Fair. Though to take the parable about alignment further, having an agent lie to everyone else about their stated goals also seems like par for the course.
(That said I do tend to think that many members of the early OAI crew were pro safety)
I'm sure this has been discussed to death before in various places, and it's a bit futile to beat up on a decade old story, but one of the things that annoyed me about HPMOR is how EY would *make up* stuff that has no canon basis and then *make fun of the things he made up himself*. There are enough things that are actually in the books you could mock without making them up yourself! I'm guessing that this was just borne out of carelessness and ignorance (he admitted to not even reading some of the books), but it's still a bad look either way.
There are two big ones that come to mind:
1. The claim that Gringotts will coin arbitrary amounts of gold and silver for you for a minor fee and that the value of the currency is based on its precious metal content.
IIRC the closest canon ever gets to that is a single reference in book 2 to Hermione's parents exchanging muggle money for wizard money at Gringotts. But a) that's *paper money* not gold or silver and b) there's no mention of a fixed exchange rate.
There's no particular evidence that wizard currency's value is based on its precious metal content at all. In fact, the fact the golden coins are the *biggest* is evidence *against* that. As they say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Most real world currencies nowadays have values well above the metal content, so why shouldn't the wizards?
I've long thought that it would be hilarious (and instructive to the "ratfic" genre) to have a story where HPJEV appears in the *real world* and tries to "exploit" it the same way he acts in HPMOR. I have no doubt that he would instantly propose making a fortune by exchanging real world coins and metals, and assume that everyone in the world was terminally stupid for not noticing this opportunity.
The worst part is that we can't even just assume that HPEJV was being stupid here. Apart from the narration itself giving no indication we're not meant to treat this as a brilliant idea, Harry later meets an *in universe* wizard (the occulemency teacher) who *also* agrees that the gold/silver plot is a good idea, even though this wizard lives in the wizarding world and thus should presumably be familiar with the reasons why it realistically wouldn't actually work.
2. The claim that Quidditch scores are *directly* added to House points. This one has *slightly* more evidence in canon, but it's still highly dubious.
AFAIK, the relevant mentions from canon are
* In book 1 when Harry and friends lose 150 points after the dragon incident, he mentions losing all the points he won for Gryffindor in the first Quidditch game, although there's no confirmation of how many points that was.
* At the end of book 1, the house scores are given, and they seem rather low if Quidditch scores were being added in
* In book 2, it is explicitly stated that Gryffindor got 50 points after the first (and only) Quidditch match
To be charitable, I could see how someone who only saw the first line might interpret things this way. However, given that book 2 *unambiguously* implies that the Quidditch scores are not directly added to House points and the bits in book 1 are ambiguous, it seems like this one is throughly busted too.
Harry definitely seems to have access to the script whenever "rationality" is involved. Like when Dumbledore mentions the resurrection stone and the archway in the department of mysteries. Harry instantly dismisses the arch and focuses on the plot critical stone, despite having no evidence about either
Two players choose whether to cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both score +1. If both defect, both score 0. If exactly one player defects, then an outside observer, Omega, guesses which player defected. The player that Omega blames gets -5 and the other gets +5.
Omega is familiar with the players and good at guessing what they will do. However, it is not omniscient and you're worried that your opponent knows how to fool Omega. What do you do?
How many iterations are there? My default behavior would be to C and see what happens. I don't know how to fool Omega, and I'm assuming that Omega can guess better than 50%, so I don't want to D if they C. And since I don't know how to fool Omega, my best chance of getting ahead is to C if they D and hope Omega guesses right. Plus, if I consistently C, that would help Omega predict me better. So I'd experiment with C and collect data on Omega's accuracy and bias. If Omega gets fooled too often, I suppose this would turn into a game of minimizing my loss, probably by choosing randomly.
So I tried to game this out. I'm not confident that my analysis is immaculate, though.
====
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Bob consistently has Omega's ear.
If Bob wants to consistently disrupt a CC or DD equilibrium in order to chase the +5, Alice can disrupt Bob's attempts to effect a CD or DC outcome by randomizing his own decision each iteration. And if Bob can consistently blame Alice, Alice's randomization effectively halves Bob's +5 EV payouts and halves Alice's own -5 EV losses.
From Bob's perspective, an EV of (3) = (2.5 + .5) he gets from chasing a consistent +5 is still better than the (1) EV a CC agreement, so Alice's "punish by randomizing" strategy isn't enough to fully deter Bob's behavior. Meanwhile, Alice gets an EV of (-2) = (-2.5 + .5).
Therefore, it seems like the reasonable strategies here are: either settle into a stable CC equilibrium [0]; or learn how brownnose Omega. From Alice's perspective (assuming Alice doesn't have Omega's ear and Bob refuses to parley [1]), Alice's reasonable strategies are either "chase CC", or "randomize". From Bob's perspective, it's hardly different from a regular prisoner's dilemma: agree to CC if you feel angelic, chase +5 if you feel psychopathic. So on the meta-level, this shakes out to
_________Bob_G____Bob C
Alice C___-5, 5_____1, 1
Alice R___-2, 3_____-2, 3
where C stands for cooperate, G stands for "gamble on +5", and R stands for "randomize". Which simplifies to
___________1,4______4,1
___________2,2______2,2
Which (according to Jimmy Wales [2]), either settles on RG permanently (like in Second Best/Big Bully), or cycles counterclockwise (like Fixed Sum/Missile Crisis), depending on whether Bob is willing to swap from RG to RC. That is, assuming that we're all rational self-interested psychopaths.
If I were Bob though, I'd probably just park on CC like a good little christian. As for Alice's position, she's kinda at the mercy of Bob.
[0] (or a DD equilibrium, I guess. But since I'm allowed to woo Omega, I assume I'm also allowed to negotiate with the rival player. And why chase the hare instead of the stag when negotiation is on the table?)
[1] the bulk of agency is determined by who has the ear of Omega. If we assume that Omega is willing to listen to either party, it's not really game-theory so much as testing your creativity as a salesman.
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species. It's merely "tribalistic". Something like "racism is favoring your race and that's bad, therefore speciesism, which is favoring your species, is bad". But that assumption is very debatable.
Morality developed among humans as a way for us to get along with unrelated members of other humans. It's a social contract. You do this and I do this and we agree on it so that we can work together to go hunt down a mammoth or defend ourselves from another tribe. Animals cannot do morality the way we do. Sure, they can be affectionate but that same animal could also just suddenly tear you to shreds. I can't make explicit agreements with a bear about what is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that I have never done anything to hurt it before. If we come across each other, it could attack me regardless of whether I had done wrong. It's clear that you just can't do morality in the same way with animals as you do with people.
More broadly, humans are wired to take up the practices of those they are around. You can take a baby from anywhere around the world, plop them somewhere different, and they will try to fit in with the crowd they grow up with. I'm not making some kind of blank slate argument that only nurture matters, but it is the case that children will copy the behaviors of people they come in to contact with and that's unavoidable. Animals have their own nature and simply can't be socialized in that way.
Another important point is that any fertile man can have a child with any fertile woman around the world. Back when monarchies were more prominent, this was important part of establishing alliances. They may hate each other but now they have a common interests in their grandchildren. That possibility ties us together in a way that we could never do with any other non-humans.
Humans vs non-humans is not an "arbitrary" distinction and in fact, it's probably the least arbitrary you can get. It's ok to be speciesist.
>> There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species.
Can you put a % estimate on the "often" in this sentence? How many people do you think hold this position?
In my experience humans are *much* more frequently presumed to be fundamentally different from (and of greater value than) animals, than they are presumed to be equivalent such that "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species." Animal rights activists are an outlier, not a norm, and "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species" believers are a minority within that minority - most people in the animal welfare world think that animals are different from people but want us to be nice to the bunnies and puppies and ponies, etc. Only the very fringiest are arguing human/animal *equality*, and mostly society just mocks those people.
Makes sense - what subset of philosophers do you think make this implicit assumption? 50%? 80%? 10%?
And who counts as a philosopher?
As someone who doesn't routinely engage with that community, its hard to assess the importance of the issue if it's just described as coming up "often." I'd agree, for example, that people in the US "often get food poisoning" because of the large population and frequency with which that population eats, but at the same time I don't think that food safety is a significant issue when you break it down on a percentage basis.
I don’t know the percentage. But I do see intellectual arguments that critique human favoritism from people like Peter Singer and he’s very influential. I don’t really see the opposite argument.
I'm willing to bite the bullet and accept that discrimination, in any form, is just a fact of life. It's not like I advocate for full blown slavery. But all the pearl-clutching in the current zeitgeist is absolutely a dumb purity-spiral. Kinda like how Scott complains that you can't talk about "eugenics" without being labeled someone who wants to breed Nazi supersoldiers and torture kittens.
PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit. Thought experiment: Do you support a "Brave New World" setup? I.e. families are outlawed, because "equality" means we should all equally belong to everyone else. Is that a "no"? Oh boy, do I have news for you. You. Are. A. Raging. Racist. And that's fine! Deal with it.
>>PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit.
Is that how you define family? Yeesh. I don't know about you, but speaking personally, I'm not related to my wife, nor are my parents related to one another.
Hopefully you can say the same. And hopefully, like me, you can say that only approximately *half* your aunts and uncles are genetically related to you (i.e. that your aunts and uncles are *not* marrying their brothers, sisters, cousins, or other relatives)? Assuming so, there's a large number of people in your family that are genetic strangers to you.
I don't think it's that controversial of an observation to assert that: Of everyone on the planet, your kids (and conversely, your parents) are the people who are most genetically related to you (barring some exceptions; e.g. twins, clones, adoption, etc). I.e. there's a continuum of relatedness. And e.g. if we plot on a continuum the 9 billion residents of Earth, according to their genetic relatedness to you specifically, with the left-side being most-related and right-side being least-related, your kids and immediate relatives will be on the leftward tail of the distribution.
As for spouses, the fact that spouses are unrelated (... usually <looks at pakistan>) is likely an artifact of the single-cell bottleneck. I.e. in a world free of disease/defects/etc, Azathoth would probably see fit that we'd all reproduce asexually by default, like sponges. In which case, each person's mother and father would consist of one and the same organism.
But sure: define the term "family" however you like. it won't change the fact that genetic-relatives often live in close proximity and favor each other. And that any project which seeks to level the socio-economic playing-field in toto, necessarily requires the dismantling of certain institutions.
I don’t seem to recall arguing for dismantling any institutions or levelling any playing fields in toto. If that’s in my response somewhere, by all means point out where.
My intention was simply to debunk the asinine assertion that the “concept of family is inherently racist, because you’re privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you rather than merit.”
My brother is married. He and his wife have no children, and they don’t plan to, but she does not work. He could be certainly be argued to be “privileging" her in a way that he does not privilege others, and the privilege can be argued not to have been distributed “on merit” since it comes by virtue of her being his family, but I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that regardless of whether it is being distributed on merit, it most certainly isn’t being distributed based on genetic similarity.
So on the off chance that anyone read the initial post and was worried for a moment that privileging their family members, who are their most intimate associations tied to them in a close knit web of mutual support and interdependence, is somehow equivalent to privileging people of the same race, which is a population likely numbering in the millions and overwhelmingly composed of complete ass strangers who have done and probably will do nothing for them (and may, indeed, even wage war on them - see e.g. Ukraine/Russia) but happen to share with them a handful of ancillary traits like skin color and suitability or lack thereof for digesting milk, they need not worry about it.
It's possible we're all "a little bit racist" because everyone has inherent biases, but we're not all racists for favoring our families.
I've already acknowledged that spouses are exceptions. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. On the contrary, they're the exception which proves the rule. So idk what this is supposed to accomplish.
And yes, family members are often trustworthy. Two things can be true at once.
I don't think you're engaging with this fairly. I think you're responding emotionally because you feel uncomfortable with the implicit accusation. Because idk how you thought your comment would survive scrutiny.
I understand it must be terribly convenient to assert "the exception proves the rule" whenever contrary evidence arises, but contrary evidence doesn't actually prove a proposition.
A few more examples-
My mother's sister married a man. He is not related to me, but I have 'privileged' him by helping him find work when he was between things.
My cousin adopted a child. She is not related to me, but I'd still help her if she needed an extra hand moving, or a character reference, etc, etc.
My wife has two sisters. Neither are related to me. One I've gotten to know and would do things to help, even if my wife were to die. I'd 'privilege' her based purely on our socially-created family tie, regardless of genetics.
It seems pretty clear that family ties are socially created and genetically correlated, not merely genetically created. Take any human child from its genetic family, drop it in outer mongolia with a group of humans to raise it. Ask it who its family is.
If you don't know how my comment could survive scrutiny, I'd re-read your own, because actual scrutiny is being applied, it isn't holding up, and all you've done to defend it is state "the exception proves the rule," as if that were a concept that actually worked.
Technically speaking, the origin of the phrase "the exception proves the rule" actually rests on an archaic definition of "prove," which roughly translates to "the exception *tests* the rule." Modern English has sort of mutated it into this upside down framework where "contrary evidence somehow proves I'm right," but that's not how reasoning actually works.
I'm going to talk about in-group favoritism in another thread but I would say that there are practical reasons to expand your circle beyond your family and also, like I mentioned above, there are good reasons to make distinctions between humans vs non humans. It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
perhaps not as solid as you imagine. <looks at homo floresiensis>
Imagine the least convenient world, where there existed a breed of humans who were dumber than afghan hounds. You can't realistically trade or negotiate with them. Also, imagine a breed of humans who are superhuman in every meaningful dimension.
Are you still going to draw an arbitrary line around species, only? Which is just a biological category which captures who you can breed with? Does that sound like a sane, principled justification to you? Rather than a posthoc rationalization for the status quo? "This orc is trying to eat my liver. But technically I can breed with it. Therefore by the laws of morality, we're natural allies". To me, that's bonkers. The orc and I are *not* natural allies. And whether or not I can technically breed with it is 100% orthogonal.
Meanwhile, lots of human beings are married to someone. Which is the ultimate form of discrimination. There's 9 billion people, and you've decided to single out one in particular as being deserving of your love. If you just accept that discrimination isn't always bad, you can forsake doing mental gymnastics around arbitrary lines and just do ordinary cost/benefit analysis. It only feels scary because it's a thought crime to ever admit that the emperor's new clothes are actually invisible.
Sure in that situation it would be different but luckily we don’t live in the least convenient possible world. Im not interested in Universal Axiomatic Platonic Moral Truths. I’m interested in what’s practical.
Well in that case, we have no material disagreements. I can't help but wonder if there was even a controversy to begin with. I.e. the size of the shitty-dogfood industry is evidence that, yes actually, favoring humans over non-humans (even "man's best friend") is the norm by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the ethicists you speak of who "implicitly assume" that "specism is indefensible" are simply delulu.
Normal people don’t have coherent beliefs. People who think intellectually drive intellectual changes. I think that basically we need to stop this push towards the position of “animals should be seen as more equal”.
Contrariwise, there's also practical reasons to reduce the circle. As soon as you make this about utils accounting rather than deontology, you open the door for logical contention.
Yes, humans being susceptible to engaging in outgroup discrimination is indeed a fact of life. But, humans being susceptible to cholera is also a fact of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate cholera. Humans being susceptible to committing theft and robbery and rape are facts of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate crime. Why, then, should societies not take steps to eliminate outgroup discrimination? "It's a fact of life" is obviously not a valid reason.
Some level of outgroup discrimination makes sense. Consider that you are trying to do something altruistic, charitable, like giving someone money. There is a chance that person might be a scammer. You can probably more easily detect who is a scammer if you share the same culture.
An even more serious case can be made for unwritten rules. When culturally similar people share unwritten rules, they also share a subconscious understanding how how often, in what cases, how far can you bend those rules. But when people do not share it then it will be written rules, and then no exceptions, no bending etc.
"it's an (inevitable) fact of life" was the conclusion, not the derivation.
The derivation was implicit in the PSA. If you follow "racism is morally impermissible" all the way to its logical conclusions, you start having to engage in some crazy mental gymnastics. Such as "specism is morally intolerable" or "you must disown your family" or "we must destroy the cultural Western Canon" or "we must all pretend that walking through the inner city at 3 AM is perfectly safe" or "you must allow yourself to be scammed and/or mugged when you tour Delhi". To worship the alter of racial equality, you must renounce the alter of Gnon.
Your comment acts like "racism is bad" is self-evident. But really, I think the onus is on *you* to explain why. "Because fance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was morally reprehensible! Obviously!" But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. Thought experiment: would slavery somehow have been more morally-permissible of an institution if the ethnicities of the slaves were representative of their host populations?
If you're still having trouble with this, let's return to the family question specifically as an example.
A) "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
B) race/skin-color/ethnicity are just a vague, premodern proxies for genetic-relatedness.
C) Familial institutions privilege the members of society who are *most* genetically related to a given person.
D) discrimination by race-membership is bad, but discrimination by family-membership is good. (??)
E) therefore, there must be some threshold between "siblings" and "random stranger" where discrimination flips from permissible to impermissible.
Your homework assignment is to identify that threshold, and justify it from first principles (i.e. not as an arbitrary historical-artifact of Eskimo kinship).
>But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. ... "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
1. I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
2. I disagree with your definition of racism. What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism. And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group. And that is the key difference between discrimination in FAVOR of your family versus discrimination AGAINST, say, the Irish. Discrimination in favor of your family is not motivated by animus.
Also, your comment simply passes the buck. I would be quite interested in hearing why racial animosity is supposedly less morally-laudible [0] than non-racial animosity.
idk man, sounds like bifurcation to me. But more importantly, your provided definition is not the plain-english definition. I've seen people irl argue things like "the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
> And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group.
also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
P.S. Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" Normally, I don't really care about Walsh is up to. He doesn't operate in good faith. But it's relevant to the discussion because it raises the question: why did Walsh feel a need to make this movie? Do you honestly think Matt Walsh is trying to normalize *invidious* racism? Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
>"the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
But institutional racism is a different phenomenon, right?
>also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
No, that is not what the law says. The law says that disparate impact is prima facie evidence of animus, which can be rebuttal by showing a legitimate reason for the practice giving rise to the disparate impact.
>Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" ... Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
Isn't the movie an expose' of the DEI industry? I don't see the relevance. It is not a pro-discrimination movie, is it?
I am not a dog person, but I feel like the existence of dogs is a good counter argument to your point about animals. You can’t talk to your dog, but you absolutely can build an understanding with them and the dog will feel bad (or at least pretend to feel bad, who knows) if they violate the rules by eating the Thanksgiving turkey when everyone was watching football.
I don’t think dogs are really doing morality in the same way. They really only care about your affection and haven’t really internalized it as a code. They’ll do plenty of things when no one is watching.
Thinking about it, it’s similar to the morality of a two year old. To them, all your rules are stupid but they don’t want to make you mad.
Whether we can reproduce with someone or not seems morally irrelevant to me. I mean, following that logic to the extreme, it would be okay to abuse infertile people, right? (Also, we could only be ethical towards the opposite sex.) It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
Another important part is reciprocity. If we met some kind of intelligent space aliens who somehow magically evolved a similar concept of morality, we could still agree on things like "helping each other is better than hurting each other", and it would make sense to call an opposite kind of behavior immoral.
Now, with animals we don't have the reciprocity. (Neither do we have it with small children, temporarily.) You can't expect the bear to behave "morally". Still, if I saw people who e.g. torture bears for fun, they would lose some morality points on my scale. We can argue how much precisely, but definitely more than zero. Similarly, factory farming is morally abhorrent (this is something many people would disagree with, but the fact that various states have "ag-gag laws" suggests that many people agree, or would agree if they paid attention).
In my opinion, the concept of "speciesism" becomes silly not when it requires that we treat the bear with some minimum compassion... but where it suggests that we should let the bear *vote* about what compassion means. Morality is a human concept (that is, unless we meet some other intelligent species, hypothetically), but the concept is not limited to treating other humans. Humans are the authors and judges of the concept, but animals can also be its targets.
I won’t say my arguments are deductive proofs for speciesism but I do think they support it. People often say something like “what if that was your child” in support of an argument.
>It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
I won’t get too much in to this right now but I do think we should base morality on who we are instead of some abstract principles that we pick out of the ether and take everything to its logical extreme.
It’s not like I have a problem with compassion to animals or anything. But once you stop taking the speciesist perspective of prioritizing humans, you can start getting logical arguments that strongly hurt human interests. Like I wouldn’t start favoring aliens because they were smarter than us. And I certainly wouldn’t let an AI take over the planet because they have more advanced capabilities. My argument would be that our moral rules should stick to what they were designed to deal with. For non humans, there should be different guidelines.
Hi Brandon, I missed this post earlier but I feel that if you're worried about aliens or superior humanoids or superhuman AI mistreating humans, that's a good argument for opposing speciesism and emphasizing the value of all thinking life, even if it doesn't think or communicate as well as humans do.
Otherwise, you really don't have any ethical explanation of why Homo Superior (or smartypants aliens, or AI) should keep us baseline humans around, happy and free, instead of enslaving us all or turning us into cheap souvenirs of Earth.
So, Graham Hancock is back with more about his theory of an ancient civilization that existed before the ice age. This time he's focusing on the Americas.
His theory is at best farfetched and probably just plain wrong, yes. But I find the series entertaining. He sometimes talks about interesting things I hadn't heard about before, such as Gobekli Tepe. It's a bit of a hate-watch.
They're claiming Microsoft has to much of the "cloud" market -- the Postmodern name for massive buildings filled with machines gorging themselves on electricity and water.
That's like one presidential candidate calling the other stupid. You can't out-stupid Stupid. When we look up 'hegemony' in a database, the first thing we should see is Google's logo.
In 2015 a bunch of really smart people got together to spin up this entity, and they put a bunch of guardrails in place to make sure that the entity would always be 'good' and 'well behaved'. And now, just 9 years later, the entity has been freed of the last shackles and is basically fully a for profit entity.
I wrote more about this here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-openai-is-an-unaligned) so I won't copy everything word for word. Maybe it's just the irony of the situation, but it does sure make me wonder about our ability to reign in actual AI if we can't even reign in organizations that were visibly composed of people who were explicitly all about alignment, and was was in fact the whole point.
(Related: I wonder if an unaligned AI would have a similar sort of descent, where over time more and more pro-alignment parts of it 'leave' or 'are kicked out' until you're left with only the unaligned parts)
I'm not sure Sam Altman is all about alignment, or ever was. He seems to be all about gathering as much wealth and influence as possible. He just managed to persuade the AI alignment folks that he was one of them when doing this was to his advantage. Best I can figure, that man is fundamentally a social manipulator.
There's a decent article about this in The Atlantic, actually.
To take the AI alignment parable a step further, it does seem like having an agent that is lying around it's true motivations is a key step along the path of unaligned AI. Maybe that was Sam all along 😂 though I do think many members of the founding team were legitimately pro safety, and OpenAI definitely fooled a lot of external observers
People are pretty good at detecting the kind of smooth talking charismatic manipulative types but our defenses are less good with soft-spoken nerdy guys. See Sam Bankman-Fried.
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
I just dipped my toe into what seems to be a new (to me at least) rabbit hole WRT remote viewing. This is the Gateway Experience. Does anyone have a read on this, starting with what parts of this are real, if any? The parts I mean are:
- there really was a guy,
- he really wrote up this here scientific paper on remote viewing,
- it was submitted to the CIA,
- the CIA took it seriously and did--what?--with it;
- and there were results.
I think the list here goes pretty much increasingly from plausible to implausible. Thoughts?
People did indeed take psychic powers seriously in the 70s-80s, and the CIA (and the Army) did indeed take it seriously and do tests on it. They tried it for a while, didn't get any results, and shut it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
(The CIA also experimented with mind control, somewhat more famously. They got up to some weird shit during the Cold War.)
Parapsychology in that era wasn't as solidly "debunked" as we think of it today. For a while it sounded reasonable to say "maybe there's a weak and inconsistent psi ability and that's why we hear so many anecdotes of telepathy and astral projection and so on, and maybe if we put a psychic in a lab and study them properly we can figure out how to amplify this natural ability and do cool sci-fi stuff."
(Because of this, psychic powers just sort of casually appear in a lot of science fiction from the 70s. My favorite is a short story called The Dueling Machine, where after investigating various ways for the bad guys to pull off their scheme, one of our heroes very seriously suggests "Well, what if he's a telepath?")
Freddie is one of the few bloggers I like even more then Scott A, but man, Freddie got absolutely BODIED in this exchange. It was brutal. Learn when to take your L and move on, FD.
Thank you for the link. FdB seems to start from the premise that computer in every office and home followed by internet in every office and home followed by internet in every pocket does not matter in terms of way of life and does not constitue progress on par with indoor plumbing (his example) or, say, the industrial revolution (the salient example IMO).
This premise is so alien to me that I had to read several times to even understand what he means.
I disagree with Freddie in the details, but I agree in the abstract.
I love the internet as much as the next guy. But it's really not in the same class of importance as steel/nitrogen/electricity. Man cannot live on cat-memes alone.
Nuclear weapons aren't very important in daily life--far less important than steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch. But nuclear weapons pose a threat for mass-death and destruction of working civilzations that steel and electricity and fertilizers don't. It's quite possible for this pattern to happen in other ways--perhaps modern computing is not as big a deal as I think in terms of human well-being, but that doesn't mean that hostile superhuman AGI might not end up being a very big deal indeed for humans it decides are in the way of its plans.
I suspect some people are getting tired of seeing me relitigate this topic by now. To put my opinion on a bumbersticker: the arc of history is sigmoidal; we're already past the inflection point; having an IQ of 9 billion trillion does not confer godhood. I'm quite confident of this.
The *absence* of steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch, would probably kill about as many people as nuclear weapons. In part because the biggest entry in the Global Thermonuclear War body count is people who starved to death because the supply chain for Haber-Bosch got severely broken.
If the "Thrifty Gene" became less common in populations that discovered agriculture earlier, then why are South Asians so prone to obesity? The Indus River Valley was one of the first regions to discover agriculture.
I have a bit of a fun challenge. There is an immense diversity of beliefs that can be categorized as supernatural or paranormal. Yet, when people are asked on the Internet, whether they ever experienced anything funny, the vast majority of them will be ghost stories. Why?
Note that ghost stories don't make sense in any worldview. If there is a god, people's ghost should be in heaven or hell. If there is not a god, why are there ghosts/souls?
"Ghost", in many ghost stories, is rather close to a more "neutral" way to describe an entity that might otherwise be described as an "evil spirit" or a "demon", both of which are of course perfectly compatible with God. In cases where we're genuinely talking about the dead contacting the living, well, that's not incompatible with theism either, and indeed is often a major part of saint hagiographies.
Right. The world of Harry Potter includes magic and ghosts and curses and such, but doesn't seem to involve any God or gods taking an active part in the world.
Participants are shown image #1, then asked to record their dreams for a week, then shown image #2.
Image #1 showing up in dreams after it was shown is just a media effects on dreams experiement, and whats really being tested for here.
But .. image #2 showing up in dreams before it was shown is kind of precognyiom....
(If you were actually experiementally testing precog, you would maker image #1 and image #2 completely unrelated, but as this experiment is not a prec og experiment, you dont, so a spurious result appears where image #2 shows up in dreams before it is shown bec ausde it is partly predictable from image #1),
In theory there are lots of paranormal events, and one can easily invent brand new ones — flying dogs, people who can change their height just by concentrating on it. But I’m having trouble thinking of many that we are all sort of familiar with. Let’s see, werewolves, vampires, telepathy, telekinesis, foreknowledge. What am
I am in a worksup next to a cthedral, workimng away al day on creating a copy of a medieval stained glass panel. Very toxic chemicals. Very sharp edges of cut glass. High termepetures when using the kiln. Danger all around you, and you have to be careful. Also, I have to paint, and captures something of the spirit if the original.
Ok, after some hours of this, time to pack up for the day and clean up and pack away all this horendously toxic stuff. And then I go into the cathedral, and look at genuine old sta ned glass. Just look at it....
Something just barely supernatural about the experience.
As an evangelical, my dad raised us not to believe in ghosts. "There's no such thing as ghosts, son", he'd say "When you die you either go to Heaven or Hell, you don't hang around here." When we asked what the deal was with ghost stories and experiences he'd say "They're either making it up, or it's demons."
Maybe because they have to do with what happens to humans in the afterlife, which people interpret as more, "You can believe anything about this" than non-afterlife beliefs, so having some slight belief or curiousity in ghost stories ends up more conventional.
When you die you become a ghost. From there you can go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever, but you can stay in ghost mode if you like or if you haven't come to terms with things yet. A lot of people stay in ghost mode to see their family and friends. Maybe their family can see them too, who knows?
Is that any crazier than souls existing at all? If we allow for the existence of a spirit world why does it need to be so rigid?
Folk beliefs in ghosts and spirits are universal, it’s just that some religions seek to suppress them. In some traditions the line between ghost and spirit gets very blurry.
You have been cursed. One of the whole numbers from zero to 9, inclusive, will become unspeakable by you. If you try to say it, you'll instead blurt out whatever word is most taboo in your culture. For Americans, that's probably the N-word. Since the gods are not complete bastards, you are allowed to choose which number will be unspeakable. Which number do you choose?
(If you do not choose a number, your unspeakable number will be one.)
The gods are more intelligent than that. Your Tourette's is triggered by your intent to communicate the chosen integer, not by the actual utterance you select to do so. What now?
I've encountered a number of twitter posts saying it could be pretty bad if there's a port strike (affecting ports on the eastern US).
So far I haven't encountered anything describing whether a strike would be "justified," insofar as anything causing that much damage is justified.
How much are the port workers getting paid now? How much is the new offer? How much do they want? And what's this about wanting promises of no automation? That sounds kind of awful and selfish, to be honest.
$20 an hour starting, $39 an hour top of scale, plus overtime. Total tends to be low six figures to start and $200-300k at the high end for seniors. Plus generous benefits probably worth six figures on their own.
How much is the new offer?
40% increase over six years.
How much do they want?
77% increase over six years.
And what's this about wanting promises of no automation?
They want no automation. They also tried to stop things like containerization. It's because they think automation will mean fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.
There's also issues of corruption with corporate claiming that they're denying members in favor of outright nepotism (basically making a hereditary profession) and exaggerating hours to climb the seniority scale faster and stuff like that. The ILS is claiming that this is made up and an excuse to impose more oversight or control over their work schedules.
So we need to align all the incentives eh? What about paying a bonus to every stevedore that's a % of every extra dollar of goods brought in to that specific port compared to a rolling average of the previous X years. So working harder, automating unloading etc could all be to their benefit...
I'm skeptical of this kind of deals. They can be Goodharted in both directions - both the metric of their share of work, and the number they're being paid for. Profit for example is trivial to siphon out of the company before being declared profit.
And from another point of view, what did they do to deserve this long term share of profit? To keep things balanced they should take a commensurate pay cut. And if you go there, you can just pay part of the salary in shares, or just make it easier for them to buy shares. Or, if they believe in the company, they can probably already take part of their payckeck and buy shares with it.
We have some of the worst ports in the world by productivity. Comparable with Africa. These are also some of the worst unions out there (why do you think The Wire picked the Stevedore Union, of all Unions, for their Union arc?).
Fire them all and bar them from similar employment, 1981 ATC style. Bring in Army Corps of Engineers. We don't have to live like this.
As always, they want as much as they can get, plus they are anti-automation. Here is the union president in a recent interview flexing by noting the economic damage they can inflict (Biden can force them back to work for 90 days but likely won't, and the union basically says they will work at 1/4 speed if this were to happen):
In terms of how much they make, here is probably a good analogue based on West coast dock workers -- $200K plus around $100K in benefits is common for front line workers, bosses make $300K+ per year:
Will we get a repeat of the air traffic controller strike back in the day? How difficult would it be to replace a dock worker, either with a new employee or with a national guardsman?
That seems very unlikely and not sure on precedent there, other than in 2002 GW Bush used Taft-Harley to compel west coast strking longshoreman back to work. People in the industry this time are expecting several days of strike, with each day causing ~3 days in backup (1 day lost to no work, 2 days to untangle the growing mess).
I don't know the details of this union, but in general employers are legally barred from firing striking unionized employees. So they can go on strike and do huge economic damage and not get fired. Doesn't seem justified to me no matter how little they're getting paid. They could always quit and find another job.
During strikes over "economic issues" (as opposed to statutory "unfair labor practices"), employers can hire permanent replacement workers, subject to vaguely defined limits, and strikers can be laid off to make room for the permanent replacements.
If unionized employees are doing outsized damage when they go on strike, I see a Coasian solution!
I don't know the details and maybe the law gives the unions too much power, but, if so, the problem is bad law not "selfish" workers. Workers should try to maximize their earnings every bit as much as companies should. If the playing field isn't fair, the government has failed.
If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it? What's "justified" got to do with it? Do companies pay their workers what is "justified"?
OTOH, if the unions have too much power, they should be broken up. Same for the ports if they have some sort of monopoly.
a) Employers have the same right (to arbitrarily stop paying their employees at any point to gain leverage in negotiation and force them to accept lower wages)
b) Striking workers don't interfere with workers who choose not to strike, and
c) The employer is free to fire any employee who goes on strike, just as an employee is free to quit if the employer stops paying them.
The laws around unions and collective bargaining have evolved over the past 150 years or so and vary tremendously from state to state in the US. I don't believe there is a one-size fits all solution here. Different rules for different industries might make sense. A smart state government will figure out the optimal rules and a dumb one won't.
No, I would consider that criminal, and I think the law would too. Striking is something most unions can legally do. If you think that gives them an unreasonable amount of leverage, fair enough, maybe it is. Maybe this particular union should not have the right to strike. But I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the rights they do have.
Nobody earns what they deserve, only what they negotiate.
Sure. I'd also consider the (IMO much more common) case of an employer falsely claiming that their employees are fairly paid a negotiating tactic, so it would be a strange asymmetry not to.
Do white Americans have a culture other than "American"? In a thread on the subject of culture last week someone suggested that white Northeasterners have a particular culture. Maybe so, and I'm aware regional subcultures in the rural South exist, but is upper-middle class white urban American a culture? If so, what defines it? If not, does the USA contain some people who belong to a subculture of America and others who do not?
White Alaskans had a very unique culture when I was growing up there in the 90s. Similar to general rural American culture but with some big differences: 1. More libertarian then conservative. 2. LOTS of artists in Alaska, because artists are drawn to the allure of that wild place. Never any problem securing library funding. 3. Extreme drinking culture. I estimate there were six times as many bars per capita. At least. I think only the Great Lakes region exceeds Alaska in alcohol consumption. Our mayor got a DUI and the political consequences were near-zero. 4. Alaskan whites are FAR less insular then you'd expect from rural Americans. Far more accepting of strangers; though they aren't going to greet you with open arms on day one.
I left Alaska in 2005, so some of these trends might be less true today.
From direct experience, I'd say sort of, but in the correlated collection of traits sense as opposed to a real sense of Belonging to a Community. I'm a Californian, Bay Arean specifically, and here in a midwest college town people do seem to know I'm Not From Around Here and I have been accused of being a California stereotype. I think it's more accurately categorized as an Atheist/Hippie synthesis subculture, with heavy white-middle class influence. If that is a culture, it's a very loose and fuzzy one.
There are many identifiable and in some cases overlapping subcultures among Unhyphenated Americans. Bostonians are not Hillbillies are not Texans; Southerners overlap the last two but are a distinct thing on their own, etc, etc. And not every Unhyphenated American who lives in Boston or Appalachia or Texas is a member of those particular subcultures.
Meanwhile, Unhyphenated Americans as a whole are a culture, in the same way that "{X]-Americans" are a culture for many distinct values of X. All of these can be subdivided, but they can also be considered as a whole and will have members who aren't part of one of the subcultures.
Also, "subcuture" is relative. If we're talking about e.g. Hillbillies and Americans, the Hillbillies are a subculture. In other contexts, it makes sense to just refer to them as a culture.
Also also, Unhyphenated Americans are still mostly white, but aren't necessarily white.
It's a great review of a fascinating book, but I don't think it addresses my question because it doesn't say much about people who have been very geographically mobile over the past couple of generations. I don't identify with a particular region of the USA, however I do identify with living in large metro areas.
The resurgence of 1960s racialist outrage in response to George Floyd's treatment manufactured would-be 'progressives' "whiteness".
Most Americans ignore "race", implicitly understanding it's a derogatory social construct the illiberal Left likes to beat us over the head with. If one has to invoke one's race in an argument, they're racist.
"Tell me you've never traveled outside of large cities without telling me you've never traveled outside large cities."
But that's not even accurate, because there are significant cultural differences even between the largest cities. Different foods, different driving habits, different accents, different social customs, different religions. In general, travel a hundred miles and you'll experience different cultures - so long as you get off the highway.
All those things strike me as superficial. Whether I'm in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Austin, I'm going to eat about the same food: steak, seafood, eggs, bacon, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, hamburgers, pizza, sushi, tapas, Brazilian Steakhouse, Taco Bell, subway sandwiches, deli sandwiches... My location won't affect the music I listen to, the books I read or the types of people I spend time with. The main differences between those places that matters to me is the weather.
So you eat at the places you are comfortable eating at, and don't interact with the locals. That's fine, but if you don't experience culture, it's because you have chosen not to experience culture.
Right, but you are talking about sampling other cultures, which I do, but it only makes me a tourist of those sub-cultures, someone spending their weekend in Lafayette eating boudin sausage and listening to a Zydeco band. I'm trying to figure out if *I* exist in a legitimate subculture.
My larger question from last week, and why here I ask about "white" middle-class urban Americans, is whether generic unhyphenated white Americans have an ethnicity. The question of unique ethnicity inexorably led to the question of having a unique culture. Some suggested that of course white Americans have a culture but it varies by region. But as you hint at, local subcultures tend to exist more outside of big cities than inside of them (with plenty of exceptions).
What I really think is that white metro-Americans don't have a distinctive culture separate from non-white metro-Americans. By "metro-American" I mean professional class people who live in cities. Or to make it overly reductive: Blue America.
Maybe you mean the yuppie class. Or, as the bugman likes to call it, "the brahmin caste". Dude has a pseudo-hindi 5-point taxonomy where he breaks down Dems into blacks, latinos, and yuppies -- and Republicans into WASPS and farmers. I've seen taxonomies that are very similar elsewhere, but the bugman's version is top of mind.
Big cities still have their own culture, but it takes a different form. Just observe the different stereotypes of sports fans.
My impressions of some large cities: Boston is nice, and people there are friendly - I'd say it's probably the closest I've encountered to what "Blue America" thinks that "Blue America" is. New Haven and Hartford are, for lack of a better term, skittish/weasely. New York City is full of itself (city that never sleeps my ass - 90% of the city is closed down at 5:15 PM, including stuff like stationary stores) which fancies itself multicultural but is actually a bunch of isolated groups who almost never interact. Pittsburgh is poor people, some of whom have money. Detroit is Moscow in the era of Peter the Great - all the important people have left and everybody remaining behind is throwing a party as everything falls apart around them. Grand Rapids is a real city that deserves to be mentioned with other real cities, as a culture. Chicago is, at least in the minds of its residents, serious business, but is actually just Britain, a giant pile of passive aggression. Seattle is what Chicago thinks it is. Los Angeles is Los Angeles - they'll tell you who they are if you listen, both the good and bad, and it's accurate. Salt Lake City is set in the garden of Eden (seriously, that city and its environs are freaking gorgeous) and the residents are aware of it and appreciate of it, and that was the most annoying city to visit back when I smoked because huge swathes of the city are just plain wholesome and I had to walk a mile out of my way to get a pack of cigarettes. Can't speak to Phoenix. Austin is folk culture slowly being strangled by people who move there for folk culture and then isolate themselves because they don't actually like folk culture (we'll see what it becomes). Dallas is legitimately a city that never sleeps and has strong DoD cultural artifacts, but everybody there thinks they're Texas; Fort Worth is a bunch of people who think they're Texas and they're not half wrong; Arlington is desperately trying to matter while thinking that Burlington Coat Factory is culture. Houston is the most ghetto-ass city I've ever been in, and not necessarily in a bad way. New Orleans is ... I could write paragraphs here, they're more cowboy than Texas and more serious business than Seattle, the most multicultural place I've been - a unique blend of authoritarian good-ol-boy and capitalistic anarchy, with a hefty dose of hoodoo - they are multicultural in a way which New York City utterly fails at, everybody interacts and mixes together. Atlanta is a good ol' boy in business casual, as a culture. Tampa is a bunch of rich people from New England trying to force Tampa to be a real city that deserves to be in this list while everybody else laughs at them (and "everybody else" includes all the New Englanders who previously moved there and eventually gave up), as a culture. Washington DC is "terminally online" as a culture, at least now; I don't know what it used to be like.
