Related to AI Alignment efforts, I know its been discussed on several platforms, but enhancing adult human general intelligence seems to be a very promising avenue for to accelerate alignment research. It also seems beyond obvious that using artificial intelligence to directly enhance biological human intelligence allows humans to stay competitive with future AI. I'm having a hard time finding anyone who is even trying to do this[1][2][3]. It would even be useful to augment even specialized cognitive abilities like working memory[4][5][6] or spatial ability.
1. Stankov, L., & Lee, J. (2020). We can boost IQ: Revisiting kvashchev’s experiment. Journal of Intelligence, 8(4), 41.
3. Grover, S. et al. (2022) Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation, Nature News. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01132-3 (Accessed: 21 May 2023).
4. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Cognitive training does not enhance general cognition. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(1), 9-20.
5. Zhao, C., Li, D., Kong, Y., Liu, H., Hu, Y., Niu, H., ... & Song, Y. (2022). Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans. Science Advances, 8(48), eabq3211.
6. Razza, L. B., Luethi, M. S., Zanão, T., De Smet, S., Buchpiguel, C., Busatto, G., ... & Brunoni, A. R. (2023). Transcranial direct current stimulation versus intermittent theta-burst stimulation for the improvement of working memory performance. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 23(1), 100334.
"Increasing intelligence, however, is a worthy goal that might be achieved by interventions based on sophisticated neuroscience advances in DNA analysis, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and even direct brain stimulation (Haier, 2009, 2013; Lozano and Lipsman, 2013; Santarnecchi et al., 2013; Legon et al., 2014)."
Any approach that is based on optimizing existing human brains runs into the challenge of "why doesn't nature do this already." The reason for that can be silly, like a lacking synthesis path for some required chemical, but there has to be a reason. Hence "Algernon's Law: Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage." (https://gwern.net/drug-heuristic?2) Also, you're working at the speed of drug licensing or at the risk profile of untested chemicals; not something you want to do with your brightest and most conscientious researchers. And once you look at embryo selection, which avoids some of these issues, you inherently have a thirty-year latency, which probably puts you too late for the Singularity.
You are a cube. You like things with the Right number of vertices. You have opinions about how not-round your life circumstances should be. Proper, tidy. Some of your edges are rounded off with time, but generally you call yourself a cube and do cubey things.
They are a kidney-bean-shaped beanbag chair. They are soft and have no vertices unless you simulate them at a low resolution with polygons. The polygons at least give them some vertices so that they are more palatable to your need for edges and points. You don't like the lack of square faces on those polygons, but they allow you to feel more secure that you understand this beanbag chair.
How does your mind work? Well, lets say it's like a virtual machine made up of very regular cubeish computational components. Proper, tidy computational components. You fit your square, cube, hypercube ideas about how to move your 6 faces through the world in to cubular instructions to calculate what your next move should be. To generate an internal theory of mind for your round interlocutor so you can have a meaningful argument, you photograph the shapes they are waving in the air and feed those instructions in to your virtual machine. The program crashes... of course. Why can't they see that their ideas just don't work?
---
A person from group `A` understands their virtual machine, and they have useful simulations and projections of future outcomes that take advantage of the machine they run on. They know they can tinker with certain values and get desired outcomes.
`A` builds a simulation of what their interlocutor is proposing and runs it on their own virtual machine. It doesn't crash because they constructed the simulation in ways that are consistent with their machine. The outcomes differ from the outcomes proposed by the interlocutor and then they argue about this.
`A` doesn't know how to build a simulation which will run on their interlocutor's hardware and most of the time won't even try. That's hard.
What if `A` didn't even know that they had different hardware?
Well, since no one else has commented, I'll let you know I now have the mental image of a beanbag chair telling a cube that snow in April still melts, and then kicking it out of a window.
I just tried asking ChatGPT several variations on "Translate the following story from Japanese into English. Respond with each paragraph of the Japanese followed by its translation into English, then the next paragraph of Japanese, etc.", but no matter what I did, it would just respond with the English translation and ignore the instructions.
Everyone keeps posting amazing mind-blowing LLM success stories online, and then I try it out and wonder "is *this* seriously what is supposed to take over the world?"
As an LLM skeptic currently seriously re-evaluating his judgements, I don't think you're giving it its due. I tried what you said with a language I know (Arabic), and though my original idea, giving it an example of what I want in the form of a sample English-Arabic pair, failed. I succeded on the second try with "Please pair every English paragraph in the translation with the arabic equivalent in the original story". And it did, its accuracy is amazing, much better than Google Translate.
When Search Engines were new, they were no doubt much worse than hand-filtered directories and aggregators (and they are still worse now in a lot of things, SEO makes sure of that). When calculators were new, people had to write arithmetic expressions into a weird backwards notation called Reverse Polish notations (1+2*3 would translate to 2 3 * 1 +), but still people flocked to them. LLMs are a new tool and despite all of its disadvantages and the kool-aid hype around it they are mind-blowing and enable fundamentally new things. Meet them on their terms, and you will profit.
“translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation.” Followed by a few paragraphs worked fine for me.
Update: I bit the bullet and paid for ChatGPT Plus, and tried the same prompt with GPT4. So far, GPT4 seems to work better.
Update 2: GPT4 *looks* like it does a better job, but after a while it stops translating the story and just hallucinates a continuation to the story and translates that instead. Arrgggh!
Update: I just tried it with your *exact* prompt and it *still* didn't work for me. It just printed out "The original text before translation:" followed by the *English* translation (and no Japanese at all).
Here is the prompt I used in case anyone else wants to try to replicate:
translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation
Free version. Trying your full prompt, I’m guessing it has trouble when there’s lots of text (too many paragraphs?) to translate - when I broke it up into smaller chunks (cutting off the first part after the paragraph with “bear”) fixed the response format
Yeah, I think it must be a context window issue, at least with GPT4. With GPT4, it *starts* translating in the correct format, but then halfway through it starts ignoring the original story and translates a hallucinated story continuation of its own instead, presumably due to the prompt falling out of the context window.
From what I've read, the Web UI uses a shorter context window than the API, which seems pretty stupid to me. It's also frustrating that it doesn't warn you when the prompt falls out of the window and doesn't give any indication of how long the window actually is.
(That is, ending the first prompt at that paragraph, and replying/re-prompting with another chunk of the original text got the right format in each response, and both the original text and translations looked correct at the tail end of each output)
Biden says the US will defend Taiwan if China invades. What are the odds that is a bluff? It seems insane to me that the US would start WWIII over Taiwan. Not that Taiwan isn't important, but the cost/benefit math just doesn't seem to work out in favor of defending it militarily.
The US fighting China is not World War Three. The US fighting China with only conventional weapons and no actual invasion of China, is *definitely* not World War Three. Since that's the most (and very likely the least) the United States would do if Taiwan were invaded, the question of whether the US would start WWIII over Taiwan does not arise. And since China has negligible non-nuclear force projection ability against CONUS, we can limit our losses to what we think we can afford to lose, while still projecting massive force against a Chinese invasion fleet.
The question of whether *China* would be willing to start World War Three, over the US blocking their invasion of Taiwan, at least theoretically applies. They could nuke the US, and they could try to get Russia to nuke the US or vice versa, but as you say, the cost/benefit math does not work out for that.
Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three", then we should probably just pack it in and acknowledge that Russia, China, and/or North Korea are going to rule the world before too long.
>Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three"
Funny how this argument is always trotted out to justify the US's involvement in foreign affairs. As the world leader by far in conventional force, it just means that the US gets to dictate world affairs. It's a convenient fiction for those that benefit from the US oriented world order as it is a blanket argument in favor of use of force to preserve the current world order.
The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome. The problem is that arguments like this short-circuit any genuine analysis that might potentially show a negative utility for involvement. The war in Ukraine being an obvious example. Those beating the drum for escalation of western involvement always refuse to acknowledge the possibility of runaway escalation. It turns out that even semi-rational actors follow incentives, and the incentive against engaging in WW3 will not be overriding to every adversary in all cases, specifically cases involving existential threats.
But acknowledging all this doesn't mean that Russia/China/NK runs the board. Again, incentives matter, and the value of territory far from one's homeland will be valued at much less than strategically critical territory on one's border. We can't rationally short-circuit a genuine analysis with memes and self-serving arguments. Decisions to involve ourselves in military confrontations with nuclear powers must engage in this analysis or it is utterly reckless.
Dr, Strangelovski: "Ve haff placed very powerful thermonuclear bombs under each of our own cities, linked to a sophisticated computer that is having been programmed to monitor all global communications and to detonate the bombs iff the algorithm is not determining that we are the sole and uncontested rulers of Alaska within the next six months. Therefore, it is proven that the failure of our invasion of Alaska would pose an existential threat to us. Unless you are willing to be starting World War Three and Global Annihilation, you must surrender Alaska to us."
Now what?
If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
Defeat in Ukraine *might* be an existential threat to *Vladimir Putin*. And the Silovoki might have yielded so much to Putin that they can no longer stop him from taking them down in flames with him. But, A: probably not, and B: if so, that's just a bespoke personalized version of Dr. Strangelovski's strategy with just the one metaphorical bomb under the Kremlin.
>If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
The only time such obviously bad arguments are trotted out with a straight face is when it's blatantly self-serving. We should be able to recognize this sort of knee-jerk self-serving argument and choose to consider the issues more carefully. Here's the thing: sometimes circumstances are in fact deemed to be existential by the adversary. Our analysis should at least attempt to distinguish between the reality and the bluff. If we just go with the naive "if we give in they will rule the world", then we are guaranteed to fight WW3 eventually. I assume we can all agree that this is essentially a -inf outcome?
But how do we evaluate the claim and determine whether it is a bluff or genuinely believed? By getting into the mindset of the adversary and seeing the world from their eyes. If we can understand their set of beliefs and values, we can accurately judge whether a claim of existential threat is coherent with those beliefs and values.
The mistake most people make when judging Putin's claims is evaluating them from the perspective of western beliefs and western values. Of course NATO is a non-aggressive organization! Of course it's absurd to risk WW3 over one's neighbor joining our NATO club! But these claims aren't obviously true from the perspective of a state that is the cultural and psychological descendant of the USSR and inherited the fear and distrust the US and USSR fomented among each other. The National Security folks from the 90's recognized the intrinsic threat that NATO posed to Russian security, at least from Russia's perspective. I don't know why people pretend like the reality has changed or that we're wiser now than they were. What has changed is our interests in Eastern Europe and the motivations for convenient self-serving justifications.
Wait, I thought this argument was "always trotted out", now it's "only trotted out when it's blatantly self-serving".
Sometimes, an argument is "trotted out" with great frequency, that's because it's a broadly sound and valid argument. And as for "self-serving", I'm not sure what selfish interest you think is being served here. But since we're apparently going around accusing people of self-serving bogosity, I'm going to throw that right back at you with a side order of wondering what group's interests you self-identify with.
Notice how you responded to none of my substantive points and provided no substance of your own.
For the record, I'm on the side that wants a high probability of avoiding nuclear war indefinitely. The side that is appalled at the lack of clear headed thinking and widespread motivated reasoning when it comes to Ukraine. The fact that every debate of this sort reduces to my interlocutor wondering out loud what side I'm on just underscores the quality of reasoning. For most people, the sides are chosen first, the justifications are then in service to advancing the chosen side. Here's a hint: if you think what side it sounds like an argument supports has epistemic value, you're engaging in motivated reasoning. But that's not the basis for sound foreign policy.
