Here’s an odd suggestion: make it in a Choose Your Own Adventure style. The joy of that format is that you can compare and contrast different possible worlds. You only need a handful of branching paths, especially when you already have two major ones.
Ustice
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I wish mathematicians would take a page out of computer science/software engineering, where we’ve collectively decided that single-character variable names are bad practice.
I do understand the value and beauty of a terse notation, especially when hand-writing it, but I can also appreciate similar beauty of well-structured and self-documenting code, especially within an code editor that uses a language server that can provide context for any symbol. White space hints at structure and comments clarify the more difficult to parse sections of code
I’m constantly algebraicly manipulating symbols. We generally call it refactoring, but it’s the same thing up to an isomorphism. I aim to write my code in such a way to minimize the cognitive load on the reader. Using single-character symbols adds a whole layer of cognitive load where the reader needs to keep a mental map of what each symbol represents, especially when the convention chooses an arbitrary symbol, rather than at least using abbreviations. This feels especially onerous for students who are trying to learn the concepts behind the symbols, while trying to keep track of what each symbol represents
This is really is just a general rant. You did a good job with your explanation. It balances technical nuance with approachability. That really is why I even had this thought to begin with.
Thanks for sharing!
When the figure is about to jump off of the roof, they briefly put down their bag. It has a long thin part of the right side. It’s not definitively a rifle, but its shape is consistent with one. There isn’t enough detail to really show for sure one way or another.
I’d be worried about further disenfranchisement of the poor. I won’t claim that this is a fatal flaw, but I think it should be addressed.
To make it more concrete, a fictional scenario:
To someone who sleeps outside with no income, selling their vote for $1000 to some rich dude sounds like a good deal, especially when that vote has a negligible chance of winning them a better situation.
That’s okay on an individual level of choice, but scaled up it’s a misalignment of incentives.
This does seem like a good idea for small organizations, but at some scale, I expect bad actors to break the system.
For me, the best I can do is remind myself of the dangers of expectations and try to be thankful when it works outs.
For people, I remind myself that they don’t owe me anything, and I try to focus on what I have rather than what I might otherwise like.
Even without an A/B comparison, if policies came with measures of success, that would go a long way to steering into better policies. Do school vouchers improve outcomes for students? It seems plausible, but we should be able to track graduation rates, and GPAs. Maybe we can even agree that that is an important goal. If after 5 years, those measures are not showing significant improvement, we can conclude that the voucher program didn’t meet its goals, and at the very least the policy needs to change, if not directly reversed.
It’s not perfect, as there can be confounding effects, but by tying the life of a policy to success metrics (that hopefully would be easier to agree on), we can at least we can show progress, and rule out the worst ideas.
How do you think this applies to paid YouTube accounts? I have one, and I don’t ever see YouTube ads. I still see the in-video ads that the artists insert into their videos, but even then I can skip them easily, and YouTube actually makes that easier, since I can skip forward twice and I get a button to skip the segment.
YouTube is pretty far along the enshitification curve. I don’t see them changing things enough to turn that ship around.
This is just posturing of the like that we’ve seen since I’ve been aware of world politics, in the 80s. Before then too, but I only have read about that.
There is a line, but given nuclear war is unprecedented, I don’t know where that is. That said, if we are talking nuclear weapons, I don’t think anywhere is safe.
Hahaha Brilliant
I hope that as intelligent entities become better at modeling orders, they become more empathic
With regards to the expensive organization, I say embrace the chaos! Just get a few bins so people don’t have to be up on each other, but if you have a lot of fun stickers, people will enjoy the hunt. Heck, you might find people that enjoy sorting and categorizing them. In any case, it’s an activity-focused social event, where the chance of finding what you’re looking for is improved by cooperation. As people pick stickers that they identify with, it will spark conversations. I love it.
I don’t think China is willing to accept yielding. I can’t think of any reason that they would.
This is totally a shower thought, and I don’t trust it, but what about a strategy of semi-cooperation? China has been contributing to open source models. Those models have been keeping up with, and catching up to the capabilities of the closed source models.
I wonder if mutual containment could come through having similar capabilities as we both learn from each other’s research. Then neither side has a gross advantage. Maybe it doesn’t have to be zero-sum.
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Any idea of how it handles context length? I’ve been using VS Code Copilot, and it’s great up until the AI assistant hits its context cap. I know that when it says, “Summarizing conversation,” that the assistant has been lobotomized and replaced with an agent who has all of the confidence of the last assistant, but basically no idea what it’s really doing.
It’s at this point that it’s most likely to screw up the codebase. I can’t imagine how it’s supposed to be autonomous when it suddenly becomes brain dead.
Ustice from the past, I disagree about one point. The preferences you were referring to not being moral questions is wrong. Obviously one could only include humans, or a subset of humans. Including humans in “it’s just nature” is obviously immoral.
