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And I don't think it's absolutely ridiculous. I've looked at the analyses, I've run the numbers, I think there are things you could believe, which are reasonable to believe, that could lead you down that path. I don't think that LLMs are everything they're promised to be, but we're clearly in a time of change, with an uncertain future. There's still plenty of low-hanging fruit, and some fundamental problems with current approaches that I expect to be solved.

For me a big part of it is--I came out to Berkeley in 2016 and worked for many years on trying to avert the end of the world, and eventually came to believe that if I'm going to do something helpful, it's thru narrow channels or weird things and not via thrashing or asceticism or whatever. Like, I kind of feel like I earned playing video games now by trying much harder when things looked much more hopeful, and I 'earned' not being super optimistic about future efforts by trying and failing.

Everyone knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust.

I'm not aware of any serious effort to breed plants specifically for honey production. Considering the progress in corn yield, I'd expect there's much room for improvement in nectar volume and bloom duration.

Agastache foeniculum, a kind of mint, has a reported yield[1] of over 2,700 pounds of honey per acre. (similar energy content to ~50 bushels of corn)

Everyone knows that food is ultimately produced by plants, though we may get it at second or third hand if we eat animals or their products. But the average plant turns most of its sugar not into starch which is digestible, but into cellulose which is not, but forms its woody skeleton. The hoofed animals have dealt with this problem in their own way, by turning their bellies into vast hives of bacteria that attack cellulose, and on whose by-products they live. We have got to do the same, but outside our bodies. It may be done on chemical lines. Irvine has obtained a 95% yield of sugar from cellulose, but at a prohibitive cost. Or we may use micro-organisms, but in any case within the next century sugar and starch will be about as cheap as sawdust.

The recognition sign. This is I like your shoelaces, thanks I stole them from the president. Doesn't seem to make any sense to me in modern times. Yes, I meet certain kinds of "insiders" when I travel (tumblr usrs, lesswrongers, academics), but this is because I talk to them online and arrange these meetings in advance.

Those interested in magical work vs posers interested in make believe and dressup. This was confusing to me, because I thought all magical rituals were make believe and dress up. But I realize it's analogous to something I understand, which is discussion. Like, there's certain people in a conversation just for the excitement of being in a conversation like that, getting to use some of their technical knowledge. I think some of these people are trying to enter a community and should be welcomed, and I have not always been kind enough to them. But there is a reason for that, which is I'm trying to get something out of the conversation, something intangible and hard to explain. You could call it "insight". This is true with LessWrong stuff and academic stuff. In both cases there is potential for some "tangible" result if some insight from a conversation leads to a paper or a post, but mostly that is not the case and there's still a difference between a "real" and "fake" conversation. Steven Pinker's description of Jeffrey Epstein is a good example: "He likes schmoozing with smart and intellectual people, but he couldn’t really or had very little interest in exploring an issue. He’d wisecrack, change subjects, or get bored after a few seconds. He’s a kibitzer more than a serious intellectual." SO while LessWrong meetup groups are centered around discussion rather than ritual, the same problem the magicians have, of an intangible goal that not everyone there is actually interested in, emerges.

The mundane vs the magical. Ayn Rand wants to make industrial society seem exciting, Greer takes for granted that it isn't and people need some escape. So there's "two worlds", the mundane and the magical, and the lodge is supposed to have the feeling of being between worlds. Greer explains a lot about lodges according to this requirement. This is why the meetings are indoors (LessWrong meetups, on the other hand, are often outdoors, like in public parks). This is why they have opening and closing rituals. Interestingly, the secrecy contributes to this. I've wondered about the consequences of MIRI's imitation of the secrecy of nuclear research, but I've never heard any emotional effect like this mentioned.

The classic one is, of course, the mantle- everybody has this image of the mantle as a sort of molten magma lake that the Earth's crust is floating on. Which is a pedagogically useful thing! Because the intuitions about how liquids work- forming internal currents, hot sections rising, cool sections sinking, all that- are all dynamics native to the Earth's mantle. We mostly talk about the mantle in the context of those currents, and how they drive things like continental drift, and so we tend to have this metaphor in mind of the mantle as a big magma lake.

