social system designer http://aboutmako.makopool.com
mako yass
Karma: 3,061
but more because of measurement errors
I sometimes think of growing private wealth as the fee that a democracy must pay for the services of the techne that it cannot expropriate.
Actually, in my father’s day, there was this one infamous landlord who people used to point at. Who was it, Claude? “Peter Rachman” yes that was it. People used to talk about “Rachmanism” which apparently just meant “being a cruel and unscrupulous landlord”, but which could probably be expanded to encompass home owner associations organizing to lobby against zoning reform if efforts were made, because when people hear ism they expect to see a civic ideology.
Unfortunately one of his most prominent sins was excessive subdivision, so he wasn’t exactly a nimby.
And also, yeah, in reality — for instance in New Zealand which has it especially bad, where substantially more than half of the families in the country own land — land investment is just a popular way of keeping savings. The last Labour government felt a need to promise, despite confessing the will, not to touch it.
Maybe “abstract” was the wrong word. Communism and minarchy both have very simple visceral moral impulses supporting them. Fairness/equality vs liberty/choice. It’s possible to get a person into a state where they feel one pole so intensely that they will be willing to fight against someone fighting earnestly for the other pole (right? But I’m not sure there’s actually been a civil war between communists and minarchists, it’s usually been communists vs monarchists/nationalists)
For grey civics, I don’t know what the unifying principle is. Commitment to growth? Progress? Hey, maybe that’s it. I’ve been considering the slogan “defending zoning isn’t compatible with calling yourself a progressive. If you believe in urban zoning you don’t believe in progress.”
Progress seems to require meritocracy, rewarding work in proportion to its subjective EV or capricious outcomes, distributing rewards unevenly, and progress comes with a duty to future generations that minarchists might not like very much, but at least in tech, people seem alright with that.
On the left, the tension mostly comes out of earnest disbelief, it’s not intuitive that progress is real. For most of our evolutionary history it wasn’t real, and today it happens only on the scale of years, and its every step is unprecedented.
But how would we resolve the tension with humanism. I guess e/acc is the faction within the grey tribe who don’t try to resolve that tension, they lean into it, they either explicitly reject the duty to defend the preferences of present humanity against those aspects of progress that threaten it, or they find reasons to downplay the immanence of those threats. The other faction has to sit and listen while Hanson warns them about the inevitability of absolute cultural drift, and I don’t think we know what to say to that.
A focus question I keep returning to, partly out of a dark sense of humor, is what kind of slogans I would have to write before people would be willing to shed blood, to fight, in the name of George, or in the name of Approval Voting, or Minor Parties, or any other system whose merits are abstract and which is neither minarchist nor soviet.
I sometimes feel like part of the problem is that there is no villain to get mad at. Our enemy is mostly just ambient incompetence, myopia, legacy systems and institutional sclerosis. Perhaps we can call it Moloch.
Afaik rent in japan is low on a global stage, and is only high relative to japanese wages?
OTOH, japanese rent shouldn’t be high relative to japanese wages (unless there are a whole lot of foreigners doing remote work or something) so I guess you could still say that the rent is too high.
I wonder who, if anyone, is in charge of deciding what Perplexity’s list of reliable sources is.
Defecting becomes unlikely if everyone can track the compute supply chain and if compute is generally supposed to be handled exclusively by the shared project.
Afaik there were not Generals saying “Covid could kill every one of us if we don’t control the situation” and controlling the situation would have required doing politically unpopular things rather than politically popular things.
Change either of those factors and it’s a completely different kind of situation.
I tend to dismiss scenarios where it’s obvious, because I expect the demonstration of strong misaligned systems to inspire a strong multi-government response. Why do you expect this not to happen?
It occurs to me that the earliest demonstrations will be ambiguous to external parties, it will be one research org saying that something that doesn’t quite look strong enough to take over would do something if it were put in a position it’s not obvious it could get to, and then the message will spread incompletely, some will believe it, others wont, a moratorium wont be instated, and a condition of continuing to race in sin could take root.
But I doubt that ambiguous incidents like this would be reported to government at all? Private research orgs generally have a really good idea of what they can or can’t communicate to the outside world. Why cry wolf when you still can’t show them the wolf? People in positions of leadership in any sector are generally very good at knowing when to speak or not.
On my homeworld, with specialist consultants (doctors, lawyers etc), we subsidize “open consultation”, which is when a client meets with more than one fully independent consultant at a time.
If one consultant misses something, the others will usually catch it, healthy debate will take place, a client will decide who did a better job and contract them or recommend them more often in the future. You do have the concept of “getting a second opinion” here, but I think our version worked a lot better for some subtle reasons.It produced a whole different atmosphere, like, the water was cleaner. It totally changes the dynamic of the consultations. People tried harder, and they listened more, they had to, and they were happy to, they found it energizing.
As a result of this, we didn’t really have any need for occupational licensing. If someone was making bad recommendations, the other people in the room would just tell the client that lmao.
