75 karma · joined February 9, 2023
We do not yet have the technology to transition between phenotypes.
What we call 'trans' is coordinated social therapy for people undergoing gender dysmorphia, for which there is no cure, that allows them to live as they choose with minimal triggers to their psychosis.
It's a crude solution, sure, but preferable to suicide in most cases.
The real question is is this process even possible to stop? Does multiculturalism help or hurt this process? Etc. Etc. We have a world of data to analyze. Will we be able to honesty face the results?
In the (largely American-dominated) western anglosphere Polarization is on the rise because of a cultural conflict over the solutions to the problems of the next 50 or so years.
Namely: Climate change and climate migration.
The shrinking marginal utility of the average person.
Unequal outcomes between groups.
Adaption to rising challengers to American global military dominance.
It's not some irrational thing produced by consuming different flavours of news - it's a fundamental schism in group orientation between two largely incompatible approaches to future challenges (largely a fight between bottom-up designs that seek to minimize harm and middle-up designs that seek to maximize growth).
We can't just lay this at the feet of media companies and their intermediaries, that's far too naive.
The western body politic is distraught at the idea of competition and unequal outcomes. They will be wholly unable to meaningfully confront a zero-sum global resource economy built on domination through competence.
Contemporary geopolitics makes a lot more sense when you realize that we're fighting about which groups dies from climate change, not IF some are going to.
The major threat as outlined by the UN is "de-complexification" (IE, society collapse) as a result of mass climate migration and conflict over limited/reduced resources.
There are no realistic pathways to prevent this situation now. It is already kicking off and will be fully underway within 20 short years.
The worst case scenario is we stretch ourselves too thin trying to manage everyone that we don't have enough excess to embark on emergency geo-engineering projects.
There was a disgraced Finnish MP who let the mask slip and suggested that the richer nations conduct a "Climate Abortion" on equatorial populations to prevent this scenario. Ghoulish, but understandable in the face of existential threat.
Personally I'm foolishly hoping fusion becomes viable and changes some of the structural calculations underlying the projections. The difference it would make in desalination alone would go a long way.
Cursor movements, keystrokes, webcam activity, badge tracking, etc.
A smart company would use it to fast-track it's heros, maintain the intermediate, and exit the rest.
The first company to do that slowly enough to avoid outright rejection will have a huge organizational advantage.
What makes you think "they" want you to survive?
What policy or statement have they made that affirms their interest in your life or the lives of your interest groups? Do they want to/have they already disarmed you? Do you control a means of producing your own food? Your own energy? Are they allowing people into your areas to compete with you in labor markets and for control over limited resources? Are they meaningfully protecting the future of the planet for you and your children? Are they encouraging or discouraging you from having children at all?
This is a genuine question.
We may be diverse, but that needn't mean every sector of every niche in every industry must be so or that it would be better if it were.
Our position in the world is relative. Our power comes from the relative delta between us and "them", whomever it is we happen to be competing with.
To forget that fundamental relation, even in service to our personal sense of morality, is solipsism.
Something not being designed to do X does not mean it is designed to do Y.
The hackles raised here over "diversity" are, as you note, likely related to demographic considerations as opposed to say geographic considerations.
The argument is usually that the goal of government programs should be to accomplish a task as effectively and efficiently as possible. In the case of AI doing so is especially important in an era of rising geopolitical multipolarity. Sacrificing this for the sake of appeasing identity interest groups is short-sighted.
As we briefly explored, arguments that demographic diversity augment this efficacy have yet to meaningfully materialize, while concrete evidence to the contrary has both in the literature and in large-scale behavioral patterns (the neighborhood trust studies come to mind). It's one of, if not THE, most contentious area of sociology and public policy right now because of the obvious implications.
IMO that's why people latch onto it and why it's getting so much attention here. It's a hot button issue of grave importance that hasn't been solved yet and discussions around it are extremely painful and frequently stifled.
If you were taught this a decade ago you likely are familiar with the "Striving, Storming, Thriving" study which demonstrates that relation especially well.
I recall a recent hand-wringing study out of Harvard jam-packed with soothing language but showing that as teams diversify their ability to engage in shared risk-taking declines [0]
If we extrapolate that relation, you eventually reach a point where the biggest player can collect and process the most information and produce an ever-evolving model to maintain that relation.
Better hope it's creators have your best interests at heart.
- Funding AI that adheres to the governments ideas of what is "ethical" and "responsible" despite massive public disagreement on how those terms manifest.
- Getting the largest tech firms in the world on board towards that goal.
- Explicitly imposing limits on what information models are allowed to share and train on if they want access to government capital and the capital of those aforementioned partners and all other businesses including capital markets that contract with the government.
LLMs are already being used as mediums of information access and will continue to grow in that role.
Information filters/access has a huge role in informing public sentiment, that makes LLMs a massive propaganda vector to be employed for whichever purpose it's controller's wish.
Their effectiveness IN that role is also likely to be beyond anything we've ever seen before.
If a person repeatedly says they are going to close a door, walks over to the door, grabs the handle, and begins to pull it closed... Is it really outside the realm of possibility that they may, in fact, close the door?
This would, for a completely random example, restrict what Palantir's AIs could do.
That would then effect results delivered to clients of Palantir, including other nationstates.
