A hacker seeking to change a political system-- independent of alignment-- would be well advised to take an approach that is almost the exact inverse of this project's.
The research on getting people to change political attitudes or engage in pro-social political behaviors says that public shame, especially amongst their friends/communities/families, is the most effective lever available.
So, instead of making a list of everyone who believes in $prosocial_behaviors_and_policies create a publicly searchable, and verifiable database of folks engaged in $anti_social_behaviors_and_policies that are destructive to the their communities.
Better transparency into where everyone stands helps to prevent toxic policies and rhetoric that poison the commons and allows communities (teammates, employers, friends, and family-- both present and future) to then apply social pressure or the threat of ostracism in order to generate meaningful change.
There's a reason that bad actors (of all stripes and political affiliations) fear transparency! It's a highly effective tool for aligning behavior with societal/community values.
This is a really cool small scale experiment. More of this type of work is need so we can have fairer and more transparent search options.
I'd be curious to see the sensitivity of the ratings to things like rater composition (is it a quirk of Redditors they like Bing better?) and search topics.
Also makes me wonder how much of the ratings rank to do with a decline in quality (or diversification/drift away from the Redditor vector) of Google's own search raters (the index is heavily influenced by manual rating).
Counterpoint 2: the findings that happiness doesn't really level off in an S-curve shape (i.e., fewer diminishing marginal returns than expected to wealth) https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2020-43605-001.
"Is there a growing class divide in happiness? Among U.S. adults ages 30 and over in the nationally representative General Social Survey (N = 44,198), the positive correlation between socioeconomic status (SES; including income, education, and occupational prestige) and happiness grew steadily stronger between the 1970s and 2010s. Associations between income and happiness were linear, with no tapering off at higher levels of income. Between 1972 and 2016, the happiness of high-SES White adults was fairly stable, whereas the happiness of low-SES White adults steadily declined. Among Black adults, the happiness of low-SES adults was fairly stable, whereas the happiness of high-SES adults increased. Thus, the happiness advantage favoring high-SES adults has expanded over the decades. Age–period–cohort analyses based on hierarchical linear modeling demonstrate that this effect is primarily caused by time period rather than by birth cohort or age. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved)"
To be fair here (and I say this as someone who's had a spinal fusion as the result of being mowed down by a distracted driver) car ownership is so incredibly subsidized from an insurance perspective that any increase in prices should be described as the removal/reduction of a subsidy.
If the damages/externalities caused by cars were internalized by the system car ownership would already be unaffordable for most. We just choose to sacrifice/maim X-number of humans every year so folks can continue to zoom around and structurally increase sprawl/pollution (which in turn have their own massive un-internalized costs).
All of us pay for these subsidies via significantly higher healthcare prices.
Look up what happened to the Michigan laws/policies that required drivers to actually pay for insurance that would compensate accident victims for their death and suffering. It was lobbied/voted out of existence almost immediately because the costs are simply too high, and we love our cars.
That is neither true of healthcare or car ownership specifically. It’s the Pareto Rule. 20% of participants drive 80% of the costs. This is expanded across the population via averaging from insurance.
Law describes this as the thin skull problem. If you accidentally tap someone that had a thin skull and their head explodes you are still guilty of manslaughter even though the action is both completely benign and unintentional. The extreme alternative is to eliminate high risk people until no risks remain in the system. Insurance is a nice balance in the middle, but that doesn’t mean ownership is otherwise unaffordable for most people.
I'm confused by this comment because there is an entire industry (personal injury attorneys) dedicated to extracting every dollar possible from the insurance company when an accident happens.
I've personally known at least five people who have been in a car accident and then received a windfall of cash after paying off their medical bills and having their car repaired/replaced.
I don't know if this is still the case but years ago my friend, who was in a collision with a drunk driver, was told by his attorney that the insurance will just settle for 3x your total expenses (medical, car repairs, etc). He was being encouraged by his attorney to see chiropractors and specialists because of this.
This, combined with the recent changes to how 'Ads' are displayed in the iOS store (almost unrecognizable from non-advertised apps at this point since they dropped the background) suggest that Apple is getting more and more aggressive about juicing it's users for revenue in tasteless ways.
We had the privilege to watch at first from the SE corner of the building and later as he climbed by the the observation deck on the 89th floor. Hair raising stuff I'll never forget.
There are many answers depending on what you meant by this, but in terms of actual risk this is probably not much worse to him than e.g. riding a motorcycle, and certainly better than what it would have been to be crew on the space shuttle.
The _actual_ threat to the programmer as a career has little to do with AI and a lot to do with the looming decline in global growth which will continue to destroy opportunities for devs to thrive.
To frame this in terms of falsifiable-ish predictions as the article requests (won't add numbers cause I don't have time to research).
- Dev productivity will improve with AI, but there will be fewer programming jobs because there will just be lower growth overall with the coming debt-overhang slowdown.
- The fraction of un/under-employed programmers as a percentage of total devs will continue to increase. We're at an all time high for number of devs worldwide and this will continue until the economy structurally re-adjusts.
- Employment in the sector will see even more "insider" vs "outsider" dynamics with a resurgence in the relative value of connections and seniority.
FWIW none of these are novel, just aggregated
Investors and markets have regularly rewarded layoffs and will continue to do so as growth stories become fewer and further between. AI (incredible though it is as a tool) is just the fig-leaf/cover for this transition to be framed as a growth and efficiency story that ennobles insiders even further. The implication will be that some devs are just more skilled at using these new tools/being insightful about business and therefore their continued employment is justified while the outsiders are just unskilled. While this will be true for a small percentage (as it is now!), it will be really mostly be access/restrictive guild dynamics at play driving the shift.
Intelligence is correlated with experimentation and drug usage (and generally do-what-you-will with your body political attitudes).
Some discussion on the phenomenon here:
"We know that intelligent people have more self-control and make better decisions in general — they’re less likely to play the lottery, more likely to follow medical advice, less likely to die in accidents. As a consequence, they tend to flourish in an environment free of normative constraints. They may experiment with drugs without ever getting addicted. They may dabble in polyamory without wrecking their marriage. They may coast on their achieved identity, dismissing traditions as stifling or unnecessary."
We don't 100% AI it but this very much matches our experience, especially the bits about defensiveness.
Going to do some testing this week to see if a better agents file can't improve some of the author's testing struggles.
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