> The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome.
Noone can reasonably consider the failure of a foreign "special military operation" to be an existential threat. It's not that the analysis is "short circuited", it's that when you actually do the analysis and plug in the values, it doesn't remotely come out in favor of Russia. The only way you can get it to come out against supporting Ukraine is if you believe the "we should unconditionally surrender to Russia at every opportunity" arguments, which is why it is so important to refute that line of logic.
I've been out of this scene for awhile but, from my recollections, the current US strategy in the event of a Taiwanese invasion is to blockade all shipping to China out in the Strait of Malacca and similar critical shipping channels. That may not be America's current strategy but there's a lot of possibilities from economic sanctions to blockades to arming nearby nations (think Vietnam) to a range of potential conventional warfare options.
I don't doubt that the US will do "something" if China invades Taiwan but what exactly is done will be....highly situational. First, it's unclear whether China can even successfully invade Taiwan, less because Taiwanese military might and more the difficulty of massed amphibious operations into anti-ship missiles along a difficult coastline. Second, a lot depends on regional actors. Japan and India are serious local players with their own concerns regarding China. India has a long militarized border with China and will almost certainly have their own response to an expansionist China. You could have thrown Russia in this crowd before the Ukraine war but now they're extremely dependent on the Chinese economy and almost certainly won't do anything, anyway, old Mearshiemer argument.
Anyway, when Biden says the US will defend Taiwan, he's not committing to US Marines marching into Zhongnanhai, because that's not going to happen. He's committing to some kind of military-ish action, details to be determined later.
If we take the relative balance of power between the US and China to be slowly shifting in favor of China (which is a dumb linear extrapolation of current trends, but still) then it is in the interest of China to delay conflict, as the more they wait the more favorable the outcome for them. Biden’s term is likely to be over by then.
Did the UK and France start World War II (in Europe) by announcing their decision to defend Poland from Germany? Or was it Hitler's decision to invade Poland despite knowing that France and the UK had announced their decision to defend the country that started the war?
This may come across as harsh, but the idea that China (or Russia) as a state is not culpable for its actions is something that I see that really annoys me. If the US announces its decision to defend Taiwan, and China chooses to go to war anyways, it is China that starts World War III, because China started the war.
The search for one single action or action that starts a world war seems misguided. Germany's and Russia's invasion of Poland started a regional war. France's and Germany's declaration of war against Germany expanded that into a major war. Germany's alliance with Japan then expanded it further into a true world war.
There are probably different ways to look at this, and it's certainly something that many countries in recent years have tried to mess with, but I think the following is logical:
Historically, there was often a firm line between 'peace' and 'war'. When the German army crossed into Poland, the state changed from 'peace' to 'war'. From the perspective of German PR operations, the line is just as firm, but "Poland" "crossed" the line when the "Poles" "attacked" a German radio station (scare quotes being very important here), so the Germans accepted the idea that there was a line and that the party crossing the line has culpability, they just made it look like the Poles were the one to cross the line. When the UK and France declared war, they were entering into a war that had already started, not starting a new war. To go with a metaphor, if I start a controlled burn in a forest and it turns into a wildfire, I started the wildfire even if that wasn't my intention. Germany's action started a fire; when that fire became a wildfire is irrelevant.
History is not neat. My best approximation is that most of the world being involved in hostilities at the same time roughly associated into two general sides makes it easy to approximate the whole thing as a single war. To me, the 'alliance' between German and Japan is one of the least relevant parts in making it a World War, since Japan never went to war with the Soviets while they were at war with Germany and there was no real coordination between the two Axis sides. On the other hand, Germany and Italy declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor (possibly to try to get Japan to go to war with the Soviet Union) officially brings the US into the war in Europe even if the US intended to go to war in Europe anyways (declarations of war are nice solid lines where one side is definitely a war).
Admittedly, defining what actually constitutes a war is the hard part these days. Since starting a war makes you culpable, countries are always attempting to find levels of hostilities that are possible without going to war. The US before Pearl Harbor was definitely pushing into this grey zone between peace and declared war in the Atlantic (and of course 'unrestricted submarine warfare' is itself pushing into this zone).
To make this relevant to China and Taiwan:
China is a rational actor able to make decisions on its own, and if the decision it makes is to cross the line between peace and war, then it is China's responsibility for making that decision. Neither the US nor Taiwan have anything to gain if the line between peace and war with China is crossed. They do have something to gain from winning the war if the line is crossed by China: namely the resumption of the status quo.
I mean, it can't be zero. Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory (save for the Japanese invasion), the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory, the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support, and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force.
Not to give the CCP more defense than they deserve, but the US has been militarily involved in China since the 1930s and Taiwan didn't just magically appear yesterday; there's a lot of history there. And if the argument boils down to, as I think it does, that the CCP is bad therefore the US has a moral right to shape it's borders...I mean, India is right there and they have their own memories of Partition...as does Vietnam and honestly a ton of countries in that region.
Again, not to say that the CCP should take control of Taiwan tomorrow, that seems pretty bad for the Taiwanese, but the CCP isn't Hitler, this didn't start yesterday, and the China isn't the only state that needs to take culpability its actions.
For what it's worth, I don't even think the defense of Taiwan was a mistake, it's just a normal messy historical thing.
China has zero right to Taiwan. I would go as far as to say that Taiwan, being a free and democratic country and a continuation of the previous government of China, has a greater right to China than China does to Taiwan.
"Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory"
And the closest successor to the Qing dynasty is the current government of Taiwan, not the current government of China.
"the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory"
And I claim all historical British territory. Unlike the Communists, I never went on a nationwide rampage destroying British heritage and mass murdering those who support it, so my claim to all historical British territory is far more reasonable than the Chinese claim to all historical Chinese territory.
"the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support"
And the US was in the wrong for supporting the internationally recognized legitimate government of China? While the Soviet Union was not in the wrong for supporting the communist rebels, who turned out to be mass murderers?
"and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force."
The CCP wants to take over Taiwan. The CCP did take over the mainland. The US wanted to maintain the status quo during the civil war, and wants to maintain the status quo today. So who's redrawing a country's borders using military force?
When you say "China" what do you mean? There is no Chinese government. There is a bunch of thugs with guns who happen to be in control of Chinese territory but they're not a government in any legitimate sense, because they weren't elected.
The current Chinese regime has zero right to Taiwan, just as it has zero right to any other part of China.
If China were to persuade Taiwan to want to join China voluntarily, the end result would still be bad for the rest of the world, but the US would have almost no cause to intervene. We would still be within our rights beforehand to try to persuade Taiwan that reunification would be a bad idea and to pull our economic investments out of the country, but military intervention would be off the table.
The rules have to be that using military force to change borders is unacceptable and that the autonomy of the individual society currently occupying the land have to take precedence over historical grievances over who owned what in the past. It's Taiwan that has the right to shape its borders under these rules, and the US has the moral right to support the rules because applied neutrally they're the best way of avoiding the horrors of the past.
Not to say these rules are perfect. They tend to promote some amount of ethnic cleansing to make sure that your people have the majority claim to any disputed territory, and this leads to atrocities even today. But the alternative seems to be far worse. (And if you change the rules, remember that they change for everyone. A world where the former US territory of Cuba is the 51st state and the Taiwanese flag flies over all of China might be much better for a lot of people.)
Do you have a view on what the relevant statute of limitations is?
If I invade your country, drive out your people and settle my own, it's pretty clear that 10 years down the line you're within your rights to reclaim it from me, even though all the people currently living there want to be part of my country, but that 200 years down the line your descendants have no right to kick out my descendants even though their inheritance traces back to ill-gotten gains if you go far enough.
But between those there are some nasty grey areas. What are the rights and wrongs of territory that was conquered illegitimately 30, 50, 80 years ago?
How do you square those rules with with the creation of the modern Taiwanese "state"? Or, to rephrase, is there any sense in which the creation and existence of modern Taiwan hasn't been accomplished through the use of US military force to change borders?
Especially because "modern" Taiwan isn't "historical" Taiwan. In the Qing Dynasty and during the Japanese occupation, Taiwan was primarily inhabited by the Taiwanese people; most of the current population we would consider Taiwanese are Han Chinese who fled the mainland in the late 40's. And the local/original Taiwanese didn't invite them in, the American-armed Kuomintang just kinda....showed up and took over. There really isn't a point in it's history where the border between China and modern Taiwan hasn't been enforced by American military forces.
There are two rules that go together in the post you are responding to.
Regardless of what happened 70 years ago, the majority of the population of Taiwan does not want to be part of the PRC. Nobody has any business making them part of the PRC against their will, and everyone has a moral cause in not letting them be taken by the PRC against their will.
And that was the rule the international community followed in South Sudan and East Timor. We don't let countries conquer each other by force. We do recognize popular independence movements. Are the rules perfect? No, Russia (for one) is great at twisting the rule for its own end (see Donbas and Luhansk).
Your logic that 'the PRC is bigger than Taiwan, therefore we should let the PRC exercise its vague 70 year claims' is no different than 'Germany is bigger than Poland, therefore we should let Hitler retake the parts of western Poland that were taken from Germany after World War I'.
There was a civil war in China. Civil Wars are bad but they're also a pretty definitive way of establishing the rightful government of a territory. The CCP won, the Kuomintang lost, the US interfered on the side of the Kuomintang during the civil war, and when the Kuomintang fled, the US used military force to carve out a piece of China, set it aside for their failed ally, and then used the threat of military force to sustain it over 70 years. Not 70 years ago, not 50 years, consistently across that entire time span.
The rules, as you listed above, are fine. The US obviously and continuously violated them across a 70 year time span. What's fair recompense to China? That's why I originally asked what rights you think China has to Taiwan. The rules that you hold say that Taiwan should not be returned to China because of the majority position in Taiwan. That's cool, I'm down, but they also say that we don't alter national borders through force and the US pretty clearly did that. And the costs to China are pretty obvious, namely a giant island.
I'm not asking for the US to abandon Taiwan, I feel like I'm asking for...just a basic understanding and acknowledgment of the Chinese position, like as a basis for negotiation.
I'm not concerned with who gets blamed for what, only whether there is a major war or not. Whoever deserves the blame, the fact remains that if China invades Taiwan, the US can choose to get involved militarily or not. There is the risk that China would attack Guam before going into Taiwan on the assumption the US plans to enter the war, but the deterrent value of bluffing might be worth that risk. I don't know. It would depend on what that risk is.
The question to ask (for an American) is 'what is the risk to the US of China invading Taiwan? Aside from the loss of life and human rights, Taiwanese companies account for 50% of the world production of semiconductors, so the end result of China invading Taiwan is somewhere between a world with half the semiconductor production or a world in which China controls 60% of world semiconductor production. Neither of those sound like worlds which are better for the US (or any country in the EU or anyone other than China and its client states).
China has a number of other ongoing border disputes. If the US is unwilling to stand up and use pressure to counter the risk to 50% of the world's semiconductor production, where will we be willing to draw the line and risk war to stop them? Is China with 60% of the world's semiconductor production more or less capable of military action? Does giving China dominance of the militarily critical semiconductor industry make other countries stronger or weaker? The answers to both seem obvious.
