All of Jiao Bu's Comments + Replies
I am having some difficulty that Jake may not have eaten the pastries and may not know what happened. But the adversarial situation asks him to somehow solve a puzzle he had no hand in creating. How do you deal with the fact that 'turning up heat' like this pretty much begs for speculation anyway?
As soon as I imagine an actually innocent Jake in this situation, his next line is, "Chocolate does not make all dogs sick, nor necessarily consistently do so. For that matter, a friend of Gillian's could have stopped by or something. I don't know, I was in my room playing video games."
Relevant information might include whether mothers sometimes have differing degrees of care for each of their own daughters. I am guessing without looking that there are studies indicating favorites can exist among equally-genetically-related-to-oneself children, also breaking the strong link to "caring in proportion to their genetic similarity to you."
Any information on false positive rates?
Quality in dentistry has been going down. The custom work of crowns, quality of fillings, and etc, have been going by the wayside for cheaper options that the consumer doesn't grok the downstream expenses of. Generally the chain dentists don't even present options. I found this out recently after getting some miracle filling that just seems so easy and cheap as "technology has improved" but I would have happily paid for gold or amalgam and a more professional job. Hadn't had one in about 28 years, so I took their sales pitch as fact...
Interesting case. Are there other cases where VC-run businesses have similar issues, perhaps in other industries? I would like to see and understand a pattern if possible.
>UBI may reasonably give people at the bottom of the market sufficient money to become participants.
The incentive is still going to drive a businessperson to come up with a way to take that money from those people (as it is now). So the rent seeking could expand to include something like slum-lording trailer parks in areas which are even further from possible employment, potentially locking those residents into a radius where no one around does anything but pot and video games.
Meanwhile, since there is more money available to the middle classes, c...
This is probably true in an internal sense, where one needs to be self-honest. It might be very difficult to understand when any conscious person other than you was doing this, and it might be dicey to judge even in yourself. Especially given the finiteness of human attention.
In my personal life, I have spent recent months studying. Did I emotionally turn away from some things in the middle of this, so that to an outside observer I might have looked like I was burying my head or averting my eyes? Sure. Was I doing that ...
It's also possible that an opposing effect happens where your shouting into the void about dragons connects in some vague way with my belief in the Ilithids, which I then end up coopting your dragon evidence into my own agenda. Especially if you find anything close to material evidence. Heck, your material evidence for dragons now gives all kinds of creedance to Ilithids, beholders, gnomes, and all sorts. So the gnome people and everyone else is now coming out of the woodwork to amplify your work on dragons. And I think this would b...
If I am a lending shark, I will lend more predatorily to people under a UBI regime, even if that income is protected. It changes the risk management calculations towards "they now have more ways to figure out a way to pay before going bankrupt" and "after bankruptcy pool of money I can extract is higher." Again, maybe you've technically protected UBI, but I can surely garnish wages in either case, pressuring them to give me as much as they can. People can miraculously make money appear when you squeeze them, and now I know there's more th...
1I don't think higher income people are spending as much %% of their money on goods and services, so everyday goods and services may not be protected as much from the "printing money" effect. Much of the shift in those prices comes from the increased spending power on the bottom margin, as the rich already have all the food and such they want anyway.
If you're already using that money to invest in stocks, then UBI probably inflates basic good prices (as it gives the lower income brackets more money and additionally reduces the labor supply to make them...
In addition to what you have said here, you cannot save up your time. It's questionable if you can save up your pats on the back (which you might just as well give away very liberally, and your reward could be as simple as the meaning or help it created for someone else). Perhaps you can save your attention, but usually that is going to be between you and your work and internet/media habits more than human interaction habits.
There could be some extreme cases where someone is hogging an undue level of time and attention (and at that point...
Does this vary on market at large scale as it does for medium scale? USA vs Asia, for example was 2-3x difference in price in concrete 10 years ago.
Wouldn't it be easier to use a platform anchored in the ocean somewhere? If there's some law that it technically needs to have "land" you could dredge some sand like the Chinese did in their reclamation projects. Have a carrier-sized piece of land (and turn that into your central park) and build everything else on elevated platforms.
Yes you have to spend a lot to maintain that structure and surface, but I am still not convinced the ice structures require any less work to maintain.
Getting land somewhere else is still probably easier and cheaper....
"You didn't commit extra crimes, but it requires more resources to protect you from crimes. (And again, since you are a single person, the extra resources get lost in the noise. But if many people did this, there would be more crime.)"
Is me creating an opportunity for someone to commit a crime constitute my doing something bad to the commons or is it on the actual criminals? It seems you are quite literally blaming (potential) victims for their drag on society. Doesn't 100% of the responsibility for that, and whatever costs are incurred lie wit...
