didericis

China’s policy never worked well and the various levels of mimicry of that policy across the world was responsible for the vast majority of the avoidable pandemic damage. Their lying about the obvious human to human transmission and repression of doctors speaking out is what prevented early containment, and their draconian lockdowns were both horribly repressive and ineffective. They made a big show to compensate for their early failures, and the world took the word of a police state trying to pretend they could prevent the spread of a highly contagious aerosolized coronavirus after it was well out of control and all over a major city with an airport.

The continued credulity of the west despite all of the lying China has done is astoundingly stupid. Anyone with an ounce of understanding of the culture and the government, particularly Xi’s government, was laughing at the Chinese figures and demanding on the ground access early on to determine what was actually happening.

Many academics wanting to follow the data don’t understand that. And so we copied a fake solution because of fake data and threw out decades of pandemic response research and planning to pretend we could contain something that was obviously out of control and clearly on the path to being endemic after March 2020.

No, it’s quite different.

It’s taking subtle human judgement out of decision making.

Some systems don’t need subtle social decision making. Using AI for those systems is great. But a lot do. And in those that do, if you’re not careful and automate too much, errors compound. Quickly.

AI recommendation engines have already ripped society apart and increased division, because the subtle bridge building that human curation enables is removed.

Hospital systems have been being increasingly systematized and are becoming increasingly hellish and expensive. They’re a non AI example of the same phenomenon. The risks are in trying to systematizes things with a social aspect.

I love automation and think we should strive to free up as much time for exploration, creativity, and human connection as we can. But AI is just plain bad at understanding us, and always will be, in my view. It will always be a mimic. It simply cannot do the subtle social things humans do because it does not have the motivations that enable that subtle behavior.

Nuclear’s expense is almost entirely artificial/regulatory in nature, think simpler and safer modern reactor designs reduce a lot of the expense.

The construction and maintenance and integration of nuclear waste storage facilities is also much simpler and more proven than the construction and maintenance and integration of battery farms on the scale needed to meet grid demands.

Or switch to modern reactor designs that don’t require active cooling -> https://www.ne.anl.gov/About/hn/logos-winter02-psr.shtml

I think these types of comments are the root cause of unhappiness more than anything else.

You bring up a valid point. So does OP. But you’re coming from such different angles that neither of you probably feels like the other really “gets” your point of view. Or if there is an understanding, there’s still a lack of any real sense of motive and context.

Every single possible direction you might want to go in life or opinion or dream you might have has someone from a completely different context piping in and telling you to go the complete opposite direction for perfectly valid reasons.

Online forums are simply too big, too impersonal, and too varied to give people that sense of connectedness they’re craving. They remove essential shared context and make most people feel unheard, which has bad mental health effects.

That is more than what happens in China, and the demand for better privacy practices in the US is allowed to persist, build, and find its way into legislation and business practices of competitors.

US companies and regulators do not have to be shining beacons of user privacy and protections to be better than a system with no boundary between the state and private companies, with no expectation of privacy, and with censorship of opinion that criticizes shortcomings of the state.

It is not a double standard. There are already legal and cultural limitations in the US that have much more respect for user consent, user privacy and intellectual property than in China.

Any US company caught putting arbitrary keyloggers in products can and should be condemned. Companies still track large amounts of data and pull shady antics, but the big difference is there is a means of holding US companies to account if they violate privacy standards, not least of which is through uncensored condemnation and legal action. That is not possible in China.

More stringent privacy norms and protections in the US would be welcomed. That doesn’t mean the status quo is comparable to China.

Stealing information without user permission is not free speech.

I think reddit still allows you to turn subreddits into rss feeds, which seems like a better way to consume content without the distractions.

This is a cliche, but it’s true; we live on through the ripples of our actions. Some part of reality remembers every subtle thing we were through cause and effect, no matter how scattered those effects.

Consciousness is also extremely strange. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of not just experiencing the totality of your father, but also the entire conscious universe in some bizarre and unfathomable way in the end. The fact that this idea is so common cross culturally and throughout history is quite strange. As are the similarities in near death experiences.

