I seem to be frustrating you with my answers, but I am doing what I can to be helpful. That is genuinely my goal here. Simple understanding is what the original question was about, since not too many people here understood why people supported Trump, and understanding, not political fighting is my entire point in engaging. I don't actually feel any need (or even desire) to defend Trump or bash Biden/Harris. If you wanted to have a conversation on specific scenarios, you may need to suggest them yourself. 'If <scenario A> happened', what would you think?' I would answer, though I might also explain why I think it doesn't apply if that... (read 3725 more words →)
I am willing to be more specific, but you aren't even engaging with what I've written at all; and there is no way I can deliver something that is true in the exact format you are requesting. Also, if you read my initial postings, I was stating a position to help others understand what it is (they asked for understanding of Trump supporters), not trying to write a persuasive essay. This quote from the end of my first thing is very important "I would prefer to talk in general, rather get bogged down in details that are not actually important to how people actually view the situation." I am still only trying... (read 1829 more words →)
Honestly, I've wondered a few times if someone would come back to this and ask that question. Still, it took me a long while to go back over my comments when I saw it today. I am loathe to make a final determination on these matters when there is still so much to come.
As always, this will be long, but the quick version is: Yes, I largely stand by my position before the election on Trump, though it is far too soon to tell at this point. I expect that things will continue to look fairly normal societally for a short while due to Trump's election. Business as usual in the rest... (read 2019 more words →)
Both examples are harder to understand than necessary. Either "The firefighters who'd been sleeping jumped into action when the alarm sounded." or "When the alarm sounded, the firefighters who'd been sleeping jumped into action." seem much more understandable. The actual short version that flows would be "Then sleeping firefighters jumped into action when the alarm sounded."
Long version: The problem I see with the examples of Hypotaxis and Parataxis might be that it is artificially chunking up the ideas involved into separate bits when it is unnecessary, and so the idea the sentence is trying to get across requires stitching it back together, distracting from the meaning.
Short version: The Hypotaxis and Parataxis examples... (read more)
This treatment of the idea of complexity is clearly incorrect for the simplest possible reason... we have no idea what the Kolmogorov complexity is of these objects versus each other, since the lower bounds are exactly identical! (Said bounds are just, a hair above zero because we can be relatively sure that their existence is not absolutely required by the laws of the universe, but little more than that.) The upper bounds are different, but not in an illuminating manner.
Thus, we have to use other things to determine complexity, and the brain is clearly far more complex in the relevant ways than something like Microsoft Word™. Word processors of similar use can... (read more)
Note: I wrote my comment while reading as notes to see what I thought of your arguments while reading more than as a polished thing.
I think your calibration on the 'slow scenario' is off. What you claim is the slowest plausible one is fairly clearly the median scenario given that it is pretty much just following current trends, and slower than present trend is clearly plausible. Things already slowed way down, with advancements in very narrow areas being the only real change. There is a reason that OpenAI hasn't dared even name something GPT 5, for instance. Even 03 isn't really an improvement on general llm duties and that is the 'exciting'... (read 1384 more words →)
Apparently the very subject coming up led to me writing a few paragraphs about the problems of a land value tax before I even started reading it. (A fraction of the things in parenthesis were put in later to elaborate a point.)
There's nothing wrong with replacing current property taxes with equivalent (dollar value) taxes that only apply to the value of the land itself (this would be good to avoid penalizing improving your own land), but the land value tax (aka Georgeism) is awful because of what its proponents want to do with it. Effectively, they want to confiscate literally all of the value of people's land. This is hugely distortionary versus... (read 638 more words →)
Math is definitely just a language. It is a combination of symbols and a grammar about how they go together. It's what you come up with when you maximally abstract away the real world, and the part about not needing any grounding was specifically about abstract math, where there is no real world.
Verifiable is obviously important for training (since we could give effectively infinite training data), but the reason it is verifiable so easily is because it doesn't rely on the world. Also, note that programming languages are also just that, languages (and quite simple ones) but abstract math is even less dependent on the real world than programming.
Math is just a language (a very simple one, in fact). Thus, abstract math is right in the wheelhouse for something made for language. Large Language Models are called that for a reason, and abstract math doesn't rely on the world itself, just the language of math. LLMs lack grounding, but abstract math doesn't require it at all. It seems more surprising how badly LLMs did math, not that they made progress. (Admittedly, if you actually mean ten years ago, that's before LLMs were really a thing. The primary mechanism that distinguishes the transformer was only barely invented then.)
There are serious problems with the idea of the 'Bitter Lesson' in AI. In most cases, things other than scale prove to be extremely useful for a time, and then are promptly abandoned as soon as scaling reaches their level, when they could just as easily combine the two, and still get better performance. Hybrid algorithms for all sorts of things are good in the real world.
For instance, in computer science, quicksort is easily the most common sorting algorithm, who uses a pure quicksort? Instead they add on an algorithm that changes the base case, or handles lists with small numbers of entries, and so on. People could have learned the lesson... (read 506 more words →)
I believe that the most important fundamental flaw for Futarchy isn't what is written here, but that the flaw this essay identifies is in fact sufficient to be described as an important fundamental flaw. I do not believe it is possible to patch out the most fundamental flaw.
My thought is that the most fundamental flaw is that you are asking for how people think the question will be resolved, and not the thing that is being referenced, so I think that prediction markets in general should be seen as just a (slightly unusual) type of opinion polling where you can theoretically win money by guessing other people's opinion's in the future. It's... (read more)