakes in review contest submissions that are finalists, or will they be posted as originally submitted?
Is there now a culture war over AIs? I admit that I feel somewhat irrationally angry at Doomers. Why do I?
Is it because I am tribally aligned with Tyler Cowen? I don't know why that would be the case, but it's a possibility.
Is it because the AIs killing humans just seems like The Latest Hysteria -- along similar lines as Overpopulation, Climate Change, Trump, Covid and Satanism? Yes, Doomers do strike me as the drama queens of The Latest Hysteria, and that may well be why I hate them.
Is it because there is no escape from Culture War, and the more you try to avoid one the more likely you end up in another?
I don't know the answer. I don't really hate Doomers. At least not most of the time. They may even be right. They just annoy me. I need to get over it, I guess.
What is your working definition of culture war? I'm skeptical of just dropping the google result in but I don't have a working one myself, so just as a starting point - "a conflict between groups, especially liberal and conservative groups, that have different cultural ideals, beliefs, or philosophies."
Personally I find this definition unsatisfactory because it kind of renders *any* policy debate a culture war. Find me an ongoing debate, from BLM to where to put a local road, where there is disagreement, and people *aren't* dividing into groups to support or oppose particular options based on their different "beliefs."
Personally, I think there has to be some kind of threshold of scale for something to become a culture war, and I don't think AI is there yet. It's generating news coverage, and it's a surprising and new divisive issue within the kinds of niche "smart on the internet man" communities like this one that (a) were already interested in the issue, and (b) are usually aligned on many subjects such that its startling to see the break, but it feels like the average person on the street is going to have more and stronger opinions on trans rights and race issues, which is why those things seem to more to fit the "culture war" moniker than AI does (at least to me, at least for now).
[Edit] Also, who do you consider a "Doomer?" If one person says "AI development should be banned" and another person says, "Regulators should require AI products be subject to testing standards before deployment - and periodically thereafter - to confirm they work as intended, and should require developers to ensure that AI-generated outcomes are explicable" are they both "Doomers?" Just the ban proponent? Neither (since neither of them are stating a belief that AI is going to kill us all)?
There is absolutely a culture war, and doomers have a classic Eschatology. While they probably have a more rational view than Christians thinking the Rapture is soon, for instance, I think that the doomer movement needs more scrutiny.
When a group has all the hallmark traits of a doomsday cult, it makes sense to be more skeptical of their conclusions.
I think the comparison to the Rapture is quite apt, but that saying one is more rational isn't. Both stem from strong priors and not a lot of empirical facts. If we are valuing empirical facts (as implied by saying one is more rational than the other), then I feel like we need actual empirical facts, not strong priors. Like, an AI system recursively improving itself, or trying to kill someone. You know, actual things beyond a theory.
I relate to this, and have determined there’s a big fear component for me. On some level, validating the debate opens me up to considering the end of the world.
Additionally, adherents this particular hysteria feel more out of touch — partially because many of them I know are genuinely out of touch people overall. At least with overpopulation, Covid, climate change, etc, everyone can sort of see things slowly going wrong and picture what things would look like if they do go very wrong. This one, however, has a sort of nerdy ivory-towerness that feels completely removed from the lives of everyday people, so despite being a nerdy ivory-towerer myself, I feel reflexively off-put.
Lastly, the huge gap between the threats that currently exist from AI and the end of the world are so massive and poorly explained that even I as an ML engineer have trouble picturing exactly through what means AI will cause my demise. Obstacles that seem very critical to me, like the requirement for massive scaling and improvements of difficult robotics are brushed off in nearly every explanation I see. This plays into my aversion to putting resources towards it too — even if the expansion of alternative energy isn’t necessary or doesn’t save the world, at least the air smells a bit better, geopolitical dependence on oil is reduced, and I save money with my electric car. However, if AI turns out to never be an issue, what was the use of all that money, brainpower, and worry? It just feels like a waste already (especially the worry part).
I’m still totally torn on this issue, but think you really described a cultural/emotional aspect I hadn’t been able to put my finger on.
Well it seems to me that what's happening to you is *not* that you're getting sucked into a culture war and hating on the outgroup, and also is not that you've mentally joined a cult. Sounds like good old-fashioned fear to me, and I don't think it's silly to be very confused and uneasy. I am. It's just really figure how plausible the pessimistic view is.
The doomers, yes. Anyone who thinks p(doom|unaligned AI)=1.0, or anything even close to that, is too enamored of their own smartness. Thinking that this doom is imminent because their buddies made ChatGPT, and then that they can avert doom with their Extra Smart AI Alignment Research, yeah, massive overconfidence.
But, I'm just as skeptical of "highly valuable new technology". Particularly for any AI that is going to come out of anything we are talking about now, I'm not expecting it to be any more valuable than e.g. social media. Some legit use cases, but mostly noise and social strife and generally making life a little bit worse for everyone.
I'm pretty sure AI is going to get us cheap, mass-produced mediocrity *long* before it gets us Canned Super Genius, and cheap mediocrity isn't going to bootstrap itself. It's just going to generate noise, and be used as a weapon by people playing status games against one another (and against me, whether I want to play or not). If and when we do get a Canned Super Genius, I think it's very likely to be persistently misaligned, and if I think that's more likely to mean that it keeps going catatonic or self-destructing than that it tries to paperclip us all, that still doesn't add up to "highly valuable".
Highly Valuable, is not impossible but requires a lot of things to line up just right. Doom, is not impossible but requires a lot of things to line up just wrong. Mass-produced mediocrity, that looks to be surprisingly easy.
I think you have what I think of as a hate structure going on regarding people who think there'a a high probability of doom. You imagine they're all mini-Yuds, and that their sense of doom is just the delicious opposite side of the coin that, when heads, shows them being smart as fuck. I doubt that's true. Some I've seen posting on Twitter seem to be just very scared people who expect catastrophes of many kinds -- we get crispie crittered by climate change, covid wrecks our bodies and soon half the world will be bed-bound, nukes, pesticides, etc etc. Lots of very scared people around these days. As for the tech bro's who think they and the other smart tech bros will make AI safe by clamping the alignment attachment to their dicks and aligning that bitch -- eh, that's just one school of optimism. Actually, most of the people I know have heard that some are worried about AI, but believe that the scientists will figure it out like always and things will proceed as usual.
BUT I agree that mass-produced mediocrity looks pretty easy to achieve. Sort of like building a mall.
Lately I've been watching old Johnny Carson Tonight Shows from the early 70s and am fascinated by how foreign the culture seems. The past is a foreign country, they say. A striking difference is how sexual so many of the jokes are. Many of the things Johnny or the other guests say to the female guests would be considered misogynistic today, because they visibly react and comment upon the attractiveness of a women in comedic, salacious ways. It's hard to tell whether the female guests would prefer if the males behaved differently.
For instance, Johnny will often ask the guest, male or female, about their dating life. It seems to be considered natural that these famous people might want to talk about their private dating lives. Johnny might also talk and joke with male guests about good lines for picking up women. References to getting drunk and having one night stands is normal.
In one episode Johnny makes a joke about having had VD during the war, and then it hit me. I had assumed I was seeing a cultural product from the peak of the Baby Boomer era, and that explained why the show was so loose in discussing sexual matters. But then I realized Carson himself had been in WW2.
It got me thinking that maybe the WW2 vets changed the culture more than even the Boomers. After all, nobody was more worldly than the vets. Consider all the cultural leaders circa 1970 who were WW2 vets: Johnny Carson (with the biggest TV audience ever in history), Hugh Hefner, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller -- all who pushed a countercultural take on America to various degrees. Carson himself isn't normally considered part of the "counterculture", but I dare you to watch those 1970s Tonight Shows and report back that they don't seem countercultural compared to your image of the early 1960s or the sexually conservative world that is 2023.
Maybe the Baby Boomer were overrated when it came to cultural change in the 60s and 70s. Maybe it was more about their veteran daddies.
It’s interesting to think about the Silent Generation contribution to the Sexual Revolution, but I think the GI/ prostitution angle is a red herring here. Casual attitudes to prostitution can easily coexist with quite strict sexual ethics around family formation and the behavior of “nice” women. Victorian London, for example, had huge numbers of prostitutes of all ages and sexes, with relatively destigmatized access for men who could afford it, while famously enforcing a tight code of sexual purity and chaste speech around its marriageable middle-class girls—and importantly, that ratcheting-up of domestic purity norms happened *with* the return of world-weary veterans from the Napoleonic Wars.
To take another example, Shakespeare’s plays joke openly about fun with whores in a way that would shock right across the political spectrum if written today, but there are also multiple plots that turn on the importance of female chastity in the aristocratic marriage market (note, again, as imagined by a middle-class person).
It doesn’t feel revolutionary for Carson to joke about catching the clap, but it does feel new for that to be perceived as a great topic for humor on a mainstream TV show aimed at a mixed audience. If the middle-class moms in the audience laughed excitedly, rather than finding it disgusting and offensive, then presumably it was something the moms wanted to hear and something the producers wanted to have said to them. I suspect it’s probably about legitimating a fantasy of libertine consumerist pleasure as a high-status coastal norm, to a willing audience of Middle American rubes. (Look at these Hollywood people, so rich and well-dressed, so morally relaxed and carefree! *They* understand that it’s OK to have a bit of fun now and then.) Feels very much of a piece with the mainstreaming of _Playboy_ as an openly accepted part of the suburban dad library, and that’s definitely also about class and consumption (smoking jackets, satin sheets, marble pillars...).
Didn't Scott have a piece on this at some point? At the very least, I seem to remember an extended conversation about how the cultural figures associated with a given generation are often actually members of an earlier generation (most of the famous rock stars and artists of the 60s were members of the Silent Generation or--as you pointed out--members of the Greatest Generation who actively participated in the Second World War. The Sex Pistols and the Ramones were Boomers. The bubble-gum pop stars and spiky-haired rap-rockers of my Millennial youth were mostly Gen-Xers). Which makes sense. The members of a generation generally aren't going to be old enough to be artistically influential to their own peers. Teenagers might be the prototypical consumers of youth/mass/counter culture, but they by and large aren't big producers of it. Even teen pop idols and child stars don't really count, because their artistic output was mostly designed by the adult producers and songwriters around them (although I'm curious how this is shifting with the current generation of teenagers. Current social media stars/influencers seem to be much closer in age to their audiences than the rock stars of yore, with much more control over their own messages than earlier teen stars)
I wonder about those young influencers and the material they release. It's clearly less polished, more repetative, and often drops the ball at key moments. It's the opposite of highly choreographed shows like you see on TV, especially as related to reality TV, which is heavily edited to take real (or "real") events and hype the excitement.
My kids started watching Mr. Beast recently and I've seen a few episodes. Climactic moments often fall apart. Filming seems random and out of order. Props fail in highly predictable ways. This is bad TV, bad storytelling, bad writing. It reminds me of hanging out with my friends as teenagers. I'm thinking that my generation liked the polish because we could see the improvement over the haphazard stuff we could do on our own, but the upcoming generations get too much polish and appreciate the authenticity of young influencers who don't have adults running the show and making everything perfect. It may be related to the fact that kids are spending a lot less time hanging out with their friends in random unstructured ways. That's an itch not being scratched, so they get it from digital sources instead of physical.
I was thinking specifically about the effects of the war on the psychology of these people. For instance, Carson's attitude toward sex was probably formed in those years. Casually referencing sex with a hooker was no big deal to him or much of his generation. Prudery likely doesn't survive major wars.
But taking that and adding it with your point makes me wonder if the so-called Sexual Revolution was merely a transfer of values from ex-GIs to the younger generation.
New article on my Substack - it's a review of "Innovation Breakdown: "How the FDA and Wall Street Cripple Medical Advances". This is a rather obscure book which tells the story of a skin cancer detection startup that got screwed over by the FDA, delaying the entrance of their product to market by several years and severely damaging the reputation of company in the eyes of dermatologists.
Maybe I've missed this discussion in previous threads, but, um, why Threads? To me, it seems that Twitter is a) money-losing enterprise, and b) huge magnet for unwanted regulatory attention. Why is Meta trying to replicate this seeming trainwreck?
One needing another Meta account (Instagram) to use another Meta product (Threads) is a red flag.
Another is the requirement to delete the Instagram account to delete Threads. Meta claims to be fixing this, but who knows how long that will take. Perhaps signing a suicide pact with users’ Instagram accounts contributed to the alleged 100 million registrations.
I suspect we think that with better execution we can make it genuinely positive, for the users and for the business. We have more expertise and resources in content moderation than Twitter ever did
Cambridge analytics was more about decision making around 3rd party API access than it was “content moderation” per se… but yes fake news troll farms were / are a content issue
Are there therapists who focus on helping people who get into conspiracy theories and distrust experts, which leads them to avoid doctors and medication, which worsens their condition?
In my very limited experience, the big issue isn't finding an appropriate psychologist, it's finding an appropriate caretaker. People with serious issues like this don't need a lot of complex therapy, they need to take incredibly powerful pills every day for the rest of their life that make them miserable and they hate, otherwise they will quickly become incredibly paranoid, like won't stand within 20 feet of phone lines, and in general just degenerate incredibly rapidly. The issue isn't, ya know, finding a solution, the problem is generally making sure that the person is consistently taking these pills, that again they absolutely hate, on the worst day of the year. People who are, underneath it, just people with all our failings. From the outside, their internal experience of skipping a pill seems like no more of a moral failing than buying a pizza and candy when you're depressed, just with horrifically worse consequences. This generally means there needs to be a caretaker person, who needs to ensure this person is on their meds, every day, for like 10 years, which is inevitably going to lead to a lot of screaming fighting matches between the caretaker and the paranoid. It's a brutal, thankless task that consumes decades of a persons life. Finding someone who will do that is difficult, finding someone who will diagnose the paranoid schizophrenic as a paranoid schizophrenic and get him pills and weekly meetings is easy.
I don't think that's a specialty. But most competent therapists, talking with someone like that, would make a special effort to stay out of the role of expert, to not give any advice,to try to be particularly transparent and honest, and to have a stance of "how can I be helpful?" I have sometimes been able to develop a working relationship with someone who had that stance. However, if the person is really deeply furious and mistrustful that is not going to work either. The last person of that kind that I saw said that being a psychotherapist was the ideal profession for imposters with no degree, because everything we say and do is bullshit anyhow. Expressed no interest in seeing proof of my degrees, because said it was still possible that I had stolen the name and the identify of the person who had actually gotten the degrees. I ended up suggesting he consider co-counselling, which I think is actually sort of high-risk, because this man was so utterly incapable of trusting authorities and yet was greatly in need of help.
Does anyone have any clear examples of someone skillfully avoiding Gell-Mann Amnesia? I personally just avoid news in general, but I wonder if there are other options. I will preemptively say that my news abstinence is trivially compatible with all strategies of the form "don't trust a news item unless you [take some extra, effortful step]"
Some stories are covered by sober minded experts and others are covered by complete idiots.
If the NYT has a piece about portage canoe trips that I know for a fact is not fully baked I don’t thInk I should regard every story on the site with suspicion.
Michael Chrichton came up with the idea and named it after the guy who discovered the quark. The physicist was brilliant and Crichton is a so-so sci fi writer. Now that naming is a bit of deception in itself. How much traction would the Michael Chrichton Amnesia meme have gained?
The point that GMA is making is not "all news articles are bullshit". It's "some news articles are bullshit. Remember this and be appropriately skeptical, especially when you are not an expert in the topic".
We know that _some_ articles even in well respected outlets are garbage. So if you are not capable of telling (which most people are not on most topics), then the natural response is to be wary of articles.
I agree we should remain skeptical and pay special attention to the source. Do your own homework. My quarrel is with the particular name, GMA. Crichton wasn't really coming up with anything new and naming it Gell-Mann was a bit of cheesy sleight of hand to make it seem like it was something cool and new.
It is especially cheesy because Gell-Mann was famously skeptical and very conscientious about getting his facts right. And he knew a *lot* of facts. I remember a Seth Lloyd book in which Seth said that meeting GM for the first time is intimidating because GM knows about 10 times as much as a typical person on any given topic. Another eminent physicist (it may have been Stuart Kauffman) opined that Gell-Mann knows more facts than any other human. It's impossible to adjudicate such a thing, but FWIW I can't think of anyone I'd put ahead of Gell-Mann at his peak in that regard.
Zvi recently linked to a tweet from lawyerBrian Manookian describing how he got off the hook for his student loans: https://twitter.com/BrianManookian/status/1674963884703088642, and saying anyone whose student loans have gotten passed from lender to lender can do what he did.
The approach is to demand proof of chain of title, i.e. proof that the loan company now servicing the loan now owns the loan, which I believe they prove by showing a bill of sale. He says that these companies that buy up big batches of student loans are sloppy, and do not do the proper paperwork, and probably will not be able to supply proof that they own a loan. The person who got the loan then petitions the court to declare that the person does not owe the loan company any money. Court does so, person sends judgment to loan company and they cannot pursue collection any more. (Seems to me that nobody else can either -- because the previous owners of the loan have sold it to a collection company, and really don't own the loan any more.)
This sounds plausible to me, and my daughter and her boyfriend both have substantial student debt and are interested in trying it. However, we would like to ask a lawyer for advice before trying it. Four lawyers have now turned me down when I have asked them to first advise us, then carry out the process if we are not confident we can do it correctly. We would be paying them for their time, of course. Lawyers have said it's outside their realm of competence. The steps Manookian describes sound to me like extremely simple basic stuff, and in fact Mazookian has supplied copies of the letters he used as models, so it's hard to understand why lawyers keep turning me down.
Anyhow, can anyone help with information? I am open to any possibility. You can give me general info then fade away, or you can actually do the filing required. You can give info in a post here, or you could send me an email or we could talk online. We can do it anonymously or using real names. I will happily pay your hourly fee, though I think I can ask all my questions in about half an hour. If you are law student or legal aide and understand the process Manookian is describing I am happy to work with you also.
And, by the way, I am sure there are many people on here dealing with school loans. You could help a lot of people at once. Or you could do them one-by-one and have a lot of clients you can process fast and easily. Maybe you can bring down one of the loan shell companies.
This is fascinating. I don't have student loans, but I do have a 98k mortgage that has been passed around three times, probably under similar circumstances as student loans (ie, as part of a big sloppy batch of loans).
On the one hand, you would think that even crappy mortgage companies would be more careful about bills of sale given the large amounts of money involved.
But on the other hand, mortgages come with a lot more paperwork than student loans do, and if they're buying mortgages in huge batches, maybe they actually might be sloppy enough to lose critical ownership paperwork.
During the mortgage collapse of 2008 there were a couple news stories related to this I think -- some seemed to be about the inability to address the crisis because it couldn’t be determined who owned the loans, and some about a lender/loan servicer that didn’t have its paperwork in order and so couldn’t evict people who didn’t pay.
I've been doing some reading since originally posting my comment - the TLDR is that mortgages seem to take documentation much more seriously than student loans and there are lots of additional protections for mortgage lenders, at least in Washington State (where my condo is). From what I can tell, even if they can't put their hands on the original paperwork, they can just do a affidavit swearing that they lost the paperwork, but, like, they totally do own the loan. But on the other hand, it looks like it's occasionally worked for people in foreclosure?
Either way, this seems like having such a low chance of working that I'm not going to seriously pursue the idea. From what I can see, "produce the note" is much easier to do with student loans because, unlike real estate, there is no underlying asset or public records about it.
I can tell you that these "Chain of Title" arguments are very important in patent litigation. In some jurisdictions "incorrect recording of inventorship or ownership is, in itself, fatal to the validity or enforceablity of a patent." (quote from here: https://blog.patentology.com.au/2014/02/inventorship-and-ownership-importance.html)
I don't know if the law is as clear when it comes to chain of title for loans, but maybe a lawyer with experience as a patent attorney would be more comfortable making these arguments?
