derektank

Why would you need a pairwise matching algorithm for finding friends? Friends are generally not exclusive nor rivalrous

Male hypergamy and polygyny has been practiced by many cultures historically. They had many problems, but low birth rates wasn’t among them. I don’t think dating apps are a sufficient causal explanation alone for low birth rates

Yes, representative democracy as a system is biased more towards preventing bad outcomes (i.e. allowing the people to remove leaders that harm their interests) rather than pursuing the pareto frontier

Basic research is funded with the understanding that applications are not imminent, yes, but also with the expectation that some of the knowledge gained will eventually result in advancements to the public welfare

Why will X not keep increasing? It’s been increasing, albeit very slowly, since the start of the 20th century as the disease burden declines and nutrition improves. I see no reason to think that future health interventions couldn’t further juice those numbers.

Will it keep up with Y? Probably not, unless people are willing to accept pretty radical interventions to their biology. But it almost certainly is not static

Sure, but I don’t think most of the money that goes into funding math is for the purposes of pure understanding. The reason governments fund mathematics research grants is generally for a more instrumental purpose; taking the US congress as an example, the mission of the NSF is to, “Promote the progress of science; advance national health, prosperity, and welfare; and secure national defense.” Most federal math grants come from the NSF.

Of course, math research is cheap and most academics don’t rely upon grants, their salary covers most of their expenses. But here too, the mathematics professor spends a substantial amount of their time teaching future engineers/quants/other applied mathematicians, who need to understand math for instrumental purposes, not as an end in and of itself. Without the tuitions of these students, I can’t imagine universities maintaining the size of their math departments, let alone expanding them as Dr. Sahai advocates for.

So who or what funds the community of pure mathematics going forward?

>The NSA mission is primarily inward focused.

This is simply false. Only domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI can conduct domestic investigations. Law enforcement or counter-intelligence agents might be given access to intelligence the NSA collects if they have a warrant, but it is not in the remit of the agency to intentionally collect information on US persons, it’s only allowed incidentally when conducting foreign intelligence collection

Paraphrasing the German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.

Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes

Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?

Not if those people are legislators or law enforcement

If, during your upbringing, you were inculcated in pro-shrimp propaganda and earned substantial rewards for helping shrimp find food or defend themselves against predators, you’d probably be fairly inclined to help them out as an autonomous adult. Hell, we have human beings today that didn’t experience that and are still committing their lives to shrimp welfare

I wouldn’t trust this argument by analogy enough to risk the fate of the world on it, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that a super intelligence would be totally disinclined to care about the interests of lesser intelligences

I would say that rationalists have some commitment to their religion being factually accurate (or at least grounded in empirical observation), which is more than can be said of most others

>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need.

Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before the internet arrived on the scene, I can’t think of anything which is harder to produce or distribute since the advent of the internet. Particularly on distribution, I have far more access to goods and services than my parents did.

Agreed that this hasn’t changed the structure of society in any meaningful way. We’re still social animals with all the same strengths and weaknesses as before.

>Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software?

Hasn’t homology modeling essentially been abandoned by researchers at this point? Maybe their livelihood wasn’t completely ruined but if you had specialized in that technology, you were probably materially harmed by the introduction of AlphaFold. That harm doesn’t outweigh the obvious benefits, but I would be very surprised if the harm doesn’t exist.

>Even the humble startup shipping yet another calendar tool isn’t harming anyone or being the direct cause of layoffs of other workers.

If they’re undercutting and outcompeting an existing calendar tool, they very well could be contributing to layoffs at their competitors.

For anyone doubting this, take a look at Zahi Hawass’s (former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities) response to the ScanPyramids project. From wikipedia,

> On November 2, 2017, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told the New York Times: "They found nothing...This paper offers nothing to Egyptology. Zero." Later, once the North Face Corridor was inspected with an Endoscope, Hawass conversely commented that ScanPyramids's work had provided a "major discovery" that would "enter houses and homes of people all over the world for the first time".

A somewhat timely SMBC has the correct solution: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waste-2

Perhaps I misread the parent comment, but the emphasis on that clause seemed to be on the fresh produce, not the lower carbon emissions. I don’t know how swapping out for 100% electric improves people’s access to fresh produce is my point

>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong

Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable with using at least some automation, be it mechanical or digital, elsewhere in our lives

I do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp apples back in the 90s and 2010s and I struggle to see where any cruelty was involved.

>If there was a direct and maintained electric train route

What do you mean by this? Most US freight trains are already diesel electric. German freight uses overhead electric wires on most of the shared passenger rail network, which is great, but doesn’t make it any easier or faster to deliver freight to consumers. Are you thinking of high speed rail? Bullet and maglev trains aren’t used to deliver freight anywhere globally that I’m aware of.

>If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you

Kevin Mitnick? Marcus Hutchins? Robert Tappan Morris?

Sure, but in an era where major unsolved mathematics problems start getting knocked out one by one, what if attacks for all of them are identified in the space of a couple of years?

I don’t doubt that we could come up with new crypto algorithms equally as fast, but how do you trust that they are resilient (or even just implemented correctly) without an extended vetting period?

So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in the next few years? As a consumer of crypto that doesn’t understand the mathematics deeply, I’m getting kind of nervous that we’re going to wake up one day to find that the backbone of TLS has been shattered.

It does provide an explanation as to why Satoshi’s wallets have gone untouched (besides him being dead). $70B ain’t that much compared to a $5T market cap.

Is it possible that the first message is more information dense/less likely to be ambiguous than the latter? It’s clearly being selected for for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of the tokenizer or specific training data, but I don’t know. If the use of jargon was complete cruft, I would expect it to be selected against during reinforcement learning

It feels like you’re moving the goalposts here. If the question is, “Who should be liable for AI agents misbehaving,” I agree, it should be the end user that tasked the agent (in this case OpenAI). People are held liable for preventable accidents all the time, and in the case of employment law, torts can be brought against principals for actions an agent conducted on the principal’s behalf.

What your previous comment appeared to assert was that these systems had no independent agency to make decisions, which I think is clearly disproven by actual events. But perhaps I misread you

No, OpenAI did not instruct their agents to hack Hugging Face. They instructed their agents to hack a piece of a software within exploit gym. Upon determining this task was impossible, they then attempted to cheat the scoring system. As an instrumental goal in achieving this task, they coordinated with other AI agents to hack Hugging Face, under the belief that information regarding how the scorer functioned might be available on the site.

Whether or not you want to describe this as thinking, doesn’t really matter. What matters is that these systems are capable of creating intermediary goals that the people tasking them did not articulate and did not want to be achieved.

>I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system

Not really relevant to the broader discussion, but this simply isn’t an accurate description of China. Starting with the gaokao, admission quotas are set by province and admits to Peking university and Tsinghua are disproportionately from the urban professional class. Candidate party members must be politically vetted, which means that people whose families have expressed anti-communist views, are members of banned organizations (e.g. falun gong), or have substantial criminal records will not be permitted to advance. And once you make it into the party and enter political service, your advancement relies upon opaque patronage networks that someone without connections is unlikely to be able to navigate, even if they successfully satisfy the economic metrics the state assigns them.

I don’t want to overstate this, the Chinese system does filter out a lot of chaff and the current Chinese leadership has a lot of very capable people in positions of power. But I do not think it is substantially more meritocratic than Western political institutions

If it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.