They'll never get me. I'll just become even weirder :)
74 karma · joined May 15, 2018
This subject is a mite tricky to Google.
Not appreciating the mental scaffolding that takes you to the next point is a serious problem. Developmental economics and artificial intelligence - the scaffolding is neglected.
In developmental economics we only thought we knew how we got rich. Regressive planning (working backwards) failed because we are unaware of most of our past, even the recent past - we had a false consciousness about what actually took place. What we have is a bunch of just-so stories for grown ups and this is normal for humans in everything.
Neuroscientists say this is feature of how our memory works.
AI is similar because of Moravec's Paradox. People have been going around saying that more intelligent machines will come and replace physical labour for some time but the opposite is true. The paradoxical results of Moravec's Paradox occur because again we are unaware of the scaffolding required to replicate an artificial cerebellum system aka a brain/nerves/muscles - a body that knows how to move.
If you watch the most recent videos of walking computers you'll notice we are heavily implying we need very effective computer algorithms and vast quantities of data to produce a robot that can walk across the floor.
There is something wrong with that picture. I wonder if sea slugs brute forced traveling across the ocean floor with their supercomputers (now lost to us!).
In Germany a new edition of Mein Kampf was published - and it sold a lot of copies. Nearly all of those copies were to people who were already anti-Nazi.
I read all sorts of stuff - doesn't mean I buy it.
The Copernican description of reality is simple and correct and threw away complex but incomplete models.
I'm sure you've noticed that people frequently create complex models for something, but it is only later it gets reduced to something easier to understand.
Probably this is because the elegant model is difficult to reach on the first pass, so the more circuitousness paths are taken first - your thoughts?
As a cleaner myself I'd suggest him building up a small round anywhere there's retired folks. He'd need a small ladder, a stepladder, squeegee and applicator, bucket, cloths. The problem isn't really the capital costs - just having attention to detail, observing for good working techniques, being patient, polite and once you're seen actively working in the neighbourhood people begin to start offering you all sorts of odd jobs.
I say this because I think some times people from middle class families identify so strongly as 'software person' it detracts from other possibilities when they're stuck for $$$.
I feel strongly about this because I was trying to explain a possible implication of optogenetics to somebody this morning and suspect I came off sounding like a crazy person :)
What Musk is doing is making the familiar alien, trying to see from an external perspective holistically - which makes for results which are closer to something out of Ghost in the Shell than the everyday banality - and yet the banal world - when all the pieces fit together from a higher perspective really does possess an extraordinary big picture. Like the termites in the hill or Charles Darwin's understanding of how something normal (sex, reproduction rates and selection) really leads to something extraordinary.
Anybody looking through the macroscope will sound maladjusted until their beliefs ignored or become widely accepted. Think of that doctor who tried to get his coworkers to wash their hands. We have a hard time distinguishing between those and Coco the Clown. Our prior is 'if you don't sound like my internal monologue you must not be an ally and so be subject to suspicion'.
The other side to this - groups like Scientology take advantage of anybody who lowers their wards.
If you make ban lists (the Silicon Valley companies are operating in near sync with each other) - then the public expectation won't just be that level of moderation/censorship within the walled garden - but also outside of it.
We're already at the point of materialization, Stormfront and a socialist organization I can't recall (World Socialist something) are prevented from using domain names and other services like turning up in Google Search, Cloudfront or GoDaddy - effectively banning them from the web. They have then migrated to more censorship resistant networks. Legitimacy to the political persecution (by liberals) narrative has solidified in far right and far left circles - even the ones who aren't affiliated with the two organizations - it is now taken for granted in parts of mainstream web, parts of Reddit that organizations like DW are outright lying.
The trend is consistent, and I don't believe either of those two organizations were accused of being law breakers - and next to go down it will be Alex Jones - a watershed moment and advertising for censorship resistant networks because Jones is more famous than either. In the case of Jones his brand will be bolstered by this. China and Russia will say he is a ideological refugee, a political dissident and they will be able to make a great argument for that.
This is how censorship looks like from the inside perspective - it's just that you're on the inside. The Chinese feel the same way when being told off by the West on the subject of reeducation camps. You'll scoff at that I expect - but at least the Chinese are able to say these people needed handling because of real terrorism and illegal activity - where you've nothing to stand on.
I felt similarly wired to what I see in the video once, I took a 10 day meditation retreat and whether or not it works doing nothing for over a week was exactly what I needed.
The problem is that it is easy to justify not doing this - an endless series of excuses are available.
Afterwards you'll feel the sharpest and most focused you've ever been and the effect lasts for weeks.
The next step is to prevent DNS resolution working.
I assume that like myself you would see that as a step too far. The problem is that the average millennial will not see a meaningful distinction between being blocked on plaform X and being prevented from using a protocol.
