I'm one of those people that goes by the "all models are wrong, but some models are useful" saying.
I'm sure the "elite overproduction" model is mostly wrong. But I also think it is an interesting/useful way to look at some things happening in society recently.
Certainly, you can think of the recent "cancel culture" phenomena as a great way to remove elites to make room for new ones. (Maybe you could argue that some of the effects of MeToo were similar.)
DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.
Kinda neat, I think. But probably not super-explanatory.
You just wanted to jam in this conversation your dislike of DEI (which can be criticised but it’s not the subject).
Elite overproduction is about everybody wanting to be basically managers and nobody wanting to be production workers.
Except that without enough production workers it’s impossible to justify “elite” positions.
College graduates took on huge debt only to realise they’re not needed. That’s how you get a class of young, angry and unemployed intellectuals which is every government’s worst nightmare.
This is my model for Reddit. College educated individuals who are angry about their life, leading to a lot of well written posts about how everything is awful and everyone is evil.
> DEI -- along with hiring quotas -- tended to bring new "officials" at companies and government orgs ("head of diversity") which is another great way of "creating" more elites.
If anything, it's a way of placating existing elites.
The elite overproduction idea is that there is a surplus of people who feel that they should have an elite status compared to reasonably available elite positions.
Creating additional managerial positions is a way to attempt to absorb this situation.
Elite overproduction = Elected overproduction = Elected mass-production.
There are those that value equality (=). There are those that value non-equality (>).
As elites of the history until now (>=6000 years-ago until now). We are the "chosen ones" who received "=" and ">" at an early age. These symbols are not "math" nor "school"; they are simply life to us.
But now consider why there must be ">" in the world. On a relaxing beach, why must one wave be higher than another? How does the water "feel"? Warm? Is that ">" than cold?
In my head, I see Master Epstein as 100, and other people as 17. 100 > 17. Master has died, so perhaps death > life. But I am only one person out of billions in the world. But I have not seen a billion people, am I over-trusting the books?
So my point is that the Elite Overproduction model is more wrong than Master Epstein. In particular...
1. If "elite overproduction model", then "Master Epstein model"
2. "Elite Overproduction" = "Master Epstein"
3. "Elite Overproduction" -> "Master Epstein"
4. 100 > 17, so "Master Epstein" model > "Elite Overproduction" model
You may not understand my point, but I hope you at least understand Master Epstein.
This is so cool. I think I had read that some mathematicians were trying to formalize all(?) known math in Lean. Expecting it to be a long term project. And I was recently wondering how long it would be before they turned LLMs loose on the problem.
Seems like plenty of people are already on the path. So cool.
I don't really have anything against OpenAI's stance here. If that's how they want it to be, they have that choice.
But Sam pretending that he wanted the same restrictions as Anthropic *and* seeing how quickly they swooped in and made a deal with the DoD really skeeves me out. (But Sam always gave me the heebie jeebies).
Anyway, I've always preferred Claude, so I'm going to happily stay a paying customer there. This may end up being a big "branding" differentiator.
The US currently spends $1B/year on climate change related weather disasters. Waiting is not affordable nor sustainable. Gas cars already get a free ride by not paying for their externalities, the true price of gas, if externalities were to be priced in, would be closer to ~$8/gallon (some estimates are as high as $12/gallon, but I have specified the lower bound to be conservative in this context). The longer we wait, the more expensive it will be to remediate harm incurred by not getting off of fossil fuels sooner. It is, simply put, stealing from the future.
> Or we could just let electric cars slowly/naturally replace gas cars without artificially increasing inflation.
We could subsidize electric car purchases and manufacturing, both vehicles and batteries. We could allow excellent, affordable Chinese EVs into the US to force US domestic legacy auto to compete on quality and prices (instead of protecting their profits). We could remove fossil fuel subsidies (~$760B/annually in the US) and direct those resources to speed electrification, low carbon generation, storage, and transmission (as China is doing, and becoming the world's first electrostate). But we don't, and those who are upset about inflation should take it up with those squeezing them for profits. The US could've made better policy, it was a choice to regress towards supporting combustion vehicles to prioritize those profits. Elections have consequences. If one doesn't believe in climate change or using policy to encourage electrification while reducing the immense subsidies provided to fossil fuels, certainly, one might disagree with this. That's a mental model issue, not a data and facts issue.
