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Some interesting points, but many don't seem to connect to the conclusion. For instance, were the car safety regulations of the 1960's really instrumental to adoption of autos? Is the AI market today at a similar state of maturity as the auto market in the 1960's? Maybe? Was there a similar international competition? Well, yes, but the Japanese carmakers won in the 70's, so if this is an analog, does it really support the conclusion?
So imagine you're living like you are, today, and somehow some message appears from a remote tribe that has never had contact with civilization before. The message reads "help! We've discovered fire and it's going to kill us! Help! Come quick!"
What do you do?
Agreed, but you can the same about interracial marriage or allowing women to vote: within the frameworks and assumptions people had then, there were strong arguments that made the ideas ridiculous and obviously wrong on the face of it.
Doom skeptics have the daunting task of trying to prove a negative. It is very hard to conclusively prove anything is safe in a generalized, unconditional way.
As to arguments that were seen as intuitively false yet were solid, there is a huge class of human rights topics: racial and gender equality, gay rights, even going back to giving peasants the vote and democratic government. All of these were intuitively ridiculous, yet it's hard to make credible counter-arguments.
Lots of legal arguments are about advocating for exceptions.
Maybe I’m missing something. How are those suggested responses not appropriate for the conversation?
Thanks for the excellent post! I don’t think you mentioned anything about technical improvements in training, such as efficiency of parallelization. Do you know if there are internet I f things going in there, or does that shake out as part of the GPU generational improvements?
I don’t buy the AI = high interest rates argument. I could be wrong, but at the very least that’s evidence that there is not universal agreement on the point, and therefore the market is conflicted rather than wrong.
Definitely true, but hugely asymmetrical bets like the lottery play on the qualitative difference between losing pocket change and the (tiny) chance of life-changing wealth. Lotteries are objectively bad bets because people in aggregate lose more than they win, but they can be subjectively good bets because individual losses are effectively zero for responsible bettors. People who play lotteries often speak of the fantasies of winning being worth the price of entry.
Re: EU and USB-C, I do not believe that the law creates the industry group that will be empowered to change the standard in response to technical advancements.
The law is quite clear that it is USB-C connectors and USB PD charging standards that are mandated: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-internal-market-and-consumer-protection-imco/file-common-chargers-for-mobile-phones
Certainly it’s possible that new developments would lead to bureaucratic revision of the law, and hopefully so, but I see no evidence of this industry-based process to do so outside of the bureaucracy. Anyone seen differently?
That would be true in a perfectly rational, globally-optimized company with perfect visibility into facts.
Consider that there is no statement about the reviews or raises they receive. It is very possible for identical work output to receive different reviews and rewards based on personal traits and relationships. Setting aside gender, taller people also make more and receive higher ratings.
So while you’re 100% correct that it should work that way, it is entirely possible that in a local situation it does not work that way. One hypothesis might be that management is predominantly male, and faced with identical work output, conscious or unconscious bias leads them to pay the man more.
I’m not sure what they author is going for here, but I can say from a lot of firsthand experience that labor markets are anything by rational. So I’d expect the result to rest on irrationality.
Thanks for this — it illustrates how facts combat reductionism, and why reductionist rhetorical strategies tend to be actively hostile to facts and science, in a way I haven’t seen before and find useful.
One nit: your red/green fruit/vegetable example is instructive but flawed. Chiles and cucumbers are both fruits (internal seeds).