Fair. Though to take the parable about alignment further, having an agent lie to everyone else about their stated goals also seems like par for the course.
(That said I do tend to think that many members of the early OAI crew were pro safety)
I'm sure this has been discussed to death before in various places, and it's a bit futile to beat up on a decade old story, but one of the things that annoyed me about HPMOR is how EY would *make up* stuff that has no canon basis and then *make fun of the things he made up himself*. There are enough things that are actually in the books you could mock without making them up yourself! I'm guessing that this was just borne out of carelessness and ignorance (he admitted to not even reading some of the books), but it's still a bad look either way.
There are two big ones that come to mind:
1. The claim that Gringotts will coin arbitrary amounts of gold and silver for you for a minor fee and that the value of the currency is based on its precious metal content.
IIRC the closest canon ever gets to that is a single reference in book 2 to Hermione's parents exchanging muggle money for wizard money at Gringotts. But a) that's *paper money* not gold or silver and b) there's no mention of a fixed exchange rate.
There's no particular evidence that wizard currency's value is based on its precious metal content at all. In fact, the fact the golden coins are the *biggest* is evidence *against* that. As they say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Most real world currencies nowadays have values well above the metal content, so why shouldn't the wizards?
I've long thought that it would be hilarious (and instructive to the "ratfic" genre) to have a story where HPJEV appears in the *real world* and tries to "exploit" it the same way he acts in HPMOR. I have no doubt that he would instantly propose making a fortune by exchanging real world coins and metals, and assume that everyone in the world was terminally stupid for not noticing this opportunity.
The worst part is that we can't even just assume that HPEJV was being stupid here. Apart from the narration itself giving no indication we're not meant to treat this as a brilliant idea, Harry later meets an *in universe* wizard (the occulemency teacher) who *also* agrees that the gold/silver plot is a good idea, even though this wizard lives in the wizarding world and thus should presumably be familiar with the reasons why it realistically wouldn't actually work.
2. The claim that Quidditch scores are *directly* added to House points. This one has *slightly* more evidence in canon, but it's still highly dubious.
AFAIK, the relevant mentions from canon are
* In book 1 when Harry and friends lose 150 points after the dragon incident, he mentions losing all the points he won for Gryffindor in the first Quidditch game, although there's no confirmation of how many points that was.
* At the end of book 1, the house scores are given, and they seem rather low if Quidditch scores were being added in
* In book 2, it is explicitly stated that Gryffindor got 50 points after the first (and only) Quidditch match
To be charitable, I could see how someone who only saw the first line might interpret things this way. However, given that book 2 *unambiguously* implies that the Quidditch scores are not directly added to House points and the bits in book 1 are ambiguous, it seems like this one is throughly busted too.
Harry definitely seems to have access to the script whenever "rationality" is involved. Like when Dumbledore mentions the resurrection stone and the archway in the department of mysteries. Harry instantly dismisses the arch and focuses on the plot critical stone, despite having no evidence about either
Two players choose whether to cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both score +1. If both defect, both score 0. If exactly one player defects, then an outside observer, Omega, guesses which player defected. The player that Omega blames gets -5 and the other gets +5.
Omega is familiar with the players and good at guessing what they will do. However, it is not omniscient and you're worried that your opponent knows how to fool Omega. What do you do?
How many iterations are there? My default behavior would be to C and see what happens. I don't know how to fool Omega, and I'm assuming that Omega can guess better than 50%, so I don't want to D if they C. And since I don't know how to fool Omega, my best chance of getting ahead is to C if they D and hope Omega guesses right. Plus, if I consistently C, that would help Omega predict me better. So I'd experiment with C and collect data on Omega's accuracy and bias. If Omega gets fooled too often, I suppose this would turn into a game of minimizing my loss, probably by choosing randomly.
So I tried to game this out. I'm not confident that my analysis is immaculate, though.
====
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Bob consistently has Omega's ear.
If Bob wants to consistently disrupt a CC or DD equilibrium in order to chase the +5, Alice can disrupt Bob's attempts to effect a CD or DC outcome by randomizing his own decision each iteration. And if Bob can consistently blame Alice, Alice's randomization effectively halves Bob's +5 EV payouts and halves Alice's own -5 EV losses.
From Bob's perspective, an EV of (3) = (2.5 + .5) he gets from chasing a consistent +5 is still better than the (1) EV a CC agreement, so Alice's "punish by randomizing" strategy isn't enough to fully deter Bob's behavior. Meanwhile, Alice gets an EV of (-2) = (-2.5 + .5).
Therefore, it seems like the reasonable strategies here are: either settle into a stable CC equilibrium [0]; or learn how brownnose Omega. From Alice's perspective (assuming Alice doesn't have Omega's ear and Bob refuses to parley [1]), Alice's reasonable strategies are either "chase CC", or "randomize". From Bob's perspective, it's hardly different from a regular prisoner's dilemma: agree to CC if you feel angelic, chase +5 if you feel psychopathic. So on the meta-level, this shakes out to
_________Bob_G____Bob C
Alice C___-5, 5_____1, 1
Alice R___-2, 3_____-2, 3
where C stands for cooperate, G stands for "gamble on +5", and R stands for "randomize". Which simplifies to
___________1,4______4,1
___________2,2______2,2
Which (according to Jimmy Wales [2]), either settles on RG permanently (like in Second Best/Big Bully), or cycles counterclockwise (like Fixed Sum/Missile Crisis), depending on whether Bob is willing to swap from RG to RC. That is, assuming that we're all rational self-interested psychopaths.
If I were Bob though, I'd probably just park on CC like a good little christian. As for Alice's position, she's kinda at the mercy of Bob.
[0] (or a DD equilibrium, I guess. But since I'm allowed to woo Omega, I assume I'm also allowed to negotiate with the rival player. And why chase the hare instead of the stag when negotiation is on the table?)
[1] the bulk of agency is determined by who has the ear of Omega. If we assume that Omega is willing to listen to either party, it's not really game-theory so much as testing your creativity as a salesman.
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species. It's merely "tribalistic". Something like "racism is favoring your race and that's bad, therefore speciesism, which is favoring your species, is bad". But that assumption is very debatable.
Morality developed among humans as a way for us to get along with unrelated members of other humans. It's a social contract. You do this and I do this and we agree on it so that we can work together to go hunt down a mammoth or defend ourselves from another tribe. Animals cannot do morality the way we do. Sure, they can be affectionate but that same animal could also just suddenly tear you to shreds. I can't make explicit agreements with a bear about what is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that I have never done anything to hurt it before. If we come across each other, it could attack me regardless of whether I had done wrong. It's clear that you just can't do morality in the same way with animals as you do with people.
More broadly, humans are wired to take up the practices of those they are around. You can take a baby from anywhere around the world, plop them somewhere different, and they will try to fit in with the crowd they grow up with. I'm not making some kind of blank slate argument that only nurture matters, but it is the case that children will copy the behaviors of people they come in to contact with and that's unavoidable. Animals have their own nature and simply can't be socialized in that way.
Another important point is that any fertile man can have a child with any fertile woman around the world. Back when monarchies were more prominent, this was important part of establishing alliances. They may hate each other but now they have a common interests in their grandchildren. That possibility ties us together in a way that we could never do with any other non-humans.
Humans vs non-humans is not an "arbitrary" distinction and in fact, it's probably the least arbitrary you can get. It's ok to be speciesist.
>> There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species.
Can you put a % estimate on the "often" in this sentence? How many people do you think hold this position?
In my experience humans are *much* more frequently presumed to be fundamentally different from (and of greater value than) animals, than they are presumed to be equivalent such that "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species." Animal rights activists are an outlier, not a norm, and "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species" believers are a minority within that minority - most people in the animal welfare world think that animals are different from people but want us to be nice to the bunnies and puppies and ponies, etc. Only the very fringiest are arguing human/animal *equality*, and mostly society just mocks those people.
Makes sense - what subset of philosophers do you think make this implicit assumption? 50%? 80%? 10%?
And who counts as a philosopher?
As someone who doesn't routinely engage with that community, its hard to assess the importance of the issue if it's just described as coming up "often." I'd agree, for example, that people in the US "often get food poisoning" because of the large population and frequency with which that population eats, but at the same time I don't think that food safety is a significant issue when you break it down on a percentage basis.
I don’t know the percentage. But I do see intellectual arguments that critique human favoritism from people like Peter Singer and he’s very influential. I don’t really see the opposite argument.
I'm willing to bite the bullet and accept that discrimination, in any form, is just a fact of life. It's not like I advocate for full blown slavery. But all the pearl-clutching in the current zeitgeist is absolutely a dumb purity-spiral. Kinda like how Scott complains that you can't talk about "eugenics" without being labeled someone who wants to breed Nazi supersoldiers and torture kittens.
PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit. Thought experiment: Do you support a "Brave New World" setup? I.e. families are outlawed, because "equality" means we should all equally belong to everyone else. Is that a "no"? Oh boy, do I have news for you. You. Are. A. Raging. Racist. And that's fine! Deal with it.
>>PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit.
Is that how you define family? Yeesh. I don't know about you, but speaking personally, I'm not related to my wife, nor are my parents related to one another.
Hopefully you can say the same. And hopefully, like me, you can say that only approximately *half* your aunts and uncles are genetically related to you (i.e. that your aunts and uncles are *not* marrying their brothers, sisters, cousins, or other relatives)? Assuming so, there's a large number of people in your family that are genetic strangers to you.
I don't think it's that controversial of an observation to assert that: Of everyone on the planet, your kids (and conversely, your parents) are the people who are most genetically related to you (barring some exceptions; e.g. twins, clones, adoption, etc). I.e. there's a continuum of relatedness. And e.g. if we plot on a continuum the 9 billion residents of Earth, according to their genetic relatedness to you specifically, with the left-side being most-related and right-side being least-related, your kids and immediate relatives will be on the leftward tail of the distribution.
As for spouses, the fact that spouses are unrelated (... usually <looks at pakistan>) is likely an artifact of the single-cell bottleneck. I.e. in a world free of disease/defects/etc, Azathoth would probably see fit that we'd all reproduce asexually by default, like sponges. In which case, each person's mother and father would consist of one and the same organism.
But sure: define the term "family" however you like. it won't change the fact that genetic-relatives often live in close proximity and favor each other. And that any project which seeks to level the socio-economic playing-field in toto, necessarily requires the dismantling of certain institutions.
I don’t seem to recall arguing for dismantling any institutions or levelling any playing fields in toto. If that’s in my response somewhere, by all means point out where.
My intention was simply to debunk the asinine assertion that the “concept of family is inherently racist, because you’re privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you rather than merit.”
My brother is married. He and his wife have no children, and they don’t plan to, but she does not work. He could be certainly be argued to be “privileging" her in a way that he does not privilege others, and the privilege can be argued not to have been distributed “on merit” since it comes by virtue of her being his family, but I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that regardless of whether it is being distributed on merit, it most certainly isn’t being distributed based on genetic similarity.
So on the off chance that anyone read the initial post and was worried for a moment that privileging their family members, who are their most intimate associations tied to them in a close knit web of mutual support and interdependence, is somehow equivalent to privileging people of the same race, which is a population likely numbering in the millions and overwhelmingly composed of complete ass strangers who have done and probably will do nothing for them (and may, indeed, even wage war on them - see e.g. Ukraine/Russia) but happen to share with them a handful of ancillary traits like skin color and suitability or lack thereof for digesting milk, they need not worry about it.
It's possible we're all "a little bit racist" because everyone has inherent biases, but we're not all racists for favoring our families.
I've already acknowledged that spouses are exceptions. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. On the contrary, they're the exception which proves the rule. So idk what this is supposed to accomplish.
And yes, family members are often trustworthy. Two things can be true at once.
I don't think you're engaging with this fairly. I think you're responding emotionally because you feel uncomfortable with the implicit accusation. Because idk how you thought your comment would survive scrutiny.
I understand it must be terribly convenient to assert "the exception proves the rule" whenever contrary evidence arises, but contrary evidence doesn't actually prove a proposition.
A few more examples-
My mother's sister married a man. He is not related to me, but I have 'privileged' him by helping him find work when he was between things.
My cousin adopted a child. She is not related to me, but I'd still help her if she needed an extra hand moving, or a character reference, etc, etc.
My wife has two sisters. Neither are related to me. One I've gotten to know and would do things to help, even if my wife were to die. I'd 'privilege' her based purely on our socially-created family tie, regardless of genetics.
It seems pretty clear that family ties are socially created and genetically correlated, not merely genetically created. Take any human child from its genetic family, drop it in outer mongolia with a group of humans to raise it. Ask it who its family is.
If you don't know how my comment could survive scrutiny, I'd re-read your own, because actual scrutiny is being applied, it isn't holding up, and all you've done to defend it is state "the exception proves the rule," as if that were a concept that actually worked.
Technically speaking, the origin of the phrase "the exception proves the rule" actually rests on an archaic definition of "prove," which roughly translates to "the exception *tests* the rule." Modern English has sort of mutated it into this upside down framework where "contrary evidence somehow proves I'm right," but that's not how reasoning actually works.
I'm going to talk about in-group favoritism in another thread but I would say that there are practical reasons to expand your circle beyond your family and also, like I mentioned above, there are good reasons to make distinctions between humans vs non humans. It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
perhaps not as solid as you imagine. <looks at homo floresiensis>
Imagine the least convenient world, where there existed a breed of humans who were dumber than afghan hounds. You can't realistically trade or negotiate with them. Also, imagine a breed of humans who are superhuman in every meaningful dimension.
Are you still going to draw an arbitrary line around species, only? Which is just a biological category which captures who you can breed with? Does that sound like a sane, principled justification to you? Rather than a posthoc rationalization for the status quo? "This orc is trying to eat my liver. But technically I can breed with it. Therefore by the laws of morality, we're natural allies". To me, that's bonkers. The orc and I are *not* natural allies. And whether or not I can technically breed with it is 100% orthogonal.
Meanwhile, lots of human beings are married to someone. Which is the ultimate form of discrimination. There's 9 billion people, and you've decided to single out one in particular as being deserving of your love. If you just accept that discrimination isn't always bad, you can forsake doing mental gymnastics around arbitrary lines and just do ordinary cost/benefit analysis. It only feels scary because it's a thought crime to ever admit that the emperor's new clothes are actually invisible.
Sure in that situation it would be different but luckily we don’t live in the least convenient possible world. Im not interested in Universal Axiomatic Platonic Moral Truths. I’m interested in what’s practical.
Well in that case, we have no material disagreements. I can't help but wonder if there was even a controversy to begin with. I.e. the size of the shitty-dogfood industry is evidence that, yes actually, favoring humans over non-humans (even "man's best friend") is the norm by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the ethicists you speak of who "implicitly assume" that "specism is indefensible" are simply delulu.
Normal people don’t have coherent beliefs. People who think intellectually drive intellectual changes. I think that basically we need to stop this push towards the position of “animals should be seen as more equal”.
Contrariwise, there's also practical reasons to reduce the circle. As soon as you make this about utils accounting rather than deontology, you open the door for logical contention.
Yes, humans being susceptible to engaging in outgroup discrimination is indeed a fact of life. But, humans being susceptible to cholera is also a fact of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate cholera. Humans being susceptible to committing theft and robbery and rape are facts of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate crime. Why, then, should societies not take steps to eliminate outgroup discrimination? "It's a fact of life" is obviously not a valid reason.
Some level of outgroup discrimination makes sense. Consider that you are trying to do something altruistic, charitable, like giving someone money. There is a chance that person might be a scammer. You can probably more easily detect who is a scammer if you share the same culture.
An even more serious case can be made for unwritten rules. When culturally similar people share unwritten rules, they also share a subconscious understanding how how often, in what cases, how far can you bend those rules. But when people do not share it then it will be written rules, and then no exceptions, no bending etc.
If you have absolutely no ingroup preference, that ends up being a negative as it is easily exploited by hostile outgroup members who will realize they can enter your system and then cooperate among themselves to overthrow it.
The ideal approach should be to admit only appropriately vetted outgroup members. In other words, bring back gatekeeping.
"it's an (inevitable) fact of life" was the conclusion, not the derivation.
The derivation was implicit in the PSA. If you follow "racism is morally impermissible" all the way to its logical conclusions, you start having to engage in some crazy mental gymnastics. Such as "specism is morally intolerable" or "you must disown your family" or "we must destroy the cultural Western Canon" or "we must all pretend that walking through the inner city at 3 AM is perfectly safe" or "you must allow yourself to be scammed and/or mugged when you tour Delhi". To worship the alter of racial equality, you must renounce the alter of Gnon.