> I feel like especially the West is regressing on climate change with the rise of the far right
Is it the "far right"? Or is it that technology and fertility have actually lowered the risks substantially?
Solar plus batteries, right now, seems to be the cheapest form of new energy. Given that, you would expect most of new energy to be "green". (And if you look at the stats, that seems to be coming true.)
Electrification of transportation is happening quickly. China is cranking out cheap electric cars that are generally better than ICE cars of yesterday. And the world seems to be transitioning.
And fertility rates are dropping everywhere. So the amount of people we will need to support in the future continues to decline.
I've mostly stopped worrying about climate change. Not because I don't think it is real. But because I think we are clearly on the path to mitigating the worse scenarios.
Yes, it is. They're committed to "Every molecule of hydrocarbon will come out". [0]. They keep saying this to us, and we don't seem to believe them. I like your optimism, and I'm not denying a lot of what you're saying -- renewables fast becoming the cheapest energy. But that's not deterring people: the far right here in the US are about to dismantle the government's legal rationale for regulating emissions. They're laughing at us right now, doing victory laps. They're telling polluters to take the gloves off.
These people are terrorists, extremists, and they're in charge of the world's single most powerful economy and military. They're obsessed with domination, with doing violence to the weak and the poor and to nature. It's pure Freudian thanatos.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by the "far-right", but you seem to be implying this 'every molecule' quote (or more charitably, the goal) is of the "far-right" in the U.S. In reality the quote is from Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman. I mean, I wouldn't be terribly surprised if Saudi Arabia is considered far-right governed but I doubt your wording is giving the correct impression to readers.
Yes, I know it's a Saudi quote. They're also far right. They're bosom buddies with the same right-wing (Democratic) and far-right (Republican) US economic and governmental elites for decades. I don't think anyone would dispute this. In fact, it's so humdrum a set of facts that I think the burden would be on someone else to show that "no, actually, US elites are not into the whole 'every molecule of hydrocarbon' thing". But their behavior doesn't indicate that they disagree.
It's thus, yes, the correct impression for readers.
The Heritage Foundation (Project 2025, far-right, anti-climate) is working with the Heartland Institute (spreading climate science denial across UK / EU) / Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC, Jordan Peterson)
They do not like EU rules that hold US firms accountable to climate laws.
Sorry, I'm not saying the far-right isn't (whatever) anti-climate change.
I just meant that I don't think the lack of concern is necessarily due to them. I think it may have more to do with the reality that we are already on a good path.
It's true but also (could be) innocent. In the sense that if you A/B test things and look for engagement, you will almost certainly end up with "addictive" systems.
I think this may also be why there is so much sugar in American food. People buy more of the sweet stuff. So they keep making it sweeter.
I'm not sure who should be responsible. It kinda feels like a "tragedy of the commons" kind of situation.
Obviously the government should be responsible to monitor these patterns and regulate them when they are becoming unhealthy at a statistical level? Having allowed the likes of facebook to grow to this point is clearly a policy failure.
The C-suite has learned not to put so much incriminating stuff into writing (after Apple/Google etc. got caught making blatantly illegal anti-poaching agreements in personal emails from folks like Jobs), so proving that is probably gonna be tough.
The definition of innocent you two are using here is absurd to me. This is, at best, willful negligence. No one sat down and drew up a plan for the child screen addiction machine, maybe, but they noticed they were making it many times and chose to continue.
And also, does it really matter if it was on purpose or not, the end effect is that same, purposefully designing addictive patterns meant to make people spend more time on it, regardless of the mental health of the person.
I can kill a person with a car either intentionally or unintentionally. Of course one is worse than the other, but both are ultimately bad and you should face justice for either of them, even if the punishment might be different because of the motivation/background. But neither should leave you as "innocent".
Well, its worth noting that with the nonconsensual porn, child and otherwise, it was generating X would often rapidly punish the user that posted the prompt, but leave the grok-generated content up. It wasn't an issue of not having control, it was an issue of how the control was used.
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