I think that there’s more to learn from history than just actions and consequences. There is “Who should I be?” rather than just “What should I do in this situation?” You can see what sorts of people tended to do good, and part of that is recognizing what was they thought was bad and what was simply in accordance with the morality of the time; disappointing, perhaps, from our modern point of view but not the sign of a flaw greater than the one we have ourselves when we fail to morally innovate.

I also think that there is advancement in morality, not just arbitrarily changes like in fashion. Maybe some things were better in the past (many other people think to think so) but overall life for almost everyone is better now than it has ever been and that’s because of progress not just in technology but in the rules that we have for relating to each other. I expect that I could probably be convinced that the people of the future were right and I was wrong if I knew what the future was, because I think that the future will probably be better than the present.

That’s why I place so much emphasis on moral humility. I expect that somewhere, I’m making a mistake. I might agree with some modern-day zealots in principle, but because I’m not sure that I’m right, I don’t agree with their methods. That, I think, is the most important lesson of history.

I don’t get it. Vance was in the Marines and while he wasn’t in combat, he presumably got basic training on firearms. I know this is a parody but what is it trying to parody?

Well technically the barbarian can only rage for a limited time without having to rest too (although he’s a lot more dangerous without rage than a caster without spells is). Would a rogue have no limited resource other than hitpoints?

The topic of judging historical figures by modern standards is an important one and actually something that I support discussing in school. (But, for the record, not in the way this article describes.) Im not saying “teaching” because I think there’s no one right answer, but the fact that prevailing moral standards were different in the past should be considered. (As should the implication that some of the things we do now will be considered wrong in the future.) If I were teaching it, my intent would be to present celebrating the accomplishments of historical figures without dismissing the bad things they did as one reasonable option, and learning the facts about history but choosing to celebrate only those people who acted entirely according to the students’ modern moral standards as another.

I would also like to include the idea of intellectual humility while making decisions under uncertainty. Often you have to make a decision even thought you know you might be making a mistake, so how should the fact that you might be wrong affect what you decide? What might historical figures have done differently if they weren’t sure that they were right? The intent is to have children realize that it can be a bad idea to do something if the consequences of being wrong are awful, even if you think you’re probably not wrong. But maybe that’s too much moralizing for public school…

I continue to fail to understand how the full documents are simultaneously too devastating for Trump to release them but not devastating enough for Biden to have released them.

It’s straight to Hell for you, no Purgatory.

I think that’s what I was actually thinking of but I mixed it up.

I read an article once about a guy who got a NO PLATE licence plate and ended up being automatically blamed whenever a cop wrote in that a car had no licence plate. I wonder what 0X00000 would do.

I am very wary of explanations of the world which emphasize “the people who disagree with this are evil” or “the people who disagree with this are stupid”. If only people weren’t deliberately trying to do harm or remain ignorant, they would of course agree with the speaker. This leaves no room for different (but reasonable) priorities, different tolerances for risk, different trusted authorities, etc. Plus, when evil and stupid do exist, they always think that their opponents are actually the evil, stupid ones. So an individual ought to remain humble: if he’s sure that he’s on the side of God fighting a clear battle against evil, that itself is evidence that he isn’t.

most proposed ideas that haven’t been tried at the relevant scale before probably legitimately would not work very well

Before you can even get to those, you have to stop all the people who are proposing ideas that have been tried, over and over, and didn’t work every one of those times.

Watch out, you’re straying close to heresy.

In relation to the process of digestion, the Catholic Church’s teaching has been expressed in this way: “The substance of Christ’s body is not subject to processes of digestion or to any chemical reactions. The qualities of bread of course behave in their normal way, undergoing a change as they are affected by digestion. Our Lord’s substantial presence ceases as these qualities cease to retain those characteristics proper to bread.”

You can have non-alphanumeric characters on license plates? What do the cops do if they need to catch you? Do they put out an APB for emoticons?

My own hypothesis is different. People do view politics as affecting their lives, but many of them view intellectuals as out of touch, uninterested, or even hostile and they want someone in charge who isn’t one of those people. It’s the “good guy to have a beer with” sentiment which helped elect GWB but taken to an extreme. In this extreme, “owning the libs” is inherently good, not just a means to an end.

I’m not sure “intellectuals” is the right word here. The people I have in mind are college-educated but that’s not all there is to it. They are the the sort of people who Trump calls the “deep state” but they’re not just government employees - they’re judges who say that something is unconstitutional, but they’re also HR heads that say something is racist or scientists who say something is harmful to the environment. Large parts of the public now don’t just lack respect for them but actively hate them.

I wonder about Musk sometimes. He often sounds downright deranged, but so does Trump and Trump has actually been very successful at using social media to spread his message and win over supporters. I know I’m in a bubble where people don’t respect behavior like theirs, but what if outside this bubble their behavior is actually a winning political strategy?

This creates urgency while potentially insulating OpenAI from criticism—acknowledging the bubble exists while positioning his company’s infrastructure spending as different and necessary.

I don’t find things that most corporate leaders say in contexts like this particularly interesting. Altman is willful but he’s also rational enough not to make any public statements that he and his marketing department haven’t reviewed thoroughly. He’ll never accidentally confess to anything. Even when he acknowledges problems, he does so with a plan to have OpenAI make the best of the situation and if acknowledging those problems wasn’t intended to help OpenAI somehow then he wouldn’t have done it.

I’m not saying that ice cream is healthier than a normal dinner, just that if I really crave something sweet then the cost to my health of eating it periodically is actually quite low, whereas the cost of some other desserts (baked sweets are often the worst offenders) is relatively high. That means that a lot can be gained simply by replacing one dessert with a different, equally tasty dessert. Hence my ice cream advocacy.

Your points are valid, but I think that building AI has benefits beyond simply enabling people to use that AI. It advances the state of the art and makes even more powerful AI possible. Still, it would be good to know about the amortized cost per query of building the AI in addition to the cost of running it.

I don’t see why this argument works better against AI than it does against microwaves. Those are used hundreds of millions of times a day too.

With regard to sugar: when I started counting calories I discovered that the actual amounts of calories in certain foods were not what I intuitively assumed. Some foods turned out to be much less unhealthy than I thought. For example, I can eat almost three pints of ice cream a day and not gain weight (as long as I don’t eat anything else). So sometimes instead of eating a normal dinner, I want to eat a whole pint of ice cream and I can do so guilt-free.

Likewise, I use both AI and a microwave, my energy use from AI in a day is apparently less than the energy I use to reheat a cup of tea, so the conclusion that I can use AI however much I want to without significantly affecting my environmental impact is the correct one.