I used to hear their radio commercials in the early 2000s and wondered how much business they lost due to people not being able to figure out how to spell the name. With Google's spelling correction it's not as big a deal nowadays, but I could think of about a dozen plausible spellings of Schick Shadel.
Is that similar to when a parent catches their kid smoking and makes them smoke until they puke? I've had significant doubts whether that was a good idea or not, even beyond questioning if it works. But it would be nice to know if it worked anyway.
They went out of business during the pandemic. Even though the program had decent statistics, better than places like Betty Ford, they were never quite accepted as legitimate. Possibly because it's kind of gross. But it really really worked for a lot of people, including the guy who owned that radio station mentioned below
Behaviorsm isn't without merits, but naive blank slate behaviorism applied to certain groups specifically (autistic, trans, and intersex people) has been bad. Anything vaguely akin to expanding this has to be vocally called out as roughly equivalent to the return of lobotomies.
This started my day with a smile. Thank you, Moon Moth!
The natural reaction when someone says something unkind is to say something unkind back to them back to them but how much better would the world be if people just said “Please be a bit nicer”?
Perhaps we can start a campaign! Get T-shirts printed!
Please be a bit nicer?
PS. Well done too to Alephwyr for accepting the advice!
I think his assumption was justified. I've never before seen someone who both believes in IQ and isn't left-wing, but also uses the "this idea has historically led to bad things, so we have to call out anyone who thinks in that direction" argument.
Isn't that the entire premise behind the suppression of leftism in the United States and other western countries? Soviets bad, therefore Food not Bombs practitioners should be arrested?
I think "X would have bad implications if applied to situation Y, so we must fight against X wherever it appears, even in situations where it could be true" is a bad idea.
I'm not opposed to the entire idea of trapped priors or a critical period, but it needs to be handled responsibly. When there is an elephant in the room and you don't acknowledge it while advancing a perspective that could have implications related to it I think it's important to try to provoke things into the open.
John Money was a quack psychiatrist who didn't believe in innate gender. He tried to prove his point by persuading a family to raise their son as a girl. Instead of being conditioned into a happy little daughter, the son hated living as a girl and rebelled against it from the age of two until his parents finally let him detransition when he was fifteen. I think Alephwyr's point is that trying to cure trans people through childhood conditioning is as futile as John Money's attempt to make a child transgender.
I agree with you, but I also think that Alephwyr's comment was very strawmanny/misrepresenting Scott's position as well as confusing-to-readers (which is what prompted my initial reply).
I think there are a lot of trans people who have felt that way for their entire lives and are happy being that way, but there are also a lot of trans people who become trans late in life due to weird life events and are still happy being that way.
Is there a word for when you accuse an opponent of something completely unrelated to what they said, then use the refusal to discuss the unrelated thing as the critical piece of evidence for your accusation?
Or he could ignore it. "Trans" was not mentioned at all in his post, so it is on the reader to infer the post has anything at all to do with transgenderism.
Were he to confirm OR deny the assertion that transgenderism is post-natally conditioned would prove nothing at all, since it is simply an argument from authority, for which I have not even heard Scott considers himself such an authoritative source to provide guidance on a stance.
Unless Scott's position has updated without my knowing, I believe Scott's running hypothesis is "The mind/brain contains an innate map of the body, part of that map includes gender, sometimes the map is wrong. Sort of like phantom limb pain." However, this post was written a decade ago. So take it with a grain of salt.
It was more complicated than that. His penis was badly injured in a circumcision gone bad. Well, social constructionism was in vogue then (as now), so of course if the anatomy had been changed, why not raise the child with the new anatomy?
Money was following the theories of the time. It shows how much damage bad theories can do to vulnerable people as much as it shows Money was a perv (which also appears to be the case).
True. But David Reimer really was vocally unhappy as a girl from an early age and only became more so as he grew older, so it seems like a lot of misery could have been avoided if Money and his family had listened to him instead of continuing the experiment for thirteen years.
I agree. I'm anti-trans-ideology, but I don't think Money is any kind of slam-dunk case against childhood transgender treatments. The problem wasn't that Reimer's gender identity was being indulged; the problem is that it was being ignored.
I think the family were only going along with what the doctors, particularly Money, were telling them. But if they had known all that was going on, they probably would have objected. Money was definitely an abuser, and that's part of the entire problem with the current drive to re-brand paedophilia as MAPs (minor attracted persons); while doubtless there are genuine people involved, there are also doubtless exactly these kinds of abusers wanting to use the campaign to hide under and get themselves protected ("you're persecuting me and I'll sue you if you don't stop slandering me as a paedophile! the psychiatric establishment is re-defining my condition so it's a medical state not a criminal offence!")
I'm confused. It's not a criminal offense to be attracted to minors. This seems pretty obvious? And implying someone has abused minors when they haven't is indeed slander. The word "pedophile" technically refers to the former but in common parlance is understood to be the latter. This is a problem for people in the former category.
It's inevitable that some criminals will find cover under this. Just as black criminals find cover under "anti-racist" rhethoric. But that's still vastly better than rounding up all black people on general suspicion.
The entire psychology community really wanted gender to be socially determined for political reasons, which is why they were so happy to accept those findings.
It's worth noting that all of these gender treatments are based on ideas that have no basis in science. The people who were doing these treatments did not have any scientifically valid reason to believe they'd be helpful, but these treatments have continued despite this fact.
The fact that they went from totally different causes for gender identity to assuming that altering people's genitals surgically and socializing them as that gender would help them is deeply troubling, because totally different causes would be very unlikely to have exactly the same treatment - but not getting sued for disfiguring the genitals of thousands of intersex children while following Money's treatments does provide a motivation for not wanting to say that these treatments don't work/are harmful.
It gets even worse when you dig into the story because the guy was actively abusive, and shouldn't have been let anywhere near children (or indeed any vulnerable person) but that was back then when everyone respected authority and if a Respected Doctor says this is the way to do things, why not?
Also why I have such strong feelings about the "we won't tell your parents because they wouldn't understand and might stop you" interventions with schools and trans kids. Much too easy to abuse "trust me, I'm an Authority Figure expert on this and I can tell you what is going on and what to do if you just follow along".
I'm sorry to directly question your character, I realize it's ad hominem, but are you a person who identifies with or is sexually attracted to dragons?
I always thought an un-PC dragon story would be a bookish winged, firebreathing dragon who gets picked on by the other dragons for not wanting to set fire to stuff. So he takes up with a cute serpentine loong who lives in the water.
Okay, I find myself confused, because that story seems to fall extremely well within the realm of "politically correct" as I know it. A story about a quiet outsider who doesn't fit in with their peers but finds someone who validates them for who they are? So, two questions, because I'm genuinely curious:
1) (Roughly) how old are you? (I want to know if this is generational semantic drift) For reference, I graduated high school roughly a decade ago.
2) How are you defining "PC" (or "un-PC") such that that the story above is "un-PC"? Or what aspects of the story make it so?
Again, not attacking you, I'm genuinely curious at how your view is different than mine here.
Off topic, but you remind me of several people I knew quite well on a forum from before the net was silo'd into social media dystopias. You wouldn't happen to have participated in late 'aughties forum culture, would you?
I have role played as a dragon in online games in the past. There was a high amount of sexual charge to my interactions, but these remained firmly within the gaming fantasy world.
Besides, it's really hard to get to meet dragons any more 😂
**That** was a very disturbing wikipedia page. But I suppose I should thank you for bringing it to my awareness. :-/
Also, "ycleptance" and "foredoomance" are kind of awesome words, and I regret that I won't be able to use them if I ever manage to forget their origin, because not everyone else will also have forgotten.
Sure, but only with their consent. In fact, I think any sexual preference that the individual having it prefers not to have should be cured. This is why conversion therapy should not be banned.
Also, it is often forced on children by parents. And this kind of thing falls somewhere near the border of what parents should be allowed to decide for their children.
>One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he’s in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a “critical window” for food preferences?
Don't we all have a story like this? I ate sriracha as a kid and got food poisoning. I now have a strong negative reaction to the smell of sriracha.
>So at the beginning, you might start in a random place and want to see if 500 miles away is more mountainous. But once your hard work has brought you 1000 feet from Everest’s summit, you don’t want to take a 500 mile jump and end up in New Delhi and have to start all over again.
It seems pretty universal that as things scale upward in mass (and accumulated learning/knowledge can be viewed as mass), they become less "maneuverable". Speedboats vs ocean liners, etc.
