Nassim Taleb

Here's my take as someone who was using Claude everyday for every little thing and now I've deleted my account because I didn't like what it was doing to my mind.

What goes totally unmentioned in the article is that this feature is designed to help mitigate dark usage patterns. My major concern with chatbots is excessive usage can lead to AI psychosis or negative rumination (depression). A feature that makes user's more self-aware of their usage patterns is a good thing. Making the user more self-aware is a necessary first step that will precede any kind of intervention to reduce their reliance.

Where this fails is it frames the intervention as a moderation problem. It may seem counterintuitive, but moderation takes more self-control than elimination. If you struggle with your relationship to LLMs, then every time you make a choice whether or not to engage with a LLM is an opportunity to struggle. The more you struggle, the worse you feel.

Obviously Anthropic cannot advocate for churning from their product. The psychological stickiness of their product is its primary selling point for investors. When they say "set quiet hours and breaks" it frames this as a user problem. Just get good bruh, it's not that the technology hallucinates or is sycophantic, or basically designed to be a AI girlfriend / boyfriend, it's a skill issue. Rather than a technology being applied incorrectly and a company floundering to hook users before they try to jack up the prices to stay solvent.

I…

> move from having government control to having oligarchic control.

Government control is oligarchic control. With the bank bailouts in 2007, it became clear the government wants to keep the oligopoly of banks in charge, instead of freeing the resources to companies worthy of them.

Bitcoin makes no change from this perspective. Taleb says "that the distribution of holdings of bitcoin follows a power law with tail index ≈ 5/4, no different from the distribution of wealth in the U.S." [1]

> If the supply of currency doesn't keep up with demand, the price skyrockets. This discourages investment, since you get more value just by holding onto it.

Indeed, the demand is affected by speculative bubbles. I hope that demand stabilizes, and that people realize the potential gain from trading against short-term sentiment.

But the supply might be a good predictor of price. [2]

> A proof-of-work cryptocurrency must at all times expend energy proportional to the value represented by the cryptocurrency, or else be vulnerable to attack.

I agree. PoW expends a ridiculous amount of energy per transaction, and gains security by essentially outspending any attacker.
But to some extent, Bitcoin developers are at fault here for refusing to increase the block size (thereby limiting the blockchain space and increasing the reward for miners).

[1] - https://nassimtaleb.org/2021/06/bitcoin-currencies-bubbles/

[2] - https:///@100trillionUSD/modeling-bitcoins-value-with-scarcity-91fa0fc03e25

Yanis:

"The Gold Standard is, indeed, a great source of insight into how dangerously primitive Bitcoin maximalist thinking is. Suppose Bitcoin were to take over from fiat currencies. What would banks do? They would lend in Bitcoin, of course. This means that overdraft facilities would emerge allowing lenders to buy goods and services with Bitcoins that do not yet exist. What would governments do? At moments of stress, they would have to issue units of account linked to Bitcoin (as they did under the Gold Exchange Standard during the interwar period)."

The reason governments could do this with gold is that gold is easy to counterfeit, hard to store securely, and expensive to transact with at a distance. So it makes sense to keep it all in a giant vault (a bank, or central bank) and trust the vaultkeeper to issue ious and transact in those.

But bitcoin does not suffer from these defects.

I don't think Yanis understands this.

https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/09/intellectual-yet-idiot/

When the characteristics that a test is supposed to measure are completely ill-defined (there is no concept of a "Measurable Intelligence" independent of a context, leaving aside biological retardation) they are a measure of nothing definitive and any correlations/predictions are subject to bias and/or randomness.

Here is Nassim Taleb;

1) IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle - https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39

2) Fooled by Correlation: Common Misinterpretations in Social "Science" - https://www.academia.edu/39797871/Common_Misapplications_and_Misinterpretations_of_Correlation_in_Social_Science_

3) Correlation videos - https://nassimtaleb.org/tag/correlation/

See also :

a) The Pseudoscience of Psychometry and The Bell Curve - https://www.jstor.org/stable/2967209

b) Pseudoscience and Mental Ability: The Origins and Fallacies of the IQ Controversy. - https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED164662

> There is a very vocal, very small minority that's ruining it for everyone else.

You're both right. Unfortunately, that very small minority is culturally dominant, so it is the case that:

1) >> We have reached a point where it has been a mainstream position to view the idea of defending free speech as disagreeable, or even deeply offensive. And;

2) > There is a very vocal, very small minority that's ruining it for everyone else.

In the same way a relatively small but well-organized group like the Taliban can control an entire country despite lacking enthusiastic support from the majority of the population, a small but well-organized subculture can dominate and dictate what is/is not acceptable in mainstream American culture.

For a better and more nuanced explanation, see "The Minority Rule" by Nassim Taleb.
https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/

Pretty much. America First Streaming is using RedWhiteBlue Hosting, FreedomDNS, etc. and BLM Streaming is using Antifa Hosting, DefundPoliceDNS, etc.

And for the rest of us who are caught in the middle, those above options are all that we have.

Imagine if restaurants only had Kosher and Halal food, but no longer make "regular" food because "regular" people will reluctantly eat Kosher or Halal, but Kosher and Halal customers will not entertain "regular" food.

So the entire stack all the way down becomes bifurcated due to political beliefs.

https://nassimtaleb.org/2016/08/intolerant-wins-dictatorship-small-minority/