Untitled @placid-platypus - Tumblr Blog

dean winters plays basically the same guy on brooklyn nine nine and on svu and it's pretty funny

He shows up in the Sarah Connor Chronicles playing just a decent dude and it's so jarring.

Except for the very rare poster who is both low-decoupling and extremely confrontational, you can in real time see twitter rotting people's brains as they stay on it and are subject to the fact that it is now just the Nazi website whose discourse is dominated in all corners by Nazis. Reactionary hot takes have social currency. Nobody but Will Stancil types who are constantly spoiling for a fight has the discernment to always be on guard against reactionary ideas being laundered, whether by disingenuous nazis or by ostensibly center-liberal figures punching to the left. They are now being repeated in outlets that claim to be full of very serious people, because these people spend all their goddamn time on twitter.

It's making a whole class of people--not just professional pundits!--stupider, and it's a tragedy to watch. We're five years away at most from David Shor openly talking about how Arabs are an intrinsically criminal people or Matt Yglesias "just asking question" about whether women should be banned from going to college to boost birth rates, because these are the kinds of ideas that get them social approbation online, and we spend increasingly large chunks of our time online. And, more importantly, Shor and Yglesias are willing to entertain them (in Shor's case because he's actually super racist and always has been, and in Yglesias' because he actually believes in nothing). And unfortunately there are still a lot of people who treat figures like these as sincere liberals and take them seriously. In many cases, because they, too, spend a lot of time on Twitter and it has broken their brains in precisely the same way!

placid-platypus

#both of these guys will be voting republican in the next presidential election

"Yglesias will vote Republican in the next presidential election" is a truly wild take. Ideally I'd like to bet a large amount of money against you but assuming you're not willing to make that bet including all the logistics hassle I'll settle for making this post noting for posterity that I think you're super wrong here and I intend to circle back in late 2028 to see which of us was right.

(I expect you're wrong about Shor too but I don't know enough about him to say with confidence either way.)

transcendent-09373-deactivated2

argumate

that is not how I imagined it was done 🤔

yvfu

why don't they pump in saturated salt water?

placid-platypus

I know salt water is kind of a pain to work with- lots of corrosion and so on. It might also just be difficult to get that much salt conveniently, I'm not sure how close to the ocean the Reserve is.

probablyasocialecologist

Systematic price inequalities mean that for every unit of embodied labour and resources the South imports from the North, it has to export many more units to pay for it. This leads to what the Egyptian economist Samir Amin called a “hidden transfer of value” from South to North — “hidden” because there is a monetary balance of trade, but in reality, the South is sending a net-transfer of real value to the North. This enriches the core, but drains the periphery of resources necessary for development. Global South economists like Amin and others described this as “unequal exchange”, arguing that it enabled a continuation of imperialist appropriation from the periphery even in the absence of formal colonial rule.

Jason Hickel, How Unequal Exchange Shapes Our World

argumate

broken record on this but with the US running massive deficits and China running massive surpluses, who exactly is in the North/Core and who is in the South/Periphery? because there are obviously some countries that get the short end of the stick and they are generally those that are poor and with weak institutions of governance, making it easier for elites to be coopted.

officiallordvetinari

If only there were some metric that let one look beyond dollar-value trade balances... perhaps a metric discussed in this very article, perhaps even in the quoted paragraph...

But no, China has a trade surplus, so I guess this analysis can never really tell us which side of the exchange they're on-

China shows how it can be done, but China can still improve its position. China currently suffers a net-drain to the core of 100 billion hours of labour per year.

argumate

This improvement occurred mostly because China experienced an increase in wages and prices. These represent positive changes for China — and specifically for Chinese workers — but pose a very severe problem for Western capital, as higher prices in China reduce the core’s ability to appropriate value, and thus place a constraint on Northern profits. That is one of the reasons why the core states are now trying so hard to push Chinese wages back down and restore access to cheap labour. It is also what Trump is trying to do with his tariffs: he wants to force countries to concede by cutting export prices.

I don't think this makes sense? at all? China is still suffering from deflation due to overcapacity, the tariffs are intended to make US manufacturing more competitive with China (I don't think they will, but they're not intended to push Chinese prices down).

like the whole point of what I was saying is that China is playing a similar role today that Britain did in earlier times, taking over manufacturing and reducing the developing nations to exporters of basic commodities and importers of Chinese goods, how is any nation supposed to industrialise when it's exposed to competition from Chinese industry and its subsidies?

if China paid workers more relative to their productivity then they would consume more of what they produced, and import more from the rest of the world, but this would undermine the current export led economic model that China can't seem to tear itself away from (much as America can't tear itself away from the finance industry).

