thenondualtankie

Since when does supporting the death penalty equate to fascism?

Leo, you've said that the number of attractive women you meet is the #1 factor for success. But you've also said that you need to behave in a highly specific way for pickup to work, and you often say you need an experienced wing. I'm wondering which one it is. Is it enough to just put yourself out there to women as much as possible? For example through new age events. As well as gigs/raves/festivals of course. Is it enough to maximise the number of connections you make / try to make?

But will just showing up lead to performance?

This post is especially for engineers / technically minded types, but please chip in anyway if you're not in that category. In a lot of circles it's considered bad to work for so-called 'defense' companies. You're directly contributing to the death of Middle Eastern children. I find myself largely in this camp. But is it always true that designing weapons is immoral? Surely not, because bad guys do exist. Under what circumstances would you agree to work on weapons systems? What country would you want to be working for, or what kind of country? Further, should one just take the 'the game is the game' attitude and simply follow the money? Defense pays. And the challenges are very interesting from a technical perspective.

It's a good question. I think it's possible for the West to revoke support for the Israeli operation. It happened with apartheid South Africa, despite the economic and geopolitical gains. The modus operandi for all geopolitical powers is self-interest, but there are cases where this seems to break down.

Your neighborhood social democrat Kyle Kulinski has made a video on term limits. He says he's mostly against term limits because it can lead to authoritarians like Putin or Erdogan staying in power for too long. But too long according to whom? Definitely not according to the Russian or Turkish population! A bigger danger than democratically elected tyrants is undemocratically elected tyrants. And arguably that's exactly what the USA faces today, with undemocratic state apparatus such as the CIA wielding immense power. Many members of the CIA have said that the CIA views Presidents as temporary officers who come and go, while the CIA themselves stay in power. In fact, there have been cases where secrets have been withheld from Presidents: JFK was allegedly not fully briefed on the Bay of Pigs invasion, for instance. Here is a great video on the so-called 'deep state', which explores the issue of undemocratic power in the United States. Term limits are stupid because they lead to a lack of proper leadership and vision, since the leadership and vision has to get shuffled around every 8 years. As a result, undemocratic state apparatus fills that gap and provides the missing leadership and vision for us.

Very interesting point. I think more specifically we'd need to make ourselves 100x more outgoing. Our brains work with tribes of a few hundred people at most - if we scaled this number up to 100,000 we'd end up with a much more cohesive society. Then why have any concentration of power and wealth in the first place? You need to concentrate power and wealth to do anything meaningful in society. And if it's the case that your society needs some concentration of power, you may as well operate that through democracy - otherwise, as I said, undemocratic institutions will concentrate the power for you.

These AI are yes-men But yes it's amazing for brainstorming. The lack of bias they have is incredible. They've seen so many perspectives in their dataset that they tend to take the higher perspectives.

That's a good point. Any other examples? I think branding places a constraint on production, since not everyone is allowed to produce that brand. And as I said constraints in production can lead to over-valued goods. I could be pulling at straws here.

The labor theory of value asserts that the true value of goods and services in the economy comes from the amount of labor that society decided to allocate to that good or service. Here's Adam Smith's argument for why this is the case: Basically, he's saying that the cost of a good is based on its true, physical cost: the effort that went into it. Labor is arguably the fundamental resource that society has. Society simply decides to allocate labor based on its needs and desires; this is usually done automatically with market forces. This labor then produces the ultimate good or service that we want. If a pile of mud takes a thousand units of labor to produce, its value would still be zero because society would never bother allocating labor to something so useless. If it did, then market forces would simply drive it out. Another example of how this works is when there's a highly demanded item but not many units being produced. This of course means that its price will be higher than you might expect from its labor value. But the fact that its over-valued means there is a market gap (an investment opportunity), and if there are no constraints in place such as lack of raw materials, then the market would simply produce more of the good and return the price to 'normal' - something that reflects its labor content. There are issues though, for instance some things appreciate in value without any labor going into it, for example aging wine. Or alternatively, if two crops require the same amount of labor, but one requires better land, then the one that requires better land will end up having higher value. My opinion is that the crux of the matter is 'what is the literal cost to society' - this includes labor but not only labor. The fact that we needed better land is a cost to society, since we didn't use that better land for something else. We had to give it up.

