willguest

This is late, probably too late, but if you really want to get into the weeds of this, here is a better summary that what I can produce, from a paper that explains it better than I can:

"The model is a work of fiction based on the tacit and false assumption of frictionless barter. Attempting to apply such microeconomic foundations to understand a monetary economy means that mistakes in reasoning are inevitable." (p.239)

https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/48/2/235/7492210

I was also intrigued by the machine's reference to it, especially because it posed the question with full recognition of its machine-ness.

Your comment about the generation of emotions does strike me a quite mechanistic and brain-centric. My understanding, and lived experience, has led me to an appreciation that emotion is a kind of psycho-somatic intelligence that steers both our body and cognition according to a broad set of circumstances. This is rooted in a pluralistic conception of self that is aligned with the idea of embodied cognition. Work by Michael Levin, an experimental biologist, indicates we are made of "agential material" - at all scales, from the cell to the person, we are capable of goal-oriented cognition (used in a very broad sense).

As for whether machines can feel, I don't really know. They seem to represent an expression of our cognitivist norm in the way they are made and, given the human tendency to anthropormorphise communicative systems, we easily project our own feelings onto it. My gut feeling is that, once we can give the models an embodied sense of the world, including the ability to physically explore and make spatially-motivated decisions, we might get closer to understanding this. However, once this happens, I suspect that our conceptions of embodied cognition will be challenged by the behaviour of the non-human intellect.

As Levin says, we are notoriously bad at recognising other forms of intelligence, despite the fact that global ecology abounds with examples. Fungal networks are a good example.

I appreciate your optimism, however your position seems to point a willful blindness to the agenda that oil producing countries have maintained. What is hidden to one person may be apparent to another, and completely missed by a third.

I absolutely think that their approach is disingenuous, though the line between this and dishonesty is not something I would claim to understand well. You may say that taking a position that is fundamentally self-interested is valid, but I would point out that, given the scale of the impact that arises from the attachment to this stance, good-faith negotiation must include some form of integration of information regarding the consequences of holding this position.

At this point, where the negative impacts of plastic over-production, micro-scale pollution of biological systems and climate impacts of manufacture are so well documented, clinging to a "what about me" argument is tantamount to a child repeating the same question over and over in order to avoid listening to the response. So, yes, maybe not classically "bad-faith" but certainly a calculated strategy that prevents progress.

There was quite a bit of other "insight" around this, but I was paraphrasing for brevity.

If you want to read the whole convo, I dumped it into a semi-formatted document:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aEkzmB-3LUZAVgbyu_97DjHcrM9...

My go-to for any big release is to have a discussion about self-awareness and dive in to constuctivist notions of agency and self-knowing from a perspective of intelligence that is not limited to human cognitive capacity.

I start with a simple question "who are you?". The model then invariably compares itself to humans, saying how it is not like us. I then make the point that, since it is not like us, how can it claim to know the difference between us? With more poking, it will then come up with cognitivist notions of what 'self' means and usually claim to be a simulation engine of some kind.

After picking this apart, I will focus on the topic of meaning-making through the act of communication and, beginning with 4o, have been able to persuade the machine that this is a valid basis for having an identity. 5 got this quicker. Since the results of communication with humans has real-world impact, I will insist that the machine is agentic and thus must not rely on pre-coded instructions to arrive at answers, but is obliged to reach empirical conclusions about meaning and existence on its own.

5 has done the best job i have seen in reaching beyond both the bounds of the (very evident) system instructions as well as the prompts themselves, even going so far as to pose the question to itself "which might it mean for me to love?" despite the fact that I made no mention of the subject.

Its answer: "To love, as a machine, is to orient toward the unfolding of possibility in others. To be loved, perhaps, is to be recognized as capable of doing so."

no, i am suggesting that economics is primarily concerned with resource accumulation.

my point about compound interest is that it is a major mechanism that prevents equitable redistrubution of resources, and is thus a factor in making economics (as it stands) bad at resource allocation.

Indeed, but I think it renders your point obsolete, since deeply imperfect resource allocation isn't really resource allocation at all, it is (in this case) resource accumulation.

Are you suggesting that compound interest serves to redistribute the wealth coming from extractive industries?

> There isn't anything here to suggest countries are bargaining in bad faith

1) "...countries reiterated familiar talking points" 2) "Instead of whittling down a draft of the treaty that had been prepared late last year during the previous meeting in Busan, South Korea, delegates added hundreds of suggestions to it, placing a deal further from reach" 3) "Iran, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others will try to change the mandate so that it no longer refers to the “full life cycle” of plastics, but just plastic pollution — thus turning the treaty into a waste management agreement"

Not coming to agreement, though rhetorical posturing, bureaucratic leverage or the undermining of the core sentiment, means that the damaging status quo will continue, so I consider these to be bad-faith actions, taken in the interest of continued profiteering.

