Among other things, consider https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

> The lack of verification is the exact reason why the lies continue

I think the evidence suggests they are not particularly constrained by reality? Recall "They're eating the cats and dogs."

(For me, "marginal" would mean that the costs were roughly equal to the benefits. I think you'd have a hard time convincing me that saving the lives of even just 1% of the people who would normally die from the flu -- between 10k and 50k people a year -- is roughly equivalent to the cost of giving out flu shots. I suppose you could argue that the benefit is marginal to individuals who have a low probability of dying from the flu, and marginal to a society which has relatively low vaccination rates overall.)

The other thing is that, according to the Claude data here, the vaccine is actually relatively effective at preventing the transmission of some flu variants, 50% effective against influenza B! If so, there would be a clear group benefit to that, you only need (1 - 1/1.3) / 0.5 = 46% of people to be vaccinated to achieve herd immunity to that strain.

This is especially true in the case of the flu because it has a relatively low R0 of approximately 1.3, meaning that without intervention/vaccines, each infected individual infects on average 1.3 other people. The vaccine just needs to be effective enough to drive the reproduction rate below 1 for the virus to die out.

We do not have good data on how effective flu vaccines are at neutralizing transmission. But for the sake of argument, let's take these relatively "bad" years for the flu where they prevented 40% of doctor's visits. Suppose that corresponds to merely preventing 40% of transmissions. The other 60% of transmissions still occur.

In that case is it even possible to drive R_eff (the effective reproduction rate of the virus) below 1? It turns out, yes! With an R0 of 1.3 and an effectiveness of only 40%, you stop the spread of the virus after vaccinating only 60% of people.

Details on the math: https://claude.ai/share/8e8ffef7-ba33-44aa-a2a6-ca3b9be6d516. You can also extend the conversation and ask more questions!

This the opposite of your understanding. The benefit to the individuals in a group from the whole group taking the vaccine is actually much larger than the benefit to an individual in the group of taking the vaccine solo.

You can read more about it here (and ask more questions!). https://claude.ai/share/8e8ffef7-ba33-44aa-a2a6-ca3b9be6d516

JAX is a tracing compiler!

(I know, I know, it sits in an extremely different part of the problem space than TraceMonkey or LuaJIT. Still.)

A big difference is that formal methods allow you to use the "for all" quantifier.

For example, you might write a unit test that says "foo('abc') returns a string with no trailing whitespace".

But with formal methods, you can prove that "for any input x, foo(x) returns a string with no trailing whitespace".

This is a trivial example, but you could imagine something more complicated, such as "for any program P, compile(P) has the same behavior as P".

Of course, you have to define what "has the same behavior as" means!

As I said, when farming became more efficient, it wasn't great to be a farmer.

But when I say (and I assume everyone else here also says) "I don't want to go back to a world where 90% of people had to be farmers" (because farming was so inefficient), that's another way of saying, the world that farming efficiencies gave us is richer / more preferable overall than the previous world. In other words, the economic surplus did not go exclusively or primarily to the richest.

I expect the same will be true for AI. I think our society should do more to help the displaced. But I do not want my grandchildren to live in a world where, 100 years from now, 90% of people are still doing jobs that could be done by a computer, but we choose for the computer not to do them. Just like I wouldn't want to have to be a farmer.

Sure, but the argument being made is that "productivity gains accrue to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth."

That is simply not true. Across the entire world, from rich countries to poor countries, economic development, driven in large part by technological development, has resulted in a dramatic improvement to everyone's quality of life.

https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun

The way some people talk about it, it's as though they wish they were middle class in the 1920s instead of in the 2020s. People are so. much. richer. today. In ways that really matter, like education, retirement, ability to travel the world. MEDICINE.

I get that it still sucks today. The only point I'm making is that it's false that the historical economic surplus has accrued "solely" (or even, mostly) to the wealthiest. It's not true.

Agreed, let's do that! Here is the economic history of the developing world over the past 70 years.

https://ourworldindata.org/history-of-poverty-has-just-begun

Pick any metric you care about: number of people living on less than $1/day, literacy, maternal mortality, access to birth control. It has dramatically improved in the developing world over the past 70 years or so.

I would question the premise that all or even most of the productivity gains of any past technological improvement have accrued to the benefit of solely those at the top of an enormous pile of wealth.

200 years ago 90% of Americans lived on farms. In the early 1900s, it was 40%. Today that number is 2%.

The economic surplus from that increase in productivity accrued to everyone in society, not just the wealthy. (The evidence for this is that we are all living at a higher standard of living today than we were in the early 1800s or 1900s.)

But certainly the positive supply shock was not great news for farmers, many of whom lost their jobs. In the case of AI, I'm asking us -- programmers -- not to make the mistake of saying "this is not a benefit for me, therefore it's not a benefit for society".

In a capitalist society, choices are made according to supply and demand.

In a world where there's a positive supply shock (in this case, there's a lot more programming available for purchase today than there was a year ago), supply goes up. We therefore expect the price for the good to decrease.

This has nothing to do with power or whether people care about xyz. It's a consequence of the economic system we live under.

You can desire to live under a different economic system! That's logically coherent. But if you want the laws of supply and demand not to apply to you, that's what you're asking for.

Honestly I'm getting tired of this narrative. People take the benefits of capitalism for granted (indeed most of us on this forum do very well for ourselves relative to the average person in our country and around the world), but we blame all of its downsides on "bad people".

Do we agree that moving towards a future that's somehow "more advanced" as compared to the present (i.e. isn't going back to the past) would likely require giving up some land, water, and energy? That is, that progress is always a trade-off?

We don't have to agree that an AI-powered future specifically is "more advanced". For example, transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables is IMO a future that looks "good and fair for regular people". But building solar panels requires energy and water, placing them requires lots of land, building batteries requires mining lithium which is bad for the local environment, building hydro power destroys ecosystems, etc.

I imagine you don't oppose this because it's overall better for humans and the planet. I'm just making the point that there are nontrivial trade-offs, and building anything requires the use of resources such as land, water, and energy.

If we're in agreement so far, then I think the main thing we're in disagreement about is whether AI is actually worth the cost. ("What does this 'future' do for us besides take our jobs?")

And to this I'd ask, how should we handle such disagreements in a free society? I may think that Mr. Beast recreating Squid Game was a profligate waste of human and non-human capital, just to make a buck. Or more seriously, I'm a vegetarian. Worldwide, meat and dairy production accounts for (very roughly) 80% of agricultural land use [1], 30% of agriculture's water use [2], and 15% of total human GHG emissions [3]. I don't think the benefit is worth the extreme cost.

People disagree with me about Mr. Beast and beef, though. They think that these are worth the cost to land, water, energy, and the planet overall.

My question is, how should we resolve disagreements of this kind, where one person thinks another person's actions are spending resources in a way that is not worth the return? It seems much larger than AI.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/global-land-for-agriculture [2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 [3] https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1634679

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

Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.

Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.

> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.

This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.

If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.

OK but the market intervention being discussed here does not create a free(er) market. Its intent and effect is the literal opposite.