The catch, of course, is that the mantle is a solid, not magma. It's just that at very large scales, the distinction between solids and liquids is... squirrely.

When cornered on this, a geologist will tell you that the mantle is 'ductile'. But that's a lie of omission. Because it's not that the mantle is a metal like gold or iron, what we usually think of when we talk about ductility. You couldn't hammer mantle-matter in to horseshoes or nails on an anvil. It's just a rock, really. Peridotite. Chemically it's got a lot of metal atoms in it, which helps, but if you whack a chunk of it with a hammer you can expect about the same thing to happen as if you whacked a chunk of concrete. Really, it's just that any and every rock is made of tons and tons of microcrystal structures all bound together, and the boundaries between these microcrystals can shift under enormous pressure on very slow timescales; when the scope of your question gets big enough, those bonds become weak in a relative sense, and a rock starts to become more like a pile of gravel where the pebbles can shift and flow around one another.

The blunt fact is, on very large scales of space and of time, almost everything other than perfect crystals start to act kind of like a liquid- and a lot of those do as well. When I made a study of very old Martian craters, I got used to 'eyeballing' the age based on how much the crater had subsided, almost exactly like the ways that ripples in the surface of water gradually subside over time when you throw a rock in to a lake. Just, you know. Slower.

Average Person: Dude, you’re scum. This should be illegal

Scalpers: There is a low supply and high need for affordable housing right now. I will buy up a bunch of houses at their affordable price just to charge people my new inflated monthly price to live in them, without actually owning them. For personal profit.

that is to say, the moral intuition around prices--that if it weren’t for people willing to defect against society at large in order to enrich themselves price rises in the face of scarcity would be less severe--is also not factually wrong. it’s an intuition geared for small communities, like a lot of our moral intuitions, and so for the purposes of framing policy in large and complex economies it is insufficient on its own. but it is a reasonable intuition.

the economics perspective is to say, because this intuition is insufficient, it is not only a poor basis for framing policy (correct) but is fundamentally unreasonable and should be disregarded completely. i think this is wrong! economics often claims to be creating a purely descriptive model, sufficient for framing policy, but smuggles in prescriptive judgements, like “efficiency (for a definition of the term that would be strange to anyone who isn’t an economist) is inherently morally good,” which are often alien to or outright opposed to ordinary moral intuitions around fairness

and by not carefully distinguishing between the two, people begin to (again, not incorrectly IMO) suspect the descriptive elements of economics are being used to, or are actually being warped contrary to evidence to, advance a specific ideological agenda, typically a laissez-faire pro-business agenda. and some economists are in fact doing this, because their bailey is “economics is just a descriptive science” and their motte is “laissez-faire capitalism is a terminal, not instrumental good, which requires no substantive justification”

now, because in a complex modern economy with billions of people, we cannot avoid there being purely profit-seeking individuals who will do anything to get ahead, any system for distributing scarce goods is going to have to reckon with the fact that price controls on their own are usually ineffective (the “economics 101″ argument that price controls are always a bad idea is simply wrong, but they do have clear downsides policymakers need to be aware of). but that doesn’t mean individuals are wrong when they notice scalpers are 1) buying up a scarce good, that 2) they don’t intend to use themselves, and 3) making it much more expensive than it otherwise would be. that their reaction is resentment is perfectly reasonable! pricing scarce goods at a low value doesn’t make them more abundant, but it does make them cheaper, which matters to the people who are able to buy them in the end, and raising the price through speculation might be more “efficient” (in the sense you will get a more accurate signal on the value of ps5s or taylor swift tickets or w/e), but people who can’t afford them at the higher price, who might have lucked into a chance to buy them at the lower price, are not being fundamentally irrational to be annoyed. it’s rational self-interest! a small chance to buy a desired good is more appealing than no chance to buy a desired good because it’s priced out of your reach

