williamtrask

It’ll be fine. Keep in mind that the world has run on handwritten signatures for a few hundred years. And anyone could say anything in a letter with no “pixels” to prove it right.

Digital media as strong evidence has been a novelty.

If anything the real thing to watch out for will be the echo of national digital ID. This would certainly solve the mild/moderate issues of deepfakes while (if done poorly) risking a serious upgrade to surveillance state/capitalism.

I think the big question here is “why do you and I have compassion and empathy when many (many!) in human history have not?”

Related: do animals act pro-socially because of rational scientific rigour or because they blindly inherit behaviours from their peers/ancestors?

My wording wasn’t clear. I wasn’t referring to SBF commuting a crime with customer funds. I was referring to him committing any crime for which limiting his assets may be appropriate.

And yet he still could have committed a crime using the funds at his disposal. Crypto doesn’t prevent crime. On the contrary it tends to make crime net easier via facilitating money laundering.

I don’t think magical thinking is optimal. But I do think strictly non-magical thinking is suboptimal. Despite being a scientist as a profession, I can’t ignore the empirical data across a million years that virtually all civilisations independently have magical thinking.

Your analogy of the appendix is a good one. Some things which were useful no longer are.

I feel religion in particular doesn’t fall into this category as it has known uses. Collective action in particular is something the exclusively scientific worldview seems to repel in practice.

I also think that we don’t yet fully see this because todays secular humanists have a tremendous amount of moral momentum inherited from 10 thousand years of non scientific society. But things are changing.

This article is about cryptocurrency facilitating SBF plausibly laundering funds.

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I think it’s interesting to observe that science is a fork of religion both in historical record and in substance, but with the “belief in something” removed. At its base is the same problem: nobody lives long enough to know what’s going on, so we write it down in a literary cannon of truth. Science’s entrance requirement is based on the scientific method (repeatable experimentation). Religions tend to have differing entrance requirements. Perhaps the most common (and useful to this convo) is the opposite of science: things I saw that break the pattern (miracles, disasters, etc….divine interventions) and which cannot be repeated.

If we do live in a simulation this is the only kind of evidence that could point to it… external signs that break the rules of the game. But by definition science cannot discover this kind of information.

Also religions have a knack for solving collective action problems through locally irrational beliefs (like karma). Science has trouble allowing these into a cannon. In the case of karma this is because it’s unscientific. It’s not enough to believe that karma would be good for society scientifically and thus we should believe in it. This doesn’t solve the prisoners dilemma. It’s only by (everyone) literally believing in karma that it can have its effect.

It’s things like this that science structurally struggles to contribute to society. Proving things outside the system (we’re in a simulation), consciousness, collective action, etc.

Not: It’s also worth noting that many of the greatest scientists and artists were religious. Hard to know where to give credit there.

Nit: A photo from Hubble isn’t beautiful because of the telescope, it’s beautiful because of what nature made it to be. Hubble is merely a reflection.

Science has given many things, and as a professional research scientist, I help it continue to do so. I by no means think science should go away.

However, it also created the ability for humanity to destroy itself: the nuclear bomb, climate change, and plenty of other existential threats.

Also there are plenty of non-tech tribes which display tremendous lifespans. To my knowledge, the common threads among centenarians is not usually tech or globalisation driven. Often they’re religious and they’re very often closely knit with their local communities.

The jury is still out on whether science is net positive. We’re only a few hundreds if years in (12,000 if you want to start with the dawn of technology…being the plow).

It’s made lives better and worse while simultaneously significantly decreasing the amount and depth to which humans believe they have a purpose, a pursuit I feel science has made little to no progress on.

But my stronger point is that magical thinking was naturally selected (as in natural selection) to be almost universally advantageous for the first 99% of human existence. I’m not sure our 1% experiment with a scientific society is as of yet conclusively better. We’ve almost made humans extinct. We might still. I don’t know of a magical belief (karma, etc.) that has put humanity in such a grave threat as the Cold War or climate change, for example.

> Personally I prefer my money to be immune from collective action, given that it's personal funds and not collective money

> It is very nice then that nobody is required to use cryptocurrency for any reason if they don't want to. Everyone who holds cryptocurrency has explicitly opted in to those benefits and risks.

There’s an internal inconsistency in your logic between these two statements.

Money is collective action. It is others controlling you and you controlling others. You cannot have one without the other.

What you’re likely advocating for is a world without politics, where corrupt institutions are replaced by machines/systems that are pure and non-corruptible.

This is the crypto dream, but it’s older then crypto. Ayn Rand is often credited with this thinking. Also, somewhat ironically, the corrupt financial system of today (including 08 crisis) is in many ways more corrupt because it was infused with this thinking in the wave of deregulation in the 90s.

For a great history on this belief system I recommend the documentary “All watched over by machines of loving grace” by Adam Curtis.

That’s a good start but IMO humanity already has the cause of avoiding death and that’s never been enough.

We may need a new good to run towards, not just an evil to run away from.

> For the sake of the survival of the planet/species, I also don't think any institution based around magical thinking should fill the gap.

I know this won’t be a popular point, but I think we have nearly all of human history as evidence that “magical believing” societies survive more effectively than not. At any time literally any tribe could have chosen to believe in nothing. It’s almost impossible to think that no tribe tried it. Heck. It’s the default state until you make up a deity!

And yet… the overwhelming majority of societies were based on “magical” thinking.

Inversely, it’s possible there could be a hard scientific truth that we discover and kills us all (“information hazard” by Nick Bostrom is a good survey… think nuclear bombs etc)

It’s a really interesting mental experiment. Is truth best defined by repeatable experimentation (Manhattan project) or by human thriving (including magical thinking).

