Also your argument is along the lines of thinking I argue for: You say I shouldn't lobby for regulation I believe is beneficial because a future government might change the regulations to make them not beneficial. This implicitly assumes that the future government wouldn't implement the non-beneficial regulations if the current government doesn't do the beneficial ones. Possibly! But this is arguing that we should firmly establish principles, values and precedents that future administrations will feel bound by. And that I would agree with: Regulations and governance should arise from principles (practical details and grey areas will always require a ton of messy detailed negotiations, but within the confines of principles!). One of the things the current US administration has done is to show that it is possible to disregard principles if you are powerful with no consequences. You can lie about elections being fraudulent, watch your supporters storm parliament and get reelected a few years later.

But if principles don't matter to those in power then the conclusion is actually the opposite of what you say. While your allies are in power you should use power however you can to further your interests, because when others are in power they will not feel bound by your restraint, and at least they first have to undo your work.

You probably don't want the government to stop being involved in securing your property or maintaining roads. None of the tech firms want the government to stop being involved in securing IP rights. Etc. etc. etc...

Let's take your argument to it's extreme point: The state should never regulate anything because the state might be bad!

This is structurally the same fallacy as "people shouldn't be allowed to do anything, because some people are bad!".

A year ago my judgement was that I had wasted my time on trying to work with the models and doing things myself would have been more productive as I would have gained intuition from the failures. Now it definitely seems to have figured out stuff that would have taken me more time than I have to spare on this problem...

So the best we can do right now seems to be to combine imperfect case studies like this with imperfect benchmarks to get some unreliable impression of where we are...

If you have 100 responses from 1 professor, and the AI wins 75% of the time that is very likely a true signal that the AI is better than this prof. It would be incorrect to generalize this to all profs though.

Further, if you sample 16 profs and the AI beats 10 of them you can be fairly certain that the real percentage of profs it beats isn't 10%. Further, when estimating the probability that the AI beats a random prof, it's the relative estimation error that scales with 1/sqrt N. If you have a coin and it lands heads up 16 times, that tells you something quite robust about the coin.

Reasonably estimating confidence intervals at small N and high p is not trivial. But it can be done.

A good heuristic is "add 2 successes and 2 failures" which is due to Agresti & Couli.

See down the page here for source papers:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binomial_proportion_confidence...

If the LLM gives you safe code you know there are entire classes of things you don't have to review for.

That said, I agree with you. My experience is that LLMs are great if you are highly competent in the domain in which you let them work. And it's probably easier to be competent in Go than in Rust.

I do think we will need to find a way to get away from publishing papers. But I thought that before the AI came along and made mediocre papers something you can produce in a day. The academic system seems utterly incapable of self-correcting on this point though. We haven't even managed to get rid of for-profit publishers. So how this all will go down is anybodies guess right now.

https://lists.isocpp.org/std-proposals/2020/05/1322.php

https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2024/p28...

There are a lot of unexamined assumptions in what you write...

It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market.

There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists...

The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth...

Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.

Why is that a desirable goal? What are the societal implications of this? What implicit assumptions is your framing hiding, and are they true? (All communication is good! All opposition to communication is oppression!)

I don't want a world where everyone can send me any ad they want without my consent. Where Billionaires and Autocrats can use their money and power to amplify their lies. Where utterances that no court has ever recognized as protected speech dominate all carefully stated opinions.

Just retreating to exactly the catchphrases and naivete of the 90s is not cutting it anymore.

https://emerging-europe.com/it-sector-in-focus-poland/

The IT sector is 4.4% of GDP. Poland has seen 3% of GDP growth year on year.

Anecdotes from your bubble inside one particular industry, that represents a small fraction of the economy of a nation, do not adequately explain the post soviet transformation of economies containing hundreds of millions of people. That's all.

Specifically I asked for evidence that current GDP growth is significantly driven by this specific type of foreign investment, as claimed. None has been forthcoming.