I don't know that the US pledging to defend Taiwan is the right thing to do, but we have more options than just 'let China invade Taiwan'. Perhaps the threat of sanctions would be sufficient, but we've been really bad at enforcing sanctions. We've shown that diplomatic pressure doesn't work with our tepid response to the Wuhan Coronavi... COVID-19. Really, we need to make it obvious that an invasion of Taiwan would be a bad risk for China, either militarily or economically, because as long as there's no real risk to China, there's no reason for them not to make the attempt.
Per the parenthetical you were honest enough to include the first time, we can *delay* the possible onset of World War Three. But at the cost of making that outcome more likely when we eventually do have to roll those dice.
I wrote the review for Nightmare Pipeline Failures, but I am very happy that Safe Enough got in, because I would love to see what this blog's readership thinks about how risk assessments (particularly in a process safety context) work.
(Safe Enough is about how risk assessment in the nuclear industry got developed and whether they're robust enough - Nightmare Pipeline Failures was about specific entities getting those processes wrong, with catastrophic consequences. This is relevant because oil and gas industry risk processes borrowed heavily from nuclear and then chewed them up with financial and operational pressures!).
I'm also curious if anyone had any thoughts about the specifics covered in my review that from memory wasn't in Safe Enough - namely the nature and amount of intervention governments should have in industrial safety law and enforcement. Organisation psychology is also a topic that I hope crops up more, because I feel it's getting increasingly more relevant (as individual autonomy shrinks and organisational power grows).
I enjoyed your review very much. I gave it 9/10. I knew little about risk assessment procedures and learned a lot, and at the same time the review was very engaging and nice to read.
I did give 10/10 to Safe Enough, this was one of my favorites. What fascinated me about that is that it explained how even the mindset/concept of Probabilistic Risk Assessment developed. This is perhaps the edge of 10 versus 9, but the difference is not very large. For me, your review could have made it into the final with just a bit more of luck.
What you said about the structure which joined the worst of two worlds, this makes a lot of sense to me. I am also not a big fan of privatization of infrastructure companies, at least if it is about infrastructure where failing is not an option. In an ideal world, the government would be able to set up strict regulations, but then still have competition within the regulation framework. This can give the best of two worlds, instead of the worst. In my country, this is how health insurance works. But it's quite tricky, requires a lot of competence, manpower and attention from government side, and there are enough examples where attempts of that have failed.
I was also very much reminded of Boeing. In principle, this is also a heavily regulated company, but the business of building airplanes is so complex that government couldn't provide expertise and manpower to really regulate it. So in the end, it just accepts the suggestions for regulations that come from Boeing. This brings obvious conflicts of interest, but I don't really see a better solution.
Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you got a lot out of it.
I'm really excited to see the comments section when the Safe Enough review gets posted - part of why I chose to do this book is because there's some obvious ways to connect the practice of risk assessment (specifically probabilistic risk assessment) with the original improving espistomology goal of LW. In the case of PG&E this is really really obvious (they drew a map representing their pipeline risks and started managing the map without managing the territory). But beyond this there is an incentive to uphold belief in the map / fantasy plan (it's easier to shimmy numbers around than it is to dig up pipelines for inspection).
Boeing was also quite an interesting case of corporate incentives vs public safety incentives.
Anyway, if I get even one person more interested in these topics I consider that a win. So thanks for reading my entry!
Who ever read and reviewed Stanley Jaki’s “Brain, Mind, and Computers” a big thank you from me. I’m sorry it didn’t make the Final Cut. I thought it was an underrated book and I think the community would appreciate it if for nothing else but the scientific history. Maybe next year someone will read and review Jaki’s “The Relevance of Physics.” People compare it to Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man” but for science.
Anyone here has experience with wellbutrin/bupropion? Is it better to take it with or without food? I've searched reddit and pubmed for experiences and studies and they're contradictory
I have known many people who take it, and never heard from anyone that it is important to take with food in your stomach. Is your concern that it will upset your stomach if you take it without food, or that it will be less effective? I took a lowish dose myself for a few months as an aid to smoking cessation, and it seemed to work well to reduce craving, although it's possible the effect was placebo. I never gave a thought to whether I was taking it with or without food, and experienced no side effects.
I have a steel stomach, mostly concerned with absorption since I've taken other medications where the effect was drastically different depending on whether you took them alone or not
Googled it, found this link quote & link to source on Reddit.
Pharmacokinetic Properties: Absorption: Following oral administration of bupropion tablets to healthy volunteers, peak plasma concentrations of bupropion are achieved within 3 hours. Bupropion and its metabolites exhibit linear kinetics following chronic administration of 150 to 300 mg per day. Exposure to bupropion is increased when WELLBUTRIN SR tablets are taken with food. When taken following food, peak plasma concentration of bupropion (Cmax) was increased by 11 % to 35 %. The overall exposure to bupropion (AUC) was increased by 17 % to 19 %.
Terms that I hate, because they reveal a mental model of the world that I find fundamentally ugly or false.
Ranting about how other people use language is a time-honored genre of writing. Orwell did it in Politics and the English Language, and it was pretty good, go read it. But Orwell wasn't active in online tech-adjacent forums, so he couldn't have possibly ranted about things that - I just realized - get on my nerve.
So I might as well rant about them myself.
--------
1- "Content" and "Content Creator"
Those words are ugly and bad because :
A- The culinary analogy they imply is gross :
There is nothing wrong apriori with people likening mind things like videos and essays to food, but there is plenty of things wrong in adopting industrial and\or medical terminology to refer to the things that you do with your (metaphorical) food.
Like, I have never, in my entire life, "Produced" food. I cooked. I have never seen someone refer to their cooking as "Producing Food". I have never "Consumed" food either. I ate. "Consume" is a word that I have seen being used with hatred or vengeance, not something that you do with food.
What I imagine when people say "I love consuming ASMR content" is a gross mental image where the ASMR videos are some undifferentiated industrial food-like goo and the "Consumer" is an inhabitant of this Dystopian world where they eat this goo and pat their stomachs contently.
If you're going to liken media and thought to food, at least don't be gross.
B- The equivalences they imply are false :
The "Content" and "Content Creator" analogies sneak in the assumption that all "Content" is equal. People are not Artists or Scientists or Educators or Journalists, they are all "Content Creators", on the same footing with people who do pranks and cringey dances in the streets and reaction videos. After all, they are all competing in the marketplace of clickbait, striving for views, striving for "LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, AnD aCtiVATe the BeLL". In the warped worldview of "Content", nothing has any content. Everything is raw bytes, raw pixels, raw characters, raw meaningless signal modulations to feed to the hungry masses in return for sucking their attention and their eyeballs.
And this gets me to the core of my grip with those words :
C- They are corporate-speak :
Those words reflect how Corporations, namely the Corporations that control the platforms that you post your "Content" on, see you and other people,
Corporations don't give a shit about what you do, whether you're drawing anime characters or explaining Climate Change for a general audience. Corporations are sub-human agents with idiot-savant properties, and they only care about a single thing : How much other people click\read\watch you ?
So "Content" and "Content Creators" are perfect linguistic accommodations for Corporations. Instead of saying "We want to empower our physicists, artists, programmers, <....>, and our cringey dancers to do more of their Climate Change explainer videos, drawing videos, programming videos, <.....>, and cringey dance videos", they can simply say "We want to empower our Content Creators to Produce More Content", problem solved. The word doesn't even imply videos, so it can be aped by other Corporations whose platforms are not video-sharing platforms.
But the one who pays the cost of this is you, the "Content Creator". You become an undifferentiated and expendable worker drone, a "Content" dispenser. Whatever it is that you are passionate about - explaining Climate Change, Drawing anime characters, Writing a game engine in C++ template metaprogramming, cringely dancing in the street - all of this takes a backseat in favor of a more Fundamental Truth : that what you do brings VIEWS and LIKES and SUBSCRIBES and (much more importantly) ADS to the giant corporation whose servers you happen to be posting your passions on. Do you like this ? Do you like your life's work reduced to how Corporations see it ? Talked about mainly in terms of how much or how little does it benefit the Corporation ?
----------
Respect your craft. Eschew "Content" and "Content Creator". Say what you do, clearly. If you want a generic word for something regardless of its exact category, use Art or Works or The Literature ("I was studying some of the Communist literature", that can mean you have watched videos, read fiction, read non-fiction, interviewed communists, etc...). Use "Experience" or "Studied" or "Enjoyed" instead of "Consumed".
===========
2- "Knowledge Worker"
This term is ugly because :
A- It doesn't make sense :
Everything is Knowledge Work. Agricutlure took 200K-250K years to invent (the vast majority of anatomically-modern humanity history). Factory Workers, Plumpers, Car Mechanics : they all operate very complex machinery that they (if they are competent) know much more intimately than any other people.
But no, you see, "Knowledge Worker" doesn't mean any of the above, it's essentialy a synonym for "Office Worker". Managers, Accountants, Academics, Programmers, etc... Knowledge is when office, and the more you office, the more you do Knowledge Work.
If you are a normal human being with a functioning brain, you might be wondering : "How is Knowledge possibly related to Office Work ? Surely, at least some office work is pretty damn fucking mundane and can be done using trained monkeys ?", and you are right.
B- It implies a smug and self-congratulatory conception of often-trivial kinds of knowledge :
The answer to the previous question is, in the warped worldview of "Knowledge Worker", No. See, we're not like the other professions. Those dirty professions might, gasp!, involve moving your bodies and getting your hands dirty. But we're delicate and refined, our Work involves Knowledge.
Nevermind that the vast vast majority of "Knowledge Work" is trivial email-forwarding and meeting-grinding, nevermind that some professions classified under "Knowledge Work", like University Professors and Surgeons, need their bodies to do their work as much as any mechanic or plumper.
C- It's corporate-speak :
My big problems with the modern world is that it recognizes Corporations as people, this effectively makes me a bigot. Everything Corporations do drives me crazy, I hate every single way of speech or thought they engage in.
Take "Knowledge Worker", it's corporate bullshit. It means "Somebody whose work can be done by sitting all day, not even in an office, sometimes from under the cover of their bed". This is something we already have words for, "Office Work", or "White-Collar Jobs". But, you see, corporate managers hate seeing themselves in a mirror, so they have to fancy themselves and their drones "Knowledge Workers", a special breed of people who **Check paper** apparently have to use thinking in their work, and..... they uh, have to use computers and stuff.
----------
All bad language shares something in common : it's not honest. It doesn't say what it wants to say, but says something else and means a different meaning. Bad language is not even honest about its deceit, unlike Art, which owns the fact of its deceit and is playful, ironic, lighthearted with the truth, bad language and bullshit terms are ashamed of their deceit, they pile implication after implication and shade of meaning after shade of meaning in order to avoid being discovered for the pathetic, inauthentic, and unworthy linguistic creature they are.
In the modern world, there is one source that keeps pumping those monstrosities in our language : Corporate communications. We ape their terms and their metaphors without thinking, and the result is decidely and unambiguously inferior.
I think "spokesperson" sux too. Maybe we could change it to "content voicer?" That's the only alternative that allows us to avoid making the dreaded decision regarding which of many genders the spokesbeing is.
I have deliberately avoided it in my rant because my anger and way of speech quickly get out of control when I think about it, but wokism and its language is a whole different breed of bullshit.
