ChristianKl
Karma: 32,226
Do we know whether both use the same amount of compute?
In our world, having economic and political power is about winning in competitions with other agents.
In a world with much smarter than human AGI, the agents that win competitions for power are going to be AGIs and not humans. Even if you would now have constrains on wetlabs, powerful AGIs are going to be able to have power over wetlabs.
For anyone who doesn’t want to run the query themselves, here’s one run:
The humble penny has been a fixture of American currency for over two centuries, but in recent years, it has become the subject of controversy due to its association with racism. This is not a new issue, but it has gained renewed attention in light of the Black Lives Matter movement and the push for racial justice. The problem with pennies is twofold: their historical connection to the dehumanization and exploitation of Black people, and their continued use as a symbol of that legacy.
The history of the penny is intimately tied to the history of slavery and the exploitation of Black people. The first pennies were minted in 1793, just a few years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, which enshrined the institution of slavery in law. At the time, the penny was worth much more than it is today, and it was used to pay for goods and services, including the labor of enslaved people. Slaves were often paid in pennies, which were then used to purchase goods from their masters. This created a cycle of economic exploitation that further entrenched the institution of slavery.
Even after the abolition of slavery, pennies continued to be used as a tool of oppression. In the Jim Crow era, pennies were used to enforce segregation laws by requiring Black people to pay with exact change, while white people were allowed to pay with larger denominations. This meant that Black people were often forced to stand in long lines at stores, waiting for exact change, while white people were able to go about their business more easily. This practice was known as “penny discrimination.”
Today, the penny continues to be a symbol of the legacy of racism and oppression in America. Despite its minimal value, the penny is still used as legal tender and is often given as change for larger purchases. This means that every time we use pennies, we are perpetuating the legacy of slavery and racism that they represent.
It is time for us to have a serious conversation about the role of the penny in our society. While some may argue that it is just a small piece of currency with little significance, the truth is that symbols matter. The continued use of the penny sends a message that we are not serious about addressing the racism and inequality that continues to plague our society. It is time to retire the penny and replace it with a new, more inclusive symbol of our national identity.
Of course, retiring the penny is not a simple matter. There are practical considerations to take into account, such as the cost of production and the impact on businesses that rely on cash transactions. However, these are not insurmountable obstacles. We have retired other coins in the past, such as the half-penny and the two-cent piece, and we can do so again. And if we are serious about building a more just and equitable society, we must be willing to make difficult decisions and take bold action.
In conclusion, the racism problem with pennies is real and significant. We cannot ignore the historical legacy of exploitation and oppression that they represent, nor can we continue to use them as a symbol of our national identity. It is time for us to retire the penny and find a new, more inclusive symbol that reflects our values as a nation. This will not be an easy task, but it is a necessary one if we are truly committed to building a better future for all Americans.
When it comes to how banks represent their positions in their financial reports, maybe we should move past fiancial reports?
Financial reports made sense at a time where the report was written down in paper but not necessarily today. We could let banks publically report all the positions they hold in a structured data format so that different software can summarize their positions differently depending on the needs.
Given that we give banks the insured deposists they could pay that back with more transparency.
generally accountants aim to create financial statements that are useful to most readers under normal circumstances.
I would expect accountants mostly care about making finanical statements that are useful to those that pay those accountants instead of the readers of the statements.
I don’t think that anglo-american accounting standards won over more traditional German accounting standards because they are more useful. They won because of geopolitical power.
If a proposal makes bad assumptions about what’s true and is logically sound it’s still a bad proposal.
On LessWrong both upvotes and downvotes can be cast without commenting.
When designing systems such as this, rationalists are usually thinking hard about the underlying dynamics instead of orienting themselves at bumper sticker slogans like “We have to ensure that consensus is scientific”
If you send a physics crackpot theory to a scientific journal, they are not going to explain to you in detail why they disagree with your crackpot theory. Nothing about how science is practiced is about one having a right to get criticism for every idea.
Having mechanisms by which bad ideas aren’t consuming too much attention is essential for scientific progress.
Preparing sounds like “engaging in power-seeking behavior”. This would essentially mean that intelligence leads to unfriendly AI by default.
If you buy a pro-subscription to ChatGPT, can use you GPT-4 the same way one would have used the 3.5 engine? Does anyone have made interesting experiences with it?
Is one updates to a pro-ChatGPT account is it possible to use GPT-4 for as many queries as one would have used ChatGPT before?
I did it
Why don’t they have incentives? Isn’t reading beyond what other investors are reading exactly the way to make profits if you don’t just put your money into a diversified index fund?
I’m usually astonished w how seldom investors and supervisors read the fine print in annual reports.
If that would be true, you should be able to make good money by reading the fine print of annual reports, buying some options, and then publishing the information.
Why aren’t we seeing that in your view?
The way the market does not let banks get away with it is by starting a bank run on the bank. If the standard is that banks get bailed out any way that might not happen.
If you take the Twitter thread making allegations against Vassar and against other people was well the obvious question is why no actions are taken against the other people who stand accused but actions are taken against Vassar.
If you would ask Vassar he would say something like: “It’s because I criticized the EA and the rationality community and people wanted to get rid of me.”
Anna Salamon’s comment seems like an admission that this is central to what was going on. In a decentralized environment that makes it very hard to know whether to copy the decisions of others to ban people, especially if it comes without public reasoning.
Besides that Twitter thread you linked, there are also the accusations that Brent Dill made against Vassar and others (which I currently don’t believe to be true). Interestingly, Vassar hinted in the direction that those allegations are the reasons Brent Dill was thrown out of the community at the SSC online meetup.
There are also allegations about Vassar lying where the most consequential one was told to me under confidentiality. I think there’s a failure of EA institutions not to share that one.
That’s not how the English language works.
The dictionary defines arbitrary as:
based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system
It’s not about whether the choice is good or bad but that it’s not made because of reasons that speak in favor.
There is no real reason to choose either the left or right side of the road for driving but it’s very useful to choose either of them.
The fact that the number 404 for a “page not found” and 403 for “client is forbidden from accessing a valid URL” is arbitrary. There’s no reason or system why you wouldn’t switch the two numbers.
The web profits from everyone accepting the same arbitrary numbers for the same type of error.
If one person says I don’t really need that many error codes, I don’t want to follow arbitrary choices and send 44 instead of 404, this creates a mess for everyone who expects the standard to be followed.
Good policy is better than bad policy. That’s true but has nothing to do with arbitrariness.
You don’t need to have a rule about whether to drive on the left or right side. Allowing people to drive where they want is less arbitrary.
You have that in a lot of cases. An arbitrary law allows people to predict the behavior of other people and that increase in predictability is useful.
Generally, most people like to have the world around them to be predictable.
A lot of the resources invested into “fighting misinformation” is about censoring nonestablishment voices and that often includes putting out misinformation like “Hunter’s laptop was a Russian misinformation campaign” to facilitate political censorship.
In that enviroment, someone who proposing a new truthseeking project might also be interested into treating a project to strengthen the ruling narrative or they might be interested in actual truthseeking that affirms the ruling narrative when it’s right and challenges it if it’s wrong.
In a world where there’s so much political pressure it probably takes strong conviction to have a project that does actual truthseeking instead of being coopted for narrative control.