Talking about moral philosophy with your CCP boss in a genuine heart-to-heart, philosophical way is like, actually insane. Imagine reading a book where an American protagonist grabs a police officer's gun from behind and the officer laughing and saying "ahh, that's good old American CQB, my friend stranger, you won't get me next time!" and then the two becoming fast friends after shouting racial slurs at each other in a McDonald's for 20 minutes.
I would at least use after-work binge drinking to make it a bit more plausible.
1I was specifically refering to US import tariffs on consumer goods.
$300,000 is a big number, enough that it starts becoming cost-competitive for the government to just contract out every component of the gamete -> educated 18 year old pipeline.
That is, the state pays for donor gametes, IVF, surrogacy, and 18 years of foster care. There's a lot of confounding factors here, but the last time I ran the numbers it was something like $200,000-$300,000 per child.
At the very least, this is a solution that continues to work even if desired number of chidren craters all the way to 0 - daycares don't seem to have any trouble finding workers, after all.
I actually think modern urbanites have a lower effective social population density than the ancestral environment. Most hunter-gatherers have very little privacy, with entire entended families huddled in the same single-room dwellings. This level of density is very rarely present in developed cities (other than pubic transit). Most people in, say, Tokyo have their own room and thus few far less crowded than the average hunter gatherer, if you polled them throughout their day. Lowering the number of people encountered per day doesn't seem to greatly increase fertility, otherwise COVID would have resulting in a big fertility bump. Maybe the problem is the opposite - modern technology allow us to have fewer undesired social encounters, which is a high-priority desire for most people, but those same undesired encounters were the main force behind the formation of romantic relationships.
It is possible that the easiest way to increase the fertility rate is a legal mandate for dinner with co-workers.
Very confused why "the US economy contains a lot of middlemen, who can just absorb massive taxes without passing them on to the consumer" is only ever used as a handwave for explaining the unexpectedly low rate of inflation. I've seen multiple people (including normally level-headed people like Ezra Klein!) bring this up briefly, but never examine the concept in detail. If true, it's a big deal, since that's a lot of consumer surplus to be gained (presumably by limiting zero-sum advertising games?), and this issue deserves much more attention! Maybe it just seems more plausible to me - shipping alone can't why the exact same CPU fans cost a fraction of the cost in China as they do in the US. Maybe Chinese consumers are just much more willing to pay the time cost to search for better deals (This seems obviously true to me, but I doubt it explains everything)?
Something to think about.
I don't think anyone in the world knows for sure how 2 and 3 are going to resolve.
On a related note, the Roman Triarii were well known to have wept and had child-like tantrums in battles where they were not deployed, sometimes to the point of mutiny. It's probably a good idea for someone in, say, the MEU to have sold if they were tilted after not getting to kick down doors.
I would quibble and say that this is very much not an accurate depiction of China.
A Definition of AGI
Currently looking at some of the example problems used to assess AI capabilities in this paper. This... obviously doesn't work as intended? Based only on recall (no search), Deepseek answers these questions somewhat well, getting 2/3 attempts for the first, 0/3 for the second, [assumes Star Wars refers to Episode I and gives the answer for that movie, changes to correct answer after clarification, so either 0/3 or 3/3]. It identifies Satan, but misidentifies the squished animal as a cat for #4 in all 3 tests. So a model with zero visual ability could score quite well just from the context given by the question and maybe the metadata of the upload file. The first question doesn't even require the name of the movie for a correct answer!
This seems to indicate fundemental problems with their test construction - it gives "written by someone from 1990 who makes an AGI test without ever interacting with an LLM" vibes. Maybe that was the intent?
They also cited actual College Board example AP tests from ~2014 as their sources for like 30% of their problems. I would be shocked they weren't in the training data multiple times.
This whole paper just feels wrong.