From my perspective, Nazis and Commies are like twin brothers
Well this perspective is just blatantly nonsense.
frontier64(weir)
Karma: 243
You can use less weasel words.
Often I feel like the question I want to ask is
becomes
I want to ask:
and less passive voice
Being articulate” is a skill I feel like I do not have, and I would like to practice this skill.”
becomes
I’m not articulate, and I want to practice being more articulate
You can stop using filler words by not using them! Know what you’re going to say when you talk. If you don’t know what to say next, don’t say “um.” You should stand there, quietly, until you have something to say. That is powerful. Listen to someone who has a refined speaking style like Ted Cruz and notice how he never says um. You should also watch the Cambridge Union debates and listen to how the more eloquent speakers speak in rehearsed phrases. The best way to sound smart is to spend hours preparing something and present it as if you made it up on the spot. Really smart people will have a ton of prepared phrases, so many that they can talk on a wide variety of topics by saying something they already know how to say and just modifying it a little.
This is racist? The poster doesn’t mention race once. And his point is supported by research. Perceived intelligence tracks measured intelligence well even when the observer sees just a photo.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-6494.7103008
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3961208/
companies throwing out the conventional wisdom on using years of education as a filter for hiring
This comment presumes that the reason companies aren’t hiring more under-18 people is because of their own executive decision rather than a result of onerous labor laws as the post posits. A quick test for this is to see what happens when there aren’t labor laws making it impossible or difficult for kids to work. History shows that even unskilled children were used as laborers. So I find the core of your comment kind of falls out.
Also, I still don’t see any positive reason to give any credence to proclamations of the FBI. They are clearly as corrupt as the CIA if not more so.
I find that your first two articles support my position as stated. 22% of republicans believe human activity is contributing a great deal to climate change, and 89% of democrats think the government is doing too little to stop climate change while only 35% of republicans agree. I for the life of me can’t figure out how that jives with the specific questions about extra efforts the government could do, but whatever (if only 35% think the government is doing too little, how could 88% think the government needs to do more??) .
With the abortion article, you should look at the actual pollster’s highlights and not the poorly formatted forbes highlights. https://apnorc.org/projects/public-holds-nuanced-views-about-access-to-legal-abortion/. 64% of republicans believe abortion should be illegal in most or all cases. 76!!% of democrats think it should be legal in all or most cases. This is a massive contrast and the median for each group lies in the “most” group skewed towards the “all” category.
And these polls are just for people who identify as republican and democrat. Please read my original comment which said ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal.’ If you want to be horrified, be horrified.
[party elites, politicians and donors] have much more radical views than the median voter of their party
This is quite false. The median conservative wants gay marriage made illegal, abortion banned, significantly lower taxes, and does not care about human production of CO2. The median liberal wants men competing in women’s sports, at-will abortion up until birth, wealth re-distribution, and global reductions in CO2 emissions. Yet these views are reflected in few of either party’s senators and congressmen. I wouldn’t take Yglesias’s word on how radical politicians are given most all of what he writes is democratic propaganda.
You underestimate the power a boss has over his subordinates when he is part of the in-group. You’re coming at it from a perspective of Barr being the out-group and him having to use his explicit power to get things done, when in reality a lot of what goes on in government (and corrupt corporate orgs) is done with tacit power. Few DOJ, CIA, and FBI officers have a full picture of just how their work is misaligned with the interests of America. But most all of them have a general understanding that they are to be more loyal to the organization than they are to America.[1] Through his familial and otherwise corrupt connections, Barr is part of the in-group at the US corrupt apparatus. It can be as simple as most inferior officers knowing he’s with them.
So Barr doesn’t have to explicitly tell the guards to look the other way, he doesn’t have to tell the FBI to run a poor investigation, he doesn’t have to tell the DOJ to continue being corrupt. As long as it becomes known internally that the big boss wants the Epstein situation cleared up it’ll be done. Lower-level bosses who have the full faith and confidence of their inferiors put small plans into place to get it done. It’s what the boss wants and the boss looks out for them.
