For this iteration I will exclude discussions involving college or college admissions.

There has been a lot of that since the last time I did one of these, along with much that I need to be careful with lest I go out of my intended scope. It makes sense to do that as its own treatment another day.

Bullying

Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school. Thread is extensive, these are the highlights translated into my perspective. A lot of it is that a bully has experience and practice, they know how to work the system, they know what will cause a response, and they are picking the time and place to do something. The victim has to respond in the moment, and by responding [...]

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Outline:

(00:22) Bullying

(02:34) Truancy

(03:56) Against Active Shooter Drills

(05:14) Censorship

(06:32) Woke Kindergarden

(09:01) Tracking

(10:43) The Case Against Education

(13:56) Home Schooling

(14:54) Despair

(17:02) Goals

(19:02) Taking the Developing World to School

(26:05) Primary School

(27:46) Guessing the Teacher's Password

(28:26) Correcting the Teacher's Incentives

(29:58) Mathematics

(31:08) Let Kids Be Kids

(32:27) Mandatory Work We Encourage

(34:03) Mandatory Work We Discourage

(35:32) Air Quality Matters

(36:18) School Choice

(39:01) Full Access to Smartphones Is Not Good For Children

(47:17) Lifetime Learning

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As always, a lot to get to. This is everything that wasn’t in any of the other categories.

Bad News

You might have to find a way to actually enjoy the work.

Greg Brockman (President of OpenAI): Sustained great work often demands enjoying the process for its own sake rather than only feeling joy in the end result. Time is mostly spent between results, and hard to keep pushing yourself to get to the next level if you’re not having fun while doing so.

Yeah. This matches my experience in all senses. If you don’t find a way to enjoy the work, your work is not going to be great.

This is the time. This is the place.

Guiness Pig: In a discussion at work today:

“If you email someone to ask for something and they send you an email trail showing [...]

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Outline:

(00:13) Bad News

(04:23) Patriots and Tyrants

(07:31) Asymmetric Justice Incarnate

(08:55) Loneliness

(11:50) Get Involved

(12:32) Government Working

(22:31) Crime and Punishment

(30:27) Squatters Should Not Be Able to Steal Your House

(33:17) El Salvador

(40:14) Our Criminal Justice Problem With Junk Science

(45:43) Variously Effective Altruism

(55:26) Technology Advances

(58:07) You Need More Screen Space

(01:00:02) Apple Vision Pro

(01:02:34) A Matter of Antitrust

(01:12:06) RTFB: Read the Bill

(01:13:42) Antisocial Media

(01:17:13) RIP NPR

(01:20:27) Entertainment Monthly

(01:22:17) Gamers Gonna Game Game Game Game Game

(01:27:57) Luck Be a Landlord

(01:31:04) Sports Go Sports

(01:39:10) Know When To Fold ‘Em

(01:44:26) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Good Game of Chess

(01:51:17) Total Eclipse of the Sun

(01:53:15) Delegation

(01:55:48) Good News, Everyone

(02:07:03) I Was Promised Flying Self-Driving Cars

(02:08:43) While I Cannot Condone This

(02:11:39) There has been little change in rates of being vegetarian (4%) or vegan (1%). Yes, the people I meet are radically more likely to be both these things, but those are weird circles. However, I also notice a radical explosion in the number of vegan restaurants and products on offer. So something is going on.

(02:15:08) What Is Best In Life?

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Claude uses tools now. Gemini 1.5 is available to everyone and Google promises more integrations. GPT-4-Turbo gets substantial upgrades. Oh and new model from Mistral, TimeGPT for time series, and also new promising song generator. No, none of that adds up to GPT-5, but everyone try to be a little patient, shall we?

Table of Contents

In addition to what is covered here, there was a piece of model legislation introduced by the Center for AI Policy. I took up the RTFB (Read the Bill) challenge, and offer extensive thoughts for those who want to dive deep.

