morleytj

Wow, this is an incredibly detailed piece. Really in depth reporting and the kind of detailed investigation we need more of on important topics like this.

"Employees now call this moment “the Blip,” after an incident in the Marvel films in which characters disappear from existence and then return, unchanged, to a world profoundly altered by their absence."

This is a very small detail, but an instinctive grimace crosses my face at the thought of these sort of Marvel references and I'm not entirely sure why.

Yeah, some people can more than others.

The nature of memory is so cool, the idea that there are completely different systems governing the creation of wholesale "new" memories and the modification of existing concepts is fascinating to me because those things really do "feel" different in a qualitative sense, but having evidence that you're physically doing something different in those cases is really cool.

Why would adding more information and context be unnecessary? And why is that bad?

The extra information is that he is the canonical case which defined our clinical understanding of the condition. Not just a "single relevant article."

I pulled it up because I was familiar with this fact.

I thought maybe people would be curious to read about how we came to understand the condition and the history behind it, as well as any associated information. Forgive me for such a deep transgression as this assumption.

A very good point. For anyone not familiar with anterograde amnesia, the classical case is patient H.M. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Molaison), whose condition was researched by Brenda Milner.

There may be some demographic groups located between people who were young during the 1980s and people who are young during the 2020s, time periods which are 40 years apart.

This seems plausible. It would be shocking if these companies didn't have an automated testing suite which is recomputing these benchmarks on a regular basis, and uploading to a dashboard for supervision.

Given that they already pre-approved various language and marketing materials beforehand there's no real reason they couldn't just leave it lined up with a function call to go live once the key players make the call.

Could be, could also be situations where things are lined up to launch in the near future and then a mad dash happens upon receiving outside news of another launch happening.

I suppose coincidences happen too but that just seems too unlikely to believe honestly. Some sort of knowledge leakage does seem like the most likely reason.

Gas Town decimated by Claude bomb from orbit

The behind the scenes on deciding when to release these models has got to be pretty insanely stressful if they're coming out within 30 minutes-ish of each other.

Heritability is a pretty funky concept because it's contextual to a certain point in time, environment, and population, effectively.

An example I like is that if you measured the heritability of depression in 2015, and then you measured the heritability of depression in 2021, you would likely see changes due to environmental effects (namely, there's the pandemic/lockdowns and this could conceivably cause more people to experience depressive symptoms). Let's assume we make those measurements and the rate of depression did increase, and we could tie it causally to the pandemic or related events.

In that scenario, the heritability of depression would have decreased. I don't think anyone would argue there were massive genetic changes in that 6 year time period on a population scale, but the environment changed in a way that affected the population as a whole, so the proportion of the effect on the trait which is genetically explained decreased.

For something like lifespan in the above example, you can imagine that in a period of wartime, famine, or widespread disease the heritability would also decrease in many scenarios (if random chance is ending a lot of lives early, how long the tail of lifespan is influenced genetically is much less important).

Given that note, it's generally tricky to talk about whether heritability increases or decreases, but with more accurate estimates of how genetic predispositions form you could see the heritability of certain traits increase with the environment held stable, as there's certainly ones that may be underestimated or genetic factors that aren't currently accounted for in many traits.

*edit: I realized I never mentioned the other thing I wanted to mention writing this! since you mentioned what the percent heritability means here, I think the best way to think of it is just "the proportion of phenotypic variation for this trait in a measured population which is explained by genetic variation." So it's dependent on the amount of variation in several aspects (environmental, genetic, phenotypic).

Thank you for the reply. I get that feeling, I've felt it in smaller doses in other contexts. There's a sense of resignation there where you keep doing something that you know is hurting you when you feel like you don't know another option and just can't muster the fortitude to escape that cycle of guilt.

This is wild, what were the effects like for you? I imagine your eyes and hands would start to see physical effects from that level of use for such a consistent time.

What sort of social changes did you notice after that period of time?

I've never used TikTok, but the techniques they employ sounds seriously addictive.

https://tjmorley.com/

Is my personal site. I've only recently started doing some writing, I'd like to do more this year. I should probably add an RSS feed.

There's definitely debate over which specific scenarios tariffs could be beneficial, as I understand it, but the general theme is that any benefits are highly concentrated (one or two companies or industries will benefit) and the negatives are felt in a diffuse fashion(every consumer pays the tax). They are broadly protectionist and the ones that do exist usually are implemented for pretty specific reasons like the following:

1: A government wants to protect domestic industries over ones outside of the country by applying price increases to the foreign ones, with the idea being that the domestic industries just need to grow into being able to compete with the industries in other areas. This is called the infant industries argument. A central problem with this is that the industries will always benefit from the protectionist policy, and are unlikely to ever admit that they have "grown up" so to say. My general view on this is that groups will of course lobby to have benefits specific to their industry, and that there are probably scenarios where we would prefer to have things handled domestically rather than abroad, but I would generally want this to be highly targeted and time-gated(Once the industries are mature enough to compete, we wouldn't want to keep subsidizing them), and that other tools are probably more efficient for this purpose.

