Very well could be. At this point, I’m so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what’s happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

I do really like the bait and switch intro strategy. I actually do that all the time in my own writing. I think that you could do that even harder using Hickel’s work as a source. Something like “Global poverty is down. Famines are going away. Things are going amazing. Except they aren’t,” then on to your stance about antinatalism. That might even open up an interesting epistemological argument to pivot: We ought to focus on what we know, not on these fragile measurements and stories, and what we do know is that people are born and will feel pain and pleasure.

As for the evolutionary disposition points, yeah those absolutely need more evidence before being used as strongly as I did, but my word limit for this was 1000-1250 and it’s sitting at like 1800 as is lol

Haha oh boy do I feel this one. I try so hard to keep my own essays under 2000 words, which is where I notice that people tend to read them a whole lot less. It’s really hard! I have no advice, since I’m terrible at this.

I do have a question, though. The problem I originally had writing this, was that it felt like a mixed-bag of poorly explained ideas from actual philosophers, with nothing original or convincing to say. I still feel like that’s largely the case, what do you think?

I actually think that’s totally fine, especially for an undergrad, but also in general. I also think about this in my own writing. I love a big new idea and feel pressure to come up with more, but sometimes that’s not what a topic needs. Sometimes things bear repeating with a new perspective, or a tweak, or a mix of other ideas. Sometimes, you just need to bring old ideas to a new audience, or repackage two relevant ideas from two places together, etc. All these things are worthy and necessary endeavors in human knowledge (re)production.

Some minor feedback on your rhetorical strategy: I think that you should reconsider your introduction. Accepting that kind of Stever Pinkeresque mainstream optimism doesn’t set up your argument very well, which is more thoughtful and much more willing to engage with subversive and controversial ideas than I thought it’d be from the intro. I especially didn’t like the law of diminishing returns bit: It’s not obvious at all why one should be able to apply a concept from classical economics about productivity to the human emotional experience. Those are pretty different things, and if you want to make that case by analogy, you’re going to have to set it up.

If it were me, I’d reframe the intro to be about how unquestioning optimism and a belief in a poorly defined “progress” is our society’s common narrative. Instead of appealing to diminishing returns to transition to your point about antinatalism, you could instead cite modern scholars like Jason Hickel who are (I think) very convincingly rebutting that narrative. That tees you up a little better to take that big step.

That’s really the main thing that jumped out to me. The only other thing that I’d say from my first pass is that you talk a lot about depression and the human tendency towards it. If I were reading this very closely, I would examine your sourcing on those points, and I would be extremely skeptical if your sources don’t include anthropologists, many of whom I suspect (though I don’t know) would take issue with that. It is true that it seems that we’re becoming more depressed, but going from there to arguing that it’s innate to humanity is, in my opinion, a big leap, even if you do cite some evolutionary reasons as to why it might be. It could that this line of thinking reifies hegemonic social conditions more than it says anything profound about humans.

Hope that helps!

All these always do the same thing.

Researchers reduced [the task] to producing a plausible corpus of text, and then published the not-so-shocking results that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did a good job generating plausible text.

From the OP , buried deep in the methodology :

Because GPT models cannot interpret images, questions including imaging analysis, such as those related to ultrasound, electrocardiography, x-ray, magnetic resonance, computed tomography, and positron emission tomography/computed tomography imaging, were excluded.

Yet here’s their conclusion :

The advancement from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4 marks a critical milestone in which LLMs achieved physician-level performance. These findings underscore the potential maturity of LLM technology, urging the medical community to explore its widespread applications.

It’s literally always the same. They reduce a task such that chatgpt can do it then report that it can do to in the headline, with the caveats buried way later in the text.

We need to set aside our petty differences and fight the true enemy: bloated IDEs.

This seems like a good read. Bookmarked after a skim.

I’m currently reading “How Labor Powers the Global Economy,” and after skimming the OP, this seems like exactly what HLPtGE set out to address. It’s a very, very compelling reformulation of capitalist economics and the LTV that embraces the inherent chaos of prices without hand-waving them away, like most economists of all persuasions, including Marxists, do today. Its a model that borrows a lot of techniques from statistical mechanics and other physical sciences, so much so that people have started calling the approach “econophysics.”

I don’t really agree with this. It is the answer that I think classical economics would give but I just don’t think it’s useful. For one, it ignores politics. Large corporations also have bought our government, and a few large wealth management funds like vanguard own a de facto controlling share in many public companies, oftentimes including virtually an entire industry, such that competition between them isn’t really incentived as much as financial shenanigans and other Jack Welch style shit.

Some scholars (i think I read this in Adrienne bullers value of a whale, which is basically basis for this entire comment) even argue that we’ve reached a point where it might be more useful to think of our economy as a planned economy, but planned by finance instead of a state central authority.

All that is to say: why would we expect competition to grow, as you suggest, when the current companies already won, and therefore have the power to crush competition? They’ve already dismantled so many of the antimonopoly and other regulations standing in their way. The classical economics argument treats these new better companies as just sorta rising out of the aether but in reality there’s a whole political context that is probably worth considering.

Yay democratic planning!

Me:

Markets are somehow still seen as fundamentally sound, while every planning idea is asked to answer for every previous planning idea, no matter how new it is or how much technology has changed.

You:

Or do you really want to collectivize farms like Stalin and Mao did?

That’s the thing I said!

