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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

Defending what we think is the right and good online every day forever is necessary but tiresome.
I suspect many will insist everything is the Algorithm's fault instead. It gets us off the hook.

Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

Robin of course proposes futarchy x.com/robinhanson/... as a structing mechanism. I imagine there are many other possibilities if we just look for them. Similarly, quality-rewarding sub-media exist, but will rarely become mass things.

Robin Hanson on X: ""Perhaps social media is a genuine threat to democracy precisely because it gives us democracy good and hard. Perhaps democracy can’t survive too much democracy." Futarchy would solve (part of) this. https://t.co/5qEF7Ey5Rt" / X

"Perhaps social media is a genuine threat to democracy precisely because it gives us democracy good and hard. Perhaps democracy can’t survive too much democracy." Futarchy would solve (part of) this. https://t.co/5qEF7Ey5Rt

x.com

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

Structuring discourse is however necessary for sophisticated action. Just because a lot of people want something does not mean implementing it is a good idea, or that the preferred implementation reaches the aim. Populism is bad at running complex societies.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

From the perspective of an open society this might not be too bad: the problem isn't the bad views but when there is no way of making one's voice heard, getting recognition of an issue, and the ability to change the issue accordingly. Liberal democracy has just been decent at it.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

Note that this model should worry anybody serious about any political ideology: populism has no color. Authoritarians trying to rein in public discourse have their work cut out for them. Democrats wanting to structure discourse still have to deal with a public with "bad" views.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

The standard response is to blame platform providers for optimizing for this, but optimizing for scale and openness likely does the same. The Eternal September started in 1994. Indeed, every step in broadening access has led to a quality issue online.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

When markets become more efficient they often become less diverse, since there are often economies of scale and people have less diverse preferences than they tell themselves. This might be what has happened on social media. Efficient memetic replicators get amplified.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

Most political parties and institutions have mechanisms to weed out crazies, wrongthink and disruption (those that don't, doesn't last). The traditional classical liberal marketplace of ideas might have been implicitly built on an assumed platform of decent society.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

The basic claim is that a lot of the bad views ventilated actually are popular views that until recently were conveniently excluded by elite-run platforms. People are populists by nature rather than some algorithmic distortion.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 14h

This essay aligns well with my long-running annoyance with blaming social media for everything. Maybe the problem is a truly efficient marketplace of ideas instead.
www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/is-social-...

Is Social Media Destroying Democracy—Or Giving It To Us Good And Hard?

It’s easier to blame the algorithm than the bewildered herd.

www.conspicuouscognition.com

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

To a large degree it is used to support the "cope bubble", the story that AI is not *really* a challenge to the human condition, the normal economy, normal politics, or human safety. It is both a defense of the status quo in society, and a status quo in mindset.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

As a Swede, this is the weirdest and most unlikely part of the entire Prize tradition: *calling people at inopportune times?!* That is simply not done!

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

The Oort case is interesting since here it is the tail of the velocity distribution that sets the long-range spread, not the median velocity. Settle around a halo star on a low-inclination orbit and you will reach a lot of the galaxy (high inclination for the view and solitude!)

Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

Over spreading timescales the stellar movement is fairly minor; the timescale to settle the Milky Way is typically some 50 million years. The exception is Oort cloud settlements, where overlapping clouds from passing stars make stellar motion the main driver (the timescale becomes some 100m years).

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Reposted by Anders Sandberg

Tech Policy Press @techpolicypress.bsky.social · 2d

Pointing out illiberal and anti-human rhetoric and myth-busting AI hype is important. But humanist rhetoric around AI is also weaponized, and digging into politicians and corporations that use it to defend the status quo is crucial, writes @mmblaszczyk.bsky.social.

Confronting Empty Humanism in AI Policy | TechPolicy.Press

Overtly humanist, democratic, and romantic rhetoric is easily co-opted by sophisticated market players and politicians, writes Matt Blaszczyk.

www.techpolicy.press

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

That would be very sexy, yes.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

Maybe this is energy efficiency: the bigger temperature difference between input and output, the sexier. Really impressive radiators keeping things optimal, oh my. Neutrino emissions from a reactor: that's hot.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

But would there be visual signals? I suspect most value lies in digital messaging, but clearly the overall function of a replicator might sometimes be useful.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

That suggests benchmarking as sexy. Trusted third parties, ecological studies, all sorts of anti-Goodhart tricks. Experimenting in the bedroom gets an entirely new meaning.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

Replicating machines do not need sexes, but recombination of traits is a good idea. You want to integrate code and designs that have proven themselves in your offspring.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

In fact, even most mammals likely do not find breasts a key secondary sexual characteristic signalling fitness - size, plumage, tusks, coloration, nuptial tubercles, etc. all work. They need to be honest signals but are basically arbitrary.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 2d

The cliched "sexy robot" has breasts because of the male mammalian gaze. What attributes would a "sexy von Neumann replicator" have?

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Reposted by Anders Sandberg

Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 3d

A lot of people are worried about a flood of trivial but true findings, but we should be just as concerned about how to handle a flood of interesting and potentially true findings. The selection & canonization process in science has been collapsing already, with no good solution

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 3d

Currently refining the range calculation to actually integrate dust along a trajectory. For a starting point above the plane there is a "shadow" from the inner region that is hard to reach. Getting out of the plane really matters.

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Anders Sandberg @arenamontanus.bsky.social · 3d

The dangerous dust density is also a function of speed: if you travel more slowly grains of a given size become less risky, so there is a speed-range tradeoff mediated by interstellar medium type. Does not seem to affect overall settlement timescale much.

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