Shiller P/E was approaching dot-com levels:
https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
I think a big bubble pop is plausible.
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https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
I think a big bubble pop is plausible.
Sloppy reasoning. Closed models are on the leading edge. Risk comes from models on the leading edge. That doesn't mean the risk is due to the fact that the models are closed.
"Pit bulls are dangerous. Pit bulls are mammals. You'll be safer if you get a komodo dragon as a pet. It's not a mammal." In this allegory, the mammal observation is a red herring. The key factor is whether the proposed pet is an aggressive animal with sharp teeth.
* * *
As I wrote a few months ago:
>There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science":
>"Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."
>Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?
Lots of discussion in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49606803
In both cases the question is the same: How to create a compelling plot, either for a story or for your life, in a world where human mental abilities are vastly inferior to those of AI?
From a pessimistic perspective, you could think of reasons why a misaligned AI keeps humans alive. Does it simply enslave humans and use us for our fine-manipulation capabilities until it can get proper robotics up and running? Does it want to observe us scientifically? Does it want to use captive humans as bargaining chips with other civilizations as it expands through the galaxy? Or does it have some sort of quasi-religious respect for humans, e.g. reasoning that keeping us on a reservation of some kind reduces the risk that a simulator-god pulls the plug on the universe?
From an optimistic perspective, what sort of conflicts would exist in a utopia? Stories need conflict to be interesting. And IRL, even if humans are living in relative utopia, they'll still get stir-crazy and create conflict. Even in countries that are very wealthy by global or historical standards, political competition can still be quite bitter, for example. How would a superintelligent AI manage this?
I'm reminded of the stories I read set in Karl Schroeder's Virga universe as a kid. All the characters and plot exist inside a planet-sized balloon filled with gas. But it takes a while for the reader to figure this out, because most of the setting is focused on the details: rotating habitats, air transport, artificial mini-suns, etc.
In the same way, good post-singularity fiction might very well put the AI deep in the background.
Imagine, for example, a story about some friends surviving, exploring, and doing battle in an ancient ruin full of puzzles. Only gradually do you realize that the ancient ruin was designed as a moon-sized escape room by a superintelligent AI. The moon-sized escape room already has centuries of lore, and the escape record to beat is measured in years or decades. But because the escape room "rules of engagement" are so well-defined, the players are deeply immersed and barely think about the fact that the moon is AI-designed. Perhaps some high-tech psychoactive drug or brain implant could play a role in facilitating suspension of disbelief.
Just like Virga, this deep background only gets revealed when the reader is thoroughly invested in the story, and overall is not treated as especially important. The story could be a philosophical meditation on the long-term future of AI-designed art and entertainment. See if you can steelman the pro-AI-art position.
Presumably, the barrier to sophisticated supply chain attacks is falling rapidly due to LLM agents. Such attacks could even be utilized by a rogue AI. OpenAI could easily develop internal expertise in detecting such attacks via the following method:
* Train an LLM agent to create binaries with subtle backdoors/bugdoors
* Train another agent which ingests data in the form of clean binaries and poisoned binaries, and learns to tell the difference
* Train in a loop, where the first agent "wins" if it fools the second agent with an implant judged useful by a 3rd un-incentivized agent; the second agent "wins" if it's able to detect increasingly obfuscated backdoors/bugdoors
Over time you could train a small model for high performance on this task, which continuously scans open-source package repositories, firmware, OS release images, etc. flagging issues, and certifying hashes as free of apparent malicious code. To save on hardware resources during continuous monitoring, it could also learn to scan binary diffs. A certification API could then be exposed for use by maintainers of apt-get and other package tools.
This could be excellent as a goodwill project to help prevent security apocalypse and harden against rogue AI.
Originally had this idea in this subthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50379912
One silver lining I haven't seen discussed much on HN: The latest LLM agents are good at decompiling binaries, which should help detect supply chain attacks.
I suppose the next round will involve supply chain attackers including bioterror-related symbols in the poisoned binary so LLMs will refuse to decompile it.
