Any society that attributes success to a few geniuses instead of the armies of people who made what they did possible will fail. Not sure why this is hard
Don't agree with this guy on much, but I do agree on this. The fact is that our giant economy has much larger energy/mass than the economy our government was designed to steer. It's like if a boat grew 1000x along with the engine, but tried to use the same rudder.
Almost all of the Western world's problems trace back to one single thing:
We advanced a lot in hard technology and almost not at all in governance technology.
Robin Hanson talking about prediction markets for governance in the 1990s to have people start poking at it for real in the 2020s is absolutely ludicrous. Prediction markets should have happened in the 1680s once we had both markets and probability theory. We're nearly 500 years behind schedule.
Lots of things follow from this and many of them are not very politically correct.
Maybe if institutions inherently try to extract as much as possible from humans, the response shouldn't be to dismantle all institutions (never going to happen), but to design multiple separate institutions that balance each other, rather than cooperate to screw us over.
spacechimplives retweeted
Unquestionably true. But not new. Worth a read, Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor". A standalone chapter in The Brother's Karamazov. It describes exactly this, but during the Spanish Inquisition of 1478. Jesus comes back, they tell him, "We don't need you anymore".
Certain people love to feel smart by parroting “dark truths” even if they have no particular evidence that they’re true.
One dark truth is that some people are better at living fulfilling lives than others. Good traits cluster; if you're pretty, you're more likely to be smart, happy, healthy, etc. And if you're a dumb, you're more likely to be poor, and a criminal, and mentally ill, and unattractive, etc. It's a weak cluster but it's still there! People are arrayed on a loose spectrum from fucked up/burdensome, and superhuman/beneficial to others.
It doesn't mean that people's lives are more or less worth living, and it does not justify less empathy. But - at least in the sense of 'helping people achieve their goals' - it does mean that some people's genes are just better quality than others.
"So you see, the 2 prisoners' revealed preferences are to be in jail for longer"
Ironically this is incorrect and smart is actually going to be the only thing worth anything.. only the smart can create new training data worth training on, or dig deep enough to exploit weakness in the generated output….
Jensen Huang told a Cambridge Union
"Intelligence is about to be a commodity"
For a long time, school and hiring treated “smart” as scarce, because fast recall and clean problem solving were hard to scale beyond the best individuals.
AI has flipped that.
Jensen explained “When AI takes over all standardized work, the only value humans have left is to handle the poorly defined work.”
“The poorly defined work is the most valuable of all work.”
- Defined Work (AI Territory)
- Poorly Defined Work (Human Territory)
Oh you mean like the part of history where the US created and distributed radical Islamic textbooks in Afghanistan in the 80s and directly resulted in the Taliban?
It’s difficult to say exactly what the root cause of the school shootings is. But clearly it’s something that had slowly trended up starting in the late 90s, and clearly it’s some kind of material societal sickness. The fact that we’re not spending billions researching/
In case anyone can’t comprehend the runaway problem that dismantling the safety net causes.
When in history has creating an underclass ever been a good idea??! It always costs more money than it saves. It always leads to the downfall of whatever civilization is doing it.