My wife was put on benzodiazepines not long ago for a wisdom tooth extraction, same as the author of that post. She did manifest some of the same behaviours (e.g. asking the same thing repeatedly). But your plan to make people in those conditions take an IQ test has a flaw: she was also obviously high as balls. No way her cognitive abilities weren’t cut down to like half of the usual. Not sure if this is a side effect of the loss of short term memory or a different effect of the sedatives, but yeah, this would absolutely impact an experiment IMO.
dr_s
Karma: 2,119
No, sorry, it’s not that I didn’t find it clear, but I thought it was kind of an irrelevant aside—it’s obviously true (though IMO going to a barista and passing a bill while whispering “you didn’t see anything” might not necessarily work that well either), but my original comment was about the absurdity of the lack of systemic solutions, so saying there are individual ones doesn’t really address the main claim.
We’re discussing whether this is a systemic problem, not whether there are possible individual solutions. We can come up with solutions just fine, in fact most of the times you can just waltz in, go to the bathroom, and no one will notice. But “everyone pays bribes to the barista to go to the bathroom” absolutely makes no sense as a universal rule over “we finally acknowledge this is an issue and thus incorporate it squarely in our ordinary services instead of making up weird and unnecessary work-arounds”.
Tipping the barista is not really sticking to the rules of the business, though. It’s bribing the watchman to close an eye, and the watchman must take the bribe (and deem it worthy its risks).
Which is probably why there were apparently >50,000 pay bathrooms in the USA before some activists got them outlawed
Oh, I didn’t know this story. Seems like a prime example of “be careful what economic incentives you’re setting up”. All that banning paid toilets has done is… less toilets, not more free toilets.
Though wonder if now you could run a public toilet merely by plastering it with ads.
Why is it better to pay an explicit bathroom providing business, then to pay a cafe (in the form of buying a cup of coffee)? It strikes me as a distinction without real difference, but maybe I’m confused.
Economically speaking, if to acquire good A (which I need) I also have to acquire good B (which I don’t need and is more expensive), thus paying more than I would pay for good A alone, using up resources and labor I didn’t need and that were surely better employed elsewhere, that seems to me like a huge market inefficiency.
Imagine this happening with anything else. “I want a USB cable.” “Oh we don’t sell USB cables on their own, that would be ridiculous. But we do include them as part of the chargers in smartphones, so if you want a USB cable, you can buy a smartphone.” Would that make sense?
Honestly if the proportions of those roles were true to real life I would simply never take the lottery, that’s an almost certainty of being a peasant. I guess they still must have made things a bit more friendly.
I explained my reasoning here. Also note that most people who have demand for using the bathroom are not penniless homeless people.
Here is my reasoning. On one hand, obviously going to the bathroom, sometimes in random circumstances, is an obvious universal necessity. It is all the more pressing for people with certain conditions that make it harder for them to control themselves for long. So it’s important that bathrooms are available, quickly accessible, and distributed reasonably well everywhere. I would also argue it’s important that they have no barrier to access because sometimes time is critical when using it. In certain train stations I’ve seen bathrooms that can only be used by paying a small price, which often meant you needed to have and find precise amounts of change to go. Absolutely impractical stuff for bathrooms.
On the other, obviously maintaining bathrooms is expensive as it requires labour. You don’t want your bathrooms to be completely fouled on the regular, or worse, damaged, and if they happen to be, you need money to fix them. So bathrooms aren’t literally “free”.
Now one possible solution would be to have “public bathroom” as a business. Nowadays you could allow entrance with a credit card (note that this doesn’t solve the homeless thing, but it addresses most people’s need). But IMO this isn’t a particularly high value business, and on its own certainly not a good use of valuable city centre land, which goes directly against the fact that you need bathrooms to be the most where the most people are. So this never really happens.
