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Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
@ESYudkowsky
Mar 3, 2021 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
Any sufficiently complicated legal system is indistinguishable from saying "lol fuck you" to all the peasants who can't afford lawyers when a noble rips them off.
Also important: Flexible week end hours, non-overworked public lawyers that everybody has the right to use once per year, 20 hours of complimentary childcare that anybody can use once per year, either don't means-test them or have the means-testing be extremely simple to pass.
In other words: Either your civil legal system can be successfully invoked by an overworked mom, or your overworked moms effectively live in a world without civil law.

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More from @ESYudkowsky

Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
Jan 29
So it's too late for this information to save your world, but let's talk about sex and gender in dath ilan.

As on Earth, the supervast majority of dath ilani are either male or female in terms of sexual biology. The vast majority of XY-chromosome bearers have dicks, XX-bearers have vaginae. Dath ilani just love being aware of edge cases, so they're not in denial about intersex cases, Y chromosomes that didn't manifest, and so on. But they're also aware of statistics, so they know the numbers and that those cases are rare.

Likewise being aware of statistics, dath ilani can grasp that some Gaussians overlap widely in their middles, while other curves (like the "penis or vagina?" curve) have hardly any middles at all. They are sufficiently grownup not to panic about the implications of two curves having different standard deviations.

For what does it matter (kids hear growing up) what other people have done along a curve? You are you, not them. Nobody in dath ilan is anyone except themselves, to be judged by the law for only their own actions and choices; or predicted by markets profit-motivated to take into account all visible individual differences when setting insurance premiums.

Fewer people in dath ilan than in Berkeley, and more than in Saudi Arabia, have received surgery or taken drugs that modifies their sexual characteristics away from their apparent birth sex. But the resulting kind of body is not exactly the same as the centroid for that birth sex; and it has occurred to no sane person in dath ilan to claim otherwise, for that would be false and known to be false, and dath ilan does not put up with that. Instead the results of different surgeries form a further addition to the special-edge-case list, which doesn't freak out dath ilani, because they are all computer programmers by nature, and virtuous computer programmers want to acknowledge edge cases.

"But what of gender?" you ask. "Do they think that an MtF is a woman?"

And the answer... is that dath ilani are sufficiently persnickety precisionist perfectionists that they wouldn't dream of just having "masculine" and "feminine" genders in the first place, what with there being more than one way to express either. What prediction market would be content with such paltry data?

But they don't have 73 genders either. A computer programmer immediately sees this is not a problem you solve with 73 subclasses.

No, in dath ilan they have gendertropes.

If you are old enough to remember Geek Codes on USENET then you already know how gendertropes work. It's what nerds do, given the time and half an opportunity, and dath ilan is from an Earthly perspective the Planet of the Nerds.

"Meddling Asexual" is a well-known gendertrope, shared between both asexes. "Desperate Demislut" (high sex drive, but can only feel sexual attraction to very few people, who then have a lot of negotiating power in that relationship) leans statistically more feminine than masculine, but nobody would blink at seeing it on a man's list of codes. "Person with a high sex drive who takes advantage of that to form an entire harem" is statistically divergent enough in its expression between the standard birth sexes that there's different gendertropes for the usually-male version and the usually-female version.

What in Earth might be called "agender" is "I hate your standard library and I'm just going to describe myself by hand". But people will roll their eyes at you if what you describe, or are seen to do, turns out to be pretty standard after all. They are rude, by Earth standards, in dath ilan; they tell fewer lies and conceal fewer reactions.

If you do statistical analysis on MtF-sexed persons (or FtMs, that cultural situation being a lot more symmetrical in dath ilan, with no weirdly one-sided moral panic) the survey finds that some MtF gendertrope distributions look statistically more like the masculine centroid, and some look more like the feminine centroid, and some are statistically associated more with MtFs than with either cis sex, and some tropes are common to both MtFs and FtMs. And that is considered fine, in dath ilan, because their first priority is the accurate description of facts. If you know somebody's bodily anatomy finely divided, and you know their gendertropes finely divided, you have the data the prediction market traders want to know, to bet on whether it will work out if you go on a date with someone.

And that, in dath ilan, is the point, and all that most anyone wants to do with all this genderstuff: make predictions about which relationships will work out. "Wants kids" / "doesn't want kids" is very near the top of standard-priority gendertrope code lists, for that reason, even if Earth would not think of that choice as a great essence of gender differentiation.

The dath ilani are not much for identifying themselves with the various clusters they could be put into -- though they do not deny the predictive power of those clusters, or their usefulness in shorthand and longhand communication. They just know that they are ultimately themselves, and that all of the other lives clustering around them are not their own lives to lead. The closest they come to identifying as male is saying, "Yeah, the bog-standard masculine centroid predicts me pretty well, and I'm comfortable with the suggested scripts for it."

And a lot of men do say that, in dath ilan. Because the standards committee responsible for surveying the masculine centroid, and annually updating the suggested default scripts, did a careful job of it...