Maybe this relates to your language post from yesterday, where a child with a vocabulary of 10,000 words can more easily learn a new language than an adult with a vocabulary of 20,000 words (and an increased number of deep rules that must be discarded, like "adjectives of quantity come before adjectives of color".)
Well, at least in the case of AI training, it's not a case of being UNABLE to move fast, it's a case of not WANTING to move fast. We could easily program the learning algorithms to keep the same high speed throughout (in fact, that's the default), but that produces worse results.
Organisms and vehicles becoming less maneuverable as they get big seems like probably a square/cube thing, where mass grows with volume but control surfaces grow with area. I don't really see how the same principles could apply to learning.
I don't understand Scott referring to algorithmic temperature as "learning rate". A learning rate should have something to do with the speed at which knowledge is acquired. Temperature is totally different; it's a metric for how often you do something random instead of doing something methodical.
The idea is that if you make enough random guesses, a few of them will likely be somewhere near the target you're trying to find, and a methodical search from there will get you to the target. But I don't really see any connection to "learning" or "speed". Making a random move usually doesn't involve any learning.
1) I even have a story like this *as an adult*, where a bad experience with green olives made me like them less, permanently.
2) Adults have much higher standards for themselves than for children. I suspect it's easy to learn a new language to an intermediate level: do it full time, without distractions or financial worries, and deliberately stay away from writing aimed at adults (which comes with an explosion of vocabulary, sentence structures, obscure turns of phrase, cultural references, and so on). Conversely, you will not learn a second language in a few years if you spend 5 minutes per day on duolingo after work.
At 16 I had a bad stomach virus shortly after eating a sub, and it was about 5 years before the nausea on tasting one went fully away (what helped quite a bit in the meantime was switching to a different meat, and having a flavorful soda or sports drink instead of water).
I don't think anything he said logically implies otherwise. People who are attracted to cartoon animals are a subset of furries, therefore people who gain a sexual attraction to cartoon animals necessarily become furries. It's a unidirectional claim. I don't think he's claimed that this is the source of all furries, thereby incorrectly assuming equality of sets.
I was under the impression that the term "furry" encompasses the entire sexuality. That is, people who are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic animals (whether cartoon or humans in costumes), and people who dress up as animals for sexual reasons, are all furries.
I suppose you could make a distinction between furry-dressers and furry-attracted people and then only use the term "furry" for one category, but there's such a huge overlap and they're mostly part of the same communities that such language would be unnecessarily pedantic for most people who don't participate or care. It seems simpler to just acknowledge that like with any subculture, furries can vary in degree of hardcore enthusiasm and participation.
Technically, within the furry fandom the term for those who like to dress up and have sex in their costumes is "murrsuiters". Basically:
* A fan of anthropomorphic characters is called a "furry", whether they dress up in a costume or not.
Most don't, either because they personally don't care that much for owning a costume, or because costumes are expensive, or require a lot of maintenance, etc.
* Costumes are called "fursuits", and thus the subgroup of furries who own one or more and dress up in them are called "fursuiters".
The typical fursuit is ill-suited for sexual activity. It lacks the required holes and is made from materials that'd be ruined if any bodily fluid, especially sticky ones, got into them, that kind of thing.
* Finally, there are those who have a fetish on fursuit-wearing and like to have sex wearing one. They typically own one or more fursuits especially designed for sexual activity, called "murrsuits", and are therefore called "murrsuiters".
Such for-sex costumes are similar to BDSM ones in that they have the necessary holes and are made from materials that are easily washable, but otherwise look like typical fursuits.
Hence we have murrsuiters as a subset of fursuiters, which in turn are a subset of furries.
They are, ranging from those who just collect plushies, to those who adapt them for adult use. There are lots of ways to slice the fandom into specific subgroups and interests.
There are furries who aren't interested in the sexual aspect *at all* and are just into it for the 'being another species' bit or cosplay or other reasons that they identified with cartoon/anthropomorphic animals (often due to social isolation/bullying as children).
A big confusion here is between furries as a "fandom" and as a sexuality. There is overlap, but there are people in all 4 quadrants. Furries who are in the fandom but not into the fetish stuff tend to object if you lump everyone together.
While difficult to prove, I think it's directionally true that furry is a fetish subculture. I went on e621 and almost all of the top-used tags related to sex.
As Eric Blumrich said in the Burned Fur days, "by and large, furries are bi and large."
Also, I am unclear as to whether the original commenter was saying "furries are not always a sexual thing" or "not all furries are sexually attracted to cartoon animals specifically". I was sort of assuming the latter?
There is an extraordinarily strong fetish subculture within the furry fandom, but also a vehemently non-fetishist subgroup. I have no numbers, but I figure the fetishists may be 60% or more of the total.
That said, it isn't surprising that maybe 95% or more of the available art is of the fetishist kind. The reason is that fetishist furries spend a *lot* of money commissioning drawings, paintings, animations, stories etc. And since most of the art available is commissions, you see where this goes.
On the other side, the community is quite united in the goal of making everyone feel welcome and comfortable, hence the extensive tagging of content. By taggint their content very accurately, uploaders allow people to filter in what they want to see, as well as to filter out what they don't want to see. Those who don't want to see any sexual content can thus mark the option not to see it, and their browsing will be almost 100% guaranteed free of it, while still providing them thousands upon thousands of images.
Interestingly, all this extensive tagging also makes generative AI drawing systems trained on furry content extremely accurate for both sexual and non-sexual content alike. An unintended but quite welcome side effect.
This is a significant underestimate. Fandom surveys from Bailey/Hsu and later Furscience indicate that among male furries, 98% or more report some degree of sexual attraction as part of their experience, with a rate of >90% among furries as a whole.
That may be the case, yes. However, keep in mind this isn't a statistic of all furries, but rather of all furries willing to fill surveys about their interests, sexual and otherwise. Also, having some interest is a very vague concept and covers a much broader range than those who are invested in the fetishist side of the fandom.
For example, I know furries who never take part in such surveys, who entered the fandom having been fans of Disney cartoons when young, and who will admit they felt a crush on Gadjet, but who have no interest whatsoever in porn drawings or murrsuiting. They therefore aren't fetishists, and won't be totalized in statistics, but even if they were, depending on how the question was asked, they might end up counted amont the fetishists due to that childhood crush.
Another one I know is a deeply neurodivergent guy who loves the "babyfur" side of the fandom, and who has a "baby bear" as a fursona. He's also completely ace, with no interest whatsoever in anything approaching sexuality in any form. Depending on how the question was asked, he'd end up falling into the fetishist bucket due to how babyfurs are generally classified.
And so on and so forth. Which is why I think the number may be high, yes, but not that high. The furry fandom threads on the edge of several different gender/attraction axes, which makes it difficult to reduce it to a single one on attraction alone.
IMHO a better measurement would be to ask whether they specifically look for sexually explicit content, and split it into three bins: never, rarely, frequently. That'd provide a more accurate view of how much of the fandom is fetishistic.
96% of furry men view furry porn, 78% of women do. 59% view it daily.
This includes most asexual furries, as it happens. "Asexual", when it comes to furries, often means in practice "sexual interests niche enough and distant enough from reality such that they have no sexual interest in real-life people." This describes a number of asexual furries I know personally, and more I've observed.
There's a degree of social desirability bias and a degree of privacy-about-sexual-matters that makes it difficult for onlookers to form fully accurate perceptions about the nature and extent of sexuality involved in the sphere.
Eh, maybe. Let me give an example using myself. I'm a part of a NSFW furry porn channel on Telegram that exists for members of a different, main SFW group, to post NSFW content. Even though the NSFW group is well advertised on the main group, only 67% of the members of the main, SFW group are members of the NSFW one. That alone suggests to me the lower percentage is more accurate.
Atop that, I'm a member of the NSFW group mostly because there are interesting conversations there on gender identity and related subjects that develop around some of the posted images. My Telegram is configured to only download images when those are tapped to save on data transfers. If you were to look at my viewing of that channel, more than 95% of the images are untapped, as I'm mostly demi myself and seeing those drawings feels very meh. The remaining 5% or so are when someone remarks on one of the images and I tap on it to see what they're talking about. Some of those I find beautiful, in the sense of being very well drawn by skilled artists (think Renaissance-nude-paintings levels of artistry) -- but even those cause no arousal in me.
I guess on average I tap one image every three days, give or take. So by the metric of the research above, as framed in your comment, I'm an ace, with a niche enough interest, who fits straight into the 96% of furries who view furry porn. And yet that absolutely doesn't describe what's going on with me.
