concordDance

Why would leaking matter? The ocean will dilute the leakage to irrelevance (recall that there's 4 billion tons of Uranium already in the ocean).

Yup, but those two countries alone are still going to hit 1.5 billion combined at current rates (DRC has 6.05 TFR declining at 0.05 per decade), momentum is key. And if they attain European rates of resource consumption then by that point they'll be by far the biggest "problem" as far as "degrowthers" are concerned.

And unlike, say, India, getting that number down is much easier (people resist being killed, but freely distributed contraceptives would likely by welcomed by women).

> Hence the degrowth movement, etc.

The oddest thing about this to me is that they don't seem to think through what exactly this implies.

If one truly believes in the need to reduce human population then by far the highest margin things are not things like preserving a few hundred year old forest in England, but mass introduction of contraceptives to the DRC. It'll be places like Nigeria and Congo that dominate in terms of number of humans next century, not dying Europe (whose resource usage will decline even faster as fertility free falls), and those countries are not going to remain low resource consumption for too long.

I'd want reports from randomly sampled Cybertruck users before agreeing to that last clause...

Reports of Tesla cars being awful and full of problems have been around for a decade, but the people I've directly spoken to like their Teslas, though none own a Cybertruck.

It could using crypto, but Spain would complain to the USA and they'd back down.

> they were largely responsible for explicitly refusing to help and making the situation worse.

Where does this come from?

The article we are discussing mentions various bits of helping, as does the wikipedia page.

It looks like a complex mix of various entities doing different things they think would help, some effective, some not.

Pithy answers don't work. Almost everything is multi-causal.

> Britain was nearing its peak “no free charity” back then

That particular peak is probably much older. Charity at a non-negligible scale to distant (meaning "not literally in visual range") people has been very rare throughout history.

I think it comes from the general belief that poverty is bad and a simplistic view of cause and effect. "Before the Empire they were really poor, with high mortality, after the empire they were much wealthier with lower mortality".

It's just going to be the default view if one does not have further information.

Having now checked the wikipedia page, that doesn't seem like it would have made a particularly big difference. The imports dwarfed the exports, particularly during 1847 when they were 8x larger.

It's one of those things that is generally true but should not be the only consideration.

A bit of dependence that would need reducing later is a very small price to pay to avoid a million starved.

I'd happily wager $100 that in a couple of years time we'll have the data to conclude that Model Ys were not 3x more lethally dangerous than average.

Would you take that bet?

I often hear this, but other than cotton, what industrial materials needed to be imported?

My understanding is that coal, wood and iron ore were plentiful in England itself.

Huh, interesting what it focused on.

> You've cited LessWrong so many times that Eliezer Yudkowsky is considering charging you royalties for intellectual property use. > Your comments have more 'bits of evidence' and 'probability updates' than most scientific papers. Have you considered that sometimes people just want to chat without Bayesian analysis? > You spend so much time trying to bring nuance to political discussions on HN that you could have single-handedly solved AI alignment by now.

> Have you ever seen a bricked Tesla driving down the road? It's terrifying.

How often has this happened?

Yeah, this. It substantially worsens the heat/light ratio of ensuing discussion and adds little.

Trump is not an obscure topic. "Trump lies all the time" is not a novel statement people won't have encountered and considered before, if someone already believes "Trump lies all the time" then that sentence tells them nothing new and if they don't believe it the post is hardly going to change their mind.

> They couldn't build a system that used my style of components because a failure due to a component would bring the whole system down and require an expensive service call

Could they not make the scope easily replaceable by the user and just supply a couple of spares?

Just thinking of how cars are complex machines but a huge variety of parts could be replaced by someone willing to spend a couple of hours learning how.

When I made that post this was in the main branch (e.g. starting at top comment and going down you hit this before any leaf): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43103830

There are definitely tangible predictive differences in the case of, say, Russia vs USA. Things like "If you go to the capital with a bunch of friends carrying placards saying '$LEADER is corrupt and evil and should be replaced by $OPPOSITION' how many of you end up in a jail cell in the next day?".

If there is literally no tangible difference then it's just label games and metaphysics and doesn't matter.

> Your personal income has absolutely no predictive value on gdp.

It actually is correlated (admittedly in most day-to-day cases it's just a lagging indicator, but things like natural disasters hit both). It's not the strongest correlation but it would still be evidential. Definitely under 1.0 bits though... One would need a LOT of such observations and having them not screen each other off to start getting a convincing number of bits.

Probably not realistic to have humans manage these sorts of numerous tiny updates though...

/nitpicks

> Ah, but if either side distrusts the other about whether the observation made is truthfully reported, how do you solve that? It requires some amount of trust and right now there’s a very clear divide there.

Yeah, it gets much trickier like that. But I do think two reasonable people from the opposite political sides could agree on some sort of observable to the extent their disagreement is anything other than narrative.

Honestly dang, I'm seeing mostly not thoughtful substantive commentary here, just ideological battling.

Which is a shame because this is certainly a topic it's possible to do that on (e.g. this comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43105417 ).

Are the good comments really worth the large amount of heat?

If they affect your life they can be observed.

If "democracy" is just metaphysics then it's irrelevant. But if it has actual tangible effects such as "can you vote?", "can you protest the government?", "is the leader of the opposition arrested?", "do most people think they live in a democracy?", "how popular is new legislation compared to previous years?", etc...

Then you can make predictions about it and test them!

You can even do local predictions if both can agree, such as "will the combined incomes of my family be higher or lower in 4 years time?" as low coupling proxies for gdp. (Ideally one would use probabilities for loosely linked proxies like that and use the probability differences the two theories assign to give bits of evidence to one over the other, so you'd want many many such proxies, ideally uncorrelated ones)

The idea would be that the two of them collaboratively agree on some observable prediction they differ on. E.g. level of officially reported government spending in 4 years time or gdp growth rate next year or number of plane crashes next year or what have you.

Just some observable metric.

If they literally can't come up with a single observable predictive difference then the predictive aspects of their models are actually equivalent and they are only narratively different and don't "really disagree". Like Copenhagen interpretation vs many worlds.

Given the two of you probably have different models of reality, perhaps you two can try and figure out which is correct by seeing which model gives better predictions?

So try to come up with some sort of future observation that can be made where you think the other person's model would give a different answer to yours about what you would be able to objectively observe.

What do you reckon?

Interesting thing about this is that because of all the Musk-related overhyping that's gone on and because the launch is a video, the thread that marks the entry of another company into the select group of serious AI companies will go off the front page with possibly only 200 points!

Depends what you mean by "people here". I mean, obviously the majority of HN commentators and even the majority of commentators on this thread seem to be. But there will always be a couple of slightly unhinged folk in a big enough group of readers.

I think a lot of that comes from people thinking the eye-catching memorable views they've read are the most common views. When they're really not and are mire likely just the views of the most passionate 1%.

Big emuse cases for me are:

1. Exploring a new domain and getting some terms I can google for.

2. Making small scripts to do things like query github's GraphQL API.

3. Autocomplete of code using copilot.

There have always been many: https://hollywoodlife.com/feature/how-many-plane-crashes-202...

Its only commercial airline crashes in the USA that are vanishingly rare. Once you expand scope to all types of planses or the world as a whole you get a lot more.

> This is creating an extremely fragmented society, all creating their own bubble of what they want to see

It has always been thus. E.g. right wingers did not use twitter back in 2021.

I will grant it's getting worse though... for instance, the battle here on hackernews between left and right has strongly intensified and it looks like the left will win the downvote/flagging war and the right will stop posting in (and reading) political threads.

What would change in the 2028 election that wasn't changed in the 2024 one?