thesteamboat

Your link doesn't exactly mean what you think --- they're giving a combination of economic growth and population growth. When looking at just the GDP growth, your link suggests that they are the 6th fastest growing US state economy. As a sibling commentator noted, this is growth is on top already being the largest state economy. (Texas had the 2nd largest GDP percentage increase from 2020 to 2021. Texas grew 2% faster than California, for an economy only 2/3 the size. Raw data [which the usnews article cited] here https://www.bea.gov/itable/regional-gdp-and-personal-income )

Not too long ago there was news that CA is about to pass Germany to become the 4th largest economy in the world. (CA press release here: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2022/10/24/icymi-california-poised-to... original article by Bloomberg)

Sorry to nitpick, but I assume you mean EU houses are better insulated than those in the US, rather than isolated.

But crucially, the incentives are different than those people have in the middle of their lives.

Most people's usual incentives lead to them optimizing for the short-to-medium term future, i.e. the next couple of months or years.

People on their deathbed will optimize either for the extremely short term (finishing this conversation) or the extremely long term (the last chance to affect how they'll be remembered).

This suggests that if people lie on their death bed, they'll lie in different ways than ordinarily. Even if you can't take deathbed statements as unvarnished truth, their differences from everyday statements can be revealing.

Presumably they (scalpers and miners) are not buying in large enough bulk orders, far enough in advance.

I too wish to add this to my repertoire. I don't think it will replace :s, but occasionally I find myself copying a line to use as a template. When I go to change each line I'm changing a particular part to different things. Assuming I remember, this trick seems like a good approach.

I don't think the parent was talking about JIT power generation but rather using JIT (in other industries) as a comparison to to talk about the efficiency-reliability tradeoff. The analogy here is cost savings of avoiding winterization make the power companies more competitive (more efficient) but less reliable.

You are, of course, right in the all specific details you've brought up vis-a-vis the winterizing and the nature of the power grid. I just think you missed the parent's point slightly.

I have seen you and others make this point in the past, it and always seems equivalent to creationists shouting "Scientists who believe in evolution are the REAL dogmatists who don't want to look at the facts! We are really being persecuted by the religion of Science!"

Your talk on this subject (helpfully posted below) only furthers this when you present a variety of arguments of wildly varying strengths against AI, in the same vein as "37 challenges to evolution". It makes me feel like you have some valid criticism and a lot of bad faith argumentation.

Sadly, I think this characterization is only mostly unfair rather than entirely so. I enjoy your writing and thoughts, and you speak with clarity, but on this subject I think you have constructed a mold of bad-AI-argumentation that you squeeze all AI-argumentation into and in so doing fail to rebut any of it.

Comments are probably have positive usefulness expected value in a probabilistic sense. Unfortunately extracting that value, separating the insights from the dross, is work and requires effort. Effort that perhaps the person doing the original work being commented on shouldn't necessarily be expected to take up.

Additionally, human nature makes it hard to receive legitimate criticism dispassionately, let alone when it comes in a big pile of stuff that also contains pointless abuse.

There is value in comments, but depending on a project's circumstances it may or may not be economical to extract it.

Both sides are guilty to some degree, but, and this is the crucial point, not to the SAME degree.

I think I'd rather have a comment "this site might be helpful" on the page than not. It doesn't take long to classify a link as either potentially helpful or useless, and I'm usually finding the SO page through a google search anyway. That may indicate I don't know the right query or jargon for what I want. In any case, I'd rather that SO err on the side of redundancy.

If you hold that all governments are unethical do you pay taxes, get mail, stop driving if pulled over by a policeman, etc.? Is it equally unethical for a government to provide for collective defense, collect taxes, enforce contracts, imprison people or to control borders?

If you're willing to admit that there are gradations to the inherent unethicalness of government actions then it's at least conceivable to grade them on the same ethical scale as every other group.

