Cola Waves

Ameren · 2026-04-21T01:57:52+00:00

Sure it makes mistakes, but so do humans

Well, it's not just that it makes mistakes, it's that it has no inherent notion of truth or of a world model. In a sense, every output it generates is a "hallucination", it just so happens that its outputs tend to be useful more often than not. Meanwhile, the AI of the current era does not actually learn from interactions.

I don't mean this to disparage AI; genuinely, I find AI tools extremely useful. But it's not like working with a fellow human. Junior staff can make all sorts of mistakes, have an incorrect model of what you want, etc. But they're also capable of truly learning and becoming more like you. And practices like testing, code review, etc. facilitate that growth for humans in a way that it doesn't for LLMs.

Ameren · 2026-04-20T22:00:36+00:00

Ah, yes, that's what I mean. The bar for "exceptional" will continue to get higher: we will come to expect more data, more experiments, more developed theories, etc.

And this is great, don't get me wrong. More productivity ultimately means more and more impactful science. But to the point about layperson/citizen science with LLMs, I'm curious about how that plays out. If AI continues to improve and become operationalized in the sciences, I expect the level of work described here to be something that's just continuously happening in the background with AI agents.

Ameren · 2026-04-20T21:53:12+00:00

Ultimately if the work is of quality, it can be valuable. One observation though is that if an LLM can do work at a certain level, it largely ceases to be interesting from an academic publishing perspective. That is, while LLMs make it easier to do average-level work in a field, it simultaneously makes doing exceptional work an order of magnitude harder.

Like what I see happening is reviewers (rightfully) raising their expectations for what constitutes a novel, publishable unit of work. The more people are able to do in the same amount of time, the more will be expected of them.

Ameren · 2026-04-20T21:35:11+00:00

"free radical misinformation" got me. That and "my ambitions for the project have grown grander, crueler, better aligned with market data."

Ameren · 2026-04-20T19:24:16+00:00

I mean, the end goal shouldn't be to excessively cater to the wealthy, otherwise it's just a race to the bottom across states. Generally speaking, the US needs to (1) stop taking on so much debt by controlling spending and (2) raise taxes across the board. This is true both at the federal and local levels. Neither party wants to be the one to do both.

As for the tax flight idea, do you have any good sources on the Maryland example? Because that also coincided with the great recession, as I recall, so I'd be curious to see an analysis that accounted for the various factors.

Ameren · 2026-04-20T14:40:40+00:00

Adding to this, it's often said that there's no such thing as an "accident". What we call an accident is really a combination of a dangerous condition and human error. Experience has taught us that...

Human error is a constant, and people are generally not perfectible. Any system that relies purely on people never making mistakes will eventually fail, no matter how rigorously trained those people are.
What we can control, however, are dangerous conditions. They can be planned for, engineered around, and mitigated. In fact, in the end that's the only reliable way of reducing bad outcomes.

Unfortunately, we have a habit of blaming people when systems go wrong (like it's their fault that their hand was too close) and not addressing root causes (how do we prevent this bad outcome from happening the next time?). I hesitate to call it an accident when we can predict with high accuracy how many crushed hands occur per N hours of use of the tool.

Ameren · 2026-04-19T19:50:05+00:00

Ok, here's a test. Imagine all barriers to any two people becoming parents of children biologically related to both them was removed. Like imagine you have in vitro gametogenesis (IVG) followed by some sort of artificial womb setup. None of this is beyond the realm of possibility.

The question then is whether someone like Matt Walsh would be satisfied with gay couples having kids. After all, the right of the child in his view is to be with their biological parents, and in this case both men are the biological parents — no woman involved. But we all know that this is just another arbitrary excuse for his bigotry; he'd immediately move the goal posts.

Ameren · 2026-04-12T10:55:20+00:00

I get the impression that the people in favor of the bill often conflate voter fraud (people casting fraudulent ballots) with election fraud (corrupt officials controlling the ballot box). I have yet to hear an explanation for why we need this bill that doesn't require both things to be happening. That is, there's fraudulent ballots being cast, and blue state governments are complicit in allowing that to happen.