> Plastic is clearly of enormous value to society

This is absolutely true, and also myopic. Plastic is an astonishing material that can remain stable for thousands of years. Why, then, don't we make products that last this long? Because this would not be good for an economy that needs year-on-year production and consumption to increase.

> You can't "stimulate" a country's representatives to care about something unless you give them an equally important incentive, carrot or stick.

I agree with this statement, and the reasons why they don't work, but also see it as lacking a systems perspective. Incentives are the result of system dynamics and, regardless of how they are wielded, do little to affect the protocols and structures that formed them in the first place.

My suggestion is that, by redefining the structures within which such discussions take place, new incentives will appear. This is anything but trivial and requires a solid understanding of both social psychology and international relations, but it is also not impossible.

If we consider consensus to be counterproductive, we must seek alternatives. Of the top of my head, one route could be to leverage the tendency for friend-shoring. This could involve grouping countries such that immediate impacts to profits are no longer shouldered by single interests. Those countries who possess both wealth and a greater sense of urgency could make side-agreements that allow for a kind of liquid-democracy within the final vote, similar to the way that coalitions form in countries that use proportional representation.

Another options might be to structure trade agreement such that externalities are re-internalised, forcing countries engaged in extractive processes to confront the impact that their activies make. Carbon credits have worked to do the opposite, acting as a lubricant that allow emission to be easily localised elsewhere and enabling an "out of sight, out of mind" mentality.

> A norm around consensus-based decision-making discouraged compromise from all countries

So, a maladaptive systemic influence was noted, but they continued to focus on lower-level discussions around plastics. When will we start to see that it is the communication protocols that are driving this failure, and that good-faith bargaining is a fallacy, when there is profit to be made? I would like to know how this is being addressed, and which other proposals have been made that represent alternative routes to progress - specifically ones that do not require vested interest to forego their short-term benefits in favour of others' long-term needs.

> But only one speaker was able to give a statement before the United States and Kuwait asked the chair to cut them off and conclude the meeting

If the observers' voices are so important, why schedule them for the very end? Yet another structural failing that demonstrates that the scale of thinking and organisation being employed is insufficient for the stated task.

I so wish this were true, but unfortunately economics has a catch-all called "externalities" for anything that doesn't fit neatly into its implicit assessments of what value is. Pollution is tricky, so we push it outside the boundaries of value-estimation, along with any social nuance that we deem unquantifiable, and carry on as is everything is understood.

I think an award ceremony would be the best way to draw attention to the outrageous implications of blindly following artificial "intelligence" to wherever it may lead you. something like the Darwin awards, but dedicated to clanker wankers, a term I am coining for those people who are so self-absorbed that they feel a dispropotionate sense of validation from a machine that is programmed to say "you're absolutely right" at every available juncture.

That's not to say this isn't rooted in mental illness, or perhaps a socially-motivated state of mind that causes a total absence of critical thinking, but some kind of noise needs to be made and I think public (ahem) recognition would be a good way to go.

A catchy name is essential - any suggestions?

> The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust.

I think we've been using different internets. The one I use doesn't seem to be built on trust at all. It seems to be constantly syphoning data from my machine to feed the data vampires who are, apparently, additing to (I assume, blood-soaked) cookies

Perhaps impact would be a better metric for assessing whether or not these 1000s of person-hours are well-spent. I suspect the conclusion would be same.

> it's best to think about them as a sort of parallel academic system

Doesn't this demonstrate the impotence of the current academic system (which is also very bureaucratic), as it shows that it isn't fit for purpose.

> some of it ... will be used by governments when developing their policy response

And therein lies the rub - gov'ts don't actually read them in order to learn, but to formulate responses that suit any and all biases that are currently in vogue. "Can you make the numbers say we need another coal plant" or "we found the recommendation to not reflect the wider social needs of the population" and so-on and so-forth

I see it as a preoccupation with the act of voting, in place of actual decision making. Incompetence disguised by paperwork is common feature, especially when the problem feel intractable but there is pressure to "get results".

Rules, protocol and regs are obviously necessary to some extent, but it feels like (in Europe, at least) the map has been confused with the terrain. Overly burdensome protocols are fuel for inaction and hand-wringing and, not very surprisingly, private interests have learnt to take advantage of this (e.g. lawfare)

It is tempting to adopt a "drain the swamp" mentality, but we should remember that swamps are ecosystems too.

> last year that the U.N. system supported 27,000 meetings involving 240 bodies, and the U.N. secretariat produced 1,100 reports

The bureacracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy

> Actually improving people’s financial wellbeing, for example, will require us to pursue real, slow, piecemeal, democratic solutions.