I’m not sure about student loans, but I did use a similar technique to get rid of credit card debt a long time ago. The collection agency was not able to provide any proof of the original debt so they had to forgive it.
I am not a lawyer, and cannot offer legal advice. This seems like it's not going to work effectively; if the shell company doesn't have record of the paperwork, they can get it from the people they bought it from. If they don't remember that, once you take them to court they can demand you tell them who that was as discovery, and then get their paperwork. They can probably make you testify under oath that you don't believe you owe the debt, with whatever perjury penalties that incurs. It really seems like you're just banking on them not showing up and losing by default, which a lawyer isn't going to want to do.
Tennessee seems to have a $25 paywall on their court cases. Might be worth your money to look up exactly what happened with that linked case, or find others like it.
Thanks, I will look it up. Guy who gave the advice said that it's not cost-effective to these companies to defend themselves so long as claims like this are rare. They have a huge number of loans, and know they will lose many to defaults. Losing to me is just one more. Calling me into court and having their lawyer grill me sounds like it would cost them a hell of a lot of money. As for getting the paperwork from the previous company -- I think a lot of them just collapse and go out of existence, then sell the loans they are holding cheap. Also, I would not be claiming that I (actually my daughter, but let's say it's me) did not know who had made the original loan and do not believe I borrowed money. I would just be saying yeah, I borrowed it and will pay it back to the organization that can prove to me it is now the owner of the loan. But I'm not sending $30,000 or so to a company that cannot document that I owe them money. No perjury involved.
Recently convinced a relative to hire a lawyer for an eviction proceeding; it cost them $4000 in total. Not chump change, but much less than the property value. The guy's arguing it's not worth the collector's hassle, which is banking on them not showing up.
Was going to say my loan servicer has changed at least twice since they were paused for COVID (and possibly more than once before that) and I could maybe honestly say I don't know who the previous ones were since I've kinda not been paying attention until they're a more pressing problem and the repayments are starting up again.
No you would not need to lie in any way. The way this works is not that you pretend you don't know who the loan company is, or who had it before, or that you owe a loan. All you are doing is saying that yes you took out a loan, and you will repay the loan to a company that can prove via paperwork that it bought the loan and is now the owner of it -- BUT that you are not sending money to a place that can't even prove it owns your loan. It is reasonable to demand that a place trying to collect a large sum from you can document that its claim is legitimate. If it can't document it, it is reasonable not to pay it, EVEN IF you think it is extremely likely that they did buy the loan, just didn't do the paperwork. I mean, it's like if you bought a rug for $5000 online, and start getting emails from the place saying send us the money -- but they can't tell you the date you bought it, the item number, and they can't prove that they are the online rug store. It's just a guy writing from his private email saying "you bought the rug from my store a while ago, and we shipped it. No I have no records of the date you bought it and no proof that we shipped it, but I'm telling you we did."
Right, I was just saying if it was a question of being asked to provide the paper trail on the loan servicer's behalf I would be able to give an honest "I dunno".
Anywho I'm sort of concerned that Brian Manookian might be a bit of an internet clout chaser, looking at the rest of his Twitter feed. Seems worth noting that he's qrt bumping a tweet from August of last year and keeps saying he's going to set up a website detailing his process and has yet to do so.
Like I don't think he's lying or that he didn't do what he's saying he did per se, just that I sort of suspect there's probably details and circumstances that are being obfuscated in a way that prevent this from being something scalable at all.
Yeah, he's definitely got a big ego and no heart of gold, and I noticed too that he hasn't set up a website, so bad at follow-through. However, one of his Twitter threads contains what's probably the crucial document, which is the one you send first. I think there's a fairly good chance that this would not work, but it looks promising enough to me to put some effort into figuring out for sure. A couple of the lawyers, before they declined to be hired, have said things in passing about why the think it would not work:
-This is not a way of getting your loans discharged. (But I already knew that. They will still be on record in various places. On the other hand, there will be no record of ongoing failed attempts to collect. The loans will exist forever in a sort of limbo: You borrowed the money, but the original lender sold the loan, and the buyer resold it, and the last organization that bought it can never collect it because the court has declared their claim permanently invalid. And none of the earlier loan-owners can collect because they sold the loan, and really do not own it any more.)
-Manookian's posting about something he did in 2016. Loan collection companies are different and better organized now. (Have no idea whether that's true, and it's not clear that the lawyer who told me that has every tried this maneuver with somebody's student loans. How would he know that the loa collection companies are better organized now, given that he said does not handle student loan debt in this practice. His field is "debt defense," but he seems to mostly help people who have very large debts and are in big trouble.
-Most student loans are federal loans. The loan companies that take them over don't really own the loans, they are being hired by the US government to do the collection work. (He would not tell me how he knew that or how to find out more about it.)
The thing is, I have had a lot of middle-aged white men (please forgive me if you are one) in authority tell me something is wrong or impossible, and my observation is that if I argue, politely, or ask probing questions a lot of them double down and start throwing out reasons why they're *positive* their view is right, and in fact these back-up arguments turn out not to be based on solid info when I look them up on google scholar or wherever. They seem to be incapable of just saying, "based on my experience and intuition that's wrong, but I can't really back that judgment up and it's possible I'm wrong." And about several important matters it has turned out that I was in fact right.
If you are interested enough in this possibility to look into it on your own, let me know.
I have little interest in the outcome of this, but I'm curious why four lawyers have turned you down.
My first two guesses would be 1) it's too novel ("outside my realm of competence" sounds like the professional phrasing of that) and 2) it violates some professional norm against lawyers being highly lawyerly. More interesting to me is whether any of them relied on consequentialist reasoning, like this attempt to apply Econ 101 concepts:
'If this becomes a trend, then lenders will probably take notice and then take steps to ensure that each buyer of each loan can demonstrate proof of chain of title with ease. Won't these additional steps taken by lenders raise administrative costs at all lenders? Won't that increase the interest rates that these companies charge future borrowers?' (Similar to the model in which shoplifting by some increases the average prices that consumers pay.)
Are plaintiffs' attorneys known to make decisions on that sort of basis? It doesn't sound like the sort of thing that they do, but then I have never asked.
Where is the AstralCodexTen for people interested in law, anyways?
Part of it may be that lawyers have an enforceable profession duty of candor to the court. They're not allowed knowingly to put perjured testimony on the stand, present forged documents, present spurious legal arguments in briefs, etc. You don't have to volunteer evidence or arguments against your client's interests, and you can definitely present things in the most favorable light to your client's claims, but you aren't allowed to outright Saul Goodman it up.
A lawyer could probably defend an action brought by a loan servicer by demanding proof the servicer owns the loan and nit-picking every shortcoming in the documentation the servicer provides, sure, but bringing an action on the client's behalf seems like it might require more of a prima facie case. If getting such a case heard would require the lawyer to file an initial brief saying "my client doesn't think he owes this money to the respondent", then an ethical lawyer (or at least a lawyer who doesn't want to risk being sanctioned by the court) needs to reasonably believe the claims he puts in his brief.
Wait, you are misunderstanding to plan I have learned about. There is no perjury involved. There is nothing that is even sort of vaguely *like* perjury. The person with the loan does not say, "what loan? I never took out a loan." They say, "yes I took out a student loan and I will repay the loan to the original lender, or to any other organization that has bought the loan. However, the organization that asks for me to make loan repayment has to be able to prove they are actually the owners of the loan. They should have a bill of sale or similar for my particular loan." If you win, it is because the loan organization bought a bunch of loans in a big batch and did not do the required paperwork. There is actually a law about this sort of thing to protect consumers -- something along the lines of, you can't dun somebody unless you have documentation of the proper kind showing they owe you money.
Anyhow, some may think this approach is kind of sleazy, because it's getting out of a loan one really does owe on a sort of technicality. But my daughter and her boyfriend have oppressively large student loans and want to do it, and I am not about to be judgmental about that.
I know one lawyer pretty well, and he's actually a highly ethical person who worries about things like that in real life. But his view is that the job of a lawyer is to make the best case he can for his client, and that considerations like those you mention are irrelevant. It's OK to take the OJ Simpsons of this world as clients and do your best to get them off the hook -- not because they deserve to go free, but because a system where everybody gets a good defense protects the justice way better than letting each lawyer's squeamish scruples rule. I agree with that point of view. And I can tell you that none of the 4 that turned me down sounded like they gave a shit about that kind of thing. I think the reason might be that as lawyer jobs go mine is really puny. Manookian estimated that a lawyer charging typical hourly fees would make maybe $1000 learning about situation from client and then doing all the paperwork involved in this project.
If lawyers were in the habit of making decision based on the type of logic you describe, we would have dramatically fewer lawyers. The majority of the lawyer profession exists to take advantage of exactly these kinds of bureaucratic overheads and process inefficiencies.
For anyone who has quit their job to take a break to pursue personal projects, how was it? Do you regret it?
I am currently torn between burning desire to quit my job and pursue a startup idea, and ruthless pragmatism that just considers the opportunity cost of lost paychecks.
I have no kids, no rent/mortgage, and many years of living expenses in the bank, but somehow can’t rationalize to myself actually taking a risk. If you ever did quit to pursue a personal interest or purely take a break, I’d love to hear from you!
I took a three month break last year to explore career options and writing, and it was the best time of my life!
I got a job again soon after just from networking in my local area, but I do not regret it at all. I think we should normalize taking sabbaticals, it's extremely useful for mental health and breaking out of rigid mental models.
I don't think people are morally or ethically against taking sabbaticals. I think we're financially against it. I would love to if I could afford to just be jobless for three months. The privilege...
I've taken at least three year-long breaks from work, first at age 20 and most recently in 2015 when I started a profitable side business manufacturing electronic products. Now that I have children, I don't expect to have that sort of opportunity again.
I grew up in near-poverty and started work in my mid-teens. My early life left me extremely frugal and with a horror of debt, so living off savings and finding work when money ran out was a naturally self-motivated process.
I pursued hobbies, did some traveling, and had some adventures, but frankly I never accomplished as much as I expected (except in 2015). Romantic partners were generally supportive but unimpressed.
I feel that I was lucky to be stably employed during periods of economic turmoil like 9/11, 2008, and the pandemic. I would caution you that various economic indicators don't look so hot, and seem likely to decline.
Probably there were opportunity costs, but certainly opportunity gains. No apparent career impact, and no regrets. All of the trite homilies about non-fungibility of time and the advantages of youth are true. Have a plan, keep to a more-or-less heathy sleep schedule, set expectations low and curiosity high. Do it!
How hard will it be to get another job if you need one?
I've never quit to pursue a passion, but my last batch of unemployment lasted six months, during which I made no progress toward any goals. So, don't assume the time will make things happen.
I have a relative who started their own company, successfully, and they mentioned mostly working 20-hour days seven days a week for about two years. Expect pain.
On the pro side, I think of Shamus Young's autobiography; https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13953. "It’s been easy over the last year to just keep coding at home and punching the clock at Taco Bell. This isn’t my dream, but it’s a tolerable substitute."
I'd say, go in with the expectation that every dollar you put into the thing is completely lost.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at that. I’m an ML engineer, so I don’t expect difficulty finding a job again, though I have a pretty chill and pleasant remote gig now that I don’t want to throw away. I am definitely in the (very) tolerable substitute territory, which is part of what makes it hard to walk away.
I certainly expect any startup process to be grueling, but feel this might be my best time to give it a go. I’m in my mid/late 20s so if I’ll ever have the energy for that sort of pace, it’s now.
I’ve done it multiple times, though not always to pursue personal projects. Sometimes just to live life. It’s paid off every time with the possible exception of quitting in January 2020. I wrote more about job-quitting in my recent Substack post titled “the fifth bomb”
You might also find the recent book “die with zero” an interesting perspective on the time vs money problem. The author frames it more as an energy problem, with your time/energy being more valuable when you’re young and losing value over time. So selling your time/energy for dollars when you’re young is a bad exchange rate (from that perspective) which supports quitting jobs often.
Also recommend the YouTube short film Slo Mo (I think it’s called) about a surgeon that loses his vision and quits working.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I’d love to take a look at your blog. I’m in my mid 20s now, so I’m certainly curious in the long-term opportunity cost equation for risky endeavors.
I do suspect growing up in a working class family one generation removed from extreme poverty has made the opportunity cost numbers seem gargantuan, though in reality, a six month attempt that returns 0 would really just mean working an extra ~3 months at the end of my career, which sounds trivial.
It’s tough stuff to grapple with so I appreciate the alternate perspectives!
Yeah I also grew up in a working class family which definitely left a chip on my shoulder too. Definitely skews perspective a bit and great that you’re aware of it
I’m late thirties and hesitate to give genetic advice, but generally think “do what you want to” seems to play out better for high agency people vs “suffer and grind”
I try to do a 24 hour fast twice a week, sometimes three, if I'm feeling ambitious. I go noon one day to noon the next, so I'm asleep for 8 hours in the middle of it. That seems to make it much more tolerable, in my experience.
Handicapping a potential Musk-Zuckerberg MMA fight. For some reason I had the impression that Zuck has been training for years, but I recently read that he only started BJJ 2 years ago. 2 years is.... not a very long time to be training, at all. At this point he probably doesn't know what he doesn't know. Reportedly Musk weighs at least 70 pounds more. I would personally not recommend that a white belt with 2 years of training and 1 competition take an extremely high-profile fight with someone 70 pounds heavier than them. For one thing, MMA fights start standing, and takedowns in no-gi take a lot of energy and skill unless you grew up wrestling. No-gi takedowns against someone much much larger is going to be very, very tough, and very, very exhausting.
Like, I don't any think of the say 170 lbs. high school or college wrestlers in my old gym could just easily take down a 240 lbs. white belt. In the gi maybe for a judoka, but not in no-gi.
Anyways, there's not a ton of fields where I know substantially more than Mark Zuckerberg, but this is 1 of them- I would personally not advise this fight. Contra Hollywood, size really matters in fights
70 pounds make a difference talking about actual athletes, where you can assume most of it is muscle. Elon looks chubby and soft. His cardio is probably terrible too.
Has Elon trained in martial arts at all? Because 2 years is a hell of a lot more than 0. I'm bigger than Elon but I've never trained in any sort of fighting so I'd hesitate to go up against the Zucc.
Respectfully disagree. You seem to argue that Zuck can’t win but that isn’t an argument for why Elon can. I can’t see him landing a KO punch so not sure his path to victory. Plus, Zuck is 13 years younger if it goes the distance.
The more interesting question to me is who will be on the undercard!
Update for the zero people who care: the combo diet of keto/intermittent fasting continues to work well. I'm down about 20 pounds in about two months. It's been remarkably easy, too. The keys to success are a) try to eat lean meats but don't be afraid to splurge now and then on some bacon or whatnot b) get some exercise but don't overdo it, cause that's when falling off the wagon is most likely, and c) don't be afraid of a little or even a lot of caffeine.
Perhaps, but I found eating lean meats lead to much better results. For Memorial Day, we had a cookout, and an entire package of ground beef patties was left untouched, so I spent the following week eating basically nothing but hamburger patties, and the weight loss slowed or stopped entirely during that time, so...ya know.
I try to do a 24 hour fast twice a week, sometimes three, if I'm feeling ambitious. I go noon one day to noon the next, so I'm asleep for 8 hours in the middle of it. That seems to make it much more tolerable, in my experience.
Do dried psilocybin mushrooms loose potency over time? Yesterday I ate some that had accidentally popped up in a Tupperware container that I was using to store damp coconut coir a couple years ago and the visuals were just not there.
Yes, the psilocybin decays over time. Just to add a little more detail over other replies, the chemistry involved is an oxidation reaction: the psilocybin reacts with oxygen from the air to give non-active blue compounds. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/mystery-of-why-magic-mushrooms-go-blue-solved/4010870.article I.e. fresh mushrooms turn blue when you bruise them because air gets in, and this represents a slight loss of potency. (only slight - the blue colour is very strongly blue and a little goes a long way)
Things other people have suggested to stop this happening sound reasonable to me. Keep in an airtight container, under vacuum or with one of those oxygen-remover sachets (not just desiccant which only removes water). Keep moisture out because being thoroughly dry can be a physical barrier to oxygen.
Chemistry happens slower in the cold so I would normally suggest that the freezer is good. I think the counter argument (that Eremolalos is thinking of) is that when you take them out of the freezer, they are so cold that water from the air condenses onto them, which makes them damp and reduces shelf-life if you're not using them straight away. Same if your container is not completely airtight in the freezer (get some good containers with a clip-on lid with a rubber seal).
If you do thaw and you're planning to refreeze, maybe thaw completely to room temp before opening, or even better, thaw the containers by putting them in an even bigger airtight container with desiccant.
Forgot to mention the other thing from that paper - part of the oxidative loss of potency is assisted by enzymes in the mushroom.
This is analogous to green tea leaves turning into black tea - the catechins/tannins in green tea turn black in an enzyme-assisted reaction with oxygen. You manufacture tea leaves by destroying the enzyme with a quick blast of heat, once the desired level of oxidation is reached.
It may be possible to do something similar with shrooms, where a quick pasteurisation-type treatment just after harvest increases shelf-life dramatically. I'm sure people have looked/are looking into it.
You're supposed to not chop them up because that exposes more surface to the air, & store them with little envelops of desiccant stuff. Last and fussiest advice I read was something about protecting them from oxygen? Or maybe air? and recommended a vacuum storage system.
Yeah they were dried and run through a coffee grinder. Each little batch stored in a small jar with desiccant packs.
I once wrote some code to calculate the decline in potency of pharmaceuticals. The big deal in that case was ambient temperature. They held up better when stored at lower temps. Not sure if this is true of mushrooms but I could store the jars in the freezer.
Or wait for some more to accidentally pop up in some damp coco coir stored in a Tupperware container as I’m sure meant by growing some more. :)
I read somewhere convincing that you should not put them in the freezer, even after they are dried. Up until then, I dried them, put in desiccant envelopes and stuck them in jars in the freezer. I absolutely cannot remember the reason why that's a bad idea but whatever it was I read convinced me. So yeah, damp coco coir
Yeah, the number will be that precise only under a similarly precise set of conditions; temperature, amount of oxygen and moisture, mixing and so on. Often though, its not just X percent of the original potency per quarter, its X percent of the remainder which is why chemists talk in half-lives (half of the remaining potency disappears in every Y-month period).
Psilocybin is not a simple example though - from the paper I linked above:
"However, no single blue compound exists in Psilocybe mushrooms. Various oxidative pathways contribute, to different extents, to the reaction. Each of them produces various chemical (including isomeric) species. [...] The substrate to oxidant ratio seems to affect the mechanism and color."
In my experience, fresh bruised mushrooms are a "pure" blue colour, with dried mushrooms being a more greenish-blue. This is consistent with slightly different compounds being formed in fresh vs dried, and these will have different rates of formation depending on conditions. Likely more difficult to model with code than Gunflint's pharmaceutical example.
Why is there so much less generative AI music than other forms of media? Is it because music that's been created to-date is all heavily copyrighted, so it's not available as training data? Generative AI obviously can create text (ChatGPT, etc.) and images (Midjourney, Dall E etc.). I've seen/heard a very small amount of AI-generated music, but infinitesimally less compared to these other media. My understanding is that existing generative AI was trained on an enormous amount of free/open-source/maybe kinda stolen media that was found online. (I mean Midjourney will randomly throw in watermarks to some images, so obviously watermarked pictures were used in the training data). Was this just not an option for music, whose copyrights are generally protected by ruthless highly litigious large companies?
I mean, intuitively to me music seems a lot simpler than imagery- if an AI can create pictures, it seems that technologically it should be able to create music too. So I'm guessing the barriers here are legal, does that sound correct?