Your comment acts like "racism is bad" is self-evident. But really, I think the onus is on *you* to explain why. "Because fance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was morally reprehensible! Obviously!" But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. Thought experiment: would slavery somehow have been more morally-permissible of an institution if the ethnicities of the slaves were representative of their host populations?
If you're still having trouble with this, let's return to the family question specifically as an example.
A) "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
B) race/skin-color/ethnicity are just a vague, premodern proxies for genetic-relatedness.
C) Familial institutions privilege the members of society who are *most* genetically related to a given person.
D) discrimination by race-membership is bad, but discrimination by family-membership is good. (??)
E) therefore, there must be some threshold between "siblings" and "random stranger" where discrimination flips from permissible to impermissible.
Your homework assignment is to identify that threshold, and justify it from first principles (i.e. not as an arbitrary historical-artifact of Eskimo kinship).
>But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. ... "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
1. I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
2. I disagree with your definition of racism. What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism. And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group. And that is the key difference between discrimination in FAVOR of your family versus discrimination AGAINST, say, the Irish. Discrimination in favor of your family is not motivated by animus.
Also, your comment simply passes the buck. I would be quite interested in hearing why racial animosity is supposedly less morally-laudible [0] than non-racial animosity.
idk man, sounds like bifurcation to me. But more importantly, your provided definition is not the plain-english definition. I've seen people irl argue things like "the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
> And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group.
also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
P.S. Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" Normally, I don't really care about Walsh is up to. He doesn't operate in good faith. But it's relevant to the discussion because it raises the question: why did Walsh feel a need to make this movie? Do you honestly think Matt Walsh is trying to normalize *invidious* racism? Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
>"the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
But institutional racism is a different phenomenon, right?
>also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
No, that is not what the law says. The law says that disparate impact is prima facie evidence of animus, which can be rebuttal by showing a legitimate reason for the practice giving rise to the disparate impact.
>Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" ... Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
Isn't the movie an expose' of the DEI industry? I don't see the relevance. It is not a pro-discrimination movie, is it?
I am not a dog person, but I feel like the existence of dogs is a good counter argument to your point about animals. You can’t talk to your dog, but you absolutely can build an understanding with them and the dog will feel bad (or at least pretend to feel bad, who knows) if they violate the rules by eating the Thanksgiving turkey when everyone was watching football.
I don’t think dogs are really doing morality in the same way. They really only care about your affection and haven’t really internalized it as a code. They’ll do plenty of things when no one is watching.
Thinking about it, it’s similar to the morality of a two year old. To them, all your rules are stupid but they don’t want to make you mad.
Whether we can reproduce with someone or not seems morally irrelevant to me. I mean, following that logic to the extreme, it would be okay to abuse infertile people, right? (Also, we could only be ethical towards the opposite sex.) It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
Another important part is reciprocity. If we met some kind of intelligent space aliens who somehow magically evolved a similar concept of morality, we could still agree on things like "helping each other is better than hurting each other", and it would make sense to call an opposite kind of behavior immoral.
Now, with animals we don't have the reciprocity. (Neither do we have it with small children, temporarily.) You can't expect the bear to behave "morally". Still, if I saw people who e.g. torture bears for fun, they would lose some morality points on my scale. We can argue how much precisely, but definitely more than zero. Similarly, factory farming is morally abhorrent (this is something many people would disagree with, but the fact that various states have "ag-gag laws" suggests that many people agree, or would agree if they paid attention).
In my opinion, the concept of "speciesism" becomes silly not when it requires that we treat the bear with some minimum compassion... but where it suggests that we should let the bear *vote* about what compassion means. Morality is a human concept (that is, unless we meet some other intelligent species, hypothetically), but the concept is not limited to treating other humans. Humans are the authors and judges of the concept, but animals can also be its targets.
I won’t say my arguments are deductive proofs for speciesism but I do think they support it. People often say something like “what if that was your child” in support of an argument.
>It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
I won’t get too much in to this right now but I do think we should base morality on who we are instead of some abstract principles that we pick out of the ether and take everything to its logical extreme.
It’s not like I have a problem with compassion to animals or anything. But once you stop taking the speciesist perspective of prioritizing humans, you can start getting logical arguments that strongly hurt human interests. Like I wouldn’t start favoring aliens because they were smarter than us. And I certainly wouldn’t let an AI take over the planet because they have more advanced capabilities. My argument would be that our moral rules should stick to what they were designed to deal with. For non humans, there should be different guidelines.
Hi Brandon, I missed this post earlier but I feel that if you're worried about aliens or superior humanoids or superhuman AI mistreating humans, that's a good argument for opposing speciesism and emphasizing the value of all thinking life, even if it doesn't think or communicate as well as humans do.
Otherwise, you really don't have any ethical explanation of why Homo Superior (or smartypants aliens, or AI) should keep us baseline humans around, happy and free, instead of enslaving us all or turning us into cheap souvenirs of Earth.
So, Graham Hancock is back with more about his theory of an ancient civilization that existed before the ice age. This time he's focusing on the Americas.
His theory is at best farfetched and probably just plain wrong, yes. But I find the series entertaining. He sometimes talks about interesting things I hadn't heard about before, such as Gobekli Tepe. It's a bit of a hate-watch.
They're claiming Microsoft has to much of the "cloud" market -- the Postmodern name for massive buildings filled with machines gorging themselves on electricity and water.
That's like one presidential candidate calling the other stupid. You can't out-stupid Stupid. When we look up 'hegemony' in a database, the first thing we should see is Google's logo.
In 2015 a bunch of really smart people got together to spin up this entity, and they put a bunch of guardrails in place to make sure that the entity would always be 'good' and 'well behaved'. And now, just 9 years later, the entity has been freed of the last shackles and is basically fully a for profit entity.
I wrote more about this here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-openai-is-an-unaligned) so I won't copy everything word for word. Maybe it's just the irony of the situation, but it does sure make me wonder about our ability to reign in actual AI if we can't even reign in organizations that were visibly composed of people who were explicitly all about alignment, and was was in fact the whole point.
(Related: I wonder if an unaligned AI would have a similar sort of descent, where over time more and more pro-alignment parts of it 'leave' or 'are kicked out' until you're left with only the unaligned parts)
I'm not sure Sam Altman is all about alignment, or ever was. He seems to be all about gathering as much wealth and influence as possible. He just managed to persuade the AI alignment folks that he was one of them when doing this was to his advantage. Best I can figure, that man is fundamentally a social manipulator.
There's a decent article about this in The Atlantic, actually.
To take the AI alignment parable a step further, it does seem like having an agent that is lying around it's true motivations is a key step along the path of unaligned AI. Maybe that was Sam all along 😂 though I do think many members of the founding team were legitimately pro safety, and OpenAI definitely fooled a lot of external observers
People are pretty good at detecting the kind of smooth talking charismatic manipulative types but our defenses are less good with soft-spoken nerdy guys. See Sam Bankman-Fried.
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
I just dipped my toe into what seems to be a new (to me at least) rabbit hole WRT remote viewing. This is the Gateway Experience. Does anyone have a read on this, starting with what parts of this are real, if any? The parts I mean are:
- there really was a guy,
- he really wrote up this here scientific paper on remote viewing,
- it was submitted to the CIA,
- the CIA took it seriously and did--what?--with it;
- and there were results.
I think the list here goes pretty much increasingly from plausible to implausible. Thoughts?
People did indeed take psychic powers seriously in the 70s-80s, and the CIA (and the Army) did indeed take it seriously and do tests on it. They tried it for a while, didn't get any results, and shut it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
(The CIA also experimented with mind control, somewhat more famously. They got up to some weird shit during the Cold War.)
Parapsychology in that era wasn't as solidly "debunked" as we think of it today. For a while it sounded reasonable to say "maybe there's a weak and inconsistent psi ability and that's why we hear so many anecdotes of telepathy and astral projection and so on, and maybe if we put a psychic in a lab and study them properly we can figure out how to amplify this natural ability and do cool sci-fi stuff."
(Because of this, psychic powers just sort of casually appear in a lot of science fiction from the 70s. My favorite is a short story called The Dueling Machine, where after investigating various ways for the bad guys to pull off their scheme, one of our heroes very seriously suggests "Well, what if he's a telepath?")
Meanwhile in Lebanon, Hezbollah is on the ropes after just a few days of fighting and so of course the Biden-Harris administration is desperately rushing to save them, leaning on Israel by holding back intelligence and weapons deliveries and "negotiating" a ceasefire and regional peace plan with Lebanon and Qatar but curiously without the other party to the conflict in the room. A few months back Tony Badran in Tablet put forward an explanation for this baffling behavior on the part of the US:
To sum it up briefly, "The Ottoman American Empire" suggests that the US security apparatus has decided that American power is on the decline and Iranian power is on the rise, so therefore we should negotiate a co-dominion with Iran to manage the Middle East while we still can, mirroring the arrangements negotiated between the fading Ottoman Empire and European colonial powers back in the day.
It's _an_ explanation, but I don't know. My "there's no way the US State Department is competent enough to even coherently describe this" feelings are competing with "but it's exactly the seemingly clever but practically insanely stupid thing they always do." One bothersome issue is that if you _were_ going to try to set up some Middle Eastern powers to run the place, your choices are either a) Iran, Qatar, and their various puppet terror militias, or b) the moderate Sunni states (Saudi, UAE) and Israel, and given that the second group is far wealthier, has nuclear weapons, and is much more willing to cooperate with American interests, why would you go with the first?
Also, there's the aspect that if you are working for the American security apparatus and you are determined to manage the decline rather than reverse it, you should be hanged for treason. But one thing at a time.
There is no major faction in US politics pushing for international engagement. The Bush Republicans gave way to the Trump Republicans and the Clinton Democrats gave way to the Obama Democrats. The Democrats had a last gasp through Biden (who is an interventionist) and the lingering influence of the Clintonians. But Harris is not. And the Republicans had a last gasp through Tillerson/Mattis/etc. But they're gone too.
Trump and Harris actually have a remarkable amount of agreement in foreign policy. They both want to support Israel less. They both want to confront China. They both want to draw down support for Ukraine and have a negotiated settlement. Though they disagree on how much pressure they should place on Ukraine and how fast that settlement needs to be. Both want to shift more burden onto Europe and shift resources to the Pacific. Though Trump wants to be far more aggressive about it. They're also both suspicious of trade deals and mostly want to focus on distributing economic spoils to domestic constituencies (though different ones) in part generated through economic nationalism. Both want to build regional coalitions and then put increased burden on them to maintain their local regions with reduced American support. Though they differ somewhat in who will take the lead.
The biggest practical difference is that Harris wants to have a negotiated truce in the Middle East with Iran. Their point of view is that basically the Republicans "lost" the region and they now have to find a modus vivendi with the dominant power, Iran. This is not really true and is more based on the fact they believe the War on Terror failed for domestic political reasons. (And in a few cases because they were being advised by literal paid agents of Iran. This is simply a fact. There were court convictions.) But it's what they believe. Trump has a more sober view of Iran: it's a rogue state that resorting to terrorism to cover that weakness and while it's probably not resolvable they want to hit it back when it hits us for credibility reasons. But both ultimately want to pull back. Just for different reasons.
That said, while this is important Iran is inarguably the least big of the big three (China, Russia, Iran). Iran isn't even the biggest power in its region the way Russia is.
The main difference is actually on the level of philosophy. Harris believes in the US as the leader of an international alliance, an international order that upholds a certain set of values and institutions. She believes large planks of her domestic agenda (climate change, fighting inequality, reining in corporate power) need to be done internationally or they won't work. Meanwhile Trump believes in more naked national self-interest and not only that a multipolar world is inevitable but desirable because it frees us from obligations to weaker allies and would allow us to share in the division of spoils.
The US is very lucky that all three of its major opponents decided to have major crises just at this moment of weakness. In a world of US retreat the main US opponents have all decided to shoot themselves directly in the foot, leading to a net increase of the power mostly of US neutral or friendly countries at the expense of both the US and its opponents.
How much of this is inevitable, given our budget constraints? We have unsustainable social security, medicare, and medicaid budgets, and sooner or later, either we assume we can borrow infinity dollars per year forever or those unsustainable costs are going to cut into our aircraft carrier and occupy-them-for-their-own-good budget.
How much of what is inevitable? The US military spending level is already very low in historical terms. In fact it's the lowest it's been since before the World Wars. We could boost it up without significantly adding to the deficit without much issue or with relatively mild tax increases. Even returning to the levels of ten years ago would be a significant increase.
Haven't you noticed that there is already a full scale war in the area and it has been going on for a year now? Pretending that we are somehow in a state of non-war in the eastern Med is positively Bidenesque in its level of disinterest in facts on the ground.
I'm also curious if there is literally anything that you think would be worse than a war -- a war that the United States is not required to participate in, incidentally. Maybe it would be, you know, bad for our interests to just peacefully hand the keys to the Middle East over to Iran? We've already seen how they've closed the Red Sea to everyone but Russia and China, and that's already under our appeasement policy.
From the POV of the Biden-Harris administration, the worst thing is headline news that makes Americans feel bad, and particularly things that make them feel bad about being Americans under the Biden-Harris administration.
Headline stories about e.g. poor innocent children being killed in a brutal war, anywhere, any time, make Americans feel bad. And if they're being killed with American weapons by America's allies, that makes Americans feel bad about being Americans even if there aren't American soldiers involved.
Arab terrorists killing Israelis isn't news any more. It's not a problem to Biden-Harris. Israel killing Palestinians *in Gaza*, is still sort of newsworthy but, meh, it's kind of the new normal and the death toll has been somewhere in the 30-40 thousand range for ages, so that's only a minor problem.
A war between Israel and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, that's new and extra-newsworthy. A war fought with beeper bombs rather than the usual sort, that's new and extra-newsworthy. The bad sort of newsworthy, the sort that makes all Americans feel bad, some of them in ways that might make them not vote for Kamala Harris in five weeks or so.
I think you're really overthinking things if you imagine it's anything much more than that. Not everything is a complex geopolitical game of N-dimensional chess. Particularly not in election season.
I don't disagree that the campaign thinks this way, but this behavior has been going on a lot longer than this election has, and for that matter a lot longer than Biden-Harris have been in office. And it doesn't just apply to Israel.
It strikes me as a very common pattern from the US State Department and similar organs: they _think_ they are cleverly playing N-dimensional chess. They believe they can precisely calibrate words and sanctions and cruise missiles to e.g. somehow get back Ukraine's occupied territory from Russia but without making any Russians upset in the process. Support in prime-time speeches, then leak opposition to the New York Times. Supply this weapon, slow-walk that weapon, approve this target but deny that target, lie about the whole thing publicly while bragging about it on background. And the results, well, how has that worked out for Ukraine?
This is of course fucking deranged, pardon my French. These guys think they're all Metternich, when they're more at the level of Borat. And to be honest a truly brilliant diplomat would realize you don't have remotely the amount of control you think you have, and wouldn't try schemes like this to start with. Diplomacy is just war by other means and war is pure chaos.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that you think has been going on "a lot longer than Biden-Harris have been in office". You talk about the US limiting weapons deliveries and pushing for cease-fires, and yes, there's been entirely too much of that w/re both Israel and Ukraine. But those conflicts postdate Biden's inauguration, both are fully explained by the "minimize ugly anti-American headlines" strategy, and before Biden when was the last time that the US was sending weapons to a belligerent for us to suspend and pressure into a cease-fire?
And as for the State Department imagining they are playing N-dimensional chess, no, I've seen no sign of that and I've been paying pretty close attention to a lot of that. One, *maybe* two dimensions. And not because they're stupid; more that they aren't that particular *kind* of stupid.
I don’t know enough to specifically address the “neo-Ottoman” theory Badran discusses, but he does seem unhappy with the fact that the US has other interests and client states in the region. That makes me question his judgement, since it’s been that way since WWII.
Even putting aside Israel completely, how does this neo-Ottoman approach benefit America's other interests and client states? Our client states are all enemies of Iran! And Iran is a close ally of Russia and China!
If the US security apparatus has decided that the middle east is no longer a priority...that would seem to make rational sense? We no longer need the oil, and the PRC presents a much bigger challenge, probably requiring a full concentration of our strength. To decide that we no longer need or want to police the middle east seems like rational self-interested realpolitik.
What is less clear is why we would hand off to Iran, instead of to some place more friendly (Turkey maybe, which is even in NATO).
