I mean, I would say that preventing 40% of disease (depending on what you're measuring, etc etc) is not marginal. I guess I'd turn it around and ask, if 40% is marginal, what number would not be marginal, and why do you draw the line there?
(For me, "marginal" would mean that the costs were roughly equal to the benefits. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that saving the lives of even just 1% of the people who would normally die from the flu -- between 10k and 50k people a year -- is roughly equivalent to the cost of giving out flu shots. I suppose you could argue that the benefit is marginal to individuals who have a low probability of dying from the flu, and marginal to a society which has relatively low vaccination rates overall.)
The other thing is that, according to the Claude data here, the vaccine is actually relatively effective at preventing the transmission of some flu variants, 50% effective against influenza B! If so, there would be a clear group benefit to that, you only need (1 - 1/1.3) / 0.5 = 46% of people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to that strain.
It's an amazing fact of mathematics that even a vaccine that has relatively low efficacy can completely neutralize transmission if enough people in a group take it.
This is especially true in the case of the flu because it has a relatively low R0 of approximately 1.3, meaning that without intervention/vaccines, each infected individual infects on average 1.3 other people. The vaccine just needs to be effective enough to drive the reproduction rate below 1 for the virus to die out.
We do not have good data on how effective flu vaccines are at neutralizing transmission. But for the sake of argument, let's take these relatively "bad" years for the flu where they prevented 40% of doctor's visits. Suppose that corresponds to merely preventing 40% of transmissions. The other 60% of transmissions still occur.
In that case is it even possible to drive R_eff (the effective reproduction rate of the virus) below 1? It turns out, yes! With an R0 of 1.3 and an effectiveness of only 40%, you stop the spread of the virus after vaccinating only 60% of people.
Parent poster is saying that even though the effect on an individual is low relative to other vaccines, the effect of a whole group taking the vaccine is actually very high.
This the opposite of your understanding. The benefit to the individuals in a group from the whole group taking the vaccine is actually much larger than the benefit to an individual in the group of taking the vaccine solo.
> Whenever I read about formal specs it always seems to me like “write the same tests just in a different way”, or worse, “write the same implementation but in a different way”. [...] Can anyone enlighten me?
A big difference is that formal methods allow you to use the "for all" quantifier.
For example, you might write a unit test that says "foo('abc') returns a string with no trailing whitespace".
But with formal methods, you can prove that "for any input x, foo(x) returns a string with no trailing whitespace".
This is a trivial example, but you could imagine something more complicated, such as "for any program P, compile(P) has the same behavior as P".
Of course, you have to define what "has the same behavior as" means!
> The historical automation story seems to be that technology replaces workers, and those workers typically end up taking lower-paying jobs
As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.
But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.
I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.
> Look at the wealth disparity. Even if quality of life has increased, it's not wrong for the people delivering that increased quality of life (workers) to also demand a requisite slice of the pie.
Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."
That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.
The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.
I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.
> Expand beyond the USA and include in your analysis how life has changed in imperialized nations that now function as cheap labor sources for our factories that pollute the local environment while exploiting workers for absurdly low wages and bad working conditions.
Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.
Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.
> There’s no reason, even under capitalism that we must allow all of the productivity gains to accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.
200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.
The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)
But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".
> Choices are made by people who have power and imposed upon people who don't.
In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.
In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.
This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.
You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.
Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".
> I want to go toward a future that looks good and fair for regular people.
Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?
We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.
I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.
If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")
And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.
People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.
My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.
All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.
As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.
Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.
Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.
I am not saying that there should be no regulations on monopolies. We are discussing a very specific market intervention, namely the proposal to
> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.
If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.
> Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.
Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds." They're not arguing that this is something to be applied only in emergencies.
Similarly in your post, you use the need to ration gas after a hurricane to argue that we should ration water all the time. This does not follow.
> Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.
The logical extension of your argument here is that the world would be better if we subsidized gasoline for "poor utilities bill payers" and "rural residents".
But why gasoline and water specifically? Why not also healthcare, food, childcare, and other necessities?
Then consider, if we have a budget of $X per family to subsidize necessities, surely the government is not best suited to decide how to split up those dollars between water, gas, healthcare, food, and childcare? There's no right answer universally, some people need food more than they need gas, and vice versa. Surely an individual family would be better equipped to decide for themselves?
We have now invented "giving money to poor people instead of subsidizing demand", which I wholeheartedly support.
> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.
We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.
Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.
> having a Waymo dropping off clear of the bike lane sounds good, until the exiting passenger accidentally doors a cyclist who isn’t prepared for that possibility.
Note that Waymos will alert you if a cyclist is approaching so you don't door them. Not saying it's perfect, you can still open the door if you want, but they are very consistent about this.
(For me, "marginal" would mean that the costs were roughly equal to the benefits. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that saving the lives of even just 1% of the people who would normally die from the flu -- between 10k and 50k people a year -- is roughly equivalent to the cost of giving out flu shots. I suppose you could argue that the benefit is marginal to individuals who have a low probability of dying from the flu, and marginal to a society which has relatively low vaccination rates overall.)
The other thing is that, according to the Claude data here, the vaccine is actually relatively effective at preventing the transmission of some flu variants, 50% effective against influenza B! If so, there would be a clear group benefit to that, you only need (1 - 1/1.3) / 0.5 = 46% of people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to that strain.