COMMENT THREAD

If you comment anywhere other than here, Nathan will delete your comment.

Trying to understand this.

I *knew* that the usefulness of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t. A hypothesis that forbids nothing, permits everything, and thereby fails to constrain anticipation.

I think what Yud means there is that a good model will break quickly. It only explains a very small set of things because the universe is very specific. So it's good that it doesn't explain many many things.

It's a bit like David Deutsch arguing that models should be sensitive to small changes.  All of their elements should be important.

I struggle a bit to remember what ASI is but I'm gonna assume it's Artificial Super Intelligence. 

Let's say that that's markedly cleverer than 1 person. So it's capable of running very successful trading strategies or programming extremely well. It's not clear to me that such a being:

• Has been driven towards being agentic, when its creators will prefer something more docile
• Can cooperate well enough with itself to manage some massive secret takeover
• Is competent enough to recursively self improve (and solve the alignment problems that creates)
• Can beat everyone else combined

Feels like what such a being/system might do is just run some terrifically successful trading strategies and gather a lot of resources while frantically avoiding notice/trying to claim it won't take over anything else. Huge public outcry, continuing regulation but maybe after a year it settles to some kind of equilibrium. 

Chance of increasing capabilities and then some later jump, but seems plausible to me that that wouldn't happen in one go. 

I guess, why is it a problem.

[This one needs work]

Isn't the case usually that housing is the single greatest factor between a US and UK standard of life? Or do you not agree?

Housing is a good source of long-term income, there are comparatively poor options, so prices go up compared to incomes. 

To quote @Ege Erdil attempting to steelman:

there could be an interest rate effect - as interest rates fall, claims on future rents become more expensive so housing prices go up.

I want to try this as a way of argument mapping alongside a community that might use it. 

It seems likely that a proper accounting of the argumetns may involve some false statements.

If it goes well I think it could be useful to me and readers, but I guess it will take several iterations.

Housing just isn't that high of a priority. The UK is poor because of productivity, not housing costs.

This from bernoulli_defect:

While housing would increase quality of life and luxury, it’s questionable whether it would fix low British productivity in non-housing constrained industries.

Consider how the Bay Area has had huge GDP growth despite housing shortages as people just cram into bedsits

I don't think lw dialogues match how I think, which is in nested bullet points. I sense from how often I see thinking displayed in this nested bullet point way (AI impacts, Kialo, Rootclaim) that many feel similarly.

There isn't a housing shortage.  There are more houses than there are households. 

This from Ian Mulheirn:

No. Back in 1991 there were just over 3.0% more houses than there were households in the UK according to government data. Today, using the ONS’s latest household estimates, there appear to be 5.2% more places to live than there are households that want to live in them. In fact growth in the stock of dwellings appears to have outstripped that of households over the past 50 years or so. This is a strange sort of ‘endemic shortage’.

He shows this graph, showing that households (blue line) have repeatedly undershot expectations (red and green line)