"Violent crimes of desperation increase because of greater wealth disparity" seems sensible. The greater wealth disparity being the cause of the desperation that instigates the crimes. The OP here is about vast wealth disparity causing social deviance, in some sense.
However, "In a situation where wealth is more equitably distributed, there are fewer crimes of desperation" seems like they could both be coming from the same font of "Our society is good and cares about its people and takes good care of them." The OP of this thread is also ab...
You still aren't telling me why I should assume I am contributing to bad outcomes instead of good ones or neutral ones without actual any actual crime or damage being done. I'm not building anything resembling a shoplifting ring here.
Let me try to think some of this through that you might be getting at. One of the things you mention is my depending on the lower crime rates. This is the single thing that keeps me from doing the exact same thing in the USA. In fact I/other people do the same thing in the USA sometimes, such as camping...
Thank you for the ongoing conversation. I do appreciate this.
"If by "drain" you mean "used far more than your fair share" everything you did that wouldn't be done so often by someone with a home was a drain."
Why should we assume "cost" by default when not conforming to systemic expectations? And why should we assume others doing it should have a bad result?
I think that would only be a drain if someone else's use was diminished afterwards. You never mention, for example, my days spent snorkeling in Hualien. Hours and hours and hours ...
2You never mention, for example, my days spent snorkeling in Hualien.
I never mention it because you are not overusing it compared to someone in a home.
even regular middle class people might be using more of the countryside in a destructive way in their time off than I am
"People who are not causing the particular harm I am causing, may be causing different sorts of harm" doesn't really justify it.
...To think of it another way, if a culture of (lawful and clean) vagabonds were to evolve in Taiwan, for all we know it might create a new culture of innovat
2If society evolved to 10% unhoused but working, healthy, and non criminal, I strongly suspect systems could be adapted. Non-destitute tent cities could likely be supported as easily as a large fairgrounds.
It’s possible then that the balance of outliers such as me are because most people just want to be housed? So the balance of light amenities for the unhoused in Taiwan is at equilibrium (and needs more amenities in the USA, probably). NB that surely I am not the first or only person in TW to do this. The countryside night-market culture seems possibly...
This is an interesting point, and I like the perspective. The main ingredients needed for my adventures were (1) lack of crime and (2) spaces, such as clean restrooms, forests, and some of the gazebos such as along the road in He Huan Mountain. The hot springs at Hell Valley, I paid for, and of course I paid for food and gas and such.
I think (1) is common to most of Asia, and I have had several friends who did similar things in China, which is a bit poorer than Taiwan. China is interesting in that almost every American female who is there...
Lower wealth disparity also results in lower crime, particularly lower violent crimes. Taiwan generally has a fairly "sleepy" government and penal system. And for many types of crimes, you can buy your sentence off for the equivalent of about $30 a day (1000 NTD). Not a lot of private gun ownership (non-zero, as aboriginals can hunt, and there are (very very few) skeet ranges, but even the president's secret service got into trouble for having a handgun in an unauthorized way). I've found very stressed and deformed rimfire cartridge...
Taiwan has the second lowest violent crime on Earth, right after Japan. I am an Engineer, I have two masters degrees, and have made decent money in both Taiwan and the USA. I spent a summer and most of an autumn unhoused in Taiwan. In Taipei, I often slept on benches near Hell Valley, and woke up and went to the hotspring in the morning with the older folks who liked to go at that time. Other times I slept around Banciao or other side of the river. Several nice nights, I would wake up to drunk college kids hanging out around m...
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1I am inclined to think "this is polluting the commons". All the things you used to survive are meant to be used by people who have homes and only occasionally need those things (and often pay indirectly, such as by making purchases in a store where they use the bathroom). The fact that they are free is a price structure that is only possible because people who use them are occasional users who rarely need them. Deliberately going without a home in the knowledge that you can survive using the free services is using much more than your fair share of the c...
"[I]s a traditional education sequence the best way to prepare myself for [...?]"
This is hard to answer because in some ways the foundation of a broad education in all subjects is absolutely necessary. And some of them (math, for example), are a lot harder to patch in later if you are bad at them at say, 28.
However, the other side of this is once some foundation is laid and someone has some breadth and depth, the answer to the above question, with regards to nearly anything, is often (perhaps usually) "Absolutely Not."
So, for a 17 year old, Yes. &nbs...
"I drew a bunch of sketches after coming round to see how it affected my ability to draw."
What was the result?
The comment being referenced may be of a very rare type. I have never been on Lesswrong, and rushed down to the comments section to type something, and found someone else having said it more eloquently than I wanted to. Normally we have a lot of entropy in the group thinking (which I love). This may just be a rare type of case.
I am perfectly happy that the patriarchal roles are no longer shackling women. I would not like to roll back time, personally, on these matters. I hope my question doesn't come across this way -- it is just that I am confused about expectations.
