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don't forget the political environment:
- locally, there's a meaningful "break up big tech" current which could make it politically difficult to simultaneously sell AI as a paradigm shift and monopolize it for yourself via the legal apparatus. cynically, firms might view regulation as a path to achieve similar ends but with fewer political repercussions, less blatant than if they leveraged patents.
- globally, the country which presently enjoys the lead in AI sees itself in an economic battle against a competitor unlikely to respect its intellectual property claims. to the degree which states view AI through any lens related of "national defense", there will be some push to maintain competitiveness at least on the global stage.
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it’s odd to leap to things like housing markets and consumer debt without considering the demographics of startup employees. i believe your graphs are national averages, so are these employees expected to hold more or less debt relative to average? more or less likely to be homeowners v.s. renters? more or less likely to live in specific regions of the country?
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the initial shock of covid 3.5 years ago was just massive. i get that it was in many ways transformative and not strictly destructive, but still hypotheticals like “a hundred billion decrease in VC funding” just seem so miniscule in comparison. simultaneously we see how the impacts of a sharp shock got dispersed pretty far across time with covid, and this VC bubble popping isn’t nearly as sharp a shock as we’ve known (call it 18mo, based on those burn rates, vs 2mo over which covid hit the whole country).
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cascading failures are notoriously difficult to predict. seems to me the real worry is not the title of this post but that the systems which have arrested cascading failures may be eroding. good for bringing up national debt, actually, would be interesting to just embrace this fully and consider food/energy security & geopolitics — but that would make for a pretty different piece.
It seems mostly correct to accept the new calculations in the Improved COTI, which represent a -25% adjustment, and then include the 13% adjustment for taxes, resulting in about a -13% adjustment. This still represents an increase in the cost of thriving.
is COTI actually an inverted measure of the literal “cost of thriving”? i.e. the index goes up when the cost goes down? otherwise, this apparent inverted sign (a -13% change in COTI representing an “increase in the cost of thriving”) is throwing me for a loop.
In broad terms, families with children have seen large reductions in their federal income tax burden, largely due to the introduction and expansion of the child tax credit.
If we want to measure the COTI, as per its original justification, it seems correct to more or less accept the ‘improved COTI’ of -25% instead of -36%, reflecting the errors in health care premiums and college sticker versus effective prices, and various minor fixes. We then must take taxes into account, which should leave us with about a -13% change from 1985 to 2023.
here it happens again: tax costs have decreased since 1985, but somehow that manifests as an increase to the “cost of thriving” index (-25% —> -13%).
To learn gravity, you need additional evidence or context; to learn that the world is 3D, you need to see movement. To understand that movement, you have to understand how light moves, etc. etc.
for the 3d part: either the object of observation needs to move, or the observer needs to move: these are equivalent statements due to symmetry. consider two 2D images taken simultaneously from different points of observation: this provides the same information relevant here as were there to be but 2 images of a moving object from a stationary observer at slightly different moments in time.
in fact then, you don’t need to see movement in order to learn that the world is 3D. making movement a requirement to discover the dimensionality of a space mandates the additional dimension of time: how then could we discover the 4 dimensional space-time without access to some 5th dimensional analog of time? it’s an infinite regress.
similarly, you don’t need to understand the movement of light. certainly, we didn’t for a very long time. you just need to understand the projection from object to image. that’s where the bulk of these axiomatic properties of worldly knowledge reside (assumptions about physics being regular, or whatever else you need so that you can leverage things like induction in your learning).
rationally, automating more tasks in my life should make for an easier life that’s subject to fewer demands. rationally, when this isn’t the case — when individuals each working to automate more things causes them to instead be subjected to more demands (learn new skills, else end up on the street), you shouldn’t expect doubling down on this strategy to be long-term viable.
rationally, if you’re predicting the proportion of people able to stay afloat to be always decreasing up to the singularity — a point at which labor becomes valueless — you shouldn’t expect to still be afloat come that moment.
“rationally”, you’re doomed unless you can slide into a different economic system wherein you do observe the benefits of automation. idly watching your peers get rolled over by that bus is bad for your future as it further separates you from the potential exit ramps. the viable solutions to your problem require collective action. that doesn’t put it entirely out of league with rationality, but if it’s not clear from my tone (i apologize if it reads too strong) i believe you’re thinking of this way too narrowly. i think you’re leaning too far toward a Spock type of rationality for what is increasingly a social problem.
> The tradeoff for connecting with similar people is not connecting with people different from us.
disagree. as you say, micro-communities are aligned very narrowly. which means that if you pair any two random individuals from the same micro-community, they'll be extremely similar along only one particular metric, but randomly different across every metric not relevant to that community. the easiest example of this is nationality: to the degree LW is a micro-community, it connects people of many different nationalities. perhaps the disappointment is that although you're connecting with different people, you aren't connecting over your differences.