You have fundamentally the same position as someone who claims "there is no ethical consumption under Capitalism." There may be some truth to that worldview, but people have to live in the world where both governments and capitalism are the status quo. Both sentiments are broad enough to critique a large fraction of human society, and thus can be pulled out as a 'reason' for targeting any particular aspect one may instinctively dislike without having to put in the mental effort to determine why.

Secondly, you say Facebook has governance only over people who have given their consent. Taking second order effects into account this is clearly not true. Facebook was named as one of the "determining" factors in the Rohingya genocide by UN Fact Finding Mission. Negative externalities exist, and in practice they can be quite common.

> his incentives are still infinitely better than those of any government because Facebook's status is built on consent rather than coercion.

Is your position that all governance is coercive and thus inherently unethical? That seems like a philosophical position fundamentally in conflict with living in the modern world.

Zuckerberg controls a majority of Facebook's voting stock. While Facebook the platform may have grown in unforeseen ways, Facebook the company remains ultimately (legally) under the control of one man. There is no reasonable comparison between Tim Berners Lee and Mark Zuckerberg when considering how much influence they have over their creations.

I largely agree with you and think that my views fall closer to yours than the GPs. I'd endorse free speech absolutism as probably the best system in the vein of "Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others". That being said

> Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).

I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.

I acknowledge the context of this article is bad behavior by censorious figures, I'll admit it is a serious free speech problem, but unfortunately I must dispute that it is the most important.

I think the mirror of this on the left manifests as performative wokeness, e.g. using whatever leftist language is at hand as a cudgel to settle political scores.

> It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.

I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions. What we had was something like the pretense of objectivity, which was probably good enough for what we needed. I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.

> Big mistake, but she owned it.

Just a tonal note. Saying 'Big mistake' implies to me that it's meant sarcastically in the sense of 'Big deal' or 'Big whoop', which I gather from the rest of your sentence is not what you intended. I would not have read it this way from the phrase 'A big mistake, but she owned it.'

I think this is missing the point of the no-longer-free-speach-absolutist sentiment (henceforth NLFSA). You note, correctly I think, that

> we've seen a lot of egregious, potent, and dangerous lies from credible, verified institutions including the former POTUS, prominent newspapers, and other important cultural institutions.

The NLFSA notes that we've been seeing a new attack on free speech and free thought emerge, namely Steven Bannon 'flood the zone with shit' approach. The classical free speech position is to fight bad ideas with better ideas, fight bad speech with good. We're running into largely unprecedented problems (in the anglosphere, at least) where bad speech is drowning out the good. There are many things we can point as possible causes (say the internet changing communication patterns, information siloing, propaganda, etc.) and there aren't clear solutions.

Conventional free speech absolutism prevents you from being muzzled -- but that's it. Acknowledging you can be silenced by a chorus of people shouting over you requires a new position.

> I don't know how someone can look at American politics and politicians (never mind cultural institutions) over the last ~decade and conclude that these people are fit to regulate Americans' speech.

The NLFSA doesn't necessarily want speech regulated, or regulated by the government, or by corporations. They may not have any particular solution in mind (though some might think they have one). The NLFSA sees a problem without necessarily seeing a solution.

I think it's reasonable to see all this, and despite our problems double down on convention free speech absolutism -- that being muzzled is the most dangerous form of intervention, that better speech will ultimately win out over bad ideas. But I don't fault someone for changing their mind to try to combat rampant conspiracy theories.

You are substituting "the West" for rgbrenner's "those on the side of human rights", and in doing so are missing the point of his argument.

"The West" as a term is very broad and sufficiently undefined[0] that it makes a great rhetorical cudgel (both for people who support it and those against it). Unfortunately that same slipperiness makes it challenging for people trying to speak clearly. While "the West" has often been loosely aligned with human rights (some defending/embracing them, some merely claiming them as magic words) they certainly have their problems.

