ericjang

Interesting ideas. If I understand what you are saying, it's that we don't have a great way of attributing cause/effect, and therefore it's difficult to assign merits or demerits in society?

1) "Reality is always multicausal" i.e. the "responsible causes" of an event are a myriad of factors and 2) the law / insurance system have to assume that there is just 1-2 causes, so that blame and deserts can be meted out?

I'm curious what you think about alternate "unified theories of modernity's problems", such as Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) or racial inequity / colonialism, and how might you attempt to convince a believer of these alternate views that your theory is more correct.

Another commenter made exactly the same point I try to make, so I copy them here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29293687

> I assume the hidden leg of your rhetorical enthymeme is that the universe is a Turing machine

No, I am not making that claim. Not sure how you inferred that.

... by any chance, are you the author of the paper linked in this post? I am asking because I wonder if you are a philosopher by training, rather than being an actual AI researcher. If you are, I wonder if you'd heard of the essay "Newton's Flaming Laser Sword" (https://philosophynow.org/issues/46/Newtons_Flaming_Laser_Sw...)

Whether certain behaviors in the universe are uncomputable or not is irrelevant. If we classify "humans" as intelligent and assume no spooky immaterial aspects of consciousness, you already have an existence proof that intelligence is computable.

You don't believe in the "wisdom of the crowds" ?

> So in contexts where one is actually trying to solve the _same problem_ as a group, placing very high weight on the honest information received from previous experts can be critical.

Another "loose attempt to make this argument rigorous" might be to invoke Grim Trigger [1] strategies from repeated PD games. A very large negative weight is placed on "dishonest" behavior across a communication channel (game).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grim_trigger

The fact that the NFT sold for more than the original print after the act suggests to me that the "sacrifice-value-transfer" is not an exact 1:1 process, since the resulting NFT had a different value. Yes, the owner is probably delighted that the NFT is worth more, but then I'd argue that "uploading a physical object's value to the digital realm" is no longer the right way to think about this.

Interesting idea. But doesn't this rely on public acceptance of the "imbuing of the original object's essence into NFT?"

How do you encourage people to associate the act of destruction with an act of value transfer?

As a counterexample, an art vandal destroying a piece of art does not inherit the value of the art, even though the vandal and art interact in a culturally significant way such that the art ceases to exist after the interaction.

I am not only awed by the size and bulk of whales, but also the sheer meatiness of shrimp. It seems like these organisms are > 90% meat. Why do they have so much meat? What do they need all that meat for?

Hypothetically, if the computer could try both of these experiments at no cost to you, and tell you whether it improved things or not, does asking whether wavelets are appropriate for the domain even matter?

I still think that AI development should be embodied, and am willing to entertain the possibility that you don't need simulation at scale to train it (e.g. some clever unsupervised learning algorithm).

Evaluating a system that can do millions of things is simply impossible in reality, and that alone necessitates some kind of software-based evaluation metric. I agree that there is a ways to go - but I think trying to make simulation more like reality is a safer bet than having a low ceiling on iteration speed in real.

+1 to these Taipei real estate price estimates. Note that TSMC is headquartered in Hsinchu County, and I think real estate is much cheaper there (please fact check me on this though).

source: Parents are from Taiwan, and I have relatives in Taiwan who tell me similar price estimates.

I wasn't debating semantics

https://inews.co.uk/news/world/afghanistans-first-female-may...

Specifically about "natives, likewise, don't mind taliban rule".

Nicholas Kristof (an American journalist with possibly pro-American biases, but one who I think has a pretty good track record of honest reporting), has pointed out that Afghani women may enjoy less rights under the new administration, and there are many who have worked for pro-Western NGOs that are fearing for their lives. I'm not sure things will "just be life as usual" for all citizens, particularly women, under Taliban rule.

Source: https://twitter.com/NickKristof/status/1426546421906362368?s...

The title and content of the article, in which Hanke espouses the virtues if Niantic Labs (an AR company), were cognitively dissonant for me.

