Good point. I'm embarrassed it didn't occur to me before.
184 karma · joined May 20, 2017
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox
Everything they said was invalid. Premise wrong, nothing else follows.
Not a slight on them of course, very few people, especially in policy, seem to be aware of this law in Comp Sci.
Moravec's Paradox is similar to Moore's Law. It implies that near all information centric work shall be automated before blue collar labour.
This is similar to inflation, a creeping thing.
It means that the majority of the (working) population will be blue collar workers.
The Industrial Revolution has already long automated the straight forward blue collar labours, brute physical effort.
The Information Revolution is going to automate the majority of the middle class because most of their jobs are concerned with information.
The future is likely to look a lot like the distant past. I know Tyler Cowen agrees with me.
Moravec's Paradox is the 21st century's 'Economic Calculation Problem'. It's not going away, it is reliable.
I think this occurs in every political system though.
The only route out is to adopt some form of the scientific process combined with metapolitics, seasteading is a hypothetical example.
To me it's all contingent on whether your brain is healthy, functioning properly, ideally at an optimum. People who talk of Life Extension say that improving 'healthspan' and lifespan are connected.
Probably society needs a range of brain ages to function, or has done until now at least. That said there is no possible utility to people getting degenerative brain disease, I don't see the point of keeping the vehicle if the driver is dead.
Also consider the tasks a person does in life. A blue collar man dies much younger than rich woman, I think 20-30+ years. Some of that may be avoidable through better healthcare or technology or simply unavoidable because of genetics but it's also hard to imagine intense physical labour doesn't affect your metabolism in such a way that it ends your life sooner.
As a blue collar worker I'm becoming aware of this drawback..!
On the other side I know workers who've worked physically demanding jobs who are in their 90s and are still trotting about, have full head of dark hair.
I suspect in practice this is a non-issue, a kind of fake argument we like to make because it sounds right.
I think genetic improvements don't give massive improvements in a single healthy individual, that kind of technology is science fiction and would require many iterations of experimental use over many generations. So boosts of +20 or +200 IQ points or +20 or +200 attractiveness points is off the table.
What we have the power to do is reduce incident of genetic disease and very modestly improve outcomes for more healthy functioning brains.
This levels the playing field between the rich and poor because the rich hit the optimum for genetic improvement very fast (having already a lion's share of genetic advantages to start with), then they must experience diminishing returns for their money. It is likely that most common genetic improvements are also the most widely spread about in the population, the opposite of your vision.
Now having foolishly stuck my neck out I shall ask Gwern whether I am full of it. ;-)
I used to be a Jehovah's Witness and am familiar with those outside the religion criticizing it because it frequently occurs that their children die due to the refusal of blood transfusions.
However I now think there is a similar type of ignorance which has stemmed out of politically correct thought.
I believe biracial children are more likely to die due to the side affects of ignoring racial topics in our society. Here is how: biracial children have a lower probability of organ donation matches, and a drastically lower probability of bone marrow matches.
I have never seen this discussed before but it seems self evident to me. In order for a Congolese-Belorussian (a real family I know) child to obtain a bone marrow match it must be sought out way in advance of the illness, if a match can be found at all that is.
Since few if any people are aware of the rarity of matches for biracial people it must mean a lot of them die, there just isn't enough time to source the match in time.
Of course there are failure modes for rightist thought also. Were biracial couples illegal I don't think that would be a step forward. Still the failures of our current order linger in my mind and I believe that a slightly more right wing policy with respect to biracial couples (activating searches for organ/marrow matches in advance) would save lives.
Some people here may suggest that this isn't right wing, it is merely common sense or logical. Sure, but as Sam Altman's blog post suggests, sometimes good ideas are quelled if they could potentially interfere with political heuristics.
Personally I think leftists, rightists and centrists are terrible at grokking stats because the human brain can't handle multifaceted realities very well.
It is possible for instance that all political positions are correct, even the apparently contradictory ones because they are part of the Elephant (the one with the blind men).
I'd add that contrary to intuition, sometimes bad ideas might be required to get to good ones. Sometimes if you're wrong in an interesting way it opens up somewhere that has been overlooked by the others who sped off in another direction.
