RobertM

LessWrong dev & admin as of July 5th, 2022.

Comments

If you're saying you can't understand why Libertarians think centralization is bad, that IS a crux and trying to understand it would be a potentially useful exercise.

I am not saying that.  Many libertarians think that centralization of power often has bad effects.  But trying to argue with libertarians who are advocating for government regulations because they're worried about AI x-risk by pointing out that government regulation will increase centralization of power w.r.t. AI is a non-sequitur, unless you do a lot more work to demonstrate how the increased centralization of power acts contrariwise the libertarian's goals in this case.

Your argument with Alexandros was what inspired this post, actually.  I was thinking about whether or not to send this to you directly... guess that wasn't necessary.

The question is not whether I can pass their ITT: that particular claim doesn't obviously engage with any cruxes that I or others like me to have, related to x-risk.  That's the only thing that section is describing.

Yeah, that seems like a plausible contributor to that effect.

Edit: though I think this is true even if you ignore "who's calling for regulations" and just look at the relative optimism of various actors in the space, grouped by their politics.

I was going to write, "surely the relevant figure is how much you pay per month, as a percentage of your income", but then I looked at the actual image and it seems like that's what you meant by house price.

Yes, right tails for things that better represent actual value produced in the world, i.e. projects/products/etc.  I'm pretty skeptical of productivity metrics for individual developers like the ones described in that paper, since almost by construction they're incapable of capturing right-tail outcomes, and also fail to capture things like "developer is actually negative value".  I'm open to the idea that remote work has better median performance characteristics, though expect this to be pretty noisy.

On priors I think you should strongly expect in-person co-working to produce much fatter right-tails.  Communication bandwidth is much higher, and that's the primary bottleneck for generating right-tail outcomes.

I don't know how I'd evaluate that without specific examples.  But in general, if you think price signals are wrong or "more misleading than not" when it comes to measuring endpoints we actually care about, then I suppose it's coherent to argue that we should ignore price signals.

Because there's a big difference between "has unsavory political stances" and "will actively and successfully optimize for turning the US into a fascist dictatorship", such that "far right or fascist" is very misleading as a descriptor.

I might agree with a more limited claim like "most people in our reference class underestimate the chances of western democracies turning into fascist dictatorships over the next decade". 

I don't think someone reading this post should have >50% odds on >50% of western democracies turning into fascist dictatorships over the next decade or two, no.  I don't see an argument that "fascist dictatorship" is a stable attractor; as others have pointed out, even countries which started out much closer to that endpoint have mostly not ended up there after a couple of decades despite appearing to move in that direction.

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