Trump's plan was to create an alliance of Sunni Arab states backed by Israel. It was somewhat working. Biden immediately sabotaged this when he got into office and China swooped in. Then Iran blew China's deal up by attacking Saudi Arabia. Then the US decided it was going to try Iran Deal 2 and a broader regional peace. Then Iran blew it up again by attacking Israel. Though it doesn't seem fully blown up. The Arab powers seem to have realized that whatever theoretical alternative China might offer the US actually shows up. Saudi Arabia is now actively stumping for an alliance with the US and to be a security partner.
He withdrew negotiators from Trump era negotiations around Israel and the Gulf States, demanded Saudi Arabia stop an offensive against the Houthis, delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group and reopened negotiations with Iran, and snubbed Saudi Arabia/communicated hostility to them. I guess sabotage might be the wrong term since it wasn't subtle or done in secret.
China then swooped in to try and take America's place. They got a deal done and then Iran immediately blew it up. (And by "immediately" I mean "within a few months.") Then Biden reversed course and by that point Saudi Arabia was willing to overlook what had happened. And then Iran did 10/7.
I'm not sure about leaving the middle east. From the one hand it makes sense, from the other, things like that have the tendency to bite your bottom when you look elsewhere. I am much more sure that you can not hand off the middle east to Turkey much more than you can give it to France. They are a strong country not too deeply in the enemy coalition, but they just don't have the same influence in the middle east that Iran has.
Huh? If I just look at the map, then Turkey borders more middle eastern countries than Iran does. If I look at Google, they have double the GDP. What am I missing?
Remember when an Iranian general was killed and then Iran gave precise warning of the retaliatory drone strike, so AFAIK no lives were lost. This was both a show of strength and a show of a willingness to de-escalate towards some bargain. The bargain now seems to be that Hezbollah loses the ability to fire rockets on Israel, but keeps the control over Lebanon. The alternative to that might be a much larger drone strike without warning.
If this were to actually happen I'm sure Israel would accept it, but as we've seen since 1701 was passed nobody is going to enforce such a deal on Hezbollah.
Yeah, to me it seems more like the standard waffling, just like with the homeless problem. Actually solving the problem one way or another would lead to Bad Things happening, which is to say, Bad Things that we're not used to. It's much more convenient to keep the situation in stasis, so that the only Bad Things happening are the ones that we're already used to. That way no one (important) has to suffer, especially from taking a political position that might alienate some of their voting base.
This might have the side effect of letting a competent growing power (not sure if this describes Iran) sneakily take control of the situation. But I don't think that's an actual objective, just a potential consequence that's not worth preventing.
> Also, there's the aspect that if you are working for the American security apparatus and you are determined to manage the decline rather than reverse it, you should be hanged for treason. But one thing at a time.
This kind of logic leads to Russia invading Ukraine. Empires do wax and wane, and making sure the decline is properly managed can make sure you go the "Britain" way or better.
Reversing the decline doesn't mean randomly lashing out. It means that you look at the situation with clear eyes and think of how to improve your position, not of how to just accept being a loser. Your nation can't always be number one, but that goal should always be your north star. Tomorrow better and stronger than today.
But rationally looking at the situation with clear eyes and thinking of how to improve your position probably leads exactly to the point of getting the fuck out of the middle east. There's nothing there that we need, and we have more pressing challenges elsewhere, that require a concentration of our strength. So why fritter our strength away trying to police some sand dunes?
I'm not forgetting about it. We have enough oil for our own use, we don't need the middle eastern stuff. Maybe our European allies do, but then, they can secure their own damn oil supplies. And I don't think there is much US trade shipping through the red sea. So I think the rational, self interested move for Uncle Sam is to GTFO the red sea entirely, and if the region wants to go to hell, let it. And if France (say) wants to protect red sea shipping because it needs the oil, let it do that also, but it's not our problem.
Going through the Mediterranean instead of all the way around Africa is indeed a big deal in terms of transport time and cost. I hope covid taught us that modern supply chains are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions, like a bunch of militants blowing up commercial ships so they have to take a much worse route. Even if most of that shipping isn't going directly to the US, that shipping being disrupted will certainly have costs for the US.
There have been a lot of military actions in the region that don't have much to do with global commerce. Afghanistan was about denying Al-Qaeda bases in the region; Iraq was about the violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty, which is at least somewhat related to American international hegemony. Certainly a lot of that wasn't necessary to secure peace and trade, and removing secular dictators only created a power vacuum exploited by Islamist radicals.
The current situation with Houthi militias is largely a consequence of the US supporting Israel. But Israel is going to be fighting the Palestinians regardless of American pressure, if the current conflict is anything to go by. And I don't see the US dropping Israel as an ally any time soon, especially as Iran is a mutual enemy and the only regional power that poses a threat to US dominance. The Ukraine war also plays a part, as Russia has been supplying Iran (who supplies the Houthis) with anti-ship weaponry. Partially this is retaliation for supporting Ukraine, and partially a warning against US/NATO forces taking action against Russia.
The deep state - and I mean this in a totally non-conspiratorial way, just the personnel in the State Dept and Pentagon who direct foreign policy - are not very interested in explaining or justifying US actions. There were a lot of wrong-headed and not clearly thought out initiatives, which is how we ended up with decades of failure from 'nation building' and 'spreading democracy'. But the US world hegemony post-WWII is predicated on maintaining stability. I have a lot of libertarian complaints in this direction, but isolationism hasn't seemed to work out in the past, and the last 70 years have been some of the most peaceful and prosperous in the world. So the whole American hegemony seems to have something going for it.
Europe is an American dependency, which is a feature and not a bug. The whole formulation of NATO in the beginning of the Cold War was to keep the US forces deployed in Europe. That way, any Soviet attack would necessarily involve attacking the US, which would trigger a nuclear response. This is also why I call it the American hegemony rather than empire; I don't know what kind of empire pays tribute to its subjects. Maybe NATO could have been disbanded in the '90s after the Soviet collapse, but the idea seems pretty unthinkable now.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I prefer having more money rather than less. And given how much wailing and gnaishing of teeth there was a few years ago over a minor bit of inflation, then I highly doubt I'm alone.
Break with powerful, civilized winners who mostly do what we say, in order to side with weak, medievalist losers who hate us and want us dead... well, it would be on brand for our elites, I'll give you that much.
But there's a difference between "fuck this place I'm out" and "fuck this place, but let's not actually leave and instead fight like demons to put it under the control of a brutal terrorist theocracy that's been at war with us since 1979, and pay them for the privilege."
I have a lot of time for isolationism with regards to the Middle East. I don't know that I agree, but it's a reasonable point of view. I don't have time for the weird compulsion to hug Iran that the center-left in this country has had since Obama.
Is the thesis that there is a faction in Washington that is actively fighting like demons to put the middle east under the control of Iran? That seems like an extraordinary claim to me, very unlikely to be true. What seems far more likely is that there is a large faction that wants to GTFO, but feels (for whatever reason) that a full withdrawal is politically impossible, so does whatever seems necessary in the short term to minimize American commitments to the region.
I want to agree with you because stupidity usually suffices to explain rather than malice, but there is a scandal currently swirling around Obama's Middle East envoy Robert Malley involving some pretty serious claims of Iranian influence operations. There is smoke out there, at least.
Problem isn't middle east or one specific issue. Problem is that "try harder" isn't enough to reverse a general decline. Smarter maybe, do strategically impactful things, yes. But to simply take every particular theatre and ask the people involved to just try harder...
Freddie is one of the few bloggers I like even more then Scott A, but man, Freddie got absolutely BODIED in this exchange. It was brutal. Learn when to take your L and move on, FD.
Thank you for the link. FdB seems to start from the premise that computer in every office and home followed by internet in every office and home followed by internet in every pocket does not matter in terms of way of life and does not constitue progress on par with indoor plumbing (his example) or, say, the industrial revolution (the salient example IMO).
This premise is so alien to me that I had to read several times to even understand what he means.
I disagree with Freddie in the details, but I agree in the abstract.
I love the internet as much as the next guy. But it's really not in the same class of importance as steel/nitrogen/electricity. Man cannot live on cat-memes alone.
Nuclear weapons aren't very important in daily life--far less important than steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch. But nuclear weapons pose a threat for mass-death and destruction of working civilzations that steel and electricity and fertilizers don't. It's quite possible for this pattern to happen in other ways--perhaps modern computing is not as big a deal as I think in terms of human well-being, but that doesn't mean that hostile superhuman AGI might not end up being a very big deal indeed for humans it decides are in the way of its plans.
I suspect some people are getting tired of seeing me relitigate this topic by now. To put my opinion on a bumbersticker: the arc of history is sigmoidal; we're already past the inflection point; having an IQ of 9 billion trillion does not confer godhood. I'm quite confident of this.
The *absence* of steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch, would probably kill about as many people as nuclear weapons. In part because the biggest entry in the Global Thermonuclear War body count is people who starved to death because the supply chain for Haber-Bosch got severely broken.
If the "Thrifty Gene" became less common in populations that discovered agriculture earlier, then why are South Asians so prone to obesity? The Indus River Valley was one of the first regions to discover agriculture.
I have a bit of a fun challenge. There is an immense diversity of beliefs that can be categorized as supernatural or paranormal. Yet, when people are asked on the Internet, whether they ever experienced anything funny, the vast majority of them will be ghost stories. Why?
Note that ghost stories don't make sense in any worldview. If there is a god, people's ghost should be in heaven or hell. If there is not a god, why are there ghosts/souls?
"Ghost", in many ghost stories, is rather close to a more "neutral" way to describe an entity that might otherwise be described as an "evil spirit" or a "demon", both of which are of course perfectly compatible with God. In cases where we're genuinely talking about the dead contacting the living, well, that's not incompatible with theism either, and indeed is often a major part of saint hagiographies.
Right. The world of Harry Potter includes magic and ghosts and curses and such, but doesn't seem to involve any God or gods taking an active part in the world.
Participants are shown image #1, then asked to record their dreams for a week, then shown image #2.
Image #1 showing up in dreams after it was shown is just a media effects on dreams experiement, and whats really being tested for here.
But .. image #2 showing up in dreams before it was shown is kind of precognyiom....
(If you were actually experiementally testing precog, you would maker image #1 and image #2 completely unrelated, but as this experiment is not a prec og experiment, you dont, so a spurious result appears where image #2 shows up in dreams before it is shown bec ausde it is partly predictable from image #1),
In theory there are lots of paranormal events, and one can easily invent brand new ones — flying dogs, people who can change their height just by concentrating on it. But I’m having trouble thinking of many that we are all sort of familiar with. Let’s see, werewolves, vampires, telepathy, telekinesis, foreknowledge. What am
I am in a worksup next to a cthedral, workimng away al day on creating a copy of a medieval stained glass panel. Very toxic chemicals. Very sharp edges of cut glass. High termepetures when using the kiln. Danger all around you, and you have to be careful. Also, I have to paint, and captures something of the spirit if the original.
Ok, after some hours of this, time to pack up for the day and clean up and pack away all this horendously toxic stuff. And then I go into the cathedral, and look at genuine old sta ned glass. Just look at it....
Something just barely supernatural about the experience.
As an evangelical, my dad raised us not to believe in ghosts. "There's no such thing as ghosts, son", he'd say "When you die you either go to Heaven or Hell, you don't hang around here." When we asked what the deal was with ghost stories and experiences he'd say "They're either making it up, or it's demons."
Maybe because they have to do with what happens to humans in the afterlife, which people interpret as more, "You can believe anything about this" than non-afterlife beliefs, so having some slight belief or curiousity in ghost stories ends up more conventional.
When you die you become a ghost. From there you can go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever, but you can stay in ghost mode if you like or if you haven't come to terms with things yet. A lot of people stay in ghost mode to see their family and friends. Maybe their family can see them too, who knows?
Is that any crazier than souls existing at all? If we allow for the existence of a spirit world why does it need to be so rigid?
Folk beliefs in ghosts and spirits are universal, it’s just that some religions seek to suppress them. In some traditions the line between ghost and spirit gets very blurry.
You have been cursed. One of the whole numbers from zero to 9, inclusive, will become unspeakable by you. If you try to say it, you'll instead blurt out whatever word is most taboo in your culture. For Americans, that's probably the N-word. Since the gods are not complete bastards, you are allowed to choose which number will be unspeakable. Which number do you choose?
(If you do not choose a number, your unspeakable number will be one.)
The gods are more intelligent than that. Your Tourette's is triggered by your intent to communicate the chosen integer, not by the actual utterance you select to do so. What now?
I've encountered a number of twitter posts saying it could be pretty bad if there's a port strike (affecting ports on the eastern US).
So far I haven't encountered anything describing whether a strike would be "justified," insofar as anything causing that much damage is justified.
How much are the port workers getting paid now? How much is the new offer? How much do they want? And what's this about wanting promises of no automation? That sounds kind of awful and selfish, to be honest.
$20 an hour starting, $39 an hour top of scale, plus overtime. Total tends to be low six figures to start and $200-300k at the high end for seniors. Plus generous benefits probably worth six figures on their own.
How much is the new offer?
40% increase over six years.
How much do they want?
77% increase over six years.
And what's this about wanting promises of no automation?
They want no automation. They also tried to stop things like containerization. It's because they think automation will mean fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.
There's also issues of corruption with corporate claiming that they're denying members in favor of outright nepotism (basically making a hereditary profession) and exaggerating hours to climb the seniority scale faster and stuff like that. The ILS is claiming that this is made up and an excuse to impose more oversight or control over their work schedules.
So we need to align all the incentives eh? What about paying a bonus to every stevedore that's a % of every extra dollar of goods brought in to that specific port compared to a rolling average of the previous X years. So working harder, automating unloading etc could all be to their benefit...
I'm skeptical of this kind of deals. They can be Goodharted in both directions - both the metric of their share of work, and the number they're being paid for. Profit for example is trivial to siphon out of the company before being declared profit.
And from another point of view, what did they do to deserve this long term share of profit? To keep things balanced they should take a commensurate pay cut. And if you go there, you can just pay part of the salary in shares, or just make it easier for them to buy shares. Or, if they believe in the company, they can probably already take part of their payckeck and buy shares with it.
For these cases I wonder about the practicality of buying off the existing employees in exchange for allowing automation and other productivity improvements. Literally just bribe them. How many dockworkers are we talking about here?
We have some of the worst ports in the world by productivity. Comparable with Africa. These are also some of the worst unions out there (why do you think The Wire picked the Stevedore Union, of all Unions, for their Union arc?).
Fire them all and bar them from similar employment, 1981 ATC style. Bring in Army Corps of Engineers. We don't have to live like this.
As always, they want as much as they can get, plus they are anti-automation. Here is the union president in a recent interview flexing by noting the economic damage they can inflict (Biden can force them back to work for 90 days but likely won't, and the union basically says they will work at 1/4 speed if this were to happen):
In terms of how much they make, here is probably a good analogue based on West coast dock workers -- $200K plus around $100K in benefits is common for front line workers, bosses make $300K+ per year:
Will we get a repeat of the air traffic controller strike back in the day? How difficult would it be to replace a dock worker, either with a new employee or with a national guardsman?
That seems very unlikely and not sure on precedent there, other than in 2002 GW Bush used Taft-Harley to compel west coast strking longshoreman back to work. People in the industry this time are expecting several days of strike, with each day causing ~3 days in backup (1 day lost to no work, 2 days to untangle the growing mess).
I don't know the details of this union, but in general employers are legally barred from firing striking unionized employees. So they can go on strike and do huge economic damage and not get fired. Doesn't seem justified to me no matter how little they're getting paid. They could always quit and find another job.
During strikes over "economic issues" (as opposed to statutory "unfair labor practices"), employers can hire permanent replacement workers, subject to vaguely defined limits, and strikers can be laid off to make room for the permanent replacements.
If unionized employees are doing outsized damage when they go on strike, I see a Coasian solution!
I don't know the details and maybe the law gives the unions too much power, but, if so, the problem is bad law not "selfish" workers. Workers should try to maximize their earnings every bit as much as companies should. If the playing field isn't fair, the government has failed.
If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it? What's "justified" got to do with it? Do companies pay their workers what is "justified"?
OTOH, if the unions have too much power, they should be broken up. Same for the ports if they have some sort of monopoly.
a) Employers have the same right (to arbitrarily stop paying their employees at any point to gain leverage in negotiation and force them to accept lower wages)
b) Striking workers don't interfere with workers who choose not to strike, and
c) The employer is free to fire any employee who goes on strike, just as an employee is free to quit if the employer stops paying them.
