bhauth

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Why do you think AGI would have a very different architecture from what humans do? I'd expect a lot of similarities, just with different hardware.

To be clear, when I talk about "high-wage areas" with expensive housing, I am not talking about US cities in general. I'm talking specifically about particularly expensive places like NYC and London.

I don't think London is expensive or has high wages because it's productive. I think that's because rich people brought money to London from elsewhere because:

  • their property rights are secure there (relative to Russia/etc)
  • there were lots of high-end stores
  • they could get luxury services like butlers and high-touch financial management
  • there were other rich people there to network with

Now that you can get some services and goods online, and there's more international competition for those rich people, you see whole sections of London where rich people have houses that just seem dead to ordinary people on the street, with luxury stores that are closed most of the time, houses that are occupied 1/3 the year and have private chefs when they're occupied, and so on.

I still think the only serious options are paywalls ("pay with your money") and ads ("pay with your attention"), and in the case of the web the value of moving fluidly from site to site pushes strongly for ads.

It's true that a lot of content is supported by ads and would not exist without ads.

I want that content not to exist.

There are other ways for content to be funded:

  • There are people who just have something to share, and post on reddit/here/etc for free.
  • There are people on youtube supported by patreon and donations.
  • There are periodicals/substacks/etc supported by subscriptions.

Those mechanisms lead to higher quality and higher consumer surplus. There is not a shortage of content, there is a shortage of curation. Ads, as a funding mechanism, incentivize clickbait and virality. That causes publications to find ways to get attention, and those ways are bad for readers, but a lot of people just can't help but have their attention drawn despite consuming that content being a net negative for them. And then ads make it more of a net negative for them. And that ad-funded content does its best to pull attention away from higher-quality content with less money for promotion.

poor evidence

What would you consider good evidence?

There's lots of money out there looking for founders to invest in, and those founders need teams, and when those teams are successful, new companies grow, creating new jobs.

Those investors tend to invest specifically in locations near themselves. That's a big part of the centralizing dynamic I'm trying to explain.

And the winners get bought out

It's easier to get bought out when you're located closer to the buyer. And mergers often lead to the purchased company moving.

Even if most CEOs are very dumb (and I still don't think that's likely to be true),

Rather than saying US executives are "dumb" I'd say that they're specialized in things that society doesn't want them specialized in, like playing political games with other executives. Also, my experience is that "normal" people are far more impressed by MBA-speak and MBAs than engineer-speak and engineers.

effort to plug into a larger conversation

You mean...longer posts with more links in them? Here? Or what?

you could at least look for what evidence is out in public - beyond just one letter by Bill Gates - and try to make a real case for some of the components of your worldview.

It's not really possible to do studies on this, so all I could do is point at a bunch of anecdotes, and then readers could still just say that's cherry-picking. So, people have to estimate base rates from their personal experiences, which are biased but known not to be adversarially picked. Or, readers could assume that what's reported by journalists/pundits is a consensus and thus more reliable. All I felt that I could do was set up a framework for people who already had evidence from their experiences.

If you are correct, then we all could learn from you, but it is very hard to open myself to updating my worldview very much based on the arguments and evidence you have gathered here.

That's certainly understandable. At the same time, I kind of have other things to do, such as actually thinking about technology.

8x higher than water when using normal outdoor temps as baseline, which actually seems like a useful measurement in this application

No. With unspecified units, that's saying (energy - x) of sodium = 8 * (energy - x) of water. For celcius, x = 273.15.

I thought he was saying that, in this application, water would boil before it rises away to be cooled.

There are nuclear plant designs using natural convection with water for emergency cooling.

I guess I don’t know your background, but why do you believe yourself over them?

Because when I look up my half-assed ideas they're often close to what people use today or what people on the cutting edge are researching. Because when I get to talk to people involved in things, I can tell how smart they are relative to me.

a disagreement on what’s safe in an incredibly complicated system with lots of disagreement out there

These are not disagreements among serious nuclear engineers. Gates just found a bunch of clowns instead.

Most high level executives don’t need to understand these things in detail, because they have other people they trust that do understand it.

No, they don't. They are unable to tell the difference between technical competence and BS. That's why Elon's companies are relatively successful despite his autism and mediocre understanding.

Is it possible that the disconnect is that you‘re valuing technical ability over being good at people+management?

US corporate executives are now selected largely for skill at "moral mazes" and I don't think "being good at people+management" is an entirely accurate description of that. They're good at dealing with similar people, who - being similar - are also not good at actually doing things.

Powerpoints need to be 5-word phrases because that’s how you should communicate with crowds.

Amazon banning Powerpoint worked out pretty well for it. Maybe all the theorizing about it actually being good was just justification.

But it’s not meant to be read strictly. It’s basically marketing material aimed at a very large crowd

I'd like to believe that, but no. It was not simplification for the common people. It was an accurate overview of how Bill Gates actually understands the technology involved and why he likes it.

It seems like you’re comparing capitalism to some ideal that has never actually been realized. And you can’t actually know if your ideal is feasible or even better in practice unless it’s been tried.

I'm not suggesting copying the Chinese government, but China is doing a better job at a lot of stuff than the USA now - the USA seems to be largely coasting on past success while institutional quality declines.

Perhaps your argument is that, with lots of new housing built in NYC, prices drop in NYC and Tulsa, but consumers of housing are not necessarily better off because (for instance) they might be "forced" to move from Tulsa to NYC, making them less happy than they would have been otherwise, despite the lower housing prices in both cities.

But that's a completely different argument.

That is my argument. That's the whole point! I just also don't think that it means prices necessarily go down in Tulsa (because people leaving for NYC shows up mainly as less construction, and prices in Tulsa are pinned to construction costs there) or necessarily go down significantly in NYC (because the price changes involved may be very small, or maybe there's just reduced friction for companies moving because of new construction rather than an actual price decrease).

  1. You're assuming a perfectly liquid market here. There can be a lot of friction when trying to move in a bunch of people or buy a bunch of office space in one place. New construction can avoid that issue.

  2. If there is no friction, and things are perfectly liquid, then the amount of price change required to cause big moves is very small.

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