To shamelessly shill a passion project: A friend of mine and I try to be skeptical-but-reasonable on our podcast https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ we aggregate papers and reporting and try to contextualize it with our own (hopefully useful) perspectives and takes
In game theory, cooperation is a dominant strategy and evolves consistently. Slave owners and other injustice committing humans often invoke "human nature" out of trying to cope with their knowledge that it is wrong but whatever trauma or other thing makes them do it anyway, to absolve themselves of agency.
(To be clear, not targeting you personally here, but targeting the rhetoric and fallacy)
Cooperation is an unstable strategy. If everyone else is cooperating and not punishing defectors much, defecting is vastly better for you.
If everyone else is defecting and you can cooperate with a few people, that's slightly better for you. Hence we have high-trust and low-trust societies, gatekeeping, etc.
Sure, and now compare polities which manage to keep defection to a minimum or structure the process of "defecting" to serve the polities purpose instead of being truly adversarial. Bruce Bueno de Mesquitas "the logic of political survival" and various works by daron acemogolu have the data on how much better these polities do.
If there's no pure play dominant strategy, you will always get a fraction of defectors willing to try their luck. But coopération still emerges, and the polities that manage to cooperate more still tend to survive and thrive more.
Many kinds of defecting aren't punished much. For example we don't refuse to buy things made with slave labor. Some people do, but they're an extreme minority. So being a slave owner is rewarding.
Not really, kindness also exists. It is the escape hatch from the evolutionary zero sum game and let's you pick a better equilibrium (bargaining vs pure Nash).
We can just not fight. There is enough room and resources,we can get more of them and build more efficient tech, and we are all more alike than different.
Kindness is an unstable equilibrium unfortunately. Mother nature is totally uninterested in it. Otherwise we would still all be protolife quasi-cells, because consuming other cells and not sharing resources isn't kind.
Maybe you argue that we are human and intelligent, so we can override this inconvenience with a system of our own design. My response would be "Sure, put your guns down and burn them, I won't stop you."
Again, it's an unstable equilibrium. Power on the other hand is dramatically more stable.
Thats your take, I tend to not agree. Nature, with all its balance by destruction, has one approach but we humans can and do things differently in some cases, for our greater benefit.
We don't kill weak links in our population just like mother nature intended and keeps doing left and right everywhere all the time, a good chunk of this forum would not pass those harsh and often random tests yet its/ours added value is non-trivial and surpasses any additional effort by society (at least I like to think that).
'Everything good in this world is kindness'. I have yet to meet a person, situation or story where this would not apply.
There's more ways of neutralizing power than meeting it with equivalent threat. You can also make it not worth exerting the power, or introduce enough friction to let it evaporate itself.
And so far, the highest historical power concentrations have always been un-stable, while the polities that put checks on that power and embed themselves in cooperative trade networks lasted for much longer
Meh, that "empathy is weakness" is just an ideology, not the historical thing. Nazi lost the war after all. Fascists in general tend to start wars and then loose them, precisely because their arrogance and lack of empathy makes them unable win long term.
The constant war of all against all with no kindness kind of societies don't do all that well, actually. Human societies do best when the kind people assert themselves against sociopaths. And human societies do worst when the sociopaths get free reign.
Chinese idioms can be notoriously difficult to interpret.
From what I've seen, they're often an abbreviation of some passage from a famous text. The listener is expected to know the rest of that text and all the major commentaries that go with it.
I absolutely do not have a solid grasp of the full works of Mencius and I have fairly anemic knowledge of the derivative works but I'm fairly sure it's not just a simple euphemism.
My read of the idiom is that Chinese political philosophers claim that the basis of Western political philosophy is the balance of power between hegemons and the basis of Chinese political philosophy is the concept of the righteous rule/mandate of heaven.
His implication seems to be that Western nations are held together primarily by force whereas the CPC primarily maintains power by serving the people.
