bachbach

I think a lot of people have forgotten or never experience the satisfaction of doing work - especially after being out of work for a while. Keep it up! :)

On Amazon worker treatment generally it's hard to tell whether it is propaganda or maltreatment. Jeff Bezos is obviously a powerful man with a lot of people under him and that attracts all sorts of interest/enemies. It is also not unusual for companies to treat workers poorly - but my instinct is skeptical of media because it's difficult not to notice some Californians are notorious for drama development. I've done a lot of not-by-the-book stuff on building sites - we just didn't keep records and convert them into issues because we used common sense to be safe and it's good work but we could have easily made it sound dire and hit our employer with all sorts of costs that ultimately would have made us less valuable.

This may be a semantic argument. I probably mean 'complex' as in useful production by being more sophisticated and you probably mean 'complex' as in there is more of it in a variety of ways.

I'm surprised it's as high as 50%. People have seriously suggested pumping lithium into the water supply. The UK issued 64.7 million prescriptions for antidepressants in a single year - I don't know the breakdown per person but that is a lot.

I suspect that interpersonal relationships are systematically weaker - that is the cause of this phenomena and also the cause of Peter Thiel's complaints about institutions getting worse at complex coordination.

I think that interpersonal relationships are weaker because people can depend on each other less, there's a technology replacement factor. People need repeated face to face interactions to form the strongest bonds and this is happening less. It could be why entrepreneurial activity rates are down and hikikomori exist. Most hikikomori wouldn't be useless at all but they lost confidence because the peer group that would have boosted them onto the initial stages of something doesn't exist. The network of "I know somebody who" is not as strong as it used to be and we all know recruitment agencies are a horrific mess even in the extremely limited niche version of "I know a guy/girl" they represent.

tldr; If we were nicer everything would be nice.

A great deal of civil servant jobs fall into that category of yours.

A lot of jobs which could be classed as bullshit exist, formalized as 'jobs' because of something missing from somewhere else.

Robin Hanson estimate half of US medical costs are not physical but people needing moral support/reassurance from others, dare I say if people feel unloved they crave attention?

Another cause of bullshit jobs is sometimes moral responsibility. Who looks after the severely autistic and those born crippled? One perspective is that these are bullshit jobs because, like the Icelandic policy demonstrates, it is strictly speaking possible to prevent some classes of these people from being born. Other people are going to be angry to hear that, since those jobs obviously involve a lot of effort and stress and they would think them the archetype of useful work.

I can understand that position but if your job exists mostly because of fetal alcohol syndrome then the moral high ground is due to be hit by tremors in the next economic crisis.

This is the kind of thing we don't like to talk about much but, and I'm sure I'm delusional, but reasonable people could hash out sane solutions to prevent most harm.

tldr; Bullshit jobs are going to exist on the contours of subjects we find to be touchy or gooey. This is why wedding planners exist.

I do not believe our lives and systems are significantly more complex than than of our great-grandparents. Instead I believe we are under an illusion.

The world has always been a complex place, but we manage that by many layers of abstraction, mostly innate but also by social organization.

The failures of social organization and complex coordination are genuine, but they're not occurring because our world is much more complex. I have a speculation on the cause which can be convincingly demonstrated but it's the species of topic where HN is liable to change the colour of your text in its lalalalalalala-itsnothappening-mode.

Under most lights our world is more simple than it used to be. You didn't have to fetch a pail of water from the well this morning. Your clothes: washed, possibly dried by machines in a process that used to take a day out of every week. Your food... you see the picture. Getting blitzed by streams of information on the internet isn't the same thing as the world becoming more complex, that's partly a choice and something people used to do with a library card - besides most of the web is not especially information dense and that's another illusion. When we do a lot of the human version of context switching it doesn't take much to overwhelm our sense of proportion.

I thought I'd scribble on the back of the envelope.

Henry Markram, a neuroscience person with a desire to emulate the human brain believes it takes 1 exaflop. It's a start.