Aside: Reinforcement Learning theory hardcore leans (implicitly) on the latter.

As someone who was homeschooled, loves being fully remote, and has worked as such for several years (and pined for it long before) I don’t think we can yet equate video chats with real conversation.

Conversation isn’t a data transfer. It’s a joint function of two people. Anything other than the real thing is messing with that function in weird ways.

Forgive my oversimplification - the financial system has many more methods than just freezing though. Tracking, reversing, and limiting international movements come to mind.

My point is that while I agree with the risks you imply with traditional finance, the crypto we have today has not fixed the issues in traditional finance and has introduced many new ones. Hard to calculate but it feels like a net loss in my book.

Feels like a far cry from the “fail safe” you mention. Yeah it’s a fail safe from a government intervening in your financial affairs, but it’s also a fail safe from them protecting you by intervening in others. It’s the opposite of collective action. It’s every human for themself. This is not an improvement.

Amongst other complications, this seems like a great example of where decentralisation / extreme techno-libertarianism greatly falls short. Creating a government-less financial system is enabling corruption in an instance when traditional finance would likely do quite well in freezing assets of an alleged criminal.

Sorry if it’s a bit much. I’m finishing a PhD sortof on the topic and I’m really passionate about it.

When reading an article like this I’m distracted by the overwhelming number of possible causes. Could be life today, life 10 years ago, or expectations for the future. We don’t have sufficient data to really disentangle so many possible variables. As a youngish adult myself I’m not sure my peers know what’s going on either as they experience mental health problems. Everything is shrouded in such complicated stories about azburgers, food intolerances (gut health), economic inequality, wholeness, pandemic, inflation, social media, consumerism, climate anxiety, etc.

It makes me wonder about more general solutions to the more general problems. I’m most persuaded by Adam Curtis’s documentaries that what we’re really experiencing is the failures of individualism being pushed too far.

The story is compelling. Life has always been hard, and the way humanity copes and intervenes is through social institutions ahd the grand stories that bring us together to collectively act and solve them. It’s family, local communities, churches, etc. that provide direct emotional and physical support at scale.

These institutions have messed up in the past, bringing with them a legacy of bad decisions and structured inequality, but I increasingly agree with Adam Curtis that deprioritising them in favor of radical individualism just isn’t working.

As Curtis says - we need a new grand story for what society is all about and social institutions to organise around that story.

And until then my peers and I will wander in the dark wondering why we feel so afraid, alone, and purposeless. We got rid of the leadership hierarchies we hated, and tech in particular helped us do it by creating markets for everything. You can live in your bubble with remote anything and delivery everything. But we failed to create a new reason for living. It’s all just open markets, infinite choice, and no need to depend on others or for them to depend on you.

Among other things, people want to feel like someone needs them.

The technique is called randomised response. Differential privacy formalises it as well

I don't think accuracy matters as much as the ability to describe various opinions and attribute them to sources.

It’s not that google can’t do this. It’s that the incentives prevent it. Chatbots may be worse because there’s a plausible way to only give you one answer and to really make it feel real.

This is a great point.

Followup question - is LLM tech more or less likely to end up replacing search when those same incentives really saturate the LLM product itself.

One big difference seems to be attribution. LLMs don’t tell you where their info comes from. They just say what is (but can be asked to cite works - with mixed results).

Will LLMs get good at citing sources and if not will people care or will they give in to LLMs as a source of information that’s “good enough because it mostly works”

From a product placement / ads perspective, being able to persuade people to fully accept everything an ad-infused LLM says because it’s good enough seems like an incredibly lucrative product bundling opportunity if they can get it right. Esp. If they can use that to convince regulators they can’t annotate the difference between ads and non ads.

Seems pretty dystopian from a disinformation perspective though.

Your long term memory and embodied sense of purpose are good places to explore this premise.

When Y==1 (such as an email spam blocker) then you proved their point.

A brand ambassador makes claims about something being great. If the claims are baseless then the brand ambassador is misleading people in a way that harms them. Just because the brand ambassador didn’t look into it doesn’t change anything. That’s just them being irresponsible.

A brand ambassador should be a famous face of a legit auditing practice. Anything less is accepting bullshit into the system… if the system is designed for large numbers of people to take your advice then the system should hold you accountable if the advice is wrong / poorly researched.

Yes they should be liable for all of those things. If they make a general endorsement they should absorb general liability for that endorsement harming people.

Commercial directors and producers should also be held liable. We have a marketing industry which is far too ambivalent about the negative impacts they scale.

I imagine the main argument has to do with having enough surplus to innovate. That said of course there’s plenty of times where surplus doesn’t go to innovation.

The world would be better if people who endorsed things were liable for what they endorsed. They should feel the pressure to actually look into what they’re advocating. I hope this is a pivot moment.

I hope that all of the ways in which you find a product become exposed to whether that product is good or not. This is horrible for online platforms and especially advertising, but it’s good for society.

I don’t think this lawsuit would hinder innovation but it would greatly change it and who owns it.

If an AI model is the joint property of all the people who contributed IP to it, it’s a pretty hugely democratic and decentralizing force. It also will incentivise a huge amount of innovation on better, richer data sources for AI.

If an AI model isn’t joint property of the IP it learned then it’s a great way to build extractive business models because the raw resource is mostly free. This will incentivise larger, more centralised entities.

Much of the most interesting data comes from everyday people. A class action precedent is probably good for society and good for innovation (particularly pushing innovation on the edge/data collection side)