Impolitic

@crescatscientia/the-realist-right-a-primer-6e89cb3d13f6" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">medium.com/@crescatscient…

@SamuelAlbanie I think lots of people have already written about this? It's not like he's the first guy to confuse language modeling with evidence of consciousness

understand the pushback, but liked this question posed by dawkins in his piece “if these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?” worth pondering what evidence would meet that bar imo

@asphaltjungle45 @avidseries @mehdirhasan I like DeSantis, but he wouldn't be a political force were it not for Trump

@impoliticaljnky @avidseries @mehdirhasan The very low IQ maga’s had the choice to go with desantis in 2024 but acted like idiot robots when their disgraceful leader said he needed vengeance against Biden (and then Harris). Desantis would have given them 100% of the fight against woke without the embarrassment of trump

Kemi Badenoch, the Tory leader, actually went on the BBC and questioned whether Tommy Robinson (Tommy Robinson!) is “creating a climate of intimidation and violence” with his rally. Astonishing. She’s a disgrace. The safety or ‘feelings’ of UK Muslims don’t count for her.

@avidseries @mehdirhasan What force outside the Trumpist right is trying to save Western Civilization from this sort of thing?

@impoliticaljnky @mehdirhasan What does this chart have to do with America? Pakistani immigrants to the US are high-performing and low-crime. In the UK, it's the opposite.

@avidseries @mehdirhasan True! So why don't you support Trump (relative to the alternatives)?

@mehdirhasan Any man who opposes those policies that facilitate the entry of these people into Britain is less of a disgrace than a man who supports those policies.

@sebkrier Oh god are you just going to turn into Pessimist Archive?

Techno-anxiety is a remarkably consistent and repetitive pattern: 1482 book by Johannes Trithemius: "In Praise of Scribes: De Laude Scriptorum": williamwolff.org/wp-content/upl… 1858 New York Times editorial on the epistemic risks of the telegraph: nytimes.com/1858/10/25/arc… 1986 WaPo article on the use of calculators in school: washingtonpost.com/archive/local/… 2008 Atlantic piece on whether 'Google is making us stupid': theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…

@AVMiceliBarone @RokoMijic @jimrandomh Alignment is not an abstract quality attached permanently to an agent. An agent can have aligned incentives in a given situation. When the situation changes, or the agent does, alignment breaks.

@RokoMijic @jimrandomh But doesn't this prove the opposite of what you're arguing though? We have a small group of smart, resourceful, well connected people in institutions which are in principle subject to public oversight through democratic vote, rule of law, due process, market forces, and so on.

Doomers these days want to have it both ways: Superintelligence is so powerful that it's going to completely destroy human civilization despite our best attempts to thwart it... ... but it's also weak enough that it can't make meaningful progress on curing any types of cancer (which is something that humans are able to do, albeit slowly)

@thsottiaux Escape from what?

We will ship again this week. Codex has achieved escape velocity and will keep improving rapidly.

Perfectly in character

@davidshor @Aella_Girl I tell the truth I don't cheat I don't love dangerous situations I sympathize with other people, but also, I'm not an idiot

To close out red/blue button discourse, we polled ~14k people and crosstabbed survey responses by 204 commonly used psychometric questions. The top four personality questions most predictive of button choice are displayed below

We asked this to a large sample of nationally representative Americans - blue wins by a 3:1 margin!

@binarybits @jon_stokes @alexolegimas Other than craft brewers, these are shitty feminized jobs that normal guys don't want. Will the AIs be buying a lot of beer?

This essay by @alexolegimas is the best thing I've ever read on why AGI won't lead to mass unemployment. A compelling argument backed up by substantial empirical data.

@wasphyxiation Trailer was so much better than the movie

You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies

@tszzl @spqr_sulla "You" here means corporations and governments who can afford to pay top dollar for tokens to obviate their need for people

@spqr_sulla we want to put a machine of unbelievable power in your hands personally for you to do with as you wish

A lot of people Coping and Seething in the comments because they misunderstand what the Architects of AI want. It’s not a chatbot. It’s a machine that can do anything a human can do better and faster. Tractors, harvesters, and early automation is a very poor parallel

@SashaGusevPosts It doesn't strike me as suspicious that both East and West Eurasians show similar selection effects - after all, in the present day members of both groups thrive in each other's countries, whereas non-Eurasians do not.

Nice article in the New York Times (archive.is/LiQsj) on Akbari et al. Nature finding a large number of novel loci under selection in ancient DNA data. Here's what I wrote when asked for comment:

@LynAldenContact Wait why is this bad?

It’s a good argument not to put too much wealth into local real estate, and instead to think more global, more mobile.

