One thing to remember though is that disease crossing the barrier between species are common and most don’t become global pandemic. In fact SARS was bad but locally contained, MERS was almost nothing, and fears of the avian and swine flues were vastly overblown for example. So the right attitude should probably be cautious rather than worried—for now.
Dirichlet-to-Neumann
Karma: 475
To be fair I think the GDP is a significant criterion for a highly contagious disease because the richest people tend to travel more both inside and outside their country, and hence spread the disease faster. Just the way you wrote it sounds weird.
Speaking of a HIV pandemy seems justified. Malaria is very different in fact it’s definitely endemic rather than pandemic—some places have malaria, some don’t.
Why would a country share of global GDP have anything to do with a disease being on trace to become pandemic ? Do you think 10 000 000 cases in India are intrinsically less worrying than 1 000 000 in China ? Or 200 000 in the USA ?
It’s not just the format for me. Glowfic is really diluted and lack direction (as expected in a collaboration/improvisation). Consequently it tends to say in 10^6 words what could have been said in half as many.
I tend to think that when your novel is twice the length of the Lord of the Rings and counting it is probably a bit too long.
Something like this exists in the French classe préparatoire system. Basically imagine highschool, but for the first two years of college education, and super hard, competitive and elitist (and without tuition fees). The point is the teachers are full time teachers and in my experience both as a student and a teacher it is way better than what universities can offer.
It is however quite expensive due to a huge teacher/student ratio, and can be hard for the mental health of students due to the tremenduous work charge. I really don’t know how the overall cost/benefits analysis work out, but all else being equal it is evidence for the “full time teachers better than half teacher/half researcher” idea.
8 of may is already taken by a pretty big victory celebration at least in the Western world. 8 of december sounds better
If adversarial adaptation means that shitty pages needs to appear as good pages with solid argumentation, it seems like a win to me.
I’m always reminded of a trademark quip of an old chemistry professor of mine: “Thermodynamic says ‘yes’, kinetic says… ‘maybe’.”
We will run out of ressources on Earth, because blablabla Second thermodynamic principle something.** Now the question is how fast, in particular how fast compared to either leaving Earth or blowing ourselves up through nukes or AI. If the answer is “not fast at all”, then we should not really worry.
**(I’m aware that the Earth is not a close system, but if I understand the physic correctly the system still needs to be stationary, meaning we need to let out as much energy as the Sun send in order not to cook ourselves up. My memories about black body radiation and so on are far away however, so I’m happy to be corrected)
I’m a bit surprised, in general, by the way people in EA/rationalist adjacent circles treat the concerns about ressource usage. Running out of a key ressource seems to me an obvious x-risk, whose probability should be estimated and taken into account, rather than quickly dismissed.
Besides, from a strategic viewpoint, the “peak everything” crowd has a lot of similarities with us : they worry about long term issues and difficult coordination problems, are treated as lunatics by the mainstream, and generally seem like prime targets for a communication effort on AI-risk and over x-risks.
“At the same time, remember how easily various political groups changed their tune on COVID lockdowns.”
That… seems like a great thing to me ? Changing their tune based on changing circumstances if something I hope and doubt political leaders are able to do.
This could be alleviated somehow by prominent people in the AI risk camp paying at least lisp service to the “AI is dangerous because systemic racist/sexist bias are backed in the training data”. Lesswrong tends to neglect or sneer at those concerns (and similar that I’ve seen in typical left wing medias) but they have probably some semblance of significance—at the very least they come under the concern that who ever wins the AI alignement race will lock in his values for ever and ever*.
* which, to be honest, is almost as scary as the traditional paperclip minimiser if you imagine Xi Jimping or Putin or “random figure of your outgroup you particularly don’t like” wins the race.
That’s an interesting question ! Although it clearly understand things like spatial positioning so it must understand some grammar.
This post seems like a thin veneer of classical game theory analysis with—in cauda venenum—a culture war-ish conclusion.
Not in theory but in practice I’m not impressed by those we saw in France recently. Most of them were recruited through propaganda videos on internet and sorely lacked in competence. The Bataclan attacks were deadly but they also failed badly on their only protected target at the Stade de France. The general pattern seems to be a high profile relatively competent group followed by not very competent imitators.
I think there are ways to treat those kind of topics in a productive way (through ideological Turing tests for example).
That’s my point though : they don’t really need to stop intelligent dedicated people from getting weapons into planes. They need to stop mentally unstable teenagers and lone wolf terrorists imitators, who are much easier to stop and may in fact just not try if the TSA project an image of security.
In general I don’t agree that security theater is not useful. A big part of security is about deterring random wannabee criminal from causing harm—showing off security mesures can be quite efficient against them, first as a deterrent and secondly as a low level filter against basic threats. This can be true even if those measures are useless against more competent and dangerous criminals. And if those dangerous criminals think the regulations are useful, they may not act anyway.
For example your house alarm will be useless against a hardened criminal but will deter your neighbour to try his hand at stealing. A good bike lock is useless against an electric saw but is enough to seriously slow down a crowbar, and will completely stop a drunk passer-by from taking your bike by mistake… Is it then just for show because a prepared criminal will be able to by-pass your lock ?
Now in the case of airplane security most of the current regulations could certainly be scrapped without any negative effect, but I expect some of them to be useful nonetheless (screening for knifes seems useful to me for example).
This seems like a straw-non-consequentialist to me. You could also just as easily make an argument were a pure utilitarian would allow an AI out of the box whereas a Kantian would not.
Chess is better than go because I’ve yet to see a chess player feeling the need to explain why the game is better on a random forum.
If you have only one child and he or she dies, your entire life is fucked up for ever.
If you have 3-4 children, losing one is heart breaking but you will survive.
Big families are more resilient against death and grief.
(This is from experience with close friends and family members btw).
That’s certainly a good solution to the homelessness problem : force them to leave the streets in the city center. Then they can go on being miserable at some place were we don’t see them, which totally solves the problem.
(This comment may contain some form of irony, thread carefully)