When negotiating it can be useful to be open to outcomes that are net destruction of value, even if the outcome is not what you ideally want.
ChristianKl
Karma: 33,696
Communities are made up of people who have subjective experiences. It’s nothing that you can’t prevent.
Squeeze them altogether in one place means that they are bound to generate large conflicts and issues, which Wikipedia is currently facing since it’s pretty much the only place where people can “change or dictate history”.
Wikipedia is a place where that happens because of the high-quality level that Wikipedia has.
It’s no perfect place and there are certainly reforms that would be good, but for that you actually have to understand Wikipedia a bit better
There were many attempts to build alternatives. Those mostly didn’t lead to projects with comparable value.
While adminship comes with certain rights, it does not come with the right to decide what a policy should be. If you would put a time limit on adminship you would likely see Wikipedia losing a lot of routine maintenance and lose quality as a result.
The policies would be still the same and likely still be executed.
It sounds to me like you ignore my main claim. The OP strawmans why people on Wikipedia hold exclusionist positions. Understanding is actually pretty important if you want to change anything that goes on in Wikipedia.
Introducing something like “reliability metrics” is something that a Wikipedia community could decide because it’s a policy question. It’s not something over which the Wikimedia Foundation has any jurisdiction and thus it’s strange to try to discuss it in a Wikimedia’s internal mailing list instead of discussing it on Wikipedia.
It is very unclear to me how difficult these problems are to solve. But I also haven’t seen realistic approaches to tackle them.
That sounds be me more like lack of interest in research than lack of attempts to solve the problems.
AutoGPT frameworks provide LLMs a way to have system II thinking. With 100k token as a context window, there’s a lot that can be done as far as such agents go. It’s work to create good training data but it’s doable provided there the capital investment.
As far as multimodel models go, DeepMinds GATO does that. It’s just not as performant as being a pure LLM
I feel like the post is long without really understanding why things are the way they are. It strawmans.
Given how important Wikipedia articles happen to be, there are a lot of interests that want to bend Wikipedia to their liking. If you take the notability policy, it’s not just there because people believe in academic standards but because an article for a topic for which there are few reliable sources can be a lot easier to manipulate.
Hydrogen is the most efficient fuel storage ‘battery’ with 40-50% round-trip energy storage possible [...] Desert pv will likely come down in price to consistent ~$0.01-0.02
If energy prices come down so much, the round-trip efficiency is not central.
You need much larger storage tanks in both ships and airplanes if you go for hydrogen than if you use denser fuel.
And electrolysis and liquefaction tech are on track to yield the stated $1.50/kg (learning curves are magic).
If that’s true why are the subventions for its production so high? What sources do you find trustworthy for those costs in an environment where plenty of the players have incentives to make people believe in a certain future?
“What do AI safety/accelerationist people disagree on that they could bet on? What concrete things are going to happen in the next two years that would prove one party right or wrong?”
That seems to me quite confused. Why would you expect that concrete things appear in the next two years that can prove either side wrong?
A lot of what AI safety people worry is about, is the dynamics of a world where most of the power is held by AI.
Most power won’t be held by AI in the next two years so we can’t make any observations that tell us about the future dynamics.
AI safety people made some predictions like the difficulty of boxing AI which came true when we now see ChatGPT browsing the internet instead of being boxed but further similar predictions are unlikely to convince any accelerationist people. The same goes for predictions of autonomous weapon systems.
I work professionally developing Liquid hydrogen fueled transport power technology.
So your job depends on believing the projections about how H2 costs will come down?
It’s very practical for some applications, particularly aircraft and ships that I expect will transition to hydrogen in next 2-3 decades, and possibly trains and agriculture.
[...]
This is likely the only realistic route to fully renewable power for human civilisation—producing in cheapest sunny or windy areas and using at high latitudes/through winters.
[...]
so a more convenient dense and long-term easily and cheaply stored energy carrier such as Ammonia or synthetic hydrocarbons made using future cheap hydrogen feedstocks may be a better option.
It’s possible that direct production of synthetic hydrocarbons will be more effective than going through H2 production. Given that we already have ships that can drive well if you fuel them with gas, it’s possible that all the money invested into trying to get ships to run on hydrogen will be wasted.
Regardless of these external economic stimuli, the ground truth remains identical: be disciplined in your deployment of capital.
In an industry where you can expect the most successful companies to have a monopoly that they can use to make a lot of money, a company that can raise and spend more than its competitors can grow faster. The competitor that’s disciplined in the deployment of capital doesn’t rise to the top and thus doesn’t make the most profits.
That seems to be the publically available except. There’s the Harvard Magazine article I linked above that speaks about the context of that writing and how it’s part of a longer seven-page document.
Summers seems to have been heavy into deregulation three decades ago. More lately he seems to be supportive of minimum wage increases and more taxes for the rich.
I do think though that they might disqualify him, or at least make him a worse choice, for something like the OpenAI board, because that comes with ideological requirements.
While I would prefer people who are ideologically clear for adding a lot of regulations for AI, it seems to me that part of what Sam Altman wanted was a board where people who can clearly counted on to vote that way don’t have the majority.
Larry Summers seems to be a smart independent thinker whose votes are not easy to predict ahead and that made him a good choice as a board candidate on which both sides can agree.
Having him on the board could also be useful for lobbying for the AI safety regulation that OpenAI wants.
Yes, I would see stepping out of that agreement with Iran also of a real breach of promises. Bush also broke formal promises made to North Korea.
I don’t think NATO expansion fits into that category.
