The ‘live under a rock’ strategy has been quite effective for me. I stopped following most political commentary sources several years ago and I’ve never regretted it.
I avoid political conversations among my family and coworkers because the overwhelming majority are strongly religious and conservative. With beliefs so different from mine discussion is not likely to be productive nor pleasant.
I see, I suppose I interpreted ‘scaling’ a bit less generally. In that case I agree.
Also I just noticed you mentioned flywheels, which are one of my favorite pieces of technology. I long for someone to make a phone with a flywheel battery as a meme/gag gift.
This has parallels with how the factory-building game Factorio presents things. The thing that makes Factorio fun[1] is how it abstracts away those pesky prohibitively complex nuances of manufacturing & automation so that everything can feasibly be automated quickly and scaled ad infinitum. For example:
The conveyor belts run on magic (they don’t require any power, which isn’t really explained considering every other electrical thing in the game requires pseudo-realistic levels of electrical input.)
The assembling machines (essentially Autofacs) don’t require any retooling/tuning/cleaning/etc to switch between completely different recipes seamlessly)
No manufacturing equipment ever wears out or needs physical maintenance.
Inserters (robot hands that handle objects to and from conveyor belts and the various structures) detect objects flawlessly and reliably and any kind can handle any type of object (and furthermore object sizes are abstracted such that all take the same amount of space on a conveyor belt)
Electrical usage is abstracted so that you only need to keep generated power >= usage or things will start to slow down/get rolling blackouts. You don’t need to worry about pesky throughput tolerances on cables, one small wooden power pole and its wire can handle just as much as a giant cross-country steel behemoth.
& thousands of other small details abstracted away for simplicity.
Overall I hope we are able to progress to Autofacs in real life, I just don’t see it being nearly as straightforward as any of us would prefer. Not that I want to discourage anyone from making the attempt! I just hope that they know what they are getting into.
Really really fun for engineering-minded people like myself.
Fun-hazard level — If you’ve never tried it before it might be wise not to unless you have incredible self discipline or several days of free time in the near future; It can be addicting.
Obviously, there would need to be a lot of scaling before it would make sense to internally produce computer chips.
More than mere scaling, this would require equipment orders of magnitude more precise and the necessary ultra-clean environment and all the minutiae those entail. Microchip manufacturing is Hard.
Interesting. I prefer working on smaller projects where I do the entire thing myself from start to finish. This is mostly because I don’t particularly enjoy familiarizing myself with somebody else’s code.
Although if I get stuck I will ask my fellow devs for input, and I enjoy showing them whatever cool thing I did once it’s polished.
At my current workplace I fill the role of ad hoc programmer, where I’m the guy to ask if somebody needs some small tedious thing automated or parsed I’m the one who can get it done quickly.
I also don’t prefer making software intended for other people to use. If something is a background data monitor or something it doesn’t need a shiny intuitive UI or anything like that. I just need to write it and set it up to run every x days or whatever. If people besides me and other devs will need to use something, that adds an entire layer of tedium in the form of usage guides and more exhaustive (layperson friendly) documentation.
Very cool analysis!
A more natural way might be to say that in this world, there is no sampling-with-replacement, there is only sampling-without-replacement.
That is nicer. I don’t have enough background in statistics to have fully internalized the regular terms for things. I end up tabooing myself and using more words than necessary.
There are probably weird consequences in thermodynamics & physics from these hidden variables too, but I’m not sure what.
That’s why I hedged with “Assuming it doesn’t break causality or similarly hazardous anti-fun effects”. It’s difficult to invent any universal magic effects that don’t throw a wrench in physics if the consequences are extrapolated far enough.
So if you’re aware of Gambler’s Verity and try to study it, then it cancels itself out!
This is fantastic!
I’m not sure the best way conflicting expectations could resolve. It could be a flat vote or have magnitude proportional to the amount of observations...Or even based on relative emotional investment! What could possibly go wrong?
Other good effects: nobody expects to get cancer, so I guess it doesn’t happen?
