I've noticed that a lot of companies provide really valuable services yet almost inevitably are hated by consumers. I call this "the Comcast Problem," though it isn't limited to Comcast. Companies face this problem when they provide access to things consumers want, but they aren't themselves the goal. When I...
This is a very short post, but I haven't seen this argument elsewhere so I wanted to write it up. The basic argument in favor of the simulation hypothesis runs like this: 1. Far future people will likely be able to and want to create simulated realities 2. If they...
I had a realization over the last few months that I'd like to share. I have always interpreted the Litany of Gendlin to compress to something like "there's no sense hiding from bad news." What I realized is that there's a reversed interpretation that's also true, correct, and useful to...
For a much less gameable and more fun version of Calibration Trivia, use the rules that the bar I play trivia at uses.
The game is broken up into rounds. Within a round, players/teams have 2, 4, 6, 8, and 10 points that they can assign to their answer as they submit it. They can use each only once. Here is the sequence of events:
I think a significant amount of the probability mass within P(no AI takeover) is in various AI fizzle worlds. In those worlds, anyone outside AI safety who is working on making the world better, is working to increase the flourishing associated with those worlds.
You can’t require people to “be safe” or “be kind” or “avoid suffering” – or, at least, you can’t do that using any of the legal and policy tools common in English-speaking countries.
This is not true, the entire area of Tort law (especially negligence law) is highly developed in English speaking countries, and is a series of elaborations on "take reasonable care to avoid harm to others."
One thing you might be missing, and the reason that widely-viewed events are so valuable as ad space, is that one function of ads can be to create common knowledge among the audience of how other people might see the product.
For example, Corona beer has a beach vibe. They don't just want you to know that it has a beach vibe, they want you to know that other people know that it has a beach vibe. That way, if you are going to a party and want to bring something that has a beach vibe, you'll reach for Corona because you want to be seen by others as bringing the beach vibe. This is why ads on widely-viewed broadcasts like sports games disproportionately (tho not exclusively) focus on products that are consumed socially or in public rather than privately.
I often think about iconic comic book characters as essentially today's version of these kind of mythical stories, which cut across people's disagreements about religion. The story of Spider Man has been retold many times but generally contains a classic arc:
Strong downvoted, because this "guide" makes a lot of bold claims with zero backup.
One other thing has to do with the procedural posture. On a motion to dismiss, Courts are not generally supposed to evaluate facts at all. A motion to dismiss is essentially an argument by the defense that, even if all those accusations are true, they don't amount to a legal claim.
By contrast, a preliminary injunction does look at facts. So one reason for different treatment of the Encode brief vs. the ex-employees brief is that they were submitted in response to different motions.
One of the most common forms of Whataboutism is of the form "You criticize X, but other people vaguely politically aligned with you failed to criticize Y." (assuming for argument that X and Y are different but similar wrongs)
The problem with that is that the only possible sincere answers are necessarily unsatisfying, and it's hard to gauge their sincerity. Here's what I see as the basic possibilities.
The problem with this argument is that it ignores a unique feature of AIs - their copiability. It takes ~20 years and O($300k) to spin up a new human worker. It takes ~20 minutes to spin up a new AI worker.
So in the long run, for a human to economically do a task, they have to not just have some comparative advantage but have a comparative advantage that's large enough to cover the massive cost differential in "producing" a new one.
This actually analogizes more to engines. I would argue that a big factor in the near-total replacement of horses by engines is not so much that engines are exactly 100x better than... (read more)
I've noticed that a lot of companies provide really valuable services yet almost inevitably are hated by consumers. I call this "the Comcast Problem," though it isn't limited to Comcast. Companies face this problem when they provide access to things consumers want, but they aren't themselves the goal.
When I consume great internet content, I get warm vibes from whatever site provided the content, whether it's instant free access to the world's knowledge on Wikipedia, thought-provoking discussion on LessWrong, great TV and movies on [whatever streaming platform], or anything else. Conversely, whenever I have problems accessing that stuff, I am quick to blame my ISP (which is in fact Comcast, though it could... (read more)
This is a very short post, but I haven't seen this argument elsewhere so I wanted to write it up.
The basic argument in favor of the simulation hypothesis runs like this:
I guess this is sort of an attack on #1 - looking around at the world today, people do create many (low-fidelity) simulations of the world, which we call video games. Some are more realistic than others, and actually most are... (read 159 more words →)
I had a realization over the last few months that I'd like to share. I have always interpreted the Litany of Gendlin to compress to something like "there's no sense hiding from bad news." What I realized is that there's a reversed interpretation that's also true, correct, and useful to remember, which is that finding out more about bad things going on in the world doesn't mean that the world is getting worse.
I think a big problem out there is that people get really revved up on social media (or traditional media) about all the negativity, and it naturally leads people to believe that things are looking down. But most of the... (read more)
Yeah! The time between the invention of the bound book and the invention of the printing press was about 1400 years. In the intervening time, books were very expensive.