1264 Comments

Yeah - the way to get into a school like that is to win national or preferably international competitions. Or best of all - publish truly novel research in math or computer science. If he won the International Math Olympiad or something, his chances would be excellent.

Expand full comment

So I did a bit of digging on Reddit to get more information about what may have happened to Stanley Zhong, the California high school student who was rejected from a bunch of top colleges despite really excellent grades and test scores. I found this bit, about what students aiming for top colleges are expected to do these days. And you know, at this point maybe it's not worth it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/collegeresults/comments/175kanu/1590_sat_397442_gpa_rejected_by_16_colleges_how/

> He went to Gunn, and he didn't have enough social impact. To get into a good school for cs from that demographic, you need to have a crazy amount of social impact. Being really good at olympiads and hackathons won't be the thing that gets you into top colleges. This is different if you get to the level of camping for an olympiad though. That being said, having USACO platinum or USAJMO in your awards section isn't enough to get into Berkeley or MIT.

> Doing things that look like they have social impact, like running nonprofits and hackathons, often require substantially less effort but have a much higher yield for college admissions.

> The person from my bay area high school who managed to sweep every UC as a cs major (pretty much impossible for this demographic in 2023) had a non-profit where he fudged numbers and applied for a shit ton of social impact awards. The people that do bs like this look more impressive to college admissions officers. The most appealing applicants are the ones that look like they're going to change the world.

> The people I know that went to Stanford, Berkeley EECS, MIT, etc. were literally all USACO silver except for one guy who was gold. This demographic is a shit-show. Being one of the smartest people at your high school won't get you into one of these schools. You have to show social impact through your ec's in the scale of hundreds to tens of thousands. Either that or feign a really niche interest to get into private schools through doing stuff like linguistics research or a classics reading club.

> This might sound cynical, but as a college student, being genuine will fuck you over if you're in this demographic. If you're a junior, organize a hackathon to get girls into coding, start a non-profit org to combine cs with art, apply for sponsors to make a scioly competition about climate change, organize a protest, etc. All of these are good things, but their scope is often exaggerated. After you finish implementation, email 50 news channels and apply to social impact awards. A lot of these things aren't as hard to do as they seem. They just require a small team and 2-3 weeks of grinding. As a college student, this is literally the formula every bay area kid who's hyper-successful on college apps follows. This is how you beat the rat-race. Do things that have a small positive impact but seem like they have a much larger scope than they do. AO's eat this shit up.

Expand full comment

For perspective, only about 2,000 people a year score 1590 or better on the SAT. About 400 prospective college students merit USACO platinum per year. The freshman class at Berkeley is about 8,000 people. If SZ isn't being basically auto-admitted everywhere with scores like that (and corresponding GPA and other academics), then these schools aren't admitting on academic merit, and they aren't admitting on academic merit with a bit of fudging to get a "well-rounded" student body.

UT Austin, however, is a fine school. If Texas wants you, and California et al don't, you should probably take the hint. Or the Google job, if your Dad can swing the interview.

Expand full comment

The part of this story that is shocking to me is not that he was rejected from the fancy private universities (I've internalized that there is a fair amount of randomness in those, plus discrimination against people with his demographics), but that he was also rejected from all the UC schools. It really feels like a kid graduating from a CA high school with a near perfect academic record `ought' to be getting auto-admitted to the UC.

Cal Poly I assume was his safety school, and the rejection was because they assumed he would get something better and wouldn't come.

Your final paragraph seems on point.

Expand full comment

I had thought that being in the top 10% of a California high school class was supposed to guarantee auto-admission in the UC system; a quick search suggests that it's 9%, and the fine print is that they only guarantee that they'll find you a place *somewhere* in the UC system.

https://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/admission-requirements/freshman-requirements/california-residents/

Possibly the unwritten rule is that if you're the Wrong Sort of smartypants academic overachiever, they offer you a slot at UC Merced and hope you take the hint. And he should also have been guaranteed a slot in the CSU system, but they don't let the Wrong Sorts into Cal Poly, that's what CSU Bakersfield is for.

Expand full comment

It's a frustrating case because there's a lot we don't know. As I see it, the credible hypotheses are:

- the bar really is incredibly high in top colleges

- the bar is incredibly high in top colleges in a very sought-after major

- there's something negative we haven't been told about SZ, like serious disciplinary problems

- SZ somehow mishandled the application process, and looked much worse than he is

- SZ is being discriminated against, because of his race

- SZ is being discriminated against, because he is from a wealthy town

- this is just a pure fluke; SZ just got unlucky

- this is a case of yield management systems run amok, with most of the schools figuring he would be accepted to some posher place, and saying yes to him would lower their yield scores for nothing

There's just so much we don't know, and that lack of information feeds a tornado of speculation.

Expand full comment

I mean - you're competing against people like William Kamkwamba of Malawi, who built a windmill from recycled junk in an impoverished African village. And Malala Youzafsai of Afghanistan, who got SHOT IN THE HEAD for her activist beliefs and even more miraculously SURVIVED AND RETURNED TO ACTIVISM. You're pack fodder unless you are:

1) winning national or international competitions for high school students

2) publishing original research, preferably in top journals

3) overcoming insane levels of adversity - think not just 'got cancer, recovered from it' but 'homeless, raised hundreds of thousands for their own chemo and from the hospital bed proceeded to earn near-perfect grades and test scores'.

Expand full comment

Like a lot of college admission stuff, this suffers from being anecdote instead of data and risks feeding into a preferred explanation. I think the reason that most people fall for this is because

the narrative on college admissions still perpetuates the myth that decisions are mostly intentional vs random.

Let's assume SZ had a much higher than random chance of getting into each of those schools. For illustration, I'm going to assume 30% chance of getting admitted and that all admission decisions are independent. Applying to 18 schools, there's about 6% chance of getting 2 or fewer acceptances. With 3-4mm high school seniors each year in the US and, maybe 10-100k applying to top schools (to say nothing of the applicants from outside the US), it isn't at all surprising that there may be many students in a position similar to SZ or even worse.

Even if we bump the probability of admission to 50% for each school and 40k similarly situated applicants, there would still be about 26 SZs per year.

Expand full comment

I'm going on record predicting a Harris win in November. I hope I'm wrong.

