NumberWangMan (u/NumberWangMan)

NumberWangMan commented on What if we made advertising illegal? simone.org/advertising/... · Posted by u/smnrg

lvass · 8 months ago

If ads just vanished, that would be great, but making it illegal ought to do more harm than good. For one, a lot of ad money would be routed to shills, which are far more pernicious and have already infested otherwise great platforms like Reddit. Everything would turn to crap and no adblocker would help you. An ad ban would make every influencer profile instantly worthless, unless they decide to shill, which they're probably already doing anyway.

Also big tech would be incentivized to sell even more user data, as their business would still mostly exist, either via subscriptions, or through the now even more profitable user data market with more expensive targeted shilling.

NumberWangMan · 8 months ago

I have thought about whether banning advertising would be a good idea prior to stumbling onto this article. I'm not saying there would be no downsides, but I think there would be a TON of benefits as well.

Consider that advertising is mostly (not 100%) a zero-sum game. It's not zero sum when it helps to inform people of products and services that would make their life better, that they would willingly have sought out and purchased if not for their lack of knowledge that the product existed.

However, there are lots of extremely common situations where advertising is just a net drain on society:

* when it encourages people to buy things they don't need, exploiting our monkey brains' desire for the seratonin that accompanies buying stuff.

* when everyone already knows what's out there in the market, and it's just massive empires fighting for market share, like coke and pepsi, or various car companies, trying to keep their products in people's minds. They're just playing tug-of-war and very little changes.

* again like with soda, or cigarettes, or vapes, or fast food and junk food, where the products being advertised are actually worse for your health than the default alternative (drinking tap water, not smoking, cooking food at home). Perhaps people enjoy these things, but there is a hedonic treadmill effect where you quickly get used to them and are no better off than if you just avoided them.

* when advertising makes public spaces less pleasant to be in. And when it's distracting to drivers, increasing the chances of an accident.

* when advertising makes websites hard to use

* when the advertising industry vacuums up tons of talented people with the attraction of the money they would make, who might otherwise have gone into careers that are more beneficial to the rest of society

I don't doubt that shills and astroturfing would still exist or possibly get worse if you did nothing about it -- but you could ban that too. You wouldn't catch everyone, but the threat of punishment would make it much less likely for people to be willing to participate in that sort of stuff.

I do think that we would need a replacement for the small, actual valuable thing that advertising provides, which is providing information. I think it would be great to allow sorts of "ad indexes" or "product indexes" which are websites specifically dedicated to aggregating information about all the products available in a given market. Maybe search engines are already good enough for this purpose. Honestly, when I want to learn about what's out there because I'm getting into a new hobby or something, I just do the google-reddit trick like searching for "reddit good value electronic piano" and reading about what other people like.

Likewise for politics, it would be fantastic if every election had a website where candidates could submit their policy platform and potentially a video or two (though I like the idea of JUST text for this) where you can read about them. It's hard enough to find out about candidates for local elections already.

So I'm very much in favor of trashing the whole thing. I think it's a case where advertising benefits those who do it (and in very rare cases, consumers) but mostly just has massive negative externalities. Classic case for either banning it, or putting a steep tax. Usually I'd prefer the latter (as in the case of carbon taxes), but I think taxing ads would be very complicated and the tax rate would probably instantly make most ads vanish anyway, so I think a ban makes more sense.

NumberWangMan commented on To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids economist.com/leaders/202... · Posted by u/bookofjoe

naming_the_user · a year ago

The issue with your assessment is that everyone includes the individuals.

The externalities associated with driving are probably -1 utility points for me whereas driving is +20 or even more.

I think that basically what you are saying only makes sense if society includes a bunch of people who do not benefit, when in reality that’s usually a fairly small group (e.g. in the US or UK the small number of homeless).

NumberWangMan · a year ago

I think the whole problem with externalities is that even if everyone gains a private benefit from their choice, you can all be worse off due to the externalities.

To take your example, if you have a society of 30 people, each of whom drives, and gains +20 utility for driving, but -1 for each other car on the road, you get a net utility of -9 per person. But if any individual decides not to drive, their utility drops to -29, even as they provide a total benefit of +29 utility to everyone else by choosing not to drive.

It's obviously a lot more complicated than that. You have local externalities (noise, particulate pollution, health issues due to a more sedentary lifestyle, deaths and injuries due to accidents) and global ones (GHG emissions). Using public transport also subjects people to some negative externalities, if crime isn't controlled enough, or if people are noise. And you don't want a place that makes driving hard, but also has crappy public transit -- though usually, crappy public transit is a symptom of car-centric design, in my opinion.

