I think the core counterargument here is that the dictionary definition of a name isn't intrinsically linked to the group, organization, or set of methods that adopt the name.
- Suppose I support the Ruritanian Democratic Movement, which promises to turn Ruritania into a democracy.
- After getting to power, its leader decides to set himself up as king for life, and the good name of the movement comes crashing down around him.
- Supposing this hasn't broken my faith in Ruritanian democracy, should I still call myself a member of the Ruritanian Democratic movement? Definitionally, I am, but, practically, that doesn't sound like the best way to achieve Ruritanian democracy.
- It may be that the name is so tainted that continuing to keep it in the public eye distracts and demoralizes anyone who believes in the cause.
- It may also be that the methods associated with the group were likely to lead to this undesirable outcome, and a clean break from them would better achieve the goals of its true believers.
Dispensing with the metaphors, what is the semantic difference between saying "I support charitable giving" and "I am an Effective Altruist"? To my understanding, the core difference is one of methods - the charitable giver selects charities heuristically, based on what he sees an immediate need for in the world, while the effective altruist poses that there is a more efficient strategy for achieving the same ends, by maximizing each dollar's marginal impact on some objective function. Identifying why EA has seen the problems it has, and how this relates to the difference in methods, would, as best I can tell, be critical to determining whether "I am an Effective Altruist" is more preferable to say than "I support charitable giving".
From an economic standpoint, the case is clear: immigration is very good for economic growth. The macro scale effect is pronounced, sticky, and it takes a spectacularly failed immigration policy to undo it.
I think that this is in question. Even in the short term, many of the employers that rely on low-wage labor encourage employees to seek transfer payments to make up the difference. Moreover, there are substantial costs associated with additional infrastructure use, education of ESL students, support of multiple languages in public and private communications, and enforcing laws on a larger and less homogeneous population.
To my knowledge, nobody has done the exact math yet, but given the fairly consistent unpopularity of increased migration rates and the relative public apathy towards corporate subsidies, I would not be surprised if it were less costly, in both economic and political terms, to simply provide a government-backed discount to the cost of domestic labor directly.
In the longer term (12 years, as opposed to 12 months), I think the stability and human capital costs of current youth unemployment alone vastly outweigh the costs of paying 20-30 percent more for labor. Moreover, quality of work is a factor - I've already seeing pretty substantial tech debt at major companies in the wake of mass H1B visa abuse (the causation is anecdotal, but consistent with the experience of every other programmer I've spoken to on the subject), and newer-build homes have a reputation for vastly poorer quality than Americans are used to.
Edit: It is worth noting that even AEI, a Bush Conservative think tank with a generally pro-migration tack, acknowledges the above (see section "Why not just bring in more immigrants?").
I think your argument applies well to misinformation/deepfakes, but not to sex/relationships/pornography, on the basis that they are targeted towards two different orders of needs. When seeking information, we care a lot about veracity and usefulness, and the value gained by small tweaks to an existing story is counteracted by the value lost by that story moving from 'entirely true' to 'not entirely true'. As an example, if there was a terrorist attack and twelve people died, then an AI edit of the story and related media that claims thirteen people died would not be straightforwardly better than the original in terms of ability to propagate or be capitalized upon. AI provides the ability to A/B test at scale and cheaply personalize, which is of relatively limited usefulness in that space.
In contrast, if I'm in the adult video business, I'm targeting the lizard brain. If an AI generated video has some immediate visual features that hit better than real ones, then my video will get more clicks, as users look for the content that elicits the strongest reaction. There isn't a fundamental limit to this, either - plenty of people already make money by producing completely animated AVs, for example, which definitely don't pass for real footage. Moreover, there's currently a tradeoff between actor quality and novelty - 'weirder' fetishes that are specific to small groups are less able to attract the most or the best performers, which serves to mitigate the "novelty spirals" that we constantly hear about, hitting a fundamental upper bound when a fetish is so specific to a given individual that nobody at all has produced a video that services it.
At a bare minimum, I think that AI-generated videos will outcompete real pornographic content and take the limits off of divergence from "normal" sexual tastes among heavier consumers. The gradient towards weirder content can become infinitely small, mitigating the shock of a piece of content that goes "too far" for someone's current preferences, and every performer can be a flawless match to the viewer's exact tastes.
He suggested the same number of people, around ten percent, are still going to real university,
That's an interesting position. It makes sense to me that that's the number that'd have the qualifications to do so, but are they still getting the same quality of education today?
I'm not sure what it's like for American high schools, but in Alberta (Canada) we had different streams for different kids. Dash-1 courses were for academic stream kids, dash-2 was either non-academic or for someone who wants a college certificate or a trade, dash-3 focuses on employability, and dash-4 is for students with learning disabilities.
That's a very common-sense system, seems like a gentler version of what Germany and Korea do. Unfortunately, the U.S. system doesn't look anything like it. We have only one track, with differentiation delivered in theory through AP courses (advanced kids) and special education (kids with severe learning disabilities) courses. Unfortunately, the former are a constant political target, and the latter are constantly in the process of "mainstreaming" students that are unsuited to standard classes by dropping them into gen. ed.
