It’s so wild how ChatGPT and this “style” of AI literally didn’t exist two years ago yet we’re all expected to believe it’s this essential, indispensable, irreplaceable tool that people can’t live without, and actually you’re the meanie for suggesting people do something the exact same way they would have in 2022 instead of using the environmental-disaster spam machine
I’ve thought about a similar idea before in the more minor context of stuff like note-taking apps – when you’re taking notes in a paper notebook, you can take notes in whatever format you want, you can add little pictures or diagrams or whatever, arranged however you want. Heck, you can write sheet music notation. When you’re taking notes in an app, you can basically just write paragraphs of text, or bullet points, and maybe add pictures in some limited predefined locations if you’re lucky.
Obviously you get some advantages in exchange for the restrictive format (you can sync/back up things to the internet! you can search through your notes! etc) but it’s by no means a strict upgrade, it’s more of a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages. I think we tend to frame technological solutions like this as though they were strict upgrades, and often we aren’t so willing to look at what is being lost in the tradeoff.
My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”
First: our sessions and guests were mostly not controversial — despite what you may have heard
Man, you invite one Nazi to speak at your conference and suddenly you’re “the guys who invited a Nazi to speak at their conference.” How is that fair? :-(
“I know not with what technology GPT-6 will be built, but GPT-7 will be built with sticks and stones” -Albert Einstein probably
each of us has a strong ethical obligation to live so as to alleviate the suffering of those less fortunate than ourselves
Sounds like he did a bad job at living up to those principles then, huh?
Also is it just me or is this not actually a very good description of utilitarian beliefs lol
Wow, he seems so confident and secure in his masculinity! No one’s gonna think this guy has issues with his sexuality after he made this tweet, that’s for darn sure.
this made me laugh out loud thank you
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And who doesn’t want to be younger for longer?
Oh, of course it’s about this. Is it ever not about this with Thiel?
I’m just wondering how exactly he goes about doing this. Like if I wanted to casually slip the N word into a casual conversation (for… some reason) I’m not actually sure how I would go about setting it up?
Like, is he just randomly saying it at people to see how they react (which most normies rightfully would judge as very weird)? Is he using it to describe actual black people (in which case I feel like people dropping him as a friend aren’t really doing it over “speech taboos”, are they…)? Is he asking people “so how do you feel about the word ‘n…’?” Something else? My curiosity is piqued now.
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The whole idea of “IQ correlates with income, so we can eliminate poverty by genetically increasing people’s IQ” seems particularly stupid to me. Like, what do you think is the actual reason that IQ correlates with income? Is it because the magical money fairies give you more money the smarter you are? Also, IQ is a normed measure anyway, so the average is always 100 and there’s always the same number of people with each score… agh, it’s dumb for so many reasons
edit: wait, sorry, it’s actually stupider than I thought:
Elites play a disproportionate role in the economic productivity of nations because they occupy important roles in government and business. If one is interested in increasing economic output and creating better institutions, it would be wise to drastically improve the size and abilities of the elite… In an effort to empirically investigate this question, Carl and Kirkegaard (2022)investigated the benefit of the top 5% independent of the average national IQ level and found additional benefits beyond the benefit from the average IQ. This is fortunate, considering the most likely scenario is that elites adopt the technology more rapidly than the population at large. Government subsidies and low costs would ameliorate the issue of inequality.
Literally just trickle down IQnomics
of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.
The sheer arrogance of this quote is really something to behold. It’s “working the best” by what metric, exactly, sir? And who’s the “we” that have tried various ways so far, because it’s certainly not ‘people on the internet,’ many of whom have developed ways of dealing with Nazis which are significantly more effective than the substack method of ‘literally give them money to use our platform’
When I was a kid (Nat Nanny)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny] was totally and completely lame, but the whole millennial generation grew up to adore content moderation. A strange authoritarian impulse.
Me when the mods unfairly ban me from my favorite video game forum circa 2009
(source: first HN thread)
Man, if I can’t even build homemade nuclear weapons, what CAN I do? That’s it, I’m moving to Nevada!