Thanks for sharing this view.
I can relate to you on some aspects. I am not feeling depressed at all but I'm a bit scared that I was born too early to really benefit from AGI.
This perspective ignores future generations, which is admittedly a weakness. However, prioritizing future generations above oneself and one's loved ones is psychologically hard.
Do you have children? I don't but I am under the impression that people who do say that this changes a bit once you have children. (because of soon to be born grandchildren I guess?)
95% was most likely an overexaggeration but that was to underline the main idea that overall if all of your recipes need several ingredients that will be used in none of the other recipes, it's much harder to make a restaurant work.
When dining in, I suppose yes, because we wouldn't think of the other dishes as Italian then - I don't make an 'Italian steak' it's just a steak, etc.
Indeed, I may be biased but many "italian things" do feel like normal things were "italian" has been added to it because they have a great cooking culture. Especially among the appetizers, where the spanish do the same, incorporating every small dish under the tapas umbrella
I live in the south so I won't be able to but my main advices would be to avoid eating near touristic places where very average stuff will be sold at a premium (Eiffel Tower, arc de triomphe for instance) and to go for places that look nice but not too fancy, especially if you want something closer to a "comfort food" feeling. Fancy places can have extremely good food but like Zvi said it, the ambiance can be mediocre and/or impersonal. Maybe ask parisians about the places where they would bring their friends for a good dinner? (and that you would like to try french specialties in some of them :) )
Exactly, the quality rules in the EU sometimes feel too strict but a few weeks in the US and I saw the difference. The compounding effect of food on your health is huge.
Salads and pasta salads on the "healthy" side. There are a lot of vegetables in the burgers, almost no option with only meat in it.
But it's not so much that than the differences in portion sizes and calories. There are legal limits to added sugar, salt or fat and to how much calories you can put in a meal. It's way lower than what you can find in the US.
Unlimited sodas are forbidden in France(Europe maybe ?) + they have way less sugar than in the US (+they are even cut a bit more in fast foods) There must be a few other stuff but out of my head they are the main ones.
Despite that we still have obesity (~23% which is kind of average today but still bad)
100%! I have seen abroad varieties of pastries that I have never seen in France (often weird ones) and I did not understand why but this actually makes it sense, if 50% of what you sell is "croissant with XYZ" it's an easier sell. Can't believe I did not get that before
But when you go to a chinese place that's what you expect right ? Overall, even italian food is not as restricted as my comment makes it look but when you go to an italian restaurant you expect pasta and pizza
Cuisines are not limited to what is sold abroad as X cuisine but it's easier to sell when customers can know pretty much what to expect. That's not doable with french food, which is what I was trying to say
Your argument is sound but I think it's actually because of its diversity in the base foods. Pasta and pizza is 95% of italian food, rice and noodles are the base of 80% of chinese/japanese/korean food, etc... In french cuisine, there is no base that is often used so you must have a lot of different ingredients. Not the best thing when you operate at "small scale" (when you're not very expensive or cheesecake factory)
I don't know if french restaurants are pretentious outside of france, but that looks more like a parisian problem than a french one.
French here.
Paris is an island in France, they are completely different from the rest of the country. We know it, they know it (and they want us to know it) and we don't like each others that much. Several of the experiences you talk about are typical parisian bullshit that would almost never happen elsewhere. About the "fancy" experience you describe, I'd say it's far from the majority and most restaurants would on the contrary be "à la bonne franquette" especially outside of Paris.
Really when you said this, I was thinking about 90% of my food experience ...
As a lawyer, I think that would be less the case because our jargon does not reflect reality per se but the consequences of the actions we make and the constructs we created as a society. But maybe I actually fail to see my friends and I doing it because people I mostly see are working in law.
I regularly find myself in situations where I want to convince people that AI safety is important but I have very little time before they lose interest. If you had one minute to convince someone with no or almost no previous knowledge, how would you do it ? (I have considered printing eliezer's tweet about nuclear)
A survey was conducted in the summer of 2022 of approximately 4271 researchers who published at the conferences NeurIPS or ICML in 2021, and received 738 responses, some partial, for a 17% response rate. When asked about impact of high-level machine intelligence in the long run, 48% of respondents gave at least 10% chance of an extremely bad outcome (e.g. human extinction).
Thank you for this. I had seen a few things but I had missed a lot. I have been getting more concerned by the day since the beginning of the year...
Thank you, I will show this to a few people! (I'm at 12%...)
P.S: I liked the final statement around 100%
Complete agreement, I should have started way earlier to dress better (and I started 10 years ago at 19!). If you're French, bonnegueule.fr is how I learned to dress nicely. I'm sure there are good websites in every country.
I read somewhere about the higher risks related to cooling the power plant because of the increasing commonness of droughts. Not sure of the magnitude of the problem but considering the worsening climate for the next 30 years it does seem to be in good faith.
Update : I didn't completely get your (gwern) answer at first but after I read eliezer's post it made more sense, I think I was missing basic information about the topic to fully get it. Your explanation really added something to the original post since it was tailored to the subject I was wondering about.
Thanks!
Maybe a stupid question but how do I access other people's shortforms? First time I'm hearing of this
Perhaps some minor factions will separate from mainstream society and artificially cap the level of permissible AI in their community to leave some areas for human superiority. Yet in most of the world, humans will probably no longer be useful to anything or anyone – even to each other – and will peacefully and happily die off.
I could see this being the setup for a novel or a movie with some tribes setting sex and reproduction as the most important part of their life. (with an AI assisted chilbirth delivery to ease everything of course...)
Thanks for the interesting read.
Thanks for the interesting post.
We Zoomers
It may be relevant to say I am 27 before answering.
I think I am on the other side of the spectrum, at least 95% of the time when I have a question, the first thing I do is googling it. Same thing when people say statistics that seem weird or counter-intuitive or when I need to feel more confident about my arguments on a subject. I have noticed however that most of my friends don't do it. It sometimes annoys people that I consistently check things.
Maybe this has to do with the fact that I am a PhD and us...
I enjoyed the read but there is one thing troubling me, those two paragraphs that seem to contradict themselves :
But the thing that she has to teach, physics 101, is still part of what she knows. At some point, she learnt it, and while it might be embedded in her brain in a somewhat different way from mine or yours, it's still the same physics.
What the above working out example showcases is not teachers forgetting or having a weird perspective on the thing they have to teach, but teachers never having learnt that thing.
You say she learned it in §1 and then that she never learned it in §2. There must be something I'm missing.
I feel like theses posts get less likes than before (and I often forget to like them) but they really are great to keep up with what's happening. Thanks for doing it!