estearum

Ah sorry I think the confusion was mine! I thought we were already talking on the top-level post about the OAI/HuggingFace article. But we are not!

What?

The issue is that models are not well-controlled and are increasingly powerful.

Offense/defense/Chinese/American/OAI/HuggingFace – none of it matters. What matters is introducing highly capable intelligences that we - quite demonstrably – do not have effective positive control over.

One man's offensive penetration tool is another mans defensive tool.

seems to suggest the author believes there's some intrinsic equilibrium

Which,

1) is definitely not proven and not guaranteed (open to proofs otherwise, not pithy sayings that have zero normative effect on reality)

2) is apparently "supported by" further evidence of lack of effective control, which does not feel like equilibrium whatsoever

Well considering it was just a few months ago that OpenAI had the brilliant idea of connecting these systems to autonomously run an actual protein synthesis wetlab, very possibly all of us.

You're presenting further evidence of lack of effective control over these systems as... a mitigating factor...?

hmm almost like the exact race-to-the-bottom + arms-race dynamic all the doomers have been warning about

That is correct, I am defending neither the metric nor the overall policy goal. I'm just articulating why it is/was one.

Super interesting! Wasn't familiar, though I admit I didn't even think of ruling class Nigerians (which as you point out, the entire world sends their elite children here to be educated), and was thinking more of "actual" immigrants.

I think there's a big difference – on virtually very dimension – between royalty/heirs/elites getting sent to Harvard and back home as compared to someone who actually uproots their life in a one-shot chance to create a new home in America.

I'm not sure I'd characterize the former as a type of "hypocrisy" though. They're doing exactly what they set out to do, which is to go learn about what works elsewhere in the world and try to apply it back home. Sometimes for evil purposes and sometimes for pro-social ones.

I think it's probably more like an "incorrect" focal length for what you'd expect. And it's kind of hard to know what you'd expect because you don't typically have arbitrary spatial control over your point-of-view, so some POVs you're used to only seeing through cameras (or even certain types of cameras), while others you're mostly used to seeing through your own eyes.

I imagine all of this will get better though.

The theory behind it is that 1) economic growth generally accrues to land values so distributing land ownership is one way to distribute wealth and 2) people generally treat the things they own better than the things they rent or consume.

Incentivizing ownership is more closely aligned with objective (1) while owner-occupancy is more closely aligned with objective (2).

These don't work in the presence of capital's outsized returns though, which allows people who (for whatever reason) have access to more capital to recursively seize more of the growth in land values from objective (1) and therefore price out objective (2).

US-migrated Nigerians are driving Nigeria's local home ownership policy? Why? How?

It seems more likely what you're seeing is the kindred spirit between parochialists of all colors. And if only they could see through the "colors" part they'd realize they're not so different after all.

Really insightful comment. Couldn't agree more.

And many of these people really do need their Good Works on the force to do the saving, because God knows what they do to their wives and kids back home.

You are incorrect. The logic behind a separate incest exception is that the vast majority of incest is at least coercive/groomed if not forcible rape, but qualifying for the rape exception would require meeting the significant and probably-not-achievable standard of proving rape months after it happened. And in many incest cases that means specifically "proving rape" after years and years "intimate relations," given again that most incest cases are coerced/groomed for years or decades.

Contrast with the simple prenatal paternity test.

Wait you think there are so many exceptions for rape and incest because of the political power of the rape and incest lobby?

Holy fuck. Even for someone who has quickly earned a name for himself and his insane takes, this is a strong entry.

Bravo, ButlerianJihad!

Suspicious? The word is abusive. Of the law, of their uniform, of their fellow citizens.

Uhh FalcoNet doesn't photograph cars. It snoops telecom traffic. And no, SCOTUS has certainly not found that the government is allowed to just arbitrarily snoop telecom traffic.

1. I didn't say "the best we have." I said the best we could possibly have. There is no form of evidence generation, real or hypothetical, greater than the randomized controlled trial.