But I think on balance, places where driving is discouraged in favor of other modes of transport are better off, and especially, a world where private automobiles are rarely used is better than a world where most everyone drives everywhere.

NumberWangMan commented on PlasticList's Advice for Food Companies twitter.com/natfriedman/s... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

PlunderBunny · a year ago

It’s interesting that, if you go to a wet market in many Asian countries (e.g. Hong Kong) you will see the butchers cutting meat on wooden chopping blocks where the cutting surface is _grain up_ - typically a circular section of a log. I thought “surely this is the worst possible orientation for the wood?” I think they clean the blocks by using hot and cold water to expand and contract the wood, and scraping it with the blade of their knives.

NumberWangMan · a year ago

I believe that if you're doing some heavy chopping, that orientation keeps the cutting board in good condition for the longest time, as you're not cutting through the wood grain and taking chunks out of the board.

Separately I've heard that while bacteria can live in wood cutting boards, they tend to stay where they are rather than migrate out of the board and into the food -- but I can't back that up with any actual references.

NumberWangMan commented on Does current AI represent a dead end? bcs.org/articles-opinion-... · Posted by u/jnord

shadowerm · a year ago

How can one not understand that UBI is captured by inflation.

Its just a modern religion really because anyone can understand this it is so basic and obvious.

You don't have to point out some bullshit captured study that says otherwise.

NumberWangMan · a year ago

My intuition, based on what I know of economics, is that a UBI policy would have results something like the following:

* Inflation, things get more expensive. People attempt to consume more, especially people with low income. * People can't consume more than is produced, so prices go up. * People who are above the break-even line (when you factor in the taxes) consume a bit less, or stay the same and just save less or reduce investments. * Producers, seeing higher prices, are incentivized to produce more. Increases in production tend to be concentrated toward the things that people who were previously very income-limited want to buy. I'd expect a good bit of that to be basic essentials, but of course it would include lots of different things. * The system reaches a new equilibrium, with the allocation of produced goods being a bit more aimed toward the things regular people want, and a bit less toward luxury goods for the wealthy. * Some people quit work to take care of their kids full-time. The change in wages of those who stay working depends heavily on how competitive their skills are -- some earn less, but with the UBI still win out. Some may actually get paid more even without counting the UBI, if a lot of workers in their industry have quit due to the UBI, and there's increased demand for the products. * Prices have risen, but not enough to cancel out one's additional UBI income entirely. It's very hard to say how much would be eaten up by inflation, but I'd expect it's not 10% or 90%, probably somewhere in between. Getting an accurate figure for that would take a lot of research and modeling.

Basically, I think it's complicated, with all the second and third-order effects, but I can't imagine a situation where so much of the UBI is captured by inflation that it makes it pointless. I do think that as a society, we should be morally responsible for people who can't earn a living for whatever reason, and I think UBI is a better system than a patchwork of various services with onerous requirements that people have to put a lot of effort into navigating, and where finding gainful employment will cause you to lose benefits.

NumberWangMan commented on Family medicine is in decline thewalrus.ca/your-doctor-... · Posted by u/mooreds

ses1984 · a year ago

Much of the regulation you’re saying is to blame was written in blood.

Want to know what food and housing was like before regulation? Read the jungle.

Do you think we have deteriorated since then?

Maybe the prosperity you think has deteriorated was not due to lack of regulation, but due to black swan events like… i dunno conquering and industrializing the entire North American continent, all peer nations blowing each other to bits in two world wars, etc?

NumberWangMan · a year ago

I agree that all regulation is written in blood. But at the same time, regulation can result in bleeding, and we don't always carefully weigh the costs and benefits of regulation. There may be a law that saves 100 lives a year, but that indirectly causes 150 deaths due to knock-on effects.

It's not easy to inject nuance into a discussion that feels like you have millions of people on each side of a tug-of-war rope that goes from "MORE REGULATION" to "LESS REGULATION".

I think housing, which you mention, is an excellent example. Yes, we need regulation in housing because without it, people will die from shoddy structures collapsing on them, electrocution, gas leaks, etc. But at the same time, in the USA there are absolutely regulations in housing with very little benefit and absolutely massive costs, where we have examples of first-world countries without those regulations that do just fine. I'm talking about things like the requirement that all apartments have 2 stairwells. Or mandatory setbacks and minimum lot sizes and parking requirements. edit -- and of course zoning codes, where we've shifted the market toward building housing that's so big that people can only afford to share it with strangers. And while people used to live in crowded, cramped tenements, driving housing prices up by restricting supply leads to people living on the street.