Those two facts (the relative number of subscribers, and my own anecdotal self-evidence), plus the conversations I have with other furries, together make me doubt the at-first-glance implications of those numbers, more than the numbers themselves. The numbers are likely correct given the questions asked, but they probably don't tell the story they seem to be telling.
Now I'm imagining a sci-fi dystopia where everyone is forced to be open about their fetishes (for some reason, maybe because someone foolishly included "sexual satisfaction" in a bill of rights somewhere, and then some judges found an emanation from a penumbra). People are hooked up to electrodes and bombarded with an AI-generated adaptive firehose of porn, to rapidly home in on exactly what they're attracted to. All asexuals to date have eventually had an attraction identified, sometimes after years of "investigation" which can cause massive SAN check failures. But our protagonist may be the first and only true asexual in the society - can they persuade the Powers That Be that they're happy just as they are, before the avalanche of porn drives them insane? Subplot: the porn-generating AI has become sapient, and is actually trying to communicate through the medium of porn, a message which only our protagonist is capable of comprehending. Will the two of them fall in platonic love and reform their society?
I think there are people who specifically have a furry fetish, but as a furry, I've always just liked anthropomorphic animals (and dragons and gryphons) in all forms of media.
Or to put it another way - it's not that I specifically have a fetish for furries, it's that I like everything to be furry, including my porn. It's a general aesthetic/worldbuilding preference. I like video games that have furries, and in fact, generally prefer that they not be especially sexualized outside of media where it is specifically designed for titillation.
Also, e621 is a porn site. There is SFW art there, but it is run by Bad Dragon, who make dragon dildos, and the site is primarily porn oriented.
If you look at other furry fandom sites (like Derpibooru, the booru for MLP fanart) the ratio is more like 10 safe:1 questionable:2 explicit, so about 25% is porn or porn adjacent.
> the AI starts at a very high learning rate (also called “temperature”)
For modern models we're talking about completely different things when we talk about temperature and learning rate. I think the confusion here is probably due to the idea of a learning schedule being similar to simulated annealing.
- 'Learning rate' is a parameter used during the training of a model, which behaves roughly as Scott described (it determines how much the model should update when given new training data)
- 'Temperature' is not about learning at all, but about how models generate their output. Models like ChatGPT don't actually work by giving you the most likely next token; they actually give you the probabilities of all possible tokens. We then pick which token to output by sampling that distribution (this gives more natural output than always picking the most likely token). The temperature is a scaling factor that gets applied to that distribution before sampling occurs - a higher temperature reduces the probability mass of the most likely outputs and distributes it among less likely outputs, making 'surprising' outputs more likely.
I don't recall hearing 'temperature' in regards to learning rate (I'm a data scientist). The idea of having a different learning rate early vs late in training I've seen called an adaptive learning rate. It's possible that the LLM community has adopted that usage but idk. Temperature, if I recall, originally is a term from simulated annealing, and then entered the popular lexicon as a user-exposed tuning parameter for GPT models. For both GPT output and annealing it has the same meaning: take some root of the relevant distribution to shrink everything to 1 to smooth it out, just as how heating metal 'smooths out' its molecular structure (this is just a restatement of what Godshatter said).
Temperature isn't just for GPT models. The reason the term is used is that virtually all models which predict categorical distributions do so with a softmax, which basically just means parameterizing them as a Boltzmann distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution). The softmax temperature parameter is just the literal temperature in the Boltzmann distribution.
I think there may also be a different subsystems learn differently aspect here. I’ve personally had food poisoning from a particular fast food restaurant and then not eaten at that entire chain for years. Similarly my girlfriend won’t go anywhere near vicinity of any kind due to a terrible experience in high school with a concerning quantity of coconut rum. I think we have a system that jumps further on bad food experiences and is much much more willing to trap into priors in a negative direction for very understandable survival reasons. E.g. berries that look/smell like this caused me to vomit all of my food up once, therefore I will never eat them again in case they are poisonous.
Once when, I was a child, I came across a puddle of rotting raspberries. and the smell was revolting. Naueseating, and it stuck in my memory for decades. I have recovered somewhat, and now they are a neutral food, which I can eat without pleasure or aversion. But mostly I'd prefer some other berry, any other berry, I don't care which, because whatever it is, I'll probably actually enjoy it at least a tiny bit.
The food example is interesting. Tomatoes are a nightshade plant, many people are allergic to them. I've come to assume that when people have strong negative food associations that it's related to that "don't eat, may be poisonous, my body reacts badly in some way" even if they don't necessarily realize there's more to it than "I hate tomatoes because my parents fed me one as a kid and it was disgusting to me in the moment." There are plenty of foods out there that people are commonly allergic to, and others where some people have a distinct taste difference (e.g., the cilantro/coriander tastes like soap phenomena). Also add in known ethnicity pool differences (how well someone processes alcohol in their system for example). Oh and certain other oddities like those who cannot process phenylalanine and have to limit or avoid certain foods/drinks with it.
Idk, I'm not sure the food examples work in a theory about learning rate. How many times do you have to get a pounding headache from red wine before you think, hmm, maybe I should switch to white? Or how many times do you have to get hives from eating a shrimp cocktail before you think, hmm, maybe I shouldn't eat shellfish? You couldn't have learned that as a kid because no one (we hope) is making their baby drink red wine. The biggest difference between kids and adults is that as a kid, you're often being force fed so it's disgusting and you spit it out immediately versus as an adult you're thinking, but everyone likes red wine so I just need to keep drinking it (i.e., social pressure) and you have to overcome that "but everyone loves it maybe I will eventually too" thought to realize what your own body is telling you.
It would make sense for "bad experience with this foodstuff" to be something that triggers the wiring over "avoid possible poisoning". If you just go around merrily stuffing any sort of berry or fungus into your mouth, you're not going to last too long in the wild. 'Just' getting off with being violently sick or nauseated by the experience means that you'll avoid that in future and so cut down the risk of "this may look shiny and delicious but it will kill you". Think of the Tide Pod Challenge, whether or not there really were significant numbers of teenagers eating laundry pods, there's enough signalling of "bright colours, shiny, looks yummy" that they're a genuine risk for toddlers and small children mistaking them for candy. Even as an adult who knows better, the "this looks like candy and candy is delicious" association works, so having a very robust "don't eat this ever again" mechanism as defence makes sense:
I don't think we have anywhere the same kind of strong aversion to "oops I nearly drowned" since you can always avoid going into large bodies of water, but you need to eat or else you die. Not eating = dying, eating the wrong thing = dying, not surprising that 'strong reactions to bad food experience' last longer and are 'stickier' than "I went swimming and went out of my depth and that was a bad idea".
I think the only way to get past food aversions is to try the food again (even a tiny nibble) a bunch of times, and if those experiences are good, you start liking the food and get over the aversion. My guess is that the tomato thing is less about the specifics of the original experience, or the fact that it was in childhood, and more about your cousin (presumably) deciding each and every day for the subsequent decades to never try cherry tomatoes again. By contrast, you've presumably had lots of positive beach experiences between the scary one and today. (Exposure therapy is obviously related.)
(A useful parenting tip that I got from the book "Bringing Up Bebe" is that it's inordinately important to try to get a kid to eat even just one bite of each kind of food you're serving. After 5 meals in 5 different weeks where they grudgingly eat a single bite of a certain food X, you might find that they have started liking X and now gobble it up.)
It's like 'getting back in the saddle'. If you fall off a horse, it's important to ride again as soon as possible, because if you don't, you'll just reinforce the negative experience and get stuck with a permanent aversion/fear.
As a motorbike rider for 30 years this is most definitely the truth.
After a very nasty smashed wrist a few years ago I swore I would never ride again. The wrist took some time to heal and I realised that life without a motorbike was very dull!
The first ride was a slightly nervy affair but I was soon back to enjoying myself again on two wheels.
When I was about six my grandparents tried introducing me to sprouts, and I wasn't very impressed to say the least. So the next day they tried another tack and served what they called brussels. I thought those tasted much nicer, and have been fond of brussel sprouts ever since!
Re the tomato trauma Scott mentioned, I wonder if the mess caused by chomping down on a cherry tomato wasn't reminiscent of blood, and thus associated with some previous bad experience such as a cut or a nose bleed.
I always figured these were something like a manifestation of chaos, in the mathematical sense. When you’re growing everything that comes later depends on what came before. Signals or their absence matter more. There’s not a “go back and redo the last step” feature in most of biology. The best thing to that is our cognition and I think that only comes after it develops right.