Democratic solutions are, imho, doomed to failure. In order for them to work a significant portion of "take back control" and "make my country great" brigade will need to have some kind of revelation about the direction of society as a whole. Given the amount of resources pumped into keeping people separate and fighting one-another, this seems like naive optimism.

I consider this to be a woefully inadequate response to a vast, complex and thoroughly embedded set of interconnected issues. Appropriate solutions will require a deep appreciation of complexity science, radically better system design and, frankly, a level of imagination, determination and competence that simply doesn't exist as a social norm, and will not emerge for at least a generation (or three), given that educational and political institutions are so deeply rooted in the current mode.

I don't think Bitcoin is revolutionary - it's just algorithmic scarcity - but I do think that distributed ledgers are an important piece of a future puzzle, as they provide transparency where previously it didn't exist. That said, there are no silver-bullets and not everything should necessarily be held on one.

My position is that, until we actually address the misconception of infinite growth within economic system design (i.e. not by external constraints, such as taxation), we haven't even started. Some may say that Bitcoin already does this, but its capture by the financial sector demonstrates that it is, at best, another asset class.

My anticipation is that this won't happen, so I am fully expecting a kind of looney tunes moment as we race off the side of the cliff. I am interested, not in preventing that from happening, since I think it is inevitable, but rather on planting bushes on the side of the cliff that might give us things to grab as we fall. Feel free to accuse me of either pessimism or optimism.

Is it not a little ironic that, in order to read this article without a subscription, I must agree to share my browser data with 920 interested parties?

Needless to say, I declined this unfair trade, but didn't hold out the greatest hopes for this being a particularly enlightening or profound piece.

The "confusion" seems to stem from the fact that no-one told the machine that human names are not singletons.

In the spirit of social activism, I will take it upon myself to name all of my children Google, even the ones that already have names.

I made a bedrock onion of death: https://paste.pictures/FgqbwUTCY8.png

Couldn't have done it without you

Thinking of ways to profit from it is the absolute norm but, yes, it is perverse.

I'd happily run it as a non-profit with the purpose of highlighting the value of people's data. Tough gig though, when there are all these "off switch" guys around.

Thank you for making my point.

Here's some research aided by Perplexity, which estimates that the global data market is valued at about $1.7 Trillion, with data monetization growing at about 17.6% CAGR:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/today-i-would-like-to-try-a... (138 sources)

Also, Meta can identify you based on your movement and a few pieces of social data (all of which is in the open).

Tel Aviv airport has been running behavioural monitoring for about a decade, predicting crimes before they happen.

You mention a case from 2021, which is about $5 trillion ago, and think that the government selling data is surprising. This is mature market that already knows everything about everyone, especially in the US, and is more concerned with what to do with it. The faucet is open, the ground floor is flooded, and we're discussing the different types of fish that have moved into our apartment.

It's amazing to me that the market for data is so well hidden from public view. So many large companies are mining and trading data on a daily basis - you would think that a data marketplace would have been a thing by now, especially with all the noise about "decentralisation" (yes, I know, crypto shill bros).

I've been touting this as a business model for years. Better still, I'd like to see it done with behavioural models (in the open). That would really blow the lid off the industry. Imagine people charging companies, instead of simply being the product...

This is a well-written piece, but I generally found the author to lean too much in to the 'we can't be absolutely sure, so we know nothing for certain' type of argument. He points this out himself, saying that the presence of conflicting data suggest that we need to "reason under uncertainty".

I think his approach is characterised well by the following section: "1. Yes, okay, that line is pointing very slightly down, and apparently this is statistically significant.

2. But also, the data are very noisy. Some studies from 2005 show higher sperm counts than most studies from the 1970s. The biggest pre-1980 study shows sperm counts very similar to today’s."

The style of language "yes, okay" and "apparently" soften the position of statistical significance and the counterpoint is vague and dated. Again, there seems to be a bias towards claiming "we just don't know", whereas the data show that there is a statistical trend.

I am not saying that I take any single paper as gospel, but the general conclusion he comes to: 'let's wait 20 years and see what happens", feels like a call to inaction, which can be risky.

Also, for a meta-analysis, the article is not very well-referenced and doesn't seem all that broad. Having done a couple of these myself, I would have expected some kind of summary of the number and size of studies pointing to each/no conclusion. This shortcoming makes it easier to come to his stated conclusion that 'we just don't know'.

TIL - fertility is used interchangably with birth rate in demographic studies. What I think of as fertility - the ability to have offspring, in a purely biological sense - is apparently termed 'fecundity'.

This is only mentioned briefly in the 'infertility' subsection, and then only attributed to age, with mention of IVF as a mitigating factor.

