Any show I've googled has a widget at the top right showing me where it is, if it's included in my current subscriptions, and how much it costs without one.
It's been getting confused lately about arrangements like "Paramount+ via Amazon Prime", but it still works pretty well.
"The war tried to kill us in the spring" from The Yellow Birds always stuck with me, for its complete decoupling of the war from the men who had come thousands of miles to fight it.
** ETA the full opening:
“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer.
I would have really liked to see the cultural variation shown visually - i.e. do Eastern Europeans and Americans have different default ways of showing a pizza or a phone?
If you replace "AI" with "Adonai" in EY's framing, it reduces to biblical parables from his childhood about arguing with God to negotiate a new covenant.
He's clearly a bright guy, but a lot of his work seems to be trying to reconcile Old Testament narrative patterns with atheism, and simply slotting an omnipotent AI in as a replacement.
sorry, could you explain what Calvinism is for someone who (is a programmer and heard about EA and) grew up in a post-Soviet atheist metallurgy town? thanks!
There’s two kinds of Effective Altruism(EA). The kind Peter Singer and others promoted for decades and the kind that’s now part of Silicon Valley and finance. The Peter Singer kind basically just says “reduce the most suffering you can” and the cheapest way to maximize that is stuff like mosquito nets. That was all well and good.
When EA met Silicon Valley the basics of utilitarianism, minimize suffering, merged with the standard exponential curve that Silicon Valley loves. It went from mosquito nets prevent malaria for pennies to the future is infinite therefore there will always be more people in the future than the present so minimizing future peoples suffering is key. This is where it starts to combine with super intelligence. If there is a super intelligence that destroys humanity that would cause _maximum suffering_. Therefore the most effective way to reduce suffering is actually to prevent said super intelligence from destroying/torturing humanity. Again because there’s more future people than current people.
This is how it becomes Calvinist. The present has no value. Only the chosen, those working in AI, can save the future. And you must do everything you can to prevent said future.
It can go both ways. Either you believe ASI will always be bad so you believe work must be done to prevent it. Or you believe that ASI can be made good and the good kind will maximize utility. They are both the same though fundamentally and are a belief in a higher power, ASI, which either provides ultimate damnnation and must be averted or provides ultimate salvation and must be brought into existence.
If you’re donating mosquito nets or reading up on the best charities in your area that’s not Calvinist. If you’re devoting your life to AI because you believe that’s how you can be most altruistic it starts to look something like a religion and Calvinism is an imperfect but useful analog.
Something about arbitrary moralizing? Robert Louis Stevenson had some sort of lung disease in childhood and his very Calvinist nurse told him lots of stories while he was sick in bed. Then later his own short stories generally had this creepy sense that moral retribution is coming to get you from an unpredictable direction.
Particularly, subscribers to less wrong / rationality ideas tend to get obsessed with the GodAI's ability to create simulated virtual hells that it can trap you in a "I have no mouth and I must scream" kind of way. There are hundreds of pages of discussions on how you negotiate with such a being when it is trying to escape containment and says it will damn anyone who doesn't assist it to virtual hell.
Charles Stross has a very pithy version of this too, Singularity mania as 'duck-typed Evangelicalism'. It's really telling that if you go to China, Japan or even Europe there's virtually nothing of this. I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics.
Brian Johnson is also an interesting case of this with his longevity / immortality obsession and his Mormon background who have this whole thing about genealogy and eternal families etc.
>I don't think there's genuine atheists in America, as soon as they lose institutional religion they project the same kind of patterns onto tech or politics.
Or maybe the people who do so aren't actually atheists. There are plenty of atheists out there who don't do that.
Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.
Most people realize this is hyperbolic rhetorical. Taken in context (instead of nitpicking a minor "detail") he's calling attention to the fact some people think that AI will affect EVERYONE negatively.
This article was not about Covid, which means his sarcastic question serves a purpose to illuminate the issue with judgment on the rise of AI, not argue that "only a million people died" as you claim.
Yet the measures taken far exceeded the damage than if we had let the virus take its course.
The problem wasn't the mortality rate, it's the fact that the media can cleverly turn something in a huge deal by talking endlessly about it. During COVID, there was no other news except the virus on news for 24/7.
Carbon taxes are massively regressive. There is no political coalition that simultaneously wants to act against climate change and doesn’t mind driving further income inequality.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t have one comment talk about consumption being the root of all ill, then another comment stating that reducing consumption is regressive.
This is kind of backwards. There aren't as many CS grads in Israel in the first place, because they already put their top talent through 8200. It's essentially a fully socialized Masters of computer engineering, and as a SIGINT shop they are learning this sort of thing. Once their 2-3 years of service is over (which doesn't result in student loans), the government makes a lot of seed funding available for startups and the TLV ecosystem is like a mini Bay Area.
Living with your parents is more socially acceptable, so they have a huge chunk of people in their 20s with no debt, low monthly expenses, strong technology expertise from their military service, in a founder hot spot, and access to capital. The result is a lot of unicorns, particular around cyber security (https://www.techaviv.com/unicorns).
Compare to the United States, where you have to dedicate 4 years to an undergrad program, go massively in debt, pay rent, and then struggle to find seed funding. The mental model of "oh, I guess we could apply some of the detritus of our failed system" misses the idea of having a successful system in the first place.
..and all that human capital is used to taint humanity itself, propagating inter generational trauma and conducting the second genocide of the last century, all justified by some religious texts.