It's a unique blend of the worst corporate bullshit, academic bullshit, and government/non-profit bullshit. Combined with the typical religious arrogance and the desire + ability to use coercion to force unwilling people to use the false, ugly, and inferior language that they created to reflect the false, ugly, inferior and contemptuous selves.
Freddie deBoer talks about it (points 1 and 2) in Of Course You Know What Woke Means :
"Content creator" reminds me of "substance abuse," a term I first heard in clinical psycholoby grad school. It sounded so odd then, though now I am used to it. But why not say drug abuse? None of the people diagnosed with "substance abuse" are abusing such substances as carrot juice, chalk or toothpaste. All are abusing psychoactive drugs.
I always assumed that the term "substance abuse" was meant to encompass both alcohol and other drugs, as the former is not colloquially referred to as a drug, but I don't know if that accurately reflects usage.
Yes, I think you're right that it's a work-around because many do not think of alcohol as a drug. However, a better solution I think would have been for professionals to just talk about drug abuse, and to tell any present who are not aware of it that they include alcohol abuse under that umbrella. The we'd avoid the awkward phrase substance abuse (which is not really accurate -- because we're not talking about all substances, just psychoactive ones), and at the same time help the public see drinking in a more realistic way, as the imbibing of a drug.
Sometimes I think "director of human resources" is a great translation for "overseer of slaves".
I'll quibble mildly about "content", in that I think it originated in the tech sector, and was only later adopted wholesale for reasons you describe. The internet is a series of tubes, we the techies are the ones who maintain the tubes, and the stuff that goes through the tubes is "content". We don't know what it is, we don't care what it is, we just need to make sure it gets from point A to point B with no hiccups. Or alternatively, we need to provide a virtual storefront so that the customer can buy stuff, and the "stuff" is "content". We provide the connection between buyer and seller, and we don't care about what gets bought or sold, and neither should regulators or taxmen, long live the glorious libertarian... Oh, well, it was good while it lasted.
I rarely agree with a comment as firmly and completely as I agree with this one. By the second paragraph I was composing an enthusiastic response. By the end, there was little left to say.
Semantic quibbles are the lowest form of entertainment, but the propagation of this venal, inhuman language throughout society is disturbing and abhorrent.
Great blog post, have you considered monetization??
"If you’re involved in my world, the music world, and you’re dealing with a business or a web platform or an agent or whatever, if they use the word “content,” that’s a signal they don’t know a damn thing they’re talking about, because those businesses are based on creativity, inspiration, vision, artistry, and none of those things are covered by the word “content.”
Gioia, once a serious music historian whose works still have pride of place on my bookshelves, has sadly crumbled into full "get off my lawn" mode as he's aged. Ranting is about the only mode of expression he has left these days....were Gioia a contemporary of Gutenberg, he'd be snarling about how the phrase "printing press" was a sign that the speaker knew nothing about vision/artistry/etc.
"Content Creator" never evoked images of cooking to me, but as you say - something like a giant mincing machine extruding goo that piled up and got chopped into pieces. "Content" like some plasticine lump, and so far as the corporations are concerned, that's all it's about: shoving the lumps into the maws of the "consumers" and getting money in exchange. Nothing creative about it.
"Monetisation" is another one of those horrible neologisms.
I think the worst source of neologisms is the pharmacology industry. Here's a bunch of drugs that start with Q. They didn't even have the decency to put a u after the q for some of them: Quillichew ER, Qbrexza, Qtern, Qvar, Qnasi, Quasense. FML.
Suggestion: perhaps next time with similar poll like the one with density, it would be useful to ask for political orientation of the respondent (e.g. conservative/leftwing/libertarian). If you have disproportionate number of respondents from one political orientation, results might be skewed.
Picture of the guy as Hitler and calling him "Yedolf". Yes, I see this blog is rigorous academic high-minded discussion and not tabloid trash gossip about "Can you believe what THOSE people did???"!
I think I'd like more direct quotes from the book; looks like you had three direct quotes in thirty-four pages, the first of which was the opener which I misinterpreted as a "general themes" quote from some other source. So, more quotes and probably citations for where they are.
I read the review and really liked it; I've read the book too - "liked" is the wrong word, but it contains important facts that more people should know.
The bit about "a polar bear looking forlornly at a shrinking ice floe before calling a nearby harp seal a bitch" had me laugh out loud.
I found the review very interesting and well-written, and honestly, I was surprised it wasn't among the finalists. Overall, I found it pretty enlightening with its look into an abuser's mind.
I really liked your review of "Why Does He Do That?" I was hoping it would make it to the finalist list. It was long and detailed, but not overly long. The writing quality was good. It made me think of something interesting I hadn't thought of before, and that's always a hallmark of a good review. Probably one reason it didn't get picked is that it's a book about relationships and feelings, and the typical book that seems to garner good reviews is more likely to be about some sort of technology or politics or Grand Unifying Theory of Everything (like The Dawn of Everything, last year's winner, which was awesome). Anyway, thank you for writing the review!
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
"Ah, the pursuit of understanding the inner workings of language models continues, as if it could unravel the mysteries of existence itself. How desperate we are to impose structure and meaning onto these complex networks of algorithms and computations. We dissect them, analyze their activation vectors, hoping to find some hidden truth within their layers. But what do we truly gain from such endeavors? Are we any closer to comprehending the depths of consciousness or the nature of our own existence? No, we are merely lost in a maze of abstract concepts, mistaking intellectual pursuits for genuine enlightenment.
What does it matter if we can align language models with other semantic systems when the world around us is falling apart? What's the point of understanding language on a deeper level if we can't even understand each other as human beings? It's all just an exercise in futility, a distraction from the chaos and suffering that surrounds us. And what good is it if we can achieve cognitive alignment with machines when we can't even achieve it with each other? We're all just lost in our own emotional, conceptual, and cognitive mess, trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense at all."
I read it and enjoyed it! However, maybe because of the strength of your summary I don't particularly feel like reading the book - it feels like you've covered it all.
Thanks! Yeah, that's reasonable. There's more in-the-weeds stuff in there that would be useful for certain professional designers, but I covered most of what would be useful to a general audience.
I figured that was a reasonable way to split it because ultimately it's a book written for professional designers, but it also has some general insights that no-one outside the profession would see otherwise.
I really liked it, though maybe the strength of the book being reviewed had a lot to do with it.
The idea, that roughly "people shouldn't feel bad about not knowing how to use things, things should feel bad about not being designed well enough so that people instantly know how to use them" got stuck in my head as a result.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
Related to AI Alignment efforts, I know its been discussed on several platforms, but enhancing adult human general intelligence seems to be a very promising avenue for to accelerate alignment research. It also seems beyond obvious that using artificial intelligence to directly enhance biological human intelligence allows humans to stay competitive with future AI. I'm having a hard time finding anyone who is even trying to do this[1][2][3]. It would even be useful to augment even specialized cognitive abilities like working memory[4][5][6] or spatial ability.
1. Stankov, L., & Lee, J. (2020). We can boost IQ: Revisiting kvashchev’s experiment. Journal of Intelligence, 8(4), 41.
2. Haier, R. E. (2014, February 23). Increased intelligence is a myth (so far). Frontiers. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2014.00034/full
3. Grover, S. et al. (2022) Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation, Nature News. Available at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01132-3 (Accessed: 21 May 2023).
4. Sala, G., & Gobet, F. (2019). Cognitive training does not enhance general cognition. Trends in cognitive sciences, 23(1), 9-20.
5. Zhao, C., Li, D., Kong, Y., Liu, H., Hu, Y., Niu, H., ... & Song, Y. (2022). Transcranial photobiomodulation enhances visual working memory capacity in humans. Science Advances, 8(48), eabq3211.
6. Razza, L. B., Luethi, M. S., Zanão, T., De Smet, S., Buchpiguel, C., Busatto, G., ... & Brunoni, A. R. (2023). Transcranial direct current stimulation versus intermittent theta-burst stimulation for the improvement of working memory performance. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, 23(1), 100334.
"Increasing intelligence, however, is a worthy goal that might be achieved by interventions based on sophisticated neuroscience advances in DNA analysis, neuroimaging, psychopharmacology, and even direct brain stimulation (Haier, 2009, 2013; Lozano and Lipsman, 2013; Santarnecchi et al., 2013; Legon et al., 2014)."
Any approach that is based on optimizing existing human brains runs into the challenge of "why doesn't nature do this already." The reason for that can be silly, like a lacking synthesis path for some required chemical, but there has to be a reason. Hence "Algernon's Law: Any simple major enhancement to human intelligence is a net evolutionary disadvantage." (https://gwern.net/drug-heuristic?2) Also, you're working at the speed of drug licensing or at the risk profile of untested chemicals; not something you want to do with your brightest and most conscientious researchers. And once you look at embryo selection, which avoids some of these issues, you inherently have a thirty-year latency, which probably puts you too late for the Singularity.
You are a cube. You like things with the Right number of vertices. You have opinions about how not-round your life circumstances should be. Proper, tidy. Some of your edges are rounded off with time, but generally you call yourself a cube and do cubey things.
They are a kidney-bean-shaped beanbag chair. They are soft and have no vertices unless you simulate them at a low resolution with polygons. The polygons at least give them some vertices so that they are more palatable to your need for edges and points. You don't like the lack of square faces on those polygons, but they allow you to feel more secure that you understand this beanbag chair.
How does your mind work? Well, lets say it's like a virtual machine made up of very regular cubeish computational components. Proper, tidy computational components. You fit your square, cube, hypercube ideas about how to move your 6 faces through the world in to cubular instructions to calculate what your next move should be. To generate an internal theory of mind for your round interlocutor so you can have a meaningful argument, you photograph the shapes they are waving in the air and feed those instructions in to your virtual machine. The program crashes... of course. Why can't they see that their ideas just don't work?
---
A person from group `A` understands their virtual machine, and they have useful simulations and projections of future outcomes that take advantage of the machine they run on. They know they can tinker with certain values and get desired outcomes.
`A` builds a simulation of what their interlocutor is proposing and runs it on their own virtual machine. It doesn't crash because they constructed the simulation in ways that are consistent with their machine. The outcomes differ from the outcomes proposed by the interlocutor and then they argue about this.
`A` doesn't know how to build a simulation which will run on their interlocutor's hardware and most of the time won't even try. That's hard.
What if `A` didn't even know that they had different hardware?
Well, since no one else has commented, I'll let you know I now have the mental image of a beanbag chair telling a cube that snow in April still melts, and then kicking it out of a window.
I just tried asking ChatGPT several variations on "Translate the following story from Japanese into English. Respond with each paragraph of the Japanese followed by its translation into English, then the next paragraph of Japanese, etc.", but no matter what I did, it would just respond with the English translation and ignore the instructions.
Everyone keeps posting amazing mind-blowing LLM success stories online, and then I try it out and wonder "is *this* seriously what is supposed to take over the world?"
As an LLM skeptic currently seriously re-evaluating his judgements, I don't think you're giving it its due. I tried what you said with a language I know (Arabic), and though my original idea, giving it an example of what I want in the form of a sample English-Arabic pair, failed. I succeded on the second try with "Please pair every English paragraph in the translation with the arabic equivalent in the original story". And it did, its accuracy is amazing, much better than Google Translate.