There is something I have been exploring, being back into the dating market in the USA after more than a decade of blessed expatriatism, and am currently seeing people and exploring all this.
Culturally, what are women supposed to do for men? No stative verbs (am/is/are/was/were/be/being/been), no nouns, no adjectives, but like what are the top 5 action verbs that women should be doing for a man and if she isn't, there should be a good reason or maybe he's going to leave? Or even 5 or 6 important ones or even mundane-but-expected ones? I c...
1Most of the useful ones are fairly symmetrical. Things like taking care of health and appearance for yourself but also more effort than you would otherwise on the margin because you care about your partner's experience. Taking note of things that seem specific to your partner/make them happy and noticing opportunities to do them. Noticing that the way your partner expresses care is probably the way they also wish they could receive it, and symmetrically noticing that the ways you keep expressing care for your partner are ways you secretly want care and doi...
Are you familiar at all with the works of Christopher Alexander? He spent about 50 years exploring the objectivity of aesthetics in Architecture (and was highly influential across several fields, including software design). His book "The Timeless Way of Building" is available as an Audiobook and is approachable. It is also the closest thing I have ever read to the teachings of my Tantric Teachers in India.
Basically, the book is about a "Pattern Language" by which beautiful things happen. The hard part though is getting people to be ...
It is also possible that the scope of evangelists would need to be sufficient to convince people who matter. Some people who can make decisions might listen to someone with an Exotic-Sounding PhD from Berkeley. Others who matter might not. Just as an example, I think some politicians and wealthy powerful types may be more willing to listen to engineers than mathematicians or pure theoreticians. And a normal engineer might also carry more clout than someone from such exotica as silicon valley communities where people are into open re...
I think now you're talking more about desired qualities of a system than teachers, which might also be interesting in the other cases. In some technical sense probably it applies to the farmer, but human use of food is so constant and cyclical, it feels misapplied there. The doctor may be similar to a farmer in that regard, making money off the nature of humans to occasionally be ill.
However, the lawyer is most like what you are describing above, fully dependent on the system of conflicts for its sustenance, as the Dao De Jing states, "The more...
"Comes from external stumuli" in this case, or more accurately incorporates external information =/= brainwashing into slavery. To some extent what you're saying is built of correct sentences, but you're keeping things vague enough and unconnected enough to defend. Above you said, "subset of this scenario is a nightmarish one where humans are brainwashed by their mindless but articulate creations and serve them, kind of like the ancients served the rock idols they created. Enslaved by an LLM, what an irony."
Yes, I have changed my mind based on ...
"Cause Panic."
Outside of the typical drudgereport level "AI admits it wants to kill and eat people" type of headline, what do you expect?
My prediction, with medium confidence, is there won't be meaningful panic until people see it directly connected with job loss. There will be handwringing about deepfakes and politics, but unfortunately that is almost a lost cause since I can already make deepfakes on my own expensive GPU computer from 3 years ago with open source GANs. Anthropic and others will probably make statements about it (I hear the wo...
1"Brainwashing" is pretty vague and likely difficult. Hypnosis and LSD usually will not get you there, if I'm to believe what is declassified. It would need to have some way to set up incentives to get people to act, no? Or at least completely control my environment (and have the ability to administer the LSD and hypnosis?)
>There is no way for such a collective pretence to get started. (This is the refutation of p-zombies.)
It could have originally had coordination utility for the units, and thus been transmitted in the manner of culture and language.
One test might then be if feral children or dirt digger tribesman asserted their own individual consciousness (though I wonder if a language with "I" built into it could force one to backfill something in the space during on the spot instance that patterns involving the word "I" are used, which also could be happening with the LLMs).
They are most definitely two different things, though it is popular to conflate them. Innocence of Evil does not require naivete, only that you are pure of doing the evil.
And the purity distinction is important. Otherwise we will fall prey to the delusion that it was our goodness itself which betrayed us or that in order to be pure, we must be fools regarding some part of the Truth. Though it is popular to think, as you have pointed out in the sexual distinction above, that awareness of consequence necessarily begets heaviness or loss of ...
You are mostly describing Naivete.
Innocence is closest to purity, as it describes absence of evil. It is compatible with guile, to be "As innocent as a dove, and as shrewd as the serpent." To do so would describe cleverness, even craftiness in service of definite intentions, without any evil in your heart. A clear example might be deceiving someone doing human trafficking in order to save those being trafficked. Sometimes a razor's edge to walk, no doubt, but one that broaches not an epsilon of naivete (which could get someone killed in the above example of trafficking).
Can you tease apart those two traits, naivete and innocence?
I believe the leverage advice is very good, and people may not know how good it is or how broadly it really applies. Real-estate with 20% down amounts to a 5x leveraged investment (and one which is expensive to maintain). For about half a century it was a home-run for most people who did it, despite caveats. Since 2011, the volatility is higher than before, and I am not even confident in that as a hill to die on much more than NVDA.
