I have been saying for years that the great gap for ML is that it isn't in space. Glad Google finally caught up with me.

He is of course 100% correct. There is no way to stop RSI without truly global cooperation and enforcement. And the incentives are such that global cooperation will never happen. So what Klein and others are really discussing is depriving the U.S. of the benefits of RSI while other nations race ahead. Even if China and the U.S. were to officially ban RSI, the compute would simply migrate to friendlier jurisdictions. In any case, enforcement, as Cowen correctly points out, would be nearly impossible.

None of this is to say that labs and researchers shouldn't take alignment extremely seriously and dedicate major resources to it. But, again, incentives. The lab(s) that allocates more resources to "intelligence" than alignment will have a compounding marginal advantage. And they all know that and are acting accordingly.

> purchased milk in a completely sealed plastic container, and it was rancid when I opened it

I've lived in the U.S. for 40 years in 8 different states and twice as many cities. Never once have I experienced this.

That’s like saying the goal of the process is the process. It is a recursive definition and a pointless, expensive endeavor.

I assume the writer is happy to speak for their own community but, quite wisely, unwilling to make unfounded claims about all other communities.

But, yes, the strawberry is medicinal—everywhere.

And all of that (along with the serious problems in how WMF/Wikipedia operate) is why I no longer donate to WMF.

Clearly, they don't need my money. But if they ever want to bring me back into the fold, they need to adopt Larry Sanger's prescriptions. This unionization seems likely to push WMF (IMO) further in the wrong direction.

I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union?

I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses.

The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?

I can't think of a single unionized organization that is run as well as or better than union-free organizations. Unionized companies all seem to be crippled by bureaucracy and unable to improve performance and output.

Professional sports is probably a good counter example. Major League Baseball, for example, treats the players better than any other baseball league around the world and most of the gains were achieved through collective bargaining.

Or how about Hollywood writers? The Writers Guild of America writers are responsible for most of the most successful movies and TV of the past decade or two (maybe longer). WGA writers are treated better than just about any other screenwriters around the world.

The daycare my parent friends go to can’t retain a teacher for longer than a year or two. I hear stories all the time about the disruption and emotional distress abruptly losing a teacher with a 1-2 weeks notice causes.

The PreK teacher at the local public school has been there over 10 years at the same school and has a masters degree. Union, of course.

I’m sure the public school system is more expensive overall. You get what you pay for.

Kaiser Permanente, Fire Sprinkler Pipe Fitters, HVAC Tin Knockers many others…

My experience is that unions very often make things stupider and less efficient.

I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen)

And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now.

See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t...

Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been.

I would submit the idea that a lot of union reforms that have been made to laws in the US have been specifically designed to make unions less attractive and less incentivized toward positive outcomes.

Which laws? And why?

Here's a big paper on the subject: https://files.epi.org/pdf/215908.pdf

I'm not sure it touches on the exact concept I said, though. I've read about it somewhere else that I can't find right now.

Thanks for the reference. I am interested in your specific perspective as opposed to someone else's (much less else the received opinions from The Experts).

Sounds plausible!

We can’t even execute heinous murderers effectively. What makes you think this would be any better?

It is truly amazing how hostile some of these "free thinkers" are to ideas and speech that are in conflict with their own. Kind of makes you wonder who is actually fascist.

Why are these books "rare"? Because no one wants them. Why then are we up in arms over their destruction? These sensational headlines make it seem as though a copy of the Codex Sassoon 1053 is being destroyed, when in fact these are just obscure books that no one cares about.

The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.