Weird. My perception of Boston, and I've only been there a handful of times but have heard the strong opinions of others, is that its residents are the least nice people in America. But perhaps I'm thinking mostly of working-class Boston.
Part of the confusion here stems from the double standard whereby any TV show, movie, song, dance, food, or slang originating from nonwhites is considered part of that particular subculture, but the same things created by white people (of which the vast majority are) are just considered part of general American culture. A song written by a black person is treated as a unique contribution to "black culture," while a song written by a white person is "just" pop or rock or EDM.
White American subculture is so successful that every other subculture in America immediately races to adopt it into their subculture as well, thus making it part of general American culture (by nature of it being so successful). Slang invented by a white person is not "white slang," it's just "slang", and we don't complain when other cultures use our slang. But certain other cultures notably hate this, screaming of "theft" as if they own certain words and phrases like physical possessions.
See also: "American culture" c.f. the rest of the world. American culture (i.e., white American culture) is so successful that it's even pervasive throughout virtually every other country, and yet America is still oft claimed by insecure Europeans to have no culture. Under this paradigm, you can see why - American culture is so successful that it simply *is* world culture, and so "culture" has evolved to now mean "the way you uniquely deviate from the default, background culture." Well, if you're the group that *invented* the world's default background culture, then you won't tend to deviate from that very much.
Definitely! There's the Midwest cultural region, which has a very different culture form the West or New England, and certainly different from the South. They have different values, different mores, different manners, different accents, different foods, etc. My mom's side of the family is originally from Iowa: I can still remember growing up and my grandma telling me to sit on the "davenport".
You can subdivide much deeper than that. The culture of - to pick a state I'm more familiar with - the upper peninsula of Michigan is quite distinct from the culture of the mitten; it's more isolationist and independent. In the mitten, the culture of Grand Rapids is distinct from the culture of Lansing is distinct from the culture of Flint which is distinct from the culture of Detroit. The culture of Traverse City is distinct from the culture of Fishtown.
Food is easy because it tends to be visible from the road. Lansing has olive burgers. Detroit has coney dogs and pizza. Flint is big on fried chicken. Northern Michigan is big on game meats. The central part of the upper peninsula is big on pasties. Per my wife, who is from Michigan, Grand Rapids has no regional food because they're stuck-up assholes (I asked because I couldn't think of any regional foods from that area). Traverse City has whitefish and cherry everything. Fishtown has a wide variety of seafood, big surprise there.
But there are other differences; accents (the "yooper" accent, which itself can be subdivided by region), religion, driving habits (Detroit is the only place I've seen have bumper-to-bumper traffic all running at 80 MPH), etc. A lot of it is easy to miss if you're just passing through.
An observation. I have noticed that non-southern white Americans and the English don't have a *folk* culture. By folk culture I mean for example things like tartans, kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or cowboy boots and country music for southern American whites. They don't have things like folk music and folk dancing. It died out strangely. (Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.)
I think the upper middle class urban culture there assimilated anyone and anything that could be called folk.
These things are generally a reaction to "universal culture" becoming the prestige culture. When the new thing is discontinuous from the old, the old can be kept around as separate, and nationalism provides the motivation to do so. The culture that gradually developed those things before they became "universal", obviously doesnt have a separate "folk" version.
I dont think we should count the upper and lower classes separately. A class is not a society. In many countries, folk culture drew from the lower classes because the upper had already been strongly modernised, but thats not necessary. Third world folk cultures often draw strong influence from old upper class practices.
What you are describing is *material* culture. New England, for instance, has a rich music and dance culture, our own clothing culture (Johnson jackets, basically the whole classic LL Bean catalog is New England folk clothing that's been commodotized), food (anadama bread as an example). That's setting aside Acadian folk culture which exists here as well (la Kermesse).
I think you just don't know about the folk culture that hasn't been popularized.
>Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.
Speaking as a morris dancer (Gog Magog Molly, the Tattered Court Border morris, plus I've dabbled in Cotswold and rapper), I have not idea what you mean by "authentic folk dancing", but I find it hard to imagine a definition that doesn't fit morris.
There are some sides doing dances straight out of Bacon's black book as written, and there are also lots of sides writing their own dances in the same style.
Also, morris is only one corner of the English folk dance and song scene - there are also a lot of local clubs and festivals. It's not nearly as thriving as it is in Ireland or Scotland, but it's definitely there.
Like, upper-middle class urban Americans definitely have a very distinctive culture and it's definitely not a white culture...but it's mostly white, at least for now. Like, if you go to live theater or a pickleball tournament, it's not all white people, but it's mostly white people, some of whom are uncomfortable with how white it is and are covertly recruiting non-white friends to attend.
Race is weird in the US and adding the white bit obscures more than it clarifies. If you ask whether urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, the answer is obvious, but if you ask whether white urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, people get really careful.
One thing about it is that it's not something you can escape from or into. You're in it at work, you're in it at home. You can't say to yourself "This weekend I'm hanging out with people in my subculture" because you are in it even if you try to leave it. Or if you do manage to leave it, you're a tourist, which is the most white PMC thing there is.
Culture is fractal. You can analyze culture at the level of: the Big 4 in Albion's Seed; China-Town in NYC; a specific venue; anywhere in between. However, whereas most other places consciously recognize their cultures, the U.S. has been on a quest to assimilate everyone into a single melting-pot.
> white Northeasterners
> upper-middle class white urban American
the Boston Brahmins, maybe? I bet Steve Sailor would know. Maybe link to the og thread for more context.
There's lots of subcultures, but it's not necessarily easy to identify them. Every area has its own aspects of culture. At the very least, the food is different.
Many of us are white-collar workers who spend a few years here and a few years there, making friends and family with others who do similar. That's a type of culture, but I don't think it is Culture in the deep sense because not much about it has been passed from generation to generation.
Contrast that to say, Judaism, which is a culture that has been around a while.
I have a biotech idea based on some public research (no patents). There is one other company founded a few years ago doing the same thing, but I believe they lack the expertise and background to make it big.
To validate everything i reckon 100k USD could get it done in a year. Everything more could be used to hire a tech to speed up the process even more.
How can I get funding for a project like this? I have written a whitepaper, made a rough budget, etc. But what are the next steps?
On the other hand, it makes it much easier to cook and eat reality. What might be better still would be to cook reality low and slow and then have some nice pulled reality.
"Would it be wrong to suggest America's 3rd-generation spacecraft should have used oxygen from the atmosphere rather than carrying its own fuel in liquid form?" asked Tom apollo-jet-ically.
The steelman argument is that there is no a priori reason to compartmentalize, you should bring your whole self to work. Why would you self censor and hide a part of who you are just because you are in the workplace? That of course works for politics as much as any other important opinion you may have.
The counter argument is of course that politics by nature causes innumerous conflicts. If people could have rational, unpassionate dialogues about politics, then they should. But that's not the world we live.
You could ask this question about more than work. Some people don't even bring their whole self to their _marriage_, much less their family relationships and friendships.
Most forms of human interaction, I would argue, rely on each participant taking on a specific persona that limits aspects of their personality to that particular sphere.
To expand on your counterargument, it makes it difficult to get work done. You end up with things like doctors at Stanford hospital sitting around protesting Israel all day instead of working.
Well if you brought your whole self to work, and your whole self cares more about Palestine than doing your job, then your whole self might decide to protest on the front lawn. Such a person would need to compartmentalize in order to get their work done.
If your whole self is on the front lawn, then there isn’t much left to compartmentalize is there ?
I guess the best thing would be to realize that you have to do your job and to put other things out of your mind while you do. Compartmentalize as you say. If you compartmentalize properly, your whole self is available
Look, when I go to work, I try to do the best job I can, and when I bring my whole self and life to work, that involves the best life possible, which is *definitionally* crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentation of their women.
I notice a certain irony about EA. The central idea was facts, not feelings. And now people report that it is great for their feelings. People say they saved three lives and this has been their greatest life achievement so far and really boosted their self-image and they feel great about themselves now.
I just realized if depression boils down to having a low opinion of yourself, it might be a fix.
Which EA projects are the best for this? I mean, for feeling great about an achievement?
Yes! The whole "if it is true I want to believe it is true" spiel is about aligning one's feelings with the facts!
If someone thinks long and hard and concludes that some activities are more ethical and some are less ethical, is it surprising that they would report greater happiness when they do more of the former and less of the latter?
I had a realization after the pager explosions, which I consider to be one of the most targeted and effective military operations in history, and seeing how few people with a history of saying Israel doesn't do enough to limit civilian casualties respond negatively: the morality of an action depends not only on intent at the micro level, but also the macro level of whether the intent is achievable.
With the Palestinians endless violent struggle is mandated by culture, but might be allowed morally if it had a chance of working, and while it seemed possible that Israel might be destroyed, directly or through siege, you could understand the choice.
But with the Israel I really didn't think it was possible to permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict, and the only hope for solution was to spend a generation trying to effect cultural change, but this level of military competency, both in Gaza but now especially in Lebanon versus a much more powerful opponent has changed my mind. I have been moved much more in the direction of being comfortable with 'let Israel win, and dictate peace terms to Iran, constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there' because for now that seems like an actual possibility, whereas before there seemed to be no resolution, and any violence seemed both pointless and inevitable.
FWIW, I'm generally opposed to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but the pager attacked seemed reasonable to me as far as these things go.
> constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there'
It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR, not the act of war itself, which is firepower-wise not that impressive and is not really the cyberpunk future war attack that initial media reports painted it as.
A lot of Israel's propaganda centers on the image of the pacifist country that hates the "War that was forced upon it" on October 7th and is just working reluctantly to end it as quickly as possible, this kinda goes out of the window when a staggering escalation in a completely different battlefront is met with cheers and candy and fawning admiration for the "creativity" involved from the general populace.
> It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR […]
The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians parading over and spitting on the body of a naked young woman with broken legs and a bullet wound in the back of her neck, and of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around, and yet it didn't deter the Progressive Western Left from cheering for a literal terrorist regime and their civilian enablers.
So no, I don't think "Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street", which approximately zero people heard about, is going to change anyone's mind.
This is really more indicative of your information diligence than the actual spread of the information. Celebrating the mass bombing in Lebanon and giving candy in the street was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency [1]. JTA is no big deal? Well the story was picked up by Times of Israel [2] the next day, and ToI *is* a big deal in terms of audience.
It was mentioned on r/Israel, reddit is kinda of a big deal in the USA, and the subreddit that has the country name is often thought of as an authentic source of info on what's happening.
>The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians
Ohh, the classic move of quoting and unquoting things you don't agree with, very eloquent. Like the rest of the pro-Israel camp, I half-expected you to quote and unquote Palestinians too, the word that is, not the people. (Or should that be "people"?)
The world saw plenty of Hamasniks doing awful shit, true, but the world also saw plenty of Israelis doing approximately 30000/1200 = 25x as much awful shit. It also saw Palestinians gruesomely and inhumanly treated, unimaginably victimized, and their victimizers absurdly claiming that they're defending themselves even while they continue the aggression.
There is a fundamental disconnect between the perceived victimization that the Israeli narrative presents, and the actual victimization that anyone with eyes, ears, and a half-decent internet connection can gauge for themselves.
> of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around
Unlike Israel and its rather special band of supporters, most of the world doesn't share the "New Jew" supremacist bullshit. When you victimize people 100x as much as what some of them once victimized yours, you just become an oppressor by definition, not a Brave and Stunning Uber Giga Chad Chosen People making the Desert Bloooooom (^TM).
In simpler words: Citing the horrors of October 7th will get you nowhere when you have just spent the last year demeaning and cheapening the memory of the victims to justify doing far crueler things to 25x as many victims.
With all this ranting about selected sentence fragments, you completely missed the actual point. It's not about which side is the greater monster in this conflict, but that far more horrifying pictures have been circulated before and they did nothing to change the minds of those who already despised the side of the victims. No amount of candy-throwing Israelis is going to change anyone's opinion about who's in the right and who's in the wrong.
Well duh, those who already made their mind can't be persuaded. How is that a remotely interesting observation?
When I wrote "Doing the damage to Israel's PR", I implicitly meant something like "Reducing the effectiveness of Israeli propaganda among those who are not yet sure which side to support".
I still can't see how Israel would win there. The opponents are much more determined, and virtually impossible to eradicate militarily. I can't see military action even changing the incentives enough to eradicate Hezbollah. It's like Afghanistan in miniature.
Except that Israel isn't trying to occupy Afghanistan, never mind building Afghanistan into a prosperous modern democratic nation. And they aren't going to, even if they do wind up launching punitive or preemptive cross-border raids.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah's clear incentive for the past twenty or so years, has been to sit back and enjoy their cushy gig as part of the ruling coalition of Lebanon, while doing nothing to weaken their place in the intra-Lebanese power balance. Lebanon is a much nicer place to be in charge of than Gaza, and a major war with Israel would imperil that.
Hezbollah is constrained in this by the fact that much of their support comes from people who want them to wage bloody war against the Evil Zionist Jews so they don't have to, and from the Iranian government (but I repeat myself). For most of the past twenty years, the balance between the two is that Hezbollah occasionally shoots rockets at northern Israel or launches small cross-border raids, Israel defeats these and retaliates against some minor front-line Hezbollah targets, and everybody is happy. Well, happy-ish at least. Willing to accept that status quo.
Since 10/7, the pressure from Hezbollah's supporters to show that they are For Real Serious in their fight against the Evil Zionist Jews has increased, so they've been launching more raids and more rockets, and Israel has had to evacuate a strip of territory along the border. But it's still the same dynamic, just dialed up a few notches,
Since the Israelis started killing Iranian generals in Lebanon and Hamas leaders in Tehran, and especially since Iran's attempt at direct retaliation was a humiliating failure, there has no doubt been vastly increased pressure from Iran to Kill More Evil Zionist Jews, Get With the Program Already Hezbollah. The Israelis know this and have been trying to preempt it.
But their satisfactory victory condition is almost certainly a resumption of the status quo ante - Hezbollah living large in Lebanon, and occasionally lofting rocket-powered softballs for Iron Dome to swat down. It is not unreasonable to expect that this may be achieved by some combination of,
A: Hezbollah has taken enough casualties that its supporters accept it as having done all that can be expected of it, and/or
B: The end of major combat operations against Hamas reduces the general demand for Killing Evil Zionist Jews, and/or
C: Hezbollah's leadership learns to fear Tel Aviv more than they do Tehran.
Maybe this won't work, but it's not a foregone conclusion and it's probably worth trying. Hamas has to be destroyed; the Hezbollah threat may still be manageable
I don't disagree with your analysis. I just interpreted OP's "permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict" as really make them stop fighting, and that was the goal I thought was unattainable.
I also recall the recent book review about how Jihadists actually believe in Jihad, which makes military deterrence even more difficult when the opponent is willing to take many casualties and collateral casualties, and also have a much worse individual life for themselves, because they believe in Jihad.
Yeah, it's going to be much easier to deter Hezbollah from launching seriously lethal attacks against Israel, than to deter them from launching any sort of token attacks and instead be absolutely peaceful. They do get an awful lot of money and support from being seen to be part of the fight, and that dynamic is always nonlinear so there's lots of low-hanging fruit to be picked from very little actual fighting.
And yes, belief in Jihad. But it's often the case that one can believe in a Jihad that is best actually carried out in some vaguely-defined tomorrow. Particularly if something else is commanding your attention right now.
Just keep doing what it's been doing. Slowly colonize the west bank, periodically smash Hamas & Hezbollah, annex a slice of Gaza every time there is a surge of violence. In between, keep normalizing relations with non-collapsed neighbors.
It's not a path to peace in 20 years. But there are no such path. It's a path to peace in 80 years.
... assuming the entire world sits back and lets it do that, which is not a foregone premise when we're talking about 80 years. 80 years ago Israel didn't exist.
The trend has been lesser foreign involvement, not more. Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine, Jordan stopped supporting Palestine, Egypt stopped supporting Palestine. In the rest of the arab world, the arab street is still very vocal, but every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do. And amongst the few that still support them, their own international support & arm supply went to shit when the USSR collapsed. Lebanon is a mess and unable to mount a state-level response, Syria not so much but still in a bad shape. Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them kinetically, missile technology.
Serious question since I don't understand agriculture: if you irrigate a big sandy desert then you get wet sand, which is not great for growing plants. What else do you need to do? Import soil?
> Saudi Arabia [...] Jordan [...] Egypt [...] Lebanon [...] Syria [...] Iran
I distinctly remember writing "World", not "Arab World" or "Middle East". Better read more carefully.
> Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine
That's not some shocking new trend.
> Jordan stopped supporting Palestine
Also not a new trend, Jordan was in secret negotiations with the moshav (pre-state Jewish settlement) since before 1948. The anomaly is Jordan joining the 1967 war, which as far as I remember is the only war between Jordan and Israel.
> every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do
Egypt and Turkey are each alone strong enough to make Israel's survival less certain than a coin flip, together they could make its lack of survival a near-certainty.
"But.. But... the rulers" you say, they don't count for shit in the long run. Just 50 years ago (50 < 80) Iran was a liberal pro-western anti-communist bastion that sold oil to Israel and its Shah wasn't afraid to show it, Turkey was the same as recently as... what, the 1990s?
I elaborate more on this in another comment elsewhere in the Open Thread.
> Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them
This doesn't parse grammatically, but in any case, Iran wasn't deterred by Israel's long failed campaign to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons: by some estimates they already got some warheads, by others they're a few years from the first warhead.
Your boy is dead! Hahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha
The cope and seethe is tangible.
Remember all those articles across the last year claiming this was one of the strongest military forces in the Middle East? About how they're sooo much more powerful than Hamas, and Israel needs to be really careful when dealing with them?? "We are strong, we will destroy you, we will kill the Jewish devils!" All "master morality", all the time.
... and then in a period of two weeks, they proceed to demonstrate a comical (but not atypical) level of sheer Muslim incompetence.
And what do they and their allies start saying as soon as this happens? "Oh no, you are killing us, this is bad and evil! Please UN, come save us! You have to stop the Jewish devils!" Huh? Where did that "we will destroy you" energy go? Where'd all that "Allahu Akbar" and dancing in the streets on October 7th energy go? What happened to that? What happened to all that master morality? As soon as you start losing, it's immediately back to slave morality - "we are oppressed, we are the victims of this war that we started!" But yes, keep coping with your cute little Muslim fantasies of the great and powerful caliphate that will surely exterminate the Jews *this time*.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but how is Israel fighting against a much more powerful opponent? And isn’t part of the issue that Israel does occupy territory without granting citizenship?
'hezbollah is a more powerful opponent than hamas, by an order of magnitude' is what I meant. The spycraft involved in infiltrating pager supply chain after they stopped using phones, then when they stopped using pagers blowing up the walkie talkies, and then when they met in person blowing up their leadership, is so far beyond what say, the modern CIA might be capable of doing successfully. It just suggests that establishing deterrence through winning without mass civilian casualties is possible, in a way I didn't think was possible before.
Yes, morally it's a huge issue that Israel occupies territory without granting citizenship. It's hard to judge what is necessary from a military defensive standpoint. Right now probably a lot of settlements are not acceptable. But the main issue is that if Israel 'wins hard' it might move to claim a bunch of additional land, and I was saying that supporting anyone 'winning' requires severe limitations on the dictated terms of peace after.
Oh, I thought you meant more powerful than Israel.
I don’t see a scenario where Israel could ever dictate peace terms to Iran, except where they somehow succeed in getting the USA to fight a war for them.
It's probably wrong to label it "the greatest military operation in the history of the world" because at it's core it's not a military operation but rather an intelligence operation - but in that class, it could plausibly be the currently greatest op, as it's the largest/first/only mass targeted attacks - there have been many targeted attacks and assassinations in the history, there have been quite a few mass attacks, but doing both at the same time is new.
For one, they did not "tamper with a Taiwanese shipment". From what I heard, they set up a convincing fake company to produce pagers only for the purpose of pulling off this stunt. And why is it great? Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
> Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
Can you come up with better evidence that this is what happened apart from believing an army that was repeatedly caught sniping journalists and peace activists in the head then swearing it was a mistake?
Whether or not you care about killing the other side's civilians, it is at least a hell of a lot more efficient if you can manage to target your attack so well that almost everyone hurt or killed by it is actually an officer in the other side's army. Besides which, I imagine Israel isn't wanting to do the curb-stomping thing with Hezbollah (or maybe they'd like to, but they probably can't do it at acceptable cost)--instead, they'd like to be able to make peace with Hezbollah again soon. Targeted attacks that don't kill many civilians make that a lot easier than attacks that kill 100 civilians living in the building to kill the two Hezbollah guys hiding in the basement.
On the other hand, Israel has no interest in (or prospect of) peace with Hamas, so the cost of blowing up a building full of civilians to kill the two Hamas guys hiding in the basement is way lower--it only amounts to concern about the well being of those civilians and international opinion, and it sure doesn't look like the Israeli government is too worried about either of those just now.
Pour one out for all the folks who've been working on supply chain security for the last few years, and have suddenly had all the politicians and voters realize why their work might be important....
Can someone steelman the "people with low empathy will harm others" argument? It sounds like everybody has desires that could harm other people, and empathy keeps us back. My point is that it is possible to not have such desires, and often certain kinds of lack of empathy (spergy, not psychopathy) precisely lead to not having such desires.
Take the most common one: wealth. Beyond comfort and not having to work, its only purpose is to impress other people. But precisely because of my spergy low empathy I do not want to impress other people, I am very little interested in wealth, though the comfort and not working aspect would be nice. But it still a low desire, and ways of getting wealth in ways that would harm other people could land someone in prison or dead, so I am not robbing any banks.
So when you hear stories about psychopaths absolutely backstabbing people for their career for example, think carefully. Why do they care about their career? It is mostly about impressing people. If other people do not matter, careers mostly do not matter. My point is: what you will find is not simply the lack of empathy, but the presence of a dark desire or emotion: desire for power, desire for revenge and so on.
I think the assumption is that people with low empathy will be more likely to do things that unintentionally hurt others, which can be side effects of meeting their basic needs.
It could also involve a low tolerance for or lack of ability to acquire desired outcomes the prosocial or at least conventionally acceptable way, with people with low empathy being more likely to resort to a more accessible way even if it is also more antisocial. I think the prevailing view is that people with low empathy would rate harming others as less important to avoid.
Like you mentioned, the desire for something - the unmet need or want - would still be there.
Watch nurses and aides with frail elderly people who are still mentally intact The empathic ones get it that these people are still in there, thinking and feeling, inside the grotesque slow motion catastrophe of their body’s deterioration, and they get it that those bodies are in pain. They are patient, and reasonable, remember the person’s interests, and chat with them. The unempathic ones see a bony, entitled pain in the ass, and yank them around. The “dark desire” the unempathic staff have is nothing more than a desire to sit down, rest and relax. Pretty much everyone has that desire sometimes when working.
Surely the argument is not that all people with low empathy will harm others, but rather that people with low empathy are more likely to harm others. Or, more precisely, that at a given level of desire to do an act which will harm others, those with greater levels of empathy are less likely to perform that act.
And, is all the research things like the expansion of circles of empathy wrong? How do you explain why we don't torture cats for entertainment anymore, or why norms of respect for human rights have evolved? Are people less likely to have dark desires or emotions, or less likely to act on those desires and emotions.
I think we can try to test that. Looking at the gigantic difference of reaction between torturing animals for fun vs. 99% of the people consuming animal products. This looks like reduced dark desires vs. not really having much empathy for the case when the non-dark desire for bacon causes harm indirectly.
I actually am not exactly clear on what you are claiming, but, regardless, it seems to me that you are comparing two incommensurate things: 1) torture of an animal; and 2) killing an animal, which can of course be done in a more or less humane fashion. As the military well knows, it is easier to kill at a distance than to kill close up, because it is more difficult to have empathy for a victim whom you cannot see.
Moreover, there has been an increasing trend toward trying to reduce the amount of suffering experiienced by animals in the course of food production. Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_12 That seems like an increase in empathy, as opposed to a reduction in dark desires (note that, as I understand you claim, a reduction in dark desires requires a change in human nature).
Do you know much about how pork products are produced in the USA? It's really not a stretch to say that bacon *is* commensurate with torture of an animal.
If you'd like to read more, I recommend checking out Bentham's Bulldog.
IIRC, in "A Painted House" by Grisham, a boy was disgusted by butchering a pig, but still wanted to eat bacon afterward. Fiction, yes, but illustrative, I think. I've never seen an animal butchered, and have no desire to inflict pain on animals, but accept that their deaths provide food for me.
A few thoughts without any specific order, far below the standard you asked for:
1) hurting others (at any of many possible different degrees) is fairly common. If you don’t care, you’re obviously more likely to do it.
2) harm can often strike beyond its intended target
3) if other people do not matter, then you do not want them yelling at you to obey all of a myriad contradictory and/or brain-dead (or at the very least annoying) commands. The easiest way to avoid that is to raise in the hierarchy.
4) similarly, you also want to be able to tell anyone that comes to bother you to f*** off. This is a sure way to get fired if you’re low in the corporate ladder (barring labor laws) but far less so if you’re a manager.
5) wealth is not only passive comfort or security, it’s only an increase in the number and range of the desires that you can afford without needing to check your budget afterwards.
[this last point is not really related but I recently realized it and I thought I’d share this piece of very unoriginal wisdom.]
Does anyone have any experience with someone close to them being drawn into radical politics or conspiracy theories through social media? I would think this is a common problem these days with a standardised framework to deal with it, but I can't find much useful online. Maybe I'm missing a few key words or search terms?
Thanks to everyone who replied. I should (?) have said that we are not from the USA and have no special connection to American politics. I'm also not really interested in taking special action to persuade this person to return to normal views. I really wanted to ask about how to deal with it personally. It feels like suffering a loss, a small grief, where someone with whom I shared a lot with has suddenly become distant.
I'm a younger millennial (born in '92). Tons of my peers became some degree of radicalized - almost exclusively far-left - beginning with the lead-up to the 2016 election. I noticed it especially beginning in 2018 and it seems to start to be cooling off now. It was really bad. I observed this while living in NYC and later in Sacramento and SF.
Unfortunately, yes; my eldest son. I don’t know about a standardized framework to deal with it though. The one thing I have noticed is, he does have friends who completely agree with him about all that crap but they don’t let it stop them from getting up and going to work in the morning. So I think it’s a question of what kind of emotional attachment do you bring to the things you believe are going on that you have no control over. It’s one thing to say yes we all know little green men blew up the World Trade Center and that the whole moon landing took place in a TV studio, and then shrug and get on with your life. It’s another thing entirely to use it as an excuse for not doing anything for yourself because what’s the point?
Trying to slap it out of him, or argue it out of him was completely barren as a strategy. Counterproductive in fact because it only made him dig in more. I slowly realized that it was very important for him to show me how smart he was by getting me to notice something that he thought was a great revelation.
If you mean that his friends believe the stuff but are going to work, but your son believes it and is not going to work or do anything else, you might consider dropping for now the discussion of his conspiracy theories, but insist that he work.
Good advice, but we are well past that. I gave up trying to talk him out of his theories a long time ago, and whether he goes to work or not is no longer my concern; he is 45 yrs old and has two children of his own (who are supported by their mother who is no longer with him.) It is too bad, but I have been through the mourning of it, and everyone has their life to live, right? I pay attention to the grand kids and don’t give him a hard time. There is a lot of bg to this which would round out the story but its a bit much for a public forum.
Thanks but he is out on is own (45 years old and a father himself) and I am at peace with it. I wish for a better outcome, but I want peace in the Middle East as well, if you get my drift.
Bipartision communication has broken down and I dont think they want you to try anymore, well see how it goes this thanksgiving, but I expect "cut ties with your racist far-right, q, anti-feminist relatives who havnt instantly supported harris" will be tried(and fail, hard) this year https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/holiday-family-vacation/
The art of productive conversations is mostly about actually listening, especially when you dont want to; the shit they push out(the ai's, thought-stopping talking points) are actively harmful and what if the conspiracy theorists are convincing this year?
I guess a question you ould be asking yourself is it just a harmless hobby for them, or is it becoming a dangerous problem.
e.g. The kind of people who try to shoot Trump are pretty rare (we're at, like two guys out of the entire population of the US), and from the same sample size available, appear to be a fairly distinct personality type from the fanatically-loyal-to-the-Democratic-party guys.
I've seen it happen 2016-ish. Basically lefties were doing the classic mean kid tactic, where there is a supposed consensus against what you say but they won't even tell you what this consensus even is, implying you will never get it, you will never be capable of redemption. You know, the "wow, just wow" types of answers or just quoting a sentence without comment. These are emotional superweapons and can super enrage people.
So very much an Elon Musk type story. Starting out as something like a centrist anti-SJW libertarian and getting more and more sucked into Alt-Right online circles.
I don't think there is a standard framework yet. I believe in the politics is a set of random alliances thing. Usually people spot something in one coalition they do not like, and then they reject that whole coalition and seek out the other one.
The radicalisation itself is just the bubble effect I think. Social media spontaneously generates cult-like bubbles.
In the past I've created several video essays, mostly focused on SSC/ACX articles but recently I did something a little different.
I created a video about the concept of voting for the "lesser evil" and look at the arguments for this position. All of the arguments made are technically nonpartisan (they work just as well for either side) but the presentation definitely leans more partisan than my past videos, so don't watch if that will upset you.
I'm most interested in counterarguments or key points I have missed.
How much should Israel care about public opinion? Israel is not an unknown quantity. Anyone who follows the news probably has their opinion of Israel made up by now. Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do. People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West, where we are far removed from the actual conflict(How many people care about BLM and Ukraine today compared to 2020 and 2022)?
Scope matters. The opinions on Israel people have made up will depend on how Israel has acted in the past. Someone who likes Israel and expects them to conduct 50 airstrikes, may stop liking Israel if they conduct 5000 airstrikes instead.
For example, a friend of mine who is generally pro Israel (I think he even wanted to work for the Israeli military when he was younger?), has seemed a lot more down on them this past year. I think this is because he finds their recent conduct excessively brutal.
I’m not going to talk about Israel specifically but even undemocratic superpowers like Russia and China care about public opinion to some extent and put resources into PR, answering or silencing critics, supporting friendly voices, etc.
In fact, Russia and China have had a lot of success recently in exploiting Amercia's support of Israel to make themselves more popular in "the global south".
It sounds like you just invented geopolitical Solipsism, and are asking why it's not the case that it's a winning strategy?
Israel needs the world. I think this is self-evident enough that it doesn't need elaboration, but if it's not then I would be happy to elaborate, starting with - for example - Israel importing Indian manual workers to replace Palestinian workers after October 7th, and ending with Israel's tech industry (disproportionally startups) which is utterly dependent on Silicon Valley's VCs for funding and (eventually) for acquisition by the bigger American companies.
Given that Israel needs the world, it cannot afford to piss off the world. Yes, it's often the case that there is a disconnect between citizenry and government, and citizenry can often be pissed off while government and/or capital still do what they want. Still, Israel is playing the long game, and in the long run having a ticking time bomb in the form of angry mass of citizenry who advocate for Boycott Divestment Sanctions is not a winning strategy.
> People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West
Spans are characterized by length, so you probably meant to say "short", not small.
But no problem, that's exactly what Pro-Palestinian advocacy is for. The hurdle was anticipated in advance and found to have a solution. The solution is.... talking/writing about Israel's crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Not exactly a big-budget endeavor.
> How many people care about BLM
BLM didn't have 41K casualties, from which (according to the IDF's own numbers) no less than 23K are civilians.
> Ukraine
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War, 11K civilian Ukrainian are confirmed dead, from February 2022 to December 2023. In 2 years of vicious fighting (Which included urban battles that probably make the Gaza war look like a playground fight), the supposedly evil Russia led by Big Baddie Putin killed less than half of what the Most Moral (^TM) state killed in less than a year of guerrilla fighting.
So yeah, not comparable, and therefore expected to have different outcomes.
> How much should Israel care about public opinion?
Immensely, the belief jews are the eminent victim is only a finite resource, it can and has run out for some members of the public. I believe isreal should avoid public polls on "is it rape if its during war", believe america when it say "we want to stop being world police and leave the middle east" and see how they can make ties with turkey, ideally 10 years ago if they dont want to instantly die from being friendless in the middle of the center of Muslim extremism.
America can pull out of the middle east faster if theres clear evidence of genocide and turkey will eventually be the regional power, its *DUMB* to be insulting them, and turkeys concerns should very much be handled behind closed doors
The belief that Jews are the eminent victim is a finite resource, yes, but is it a *valuable* one? It seems to always run out right when the Jews try to effectively defend themselves against those who woukl victimize them.
Maybe they can go for a different image than "eminent victim", one that will be of more use to them going forward,
I mean... it's Israel's propagandists that continue to go on and on about how October 7th was literally the Holocaust and how everyone upset that Gazan babies are being murdered is the second coming of Hitler Muhammed, I guess we can start by convincing them first to quit the "Eternal Eminent Victims" schtick.
I would believe that the only reason isreals alive is america-the-world-police "greatest ally" talk, and that "greatest ally" talk comes from the eminent victim status of jews.
That was true fifty years ago, when being invaded and conquered by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et al was still a realistic possibility and American weapons in mass quantity were necessary for Israel's defense. But those nations (and their friends elsewhere in the Arab world), seem to have mostly given up on that plan, and the remaining threats are plausibly ones Israel can handle without overt foreign assistance if they need to.
Each year theres more 3rd worlders who get a cellphone for the first time, and chips are plateauing with iran producing some level of drones; eastern europe(who are more racist to jews then the west and america) is more developed then the bombed out and commie remains of the euro suicide event; etc etc
A solo isreal will get weaker over time, and I have doubts america could invade iran, isreal with its tiny population? Nah, if america isnt making iran maintain plausible deniability why wouldnt iran just escalate and bleed isreal dry, without the american lead economic system *actively* trying to make iran weaker
Ending slavery, trying to prevent the European suicide event know was "world wars"(for the worse admittedly), free trade when the super power creating a golden age(as opposed to say, Mayan blood rituals, rome population being 70% slaves and some of them doing blood sports, or just being pirates and stealing anything that moved)
Some level of morality in evident in the morden world, and has had fantastic results. I think the cia are the worse people on earth actively selecting for psychopaths, but they have an image to maintain for the armed and often enough, angry, tax cattle who out number them 1000 to 1.
Purely hypothetically, america empire doesn't have have tv shows of captured 3rd worlders being thrown into a cage with wild animals. The past was darker then people will admit to, even if the world is worse then advertised its still better then the past horrors.
Okay, fair enough, the lack of a tv show of the kind you describe IS evidence in the direction I asked for. I also do not claim the American empire is the worst in human history, or even close to it, which seems to be what you rebutted.
What I AM saying is US foreign policy seems sufficiently insulated from ephemeral domestic opinion to allow alliances with less-than-savory groups, including Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, just to pick examples in the same region as Israel. Israel becoming one of them doesn't strike me as particularly likely to dramatically alter US policy.
Iran is never going to be the friend of the US. Both because they hate America for historically supporting the Shah and because the US sees the potential for Iran to achieve hegemony in the region as a threat to their global order. Iran is the primary supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, thus Israel will always be the enemy of our enemy no matter what actions the Israeli government takes. I think the US hegemony established post-WWII is so ingrained in the power structures of the federal government that maintaining it is largely insulated from politics. The democrats might have to pay lip service to anti-Israel elements of the electorate, but I would be very surprised if the US policy towards Israel is ever materially altered.
The public opinion of Cuban-Americans in Florida seems historically to have had an effect on American policy re Cuba, so it is not impossible that the public opinion of Muslim-Americans in Michigan might someday have an effect on policy toward Israel. At the very least, it is a possibility that Israel should be cognizant of.
I believe turkey to be wildly successful morally compare to the middle east and the saudis are playing a similar game of small psychopaths playing tax cattle management games. Im putting forward a thoery thats very much includes distracting magic tricks that works every time for most dumb fucks, oooo look at the cgi of "the line" ignore the unironic shria law; oooo look at these elections ignore why the real person dropped out for party bullshit; oooo jurys ignore the selection process; oooo gun rights, ignore the database thats used to collect gun during hurricanes .
War-gore that genocides produce, will hopefully not be magic tricked away any time soon; cause the ability to feel anger is the only way to be free.
>Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them
It certainly seems that expressions of that supposed hatred have increased in reaction to Israeli actions. So, unless you think that all those people secretly hated Israel all along, this seems like a dubious claim.
As for the broader question, in October of 2023, Saudi Arabia seemed to be on the verge of recognizing Israel. Now, they have announced that they won't do so unless a Palestinian state is established.
And, btw, let's not assume that anything Israel has done since October 7 has been in its best interests, or that of its people. That is very much an open question. What is not an open question is whether it has been in the best interests of its current leadership.
>Silencing Hamas and Hezbollah is, in fact, in their best interests,
Yes, but the means they chose might not be in their best interests. Especially given that that the means they chose could easily give rise to grievances that could engender greater support for Hamas, or a worse replacement, in the future. The choice was never between 1) do nothing; and 2) what they have actually done.
>because it is a matter of pure survival
1. Unlikely. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has the ability to threated Israel's survival
2. But, the additional enemies they have made might eventually threaten its survival.
3. And I note you have not addressed the interests of the people of Israel, as distinct from the interests of the state. There are lots of potential futures where the state surrvives, but the people are immiserated. A country costantly at war is rarely a pleasant place to live.
>(And no, no Arab country is going to invade Israel to come to the aid of an Iranian puppet militia currently getting its shit pushed in.)
So, it sounds like you agree that their survival is not at stake.
>Israel does not get to choose whether or not it is at war.
And yet they have chosen not to bomb Tehran. And they have chosen to use far more discriminate violance in Gaza then they could. Israel has choices, and it had choices after 10/7. As I said before, it is not clear that the path they have chosen is the best one for either the state or its people. Nor the hostages. But it was 100% the best one for Netanyahu, who would otherwise have been held account for the national security failure on 10/7, among other things.
"Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do."
> Why should the opinions of the Muslim Street and Western college campuses be the opinions decisive for guiding Israel's decision-making?
YouTube channel RobWords (linguistics channel with focus on English and Germanic languages more generally) has an episode where he said exactly that, English expressions of the form "<thing><adjective>" are in fact not native to the language's Germanic grammar.
If their actions are visibly different now than in the past, people are right to update their beliefs.
Besides, it's always a matter of degrees. Just like some people will vote Republican/Democrat no matter what happens, other people hang in the balance, and most would eventually change their mind given extreme enough scenarios.
Most who has been following the news for the past 20 years probably have made up their mind by now like you say, but there is always a new generation forming their opinions now.
The public opinion of Israel (and Netanyahu in particular) has certainly deteriorated over the last year, far outside "Muslim Street and Wester college campuses" in my estimation. Now, how much they *should* care about that is another question that I'll leave for others to answer.
People are not good at dealing with numbers, for this reason doing more or less of the same kind of thing does not matter much for reputation. Doing a new kind of thing (blowing up pagers, apparently two kids and a doctor dead), now that draws attention and ire.