Your argument seems to be do the following: substitute an inferior term into rgbrenner's argument, and then complaining that your chosen term is inferior.

rgbrenner:> The sides aren't US and China, they're X and anti-X

you:> You say the sides are Y and anti-X, but Y isn't X

[0]: Do we mean America? America + Western Europe? Are we including Canada? How about Mexico? All colonial powers? Does Eastern Europe count? How about Australia? Or even Japan? You might have a particular definition in mind, but it's likely other people have different understandings.

I think you're out of luck simply because Americans dominate the English speaking internet. According to loosely eyeballed data [0], Americans account for over 20% of English speakers (a commanding plurality) and over 60% of native speakers. It might not be fair, and there are plenty of valid reasons to want to talk about other countries and other perspectives, but it's going to remain the default perspective of the English speaking internet unless demographics substantially shift.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

> Rent-seeking by itself is morally neutral, like guns. Like a gun, it's how you use it that determines if you're contributing positive value to overall society.

This strikes me as a bad analogy. What differentiates your statement from

Theft by itself is morally neutral, [...] it's what you steal that determines if you're contributing positive value to overall society.

You might be willing to endorse that statement, but I think most people would not.

I think that if you want to assert that rent-seeking is tool-like, with multiple uses some positive and some negative, then the burden of proof is on you to provide some examples.

Invoking parallel universes was solely for ease of explaining/emphasizing the math, not because I think it's a realistic model.

Talking about the Hubble Deep Field kind of misses the point. The original Drake equation[0] estimates the number of alien civilizations in our galaxy. I probably should have used galaxies in my example, but left it with parallel universes as that is the common phrase.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation

From a previous discussion of this paper I took away the following clarifying insight:

The Drake equation is usually turned into the Fermi paradox via some estimations that show the average (mean) number of alien civilizations we expect to see is large (>1).

However, just because the mean is large does not imply that seeing 0 is low probability.

More concretely, suppose there were 10 possible 'parallel' universes. In 9 of them humanity is alone and in the tenth there are tens of millions of alien civilizations. The probability of appearing to be alone is 90% even though the number of alien civilizations we'd expect to see is in the millions.

> Time and time again, experts have been shown to have consensus opinions which are wildly off from reality. You can almost set your watch to how often an outsider will analyse a situation from first principles and make money off the 'experts', especially in the stock market.

> Progress almost always comes from non-consensus outsiders. This whole website is supposed to be a testament to that!

Even granting that these statements are accurate (which plenty of sibling comments are willing to dispute) I don't think these statements suggest that "Stay in your lane" is bad advice.

Why? It's a question of distributions. For any given task/field there are a lot more laypeople than experts. Consider the following simple model where we quantify some arbitrary ability score. If lay people's scores are normally distributed with a low mean and expert's scores are normally distributed with a high mean we can still see the best lay person beating all the experts simply because there are so many more of them.

"You don't know more than the 'experts'" is good advice for almost everyone even if there are counterexamples.

There's a separate problem I think you're trying to point at where in some fields credentials don't correlate as well with expertise as one would hope. But even if credentials are an imperfect proxy for expertise, they are probably better than just trusting your gut in the absence of any expertise of your own.

> Pretty much the only field which hasn't been embarrassed by an outsider of late is physics, [...]

This seems an idiosyncratic take on the current state of science to me. I've seen plenty of examples of a field being embarrassed by insiders (e.g. the replication crisis of psychology) or seen great results from experts who were not particularly recognized by the system as set up (see Yitang Zhang's work on the twin prime conjecture). What I don't think I've seen is a field's dogma being overthrown by a complete outsider. For the sake of my own calibration, I'd welcome any examples of this.

Presumably a single person or small group attempting such would be engaged in market manipulation as traditionally understood, and the SEC would try to charge them. (But I am neither a lawyer nor a financial expert, so the above is just uninformed speculation.)

> The SWP's standing among young, idealistic socialists exploded after it emerged that ...

Not to take away from your otherwise excellent post, but your use of the word 'exploded' seems ambiguous. I take it you mean that their standing went down, i.e. their standing was reduced to rubble. However, I am much more used to seeing exploded used to describe a large increase, e.g. downloads for our latest app have exploded after reducing the price.

