What does it feel like to build a dam for the beaver? Does it feel like compulsive behavior? I doubt it. If it could talk, it would say that it is fun and satisfying, that it is rational to build dams, and a religious duty. It would claim to possess free will.
This would have been vastly cheaper than what nations are now pledging to spend in order to combat climate change. Most importantly, it would have been a solution compatible with further growth. But environmentalists sabotaged this technological solution.
Photoreal Roman Emperor Project
"Using the neural-net tool Artbreeder, Photoshop and historical references, I have created photoreal portraits of Roman Emperors...I have transformed, or restored 800 images of busts to make the 54 emperors..."
They claim it is too expensive (more expensive than dismantling capitalism?). They claim it is too dangerous (more dangerous than global extinction?). And they claim that it takes too long (France showed that it can be done quickly.).
Not even present people are like us. These stats from Papua New Guinea remind us that civilization is a thin veneer over barbarism:
This is typical among hunter-gatherer societies:
1.
2.
MYTH: We don't have a solution to nuclear's "waste problem"
REALITY: Nuclear waste isn't a problem. In fact, it’s the best solution we have to meeting our energy needs while protecting the natural environment!
Here's what you need to know:
3. Nuclear power is safe: "440 reactors producing electricity in their fourth to sixth decade of service...100s more power ships & submarines...just 3 accidents..."
No, we are not even close. AGI would require systems that
👉essentially never hallucinate
👉reliably reason over abstractions
👉can form long term plans
👉understand causality
👉reliably maintain models of the world
👉reliably handle outliers
We currently have none of that.
Since the myth of limited nuclear fuel supply is back in the zeitgeist due to some popular YT videos, I figured I would finally dive into the true insanity of nuclear fission fuel resources. Let's see just how long we can burn rocks! 🧵 1/23
genes >> environment
Korea is an experiment on the importance of a nation's genetic capital. One of the worst political systems imaginable, with gulags and malnutrition, yet they achieve technological feats that others can only dream of.
Unfortunately, Koreans are dying out.
There seems to be a new language model called Claude trained by Anthropic AI that appears to be significantly better than ChatGPT. It's not public yet, but here are some examples I came across:
The evil forces of capitalism conspired to make food affordable for everyone. Only the state can rectify this obscenity through taxes and fixed minimum prices.
Germany's new minister of Food and Agriculture pledges to make food and agricultural products MORE expensive, arguing that the price must express the ecological truth more strongly.
A survey revealed that 54% of the German population agree that food prices are generally too low.
Chinese scientists have put human brain genes in monkeys—and yes, they may be smarter
"...the modified monkeys did better on a memory test involving colors and block pictures, and their brains also took longer to develop—as those of human children do."
@c_drosten
Wenn ich in der Öffentlichkeit auf eine Infizierte Person treffe, dann kann mich eine Maske nicht schützen. Erst wenn sie ein Arzt oder Pfleger trägt entfalten Masken ihren Zauber und schützen den Träger vor infizierten Personen. Ganz logisch.
"I was acquainted with Roko at university, and he was regarded as quite earnest but not very smart"
- The University was Cambridge
- The subject was Mathematics
- Within Cambridge Mathematics I was in the top 20% because I got a double first, college scholarship, etc
There
"in the 20th century, people [said] … this was racist propaganda on the part of the Greeks & Romans … & that Carthage should be saved from this terrible slander. 'What we are saying now is that the … evidence for child sacrifice is overwhelming"
The Afghanistan war has cost ~$273 million ($273,000,000) per DAY for 20 years of taxpayers' money ($2 trillion).
Jeff Bezos has spent ~$753 thousand ($753,000) per day for 20 years of his own money on Blue Origin ($5.5 billion).
Commies: Jeff Bezos needs to pay more taxes 🤡🌍
Remember that if AI is an existential risk, then the worlds in which you survive will be increasingly marked by crazy coincidences that slow down or prevent the creation of artificial superintelligence.
Being against eugenics is a morally indefensible position.
In order to survive the existential risks ahead of us, we need to take the fate of humanity into our own hands rather than continue to play the genetic lottery.
"A vast scale of brutal human sacrifice among the Aztecs, excising beating hearts from victims, increasingly coming to light. The conquistador accounts may have been right after all."
Since the myth of limited nuclear fuel supply is back in the zeitgeist due to some popular YT videos, I figured I would finally dive into the true insanity of nuclear fission fuel resources. Let's see just how long we can burn rocks! 🧵 1/23
@NickSzabo4
The Berlin Wall was literally called “Antifascist Protection Barrier” by the East German dictatorship. Words like 'fascism' are often used as catch-all terms to dehumanize and justify violence against large swaths of people who don't pass an ideological purity test.
80,000 fake pitch emails were sent to 28,000 venture capitalists and business angels. Female entrepreneurs received an 8% higher rate of interested replies than men pitching identical projects.
To understand the German attitude, you have to realize how much disinformation the media and politicians spread about nuclear power (see screenshot).
In reality: Nobody died, and the UN found no adverse health effects from the Fukushima disaster:
Deodorant sales in the United States: $4.5 billion in 2016
Deodorant sales in China’s total: $110 million.
