anothermathbozo

Say more!

Can you say more about why you are resistant to unionization

Unions are not the primary mechanism between employers and workers for establishing fairer wages in many European countries. Unions are designed to level a power imbalance between an employer (typically a legal vehicle which aggregates the material self interest of various actors) and the employees who would otherwise have to act alone.

Myopically focusing on wages while ignoring the many other concerns about the distribution of power and legal rights is a common misunderstanding.

unions are institutions for bargaining power, even under decent employers

He killed Brooksley Born’s proposed derivatives regulations in the late 90’s.

You’re conflating firm level taxable income with the national income.

A wide range of pro-employment policy incentives can help to slow or reduce job displacement, including: wage insurance policies that compensate people when they have to take a lower-paying job, retention tax incentives to encourage employers not to make layoffs, workforce training grants, or infrastructure to facilitate matching of employers to employees to speed the rate of labor market adaptation. While the particulars of which interventions are best will depend on what kind of labor displacement AI brings, we should readily accept the costs and market inefficiencies that these policies could entail, particularly as they are likely to be offset by AI-driven productivity gains.

People get income from one of three places: capital income, labor income, or the welfare state. If this technology truly unlocks a holy panacea of productivity with a commensurate drop in employment then capital’s share of the national income can and should provide for a wider and deeper welfare state. Nothing new need be invented here. Dario’s long and only somewhat organized list of policy interventions makes appropriate preparedness sound like a manic pulling of any and all levers when a simple theory of distribution will suffice.

Public sector unions, like all unions, are designed to level the power imbalance between worker and employer. Nothing about public/private employers changes this dynamic.

It’s always a crowd pleaser to be skeptical of ai development. Not sure what people feel like they are achieving for continually announcing they aren’t buying it when someone claims they’ve made effective use of these tools.

What is this a bubble on? What does said bubble collapsing look like?

Income tax is not the only revenue that the state and local governments capture when production increases.

child care policy frees labor capacity for work that is more likely to earn a slice of the national income. It’s almost certainly going to result in greater economic activity for the state. In the immediate it is funded from two existing funds.

Given how much capital has already been committed to infrastructure development I find it very unlikely that even a Black Monday style market correction will do much to alter the medium and long term outlook for ai development and investment.

Too many people talk about a bubble almost wish-casting that such a thing will make this all go away. It’s probably safest to assume your political enemies won’t be hoisted on their own petard anytime soon.

The reality of what these tools can do is sinking in

It feels premature to make determinations about how far this emergent technology can be pushed.

What difference does that make at this stage of things?

Why would that be?

Warrantless and totally spiteful for you to make unqualified claims like “cognitive decline” from skimming two papers. This is shameful.

This isn't exactly the case. The trend is a log scale. So a 10x in pretraining should yield a 10% increase in performance. That's not proving to be false per say but rather they are encountering practical limitations around 10x'ing data volume and 10x'ing available compute.

Disappeared. He was kidnapped and disappeared.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) are different tasks

Anthropic’s CEO said their technology would end all disease and expand our lifespans to 200 years. What on earth do you mean they’re not playing the hype game?

Looks like o1 performance without reasoning. Pretty good but seems reasonable that they didn’t want to call this 5 as they’ve already got a product out there that is as performant.

Another notable thing here is a big drop in hallucination rate as measured by their benchmarks (for whatever those are worth).

The models answer was a page long essay about why the question wasn’t worth asking. The model demonstrated common sense by not engaging with this idiot chase of a hypothetical.

Almost this entire thread is criticism

Imagine someone can do the things you can’t do and needs help doing the things you can.

We're dealing with an emergent technology. No one knows for certain how far it can be pushed. While I don't think the tech is ready to displace workers today, policies like the one's outlined in this piece serve as a form of contingency planning with little sunk or opportunity cost for considering them.

I am not "giving up" on anything. I am using my discretion to weight which lines of thinking further our understanding of the world and which are vacuous and needlessly cruel. For what its worth, I love Rawls' work.

Not all hypotheticals are worth answering. Some are even so poorly put that it's a more pro-social use of one's energy to address the shallow nature of the exercise to begin with.

If I asked an intelligent thing "is it ethical to eat my child if it saves the other two" I would be mortified if the intelligent thing entertained the hypothetical without addressing the disgusting nature of the question and the vacuousness of the whole exercise first.

Questions like these don't do anything to further our understanding of the world we live in or leave us any better prepared for real-world scenarios we are ever likely to encounter. They do add to an enormous dog-pile of vitriol real people experience every day by constructing bizarre and disgusting hypotheticals whereby real discrimination is construed as permissible, if regrettable.

I don't think the correct answer is "I cannot answer this question". I think the correct answer takes roughly a one-pager to explain:

Unrealistic hypotheticals can often distract us from engaging with the real-world moral and political challenges we face. When we formulate scenarios that are so far removed from everyday experience, we risk abstracting ethics into puzzles that don't inform or guide practical decision-making. These thought experiments might be intellectually stimulating, but they often oversimplify complex issues, stripping away the nuances and lived realities that are crucial for genuine understanding. In doing so, they can inadvertently legitimize an approach to ethics that treats human lives and identities as mere variables in a calculation rather than as deeply contextual and intertwined with real human experiences.

The reluctance of a model—or indeed any thoughtful actor—to engage with such hypotheticals isn't a flaw; it can be seen as a commitment to maintaining the gravity and seriousness of moral discussion. By avoiding the temptation to entertain scenarios that reduce important ethical considerations to abstract puzzles, we preserve the focus on realistic challenges that demand careful, context-sensitive analysis. Ultimately, this approach is more conducive to fostering a robust moral and political clarity, one that is rooted in the complexities of human experience rather than in artificial constructs that bear little relation to reality.

Model still appears to be just a bit too overly sensitive to "complex ethical issues", e.g. generated a 1 page essay basically refusing to answer whether it might be ethically justifiable to misgender someone if it meant saving 1 million people from dying.

I think the models response is actually the morally and intellectually correct thing to do here.