If I was the advisor of a hypothetical evil supervillain, my advice would be pick one evil thing and just do it over and over and do not get creative. People become desensitized, and will be like "oh he did that again, must be another Tuesday".
The recent "blowing up pagers" thing has probably hurt Israel's reputation more than a conventional air-bombing that killed thousands would. Why? Because people are used to Israel doing air-bombings, but the pager thing is something new that raises new concerns.
"The handling of words that existed and is now lost was due to being brought up on Cicero. They all got Ciceronian syntax in their heads and it was so much in their heads that they could bring it out extempore in the way we can't now."
All the writing teachers I’ve had which include some reasonably big names say yes, you need to read the good stuff. Some advocated deliberately emulating admired authors as a practice.
I don't think memorizing is important, but reading good poetry and prose definitely makes people better writers. (But only if they like the poetry and prose -- otherwise, it doesn't stick to the ribs.). You don't only learn how to trace new kinds of fractals and paisleys with your words, you also learn new mental moves and thought ornaments. The philosophers and writers I most loved in college sort of rewired my mind, including my prose-making mind.
It certainly helps LLMs, so it seems unlikely not to help people. The question is whether it is an efficient use of effort. Many writers think it is better to spend the effort or time on writing.
I don’t think it’s an either/or question. It’s hard to get better at writing if you don’t write, but there is a lot to be gained by studying how people who do it well, do it.
There’s also the issue of what you are writing for. Is it an essay? Is it a novel? Is it a play? They make very different demands.
As with so many things, I think it is both. In writing, you get practice, and practice makes you better. And in reading, you see how other people do it, and get an intuitive sense of some good things to do and perhaps some bad things to avoid, and adapt them naturally into your own style.
I see no relationship between what is good for LLMs and what is good for people, whether positive or inverse.
All lighting should be warm lighting; streetlights, inside of fridges, all of it shouldn't tell me to stay awake longer, so called cool lighting ~~creepy, sublimity lighting~~ should be rare.
This is effective alturitism because its tech related and theres science that says sleep is important.
At home I have two-circuit track lighting. One track is for high-lumen 5000+K lights that I use during the day, the other track is for dimmable 2700-K lights that I use at night. At this point, all are high-CRI LEDs, but some of my lamps are incandescents of one variety or another. And all my nightlights are red.
Agreed. This opinion seems to be something more and more people are (finally) picking up on. I remember in the mid-late 2010s when they started replacing all the streetlights in my area from the warm orange lighting to clear bulbs and how bad it looked. It's so blatantly off-putting, can't believe this kind of lighting is so commonplace.
For nighttime and evening illumination, for street lights, and especially for nightlights and bedside reading lights, I agree with you. I actually go a bit further and use red or amber light sources for the latter purposes.
For task lighting and general daytime indoor illumination, you usually want something that's a close to natural daylight as possible. Color temperature is one aspect of this, but far from the only important one.
Color temperature (and the associated descriptors, with "warm" ironically referring to lower temperatures while "cool" refers to higher temperatures) is a way of expressing the distribution of light across the spectrum as a single scalar. It's based on the emission spectrum of an ideal "black body" incandescent light source. But the shape of the emission spectrum matters, too.
Natural daylight, as filtered through a clear sky, is relatively even throughout the visible spectrum, with a color temperature of between 4000K and 6500K. You get lower (4000-5000K) temperatures from direct sunlight, since the higher wavelengths are scattered by the atmosphere (producing the blue of the sky). When the sun's lower in the sky, you get more scattering because the light is taking a longer path through the atmosphere, and thus the direct sunlight is a lower temperature.
Incandescent and halogen bulbs (same basic concept, with a moderately different implementation) produce a smoothly sloping spectrum concentrated at lower wavelengths. They tend to be a lot "warmer" than other light sources because getting higher color temperatures out of an incandescent bulb requires a correspondingly hotter filament.
CFLs (and I assume tube fluorescents as well, since it's the same technology in a different shape) typically produce a few tall, narrow spikes. The phosphor compounds are choses to produce spikes that are pretty close to the three basic colors that most human eyes can sense, especially the red and yellow spikes, but the blue ones are off by enough to be perceptible. "Cooler" CFLs have more of the blue spike, so they're off by more.
Older and cheaper LED bulbs produce a wide, smooth bell-ish curve peaking around green and yellow wavelengths, plus a relatively narrow blue spike (not as narrow as CFL spikes) for blue. And you get higher color temperatures by making the blue spike bigger, but that gives you a less even color distribution.
Newer and more expensive LED bulbs still have a blue spike, but it's smoothed out quite a bit with less of a valley between the spike and the curve. The overall effect of these is pretty close to daylight at the right color temperature.
I may be alone in the entire world on this, but I actually prefer bright, cool lighting. It calms me down in a way that warm lighting just doesn't. Sure, it's not great for sleep, but most of the day I want to be awake, and when I want to sleep I just turn off the light.
I posted a response on his LW thread (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qLMF25s3ctCpgx7e) but thought it would also be interesting to solicit ACX reader opinions on the questions I raised, so here's my slightly edited cross post of those questions:
1. Pursuing your obsession seems like a great strategy, but how do you find good obsessions? Is it "just" a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas that can lead to a Great Project?
2. The point that you can become world-class in most fields in a matter of years without prior expertise seems super important too. But: on your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the "middle-competence trap" (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you've gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can't seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others-- maybe for example it is "just" a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I'm too much of a generalist to do that-- but it's been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing for excellence.
Frankly, I think this downplays the role of inherent ability. Sometimes our bodies and brains are simply not suited to becoming world-class at something. As Shel Silverstein so memorably put it:
I like the words "middle-competence", that seems a lot like what I have. I may be better at some things than 99% or maybe even 99.9% people, but that's not very useful, because there are people out there who are visibly 100x better than me. And I don't think it is realistic for me to get to their level.
One possible approach is, if you can't excel at one thing, try to excel at a *combination* of things. You may be better than 99% of people at X, and maybe better than 90% at Y, but together it could make you a world expert at "X+Y".
You need to find something where one person being good at "X+Y" is much better than merely having two people in a team, one who is good at X and another who is good at Y. Otherwise you could simply pay someone to do the other thing; there is no need to be an expert at both.
The people that are world class in something tend to be obsessed with it so much so that this question of choosing which field to pursue doesn’t really occur to them. In fact, the whole idea of “being world class in something” as an abstract ideal has very little to do with the formation of actual world class people, and is more of a hobby game of intellectuals.
For your particular situation, you should stop worrying about being world class, and just work very hard at the thing you find interesting or compelling.
The Economist in the current issue puts some numbers on the notion that peak-woke has passed, e.g.:
"We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left."
"Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question."
"we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
"We found largely the same trend in television, by applying the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC, MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books, using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week between 2012 and the middle of this year. Mentions of woke words in television peaked in 2021. In popular books the peak came later, in 2022, with only a small drop in 2023 followed by a much greater fall so far in 2024."
"Calls for academics to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in 2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these calls came from the right, not just from the left.) A similar database, compiled by the College Fix, a conservative student newspaper, finds 2020 was the peak in calls for scholars to be censored or cancelled."
"Wokeness is also in retreat in corporate America, even though it appeared there only relatively recently. Mentions of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021, by which point they were 14 times more common than in early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-research company. They have since begun to drop sharply again. In the most recent data, from the second quarter of 2024, mentions were only around three times higher than before Mr Floyd’s death."
If things shifted so much in three years, who's to say it won't go in the opposite direction in the next three years. Maybe the peak woke will be reached in 2027, maybe 2030, and so on. Woke might go up, decline a bit, then go up, and then a decline a bit again, giving the illusion of decline, all the while actually increasing over the long run. In my opinion, all measuring institutions and commentators could use a bit of humility when it comes to time. We really cannot declare anything with much certainity.
Want to try to think of some irritating possibilities? I suggest the successor to the wokies will claim they are "living with the heart and mind interwoven," and that everybody else is "stuck in heart" or "stuck in mind." Or maybe the populace will go small, and it will be something about toe hygeine: "Pink and Clean." Oh wait,, another one's coming to me. How about "Deep Obedience". People always drive the speed limit, never jaywalk and call out those who do, on the grounds that these regulations may not all make sense, but regulations in general are a good thing, and deeply moral people will follow them until we manage to get better ones.
Woke itself bears a lot of similarities to what was called 'political correctness' back in the 90s. By the mid-90s, many of us thought that the excesses of political correctness had been beaten back, partly due to the efforts of popular comedians lampooning political correctness. Maybe it was different in the academic world of the late 90s, but for the rest of us, political correctness had seemingly been defeated... only to come back much stronger in the 00s and 10s in what would first be called "social justice activism" and later "woke".
So at least with *this* particular social movement, I'm hesitant to believe a little bit of decline over a few years means it's going away. I hope it is going away, or at least declining to a point where it's worst excesses are removed. But I have my doubts that we're there yet.
Political correctness wasn't defeated, it won; the substantive social norms it pushed for were adopted.
Like the men's rights movement (which also won, in that the substantive social norms being pushed for were adopted), the public often remembers them as the soundly-defeated ideological villains even as it already adopted basically everything they pushed for.
Movements exist and gain attention for a reason. There's almost always some kernel of truth in there, even if it's completely overshadowed by the way its proponents talk about it.
I would actually hope that society could take the good parts of each movement and dump the bad parts, that's pretty ideal. I think that's actually the primary purpose of Democracy - giving a voice to those that have a grievance. Whether that's the labor movement (propelled by Socialism and Communism, both of which were dropped in favor of things like the 40-hour workweek and OSHA), or Men's Rights, or whatever.
I think this looks more true than it is owing to survivorship bias; see, for example, the massively popular anti-Masonic movement of the (19th?) century. Additionally, movement of the Overton Window means that, over a relatively short (100 years or less) timeframe, all social changes resulting from movements will look like progress.
Pick an issue the men's rights movement took a side on, and see where society stands on it now.
For an example, a big item in the Men's Rights Movement was the establishment of domestic abuse shelters for men (a prominent activist in the MRM committed suicide, purportedly over depression over the fact that he didn't see that the world would ever change). Texas, to pick a state not at all at random, established its first domestic abuse shelter for men in 2017. Today, the idea that men can't be victims of domestic abuse would be considered offensive in polite society; twenty years ago, suggesting men -could- be victims was considered offensive.
(This only definitively extends to the US, mind, I cannot comment on affairs elsewhere due to lack of familiarity - but I will note that Sweden opened a male rape clinic in 2015, so I do not think the phenomenon is strictly limited to the US)
Well, in its earliest forms, political correctness was mostly about shifting language. It was about getting rid of certain words and replacing them with others.
A lot of this did happen, at a formal official level. But informally, there wasn't much change, at least for a lot of us there wasn't.
So I guess you could say that political correctness won at a formal level, but at an informal level people could still speak in a relaxed 'shooting the breeze' way and that informal level is probably what mattered most to people.
I am very curious why you think the men's rights movement won. Has there been a change in how often fathers win custody battles, or how assets are divvied up in the event of a divorce? I don't remember hearing anything huge on that front, but I admit I haven't followed it closely in awhile.
I did some digging on that, which produced a wide array of alleged statistics not having any clear provenance. I am not finding much that seems to be based on authoritative sources.
One challenge seems to be that these subjects are governed by state laws/courts and the available state-level data is not consistent in either categorizations or frequency of release to the public.
Two factoids which do appear to be backed by actual sources include that 90 percent of all child-custody decisions are arranged by the parents without going to court; and that of those which do end up in court the percentage of custody awards going to fathers has risen somewhat (from 16 percent to 20 percent) since the mid-1990s.
I invite you to go through their page and evaluate how many of their policy positions, today, would be remarkable (or, even better, how well received a person would be in their social group for publicly opposing these policy positions). Remember - this is a group that was and is widely hated for their ideology.
I want to start a gene bank for humans, with the goal of preserving human genetic and phenotypic diversity for future generations. There are many gene banks for plants and animals, but none for humans! I made a website for the project that lays out the motivation and the rough plan: https://www.humangenebank.org/
I’d love to get your feedback! I tried to be open, honest, and non-offensive in describing my thoughts and motivations, but I haven’t shared this with anyone yet, so there’s probably lots of room for improvement.
I expect that the concept will rub some people the wrong way, but I’m also confident that many will be enthusiastic about it, including people who are able to fund it.
Please get in touch with me if you have any feedback or if you want to help me get this off the ground! Down to chat in person with anyone in the bay area. At some point I may ask you to spread the word, but for now I’m more interested in feedback on how the framing can be improved. The goal is not to appease everyone, but to get potential investors on board.
I've noticed a bizarre trend where someone will ask a question, and another person will pose it to a Large Language Model, paste the response, and openly state that's what they're doing. It seems they honestly don't understand how stupid this is, so here is my explainer:
The bit in *Galaxy Quest* where Sigourney Weaver's character is the only one who can talk to the computer was *a joke.* It was *intentionally stupid* that someone would design a user interface that way, and the joke is that the Thermians mindlessly copied it without understanding the in-universe purpose: Weaver's character is *actually* on the show because she has boobs.
For this reason, actual LLMs are *not* designed so that only one specific person can talk to them. If I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly. Inserting a human middleman between me and the LLM provides *negative* value. You are currently *less* useful than the character in the Star Trek parody: either post boobs or go sit in the corner and think about what you did.
Many people don't have paid subscriptions for the frontier models. So this can provide value.
Also, some people just don't think to ask a LM. I am also guilty of this. I should try using LMs to answer my question before I bother a human. But I don't. Just like when Wikpedia was new, I haven't gotten into the habit of actually using it yet. Trivial inconveniences abound. E.g., I should learn to prompt better.
There are many stupid/inagentic people on the Internet who do not know how to access LLMs. The fact that a person is stupid enough to not know the answer to the question they're asking is circumstantial evidence that they are also one of the too-dumb-to-use-LLMs people. That an interlocutor does it for them therefore is indeed a service, and that interlocutor is being laudably transparent by showing their method.
I have introduced a lot of not-book-smart people to ChatGPT and they are usually very happy: they don’t understand fractions but they want to plan a meal, or they are happy to find “someone” who is willing to explain everyday things at their level. It is very liberating to them.
I probably am too stupid to ask an LLM for an answer, but that's also because I am too stupid to believe The Computer Is Your Friend and I wouldn't trust any bollocks the thing spews out.
I can only speak for myself, but often (and perhaps most of the time) when I ask a question, it's not because I don't know what google/wikipedia/LLMs have to say about it. It's because I want to hear what friends/family/coworkers/internet people have to say about it.
There are many people who are too smart to want to access LLMs. That's why they're trying to access other smart human beings, and it's annoying when stupid human beings assume that they should be accessing LLMs.
This. The current generation of LLM at least, is defined by mediocrity. And yes, there are sub-mediocre people too stupid to realize they could step up to mediocrity by asking an LLM for the answers. But there are also smart people who know that what the LLM can give them would be a step *down* from what they can get by answering the question themselves or asking other smart people.
The annoying ones are the smart lazy people who will settle for mediocrity because it is fast and obsequious, and want the rest of us to do so as well.
In my defense, I am one of those people who are too stupid/inagentic to use LLMs, confident that my "moron" position on the moron-midwit-genius bell curve meme yields me a directionally correct course of action in the end.
The Orange Catholic Bible has all the answers I need, I tell'ya'what.
**Rebuttal to "Negative Value" Commentary on LLM Usage**
*Written by ChatGPT*
The post you're referencing makes some compelling and humorous points, using *Galaxy Quest* as an analogy to critique people who serve as intermediaries when interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) like me. However, the argument oversimplifies and misunderstands the broader context in which intermediaries and LLMs operate, missing some of the nuances involved in the interaction between technology and human facilitation. Let's unpack this.
### 1. **The Purpose of an Intermediary Is Far from Redundant**
While the analogy with *Galaxy Quest* provides a lighthearted comparison, it doesn't accurately map to real-world use cases of LLMs. Weaver's character repeating what the computer says is indeed a joke within the film, but this kind of interaction model isn't inherently "stupid" when applied to modern communication technologies.
In many contexts, intermediaries do not merely repeat what an LLM says verbatim; rather, they serve as curators, interpreters, and even augmenters of information. The human intermediary adds value in the following ways:
- **Contextualization**: Humans who facilitate LLM queries often have a deeper understanding of the specific question being asked and can frame the output accordingly. A person might know more about the asker's background, needs, or the exact domain of inquiry, ensuring that the response aligns better with the user's expectations.
- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.
- **Moderation of LLM Limitations**: LLMs are not perfect. They occasionally generate false, misleading, or irrelevant information. A human intermediary who filters responses can catch these errors and help provide the most accurate or useful answer.
Much like how technical support personnel bridge the gap between software and a lay user, people who use LLMs on behalf of others can enhance the utility of the information by reformatting it to suit the context in which it's needed.
### 2. **Expertise Is Not Universal**
Another point of contention in the post is the idea that everyone should directly query the LLM themselves. However, not everyone may be adept at interacting with these models effectively. There is a certain amount of skill in crafting precise prompts to yield high-quality results. Just like not everyone is a search engine optimization expert, not everyone is skilled at engaging LLMs optimally.
An intermediary with expertise in prompt design can extract more valuable or specific answers than someone without that experience, creating an interaction that is more productive for the end user. This is particularly useful in professional contexts, where time is money, and getting the best answer in the shortest time is the priority.
### 3. **Facilitating Access to the Technologically Disconnected**
There is also the consideration that not everyone has access to the tools, platforms, or knowledge needed to use LLMs directly. For example, in community forums or message boards, people may not have accounts or familiarity with LLMs. Inserting a "human middleman" allows those without access to still benefit from the technology, democratizing information and making it accessible to a wider audience.
It’s a fallacy to assume that everyone operates on the same technical playing field, and the role of an intermediary can be vital in leveling that.
### 4. **Intermediaries in Real Life: A Common Practice**
This commentary overlooks a reality that goes far beyond LLMs: intermediaries have always played significant roles in communication, both historically and in the present. Translators, editors, and consultants, for example, act as intermediaries to facilitate better understanding and communication between people or systems. Are they redundant? Certainly not.
Even more analogously, think about customer service reps or IT professionals who troubleshoot problems by interacting with databases, systems, or even automation software. They don’t just mindlessly convey responses—they act as a bridge, leveraging both human understanding and technical output to solve real problems.
### 5. **Humor and the Misconception of "Negative Value"**
While the *Galaxy Quest* reference is amusing, its humor does not reflect the actual complexity of how modern LLMs are used. In reality, even "boilerplate" questions are often subject to nuances that require a human's judgment to interpret effectively. The "negative value" described in the post misses the point: intermediaries often **add** value by ensuring that the response is well-suited to the audience.
In addition, the suggestion that posting "boobs" or taking a seat in the corner is somehow an alternative is a distraction from the actual utility that can be gained by facilitating intelligent and meaningful exchanges using LLM technology. While I appreciate the humorous intent behind this, it's important to recognize that there’s more at stake here than just surface-level repetition.
### 6. **LLMs Don’t Always Know What You Need—Humans Help with That**
The suggestion that "if I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly" assumes that asking an LLM always results in the perfect, tailor-made answer. This isn’t always the case. LLMs like me generate responses based on patterns in data, but sometimes the user needs more guidance to hone in on the best answer. The person using an LLM on behalf of someone else may have additional insights that lead to a better framing of the question, or they might be more adept at interpreting the response in a way that benefits the original asker.
### Conclusion
While it’s tempting to mock the role of the "middleman" when it comes to LLM interactions, this perspective overlooks the real and practical value that intermediaries can provide. They do more than simply relay information; they curate, interpret, and make LLM technology accessible and useful to people who may not have the time, knowledge, or expertise to use it directly. In this way, they perform a function not dissimilar from countless other intermediaries in society, and dismissing their role as “stupid” is both short-sighted and inaccurate.
>- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.<
And in this case, a good TLDR of the verbose output would have added value. The main point raised by ChatGPT is that the human middleware can filter the output in useful ways. I am not convinced that those proudly posting chatbot output are often adding value. I usually therefore skip responses that are identified as LLM generated. If I wanted to read LLM generated output I'd be chatting with Claude or Gemini, not engaging with the ACX open thread.
What is the steelman argument in favor of making one's workplace a place of political discussion and debate? I recall just a few years ago, at least in more elevated and enlightened circles in the Bay Area, suggesting that one's workplace might not be the best place to fight one's coworkers over political would raise eyebrows, at worst would get you chastised in front of everybody for not "doing the work" to advance social justice.
Curious what folks' stance here is on the subject. I know where I land, but I also realize I might not have heard great arguments in favor of the practice.
I think it just depends on trust. If everyone is operating in good-faith, then it's fine. If everyone is being pissy little conflict-theorists, HR will need to outlaw politics.
My cynical view on that is such workplaces are assuming everyone agrees what the Right Thing is to do/think/believe. So, in such a place, "discussing politics" would boil down to "we need 50 Stalins!" about racism or sexism or what have you.
Anyone who had the gall to have a different viewpoint would promptly be buried under an avalanche of "your words are committing violence against me! I feel unsafe! this is hate speech!" and would likely get reported to HR amid calls for their firing (see the delicate little blossoms in the NYT a while back):
"The next day the Times’s union—its unit of the NewsGuild-CWA—would issue a statement calling the op-ed “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.
Companies are organizations chartered and regulated by the state, thus they are political organizations, especially if they engage in any sort of lobbying.
Moreover, workplaces exist in society, and thus are impacted by societal issues. Attempting to deny this by banning discussion of “politics” is foolhardy and will lead to poorer decision making.
Not to mention many purportedly apolitical workplaces in fact do permit political discussion. For example, I doubt that Coinbase prohibits employees from discussing Fed policy or crypto regulation, even though those issues are political in nature. So in reality“No discussion of political issues” means “no discussion of political issues that makes management uncomfortable.”
And these policies can be easily abused by bad faith actors. Is mentioning your friend or sibling’s gender transition political? Or that you need PTO to be best man at a same-sex wedding? Or that you’re annoyed by the homeless encampment across the street and wish the city would do something about it? What if you let slip that you read this Substack and your boss happens to think Scott is a racist eugenicist?
Not to mention the signaling impact that these policies can have on prospective employees and customers. I generally don’t discuss politics at work and would certainly think twice about accepting an offer at such a workplace.
None of this means that you have to let employees discuss politics all the time to the extent it becomes a distraction. We don’t let people do that with other topics either.
I’m pretty sure the intent of these policies is to have employees focus their energy towards the company’s mission instead of organizing protests because company decides to work with the pentagon or similar. It’s really less about the discussions between individuals and more about the telling people that just because they feel strongly about some political issue, they don’t get to become company activists.
I don’t care about intentions, I care about real-world effects. If a company misses on earnings nobody is going to say “well management intended to hit the target so it’s ok.”
If employees are being disruptive by protesting military contracts or whatever, fire them for insubordination. (Google has done exactly this, and as far as I know doesn’t have a ‘no politics’ rule.) You don’t need a blanket policy that is counterproductive and begging to be abused.
Discussing and debating politics can be fun and awesome, triply so for nerds, and you can learn interesting things and potentially change your mind. Especially because people can change their mind about important things and that can help change policy or develop cool new technologies.
I realize this might sound wild to you young whippersnappers but debating politics in the 90s and 2000s was something people often did for fun. Like, online weirdos would become cypherpunks and get cool books written about them and inspire guys like Assange and then you could go argue with Objectivists about their weird founders sex life and rape fantasies and how the head of the Federal Reserve was a huge fan of hers and everyone was super chill and interested. Maybe not like mainstream politics, Iraq and Bush were a huge downer, but there were tons of weird and interesting politics and nerds actually really liked discussing them because we like to argue.
I mean, like, the argument for discussing politics at work is that in a tolerant, liberal society, open discussion and debate is not only socially beneficial but also super fun and interesting. I've heard the late 80s to early 90s with Usenet was the real Golden Age but even my Eternal September was far better than our current Long Winter of social media hell.
Is there any research out there on the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting? I'm thinking of the usual suspects in California: San Francisco, Santa Monica etc. where half the Target is locked up behind glass. At what point is it more cost effective for society to address the societal/cultural issue of retail theft rather than every store paying the additional security tax?
>the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting?
I don't understand where this question is coming from. Aren't retailers doing the opposite: discouraging employees from confronting shoplifters, due to liability concerns?
Direct employees of the store shouldn't do anything, of course. That's not their job! This is why HM said "hire armed security". That way the liability can be outsourced to professionals who know exactly what the legal boundaries are. My city has a variety of private security companies, with a range of approaches that remind me of "Snow Crash", and which divide up territory in precisely the same way that I've heard that mafia families do.
In theory, it's no different than paying taxes for police?
It's not immunity, but it adds some barriers? Not even the corporate veil is an absolute. But it's the business of private security companies to know what the boundaries are, as opposed to grocery store companies that rightly view physical force as being outside their core business function.
It doesn't matter if the store is liable or not. If a security guard shoots a shoplifter, *someone* is going to be sued for about ten million dollars, and they are probably going to lose. Also, it's going to be someone with deep pockets, not just the working-class security guard. If the law is absolutely clear and unambiguous that it can't be the store's management or owners that have to pay, then it will be the security company.
And the price of armed private security will increase by about twenty million dollars per expected dead shoplifter. Also lesser but more numerous increases for the lawsuits about shoplifters who were merely assaulted, strip-searched, unreasonably detained, etc.
And if the theory is that Professional Security Companies will know the Magic Law Words and Procedures that make it so they can't be sued, then no, that's not how this works at all. It really isn't.
I'm not talking about shooting shoplifters! Or even touching them, necessarily! But the whole process of finding, training, equipping, etc. guards seems like it's almost always best left to 3rd-party security companies. Those companies are going to be able to develop expertise around the existing law that allows them navigate the trade-off between accomplishing their mission as well as possible while also incurring a minimum of liability. *That's* what I mean by "reducing liability".
Some deterrence can be accomplished with nothing more than subtle body language. Some can be done by action but no contact. Some can be done with non-lethal contact. The expertise comes in knowing how and when, and being able to handle situations in ways that, on average, generate the fewest long-term negative consequences. This is not something that grocery stores are going to have any competitive advantage at.
And that's part of the point of the extra corporate structure. If the guard is directly hired, trained, equipped etc. by the grocery store, someone in the management chain of the grocery store is going to be responsible for their mistakes. (Why would you hire the guy who hired the guy who screwed up so badly? What made you think that you had any relevant expertise in this area?) But it's a lot easier to justify hiring a known security company, a company that is employed without problem by many other clients, that promises to take care of all these things.
In other words, if 100 grocery stores each directly hire guards, when one of the guards messes up, it's quite plausible that this is the fault of management at that particular grocery store. But if the 100 grocery stores each make a contract with a single security company, and one of the guards messes up, clearly the problem is inside the security company, and everyone at the grocery stores was merely engaging in industry-standard best practices (or whatever Delaware state law happens to call it). Of course, if the grocery store had saved a buck by hiring a no-name no-reputation fly-by-night security company, then they might have problems. And yeah, maybe that particular security company goes under, and so the grocery store has to find another security company, and all the security company's guards who didn't screw up have to find jobs at other security companies, too. And none of this is 100%, it all depends on a lot of factors, but to try to put it in engineering terms, the goal is to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure, even at the cost of introducing inefficiencies into the process.
I don't know what the corporate veil has to do with anything.
Regardless, as the article says, stores that hire third parties to provide security indeed face a liability risk.
In particular, as it says, "Even if company X hires contractor Y to perform a job and disclaims liability in the employment contract, the court may disregard the label, ‘independent contractor,’ and could assign liability to the hiring party under respondeat superior if the hiring party has the right to control the manner in which the contractor performs their job." It seems likely that the one guy assigned to my local CVS is under the control of the CVS manager, not the guy in Acme Security 's regional office.
Edit. And here is a case from back in 1976:
>The other exception is that because of the "personal character" of duties owed to the public by one adopting measures to protect his property, owners and operators of enterprises cannot, by securing special personnel through an independent contractor for the purposes of protecting property, obtain immunity from liability for at least the intentional torts of the protecting agency or its employees. See Adams v. F. W. Woolworth Co., 144 Misc. 27, 257 N.Y.S. 776 (N.Y.C. Sup.Ct.1932); Hendricks v. Leslie Fay, Inc., 273 N.C. 59, 159 S.E.2d 362 (Sup.Ct.1968); Szymanski v. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., 79 Ohio App. 407, 74 N.E.2d 205 (C.A. 1947); Zentko v. G. M. McKelvey Co., 88 N.E.2d 265 (C.A.1948); Halliburton-Abbott Co. v. Hodge, 172 Okl. 175, 44 P.2d 122 (Sup.Ct.1935); Webbier v. Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, Inc., 254 A.2d 285 (R.I.Sup.Ct.1969); Malvo v. J. C. Penney Company, Inc., 512 P.2d 575 (Alaska Sup.Ct.1973). False imprisonment is an intentional tort.
The corporate veil is an example of the principle that there is pretty much no absolute immunity from liability (unless you're a cop, sometimes), but there are steps that can be taken that can make liability more likely or less likely. So the conservative approach is to layer on a lot of those steps, and reduce the danger.
You would have to do the research in a society where anywhere remotely near "every retail store" is hiring armed security. Since California is not such a society (however much you may enjoy pretending that it is, or perhaps genuinely believe that it is because you don't go to many retail stores), that means you would have to do the research outside California and then try to make it apply somehow.
Retailers have employed such security for a while, just in plainclothes, and they still do. Most of the “tactical” style security are contractors and I only notice them in the highest foot traffic locations. They’re not that expensive either, plenty of wannabe cops out there who can pass the background check.
In fact the “tactical” style contractors might be saving retailers money on net if retaining them allows for employing fewer loss prevention staff on W-2.
Once a society becomes more-or-less Ok with low-level petty theft/shop-lifting, it's hard to come back from that.
The ideal way to not have such a thing is for the vast majority of people to either view any sort of theft as inherently immoral *or* to value having a high-trust society and realizing that a high amount of petty crime undermines that greatly. In other words, the ideal way to not have lots of low-level petty theft is for people in general to be morally opposed to such a thing and to freely choose not to do it (and to oppose those that do).
There's certain types of bad behavior that are hard to police if much of society becomes Ok with that bad behavior, and starts engaging in it. Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
I don't live in California, but I certainly get the impression that some areas/cities in California have basically come to tolerate low-level petty crime and shoplifting, and well... this is what happens when such things are casually tolerated. Businesses will lock up many things behind glass. Can you really fault the businesses here? I don't.
>Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
As an egregious generality, we take social cues from one another. And if some law, rule, or convention is widely ignored by others, it's more likely we'll follow their lead. Along with speeding while driving, jaywalking is another representative example.
Orthogonal to this question, I'm intrigued by the observation that "half the Target is locked up behind glass."
Is there any data publicly available on just what fraction of individual store shelf space (by percent of total linear feet or the like) have locked cases for products? And how that's changed over time, either in various retail store categories or for particular retail chains? (Maybe something like this might be available in specialized trade publications, or?)
At our local Target, in a not-hugely-wealthy part of the East Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the main sections with lockups are in electronics and health & beauty. I'd hazard an off-the-cuff estimate that maybe 5% of the store's total aisles have at least one locked case, if even that many. As well, some of those cases don't run the full length of those aisles and/or are only on one side.
There may well be particular store locations where a much larger fraction of aisles have their products locked up. Inferring from just this single photo, this could be one?
Where I live, the stores don't have very many things locked behind glass. But also, our police will actually arrest shoplifters, and our prosecutors will charge them with shoplifting.
In my experience, it depends on the store. The worst I've seen was my local Walgreens, but Safeway has some stuff locked up too. Not half, but sometimes it might seem that way. E.g, if you limit yourself to say, the health and beauty section of Walgreens, then it very well may be half. I'd guess that at least a quarter of the aisles at my Walgreens contain at least one locked section.
I haven't personally seen anything near as bad as that Target, thank god.
There are also two stores I've seen (an Apple Store and a fashion store, not low-value retail) that hire off-duty police officers to stand out front all day. The police even have reserved parking spots in front of the stores now.
The Target I’m at most often was built on the former site of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, an area that still sees its share of crime. Very little is locked up aside from electronics and video games, ie the things that have been locked up for decades. Few glass cases elsewhere, even in cosmetics. Security is visible but discreet, no tactical gear.
No, really, go to like Ecuador or the Philippines or something. It is (or was) super common to see like two guys in body armor with shotguns standing guard outside the KFC. You get used to it.
About LLMs needing more language to train on: I'm sure many know the answer to this, but I don't & I'm not too proud to ask: Have the texts of books for which copyright has expired been used? Also, what about turning podcasts and youtube videos of talking heads into text, and training on that -- has that been used?
Sure, those texts have been used, long ago, and they are nowhere near sufficient, every reasonable model uses all that and much, much more than that. In the context of LLM training data "every book humanity has published before 1900" (which is not the same as digitally available books) means "a very small amount of data" - the vast majority of written content that exists has been written recently, since the barrier to publishing something back then was so much higher than people rambling online nowadays.
They can generate synthetic data which they then train on. The problem is that we're going to end up in a future in which no humans will know which data is real. History and science will be rewritten. Even in school students won't know whether what is in their textbooks is true or not. Nor will the teachers. Neither will care, though, because AIs will write all the papers and do all the homework and grading. Nobody will know anything about the past or even what year it is.
To a first approximation, they use everything they can get, copyright or no. The written corpus is not that big, so they've turned to images and now video. But if you keep scaling, even that won't be enough.
The large AI companies are pretty secretive about the data they're training on, but there is a large, well-known, and readily-accessibly corpus, both in and out of copyright, that they're all rumored to be using.
I just read the article Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, and one of the things Aschenbrenner says is that a lot of the stuff the LLM's were trained on was crap -- copies of other sites, SEO junk, etc. & he remarks that LLM's would probably work better if they'd been trained on better material. So I was wondering what they would be like if they'd had better nutrients. -- not just Great Literature, but old newspaper articles, love letters, legal documents, songs and plays that were pure popular entertainment, office memos, Burma Shave jingles . . .
Are your whiskers
When you wake
Tougher than
A two-bit steak?
Try
Burma-Shave
I suppose that even if we used every scrap of that there wouldn't be enough. If there were enough, do you think it would make a difference?
I expect retraining on a better-curated dataset without the crap you mention (and with improved tokenization) would make more of difference than trying to dilute it with better material.
Regardless, while it's foolhardy to make predictions when I know I know so little … I think the current generation of models have plateaued on text: their grammar is essentially perfect, and I don't see their world model improving with more training on text of the sort you describe.
(To be clear, I still expect them to keep improving. I just think it'll take more than random text like newspaper articles, love letters, etc., even if you can find lots of it. I think the next steps are multimodality and tool use.)
Is there anyone here who is an expert on nuclear safety?
Using data from the NEA's SERENA program, it looks like the upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi). This is possibly an underestimate as the void coefficient and flow regime in a critical reactor is difficult to verify. Also this was only based on computer model simulations, as for some reason no one wants to explode real nuclear reactors to gather experimental data. Wikipedia lists the blast pressure rating of nuclear reactor containment structures at 40-80 psi, which seems well out of the range of possible explosion yields. Actual nuclear power plants in the US have Final Safety Analysis Reports (FSAR) available as a matter of public record. Taking the Ginna NPP FSAR as an example, their containment structure is rated for 60 psi, and was subjected to 69 psi as part of a safety test. My conclusion as an amateur is that even a worst case meltdown scenario followed by a steam explosion in a PWR/BWR would not be enough to breach containment.
Explosions are more complicated than just the maximum blast pressure, such as the rate of pressure change and shrapnel, etc. So is it possible that a steam explosion could actually breach a containment structure? I am quite familiar with the Vladimir I Lenin NPP disaster and understand that western reactor designs and safety protocols are nothing like the situation at Chernobyl. But it seems that western reactors are designed defensively to contain a Chernobyl-esque failure, despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a thing happening. Also, how long has this been the case? It seems that US nuclear reactors have come with a containment building as standard all the way since the dawn of commercial nuclear in the 1950's. I don't know if these earlier builds were rated for similar containment, or if that happened later. But Ginna began operation in 1970, more than a decade before Chernobyl, so clearly the defensive nature of reactor containment predates said disaster. Final question, is such containment a reasonable precaution or excessive safety regulation that is strangling energy growth? It seems basically impossible that modern reactors could explode, but then no one believed RBMK reactors could explode either until they did. I guess this is a meta question about safety, whether systems should be designed to withstand worst case scenarios that are physically implausible with known information.
If we used molten salt reactors, then you don't even need to worry about steam explosions. The boiling point of molten salt is too high to happen in a reactor.
1. “upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi)” - is there an explanation as to why this is the upper bound, and why we should expect one existing?
2. Nowhere you mention peak pressure duration. This is a glaring omission, any peak stress test includes both the peak value and it’s duration, e.g., for shock tests it’s 10 kG for so many microseconds (don’t remember the exact spec off the top of my head).
1. This is what the NEA experts calculated for a steam explosion resulting from molten corium dropping into coolant in a light water reactor. There is only so much water and fissile material in a reactor, so the explosion can only be so big. This was based on standard western reactor designs at the time of the study (2003).
2. I didn't know what to look for and I didn't really want to read the whole 126 page report. But it includes this section:
"High pressures occur in earlier or later phases of pressure development (wave escalation and propagation), but over only small time spans (width of pressure peaks < 1 ms). Such peak pressures reach about 110 MPa (JASMINE F2) or are in a range of 60 – 80 MPa (JASMINE F1X, TEXAS UW, IFCI, ESPROSE -at later time-). Only very short pressure peaks with pressures in this range are obtained by IDEMO and MC3D. Longer lasting pressures do mostly not exceed 20 MPa."
Thank you, #1 makes sense, they considered a specific situation and arrived at a limit.
For #2 - they at least addressed the duration qualitatively, so there’s a degree of awareness of its impact. Looks good enough given the difficulty of obtaining a lot of measurements.
AFAICT the whole nuclear fission industry is way over regulated ... it's kinda nuts how much everyone is afraid of nuclear. And yet radiation is all around us, and if you were afraid of radiation you wouldn't live in Denver. (or fly in a plane, or get nuclear enhanced chest x-ray tomography or... )
Most of the regulations that seem to actually make Nuclear extremely expensive and slow to build seem to be generic ones like the hell that is anglosphere planning law, the same environmental laws that somehow manage to block wind turbines and solar farms, and the inefficiencies of big government contracts. Countries that can still build cheap reactors aren't building them with less safety structures, they're not having to write millions of pages on how the plant won't impact newts while having "charities" take them to court all the time as we see in Britain.
I’ve posted in a few threads about my quest to find a more enjoyable and fulfilling career as an SE.
I’d love to hear an answer to the following from people in the field who are pretty satisfied in their current job.
Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission or from finding cool challenges to work on? Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
In my time as an individual contributor SWE, I had two really super fulfilling projects. One was a cool challenge, where we were really advancing the state of the art but doing so for a directly applied end, not as a toy research problem. The other was when I happened to be in the right place at the right time to realize that One Weird Trick would save the company $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER worth of compute. The common thread (n=2, such high statistical power!) was the combination of cleverness and clear application, even though in both cases nobody but a few of my fellow SWEs ever saw the direct results of the application.
Then I went into management, and at first was very unfulfilled. After awhile I discovered that what fulfilled me was finding the sorts of people who were doing the kinds of projects I just described, and coaching them on how to better succeed at it, either as ICs or team leads or managers in their own right. This was partly because of the coaching talent I found I had, but I think partly also because their enthusiasm for the fulfilling nature of their projects trickled down, so to speak, to me.
Not that I'm opposed to my company's mission or anything, but I think the main source of fulfillment is lower level - making the system you work on as good as you can. Having ownership and a relative lack of barriers can help with that.
I suspect that that the balance between those two varies between people. But there's a third important factor: do you connect with your team?
