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High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute

This counts on there being more juice to squeeze out of learning than I think actually exists. The people currently spending $1000s/month on real tutors are probably learning at ~90% of their potential. An idealized AI might push that to 100%, but the people who can't afford tutors or college are going to see greater benefit from even the cheapest models. That scenario results in decreasing stratification.

The BBC has editorial control over their headlines. The wording in the article is unclear and it may not be a mischaracterization. But, assuming that it is, 'someone lied to us and so we put it into our headline' is not a defense that turns bad journalism into good.

It's an obvious quote, unless you think people are going to misunderstand and think that the BBC as a publication is talking about it's mother somehow. Quotes are generally well understood to be the view of the person giving it, not the publication.

I think people are going to expect the BBC to validate the correctness of quotes that they elevate into headlines. The interviewee didn't decide that that quote should be a headline, that's a creative choice by the BBC. By putting it there, they are implying that it is an accurate description of the story that follows. Is that incorrect?

The quote:

1. Indicates this a human interest story

2. Is by definition of an accurate representation of the words of the person they are quoting

3. Is a reasonable overview of a complex story, given we understand that "free-spirited" is subjective and that, again, this is a human interest story and conveying the feelings of the people involved is part of the point.


I don't know what you're getting at with 1 and 2. If the person they were quoting claimed to have been abducted by sasquatch, you could still make these two points. Would you still be arguing that it doesn't reflect poorly on the BBC to put that false claim into a headline?

If you would, that is probably the heart of our disagreement. If not, I guess it comes down to an agree to disagree on whether the subjective window of the personality trait 'free-spirited' can include 'active participant in violent resistance against a dictatorship'.


> If the person they were quoting claimed to have been abducted by sasquatch, you could still make these two points. Would you still be arguing that it doesn't reflect poorly on the BBC to put that false claim into a headline?

No? That’s a very good headline for an article about someone who believes that they were abducted by a Sasquatch. It would be a missed opportunity for a newspaper to NOT do.


Yes, it's incorrect. You seem to be under the impression that headlines need to be dry facts, which is just... not what they are or have ever been. Using a quote that draws you in to read is a normal, common thing to do.

Screensharing on a browser and trying to change tabs is a constant frustration; you have to wait for that overlay to get into the moveable state. Sometimes I have to switch between chats several times to get it to acknowledge that I've seen that latest message. When you add a code block at the end of your message, it's a toss-up whether you can type outside of it afterwards with the right or down arrow-key. If you can't and you need to, you just have to start over AFAICT. Making the codeblocks in the first place is usually a hassle even though parsing markdown is a solved problem. It has a lot of redundancy with Outlook and I often need to clear notifications from both. Search is unreliable. Sometimes I open an active conversation and it decides to scroll me back a month.

That covers what I'll encounter in a typical week. There are one-offs as well. It's not the worst software I work with, but talking to my team should really be zero friction.


Electricity doesn't remove the need for human labor, it just increases productivity. If we produced AGI that could match top humans across all fields, it would mean no more jobs (knowledge jobs at least; physical labor elimination depends on robotics). That would make the university model obsolete- training researchers would be a waste of money, and the well-paid positions that require a degree and thus justify tuition would vanish. The economy would have to change fundamentally or else people would have to starve en masse.

If we produced ASI, things would become truly unpredictable. There are some obvious things that are on the table- fusion, synthetic meat, actual VR, immortality, ending hunger, global warming, or war, etc. We probably get these if they can be gotten. And then it's into unknown unknowns.

Perfectly reasonable to believe ASI is impossible or that LLMs don't lead to AGI, but there is not much room to question how impactful these would be.


I disagree, you have to take yourself back to when electricity was not widely available. How much labor did electricity eliminate? A LOT I imagine.

AI will make a lot of things obsolete but I think that is just the inherent nature of such a disruptive technology.

It makes labor cost way lower for many things. But how the economy reorganizes itself around it seems unclear but I don’t really share this fear of the world imploding. How could cheap labor be bad?

Robotics for physical labor lag way behind e.g. coding but only because we haven’t mastered how to figure out the data flywheel and/or transfer knowledge sufficiently and efficiently (though people are trying).


>How much labor did electricity eliminate? A LOT I imagine.

90% or even 99.9% are in an entirely separate category from 100%. If a person can do 1000x labor per time and you have a use for the extra 999x labor, they and you can both benefit from the massive productivity gains. If that person can be replaced by as many robots and AIs as you like, you no longer have any use for them.