It seems to me that the fetal (through adulthood) developmental process of synaptic pruning matches your idea of chaos molded by signal. Here’s a quote from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species:
“Like Darwinian evolution, the adaptive structure of neural circuitry emerges out of the selective promotion and elimination of specific variant patterns. By initially overproducing connections that have been spread to a wide variety of targets, and then selecting from among these on the basis of their different functional characteristics, highly predictable and functionally adaptive patterns of connectivity can be generated with minimal prespecification of the details.”
Taking some online courses from the Santa Fe Institute about Chaos really changed the way I saw the world. I used to think being really good at math would just help you be able to solve all problems, but the more I think about it now the more I think even god-like AI is going to really struggle with some of that stuff.
Ah yes, Santa Fe. I remember a reviewer of Kauffman’s Origins of Order remarking that “you'll be so excited you'll want to rush and explain it to someone else” but you’ll simply have to “face the fact that you are now relatively alone on a higher plane.”
I don’t know anything about the boundaries of AI, but I always wonder how it fits with John Mayfield’s ideas about Evolution as Computation: “random events and random choices are the ultimate source of all goal-oriented information.”
It does feel to me like humans mostly cannot escape dualistic framing. General AI lives in a neighborhood where right next door is Colonel GiM, and directly across the street is Captain Homunculus.
I would think most people here are familiar with Chaos. Also as a funny aside, there seems to be some strange attractor in midjourney where if I use it via can of soup to alter images of myself it always wants to put me in a turquoise blazer. It’s very odd and I wonder if it will be used as a source of divination for weird cults in the future.
AI stuff is odd because I think of it like blowing dust in an attic to find beams of sunlight. Those beams are the order found in the chaos. I also consider the fact that LLMs work at all as strong philosophical proof that a lot of the constructionist arguments about language are not correct, ie language represents something real and orderly about the universe.
On ghost in the machine stuff… I’m starting to have very esoteric pan psychist but less fun thoughts about what this all means for what we are, really, and what it means for something to be alive and intelligent.
I like that image of dust revealing shafts of sunlight. The interesting thing about that is that the form of the shafts is created by what is blocking the sun. The shape of nature is created by what is not possible. Terrence Deacon calls this “the efficacy of absence.” It’s what gives the concept of possibility space a sense of teleonomy. From there one could choose a panvitalist view of the world, “This leaves open the possibility that most physical events have no conscious aspect, and yet may nonetheless exhibit properties like end-directedness, information, value, and so forth.”
That is a beautiful way to describe the nature of nature. Defined by what is not allowed. That’s more or less my own view.
The everything is alive stuff is fun until you resolve it down to what that means. For me it’s not that much fun. Some of this for me resolves down to mathematical versus computational universe stuff. I fall into the math camp. Things exist in material reality and as the concept of what they are in immaterial reality.
How does this programming relate to life long diet, behavior, skills? And how much more effort is required to retrain? We invest on a thesis. We spend 1.7T in US on food, 1.9T on healthcare cost of poor nutrition. You use to go to grocery and were thin, now you get diabetes. We have been trained to like ultraprocessed food even though it's bad for us. We don't invest in behavior change. We do invest in things people want. They want to live longer but are stuck eating the things programmed in their brain in their youth. What is the innovation path of least resistance to better health and behavior change?
Pretty sure you don't need to be trained to like fat, sugar and crispiness. Cavemen would in all likelihood have loved a hamburger or a bar of chocolate!
I don't think this is right, because if you go to other countries, you'll find people who genuinely don't like super-sweet stuff. I'm British but live in China: many people here don't eat chocolate, saying, "it's too sweet." Confuses the hell out of me, but that's what they say! And the most obvious reason why this might be the case is that they didn't have chocolate when they were kids, and so never developed the taste for it.
Incidentally, I'm early 40s, and have spent neatly half my life in the UK and half in China. Over my 20 years here, my tastes have changed, but there seems to be a hard core of food preferences formed early in my life that aren't changing. That includes chocolate, potatoes, and certain kinds of convenience foods - I still like classic British baked beans, even though I very rarely eat them, for example.
So I think there's a fair chance that cavemen who grew up on a diet that is to us very bland and lacking in seasoning would find our ultra-salty, ultra-sugary food very offputting.
I'm an American in Germany and the germans favorite thing to say about a good dessert is that "it's not too sweet" - like that's a compliment. My wife is German and we both get a real kick out of this because - and it's just a theory - that it is a lie. Like the British they lie to themselves that food doesn't need sugar or flavor. It's just post-war propaganda. Sugar was heavily rationed after the war so they got used to boring desserts and a bland diet, food as sustenance not as something to savor.
As a kid I used to put sugar on my frosted flakes, I wish everyone was as fortunate as I was : )
Yep, I have definitely toyed with that idea as well. Ultimately, I don't think it's right - my Chinese wife doesn't have any reason to pretend in front of me, and she really never chooses chocolate. She also notices sweetness in savoury foods much more than me. It seems as though her tastebuds are just set at a higher level of sensitivity to sweetness than mine - and I see lots of people here who seem to share her tastes. I don't discount the possibility that there's an element of talking themselves into it, but I think they've talked themselves into it successfully!
In the next generation, that will probably all change. Kids who've grown up with fizzy drinks and McDonald's ice cream will probably have a higher tolerance for sugariness; I'm sure cavemen kids would adapt, too. But I still think there's a fair chance that if you brought a bunch of cavemen to modern Britain/America, they'd reject most process foods.
Anecdotally, it's definitely not always a lie. I think many foods and drinks are way too sweet now, but this was not so when I was a kid. No propaganda on this from anybody in my family - my grandparents, who experienced the war, love sweet stuff. I probably think it's a matter of habit. As I ate less sweets, I became calibrated to less sweet tastes - and now too sweet foods taste off-putting - like it's just too much. I will still get totally temporarily addicted if somebody puts out a bowl of sweets though :)
Was about to say this! :) My diet is low-carb and many sweets are just overwhelmingly sugary to me - as Vitor below says, the taste profile ends up overwhelmed by the sweetness, leaving nothing particularly interesting to taste.
For calibration: A common dessert I make for myself is unsweetened yoghurt, coconut shavings, raw cocoa nibs and a small handful of raspberries. It's not very sweet (nearly all of the sweetness comes from the raspberries, with a little from the lactose in the yoghurt), but it's basically perfect for me.
(Also, 90% chocolate is my favourite chocolate percentage. If the percentage goes any lower, the chance I'll like the chocolate goes down, not up. That said, I've had a few good 70% ones. Conversely, everything I've sampled under about 60% has never struck me as anything but gross, though as a kid (pre-teen) I dimly recall thinking otherwise. Can't get back into the mindset, though.)
I used to hear their radio commercials in the early 2000s and wondered how much business they lost due to people not being able to figure out how to spell the name. With Google's spelling correction it's not as big a deal nowadays, but I could think of about a dozen plausible spellings of Schick Shadel.
It's the sort of name a drunk can pronounce 😂
Is that similar to when a parent catches their kid smoking and makes them smoke until they puke? I've had significant doubts whether that was a good idea or not, even beyond questioning if it works. But it would be nice to know if it worked anyway.
They went out of business during the pandemic. Even though the program had decent statistics, better than places like Betty Ford, they were never quite accepted as legitimate. Possibly because it's kind of gross. But it really really worked for a lot of people, including the guy who owned that radio station mentioned below
Thanks John Money. Surely we can put this to use to cure trans people immediately.
???
Behaviorsm isn't without merits, but naive blank slate behaviorism applied to certain groups specifically (autistic, trans, and intersex people) has been bad. Anything vaguely akin to expanding this has to be vocally called out as roughly equivalent to the return of lobotomies.
Ever notice how left-wing heritability denialism gets put on hold whenever politically convenient?
Hey non-philosopher:
1. I'm not left wing
2. I believe in IQ
Please be a bit nicer? I enjoy your commentary and don't want to see you banned.
Apologies. I will try to do better.
This started my day with a smile. Thank you, Moon Moth!
The natural reaction when someone says something unkind is to say something unkind back to them back to them but how much better would the world be if people just said “Please be a bit nicer”?
Perhaps we can start a campaign! Get T-shirts printed!
Please be a bit nicer?
PS. Well done too to Alephwyr for accepting the advice!
I think his assumption was justified. I've never before seen someone who both believes in IQ and isn't left-wing, but also uses the "this idea has historically led to bad things, so we have to call out anyone who thinks in that direction" argument.
Isn't that the entire premise behind the suppression of leftism in the United States and other western countries? Soviets bad, therefore Food not Bombs practitioners should be arrested?
I think "X would have bad implications if applied to situation Y, so we must fight against X wherever it appears, even in situations where it could be true" is a bad idea.
