DubiousPusher

A stream of linguistic organization laying out multiple steps in order to bring about some end sounds exactly like a process which is creating a “plan” by any meaningful definition of the word “plan”.

That goal was incepted by a human but I don’t see that as really mattering. We’re this AI given access to a machine which could synthesize things and a few other tools it might be able to act in a dangerous manner despite its limited form of will.

A computer doing something heinous because it is misguided isn’t much better than one doing so out of some intrinsic malice.

This is a phenomenon I call cinetrope. Films influence the world which in turn influences film and so on creating a feedback effect.

For example, we have certain films to thank for an escalation in the tactics used by bank robbers which influenced the creation of SWAT which in turn influenced films like Heat and so on.

This is a false dichotomy. The choice isn't between total exploitation of the biosphere and poverty. Nowhere did I say that European development should have been minimized. I simply said the example of European development was not a good argument for attempting to transform the environment of the American West.

Let's look at the chain of argument. The poster was countering an assertion that humans have created massive ecological turmoil by seeking to fundamentally reshape the Earth. Their counter was that Europe was once forest and swamp. I can only assume they meant that we take for granted that the present condition of Europe is good and because it was once mostly "just" forest and swamp that Europe demonstrates that these transformations are acceptable or even preferable and therefore we should do them.

I think this is a bad argument because it contains many assumptions and implications which I think are false.

Assumptions: #1 The magnitude of exploitation of Europe was necessary to achieve modern life.

#2 The development of modern European life occurred on an ideal or preferable timeline and things would not be better if this process had been gentler to the environment and taken an additional 1,000 years.

#3 The ecosystems of the American West are not more unique or prized than the temperate forests of Europe and their loss represents a similar loss therefore justifying the trade off.

#4 Wilderness, despite its increasing scarcity is not more valuable today than it was 1,000 years ago.

#5 Exploitation of the American West would have a similar economic and developmental impact as the exploitation of primeval Europe and therefore represents a worthwhile trade off.

I don't think any of the above should be taken for granted.

More habitable for whom?

The point is that we do not need this land. There is plenty of land all around the United States that is "habitable". And given the trend of birth rates and urbanization there is virtually no reason to go destroying fragile and unique ecosystems just so people can satisfy some compulsion for a manifest destiny of occupying every available square foot of this planet.

If you think this is a convincing counterpoint, I assure you it is not.

As a life long resident of the American West, I can imagine few ecological crimes more horrifying. This is one of the most unique geographies on this planet. The life here is thoroughly adapted to a fragile balance of long want and occasional abundance. Everywhere you "terraform" would obliterate that balance. The application of the word itself is obtuse. How can you make more Earth like what the Earth itself made? I suggest that you take your infrastructure projects and apply them where people already live. The damage has already been done there. And those places have an elasticity of life due to the high amounts of water that let them bounce back at some point. Instead I suggest for the West we take a page out of Edward Abbey and simply marvel at its incredible uniqueness and beauty.

Desert Solitaire https://a.co/d/16MZLfL

But we literally don't know the variability. Unlike the numbers of stars in the universe or the number of planets, which we have some statistically board observational evidence for, we have no such statistical evidence for the development of high energy microbiology. We have 1/1 examples. And we don't know if that's because it was inevitable and the eukaryotes have just outcompeted everything else or if it was exceedingly rare. It could be a coefficient of effectively 0 on the whole the thing.

It's a matter of water being a great place for carbon based chemistry to occur. Why carbon? Because it is so dynamic. It readily forms complex molecules which interact in interesting ways.

Looking at other forms of chemistry we don't see much as naturally varying as carbon. Though I have heard some chemists and biologists hypothesize about sikicon based life. At high temperatures it forms the kinds of dynamic connections that carbon does.

But it spent 1.5 billion years trapped in a low energy trap. Only the unusual process that brought proto-mitochondria inside bacteria made it interest. The branches that didn't follow have remained trapped with a severe limit upon their complexity.

It's not even clear that the ants haven't won.

The Drake Equation is a fun idea and all but I think it should go up there with Sagan's Nuclear Winter work as more thought experiment than reality.

It's just too arrogant to think we currently can place odds on all the important events necessary for us or something like us to come into being. At the time this equation was devised, I'm not even sure they understood how crazy lucky the development of mitochondria was.

In reality, we just don't know the many factors that might've affected our outcome. Also, it's just pure lottery falacy to reason about the statics that specifically "we" exist. If the odds for some strange reason settled out around about 1 of there being a single sentient species in our universe, that species would come to reason about itself and produce the same long odds of their existence. It's a longshot that a specific someone wins the lottery twice. It is a statistical inevitability that someone will win twice.