Our economy runs on the fact that we all have value to contribute and needs to fill; we exchange that value for money and then exchange that money for survival necessities plus extra comforts. If we no longer have any value versus a machine, we no longer have a method to attain food and shelter other than already having capital. Capitalism cannot exist under these conditions. And you can't get the AGI manager or AGI repairman job to account for it- the AGI is a better fit for these jobs too.

The only jobs that can exist under those conditions are government mandated. So we either run a jobs program for everybody or we provide a UBI and nobody works. Electricity didn't change anything so fundamental.


Why shouldn't you expect a problem's simplicity to correlate tremendously with how well it is represented in training data? Every angle I can think of tilts in that direction. Simpler problems are easier to remember and thus repeat, they come up more often, asd they require less space/time/effort to record (which also means they are less likely to contain errors).


I think you have to change or abandon the metaphor to make your point. These are not true statements of spoiled eggs and house fires, and so much so as to make a reasonable claim about institutions and malfeasance look absurd.


> These are not true statements of spoiled eggs and house fires, and so much so as to make a reasonable claim about institutions and malfeasance look absurd.

True, but I disagree with the conclusion. When I try to map it back to reality and it doesn't make sense, it is indeed an indictment of the analogy. But the fact I have to abuse the analogy to make that mapping coherent is not my problem; it's not my analogy.

However, within the context of the analogy, and if one can imagine that absolutely insane scenario, the logic holds.



Take 100% of the wealth of everyone with more than $1B in the US and you get $23k per person / $33k per adult. That's a good amount of money; the adult number would be enough to live off of in the right parts of the country. It's about 4x the annual welfare spend. But then next year comes, you have to find the money again, and you're out of billionaires.

Change billionaires to top 1% wealth holders (>$13.7M) and things are more tenable. You could run the $33k/adult-year program for 6 years, or invest at 7% return for $13k/adult-year. You probably can't get a 7% return for at least a few years after second-order effects on the economy and I don't know what those effects would be long-term, but these numbers at least pass the smell test.


An important point is that this wealth is purely notional. It doesn't exist as cash you can distribute unless there is a liquid market, and confiscating it would annihilate any liquid markets. Furthermore, ~70% of that wealth in the US is non-liquid generally.

That wealth doesn't become cash unless there is a giant pile of cash owned by someone that can be used to buy the assets at the notional value. Where is that cash going to come from? It can't come from the government printing money since that is just inflation with more steps.


>It's not clear if these violations actually represent a real environmental hazard or are more reflective of NIMBY degrowth sentiment.

>it's not clear if you know what environmental regulations are or if you are just shilling for polluting billionaires.

This is pretty clearly an escalation beyond what you're describing.

e: Because you did already read these lines, I guess I should spell this out: the former says we can't trust this datapoint as reflecting the issue we're concerned about; the latter says that the former person is either completely ignorant about the subject matter or lying due to corruption. The former is disagreeable; the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith against HN guidelines.


You did not include the more equivalent quote from the OP in my view:

> The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development

This doesn't just say we can't trust a datapoint, it starts with a position premised on bad faith motivations for all environmental regulations. Still not totally equivalent, but I don't think the original commenter was exactly being neutral or reasoned in their opening argument.


A charitable reading of their comment would be that they meant NIMBYs write and use environmental regulations to stunt development, rather than that there is no such thing as a legitimate environmental regulation. It's definitely poorly phrased in a way that lends itself to the uncharitable interpretation, but their subsequent remarks are very clear that they don't agree with that.

As you note, even the uncharitable interpretation isn't equivalent- you say 'not totally equivalent' but they're different quite critically in that the one is attacking a political position and some laws and the other is attacking an individual person on this forum.


Let's look at the opening of the two comments which clearly mirror each other in tone and structure.

The tricky thing about environmental regulations is that they are crafted and utilized by NIMBYs to block any infrastructure development. Even if, on balance, the infrastructure is a net positive.

The tricky thing about deregulating the environment is that deregulations are uncrafted and utilized by amoral capitalists who want to make money no matter what, including by poisoning the land and sea and air as much as they want.

Perhaps missing the point like this was not deliberate, but you nevertheless missed it.

latter says that the former person is either [...] or [...] [...] the latter is an ad hominem assuming bad faith

You went from characterizing it as an either/or comment in one sentence, to characterizing it as a bad faith assumption in the next. This is equivalent to: 'he says it's either odd or even...he says it's odd.'


I don't think that taking umbrage with a rude part of a comment can be called missing the point because another part of the comment was better. Am I missing yours?

And yeah, looks like I dropped an 'or' between 'hominem' and 'assuming'. My bad, I wasn't sure how long the edit window lasts and rushed it.


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