(Counterpoint: for big groups like bureaucracies, intra-country variances can average out. I do think we can predict that a group of 100 random Americans writing an AI constitution would place more value on political self-determination and less on political unity than a similar group of Chinese.)
robo
Karma: 389
There’s more variance within countries than between countries. Where did the disruptive upstart that cares about Free Software[1] come from? China. Is that because China’s more libertarian than the US? No, it’s because there’s a wide variance in both the US and China and by chance the most software-libertarian company was Chinese. Don’t treat countries like point estimates.
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Free as in freedom, not as in beer
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Of course, I agree, it’s such a pattern that it doesn’t look like a joke. It looks like a very compelling true anecdote. And if someone repeats this “very compelling true anecdote” (edit and other people recognize that, no, it’s actually a meme) they’ll make AI alignment worriers look like fools who believe Onion headlines.
This is a joke, not something that happened, right? Could you wrap this in quote marks or put a footnote or somehow to indicate this is riffing on a meme and not a real anecdote from someone in the industry? I read a similar comment on LessWrong a few months ago and it was only luck that kept me from repeating it as truth to people on the fence about whether to take AI risks seriously.
LessWrong is uncensored in China.
I know it’s not your main point, but for the actual 4-minute-mile I’m on the side of the null hypothesis. In a steady progression, once any one arbitrary threshold is crossed (4:10 minutes, 4:00 minutes, 3:50 minutes), many others are soon to follow.
Trolling a bit, perhaps we could talk about a “4-Minute-Mile Gell-Mann Effect”. Events that to outsiders look like discontinuous revolutions look to insiders like minor ticks with surprising publicity.
A standard trick is to add noise to the signal to (stochastically) let parts get over the hump.
BTW, feed this post into ChatGPT and it will tell you the answer
Somewhat mean caveat emptor for other readers: I just spent an hour trying to understand this post, and wish that I hadn’t. It’s still possible I’m missing the thing, but inside view is I’ve found the thing and the thing just isn’t that interesting.[1]
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Feeding a program its Gödel numbering isn’t relevant (and doesn’t work?!), and the puzzle is over perhaps missing out on an unfathomably small amount of money[2].
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By “unfathomably small” I mean ≈ dollars. And, sure, there could be a deep puzzle there, but I feel that when a puzzle has its accidental complexity removed you usually can produce a more compelling use case.
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Could you spell this out? I don’t see how AI has much to do with trade. Is the idea that AI development is bounded on the cost of GPUs, and this will raise the cost of outside-China GPUs compared to inside-China GPUs? Or is it that there will be less VC money e.g. because interest rates go up to combat inflation?
Yes, it means figure out how the notation works.
That’s a good Coasian point. Talking out of my butt, but I think the airlines don’t carry the risk. The sale channel (airlines, Expedia, etc.) take commissions distributing an insurance product designed another company (Travel Insured International, Seven Corners) who handles product design compliance, with the actual claims being handled by another company and the insurance capital by yet another company (AIG, Berkshire Hathaway).
LLMs tell me the distributors get 30–50% commission, which tells you that it’s not a very good product for consumers.
But fear of death does seem like a kind of value systematization
I don’t think it’s system 1 doing the systemization. Evolution beat fear of death into us in lots of independent forms (fear of heights, snakes, thirst, suffocation, etc.), but for the same underlying reason. Fear of death is not just an abstraction humans invented or acquired in childhood; is a “natural idea” pointed at by our brain’s innate circuitry from many directions. Utilitarianism doesn’t come with that scaffolding. We don’t learn to systematize Euclidian and Minkowskian spaces the same way either.
Quick takes are presented inline, posts are not. Perhaps posts could be presented as title + <80 (140?) character summary.
You may live in a place where arguments about the color of the sky are really arguments about tax policy. I don’t think I live there? I’m reading your article saying “If Blue-Sky-ism is to stand a chance against the gravitational pull of Green-Sky-ism, it must offer more than talk of a redistributionist tax system” and thinking ”...what on earth...?”. This might be perceptive cultural insight about somewhere, but I do not understand the context. [This my guess as to why are you are being voted down]
You might be[1] overestimating the popularity of “they are playing god” in the same way you might overestimate the popularity of woke messaging. Loud moralizers aren’t normal people either. Messages that appeal to them won’t have the support you’d expect given their volume.
Compare, “It’s going to take your job, personally”. Could happen, maybe soon, for technophile programmers! Don’t count them out yet.
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Not rhetorical—I really don’t know
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Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a story Kindness to Kin about aliens who love(?) their family members proportionally to the Hamilton’s “I’d lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins” rule. It gives an idea to how alien it is.
Then again, Proto-Indo-European had detailed family words that correspond rather well to confidence of genetic kinship, so maybe it’s a cultural thing.
Sure, I think that’s a fair objection! Maybe, for a business, it may be worth paying the marginal security costs of giving 20 new people admin accounts, but for the federal government that security cost is too high. Is that what people are objecting to? I’m reading comments like this:
Yeah, that’s beyond unusual. It’s not even slightly normal. And it is in fact very coup-like behavior if you look at coups in other countries.
And, I just don’t think that’s the case. I think this is pretty-darn-usual and very normal in the management consulting / private equity world.
I don’t think foreign coups are a very good model for this? Coups don’t tend to start by bringing in data scientists.
What I’m finding weird is...this was the action people thought worrying enough to make it to the LessWrong discussion. Cutting red tape to unblock data scientists in cost-cutting shakeups—that sometimes works well! Assembling lists of all CIA officers and sending them emails, or trying to own the Gaza strip, or <take your pick>. I’m far mode on these, have less direct experience, but they seem much more worrying. Why did this make the threshold?
Huh, I came at this with the background of doing data analysis in large organizations and had a very different take.
You’re a data scientist. You want to analyze what this huge organization (US government) is spending its money on in concrete terms. That information is spread across 400 mutually incompatible ancient payment systems. I’m not sure if you’ve viscerally felt the frustration of being blocked, spending all your time trying to get permission to read from 5 incompatible systems, let alone 400. But it would take months or years.
Fortunately, your boss is exceptionally good at Getting Things Done. You tell him that there’s one system (BFS) that has all the data you need in one place. But BFS is protected by an army of bureaucrats, most of whom are named Florence, who are Very Particular, are Very Good at their job, Will Not let this system go down, Will Not let you potentially expose personally identifiably information by violating Section 3 subparagraph 2 of code 5, Will Not let you sweet talk her into bypassing the safety systems she has spent the past 30 years setting up to protect oh-just-$6.13 trillion from fraud, embezzlement, and abuse, and if you manage somehow manage to get around these barriers she will Stop You.
Your boss Gets Things Done and threatens Florence’s boss Mervin that if he does not give you absolutely all the permissions you ask for, Mervin will become the particular object of attention of two people named Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
You get absolutely all the permissions you want and go on with your day.
Ah, to have a boss like that!
EDIT TL/DR: I think this looks weirder in Far mode? Near mode (near to data science, not near government), giving outside consultant data scientists admin permissions for important databases does not seem weird or nefarious. It’s the sort of thing that happens when the data scientist’s boss is intimidatingly high in an organization, like the President/CEO hiring a management consultant.
This is true, and it strongly influences the ways Americans think about how to provide public goods to the rest of the world. But they’re thinking about how to provide public goods the rest of the world[1]. “America First” is controversial in American intellectual circles, whereas in my (limited) conversations in China people are usually confused about what other sort of policy you would have.
Disclosure: I’m American, I came of age in this era