Existing supercomputers reach 50 petaflops. 50 billion petaflops is 50 million exaflops.

Is this 50 million brain EM moments?

It's possible it was in the ballpark of a human brain emulation although I strongly suspect a fair comparison isn't easily comprehensible.

> I agree that there are alot of very subtle, but fundamental mistakes and omissions in both the design and combinations of current generation intelligence algorithms that are impeding a viable path toward general intelligence

I think that is true of specialized intelligence, and that zero progress of any sort has been made on AGI. I don't mind being wrong if you know of primitive examples that qualify.

It is unclear how to begin. Maybe rehearsing something like real biological evolution.

> , if all we care about is dramatically increasing the efficiency of solving problems humans care about, this totally isn't a problem, because we apparently don't need general intelligence to do that.

Daniel Dennett makes this point philosophically in a video I watched yesterday. Other people have made the observation that we're already surrounded by AGIs in the form human society based collective intelligences we know well.

And using real names and real photographs ironically makes most of us less genuine.

Are you really under attack for recommending the standard textbook?

This website's community has got peculiar more and more over the last 3-5 years and not in a positive way. There were the assholes of yesteryear but even they seemed like more sincere assholes than present day assholes.

My thoughts are:

Intelligence is not an algorithm.

Intelligence is a criteria for which many assorted algorithms may be judged.

The criteria is making an improbable outcome - more probable.

Any process, biological, mechanical or electronic - that results in narrowing the search space is exhibiting intelligence.

Consciousness is not intelligence - it's a feature of biological life that is frequently conflated with intelligence because we have both. No amount of computational power or data creates an emergent consciousness.

> Do we have a terrific reservoir of computational ability though?

We do (and I wrote a long post with a list of bullet points proving so before I just deleted it), but I don't think we should waste time debating whether this is true or not true. We're on the same side after all, your objective is my objective.

> But if myself and fellow computer users did have access to efficient powerful computers, we'd probably want to write algorithms that allowed us to make many attempts at the solution per second. I'd imagine writing a simulator to project many agents into where they are competing for resources and many of these simulations taking place concurrently.

I recommend you look at David Krateneur's ideas, he has a video called "The Stupid Ways That We Have Thought About Intelligence". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pi7h6nmkvAM

> Something of a multiverse of simulation and optimization.

An artificial imagination really.

I really recommend watching that video.

> And where are the people proposing rocket designs, in modern AI research?

We like people like Geoffrey Hinton as their work produces results - he is the first to admit you can't get there from here.

I think it's the people who are concerned with fundamentals, like the people at the Sante Fe Institute - complex adaptive systems.

In the beginning we believed in programming AI from the axioms of mathematics - not many people believe that now. A bit like configuring an animal from atoms. Difficult, pointless.

The first story is that 'fundamentals' might mean some evolutionary framework being required to plug in results from other areas like computer vision and machine learning, my guess would be something from genetic algorithms.

The other story is there exists a 'God Algorithm' that all sapient beings possess - but I find that difficult to believe.

Another story is that we simply have to start from the start - literally everything we know is nearly worthless because consciousness is too unlikely with computer hardware - that the entire history of computing is a dead end. Great for human technology but just not the route to a synthetic version of biological beings. I suspect we're more biased against this possibility than we should be.

I hope that it is the first story - my rationale is that biological intelligence and consciousness is not as far away as we think it is. If we look to evolution we see these vast periods of time in which nature works on different paths and it's only in the last few moments that an animal begins building cities and civilizations. There are also lots of the neurological version of transition fossils if you look around - lots of animals exist that exhibit human level cognitive abilities and some of them outright outrank us. I'm sure you've seen those birds assessing situations and solving puzzles, heard of monkeys coming up with original innovations like salted potatoes - a lot of animals outperform human children.

My thought is that when/if we break Moravec's Paradox and develop a robot that can walk, really walk, then we're some way towards developing machines that perform comparably to biological brains.

