walkhour

What books in particular would you recommend?

This argument gives a 35% chance of AI "taking over" (granted this does not mean extinction) this century: https://www.foxy-scout.com/wwotf-review/#underestimating-ris.... The argument consists of 6 steps, assigning probabilities to each step, and multiplying the probabilities.

The US military budget is 12% of the total.

I want affordable housing. Affordable healthcare. High speed rail. Better zoning laws. New subway lines.

Are you saying we only need 12% of the budget to fix these things? Note that coincidentally medicare is already accounting for ~12% of the total.

Say the military budget goes to zero (which it can't), and we spend half of that on medicare (it would be 18%). Will it fix the problem?

I think the problem is much deeper than wasting this 12%.

This is just the beginning and we don't know what will happen. Some people will say creative destruction is happening and people will find other jobs. They may equate this to the horse drivers finding other jobs at the beginning of the XXth century.

The truth is we don't know. People that will lose their jobs may find other jobs or not. Maybe it's harder to reinvent oneself now. Maybe a lot of people will truly suffer because of AI.

I find very hard to know with certainty what will happen, who will remain unharmed, and who will struggle but make it through, but change is coming.

Germany was especially vulnerable to the withdrawal of Russian natural gas supplies—the country used a disproportionate amount of natural gas for its heavy industry and gas-powered home heating systems, and in 2021, 55% of German natural gas consumption came from Russia

So much reliance on a potential enemy was a huge mistake. Germany should've foreseen that in the span of say 40 years it was likely there would be a major conflict with Russia.

All prediction markets were estimating at fairly high this possibility and the fact that Germany didn't realize this and course-corrected is surprising to say the least.

found the digital keys to his crypto fortune hidden in a basement floor safe and a popcorn tin in the bathroom.

Apparently he didn't voluntarily give away he's secrets, they were found around his place.

Quinney should be entitled to compensation from the state. It isn’t immediately clear what the final number will be but it will stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

Hundreds of thousands for eight years in jail, decades of angst, and a broken family ...

The fact that bureaucrats err on side of minimizing deaths caused by experiments is just a consequence of deaths being caused by experiments being unequivocally trivial to prove.

Meanwhile finding out the number of deaths caused by extra caution and delaying the experiment requires a calculation, and then a very lengthy blog post to be communicated.

Bureaucrats don't care about the second kind of deaths because they can hardly be linked to their actions. Now the first kind of deaths are directly their responsibility. And guess what, they can be avoided with a flick of a pen.

No I don’t agree that heritability of IQ is well established

Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component ...

You have written both statements ...

Someone said a few posts ago housing can't be affordable and a good investment.

This is just madness, house prices are guaranteed to go up and affordability is likely to increase zero.

Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis

Sure, but this is not the claim I originally quoted. I was taking about heritability, and you're taking now about disparities between groups.

Nevertheless it seems you agree the heritability of IQ is well established, which you were denying originally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

Doesn't this author have a terrible reputation? And he's known for standing by disproven theories? I'm surprised you didn't find a better example.

How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:

Sorry, I haven't watched these 2 hours and 40 minutes, can I read the summary somewhere? Hopefully it's better than Nassim's article.

Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations

What is a peer reviewed summary? Is it like a meta-analysis? But honest questions: how much weight do you think this has? Are the citations supporting it or criticising it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations

Looks like an example of bad science that was caught and exposed? Why do you think this reflects badly on the rest of the research?

To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.

You are asking for consensus. Do you mean an ultra majority? There's no consensus even on whether climate change is real, only 97% of scientist think so. Could you give percentages of who supports what on the science of IQ.

Jobs may even be outsourced from the cities to cheaper areas in US. Not many countries allow firing at will, and apparently this is needed every ~10 years for 20% of the staff.

That article is largely a pseudoscientific swindle, and it has repeatedly been rebutted, please see https://archive.ph/PCvgk.

Overall I'd recommend not taking a single article and using it as something that can refute a whole science.

