The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south" as can be coerced into lopsided agreements, and much more generally the possible futures available to humankind. Cell membranes externalize entropy in the same way, the difference is they are good enough at working together, and working with the world around them, which is perhaps frequently hostile but also nutritious and useful, that higher-order life emerges nonetheless.
Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else"
This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere. The world in this view is a finite pie that can only be sliced up differently. Nothing is ever created. Wealth can only be redistributed.
This ignores the fact that the past 200 years have seen insane wealth creation that has enabled more people than have ever lived to live better than most people have ever lived. Look at how many have risen out of poverty globally in just the last 25 years.
Someone will inevitably bring up climate change, etc., and argue that it’s all bound to come crashing down. Maybe it will, but asserting that it must as some law of nature is a fatalistic ideology.
It’s a fatalistic ideology that some people seem to like and be emotionally attached to for reasons that aren’t clear to me. I tend to think it’s a big cop out. If everything is doomed, doomed, doomed, then there is no point in even trying. Eat, drink, and be merry while the ship sinks.
> This may be true to some extent, but what I dislike about this idea is that to many it implies that human flourishing is impossible without suffering exported elsewhere
To some degree this is true, in the sense that human flourishing implies some degree of suffering for e.g. the ants we accidentally step on, animals we eat, bacteria in our guts, etc. But Jains do their best not to step on the ants, many people refuse to eat flesh, and so on. Plants and bacteria will have to fend for themselves for now. We can certainly do better with each other.
I am proposing no version of fatalism, besides the fact that, at least in our living substrate, organisms have not all learned to do each other no harm, if this is even possible, and even if it isn't, fatalistic hedonism is not the inevitable response to this fact.
> The life possible in San Francisco is possible in large part because of the entropy it externalizes to "somewhere else", a place many in SF and the US more generally prefer to ignore, and which includes Bangladesh, alongside as much of the "global south"
San Francisco is not rich because Bangladesh is poor. This idea is not only wrong, but dangerous. I’m stuck in America because my parents and grandparents in Bangladesh were infected by such stupid thinking. Other people in the “global south” that rejected such victimhood leapt ahead. When we came to America in 1989, China’s per-capita GDP was a little higher than Bangladesh, but a little lower than India. Since then, China has become a livable place, while Bangladesh and India remain impoverished. Your mindset is a roadmap for the global south to remain poor and backward.
I'm not endorsing victimhood or saying that Bangladesh is poor because the US is rich. It was badly phrased if that is how it reads, for that I apologize.
I'm saying the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means. It is not unique in this. This is not the only reason the US is rich or the only reason any other is not.
I'm also saying that this is a really bad strategy if the goal is humankind flourishing on this planet. People already enrich one another in many ways. We have to stop warring on one another and nature, thoughtlessly dumping entropy where we can't see it, etc.
>the US does what it can to keep itself richer than other countries all around the globe by immoral means.
I don't believe that.
Like most countries, the US has a community of professionals in government dedicated to the country's national security and this class of professionals has often done harm around the world by trying to increase the US's national security when it is already more secure than most countries are. For example, the US's overreaction to 9/11. For example, the US's overthrowing of Communist governments in the third world during the Cold War.
And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.
It does: but the US did those things for national security goals, not to make the US richer.
Often those things made the US considerably poorer, e.g., the US intervention in Vietnam, e.g., when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.
During the Cold War, the US encouraged international trade to show the world the benefits of trade and of capitalism and as a bribe to try to get and to keep countries in our military coalition against the Soviets. Often the encouragement and the bribe included Washington's opening up the US consumer market to imports (i.e., without tariffs). But it did those thing for national security reasons (i.e., stopping the spread of communism) not because the US needs to import anything or to export anything or to steal anything from overseas to be the richest country.
Yes, international trade makes the US richer than it would be without the trade, but the US would still be the richest country even if it did zero international trade: its not like China or Germany whose economies are highly reliant on international trade.
The Iranian coup d'état was literally about allied control of oil to secure control of global flow of oil and energy related wealth.
Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.
> when it wasted many trillions of dollars over 20 years in trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy.
Or, alternatively, recirculated trillions of US taxpayer dollars into US weapons, US mercanaries, US personnel, and fed pork barrels where directed by US lobbyists.
> Security and being rich are part and parcel of the same coin.
No the two things are quite different. There are many rich countries (Singapore, Denmark, Taiwain, etc.) that don't have extensive security operations around the world. The U.S. uses its wealth for ideological reasons, not to become richer. This is something that people with a third-world mindset have the hardest time understanding about the U.S.
Yes, the US was involved in the coup in Iran, but again not as part of some plan to enrich the US. (They didn't want the Communists in control in Tehran and they didn't want Soviet warships and Soviet shipping in general to be able to operate from Iranian ports.)
Since the world is complicated and people are creative and opportunistic about how they try to make money, certain American individuals and certain small conspiracies of Americans probably tried to make money off of the US's interventions in other countries, but the US government as a whole basically never has -- at least not in the last 100 years.
While the US economy was dependent on oil from the Persian Gulf (approximately from 1957 to 2020) it used military force and pressure on governments to ensure American companies could buy Persian Gulf oil, but those American companies always paid the going price for the oil: Washington never tried to arrange so that any American interest got oil from overseas for free or for less than the fair price for the oil.