Accelerated progress also means increased volatility / wider confidence bands, probably on everything.
We are also overloading the word "Child" here, which we may need to disambiguate at this point.
What you are saying applies broadly to a 7 year old, and less to a 16 year old. For the 16 year old, there's no longer 2 possible outcomes "succeed as a Salafi" or "fail as a Salafi." There is often the very real option to "Make your way towards something else." And the seeds of that could easily start (probably did!) in the 13 or 14 year old.
It's also neat that humans are kind of wired where the great questioning/rebellion tends to happen more...
I think that you are correct, policies that "everyone knows" aren't "real" tend to reduce the degree to which everyone takes other policies seriously. But I think a lot of the "unreal" policies are in place for reasons of liability, risk management, or other communication tool. Also, seldom are any policy actually absolute or meant to be absolute. Just ask your lawyer, nearly everything in life is negotiable.
What's more, speed limit policy is geared towards a complex set of goals, politically decided upon in a risk-managed, engineered way...
"The best way to get out of a local maximum that I've found is to incorporate elements of a different, but clearly functional, intellectual tradition."
I agree wholeheartedly with this being a good way (Not sure about "best"). The crux is "clearly functional" and "maxima" -- and as an adult, I can make pretty good judgments about this. I'm also likely to bake in some biases about this that could be wrong. And depending on what society you find yourself within, you might do the same.
If I understand you, you are basically asking to jump from...
"There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world,[...]"
The purpose of the questioning is to find out which objects are in that bucket, and which objects are in some other bucket.
If the child accepts what she is told about (A)There are large bodies of highly reliable knowledge in the world, and (B) This is one of them, then you might get many types of crazy.
TH;DT: The idea of firmly established ideas is unfortunately culturally and sub-culturally bound, at least to an extent. Which "firmly established truths" are currently being...
Related: I got two masters degrees, at midlife, after doing other stuff. I also moved back to the USA during that time and found it useful to learn a lot of little things I never needed to think about in Taiwan, like how to fix a car. So, having learned a handful of new skills in the past eight years or so, from car repairs to calculus, as a general heuristic I find doing something independently from beginning to end and fixing the problems along the way the first time teaches about 50% of the knowledge. 2-3 times gets to 75%. ...
I think OP is painting with a broad brush. However, he probably has a point that social attitudes end up shaping the experience itself. Similar to the above poster talking about age gaps or miscarriages.
A problem in your objection, as well as any rebuttal to it, is how would we separate social contagion from the data? It seems that if OP is right, we wouldn't have the data to say he's right or wrong. If he's wrong, the data wouldn't really show that or not either. Embedded social attitudes are a matter of the fish not knowing ...
As I think more about this, the LLM as a collaborator alone might have a major impact. Just off the top of my head, a kind of Rube Goldberg attack might be <redacted for info hazard>. Thinking about it in one's isolated mind, someone might never consider carrying something like that out. Again, I am trying to model the type of person who carries out a real attack, and I don't estimate that person having above-average levels of self confidence. I suspect the default is to doubt themselves enough to avoid acting in the same way ...
Solving for "A viable attack, maximum impact" given an exhaustive list of resources and constraints seems like precisely the sort of thing GPT-4-level AI can solve with aplomb when working hand in hand with a human operator. As the example of shooting a substation, humans could probably solve this in a workshop-style discussion with some Operations Research principles applied, but I assume the type of people wanting to do those things probably don't operate in such functional and organized ways. When they do, it seems to get very bad.
The LLM can easily sup...
So is the hypothetical Puce just otherwise Blue tribers who tolerate or welcome some amount of forbidden talk, media, ideas?
What would you call an educated leftist who has no objection at all to Alt-right or anti-vaxxers speaking freely on twitter? What about one who is actively bothered when those people get deplatformed or legally interfered with, even if it is something truly repugnant such as neonazis? I have read a few corners of leftist media that express these ideas. Is this Puce, Grey, or something else?
In MBTI terms, you may have an Se blindspot. Se, or "External Sensation" is just what is right in front of you, what you see. People with high Se tend to be pretty good at status symbols, both reading them and communicating in them (and they also often fall pray to "what you see is all there is" illusions/delusions, as well as "X resembles y enough that x=y, and I'm done with any need for further information.").
Se Blindspot can make people basically fail to grok social status cues at all, and "Your strongpoint is your weakpoint" applies here.
There's still a principle I feel needs addressed. An authority figure (or at least someone who is supposed to be my ally) seems to be turning up the heat, adding pressure, escalating, questioning my veracity, fishing around for lies. And in that situation, evasive, defensive (possibly offense as a defense) and justifying tactics could be a natural response for the innocent.
Simply put, how do you make useful distinctions within that?