LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I freely admit to not really understanding how shares are priced. To me it seems like the value of a share should be related to the expected dividend pay-out of that share over the remaining lifetime of the company, with a discount rate applied on pay-outs that are expected to happen further in the future (IE dividend yields 100 years from now are valued much less than equivalent payments this year). By this measure, justifying the current price sounds hard.

Google says that the annual dividend on Nvidia shares is 0.032%. (Yes, the leading digits are 0.0). So, right now, you get a much better rate of return just leaving your money in your bank's current account. So, at least by this measure, Nvidia shares are ludicrously over-priced. You could argue that future Nvidia pay outs might be much larger than the historical ones due to some big AI related profits. But, I don't find this argument convincing. Are future pay outs going to be 100x bigger? It would require a 100-fold yield increase for it to just be competitive with a savings account. If you time discount a little (say those 100-fold increases don't materialise for 3 years) then it looks even worse.

Does Deepseek actually mean that Nvidia is over valued?

FYI I wrote this a few days ago but could not post it due to being rate limited. The one change I made is adding actually to the 1st line.

To be clear I have no intention whatsoever of shorting NVDA

Epistemic status -- I have no idea what I'm talking about

Epistemic status -- very speculative but not quite a DMT hallucination

Super human AI will run on computers not much more expensive than personal computers but perhaps with highly specialized chips maybe even specialized for the task of running a single AI instance

Investment in AI proper will be small relative to AI directed production

There will be a period of increasing marginal returns from AI; but this will eventually become diminishing marginal returns

Even during the period of increasing marginal returns more $$$ will go to AI directed production than AI proper

Companies that most successfully transition to AI will blow the competition away; some of these companies will have a moat & continue to make high profits. But how can such high profits be justified? Maybe the government needs to take 50% of the shares & create trust funds for its citizens.

Companies that buy up the right kinds of land & natural resources will also do well

Companies that are least affected by AI will benefit b/c of the Baumol effect

So what are the get rick quick schemes? Specialized chips, incorporating AI into production systems for non AI goods, strategically buying up the right land & land rights, AI resistant industries!?

Interesting times maybe too interesting

In conclusion I'm agnostic as to whether Nvidia is or is not over valued but other companies may benefit even more as AI advances. I think it's more about leadership & seizing opportunities more so than a few companies having a overwhelmingly dominant position.

Thanks for the reply!

The only general remarks that I want to make

are in regards to your question about

the model of 150 year long vaccine testing

on/over some sort of sample group and control group.

I notice that there is nothing exponential assumed

about this test object, and so therefore, at most,

the effects are probably multiplicative, if not linear.

Therefore, there are lots of questions about power dynamics

that we can overall safely ignore, as a simplification,

which is in marked contrast to anything involving ASI.

If we assume, as you requested, "no side effects" observed,

in any test group, for any of those things

that we happened to be thinking of, to even look for,

then for any linear system, that is probably "good enough".

I am not sure I understand the distinction between linear and exponential in the vaccine context. By linear do you mean that only few people die? By exponential do you mean that a lot of people die?

If so, then I am not so sure that vaccine effects could only be linear. For example, there might be some change in our complex environment that would prompt the vaccine to act differently than it did in the past.

More generally, our vaccine can lead to catastrophic outcomes if there is something about its future behavior that we didn't predict. And if that turns out to be true, then things could go ugly really fast.

And the extent of the damage can be truly big. "Scientifically proven" cancer vaccine that passed the tests is like the holy grail of medicine. "Curing cancer" is often used by parents as an example of the great things their children could achieve. This is combined with the fact that cancer has been with us for a long time and the fact that the current treatment is very expensive and painful.

All of these factors combined tell us that in a relatively short period of time a large percentage of the total population will get this vaccine. At that point, the amount of damage that can be done only depends on what thing we overlooked, which we, by definition, have no control over.

If there is some long future problem that crops up,

the company can say "we never looked for that"

and "we are not responsible for the unexpected",

because the people who made the deployment choices

have taken their profits and their pleasure in life,

and are now long dead. "Not my Job".

"Don't blame us for the sins of our forefathers".

Similarly, no one is going to ever admit or concede

any point, of any argument, on pain of ego death.

This same excuse would surely be used by companies manufacturing the vaccine. They would argue that they shouldn't be blamed for something that the researchers overlooked. They would say that they merely manufactured the product in order to prevent the needless suffering of countless people.

For all we know, by the time that the overlooked thing happens, the original researchers (who developed and tested the vaccine) are long dead, having lived a life of praise and glory for their ingenious invention (not to mention all the money that they received).

