There’s two kinds of Effective Altruism(EA). The kind Peter Singer and others promoted for decades and the kind that’s now part of Silicon Valley and finance. The Peter Singer kind basically just says “reduce the most suffering you can” and the cheapest way to maximize that is stuff like mosquito nets. That was all well and good.
When EA met Silicon Valley the basics of utilitarianism, minimize suffering, merged with the standard exponential curve that Silicon Valley loves. It went from mosquito nets prevent malaria for pennies to the future is infinite therefore there will always be more people in the future than the present so minimizing future peoples suffering is key. This is where it starts to combine with super intelligence. If there is a super intelligence that destroys humanity that would cause _maximum suffering_. Therefore the most effective way to reduce suffering is actually to prevent said super intelligence from destroying/torturing humanity. Again because there’s more future people than current people.
This is how it becomes Calvinist. The present has no value. Only the chosen, those working in AI, can save the future. And you must do everything you can to prevent said future.
It can go both ways. Either you believe ASI will always be bad so you believe work must be done to prevent it. Or you believe that ASI can be made good and the good kind will maximize utility. They are both the same though fundamentally and are a belief in a higher power, ASI, which either provides ultimate damnnation and must be averted or provides ultimate salvation and must be brought into existence.
If you’re donating mosquito nets or reading up on the best charities in your area that’s not Calvinist. If you’re devoting your life to AI because you believe that’s how you can be most altruistic it starts to look something like a religion and Calvinism is an imperfect but useful analog.
My stance is more that compute isn’t the limiting factor anymore. These models are useful if you’re a software dev. What we need is time to integrate these models in ways that are useful to normal people. I do not share the belief that if we keep expanding we’ll hit some magical limit where it’ll suddenly be a god and solve our problems.
It’s because speedometers aren’t showing a fraction of a whole. Analog clocks work by showing how far through the minute/hour/12 hour period you are. Speedometers are just sticks pointing at numbers. Analog speedometers do however do a better of representing your acceleration than digital ones because the speed of the dial does show acceleration.
Totally agree. One thing the AI bros believe though is that growth == useful. If you strongly believe that the larger the model the smarter it is then you think through growth we get AGI which implicitly is useful because reasons.
Yep this is why I prefer analog watches. They are much faster to internalize the time but slower to convert to numbers. Because it’s an abstraction I innately know as someone who learned to read them as a child they are very familiar and easy to read. You really only need the actual numbers when someone asks you for the time.
This is a large part of why I went with a Retroid Pocket over buying a Switch 2. It’s not nearly as powerful but it’ll run Linux and most indie games I buy on GOG. It’s more work of course but knowing that the games I buy I’ll be able to play into the future on any number of devices is worth it.
Huh what is dystopian about that? I’m just referencing how MMT prescribes to solve for inflation and the reality that it’s hard in a democracy to raise taxes.
Yea the covid money printing is regularly pointed to as a reason why MMT is clearly bad but that ignores that there’s literally a solution to this problem in MMT. Raise taxes to reclaim the money. It’s a trivial solution which is sadly politically incredibly challenging.
I was curious how extreme this was in comparison to the past. I grew up near Philly so I looked at the Mount Holly historical data set. Since 1996, that’s the cutoff of the data I found, there’s been 4 summers with two 100+ days in a row in them. Zero instances of three in a row. Honestly it’s rare enough I didn’t believe it had ever been over 100. But it does seem like it’s a once every 10 or so years event. I’d already made plans to go to Florida. I guess I’m going there to avoid the heat this year.
Disclaimer: not trying to make a climate statement here just genuinely curious.
The level of trust in leadership is remarkable. There’s reasonable ways to have people try power tools. Have one team use power tools and another hand tools and see the outcome.
The mandate was literally “the more sawdust you create the more money you’ll make”. Nothing of value is learned by that mandate. Sure it’ll make people use power tools but it won’t cause anyone to learn how to use them to make furniture.
They might understand the danger of bad metric but that doesn’t mean they aren’t victims of them. If there was intentionality here it was lazy as hell at best.
He’s not saying he has any of those experiences. He even qualifies it at the end with the bit about Oliver Twist. The point isn’t “I’m better than you” it’s that experience brings a different sort of knowledge than simply reading about things. And yes that knowledge is more complete simply by virtue of there being more to an experience than just reading about it.
We do multiple trips. A few long weekends, one one week, and one two week. The two week one we have to take it easy. I also backpack and ski and while Disney is obviously real cushy when you’re getting up at 6am every day and doing 25k steps it’s surprisingly exhausting.
That’s next level and might even be more than Disney adult. I spent a whole month last year at Disney Word and am doing it again this year but even I describe that as going too far.
I was replying to the comment not necessarily the article. The _not new_ was in reference to college grads not always having an easy time. That being said looking at the cited data I don't really know if I agree with the conclusion.
While it is new, since 1990, that recent college grads are doing worse than all workers it's not the case that the degree is no longer a buffer. If you compare Young Workers(7.5%) to Recent College Grads(5.6%), i.e. the same age range, or All Workers(4.3%) to All College Grads(3.1%) as of today there's still a buffer.
Edit: They point this out later in the piece themselves
This isn’t really new. When I graduated in 2013 the barista with a college degree was a trope for a reason. Maybe 50% of my graduating CS class had a CS job within 6 months of graduating. Friends with other degrees spent years trying to find something in their field.
> There is no independent "consciousness mechanism" that one might imagine humans have learned or evolved for its own sake.
> There is nothing that a priori constrains token prediction from the domain of consciousness.
We don’t know either of these are true or false though. We simply don’t know. There is no agreed upon definition of consciousness, aside from maybe _the having of qualia_, so arguing that some can or cannot be conscious a priori can’t be done.