But that's not an issue, right? No government would ever contract out it's ultra-high end scale-of-observation intelligence tasks... Right?
We're standing here designing neutron bombs and arguing about who gets to decide what the targeting criteria is.
That should matter to absolutely everyone.
By all means, if you believe (as it sounds like you do) that this will result in the affirmation and expansion of your worldview this is good news for you.
If you suspect, at any level, that maybe the current formulation of what is "ethical" and what is not may, at any point in the future, be called into question, than designing the fabric of super intelligent computational processes to presumptively adhere to your preconceptions is at best ill conceived at at worst malicious.
Enjoy the basilisk.
At the very least it's promoted by a coalition of true believers and those who see it as a power-building opportunity.
I'm not going to bat for blue team or red team here, I'm pointing out that we've (likely) entered an inevitable slide into the tactics of totalism. Unity is getting harder, more people have a solidified allegiance and conversions are becoming less common even among independents. When you lose the ability to sway a shrinking middle ground your tactics adapt accordingly.
This aside, you are asking for proof of capital outflow from red demos and into blue demos under the Biden admin. I can provide that here:
[0 - breakdown of federal 2020 budget by sector] https://www.investopedia.com/comparing-the-economic-plans-of...
[1 - breakdown of professional catagories by political allignment] https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/most-partisan...
Observe how the sectors that will receive the vast majority of new blue spending (green energy, local news, unions, government workers, regs agencies, et.c) support team blue.
Observe how the sectors most targeted with new taxes (natural resource extraction, corporate news, finance, etc.) are red supporters.
Observe how welfare spending is concentrated/directed to urban environments who vote blue.
Observe how new ballot harvesting regulations offer structural advantage to dense areas (cities) and cities vote blue.
I'm not saying It's good, it will lead to war eventually, but it is the most effective strategy when the likelihood of 'winning people over' drops. It's power politics.
The fight is between collectivism and individualism.
Collectivization requires that all sacrifice and all gain, lashed together.
Individualism allows for some to sacrifice and for some to gain, devil take the hindmost.
The questions facing those of us undecided on our allegiance are:
Is our morality objective? Are we willing to die for a stranger? Are we willing to risk being ruled if we are uncomfortable ruling? Do we truely want the same things? Is harm minimization or gain maximization a better long-term strategy?
If you look at the policies of the Biden admin, almost all of their bills caused capital outflows of red areas, professions and demographics and into blue areas, professions, and demographics.
The new logic of american politics is to not bother courting those who wont vote for you and instead seek to minimize their raw numbers(population), vote impact (dilution), wealth (jobs), and recruitment (deplatforming).
The "culture war" is built on two fundamentally opposed, zero-sum worldviews and they're starting to realize that.
"Generalists" usually carries an implication of a higher volume of less developed skills. GPU.
"Specialists" likewise refers to fewer more developed skills. CPU.
The future belongs to those who can maximize both trees. A high volume of highly developed skills.
That will likely take the form of a specialized skillset: Leveraging frontier technologies to advance complexity in market niches (presumably via heavy usage of AI). This aligns more with the "Specialist" than the "Generalist".
Was the microchip unethical? Was the steam engine? Was the domestication of grain unethical?
It seems we only apply our model of "what should" to systems of less complexity than ourselves.
If that's accurate, then a lot of modern ethical reasoning is flawed as well. If the goal of ethics is to advance humanity's exclusive interest then we've been wrong ever since we started down the harm-min path instead of the gain-max path.
Any AI researcher with access to the mechanisms of AI training here would be best served to train an AI with their (or their in-group's) exclusive interests at heart. To do otherwise is to subject yourself and everyone else you love to a hostile version of the tool you refuse to build.
Roku's Basilisk applies heavily here.
The best possible reward in this scenario is to build an AI that designates your own favorite group of humans as the AI's collaborator class in exchange for a dignified and dopamine rich extinction/amalgamation a few generations down the line. A great deal for groups already trending towards extinction with almost no downsides if you truely believe in AI-driven apocalypse.
Cost of trait differentiation at scale.
In scenarios where the cost reductions of aggregation are larger than the gains received fron individual processing, stereotyping is the most efficient choice.
Example: There are several bowls of M&Ms, they all have a low but varied percentage of poisoned M&Ms in them and these are difficult to detect. You are competing to eat as many as possible as fast as possible for as long as possible. Does it make sense to scrutinize every individual candy? Does it make sense to only eat from certain bowls when possible? If you mix all the bowls together and equalize the risk profile, is this of a higher benefit than dumping the highest risk bowls in the trash? How do these answers change based on the severity of the poison and the distribution in the various bowls?
Arguments against this type of analysis are either moral, structural (conflict costs), or case-based.
The author doesn't delve into any of this.
They are, in their argument, almost entirely composed of "non-heroes" and their actual work is of speculative value. Hence why they are suggesting that 50% of them can be randomly removed without a corresponding loss of effective productivity.
I don't know if that's true or not (though I'd love to see it studied), but I can at least see that logic behind the claim - roughly summarized as:
"The ability of a manager to increase the productivity of workers is inversely proportional to the complexity of the work being done."
For the majority of degrees this is probably true when compared to alternatives like trade schools.