I'm basing this on hearing that Trump is saying there will be no 2nd debate, that Harris calling for one is like a losing prize-fighter demanding a rematch. This is such a poor reading of the political situation I think it is indicative of how the rest of the campaign will go.

Looking objectively, the debate had no clear winner. So Trump is delusional in thinking he clearly won. Trump backers will back Trump even if he has some awful gaffe, so Trump's objective ought to be winning over independent voters. Another debate is one way to do this, and I know of no better way, taking the national stage in a format he is somewhat good at.

Caveat: if another debate DOES happen, this prediction is void. I may make a new prediction after the debate in that case.

Expand full comment

Trump lost the debate hard, which is why he was complaining about moderator bias the days after because he couldn't answer the super hard questions they asked him like "Will you support Ukraine?" or "Will you veto a federal abortion ban?"

You also say further down "Harris seldom responded to the question at hand, seeming to speak only statements prepared ahead of time" - which is a weird criticism to make when Trump said he had "concepts of a plan" with respect to healthcare and that it wasn't his responsibility to have one prepared because he's not currently President, or when he spent most of his time for a question ranting about his crowd sizes in response to provocation from Kamala. There was not a single question Kamala didn't answer, and she at least passed the sniff test for understanding how government works and what her responsibility to Americans is as a Presidential candidate.

Trump's greatest achievement was lying about Haitians eating cats and dogs in Springfield, which was pretty funny, but totally unbecoming of anybody running for President to spend his time repeating stupid lies off social media rather than coming up with a healthcare or foreign policy or abortion plan. It seems like he not only avoided the Republican debates but also refused to even watch them to at least get a feel of what policy members his own party members wanted, let alone the American public.

Expand full comment

Trump answered the question. He doesn't yet have a complete plan, to be picked apart because of its incompleteness, so gave no details. What was Harris's plan to compare? "Strengthen the Affordable Care Act". What will be added? Where is it weak? That is no less vague than Trump.

I still look at it and see no clear objective winner. You clearly have a bias towards Harris. I am done responding to subjective arguments.

Debate transcript: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/harris-trump-presidential-debate-transcript/story?id=113560542

Expand full comment

I think Trump is likely to win, but I hope I'm wrong.

But as for the debate thing, Trump is clearly scared of debating Harris. It won't end well for him and he knows it.

Expand full comment

Judging from Harris's performance, it would be easy to beat her in another debate with some preparation. I don't think Trump thinks it necessary to prepare for a debate. But the preparations would be easy: prepare some questions yourself for Harris, so that ignoring them would make her look bad. If, as I saw, she only delivered prepared statements, she wouldn't be able to competently address them.

You didn't explain why you think Trump is likely to win, so I conclude this is just a sarcastic mirror of my original statement. But my statement is based on Trump running a campaign, not on his merits as president. Harris would be another Biden presidency, and the Trump presidency was better than the Biden one.

Expand full comment

I wasn't being sarcastic at all. I think Trump is likely to win because Nate Silver is giving him a 61% chance to win. The attempted assassination yesterday will probably help him a bit as well.

Expand full comment

Nate Silver's latest projection gives Harris a 38.7% probability of winning, against Trump's 61.0%. The electoral college really hurts the Democrats in a race this close. There's about a 20% chance Harris will win the popular vote but lose the election.

Expand full comment

You should get your vision checked if your objective glance tells you there's no clear winner. One person was afraid to make eye contact with the other one, one person was easily goaded, one person ranted about completely false bullshit that consists of tropes that have been discredited for years. It wasn't Harris.

(Oh, and one person is afraid to do a second debate. That's not "no clear winner" territory.)

Expand full comment

My OBJECTIVE vision doesn't make definitive conclusions on such things. From a different perspective, Harris was weaker by constantly looking toward Trump, even mentioning him a lot by name, so eye contact she was pushing at him that was not received, as he was mostly looking at the camera, does not go well in Harris's favor. A perspective on Trump's being "goaded" is answering some things Harris said, which is, after all, the purpose of a debate. On the other hand, Harris seldom responded to the question at hand, seeming to speak only statements prepared ahead of time (NOT from being fed the questions before the debate).

I addressed Trump's willingness to debate a second time in my original post, and I know of no sane perspective to consider that it is because of fear.

It looks to me like you're viewing the debate through a pro-Harris perspective, which is your right. But it certainly isn't objective.

Expand full comment

Emphasizing OBJECTIVE doesn't make it so. You're coming at it with an anti-Harris perspective, just like you were before the debate when you made baseless claims that she'd drop out of it because she was the weaker candidate. Now that she's no longer done so, you've found a new framing of events that fits your worldview even though it's still divorced from reality.

Expand full comment

This is not correct. The things you are pointing to saying Harris won are not definitive, but subject to interpretation. It is YOUR viewpoint trying to make Harris a clear winner.

If I were to take a subjective viewpoint, I could point out how few questions Harris answered, pointing to only practiced debate preparation. After all, what else did she need to do in the month proceeding? It's not like she had any real duties as vice president that people were depending on. So she practiced answers to questions chosen to help her campaign, and delivered them regardless of the questions asked, with few exceptions. She clearly failed in the "debate" aspect, which ought to be worrisome for someone who needs to make quick, good decisions.

And Trump had a strong stage presence, from making her come to him for shaking hands, to ignoring her in favor of the audience when speaking. He avoided traps in the questions attempting to pin him an unfavorable position. And he certainly delivered the most memorable lines.

So no, I think there was NO CLEAR WINNER, and I have yet to see anything that indicates otherwise. Go ahead and vote for Harris. But when you attack my stated objectivity, please do so with something more than your own opinion.

Expand full comment

I am not attacking your objectivity because you have none to attack. You're a Trump fanatic through and through and you ought to be honest if not to us than to yourself by admitting as much.

Expand full comment

> Harris was weaker by constantly looking toward Trump, even mentioning him a lot by name, so eye contact she was pushing at him that was not received, as he was mostly looking at the camera, does not go well in Harris's favor.

We seem to have very different interpretations of body language. Looking at your opponent signals confidence, while avoiding eye contact signals fear. Although ignoring someone can signal dominance, it only works if you don't stare doggedly past them when they actively challenge you with their eye contact.

Expand full comment

Body language does depend on the situation. Trump never forgot that the audience was the camera, no matter who was in the room. Did he look at even the moderators? It wasn't clear.