Picture Musk’s possible purchase of Twitter. Do you think that if Musk bought Twitter, even as a private owner, he would suddenly have full control of the whole apparatus? Of course not. The people with real power would be his inferiors who have been there for a while and are part of the in-group. The only way for Musk to get a hold of Twitter would be to fire quite a lot of people, many who are integral to the organization. If Musk gave a directive to unban all the conservatives Twitter banned in the past, it would take months to years to get that done. The employees with their hands on the buttons capable of doing it in a day will drag their feet. Their superiors will pretend their department doesn’t handle that problem. Reports will be written saying they’re, ‘Getting it done.’ And some employees will resign in protest.
An executive that is part of the in-group of his organization can get a lot done more quickly and secretively than an executive who is considered an outsider.
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This is most clearly evinced by CIA hiring practices. They are incredibly insular and make much of the hiring process about having strong loyalty to the organization. They intentionally search for blackmail and anything in an agent’s history they can use against them. The interviews are highly subjective and applicants are restricted from discussing anything they’re questioned about. The CIA even outwardly say that their goal is to create their own community. Anecdotally, I had two friends apply to different US intelligence agencies, both of which were rejected even though they were highly qualified (both now work in highly-skilled private jobs earning six figures). From their description of the interview process it seems as if they were rejected for lacking the required ideology. Both friends are decidedly un-ideological, but that is not enough for the US intelligence agencies, you must be willing to toe the line or they won’t accept you.
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Google is also punishing this kind gesture. When viewers skip over dead-air at the end of a video that really hurts the video’s recommendations in the algorithm.
I think it’s too easy to overcorrect towards ‘Feynman wasn’t that goofy.’ And I think a lot of people are doing that here. It’s contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake. Physics researchers can be very boring. You don’t hear stories about many other famous physicists doing weird things like Feynman. Why are people here so willing to disagree that he was unusual? I really think it’s just status-seeking behavior to say, “nah that’s just a public misconception, real sciencey folks know that Feynman was actually really good at math and wasn’t that weird.”
And there’s a lot of strawmanning as well. Nobody makes the claim that Feynman was spending most of his time goofing around picking locks and asking people weird psych questions. Yet that’s the only thing that I see other comments here arguing against.
You mention ‘classified’ in the facebook post and I agree with you that it has shortfalls. I believe, ‘confidential’, is better, and probably is good enough to refer to the concept. Look at the merriam webster definition #4[1] for ‘confidential’. I also think simply saying ‘dangerous information’ works. I can’t think of any other kind of dangerous information besides infohazards and the socially dangerous information you describe. Therefore if information is dangerous but it isn’t an infohazard it’s dangerous information [other].
suppose you could triple the proportion of capable ML researchers who consider alignment to be their responsibility as an ML researcher, but all of the new population are on the blue side of zero on the protect-groups-vs-protect-norms debate. Is this an outcome more likely to save everyone?
Allying AI safety with DEI LGBTQIA+ activism won’t do any favors to AI safety. Nor do I think it’s a really novel idea. Effective Altruism occasionally flirts with DEI and other people have suggested using similar tactics to get AI safety in the eyes of modern politics.
AI researchers are already linking AI safety with DEI with the effect of limiting the appearance of risk. If someone was to read a ‘risks’ section on an OpenAI paper they would come away with the impression that the biggest risk of AI is that someone could use it to make a misleading photo of a politician or that the AI might think flight attendants are more likely to be women than men! Their risks section on Dalle-2 reads:
“Use of DALL·E 2 has the potential to harm individuals and groups by reinforcing stereotypes, erasing or denigrating them, providing them with disparately low quality performance, or by subjecting them to indignity.”
[...]
The default behavior of the DALL·E 2 Preview produces images that tend to overrepresent people who are White-passing and Western concepts generally. In some places it over-represents generations of people who are female-passing (such as for the prompt: “a flight attendant” ) while in others it over-represents generations of people who are male-passing (such as for the prompt: “a builder”).
The point being, DEI does not take up newcomers and lend its support to their issues. It subsumes real issues and funnels efforts directed to solve them towards the DEI wrecking ball.
I think the best answer can come from the history of China pre-coronavirus. There, mask wearing is far from common, but in a crowd of 100 people you will likely find at least one person wearing a mask and sometimes 10 or more. Often people wear masks because they have a cold and think mask-wearing will protect others. I’m not sure specifically if this trend is also present in pre-corona, Chinese schools, but it makes sense that they would be similar to the general population.