I'm not opposed to the entire idea of trapped priors or a critical period, but it needs to be handled responsibly. When there is an elephant in the room and you don't acknowledge it while advancing a perspective that could have implications related to it I think it's important to try to provoke things into the open.
John Money was a quack psychiatrist who didn't believe in innate gender. He tried to prove his point by persuading a family to raise their son as a girl. Instead of being conditioned into a happy little daughter, the son hated living as a girl and rebelled against it from the age of two until his parents finally let him detransition when he was fifteen. I think Alephwyr's point is that trying to cure trans people through childhood conditioning is as futile as John Money's attempt to make a child transgender.
I agree with you, but I also think that Alephwyr's comment was very strawmanny/misrepresenting Scott's position as well as confusing-to-readers (which is what prompted my initial reply).
Scott could simply deny that he thinks Transgenderism is post-natally conditioned. It would immediately resolve this.
I think there are a lot of trans people who have felt that way for their entire lives and are happy being that way, but there are also a lot of trans people who become trans late in life due to weird life events and are still happy being that way.
Are you implying treatments exist for those who are unhappy being that way? If so please present evidence.
Is there a word for when you accuse an opponent of something completely unrelated to what they said, then use the refusal to discuss the unrelated thing as the critical piece of evidence for your accusation?
Paranoia (non-pejorative)
Or he could ignore it. "Trans" was not mentioned at all in his post, so it is on the reader to infer the post has anything at all to do with transgenderism.
Were he to confirm OR deny the assertion that transgenderism is post-natally conditioned would prove nothing at all, since it is simply an argument from authority, for which I have not even heard Scott considers himself such an authoritative source to provide guidance on a stance.
Unless Scott's position has updated without my knowing, I believe Scott's running hypothesis is "The mind/brain contains an innate map of the body, part of that map includes gender, sometimes the map is wrong. Sort of like phantom limb pain." However, this post was written a decade ago. So take it with a grain of salt.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender-identity/
Thank you. This assuages my concerns somewhat.
It was more complicated than that. His penis was badly injured in a circumcision gone bad. Well, social constructionism was in vogue then (as now), so of course if the anatomy had been changed, why not raise the child with the new anatomy?
Money was following the theories of the time. It shows how much damage bad theories can do to vulnerable people as much as it shows Money was a perv (which also appears to be the case).
True. But David Reimer really was vocally unhappy as a girl from an early age and only became more so as he grew older, so it seems like a lot of misery could have been avoided if Money and his family had listened to him instead of continuing the experiment for thirteen years.
I agree. I'm anti-trans-ideology, but I don't think Money is any kind of slam-dunk case against childhood transgender treatments. The problem wasn't that Reimer's gender identity was being indulged; the problem is that it was being ignored.
I think the family were only going along with what the doctors, particularly Money, were telling them. But if they had known all that was going on, they probably would have objected. Money was definitely an abuser, and that's part of the entire problem with the current drive to re-brand paedophilia as MAPs (minor attracted persons); while doubtless there are genuine people involved, there are also doubtless exactly these kinds of abusers wanting to use the campaign to hide under and get themselves protected ("you're persecuting me and I'll sue you if you don't stop slandering me as a paedophile! the psychiatric establishment is re-defining my condition so it's a medical state not a criminal offence!")
I'm confused. It's not a criminal offense to be attracted to minors. This seems pretty obvious? And implying someone has abused minors when they haven't is indeed slander. The word "pedophile" technically refers to the former but in common parlance is understood to be the latter. This is a problem for people in the former category.
It's inevitable that some criminals will find cover under this. Just as black criminals find cover under "anti-racist" rhethoric. But that's still vastly better than rounding up all black people on general suspicion.
I actually will agree with that. Money stuck to his ideology instead of listening to the patient, and Reimer was the victim.
The entire psychology community really wanted gender to be socially determined for political reasons, which is why they were so happy to accept those findings.
It's worth noting that all of these gender treatments are based on ideas that have no basis in science. The people who were doing these treatments did not have any scientifically valid reason to believe they'd be helpful, but these treatments have continued despite this fact.
The fact that they went from totally different causes for gender identity to assuming that altering people's genitals surgically and socializing them as that gender would help them is deeply troubling, because totally different causes would be very unlikely to have exactly the same treatment - but not getting sued for disfiguring the genitals of thousands of intersex children while following Money's treatments does provide a motivation for not wanting to say that these treatments don't work/are harmful.
It gets even worse when you dig into the story because the guy was actively abusive, and shouldn't have been let anywhere near children (or indeed any vulnerable person) but that was back then when everyone respected authority and if a Respected Doctor says this is the way to do things, why not?
Also why I have such strong feelings about the "we won't tell your parents because they wouldn't understand and might stop you" interventions with schools and trans kids. Much too easy to abuse "trust me, I'm an Authority Figure expert on this and I can tell you what is going on and what to do if you just follow along".
I'm sorry to directly question your character, I realize it's ad hominem, but are you a person who identifies with or is sexually attracted to dragons?
Yes to both, and there are many other things which could be used to impugn my character as well.
No worries, I was just curious about Scott's "fetish/imprint ->broadly, furries?" -> "lobotomies!?" in terms of reaction.
Ok your writing is very good
Thank you. I will try to write more.
Awesome.
I always thought an un-PC dragon story would be a bookish winged, firebreathing dragon who gets picked on by the other dragons for not wanting to set fire to stuff. So he takes up with a cute serpentine loong who lives in the water.
Okay, I find myself confused, because that story seems to fall extremely well within the realm of "politically correct" as I know it. A story about a quiet outsider who doesn't fit in with their peers but finds someone who validates them for who they are? So, two questions, because I'm genuinely curious:
1) (Roughly) how old are you? (I want to know if this is generational semantic drift) For reference, I graduated high school roughly a decade ago.
2) How are you defining "PC" (or "un-PC") such that that the story above is "un-PC"? Or what aspects of the story make it so?
Again, not attacking you, I'm genuinely curious at how your view is different than mine here.
Figure out what ethnicities the dragons would be if they were people.
Now does it make sense?
...Okay, that's a stretch, and so much less interesting that I was hoping for.
Did you ever see Disney's "The Reluctant Dragon"? It brings new meaning to "flaming", wink wink nudge nudge.
I recognise you from bsky. :)
Off topic, but you remind me of several people I knew quite well on a forum from before the net was silo'd into social media dystopias. You wouldn't happen to have participated in late 'aughties forum culture, would you?
I did. But I am trying to avoid making it too easy for random parties to collate large chunks of my identity.
Okay, follow up question, did one of those forums have the initials ED?
I have had like 100 handles because I was banned 20+ times from the forums I used the most, but I don't think so.
Okay, now you've gone and outed the both of you as having "erectile disfunction."
I have role played as a dragon in online games in the past. There was a high amount of sexual charge to my interactions, but these remained firmly within the gaming fantasy world.
Besides, it's really hard to get to meet dragons any more 😂
**That** was a very disturbing wikipedia page. But I suppose I should thank you for bringing it to my awareness. :-/
Also, "ycleptance" and "foredoomance" are kind of awesome words, and I regret that I won't be able to use them if I ever manage to forget their origin, because not everyone else will also have forgotten.
Sure, but only with their consent. In fact, I think any sexual preference that the individual having it prefers not to have should be cured. This is why conversion therapy should not be banned.
Conversion therapy does not work and is therefore fraud. Fraud should be illegal.
I wonder how much standard talk therapy is in the same boat, tbh.
Also, it is often forced on children by parents. And this kind of thing falls somewhere near the border of what parents should be allowed to decide for their children.
>One of my distant cousins won't eat tomatoes. His parents say when he was very young, he bit into a cherry tomato and it exploded into goo in his mouth, and he was so upset he wouldn't eat tomatoes from then on. Now he’s in his 30s and still hates them. Is this fairly described as a “critical window” for food preferences?
Don't we all have a story like this? I ate sriracha as a kid and got food poisoning. I now have a strong negative reaction to the smell of sriracha.
>So at the beginning, you might start in a random place and want to see if 500 miles away is more mountainous. But once your hard work has brought you 1000 feet from Everest’s summit, you don’t want to take a 500 mile jump and end up in New Delhi and have to start all over again.
It seems pretty universal that as things scale upward in mass (and accumulated learning/knowledge can be viewed as mass), they become less "maneuverable". Speedboats vs ocean liners, etc.
Maybe this relates to your language post from yesterday, where a child with a vocabulary of 10,000 words can more easily learn a new language than an adult with a vocabulary of 20,000 words (and an increased number of deep rules that must be discarded, like "adjectives of quantity come before adjectives of color".)
