I don't think he meant "show the actual data," I think he meant "what leaked? My name, address, phone number, email, medical records, payment history, bank account number?"
We get a "your private data is now public" email, but knowing exactly what data turns that from a depressing statement on how much corporations value their customers' privacy into something actionable.
Yes, I meant the actual data so you know what leaked. There is a difference between leaking a password 12345678 and leaking a password that was reused on a different site. There is a difference between leaking your actual birthday and leaking 01/01/1900. There is a difference between leaking a fake address, your previous address, and your current address.
Some theft is efficient. If a hypothetical thief grabs a few bills from an unattended wallet, and the wallet's owner wasn't counting on having a specific amount of money available soon after, the amount lost by the victim is roughly equal to the amount gained by the thief.
Stealing copper from power lines and transformers is among the least-efficient kinds theft; it's hard to do worse without shooting a wealthy philanthropist couple to steal a wallet and a pearl necklace. I have seen a term suggested--the "rapacity index"--for the ratio of value gained by the thief, to value lost by the victim. I think it makes sense to take a crime's rapacity index into consideration during sentencing.
That ignores higher order effects--how theft changes primary behavior. In your example, fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors. Your rapacity index makes little sense: by your logic, corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction. And given the deterrent function of sentencing, the more relevant figure is the aggregate effect of a particular class of theft, not an individual instance of theft.
> fear of pick pocketing may reduce the degree to which people carry around and spend money with vendors.
Yes, that's why I specified an unattended wallet. I agree that direct monetary loss is not the total harm to the victim.
> corruption has a low rapacity index, since the state has a lot of money compared to the amount of the transaction.
That's not the calculation I suggested. Corruption isn't always the same as theft--and, if it were decided so, the calculation for corruption would be the money absconded with by the taker, divided by the money lost by the victim. In many cases of corruption, as in power line theft, the victim is diffuse; it's usually harder to calculate exact numbers, but this kind of calculation is done in court all the time.
You're correct that, generally speaking, policy debates should not appear one-sided (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...). We should put very little prior weight on the hypothesis that one side is actual cartoon villains, from a children's TV show, with the simple goal of looting the system and no concern for how much of the future they destroy while doing so.
However, to be effective reasoners, we can't assign that hypothesis 0 prior probability; and once sufficient evidence has come in, our posterior distribution must shift.
I don't think there's any reasonable case for shutting down an early warning system which costs around the price of the new white house thunderdome every decade, and instead waiting to find out AMOC has collapsed when Scotland is hemmed in by year-round ocean ice and agriculture is impossible in Western Europe.
Stranded assets alone, in the latter case, will easily run to hundreds of billions. Knowing when to change crop profiles, reinsuance schedules, etc., would save much more.
Ted Chiang is a great SF author, but it's bizarre how much foggier and more obfuscated his thoughts about thinking machines got, once those machines became real. Same with several other SF authors.
I'm willing to buy the idea that most fund managers have the lattitude to give SpaceX the standard seasoning period, instead of buying in right when they hit the index. Which funds will do that? If it's all or most of them, that'd be nice.
I don't know what to tell you guys because I am not a fund manager. If any of you are, then I'll go with what you're saying. But I do know how large organizations work first hand, and I'm sure lots of us do on here.
Who exactly do you think wants to stick their neck out and say, "I work for a passive index fund. The whole premise of our career is that we don't try to play the market. But just this one time, I'm going to play the market anyway, and I'm going to use your money to do it."
Sorry, not happening. If you don't like the fact that this stuff is going to be included in the index, then your only option is to stop buying the index. Of course they think they would think they're right. Everyone doing active investing always, every time, thinks they're right. They will buy the index the way they always do, and then they will say, "If you don't like it, take it up with the index."
Watch the scene in Big Short at the bond rating agency for an indication of what's really going on here, is my guess.
Yeah, it's a 24 year old company that controls space Internet and is the most competent company building data centers. If a passive index doesn't include it they are taking a much stronger opinion on the stock than if they do include it.
If it's a poorly run fraudulent company the regulators and the banks are at fault for letting it go public not the indicies
When "guess with some magic" can solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to, it seems fair to ask whether it's approaching risky levels of intelligence.
I mean we've been using technology to solve long-standing problems in mathematics that no human had been able to do for years. Is Deep Blue sentient because it can beat any human at chess?
Deep Blue's strength was leveraging massive compute to execute a task-specific, human-written algorithm. The problems which LLMs are tackling don't elude mathematicians because they require too much number-crunching, but because they demand creative problem solving. The latter seems more profound, even if it doesn't imply sentience.
Not to get too reductive - but LLMs are essentially performing massive number-crunching at a textual representation level. If you've ever played around with early NLP models, they can give you some astounding results for aspects like sentiment analysis that would seem like creative problem solving to someone in 1950. You could say the same for using a neural network to perform things like object recognition.
That's not removing the amazing ability of LLMs and the scale of this accomplishment, don't get me wrong - it's incredibly impressive that specialised models are now able to walk down pathways for creative problem solving - but I don't think that suggests a sentience or profoundness - rather it's just number-crunching at a astronomically larger scale.
This is not a contradiction; it's an augmentation. As an operations guy, I can tell you that well-constructed automation to reduce the amount of manual checking a human has to do almost always increases the quality of the overall process's output.