Our minds play all kinds of tricks on us. Who knows how deep that goes. Our science is a powerful means of bypassing our ability to deceive ourselves, but it is forever limited by that same deceptive perception it attempts to bypass. What lies outside our perception is a great mystery, and I think it’s arrogant to rule out an angle of reality not accessible to the materialist conscious angle we perceive so sharply. The fact that it is far more prudent to walk where we can see instead of where we can’t doesn’t mean there is no world beyond our vision.

> Like most AI research, the training set and the biases and assumptions it contains are the real challenge.

That seems like an insurmountable problem. AI obfuscates those assumptions and risks deeply ingraining them/causing stagnation. If there isn’t some kind of distributed human mechanism actively involved in not just generating data, but also in choosing the relevancy and the modeling, it seems like many of these AI applications will be actively worse than human centered systems that can address and evolve the model/data collection based on those biases/assumptions on the fly.

AI seems like something that should only be used when the success criteria are super clear/close to incontrovertible.

I think the best way to handle that sour taste is to make a product that actually lives up to sales hype.

I disagree. Bitcoin started the same way on the darknet. That does not mean it had no greater value, as we now see.

The actual people using Monero are unknown. That’s the point. To say it is centralized behind a group of criminals is incorrect. It has been extensively used to get money into places like Venezuela where the state is hostile, and for all kinds of positive services where people simply value privacy. See http://monerica.com

The fact that criminals also use Monero is a feature, not a bug, and proves that it works in the most hostile environments. The fact that it enforces the fourth amendment is a good thing, and it forces law enforcement to target criminals specifically rather than enabling blanket surveillance.

Anyone who wants tools to prevent the state from abusing power has ample reason to use Monero, and given the way politics has been infringing on banking rights in Canada, that is bound to be a growing number.

Regardless of what you think of the Canadian protestors, the real question is what do you think of the right to privacy and our ability to ensure our rights in the USA, given our constitution. If we do not trust people to transact privately then lets just repeal the fourth amendment and be honest about what rights we do and don’t have.

I happen to believe the right to privacy is fundamental and that to remove it is to create a panopticon. I believe law enforcement has ample means to go after crime without violating financial privacy, and believe it is equally if not more important to prevent abuse of law enforcement powers given the tendency for corruption, political use, and lack of effectiveness that has plagued all of human history.

Well said, agree with all of that. I have hope for systems that allow for the easy, anonymous (to outside observers, at least) build up of networks for the kind of information exchange you rightly claim to be the most important aspect of creating good systems in practice.

It doesn’t solve that information bottleneck problem, but I think the more efficient structures that lead to transactional bottlenecks and are necessary in things like Bitcoin are technical problems that can and I think have been worked out in currencies like Monero. Monero has quite successfully resisted the same pulls to centralization that Bitcoin and Ethereum have succumbed to for the sake of efficiency. It is smaller, but still quite large.

That does not necessarily mean it is good, and while I’m optimistic, I understand where the caution comes from. At the very least it’s extremely interesting, both from a technical perspective and a social/political perspective.

At the end of the day I am more and more convinced that all of this money and power stuff is downstream of relationships, culture, and ability to communicate and cooperate across differences. That’s what’s really important, and can be either encouraged or discouraged to move in a direction that helps the most people with all kinds of different tools, of which money is just one, and which could happen all kinds of different ways in different systems.

I wish it were easier to know what helps and what doesn’t so we wouldn’t risk making things worse. But I think the only way to know is to experiment.

Trust is a feature.

Transparent systems in which transactions are screened do not trust their people.

North Korea would never allow their people access to a truly private cryptocurrency (which Monero does better). It would become easier to funnel money internally and create opposing factions.

This discussion is no different than a discussion about just rulers. If the person in charge of a monetary system has good intentions, or is informed by a democracy with collectively good intentions, it is better for them to dictate who can have access and who cannot.

Crypto forces those on the network to trust in the free decisions of the collective. If you think more people would transact with a large criminal psychopathic state like North Korea than they would with people who oppose North Korea, that is a collective choice. In a truly decentralized system, where everyone had access (which is not the case, and complicates things), the real, in practice will of the people comes out.