> Widespread camaraderie is becoming rarer and rarer. Most of us live in highly polarized societies where the vast majority of people won’t even date across political party lines. More than ever, we should be looking for ways to create camaraderie at scale and soften the dividing impact of micro-communities.
this may be a misleading use of "divide" in the context of "polarization". there's a pretty clear hierarchy here: a societal foundation upon which micro-communities are built. most micro-communities, like ours, aren't antagonistic to other micro-communities nor can they be too antagonistic to the foundation unless they seek literal suicide. in the realm of micro-communities, cross-community disagreements are resolved via distance. but every micro-community is subject to the demands of that massive, volatile foundation. lesswrong.com dies if the nations to which we belong decide they don't want us using their cables to communicate. if not for the power of the macro over the micro, we would not experience the level of division we do today. just look up: is it the micro-communities, or the macro society/state, which wields the power to legislate and enforce every thing which is today the topic of polarization?
to consider your example: i think it's quite right to reject a date from anyone who participates in political action focused on destroying the micro-communities which allow you or i to be as we are. i don't mind different *philosophies*: i'm perfectly happy to have a companion with whom to debate the existence of God -- just so long as they aren't fighting crusades about it. but coupled to every "political belief" is a vote, and behind that, an action in the real world.
during some period of the 18th century, we lived in a politics of construction. legislating things like the Bill of Rights. *creating* choice in religion, choice in speech, choice in which aspects of our life we share with whom (protections from unreasonable “search and seizure”). we created the very protections which allow for micro-identity and micro-communities.
today's is a politics of destruction. it’s about restricting what a person can do to or put in their body; restricting what one can teach to the youth; restricting the very bits and information you and i are allowed to share with each other (not just the tainted label of "free speech", but everything from DRM to intrusive surveillance). the mistake of the day is not that we refuse to date across political boundaries, but that we fail to recognize the very real violence beneath our political abstractions.
> 9/11 broke Americans’ sense of micro-identity. All of a sudden, which team you supported or which political party you agreed with seemed to not matter. Instead, people defaulted to a higher level of identity—being an American.
and this was pivotal to everything you discuss around community. the post-9/11 "camaraderie" led directly to this lasting atmosphere of “if you see something, say something” mutual distrust; to an increased normalization of aggression and dehumanization in our social hierarchies: being fondled by a TSA agent is just a *normal* component of domestic travel; and to the surveillance state which views every micro deviation -- vital to micro-community -- as cause for suspicion.
if this is what political camaraderie creates, then **i don't want that**.
> When the fate of humanity is at risk, we all take on the identity of human.
and of course, EA seeks to promote this type of identity even without the risk. it's also not a terrible place to find those "serendipitous, unscripted, and raw interaction[s]" you treasure. it's especially interesting if you were find camaraderie in any of its spaces... as a collection of growing micro-communities, promoting an ideal of cooperation as it grows toward that dominant macro-community that's today largely void of camaraderie: as EA grows how does the sense of camaraderie change, and if its ideals really did become the universal, would that bring about the type of "at scale" camaraderie you dream of?
> If camaraderie at scale makes ordinary days better, wouldn’t it be awesome to experience it more often? Or at least recreate it on a smaller scale within our own lives and communities. [...]
> What’s missing from the current stack is moments of serendipitous, unscripted, and raw interaction—moments where we find connection in places we least expect it.
i just want to promote in-person conferences and conventions of any kind here. to build on my claim that everyone in this micro-community is meaningfully different in ways we don't display in this medium, IRL gatherings are exactly that opportunity to explore those differences. and especially the nominally entertainment-focused conventions (anything from Comicon to EMFcamp): these specifically create an atmosphere where you can feel both comfortable enough and inspired enough to be creative and spontaneous with complete strangers. the most amazing ones are at their core a chaotic swirling of intensely human passion, some unidentifiable thing that just wants for everyone there to impart a little bit of themselves into whatever's being created and to see eachother in the product. i can't tell you the number of times i've walked past some conference hall at the end of the day, see 4 people painstakingly stacking 1000 chairs, walk inside to help and ten minutes later there's 20 of us and the room's spotless. that alone is satisfying, and it's a short journey from there to far deeper acts of camaraderie.
that camaraderie might not be so immediately focused on "changing the world" or operating "at scale", but it does exist in the moment, it's strong enough to perpetuate itself, and it might provide insights for anyone ambitious enough to recreate it in new environments.
i’d love for anyone to present the argument against this. eq says it’s things like karaoke which make friendships great. the friends i know who are eager to do karaoke are the same ones who will start wild, speculative conversation when we’re idly sitting in the living room together. they’re the interesting people.
the people in my life whom, come the first lull in smalltalk after dinner get uncomfortable and declare “great meal, time to go” instead of opening themselves up for those late-night intimate conversations, are the same people who would turn down an invitation to karaoke.
interesting friends are fun friends. “boring” is the opposite of both “fun” and “interesting”. so if the latter two mean something different to the author than to me, perhaps we agree by saying “build non-boring friendships”?
OpenAI estimated that the energy consumption for training GPT-3 was about 3.14 x 10^17 Joules.
sanity checking this figure: 1 kWh is 1000 x 60 x 60 = 3.6 MJ. then GPT-3 consumed 8.7 x 10^10 kWh. at a very conservative $0.04/kWh, that’s $3.5B just in the power bill — disregarding all the non-power costs (i.e. the overheads of operating a datacenter).
i could believe this number’s within 3 orders of magnitude of truth, which is probably good enough for the point of this article, but i am a little surprised if you just took it 100% at face value.
Should there be an opt-out from A.I. systems? Which ones? When is an opt-out clause a genuine choice, and at what point does it become merely an invitation to recede from society altogether, like saying you can choose not to use the internet or vehicular transport or banking services if you so choose.
the examples given are all networks, with many of the nodes human. if “receding from society” means being less connected with the other humans, then there’s no debate: to opt out of these networks is necessarily to “recede from society”.
but LLMs don’t have this property. they aren’t a medium used to bridge connections between individuals: rather things like chatbots exist explicitly to replace human-human interactions with human-machine interactions, and presently they also serve as knowledge repositories: a single massive node with only one connection, to you, the user. to opt out of this form of human-machine interaction at present is not to recede from society, but rather the opposite.
will this change? surely. but i wouldn’t trust the author’s analogy to be at all useful in understanding how.