Most psychologists today believe that the supposed heritability was observed because of bias within the research.

This is the crux of your comment and its a huge statement. Do you have evidence supporting this claim?

Same reason animals living in darkness lose their sight. There's a cost to keeping the hardware, and no rewards.

A non biased article would've mentioned how much Bitcoin mining accounts for the total energy used in US. And that would've been compared to the energy used in other industries. Take videogames for example. Just that datum would've changed the whole narrative of the article. The article does mention something in passing about how other industries at least bring jobs. I guess that's a net positive then.

Were the authors aware of how tiny Bitcoin usage is and how much waste there is going around? Of course they were. Was this datum useful to the reader? Yes. Did the authors purposefully decide to exclude this datum because it didn't fit the narrative? Of course.

Just imagine your average reader, if at the end of the article they were told, that we can't even agree on whether Bitcoin mining consumes more power than Christmas lights. Apparently that was not the case using the 2008 Christmas lights usage, and we don't know now, because both sides of the argument get wildly different values.

Your average reader leaves the article thinking they know everything they need to know about Bitcoin: it's bad because it makes energy more expensive, and people have died, possibly because energy was expensive.

The factual claims are accurate. The implications are not. Only one side of the story is told. You can outright lie with a stream of facts, and that's the approach of hit pieces like this.

I said cold blooded because the authors are aware of how they mislead, and do it nevertheless, because they have an agenda, otherwise an article can't be this biased.

Simply a cold blooded, profoundly biased, partisan piece of the most outrageous propaganda on Bitcoin.

By the end of Feb. 14, 2021, nearly 40 people had died, some from the freezing cold.

And you know what? These deaths may not have happened if it wasn't because of Bitcoin.

I look forward to the NYTimes' take on the Christmas lights. Maybe they can somehow let the reader infer someone has died because they made electricity more expensive.

The drop in attendance is not because schools are under funded, or the staff is burnt. It's pretty clear the biggest changes that have happened in US schools in the last years.

We also don't have examples of one of the two contemplated options, we haven't seen a technology that has destroyed the world either.

If you don’t believe in crazy science fiction scenarios like these, fine. But then why are you so sure that it’s crucial to “win” the AI “race”?

The whole point of the article is that either AI is not that big of a deal and like many other technologies (e.g. electricity, cars, ... ), or it's so revolutionary that's it's so hard to align that we're doomed.

Well, can't it be something else? Can't it be something very safe which gives a country a 200 year head start?

AI is going to very early optimize this use case. I fear for the Dr's job because I can't see what many of them will be needed for.

Such a long post and you still haven't proven high car insurance costs are a root cause of poverty.

This is the only thing that matters, not whether you personally find something bizarre or not or the non sequitur about young people and different areas in UK.

I don't accept that dichotomy despite I see value in the argument. Since the invention of nuclear bombs, how many countries without nuclear weapons have lost their sovereignty of those surrounding Russia?

Btw if it's either NATO or nuclear bombs, why didn't Finland get nuclear bombs in the last 60 years?

This is an excellent deal for Finland, whose sovereignty is protected.

Is it the same for the US? Do I want an attack against Finland to be considered an attack against the US? An attack against the US can unleash the end of humanity. I find very risky to leave this at the whims of some out of touch Russian dictator.

Your haven't quoted me, and your original statement is still false.

Please write precisely, write what you mean, so others don't have to realize you actually mean something else than what you wrote

Please quote the statement that I wrote that you think it's propaganda.

I'll do the same:

Russia has gone backwards for a year now.

This is false, Russia went backwards, and then went forwards. Maybe you meant to say "has gone backwards with respect to where it was last year". That is true.

Rusia has been inching forwards for months. That's just a fact. Propaganda has got to you.

Individuals like LeBron James do it — a self proclaimed human rights activist. Companies do it. I have yet to see a public entity who has a spine on this topic and is well respected.

It's obvious this is a business decision, not some conclusion of "exploring the cultural differences of different countries, and China has a more respectful culture".