slibhb

That sounds like an argument for anarchism. I am very unimpressed by political philosophies that take arguments to their logical conclusion.

What seems to me to have worked is understanding that a government is necessary, that it has the potential to misbehave, and therefore we should carefully design laws and processes to constrain it. I would like to see opponents of mass surveillance do this, which seems more productive than what I normally observe.

I'm generally in favor of mass surveillance, as long as it's in public. I think it can prevent a lot of crime and I don't believe we have a right to "privacy in public". Red light cameras, for example, strike me as unalloyed good.

However, I'd be interested to see if opponents of mass surveillance could draft good legislation to curb potential abuses. For example, the laws around who owns/controls data from cameras could be changed/redefined, as could the process of accessing that data.

From what I understand, none of the people involved here are originators of the idea that led to this solution. Not Buckmaster nor Alpöge nor OpenAI. All of the above were using LLMs to push other mathematicians' ideas forward (Diego Cordoba and Luis Martinez-Zoroa; named in the linked document).

I don't know how the math community handles this but normally I would think if X mathematician comes up with an idea and Y mathematician uses it to solve some problem, Y would get credit. But does that change if Y heavily relied on LLMs? I suppose we're going to find out.

Worth noting that Tao's post says the authors had "significant AI input" but are reworking them into "acceptable form". Either way, it seems AI was involved.

> But the right to accurate information from public officials, I thought that was indeed an absolute and basic right in a democracy

That's a misunderstanding on your part. You can't have a "right to accurate information" because officials might simply be wrong. "Being wrong" can't be against the law. Additionally, people simply disagree about lots of things and often there's no procedure to resolve this.

However, you can't lie under oath, or in front of Congress. But lying is not the same as providing inaccurate information. In most other contexts, lying is legal.

This is what happens when people get "the entire history of humanity" from Howard Zinn-like sources. Healthy, stable societies are not based on the threat of violence, but rather consensual submission to a rule of law. As a rule, humans cooperate, play fairly, and want others to admire and respect them.

1. The government will force them to submit

2. They care about status, fame, reputation

3. Attitudes towards taxation/redistribution will change in a world where AI is doing almost all the labor

That's not the main issue at all. I'm baffled where you got that idea.

Also, I live in Northern Virginia where we have tons of data centers, and energy prices have not spiked.

Today, the decentralized nature of human labor means we have to incentivize people in broad ways. But if there's like 5 AI companies doing all the labor with their robots, we can just tax them and redistribute.

The owners/workers at AI companies won't resist the redistribution. It will be seen as inevitable as AI performs a greater and greater share of labor. Also, the AI company owners/workers will accrue massive status and fame; which will become the new currency (like you noted in your first post).

The US has never experienced a widespread famine.

In some sense I agree with you that starvation in the modern world is a political problem. Evidence for that is the common observation that famines don't occur in functioning liberal democracies.

But food production relies on more than technology. Human labor is necessary to produce food, and so incentives have to exist for people to do that work (prices, free markets, capitalism, inequality, etc). So if we decide "everyone deserves free food" then we are undermining the production of food. Why would people work in the fields when they could just collect their free food? Scarcity won't be truly gone until food is abundant whether or not there are any people working the fields.

Scarcity of status, fame, power, etc may be inevitable -- but that's fine. After all, people need stuff to do.

But if we solve food, hunger, housing, education, healthcare, and entertainment then that's enough for me. And no, it's not "the current political system" that prevents us from solving those problems now. Rather it's that engine of production is human labor, which forces us to rely on incentives.

> Do you see the missing link there? They might ask: “What happens to those goods? What happens to me? Do I get given the goods? Are the goods sold and then I am paid a stipend? I’m hungry. Will I still need to buy things? Okay, if so, but I have no money because I was fired.”

This process will take generations. Over time, people will work less and less as productivity steadily increases (we already see this in the pre-AI era as technology has accumulated). Eventually, AI will do all necessary labor and goods/services will be incredibly cheap. Over the decades, as this situation develops, our governments will become more socialist/redistributionist.

Also, it's possible that this technology just doesn't pan out. There could be a bottleneck or a nuclear war or whatever. Maybe it just stops scaling, or it stays in the realm of text-generation and can't replace manual labor. But it's worth a shot, and leftists should get on board.

Feels more like leftists are pro-scarcity into order to "empower workers"

"Technology will free mankind from labor and usher in an era where everyone is simply allocated whatever they requre" was a staple of leftism up until the USSR collapsed.

The difference is that today, unlike in the 20th century, there's a feasible path to post-scarcity. It's not "around the corner" but there's a path if you squint. Myabe it won't pan out, but it's worth a shot. The irony is that leftists want to ban AI to preserve scarcity thereby protecting people's jobs.

In my view, AI is our best shot at a post-scarcity society where massive redistribution has no/few downsides. If all labor is done by AIs then the price of everything will go to near zero and everyone can have a government mandated middle class lifestyle. Therefore I find it ironic that leftists oppose AI progress.