Mask wearing really didn’t start in pre-corona China until there was a sars outbreak around 2004. And their intermittent mask-wearing lasted up until 2019. I would extrapolate from this history that at least 1-10% of children in America schools will be wearing masks in school until at least 2035. Probably with a lot of variation betwixt leftists and conservatives. Currently 0% of children wear masks in many Florida and Georgia schools. Whereas in California, as you’ve seen, entire schools remain masked.
We are ancient apes who can say yes or no to humans evolving. Tough choice. What do you think the apes should have chosen?
I think the trauma is overstated because it pulls mostly on the particularities of your life. Most of your indicia of trauma is shared experiences from your social circle. From my social circle, those shared experiences are always that active shooter drills are fairly interesting and break up the monotony of school life in a memorable way. I personally don’t know anybody who has ever reported being traumatized from an active shooter drill (I know more people who have been traumatized by being awoken for fire drills). I have now only heard people report this as traumatizing through this post. I’m not saying that my indicia trump yours, but it does temper their weight.
I also think the drills serve more and different purposes than merely lowering the harm from school shootings. For one, it teaches kids from a young age how ridiculously stupid authority can be. Clearly hiding under your desk or piling up in the closet is a really stupid plan to protect yourself from an active shooter. Yet that’s what the people in authority are having us practice! Many kids correctly realize that this is another example of authority being stupid, and might even start theorizing about improper incentivizes. Yes kids have many other examples of authority being stupid, but things like fire drills and active shooter drills benefit from being really obviously stupid and related to one’s bodily safety.
The drills can also just teach people generally that there is violent danger out there. The first time someone seriously considers that they could die in a shooting shouldn’t be in college when some gangbangers start killing each other a block from their campus. Many of those middle schoolers will end up living in big cities for part of their lives and a part of big city life is maintaining the basic mindset that there are some violent and crazy people who may attack you and you need to be somewhat prepared to survive. 20-somethings who never even heard a gunshot before may freak out and not be able to handle life apart from their hometown. It can be quite surreal to get an e-mail notification about a shooting outside your campus and to see new bullet marks in the library wall. The drill is acclimating them to this future reality.
because Covid did not come from U.S. gain-of-function labs
Do you have any particular reason to believe this?
I like using the intuition pump of, AI : Humans :: Human : Apes. Imagine apes had the decision to create humans or not. They can sit there and argue about how humans will share ape values because they’re descended from apes. Or how humans pose an existential risk to apes or some such.
Humans may be dangerous because they’ll be smarter than us apes. Maybe humans will figure out how to get those bananas at the very top of the tree without risk of falling, then humans will have a massive advantage over apes. Maybe humans will better know how to hide from leopards; they’ll be able to hurt apes by attracting leopards to the colony and then hiding. Humans might be dangerous, but if we contain them or ensure that they share ape values then us apes will be better off.
And then humans take over the whole world and apes live in artificial habits entertaining us or survive in the wild only due to our mercy. We’re just too stupid to reasonably think of the ways AI will be able to defeat us. We’re sitting here with a boxed-AI thinking about the risk of nanotech while the AI is creating irl magic by warping the electric field of the world using just it’s transistors.
Like, we’re so stupid we don’t even know how to spontaneously generate biological life. The upper bound on intelligence is way above where we’re at now.
It seems like someone’s already put the effort in to give you a list of ways AGI could kill all humans so I don’t have to do that.
Downvoted because you give no reasoning. If you edit to give a reason why you think: “we are overestimating how likely is that an AGI can come up with feasible scenarios to kill all humans” then I will reverse my vote.
I don’t really see the why for your assertions in your post here. For example:
Ok, it’s not nice. Its understandable that many people don’t want to think they’re not good enough. But if they truly are not good enough then the effort they spend towards solving alignment in a way they can’t contribute towards doesn’t help solving alignment. The niceness of the situation has little bearing on how effective the protocols are.
Ok, this is a notion, maybe it’s right, maybe it’s not, I’m just not getting much from this post telling me why it’s right.