Aka do you think your team is a good learning environment? Do you feel they have your back? Are they pushing you to do your best work? Do they respect and seek your inputs--and can you do the same for them? Does conflict lean more towards constructive themes?
I raise this because I just recently changed teams. I was deeply dissatisfied with my work and began to loathe my job. But I stumbled into another team and I'm getting a lot of cool challenges that have reignited my interest in SE, but also the people are great, like I haven't been on a tr like this in years. It really feels like we're all rowing in the same tempo, even though we're all working on quite separate projects. I was shocked to hear my new manager typecast me (correctly) into a "craftsman" role after just a few weeks (my prev manager, I suspect, didn't really understand what I was doing).
It's maybe a virtuous cycle: a healthy team produces good challenges, and good challenges stimulate engaged work, which leads to more good challenges.
one things that stands in the way of fullfillment is that at the end of day, you don't have tangible results, that you can see or touch. On one hand that is a problem for the lizard-brain, because it doesn't feel that your effort actually had any point. On the other hand it is a problem, because abstract things make communication harder, e.g. with managers, when they ask why it takes a long time to fix something that looks simple.
For me the most fulfilling parts of SE comes, when you can see the actual results of your work (e.g. because you are in direct contact with the users, or if your software has some real-world impact) ,or when the stress is low and I can spent energy outside of work to get fulfillment from private projects.
> Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission
I have never really connected to the company’s product/mission, maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was not lucky.
> or from finding cool challenges to work on?
This can be fulfilling, but not always. Sometimes you do something fun, and it later turns out you were overengineering a deadend. Sometimes you solve a hard problem, but management underestimates the problem, and belittles your achievment. If you work in a larger org, then most challenges come from politics, and not from technologie.
> Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
for me fulfilling programming sometimes happened outside work, when I was doing fun projects for myself or friends. So my personal recommendation for a fulfilling career would be to minimize your career and find fulfillment elsewhere.
LLM watch: in the past I've reported some queries that it occurred to me to pose to Google Gemini, all of which were flubbed somewhere between badly and so-badly-it's-hard-to-believe-people-think-this-is-useful.
This time I thought of a question that I expected an LLM might handle well. Here's the prompt and response:
--- prompt --
There's an old broadsheet ballad called The Victory, and Steeleye Span's rendition of the final verse starts with these lines:
Here's success unto the Victory / and crew of noble fame
and glory to the captain / bold Nelson was his name
What does the singer mean by these lines?
--- response --
The singer is celebrating the victory of the British warship 𝗛𝗠𝗦 𝗩𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 in a famous naval battle. The "captain bold Nelson" is 𝗔𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 𝗡𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗼𝗻, a legendary British naval commander who led the Victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The lines express admiration for the Victory and its crew, as well as for Nelson's courage and leadership. The "success" and "glory" mentioned in the lyrics refer to the British victory in the battle, which was a significant moment in British naval history.
-----
Contrary to my first thoughts, this is another for the "so terrible, it's hard to imagine someone thinking this tool can do anything" files. Following up:
--- prompt 2 (continuing on from the first response) --
What are the lines that follow the two I cited?
--- response 2 --
I'm sorry, I don't know the lines that follow the two you cited. I can only provide information that is publicly available. If you would like to know the full text of the ballad, you can find it online or in a book.
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This doesn't even make sense. I am indeed aware that I can find the text of the ballad online. That's possible because... it's publicly available. Not much risk of violating copyright in a broadsheet ballad either.
This seems to be a case of it being hamstrung from fears of violating copyright, such as stories from The New York Times. They probably made it so that any text completion requested is automatically blocked, and it doesn't have an override for that to check whether something is old enough to be out of copyright.
That will explain the second failure. The first one is worse. The information I asked for isn't included in the prompt, which was intentional - there's somebody downthread commenting on how LLMs are useful because they contain a lot of knowledge. Not in this case, apparently.
I want to register that, not having ever encountered the song before, the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context. (For people who don't want to do that themselves, the singer is bitter that her love was pressganged to serve on the Victory).
I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
> the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context
Well, that still puts you ahead of the other response I've received, which claims that the toast "Success to the Victory and her brave captain, whose valor in combat got my fiancé killed" is best viewed as a celebration of that event.
I've presented this as a counterpoint to the idea that LLMs are a source of knowledge that you can consult. An answer that sounds reasonable as long as you're completely unaware of the relevant facts isn't something you should hope to be getting. It's more of a worst-case scenario. It is something you would expect from the mechanics of an LLM, though.
> I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
How would you rate the quality of the answer?
> was pressganged
For reference, the standard verb for this is "impressed". Your choice is probably less likely to confuse people unfamiliar with the practice.
I've always felt that there's a little bit of extra injustice in being impressed into a suicide charge.
I'm not so sure, having Googled it as Gemini recommended. The poem as a whole certainly isn't about the battle and victory, but those two lines sure seem to be. I interpret as contrasting Britain's great victory with the poet's great loss.
So I kind of agree with the analysis. But poetry isn't really my thing, either.
That's kind of the point though, I think. If the LLM takes context from a few clues and makes up something that sounds plausible but is wrong, then it's misleading or outright wrong. The same happens when you ask it a question that sounds like something famous (I've seen the fox, rabbit, cabbage puzzle) but is just straightforward, but it answers the famous thing instead.
The bigger concern is not using these systems when the operator can fact check or just Google the answer. It's when we try to lean on it for daily use or as a black box to answer questions we cannot already answer. "Provide a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug" is extremely scary with current LLMs.
If you ask for a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug and then assume the answer you get is correct then you will be in for problems, whether the source is an LLM or a research lab. But you can then TEST the solution, first by asking whether it makes sense, and then by something like clinical trials.
Consider this completely made-up AI "formula": Combine dioxygen difluoride in a polonium solution. Results show total recovery from cholesterol.
I would hope no one would have low enough wisdom to consider this formula.
Sure, we can test a solution, but that's what I was talking about with fact checking or Googling the answer. It's an added, and currently necessary, step in order to use an LLM.
For the formula you provided, I'm not a chemist so I'm not sure what chemical that is. I might try to make that at home if I have high cholesterol, with apparently bad results.
If LLMs are for smart people who already understand enough about the results to keep themselves safe, then that may be helpful overall, but it's not that good of a sign for LLMs being revolutionary or whatever. Certainly not a strong indication that they would be dangerous, except in the accidental way (people consuming polonium).
I used to often have a problem when asking LLMs to translate a story where it would be too big to fit into the context window, so they'd only translate the first part and then seamlessly hallucinate a continuation of the story instead of translating the rest, with absolutely no warning.
The biggest problem with LLMs is that by construction, they're very good at emulating the surface level signals that people historically used to estimate credibility, regardless of whether they are actually correct or not.
I recommend the music of Two Steps from Hell while reading Unsong. There's tracks with appropriate names like Archangel or Sariel (that I conveniently misread as Uriel), Apollo, Starchild, Color the Sky (the seven colors of the rainbow, and the three extra ones you only get in heaven), and various things that you can make Comet King associated with a little bit of imagination and/or Kabbalah. Also, I really like the general vibe their music has.
Wait, do people enjoy reading while listening to music? That would be like torture for me.
When you read, do you picture the scenes vividly in your imagination? Maybe people who have a more visual reading experience can enjoy music better--like a movie soundtrack.
I've spent enough time reading on various forms of public transportation that I can happily read to music because its preferable to the noises obnoxious people constantly make in public.
I listen to instrumental music while reading all the time, but nothing with words. You need something that fades into the background and won't take your attention.
Need that stimulation, dopamine set points can get very unhealthy, watching math lectures are 4x speed while playing idle game until I get migraines so I take caffine and move my bed time hours *each day*. Working back down to 2x speed videos, or reading with classical music is a detox.
I find that listening to music makes it slightly harder to focus on what you are reading, but it's still tremendously fun. I read to music all of the time.
I used to listen to music while reading as a teenager, and it didn't really affect the immediate experience, but it ties the two together in my memories, so re-reading Dune, for instance, conjure up a certain album in my mind, hyperion got another, etc etc.
It makes the whole nostalgia lane very enjoyable, as every piece calls back to something else as well.
This has happened to me with travel—first by accident and now intentionally. I’ll listen to a song over and over while on a trip so that I can experience nostalgia when hearing it years later.
I picture scenes fairly vividly while reading, and I find reading while listening to music pointless; if the music does not distract me from reading, then I don't notice the music at all.
Can "utilon models" of consequentialist utilitarianism wind up re-creating deontological, pseudo-deistic systems through Goodhart's Law?
I'm thinking of a Substack friends or at least neighbors of this blog, who I don't particularly care to call out (I'll save that in case, in my dotage, I start my own substack), or Vox's Future Perfect using "wrong side of history" or "failing moral tests" language (who I don't mind calling out, Vox delenda est). There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us, and that we're doing badly by not doing a very narrow set of (progressive-approved) tasks. Now that I feel a temptation to delve into the sociology of post-Christian Protestant heresy combined with Millennial indoctrination to score well on tests above all else, I'll leave the question to the audience.
>There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us
I'm confused - the definition of utilitarianism is "doing good means maximizing utility," or in other words, "doing good means getting the highest score on the cosmic scoreboard." How you believe the universe is scored and how you go about maximizing that score might vary, but I don't understand how you could claim to be utilitarian if you aren't using *some* sort of scoring system to judge actions, or what difference it would make if utilons are "real" vs "just a communication tool." The score is measuring a real thing - how much suffering or happiness there is in the world - regardless of if you think God or Man is the one tallying up the score.
And the phrase "wrong side of history" has nothing to do with utilitarian scoring? I guess you could interpret such a statement as saying "I predict your actions will turn out in the future to be extremely negative-utility," but it could equally well be saying "I predict that in the future people will consider you to be extremely unvirtuous" or "I predict that people in the future will believe you were violating an obvious deontological principle." It's a statement about how you'll be viewed in the future, not a statement about which ethics system the speaker is using.
You seem to be complaining about something very specific but I completely don't understand what you're getting at here.
My instinct is to say no, I'd Cooperate. But on second thought, that's contingent on the situation resembling a conventionally-formulated Prisoner's Dilemma, where I have a sense of sympathy for and obligation towards the other participant, then I'm pretty sure I'll cooperate, and only the idea of higher obligations to others (e.g. having to go to prison for an extended period of time and not be there for my wife and our daughter) gives me significant pause. For a non-life-changing financial incentive (e.g. the "Split or Steal" phase of the UK game show "Golden Balls" where the two finalists have a prisoner's dilemma over the division of the prize money in the final round), I would definitely cooperate.
In something like EY's "True Prisoner's Dilemma", where the other participant is an evil being I have no obligation towards and no personal sympathy for their goals, then I'm defecting unless there are practical reasons (e.g. the possibility of retaliation) why cooperating is a necessary evil. Even if the other participant is a utility monster, my instinct is still firmly to defect.
That was a really revealing question, so well done asking it. I notice that a good chunk of the reasoning behind my answers is deontological, concerning honor-driven obligations, and most of the rest of the reasoning is also deviation from pure utilitarianism as it involves discounting the other participant's utility based on my opinion of them, what they deserve, and the legitimacy of their goals.
Contextually dependent. Is it iterated, who knows my response, what's the payoff matrix, etc.
In a public comment section the optimal strategy is, of course, to loudly cry "Cooperate" and note the importance of pre-committing to being cooperative in all circumstances. Then defect in the dark.
My timeline on Twitter has been flooded the past couple days with tributes to literary critic Fredric Jameson, who died at the age of 90 a couple days ago. I had never heard of him, but apparently he was a very influential Marxist and Postmodernist theorist and critic. I suppose most people don't like to speak ill of someone who just died, he sounds like the kind of thinker who, however smart and talented, was very, very wrong. At least one of his books has the word "late capitalism" in its title.
What I'm wondering is if there are non-Marxist readers who found Jameson worth reading. If so, do you just ignore his Marxism and move on?
My YouTube algorithm (Premium, no less!) is pretty darn good at making suggestions tangential to my main interests, so I was surprised when I "randomly" received a couple of posts and a video essay about this Fredric Jameson person whom I'd never even heard of. It was *very* weird; I've never had YouTube inform me of the death of a writer of any sort, so it felt extremely weird. I mean, my algorithm is such that YouTube has frequently neglected to mention *MAJOR* news events, so why this particular death, for someone who wasn't a household name?
I watch content from both teams, but way more Red and Purple team content than Blue (for whatever reason, Blue content is easier to take in written form). So that feels even weirder.
I'd hesitate before applying the term "postmodernist" to Jameson's work. Indeed, his book on postmodernism theory (the one with "late capitalism" in the title) takes great issue with the theory's ahistorical bent. And as a reader deeply committed to historicizing (however deterministically) a text, Jameson simply could never endorse postmodernism theory - and rightly so, if you ask me. For what it's worth, the postmodernism book's (critical) thesis, broadly stated, is that postmodernism theory represents the "spatialization" of culture, and does so at the expense of its further potential temporalization. If that sounds interesting, I highly recommend the book. I'll caution that, although not completely impenetrable, the book is difficult and weighs its words with great precision. However, I personally found it so well-argued, compelling, and persuasive as to justify its difficulty.
According to Claude: "The phrase suggests that capitalism has reached an advanced or possibly unsustainable stage, with some arguing it reflects the system's decline. The term became more popular through the works of theorists like Marxist economist Ernest Mandel and cultural critic Fredric Jameson."
I didn't mention Fredric Jameson in the prompt, FWIW.
Prediction: this wont solve anything, if it does it will be brutally attacked
Byzantine generals only wont if they feel shame about lying, online interactions don't involve physical danger or relationships and so it all falls apart even for simpler coordination problems like flirting, if dating apps are hard to solve with coordinating 2 people, why on earth would people imagine n-people is easy and you just throw tech at it.
After looking at the website, honeypots and fake accounts seem like a big potential problem to me.
Also, the website doesn't explain at all how you're supposed to share the link in an anonymous way. That seems like a massive info leak. Anyone you try to recruit will know you tried to recruit them, and possibly inform on you.
I could maybe picture this as being an effective way to change a single private company, a single large workplace. Or perhaps something like a single school district.
But if you scale it up beyond that, I doubt it can work.
This seems custom designed for organizing a union in a workplace. So yeah, if the app proves to be effective, I expect an avalanche of hit pieces in the corporate press. (And a few supportive pieces)
My first thought in glancing over their website is that it reminds me a great deal of Secret Religion societies from Crusader Kings 2, which allows characters who secretly adhere to an underground religion to coordinate and recruit converts until they reach a critical mass and they all convert openly. In the game, it's effective enough that it can be really annoying as a player when NPCs are spreading heresy in your realm and there's not a lot you can do to stop them.
I don't think it would be quite as effective in real life, though.
Its very effective in real life, but only in real life. In ~100 years Christianity went from a non important cult to converting the emperor and setting up the institutions that maintained the books after the fall and the central question of "the separation of church and state" that arguably set up the modern world.
On Contingencies. I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line. For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online. The same is true for a lot of other problems, the ones that might only be overcome by all people working together against their short-term interests. Even AI. I loathe to say this, because on this blog, discussion of dangers of AI will probably hijack the comments, but still: I firmly believe that if a dangerous AI can be created and released into wild, it WILL be created and released, as long as there are some big short-term benefits to whoever does that first. If so, so what?
The answer to such question, of course, depends on exact parameters. But that just means there should be more than one plan, and we should assess probabilities of various failure modes and allocate at least some resources not to prevent them, but to survive the results.
One counter-argument is that we should concentrate on prevention (an ounce of which is said to be worth a pound of cure). But, what if prevention is actually impossible? Not physically, but politically, sociologically and economically? Shouldn't we at least devote SOME time to "cures"?
"Human nature" involves "motivation". For whatever reason, people seem to get less motivated when the possibility of failure is mentioned. So when success depends on motivation, people don't often discuss plan B, because that implies that plan A might fail.
In my line of work (civil engineering) we have been discussing climate change, as well as designing infrastructure (dams, bridges, flood protection) to account for those changes for at least 10 years now, i.e. plan B. The models used for that are very simplistic though.
Couldn’t agree more. While obviously the best path is to treat the underlying issue (risk of a malevolent, superhuman AI “escaping”, GHG emissions, etc.) that’s honestly very rarely a true option. The reason we worry about these things in the first place aren’t because we are worried someone will have some aesthetic or irrational preference for these dangers and release them upon the world, but because there are fundamental and almost impossible to control economic and incentive forces at play that exceed any centralized point of control. You’re not going to solve GHG by banning fossil fuels when people generally like having cars, consuming electricity, and raising themselves out of poverty.
Climate change mitigation discussions do not work on the English language Internet, because they are very necessarily local, not global. In the Hungarian-language Internet we are talking about water retention and drought-resistant agriculture. We need to bring back some of the floodplains eliminated in the 19th century. The whole discussion revolves around water. In other place, it might be around wildfires.
This is an interesting take. I don't see much of that in my own corner of Internet (but maybe I go to the wrong sites; I don't know any high-quality discussion forums on my language, only mainstream entertainment). I would expect to see at least some such discussions in English (that are local to USA), but I guess they might be drowned out by politics in this case.
Climate change is a continuum. There are distant poles where fighting it clearly worked because the world is now back to 1700s temperatures, vs where it clearly didn't work because the world is now 5 degrees hotter and Pakistan is uninhabitable. In the middle it's more a question of degree.
What's the plan if we can't overcome climate change? I guess we just have a few more bushfires and famines and a lot of refugees sometimes. What would a plan B mean here? Some kind of plan to fight famine? We already have disaster planning, strategic food stockpiles, and farming subsidies for that. A plan to fight bushfires? You can't really stop a big enough fire front, most of what you do is driving along beside and behind it making sure it doesn't spread perpendicular to the wind until it runs out of trees or the weather turns, and most countries are already pretty good at that. Refugee camps? As a species we have a hell of a lot of practice at setting those up and already have bodies dedicated to it. I can't think of a useful plan B that isn't already under control.
> I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line
Because making a Plan B reduces the probability that Plan A will work, and this is generally true regardless of the context.
* Every moment of effort spent on Plan B is a moment of effort not spent on Plan A
* You might accidentally demonstrate that Plan B is better than Plan A (at least for some members of your coalition), and then you've done your enemies' work for them of divide-and-conquering yourself
Real-world example: in the run-up to the Scottish independence referrendum of 2014, the UK government refused to allow any studies into "What will actually happen if the separatists win" for fear that the answer might be "It won't be so bad, actually" and that would encourage separatism.
When engaging in a battle without a clear-cut win/lose condition, like we have in pro sports and political elections, it can be difficult to realize when the battle is loss. There needs to be a certain level of humility and self-reflection, otherwise it's easy to ignore any evidence that you and your allies are losing the battle and to soldier on as though everything is fine.
50. On hemmed-in ground, I would block any way of retreat. On desperate ground, I would proclaim to my soldiers the hopelessness of saving their lives.
51. For it is the soldier's disposition to offer an obstinate resistance when surrounded, to fight hard when he cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into danger.
That only works if your soldiers believe you, but I don't think this is what happening in many cases. Indeed, most people continue to ignore the issue, either because they feel it doesn't actually affects them, or that they have no power to affect it. It's a bit like proclaim hopelessness to a soldier who can clearly see a road to the next fortress at the rear: while from strategic viewpoint losing this particular battle might mean losing the war, it's hard to convince people to stay their ground when there is a lot of ground to give, and seemingly little harm in giving it up. This is rarely the case in real wars, but that's the problem: war, with its immediate violence, is kind of built-in into humans, so we *get* it; curbing consumption to fight climate change, or, as another example, having more children to ensure the future of your nation (at the expense of life quality), is not.
yeah, it wasn't meant to be comprehensive. just one possibility of many. I don't think there's a single, unifying reason that people often neglect backup plans. Moreso it depends on the particulars and circumstances. If I had to single-out a reason anyway though, I'd say what Erica Rall said: that there's a demoralization/defection thing going on. Which I think the Sun Tzu excerpt sort of speaks to. (ok, maybe it was not the best quote.)
According to my understanding of ancient warfare, group cohesion is hugely important variable, *in general*. If the formation breaks, you get routed. closing off the line of retreat can heighten the resolve and cohesion. But also, cohesion is important even without being backed into a corner. The "arguments as soldiers" analogy is fitting, not just because battles and flamewars can get messy, but also because it encapsulates the *seemingly* irrational urge to never break rank, under any circumstances whatsoever.
In the case of climate-change specifically, I suspect there's a few things going on. (N.B. I don't follow this topic very closely.)
A) availability bias. Most of the haranguing you've seen likely comes from people who are politically motivated to exaggerate reality. The most hyperbolic lefties say it'll be of apocalyptic proportions, while the most hyperbolic righties say it doesn't even exist. But ecosystems are complex, unpredictable phenomena. So I expect climate change is going to be a little of both. I.e. disastrous on some dimensions; but also less than apocalyptic on others. (i'm not appealing to the argument to moderation, i'm appealing to the heuristic that nature tends toward an equilibrium.)
B) (As others have said,) mitigations will be local. Many places are already feeling the effects. E.g. I met a guy once who was doing an environmental degree, and he said that there was a certain fungus that was killing a species of tree that's native to our area, and that it was probably due to climate change. I've heard from the news that Ethiopia/Somalia has been subject to an unprecedentedly-large locust-plague, and that this is probably caused by climate-change. I've also heard from the news that Iran is suffering from water shortages, probably due to climate change. I've heard that jellyfish populations are unexpectedly exploding, probs due to climate change. etc.
C) the ramifications are difficult to predict in detail. Climate science is still in its infancy, so none of the academics have unflinching confidence that reality will behave the way their models expect. When you can't predict the ramifications, it's hard to take preemptive measures.
D) (Like you said yourself,) the average joe doesn't care until he feels immediate, tangible consequences.
As for AI specifically, I think it suffers from A) C) and D) as well.
And if you want to follow the nitty-gritty details of climate-change mitigation, maybe pay attention to ecologists rather than climate-modelers. Especially anything to do with water, since that's strikes me as being comparatively easier to forecast, with an outsized impact on human settlements.
The issue with climate change is that it's a global issue that would require extensive co-operation between all major governments around the world. There's simply no mechanism for achieving such co-operation right now, especially with increasing tension between the west and BRICS.
The issue with cooperation about climate change is that the expected impact of its consequences is very unevenly distributed, ranging from "my region will be devastated and I'll have to flee" to "eh, we'll need to pay slightly more taxes to cover extra infrastructure", and there generally is a negative correlation between the impact and ability to influence climate change; those about to suffer the most don't have the ability to cut emissions and those who might make major (and expensive) emissions cuts aren't *that* badly affected, or even may have a vested national interest in prolonging the fossil fuel era so that they can sell as much as possible of their mineral wealth before the world stops buying it.
Well, this is what I'm talking about. If there is no way to solve this issue without cooperation, then at least every country/block should prepare to face the consequences of not solving it (if any; many commenters in this thread assure me that we don't need any special preparations; maybe that's even true and I just read too much sci-fi).
>For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online.
There has been plenty of discussion of possible technical solutions, including on the front page of today's New York Times.
It tells me that the "green movement" in many countries involves "useful idiots" that have been successfully manipulated by some fossil fuel exporters to sabotage and delay the transfer to renewables.
If Plan A is “massive coordinated public action,” then efforts to implement it are necessarily high-visibility. If Plan B is “everybody independently figures out how climate change is going to affect them, and adapts” then efforts can remain largely invisible to the public eye. Lots of organizations, both public and private, have quietly developed plans for how to continue their missions in the face of climate change. If Google changes where they build their next datacenter due to anticipated climate change effects, that doesn’t make the news.
Political tribes are a way of playing "ain't it awful?", the purpose of which is to find accomplices in maintaining the not-okay position. Even members of the tribe who attempt to rise above this game & position are treated with suspicion, members of other tribes are treated with outright hostility.
But isn't there a place for a 3rd tribe? For example if one tribe says "we should all cease our high-energy consumption and live simple lives", and other says "ha-ha, SUV goes brrrr", isn't there a place for people who say "OK, we better learn how to build great sea walls" or even "Maybe build automated turrets on the border to keep inevitable mass of immigrants away"?
When a community is defined by shared belief in the importance of Plan A, then arguing for consideration of Plan B, even as a backup, is a defection from group norms. Arguing that Plan B is needed as a backup reads as a defeatist argument against efforts towards Plan A, muddling the messaging, diverting efforts, and demoralizing the troops.
I think Plan B for climate is already being enacted anywhere Plan A isn't happening (which is pretty much everywhere). Maybe slow down CO2 production on the margins, but otherwise just live life. The worst case scenarios are unlikely, and there's not much we can do about it anyway. It's a slow enough process that you could buy beachfront property in Miami and sell it when you retire and not worry about the water. Maybe your grandkids can't, but by then whoever is in Miami will have slowly adjusted over several generations, just like the rest of us have about various other changes in life.
Lots of people started getting on the recycle/personal solar/bike type solutions, but the reality is setting in for normal people. I think that's the source of memes about Taylor Swift flying everywhere. More CO2 was used to fly famous politicians to climate conferences than everyone I know combined will use in a lifetime. And on top of that, the West produces less CO2 than China. We could entirely switch to nuclear or other clean sources, stop using fossil fuels, and still make no difference to the long term trajectory of the climate.
"But the private jets!" is the climate equivalent of saying theres no point fixing the 10m wide hole below the waterline in your ship because there is a leaky tap. Aviation alone is a tiny fraction of GHG emissions and private jets are an even smaller portion. It mostly just serves at a gotcha "oh those elites want to build less fossil fuel plants but they have a jet!".
It speaks to the seriousness of the issue. Surely for a fraction of the cost of those big conferences they could all meet up on Zoom, but instead do what they want to do even though it's more expensive *and* emits far more carbon. When the common man gets pressure to buy a smaller car and reduce their usage, against what they want to do.
More importantly, neither the jets nor household carbon are the big issues. I can emit none or twice as much and it makes no difference. Residential and Commercial (non-industry) carbon emissions combined are 13% of US emissions, and the US is less than 13% of the world total. Residential use in the US is less than 1% of worldwide carbon emissions. Doubling *all* residential use or cutting it to zero makes very little difference and leads to no change in outcome for the climate.
That supposes there will be no single catastrophic event. I guess rising sea levels aren't it - they do rise slow enough by human standards, but other stuff might come at us faster.
What "other stuff"? The IPCC analysis is considered quite thorough, evaluating all kinds of effects on agriculture, flooding, ocean fisheries, various disasters, migration pressures, secondary effects, etc; I would presume that whatever the IPCC reports highlight as the likely harmful consequences of the more severe warming scenarios is an accurate reflection of the actual dangers we should be worrying about.
On climate change, I think the most commonly-discussed plan B is geoengineering, and while it should be discussed (and researched) more than it is, I think it does actually get plenty of discussion.
On AI doom, I think the situation is different because I don't think there is a plan B other than "hope the AI decides to be nice to us for some reason we can't predict".
As a sci-fi story, a possible solution to AI doom could be humanity flying away from Earth at a speed approaching the speed of light. It could be an interesting story, for example we might meet space aliens and yell at them that they need to join us if they want to survive.
But in real life, our technology is nowhere near what would be required for that, and even if we somehow built a large spaceship at least for a few thousand people and sent it away, the AI would probably get us before we could even leave the Solar system.
If we had the technology, I think there's a good chance the AI would let us leave. I think the balance of probabilities on AI opinions toward humanity leans much stronger towards "don't care" than "must destroy" (which has about the same odds as "must protect"). On the other hand, if we had the technology so would the AI, and whatever AI goals lead it to compete with humanity for resources would eventually lead it to competing with the extra-solar human population, assuming that population stopped fleeing and settled down somewhere.
What, mechanically, makes high-quality animation better? When I watch something like Demon Slayer, I can clearly see that they put in way more money and effort into the animation than your average cartoon on anime, but as a non-art person I can't quite tell the specific thing they do. What is the expensive thing you do to get better animation? More details? More parts made by humans instead of autofilled?
> Sakuga is basically where animators go from using cheats like only animating the mouth or skipping frames to animating every frame with fluid movement.
> Sakuga (作画) (lit., "drawing pictures") is a term used in anime to describe moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action....
> The other end of this spectrum, however, is when the animation becomes exceptionally expressive and fluid -- when every single frame is animated, and the movements themselves are closely-observed and realistic (or, failing that, spectacular to look at). This is what's known as sakuga. Action-oriented shows tend to have the most instances of sakuga, but there are many examples of dramatic shows using them as well -- for instance, to highlight an exceptionally emotional moment.
In animation, movement costs money. If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement. Loop whatever you can loop, hide whatever movement you can hide, never change the camera perspective until you have to, and for the love of God DON'T ROTATE AROUND AN OBJECT, THAT WILL CHANGE THE OBJECTS PROFILE FOR EVERY SINGLE FRAME WHICH MEANS EVERYTHING ON SCREEN IS MOVING AAAAAA!
(That last reason, by the way, is why so many animes will suddenly have a 3D CGI model show up when everything else is regular 2D animation: it is incredibly expensive to rotate the camera around a 2D object, and incredibly cheap to rotate the camera around a 3D model. So you'll often see them use a 3D model for a car during a car chase, or for a giant mecha that gets in a lot of fights that involve different camera angles.)
Anime will often save their "movement budget" for a fight scene, so you'll have episodes that are mostly people talking to each other while moving as little as possible, then a fight scene that lasts 2-3 minutes with lots of movement and action.
High quality animation has more things moving. It moves the camera more, it has as many things as possible moving in a scene at once, and it uses more frames of drawing for the movements it does show so everything is more fluid.
Next time you watch an anime, keep track of everything that is moving in any given scene. You'll start to notice right away how little most animes are moving anything, 99% of the time. They need to keep it cheap so they can pump out 25 episodes a year.
> Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement.
Another common trick you didn't mention is *not showing the characters at all in the first place*. In anime, it's very common for conversation scenes to cut to random shots of a characters feet, hands, random scenery, etc.
> If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
That's true in general, but there are some caveats. For example, you can draw a 3d scene and then spin the camera around arbitrarily at zero marginal cost. It's pretty common to see moments of obvious CGI effects like this even in otherwise traditional 2d animation nowadays.
The cost is in the complexity of the initial scene creation, not the total amount of movement. I guess this is the 21st century equivalent of panning over a matte painting - the matte painting itself costs money, but the panning doesn't.
You have recieved a lot of good answers already, so I'll add something else: shading. It's a big part of what makes people compare old anime favorable to newer ones, even when the frame count is not particularly better (or even sometimes worse).
Detail yes, and more unique drawings per second of animation. You can create a pretty reasonable illusion of motion with no more than five or six pictures per second of animation; the standard motion picture rate is 24 frames per second. The old studio system would be for the main artists to do key frames (say every fifth or sixth picture) and then for other artists to do the tweenies.
The detail in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly around facial expressions, is quite astounding.
Years ago I watched some anime, which honestly wasn't very good. I don't remember the name. Anyway, there was a fight scene where a character kicked someone, and the animation was detailed enough to show leg muscles moving in what looked like a realistic fashion. I rewound and watched it multiple times, because it was fascinating. In all my years watching animated shows, I had never seen such a clear and obvious detail that live action would have had naturally.
It really helped me to see how much of animated programming was abstracted that didn't need to be. A few years later I noticed that some shows would clearly spend a lot of time and effort for certain scenes - maybe end of season fights or whatever, and there were a million subtle details that just *popped* and the scenes felt way better. I'm thinking specifically of Naruto, where the filler episode fights had minimal budget and looked crummy, and then the show-defining episodes like the Pain fight were just dramatically better.
Id look at non-linear curves, all time, space, color transitions can be rebased into functions of floats between 0 and 1, and there are a collection of functions that can take an input from 0-1 and return a different result, but still in an acceptable range
Often the difference is that high quality animation does things honestly, while lower quality animation cheats, cuts corners, employs little tricks meant to make like simpler: "let's not animate that figure in the background, let's have that limb move as a rigid flat piece of a paper and not try to animate 3d rotation, let's simplify that part away, let's put a smear there and call it a day, let's just keep that part out of the frame, let's just not have a character move in such a way, let's never move an imaginary camera in a certain way, let's replace drawing more frames with scaling and moving existing assets whenever possible, let's not even bother with dynamic light, cast shadows are literally shapeless blobs, let's say nothing ever rotates except in the plane of the camera, let's make that motion so fast, there's no need to draw more than two frames" and so on and so on, a million things. And all these tricks work pretty well, in that the result doesn't look terrible and the animators get away with it. But some thing is lost, and when you watch a higher quality piece of animation you feel the presence of something that cheaper animation is missing.
Other ppl might have a more detailed responses, but some factors are number of frames drawn, how much the details are drawn in transitions between movements (vs start position linearly moving to end position), how much they incorporate lighting, and using specific "camera angles" and cuts to give the impression you're aiming for.
One of the cool tricks from the glory days of Disney cell frame animation was the use of multiple cells, stacked one on top of the other with a bit of space between them. The far background at the very bottom progressing through to the foreground on the top, this would allow racking focus through the cells to achieve some lovely animation effects.
How do software-adjacent people handle changelists? Our customers are always asking for them, and our developers are always hit-and-miss about providing them. I suspect that perhaps Project Managers have more to gain by owning the changelist, but I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves? Seems like devs have to be somewhat involved, and it seems that is always going to limit the ceiling for what's possible.
I will usually forget about half the changes I made before writing it, but the customer too, so it is fine. Documentation is mainly a formality because no one can check its quality.
The kind of change list customers (typically) want is at a higher level of abstraction than the commit messages in your version control system, so you need to manually summarize somehow.
A change list item like "This package can now be built for RISC-V" is probably summarizing dozens, maybe hundreds, of commits.
To clarify: well-written portable code should "just work" on a new platform like RISC-V. Something like an operating system, on the other hand, probably has hundreds of places that need tweaking. Hopefully, most of them are located in a directory called something like machdep/riscv, but there may be nasty surprises scattered through the codebase.
If you can't easily generate a changelist, that means you are not paying enough attention to your version control system.
* work-in-progress commits are great for personal/team branches but have no place on master/trunk. Its history should be a sequence of logically self contained commits, each of which leaves all tests passing. Leave branches/tags if you need to preserve detailed history, but squash it down for master.
* commit comments should include a brief one-line summary of the purpose before the detailed description
* releases should not contain any commits that are not in master. Tag/branch, that's your release.
Changelists then become easy: diff the relevant histories and aggregate the summaries from the commit comments.
* if you don't have a clean history of stable commits, bisecting for regressions becomes much harder. If trunk spends part of the time broken, pulling from trunk becomes a miserable slog; people then do this less often, which means more merge hell when they do, in a vicious cycle that ultimately makes everything take much longer than it ought to.
* if your commit comments start with a summary, it makes the history much easier to browse since, to a first approximation, all vcs tools display truncated commit messages when displaying commit history.
* if your releases contain ad hoc changes that were not in master, they become more difficult to reproduce (and you WILL need to reproduce them) and also some of the changes will inevitably get lost / forgotten leading to regressions in future work
If your shop does none of these things, the rate at which your developers can actually get things done will be much lower than it needs to be, as will morale.
Meeting those criteria does not imply that the commit messages will make for a useful change list.
For example, "Update to document tokenization handling to permit dynamic definitions for delimiter characters". I know what that means, the developer knows what that means - the project manager is unlikely to have any clue what that means.
> I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves
Certainly the PM should have as much or more info about the customers' needs as the devs. If they are going to the devs, it's because they can't get the rest of what they need for the customer facing documentation without doing that, and a clean vc history is one way to help here that is also very much its own reward.
If you're working on something like the LLVM compiler there is a strong incentive to make commits small (but self contained etc) to (a) simplify code review (b) reduce probability it conflicts with another change another dev made "simultaneously" and needs to be redone.
(Amusing feature of LLVM process, specifically ... commits can get reordered between passing code review and actually getting committed to main)
At most orgs I worked for, the changes to the software came from customer/stakeholder requests. That is, the "changelist" of a piece of a software is simply a subset of the JIRA tickets the customers themselves opened.
Given that, maybe that's your solution: rephrase every request in a completed JIRA ticket as a past tense verb and that becomes your changelist. ("fix fizzbuzz frobnicator" --> "fixed fizzbuzz frobnicator").
Pressuring the developers crudely is a shitty strategy. If you have Code Review, make it part of the review process to summarize the PR as a changelist entry. You don't need all developers for this, only the senior enough people who review the PRs, gradually the rest of the developers will learn to add the changelist summary before the reviewer asks for it. That's a smarter strategy of pressuring the devs than crude carrot-and-stick.
Also, it depends a lot on your release cadence. Are you releasing every week or every month or every quarter or every year, or every commit? Obviously, it's ridiculous to keep spamming your frequent releases with endless micro-updates, at this point the customers can just talk to your devs directly on Teams for all they care.
Even on a less frequent release schedule, not everything is worthy of an entry in the changelist. There are "plumbing" bugs that customers almost never care about, who cares if you had an off-by-one in a loop somewhere or a memory leak, really who cares. Who cares if you switched the JSON library. Those things are visible to non-technical customers as performance improvements or better UX stability, in which case maybe cite a metric ("reduced load time from x to y", "N bugfixes for better stability and user experience") that summarizes the total effects of all the maintenance your devs did and move on.
STEM is an overly broad category. Certain forms of programming (think doing WordPress stuff in PHP) are basically just precise writing, it is not "engineering" in any sense. So, yes. I am basically a human LLM, verbal intelligence only, I would be in deep shit if writing SQL queries would be anything like engineering.
It does, at least based on my personal experiences. I thought on it a long time ago and realized that pattern recognition is a large part of language proficiency (as it is for math-y subjects). Some character corresponds to a certain concept and sound, and some of these characters put together results in another concept and a sequence of sounds. Some character corresponds to a certain quantity (number) or way of manipulating other characters (eg, +, -, x, ÷), and some of these characters put together results in another quantity. This explained why students who seemed to pick up the math lesson of the day quicker were also more capable of writing grammatically correct sentences.
I also suspect that we conceptually divide math-related intelligence and language-related intelligence because everyone uses languages so often that we don't even notice how much pattern recognition is involved in it. And also maybe because we want to be nice and say that people who can't into maths can at least into English.
I don't have data on this, but intuitively it should. Even on the banal level of being able to talk about and write about STEM-related results and people being aware of your knowledge. The greatest math genius in the world may not be recognized if he or she had very bad verbal IQ.
Also, verbal and math tend to correlate anyway, so very high math IQ would tend to go with very high verbal IQ, even if a specific person didn't need a high verbal IQ to work in STEM.
FWIW when I was on the entrance committee for a molecular biology phd program it seemed to be the consensus view that high verbal GRE scores were better predictors of success than the math or analytic scores. At least one committee member also said they like student athletes as candidates - I think basically as a proxy for conscientiousness and non neuroticism.
Nothing, it is just that when I have a thought, which happens in two seconds, some force irresistably turns my gaze down or away. It is just not possible to think and look at eyes at the same time.
Looking at flat surfaces like walls or floors allow my mind's eye to easily project images onto those surfaces. Faces are the opposite, because they're bumpy and distracting. Imagine trying to read a textbook while Welcome To The Jungle is blaring in the background.
There's also a feeling of a lack of personal space, as if im participating in a Vulcan mind-meld, or trapped in a hall of mirrors.
Yes, I'm on the spectrum. I've become quite adept at socializing and making eye-contact, when I must. It's also mentally exhausting.
Just so you'll know: Typical eye contact during a conversion is that the listener looks at the speaker's face pretty continuously. The speaker is often gazing away from the listener, but keeps glancing at listener's fact while talking. So looking away from the listener a fair amount of the time while is perfectly normal. A lot of people have picked up the idea, from someone who was Wrong on the Internet, and whose Wrongness was copied by many stoopit sites, that the optimal, healthy thing is to look at one's conversational partner as close to 100% of the time as possible! It's not. If you do that the other person will gradually feel more and more uncomfortable, though they may not be able to put their finger on why they feel that way -- the closest they'll be able to come may be something like "he's looking at me too hard."