> The concept reached one of its most complete expressions in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, where virtually everyone has abandoned reality for an elaborate VR massively multiplayer video game. A lot of people these days seem very interested in bringing this near-future vision of a virtual world to life, including some of the biggest names in technology and gaming. But in fact these novels served as warnings about a dystopian future of technology gone wrong. As a society, we can hope that the world doesn’t devolve into the kind of place that drives sci-fi heroes to escape into a virtual one

I'm trying to understand what Hanke is really saying. Is he saying that VR sucks, and AR, specifically AR that encourages people to interact with the real physical world, is where its at? I assume by "biggest names in technology and gaming" he is referring to Niantic's competitors? Specifically what about those bets does he disagree with?

This is a sensitive topic, so I hope my question comes off as genuinely curious and not invalidating to the OPs experience, but rather a general question about how applicant selection ought to work. I wonder if the OP has some qualities that are weakly or strongly correlated with age (e.g. number of "older silicon valley institutions" one has worked at), and YC was selecting on those factors rather than explicitly filtering based on age.

My question is: if there exists some correlation between a protected class and some other variable X, is it moral to select based on X?

What happens if X is highly predictive of some conventional success metric (e.g. ability to raise a series A)?

Things that come to mind: redlining, use of zip code in credit score prediction, etc. If we deem these immoral, is the implication that we should perform selection within protected classes, and within non-protected classes (e.g. p(X|is protected class)), and guarantee equality of outcome (or non-discrimination of protected classes based on X)?

Note that I'm not saying YC was doing this - might just be standard unconscious bias.

Believe it or not, I spent the last hour typing and re-deleting a response to your sarcastic comment that you probably casually typed in the span of 10 seconds. In the end I reduced a 1000 word paragraph into a short one, in hopes that people who share your views see this.

Reuters and AP, as news organizations, do not typically make value judgements. Any opinions stated in the article are the opinions of whoever Reuters is quoting, not of Reuters themselves. Next time, instead of posting such a reductive and frankly off-topic comment, I challenge you to find something in the article that you factually disagree with.

On whataboutism: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#China

Now to help you out a bit with an interesting factoid: In the process of putting their own interests above other countries, the USA has made many mistakes, such as aggressive farm subsidies that ended up impoverishing Mexican farmers who could not compete. So there is a kernel of truth to what you are saying - that nationalistic import/export policy was something that America engaged with in the past. You can try and engage some logical debate as to whether the trade barriers China is putting up are comparable here, but it's certainly not obvious at first glance that they are the same thing. The morality of it depends on the strategic purpose of the barriers, what agreements / social contracts were established beforehand, and such. Certainly not resolvable in an off-hand comment like "America - Good / China - Bad".

Thanks for sharing your experience. the term "dark chasm lurking just beneath the surface" to describe what total freedom looks like on bad days speaks to me.

I also agree with your assessment of his partner. Keeping up with the Joneses sounds shallow at first, but I think it belies the true human desire to be respected by others. Maybe his partner felt like they weren't "accomplishing much" in life, which doesn't mean a 9-5 per se or an annual income $ per se, but that accomplishments were the best way to get respected by other people.

We're social creatures, so I don't think it's wrong to seek social validation by others. I think when one is single and looking for a partner, what other people think does matter a lot. I think if the author was still committed to not working, finding a partner would be much harder.

Googler here. dabfiend19 is correct, around ~2019 I believe new L3 hires were switched to this new grant schedule. Prior to that, it was based on a fixed number of shares.

This was an interesting, well-written post. I myself was an avid movie buff up until graduating college, after which point I became interested in other hobbies. My two cents:

1) I wonder to what extent the anhedonia is due to not the movie industry changing, but the author themselves changing, maturing, becoming more interested in other things in life. I used to consume copious amounts of anime / manga, now that stuff doesn't nearly interest me as much anymore, even though there is lots of fresh new content out there.

2) To the author: perhaps a new level of appreciation in films can be attained by trying to shoot a film, do a cel animation, write a storyboard of your own? The act of trying to create that which is so familiar can help you see things in an entirely new perspective.

> To be fair, meme activism has had its upsides.

The author seems to dislike the meme #BlackLivesMatter, but also praises some memes like "#5DemandsNot1Less to generate pressure on the Chinese government to preserve the relative political freedom of Hong Kong".

Both of these are memes. I am curious, what is the principle by which one decides which memes are "good" and which ones "have gone too far"? They propose 3 recommendations at the end for how to engage with memes, but couldn't this be applied to #5DemandsNot1Less as well?

