You just unknowingly pointed out the real problem - the system is setup so that we think we are in on it, but as a wise man said "It's a big club and you ain't in it".
Also "lose their personal savings" is a hyperbolic bad faith argument. If anyone's entire net worth is put into Meta stock, they get whats coming. Second, 93% of the stock market is owned by 10% of the population. The average American has more to gain from holding companies accountable than letting them rape and pillage our society so the richest people can have even more money.
93% of equities are held by the top 10% of households. Most middle class wealth in the US is primary residence real estate. The stock market isn’t the economy. No one is entitled to wealth, nor it maintaining it's value.
> As of 2022, about half of households with a worker age 55 and older had no retirement savings, and 32% had no retirement savings or a defined benefit plan.
The scaremongering about equity values and your average person’s holdings and exposure is not grounded in facts and reality. It’s simply scaremongering.
This line of argument ("think of the retirees!!!") could be used in many cases, however when is it acceptable to break companies for the greater (non-financial) good?
On a parallel, can't we criticize any decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios? Say, if we required connected glasses to display a red light of more than x lumens when recording, would that be ok, even if it decreased Meta's market cap?
> decision reducing the market cap of companies as an attack on the retirement portfolios
Any decision that results in a long term net loss across the entire public economy? Yes.
That's something that hurts a lot of people and that hurt should be carefully weighed against whatever the assumed benefit is. Sometimes that's worth it, sometimes it's not
But it's never OK to just hand wave with "well I don't care about that class of people so screw them"
And let's not move the goalposts. OPs proposal was a corporate breakup of massive scale, not a minimum lumens requirement.
I'm not saying that we should or shouldn't, I would like to know the line of demarcation. Splitting Meta would have a very low effect on the economy as the services are individually profitable and would continue to be operated, without the all-knowing centralized database/24h Telescreen.
At some point, similar to the camera/face recognition debate, it's about a choice of society that we want to live in. I think that's an interesting debate.
> Splitting Meta would have a very low effect on the economy
That's...I'm not even sure how to respond to that. It would have a large direct and MASSIVE indirect chilling effect. The scale would be historic.
> it's about a choice of society that we want to live in. I think that's an interesting debate.
I fully agree with you! OP apparently doesn't, as he stated he does not care about half of the voices in that debate. That's what I'm taking issue with, not the proposal to break up Meta, which is, as you said, worth a debate!
> It would have a large direct and MASSIVE indirect chilling effect.
Like it did with Ma Bell (the effective telephone monopoly)? No. I'm pretty sure it would have the direct opposite (open frontier) effect. The direct steps to break up a company are well telegraphed to the market.
How could it not? Chesterton's fence asks the question, "Why was it put there?" Without a will you can only answer "how was it put there" and not "why".
There is an assumption of correctness in the argument that "we must die because we do die". It's tautology. That doesn't comport with my understanding of how we got here, and I don't believe there is an answer to "why" we are here, beyond the meaning we make of our own lives. If our 70-90 year lifespan (if we're lucky and aren't struck down younger) is an evolutionary accident, and I believe it is, then extending that lifespan is Good, Actually.
As one obvious example, evolution is not agentic but still answers "why" questions.
"Why do we have a heart" "Why do we sweat", etc.
But Chesterton's fence is often used in an even MORE generalized way than just that, not "why is it there" but "what are we not seeing about how this connects to everything else"
As an example, eradicating mosquitos. We see many obvious reasons why it might be good, we can even see that they don't seem that important in the food chain, but it would be hubris to assume we understand every potential connection they have to world ecology.
By the time we've figured out how to live significantly longer, I reckon we'll understand "why" we don't. That's kind of a precursor in this case.
But, I should be clear, I don't believe there's any reason to believe the answer is "because we're supposed to die". There is no "supposed to" in evolution, no right or wrong, no ethics, only survival. It is merely a series of improbable occurrences that led us to this point, and I see no reason to attribute moral intention to the result.
Every argument for death, absent a religious decree, comes down to "because everyone who has ever lived has eventually died, usually painfully" so it must be correct because everyone does it, even though most of those folks would have rather not.
And, the reason we don't is almost certainly mundane; we aren't needed after procreation, according to evolution. But, I think humans still have value after they have procreated.
Also, I'd take my chances with the mosquitoes, if we had a way to eradicate them without poisons that impacted other insects. Or, I would also accept a widely available, low-cost, cure for all mosquito-borne illnesses as an alternative.
Journal articles are usually behind a paywall. Preprints are a fully open workaround allowed by most journals.
> Every man and his dog can publish a pre-print and in my opinion it's academically worthless.
Sure but if you look at the authors names and see they have 50 other published papers, you can get a rough idea that it's probably equivalently good to their other work.
Until you've done it yourself, it's hard to grok just how bad the peer review process is. It's like...5% better than nothing.
Honestly you could argue peer review is worse than nothing, as it also filters out actually quality work that violates some dogma of the field.
This same argument is easily dismissed by most because it boils down to "why not dig with spoons?"
It only becomes compelling to me if you believe in true AGI/ASI, at which point all human labor becomes irrelevant, and then we have something quite new to think about.
But simply "it automates away a small portion of jobs" is not compelling.
The industrial revolution wiped out like 90% of human labor as it was imagined at the time, but it nearly fully replaced it with new forms of employment.