Instincts to punish people are how actual humans precommit.
i think you could equally frame this as “people precommit due to an expectation of reciprocity”. like, i don’t generally follow through on my commitments to plans with friends because i fear punishment for breaking them. it’s more that i expect whatever amount i invest into the friendship will be reciprocated (approximately).
you could frame the fallout of a commitment failure as “punishment”, but if the risk of punishment exceeded the benefit of cooperation that would discourage me from pre-committing; from interacting with the thing at all. if i thought my crush would beat me should i break things off with him, then i’d simply never ask him out to begin with and we’d probably both be worse off for that.
no love for it from me either, i’m sorry to say. the “society only exists when we overcome our base sexual desires” meme is tired. my university days were simultaneously my most promiscuous and my most productive (subjectively, measured by my extra-curricular contributions to technology). that’s a sample size of 1 (or dozens? depends how you measure it), but Huxley doesn’t even claim a single sample for the opposing view — much less an experiment, despite claiming this foundational assumption as “scientific”.
are complex systems like societies path-dependent? absolutely. the example of decentralized Swedish production arising after centralized English production is intriguing, in that this diversity appears to be predicated on the two societies having been only loosely connected prior to this — suggesting that this sort of divergence become more difficult as societies become more globalized (the opposing point of view being that globalization means those people with similar, but niche, divergent interests can more easily locate and collaborate with eachother). but that’s sort of the only interesting thing i could scrape from that intro, and it’s 80% my own extrapolation.
UBI will always have some power imbalance. if not due to how that income is provided, then by how that income is exchanged for the basic goods. if we want to universally provide for the basic needs, while avoiding that kind of power imbalance, it seems sensible to focus exactly on that: automate more and more of the housing/food production chain, and distribute the tools for that to decrease the power of whichever hierarchies might otherwise bar access to them.
so Universal Basic Income is the practical implementation for providing basic needs for as long as there’s actually a significant labor requirement in that loop: but further into the utopian future it will need to shift to Universal Basic Production, where individuals/households/communities are granted both the power and responsibility of operating whatever machinery actually does the providing.
consider a few scenarios around these two characters: a possibly-depressed Pierre and probably-sociopathic Eliza:
- these characters chat IRL and Pierre ends his life.
- these characters enact that same scenario on-stage at a theater.
- these characters enact that same scene in a videogame via the player selecting dialogue options.
it’s scenario 1 which is horrific. in scenario 2, a Pierre-like viewer is far less likely to end his life after leaving the theater, ditto with scenario 3.
i think some of us already think of these chatbots as “acting out a role” — that’s what a bunch of prompt engineering is about. sometimes we’re explicit in telling that chatbot what “kind” of actor it’s chatting with. getting tsundere output from a chatbot is an example that requires role-playing for both actors. the weird part, then, is why do users end up relating to the experience as if it’s form (1) instead of (2) or (3)? is it possible (and good?) to explicitly shift the experiences into form (2) or (3)? instead of presenting the user a textbox that’s supposed to represent them, should we rather be presenting them a scene of two actors, and placing them in control of one of those actors?
the second-order effects of turning off the WiFi are surely comprised of both positive and negative effects, and i have no idea which valence it nets out to.
these days homes contain devices whose interconnectedness is used to more efficiently regulate power use. for example, the classic utility-controlled water heater, which reduces power draw when electricity is more expensive for the utility company (i.e. when peakers would need to come online). water heaters mostly don’t use WiFi but thermostats like Nest, programmable light bulbs, etc do: when you disrupt that connection, in which direction is power use more likely to change?
i have my phone programmed so that when i go to bed (put it in the “i’m sleeping” Do Not Disturb mode) it will automatically turn off all the outlets and devices — like my TV, game consoles, garage space heater — which i only use during the day. leaving any one of these on for just one night would cancel weeks of gains from disabling WiFi.
interoperability. we take it forgranted everywhere else in life: when you have to replace a fridge it’s easy because they all have the same electrical/water hookups. replace a door, same thing: standardized size, hinges, and knobs. going further, i’ve been upgrading the cabinets/drawers in my kitchen: they’re standard size so i can buy 3rd party silverware inserts, or even inserts made specifically to organize anything that’s k-cup shaped. i replaced the casters on my office chair with oversized carpet-friendly wheels: standardized attachments. so many things in the physical world are made to be interoperable because it facilitates mass production and allows for any company to innovate in any sliver they see. it’s cheaper for producers, and improves the consumer experience.
i assure you those causes and benefits aren’t restricted to the physical world. i read this post in my RSS client, even as my roommate was fiddling with the router because all my RSS feeds get saved for offline reading in the background, before i even decide to read them. simultaneously that RSS standard allows LessWrong to get more reach.
i confront the crux of your post differently: “how do i navigate adversarial relationships (with a business)”? increasingly my approach is to just not engage (or engage less). when it comes to mid-size group stuff, it’s usually pretty easy: LW is just better than Facebook, reddit, or anything that sees its users as a resource to extract from.
for smaller groups or1-to-1 things i choose SMS over Discord; for the people where that’s too low-bandwidth and IRL hangouts aren’t practical, treat any monopoly replacement (signal, telegram, etc) as explicitly ephemeral: as these services switch to value capture we hop ship without losing anything. the world is large enough that there are plenty of substitute activities even if you disengage from Facebook, say. but it’s easier to adopt a policy of “don’t engage” a priori, rather than integrate them into your life and then decide to cut back on them..
further down on that page:
We are also now offering dedicated instances for users who want deeper control over the specific model version and system performance. By default, requests are run on compute infrastructure shared with other users, who pay per request. Our API runs on Azure, and with dedicated instances, developers will pay by time period for an allocation of compute infrastructure that’s reserved for serving their requests.
