One other thing has to do with the procedural posture. On a motion to dismiss, Courts are not generally supposed to evaluate facts at all. A motion to dismiss is essentially an argument by the defense that, even if all those accusations are true, they don’t amount to a legal claim.
By contrast, a preliminary injunction does look at facts. So one reason for different treatment of the Encode brief vs. the ex-employees brief is that they were submitted in response to different motions.
One of the most common forms of Whataboutism is of the form “You criticize X, but other people vaguely politically aligned with you failed to criticize Y.” (assuming for argument that X and Y are different but similar wrongs)
The problem with that is that the only possible sincere answers are necessarily unsatisfying, and it’s hard to gauge their sincerity. Here’s what I see as the basic possibilities.
Y and X are equally bad, my allies are wrong about this [but what are you gonna do about it?]
Y is bad but X is genuinely worse because of …. (can sound like a post hoc justification)
Y and X are equally bad, but I still support my side because the badness of Y is outweighed by the goodness of A, B, etc.
Y is actually not bad because of ….
You are right, Y is terrible, I abandon my allies [and join … what? If Y is disqualifying X surely is too...]
The PCC is a lot more valid when its actually the same person taking inconsistent positions on X and Y. Otherwise your actual interlocutor might not be inconsistent at all but has no plausible way of demonstrating that.
The problem with this argument is that it ignores a unique feature of AIs—their copiability. It takes ~20 years and O($300k) to spin up a new human worker. It takes ~20 minutes to spin up a new AI worker.
So in the long run, for a human to economically do a task, they have to not just have some comparative advantage but have a comparative advantage that’s large enough to cover the massive cost differential in “producing” a new one.
This actually analogizes more to engines. I would argue that a big factor in the near-total replacement of horses by engines is not so much that engines are exactly 100x better than horses at everything, but that engines can be mass-produced. In fact I think the claim that engines are exactly equally better than horses at every horse-task is obviously false if you think about it for two minutes. But any time there’s a niche where engines are even slightly better than horses, we can just increase production of engines more quickly and cheaply than we can increase production of horses.
These economic concepts such as comparative advantage tend to assume, for ease of analysis, a fixed quantity of workers. When you are talking about human workers in the short term, that is a reasonable simplifying assumption. But it leads you astray when you try to use these concepts to think about AIs (or engines).
This idea kind of rhymes with gain-of-function research in a way that makes me uncomfortable. “Let’s intentionally create harmful things, but its OK because we are creating harmful things for the purpose of preventing the harm that would be caused by those things.”
I’m not sure if I can formalize this into a logically-tight case against doing it, but it seems conceptually similar to X, and X is bad.
Just to make the math easy, let’s suppose the gouging tax is 50%.
The air purifiers problem seems like not a big problem? If they are normally “worth” $150 and you value having them at $300, you could post them up for sale at $450. Then, if someone really needs them, you get your $300, they get their air purifier, and $150 goes to disaster relief. This tax only prevents the trade if the buyers would buy them for $300 but not for $450, which limits the amount of deadweight loss here to a maximum of $149, rather than potentially unbounded deadweight loss under current policy.
Sorry
Many states have already passed something like this, which only takes effect once enough states sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
However, I think it’s unlikely that this will get over the 270 hump anytime soon, because right now GOP-run states (correctly) perceive that the EC has a pro-GOP tilt (for now at least); and the swing states benefit a lot from swing status.
Those kinds of VC-run business can also often have other problems. For example, Aspen Dental was sued for deceptive marketing.
It’s not true that you can’t pay negative taxes on your betting market losses, at least if you are someone who uses prediction markets routinely. You are allowed to deduct your gross gambling losses from your gambling gains, and you only pay tax on the net gain. See https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/at-02-53.pdf.
Just to push back a little—I feel like these people do a valuable service for capitalism. If people in the reviews or in the press are criticizing a business for these things, that’s an important channel of information for me as a consumer and it’s hard to know how else I could apply that to my buying decisions without incurring the time and hassle cost of showing up and then leaving without buying anything.
I treat chatGPT as a vibes-ologist; it’s good for answering questions about like which X is most popular or what do most people think about X. I agree it’s less good for “X is true”
Well, you don’t see them as much because they don’t necessarily interact with the metaphorical pope(s)/cardinal(s)/etc. I’m just talking about all the thousands of people who have read the sequences and/or other foundational rationalist texts, interpreted them for themselves, and did their best to apply those lessons in their own lives. Many such people exist! They just don’t live in the Bay Area, don’t necessarily go to rationalist meetups, and might not be active LW posters. So the reason I don’t have examples for you is precisely because Active in the Rationalist Community is highly correlated with both “LW readers are likely to know who this person is” and/or “this person is publicly identifiable as a Rationalist,” and also with “Catholic within this metaphor”—Official Rationalist Spaces are effectively catholic churches, in the metaphor. Of course you won’t find a ton of protestants there!
The Protestant/Catholic schism was fundamentally over whether the Bible should be interpreted by the Pope and the Catholic church, with the role of the faithful to listen to their priest and take what they say as the Received Interpretation of the Word of God, or instead whether each individual Christian should become literate, and read and interpret the Bible for themselves. Of course, there were particular points of dispute but they all stemmed from this—is it possible for the Pope to be wrong, and if so, what does that say about our faith?
The Catholic position was, it is not possible for the Pope to be wrong within the bounds of our faith, and therefore if there is proof that the Pope is wrong then it would prove that our faith is wrong. The Protestant position was, like, of course its possible for the Pope to be wrong, he’s just some guy. So when Martin Luther was saying “it is possible for the Pope to be wrong” that was a big f’in deal. But you don’t see modern protestants going around defiantly asserting that it’s possible for the Pope to be wrong—they know there are millions of people who already agree with this idea, and it just kinda seems silly or beside the point for them? A protestant generally doesn’t care what the Pope thinks any more than they care what other prominent world leaders think.
This comment probably won’t get a ton of readership on an old post, but if you understand my metaphor and think you are “protestant,” please react with Checkmark, even if you are mostly an LW lurker. If you understand and you think you are “catholic”, react with Xmark. If you think this metaphor makes no sense or is fundamentally wrong, then I guess react with something else.
Footnotes are good in translated works. I read the 3-body trilogy translated into English, and it was very helpful to have notes from the translator explaining certain points of cultural context that a Chinese reader would be expected to be familiar with.
Well, “fish” is a statutorily defined term that clearly includes all invertebrates. What did you want the court to do, ignore the statutory text? Arguably, that outcome supports the notion that the courts are less likely to just ignore text limiting the kinds of harm that are cognizable, not more likely, as you seem to be arguing.
I have a hard time imagining a Court ruling that “Other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity” could embrace something so different-in-kind than the listed items.
It only counts if the $500m comes from “cyber attacks on critical infrastructure” or “with limited human oversight, intervention, or supervision....results in death, great bodily injury, property damage, or property loss.”
So emotional damages, even if severe and pervasive, can’t get you there.
I guess it depends on whether you are trying to maximize the amount of [exercise X] you do, or whether there’s a fixed quantity of [exercise X] that you are trying to force yourself to do. If the latter, obviously it will take longer if you do it while playing Civ but that’s not necessarily a problem.
Civ is famous for “just one more turn”—maybe you can hide whatever it is in between turns?
Just move the percent? Instead of “RFK Jr is very unlikely to win the presidency (0.001%)”, say “RFK Jr is very unlikely (0.001%) to win the presidency”
Strong downvoted, because this “guide” makes a lot of bold claims with zero backup.