All of RamblinDash's Comments + Replies

One of the most common forms of Whataboutism is of the form "You criticize X, but other people vaguely politically aligned with you failed to criticize Y." (assuming for argument that X and Y are different but similar wrongs)

 The problem with that is that the only possible sincere answers are necessarily unsatisfying, and it's hard to gauge their sincerity. Here's what I see as the basic possibilities.

• Y and X are equally bad, my allies are wrong about this [but what are you gonna do about it?]
• Y is bad but X is genuinely worse because of .... (ca

The problem with this argument is that it ignores a unique feature of AIs - their copiability. It takes ~20 years and O($300k) to spin up a new human worker. It takes ~20 minutes to spin up a new AI worker. 

So in the long run, for a human to economically do a task, they have to not just have some comparative advantage but have a comparative advantage that's large enough to cover the massive cost differential in "producing" a new one.

This actually analogizes more to engines. I would argue that a big factor in the near-total replacement of horses by eng... (read more)

This idea kind of rhymes with gain-of-function research in a way that makes me uncomfortable. "Let's intentionally create harmful things, but its OK because we are creating harmful things for the purpose of preventing the harm that would be caused by those things."

I'm not sure if I can formalize this into a logically-tight case against doing it, but it seems conceptually similar to X, and X is bad.

Just to make the math easy, let's suppose the gouging tax is 50%. 

The air purifiers problem seems like not a big problem? If they are normally "worth" $150 and you value having them at $300, you could post them up for sale at $450. Then, if someone really needs them, you get your $300, they get their air purifier, and $150 goes to disaster relief. This tax only prevents the trade if the buyers would buy them for $300 but not for $450, which limits the amount of deadweight loss here to a maximum of $149, rather than potentially unbounded deadweight loss under current policy.

Sorry

Many states have already passed something like this, which only takes effect once enough states sign on. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact

However, I think it's unlikely that this will get over the 270 hump anytime soon, because right now GOP-run states (correctly) perceive that the EC has a pro-GOP tilt (for now at least); and the swing states benefit a lot from swing status.

Those kinds of VC-run business can also often have other problems. For example, Aspen Dental was sued for deceptive marketing.

It's not true that you can't pay negative taxes on your betting market losses, at least if you are someone who uses prediction markets routinely. You are allowed to deduct your gross gambling losses from your gambling gains, and you only pay tax on the net gain. See https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-news/at-02-53.pdf.

Just to push back a little - I feel like these people do a valuable service for capitalism. If people in the reviews or in the press are criticizing a business for these things, that's an important channel of information for me as a consumer and it's hard to know how else I could apply that to my buying decisions without incurring the time and hassle cost of showing up and then leaving without buying anything.

I treat chatGPT as a vibes-ologist; it's good for answering questions about like which X is most popular or what do most people think about X. I agree it's less good for "X is true"

Well, you don't see them as much because they don't necessarily interact with the metaphorical pope(s)/cardinal(s)/etc. I'm just talking about all the thousands of people who have read the sequences and/or other foundational rationalist texts, interpreted them for themselves, and did their best to apply those lessons in their own lives. Many such people exist! They just don't live in the Bay Area, don't necessarily go to rationalist meetups, and might not be active LW posters. So the reason I don't have examples for you is precisely because Active in the R... (read more)

Footnotes are good in translated works. I read the 3-body trilogy translated into English, and it was very helpful to have notes from the translator explaining certain points of cultural context that a Chinese reader would be expected to be familiar with.

Well, "fish" is a statutorily defined term that clearly includes all invertebrates. What did you want the court to do, ignore the statutory text? Arguably, that outcome supports the notion that the courts are less likely to just ignore text limiting the kinds of harm that are cognizable, not more likely, as you seem to be arguing.

I have a hard time imagining a Court ruling that "Other grave harms to public safety and security that are of comparable severity" could embrace something so different-in-kind than the listed items.

I guess it depends on whether you are trying to maximize the amount of [exercise X] you do, or whether there's a fixed quantity of [exercise X] that you are trying to force yourself to do. If the latter, obviously it will take longer if you do it while playing Civ but that's not necessarily a problem.

Civ is famous for "just one more turn" - maybe you can hide whatever it is in between turns?