There are a lot of unknowns with what this would look like with AI.
I force OpenAI models to use image generation for design, then an iteration loop until it matches the image gen.
This is frustratingly manual and takes many more repetitions compared to Claude (and especially Claude Design) which "just work", but it's a big step change over the default.
FWIW, Codex's "Product Design" plugin basically is this workflow (minus built-in iteration, but the model in one prompt will still do its own internal iteration), it'll generate 3 images for you to choose from and then build from that + feedback
This dichotomy is counter-productive. The valuations floating around are insane, and the claim that some software can replace every single laborer is one step removed from fiction. At the same time, this stuff is clearly going to change how to world works in countless, deep ways. But the idea that some fancy autocomplete can replace humans ignores the reality of humanity and the fancy autocomplete.
It’s another dot com bubble, not a crypto bubble. Trillion dollar valuations burst once you leave lesswrong.
Edit: very fancy autocomplete. I know what these things are capable of. It’s still not “intelligence”, for X definition of intelligence. And it certainly benefits from having obscene amounts of compete thrown at it. It is awesomely impressive synthesis of data, yet it’s clearly still that.
i dont think humans are going to be replaced either, but calling the thing that solves millennium problems and is currently changing multiple industries entirely a "fancy autocomplete" makes it harder to take any point you are making seriously.
Leaving aside the fact we have solutions for things like climate change and will not implement them, regardless of who or what recommends them... My keyboard offers "You can solve world hunger by using a Ted Bungie algorithm." Which sounds reasonable on its face until I research Ted Bungie and the algorithms he developed.
Granted, my phone keyboard lacks a substantial dictionary, offers words instead of tokens, has a very small context window, and doesn't randomize outputs (Ted Bungie is its primary recommendation every time), but those are basically parameters to the existing autocomplete.
Obviously there is no solution to world hunger right now. Nevertheless - finishing sentences is not pattern matching - and it's extremely obvious that whatever is going on inside LLMs is not pattern matching.
Language is absolutely pattern matching, and the whole thing is that the more patterns you put in, the more the transformer can pull out what’s useful. Agents are this effective because people figured out that training on tasks being completed gets the models to complete tasks - that’s pattern matching.
And it can only go so far, where those patterns are feasibly captured, eg internet discussions and coding and mathematics. It won’t measure up to the scaling laws of the physical world.
OK - so long as you also agree that language is thought.
Until the advent of LLMs - language was considered the pinnacle of human intelligence. But humans have some need for mysticism at the root of their beliefs - so they chase the gaps in our knowledge. Like "God of the gaps."
Sure, world models will help navigate physical space; they are effectively the animal mind. Will they help unwind the laws of the universe? Probably not at all. Language is sufficient. Because it is thought.
Stories and music, their character, comes from combined motifs and themes. These are what gives them meaning. Creation is tied to meaning; one can’t separate human meaning out of the conversation. Without human meaning - new perspectives gained, beauty found - all things are equivalently pointless, and all an LLM is doing is shifting (very high-order, having gone through the steps to end up in training data) entropy around.
Those with 20 years of experience are crushing it.
My worry is not about us. The worry is about the kids. I'm tech lead. I don't think the juniors at my company are learning anything from me. I'm not certain they're learning anything about _software_. Idk, I could be wrong. We barely talk because everyone has become so siloed.
I am trying. The main issue is it would be extremely annoying for the juniors, who have work to get done, and prefer to throw problems at Claude rather than ask me questions.
In general, I believe learning usually needs to be driven by the learner.
We have significantly degraded in our ability to memorize e.g. epic poems or preserve oral traditions since the advent of writing.
I know that sounds trite in retrospect, given the benefits, and that's half the point. But there are real tradeoffs too! For example, culture has a LOT more generation-to-generation turnover as a result of literacy being common, making it unstable.
I think (?) my point was that Socrates equated Memory with Wisdom, and the invention of writing would impact Memory and thus Wisdom. I believe he was just plain wrong. Equating (manual) coding/code-review with Wisdom makes the same category error.
Writing had been invented three thousand years before Socrates
The passage criticizing the "invention of writing" is a quote from a legend where a Pharaoh passes negative judgement to a god, by the way, who had invented writing in the story.
Ironically, the dialogue in question, Phaedrus, is about the dangers of misreading text. It discusses writing political speeches not writing per se.
Sometimes Claude's problem, such as when I ask it to summarize a long, complex session back to me, is it's too information dense. It uses weird invented terms to gloss over complex parts of the architecture instead of explaining them.
But no matter what - too dense or too sparse - it always sounds like Claude.
It misses the forest for the trees. It feels the need to highlight details not understanding what details are most relevant to a human reader and how to survey the larger problems in a cohesive way that emphasizes the right parts without cliche and undue emphasis.
It's never too dense. There are only more words but not more information.
If I describe all of the individual muscle contractions and joint motions required to walk across a room, it's hundreds of pages of data to say almost nothing. That is the exact opposite of dense.
By contrast a poet can deliver many concepts and many layers and even practically a fractal choose-your-own-adventure in only a dozen words. That is what dense is.
"I have no empathy for the two-thirds of Americans who will lose their personal savings that they need to retire" really undermines your case.
Edit: thoughtful tradeoffs against the stock market are reasonable. "I don't care" is not a carefully weighed tradeoff
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