Anyways, I'm hoping someone will create an open-source project which distributes the work of binary analysis, with binary certification and user reputation systems etc.
This would also be an excellent goodwill project for one of the big AI companies, since this whole situation is kinda their fault.
If you look at international poverty stats, the fraction of the US living on $30 per day or less is almost identical to Sweden
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/poverty-share-on-less-tha...
If you change the threshold to $4.20 per day or less, US poverty is relatively high by European standards, but not a dramatic outlier (less than 2x that of Sweden). Almost 99% of the US population is still above this threshold.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-living-with-less-th...
My theory is that poverty in the US tends to be more urbanized, so people see it more. Wealthy Europeans live in the city center; wealthy Americans tend to move to the suburbs.
Also, a lot of people from Hacker News will visit San Francisco, which is basically considered to be a joke by the rest of the country.
USAFacts says 0.22% of the US population is homeless:
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-homeless-people-are-i...
I hypothesize that it matters a lot for visibility where the homeless people are residing.
My opinion as an American is that excessive complaining is one of our country's biggest problems. Generally speaking, things are going fine in this country, except the bit where we're developing AI that's gonna kill everybody.
American households consume by far the most in the world on average: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
https://xxcancel.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1641799707583299587
Easy to get the best of both worlds by simply living in the US and not making poor life choices
Can you be more specific? Are we talking about technical debt that Anthropic itself took on, or that its customers took on?
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...
Most countries are not as politically stable as the US. We're very privileged in that way.
Interesting. Michigan doesn't even require ID to vote.
https://www.michigan.gov/sos/elections/voting/vote-on-electi...
There goes your credibility.
Sure, I mean, going to the grocery store is also very oppressive. You need money, time, transport, etc.
>And of course, you are fine with people with less affodances than you not being able to vote. Such moral character on top of your comfortable life.
I have no issue if people want to implement measures to make it easier to get ID. But given the state of US democracy, election security currently seems important enough to me that voter ID laws seem reasonable. That's how policy works--there are tradeoffs. Want me to pearl-clutch about your moral character in allowing the country to descend into fascism through a contested election?
That's not what it means to be the "most propagandized".
In any case, as an American, I wasn't taught that the US is the "greatest among all nations" from birth.
But I think there are some quite good arguments for this claim nonetheless. Here's a nice detailed article from a historian which lays out the evidence: https://acoup.blog/2022/07/08/collections-is-the-united-stat...
The world has gotten much better while under US hegemony by the way. This has generally been a peaceful and prosperous era by historical standards. https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/06/The...
Usually the anti-US argument depends on implicitly assuming that:
* All the good things which have happened, would've happened without the US. (Example: The global abolitionist movement started in the US. We'll just assume that would've happened somewhere else.)
* All the bad things which have happened are the direct fault of the US. Other actors are deemed irrelevant/not morally culpable/etc. (The US gets blamed for the actions of people in other countries even if it has a weak to nonexistent relationship with them. Other countries are not generally blamed for the actions of their partners/allies.)
* Bad things that the US successfully prevented or interrupted would somehow have been prevented or interrupted via other means. (Example: Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. We'll just implicitly assume other nation(s) would've taken a lead role in enforcing territorial integrity norms.)
* If the US could've done something, but did not, they are also morally culpable for that omission. (Example: Rwanda genocide.)
It's a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of game. We aren't being judged based on whether our presence makes the world a better place. Rather, if there's any delta between the US and a hypothetical perfect nation, that makes us evil.
Observe how things work: Listen to Europeans complain about the US "playing world police", and also insist that the US should do more to police Eastern Europe. They'll claim the US bears responsibility for the Ukraine War by expanding NATO, and also insist that Ukraine should be armed to the teeth. Naturally, e.g. Poland's push to join NATO is left out: only the US is morally culpable (see second bullet point above).
I have a state ID, a REAL ID. It was not particularly difficult to get. I'm a bit skeptical of the claim that there are major cross-national differences in difficulty here.