The choice of where to draw the line is very much a moral question. At least all humans is a pretty good Schelling point, but after that it there are only a few major points before things get murky, and rational moral minds can disagree.
I don’t believe you meant to be dismissive, but your argument was, and that’s not fair. I apologize on his behalf.
This is really cool analysis, but I think your conclusions are off.
I think this is what happens when you optimize for attention. Especially with user-generated art. I know I’ve watched more “incest” porn in the past few years—because it’s hard to avoid—yet, I’ve contributed to that tend. Gotta give people what they want, right? Bleh. Porn is subject to the same market pressures of enshittification that other businesses on to internet are under. YouTube is a great example, but so is Facebook, Amazon, MySpace, Reddit, and many more.Most of this is fantasy role-play, not real desires. People that like Little kink aren’t pedophiles. Furries don’t want to fuck real animals. Dommes aren’t sadistic assholes.
I’m not saying that there isn’t problematic and porn. There is, and it’s gross. But being squicked out by someone else’s kink doesn’t mean their kink isn’t okay too.
I’m pretty convinced at this point that qualia comes from systems with a certain level of complexity, or maybe it comes from life. I’m very skeptical of the idea that only humans experience things. I think it’s highly likely that ants have inner lives.
Where you lose me is the assumption that all insects are suffering. I expect that, like people, most of them are going about their day to day. Their lives have meaning to them. Yes, there are a lot being injured right now, but the VAST majority are because they were just going about their day. Life is hard.
To me, your argument breaks down when you take it further. What about the single-cell organisms? They also respond to negative stimulus. I don’t know if the question of suffering of single-cell organisms has really been studied, but even multicellular creatures are essentially colonies of cells of multiple types and even species. Wikipedia says there are about 3x10^13 human cells in a human body, with about that many bacterial cells. Should we be horrified at the desiccation and death of skin cells? The countless bacterial cell you are likely murdering every moment of your life as your cells fend off infection, and so too the cells of yours that die in the effort? Of cancer cells, who just want to live?
These things are a part of nature. Intervening is just picking sides out of preference. It’s okay to have preferences, but they aren’t moral questions.
To bring it back around, I’m with you on preserving habitat, and respecting life. When I find insects in my house that I can catch and release outside, I do. I think we need better regulation on wide-scale insecticide use.
When a mosquito bites me, I’m going to kill it. If they’re living in my home, we’re at war.
Hey, thanks for the interesting perspective. 👋
I think it’s easy to lose perspective when you multiply a really big number by a really small number.
Oh man, of people I’ve interviewed, the college graduates are next to useless. There are exceptions, but that’s true of those that have less traditional backgrounds too. There are way more talentless hacks than skilled professionals. Even at the graduate level.
If they’re there because of a paycheck, you can keep them. I want the people on my team that do it because they love it, and they have since they were a kid. They’re the ones that keep up, and improve the fastest—I am certainly biased.
With the new generative AI assistants, we’re going to have way more who are new and dabbling. Hopefully more of them are inspired to go deeper. But you know what, even shitty software that’s e solves a task can be useful.
Assuming AI is aligned, I don’t see how self-replicating machines would be useful. I doubt there’ll be much pressure for that. If AI is malicious, self-replication hardly matters.
The real-world data is likely the real obstacle. With enough, I expect they’ll be able to compensate for manufacturing defects, and have regular maintenance. I assume they’ll be able to self-improve with more experience (and likely pooling experiences)
It’s pure speculation though.
You aren’t looking for professional. That takes systems and time, and frankly, king power. Hackers/Makers are about doing despite not going that route, with a philosophy of learning from failure. Now you may be interested in subjects that are more rare in the community, but your interests will inspire others.
I’m a software engineer by trade. I kind of think of myself as an artificer: taking a boring bit of silicone and enchanting it with special abilities. I always tell people the best way to become a wizard like me is to make shitty software. Make something you know, something small, and that sounds like fun. It’ll be terrible and barely functional, but it’ll be yours, and the next one will be a little less shitty. Keep at that, until you can start thinking at higher levels of abstraction. eventually, your work will be less and less shitty, and before you know it it’ll be good.
Hackers/Makers encourage amateur work, because that’s where most people are, because they’re just starting out. Make no mistake, there are professionals in the community, but no one expects you to be up to their standards. Instead, they’ll help you make things a little less shitty.
Make it. Then make it work. Then make it right.
Failure is your teacher.
Recursion/induction is like a loop with an off-ramp. Like a letter Q.
Maybe proof by contradiction is like an inverted house of cards. You make an assumption, and then look for ways to knock it down.
proof by probability feels like a gauge, like a line with an arrow that indicates a threshold.
Direct proof is a square. It just sits there on its own.
I don’t know one directly for contraposition, but it involves negative space like the image of the faces and vases.