As you can probably tell, I don’t know much about particle physics and am not looking to get into a debate about that specific hypothetical, was just saying wires (or small tubes) might be useful for future stuff and it’d be nice if they were easy to put on/take off of buildings.

Agreed. Maybe there will be entangled particles in the future that get shot out down wires and then allow you to instantaneously communicate with people after you receive them.

The right future oriented mindset in terms of building a house would be to make it easy to install wires. Or pipes. Or whatever.

Just in time hardware is only useful if you have a place to put it. That’s the tricky part; trying to figure out how to make sure you stay compatible with whatever new stuff comes along.

It is economically positive in the real economy.

Our paper economies are not in tune with reality. They were made to serve people. If there are fewer people with fewer relationships and our economies value numbers over creating happy families, our metrics and economies are broken.

It did not take material wealth or years of checkbox regulated planning to raise a happy family in the past and it does not take it now.

The decline in birthrates is a world wide values and time allocation problem. We do not prioritize relationships and community building, we prioritize immediate gratification and status seeking.

All that an economy should do is manage the logistics of a higher purpose.

We have lost that higher purpose.

I have an archiving/notes/forum tool I’ve been working on to try to solve this, noticed this problem a long time ago. I’ve gone through a couple iterations I’ve just tested on myself, intend to release it for wider testing/feedback in the near future.

The goal is to make it as low friction as possible to share, link, and edit text snippets and raw files in a big graph. It’s similar to obsidian but I’m focusing more on mobile and creating something that allows for interrelated knowledge graphs.

I do believe technology can make our environment more inhospitable.

The best world is one with zero emissions and everyone having all their shipping/transportation, heating, air conditioning, farming, food preservation, and other energy needs met in full. The philosophizing becomes important when deciding between people’s ability to meet basic needs and environmental protection. I think it’s a mistake to think there’s an intrinsic good in trying to preserve nature as it is currently, as nature is agnostic and much more inhospitable without modern amenities. The good relates to all of the many benefits of the way the environment is now to us, including long term environmental effects relative to our survival and the continuation of all the beauty and learning opportunities that currently exist in the current form of our natural world.

I’m not sure where the hostility is coming from. My consumption is pretty low and I enjoy spending time in and learning about nature. I think the best and most practical thing we could be doing energy wise is building more nuclear salt reactors, which I advocate for fairly frequently. I am not arguing that we shouldn’t take care of the environment.

Haha, I don’t practice what I preach that well/don’t try to look for real value that actively. Majority of what I invest is in a couple different Vanguard index funds. I don’t have the time to do the proper research to pick well, so I just kind of hope the averages in the Vanguard picks work out favorably over time.

I took a chance on crypto in 2019 that worked well, but that wasn’t a huge bet.

I’m currently spinning up my own business, which I consider my main pie in the sky active investment. Depending on how that goes I might shift to more active investing later in life (am 30, single currently, and feel like the best path for active investment and hunting for real value right now is something I steer myself).

I think the best example of people who assume reciprocation are the types of tourists that walk up to and try to take pictures with wild animals. They assume as long as they’re nice the animal will be nice. On a larger scale, I think people tend to assume that bad natural events like fires, hurricanes, floods, etc relate to how we treat the planet, and that if we stop human activities, those things will become more manageable. I think a lot of people vastly underestimate how powerful and uncaring most natural forces are to a lot of what we do. Volcanoes have randomly erupted and emitted enough particulates to effectively cancel spring/summer. While we don’t want to use technology poorly and pollute our environment, the reason we have technology in the first place is to shape our environment to be less inhospitable to us than it is naturally.

> if something that seems crazy continues to happen then the primary culprit is money

I agree, but I’d get more specific; the primary culprit is usually over abstraction and misallocation due to bad assumptions about value.

When used appropriately, money is a fantastic way to signal relative need and allocate resources in a decentralized way, and is one of the most powerful and sophisticated technologies we have.