Things happen exactly as in reality except the existence of expectation applies a base-rate multiplier. So there would be more disease because e.g. hypochondriacs would be more likely than normal to contract disease.
There are many ways conflicting expectations could resolve, I’m not sure which would make the most sense. It could be a flat vote or have magnitude proportional to the amount of observations.
If it was advantageous to use structures of those inside cells for reactions somehow, then some organisms would already do that.
Not necessarily. The space of advantageous biologically possible structural configurations seems to me to be intuitively larger than the space of useful configurations currently known to be in use.
In order for a structure to be evolutionarily feasible, it must not only be advantageous but also there must be a path of individually beneficial (or at minimum not harmful) small steps in between it and currently existing structures. If an adaptation does not lend itself to linearly realized benefit, e.g. one that works really well but only when 90%+ is ‘correct’, it has no evolutionary way to piece itself together from 0-90%.
Like, for example, it makes sense that a future LLM would be able to explain a mathematical concept that has been documented and previously discussed but I just can’t see it solving existing frontier problems in mathematical theory, as it’s a completely different “skillset”.
Most non-mathmatician humans such as myself are arguably in the same boat for this specific example. I certainly wouldn’t know how to begin to work on frontier mathematical theory, but despite this if I were an AI I would fit many definitions of an AGI, albeit a lowly human-level one.
It would be useful to have a distinction between ‘routine’ logical reasoning (being able to apply established knowledge dynamically) and novel logical reasoning (being able to synthesize new theories/ideas from existing ones).
LLMs can arguably do the first but not the second, however the line dividing the two can be hazy. Many “novel advances” are not ‘new’ as much as existing approaches from different domains being recombined to solve a different type of problem than they had previously been used for. Is this routine or novel? Could an LLM do this? Particularly if the problem were phased to be tabooed/abstractified to avoid using leading questions/keywords that would encourage the LLM to regurgitate the common approaches?
An impressive thing about LLMs is how well they can work with arbitrary problems, so long as the problems are not too far out of the training distribution.
An example:
I asked ChatGPT 4o:
”A widget = 14
A phro = −3
A midge = 5
An attached wrok multiplies value by 0.5
What is the value of: A widget with an attached wrok plus three phros and two midges, and three wroks by themselves?”
Solving this sort of (simple to a human) word problem requires combining the domains of basic math and conceptual relations between objects (i.e. <object> can have <relation> to other <object> which interacts with the properties of that thing) and also the ability to make assumptions from missing information (no explicit value was assigned to solitary wroks)
GPT answer:
”To find the value of the given expression, let’s break it down step by step.
1. **Value of a widget with an attached wrok:**
- A widget is worth 14.
- An attached wrok multiplies the value by 0.5.
- So, the value of a widget with an attached wrok is .
2. **Value of three phros:**
- A phro is worth −3.
- So, three phros are .
3. **Value of two midges:**
- A midge is worth 5.
- So, two midges are .
4. **Value of three wroks by themselves:**
- Since a wrok by itself is not attached to anything and we don’t have a specified standalone value for a wrok, we can assume it doesn’t add any value by itself. So, three wroks by themselves are worth .
Now, we need to add all these values together:
First, let’s handle the addition of 7 and −9:
Then, add the result to 10:
And finally, add the result to 0:
So, the value of a widget with an attached wrok plus three phros and two midges, and three wroks by themselves is .”
Is this logical reasoning? Depends on how you define it. It’s certainly useful. How much of the thinking we humans do is ‘mere’ pattern matching with variable inputs? I suspect a large amount.
Haha makes sense. I wasn’t sure what the demographic distribution was likely to be.
You’re right, “objectively” doesn’t fit as well in that statement as I thought.
That is how I intended ‘convincing’ to be interpreted.
For almost every category of X, you’ll be judged hard for your preferences, even if you didn’t consciously choose any of them.
It depends on if X is a demographic/group or a variable. “I don’t want to date people who are [uneducated/from a drastically different cultural background]” sounds a lot less politically correct than “I want to date people with whom I estimate a high probability of mutual relationship satisfaction.” because you don’t have to explain your criteria to everyone.