and this is the point that’s always bugged me about this kind of economics 101 framing of price and distribution of scarce goods--your economics 101 guy will call the market with the scalpers in it more “efficient” in some sense. but efficient for whom? it facilitates access to the good for people with more money, to whom the marginal value of a dollar is smaller, because it prices all the people who couldn’t afford the good out of the market to acquire the good. but it’s no better at getting the good to people who want the good. it just excludes a large potential segment of the customer base. this market is more profitable for the seller, if the price of the good is variable and the seller can update their prices when they notice the existence of scalpers, and it’s better for the seller if the thing they care about is maximizing their monetary profit. it’s a more efficient system for society at large (in terms of the most number of people having their preferences satisfied) if and only if increased profit for the seller allows them to increase supply--so, a good system for game consoles, which you can build more of barring supply chain issues, but not for concert tickets, which are limited by the size of the venue you booked in advance.

moreover, the scalpers and speculators in this scenario are doing something that looks suspiciously like rent extraction, getting quite a lot of money for very little work, without actually adding value at all. we already established they’re not functionally increasing access to the good--they are in fact limiting access! in the game console scenario, the console manufacturer might eventually raise their prices, meaning the scalper can sell their inventory for less than the retail price but more than they bought it for, but if it takes that long for the scalper to move their inventory, then they probably got greedy set their price too high to begin with when the console was cheap--and as the manufacturer ramps up production, consumers can expect the price to fall further, so the speculator may have actually just screwed themselves

@tanadrin Isn't it obviously better at getting the good to the people how want the good, because they can pay more for it? There may be some distortion because different people have different amounts of money, but allocating the good to whoever happened to look at a website at a given time is also very distorting, a priori it doesn't seem like that would do any better job.

this is the standard econ 101 analysis, and i think it’s insufficient. i think ability to pay is a bad proxy for “wants it more,” because the marginal value of a dollar is wildly different at different income/wealth levels

this analysis would, IMO, make more sense in a society with a very even income distribution. but as it stands, you can effectively lock large numbers of people out of a market entirely by setting your price high enough, no matter how badly they might want the good in question--healthcare in the US is actually a pretty good example of this phenomenon at its extremes, in that it’s something that most people find extremely important (nobody wants to be sick; nobody wants to die!), but people without insurance frequently can’t afford it at any price.

The PS5 scalper isn't actually providing any value to society. They're not making the product. They're not the retailers that are buying at wholesale and selling at MSRP.

In fact: by inserting themselves into the process, they are adding friction and mistrust into a market that's already experiencing scarcity.

that is not the case with housing (apartments anyway). The housing is expensive to build and won't be built without the promise of making money back for it, either as the landlord or by selling the rights to someone who will be the landlord and expect it to eventually pay off. the apartments are not lying around only to be snapped up by evil landlords getting in the way -- landlords are in fact the customers for housing blocks and why they get made. they have to do the work of maintaining and coordinating in the building as well as all the building code compliance shit. some of them are shitty and neglect these duties but some people at every kind of job are shitty. if you think that your building would be fine without a landlord, fine, buy it! turn it into a co-op, people do that, it won't solve nearly as many problems as you think (everything costs SO much more than you think it does) but it might solve some. that doesn't mean the landlord was stealing from you it meant you could make a mutually beneficial trade.

They’re moving a PS5 from someone who wants it less to someone who wants it more, which is providing value.

In response to brazenautomaton:

I agree that the scalper is taking gains-from-trade that the creator is leaving on the ground (and the creator should do it instead). 

He's an outspoken Bayesian who believes in probabilistic reasoning and does explicit calibration tests of himself. He's incredibly good at this, producing consistently well-calibrated forecasts across multiple domains. (And he's winning!)

He even exemplifies the actual primary rationalist virtue, which is pissing people off by being contrarian on the internet.

I’m playing it again after many years, and noticing some of the new features.

But this bit of a dwarf’s personality spoke to me:

In child psychology, a paracosm is a mental construct developed by (often lonely) children and early teenagers. It is a fantasy world secluded from ours, featuring new words for common and novel phenomenon, intricate taxonomies of nations, animals etc. Emily Brontë had one. Henry Darger had one. Children tend to forget their paracosms as the Real World imposes its terms (around 13-15).