Well, at least in the case of AI training, it's not a case of being UNABLE to move fast, it's a case of not WANTING to move fast. We could easily program the learning algorithms to keep the same high speed throughout (in fact, that's the default), but that produces worse results.
Organisms and vehicles becoming less maneuverable as they get big seems like probably a square/cube thing, where mass grows with volume but control surfaces grow with area. I don't really see how the same principles could apply to learning.
I don't understand Scott referring to algorithmic temperature as "learning rate". A learning rate should have something to do with the speed at which knowledge is acquired. Temperature is totally different; it's a metric for how often you do something random instead of doing something methodical.
The idea is that if you make enough random guesses, a few of them will likely be somewhere near the target you're trying to find, and a methodical search from there will get you to the target. But I don't really see any connection to "learning" or "speed". Making a random move usually doesn't involve any learning.
Yeah, I thought temperature was an inference-time hyperparameter, not a training-time hyperparameter
>Don't we all have a story like this?
No.
There is a large literature on this within the physiological psychology field--it's called 'flavor toxicosis'.
1) I even have a story like this *as an adult*, where a bad experience with green olives made me like them less, permanently.
2) Adults have much higher standards for themselves than for children. I suspect it's easy to learn a new language to an intermediate level: do it full time, without distractions or financial worries, and deliberately stay away from writing aimed at adults (which comes with an explosion of vocabulary, sentence structures, obscure turns of phrase, cultural references, and so on). Conversely, you will not learn a second language in a few years if you spend 5 minutes per day on duolingo after work.
At 16 I had a bad stomach virus shortly after eating a sub, and it was about 5 years before the nausea on tasting one went fully away (what helped quite a bit in the meantime was switching to a different meat, and having a flavorful soda or sports drink instead of water).
wanted to note that you are incorrectly using the term 'furry' to refer to people who are attracted to cartoon animals; not all furries are.
I don't think anything he said logically implies otherwise. People who are attracted to cartoon animals are a subset of furries, therefore people who gain a sexual attraction to cartoon animals necessarily become furries. It's a unidirectional claim. I don't think he's claimed that this is the source of all furries, thereby incorrectly assuming equality of sets.
I don't think that's true. Sexual attraction to furries isn't the same as identifying as one yourself.
I was under the impression that the term "furry" encompasses the entire sexuality. That is, people who are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic animals (whether cartoon or humans in costumes), and people who dress up as animals for sexual reasons, are all furries.
I suppose you could make a distinction between furry-dressers and furry-attracted people and then only use the term "furry" for one category, but there's such a huge overlap and they're mostly part of the same communities that such language would be unnecessarily pedantic for most people who don't participate or care. It seems simpler to just acknowledge that like with any subculture, furries can vary in degree of hardcore enthusiasm and participation.
Technically, within the furry fandom the term for those who like to dress up and have sex in their costumes is "murrsuiters". Basically:
* A fan of anthropomorphic characters is called a "furry", whether they dress up in a costume or not.
Most don't, either because they personally don't care that much for owning a costume, or because costumes are expensive, or require a lot of maintenance, etc.
* Costumes are called "fursuits", and thus the subgroup of furries who own one or more and dress up in them are called "fursuiters".
The typical fursuit is ill-suited for sexual activity. It lacks the required holes and is made from materials that'd be ruined if any bodily fluid, especially sticky ones, got into them, that kind of thing.
* Finally, there are those who have a fetish on fursuit-wearing and like to have sex wearing one. They typically own one or more fursuits especially designed for sexual activity, called "murrsuits", and are therefore called "murrsuiters".
Such for-sex costumes are similar to BDSM ones in that they have the necessary holes and are made from materials that are easily washable, but otherwise look like typical fursuits.
Hence we have murrsuiters as a subset of fursuiters, which in turn are a subset of furries.
Are "plushies" no longer a thing?
They are, ranging from those who just collect plushies, to those who adapt them for adult use. There are lots of ways to slice the fandom into specific subgroups and interests.
There are furries who aren't interested in the sexual aspect *at all* and are just into it for the 'being another species' bit or cosplay or other reasons that they identified with cartoon/anthropomorphic animals (often due to social isolation/bullying as children).
A big confusion here is between furries as a "fandom" and as a sexuality. There is overlap, but there are people in all 4 quadrants. Furries who are in the fandom but not into the fetish stuff tend to object if you lump everyone together.
While difficult to prove, I think it's directionally true that furry is a fetish subculture. I went on e621 and almost all of the top-used tags related to sex.
As Eric Blumrich said in the Burned Fur days, "by and large, furries are bi and large."
That is a hilarious quote.
Also, I am unclear as to whether the original commenter was saying "furries are not always a sexual thing" or "not all furries are sexually attracted to cartoon animals specifically". I was sort of assuming the latter?
There is an extraordinarily strong fetish subculture within the furry fandom, but also a vehemently non-fetishist subgroup. I have no numbers, but I figure the fetishists may be 60% or more of the total.
That said, it isn't surprising that maybe 95% or more of the available art is of the fetishist kind. The reason is that fetishist furries spend a *lot* of money commissioning drawings, paintings, animations, stories etc. And since most of the art available is commissions, you see where this goes.
On the other side, the community is quite united in the goal of making everyone feel welcome and comfortable, hence the extensive tagging of content. By taggint their content very accurately, uploaders allow people to filter in what they want to see, as well as to filter out what they don't want to see. Those who don't want to see any sexual content can thus mark the option not to see it, and their browsing will be almost 100% guaranteed free of it, while still providing them thousands upon thousands of images.
Interestingly, all this extensive tagging also makes generative AI drawing systems trained on furry content extremely accurate for both sexual and non-sexual content alike. An unintended but quite welcome side effect.
>60%
This is a significant underestimate. Fandom surveys from Bailey/Hsu and later Furscience indicate that among male furries, 98% or more report some degree of sexual attraction as part of their experience, with a rate of >90% among furries as a whole.
That may be the case, yes. However, keep in mind this isn't a statistic of all furries, but rather of all furries willing to fill surveys about their interests, sexual and otherwise. Also, having some interest is a very vague concept and covers a much broader range than those who are invested in the fetishist side of the fandom.
For example, I know furries who never take part in such surveys, who entered the fandom having been fans of Disney cartoons when young, and who will admit they felt a crush on Gadjet, but who have no interest whatsoever in porn drawings or murrsuiting. They therefore aren't fetishists, and won't be totalized in statistics, but even if they were, depending on how the question was asked, they might end up counted amont the fetishists due to that childhood crush.
Another one I know is a deeply neurodivergent guy who loves the "babyfur" side of the fandom, and who has a "baby bear" as a fursona. He's also completely ace, with no interest whatsoever in anything approaching sexuality in any form. Depending on how the question was asked, he'd end up falling into the fetishist bucket due to how babyfurs are generally classified.
And so on and so forth. Which is why I think the number may be high, yes, but not that high. The furry fandom threads on the edge of several different gender/attraction axes, which makes it difficult to reduce it to a single one on attraction alone.
IMHO a better measurement would be to ask whether they specifically look for sexually explicit content, and split it into three bins: never, rarely, frequently. That'd provide a more accurate view of how much of the fandom is fetishistic.
The Furscience stats:
96% of furry men view furry porn, 78% of women do. 59% view it daily.
This includes most asexual furries, as it happens. "Asexual", when it comes to furries, often means in practice "sexual interests niche enough and distant enough from reality such that they have no sexual interest in real-life people." This describes a number of asexual furries I know personally, and more I've observed.
There's a degree of social desirability bias and a degree of privacy-about-sexual-matters that makes it difficult for onlookers to form fully accurate perceptions about the nature and extent of sexuality involved in the sphere.
Eh, maybe. Let me give an example using myself. I'm a part of a NSFW furry porn channel on Telegram that exists for members of a different, main SFW group, to post NSFW content. Even though the NSFW group is well advertised on the main group, only 67% of the members of the main, SFW group are members of the NSFW one. That alone suggests to me the lower percentage is more accurate.
Atop that, I'm a member of the NSFW group mostly because there are interesting conversations there on gender identity and related subjects that develop around some of the posted images. My Telegram is configured to only download images when those are tapped to save on data transfers. If you were to look at my viewing of that channel, more than 95% of the images are untapped, as I'm mostly demi myself and seeing those drawings feels very meh. The remaining 5% or so are when someone remarks on one of the images and I tap on it to see what they're talking about. Some of those I find beautiful, in the sense of being very well drawn by skilled artists (think Renaissance-nude-paintings levels of artistry) -- but even those cause no arousal in me.