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Outline:

(00:31) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(03:11) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(06:55) Clauding Along

(10:19) Persuasive Research

(17:55) The Gemini System Prompt

(21:03) Fun with Image Generation

(21:24) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(25:02) Copyright Confrontation

(29:59) Collusion

(32:33) Out of the Box Thinking

(37:33) The Art of the Jailbreak

(38:02) They Took Our Jobs

(43:55) Get Involved

(44:23) Introducing

(47:26) In Other AI News

(53:16) GPT-4 Real This Time

(57:19) GPT-5 Alive?

(01:04:02) Quiet Speculations

(01:06:45) Antisocial Media

(01:19:57) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(01:33:33) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:39:35) Challenge Accepted

(01:51:06) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:51:55) Please Speak Directly Into This Microphone

(01:56:45) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:57:15) The Lighter Side

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A New Bill Offer Has Arrived

Center for AI Policy proposes a concrete actual model bill for us to look at.

Here was their announcement:

WASHINGTON – April 9, 2024 – To ensure a future where artificial intelligence (AI) is safe for society, the Center for AI Policy (CAIP) today announced its proposal for the “Responsible Advanced Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024.” This sweeping model legislation establishes a comprehensive framework for regulating advanced AI systems, championing public safety, and fostering technological innovation with a strong sense of ethical responsibility.

“This model legislation is creating a safety net for the digital age,” said Jason Green-Lowe, Executive Director of CAIP, “to ensure that exciting advancements in AI are not overwhelmed by the risks they pose.”

The “Responsible Advanced Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024” is model legislation that contains provisions for requiring that AI be developed safely [...]

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Outline:

(05:00) RTFC: Read the Bill

(05:39) Basics and Key Definitions

(10:00) Oh the Permits You’ll Need

(21:11) Rubrics for Your Consideration

(25:55) Open Model Weights Are Unsafe And Nothing Can Fix This

(30:02) Extremely High Concern Systems

(32:43) The Judges Decide

(35:01) Several Rapid-Fire Final Sections

(39:47) Overall Take: A Forceful, Flawed and Thoughtful Model Bill

(49:20) The Usual Objectors Respond: The Severability Clause

(52:34) The Usual Objectors Respond: Inception

(54:12) The Usual Objectors Respond: Rulemaking Authority

(01:01:53) Conclusion

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Previously: #1

It feels so long ago that Covid and health were my beat, and what everyone often thought about all day, rather than AI. Yet the beat goes on. With Scott Alexander at long last giving us what I expect to be effectively the semi-final words on the Rootclaim debate, it seemed time to do this again.

Bad News

I know no methodical way to find a good, let alone great, therapist.

Cate Hall: One reason it's so hard to find a good therapist is that all the elite ones market themselves as coaches.

As a commentor points out, therapists who can’t make it also market as coaches or similar, so even if Cate's claim is true then it is tough.

My actual impression is that the elite therapists largely do not market themselves at all. They instead work on referrals and [...]

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Outline:

(00:24) Bad News

(01:27) Good News, Everyone

(03:35) The Battle of the Bulge

(09:13) Support Anti-Aging Research

(09:37) Variably Effective Altruism

(09:51) Periodic Reminders (You Should Know This Already)

(12:05) FDA Delenda Est

(13:03) Other Enemies of Life

(14:04) Covid Postmortems

(14:55) Everything sounds like a sales pitch

(17:07) Information that would have been helpful was never provided

(17:49) A disconnect between what I experienced on the ground and the narrative I was hearing

(21:52) Covid-19 Origins

(24:29) Assisted Suicide Watch

(27:58) Talking Price

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It was clear within the first ten minutes this would be a rich thread to draw from. In my childhood and education roundups, and of course with my own kids, I have been dealing with the issues Haidt talks about in his new book, The Anxious Generation. Ideally I’d also have read the book, but perfect as enemy of the good and all that.

I will start with my analysis of the podcast, in my now-standard format. Then I will include other related content I was going to put into my next childhood roundup.