The laws around unions and collective bargaining have evolved over the past 150 years or so and vary tremendously from state to state in the US. I don't believe there is a one-size fits all solution here. Different rules for different industries might make sense. A smart state government will figure out the optimal rules and a dumb one won't.
No, I would consider that criminal, and I think the law would too. Striking is something most unions can legally do. If you think that gives them an unreasonable amount of leverage, fair enough, maybe it is. Maybe this particular union should not have the right to strike. But I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the rights they do have.
Nobody earns what they deserve, only what they negotiate.
Sure. I'd also consider the (IMO much more common) case of an employer falsely claiming that their employees are fairly paid a negotiating tactic, so it would be a strange asymmetry not to.
Do white Americans have a culture other than "American"? In a thread on the subject of culture last week someone suggested that white Northeasterners have a particular culture. Maybe so, and I'm aware regional subcultures in the rural South exist, but is upper-middle class white urban American a culture? If so, what defines it? If not, does the USA contain some people who belong to a subculture of America and others who do not?
White Alaskans had a very unique culture when I was growing up there in the 90s. Similar to general rural American culture but with some big differences: 1. More libertarian then conservative. 2. LOTS of artists in Alaska, because artists are drawn to the allure of that wild place. Never any problem securing library funding. 3. Extreme drinking culture. I estimate there were six times as many bars per capita. At least. I think only the Great Lakes region exceeds Alaska in alcohol consumption. Our mayor got a DUI and the political consequences were near-zero. 4. Alaskan whites are FAR less insular then you'd expect from rural Americans. Far more accepting of strangers; though they aren't going to greet you with open arms on day one.
I left Alaska in 2005, so some of these trends might be less true today.
From direct experience, I'd say sort of, but in the correlated collection of traits sense as opposed to a real sense of Belonging to a Community. I'm a Californian, Bay Arean specifically, and here in a midwest college town people do seem to know I'm Not From Around Here and I have been accused of being a California stereotype. I think it's more accurately categorized as an Atheist/Hippie synthesis subculture, with heavy white-middle class influence. If that is a culture, it's a very loose and fuzzy one.
There are many identifiable and in some cases overlapping subcultures among Unhyphenated Americans. Bostonians are not Hillbillies are not Texans; Southerners overlap the last two but are a distinct thing on their own, etc, etc. And not every Unhyphenated American who lives in Boston or Appalachia or Texas is a member of those particular subcultures.
Meanwhile, Unhyphenated Americans as a whole are a culture, in the same way that "{X]-Americans" are a culture for many distinct values of X. All of these can be subdivided, but they can also be considered as a whole and will have members who aren't part of one of the subcultures.
Also, "subcuture" is relative. If we're talking about e.g. Hillbillies and Americans, the Hillbillies are a subculture. In other contexts, it makes sense to just refer to them as a culture.
Also also, Unhyphenated Americans are still mostly white, but aren't necessarily white.
It's a great review of a fascinating book, but I don't think it addresses my question because it doesn't say much about people who have been very geographically mobile over the past couple of generations. I don't identify with a particular region of the USA, however I do identify with living in large metro areas.
The resurgence of 1960s racialist outrage in response to George Floyd's treatment manufactured would-be 'progressives' "whiteness".
Most Americans ignore "race", implicitly understanding it's a derogatory social construct the illiberal Left likes to beat us over the head with. If one has to invoke one's race in an argument, they're racist.
"Tell me you've never traveled outside of large cities without telling me you've never traveled outside large cities."
But that's not even accurate, because there are significant cultural differences even between the largest cities. Different foods, different driving habits, different accents, different social customs, different religions. In general, travel a hundred miles and you'll experience different cultures - so long as you get off the highway.
All those things strike me as superficial. Whether I'm in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Austin, I'm going to eat about the same food: steak, seafood, eggs, bacon, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, hamburgers, pizza, sushi, tapas, Brazilian Steakhouse, Taco Bell, subway sandwiches, deli sandwiches... My location won't affect the music I listen to, the books I read or the types of people I spend time with. The main differences between those places that matters to me is the weather.
So you eat at the places you are comfortable eating at, and don't interact with the locals. That's fine, but if you don't experience culture, it's because you have chosen not to experience culture.
Right, but you are talking about sampling other cultures, which I do, but it only makes me a tourist of those sub-cultures, someone spending their weekend in Lafayette eating boudin sausage and listening to a Zydeco band. I'm trying to figure out if *I* exist in a legitimate subculture.
My larger question from last week, and why here I ask about "white" middle-class urban Americans, is whether generic unhyphenated white Americans have an ethnicity. The question of unique ethnicity inexorably led to the question of having a unique culture. Some suggested that of course white Americans have a culture but it varies by region. But as you hint at, local subcultures tend to exist more outside of big cities than inside of them (with plenty of exceptions).
What I really think is that white metro-Americans don't have a distinctive culture separate from non-white metro-Americans. By "metro-American" I mean professional class people who live in cities. Or to make it overly reductive: Blue America.
Maybe you mean the yuppie class. Or, as the bugman likes to call it, "the brahmin caste". Dude has a pseudo-hindi 5-point taxonomy where he breaks down Dems into blacks, latinos, and yuppies -- and Republicans into WASPS and farmers. I've seen taxonomies that are very similar elsewhere, but the bugman's version is top of mind.
Big cities still have their own culture, but it takes a different form. Just observe the different stereotypes of sports fans.
My impressions of some large cities: Boston is nice, and people there are friendly - I'd say it's probably the closest I've encountered to what "Blue America" thinks that "Blue America" is. New Haven and Hartford are, for lack of a better term, skittish/weasely. New York City is full of itself (city that never sleeps my ass - 90% of the city is closed down at 5:15 PM, including stuff like stationary stores) which fancies itself multicultural but is actually a bunch of isolated groups who almost never interact. Pittsburgh is poor people, some of whom have money. Detroit is Moscow in the era of Peter the Great - all the important people have left and everybody remaining behind is throwing a party as everything falls apart around them. Grand Rapids is a real city that deserves to be mentioned with other real cities, as a culture. Chicago is, at least in the minds of its residents, serious business, but is actually just Britain, a giant pile of passive aggression. Seattle is what Chicago thinks it is. Los Angeles is Los Angeles - they'll tell you who they are if you listen, both the good and bad, and it's accurate. Salt Lake City is set in the garden of Eden (seriously, that city and its environs are freaking gorgeous) and the residents are aware of it and appreciate of it, and that was the most annoying city to visit back when I smoked because huge swathes of the city are just plain wholesome and I had to walk a mile out of my way to get a pack of cigarettes. Can't speak to Phoenix. Austin is folk culture slowly being strangled by people who move there for folk culture and then isolate themselves because they don't actually like folk culture (we'll see what it becomes). Dallas is legitimately a city that never sleeps and has strong DoD cultural artifacts, but everybody there thinks they're Texas; Fort Worth is a bunch of people who think they're Texas and they're not half wrong; Arlington is desperately trying to matter while thinking that Burlington Coat Factory is culture. Houston is the most ghetto-ass city I've ever been in, and not necessarily in a bad way. New Orleans is ... I could write paragraphs here, they're more cowboy than Texas and more serious business than Seattle, the most multicultural place I've been - a unique blend of authoritarian good-ol-boy and capitalistic anarchy, with a hefty dose of hoodoo - they are multicultural in a way which New York City utterly fails at, everybody interacts and mixes together. Atlanta is a good ol' boy in business casual, as a culture. Tampa is a bunch of rich people from New England trying to force Tampa to be a real city that deserves to be in this list while everybody else laughs at them (and "everybody else" includes all the New Englanders who previously moved there and eventually gave up), as a culture. Washington DC is "terminally online" as a culture, at least now; I don't know what it used to be like.
Weird. My perception of Boston, and I've only been there a handful of times but have heard the strong opinions of others, is that its residents are the least nice people in America. But perhaps I'm thinking mostly of working-class Boston.
Part of the confusion here stems from the double standard whereby any TV show, movie, song, dance, food, or slang originating from nonwhites is considered part of that particular subculture, but the same things created by white people (of which the vast majority are) are just considered part of general American culture. A song written by a black person is treated as a unique contribution to "black culture," while a song written by a white person is "just" pop or rock or EDM.
White American subculture is so successful that every other subculture in America immediately races to adopt it into their subculture as well, thus making it part of general American culture (by nature of it being so successful). Slang invented by a white person is not "white slang," it's just "slang", and we don't complain when other cultures use our slang. But certain other cultures notably hate this, screaming of "theft" as if they own certain words and phrases like physical possessions.
See also: "American culture" c.f. the rest of the world. American culture (i.e., white American culture) is so successful that it's even pervasive throughout virtually every other country, and yet America is still oft claimed by insecure Europeans to have no culture. Under this paradigm, you can see why - American culture is so successful that it simply *is* world culture, and so "culture" has evolved to now mean "the way you uniquely deviate from the default, background culture." Well, if you're the group that *invented* the world's default background culture, then you won't tend to deviate from that very much.
Definitely! There's the Midwest cultural region, which has a very different culture form the West or New England, and certainly different from the South. They have different values, different mores, different manners, different accents, different foods, etc. My mom's side of the family is originally from Iowa: I can still remember growing up and my grandma telling me to sit on the "davenport".
You can subdivide much deeper than that. The culture of - to pick a state I'm more familiar with - the upper peninsula of Michigan is quite distinct from the culture of the mitten; it's more isolationist and independent. In the mitten, the culture of Grand Rapids is distinct from the culture of Lansing is distinct from the culture of Flint which is distinct from the culture of Detroit. The culture of Traverse City is distinct from the culture of Fishtown.
Food is easy because it tends to be visible from the road. Lansing has olive burgers. Detroit has coney dogs and pizza. Flint is big on fried chicken. Northern Michigan is big on game meats. The central part of the upper peninsula is big on pasties. Per my wife, who is from Michigan, Grand Rapids has no regional food because they're stuck-up assholes (I asked because I couldn't think of any regional foods from that area). Traverse City has whitefish and cherry everything. Fishtown has a wide variety of seafood, big surprise there.
But there are other differences; accents (the "yooper" accent, which itself can be subdivided by region), religion, driving habits (Detroit is the only place I've seen have bumper-to-bumper traffic all running at 80 MPH), etc. A lot of it is easy to miss if you're just passing through.
An observation. I have noticed that non-southern white Americans and the English don't have a *folk* culture. By folk culture I mean for example things like tartans, kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or cowboy boots and country music for southern American whites. They don't have things like folk music and folk dancing. It died out strangely. (Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.)
I think the upper middle class urban culture there assimilated anyone and anything that could be called folk.
These things are generally a reaction to "universal culture" becoming the prestige culture. When the new thing is discontinuous from the old, the old can be kept around as separate, and nationalism provides the motivation to do so. The culture that gradually developed those things before they became "universal", obviously doesnt have a separate "folk" version.
I dont think we should count the upper and lower classes separately. A class is not a society. In many countries, folk culture drew from the lower classes because the upper had already been strongly modernised, but thats not necessary. Third world folk cultures often draw strong influence from old upper class practices.
What you are describing is *material* culture. New England, for instance, has a rich music and dance culture, our own clothing culture (Johnson jackets, basically the whole classic LL Bean catalog is New England folk clothing that's been commodotized), food (anadama bread as an example). That's setting aside Acadian folk culture which exists here as well (la Kermesse).
I think you just don't know about the folk culture that hasn't been popularized.
>Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.
Speaking as a morris dancer (Gog Magog Molly, the Tattered Court Border morris, plus I've dabbled in Cotswold and rapper), I have not idea what you mean by "authentic folk dancing", but I find it hard to imagine a definition that doesn't fit morris.
There are some sides doing dances straight out of Bacon's black book as written, and there are also lots of sides writing their own dances in the same style.
Also, morris is only one corner of the English folk dance and song scene - there are also a lot of local clubs and festivals. It's not nearly as thriving as it is in Ireland or Scotland, but it's definitely there.
Like, upper-middle class urban Americans definitely have a very distinctive culture and it's definitely not a white culture...but it's mostly white, at least for now. Like, if you go to live theater or a pickleball tournament, it's not all white people, but it's mostly white people, some of whom are uncomfortable with how white it is and are covertly recruiting non-white friends to attend.
Race is weird in the US and adding the white bit obscures more than it clarifies. If you ask whether urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, the answer is obvious, but if you ask whether white urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, people get really careful.
One thing about it is that it's not something you can escape from or into. You're in it at work, you're in it at home. You can't say to yourself "This weekend I'm hanging out with people in my subculture" because you are in it even if you try to leave it. Or if you do manage to leave it, you're a tourist, which is the most white PMC thing there is.
Culture is fractal. You can analyze culture at the level of: the Big 4 in Albion's Seed; China-Town in NYC; a specific venue; anywhere in between. However, whereas most other places consciously recognize their cultures, the U.S. has been on a quest to assimilate everyone into a single melting-pot.
> white Northeasterners
> upper-middle class white urban American
the Boston Brahmins, maybe? I bet Steve Sailor would know. Maybe link to the og thread for more context.
There's lots of subcultures, but it's not necessarily easy to identify them. Every area has its own aspects of culture. At the very least, the food is different.
Many of us are white-collar workers who spend a few years here and a few years there, making friends and family with others who do similar. That's a type of culture, but I don't think it is Culture in the deep sense because not much about it has been passed from generation to generation.
Contrast that to say, Judaism, which is a culture that has been around a while.
Fair. Though to take the parable about alignment further, having an agent lie to everyone else about their stated goals also seems like par for the course.
(That said I do tend to think that many members of the early OAI crew were pro safety)
I'm sure this has been discussed to death before in various places, and it's a bit futile to beat up on a decade old story, but one of the things that annoyed me about HPMOR is how EY would *make up* stuff that has no canon basis and then *make fun of the things he made up himself*. There are enough things that are actually in the books you could mock without making them up yourself! I'm guessing that this was just borne out of carelessness and ignorance (he admitted to not even reading some of the books), but it's still a bad look either way.
There are two big ones that come to mind:
1. The claim that Gringotts will coin arbitrary amounts of gold and silver for you for a minor fee and that the value of the currency is based on its precious metal content.
IIRC the closest canon ever gets to that is a single reference in book 2 to Hermione's parents exchanging muggle money for wizard money at Gringotts. But a) that's *paper money* not gold or silver and b) there's no mention of a fixed exchange rate.
There's no particular evidence that wizard currency's value is based on its precious metal content at all. In fact, the fact the golden coins are the *biggest* is evidence *against* that. As they say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Most real world currencies nowadays have values well above the metal content, so why shouldn't the wizards?
I've long thought that it would be hilarious (and instructive to the "ratfic" genre) to have a story where HPJEV appears in the *real world* and tries to "exploit" it the same way he acts in HPMOR. I have no doubt that he would instantly propose making a fortune by exchanging real world coins and metals, and assume that everyone in the world was terminally stupid for not noticing this opportunity.
The worst part is that we can't even just assume that HPEJV was being stupid here. Apart from the narration itself giving no indication we're not meant to treat this as a brilliant idea, Harry later meets an *in universe* wizard (the occulemency teacher) who *also* agrees that the gold/silver plot is a good idea, even though this wizard lives in the wizarding world and thus should presumably be familiar with the reasons why it realistically wouldn't actually work.
2. The claim that Quidditch scores are *directly* added to House points. This one has *slightly* more evidence in canon, but it's still highly dubious.
AFAIK, the relevant mentions from canon are
* In book 1 when Harry and friends lose 150 points after the dragon incident, he mentions losing all the points he won for Gryffindor in the first Quidditch game, although there's no confirmation of how many points that was.
* At the end of book 1, the house scores are given, and they seem rather low if Quidditch scores were being added in
* In book 2, it is explicitly stated that Gryffindor got 50 points after the first (and only) Quidditch match
To be charitable, I could see how someone who only saw the first line might interpret things this way. However, given that book 2 *unambiguously* implies that the Quidditch scores are not directly added to House points and the bits in book 1 are ambiguous, it seems like this one is throughly busted too.
Harry definitely seems to have access to the script whenever "rationality" is involved. Like when Dumbledore mentions the resurrection stone and the archway in the department of mysteries. Harry instantly dismisses the arch and focuses on the plot critical stone, despite having no evidence about either
The Blame Game:
Two players choose whether to cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both score +1. If both defect, both score 0. If exactly one player defects, then an outside observer, Omega, guesses which player defected. The player that Omega blames gets -5 and the other gets +5.