The way the executive can make promises to other countries that are binding for future administrations is to do it as part of a treaty that gets ratified by the Senate.
The German unification happened under the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany which has Russia and the United States as parties. If Russia’s position at the time had been that they only agreed with German unification if a promise was made not to expand eastward, they could have asked for it to be included in that treaty.
If they would have done that, it would have been binding for future US administrations in a way that statements by a foreign ministers aren’t.
There are plenty cases like the sanctions against Belarus that are a much better example of the United States actually not uploading promises it made.
I’d need to read the memo to form my own opinion on whether that holds.
It seems generally bad form to criticize people for things without actually reading what they wrote.
Just reading a text without trying to understand the context in which the text exists is also not a good way to understand whether a person made a mistake.
I think what you wrote here is likely more morally problematic than what Summers did 30 years ago. Do you think that whenever someone thinks about your merits as a person a decades from now someone should bring up that you are a person who likes to criticize people for what they said without reading what they said?
I never got the sense of this being settled science (of course given how controversial the claim would be hard for it to be settled for good), but even besides that, the question is: what does one do with that information?
He did not present it as settled science but as one of three hypotheses for why women may have been underrepresented in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions. The key implication of the hypothesis being true would be that having quotas for a certain amount of women in tenure positions is not meritocratic.
Conversely, someone who suggests that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable” seems already to think that economics are mainly about maximal efficiency, and any concerns for human well being are at best tacked on.
His position seems to be that the sentence was ironic. The word “impeccable” usually does not appear in serious academic or policy writing. The memo seems to be in response to a report that suggested that free trade will produce environmental benefits in developing nations. It was a way to make fun of a PR lie.
It’s actually related to what Zvi talked about as bullet biting. If you want to advocate the policies of the World Bank in 1991 on free trade, it makes sense to accept that this comes with negative environmental effects in some third-world countries.
his comments about sending waste to low income countries.
Wikipedia describes those as:
In December 1991, while at the World Bank, Summers signed a memo that was leaked to the press. Lant Pritchett has claimed authorship of the private memo, which both he and Summers say was intended as sarcasm.[19] The memo stated that “the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.[19] … I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted.”[20] According to Pritchett, the memo, as leaked, was doctored to remove context and intended irony, and was “a deliberate fraud and forgery to discredit Larry and the World Bank.”[21][19]
Generally, judging people by what they said over three decades ago is not very useful. In this case, there seems to be a suggestion that it was a joke.
Hanging out with Epstein is bad, but it does not define a person who does lots of different things.
infer his intentions only from what policies he’s advocated and implemented relative to counterfactual for who else could have filled the positions he’s held.
infer his intentions only from what policies he’s advocated and implemented relative to counterfactual for who else could have filled the positions he’s held.
So what did he advocate lately? Things like:
“I am certainly no left wing ideologue, but I think something wrong when taxpayers like me, well into the top .1 percent of income distribution, are getting a significant tax cut in a Democrats only tax bill as now looks likely to happen,” wrote Summers.
“No rate increases below $10 million, no capital gains increases, no estate tax increases, no major reform of loopholes like carried interest and real estate exchanges but restoration of the state and local deduction explain it.”
Especially given that he’s on the board of a VC firm advocating for closing the carried interest loophole suggests that does not only see his own economic self-interests as important.
There are plenty of biology questions where I feel like Aaron Silverbook should study them more to be able to give answers.
One of them was why about mutacin 1140 and why it’s no problem of the new bacterium. I would be pretty certain that given that the new bacteria was grown in a culture after getting the gene to produce mutacin 1140 it likely evolved changes to be able to partly immunize itself against mutacin.
While those mutations were not explicitly inserted, they likely evolved under evolutionary pressure.
As matter of irony, lsusr decided to censor me from commenting on his posts, so I can’t comment on Restricting freedom is more harmful than it seems.
If you disagree with something someone said, don’t include words that suggest that he said things he didn’t say. Don’t make false claims.
Don’t try to use links to opinions about what he said as sources but seek to link to the actual statements by the person and quote the passages you found offensive or a factual description of what’s actually said.
Sorry I said he thinks women suck at life the wrong way? Gotta say I’m disappointed that you’re just filing this under “well, technically women do have less variance”. That seems … likely to help paper over the likely extent of threat that can be inferred from his having used a large platform to announce this thing,
Wikipedia describes the platform in which he made the statements as “In January 2005, at a Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Summers sparked controversy with his discussion of why women may have been underrepresented “in tenured positions in science and engineering at top universities and research institutions”. The conference was designed to be off-the-record so that participants could speak candidly without fear of public misunderstanding or disclosure later.”
There’s no reason to translate “we might have less women at top positions because of less variance in women” in such a context into “women suck at life”.
I’m saying I believe he believes it, based on his pattern of behavior surrounding when and how he made the claim, and the other things he’s said, and his political associations
His strongest political affiliations seem to be around holding positions in the treasury under Clinton and then being Director of the National Economic Council under Obama.
Suggesting that being associated with either of those Democratic administrations means that someone has to believe that “women suck at life” is strange.
It’s quite ironic that you say that at the same time as speaking against actions that are about making it harder to game Wikipedia by malicious actors.
Wikipedia isn’t perfect but all decisions have their tradeoffs and when you don’t think about those, that’s not really the basis for improving anything.
There are plenty of different ways knowledge is published on the web and Wikipedia does not have a monopoly on knowledge. What it has is a community that in all its flaws has a decent process that produces valuable outcomes.
Nobody found a way to set up the way a community around the topic works better than Wikipedia.