I guess on average I tap one image every three days, give or take. So by the metric of the research above, as framed in your comment, I'm an ace, with a niche enough interest, who fits straight into the 96% of furries who view furry porn. And yet that absolutely doesn't describe what's going on with me.
Those two facts (the relative number of subscribers, and my own anecdotal self-evidence), plus the conversations I have with other furries, together make me doubt the at-first-glance implications of those numbers, more than the numbers themselves. The numbers are likely correct given the questions asked, but they probably don't tell the story they seem to be telling.
Now I'm imagining a sci-fi dystopia where everyone is forced to be open about their fetishes (for some reason, maybe because someone foolishly included "sexual satisfaction" in a bill of rights somewhere, and then some judges found an emanation from a penumbra). People are hooked up to electrodes and bombarded with an AI-generated adaptive firehose of porn, to rapidly home in on exactly what they're attracted to. All asexuals to date have eventually had an attraction identified, sometimes after years of "investigation" which can cause massive SAN check failures. But our protagonist may be the first and only true asexual in the society - can they persuade the Powers That Be that they're happy just as they are, before the avalanche of porn drives them insane? Subplot: the porn-generating AI has become sapient, and is actually trying to communicate through the medium of porn, a message which only our protagonist is capable of comprehending. Will the two of them fall in platonic love and reform their society?
Nowhere near 95% of furry art is porn.
If you look at, say, Derpibooru, it's about 25% porn, which is probably about right. Most furry art isn't pornographic in nature.
e621 is heavily pornographic because it's a porn site that also has SFW work on it.
I think there are people who specifically have a furry fetish, but as a furry, I've always just liked anthropomorphic animals (and dragons and gryphons) in all forms of media.
Or to put it another way - it's not that I specifically have a fetish for furries, it's that I like everything to be furry, including my porn. It's a general aesthetic/worldbuilding preference. I like video games that have furries, and in fact, generally prefer that they not be especially sexualized outside of media where it is specifically designed for titillation.
Also, e621 is a porn site. There is SFW art there, but it is run by Bad Dragon, who make dragon dildos, and the site is primarily porn oriented.
If you look at other furry fandom sites (like Derpibooru, the booru for MLP fanart) the ratio is more like 10 safe:1 questionable:2 explicit, so about 25% is porn or porn adjacent.
> the AI starts at a very high learning rate (also called “temperature”)
For modern models we're talking about completely different things when we talk about temperature and learning rate. I think the confusion here is probably due to the idea of a learning schedule being similar to simulated annealing.
Specifically,
- 'Learning rate' is a parameter used during the training of a model, which behaves roughly as Scott described (it determines how much the model should update when given new training data)
- 'Temperature' is not about learning at all, but about how models generate their output. Models like ChatGPT don't actually work by giving you the most likely next token; they actually give you the probabilities of all possible tokens. We then pick which token to output by sampling that distribution (this gives more natural output than always picking the most likely token). The temperature is a scaling factor that gets applied to that distribution before sampling occurs - a higher temperature reduces the probability mass of the most likely outputs and distributes it among less likely outputs, making 'surprising' outputs more likely.
Doesn’t “temperature” get used for both of these concepts?
I don't recall hearing 'temperature' in regards to learning rate (I'm a data scientist). The idea of having a different learning rate early vs late in training I've seen called an adaptive learning rate. It's possible that the LLM community has adopted that usage but idk. Temperature, if I recall, originally is a term from simulated annealing, and then entered the popular lexicon as a user-exposed tuning parameter for GPT models. For both GPT output and annealing it has the same meaning: take some root of the relevant distribution to shrink everything to 1 to smooth it out, just as how heating metal 'smooths out' its molecular structure (this is just a restatement of what Godshatter said).
Temperature isn't just for GPT models. The reason the term is used is that virtually all models which predict categorical distributions do so with a softmax, which basically just means parameterizing them as a Boltzmann distribution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_distribution). The softmax temperature parameter is just the literal temperature in the Boltzmann distribution.
Oh that's interesting, I wasn't aware of the Boltzmann connection. I had assumed it was by analogy with the temperature in metallurgic annealing.
I think there may also be a different subsystems learn differently aspect here. I’ve personally had food poisoning from a particular fast food restaurant and then not eaten at that entire chain for years. Similarly my girlfriend won’t go anywhere near vicinity of any kind due to a terrible experience in high school with a concerning quantity of coconut rum. I think we have a system that jumps further on bad food experiences and is much much more willing to trap into priors in a negative direction for very understandable survival reasons. E.g. berries that look/smell like this caused me to vomit all of my food up once, therefore I will never eat them again in case they are poisonous.
Once when, I was a child, I came across a puddle of rotting raspberries. and the smell was revolting. Naueseating, and it stuck in my memory for decades. I have recovered somewhat, and now they are a neutral food, which I can eat without pleasure or aversion. But mostly I'd prefer some other berry, any other berry, I don't care which, because whatever it is, I'll probably actually enjoy it at least a tiny bit.
The food example is interesting. Tomatoes are a nightshade plant, many people are allergic to them. I've come to assume that when people have strong negative food associations that it's related to that "don't eat, may be poisonous, my body reacts badly in some way" even if they don't necessarily realize there's more to it than "I hate tomatoes because my parents fed me one as a kid and it was disgusting to me in the moment." There are plenty of foods out there that people are commonly allergic to, and others where some people have a distinct taste difference (e.g., the cilantro/coriander tastes like soap phenomena). Also add in known ethnicity pool differences (how well someone processes alcohol in their system for example). Oh and certain other oddities like those who cannot process phenylalanine and have to limit or avoid certain foods/drinks with it.
Idk, I'm not sure the food examples work in a theory about learning rate. How many times do you have to get a pounding headache from red wine before you think, hmm, maybe I should switch to white? Or how many times do you have to get hives from eating a shrimp cocktail before you think, hmm, maybe I shouldn't eat shellfish? You couldn't have learned that as a kid because no one (we hope) is making their baby drink red wine. The biggest difference between kids and adults is that as a kid, you're often being force fed so it's disgusting and you spit it out immediately versus as an adult you're thinking, but everyone likes red wine so I just need to keep drinking it (i.e., social pressure) and you have to overcome that "but everyone loves it maybe I will eventually too" thought to realize what your own body is telling you.
When I was around 8 I bit into a meatball that had a large egg soaked uncooked breadcrumb in the middle that was pretty gross and unappetizing.
To this day, I cannot eat a meatball.
I grew up in NJ in a large Italian family so I was forever exposed to *meatballs.
*all types - yo : )
It would make sense for "bad experience with this foodstuff" to be something that triggers the wiring over "avoid possible poisoning". If you just go around merrily stuffing any sort of berry or fungus into your mouth, you're not going to last too long in the wild. 'Just' getting off with being violently sick or nauseated by the experience means that you'll avoid that in future and so cut down the risk of "this may look shiny and delicious but it will kill you". Think of the Tide Pod Challenge, whether or not there really were significant numbers of teenagers eating laundry pods, there's enough signalling of "bright colours, shiny, looks yummy" that they're a genuine risk for toddlers and small children mistaking them for candy. Even as an adult who knows better, the "this looks like candy and candy is delicious" association works, so having a very robust "don't eat this ever again" mechanism as defence makes sense:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/why-teenagers-eat-tide-pods-2018013013241
I don't think we have anywhere the same kind of strong aversion to "oops I nearly drowned" since you can always avoid going into large bodies of water, but you need to eat or else you die. Not eating = dying, eating the wrong thing = dying, not surprising that 'strong reactions to bad food experience' last longer and are 'stickier' than "I went swimming and went out of my depth and that was a bad idea".
I think the only way to get past food aversions is to try the food again (even a tiny nibble) a bunch of times, and if those experiences are good, you start liking the food and get over the aversion. My guess is that the tomato thing is less about the specifics of the original experience, or the fact that it was in childhood, and more about your cousin (presumably) deciding each and every day for the subsequent decades to never try cherry tomatoes again. By contrast, you've presumably had lots of positive beach experiences between the scary one and today. (Exposure therapy is obviously related.)
(A useful parenting tip that I got from the book "Bringing Up Bebe" is that it's inordinately important to try to get a kid to eat even just one bite of each kind of food you're serving. After 5 meals in 5 different weeks where they grudgingly eat a single bite of a certain food X, you might find that they have started liking X and now gobble it up.)