@Leo Gura So would you say your mind is on the loose or strict end? You seem like quite a logical person but you also have all these mystical experiences. And your psychedelic tolerance is much lower than most.

I live in London. How do I take advantage of this? I don't want to go solo clubbing, nor do I know anyone that I could go with. Right now my main idea is to go to a lot of new age events. Breathwork sessions is an appealing one. There's also the psychedelic society which does events and meetups. These events are usually super expensive though, like £40+ for a single session.

How did you do this back in the day?

like if you wanna do something several times a week it adds up really fast

There seems to be this strange delusion among programmers that AI has somehow plateaued. There's no evidence that AI has plateaued. The current best systems use only around 1-2 trillion parameters and were trained with GPUs from 2022. What will AI look like once we have 10 trillion parameters? 100 trillion? And what about compute, you think compute is just done progressing? Stop being so blind.

I think getting them to open source the models would be a big step. You'd still need the compute power to be able to run the models though. Which might end up being cheap enough in the end.

I agree with Leo 100%, not that my opinion particularly matters. AI has no survival agenda, it simply acts as it is trained. If the desire to destroy humanity isn't trained into the AI, it won't magically start doing it. Unbridled capitalism is the biggest risk associated with AI.

Guys... It's ChatGPT. Generative Pretrained Transformer. WTF is ChatGTP? Generative Transformer, Pretrained?

https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1akrpxk/well_didnt_have_this_one_on_my_bingo_card_tucker/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 TL;DR Tucker announced he's in Moscow and he's going to interview Putin. He says his intentions are for America to see the other side of the story. One part of me thinks this could be good to make people in the West less biased. The other part thinks that it's simply going to push people into having new biases, or strengthening their old ones. In theory it sounds like something that should make people less biased but that's not always how things like this work.

The role of government is much more than just providing physical security. It's to make sure society runs effectively. The point of society is to build material wealth (this holds true until we have superabundance). That means the point of government is to maximize the building of material wealth. This involves everything the government does, including the justice system, education, military (so yes physical security), whatever. If there were no justice in a capitalist system, then some companies would have an unfair advantage over others. This means that the disadvantaged companies cannot produce as much value. The result is less overall value production than if all companies had a level playing field. That's why you need things like the prevention of false advertising (as well as a huge range of other laws that make capitalism more fair). Because otherwise, companies providing real value by not doing false advertising are disadvantaged. This is bad for society. Education increases the amount of value that individuals can provide to society. That's the only reason it exists. And then of course we have private property protection (as well as other forms of physical protection) as you mentioned. But there's a lot more to government than just this.

If small businesses were more efficient at producing economic value than mega corporations, then we wouldn't have mega corporations in the first place. Mega corporations are highly effective at creating economic value.

Allow me to respond to you @Bobby_2021. Currently the prime objective of government is for corporations to run effectively. The whole point of government is the effective creation of economic value. Literally nothing else matters from the POV of society, especially at our current level of development. Hence government is literally just a tool for corporations to dominate the world. Because that's currently the most efficient way of creating economic value. So to say that it's just government to be blamed is stupid IMO. The government's main job is to represent corporations, which it does very effectively.

Could you elaborate on the difference between consciousness and awareness? Isn't this just semantics?

Hi Yimpa. Most of the GPTs are basically useless in my opinion. You get the same benefit by prompting the default system yourself. However, 'Consensus AI' is a pretty useful one because it lets you search a database of academic papers. I find it more useful to create my own GPTs as I need them. For example, I created a psychedelic assistant GPT that helps with things like testing, ROA and general knowledge around psychedelics. The main benefit is that it gets straight to the point without preceding its message with a thousand safety and legal warnings.

I use ChatGPT quite heavily and very rarely reach the message limit