lambdaphagy

I don’t think I understand your argument. If a wealth tax causes the wealthy to leave then you have even less tax revenue than before, right?

Given that no one understands how the mental relates to the physical in the first place, I have no idea how you would reach such a confident conclusion about the phenomenological status of 200k human neurons in a petri dish playing Doom?

China does not consider all lethal autonomous weapons system "unacceptable" even for use, let alone to develop, and the document you linked explains this very clearly. Here's what the document actually says, formatted slightly for clarity:

``` Basic characteristics of Unacceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems should include but not limited to the following:

- Firstly, lethality, meaning sufficient lethal payload (charge) and means.

- Secondly, autonomy, meaning absence of human intervention and control during the entire process of executing a task.

- Thirdly, impossibility for termination, meaning that once started, there is no way to terminate the operation.

- Fourthly, indiscriminate killing, meaning that the device will execute the mission of killing and maiming regardless of conditions, scenarios and targets.

- Fifthly, evolution, meaning that through interaction with the environment, the device can learn autonomously, expand its functions and capabilities in a degree exceeding human expectations.

Autonomous weapons systems with all of the five characteristics clearly have anti-human characteristics and significant humanitarian risks, and the international community could consider following the example of the Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons and work to reach a legal instrument to prohibit such weapons systems. ```

Charitably, you might say that China is worried about a nightmare scenario. Less charitably, you might say that the definition of an unacceptable weapon system is so tight that it does not describe anything that anyone would ever build, or would want to build. This posture would allow China to adopt the international posture of seeming to oppose autonomous weapons without actually de facto constraining themselves at all.

This, by contrast, is what China considers acceptable:

``` Acceptable Autonomous Weapons Systems could have a high degree of autonomy, but are always under human control. It means they can be used in a secure, credible, reliable and manageable manner, can be suspended by human beings at any time and comply with basic principles of international humanitarian law in military operations, such as distinction, proportionality and precaution. ```

So as long as the system has a killswitch (something that afaik absolutely no one is proposing to dispense with?), it's Acceptable.

Meanwhile, it would certainly seem that China's defense research universities are interested in developing this tech: https://thediplomat.com/2026/02/machines-in-the-alleyways-ch....

So, I did a bit of research with my internet access-- how do my findings square with your impressions?

I agree that the risk of an accidental strike was a huge problem with the theory of nuclear deterrence, but the question is: compared to what? In expectation or even in a 1st percentile scenario, was MAD worse than a world where the USSR is a unilateral nuclear power? For that matter, what would it have taken to get a stronger SALT treaty sooner?

I think you need to have people thinking through this stuff at a nuts-and-bolts level if you want to avoid getting dominated by a slightly less nice adversary, and so too with AI. Does a unilateral guarantee not to build autonomous killbots actually make anyone safer if China makes no such promise, or does that perversely put us at more risk?

I’d love to know that the “no killbots, come what may” strategy is sound, but it’s not clear that that’s a stable equilibrium.

The guy who authorized the Manhattan project:

- had four [!] terms, a move so anomalous it was subsequently patched by constitutional amendment

- threatened court-packing until SCOTUS backed down and stated rubber-stamping his agenda

- ruled entire industries by emergency decree in a way that contemporaries on the left and right compared to Mussolini

- interned 120k people without due process, on the basis of ethnicity

- turned a national party into a personal patronage system

- threatened to override the legislature if it didn’t start passing laws he liked

Not even saying any of this is even good or bad, clearly in the official history it was retroactively justified by victory in WWII. But it’s a bit rich to say that the bomb wasn’t developed under authoritarian conditions.

There is an extremely straightforward argument that WMDs are precisely what prevented the outbreak of direct warfare between major powers in the latter 20th. (Note that WWI by itself wasn’t sufficient to prevent WWII!)

You can take issue with that argument if you want but it’s unconvincing not to address it.

Say more?

I picked two random numbers between one and one million. The chances of it having seen that specific problem in its training set seem very low.