Nice post! There can be some surprising language-barriers between early modern writers and today's readers. I remember as an undergrad getting very confused by a passage from Locke in which he often used the word 'sensible.' I took him to mean 'prudent' and only later discovered he meant 'can be sensed'!

does that require you to either have the ability to commit to a plan or the inclination to consistently pick your plan from some prior epistemic perspective

You aren't required to take an action (/start acting on a plan) that is worse from your current perspective than some alternative. Let maximality-dominated mean "w.r.t. each distribution in my representor, worse in expectation than some alternative." (As opposed to "dominated" in the sense of "worse than an alternative with certainty".) Then, in general you would need^[1] to ask, "Among the actions/plans that are not maximality-dominated from my current perspective, which of these are dominated from my prior perspective?" And rule those out.

1. ^{^}

   If you care about diachronic norms of rationality, that is.

What? If every couple had only one child, the population would halve at each generation. That's what they mean. Replacement rate requires more than just one child.

I mean, the whole point was "how can we have fertility but also not be a dystopia". You just described a dystopia. It's also kind of telling that the only way to make people have children, something that is supposedly a joyous experience, you can think of is "have a tyrannical dictator make it very clear that they'll make sure the alternative is even worse". That's pretty telling. Someone thinking this way is part of the problem more than they are of the solution.

I honestly think "find the elixir of immortality within a couple of generations" is not what I'd call a pragmatic plan to solve this. Personally I don't think having 2 or 3 children would necessarily be such a curse in a different kind of world. A few obvious changes that I think would help towards that:

• short of immortality, any extension of youth helps. Part of the problem here is that by the time we feel like we've got our shit sorted out, we're almost too old to have children;

• artificial wombs. Smooth out the risks of pregnancy and eliminate the biological divide between men and women in this deal;

• houses, houses, houses. Children need space. People want to give their children space. "Shit sorted out" almost always includes buying a house. Build more fucking houses. Have priorities;

• a less neurotic culture around children. We kept raising the bar about what it means to be a good parent and then we're surprised so many people see it as way too stressful and hard for them. Make more independence to children not only legal when it's not, but normal. That has the double benefit of being known to actually really help the psychological growth of those children and of leaving more free time to the parents. Are there risks? Yes, but all life comes with risks, they can be mitigated in other ways, and these risks I feel are likely perceived way more than statistics would justify;

• get our priorities straight about work. Look, yes, productivity is important and all. But effectively our society tells people that if you want to work towards developing a new sports betting app, that's £80,000 per year; if you want to work towards making sure the city doesn't fall to dysentery by keeping it clean, that's £30,000 per year; and if you want to have and raise the next generation, a £100,000 lump sum for 18 years of work would be the wildest thing we can think of. Obviously this is not even on the same scale. Pay a straight up parental sabbatical for people at peak reproductive age (say, 25-35), see what happens. A time to do mostly parenting and nothing else, maybe some easy part time work on the side. Does that mean losing some peak productive years? Yes, of course. Would that productivity be best used for society making sure all the middle management is properly middle managed in the umpteenth marketing company?

The problem is honestly that this issue is so polarized. So doing anything about it is now associated with being with the religious right wing (or worse, the racist right wing specifically worried about white people being out-bred), which then means that the actually more liberal and rational parts of the centre-right, centre and left abhor touching it and have to pretend there's no problem. The Amish thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think the way forward in this sense would be to spin it: not "you must have children for the sake of humanity's future!", but "our inability to allow people to have children is actually ruining their potential happiness". There's already some efforts in that direction but they feel quite half assed, and I think the left in particular focuses too much on the economic aspects only without seeing that there's a bit more at play.

I basically don't care about philosophy of mind anymore, mostly because I don't care about philosophy anymore.

Philosophy, as a project, is usually about two things. One, figure out metaphysics. Two, figure out a correct ontology for reality.

Both of these are flawed projects. Metaphysics is that which we can't know from experience, so it's all speculative and also unnecessary, because we can model the world adequately without supposing to know how it works beyond our ability to observe it. Fake metaphysics is helpful contingently because it lets you have fake models that are easier to reason about, but that's the main use case.

As for finding a correct ontology, we know the map is not the territory, and further there are many possible maps. All models are wrong, some are useful.

I did still care about philosophy a lot right up until "I" switched into PNSE, which happened after several thousands hours of meditation practice, and a lot of other things, too.

Basically what I can say is, the whole idea of philosophy of mind is confused, because it supposes mind to be something separate from reality itself. But the world is only known through mind, and so the world is mind. The appearance of an external world is a useful model for predicting future experiences, and it works well to think and behave as if there is an external reality, because that's a metaphysical belief that pays substantial rent. But, epistemologically speaking, external reality is not prior to experience, and thus deeper questions about consciousness are mostly confused because they mix up causal dependency in one's ontology.

I think the state handling child rearing is the long term solution. The need for new people is a society wide problem and not ultimately one of personal responsibility.  Of course people should still be free to do it on their own if they want. It'll be weird that not everyone will have traditional parents, but I think we can figure it out. Maybe a mandatory or highly incentivized big brother/ sister program would help make it more nurturing.