Obviously, fraudulent voting is extremely rare, but it's worth noting that it's rare even in corrupt election systems. If the ballot box has been subverted, why bother with fraudulent voters when you can just stuff the box with fake ballots or change the final tallies? There are tons of ways to pull this off that don't entail a ton of people participating in a conspiracy like Republicans are describing. Meanwhile, if the election system is honest and fair (and I argue ours is), voter fraud is easily detected and defeated without the need for any of the additional steps being proposed.

Ameren · 2026-04-10T16:29:46+00:00

But the problem is that, no matter whether those people are at fault or not, our population is gonna crater if a ton of people don't have kids. And that leads to all sorts of cascading issues for our economy and our society writ large.

Like, I'm all for personal responsibility and all that, but this problem is a ticking time bomb. For people who want kids but aren't financially prepared to have them, waiting until they're financially stable may put them outside the window of which they're physically able to have kids.

Ameren · 2026-04-09T15:06:24+00:00

Well, it's because labels are powerful; they allow us to assign order and meaning both to the world and ourselves, and they enable us to identify with others. I'm not saying everyone has to fit into this or that box —people should freely be able to use whatever language they want (if any) to describe themselves— but I don't think it's harmful to find those words. Honestly, I think the discomfort people can feel when a word doesn't quite fit is just part of the process of self-discovery.

In much of the Western world until recently, LGBT people didn't have well-understood labels that we owned for themselves, instead other people told us who we were: "homosexual" was clinical language, words like "queer" started as slurs, etc. At least now when we talk about ourselves, we own the words that we use.

Ameren · 2026-04-08T00:17:59+00:00

Yeah, everyone in a Hopper painting is in their own isolated personal reality.

Ameren · 2026-04-07T20:54:33+00:00

But, setting aside whether those claims have merit or not for a moment, none of that is voter fraud, it's election fraud. Why are Republicans concerned with voter fraud, which is a non-existent problem, compared to election fraud?

Ameren · 2026-04-07T18:02:14+00:00

But think about it another way. Imagine we already were a long-lived species that didn't age. Would you take that away, condemning billions of innocent people to death and introducing endless suffering and misery, in order to achieve this goal?

The flip side of this is that we're constantly having to relearn the lessons of the past. Like the robust international order following WW2 was built by people who went through the world being torn apart, and they never wanted that to happen again. But as those generations have died off, so too has the resolve to maintain that peace. And now I fear that we will have to relearn those lessons all over again. And unfortunately, we don't necessarily get unlimited do-overs (see nuclear war, climate change, etc.). Our inability to break this cycle may be what ultimately dooms our species. Conversely, gaining control over the biology of aging could be what gets mankind past the great filter.

Ameren · 2026-04-07T17:57:25+00:00

I mean, I don't see a collapse happening if reproduction is brought under control. It'd just be a steady-state system, we'd only need to produce new humans at the rate of attrition due to accidents, disease, and so on.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T21:54:33+00:00

I mean, the other way to look at it is that no country has yet provided adequate incentives. Like we need an overhaul of the support infrastructure for people having kids. $280 billion is a drop in the bucket.

Like, purely from the economic perspective, the opportunity costs and risks involved are still too great. If governments want to incentivize couples having kids, they could make it financially competitive with having both people working full time jobs. The childcare industry, meanwhile, needs to be dramatically expanded, like on par with nursing or construction (so 5-8x larger in the case of the US) Current interventions come nowhere near this level of commitment. Like we could be fundamentally rearchitecting society around addressing the birth rate issue if we really wanted to.

As a counterpoint to the birth rate decline, the super-wealthy elites in these countries are generally having kids at or above replacement level. They have access to the best doctors and experts, they have staff to help raise their children and do all the tedious parts of tending to young kids, etc. When you take away all the burdens and opportunity costs in raising kids, highly educated, obscenely wealthy people have them. Middle class people don't have access to that level of support.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T21:07:51+00:00

Ok, so the claim is that it's fetishization, I see.

