Perhaps my window is just way larger than yours. I've watched a youtube video that analyzes the possibility of taiwan doing it with long range missiles, so that it can use the possibility as a deterrent against invasion.
One of the unserious reasons 3 Gorges Dam collapse gets memed on online is that being a hydrology disaster it would make the ccp lose the mandate of heaven and trigger a revolution leading to a new dynasty
1I think this is true in the long run but today our current systems are not very smart, require lots of investment to scale. This makes it more like labor than capital.
Labor of course, is also capital. Your body parts are tools which you use for economic production. On the flip-side, your self-concept is fluid enough that a metal machine you operate can feel like part of you. A human operator can learn to operate a robot arm very quickly, as if it were her own arm.
That said, I do expect that ethical reasons, some humans will apply to the LLMs frames of labor rights, unions, agency, dignity of life, political systems & radical revolutionary action etc. Actually treating the AI with dignity might just improve model performance.
my antidote for this is to consume a lot of media from the opposite side. and spend a lot of time in "enemy" territory trying to find the wisdom of people i disagree with. consider the trained up ideologies to be a form of compression over true people's desires. what you call polarization, i call specialization.
i also think this is a very uh news thinkpeice eternal-september way of looking at social media. by and large interaction on social media is wholesome entertainment and commerce. that people get in vitriolic fights is just the nature of the agora. i really don't take "disinformation" seriously either. in a state of nature everyone is wrong about everything and only on modern internet do people regularly encounter whole other lives and worldviews.
it is good and right for you lesswrongers to continue doin research and longposting here. this place is something special. i feel like twitter is kind of the street epistemology of rationalism. could be good. could get you hurt. not for everyone. not every place should be like it.
the addiction is real tho.
facebook knows that some people hide posts to "archive" them, not because they don't like them. i wonder if the platform you are using thinks this, and maybe you have to ignore bad content with your mind and scroll past rather than ignoring it with your hands.
I'm sure you treat your animals well.
There's a weird power law thing where the majority of meat comes from very few companies with massive scale. It could both be the case that most farmers treat their animals well and most meat comes from tortured animals. most farmers do not produce most meat.
Curious to hear more about your experience. The post new-deal demand-planning stuff like paying farmers to produce less -- is this a thing that actually happens? How much do you think welfare concerns will hurt farmer productivity? Do you see a path forward for farmers to make more money while also treating animals better, perhaps by producing higher-quality agriculture as Japan has done?
They often have access to the outdoors for a large percentage of their lives. They are cuter so we treat them better. Also, since they’re massive, even if their lives are quite bad, if you ate exclusively cow for a year, you most likely wouldn’t finish a single cow. Compare that to a chicken, which might last you a day. The same logic applies to dairy.
One of my gripes with utilitarians is not taking math and scale seriously enough. These both sound like arguments for "pro eating beef" but taken together they counteract each other. If cows live good lives on the pasture, then we want more cows rather than less, which means taking an entire year of burgers to eat a 1 cow is a tragedy, and we'd rather there be chicken levels of throughput.
Then again, it's the high chicken throughput that creates the chicken suffering.
A better example is bees.
The bentham's bulldog substack had this article against eating honey that made its way around rationalist & EA twitter. He is correct that bees are small, high animal count per calorie, and surprisingly smart. but he incorrectly thinks that bees live bad lives. on the contrary, hives can produce new queens and easily leave, so beekeepers are heavily aligned with bee welfare. they do things like supplement the hive with sugar if it is lacking. artificial hives are just safer and easier environments.
Put together, this implies that I should be honey-maxxing for utilons. I am too egoist, scornful of insects, and skeptical of the health properties of a Hazda / Ray Peat / Yudkowsky-pemmican diet to actually do this. But the article did successfully negatively polarize me into favoring honey as my go-to sweetener and to try it for burn management and colds in the future.
thanks for writing this article. i really liked it.
if you were looking for a sign from the universe, from the simulation, that you can stop working on AI, this is it. you can stop working on AI.
work on it if you want to.
don't work on it if you don't want to.
update how much you want to based on how it feels.
other people are working on it too.
if you work on AI, but are full of fear or depression or darkness, you are creating the danger. which is fine if you think that's funny but it's not fine if you unironically are afraid, and also building it.
if you work on AI, but are full of hopium, copium, and not-observing-the-worldium, you are going to kill yourself through hallucinations eventually -- one way or another.
focus on what you want to see more of.
and whatever you do,
never kill yourself.
and trust your own Rationality.
this is your final exam. you have as much time as you need.
what of the french royals? the native american chiefs? the ottoman caliphate? the spanish empire and all their gold? the qing dynasty?
conquest, "land reform", communism fascism & democracy - these are the typical outcomes of industrializing countries. you notice the royals who made it not the royals who didn't.
then again, war and death was the norm for royal families before the factory. there's a reason we don't do royalty for real anymore and just let them be celebrity trad-larpers or petro-state CEOs