There’s a lot of music in the public domain, but the existing recordings are copyright, and so is the published sheet music . It’s a little weird. But an AI can learn a lot of public domain music by ear. Why not? Hook up a microphone play a song. It should have perfect pitch… after that it should be able to play with what it has. But I agree with others in this thread that I doubt it’s worth it because of the nature of music and how people want to consume it, and what people usually want out of making it. Also, I don’t know how much it gets you over a modern synthesizer.
I remember a funny experience at the Lincoln library for the performing arts years ago. I went in looking for sheet music for the song “streets of Laredo”, it one in a long line of descendants of a 16th century folk song.? The rakes lament, Saint James infirmary, a young soldier, cut down in his prime etc. anyone can use that tune, and write their own lyrics to it basically.
I found the sheet music, but they would not let me Xerox it. It was perfectly appropriate for me to copy it by hand onto another sheet of notation paper though (which they provided me with) and then do what I wanted with it. Most of the western Canaan of classical music is free from any copyright. The actual recordings are a different story though; anyone can do Don Giovanni if they want to, and they don’t have to pay Mozart a nickel. So you could get an AI to do variations on a theme by Mozart, for instance and knock yourself out. You have to stay away from Marvin Gaye, though.
This is something I've long noticed. Generative music is highly feasible: spend some time listening to random OpenAI Jukebox samples https://jukebox.openai.com/ and note that this is generating raw audio from scratch, posted in *2020* using 2019 stuff, and not as scaled-up as GPT-3 was, and there's vastly more accessible audio data. You could also get fairly reasonable samples from non-raw-audio data sources with a few tricks (https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music) which sound even better if you put a tiny bit of effort into them (https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music). So, where is it all?
It seems to be a combination of: (1) the copyright situation is much scarier. Music comes with *all sorts* of bizarre complex IP laws and rights that don't apply to text or images, and this is because of (and empowers) groups like the RIAA. Every commercial startup doing music-related generative work seems to keep things very quiet, as blackbox as possible, restricting to licensed datasets when possible, and definitely not releasing stuff. (2) lack of major hobbyist interest - people may like to listen to music, but a lot of it is parasocial, there's superstar winner-take-all effects, and people don't generally want to make their own music the way they do their own images & text - think about porn/hentai as a huge driver of image synthesis. There is no porn/hentai of music generative models. (3) relatively demanding compute compared to other modalities. Audio is just very, very bulky: a piece of music is made out of millions of individual datapoints (X frequencies times Y milliseconds), while you can make a recognizable image with just 64x64=4096 pixels. Jukebox wasn't as demanding as GPT-3-175b was... but it's still a lot more compute than most people want to spend. Even sampling Jukebox is pushing it: early use of the released Jukebox model deterred hobbyists when they realized it (a) didn't fit in their consumer GPUs and (b) would take like half a day to generate a full audio file. Yikes. It'd be a lot better today, of course, but is nowhere near the instant gratification of a GAN or near-instant of the OA API or heavily-optimized diffusion model.
I'd also note that images specifically has benefited from luck: you would be seeing way less generated images today, and you would be unimpressed by image progress, if Emad hadn't done what all of the giants refused to do and bankrolled a decent FLOSS image generation model. (You would be wrong to be unimpressed, because there were, and still are, many much better image generation models than the Stability ones, and trying to judge image generation SOTA by what an SD model can or cannot do is a serious mistake - but they are all locked up behind barriers so you can't use them.)
Thank you for saying this. I had the same thought, and it is one of my exhibits that I point to when I try to make the case that AI's impact is a lot more marginal relative to its perception. The nothingburger that is AI music is proof that AI is much more incremental than people expect. AI seems to frequently arrive in a context where generation is already very cheap, potentially free, or even negative. In the case of music, the negative costs are borne by all the striving artists donating in-kind time to become hits.
The music industry has already gone through multiple waves of being concerned about cheap, fake and derivative music, and sometimes those controversies ironically become foundations, such as the initial aversion to autotune until current entrenchment.
There is a recurring ebb and flow of new innovations, such as even something simple as analytics-driven producers cracking the code as to what it takes to make a hit in the 1960s, to the modern Rotten Tomatoes-like algorithmic PCA to find the right sample banks, producers, writers, and overall secret juju to produce that true derivative—but extremely catchy—hit.
Gen Music is simply not as profound or disruptive as other techs like autotune. There is still no secret to creating the perfect hit, just as there is still no secret to creating the perfect trader. (something something arms races)
And this extrapolates to other domains. I find it interesting that Gen Art came at roughly the same time we were just getting used to free high-quality images from Unsplash. At first, it was like, "Wow, Stable Diffusion solves all my clipart problems" to "Wait, these problems were already solved by Unsplash."
Or that GPT-based coding is downstream from a world where we were already googling 90% of our issues to find a good Stack Overflow link and then blindly copying-and-pasting. The existence of GitHub Copilot initially seemed like, "Wow, this is going to end all programming", and yet here I am now spending instead of 90% of my time fishing for Stack Overflow, I'm spending 80% of my time. Or, correction, I'm sending more time, because in parallel with these innovations we have the further advancement of community-heavy frameworks and packages, which seem to lend themselves to a dependence on Stack Overflow. For example, you cannot separate the rise of React from the rise in our dependence on Stack Overflow, unlike earlier eras where PHP programmers only looked up issues occasionally.
The future is boring. Object Detection's improvement is logarithmic to current AI R&D expenditure. Moore's Law is downstream from Rock's Law. Secular stagnation puts a hard cap on demand. 1960: The Year the Singularity was Canceled (by Scott Alexander), etc.
You can drastically reduce the size of generated music (and presumably the compute and data set needed) by having your AI generate sheet music instead of audio.
That just occurred to me the other day, too. And, it would improve the sound of generated music a lot. Right now it sounds like a muddy mishmash. Rather than AI having to try to discern "what a guitar sounds like" it would make more sense to have it try to discern "what notes and rhythms are enjoyable." It could generate MIDI files and/or sheet music instead of audio files.
Thanks, yes I didn't think about answers 2 or 3 at all. The universe of paying consumers who want to make their own music at home is probably pretty small. (And most of the ones who do probably want to copy existing, copyrighted artists- 'make a collaboration of Taylor Swift and Drake and Tupac' or something).
I'm skeptical the music industry will ever want to license their IP to AI either, just to ensure that they're not cannabilizing their existing artists
I remember hearing a talk about a music-generating AI something like a decade ago (possibly a TED talk?). Some musician had creative block while working on an important commission and decided to write an AI that could sample a bunch of sheet music in a given style and then compose new songs in that style, then turned it on his own past work to fulfill the commission, then gave a talk about how he did it.
I don't think copyright is an issue; most of the training data in the current popular generative AIs is already copyrighted, but the stance of the companies is that using something as training data is not a copyright infringement (and I think they are correct).
But "there isn't a lot of sheet music posted online in places where you can download it for free" might be an issue.
Hmm, but AI isn't too bad at (very) short stories. You'd think they'd be able to produce a few bars of nice music (are they? I haven't kept up with the music side of things).
I don't think that's a difference. A piece of sheet music only "changes over time" in the sense that it has a beginning, middle, and end, and text also "changes over time" in that sense.
- How does affirmative action in college admissions actually work? Are there any concrete examples of how admissions would look with and without affirmative action?
- Do we know specifically what changed in UC admissions policy after Prop 209?
- How was Prop 209 enforced? If admissions policy is totally opaque, what's stopping the university from "considering race"?
- How was the Bakke 1978 ruling against racial quotas enforced?
- How will the SFFA v Harvard ruling be enforced?
- Do people understand what affirmative action is? In this Pew survey, a plurality said affirmative action is "a good thing", but "only 17% say college admissions should take race into account."
- "[Opponents of affirmative action] claim that making room for an applicant of one race necessarily requires a university to reject a different applicant."
Don't supporters of AA claim this as well? Isn't this the *whole point* of AA?
- How does affirmative action in college admissions actually work? Are there any concrete examples of how admissions would look with and without affirmative action?
Sort of. What we have from discovery are (1) evidence a lot of this was just open racism from admissions committees and (2) theoretical class statistics in a counterfactual world where things like personality scores were removed.
- Do we know specifically what changed in UC admissions policy after Prop 209?
Yes. There was a brief surge in white and Asian percentages (and to some extent women over men) before it returned to normal. One of the UC administrators was recently caught on tape admitting that they did this by illegally ignoring the ruling and simply avoiding keeping any records of it. So now he's probably getting removed and there's probably a lawsuit incoming.
- How was Prop 209 enforced? If admissions policy is totally opaque, what's stopping the university from "considering race"?
- How was the Bakke 1978 ruling against racial quotas enforced?
Poorly. See previous example. However, now a bunch of people have cause of action against the UC system. Remember, though, that discrimination is not an intent issue. If you can simply prove disparate impact (such as through admissions numbers) that is sufficient.
- How will the SFFA v Harvard ruling be enforced?
Probably about the same. There's already a bunch of administrators walking right up to the line of saying they're going to find work arounds. Which probably means more lawsuits.
- Do people understand what affirmative action is? In this Pew survey, a plurality said affirmative action is "a good thing", but "only 17% say college admissions should take race into account."
Affirmative action doesn't just apply to college admissions. It's perfectly consistent to argue that you want (say) a representative bureaucracy but not representative college admissions. In fact this is more normal. In places like Singapore or Lebanon it's considered necessary for social peace to make sure there are minority administrators and politicians but who gets to be a doctor or engineer is entirely race/religion blind.
- "[Opponents of affirmative action] claim that making room for an applicant of one race necessarily requires a university to reject a different applicant." Don't supporters of AA claim this as well? Isn't this the *whole point* of AA?
They deny it because if no one is harmed no one has standing to sue. Of course people are in fact losing out on slots and so do have standing. Supporters just don't like that fact because they want to be able to do racial balancing (which was illegal even before this decision) and they're going to say whatever they need to say to try and get it past the courts. Freddie DeBoer's a good source of honesty: he believes it's a reparations program and so do most of its supporters. But such racial programs are illegal and so they (broad they, not Freddie specifically) lie to get around that fact.
The long term goal here, as they tried in California, is to repeal the parts of constitutions that require race neutrality so they can do it legally.
- Does the "ban on affirmative action" mean that it would now be illegal for a politician to (as Biden did) say they will appoint a black Supreme Court justice? Would it be illegal for a corporation to deliberately appoint a black board member so their board looks more diverse (if someone could prove in court that this was their logic?)
No to the first question. Politicians have wide latitude to select people for whatever reason they wish. The second one is already illegal unless the business can show a compelling interest in why having a member of that race on the board is important. And diversity is now not an acceptable compelling reason.
The literal phrase diversity is downstream of legal decisions saying that while racial discrimination was illegal without a compelling interest that diversity was a valid compelling interest. Because these people are lawyers or lawyer adjacent they just copy-pasted (in some cases literally) the justification the Supreme Court said was allowed.
"discrimination is not an intent issue. If you can simply prove disparate impact (such as through admissions numbers) that is sufficient."
That is certainly not the case re employment discrimination. Rather, disparate impact establishes a prima facie case for a violation, and then the employer has the burden of showing a legitimate business reason for the policy that creates the disparity. Note also that the individualized use of race endorsed by the court will likely result in disparate impact; a black applicant is more likely to be able to show how race affected him than is a white applicant.
"diversity is now not an acceptable compelling reason."
Not necessarily. After all, the court left open the possibility that diversity could be a compelling interest for military academy admissions, so there was no holding that diversity is per se never a compelling interest.
1. Correct, once you have shown disparate impact you then have to find a safe harbor for why the disparate impact is allowed. If you can't then it's discrimination. The previous safe harbor was diversity. That is no longer allowed.
2. The opinion specifically pointed out this is not allowed and that the theory advanced by the liberal justices it might be allowed is wrong.
3. The court simply pointed out that it was not being asked to consider military academy admissions and that it wasn't certain that appointment to military academies, which is done through politicians much of the time, are the same thing as general university admissions.
"2. The opinion specifically pointed out this is not allowed and that the theory advanced by the liberal justices it might be allowed is wrong.'
I am not positive what "this" refers to, but the decision says: "At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise." It seems to me that a policy implementing that suggestion will likely have a disparate impact.
"3. The court simply pointed out that it was not being asked to consider military academy admissions and that it wasn't certain that appointment to military academies, which is done through politicians much of the time, are the same thing as general university admissions."
What the court said, in footnote 4, was this: "The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military
academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present" That certainly sounds like they are saying that diversity might constitute a compelling interest in the context of military academies, and hence that the court did not hold that diversity can never be a compelling interest. And there might well be other instances in which diversity might conceivably be a compelling interest, such as hiring police officers in a diverse community. I am not saying that that is likely, but only that your statement is too broad.
Does the "ban on affirmative action" mean that it would now be illegal for a politician to (as Biden did) say they will appoint a black Supreme Court justice? Would it be illegal for a corporation to deliberately appoint a black board member so their board looks more diverse (if someone could prove in court that this was their logic?)
Re the Supreme Court appointment, no. AFAIK, no court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment limits the appointment power of the President or state executives. Re corporations, board members probably are not employees for the purpose of federal anti-discrimination law, so I doubt there are any limits on such appointments.
"If admissions policy is totally opaque, what's stopping the university from "considering race"?"
Being able to prove from other evidence that racial discrimination is happening. Completely coincidentally I'm sure, there's a (successful) push to get rid of standardized testing and other "objective" measures of academic merit.
The Frankfurt Kitchen was the first modern kitchen - designed with flat, uniform countertops, an electric stove instead of a hearth, and a layout carefully calculated to minimize the number of steps between each action in cooking. The architect, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, took inspiration from the compact kitchens on trains or ships and assembly-line management ideas (very modernist). It was also politically motivated - she hoped that it would liberate women by allowing them to finish their household work quickly and have time for themselves.
(The podcast also discusses a related architecture-as-politics idea - designing homes with no kitchens of their own. The cooking would be done in communal kitchens, elevating it from unpaid "women's work" and reducing the amount of labor needed overall. Unlike the Frankfurt kitchen, this didn't catch on.)
And on the one hand, the political dreams didn't pan out. The labor that women saved mostly went into more household labor - now that you can cook really quickly, you're expected to make fancier meals, or spend more time on other chores like ironing. And there were also some issues with adapting to the new design - the isolated design made it harder to watch the kids, the electric appliances were a liability if you were too poor to pay the bills, etc. And this was in a public housing project, so if you had an issue with the layout you didn't much choice. (Once again, High Modernism packs everyone into evenly spaced rectangular grids!)
But on the other hand, the Frankfurt kitchen is the ancestor of all modern kitchens. The basic ergonomic design is still around, and everyone designs around electric appliances now. Architects treat the kitchen as the centerpiece of the home instead of writing it off as something for the women to deal with. And of course, women do indeed work outside the home these days, and labor-saving appliances are a part of that. So maybe give Modernism some credit for this one?
I'm having a hard time imagining that before the Frankfurt kitchen, the layout of kitchens was not designed to maximize the ease of cooking. Putting things together that are frequently used together is a basic organizational principle. What were kitchens of the past designed for, if not that?
Besides what others have brought up already, the big difference was a systematic effort to apply time-and-motion-study analysis to home kitchen design. Things had been optimized before, but through ad hoc creativity and analysis by individual householders rather than an attempt to design and popularize the One True Kitchen design. It's more or less the difference between learning to play a complex strategy game by everyone playing around with it, seeing what works, an occasionally copying someone else's strategies; versus someone making a bunch of spreadsheets based on the game mechanics and trying to work out optimal "meta" build orders and unit designs.
I suspect it's less the layout itself, and more about furnishing the room specifically for cooking - having countertops instead of tables, and building those counters with dishracks and places to hold utensils, and so on. The Frankfurt kitchen was designed for a new public housing project, so they had the opportunity to mass-produce furnishings for a new style of kitchen.
The ancestor room / area of the ‘kitchen’ served many purposes, not only cooking.
Heating of the household, and managing the movement of fuel, air, and radiant heat, was an important role of traditional hearths and early ‘stubes’, as an example.
So you can imagine the optimal arrangement for some purposes might be different from the optimal arrangement for other purposes, such as water storage and access, or food preservation, or cooking a meal to be eaten the same day.
That does make sense, it didn't occur to me that what I think of as a kitchen didn't necessarily exist prior to the Frankfurt kitchen. Thank you (and also the other commenters) for the explanation.
There are other changes, both social and technological, that happened at the same time:
-Historically people who were wealthy enough to live in a house with a separate kitchen also had servants to cook for them. So the kitchen would be "below stairs" in the servants' area of the house.
-In a house where some but not all of it has running water, the kitchen needs to be somewhere that has it. If none of the house has running water, the kitchen needs to be somewhere where water can easily be brought.
-If solid fuels like coal are being used to cook, the kitchen will be somewhere that's close to where the fuel is stored. You also have considerations of exhaust, and possibly proximity to larders.
Do libertarians or other heavily market-oriented types have a more free market solution for providing social welfare programs? Right now retirement payments (Social Security) and healthcare for the poor & elderly (Medicare & Medicaid) are the largest parts of the US budget by a huge huge margin, and I would assume the same for other countries. The simple benefit of the private sector somehow providing these goods is simply saving the federal government a staggering amount of money.
I mean, we know how to have the government provide them- the Nordic/Western European model where income tax rates are 40-60% for the middle class, plus a VAT of 20+%. I don't have a huge philosophical objection to this, but it doesn't really seem like this is the final form of government that humanity has invented- I kind of doubt 'the government has to take half of everyone's paychecks forever' is like a Fukuyama-ish end of history and we will never invent a superior governance model. If it's the 25th century and we're zipping around to Alpha Centauri in a warp drive, will the government still have to take half of everyone's paychecks in order to provide the social welfare goods that citizens demand? Seems a bit unlikely?
So- what are the more market-oriented solutions? Forced 401k savings for everyone as opposed to Social Security? (Don't some countries like Singapore already do this?) Mandated private sector insurance program covering all citizens? I think in practice you do need a government mandate for people to purchase these, otherwise free loaders will refuse and then turn to the state when they need medical care- I don't think this is a solvable political problem otherwise
The main theme in that answer is arguably that whether your market is free or not, the libertarian notes that you will have to give people an incentive to want to provide services, for health, welfare, or otherwise. You will also want to give them an incentive to improve that service, either by raising the quality or lowering the price (or both), and since it's impossible to make anyone want to work for less money in a vacuum, you need another incentive, which turns up in the form of competition.
The problem with a government-forever system like you describe is that there's almost no incentive to improve. There's one provider, it gets paid regardless of how well it does, so its remaining incentive is to exert as little expenditure as possible to avoid revolution. Elections only matter if providers themselves are elected, and it's empirically harder to improve or maintain high service than it is to simply change the election rules to make their positions immune. So the entire system calcifies. All ailments treatable today are all there will ever be. Same for all financial troubles. Assistance is impersonal and austere; see the Department of Motor Vehicles in large cities for a model of what the optimized end will be.
I like all of them, but 4 is the classic area where government regulation is needed. Providers deliberately don't publish prices now so that consumers can't compare them and price-shop. It's the same reason every B2B company doesn't list their prices on their website, you have to call & chat with their enterprise sales guy- they don't want to be commodified and have their prices driven down.
I mean- 'Price transparency makes the market more efficient - and less expensive'- you get why existing providers are not going to do that willingly, right? It requires government action
If an outbreak of Teutonic Bronyvirus-K happens, Medicare announcing it will pay for the first $200 of treatment (or everything over $5000 or the middle $1000 on alternate Wednesdays or whatever) will do bugger-all if everyone with any expertise in immunology knows that it will cost more than that to develop any sort of vaccine against the Teuts.
Generally, anyone sick from something new, is screwed, because there's no incentive for anyone knowledgeable to cure it, by government decree.