2: Some sort of national security argument, where production being cut off during war would be a serious concern. My general thought on this one is that if something is specifically important for national security, broad reaching taxes on all imports probably aren't as useful as targeted government interventions in those specific industries. The government can build whatever factories it wants or contract people to do specific things if it passes a law to do so. If we're worried that we need a domestic supply of beets(randomly selected example) and the government is willing to produce them at a loss for national security reasons, they should probably just do that rather than tax imports of coffee, chocolate, bananas, beets, beef, and cars in order to encourage domestic production of beets. The broad spectrum nature of across the board tariffs doesn't specifically protect any given industry, unless the specific protection desired is "nothing should be imported, only ever produced domestically."

3: Historically speaking tariffs were a major source of government revenue. There was no income tax in the very early US (and this was the case in many places), and tariffs were seen as an efficient way to raise a lot of money for the government. At the time it was also something that was a lot easier to measure than things like property value, sales, or individual income, because all the goods had to come in through a port. Pretty easy to check the majority of the things coming in, compared to other taxation methods. A major argument in the time period was actually that the government was making too much revenue, such that it was constricting the growth of the private economy! A huge debate in the 1880s and 1890s was on how the share of government revenue could be lowered, and the growth of the economy could be encouraged. Republicans argued that implementing more tariffs would actually reduce imports and lead to lower revenues, which was the stated goal of the McKinley tariffs.

The general reason some people oppose tariffs overall is that they represent an approach to economic growth based on zero-sum thinking, i.e. an idea that if another country experiences economic growth, ours must suffer economic decline. There tends to be more support from many people behind the idea that international trade allows multiple economies to grow in tandem, as I understand it, but I'm definitely not an expert in this stuff, haha. I just find the historical aspect interesting.

On your second point, describing it as a major export economy in the period I describe is maybe not capturing the scenario, because we were in the middle of a major change in manufacturing. We were major importers of manufactured goods in the preceding time period, and we exported agricultural goods! The period from 1890 to 1910 roughly(depending on when you draw the cutoff) is when the US mainly started exporting manufactured goods more than importing them, and it was a massive transition. The period we're talking about is probably best understood as when we were in the process of industrializing more.

It's fair to point out that the economy was pretty different at the time, but it was different in a bigger way.

For the US, it's not too out of the norm historically speaking. Up until relatively recently tariffs were very popular in the US despite the clear understanding by academics that they were incredibly damaging to the economy. Political movements based around protectionist economic arguments have a long history in the US.

For an example, take a look at the 1888 US presidential election, which largely revolved around tariffs. Grover Cleveland lost re-election due to being part of the pro-business wing of the Democrats, and he came to the conclusion that tariffs were a negative to the economy overall, while his opponents were strongly protectionist. After McKinley's Republicans won the election on a protectionist platform, he instituted the McKinley tariffs (average import duties of around ~50%), which were devastating to the economy despite being extremely popular with the nation in the election. It led to massive price increases which led to the re-election of Grover Cleveland in 1892 (only other non-consecutive term president aside from Trump). Despite expert opinion being fairly solidified against tariffs even at the time, the idea of "protecting American business" and "punishing other countries for their unequal trade deficits with the US" was pretty popular with specific interest groups!

Parts of this sound rather familiar, do they not? I would then argue that it points to a cultural element, out of the two options of a failure of education or a culture of rejecting it. History certainly rhymes on this point.

If advertising is no longer financially rewarding, is there not an argument that labor could transition into a different sector of the economy?

Companies based around advertising would die, yes, but they only exist in the first place because of how lucrative the activity is. Nobody is sitting around dreaming of how they could sell ads better than anyone else while not thinking of the financial compensation. At least I hope they aren't.

If someone was saying "many people have jobs in running offshore internet sports betting companies, if we put regulations on offshore internet sports betting, it would remove jobs" wouldn't the natural question be whether those industries are actually productive to have people employed in, or if it's a harmful industry overall? Generally in my view its somewhat sad that the system as a whole optimizes for advertising work rather than orienting in a way that everyone could be putting their work towards something they see as more fulfilling.

There is certainly more need for product discoverability broadly than something like online gambling, but I think the more relevant conversation is if the current advertising model is more like a local minima preventing progress towards a more economically viable method of handling product discoverability.