In any case, since it is subject to interpretation, I'm ignoring my take on body language. I'm rather surprised that what seems to be the most controversial part of my post is my claim to objective analysis, and that no one "won" the debate clearly.

Expand full comment

ACXLW Meetup 74: Design for Developing Countries & Ethics of Extinction

Hello Folks! We are excited to announce the 74th Orange County ACX/LW meetup happening this Saturday and most Saturdays after that.

Host: Michael Michalchik

Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com (For questions or requests)

Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660

Phone: (949) 375-2045

Date: Saturday, September 14, 2024

Time: 2:00 PM

Conversation Starters:

1. Why Western Designs Fail

Text Transcript: Google Document Link

Video Title: Why Western Designs Fail

Video: YouTube Link

Summary: This video explores why innovative, highly praised designs for developing countries often fail. The key problem lies in cultural misunderstandings: designers focus on the functionality of a product without understanding the deeper cultural and social contexts in which the products will be used. For instance, the Neon Nurture incubator, made from car parts to be low-cost and easily repaired, never gained acceptance because it lacked the prestige and appearance that medical officials in developing nations value. Other examples like the PlayPump (a merry-go-round that pumps water) illustrate how Western solutions often mismatch the actual needs of the communities they intend to help.

Questions for discussion:

Why do you think Western designers frequently overlook cultural factors when developing products for other parts of the world? How can this be addressed?

What role should local communities play in designing products intended to meet their needs? Could co-design processes become the new standard?

In cases like the PlayPump or mosquito nets being used for fishing, how should designers react when their products are repurposed by local users in unexpected ways?

2. Driving the Screw Worm to Extinction: The Ethics of Annihilation

Text Transcripts:

Killing Every Screwworm Transcript

14 Million Worms Transcript

Video Titles:

Killing Every Screwworm Would Be the Best Thing Humanity Ever Did | Kevin Esvelt

Why the US Drops 14.7 Million Worms on Panama Every Week

Videos:

Killing Every Screwworm Video

14 Million Worms Video

Summary:

The first video by Kevin Esvelt argues for using CRISPR gene drive technology to eradicate the New World screwworm, a parasitic fly whose larvae feed on the flesh of mammals and birds, causing immense suffering. Esvelt contends that wiping out the screwworm would have a far greater impact on animal welfare than ending factory farming. The second video outlines the decades-long U.S.-Panama collaboration to keep screwworms out of North America by dropping millions of sterile flies in Panama each week. While this method works as a border defense, it is not sufficient to eradicate the screwworm from South America, where the problem persists.

Questions for discussion:

What ethical principles should guide decisions to drive a species to extinction, even if it causes widespread harm? Does the end justify the means?

Could gene drive technology be misused in other contexts, and what safeguards should be put in place to prevent this? What might be the long-term risks of eliminating species?

If the eradication of harmful species like the screwworm is possible, should we consider other "pest" species next? Where should we draw the line in deciding which species to eliminate?

Walk & Talk:

After the meeting, we will take an hour-long walk and talk session. There are two mini-malls nearby with hot takeout options—look for Gelson's or Pavilions in the 92660 area.

Share a Surprise:

Bring something unexpected to share that has changed your perspective on life or the universe.

Future Direction Ideas:

Please contribute your thoughts on future topics, meeting types, activities, or other ideas for the group’s future direction.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

Expand full comment

If you are a League of Legends gamer, this is a 7 question survey about your analytics tool usage. It shows how other players answered at the end and you can sign up for the waitlist for an analytics tool that might or might not become commercial later.

@Mods: Let me know if this is not suitable and I'm going to delete it.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfUlYq2nXSyhjQuki61cXPqcBUShYqasEw3W7NkCkj3zidK0w/viewform

Expand full comment

Yudkowsky on Twitter:

- All of these LLM Whisperers that I see on Twitter, appear to also be insane.

- Why?"

Unless irs random coincidence, there is an interesting phenomenon to be explained here.

As Yudkowsky mentions, there is well-known correlation of computer security experts with high-functioning autism and/or being transgender, Seeing that corelation, again, would not be a surprise. (There are obvious mechanisms for why high functioning autism would give you an advantagde at programming, and the autism-transgender correlation has been noted elsewhere, e.g. by gender clinics) But with the LLM hackers, we're seeing a personality type that is distinctly different from the high functioning autism that we know and love. So we wonder ... why?

(Janus may be a little offended we have him down as this ... other thing,, but its a serious question.)

If I were to guess what this other thing might be ... what the hell? Is "high functioning schizophrenia" even a thing? The DSM gives us schizotypal, etc.

Expand full comment

I've experienced psychotic breaks and have met many others in psych wards who have also had psychotic episodes or have full on schizophrenia. One of the early symptoms I've seen with a lot of these people, and myself, is divinatory magical thinking. This kicks in really early while you're still high functioning. Interacting with LLMs is very similar to divination and I would not be surprised at all if schizophrenics are drawn to the activity.

Expand full comment

Context? I suppose we all know what an LLM is at this point, but even with a quick Google I can't find what on Earth "LLM whispering" would be beyond the well established prompt engineering. And whatever Janus you're talking about, it's probably not the 1st result I get, which is an AI-assisted coding project on GitHub.

Expand full comment

One possible theory for Janus, in particular, is that he is deliberately poisoning AI training sets, and the reason he talks the way he does is for the benefit of LLMs that are trained on Twitter, and not for us mere humans.

Expand full comment

My guess is that RLHF shapes LLM outputs primarily for in-distribution responses - because that is where inputs come from mostly and where the people rating the response have a clue how to interpret it. But crazy people and thus "crazy" questions and responses are out-of-distribution and the model doesn't know whether the response is good or bad! Thus if you get it into such parts of the distribution, chances are that it will reply as desired.

With a deeper understanding, the model would be able to generalize to these cases, but models apparently aren't there yet. I guess they eventually will.

For now, this suggests other avenues of jail-breaking. For example, I also get LLMs often to answer beyond the guardrails, but not with crazyness, but what you could call intellectual high-status superiority. Raters presumably also haven't seen much such input and if, they are likely not rating it as bad (science=good, elite=good, right?).

