MiStickGuy

A stick figure attempting to maximize global utility. Mostly retweets stuff for personal reference.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease.

This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit.

The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London.

A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box.

These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel.

They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains.

They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep.

Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”:

> “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.”

—

The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates.

It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption.

SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins).

The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill.

With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment.

Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two.

It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place.

All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now.

That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective.

If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

[Mitt Romney @MittRomney]

Our highest and most urgent national priority should be AI safeguards. The risks of AI weapons, pathogens, mass unemployment, surveillance, and even extinction must not continue to be largely ignored.

[NBC News @NBCNews]

A flesh-eating parasite that had been kept out of U.S. livestock for decades has been detected in Texas, threatening the nation’s cattle industry and food supply at a time when prices are already high. https://t.co/p011Q4crOe

[Stuart Buck @stuartbuck1]

@TECleveland @cremieuxrecueil Despite some bogus grants, a lot of government is like this cartoon. I bet this "small team" would find a line item for "screwworm sterilization" and delete it, not knowing that they just devastated American farming: https://t.co/OAnAkxDSEK

[BBC News (World) @BBCWorld]

Flesh-eating screwworm arrives in US with first case detected in Texas cattle https://t.co/VwFx8tm3UE

[tautologer @tautologer]

asking an llm how many letters are in a word is like asking a person what wavelength of light a color is

[dave kasten @David_Kasten]

But I was told they were stochastic parrots

[Agus 🔸 @austinc3301]

I find it incredibly funny that this article turned out to be part of an astroturfing operation, which involved AIs posing as reporters for a fake news site, all ostensibly run by a PR firm working for the pro-AI lobby

[Sen. Bernie Sanders @SenSanders]

Uncontrolled AI poses a severe danger to all of humanity.

On Wednesday, I'll be hosting a discussion with leading AI scientists from the US and China about the need for international cooperation against this existential threat. This is an enormously important issue. Join us.

[Helen Toner @hlntnr]

Not the line of questioning I was expecting in a hearing about Chinese IP theft, but I'm glad senators are starting to really get why "we must beat China!" is really nowhere near a complete plan for how to make sure AI goes well.

---

Transcript:
HAWLEY: Ms. Toner, can I just come back to something that I think you said in response to Senator Durbin. You said to him that, regarding American AI companies, you said that it is hard to believe but nevertheless true that American AI companies are working as hard and as fast as they can to try to develop technology that will displace many millions of workers and potentially pose existential risks. Now that's my gloss, maybe you wanna correct the record exactly as you said it before. I thought that was very interesting and very important. Could you just reiterate that for us?

TONER: Yes. AI is a very fast-moving field, and I think it is important that as we think about what AI's implications are for our society, for our civilization, we don't merely look at the AI systems that we have today—chatbots, starting to be agents that can help a little bit with some professional tasks—but instead we take seriously the goals of the companies that are building these systems.

Over the past 10 or 20 years, it's gone from a very abstract idea that we might build AI that can outperform humans at any intellectual task, to a pretty concrete idea that some of the most well-capitalized companies in the history of the planet are driving towards as fast as they can. They may fail! It may turn out to be harder than they think to build systems that are that capable. Personally, I'm skeptical of some of the extremely short timelines that they name, saying we might have these superintelligent AI systems within, you know, one to three years. But it seems so clear that there's a real possibility that they build these systems within three years, 10 years. If they build it within 10 years, that's when my daughter is entering high school. That's not very long. That is an extremely radical thing to be trying to do, to build computer systems that can outperform humans, that may escape the control of humans, and the companies are telling us they're doing it, and I think we don't take them seriously, and we should.

HAWLEY: These same companies often say, and often in front of this committee and to this body, that it's absolutely vital that they succeed at whatever it is they're doing on that particular day, in order so that we can beat China. You know, they're our great American national champions and we have to beat China. My concern is based on what you've just testified to and what I've heard others testify to, it sounds an awful lot like the goals that they have in mind, that these companies, these CEOs have in mind, are every bit as nefarious. In fact, if these same goals were held by a foreign adversary, we would say this is an incredible threat to our national security, we'd never allow a foreign corporation to try and pursue such plans at the expense of American workers, at the expense of American families, and yet these companies, our own companies so to speak, are doing it. Let me just ask it this way: Will it do us any good if these American AI companies are able to pursue their designs without any hindrance? Will it do any good that we beat China if in fact they succeed in displacing millions of American workers, gobbling up all of Americans' data, completely destroying our IP system, etc.?

