wycs

Nope. Seems I was wrong.

Yes. False memory on my part it seems. I was very clearly wrong. The current SAT is clearly selective enough for my very popular scheme.

My point was just there are obvious ways to prevent bribery. And considering the amount we burn on higher education, spending much more on tests and verification does seem like a much much better use of money.

A perfect score on the modern SAT is not very impressive. The bar has been lowered considerably in the last 40 years.

[edit: seems I was very clearly wrong about this]

Make the SAT so difficult that on average 1 person gets a perfect score each year. Then do not allow any other criteria for admission.

To prevent bribery randomly sample 1% for a retest under much stricter security.

If you must, lower standards for protected classes to even out demographics.

Rich people can afford to burn their children’s childhood on the enrichment activities and “volunteer” work Harvard requires.

Standardized testing is by far the most fair way to do this. SAT prep is not that effective and besides SAT prep is now available online for free.

If regulators do this it will be to protect a crooked accreditation monopoly from their well-deserved demise.

These claims are certainly plausible to me, but they are by no means obvious. (For reference, I'm a postdoc who specializes in machine learning.)

I don't think I disagree very much with you then.

People thought the same thing about nuclear energy. A popular quote from the 50s was "energy too cheap to meter." Yet here we are in a world were nuclear energy exists but unforeseen factors like hardware costs cause the costs to be much more than optimists expected.

In worlds where this is true, OpenAI does not matter. So I don't really mind if they make a profit.

Or to put it another way, comparative advantage dulls the claws of capitalism such that it tends to make most people better off. Comparative advantage is much, much more powerful than most people think. But nonetheless, in a world where software can do all economically-relevant tasks, then comparative advantage breaks, at least for human workers and the Luddite fallacy becomes a non-fallacy. At this point, we have to start looking at evolutionary dynamics instead of economic ones. An unaligned AI is likely to win in such a situation. Let's call this scenerio B.

OpenAI has defined the point at which they become redistributive in the low hundreds of billions. In worlds where they are worth less than hundreds of billions (scenerio A, which is broadly what you describe above) they are not threatening so I don't care - they will help the world as most capitalist enterprises tend to, and most likely offer more good than the externalities they impose. And as in scenerio A, they will not have created cheap software that is capable of replacing all human capital, comparative advantage will work its magic.

In worlds where they are worth more, scenerio B, they have defined a plan to become explicitly redistributive and compensate everyone else, who are exposed to the extreme potential risks of AI, with a fair share of the extreme potential upsides. This seems very, very nice of them.

And should the extreme potentials be unrealizable then no problem.

This scheme allows them to leverage scenerio A in order to subsidize safety research for scenerio B. This seems to me like a really good thing, as it will allow them to compete with organizations, such as FaceBook and Baidu, that are run by people who think alignment research is unimportant.

AGI == software capable of any economically relevant task.

If you have AGI, it is very clear you could very quickly displace the entire economy, especially as inference is much cheaper than training: which implies there will be plenty of hardware available at the time AGI is created.

I don't see the problem. If they get AGI, it will create value much larger than 100 billion. Much larger than trillions to be honest. If they fail to create AGI, then who cares?

California has some of the worst municipal governments in the country. Shockingly poorly governed. Live a year in Singapore. Live a year in San Francisco. Your opinions on many things will change.

Hearing the performative compassion of San Francisco‘s politicians and the results: streets covered in human shit, crazed heroin zombies colonizing them, a pathetic protest culture pushing zoning legislation that extracts rents from everyone; one is reminded of this Kipling poem: http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm

Art is the production of veblen goods. Duchamp, in his genius, realized that though the ability to buy something painfully handcrafted does signal wealth, buying literal garbage is a much better display of wealth. Someone who can afford to buy a meticulously painted portrait, well, one may be will willing to make sacrifices for beauty. Someone able to spend millions on literal garbage - now that is a rich man.

Another aspect is photography allowed normal people access to create cheap reproductions of beautiful art. High-class people used to be able to distinguish themselves from the mob with beautiful things the mob couldn't afford.

But this does not work with cheap reproductions allowing one to signal the same taste.

In this way, there became an incentive for high-class people to acquire and inculcate a taste for art that is actively repulsive to distinguish themselves from those normal people who desire beautiful things.

Mostly this doesn't matter. They are only hurting themselves. But the effect of these incentives on public architecture has been pretty horrifying.

One supposes a man such as him would be able to accept death with equanimity. This is backwards. As he was losing much more in death than most of us will; he was far more alive than most anyone has ever been.

Well, Von Neumann was likely the smartest man who ever lived.

People are entitled to build whatever they want on their property. As Silicon Valley is ruled by rent seekers who make building illegal, people have every right to complain.

Ideally a state without zoning laws or noncompetes. I can’t think of one.

Pure nicotine in the doses people take it is pretty safe. I really don’t think it is any worse than caffeine.

I sense this is a lost cause, but we can already predict ~10 percent of the variance in educational attainment with the genome alone.

Once we get data sets with millions of genomes tagged with their donors IQ, this number will rise. If we can predict, say, 60% of the variance in IQ (based on the genome alone) will you change you mind?

That is, what sort of data would change your mind?

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-018-0147-3

Have you considered the possibility that confounding variables exist? I have no doubt that coming from a family where your parents have received a good education makes it much more likely for you to personally also go on to get the same education for example.

Yes.

If you read the citations you will see this is based on twin adoption studies, which control for confounding variables almost perfectly.

I assure you, ever single objection you can think of off the top of your head has been raised and overcome.

The heritability of IQ is not a conclusion psychologists wanted to affirm. It is fact the field was forced to come to from the data, despite the ideological drifts of the last 50 years yearning (or in the case of Stephen Jay Gould outright falsifying data) for the opposite conclusion.

Harvard does not discriminate against Jews today. They have historically. Now they do the same to Asians. This, one supposes, must be an example of moral progress.

See Singapore for such a country.

You are just wrong:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritability_of_IQ

I know it is ideologically uncomfortable but this is a fact you will have to get used to. Cognitive genomics is coming. The undeniable is becoming laughable to deny.

When this is tried, it does not output ideologically-pleasing student demographics. Presumably because all objective tests of merit are hopelessly biased.

Caltech is such a school. And its population is largely largely Asian and Jewish, both demographics Harvard has a history of discriminating against.

I am sure Caltech’s administration is considered hopelessly reactionary, but their graduates have the highest number of Nobel prizes per capita. But again, what sort of merit does a Nobel prize prove? Look at the demographics of the winners.

Of course he was manufacturing them. He explicitly talks about the art of having an adventure in the book.

In fact, “futurism” is contributing nothing either.

Anyone who thinks China is not full of extremely talented software engineers does not know anything about China.

Monsters.

The general rule of cars is buy used, buy cheap and buy Japanese. A 6000 used Honda Fit will run forever with cheap maintenance. Spending more than 10000 really is not needed if you don’t care about impressing people. Though impressing people is often important and not necessarily a vice.

Once Honda and Toyota go electric, those things will last a century.

It’s almost like intellectual property is an absurd injustice.

Vaporizing nicotine is unlikely to be as harmful as smoking long term. Nicotine itself is only moderately addictive without the concomitant administration of MAIO inhibitors. However, the incentive structure being what it is I somehow doubt vape companies will be able to resist creating similar cocktails.

Moral hazard. Their welfare system removes the incentive to have children. Could be fixed by giving parents a cut of the tax revenue of their future children.