Abe

Karma: 77

Abe 19 Apr 2026 23:44 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: kbear’s comment on: David Matolcsi’s Shortform
Certainly preference cascades and demographic change can explain some changes in public opinion, but I also think that people actually change their minds. Having lived through it, I’m pretty confident that the shift in public opinion on gay marriage was due at least in part to some people genuinely changing their minds, and even then penitence is rare to non-existent.

Abe 18 Apr 2026 16:27 UTC
6 points
−1
in reply to: David Matolcsi’s comment on: David Matolcsi’s Shortform
I think there are limits to how good one’s values can get without facing one’s past sins.
I don’t think this is true, or at least I don’t think it’s obvious. When opinions change in Democratic societies, in my experience the generic stance is “That’s how I always felt, I’m glad everyone else caught up.” But clearly _someone_ must have changed their mind about gay marriage between 2005 and 2015. I don’t think there’s a limit on how far you can shift without penitence. I’m not sure that’s how human psychology works.

Abe 17 Jan 2025 22:52 UTC
13 points
3
on: Tax Price Gouging?
If items are only available at “gouged” rates, then this will make them more expensive. That is, this tax will fall only on people in the emergency zone, and specifically those who are desperate enough to buy goods at these elevated costs. Since demand is very inelastic under these circumstances, the tax burden will fall almost entirely on the consumer.
Another approach might be to temporarily raise taxes everywhere except the emergency zone on these goods. For example, if bottled water falls under a temporary excise tax during a hurricane everywhere except the hurricane zone, that incentivizes sellers to bring bottled water to the hurricane victims.

Abe 4 Dec 2024 3:55 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: garrison’s comment on: China Hawks are Manufacturing an AI Arms Race
I listen to his podcast semi-regularly, and this just seems like a pretty slippery description of his views. It’s pretty obvious that he favors the United States taking a less aggressive stance toward China, for example in his views on the various protectionist measures that the United States has taken in the last ten years. He also seems to see more room for cooperation than anyone I would describe as a China hawk, and in this podcast he suggests that China could likely liberalize after Xi:
https://www.manifold1.com/episodes/molson-hart-china-and-amazon-up-close-60/transcript
I don’t think it’s an unreasonable take, but it’s not one that I would describe as “hawkish”.

Abe 25 Oct 2024 16:13 UTC
1 point
0
on: Big tech transitions are slow (with implications for AI)
This argument seems to be a one by analogy. steam engine:industrial revolution::???:machine learning. But as you can see there’s a term in the analogy I don’t understand. Is ??? chatgpt? LLMs? Transformers? AlexNet? The internet? Digital computers? Something that hasn’t yet been invented?

Abe 24 Oct 2024 16:14 UTC
56 points
1
on: BIG-Bench Canary Contamination in GPT-4
It should be pointed out that the original paper/press release describing GPT-4 explicitly says that they found that BIG-bench had contaminated their training data, and therefore excluded it as an evaluation. As far as I know there was no similar disclosure for claude or other models. See footnote 5 here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.08774v1

Abe 24 Mar 2023 14:10 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 | Microsoft Research
Leetcode questions are not selected for novelty. In fact, the best way to get a problem turned into a Leetcode question is to post it to Leetcode’s discussion board and say someone asked you it in an interview at a big tech company. So it’s still possible that some or even many these questions appear nearly verbatim in the training data.