As part of this increased mobility and independence of specialists, practices end up being a very different kind of business, they weren’t brands or instutitions who owned their consultants, they were just facilities which specialists and clients used. Consultants worked in different offices on different days depending on who they were meeting with.
Drawbacks? Not really, but like, to facilitate the inclusion of younger specialists, we had to make sure an aspirant with good investor assessments could bid to attend open consultations and learn from them and to advertise themselves to clients and get discovered.
Occasionally this would result in the presence of a corrupt aspirant who has no real career prospects and was just there to cash in and sell the client some addiction or other on behalf of an advertiser. Usually, though, experienced specialists are able to convince the client to just ask those aspirants to leave pretty quickly. It didn’t happen often and those few clients who’ve experienced this issue came away mostly just amused.
Usually, attending aspirants are suitably humble and only speak up when they have something to contribute.I guess this was coming from our general all-pervading paranoia about cult dynamics, which got pretty extreme sometimes (ie, most kids movies were legally required to end with a section where two or three independent education theorists reflect on the themes, and offer alternative views. The kids always want to skip them! xD), but I definitely preferred our way of doing specialist consultation over the way you do it here :S here I feel like you’re expected to just trust your doctor? And also the fact that you have to use occupational licensing because you don’t have this is part of the reason I think there’s so little innovation, you haven’t created conditions where the better specs can step up and compete and shine and get discovered!
Prediction in draft: Linkposts from blogs are going to be the most influential form of writing over the next few years, as they’re the richest data source for training LLM-based search engines, which will soon replace traditional keyword-based search engines.
I wrote about this, and I agree that it’s very important to retain archival copies of misaligned AIs, I go further and claim it’s important even for purely selfish diplomacy reasons https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/audRDmEEeLAdvz9iq/do-not-delete-your-misaligned-agi
IIRC my main sysops suggestion was to not give the archival center the ability to transmit data out over the network.
The ‘answer engine’ idea is great, and occasionally I find it the right tool for the right job although mostly I end up at either the Google Search or Claude Sonnet ends of the spectrum.
It’s surprisingly rare that Perplexity can answer a question that google can’t for me.
What I really need from AI search is usually far better serviced by the little known and unspectacular exa.ai.
Humorously, in retrospect, it turns out we actually did need a much larger government project to realize the potential of the internet. Licklider’s visions of a new infrastructures for trade and collective intelligence were all totally realistic, those things could have been built, the internet would have been very different and much more useful if the standards had been designed, the distributed database design problems had been solved, but no one did that work! There was no way to turn it into a business! So now the internet is mostly just two or three entertainment/advertising tubes.
I think I agree that this is possible, and it’s closely connected to the reasons I think making alignable ASI open source definitely wouldn’t lead to egalitarian outcomes:
Artificial Superintelligence, lacking the equalizing human frailties of internal opacity, corruption (principle-agent problems), and senescence, is going to be even more prone to rich-get-richer monopoly effects than corporate agency was.
You can give your opponent last-gen ASI, but if they have only a fraction of the hardware to run it on, and only a fraction of the advanced manufacturing armatures. Being behind on the superexponential curve of recursively accelerating progress leaves them with roughly zero part of the pie.(Remember that the megacorporations who advocate for open source AI in the name of democratization while holding enduring capital advantages in reserve all realize this.)
Well let’s fix this then?
I find that it is better than not racing. Advocating for an international project to build TAI instead of racing turns out to be good if the probability of such advocacy succeeding is ≥20%.
Both of these sentences are false if you accept that my position is an option (racing is in fact worse than international cooperation which is encompassed within the ‘not racing’ outcomes, and advocating for an international project is in fact not in tension with racing whenever some major party is declining to sign on.)
There are actually a lot of people out there who don’t think they’re allowed to advocate for a collective action without cargo culting it if the motion fails, so this isn’t a straw-reading.
As an advocate for an international project, I am not advocating for individual actors to self-sacraficially pause while their opponent continues. Even if it were the right thing to do, it seems politically non-viable, and it isn’t remotely necessary as a step towards building a treaty, it may actually make us less likely to succeed by seeming to present our adversaries with an opportunity to catch up and emboldening them to compete.
Slight variation: If China knew that you weren’t willing to punish competition with competition, that eliminates their incentive to work toward cooperation!
destroying current western robotics industry in the same way that the West’s small kitchen appliance industry was utterly crushed. (70%)
I’ve heard that the US is already ahead on advanced — IE, fully automated — manufacturing. China’s manufacturing economy depends on cheap human labor, which is an advantage they seem to be losing for some reason. I don’t see much of a reason to think there’s going to be a continuity between Chinese dominance in the pre-robotics manufacturing era and the next manufacturing era.
Funnily enough, Nvidia’s recent 340B parameter chat assistant release did boast about being number one on the reward model leaderboard, however, the reward model only claims to capture helpfulness and a bunch of other metrics of usefulness to the individual user. But that’s still pretty good.
I’m not sure that cleaving a distinction between the meanings of “possession” and “ownership” is a winnable battle.