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malloryerik commented on Ilya Sutskever: We're moving from the age of scaling to the age of research   dwarkesh.com/p/ilya-sutsk... · Posted by u/piotrgrabowski
fhd2 · 20 days ago
It would be if demand was limited. Let's assume the people already have enough food, and the population is not growing - that was my premise. Through innovation, one farmer can grow more than all the others.

Since there already was enough food, the market is saturated, so it would effectively reduce the price of all food. This would change the ratio so that the farmer who grows more gets more money in total, and every other farmer gets a bit less.

As long as there is any sort of growth involved - more people, more appetite, whatever, it would be value creation. But without growth, it's not.

At least not in the economical sense. Saving resources and effort that goes into producing things is great for society, on paper. But with the economic system that got us this far, we have no real mechanism for distributing the gains. So we get over supplying producers fighting over limited demand.

The world is several orders of magnitude more complex than that example, of course. But that's the basic idea.

That said, I'm not exactly an economist, and considering it's a bleak opinion to hold, I'd like to learn something based on which I could change it.

malloryerik · 17 days ago
Late comment but if technology brought down the price of food then people could spend less on food, more on other good and services. Or the same on higher quality food. You don't need an increasing population for that. The improvement in agriculture could mean some farmers would have to find other work. So you can have economic growth with a stagnant or falling population. And you can rather easily have economic growth on a per-capita basis with no overall GDP growth, like is common in Japan today.

About the farmer needing to change jobs, in the interview that is the subject of this thread Ilya Sutskever speaks with wonder about humans' ability to generalize their intelligence across different domains with very little training. Cheaper food prices could mean people eat out or order-in more and then some ex-farmers might enter restaurant or food preparation businesses. People would still be getting wealthier, even without the tailwind of a growing population.

malloryerik commented on Replacement.ai   replacement.ai... · Posted by u/wh313
TechSquidTV · 2 months ago
Personal belief, but robots coming for your jobs is not a valid argument against robots. If robots can do a job better and/or faster, they should be the ones doing the jobs. Specialization is how we got to the future.

So the problem isn't robots, it's the structure of how we humans rely on jobs for income. I don't necessarily feel like it's the AI company's problem to fix either.

This is what government is for, and not to stifle innovation by banning AI but by preparing society to move forward.

malloryerik · 2 months ago
Might want to read some Karl Polanyi.
malloryerik commented on Seoul says US must fix its visa system if it wants Korea's investments   english.hani.co.kr/arti/e... · Posted by u/garbawarb
__turbobrew__ · 3 months ago
Has anyone disputed the validity of the visas of the workers which were deported? My understanding is that SK citizens cannot get E-4, so people came to the US and worked on a visa that didn’t allow working, and the US deported the people violating visa rules in a not nice way?

Im guessing this is the case or else the SK sources would be calling out that these workers were following visa rules?

malloryerik · 3 months ago
I think there feeling is, you say you want us to build our products in the U.S. but then our essential workers aren't allowed in so it's an impossible demand.
malloryerik commented on A high schooler writes about AI tools in the classroom   theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/dougb5
djoldman · 3 months ago
Unfortunately, this kind of story will continue to be a popular one in newspapers and magazines, garnering lots of clicks. It feeds into the "everything is different now" sort of desperate helplessness people seem primed to adopt with respect to AI sometimes.

Obviously the answer to testing and grading is to do it in the classroom. If a computer is required, it can't connect to the internet.

Caught with a cellphone, you fail the test. Caught twice you fail the class.

The non-story beatings will continue until morale and common sense improve.

malloryerik · 3 months ago
Instead of extending hours in classrooms, which might feel like torture, what about no-tech libraries for individual work like homework? Or with a coffeeshop vibe. I'd personally say four hours a day but I'm guessing two might be what many found reasonable. If you finished your work early you could read what you'd like. Town and city libraries could be enlisted for this along with the school libraries, which might need to be expanded to fit all of these kids. Add sports and you get a serious full day for kids, not the kind of half day they have now in the U.S. That additionally lightens the load on working parents.
malloryerik commented on Some thoughts on LLMs and software development   martinfowler.com/articles... · Posted by u/floverfelt
awesome_dude · 4 months ago
I have a very similar (probably unoriginal) thought about some human mental illnesses.

So, we VALUE creativity, we claim that it helps us solve problems, improves our understanding of the universe, etc.

BUT people with some mental illnesses, their brain is so creative that they lose the understanding of where reality is and where their imagination/creativity takes over.

eg. Hearing voices? That's the brain conjuring up a voice - auditory and visual hallucinations are the easy example.

But it goes further, depression is where people's brains create scenarios where there is no hope, and there's no escape. Anxiety too, the brain is conjuring up fears of what's to come

malloryerik · 4 months ago
You may like to check out Iain McGilchrist's take on schizophrenia, which essentially he says is a relative excess of rationality ("if then else" thinking) and a deficit of reasonableness (as in sensible context inhabiting).
malloryerik commented on Famous Cognitive Psychology Experiments That Failed to Replicate   aethermug.com/posts/famou... · Posted by u/zdw
malloryerik · 4 months ago
A few on this list are interesting because they replicated some times and not others. I'd like to see a list of experiments that succeeded in replicating.
malloryerik commented on 40% decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years: American Time Use Survey   cell.com/iscience/fulltex... · Posted by u/malloryerik
malloryerik · 4 months ago
Some press about this study:

Fewer People Are Reading for Fun, Study Finds https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/well/reading-pleasure-dec...

‘Deeply concerning’: reading for fun in the US has fallen by 40%, new study says https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/20/reading-for-...

Reading for pleasure falls by 40% in the US https://www.ft.com/content/5dcf01d6-7a70-4990-9ae6-217d07c9d...

malloryerik commented on GPT-5: Overdue, overhyped and underwhelming. And that's not the worst of it   garymarcus.substack.com/p... · Posted by u/kgwgk
justcallmejm · 4 months ago
Perception and understanding are different things. Just because you have wiring in your body to perceive certain vibrations in spacetime in certain ways, does not mean that you fully grasp reality - you have some data about reality, but that data comprises an incomplete, human-biased world model.
malloryerik · 4 months ago
Yeah we'll end up on a "yes and no" level of accord here. Yes I agree that understanding and perception aren't always the same, or maybe I'd put it that understanding can go beyond perception, which I think is what you mean when you say "incomplete." But I'd say, "Sorry but no, I respectfully disagree" in that at least from my point of view, we can't equate human experience with "data" and doing so, or viewing people as machines, cosmos as machine, everything as merely material in a dead way out of which somehow springs this perhaps even illusion of "life" that turns out to be a machine after all, this kind of view risks extremely deep and dangerous -- eventually even perilous -- error. As we debated this, assuming I'm not mischaracterizing your position but it does seem to lead in that direction, I'd shore up my arguments with support from phenomenologists, I'd try to use recent physics of various flavors though I'm very very much out of my depth here but at least enough to puncture the scientific materialism bias, Wittgenstein, from the likes of McGilchrist and neuro and psychological sources, even Searle's "Seeing Things as They Are" which argues that perception is not made of data. I'd be against someone like a Daniel Dennett (though I'm sure he was a swell fellow) or Richard Dawkins. Would I prevail in the discussion? Of course I'm not sure, and realize now that I might, in LLM style, sound like I know more than I actually do!

u/malloryerik

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