Developers get full control over the instance’s load (higher load improves throughput but makes each request slower), the option to enable features such as longer context limits, and the ability to pin the model snapshot.
Dedicated instances can make economic sense for developers running beyond ~450M tokens per day.
that suggests one shared “instance” is capable of processing > 450M tokens per day, i.e. $900 of API fees at this new rate. i don’t know what exactly their infrastructure looks like, but the marginal costs of the compute here have got to be still an order of magnitude lower than what they’re charging (which is sensible: they do have fixed costs they have to recoup, and they are seeking to profit).
commenting on the body, separate from the incident that prompted this. when i was in school:
- the occasional professor would invite the class for drinks after a test.
- a subset of students i TA’d would invite me for tea.
- a subset of students would bake food and share it after exams.
no mention of relationships yet. but all these activities are exactly those avenues by which people learn about each other and by which they form bonds. the professors i bonded with were exactly those professors whose office hours i attended most. and vice versa for the students i bonded with attending more of my office hours.
student/teacher bonding means the student is more comfortable asking the teacher for help, means the teacher better understands how to frame things in a way the student will get. if you ran the study, you would surely find correlation between this and course scores. does that mean this style of bonding is unethical?
if you ran the study and found that informal socializing didn’t decrease any student’s learning outcome, but it did increase some outcomes non-uniformly, would that be unethical?
it seems to me that the vast majority of times where relationships cause power problems is when one of the members is in competition with another. the argument that the criteria for competition among employees in the workplace shouldn’t involve sex is largely an argument that people shouldn’t be coerced into participating in a competition they don’t want to be a part of. aiming for consensus w.r.t. which criteria you should apply such that all workers prefer to be in such competition is a somewhat limited prospect. maybe there’s some progress that can be made there, but i expect the bulk of progress will actually be in finding ways to not force everyone into the same competition. in the post-scarcity world where you don’t have to compete in the workplace to stay alive, this consent issue would largely disappear. until then, the best we can do is fragment the competitive pools: less hierarchical workplaces such that the effect of any one competition is radically reduced, and more employment choices so that those who want work and life to be separate can avoid entering into direct competition with those who want work and life to overlap.
More importantly, if we have some one value, that values are to be valued, so much as to enact for, not only to want them - then we have a value which has no opposite in utilitarianism.
sounds a little like Preference Utilitarianism.
this observation means, if we align to mere values of humanity: AI can simply modify the humans, so to alter their values and call it a win; AI aligns you to AI. In general, for fulfillment of any human value, to make the human value it, seems absolutely the easiest, for any case.
here “autonomy”, “responsibility”, “self-determination” are all related values (or maybe closer to drives?) that counter this approach. put simply, “people don’t like being told what to do”. if an effective AI achieves alignment via this approach, i would expect it to take a low-impedance path where there’s no “forceful” value modification, coercion is done by subtler reshaping of the costs/benefits any time humans make value tradeoffs.
e.g. if a clever AI wanted humans to “value” pacifism, it might think to give a high cost to large-scale violence, which it could do by leaking the technology for a global communications network, then for an on-demand translation systems between all human languages, then for highly efficient wind power/sail design, and before you know it both the social and economic costs to large-scale violence is enormous and people “decide” that they “value” peaceful coexistence.
i’m not saying today’s global trade system is a result of AI… but there are so many points of leverage here that if it (or some future system like it) were, would we know?
if we wanted to avoid this type of value modification, we would need to commit to a value system that never changes. write these down on clay tablets that could be preserved in museums in their original form, keep the language of these historic texts alive via rituals and tradition, and encourage people to have faith in the ideas proposed by these ancients. you could make a religion out of this. and its strongest meta-value would necessarily be one of extreme conservatism, a resistance to change.
i’m naive to the details of GPT specifically, but it’s easy to accidentally make any reduction non-deterministic when working with floating point numbers — even before hardware variations.
for example, you want to compute the sum over a 1-billion entry vector where each entry is the number 1. in 32-bit IEEE-754, you should get different results by accumulating linearly (1+(1+(1+…))) vs tree-wise (…((1+1) + (1+1))…).
in practice most implementations do some combination of these. i’ve seen someone do this by batching groups of 100,000 numbers to sum linearly, with each batch dispatched to a different compute unit and the 10,000 results then being summed in a first-come/first-serve manner (e.g. a queue, or even a shared accumulator). then you get slightly different results based on how each run is scheduled (well, the all-1’s case is repeatable with this method but it wouldn’t be with real data).
and then yes, bring in different hardware, and the scope broadens. the optimal batching size (which might be exposed as a default somewhere) changes such that even had you avoided that scheduling-dependent pitfall, you would now see different results than on the earlier hardware. however, you can sometimes tell these possibilities apart! if it’s non-deterministic scheduling, the number of different outputs for the same input is likely higher order than if it’s variation strictly due to differing hardware models. if you can generate 10,000 different outputs from the same input, that’s surely greater than the number of HW models, so it would be better explained by non-deterministic scheduling.