Another solution is to have bathrooms as part of private businesses doing other stuff (serving food/drinks) and have them charge for their use. Which is how it works now. The inadequacy lies into how for some reason these businesses charge you indirectly by asking you to buy something. This is inefficient in a number of ways: it forces you to buy something you don’t really want, paying more than you would otherwise, and the provider probably still doesn’t get as much as they could if they just asked a bathroom fee since they also need the labour and ingredients to make the coffee or whatever. So why are things like this? I’m not sure—I think part of it may be that they don’t just want money, they want a filter that will discourage people from using the bathroom too much to avoid having too many bathroom goers. If that’s the case, that’s bad, because it means some needs will remain unfulfilled (and some people might forgo going out for too long entirely rather than risking being left without options). Part of it may be that they just identify their business as cafes and would find it deleterious to their image to explicitly provide a bathroom service. But that’s a silly hangup and one we should overcome, if it causes this much trouble. Consider also that the way things are now, it’s pretty hard of the cafes to enforce their rules anyway, and lots of people will just use the bathroom without asking or buying anything anyway. Everyone loses.
Or you could simply build and maintain public bathrooms with tax money. There are solutions to the land value problem (e.g. build them as provisionary structures on the sidewalk) and this removes all issues and quite a lot of unpleasantness. You could probably use even just some of the sales tax and house taxes income from the neighbourhood and the payers would in practice see returns out of this. Alternatively, you could publicly subsidize private businesses offering their bathrooms for free. Though I reckon that real public bathrooms would be better for the homeless issue since businesses probably don’t want those in their august establishments.
I suspect the argument that it is ridiculous comes from an intuition that the need to go to the bathroom is such a human universal that we are all accustomed to, and the knowledge that having to hold in your urine is seriously unpleasant is so universal, that it becomes a matter of basic consideration for your fellow human beings to provide them with the ability to access the bathroom in an establishment when they clearly need to.
This, and how completely unrelated specifically the “buy a coffee” thing is. It makes no sense that to satisfy need A I have to do unrelated thing B. The private version of the solution would be bathrooms I can pay to use, and those happen sometimes, but they’re not a particularly common business model so I guess maybe the economics don’t work out to it being a good use of capital or land.
Technical AI safety and/or alignment advances are intrinsically safe and helpful to humanity, irrespective of the state of humanity.
I think this statement is weakly true, insofar as almost no misuse by humans could possibly be worse than what a completely out of control ASI would do. Technical safety is a necessary but not sufficient condition to beneficial AI. That said, it’s also absolutely true that it’s not nearly enough. Most scenarios with controllable AI still end with humanity nearly extinct IMO, with only a few people lording their AI over everyone else. Preventing that is not a merely technical challenge.
The impossibility of traveling faster than the speed of light was a lot less obvious in 1961.
I would argue that’s questionable—they knew relativity very well in 1961 and all the physicists would have been able to roll out the obvious theoretical objections. But obvious the difficulties of approaching the speed of light (via e.g. ramscoop engine, solar sail, nuclear propulsion etc) are another story.
Was Concorde “inherently a bad idea”? No, but “inherently” is doing the work here. It lost money and didn’t lead anywhere, which is the criteria on which such an engineering project must be judged. It didn’t matter how glorious, beautiful or innovative it was. It’s a pyramid that was built even though it wasn’t efficient.
I guess my point is that there are objective limits and then there are cultural ones. We do most things only for the sake of making money, but as far as human cultures go we are perhaps more the exception than the rule. And in the end individuals often do the opposite—they make money to do things, things they like that play to their personal values but don’t necessarily turn out a profit all the time. A different culture could have concluded that the Concorde was a success because it was awesome, and we should do more of that. In such a culture in fact the Concorde might even have been a financial success, because people would have been more willing to pay more money to witness it first hand. Since here the argument involves more the inherent limits of technology and/or science, I’d say we should be careful to separate out cultural effects. Self-sustaining Mars colonies, for example, are probably a pipe dream with current technology. But the only reason why we don’t have a Moon base yet is that we don’t give enough of a shit. If we cared to build one, we probably could have by now.
I’m honestly always amazed from just how much money some people in these parts seem to have. That’s a huge sum to spend on an LLM experiment. It would be pretty large even for a research group, to burn that in just 6 days!