> For example, transformer-based language models can't reliably do multi-digit arithmetic because they have no number sense, only statistical patterns over digit tokens.

I asked Opus 4.6 to multiply 50,651 x 895,707. It immediately responded: 45,368,055,057. This was wrong, but very close (good to about 10^-5 relative error). I then asked it how it arrived at that answer, and whether it had used any tool calls. It said:

``` No, I didn't use any specialized tools — I just computed it directly. Though I should be honest: large multiplications done "in my head" like this are prone to error. Let me double-check by breaking it down: 50,651 × 895,707 = 50,651 × (900,000 - 4,293) = 50,651 × 900,000 - 50,651 × 4,293 First term: 50,651 × 900,000 = 45,585,900,000 Second term: 50,651 × 4,293

50,651 × 4,000 = 202,604,000 50,651 × 293 = 14,840,743 Total: 202,604,000 + 14,840,743 = 217,444,743

Result: 45,585,900,000 - 217,444,743 = 45,368,455,257 So my first answer was actually slightly off! The corrected answer is 45,368,455,257. I don't have a calculator tool available — I'm doing this arithmetically by decomposition. For mission-critical calculations, I'd recommend verifying with a calculator since I can make arithmetic errors on large numbers like this. ```

So I would rate OP's claim (which is supported by a paper from 2024) highly implausible. Opus 4.6 appears to be able to do multi-digit arithmetic formally, as well as give remarkably accurate estimates based on something like "number sense".

Hi!

I can’t speak for your friend, but as a former atheist who brcame a Christian (albeit a very mediocre one) I feel like I can see both sides of this so perhaps I can offer a perspective that might help you understand each other better.

When I was an atheist, I assumed that anyone who didn’t care for the kinds of jokes you mentioned was worried that God would zap them with a lightning bolt.

Now I see it a little differently: if you see something as being of great importance, then it simply feels off / wrong / weird / missing the point to treat it as if it’s of little or no importance. In a word, it feels cringe. If such a project holds no allure for you, then you’re not missing much by sitting it out.

Not to harsh on your sense of humor, but I hope it might help to understand your friend better.

> Rubio was promoting a conspiracy theory about what he has called the “censorship-industrial complex,” which alleges widespread collusion between the US government, tech companies, and civil society organizations to silence conservative voices

Is that a conspiracy theory in the sense of “some crazy low-status nonsense that no one should pay attention to”, or a conspiracy theory in the sense of “a theory about a private arrangement between multiple actors”?

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/zuckerberg-says-the-wh...

Inspiring to see women getting into the far weeds of the unicode technical standard.

The Know Nothing Party had nothing to do with anti-intellectualism per se. It was a secret anti-immigration party whose members were required to say they “knew nothing” of the group if asked.

Yeah, that's precisely what I'm objecting to-- smuggling in assumptions about the relationship between Sami and other Northern-European populations by using a term that implies that Scandinavians aren't native to Scandinavia, at least as much as any human population is native to anywhere.

In particular it obscures what is fundamental to the conflict, which is state/settled vs non-state/tribal, not one group being native to the land and the other being some sort of outside occupying force.

Referring to the Sami as "Indigenous" in contrast to the Scandinavian and Finnish peoples seems pretty tendentious. All three of these groups have been in Northern Europe for thousands of years.

Sorry, that came out as unnecessarily harsh on users when it was intended for Duolingo’s product department. I don’t mean to suggest that the amount of language learning is literally zero, just that whenever language learning is in tension with legible metrics, the latter tends to win out internally.

My impression of duolingo was strongly influenced by a former PM who said basically what OP said without any hint of ill will in their voice. Duolingo discovered that it was easier to reward-hack short term signals of language learning instead of scaffolding those signals into longterm language learning. Today it’s essentially Candy Crush for people who think they’re too smart for Candy Crush.

That’s not even a diss, it’s just The Way Of The World when you are directly rewarded for growth and retention and very indirectly for language learning.

Fascism and Ayn Rand's political philosophy are pretty different from each other, however you may feel about either one. Not everything you dislike is the same bad thing.

