This article is frankly an embarrassment to the forum. How can we seriously spend more words on the claim that an organization Musk ran published a webpage with some misinformation on it (a claim NOT backed up by the source linked, which does not contain the word ‘misinformation’ at all) than Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, xAI, the Boring Company and Neuralink combined—the latter three companies getting not a single mention at all? I recommend a full deletion of the page until someone else can write a version with at least a pretense of fairness.
Larks
Karma: 15,856
Interesting question. I think there is a plausible case to be made that convergent factors in AGI/ASI development might render it less important where it came from, and that fixating on this might simply cause dangerous race dynamics. However, it seems pretty clear to me that directionally the US is better:
Over the past 30 years, the Chinese government has done more for the flourishing of Chinese citizens than the American government has done for the flourishing of American citizens.
Prior to 1979 the CCP was one of the most tyrannical and abusive totalitarian governments the world has ever known. In addition to causing a huge death tool and systematically violating the rights of its citizens, it also impoverished them. Rapid growth since then has largely been the result of a return to more normal governance quality, combined with a very low base. It’s a big improvement, but that doesn’t mean policy has been amazing—they’ve just stopped being so abjectly terrible.
However, at the same time they stopped being so communist, the CCP started implementing the One Child Policy. The US has done some pretty bad social engineering in time, but none with quite the cruelty of the OCP, or whose effects are quite so predictably disastrous. Maybe they will get lucky because robots will arrest their demographic collapse, but on an ex ante basis the policy is simply atrocious.
Commerce in China ditches some of the older ideas of Marxism because it’s the means to an end: the China Dream of wealthy communism.
Responding to this one would take more time than I have so I will skip.
The American Supreme Court has established “corporate personhood” to an extent that is nonexistent in China. As corporations become increasingly managed by AI, this legal precedent will give AI enormous leverage for influencing policy, without regard to human interests.
I’m not an expert on Chinese law, but my understanding is the key parts of corporate personhood—the right to own property, to sign contracts, to be sued, etc. - exist in both China and the US. Perhaps you are thinking of Citizens United v. FEC, but that is primarily about free speech, not corporate personhood, and free speech seems like an area that the US is clearly superior to the PRC.
Compared to America, China has a head start in using AI to build a harmonious society. The American federal, state, and municipal governments already lag so far behind that they’re less likely to manage the huge changes that come after AGI.
I’m not sure what you’re gesturing at here.
America’s founding and expansion were based on a technologically-superior civilization exterminating the simpler natives. Isn’t this exactly what we’re trying to prevent AI from doing to humanity?
I don’t think that is a fair summary of the foundation of America, and nor do I really see the relevance here. Even if it was relevant, contemporary US treatment of native tribes seems significantly better than PRC treatment of groups like the Uyghurs.
Thanks for sharing this write-up! It’s not easy to massively change direction in response to new evidence but it seems like you did a great job.
On the object level, for my interest: do you know why the egg density was so different between university and other catered meals?
I think including this sort of section is basically a bait and switch—it allows the author to assert positions, potentially persuading people of them, but if challenged on the LLM slop to hide behind “oh yeah but I said I didn’t mean that”.
Because I was running out of time, I asked ChatGPT to draft this section, and have only skimmed it (ie I haven’t carefully fact checked it).
Please don’t do this. Many people will read the post; you are defecting against the epistemic commons here.
Any confusion seems like largely OpenAI’s fault, given this is how it appears on the website dropdown:
Thanks, great writeup.
I am trying my hardest to disambiguate ‘market/economic freedom’ from ‘unrestrained accumulation of wealth’.
You mentioned scandinavian countries specifically, but Swedish Wealth Inequality is as high as the US and higher than the UK. In general european countries raise large amounts of tax/GDP by having higher taxes on middle income people than the US, not by having higher taxes at the high end.
and highly socialist societies such as the Scandis enjoy both higher quality and higher utility than more capitalist countries such as the United States or the UK.
While Scandinavian countries generally are less capitalist than the US or UK, the difference is small. Here are their rankings on the Economic Freedom index:
Rank Country Score 5 United States 8.09 6 Denmark 8.02 12 United Kingdom 7.88 13 Finland 7.87 14 Iceland 7.84 25 Sweden 7.61 28 Norway 7.58 All of them are comfortably in the top quartile, and Denmark is actually above the UK in the rankings.
Apparently Germany is considering a vote to initiate the process for banning the political party AfD, which according to recent polls is the second most popular party in the country. I’m not aware of any examples of a democratic country banning such a popular political party before—the closest I can think of is Turkey banning the pro-Shari-law “Welfare Party” in 1998. My impression is that fair measures of democracy would significantly penalize such an act, maybe pushing them from “full democracy” to “flawed democracy” on something like the EIU.
In particular, if they did this it seems to me like the democratic feedback mechanism is just totally broken in Germany. As far as I’m aware, a fair-but-stylized history of recent German politics is basically:
Merkel admits a huge number of young male migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.
Integration goes worse than expected, economic costs are higher than expected, and crime rises.
Because of 2., voters are unhappy and want change.
The traditional parties do not significantly change policy.
Voters turn to AfD instead who are more credibly committed to change.
[Possibly] the other political parties ban the AfD.
If AfD are banned it seems like there just is no reliable democratic mechanism for voter preferences to determine policy in Germany.
The purported benefits of accreditation would still get delivered.
This seems false to me, without the RSPCA’s brand behind it, consumers would be less willing to pay a premium for the products, and supermarkets would be less keen to stock them.
This looks like the second time in two months you posted harsh but inaccurate criticism of a group based on confusing them with a different group. I suggest in the future you put more effort into understanding the people you are criticizing.
Is there much reason for this to be an app as opposed to a website, or an LLM?
Thanks for clarifying!
Is WHO cost-effectiveness similar to US GHD spending?
At this point I think we are reading tea leaves that the OP could easily clarify, but FWIW my interpritation was they invested more than they would have otherwise, e.g. in less specific training, because they thought this training was a secondary route to impact.
It sounds like if his org had expected mass emigration they’d have spent less time making other human capital investments as well though.
Yes and no—the only concrete thing I see @WillieG having done was “sign[ing] letters of recommendation for each employee, which I later found out were used to pad visa applications.”
Sounds like they did more than this, though the description is vague:
We invested a lot of time and money into training these employees, with the expectation that they (as members of the college-educated elite) would help lead human rights reform in the country long after our project disbanded.
Thanks for providing this summary!
The CGD suggests spending on migrants inside the UK as a currently elevated item that could be reduced significantly.
EDIT: though now I think about it, “drop the Chagos Islands deal” could be a politically viable alternative source of funds, give then $8bn cost of the extremely unpopular deal is sort of like inefficient foreign aid. (Though the $8bn is not an annual figure).