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All of Dana's Comments + Replies

Summary of and Thoughts on the Hotz/Yudkowsky Debate
Dana1mo10

How is that addressing Hotz's claim? Eliezer's post doesn't address any worlds with a God that is outside of the scope of our Game of Life, and it doesn't address how well the initial conditions and rules were chosen. The only counter I see in that post is that terrible things have happened in the past, which provide a lower bound for how bad things can get in the future. But Hotz didn't claim that things won't go bad, just that it won't be boring.

8SimonM4mo
This doesn't seem to account for property taxes, which I expect would change the story quite a bit for the US.
1Gunnar_Zarncke4mo
Thank you.
Don't take bad options away from people
Dana6mo31

How about slavery? Should that be legal? Stealing food, medication? Age limits?

There are all sorts of things that are illegal which, in rare cases, would be better off being legal. But the legal system is a somewhat crude tool. Proponents of these laws would argue that in most cases, these options do more harm than good. Whether that's true or not is an open question from what I can tell. Obviously if the scenarios you provide are representative then the answer is clear. But I'm not sure why we should assume that to be the case. Addiction and mental illnes... (read more)

1Dumbledore's Army6mo
Just so you know, there are a lot of people disagreeing with me on this page, and you are the only one I have downvoted.  I'm surprised that someone who has been on LessWrong as long as you would engage in such blatant strawmanning. Slavery? Really?
3Sweetgum6mo
Slavery and theft harm others, so they are not relevant here. Age limits would be the most relevant. We have age limits on certain things because we believe that regardless of whether they want to, underage people deciding to do those things is usually not in their best interest. Similarly, bans on sex for rent and kidney sale could be justified by the belief that regardless of whether they want to, people doing these things is usually not in their best interest. However, this is somewhat hard to back up: It's pretty unclear whether prostitution or homelessness is worse, and it's easy to think of situations where selling a kidney definitely would be worth it (like the one given in the post). I don't want to live in that world either, but banning sex for rent doesn't resolve the issue. It just means we've gone from a world where women have to prostitute themselves to afford rent to a world where women just can't afford rent, period. What I said here is wrong, see this comment You don't think having to sell your kidneys and have sex for rent to get by is bad enough to get people to protest/riot? Also, it seems like you've implicitly changed your position here. Previously, you said that when someone sells a kidney/trades sex for rent it would usually not be in their best interest, and that those options would usually only be taken under the influence of addiction or mental illness. Now, when you say that people would do those things "to get by" it sounds like you're implying that these are rational choices that would be in peoples' best interest given the bad situation, and would be taken by ordinary people. Which of these do you agree with?
7tailcalled6mo
The kinds of enslavement most people are familiar with is the enslavement of African-Americans. As far as I understand, they were originally enslaved as part of inter-tribal warfare and raids in Africa. This is a sort of force/expropriation, which seems distinct from the sorts of "bad options" talked about in the post, in that they aren't really options, they are forced. Also, this kind of slavery has been exceptionally brutal compared to other kinds of slavery. I'm not super familiar with other kinds of slavery historically. As I understand, it has often been debt slavery.
On AI and Interest Rates
Dana8mo30

It is explained in the first section of the referenced post: AGI and the EMH: markets are not expecting aligned or unaligned AI in the next 30 years - EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)

Unaligned: If you're going to die soon, you probably want to spend your money soon.

Aligned: If you're going to be rich soon, you probably don't want to save your money.

Both scenarios depend upon the time-discounted value of money to be lower after AGI. I guess the underlying assumptions are that the value derived from aligned AGI will be distributed without respect to cap... (read more)

2Dagon8mo
Ah, so the mechanism is a reduction in present value of money, not an increase in future value (though it implies an increase from the reduced current value).  That does fit nicely with my general finance-world outlook, which is "we're not as rich as we think", but I'm not sure I'm sold on the rebound part of the story.
Why didn't we get the four-hour workday?
Dana9mo132

You are not talking about per person, you are talking about per worker. Total working hours per person has increased ~20% from 1950-2000 for ages 25-55.

8jasoncrawford9mo
Oh, I misunderstood. Yes, my stats are per worker. It's interesting to see that per-person has increased a bit. Not sure what to make of that. The early-1900s stats didn't count a lot of housework that was done mostly by housewives.
johnswentworth's Shortform
Dana10mo54

The problem with this explanation is that there is a very clear delineation here between not-fraud and fraud. It is the difference between not touching customer deposits and touching them. Your explanation doesn't dispute that they were knowingly and intentionally touching customer deposits. In that case, it is indisputably intentional, outright fraud. The only thing left to discuss is whether they knew the extent of the fraud or how risky it was.

I don't think it was ill-intentioned based on SBF's moral compass. He just had the belief, "I will pass a small... (read more)

Pronunciations
Dana1y90

I find https://youglish.com/ to be very helpful with this.

1Solenoid_Entity1y
Some websites are great, but I've found they're wrong often enough I usually want to corroborate them with something else.