immigration is very good for economic growth
This is certainly true for US-style immigration, where immigrants are higher-skilled and likely to speak English. But surely the effect is comparatively worse for European-style immigration, where immigrants tend to be much poorer, often refugees from religious third-world countries, and have a low chance of speaking the native language. All of which complicates integration and increases anti-immigration sentiment.
If I remember right Merkel’s decision was due to her experience of being asked by a young struggling and fearful refugee whether Merkel thought it was right for her to be deported.
I don’t see why I’d believe any career politician when they claim that a particular one-off event (that seems well-suited for journalistic reports) fundamentally changed their mind about a topic. And in the first place, did she even claim this to be the reason?
The attitude of modern parties towards immigration policy is pretty insane. I understand that politicians, being cultural elites, tend to be much more cosmopolitan than the population average. But repeatedly overriding your own constituents’ preferences inevitably invites backlash, and ultimately sets back the very cause you wanted to champion. On this topic, I liked David Frum’s 2019 article, If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.
Because in this model, kindness to kin evolved because we share a significant fraction of our genes with our close kin (1/2 for children, siblings, and parents; 1⁄4 for grandchildren, grandparents, uncles/aunts/nieces/nephews; etc.). If there’s instead an ant queen, then all ants in this particular colony are siblings, but genetic relatedness to other hives is very low. Then you don’t get kindness to kin but something else, like kindness to hive or self-sacrifice for hive.
EDIT: I think the above holds, but the justification in EY’s Twitter thread is different, namely that “Human bands and tribes are the right size for us to need to trade favors with people we’re not related to” but scaled-up ant colonies are not.
The weirdest event of the week was America and China both self-sabotaging on chips. America is trying to sell Nvidia H20s to China and looks open to selling the vastly superior B20As to China as well despite this being an obviously crazy thing to do, and China is feeling insulted by Howard Lutnick and telling companies not to buy the H20s and maybe not even the B20As, and even looking into banning using foreign chips for inference.
We truly are in a dumb timeline.
Sites like Reddit and Substack and Youtube all have similar problems. And they’re surely aware of it, but none of them have fixed it. I wonder why?
If a powerful antagonist is dumb or shortsighted enough, anyone can kill them, but what stories go out of their way to claim that their Big Bad is dumb? That’s usually the role of side characters or mooks, not of the Big Bad.
Plus it takes a certain kind of survival instinct to survive for 1000 years in the first place.
I agree with the tradeoff of safety vs. convenience, but there are many types of preparation that require a one-off investment, rather than an ongoing inconvenience. Cost, though, should not matter to most antagonists, since they typically far exceed the protagonists’ resources.
I also criticized HPMOR’s Final Exam at the time, though for reasons of story consistency, rather than narrative.
That said, I don’t think the particular kind of satisfying conclusion you wanted to see works for rationalist fiction like HPMOR. After all, the premise is that all characters, protagonists and antagonists alike, have their own spark of optimization, genre savvy, and so on. So they know how these stories are supposed to go (the Hero wins, the Dark Lord loses, etc.), imagine how they could be defeated, and preempt those scenarios as best they can.
So in a rationalist version of that game finale, the elder vampire takes precautions against having his precious box stolen; protects his coffin from tampering; has overcome his weakness to garlic, or found a workaround (like a gust of wind spell or something), or faked having the weakness in the first place; etc. etc.
The most likely way for a prepared adversary to lose in such a situation is through a surprise, an out-of-sample error. That may not be as narratively satisfying, but it makes a lot more sense than for an elder vampire to die because an average human learned about his weaknesses. As if the vampire wasn’t aware of those weaknesses himself and didn’t have ample time to compensate for them.
I made a partial transcript of a WWMoR podcast episode with Eliezer from 2020, which included this part:
I feel like the largest literary flaw [in the story] is that the grand climax of the story is Harry solving what I would later call a Level 2 Intelligent Character puzzle, which is sort of like a Munchkin puzzle. The Final Exam is like ‘Assemble these facts from inside the story and come up with a creative use for them.’, and it’s not a final challenge that holds up the thematic weight of the rest of the book. [...] It’s like a thing of cleverness where the solution doesn’t really have the depth that I learned to write in the rest of the story.
