This argument gives a 35% chance of AI "taking over" (granted this does not mean extinction) this century: https://www.foxy-scout.com/wwotf-review/#underestimating-ris.... The argument consists of 6 steps, assigning probabilities to each step, and multiplying the probabilities.
This is just the beginning and we don't know what will happen. Some people will say creative destruction is happening and people will find other jobs. They may equate this to the horse drivers finding other jobs at the beginning of the XXth century.
The truth is we don't know. People that will lose their jobs may find other jobs or not. Maybe it's harder to reinvent oneself now. Maybe a lot of people will truly suffer because of AI.
I find very hard to know with certainty what will happen, who will remain unharmed, and who will struggle but make it through, but change is coming.
> Germany was especially vulnerable to the withdrawal of Russian natural gas supplies—the country used a disproportionate amount of natural gas for its heavy industry and gas-powered home heating systems, and in 2021, 55% of German natural gas consumption came from Russia
So much reliance on a potential enemy was a huge mistake. Germany should've foreseen that in the span of say 40 years it was likely there would be a major conflict with Russia.
All prediction markets were estimating at fairly high this possibility and the fact that Germany didn't realize this and course-corrected is surprising to say the least.
> Quinney should be entitled to compensation from the state. It isn’t immediately clear what the final number will be but it will stretch into the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.
Hundreds of thousands for eight years in jail, decades of angst, and a broken family ...
The fact that bureaucrats err on side of minimizing deaths caused by experiments is just a consequence of deaths being caused by experiments being unequivocally trivial to prove.
Meanwhile finding out the number of deaths caused by extra caution and delaying the experiment requires a calculation, and then a very lengthy blog post to be communicated.
Bureaucrats don't care about the second kind of deaths because they can hardly be linked to their actions. Now the first kind of deaths are directly their responsibility. And guess what, they can be avoided with a flick of a pen.
> Although IQ differences between individuals have been shown to have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in IQ between groups have a genetic basis
Sure, but this is not the claim I originally quoted. I was taking about heritability, and you're taking now about disparities between groups.
Nevertheless it seems you agree the heritability of IQ is well established, which you were denying originally.
Doesn't this author have a terrible reputation? And he's known for standing by disproven theories? I'm surprised you didn't find a better example.
> How about a video essay which summarizes other critiques:
Sorry, I haven't watched these 2 hours and 40 minutes, can I read the summary somewhere? Hopefully it's better than Nassim's article.
> Or a peer reviewed summary which got published in an academic journal with over a 100 citations
What is a peer reviewed summary? Is it like a meta-analysis? But honest questions: how much weight do you think this has? Are the citations supporting it or criticising it?
Looks like an example of bad science that was caught and exposed? Why do you think this reflects badly on the rest of the research?
> To date, the literature does not support any consensus around the theory of general intelligence nor the efficacy of IQ as a theory for intelligence.
You are asking for consensus. Do you mean an ultra majority? There's no consensus even on whether climate change is real, only 97% of scientist think so. Could you give percentages of who supports what on the science of IQ.
Jobs may even be outsourced from the cities to cheaper areas in US. Not many countries allow firing at will, and apparently this is needed every ~10 years for 20% of the staff.
A non biased article would've mentioned how much Bitcoin mining accounts for the total energy used in US. And that would've been compared to the energy used in other industries. Take videogames for example. Just that datum would've changed the whole narrative of the article. The article does mention something in passing about how other industries at least bring jobs. I guess that's a net positive then.
Were the authors aware of how tiny Bitcoin usage is and how much waste there is going around? Of course they were. Was this datum useful to the reader? Yes. Did the authors purposefully decide to exclude this datum because it didn't fit the narrative? Of course.
Just imagine your average reader, if at the end of the article they were told, that we can't even agree on whether Bitcoin mining consumes more power than Christmas lights. Apparently that was not the case using the 2008 Christmas lights usage, and we don't know now, because both sides of the argument get wildly different values.
Your average reader leaves the article thinking they know everything they need to know about Bitcoin: it's bad because it makes energy more expensive, and people have died, possibly because energy was expensive.
The factual claims are accurate. The implications are not. Only one side of the story is told. You can outright lie with a stream of facts, and that's the approach of hit pieces like this.
I said cold blooded because the authors are aware of how they mislead, and do it nevertheless, because they have an agenda, otherwise an article can't be this biased.
Simply a cold blooded, profoundly biased, partisan piece of the most outrageous propaganda on Bitcoin.
> By the end of Feb. 14, 2021, nearly 40 people had died, some from the freezing cold.
And you know what? These deaths may not have happened if it wasn't because of Bitcoin.
I look forward to the NYTimes' take on the Christmas lights. Maybe they can somehow let the reader infer someone has died because they made electricity more expensive.
The drop in attendance is not because schools are under funded, or the staff is burnt. It's pretty clear the biggest changes that have happened in US schools in the last years.