I admit that’s more semantic obfuscation of judgement risk markers than it is mitigating the problem.
The rule “90% of everything is garbage” applies, but recent moral values are rejecting any sorts of hierarchies, even between functional and dysfunctional countries, cultures, cities, religions, values, etc.
When society suppresses attempts to evaluate concepts or situations as objectively better or worse than alternatives, is it any surprise that polarization increases?
If there are no commonly agreed upon benchmarks to calibrate against it becomes a war of whoever can shout loudest/most convincingly.
I think a significant contributing factor that makes ‘simple’ questions in some contexts prohibitively difficult to answer is the lack of True Availability of the information being requested.
In this case, I’m defining True Availability[1] as the requested content being already prepared and organized into the correct format and grouped together, needing no further processing other than finding it. Conditional Availability would be when you know how to obtain the information, but it requires some degree of processing and filtering to be ready for consumption.
In computer science, this is similar to a lookup table. Lookup tables typically contain a collection of pre-calculated results for common computations, because looking up a result in a table is generally faster than calculating it from scratch.
Anything you have in a LT is Truly Available, whereas anything you have to calculate is Conditionally Available.
In your example of freedom of information requests, the questions are hard to answer because they are only available on the condition that someone filters the requested information from everything else and then prepares it into a usable format for releasing.
If I was tasked with refining the information availability of a large organization, I would attempt to prepare publicly-releasable copies of everything that COULD legally be requested via freedom of information act and publish a public database of that. Let them knock themselves out. Individual request processing and answering sounds like a terribly inefficient method of sharing information.
There are probably legal/bureaucratic/practical difficulties to my proposed solution, but my point is merely that there are in some contexts systemic barriers making answers disproportionately expensive rather than answers being intrinsically more difficult in every case.
I suspect there already exist more conventional terms for the concepts I’m referring to, but I’m making do with what I already have Available.
If you want to be generally skilled at the type of challenges D&D Sci provides, putting some points into the data science and statistics proficiencies would be a good way to start.
In particular, some related skills:
SQL—Easy to pick up for someone with good technical skills. Challenging to master. Before going too deep on relational databases I also recommend learning good theory and practices behind it like the different design forms and why they’re important.
R programming language
Familiarization with various statistical analysis methods and what use cases they are intended for
As a software developer who works on object-level automation every day, I’m intimidated by the difficulty of attempting to definitively quantify ‘profit from automated tasks’ in a useful way.
For example, how do we define ‘automation’? “A task that formerly needed to be done by a human that now doesn’t need to be”? A printing press is automation by some interpretations of that insufficient definition.
Some changes in efficiency also have similar effects on productivity without being ‘automation’ (although much less scalable), for example a user that becomes highly proficient in the hotkeys of a complex platform may see massive improvements in their productivity, and subsequently eliminate jobs that would have been needed if they hadn’t become more productive.
I suspect if additional taxes were levied on ‘job automation’ it would merely create large incentives for companies to skirt around whatever the legal definition of automation was, and potentially hide it in things like the above example.
In the case where there was no ‘automation tax’ created, I would anticipate a NIT to be reasonable but not sustainable because I expect automation to continue to remove jobs at an accelerating rate in years to come. I do not expect tax revenue to increase at the same rate because my current understanding is that the most wealthy tend to also be those most proficient at exploiting loopholes in the tax system to evade as much as possible.
My takes here are almost entirely conjecture and I’d appreciate someone more informed to correct and/or clarify.
The National Association of Realtors is a rent-seeking organization. This is because commissions should be
strictly proportional to the amount of work required for the specific taskable to change with market forces rather than an arbitrary percentage of the value of a particular property, since the effort needed to sell a property is not necessarily proportional to the value of said property.I’m disgusted that they’ve managed to make a percentage of property value the accepted norm for commissions. How were people suckered into that rather than demanding per-hour rates?
Edited to reflect insight gained from comments.