Oversimplifiers vs. Difference Deniers: a dynamic regarding group differences that leads to rage and confusion

December 17, 2023

Here's a misery-filled dynamic that I believe commonly plays out regarding small observed differences between groups: (1) Two groups have a small (but meaningful) difference in their average value of some trait, with heavily overlapping distributions. (2) Some people ("Oversimplifiers") observe this difference (in their everyday life or media reports) and turn this small average difference into a (sometimes very harmful) oversimplification: "A's are like this, B's are like that." (3) O...

Nine ways that text-generating AIs will probably change the world in the next ten years

December 3, 2022

Image generated by the A.I. DALL·E 2 using the prompt "A robot hand drawing itself by MC Escher"

Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4). Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years: #1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and...

Hypothesis about America: people are coming to realize society is messed up

September 1, 2020

I've been coming to think that the following hypothesis may be true about America: Increasingly, people in the U.S. are concluding that society is really F'd up. But the reasons are subtle, hidden, and complex, so each group picks their favorite simple enemy to blame. Problems go unfixed. Points in favor of the claim that people are increasingly coming to this realization: 1. This helps explain Trump's election in 2016. Many rural Republicans and disaffected independents believed s...