Moreover, anyone who suspects a way to generate insulin for only $3/kilo won't bother to look into it any further if they know the government rate is higher and they'd just be leaving money on the table or competing with Uberpfizer. In other words, if it costs $X to fix your health problem, it will always cost $X. If a company knows how to do it for $X/2, they'll still charge you $X. And they won't tell you except in private, so that anyone else who might know how to fix it for $X/2 won't try, because they don't know what X is.
Generally, the current state of the art in medical will be frozen in time.
Heavily market oriented doesn't necessarily preclude government action in this area. Libertarians disagree with these government actions but for philosophical reason separate from their market orientation (though there is some overlap). Milton Friedman suggested a negative income tax as a replacement to many social programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
Charity (including churches and non-religious groups), family, and community would be the answer to how to provide these services without any government action. Groups like the Salvation Army or St. Judes do this already
I'm not so sure about that. NIT scales with income and is only available to people making below a certain level. Isn't the main point of UBI that everyone receives it and its the same amount for everyone? Those are two major factors that change a lot of dynamics of either proposal (not to mention that UBI would probably be taxed in the US while a NIT would be a tax refund, more or less, so after tax).
Combining an income tax where you pay $T(I) depending on your income and a UBI where you unconditionally receive $U is the same as a single, possibly-negative income tax of $T'(I) = $T(I) - $U
I would think the only real heavy hitters here are finding some way to reduce healthcare and housing expenses for the elderly (or ideally, for everyone). Regardless of how the payment is provided, as long as it remains expensive, you achieve only abstractly moral benefits over just taking 40-60% of everyone's paychecks. Maybe they can find some more voluntary means of getting that money, but it would still divert an enormous volume of the economy toward keeping people who are past working age healthy and off the streets.
I supposed the tech bro stereotype thing is replace all the doctors with GPT-15 and house people in Tokyo-style highrise cubbyholes with a hospital across the street.
We have great solutions to both of those problems already, we just reject them as unthinkable. For housing, we can tell people to move to cheaper places (which Libertarians may tell you is already what the market is telling people who cannot afford their current housing). Old people on Social Security will get much further in random rural places than big expensive cities.
Healthcare is even easier, but much more fraught. You run an analysis of life expectancy compared to cost of treatment and let people die if they are too expensive.
I don't advocate these options, but everyone knows they exist and they would be pretty effective. There's also no other way to lower either of those costs more than marginal amounts.
If you get rid of forced saving you need to be willing to let the people who fail at this actually fail.
And to tolerate the impacts of that. Mostly these days people are not interested in watching grandmas starve in the streets in their 60s even if the grandmas were extremely profligate and short sighted with their money for the 40 years before that.
So if we are going to be forced to take care of people then they need to have a certain level of responsibility forced on them.
To me it seems like the only libertarian solution is charity, i.e. consensual giving. A market-based approach would be to auction off those who are unable to take care of themselves as wards to the lowest bidder. Forced saving mostly just seems like a way to pretend that taxation isn't taxation.
Indentured servitude only works for people whose labour is worth more than the cost of keeping them alive. Welfare is for the people whose labour isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattigauktion describes how this worked in practice.
It's a weekly link aggregation of projects, papers, news, repos, demos and products in the "LLM space". Basically for Machine Learning Engineers or AI Engineers or Prompt Engineers however you'd like to call it.
Recently I've covered a lot of what's happening with Open Source language models that you can (mostly) run on consumer GPUs.
Why do I want more readers? The more people I reach the more I'm motivated to invest time & resources in it. I like the flywheel.
Anyone need a top-tier graduate student in either Economics or Computer Science? I have one to recommend! He's extremely smart and self-motivated. But he's unfortunately from a developing country, so he has extremely limited opportunities, so I'd like to get him into a program in the global north.
He's the kind of student of whom you can ask "I need to apply a Wald estimator to this data, but don't have time. Can you take a look and do it this week?"... and then he came back THREE HOURS later, saying, "I figured out how they work, and went ahead and wrote the code that applies it to your data files".
Why do attendants at full-service gas stations insist on topping off your gas tank? As long as I've been alive, the general recommendation has been that it is a bad thing to do, because it screws with internal portions of how the fuel system works in various ways that I don't understand. It also may be a waste of the extra gas. And yet even if I ask the gas attendant not to top it off, he usually will still do it about half the time, maybe just because they're used to doing it and it's a muscle memory thing.
My question is, why do they even do it at all? Every single official recommendation from all auto manufacturers is not to do this. So do the attendants do it because they think customers want it? Do they know that it messes with the fuel system? Are they just trying to squeeze out a few extra bucks out of each customer?
> Second, with a completely filled tank, you drive around some extra weight in gas, which will raise your consumption.
That's a very interesting take on it! However, I expect that, for myself at least, any minor cost saved by driving around with slightly less weight with fewer gallons would easily be outweighed by:
1. The amount of extra miles I'd be driving to and from the gas station more often
2. The monetary value of my time spent driving to and from the gas station
3. My own stress about having to fill up more often and procrastinating on it
I am curious, though, if you have any figures for how much gas consumption might increase per pound that the car carries around.
When I fill my tank, I wait 15-30 seconds after the pump auto-stops, then start it again. I can get another .2-.5 gallons in there. This is due to air escaping from the tank. I guess you can call it topping off but I don't think there is risk of damage to the system. I have a 14 gallon tank and if i drive it until the estimated range is below 10 mi, I usually only get ~13 gallons in before the pump stops itself.
Boy, in the US full service is pretty rare since, oh, 1980 or so. They just suddenly started making most of us pump our own gas. It was a pretty abrupt change.
So here is the last appearance of a full service gas station in a major American movie. Dan Ackroyd offers to wash the dead bugs off Twiggy’s windshield in the Blues Brothers 1980. (don’t worry it’s just a 24 second clip)
Unless something's happened since I last heard, I'm pretty sure they only relaxed it for rural areas at night, to make it easier to stay open (having struggled to find an open station driving through Clatskanie at 11pm with the needle kissing E, I'm in favor of this).
From Zip recruiter: "As of Jul 2, 2023, the average hourly pay for a Gas Station Attendant in New Jersey is $15.76 an hour. While ZipRecruiter is seeing salaries as high as $20.16 and as low as $8.85, the majority of Gas Station Attendant salaries currently range between $14.76 (25th percentile) to $18.46 (75th percentile) in New Jersey."
Why do they do it?
Because likely they are general poorly trained and selected from the bottom of the barrel.
otter841 will be captured soon and the break will be the safer for it..
..but then otters will no longer ride the waves on stolen boards at Steamer Lane:
https://www.npr.org/2023/07/13/1187295769/otter-santa-cruz-surfboard-surfers-california
I only started reading ACX after the move from SSC. I have gone back and read the top posts from SSC but still felt like I was missing out on some of the old classics. I built a website to resurface old content from blogs by sending weekly emails. Let me know if you have any suggestions of other blogs / content you’d like to see, hope you find it helpful!
https://www.evergreenessays.com/
Some suggestions (note that I endorse the first the most):
- Overcoming Bias (by Robin Hanson), which has been around for ages and is very rationalist-relevant (it was in fact the birthplace of the Sequences!)
- Marginal Revolution (by Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok)
- Wait But Why (by Tim Urban)
- Ribbonfarm (by Venkatesh Rao)
Also, I'm happy that you've made this website in the first place! I am subscribing to read the Slate Star Codex archives, since I considered reading them during the SSC-ACX gap (June 2020 - January 2021) but never really made it all the way. Also, I suggest that you make the "Success" dialog more prominent.
Thanks for the feedback, just updated it with your suggestions! Will send out first posts next week. Currently working on allowing for more granular control of which posts you want, eg only send posts in past year, or only posts of type x, or send y posts in a week, etc.
Just saw this report: Forecasting Existential Risks. I'm still reading it but it has a section on the existential risk of AI.
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/635693acf15a3e2a14a56a4a/t/64abffe3f024747dd0e38d71/1688993798938/XPT.pdf
Kevin Drum commented on this, and I have to agree with Kevin's assessment...
"Let me say from the start that I think this is kind of nuts. I'd personally put the overall risk of extinction from everything combined at about 0.1% or so. But that's just me. I'm an eternal optimist, I guess."
https://jabberwocking.com/some-ai-experts-are-really-rattled-by-the-whole-extinction-thing/
>Apparently there's a group of AI experts who are absolutely obsessed with extinction and have spent more than 1,000 hours thinking about it. These people seem to have thought themselves into a frenzy and they're obviously driving up the average a lot.
Wow, I wouldn't have come up with that interpretation if I tried really hard. We should trust people who spend more time on things more than people who spend less time in general. Otherwise, our way of doing science and policy implodes!
Just want to flag that the report highlights a divergence between "domain experts" and "historically accurate forecasters", which goes like this:
1. The median expert predicted a 20% chance of catastrophe and a 6% chance of human extinction by 2100. Superforecasters saw the chances of both catastrophe and extinction as considerably lower than did experts. The median superforecaster predicted a 9% chance of catastrophe and a 1% chance of extinction.
2. The gap between forecasts of experts and superforecasters was not uniform across topics. Experts and superforecasters were furthest apart on AI risk—and less so on the risk of nuclear war.
Asked this question in one of the threads, but I'm also curious about what the broader board population thinks.
Who do you consider a "AI Doomer?" If one person says "AI development should be banned" and another person says, "Regulators should require AI products be subject to testing standards before deployment - and periodically thereafter - to confirm they work as intended, and should require developers to ensure that AI-generated outcomes are explicable" are they both "Doomers?" Just the ban proponent? Neither (since neither of them are stating a belief that AI is going to kill us all)?
I'd personally limit application of the "AI Doomer" to perspectives along the lines of "humanity will go extinct if we don't ban AI," but a lot of the pro-AI circles also trend pretty libertarian, so I think the actual usage may be be more expansive, in much the same way that some people in our corner of the world consider zoning to be "tyranny," "food regulations "basically fascism" and so on.
It's in the name. "If ignored, [Thing] could be our doom." Anyone who thinks unchecked climate change will wipe out humanity is a doomer. Anyone who thought an unchecked Y2K bug could lead to societal collapse was a doomer. Any Pompeiian who was worried about Mount Vesuvius erupting was a doomer.
The difference between a Doomer and whatever the alternative is is whether they think something can be disastrous, or just unpleasant. (I guess the second ones are Gloomers? I'm calling them Gloomers.)
Is it "if ignored [thing] could be our doom" or "if ignored [thing] will be our doom?"
Probably just a typo but the climate change example used a "will" and the Y2K example used a "could" so I wnated to clarify.
I'd challenge that a doomer should have to breach some threshold of belief that the doom *will* happen. Otherwise anyone who acknowledges the existence of any X risk at all would be a "doomer" about it, simply on the basis of the acknowledgement. Which would make almost all of humanity "nuclear proliferation doomers" or "large asteroid impact doomers," etc.
Probably a matter of taste. I draw the line at "could". If you think civilization is at any level of risk, you're a doomer.
And yes, almost all of humanity is a nuclear asteroid doomer. Although I guess we could add a second required layer of "we have to do something"; most people think there's nothing to be done about nuclear asteroids, and don't spend any effort on it. But I'd say they don't get called doomers just because nobody dislikes their opinion enough to do so.
For me, a Doomer is someone who puts AI x-risk within the next century at higher than one in a million, more or less. I'm not in favor of any AI regulations at this point, but I'd reserve the Doomer label for those who focus on the supposed threat of human extinction by AI.
>> For me, a Doomer is someone who puts AI x-risk within the next century at higher than one in a million, more or less.
Wouldn’t that render many AI advocates themselves *also* Doomers? “Unaligned AI is an x risk” isn’t exactly an uncommon perspective in those circles, at least from what I’ve seen.
In that case someone who (a) advocates for AI research and (b) believes “unaligned AI is an x-risk so alignment is important” would nevertheless be an “AI Doomer” if they thought the chance of an unaligned AI nevertheless slipping through was 1/500,000.
Granted, definitions can be whatever people want, but it seems like an odd usage if I can simultaneously advocate for AI and be an “AI Doomer”
Yeah, I would consider anyone who considers alignment important to prevent x-risk to be a Doomer.
Now, I'm attempting to answer your OP, but I don't think it's particularly important to define who is and who isn't one. I use the term Doomer below because it seems like the online world I read is splitting into two camps with, say, Scott and Zvi on one side and Tyler Cowen and Marc Andreeson on the other.
>it seems like an odd usage if I can simultaneously advocate for AI and be an “AI Doomer”
Maybe I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that most AI Doomers are Futurists who are or were very pro-AI but who view Alignment as the big filter to get through. Some of them have become so pessimistic that they might not be pro AI anymore. I don't think many (any?) of them are outright Luddites in general. Genuine anti-AI Luddites are more worried about losing their jobs tomorrow (For example, The Writers Guild of America). Or people worried that the AI is going to steal the election somehow. Those people are not Doomers because they aren't worried about x-risk.
Doomer is an arbitrary term—and functionally it's an ad hominem attack. And as you pointed out the goalposts for doomer are likely to move depending on the opinions of the person with their ax to grind. I think a better question would be: what percentage of people that there's a significant chance that AI will cause an extinction event for humanity?
As we've seen with COVID, the term "COVID minimizer" has migrated from the GBD folks and their ilk all the way to encompassing T Ryan Gregory—who up until recently was one of the leading COVID and infectious disease alarmists on Twitter.
How is Doomer an ad hominem attack?
Doomer is an ad hominem attack in that it appeals to feelings or prejudices rather than the intellect. It's used to negatively stereotype a person or group of people rather than a way of directly engaging with or addressing their arguments.
Doomer may not be a particularly nasty label, but it's a label all the same. Supposedly, we're all rationalists here, and we're supposed to argue things rationally rather than emotionally. I say "supposedly" because I've seen a lot of people on these threads confuse emotional arguments with rational discussion. While I admit I haven't been a saint on some of these threads—having let my sarcasm get the better of me sometimes—I've tried to focus on arguments and data rather than attaching dismissive labels to people. The use of ad hominem labels is an unsophisticated method of arguing one's point—at the risk of being ad hominemy it's sort of juvenile. I think you (and we ) can do better than fall into that trap.
But having said that, I think a lot of AI experts vastly overrate the threats of AI. And I've never heard a logically consistent scenario that would lead to the extinction of humanity. They seem to be channeling their fears rather than working through scenarios.
Some people from Metaculus have asked for clarification on some of my 2023 prediction questions. In order to say everything as publicly as possible so nobody gets an advantage, I'm putting it here:
>> 1. Will US CPI inflation for 2023 average above 4%? Are you comparing CPI at the end of 2023 vs the end of 2022, the average CPI inflation across 12 months (CPI Jan 2023 vs CPI Jan 2022, CPI Feb 2023 vs CPI Feb 2022, etc.), or something else?
Let's say https://www.bls.gov/cpi/ will be the canonical site. If they don't update in time, it will be some other measure of year-on-year inflation.
>> 2. In 2023 will there be more than 25 million confirmed COVID cases in China?
You mean happening in 2023 right? Not if the total number will reach 25 million in 2023.
Yes.
>> 3. In 2023 will Google, Meta, Amazon, or Apple release an AR headset?
Is the definition of AR that the user can see through it, i.e. that the screen is transparent, and therefore MR headsets where the user can see the environment through cameras don't count?
I will defer to Dan Schwartz from Metaculus, who wrote this question, but if he doesn't weigh in, then my interpretation is that any headset which allows AR capabilities counts, including if that happens through projecting the outside world onto an internal screen through cameras.
>> 4. In 2023 will a cultured meat product be available in at least one US store or restaurant for less than $30? Could it be a special offer that lasts for a limited amount of time? Do giveaways count? Does imported meat count? Does partial cultured meat count and if so is any percentage ok? If it's part of a menu do we divide the cost of the menu by the number of dishes or does the whole cost count?
I'm going to rule that promotions where it stops being available later won't count, but that if it's available just like any food, and some sale of the same sort that other foods sometimes get causes it to be on sale for below $30, I'll allow it. Imports are fine. Partial cultured meat is a good question; I'm going to rule that animal meat+cultured doesn't count, but plant-based-meat+cultured does if the cultured significantly changes the taste or texture or something. I'm going to rule that you have to be able to purchase it with less than $30 in your pocket, so if it's part of a package meal that costs more than $30, it doesn't count.
>> 5. In 2023, will SpaceX's Starship reach orbit? Does a transatmospheric orbit count or does it have to be at an altitude of more than 100km?
I'm not an expert on the definition of orbit. Google suggests an orbital spaceflight is one "in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit." I will consult with people who know more about orbits but try to generally use this definition.
>> 6. Will the Shanghai index of Chinese stocks go up over 2023? Are you referring to the SSE Composite Index? Because there are others, such as the SSE 50.
Yes, SSE Composite.
>> 7. On January 1, 2024, will an ordinary person be able to take a self-driving taxi from Oakland → SF during rush hour? Is the person being selected from a waitlist ok? You're saying "self-driving taxis in SF only operate at night" in your clarification, but these are waitlist only (as per a commentator).
I think the plain text of the question gives me one hour from the time I start worrying about this to make the trip, so if I have to worry about waitlists more than one hour before, no.
>> 8. In 2023 will a successful deepfake attempt causing real damage make the front page of a major news source? What's a major news source? E.g., would this count? What about TV news shows or radio programmes or news sites in general that don't exactly have "front pages"?
CBC seems major. I would count anything linked from the front page of their website, ie cbc.ca. Realistically this is a bad question because of articles like this where the deepfake itself isn't of major interest but is being used to make a wider point about deepfakes. I will probably be forced to count it anyway.
“ >> 5. In 2023, will SpaceX's Starship reach orbit? Does a transatmospheric orbit count or does it have to be at an altitude of more than 100km?
I'm not an expert on the definition of orbit. Google suggests an orbital spaceflight is one "in which a spacecraft is placed on a trajectory where it could remain in space for at least one orbit." I will consult with people who know more about orbits but try to generally use this definition.”
100km is the internationally accepted minimum altitude of space, and you more or less cannot remain in a stable orbit lower than that. In any case I doubt you’d event try to put Starship on an “orbital” trajectory there so it’s probably moot.
Obviously the Starship actually completing one or more orbits would seal the deal.
For a suborbital flight, I would say you should only count it if the flight is on an orbital trajectory at some point in the mission but intentionally deorbits via retro burn.
Maybe you could count if the rocket follows a full mission profile but (intentionally) does not go orbital.
What do I mean by this? Most often, launch vehicles going to orbit fire their engines multiple times - first a boost to apogee and then a restart and “circularization burn” to raise the perigee into a stable orbit.
Now a so called “direct insertion” where you do only one burn is possible (though less flexible) and I believe Falcon 9 uses this at least some of the time. That said, to do all the things Starship is supposed to do, it definitely needs the capability to restart its engines (probably multiple times) in space. This is not a trivial problem, so I would argue it needs to be demonstrated before you really call the rocket “orbital”.
If you really want to be lenient I guess you could count a launch where they achieve a successful full duration burn on stage 2 but it stays suborbital intentionally. But I don’t like that and I don’t think the planned profile of the test flight would have counted.
I'd also probably count it if it were on a trajectory with an apogee above 100 km and a perigee no worse than -100 km; that would demonstrate performance close enough to orbit as makes no difference, but give them a guaranteed reentry over open ocean if everything goes dead half an hour after launch.
That’s fair, assuming that’s where they aimed it.
Hello, Dan Schwarz from Metaculus here.
>> >> 3. In 2023 will Google, Meta, Amazon, or Apple release an AR headset?
>> Is the definition of AR that the user can see through it, i.e. that the screen is transparent, and therefore MR headsets where the user can see the environment through cameras don't count?
