concordDance

Even granting that, you would want MORE LGBTQ+/minority speech. The more energy people spend arguing with each other about culture war, the more dividee they are and the less they have for trying to change inequality.

Trying to silence LGBTQ+ etc people goes directly against the goal you posit.

Can it be at the bottom instead?

> In reality, the goal has always been to silence minorities who already struggle to express themselves

This particular clause seens very unlikely. One could want an increase in racism and homophobia on a platform without specifically wanting there to be less black people (for example) speaking out. That the -isms cause said people to speak up less would likely be a (pleasant?) side effect rather than the primary goal.

> So your assertion that "Twitter was _never_ a net positive for anyone" is not only false but an absurdly biased and frankly wrong view on how the world accesses information.

I presume the grandparent was being rhetorical and trying to say Twitter was always a net negative for society as a whole.

Even today, its a net positive for plenty of people (myself included).

Isn't this kind of statement metaphorical?

The literal thing that happens is your country starts spending a greater and greater proportion of revenue servicing its debt (and eventually defaults), but this is less snappy to say.

> This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do.

Depends on the ratio you put on human vs animal lives. Money is fungible, the more you spend on walkways the less you spend on road signage or MRI machines.

Related: "rounding to the nearest common cliche"

> Not to nitpick, but "taxing the 1% will solve our country's financial problems" comes off as a bit of a strawman.

I've seen it at least three times on hackernews and countless times on reddit.

Current AIs are safe. Will the ones in 5 years be, 20 years?

His argument is of the form "if we get a Thing(s) with these properties you most likely get these outcomes for these reasons". He avoids over and over again making specific timeline claims or stating how likely an extrapolation of current systems could become a Thing with those proporties.

Each individual bit of the puzzle (such as the orthogonaly thesis or human value complexity and category decoherence at high power) seems sound, problem is the entire argument-counterargument tree is hundreds of thousands of words, scattered about in many places.

Why are you comparing AGI (which we do not have yet and do not know hoe to get) to the printing press rather than comparing it to the evolution of humans?

Actual proper as-smart-as-a-human-except-where-its-smarter copy-pasteable intelligence is not a tool, its a new species. One that can replicate and evolve orders of magnitude faster.

I've no idea when this will appear, but once it does, the extinction risk is extreme. Best case scenario is us going the way of the chimpanzee, kept in little nature reserves and occasionally as pets. Worst case scenario is going the way of the mammoth.

> He’s messaging to others on the far right that the federal government will tolerate them. Doing so will embolden them to take action.

Well that's definitely more plausible than the antisemitism...

That said? Musk is exceptionally bad at understanding how his words and actions will be perceived and seems to make no effort to send correct signals. While also being a frequent troll who likes raising his middle finger to the "woke".

It being a big "fuck you" seems far more in keeping with his character than it being a subtle Machiavellian communication.

I'm quite curious if someone has gone to the effort of making a full list of all the things fommonly thought of as pros and cons and made it available somewhere... would be interesting.

> It's not something you can do by accident.

There are countless memes online showing pictures of other famous people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortwz doing similar things.

Anyway, even if it was a nazi salute, what would that even imply about him other than the childish edgelord aspect which is already well publicized? That he wants to gas the jews?

> However, there are plenty of forms of "animal testing" that confer zero positive value.

I find it difficult to believe that companies do expensive surgery on expensive animals for no reason (other than sadism?). These companies think this testing does in fact have value (and if we don't trust companies to make that determination we probably should restrict animal testing to governments).

But regardless, there's no real way to justify eating meat (given the marginal benefit of taste over vegan food) other than saying the lives and suffering of animals is essentially worthless. There isn't a threshhold you can put which will allow eating but prevent animal testing.

> Keeping some persistent outlet (front page post) for discussion of this major topic is important to give people a politically agnostic and technically proficient space to integrate what's happening.