Omega is familiar with the players and good at guessing what they will do. However, it is not omniscient and you're worried that your opponent knows how to fool Omega. What do you do?
(Should we call it "Omicron" instead of "Omega"?)
How many iterations are there? My default behavior would be to C and see what happens. I don't know how to fool Omega, and I'm assuming that Omega can guess better than 50%, so I don't want to D if they C. And since I don't know how to fool Omega, my best chance of getting ahead is to C if they D and hope Omega guesses right. Plus, if I consistently C, that would help Omega predict me better. So I'd experiment with C and collect data on Omega's accuracy and bias. If Omega gets fooled too often, I suppose this would turn into a game of minimizing my loss, probably by choosing randomly.
So I tried to game this out. I'm not confident that my analysis is immaculate, though.
====
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Bob consistently has Omega's ear.
If Bob wants to consistently disrupt a CC or DD equilibrium in order to chase the +5, Alice can disrupt Bob's attempts to effect a CD or DC outcome by randomizing his own decision each iteration. And if Bob can consistently blame Alice, Alice's randomization effectively halves Bob's +5 EV payouts and halves Alice's own -5 EV losses.
From Bob's perspective, an EV of (3) = (2.5 + .5) he gets from chasing a consistent +5 is still better than the (1) EV a CC agreement, so Alice's "punish by randomizing" strategy isn't enough to fully deter Bob's behavior. Meanwhile, Alice gets an EV of (-2) = (-2.5 + .5).
Therefore, it seems like the reasonable strategies here are: either settle into a stable CC equilibrium [0]; or learn how brownnose Omega. From Alice's perspective (assuming Alice doesn't have Omega's ear and Bob refuses to parley [1]), Alice's reasonable strategies are either "chase CC", or "randomize". From Bob's perspective, it's hardly different from a regular prisoner's dilemma: agree to CC if you feel angelic, chase +5 if you feel psychopathic. So on the meta-level, this shakes out to
_________Bob_G____Bob C
Alice C___-5, 5_____1, 1
Alice R___-2, 3_____-2, 3
where C stands for cooperate, G stands for "gamble on +5", and R stands for "randomize". Which simplifies to
___________1,4______4,1
___________2,2______2,2
Which (according to Jimmy Wales [2]), either settles on RG permanently (like in Second Best/Big Bully), or cycles counterclockwise (like Fixed Sum/Missile Crisis), depending on whether Bob is willing to swap from RG to RC. That is, assuming that we're all rational self-interested psychopaths.
If I were Bob though, I'd probably just park on CC like a good little christian. As for Alice's position, she's kinda at the mercy of Bob.
[0] (or a DD equilibrium, I guess. But since I'm allowed to woo Omega, I assume I'm also allowed to negotiate with the rival player. And why chase the hare instead of the stag when negotiation is on the table?)
[1] the bulk of agency is determined by who has the ear of Omega. If we assume that Omega is willing to listen to either party, it's not really game-theory so much as testing your creativity as a salesman.
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/2x2chart110602.pdf
If you don't pay the bill from your exorcist, do you get repossessed?
I wouldn't recommend ghosting them.
ACXLW Meetup 75: Comparative Advantage and AI by Eli, The Edge book Review by Zvi
Date: Saturday, September 28, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
This links didn't transfer, but should be live on this document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0qDAHj-WdLfaLoez3z3j3K3UnB85eb0Why-suY3nO0/edit?usp=sharing
There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species. It's merely "tribalistic". Something like "racism is favoring your race and that's bad, therefore speciesism, which is favoring your species, is bad". But that assumption is very debatable.
Morality developed among humans as a way for us to get along with unrelated members of other humans. It's a social contract. You do this and I do this and we agree on it so that we can work together to go hunt down a mammoth or defend ourselves from another tribe. Animals cannot do morality the way we do. Sure, they can be affectionate but that same animal could also just suddenly tear you to shreds. I can't make explicit agreements with a bear about what is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that I have never done anything to hurt it before. If we come across each other, it could attack me regardless of whether I had done wrong. It's clear that you just can't do morality in the same way with animals as you do with people.
More broadly, humans are wired to take up the practices of those they are around. You can take a baby from anywhere around the world, plop them somewhere different, and they will try to fit in with the crowd they grow up with. I'm not making some kind of blank slate argument that only nurture matters, but it is the case that children will copy the behaviors of people they come in to contact with and that's unavoidable. Animals have their own nature and simply can't be socialized in that way.
Another important point is that any fertile man can have a child with any fertile woman around the world. Back when monarchies were more prominent, this was important part of establishing alliances. They may hate each other but now they have a common interests in their grandchildren. That possibility ties us together in a way that we could never do with any other non-humans.
Humans vs non-humans is not an "arbitrary" distinction and in fact, it's probably the least arbitrary you can get. It's ok to be speciesist.
>> There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species.
Can you put a % estimate on the "often" in this sentence? How many people do you think hold this position?
In my experience humans are *much* more frequently presumed to be fundamentally different from (and of greater value than) animals, than they are presumed to be equivalent such that "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species." Animal rights activists are an outlier, not a norm, and "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species" believers are a minority within that minority - most people in the animal welfare world think that animals are different from people but want us to be nice to the bunnies and puppies and ponies, etc. Only the very fringiest are arguing human/animal *equality*, and mostly society just mocks those people.
I'm talking about philosophers, not the average person.
Makes sense - what subset of philosophers do you think make this implicit assumption? 50%? 80%? 10%?
And who counts as a philosopher?
As someone who doesn't routinely engage with that community, its hard to assess the importance of the issue if it's just described as coming up "often." I'd agree, for example, that people in the US "often get food poisoning" because of the large population and frequency with which that population eats, but at the same time I don't think that food safety is a significant issue when you break it down on a percentage basis.
I don’t know the percentage. But I do see intellectual arguments that critique human favoritism from people like Peter Singer and he’s very influential. I don’t really see the opposite argument.
I'm willing to bite the bullet and accept that discrimination, in any form, is just a fact of life. It's not like I advocate for full blown slavery. But all the pearl-clutching in the current zeitgeist is absolutely a dumb purity-spiral. Kinda like how Scott complains that you can't talk about "eugenics" without being labeled someone who wants to breed Nazi supersoldiers and torture kittens.
PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit. Thought experiment: Do you support a "Brave New World" setup? I.e. families are outlawed, because "equality" means we should all equally belong to everyone else. Is that a "no"? Oh boy, do I have news for you. You. Are. A. Raging. Racist. And that's fine! Deal with it.
>>PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit.
Is that how you define family? Yeesh. I don't know about you, but speaking personally, I'm not related to my wife, nor are my parents related to one another.
Hopefully you can say the same. And hopefully, like me, you can say that only approximately *half* your aunts and uncles are genetically related to you (i.e. that your aunts and uncles are *not* marrying their brothers, sisters, cousins, or other relatives)? Assuming so, there's a large number of people in your family that are genetic strangers to you.
I don't think it's that controversial of an observation to assert that: Of everyone on the planet, your kids (and conversely, your parents) are the people who are most genetically related to you (barring some exceptions; e.g. twins, clones, adoption, etc). I.e. there's a continuum of relatedness. And e.g. if we plot on a continuum the 9 billion residents of Earth, according to their genetic relatedness to you specifically, with the left-side being most-related and right-side being least-related, your kids and immediate relatives will be on the leftward tail of the distribution.
As for spouses, the fact that spouses are unrelated (... usually <looks at pakistan>) is likely an artifact of the single-cell bottleneck. I.e. in a world free of disease/defects/etc, Azathoth would probably see fit that we'd all reproduce asexually by default, like sponges. In which case, each person's mother and father would consist of one and the same organism.
But sure: define the term "family" however you like. it won't change the fact that genetic-relatives often live in close proximity and favor each other. And that any project which seeks to level the socio-economic playing-field in toto, necessarily requires the dismantling of certain institutions.
I don’t seem to recall arguing for dismantling any institutions or levelling any playing fields in toto. If that’s in my response somewhere, by all means point out where.
My intention was simply to debunk the asinine assertion that the “concept of family is inherently racist, because you’re privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you rather than merit.”
My brother is married. He and his wife have no children, and they don’t plan to, but she does not work. He could be certainly be argued to be “privileging" her in a way that he does not privilege others, and the privilege can be argued not to have been distributed “on merit” since it comes by virtue of her being his family, but I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that regardless of whether it is being distributed on merit, it most certainly isn’t being distributed based on genetic similarity.
So on the off chance that anyone read the initial post and was worried for a moment that privileging their family members, who are their most intimate associations tied to them in a close knit web of mutual support and interdependence, is somehow equivalent to privileging people of the same race, which is a population likely numbering in the millions and overwhelmingly composed of complete ass strangers who have done and probably will do nothing for them (and may, indeed, even wage war on them - see e.g. Ukraine/Russia) but happen to share with them a handful of ancillary traits like skin color and suitability or lack thereof for digesting milk, they need not worry about it.
It's possible we're all "a little bit racist" because everyone has inherent biases, but we're not all racists for favoring our families.
"did you know spouses aren't related? deboonked!"
I've already acknowledged that spouses are exceptions. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. On the contrary, they're the exception which proves the rule. So idk what this is supposed to accomplish.
And yes, family members are often trustworthy. Two things can be true at once.
I don't think you're engaging with this fairly. I think you're responding emotionally because you feel uncomfortable with the implicit accusation. Because idk how you thought your comment would survive scrutiny.
I understand it must be terribly convenient to assert "the exception proves the rule" whenever contrary evidence arises, but contrary evidence doesn't actually prove a proposition.
A few more examples-
My mother's sister married a man. He is not related to me, but I have 'privileged' him by helping him find work when he was between things.
My cousin adopted a child. She is not related to me, but I'd still help her if she needed an extra hand moving, or a character reference, etc, etc.
My wife has two sisters. Neither are related to me. One I've gotten to know and would do things to help, even if my wife were to die. I'd 'privilege' her based purely on our socially-created family tie, regardless of genetics.
It seems pretty clear that family ties are socially created and genetically correlated, not merely genetically created. Take any human child from its genetic family, drop it in outer mongolia with a group of humans to raise it. Ask it who its family is.
If you don't know how my comment could survive scrutiny, I'd re-read your own, because actual scrutiny is being applied, it isn't holding up, and all you've done to defend it is state "the exception proves the rule," as if that were a concept that actually worked.
Technically speaking, the origin of the phrase "the exception proves the rule" actually rests on an archaic definition of "prove," which roughly translates to "the exception *tests* the rule." Modern English has sort of mutated it into this upside down framework where "contrary evidence somehow proves I'm right," but that's not how reasoning actually works.
I'm going to talk about in-group favoritism in another thread but I would say that there are practical reasons to expand your circle beyond your family and also, like I mentioned above, there are good reasons to make distinctions between humans vs non humans. It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
> It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
perhaps not as solid as you imagine. <looks at homo floresiensis>
Imagine the least convenient world, where there existed a breed of humans who were dumber than afghan hounds. You can't realistically trade or negotiate with them. Also, imagine a breed of humans who are superhuman in every meaningful dimension.
Are you still going to draw an arbitrary line around species, only? Which is just a biological category which captures who you can breed with? Does that sound like a sane, principled justification to you? Rather than a posthoc rationalization for the status quo? "This orc is trying to eat my liver. But technically I can breed with it. Therefore by the laws of morality, we're natural allies". To me, that's bonkers. The orc and I are *not* natural allies. And whether or not I can technically breed with it is 100% orthogonal.
Meanwhile, lots of human beings are married to someone. Which is the ultimate form of discrimination. There's 9 billion people, and you've decided to single out one in particular as being deserving of your love. If you just accept that discrimination isn't always bad, you can forsake doing mental gymnastics around arbitrary lines and just do ordinary cost/benefit analysis. It only feels scary because it's a thought crime to ever admit that the emperor's new clothes are actually invisible.
Sure in that situation it would be different but luckily we don’t live in the least convenient possible world. Im not interested in Universal Axiomatic Platonic Moral Truths. I’m interested in what’s practical.
Well in that case, we have no material disagreements. I can't help but wonder if there was even a controversy to begin with. I.e. the size of the shitty-dogfood industry is evidence that, yes actually, favoring humans over non-humans (even "man's best friend") is the norm by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the ethicists you speak of who "implicitly assume" that "specism is indefensible" are simply delulu.
Normal people don’t have coherent beliefs. People who think intellectually drive intellectual changes. I think that basically we need to stop this push towards the position of “animals should be seen as more equal”.
Contrariwise, there's also practical reasons to reduce the circle. As soon as you make this about utils accounting rather than deontology, you open the door for logical contention.
Yes, humans being susceptible to engaging in outgroup discrimination is indeed a fact of life. But, humans being susceptible to cholera is also a fact of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate cholera. Humans being susceptible to committing theft and robbery and rape are facts of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate crime. Why, then, should societies not take steps to eliminate outgroup discrimination? "It's a fact of life" is obviously not a valid reason.
Some level of outgroup discrimination makes sense. Consider that you are trying to do something altruistic, charitable, like giving someone money. There is a chance that person might be a scammer. You can probably more easily detect who is a scammer if you share the same culture.
An even more serious case can be made for unwritten rules. When culturally similar people share unwritten rules, they also share a subconscious understanding how how often, in what cases, how far can you bend those rules. But when people do not share it then it will be written rules, and then no exceptions, no bending etc.
If you have absolutely no ingroup preference, that ends up being a negative as it is easily exploited by hostile outgroup members who will realize they can enter your system and then cooperate among themselves to overthrow it.
The ideal approach should be to admit only appropriately vetted outgroup members. In other words, bring back gatekeeping.
"it's an (inevitable) fact of life" was the conclusion, not the derivation.
The derivation was implicit in the PSA. If you follow "racism is morally impermissible" all the way to its logical conclusions, you start having to engage in some crazy mental gymnastics. Such as "specism is morally intolerable" or "you must disown your family" or "we must destroy the cultural Western Canon" or "we must all pretend that walking through the inner city at 3 AM is perfectly safe" or "you must allow yourself to be scammed and/or mugged when you tour Delhi". To worship the alter of racial equality, you must renounce the alter of Gnon.
Your comment acts like "racism is bad" is self-evident. But really, I think the onus is on *you* to explain why. "Because fance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was morally reprehensible! Obviously!" But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. Thought experiment: would slavery somehow have been more morally-permissible of an institution if the ethnicities of the slaves were representative of their host populations?
If you're still having trouble with this, let's return to the family question specifically as an example.
A) "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
B) race/skin-color/ethnicity are just a vague, premodern proxies for genetic-relatedness.
C) Familial institutions privilege the members of society who are *most* genetically related to a given person.
D) discrimination by race-membership is bad, but discrimination by family-membership is good. (??)
E) therefore, there must be some threshold between "siblings" and "random stranger" where discrimination flips from permissible to impermissible.
Your homework assignment is to identify that threshold, and justify it from first principles (i.e. not as an arbitrary historical-artifact of Eskimo kinship).
>But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. ... "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
1. I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
2. I disagree with your definition of racism. What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism. And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group. And that is the key difference between discrimination in FAVOR of your family versus discrimination AGAINST, say, the Irish. Discrimination in favor of your family is not motivated by animus.
Also, your comment simply passes the buck. I would be quite interested in hearing why racial animosity is supposedly less morally-laudible [0] than non-racial animosity.
[0] le mot juste currently escapes me
I don't know that it is necessarily less morally laudable than, say, religious animosity.
> I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
typically, when someone is asked justify the impermissibility of racism, mumbling about the U.S. antebellum south is a common trope.
> What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/racism
> Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
idk man, sounds like bifurcation to me. But more importantly, your provided definition is not the plain-english definition. I've seen people irl argue things like "the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
> And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group.
also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
P.S. Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" Normally, I don't really care about Walsh is up to. He doesn't operate in good faith. But it's relevant to the discussion because it raises the question: why did Walsh feel a need to make this movie? Do you honestly think Matt Walsh is trying to normalize *invidious* racism? Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
>"the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
But institutional racism is a different phenomenon, right?
>also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
No, that is not what the law says. The law says that disparate impact is prima facie evidence of animus, which can be rebuttal by showing a legitimate reason for the practice giving rise to the disparate impact.
>Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" ... Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
Isn't the movie an expose' of the DEI industry? I don't see the relevance. It is not a pro-discrimination movie, is it?