>> I will defer to Dan Schwartz from Metaculus, who wrote this question, but if he doesn't weigh in, then my interpretation is that any headset which allows AR capabilities counts, including if that happens through projecting the outside world onto an internal screen through cameras.
Agree with Scott, we should interpret "user can see through it" to refer to the capability, not the literal transparency of the material. Mixed Reality (MR) devices that do this with cameras would count.
This is a bad question because if MR headsets count then it should have resolved before it was even asked thanks to Meta’s Quest Pro, which released in 2022.
Following on from the "Americans created 'Italian' food" piece, here's Max Miller of "Tasting History" re-creating the Pompeian 'pizza' from the recently discovered fresco:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66031341
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEgSGkp8nMA
I'm re-reading Albion's Seed for the first time in a few years. This passage triggered my Gell-Mann amnesia alarm bells:
"The Puritanism of eastern England was not all of a piece. Several distinct varieties of religious dissent developed there, each with its own base. A special strain of religious radicalism which put heavy stress upon the spirit (Antinomianism) flourished among Puritans in eastern Lincolnshire. The more conservative and highly rationalist variant of Calvinism (Arminianism) found many adherents in London, Middlesex, and Hertfordshire."
I'm no expert on the different strands of the Reformation, but I've always understood Arminianism as being diametrically opposed to Calvinism, not a variant of it.
Maybe I'm wrong and Fischer is right? How much should this make me distrust the book as a whole?
If you want to get a good fictional account of religious conflict in England, try "Micah Clarke" by Arthur Conan Doyle.
It covers the Monmouth Rebellion and the scandal of the Taunton schoolgirls.
I think the confusion is that both Calvinism and Arminianism arise out of what were (are?) the Reformed churches of the time, and that it's debatable if Arminianism was a movement within the broader Calvinist grouping or something entirely separate.
They did eventually come to an official breaking apart and setting up as opposed camps, but within the specifically English context of the later Dissenters, probably they're best viewed as a strain of Calvinism or at least a breakaway group of Calvinists.
This is all pure ignorance on my part because I can't keep the finer points of which Reformed churches are what between France, Switzerland, the Netherlands etc.
Diarmuid MacCulloch's "Reformation" is helpful here; the Dutch split arose out of the conflict between the hardline Calvinists and those led by Arminius who had been trained in Calvinist orthodoxy but was questioning the theology. The English version were something different, at least according to MacCulloch:
"Many clergy and laity in England would have been horrified to think of themselves as Puritans, but they still regarded their Church as part of the international Reformed consensus; they were highly distrustful of the new tendency in divinity, and the new Archbishop Abbot shared their distrust. During the 1610s they gave avant-garde conformists a foreign name in allusion to the disputes about predestination that were currently tearing apart the Dutch Reformed Church – ‘Arminians’.
This was not so much because the English ‘Arminians’ were interested in the issues about salvation and predestination that preoccupied the Dutch. Although many of them did reject what they saw as a Calvinist doctrine of predestination, and there were friendly contacts between Dutch and English Arminians, the English party was more concerned with promoting ceremonial worship, use of the sacraments and a high view of clerical vocation (shockingly to many they had no hesitation in regularly calling ministers of the Church of England ‘priests’). None of these issues had any parallel in Dutch Arminianism. The Arminian label was a symbol that England was witnessing a rebellion against European Reformed orthodoxy as serious as that of the Arminians in the Netherlands. Some also nicknamed the developing Arminian clique ‘the Durham House set’, since from 1617 Richard Neile was Bishop of Durham, and Durham House, his London residence in the Strand, became an unofficial headquarters for the group, the shadow equivalent of Archbishop Abbot’s Lambeth Palace across the river Thames."
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation . Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.
Thanks, this clarifies a lot. Glad to hear it's a sensible interpretation. Basically my whole understanding of American history is underpinned by Albion's Seed. If this was an outright mistake like I had assumed, I would have had to go through all my assumptions with a very fine toothed comb.
"The Vicar of Bray" is a satirical song from the 18th century and very good at showing the twists and turns in the Church of England from the early 17th to the early 18th century (reigns of Charles I 1625-1649 through to George I 1714-1727):
The Vicar of Bray - Lyrics
1. In good King Charles' golden time, when loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous high churchman was I, and so I gained preferment.
To teach my flock, I never missed: Kings are by God appointed
And damned are those who dare resist or touch the Lord's annointed.
(Chorus):
And this be law, that I'll maintain until my dying day, sir
That whatsoever king may reign, Still I'll be the Vicar of Bray, sir.
2. When royal James possessed the crown, and popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down, and read the Declaration.
The Church of Rome, I found, did fit full well my constitution
And I had been a Jesuit, but for the Revolution.
(Chorus)
3. When William was our King declared, to ease the nation's grievance,
With this new wind about I steered, and swore to him allegiance.
Old principles I did revoke; Set conscience at a distance,
Passive obedience was a joke, a jest was non-resistance.
(Chorus)
4. When Royal Anne became our queen, the Church of England's glory,
Another face of things was seen, and I became a Tory.
Occasional conformists base; I blamed their moderation;
And thought the Church in danger was from such prevarication.
(Chorus)
5. When George in pudding time came o'er, and moderate men looked big, sir
My principles I changed once more, and I became a Whig, sir.
And thus preferment I procured From our new Faith's Defender,
And almost every day abjured the Pope and the Pretender.
(Chorus)
6. The illustrious house of Hanover and Protestant succession
To these I do allegiance swear -- while they can hold possession.
For in my faith and loyalty I never more will falter,
And George my lawful king shall be -- until the times do alter.
(Chorus)
So you can see that Puritan, Calvinist, etc. in the Church during the immediate aftermath of Henry's Reformation, through the reigns of Edward, Mary, Elizabeth and then James on, would have been very fluid categories with some, but not total, resemblance to the Continental models 😀 (and with clergy of various sympathies in official positions as bishops, so you had 'Puritan' bishop and 'Arminian' bishop in the Church of England).
I'm an outsider here, so I do see Arminianism as a variant of Calvinism, where it grew up within Calvinism and along Calvinist principles but the major disagreement is on predestination. I think Arminians would have identified as belonging to the wider Reformed, even if the Calvinists had rejected them.
Under the rule of the Parliamentarians, there wasn't the same force holding things together, so a lot of little groupings were free to do things their own way:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Puritans_from_1649
"From 1649 to 1660, Puritans in the Commonwealth of England were allied to the state power held by the military regime, headed by Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell until he died in 1658. They broke into numerous sects, of which the Presbyterian group comprised most of the clergy, but was deficient in political power since Cromwell's sympathies were with the Independents.
With the abolition of the Act of Uniformity, even the pretense of religious uniformity broke down. Thus, while the Presbyterians were dominant (at least theoretically) within the established church, those who opposed Presbyterianism were in fact free to start conducting themselves in the way they wanted. Separatists, who had previously organized themselves underground, were able to worship openly. For example, as early as 1616, the first English Baptists had organized themselves in secret, under the leadership of Henry Jacob, John Lothropp, and Henry Jessey. Now, however, they were less secretive. Other ministers – who favored the congregationalist New England Way – also began setting up their own congregations outside of the established church.
Many sects were also organized during this time. It is not clear that they should be called "Puritan" sects since they placed less emphasis on the Bible than is characteristic of Puritans, instead insisting on the role of direct contact with the Holy Spirit. These groups included the Ranters, the Fifth Monarchists, the Seekers, the Muggletonians, and – most prominently and most lastingly – the Quakers.
The Puritan movement split over issues of ecclesiology in the course of the Westminster Assembly. In the course of the 1650s, the movement became further split in the course of a number of controversies. With no means to enforce uniformity in the church and with freedom of the press, these disputes were largely played out in pamphlet warfare throughout the decade."
Asking for a friend: Is there a point to fixing small mistakes in review contest submissions that are finalists, or will they be posted as originally submitted?
Is there now a culture war over AIs? I admit that I feel somewhat irrationally angry at Doomers. Why do I?
Is it because I am tribally aligned with Tyler Cowen? I don't know why that would be the case, but it's a possibility.
Is it because the AIs killing humans just seems like The Latest Hysteria -- along similar lines as Overpopulation, Climate Change, Trump, Covid and Satanism? Yes, Doomers do strike me as the drama queens of The Latest Hysteria, and that may well be why I hate them.
Is it because there is no escape from Culture War, and the more you try to avoid one the more likely you end up in another?
I don't know the answer. I don't really hate Doomers. At least not most of the time. They may even be right. They just annoy me. I need to get over it, I guess.
What is your working definition of culture war? I'm skeptical of just dropping the google result in but I don't have a working one myself, so just as a starting point - "a conflict between groups, especially liberal and conservative groups, that have different cultural ideals, beliefs, or philosophies."
Personally I find this definition unsatisfactory because it kind of renders *any* policy debate a culture war. Find me an ongoing debate, from BLM to where to put a local road, where there is disagreement, and people *aren't* dividing into groups to support or oppose particular options based on their different "beliefs."
Personally, I think there has to be some kind of threshold of scale for something to become a culture war, and I don't think AI is there yet. It's generating news coverage, and it's a surprising and new divisive issue within the kinds of niche "smart on the internet man" communities like this one that (a) were already interested in the issue, and (b) are usually aligned on many subjects such that its startling to see the break, but it feels like the average person on the street is going to have more and stronger opinions on trans rights and race issues, which is why those things seem to more to fit the "culture war" moniker than AI does (at least to me, at least for now).
[Edit] Also, who do you consider a "Doomer?" If one person says "AI development should be banned" and another person says, "Regulators should require AI products be subject to testing standards before deployment - and periodically thereafter - to confirm they work as intended, and should require developers to ensure that AI-generated outcomes are explicable" are they both "Doomers?" Just the ban proponent? Neither (since neither of them are stating a belief that AI is going to kill us all)?
There is absolutely a culture war, and doomers have a classic Eschatology. While they probably have a more rational view than Christians thinking the Rapture is soon, for instance, I think that the doomer movement needs more scrutiny.
When a group has all the hallmark traits of a doomsday cult, it makes sense to be more skeptical of their conclusions.
I think the comparison to the Rapture is quite apt, but that saying one is more rational isn't. Both stem from strong priors and not a lot of empirical facts. If we are valuing empirical facts (as implied by saying one is more rational than the other), then I feel like we need actual empirical facts, not strong priors. Like, an AI system recursively improving itself, or trying to kill someone. You know, actual things beyond a theory.
I relate to this, and have determined there’s a big fear component for me. On some level, validating the debate opens me up to considering the end of the world.
Additionally, adherents this particular hysteria feel more out of touch — partially because many of them I know are genuinely out of touch people overall. At least with overpopulation, Covid, climate change, etc, everyone can sort of see things slowly going wrong and picture what things would look like if they do go very wrong. This one, however, has a sort of nerdy ivory-towerness that feels completely removed from the lives of everyday people, so despite being a nerdy ivory-towerer myself, I feel reflexively off-put.
Lastly, the huge gap between the threats that currently exist from AI and the end of the world are so massive and poorly explained that even I as an ML engineer have trouble picturing exactly through what means AI will cause my demise. Obstacles that seem very critical to me, like the requirement for massive scaling and improvements of difficult robotics are brushed off in nearly every explanation I see. This plays into my aversion to putting resources towards it too — even if the expansion of alternative energy isn’t necessary or doesn’t save the world, at least the air smells a bit better, geopolitical dependence on oil is reduced, and I save money with my electric car. However, if AI turns out to never be an issue, what was the use of all that money, brainpower, and worry? It just feels like a waste already (especially the worry part).
I’m still totally torn on this issue, but think you really described a cultural/emotional aspect I hadn’t been able to put my finger on.
Well it seems to me that what's happening to you is *not* that you're getting sucked into a culture war and hating on the outgroup, and also is not that you've mentally joined a cult. Sounds like good old-fashioned fear to me, and I don't think it's silly to be very confused and uneasy. I am. It's just really figure how plausible the pessimistic view is.
Am I allowed to find both sides infuriating?
The doomers, yes. Anyone who thinks p(doom|unaligned AI)=1.0, or anything even close to that, is too enamored of their own smartness. Thinking that this doom is imminent because their buddies made ChatGPT, and then that they can avert doom with their Extra Smart AI Alignment Research, yeah, massive overconfidence.
But, I'm just as skeptical of "highly valuable new technology". Particularly for any AI that is going to come out of anything we are talking about now, I'm not expecting it to be any more valuable than e.g. social media. Some legit use cases, but mostly noise and social strife and generally making life a little bit worse for everyone.
I'm pretty sure AI is going to get us cheap, mass-produced mediocrity *long* before it gets us Canned Super Genius, and cheap mediocrity isn't going to bootstrap itself. It's just going to generate noise, and be used as a weapon by people playing status games against one another (and against me, whether I want to play or not). If and when we do get a Canned Super Genius, I think it's very likely to be persistently misaligned, and if I think that's more likely to mean that it keeps going catatonic or self-destructing than that it tries to paperclip us all, that still doesn't add up to "highly valuable".
Highly Valuable, is not impossible but requires a lot of things to line up just right. Doom, is not impossible but requires a lot of things to line up just wrong. Mass-produced mediocrity, that looks to be surprisingly easy.
I think you have what I think of as a hate structure going on regarding people who think there'a a high probability of doom. You imagine they're all mini-Yuds, and that their sense of doom is just the delicious opposite side of the coin that, when heads, shows them being smart as fuck. I doubt that's true. Some I've seen posting on Twitter seem to be just very scared people who expect catastrophes of many kinds -- we get crispie crittered by climate change, covid wrecks our bodies and soon half the world will be bed-bound, nukes, pesticides, etc etc. Lots of very scared people around these days. As for the tech bro's who think they and the other smart tech bros will make AI safe by clamping the alignment attachment to their dicks and aligning that bitch -- eh, that's just one school of optimism. Actually, most of the people I know have heard that some are worried about AI, but believe that the scientists will figure it out like always and things will proceed as usual.
BUT I agree that mass-produced mediocrity looks pretty easy to achieve. Sort of like building a mall.
Lately I've been watching old Johnny Carson Tonight Shows from the early 70s and am fascinated by how foreign the culture seems. The past is a foreign country, they say. A striking difference is how sexual so many of the jokes are. Many of the things Johnny or the other guests say to the female guests would be considered misogynistic today, because they visibly react and comment upon the attractiveness of a women in comedic, salacious ways. It's hard to tell whether the female guests would prefer if the males behaved differently.
For instance, Johnny will often ask the guest, male or female, about their dating life. It seems to be considered natural that these famous people might want to talk about their private dating lives. Johnny might also talk and joke with male guests about good lines for picking up women. References to getting drunk and having one night stands is normal.
In one episode Johnny makes a joke about having had VD during the war, and then it hit me. I had assumed I was seeing a cultural product from the peak of the Baby Boomer era, and that explained why the show was so loose in discussing sexual matters. But then I realized Carson himself had been in WW2.
It got me thinking that maybe the WW2 vets changed the culture more than even the Boomers. After all, nobody was more worldly than the vets. Consider all the cultural leaders circa 1970 who were WW2 vets: Johnny Carson (with the biggest TV audience ever in history), Hugh Hefner, Kurt Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller -- all who pushed a countercultural take on America to various degrees. Carson himself isn't normally considered part of the "counterculture", but I dare you to watch those 1970s Tonight Shows and report back that they don't seem countercultural compared to your image of the early 1960s or the sexually conservative world that is 2023.
Maybe the Baby Boomer were overrated when it came to cultural change in the 60s and 70s. Maybe it was more about their veteran daddies.
It’s interesting to think about the Silent Generation contribution to the Sexual Revolution, but I think the GI/ prostitution angle is a red herring here. Casual attitudes to prostitution can easily coexist with quite strict sexual ethics around family formation and the behavior of “nice” women. Victorian London, for example, had huge numbers of prostitutes of all ages and sexes, with relatively destigmatized access for men who could afford it, while famously enforcing a tight code of sexual purity and chaste speech around its marriageable middle-class girls—and importantly, that ratcheting-up of domestic purity norms happened *with* the return of world-weary veterans from the Napoleonic Wars.
To take another example, Shakespeare’s plays joke openly about fun with whores in a way that would shock right across the political spectrum if written today, but there are also multiple plots that turn on the importance of female chastity in the aristocratic marriage market (note, again, as imagined by a middle-class person).
It doesn’t feel revolutionary for Carson to joke about catching the clap, but it does feel new for that to be perceived as a great topic for humor on a mainstream TV show aimed at a mixed audience. If the middle-class moms in the audience laughed excitedly, rather than finding it disgusting and offensive, then presumably it was something the moms wanted to hear and something the producers wanted to have said to them. I suspect it’s probably about legitimating a fantasy of libertine consumerist pleasure as a high-status coastal norm, to a willing audience of Middle American rubes. (Look at these Hollywood people, so rich and well-dressed, so morally relaxed and carefree! *They* understand that it’s OK to have a bit of fun now and then.) Feels very much of a piece with the mainstreaming of _Playboy_ as an openly accepted part of the suburban dad library, and that’s definitely also about class and consumption (smoking jackets, satin sheets, marble pillars...).
Didn't Scott have a piece on this at some point? At the very least, I seem to remember an extended conversation about how the cultural figures associated with a given generation are often actually members of an earlier generation (most of the famous rock stars and artists of the 60s were members of the Silent Generation or--as you pointed out--members of the Greatest Generation who actively participated in the Second World War. The Sex Pistols and the Ramones were Boomers. The bubble-gum pop stars and spiky-haired rap-rockers of my Millennial youth were mostly Gen-Xers). Which makes sense. The members of a generation generally aren't going to be old enough to be artistically influential to their own peers. Teenagers might be the prototypical consumers of youth/mass/counter culture, but they by and large aren't big producers of it. Even teen pop idols and child stars don't really count, because their artistic output was mostly designed by the adult producers and songwriters around them (although I'm curious how this is shifting with the current generation of teenagers. Current social media stars/influencers seem to be much closer in age to their audiences than the rock stars of yore, with much more control over their own messages than earlier teen stars)
I wonder about those young influencers and the material they release. It's clearly less polished, more repetative, and often drops the ball at key moments. It's the opposite of highly choreographed shows like you see on TV, especially as related to reality TV, which is heavily edited to take real (or "real") events and hype the excitement.
My kids started watching Mr. Beast recently and I've seen a few episodes. Climactic moments often fall apart. Filming seems random and out of order. Props fail in highly predictable ways. This is bad TV, bad storytelling, bad writing. It reminds me of hanging out with my friends as teenagers. I'm thinking that my generation liked the polish because we could see the improvement over the haphazard stuff we could do on our own, but the upcoming generations get too much polish and appreciate the authenticity of young influencers who don't have adults running the show and making everything perfect. It may be related to the fact that kids are spending a lot less time hanging out with their friends in random unstructured ways. That's an itch not being scratched, so they get it from digital sources instead of physical.
I was thinking specifically about the effects of the war on the psychology of these people. For instance, Carson's attitude toward sex was probably formed in those years. Casually referencing sex with a hooker was no big deal to him or much of his generation. Prudery likely doesn't survive major wars.
But taking that and adding it with your point makes me wonder if the so-called Sexual Revolution was merely a transfer of values from ex-GIs to the younger generation.
Are these old episodes of the Johnny Carson show online?
I'm getting them on the Roku app.
I have never done any research into climate change. I have just always deferred to people smarter than I am and the consensus seems obvious.
I'm now looking at an investment in a climate sensitive region and would like to understand more.
Does anyone have a recommended primer / link / book etc. (that is politically motivated)?
> I'm now looking at an investment in a climate sensitive region and would like to understand more.
Can you expand on this?
97% of AI Risk researchers agree that AI poses serious risks.
Therefore, we should end all AI research, and you can’t disagree with me because that’s the scientific consensus.