As a software developer, you must never subject your team mates to a PR that you yourself believe to be low quality. The point of code review by others is to catch things that you missed.
There are multiple lines of defense for quality. Yes, automation can and should be one of them, but your own self-review always has to come before review by your team mates.
And for a dev, that's essential professional ethics, and good personal pride as a craftsman.
However, from an operations perspective, a dev is a piece of the qa pipeline with a nonzero error rate, and an optimal throughput rate, above which that error rate rises dramatically.
As a dev, you'll never merge a bad PR; in ops, we want to help you with that goal, and also have plans for what happens when it fails.
Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends; only the tradeoffs.
You could have a deontological commitment to never giving a sucker an even break.
You could have a virtue ethicist who considers the Joker a paragon--I think some of them are in politics.
Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains.
Consequentialism is ceteris paribus correct; but ceteris is often not paribus for humans, so pure consequentialism has a lot of footguns in it.
> Neither Deontology, Virtue Ethics, nor Consequentialism describe the ends
If you insist on just looking at the general, abstract terms as categories, instead of the actual ethical systems that are usually described as falling into those categories, I suppose that's true. But I don't see why it's relevant. In order to actually make ethical choices in the real world, you have to specify ends--your ethical choices have to bottom out at some point in saying that some things are good and some things are bad, just because. That's true whether you think you're doing Deontology, Virtue Ethics, Consequentialism, or what have you.
> Consequentialism just says that deontology is too myopic, and locally following the correct rules is sometimes less good than maximizing long-term gains.
And in making such claims, Consequentialism is both misdescribing Deontology and avoiding the actual issue.
First, there is nothing that restricts Deontology to "locally following correct rules". More generally, there is nothing that forbids Deontology from looking at consequences! Indeed, Deontology often requires you to look at consequences, since actions that might be innocuous taken in isolation can have serious ethical implications when put in context.
Second, when you say "maximizing long-term gains", what counts as "long-term" and what counts as "gains"? Any answer to such questions is going to bottom out, as I said, in claims that some things are good, and some things are bad, just because. There is no way to avoid that. But Consequentialism bills itself as avoiding that--as avoiding "just following rules" and looking at things rationally instead. And it doesn't and can't deliver on that promise. It just obfuscates what it's actually doing.
If you want to talk about ends, you're talking Axiology, not strictly Ethics.
By "ceteris paribus correct," I mean that if you were programming a superintelligent AI--and you knew exactly what you were doing, rather than structuring a learning schedule and feeding that a corpus--you would want a consequentialist.
Deontology and Virtue Ethics are patches for flaws in human morality. For example, the deontological rule "never kill the leader of the group and take over, even for the good of the group" is there because power is instrumentally useful enough that evolved social animals will deceive themselves about why they want power, so naive consequentialism doesn't work for them.
> If you want to talk about ends, you're talking Axiology, not strictly Ethics.
Even if I accept this quibbling over definitions, I don't see how it's relevant. We're talking about how to actually make choices. That's ethics.
> if you were programming a superintelligent AI--and you knew exactly what you were doing, rather than structuring a learning schedule and feeding that a corpus--you would want a consequentialist.
That if that you're glossing over is actually impossible, so I don't see how this is relevant either.
> Deontology and Virtue Ethics are patches for flaws in human morality.
No, they're recognitions of the fact that it's impossible for any finite being to compute and judge all of the consequences in real time, even if we assume there is some universally agreed on system for judging the consequences, which there isn't.
> power is instrumentally useful enough that evolved social animals will deceive themselves about why they want power, so naive consequentialism doesn't work for them.
Power is instrumentally useful for a superintelligent AI too, so "naive consequentialism" doesn't work for it either, at least not if you want us humans to survive in a world that has it.
If power is so cheap mid-day, why don't european buildings have sufficient air conditioning not to kill the elderly during heat waves? The laws restricting AC all have power conservation as their rationale.
Do old people not have air conditioning because the law prohibits it? I thought it was more that air conditioners are expensive, old people in Europe are often somewhat poor and on fixed incomes, and a lot of historically temperate places in Europe have no tradition of AC.
Certainly a lot of the young wealthy people I know in Europe have AC, even outside of the really hot places.
The death toll per heat wave can easily hit 5 figures in just france. A hybrid portable-minisplit that will cool a 100m^2 apartment is under a thousand euros, and draw just under a Mwh per year. A portable to cool one small bedroom is much less power-efficient, but can often be found between 200 and 300.
That's not cheap, per se, but funerals aren't much less expensive in Europe than in America.
Many EU countries allow some limited cooling in public buildings, but I still sweat in most grocery stores, malls, libraries, museums, etc. during hot weather--they just don't take air conditioning to a comfortable temperature as worth the power bill, the way America does.
Mini-splits are more complicated than window ACs, they allow the indoor and outdoor components to be separated.
Most European homes don't have the kind of window that you could stick an AC in, the windows hinge rather than sliding up and down. You can get one of those floor units with a hose for probably ~€300 though.
It's cultural latency. Europe is the faster warming continent and the buildings were perfectly fit for purpose 30 years ago. Old people lived their entire lives without AC and plainly dislike it.
We get a "your private data is now public" email, but knowing exactly what data turns that from a depressing statement on how much corporations value their customers' privacy into something actionable.
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