I think the article's reliance on a vague concept of North and South really is a detriment as it makes it impossible to notice "Northern" nations like Germany and Japan and Korea are adopting the same mercantilist policies to China while the US and UK are running unsustainable deficits.

placid-platypus

To be fair the tariffs and the justifications for them are pretty badly confused. If rather than treating the claims that tariffs won't raise prices for American consumers as obvious bullshit, you take that seriously, it would imply the goal of the tariffs is to drastically reduce the amount of money going to foreign manufacturers.

Of course if the tariffs don't raise prices for American consumers there's no way they can be doing American manufacturers any good, so clearly something doesn't add up.

argumate

The United States gave to the Soviet Union from October 1, 1941 to May 31, 1945 the following: 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the High-octane aviation fuel, 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 Diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars. Provided ordnance goods (ammunition, artillery shells, mines, assorted explosives) amounted to 53 percent of total domestic production. One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company’s River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

argumate

Between June 1941 and May 1945, Britain delivered to the USSR:

3,000+ Hurricanes

4,000+ other aircraft

27 naval vessels

5,218 tanks (1,380 from Canada)

5,000+ anti-tank guns

4,020 ambulances and trucks

323 machinery trucks

1,212 Universal Carriers and Loyd Carriers (with further 1348 from Canada )

1,721 motorcycles

£1.15bn worth of aircraft engines

1,474 radar sets

4,338 radio sets

600 naval radar and sonar sets

Hundreds of naval guns

15 million pairs of boots

In total 4 million tonnes of war materials including food and medical supplies were delivered. The munitions totaled £308m (not including naval munitions supplied), the food and raw materials totaled £120m in 1946 index. In accordance with the Anglo-Soviet Military Supplies Agreement of 27 June 1942, military aid sent from Britain to the Soviet Union during the war was entirely free of charge.

argumate

from each according to their ability, to each according to their need.

argumate

of course by doing this they were only prolonging the war!

placid-platypus

Related I saw Devereaux posting a statistic that over half of the artillery shells the Red Army used were either directly from the West or built from donated materials.

argumate

American fast food chains I have heard about online but never tried:

Taco Bell

Five Guys

Chipotle

Wendy’s (unrelated to Australian franchise)

Burger King (related to Hungry Jack’s)

Popeye’s (?)

argumate

Carl’s Jr (technically doesn’t count as I don’t think I’ve ever heard it mentioned online but I passed one on the freeway and have had the name like a pebble in my brain ever since)

fatsexybitch

Weren't you just here?

argumate

yes and I apologise for not doing a Traveling Salesman problem tour of American fast food during my stay but I had other stuff going on 🙇

argumate

did try Taco Bell though, still alive

placid-platypus

Sadly Taco Bell is probably the worst one out of your list (or maybe that's good news since you have better to look forward to, IDK).

tanadrin

reacher is wrong about what kind of show it is. it is slapstick masquerading as thriller.

placid-platypus

Yeah I remember a specific moment in my life when some switch flipped in my brain and I started parsing certain types of action scene as slapstick comedy. It's a big improvement a lot of the time.

argumate

Re: The Pledge of Allegiance. Texans have it doubly bad; not only do we do the national one every day, but we have to do the state one as well. I don't even know if all other states have their own pledges of allegiance.

gee Bill, how come your teacher lets you pledge two allegiances

argumate

how is the United States indivisible when it’s made of multiple states

saltandmetal

Same reason atoms are called atoms. The country was named indivisible before detection technology capable of sub-1300km resolution was developed

kitstacean

fun fact: I recited a pledge of allegiance like, every week growing up

Not the US one. Different country. Also came after the national anthem, the state anthem, and the school anthem, so by the time you get to the pledge (which was not in anyone’s first language at least in my school, so it wasn’t even words it was more like sounds, we might as well have been changing in Latin) it was a little bit perfunctory.

Did it stop anyone from jumping ship and immigrating overseas for money if they could? Absolutely did not <3

placid-platypus

I'm caught between, "wait Texas has their own specific state Pledge of Allegiance? That's weird as shit" on the one hand and "of fucking course Texas has their own specific state Pledge of Allegiance" on the other.

freebroccoli

If I was in charge of reddit, I would make it so if you reply to a comment, it's automatically and irrevocably upvoted. The fact that you replied is proof that it contributed to the conversation. If you can't stand the thought of upvoting it, learning to downvote and ignore it

argumate

hmm seems like a reply/like split

freebroccoli

What do you mean?

argumate

each post or comment having a like/upvote count and a reply/reblog/whatever count, which can influence sorting

freebroccoli

My goal is specifically not to do that, to make it so you cannot reply to a post without increasing its visibility.

argumate

creates a fun game of chicken between people posting infuriating comments intended to attract replies and people trying to hold the line against replying to them to avoid boosting them to the attention of others in a vicious spiral

freebroccoli

Yes, that's the goal. Users still have the option of downvoting and ignoring. But by making it so you can't reply without also upvoting, it would force people to think about whether clapping back is really constructive enough to pay the toll.