When money is artificially easy to come by and leveraging is artificially low risk, that decreases price signal quality and leads to increasing levels of insanity.

I think an even more interesting question is to delve into what exactly “net bad” or “net good” even means. Relative to what?

I think we’ve been living in artificial environments for so long we’ve forgotten how much nature simply does not care and is not meant to be any particular way. It just is. Whether we are a part of the environment nature is adapting to is totally irrelevant from the perspective of other creatures, and we are both naive and solipsistic to think our notions of harm and no harm matter on an evolutionary timescale.

Dropping containers into the bottom of the ocean is bad for us. It conflicts with the pristine natural environment we envision and the natural order we have been adapted to and find interesting, beautiful and wish to protect, and it feels like bad stewardship of a garden we wish to cultivate.

That does not matter to nature. Different species within the ocean are in a constant battle for survival to adapt to anything and everything and containers are just another adaptational factor like any other.

I am worried by the number of people that seem to think nature will reciprocate if we are nice to it. We should strive to protect the environment and not change it drastically for our own reasons, not anthropomorphize and treat it like a substitute God that will reward us if we make the proper sacrifices to it.

This is a tangential rant not that related to what you’re saying, and I don’t know why a particular flavor of desire to protect nature as some kind of good in and of itself bothers me so much (which you may not hold in the manner that bothers me), but it does. I say that as someone who is currently bird watching while browsing hn by a marsh and loves evolutionary history and the study/protection of the natural world. I think maybe it’s because it diminishes where all of the stuff around us comes from and how we got here. Biological stuff is really, really, really old and been through environmental changes we can’t even imagine. I feel like a bunch of containers dropped in the ocean is like just another thing in a long, long, loooong history of all kinds of curve balls that contribute to the constant change that is the natural world.

There are multiple reasons why people might be unwilling to cure their loneliness with others, most of which I think relate to past rejection, lack of willingness to adapt and/or incompatibility with the people around them.

I’m not advocating force to address those issues. If you want an AI companion instead of people then that’s your choice. I just think it’s a poor substitute for actual human companionship and will not engender positive growth.

I keep coming back to the narcotic analogy. They have their place, and people are going to do what they’re going to do, but I don’t think encouraging the widespread use of narcotics in the future is a great idea.

> Even if they don’t bring in that amount every year, it might still be a net plus

Or it might not.

Thats the root of the problem. The administrators are the people coming up with the metrics and arguments to justify their own existence.

I’m sure many of them believe they’re making a positive contribution, and the situation is more complex and tragic than just “these are the baddies” type arguments suggest, but there’s still an accountability problem that needs to be reckoned with.

Although its exhausting, one of the things I most appreciate about HN is the willingness of people to sort through those misinterpretations; thank you for doing that.

Agree 1000% about the stupid part, the pain being caused right now is so tragic and unnecessary. And I hope you’re right about the rest/think you probably are, but its important not to get too arrogant about our position given the stakes.

They seem to have lost their initial short term objectives, and the fog of war is real/I can’t tell how good or bad they’re currently doing, but I think regardless of their competency or resolve it’s foolish to underestimate a China-Russia coalition’s resiliency long term, if only due to their much more totalitarian hold over their populace. The lack of easy avenues for a change in leadership even if extremely disastrous for most Russians is a significant difference.

That said, I think there are rumblings of regime change in China. The housing market crash and extreme lockdowns seem to have a lot of people upset.

Seems like we’re living through interesting times, unfortunately… I’m probably delusional, but I’m somewhat optimistic that people will be better off once the dust settles. Depends on how rough it gets and whether we can manage a smooth landing.

I can’t help but notice how you talk about your family.

I don’t think size, kids, proximity, or frequency of visits is universal; there’s going to be lots of differences between people. But I think everyone benefits from knowing there are at least a few people in the world that they care about and that care about them.

I find some of the people in the comments that believe lots of people are destined to die alone, should commit suicide, or have AI companions instead pretty disturbing, frankly. I think trying to relate to others, even if only a few people, is a much better way to go about life that should be encouraged.