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Thanks for the detailed and clear answer! I mostly agree with you.
Each regulation has a cost. Of course privacy and sensitive data protection is a nice to have, but is it worth the marginal cost it imposes? Or another way to see it: When you have a large number of costly regulations, you raise the cost to the point that the EU tech industry underperforms:
There is a clear difference in mindset like you said. Europe is less inclined towards entrepreneurship and more towards a powerful state that regulates the economy. I won't lie, I am often disappointed when looking at it on the entrepreneur side.
But overall, and I think that's the whole point : most europeans are fine with it because of the tons of protections it brings to citizens compared to... well pretty much everywhere else. (again this is looking at a very broad picture, there are huge differences in Europe between countries, people, etc...)
Here, GDPR is often looked at through the eyes of americans and obviously it's completely against the US way : that was actually the point, exactly like the tax on digital services and other "attacks" against tech giants. Americans can say they hate the GDPR, that's fine with me but always saying "this is so stupid" is imho misunderstanding its goal.
GDPR is clearly not perfect but this incessant bashing is tiring. Not everything has to be about being more productive. Privacy and sensitive data protection matters. I find it kind of sad to have to say those things when it's been a year of constant warnings about the future dangers of AIs.
It's easier to not care about it when half the companies leeching data are US based but from what I read about the TikTok ban, as soon as it's not an american company, then it's a big problem. The EU cannot rely on the US (and US companies) to care about them or be very reliable (and have proven that time and time again).
I feel you, I'm a lawyer in France in civil law and people will deform so many things that you will learn about so late in the process that it gets very difficult (if possible at all) to backtrack.
I'm coming very late to this but it is also possible that the people forecasting on each of the questions are noticeably different and they have different ideas about AI. Maybe some just don't know about the other questions. It won't explain everything but it could be a factor.
Also, it is difficult to keep all your forecasts up to date. You can forget.
I feel like theses posts get less likes than before (and I often forget to like them) but they really are great to keep up with what's happening. Thanks for doing it!
Thanks for sharing this view.
I can relate to you on some aspects. I am not feeling depressed at all but I'm a bit scared that I was born too early to really benefit from AGI.
This perspective ignores future generations, which is admittedly a weakness. However, prioritizing future generations above oneself and one's loved ones is psychologically hard.
Do you have children? I don't but I am under the impression that people who do say that this changes a bit once you have children. (because of soon to be born grandchildren I guess?)
95% was most likely an overexaggeration but that was to underline the main idea that overall if all of your recipes need several ingredients that will be used in none of the other recipes, it's much harder to make a restaurant work.
When dining in, I suppose yes, because we wouldn't think of the other dishes as Italian then - I don't make an 'Italian steak' it's just a steak, etc.
Indeed, I may be biased but many "italian things" do feel like normal things were "italian" has been added to it because they have a great cooking culture. Especially among the appetizers, where the spanish do the same, incorporating every small dish under the tapas umbrella
I live in the south so I won't be able to but my main advices would be to avoid eating near touristic places where very average stuff will be sold at a premium (Eiffel Tower, arc de triomphe for instance) and to go for places that look nice but not too fancy, especially if you want something closer to a "comfort food" feeling. Fancy places can have extremely good food but like Zvi said it, the ambiance can be mediocre and/or impersonal. Maybe ask parisians about the places where they would bring their friends for a good dinner? (and that you would like to try french specialties in some of them :) )
Exactly, the quality rules in the EU sometimes feel too strict but a few weeks in the US and I saw the difference. The compounding effect of food on your health is huge.
Salads and pasta salads on the "healthy" side. There are a lot of vegetables in the burgers, almost no option with only meat in it.
But it's not so much that than the differences in portion sizes and calories. There are legal limits to added sugar, salt or fat and to how much calories you can put in a meal. It's way lower than what you can find in the US.
Unlimited sodas are forbidden in France(Europe maybe ?) + they have way less sugar than in the US (+they are even cut a bit more in fast foods) There must be a few other stuff but out of my head they are the main ones.
Despite that we still have obesity (~23% which is kind of average today but still bad)
100%! I have seen abroad varieties of pastries that I have never seen in France (often weird ones) and I did not understand why but this actually makes it sense, if 50% of what you sell is "croissant with XYZ" it's an easier sell. Can't believe I did not get that before
But when you go to a chinese place that's what you expect right ? Overall, even italian food is not as restricted as my comment makes it look but when you go to an italian restaurant you expect pasta and pizza
Cuisines are not limited to what is sold abroad as X cuisine but it's easier to sell when customers can know pretty much what to expect. That's not doable with french food, which is what I was trying to say
Your argument is sound but I think it's actually because of its diversity in the base foods. Pasta and pizza is 95% of italian food, rice and noodles are the base of 80% of chinese/japanese/korean food, etc... In french cuisine, there is no base that is often used so you must have a lot of different ingredients. Not the best thing when you operate at "small scale" (when you're not very expensive or cheesecake factory)
I don't know if french restaurants are pretentious outside of france, but that looks more like a parisian problem than a french one.
I was also surprised to see it so low.
French here.
