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E Pur Si Muove

blog.samaltman.com

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Re: E Pur Si Muove

#741

Post by TeMPOraL »

ihm wrote: post #699
TeMPOraL wrote: post #667

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There could be, but this is exactly why politics is toxic. People start to bicker about who gets what piece of a pie before it's even baked, and they're willing to kill each other and destroy the oven over that, even though without that pie, everyone will starve.

But it's clear who will have access to these technologies once they exist -- those who can pay the most. Access to such technologies will probably also give the user better economic outcomes, so there's a very legitimate fear that such technologies will significantly widen the already wide chasm separating rich from poor. The kind of argument you're making only stands to benefit those who will get access to these tec…

I'm not rich and yet I'm making the argument, because it seems to me that a) life-improving inventions that can scale eventually scale to everyone, even if initially they were limited to the well-off, and b) (and this may be controversial) all in all, still I find it strictly better to have a part of the population with access to life extension than nobody with access to it.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#742

Post by ghostcluster »

te_chris wrote: post #720
jochung wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firing people for providing criticism of a company's diversity police, while citing science, and letting your friends in media drag the plaintiff through the mud. Cancelling events and boycotting sponsors because their speaker line up isn't sufficiently in line with imaginary industry demographics. Or even because a blind selection process, the thing people say they want, ends up selecting a wrongthinker. Bullying co…

'Citing science'. I can think of a few other groups throughout history who have said awful things and backed it up with 'science'.

Yeah! Like Stanford Medical School in 2017. http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#743

Post by erik_seaberg »

CrystalGamma wrote: post #701
alien_at_work wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But can't you see the difference here? There is no argument that dumping mercury in a river is good for society, the environment or anything else. It's only "good" for this companies profits and even the real value there is a question given the impact on most people working there. But extending human life? Maybe it will be bad. Maybe people will keep having children at the same rate and with no one dying anymore the…

On the other hand, people not only drive, but also oppose progress; as a smarter than me person (don't remember who it was) said: Science advances one funeral at a time (it's basically like evolution). If people stop dying (barring accidents), we'll basically stop advancing as well.

Aging eventually impairs the brain. If life extension is possible, it will have to protect pretty much all your organs from aging, and why would the brain be excluded?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#744

Post by ghostcluster »

beachy wrote: post #364
Diederich wrote: post #339

Shortly prior to the recent US presidential election, I worked next to a nice, smart young man from California who went to a well-known progressive university in the bay area. Politics was very rarely discussed at work, but in the weeks before the election, there was some cross talk in the isles. He trusted me enough to message me privately that he was planning to vote for Trump. At that time, I was quite anxious abo…

Leaning in from outside the US, the path forward is obvious. "Progressives" should embrace guns and reject abortion. That would make them palatable to these mysterious deplorables that seem to hold sway over the US political system, giving them access to the halls of power. Then said progressives, having kept their powder dry, could expend it on what really matters - convincing the deplorables that science is a thing…

Are you kidding? Progressives openly reject science when it doesn't fit their ideology. We saw that with the response to Damore.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#745

Post by erik_seaberg »

ghshephard wrote: post #583
mundo wrote: post #577

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a reasonable point in the abstract, but it doesn't account for the current reality in which "Look, I found a heretic" affords such outsized rewards in karma (or social cachet, or the personal satisfaction of having taken down a baddie, or whatever you want to call it). Fifty years ago, you could say women are too dumb to program computers and still keep your job and be invited to dinner parties, and now you w…

Nitpicking here, but your example was somewhat ironic, as 50 years ago, Computer were predominantly programmed by women [1] , so the heretical idea would have been to say that men should be programming computers. [1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi...

"Programmer" was a data entry job that we automated away. They were basically compiling flowcharts that were written by "systems analysts" doing the work we would call programming.

It's like an "EPROM programmer", which is a tool to make the hardware run the software.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#746

Post by mephitix »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #676
mephitix wrote: post #610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, whatever points this article had were completely marred by terrible examples. Saying it's easier to talk about things in China vs US. I've been to China and you can get thrown in jail for saying the type of things we say re. our political environment. My friends there have to speak in whispers in public while people in SF have no problem raging about our politicians. And saying we should "allow people to say di…

> I've been to China and you can get thrown in jail for saying the type of things we say re. our political environment. It's jail vs sacking; different aspects of the same reaction.

Huh? In SF I can walk down the street or go into a restaurant and hear people saying how bad Trump is. In China if someone hears you, they will report you and you will be taken in. How in the world is this the same reaction?

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#747

Post by tsjackson »

jerf wrote: post #723
tsjackson wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main thrust of the argument seems to be that we should do our best to stop censorship. I'm arguing that we probably shouldn't. Our society is not really equipped to handle the free exchange of ideas at this point.

Let me be blunt: I don't trust you enough to make that decision. Let me be even more blunt: I suspect what you really mean is simply that people who disagree with you should be shut up. Let me be a bit philosophical: Unless you are so arrogant as to believe that you are right about everything right now , the set of people you believe should shut up includes both your future and past self. Perhaps you should accord to…

There is nothing in my statement that suggests that every viewpoint that disagrees with my own should be censored. What I'm arguing is that the world has gotten a WHOLE lot more complex when it comes to mapping peoples' understanding of the world. The signal to noise ratio has turned upside down, and society as a whole has become more volatile as a result. We have to take the threats of this new reality very seriously and avoid broad generalizations.

