It's funny. In my failing democracy people are convinced the solution is a two party system like the US (we have a parliament with a large amount of parties)

Somehow I have a feeling the problem is not the system, but the culture...

>In my failing democracy

Which nation, may I ask?

I think the motivation for someone like Altman is not AGI, it's power and influence. And when he wields billions he has power, it doesn't really matter if there's AGI coming.

Yep, he just wants to become too big to fail at this point.

I view OpenAI like a pyramid scheme: taking in increasing amounts of money to pursuit ever growing promisses that can be dangled like a carrot to the next investor.

If you owe investors $100 million, that's your problem. If you owe investors $100 billion, that's their problem.

Who else pursued this strategy in the dot-com bubble and failed to the point of going under?

I'm old enough to remember it, but young enough not to remember it well.

Yes, that adjustment could well be monarchy.

I can't see how functioning democracy can survive without truth as shared grounds of discussion.

The media's been lying to us for as long as it has existed.

Prior to the Internet the range of opinions which you could gain access to was far more limited. If the media were all in agreement on something it was really hard to find a counter-argument.

We're so far down the rabbit hole already of bots and astroturfing online, I doubt that AI deepfake videos are going to be the nail in the coffin for democracy.

The majority of the bot, deepfake and AI lies are going to be created by the people who have the most capital.

Just like they owned the traditional media and created the lies there.

I don't think the US was a monarchy for its first hundred years.

> > I can't see how functioning democracy can survive without truth as shared grounds of discussion.

> I don't think the US was a monarchy for its first hundred years.

Did the US not have truth as shared grounds of discussion for its first hundred years?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism has been a thing for a very long time.

Right, by which standard truth has never been a shared grounds of discussion. I think that there's a big difference between "some people lie" and "there's no agreement on shared truth."

That has nothing to do with generated videos though.

Yes, plus, these are corporate agents, not yours. They are pets as much as a Trojan horse is.

Nope. He believes it is a threat to freedom. And not in the way you presented it

Interesting. When I Google I always get the AI summary which does it for me.

the google search AI is trash and wrong very often, and I’m a big fan/early adopter of LLMs

I just read this..I don't understand where the hit piece is...

Seems pretty factual.

The hysteria in the "rationalist" circles is mirroring the so called "Blue tribe" quite accurately.

So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals?

"Race" is so undefined it's just silly to argue about. We are tremendously more similar than different. We have a visual bias, so a difference in skin color will dominate all other similarities. Then we go and theorize about other differences when we start our division from this arbitrary difference. This is lazy thinking. And a lot of the time is used for hate mongering against some "other".

Of course cultures have different set of values, and this influences the aggregate decisions of the individuals, but taking the next step and forecasting and analyzing a single individual by projecting sociatal bias on them is dehumanizing, and as recent history taught us, is dangerous.

>So averages and social dynamics map exactly to individuals?

I don't think anyone claims that but patterns are significant enough that it is useful in mapping to individuals but within context.

When I'm interacting with an Indian, I can reasonably guess what their values are, what their personalities are and what they find important.

Same when I'm interacting with a woman.

Same when I'm interacting with an older person.

Of course, with context I'll learn more about the person, but I will not dismiss patterns that do exist and are largely true.

If you consciously dismiss these patterns you are just lying to yourself and robbing yourself out of meaningful starting points.

> but patterns are significant enough that it is useful in mapping to individuals but within context.

How would you do this in the US? Do you count Americans as a race? Or do you do patterns by state/region or city/rural? How can you tell?

I'll use all the information provided and form an opinion. It doesn't matter what category American as, as long as I understand the patterns an American exhibits.

The correct word here is cultures, not races. South Asians of European ancestry (like one side of my family) are still culturally south Asian (albeit a particular subculture in our case). I know lots of people of non white ancestry who are culturally British (I mostly am myself).

I think culture is also a lot less dehumanising than race because it is complex and therefore less prone to grouping people in the same stereotyped way. Not all South Asian cultures are the same - there is a huge difference between, for example, an urban Sri Lankan (as I was born) and a rural Pakistani. Much as there are huge cultural differences within Europe (e.g. between Wales and Albania).