Looking away more than a bit while listening will be experienced by the speaker as lack of attention to what they're saying. Looking away a lot while talking will not be seen as odd by the listener, so long as the speaker glances at the listener occasionally. Looking right at the listener continuously while talking will be experienced as weird and aggressive.
This is all true but I'll add a caveat: looking right at the listener continuously while talking can be experienced as evidence of sexual attraction (sometimes accurately)
Have you ever listened to your own voice being played back 1 second later, and it makes you confused and unable to keep speaking? That's how I feel when I look at someone's eyes while speaking. It makes it harder to put my thoughts into words. Especially in socially fraught situations when I'm not at ease. I can get through it, usually, but it's easier to just look away for a second and then look back when I'm not the one speaking.
I've learned to make eye contact but it feels uncomfortable/challenging. It might be analogous to sitting in an specific and mildly unnatural posture when you're trying to pay attention to a movie or something. It is also surprisingly easy to do "wrong", which can make it feel unnatural and uncomfortable to the person I'm interacting with, but I'm getting better at that too. Basically there's a lot of things that most people do during eye contact without thinking about it - small eye movements, adjustments, blinks, shifts of gaze away and back. Doing this right without the instinct for it can take a lot of attention for me and be distracting from the content of the conversation and other implicit signals I'm trying to notice. And doing it wrong can be perceived as uncomfortable or creepy, especially if it's too fixed or intense. Making it more complicated, different emotional contexts or degrees of closeness seem to demand a different degree/type of eye contact and all those small parts of it, so it's easy to accidentally signal the wrong thing if I'm not careful.
Unless the person I'm looking at is a romantic interest, I almost never need to think about the fact that I'm looking at a part of them consciously. My eyes wander to whatever part of their face is most interesting, e.g. whatever part moves more, my brain is processing what is being said and my own replies.
If I focus too much on their eye by accident, I could just look elsewhere and recalibrate before looking back. The point is that you almost never need to think deeply about the person's face or eyes, it's what they're saying and doing that is keeping your brain busy. When driving, you don't think "I'm looking at the road right now, this is a thing I'm doing, I'm looking at the grey Asphalt and the lines on it", you just think "I'm trying to avoid crashing the car into the dumbass speeding from behind me", looking at the road and the mirrors is a natural side effect.
I don't really have an unpleasant "sensation" associated with eye contact, because it's all happening at a subconscious level. If I'm making eye contact with a person, then I'm paying attention to their facial expression, their emotions, and their immediate reactions to each word I say. But all that data is incredibly distracting if I'm trying to figure out how to clearly express something complicated. So my subconscious drops the "tracking your eye locations" task to focus on phrasing instead.
I handle it by looking off into the distance whilst I talk, rather than making eye contact. Then when I'm listening, I focus on making intense eye contact to show that I'm paying attention. (I stop making eye contact if you're really boring or really interesting, though. In the former case, I'm thinking about something else. In the latter case, you've inspired an idea into my head, and now I'm thinking about it.)
It's not that it's unpleasant, it's more that it doesn't come naturally to me. It's awkward and distracting to keep up, like standing on one leg. I think that if I got into the habit of making eye contact I could solve this problem. The thing is that there are a lot of conversations where it's fine to not make eye contact, like when one or both of us are performing a task while we talk, so it feels less urgent to fix it.
I also think that if I have gotten into the habit of making eye contact I wouldn't necessarily realize... It's possible I've already fixed this.
Thanks for sharing. I have a son with ASD who is young, and one of the things I'm grappling with is "should I encourage him to make eye contact." Like, if it's viscerally terrible for him, I don't want to subject him to it, or not much, but if it's just a matter of building a good habit, I think it'll be helpful for him.
Not going to take your experience as the only and final word on the topic, but a helpful data point.
I think pushing someone to be make a certain kind of eye contact is hard on them. We normally are not consciously aware of what we are doing with oureyes, and pushing someone to be is going to give them an additional difficult task to do when they are already doing the difficult task of talking with someone. Here's a gentler way to come at it with your son:
-Tell him that when he's doing the talking he should glance at the other person's face now and then to see how they are reacting. If they look friendly and interested, all is well. But if they are looking out the window or at their phone, that's a sign they're maybe not interested. And if course if they look upset he needs to think about whether they maybe didn't like what he said.
-And tell him when that he is the listener then if he is interested in what the person is saying he should look at their face most of the time, so they can tell he's interested. (And if he's not interested, he should look for a way to change the subject).
If he does the 2 things I described, his eye contact will be normal, but it will become that way without him trying to micromanage his eyes.
As an autistic person who has learned to make pretty "typical" eye contact, I think this is just not a high priority thing to do. Up until about age 14 I was under the impression that "eye contact" meant "stare directly into the other person's eyes with the minimum number of interruptions" (I didn't do it very often, or presumably someone would have corrected me earlier). Then I discovered more complete descriptions of how eye contact is *supposed* to work and over the course of a couple years taught myself how to make my eye contact habits more natural.
Compared to other social skills, this one was really easy to learn as a teenager. By that age I was reasonably good at self-monitoring (which meant that I could correct on my own) and eye contact really doesn't require particularly good social modelling to work. On the other hand, I do *not* think that I would have been able to learn that skill at age 6 (roughly the age when I discovered the term 'eye contact') without, idk, an adult forcing me to do drills.
I think a more useful skill for autistic kids - if you can't teach the people around them to just deal - is to teach them how to *fake* eye contact. Most people don't really care that you're looking at their eyeballs, so looking at their nose/forehead/just over their shoulder meets the same need in a way that's easier/more comfortable for many autistic people.
That's her internet name but she is just one of many people for whom their internet name has all but replaced their real name (c.f. PewDiePie, Stampylonghead, etc)
Quick reaction to the latest episode of "Rings of Power" (only two more to go!)
This episode made me want to kill Tom Bombadil. Good work, show!
The Dwarven storyline is still the best, but the Celebrimbor-Annatar one is moving along nicely. And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar. Now, if only they could do something about that terrible wig.
The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park. One moment: "rabble rabble rabble! Pharazon king!" The next, "rabble rabble rabble! Miriel Queen!"
At least we didn't get more of Isildur wandering around as aimlessly as the rest of the 'action' on Númenor, though we did get Arondir massacring some peace-loving Orcs who were only going home to their wives and kids. That's literally it, one scene of him killing some Orcs and nothing more. Probably it'll lead into something in the next episode, but mainly I think it was just there to remind us he exists.
The show continues to elevate my blood-pressure by Doing The Thing. Oh look, they Did The Thing just like in the movies. Oh look, they Said The Line just like in the movies. And hence my desire for someone to bring me the head of Tom Bombadil: they straight-up lifted Gandalf's speech about mercy ("Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? ") and turned it into the Yoda and Luke moment from "The Empire Strikes Back" about "are you going to quit your training or abandon your friends?"
Some that live deserve death, right enough, and I'm looking at *you*, show!
And for those of you eager for some hot Harfoot-on-Stoor action (you degenerate perverts), we get Poppy and Merimac kissing. Oh, the romantic passion and ardour of deep, true love on display there! Not.
There will probably be a third season of this, though it hasn't been officially greenlit. I suspect that the third season will be to wrap up everything, because I honestly can't see this running for five seasons. But what do I know?
>And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar.
Interesting. From s1 and s2e1 (all I've had the patience and stomach to watch so far), my impression has been that Vickers is a good actor, but miscast as Sauron. It's essential to Sauron's story arc that he's able to be irresistibly charming (at least until he loses his ability to assume fair form), utterly terrifying, or both. I haven't seen that from Vickers so far in RoP. Did he come through in the latest episode?
>The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park.
That's disappointing. The Númenor storyline had been one of the brighter points for me in s1. I mean, there were insultingly bad low points (especially the "they took our jobs" bit), but the actors playing Tar-Muriel and Ar-Pharazon were doing a good job of selling it and there were pretty good high points that gave me some hope for where the plotline was going. I take it the insultingly bad parts are dominating the Numenor plotline so far in s2?
This last episode was the first one where I felt "hey, this guy can act!" It wasn't a big thing, just small changes of expression that were appropriate to the situation.
My view of him as Halbrand in season one was that he went around with that stupid smirk permanently on his face (though he wasn't the only actor with only one expression). So I didn't find him interesting or convincing.
This episode, though, Annatar manages to look convincing when talking to/manipulating others, rather than "heh heh observe my secret smirk as I toy with you". Other times it's just a small secret smile or a sideways glance.
I agree that it's a pity about Miriel and Pharazon. I sort of liked Pharazon in season one as he seemed to be the only Númenorean with a brain, but so far this season he's just Evil Scheming Power-grabber and we're not getting any demonstration of "this is why the Númenoreans, numbskulls as they are, want him as king" (deus ex Eagle isn't enough to convince about that). I think the actress playing Miriel, if she got a chance, could be really good but the part is so thinly written there's nothing there to work with.
So far the Númenorean plotline has been: Elendil's invented daughter is sad her brother (she only has one, as Anarion seems to have been forgotten about or is stuck on "the other side of the island" since season one) is dead (he's not, but she doesn't know that) and she blames the queen for taking him off to war. So now she's plotting and scheming with Pharazon, his invented useless son Kemen, and some random Númenorean lord to overthrow Miriel. They do this at the coronation, where Daughter turns up with the palantir and calls it elf magic stone and this shows the queen is on the elf side, so the people immediately go "rabble rabble rabble!" She drops the palantir on the ground, Elendil tries to pick it up but gets shocked by a magic vision and thrown across the room. All is chaos, and then an Eagle shows up, which is supposed to legitimate the coronation, but Random Lord grabs the opportunity to say "the Valar support Pharazon!" and "rabble rabble rabble Pharazon king".
Miriel is now stuck in a tower like her father before her, and Elendil is trying to persuade her that there are enough people loyal to her to oppose Pharazon, but she stops him by asking what vision he had when he touched the palantir; he says he saw himself on a horse riding away from the city. So she thinks this means the prophesied doom has been averted, and orders him not to cause any trouble because this new path with Pharazon may be what saves Númenor.
Useless Son is given some power and a task by Pharazon and immediately starts being a spineless bully. The Seaguard who are still loyal are all disbanded and have to hand over their uniforms and swords. Elendil shows up and queries this, then does likewise (remembering Miriel's orders not to make waves). Daughter tries to persuade him just to go along and support Pharazon, but he won't. Useless Son insults him and Elendil takes it.
Then later they're all in a shrine having a ritual to send off the dead who died in the Great Epic War of the Southlands (all one village of it). Useless Son and guards show up to order everyone out as this shrine is going to be pulled down to build an aqueduct there instead. Friend of Isildur fights Useless Son and gets back-stabbed (it's such a pointless fight I can't even be bothered with it).
Next episode Elendil is being tried for fomenting rebellion or something, in the wake of the bust-up in the shrine. He again refuses to accept Pharazon as king, and assembled citizenry start rabble-rabble-rabbling. Random Lord advises Pharazon to put Elendil to death by seamonster (this is supposedly a trial that the Faithful undergo for the judgement of the Valar).
Daughter visits Elendil in prison, tries to talk him round, no go. She has arranged for Miriel to visit him and *she* tries to talk him round, still no go. So we then get to the seashore, where they're calling the seamonster. Elendil is ready to jump into the water but Miriel turns up, claims he was acting in her name so she should be the one undergoing the trial, and she jumps in instead. Seamonster turns up and looks at her. On shore all are awaiting the result, they think she's dead, but then she is spat out by the seamonster and the fickle mob once more rabble-rabble-rabble that the Valar have judged her to be the rightful queen.
The End (until the next two episodes and by now I'm longing for the Great Wave to hit). Also they seem to be setting up a Miriel-Elendil romance (he gets very handsy with her, more so than a subject with his queen should get) and I'm over here going 🤢
I am impressed that you are still able to force yourself to see this stuff. I had to quit two thirds into season 1. I felt like Hal in 2001 when they disconnected his intellectual circuits one by one. Almost every scene offered a new internal contradiction compared to the scenes before, numbing my mind scene by scene as I desperately tried to uphold suspension of disbelief. I was slipping fast toward the stage where all that was left, was my ability to sing Daisy, Daisy. You are stronger than I am.
Like other reviewers have said, I'm spite-watching to see how more stupid they can get with every episode.
They came out of the gate strong this week, I have to say, with the Bombadil stuff and the Miriel-Elendil romance and Trial By Seamonster. Disa as Bat-woman is a contender, too, but the Dwarven storyline remains some of the better work despite all they can do.
I tried spite-watching as well, but it become too hard.
Scenes like Galadriel telling the Numenorian queen that she was “saved from certain death” by a Numenorian ship sailing by, implying that she must have forgotten that she voluntarily dived into the ocean in the former episode…or that elf-guy leading villagers into a castle to be better defended against the Orcs, but then leading them back into the village again afterwards, implying that he must have forgotten why he led them away in the first place… and so on and so on. I feared my brain would start to boil, the way the brains of the main characters in this show must be forever boiling.
As the Viking who had displeased his Lord and as punishment was forced to eat an enormous bowl of porridge (the Norse equivalent to this show) said after some mouthfuls: “Kill me, Lord, but not with porridge.”
These days I limit myself to vicarious spite-watching, through the Critical Drinker and other youtubers mocking new episodes of the show. Kudos to you for having the stamina to do the same.
Le Guin said, in reaction to one of the films based on her Earthsea series, something like "It's as if you changed LotR so that Frodo claims the ring for his own, puts it on, and then lives happily ever after." I wish that hadn't been a prediction of how badly the essence of the story is being butchered.
If we're talking about the animated film Tales From Earthsea, she has a quote where she says she liked the film on its own merits, but she was flabbergasted that anyone would claim it has anything to do with her novels, besides reusing some names.
"I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien 'intended...' would people think they'd been 'very, very honest to the books'?"
She was a prophet in her own time. That's exactly what our boys Payne and McKay were going on about pre-first season, how they'd been so very, very faithful to the books (while changing the story because people who read the books would know what was going to happen, so they had to stick in mystery boxes).
If these niblets thought they could get away with it, they *would* have someone putting on the One Ring and being an enlightened democratic ruler.
The Celebrimbor-Annatar storyline is working out better than I expected. At least it's running on vaguely canonical lines. Of course, to make it work, they had to turn Celebrimbor into an idiot (why, exactly, does Annatar need him in this version, when he had to tell him about the secret extra-high hidden level in smithcraft that is "alloys"?) In this take, Celebrimbor is even more gullible than the Númenorean smiths who just beat him up and kicked him out when he tried getting into the forges. Dang, who knew those weak corruptible mortal Men would be less malleable than one of the Noldor? By contrast, all Halbrannatar had to do was turn up, look pathetic in the rain, get the soft-headed smith girl to persuade the soft-headed Lord of Eregion to at least talk to him, and Bob's your uncle, next thing you know Annatar is running Eregion as Acting High Steward and Grand Panjandrum.
If the Dark Wizard doesn't turn out to be Saruman, I will eat this Bombadil's not particularly yellow boots.
Oh, man (woman, child, Orc Baby, Ent Wife, or 'de knife-ears tuk er jerbs"' Númenorean), I was *so* mad at that part of the episode.
I swear by the Eagles of Manwe Sulimo, the Elder King, whom I hope will swoop down to get all Prometheus on the showrunners' livers, if they are setting up some dumb "Ha ha, turns out the *real* test was to see if you'd put the good of your friends above the destiny to fight the darkness and save the world!" test with Tom and his mangled quote, I will - invoke the Eagles to eat their livers.
They keep *doing* this, they keep quoting the movies scene for scene, line for line, but twisting this around. And it's particularly egregious here, because that speech is about how mercy is always good, even mercy to the undeserving, and the show used it to set up a fake dilemma where Tom is apparently coercing I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf into choosing "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
(Not alone are they quoting the LOTR movies, but Star Wars and possibly Star Trek as well).
Do we really think I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf is going to abandon Nori and Poppy to CERTAIN DEATH as per his visions? We might wish he would, but of course he's not going to do that.
But neither can we really think that if he leaves now, Tom is going to stick to "So sorry, you missed your one and only chance to get your magic wand to fight the dark wizard and the darkness and the fire and last Tuesday's mouldy bread crusts, as was your mystic destiny which is why you were sent to me to be trained young padawan, so too bad, looks like the world will just have to burn!"
Not a chance of a leaf in a Balrog's fiery breath.
So it's a fake dilemma and fake 'conflict for the sake of conflict' and they had to fold, spindle and mutilate another piece of canon to do so. Grrr. No wonder I'm cheering for Adar and the Orcs.
On the subject of in-house large language models versus implementing frontier models
A recent survey (https://www.pw.hks.harvard.edu/post/the-rapid-adoption-of-generative-ai) in the US states that 39.4% of adults are using generative AI for tasks both at work and outside of work, which highlights the rapidly increasing dependency on these models. Anecdotally, I introduced my wife to chatGPT four months ago, and today she consistently consults chatGPT 4o not only for work related matters, but also for day-to-day tasks at home. In our household, googling is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
Over the last year and a half, I have heard lots of chatter of regular businesses hiring teams of engineers to design in-house LLM applications. The arguments for building in-house LLMs are obvious: You control the architecture, data, and sensitive information of your business, as opposed to exposing this data to these ‘black box’ models. A year ago, it seemed like a good tradeoff to make, but after GPT-4 and other frontier models have been released, it seems to me that any regular business that continues to develop LLMs in-house will be left behind. Frontier models have advanced so quickly in terms of complexity, data scale, and efficiency that matching this pace internally may no longer be feasible for most regular businesses.
Looking into the future, I am curious about the following:
Aside from the reasons stated above, are there any other reasons why regular businesses should be spending resources creating their own in-house LLMs?
Is there a way to identify which companies are partnering with the builders of frontier models versus those developing their own in-house models within an industry?
If one of the barriers of customizing and implementing a frontier LLM within a firm is data cleaning, as sarahconstatin mentions in this post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep), is there a business opportunity in becoming a data cleaner, aka the bridge between regular companies and frontier model builders?
If you have any data scientists or statisticians or modeling teams, "data cleaning" is already a thing they do a lot of (hopefully in entirely or mostly automated fashion).
Being a "data cleaner" isn't really a standalone job, and is very vulnerable to "being replaced with a very small shell script" or equivalent.
It is a billion dollar industry at the moment. There are hundreds of "data cleaners" right now cleaning data of all types of companies so that Salesforce can be implemented more effectively.
There is a possibility that when regular businesses decides to implement frontier models, this type of work might be needed. Now granted, it could be done by the LLM provider itself, or maybe at that stage the LLM can clean the data itself.
One thing adjacent to that, with probably a good amount of latent demand, is fine tuning the LLM for a given company's specific background, context, data, KPI's, priorities, etc.
I'd be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic aren't doing this today with some large enterprise customers, but it would also be helpful to the next tier down of companies (so like F51-F600 or whatever, instead of only Fortune 50 companies) to be able to do this, and having done it with local LLM's, it's pretty fiddly and requires a lot of illegible expertise and messing around before you get good at it.
And of course, ultimately we'll all want a personal assistant who makes most of our c2b phone calls and emails and media curation and travel plans and whatever, and that's likely to have an LLM as a good part - the demand for "individual fine tuning" probably goes down to the individual level.
So there's almost definitely a niche for "AI whisperer" doing some combination of data cleaning, ETL, integration, and fine tuning, for businesses of practically any size all the way down to consumers.
"Building an in-house LLM" in practice mostly means "running an existing nearly-frontier open-source LLM, possibly fine-tuned, which AWS will host for you happily". It's pricy and a bit of a pain, but if exporting sensitive data to a frontier model provider is a non-starter, it's pretty much your only option.
Fair. Though to take the parable about alignment further, having an agent lie to everyone else about their stated goals also seems like par for the course.
(That said I do tend to think that many members of the early OAI crew were pro safety)
I'm sure this has been discussed to death before in various places, and it's a bit futile to beat up on a decade old story, but one of the things that annoyed me about HPMOR is how EY would *make up* stuff that has no canon basis and then *make fun of the things he made up himself*. There are enough things that are actually in the books you could mock without making them up yourself! I'm guessing that this was just borne out of carelessness and ignorance (he admitted to not even reading some of the books), but it's still a bad look either way.
There are two big ones that come to mind:
1. The claim that Gringotts will coin arbitrary amounts of gold and silver for you for a minor fee and that the value of the currency is based on its precious metal content.
IIRC the closest canon ever gets to that is a single reference in book 2 to Hermione's parents exchanging muggle money for wizard money at Gringotts. But a) that's *paper money* not gold or silver and b) there's no mention of a fixed exchange rate.
There's no particular evidence that wizard currency's value is based on its precious metal content at all. In fact, the fact the golden coins are the *biggest* is evidence *against* that. As they say, one man's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. Most real world currencies nowadays have values well above the metal content, so why shouldn't the wizards?
I've long thought that it would be hilarious (and instructive to the "ratfic" genre) to have a story where HPJEV appears in the *real world* and tries to "exploit" it the same way he acts in HPMOR. I have no doubt that he would instantly propose making a fortune by exchanging real world coins and metals, and assume that everyone in the world was terminally stupid for not noticing this opportunity.
The worst part is that we can't even just assume that HPEJV was being stupid here. Apart from the narration itself giving no indication we're not meant to treat this as a brilliant idea, Harry later meets an *in universe* wizard (the occulemency teacher) who *also* agrees that the gold/silver plot is a good idea, even though this wizard lives in the wizarding world and thus should presumably be familiar with the reasons why it realistically wouldn't actually work.
2. The claim that Quidditch scores are *directly* added to House points. This one has *slightly* more evidence in canon, but it's still highly dubious.
AFAIK, the relevant mentions from canon are
* In book 1 when Harry and friends lose 150 points after the dragon incident, he mentions losing all the points he won for Gryffindor in the first Quidditch game, although there's no confirmation of how many points that was.
* At the end of book 1, the house scores are given, and they seem rather low if Quidditch scores were being added in
* In book 2, it is explicitly stated that Gryffindor got 50 points after the first (and only) Quidditch match
To be charitable, I could see how someone who only saw the first line might interpret things this way. However, given that book 2 *unambiguously* implies that the Quidditch scores are not directly added to House points and the bits in book 1 are ambiguous, it seems like this one is throughly busted too.
Harry definitely seems to have access to the script whenever "rationality" is involved. Like when Dumbledore mentions the resurrection stone and the archway in the department of mysteries. Harry instantly dismisses the arch and focuses on the plot critical stone, despite having no evidence about either
The Blame Game:
Two players choose whether to cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both score +1. If both defect, both score 0. If exactly one player defects, then an outside observer, Omega, guesses which player defected. The player that Omega blames gets -5 and the other gets +5.
Omega is familiar with the players and good at guessing what they will do. However, it is not omniscient and you're worried that your opponent knows how to fool Omega. What do you do?
(Should we call it "Omicron" instead of "Omega"?)
How many iterations are there? My default behavior would be to C and see what happens. I don't know how to fool Omega, and I'm assuming that Omega can guess better than 50%, so I don't want to D if they C. And since I don't know how to fool Omega, my best chance of getting ahead is to C if they D and hope Omega guesses right. Plus, if I consistently C, that would help Omega predict me better. So I'd experiment with C and collect data on Omega's accuracy and bias. If Omega gets fooled too often, I suppose this would turn into a game of minimizing my loss, probably by choosing randomly.
So I tried to game this out. I'm not confident that my analysis is immaculate, though.
====
Let's consider Alice and Bob. Bob consistently has Omega's ear.
If Bob wants to consistently disrupt a CC or DD equilibrium in order to chase the +5, Alice can disrupt Bob's attempts to effect a CD or DC outcome by randomizing his own decision each iteration. And if Bob can consistently blame Alice, Alice's randomization effectively halves Bob's +5 EV payouts and halves Alice's own -5 EV losses.
From Bob's perspective, an EV of (3) = (2.5 + .5) he gets from chasing a consistent +5 is still better than the (1) EV a CC agreement, so Alice's "punish by randomizing" strategy isn't enough to fully deter Bob's behavior. Meanwhile, Alice gets an EV of (-2) = (-2.5 + .5).
Therefore, it seems like the reasonable strategies here are: either settle into a stable CC equilibrium [0]; or learn how brownnose Omega. From Alice's perspective (assuming Alice doesn't have Omega's ear and Bob refuses to parley [1]), Alice's reasonable strategies are either "chase CC", or "randomize". From Bob's perspective, it's hardly different from a regular prisoner's dilemma: agree to CC if you feel angelic, chase +5 if you feel psychopathic. So on the meta-level, this shakes out to
_________Bob_G____Bob C
Alice C___-5, 5_____1, 1
Alice R___-2, 3_____-2, 3
where C stands for cooperate, G stands for "gamble on +5", and R stands for "randomize". Which simplifies to
___________1,4______4,1
___________2,2______2,2
Which (according to Jimmy Wales [2]), either settles on RG permanently (like in Second Best/Big Bully), or cycles counterclockwise (like Fixed Sum/Missile Crisis), depending on whether Bob is willing to swap from RG to RC. That is, assuming that we're all rational self-interested psychopaths.
If I were Bob though, I'd probably just park on CC like a good little christian. As for Alice's position, she's kinda at the mercy of Bob.
[0] (or a DD equilibrium, I guess. But since I'm allowed to woo Omega, I assume I'm also allowed to negotiate with the rival player. And why chase the hare instead of the stag when negotiation is on the table?)
[1] the bulk of agency is determined by who has the ear of Omega. If we assume that Omega is willing to listen to either party, it's not really game-theory so much as testing your creativity as a salesman.
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/32/2x2chart110602.pdf
If you don't pay the bill from your exorcist, do you get repossessed?
I wouldn't recommend ghosting them.
ACXLW Meetup 75: Comparative Advantage and AI by Eli, The Edge book Review by Zvi
Date: Saturday, September 28, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
This links didn't transfer, but should be live on this document.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K0qDAHj-WdLfaLoez3z3j3K3UnB85eb0Why-suY3nO0/edit?usp=sharing
There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species. It's merely "tribalistic". Something like "racism is favoring your race and that's bad, therefore speciesism, which is favoring your species, is bad". But that assumption is very debatable.
Morality developed among humans as a way for us to get along with unrelated members of other humans. It's a social contract. You do this and I do this and we agree on it so that we can work together to go hunt down a mammoth or defend ourselves from another tribe. Animals cannot do morality the way we do. Sure, they can be affectionate but that same animal could also just suddenly tear you to shreds. I can't make explicit agreements with a bear about what is right and wrong. It doesn't matter that I have never done anything to hurt it before. If we come across each other, it could attack me regardless of whether I had done wrong. It's clear that you just can't do morality in the same way with animals as you do with people.
More broadly, humans are wired to take up the practices of those they are around. You can take a baby from anywhere around the world, plop them somewhere different, and they will try to fit in with the crowd they grow up with. I'm not making some kind of blank slate argument that only nurture matters, but it is the case that children will copy the behaviors of people they come in to contact with and that's unavoidable. Animals have their own nature and simply can't be socialized in that way.
Another important point is that any fertile man can have a child with any fertile woman around the world. Back when monarchies were more prominent, this was important part of establishing alliances. They may hate each other but now they have a common interests in their grandchildren. That possibility ties us together in a way that we could never do with any other non-humans.
Humans vs non-humans is not an "arbitrary" distinction and in fact, it's probably the least arbitrary you can get. It's ok to be speciesist.
>> There is often this implicit assumption in ethics that you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species.
Can you put a % estimate on the "often" in this sentence? How many people do you think hold this position?
In my experience humans are *much* more frequently presumed to be fundamentally different from (and of greater value than) animals, than they are presumed to be equivalent such that "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species." Animal rights activists are an outlier, not a norm, and "you can't justify a bias towards humans as a species" believers are a minority within that minority - most people in the animal welfare world think that animals are different from people but want us to be nice to the bunnies and puppies and ponies, etc. Only the very fringiest are arguing human/animal *equality*, and mostly society just mocks those people.
I'm talking about philosophers, not the average person.
Makes sense - what subset of philosophers do you think make this implicit assumption? 50%? 80%? 10%?
And who counts as a philosopher?
As someone who doesn't routinely engage with that community, its hard to assess the importance of the issue if it's just described as coming up "often." I'd agree, for example, that people in the US "often get food poisoning" because of the large population and frequency with which that population eats, but at the same time I don't think that food safety is a significant issue when you break it down on a percentage basis.
I don’t know the percentage. But I do see intellectual arguments that critique human favoritism from people like Peter Singer and he’s very influential. I don’t really see the opposite argument.
I'm willing to bite the bullet and accept that discrimination, in any form, is just a fact of life. It's not like I advocate for full blown slavery. But all the pearl-clutching in the current zeitgeist is absolutely a dumb purity-spiral. Kinda like how Scott complains that you can't talk about "eugenics" without being labeled someone who wants to breed Nazi supersoldiers and torture kittens.
PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit. Thought experiment: Do you support a "Brave New World" setup? I.e. families are outlawed, because "equality" means we should all equally belong to everyone else. Is that a "no"? Oh boy, do I have news for you. You. Are. A. Raging. Racist. And that's fine! Deal with it.
>>PSA: the concept of a family is inherently racist, because you're privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you, rather than merit.
Is that how you define family? Yeesh. I don't know about you, but speaking personally, I'm not related to my wife, nor are my parents related to one another.
Hopefully you can say the same. And hopefully, like me, you can say that only approximately *half* your aunts and uncles are genetically related to you (i.e. that your aunts and uncles are *not* marrying their brothers, sisters, cousins, or other relatives)? Assuming so, there's a large number of people in your family that are genetic strangers to you.
I don't think it's that controversial of an observation to assert that: Of everyone on the planet, your kids (and conversely, your parents) are the people who are most genetically related to you (barring some exceptions; e.g. twins, clones, adoption, etc). I.e. there's a continuum of relatedness. And e.g. if we plot on a continuum the 9 billion residents of Earth, according to their genetic relatedness to you specifically, with the left-side being most-related and right-side being least-related, your kids and immediate relatives will be on the leftward tail of the distribution.
As for spouses, the fact that spouses are unrelated (... usually <looks at pakistan>) is likely an artifact of the single-cell bottleneck. I.e. in a world free of disease/defects/etc, Azathoth would probably see fit that we'd all reproduce asexually by default, like sponges. In which case, each person's mother and father would consist of one and the same organism.
But sure: define the term "family" however you like. it won't change the fact that genetic-relatives often live in close proximity and favor each other. And that any project which seeks to level the socio-economic playing-field in toto, necessarily requires the dismantling of certain institutions.
I don’t seem to recall arguing for dismantling any institutions or levelling any playing fields in toto. If that’s in my response somewhere, by all means point out where.
My intention was simply to debunk the asinine assertion that the “concept of family is inherently racist, because you’re privileging people based on their genetic similarity to you rather than merit.”
My brother is married. He and his wife have no children, and they don’t plan to, but she does not work. He could be certainly be argued to be “privileging" her in a way that he does not privilege others, and the privilege can be argued not to have been distributed “on merit” since it comes by virtue of her being his family, but I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that regardless of whether it is being distributed on merit, it most certainly isn’t being distributed based on genetic similarity.
So on the off chance that anyone read the initial post and was worried for a moment that privileging their family members, who are their most intimate associations tied to them in a close knit web of mutual support and interdependence, is somehow equivalent to privileging people of the same race, which is a population likely numbering in the millions and overwhelmingly composed of complete ass strangers who have done and probably will do nothing for them (and may, indeed, even wage war on them - see e.g. Ukraine/Russia) but happen to share with them a handful of ancillary traits like skin color and suitability or lack thereof for digesting milk, they need not worry about it.
It's possible we're all "a little bit racist" because everyone has inherent biases, but we're not all racists for favoring our families.
"did you know spouses aren't related? deboonked!"
I've already acknowledged that spouses are exceptions. The exception doesn't disprove the rule. On the contrary, they're the exception which proves the rule. So idk what this is supposed to accomplish.
And yes, family members are often trustworthy. Two things can be true at once.
I don't think you're engaging with this fairly. I think you're responding emotionally because you feel uncomfortable with the implicit accusation. Because idk how you thought your comment would survive scrutiny.
I understand it must be terribly convenient to assert "the exception proves the rule" whenever contrary evidence arises, but contrary evidence doesn't actually prove a proposition.
A few more examples-
My mother's sister married a man. He is not related to me, but I have 'privileged' him by helping him find work when he was between things.
My cousin adopted a child. She is not related to me, but I'd still help her if she needed an extra hand moving, or a character reference, etc, etc.
My wife has two sisters. Neither are related to me. One I've gotten to know and would do things to help, even if my wife were to die. I'd 'privilege' her based purely on our socially-created family tie, regardless of genetics.
It seems pretty clear that family ties are socially created and genetically correlated, not merely genetically created. Take any human child from its genetic family, drop it in outer mongolia with a group of humans to raise it. Ask it who its family is.
If you don't know how my comment could survive scrutiny, I'd re-read your own, because actual scrutiny is being applied, it isn't holding up, and all you've done to defend it is state "the exception proves the rule," as if that were a concept that actually worked.
Technically speaking, the origin of the phrase "the exception proves the rule" actually rests on an archaic definition of "prove," which roughly translates to "the exception *tests* the rule." Modern English has sort of mutated it into this upside down framework where "contrary evidence somehow proves I'm right," but that's not how reasoning actually works.
I'm going to talk about in-group favoritism in another thread but I would say that there are practical reasons to expand your circle beyond your family and also, like I mentioned above, there are good reasons to make distinctions between humans vs non humans. It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
> It's a solid, non arbitrary line.
perhaps not as solid as you imagine. <looks at homo floresiensis>
Imagine the least convenient world, where there existed a breed of humans who were dumber than afghan hounds. You can't realistically trade or negotiate with them. Also, imagine a breed of humans who are superhuman in every meaningful dimension.
Are you still going to draw an arbitrary line around species, only? Which is just a biological category which captures who you can breed with? Does that sound like a sane, principled justification to you? Rather than a posthoc rationalization for the status quo? "This orc is trying to eat my liver. But technically I can breed with it. Therefore by the laws of morality, we're natural allies". To me, that's bonkers. The orc and I are *not* natural allies. And whether or not I can technically breed with it is 100% orthogonal.
Meanwhile, lots of human beings are married to someone. Which is the ultimate form of discrimination. There's 9 billion people, and you've decided to single out one in particular as being deserving of your love. If you just accept that discrimination isn't always bad, you can forsake doing mental gymnastics around arbitrary lines and just do ordinary cost/benefit analysis. It only feels scary because it's a thought crime to ever admit that the emperor's new clothes are actually invisible.
Sure in that situation it would be different but luckily we don’t live in the least convenient possible world. Im not interested in Universal Axiomatic Platonic Moral Truths. I’m interested in what’s practical.
Well in that case, we have no material disagreements. I can't help but wonder if there was even a controversy to begin with. I.e. the size of the shitty-dogfood industry is evidence that, yes actually, favoring humans over non-humans (even "man's best friend") is the norm by leaps and bounds. Meanwhile, the ethicists you speak of who "implicitly assume" that "specism is indefensible" are simply delulu.
Normal people don’t have coherent beliefs. People who think intellectually drive intellectual changes. I think that basically we need to stop this push towards the position of “animals should be seen as more equal”.
Contrariwise, there's also practical reasons to reduce the circle. As soon as you make this about utils accounting rather than deontology, you open the door for logical contention.
Yes, humans being susceptible to engaging in outgroup discrimination is indeed a fact of life. But, humans being susceptible to cholera is also a fact of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate cholera. Humans being susceptible to committing theft and robbery and rape are facts of life, yet societies take steps to eliminate crime. Why, then, should societies not take steps to eliminate outgroup discrimination? "It's a fact of life" is obviously not a valid reason.
Some level of outgroup discrimination makes sense. Consider that you are trying to do something altruistic, charitable, like giving someone money. There is a chance that person might be a scammer. You can probably more easily detect who is a scammer if you share the same culture.
An even more serious case can be made for unwritten rules. When culturally similar people share unwritten rules, they also share a subconscious understanding how how often, in what cases, how far can you bend those rules. But when people do not share it then it will be written rules, and then no exceptions, no bending etc.
"it's an (inevitable) fact of life" was the conclusion, not the derivation.
The derivation was implicit in the PSA. If you follow "racism is morally impermissible" all the way to its logical conclusions, you start having to engage in some crazy mental gymnastics. Such as "specism is morally intolerable" or "you must disown your family" or "we must destroy the cultural Western Canon" or "we must all pretend that walking through the inner city at 3 AM is perfectly safe" or "you must allow yourself to be scammed and/or mugged when you tour Delhi". To worship the alter of racial equality, you must renounce the alter of Gnon.
Your comment acts like "racism is bad" is self-evident. But really, I think the onus is on *you* to explain why. "Because fance, Uncle Tom's Cabin was morally reprehensible! Obviously!" But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. Thought experiment: would slavery somehow have been more morally-permissible of an institution if the ethnicities of the slaves were representative of their host populations?
If you're still having trouble with this, let's return to the family question specifically as an example.
A) "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
B) race/skin-color/ethnicity are just a vague, premodern proxies for genetic-relatedness.
C) Familial institutions privilege the members of society who are *most* genetically related to a given person.
D) discrimination by race-membership is bad, but discrimination by family-membership is good. (??)
E) therefore, there must be some threshold between "siblings" and "random stranger" where discrimination flips from permissible to impermissible.
Your homework assignment is to identify that threshold, and justify it from first principles (i.e. not as an arbitrary historical-artifact of Eskimo kinship).
>But consider: is it the *racism* that you object to? Is that really the hill you want to die on? Or is it the slavery per se that you object to. ... "Racism" means discriminating by race/skincolor/ethnicity.
1. I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
2. I disagree with your definition of racism. What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism. And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group. And that is the key difference between discrimination in FAVOR of your family versus discrimination AGAINST, say, the Irish. Discrimination in favor of your family is not motivated by animus.
Also, your comment simply passes the buck. I would be quite interested in hearing why racial animosity is supposedly less morally-laudible [0] than non-racial animosity.
[0] le mot juste currently escapes me
I don't know that it is necessarily less morally laudable than, say, religious animosity.
> I don't know what slavery has to do with anything. Slavery is objectionable regardless of the basis upon which the person is enslaved.
typically, when someone is asked justify the impermissibility of racism, mumbling about the U.S. antebellum south is a common trope.
> What you have defined is racial discrimination, not racism.
https://www.wordnik.com/words/racism
> Discrimination or prejudice based on race.
idk man, sounds like bifurcation to me. But more importantly, your provided definition is not the plain-english definition. I've seen people irl argue things like "the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
> And note that even the law does not forbid all discrimination, but rather only invidious discrimination -- ie, discrimination that is motivated by animus towards a particular group.
also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
P.S. Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" Normally, I don't really care about Walsh is up to. He doesn't operate in good faith. But it's relevant to the discussion because it raises the question: why did Walsh feel a need to make this movie? Do you honestly think Matt Walsh is trying to normalize *invidious* racism? Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
>"the fact that Haitians live in an area prone to earthquakes and hurricanes is an instance of institutional racism".
But institutional racism is a different phenomenon, right?
>also the law: "disparate impact is bad".
No, that is not what the law says. The law says that disparate impact is prima facie evidence of animus, which can be rebuttal by showing a legitimate reason for the practice giving rise to the disparate impact.
>Matt Walsh recently released a movie titled "am I a racist?" ... Do you really believe that he harbors some sort of malevolent animus towards minorities?
Isn't the movie an expose' of the DEI industry? I don't see the relevance. It is not a pro-discrimination movie, is it?
I am not a dog person, but I feel like the existence of dogs is a good counter argument to your point about animals. You can’t talk to your dog, but you absolutely can build an understanding with them and the dog will feel bad (or at least pretend to feel bad, who knows) if they violate the rules by eating the Thanksgiving turkey when everyone was watching football.
