cesspool

Yeah, and it's too hard to measure whether someone is "happy" anyway. It's inherently impossible to know another person's subjective experience, and people lie about their own experience for various social reasons all the time so self-reporting is pretty useless. Let alone effectively gauging whether situation A or situation B makes them happier. There probably are humans out there whose optimal life experience consists mostly of laying in bed and watching netflix, just like there are humans out there whose best life looks like training to run ultramara... (read more)

I think the "people living with UBI would suffer from pointless lives devoid of meaning" argument has some truth to it, but people take it too far.

Humans in general derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction in life from engaging their mind and body to solve problems and overcome challenges, and doing those things collaboratively with other humans. A good job ("good" in this case meaning subjectively pleasant to work at, not high-status or high-earning) provides this satisfaction to many people, whether they know it or not. There's no reason a person could... (read more)

Anti-money laundering and fraud protections introduce a lot of bullshit and risks. Many human beings on either side of the transaction in a bank transfer are monitoring it, have to do a lot of paperwork and screening especially for large transfers (that's the "bullshit" part, and someone has to pay them to do it which results in the high fees), and one risk is that the transaction will be erroneously flagged for AML or fraud and get held up and require even more bullshit to be pushed through. Another risk is that now two governments, not just one, have t... (read more)

You hit the nail on the head with the "out of government control" line. As has been shown by some political polling done on LW, a good chunk of rationalists (full disclosure, myself included) have libertarian leanings. We regard the government's ability to control transactions and the money supply as a huge liability. I wish I shared your optimism about our ability to "vote out" governments who do a bad job of money management and use their control of the monetary system to enforce unjust laws, inflate the money supply to prop up spending on unjust wars... (read more)

I would say your description of a world where most people are left to "shut the fuck up and enjoy your government handouts or freemium robot butlers or whatever" while the few elites are uploading their consciousness and living in unimaginable luxury is a post-scarcity vision, and it's a fine one. Inequality is only an issue insofar as it includes suffering and poverty. If 1% of the people have 99% of the wealth and status, but they make sure us plebeians all have plenty of food, water, housing, and free time and access to all the tools and supplies with... (read more)

I appreciate all the time and effort people put into writing utopia stories, but I think most of the really detailed ones are making a mistake based on some totally normal human assumptions.  They depict incredibly complex simulated worlds of uploaded consciousness optimized to have the most subjectively good experience that the author can imagine.  (I just read one of the most highly rated ones so this is partially a critique of that story, but I have read others like it and it seems representative of many utopia-envisioning efforts as a whole.)... (read more)

I'm not sure exactly what point you're trying to make here (Was it "an outdoor space isn't really 'nature' unless there's constant, imminent danger?"), but you said it yourself about a spectrum instead of a binary, and then kind of went back to a binary again by the end of the article (Amazon or Outback = true nature, everything else = tame or domesticated).  I think you had it right earlier on.  Outdoor spaces are on a spectrum.  Parks are not really "pure" nature, but they're one step further towards "nature" on the axis than concrete buil... (read more)

There seems to be a disconnect here between the idea of agency you and these other articles are pursuing, and what your specific goals are.  The definition of "agency" can mean a lot of different things to different people, but the version the LW community seems to coalesce around is something like "recognizing when irrational factors like social norms and emotional influences are stopping you from pursuing your goals as effectively as possible, and changing your behavior so that you are no longer restrained by those factors".  If that's what you... (read more)

It sounds to me like you are looking for two conflicting things, trying to achieve them both at once and getting frustrated at the results.  You're trying to deepen your understanding of philosophy and participate in conversation on the subject, and you're trying to "cure" your growing misanthropy and rediscover your love and kinship for your fellow man.

Any rational person who is above average intelligence can't escape having some elitism.  The majority of average people are, for all practical purposes, not capable of engaging with, understanding... (read more)

Some lawyers, sure, but not the vast majority of the legal profession.

