A Supreme Court judge (Scalia) made the case that torture was legal under the US Constitution, as it only prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. So, torture for other reasons is obviously fine.

I think, never stopping to consider the implications must count as an example of “white privilege”.

They called it. I had already forgotten about that, so thx for the reminder.

A year as cool as the one they were born in

Productivity because it’s in the OP.

I used to argue with climate change denialists, so I already know the pitch. I can’t be bothered anymore.

Running anything means understanding the facts you are facing. Running a society means looking at statistics. You must know what they say or do not say. Someone who does not know what “productivity” means is not going to be part of the solution.

Yes and no. Productivity is not measured in physical output. It’s measured in how much money people pay, which has problems, of course. If it really goes straight to the landfill, then nothing has been produced. Countries may pay for that sort of thing with taxes to create jobs, but that’s not a neoliberal thing at all.

Eventually, the only reasonable way to measure productivity is in terms of what people want. That’s what you do when you look at what people pay for something. Any other way would also have problems.

Failure to consider environmental degradation and resource depletion are indeed problems. Norway is a better example for this. They have a very high productivity on paper, because oil. But that basically pretends that they literally produce the oil, rather than pumping it out of the sea floor. In reality, that’s more like selling off an inheritance. And that’s not even considering the damage done when fossil fuels are burned.

On a national level, in macro-economics, productivity is GDP divided by total hours worked (for money).

I’d say that a high productivity generally means working less hard, because machines do the tough bits. A high productivity requires a very high skilled labor force, using a lot of machines and robots. It’s by definition an efficient and effective use of labor, though one could ask pointed questions about environmental degradation.

Those are not the assumptions, but there are indeed a great many problems with measuring productivity.

Usually, you only count work for money. Cooking dinner at home does not go into the statistic. Ordering dinner from a restaurant does. I would say that it is a problem that the “production” of leisure time is not counted. Of course, it’s not clear how this could be reasonably done.

“Productivity” already goes some way towards addressing such problems. It is usually GDP divided by hours worked (for money). US Americans work far more hours than their European counter-parts, so that their average incomes are much higher. Whether they are actually richer, depends on the value of “free” time. “Free” in quotes because it does not include necessary work like housework or healthcare visits.

If you look at a list of countries by productivity, you will find that it more or less matches common intuitions about what the rich countries are. That’s where people want to migrate to, so it does tell you something.

“Productivity” is how much a worker produces in an hour. Lower productivity means either that a people have to work longer hours, or make do with less. So, who cares? Pretty much everyone.

FunSearch (so called because it searches for mathematical functions, not because it’s fun)

I’m probably not the only one who wondered.

Understandable.

Why is it important to you what some corporation does or doesn’t do?

Can I ask why this is important to you? Did you donate and don’t like how your money is used?

ETA: I asked, because I wondered if it has to do with AI-tech specifically, as many here obviously believe. OP kindly answered my question in DMs. They obviously do not wish the details to be public, but I believe I can say that the answer was very reasonable and not connected to AI-tech. (There’s nothing in the answer which is private or couldn’t be made public, but it’s up to them.)

Direct link to paper: Nature Human Behaviour: “Socio-cultural practices may have affected sex differences in stature in Early Neolithic Europe”

(Kudos to https://feddit.de/u/mettwurstkaninchen for posting a report that actually linked to the source.)

It’s likely a reference to Yudkowsky or someone along those lines. I don’t follow that crowd.

Part of the platform of the Swedish Pirate Party?

Can’t find it in the Election Manifesto 2022, that they have in English. Sounds more like they want copyright to serve society, not to protect interests.

Which pirate party is that?

It’s noteworthy that patent law is 20 years to this day. It has survived with its core fairly intact, the main change being that you can no longer get a patent for bringing an invention into the country. Today that is called piracy (poor China).

I believe that is because patents simply have to work for the whole country in encouraging progress. If cultural production is stifled, well… Who cares? The elites in the copyright industry benefit, and they have an outsize influence on public discourse.

It just seems that Google should have been able to move faster. Yes, they did publish a lot of important stuff, but seeing the splash that came from Stability and OpenAI, they seem to have done so little with it. What their researchers published was important but I can’t help thinking, that a public university would have disseminated such research more openly and widely. Well, I may be wrong. I don’t have inside knowledge.

For the fine-tuning stage at the end, where you turn it into a chatbot, you need specific training data (eg OpenOrca). People have used ChatGPT to generate such data. Come to think of it, if you use Mechanical Turk, then you almost certainly include text from ChatGPT.