CC
Comments9
"Under physicalist epiphenomenalism (which is the standard approach to the mind-matter relation)" <- can you give support for this parenthetical claim? It has been some years since I took a philosophy of mind course, but when I did, I got the impression that epiphenomenalism is not the most popular view on the mind-body problem.
Michael Lewis tries to provide some rough estimates in the last chapter or two of "Going Infinite". From memory, his answer is more or less along the same lines as Jason's comment. Also, some of the money was stolen in hacks, and some has now gone to the bankruptcy lawyers etc.
Before FTX collapsed, the company was aggressively marketing crypto, a highly speculative and volatile asset class, to unsophisticated retail investors. IMO this should have been a red flag, because it's a harmful career in the form of "Marketing and R&D for compulsive behaviours such as [...] gambling" from this list: https://80000hours.org/2015/08/what-are-the-10-most-harmful-jobs/ . This should have made the EA community apply more scrutiny towards SBF and FTX and avoid making him the public face of the movement as much as he was.
If I understand correctly, it sounds like you think the US and EU are more amenable to regulating AI than mainland China, Taiwan, or South Korea. Is that true? The US and some European countries are famous for valuing individual liberty, so on that basis I might guess they would be less amenable to regulation than East Asian countries. And this article seems to indicate that the Chinese government is already regulating AI more strictly than the US government is: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/22/23609945/china-ai-chatbots-chatgpt-regulators-censorship
The article is mainly about SBF's political donations - here's a paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/8FX5V
I saw this in a Financial Times article about FTX today:
'[L]egal experts argue that even if these funds were proven to be linked to wrongdoing, there probably would be no legal basis for clawbacks. James Cox, professor of corporate and securities law at Duke University, said this was due to the “bona fide” principle, which protects individuals who accept money with no knowledge it derives from illicit activity.' https://www.ft.com/content/428c7800-c72d-4c59-9940-4376fea6e263 (paywalled)
Any thoughts on this?
There are forms of physicalism that are not eliminativist (they see consciousness as something real, for example as a kind of information processing) and are not epiphenomenalist (they hold that mental states can affect the physical world). I hold a view like this, and I would guess most non-dualist philosophers of mind do too.
Personally I think that eliminativism (at least in its most extreme forms) and epiphenomenalism are both intuitively implausible. They contradict my firsthand experience that my consciousness exists and has effects on the observable physical world. So I'm unlikely to accept either of them without a strong argument.