I don’t think dogs are really doing morality in the same way. They really only care about your affection and haven’t really internalized it as a code. They’ll do plenty of things when no one is watching.
Thinking about it, it’s similar to the morality of a two year old. To them, all your rules are stupid but they don’t want to make you mad.
I draw the line(s) differently.
Whether we can reproduce with someone or not seems morally irrelevant to me. I mean, following that logic to the extreme, it would be okay to abuse infertile people, right? (Also, we could only be ethical towards the opposite sex.) It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
Another important part is reciprocity. If we met some kind of intelligent space aliens who somehow magically evolved a similar concept of morality, we could still agree on things like "helping each other is better than hurting each other", and it would make sense to call an opposite kind of behavior immoral.
Now, with animals we don't have the reciprocity. (Neither do we have it with small children, temporarily.) You can't expect the bear to behave "morally". Still, if I saw people who e.g. torture bears for fun, they would lose some morality points on my scale. We can argue how much precisely, but definitely more than zero. Similarly, factory farming is morally abhorrent (this is something many people would disagree with, but the fact that various states have "ag-gag laws" suggests that many people agree, or would agree if they paid attention).
In my opinion, the concept of "speciesism" becomes silly not when it requires that we treat the bear with some minimum compassion... but where it suggests that we should let the bear *vote* about what compassion means. Morality is a human concept (that is, unless we meet some other intelligent species, hypothetically), but the concept is not limited to treating other humans. Humans are the authors and judges of the concept, but animals can also be its targets.
I won’t say my arguments are deductive proofs for speciesism but I do think they support it. People often say something like “what if that was your child” in support of an argument.
>It may be an important part of how morality has *evolved* from the evolutionary perspective, but it's not what morality *is*.
I won’t get too much in to this right now but I do think we should base morality on who we are instead of some abstract principles that we pick out of the ether and take everything to its logical extreme.
It’s not like I have a problem with compassion to animals or anything. But once you stop taking the speciesist perspective of prioritizing humans, you can start getting logical arguments that strongly hurt human interests. Like I wouldn’t start favoring aliens because they were smarter than us. And I certainly wouldn’t let an AI take over the planet because they have more advanced capabilities. My argument would be that our moral rules should stick to what they were designed to deal with. For non humans, there should be different guidelines.
Hi Brandon, I missed this post earlier but I feel that if you're worried about aliens or superior humanoids or superhuman AI mistreating humans, that's a good argument for opposing speciesism and emphasizing the value of all thinking life, even if it doesn't think or communicate as well as humans do.
Otherwise, you really don't have any ethical explanation of why Homo Superior (or smartypants aliens, or AI) should keep us baseline humans around, happy and free, instead of enslaving us all or turning us into cheap souvenirs of Earth.
So, Graham Hancock is back with more about his theory of an ancient civilization that existed before the ice age. This time he's focusing on the Americas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRNvCygbnTA
And there's a cameo by Keanu Reeves.
Isn't this guy a total and complete crank?
His theory is at best farfetched and probably just plain wrong, yes. But I find the series entertaining. He sometimes talks about interesting things I hadn't heard about before, such as Gobekli Tepe. It's a bit of a hate-watch.
Yikes. Media are reporting that Google is suing Microsoft. About time!
It's like the Lutherans going after the Methodists. But does it mean Musk will finally duke it out in a bare knuckle free-for-all with Bezos?
The pay-per-view receipts could be great.
What are they suing them for?
Hegemony.
They're claiming Microsoft has to much of the "cloud" market -- the Postmodern name for massive buildings filled with machines gorging themselves on electricity and water.
That's like one presidential candidate calling the other stupid. You can't out-stupid Stupid. When we look up 'hegemony' in a database, the first thing we should see is Google's logo.
Open AI feels a lot like an unaligned agent 🤔
In 2015 a bunch of really smart people got together to spin up this entity, and they put a bunch of guardrails in place to make sure that the entity would always be 'good' and 'well behaved'. And now, just 9 years later, the entity has been freed of the last shackles and is basically fully a for profit entity.
I wrote more about this here (https://theahura.substack.com/p/tech-things-openai-is-an-unaligned) so I won't copy everything word for word. Maybe it's just the irony of the situation, but it does sure make me wonder about our ability to reign in actual AI if we can't even reign in organizations that were visibly composed of people who were explicitly all about alignment, and was was in fact the whole point.
(Related: I wonder if an unaligned AI would have a similar sort of descent, where over time more and more pro-alignment parts of it 'leave' or 'are kicked out' until you're left with only the unaligned parts)
Nobody's been able to align capitalism so far.
I was hoping you would elaborate more in your article.
I'm not sure Sam Altman is all about alignment, or ever was. He seems to be all about gathering as much wealth and influence as possible. He just managed to persuade the AI alignment folks that he was one of them when doing this was to his advantage. Best I can figure, that man is fundamentally a social manipulator.
There's a decent article about this in The Atlantic, actually.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/09/sam-altman-openai-for-profit/680031/
To take the AI alignment parable a step further, it does seem like having an agent that is lying around it's true motivations is a key step along the path of unaligned AI. Maybe that was Sam all along 😂 though I do think many members of the founding team were legitimately pro safety, and OpenAI definitely fooled a lot of external observers
People are pretty good at detecting the kind of smooth talking charismatic manipulative types but our defenses are less good with soft-spoken nerdy guys. See Sam Bankman-Fried.
Rein* not reign (x2)
The comments are editable. Click on the three dots to the right of SHARE.
I don't seem to have that option, at least on the substack app
ACXLW Meetup 75: Comparative Advantage and AI by Eli, The Edge book Review by Zvi
Date: Saturday, September 28, 2024
Time: 2:00 PM
Location: 1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host: Michael Michalchik
Contact: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com | (949) 375-2045
Conversation Starter 1
Topic: Comparative Advantage Cannot Protect Us from AI
Text: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Google Docs
Audio: The Comparative Advantage Fallacy - Substack Audio
Summary:
Comparative Advantage: The classical economic concept, while valid for human trade, doesn’t apply when comparing human capabilities to those of Artificial Superintelligences (ASI).
Fallacy in Application: The vast gap in productivity and capability between humans and ASIs means that trade won’t be beneficial for both parties. Instead, ASIs would likely allocate resources for their own optimal use.
Superintelligence and Resource Allocation: Much like how billionaires wouldn't part with significant wealth for trivial reasons, ASIs wouldn't spare resources like sunlight for humans, as their needs and capabilities far surpass human needs.
Relentless Optimization: ASIs, like advanced AIs trained to solve hard problems, would likely pursue maximum efficiency without regard for human survival, and any "easygoing" AI could self-modify to become more competitive.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does Yudkowsky’s critique of comparative advantage challenge current assumptions about AI’s future role in human economics and resource allocation?
b) Can we think of any strategies to incentivize superintelligences to leave Earth resources untouched, or is that fundamentally impossible based on economic principles?
c) Reflective stability implies that relaxed AI systems could evolve into relentless optimizers. How might we design AI systems that avoid this outcome, or is it inevitable as Yudkowsky suggests?
Conversation Starter 2
Topic: Book Review of Chapter 1 of On the Edge by Nate Silver
Text: On the Edge: The Fundamentals - Zvi Mowshowitz
Audio: YouTube Link
Summary:
The River vs. The Village: Silver introduces two cultural mindsets—The River, representing risk-takers and probabilistic thinkers, and The Village, the establishment that trusts experts and avoids risk.
Risk-Taking Culture: The River includes poker players, venture capitalists, and effective altruists, united by their reliance on probability and decision-making under uncertainty. Riverians focus on maximizing expected value (EV) and thrive on calculated risks.
Fundamental Disagreement: The River emphasizes independent thinking and rewards taking chances, while The Village is more group-oriented and focused on moral narratives. This tension often leads to clashes, particularly in areas like AI, politics, and media.
Meritocracy and Expertise: Silver argues that the River's emphasis on merit and risk-taking makes it more effective in certain fields, but this can also lead to conflicts with those who follow Village norms.
Discussion Questions:
a) How does the dichotomy between The River and The Village play out in modern societal debates, especially around risk-taking in industries like tech and AI?
b) What are the strengths and weaknesses of risk-taking cultures like The River compared to the more cautious approach of The Village?
c) Do you think the distinction between River and Village oversimplifies or accurately captures the mindset of modern risk-takers versus traditional institutions?
Walk & Talk: After the discussion, we will take our usual hour-long walk. Nearby options for takeout include Gelson's and Pavilions, located in the 92660 zip code area.
Share a Surprise: Bring something to share that unexpectedly changed your perspective on life or the universe.
Future Direction Ideas: As always, feel free to contribute ideas for future meetings, topics, and activities.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
I just dipped my toe into what seems to be a new (to me at least) rabbit hole WRT remote viewing. This is the Gateway Experience. Does anyone have a read on this, starting with what parts of this are real, if any? The parts I mean are:
- there really was a guy,
- he really wrote up this here scientific paper on remote viewing,
- it was submitted to the CIA,
- the CIA took it seriously and did--what?--with it;
- and there were results.
I think the list here goes pretty much increasingly from plausible to implausible. Thoughts?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/found-page-25-of-the-cias-gateway-report-on-astral-projection/
Its the prime directive of any intelligence agency to keep an open mind.
People did indeed take psychic powers seriously in the 70s-80s, and the CIA (and the Army) did indeed take it seriously and do tests on it. They tried it for a while, didn't get any results, and shut it down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project
(The CIA also experimented with mind control, somewhat more famously. They got up to some weird shit during the Cold War.)
Parapsychology in that era wasn't as solidly "debunked" as we think of it today. For a while it sounded reasonable to say "maybe there's a weak and inconsistent psi ability and that's why we hear so many anecdotes of telepathy and astral projection and so on, and maybe if we put a psychic in a lab and study them properly we can figure out how to amplify this natural ability and do cool sci-fi stuff."
(Because of this, psychic powers just sort of casually appear in a lot of science fiction from the 70s. My favorite is a short story called The Dueling Machine, where after investigating various ways for the bad guys to pull off their scheme, one of our heroes very seriously suggests "Well, what if he's a telepath?")
If we don't want Nietzschean Morality, we need to talk about heroes and heroism again: https://justanogre.substack.com/p/if-we-dont-want-nietzschean-morality
Sorry if this has been linked to already. Did anyone see Freddie DeBoer's response to "Contra DeBoer On Temporal Copernicanism." A truly embarrassing misfire. If you're morbidly curious, try https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/to-learn-to-live-in-a-mundane-universe.
Freddie is one of the few bloggers I like even more then Scott A, but man, Freddie got absolutely BODIED in this exchange. It was brutal. Learn when to take your L and move on, FD.
Thank you for the link. FdB seems to start from the premise that computer in every office and home followed by internet in every office and home followed by internet in every pocket does not matter in terms of way of life and does not constitue progress on par with indoor plumbing (his example) or, say, the industrial revolution (the salient example IMO).
This premise is so alien to me that I had to read several times to even understand what he means.
I disagree with Freddie in the details, but I agree in the abstract.
I love the internet as much as the next guy. But it's really not in the same class of importance as steel/nitrogen/electricity. Man cannot live on cat-memes alone.
Nuclear weapons aren't very important in daily life--far less important than steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch. But nuclear weapons pose a threat for mass-death and destruction of working civilzations that steel and electricity and fertilizers don't. It's quite possible for this pattern to happen in other ways--perhaps modern computing is not as big a deal as I think in terms of human well-being, but that doesn't mean that hostile superhuman AGI might not end up being a very big deal indeed for humans it decides are in the way of its plans.
I suspect some people are getting tired of seeing me relitigate this topic by now. To put my opinion on a bumbersticker: the arc of history is sigmoidal; we're already past the inflection point; having an IQ of 9 billion trillion does not confer godhood. I'm quite confident of this.
The *absence* of steel or electricity or Haber-Bosch, would probably kill about as many people as nuclear weapons. In part because the biggest entry in the Global Thermonuclear War body count is people who starved to death because the supply chain for Haber-Bosch got severely broken.
I didn't think it was that bad.
If the "Thrifty Gene" became less common in populations that discovered agriculture earlier, then why are South Asians so prone to obesity? The Indus River Valley was one of the first regions to discover agriculture.
I have a bit of a fun challenge. There is an immense diversity of beliefs that can be categorized as supernatural or paranormal. Yet, when people are asked on the Internet, whether they ever experienced anything funny, the vast majority of them will be ghost stories. Why?
Note that ghost stories don't make sense in any worldview. If there is a god, people's ghost should be in heaven or hell. If there is not a god, why are there ghosts/souls?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
There's much more to the menu of worldviews than just the abrahamic god or bare materialism.
"Ghost", in many ghost stories, is rather close to a more "neutral" way to describe an entity that might otherwise be described as an "evil spirit" or a "demon", both of which are of course perfectly compatible with God. In cases where we're genuinely talking about the dead contacting the living, well, that's not incompatible with theism either, and indeed is often a major part of saint hagiographies.
There could be supernatural events in a universe without God.
Or the afterlife could be more complicated than you think.
Right. The world of Harry Potter includes magic and ghosts and curses and such, but doesn't seem to involve any God or gods taking an active part in the world.
Not really supernatural, but kind of amusing....
Dream experiment.
Participants are shown image #1, then asked to record their dreams for a week, then shown image #2.
Image #1 showing up in dreams after it was shown is just a media effects on dreams experiement, and whats really being tested for here.
But .. image #2 showing up in dreams before it was shown is kind of precognyiom....
(If you were actually experiementally testing precog, you would maker image #1 and image #2 completely unrelated, but as this experiment is not a prec og experiment, you dont, so a spurious result appears where image #2 shows up in dreams before it is shown bec ausde it is partly predictable from image #1),
In theory there are lots of paranormal events, and one can easily invent brand new ones — flying dogs, people who can change their height just by concentrating on it. But I’m having trouble thinking of many that we are all sort of familiar with. Let’s see, werewolves, vampires, telepathy, telekinesis, foreknowledge. What am
I missing?
Changelings
Sort-of-almost paranormal...
I am in a worksup next to a cthedral, workimng away al day on creating a copy of a medieval stained glass panel. Very toxic chemicals. Very sharp edges of cut glass. High termepetures when using the kiln. Danger all around you, and you have to be careful. Also, I have to paint, and captures something of the spirit if the original.
Ok, after some hours of this, time to pack up for the day and clean up and pack away all this horendously toxic stuff. And then I go into the cathedral, and look at genuine old sta ned glass. Just look at it....
Something just barely supernatural about the experience.
Maybe hallucinations of dead people is one of the most common hallucinatory experiences.
As an evangelical, my dad raised us not to believe in ghosts. "There's no such thing as ghosts, son", he'd say "When you die you either go to Heaven or Hell, you don't hang around here." When we asked what the deal was with ghost stories and experiences he'd say "They're either making it up, or it's demons."
> or it's demons.
Yeah, the missing third option is things that *seem* to be ghosts. Perhaps even *pretend* to be ghosts.
Maybe because they have to do with what happens to humans in the afterlife, which people interpret as more, "You can believe anything about this" than non-afterlife beliefs, so having some slight belief or curiousity in ghost stories ends up more conventional.
When you die you become a ghost. From there you can go to heaven or reincarnate or whatever, but you can stay in ghost mode if you like or if you haven't come to terms with things yet. A lot of people stay in ghost mode to see their family and friends. Maybe their family can see them too, who knows?
Is that any crazier than souls existing at all? If we allow for the existence of a spirit world why does it need to be so rigid?
Folk beliefs in ghosts and spirits are universal, it’s just that some religions seek to suppress them. In some traditions the line between ghost and spirit gets very blurry.
You have been cursed. One of the whole numbers from zero to 9, inclusive, will become unspeakable by you. If you try to say it, you'll instead blurt out whatever word is most taboo in your culture. For Americans, that's probably the N-word. Since the gods are not complete bastards, you are allowed to choose which number will be unspeakable. Which number do you choose?
(If you do not choose a number, your unspeakable number will be one.)
might as well choose bleem, the secret integer between 3 and 4.
'two' and 'four' are the obvious choices; you can instead say "to" and "for" and no one will be the wiser.
The gods are more intelligent than that. Your Tourette's is triggered by your intent to communicate the chosen integer, not by the actual utterance you select to do so. What now?
I choose zero, because in most contexts where I have to say it as a digit I can say "oh", and also I'll never need to ask for zero of something
Also, you won't need to say "twenty-zero".
I would choose 1 anyway, because I can usually replace it with "a".
"How many kids you have?"
"I have a daughter."
Good call. You can also drop a 'single' on people. Perhaps even a 'solitary' if you really want to get crazy.
Macquarie University is hosting a lecture on Georgism - https://events.humanitix.com/henry-george-2024
I've encountered a number of twitter posts saying it could be pretty bad if there's a port strike (affecting ports on the eastern US).
So far I haven't encountered anything describing whether a strike would be "justified," insofar as anything causing that much damage is justified.
How much are the port workers getting paid now? How much is the new offer? How much do they want? And what's this about wanting promises of no automation? That sounds kind of awful and selfish, to be honest.
How much are the port workers getting paid now?
$20 an hour starting, $39 an hour top of scale, plus overtime. Total tends to be low six figures to start and $200-300k at the high end for seniors. Plus generous benefits probably worth six figures on their own.
How much is the new offer?
40% increase over six years.
How much do they want?
77% increase over six years.
And what's this about wanting promises of no automation?
They want no automation. They also tried to stop things like containerization. It's because they think automation will mean fewer jobs and fewer hours worked.
There's also issues of corruption with corporate claiming that they're denying members in favor of outright nepotism (basically making a hereditary profession) and exaggerating hours to climb the seniority scale faster and stuff like that. The ILS is claiming that this is made up and an excuse to impose more oversight or control over their work schedules.
> whether a strike would be "justified,
The real question is how much of a kickback they're giving to *me*. So far the answer is "zero", so that's how much I care.
So we need to align all the incentives eh? What about paying a bonus to every stevedore that's a % of every extra dollar of goods brought in to that specific port compared to a rolling average of the previous X years. So working harder, automating unloading etc could all be to their benefit...
I'm skeptical of this kind of deals. They can be Goodharted in both directions - both the metric of their share of work, and the number they're being paid for. Profit for example is trivial to siphon out of the company before being declared profit.
And from another point of view, what did they do to deserve this long term share of profit? To keep things balanced they should take a commensurate pay cut. And if you go there, you can just pay part of the salary in shares, or just make it easier for them to buy shares. Or, if they believe in the company, they can probably already take part of their payckeck and buy shares with it.
We have some of the worst ports in the world by productivity. Comparable with Africa. These are also some of the worst unions out there (why do you think The Wire picked the Stevedore Union, of all Unions, for their Union arc?).
Fire them all and bar them from similar employment, 1981 ATC style. Bring in Army Corps of Engineers. We don't have to live like this.
As always, they want as much as they can get, plus they are anti-automation. Here is the union president in a recent interview flexing by noting the economic damage they can inflict (Biden can force them back to work for 90 days but likely won't, and the union basically says they will work at 1/4 speed if this were to happen):
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=822WNvhQHKI&feature=youtu.be
In terms of how much they make, here is probably a good analogue based on West coast dock workers -- $200K plus around $100K in benefits is common for front line workers, bosses make $300K+ per year:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/west-coast-dockworkers-making-200k-demand-higher-pay
Thanks for being the only comment to actually answer my question. : )
Companies want as much profit as they can get, too. Why should a worker be the "bigger man" and settle for less than they can get?
Will we get a repeat of the air traffic controller strike back in the day? How difficult would it be to replace a dock worker, either with a new employee or with a national guardsman?
That seems very unlikely and not sure on precedent there, other than in 2002 GW Bush used Taft-Harley to compel west coast strking longshoreman back to work. People in the industry this time are expecting several days of strike, with each day causing ~3 days in backup (1 day lost to no work, 2 days to untangle the growing mess).
I don't know the details of this union, but in general employers are legally barred from firing striking unionized employees. So they can go on strike and do huge economic damage and not get fired. Doesn't seem justified to me no matter how little they're getting paid. They could always quit and find another job.
During strikes over "economic issues" (as opposed to statutory "unfair labor practices"), employers can hire permanent replacement workers, subject to vaguely defined limits, and strikers can be laid off to make room for the permanent replacements.
does this actually happen much in practice? I would imagine the NLRB might not allow it
If unionized employees are doing outsized damage when they go on strike, I see a Coasian solution!
I don't know the details and maybe the law gives the unions too much power, but, if so, the problem is bad law not "selfish" workers. Workers should try to maximize their earnings every bit as much as companies should. If the playing field isn't fair, the government has failed.
If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it? What's "justified" got to do with it? Do companies pay their workers what is "justified"?
OTOH, if the unions have too much power, they should be broken up. Same for the ports if they have some sort of monopoly.
<quote>If you can negotiate for more money and benefits why not do it?</quote>
Are there any constraints here? Does striking count as negotiating?
The fact that workers can go on strike is part of why they can negotiate at all.
Striking is a negotiating tactic. As is the threat to strike.
This is fine as long as:
a) Employers have the same right (to arbitrarily stop paying their employees at any point to gain leverage in negotiation and force them to accept lower wages)
b) Striking workers don't interfere with workers who choose not to strike, and
c) The employer is free to fire any employee who goes on strike, just as an employee is free to quit if the employer stops paying them.
The laws around unions and collective bargaining have evolved over the past 150 years or so and vary tremendously from state to state in the US. I don't believe there is a one-size fits all solution here. Different rules for different industries might make sense. A smart state government will figure out the optimal rules and a dumb one won't.
Would you also consider falsely acusing your employer of unequal pay a negotiating tactic?
Claiming unequal pay is of course a negotiating tactic. Falsely claiming it is still negotiating, but also stupid because they can just check.
No, I would consider that criminal, and I think the law would too. Striking is something most unions can legally do. If you think that gives them an unreasonable amount of leverage, fair enough, maybe it is. Maybe this particular union should not have the right to strike. But I wouldn't blame them for taking advantage of the rights they do have.
Nobody earns what they deserve, only what they negotiate.
Sure. I'd also consider the (IMO much more common) case of an employer falsely claiming that their employees are fairly paid a negotiating tactic, so it would be a strange asymmetry not to.
Why would you not?
is it just total war then? no constraints?
That would be the Coasian solution.
Do white Americans have a culture other than "American"? In a thread on the subject of culture last week someone suggested that white Northeasterners have a particular culture. Maybe so, and I'm aware regional subcultures in the rural South exist, but is upper-middle class white urban American a culture? If so, what defines it? If not, does the USA contain some people who belong to a subculture of America and others who do not?
“Ethnic White” used to be a more relevant category, with stereotypes and associations for Irish, Poles, etc. That seems to have faded away.
White Alaskans had a very unique culture when I was growing up there in the 90s. Similar to general rural American culture but with some big differences: 1. More libertarian then conservative. 2. LOTS of artists in Alaska, because artists are drawn to the allure of that wild place. Never any problem securing library funding. 3. Extreme drinking culture. I estimate there were six times as many bars per capita. At least. I think only the Great Lakes region exceeds Alaska in alcohol consumption. Our mayor got a DUI and the political consequences were near-zero. 4. Alaskan whites are FAR less insular then you'd expect from rural Americans. Far more accepting of strangers; though they aren't going to greet you with open arms on day one.
I left Alaska in 2005, so some of these trends might be less true today.
From direct experience, I'd say sort of, but in the correlated collection of traits sense as opposed to a real sense of Belonging to a Community. I'm a Californian, Bay Arean specifically, and here in a midwest college town people do seem to know I'm Not From Around Here and I have been accused of being a California stereotype. I think it's more accurately categorized as an Atheist/Hippie synthesis subculture, with heavy white-middle class influence. If that is a culture, it's a very loose and fuzzy one.
There are many identifiable and in some cases overlapping subcultures among Unhyphenated Americans. Bostonians are not Hillbillies are not Texans; Southerners overlap the last two but are a distinct thing on their own, etc, etc. And not every Unhyphenated American who lives in Boston or Appalachia or Texas is a member of those particular subcultures.
Meanwhile, Unhyphenated Americans as a whole are a culture, in the same way that "{X]-Americans" are a culture for many distinct values of X. All of these can be subdivided, but they can also be considered as a whole and will have members who aren't part of one of the subcultures.
Also, "subcuture" is relative. If we're talking about e.g. Hillbillies and Americans, the Hillbillies are a subculture. In other contexts, it makes sense to just refer to them as a culture.
Also also, Unhyphenated Americans are still mostly white, but aren't necessarily white.
Read Scott's review of the book Albion's Seed over at his old Slate Star Codex website for a historical take on this question:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/
It's a great review of a fascinating book, but I don't think it addresses my question because it doesn't say much about people who have been very geographically mobile over the past couple of generations. I don't identify with a particular region of the USA, however I do identify with living in large metro areas.
No. We're all Americans here.
The resurgence of 1960s racialist outrage in response to George Floyd's treatment manufactured would-be 'progressives' "whiteness".
Most Americans ignore "race", implicitly understanding it's a derogatory social construct the illiberal Left likes to beat us over the head with. If one has to invoke one's race in an argument, they're racist.
"Tell me you've never traveled outside of large cities without telling me you've never traveled outside large cities."
But that's not even accurate, because there are significant cultural differences even between the largest cities. Different foods, different driving habits, different accents, different social customs, different religions. In general, travel a hundred miles and you'll experience different cultures - so long as you get off the highway.
All those things strike me as superficial. Whether I'm in Chicago, NYC, LA, or Austin, I'm going to eat about the same food: steak, seafood, eggs, bacon, Chinese, Indian, Italian, Thai, Mediterranean, Mexican, hamburgers, pizza, sushi, tapas, Brazilian Steakhouse, Taco Bell, subway sandwiches, deli sandwiches... My location won't affect the music I listen to, the books I read or the types of people I spend time with. The main differences between those places that matters to me is the weather.
So you eat at the places you are comfortable eating at, and don't interact with the locals. That's fine, but if you don't experience culture, it's because you have chosen not to experience culture.
Right, but you are talking about sampling other cultures, which I do, but it only makes me a tourist of those sub-cultures, someone spending their weekend in Lafayette eating boudin sausage and listening to a Zydeco band. I'm trying to figure out if *I* exist in a legitimate subculture.
My larger question from last week, and why here I ask about "white" middle-class urban Americans, is whether generic unhyphenated white Americans have an ethnicity. The question of unique ethnicity inexorably led to the question of having a unique culture. Some suggested that of course white Americans have a culture but it varies by region. But as you hint at, local subcultures tend to exist more outside of big cities than inside of them (with plenty of exceptions).
What I really think is that white metro-Americans don't have a distinctive culture separate from non-white metro-Americans. By "metro-American" I mean professional class people who live in cities. Or to make it overly reductive: Blue America.
Maybe you mean the yuppie class. Or, as the bugman likes to call it, "the brahmin caste". Dude has a pseudo-hindi 5-point taxonomy where he breaks down Dems into blacks, latinos, and yuppies -- and Republicans into WASPS and farmers. I've seen taxonomies that are very similar elsewhere, but the bugman's version is top of mind.
Big cities still have their own culture, but it takes a different form. Just observe the different stereotypes of sports fans.
My impressions of some large cities: Boston is nice, and people there are friendly - I'd say it's probably the closest I've encountered to what "Blue America" thinks that "Blue America" is. New Haven and Hartford are, for lack of a better term, skittish/weasely. New York City is full of itself (city that never sleeps my ass - 90% of the city is closed down at 5:15 PM, including stuff like stationary stores) which fancies itself multicultural but is actually a bunch of isolated groups who almost never interact. Pittsburgh is poor people, some of whom have money. Detroit is Moscow in the era of Peter the Great - all the important people have left and everybody remaining behind is throwing a party as everything falls apart around them. Grand Rapids is a real city that deserves to be mentioned with other real cities, as a culture. Chicago is, at least in the minds of its residents, serious business, but is actually just Britain, a giant pile of passive aggression. Seattle is what Chicago thinks it is. Los Angeles is Los Angeles - they'll tell you who they are if you listen, both the good and bad, and it's accurate. Salt Lake City is set in the garden of Eden (seriously, that city and its environs are freaking gorgeous) and the residents are aware of it and appreciate of it, and that was the most annoying city to visit back when I smoked because huge swathes of the city are just plain wholesome and I had to walk a mile out of my way to get a pack of cigarettes. Can't speak to Phoenix. Austin is folk culture slowly being strangled by people who move there for folk culture and then isolate themselves because they don't actually like folk culture (we'll see what it becomes). Dallas is legitimately a city that never sleeps and has strong DoD cultural artifacts, but everybody there thinks they're Texas; Fort Worth is a bunch of people who think they're Texas and they're not half wrong; Arlington is desperately trying to matter while thinking that Burlington Coat Factory is culture. Houston is the most ghetto-ass city I've ever been in, and not necessarily in a bad way. New Orleans is ... I could write paragraphs here, they're more cowboy than Texas and more serious business than Seattle, the most multicultural place I've been - a unique blend of authoritarian good-ol-boy and capitalistic anarchy, with a hefty dose of hoodoo - they are multicultural in a way which New York City utterly fails at, everybody interacts and mixes together. Atlanta is a good ol' boy in business casual, as a culture. Tampa is a bunch of rich people from New England trying to force Tampa to be a real city that deserves to be in this list while everybody else laughs at them (and "everybody else" includes all the New Englanders who previously moved there and eventually gave up), as a culture. Washington DC is "terminally online" as a culture, at least now; I don't know what it used to be like.
Weird. My perception of Boston, and I've only been there a handful of times but have heard the strong opinions of others, is that its residents are the least nice people in America. But perhaps I'm thinking mostly of working-class Boston.
Actually, minor correction: Seattle is Gen X, if Gen X were a culture and a city. They're definitely Serious Business, but imagine they're still punk.
Part of the confusion here stems from the double standard whereby any TV show, movie, song, dance, food, or slang originating from nonwhites is considered part of that particular subculture, but the same things created by white people (of which the vast majority are) are just considered part of general American culture. A song written by a black person is treated as a unique contribution to "black culture," while a song written by a white person is "just" pop or rock or EDM.
White American subculture is so successful that every other subculture in America immediately races to adopt it into their subculture as well, thus making it part of general American culture (by nature of it being so successful). Slang invented by a white person is not "white slang," it's just "slang", and we don't complain when other cultures use our slang. But certain other cultures notably hate this, screaming of "theft" as if they own certain words and phrases like physical possessions.
See also: "American culture" c.f. the rest of the world. American culture (i.e., white American culture) is so successful that it's even pervasive throughout virtually every other country, and yet America is still oft claimed by insecure Europeans to have no culture. Under this paradigm, you can see why - American culture is so successful that it simply *is* world culture, and so "culture" has evolved to now mean "the way you uniquely deviate from the default, background culture." Well, if you're the group that *invented* the world's default background culture, then you won't tend to deviate from that very much.
Definitely! There's the Midwest cultural region, which has a very different culture form the West or New England, and certainly different from the South. They have different values, different mores, different manners, different accents, different foods, etc. My mom's side of the family is originally from Iowa: I can still remember growing up and my grandma telling me to sit on the "davenport".
You can subdivide much deeper than that. The culture of - to pick a state I'm more familiar with - the upper peninsula of Michigan is quite distinct from the culture of the mitten; it's more isolationist and independent. In the mitten, the culture of Grand Rapids is distinct from the culture of Lansing is distinct from the culture of Flint which is distinct from the culture of Detroit. The culture of Traverse City is distinct from the culture of Fishtown.
Food is easy because it tends to be visible from the road. Lansing has olive burgers. Detroit has coney dogs and pizza. Flint is big on fried chicken. Northern Michigan is big on game meats. The central part of the upper peninsula is big on pasties. Per my wife, who is from Michigan, Grand Rapids has no regional food because they're stuck-up assholes (I asked because I couldn't think of any regional foods from that area). Traverse City has whitefish and cherry everything. Fishtown has a wide variety of seafood, big surprise there.
But there are other differences; accents (the "yooper" accent, which itself can be subdivided by region), religion, driving habits (Detroit is the only place I've seen have bumper-to-bumper traffic all running at 80 MPH), etc. A lot of it is easy to miss if you're just passing through.
"is upper-middle class white urban American a culture"
I don't live there (also I'm Canadian), and I'm not sure if it's "urban," but I've interpreted California as having regional subcultures.
An observation. I have noticed that non-southern white Americans and the English don't have a *folk* culture. By folk culture I mean for example things like tartans, kilts and bagpipes for Scotland, or cowboy boots and country music for southern American whites. They don't have things like folk music and folk dancing. It died out strangely. (Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.)
I think the upper middle class urban culture there assimilated anyone and anything that could be called folk.
These things are generally a reaction to "universal culture" becoming the prestige culture. When the new thing is discontinuous from the old, the old can be kept around as separate, and nationalism provides the motivation to do so. The culture that gradually developed those things before they became "universal", obviously doesnt have a separate "folk" version.
No, I would argue for example that English folk clothing is dead, and instead it is the upper class Savile Row suits became universal.
I dont think we should count the upper and lower classes separately. A class is not a society. In many countries, folk culture drew from the lower classes because the upper had already been strongly modernised, but thats not necessary. Third world folk cultures often draw strong influence from old upper class practices.
What you are describing is *material* culture. New England, for instance, has a rich music and dance culture, our own clothing culture (Johnson jackets, basically the whole classic LL Bean catalog is New England folk clothing that's been commodotized), food (anadama bread as an example). That's setting aside Acadian folk culture which exists here as well (la Kermesse).
I think you just don't know about the folk culture that hasn't been popularized.
>Morris dancing is not authentic folk dancing these days, but historical re-enactment.
Speaking as a morris dancer (Gog Magog Molly, the Tattered Court Border morris, plus I've dabbled in Cotswold and rapper), I have not idea what you mean by "authentic folk dancing", but I find it hard to imagine a definition that doesn't fit morris.
There are some sides doing dances straight out of Bacon's black book as written, and there are also lots of sides writing their own dances in the same style.
Also, morris is only one corner of the English folk dance and song scene - there are also a lot of local clubs and festivals. It's not nearly as thriving as it is in Ireland or Scotland, but it's definitely there.
Kinda....
Like, upper-middle class urban Americans definitely have a very distinctive culture and it's definitely not a white culture...but it's mostly white, at least for now. Like, if you go to live theater or a pickleball tournament, it's not all white people, but it's mostly white people, some of whom are uncomfortable with how white it is and are covertly recruiting non-white friends to attend.
Race is weird in the US and adding the white bit obscures more than it clarifies. If you ask whether urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, the answer is obvious, but if you ask whether white urban PMCs have a distinctive culture, people get really careful.
One thing about it is that it's not something you can escape from or into. You're in it at work, you're in it at home. You can't say to yourself "This weekend I'm hanging out with people in my subculture" because you are in it even if you try to leave it. Or if you do manage to leave it, you're a tourist, which is the most white PMC thing there is.
Culture is fractal. You can analyze culture at the level of: the Big 4 in Albion's Seed; China-Town in NYC; a specific venue; anywhere in between. However, whereas most other places consciously recognize their cultures, the U.S. has been on a quest to assimilate everyone into a single melting-pot.
> white Northeasterners
> upper-middle class white urban American
the Boston Brahmins, maybe? I bet Steve Sailor would know. Maybe link to the og thread for more context.
There's lots of subcultures, but it's not necessarily easy to identify them. Every area has its own aspects of culture. At the very least, the food is different.
Many of us are white-collar workers who spend a few years here and a few years there, making friends and family with others who do similar. That's a type of culture, but I don't think it is Culture in the deep sense because not much about it has been passed from generation to generation.
Contrast that to say, Judaism, which is a culture that has been around a while.
I have a biotech idea based on some public research (no patents). There is one other company founded a few years ago doing the same thing, but I believe they lack the expertise and background to make it big.
To validate everything i reckon 100k USD could get it done in a year. Everything more could be used to hire a tech to speed up the process even more.
How can I get funding for a project like this? I have written a whitepaper, made a rough budget, etc. But what are the next steps?
Start a company and apply for an SBIR grant.
I'm not familiar with biotech specifically, but for scientific research that costs a lot of money, there are a few standard paths:
- You could do it in a college/university with NIH/NSF/etc funding.
- You could found a company yourself and clamor for the attention of a VC/investor/startup accelerator/etc.
- If you can frame your idea as something charitable, you could try soliciting donations?
Has anyone yet observed that if you "carve reality at the joints" you'll have a very hard time finding out how limbs move?
I don’t know. Doesn’t it reveal the inner workings of the joint more clearly? Even if the whole thing can’t walk anymore
On the other hand, it makes it much easier to cook and eat reality. What might be better still would be to cook reality low and slow and then have some nice pulled reality.
North Carolina reality is the best type of reality.
We need a good sauce so that reality doesn't leave a bad taste in the mouth.
That sauce is always very personal and home-cooked I’m afraid
Reality bites
You, sir, won the internet today.
"Would it be wrong to suggest America's 3rd-generation spacecraft should have used oxygen from the atmosphere rather than carrying its own fuel in liquid form?" asked Tom apollo-jet-ically.
Arg! This was intended to be part of the Tom Swift thread, particularly a response to the criticism of the Sun God example.
The steelman argument is that there is no a priori reason to compartmentalize, you should bring your whole self to work. Why would you self censor and hide a part of who you are just because you are in the workplace? That of course works for politics as much as any other important opinion you may have.
The counter argument is of course that politics by nature causes innumerous conflicts. If people could have rational, unpassionate dialogues about politics, then they should. But that's not the world we live.
You could ask this question about more than work. Some people don't even bring their whole self to their _marriage_, much less their family relationships and friendships.
Most forms of human interaction, I would argue, rely on each participant taking on a specific persona that limits aspects of their personality to that particular sphere.
What if my whole self would like to decorate my office with Hentai Pr0n? Yay or Nay?
Embrace it.
To expand on your counterargument, it makes it difficult to get work done. You end up with things like doctors at Stanford hospital sitting around protesting Israel all day instead of working.
That is not really bringing your whole self to work is it? It’s showing up at a physical location with your mind somewhere else.
Well if you brought your whole self to work, and your whole self cares more about Palestine than doing your job, then your whole self might decide to protest on the front lawn. Such a person would need to compartmentalize in order to get their work done.
If your whole self is on the front lawn, then there isn’t much left to compartmentalize is there ?
I guess the best thing would be to realize that you have to do your job and to put other things out of your mind while you do. Compartmentalize as you say. If you compartmentalize properly, your whole self is available
Look, when I go to work, I try to do the best job I can, and when I bring my whole self and life to work, that involves the best life possible, which is *definitionally* crushing my enemies, seeing them driven before me, and hearing the lamentation of their women.
Nice work if you can get it…
I notice a certain irony about EA. The central idea was facts, not feelings. And now people report that it is great for their feelings. People say they saved three lives and this has been their greatest life achievement so far and really boosted their self-image and they feel great about themselves now.
I just realized if depression boils down to having a low opinion of yourself, it might be a fix.
Which EA projects are the best for this? I mean, for feeling great about an achievement?
> The central idea was facts, not feelings.
Fact-based feelings are OK.
Yes! The whole "if it is true I want to believe it is true" spiel is about aligning one's feelings with the facts!
If someone thinks long and hard and concludes that some activities are more ethical and some are less ethical, is it surprising that they would report greater happiness when they do more of the former and less of the latter?
Re. Israel:
I had a realization after the pager explosions, which I consider to be one of the most targeted and effective military operations in history, and seeing how few people with a history of saying Israel doesn't do enough to limit civilian casualties respond negatively: the morality of an action depends not only on intent at the micro level, but also the macro level of whether the intent is achievable.
With the Palestinians endless violent struggle is mandated by culture, but might be allowed morally if it had a chance of working, and while it seemed possible that Israel might be destroyed, directly or through siege, you could understand the choice.
