technicalities

• technicalities 15 Nov 2014 23:06 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: bentarm’s comment on: Meetup : Glas­gow (Scot­land) Meetup

  Hi,

  Just saw this, but will sadly miss it. Would be very interested in future meetups.

Au­to­matic for the people

• technicalities 9 Jul 2018 17:29 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  “80%” seems accurate about the UK’s media; see this (2007) study which puts original reporting at only 19% of all stories:

  In short, fewer than one in five press articles (19%) appear to be based mainly on information that does not come from pre-packaged sources. Indeed, 60% of press stories rely wholly or mainly on pre-packaged information, and only 12% are entirely independent of such material

  I’ve linked that and qualified the claim as about “[UK] journalism” anyway; thanks.

  The slow uptake of auto-journalism is evidence that it isn’t really ready, sure. How Efficient do you take old media to be?

  What links here?

  • Au­to­matic for the people by technicalities (8 Jul 2018 14:23 UTC; 18 points)

• technicalities 9 Jul 2018 17:33 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  Fixed, thank you.

• technicalities 9 Jul 2018 18:01 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  Yes, the piece is conditional; the “47% of jobs in the next few decades” estimate, which spurred me to write this, is more or less naive top-down extrapolation.

  But many of the same considerations apply if long-term labour trends continue:

  Anyway other powerful forces (e.g. global outsourcing, the decay of unions) besides robots have led to the 40-year decline in labour’s share of global income. But those will produce similar dystopian problems if the trend continues, and there’s enough of a risk of the above scenario for us to put a lot of thought and effort into protecting people, either way.

• technicalities 9 Jul 2018 18:31 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Sable’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  Demographics: not sure!

  1) Naively, population growth should delay automation by decreasing wages. Frey and Osborne don’t account for this, let alone more realistic second-order effects (e.g. ‘more people, more demand, thus feedback...’). But they don’t commit to a real timeframe anyway.

  2) Banally: “if economic growth matches or exceeds population growth, at least the downside will be bounded”. But we’re not going to get sensible macro’ predictions for a century away, so that ends that thought.

  Even conditional on Frey and Osborne’s dramatic scenario, I doubt there will be a crisis (in the sense of sudden violent unrest), since automation progress isn’t that fast (e.g. takes a given public company years, not days) and can often be stalled by regulation. Things like job sharing (n part-time workers instead of one full-time worker) could be stepped-up very gradually too. (Or whatever the minimal change to the system that just averts an explosion is.)

• technicalities 9 Jul 2018 18:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: shminux’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  Sorry if I was unclear; I’m not endorsing that logical extreme of the UBI, and I’m also unnerved by many of the policies I describe. (“total control of production by any entity is a terrible unnecessary risk”). The point of the calculation is to show that automation (or a similarly giant productivity gain) is necessary for a good future. Or are you saying it’s so implausible that it’s not worth thinking about?

  I think the best argument against basic income is that it transfers vastly more economic power to politicians. That’s what makes me take capital distribution seriously: put it right into people’s hands, away from mob-shaped politicians and denial.

• technicalities 9 Jul 2018 21:31 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  That’s a fair inference; ‘foolish’ was an unhelpful thing to say.

  (My actual reason for disdaining Macs is finding recently that my desired laptop—nothing crazy, i7, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD—was unavailable for any price. And that a price-matched one had about 25% those specs. Is that ideological?)

• technicalities 11 Jul 2018 20:48 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: Au­to­matic for the people

  1 and 2. These are what I mean by capital distribution:

  Prop up the liberal mixed economy: with a programme of mass employee stock ownership (mostly your 1); or by carving each full-time job into several part-time ones, plus heavy wage subsidies (your 2) (...); or get the government to buy every 18 year old a serious stock portfolio (your 2)

  Basic income is also political in your sense (2), since it’s a large government-driven change from the status quo (and, unless we wait for >> 50 years of growth before we implement it, it will likely involve tax hikes *).

