wycs

Nope. Seems I was wrong.

Yes. False memory on my part it seems. I was very clearly wrong. The current SAT is clearly selective enough for my very popular scheme.

My point was just there are obvious ways to prevent bribery. And considering the amount we burn on higher education, spending much more on tests and verification does seem like a much much better use of money.

A perfect score on the modern SAT is not very impressive. The bar has been lowered considerably in the last 40 years.

[edit: seems I was very clearly wrong about this]

Make the SAT so difficult that on average 1 person gets a perfect score each year. Then do not allow any other criteria for admission.

To prevent bribery randomly sample 1% for a retest under much stricter security.

If you must, lower standards for protected classes to even out demographics.

Rich people can afford to burn their children’s childhood on the enrichment activities and “volunteer” work Harvard requires.

Standardized testing is by far the most fair way to do this. SAT prep is not that effective and besides SAT prep is now available online for free.

If regulators do this it will be to protect a crooked accreditation monopoly from their well-deserved demise.

>These claims are certainly plausible to me, but they are by no means obvious. (For reference, I'm a postdoc who specializes in machine learning.)

I don't think I disagree very much with you then.

>People thought the same thing about nuclear energy. A popular quote from the 50s was "energy too cheap to meter." Yet here we are in a world were nuclear energy exists but unforeseen factors like hardware costs cause the costs to be much more than optimists expected.

In worlds where this is true, OpenAI does not matter. So I don't really mind if they make a profit.

Or to put it another way, comparative advantage dulls the claws of capitalism such that it tends to make most people better off. Comparative advantage is much, much more powerful than most people think. But nonetheless, in a world where software can do all economically-relevant tasks, then comparative advantage breaks, at least for human workers and the Luddite fallacy becomes a non-fallacy. At this point, we have to start looking at evolutionary dynamics instead of economic ones. An unaligned AI is likely to win in such a situation. Let's call this scenerio B.

OpenAI has defined the point at which they become redistributive in the low hundreds of billions. In worlds where they are worth less than hundreds of billions (scenerio A, which is broadly what you describe above) they are not threatening so I don't care - they will help the world as most capitalist enterprises tend to, and most likely offer more good than the externalities they impose. And as in scenerio A, they will not have created cheap software that is capable of replacing all human capital, comparative advantage will work its magic.

In worlds where they are worth more, scenerio B, they have defined a plan to become explicitly redistributive and compensate everyone else, who are exposed to the extreme potential risks of AI, with a fair share of the extreme potential upsides. This seems very, very nice of them.

And should the extreme potentials be unrealizable then no problem.

This scheme allows them to leverage scenerio A in order to subsidize safety research for scenerio B. This seems to me like a really good thing, as it will allow them to compete with organizations, such as FaceBook and Baidu, that are run by people who think alignment research is unimportant.

AGI == software capable of any economically relevant task.

If you have AGI, it is very clear you could very quickly displace the entire economy, especially as inference is much cheaper than training: which implies there will be plenty of hardware available at the time AGI is created.

I don't see the problem. If they get AGI, it will create value much larger than 100 billion. Much larger than trillions to be honest. If they fail to create AGI, then who cares?

Art is the production of veblen goods. Duchamp, in his genius, realized that though the ability to buy something painfully handcrafted does signal wealth, buying literal garbage is a much better display of wealth. Someone who can afford to buy a meticulously painted portrait, well, one may be will willing to make sacrifices for beauty. Someone able to spend millions on literal garbage - now that is a rich man.

Another aspect is photography allowed normal people access to create cheap reproductions of beautiful art. High-class people used to be able to distinguish themselves from the mob with beautiful things the mob couldn't afford.

But this does not work with cheap reproductions allowing one to signal the same taste.

In this way, there became an incentive for high-class people to acquire and inculcate a taste for art that is actively repulsive to distinguish themselves from those normal people who desire beautiful things.

Mostly this doesn't matter. They are only hurting themselves. But the effect of these incentives on public architecture has been pretty horrifying.