mahogany

I’m not talking about average wealth. I’m talking about every decile being richer in absolute terms.

Wealth by decile in poor society

100, 101, …, 109

Wealth by decile in rich society

101, 102, …, 1000000000000

This is what I was describing. Maybe I’m confused. What am I missing from the prompt?

As an example, what if your richer society was only 1% richer in the lowest decile but had massively more inequality compared to the poorer society, leading to a society where the rich controlled everything including land, and where the lowest decile had virtually a nonexistent chance to rise to a higher class? I’d take the poorer society if I’m not rich. Maybe I’d at least have a shot at property ownership.

It is not hard to think of how quickly nuance enters this picture. Much of the discussion here is about what exactly the inequality curve should look like. Shaving it down a bit is not the same as saying we should all be equal or whatever.

I wish we could disambiguate between what we mean by “screen” in these conversations. A screen is a medium, which I do not believe is universally bad. I am not sure about tablets and they do seem like they can have “bad” content, and I am 100% sure they are used as a crutch when they “shouldn’t” be.

But in moderation, it would be pretty difficult for someone to convince me that showing my toddler Mr Rogers was bad for him just because it is on a screen. There are things that the show Mr Rogers can do that no book or toy can do. It can show a narrated video of a real factory that makes crayons that enthralled my kid and boosted his imagination which translated directly into play time. It can show a real jazz band and have the members talk about how their instruments work (and we can hear them). It can show adult dynamics between non-authority figures which is rare in today’s world. Or any number of things like this.

I would be interested to hear why this is wrong or bad, and what a universally superior option would be that should be used in place of it. I see diversity of experience (even an experience in separate mediums) as important. 1 part coloring and 1 part Mr Rogers easily beats 2 parts coloring in my mind.

Not just that, but:

- how many kids do you have

- do they have disabilities

- do they go to daycare (aka how many hours are you directly responsible for them)

- do you pay for babysitting or have family nearby that can do that duty (aka how many hours are you directly responsible for them)

- what type of environment do you live in (can you let them run outside)

- do you do 100% of your cooking, cleaning, etc

- etc

In other words, there are so many factors at play here, but all the vitriol and high horse behavior typically doesn’t talk about that. In many ways, raising kids is harder than in the past, due to smaller and disconnected families, 2 working parents, fear/panic of letting kids roam outside, etc. Much of this is a societal failure.

No they are not picture-only books. They have simple stories, which are for parents to read to their children. Reading stories to children before they can read is a very, very old tradition :) (think fairy tales)

(edit - you've gotten several responses but I will say that you are correct that this sort of thing does not happen in all households; that's one reason this program is great, because it encourages this behavior)

> The point is that people, like horses, can do other things.

...like what? If we start with the assumption that AI can broadly replace humans in knowledge jobs, what industries are absorbing tens of millions of humans for labor?

I see this as a categorical difference. The difference between AI and agricultural mechanization is that AI is highly heterogeneous. During the mechanization of agriculture that you talk about (which also happened over generations), there were alternative industries to move to. What happens when AI is competing in the majority of industries? Are there going to be 10 million new plumbers?

I think there is no magic trick here. The answer is simply that humans will no longer understand the code.

Although, following Anthropic’s ethos and taking this to its conclusion, I’m not even sure why they need human reviewers at all. What, they bring in a human to look at a diff of an “important” section of code that was written by agents and has changed a dozen times since last week through 12 PRs of churn? Obviously they don’t know what’s going on. So what’s a human to do? Do what the other approvers (if any) did: fire up a Claude to command it “verify this change has no regression; check carefully for edge cases”, then come back after a half hour of High Thinking to see “Change is clean (with some non-blocking findings below, in order of significance)” and click Approve. Not sure what the purpose of the human is in such a process.

Can you explain more? This statement is already true before this policy change, so I don't understand why this is not a non sequitur. But I know this is a common rhetoric so I am trying to understand what the logic is.

No, it's not how math works at all. Math is not experimental science. Results take years to formulate and are generally known to be true by colleagues via correspondence and seminars before a paper is even written. Retraction is very rare.

I don't know why people are talking about something like this that they are clearly not familiar with.