In medicine, there are diminishing marginal returns to making doctors go through more schooling, and the cost is simply that fewer people choose to be doctors, and people just go without health care. And even within that simple dilemma of "should we make it harder or easier to be a doctor", i'm sure there is a universe of alternate ways to move the needle in different dimensions. Requiring more or less schooling, more or less time in residency, changing limits on the number of hours doctors and nurses can be scheduled in a week, tightening or loosening malpractice law in different ways, etc. Each of these has some positive and negative effects, and I'm sure we have a ways to go before we hit the optimal point. And even then, you have to choose how to balance quality of patient care against doctors and nurses quality of life!

Or take drug approvals. There are drugs in development that show lots of promise, that probably should be made available to people who are dying anyway and want to try them. The FDA does not allow that. We have to balance against companies trying to scam people with fake medicine. No policy is 100% without harm. I believe that, even for policies I strongly advocate.

Or laws that were originally targeted at local environmental protection, that are now being used by nearby residents to stop solar farms from being built, stopping us from reducing fossil fuel usage. Those regulations were written in the blood of wildlife -- and now they're cause much more harm than good to wildlife all across the world.

So if you are asking if we've deteriorated since The Jungle, in many ways, no, of course we've improved safety of working conditions massively, and lots of other things. But in other, important ways, we've gone somewhat backwards. I believe it's absolutely possible to improve our society by removing some regulations, but I think it takes a lot of careful, small, targeted tweaks, where we've carefully weighed the costs and benefits. Though in rare cases, like as in parking minimums, the evidence is that they are so harmful that just scrapping the regulation entirely is the way to go.*

NumberWangMan commented on The flip-flop on whether alcohol is good for you (2023) slate.com/technology/2023... · Posted by u/nickwritesit

UniverseHacker · 2 years ago

This... our understanding of biology is way too primitive to have a meaningful mechanistic understanding of what is healthy, and what is not. Most of the nutrition advice is based on simple observational correlations that are assuming a cause and effect that just isn't there. People with high cholesterol also tend to have more cardiovascular disease, but it turns out eating cholesterol and fat doesn't actually increase risk of cardiovascular disease. People who eat a lot of fish tend to have better health outcomes, but it turns out taking fish oil does not reproduce those outcomes, and so on and so on.

Scientific nutrition is mostly just "scientism" - an irrational overconfidence bordering on a religious faith in unfounded assumptions based on observational studies, without admitting what we don't know.

I think it is reasonable to avoid trying to make decisions about diet based on this stuff, but I think ideas like the paleo diet or evolutionary nutrition make a lot of sense- eat diets similar to those that humans have eaten safely for a long time, as those are what we are likely adapted to. Interestingly though this itself is massively diverse: there are hunter gatherer societies with almost every diet composition imaginable: from artic diets that are high protein and fat but nearly zero carb, to cultures like the kitavans whose diet is very high carb and low protein. Our metabolism is very adaptable and any diet that is mostly fresh nutrient dense foods from plant and/or animal sources is probably about equally healthy.

Ironically, the stress of worrying constantly about if your food is optimally healthy, is probably more harmful to your health than anything typically considered unhealthy.

NumberWangMan · 2 years ago

I don't think that the scientific consensus on nutrition as unsettled as you say. As an example, there are a lot of people making money selling various diets as well as promoting uncertainty and doubt around the issue, but there seems to be pretty definitive evidence in favor of cholesterol and fat increasing cardiovascular disease risk. People love to misrepresent studies, or cherry-pick poorly designed studies, and use them to claim that the consensus is wrong.

I'm not talking about observational studies either, but actual controlled feeding trials where they put you on a strictly controlled diet for a period of time.

Even if you look at what humans are evolved to eat -- evolution puts selective pressure on reproductive fitness. As a process, it does not put any pressure on you to live a long time, as long as you reproduce successfully (which is why insects like the mayfly can even exist). So looking at what primitive people ate does not really give us information about what is healthy if you want to live a long time (aside from avoiding things that are obviously immediately poisonous).