And that was an example of a flaw that just could not be fixed because of the number of open parentheses that had been set up and the amount of foreshadowing done going literally back to the first sentence of the book, pinpointing that exact puzzle and that exact solution. By the time I got there and could sort of see the way in which it wasn’t adequate, the structure of the book was woven together so tightly that there was absolutely no way to change it.
Gwern is a very poor counterexample, both because he’s also/primarily an extraordinarily prolific top-level poster (e.g. all of gwern.net), and because he’s such a noncentral example of a commenter. The typical (or average or median or whatever) comment on the Internet, or on LW, is not Gwern-level, so why bring him into this if not to muddy the waters?
Also, the distinction between comments and posts is not arbitrary. Writing top-level posts is much closer to creating, commenting is much closer to critique. No-one would argue that a movie director produces the same kind of value as a movie critic; the same applies to posts vs. comments. Or as another comparison, writing top-level posts is closer to shipping software features (like your work on gwern.net?), while commenting is closer to submitting bug reports, and usually ones that aren’t about critical issues like crashes. Again, both activities have their place, but they’re not at all interchangeable.
Regarding the LW discussion on effort, I am fully aware of it. In my comment I clearly claimed “is hard but has much larger potential upside”, i.e. I’m claiming writing top-level posts produces more value in expectation, and thus just the attempt to do so already deserves some credit. Whereas if a site treats its new creators too harshly, eventually all it’s left with are its critics.
Finally, a meta comment: Your comment here is a good example of what I meant by commenting being easier than making top-level posts: if it had been a top-level post by someone else, and you had read it, I expect you would have rightly criticized the OP for bringing up Gwern despite him being such a noncentral example. But your comment lacks the very rigor you expect in others.
In fact, if comments and posts are no different, then I dare you to put your words into practice. Make this very topic (or another one like your work on gwern.net) a full post and open it up to the kinds of critique only top-level posts are subject to.
Maybe tokens are expensive, so there’s optimization pressure towards conciseness?
Commenting is easy, whereas writing posts is hard but has much larger potential upside (in terms of reach, timelessness, etc). Therefore, the more challenging task deserves a much higher baseline of credit, from which one then adjusts up or down depending on criteria like “quality, or usefulness, or relevance”.
(And the LW team doesn’t exempt itself from this rule, e.g. this podcast with Habryka was considered to be a Personal Blog.)
Offtopic: the reason Ctrl+F didn’t find the quote appears to be that when I copy it in Firefox from the pdf, the syllable division of “nonreasoning” becomes something like this:
However, CoTs resulting from prompting a non- reasoning language model are subject to the same selection pressures to look helpful and harmless as any other model output, limiting their trustworthiness.
But the text that can be found with Ctrl+F in the pdf paper has no syllable division:
However, CoTs resulting from prompting a nonreasoning language model are subject to the same selection pressures to look helpful and harmless as any other model output, limiting their trustworthiness.
Yes, that’s the kind of thing I find impressive/scary. Not merely generating ideas.
things the ideal sane discourse encouraging social media platform would have: [...]
opt in anti scrolling pop up that asks you every few days what the highest value interaction you had recently on the site was, or whether you’re just mindlessly scrolling. gently reminds you to take a break if you can’t come up with a good example of a good interaction.
Cynical thought: these two points might be incompatible. Social media thrives on network effects, and one requirement for those is that the website be addicting or attention-grabbing. Anti-addictiveness designs are nice in principle, but then your prospective users just spend their time on something that’s more addicting instead (whether other websites or Netflix or whatever), and thus can’t benefit from the other ways in which your site is better.
And digital brains can generate certain sorts of random ideas much faster than carbon ones.
Even for humans, ideas are comparatively cheap to generate; the problem is generating valid insights. So rather than focusing on ability to generate ideas, it seems to me it would be better to focus on ability to generate valid insights, e.g. by conducting mental experiments, or by computing all logical consequences of sets of axioms, etc.
(Did you mean to link to that comment, rather than to the parent or child comment, both of which are from you?)
As mentioned in the post, Congress is perfectly free to get its act together and do proper legislation themselves, but since they don’t actually want to do that*, then it’s insane for them to pre-empt the states from doing it.
* (E.g. the US Senate, or rather all the 100 individual Senators, could at any time abolish the modern filibuster and actually restore their ability to legislate as a co-equal branch of government, if they ever wanted to. But they don’t.)
I found that event online, but not the claim that this was what motivated the shift in policy.