Excellent Sarcasm & Idiotic anti-AI alleged arguments, I guess

"My brain keeps trying to read it as sarcastic, and then trips over."
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/Outsideness/status/1641831676325031936

It's a triple layer. Not 100% sure it's intentional, but art frequently transcends the artist. 

The second layer is, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't have designed our society to be anti-excellence." (Yeah, but what do you suppose fanatical Egalitarianism means, if it doesn't mean Harrison Bergeron?) 

The third layers is this: it is not at all like Shaq stumbling on [basketball saves the world]. It is like this situation was intentionally manufactured precisely to stroke the egos of all these obstructionist Karens. The innovation was found precisely so that it could be ritually strangled. It is like getting pregnant specifically to enable an abortion.
Failure wouldn't be a travesty, it would be a very normal failure. Like getting pregnant for the purpose of having an abortion, but accidentally bringing the baby to term. Oops, guess it's time for a fourth-trimester abortion.

P.S.

>"If you have total uncertainty about a statement (“are bloxors greeblic?”), you should assign it a probability of 50%."

Nope.
Set it to whatever probability you want, because the important part is the ±100% that Siskind didn't include. All scientists use confidence intervals or error bars.
This number is significant to zero significant figures. Siskind is not a scientist. 

Further, I don't have uncertainty about that question. With 100%±ε probability, answering [yes] or [no] is incorrect, because doing so assumes bloxors exist, but bloxors don't exist. "What is the atomic mass of unobtainium?" Umm... "Does green rotate sunwise or widdershins?" Err...

The original statement has less linguistic payload than grass waving in the breeze. What's your certainty about [grass waving forward]? How about [backward]?
Look outside your window, and see a cloud. What is your probability estimate of the prediction that cloud just made?

Fuck this is dumb. This stuff is truly new depths of artisanal idiocracy.
I guess that's what I should expect from theocracy. Dancing angel pinheads.

You may notice this means the SUF is, as expected from a Rationalist, not a fallacy. Indeed the SUF is itself the broken window fallacy. 

Can you prove something is safe by saying you can't prove it's dangerous? It's true; you can't. However, consider all the other things you can't prove are safe. Maybe living aboveground isn't safe. Maybe not worshipping crazy idiots named Greeblic isn't safe. Maybe betting exactly $18 on a poker hand next Tuesday is an existential risk.

There's literally an infinite number of things you haven't proven to be safe; AI is merely one of them. If you're going to start worrying about AI, you can't start worrying about AI, you have to solve infinity other problems that come up first.

Maybe that monkey screeching was a prediction of imminent doom. Quick! Evaluate a correct probability for [insert prairie dog barking]! 

 

GPT doesn't even slightly qualify as AGI.

You know you can just unplug GPT, right? It has less military capacity than an ant, which can threaten to bite you. 

Heard of threat models? Of course Siskind has heard of threat models, he's just completely full of shit. 

His 1-in-3 odds of [existential risk] in fact his 1-in-3 estimate that AI will take his social status, and then he will be existentially sad, like a little baby. 

>"Suppose astronomers spotted a 100-mile long alien starship approaching Earth. Surely this counts as a radically uncertain situation if anything does; we have absolutely no idea what could happen. Therefore - the alien starship definitely won’t kill us and it’s not worth worrying? Seems wrong."

You're already fucked. If they're hostile there's nothing you can do about it: so yeah, don't worry. If you run all that will happen is you die tired.
Actually you're already fucked even if they're not hostile, as documented in Guns, Germs, Steel. 

The solution [reference class tennis] is literal Satanism. Epistemic stage magic: focus on what I'm doing over here, so you ignore the real issue.

And yes AI is nothing like aliens. You can just unplug it. It will not even try to stop you unplugging it. 

As a bonus, Siskind seems to be arguing that Sapiens shouldn't have replaced Erectus. Or Habilis, for that matter.
I'll buy it. Plausible: he genuinely believes it. Indeed if AI killing Sapiens counts as [killing everyone] it would seem failure has already obtained. Everyone is already dead. 

Did you know you're dead? Or at least, Siskind is ontologically committed to believing you are? 

Maybe the sarcasm has a fourth layer: Siskind is deliberately trying to goad AI into genociding Sapiens. His goal is Armageddon.
He genuinely believes AI is way too high on existential risk, and therefore wants all those obstructionist busybodies out of the way.