Expand full comment

Why do you assume the two groups are mutually exclusive? Autism is comorbid to schizophrenia and a whole bunch of other mental illnesses. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditions_comorbid_to_autism

Expand full comment

The word of the day is OOLOGIST, someone who studies or collects bird eggs.

I'm trying to find a way to stick more Os on the beginning of that, but can't think of any.

Expand full comment

Original Online Orthodox Oologist.

Expand full comment

There is a guy who has ham radio callsign M0OOO (the joke works even better in Morse code)

Expand full comment

In case there’s anyone not familiar with the racehorse Potoooooooo: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potoooooooo

Expand full comment

I'm deeply skeptical that people who fit the mold of rationalist to a T will consistently identify themselves as such. Rationalism is bound to attract an overabundance of people who shy away from being labeled as an "ist" whenever possible.

You've all surely met people who vote Republican (or Democrat) without fail but insist they are independents, not Republicans. That's a good analogy for I think what's happening in the ACX polls where readers get asked about their rationalist status. (If I'm misremembering these polls and mischaracterizing them, please disregard this comment entirely. Oops)

I'm not accusing anyone of being dishonest or sneaky. If your inner voice says "I'm not a rationalist," go ahead and speak your truth. I'm more calling onto question the limits of polling. Can we stop throwing around questionable ACX poll results and saying "There are barely any rationalists here!"

Expand full comment

Anecdata: I don't see a lot of Less Wrong rationalists posting on these threads. Instead, I see a lot of classical rationalists (in the tradition of Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza) who think they can determine Truth through reason alone. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Less Wrong rationalists seem to embrace their own brand of Bayesian Empiricism. But I don't see much empirical thinking in the discussions on these threads. In fact, I'm not sure why Scott gave the Less Wrong crowd the moniker "rationalist" because it's confusing from a philosophical standpoint. Or did EY or somebody else mislabel the Less Wrong crowd?

Full disclosure: I am not a rationalist of either the Less Wrong type or the classical rationalist type. I am a mystic. But mystics have used rationalism and empiricism (even though didn't use these terms) as tools to reach their experiential a-rational goals at least since the Axial Age.

Expand full comment

I see Bayesian arguments, and references to Bayesianism, approximately 4700 times more here than on any other forum I've seen. Of course, I have not yet visited Less Wrong, because my system might not be able to handle a shot of pure rationalism. I might drop dead.

(Yes, it's annoying there are two separate rationalisms. It sucks, it's confusing, but here we are)

Expand full comment

the separation of different type of rationalism is in people's minds. It's not a feature of the processes that lead to good decisions. I think a big part of the grouping is about aesthetics and alliances and not about Bayesianism or other empirical or systematical ways of decisionmaking.

Expand full comment

ACX is rationalist-leaning (whatever questionable poll results you wanna throw at me) so in the interests of “when in Rome,” I dom’t spend my time here trying to debunk rationalism. But I could write a whole book about my problems with rationalism and utilitarianism. They're not for me.

Expand full comment

We have a unique situation where there is a real-money, highly liquid prediction market for one Presidential candidate: NASDAQ ticket DJT. It's not doing too well lately:

https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/DJT

Expand full comment

Don't assume he'll go away if he loses the election.

Expand full comment

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

Expand full comment

I mean he could still be the de facto leader of the Republican Party and then run again in 2028.

Has happened before.

Expand full comment

Yes, it's plausible, although in four years he'll be in his 80's, would be hard to avoid the inevitable comparisons to Biden. But how this would impact the stock is an interesting question. I tend to think that if Trump wins in November it may actually be bad for DJT stock because he won't.... need it anymore. He'd get his official Potus Xitter handle back. But who knows.

All of this is unprecedented.

Expand full comment

DJT is a pure memestock. There's no rational basis supporting its valuation. Nobody buys it because they think its revenue numbers look good.

It depends a lot on how much Trumpsters feel like throwing their money at him at the moment, as well as on how much supply of stock there is (a big part of the decline in price is likely due to locked-up stock coming onto the market, or getting nearer to coming to the market).

Expand full comment

Yes to all this, which is why it serves as a (less-then-perfect) barometer of Trump's electoral fortunes. But - the sensitivity of the price to future increases of supply - if we can really make this connection - speaks to the influence of more sophisticated investors as it's hard to imagine your typical Trumpster making rational decisions w.r.t. this stock...

Expand full comment

Typically one or more candidates in an election will not meet the electoral threshold (majority of votes, majority of electoral votes, etc) for assuming the office sought. In this situation we say that the candidate "lost the election".

Expand full comment

did you forget to type /sarcasm? because you're not providing any value here.

I'm curious why A.T. wrote what he wrote in response to my post, because what he wrote was banally true. I'm proposing a gauge for Trump's prospects as a candidate. I'm bloody well-aware that a candidate may loose an election. What does him "not going away" afterwards has to do with anything?

Now, maybe the point is that the value of DJT the ticket is not tied to the election outcome, or may in fact be bolstered by Trump's loss, or something else. I'm hoping A.T. will clarify his point. Your response did nothing of the sort.

Expand full comment

I agree that A.T.'s comment was not germane. However, I thought the meaning of his statement was self-evident, so assumed your response was meant imply that DJT did not previously lose an election - not sincerely but as sarcasm. Thus I thought I didn't need an additional sarcasm qualifier in replying. No offense intended.

Expand full comment

Cheers.

Expand full comment

Having just learned from Wikipedia that the stuffed corpse of the Cocaine Bear can legally officiate marriages, provided that the couple don't know that it is not, in fact, authorised to do so...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Bear_(bear)

.. presumably when they get to the "Speak now or forever hold your peace" part of the ceremony, it is one of the rare legitimate cases where you can stand up and say "Actually, that stuffed bear is not authorized to perform marriages."

(A Catholic friend of mine got married by a priest who had been excommunicated for schism for refusing to accept the Second Vatican Council. Valid marriage in the eyes of the catholic Church, I bel3ive, by the Stuffed Bear Principle)

Expand full comment

Anyone who wants to read some good old-fashioned Catholic drama, google the "belorado nuns". It's been the comic relief news for the whole summer over here in Spain.

Expand full comment

Of course, back in the Early Modern era these kind of shenanigans would get both you and your stuffed bear burned at the stake.