2. That doesn't necessarily make it always "sufficiently good evidence", but the beauty of statistics is we actually can know – quite precisely – whether a given evidence generation method gives us sufficient certainty. When an RCT is used as evidence for approval, it is not "well you did an RCT so I suppose it's fine." Approvals actually are not dependent whatsoever on the evidence generation method. The only thing that matters is whether you prove – to sufficient statistical certainty – the claims you are making. It's very hard to do this without RCTs (again being the greatest evidence generation form that could exist), which is why they tend to be the default. But you can run an RCT that fails to produce certainty, and your drug application will be denied. You can also get approval based on a non-RCT (but again it's hard to do because statistics).

We've had this discussion before and the crux of the issue is that you do not understand statistics while the people who design, run, and evaluate clinical trials do. I highly recommend taking a statistics course or four.

If you have a fine of $100 for a widespread practice that costs $1,000 to collect, the state isn't going to magically allocate resource to applying it.

Seems empirically false given e.g. the immense investment we make in counter-drug enforcement.

I think you're missing group 3, which is the "assume bad faith and/or bad outcome from any possible change to anything, and especially changes to open source projects that can be interpreted as exogenous, e.g. from an acquirer, and especially if that acquirer is a gigantic commercial entity."

There are not nearly enough disenfranchised Bun-on-Zig contributors to make a dent in this conversation. There are lots of Group 3s in every similar convo, for any combination of technology, project, and acquirer you can name.

1. The point of laws is not to turn a profit on their enforcement

2. The burden of proof/right to defense/notifications etc are all quite a lot easier for licensed entities like real estate brokers – that's kind of the entire point of licensure

Given that this would be the first ever law with any degree of ambiguity ever created, we should create some type of like... room... maybe call it a "court"... where people could "judge" whether a person fell on the allowable or disallowable end of the spectrum

It's a groundbreaking idea but it might work. And who knows, maybe it's an innovation we could apply to other areas of law in case they also ever need to interact with any ambiguity (which hasn't happened yet, of course).

What?

Is your claim that every photo will be labeled as AI-modified, or that people won't label AI-modified images? If the latter, just penalize the listing agents. Trivial.

The entire issue is that the platforms are already inundated with misleading, unlabeled AI-modified images.

Also cracks me up that, for this person, wokeness is what ruined... [ checks notes ] The Devil Wears Prada 2...

The grievances know no bounds

Drugs are approved for the specific uses based on extremely high-quality evidence. That evidence balances the benefits against the detectable downsides/costs/side-effects. Those downsides are also on the label.

That's almost entirely generated by the highest quality evidence generation system we could possibly have, which is RCTs. And no, pharma reps actually aren't allowed to encourage (or even talk about) off-label uses of drugs.

I get the sense that you don't know much about this space.

Yeah I work in clinical trials so I'm very comfortable with all the caveats the need to be applied to correlative studies like these.

Which also answers your other question of why doctors don't recommend it: we don't actually know that it does this.

As for the rest of the ramble, you (or I) definitely don't know hardly anything that hasn't been established in clinical trials. Certainly can't just vibes-based assess a label and its completeness. It's really, really hard to know things.

The precise wording as far as safety is: "we have no substantive or high-quality evidence that the drug is unsafe."

The reason people can't save is almost entirely due to the cost of rent/mortgage, which is overwhelmingly driven by the cost of land, especially since the cost of land is modulated directly by the local wages (so there's no such thing as high-income, low-cost areas).

Has nothing to do with "the biggest corporations" reaping "the biggest profits". The largest companies that sell basic needs to Americans make like 10% overall profit.

Why?

The first paper shows no evidence of any effect from Tylenol...? But yeah seems like lots of support for the ibuprofen protective effect, interestingly.

Strongly disagree. Google (and Apple) need only be near the frontier. Their incredible distribution and integration will propel them far beyond the next marginal billion dollar benchmarkmaxxing.

1. Voluntary transactions (even if high-margin for one side) is not "robbery"

2. None of the examples GP listed has anything to do with high corporate profits