You want something politically motivated?? Do you have a political point-of-view preference?
New article on my Substack - it's a review of "Innovation Breakdown: "How the FDA and Wall Street Cripple Medical Advances". This is a rather obscure book which tells the story of a skin cancer detection startup that got screwed over by the FDA, delaying the entrance of their product to market by several years and severely damaging the reputation of company in the eyes of dermatologists.
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/book-review-innovation-breakdown
Maybe I've missed this discussion in previous threads, but, um, why Threads? To me, it seems that Twitter is a) money-losing enterprise, and b) huge magnet for unwanted regulatory attention. Why is Meta trying to replicate this seeming trainwreck?
One needing another Meta account (Instagram) to use another Meta product (Threads) is a red flag.
Another is the requirement to delete the Instagram account to delete Threads. Meta claims to be fixing this, but who knows how long that will take. Perhaps signing a suicide pact with users’ Instagram accounts contributed to the alleged 100 million registrations.
I suspect we think that with better execution we can make it genuinely positive, for the users and for the business. We have more expertise and resources in content moderation than Twitter ever did
> more expertise in content moderation
Imagine someone hearing this at the peak of the Cambridge Analytica & troll farm Fake News scandals of 2017... and yet it's 100% accurate.
Cambridge analytics was more about decision making around 3rd party API access than it was “content moderation” per se… but yes fake news troll farms were / are a content issue
I’m not sure I completely understand the question -- are you claiming that harassment is permitted from progressives but not to progressives?
Is it a money losing enterprise if it just piggybacks on the existing Meta infrastructure?
Good point. I don't know! Do we have any Meta accountants in the audience?
Are there therapists who focus on helping people who get into conspiracy theories and distrust experts, which leads them to avoid doctors and medication, which worsens their condition?
....alright, let's avoid the uncharitable take.
In my very limited experience, the big issue isn't finding an appropriate psychologist, it's finding an appropriate caretaker. People with serious issues like this don't need a lot of complex therapy, they need to take incredibly powerful pills every day for the rest of their life that make them miserable and they hate, otherwise they will quickly become incredibly paranoid, like won't stand within 20 feet of phone lines, and in general just degenerate incredibly rapidly. The issue isn't, ya know, finding a solution, the problem is generally making sure that the person is consistently taking these pills, that again they absolutely hate, on the worst day of the year. People who are, underneath it, just people with all our failings. From the outside, their internal experience of skipping a pill seems like no more of a moral failing than buying a pizza and candy when you're depressed, just with horrifically worse consequences. This generally means there needs to be a caretaker person, who needs to ensure this person is on their meds, every day, for like 10 years, which is inevitably going to lead to a lot of screaming fighting matches between the caretaker and the paranoid. It's a brutal, thankless task that consumes decades of a persons life. Finding someone who will do that is difficult, finding someone who will diagnose the paranoid schizophrenic as a paranoid schizophrenic and get him pills and weekly meetings is easy.
I don't think that's a specialty. But most competent therapists, talking with someone like that, would make a special effort to stay out of the role of expert, to not give any advice,to try to be particularly transparent and honest, and to have a stance of "how can I be helpful?" I have sometimes been able to develop a working relationship with someone who had that stance. However, if the person is really deeply furious and mistrustful that is not going to work either. The last person of that kind that I saw said that being a psychotherapist was the ideal profession for imposters with no degree, because everything we say and do is bullshit anyhow. Expressed no interest in seeing proof of my degrees, because said it was still possible that I had stolen the name and the identify of the person who had actually gotten the degrees. I ended up suggesting he consider co-counselling, which I think is actually sort of high-risk, because this man was so utterly incapable of trusting authorities and yet was greatly in need of help.
Yes, it’s quite addicting to be proven right again and again after being told you’re crazy for years.
Does anyone have any clear examples of someone skillfully avoiding Gell-Mann Amnesia? I personally just avoid news in general, but I wonder if there are other options. I will preemptively say that my news abstinence is trivially compatible with all strategies of the form "don't trust a news item unless you [take some extra, effortful step]"
I think you are making too big a deal about GMA.
Some stories are covered by sober minded experts and others are covered by complete idiots.
If the NYT has a piece about portage canoe trips that I know for a fact is not fully baked I don’t thInk I should regard every story on the site with suspicion.
Michael Chrichton came up with the idea and named it after the guy who discovered the quark. The physicist was brilliant and Crichton is a so-so sci fi writer. Now that naming is a bit of deception in itself. How much traction would the Michael Chrichton Amnesia meme have gained?
The point that GMA is making is not "all news articles are bullshit". It's "some news articles are bullshit. Remember this and be appropriately skeptical, especially when you are not an expert in the topic".
We know that _some_ articles even in well respected outlets are garbage. So if you are not capable of telling (which most people are not on most topics), then the natural response is to be wary of articles.
I agree we should remain skeptical and pay special attention to the source. Do your own homework. My quarrel is with the particular name, GMA. Crichton wasn't really coming up with anything new and naming it Gell-Mann was a bit of cheesy sleight of hand to make it seem like it was something cool and new.
It is especially cheesy because Gell-Mann was famously skeptical and very conscientious about getting his facts right. And he knew a *lot* of facts. I remember a Seth Lloyd book in which Seth said that meeting GM for the first time is intimidating because GM knows about 10 times as much as a typical person on any given topic. Another eminent physicist (it may have been Stuart Kauffman) opined that Gell-Mann knows more facts than any other human. It's impossible to adjudicate such a thing, but FWIW I can't think of anyone I'd put ahead of Gell-Mann at his peak in that regard.
Zvi recently linked to a tweet from lawyerBrian Manookian describing how he got off the hook for his student loans: https://twitter.com/BrianManookian/status/1674963884703088642, and saying anyone whose student loans have gotten passed from lender to lender can do what he did.
The approach is to demand proof of chain of title, i.e. proof that the loan company now servicing the loan now owns the loan, which I believe they prove by showing a bill of sale. He says that these companies that buy up big batches of student loans are sloppy, and do not do the proper paperwork, and probably will not be able to supply proof that they own a loan. The person who got the loan then petitions the court to declare that the person does not owe the loan company any money. Court does so, person sends judgment to loan company and they cannot pursue collection any more. (Seems to me that nobody else can either -- because the previous owners of the loan have sold it to a collection company, and really don't own the loan any more.)
This sounds plausible to me, and my daughter and her boyfriend both have substantial student debt and are interested in trying it. However, we would like to ask a lawyer for advice before trying it. Four lawyers have now turned me down when I have asked them to first advise us, then carry out the process if we are not confident we can do it correctly. We would be paying them for their time, of course. Lawyers have said it's outside their realm of competence. The steps Manookian describes sound to me like extremely simple basic stuff, and in fact Mazookian has supplied copies of the letters he used as models, so it's hard to understand why lawyers keep turning me down.
Anyhow, can anyone help with information? I am open to any possibility. You can give me general info then fade away, or you can actually do the filing required. You can give info in a post here, or you could send me an email or we could talk online. We can do it anonymously or using real names. I will happily pay your hourly fee, though I think I can ask all my questions in about half an hour. If you are law student or legal aide and understand the process Manookian is describing I am happy to work with you also.
And, by the way, I am sure there are many people on here dealing with school loans. You could help a lot of people at once. Or you could do them one-by-one and have a lot of clients you can process fast and easily. Maybe you can bring down one of the loan shell companies.
This is fascinating. I don't have student loans, but I do have a 98k mortgage that has been passed around three times, probably under similar circumstances as student loans (ie, as part of a big sloppy batch of loans).
On the one hand, you would think that even crappy mortgage companies would be more careful about bills of sale given the large amounts of money involved.
But on the other hand, mortgages come with a lot more paperwork than student loans do, and if they're buying mortgages in huge batches, maybe they actually might be sloppy enough to lose critical ownership paperwork.
Huh.
During the mortgage collapse of 2008 there were a couple news stories related to this I think -- some seemed to be about the inability to address the crisis because it couldn’t be determined who owned the loans, and some about a lender/loan servicer that didn’t have its paperwork in order and so couldn’t evict people who didn’t pay.
I've been doing some reading since originally posting my comment - the TLDR is that mortgages seem to take documentation much more seriously than student loans and there are lots of additional protections for mortgage lenders, at least in Washington State (where my condo is). From what I can tell, even if they can't put their hands on the original paperwork, they can just do a affidavit swearing that they lost the paperwork, but, like, they totally do own the loan. But on the other hand, it looks like it's occasionally worked for people in foreclosure?
Either way, this seems like having such a low chance of working that I'm not going to seriously pursue the idea. From what I can see, "produce the note" is much easier to do with student loans because, unlike real estate, there is no underlying asset or public records about it.
I can tell you that these "Chain of Title" arguments are very important in patent litigation. In some jurisdictions "incorrect recording of inventorship or ownership is, in itself, fatal to the validity or enforceablity of a patent." (quote from here: https://blog.patentology.com.au/2014/02/inventorship-and-ownership-importance.html)
I don't know if the law is as clear when it comes to chain of title for loans, but maybe a lawyer with experience as a patent attorney would be more comfortable making these arguments?
Thank you, that's a good suggestion and I will follow up on it.
I’m not sure about student loans, but I did use a similar technique to get rid of credit card debt a long time ago. The collection agency was not able to provide any proof of the original debt so they had to forgive it.
Ooh! I like that story.
I am not a lawyer, and cannot offer legal advice. This seems like it's not going to work effectively; if the shell company doesn't have record of the paperwork, they can get it from the people they bought it from. If they don't remember that, once you take them to court they can demand you tell them who that was as discovery, and then get their paperwork. They can probably make you testify under oath that you don't believe you owe the debt, with whatever perjury penalties that incurs. It really seems like you're just banking on them not showing up and losing by default, which a lawyer isn't going to want to do.
Tennessee seems to have a $25 paywall on their court cases. Might be worth your money to look up exactly what happened with that linked case, or find others like it.
Thanks, I will look it up. Guy who gave the advice said that it's not cost-effective to these companies to defend themselves so long as claims like this are rare. They have a huge number of loans, and know they will lose many to defaults. Losing to me is just one more. Calling me into court and having their lawyer grill me sounds like it would cost them a hell of a lot of money. As for getting the paperwork from the previous company -- I think a lot of them just collapse and go out of existence, then sell the loans they are holding cheap. Also, I would not be claiming that I (actually my daughter, but let's say it's me) did not know who had made the original loan and do not believe I borrowed money. I would just be saying yeah, I borrowed it and will pay it back to the organization that can prove to me it is now the owner of the loan. But I'm not sending $30,000 or so to a company that cannot document that I owe them money. No perjury involved.
Recently convinced a relative to hire a lawyer for an eviction proceeding; it cost them $4000 in total. Not chump change, but much less than the property value. The guy's arguing it's not worth the collector's hassle, which is banking on them not showing up.
Was going to say my loan servicer has changed at least twice since they were paused for COVID (and possibly more than once before that) and I could maybe honestly say I don't know who the previous ones were since I've kinda not been paying attention until they're a more pressing problem and the repayments are starting up again.
No you would not need to lie in any way. The way this works is not that you pretend you don't know who the loan company is, or who had it before, or that you owe a loan. All you are doing is saying that yes you took out a loan, and you will repay the loan to a company that can prove via paperwork that it bought the loan and is now the owner of it -- BUT that you are not sending money to a place that can't even prove it owns your loan. It is reasonable to demand that a place trying to collect a large sum from you can document that its claim is legitimate. If it can't document it, it is reasonable not to pay it, EVEN IF you think it is extremely likely that they did buy the loan, just didn't do the paperwork. I mean, it's like if you bought a rug for $5000 online, and start getting emails from the place saying send us the money -- but they can't tell you the date you bought it, the item number, and they can't prove that they are the online rug store. It's just a guy writing from his private email saying "you bought the rug from my store a while ago, and we shipped it. No I have no records of the date you bought it and no proof that we shipped it, but I'm telling you we did."
Right, I was just saying if it was a question of being asked to provide the paper trail on the loan servicer's behalf I would be able to give an honest "I dunno".
Anywho I'm sort of concerned that Brian Manookian might be a bit of an internet clout chaser, looking at the rest of his Twitter feed. Seems worth noting that he's qrt bumping a tweet from August of last year and keeps saying he's going to set up a website detailing his process and has yet to do so.
Like I don't think he's lying or that he didn't do what he's saying he did per se, just that I sort of suspect there's probably details and circumstances that are being obfuscated in a way that prevent this from being something scalable at all.
Yeah, he's definitely got a big ego and no heart of gold, and I noticed too that he hasn't set up a website, so bad at follow-through. However, one of his Twitter threads contains what's probably the crucial document, which is the one you send first. I think there's a fairly good chance that this would not work, but it looks promising enough to me to put some effort into figuring out for sure. A couple of the lawyers, before they declined to be hired, have said things in passing about why the think it would not work:
-This is not a way of getting your loans discharged. (But I already knew that. They will still be on record in various places. On the other hand, there will be no record of ongoing failed attempts to collect. The loans will exist forever in a sort of limbo: You borrowed the money, but the original lender sold the loan, and the buyer resold it, and the last organization that bought it can never collect it because the court has declared their claim permanently invalid. And none of the earlier loan-owners can collect because they sold the loan, and really do not own it any more.)
-Manookian's posting about something he did in 2016. Loan collection companies are different and better organized now. (Have no idea whether that's true, and it's not clear that the lawyer who told me that has every tried this maneuver with somebody's student loans. How would he know that the loa collection companies are better organized now, given that he said does not handle student loan debt in this practice. His field is "debt defense," but he seems to mostly help people who have very large debts and are in big trouble.
-Most student loans are federal loans. The loan companies that take them over don't really own the loans, they are being hired by the US government to do the collection work. (He would not tell me how he knew that or how to find out more about it.)
The thing is, I have had a lot of middle-aged white men (please forgive me if you are one) in authority tell me something is wrong or impossible, and my observation is that if I argue, politely, or ask probing questions a lot of them double down and start throwing out reasons why they're *positive* their view is right, and in fact these back-up arguments turn out not to be based on solid info when I look them up on google scholar or wherever. They seem to be incapable of just saying, "based on my experience and intuition that's wrong, but I can't really back that judgment up and it's possible I'm wrong." And about several important matters it has turned out that I was in fact right.
If you are interested enough in this possibility to look into it on your own, let me know.
Was thinking about this the other day and couldn't quite recall where I'd seen it. Can confirm I'd also be interested in knowing more.
I have little interest in the outcome of this, but I'm curious why four lawyers have turned you down.
My first two guesses would be 1) it's too novel ("outside my realm of competence" sounds like the professional phrasing of that) and 2) it violates some professional norm against lawyers being highly lawyerly. More interesting to me is whether any of them relied on consequentialist reasoning, like this attempt to apply Econ 101 concepts:
'If this becomes a trend, then lenders will probably take notice and then take steps to ensure that each buyer of each loan can demonstrate proof of chain of title with ease. Won't these additional steps taken by lenders raise administrative costs at all lenders? Won't that increase the interest rates that these companies charge future borrowers?' (Similar to the model in which shoplifting by some increases the average prices that consumers pay.)
Are plaintiffs' attorneys known to make decisions on that sort of basis? It doesn't sound like the sort of thing that they do, but then I have never asked.
Where is the AstralCodexTen for people interested in law, anyways?
Part of it may be that lawyers have an enforceable profession duty of candor to the court. They're not allowed knowingly to put perjured testimony on the stand, present forged documents, present spurious legal arguments in briefs, etc. You don't have to volunteer evidence or arguments against your client's interests, and you can definitely present things in the most favorable light to your client's claims, but you aren't allowed to outright Saul Goodman it up.
A lawyer could probably defend an action brought by a loan servicer by demanding proof the servicer owns the loan and nit-picking every shortcoming in the documentation the servicer provides, sure, but bringing an action on the client's behalf seems like it might require more of a prima facie case. If getting such a case heard would require the lawyer to file an initial brief saying "my client doesn't think he owes this money to the respondent", then an ethical lawyer (or at least a lawyer who doesn't want to risk being sanctioned by the court) needs to reasonably believe the claims he puts in his brief.
Wait, you are misunderstanding to plan I have learned about. There is no perjury involved. There is nothing that is even sort of vaguely *like* perjury. The person with the loan does not say, "what loan? I never took out a loan." They say, "yes I took out a student loan and I will repay the loan to the original lender, or to any other organization that has bought the loan. However, the organization that asks for me to make loan repayment has to be able to prove they are actually the owners of the loan. They should have a bill of sale or similar for my particular loan." If you win, it is because the loan organization bought a bunch of loans in a big batch and did not do the required paperwork. There is actually a law about this sort of thing to protect consumers -- something along the lines of, you can't dun somebody unless you have documentation of the proper kind showing they owe you money.
Anyhow, some may think this approach is kind of sleazy, because it's getting out of a loan one really does owe on a sort of technicality. But my daughter and her boyfriend have oppressively large student loans and want to do it, and I am not about to be judgmental about that.
I know one lawyer pretty well, and he's actually a highly ethical person who worries about things like that in real life. But his view is that the job of a lawyer is to make the best case he can for his client, and that considerations like those you mention are irrelevant. It's OK to take the OJ Simpsons of this world as clients and do your best to get them off the hook -- not because they deserve to go free, but because a system where everybody gets a good defense protects the justice way better than letting each lawyer's squeamish scruples rule. I agree with that point of view. And I can tell you that none of the 4 that turned me down sounded like they gave a shit about that kind of thing. I think the reason might be that as lawyer jobs go mine is really puny. Manookian estimated that a lawyer charging typical hourly fees would make maybe $1000 learning about situation from client and then doing all the paperwork involved in this project.
If lawyers were in the habit of making decision based on the type of logic you describe, we would have dramatically fewer lawyers. The majority of the lawyer profession exists to take advantage of exactly these kinds of bureaucratic overheads and process inefficiencies.
For anyone who has quit their job to take a break to pursue personal projects, how was it? Do you regret it?
I am currently torn between burning desire to quit my job and pursue a startup idea, and ruthless pragmatism that just considers the opportunity cost of lost paychecks.
I have no kids, no rent/mortgage, and many years of living expenses in the bank, but somehow can’t rationalize to myself actually taking a risk. If you ever did quit to pursue a personal interest or purely take a break, I’d love to hear from you!
I took a three month break last year to explore career options and writing, and it was the best time of my life!
I got a job again soon after just from networking in my local area, but I do not regret it at all. I think we should normalize taking sabbaticals, it's extremely useful for mental health and breaking out of rigid mental models.
I don't think people are morally or ethically against taking sabbaticals. I think we're financially against it. I would love to if I could afford to just be jobless for three months. The privilege...
I've taken at least three year-long breaks from work, first at age 20 and most recently in 2015 when I started a profitable side business manufacturing electronic products. Now that I have children, I don't expect to have that sort of opportunity again.
I grew up in near-poverty and started work in my mid-teens. My early life left me extremely frugal and with a horror of debt, so living off savings and finding work when money ran out was a naturally self-motivated process.
I pursued hobbies, did some traveling, and had some adventures, but frankly I never accomplished as much as I expected (except in 2015). Romantic partners were generally supportive but unimpressed.
I feel that I was lucky to be stably employed during periods of economic turmoil like 9/11, 2008, and the pandemic. I would caution you that various economic indicators don't look so hot, and seem likely to decline.
Probably there were opportunity costs, but certainly opportunity gains. No apparent career impact, and no regrets. All of the trite homilies about non-fungibility of time and the advantages of youth are true. Have a plan, keep to a more-or-less heathy sleep schedule, set expectations low and curiosity high. Do it!
How hard will it be to get another job if you need one?
I've never quit to pursue a passion, but my last batch of unemployment lasted six months, during which I made no progress toward any goals. So, don't assume the time will make things happen.