Paris is an island in France, they are completely different from the rest of the country. We know it, they know it (and they want us to know it) and we don't like each others that much. Several of the experiences you talk about are typical parisian bullshit that would almost never happen elsewhere. About the "fancy" experience you describe, I'd say it's far from the majority and most restaurants would on the contrary be "à la bonne franquette" especially outside of Paris.
Really when you said this, I was thinking about 90% of my food experience in France, especially at home (but I'll come back to this later):
"What I love most about American food, and eating in America in general, is that it is the opposite of the French mistake of trying to impress you or waste your time. American food wants you to be happy, it wants to give you the experience you want and not hold back, it values your time and it does not much care how it looks doing it."
To come back to regional specialties, when you look for them you can have everything in Paris . I have to admit that. It may not be the easiest thing, especially for a stranger, but if you go outside of the touristic places you will find them and good food is worth searching for. I know there is a lot to visit in Paris and that may not be the priority but I feel like that's one of the reasons why strangers never actually eat typical french food.
There is no "french food" per se, the style of food completely changes from region to region and I feel like this is really what most people miss about it. Sure is easy to know about italian food, it's pizza, pasta and ice cream. French food is not that way, for better or for worse.
In my (limited, but still a few months) experience, americans rarely (if ever) eat home cooked food. For americans to eat at home, there is either a sports event that forces you to stay home or twice a year you will have people coming and make food. I have known couples who had four plates and that's it. All of this shocked me a bit and I honestly did not like it very much. Maybe it's bad luck but the sheer quantity of fast food (and extremely fat food in it) makes me doubt it. Did you try McDonald's in France? I could not believe how healthy it was actually compared to the american ones. (easiest comparison but it's the same in other fast foods)
We love our restaurants but cooking at home is a huge part of our food culture. If it takes the whole day to cook for friends and family, well it takes the whole day. The quality of the food we can buy in markets is way better than what I found in the US (the EU rules are much stricter) and many French become good cooks since they spend so much time in the kitchen so food at home is really really good.
As a lawyer, I think that would be less the case because our jargon does not reflect reality per se but the consequences of the actions we make and the constructs we created as a society. But maybe I actually fail to see my friends and I doing it because people I mostly see are working in law.
I regularly find myself in situations where I want to convince people that AI safety is important but I have very little time before they lose interest. If you had one minute to convince someone with no or almost no previous knowledge, how would you do it ? (I have considered printing eliezer's tweet about nuclear)
Thank you for this. I had seen a few things but I had missed a lot. I have been getting more concerned by the day since the beginning of the year...
Thank you, I will show this to a few people! (I'm at 12%...)
P.S: I liked the final statement around 100%
Complete agreement, I should have started way earlier to dress better (and I started 10 years ago at 19!). If you're French, bonnegueule.fr is how I learned to dress nicely. I'm sure there are good websites in every country.
I read somewhere about the higher risks related to cooling the power plant because of the increasing commonness of droughts. Not sure of the magnitude of the problem but considering the worsening climate for the next 30 years it does seem to be in good faith.
Update : I didn't completely get your (gwern) answer at first but after I read eliezer's post it made more sense, I think I was missing basic information about the topic to fully get it. Your explanation really added something to the original post since it was tailored to the subject I was wondering about.
Thanks!
Thanks for the answer and the link ! I'll go read group selection tomorrow.
Maybe a stupid question but how do I access other people's shortforms? First time I'm hearing of this
Perhaps some minor factions will separate from mainstream society and artificially cap the level of permissible AI in their community to leave some areas for human superiority. Yet in most of the world, humans will probably no longer be useful to anything or anyone – even to each other – and will peacefully and happily die off.
I could see this being the setup for a novel or a movie with some tribes setting sex and reproduction as the most important part of their life. (with an AI assisted chilbirth delivery to ease everything of course...)
Thanks for the interesting read.
Thanks for the interesting post.
We Zoomers
It may be relevant to say I am 27 before answering.
I think I am on the other side of the spectrum, at least 95% of the time when I have a question, the first thing I do is googling it. Same thing when people say statistics that seem weird or counter-intuitive or when I need to feel more confident about my arguments on a subject. I have noticed however that most of my friends don't do it. It sometimes annoys people that I consistently check things.
Maybe this has to do with the fact that I am a PhD and used to spending hours researching. However, I was less inclined to search on Google when writing my thesis. By the end of it I found out it was actually a very good starting point to find the most interesting sources, a bit like the way you should start on Wikipedia but not stop there.
I sometimes wonder if this "dependence" is a good thing but, like you, I think the tool is too powerful to forget to use it.
Definitely, thank you! :)
I enjoyed the read but there is one thing troubling me, those two paragraphs that seem to contradict themselves :
But the thing that she has to teach, physics 101, is still part of what she knows. At some point, she learnt it, and while it might be embedded in her brain in a somewhat different way from mine or yours, it's still the same physics.
What the above working out example showcases is not teachers forgetting or having a weird perspective on the thing they have to teach, but teachers never having learnt that thing.
You say she learned it in §1 and then that she never learned it in §2. There must be something I'm missing.