Just move the percent? Instead of "RFK Jr is very unlikely to win the presidency (0.001%)", say "RFK Jr is very unlikely (0.001%) to win the presidency"

I think this post is good but a distracting factual inaccuracy in it is that yeast are not bacteria.

If it did work, you might call it "immaculate contraception"!

This is equally applicable under normal law, under which property taxes already exist, they just tax both structures and land instead of just land.

For opinions that's right - for news stories about complaints being filed, they are sometimes not publicly available online, or the story might not have enough information to find them, e.g. what specific court they were filed in, the actual legal names of the parties, etc.

They also do this with court filings/rulings. The thing they do that's most annoying is that they'll have a link that looks like it should be to the filing/ruling, but when clicked it's just a link to another earlier news story on the same site, or even sometimes a link to the same page I'm already on!

It's something that kinda falls out of Attorney ethics rules, where a lot of duties attach to representation of a client. So we want to be very clear when we are and are not representing someone. In addition, under state ethics laws (I'm a state government lawyer), we are not authorized to provide legal advice to private parties.

I suppose it's related, but I think maybe I was thrown off by the parenthetical. I perceive it as fundamentally different from altruism. This form of 'love as being on the same team' is also about enjoying your loved ones' successes, seeing them learn and grow and triumph, even if you don't particularly give or protect anything in particular. Because when we're on the same team, their win is my win. 

In general, courts are not so stupid and the law is not so inflexible to ignore such an obvious fig leaf, if the NDA was otherwise enforceable. Query whether it is, but whether or not you just make your statement openly or whether you have a totally-fictional statement about totally-not-OpenAI would be unlikely to make a difference IMO.

*I don't represent you and this statement should not be taken as legal advice on any particular concrete scenario.

One argument that this post misses is that a significant chunk overall, and much of the most burdensome subset of this debt (which is not the same as the highest volume of the debt), will never be collected anyway, although it still makes the holders' lives worse. So the estimates of the costs of this policy are very inflated if they treat the forgiveness of unsecured debt as costing $1 for $1.

Still, I agree that just plain blanket forgiveness is bad policy. I don't think that's what was ever on the table tho? Forgiving a capped amount (I think $20,000 was... (read more)

So I guess I'm not sure what you mean by that. I think it might be easier to support what I'm saying in the negative. Some example of inauthenticity or un-openness might be:

• Consciously faking your personality (in a way that you wouldn't want to maintain as an essentially permanent change)
• Lying about what you want out of the relationship
• Pretending to like/dislike hobbies or interests that you actually strongly dislike/like

The problem with doing these things is that, to the extent that doing them was necessary to gain the relationship, you are now stuck with... (read more)

[M]aybe being yourself and open works for people who happen to already be relationship-compatible. People who are not would be worse off by trying to be themselves. I think I have been burned in the past a lot by that kind of advice, although my experience is too much of an anecdote to infer an average.

I think you are maybe using a different definition of "worse off." I would submit that a relationship that is maintainable only by being inauthentic and unopen is, in the long run, significantly worse than no relationship, both because of the experienc... (read more)

IDK, I think this comment warrants the level of karma. OP is proposing messing around with a drug class that kills thousands of people per year. Even only counting benzo overdoses that don't involve opioids, it kills ~1500 people per year. Source: https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overdose-death-rates (you can download the data from that page to see precise numbers).

It's not often that a forum comment could save a life!

Oh, I wasn't saying that student debt is variable interest, just making a point about debt and inflation in general.

I think people experience rising prices as inflation, but rising wages as a result of their own hard work. Thus, "inflation" feels bad, even if it actually benefits you. Also, wages are stickier than prices, so even if overall wages are rising your own personal wage might not rise smoothly along.

Also, if your debt is variable-interest, then inflation doesn't necessarily benefit you. It only benefits you if you have fixed-interest debt.

I feel like this comparison of the enforcement here with the TikTok ban is not directed at the actual primary concern about TikTok, which is content curation by its opaque algorithm, not data privacy per se.

By analogy, if a Soviet state-owned enterprise in 1980 wanted to purchase NBC, would/should we have allowed that? If your answer is "no," keeping in mind how many people get their news via TikTok, why would/should we allow what effectively seems to be a CCP-(owned or heavily influenced) company to control what content our people see?

I am not a mediator so maybe you have me beat, but it's not immediately clear why you would assume this

But don't the non-diseased copies not just need to generally meditate, but to do some special kind of meditation where they forget the affirmative evidence they have that they don't have the disease?