TBF, was Concorde inherently “a bad idea”? Technologies have a theoretical limit and a practical one. There’s deep reasons why we simply couldn’t reach even near speed of light by 1982 no matter how much money we poured into it, but Concorde seems more a case of “it can be done, but it’s too expensive to keep safe enough and most people won’t pay such exorbitant tickets just to shave a few hours off their transatlantic trip”. I don’t think we can imagine such things happening with AGI, partly because its economic returns are obvious and far greater, partly because many who are racing to it have more than just economic incentives to do so—some have an almost religious fervour. Pyramids can be built even if they’re not efficient.
I think in practice we don’t know for sure—that’s part of the problem—but there are various reasons to think why this might be possible with vastly less complexity than the human brain. First, the task is vastly less complex than what the human brain does. The human brain does not handle only conscious rational thought, it does a bunch of other things that mean it still fires at full cylinders even when you’re unconscious. Second, lots of artificial versions of natural organs are vastly less complex than their inspiration. Cameras are vastly less complex than eyes. Plane wings are vastly less complex than bird wings. And yet these things outperform their natural counterparts. To me the essence of the reason for this is that evolution deals in compromises. It can never design just a camera. The camera must be made of organic materials, it must be self organising and self repairing, it must be compatible with everything else and it must be achievable via a set of small mutations that are each as or more viable than the previous one. It’s all stumbling around in the dark until you hit something that works under the many, many constraints of the problem. Meanwhile, artificial intelligent design on our part is a lot more deliberate and a lot less constrained. The AI itself doesn’t need to do anything more than be an AI—we’ll provide the infrastructure, and we’ll throw money at it to keep it viable until it doesn’t need it any more, because we foresee the future and can invest on it. That’s more than evolution can do, and it’s a significant advantage that can compensate for a lot of complexity.
How much of that is API costs? Seems like the most part, unless you’re considering a truly exorbitant salary.
The bathroom thing sucks in general. We honestly just need more public bathrooms, or subsidies paid to venues to keep their bathrooms fully public. I understand most businesses won’t risk having to deal with the potential mess of having anyone use their bathroom, but it’s ridiculous even for those who do have the money that you’re supposed to buy a coffee or something to take a leak (and then in practice you can often sneak by anyway).
Seems a restrictive definition of “utility function”. It can have the weather as one of its inputs. It can have state (because really, that only means its input is not just the present but the whole past trajectory).
“Function” is an incredibly broad mathematical term.
About the post linked, mostly agree, but I don’t see the need to move away from utility maximisation as a framework. We just have a piss poor description of the utility function. “I enjoy being like that rich and successful dude” is a value.
What’s a solution to this problem?
Abolish the conference talk, turn everything into a giant poster session, possibly with scheduled explanations. Or use the unconference format, and everyone only talks with a table’s worth of people at a time, possibly doing multiple rounds if there’s interest.
Academic conferences as they work now are baaaad. No wonder people complained about them going remote for COVID, everything of value happens chatting over coffee and/or in front of posters, no one gives a shit or gains anything from the average talk, given by some tired and inexperienced PhD student who doesn’t know how to communication well, thinks they have to jam their talk with overly technical language to be more impressive, and possibly has bad English to make things even harder to follow to boot. Absolute snoozefest, almost no reach outside of the very narrow group of hyper specialists already studying the same topic.
I think in general it’s mostly 1); obviously “infinite perfect bathroom availability everywhere” isn’t a realistic goal, so this is about striking a compromise that is however more practical than the current situation. For things like these honestly I am disinclined to trust private enterprise too much—especially if left completely unregulated—but am willing to concede that it’s not my main value. Obviously I wouldn’t want the sidewalk to be entirely crowded out by competing paid chemical toilets though, that solves one problem but creates another.
Since the discussion here started around homelessness, and homeless people obviously wouldn’t be able to pay for private bathrooms (especially if these did the obvious thing for convenience and forgo coins in exchange for some kind of subscription service, payment via app, or such), I think the best solution would be free public bathrooms, and I think they would “pay themselves” in terms of gains in comfort and cleanliness for the people living in the neighborhood. They should be funded locally of course. Absent that though, sure, I think removing some barriers to private suppliers of paid for bathroom services would still be better than this.