Consider that probably a majority of the most influential early scientists thought the world was 6000 years old, that most interesting people in the Middle Ages were deep down the Alchemy rabbit hole.
I distinctly remember a BBC article on a Chinese scientist saying (paraphrased) "Hey, if you eat these animals, if you like them, you should sequence them right away, they should be priority". The pathos of the article implied this was mildly barbaric instead of making complete sense. I remember thinking "Man, you can't even explain why this dude is wrong". Abrupt, yes, wrong, no.
Scott Alexander made an observation on why this happens.
"But I can’t help noticing that eight years ago, New Atheism was really popular, and now it’s really unpopular. Or that eight years ago I was in a place where having Richard Dawkins style hyperrationalism was a useful brand, and now I’m (for some reason) in a place where having James C. Scott style intellectual conservativism is a useful brand. A lot of the “wisdom” I’ve “gained” with age is the kind of wisdom that helps me channel James C. Scott instead of Richard Dawkins; how sure am I that this is the right path?
Sometimes I can almost feel this happening. First I believe something is true, and say so. Then I realize it’s considered low-status and cringeworthy. Then I make a principled decision to avoid saying it – or say it only in a very careful way – in order to protect my reputation and ability to participate in society. Then when other people say it, I start looking down on them for being bad at public relations. Then I start looking down on them just for being low-status or cringeworthy. Finally the idea of “low-status” and “bad and wrong” have merged so fully in my mind that the idea seems terrible and ridiculous to me, and I only remember it’s true if I force myself to explicitly consider the question. And even then, it’s in a condescending way, where I feel like the people who say it’s true deserve low status for not being smart enough to remember not to say it. This is endemic, and I try to quash it when I notice it, but I don’t know how many times it’s slipped my notice all the way to the point where I can no longer remember the truth of the original statement."
I wonder if they choose nesting material based on insulation properties also. Cigarette stubs are probably great for stuffing into cracks and it is known that plugging air gaps dramatically increases whole house/nest insulation value.
Recommend the BIFL (buy it for life) community on Reddit.
I think it's a contrarian media organization. I recall when the conservatives were all "kill this guy" during the Bush administration, now they they think he's the rescuer of Western Civilization.
If you have any belief in 'checks and balances' as an anti-corruption mechanism then this is a positive.
Who could regulate the 4th Estate, the academies? Not the government, they would be accused of corruption or despotism. Enter WL.
Think about it: who is 'the establishment'. It can't be the President/White House can it, not when the majority of pundits, journalists and intellectuals were against him.
Suppose that the center opinion on Y was correct.
Then there would be no need for 'search'. Leftist and Rightist would not exist. Liberals in the center would always be the winners.
It's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation
This is definitely true.
If those autocompletes weren't biased then I must be blind.
It's also annoying when their international shipping policy is "Free Shipping" which usually means $30-$50 flat fee to any international destination no matter how small or light the package is.
Military uses huge numbers of powerful diesel engines and the US military is larger than most of the rest combined.
There are a lot of failure modes in politics and the widely held feeling that if only we nipped the 'extremes' at either end of the spectrum and everything would be alright, that is bunk.
I continue to see a conflation of violent extremism and how far the political orientation is from the center of politics.
One of the most important failures of the political spectrum model is the inability to recognize the center is a homogeneous place while the edges are extremely diverse. Like everything else it's a tree structure.
As I see it the most important error in recent years was the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions. That didn't come about as a result of far right extremism or far left agitating. Broadly speaking neither faction wanted the war, so it must have come from the center.
It irks me that most attention is paid to the handful of violent ideologues, when the worst strategic errors are overlooked because they are closer to the center and have a body of political support. This is not a coherent way to police political violence.
They do advocate for millions of class enemies to be killed.
Personally I feel, and I know many people disagree, that parallels between today and '30s are overrated.
While history can rhythm, the modern left and right have mythologized that period to the point it is unrecognizable.
People don't actually read books on WWII.
It's nice that Google and Reddit's staff are feeling virtuous but it is becoming harder to talk civilly than it used to be and if it doesn't stop the pro-violence extremists will become validated and nothing positive starts from there.