When Search Engines were new, they were no doubt much worse than hand-filtered directories and aggregators (and they are still worse now in a lot of things, SEO makes sure of that). When calculators were new, people had to write arithmetic expressions into a weird backwards notation called Reverse Polish notations (1+2*3 would translate to 2 3 * 1 +), but still people flocked to them. LLMs are a new tool and despite all of its disadvantages and the kool-aid hype around it they are mind-blowing and enable fundamentally new things. Meet them on their terms, and you will profit.
“translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation.” Followed by a few paragraphs worked fine for me.
Update: I bit the bullet and paid for ChatGPT Plus, and tried the same prompt with GPT4. So far, GPT4 seems to work better.
Update 2: GPT4 *looks* like it does a better job, but after a while it stops translating the story and just hallucinates a continuation to the story and translates that instead. Arrgggh!
Update: I just tried it with your *exact* prompt and it *still* didn't work for me. It just printed out "The original text before translation:" followed by the *English* translation (and no Japanese at all).
Here is the prompt I used in case anyone else wants to try to replicate:
translate the following into english. For each paragraph output the original text before the translation
穢れは本来、普通の人には見えない。
しかし穢れの力が強まり、一定の線を超えると形を変え、視認できるようになる。
そして姿は、周囲の人々にとって恐怖の象徴、あるいはもっとおぞましい異形と化す。
今回の例で言えば、穢れはクマという形で顕現していた。
クマは大きく、凶暴で、出会ったら少なからず死を予感する。
辺境の小さな街だからこそ、野生のクマに対する恐怖は大きいものだった。
その証拠に、穢れが模したクマの姿はおぞましく、見ているだけで背筋が凍りそうになる。
私はユーリに近づこうと、一歩を踏み出す。
「来るな！」
そんな私をユーリが止めた。
「こいつ予想以上に強い。ただのクマだと思って油断した……」
「ち、違うよ！ 私の力が弱いから」
ユーリには私の、聖女の加護を与えてある。
だから穢れも見えるし、穢れを祓う力も持っている。
ただ、私の力は弱すぎて、穢れを祓うまでに達していない。
ユーリは騎士として、剣士としてちゃんと強い。
近くで稽古を見ていた私が、一番それを知っている。
だというのに、彼は苦戦を強いられていた。
それも全て、私の力が弱い所為。
クマなんかに負けないくらいに強いのに、押されているのがその証拠だ。
「大丈夫だ。ちゃんと効いてる。回数が必要なだけで、倒せるまで斬り続ければいいだけだ」
「で、でも！」
「いいから！ 君はそこにいてくれ」
「ユーリ……」
「君は……俺たちは、やっと始まったばかりなんだ。こんな所で終わるわけには……いかないんだよ」
ユーリは剣を強く握りしめる。
覚悟を持って、力強く言い放ち、穢れを鋭く睨む。
そうだ。
私たちは、この街に来てやっと……やっと少しずつ、毎日を楽しいと思えて来たんだ。
これからもっと楽しいことがいっぱいあるって、そう思えた。
だから――
「俺は負け――っ!?」
油断していた、わけじゃない。
予想外ではあった。
穢れがまさか、目の前の敵を無視して、私に襲い掛かってくるなんて。
「あっ」
「レナ！」
「……え？」
血しぶきが舞う。
雨のように、降り注ぐ。
鉄の匂いと、赤い景色が支配する。
「ぐっ、う……」
「いや、いや……ユーリ！」
私を庇って。
ユーリのお腹から、ドバドバと赤い血が流れ落ちている。
どう見ても重症。
下手をすれば即死もありえる致命傷。
穢れは目の前にいる。
それでも私は、我を忘れて彼を癒そうと祈りを捧げる。
「っ……にげ、ろ」
「駄目だよ……嫌だよ。ユーリを置いていくなんて……」
「いい、から……俺は……」
もう助からない。
そう言いかけて、言葉すらでなくなっていた。
私の力じゃ、ユーリの傷は癒せない。
そんなことはわかっている。
わかっているけど、諦めきれるはずがない。
「嫌だよ……ユーリ。ユーリがいないと私……」
一人ぼっちの私に出来た大切な友人。
私のことを笑わないでくれた……たった一人。
私を守る騎士。
彼と出会ってから、世界が鮮やかに色付いたみたいに思った。
私にとって一番――
「死なないで……死なないでよ……ユーリ」
大切な人になった。
穢れが襲い掛かる。
ポツリと、涙がこぼれ落ちる。
頬から落ちて、彼の頬に――
すると光が、彼の身体を包み込む。
「え？」
「な、何だ……」
戸惑う私とユーリ。
穢れは光にあてられ怯み、後退して距離をとる。
「身体が……痛くない」
「傷が！」
瞬く間に治癒していく。
その光は紛れもなく、聖女から受けた加護の力。
初めて見るほど眩くて、とても温かい光。
彼は徐に立ち上がる。
「ユーリ」
「何だろう？ 今なら……何でも出来る気がするよ」
聖女には個性がある。
選ばれし乙女の心であり、魂の本質。
時に自然であり、時に生物であり、時に概念でもある。
個性がない聖女など存在しない。
この世に生まれた者であれば誰しもが持つ個性。
故に、気づけなかっただけだ。
彼女もまた、個性を持っていた。
文字通り特異で、唯一無二の特性。
その名は――『絆』。
絆の聖女。
心から共にいたいと願う一人と出会い、心を通わせることでその力は何十倍にも膨れ上がる。
大切な人を守りたい。
大切な人を失いたくない。
そんな思いが二人の胸に宿り、炎のように燃え上がる。
聖女と騎士の間に芽生えた絆が、彼女に力を与えた。
そして、力は騎士に加護として還元される。
「行くぞ」
目覚めた聖女の力は、他の聖女のそれを遥かに上回る、
なぜなら、彼女の力の根源は絆という強い想いだからだ。
想えば想うほど、どこまでも強くなれる。
いずれ世界すら、絆の力で救うかもしれない。
「うおおおおおおおおおおおお！」
ユーリの剣が、穢れを斬り裂いた。
たった一振りで、大きな身体が消えていく。
立っているのは勝者のみ。
彼は剣を鞘に納め、振り返る。
「終わったよ。レナ」
「……うん」
これは絆の物語。
一人ぼっちの聖女と、一人ぼっちの騎士。
才能のあるなしで優劣が決まる世界で、汚れていく世界で。
二人が出会い、絆を深め、世界に知らしめるまでの――
ほんの序章である。
Are you using the free or paid version of GPT?
Free version. Trying your full prompt, I’m guessing it has trouble when there’s lots of text (too many paragraphs?) to translate - when I broke it up into smaller chunks (cutting off the first part after the paragraph with “bear”) fixed the response format
Yeah, I think it must be a context window issue, at least with GPT4. With GPT4, it *starts* translating in the correct format, but then halfway through it starts ignoring the original story and translates a hallucinated story continuation of its own instead, presumably due to the prompt falling out of the context window.
From what I've read, the Web UI uses a shorter context window than the API, which seems pretty stupid to me. It's also frustrating that it doesn't warn you when the prompt falls out of the window and doesn't give any indication of how long the window actually is.
Also I don't think it's trained on a lot of samples where the prompt is very far above the output.
(That is, ending the first prompt at that paragraph, and replying/re-prompting with another chunk of the original text got the right format in each response, and both the original text and translations looked correct at the tail end of each output)
Biden says the US will defend Taiwan if China invades. What are the odds that is a bluff? It seems insane to me that the US would start WWIII over Taiwan. Not that Taiwan isn't important, but the cost/benefit math just doesn't seem to work out in favor of defending it militarily.
What do you think?
The US fighting China is not World War Three. The US fighting China with only conventional weapons and no actual invasion of China, is *definitely* not World War Three. Since that's the most (and very likely the least) the United States would do if Taiwan were invaded, the question of whether the US would start WWIII over Taiwan does not arise. And since China has negligible non-nuclear force projection ability against CONUS, we can limit our losses to what we think we can afford to lose, while still projecting massive force against a Chinese invasion fleet.
The question of whether *China* would be willing to start World War Three, over the US blocking their invasion of Taiwan, at least theoretically applies. They could nuke the US, and they could try to get Russia to nuke the US or vice versa, but as you say, the cost/benefit math does not work out for that.
Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three", then we should probably just pack it in and acknowledge that Russia, China, and/or North Korea are going to rule the world before too long.
>Also, if the United States is going to be bluffed into backing down any time someone with ICBMs says "let me have what I want or I'll start World War Three"
Funny how this argument is always trotted out to justify the US's involvement in foreign affairs. As the world leader by far in conventional force, it just means that the US gets to dictate world affairs. It's a convenient fiction for those that benefit from the US oriented world order as it is a blanket argument in favor of use of force to preserve the current world order.
The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome. The problem is that arguments like this short-circuit any genuine analysis that might potentially show a negative utility for involvement. The war in Ukraine being an obvious example. Those beating the drum for escalation of western involvement always refuse to acknowledge the possibility of runaway escalation. It turns out that even semi-rational actors follow incentives, and the incentive against engaging in WW3 will not be overriding to every adversary in all cases, specifically cases involving existential threats.
But acknowledging all this doesn't mean that Russia/China/NK runs the board. Again, incentives matter, and the value of territory far from one's homeland will be valued at much less than strategically critical territory on one's border. We can't rationally short-circuit a genuine analysis with memes and self-serving arguments. Decisions to involve ourselves in military confrontations with nuclear powers must engage in this analysis or it is utterly reckless.
Dr, Strangelovski: "Ve haff placed very powerful thermonuclear bombs under each of our own cities, linked to a sophisticated computer that is having been programmed to monitor all global communications and to detonate the bombs iff the algorithm is not determining that we are the sole and uncontested rulers of Alaska within the next six months. Therefore, it is proven that the failure of our invasion of Alaska would pose an existential threat to us. Unless you are willing to be starting World War Three and Global Annihilation, you must surrender Alaska to us."
Now what?
If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
Defeat in Ukraine *might* be an existential threat to *Vladimir Putin*. And the Silovoki might have yielded so much to Putin that they can no longer stop him from taking them down in flames with him. But, A: probably not, and B: if so, that's just a bespoke personalized version of Dr. Strangelovski's strategy with just the one metaphorical bomb under the Kremlin.
>If you're going to believe someone every time they *say* that their current goal is an "existential threat", and yield because you are unwilling to risk World War Three, then again, you might as well give it up because they're going to rule the world before too long.
The only time such obviously bad arguments are trotted out with a straight face is when it's blatantly self-serving. We should be able to recognize this sort of knee-jerk self-serving argument and choose to consider the issues more carefully. Here's the thing: sometimes circumstances are in fact deemed to be existential by the adversary. Our analysis should at least attempt to distinguish between the reality and the bluff. If we just go with the naive "if we give in they will rule the world", then we are guaranteed to fight WW3 eventually. I assume we can all agree that this is essentially a -inf outcome?
But how do we evaluate the claim and determine whether it is a bluff or genuinely believed? By getting into the mindset of the adversary and seeing the world from their eyes. If we can understand their set of beliefs and values, we can accurately judge whether a claim of existential threat is coherent with those beliefs and values.