The catch is that people who think a walking robot is trivial are so wrong - it is spectacularly difficult. Boston Dynamics is impressive until you understand that a three or four year old is the Albert Einstein of getting about on arms and legs. Show me a robot that can mimic a human walking down the street and I'll stand up at the other side of this internet connection and start clapping. Most people start to change the definition of walking because that is easier than admitting we can't do something that looks easy. I didn't say give a machine locomotive power by changing the shape of the machine or its environment. I said walk - I meant walk.

1950 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj0Mr3mLujE

A toy, but not bad for £16.00

66 years, a team of experts and millions of dollars.

2016 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY

We could be waiting until 2082 or longer.

> We have good reason to believe our computers are underpowered for the task.

What are those reasons?

It appeared to me as if we had amassed a terrific reservoir of computational ability - but we wasted nearly all because it was expedient to waste resources when they were ample.

If I gave you a computer with 1 billion times the processing ability of current supercomputers, can you convince me that you'd be capable of replicating the functionality of a biological brain?

I believe the key factor is our education systems have heavily implied blue collar labour is low status so now there are labour shortages and the average age for a blue collar worker in some parts of the USA is in the 60s. I expect wages of $50 - $60 per hour to get normalized and even higher rents as housing stock stagnates.

The Fine Homebuilding podcast has a discussion here.

https://www.finehomebuilding.com/2018/07/06/podcast-episode-...

The makerspace community?

I propose a betting market or a prediction market in my other post here.

I'm also a fan of paying for services. I pay for Fastmail instead of Gmail - am happy with that. $10 per year.

What is the profit made per real user of Google?

I'd pay about $50 per year for a search engine that was entirely aligned with myself. I suspect that is higher than what is made by surveillance.

Seasteading.

That many competitors did exist - Bebo, Orkut, MySpace goes against the luck/timing story. I think what Mark Zuckerberg hit on is that people like to belong to an exclusive club - so Facebook started out behaving like a night club to give the platform a feeling (now forgotten) of sophistication.

That was my point too. If such people can be found then by all means this is a testable proposition. I had another idea though.

Give these journalists what they ask for and attach betting markets to news articles as bets on media bullshit - then we'll see what happens next. I'm sure it will be illuminating.

The bets could come in many forms from "Is X true?" where X is measurable to more complex bets like "If X then Y result" where Y objectively measurable. This incentive will balance against the clickbait incentive of journalists and the bookmaker will make more money if more people accept the terms of the bet - so the third party has an incentive to resolve for good quality propositions. Sports bookmakers already slice up complex scenarios into betting proposals so I'm sure this can be accomplished in a way reasonable to all partisans.

The people on Capitol Hill are situated at the correct depth?

Isn't it nice to have some positive news for a change!

I remember when we believed competition of ideas was a real thing. I have the impression this is gauche now.

As I see it this thought process only takes you so far in most areas of importance. The main purpose of an ITT is for those areas for which capturing knowledge and comprehension of that is trickier.

In the hard sciences, objective truth serves and you can talk of approximating towards something truer than before. That is something linear. The model gets measurably improved.

Most of everything else in society, economy, social, politics, ecology - I don't think runs well on such thinking to the point using it is counterproductive aka you will not survive by thinking like this. Practical people with rational ideas inserted into the political arena appear to typically get eaten alive. You're left with ogres, hopefully enlightened ones. It's likely the spectacularly convoluted nature of human politics is responsible for our biological evolution - like A/B testing with millions of lives, there's a nice essay musing on the cruelty of ourselves called Meditations on Moloch at Slatestarcodex.

Objective truths remain in all of those areas, society, economy, social, politics, ecology but they're the kind of truths which are not especially helpful. There's these cyclical patterns, emergent phenomenons.

