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Good food I can see as a luxury. How is exercise a luxury though? It seems like going for a walk or a run is available to almost everyone.

If anything it seems like those on the lower income level would be forced to be outside doing physical activity more than the wealthy.


> would be forced to be outside doing physical activity more

I have no citation, but I believe most low-income jobs in the US involve:

  * standing for long, long hours and not moving (cashiers)
  * sitting for long, long hours and not moving (call centers)


This is a really weird claim to me. It can’t be about the MRI itself, it must be about the surrounding politics or legal environment.

How can it ever be bad to have more objective data? Having a test result to ignore is still strictly better than not testing at all. You still have the option to ignore or discount the test results if you want to. If you’re forced to do otherwise that’s entirely a human problem, not a technological one.


> How can it ever be bad to have more objective data? Having a test result to ignore is still strictly better than not testing at all.

That’s why you base healthcare on data. And that’s what the data shows.


I still don’t get it.

If MRIs lead to unnecessary biopsies, then don’t do the biopsy. What exactly does the data show? If doing a test leads to an unnecessary biopsy, how can it be the test’s fault? Tests aren’t moral agents. The MRI machine can’t make any healthcare decisions for anyone.


> the "personhood" of what people generally find to be implausible bullshit generators

If this was the dividing line for personhood, many human beings wouldn't qualify as people.


So I need to ask the obvious question, why does it make sense to play this game “to win”?

Throughout human history, humans have been making up shibboleths to distinguish the in group from the out group. You can use skin color, linguistic accents, favorite sports teams, religious dogma, and a million other criteria.

But why? Why even start there? If we are on the verge of true general artificial intelligence, why would you start from a presumption of prejudice, rather than judging on some set of ethical merits for personhood, such as empathy, intelligence, creativity, self awareness and so forth?

Is it that you assume there will be an “us verses them” battle, and you want the battle lines to be clearly drawn?

We seem to be quite ready for AGI as inferiors, incapable of preparing for AGIs as superiors, and unwilling to consider AGIs as equals.


I think of the Turing test as just another game, like chess or Go. It’s not a captcha or a citizenship test.

Making an AI that can beat good players would be a significant milestone. What sort of achievement is letting the AI win at a game, or winning against incompetent players? So of course you play to win. If you want to adjust the difficulty, change the rules giving one side or the other an advantage.


I was confused by your first reply at first. I think that's because you are answering a different question from a number of other people. You're asking about the conditions under which and AI might fool people into thinking it was a human, whereas I think others are considering the conditions under which a human might consistently emotionally attach to an AI, even if the human doesn't really think it's real.


Yeah, I think the effect they are talking about is like getting attached to a fictional character in a novel. Writing good fiction is a different sort of achievement.

It's sort of related since doing well at a Turing test would require generating a convincing fictional character, but there's more to playing well than that.


That part of the movie actually makes perfect sense to me.

In the real world, the vast majority of people are quick to misinterpret scientific findings to reinforce their own biases. Gattaca is the story of a world where the "Others" in that society are those who are not genetically engineered to culturally acceptable standards.

IMHO it is a very human and believable part of the story that most of society will simply choose to go along with being bigoted against the out group, and not spend the extra time and effort to figure out if their biases are actually correct. In the story, Anton tells Vincent his parents died assuming that he had died young, because the doctors told them he would.


I suspect this is probably correct, thank you.


> You really think in <10 years

We have no idea how AI models will be in 10 years. At the speed the industry is moving is true AGI possible in 10 years? I think it would be beyond arrogant to rule out that possibility.

I would think that it's at least likely that AI models become better at Devops, monitoring and deployment than any human being.


I assume this is because they bundle their streaming service with Amazon Prime? I use it maybe once a year compared to considerably more often for Netflix.


