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A stance against student debt cancellation doesn’t rely on the assumptions of any single ideology. Strong cases against student debt cancellation can be made based on the fundamental values of any section of the political compass. In no particular order, here are some arguments against student debt cancellation from the perspectives of many disparate ideologies.
Student debt cancellation is a massive subsidy to an already prosperous and privileged population. American college graduates have nearly double the income of high school graduates. African Americans are far underrepresented among degree holders compared to their overall population share.
Within the group of college graduates debt cancellation increases equity, but you can’t get around the fact that 72% of African Americans have no student debt because they never went to college....
I'd like to provide a qualitative counterpoint.
Aren't these arguments valid for almost all welfare programs provided by a first-world country to anyone but the base of the social pyramid? For one example, let's take retirement. All the tax money that goes into paying retirees to do nothing would be much better spent by helping victims of malaria etc. in 3rd world countries. If they weren't responsible enough to save during their working years to be able to live without working for the last 10 to 30 years of their lives, especially those from the lower midd...
Right. Thanks for putting the full context. Voluntary commitments refers to the WH commitments which are much narrower than the PF so I think my observation holds.
On AI and Jobs: How to Make AI Work With Us, Not Against Us With Daron Acemoglu
Here is Claude.ai's summary of Daron Acemoglu's main ideas from the podcast:
...
- Historically, major productivity improvements from new technologies haven't always translated into benefits for workers. It depends on how the technologies are used and who controls them.
- There are concerns that AI could further exacerbate inequality and create a "two-tiered society" if the benefits accrue mainly to a small group of capital owners and highly skilled workers. Widespread prosperity is not automatic.
- We should aim for "machine usefulness" - AI that augments and complements human capabilities - rather than just "machine intelligence" focused on automating human tasks. But the latter is easier to monetize.
- Achieving an AI future that benefits workers broadly will require
But I should add, I agree that 1-3 poses challenging political and coordination problems. Nobody assumes it will be easy, including Acemoglu. It's just another one in the row of hard political challenges posed by AI, along with the questions of "aligned with whom?", considering/accounting for people's voice past dysfunctional governments and political elites in general, etc.
I swear to never joke again sir
tl;dr: LessWrong released an album! Listen to it now on Spotify, YouTube, YouTube Music, or Apple Music.
On April 1st 2024, the LessWrong team released an album using the then-most-recent AI music generation systems. All the music is fully AI-generated, and the lyrics are adapted (mostly by humans) from LessWrong posts (or other writing LessWrongers might be familiar with).
Honestly, despite it starting out as an April fools joke, it's a really good album. We made probably 3,000-4,000 song generations to get the 15 we felt happy about, which I think works out to about 5-10 hours of work per song we used (including all the dead ends and things that never worked out).
The album is called I Have Been A Good Bing. I think it is a pretty...
When I was working on my AI music project (melodies.ai) a couple of years ago, I ended up focusing on creating catchy melodies for this reason. Even back then, voice singing software was already quite good, so I didn't see the need to do everything end-to-end. This approach is much more flexible for professional musicians, and I still think it's a better idea overall. We can describe images with text much more easily than music, but for professional use, AI-generated images still require fine-scale editing.
I've never done explicit timelines estimates before so nothing to compare to. But since it's a gut feeling anyway, I'm saying my gut feeling is lengthening.
Of course, Karpathy's post could be in the multimodal training data.