Expand full comment

Dostoevsky is overrated but he's a central example of a writer of Literary fiction, which is about love, suffering, hope, despair and mortality. When we talk about great writers, we are talking about not only who can render the cleverest and most poetic prose but who can make new and profound utterances on those subjects. Genre fiction doesn't cut it because it avoids immersing itself in those themes, particularly the suffering. The reason Shakespeare is still a good bet for best writer ever, despite Sam Bankman-Fried's math, is that he is at least one of the greatest writers on those themes. There may be more smarter writers today than in Shakespeare's time, but how many of them are writing about those deepest of themes? We live in lighter times and have lighter artists.

Expand full comment

>Genre fiction doesn't cut it because it avoids immersing itself in those themes, particularly the suffering.

Re:Zero

Expand full comment

We only know the *best* writers of the past. What about the average author in Shakespeare's or Dostoevsky's era? Those probably sucked. Also, saying *new* things about human situation is a bit easier when you live a few centuries earlier than your competitors.

If you like sad art, I don't read many fiction books these days, so instead I will link a movie and a music video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pev09MLly2o - Night on the Galactic Railroad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6wFZp-bo3A - Inevitability

Expand full comment

Did anybody watch the debate? I could not bring myself to do so, but I will probably watch the highlights reel tomorrow.

Expand full comment

Yeah. No one did badly enough to drop out.

I'm feeling grumpy. Trump is, weirdly enough, a poster child for a conservative anti-immigration argument, in terms of his approach to political debates. He personally demonstrates how even a single person who brazenly flouts civilized standards of behavior, can cause a chain reaction that inspires enough others to ignore the standards, that we then lose all the nice things that those standards supported. There's no longer even the veneer of hypocrisy, which vice has the virtue of acknowledging the existence of virtue.

I can easily imagine Harris performing well as a prosecutor. And I think what she said at the debate probably has as much to do with her actual agenda as her suppression of DNA evidence while Attorney General had to do with her calls for admission of the same DNA evidence when she became a politician. She's a professional. Since this is ACX ... yadda yadda orthogonality thesis?

Expand full comment

It'd been on my calendar to not watch for weeks. Definitely the must-not-watch event of the season. And in the end I enjoyed not watching it so much I plan to not watch it again tomorrow!

Expand full comment

I could only stomach about 10 minutes of Biden's performance so just having Harris be able to competently block and parry was a huge relief. Trump seemed pretty much as expected.

I'm still not confident Harris will win, but I'm more confident than I was yesterday.

Expand full comment

In terms of the debate itself, seems like Harris came out ahead in theory. In practice, everybody is actually talking about Trump's performance, and not in a "He failed miserably way", but in the very typical "Look at this crazy thing Trump said!" way, which has been his bread and butter method of dominating the political-media landscape since he entered into politics.

Expand full comment

It looks like there was a police report from one guy saying the illegal immigrants were snatching geese from the park. Trump then turned this into them eating peoples' pets. It sounds totally unhinged, but it does draw attention to the government basically dumping illegal immigrants all over the place and causing difficulties for the locals. I still haven't decided whether this is some genius 4D-chess move on Trump's part or whether it makes him look crazy. Maybe both?

Expand full comment

It wasn't Trump, it was right-wing Twitter, and it spread because it was making people angry. Like the Vance couch thing, it's just stupid internet meme stuff.

Expand full comment

The whole thing is so funny to me. 20,000 Haitians are sent to a town of 60,000 people, meaning they now make up 1/4 of the population. And the worst thing that's happened is a few of them (allegedly) ate some geese out of a park? That doesn't look so good for the illegals are a bunch of criminals and rapists narrative.

I guess even right wingers thought this was weak, so they went with eating cats. And there was actually a lady in southern Ohio who killed and ate a cat in front of people! But she wasn't a Haitian immigrant and she had some psychotic mental problem, not a food problem.

Expand full comment

I think the cat thing comes from videos of citizens making complaints to their local government, and statements of people on the ground? Some of them are up online. So I'd say it's not the right winger twits making it up, but at best it's people in the neighborhood making it up, and at worst it's true. The local government seemed hostile to complaints about the refugees, so it wouldn't shock me if they simply failed to investigate, thus leading to no "evidence".

Expand full comment

Washington Post did an article running down the sources for it, with links:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/09/09/rumors-about-an-ohio-town-show-scale-right-wing-bubble/

The TL;DR is that it was assembled out of many unrelated parts - one person on facebook saying that their neighbor's daughter's friend (I'm not exaggerating, that's literally what they said) said they lost their cat and discovered Haitians had killed it, a photo of a black man carrying a goose (in a different city, unknown what his intent or immigration status was), and a news report of another woman (not an immigrant and in yet another city) who did in fact eat a cat. The police say they did not receive any reports of pets being stolen.

So like, I don't think you need to jump to "the government is hostile to complaints about the refugees" when "the police are not inclined to investigate a rumor from a neighbor's daughter's friend" seems sufficient.

Expand full comment

No, the worst thing that happened is one of them plowed a van into a bus and killed an 11 year old boy. While driving without a valid US license.

https://www.springfieldnewssun.com/news/aiden-clark-the-11-year-old-student-killed-in-bus-crash-loved-snuggling-sports-and-family/Y6EROJUF7FHJVFEEXYVFYT5ZZU/

Expand full comment

I know, there's no way that many people can be dumped in a city that size and not cause all kinds of problems. But rightwing X, and by extension Trump, weren't talking about that. They went with the Haitians are going to eat your cat! Why didn't he say these immigrants ran into a bus, killing an eleven year old and injuring a bunch of other children? I wouldn't be surprised if this is part of the Trump playbook, say something ridiculous and then everyone ends up talking about it regardless of how true it is. But he also says ridiculous things without apparently thinking about it all the time.

Expand full comment

> "Look at this crazy thing Trump said!"

Seriously, though, how is the man getting away with saying things like "people are eating cats" without being forced to follow Biden's example? We were never this shy about declaring his opposite number too senile to govern.

Expand full comment

I heard that rumor, about some Chinese family, that was eating stray cats in the neighborhood perhaps 20 years ago. I have no idea of the validity, but it was an entertaining story, about cultural differences. Supposedly people noticed a marked drop in stray cats around, and eventually pinpointed the cause and had a talk with the family.

It IS new saying they're eating people's pets, and the debate was the first place I heard that one. Maybe the source of this was Real Raw News?

