Yes, representative democracy as a system is biased more towards preventing bad outcomes (i.e. allowing the people to remove leaders that harm their interests) rather than pursuing the pareto frontier

Why will X not keep increasing? It’s been increasing, albeit very slowly, since the start of the 20th century as the disease burden declines and nutrition improves. I see no reason to think that future health interventions couldn’t further juice those numbers.

Will it keep up with Y? Probably not, unless people are willing to accept pretty radical interventions to their biology. But it almost certainly is not static

IQ hasn't been increasing in developed countries for about three decades now. In fact, it has been declining in most.

The increases still happen globally but mostly driven by developing countries.

Indeed. The Flynn effect has reversed.

X will increase through Y. Evolution something something.

Sure, but I don’t think most of the money that goes into funding math is for the purposes of pure understanding. The reason governments fund mathematics research grants is generally for a more instrumental purpose; taking the US congress as an example, the mission of the NSF is to, “Promote the progress of science; advance national health, prosperity, and welfare; and secure national defense.” Most federal math grants come from the NSF.

Of course, math research is cheap and most academics don’t rely upon grants, their salary covers most of their expenses. But here too, the mathematics professor spends a substantial amount of their time teaching future engineers/quants/other applied mathematicians, who need to understand math for instrumental purposes, not as an end in and of itself. Without the tuitions of these students, I can’t imagine universities maintaining the size of their math departments, let alone expanding them as Dr. Sahai advocates for.

So who or what funds the community of pure mathematics going forward?

Research in pure mathematics is part of what we call "basic research". There are no applications in mind a priori. People instead focus on understanding, because history has taught us that understanding tough problems in mathematics finds natural applications elsewhere. It's the same as theoretical physics or theoretical computer science.

> People instead focus on understanding, because history has taught us that understanding tough problems in mathematics finds natural applications elsewhere.

If the goal is still eventually the applications elsewhere, we're back to what happens if the AI is simply better at this.

You can probably make an argument that human understanding is better as humans are better at finding new patterns or fundamental new ways of thinking and also applying them to new applications.

However, what if AI becomes better at humans for that as well?

No reason you couldn't have an AI be optimised for advancing basic research and understanding and a second AI to take these results and optimise for finding new applications for these discoveries.

> what if AI becomes better at humans for that as well?

The "if" is the problem. If it happens, then of course, let AI do it. For the moment AI is still bad at those type of tasks [1], so the discussion shouldn't focus on highly conjectural situations. We can't destroy the scientific ecosystem based on vague speculations.

[1] There are real reasons: it is not obvious how to optimize an LLM for doing basic science or other ill defined tasks. On the contrary, optimizing for writing a proof that passes the Lean test or code that passes the tests is a different story.

Basic research is funded with the understanding that applications are not imminent, yes, but also with the expectation that some of the knowledge gained will eventually result in advancements to the public welfare

>The NSA mission is primarily inward focused.

This is simply false. Only domestic law enforcement agencies like the FBI can conduct domestic investigations. Law enforcement or counter-intelligence agents might be given access to intelligence the NSA collects if they have a warrant, but it is not in the remit of the agency to intentionally collect information on US persons, it’s only allowed incidentally when conducting foreign intelligence collection

What makes you think that the NSA cares about rules or laws?

Snowden showed that was the case, and that was a long time ago. Lots more compute and toys for them to play with now.

Oh I thought their primary focus was direct threats to the US as opposed to more general adverseries but I may be thinking of DHS.

On the night when the first large batch of "domestic terrorists", selected by some fucking LLM filtering of mass surveillance data that should never have been allowed to be collected by NSA in the first place, are rounded up by ICE and taken to the camps, I just know that there will be some jackwagon on the ride in or in the cells after making some completely irrelevant point about the separation of foreign vs. domestic surveillance, as if this matters in practice to an increasingly desperate fascist regime.

Paraphrasing the German General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

in reference to a WW1 Austrian General (for others who pass by and are curious, since you seem to be in the know)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Conrad_von_H%C3%B6tzendo...

Completely disagree. When we’re talking about something like air, missile, or artillery strikes, the operator of the weapon system may literally never even see the target, on a screen or otherwise. They may simply be entering targeting information provided to them by an operations center. These decisions are social and group decisions, with distributed responsibility, which is why it’s so important to have institutions like the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence which historically has identified and helped implement the policies which prevent these kinds of disasters, but which unfortunately the current administration decided to shut down without a replacement.

Sometimes, the difference between a successful strike on a lawful combatant and disaster is one analyst pointing out that the building the enemy is hiding in is next to a square that’s used for a market on Tuesdays and wouldn’t you know it, it’s Tuesday. That’s not something the person “pulling the trigger,” can always be expected to know, which is why every ops center needs to be designed to elevate those voices, when the time comes

the operator was following orders...

Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?

Not if those people are legislators or law enforcement

If, during your upbringing, you were inculcated in pro-shrimp propaganda and earned substantial rewards for helping shrimp find food or defend themselves against predators, you’d probably be fairly inclined to help them out as an autonomous adult. Hell, we have human beings today that didn’t experience that and are still committing their lives to shrimp welfare

I wouldn’t trust this argument by analogy enough to risk the fate of the world on it, but it doesn’t seem obvious to me that a super intelligence would be totally disinclined to care about the interests of lesser intelligences

I would say that rationalists have some commitment to their religion being factually accurate (or at least grounded in empirical observation), which is more than can be said of most others