22 Comments

In what parallel universe is The Economist, "Moderate Right?" Maybe it was 20 years ago

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To be fair, it was grading a single op-ed, but I read the op-ed the other day, and it isn't moderate right either- just warning the Biden Administration and the Democrats of their risks in supporting the open border the way they are.

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I fail to see why it matters whether what you describe is labeled moderate right or moderate left. Either way there are many on the right who favor well regulated immigration.

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The essaygrader rated it moderate right, not me. The essay itself isn't, though- the essay grader misjudged it, and probably because the algorithm simply assumes anyone opposed to the open border policies or writes about it in a critical way has to be on the right.

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I don't know anything about the article other than you saying it mentions risks to open border. That doesn't sound "campus-rag 'radical' " to me.

How does a position become

"campus-rag 'radical' "

without being something akin to open border? And what's the difference between moderate right and moderate left on this?

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Correct. I continued a gift subscription I got in my youth for two decades and used to look forward to the print edition and read the whole thing. There was a turn from moderate right to center around 2006, but it went "moderate left" during Obama's candidacy and never looked back.

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Feb 4Edited

I stopped getting economist via the job shortly after I retired in 2019. I guess it and I were both moderate left on most social issues (still far from woke) but I never saw it as left on economic and financial issues. Maybe it had a more favorable view of govt than me but I don't honestly remember on that one.

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Guessing you just skipped over every little bit they put in there on "climate change" etc.?

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I don't remember exactly where they stand on that but am sure it's a little left of me. They surely see more reason to be proactive than me. That said, I don't remember them assuming the worst or misrepresenting the likely consequences. Unless one sees climate change as a non-issue, they don't seem too far off.

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The Economist has come to have something of a Jeckyll & Hyde syndrome. For a well written, rational discussion of various things it is still a go-to publication but when it comes to any objective, critical analysis of our current 'social liberal' orthodoxies.....it suddenly entirely loses all perspective and becomes mere campus-rag 'radical'. Sad to say.

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What do you think it is now?

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Whether the economy is real or simulated (EMs a la Hanson or Virtual Reality for the masses) presumably it will require energy. We have "only" a few hundred years of exponential growth left before our waste heat alone would ruin the biosphere. Ergo, the economy must be some or any of stagnant/much slower growing, non-energy based, or non-biological, and this must happen within 1 or 2 hundred years.

https://tmurphy.physics.ucsd.edu/papers/limits-econ-final.pdf

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Yes. If one makes absurd assumptions, one can get a prediction. Doesn't make the prediction right.

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I don't think I nor the author are making a prediction so much as saying 2.3% energy consumption growth for much longer is indeed an absurd assumption.

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There we go.

Why did you pick 2.3% energy consumption growth?

What assumption(s) tie that to economic growth?

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You lost me in the first paragraph:

the biggest LLMs. 1E13 tokens is pretty much all the quality text publicly available on the Internet.

What is an LLM? What is an 1E13 token, let alone a 1E13?

When I read texts in Chinese I expect to look up maybe two or three characters, but English is my native language.

Sorry! It's probably a great post....

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https://nypost.com/2024/02/04/lifestyle/inside-cybrothel-the-worlds-first-ai-brothel-using-sex-dolls/

Looks like porn will beat edu for making money with combined VR, sex dolls, and AI.

Once a person is enjoying as many orgasms daily as he or she* can, it’s hard to see 30% “growth in orgasms”. The Aden Barton note seems similarly click-bait-ish, but is a good question about limits to growth. The real world limits, not to mention aging populations, will insure it’s less than 30%, yet much higher than 2% seems likely. UBI & 20 or even 10 hr work weeks will likely become irresistible to ask for. That’s a reason to get practice with a govt Job Gurantee, instead. Even if only 20 hr/week.

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"The Economist — Moderate Right"

has endorsed the Dem pres candidate at every US election since 2004. is pro gay marriage, pro open borders, pro abortion, pro virtually every us foreign intervention. had Trump derangement syndrome that would put any NYT histrionic columnist to shame.

"moderate right" . sure. ok. have fun with that.

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The CredAlable post mentions the difficulty they have in identifying libertarian writings. I left the following suggestion:

A more inclusive approach to representing political ideologies, especially for incorporating libertarian perspectives, could involve transitioning from a traditional left-right continuum to a two-dimensional x/y scatter plot. This model plots beliefs about the government's role in both economic and social freedoms. The vertical axis represents the degree of support for social freedoms, like free speech and gay marriage, while the horizontal axis gauges belief in economic freedom, encompassing aspects like property rights and tax policies. In this framework, editorial positions in the upper left quadrant would be categorized as 'liberal,' signifying strong social freedoms but more economic regulation. Conversely, the lower right quadrant represents 'conservative' views, favoring economic freedom but more social regulation. Significantly, the upper right quadrant highlights 'libertarian' stances, advocating high degrees of both economic and social freedoms."

This revision aims to make the explanation more concise and clear, emphasizing the distinctiveness of each quadrant in relation to libertarianism.

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Yan LeCun is no idiot, but he raises an important observation without following the train of thought far enough, perhaps.

So, here's my thinking: does 'how the world works' scale from small physical objects to large organizations in the same way? What would it take for an intelligence, artificial or otherwise, to learn by fumbling experience (trial and error) at scales that would be required to train it on large scales, like managing a corporation? If we train an intelligence on smaller scales, the lessons don't necessarily hold faithfully; but training at very large scales could be catastrophic, no? Too big to fail and all that? Seems like AI should be trapped in the same place as human executives, bureaucrats, and so on... or am I just completely off base?

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"...the AI alignment problem is simply a variation on the human alignment problem" - bingo. Hit the nail on the head. And how have we been doing on this human alignment problem for the last 50,000 years?

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Moderate Left (at least)

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