Whoever they are, they can't alienate themselves from being the one despite all the statistical huffing and puffing they can conjure. We will only know how special we are when we find another or once we have surveyed enough planets in depth.

Absolutely. This is a huge trade-off. The constraints you place on the model output is all about how much your app and user experience can tolerate bad LLM behavior.

Pretty good. Despite my high scepticism of the technology I have spent the last year working with LLMs myself. I would add a few things.

The LLM is like another user. And it can surprise you just like a user can. All the things you've done over the years to sanitize user input apply to LLM responses.

There is power beyond the conversational aspects of LLMs. Always ask, do you need to pass the actual text back to your user or can you leverage the LLM and constrain what you return?

LLMs are the best tool we've ever had for understanding user intent. They obsolete the hierarchies of decision trees and spaghetti logic we've written for years to classify user input into discrete tasks (realizing this and throwing away so much code has been the joy of the last year of my work).

Being concise is key and these things suck at it.

If you leave a user alone with the LLM, some users will break it. No matter what you do.

This article is literally about a permeant or semi-permenant cure for diseases which are currently treated with drugs costing as much as tens of thousands of dollars per month. The profit motive would be not to bring inverse vaccines to market.

If inverse vaccines work, they will end the most lucrative drugs in the history of medicine.

Humira the OG biologic treatment for autoimmune conditions costs $5,000/month. There has been a gold rush by pharmaceutical companies to create humira-like drugs or new monoclonal antibodies. Enbrel, Simponi, Taltz, Rinvoq and on. They all cost thousands of dollars per month and must be taken for life.

Immune suppresant biologics has been one of the biggest profit growth areas for pharma over the last 20 years. They are all chasing it. These inverse vaccines would end that.

Why is the person who treats most autoimmune diseases called a rheumatologist? Because the people who documented and categorized these diseases in Western medicine were believers in Humorism. That is a belief that human ailments stem from the imbalance of the four humors (blood, green bile, black bile and phlegm). They believed the inflammation in these disorders was the product of a phlegm imbalance, specifically of the mucus rheum. Hence the field name of Rheumatology.

The name dates back to the 17th century. My history is a little shaky, but as far as I can recall, the 17th century was before pharmaceuticals, pesticides and the entire industrial revolution. But maybe I need to get on that Gary Kasperov history where the Roman Empire fell in like 1940 or whatever.

Yes, Swype keyboard fail.

You can have people with Psoriatic Arthritis creating legions on their skin. You give them an immune suppressant and the legions go away. Please explain to me your alternative hypothesis for this mode of action.

Well, considering that current treatments for these diseases involve a broad based suppression of the immune system which lead to substantial increases risk from routine infection, they would have to be pretty bad to do worse than the current standard of care.

For example, the near state-of-the-art in immune suppression is the IL-17 inhibitor. IL-17 itself is a crucial signaller for Cytokine production. And it signals a broad array of Citokines. Citokines are essential in fighting most forms of infection. So, to have side effects as bad as a modern immune suppressant, an "inverse vaccine" would have to have a generalized effect as bad as global Citokine suppression. That would be an extraordinary leap for a drug which is meant to tell T cells to ignore one specific molecule.

Just a heads up for anyone who finds themselves with a similar requirement, there's a very robust set of office APIs available in .net. I would be surprised if you couldn't open and run a whole workbook with them though I have only used them for more tangential tasks.

It's complicated but most of it comes down to two things. First, was Napoleon III's domestic situation. He had fashioned himself as a second Bonaparte and there were two main aspects to Bonapartian politics, domestic modernization and foreign domination through military victory. While Napoleon III had succeeded quite well at the former (really exceeding his uncle) he had only moderate foreign successes and a few blunders to his name. Napoleon III and his ruling clique became convinced that a good old fashioned European land war was the only thing that could keep France united and legitimize the second French Empire. And there may have been some truth to this. Regardless, they saw it as vital to maintaining the "Empire" which they believed had brought France out of a dark historical period.

Second, was what about what German unification did to what we call "The Balance of Powers". "The Balance of Powers" is a concept that things are good when there are several European powers who have relatively balanced economic and military powers. But that things get very bad when one power becomes dominant and seeks to annihilate or mortally wound its counterparts. It was a concept favored by the high born, elite educated aristocrats who made up the ministers in Europe's Empiral bureaucracies. To this view, things which might disturb his balance are bad and things which maintain the balance are good.