It also seems to have to do with Netflix subscriber loss. Netflix tries to target a more left-wing, "woke" younger audience, and while that works for most tech companies Amazon has targeted sports and older demographics, which seems to be the larger market in the world of TV. Netflix has been bleeding US subscribers for a while while Amazon is growing


They have been essentially flat in the 73-74MM range since COVID started. Peak 75MM about a year ago. They announced the price hike to $15-20/mo about that time and slid down to 73MM again. Revenue was still up despite the price increase. https://www.statista.com/statistics/250937/quarterly-number-...

No comment on the woke theory. I just don’t see it in the numbers.


Thursday Night Football is a coup.


Indeed, but with Prime going down the toilet, this might not last.


Is there some new way Prime is "going down the toilet" as opposed to Amazon's retail arm in general?


Some people still report that they get Prime deliveries in 2 days or less but many people believe AMZN is no longer offering this to their ZIP code.


I not only believe this, I have been led to believe this by Amazon itself. It's not possible to get free 2 day shipping here any more, things typically take a week or more.


I can't disagree more with this take.

The benefits and salaries that Twitter employees get are just the free market at work. Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple don't pay big bucks and give huge perks because they're liberal, they do it because it's the only way to retain talented employees.

The take is hypocritical at it's core. Musk himself is an extremely privileged billionaire. Under the same principle that Musk deserves his wealth, Twitter employees deserve every penny of compensation and every hour of time off that they get.

Musk doesn't get that. He's going to utterly fail because the engineers at Twitter have other options. They don't have to work there. They worked there because they were getting competitive benefits and salary. Musk is cutting that just because he doesn't like the rate. Ok, fine, but don't be surprised when your company falls apart and you can't hire anyone as a result.


> (homicides are up like 60% compared to the pre-BLM days).

Where are you getting this statistic? A quick google search doesn’t show any such surge in the murder rate in the United States. 60% is a very large increase. I would expect this stat to have huge ripple effects if it were true.


The FBI has a nice analysis front end at https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/home

Here is the murder rate graph - note that the most recent year is flagged as not fully reported yet.

https://crime-data-explorer.fr.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crim...

Up 60% isn't far off, depending on when "pre-BLM days" starts, but it takes a big leap to connect it to BLM.

Also, if you look at the rate since the early 90's we are doing quite a bit better, so you get to pick your favorite trend line.


The stat has had huge ripple effects, especially in poorer urban communities. Checking the homicide rates on the FBI data explorer shows an increase of 50% which gels with my 60% ballpark figure (rates accounts for population increases in a way my homicide increases figure doesn't).

My 60% figure was grabbing the homicide count in 2014 from the FBI UCR (14,249 per https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-....) and comparing it with the stats from 2021 (22,900).


In some US cities there was a spike, which is probably what they are loosely referring to.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/what-caused-the-2020-h...


It’s a complete fabrication of course.


According to the FBI, there were 22,900 homicides in 2021 and 14,249 in 2014. If a ~60% increase isn't the right figure, what do you think it is, and how did you arrive at your conclusion?


Two mis-informations don't make a truth.


That argument doesn’t make sense to me. If someone has acknowledged that they will cheat when there are NO stakes, why does that make it less likely they will cheat if something is on the line?

If anything someone who is already known to cheat “just because” is even more likely to cheat when there is something to gain.


The claim in the original comment that I replied to was that Hans had admitted to cheating in "real, official, prize money online tournaments", which was when he was 12.

As for cheating and stakes I think it all depends. His claim is he cheated when he was 16 to boost his rating so he could player higher level opponents on stream and boost his career. If you accept that claim it would make sense that he rationalized it that he was just cheating to get to his "true" Elo and stopped cheating once he got there. Now Chess.Com seems to believe that he cheated beyond that but they haven't specified more at this point.


How can a game be no-stakes and also rating-boosting?

It sounds like he's saying he cheated to get to where he was going faster, but that he would have gotten there eventually so it's fine.

It would be like Armstrong saying he only cheated during trials and training.


Well steroids and doping are different because they effect your body but sure, if Armstrong had cheated during trials with something like a small motor but not during the actual tour it would have tarnished his legacy but I don't think it would have ruined it like his cheating did.


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