concordDance

Have you done the maths to check if that would have fixed things?

The vast majority of Americans care about improving the lives of Americans. Trump and Musk are likely no exception.

They might care about other things more than that though...

Unrelated corporations are not natural allies. In fact they often compete.

It can list tradeoffs and approaches you might have forgotten. Thats the big use case for me.

> It appears the ven diagram of the beliefs and crimes overlap quite a bit.

There are hundreds of thousands of rationalists (to a greater or lesser extent). Very few go shoot people.

Conflating ziz and less wrong feels a bit like conflating Aiden Hale with the LGBTQ movement or the Branch Davidians with Christianity.

> They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.

I have never seen this and I've been active around this around for almost two decades now.

> isolation

Also very much doesn't match my experience. Only about a quarter of my friends are even rationalists.

While I won't claim he currently has much of interest to say, he definitely explained a lot of important ideas for thinking more clearly to people who would not otherwise have encountered them, even if he didn't invent any of them.

Pretty sure Zizians haven't been considered rationalists for at least five years.

They definitely used to be, but haven't been much good for years. At least 8 years in the case of reddit, maybe 3 in the case of hackernews.

Though at this point it's a habit I cannot quite bring myself to break...

I think you might be a better fit for reddit than hackernews. The lack of thoughtfulness, heavy use of signalling and petty insults are more normal there.

> Can we just be real and just say we aren't advancing humanity with AI, it is just focused on automating out jobs.

These are the same thing.

Automation does advance humanity. The reason for the current world prosperity has been lots of automation.

(There is the separate and much more concerning risk of humans going the way of the horse, but that does not seem to be what you are concerned about)

This is completely wrong as far as I can tell.

I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)

Hackernews has finally declined to the level of reddit. :(

You cannot be serious it. All of the ad tech companies produce a service people want otherwise no one would use them!

There may be other services that might be better if not for network effects, but it is trivially true that a search engine is better for most people than no search engine at all. And that is what is produced.

Ticks do not require the consent of the host to drink blood.

Things like Google and Facebook cannot be parasitic, every dollar gained is a voluntary exchange with no threats. People choose to use Google and gain something from doing so.

Options traders help with the efficient allocation of capital, which is actually very valuable to society.

Hampering industry that will bring prosperity to thousands to avoid having to wait to do some specific types of astronomy until Starship is working doesn't seem like a good trade-off.

> Online, it was undermined by troll farms pulling the strings in favor of certain shady factions.

No, online it was undermined by selection effects. Where those who care the most about something are most likely to engage or post, leading to endless streams of unrepresentative and extreme views.

Limits are often set for political reasons (in both directions).

There can also be very different appetites for risk.

I've read some climate papers but haven't done the email thing (I should, but have not).

The IPCC summaries are a good read too.

Do you genuinely think severe weather events are going to be even amongst the top ten killers this century? If so, I do strongly advise emailing local uni climate scientist. (What's the worst that can happen? Heck, they might confirm your views!)

(In other circumstances I might go through the whole "what have you observed that has given you this belief?" thing, but in this case there is a simple and reliable check in the form of a 5 minute email)

... actually, I can do so on your behalf... would you like me to? The specific questions I would be asking unless told otherwise would be:

1. Probability of human extinction in the next century due to climate change. 2. Probability of more than 10% of human deaths being due to extreme weather. 3. Places to find good unbiased summaries of the likely effects of climate change.

Any others?

You've been greviously mislead if you think climate change could plausibly make the world uninhabbitable in the next couple of centuries given current trajectories. I advise going to the primary sources and emailing a climate scientist at your local university for some references.

I don't think humans ever do that. They research/read and ask other humans.

> climate change is one of the most difficult and worst problems of our time.

Slightly surprised to see this view here.

I can think of half a dozen more serious problems off hand (e.g. population aging, institutional scar tissue, dysgenics, nuclear proliferation, pandemic risks, AI itself) along most axes I can think of (raw $ cost, QALYs, even X-risk).

> if we asked an LLM to produce an image of a "human woman photorealistic" it produces result

Large language models don't do that. You'd want an image model.

Or did you mean "multi-model AI system" rather than "LLM"?

> Right now I can ask an (experienced) human to do something for me and they will either just get it done or tell me that they can’t do it.

Finding reliable honest humans is a problem governments have struggled with for over a hundred years. If you have cracked this problem at scale you really need to write it up! There are a lot of people who would be extremely interested in a solution here.

One thing you could do is use different axes. A two-color pattern where the pattern would be religion, the hue of one color language, the other family structure, etc.

> Opioids are bad.

Years of life aren't the most important thing. Opiods might reduce life expectancy but increase the averge quality of life of those living in a given year.

> A copy of your brain/personality/you... isn't you... it's a copy

This reads a bit like "a copy of Super Mario Bros isn't Super Mario Bros, it's a copy".

It has all of the bits that let you distinguish Super Mario Bros from Donkey Kong or Super Mario World. Why isn't it also Super Mario Bros?

Supcom, AoE2, Zero-K and BAR are all superior along different axes to SC2. RTS is a very wide category.