There is a good chance of that happening I think - it's a matter of time before somebody develops a 'fake news' list and the wrongthinkers are effectively not part of the web for nearly everybody.
What will happen then is a big expansion of that other portion of the internet, and eventually citizens will go there to 'find out what really happened' on event x.
I am tired of people using 'human rights' as a flag for moral uprightness.
There are good arguments against human rights from all parts of the political spectrum.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2014/dec/04/-sp-case-agains...
That's right, an argument against the received wisdom on human rights from the Guardian.
Alex Jones is influential enough that he could, to use the parlance 'name the jew' and most of his followers would follow along with it or he would get new ones. If you think that he would find himself marginalized you are absolutely wrong - that would only occur at one level of society and the polite part isn't close to being meaningful - there is a huge market for this.
Throwing all people you find objectionable into one bucket is an error.
In fact I suspect you have it backward. Jones will be intimately aware of (some of) the far left and (some of) far right anti-semite culture - it takes some character to see the big picture and in my personal exhaustive experience with that world most people exposed to those cultures would become anti-semites fast.
Jone's nemesis is altogether more abstract - he sees himself as crusader against a modern meme similar to communism or fascism.
It really is the worst.
There are no true public forums anywhere on the web that I'm aware of.
2. Import duties and taxes so high that when added to shipping they're equal to the price of the product. This is usually discovered at the last minute.
3. Amazon's policy of listing dozens of product providers - with sometimes no visible way to detect if they ship to your country - so you have to hop back and forth to check if you may really buy it. I'm amazed Amazon does not provide a method for a user to send a message saying "I'd buy x if your shipping to country y was lower than z".
(1) and (3) are laziness. (2) could link to third party retailers to make an end run around the taxes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAfBsrds4_g
I'm convinced that if some objective 'progress bar' existed, constantly put in front of the public's mind by media or by government diktat - then a firehose of resources would be put at the disposal of R&D, like X-Prizes for medical enterprises.
I'm an initial cleaner, a type of cleaning that takes place for new buildings.
We use a host of specialized tools and techniques, here is one tip on glass. Typically removing concrete, paint, plastic, plaster, caulk from it.
Most cleaners and builders use Stanley blades and score lovely scratches all over your expensive windows - today can be 15% of materials costs. When the sun rises you'll want to cry. The more modern or expensive your window the more surely it shall be damaged.
There are three options. 1.2 mostly works on older glass types, usually not to be used on toughened glass or low e-glass and never interior door glass or veluxes.
1.1 Protect the glass using plastic and tape. 1.2 Use this with a water soaked applicator https://www.homedepot.com/p/Unger-14-in-Window-Scrubber-with... https://www.ungerglobal.com/en/trim-10-1 1.2.1 Use plastic blades 1.3 Use applicator then red pad (special grit of buffing pad that won't harm glass) and a cream abrasive.
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/3M-...
http://www.cifclean.co.uk/product/category/971337/creams
The construction trades are filled with a zoo of techniques that individually seem obvious - which must be why few doing DIY do it the right way ever. I subscribe to Fine Homebuilding and read their articles because I know I can't wing it on everything when I self-build - even caulking is a specialization, and few professionals seem to know how to airseal or fully flash a building.
Engineers should be aware that building has one of the lowest rates of automation. The main difference between builders today and builders half a century ago is pneumatic tools. When you think of it - all house are built by hand, and the factory built housing paradigm has tried to get off the ground and failed dozens of times, prefabs aren't much more common than they were centuries ago.
You won't automate the construction of your house and profit (the important bit - or it means you invented a kind of toy) without a giant breakthrough in AI. The nearest you'd get to automating a process and profiting from it will be gang cutting studs with a circular saw.
Persons within the state or other state actors orchestrate a takeover because they are greedy or fearful and then their hold on power is also tenuous so there is a race to the bottom to stay alive.
Mass surveillance has potential ethical use which is the study of an information ecology. The participants are aware of their observation - their behavior and even thoughts change. Predictive power is lost and adds a multiplier to political instability.
An ideologue takes over and uses the apparatus to kill all those who can be identified as an enemy.
The apparatus is used for personal gain, the theft of industrial secrets, blackmail - becoming systematic and introducing crippling costs to anybody wanting to go into business or politics.
The fact is that many media people are racists and these people and their fellow travelers don't like it being pointed out that they are being hypocrites. Some of them think being white males themselves is an exemption from criticism - except there are so many historical examples of self hating peoples who supported the people attacking them that it would make your head spin. I remember Scott Alexander, usually a level headed person as you could hope to find - unsettled by what he was reading about the Jewish refugees who ended up in England during WWII - many of whom were praising Adolf with full awareness of what was happening. There's not much to stop self hate going from signalling to malignant.