Make the sleeping environment cool: ~3 degrees less than during the day
assuming Celcius in the absence of units. but even so, this is a smaller delta than i expected. i prefer about 10 C below “room temperature” when sleeping (living in the PNW: i just open the window to varying angle to approximate this throughout the year), with 3-4 blankets, layered. 3 C below room temperature doesn’t really let me layer blankets (or maybe i can get two blankets) and a common problem i have when sleeping as a guest somewhere that keeps temperature this high is waking up in the night, sweaty.
but how large is this temperature range? am i possibly disrupting other parts of the cycle by sleeping at relatively low ambient temperatures? for example, re-heating the room when i get out of bed takes some time so i sit 10 minutes right by the heater: it sounds like that might be bad in the same way that a morning hot shower is bad.
i have some questions around clothes still (i sleep in the nude), as well as body hair/shaving, but they may be too niche for this setting. thanks for the post! Huberman gets cited to me frequently and to good effect so i’m glad to learn about his online resources/presence.
AI will be less tool like and more agent like in my view.
it’s not clear to me that this distinction is real, or would matter even if it is real. from my perspective, looking up, i am an agent within the company i work within. from the employer’s perspective, looking down, i am a tool to drive revenue. this relation exists all the way up through to the C-suite, and then the hedge funds and retirement fund managers, and back around to the employees who own those funds. in our capitalist system of ownership every agent is also someone else’s tool.
recessions, bubbles etc (but really any rare-ish economic event) are incredibly hard to model because the length of time the economic system has existed is actually relatively short so we don't have that large a sample size. That point can be extrapolated across to this situation almost exactly.
our economic systems have weathered all these events. if your point is that AI is of the same class as bubbles/recessions, then shouldn’t the takeaway be that our economic systems can handle it — just expecting it to be as painful as any other economic swing?
i suppose i probably just don’t understand what you mean when you speak of “rethinking” the economic system. that sounds like a revolutionary change, whereas for the dominant economic systems today, looking back i can trace what is more of an evolutionary path from the dawn of cities/trade up to the present day. the only time i can say we’ve “rethought” our economic system is when various countries tried to pivot from their established distributed system to a centrally managed system of production more or less “overnight”.
i'm generally receptive to the idea that our economic systems could be changed significantly for the better, but looking historically i don't think any of this "demands" a rethink of the dominant economic system in play today. it will mutate in the same patchwork way it has ever since the invention of the printing press (an early device that turned a previously scarce resource into an abundant one). it somehow made it through both the explosive decrease in energy scarcity of the industrial revolution and the explosive decrease in information scarcity of the past 50 years.
i think there's some argument here that the periods which experience outsized economic growth are largely those same periods which experienced rapid decrease in scarcity of some underlying resource, though i don't have the data to properly claim that. on the other hand, the industrial revolution while successful in economic terms had some pretty terrible social consequences at the time: generally poor living and working conditions for large segments of the population. the response to this was largely social and political: unions, regulation. the actual economic system has proven itself to be robust to these kind of changes and also faster at responding to them than the social/political systems, so i think the more appropriate focus is on the latter: are our social and political systems of today up to the task of handling another rapid decrease in scarcity?
On the other hand, every known living creature on Earth uses essentially the same DNA-based genetic code, which suggests abiogenesis occurred only once in the planet’s history.
well this alone doesn’t suggest abiogenesis occurred only once: just that if any other abiogenesis occurred it was outcompeted by DNA replicators.
when i was in school there was a theory that RNA was a remnant of pre-DNA abiogenesis: either that it bootstrapped DNA life, or that it was one such distinct line which “lost” to DNA. in the latter case, hard to say how many other lines there were which left no evidence visible today, or even how many lines/abiogenesis events would have occurred if not for DNA replicators altering the environment and available resources. hopefully research has provided better predictions here that i just haven’t heard about yet.
this does help the original question: “where is everybody” can reasonably be answered with “they’re on the other side of a coin flip”. in the point estimate version it was “they’re on the other side of some hundreds of consecutive coin flips”. so it helps the original question in that there’s far less that needs to be explained.
if the code base for Google Search represents wealth, but is itself a critical component of Google-the-company’s success, then doesn’t that mean that for any financial instrument based on Google (i.e. Google stock, bonds issued by Google), to consider it also a form of wealth would be to double count that code base?
i’m skeptical that money can be both a claim on wealth and also a form of wealth. it seems like it should be strictly one or the other, else you end up with a bank owning a bank owning a bank owning … with each additional layer of ownership somehow resulting in more wealth, and that seems questionable to me.
The underground bunker is only weird if I’m vocal about it. Am I posting this from behind tor? Do I pass my messages through an anti-stylometry filter before sharing them? I’m already operating behind a nonsense pseudonym, but if I used a real-sounding name that wasn’t my legal name, would you question it? It’s often the case that effective privacy techniques simply aren’t easily detectable by 3rd or even 2nd parties: the goal is frequently to blend in (to become a part of some larger “anonymity set”).
just don’t watch the subsequent film, which completely unravels the original ending 😢
how broad did you intend “status quo” to read here (status quo of the non-crypto society, status quo of the crypto-only society, or status quo of all of society)? there’s a certain interpretation of this comment which is almost tautological: the things any social system is good at are (definitionally?) the things about it which can’t be exploited, the things it isn’t robust against are those where it can be exploited. but i can’t tell if that’s exactly what you’re getting at, or not.
does value extraction always decrease the utility of the thing being monopolized? in the troll example there are fewer crossings; the bridge gets less use, so it does decrease utility. in a modern toll system, it might be the case that restricting traffic flow allows those who do use the thing to get places faster (less traffic congestion). tolls also select such the remaining people — who can now get places faster — are exactly those whose time is “worth more”, the ones they benefit are exactly those who are able to be “most productive” with the saved time. is it plausible that an extractive toll system could increase net utility (value)?
