ethanbond

This is an excellent application of George Ainslie’s concept of future reward discounting. Very powerful concept that can be fruitfully applied to all sorts of things in life: http://www.picoeconomics.org/

This is a really cool project. What’s the pricing?!

The “this is no different than before!” argument is dismissible on its face. As evidenced by NVDA’s trillion dollar valuation and the hundreds of billions being deployed into AI companies — that’s not because they’re building stuff that makes the world just the same as it was before.

Ah yes, middle school/high school bullies: famously disempowered by things like plausible deniability. The suffering caused by bullying and harassment: powerless in the light of plausible deniability.

AFAICT the people who would be close to this issue (e.g. people who pay attention to online harassment, teen mental health, and child pornography) come to a different prediction as far as impact. I’m far more inclined to believe them than people leveling an argument that, as I said, can just as readily defend murder, car thefts, and medical malpractice. All the suffering is just in people’s heads and all of it can be eliminated by proliferating the behavior to sufficient degree.

What was I joking about and what was absolute in terms of outcomes?

Does harassment to the point of job loss, familial dysfunction, or suicide count as tangible harm or not tangible?

Sure, if you can do that. Of course the question is whether/when that’ll happen and how many young people have to be victimized first in order to get there — and for what benefit?

The general form of the argument is just “when things happen very frequently, people get used to them.”

This is both true and a terrible reason to be okay with bad things proliferating. And it’s especially suspicious when this argument is leveled by people who generally aren’t going to be victimized by said bad things.

Connotations aren’t an affliction of idiots…

Do you have an alternative theory that's more compelling than the one that many, many women report about their own thinking?

But but but what about my intuition and gotcha questions about how this could never work in practice?

Totally. I'm a designer and was very, very guilty of this throughout my early career

It's just a fairly lengthy fall into a trap that many, many programmers fall into: detaching their craft from the business purpose it serves.

A webpage rendering Xms faster has negative value if it e.g. took 3 months longer to hire the programmer responsible for writing it, or if that programmer costs $100,000/yr more, or if training them to proficiency took 6 months, etc etc. The advantages of well-known frameworks are very real to the business, they just offend some programmers' sensibilities which should be simply ignored.

In any case, the IBM analog is also weird/wrong. The takeaway from IBM has to do with bureaucratic decision-making and especially the principal-agent conflict between people who buy systems like IBM and people who have to use them. I have never seen a similar dynamic be responsible for the decision to use React. There is no React salesperson wining and dining the C-suite.

There are some artists who do and IMO they’re rather gimmicky. Not sure how widely shared that view is.

All of these examples are end-products. "AI" itself will not be. The winner in AI will be whoever permeates other products/brands most successfully, and end-user brand familiarity doesn't matter much for that. Familiarity among engineering and product leaders is what matters.

Correct, I didn't say it's a bad thing. I said it's not clear that it's a good thing (i.e. an asset)

Meh, I don't think it's worth much. In a few years that'll be like claiming that so-and-so had name brand recognition for transistors. Most people don't need to care who manufactures their transistors.

Well sure, which is why elections provide an (imperfect) counter to that strategy.

A huge part of the job of running a country is politicking though. That’s how policies are created and agreed upon in states (by design).

Do you think these will be free?

Seems a much better approach is to advocate for men exercising their agency and building relationships. I don’t see how dating is more a competition today than it has been historically?

The wise man bowed his head, “no difference between true and untrue” etc

Now define “we” “have to” and “kill.”

What mechanism, that is not a system vulnerable to the same ossification but with far more unilateral power, will actually execute such a directive?

But that was part of “the shift” that GP is crediting for moving toward broader appeal.

Agreed on the general point, this stuff can’t really be disaggregated in a meaningful way, but of course it doesn’t need to be disaggregated: the overall set of Musk’s decisions have been extremely destructive to the company (so far).

Wouldn’t Twitter be an unambiguously more successful business if Elon’s moderation moves brought it more in line with “the normal consumer?”

Seems to me he simultaneously put out a dogwhistle for one audience (far right commentators agree on this) and was openly hostile both to individuals and standard sensibilities among another audience (e.g. it’s distasteful to treat employees of your newly acquired company the way he did).

That could fully explain “the shift” without any “omg conspiracy Overton window biased moderation” mumbo jumbo.

Same exact expectation and same exact violation of my expectations. It actually looks like that. In the sky. Huge.

It is quite literally a night and day difference.

99% you’re in daytime. 100% you’re in nighttime.

Agreed. I just had this overwhelming sense of powerlessness. It’s the only time in my life I have felt the fact that we’re just standing on a rock hurdling through space.

It is a mind-boggling experience.

Wow that is fucked up. You should go travel into the path of totality with your kid, if it’s an option at all.

It is worth crossing continents for.

Oh yeah, absolutely prepared for it haha. I appreciate it!

I was able to catch the last eclipse in 2016/17 (?) and am using the wedding to trick all my loved ones into (hopefully) getting to experience one too.

Fair point -- it's dramatically reduced though.

That these states are antagonistic to women's health. See: Alabama's ruling that frozen embryos for IVF are actually children with all the rights thereof, immediately ceasing IVF procedures.

See also: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/05/us/texas-woman-high-risk-preg...

This woman in Texas having to sue to avoid a very dangerous birth of a child who will she will end up having to watch die within a few days.

> It states Cox’s OB-GYN, Dr. Damla Karsan, has a “good faith belief” that Cox falls under the legal exception to the abortion ban, but can’t provide the abortion without a court order because she “cannot risk loss of her medical license, life in prison, and massive civil fines” if her belief is not accepted by the courts.

So yes, Texas has an exception for births that would threaten the mother's life, but in practice doctors are justifiably petrified of betting their freedom on their assessment of that risk lining up with a bunch of medically ignorant theocrats' assessments.

It'd definitely alleviate it. I'm going to Vermont to try to see it (coinciding with my wedding) and the weather is really the only thing worrying me at the moment.