I showed up and some other people were in the room :(
Brendan Long
Karma: 2,003
I’m finishing up packing but won’t make it there until 2:15 or so.
Haha, well that dosage probably would probably cause weight loss.
All of the sources I can find give the density as exactly 4 oz = 1⁄2 cup, although maybe this is just an approximation that’s infecting other data sources?
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=density+of+butter+*+(1%2F2+cup)+in+ounces
But 1⁄2 cup of butter weighs 4 ounces according to every source I can find: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=density+of+butter+*+(1%2F2+cup)+in+ounces
Which means a 4 ounce stick of butter is 1⁄2 cup by volume.
It sounds like 1⁄2 cup of butter (8 tbps) weighs 4 oz, so shouldn’t this actually work out so each of those sections actually is 1 tbsp in volume, and it’s just a coincidence (or not) that the density of butter is 1 oz / 2 fl oz?
The problem is that lack of money isn’t the reason there’s not enough housing in places that people want to live. Zoning laws intentionally exclude poor people because rich people don’t want to live near them. Allocating more money to the problem doesn’t really help (see: the ridiculous amount of money California spends on affordable housing), and if you fixed the part where it’s illegal, the government spending isn’t necessary because real estate developers would build apartments without subsidies if they were allowed to.
Also, the most recent election shows that ordinary people really, really don’t like inflation, so I don’t think printing trillions of dollars for this purpose is actually more palatable.
You’re right, I was taking the section saying “In this new system, the only incentive to do more and go further is to transcend the status quo in some way, and earn recognition for a unique contribution.” too seriously. On a second re-read, it seems like your proposal is actually just to print money to give people food stamps and housing vouchers. I think the answer to why we don’t do that is that we do that.
Food is essentially a solved problem in the United States, and the biggest problem with housing vouchers is that there physically isn’t enough housing in some areas. Printing more money doesn’t cause more housing to exist (it could change incentives, but incentives don’t matter much when building housing for poor people is largely illegal).
I think you’ve re-invented Communism. The reason we don’t implement it is that in practice it’s much worse for everyone, including poor people.
I’ll try to make it but I might be moving that day so I’m not sure :\
Finally, note to self, probably still don’t use SQLite if you have a good alternative? Twice is suspicious, although they did fix the bug same day and it wasn’t ever released.
But is this because SQLite is unusually buggy, or because its code is unusually open, short and readable and thus understandable by an AI? I would guess that MySQL (for example) has significantly worse vulnerabilities but they’re harder to find.
I don’t know anything about you in particular, but if you know alignment researchers who would recommend you, could you get them to refer you either internally or through their contacts?
This is actually why a short position (a complicated loan) would theoretically work. If we all die, then you, as someone else’s counterparty, never need to pay your loan back.
(I think this is a bad idea, but not because of counterparty risk)
I think the idea is that short position pays off up-front, and then you don’t need to worry about the loan if everyone’s dead.
If by paying off you mean this bet actually working I think you’re right though. It seems more likely that the stock market would go up in the short term, forcing you to cover at a higher price and losing a bunch of money. And if the market stays flat, you’ll still lose money on interest payments unless doom is coming this year.
I’ll be out of town (getting married on the 25th) but I’d be happy to do something the weekend after.
I don’t think this is actually the rule by common practice (and not all bad things should be illegal). For example, if one of your friends/associates says something that you think is stupid, going around telling everyone that they said something stupid would generally be seen as rude. It would also be seen as crazy if you overheard someone saying something negative about their job and then going out of your way to tell their boss.
In both cases there would be exceptions, like if if the person’s boss is your friend or safety reasons like you mentioned, but I think by default sharing negative information about people is seen as bad, even if it’s sometimes considered low-levels of bad (like with gossip).
I also agree with this to some extent. Journalists should be most concerned about their readers, not their sources. They should care about accurately quoting their sources because misquoting does a disservice to their readers, and they should care about privacy most of the time because having access to sources is important to providing the service to their readers.
I guess this post is from the perspective of being a source, so “journalists are out to get you” is probably the right attitude to take, but it’s good actually for journalists to prioritize their readers over sources.
The convenient thing about journalism is that the problems we’re worried about here are public, so you don’t need to trust the list creators as much as you would in other situations. This is why I suggest giving links to the articles, so anyone reading the list can verify for themselves that the article commits whichever sin it’s accused of.
The trickier case would be protecting against the accusers lying (i.e. tell journalist A something bad and then claim that they made it up). If you have decent verification of accusers’ identifies you might still get a good enough signal to noise ratio, especially if you include positive ‘reviews’.
I largely agree with this article but I feel like it won’t really change anyone’s behavior. Journalists act the way they do because that’s what they’re rewarded for. And if your heuristic is that all journalists are untrustworthy, it makes it hard for trustworthy journalists to get any benefit from that.
A more effective way to change behavior might be to make a public list of journalists who are or aren’t trustworthy, with specific information about why (“In [insert URL here], Journalist A asked me for a quote and I said X, but they implied inaccurately that I believe Y” “In [insert URL here], Journalist B thought that I believe P but after I explained that I actually believe Q, they accurately reflected that in the article”, or just boring ones like “I said X and they accurately quoted me as saying X”, etc.).
I’m planning to donate $1000[1] but not until next year (for tax purposes). If there was a way that pledge that I would.
I’m committing to donating $1000 but it might end up being more when I actually think through all of the donations I plan to do next year.