TONER: I think the way I've heard this put best is: Right now, the way that we build AI and the level of control we have over it, which is not great, the winner of any AI race between the US and China is the AI. And I think we need to be working to make sure that is not the case. I think it is very important that the US AI sector remains ahead of the Chinese AI sector, but if that's at the expense of AI overrunning the entire planet, then that is, you know, that hasn't benefited us.

HAWLEY: Yeah, that sounds entirely sensible to me and I just have to say I don't really have any interest in winning an AI race in which the goal, the victory rather, the prize for success is to become like China. Is to become a surveillance state. Is to become a place where there is no private property any longer, where nothing is personal, nothing can be protected, nothing can be owned by any individual. Why in the world would we want that in the United States of America? I mean, if the prize is to destroy everything that makes us Americans, why would we compete in that game? It seems very dangerous to me. Let me ask you something else about competition with China though. You also testified to Senator Durbin that the best way, if I remember correctly, the best way to constrain China's ability to match us in AI development is to constrain the hardware to which they have access. That seems to be an important point to me, can you just elaborate?

TONER: Yes. I think there's different levers of what goes into having a competitive AI ecosystem, and many of them, talent, data, algorithmic ideas, are very difficult to control. We're very fortunate that we're in a situation where the most advanced hardware is produced by American companies, is designed by American companies. And I think we, if you look at the, China is growing their capacities here, but they're not growing them nearly fast enough to meet their own domestic demand, nor are the US companies to be clear. So we can control chips to China and not forgo any profits, not forgo any revenue because the demand for those chips is so great.

I'll also call your attention to semiconductor manufacturing equipment, what goes in the fabrication facilities. I think it's even more strategically clear that we should not be allowing China access to advanced tools. That is something that has gotten lip service from the past three administrations but enforcement has been very weak. And I think ensuring that the most advanced lithography tools, the most advanced design software, other aspects of the semiconductor supply chain are not being exported to China to let them build their own indigenous supply chain is also one of the simplest and most important levers we have available.

HAWLEY: Let me just conclude by saying that I think it is absolutely vital that we bend this technology, this AI technology which is upon us whether we like it or not, that we bend it to the good of the American worker and the American family. And I am firmly of the view that this is not just going to happen magically. That if we just stand back and just wait to see what will happen, it's not going to be good for American workers, it's not going to be good for American families. We've got to make a choice as a society to make it so. And this is the time to make that choice right now.

https://t.co/xnuVcYwCNg

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page.

It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection.

Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do.

Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades.

The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water.

It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left.

The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero.

When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

[Jack Lindsey @Jack_W_Lindsey]

Before limited-releasing Claude Mythos Preview, we investigated its internal mechanisms with interpretability techniques. We found it exhibited notably sophisticated (and often unspoken) strategic thinking and situational awareness, at times in service of unwanted actions. (1/14)

[MiStickGuy @stick_mi]

@krishnanrohit Pushing something you don't believe in for its second-order effects is not a scalable strategy

[Ori Nagel @ONagel33303]

"In a sane world, what happens is the leadership of the United States sits down with the leadership in China and leadership around the world to work together so that we don't go over the edge and create a technology which could perhaps destroy humanity. "
— Bernie Sanders

[Trevor Levin @trevposts]

A very clear and concise explanation of the ASI alignment problem, maybe the state-of-the-art for the 5-minute scale

[autumn @paramitanoia]

did lesswrong ever predict that the first big challenge to alignment would be "the us government puts a gun to your head and tells you to turn off alignment"

[MiStickGuy @stick_mi]

@waitbutwhy overweights internet culture war topics, underweights normal financial concerns. the average american cares more about egg prices than any of this

[Tomás Bjartur @BjarturTomas]

https://t.co/G2JGpbAIZF

[Ryan Moulton @moultano]

Oil is the most Lovecraftian thing that actually exists. You're telling me that there's a black ichor under the earth, made from the ancient dead, whose burning can realize all the dreams of man but only at the price of slowly returning the earth to its primordial state?

[kaisa @kuuhulluutta]

got my bf copies of the zhuangzi in english & traditional chinese (bc sadly a good bilingual edition doesn't seem to exist) as an early xmas present & nothing could have prepared me for how insane all the translated names are