toasterlovin

I don’t think we disagree. I’m not taking issue with scientists having jargon, which I agree is good and necessary (though I think the less analytical academic disciplines, not being rooted in fact, have come to bear many similarities to state-backed religions; and I think they use jargon accordingly). I’m pointing out that I specifically intended to exclude professionals by scoping my statement to “social groups”. Primarily I had in mind religion, politics, certain social media sites, and whatever you want to call movements like capital R Rationality (I have personally duck typed it as a religion).

My preferred argument against the AI doom hypothesis is exactly this: it has 8 or so independent prerequisites with unknown probabilities. Since you multiply the probabilities of each prerequisite to get the overall probability, you end up with a relatively low overall probability even when the probability of each prerequisite is relatively high, and if just a few of the prerequisites have small probabilities, the overall probability basically can’t be anything other than very small.

Given this structure to the problem, if you find yourself espousing a p(doom) of 80%, you’re probably not thinking about the issue properly. If in 10 years some of those prerequisites have turned out to be true, then you can start getting worried and be justified about it. But from where we are now there’s just no way.

> social group

> The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag

Even better: a social group with a lot of invented lingo is a red flag that you can see before you get isolated from your loved ones.

> the typical outside view that rationalism itself is a cult and Eliezer Yudkowsky is a cult leader, both of which I consider absurd notions

Cults are a whole biome of personalities. The prophet does not need to be the same person as the leader. They sometimes are and things can be very ugly in those cases, but they often aren’t. After all, there are Christian cults today even though Jesus and his supporting cast have been dead for approaching 2k years.

Yudkowsky seems relatively benign as far as prophets go, though who knows what goes on in private (I’m sure some people on here do, but the collective We do not). I would guess that the failure mode for him would be a David Miscavige type who slowly accumulates power while Yudkowsky remains a figurehead. This could be a girlfriend or someone who runs one of the charitable organizations (controlling the purse strings when everyone is dependent on the organization for their next meal is a time honored technique). I’m looking forward to the documentaries that get made in 20 years or so.

Dead reckoning is a great analogy for coming to conclusions based on reason alone. Always useful to check in with reality.

Until Apple forced other chip makers to respond, nobody else was making high end phone processors. And their A series processors are competitive with and have transistor counts comparable to most mobile and desktop PC processors (and have for years). So the alternate reality where Apple isn't a TSMC customer means that TSMC is no longer manufacturing several hundred million high transistor count processors per year. In my opinion, it’s pretty likely TSMC isn’t able to achieve or maintain process dominance without that.

Update: To give an idea of the scales involved here, Apple had iPhone revenue in 2024 of about $200B. At an average selling price of $1k, we get 200 million units. Thats a ballpark estimate, they don’t release unit volumes, AFAIK. This link from IDC[1] has the global PC market in 2024 at about 267 million units. Apple also has iPads and Macs, so their unit processor volume is roughly comparable to the entire PC market. But, and this is hugely important: every single processor that Apple ships is comparable in performance (and, thus, transistor counts) to high end PC processors. So their transistor volume probably exceeds the entire PC CPU market. And the majority of it is fabbed on TSMC’s leading process node in any given year.

[1]: https://my.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS53061925

> Apple Silicon is simply not that special in the grand scheme of things

Apple Silicon might not be that special from an architecture perspective (although treating integrated GPUs as appropriate for workloads other than low end laptops was a break with industry trends), but it’s very special from an economic perspective. The Apple Silicon unit volumes from iPhones have financed TSMC’s rise to semiconductor process dominance and, it would appear, permanently dethroned Intel.

Right, it’s exactly the opposite. What is the AI skeptic version of MIRI, for instance?

Notably when I was checking the Current Events Portal for a while, most coverage of the Israel/Hamas war was sourced from Al Jazeera and it definitely felt biased. Checking it just now, it appears to be more balanced now.

Silicon Valley is filled with people who moved there to start businesses. Portland is filled with people who moved there for a better quality of life.

As I said:

> Somewhat of a tangent

I was just using your comment as a launching point for a thought I've had rattling around in my mind for a while. You mentioned some people having an inclination toward what is old and Eastern. That's the "somewhat" and the "tangent" is that I then connected that to people who apply the same heuristic to religion.