That did not happen to Elysium. Elysium was always going to be massive. Large enough to blot out our entire reality. Messianic. Transatlantic.

Elysium: the Crown of the World.

Elysium: the Real World is an embarrassing fantasy construct and Elysium is real.

Hence, Elysium survived contact with the Real World through competition. It had its genesis during the turn of the century as a high fantasy setting. With - I would say - "some interesting ideas." Back then we were over the moon about it. We wrote incessantly. Mostly spells, hundreds if not thousands of them, each exactly one page. We visited Elysium via pen-and-paper role-playing, using a proprietary system that later became Disco Elysium's Metric. "We" were a group of 5-10 highschool dropouts called The Overcoats (it was terribly cold outside and we wore thick coats), anarchists of some sort, with the motto: "Today we drink tea; tomorrow we rule the world." Unironically, we intended Elysium to be the vessel of this conquest.

After all - it was all we had. Truancy means vagrancy, unemployment, an assortment of mental illnesses. Seeing your friends go off to University to become "real people" and have things like a PC to play Baldur's Gate 2 on. The need for a paracosm did not dissipate as the Aughts rolled on - it intensified. With nowhere to go and -22 centigrade temperatures outside, we knew we had to become "artist-people" of some sort to survive. Yet it was hard to write anything in this "fallen world" as early Christians put it. The names themselves seemed compromised, a catwalk parody: London, Milan, Paris. A shudder of loathing still overtakes me as I write them. Revachol, Mirova, La Scala del Mesque - now that I could write. An implacable air hung over the states and cities. The cold light of the mind. Grand. A quality we've come to call elytical. Even basic terms for everyday machinery needed to be changed to preserve this intangible quality. Motor carriage. Graffito. Sprechgesang. (What they call rapping.) However, the version of Elysium we had then was not that. It was "Revachol, something-something, name missing, something lame." After a year or two of spell-writing the result was deemed "weak." Naive (which it was). We couldn't bin it, however - it was too big to fail. So we started replacing things: names, concepts, characters. Everything smaller and less credible than reality had to go. Circa 2002, we invented the pale. By 2005, we'd discarded medievalism, the pseudo-renaissance, and the industrial revolution, replacing it with modernity: plastic telephones, cops, communism, the international currency. (The spells, too, had to go. A term you have yet to encounter - extraphysics - pushed them out. Magic, we realized, needed to remain a complete unknown.) The world around us was getting larger and darker. To keep up, Elysium needed to be even larger and more terrifying. Moreover, the world that ends all worlds ought also be more beautiful than reality. More extreme. We were anarchists, after all - growing into hardboiled Marxist-Leninists on empty stomachs. The alternative need not only to outgrow, but also to outclass the Real World and its satanic complexes. It quickly became apparent that in order to go "further than Pärnu" (Pärnu is a tiny beach town 100 kilometres from Tallinn) we needed to outdo History.

So far we've only managed to show you a tiny, insignificant corner of it: the district of Martinaise in Revachol West, on Insulinde. I can not begin to tell you how introductory it is. ("Disco Elysium" means "I learn Elysium"). It's small. A matchbox world. It's all we had money for. Yet because of You - you angel, you legend, our comrade in arms - because of your interest in our idea, we get to see more of it. Jamrock, I hope. And then to other isolas. Thank you. We hope you enjoy the Final Cut. Robert Kurvitz, lead designer / lead writer Brighton, England December 2020

Note that ‘trade secrets’ don’t really have much in the way of legal protection; I actually really like the trade secret vs. patent distinction, where you only get socially enforced temporary control of something *if* you tell the public how it works.

(ofc implementation details matter and our current system isn’t great)

ive read about ppl getting in trouble over trade scecrets… this guy

But if the ingredients of my sauce are just a trade secret, there needs to be a person that leaked it (or you needed to have reverse engineered my sauce, which is itself a crime) for me to sue.