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Leftwing point of view:
Its a wealth transfer to younger people. Im fully aware that middle aged people have college debt.
Conversely wealth inequality by age is fairly extreme.
So I remain extremely in favor of student debt cancellation. Note I have never taken on any student debt so I obviously dont have any.
rohinmshah on Competition: Amplify Rohin’s Prediction on AGI researchers & Safety ConcernsIt's interesting to look back at this question 4 years later; I think it's a great example of the difficulty of choosing the right question to forecast in the first place.
I think it is still pretty unlikely that the criterion I outlined is met -- Q2 on my survey still seems like a bottleneck. I doubt that AGI researchers would talk about instrumental convergence in the kind of conversation I outlined. But reading the motivation for the question [LW(p) · GW(p)], it sure seems like a question that reflected the motivation well would have resolved yes by now (probably some time in 2023), given the current state of discourse and the progress in the AI governance space. (Though you could argue that the governance space is still primarily focused on misuse rather than misalignment.)
I did quite deliberately include Q2 in my planned survey -- I think it's important that the people whom governments defer to in crafting policy understand the concerns, rather than simply voicing support [EA(p) · GW(p)]. But I failed to notice that it is quite plausible (indeed, the default) for there to be a relatively small number of experts that understand the concerns in enough depth to produce good advice on policy, plus a large base of "voicing support" from other experts who don't have that same deep understanding. This means that it's very plausible that fraction defined in the question never gets anywhere close to 0.5, but nonetheless the AI community "agrees on the risk" to a sufficient degree that governance efforts do end up in a good place.
russellthor on OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with text, voice and visionI have just used it for coding for 3+ hours and found it quite frustrating. Definitely faster than GPT 4.0 but less capable. More like an improvement for 3.5. To me a seems a lot like LLM progress is plateauing.
Anyway in order to be significantly more useful a coding assistant needs to be able to see debug output, in mostly real time, have the ability to start/stop the program, automatically make changes, keep the user in the loop and read/use GUI as that is often an important part of what we are doing. I havn't used any LLM that are even low-average ability at debugging kind of thought processes yet.
d0themath on Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political CompassI'm skeptical a humanities education doesn't show up in earnings. Coming out of Daniel Gross and Tyler Cowen's Talent book, they argue a common theme they personally see among the very successful scouters of talent is the ability to "speak different cultural languages", which they also claim is helped along by being widely read in the humanities.
I expect it matters a lot less whether this is an autodidactic thing or a school thing, and plausibly autodidactic humanities is better suited for this particular benefit than school learned humanities, since if reading a text on your own, you can truly inhabit the world of the writer, whereas in school you need to constantly tie that world back into acceptable 12 pt font, double-spaced, times new roman, MLA formatted academic standards. And of course, in such an environment there are a host of thoughts you cannot think or argue for, and in some corners the conclusions you reach are all but written at the bottom of your paper for you.
Edit: I'll also note that I like Tyler Cowen's perspective on the state of humanities education among the populace, which he argues is at an all-time high, no thanks to higher education pushing it. Why? Because there is more discussion & more accessible discussion than ever before about all the classics in every field of creative endeavor (indeed, such documents are often freely accessible on Project Gutenberg, and the music & plays on YouTube), more & perhaps more interesting philosophy than ever before, and more universal access to histories and historical documents than there ever was in the past. The humanities are at an all-time high thanks to the internet. Why don't people learn more of them? Its not for lack of access, so subsidizing access will be less efficient than subsidizing the fixing of the actual problem, which is... what? I don't know. Boredom maybe? If its boredom, better to subsidize the YouTubers, podcasters, and TikTokers than the colleges (if you're worried about the state of humanities with regard to their own metrics of success--say, rhetoric--then who better to be the spokespeople?).
ape-in-the-coat on What you really mean when you claim to support “UBI for job automation”Looking forward to the next part then.
it's pretty unclear from the research whether NIT actually reduces employment (the main side effect of penalizing productivity). Of course theoretically it should, but the data isn't really conclusive in either direction.
I think as a general rule, when something theoretically is supposed to happen and we do not have conclusive practical data, its reasonable to assume that it indeed will happen.
You'd rather have a program that costs $4 trillion with zero maintenance costs, than a similarly impactful program that costs $~650 billion with maintenance costs?
Depends on the maintenance cost, obviously. But again the problem here is that our best theories strongly predict that impact will not be similar. NIT creates perversive incentives that UBI doesn't. And incentives matter - economy isn't a zero sum game.
So a more appropriate question is: Would you rather invest 4 trillions in a company which evaluation will go up or 650 billions in a company which evaluation will go down?
pretty dicey political stance.
I predict that implementation of general NIT will face much more pushback than implementation of UBI. No matter how minor are the required tweaks to EITC they are politically unfeasible in US. Meanwhile, UBI has support all around the political spectrum, from leftists to libertarians.
the-gears-to-ascension on OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with text, voice and visionoh, interesting, okay. I certainly didn't notice any strong effect like this when talking to gemini previously.
dr_s on Against Student Debt Cancellation From All Sides of the Political CompassI think debt cancellation would make sense as a sort of amnesty if it came together with some kind of reform that has the goal of preventing the situation from repeating in the future, whatever that may be. Otherwise, it's just a one off with the downsides you mention.
The problem is that fundamentally the argument is that humanities studies have positive externalities that aren't reflected in the salary of their graduates. I don't dismiss this argument, though I think with humanities a lot of value is provided by the very top percentile (e.g. a handful of very capable historians will write books that will be read by millions, most others will do very little unless they teach). In that sense there may be a need to subsidize the humanity degrees, but that might be best done in the long run with things like fully paid bursaries for deserving candidates. There's also a problem of evaluation because of course if you push such an argument you must accept some political accountability, and right now humanities are often terrible at making a case for themselves (every discussion about this I see tends to degenerate into "you can not appreciate our sophisticated knowledge, you bumpkins, but somehow studying humanities makes you a Better Person, so just accept it and thank us for our existence", which isn't terribly persuading. And at the very least, that the experts in subjects most closely associated with rhetoric and the understanding of human nature are so awful at persuasion is in itself concerning).
simeon_c on OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with text, voice and visionRight. Thanks for putting the full context. Voluntary commitments refers to the WH commitments which are much narrower than the PF so I think my observation holds.
review-bot on I hired 5 people to sit behind me and make me productive for a monthThe LessWrong Review [? · GW] runs every year to select the posts that have most stood the test of time. This post is not yet eligible for review, but will be at the end of 2024. The top fifty or so posts are featured prominently on the site throughout the year. Will this post make the top fifty?
ben-livengood on OpenAI releases GPT-4o, natively interfacing with text, voice and visionI was a bit surprised that they chose (allowed?) 4o to have that much emotion. I am also really curious how they fine-tuned it to that particular state and how much fine-tuning was required to get it conversational. My naive assumption is that if you spoke at a merely-pretrained multimodal model it would just try to complete/extend the speech in one's own voice, or switch to another generically confabulated speaker depending on context. Certainly not a particular consistent responder. I hope they didn't rely entirely on RLHF.
It's especially strange considering how I Am A Good Bing turned out with similarly unhinged behavior. Perhaps the public will get a very different personality. The current ChatGPT text+image interface claiming to be GPT-4o is adamant about being an artificial machine intelligence assistant without emotions or desires, and sounds a lot more like GPT-4 did. I am not sure what to make of that.