The quotes might signal opposition, but they also might just signal fuzziness. E.g. This is a word that you're probably familiar with used in a specific jargony way that you cannot deduce merely from the standard definition.

The thesis of vim is that editing is more fundamental to the act of writing than inputting text. The default mode, normal mode, is entirely shortcuts to do editing tasks better and easier. Moving around the document, and moving or deleting text are the primary concern.

What's more, as several other commenters have alluded to, vim thinks of editing as a language. There are verbs like cut or copy or paste, and there are nouns like [this] sentence or [this] word or one word backwards or from here until the letter j. Once you start building sentences of editing commands (e.g. copy from here to the 3rd next instance of the a line starting with 'Hello' namely <y3/^Hello>) the flexibility it offers is unparalleled. This is all done from your default context without fingers leaving the keyboard. Once you achieve fluency (admittedly not a trivial task) there is no context switching for any editing task, it becomes reflexive and subconscious.

Other stuff, like macros and registers, or easy access to regexes and ex commands help extend this, but the core reason why vim is still used today is this strength.

I'd highly recommend another classic response, given here, elaborating on the nature of vim as a language for editing: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1218390/what-is-your-mos...

> We're still not comfortable checking if rationals are equal in any major language...

This seems to be confusing the issue to me. Checking for rational equality is trivial (just cross multiply). What we don't have is major languages deciding the the type rational numbers is useful enough to get first class support. And even that is overstating the issue, some languages do care and make representing rationals easy. In Julia, rational numbers can just be written like 2//3.

If people try to use floats to represent rationals and run into errors, the problem isn't that languages are incapable of representing rationals.

I don't see any upsides to using surreal numbers as a datatype. If you're restricting it to a finite size you're still going to have analagous problems that float or double do and I don't see any advantages in stability or whatever. If you're allowing arbitrary size (but obviously still finite) representation, you can still only represent the dyadic rationals, so you can't even express 1/3. The infinitesimals and infinities would require infinite size, so they're never practical.

I remain skeptical because all practical computing necessarily has finite representation. We don't compute with real numbers, we use floats or doubles of a given precision. While this very occasionnaly leads to weird errors (from the perspective of pure mathematics) it's usually good enough.

Having briefly read your paper I think it makes a mistake analogous to arguments that machine intelligence is impossibly by Godel's incompleteness theorems. Consider the statement:

> This statement is not true if written by xamuel

Despite the fact that you cannot consistently assert that statement, it doesn't strike me as a strong argument against your general intelligence.

By analogy, why don't your arguments in section 3 prove the impossibility of Human General Intelligence? You are replacing the usual meaning of AGI (a machine that can execute a wide variety of tasks in human to superhuman fashion) with a far stronger one (a machine that can complete arbitrary tasks perfectly). A machine that (as in example 5) has an `incorrect' loss function may still be generally an AGI.

I'd challenge the notion that non-Archimedean tasks are relevant to AGI. Here is another example of your non-Archimedean tasks. Pick a pair of integers. The reward for this task is such that for points p and q, p < q if p comes before q lexicograpically, and |p-q| >= 1 if p!=q. All the complexity is baked into the structure of the task, but it doesn't seem to be a compelling barrier to an AGI any more than the search task "Find the largest integer" is.

I'd expect AGI's to be able to approach non-Archimedean tasks at least as well as humans, but I expect they'd do it in an analagous way -- by loading Surreal numbers or the equivalent into their software rather than their hardware. That is to say, an AGI should be able to reason about these concepts despite not being built out of them.

This seems a strange prediction to me. Can you elaborate on why you think this? Do you think the reals will be replaced by surreals in common usage by laypeople, by working mathematicians or in mathematical pedagogy? While I certainly think surreal numbers are really nifty for tying together different number systems into one rigorous foundation, your claim sounds like someone saying that the algebraic numbers would surpass the rational numbers.