It's like 'getting back in the saddle'. If you fall off a horse, it's important to ride again as soon as possible, because if you don't, you'll just reinforce the negative experience and get stuck with a permanent aversion/fear.
As a motorbike rider for 30 years this is most definitely the truth.
After a very nasty smashed wrist a few years ago I swore I would never ride again. The wrist took some time to heal and I realised that life without a motorbike was very dull!
The first ride was a slightly nervy affair but I was soon back to enjoying myself again on two wheels.
Yep, for example if you have a bad diving experience there's only one thing for it, try, try again :-P
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12441555/Shocking-moment-lifeguard-kicks-young-man-10m-high-dive-board-refused-come-down.html
(video of impromtu training session)
When I was about six my grandparents tried introducing me to sprouts, and I wasn't very impressed to say the least. So the next day they tried another tack and served what they called brussels. I thought those tasted much nicer, and have been fond of brussel sprouts ever since!
Re the tomato trauma Scott mentioned, I wonder if the mess caused by chomping down on a cherry tomato wasn't reminiscent of blood, and thus associated with some previous bad experience such as a cut or a nose bleed.
I was given an erroneous diagnosis of Hazelnut allergy after a reaction to something that may or may not have contained some.
I avoided them for about 5 years and then accidentally ate something with Hazelnut in and... nothing happened...!
During the time I was supposedly allergic I was super vigilant and somewhat afraid of any potential consequences.
Now, I eat them whole in my breakfasts.
Faulty beliefs seem able to create a whole plethora of physical responses..
I always figured these were something like a manifestation of chaos, in the mathematical sense. When you’re growing everything that comes later depends on what came before. Signals or their absence matter more. There’s not a “go back and redo the last step” feature in most of biology. The best thing to that is our cognition and I think that only comes after it develops right.
It seems to me that the fetal (through adulthood) developmental process of synaptic pruning matches your idea of chaos molded by signal. Here’s a quote from Terrence Deacon’s The Symbolic Species:
“Like Darwinian evolution, the adaptive structure of neural circuitry emerges out of the selective promotion and elimination of specific variant patterns. By initially overproducing connections that have been spread to a wide variety of targets, and then selecting from among these on the basis of their different functional characteristics, highly predictable and functionally adaptive patterns of connectivity can be generated with minimal prespecification of the details.”
Taking some online courses from the Santa Fe Institute about Chaos really changed the way I saw the world. I used to think being really good at math would just help you be able to solve all problems, but the more I think about it now the more I think even god-like AI is going to really struggle with some of that stuff.
Ah yes, Santa Fe. I remember a reviewer of Kauffman’s Origins of Order remarking that “you'll be so excited you'll want to rush and explain it to someone else” but you’ll simply have to “face the fact that you are now relatively alone on a higher plane.”
I don’t know anything about the boundaries of AI, but I always wonder how it fits with John Mayfield’s ideas about Evolution as Computation: “random events and random choices are the ultimate source of all goal-oriented information.”
It does feel to me like humans mostly cannot escape dualistic framing. General AI lives in a neighborhood where right next door is Colonel GiM, and directly across the street is Captain Homunculus.
(GiM= Ghost in Machine)
I would think most people here are familiar with Chaos. Also as a funny aside, there seems to be some strange attractor in midjourney where if I use it via can of soup to alter images of myself it always wants to put me in a turquoise blazer. It’s very odd and I wonder if it will be used as a source of divination for weird cults in the future.
AI stuff is odd because I think of it like blowing dust in an attic to find beams of sunlight. Those beams are the order found in the chaos. I also consider the fact that LLMs work at all as strong philosophical proof that a lot of the constructionist arguments about language are not correct, ie language represents something real and orderly about the universe.
On ghost in the machine stuff… I’m starting to have very esoteric pan psychist but less fun thoughts about what this all means for what we are, really, and what it means for something to be alive and intelligent.
I like that image of dust revealing shafts of sunlight. The interesting thing about that is that the form of the shafts is created by what is blocking the sun. The shape of nature is created by what is not possible. Terrence Deacon calls this “the efficacy of absence.” It’s what gives the concept of possibility space a sense of teleonomy. From there one could choose a panvitalist view of the world, “This leaves open the possibility that most physical events have no conscious aspect, and yet may nonetheless exhibit properties like end-directedness, information, value, and so forth.”
That is a beautiful way to describe the nature of nature. Defined by what is not allowed. That’s more or less my own view.
The everything is alive stuff is fun until you resolve it down to what that means. For me it’s not that much fun. Some of this for me resolves down to mathematical versus computational universe stuff. I fall into the math camp. Things exist in material reality and as the concept of what they are in immaterial reality.
Yea those Santa Fe courses are very mind broadening. Escape from Newtonian imperatives is really liberating.
How does this programming relate to life long diet, behavior, skills? And how much more effort is required to retrain? We invest on a thesis. We spend 1.7T in US on food, 1.9T on healthcare cost of poor nutrition. You use to go to grocery and were thin, now you get diabetes. We have been trained to like ultraprocessed food even though it's bad for us. We don't invest in behavior change. We do invest in things people want. They want to live longer but are stuck eating the things programmed in their brain in their youth. What is the innovation path of least resistance to better health and behavior change?
Pretty sure you don't need to be trained to like fat, sugar and crispiness. Cavemen would in all likelihood have loved a hamburger or a bar of chocolate!
I don't think this is right, because if you go to other countries, you'll find people who genuinely don't like super-sweet stuff. I'm British but live in China: many people here don't eat chocolate, saying, "it's too sweet." Confuses the hell out of me, but that's what they say! And the most obvious reason why this might be the case is that they didn't have chocolate when they were kids, and so never developed the taste for it.
Incidentally, I'm early 40s, and have spent neatly half my life in the UK and half in China. Over my 20 years here, my tastes have changed, but there seems to be a hard core of food preferences formed early in my life that aren't changing. That includes chocolate, potatoes, and certain kinds of convenience foods - I still like classic British baked beans, even though I very rarely eat them, for example.
So I think there's a fair chance that cavemen who grew up on a diet that is to us very bland and lacking in seasoning would find our ultra-salty, ultra-sugary food very offputting.
I'm an American in Germany and the germans favorite thing to say about a good dessert is that "it's not too sweet" - like that's a compliment. My wife is German and we both get a real kick out of this because - and it's just a theory - that it is a lie. Like the British they lie to themselves that food doesn't need sugar or flavor. It's just post-war propaganda. Sugar was heavily rationed after the war so they got used to boring desserts and a bland diet, food as sustenance not as something to savor.
As a kid I used to put sugar on my frosted flakes, I wish everyone was as fortunate as I was : )
Yep, I have definitely toyed with that idea as well. Ultimately, I don't think it's right - my Chinese wife doesn't have any reason to pretend in front of me, and she really never chooses chocolate. She also notices sweetness in savoury foods much more than me. It seems as though her tastebuds are just set at a higher level of sensitivity to sweetness than mine - and I see lots of people here who seem to share her tastes. I don't discount the possibility that there's an element of talking themselves into it, but I think they've talked themselves into it successfully!
In the next generation, that will probably all change. Kids who've grown up with fizzy drinks and McDonald's ice cream will probably have a higher tolerance for sugariness; I'm sure cavemen kids would adapt, too. But I still think there's a fair chance that if you brought a bunch of cavemen to modern Britain/America, they'd reject most process foods.
Anecdotally, it's definitely not always a lie. I think many foods and drinks are way too sweet now, but this was not so when I was a kid. No propaganda on this from anybody in my family - my grandparents, who experienced the war, love sweet stuff. I probably think it's a matter of habit. As I ate less sweets, I became calibrated to less sweet tastes - and now too sweet foods taste off-putting - like it's just too much. I will still get totally temporarily addicted if somebody puts out a bowl of sweets though :)
Was about to say this! :) My diet is low-carb and many sweets are just overwhelmingly sugary to me - as Vitor below says, the taste profile ends up overwhelmed by the sweetness, leaving nothing particularly interesting to taste.
For calibration: A common dessert I make for myself is unsweetened yoghurt, coconut shavings, raw cocoa nibs and a small handful of raspberries. It's not very sweet (nearly all of the sweetness comes from the raspberries, with a little from the lactose in the yoghurt), but it's basically perfect for me.
(Also, 90% chocolate is my favourite chocolate percentage. If the percentage goes any lower, the chance I'll like the chocolate goes down, not up. That said, I've had a few good 70% ones. Conversely, everything I've sampled under about 60% has never struck me as anything but gross, though as a kid (pre-teen) I dimly recall thinking otherwise. Can't get back into the mindset, though.)