For over a century, the unification of Germany had been one of those "bad" things which might come to pass. It loomed as a boogieman over the old European, "Balance of Powers". Independently, the German speaking states of Northern Europe had become the most economically developed parts of the continent. There was a feeling that if they joined together, their economic power and as a consequence, their military power would eclipse all of Europe. And this was not just the feeling of the French. The Russians were concerned about this question. And the Austrians too. They had the most complicated situation of all because many of the German states had been part of The Holy Roman Empire which had Austria had dominated. As the German states rose, many Austrian aristocrats benefited but they also understood this rise as a threat. Thus they had worked against German unification for decades.

I think the French figured that smashing an infant German state before it had time to develop cohesion was there best chance to avoid German domination. This of course was a blunder. The war pushed Southern German States into unification and created the popular basis for a cohesive German nation.

Now, regarding the infamous "insult" which was the French excuse for war. The insult itself is not really important. The French and Germans both were eager for the war. France for the reasons stated above, Germany for the reason that they figured it would bring the South German states into their union. The French were looking for a reason and Bismarck with his publication of the Ems Dispatch obliged them. In the end, it could've been almost anything.

As a foot note, there is a ton of debate about whether "The Balance of Powers" was really the product of the magnanimous wisdom of conservative ministers or whether it was just an inescapable reality which they accepted, it being simply too hard to project power at the scale necessary to dominate all of Europe at this time. Regardless of its root intention, "The Balance of Power" is something we see at work in European politics. The treaties that ended European wars from the thirty years war until the Franco-Prussiian war were rarely very punitive. Usually they attempt to give the victor some kind of upper hand but they don't usually involve measures that another power might feel they truly cannot accept. They indeed often look as though they are trying to create some kind of stable peace.

> One of the biggest mistakes that people tend to make is looking at the current population and using it to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record.

I think this is good to keep in mind but let's be real, humans have tended to make hierarchy be one of those things they push backwards in time. So yeah, it's best to be as impartial as possible but in this case, the authors are the ones contradicting the common anachronism.

You are interpreting reality through a television show...

If you want to understand 20th and 21st century European history, you really do need some background in the Franco-Prussian war. There's obviously no specific moment when Germany became ascendant. It was a process that took several hundred years, going back to the efforts of Prussia to distinguish itself amongst the member polities of the Holy Roman Empire.

But the war did solidify or make official many important features of 20th century Europe. Namely, Germany as a unified whole with a German speaking core that defines its contemporary borders, the centralization of the rivalry between France and Germany, Germany as the dominant military and economic power of Europe, the stabilization of French Republicanism sans monarchy, the relative irrelevance of the Austrians, the end of a common belief in great power stabilization as a long term objective in favor of a more manichean struggle for dominance, etc.

It should be a fundamental human right to have and communicate secrets. That's the end of the story for me.

There should be things the state simply cannot touch not just things which it should not touch.

The technical aspects of this don't matter one way or the other if you believe that it is a fundamental human right to have secrets and communicate them. That's the root question here.

If you say, "well yes but only for legal purposes", then the jig is up. End-to-end encryption must die. You can fiddle here and there with what getting the warrants and the wiretaps and all that looks like but you have decided the fundamental question. From then on, between civil libertarians and law enforcement the issue becomes a skrimage. The courts will hash it out and subsequent legislation will ebb and flow the limits on both sides. But you have decided the fundamental question. Humans are not allowed to actually have secrets. Period. That is what happens the second you make this conditioned in any way.

Of course there are better and worse versions of this that can exist but ultimately I think it should be opposed as a state violation of human rights.

This is a good point. I should have said, in the absence of law, there is only power through individual domination and vassalage. Law does not guarantee a more equitable distribution of power but it can allow for it.

I disagree. Law (not in a vacuum but as practiced) can distribute power and thus unseat the power of strength alone. In many places throughout history, a strong person could hit whomever they wanted excepting the rich and aristocratic. A man could in this way dominate his family and neighbors. The only recourse was honor killing and revenge.

Today, in many places, even minor assault will result in consequences. In this way, the law redistributes power from the physically strong to those who may be weak but who have legal standing.

Of course, in an absolute sense, everything redounds to power. All law is in the end, enforced at the point of a gun. But this is an observation with very little practical utility IMO. It's like the saying which people employ when things are not going well, "it could be worse".

To be clear, I'm am here making a case for law as an insurance against indivual domination and warlordism which I think it can be. I am not making a case for the state in general though.

In the absence of law, there is only power.

For me, McCarthy is among a few authors ( Sherman Alexie, Edward Abbey, Octavia Butler, etc) who truly broke the Northeastern cultural stranglehold on American literature. His voice is brutally and uncompromisingly continental.