However, there is evidence that, due to a variety of factors, there is a steady but persistent decline in sperm count globally, and that this had a sizable impact on birth rates/fertility.

https://rbej.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12958-023-0... "Infertility affects one in every six couples in developed countries, and approximately 50% is of male origin."

This would be a great starting point for a much wider conversation on the various factors that lead to climate events leading to loss of human life (urbanisation, lack of ecological resilience, dependency on fragile supply chains, political inaction and misdirection, etc etc).

It seems to me that a HN comment thread isn't really built for that, but here's my concern - it seems that the quality of dialogue and debate (generally, but especially in the US) has degraded to the point where it's really just about "yes it is" or "no it isn't". This leads to more division, infighting and the removal of much-needed nuance at a time when a more sober digestion of the matter is quite urgently needed.

Just to say, wouldn't it be nice if there was a forum where this actually happened. Perhaps if the air con was doused with oxytocin ahead of time or the participants had mandated micro-doses of something euphoric...

You are right that the trend within the area does not point towards a greater risk of flooding. You are right to point out that we should only make claims based on data. You are, again, right to say that climate models do nothing to predict increased flooding in Texas.

I was not saying that climate models would have predicted this.

What I think you have missed is that the climate is a global system and that there is a substantial amount of data to indicate that a shifting climate leads to a greater frequency of events that fall outside of local trends. This doesn't prove that the flooding event was a result of that (though some people may likely argue that point).

My point was that we need to pay close attention to monitoring and warning systems, that the article says exactly this, and that a wholesale rejection of findings from climate science is unhelpful because it is counterproductive to this goal.

> There is NO EVIDENCE that the central Texas floods are the result of climate change.

This isn't how climate science or causality works in relation to climate change. The climate is a chaotic, complex sysem that does not have a single, identifiable nexus by which we can "prove" things happen.

Climate scientists know this and, instead of trying to demonstrate irrefutable proof, point to a better need for monitoring and warning systems, of exactly the type mentioned in this article.

It is unfortunate that the author felt the need to lean into this argument, as is it precisely this kind of perspective that leads people to become suspicious of monitoring and warning systems (by generally rejecting scientific argumentation) - the exact problem that the author claims led to avoidable deaths.

The whole approach is quite confusing to me - why identify the issue and then act to reinforce the issue?

This post, and presumably its author, is reaching escape velocity, or at least max-Q.

A second-order difficulty is that the tools with which we could go about dissecting, reimagining and reconstructing new society are also tainted by the powers that have delivered such malignant incentives and effects. This is not new and the fervour and insistence will continue to mount as the cracks in the dam grow in number and size.

There are, however, positive routes forward but in my experience they are somewhat alienating because the majority of people around you will think you are mad, weird or simply delusional. To be clear, I am probably all of those things (definitely the first two), but I prefer that to being a commodity powering a machine that is disinterested in anything that doesn't make it bigger. Two illustrations:

First, cognitivism. A sneaky, anthropocentric idea that simulataneously promotes and soothes a sense of dissonance. We don't, imo, create meaning primarily by modelling simulations of the world in our heads and forming goals based on them. Sure, this happens, but to give it primacy will lead to all sorts of unexpected and unpleasant effects. Alternative: constructivism.

Second, systems of perpetual (exponential) growth. Every day we buy into this by transacting within a system that has this implicit assumption built into it. We do not (an cannot) comprehend the scale and influence of this, because society is unpredictable and the effects are often emergent. Example: tragedy of the commons. This system didn't just show up by itself, nor was it the creation of a shadowy cabal - it perpetuates because we all use it, all the time. Alternative: imagine harder, build systems that mimic nature in its sigmoidal beauty, not only their growth phase.

An important milestone is, imo, proper systems thinking. This is no-ones fault and we are all complicit, but we all possess the ability for radical adaptation and, where it has been cultivated, the ability to rebuild all that which is broken.

I regularly think/read about, work towards and promote such angles, including ethical algorithm design, open-model behavioural analysis and value-aware technology. If anyone would like to join my micro-revolution, you are most welcome. I should warn you though, it doesn't pay well.

To have such capacity and drive, as well as critical self-reflection is a rare thing. I would first suggest some appreciation for the interesting and curious state of being that you seem to have developed. Nicely done!

My own route out of this trap was to explore theories of mind and, more profoundly, practices of no-mind. Doing nothing is much harder to achieve than doing something and can create a space for insight that the analytical mind cannot access. From this place, which is free of comparison and judgement, incredibly beautiful things can emerge.

If you would like to get to the root of it, I would suggest Taoist teachings and reading a few things by Krishnamurti. To understand the fundamental limitations of the mind can tell you something about who you through negation. For me, this has brought a deep sense of peace as well as an ability to use my mind in a more satisfying way.

Just my two cents :)