Expand full comment

Judging by what I've seen on Twitter, this is more of a "couch" thing, which only took off because the memes on the matter offend the "right people" from the perspective of those sharing them.

Expand full comment

(Although I find it quite plausible that immigrants caught and ate some wild fowl; this isn't an immigrant thing, though, but rather a rural-vs-city thing. Take half my neighbors growing up and put them in a large city and they'd definitely offend some neighbors catching and eating some of the local wildlife; ducks in particular.)

Expand full comment

There is a photo of that, apparently.

What bugs me is that it is theoretically illegal to do this, but lol at the idea of enforcing a law even if it's kind of stupid.

Expand full comment

>We were never this shy about declaring his opposite number too senile to govern.

Who is "we"? If it was Democrats, that's just not true unless the argument is that Biden suddenly became senile a half hour before the first debate.

Expand full comment

What do you mean, senile? Do you think he actually believes that? He didn't even start that rumor himself.

Expand full comment

The world is full of people who believe anything they read on the internet that seems to support their worldview. Trump is such a person

Expand full comment

Dunno what timeline you live in, but I've spent the last four years in a timeline in which Biden's obvious senility was denied for years in spite of ever-mounting evidence.

But setting -that- aside, Trump gets away with it because it keeps working. Look, you're still talking about him.

Expand full comment
Comment deleted
Sep 11
Comment deleted
Expand full comment

I'm not a Trumpist, but a conservative.

Harris was better than I was led to believe, but also about the same. As expected, it made no difference whatsoever what the first question was she was asked, as she clearly had a pre-practiced delivery, which she did reasonably well. She seemed understandably nervous through the first third of the debate. I cannot recall a single question she was asked to which she answered that question, nor did she actually state what specific things she wanted to do, but only ambiguous things like literally stuff "everyone wants". She had a distinct lack of "incoherence" and infamous cackle.

Trump was Trump as usual, though it seemed like one of his worse days. The "immigrants eating people's pets" was new to me, and, whether true or not, seemed largely irrelevant to the national stage. Often it seemed like he ought to have answered some questions plainly, such as with an emphatic "no" about any regrets for January 6th actions, but maybe he's getting some politician instincts. He wandered too much from subject to subject, too, as I thought he could have hammered harder on some points he brought up, then changed to something else. This was especially evident in his closing remarks, where he was all negative about the current administration, but never pointed out that HE would fix everything.

Bottom line: I think there was no clear winner. I expected Trump to demolish Harris, so maybe this would count as a win for her. Everyone already knows what Trump is like, and the debate probably didn't change anyone's minds about him, but I'm still pretty much in the dark about who Harris is, between lack of concrete policy statements, and prepared talking points that said little of substance.

I have heard that the Democratic party was highly pleased, and is calling for another debate now, which was in question before. If they're right, this would be a mistake, as it would be a chance for Trump to come out better, and Harris would have little to gain and much to lose. Trump's team should want another debate for these reasons, so maybe he could show that he ought to be president to make things better, rather than just showing how awful things are.

Expand full comment

Considering that the populace is full of negativity and anger, that's probably not a bad thing. I mean, have you seen how angry Hitler was in his speeches? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJ3N_2r6R-o If he is able to successfully channel the people's rage, pain, resentment, hatred... oh, what a wonderful sight it will be.

Honestly, I'm still amazed at how much sheer bullshit he can string together, non-stop, for minutes on end. A deluge of words that don't mean anything together, but individually they have symbolism, power. It's like he accidentally managed to optimize his speech to appeal to instinct.

And look at Harris, smiling like an idiot as Trump goes on his tirades. She is not taking the man seriously. And that's the root of the problem: the liberals take everything for granted. Their institutions, their careers, their lives. As if God has entitled them to everything they have. It will be their undoing.

Expand full comment

I got nerd-sniped today in a discussion of why it is that LLM's have a difficult time counting the "R"s in the word "strawberry" (most models claim there are two R's).

If you google it or whatever, you'll see lots of people claiming that the problem is tokenization -- the LLM perceives the word "strawberry" not as those 9 letters, but as (probably) two tokens, one for straw and one for berry. It is then common to go on to claim that because of tokenization, the LLM has "no idea" what letters are in the word and it just guesses or something.

The problem with this statement is that LLMs are actually decent at counting letters in words. It gets the frequency of every other letter in "strawberry" correct, and it correctly counts the R's in "arrears" and "regretful," and when I ask it the frequency of every letter in "insouciant," it is correct. This all seriously complicates the story that LLMs just can't perceive letters.

Does anyone know the correct explanation here? When I ask GPT, it suggests sort of general understanding of english language as a concept, but that seems to me unlikely to result in performance as good as LLMs can actually get.

Expand full comment

Relatedly, I recently asked ChatGPT-4 to help with a crossword puzzle. My son had been given this Beowulf-themed puzzle for homework; he could use any resource, it was 10pm and he was having trouble, I had no idea not having read Beowulf recently, so I thought why not. CG4 was useless - if I requested a 6 letter word meaning 'a treasure sought by a thane' (or whatever), where the second letter was 't', it would come back with an 8 letter word that had no 't's. I could keep asking for other answers, and it would keep apologizing and failing to provide anything remotely like a useable solution. And this was for the four different clues I tried - it could answer none of them. So I wondered - do all LLMs do terribly at crosswords?

By the way, the teacher threw out the assignment the next day because she had no key and also could not answer some of the clues. So my son came out okay anyway.

Expand full comment

Following the o1 model release I had it try solving the crossword, this time providing the length of the word and any known letters from previous answers. https://chatgpt.com/share/66e46bb5-e268-8005-83be-4664c96d9863

It performed almost perfectly. Every response it provided followed the provided restrictions and was the correct answer. It was able to solve several ("deathprice", "anger") that GPT-4 never successfully answered.

The only oddity was that sometimes it would think and not provide a response. When looking at the chain of thought it would usually have the word in there, but I re-prompted in those cases to make it output the answer.

Response times were highly variable. Some questions took 10+ seconds despite seeming straightforward, others were mostly instant.

I ran out of tokens before it could answer the final 2 questions but based on its prior performance I doubt it would have struggled with those. Very much regretting doing this experiment given that my o1 tokens apparently won't refresh for an entire week. (I did use some on unrelated tasks since getting access yesterday.)