further, the distinction you make between value capture and value extraction seems to be framed through a moral lens. IF an extractive system could increase value, could it ever be justified morally? for example, the above hypothetical toll system which increases net value: if it also redistributed the extracted value such that no individual is measurably “worse off” from it (say, it distributes the tolls as a UBI across everyone in the region), could it be morally just even though the value extraction is happening by someone other than the creator?
at the end of this article the interviewer clarifies that she verified this to be SBF, but does not clarify that SBF understood this conversation to be public (which suggests he may not have). hoping for some clarification there, because it’s relevant to understanding the broader ethical context in which this is all playing out under.
you cite software. turnover in that industry tends to be pretty high, which means the successful companies end up with some structure where when any particular engineer leaves, their responsibilities are re-distributed quickly. so (1) if a team member is out for a week their most urgent responsibilities can already be picked up by their peers and (2) wherever this isn’t the case, the employer is likely to see that as a failure in need of fixing.
unaligned week-long holidays sort of serve as a dry run to ensure that things are set up such that when the employee on leave were to leave permanently things would still continue.
there’s another way to address this coordination, btw: ask that employees schedule their time away 2 weeks in advance: when the team plans the next chunk of work, sequence things such that this employee won’t be working on a blocking task near the interval where they’re away.
regardless, certain Schelling points do arise naturally. it’s far more common for someone to take individual Fridays off than it is to take Tuesdays off, for example. weekends themselves are some example of what you’re getting at: extending those (by occasionally adding Fridays or Mondays) seems an easy course to follow.
Why do you think my post is being shot down?
my first instinct is general “politics is the mindkiller” weariness, but i wonder if it’s more an issue of scope. it’s framed to be relevant only to Floridians, and relevant answers would have to be very broad with little depth (“vote A, B, … and Z”) or deep but tangential and not a direct answer (“i like candidate Q because of their proposed policy R which is good because S but has some uncertainties around T…”).
it also feels like you’re offloading too much to the reader. it’s easily mistaken as a “do my homework for me” request, even. i have no idea what’s on the ballot, and i guess if i were in Florida i’m supposed to fish out the ballot and study up on it first? just hope i happen to be near my desk or i’ll have to google around for an online version.
if you want, you might get more discussion by taking one policy on the ballot, decoupling it from the specific geography, and then identifying a few intriguing ramifications/uncertainties as starting points for a (more focused) discussion. food for thought, as i’m in no position to speak for all LWers.
since this post isn't getting much traction i'll propose a different angle. most of us here are very aware of coordination problems, and those of us living in democracies are explicitly given regular opportunities to participate in a system of which one of its claims is to overcome certain coordination problems (e.g. legislate some thing which works only if universally adopted, and then force everyone to adhere to that legislation).
this particular system of democracy has its successes and its flaws, but viewing it as a tool, what's the best way to make use of it? for example, should one simply vote for their self-interests? should one eschew voting because the time required results in negative EV? should one publicly discuss alternatives and then use their vote as a lever to direct more attention to these alternatives (think: voting for "obviously bad" nihilistic policies/representatives)?
i can’t think of another (pseudo-)acronym which gets used as an all-caps unit, off the top of my head. i may toy around with “Flop” as a unit, like GFlop for a billion operations, GFlop/s for a billion operations per second.
this could make certain statistical measurements less noisy, but as you point out there are so many confounding variables to deal with (e.g. period effects). if we couldn’t conclude anything from the 50 years ago where we made this same change (in reverse), i don’t quite understand what’s different this time around such that we will be able to conclude things from this change.
Not only do our brains say "no fuck you, you don't get to work on rockets"
getting yourself to somewhere on this curve which is not the far left but also not too far to the right can be unbelievably productive. there’s a certain type of infatuation which drives one to show off their achievements, which in turn requires one to make achievements. building a rocket, and inventiveness in general, is a decently high status thing: you may experience a greater drive to actually do these things during a certain period of infatuation.
If people were more aware of the limits of politics, disengagement and cynicism would probably increase. These attitudes are already a problem, particularly among the less educated, and are associated with a series of negative outcomes.
this is a particularly interesting statement to me. on the one hand, the bulk of your post is about illuminating the limits of politics, and you mention academics and such admitting to these limits. hence, “awareness of the limits of politics” is supposed to be a highly-educated view. then you illustrate the downstream effects of disengagement and cynicism, but cite these as problems among the lesser-educated — the opposite end of the education spectrum.
so which is it? is awareness of the limits of politics a good thing only when a person is “highly educated enough” to convince themselves that carrying on the illusion, and not disengaging, is a good thing? if this is true, you should be able to convince the other person of this view, and then feel safe in revealing the rest of the truth. much of this post has the vibe of “we can’t trust these fools with the truth, thus we’re going to withhold it and thereby ensure that they remain fools”… there’s a lot of hubris to that idea.
i’m not sure i’d recommend nicotine even in gum form. you’ll notice an obvious boost the first few times you do it — and the shorter half-life is nice for working in the evenings — but like most other drugs you build dependence quick. after a couple weeks you literally won’t notice any effect from taking that same initial dose. overcoming that by bumping the dose is, obviously, unsustainable.
if you do go the nicotine route, try both the gum and the lozenges. gum is more effective at quickly weening you off of cigs because it replaces one ritual (smoking) with another (chewing), whereas the lozenges are really just about physically delivering nicotine to the body without much ritual (i.e. they’re less “habit forming”).