If you look around you won't notice many people speaking out against it, that's because it's mainstreamed, it is the we've always been at war with Eurasia. These people are very confident and very stupid.
The moderation mechanism on websites such as this feeds back into this echo chamber too, because I'm aware that every thing I say will be under exacting scrutiny but I'll regularly see violations of the rules I'd never get away with. Rule violations have to be extraordinary to reach a moderators's inbox if they are in the general spirit of the group believes.
I am certain the distractability of the web is bad for us and can see myself spending less time on this app in the future.
We should be asking ourselves deeper questions before we have these issues so we don't buy into the herd consensus.
I've been following, causally at first, his ideas through books written about or by him, many hours of youtube videos and essays in and around the topics he talks about. It is difficult to distill this into a synopsis because although I can provide a TLDR it doesn't mean you'd get any predictive power of it.
I suggest doing your own homework and coming to your own conclusions. I think I'd give a lot for a photo of his bookshelves.
Here's a start.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2011/10/end-future-peter-thie...
A common theme in Thiel's thought is that 'reality is often very different from the mainstream conception of it'. Ron Unz wrote this essay which gives body to this belief.
http://www.unz.com/runz/our-american-pravda/
Another theme is that humankind is highly mimetic - meaning they have a desire to be copying each other. This comes out of the philosophy of René Girard and you'll have to read something of his to fully understand where we're going with this.
https://woodybelangia.com/what-is-mimetic-theory/
Watch this if you only watch one video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
Peter Thiel is at the intersection of an unusually large number of obscure and strange topics, that's the reason why he's ahead of the curve over and over. Things like Seasteading, Urbit, if you ferret away at the peripheral you start to see interesting stuff, some of which gets ferried back to the mainstream sooner or later he's not the only talent scout for weird ideas like this but there's surprisingly few people out there in these strange circles - I've found that I keep running into the same people over and over, only a few hundred of them I'd guess. I'm tired now, it's near GMT midnight but good luck on your quest!
A lot of Tyler Cowen's ideas intersect with Thiel, that's another good line of enquiry.
I believe Thiel is correct in what he is saying and that is terrifying. It is going to take Westerners a long time to finally wake up and when it finally does it'll be jarring and immensely depressing.
Employers everywhere are saying the same thing - we can't find anybody competent at this form of labour. The normal response on HN will be "raise wages" - which we do and we tell them we can pay a lot more if they can perform ... except we still can't find anybody who has their shit together to the point they're capable of earning themselves a minimum wage. The opportunity costs of hiring create a situation where hiring anybody is a losing proposition - making employers very conservative despite the market braying for new workers. We want to hire because we want to make money, we'd do it if we could.
We can get people 'available to work' but they're so inept they can't be employed productively or even trained up because the snobbery of poverty is real and - a value judgement I know but it has to be said - prospective employees are also typically unusually unreliable people with smartphone, videogame or drug addictions, distracted, zero attention span.
I despise that arrogant middle class perspective of those who believe you just need to throw warm bodies at blue collar work. It does not work. It hasn't been true for a long time. "The world needs ditch diggers too" doesn't operate in a world where the ditch digger is using a mechanical excavator and is paid $60+ per hour is competing with an idiot using the excavator who will cost tens of thousands if he busts a pipe or hits something valuable. Literal shovel ready jobs do not exist! Tyler Cowen describes this in his book, Average is Over - the situation is not what politicians and most people think it is.
There's was a natural aptitude or blue collar culture that went unappreciated that is simply missing today. Now people are going to pay for that expertise in a way nobody had to before. Most blue collar workers operate together with a collection of machinery to augment their effort which is very expensive - a joinery guy installing a kitchen I saw last month had 20k of Festool tools laying around him, that's not even his workshop - the barrier to entry is getting higher all the time.
People have been saying labour compensation would occur (migration, middle class adaption, upskilling, machine replacment, houses built in factories) would occur for over a decade now and it hasn't happened in a meaningful way at scale and now the average age of a plumber in some states is near 60.
If you want to send in the Androids to do work, now would be a good time Silicon Valley... I suspect it's not really happening.
In a nutshell - just as infrastructure has been physically neglected in the West - so too has the skillset of the workers that maintain it. Where are the AR Platforms that teach a framer how to toenail studs into place? Has anybody here heard of companies producing such modules?
In ten years things are going to look very dire for the typical white collar worker, probably a good portion of the population is going to go bankrupt and lose their property - potholes and lots of anger.
As you've mentioned when the middle class lost all their servants to the factories and farms because the wages were higher - suddenly women who never had to clean or cook had to learn those skills - this was one of the drivers behind electrical home tools for cleaning and cooking (most cooking books were invented around this time says the Gastropod food podcast) and the feminist political movements. I think this will happen again and automation will occur but it's on the scale of decades, not years.
tldr; This gets worse before it gets better.