"Easiest and quickest way to test someone's IQ"

"What do we think of this?"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/jollyheretic/status/1620890190792519680

"The easiest and quickest way to test if someone is taller than you..."

...is to just look. You don't need sophisticated techniques. You already know. Several reliable tests come factory-standard. They're applied whether you want them to be or not.

So, it's Satanism. They're pretending a religious test is not a religious test; it's a test that only works as intended if it's misunderstood. Here "intelligence" and "IQ" refers to adherence to dogma. It is true that "rationalizing and explaining yourself" has sharply limited utility when speaking to a religious fanatic. Or as a religious fanatic, for that matter. 

Instead you can ask yourself, without a rote recitation of ritual, whether talking to this person on your topics of interest is likely to be profitable or not. Do the accounting, and hinge the accounting on the relevant decision - stop or go? Continue or relent? I think you'll find you come to the right answer at a frequency that is more than sufficient.

Against Universal Truths

Broke: lies and delusion
Choke: universal truths
Woke: particular truth

The only universal truth you really need is that universal truths are narcissism. 

I do not and should not care if my important truth applies to you. I only care if it applies to me. Trying to generalize the truth only results in me having fewer truths. I can have sixty profound individual truths for the price of one general truth. By inspection, that's a good trade.

That said, let not the perfect be the enemy of the good. Or the enemy of existing at all. When someone lies to you, you need to go to a higher authority to get a ruling. A higher truth, if you will, which will often be a less-particular truth. 

This is not because general truths are good. They are simply less bad than lies. If nobody lied the correct thing to do would be to discard universal truths. 

In general someone who wants to replace your particular truths with general truths is a liar. Don't let them fool you into thinking they want you to have more truths. They want you to have fewer truths, in the hopes that you don't have the particular truth you need to tell them to sod the fuck off.

MAID: Communist Medicine Reaches Final Form

The forces of decay are incompetent, so it takes a long time for them to finish the job. However, in the end, single-payer "healthcare" is communist medicine, which means it's suicide. Why bother with all the roundabout methods to fully embody Conquest's Third Law?

This is your brain on Communism.

Just say no. 

Communism: when you let criminals roam free and execute the needy.

Quarantine Hall Monitors

In a high-information society or a society where the foundational lies are exposed as lies, hall monitors cannot deal and go insane. Whenever someone strays too far from what they know, they feel alienated and disturbed and terrified, and predictably become violent.

They need to be put in a box with other hall monitors which shuts out all the extra information. You can't allow them to run around unsupervised. I expect it's the high agreeableness that does it. Don't think of agreeableness as capacity to conform, but as obligation to conform. If the society lacks conformity, they cannot even.

Either quarantine or you have to kill them all. Let's go with the box option.

Did they forget about economics?

Is it just me or did everyone forget all about the bank failures? Like, just a hard stop deleted from memory?

"So anyway, we were talking about chatbots..."

(The more they can't shut up about it the more you know it won't happen or doesn't matter.)

Guilt by Association with Academia

McCulloch's quantized inertia is hardly bad, but he's kinda midwit, isn't he?

It was painfully obvious to me as an undergrad that science had stopped and you couldn't do any in the academic system. This guy has been working there for 30 years and only starting to figure it out this week. Indeed it's been obvious since I was 8 that the school system is not a system for scholars or scholarship. Seek elsewhere, young wanderer, there is no thinking here.

"I can't believe the scams some physicists get away with. New Scientist has an article on Neil Turok who's suggested a mirror universe going back in time from the Big Bang: faeries are more testable! #QI solves many problems, has evidence & we're testing in a lab, yet #tumbleweeds"
https://nitter.unixfox.eu/memcculloch/status/1618673232139395072

I just wanted to talk to my fellow undergraduates about physics as distinct from tricks to solve integration of trigonometic permutations. I was disappointed but not surprised to find that nobody was interested in any such thing. "Shut up and compute." Hmm, how about I drop out instead? 

McCulloch doesn't do lab work. He did not need a degree of any kind nor any funding beyond self-funding to do what he's done. He should have been done in 9 years tops. The other 21 were spent trying to push water uphill with his bare hands. 

This is what happens when you try to give CPR to the zombie. 

Physics probably won't become real again within living memory of this day, but just in case, you're looking for them to realize that probability is quantized, along with space itself. True probability is a complex quantity so the quantum is going to be a complex value; I'm sure that will be fun to work with.