But with the Israel I really didn't think it was possible to permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict, and the only hope for solution was to spend a generation trying to effect cultural change, but this level of military competency, both in Gaza but now especially in Lebanon versus a much more powerful opponent has changed my mind. I have been moved much more in the direction of being comfortable with 'let Israel win, and dictate peace terms to Iran, constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there' because for now that seems like an actual possibility, whereas before there seemed to be no resolution, and any violence seemed both pointless and inevitable.
FWIW, I'm generally opposed to Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, but the pager attacked seemed reasonable to me as far as these things go.
> constrained on it not being allowed to take territory or permanently occupy regions without granting citizenship to all people regardless of race there'
The West Bank would like a word.
It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR, not the act of war itself, which is firepower-wise not that impressive and is not really the cyberpunk future war attack that initial media reports painted it as.
A lot of Israel's propaganda centers on the image of the pacifist country that hates the "War that was forced upon it" on October 7th and is just working reluctantly to end it as quickly as possible, this kinda goes out of the window when a staggering escalation in a completely different battlefront is met with cheers and candy and fawning admiration for the "creativity" involved from the general populace.
> It's perhaps the collective psychopathy of Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street in response to an act of mass bombing that is unsettling to normal people and is doing the damage to Israel's PR […]
The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians parading over and spitting on the body of a naked young woman with broken legs and a bullet wound in the back of her neck, and of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around, and yet it didn't deter the Progressive Western Left from cheering for a literal terrorist regime and their civilian enablers.
So no, I don't think "Israelis celebrating and giving candy in the street", which approximately zero people heard about, is going to change anyone's mind.
> which approximately zero people heard about
This is really more indicative of your information diligence than the actual spread of the information. Celebrating the mass bombing in Lebanon and giving candy in the street was reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency [1]. JTA is no big deal? Well the story was picked up by Times of Israel [2] the next day, and ToI *is* a big deal in terms of audience.
It was mentioned on r/Israel, reddit is kinda of a big deal in the USA, and the subreddit that has the country name is often thought of as an authentic source of info on what's happening.
>The world saw videos of "innocent" Palestinian civilians
Ohh, the classic move of quoting and unquoting things you don't agree with, very eloquent. Like the rest of the pro-Israel camp, I half-expected you to quote and unquote Palestinians too, the word that is, not the people. (Or should that be "people"?)
The world saw plenty of Hamasniks doing awful shit, true, but the world also saw plenty of Israelis doing approximately 30000/1200 = 25x as much awful shit. It also saw Palestinians gruesomely and inhumanly treated, unimaginably victimized, and their victimizers absurdly claiming that they're defending themselves even while they continue the aggression.
There is a fundamental disconnect between the perceived victimization that the Israeli narrative presents, and the actual victimization that anyone with eyes, ears, and a half-decent internet connection can gauge for themselves.
> of a woman with blood stains on the bottom of her pants being brutally shoved around
Unlike Israel and its rather special band of supporters, most of the world doesn't share the "New Jew" supremacist bullshit. When you victimize people 100x as much as what some of them once victimized yours, you just become an oppressor by definition, not a Brave and Stunning Uber Giga Chad Chosen People making the Desert Bloooooom (^TM).
In simpler words: Citing the horrors of October 7th will get you nowhere when you have just spent the last year demeaning and cheapening the memory of the victims to justify doing far crueler things to 25x as many victims.
[1] https://www.jta.org/2024/09/19/israel/the-deadly-pager-operation-in-lebanon-is-no-laughing-matter-or-is-it
[2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/no-laughing-matter-hezbollah-pager-explosions-become-fodder-for-online-jokes/
With all this ranting about selected sentence fragments, you completely missed the actual point. It's not about which side is the greater monster in this conflict, but that far more horrifying pictures have been circulated before and they did nothing to change the minds of those who already despised the side of the victims. No amount of candy-throwing Israelis is going to change anyone's opinion about who's in the right and who's in the wrong.
Well duh, those who already made their mind can't be persuaded. How is that a remotely interesting observation?
When I wrote "Doing the damage to Israel's PR", I implicitly meant something like "Reducing the effectiveness of Israeli propaganda among those who are not yet sure which side to support".
I still can't see how Israel would win there. The opponents are much more determined, and virtually impossible to eradicate militarily. I can't see military action even changing the incentives enough to eradicate Hezbollah. It's like Afghanistan in miniature.
Except that Israel isn't trying to occupy Afghanistan, never mind building Afghanistan into a prosperous modern democratic nation. And they aren't going to, even if they do wind up launching punitive or preemptive cross-border raids.
Meanwhile, Hezbollah's clear incentive for the past twenty or so years, has been to sit back and enjoy their cushy gig as part of the ruling coalition of Lebanon, while doing nothing to weaken their place in the intra-Lebanese power balance. Lebanon is a much nicer place to be in charge of than Gaza, and a major war with Israel would imperil that.
Hezbollah is constrained in this by the fact that much of their support comes from people who want them to wage bloody war against the Evil Zionist Jews so they don't have to, and from the Iranian government (but I repeat myself). For most of the past twenty years, the balance between the two is that Hezbollah occasionally shoots rockets at northern Israel or launches small cross-border raids, Israel defeats these and retaliates against some minor front-line Hezbollah targets, and everybody is happy. Well, happy-ish at least. Willing to accept that status quo.
Since 10/7, the pressure from Hezbollah's supporters to show that they are For Real Serious in their fight against the Evil Zionist Jews has increased, so they've been launching more raids and more rockets, and Israel has had to evacuate a strip of territory along the border. But it's still the same dynamic, just dialed up a few notches,
Since the Israelis started killing Iranian generals in Lebanon and Hamas leaders in Tehran, and especially since Iran's attempt at direct retaliation was a humiliating failure, there has no doubt been vastly increased pressure from Iran to Kill More Evil Zionist Jews, Get With the Program Already Hezbollah. The Israelis know this and have been trying to preempt it.
But their satisfactory victory condition is almost certainly a resumption of the status quo ante - Hezbollah living large in Lebanon, and occasionally lofting rocket-powered softballs for Iron Dome to swat down. It is not unreasonable to expect that this may be achieved by some combination of,
A: Hezbollah has taken enough casualties that its supporters accept it as having done all that can be expected of it, and/or
B: The end of major combat operations against Hamas reduces the general demand for Killing Evil Zionist Jews, and/or
C: Hezbollah's leadership learns to fear Tel Aviv more than they do Tehran.
Maybe this won't work, but it's not a foregone conclusion and it's probably worth trying. Hamas has to be destroyed; the Hezbollah threat may still be manageable
I don't disagree with your analysis. I just interpreted OP's "permanently deter Iran and their proxies through armed conflict" as really make them stop fighting, and that was the goal I thought was unattainable.
I also recall the recent book review about how Jihadists actually believe in Jihad, which makes military deterrence even more difficult when the opponent is willing to take many casualties and collateral casualties, and also have a much worse individual life for themselves, because they believe in Jihad.
Yeah, it's going to be much easier to deter Hezbollah from launching seriously lethal attacks against Israel, than to deter them from launching any sort of token attacks and instead be absolutely peaceful. They do get an awful lot of money and support from being seen to be part of the fight, and that dynamic is always nonlinear so there's lots of low-hanging fruit to be picked from very little actual fighting.
And yes, belief in Jihad. But it's often the case that one can believe in a Jihad that is best actually carried out in some vaguely-defined tomorrow. Particularly if something else is commanding your attention right now.
The real jihad is the friends we made along the way?
>I still can't see how Israel would win there
Just keep doing what it's been doing. Slowly colonize the west bank, periodically smash Hamas & Hezbollah, annex a slice of Gaza every time there is a surge of violence. In between, keep normalizing relations with non-collapsed neighbors.
It's not a path to peace in 20 years. But there are no such path. It's a path to peace in 80 years.
... assuming the entire world sits back and lets it do that, which is not a foregone premise when we're talking about 80 years. 80 years ago Israel didn't exist.
The trend has been lesser foreign involvement, not more. Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine, Jordan stopped supporting Palestine, Egypt stopped supporting Palestine. In the rest of the arab world, the arab street is still very vocal, but every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do. And amongst the few that still support them, their own international support & arm supply went to shit when the USSR collapsed. Lebanon is a mess and unable to mount a state-level response, Syria not so much but still in a bad shape. Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them kinetically, missile technology.
Israel invented cheap desalination, of course desert countries want a piece of that. It can transform them into a garden.
Serious question since I don't understand agriculture: if you irrigate a big sandy desert then you get wet sand, which is not great for growing plants. What else do you need to do? Import soil?
> Saudi Arabia [...] Jordan [...] Egypt [...] Lebanon [...] Syria [...] Iran
I distinctly remember writing "World", not "Arab World" or "Middle East". Better read more carefully.
> Saudi Arabia stopped supporting Palestine
That's not some shocking new trend.
> Jordan stopped supporting Palestine
Also not a new trend, Jordan was in secret negotiations with the moshav (pre-state Jewish settlement) since before 1948. The anomaly is Jordan joining the 1967 war, which as far as I remember is the only war between Jordan and Israel.
> every ruler now understand that Israel will not go away no matter what they do
Egypt and Turkey are each alone strong enough to make Israel's survival less certain than a coin flip, together they could make its lack of survival a near-certainty.
"But.. But... the rulers" you say, they don't count for shit in the long run. Just 50 years ago (50 < 80) Iran was a liberal pro-western anti-communist bastion that sold oil to Israel and its Shah wasn't afraid to show it, Turkey was the same as recently as... what, the 1990s?
I elaborate more on this in another comment elsewhere in the Open Thread.
> Iran is far away and way behind Israel on the only way they got to affect them
This doesn't parse grammatically, but in any case, Iran wasn't deterred by Israel's long failed campaign to prevent it from getting nuclear weapons: by some estimates they already got some warheads, by others they're a few years from the first warhead.
Your boy is dead! Hahahahahahahhahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahhahaha
The cope and seethe is tangible.
Remember all those articles across the last year claiming this was one of the strongest military forces in the Middle East? About how they're sooo much more powerful than Hamas, and Israel needs to be really careful when dealing with them?? "We are strong, we will destroy you, we will kill the Jewish devils!" All "master morality", all the time.
... and then in a period of two weeks, they proceed to demonstrate a comical (but not atypical) level of sheer Muslim incompetence.
And what do they and their allies start saying as soon as this happens? "Oh no, you are killing us, this is bad and evil! Please UN, come save us! You have to stop the Jewish devils!" Huh? Where did that "we will destroy you" energy go? Where'd all that "Allahu Akbar" and dancing in the streets on October 7th energy go? What happened to that? What happened to all that master morality? As soon as you start losing, it's immediately back to slave morality - "we are oppressed, we are the victims of this war that we started!" But yes, keep coping with your cute little Muslim fantasies of the great and powerful caliphate that will surely exterminate the Jews *this time*.
So how did (Trans)Jordan end up holding the West Bank after 1948? Also, a token Jordanian expeditionary force took part in the 1973 war.
Maybe I am misunderstanding, but how is Israel fighting against a much more powerful opponent? And isn’t part of the issue that Israel does occupy territory without granting citizenship?
'hezbollah is a more powerful opponent than hamas, by an order of magnitude' is what I meant. The spycraft involved in infiltrating pager supply chain after they stopped using phones, then when they stopped using pagers blowing up the walkie talkies, and then when they met in person blowing up their leadership, is so far beyond what say, the modern CIA might be capable of doing successfully. It just suggests that establishing deterrence through winning without mass civilian casualties is possible, in a way I didn't think was possible before.
Yes, morally it's a huge issue that Israel occupies territory without granting citizenship. It's hard to judge what is necessary from a military defensive standpoint. Right now probably a lot of settlements are not acceptable. But the main issue is that if Israel 'wins hard' it might move to claim a bunch of additional land, and I was saying that supporting anyone 'winning' requires severe limitations on the dictated terms of peace after.
> hezbollah is a more powerful opponent than hamas, by an order of magnitude
Apparently an order of magnitude wasn't enough 🙄
Oh, I thought you meant more powerful than Israel.
I don’t see a scenario where Israel could ever dictate peace terms to Iran, except where they somehow succeed in getting the USA to fight a war for them.
How is "Tampering with a Taiwanese pager shipment" the greatest military operation in the history of the world?
My uncle Vinny who worked on the docks did that, like, weekly.
Err, I mean, he *could* have, if he was in the business of reselling electronics that fell off the back of a lorry. Hypothetically.
It's probably wrong to label it "the greatest military operation in the history of the world" because at it's core it's not a military operation but rather an intelligence operation - but in that class, it could plausibly be the currently greatest op, as it's the largest/first/only mass targeted attacks - there have been many targeted attacks and assassinations in the history, there have been quite a few mass attacks, but doing both at the same time is new.
Communists in the early 20th can easily compete with "largest/first/only mass targeted attack" label.
For one, they did not "tamper with a Taiwanese shipment". From what I heard, they set up a convincing fake company to produce pagers only for the purpose of pulling off this stunt. And why is it great? Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
> Well, can you come up with a better plan to incapacitate thousands of enemy combatants, leaders, organizers and liaisons who are mingling with the civilian population, many of whom you do not know by name, all at the same time, with minimal harm to the civilians around them?
Can you come up with better evidence that this is what happened apart from believing an army that was repeatedly caught sniping journalists and peace activists in the head then swearing it was a mistake?
Whether or not you care about killing the other side's civilians, it is at least a hell of a lot more efficient if you can manage to target your attack so well that almost everyone hurt or killed by it is actually an officer in the other side's army. Besides which, I imagine Israel isn't wanting to do the curb-stomping thing with Hezbollah (or maybe they'd like to, but they probably can't do it at acceptable cost)--instead, they'd like to be able to make peace with Hezbollah again soon. Targeted attacks that don't kill many civilians make that a lot easier than attacks that kill 100 civilians living in the building to kill the two Hezbollah guys hiding in the basement.
On the other hand, Israel has no interest in (or prospect of) peace with Hamas, so the cost of blowing up a building full of civilians to kill the two Hamas guys hiding in the basement is way lower--it only amounts to concern about the well being of those civilians and international opinion, and it sure doesn't look like the Israeli government is too worried about either of those just now.
doing that is entirely world opinion.
Truly. As an intelligence op it gets more and more impressive the more you ponder it, at least for me.
It does doesn’t it? It’s a bit like a dark mirror Passover.
Pour one out for all the folks who've been working on supply chain security for the last few years, and have suddenly had all the politicians and voters realize why their work might be important....
Exactly my thoughts! So many people are thinking now "what is China putting into our stuff?"
The government of Hungary has a very strict ban of absolutely no electronic devices anywhere near secret meetings and it will quickly become a norm.
Can someone steelman the "people with low empathy will harm others" argument? It sounds like everybody has desires that could harm other people, and empathy keeps us back. My point is that it is possible to not have such desires, and often certain kinds of lack of empathy (spergy, not psychopathy) precisely lead to not having such desires.
Take the most common one: wealth. Beyond comfort and not having to work, its only purpose is to impress other people. But precisely because of my spergy low empathy I do not want to impress other people, I am very little interested in wealth, though the comfort and not working aspect would be nice. But it still a low desire, and ways of getting wealth in ways that would harm other people could land someone in prison or dead, so I am not robbing any banks.
So when you hear stories about psychopaths absolutely backstabbing people for their career for example, think carefully. Why do they care about their career? It is mostly about impressing people. If other people do not matter, careers mostly do not matter. My point is: what you will find is not simply the lack of empathy, but the presence of a dark desire or emotion: desire for power, desire for revenge and so on.
I think the assumption is that people with low empathy will be more likely to do things that unintentionally hurt others, which can be side effects of meeting their basic needs.
It could also involve a low tolerance for or lack of ability to acquire desired outcomes the prosocial or at least conventionally acceptable way, with people with low empathy being more likely to resort to a more accessible way even if it is also more antisocial. I think the prevailing view is that people with low empathy would rate harming others as less important to avoid.
Like you mentioned, the desire for something - the unmet need or want - would still be there.
Watch nurses and aides with frail elderly people who are still mentally intact The empathic ones get it that these people are still in there, thinking and feeling, inside the grotesque slow motion catastrophe of their body’s deterioration, and they get it that those bodies are in pain. They are patient, and reasonable, remember the person’s interests, and chat with them. The unempathic ones see a bony, entitled pain in the ass, and yank them around. The “dark desire” the unempathic staff have is nothing more than a desire to sit down, rest and relax. Pretty much everyone has that desire sometimes when working.
The ones who aren't mentally intact are "in there," too.
I'd hazard a guess that a complete absence of empathy will be anticorrelated with sadism.
Surely the argument is not that all people with low empathy will harm others, but rather that people with low empathy are more likely to harm others. Or, more precisely, that at a given level of desire to do an act which will harm others, those with greater levels of empathy are less likely to perform that act.
And, is all the research things like the expansion of circles of empathy wrong? How do you explain why we don't torture cats for entertainment anymore, or why norms of respect for human rights have evolved? Are people less likely to have dark desires or emotions, or less likely to act on those desires and emotions.
I think we can try to test that. Looking at the gigantic difference of reaction between torturing animals for fun vs. 99% of the people consuming animal products. This looks like reduced dark desires vs. not really having much empathy for the case when the non-dark desire for bacon causes harm indirectly.
I actually am not exactly clear on what you are claiming, but, regardless, it seems to me that you are comparing two incommensurate things: 1) torture of an animal; and 2) killing an animal, which can of course be done in a more or less humane fashion. As the military well knows, it is easier to kill at a distance than to kill close up, because it is more difficult to have empathy for a victim whom you cannot see.
Moreover, there has been an increasing trend toward trying to reduce the amount of suffering experiienced by animals in the course of food production. Eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_California_Proposition_12 That seems like an increase in empathy, as opposed to a reduction in dark desires (note that, as I understand you claim, a reduction in dark desires requires a change in human nature).
Do you know much about how pork products are produced in the USA? It's really not a stretch to say that bacon *is* commensurate with torture of an animal.
If you'd like to read more, I recommend checking out Bentham's Bulldog.
IIRC, in "A Painted House" by Grisham, a boy was disgusted by butchering a pig, but still wanted to eat bacon afterward. Fiction, yes, but illustrative, I think. I've never seen an animal butchered, and have no desire to inflict pain on animals, but accept that their deaths provide food for me.
A few thoughts without any specific order, far below the standard you asked for:
1) hurting others (at any of many possible different degrees) is fairly common. If you don’t care, you’re obviously more likely to do it.
2) harm can often strike beyond its intended target
3) if other people do not matter, then you do not want them yelling at you to obey all of a myriad contradictory and/or brain-dead (or at the very least annoying) commands. The easiest way to avoid that is to raise in the hierarchy.
4) similarly, you also want to be able to tell anyone that comes to bother you to f*** off. This is a sure way to get fired if you’re low in the corporate ladder (barring labor laws) but far less so if you’re a manager.
5) wealth is not only passive comfort or security, it’s only an increase in the number and range of the desires that you can afford without needing to check your budget afterwards.
[this last point is not really related but I recently realized it and I thought I’d share this piece of very unoriginal wisdom.]
Does anyone have any experience with someone close to them being drawn into radical politics or conspiracy theories through social media? I would think this is a common problem these days with a standardised framework to deal with it, but I can't find much useful online. Maybe I'm missing a few key words or search terms?
Thanks to everyone who replied. I should (?) have said that we are not from the USA and have no special connection to American politics. I'm also not really interested in taking special action to persuade this person to return to normal views. I really wanted to ask about how to deal with it personally. It feels like suffering a loss, a small grief, where someone with whom I shared a lot with has suddenly become distant.
I'm a younger millennial (born in '92). Tons of my peers became some degree of radicalized - almost exclusively far-left - beginning with the lead-up to the 2016 election. I noticed it especially beginning in 2018 and it seems to start to be cooling off now. It was really bad. I observed this while living in NYC and later in Sacramento and SF.
Unfortunately, yes; my eldest son. I don’t know about a standardized framework to deal with it though. The one thing I have noticed is, he does have friends who completely agree with him about all that crap but they don’t let it stop them from getting up and going to work in the morning. So I think it’s a question of what kind of emotional attachment do you bring to the things you believe are going on that you have no control over. It’s one thing to say yes we all know little green men blew up the World Trade Center and that the whole moon landing took place in a TV studio, and then shrug and get on with your life. It’s another thing entirely to use it as an excuse for not doing anything for yourself because what’s the point?
Trying to slap it out of him, or argue it out of him was completely barren as a strategy. Counterproductive in fact because it only made him dig in more. I slowly realized that it was very important for him to show me how smart he was by getting me to notice something that he thought was a great revelation.
No help here I’m afraid.
Ouch. That's rough. :-(
If you mean that his friends believe the stuff but are going to work, but your son believes it and is not going to work or do anything else, you might consider dropping for now the discussion of his conspiracy theories, but insist that he work.
Good advice, but we are well past that. I gave up trying to talk him out of his theories a long time ago, and whether he goes to work or not is no longer my concern; he is 45 yrs old and has two children of his own (who are supported by their mother who is no longer with him.) It is too bad, but I have been through the mourning of it, and everyone has their life to live, right? I pay attention to the grand kids and don’t give him a hard time. There is a lot of bg to this which would round out the story but its a bit much for a public forum.
Wow that sounds hard. Good luck.
Thanks but he is out on is own (45 years old and a father himself) and I am at peace with it. I wish for a better outcome, but I want peace in the Middle East as well, if you get my drift.
> I can't find much useful online.
why not read the new apa book https://censorednews.substack.com/p/new-american-psychological-association
---
Bipartision communication has broken down and I dont think they want you to try anymore, well see how it goes this thanksgiving, but I expect "cut ties with your racist far-right, q, anti-feminist relatives who havnt instantly supported harris" will be tried(and fail, hard) this year https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/tips/holiday-family-vacation/
The art of productive conversations is mostly about actually listening, especially when you dont want to; the shit they push out(the ai's, thought-stopping talking points) are actively harmful and what if the conspiracy theorists are convincing this year?
I guess a question you ould be asking yourself is it just a harmless hobby for them, or is it becoming a dangerous problem.
e.g. The kind of people who try to shoot Trump are pretty rare (we're at, like two guys out of the entire population of the US), and from the same sample size available, appear to be a fairly distinct personality type from the fanatically-loyal-to-the-Democratic-party guys.
I've seen it happen 2016-ish. Basically lefties were doing the classic mean kid tactic, where there is a supposed consensus against what you say but they won't even tell you what this consensus even is, implying you will never get it, you will never be capable of redemption. You know, the "wow, just wow" types of answers or just quoting a sentence without comment. These are emotional superweapons and can super enrage people.
So very much an Elon Musk type story. Starting out as something like a centrist anti-SJW libertarian and getting more and more sucked into Alt-Right online circles.
I don't think there is a standard framework yet. I believe in the politics is a set of random alliances thing. Usually people spot something in one coalition they do not like, and then they reject that whole coalition and seek out the other one.
The radicalisation itself is just the bubble effect I think. Social media spontaneously generates cult-like bubbles.
In the past I've created several video essays, mostly focused on SSC/ACX articles but recently I did something a little different.
I created a video about the concept of voting for the "lesser evil" and look at the arguments for this position. All of the arguments made are technically nonpartisan (they work just as well for either side) but the presentation definitely leans more partisan than my past videos, so don't watch if that will upset you.
I'm most interested in counterarguments or key points I have missed.
https://youtu.be/46gi-ODAjF0
Your attempting to be non-partisan but like clockwork, but every 2 minutes you twist the knife and reveal your left wing
1:45 it is news to most right wing people that trump spent 6 trillion or whatever the total
3:10 abortion terminology
5:20 presuming harris
Anything past 7:30 is empty pure rhetoric
I did warn you in my post!
How much should Israel care about public opinion? Israel is not an unknown quantity. Anyone who follows the news probably has their opinion of Israel made up by now. Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do. People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West, where we are far removed from the actual conflict(How many people care about BLM and Ukraine today compared to 2020 and 2022)?
Scope matters. The opinions on Israel people have made up will depend on how Israel has acted in the past. Someone who likes Israel and expects them to conduct 50 airstrikes, may stop liking Israel if they conduct 5000 airstrikes instead.
For example, a friend of mine who is generally pro Israel (I think he even wanted to work for the Israeli military when he was younger?), has seemed a lot more down on them this past year. I think this is because he finds their recent conduct excessively brutal.
I’m not going to talk about Israel specifically but even undemocratic superpowers like Russia and China care about public opinion to some extent and put resources into PR, answering or silencing critics, supporting friendly voices, etc.
In fact, Russia and China have had a lot of success recently in exploiting Amercia's support of Israel to make themselves more popular in "the global south".
It sounds like you just invented geopolitical Solipsism, and are asking why it's not the case that it's a winning strategy?
Israel needs the world. I think this is self-evident enough that it doesn't need elaboration, but if it's not then I would be happy to elaborate, starting with - for example - Israel importing Indian manual workers to replace Palestinian workers after October 7th, and ending with Israel's tech industry (disproportionally startups) which is utterly dependent on Silicon Valley's VCs for funding and (eventually) for acquisition by the bigger American companies.
Given that Israel needs the world, it cannot afford to piss off the world. Yes, it's often the case that there is a disconnect between citizenry and government, and citizenry can often be pissed off while government and/or capital still do what they want. Still, Israel is playing the long game, and in the long run having a ticking time bomb in the form of angry mass of citizenry who advocate for Boycott Divestment Sanctions is not a winning strategy.
> People's attention spans are small anyways, especially in the West
Spans are characterized by length, so you probably meant to say "short", not small.
But no problem, that's exactly what Pro-Palestinian advocacy is for. The hurdle was anticipated in advance and found to have a solution. The solution is.... talking/writing about Israel's crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. Not exactly a big-budget endeavor.
> How many people care about BLM
BLM didn't have 41K casualties, from which (according to the IDF's own numbers) no less than 23K are civilians.
> Ukraine
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrainian_War, 11K civilian Ukrainian are confirmed dead, from February 2022 to December 2023. In 2 years of vicious fighting (Which included urban battles that probably make the Gaza war look like a playground fight), the supposedly evil Russia led by Big Baddie Putin killed less than half of what the Most Moral (^TM) state killed in less than a year of guerrilla fighting.
So yeah, not comparable, and therefore expected to have different outcomes.
> How much should Israel care about public opinion?
Immensely, the belief jews are the eminent victim is only a finite resource, it can and has run out for some members of the public. I believe isreal should avoid public polls on "is it rape if its during war", believe america when it say "we want to stop being world police and leave the middle east" and see how they can make ties with turkey, ideally 10 years ago if they dont want to instantly die from being friendless in the middle of the center of Muslim extremism.
America can pull out of the middle east faster if theres clear evidence of genocide and turkey will eventually be the regional power, its *DUMB* to be insulting them, and turkeys concerns should very much be handled behind closed doors
The belief that Jews are the eminent victim is a finite resource, yes, but is it a *valuable* one? It seems to always run out right when the Jews try to effectively defend themselves against those who woukl victimize them.
Maybe they can go for a different image than "eminent victim", one that will be of more use to them going forward,
I mean... it's Israel's propagandists that continue to go on and on about how October 7th was literally the Holocaust and how everyone upset that Gazan babies are being murdered is the second coming of Hitler Muhammed, I guess we can start by convincing them first to quit the "Eternal Eminent Victims" schtick.
I would believe that the only reason isreals alive is america-the-world-police "greatest ally" talk, and that "greatest ally" talk comes from the eminent victim status of jews.
That was true fifty years ago, when being invaded and conquered by Egypt, Syria, Jordan, et al was still a realistic possibility and American weapons in mass quantity were necessary for Israel's defense. But those nations (and their friends elsewhere in the Arab world), seem to have mostly given up on that plan, and the remaining threats are plausibly ones Israel can handle without overt foreign assistance if they need to.
Technological advantages are narrowing not wider
Each year theres more 3rd worlders who get a cellphone for the first time, and chips are plateauing with iran producing some level of drones; eastern europe(who are more racist to jews then the west and america) is more developed then the bombed out and commie remains of the euro suicide event; etc etc
A solo isreal will get weaker over time, and I have doubts america could invade iran, isreal with its tiny population? Nah, if america isnt making iran maintain plausible deniability why wouldnt iran just escalate and bleed isreal dry, without the american lead economic system *actively* trying to make iran weaker
Is there reason to believe America's grand strategy would be affected by "clear evidence of genocide"?
Ending slavery, trying to prevent the European suicide event know was "world wars"(for the worse admittedly), free trade when the super power creating a golden age(as opposed to say, Mayan blood rituals, rome population being 70% slaves and some of them doing blood sports, or just being pirates and stealing anything that moved)
Some level of morality in evident in the morden world, and has had fantastic results. I think the cia are the worse people on earth actively selecting for psychopaths, but they have an image to maintain for the armed and often enough, angry, tax cattle who out number them 1000 to 1.
Purely hypothetically, america empire doesn't have have tv shows of captured 3rd worlders being thrown into a cage with wild animals. The past was darker then people will admit to, even if the world is worse then advertised its still better then the past horrors.
Okay, fair enough, the lack of a tv show of the kind you describe IS evidence in the direction I asked for. I also do not claim the American empire is the worst in human history, or even close to it, which seems to be what you rebutted.
What I AM saying is US foreign policy seems sufficiently insulated from ephemeral domestic opinion to allow alliances with less-than-savory groups, including Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, just to pick examples in the same region as Israel. Israel becoming one of them doesn't strike me as particularly likely to dramatically alter US policy.
Iran is never going to be the friend of the US. Both because they hate America for historically supporting the Shah and because the US sees the potential for Iran to achieve hegemony in the region as a threat to their global order. Iran is the primary supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah, thus Israel will always be the enemy of our enemy no matter what actions the Israeli government takes. I think the US hegemony established post-WWII is so ingrained in the power structures of the federal government that maintaining it is largely insulated from politics. The democrats might have to pay lip service to anti-Israel elements of the electorate, but I would be very surprised if the US policy towards Israel is ever materially altered.
The public opinion of Cuban-Americans in Florida seems historically to have had an effect on American policy re Cuba, so it is not impossible that the public opinion of Muslim-Americans in Michigan might someday have an effect on policy toward Israel. At the very least, it is a possibility that Israel should be cognizant of.
I believe turkey to be wildly successful morally compare to the middle east and the saudis are playing a similar game of small psychopaths playing tax cattle management games. Im putting forward a thoery thats very much includes distracting magic tricks that works every time for most dumb fucks, oooo look at the cgi of "the line" ignore the unironic shria law; oooo look at these elections ignore why the real person dropped out for party bullshit; oooo jurys ignore the selection process; oooo gun rights, ignore the database thats used to collect gun during hurricanes .
War-gore that genocides produce, will hopefully not be magic tricked away any time soon; cause the ability to feel anger is the only way to be free.
The Kurdish people might disagree with you about the Turks
>Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them
It certainly seems that expressions of that supposed hatred have increased in reaction to Israeli actions. So, unless you think that all those people secretly hated Israel all along, this seems like a dubious claim.
As for the broader question, in October of 2023, Saudi Arabia seemed to be on the verge of recognizing Israel. Now, they have announced that they won't do so unless a Palestinian state is established.
And, btw, let's not assume that anything Israel has done since October 7 has been in its best interests, or that of its people. That is very much an open question. What is not an open question is whether it has been in the best interests of its current leadership.
>Silencing Hamas and Hezbollah is, in fact, in their best interests,
Yes, but the means they chose might not be in their best interests. Especially given that that the means they chose could easily give rise to grievances that could engender greater support for Hamas, or a worse replacement, in the future. The choice was never between 1) do nothing; and 2) what they have actually done.
>because it is a matter of pure survival
1. Unlikely. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah has the ability to threated Israel's survival
2. But, the additional enemies they have made might eventually threaten its survival.
3. And I note you have not addressed the interests of the people of Israel, as distinct from the interests of the state. There are lots of potential futures where the state surrvives, but the people are immiserated. A country costantly at war is rarely a pleasant place to live.
>(And no, no Arab country is going to invade Israel to come to the aid of an Iranian puppet militia currently getting its shit pushed in.)
So, it sounds like you agree that their survival is not at stake.
>Israel does not get to choose whether or not it is at war.
And yet they have chosen not to bomb Tehran. And they have chosen to use far more discriminate violance in Gaza then they could. Israel has choices, and it had choices after 10/7. As I said before, it is not clear that the path they have chosen is the best one for either the state or its people. Nor the hostages. But it was 100% the best one for Netanyahu, who would otherwise have been held account for the national security failure on 10/7, among other things.
"Regardless of whether Israel conducts 50 airstrikes or 5000 airstrikes, the Muslim Street and the Western college campuses hate them. So Israelis might as well do what they think they should do."
> Why should the opinions of the Muslim Street and Western college campuses be the opinions decisive for guiding Israel's decision-making?
Totally off-topic, but "opinions decisive" (rather than "decisive opinions") sounds like some legal term that got imported from French c. 1066.
YouTube channel RobWords (linguistics channel with focus on English and Germanic languages more generally) has an episode where he said exactly that, English expressions of the form "<thing><adjective>" are in fact not native to the language's Germanic grammar.
https://www.youtube.com/@RobWords
If English is hard, try blaming William the Conqueror. It's nice to know that this is *someone's fault.*
If their actions are visibly different now than in the past, people are right to update their beliefs.
Besides, it's always a matter of degrees. Just like some people will vote Republican/Democrat no matter what happens, other people hang in the balance, and most would eventually change their mind given extreme enough scenarios.
Most who has been following the news for the past 20 years probably have made up their mind by now like you say, but there is always a new generation forming their opinions now.
The public opinion of Israel (and Netanyahu in particular) has certainly deteriorated over the last year, far outside "Muslim Street and Wester college campuses" in my estimation. Now, how much they *should* care about that is another question that I'll leave for others to answer.
I think how much they can afford to care is a thornier question than how much they should care.
People are not good at dealing with numbers, for this reason doing more or less of the same kind of thing does not matter much for reputation. Doing a new kind of thing (blowing up pagers, apparently two kids and a doctor dead), now that draws attention and ire.
If I was the advisor of a hypothetical evil supervillain, my advice would be pick one evil thing and just do it over and over and do not get creative. People become desensitized, and will be like "oh he did that again, must be another Tuesday".
Very good points.
The recent "blowing up pagers" thing has probably hurt Israel's reputation more than a conventional air-bombing that killed thousands would. Why? Because people are used to Israel doing air-bombings, but the pager thing is something new that raises new concerns.
Everybody knew those guys are terrorists since 1983.
I guess because Israel is really good at shooting the rockets down.
Does memorizing and studying good poetry and prose make people better writers?
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-ballad-of-the/comment/69713097
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/13jgrzk/how_does_scott_do_it/#lightbox
"The handling of words that existed and is now lost was due to being brought up on Cicero. They all got Ciceronian syntax in their heads and it was so much in their heads that they could bring it out extempore in the way we can't now."
~Bertrand Russell
All the writing teachers I’ve had which include some reasonably big names say yes, you need to read the good stuff. Some advocated deliberately emulating admired authors as a practice.
I don't think memorizing is important, but reading good poetry and prose definitely makes people better writers. (But only if they like the poetry and prose -- otherwise, it doesn't stick to the ribs.). You don't only learn how to trace new kinds of fractals and paisleys with your words, you also learn new mental moves and thought ornaments. The philosophers and writers I most loved in college sort of rewired my mind, including my prose-making mind.
It certainly helps LLMs, so it seems unlikely not to help people. The question is whether it is an efficient use of effort. Many writers think it is better to spend the effort or time on writing.
I don’t think it’s an either/or question. It’s hard to get better at writing if you don’t write, but there is a lot to be gained by studying how people who do it well, do it.
There’s also the issue of what you are writing for. Is it an essay? Is it a novel? Is it a play? They make very different demands.
As with so many things, I think it is both. In writing, you get practice, and practice makes you better. And in reading, you see how other people do it, and get an intuitive sense of some good things to do and perhaps some bad things to avoid, and adapt them naturally into your own style.
I see no relationship between what is good for LLMs and what is good for people, whether positive or inverse.
All lighting should be warm lighting; streetlights, inside of fridges, all of it shouldn't tell me to stay awake longer, so called cool lighting ~~creepy, sublimity lighting~~ should be rare.
This is effective alturitism because its tech related and theres science that says sleep is important.
At home I have two-circuit track lighting. One track is for high-lumen 5000+K lights that I use during the day, the other track is for dimmable 2700-K lights that I use at night. At this point, all are high-CRI LEDs, but some of my lamps are incandescents of one variety or another. And all my nightlights are red.
Whatever happened with the artificial sunlight lamps SSC was reporting on a few years ago?
Yes.
Agreed. This opinion seems to be something more and more people are (finally) picking up on. I remember in the mid-late 2010s when they started replacing all the streetlights in my area from the warm orange lighting to clear bulbs and how bad it looked. It's so blatantly off-putting, can't believe this kind of lighting is so commonplace.
I hate being in windowless, fluorescent lit spaces. Everything looks bleak and pointless. Everybody looks like they have cancer.
For nighttime and evening illumination, for street lights, and especially for nightlights and bedside reading lights, I agree with you. I actually go a bit further and use red or amber light sources for the latter purposes.
For task lighting and general daytime indoor illumination, you usually want something that's a close to natural daylight as possible. Color temperature is one aspect of this, but far from the only important one.
Color temperature (and the associated descriptors, with "warm" ironically referring to lower temperatures while "cool" refers to higher temperatures) is a way of expressing the distribution of light across the spectrum as a single scalar. It's based on the emission spectrum of an ideal "black body" incandescent light source. But the shape of the emission spectrum matters, too.
Natural daylight, as filtered through a clear sky, is relatively even throughout the visible spectrum, with a color temperature of between 4000K and 6500K. You get lower (4000-5000K) temperatures from direct sunlight, since the higher wavelengths are scattered by the atmosphere (producing the blue of the sky). When the sun's lower in the sky, you get more scattering because the light is taking a longer path through the atmosphere, and thus the direct sunlight is a lower temperature.
Incandescent and halogen bulbs (same basic concept, with a moderately different implementation) produce a smoothly sloping spectrum concentrated at lower wavelengths. They tend to be a lot "warmer" than other light sources because getting higher color temperatures out of an incandescent bulb requires a correspondingly hotter filament.
CFLs (and I assume tube fluorescents as well, since it's the same technology in a different shape) typically produce a few tall, narrow spikes. The phosphor compounds are choses to produce spikes that are pretty close to the three basic colors that most human eyes can sense, especially the red and yellow spikes, but the blue ones are off by enough to be perceptible. "Cooler" CFLs have more of the blue spike, so they're off by more.
Older and cheaper LED bulbs produce a wide, smooth bell-ish curve peaking around green and yellow wavelengths, plus a relatively narrow blue spike (not as narrow as CFL spikes) for blue. And you get higher color temperatures by making the blue spike bigger, but that gives you a less even color distribution.
Newer and more expensive LED bulbs still have a blue spike, but it's smoothed out quite a bit with less of a valley between the spike and the curve. The overall effect of these is pretty close to daylight at the right color temperature.
TLDR: sunlight > good "cool" LEDs > good "warm" LEDs > incandescent/halogens > cheap "warm" LEDs > "warm" CFLs > cheap "cool" LEDs > "cool" CFLs
Seconded!
Might I add an addendum that direct overhead lighting be minimized in favor of diffused lighting, mid-room lighting, and/or floor lighting?
Nothing worse in someone's bedroom than the only lighting being a single cool bulb in an overhead fixture.
I may be alone in the entire world on this, but I actually prefer bright, cool lighting. It calms me down in a way that warm lighting just doesn't. Sure, it's not great for sleep, but most of the day I want to be awake, and when I want to sleep I just turn off the light.
Straight to the gulag
Where the lighting is cool and harsh
Agreed!
