GeneSmith

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This is quite a story.

I don't think my odds of lab origin are 99% yet, but I think after this article I'd move my odds from 80%->90%. I'd like to see confirmation by more sources before I move any higher. But the evidence looks pretty compelling with this point; the narrative is coherent, the counterarguments (of those I've read) seem weak. Though it's possible I've missed some stronger ones since most of the people in my information sphere seem to believe the lab leak hypothesis.

Was "avoiding anti-Chinese sentiment" really a motivation? The official explanation is that some Chinese person ate like a barbecued bat or got bit by a pangolin or something. I don't see how a lab leak would make people any more racist or hateful towards the Chinese than the official explanation did.

I suppose that it probably was a motivation even though it did not make much rational sense to me. I just wonder if that concern was more of a matter of political identity rather than a considered response.

career-ally

Professionally?

Thanks for such a high quality comment. I've heard that the termination rate for Down Syndrome pregnancies varies by country. For example, I've heard it's higher in most European countries than in America.

And that makes me wonder how many other conditions that would be true for. How many people would still select the embryo that is gay? I fear only very few. And would choosing against them make the world a better place? I doubt it.

I don't think everyone is going to make the same choice here. I suspect some parents would select for greater chance of same-sex attraction and some will select against it. Though I suspect that in most cases parents are just going to care much more about other traits so it won't be selected very strongly either way.

I see the situation with competing AIs as much more unstable than the one with two opposing armies or countries.

If you want to invade and take over another country, you have to send in your army to their territory to destroy their army, and then you either have to subdue the population or colonize the land with your people. This is hard because it takes a lot of time to move a lot of people, and people can only reproduce and grow up so quickly.

This just seems far, far easier with AI: you can literally "travel" from one datacenter to another in under a second and there exist various drivers that make it fairly simple to utilize other computational resources. An LLM like GPT-4 can make an additional copy of itself in someone else's data center in under an hour.

Once there's a slight imbalance in power, I would expect the situation to resolve itself with the more powerful AI completely overpowering and destroying the weaker AI.

This is the main reason why the prospect of "multiple AGIs" gives me no comfort. It just doesn't seem stable.

Wow. Ok, I guess my odds that this is actually an alien spacecraft went up a little bit.

It's interesting that at the end they quote a NASA official who stated that they haven't found any evidence of extraterrestrial life yet, directly contradicting the whistleblower. That means either the evidence the whistleblower has isn't sufficient to convince the scientists at NASA or the DOD isn't sharing it with them.

Couldn't GPU restrictions still make them more expensive? Like let's say tomorrow that we impose a tax on all new hardware that can be used to train neural networks such that any improvements in performance will be cancelled out by additional taxes. Wouldn't that also slow down or even stop the growth of smaller training runs?

No, the option to select against all diseases in proportion to their impact on quality-adjusted lifespan is the default. But parents can re-do the calculation to like take age of onset into account if they want. Or they could add other non-disease traits to their selection criteria (like intelligence, as estimated by some third party service).

I agree, it's very sub-optimal for parents to have to do all this themselves.

It's worth noting that most of the major news orgs passed on this story despite being offered the opportunity to cover it. We don't know why they did it yet, but given that various orgs have covered the Snowden documents and other whistleblowers that the government very much didn't like, my guess is they did it for reasons related to the quality of the story rather than any conversations with government officials who encouraged them not to cover it.

My priors against us having discovered alien tech are very high, though not literally infinite.

But I still don't have a clear story for exactly what's going on. Most of the videos of UFOs look pretty similar: silvery orbs flying around at very high speed. I haven't yet heard an explanation of how this could be explained by camera artefacts, weather phenomena, or anything else.

Other videos like this one released by the Navy show non-spherical objects that even rotate while moving. I struggle to think of what could be causing this.

I'm too lazy to look into it right now, but at the very least there's a scientific mystery here. Whether or not the explanation turns out to be interesting remains to be seen. There seems to be a big stigma against reporting UAP in the military, which some NASA officials think is hindering our understanding; with fewer recorded phenomena, it's hard to figure out what's going on.

I think people underestimate the degree to which hardware improvements enable software improvements. If you look at AlphaGo, the DeepMind team tried something like 17 different configurations during training runs before finally getting something to work. If each one of those had been twice as expensive, they might not have even conducted the experiment.

I do think it's true that if we wait long enough, hardware restrictions will not be enough.

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