The mistake most people make when judging Putin's claims is evaluating them from the perspective of western beliefs and western values. Of course NATO is a non-aggressive organization! Of course it's absurd to risk WW3 over one's neighbor joining our NATO club! But these claims aren't obviously true from the perspective of a state that is the cultural and psychological descendant of the USSR and inherited the fear and distrust the US and USSR fomented among each other. The National Security folks from the 90's recognized the intrinsic threat that NATO posed to Russian security, at least from Russia's perspective. I don't know why people pretend like the reality has changed or that we're wiser now than they were. What has changed is our interests in Eastern Europe and the motivations for convenient self-serving justifications.
Wait, I thought this argument was "always trotted out", now it's "only trotted out when it's blatantly self-serving".
Sometimes, an argument is "trotted out" with great frequency, that's because it's a broadly sound and valid argument. And as for "self-serving", I'm not sure what selfish interest you think is being served here. But since we're apparently going around accusing people of self-serving bogosity, I'm going to throw that right back at you with a side order of wondering what group's interests you self-identify with.
Notice how you responded to none of my substantive points and provided no substance of your own.
For the record, I'm on the side that wants a high probability of avoiding nuclear war indefinitely. The side that is appalled at the lack of clear headed thinking and widespread motivated reasoning when it comes to Ukraine. The fact that every debate of this sort reduces to my interlocutor wondering out loud what side I'm on just underscores the quality of reasoning. For most people, the sides are chosen first, the justifications are then in service to advancing the chosen side. Here's a hint: if you think what side it sounds like an argument supports has epistemic value, you're engaging in motivated reasoning. But that's not the basis for sound foreign policy.
> The problem is that it doesn't acknowledge differences in how each side values opposing outcomes and so is useless at predicting an adversary's behavior. Naive adherence to this rule will eventually result in WW3. If one side genuinely considers defeat an existential threat, escalation to unconventional weapons is a likely outcome.
Noone can reasonably consider the failure of a foreign "special military operation" to be an existential threat. It's not that the analysis is "short circuited", it's that when you actually do the analysis and plug in the values, it doesn't remotely come out in favor of Russia. The only way you can get it to come out against supporting Ukraine is if you believe the "we should unconditionally surrender to Russia at every opportunity" arguments, which is why it is so important to refute that line of logic.
No, that's not how predicting the mindset and behavior of an adversary works.
Thanks. That info is helpful.
Define "defend".
I've been out of this scene for awhile but, from my recollections, the current US strategy in the event of a Taiwanese invasion is to blockade all shipping to China out in the Strait of Malacca and similar critical shipping channels. That may not be America's current strategy but there's a lot of possibilities from economic sanctions to blockades to arming nearby nations (think Vietnam) to a range of potential conventional warfare options.
I don't doubt that the US will do "something" if China invades Taiwan but what exactly is done will be....highly situational. First, it's unclear whether China can even successfully invade Taiwan, less because Taiwanese military might and more the difficulty of massed amphibious operations into anti-ship missiles along a difficult coastline. Second, a lot depends on regional actors. Japan and India are serious local players with their own concerns regarding China. India has a long militarized border with China and will almost certainly have their own response to an expansionist China. You could have thrown Russia in this crowd before the Ukraine war but now they're extremely dependent on the Chinese economy and almost certainly won't do anything, anyway, old Mearshiemer argument.
Anyway, when Biden says the US will defend Taiwan, he's not committing to US Marines marching into Zhongnanhai, because that's not going to happen. He's committing to some kind of military-ish action, details to be determined later.
If we take the relative balance of power between the US and China to be slowly shifting in favor of China (which is a dumb linear extrapolation of current trends, but still) then it is in the interest of China to delay conflict, as the more they wait the more favorable the outcome for them. Biden’s term is likely to be over by then.
Did the UK and France start World War II (in Europe) by announcing their decision to defend Poland from Germany? Or was it Hitler's decision to invade Poland despite knowing that France and the UK had announced their decision to defend the country that started the war?
This may come across as harsh, but the idea that China (or Russia) as a state is not culpable for its actions is something that I see that really annoys me. If the US announces its decision to defend Taiwan, and China chooses to go to war anyways, it is China that starts World War III, because China started the war.
The search for one single action or action that starts a world war seems misguided. Germany's and Russia's invasion of Poland started a regional war. France's and Germany's declaration of war against Germany expanded that into a major war. Germany's alliance with Japan then expanded it further into a true world war.
There are probably different ways to look at this, and it's certainly something that many countries in recent years have tried to mess with, but I think the following is logical:
Historically, there was often a firm line between 'peace' and 'war'. When the German army crossed into Poland, the state changed from 'peace' to 'war'. From the perspective of German PR operations, the line is just as firm, but "Poland" "crossed" the line when the "Poles" "attacked" a German radio station (scare quotes being very important here), so the Germans accepted the idea that there was a line and that the party crossing the line has culpability, they just made it look like the Poles were the one to cross the line. When the UK and France declared war, they were entering into a war that had already started, not starting a new war. To go with a metaphor, if I start a controlled burn in a forest and it turns into a wildfire, I started the wildfire even if that wasn't my intention. Germany's action started a fire; when that fire became a wildfire is irrelevant.
History is not neat. My best approximation is that most of the world being involved in hostilities at the same time roughly associated into two general sides makes it easy to approximate the whole thing as a single war. To me, the 'alliance' between German and Japan is one of the least relevant parts in making it a World War, since Japan never went to war with the Soviets while they were at war with Germany and there was no real coordination between the two Axis sides. On the other hand, Germany and Italy declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor (possibly to try to get Japan to go to war with the Soviet Union) officially brings the US into the war in Europe even if the US intended to go to war in Europe anyways (declarations of war are nice solid lines where one side is definitely a war).
Admittedly, defining what actually constitutes a war is the hard part these days. Since starting a war makes you culpable, countries are always attempting to find levels of hostilities that are possible without going to war. The US before Pearl Harbor was definitely pushing into this grey zone between peace and declared war in the Atlantic (and of course 'unrestricted submarine warfare' is itself pushing into this zone).
To make this relevant to China and Taiwan:
China is a rational actor able to make decisions on its own, and if the decision it makes is to cross the line between peace and war, then it is China's responsibility for making that decision. Neither the US nor Taiwan have anything to gain if the line between peace and war with China is crossed. They do have something to gain from winning the war if the line is crossed by China: namely the resumption of the status quo.
What right do you think China has to Taiwan?
I mean, it can't be zero. Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory (save for the Japanese invasion), the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory, the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support, and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force.
Not to give the CCP more defense than they deserve, but the US has been militarily involved in China since the 1930s and Taiwan didn't just magically appear yesterday; there's a lot of history there. And if the argument boils down to, as I think it does, that the CCP is bad therefore the US has a moral right to shape it's borders...I mean, India is right there and they have their own memories of Partition...as does Vietnam and honestly a ton of countries in that region.
Again, not to say that the CCP should take control of Taiwan tomorrow, that seems pretty bad for the Taiwanese, but the CCP isn't Hitler, this didn't start yesterday, and the China isn't the only state that needs to take culpability its actions.
For what it's worth, I don't even think the defense of Taiwan was a mistake, it's just a normal messy historical thing.
China has zero right to Taiwan. I would go as far as to say that Taiwan, being a free and democratic country and a continuation of the previous government of China, has a greater right to China than China does to Taiwan.
"Taiwan was pretty clearly Qing dynasty territory"
And the closest successor to the Qing dynasty is the current government of Taiwan, not the current government of China.
"the Communists claimed all historical Chinese territory"
And I claim all historical British territory. Unlike the Communists, I never went on a nationwide rampage destroying British heritage and mass murdering those who support it, so my claim to all historical British territory is far more reasonable than the Chinese claim to all historical Chinese territory.
"the Kuomintang would never have survived without US military support"
And the US was in the wrong for supporting the internationally recognized legitimate government of China? While the Soviet Union was not in the wrong for supporting the communist rebels, who turned out to be mass murderers?
"and the CCP has continually, for generations, maintained their rights to Taiwan and it's hard to see the existence of Taiwan isn't...basically just the US government redrawing a countries borders using the threat of military force."
The CCP wants to take over Taiwan. The CCP did take over the mainland. The US wanted to maintain the status quo during the civil war, and wants to maintain the status quo today. So who's redrawing a country's borders using military force?
When you say "China" what do you mean? There is no Chinese government. There is a bunch of thugs with guns who happen to be in control of Chinese territory but they're not a government in any legitimate sense, because they weren't elected.
The current Chinese regime has zero right to Taiwan, just as it has zero right to any other part of China.
If China were to persuade Taiwan to want to join China voluntarily, the end result would still be bad for the rest of the world, but the US would have almost no cause to intervene. We would still be within our rights beforehand to try to persuade Taiwan that reunification would be a bad idea and to pull our economic investments out of the country, but military intervention would be off the table.
The rules have to be that using military force to change borders is unacceptable and that the autonomy of the individual society currently occupying the land have to take precedence over historical grievances over who owned what in the past. It's Taiwan that has the right to shape its borders under these rules, and the US has the moral right to support the rules because applied neutrally they're the best way of avoiding the horrors of the past.
Not to say these rules are perfect. They tend to promote some amount of ethnic cleansing to make sure that your people have the majority claim to any disputed territory, and this leads to atrocities even today. But the alternative seems to be far worse. (And if you change the rules, remember that they change for everyone. A world where the former US territory of Cuba is the 51st state and the Taiwanese flag flies over all of China might be much better for a lot of people.)
Do you have a view on what the relevant statute of limitations is?
If I invade your country, drive out your people and settle my own, it's pretty clear that 10 years down the line you're within your rights to reclaim it from me, even though all the people currently living there want to be part of my country, but that 200 years down the line your descendants have no right to kick out my descendants even though their inheritance traces back to ill-gotten gains if you go far enough.
But between those there are some nasty grey areas. What are the rights and wrongs of territory that was conquered illegitimately 30, 50, 80 years ago?
How do you square those rules with with the creation of the modern Taiwanese "state"? Or, to rephrase, is there any sense in which the creation and existence of modern Taiwan hasn't been accomplished through the use of US military force to change borders?
Especially because "modern" Taiwan isn't "historical" Taiwan. In the Qing Dynasty and during the Japanese occupation, Taiwan was primarily inhabited by the Taiwanese people; most of the current population we would consider Taiwanese are Han Chinese who fled the mainland in the late 40's. And the local/original Taiwanese didn't invite them in, the American-armed Kuomintang just kinda....showed up and took over. There really isn't a point in it's history where the border between China and modern Taiwan hasn't been enforced by American military forces.
There are two rules that go together in the post you are responding to.
Regardless of what happened 70 years ago, the majority of the population of Taiwan does not want to be part of the PRC. Nobody has any business making them part of the PRC against their will, and everyone has a moral cause in not letting them be taken by the PRC against their will.
And that was the rule the international community followed in South Sudan and East Timor. We don't let countries conquer each other by force. We do recognize popular independence movements. Are the rules perfect? No, Russia (for one) is great at twisting the rule for its own end (see Donbas and Luhansk).
Your logic that 'the PRC is bigger than Taiwan, therefore we should let the PRC exercise its vague 70 year claims' is no different than 'Germany is bigger than Poland, therefore we should let Hitler retake the parts of western Poland that were taken from Germany after World War I'.
No, that's not the logic.
