LessWrong 2.0 Reader

Maybe the key is not to assume the entire economy will win, but make some attempt to distinguish winners from losers and then find ETFs and other instruments that approximate these sectors.

So, some wild guesses...

• AI labs and their big-tech partners: winners
• Cloud hosting: winners
• Commercial real estate specializing in server farms: winners
• Whoever comes up with tractable ways to power all these server farms: winners
• AI-enabling hardware companies: winners until the Chinese blockade Taiwan and impose an embargo on raw materials... after that... maybe losers except the ones that have already started diversifying their supply-chains?
• Companies which inherently depend on aggregating and reselling labor: tricky, because if they do nothing, they're toast, but some of them can turn themselves into resellers of AI... e.g. a temp agency rolling out AI services as a cheaper product line
• Professional services: same as above but less exposed
• Businesses that are needed only in proportion to other businesses having human employees: travel, office real estate, office furniture and supplies: losers

As the effects ripple out and more and more workers are displaced...

• Low to mid-end luxury goods and eventually anything that depends on mass discretionary spending: losers

Though what I really would like to do is create some sort of rough model of an individual non-AI company with the following parameters:

• Recurring costs attributable to employees
• Other recurring costs
• Revenue
• Fraction of employees whose jobs can be automated at the current state of the art
• Variables representing of how far along this company is in planning or implementing AI-driven consolidation and how quickly it is capable of cutting over to AI
• Fixed costs of cut-over to AI
• Variable costs of cut-over to AI (depending on aggregate workload being automated)
• Whatever other variables people who unlike me actually know something about fundamental analysis would put in such a model.

...and then be able to make a principled guess about where on the AI-winners vs AI-losers spectrum a given company is. I even started sketching out a model like this until I realized that someone with relevant expertise must have already written a general-purpose model of this sort and I should find it and adapt it to the AI-automation scenario instead of making up my own.

Our situation is analogous to someone who has been diagnosed with cancer and told he has a low probability of survival, but at least there's a nifty investment opportunity he can buy that pays off big if he does survive.

Thanks for the kind words!

The thing you quoted was supposed to be very silly and self-deprecating, but I wrote it very poorly, and it actually wound up sounding kinda judgmental. Oops, sorry. I just rewrote it. I agree with everything you wrote in this comment.

I don’t think Paul thinks verification is generally easy or that delegation is fundamentally viable. He, for example, doesn’t suck at hiring because he thinks it’s in fact a hard problem to verify if someone is good at their job.

I liked Rohins comment elsewhere on this general thread.

I’m happy to answer more specific questions, although provide would generally feel more comfortable answering questions about my views then about Paul’s.

I tried it and it works for me too.

For me the dancer was spinning contraclockwise and would not change. With your screwing trick I could change rotation, and where now stably stuck in the clockwise direction. Until I screwed in the other direction. I've now done this back and forth a few times.

Section 1.6 is another appendix about how this series relates to Philosophy Of Mind. My opinion of Philosophy Of Mind is: I’m against it! Or rather, I’ll say plenty in this series that would be highly relevant to understanding the true nature of consciousness, free will, and so on, but the series itself is firmly restricted in scope to questions that can be resolved within the physical universe (including physics, neuroscience, algorithms, and so on). I’ll leave the philosophy to the philosophers.

At the risk of outing myself as a thin-skinned philosopher, I want to push back on this a bit. If we are taking "philosophy of mind" to mean, "the kind of work philosophers of mind do" (which I think we should), then your comment seems misplaced. Crucially, one need not be defending particular views on "big questions" about the true nature of consciousness, free will, and so on to be doing philosophy of mind. Rather, much of the work philosophers of mind do is continuous with scientific inquiry. Indeed, I would say some philosophy of mind is close to indistinguishable from what you do in this post! For example, lots of this work involves trying to carve up conceptual space in a way that coheres with empirical findings, suggests avenues for further research, and renders fruitful discussion easier. Your section 1.3 in this post features exactly the kind of conceptual work that is the bread-and-butter of philosophy. So, far from leaving philosophy to the philosophers, I actually think your work would fit comfortably into the more empirically informed end of contemporary philosophy of mind. To end on a positive note, I think it's really clearly written, fascinating, and fun to read. So thanks! 

I'm trying out this strategy on Investopedia's simulator (https://www.investopedia.com/simulator/trade/options)

The January 15 2027 call options on QQQ look like this as of posting (current price 481.48):

So, if you were following this strategy and buying today, would you buy 485 because it has the lowest OOM strike price? Would you buy 675 because it's the lowest strike price where the ask is lower than the theoretical Black-Sholes fair price? Would you go for 720 because it's the cheapest available? Would you look for the out-of-money option with the largest difference between Black-Sholes and the ask?

What would be your thought process? I'm definitely hoping to hear from @lc but am interested in hearing from anybody who found this line of reasoning worth investigating and has opinions about it.

I think this is mixing up colloquial "know nothing" and literal "know nothing".  It's impossible to identify a thing about which one knows nothing, as that identification is something about the thing.  It can be wrong, and it can be very imprecise, but it's not nothing.

50/50 are the odds of A when we know nothing about A.

No.  50/50 is a reasonable universal prior, but that's both very theoretical and deeply unclear how to categorize quantum waveforms into things over which a probability is even applicable.  In most real cases, 50/50 are the odds to start with when all you know is that it's common enough to come to your attention, and that it "feels" balanced whether or not it'll happen.   

In other words, "undefined and inapplicable" is the probability for things you know nothing about.  Almost all things you can apply probability to, you know SOMETHING about.

You add another layer of mixing literal and figurative "don't know anything" to the term "singularity".  Also, don't forget to multiply by the probability that a singularity-on-relevant-factors might not have happened for the thing you're predicting. 

No, because John could be speaking about himself administering the medication.

If it's about John administering the medication then you'd have to say "... he refused to let him".

It’s also possible to refuse to do something you’ve already acknowledged you should do, so the 3rd he could still be John regardless of who is being told what.

But the sentence did not claim John merely acknowledged that he should administer the medication, it claimed John was the originator of that statement. Is John supposed to be refusing his own requests?

If we know nothing about them, the statements could equally be true or false, and positively or negatively dependent. The same argument which makes us assume 50% probability to individual statements would also make us assume independence between statements. The possibilities cancel out, so to speak.