...Before submitting their recommendations to the delegates of the fluid democracy annually temporarily formed by men, to negotiate with the delegates of women, on masculine-feminine relationship defaults for the next year. Those recommendations obviously are not binding on anyone (except a few highly specialized cities for people who really really want predictable standardized relationships, which make that a condition of accepting new residents) but it saves work over everyone negotiating separately. The negotiations don't touch on toilet seats because they designed better toilet seats. They don't touch on public restrooms because dath ilan doesn't have segregated restrooms, just restrooms with helpfully differentiated stations that only a few rare highly specialized cities would dream of making mandatory. "Fewer laws need fewer exceptions", as the saying goes in dath ilan.

Good luck, Earth.
Dath ilan doesn't have to consider who gets to compete in Women's Sports because they just compete at things, and most women on the planet would be insulted at the suggestion. (They do have Anything-Goes Augmented Sports vs. Sports Without Drugs.)
Dath ilan is the world such that Eliezer Yudkowsky is its exactly median resident, including Spearman's g. Standard stats suggest that sexual assault would be less of a problem; also dumb criminals who commit crimes with witnesses get caught fast.
Read 7 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
Jan 28
I heard from many people who said, "An NVDA drop makes no sense as a Deepseek reaction; buying NVDA." So those people have now been cheated by insider counterparties with political access. They may make fewer US trades in the future.
Also note that the obvious meaning of this news is that someone told and convinced Trump that China will invade Taiwan before the end of his term, and the US needs to wean itself off Taiwanese dependence.
This was a $400B market movement, and if @SECGov can't figure out who did it then the SEC has no reason to exist.
Read 5 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
Jan 7
Watching historians dissect _Chernobyl_.

Imagining Chernobyl run by some dude answerable to nobody, who took it over in a coup and converted it to a for-profit.

Shall we count up how hard it would be to raise Earth's AI operations to the safety standard AT CHERNOBYL?
That charismatic guy who seized control of a nonprofit research power plant and converted it to a for-profit, answerable to nobody?

He's gone. His less coup-prone competitors, trying to build huger power cores, are also gone. That's not how they did things EVEN AT CHERNOBYL.
It's not just best-in-class safety institutions, like the NHTSA or air traffic control in the US, that don't turn nuclear plant safety over to gung-ho CEOs. *Chernobyl* didn't do that. You've got to ditch those guys just to get to the safety standard AT CHERNOBYL.
Read 32 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
Dec 22, 2024
Okay. Look. Imagine how you'd have felt if an AI had just proved the Riemann Hypothesis.

Now you will predictably, at some point, get that news LATER, if we're not all dead before then. So you can go ahead and feel that way NOW, instead of acting surprised LATER.
So if you ask me how I'm reacting to a carelessly-aligned commercial AI demonstrating a large leap on some math benchmarks, my answer is that you saw my reactions in 1996, 2001, 2003, and 2015, as different parts of that future news became obvious to me or rose in probability.
I agree that a sensible person could feel an unpleasant lurch about when the predictable news had arrived. The lurch was small, in my case, but it was there. Most of my Twitter TL didn't sound like that was what was being felt.
Read 4 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
Sep 23, 2024
A common claim among e/accs is that, since the solar system is big, Earth will be left alone by superintelligences.

A simple rejoinder is that just because Bernald Arnault has $170 billion, does not mean that he'll give you $77.18.

(Megathread.)
Earth subtends only 4.54e-10 = 0.0000000454% of the angular area around the Sun, according to GPT-o1.

(Sanity check: Earth is a 6.4e6 meter radius planet, 1.5e11 meters from the Sun. In rough orders of magnitude, the area fraction should be ~ -9 OOMs. Check.)
Asking an ASI to leave a hole in a Dyson Shell, so that Earth could get some sunlight not transformed to infrared, would cost It 4.5e-10 of Its income.

This is like asking Bernald Arnalt to send you $77.18 of his $170 billion of wealth.

In real life, Arnalt says no.
Read 37 tweets
Eliezer Yudkowsky ⏹️ Profile picture
Sep 22, 2024
A common claim among e/accs is that, since Space is big, Earth will be left alone by superintelligences.

A simple rejoinder (a longer one follows) is that just because Bill Gates has $139 billion dollars, does not mean that he'll give you $6300.
Earth subtends only 4.54e-10 = 0.0000000454% of the angular area around the Sun, according to GPT-o1.

(Sanity check: Earth is a 6.4e6 meter radius planet, 1.5e11 meters from the Sun. In rough orders of magnitude, the area fraction should be ~ -9 OOMs. Check!)
Asking an ASI to leave a hole in a Dyson Shell, so that Earth could get some sunlight not transformed to infrared, would cost It 4.5e-10 of Its income.

This is like asking Bill Gates to send you $6,300 of his $139 billion dollars of wealth.

In real life, Gates says no.
Read 31 tweets

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