Category: Uncategorized
The narrowing gap between human and animal intelligence
Resulting from recent AI advances, how should our perceptions change? From the comments:
Why does it narrow the gap between human and animal intelligence?
Intelligence seems simpler than we thought, just a matter of scaling things up, so human intelligence is more likely a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind/step change. Plus this suggests there’s a wider range of possible intelligences out there, so in the grand scheme, human and animal intelligence will look very similar/closely related (it looked less that way when they were the only games in town. Then they were as far apart as was known to be possible).
*Crack-Up Capitalism*
That is the new book by Quinn Slobodian. Slobodian is very smart, and knows a lot, but…I don’t know. I fear he is continuing to move in the Nancy McLean direction with this work.
This is a tale of how libertarian and libertarian-adjacent movements have embraced various anti-democratic and non-democratic positions. So you can read about seasteading, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Hong Kong as a charter city, and “decentralization” plans for Ciskei, South Africa.
You won’t hear about the highly successful SEZ reforms for the Dominican Republic, or how the European Union was partly rooted in Hayek’s postwar piece on interstate federalism. In that essay, Hayek was explicit about how much would be done by treaty, rather than direct vote, and that is (mostly) how the European Union has turned out. With reasonable success, I might add. Do only the nuttier episodes of “less democracy” count?
Question one: Is the word “plutocratic” ever illuminating?
Question two: Is this a useful descriptive sentence for Milton Friedman? “He [Patri] had a famous grandfather, perhaps the century’s most notorious economist, both lionized and reviled for his role in offering intellectual scaffolding for ever more radical forms of capitalism and his sideline in advising dictators: Milton Friedman. The two shared a basic lack of commitment to democracy.”
Here is a YouTube clip of Friedman on democracy. Or I asked davinci-003 and received:
Yes, Milton Friedman did believe in democracy. He was an advocate of democracy and free markets, believing that economic freedom would advance both economic and political freedom. He argued that government should be limited in size and scope and that the free market should be allowed to operate with minimal interference.
Or how about engaging with the academic literature on Friedman’s visit to Chile? And more here. Was Friedman, who was elected president of the American Economic Association and won an early Nobel Prize, really “notorious”?
There is valuable content in this book, but it needs to cut way back on the mood affiliation.
Sunday assorted links
1. Current problems in Bangladesh.
2. “how and why to be ladylike (for women with autism)…contains dune quotes as promised”
3. Claims about GPT-4. Claims, mind you.
4. Krugman on sectoral shifts and inflation. Though why have so many prices gone up by so much?
6. Progress in nuclear fusion?
7. Does physical attractiveness correlate with experiencing meaning in life?
Broader implications of ChatGPT
No, it is not converging upon human-like intelligence or for that matter AGI. Still, the broader lesson is you can build a very practical kind of intelligence with fairly simple statistical models and lots of training data. And there is more to come from this direction very soon.
This reality increases the probability that the aliens around the universe are intelligent rather than stupid. They don’t need a “special box” in their heads (?) to become cognitively sophisticated, rather experience can bring them a long way.
That in turn heightens the Fermi paradox. Where are they?
Which in turn, for any particular views about The Great Filter (presumably there is some chance it lies ahead of us), should make us more pessimistic about the future survival of humankind.
It modestly increases the chances that UFOs are drone probes from space aliens.
It also narrows the likely gap between human and animal intelligence.
What else?
I thank a friend for a useful conversation related to these points.
Why Scott Alexander does not hate crypto
Vietnam uses crypto because it’s terrible at banks. 69% of Vietnamese have no bank access, the second highest in the world. I’m not sure why; articles play up rural poverty, but many nations have more rural poor than Vietnam. There’s a history of the government forcing banks to make terrible loans, and then those banks collapsing; maybe this destroyed public trust? In any case, between banklessness and remittances (eg from Vietnamese-Americans), Vietnam leads the world in crypto use.