I think that we can collectively come to a reasonable agreement about what should and should not pass as discourse vs. plain trollery. If someone is parroting "facts" about Barack Obama's secret Kenyan birth and closed door Muslim religion, all of which have been refuted, and cannot offer a standard of evidence that would be sufficient to change their mind, they aren't engaging in a debate, they are simply spreading a lie. That lie, and many others like it, have recently shown the ability to propagate propelled solely by regular repetition. Is censorship the only way to provide a pattern interrupt? I don't really know, but I do know that it is TERRIBLE for a democratic and free society to have huge portions of the population very certain about opinions that are totally, demonstrable false, not to mention that these same opinions also incline these people to be less tolerant, less trusting, and more aggressive. I don't think we should rule out some level of censorship, at least at the interpersonal level, for thoroughly refuted ideas. I'm not saying we should have government intervention, I'm just arguing that you should have every right to tell your angry, misinformed uncle to stop spreading lies at the dinner table.

On a personal level, my own standard is that you earn the right to have a discourse by being willing to let go of your viewpoint if it's refuted, in fact that's part of why you are entering into a conversation - to learn what you are wrong about. Strong beliefs, lightly held. The right to speak comes with a responsibility to engage honestly.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#748

Post by ghostcluster »

tomtheelder wrote: post #441
Houshalter wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. That's probably why it got so much attention. The original had a bunch of links and graphs and plots. But the version most people read was published by some newspaper that stripped all that stuff out (and titled it an "anti-diversity screed" just to show how unbiased they were.) >they should "respect all points of view" (no matter how…

> Damore did make a scientific case for his claims and referenced a bunch of studies. Ehhh. Among my friends/coworkers one of the biggest objections was how dicey a lot of the referenced research was, and how much he was bending or extending conclusions to fit his narrative. At the very best his essay was awful science, but to me it felt more like a half-hearted attempt to cherrypick studies that sort of reinforced h…

The reason the Damore stuff is so insane is because the science he cited is abundant and well replicated over decades!

Look at this piece from Stanford Medical School in the spring! http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2017spring/how-mens-and-womens-b...

Or here, from 2013: http://atavisionary.com/study-index/intelligence-psychometri...

There is an abundance of highly cited research that backs up what Damore carefully stated in his essay.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#749

Post by Diederich »

jacquesm wrote: post #660
Diederich wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> are you saying this person voted for Trump to "own the libs"? No, that's not what I said nor is it what I implied. He voted for Trump because, among other reasons, he thought Mrs. Clinton was a terrible candidate and would make a terrible president, and he personally weighed that more heavily than what he knew of Trumps disadvantages. I don't agree with that assessment, but it is reasonable.

Besides how you feel about it, how does your friend feel about it? Have his expectations been met?

I believe that he feels like he made a mistake.

Re: E Pur Si Muove

#750

Post by rhapsodic »

btilly wrote: post #727
rhapsodic wrote: post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While it is true that the RW statement doesn't imply that all Muslims are terrorists, it does imply that it is ok to ban ALL Muslims if some are terrorists. The liberal position is that this is NOT ok; we feel that the cost of blocking innocent people from entering the country is not worth the cost of allowing some possible terrorists in. I'm about to speak one of the "heresies" that sama referred to in the third pa…

This one is a factual question which should be discussed openly. Shutting down the conversation doesn't change opinions, it just hardens them, drives them underground, and makes it clear that we do not tolerate open debate. That said, the majority of studies that I have seen disagree with your calculation. http://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-ef... is typical. Even low skilled immigrants have a s…

>That said, the majority of studies that I have seen disagree with your calculation. http://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2016/1/27/the-ef.... is typical. Even low skilled immigrants have a small but net positive effect on the net wealth of US citizens.

I understand that reducing productivity costs will increase productivity, so unlimited immigration would make GDP go up. (And GDP does not factor in the costs of supporting increased numbers of unemployed people.) But this, from the study, strikes me as pure hand-waving:

>Moreover, immigrants are often imperfect substitutes for native-born workers in U.S. labor markets. That means they do not compete for the same jobs and put minimal downward pressure on natives’ wages.

For the statement "they do not compete for the same jobs" to be even partially true, you would have to show me at least one job in the US that only immigrants do, and no natives do. It certainly would not be construction, or landscaping, or custodial work.

A flood of low-skilled, low-educated immigrants would benefit people like me, who they do not compete with for jobs, because it would make the services they provide cheaper for me.

But as you acknowledged, it does hurt the people whom they DO compete with, and I would argue that extends beyond blacks and teenagers, although that alone is enough for me.

Roughly half of the working population in the US has an IQ of 100 or below. These are the people upon whose well-being, I, personally, place a far higher priority than similar people who are currently not US citizens. That is what my position is premised upon. I am willing to forgo the extra GDP and cheaper lawncare so that their lives might be a little less difficult than they currently are.

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