In this scenario, why are the non-disease-having copies participating? They are not in a state of ignorance, they know they don't have the disease.

Asteroid impacts are a prime candidate to stop global warming.

I dunno man, Randall Munroe thinks that they would cause global warming.

The nicest thing one can say about that arrangement is that it failed to start WW III

You say this like it's some kind of grudging acknowledgement, but it's actually the entire point of the structure and a Big F'n Deal. Recall that there was less than 25 years between WW1 and WW2. It's been almost 80 years without WW3, despite high tensions at various times. WW3 would have been catastrophic, and preventing it is a great accomplishment.

If that's what Quinn (comment OP) is saying then I think it's obviously wrong - people really do value the goods and services they access via the internet very highly. This leads me to believe that this is not what Quinn is saying.

What I (post author) am saying is people don't apply even a tiny fraction of the vibes that come with that high value to their actual ISP (or, analogously, airline, electric company etc).

I think the lesson of social desirability bias is that valuable services having lower status than they "ought" to is the system working as intended.

Can you elaborate? I don't understand your point because it's too compressed. I feel like I need ~3 more sentences here to get it.

Yes, my claim is that "The Comcast Problem" is the reason for hatred, as opposed a feeling more like "I really value the service but am annoyed by the customer service and pricing, so overall meh."

On a -5 to +5 scale, I'm saying they are often at like -5 when they really should be somewhere between -1 and +1.

Well, one additional factor the US has is that various veto points and power centers cycle on different time scales.

There would also be an incentive to introduce lots of meaningless elections between irrelevant (to you) alternatives in order to abstain and accrue more stored votes.

Could also be described as "There would also be an incentive to allow others to make decisions on issue that matter more to them than to you, in order to be more likely to get your way on an issue you care about."

Re-phrased that way, it's not clear to me that this is a bad thing. If they don't care about those other issues either, then you won't gain any stored votes on net relative to other voters.

Absolutely! I value your voice. But, and excuse me if this is a misread, your posts in this series read to me like you are still trying to convince yourself and/or him.

It reads like you are a sort of rationalist Martin Luther criticizing the Pope. But, like, there are already a lot of metaphorically-protestant rationalists.

I think I'm trying to make a different point than footnote 20?

It seems like you are taking me to be saying something like "You shouldn't care what EY thinks about this Trans issue because "Everybody Knows" not to take his statements on this seriously" - that's how I read FN20.

Whereas I think my point is much more general and really not specific to Trans at all - like why be so deeply invested in the contents of some one guy's mind, at all? On any issue?

EY wrote some great (book-like objects). Inspiring, even. Worldview changing. But, like, whatever his opi... (read more)

Maybe I just don't get it because I'm not part of the Berkeley Community, I just read the writing. But my immediate reaction to this is like, why does Zack care so much about what Eliezer (2024) does or does not think? Or even whether, these days, he is or is not a fraud?

Like if you thought what he wrote in 2007 was great, just listen to that? Many (all?) authors who write great books have also written worse books. Maybe Zack's opinion is falling a long way from wherever it was.

But perhaps he would be happier to adopt a more ecumenical non-Berkeley-ite sta... (read more)

One thing to further ponder is the extent to which systematic or repeated boundary violations can effectively amount to a dissolution. Analogous examples:

• Forcing someone to submit to multiple-times-daily injections, so far all of which have been harmless saline
• Constantly stealing objects from someone's house in a way that they don't feel like they can meaningfully accumulate personal property
• Entering a country with closed borders so frequently that its ability to enforce its immigration laws is effectively gummed up

(See this list of bar associations just for Massachusetts.)

Minor point but this is often misunderstood. These bar associations are essentially networking groups for lawyers. They are not required in order to practice. What's required to practice is bar admission which is different. There's also a federal bar admission, but that's only two, not dozens.

In a game where you play a higher number of shorter games, you can ideally have a handicap that adjusts after every game.  For example, in Super Smash Bros, if you turn handicap to "auto" then the stronger player starts with damage, which (in two player) goes up 10% every time they win, and down 10% every time they lose. It gets a little more complicated in 3+ player games, and I'm not sure the exact algorithm, but it works reasonably well. Maybe something to emulate in a game where handicaps can be reasonably granular?