No culture treats men and women equally-- they differ in how they treat men and women differently. Just today in my progressive coastal startup, for example, there was a proposal to set up a dedicated ERG for the women employees. In a company where people are routinely pulling 60-80 hour weeks, it was considered a plausible priority to take time aside to especially ensure that the women were feeling comfortable.

Whether or not this proposal is a good idea is not even the point: the point is that it was considered plausible, and hence that not even coastal progressives actually think it desirable to treat men and women equally.

I'm not making any claims about what anyone can or can't handle. I'm simply observing that just about every mixed group ends up adopting female norms of communication. I'm not even saying that's necessarily a bad thing for a mixed group, I think it's to some extent natural and healthy in social settings. In fact taboos that proscribe the ways men may speak in the presence of women are also quite common cross-culturally. But the fact that there is a difference remains.

Japanese tea gardens are pretty artificial and manicured, and they’re awesome. It’s great to have undespoiled natural beauty, and it’s also cool to see what people can do with a landscape.

Practically every culture on earth (except ours as of 10 minutes ago) had some sort of place for single-sex bonding, which suggests there’s something important to it. Traditional cultures aren’t incel, to the contrary it’s only in modern cultures that mass-scale failures of relations between the sexes seem to arise.

As for bjj, the scenario of the instructor dating a female student and breaking up the gym in the ensuing fallout is a well-deserved trope by now. There are women at my gym and you can make it work if everyone’s bending over backwards to be professional, but it’s obviously Different.

I wasn’t the one referring to behaviors.

But I bet a social club that rigorously enforced the rules of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood would be more popular than anything goes.

What's classist about having behavioral rules?

When I visited an Opus Dei house once for a philosophy lecture they were discussing Plato, the Timaeus in particular.

> People need prompting and guidance on the parts that feel uncomfortable, not the parts that dovetail neatly with their intuitions.

I totally agree in general. But I wouldn't say that the issues with Francis's style amounted to knee-jerk discomfort without concrete objections. The concrete objection is that many of his comments had to be read in a kind of maximally un-Gricean way to be squared with Church teaching.

Francis's deployment of ambiguity in communication isn't something I'm making up-- it was a highly unusual and distinctive element of his papacy, most notably evidenced in his refusal to respond to (quite concrete) dubia over seemingly unorthodox comments for seven years.

But if there is a silver lining, I suppose there has been no other pope in recent years that has occasioned more clarification of the doctrine of papal infallibility, so there is that.

That question very much does turn this political, and is not in the spirit of the thread. What is it that you'd really like to know?

I share some of your frustrations, and yet there is also a spiritual peril in failing to extend charity in the interpretation of these remarks, let alone in claiming to know that anyone who interpreted them differently is being willfully obtuse.

The greater the errors of the Franciscan papacy in your view, the more you owe the man your prayers.

I think what many Catholics found frustrating about Pope Francis was his tendency to make apparently off-the-cuff remarks which, while never quite explicitly straying outside the bounds of faith and morals defined by the Magisterium, often seemed to strongly imply the opposite. This was especially true for audiences that did not already know the Catechism through and through, which even most Catholics do not. In that sense, Pope Francis's remarks sometimes seemed to possess a kind of not-committing-heresy-can't-get-mad character. This was exacerbated in turn by the media's selective quotation of statements that were, if quite reasonable in their entirety, not exactly robust to misinterpretation.

Although I personally wish Pope Francis had done certain things differently, God chose him for a reason. I will try reflect on that as I, along with the Church, pray for him.

As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, I don’t think curing cancer is the bar for sober self-experimentation. “Noticeable amelioration of disease” is.

There is substantial regulatory burden that prevents US-based companies from doing what you suggest. In fact there is regulatory burden that prevents things that 99% of American voters would prefer, like having reciprocity agreements that allow you to take any drug that had already been approved in Europe. It’s instructive to look at the case of Halassy and notice how much reflexive resistance there is to even the most self-evidently good ideas.