> "it's old, and it's eastern"

Somewhat of a tangent, but an interesting thought if one is inclined toward the old and Eastern: Christianity is old and Eastern.

And yet you can find a Christian community practicing very ancient rituals right here in the United States. You can celebrate those rituals in English, or various ancient languages, or a combination of both. Rituals are available every day, but the most elaborate and meaningful ones are saved for the most convenient day of the week: Sunday.

I don't know enough to argue the merits of your point, so instead I'll just point to Hindu nationalism in present day India.

> that need to justify one’s beliefs, provides a drive that monotheists have and polytheists lack

FYI, before the monotheists fully suppressed the polytheists in the Roman Empire, it was the polytheists who were suppressing the monotheists.

> Yet the paucity of yhwh names.

Many of the biblical names ending in "ah" are YHWH names. This includes many of the prophets. So Elijah, Zechariah, Jeremiah, Micaiah, Isaiah, for instance are all "ah" ending names that have a meaning related to YHWH in the same way that the "el" ending names are related to El. And then Joshua (and, hence, Jesus) is also a YHWH name.

Also:

* Communal living

* Sacred texts & knowledge

* Doomsday predictions

* Guru/prophet lives on the largesse of followers

It's rich for a group that claims to reason based on priors to completely ignore that they possess all the major defining characteristics of a cult.

Famously, Mr. Market deals in what things cost, not what they are worth.

The thing is, we do actually have a tech industry and other countries largely do not. It’s like arguing that industrialized nations are only wealthier than agricultural nations if you include manufacturing. Thats the whole point!

I'm not sure that a US government bond has a meaningfully different risk profile than an aggregate investment in US equity markets.

FYI, you can view the NEC for free. You have to have an account and it’s a janky web view of a PDF, which is suboptimal, but it is free.

FWIW, Amazon's search algorithm is actually extremely simple: rankings are based on what people buy after searching for a particular term. To use your examples, the reason why Amazon is showing power strips when you search for "surge protectors" is because people often use the terms interchangeably. So, while this is bad for you, since you correctly distinguish the terms, it's actually better for people who use the terms interchangeably and do want a power strip when they search for surge protectors. And I think it's ambiguous what the correct behavior should be. Perhaps in the future some AI system will be able to help customers manage this kind of confusion, but we're not there yet.

Since inevitably someone will mention that the search results are littered with ads: yes, they are, and due to the same factor I mentioned above, it makes sense for sellers to advertise, say, power strips against the search term "surge protector." We run into a similar thing with "outdoor" rated wire. It's a term which technically means a rating for UV exposure. However, customers often use it to refer to wire that is rated for burial in the ground. So we advertise our burial rated cable against the "outdoor" search keyword. Gotta meet the customers where they are.

> I know a person that was taken away by extended family as a child because the father had anger management issues.

Yeah, but the default was for them to be raised by their nuclear family.

If nuclear families were not of fundamental importance, you would not see “mother” and “father” universally conserved across all languages as the first words that people learn. This is like the thing with the two fish who don’t know what water is; nuclear families are so pervasively important that you just can’t see it.

Look, I don’t know what to tell you. Dictionaries contain the meanings of words and terms as commonly used. If you look up “nuclear family,” the meaning comports entirely with how I have been using the term. I’m sorry that’s inconvenient for your self conception.

See my other comment in this thread about anthropologists dichotomizing societies based on nuclear vs extended families. In short, it’s orthogonal to the issue.

It is. I think you’re bringing a lot of baggage to the term. In common usage (verified on my phone dictionary), it simply means a couple and their dependent children. It doesn’t require that they live separately from extended family. It doesn’t require that all the children have the same biological parents. It doesn’t even require that the parents are different sexes. Or that the parents are married and live together. It’s just a more specific term to remove the “extended” sense of the more general “family.”

I think you’re actually confused about the term, see my responses elsewhere in this thread.

No, that’s baggage that people are bringing to the conversation. It merely means a couple and their dependent children. Whether or not they live separately from extended family has no bearing on the term.

> if your father and the clan's patriarch give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

Good question, here’s one for you: if your father and a police officer give you conflicting orders, who do you obey?

The existence of a layer cake of social units doesn’t argue against the primacy of the nuclear family. Here’s another question for you: who’s more likely to advocate for your interest, your father or the clan’s patriarch?