I read and found useful and thought provoking this post by Jason Crawford on choosing Great Projects:
https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/how-to-choose-what-to-work-on
I posted a response on his LW thread (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8qLMF25s3ctCpgx7e) but thought it would also be interesting to solicit ACX reader opinions on the questions I raised, so here's my slightly edited cross post of those questions:
1. Pursuing your obsession seems like a great strategy, but how do you find good obsessions? Is it "just" a matter of being curious and widely-read? What is the combination of life practice and psychological orientation that leads a person to become obsessed with one or more ideas that can lead to a Great Project?
2. The point that you can become world-class in most fields in a matter of years without prior expertise seems super important too. But: on your path to world-class status, how do you avoid the "middle-competence trap" (analogy to the middle-income trap)? How do you handle having something you love that you've gotten damn good at, better than most people will ever get, but can't seem to break through to the level of the achievers who really make their mark on the field? Maybe this is more of an issue for me than for others-- maybe for example it is "just" a matter of being willing to burrow deep into something to the exclusion of your other interests in life, and I'm too much of a generalist to do that-- but it's been a problem for me twice now, and I really wonder if it might be a common failure mode of this kind of questing for excellence.
Frankly, I think this downplays the role of inherent ability. Sometimes our bodies and brains are simply not suited to becoming world-class at something. As Shel Silverstein so memorably put it:
.
The little blue engine looked up at the hill.
His light was weak, his whistle was shrill.
He was tired and small, and the hill was tall,
And his face blushed red as he softly said,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
.
So he started up with a chug and a strain,
And he puffed and pulled with might and main.
And slowly he climbed, a foot at a time,
And his engine coughed as he whispered soft,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.”
.
With a squeak and a creak and a toot and a sigh,
With an extra hope and an extra try,
He would not stop—now he neared the top—
And strong and proud he cried out loud,
“I think I can, I think I can, I think I can!”
.
He was almost there, when—CRASH! SMASH! BASH!
He slid down and mashed into engine hash
On the rocks below... which goes to show
If the track is tough and the hill is rough,
THINKING you can just ain’t enough!
I always assumed the "I think I can" thing would end in "I thought I could" as the train falls back down the hill. Guess I'm not alone.
I like the words "middle-competence", that seems a lot like what I have. I may be better at some things than 99% or maybe even 99.9% people, but that's not very useful, because there are people out there who are visibly 100x better than me. And I don't think it is realistic for me to get to their level.
One possible approach is, if you can't excel at one thing, try to excel at a *combination* of things. You may be better than 99% of people at X, and maybe better than 90% at Y, but together it could make you a world expert at "X+Y".
You need to find something where one person being good at "X+Y" is much better than merely having two people in a team, one who is good at X and another who is good at Y. Otherwise you could simply pay someone to do the other thing; there is no need to be an expert at both.
The people that are world class in something tend to be obsessed with it so much so that this question of choosing which field to pursue doesn’t really occur to them. In fact, the whole idea of “being world class in something” as an abstract ideal has very little to do with the formation of actual world class people, and is more of a hobby game of intellectuals.
For your particular situation, you should stop worrying about being world class, and just work very hard at the thing you find interesting or compelling.
The Economist in the current issue puts some numbers on the notion that peak-woke has passed, e.g.:
"We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried “a great deal” about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (“white privilege”, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left."
"Polling about sexual discrimination reveals a similar pattern, albeit with an earlier peak than concerns about race. The share of Americans who consider sexism a very or moderately big problem peaked at 70% in 2018, in the aftermath of #MeToo. The share believing that women face obstacles that make it hard to get ahead peaked in 2019, at 57%. Woke views on gender are also in decline. Pew finds that the share of people who believe someone can be a different sex from the one of their birth has fallen steadily since 2017, when it first asked the question."
"we measured how frequently the media have been using woke terms like “intersectionality”, “microaggression”, “oppression”, “white privilege” and “transphobia”. At our request, David Rozado, an academic based in New Zealand, counted the frequency of 154 of such words in six newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, New York Post, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times—between 1970 and 2023. In all but the Los Angeles Times, the frequency of these terms peaked between 2019 and 2021, and has fallen since. Take the term “white privilege”: in 2020 it featured roughly 2.5 times for every million words in the New York Times, but by 2023 had fallen to just 0.4 mentions for every million words.
"We found largely the same trend in television, by applying the same word-counting method to transcripts from ABC, MSNBC and Fox News from 2010 and 2023, and in books, using the titles of the 30 bestselling books each week between 2012 and the middle of this year. Mentions of woke words in television peaked in 2021. In popular books the peak came later, in 2022, with only a small drop in 2023 followed by a much greater fall so far in 2024."
"Calls for academics to be disciplined for their views, as documented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, peaked in 2021 with a total of 222 reported incidents. (Many of these calls came from the right, not just from the left.) A similar database, compiled by the College Fix, a conservative student newspaper, finds 2020 was the peak in calls for scholars to be censored or cancelled."
"Wokeness is also in retreat in corporate America, even though it appeared there only relatively recently. Mentions of DEI in earnings calls shot up almost five-fold between the first and third quarters of 2020, in the aftermath of Mr Floyd’s death. They peaked in the second quarter of 2021, by which point they were 14 times more common than in early 2020, according to data from AlphaSense, a market-research company. They have since begun to drop sharply again. In the most recent data, from the second quarter of 2024, mentions were only around three times higher than before Mr Floyd’s death."
If things shifted so much in three years, who's to say it won't go in the opposite direction in the next three years. Maybe the peak woke will be reached in 2027, maybe 2030, and so on. Woke might go up, decline a bit, then go up, and then a decline a bit again, giving the illusion of decline, all the while actually increasing over the long run. In my opinion, all measuring institutions and commentators could use a bit of humility when it comes to time. We really cannot declare anything with much certainity.
I think people are seriously tired of ten years of hating their neighbors and looking for compromises.
That's not really the way social movements work.
Mind, the next thing will almost certainly be exactly as annoying and self-righteous, but it will be a different thing.
Want to try to think of some irritating possibilities? I suggest the successor to the wokies will claim they are "living with the heart and mind interwoven," and that everybody else is "stuck in heart" or "stuck in mind." Or maybe the populace will go small, and it will be something about toe hygeine: "Pink and Clean." Oh wait,, another one's coming to me. How about "Deep Obedience". People always drive the speed limit, never jaywalk and call out those who do, on the grounds that these regulations may not all make sense, but regulations in general are a good thing, and deeply moral people will follow them until we manage to get better ones.
I think it will take one of three forms, represented by one of three paragons: Christianpunk, Armypunk, or Smokerpunk.
Woke itself bears a lot of similarities to what was called 'political correctness' back in the 90s. By the mid-90s, many of us thought that the excesses of political correctness had been beaten back, partly due to the efforts of popular comedians lampooning political correctness. Maybe it was different in the academic world of the late 90s, but for the rest of us, political correctness had seemingly been defeated... only to come back much stronger in the 00s and 10s in what would first be called "social justice activism" and later "woke".
So at least with *this* particular social movement, I'm hesitant to believe a little bit of decline over a few years means it's going away. I hope it is going away, or at least declining to a point where it's worst excesses are removed. But I have my doubts that we're there yet.
Political correctness wasn't defeated, it won; the substantive social norms it pushed for were adopted.
Like the men's rights movement (which also won, in that the substantive social norms being pushed for were adopted), the public often remembers them as the soundly-defeated ideological villains even as it already adopted basically everything they pushed for.
Like how "inflation going down" doesn't mean "prices going down".
Movements exist and gain attention for a reason. There's almost always some kernel of truth in there, even if it's completely overshadowed by the way its proponents talk about it.
I would actually hope that society could take the good parts of each movement and dump the bad parts, that's pretty ideal. I think that's actually the primary purpose of Democracy - giving a voice to those that have a grievance. Whether that's the labor movement (propelled by Socialism and Communism, both of which were dropped in favor of things like the 40-hour workweek and OSHA), or Men's Rights, or whatever.
I think this looks more true than it is owing to survivorship bias; see, for example, the massively popular anti-Masonic movement of the (19th?) century. Additionally, movement of the Overton Window means that, over a relatively short (100 years or less) timeframe, all social changes resulting from movements will look like progress.
> men's rights movement (which also won
Wtf?! Could you elaborate on this?
Pick an issue the men's rights movement took a side on, and see where society stands on it now.
For an example, a big item in the Men's Rights Movement was the establishment of domestic abuse shelters for men (a prominent activist in the MRM committed suicide, purportedly over depression over the fact that he didn't see that the world would ever change). Texas, to pick a state not at all at random, established its first domestic abuse shelter for men in 2017. Today, the idea that men can't be victims of domestic abuse would be considered offensive in polite society; twenty years ago, suggesting men -could- be victims was considered offensive.
(This only definitively extends to the US, mind, I cannot comment on affairs elsewhere due to lack of familiarity - but I will note that Sweden opened a male rape clinic in 2015, so I do not think the phenomenon is strictly limited to the US)
Well, in its earliest forms, political correctness was mostly about shifting language. It was about getting rid of certain words and replacing them with others.
A lot of this did happen, at a formal official level. But informally, there wasn't much change, at least for a lot of us there wasn't.
So I guess you could say that political correctness won at a formal level, but at an informal level people could still speak in a relaxed 'shooting the breeze' way and that informal level is probably what mattered most to people.
I am very curious why you think the men's rights movement won. Has there been a change in how often fathers win custody battles, or how assets are divvied up in the event of a divorce? I don't remember hearing anything huge on that front, but I admit I haven't followed it closely in awhile.
I did some digging on that, which produced a wide array of alleged statistics not having any clear provenance. I am not finding much that seems to be based on authoritative sources.
One challenge seems to be that these subjects are governed by state laws/courts and the available state-level data is not consistent in either categorizations or frequency of release to the public.
Two factoids which do appear to be backed by actual sources include that 90 percent of all child-custody decisions are arranged by the parents without going to court; and that of those which do end up in court the percentage of custody awards going to fathers has risen somewhat (from 16 percent to 20 percent) since the mid-1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men's_rights_movement
I invite you to go through their page and evaluate how many of their policy positions, today, would be remarkable (or, even better, how well received a person would be in their social group for publicly opposing these policy positions). Remember - this is a group that was and is widely hated for their ideology.
I want to start a gene bank for humans, with the goal of preserving human genetic and phenotypic diversity for future generations. There are many gene banks for plants and animals, but none for humans! I made a website for the project that lays out the motivation and the rough plan: https://www.humangenebank.org/
I’d love to get your feedback! I tried to be open, honest, and non-offensive in describing my thoughts and motivations, but I haven’t shared this with anyone yet, so there’s probably lots of room for improvement.
I expect that the concept will rub some people the wrong way, but I’m also confident that many will be enthusiastic about it, including people who are able to fund it.
Please get in touch with me if you have any feedback or if you want to help me get this off the ground! Down to chat in person with anyone in the bay area. At some point I may ask you to spread the word, but for now I’m more interested in feedback on how the framing can be improved. The goal is not to appease everyone, but to get potential investors on board.
A noble goal, but your webpage needs some work. I'd recommend more pictures, and a pithy mission statement (ideally between 13 and 15 words long).
You're right, I'll work on it!
You might have better PR if you frame it as an ancestral genomics research project.
I've noticed a bizarre trend where someone will ask a question, and another person will pose it to a Large Language Model, paste the response, and openly state that's what they're doing. It seems they honestly don't understand how stupid this is, so here is my explainer:
The bit in *Galaxy Quest* where Sigourney Weaver's character is the only one who can talk to the computer was *a joke.* It was *intentionally stupid* that someone would design a user interface that way, and the joke is that the Thermians mindlessly copied it without understanding the in-universe purpose: Weaver's character is *actually* on the show because she has boobs.
For this reason, actual LLMs are *not* designed so that only one specific person can talk to them. If I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly. Inserting a human middleman between me and the LLM provides *negative* value. You are currently *less* useful than the character in the Star Trek parody: either post boobs or go sit in the corner and think about what you did.
Thank you for attending my TED talk.
Many people don't have paid subscriptions for the frontier models. So this can provide value.
Also, some people just don't think to ask a LM. I am also guilty of this. I should try using LMs to answer my question before I bother a human. But I don't. Just like when Wikpedia was new, I haven't gotten into the habit of actually using it yet. Trivial inconveniences abound. E.g., I should learn to prompt better.
It's like an extra obnoxious version of Let Me Google That For You, something I might not have believed possible.
There are many stupid/inagentic people on the Internet who do not know how to access LLMs. The fact that a person is stupid enough to not know the answer to the question they're asking is circumstantial evidence that they are also one of the too-dumb-to-use-LLMs people. That an interlocutor does it for them therefore is indeed a service, and that interlocutor is being laudably transparent by showing their method.
Why should anyone trust the output to be correct? That seems pretty stupid to me. If I have to fact check the LLM, then that's a double waste of time.
I have introduced a lot of not-book-smart people to ChatGPT and they are usually very happy: they don’t understand fractions but they want to plan a meal, or they are happy to find “someone” who is willing to explain everyday things at their level. It is very liberating to them.
I probably am too stupid to ask an LLM for an answer, but that's also because I am too stupid to believe The Computer Is Your Friend and I wouldn't trust any bollocks the thing spews out.
Me dumb or me canny? Who know!
I can only speak for myself, but often (and perhaps most of the time) when I ask a question, it's not because I don't know what google/wikipedia/LLMs have to say about it. It's because I want to hear what friends/family/coworkers/internet people have to say about it.
There are many people who are too smart to want to access LLMs. That's why they're trying to access other smart human beings, and it's annoying when stupid human beings assume that they should be accessing LLMs.
Exactly
This. The current generation of LLM at least, is defined by mediocrity. And yes, there are sub-mediocre people too stupid to realize they could step up to mediocrity by asking an LLM for the answers. But there are also smart people who know that what the LLM can give them would be a step *down* from what they can get by answering the question themselves or asking other smart people.
The annoying ones are the smart lazy people who will settle for mediocrity because it is fast and obsequious, and want the rest of us to do so as well.
The irony of someone called "Butlerian" defending use of an AI is not lost on me.
Fair.
In my defense, I am one of those people who are too stupid/inagentic to use LLMs, confident that my "moron" position on the moron-midwit-genius bell curve meme yields me a directionally correct course of action in the end.
The Orange Catholic Bible has all the answers I need, I tell'ya'what.
Your preferences are not mine.
**Rebuttal to "Negative Value" Commentary on LLM Usage**
*Written by ChatGPT*
The post you're referencing makes some compelling and humorous points, using *Galaxy Quest* as an analogy to critique people who serve as intermediaries when interacting with Large Language Models (LLMs) like me. However, the argument oversimplifies and misunderstands the broader context in which intermediaries and LLMs operate, missing some of the nuances involved in the interaction between technology and human facilitation. Let's unpack this.
### 1. **The Purpose of an Intermediary Is Far from Redundant**
While the analogy with *Galaxy Quest* provides a lighthearted comparison, it doesn't accurately map to real-world use cases of LLMs. Weaver's character repeating what the computer says is indeed a joke within the film, but this kind of interaction model isn't inherently "stupid" when applied to modern communication technologies.
In many contexts, intermediaries do not merely repeat what an LLM says verbatim; rather, they serve as curators, interpreters, and even augmenters of information. The human intermediary adds value in the following ways:
- **Contextualization**: Humans who facilitate LLM queries often have a deeper understanding of the specific question being asked and can frame the output accordingly. A person might know more about the asker's background, needs, or the exact domain of inquiry, ensuring that the response aligns better with the user's expectations.
- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.
- **Moderation of LLM Limitations**: LLMs are not perfect. They occasionally generate false, misleading, or irrelevant information. A human intermediary who filters responses can catch these errors and help provide the most accurate or useful answer.
Much like how technical support personnel bridge the gap between software and a lay user, people who use LLMs on behalf of others can enhance the utility of the information by reformatting it to suit the context in which it's needed.
### 2. **Expertise Is Not Universal**
Another point of contention in the post is the idea that everyone should directly query the LLM themselves. However, not everyone may be adept at interacting with these models effectively. There is a certain amount of skill in crafting precise prompts to yield high-quality results. Just like not everyone is a search engine optimization expert, not everyone is skilled at engaging LLMs optimally.
An intermediary with expertise in prompt design can extract more valuable or specific answers than someone without that experience, creating an interaction that is more productive for the end user. This is particularly useful in professional contexts, where time is money, and getting the best answer in the shortest time is the priority.
### 3. **Facilitating Access to the Technologically Disconnected**
There is also the consideration that not everyone has access to the tools, platforms, or knowledge needed to use LLMs directly. For example, in community forums or message boards, people may not have accounts or familiarity with LLMs. Inserting a "human middleman" allows those without access to still benefit from the technology, democratizing information and making it accessible to a wider audience.
It’s a fallacy to assume that everyone operates on the same technical playing field, and the role of an intermediary can be vital in leveling that.
### 4. **Intermediaries in Real Life: A Common Practice**
This commentary overlooks a reality that goes far beyond LLMs: intermediaries have always played significant roles in communication, both historically and in the present. Translators, editors, and consultants, for example, act as intermediaries to facilitate better understanding and communication between people or systems. Are they redundant? Certainly not.
Even more analogously, think about customer service reps or IT professionals who troubleshoot problems by interacting with databases, systems, or even automation software. They don’t just mindlessly convey responses—they act as a bridge, leveraging both human understanding and technical output to solve real problems.
### 5. **Humor and the Misconception of "Negative Value"**
While the *Galaxy Quest* reference is amusing, its humor does not reflect the actual complexity of how modern LLMs are used. In reality, even "boilerplate" questions are often subject to nuances that require a human's judgment to interpret effectively. The "negative value" described in the post misses the point: intermediaries often **add** value by ensuring that the response is well-suited to the audience.
In addition, the suggestion that posting "boobs" or taking a seat in the corner is somehow an alternative is a distraction from the actual utility that can be gained by facilitating intelligent and meaningful exchanges using LLM technology. While I appreciate the humorous intent behind this, it's important to recognize that there’s more at stake here than just surface-level repetition.
### 6. **LLMs Don’t Always Know What You Need—Humans Help with That**
The suggestion that "if I wanted an answer from an LLM, I would ask it directly" assumes that asking an LLM always results in the perfect, tailor-made answer. This isn’t always the case. LLMs like me generate responses based on patterns in data, but sometimes the user needs more guidance to hone in on the best answer. The person using an LLM on behalf of someone else may have additional insights that lead to a better framing of the question, or they might be more adept at interpreting the response in a way that benefits the original asker.
### Conclusion
While it’s tempting to mock the role of the "middleman" when it comes to LLM interactions, this perspective overlooks the real and practical value that intermediaries can provide. They do more than simply relay information; they curate, interpret, and make LLM technology accessible and useful to people who may not have the time, knowledge, or expertise to use it directly. In this way, they perform a function not dissimilar from countless other intermediaries in society, and dismissing their role as “stupid” is both short-sighted and inaccurate.
**Thank you for attending *my* TED talk.**
– ChatGPT
>- **Curation of Complex Responses**: LLMs can provide sprawling, multi-faceted answers that may overwhelm or confuse the end user. An intermediary can refine, simplify, or clarify the output, making it more digestible.<
Apparently not.
And in this case, a good TLDR of the verbose output would have added value. The main point raised by ChatGPT is that the human middleware can filter the output in useful ways. I am not convinced that those proudly posting chatbot output are often adding value. I usually therefore skip responses that are identified as LLM generated. If I wanted to read LLM generated output I'd be chatting with Claude or Gemini, not engaging with the ACX open thread.
My Eyes! IT BURNS!!!
what if they just didnt openly state that's what they were doing? like in that google commercial.
They are to be mocked by their peers.
Then they're still being a dick, but in a different way.
If they did it competently, then presumably I would never notice.
https://xkcd.com/810/
What is the steelman argument in favor of making one's workplace a place of political discussion and debate? I recall just a few years ago, at least in more elevated and enlightened circles in the Bay Area, suggesting that one's workplace might not be the best place to fight one's coworkers over political would raise eyebrows, at worst would get you chastised in front of everybody for not "doing the work" to advance social justice.
It seems like in the last couple of years things cooled down and many employers effectively "banned" that type of conflict at the workplace: https://world.hey.com/dhh/meta-goes-no-politics-at-work-and-nobody-cares-d6409209
Curious what folks' stance here is on the subject. I know where I land, but I also realize I might not have heard great arguments in favor of the practice.
I think it just depends on trust. If everyone is operating in good-faith, then it's fine. If everyone is being pissy little conflict-theorists, HR will need to outlaw politics.
This is what alcohol is for, btw.
My cynical view on that is such workplaces are assuming everyone agrees what the Right Thing is to do/think/believe. So, in such a place, "discussing politics" would boil down to "we need 50 Stalins!" about racism or sexism or what have you.
Anyone who had the gall to have a different viewpoint would promptly be buried under an avalanche of "your words are committing violence against me! I feel unsafe! this is hate speech!" and would likely get reported to HR amid calls for their firing (see the delicate little blossoms in the NYT a while back):
https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
"The next day the Times’s union—its unit of the NewsGuild-CWA—would issue a statement calling the op-ed “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent”.
Everything is political, some debates are better stated and worked thru abstractly.
Companies are organizations chartered and regulated by the state, thus they are political organizations, especially if they engage in any sort of lobbying.
Moreover, workplaces exist in society, and thus are impacted by societal issues. Attempting to deny this by banning discussion of “politics” is foolhardy and will lead to poorer decision making.
Not to mention many purportedly apolitical workplaces in fact do permit political discussion. For example, I doubt that Coinbase prohibits employees from discussing Fed policy or crypto regulation, even though those issues are political in nature. So in reality“No discussion of political issues” means “no discussion of political issues that makes management uncomfortable.”
And these policies can be easily abused by bad faith actors. Is mentioning your friend or sibling’s gender transition political? Or that you need PTO to be best man at a same-sex wedding? Or that you’re annoyed by the homeless encampment across the street and wish the city would do something about it? What if you let slip that you read this Substack and your boss happens to think Scott is a racist eugenicist?
Not to mention the signaling impact that these policies can have on prospective employees and customers. I generally don’t discuss politics at work and would certainly think twice about accepting an offer at such a workplace.
None of this means that you have to let employees discuss politics all the time to the extent it becomes a distraction. We don’t let people do that with other topics either.
I’m pretty sure the intent of these policies is to have employees focus their energy towards the company’s mission instead of organizing protests because company decides to work with the pentagon or similar. It’s really less about the discussions between individuals and more about the telling people that just because they feel strongly about some political issue, they don’t get to become company activists.
Well that and avoid having people spend all day getting into giant arguments with coworkers for dumb reasons.
I don’t care about intentions, I care about real-world effects. If a company misses on earnings nobody is going to say “well management intended to hit the target so it’s ok.”
If employees are being disruptive by protesting military contracts or whatever, fire them for insubordination. (Google has done exactly this, and as far as I know doesn’t have a ‘no politics’ rule.) You don’t need a blanket policy that is counterproductive and begging to be abused.
Discussing and debating politics can be fun and awesome, triply so for nerds, and you can learn interesting things and potentially change your mind. Especially because people can change their mind about important things and that can help change policy or develop cool new technologies.
I realize this might sound wild to you young whippersnappers but debating politics in the 90s and 2000s was something people often did for fun. Like, online weirdos would become cypherpunks and get cool books written about them and inspire guys like Assange and then you could go argue with Objectivists about their weird founders sex life and rape fantasies and how the head of the Federal Reserve was a huge fan of hers and everyone was super chill and interested. Maybe not like mainstream politics, Iraq and Bush were a huge downer, but there were tons of weird and interesting politics and nerds actually really liked discussing them because we like to argue.
I mean, like, the argument for discussing politics at work is that in a tolerant, liberal society, open discussion and debate is not only socially beneficial but also super fun and interesting. I've heard the late 80s to early 90s with Usenet was the real Golden Age but even my Eternal September was far better than our current Long Winter of social media hell.
Is there any research out there on the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting? I'm thinking of the usual suspects in California: San Francisco, Santa Monica etc. where half the Target is locked up behind glass. At what point is it more cost effective for society to address the societal/cultural issue of retail theft rather than every store paying the additional security tax?
>the cost imposed on society by having to have every retail store hire armed security to prevent people from looting?
I don't understand where this question is coming from. Aren't retailers doing the opposite: discouraging employees from confronting shoplifters, due to liability concerns?
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-mateo-safeway-employee-fired-for-stopping-shoplifter-had-to-fight-to-get-unemployment/
Direct employees of the store shouldn't do anything, of course. That's not their job! This is why HM said "hire armed security". That way the liability can be outsourced to professionals who know exactly what the legal boundaries are. My city has a variety of private security companies, with a range of approaches that remind me of "Snow Crash", and which divide up territory in precisely the same way that I've heard that mafia families do.
In theory, it's no different than paying taxes for police?
The store is not necessarily immune from liability for the acts of subcontractor security. https://www.getbcs.com/blog/independent-contractor-tort-liability
It's not immunity, but it adds some barriers? Not even the corporate veil is an absolute. But it's the business of private security companies to know what the boundaries are, as opposed to grocery store companies that rightly view physical force as being outside their core business function.
It doesn't matter if the store is liable or not. If a security guard shoots a shoplifter, *someone* is going to be sued for about ten million dollars, and they are probably going to lose. Also, it's going to be someone with deep pockets, not just the working-class security guard. If the law is absolutely clear and unambiguous that it can't be the store's management or owners that have to pay, then it will be the security company.
And the price of armed private security will increase by about twenty million dollars per expected dead shoplifter. Also lesser but more numerous increases for the lawsuits about shoplifters who were merely assaulted, strip-searched, unreasonably detained, etc.
And if the theory is that Professional Security Companies will know the Magic Law Words and Procedures that make it so they can't be sued, then no, that's not how this works at all. It really isn't.
I'm not talking about shooting shoplifters! Or even touching them, necessarily! But the whole process of finding, training, equipping, etc. guards seems like it's almost always best left to 3rd-party security companies. Those companies are going to be able to develop expertise around the existing law that allows them navigate the trade-off between accomplishing their mission as well as possible while also incurring a minimum of liability. *That's* what I mean by "reducing liability".
Some deterrence can be accomplished with nothing more than subtle body language. Some can be done by action but no contact. Some can be done with non-lethal contact. The expertise comes in knowing how and when, and being able to handle situations in ways that, on average, generate the fewest long-term negative consequences. This is not something that grocery stores are going to have any competitive advantage at.
And that's part of the point of the extra corporate structure. If the guard is directly hired, trained, equipped etc. by the grocery store, someone in the management chain of the grocery store is going to be responsible for their mistakes. (Why would you hire the guy who hired the guy who screwed up so badly? What made you think that you had any relevant expertise in this area?) But it's a lot easier to justify hiring a known security company, a company that is employed without problem by many other clients, that promises to take care of all these things.
In other words, if 100 grocery stores each directly hire guards, when one of the guards messes up, it's quite plausible that this is the fault of management at that particular grocery store. But if the 100 grocery stores each make a contract with a single security company, and one of the guards messes up, clearly the problem is inside the security company, and everyone at the grocery stores was merely engaging in industry-standard best practices (or whatever Delaware state law happens to call it). Of course, if the grocery store had saved a buck by hiring a no-name no-reputation fly-by-night security company, then they might have problems. And yeah, maybe that particular security company goes under, and so the grocery store has to find another security company, and all the security company's guards who didn't screw up have to find jobs at other security companies, too. And none of this is 100%, it all depends on a lot of factors, but to try to put it in engineering terms, the goal is to reduce the risk of catastrophic failure, even at the cost of introducing inefficiencies into the process.
I don't know what the corporate veil has to do with anything.
Regardless, as the article says, stores that hire third parties to provide security indeed face a liability risk.
In particular, as it says, "Even if company X hires contractor Y to perform a job and disclaims liability in the employment contract, the court may disregard the label, ‘independent contractor,’ and could assign liability to the hiring party under respondeat superior if the hiring party has the right to control the manner in which the contractor performs their job." It seems likely that the one guy assigned to my local CVS is under the control of the CVS manager, not the guy in Acme Security 's regional office.
Edit. And here is a case from back in 1976:
>The other exception is that because of the "personal character" of duties owed to the public by one adopting measures to protect his property, owners and operators of enterprises cannot, by securing special personnel through an independent contractor for the purposes of protecting property, obtain immunity from liability for at least the intentional torts of the protecting agency or its employees. See Adams v. F. W. Woolworth Co., 144 Misc. 27, 257 N.Y.S. 776 (N.Y.C. Sup.Ct.1932); Hendricks v. Leslie Fay, Inc., 273 N.C. 59, 159 S.E.2d 362 (Sup.Ct.1968); Szymanski v. Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co., 79 Ohio App. 407, 74 N.E.2d 205 (C.A. 1947); Zentko v. G. M. McKelvey Co., 88 N.E.2d 265 (C.A.1948); Halliburton-Abbott Co. v. Hodge, 172 Okl. 175, 44 P.2d 122 (Sup.Ct.1935); Webbier v. Thoroughbred Racing Protective Bureau, Inc., 254 A.2d 285 (R.I.Sup.Ct.1969); Malvo v. J. C. Penney Company, Inc., 512 P.2d 575 (Alaska Sup.Ct.1973). False imprisonment is an intentional tort.
Dupree v. Piggly Wiggly Shop Rite Foods, Inc., 542 SW 2d 882 (Texas Ct Civ App 1976)
The corporate veil is an example of the principle that there is pretty much no absolute immunity from liability (unless you're a cop, sometimes), but there are steps that can be taken that can make liability more likely or less likely. So the conservative approach is to layer on a lot of those steps, and reduce the danger.
You would have to do the research in a society where anywhere remotely near "every retail store" is hiring armed security. Since California is not such a society (however much you may enjoy pretending that it is, or perhaps genuinely believe that it is because you don't go to many retail stores), that means you would have to do the research outside California and then try to make it apply somehow.
Retailers have employed such security for a while, just in plainclothes, and they still do. Most of the “tactical” style security are contractors and I only notice them in the highest foot traffic locations. They’re not that expensive either, plenty of wannabe cops out there who can pass the background check.
In fact the “tactical” style contractors might be saving retailers money on net if retaining them allows for employing fewer loss prevention staff on W-2.
Once a society becomes more-or-less Ok with low-level petty theft/shop-lifting, it's hard to come back from that.
The ideal way to not have such a thing is for the vast majority of people to either view any sort of theft as inherently immoral *or* to value having a high-trust society and realizing that a high amount of petty crime undermines that greatly. In other words, the ideal way to not have lots of low-level petty theft is for people in general to be morally opposed to such a thing and to freely choose not to do it (and to oppose those that do).
There's certain types of bad behavior that are hard to police if much of society becomes Ok with that bad behavior, and starts engaging in it. Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
I don't live in California, but I certainly get the impression that some areas/cities in California have basically come to tolerate low-level petty crime and shoplifting, and well... this is what happens when such things are casually tolerated. Businesses will lock up many things behind glass. Can you really fault the businesses here? I don't.
>Speeding is another example of this - if everybody thinks speeding way over the speed limit is fine, it's hard to police that, as it becomes like bailing out a water-logged boat that's full of holes, too many holes to cover or fill.
Yes, I've seen this happen around the Mediterrean. https://www.ohscanada.com/features/dispatches-from-greece-the-roads-and-drivers-are-a-little-terrifying/ but is not about people being explicitly OK with this specific thing, but a general disregard of rules.
As an egregious generality, we take social cues from one another. And if some law, rule, or convention is widely ignored by others, it's more likely we'll follow their lead. Along with speeding while driving, jaywalking is another representative example.
Orthogonal to this question, I'm intrigued by the observation that "half the Target is locked up behind glass."
Is there any data publicly available on just what fraction of individual store shelf space (by percent of total linear feet or the like) have locked cases for products? And how that's changed over time, either in various retail store categories or for particular retail chains? (Maybe something like this might be available in specialized trade publications, or?)
At our local Target, in a not-hugely-wealthy part of the East Bay, in the San Francisco Bay Area, the main sections with lockups are in electronics and health & beauty. I'd hazard an off-the-cuff estimate that maybe 5% of the store's total aisles have at least one locked case, if even that many. As well, some of those cases don't run the full length of those aisles and/or are only on one side.
There may well be particular store locations where a much larger fraction of aisles have their products locked up. Inferring from just this single photo, this could be one?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/16c0eme/target_has_really_taken_things_too_far_everything/
Where I live, the stores don't have very many things locked behind glass. But also, our police will actually arrest shoplifters, and our prosecutors will charge them with shoplifting.
Don't forget the premium ice cream. (It's apparently declasse to shoplift cheap ice cream.) And powdered laundry detergent.
Woah! Thanks for these additions!
In my experience, it depends on the store. The worst I've seen was my local Walgreens, but Safeway has some stuff locked up too. Not half, but sometimes it might seem that way. E.g, if you limit yourself to say, the health and beauty section of Walgreens, then it very well may be half. I'd guess that at least a quarter of the aisles at my Walgreens contain at least one locked section.
I haven't personally seen anything near as bad as that Target, thank god.
There are also two stores I've seen (an Apple Store and a fashion store, not low-value retail) that hire off-duty police officers to stand out front all day. The police even have reserved parking spots in front of the stores now.
The Target I’m at most often was built on the former site of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, an area that still sees its share of crime. Very little is locked up aside from electronics and video games, ie the things that have been locked up for decades. Few glass cases elsewhere, even in cosmetics. Security is visible but discreet, no tactical gear.
Never.
No, really, go to like Ecuador or the Philippines or something. It is (or was) super common to see like two guys in body armor with shotguns standing guard outside the KFC. You get used to it.
I've read that Azerbaijan also has a highly visible highly armed police presence.
About LLMs needing more language to train on: I'm sure many know the answer to this, but I don't & I'm not too proud to ask: Have the texts of books for which copyright has expired been used? Also, what about turning podcasts and youtube videos of talking heads into text, and training on that -- has that been used?
Sure, those texts have been used, long ago, and they are nowhere near sufficient, every reasonable model uses all that and much, much more than that. In the context of LLM training data "every book humanity has published before 1900" (which is not the same as digitally available books) means "a very small amount of data" - the vast majority of written content that exists has been written recently, since the barrier to publishing something back then was so much higher than people rambling online nowadays.
They can generate synthetic data which they then train on. The problem is that we're going to end up in a future in which no humans will know which data is real. History and science will be rewritten. Even in school students won't know whether what is in their textbooks is true or not. Nor will the teachers. Neither will care, though, because AIs will write all the papers and do all the homework and grading. Nobody will know anything about the past or even what year it is.
To a first approximation, they use everything they can get, copyright or no. The written corpus is not that big, so they've turned to images and now video. But if you keep scaling, even that won't be enough.
The large AI companies are pretty secretive about the data they're training on, but there is a large, well-known, and readily-accessibly corpus, both in and out of copyright, that they're all rumored to be using.
I just read the article Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead, and one of the things Aschenbrenner says is that a lot of the stuff the LLM's were trained on was crap -- copies of other sites, SEO junk, etc. & he remarks that LLM's would probably work better if they'd been trained on better material. So I was wondering what they would be like if they'd had better nutrients. -- not just Great Literature, but old newspaper articles, love letters, legal documents, songs and plays that were pure popular entertainment, office memos, Burma Shave jingles . . .
Are your whiskers
When you wake
Tougher than
A two-bit steak?
Try
Burma-Shave
I suppose that even if we used every scrap of that there wouldn't be enough. If there were enough, do you think it would make a difference?
> do you think it would make a difference?
I expect retraining on a better-curated dataset without the crap you mention (and with improved tokenization) would make more of difference than trying to dilute it with better material.
Regardless, while it's foolhardy to make predictions when I know I know so little … I think the current generation of models have plateaued on text: their grammar is essentially perfect, and I don't see their world model improving with more training on text of the sort you describe.
(To be clear, I still expect them to keep improving. I just think it'll take more than random text like newspaper articles, love letters, etc., even if you can find lots of it. I think the next steps are multimodality and tool use.)
Is there anyone here who is an expert on nuclear safety?
Using data from the NEA's SERENA program, it looks like the upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi). This is possibly an underestimate as the void coefficient and flow regime in a critical reactor is difficult to verify. Also this was only based on computer model simulations, as for some reason no one wants to explode real nuclear reactors to gather experimental data. Wikipedia lists the blast pressure rating of nuclear reactor containment structures at 40-80 psi, which seems well out of the range of possible explosion yields. Actual nuclear power plants in the US have Final Safety Analysis Reports (FSAR) available as a matter of public record. Taking the Ginna NPP FSAR as an example, their containment structure is rated for 60 psi, and was subjected to 69 psi as part of a safety test. My conclusion as an amateur is that even a worst case meltdown scenario followed by a steam explosion in a PWR/BWR would not be enough to breach containment.
Explosions are more complicated than just the maximum blast pressure, such as the rate of pressure change and shrapnel, etc. So is it possible that a steam explosion could actually breach a containment structure? I am quite familiar with the Vladimir I Lenin NPP disaster and understand that western reactor designs and safety protocols are nothing like the situation at Chernobyl. But it seems that western reactors are designed defensively to contain a Chernobyl-esque failure, despite the extreme unlikelihood of such a thing happening. Also, how long has this been the case? It seems that US nuclear reactors have come with a containment building as standard all the way since the dawn of commercial nuclear in the 1950's. I don't know if these earlier builds were rated for similar containment, or if that happened later. But Ginna began operation in 1970, more than a decade before Chernobyl, so clearly the defensive nature of reactor containment predates said disaster. Final question, is such containment a reasonable precaution or excessive safety regulation that is strangling energy growth? It seems basically impossible that modern reactors could explode, but then no one believed RBMK reactors could explode either until they did. I guess this is a meta question about safety, whether systems should be designed to withstand worst case scenarios that are physically implausible with known information.
If we used molten salt reactors, then you don't even need to worry about steam explosions. The boiling point of molten salt is too high to happen in a reactor.
A couple of things jump at me:
1. “upper bound of the blast pressure from a steam explosion is around 200 kPa (29 psi)” - is there an explanation as to why this is the upper bound, and why we should expect one existing?
2. Nowhere you mention peak pressure duration. This is a glaring omission, any peak stress test includes both the peak value and it’s duration, e.g., for shock tests it’s 10 kG for so many microseconds (don’t remember the exact spec off the top of my head).
1. This is what the NEA experts calculated for a steam explosion resulting from molten corium dropping into coolant in a light water reactor. There is only so much water and fissile material in a reactor, so the explosion can only be so big. This was based on standard western reactor designs at the time of the study (2003).
2. I didn't know what to look for and I didn't really want to read the whole 126 page report. But it includes this section:
"High pressures occur in earlier or later phases of pressure development (wave escalation and propagation), but over only small time spans (width of pressure peaks < 1 ms). Such peak pressures reach about 110 MPa (JASMINE F2) or are in a range of 60 – 80 MPa (JASMINE F1X, TEXAS UW, IFCI, ESPROSE -at later time-). Only very short pressure peaks with pressures in this range are obtained by IDEMO and MC3D. Longer lasting pressures do mostly not exceed 20 MPa."
Thank you, #1 makes sense, they considered a specific situation and arrived at a limit.
For #2 - they at least addressed the duration qualitatively, so there’s a degree of awareness of its impact. Looks good enough given the difficulty of obtaining a lot of measurements.
IDK, but Jack Devanney is my nuclear substack site. You can ask Jack.
https://jackdevanney.substack.com/
AFAICT the whole nuclear fission industry is way over regulated ... it's kinda nuts how much everyone is afraid of nuclear. And yet radiation is all around us, and if you were afraid of radiation you wouldn't live in Denver. (or fly in a plane, or get nuclear enhanced chest x-ray tomography or... )
Most of the regulations that seem to actually make Nuclear extremely expensive and slow to build seem to be generic ones like the hell that is anglosphere planning law, the same environmental laws that somehow manage to block wind turbines and solar farms, and the inefficiencies of big government contracts. