Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny • Hacker News Board

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#251

Post by dragonwriter » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:09 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #249

dragonwriter wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc. Sure. But sometimes, it seems like the "something wrong with our DMVs" isn't a separate problem, but a fairly deliberate effort to exploit the danger directly created by adding the functioning of the DMV as a dependency in the electoral process. [0] [0] e.g., http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/alabama-dmv-closings-draw-call-fe...

We need to hold our state legislators accountable for doing their job. They know how hard it is for some citizens to get the mandated IDs, and if they don't, they should.

> We need to hold our state legislators accountable for doing their job.

Its harder to do that when they are directly making it harder for people who tend to disagree with them to vote at all.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#252

Post by aetherson » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

wturner wrote: post #22

cushychicken wrote: post #5

Thinking democracy's success is tied to economic growth is a pretty dim worldview. I hope he's wrong about that.

"Economic growth" can exist on a computer screen completely decoupled from the "real world" and independent of a strong middle class. IMHO An economically strong middle class is needed to maintain social order. This mitigates the public from hunting and and killing the rich and keeps the public from displacing their social frustrations on to each other and creating riots. Generally its a better existence for everyone…

Historically speaking, I don't feel like the basic way that society fails is by "hunting and killing the rich." I mean, you can MAYBE gloss the communist revolutions of the early 20th Century that way. What else?

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#253

Post by cftm » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:16 PM UTC

thpalmear wrote: post #4

It's all about real AI today (not based on words and rules - lookup CTM - the real bots have this and its based on vector space). Get the companies and groups that are making very small breakthroughs in this area. The days of regurgitated cut-n-pasted text entry boxes and js (geocities, friendster, myspace, facebook) are over. Time for the new Googles of the world that will solve things bigger than SpaceX like extend…

You do realize that we're still dealing with the world of models that need be trained. Models are only as good as the data that is given to them, and data is only as good as those who collect it. Neural Networks aren't even close to real AI, they're black-box models - believe them blindly and catastrophe will follow. An excellent example I recently read pertains to a hospital attempting to use a neural network in determining whether to send pnemonia patients home or have them stay in hospital for treatment. The model told them to send asthmatic patients home. Why you may ask? Well, asthmatic patients were always triaged to the ICU, thus the results told the hospital to send this group home. We don't even understand cognition in the human brain, how can we expect to stumble upon it with digital systems?

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#254

Post by prodigal_erik » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:18 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #233

Idontagree wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not impossible? In today's world finding your full name and address is incredibly easy. Yes, finding which precinct you vote in isn't as easy, but I don't understand why the system is such that having a government issued I.D. is so difficult to obtain. If that's really stopping people from voting, then there's something wrong with our DMVs, etc.

> In today's world finding your full name and address is incredibly easy. Yes, finding which precinct you vote in isn't as easy That's fairly easy, too, since there is usually a direct mapping between addresses and precincts. But to cast a fraudulent vote it takes more than doing that, it takes finding that information and using it to vote before the legitimate voter does -- and to do it undetected requires the legit…

That's only a problem when a legitimate voter exists (edit: and hasn't died, as Chicago is notorious for). If we never require verifiable ID, how do we limit fraud in registration?

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#255

Post by feelix » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:21 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #120

feelix wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it odd that you'd criticize Sam Altman in this way then go on to call Steve Jobs a "true visionary". I see Jobs as being more a managerial type that managed to get a few things very right. He wasn't able to dive deep into technical things and grok them as you said. I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming…

> I have read comments on hacker news from people that worked directly under him, talking about how he forbid using object orientation in programming. Steve Jobs talked incessantly about object-oriented programming after he left Apple, and built an entire company (NeXT) and operating system (NeXTStep) using a new object-oriented programming language (Objective-C). He didn't write the code himself but he funded and le…

This was probably before NeXT

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#256

Post by thedaniel » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:22 PM UTC

wyldfire wrote: post #137

jonnathanson wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's completely wacky, but if you've got a few mil to drop on wacky ideas, it starts to seem a bit less wacky in the grand scheme of things. It's basically a wager: "There's a small, but perhaps nonzero chance I'm living in a simulation. I've got the throwaway cash to fund an escape attempt. This investment has a massive chance of being completely wasted, even if this is a simulation. But if there is even a tiny chan…

What would it even mean to 'escape' a simulation? In my mind I'm imagining when I write code to model a real process and even at some super high-fidelity simulation I can't imagine an 'escape'. Maybe if the simulation were so self-aware it could conduct local privilege-escalation attacks and replicate itself like a worm/virus? EDIT: aside -- "Microcosmic God" [1] was a great short story along these lines [1] https://…

Permutation City has some really interesting brain candy about a simulated reality affecting its enclosing reality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#257

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:23 PM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #240

agumonkey wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He said people, not the medias.

Who do you think the media's audience is? Perhaps he should have said "most people" instead of what he did say.

I was half kidding. But sometimes all you care about is media validation, not what people actually think. You have your face in the press and get broadcast and that's it.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#258

Post by R_haterade » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:36 PM UTC

zardo wrote: post #167

Artoemius wrote: post #13

> two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation I'm very curious who these two billionaires are and what exactly are they planning to do regarding this likely hopeless project.

There's no way out. It's turtles all the way down.

Impossible. That would cause a stack overflow.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#259

Post by sulam » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 9:54 PM UTC

Idontagree wrote: post #190

sulam wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could also say that laws that are aimed at reducing voter fraud (from zero) are a smokescreen for a favored candidate/party, because they tend to reduce voting among younger people (less likely to vote in a place that matches their home address) and the poor (less likely to have various types of identification, most importantly a driver's license). There are also people trying to pass laws to reduce the number of…

How do you get from reducing voter fraud to it being a bad thing for elections. If the problem is that some basic form of government I.D. is hard to come by then fix that, not make it so anyone can walk in and vote. The other stuff about making polling places close early and stuff, I agree, is riduculous, but I don't see how requiring proper identification is a bad thing.

"Fraud is bad" is a pretty simple formulation that we all can agree on. Here's another one: "disenfranchising people is bad". Voter ID laws are _known_ to disenfranchise people who should legally be able to vote at a rate that is so far beyond the rate of voting fraud that it's clear what the actual intent is. This effect is precisely the point of such laws. They are not trying to combat voter fraud, because there is essentially no voter fraud. If voter ID laws did not disproportionately disenfranchise the young and the poor, they wouldn't exist.

Re: Sam Altman’s Manifest Destiny

#260

Post by veddox » Mon, Oct 03, 2016, 10:02 PM UTC

Denzel wrote: post #58

I've been trying to put my finger on what bothers me about Sam Altman ever since he was named President of YC in 2014. Now I know. It's less to do with him; more to do with this narrative of Sam Altman as some visionary, world-saving, future-builder. The story just doesn't fit the character. There's no comparison between him and true visionaries like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, etc. Unlike Sam, these guys can…

> I have yet to see him dive deep into any of the frontiers he's focused upon: AI, energy, biotech, etc.

I do admit I am still very skeptical about his views on AI. I am not an expert on that particular subject, but as a student of biology my understanding is that we are still a very long way away from truly understanding how "intelligence" works...