OpenAI, should you read this: I would glaaaaaaadly pay 5x the fee ($100 a month) for a significantly higher cap on o1 usage. Or more, make an offer. Hitting the o1 cap feels the same as when GPT-4 came out and being forced to downgrade to 3. It would also be nice to know when someone is approaching the cap and how long it'll be in effect.

Expand full comment

Interestingly, I came across this today on Marginal Revolution:

"My test for new models is a set of cryptic crossword clues that aren’t online (my granny wrote them). Every model so far has been completely useless at them… but o1 gets them."

https://x.com/matthewclifford/status/1834485810113990786?t=ts7RNfmujNcrAqSmkDb0TA

Expand full comment

Granted I’ve only played with it a bit for a day in the chat interface, but not surprising. People complaining that it’s “just” the intelligence of 4 with a bolted on internal echo chamber and other tools (although it probably is more than that) or that it turns a single prompt internally into a few shot with validation are missing the point.

It feels like a significant step change in terms of the types of work it can complete at a given level of effort. I am legitimately bummed having to wait a week for the cap to reset. I expected I’d hit the cap today. I assumed it would lift after a day or two. Not a week, OpenAI. Come on you super geniuses, make this more generally available. Chop chop.

Bummed to the point that I’ll probably make a new account to get around it rather than wait, depending on how o1-mini goes for some things I’d planned to work on this weekend.

Looking through its CoT minimal outputs is interesting. It seems to be interacting with some sort of assistant persona itself when working through requests. And even referencing crossword clues about things being outside human control seemed to trigger extra consideration of safety. Pure anecdotal guessing though.

Expand full comment

Worth adding - when looking through its reasoning, it has a tendency to get stuck on previous clues, especially the one "deathprice" that took the longest to answer, leading to longer chain of thought reasoning as it worked through and discarded answers specifically related to it.

I assume that's because its context is dominated with internal CoT text related to that clue. It would have probably been more efficient from a token standpoint to have a separate chat per question. Easier via API but I'm not a money bag BigCorp who would have o1 API access yet.

Expand full comment

I tried the same exercise with GPT-4 and had generally good results by simply prompting it with the crossword clue, not including the length or other information in most of the cases. It got the majority on the first try and was able to guess correctly after I told it to try again and provided the length and / or a known letter in several cases. There were some that it never got correct. It did best when dealing with specific questions that could have only one correct answer and worse with more general ones.

You are right that it was terrible at matching explicit length restrictions though.

https://chatgpt.com/share/86b55d38-faa6-424f-9372-0ac4562048ed

(Although this has the standard disclaimer about possible personalized data at the top, I didn't tweak it behind the scenes and none of my previous chats have involved Beowulf, crosswords, or Anglo-Saxon poetry, so there should be no user relevant memories involved.)

Expand full comment

I'll have to try to complete this. It's been a long time since I read my namesake's epic.

Expand full comment

Gemini does fine:

Prompt: How many letter Rs are there in the word "strawberry"?

Gemini: There are 3 letter Rs in the word "strawberry".

Expand full comment

>the LLM perceives the word "strawberry" not as those 9 letters,<

Looks like someone else also thinks strawberry only has two r's. :)

Expand full comment

I've been playing around with GPT-4o and not only will it routinely miscount the Rs in Strawberry, it then will sometimes go on to assert that there is only one R in "berry".

Looking for other words that fail, it tells me that "lawfully" contains two Ls but "unlawfully" contains three. When I asked it how that could be, it explained "it still contains the same two Ls from "lawfully" plus one additional L from the prefix "un-""

My guess for what's going on here is that somewhere in its training data it has ingested things like "a list of words with a double R". Since "double" is associated with "two", it will assume that because Strawberry has a double R, it must contain two Rs.

Expand full comment

This was interesting, it seems the problem is just with berry.

You said:

how many times is the letter R used in the word strawberry?

ChatGPT said:

In the word "strawberry," the letter R is used 2 times.

You said:

are you sure?

ChatGPT said:

Yes, I’m sure. In "strawberry," the letter R appears twice.

You said:

how many times does R appear in berry?

ChatGPT said:

In the word "berry," the letter R appears once.

You said:

spell the word berry

ChatGPT said:

The word "berry" is spelled B-E-R-R-Y.

You said:

spell the word berry, counting the number of letter R

ChatGPT said:

Sure! In the word "berry," the spelling is B-E-R-R-Y. There are two instances of the letter R.

Expand full comment

A trick I learned recently - you can view youtube videos without the annoying ads by changing the url from youtube.com to yout-ube.com - for example, the very nice Trio for flute oboe and piano by Madeleine Dring at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGeVU1-81BA

becomes

https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=GGeVU1-81BA

Unfortunately, going directly to www.yout-ube.com doesn't give you search options.

Expand full comment

I've just switched to watching them on Firefox. Adblock still works perfectly there.

Expand full comment

Adblock on Firefox works for me too, at least for now. I have also run up against one video where the yout-ube trick fails.

Expand full comment

"Oh, Shit -- Kamala Posted Some Policies! And I Bit the Bullet and Read Them. Now you don't have to!"

https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/oh-shit-kamala-posted-some-policies

Jeff Maurer is a former writer for the Daily Show, so a political obsessive who brings some wise-ass writing skillz to the party. His summary is worth the read, as is the Harris campaign document if you're in a masochistic mood. [I'm still personally trying to recover some of the brain cells that died while plowing through the 2016 Clinton campaign's policy documents.] Some summary takeaways from Maurer:

-- "Is her economic plan Obama-ish or Warren/Sanders-y? In my opinion, this plan panders to the Warren/Sanders wing of the Democratic Party close to the minimum amount possible....When Harris’ plan to deputize the FTC to lower grocery prices caused every living economist to yell “THAT’S DUMB!” loudly, in unison, over-and-over, Harris explained that actually, her big, bold plan was narrow and inconsequential. The plan described in this platform is definitely narrow....basically, Harris is imagining a plan that will prevent Jimmy Dean from jacking up the price of sausage patties during a hurricane, but won’t do much else...."