Bill Clinton (1993-2001), George W. Bush (2001-2009), Barack Obama (2008-2012), and Joe Biden (2021-2025) were U.S. Presidents with the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Despite the unilateral ability to launch nuclear weapons, they did not.
Why are Obama's second term and both of Donald Trump's terms missing?
Great article - provides clear examples of a trend that we've all quietly suspected. There is, however, one thing that I think it misses:
If the average American has barely improved, what about the intellectual class? That is, those Americans who have at least attended some college?
In the American 1950's (and in virtually every other country with a globally-respected education system today), college attendance was something for the top ten percent of the population. At present, 39 percent of 25- to 29-year-olds have a Bachelor's degree, and nearly half have a degree of some kind.
While the dumbing-down of college can be somewhat ameliorated by the stratification of the college experience that we've seen (a State U degree used to be prestigious!), with 'top-college education' replacing 'college education' in our culture, in practice, it's very hard to make a clean break, especially seeing as the U.S. education system is allergic to the idea that one person might ever be inextricably more qualified than another on the basis of their intelligence or natural work ethic. Proposals for a German - style path system, in which students that aren't likely to thrive in higher education are directed towards careers they're more likely to do well with, have been repeatedly shot down on this grounds.
Worth pointing out that high school has had a similar issue. NCLB made a lot of people feel better about themselves, but it essentially destroyed the last vestiges of rigor in the public school system. You can't build a meaningful HS degree around the -2sd kid that isn't allowed to wait a year and go over difficult material again, and is strongly discouraged from dropping out at 17 and getting an early start on his career (which would be significantly kinder for him - the extra money helps, and not everyone can learn Calculus).
1c) Tomorrow, every single human on Earth, including you and everyone you know, will also have their lives randomly swapped with someone else.
The problem I have with this thought experiment is that "lives swapped", once you think about it for a minute or two, becomes incoherent. Suppose you "swap" persons A and B. A is a calm, highly-intelligent nuclear reactor technician, and B is a linebacker with the opposite personality.
* Are you just swapping them physically and legally? Neither can do the other's job, so that gets you immediate societal collapse.
* Are you swapping their bodies and capabilities, but leaving their personalities intact? Plenty of jobs have demeanor as an essential qualification, so that gets you less intense societal collapse, but still societal collapse.
* Okay, so you swap everything. Person B now has person A's location, appearance, DNA, legal identity, intelligence, and personality. In what sense is he still person B?
I've mostly seen this hypothetical used as the basis for moral tracts, where it engages in Begging The Question. It imposes the assumption that there's some special attribute that makes a person who they are which is independent of their genetics, their experiences, and all of the choices that they have made, and then uses this to argue that genetics, experiences, and past choices should be discounted when comparing individuals' moral worth.
Other responses have touched on money not being power, but I think one of your examples makes it clearest. Let's consider colleges:
Some kids are just an obvious “yes”, their skills or track record include insane things way beyond what a high schooler normally achieves. That’s the winners’ bracket.
The bulk of the slots will be filled out by a lot of people who look largely similar, with only marginal differences. That’s where various semipolitical games can bump one slightly ahead of other marginal people. That’s the losers’ bracket.
STEM programs are vastly more competitive, and higher-paying in the average case. At a typical university, the superstar physics professor is what give it great press. He spends all day and most of the night reading papers, trying out models of the universe, trying to push the frontier forward and immortalize his name. He may well succeed in this.
Meanwhile, a less-ambitious professor, perhaps in a less challenging discipline, with a much lower salary, is on every single committee. His name is all but unknown, but, rather than spending his time on research questions that have stumped generations of Earth's greatest minds, he gets to adjust institutional policy such that it matches up perfectly with his whims alone. His grad students aren't busy proving theorems, and can be 'assigned' towards campus activism that advances his goals further. If he and the superstar professor above have conflicting interests, it is likely that he will prevail - the other guy can't spare the time or the resources to fight back.
One of the great coordination problems of our time is that the best people would all prefer to be in the former position rather than the latter. This, unfortunately, means that society ends up being governed by the "losers' bracket". This is amplified by the fact that the people aspiring to greatness are all in competition with each other, whereas the spoils system provides an immediate structural incentive for rent-seekers to help each other take a larger share of the pie. Moreover, a businessman or researcher who makes himself a target by taking a principled stand against rent-seeking now has a significant disadvantage over his peers who pay a smaller cost by toeing the line.
The point I'd raise is that a lack of memory isn't necessarily a lack of statefulness. Neurons can still be primed by prior activations, and presumably exhausted as well. The human mind isn't a RESTful API, after all - it can change without writing to the 'database'.
I think this is a useful goal. I'd pose that quantifying human research taste seems like the best starting point. Can a human researcher achieve a high score on this metric?
A metric I would propose is somewhat different, and I think potentially less vulnerable to noise and measurement error:
For example, if I were evaluating an LLM that had stopped training just after DiffPure released, I might ask it how best to combat this defense from the perspective of the attacker. I'd then compare its proposal to the methods demonstrated by DiffAttack, and rank LLMs (and humans - either queried before the cutoff or from separate subfields without knowledge of the ground truth outcome) by having an evaluator repeatedly decide which of two models' proposals best match what ended up working. This might look like: