The greatest strategy for organizing vast conspiracies is usually failing to realize that what you’re doing is illegal.
lc
Karma: 9,013
I plan to cross-post to LessWrong but to not read or reply to comments (with a few planned exceptions).
:( why not?
Pretty much ~everybody on the internet I can find talking about the issue both mischaracterizes and exaggerates the extent of child sex work inside the United States, often to a patently absurd degree. Wikipedia alone reports that there are anywhere from “100,000-1,000,000” child prostitutes in the U.S. There are only ~75 million children in the U.S., so I guess Wikipedia thinks it’s possible that more than 1% of people aged 0-17 are prostitutes. As in most cases, these numbers are sourced from “anti sex trafficking” organizations that, as far as I can tell, completely make them up.
Actual child sex workers—the kind that get arrested, because people don’t like child prostitution—are mostly children who pass themselves off as adults in order to make money. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the government classifies any instance of child prostitution as human trafficking, regardless of whether or not there’s evidence the child was coerced. Thus, when the Department of Justice reports that federal law enforcement investigated “2,515 instances of suspected human trafficking” from 2008-2010, and that “forty percent involved prostitution of a child or child sexual exploitation”, it means that it investigated ~1000 possible cases of child prostitution, not that it found 1000 child sex slaves.
People believe a lot of crazy things, but I am genuinely flabbergasted at how many people find it plausible that there’s an entire underworld industry of kidnapping children and selling them to pedophiles in first world countries. I know why the anti sex trafficking orgs sell these stories—they’re trying to attract donations, and who is going to call out an “anti sex trafficking” charity? But surely most people realize that it would be very hard for an organized child rape cabal to spread word about their offerings to customers without someone alerting police.
Sometimes people say “before we colonize Mars, we have to be able to colonize Antarctica first”.
What are the actual obstacles to doing that? Is there any future tech somewhere down the tree that could fix its climate, etc.?
LessWrong and “TPOT” is not the general public. They’re not even smart versions of the general public. An end to leftist preference falsification and sacred cows, if it does come, will not bring whatever brand of IQ realism you are probably hoping for. It will not mainstream Charles Murray or Garrett Jones. Far more simple, memetic, and popular among both white and nonwhite right wingers in the absence of social pressures against it is groyper-style antisemitism. That is just one example; it could be something stupider and more invigorating.
I wish it weren’t so. Alas.
I regret that both factions couldn’t lose.
I do think that AIs will eventually get much smarter than humans, and this implies that artificial minds will likely capture the majority of wealth and power in the world in the future. However, I don’t think the way that we get to that state will necessarily be because the AIs staged a coup. I find more lawful and smooth transitions more likely.
I think my writing was ambiguous. My comment was supposed to read “similar constraints may apply to AIs unless one (AI) gets much smarter (than other AIs) much more quickly, as you say.” I was trying to say the same thing.
My original point was also not actually that we will face an abrupt transition or AI coup, I was just objecting to the specific example Meme Machine gave.
Is it your contention that similar constraints will not apply to AIs?
Similar constraints may apply to AIs unless one gets much smarter much more quickly, as you say. But even if those AIs create a nice civilian government to govern interactions with each other, those AIs will have any reason to respect our rights unless some of them care about us more than we care about stray dogs or cats.
I mean to say that high ranking generals could issue such a coup
Yes, and by “any given faction or person in the U.S. military” I mean to say that high ranking generals inside the United States cannot form a coup. They literally cannot successfully give the order to storm the capitol. Their inferiors, understanding that:
The order is illegal
The order would have to be followed by the rest of their division in order to have a chance of success
The order would be almost guaranteed to fail in its broader objective even if they manage to seize the FBI headquarters or whatever
That others around them are also making the same calculation and will also probably be unwilling to follow the order
Would report their superiors to military law enforcement instead. This is obvious if you take even a moment to put your shoes in any of the parties involved. Our generals inside the U.S. military also realize this themselves and so do not attempt to perform coups, even though I’m certain there are many people inside the white house with large ‘nominal’ control over U.S. forces who would love to be dictator.