One day the model will be Fedualism, another Liberalism, another day Communism, another day another -ism, but what is really going on? So maybe some of the time some people are wrong, but more often the new -ism is saying "incomplete model" and if your society decreases in complexity it may even start to say something like "reduce model", deregulate, even promote anarchy.

The most appropriate model is that of a Garden. You may grow blackberry plants or oak trees, but you can't really think of "how do I optimize it all" because bluntly you're not that intelligent and nobody is that intelligent. Instead you get weeds, experiments, patterns of growth, environmental conditions, incentives, bad weather - all those joys. In one way you may read scientific literature on optimizing particulars - but I wouldn't say that's what Gardeners really do unless their only goal is to produce spuds - and even then any farmer will update you on just how much of that is outside their control. It's like that with Society but we're in a worse devil of a position. Talk about legacy code, yikes.

tldr; You're maybe not looking for "the truth" as wondering "how do you get a benevolent gardener" and still deal with the slugs :-).

I've always worried that it's worse than that.

Even if there's plenty of deep thinkers (which is what slow thinking is in my opinion) - there should always be some people with good fortune and circumstances to push at the peripheral. I honestly do not see that today in Silicon Valley - I see a lot of useless bullshit and superficial replacements, there's only a handful of people out there keeping it together.

However... poverty of Time is not likely to be the main constraint unless you live in the Middle Ages. Many intellectuals have taken jobs which enable them to kill two birds, merely being physically active and forced to be active by a job that requires it is a genuine cognitive advantage - not to mention the infinite distractions that can smear your available leisure time such that you produce nothing of value. Most aristocrats did not belong to the Royal Society.

No - the real problem is that we're too synchronized. We think alike - we have a 'frame problem' of our own.

Being here on HN or on the Internet in general is not an advantage. It at first appears to be valuable in the sense that you understand what exists and who is doing what, the context. That is I suspect the opposite of what we need for true innovation.

For true innovation you need to connect up with 'the network' once or twice a year - and the rest of the time fuck off and do something good (ideally with a small close knit group).

“[..]Although personally, I think cyberspace means the end of our species." Yes? Why is that?" Because it means the end of innovation," Malcolm said. "This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death. Every biologist knows that small groups in isolation evolve fastest. You put a thousand birds on an ocean island and they'll evolve very fast. You put ten thousand on a big continent, and their evolution slows down. Now, for our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behaviour. We innovate new behaviour to adapt. And everybody on earth knows that innovation only occurs in small groups. Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible. That's the effect of mass media - it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benetton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas. People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees. But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species. Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same thing at the same time. Global uniformity. [..]”

― Michael Crichton, The Lost World

Silicon Valley is suffering by being too middle class - the hubris is coming out of the groupthink. I think it takes a peculiar mixture of working class and middle class thinking to do something really good. I don't think that's a new insight, it's in the plot of the 1927 Metropolis but sometimes a cliché is really true. The people I've met at HackerSpaces, the people who impressed me were always adept at dealing with a lot of information - a middle class trait, but had a deep blue streak in their character that is completely absent from the people I went to University with. Matthias Wandel and Bill Gray are examples I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wZ1v4PIsYI

http://www.velkess.com/

What causes confusion is that both the Democrats and Republicans descend from the Enlightenment political philosophy called Liberalism - the same is true of Labour and Tories.

I didn't completely grasp this for a very long time despite understanding 'American Liberals' were not the same as 'Classical Liberals' - it's not intuitive.

To prevent confusion the etymology is the same as the word "Christian". Both Catholics and Protestants are Christians. Sometimes one will claim to be more 'Christian' than the other but that is beside the point: to a non-Westerner they're the same group. The same is true of the word "Liberal". Democrat Liberals, Progressives, Conservatives, Republicans, Libertarians - these are all species of Liberal.

What this means may be found controversial by some people.

This would mean in the West, or at least in the Anglosphere political authority is typically wielded by two competing variants of the same political philosophy.

I find this interesting because that is not at all what is advertised.

