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
we simply don't know how the world will look if there are a trillion or a quadrillion superhumanly smart AIs demanding rights
I feel like this scenario depends on a lot of assumptions about the processing speed and energy/resource usage of AIs. A trillion is a big number. Notably there's currently only about 0.8% this number of humans, who are much more energy efficient than AIs.
even putting aside philosophy/ethics, have they never heard of common expressions like "too much of a good thing" or "the dose makes the poison"? it's just an extremely, extremely common idea basically everywhere except in the tech industry
"how would women use our protocol?"
"oh, right, women, shit. uh, I guess they could use it for dating men?"
"yeah, that's a pretty good one, any other ideas?"
"do women even do anything else?"
"hmmm... I guess not that I'm aware of, no"
"all right then let's go with that one"
Feel like the very beginning of this is not completely crazy (I've also thought in the past that straight people often perform "attractiveness" more for the approval of their same-sex friends) but it seems to kind of jump off the evo-psych deep end after that, lol
Also you can't build a bunch of assumptions about "we should organize society this way" while ignoring the existence of LGBT people, and then go "yeah I know I ignored them but it simplified my analysis." Like yeah it simplifies the analysis to ignore a bunch of stuff that actually exists in reality, but... then that means maybe your conclusions about how to structure society are wrong??
edit: also this quote is choice:
I don't know if this really happens. But even if not, the fiction does a great job of highlighting the dynamic I'm thinking of.
It really does illustrate the way they see culture not as, like, a beautiful evolving dynamic system that makes life worth living, but instead as a stupid game to be won or a nuisance getting in the way of their world domination efforts
The problem is just transparency, you see -- if they could just show people the math that led them to determining that this would save X million more lives, then everyone would realize that it was actually a very good and sensible decision!
Is this a correct characterisation of the EA community? That they all harbour anti-abortion sentiment but for whatever reason permit abortion?
I actually wouldn't be surprised if this were the case -- the whole schtick of a lot of these people is "worrying about increasing the number of future possibly-existing humans, even at the cost of the suffering of actually-existing humans", so being anti-abortion honestly seems not too far out of their wheelhouse?
Like I think in the EAverse you can just kinda go "well this makes people have less kids which means less QALYs therefore we all know it's obviously bad and I don't really need to justify it." (with bonus internet contrarian points if you are justifying some terrible thing using your abstract math, because that means you're Highly Decoupled and Very Smart.) See also the quote elsewhere in this thread about the guy defending child marriage for similar reasons.
I... think (hope??) the "" is representing filled in squares in the crossword and that he has a grid of characters. But in that case the problem is super easy, you just need to print out HTML table tags between each character and color the table cell black when the character is "". It takes like 10 minutes to solve without chatgpt already. :/
I would blame the rise of smartphones for that too. Somehow everyone became convinced that if tech isn't radically upending everyone's lives every 10 years then something is wrong. But hey, maybe our lives don't need tech companies to disrupt them anymore actually?
Me when the mods unfairly ban me from my favorite video game forum circa 2009
(source: first HN thread)