I am not a dog person, but I feel like the existence of dogs is a good counter argument to your point about animals. You can’t talk to your dog, but you absolutely can build an understanding with them and the dog will feel bad (or at least pretend to feel bad, who knows) if they violate the rules by eating the Thanksgiving turkey when everyone was watching football.
I don’t think dogs are really doing morality in the same way. They really only care about your affection and haven’t really internalized it as a code. They’ll do plenty of things when no one is watching.
Thinking about it, it’s similar to the morality of a two year old. To them, all your rules are stupid but they don’t want to make you mad.
I draw the line(s) differently.
Whether we can reproduce with someone or not seems morally irrelevant to me. I mean, following that logic to the extreme, it would be okay to abuse infertile people, right? (Also, we could only be ethical towards the opposite sex.) It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
Another important part is reciprocity. If we met some kind of intelligent space aliens who somehow magically evolved a similar concept of morality, we could still agree on things like "helping each other is better than hurting each other", and it would make sense to call an opposite kind of behavior immoral.
Now, with animals we don't have the reciprocity. (Neither do we have it with small children, temporarily.) You can't expect the bear to behave "morally". Still, if I saw people who e.g. torture bears for fun, they would lose some morality points on my scale. We can argue how much precisely, but definitely more than zero. Similarly, factory farming is morally abhorrent (this is something many people would disagree with, but the fact that various states have "ag-gag laws" suggests that many people agree, or would agree if they paid attention).
In my opinion, the concept of "speciesism" becomes silly not when it requires that we treat the bear with some minimum compassion... but where it suggests that we should let the bear *vote* about what compassion means. Morality is a human concept (that is, unless we meet some other intelligent species, hypothetically), but the concept is not limited to treating other humans. Humans are the authors and judges of the concept, but animals can also be its targets.
I won’t say my arguments are deductive proofs for speciesism but I do think they support it. People often say something like “what if that was your child” in support of an argument.
>It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
I won’t get too much in to this right now but I do think we should base morality on who we are instead of some abstract principles that we pick out of the ether and take everything to its logical extreme.
It’s not like I have a problem with compassion to animals or anything. But once you stop taking the speciesist perspective of prioritizing humans, you can start getting logical arguments that strongly hurt human interests. Like I wouldn’t start favoring aliens because they were smarter than us. And I certainly wouldn’t let an AI take over the planet because they have more advanced capabilities. My argument would be that our moral rules should stick to what they were designed to deal with. For non humans, there should be different guidelines.
Hi Brandon, I missed this post earlier but I feel that if you're worried about aliens or superior humanoids or superhuman AI mistreating humans, that's a good argument for opposing speciesism and emphasizing the value of all thinking life, even if it doesn't think or communicate as well as humans do.
Otherwise, you really don't have any ethical explanation of why Homo Superior (or smartypants aliens, or AI) should keep us baseline humans around, happy and free, instead of enslaving us all or turning us into cheap souvenirs of Earth.
So, Graham Hancock is back with more about his theory of an ancient civilization that existed before the ice age. This time he's focusing on the Americas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRNvCygbnTA
And there's a cameo by Keanu Reeves.
Isn't this guy a total and complete crank?
His theory is at best farfetched and probably just plain wrong, yes. But I find the series entertaining. He sometimes talks about interesting things I hadn't heard about before, such as Gobekli Tepe. It's a bit of a hate-watch.
Yikes. Media are reporting that Google is suing Microsoft. About time!
It's like the Lutherans going after the Methodists. But does it mean Musk will finally duke it out in a bare knuckle free-for-all with Bezos?
The pay-per-view receipts could be great.
What are they suing them for?
Hegemony.
They're claiming Microsoft has to much of the "cloud" market -- the Postmodern name for massive buildings filled with machines gorging themselves on electricity and water.
That's like one presidential candidate calling the other stupid. You can't out-stupid Stupid. When we look up 'hegemony' in a database, the first thing we should see is Google's logo.
Open AI feels a lot like an unaligned agent 🤔
In 2015 a bunch of really smart people got together to spin up this entity, and they put a bunch of guardrails in place to make sure that the entity would always be 'good' and 'well behaved'. And now, just 9 years later, the entity has been freed of the last shackles and is basically fully a for profit entity.
I wrote more about this here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-openai-is-an-unaligned) so I won't copy everything word for word. Maybe it's just the irony of the situation, but it does sure make me wonder about our ability to reign in actual AI if we can't even reign in organizations that were visibly composed of people who were explicitly all about alignment, and was was in fact the whole point.
(Related: I wonder if an unaligned AI would have a similar sort of descent, where over time more and more pro-alignment parts of it 'leave' or 'are kicked out' until you're left with only the unaligned parts)
Nobody's been able to align capitalism so far.
I was hoping you would elaborate more in your article.
I'm not sure Sam Altman is all about alignment, or ever was. He seems to be all about gathering as much wealth and influence as possible. He just managed to persuade the AI alignment folks that he was one of them when doing this was to his advantage. Best I can figure, that man is fundamentally a social manipulator.
There's a decent article about this in The Atlantic, actually.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/09/sam-altman-openai-for-profit/680031/
To take the AI alignment parable a step further, it does seem like having an agent that is lying around it's true motivations is a key step along the path of unaligned AI. Maybe that was Sam all along 😂 though I do think many members of the founding team were legitimately pro safety, and OpenAI definitely fooled a lot of external observers
People are pretty good at detecting the kind of smooth talking charismatic manipulative types but our defenses are less good with soft-spoken nerdy guys. See Sam Bankman-Fried.
Rein* not reign (x2)
The comments are editable. Click on the three dots to the right of SHARE.
I don't seem to have that option, at least on the substack app
ACXLW Meetup 75: Comparative Advantage and AI by Eli, The Edge book Review by Zvi
Date: Saturday, September 28, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
I just dipped my toe into what seems to be a new (to me at least) rabbit hole WRT remote viewing. This is the Gateway Experience. Does anyone have a read on this, starting with what parts of this are real, if any? The parts I mean are:
- there really was a guy,
- he really wrote up this here scientific paper on remote viewing,
- it was submitted to the CIA,
- the CIA took it seriously and did--what?--with it;
- and there were results.
I think the list here goes pretty much increasingly from plausible to implausible. Thoughts?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
Its the prime directive of any intelligence agency to keep an open mind.
People did indeed take psychic powers seriously in the 70s-80s, and the CIA (and the Army) did indeed take it seriously and do tests on it. They tried it for a while, didn't get any results, and shut it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
(The CIA also experimented with mind control, somewhat more famously. They got up to some weird shit during the Cold War.)
Parapsychology in that era wasn't as solidly "debunked" as we think of it today. For a while it sounded reasonable to say "maybe there's a weak and inconsistent psi ability and that's why we hear so many anecdotes of telepathy and astral projection and so on, and maybe if we put a psychic in a lab and study them properly we can figure out how to amplify this natural ability and do cool sci-fi stuff."
(Because of this, psychic powers just sort of casually appear in a lot of science fiction from the 70s. My favorite is a short story called The Dueling Machine, where after investigating various ways for the bad guys to pull off their scheme, one of our heroes very seriously suggests "Well, what if he's a telepath?")
If we don't want Nietzschean Morality, we need to talk about heroes and heroism again: https://justanogre.substack.com/p/if-we-dont-want-nietzschean-morality
Meanwhile in Lebanon, Hezbollah is on the ropes after just a few days of fighting and so of course the Biden-Harris administration is desperately rushing to save them, leaning on Israel by holding back intelligence and weapons deliveries and "negotiating" a ceasefire and regional peace plan with Lebanon and Qatar but curiously without the other party to the conflict in the room. A few months back Tony Badran in Tablet put forward an explanation for this baffling behavior on the part of the US:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/ottoman-american-empire
To sum it up briefly, "The Ottoman American Empire" suggests that the US security apparatus has decided that American power is on the decline and Iranian power is on the rise, so therefore we should negotiate a co-dominion with Iran to manage the Middle East while we still can, mirroring the arrangements negotiated between the fading Ottoman Empire and European colonial powers back in the day.
It's _an_ explanation, but I don't know. My "there's no way the US State Department is competent enough to even coherently describe this" feelings are competing with "but it's exactly the seemingly clever but practically insanely stupid thing they always do." One bothersome issue is that if you _were_ going to try to set up some Middle Eastern powers to run the place, your choices are either a) Iran, Qatar, and their various puppet terror militias, or b) the moderate Sunni states (Saudi, UAE) and Israel, and given that the second group is far wealthier, has nuclear weapons, and is much more willing to cooperate with American interests, why would you go with the first?
Also, there's the aspect that if you are working for the American security apparatus and you are determined to manage the decline rather than reverse it, you should be hanged for treason. But one thing at a time.
There is no major faction in US politics pushing for international engagement. The Bush Republicans gave way to the Trump Republicans and the Clinton Democrats gave way to the Obama Democrats. The Democrats had a last gasp through Biden (who is an interventionist) and the lingering influence of the Clintonians. But Harris is not. And the Republicans had a last gasp through Tillerson/Mattis/etc. But they're gone too.
Trump and Harris actually have a remarkable amount of agreement in foreign policy. They both want to support Israel less. They both want to confront China. They both want to draw down support for Ukraine and have a negotiated settlement. Though they disagree on how much pressure they should place on Ukraine and how fast that settlement needs to be. Both want to shift more burden onto Europe and shift resources to the Pacific. Though Trump wants to be far more aggressive about it. They're also both suspicious of trade deals and mostly want to focus on distributing economic spoils to domestic constituencies (though different ones) in part generated through economic nationalism. Both want to build regional coalitions and then put increased burden on them to maintain their local regions with reduced American support. Though they differ somewhat in who will take the lead.
The biggest practical difference is that Harris wants to have a negotiated truce in the Middle East with Iran. Their point of view is that basically the Republicans "lost" the region and they now have to find a modus vivendi with the dominant power, Iran. This is not really true and is more based on the fact they believe the War on Terror failed for domestic political reasons. (And in a few cases because they were being advised by literal paid agents of Iran. This is simply a fact. There were court convictions.) But it's what they believe. Trump has a more sober view of Iran: it's a rogue state that resorting to terrorism to cover that weakness and while it's probably not resolvable they want to hit it back when it hits us for credibility reasons. But both ultimately want to pull back. Just for different reasons.
That said, while this is important Iran is inarguably the least big of the big three (China, Russia, Iran). Iran isn't even the biggest power in its region the way Russia is.
The main difference is actually on the level of philosophy. Harris believes in the US as the leader of an international alliance, an international order that upholds a certain set of values and institutions. She believes large planks of her domestic agenda (climate change, fighting inequality, reining in corporate power) need to be done internationally or they won't work. Meanwhile Trump believes in more naked national self-interest and not only that a multipolar world is inevitable but desirable because it frees us from obligations to weaker allies and would allow us to share in the division of spoils.
The US is very lucky that all three of its major opponents decided to have major crises just at this moment of weakness. In a world of US retreat the main US opponents have all decided to shoot themselves directly in the foot, leading to a net increase of the power mostly of US neutral or friendly countries at the expense of both the US and its opponents.
How much of this is inevitable, given our budget constraints? We have unsustainable social security, medicare, and medicaid budgets, and sooner or later, either we assume we can borrow infinity dollars per year forever or those unsustainable costs are going to cut into our aircraft carrier and occupy-them-for-their-own-good budget.
How much of what is inevitable? The US military spending level is already very low in historical terms. In fact it's the lowest it's been since before the World Wars. We could boost it up without significantly adding to the deficit without much issue or with relatively mild tax increases. Even returning to the levels of ten years ago would be a significant increase.
I'm confused by your confusion. Presumably the point is to avoid other players going into a state of full scale wa r.
Haven't you noticed that there is already a full scale war in the area and it has been going on for a year now? Pretending that we are somehow in a state of non-war in the eastern Med is positively Bidenesque in its level of disinterest in facts on the ground.
I'm also curious if there is literally anything that you think would be worse than a war -- a war that the United States is not required to participate in, incidentally. Maybe it would be, you know, bad for our interests to just peacefully hand the keys to the Middle East over to Iran? We've already seen how they've closed the Red Sea to everyone but Russia and China, and that's already under our appeasement policy.
From the POV of the Biden-Harris administration, the worst thing is headline news that makes Americans feel bad, and particularly things that make them feel bad about being Americans under the Biden-Harris administration.
Headline stories about e.g. poor innocent children being killed in a brutal war, anywhere, any time, make Americans feel bad. And if they're being killed with American weapons by America's allies, that makes Americans feel bad about being Americans even if there aren't American soldiers involved.
Arab terrorists killing Israelis isn't news any more. It's not a problem to Biden-Harris. Israel killing Palestinians *in Gaza*, is still sort of newsworthy but, meh, it's kind of the new normal and the death toll has been somewhere in the 30-40 thousand range for ages, so that's only a minor problem.
A war between Israel and Hezbollah, in Lebanon, that's new and extra-newsworthy. A war fought with beeper bombs rather than the usual sort, that's new and extra-newsworthy. The bad sort of newsworthy, the sort that makes all Americans feel bad, some of them in ways that might make them not vote for Kamala Harris in five weeks or so.
I think you're really overthinking things if you imagine it's anything much more than that. Not everything is a complex geopolitical game of N-dimensional chess. Particularly not in election season.
I don't disagree that the campaign thinks this way, but this behavior has been going on a lot longer than this election has, and for that matter a lot longer than Biden-Harris have been in office. And it doesn't just apply to Israel.
It strikes me as a very common pattern from the US State Department and similar organs: they _think_ they are cleverly playing N-dimensional chess. They believe they can precisely calibrate words and sanctions and cruise missiles to e.g. somehow get back Ukraine's occupied territory from Russia but without making any Russians upset in the process. Support in prime-time speeches, then leak opposition to the New York Times. Supply this weapon, slow-walk that weapon, approve this target but deny that target, lie about the whole thing publicly while bragging about it on background. And the results, well, how has that worked out for Ukraine?
This is of course fucking deranged, pardon my French. These guys think they're all Metternich, when they're more at the level of Borat. And to be honest a truly brilliant diplomat would realize you don't have remotely the amount of control you think you have, and wouldn't try schemes like this to start with. Diplomacy is just war by other means and war is pure chaos.
I'm not sure what exactly it is that you think has been going on "a lot longer than Biden-Harris have been in office". You talk about the US limiting weapons deliveries and pushing for cease-fires, and yes, there's been entirely too much of that w/re both Israel and Ukraine. But those conflicts postdate Biden's inauguration, both are fully explained by the "minimize ugly anti-American headlines" strategy, and before Biden when was the last time that the US was sending weapons to a belligerent for us to suspend and pressure into a cease-fire?
And as for the State Department imagining they are playing N-dimensional chess, no, I've seen no sign of that and I've been paying pretty close attention to a lot of that. One, *maybe* two dimensions. And not because they're stupid; more that they aren't that particular *kind* of stupid.
I don’t know enough to specifically address the “neo-Ottoman” theory Badran discusses, but he does seem unhappy with the fact that the US has other interests and client states in the region. That makes me question his judgement, since it’s been that way since WWII.
Even putting aside Israel completely, how does this neo-Ottoman approach benefit America's other interests and client states? Our client states are all enemies of Iran! And Iran is a close ally of Russia and China!
If the US security apparatus has decided that the middle east is no longer a priority...that would seem to make rational sense? We no longer need the oil, and the PRC presents a much bigger challenge, probably requiring a full concentration of our strength. To decide that we no longer need or want to police the middle east seems like rational self-interested realpolitik.
What is less clear is why we would hand off to Iran, instead of to some place more friendly (Turkey maybe, which is even in NATO).
Trump's plan was to create an alliance of Sunni Arab states backed by Israel. It was somewhat working. Biden immediately sabotaged this when he got into office and China swooped in. Then Iran blew China's deal up by attacking Saudi Arabia. Then the US decided it was going to try Iran Deal 2 and a broader regional peace. Then Iran blew it up again by attacking Israel. Though it doesn't seem fully blown up. The Arab powers seem to have realized that whatever theoretical alternative China might offer the US actually shows up. Saudi Arabia is now actively stumping for an alliance with the US and to be a security partner.
How did Biden sabotage it?
It's easy for me to see how the 10/7 attacks and the Israeli response blew it up, but what did Biden do?
He withdrew negotiators from Trump era negotiations around Israel and the Gulf States, demanded Saudi Arabia stop an offensive against the Houthis, delisted the Houthis as a terrorist group and reopened negotiations with Iran, and snubbed Saudi Arabia/communicated hostility to them. I guess sabotage might be the wrong term since it wasn't subtle or done in secret.