I have a relative who started their own company, successfully, and they mentioned mostly working 20-hour days seven days a week for about two years. Expect pain.
On the pro side, I think of Shamus Young's autobiography; https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=13953. "It’s been easy over the last year to just keep coding at home and punching the clock at Taco Bell. This isn’t my dream, but it’s a tolerable substitute."
I'd say, go in with the expectation that every dollar you put into the thing is completely lost.
Thanks, I’ll take a look at that. I’m an ML engineer, so I don’t expect difficulty finding a job again, though I have a pretty chill and pleasant remote gig now that I don’t want to throw away. I am definitely in the (very) tolerable substitute territory, which is part of what makes it hard to walk away.
I certainly expect any startup process to be grueling, but feel this might be my best time to give it a go. I’m in my mid/late 20s so if I’ll ever have the energy for that sort of pace, it’s now.
I’ve done it multiple times, though not always to pursue personal projects. Sometimes just to live life. It’s paid off every time with the possible exception of quitting in January 2020. I wrote more about job-quitting in my recent Substack post titled “the fifth bomb”
You might also find the recent book “die with zero” an interesting perspective on the time vs money problem. The author frames it more as an energy problem, with your time/energy being more valuable when you’re young and losing value over time. So selling your time/energy for dollars when you’re young is a bad exchange rate (from that perspective) which supports quitting jobs often.
Also recommend the YouTube short film Slo Mo (I think it’s called) about a surgeon that loses his vision and quits working.
Interesting, thanks for sharing! I’d love to take a look at your blog. I’m in my mid 20s now, so I’m certainly curious in the long-term opportunity cost equation for risky endeavors.
I do suspect growing up in a working class family one generation removed from extreme poverty has made the opportunity cost numbers seem gargantuan, though in reality, a six month attempt that returns 0 would really just mean working an extra ~3 months at the end of my career, which sounds trivial.
It’s tough stuff to grapple with so I appreciate the alternate perspectives!
Yeah I also grew up in a working class family which definitely left a chip on my shoulder too. Definitely skews perspective a bit and great that you’re aware of it
I’m late thirties and hesitate to give genetic advice, but generally think “do what you want to” seems to play out better for high agency people vs “suffer and grind”
it’s worked for me 🤷♂️
I try to do a 24 hour fast twice a week, sometimes three, if I'm feeling ambitious. I go noon one day to noon the next, so I'm asleep for 8 hours in the middle of it. That seems to make it much more tolerable, in my experience.
Whoops. I meant this as a reply to Nolan Eoghan below.
Handicapping a potential Musk-Zuckerberg MMA fight. For some reason I had the impression that Zuck has been training for years, but I recently read that he only started BJJ 2 years ago. 2 years is.... not a very long time to be training, at all. At this point he probably doesn't know what he doesn't know. Reportedly Musk weighs at least 70 pounds more. I would personally not recommend that a white belt with 2 years of training and 1 competition take an extremely high-profile fight with someone 70 pounds heavier than them. For one thing, MMA fights start standing, and takedowns in no-gi take a lot of energy and skill unless you grew up wrestling. No-gi takedowns against someone much much larger is going to be very, very tough, and very, very exhausting.
Like, I don't any think of the say 170 lbs. high school or college wrestlers in my old gym could just easily take down a 240 lbs. white belt. In the gi maybe for a judoka, but not in no-gi.
Anyways, there's not a ton of fields where I know substantially more than Mark Zuckerberg, but this is 1 of them- I would personally not advise this fight. Contra Hollywood, size really matters in fights
70 pounds make a difference talking about actual athletes, where you can assume most of it is muscle. Elon looks chubby and soft. His cardio is probably terrible too.
Has Elon trained in martial arts at all? Because 2 years is a hell of a lot more than 0. I'm bigger than Elon but I've never trained in any sort of fighting so I'd hesitate to go up against the Zucc.
Respectfully disagree. You seem to argue that Zuck can’t win but that isn’t an argument for why Elon can. I can’t see him landing a KO punch so not sure his path to victory. Plus, Zuck is 13 years younger if it goes the distance.
The more interesting question to me is who will be on the undercard!
Update for the zero people who care: the combo diet of keto/intermittent fasting continues to work well. I'm down about 20 pounds in about two months. It's been remarkably easy, too. The keys to success are a) try to eat lean meats but don't be afraid to splurge now and then on some bacon or whatnot b) get some exercise but don't overdo it, cause that's when falling off the wagon is most likely, and c) don't be afraid of a little or even a lot of caffeine.
Does not keto allow all the bacon you can eat? And meats as fatty as you want?
Perhaps, but I found eating lean meats lead to much better results. For Memorial Day, we had a cookout, and an entire package of ground beef patties was left untouched, so I spent the following week eating basically nothing but hamburger patties, and the weight loss slowed or stopped entirely during that time, so...ya know.
How intermittent is the fasting?
I try to do a 24 hour fast twice a week, sometimes three, if I'm feeling ambitious. I go noon one day to noon the next, so I'm asleep for 8 hours in the middle of it. That seems to make it much more tolerable, in my experience.
Do dried psilocybin mushrooms loose potency over time? Yesterday I ate some that had accidentally popped up in a Tupperware container that I was using to store damp coconut coir a couple years ago and the visuals were just not there.
Yes, the psilocybin decays over time. Just to add a little more detail over other replies, the chemistry involved is an oxidation reaction: the psilocybin reacts with oxygen from the air to give non-active blue compounds. https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/mystery-of-why-magic-mushrooms-go-blue-solved/4010870.article I.e. fresh mushrooms turn blue when you bruise them because air gets in, and this represents a slight loss of potency. (only slight - the blue colour is very strongly blue and a little goes a long way)
Things other people have suggested to stop this happening sound reasonable to me. Keep in an airtight container, under vacuum or with one of those oxygen-remover sachets (not just desiccant which only removes water). Keep moisture out because being thoroughly dry can be a physical barrier to oxygen.
Chemistry happens slower in the cold so I would normally suggest that the freezer is good. I think the counter argument (that Eremolalos is thinking of) is that when you take them out of the freezer, they are so cold that water from the air condenses onto them, which makes them damp and reduces shelf-life if you're not using them straight away. Same if your container is not completely airtight in the freezer (get some good containers with a clip-on lid with a rubber seal).
If you do thaw and you're planning to refreeze, maybe thaw completely to room temp before opening, or even better, thaw the containers by putting them in an even bigger airtight container with desiccant.
Forgot to mention the other thing from that paper - part of the oxidative loss of potency is assisted by enzymes in the mushroom.
This is analogous to green tea leaves turning into black tea - the catechins/tannins in green tea turn black in an enzyme-assisted reaction with oxygen. You manufacture tea leaves by destroying the enzyme with a quick blast of heat, once the desired level of oxidation is reached.
It may be possible to do something similar with shrooms, where a quick pasteurisation-type treatment just after harvest increases shelf-life dramatically. I'm sure people have looked/are looking into it.
You're supposed to not chop them up because that exposes more surface to the air, & store them with little envelops of desiccant stuff. Last and fussiest advice I read was something about protecting them from oxygen? Or maybe air? and recommended a vacuum storage system.
Or you can just grow some more ; )
Yeah they were dried and run through a coffee grinder. Each little batch stored in a small jar with desiccant packs.
I once wrote some code to calculate the decline in potency of pharmaceuticals. The big deal in that case was ambient temperature. They held up better when stored at lower temps. Not sure if this is true of mushrooms but I could store the jars in the freezer.
Or wait for some more to accidentally pop up in some damp coco coir stored in a Tupperware container as I’m sure meant by growing some more. :)
I read somewhere convincing that you should not put them in the freezer, even after they are dried. Up until then, I dried them, put in desiccant envelopes and stuck them in jars in the freezer. I absolutely cannot remember the reason why that's a bad idea but whatever it was I read convinced me. So yeah, damp coco coir
Yes they definitely lose potency over time. Anecdotally I’ve heard 7% loss of potency per quarter but 🤷♂️
That's a really specific/precise number!
Yeah, the number will be that precise only under a similarly precise set of conditions; temperature, amount of oxygen and moisture, mixing and so on. Often though, its not just X percent of the original potency per quarter, its X percent of the remainder which is why chemists talk in half-lives (half of the remaining potency disappears in every Y-month period).
Psilocybin is not a simple example though - from the paper I linked above:
"However, no single blue compound exists in Psilocybe mushrooms. Various oxidative pathways contribute, to different extents, to the reaction. Each of them produces various chemical (including isomeric) species. [...] The substrate to oxidant ratio seems to affect the mechanism and color."
In my experience, fresh bruised mushrooms are a "pure" blue colour, with dried mushrooms being a more greenish-blue. This is consistent with slightly different compounds being formed in fresh vs dried, and these will have different rates of formation depending on conditions. Likely more difficult to model with code than Gunflint's pharmaceutical example.
Thanks!
Why is there so much less generative AI music than other forms of media? Is it because music that's been created to-date is all heavily copyrighted, so it's not available as training data? Generative AI obviously can create text (ChatGPT, etc.) and images (Midjourney, Dall E etc.). I've seen/heard a very small amount of AI-generated music, but infinitesimally less compared to these other media. My understanding is that existing generative AI was trained on an enormous amount of free/open-source/maybe kinda stolen media that was found online. (I mean Midjourney will randomly throw in watermarks to some images, so obviously watermarked pictures were used in the training data). Was this just not an option for music, whose copyrights are generally protected by ruthless highly litigious large companies?
I mean, intuitively to me music seems a lot simpler than imagery- if an AI can create pictures, it seems that technologically it should be able to create music too. So I'm guessing the barriers here are legal, does that sound correct?
There’s a lot of music in the public domain, but the existing recordings are copyright, and so is the published sheet music . It’s a little weird. But an AI can learn a lot of public domain music by ear. Why not? Hook up a microphone play a song. It should have perfect pitch… after that it should be able to play with what it has. But I agree with others in this thread that I doubt it’s worth it because of the nature of music and how people want to consume it, and what people usually want out of making it. Also, I don’t know how much it gets you over a modern synthesizer.
I remember a funny experience at the Lincoln library for the performing arts years ago. I went in looking for sheet music for the song “streets of Laredo”, it one in a long line of descendants of a 16th century folk song.? The rakes lament, Saint James infirmary, a young soldier, cut down in his prime etc. anyone can use that tune, and write their own lyrics to it basically.
I found the sheet music, but they would not let me Xerox it. It was perfectly appropriate for me to copy it by hand onto another sheet of notation paper though (which they provided me with) and then do what I wanted with it. Most of the western Canaan of classical music is free from any copyright. The actual recordings are a different story though; anyone can do Don Giovanni if they want to, and they don’t have to pay Mozart a nickel. So you could get an AI to do variations on a theme by Mozart, for instance and knock yourself out. You have to stay away from Marvin Gaye, though.
It's possible the sheet music _was_ copyrighted even tho the 'info content' wasn't.
Exactly.
This is something I've long noticed. Generative music is highly feasible: spend some time listening to random OpenAI Jukebox samples https://jukebox.openai.com/ and note that this is generating raw audio from scratch, posted in *2020* using 2019 stuff, and not as scaled-up as GPT-3 was, and there's vastly more accessible audio data. You could also get fairly reasonable samples from non-raw-audio data sources with a few tricks (https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music) which sound even better if you put a tiny bit of effort into them (https://soundcloud.com/theshawwn/sets/ai-generated-videogame-music). So, where is it all?
It seems to be a combination of: (1) the copyright situation is much scarier. Music comes with *all sorts* of bizarre complex IP laws and rights that don't apply to text or images, and this is because of (and empowers) groups like the RIAA. Every commercial startup doing music-related generative work seems to keep things very quiet, as blackbox as possible, restricting to licensed datasets when possible, and definitely not releasing stuff. (2) lack of major hobbyist interest - people may like to listen to music, but a lot of it is parasocial, there's superstar winner-take-all effects, and people don't generally want to make their own music the way they do their own images & text - think about porn/hentai as a huge driver of image synthesis. There is no porn/hentai of music generative models. (3) relatively demanding compute compared to other modalities. Audio is just very, very bulky: a piece of music is made out of millions of individual datapoints (X frequencies times Y milliseconds), while you can make a recognizable image with just 64x64=4096 pixels. Jukebox wasn't as demanding as GPT-3-175b was... but it's still a lot more compute than most people want to spend. Even sampling Jukebox is pushing it: early use of the released Jukebox model deterred hobbyists when they realized it (a) didn't fit in their consumer GPUs and (b) would take like half a day to generate a full audio file. Yikes. It'd be a lot better today, of course, but is nowhere near the instant gratification of a GAN or near-instant of the OA API or heavily-optimized diffusion model.
I'd also note that images specifically has benefited from luck: you would be seeing way less generated images today, and you would be unimpressed by image progress, if Emad hadn't done what all of the giants refused to do and bankrolled a decent FLOSS image generation model. (You would be wrong to be unimpressed, because there were, and still are, many much better image generation models than the Stability ones, and trying to judge image generation SOTA by what an SD model can or cannot do is a serious mistake - but they are all locked up behind barriers so you can't use them.)
Thank you for saying this. I had the same thought, and it is one of my exhibits that I point to when I try to make the case that AI's impact is a lot more marginal relative to its perception. The nothingburger that is AI music is proof that AI is much more incremental than people expect. AI seems to frequently arrive in a context where generation is already very cheap, potentially free, or even negative. In the case of music, the negative costs are borne by all the striving artists donating in-kind time to become hits.
The music industry has already gone through multiple waves of being concerned about cheap, fake and derivative music, and sometimes those controversies ironically become foundations, such as the initial aversion to autotune until current entrenchment.
There is a recurring ebb and flow of new innovations, such as even something simple as analytics-driven producers cracking the code as to what it takes to make a hit in the 1960s, to the modern Rotten Tomatoes-like algorithmic PCA to find the right sample banks, producers, writers, and overall secret juju to produce that true derivative—but extremely catchy—hit.
https://tedium.co/2023/02/04/why-do-modern-pop-songs-have-so-many-credited-writers/
Gen Music is simply not as profound or disruptive as other techs like autotune. There is still no secret to creating the perfect hit, just as there is still no secret to creating the perfect trader. (something something arms races)
And this extrapolates to other domains. I find it interesting that Gen Art came at roughly the same time we were just getting used to free high-quality images from Unsplash. At first, it was like, "Wow, Stable Diffusion solves all my clipart problems" to "Wait, these problems were already solved by Unsplash."
Or that GPT-based coding is downstream from a world where we were already googling 90% of our issues to find a good Stack Overflow link and then blindly copying-and-pasting. The existence of GitHub Copilot initially seemed like, "Wow, this is going to end all programming", and yet here I am now spending instead of 90% of my time fishing for Stack Overflow, I'm spending 80% of my time. Or, correction, I'm sending more time, because in parallel with these innovations we have the further advancement of community-heavy frameworks and packages, which seem to lend themselves to a dependence on Stack Overflow. For example, you cannot separate the rise of React from the rise in our dependence on Stack Overflow, unlike earlier eras where PHP programmers only looked up issues occasionally.
The future is boring. Object Detection's improvement is logarithmic to current AI R&D expenditure. Moore's Law is downstream from Rock's Law. Secular stagnation puts a hard cap on demand. 1960: The Year the Singularity was Canceled (by Scott Alexander), etc.
You can drastically reduce the size of generated music (and presumably the compute and data set needed) by having your AI generate sheet music instead of audio.
That just occurred to me the other day, too. And, it would improve the sound of generated music a lot. Right now it sounds like a muddy mishmash. Rather than AI having to try to discern "what a guitar sounds like" it would make more sense to have it try to discern "what notes and rhythms are enjoyable." It could generate MIDI files and/or sheet music instead of audio files.
Thanks, yes I didn't think about answers 2 or 3 at all. The universe of paying consumers who want to make their own music at home is probably pretty small. (And most of the ones who do probably want to copy existing, copyrighted artists- 'make a collaboration of Taylor Swift and Drake and Tupac' or something).
I'm skeptical the music industry will ever want to license their IP to AI either, just to ensure that they're not cannabilizing their existing artists
I remember hearing a talk about a music-generating AI something like a decade ago (possibly a TED talk?). Some musician had creative block while working on an important commission and decided to write an AI that could sample a bunch of sheet music in a given style and then compose new songs in that style, then turned it on his own past work to fulfill the commission, then gave a talk about how he did it.
I don't think copyright is an issue; most of the training data in the current popular generative AIs is already copyrighted, but the stance of the companies is that using something as training data is not a copyright infringement (and I think they are correct).
But "there isn't a lot of sheet music posted online in places where you can download it for free" might be an issue.
How about IMSLP? There's quite a bit of free sheet music on there
"If an AI could generate new Mozart operas on the fly, I’d listen to them a lot! But it can’t"
It has been able to generate "classical" music for 3 decades. Nearly as long for jazz. There is no market. Even less for opera.
> Caveat: I have no idea what I'm talking about but this sounds pretty good)
Well you sure had me fooled. Geez I was ok with temporal, but tension, motifs and climaxes! I was sure you had to know what you were talking about.
Hmm, but AI isn't too bad at (very) short stories. You'd think they'd be able to produce a few bars of nice music (are they? I haven't kept up with the music side of things).
I would love to read a linked AI-generated short story that wasn't absolutely horrible, formulaic schlock.
a couple bars can be enough to get a piece going. "Scrambled eggs" did end up turning into "Yesterday".
Scrambled eggs
are such an easy meal to make…
Gimme a break gimme a break break me off of that… I am drawing a total blank - The Office
https://www.tiktok.com/@theoffice/video/6914076535381150982?lang=en
I don't think that's a difference. A piece of sheet music only "changes over time" in the sense that it has a beginning, middle, and end, and text also "changes over time" in that sense.
Questions about affirmative action:
- How does affirmative action in college admissions actually work? Are there any concrete examples of how admissions would look with and without affirmative action?
- Do we know specifically what changed in UC admissions policy after Prop 209?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_California_Proposition_209#Effect_on_enrollment,_graduation,_and_income
- How was Prop 209 enforced? If admissions policy is totally opaque, what's stopping the university from "considering race"?
- How was the Bakke 1978 ruling against racial quotas enforced?
- How will the SFFA v Harvard ruling be enforced?
- Do people understand what affirmative action is? In this Pew survey, a plurality said affirmative action is "a good thing", but "only 17% say college admissions should take race into account."
https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2023/06/08/asian-americans-hold-mixed-views-around-affirmative-action/
- "The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it."
How have college administrators avoided being blamed for racially skewed student populations?
https://laneless.substack.com/p/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics
- "[Opponents of affirmative action] claim that making room for an applicant of one race necessarily requires a university to reject a different applicant."
Don't supporters of AA claim this as well? Isn't this the *whole point* of AA?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23405267/affirmative-action-supreme-court-ruling-race-harvard-unc-chapel-hill
The University of Arizona stopped the consideration of race in admissions in 2010. Its most recent incoming freshman class was 47% minorities.
People who claim the Supreme Court somehow diminished the inclusion of minority races in college admissions are mistaken.
- How does affirmative action in college admissions actually work? Are there any concrete examples of how admissions would look with and without affirmative action?
Sort of. What we have from discovery are (1) evidence a lot of this was just open racism from admissions committees and (2) theoretical class statistics in a counterfactual world where things like personality scores were removed.
- Do we know specifically what changed in UC admissions policy after Prop 209?
Yes. There was a brief surge in white and Asian percentages (and to some extent women over men) before it returned to normal. One of the UC administrators was recently caught on tape admitting that they did this by illegally ignoring the ruling and simply avoiding keeping any records of it. So now he's probably getting removed and there's probably a lawsuit incoming.
- How was Prop 209 enforced? If admissions policy is totally opaque, what's stopping the university from "considering race"?