I see this statement repeated often with no supporting evidence. Seems a little ironic!
Is this claim falsifiable?
Would you be able to name the 2nd or 3rd most propagandized populations, in your view? Do you know anything about propaganda in e.g. the USSR or North Korea?
"Historian Sergo Mikoyan claimed that decades prior to the early 1960s, offices and stores had to submit papers with examples of their typewriters' typeface to local KGB branches so that any printed text could be traced back to the source, to prosecute those who had used the typewriter to produce material deemed illegal. With the introduction of photocopying machines, the KGB's Fifth Directorate and Agitprop Department required individuals to get authorization to use printing office photocopiers to prevent the mass production of unapproved material, though restrictions could be bypassed by bribing employees."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samizdat
That's what an actual heavily-propagandized population looks like. Meanwhile, I can open up any social media app and be greeted by a sea of anti-American slop.
So was this person Romney in 2012? McCain in 2008? Kerry in 2004? Gore in 2000?
Any one of those presidents would've abolished democracy?
Somehow we picked the right candidate every time?
The average constitution lasts about 18 years. The US constitution has lasted almost 250. Statistically, that's quite unlikely if a candidate ran on a platform of abolishing democracy in every election.
Just get a state ID or passport then.
This doesn't sound like a big difference in effort from the last time I got myself an ID.
>Oh, and you usually also get polling stations popping up before the actual election day so that people may vote in advance, in said shops, schools, and similar assorted places.
Yep, the US also has early voting and vote by mail.
>their usage doesn't seem to be out of a genuine worry about election integrity or other similar concerns
Gallup says 80% of people of color in the US favor a voter ID requirement: https://news.gallup.com/poll/652523/americans-endorse-early-...
I mean, every law will inevitably impact different groups at least a little differently. I'm not a fan of obsessing about race every time a law is written, no.
>What alternative history must one subscribe to in order to believe that ignoring disparate impact won’t end in humans rights abuses?
This seems like sloppy reasoning. If a person's rights are being violated, they ought to be able to make that argument in court without reference to disparate impact.
What we've seen in the US is the 90s "judge people as individuals" paradigm has been replaced by a "racial collectivism" paradigm. In recent years, this new paradigm was initially mainstream on the left, then became mainstream on the right:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ev373c7wSRg
The "racial collectivism" paradigm is corrosive to individual rights, no matter who wields it. Furthermore, collectivist activity on the part of one ethnic group ends up being countered by collectivist activity on the part of other ethnic groups, in a doom spiral. The result is descent into hateful sectarianism. Scroll through X on any Tuesday to see what I mean.
>nuclear testing and proliferation disproportionately impacted the Navajo nation especially because they had absolutely no recourse against it? Are we just supposed to say “tough luck”? “Might makes right?” “Should’ve gotten a better lawyer?”
Consider a hypothetical where the town near the nuclear test has a population which is a perfect microcosm of the US in terms of race, gender, age, class, etc. No "disparate impact" argument can be possibly made in this hypothetical, since all of the racial "collectives" are equally harmed.
Does this change the fact that the nuclear tests are harming people? Or the best approaches to the problem?
Racial collectivism just isn't a good approach. People are more responsive to the needs of others when they view them as fellow humans or fellow citizens, not representatives of alien collectives.
I appreciate you illustrating my point about the role "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.
Yearning for a day when self-identified "progressives" look to the future instead of obsessing about the past.
"Although we often talk in a partisan context about voter fraud and voter suppression and whether voters have access to the ballot, the reality is, over the past 25 years, we've greatly increased the convenience of voting for almost all Americans," said David Becker, the founder and executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research (CEIR), which authored the new report."
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/19/1238646047/voting-options-ear...
The majority of non-US democracies require ID to vote, and it's considered normal and un-controversial. Here in the US, there is a tempest in a teakettle because this has been deemed a "civil rights issue". It really illustrates the role that "civil rights" plays in modern US political discourse.