But to answer your question: No, I do not. I’m interested in learning from the past while embracing new technologies. I’m also interested in democratic planning, not bureaucratic central planning, as Stafford Beer called Soviet style planning. I’m particularly interested in the approach of Allende’s government, and project Cybersyn, which looked very promising until an American supported military coup ousted him.

edit to add:

Your criticism is aimed at insufficient market regulation.

The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s an unfalsifiable claim. Markets are believed to “work,” but only if they’re regulated right, which apparently they aren’t now and rarely have been in all of history. This idea of markets is something Milton Friedman popularized (this entire fee.org write-up is very Friedman). If you believe markets work with the right kind of regulation as axiomatically true, then it’s impossible to disprove that, because you can always blame the wrong kind of regulations. It’s very unscientific, something Friedman himself was famously sensitive about.

I’d argue that it’s markets that have proven unworkable. Markets have failed as catastrophically as possible. They are destroying the earth, and every day that they continue doing so is another day that they show how untenable they are.

Just because previous attempts to plan have failed doesn’t mean that the concept of planning itself is impossible. Virtually every rich country right now is actively “trying” to make markets work in the face of a climate crisis, and it has proven impossible, yet markets are somehow still seen as fundamentally sound, while every planning idea is asked to answer for every previous planning idea, no matter how new it is or how much technology has changed.

We have a lot to learn about planning, especially now that we have computers, but in order to have that conversation, it’s important for us to understand what a catastrophic failure the market really is.

edit to add: Markets are also inherently undemocratic. So long as we continue to vote with our dollars on what our economy does, the rich and their corporations will always outvote us. The rich will always have corporate lawyers but normal people can’t have child care, for example.

Honestly I almost never have to deal with any of those things, because there’s always a more fundamental problem. Engineering as a discipline exists to solve problems, but most of these companies have no mechanism to sit down and articulated what problems they are trying to solve at a very fundamental level, and then really break them down and talk about them. The vast majority of architecture decisions in software get made by someone thinking something like “I want to use this new ops tool” or “well everyone uses react so that’s what I’ll use.”

My running joke is that every client has figured out a new, computationally expensive way to generate a series of forms. Most of my job is just stripping everything out. I’ve replaced so many extremely complex, multi-service deploy pipelines with 18 lines of bash, or reduced AWS budgets by one sometimes two orders of magnitude. I’ve had clients go from spending 1500/month on AWS with serverless and lambda and whatever other alphabet soup of bullshit services that make no sense to 20 fucking dollars.

It’s just mind-blowing how stupid our industry is. Everyone always thinks I’m sort of genius performance engineer for knowing bash and replacing their entire front-end react framework repo that builds to several GB with server side templating from 2011 that loads a 45kb page. Suddenly people on mobile can actually use the site! Incredible! Turns out your series of forms doesn’t need several million lines of javascript.

I don’t do this kind of work as much anymore, but up until about a year ago, it was my bread and butter…

I agree. I’ve actually written about this.

It gets solved by planning. Actual long term planning that includes the relevant stakeholders. Currently everything is run by and for VCs who only plan in terms of funding rounds and exits.

Yeah, I totally see that. I want to clarify: It’s not that I don’t think it’s useful at all. It’s that our industry has fully internalized venture capital’s value system and they’re going to use this new tool to slam on the gas as hard as they can, because that’s all we ever do. Every single software ecosystem is built around as fast as possible, everything else be damned.

Yeah, I think helping people who don’t know how to code and letting them dabble is a great use case. I fully encourage that.

I don’t think it’s actually good for generating scaffolding in terms of helping people write quality software, but I do agree with you that that’s how people are going to use it, and then the expectation is going to become that you have to do things that fast. It’s kind of mindboggling to me that anyone would look at the software industry and decide that our problem is that we don’t move fast enough. Moving too fast for speed’s own sake is already the cause of so many of our problems.

I do software consulting for a living. A lot of my practice is small organizations hiring me because their entire tech stack is a bunch of shortcuts taped together into one giant teetering monument to moving as fast as possible, and they managed to do all of that while still having to write every line of code.

In 3-4 years, I’m going to be hearing from clients about how they hired an undergrad who was really into AI to do the core of their codebase and everyone is afraid to even log into the server because the slightest breeze might collapse the entire thing.

LLM coding is going to be like every other industrial automation process in our society. We can now make a shittier thing way faster, without thinking of the consequences.

A delicious example (pun intended) of what I call a technological antisolution

Sorta… the second does some pretty thin analysis, and the refers right back to the same report, of which i am skeptical considering they were just caught bending the truth in their favor.

We need a robust and publicly accountable third party investigation. I fear we don’t have the political and institutional infrastructure to do that, and it’s going to be like how even just 50 years ago the FDA regularly was letting dangerous shit fly that they absolutely should’ve caught and that companies were straight up lying about.

Both of those links rely on the same self-reported data by Cruise… We’ll see, I suppose! Happy to be proven wrong. I live on a frozen hilly dirt road, so realistically, for me, it’s not going to happen.

As far as I know, there doesn’t exist a single shred of actual, empirical evidence that we can make self driving cars actually better than humans, outside of our faith in technological improvement. Companies used to publish their data on simulated injury rates for their internal testing, and they were way way way worse than professional human drivers, like taxi drivers, which is what Cruise is trying to replace.

I don’t want to be right. I want self-driving cars that work. It’d be personally very convenient for me, so much so that I would buy a brand new car for the first time in my life (I’m in my mid thirties) if I had actual, robust, empirical reason to believe that they work as advertised.