I do agree that stereotyping leads to dehumanisation, but I also think cultural differences are worth talking about. I also strongly agree that thinking in terms of race rather than culture is very damaging and encourages racism.

there are obviously drawbacks, but generalisations and assumptions are literally how we naturally store knowledge. its the quality of the information that is the problem not the generalisation.

So you want Israel to cease to exist? Germany did the Holocaust, nobody said Germany can't exist. Russia attacks Ukraine in an emperialistic power move, no one suggest Russia shouldn't exist.

But Israel is a "project" that needs to end. More like a scape goat.

I'm israeli. This war is bad, my government is evil. But I deserve to have a nation to call home, so do the Palestinians.

If you disagree with me, think about it a bit and what it says about you.

> Russia attacks Ukraine in an emperialistic power move, no one suggest Russia shouldn't exist.

But people do suggest russia should give back the territory they’ve taken by force. That’s most (if not all depending on your take) of israel.

Historically - in my opinion in the wake of ww2 a jewish state should have been carved out of germany, rather than england giving away land that wasn’t theirs to give away. So in a sense Germany as we know it should have ceased to exist.

Just as now, i believe for there to be peace in the region israel as we know it must cease to exist. Either by radically changing and becoming a place where palestinians and jews live together in peace and shared governance, or by giving up a huge chunk of land they stole in ‘48 to create two states.

Opinions, obviously.

I supportthe two state solution.

Alas hamas killed that one in The 90s when they decided to send suicide bombers to Israeli busses during the peace process that Israel initiated.

Also Israel accepted the two state solution in 1948, alas all Arab countries decided to attack the newly idndependent country.

Saying "we" stole the land is a bit odd. The arabs leaving in Israel didn't call themselves Palestinians until after 1948.

Israel is not in the Arab peninsula, arabs living here came from there, hence they are Arabs.

I still support their right to their national claim. But pretending it's some ancient construct that "we" stole from is not historical. Palestinian nationalism is a modern construct.

Who has the right to exist in that area? The people that already lived there and their offspring, who are now refugees in Gaza. People do have the right to form their own states, but on land they already own legally and ethically, not when you colonize land already occupied by others.

I did not call for the end of Israel as a project, I do disagree with it's creation, considering how it turned out, especially since it was more or less the intention of Zionism as stated by it's founders.

I don't know how to solve it. But I do know that Israels actions since it was founded has worked against any kind of solution that is not a takeover of the area and the creation of their ethnostate.

You are severely lacking in history.

You domknownthat Palestinians are mostly Arabs and not native to the region.

The Israeli founders accepted the UN partition resolution. all Arab countries attacked Israel to destroy and create their pan Arabian fantasy.

In the 90s Israel initiated the peace process and gave self rule to the Palestinians with an end goal to create a Palestinian state. Hamas decided to send suicide bombers to bomb Israeli busses killing thousands.

This caused a massive shift right in israeli politics. And gave power to those saying we can't afford to give land. I don't agree with them.

Your revisionism is abhorrent.

Whos's native then? Only jews? What about the peoples that lived in that region before them? Or the people that moved through the area after leaving Africa? This is a nonsense argument, people lived there and others colonized the area and has operated like most European colonies. This is what happened in recent times, not 2000 years ago.

In private letters from the founders they write about their true intent of accepting the 48 deal just to get a foothold and then keep taking over the rest of the land, you can look it up yourself. And what a deal, Jews owned like 7% of the land and was handed 55%? Why would anyone be angry about that. By an organization that was basically three countries in a trenchcoat and without the support of most the people who lived there.

I know Hamas is bad, I can call them terrorist without a problem. Netanyahu however is also a fan of Hamas as he has stated its critical to prop them up as that allows them to divide and conquer the Palestinians and create more chaos that they can use. Exactly like how they are using Oct 7 in both Gaza and the West Bank now.

I understand that Israel is in the grips of far right zionist fanatics, but a large part of their population does support some kind of genocide.

Your genocide excuses are disgusting.

Hey, American here.

> This war is bad, my government is evil.

We have a lot in common

> But I deserve to have a nation to call home, so do the Palestinians.

Absolutely!!!

If the only way that Israel can continue to exist is as an apartheid state where a large proportion of the population has to be forcibly kept in a status with no political rights, or else expelled or killed altogether, then yes, Israel doesn't deserve to exist.