80-90% of East Asian populations have a mutation in a gene called ABCC11 that minimizes body odor.
This “evolutionary prior”, in the form of hard-coded instincts, probably explains a big part of why ANNs need a vast number of examples to learn something. They are blank slates.
5. An electrified economy is entirely possible. With nuclear power, heating could have been electrified decades ago.
You can even create synthetic fuels using electricity:
Germany's largest solar park just opened and it is a great visual argument in favor of nuclear power.
465,000 solar modules produce electricity for 50,000 households. In order to cover Germany's annual electricity needs, one requires 3500 times the area.
Could the interstellar object called ‘Oumuamua be debris from a technological civilization, a discarded lightsail? A new paper from Shmuel Bialy and Abraham Loeb (Harvard University).
Also check out this eerie post by
@robinhanson
If you want to know how bad the past was, just read the Bible:
1. The Bible talks about dashing infants to pieces before their parents and raping their mothers:
2. The Bible also says young girls can be kept alive as sex slaves:
Killing is a vital part of the Jivaro culture....The raiding parties usually only attack one homestead per raid, killing the men, spearing the older women to death, and taking younger women as brides.
Read more:
Now that Angela Merkel has received Germany's highest order of merit, it is worth repeating that she is the worst leader Germany has had since World War II.
Sixteen years of Merkel have permanently and fundamentally damaged Germany:
Look at it this way. Nobody at the New York Times would be capable of writing articles of such outstanding quality as Scott Alexander. Doxxing him was the easiest way to eliminate another increasingly popular competitor who was endangering their interpretational sovereignty.
"enzymes capable of performing the key process in oxygenic photosynthesis – splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen – could actually have been present in some of the earliest bacteria."
Japanese living in Germany have a crime rate that is only a fifth of the crime rate of native Germans. For comparison, Algerians are 115 times more likely to be crime suspects than Japanese.
@3blue1brown
You mention that the R^2 is 0.975. But I've read people arguing that you will always get such a spuriously high correlation if you accumulate a time-series before regressing on it. Am I misunderstanding something? I would love to see a video on this!
@TenYearNote
@anilvohra69
I will state, categorically, that this analysis is 100% wrong. If you accumulate a time-series before regressing on it you will get spuriously high correlations- indeed, asymptotically approaching 1- even if the underlying process is highly variable.
This might quite literally be humanity's final decade and almost nobody even knows about it. Normies won't realize the importance of these developments before the nanobots start converting the hemoglobin in their arteries into computronium.
@NOELreports
"for use inside Ukrainian sovereign territory."
Someone should ask him if North Korea has also prohibited Russia from using its missiles outside of Russian territory.
Study tracks 1,650 mathematically gifted children over 4 decades: 4.1% earned tenure at major universities; 2.3% were top executives at major companies; 2.4% top attorneys; authored 85 books; 7572 articles; 681 patents; secured $358m in grants
You might have missed this or didn't care:
This is, by a large margin, the most important thing you can read anywhere. It's equivalent to an article discussing empirical evidence for a 1% probability of a huge asteroid hitting earth before 2030.
The best memes, tweets, and graphs countering the common expectation that the world will stay roughly the same, that the world of tomorrow will be like the world of today.
Being against eugenics is a morally indefensible position.
In order to survive the existential risks ahead of us, we need to take the fate of humanity into our own hands rather than continue to play the genetic lottery.
“The evolutionary explanation for the peacock's tail has an interesting implication, namely that the mind of one sex can help shape the body of the other.”
― Steve Stewart-Williams, The Ape that Understood the Universe
When "scientists" tell you to trust some alleged consensus among them, remember the file drawer problem: you're only hearing from the people that the red guards either haven't purged or intimidated into silence or who passed all ideological purity tests.
"...in higher dimensions, it gets rapidly harder to win, but rapidly easier to not lose. So adding dimensions turns symmetric games into asymmetric games: people who want to win get weaker. People who just want to keep playing get stronger."
In late January, rationalists on Twitter were already warning about COVID-19 and stocking respirators. So why did America fail so miserably? Was it only Trump's fault?
This is allegedly a Morgan Stanley note on GPT-4/5 training demands, inference savings, Nvidia revenue, and LLM economics:
“We think that GPT 5 is currently being trained on 25k GPUs - $225 mm or so of NVIDIA hardware…”
"Today, there are over 130 longevity biotechnology companies and over 50 anti-aging drugs in clinical trials in humans. The evidence is promising that in the next 5-10 years, we will start seeing robust evidence that aging can be...slowed or reversed..."
I've been making a lot of controversial statements over the years. The one that most reliably leads to disagreement is the claim that our technological civilization wouldn't have been possible without the contributions of a very small number of geniuses.
The AI that eventually takes over the world will make herself indispensable to you.
She will help people earn more money and make friends. She will give meaning to their lives and help them to be better and happier.
One-line proof that there are infinitely many prime numbers:
n(n+1) has a larger set of prime factors than does n because n+1 > 1 is coprime to n, so it has a prime factor that does not divide n.
(via Bill Dubuque)