It doesn't really feel like a politically agnostic space. A large number of users (though probably a small proportion of total HN users) seem to care a lot and of those who care a lot it looks like at least 3/4rs have a "leftist" persuasion.

(Sadly, I'm not longer aware of any intelligent and politically agnostic space where politics can be discussed. All those I knew have gradually become dominated by one political direction or another)

I'm quite curious on your retrospective thoughts on this thread once this article goes off the front page! Also whether you'd do the same again.

Having looked around, probably around 80% of comments are mostly uninteresting/partisanship (though a fair few of those combine the mud slinging with an interesting fact or argument, which complicates categorization).

(Aside: One of the issues for me is that on high emotion topics like this I can't take people's word for things as much as in a usual thread, it just becomes visual noise)

Unprecedented things happen in every US presidency, they're just different things. (Hard to mention examples because the ones I am most familiar with are the last 6 terms, and each topic has flamebait potential)

While that might be applicable in many cases it isn't in this particular one.

Both the main subreddits and blue sky's default moderation prohibit things in the middle of the right's Overton Window (e.g. on Trump or trans rights) while X does not prohibit things in the middle of the left's Overton Window.

(I dislike using the terms "left" and "right", but as vague as they are, this phenomena applies for almost all such categorizations)

> Giving that there are a lot of indices that X did infer with US elections due to how it tuned itself to maximize the reach and effectiveness of right wing propaganda this is quite an important analysis.

This superficially reads like the left wing equivalent of the "facebook suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop" conspiracy theory. Are you able to link to any evidence of this?

Profit works very well if there are many food sources with uncorrelated problems.

Still works fairly well as long as capital owners are smart and use insurance (who in turn advise their users on how to reduce their risk).

One unfortunate aspect of this phenomena is that as reddit "evaporatively cools" (ala https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ... ) as the more level headed people leave reddit gets even more radical.

It's even possible the places that people then move to (such as HN) also get more radical if the leavers have higher levels of radicalism than the place they join.

> anti chromosomal expression

Genuinely couldn't figure out what this is a euphamism for.

> it's baked into our DNA i suppose.

In the unlikely event it genuinely was then this would be solveable with subsidized genetic engineering for the masses.

I also think there's a lot to improve in education. While making everyone a rationalist is unrealistic, most of the ideas such as sampling bias and messy word meanings can be taught to almost all.

The Yud series on this is actually pretty good (I believe it also predates the term purity spiral): https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

> Like, implement a 5% tax on their wealth, and just fix all the problems.

My understanding is that's nowhere near enough.

The USA deficit is $1.8 Trillion a year with $30T total. The net worth of all USA billionaires is around $4.5T. So 5% would reduce the deficit by 10% until the billionaires wise up and move their wealth out of the country.

Even confiscating it all in a one-off pile reduces the national debt by about 15%.

I had an idea in my head about what the word "coup" means and why it is bad and I'm struggling to figure out how it applies to this situation (possibly because being no-American I don't get their news).

My understanding is the USA executive is an obscenely powerful position by the standard of the rest of the Western world and they can also delegate that power to accomplish specific objectives.

Is this a coup of Musk against Trump or the executive doing things its not allowed to do or a coup of the executive against the legislature?

(Maybe tabooing (in the rationalist sense) the word "coup" might help...)

Aside: the article paints a very concerning picture about the consequences of contemptuous ignorant imposition of abrupt blanket rules on valuable complex systems. I thank the OP for posting it.

As a non-American: What's illegal here?

My understanding is this is DOGE getting some analysis software in place so they can find out where the money goes and start their cuts, which I understand there is an executive order for. And my understanding is that the executive does have the power to do that sort of audit.

Where has my understanding gone wrong?

Anyone have any guesses as to why "Both are quite bad. I expect better from Wired." would be flagged?

Sometimes HN really confuses me.

It used to be very libertarian (big on free speech, etc) but has since shifted substantially liberal, including much warmer attitudes towards the use of violence.

So partly orthogonal to the main left-right axis.