Should this be reassuring from a "great filter" perspective? It would seem to raise the odds that our species will survive long enough to create black holes

> Some futurist philosophers had extended the idea to explain the emergence of complex life from hot gas and stars. Humans exploit increasingly powerful energy sources, a progression they argued could culminate in artificial black holes. If those black holes spawned new universes, then a cosmos capable of producing technologically advanced life might produce more offspring. The progression from hot gas to stars, life and technology could, they proposed, be a product of cosmic natural selection.

So the meaning of life is to make as many black holes as possible?

> I have come to believe, however, that we have this backwards. As intelligent, social entities, we decide (or, to some degree, our evolutionary history has decided for us) which other entities we regard as having inner lives and being worthy of care. We do not care for others because they are conscious. Rather, we believe they are conscious when and because we care about them.

I care about my plants and I don't think they're conscious. Hell, I care about my car.

This is what I used to think. That "aphantasia" was just people arguing semantics about subjective experience. But my belief now is that if you think this way, you likely have aphantasia (I think I do).

A couple things that convinced me that the phenomenon is probably real:

1. I can visualize when I dream, or when I'm dozing/napping. But I can't while awake

2. I can "visualize" sounds, so I can hear a sound/song in my head and it's pretty much like actually hearing it. But I can't do this for imagery

Admittedly, neither of those is a smoking gun and I'd also be interested in a more objective test.

I agree with you that nothing has been proven either way. But I would say that, because people hate social media so much, we should perhaps be a little skeptical of claims that it causes harms. It's very easy to believe "X thing I hate" causes harm, even when the evidence is not solid.

> So since I can't wait another century for their to finally be good science about social media, I have no choice but to go with my gut.

Doing nothing seems fine!

Meta-analysis, very large, shows small correlation between unhappiness and social media use: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...

Large AU observational study. Moderate social media use correlates to the happiest kids, high use and no use correlates to unhappiness: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/article-abst...

Swedish obervational study, after adjusting the data there was no correlation: https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(26)00162-X/full...

I can't find the specific inverventional study I mentioned. As I recall, it was mixed but possibly I remembered wrongly.

Some studies do show a significant correlation between unhappiness and social media use, but causation has not been established and the bigger, better done studies have weaker correlations. People believe in causation because it suits their bias against social media.

I dislike social media but I doubt it's harmful. This substack summarizes my view on what really makes children unhappy: https://substack.com/home/post/p-186087964 (school). I'd guess that lack of freedom is what makes school so awful; modern schools are like little totalitarian states, where every minute of your day is accounted for and there is no privacy.

It's been eye-opening to watch people fall for the "social media is hurting the children" scam.

The best and largest observational studies don't show a strong correlation. Studies with an intervention are mixed/the effect isn't large. Extreme and compulsive social media use is bad, but it's almost maybe always a symptom rather than a cause.

I saw the trailer for the new Facebook movie last weekend. It's comical really; first people blamed Facebook for the 2016 election and now for their kids being depressed. It's classic scapegoating.

What makes this worse is the irony: in the name of protecting children, we're going to further reduce their freedom. And if there is single largest cause of children being depressed, I'd bet on "lack of freedom" over "social media use".

Lots of places in the US have plentiful water. Don't build data centers where there's a lack of water! And it's a dead horse at this point, but we don't need to be growing almonds in CA. If you actually care about water use, focus on that.

Because people are more "against capitalism" than ever, free markets have become an underrated solution to many of our problems. E.g. 1. stop subsidizing wasteful, environmentally damaging agriculture and 2. legalize building housing. Markets aren't perfect but they could improve the status quo in certain areas.

This is business as usual for public sector unions. Focusing on police unions is a good way to highlight these issues to leftists who reflexively both defend unions and criticize police

One of the use cases I've wondered about for AI is giving it a picture of the "spice wall" in a grocery store and asking it to find all jars of e.g. cardamom. This takes me an annoyingly long time to do when I'm shopping, so it would actually be useful.

I'd love to see some other data. But afaik it's basically not contested that the US has shorter wait times than the UK and Canada

Anecdotes aside, here's some data:

https://benchmarkcanada.org/Governing_Healthcare-Wait-Times....

The US does far better than the UK and Canada.

Canadians can (and do) just cross the border and use private US health care. The vast majority of them live near the US border.

Is "data" to blame for this? Or is it just the normal cycle of every fast food restaurant? There are numerous local franchises near me that were great when I moved here but complete crap now. There are outliers (like Chik-fil-a) but in general, over the decades, fast food restaurants always degenerate.

Seriously!

When I clicked the article, I thought it was going to include, like, how many kids/pets he has or his wife's maiden name. But I don't find any of the information listed in the article "creepy". It seems like obvious stuff they'd want to track.