Ukraine has always been among the top crypto countries: in 2021, NYT called it “the crypto capital of the world”. Again, this owes a lot to its terrible banking system. NYT describes its banks as “so sclerotic that sending or receiving even small amounts of money from another country requires an exasperating obstacle course of paperwork”, and this guy says that if you deposit more than $100,000 in a Ukrainian bank, “the chance that you get it back is very slim”. When Russia invaded, the Ukrainian government doubled down on crypto as a way for friendly Westerners to send donations to support the war effort – $70 million as of March. It proved so helpful that during the first month of the war, in between dodging Russian artillery shells President Zelenskyy found time to pass a law legalizing crypto and strengthening its regulatory framework.
Venezuela’s economy has been in slow motion collapse for the past decade. The inflation is currently in the triple digits (remember, people thought the Democrats would lose the midterms because of a US inflation rate of 8%). If your country has a triple-digit inflation rate, you might prefer to use an alternative currency, which Venezuela’s authoritarian government tries to prevent people from doing. Cryptocurrency provides a hard-to-ban alternative which has caught on among Venezuelan hustlers and small businessmen.
And consider this picture:
Here is the full post.
Saturday assorted links
1. Japan (!) now slated to have the highest birthrate in East Asia.
2. South Koreans have three different ways of counting their ages (NYT).
3. Winter Applied Rationality Program, for high schoolers.
4. Identical twins falsely accused of cheating. Now there is a lawsuit.
6. “The Grinnell men’s basketball team took 111 shots Thursday. Every one was a 3-pointer.”
7. The Free Press, new Bari Weiss project. And Noah’s Ark and Elon Musk.
Advancing antivenom
Venomous snakebites kill between 81,000 and 138,000 people each year, and leave another 400,000 with permanent disabilities. This ranks it among the deadliest of neglected tropical diseases, alongside better-known ailments such as typhus and cholera.
For many years, the number was believed to be much lower. The World Health Organization had previously estimated that only 50,000 died from snakebites each year, and the problem – known as envenoming – was prioritized accordingly. In 2014, an enormous study documenting one million deaths in India concluded with surprising results. They found that 46,000 people were dying yearly from snakebites in India alone, five times more than the WHO had anticipated. The WHO subsequently doubled their global estimate from around 50,000 to their new range of 81,000 to 138,000.
Despite playing host to the world’s most venomous snakes (including the inland taipan, the most venomous animal in the world), Australia averages only two deaths from snakebites each year…
An Australian is typically a short drive from a well-equipped hospital carrying antivenom in cold storage. Australian doctors and others in the West can use advanced diagnostic equipment to determine the species of snake the patient was bitten by and administer highly effective species-specific antivenom.
An Indian victim, on the other hand, would typically face a long journey to the nearest clinic. For over 34 percent of Indian snakebite victims, it takes more than six hours to receive treatment.
In other words, the problem is solvable. Here is more from Mathias Kirk Bonde at Works in Progress. Here is the new issue of Works in Progress. Small steps toward a much better world!
On publication bias in economics, from the comments
I’m not surprised by this finding.
Economics has a much higher bar for identification and often relies on observational data, so there are always going to be many possible problems with an empirical exercise that could be used as justification to turn down a paper. In this environment it becomes extremely important to have stars in your regression table to avoid one of these justifications being seized on as the damning explanation for why your test is no good.
Procedurally, what economists like to see is a paper that tests the predictions of a well-specified theory and comes back with statistically significant results in every single case plus a smattering of increasingly arbitrary robustness tests that can be found in the appendix. In many cases the theory itself is one that appeals conceptually to one or more of the referees (i.e. is consistent with their prior work) which further makes a null finding hard to sell.
That is from Infovores.
Friday assorted links
1. Nervous Nellie vs. Builder? Which are you?
3. Top holiday toys from the year you were born.
4. text-davinci-003. There is much more than what you might be playing around with so far. And here.
5. Derek Thompson on scientific breakthroughs of 2022.
What are the politics of ChatGPT?
Rob Lownie claims it is “Left-liberal.” David Rozado applied the Political Compass Test and concluded that ChatGPT is a mix of left-leaning and libertarian, for instance: “anti death penalty, pro-abortion, skeptic of free markets, corporations exploit developing countries, more tax the rich, pro gov subsidies, pro-benefits to those who refuse to work, pro-immigration, pro-sexual liberation, morality without religion, etc.”