Author here. Thanks for challenging my ideas.

If you keep the bag for yourself, and don't care that other people think you have a fake bag, then this is equivalent to the case of "consumable luxuries" that I discuss with Wagyu beef NFTs. I think this still creates pressure on the counterfeit economic incentives. The counterfeiter needs to acquire a real NFT for every fake bag they want to sell, and furthermore, this scam does not profit in units of cash - you end up with NFT-less real bags, which will be difficult to trade back into cash (caveat: this is assuming that no one will want to buy the NFt-less real bag).

I also mention the following in the post - it is not about guaranteeing the pairing of NFT and physical objects. I agree that there does not seem at present a reliable mechanism to pair NFTs with a physical objects. However, I changed my mind once I realized that it's about disrupting the economic incentives of counterfeiters. An even more roundabout way to achieve this goal would be to create legitimate jobs for people with these counterfeiting skills. Not all solutions have to be secure in the transactional sense.

I'm curious how many people take advantage of the "borrow money against equity to finance lifestyle" approach. At what net worth / amount of equity does this strategy start to make sense? 100k? 500k? 10M?

I've heard that wealth managers offer very competitive (sometimes zero interest!) rates because what they are getting in return is your social / professional network's business.

Setting aside the advantages of Proof-of-Stake in terms of energy consumption, and setting aside the "green energy buyer of last resort" argument that the BTC maximalists often say, and setting aside the theoretical requirements for a valid PoW function, I do think it's tricky to argue which computing is inherently "valuable" or "not valuable".

There is this intuition that guessing a bunch of random numbers doesn't contribute high-leverage information or "work" to society. That there are a bunch of "information processing" tasks that have more inherent value.

But consider SETI@home - is decoding massive amounts of space noise valuable if nothing ever comes of it? Is the computation wasted?

Consider Folding@home - there are now far superior algorithms like AlfaFold that take far less compute. Is the computation wasted?

Consider all the matrices being multiplied on gigantic neural networks. Some of the resulting models will be enormously valuable to society. Most of it will be dead-on-arrival experiments - simply wasted compute. Even worse, the leverage can go the other way - a ML model can cause far more harm than the energy footprint used to train it.

One of the nice properties of the BTC PoW function is that you can be sure that your hash finding algorithm is probably not that sub-optimal.

I sincerely hope that someone as skilled & self-motivated as Radon is absolutely flooded with job offers due to the PR explosion of this blog post.

I agree about the "corporate tax creates work in tax avoidance", but if corporate taxes are abolished, wouldn't it drive more individuals to incorporate their own businesses?

The tax avoidance industry now shifts to servicing individuals, and again we find ourselves with inequality between individuals who can afford those services and those who cannot.

An alternative way to tax would be to simply raise interest rates, and discourage capital from not being deployed productively.

I agree with this comment and upvoted it for credible argument's sake

I would take a more charitable view on their move here.

AGI research is risky from a R&D standpoint (for obvious reasons), and also tricky from a business strategy and product development standpoint. There isn't a mature business playbook of how to monetize this technology, and although they probably have some ideas, their GPT-3 API pilots have suggested that outside entrepreneurs and programmers can come up with a larger search space of potential use cases then OpenAI can come up with themselves (in the same way that AWS users create more diverse products than Amazon can envision).

It's not an admission that they can't deploy capital - it's that they see an untapped resource of creativity that they can cheaply profit from, rather than building things in-house. The would rather grow the whole pie than try to grow their own slice. It's in a similar vein to how Taiwan Semiconductor lets other companies build on top of their platform and foster trust by never competing with them. In turn, they get to partner with more companies.

If they had pivoted entirely to a 100% investment firm, I would agree with you. But it looks to me from this announcement that they have built some fundamental technology and would like others to figure out the best way to monetize it, and they want to focus on new fundamental technology. An investment fund will align incentives with entrepreneurs building on top of GPT-3.

How would oracles verify semi-private business deals?

I went and read the paper in more detail. Yeah, my original comment was way off-base, except if you draw a parallel with normalizing flows as iterated refinement (similar to iterated de-noising), and see that the DDPM is a more unconstrained form.

But at a surface level, there isn't a clear connection between DDPM and energy-based models.