So I still haven't seen any example in this thread of Washington's extracting any wealth from the rest of the world other than through free trade, i.e., trade in which the non-American half of the trade entered into the trade voluntarily. (And again the US economy doesn't even need to engage in any free trade with the rest of the world for the US to be the richest country.)
> And yet the historic record shows numerous examples of the US overthrowing democratically elected parties to be replaced by thugs and patsies for the US.
We did that for ideological reasons. The U.S. was already one of the richest countries in the world per capita at the time of the founding. It was about as rich per capita in 1800 as India is today (in nominal dollars).
The resulting unrest can only be suppressed by abandoning basic civil liberties, or by adopting New Deal style reforms. Either one amounts to an abandonment of libertarianism.
On what grounds do you think it likely that this phenomenon is at all related to consciousness? The latter is hardly understood. We can identify correlates in beings with constitutions very near to ours, which lend credence (but zero proof) to the claim they're conscious.
Language models are a novel/alien form of algorithmic intelligence with scant relation to biological life, except in their use of language.
This also evidences that in this case, it's more developers of handbrake just know their audience rather than a real design failure. Maybe they'd prefer to keep the user base deliberately small?
Fewer every year. If 3I/A is ET flyby, perhaps our progress trading primitive simulacra for biological miracles will satisfy it that we pose no great risk, annihilation being costly and reserved for planets with better long term odds
How do you figure? Just because we gain some understanding of how a caterpillar turns to slush, then turns into a butterfly, yet somehow retains some level of memory from before, doesn't mean that it's somehow less of a miracle.
Strongly agree. Our beginning to grasp how it works even adds to the miracle!
But what we're beginning to understand we're also destroying far more rapidly even as we devote more and more effort to digital facsimiles of our faculties
My dry pessimism was a comment on this foolish inversion of priorities. Alien visitors, if the forest is truly dark, may conclude we're well on the way to self-annihilation in pursuit of false idols, while we fail to recognize the miraculous nature of existing biology.
> A chat like this is not a solution though, it is an indicator that our societies have issues
Correct, many of which are directly, a skeptic might even argue deliberately, exacerbated by companies like OpenAI.
And yet your proposal is
> a company to tackle this at scale.
What gives you the confidence that any such company will focus consistently, if at all,
> on help, not profits
Given it exists in the same incentive matrix as any other startup? A matrix which is far less likely to throw one fistfuls of cash for a nice-sounding idea now than it was in recent times. This company will need to resist its investors' pressure to find returns. How exactly will it do this? Do you choose to believe someone else has thought this through, or will do so? At what point does your belief become convenient for people who don't share your admirably prosocial convictions?
Is OpenAI taking steps to reduce access to mental healthcare in an attempt to force more people to use their tools for such services? Or do you mean in a more general sense that any companies that support the Republican Party are complicit in exacerbating the situation? At least that one has a clear paper trail.
Yes, the answer is not some business plan by which some can dodge disaster in an untrustworthy market, the answer is to recognize that this planet is a spaceship i.e. materially closed, and we are massively soiling the nest, microplastic is in steak because it's literally everywhere on the surface of the earth, etc.
Therefore, good ecological governance is a requirement, as is the analysis, as a public service, of the resources and ecosystems, and the services they provide human beings and our dependents, i.e. a democratic and just policy, not a lucrative plan to privatize yet more of public health
If one is convinced the best vehicle for the above in the near term is a business, then it had better have a different approach than is typical of personal health tech startups
Empowering individuals isn't worthless by any means but pitting one against another with asymmetric information is worse than worthless
The fundamental constraint the article alludes to is the powerlessness of consumer choice. You can’t make a better choice because you don’t have any better option. When there is a better option, you lack the tools to verify that the option is truly better vs scamming you to pay more for something which either doesn’t matter or is simply a lie.
Prior to free trade, you could reasonably sue the manufacturers or distributors for egregious harms. You could also reasonably expect domestic regulatory authorities to intervene before these harms entered the market.*
In principal, this could be done in a free trade system with counterparties who implement and enforce similar rules. But then you need all parties to agree on any new rules and enforcement mechanisms. You only need one bad actor to nuke the arrangement by growing without these burdens.
* Assuming regulations and laws are equitably and incorruptibly enforced in the local government.
A second-order issue there is the pervasive phenomenon of people wanting things cheap which results in hidden costs. When it costs more to make things safer or to test that they are safe, bad actors can succeed by not doing that and finding ways to dodge responsibility, because people just gravitate towards low prices. Part of the "governance" challenge is forcing market participants to internalize their costs.
Somewhat ironically, a countervailing strategy has emerged of charging more for something based on the claim that it's "natural", "organic", "handcrafted", etc. This strategy can also be seen in various types of "detectors" and at-home tests for things, and perhaps even things like the ConsumerLabs mentioned in another comment.
This muddies the waters even more, since even people who are willing to pay more for something that's better can't figure out how to avoid paying more for something that's just equally bad. These problems exist not just in the realm of food and health but in all product categories.
Much work in e.g. anthropology shows the "default state" of humanity is not nearly as well-defined as "subsistence agriculture". That is recent and it is a prototype of a strange phenomenon at the limit of which is San Francisco, a truly unusual bubble of order and some degree of flourishing, for the moment. If we were wiser we would be trying to extend the cell metaphor to the planet as a whole, which would benefit people in San Francisco and Bangladesh alike. Part of that includes retiring the war against nature mentality, it does very little good imo.