  One reason to favour building up private stocks (over UBI, a flow) is that this protects people (a bit) from later nativist or populist governments cutting off parts of the population. It still goes through politicians, but only once rather than annually. Not sure what protects against revolutionary appropriation (3) though.

  (ESOPs are a relatively apolitical nudge, but I don’t know how much of the problem they’d solve.)

  \* World growth this year was 3.1%. Compounding that fifty times gets us $370tn GWP. It’s hard to tell what the ‘average world tax rate’ is at present, but approximate it with public expenditure, around 25% of GWP. If we could only use 25% of $370tn, we’d be roughly where the above long extreme calculation put us: nowhere near enough.

• technicalities 15 May 2019 7:28 UTC

  4 points

  on: Epistea Sum­mer Experiment

  Will this clash with the Human-Aligned AI event?

• technicalities 3 Jun 2020 9:27 UTC

  10 points

  on: Con­cep­tual en­g­ineer­ing: the rev­olu­tion in philos­o­phy you’ve never heard of

  Raised in the old guard, Chalmers doesn’t understand...

  This amused me, given that in the 90s he was considered an outsider and an upstart, coming round here with his cognitive science, shaking things up. (” ‘The Conscious Mind’ is a stimulating, provocative and agenda-setting demolition-job on the ideology of scientific materialism. It is also an erudite, urbane and surprisingly readable plea for a non-reductive functionalist account of mind. It poses some formidable challenges to the tenets of mainstream materialism and its cognitivist offshoots” )

  Not saying you’re wrong about him in that lecture. Maybe he has socialised and hardened as he gained standing. A funny cycle, in that case.

Self-help, hard and soft

• technicalities 3 Oct 2020 9:07 UTC

  1 point

  on: Cal­ling Bul­lshit in A.I?

  Yeah, the definition of evidence you use (that results must single out only one hypothesis) is quite strong, what people call “crucial” evidence.

  https://​​en.m.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Experimentum_crucis

• technicalities 9 Nov 2020 9:27 UTC

  1 point

  on: Model Depth as Panacea and Obfuscator

  Great post. Do you have a sense of

  1. how much of tree success can be explained /​ replicated by interpretable models;

  2. whether a similar analysis would work for neural nets?

  You suggest that trees work so well because they let you charge ahead when you’ve misspecified your model. But in the biomedical/​social domains ML is most often deployed, we are always misspecifying the model. Do you think your new GLM would offer similar idiotproofing?

We have some ev­i­dence that masks work

• technicalities 19 Jul 2021 16:12 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: J Mann’s comment on: We have some ev­i­dence that masks work

  Sadly Gelman didn’t have time to destroy us. (He rarely does.)

• technicalities 22 Jul 2021 20:16 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Webstir’s comment on: Fire Law Incentives

  This is an interesting counterpoint (though I’d like to see a model of CO2 cost vs thinning cost if you have one), and it’s funny we happen to have such a qualified person on the thread. But your manner is needlessly condescending and—around here—brandishing credentials as a club will seriously undermine you rather than buttressing you.

• technicalities 30 Jul 2021 15:52 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Mike Harris’s comment on: We have some ev­i­dence that masks work

  Great! Comment below if you like this wording and this can be our bond:
  
  ”Gavin bets 100 USD to GiveWell, to Mike’s 100 USD to GiveWell that the results of NCT04630054 will show a median reduction in Rt > 15.0 % for the effect of a whole population wearing masks [in whatever venues the trial chose to study].”

• technicalities 31 Jul 2021 9:47 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Mike Harris’s comment on: We have some ev­i­dence that masks work

  Sounds fine. Just noticed they have a cloth and a surgical treatment. Take the mean?

• technicalities 2 Sep 2021 7:34 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Mike Harris’s comment on: We have some ev­i­dence that masks work

  Givewell’s fine!

  Thanks again for caring about this.