I think your blanket statement on the impossibility of Juntas is void.
I made no such blanket statement. In different countries the odds and incentives facing each of these parties are different. For example, if you live in a South American country with a history of successful military overthrows, you might have a much greater fear your superior will succeed, and so you might be more scared of him than the civilian government. This is part (though not all) of the reason why some countries are continually stable and others are continually unstable.
If it really wanted to, there would be nothing at all stopping the US military from launching a coup on its civilian government.
There are enormous hurdles preventing the U.S. military from overthrowing the civilian government.
The confusion in your statement is caused by blocking up all the members of the armed forces in the term “U.S. military”. Principally, a coup is an act of coordination. Any given faction or person in the U.S. military would have a difficult time organizing the forces necessary without being stopped by civilian or military law enforcement first, and then maintaining control of their civilian government afterwards without the legitimacy of democratic governance.
In general, “more powerful entities control weaker entities” is a constant. If you see something else, your eyes are probably betraying you.
Totally understand why this would be more interesting; I guess I would still fundamentally describe what we’re doing on the internet as conversation, with the same rules as you would describe above. It’s just that the conversation you can find here (or potentially on Twitter) is superstimulating compared to what you’re getting elsewhere. Which is good in the sense that it’s more fun, and I guess bad inasmuch as IRL conversation was fulfilling some social or networking role that online conversation wasn’t.
10xing my income did absolutely nothing for my dating life. It had so little impact that I am now suspicious of all of the people who suggest this more than marginally improves sexual success for men.
In the same way that Chinese people forgot how to write characters by hand, I think most programmers will forget how to write code without LLM editors or plugins pretty soon.
...How is that definition different than a realtime version of what you do when participating in this forum?
I’m interested too. I think several of the above are solvable issues. AFAICT:
Solved by simple modifications to markets:
Races to correct naive bidders
Defending the true price from incorrect bidders for $ w/o letting price shift
Seem doable with thought:
Billing for information value
Policy conditionals
Seem hard/idk if it’s possible to fully solve:
Collating information known by different bidders
Preventing tricking other bidders for profit
General enterprise of credit allocation for knowledge creation
The Prediction Market Discord Message, by Eva_:
Current market structures can’t bill people for the information value that went into the market fairly, can’t fairly handle secret information known to only some bidders, pays out most of the subsidy to whoever corrects the naive bidder fastest even though there’s no benefit to making it a race, offers almost no profit to people trying to defend the true price from incorrect bidders unless they let the price shift substantially first, can’t be effectively used to collate information known by different bidders, can’t handle counterfactuals / policy conditionals cleanly, implement EDT instead of LDT, let you play games of tricking other bidders for profit and so require everyone to play trading strategies that are inexploitable even if less beneficial, can’t defend against people who are intentionally illegible as to whether they have private information or are manipulating the market for profit elsewhere...
But most of all, prediction markets contain supposedly ideal economic actors who don’t really suspect each other of dishonesty betting money against each other even though it’s a net-zero trade and the aggreeement theorem says they shouldn’t expect to profit from it at all, so clearly this is not the mathematically ideal solution for a group to collate its knowledge and pay itself for the value that knowledge [provides]. Even if you need betting to be able to trust nonsharable information from another party, you shouldn’t have people betting in excess of what is needed to prove sincerity out of a belief other people are wrong unless you’ve actually got other people being wrong even in light of the new actors’ information.
I don’t think I will ever find the time to write my novel. Writing novels is dumb anyways. But I feel like the novel and world are bursting out of me. What do
Outside of politics, none are more certain that a substandard or overpriced product is a moral failing than gamers. You’d think EA were guilty of war crimes with the way people treat them for charging for DLC or whatever.
At least according to CNN’s exit polls, a white person in their twenties was only 6% less likely to vote for Trump in 2020 than a white person above the age of sixty!
This was actually very surprising for me; I think a lot of people have a background sense that younger white voters are much less socially and politically conservative. That might still be true, but the ones that choose to vote vote republican at basically the same rate in national elections.
I think the entire point of rationalism is that you don’t do things like this.