For years I thought the differences between China's One Party State and the West were plain to see but now I think the distinction is less obvious. Going back to my Christianity analogy, it may be an argument over The Holy Trinity - both completely different and also the same simultaneously.

Is the West a Two Party System with one faction? Is China a One Party System with multiple factions? If so what's the real difference or is there a real difference?

There's a strange perspective distortion where the differences are either enormous or minor but it's hard to tell which - I speculate that metapolitics has a Lovecraftian quality to it where it might not be possible to understand without going insane. :)

We're not buying those either. I've seen only one prefab in my area.

We're not even building Tiny Houses. That movement has faded away as the land permission issue dominated over their advantages.

Meanwhile: https://youtu.be/M73r32vK7C4

That's not a joke - there is a steep decline in being 'handy' - I'm doing everything I can to learn how to be but it still feels a bit unnatural. That lack of adaptability is like an extra tax.

I don't think my parents are more handy either, but that's a generation that bought their houses at 5x-15x lower prices so millennials like me could really do with being more hands on.

To put this in perspective, my father bought his house for 40k 20 years ago and now it is valued at least 250k. I earn about the same as he did 20 years ago and I suspect I earn more per hour than my university peers. Bluntly - they're poor - the most sensitive subject you could talk about is how much you earn. That's private.

It's not the cost of equipment that's the problem. The cost of good power tools is lower than before and they're more effective. Materials prices are higher but not that much. The big constraint is psychological, possibly followed up by permissions for building.

There's a weird psychology with this subject - weird to hear it described but it's there.

Somehow not having a house is believed to be less impoverished than going and building one. Count me out! I don't think forking over half your earnings to a landlord is sophisticated. I remember talking to people about the Tiny House concept and I got the strong impression that living in a modest self built dwelling was an admission of poverty.

I agree and I'm in this group.

I blame the duration of modern education. It has made newer generations less flexible. Institutionalization. It's a paradox because the Internet has made the pollination of ideas more likely - but we are less likely to do new things, we stay in our boxes.

This shows up in the productivity and entrepreneurship statistics.

It may be true that wages are poor and rents are high - but also we're really not helping ourselves. Rates of self built homes should be increasing among young people but I don't see that. Usually over the years a generation gets richer but I suspect many young people with 'careers' are waiting for a golden goose.

If you are aged > 30 and rent in a major city and earn less than 40k-60k per year - you need to wake up and get out before you become a poor middle aged person. Most people my age from university are living like students a decade after leaving the university. Having to live with your parents or live in a house share cannot be half your adult life if you have a successful career, nor can forking most of your income over to a landlord.

HN's residents are an anomaly in the broader economy and their experience is alien to most of their generation.

That is an issue of reputation or PR.

That's funny, but it is wrong. The devil is in the detail. These topics have bedeviled the best statesmen and internet forum moderators we have.

You may correct me if you know better, but I have not seen any information that was leaked that I didn't imagine Russia or China already being very aware of.

Was this information revealed to only Russia/China and kept from journalists? If so how do you know about it?

I'm going to put a plug for the Fine Woodworking and Fine Homebuilding magazines and websites here. They both also run excellent podcasts filled with inspiration and advice.

No connection to either, but they're institutions.

Inspired by Fine Homebuilding I'm setting out this summer or autumn to construct this building:

http://www.rodneydiaz.com/garden-shed/

If you've any desire to build your own house, accomplish a DIY or other wood built project - I have an especially good tip here.

Go to Amazon.com and search for "Fine Homebuilding on" or "Fine Woodworking on". These are incredible repositories of hard won knowledge on a specific topic for often literally $0.01 per issue.

The real benefit of all this wood using culture is though - is that you can say to yourself "I think I could do that" and this is invaluable.

I had a refutation complied but on second thought I'll say this instead.

Nothing of intelligence can be said on this subject on Hacker News.

In Politics higher intelligence is a handicap, not an advantage.