Now, I don't know whether that is true. It seems to be the argument that the Israeli government and the right-wing majority of its population are making now - that if they give Palestinians actual freedom, Israel will just cease to be, so they have to starve people to death, bomb them etc. The more they do that, the stronger the argument that Israel should cease to exist.

If there is another option that allows Israel to continue to exist, that's great. But it's really up to Israel to come up with a viable option for that, because Israel is an alien entity that forcefully imposed itself on this territory to begin with.

Regarding Russia, I'm a Russian citizen, and the invasion of Ukraine did, in fact, made me reach the conclusion that Russia should not exist as a state. It's not that this particular war is especially damning; it's that Russia has a very long track record of imperialist wars, and, more importantly, it doesn't change - it keeps doing it. Arguably Russia as it exists today is inevitably imperialistic simply because it's a polity that is cobbled together and still largely held by force or threat of it - it never really fully de-colonized, and if it ever does, it'd be an order of magnitude smaller. So from that perspective it really cannot change - and if so, then yes, it should cease to exist.

If Israel is alien to the region, so are Arabs which is what Palestinians are.

That's nonsense.

The Jewish people have a long (2000years) of calling Israel territory as home. Does it mean I deny the Palestinians national claim, no. But it sure as hell mean Jews have a claim atleast as much as Arab immigrants and conquerers

The vast majority of Jews who settled in modern Israel didn't have a 2000-year history of Israel as their home. They have a 2000-year history of religious beliefs that center around Israel and date back to their very distant ancestors living in that place, but that's not at all the same thing. I mean, can you imagine what the world map would look like if we were to apply this criteria to other nations today?

Palestinians, on the other hand, have actually been physically living in that place for well over a millennium. Not only that, but dismissing them as "Arab invaders" is also rather misleading - while the language and the culture is Arabic, the Palestinian population is mostly descendants of the same people who lived in this area 2000 years ago (Canaanites etc), with Arabic culture imposed on them during the early Islamic conquests. And again, if you're willing to look back that far to establish a link that translates to right of possession, then should we go back another 1000 years and talk about Torah's vivid descriptions of the invasion of Canaan by Jewish tribes and genocide of the local population?

I think it's foolish to try to derive some kind of meaningful claim today from what happened 2000-3000 years ago, though. And looking at the more recent history, what is today Israel was explicitly a settler colonialist project. Here's Ze'ev Jabotinsky writing in 1923, not mincing words about Palestinians being the native population that he wants to displace:

"There can be no voluntary agreement between ourselves and the Palestine Arabs. Not now, nor in the prospective future. I say this with such conviction, not because I want to hurt the moderate Zionists. I do not believe that they will be hurt. Except for those who were born blind, they realised long ago that it is utterly impossible to obtain the voluntary consent of the Palestine Arabs for converting "Palestine" from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority. ... Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators. ... Zionist colonisation must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach."

Speaking from a London perspective, though I'm sure a NY one is worse, not better.

> Sry lack of new houses seems doesn't seem like a cause for homelessness. If you can't afford a house in the big city, you move to a smaller one.

This would only make sense if the smaller houses were reasonably priced as opposed to the bigger ones. This is not the case.

And creating more housing would absolutely be a step in the right direction in terms of reducing extreme housing prices. Unless you don't believe in demand and supply economics, that is.

> Once they're down, it's almost impossible to get back up

Yes but that's partly because they can't afford to rent even basic lodging, let alone afford to buy one, and a basic roof over one's head is a pivotal basic need for most things one needs to do in life.

This kind of problem rarely has a single cause but housing costs put pressure on many of them. High housing costs mean people save less and are more vulnerable to other events cascading into homelessness. They also increase stress levels because people live further away from their jobs and spend more time and money commuting while being less able to care for their families, which can have generational impacts when older kids aren’t studying because they’re taking care of younger siblings while their parents work and commute. It also inflated prices for almost everything else because businesses are paying more for their space and have to pay their workers more, too.

That doesn’t mean that we don’t also need things like better support and easily-accessible government healthcare, but we have to recognize that these things are all connected. Salt Lake City somewhat famously found immediately housing people helps with mental/substance abuse issues simply because all of the other problems in life are more approachable when you’re not sleeping on the street, missing appointments, and having your essentials stolen.