- How was the Bakke 1978 ruling against racial quotas enforced?
Poorly. See previous example. However, now a bunch of people have cause of action against the UC system. Remember, though, that discrimination is not an intent issue. If you can simply prove disparate impact (such as through admissions numbers) that is sufficient.
- How will the SFFA v Harvard ruling be enforced?
Probably about the same. There's already a bunch of administrators walking right up to the line of saying they're going to find work arounds. Which probably means more lawsuits.
- Do people understand what affirmative action is? In this Pew survey, a plurality said affirmative action is "a good thing", but "only 17% say college admissions should take race into account."
Affirmative action doesn't just apply to college admissions. It's perfectly consistent to argue that you want (say) a representative bureaucracy but not representative college admissions. In fact this is more normal. In places like Singapore or Lebanon it's considered necessary for social peace to make sure there are minority administrators and politicians but who gets to be a doctor or engineer is entirely race/religion blind.
- "[Opponents of affirmative action] claim that making room for an applicant of one race necessarily requires a university to reject a different applicant." Don't supporters of AA claim this as well? Isn't this the *whole point* of AA?
They deny it because if no one is harmed no one has standing to sue. Of course people are in fact losing out on slots and so do have standing. Supporters just don't like that fact because they want to be able to do racial balancing (which was illegal even before this decision) and they're going to say whatever they need to say to try and get it past the courts. Freddie DeBoer's a good source of honesty: he believes it's a reparations program and so do most of its supporters. But such racial programs are illegal and so they (broad they, not Freddie specifically) lie to get around that fact.
The long term goal here, as they tried in California, is to repeal the parts of constitutions that require race neutrality so they can do it legally.
- Does the "ban on affirmative action" mean that it would now be illegal for a politician to (as Biden did) say they will appoint a black Supreme Court justice? Would it be illegal for a corporation to deliberately appoint a black board member so their board looks more diverse (if someone could prove in court that this was their logic?)
No to the first question. Politicians have wide latitude to select people for whatever reason they wish. The second one is already illegal unless the business can show a compelling interest in why having a member of that race on the board is important. And diversity is now not an acceptable compelling reason.
The literal phrase diversity is downstream of legal decisions saying that while racial discrimination was illegal without a compelling interest that diversity was a valid compelling interest. Because these people are lawyers or lawyer adjacent they just copy-pasted (in some cases literally) the justification the Supreme Court said was allowed.
"discrimination is not an intent issue. If you can simply prove disparate impact (such as through admissions numbers) that is sufficient."
That is certainly not the case re employment discrimination. Rather, disparate impact establishes a prima facie case for a violation, and then the employer has the burden of showing a legitimate business reason for the policy that creates the disparity. Note also that the individualized use of race endorsed by the court will likely result in disparate impact; a black applicant is more likely to be able to show how race affected him than is a white applicant.
"diversity is now not an acceptable compelling reason."
Not necessarily. After all, the court left open the possibility that diversity could be a compelling interest for military academy admissions, so there was no holding that diversity is per se never a compelling interest.
1. Correct, once you have shown disparate impact you then have to find a safe harbor for why the disparate impact is allowed. If you can't then it's discrimination. The previous safe harbor was diversity. That is no longer allowed.
2. The opinion specifically pointed out this is not allowed and that the theory advanced by the liberal justices it might be allowed is wrong.
3. The court simply pointed out that it was not being asked to consider military academy admissions and that it wasn't certain that appointment to military academies, which is done through politicians much of the time, are the same thing as general university admissions.
"2. The opinion specifically pointed out this is not allowed and that the theory advanced by the liberal justices it might be allowed is wrong.'
I am not positive what "this" refers to, but the decision says: "At the same time, as all parties agree, nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise." It seems to me that a policy implementing that suggestion will likely have a disparate impact.
"3. The court simply pointed out that it was not being asked to consider military academy admissions and that it wasn't certain that appointment to military academies, which is done through politicians much of the time, are the same thing as general university admissions."
What the court said, in footnote 4, was this: "The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military
academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present" That certainly sounds like they are saying that diversity might constitute a compelling interest in the context of military academies, and hence that the court did not hold that diversity can never be a compelling interest. And there might well be other instances in which diversity might conceivably be a compelling interest, such as hiring police officers in a diverse community. I am not saying that that is likely, but only that your statement is too broad.
More questions:
Does the "ban on affirmative action" mean that it would now be illegal for a politician to (as Biden did) say they will appoint a black Supreme Court justice? Would it be illegal for a corporation to deliberately appoint a black board member so their board looks more diverse (if someone could prove in court that this was their logic?)
Re the Supreme Court appointment, no. AFAIK, no court has held that the Fourteenth Amendment limits the appointment power of the President or state executives. Re corporations, board members probably are not employees for the purpose of federal anti-discrimination law, so I doubt there are any limits on such appointments.
"If admissions policy is totally opaque, what's stopping the university from "considering race"?"
Being able to prove from other evidence that racial discrimination is happening. Completely coincidentally I'm sure, there's a (successful) push to get rid of standardized testing and other "objective" measures of academic merit.
They go into detail as t how it worked in both Harvard and UNC in the opinions on the latest SC case:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
The podcast 99% Invisible had an episode which I think would be of interest to this crowd: The Frankfurt Kitchen: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-frankfurt-kitchen/
The Frankfurt Kitchen was the first modern kitchen - designed with flat, uniform countertops, an electric stove instead of a hearth, and a layout carefully calculated to minimize the number of steps between each action in cooking. The architect, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, took inspiration from the compact kitchens on trains or ships and assembly-line management ideas (very modernist). It was also politically motivated - she hoped that it would liberate women by allowing them to finish their household work quickly and have time for themselves.
(The podcast also discusses a related architecture-as-politics idea - designing homes with no kitchens of their own. The cooking would be done in communal kitchens, elevating it from unpaid "women's work" and reducing the amount of labor needed overall. Unlike the Frankfurt kitchen, this didn't catch on.)
And on the one hand, the political dreams didn't pan out. The labor that women saved mostly went into more household labor - now that you can cook really quickly, you're expected to make fancier meals, or spend more time on other chores like ironing. And there were also some issues with adapting to the new design - the isolated design made it harder to watch the kids, the electric appliances were a liability if you were too poor to pay the bills, etc. And this was in a public housing project, so if you had an issue with the layout you didn't much choice. (Once again, High Modernism packs everyone into evenly spaced rectangular grids!)
But on the other hand, the Frankfurt kitchen is the ancestor of all modern kitchens. The basic ergonomic design is still around, and everyone designs around electric appliances now. Architects treat the kitchen as the centerpiece of the home instead of writing it off as something for the women to deal with. And of course, women do indeed work outside the home these days, and labor-saving appliances are a part of that. So maybe give Modernism some credit for this one?
I'm having a hard time imagining that before the Frankfurt kitchen, the layout of kitchens was not designed to maximize the ease of cooking. Putting things together that are frequently used together is a basic organizational principle. What were kitchens of the past designed for, if not that?
Besides what others have brought up already, the big difference was a systematic effort to apply time-and-motion-study analysis to home kitchen design. Things had been optimized before, but through ad hoc creativity and analysis by individual householders rather than an attempt to design and popularize the One True Kitchen design. It's more or less the difference between learning to play a complex strategy game by everyone playing around with it, seeing what works, an occasionally copying someone else's strategies; versus someone making a bunch of spreadsheets based on the game mechanics and trying to work out optimal "meta" build orders and unit designs.
This article (https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/brief-history-of-the-kitchen-from-1900-to-1920-247461) shows what kitchens before the Frankfurt kitchen. It makes me think the Frankfurt kitchen was more of an incremental innovation, partly made possible by other recent innovations of the time.
I suspect it's less the layout itself, and more about furnishing the room specifically for cooking - having countertops instead of tables, and building those counters with dishracks and places to hold utensils, and so on. The Frankfurt kitchen was designed for a new public housing project, so they had the opportunity to mass-produce furnishings for a new style of kitchen.
The ancestor room / area of the ‘kitchen’ served many purposes, not only cooking.
Heating of the household, and managing the movement of fuel, air, and radiant heat, was an important role of traditional hearths and early ‘stubes’, as an example.
So you can imagine the optimal arrangement for some purposes might be different from the optimal arrangement for other purposes, such as water storage and access, or food preservation, or cooking a meal to be eaten the same day.
That does make sense, it didn't occur to me that what I think of as a kitchen didn't necessarily exist prior to the Frankfurt kitchen. Thank you (and also the other commenters) for the explanation.
There are other changes, both social and technological, that happened at the same time:
-Historically people who were wealthy enough to live in a house with a separate kitchen also had servants to cook for them. So the kitchen would be "below stairs" in the servants' area of the house.
-In a house where some but not all of it has running water, the kitchen needs to be somewhere that has it. If none of the house has running water, the kitchen needs to be somewhere where water can easily be brought.
-If solid fuels like coal are being used to cook, the kitchen will be somewhere that's close to where the fuel is stored. You also have considerations of exhaust, and possibly proximity to larders.
Do libertarians or other heavily market-oriented types have a more free market solution for providing social welfare programs? Right now retirement payments (Social Security) and healthcare for the poor & elderly (Medicare & Medicaid) are the largest parts of the US budget by a huge huge margin, and I would assume the same for other countries. The simple benefit of the private sector somehow providing these goods is simply saving the federal government a staggering amount of money.
I mean, we know how to have the government provide them- the Nordic/Western European model where income tax rates are 40-60% for the middle class, plus a VAT of 20+%. I don't have a huge philosophical objection to this, but it doesn't really seem like this is the final form of government that humanity has invented- I kind of doubt 'the government has to take half of everyone's paychecks forever' is like a Fukuyama-ish end of history and we will never invent a superior governance model. If it's the 25th century and we're zipping around to Alpha Centauri in a warp drive, will the government still have to take half of everyone's paychecks in order to provide the social welfare goods that citizens demand? Seems a bit unlikely?
So- what are the more market-oriented solutions? Forced 401k savings for everyone as opposed to Social Security? (Don't some countries like Singapore already do this?) Mandated private sector insurance program covering all citizens? I think in practice you do need a government mandate for people to purchase these, otherwise free loaders will refuse and then turn to the state when they need medical care- I don't think this is a solvable political problem otherwise
About two years ago, I wrote on the application of libertarianism to healthcare, on Quora. Much of that could apply to social welfare in general.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-libertarian-view-on-healthcare/answer/Paul-Brinkley-1
The main theme in that answer is arguably that whether your market is free or not, the libertarian notes that you will have to give people an incentive to want to provide services, for health, welfare, or otherwise. You will also want to give them an incentive to improve that service, either by raising the quality or lowering the price (or both), and since it's impossible to make anyone want to work for less money in a vacuum, you need another incentive, which turns up in the form of competition.
The problem with a government-forever system like you describe is that there's almost no incentive to improve. There's one provider, it gets paid regardless of how well it does, so its remaining incentive is to exert as little expenditure as possible to avoid revolution. Elections only matter if providers themselves are elected, and it's empirically harder to improve or maintain high service than it is to simply change the election rules to make their positions immune. So the entire system calcifies. All ailments treatable today are all there will ever be. Same for all financial troubles. Assistance is impersonal and austere; see the Department of Motor Vehicles in large cities for a model of what the optimized end will be.
For more specific libertarian-style reforms to US health care, I also wrote the following:
https://www.quora.com/As-a-libertarian-how-do-you-think-the-US-should-reform-its-health-care-system/answer/Paul-Brinkley-1
I like all of them, but 4 is the classic area where government regulation is needed. Providers deliberately don't publish prices now so that consumers can't compare them and price-shop. It's the same reason every B2B company doesn't list their prices on their website, you have to call & chat with their enterprise sales guy- they don't want to be commodified and have their prices driven down.
I mean- 'Price transparency makes the market more efficient - and less expensive'- you get why existing providers are not going to do that willingly, right? It requires government action
Why do any private providers provide prices?
If an outbreak of Teutonic Bronyvirus-K happens, Medicare announcing it will pay for the first $200 of treatment (or everything over $5000 or the middle $1000 on alternate Wednesdays or whatever) will do bugger-all if everyone with any expertise in immunology knows that it will cost more than that to develop any sort of vaccine against the Teuts.
Generally, anyone sick from something new, is screwed, because there's no incentive for anyone knowledgeable to cure it, by government decree.
Moreover, anyone who suspects a way to generate insulin for only $3/kilo won't bother to look into it any further if they know the government rate is higher and they'd just be leaving money on the table or competing with Uberpfizer. In other words, if it costs $X to fix your health problem, it will always cost $X. If a company knows how to do it for $X/2, they'll still charge you $X. And they won't tell you except in private, so that anyone else who might know how to fix it for $X/2 won't try, because they don't know what X is.
Generally, the current state of the art in medical will be frozen in time.
Heavily market oriented doesn't necessarily preclude government action in this area. Libertarians disagree with these government actions but for philosophical reason separate from their market orientation (though there is some overlap). Milton Friedman suggested a negative income tax as a replacement to many social programs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax
Charity (including churches and non-religious groups), family, and community would be the answer to how to provide these services without any government action. Groups like the Salvation Army or St. Judes do this already
FWIW, NIT & UBI are functionally equivalent under some conditions.
I'm not so sure about that. NIT scales with income and is only available to people making below a certain level. Isn't the main point of UBI that everyone receives it and its the same amount for everyone? Those are two major factors that change a lot of dynamics of either proposal (not to mention that UBI would probably be taxed in the US while a NIT would be a tax refund, more or less, so after tax).
Combining an income tax where you pay $T(I) depending on your income and a UBI where you unconditionally receive $U is the same as a single, possibly-negative income tax of $T'(I) = $T(I) - $U
I would think the only real heavy hitters here are finding some way to reduce healthcare and housing expenses for the elderly (or ideally, for everyone). Regardless of how the payment is provided, as long as it remains expensive, you achieve only abstractly moral benefits over just taking 40-60% of everyone's paychecks. Maybe they can find some more voluntary means of getting that money, but it would still divert an enormous volume of the economy toward keeping people who are past working age healthy and off the streets.
I supposed the tech bro stereotype thing is replace all the doctors with GPT-15 and house people in Tokyo-style highrise cubbyholes with a hospital across the street.
We have great solutions to both of those problems already, we just reject them as unthinkable. For housing, we can tell people to move to cheaper places (which Libertarians may tell you is already what the market is telling people who cannot afford their current housing). Old people on Social Security will get much further in random rural places than big expensive cities.
Healthcare is even easier, but much more fraught. You run an analysis of life expectancy compared to cost of treatment and let people die if they are too expensive.
I don't advocate these options, but everyone knows they exist and they would be pretty effective. There's also no other way to lower either of those costs more than marginal amounts.
If you get rid of forced saving you need to be willing to let the people who fail at this actually fail.
And to tolerate the impacts of that. Mostly these days people are not interested in watching grandmas starve in the streets in their 60s even if the grandmas were extremely profligate and short sighted with their money for the 40 years before that.
So if we are going to be forced to take care of people then they need to have a certain level of responsibility forced on them.
To me it seems like the only libertarian solution is charity, i.e. consensual giving. A market-based approach would be to auction off those who are unable to take care of themselves as wards to the lowest bidder. Forced saving mostly just seems like a way to pretend that taxation isn't taxation.
Indentured servitude is very market based indeed!
Indentured servitude only works for people whose labour is worth more than the cost of keeping them alive. Welfare is for the people whose labour isn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fattigauktion describes how this worked in practice.
I'm trying to get more readers at https://codingwithintelligence.substack.com/
It's a weekly link aggregation of projects, papers, news, repos, demos and products in the "LLM space". Basically for Machine Learning Engineers or AI Engineers or Prompt Engineers however you'd like to call it.
Recently I've covered a lot of what's happening with Open Source language models that you can (mostly) run on consumer GPUs.
Why do I want more readers? The more people I reach the more I'm motivated to invest time & resources in it. I like the flywheel.
Anyone need a top-tier graduate student in either Economics or Computer Science? I have one to recommend! He's extremely smart and self-motivated. But he's unfortunately from a developing country, so he has extremely limited opportunities, so I'd like to get him into a program in the global north.
He's the kind of student of whom you can ask "I need to apply a Wald estimator to this data, but don't have time. Can you take a look and do it this week?"... and then he came back THREE HOURS later, saying, "I figured out how they work, and went ahead and wrote the code that applies it to your data files".
If interested, please ping me!
Why do attendants at full-service gas stations insist on topping off your gas tank? As long as I've been alive, the general recommendation has been that it is a bad thing to do, because it screws with internal portions of how the fuel system works in various ways that I don't understand. It also may be a waste of the extra gas. And yet even if I ask the gas attendant not to top it off, he usually will still do it about half the time, maybe just because they're used to doing it and it's a muscle memory thing.
My question is, why do they even do it at all? Every single official recommendation from all auto manufacturers is not to do this. So do the attendants do it because they think customers want it? Do they know that it messes with the fuel system? Are they just trying to squeeze out a few extra bucks out of each customer?
You should buy gas for a given amount of dollars. If you always fill your tank, you buy a set amount of gallons.
First, due to the cost averaging, you'll buy more of the cheap gas and less of the expensive gas.
Second, with a completely filled tank, you drive around some extra weight in gas, which will raise your consumption.
> Second, with a completely filled tank, you drive around some extra weight in gas, which will raise your consumption.
That's a very interesting take on it! However, I expect that, for myself at least, any minor cost saved by driving around with slightly less weight with fewer gallons would easily be outweighed by:
1. The amount of extra miles I'd be driving to and from the gas station more often
2. The monetary value of my time spent driving to and from the gas station
3. My own stress about having to fill up more often and procrastinating on it
I am curious, though, if you have any figures for how much gas consumption might increase per pound that the car carries around.
You're right... apparently 100 kg of additional weight can cost up to 0.3 liters for 100 km. https://www.adac.de/verkehr/tanken-kraftstoff-antrieb/tipps-zum-tanken/sprit-sparen-tipps/ So the 20 or 30 kg of gas that you drive around won't do much of a difference. Especially if you need to drive a detour to the gas station.
But nevertheless, if filling the tank always costs you e.g. something between 50$ and 60$, you should always ask for 50$ of gas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging
When I fill my tank, I wait 15-30 seconds after the pump auto-stops, then start it again. I can get another .2-.5 gallons in there. This is due to air escaping from the tank. I guess you can call it topping off but I don't think there is risk of damage to the system. I have a 14 gallon tank and if i drive it until the estimated range is below 10 mi, I usually only get ~13 gallons in before the pump stops itself.
Boy, in the US full service is pretty rare since, oh, 1980 or so. They just suddenly started making most of us pump our own gas. It was a pretty abrupt change.
So here is the last appearance of a full service gas station in a major American movie. Dan Ackroyd offers to wash the dead bugs off Twiggy’s windshield in the Blues Brothers 1980. (don’t worry it’s just a 24 second clip)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sy3qvBPr5c4
Still mandatory in Oregon. I think? https://www.opb.org/article/2023/06/30/oregon-self-serve-gas-pump-law-governor-tina-kotek/
They just changed/repealed the law, right?
Unless something's happened since I last heard, I'm pretty sure they only relaxed it for rural areas at night, to make it easier to stay open (having struggled to find an open station driving through Clatskanie at 11pm with the needle kissing E, I'm in favor of this).
Too bad – so ridiculous
From Zip recruiter: "As of Jul 2, 2023, the average hourly pay for a Gas Station Attendant in New Jersey is $15.76 an hour. While ZipRecruiter is seeing salaries as high as $20.16 and as low as $8.85, the majority of Gas Station Attendant salaries currently range between $14.76 (25th percentile) to $18.46 (75th percentile) in New Jersey."
Why do they do it?
Because likely they are general poorly trained and selected from the bottom of the barrel.