I have some qualms about some systematic things, but it's a broad philosophical dispute and not the running of HN. In governance - there is no way to 'win' anyway.
I wish every leader had to be a forum moderator of very different groups of people, but we seem to select for whatever the opposite of that is no matter the political predilection.
Apart from more sophisticated robot hoovers, lawn mowers I don't think that is necessarily so.
Hoovers and mowers are safe because they are small, light, low to the ground and constrained to floors and lawns.
Vehicles, fast, heavy, high, are in a controlled environment.
Other controlled enviroments like factories have already ventured into robotics.
It seems to me that main advantages of automated movement would exist in unstructured environments like streets, shops. The robots I've seen so far have low center of gravity, are heavy so as to inhibit any danger.
What exactly does automated driving do for other unstructured environments?
It is far from clear to me that this is going to be a trifle soon after the roads swarm with autos.
I suspect that when a government is unable to scale its ability to govern, the statistics become dopey.
This doesn't imply a conspiracy necessarily. It could be for instance that if people stop reporting crime, that either the crimes are not occurring or that people's faith in the government to provide effective policing is undermined.
This makes a government's statistic's office an unreliable narrator even if every person is not corrupted and competant at their job.
Semi-related: I feel a faint thrill of unease at this reasoning because of the broader notion - that any society going into reverse wouldn't be sensible to what was happening: things would just gradually get weirder. Nobody would know why. A society suffering from Alzheimer's disease. It would just get worse with the ability of society to possess executive function dropping off at a similar rate to the ability to physically function. Eventually people would be looking upon the ruin wondering what the fuck happened.
Second thought.
Although no expert on SA's economic infrastructure I do know one thing which is at odds with your portrayal. Escom is the almost exclusive provider of electric power, still owned by the SA state IIRC. It has not added any electrical generation capacity to the grid since Apartheid. Their facilities are also badly run down.
How can you claim then, that more South Africans have access to electricity? Were white people hoarding all the electricity and now it is more evenly distributed? It seems more likely that more people would have obtained access in name only.
> quality of life has gotten materially better for the vast majority of people (coming off a low base), but worse, or stagnated for those of us SA'ns well-off enough to frequent HN.
I concede it is possible I have obtained a biased version of reality from those South Africans capable of net access.
I'd suspect though that most right wing South Africans would have left 20 years ago, so the people left in SA must be the more Liberal and Left of center portion of the population, or those unable to leave. If this is true, and we believe that political character is mostly hereditary (I do), then the bias may lie in the opposite direction.
That most media sources bias would be in that same direction nearly goes without saying. Western media trumpeted a great victory after Apartheid after all.
Final thought:
For what criteria would you concede being mistaken? Mine is simple: if South Africa experiences significant increases in real wages and life expectancy goes up, then it is successful.
I put to you that since AIDs should be fatal to those without access to expensive drugs, and infant mortality likely is dropping as you said you should expect an uptick in life expectancy over the next few decades.
Were that not to occur, then something is wrong.
I know some people believe the tentacles of the former regime have gotten stronger over time but this seems conspiratorial to me and I've never heard a fleshed out explanation for why that ought to be so.
I want to see better ways for people to 'opt out', because otherwise they will begin making demands that put other people's options in jeopardy.
It's bad enough this is an emotive political subject, but it's also a complex one. If I can continue to harp on my 'dust mote' fable. The life expectancy was 64 under the previous regime, and is 56 in the current one.
Some back of the envelope arithmetic.
8 years x 40 million = 320000000 person years.
Let us call that, assuming the higher life expectancy: five million dead.
That's the cost of bad government. Silent. Insidious. Real.
Now it's complex, because you'll say: "It couldn't be helped, we don't really know if the previous regime would have done better", and I'll agree with you. Then it becomes subjective because nobody can really know the answer and it's impossible to test.
I strongly suspect improper rule has led to at least several million avoidable deaths.
As I see it, if a government does 99/100 things right, but 1/100 things wrong, and those 1/100 things have a greater impact than the other 99... I think you see what I'm getting at. Good intentions, some gains morally, it's all kind of worthless if the big things aren't got right. To use a Comp Sci analogy, governments have their own version of Big O notation.