To make things concrete, here’s a practical idea: write down everything you eat while on a medication and rate your subjective well being everyday. Look for patterns. If anything jumps out at you, try eliminating it and seeing if your subjective wellbeing improves. Is this method fool-proof and without failure modes? Of course not. Is the prior probability that you’re eating at least one thing that’s unknowingly contraindicated for your condition / treatment pair very low? Also no.

My model is that the rate limiting factor for spotting unknown contraindications mostly just individual attention / discipline, so EMH arguments are unresponsive to this factor.

Consider the following argument: if obesity were such a big health problem, why is everyone fat? Mostly because losing weight is really hard, which I sympathize with but don’t take as an indication that it’s impossible to do anything about it.

In fact we don’t even have to bring disease into it at all. I’m sure that if i did a systematic elimination diet i would find one or two common foods that really didn’t agree with me, which i could make noticeable differences in QoL by avoiding. Why don’t I? Mostly because I’m just too lazy, and I’m fine with copping to that. But i don’t think it’s crazy for someone to choose otherwise, especially if they had a higher upside.

TBC I have no reason to believe that Big Pharma is deliberately withholding effective treatments it knows about so much as making (understandable) decisions not to investigate them in the first place. The total addressable market of a potential therapy is a central consideration for target selection-- you're roughly trying to maximize patient population times marginal willingness to pay over the standard of care. I don't think there's anything nefarious about this btw, you have to do what makes the greatest difference.

But that does mean that if you have a hyper-specific rare disease, the person who is willing to spend the most time thinking about it may very well be you. Or if you're living far from a major hospital and getting treated by a generalist with a heavy case load, you might be the most invested person within 500 miles of you, which is almost the same thing but better because you can still read the literature.

I wouldn't encourage the average patient to try doing rational drug design in their garage, but one could ask: "are there things that look promising that are still a year out from clinical trials?" and think about how to DIY some approximation to that.

At the extreme end of this spectrum, you have people like Beata Halassy who did just that, treating her own cancer with DIY viral therapy (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03647-0, and please do note all the finger-wagging about how terrible and irresponsible of her it was to save her own life). Why did she have to do that instead of just going to a doctor? Because the route to the clinic is too slow. Why is the route to the clinic too slow? Because FDA has the institutional incentives that it's better that ten thousand patients die for lack of a cure than one die of quackery. Why's that? Because the FDA gets penalized for bad treatments but not for treatments that don't exist. But I say that dying of lack of a cure is not much better than dying of quackery, so we might as well minimize total deaths.

At the somewhat less extreme end, you have ideas like trying to treat GBM with Zika virus, which has a sketch of a mechanistic explanation and some support in animal models, but afaict no clinical trials yet (https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?cond=GBM&intr=Zika). Is this a cure for GBM? Complete BS? Something in between? I have no idea, which is kind of my point-- no one knows yet. Regulators probably aren't that jazzed about signing off on giving neurotropic viruses to immunocompromised patients without a lot of prior evidence that will give them cover for making that call if something goes wrong (which it totally might!). But an individual patient might look at that question with a different set of incentives.

Or consider psychiatric treatment of various mental illnesses. The best and most honest psychs I know will tell you that, past a certain point, responsiveness to a given drug is idiosyncratic and the state of the art is really just "try a bunch of stuff until something works", without much concern for hypotheses about underlying mechanisms. Is that rational medicine or bro science? Something in between, I think. And is it possible that there are behavioral protocols that help one particular schizophrenia patient to manage their quality of life better than the standard of care as defined for the entire population? Given that no one really agrees about what schizophrenia even is, this seems not totally impossible.

And then at the other end of the spectrum you basically have lifestyle interventions, as you note. Almost everyone agrees that certain of these are good for you, but some are really difficult to implement and adhere to. It seems reasonable to self-experiment with those things.