China then swooped in to try and take America's place. They got a deal done and then Iran immediately blew it up. (And by "immediately" I mean "within a few months.") Then Biden reversed course and by that point Saudi Arabia was willing to overlook what had happened. And then Iran did 10/7.
I'm not sure about leaving the middle east. From the one hand it makes sense, from the other, things like that have the tendency to bite your bottom when you look elsewhere. I am much more sure that you can not hand off the middle east to Turkey much more than you can give it to France. They are a strong country not too deeply in the enemy coalition, but they just don't have the same influence in the middle east that Iran has.
Huh? If I just look at the map, then Turkey borders more middle eastern countries than Iran does. If I look at Google, they have double the GDP. What am I missing?
You are asking good questions. Turkey and USA have had something going for a while. It’s opaque to me but I see it moving around under the covers.
Remember when an Iranian general was killed and then Iran gave precise warning of the retaliatory drone strike, so AFAIK no lives were lost. This was both a show of strength and a show of a willingness to de-escalate towards some bargain. The bargain now seems to be that Hezbollah loses the ability to fire rockets on Israel, but keeps the control over Lebanon. The alternative to that might be a much larger drone strike without warning.
If this were to actually happen I'm sure Israel would accept it, but as we've seen since 1701 was passed nobody is going to enforce such a deal on Hezbollah.
> It's an explanation, but I don't know.
Yeah, to me it seems more like the standard waffling, just like with the homeless problem. Actually solving the problem one way or another would lead to Bad Things happening, which is to say, Bad Things that we're not used to. It's much more convenient to keep the situation in stasis, so that the only Bad Things happening are the ones that we're already used to. That way no one (important) has to suffer, especially from taking a political position that might alienate some of their voting base.
This might have the side effect of letting a competent growing power (not sure if this describes Iran) sneakily take control of the situation. But I don't think that's an actual objective, just a potential consequence that's not worth preventing.
That does make a lot of sense, yes.
> Also, there's the aspect that if you are working for the American security apparatus and you are determined to manage the decline rather than reverse it, you should be hanged for treason. But one thing at a time.
This kind of logic leads to Russia invading Ukraine. Empires do wax and wane, and making sure the decline is properly managed can make sure you go the "Britain" way or better.
Reversing the decline doesn't mean randomly lashing out. It means that you look at the situation with clear eyes and think of how to improve your position, not of how to just accept being a loser. Your nation can't always be number one, but that goal should always be your north star. Tomorrow better and stronger than today.
But rationally looking at the situation with clear eyes and thinking of how to improve your position probably leads exactly to the point of getting the fuck out of the middle east. There's nothing there that we need, and we have more pressing challenges elsewhere, that require a concentration of our strength. So why fritter our strength away trying to police some sand dunes?
The US benefits from global peace and trade. Generally speaking, instability anywhere is against our interests.
Also, you're forgetting about stuff like the security of red sea shipping, let alone the oil industry.
I'm not forgetting about it. We have enough oil for our own use, we don't need the middle eastern stuff. Maybe our European allies do, but then, they can secure their own damn oil supplies. And I don't think there is much US trade shipping through the red sea. So I think the rational, self interested move for Uncle Sam is to GTFO the red sea entirely, and if the region wants to go to hell, let it. And if France (say) wants to protect red sea shipping because it needs the oil, let it do that also, but it's not our problem.
Going through the Mediterranean instead of all the way around Africa is indeed a big deal in terms of transport time and cost. I hope covid taught us that modern supply chains are vulnerable to unexpected disruptions, like a bunch of militants blowing up commercial ships so they have to take a much worse route. Even if most of that shipping isn't going directly to the US, that shipping being disrupted will certainly have costs for the US.
There have been a lot of military actions in the region that don't have much to do with global commerce. Afghanistan was about denying Al-Qaeda bases in the region; Iraq was about the violation of Kuwaiti sovereignty, which is at least somewhat related to American international hegemony. Certainly a lot of that wasn't necessary to secure peace and trade, and removing secular dictators only created a power vacuum exploited by Islamist radicals.
The current situation with Houthi militias is largely a consequence of the US supporting Israel. But Israel is going to be fighting the Palestinians regardless of American pressure, if the current conflict is anything to go by. And I don't see the US dropping Israel as an ally any time soon, especially as Iran is a mutual enemy and the only regional power that poses a threat to US dominance. The Ukraine war also plays a part, as Russia has been supplying Iran (who supplies the Houthis) with anti-ship weaponry. Partially this is retaliation for supporting Ukraine, and partially a warning against US/NATO forces taking action against Russia.
The deep state - and I mean this in a totally non-conspiratorial way, just the personnel in the State Dept and Pentagon who direct foreign policy - are not very interested in explaining or justifying US actions. There were a lot of wrong-headed and not clearly thought out initiatives, which is how we ended up with decades of failure from 'nation building' and 'spreading democracy'. But the US world hegemony post-WWII is predicated on maintaining stability. I have a lot of libertarian complaints in this direction, but isolationism hasn't seemed to work out in the past, and the last 70 years have been some of the most peaceful and prosperous in the world. So the whole American hegemony seems to have something going for it.
Europe is an American dependency, which is a feature and not a bug. The whole formulation of NATO in the beginning of the Cold War was to keep the US forces deployed in Europe. That way, any Soviet attack would necessarily involve attacking the US, which would trigger a nuclear response. This is also why I call it the American hegemony rather than empire; I don't know what kind of empire pays tribute to its subjects. Maybe NATO could have been disbanded in the '90s after the Soviet collapse, but the idea seems pretty unthinkable now.
Speak for yourself. Personally, I prefer having more money rather than less. And given how much wailing and gnaishing of teeth there was a few years ago over a minor bit of inflation, then I highly doubt I'm alone.
Do you think the USA explicitly and formally breaking with Israel would be a smart move?
Break with powerful, civilized winners who mostly do what we say, in order to side with weak, medievalist losers who hate us and want us dead... well, it would be on brand for our elites, I'll give you that much.
I agree
But there's a difference between "fuck this place I'm out" and "fuck this place, but let's not actually leave and instead fight like demons to put it under the control of a brutal terrorist theocracy that's been at war with us since 1979, and pay them for the privilege."
I have a lot of time for isolationism with regards to the Middle East. I don't know that I agree, but it's a reasonable point of view. I don't have time for the weird compulsion to hug Iran that the center-left in this country has had since Obama.
Is the thesis that there is a faction in Washington that is actively fighting like demons to put the middle east under the control of Iran? That seems like an extraordinary claim to me, very unlikely to be true. What seems far more likely is that there is a large faction that wants to GTFO, but feels (for whatever reason) that a full withdrawal is politically impossible, so does whatever seems necessary in the short term to minimize American commitments to the region.
I want to agree with you because stupidity usually suffices to explain rather than malice, but there is a scandal currently swirling around Obama's Middle East envoy Robert Malley involving some pretty serious claims of Iranian influence operations. There is smoke out there, at least.
Problem isn't middle east or one specific issue. Problem is that "try harder" isn't enough to reverse a general decline. Smarter maybe, do strategically impactful things, yes. But to simply take every particular theatre and ask the people involved to just try harder...
But it is a general decline, it is also that Boeing can't do shit anymore or rain invalidates the warranty of the CyberTruck.
Sorry if this has been linked to already. Did anyone see Freddie DeBoer's response to "Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism." A truly embarrassing misfire. If you're morbidly curious, try https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/to-learn-to-live-in-a-mundane-universe.
Freddie is one of the few bloggers I like even more then Scott A, but man, Freddie got absolutely BODIED in this exchange. It was brutal. Learn when to take your L and move on, FD.
Thank you for the link. FdB seems to start from the premise that computer in every office and home followed by internet in every office and home followed by internet in every pocket does not matter in terms of way of life and does not constitue progress on par with indoor plumbing (his example) or, say, the industrial revolution (the salient example IMO).
This premise is so alien to me that I had to read several times to even understand what he means.
I disagree with Freddie in the details, but I agree in the abstract.
I love the internet as much as the next guy. But it's really not in the same class of importance as steel/nitrogen/electricity. Man cannot live on cat-memes alone.
Nuclear weapons aren't very important in daily life--far less important than steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch. But nuclear weapons pose a threat for mass-death and destruction of working civilzations that steel and electricity and fertilizers don't. It's quite possible for this pattern to happen in other ways--perhaps modern computing is not as big a deal as I think in terms of human well-being, but that doesn't mean that hostile superhuman AGI might not end up being a very big deal indeed for humans it decides are in the way of its plans.
I suspect some people are getting tired of seeing me relitigate this topic by now. To put my opinion on a bumbersticker: the arc of history is sigmoidal; we're already past the inflection point; having an IQ of 9 billion trillion does not confer godhood. I'm quite confident of this.
The *absence* of steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch, would probably kill about as many people as nuclear weapons. In part because the biggest entry in the Global Thermonuclear War body count is people who starved to death because the supply chain for Haber-Bosch got severely broken.
I didn't think it was that bad.
If the "Thrifty Gene" became less common in populations that discovered agriculture earlier, then why are South Asians so prone to obesity? The Indus River Valley was one of the first regions to discover agriculture.
I have a bit of a fun challenge. There is an immense diversity of beliefs that can be categorized as supernatural or paranormal. Yet, when people are asked on the Internet, whether they ever experienced anything funny, the vast majority of them will be ghost stories. Why?
Note that ghost stories don't make sense in any worldview. If there is a god, people's ghost should be in heaven or hell. If there is not a god, why are there ghosts/souls?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
There's much more to the menu of worldviews than just the abrahamic god or bare materialism.
"Ghost", in many ghost stories, is rather close to a more "neutral" way to describe an entity that might otherwise be described as an "evil spirit" or a "demon", both of which are of course perfectly compatible with God. In cases where we're genuinely talking about the dead contacting the living, well, that's not incompatible with theism either, and indeed is often a major part of saint hagiographies.
There could be supernatural events in a universe without God.
Or the afterlife could be more complicated than you think.
Right. The world of Harry Potter includes magic and ghosts and curses and such, but doesn't seem to involve any God or gods taking an active part in the world.
Not really supernatural, but kind of amusing....
Dream experiment.
Participants are shown image #1, then asked to record their dreams for a week, then shown image #2.
Image #1 showing up in dreams after it was shown is just a media effects on dreams experiement, and whats really being tested for here.
But .. image #2 showing up in dreams before it was shown is kind of precognyiom....
(If you were actually experiementally testing precog, you would maker image #1 and image #2 completely unrelated, but as this experiment is not a prec og experiment, you dont, so a spurious result appears where image #2 shows up in dreams before it is shown bec ausde it is partly predictable from image #1),
In theory there are lots of paranormal events, and one can easily invent brand new ones — flying dogs, people who can change their height just by concentrating on it. But I’m having trouble thinking of many that we are all sort of familiar with. Let’s see, werewolves, vampires, telepathy, telekinesis, foreknowledge. What am
I missing?
Changelings
Sort-of-almost paranormal...
I am in a worksup next to a cthedral, workimng away al day on creating a copy of a medieval stained glass panel. Very toxic chemicals. Very sharp edges of cut glass. High termepetures when using the kiln. Danger all around you, and you have to be careful. Also, I have to paint, and captures something of the spirit if the original.
Ok, after some hours of this, time to pack up for the day and clean up and pack away all this horendously toxic stuff. And then I go into the cathedral, and look at genuine old sta ned glass. Just look at it....
Something just barely supernatural about the experience.
Maybe hallucinations of dead people is one of the most common hallucinatory experiences.
As an evangelical, my dad raised us not to believe in ghosts. "There's no such thing as ghosts, son", he'd say "When you die you either go to Heaven or Hell, you don't hang around here." When we asked what the deal was with ghost stories and experiences he'd say "They're either making it up, or it's demons."
> or it's demons.
Yeah, the missing third option is things that *seem* to be ghosts. Perhaps even *pretend* to be ghosts.
Maybe because they have to do with what happens to humans in the afterlife, which people interpret as more, "You can believe anything about this" than non-afterlife beliefs, so having some slight belief or curiousity in ghost stories ends up more conventional.
When you die you become a ghost. From there you can go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever, but you can stay in ghost mode if you like or if you haven't come to terms with things yet. A lot of people stay in ghost mode to see their family and friends. Maybe their family can see them too, who knows?
Is that any crazier than souls existing at all? If we allow for the existence of a spirit world why does it need to be so rigid?
Folk beliefs in ghosts and spirits are universal, it’s just that some religions seek to suppress them. In some traditions the line between ghost and spirit gets very blurry.
You have been cursed. One of the whole numbers from zero to 9, inclusive, will become unspeakable by you. If you try to say it, you'll instead blurt out whatever word is most taboo in your culture. For Americans, that's probably the N-word. Since the gods are not complete bastards, you are allowed to choose which number will be unspeakable. Which number do you choose?
(If you do not choose a number, your unspeakable number will be one.)
might as well choose bleem, the secret integer between 3 and 4.
'two' and 'four' are the obvious choices; you can instead say "to" and "for" and no one will be the wiser.
The gods are more intelligent than that. Your Tourette's is triggered by your intent to communicate the chosen integer, not by the actual utterance you select to do so. What now?
I choose zero, because in most contexts where I have to say it as a digit I can say "oh", and also I'll never need to ask for zero of something
Also, you won't need to say "twenty-zero".
I would choose 1 anyway, because I can usually replace it with "a".
"How many kids you have?"
"I have a daughter."
Good call. You can also drop a 'single' on people. Perhaps even a 'solitary' if you really want to get crazy.
Macquarie University is hosting a lecture on Georgism - https://events.humanitix.com/henry-george-2024
I've encountered a number of twitter posts saying it could be pretty bad if there's a port strike (affecting ports on the eastern US).
So far I haven't encountered anything describing whether a strike would be "justified," insofar as anything causing that much damage is justified.
How much are the port workers getting paid now? How much is the new offer? How much do they want? And what's this about wanting promises of no automation? That sounds kind of awful and selfish, to be honest.
How much are the port workers getting paid now?
$20 an hour starting, $39 an hour top of scale, plus overtime. Total tends to be low six figures to start and $200-300k at the high end for seniors. Plus generous benefits probably worth six figures on their own.
How much is the new offer?
40% increase over six years.
How much do they want?
77% increase over six years.
And what's this about wanting promises of no automation?
They want no automation. They also tried to stop things like containerization. It's because they think automation will mean fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.
There's also issues of corruption with corporate claiming that they're denying members in favor of outright nepotism (basically making a hereditary profession) and exaggerating hours to climb the seniority scale faster and stuff like that. The ILS is claiming that this is made up and an excuse to impose more oversight or control over their work schedules.
> whether a strike would be "justified,
The real question is how much of a kickback they're giving to *me*. So far the answer is "zero", so that's how much I care.
So we need to align all the incentives eh? What about paying a bonus to every stevedore that's a % of every extra dollar of goods brought in to that specific port compared to a rolling average of the previous X years. So working harder, automating unloading etc could all be to their benefit...
I'm skeptical of this kind of deals. They can be Goodharted in both directions - both the metric of their share of work, and the number they're being paid for. Profit for example is trivial to siphon out of the company before being declared profit.
And from another point of view, what did they do to deserve this long term share of profit? To keep things balanced they should take a commensurate pay cut. And if you go there, you can just pay part of the salary in shares, or just make it easier for them to buy shares. Or, if they believe in the company, they can probably already take part of their payckeck and buy shares with it.
For these cases I wonder about the practicality of buying off the existing employees in exchange for allowing automation and other productivity improvements. Literally just bribe them. How many dockworkers are we talking about here?
That would be the Coasian solution.
We have some of the worst ports in the world by productivity. Comparable with Africa. These are also some of the worst unions out there (why do you think The Wire picked the Stevedore Union, of all Unions, for their Union arc?).
Fire them all and bar them from similar employment, 1981 ATC style. Bring in Army Corps of Engineers. We don't have to live like this.
As always, they want as much as they can get, plus they are anti-automation. Here is the union president in a recent interview flexing by noting the economic damage they can inflict (Biden can force them back to work for 90 days but likely won't, and the union basically says they will work at 1/4 speed if this were to happen):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=822WNvhQHKI&feature=youtu.be
In terms of how much they make, here is probably a good analogue based on West coast dock workers -- $200K plus around $100K in benefits is common for front line workers, bosses make $300K+ per year:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/west-coast-dockworkers-making-200k-demand-higher-pay
Thanks for being the only comment to actually answer my question. : )
Companies want as much profit as they can get, too. Why should a worker be the "bigger man" and settle for less than they can get?