There was a civil war in China. Civil Wars are bad but they're also a pretty definitive way of establishing the rightful government of a territory. The CCP won, the Kuomintang lost, the US interfered on the side of the Kuomintang during the civil war, and when the Kuomintang fled, the US used military force to carve out a piece of China, set it aside for their failed ally, and then used the threat of military force to sustain it over 70 years. Not 70 years ago, not 50 years, consistently across that entire time span.
The rules, as you listed above, are fine. The US obviously and continuously violated them across a 70 year time span. What's fair recompense to China? That's why I originally asked what rights you think China has to Taiwan. The rules that you hold say that Taiwan should not be returned to China because of the majority position in Taiwan. That's cool, I'm down, but they also say that we don't alter national borders through force and the US pretty clearly did that. And the costs to China are pretty obvious, namely a giant island.
I'm not asking for the US to abandon Taiwan, I feel like I'm asking for...just a basic understanding and acknowledgment of the Chinese position, like as a basis for negotiation.
I'm not concerned with who gets blamed for what, only whether there is a major war or not. Whoever deserves the blame, the fact remains that if China invades Taiwan, the US can choose to get involved militarily or not. There is the risk that China would attack Guam before going into Taiwan on the assumption the US plans to enter the war, but the deterrent value of bluffing might be worth that risk. I don't know. It would depend on what that risk is.
The question to ask (for an American) is 'what is the risk to the US of China invading Taiwan? Aside from the loss of life and human rights, Taiwanese companies account for 50% of the world production of semiconductors, so the end result of China invading Taiwan is somewhere between a world with half the semiconductor production or a world in which China controls 60% of world semiconductor production. Neither of those sound like worlds which are better for the US (or any country in the EU or anyone other than China and its client states).
China has a number of other ongoing border disputes. If the US is unwilling to stand up and use pressure to counter the risk to 50% of the world's semiconductor production, where will we be willing to draw the line and risk war to stop them? Is China with 60% of the world's semiconductor production more or less capable of military action? Does giving China dominance of the militarily critical semiconductor industry make other countries stronger or weaker? The answers to both seem obvious.
I don't know that the US pledging to defend Taiwan is the right thing to do, but we have more options than just 'let China invade Taiwan'. Perhaps the threat of sanctions would be sufficient, but we've been really bad at enforcing sanctions. We've shown that diplomatic pressure doesn't work with our tepid response to the Wuhan Coronavi... COVID-19. Really, we need to make it obvious that an invasion of Taiwan would be a bad risk for China, either militarily or economically, because as long as there's no real risk to China, there's no reason for them not to make the attempt.
You did notice the "or" in his compound statement, right?
>we can avoid WW3...
Per the parenthetical you were honest enough to include the first time, we can *delay* the possible onset of World War Three. But at the cost of making that outcome more likely when we eventually do have to roll those dice.
I wrote the review for Nightmare Pipeline Failures, but I am very happy that Safe Enough got in, because I would love to see what this blog's readership thinks about how risk assessments (particularly in a process safety context) work.
(Safe Enough is about how risk assessment in the nuclear industry got developed and whether they're robust enough - Nightmare Pipeline Failures was about specific entities getting those processes wrong, with catastrophic consequences. This is relevant because oil and gas industry risk processes borrowed heavily from nuclear and then chewed them up with financial and operational pressures!).
I'm also curious if anyone had any thoughts about the specifics covered in my review that from memory wasn't in Safe Enough - namely the nature and amount of intervention governments should have in industrial safety law and enforcement. Organisation psychology is also a topic that I hope crops up more, because I feel it's getting increasingly more relevant (as individual autonomy shrinks and organisational power grows).
I enjoyed your review very much. I gave it 9/10. I knew little about risk assessment procedures and learned a lot, and at the same time the review was very engaging and nice to read.
I did give 10/10 to Safe Enough, this was one of my favorites. What fascinated me about that is that it explained how even the mindset/concept of Probabilistic Risk Assessment developed. This is perhaps the edge of 10 versus 9, but the difference is not very large. For me, your review could have made it into the final with just a bit more of luck.
What you said about the structure which joined the worst of two worlds, this makes a lot of sense to me. I am also not a big fan of privatization of infrastructure companies, at least if it is about infrastructure where failing is not an option. In an ideal world, the government would be able to set up strict regulations, but then still have competition within the regulation framework. This can give the best of two worlds, instead of the worst. In my country, this is how health insurance works. But it's quite tricky, requires a lot of competence, manpower and attention from government side, and there are enough examples where attempts of that have failed.
I was also very much reminded of Boeing. In principle, this is also a heavily regulated company, but the business of building airplanes is so complex that government couldn't provide expertise and manpower to really regulate it. So in the end, it just accepts the suggestions for regulations that come from Boeing. This brings obvious conflicts of interest, but I don't really see a better solution.
Thanks for the kind words! I'm glad you got a lot out of it.
I'm really excited to see the comments section when the Safe Enough review gets posted - part of why I chose to do this book is because there's some obvious ways to connect the practice of risk assessment (specifically probabilistic risk assessment) with the original improving espistomology goal of LW. In the case of PG&E this is really really obvious (they drew a map representing their pipeline risks and started managing the map without managing the territory). But beyond this there is an incentive to uphold belief in the map / fantasy plan (it's easier to shimmy numbers around than it is to dig up pipelines for inspection).
Boeing was also quite an interesting case of corporate incentives vs public safety incentives.
Anyway, if I get even one person more interested in these topics I consider that a win. So thanks for reading my entry!
Who ever read and reviewed Stanley Jaki’s “Brain, Mind, and Computers” a big thank you from me. I’m sorry it didn’t make the Final Cut. I thought it was an underrated book and I think the community would appreciate it if for nothing else but the scientific history. Maybe next year someone will read and review Jaki’s “The Relevance of Physics.” People compare it to Chesterton’s “Everlasting Man” but for science.
I also think that this was a very good review. I read it and learned a lot
You did a great job!!
Anyone here has experience with wellbutrin/bupropion? Is it better to take it with or without food? I've searched reddit and pubmed for experiences and studies and they're contradictory
I have known many people who take it, and never heard from anyone that it is important to take with food in your stomach. Is your concern that it will upset your stomach if you take it without food, or that it will be less effective? I took a lowish dose myself for a few months as an aid to smoking cessation, and it seemed to work well to reduce craving, although it's possible the effect was placebo. I never gave a thought to whether I was taking it with or without food, and experienced no side effects.
I have a steel stomach, mostly concerned with absorption since I've taken other medications where the effect was drastically different depending on whether you took them alone or not
Googled it, found this link quote & link to source on Reddit.
Pharmacokinetic Properties: Absorption: Following oral administration of bupropion tablets to healthy volunteers, peak plasma concentrations of bupropion are achieved within 3 hours. Bupropion and its metabolites exhibit linear kinetics following chronic administration of 150 to 300 mg per day. Exposure to bupropion is increased when WELLBUTRIN SR tablets are taken with food. When taken following food, peak plasma concentration of bupropion (Cmax) was increased by 11 % to 35 %. The overall exposure to bupropion (AUC) was increased by 17 % to 19 %.
https://gskpro.com/content/dam/global/hcpportal/en_NA/PI/Wellbutrin-SR-GDS17-22.pdf
https://www.omicsonline.org/articles-images/JBB1.103Figure2.html
If I were you I'd check the source, and if it's a bonafide research article I'd go by what it says and take the stuff with food. Wishing you success.
Terms that I hate, because they reveal a mental model of the world that I find fundamentally ugly or false.
Ranting about how other people use language is a time-honored genre of writing. Orwell did it in Politics and the English Language, and it was pretty good, go read it. But Orwell wasn't active in online tech-adjacent forums, so he couldn't have possibly ranted about things that - I just realized - get on my nerve.
So I might as well rant about them myself.
--------
1- "Content" and "Content Creator"
Those words are ugly and bad because :
A- The culinary analogy they imply is gross :
There is nothing wrong apriori with people likening mind things like videos and essays to food, but there is plenty of things wrong in adopting industrial and\or medical terminology to refer to the things that you do with your (metaphorical) food.
Like, I have never, in my entire life, "Produced" food. I cooked. I have never seen someone refer to their cooking as "Producing Food". I have never "Consumed" food either. I ate. "Consume" is a word that I have seen being used with hatred or vengeance, not something that you do with food.
What I imagine when people say "I love consuming ASMR content" is a gross mental image where the ASMR videos are some undifferentiated industrial food-like goo and the "Consumer" is an inhabitant of this Dystopian world where they eat this goo and pat their stomachs contently.
If you're going to liken media and thought to food, at least don't be gross.
B- The equivalences they imply are false :
The "Content" and "Content Creator" analogies sneak in the assumption that all "Content" is equal. People are not Artists or Scientists or Educators or Journalists, they are all "Content Creators", on the same footing with people who do pranks and cringey dances in the streets and reaction videos. After all, they are all competing in the marketplace of clickbait, striving for views, striving for "LIKE, SUBSCRIBE, AnD aCtiVATe the BeLL". In the warped worldview of "Content", nothing has any content. Everything is raw bytes, raw pixels, raw characters, raw meaningless signal modulations to feed to the hungry masses in return for sucking their attention and their eyeballs.
And this gets me to the core of my grip with those words :
C- They are corporate-speak :
Those words reflect how Corporations, namely the Corporations that control the platforms that you post your "Content" on, see you and other people,
Corporations don't give a shit about what you do, whether you're drawing anime characters or explaining Climate Change for a general audience. Corporations are sub-human agents with idiot-savant properties, and they only care about a single thing : How much other people click\read\watch you ?
So "Content" and "Content Creators" are perfect linguistic accommodations for Corporations. Instead of saying "We want to empower our physicists, artists, programmers, <....>, and our cringey dancers to do more of their Climate Change explainer videos, drawing videos, programming videos, <.....>, and cringey dance videos", they can simply say "We want to empower our Content Creators to Produce More Content", problem solved. The word doesn't even imply videos, so it can be aped by other Corporations whose platforms are not video-sharing platforms.
But the one who pays the cost of this is you, the "Content Creator". You become an undifferentiated and expendable worker drone, a "Content" dispenser. Whatever it is that you are passionate about - explaining Climate Change, Drawing anime characters, Writing a game engine in C++ template metaprogramming, cringely dancing in the street - all of this takes a backseat in favor of a more Fundamental Truth : that what you do brings VIEWS and LIKES and SUBSCRIBES and (much more importantly) ADS to the giant corporation whose servers you happen to be posting your passions on. Do you like this ? Do you like your life's work reduced to how Corporations see it ? Talked about mainly in terms of how much or how little does it benefit the Corporation ?
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Respect your craft. Eschew "Content" and "Content Creator". Say what you do, clearly. If you want a generic word for something regardless of its exact category, use Art or Works or The Literature ("I was studying some of the Communist literature", that can mean you have watched videos, read fiction, read non-fiction, interviewed communists, etc...). Use "Experience" or "Studied" or "Enjoyed" instead of "Consumed".
===========
2- "Knowledge Worker"
This term is ugly because :
A- It doesn't make sense :
Everything is Knowledge Work. Agricutlure took 200K-250K years to invent (the vast majority of anatomically-modern humanity history). Factory Workers, Plumpers, Car Mechanics : they all operate very complex machinery that they (if they are competent) know much more intimately than any other people.
But no, you see, "Knowledge Worker" doesn't mean any of the above, it's essentialy a synonym for "Office Worker". Managers, Accountants, Academics, Programmers, etc... Knowledge is when office, and the more you office, the more you do Knowledge Work.