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(42:46) Ban Phones in Schools

(54:33) Let Kids be Kids

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Another round? Of economists projecting absurdly small impacts, of Google publishing highly valuable research, a cycle of rhetoric, more jailbreaks, and so on. Another great podcast from Dwarkesh Patel, this time going more technical. Another proposed project with a name that reveals quite a lot. A few genuinely new things, as well. On the new offerings front, DALLE-3 now allows image editing, so that's pretty cool.

Table of Contents

Don’t miss out on Dwarkesh Patel's podcast with Sholto Douglas and Trenton Bricken, which got the full write-up treatment.

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Previous Fertility Roundups: #1, #2.

The pace seems to be doing this about twice a year. The actual situation changes slowly, so presumably the pace of interesting new things should slow down over time from here.

Demographics

This time around, a visualization. Where will the next 1,000 babies be born?

Population Trends

Scott Lincicome notes American population now expected to peak in 2080 at 369 million.

South Korea now down to 0.7 births per woman. The story of South Korea is told as a resounding success, of a country that made itself rich and prosperous. But what does it profit us, if we become nominally rich and prosperous, but with conditions so hostile that we cannot or will not bring children into them? If the rule you followed led you here, of what use was the rule? Why should others follow it?

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Outline:

(00:20) Demographics

(00:32) Population Trends

(04:31) Causes

(10:50) Causes: South Korea

(18:56) Causes: South Korea: Status Competition

(27:06) More Dakka

(33:38) Less But Nonzero Dakka

(35:31) Preferences

(37:11) Surrogacy

(38:47) Technology

(40:58) Insular High Fertility Cultures

(44:44) In Brief

(45:19) Cultural Trends

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Dwarkesh Patel continues to be on fire, and the podcast notes format seems like a success, so we are back once again.

This time the topic is how LLMs are trained, work and will work in the future. Timestamps are for YouTube. Where I inject my own opinions or takes, I do my best to make that explicit and clear.

This was highly technical compared to the average podcast I listen to, or that Dwarkesh does. This podcast definitely threated to technically go over my head at times, and some details definitely did go over my head outright. I still learned a ton, and expect you will too if you pay attention.

This is an attempt to distill what I found valuable, and what questions I found most interesting. I did my best to make it intuitive to follow even if you are not technical, but [...]

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Welcome, new readers!

This is my weekly AI post, where I cover everything that is happening in the world of AI, from what it can do for you today (‘mundane utility’) to what it can promise to do for us tomorrow, and the potentially existential dangers future AI might pose for humanity, along with covering the discourse on what we should do about all of that.

You can of course Read the Whole Thing, and I encourage that if you have the time and interest, but these posts are long, so they also designed to also let you pick the sections that you find most interesting. Each week, I pick the sections I feel are the most important, and put them in bold in the table of contents.

Not everything here is about AI. I did an economics roundup on Tuesday, and a general monthly roundup [...]

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Outline:

(01:16) Language Models Offer Mundane Utility

(06:58) Language Models Don’t Offer Mundane Utility

(08:37) Stranger Things

(09:09) Clauding Along

(16:30) Fun with Image Generation

(19:01) Deepfaketown and Botpocalypse Soon

(21:29) They Took Our Jobs

(24:19) Introducing

(26:27) In Other AI News

(28:59) Loud Speculations

(31:10) Quiet Speculations

(36:04) Principles of Microeconomics

(44:54) The Full IDAIS Statement

(45:37) Consensus Statement on Red Lines in Artificial Intelligence

(47:54) Roadmap to Red Line Enforcement

(50:19) Conclusion

(50:49) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(56:38) The Week in Audio

(57:29) Rhetorical Innovation

(01:13:41) How Not to Regulate AI

(01:25:48) The Three Body Problem (Spoiler-Free)

(01:27:11) AI Doomer Dark Money Astroturf Update

(01:36:35) Evaluating a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:50:15) Aligning a Smarter Than Human Intelligence is Difficult

(01:53:32) AI is Deeply Unpopular

(01:53:47) People Are Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:55:43) Other People Are Not As Worried About AI Killing Everyone

(01:57:31) Wouldn’t You Prefer a Good Game of Chess?

(02:00:03) The Lighter Side

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