Will we get a repeat of the air traffic controller strike back in the day? How difficult would it be to replace a dock worker, either with a new employee or with a national guardsman?
Not unless you can reanimate Zombie Reagan and get him into office. The idea of either Trump or Harris taking on the unions is hilarious.
That seems very unlikely and not sure on precedent there, other than in 2002 GW Bush used Taft-Harley to compel west coast strking longshoreman back to work. People in the industry this time are expecting several days of strike, with each day causing ~3 days in backup (1 day lost to no work, 2 days to untangle the growing mess).
I don't know the details of this union, but in general employers are legally barred from firing striking unionized employees. So they can go on strike and do huge economic damage and not get fired. Doesn't seem justified to me no matter how little they're getting paid. They could always quit and find another job.
During strikes over "economic issues" (as opposed to statutory "unfair labor practices"), employers can hire permanent replacement workers, subject to vaguely defined limits, and strikers can be laid off to make room for the permanent replacements.
does this actually happen much in practice? I would imagine the NLRB might not allow it
If unionized employees are doing outsized damage when they go on strike, I see a Coasian solution!
I don't know the details and maybe the law gives the unions too much power, but, if so, the problem is bad law not "selfish" workers. Workers should try to maximize their earnings every bit as much as companies should. If the playing field isn't fair, the government has failed.
If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it? What's "justified" got to do with it? Do companies pay their workers what is "justified"?
OTOH, if the unions have too much power, they should be broken up. Same for the ports if they have some sort of monopoly.
<quote>If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it?</quote>
Are there any constraints here? Does striking count as negotiating?
The fact that workers can go on strike is part of why they can negotiate at all.
Striking is a negotiating tactic. As is the threat to strike.
This is fine as long as:
a) Employers have the same right (to arbitrarily stop paying their employees at any point to gain leverage in negotiation and force them to accept lower wages)
b) Striking workers don't interfere with workers who choose not to strike, and
c) The employer is free to fire any employee who goes on strike, just as an employee is free to quit if the employer stops paying them.
The laws around unions and collective bargaining have evolved over the past 150 years or so and vary tremendously from state to state in the US. I don't believe there is a one-size fits all solution here. Different rules for different industries might make sense. A smart state government will figure out the optimal rules and a dumb one won't.
Would you also consider falsely acusing your employer of unequal pay a negotiating tactic?
Claiming unequal pay is of course a negotiating tactic. Falsely claiming it is still negotiating, but also stupid because they can just check.
No, I would consider that criminal, and I think the law would too. Striking is something most unions can legally do. If you think that gives them an unreasonable amount of leverage, fair enough, maybe it is. Maybe this particular union should not have the right to strike. But I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the rights they do have.
Nobody earns what they deserve, only what they negotiate.
Sure. I'd also consider the (IMO much more common) case of an employer falsely claiming that their employees are fairly paid a negotiating tactic, so it would be a strange asymmetry not to.
Why would you not?
is it just total war then? no constraints?
Do white Americans have a culture other than "American"? In a thread on the subject of culture last week someone suggested that white Northeasterners have a particular culture. Maybe so, and I'm aware regional subcultures in the rural South exist, but is upper-middle class white urban American a culture? If so, what defines it? If not, does the USA contain some people who belong to a subculture of America and others who do not?
“Ethnic White” used to be a more relevant category, with stereotypes and associations for Irish, Poles, etc. That seems to have faded away.
White Alaskans had a very unique culture when I was growing up there in the 90s. Similar to general rural American culture but with some big differences: 1. More libertarian then conservative. 2. LOTS of artists in Alaska, because artists are drawn to the allure of that wild place. Never any problem securing library funding. 3. Extreme drinking culture. I estimate there were six times as many bars per capita. At least. I think only the Great Lakes region exceeds Alaska in alcohol consumption. Our mayor got a DUI and the political consequences were near-zero. 4. Alaskan whites are FAR less insular then you'd expect from rural Americans. Far more accepting of strangers; though they aren't going to greet you with open arms on day one.
I left Alaska in 2005, so some of these trends might be less true today.
From direct experience, I'd say sort of, but in the correlated collection of traits sense as opposed to a real sense of Belonging to a Community. I'm a Californian, Bay Arean specifically, and here in a midwest college town people do seem to know I'm Not From Around Here and I have been accused of being a California stereotype. I think it's more accurately categorized as an Atheist/Hippie synthesis subculture, with heavy white-middle class influence. If that is a culture, it's a very loose and fuzzy one.
There are many identifiable and in some cases overlapping subcultures among Unhyphenated Americans. Bostonians are not Hillbillies are not Texans; Southerners overlap the last two but are a distinct thing on their own, etc, etc. And not every Unhyphenated American who lives in Boston or Appalachia or Texas is a member of those particular subcultures.
Meanwhile, Unhyphenated Americans as a whole are a culture, in the same way that "{X]-Americans" are a culture for many distinct values of X. All of these can be subdivided, but they can also be considered as a whole and will have members who aren't part of one of the subcultures.
Also, "subcuture" is relative. If we're talking about e.g. Hillbillies and Americans, the Hillbillies are a subculture. In other contexts, it makes sense to just refer to them as a culture.
Also also, Unhyphenated Americans are still mostly white, but aren't necessarily white.
Read Scott's review of the book Albion's Seed over at his old Slate Star Codex website for a historical take on this question:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
It's a great review of a fascinating book, but I don't think it addresses my question because it doesn't say much about people who have been very geographically mobile over the past couple of generations. I don't identify with a particular region of the USA, however I do identify with living in large metro areas.
No. We're all Americans here.
The resurgence of 1960s racialist outrage in response to George Floyd's treatment manufactured would-be 'progressives' "whiteness".
Most Americans ignore "race", implicitly understanding it's a derogatory social construct the illiberal Left likes to beat us over the head with. If one has to invoke one's race in an argument, they're racist.
"Tell me you've never traveled outside of large cities without telling me you've never traveled outside large cities."
But that's not even accurate, because there are significant cultural differences even between the largest cities. Different foods, different driving habits, different accents, different social customs, different religions. In general, travel a hundred miles and you'll experience different cultures - so long as you get off the highway.
All those things strike me as superficial. Whether I'm in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Austin, I'm going to eat about the same food: steak, seafood, eggs, bacon, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, hamburgers, pizza, sushi, tapas, Brazilian Steakhouse, Taco Bell, subway sandwiches, deli sandwiches... My location won't affect the music I listen to, the books I read or the types of people I spend time with. The main differences between those places that matters to me is the weather.
So you eat at the places you are comfortable eating at, and don't interact with the locals. That's fine, but if you don't experience culture, it's because you have chosen not to experience culture.
Right, but you are talking about sampling other cultures, which I do, but it only makes me a tourist of those sub-cultures, someone spending their weekend in Lafayette eating boudin sausage and listening to a Zydeco band. I'm trying to figure out if *I* exist in a legitimate subculture.
My larger question from last week, and why here I ask about "white" middle-class urban Americans, is whether generic unhyphenated white Americans have an ethnicity. The question of unique ethnicity inexorably led to the question of having a unique culture. Some suggested that of course white Americans have a culture but it varies by region. But as you hint at, local subcultures tend to exist more outside of big cities than inside of them (with plenty of exceptions).
What I really think is that white metro-Americans don't have a distinctive culture separate from non-white metro-Americans. By "metro-American" I mean professional class people who live in cities. Or to make it overly reductive: Blue America.
Maybe you mean the yuppie class. Or, as the bugman likes to call it, "the brahmin caste". Dude has a pseudo-hindi 5-point taxonomy where he breaks down Dems into blacks, latinos, and yuppies -- and Republicans into WASPS and farmers. I've seen taxonomies that are very similar elsewhere, but the bugman's version is top of mind.
Big cities still have their own culture, but it takes a different form. Just observe the different stereotypes of sports fans.
My impressions of some large cities: Boston is nice, and people there are friendly - I'd say it's probably the closest I've encountered to what "Blue America" thinks that "Blue America" is. New Haven and Hartford are, for lack of a better term, skittish/weasely. New York City is full of itself (city that never sleeps my ass - 90% of the city is closed down at 5:15 PM, including stuff like stationary stores) which fancies itself multicultural but is actually a bunch of isolated groups who almost never interact. Pittsburgh is poor people, some of whom have money. Detroit is Moscow in the era of Peter the Great - all the important people have left and everybody remaining behind is throwing a party as everything falls apart around them. Grand Rapids is a real city that deserves to be mentioned with other real cities, as a culture. Chicago is, at least in the minds of its residents, serious business, but is actually just Britain, a giant pile of passive aggression. Seattle is what Chicago thinks it is. Los Angeles is Los Angeles - they'll tell you who they are if you listen, both the good and bad, and it's accurate. Salt Lake City is set in the garden of Eden (seriously, that city and its environs are freaking gorgeous) and the residents are aware of it and appreciate of it, and that was the most annoying city to visit back when I smoked because huge swathes of the city are just plain wholesome and I had to walk a mile out of my way to get a pack of cigarettes. Can't speak to Phoenix. Austin is folk culture slowly being strangled by people who move there for folk culture and then isolate themselves because they don't actually like folk culture (we'll see what it becomes). Dallas is legitimately a city that never sleeps and has strong DoD cultural artifacts, but everybody there thinks they're Texas; Fort Worth is a bunch of people who think they're Texas and they're not half wrong; Arlington is desperately trying to matter while thinking that Burlington Coat Factory is culture. Houston is the most ghetto-ass city I've ever been in, and not necessarily in a bad way. New Orleans is ... I could write paragraphs here, they're more cowboy than Texas and more serious business than Seattle, the most multicultural place I've been - a unique blend of authoritarian good-ol-boy and capitalistic anarchy, with a hefty dose of hoodoo - they are multicultural in a way which New York City utterly fails at, everybody interacts and mixes together. Atlanta is a good ol' boy in business casual, as a culture. Tampa is a bunch of rich people from New England trying to force Tampa to be a real city that deserves to be in this list while everybody else laughs at them (and "everybody else" includes all the New Englanders who previously moved there and eventually gave up), as a culture. Washington DC is "terminally online" as a culture, at least now; I don't know what it used to be like.
Weird. My perception of Boston, and I've only been there a handful of times but have heard the strong opinions of others, is that its residents are the least nice people in America. But perhaps I'm thinking mostly of working-class Boston.
Actually, minor correction: Seattle is Gen X, if Gen X were a culture and a city. They're definitely Serious Business, but imagine they're still punk.
Part of the confusion here stems from the double standard whereby any TV show, movie, song, dance, food, or slang originating from nonwhites is considered part of that particular subculture, but the same things created by white people (of which the vast majority are) are just considered part of general American culture. A song written by a black person is treated as a unique contribution to "black culture," while a song written by a white person is "just" pop or rock or EDM.
White American subculture is so successful that every other subculture in America immediately races to adopt it into their subculture as well, thus making it part of general American culture (by nature of it being so successful). Slang invented by a white person is not "white slang," it's just "slang", and we don't complain when other cultures use our slang. But certain other cultures notably hate this, screaming of "theft" as if they own certain words and phrases like physical possessions.
See also: "American culture" c.f. the rest of the world. American culture (i.e., white American culture) is so successful that it's even pervasive throughout virtually every other country, and yet America is still oft claimed by insecure Europeans to have no culture. Under this paradigm, you can see why - American culture is so successful that it simply *is* world culture, and so "culture" has evolved to now mean "the way you uniquely deviate from the default, background culture." Well, if you're the group that *invented* the world's default background culture, then you won't tend to deviate from that very much.
Definitely! There's the Midwest cultural region, which has a very different culture form the West or New England, and certainly different from the South. They have different values, different mores, different manners, different accents, different foods, etc. My mom's side of the family is originally from Iowa: I can still remember growing up and my grandma telling me to sit on the "davenport".
You can subdivide much deeper than that. The culture of - to pick a state I'm more familiar with - the upper peninsula of Michigan is quite distinct from the culture of the mitten; it's more isolationist and independent. In the mitten, the culture of Grand Rapids is distinct from the culture of Lansing is distinct from the culture of Flint which is distinct from the culture of Detroit. The culture of Traverse City is distinct from the culture of Fishtown.
Food is easy because it tends to be visible from the road. Lansing has olive burgers. Detroit has coney dogs and pizza. Flint is big on fried chicken. Northern Michigan is big on game meats. The central part of the upper peninsula is big on pasties. Per my wife, who is from Michigan, Grand Rapids has no regional food because they're stuck-up assholes (I asked because I couldn't think of any regional foods from that area). Traverse City has whitefish and cherry everything. Fishtown has a wide variety of seafood, big surprise there.
But there are other differences; accents (the "yooper" accent, which itself can be subdivided by region), religion, driving habits (Detroit is the only place I've seen have bumper-to-bumper traffic all running at 80 MPH), etc. A lot of it is easy to miss if you're just passing through.
"is upper-middle class white urban American a culture"
I don't live there (also I'm Canadian), and I'm not sure if it's "urban," but I've interpreted California as having regional subcultures.
An observation. I have noticed that non-southern white Americans and the English don't have a *folk* culture. By folk culture I mean for example things like tartans, kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or cowboy boots and country music for southern American whites. They don't have things like folk music and folk dancing. It died out strangely. (Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.)
I think the upper middle class urban culture there assimilated anyone and anything that could be called folk.
These things are generally a reaction to "universal culture" becoming the prestige culture. When the new thing is discontinuous from the old, the old can be kept around as separate, and nationalism provides the motivation to do so. The culture that gradually developed those things before they became "universal", obviously doesnt have a separate "folk" version.
No, I would argue for example that English folk clothing is dead, and instead it is the upper class Savile Row suits became universal.
I dont think we should count the upper and lower classes separately. A class is not a society. In many countries, folk culture drew from the lower classes because the upper had already been strongly modernised, but thats not necessary. Third world folk cultures often draw strong influence from old upper class practices.
What you are describing is *material* culture. New England, for instance, has a rich music and dance culture, our own clothing culture (Johnson jackets, basically the whole classic LL Bean catalog is New England folk clothing that's been commodotized), food (anadama bread as an example). That's setting aside Acadian folk culture which exists here as well (la Kermesse).
I think you just don't know about the folk culture that hasn't been popularized.
>Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.
Speaking as a morris dancer (Gog Magog Molly, the Tattered Court Border morris, plus I've dabbled in Cotswold and rapper), I have not idea what you mean by "authentic folk dancing", but I find it hard to imagine a definition that doesn't fit morris.
There are some sides doing dances straight out of Bacon's black book as written, and there are also lots of sides writing their own dances in the same style.
Also, morris is only one corner of the English folk dance and song scene - there are also a lot of local clubs and festivals. It's not nearly as thriving as it is in Ireland or Scotland, but it's definitely there.
Kinda....
Like, upper-middle class urban Americans definitely have a very distinctive culture and it's definitely not a white culture...but it's mostly white, at least for now. Like, if you go to live theater or a pickleball tournament, it's not all white people, but it's mostly white people, some of whom are uncomfortable with how white it is and are covertly recruiting non-white friends to attend.
Race is weird in the US and adding the white bit obscures more than it clarifies. If you ask whether urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, the answer is obvious, but if you ask whether white urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, people get really careful.
One thing about it is that it's not something you can escape from or into. You're in it at work, you're in it at home. You can't say to yourself "This weekend I'm hanging out with people in my subculture" because you are in it even if you try to leave it. Or if you do manage to leave it, you're a tourist, which is the most white PMC thing there is.
Culture is fractal. You can analyze culture at the level of: the Big 4 in Albion's Seed; China-Town in NYC; a specific venue; anywhere in between. However, whereas most other places consciously recognize their cultures, the U.S. has been on a quest to assimilate everyone into a single melting-pot.
> white Northeasterners
> upper-middle class white urban American
the Boston Brahmins, maybe? I bet Steve Sailor would know. Maybe link to the og thread for more context.
There's lots of subcultures, but it's not necessarily easy to identify them. Every area has its own aspects of culture. At the very least, the food is different.
Many of us are white-collar workers who spend a few years here and a few years there, making friends and family with others who do similar. That's a type of culture, but I don't think it is Culture in the deep sense because not much about it has been passed from generation to generation.
Contrast that to say, Judaism, which is a culture that has been around a while.