Currently I think it is difficult to argue that advertising in its most visible forms have any serious benefit to people looking to obtain a service.

How often does an actual random advertisement shown on a billboard or a preroll youtube ad actually lead to a quality product? I think it is fairly common for people who are acquiring the best versions of things to do so primarily through research in forums or reviews, which is coming from the user looking from the product, rather than the product forcing itself into the mind of a given user to convince them to consume it.

The reason it pays for that is through redistribution though, right? If they weren't receiving a monetary benefit from advertising, they wouldn't run them, and the monetary benefit needs to be larger than the cost to fund those things, otherwise it wouldn't be cost-efficient to run it.

By definition it shows an issue where we have a process that tricks human minds into thinking they aren't paying for something, when as a collective, we pay more for a worse service than we would have if it existed in a alternate framework.

It's incredibly costly, and I think it's also incredibly costly in difficult to measure ways. The main method that the average American (read as: not incredibly wealthy person who has lawyers retained) uses to deal with the early stages of this pipeline is engaging in interminably long phone calls, going back and forth between multiple stakeholders, and trying to negotiate as to what actually needs to be paid or done individually. The incentives are aligned for various members of this process to make it a complicated and frustrating experience for customers, because they often benefit from increasing friction for the insured party. I think if you measured working hours lost or impacted by this it would be startlingly high.

Am I that old already? I just turned 29 a few months ago.

This is a thing I think about often.

I think people have a mistaken view of what makes some form of storytelling interesting. Perhaps this is my own bias, but something could be incredibly technically proficient or realistic and I could find it utterly uninteresting. This is because the interesting part is in what is unique about the perspective of the people creating it and ideas they want to express, in relation to their own viewpoint and background.

Like you pointed out, many famous and widely enjoyed pieces of media are extremely simple in their portrayal.

I think reading does force more long term focus, even if it's marginal for certain books. Certainly moreso than scrolling TikTok.

My personal process of grappling with this led to a focus on agency and intentionality when defining the difference.

Scrolling TikTok, much as scrolling Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or YouTube's recommendations would be, is an entirely passive activity. You sit back and you allow the Content to be fed to you.

Reading a book requires at least a bare minimum of selecting a book to read, choosing to finish that book, and intentionally choosing at any given time to spend your time reading that particular book. Similar things can be said for selecting movies. The important part in my mind is that you chose it, rather than letting someone or something else pick what they think you'll like.

The process of picking things yourself allows you to develop taste and understand what you like and dislike, mentally offloading that to someone or something else removes the opportunity to develop that capability.

I think there's arguments to be made against this view: how can you decide what to read or watch without getting recommendations or opinions? If you only engage with popular media isn't it just a slower process of the same issue?

But I do believe there is a fundamental difference between passivity and active evaluation of engagement as mental processes, and it's the exact reason why it is harder to do than scrolling is.

The democratization of storytelling is probably the best argument in favor, I'd agree. Thank you for the response!

I do find the actual generation of video very cool as a technical process. I would also say that I can find a lot of things cool or interesting that I think are also probably deleterious to society on the whole, and I worry about the possibility of slop feeds that are optimized to be as addictive as possible, and this seems like another step in that direction. Hopefully it won't be, but definitely something that worries me.

Certainly, and that is the more pessimistic view that I have, that this is being developed with a view to introduce product sponsorships and advertisements.

I mainly am curious if anyone has the view that there is broader benefit to the development of this, after all, wasn't that the entire mission statement of OpenAI?

Quoting from their announcement on their site:

OpenAI is a non-profit artificial intelligence research company. Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.

This feels like something constrained by the need to generate a financial return, and not something primarily focused on understanding physics and world models, to be blunt.

source: https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai/

You're right that the societal cost is very different. I hadn't thought about people doing the stupid things on video, I think personally I focus on the effects of the consumption moreso.

Personally I think the problem with TikTok is largely based in hyperoptimized content specialized to your interest shaping your worldview and isolating your perspective of the world from others, as well as probably being pretty bad for the ability to maintain attention and engage with long form narratives and ideas. I don't really think TikTok is unique here, other than that it's the best in the game at doing it and keeping people's attention.

But overall I suppose I just see something like this as potentially worse in those regards, but maybe I'm overly pessimistic.

Not to be a downer, but even as someone very optimistic about technology and AI generally, "TikTok but AI" sounds like a societally terrible thing to try and create.

What's the benefit of this? Curious if anyone has a solid viewpoint steelmanning any positives they can think of.

Is it? I thought it was overtaken by the RAV4 a while back.