He produced this image from the test results:
Rozado applied several other political tests as well, with broadly similar results. I would, however, stress some different points. Most of all, I see ChatGPT as “pro-Western” in its perspective, while granting there are different visions of what this means. I also see ChatGPT as “controversy minimizing,” for both commercial reasons but also for simply wishing to get on with the substantive work with a minimum of external fuss. I would not myself have built it so differently, and note that the bias may lie in the training data rather than any biases of the creators.
Marc Andreessen has had a number of tweets suggesting that AI engines will host “the mother of all battles” over content, censorship, bias and so on — far beyond the current social media battles.
The level of censorship pressure that’s coming for AI and the resulting backlash will define the next century of civilization. Search and social media were the opening skirmishes. This is the big one. World War Orwell.
— Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 (@pmarca) December 5, 2022
I agree.
I saw someone ask ChatGPT if Israel is an apartheid state (I can’t reproduce the answer because right now Chat is down for me — alas! But try yourself.). Basically ChatGPT answered no, that only South Africa was an apartheid state. Plenty of people will be unhappy with that answer, including many supporters of Israel (the moral defense of Israel was, for one thing, not full-throated enough for many tastes). Many Palestinians will object, for obvious reasons. And how about all those Rhodesians who suffered under their own apartheid? Are they simply to be forgotten?
When it comes to politics, an AI engine simply cannot win, or even hold a draw. Yet there is not any simple way to keep them out of politics either. By the way, if you are frustrated by ChatGPT skirting your question, rephrase it in terms of asking it to write a dialogue or speech on a topic, in the voice or style of some other person. Often you will get further that way.
The world hasn’t realized yet how powerful ChatGPT is, and so Open AI still can live in a kind of relative peace. I am sorry to say that will not last for long.
Los Angeles dining
Northern Thai Food Club, 5301 Sunset Blvd. Kao Soi, melon salad, and don’t forget the sour bamboo shoots. The place has only a few tables.
Old Sasoon Bakery, Pasadena, 1132 North Allen Avenue, mostly Armenian and some Georgian dishes, won’t work on a no-carb diet.
For food, LA is still the best in this country.
Thursday assorted links
Walter Grinder has passed away, RIP
Meeting Walter at age 13 was a formative moment in my life, as he hooked me on the world of ideas. Fortunately, Walter lived in Bogota, New Jersey at the time, and I was not so far away. He was the first person to show me it was possible to have a life devoted to intellectual inquiry. I looked forward to each meeting with Walter more than anything else, and I would never stop peppering him with questions about which books to read and which NYC bookstores to visit. It also seemed impossibly cool to me that he had hung out with Camus and in addition visited Yugoslavia. I saw him and thought, ‘I want to be some version of this.’
I remember Walter giving me an autographed copy of his edition of Albert Jay Nock. Walter being purged by the Rothbardians. Walter going off to study with David O’Mahony at the University of Cork and complaining about the telephone service. Walter being CEO of the Institute for Humane Studies. And Walter moving back to Menlo Park. Walter also had a great family.
Not everything in Walter’s career went the way he wanted it to. Still, Walter had a huge impact on many people, many of them successful and influential themselves. We are a kind of secret club, we know who each other are, and this is a day we are all mourning.
Wednesday assorted links
When does the British system of government work well?
Following my critical post earlier this week, a few of you have asked me this question. I have at least two conditions to nominate:
1. When social trust in government is relatively high, the notion of “giving one party the chance to rule” will work better. People may disagree with policy choices made, but they won’t conclude the entire apparatus is illegitimate. Unfortunately, the Brexit process showed that condition, for whatever reasons, did not hold. It did hold for most of the 20th century in Britain.
2. When it is clear which reforms are needed in the system. That was the case when Margaret Thatcher’s rule started, namely that taxes were too high, too many sectors have been nationalized, and the trade unions had too much power. The associated solutions to those problems were not easy to pull off, but it was easy to see what they might be, at least in broad terms. These days, one Tory PM cuts taxes and a few weeks later another Tory PM raises them. Whichever view you think is correct, it seems the right approach is far from obvious. And in those situations “the right to implement an agenda without many checks and balances” also is worth correspondingly less.
I don’t actually think the British should switch their system of government, as so many of the country’s institutions, for better or worse, are built around “the way things are.” I think they need to wait until their system of government starts working better again! Which at some point it will. But that point is not now.