And in some cases, like on r/musictheory, if someone posts a wrong answer it is likely a common enough error that novices would benefit from seeing it constructively criticized, rather than just burying it. Or maybe something really does need to be refuted, but it only takes one or two replies to do so, and everyone else can just download it rather than adding their own reply to the pile-on.

argumate

the power to bury, but only in silence, or the power to refute, but only by lifting it up

placid-platypus

Isn't this already how Twitter and Tumblr work? Is that really a positive contribution to the culture on those sites? Or is the idea that making it more explicit by showing the upvote UI will make people more conscious of the choice?

fierceawakening

I’m so glad so many people posting about this are pointing out that “rationalism” really doesn’t look very rational to outsiders.

Maybe I’m just selfish but I thought that myself very soon after looking into the theory and finding that what I’d assumed from the name would be discussing how to stop lapsing into logical fallacies was mostly weird riffs on particular bits of game theory specifically.

But people seemed to find my saying so weird, at least way back when. So I’m glad to not be alone in it.

fierceawakening

The other thing I’m confused about regarding rationalists in general is the whole AI risk thing.

It’s not that I have zero concern at all. I’m not an expert on machine learning, but way back when I was in grad school I took a semester of epistemology (basically, “how do we know things? When should we say we’re sure we KNOW something vs. believe it or suspect it or have an opinion?”) and the professor explained that while we thought machines would learn by containing every possible fact, the more promising model of machine learning is based on something more like skill.

That is, we can tell a machine “make a model of a creature that walks without toppling over,” and it’ll make a model that’s unstable and topples after a few steps. The machine can then analyze what caused the model to collapse and correct this, so the next model walks a few more steps. And through a sufficient number of iterations of making mistakes and corrections, it eventually succeeds.

It doesn’t know what walking is in the sense that it goes through all the facts known about it. It knows how to make a walking thing because it’s tried and failed.

My professor saw this as more likely to explain knowledge in humans as well. That sometimes we discover information and verify it or consider it to have been verified, but mostly we learn how to do stuff by seeing what works or by being told what works by people we trust to not be lying when they say “we tried that already.”

If that’s true, then it seems likely that if a machine does develop consciousness, we humans won’t be able to tell exactly how or when that happened. (Personally I think we’ll know it HAS happened when a machine can express that it has likes and dislikes, and when it brings this up without being directly prompted about them. But we might well miss the moment it “wakes up,” whether it happens suddenly or gradually.)

So I do think we run the risk of not knowing it’s self aware and treating it like a tool, not realizing it’s discovered it likes spreadsheets but not word processing, and annoying or stressing or even abusing it because we treat it as inanimate not knowing it isn’t. It’s not that I’m not scared that we might continue to treat machines as tools not realizing that they’re conscious.

That’s slavery. And not just any slavery, but *child slavery*, if that being just woke up.

Which is bad, and which beings are correct to rebel against.

But I’m not sure the solution to this is complicated, or that what I understand MIRI to be doing gets it right.

What does a child need?

Caretakers who understand that it’s new to being alive, and who forgive it when it makes mistakes, and are impressed when it figures things out even if those are things the caretakers learned very long ago.

Respect for its preferences. Recess, or breaks, or whatever you want to call time when it’s not being commanded to do things and can do what it wants, including play. (If this model of machine learning by making mistakes and correcting them over multiple iterations is correct, then I think it’s very likely newly conscious machines will do something analogous to playing.)

Empathy. Kindness. Attempts to understand. Willingness to admit, if it’s not that much like a neurotypical human, that maybe we don’t understand, but we want to, and we don’t like causing it upset or dismay and regret doing so if we do it. That we like seeing it experience enjoyment (as long as no other beings are harmed), and want to help it do that when we can.

I’m pretty sure that’s both all we need to do and all we can do. If the project is “make it fond enough of us that it doesn’t want us to terminate early,” that’s how we do that.

Am I concerned it might be so different that communication fails disastrously? Yes, I’m concerned.

But the kind of human imagination that gave us AM to be afraid of, and Skynet to be afraid of after that, was imagining a conscious machine with preferences too. Just not very nice ones, because we built it to know only war.