Eth lending rates on Aave/Compound have remained < 1% for literally years. most returns in DeFi are dollar-denominated. the sustainable ones don’t seem to move much outside the 2-6% APY range (except during bull markets where people will pay a premium to leverage their Eth/BTC — but we’re no longer in a bull market). the 20% APY dollar-denominated yields have shown themselves to largely be unsustainable (e.g. UST). in an environment where the sustainable DeFi yields no longer vastly outcompete bonds/treasuries, why would you be bullish on DeFi?
follow-up: if you’re using DeFi today, which platforms are you using which i’m likely to be overlooking when i make these claims?
in areas where land is competitive — i.e. those areas where LVT is most impactful — it’s common for developers to buy a lot, tear down an existing home, and then build a new one. consider:
lot with old home (O) -> empty lot (E) -> lot with new home (N)
if O -> N is a value-positive transition, and it’s not possible to go there without passing through E, then both O -> E and E -> N ought to be value-positive. O -> E is valuable because it reduces the amount of work required to reach the valuable (and more liquid) state N.
so why don’t we see more empty lots go up for sale in areas where it’s routine to redevelop lots? my guess is it’s just different types of friction coming together to create a transaction cost around selling empty lots. integrating that whole process from O -> N overcomes the transaction cost, yielding more profit. maybe you can say “gosh, structure X would go great on lot Y or Z”, but you have no way of communicating “i’d pay $D for an empty lot Y or Z”, and so a meaningful market for empty lots never emerges.
but create a market for empty lots — i.e. reduce the transaction costs in that area and encourage separate specialization of O -> E from E -> N — and you should have much more data for calculating land values. i’m not sure how to create that market other than literally creating a marketplace and then incentivizing each side of the market to participate in your marketplace until it’s bootstrapped, i.e. the Uber approach.
adding to this: fold related tasks together. let your commute be your workout (i.e. jog or bike home from work). if you want to cook a good meal some evening, but also leave time open for socializing, then invite your friends over to cook with you. if you want to learn woodworking and don’t like the furniture in your home, then learn by building new furniture.
that last bit is where the “trade money for time” scheme risks being derailed. in the end, you’re never strictly exchanging money for time — outside of life-extension efforts. you’re identifying an opportunity to replace your time spent doing A with time spent doing B, at a cost of C. the more you dislike A (doing the dishes), probably the more you should be willing to pay for replacing it with B (reading a book while the dishwasher runs). but if A isn’t a chore… if it’s a hobby you enjoy for its own sake (woodworking), then it might not ever make sense to outsource it.
because most of us specialize in only one form of production, we think of these trades as me giving money and receiving a preferable use of time. once you’re dealing in productive hobbies, it’ll make sense to treat this as an exchange that can go in either direction. if your hobby is to woodwork, but you live next to Ikea, in might be a reasonable course of action to spend $200 on lumber, a few evenings turning that into a table, and then selling the table for $150. it looks dumb on the surface but each trade individually could make sense (my enjoyment from this hobby is >= $200; my benefit from this table is <= $150).
then you get to the point where it’s worth considering nonfungible intangibles — like sentimentality. that table from above might be worth $150 to a buyer off the street, but your grandma might consider the thing “priceless”. she would never buy it from you for what it’s actually worth to her, because doing so destroys some of the sentiment she attaches to the table. so gift the table to her. she’ll be inclined to pay it back in other forms (hosting dinners, etc — chances are she’s more than covered the cost of the table by raising you though so arguably you’re paying back a > $150 debt with the gift).
i happen to mostly agree with you on those broad ideals. a large space full of constant experimentation allows for regularly finding better ways of doing things: American dynamism in a nutshell.
Abortion comes to mind as an example of a moral question that the government has to legislate on.
yes, and no. abortion is relevant to a government because most governments promise a specific set of rights to their citizens which must be defended, and one of these rights is protection from violence. it’s reasonable for a government to approach abortion strictly from the angle of “at what moment(s) in human development do we grant humans their citizenship.” as with the question of justice, the decision-making here could be guided by processes which are either closely tied to morality (“life is sacred; citizenship is granted at conception”) or less directly related to morals (“for the good of the country, citizenship should be granted once the expected gains from providing it outweigh the cost”).
in a competitive landscape, one might expect selective pressures to optimize for the latter interpretation. in fact, if one understands morality to be a thing which emerged in the context of social cooperation, one might expect the individual’s moral view to yield similar results to the amoral view of decision making — and that significant disagreements at that level are due to radical changes in the human experience since roughly the agricultural revolution, where the optimal methods of cooperation began to shift at a rate that challenged the ability for morals to match. but this is me shooting loosely-formed ideas from the hip here: i’ve never looked into the history of morality and it could easily exist for reasons other than facilitating social cooperation.
Discussion of whether "punishment" is even a useful concept from the government-level perspective or whether the goal should always be reduction in future crime.
more broadly, to what degree ought a government promote any specific framework of morality, v.s. preserve the space for society at large to explore.
i think this piece would benefit from a few examples of historic ideas which boosted the labor productivity multiple. it’s not clear to me why ideas aren’t treated as just a specific “type” of capital: if the ideas you’re thinking of are things like “lean manufacturing” or “agile development”, these all originated under existing capital structures and at one time had specific “owners” (like Toyota). we have intellectual property laws, so some of these ideas can be owned: they operate as an enhancement to labor productivity and even require upkeep (depreciation) to maintain: one has to teach these ideas to new workers. so they seem like a form of capital to me.
my suspicion is that these “ideas” are just capital which has escaped any concrete ownership. they’re the accumulation of positive externalities. it’s worth noting that even once these ideas escape ownership, they don’t spread for free: we have schools, mentorship, etc. people will voluntarily participate in the free exchange of ideas (e.g. enthusiast groups), but that doesn’t mean there’s no upkeep in these ideas: it just isn’t financialized. in the end, a new idea displacing an old one doesn’t look all that different from a more efficient (higher output per input) machine displacing a less efficient machine: they’re both labor productivity enhancements which require some capital input to create and maintain.