Even hunter gatherer tribes that eat a meat-and-dairy-heavy diet like the Maasai have been examined and have pretty significant cardiovascular disease -- but they are also so ridiculously active their blood vessels are much wider than people with a modern sedentary lifestyle, and that mostly balances out the narrowing from arterial plaque. Native people who eat a traditional diet heavy in whole grains, legumes, and tubers for calories have them beat by a mile when it comes to arterial health.

NumberWangMan commented on Banning open weight models would be a disaster rbren.substack.com/p/bann... · Posted by u/rbren

bradley13 · 2 years ago

Government is necessary, in order to organize a complex society, but government is like any other organization: made up of people, many of who are out for their own interests. The most prominent of those interests are power and money.

Whenever government proposes banning a technology, one must ask: who benefits? The LLMs, even in their current state of infancy, are powerful tools. Restricting access to those tools keeps power in the hands of wealthy corporations and the government itself. That's the power aspect.

The money aspect is even simpler: Don't doubt that some of those wealthy corporations are making donations to certain officials, in order to gain support for actions like this. Almost no one leaves the Congress (or almost any parliamentary body in any country) as less than a multi-millionaire. Funny, how that works...

NumberWangMan · 2 years ago

Sure, but you still have to balance your "who benefits" against the harm of the thing they're proposing to ban.

In the case of these models, you can fine-tune the model all you want to be moral and not do harmful things like scam the elderly, carry out disinformation campaigns, harass people to the point of suicide. But as soon as you release the model weights, you are giving anyone the ability to fine-tune out all of those restrictions, with orders of magnitude less cost that it took to develop the model in the first place.

Regulating AI, especially as it becomes AGI and beyond, is going to be very tricky, and if everyone has the ability to create their own un-restricted, potentially sociopathic intelligences by tweaking the safe models created under careful conditions by big labs, we're in for a lot of trouble. That assumes we put the proper regulations on the big labs, and that they have the ability to make them "safe", which is hard, yes. But as AI turns into AGI and beyond, things are going to go pretty nuts, so it's important to start laying groundwork now.

NumberWangMan commented on Retiring GOP Lawmaker: $174,000 Isn't Enough Money for Us businessinsider.com/patri... · Posted by u/DocFeind

boeingUH60 · 2 years ago

For the amount of power Congresspeople command, $174k is definitely meager pay.

That’s why the position tends to attract already wealthy people seeking prestige and power or normal individuals who use it as a stepping stone to million-dollar book deals or cushy jobs in the private sector.

NumberWangMan · 2 years ago

I've heard it said that paying public servants well is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for avoiding corruption (this was as applied to Singapore). You don't want people trading power for money, and when you consider how much economic damage a corrupt person in a position of power can do, paying them well is really cheap.

Of course, it is best to couple the good pay with severe penalties for abusing power.

NumberWangMan commented on Helen Toner shares her side wsj.com/tech/ai/helen-ton... · Posted by u/Leary

caesil · 2 years ago

Interesting how an intellectual movement claiming to know better than anyone else how development of an unpredictable technology might pan out over the course of years failed to predict how one decision would pan out over the course of a single weekend.

Perhaps there's some level of overconfidence at play from systems thinkers who overintellectualize their ability to conceptualize and extrapolate forward an impossibly complex system.

NumberWangMan · 2 years ago

> how development of an unpredictable technology might pan out

> how one decision would pan out

I'm not sure what point you are making here. Are you trying to say "see, the AI not-kill-everyone-ists couldn't predict the future even in the short term, therefore we shouldn't put much credence into the the idea that the specific examples of AI doom they have given will happen"?

Or are you trying to imply that the idea of AI doom as a whole is bunk, because we can't predict the future... therefore everything will be fine...?

NumberWangMan commented on Cocoa harvested by kids as young as 5 in Ghana: CBS News investigation cbsnews.com/news/children... · Posted by u/hammock

abracadaniel · 2 years ago

If you ban child labor the jobs don't go away. The process still requires the same amount of labor. So, employment will increase, and with the higher labor demand, so will wages. Either way, the product is profitable and in high demand so the same or more money will be spent producing it. Child labor is one of the reasons why so little of the profit from their work reaches them. They're subsidizing the industry by sacrificing their children to increase labor availability.

NumberWangMan · 2 years ago

Everyone is better off if children don’t work, but if everyone else has their children work and you don’t, you lose. Sounds like moloch!

(I’m ignoring corporate profits and consumer prices for simplicity-but I think most of us would be happy if child labor was banned even if it meant higher prices)