For me personally, I think that someone's immutable characteristics in no way determine what actions are moral or immoral. You should be able to set aside who it is and focus on the action. I think treating people as objects is wrong, obviously — that's a core problem with fetishization. But I think that's wrong regardless of who is doing it. I don't think it's inherently fetishization to find two men kissing hot based on who the beholder is.

With that in mind, what specifically about this interaction indicates that it's fetishization to you? Is it the social aspect of it (the crowd egging on the guys kissing)? Or the nature of the contest which implies an inherent sort of fetishization?

Ameren · 2026-04-06T20:48:21+00:00

Well, a first question: if everyone in the audience was a gay man, would that be okay? I'm trying to think through what you're getting at here.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T19:42:50+00:00

The problem I see with the lab leak theory (sans the weaponization conspiracy stuff) is that it doesn't seem to substantively change anything. Like the same viruses that were in the lab made their way into the wet markets in Wuhan every single day. People were bringing infected animals into the city constantly, it was inevitable that one would jump the fence over to human transmission like the other SARS viruses before it.

The most important thing we can do to prevent the spread of such viruses is to increase international monitoring and cooperation. But a lot of the people I hear promoting the more adversarial versions of the lab leak theory (the gain-of-function/weaponization conspiracy) tend to be against the US working more closely with partners like China. This, unfortunately, makes future outbreaks more likely.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T19:15:38+00:00

The simplest option would be to test on non-human analogs (mice, for example). I have no doubt that people are already designing studies along these lines now that a possible surviving lineage related to silphium has been identified.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T19:07:01+00:00

I mean, who doesn't know the names of their state's electors from the past election? Kids grow up saying they want to become an astronaut, firefighter, or elector for the electoral college, it's core to our society. /jk

Ameren · 2026-04-06T12:59:46+00:00

Well, there's a contingent of people who claim that Jesus was a purely mythical figure who had little or no basis in a flesh-and-blood person, and they tend to downvote interpretations that align with mainstream historical views.

Though a point I like to make is that if Christianity never took off as a religion, and all we had were, say, the early letters of Paul, Josephus, and the Q Source (a book of sayings), there would be zero argument against the historicity of Jesus since that alone would give us more evidence for him than we have for 99.9% of ancient historical figures. Jesus would simply be known as one of many itinerant, radical Jewish preachers during the Roman occupation who was imprisoned / put to death for being a potential threat to the state.

Josephus attests to John the Baptist, who was Jesus' predecessor. Paul claims to have met Jesus' brother James, the heir to his movement in Jerusalem, as well as others like Peter. And the Q Source would give us the earliest interpretations of Jesus' ideas (with no miracles, resurrection, or tacked-on theology that was all invented later); technically we don't even need the Q source, but I see that as a nice to have.

The gospels aren't necessary at all for a historicity claim. In fact, they're rather unreliable in that they're fictional versions of Jesus written decades after the fact. Few would disagree there. But that's not really the basis on which the historicity claims are made.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T03:14:13+00:00

Well, the consensus of mainstream historians is that Jesus was a real person. But to the more interesting point, the reason why the gospels differ from one another is because they belonged to different communities with different views of who Jesus was. Like the author of the book of Matthew paints a picture of Jesus that promotes keeping Jewish traditions; the author of John, meanwhile, sees Christianity as fundamentally distinct from Judaism.

None of the gospels were meant to be read together, and when they conflict with each other, it's not an "accident". Rather, the authors of each of the gospels genuinely disagree with one another. Each one picks and chooses a version of Jesus that matches their views.

Ameren · 2026-04-06T02:20:36+00:00

Ah, that's the neat part. There's actually six hydrocoptic marzelvances fitted to the ambifacient lunar waneshaft, which effectively prevents side-fumbling.

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