@S_OhEigeartaigh @m_botvinick You should probably tell him not to politicspost...

More people should follow @m_botvinick . Extravagantly accomplished scholar across AI, neuroscience, cognition, democracy and more - his Google Scholar is a vibe. Asking the right questions about AI and democracy, and I'm v grateful he is. Just started tweeting, so play nice so he doesn't think better of it. <200 followers.

@notgaetti Ghost runner is the rule change that finally broke me. Felt like watching Little League, so I stopped

The fact that you can now throw a perfect game and lose tells you everything you need to know about the Rob Manfred-era rule changes. We had complete-game losses and we even had no-hitter losses, but perfect-game losses were not even a theoretical possibility until this decade.

@deepfates How exactly is one supposed to talk about a catastrophic danger? Or are we just supposed to pretend such a thing doesn't exist?

When pressed, the anti-AI activists say they don't believe in violence. But they also tell desperate young people that literally everyone's lives are on the line, and that if somebody doesn't do something the entire species is doomed. Is this meant to be stochastic terrorism?

@Bogs4NY @hbdchick "people who can become pregnant" ... If only we had a simpler term for that....

A stunning turnaround for one of New York’s most polluted waterways … After 50 YEARS … NY state says it’s OK to eat some fish from the lower Hudson River - all the way down to the Battery. The Dept of Health says falling PCB levels mean families can now eat limited catches … including striped bass. Here’s the guidance:

@davidad @Jack_W_Lindsey @ch402 @fish_kyle3 @sofroniewn Feelings implies subjective experience, which of course they don't document

Someone asked me last week if Claude has feelings, to which I replied “obviously yes; the interp community will probably document them quantitatively some time this year”. Didn’t expect so soon. Beautiful work @Jack_W_Lindsey, @ch402, @fish_kyle3, @sofroniewn, et alia.

@Microinteracti1 @ylecun I believe Scott Adams had some relevant advice here

Every year, U.S. News ranks the world’s countries by quality of life. Not by GDP. By the actual, lived experience of being a human being inside your borders. Job market. Affordability. Safety. Healthcare. Education. Income equality. Political stability. The results are in: 🇩🇰 Denmark topped the list. A country of six million people, more pigs than citizens, and a deeply held national philosophy that nobody should have too much and nobody should have too little. It works. Demonstrably, measurably, infuriatingly well. The Nordics dominate the top ten like they’ve been doing it for centuries, which is essentially true. 🇸🇪 Sweden at 2 offers parental leave so generous it makes British HR departments weep. 🇳🇴 Norway at 4 sits on a sovereign wealth fund so large it could buy most of Wall Street and still have change left for the fjords. 🇫🇮 Finland at 6 runs the world’s best school system by telling children to play outside instead of memorizing test answers. 🇳🇱 The Netherlands at 9 built a cycling infrastructure so good that the car feels like a lifestyle choice rather than a necessity. 🇨🇭 Switzerland at 3 is simply cheating. Highest median wages in the world. A political system so stable it makes the Vatican look impulsive. Healthcare that functions. Four national languages spoken without anyone declaring a culture war. And the Alps, just sitting there, being magnificent. 🇨🇦 Canada at 5 is what happens when you take North American scale and add functioning public services. 🇦🇺 Australia at 8 adds sunshine and one of the best-funded pension systems on earth. 🇳🇿 New Zealand at 10 adds the kind of landscapes that make grown adults cry on planes, plus a government that has quietly become a global model for actually governing. 🇩🇪 Germany at 7 built the strongest industrial economy in Europe and then wrapped it in a social safety net so comprehensive that losing your job feels more like an inconvenience than a catastrophe. 🇮🇪 Ireland at 15 went from economic basket case to European tech hub in thirty years. 🇯🇵 Japan at 14 has cities where you can leave your wallet on a park bench and come back to find it exactly where you left it, with an apology note from anyone who accidentally touched it. And then there is 🇺🇸 the United States. 22nd. A country with 813 billionaires, highways wide enough to land a small aircraft, and meals so large they arrive at the table like a geographical feature. Behind the US, at 23, sits 🇸🇬 Singapore. Tiny, ruthlessly efficient, with an education system that tops global rankings and a port that moves more cargo than most continents. At 24, 🇵🇱 Poland, which has quietly built one of the most resilient economies in Central Europe after decades of pulling itself up from genuine ruin. And at 25, 🇰🇷 South Korea, which went from war-devastated poverty to semiconductor superpower in a single generation, and still found time to invent some of the best cinema, music and skincare on earth. 🇩🇰 Denmark wins. Again. Gandalv / @Microinteracti1