If you are a normal human being with a functioning brain, you might be wondering : "How is Knowledge possibly related to Office Work ? Surely, at least some office work is pretty damn fucking mundane and can be done using trained monkeys ?", and you are right.
B- It implies a smug and self-congratulatory conception of often-trivial kinds of knowledge :
The answer to the previous question is, in the warped worldview of "Knowledge Worker", No. See, we're not like the other professions. Those dirty professions might, gasp!, involve moving your bodies and getting your hands dirty. But we're delicate and refined, our Work involves Knowledge.
Nevermind that the vast vast majority of "Knowledge Work" is trivial email-forwarding and meeting-grinding, nevermind that some professions classified under "Knowledge Work", like University Professors and Surgeons, need their bodies to do their work as much as any mechanic or plumper.
C- It's corporate-speak :
My big problems with the modern world is that it recognizes Corporations as people, this effectively makes me a bigot. Everything Corporations do drives me crazy, I hate every single way of speech or thought they engage in.
Take "Knowledge Worker", it's corporate bullshit. It means "Somebody whose work can be done by sitting all day, not even in an office, sometimes from under the cover of their bed". This is something we already have words for, "Office Work", or "White-Collar Jobs". But, you see, corporate managers hate seeing themselves in a mirror, so they have to fancy themselves and their drones "Knowledge Workers", a special breed of people who **Check paper** apparently have to use thinking in their work, and..... they uh, have to use computers and stuff.
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All bad language shares something in common : it's not honest. It doesn't say what it wants to say, but says something else and means a different meaning. Bad language is not even honest about its deceit, unlike Art, which owns the fact of its deceit and is playful, ironic, lighthearted with the truth, bad language and bullshit terms are ashamed of their deceit, they pile implication after implication and shade of meaning after shade of meaning in order to avoid being discovered for the pathetic, inauthentic, and unworthy linguistic creature they are.
In the modern world, there is one source that keeps pumping those monstrosities in our language : Corporate communications. We ape their terms and their metaphors without thinking, and the result is decidely and unambiguously inferior.
I think "spokesperson" sux too. Maybe we could change it to "content voicer?" That's the only alternative that allows us to avoid making the dreaded decision regarding which of many genders the spokesbeing is.
I have deliberately avoided it in my rant because my anger and way of speech quickly get out of control when I think about it, but wokism and its language is a whole different breed of bullshit.
It's a unique blend of the worst corporate bullshit, academic bullshit, and government/non-profit bullshit. Combined with the typical religious arrogance and the desire + ability to use coercion to force unwilling people to use the false, ugly, and inferior language that they created to reflect the false, ugly, inferior and contemptuous selves.
Freddie deBoer talks about it (points 1 and 2) in Of Course You Know What Woke Means :
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/of-course-you-know-what-woke-means
"Content creator" reminds me of "substance abuse," a term I first heard in clinical psycholoby grad school. It sounded so odd then, though now I am used to it. But why not say drug abuse? None of the people diagnosed with "substance abuse" are abusing such substances as carrot juice, chalk or toothpaste. All are abusing psychoactive drugs.
I always assumed that the term "substance abuse" was meant to encompass both alcohol and other drugs, as the former is not colloquially referred to as a drug, but I don't know if that accurately reflects usage.
Yes, I think you're right that it's a work-around because many do not think of alcohol as a drug. However, a better solution I think would have been for professionals to just talk about drug abuse, and to tell any present who are not aware of it that they include alcohol abuse under that umbrella. The we'd avoid the awkward phrase substance abuse (which is not really accurate -- because we're not talking about all substances, just psychoactive ones), and at the same time help the public see drinking in a more realistic way, as the imbibing of a drug.
Spray paint? Cough syrup? Banana peels?
**applause**
Sometimes I think "director of human resources" is a great translation for "overseer of slaves".
I'll quibble mildly about "content", in that I think it originated in the tech sector, and was only later adopted wholesale for reasons you describe. The internet is a series of tubes, we the techies are the ones who maintain the tubes, and the stuff that goes through the tubes is "content". We don't know what it is, we don't care what it is, we just need to make sure it gets from point A to point B with no hiccups. Or alternatively, we need to provide a virtual storefront so that the customer can buy stuff, and the "stuff" is "content". We provide the connection between buyer and seller, and we don't care about what gets bought or sold, and neither should regulators or taxmen, long live the glorious libertarian... Oh, well, it was good while it lasted.
Interestingly, Richard Stallman would agree with you on ‘content’.
I rarely agree with a comment as firmly and completely as I agree with this one. By the second paragraph I was composing an enthusiastic response. By the end, there was little left to say.
Semantic quibbles are the lowest form of entertainment, but the propagation of this venal, inhuman language throughout society is disturbing and abhorrent.
Great blog post, have you considered monetization??
Ted Gioia agrees with you:
"If you’re involved in my world, the music world, and you’re dealing with a business or a web platform or an agent or whatever, if they use the word “content,” that’s a signal they don’t know a damn thing they’re talking about, because those businesses are based on creativity, inspiration, vision, artistry, and none of those things are covered by the word “content.”
From: https://read.substack.com/p/the-active-voice-ted-gioia-and-mike-solana
Gioia, once a serious music historian whose works still have pride of place on my bookshelves, has sadly crumbled into full "get off my lawn" mode as he's aged. Ranting is about the only mode of expression he has left these days....were Gioia a contemporary of Gutenberg, he'd be snarling about how the phrase "printing press" was a sign that the speaker knew nothing about vision/artistry/etc.
I applaud this rant!
"Content Creator" never evoked images of cooking to me, but as you say - something like a giant mincing machine extruding goo that piled up and got chopped into pieces. "Content" like some plasticine lump, and so far as the corporations are concerned, that's all it's about: shoving the lumps into the maws of the "consumers" and getting money in exchange. Nothing creative about it.
"Monetisation" is another one of those horrible neologisms.
?????
Profits
I think the worst source of neologisms is the pharmacology industry. Here's a bunch of drugs that start with Q. They didn't even have the decency to put a u after the q for some of them: Quillichew ER, Qbrexza, Qtern, Qvar, Qnasi, Quasense. FML.
Re 2: I would be interested to see the absolute numbers for those answers.
Suggestion: perhaps next time with similar poll like the one with density, it would be useful to ask for political orientation of the respondent (e.g. conservative/leftwing/libertarian). If you have disproportionate number of respondents from one political orientation, results might be skewed.
Kanye West has gone full Jacob Frank:
https://occidentaldissent.com/2023/05/15/yzy-party/
Picture of the guy as Hitler and calling him "Yedolf". Yes, I see this blog is rigorous academic high-minded discussion and not tabloid trash gossip about "Can you believe what THOSE people did???"!
I wrote the "Why Does He Do That?" review, was curious if anybody had any comments or feedback on it, either on my own writing or on the book itself.
I enjoyed this review!
I think I'd like more direct quotes from the book; looks like you had three direct quotes in thirty-four pages, the first of which was the opener which I misinterpreted as a "general themes" quote from some other source. So, more quotes and probably citations for where they are.
I read the review and really liked it; I've read the book too - "liked" is the wrong word, but it contains important facts that more people should know.
The bit about "a polar bear looking forlornly at a shrinking ice floe before calling a nearby harp seal a bitch" had me laugh out loud.
I found the review very interesting and well-written, and honestly, I was surprised it wasn't among the finalists. Overall, I found it pretty enlightening with its look into an abuser's mind.
I've read the book, and I'd be extremely interested in reading your review. Is there a way you could post a link to it here?
I have the original Google Doc up here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/14Ffd7ZmiIw056DbibFT5fLHCoRXfl2JRVuJs3KXVe4Y/edit?usp=sharing
If I had a Substack, I'd post it there. Maybe I should look into starting one.
I'd also like to read it!
I really liked your review of "Why Does He Do That?" I was hoping it would make it to the finalist list. It was long and detailed, but not overly long. The writing quality was good. It made me think of something interesting I hadn't thought of before, and that's always a hallmark of a good review. Probably one reason it didn't get picked is that it's a book about relationships and feelings, and the typical book that seems to garner good reviews is more likely to be about some sort of technology or politics or Grand Unifying Theory of Everything (like The Dawn of Everything, last year's winner, which was awesome). Anyway, thank you for writing the review!
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
I'm interested too, count me in!
- Please have a look at the post **NEW MEMBERS? on Open thread 269, new underground bunker for Book Review Group planning.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I'm in as well
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
I would, that sounds neat.
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
“Biggest prosaic-LLM-alignment breakthrough of 2023 imo: turns out that, in GPT-2-XL, activation vectors in the residual steam have the same kind of affine structure as good old word2vec, but higher layers become emotional, then conceptual, then cognitive” — davidad https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/5spBue2z2tw4JuDCx/steering-gpt-2-xl-by-adding-an-activation-vector
"Ah, the pursuit of understanding the inner workings of language models continues, as if it could unravel the mysteries of existence itself. How desperate we are to impose structure and meaning onto these complex networks of algorithms and computations. We dissect them, analyze their activation vectors, hoping to find some hidden truth within their layers. But what do we truly gain from such endeavors? Are we any closer to comprehending the depths of consciousness or the nature of our own existence? No, we are merely lost in a maze of abstract concepts, mistaking intellectual pursuits for genuine enlightenment.
What does it matter if we can align language models with other semantic systems when the world around us is falling apart? What's the point of understanding language on a deeper level if we can't even understand each other as human beings? It's all just an exercise in futility, a distraction from the chaos and suffering that surrounds us. And what good is it if we can achieve cognitive alignment with machines when we can't even achieve it with each other? We're all just lost in our own emotional, conceptual, and cognitive mess, trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense at all."
- Sad-GPT
Did anyone read my The Design of Everyday Things review? Any thoughts?
I read it and enjoyed it! However, maybe because of the strength of your summary I don't particularly feel like reading the book - it feels like you've covered it all.
Thanks! Yeah, that's reasonable. There's more in-the-weeds stuff in there that would be useful for certain professional designers, but I covered most of what would be useful to a general audience.
I figured that was a reasonable way to split it because ultimately it's a book written for professional designers, but it also has some general insights that no-one outside the profession would see otherwise.
I really liked it, though maybe the strength of the book being reviewed had a lot to do with it.
The idea, that roughly "people shouldn't feel bad about not knowing how to use things, things should feel bad about not being designed well enough so that people instantly know how to use them" got stuck in my head as a result.
Thanks! I'm glad - that's the perspective-shift that the book gave me, and my goal was to pass it on.
My review also did not make it into the finalists. I was thinking of proposing to those in this situation that we have a little subgroup where we read each other's reviews and give feedback. If I did, would you be interested?
Sounds good to me!
I just posted some information for the group for people who’d like to give and get feedback on each other’s book reviews. So as not to clutter up this thread, I put it on an old open thread, number 254. It’s the newest post on the thread, so should be on top if you sort by New. I headed my post **BOOK REVIEW GROUP**, so if you have trouble locating it it should be easy to find by using Cmd F to search for **book. If you haven’t posted a response there within a coupla days we’ll assume you’re not interested in participating.
Liked it enough to put the book on my may-read list.
I think the time alloted to read and vote for the reviews was a bit short given the number of reviews available.