The how of the reference seems important, it's not like he brought it up first apparently
>Xi has referenced Allison’s term before. In a speech in Seattle in 2015, Xi said, “There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides Trap.” And in an October 2023 meeting with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Xi said, “The ‘Thucydides’ Trap’ is not inevitable, and Planet Earth is vast enough to accommodate the respective development and common prosperity of China and the United States.
Genuine take: maybe it would be more efficient for the economy and society, as well as better for everyone involved individuall, to make room for the ease in period as well, with a clearly communicated end towards the same, so people can acclimatize?
Speaking as someone who grew up in a slightly more cruel world, but still received way more kindness than previous generations (did not die of previously deadly respiratory complications in childhood, got accepted into gifted children program for enthousiasm, not IQ, got recommendation letters for the same reasons, short sighted, ADHD) in my self evaluation, each time I got a break it spurned me to work harder and try more to "pay it back", and every time I powered through strict evaluation and scrutiny it left scars that overall impede my productivity/would do so if I had not gotten therapy to overcome them .
Nature is cruel, but also inefficient. We have long since started building a "rela world" full of safety bubbles that let us thrive. Why not continue with this one?
The majority of US jobs are offered by small businesses.
The idea of “ease in” periods is nice, but it’s incredibly challenging when the business is understaffed (and hence hiring) for a specific role. You don’t have a lot of extra bandwidth on the existing team to cover for the new guy while he settles in.
Sure , it's difficult, and not always possible,but maybe we should treat it as what it is (an unfortunate reality) rather than creating false valor.
I don't think people are unaware of the reality of real life, and the ones that are won't wake up if you terminate them in college. If we want to make sure, make them do mandatory work Placements instead of the grades, to experience the pressure of real world without risk of career failure
Because that's not reality in the least. And all you are doing is creating a clutch of children/students who have no experience with things that are difficult.
Fun, I've been building a similar idea for the last year in my evenings, but focusing on human curation and human consumption and ensuring the humans understand the concepts correctly. Gonna be nice to have all these orthogonal projects complementing one another
Honest question: What _would_ convince you that we are not heading towards a singularity? Like, is this belief falsifiable?
(Secondary question: what do you mean with singularity?)
As an offering of me engaging in good faith, a controversial opinion of mine: I legit think arpanet going online and starting the networking all of humanity into a massive coupled complex system fits the definition of singularity of "the moment after which predicting what will happen becomes hard to impossible", although that of course heavily depends on your definitions of prediction and hard/impossible.
For falsification, I would take a year in which we don’t see an absolute sea change in capability. The last twelve months were not that, in my opinion, nor were the twelve before it. Hell, I’d even throw in “a year in which capabilities obviously improve but at a cost consumers can’t afford”.
“What LLMs can’t do, only humans can” feels like a God of the Gaps situation: people have to keep moving the goal posts because the more recent models keep unlocking more territory that was previously a “well they’ll never be able to do this!” holdout
That's the best answer I've seen to that question so far, my honest respect. I am much more skeptical than you, for me I have seen a sea change in _tool capabilities_ (mainly pre opus 4.5 to post 4.5) and harness engineering but no strong change in the type of errors made and the pattern of harness engineering (the pattern of "set things up for the LLM to see when it fucks up and let it flail till the verifier tells it to stop").
I would actually expect the sea changes as you describe it in your first criteria to continue with 1) vision, audio and video natively integrated 2) continued scaling of e2e rlvf for workflows with large scale labeling efforts 3) ASICs and widescale deployment of diffusion models leading to speed ups
But as of right now, I still expect these models to need humans to prune the output to the gold and set up the harness right for both the novel bits, and for the boilerplate to be cohesive with the global intent.
Which is of course an amazing potential boost in productivity, but still a sigmoid flattening.
As for your second criteria that includes cost, I think we might every well see this coming soon, but it's difficult to estimate with the efficiency gains still possible.
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