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Well, I mean, congrats on your choice, but why are your numbers more indicative than mine? Looks to me like you’re just cherrypicking. Everyone can cherrypick.
I'm not claiming that they're more indicative, but I do claim that they aren't obviously less indicative. Since everyone can cherrypick, it's not clear in what way are objective numbers better than vibes anyhow.
Ok, cool, imagine China becomes as rich per capita as the US.
IMO CCP-led China will never come close, and the level of repression is an important factor of that. Small-ish petrostates aren't relevant here.
You’ve got to choose some objective numbers that reflect reality.
Fair. I choose the number of legal oppositional parties and the number of peasants prevented from migrating to cities by the hukou system.
the repression in today’s China is much lower than these historical examples, and not obviously worse than in the US
The former is obvious, the latter is a spicy take. Of course, the US isn't exactly having its best moment these days, but I still doubt that the percentage of Americans who would prefer living in China would be even within one order of magnitude of that of hopeful Chinese immigrants.
They are: how many people the country represses internally, and how many people the country kills in foreign wars. These are the topline metrics for a government being good domestically and being good internationally. For example, Nazi Germany had horrible repression internally and started horrible aggressive wars, and that’s the entire reason we think it was bad. Well, today’s US has much higher incarceration rate than today’s China and also kills much more people in foreign wars, so there’s that.
Is your claim that non-imprisoned Chinese should be considered non-repressed, or at least comparably repressed to Americans?
Second, deep learning works in practice, using a reasonable amount of computational resources; meanwhile, even the most efficient versions of Solomonoff induction like speed induction run in exponential time or worse.
But doesn't increasing the accuracy of DL outputs require exponentially more compute? It only "works" to the extent that labs have been able to afford exponential compute scaling so far.
irrational reaction to anything “sex” and it is useful to give people space to talk about gender variance without it being inherently sexual
Yeah, "sex" itself is also problematic of course, referring both to essential characteristics of individuals and to complicated social interactions.
My biggest problem with "transgender" is that it implies the desirability of grave, not-entirely-reversible hormonal/surgical transition to people that are only uncomfortable with their gender role, but have no body map issues. I'd say that decoupling (temporary, reversi...
There is evidence of a biological basis for trans identity.
It's plausible that there is a biological basis for feelings of body-map mismatch, but categorizing all of this under the rubric of "trans identity" continues to seem like a horrible civilization-wide confusion-inducing mistake to me.
The deprecated term "transsexual" also had its issues, of course (the confusion about whether the "sexual" part refers to your sex or the sex of people you are attracted to, like it does in e.g. "homosexual"), but it at least clearly pointed to the fact that it isn't entirely about "gender identity" qua social role-play.
I would still use an actual mp3 player, but ReplayGain (volume adjustment) has irrevocably spoiled me. And also, wireless earbuds have finally gotten good since then. So, phone-as-a-mp3-player it is.
For the former-maids now working in the modern service sector, this was a major step up.
Seems doubtful tbh. I think that being a maid/manservant to a one-percenter could in theory be a much better gig, but society apparently collectively decided that such jobs are inherently degrading and fundamentally conflict with the Egalitarian Spirit, and abolished them on moral grounds instead of economic ones.
Yeah, it's not the gramophone that displaced in-person socializing. TV struck first, and then the internet dealt the killing blow.
Even humans have pretty much succeeded at taking over the world.
Coalitions of humans have. It's plausible that a slightly smarter in relevant ways AI might soon end up heading one, but I don't expect it to get away with acting egregiously misaligned.
The issue is that nobody is sure how things are going to go.
Well, they aren't behaving accordingly. Pessimists are super doomy, optimists expect "loving grace" around the corner, and neither side is at all discomfited by the vast gulf of confident disagreement in between.
This inclines me toward caution
A widely agreeable notion, surely, until elaborated on.
will future powerful AGI / ASI “by default” lack Approval Reward altogether?
I'd say that pessimists are similar to LLM optimists in their conviction that it would be pretty easy to match and then greatly surpass general human intelligence, trusting their own intuitions far too much. Of course, once that assumption is made, everything else straightforwardly follows.
If you define wireheading as hacking the brain to do something weird that makes you feel better
There are similarities, but the space of hardware solutions is much bigger.
stimulated their reward system which, under RTB, is unlikely to solve the problem of chronic suffering
But surely something in the vicinity should work? In any case, I'm pretty sure that most people don't want to exist in a permanent state of pure bliss, whatever it means, and wouldn't take a drug to that effect, so the problem description seems lacking. I'm not claiming to be able to produce a better one, though.
Absolute-zero-based suffering.
Does this imply that wireheading perfectly solves the problem, absent traditional Buddhist worries like reincarnation, which RTB presumably eschews?
Players naturally distinguish “legitimate” actions (swinging sword, drinking potion) from “illegitimate” ones (using console commands to spawn items). This isn’t in the game’s code—the engine doesn’t care. It’s a social distinction we impose based on our intuitions about fair play and authentic experience. We’ve collectively decided that some causal interventions are kosher and others are “cheating,” even though they’re all just bits flipping in RAM.
It's worth mentioning speedrunning here. When players decide to optimize some aspects of gameplay (e.g. g...
One might also do, say, a thought experiment with alien civilisations untouched by whites’ hands and unaware about the oppression system.
Even though their supposed oppressor classes are unlikely to look like white males, that doesn't guarantee the absence of platonic toxic whiteness & masculinity.
What #1,#2,#4 have in common is that it is harder to check experimentally unless you are immersed with the area and the potential difficulty of publishing your results threatening to invalidate the dominant narrative.
Indeed.
...
It’s usually much easier to bullshit value claims than epistemic claims.
Sure, if we compare the sets of all value claims with all epistemic claims. However, the controversial epistemic claims aren't typical, they're selected for both being difficult to verify and having obvious value implications. Consider the following "factual" claims that are hacking people's brains these days:
Nah, the weird idea is AI x-risk, something that almost nobody outside of LW-sphere takes seriously, even if some labs pay lip service to it.
I'm surprised that you're surprised. To me you've always been a go-to example of someone exceptionally good at both original seeing and taking weird ideas seriously, which isn't a well-trodden intersection.
We need an epistemic-clarity-win that’s stable at the the level of a few dozen world/company leaders.
If you disagree with the premise of “we’re pretty likely to die unless the political situation changes A Lot”, well, it makes sense if you’re worried about the downside risks of the sort of thing I’m advocating for here. We might be political enemies some of the time, sorry about that.
These propositions seem in tension. I think that we're unlikely to die, but agree with you that without an "epistemic-clarity-win" your side won't get its desired polici...
My impression is that things are as relaxed as they are going to get, and the trend these days seems to be in the direction of increasing repression.