All those points you made are correct (besides maybe the x-risk one--you were right that that one came a little more from opinion, having worked with a bunch of lawyers I believe they generally do nothing better than provide expert arguments and rationalizations for whatever they want to believe or make you believe, rather than following the facts to the truth in good faith), but I don't think they're enough to outweigh the fact that the legal profession is absolutely ripe for the kinds ... (read more)

Update:  After 2 seconds of Googling I realized what I'm talking about is literally just a Wiki and I'm trying to reinvent it.  MediaWiki which powers Wikipedia is open source and would be a perfect fit for this project I think.  Besides, "The Whistleblower Wiki" has a nice ring to it.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki

Cool to hear my feedback is appreciated!  Spreadsheet is an improvement.  I think the ultimate form of this project would be some kind of SQL database with a website and fancy UI built on top of it--but that's not my area of expertise so I wouldn't even know where to start.  Maybe you have 2 components--a spreadsheet/database that lets you search for names based on categories and filters, and then each gives a link to a Wiki-style page on the person with the full text of their story, notes on what they did right/wrong and all the other stuff... (read more)

First I want to say that I'm really on your team here.  I support what you're trying to do, I agree with you about the importance of whistleblowers, and your idea seems like it could be a valuable resource to prospective whistleblowers or just plain people who want to get more educated about some of the history of government wrongdoing and attempts to cover it up.

But that said...  for something you called a "database", a long list of bullet points is about the worst way the data could be organized and makes it borderline useless as a resource. &n... (read more)

[disclaimer:  I'm a cis, hetero, straight, white male who has never struggled with any issues around gender identity, so my perspective on trans issues is entirely an outside one]

I think another factor here is the "bubble" effect that happens in many online communities.  Many chronically-online people who get a lot of their social interaction within a single niche online community can begin to form distorted views where they believe the views, beliefs and norms in their online niche are much more representative of society at large than they actua... (read more)

Correct, my mistake.  1200s.  I was just reaching for a historical example of when a real "apocalypse" did in fact come to pass--when not only are you and everyone you know going to get killed but also your entire society as you know it will come to an end--and the brutal Mongol conquest of China was the first one that came to my mind, probably thanks to Dan Carlin's excellent Hardcore History podcast on the subject.  I didn't take the 2 seconds on Wikipedia I should have to make sure I was talking about the right century.

I was thinking of o... (read more)

That's comparing apples to oranges.  There are doomers and doomers.  I don't think the "doomers" predicting the Rapture or some other apocalypse are the same thing as the "doomers" predicting the moral decline of society.  The two categories overlap in many people, but they are distinct, and I think it's misleading to conflate them.  (Which is kind of a critique of the premise of the article as a whole--I would put the AI doomers in the former category, but the article only gives examples from the latter.)

The existential risk doomers hi... (read more)

Before you get too excited about the idea, let's think for a minute.  What would world leaders--notoriously a bunch of people prone to be ruthless, sociopathic, and morally unscrupulous, even if they're ostensibly in charge of liberal democracies--be able to reach through their cultural boundaries and agree on?

Peace?  No way.  Everyone has too many problems like outstanding land disputes they want to reserve the option of using war to correct.

An end to poverty?  For who?  To any leader in the developed world, agreeing on human plen... (read more)

Not to put words in the author's mouth, but when they said "We go gently...", I don't think they meant "go" as in become extinct, at least not any time soon.  I took that to mean "go" into obscurity and stagnation instead of keeping on advancing technologically until we're building Dyson spheres and colonizing other planets and all the science fiction stuff that most people believe humanity is going to do eventually.  In that scenario, we would keep living on aimlessly for many millenia until some asteroid or other cosmic event took us out, becau... (read more)

You could be right about the limit based on overall compute applying to other approaches to AI just as much as to LLMs.  Speculating about the future of AI is always a little frustrating because ultimately we won't know how to make AGI/ASI until we have it (and can't even agree on how we will know it when we see it).  The way I approach the problem is by looking at what we do know--at this point in time, we only know of one system in existence that we can all agree meets the definition of "general intelligence", and that is the human brain.  ... (read more)

AI-2027 and a lot of other AI doom forecasts seem to rest on a big assumption--that LLMs are capable of achieving some form of AGI or superintelligence, and that progress we see in LLMs getting better at doing LLM things is equivalent to progress towards humanity developing AGI or ASI as a whole.  This is not necessarily true, though it can be tempting to believe it is, especially when you're watching the LLMs getting better at conversing and coding and taking over peoples' jobs in real time.  I think a lot of that progress is totally tangential ... (read more)