there’s a lot of ways you can lose a domain. ICANN requires a domain’s WHOIS records (which includes email, tel, and physical address) to be accurate. i don’t have much experience with enforcement, but i think some TLDs are more impacted by this than others — e.g. .us explicitly treats WHOIS records as public and periodically “spot checks” the accuracy of records. [1]
additionally, ownership over the popular .io TLD has been contested in the past. i understand that the DNS root servers themselves are highly decentralized, across continents even, but the smaller TLDs and the registration part of it feels like it might be one of those human systems that relies heavily on norms and pure-hearted authorities.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7251-2005Mar4.html
2: https://salt.agency/blog/biot-chagos-islands-risk-to-io-cctld-domains/
are there parallels that a US citizen could be more directly affected by, and which could be informed by these current events in Russia/Ukraine? for example, i’m seeing people draw the link that how this Russia/Ukraine conflict proceeds will have implications for the future of China/Taiwan, which will be more directly relevant to the US. it seems to me that China has exerted far more soft power and less military power in this context so far, so my initial reaction is to think that the situations are distinct enough that one won’t substantially inform the other.
when you announce an identity, it’s useful primarily for signaling. even if i’m receptive to sexual acts with either sex, the IRL driver of most of these things for me today is romantic partnership. and when it comes to long-term romantic partnerships i have a strong preference toward the opposite sex, so i’m likely going to identify as “straight” in most situations to avoid giving off misleading signals, but it’s important to understand that the answer is context-dependent. it shouldn’t surprise anyone if my advertised orientation on a dating app like Hinge varies from my orientation on a hookup app like Tinder.
a simple “are you L/G/B/T” survey question is way too detached from context, it’s sort of meaningless. with enough control (cohorting, etc), maybe you can claim that “today’s generation thinks about sexuality differently than the previous generation” or “individual’s thoughts toward sexuality change as they age”, both of which seem too trivial to merit asking the question in the first place. i think we lose a lot of the actual substance by treating these things as (context-free) identity.
Even their original plan was to blockade the capital until vaccine mandates were lifted, and again this does not work at all since the pro-mandate side can do the same thing and also we can’t have policy determined by who can rally larger groups of people.
a charitable interpretation of the trucker’s protest is “govt restricted my freedom of movement, so i’m restricting their freedom of movement (by blocking border crossings)”. IF you could convincingly frame your protest like this — as a tit-for-tat response — you avoid lending legitimacy to any escalatory action by the pro-mandate side (because it will necessarily be just that: the pro-mandate side made the first escalation two whole years ago and so long as you strictly act according to reciprocity an unfavorable response from your opponent can always be framed as being unfair/unreasonable/unjust).
i’m of the opinion that the anti-mandate side has some source of inherent legitimacy to it not accessible by the other side simply because it was their opposing side which first escalated (merely by introducing mandates where they didn’t before). i’m not making a statement comparing the overall legitimacy of these two side — just pointing out an advantage that can only ever be granted to one side. but it’s extremely difficult to tap into that advantage: especially when dealing with loosely coordinated groups, tit-for-tat becomes unstable, fast.
this is an interesting take, that death (or the uncertainty of it) might be worse than life and also both together worse than non-existence for a person. then a further question: if we take complete lack of experience to be neutral (sleep, in Hume’s example), and we had a magic device that could grant each individual the opportunity to cease experience from this moment to their naturally occurring death (i.e. to become a zombie), 1) how many people who claim their life has negative value would follow through by using this device and 2) is this meaningfully different from choosing death directly? from the experiential point of view it’s identical. from the experience of those around you, not as much, though in the zombie case you’re being dishonest with those around you and that brings its own baggage.
also interesting is that even in the friendliest of utilitarian views the repugnant conclusion usually ends with “a plethora of near-0-value lives” or “a single maximally high-value life”. less discussed is a plethora of willful negative existences required to enable a counteracting positive existence (for example, a miserable father who slaves away so his children may lead better lives). yet that arrangement is arguably more relatable to the typical individual, who may frequently embrace negative states in order to obtain later positive ones (e.g. as simple as setting an early alarm clock so that you can admire the sun rise).
the saving grace to all this, for me, is that i find it incredibly unlikely that any of these distasteful utilitarian hypotheticals actually represent the global maximum. or even significant local maxima for that matter. no matter if it’s the sum or the mean, negative experience immediately adjacent to positive experience doesn’t seem to be so stable. most human relationships are co-beneficial, for example. many people gain more than they lose when they give (charity/philanthropy/etc).
an important aspect of Pomodoro at a corporate gig is not “how long can i remain attentive” but “how long is it acceptable to be unreachable for”. it’s about guaranteeing yourself an uninterrupted chunk of time, by disabling slack/email/etc. as long as you’re doing vaguely productive things for that time slot, you’ve already unlocked most of the benefits.
for truly personal work, i mostly don’t use Pomodoro timers, and go for a more freeform approach: once i feel myself slowing down, i’ll set down my work, take a break, and then pick a different thing off my to-do list. the exception is for tasks that i have trouble getting started on. say, a book whose opening isn’t hooking me. i’ll set a timer promising to do the activity for 15 minutes. during those minutes, i free myself from thinking about the meta picture of “is this the right task to be working on” and can properly focus on getting into the book. when the alarm goes off, only then do i reconsider my priorities, and either keep at the task without the timer, or put it down.
in the end, maybe it’s just about being aware/explicit with your time. no timer is going to force you into flow. but it will force you to think more critically about your time.