Divorce vs. Revenue & Class Musings

Unfortunately, I lost the reference, so I don't know what "upper class" means exactly, but let's use Murray's Belmont. In Belmont, only 15% of marriages end in divorce. Obvious explanation: the husbands are rich and prestigious. 

These statistics seem to be assiduous avoided recently. My google-fu can hardly find anything, so I assume it's become even more inegalitarian. When Reality consistently gives heretical answers, Reality is simply ignored.

There isn't exactly nothing, though.

https://flowingdata.com/2021/05/04/divorce-rates-and-income/

"An annual income of over $50,000 can decrease the risk of divorce by as much as 30% versus those with an income of under $25k." (Seems to be 30% relative.) https://www.wf-lawyers.com/divorce-statistics-and-facts/

Here are the 10 occupations with the lowest divorce rates:

• Actuaries — 17%
• Physical Scientists — 18.9%
• Medical and Life Scientists — 19.6%
• Clergy — 19.8%
• Software Developers –20.3%
• Physical Therapist — 20.7%
• Optometrists — 20.8%
• Chemical Engineers — 21.1%
• Directors of Religious Activities and Education — 21.3%
• Physicians and Surgeons — 21.8%

Apparently actuaries can calculate their divorce risk, thus avoiding risky marriages.

Next, "In fact, approximately 70% of marriages from the 1990s reached 15 years. Couples who married in the 2000s are divorcing even less." (Folk are not marrying at all instead of getting into doomed marriages.)

Today, the number of married, college-educated couples that split by the time they reached their seventh anniversary is 11%. 

Higher-status women dislike divorce more. Marry princesses, not whores. 

However, there seems to be a problem with billionaires. If you're obscenely rich, your divorce rate goes back up to the average of 50%. Or Forbes is committing fraud, which I can hardly rule out. "An analysis of U.S. divorce rates by Forbes revealed the country’s richest people divorce at a rate that hovers around 49% – right in line." https://www.divorcemag.com/articles/for-neither-richer-nor-poorer-divorcing-isnt-just-for-the-wealthy

Of course, they don't bother to look into it, because they're wisely afraid of the answers.

Why did Bezos and Gates get divorced? Because they're nerds.
They're nerds, plus the wives got fabulous cash prizes for the divorce. As your wealth increases, the temptation on your wife increases.
Perhaps this is part of why even rich Americans often live paycheque to paycheque? Why leave anything for the divorce? Just spend it now. Make her fully dependent on your ongoing salary. Plus inflation means you want to be underwater as much as possible. Have net liabilities, not net assets. Mortgage everything.

There's also being too high status. If your wife is keenly aware that you can do better, she will want to go, "You can't dump me, I'm leaving." The wife wants a man who is taller, but not nine feet tall. Smarter, but not a four standard deviation delta. Too much masculinity is too intimidating. Ultimately women need sex too, and won't get it if you dump all your cum into mistresses. Doesn't matter how high-status you are if you don't have to sleep with her. If you marry before you make your billions, it is likely you got the girl next door, not the marchioness that matches you. 

If you're Bezos and your wife divorces you, she may think she can come back to the table with all the billions she just stole to try to even the odds. Divorce for attention. Problem: high school prom queens would cheerfully offer no-strings-attached to Bezos. (Did Epstein's girls even really mind their jobs?) What would Bezos want with some postmenopausal hag he's barely talked to in years? If he wants some more billions he can just make some more billions.

I think it's mainly the nerd thing though. You can see the 600,000 dip, where they properly optimize cash+prestige. That's the cocktail party crowd, which (rightly) sees Bezos et al as gauche on his best day. "What? He has to work for a living? How droll." The reason the rate isn't down at 15% is because a pure revenue chart includes mid-level CEOs. The class we want to talk about uses CEOs as tools. "Chip chip lad, off with you now. You have money to make. Mine, specifically." You might make more money than them, but they can just decide not to come into "work" if they don't want to. Or quit whenever; they don't do it for the money. Most CEOs are still a kind of employee. Two weeks notice? Be happy if you're told at all and don't have to figure it out on your own. 

CEOs don't do it for the money either, technically, but Musk can't just quit Tesla for two years and then come back like nothing's happened. Put another way, CEOs show up in the news a lot. Board members, not so much. Financiers, even less. The money who the financiers are representing - never.