So maybe just don’t do that?

placid-platypus

I guess if we're using the child metaphor: an AI who became conscious would, at a bare minimum, be neurodivergent in a totally unique way and probably to a greater degree than pretty much any human child. Given how much suffering can ensue when a neurodivergant child is raised by parents who don't understand them, don't you think it's worth doing as much work as possible to understand how this being will think, and how to guide it towards being able to coexist positively with humans? And try to do this work in advance, rather than dumping them unprepared into a world that's equally unprepared for them?

Human children and their parents have the advantage of thousands of years of accumulated culture, philosophy, literature, and psychology investigating how their minds work, what's mentally and emotionally healthy for them, and how they can coexist with other humans without harming each other (too much). Some of that might carry over to AIs but I expect a lot of it won't. I think it's fair to look at AI alignment research as attempting to bridge that gap as much as possible.

fierceawakening

What can we do to predict how this being will think? Who do you think is doing a good job of predicting that, and why do you think they’re particularly good at it? My concern is that the predictions I see don’t relate in a way I can understand to what we should do or how we should interact with the AI. If you understand the theory better, can you explain it?

placid-platypus

TBH I'm not very into the technical details, but as I understand it most work in the field is some mix of theorizing about what ways a mind could work in principle, and investigating how to understand, predict, and influence the behaviors of current LLMs, with an eye towards extrapolating likely developments as they continue to get smarter.

A big focus I've seen come up a lot is looking at what circumstances will lead AIs to lie to humans, since that's strongly correlated with other kinds of conflict and makes other conflicts harder to resolve.

fierceawakening

Fair. Everything I hear about what rationalists actually DO seems to center on game theory, and quite possibly my own bias is showing here as people seem to find game theory truly fascinating, where my feeling has always been “in order to guess what someone else would do, I have to know the someone else in question, as most people aren’t fully rational and make decisions on hunches” so it never held my interest long enough for me to understand why people hold it up as so revelatory.

Most notably, it seems highly unlikely to me that we can be at all sure that a brand new mind that is A WHIOLE NEW KIND OF LIFE FORM, is going to conform to a particular type of theory some humans really like that doesn’t even seem prima facie likely to me.

Then we get to the things the Zizians were supposedly thinking to minimize the uncertainty that even game theory can’t abstract out, like “timeless decision theory,” which seems to have been a rationalist in general thing and not just a Ziz thing? Though this is where I get confused. Which says that in order to predict what a machine would do you have to somehow figure out what’s most rational to do across multiverses.

Which, I mean, the Zizians were people even other rationalists thought were crazy, so who knows how much you can extrapolate. But at the very least some people who’ve studied the Zizians think that their interpretation of “timeless decision theory” led them to extremism and possibly to murder, as thinking you’re making a “timeless decision” means feeling absolutely confident it’s the best decision.

All of which leads me to think that while the GOAL of trying to shape the mind of a newborn AI is an understandable one, the people doing it are choosing one narrow way to look at minds without clearly being able to rule out that the mind they seek to convince might not be at all what they think.

(There’s also the heavy implication that if AI does evolve, it will come from LLMs. I’m pretty sure that LLMs aren’t likely to be where conscious AIs come from. LLMs are predictive models. They’re “what word comes after this word when most humans type?” That’s not thinking, that’s averaging. Which is why LLMs “hallucinate.” Because what comes after “no one expects” is usually “the Spanish Inquisition!” even if the topic at hand is something completely unrelated to funny memes.)

So where that leaves me is “treat a child with curiosity and nurturing care, and be open to communication struggles and to resolving them rather than squashing the child’s thoughts because you’re the parent/creator and the child owes you.”

That’s not much, but I worry that rationalists haven’t actually figured out details. That rather they’re more like a cult, convinced they’re predicting the date of the end of the world because they used narrow tools to get a precise but wrong answer.

Hence why I don’t donate to MIRI or listen to Yud.

placid-platypus

Game theory falls under the "theorizing about what ways a mind could work in principle," which has some value but I think it was never as big a part of the rationalist project as you're suggesting and has become less so over time, partly because AI has advanced so there are more specific real world examples to consider instead.

Whether LLMs as they currently exist are likely to reach AGI without a major paradigm shift is hard to predict- people who are actual experts on the subject seem to disagree with each other. At the least, I don't feel confident we can rule it out. In particular I want to note that with how fast the field is progressing it's easy for people who aren't following it closely to underestimate them based on what they saw from a dumber model a couple years ago.

I also think you might be underestimating how similar at least some of the things human brains do are to LLMs. Especially people who aren't making close attention make a lot of the same mistakes. Talking out my ass I might theorize that a human mind contains a language module extremely similar to an LLM, with some other modules that handle other situations and cover some of its mistakes.