I immediately thought of Ross Scott’s story about buying souls.
cousin_it(Vladimir Slepnev)
Karma: 25,936
Sounds like a decent society, cribbing ideas from various religions and utopian movements. I guess the main problem is that young people, being naturally rebellious but inexperienced with superstimuli, would be quite vulnerable to the export image of the US—sex drugs rock-n-roll and coca cola. See 80s USSR, or the story of the mall in Najran.
I think “nerds” need to be taught exercise differently: not by pushing them to compete with others right away, but by lots and lots of patience, repetition, and focus on basics. At some point it will click and they’ll be able to compete and have fun. Same as with “non-nerds” and math, really.
From my humble experience, I’ve come to believe that Deming’s view was the wisest:
The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise. Everyone propels himself forward, or tries to, for his own good, on his own life preserver. The organization is the loser.
Very informative, thanks! The “tribalism” section does leave some unanswered questions, which only grow when you look at the actual (very complicated) org chart of the EU. Designing an international organization that doesn’t fall prey to gridlock, doesn’t fall apart, doesn’t get pushed aside, doesn’t gain too much power and so on seems like a fascinating problem. Do you have any thoughts about this?
Might be solvable with enough sci-fi technology:
Bioengineering ourselves to live on other planets, or live differently on Earth (I’d like to be smaller and fly)
Mind uploading, space colonization in uploaded form (send a receiver, then transmit people by radio)
Solving population growth and arms races by worldwide cooperation / mind merging
Quantum suicide reality editing, and otherwise using the exponential living space in quantum branches
Writing ourselves into a mathematically possible universe with more room for growth, like in Permutation City
Other possibilities that a smarter-than-me AI would find
Feedback calibration
Just wanna say I think this is good moderation policy, and thank you for upholding it.
Wouldn’t a currency whose total supply is fixed while the economy grows, lead to the same problems with changing definition of horsepower and so on?
Huh, interesting. Indeed it seems post hoc-ed in this case, I should’ve looked at bitcoin’s history more closely before making a confident statement. Thanks!
To me, trade and morality overlap more than they differ. For example, if someone did me good, even if they didn’t put any conditions on it, I instinctively want to do them good in return, more than I want to good to other people (who might need it more).
or got most of his ideas from the academy
Yes, in a very strong sense of “most”. Check out David Chaum.
If we can ignore moral edicts because they’re too demanding (or because we can find competing moral demands from other groups), why can’t we just ignore all of them?
Because if you ignore all of them, people won’t give you nice things. You’ve got to give something to get something. But if you tell me that I ought to give much more than I get, otherwise I’m evil, then I’m liable to say “don’t preach at me” and shut the door.
To me, the main objection to morality being all-demanding is that there are too many groups who want to enlist you into their all-demanding moralities, and most such groups have been wrong. Basically having too much regard for morality received from others is a security flaw in human nature, and proselytizing faiths are the exploit of that flaw. For that reason I think everyone needs to have a little bit of selfish amorality, being able to tell anyone “don’t preach at me”.
I think the view of learning as memorization (or, as you suggest, repeated memorization and forgetting) isn’t quite right. It’s better to think of it as strength training, slowly building up ability that can be lost through disuse.
Learning a language does feel like memorization, but that’s because your language ability is already trained. Math is harder, because most people’s minds are untrained for math and need lots of simple repetitive exercises first. Art, music or sports are somewhere in between: they also need a ton of repetition, but at least we’ve figured out over centuries which exercises to use. Beginner programming is even harder than beginner math, because we don’t even know which exercises we need.
This is a breathless article about something that’s obvious to people who know the state of the art. (I’ve worked in geoinformational systems.) If you want a map that shows the shapes and sizes of continents without too much distortion, and don’t mind having two circles, the Nicolosi globular projection is a thousand years old.
I like Scott as much as anyone, but I think your post points people in a subtly wrong direction.
This mindset is nigh-incomprehensible to people of The Narrative who are used to being guided by a single source of truth enforced by social consensus.
Actually the left argue among each other bitterly and non-stop.
Its main proponent is Balaji Srinivasan, who wants Silicon Valley to tell its own narrative of “technological progressivism”. It is a story of humanity’s biggest challenges, from education to climate change to death itself, being solved by decentralized technological innovation as opposed to centralized institutional regulation.
That story is a myth. The internet came from ARPA, hypertext was invented by the director of OSRD, public key cryptography was invented at GCHQ, pagerank and blockchain come from academia. And if you look for big ideas in computing that didn’t come from government/military/academia, your next stop will be AT&T Bell Labs and IBM, megacorps that are bigger than many governments.
That’s just handing your soul to the devil — the same devil that employs Metz.
Metz’s side is just proselytizing faith. (I think what we’re seeing today is the age-old conflict between proselytizing faith and everything else, which started with Christianity but isn’t unique to it.) You can say many bad things about it, but it doesn’t have a monopoly on doxing, narrative building, censorship and so on. The only thing it has a monopoly on is proselytizing, and sadly I hear echoes of that in Eliezer and Scott’s writings as well. It’s a hard habit to break.
Yeah, the last paragraph is very close to how I’ve been thinking about these things. Maybe instead of “attention” I’d focus on “importance”. People propagate information based on what they consider important, but their importance judgments are themselves based on information received from other people. So the public conversation becomes a huge game of “importance telephone”, leading to factions that hate each other for having “wrong” importance judgments.
Maybe effective altruism could be a way out of this mess? Agree on the QALY as a common yardstick of importance, and create QALY-centric news media. Has anyone tried that?
I can’t figure out why this is being downvoted.
Because the events are not related to AI alignment, but are the focus of a current battle in the culture war.
I like push-ups and pull-ups, they’re my main thing now that the office gym is closed. But I kinda miss the deadlift, there seems to be no bodyweight exercise that approximates it.