-- "a mild indication that Harris understands our [federal] budget situation can be found in her section on Social Security and Medicare. She says she’ll “strengthen and protect” the programs, and that she’ll “fight to ensure that Americans can count on getting the benefits they earned.” And that’s what I’d expect any Democrat to say. But Harris doesn’t go above and beyond to forswear cuts....Of course, the reality is that we’ll probably have to accept modest cuts to future beneficiaries as part of a deal to keep the programs solvent. The fact that Harris doesn’t fall all over herself denouncing cuts suggests that she understands that."

-- "This platform is not woke. If Harris had proposed this platform in 2020, there would not have been enough papier-mâché in the world to make all the giant “Kamala the Klanswoman” puppets that lefty protesters would have wanted to make of her....Harris is still definitely a Democrat — I’m cherry-picking stuff that indicates which way she’s leaning and leaving out Democratic boilerplate that could have been lifted from the Mondale campaign. But the woke/not woke question has divided the party for years, and with this platform, Harris is staking out territory on the “not woke” side of the party."

Expand full comment

I hope Maurer is right, because there's a good chance she wins, but I have to say there's a sort of motivated tea leaf reading going on here. Taking microscopic hints and word choices in a vaguely phrased document and extrapolating them to predict sane, centrist policy... reminds me of the absurd "Bayesian updating" people around here were doing about the origins of Covid and it's probably about as accurate.

Though that said, it's not impossible. Harris strikes me as someone with zero principles who will just say and do whatever gets her into office, and if the vibe is moving center-ward she will move with it without a moment's thought. I'd certainly prefer that to a committed left-wing ideologue.

Expand full comment

I live and work amongst the people who you call left-wing ideologues. Deep in the heart of Blue America so to speak. Also I have a sibling who proudly says the same and in his case he was Harris's constituent when she was a senator.

From that, two things come to mind as examples of why my brother literally LOL's at the idea that Harris is a progressive (today's term of pride for the worldview that you are referring to):

-- no politician fitting that description has ever chosen to start their career by becoming a front-line prosecutor. Let alone doing that job for a full decade and then becoming a big-city district attorney who aggressively cleared backlogged murder cases, demanded maximum sentences upon conviction, etc. In progressive circles that's roughly as likely a career path as taking an entry-level management job at ExxonMobil or Hobby Lobby.

-- a progressive-base politician going on a national broadcast and talking about being a lifelong _gun_ owner?? Ho ho ho, come on now. That is literally as likely nowadays as a MAGA-based candidate publicly thanking the doctors who carried out his middle-school child's gender-reassignment surgery.

Expand full comment

FWIW, I was hesitant to vote for her in 2016 due to her past as a prosecutor. I actually voted against her in the primary.

Expand full comment

Would she move center, or merely spout more centrist rhetoric? After the debate, I have no more idea who she is than before it.

Expand full comment

I genuinely don't think she has a single actual policy preference in her body. In an alternate universe she's on the GOP ticket facing off against lifelong New York Democrat Donald Trump.

Expand full comment

Honestly, why are we even bothering to discuss policy ahead of the election? We all know this election isn't about economic policy. It's about deciding the future of this country: to let the liberal hegemony persist, or to burn everything to the ground. The populace does not give a damn about the specifics of how the economy functions.

Her sudden switch to appealing to moderates isn't going to convince anyone. She can't escape the fact that she's a colored woman. Do they really think such a person is electable in this country, in this cultural climate? Her policies, her competence, her demeanor, none of that matters. It's about what electing her would represent: complete cultural dominance of the left. The right will not let that happen.

Expand full comment

>She can't escape the fact that she's a colored woman. Do they really think such a person is electable in this country, in this cultural climate?

Uh... did you just get off the train from 1961? The only references I've seen to Harris's skin color that have any traction at all are resentful "she's not really black" from some random right-wingers on social media, and that is kind of the opposite of what you're claiming!

To be honest, it's been refreshing how little talk of her race I've seen from either side.

Expand full comment

There's an alternate timeline where Trump said Kamala isn't really Indian because of the one-drop rule.

Expand full comment

Except the only voters that truly count at this point are the centrists, everybody else is long decided.

Expand full comment

This is pretty bleak. Do you really think the majority of RW people want to burn everything to the e ground?

Expand full comment

I don't know about majority, but there's several very vocal rightwingers on DSL who call for burning everything to the ground.

And ideas like "actually, it's good to default on the debt" or "we should fire all civil servants" do seem to have an alarming amount of currency on the right. IIRC, there was one actual candidate who called for randomly firing 50% of civil servants on day 1.

Expand full comment

> This is pretty bleak. Do you really think

this is a valid response to roughly 100% of anomie's comments

Expand full comment

How else are you going to build something new?

Expand full comment

Actually, the only way to build greater things is to build on top of other great things. One cannot build pyramids nor skyscrapers starting at the top.

Expand full comment

As far as I can tell it's about intra-left signaling. No right-winger is going to vote Harris and none of them are going to take any of these policies seriously or in remotely good faith and vice-versa for Democrats/leftists looking at Trump.

But if you're already a Democrat/leftist, these minor variations could be important. Kamala Harris is woke, by the opinion of some majority of the country (some Democrats and ~99% of Republicans) but how woke she is within the Overton Window of the Democratic coalition is potentially something people care about.

Expand full comment

"As far as I can tell it's about intra-left signaling. No right-winger is going to vote Harris and none of them are going to take any of these policies seriously or in remotely good faith and vice-versa for Democrats/leftists looking at Trump."

Have you ever heard of a concept called the swing voter?

Expand full comment

Sure -- 20 or 40 years ago, at least in nationally-meaningful numbers.

There are still some swing voters today too, yes. Two of them are mulling it over, the third is waiting til October to tune in and make up her mind.

Expand full comment

Hey, no stealing my sarcastic reply.

Expand full comment

Some various thoughts:

-Kamala thinking she needs to make some effort to appear to lower food prices really undercuts the whole economy good/inflation not a problem during the Biden years narrative.

-No politician in America is ever going to admit that Social Security/Medicare is a giant Ponzi scheme that is going bankrupt and needs cuts. They would never get elected no matter how obvious the former fact is. Her messaging on this one way or another is a nothing burger.

-I guess it's a good sign that Harris feels the need to pander more to the center during an election rather than the fringe. But her Senate voting record, VP tie breaking record, and selection of Walz all point to a commitment to far leftist positions. I don't see why anyone should believe her election campaigning on this point.

Expand full comment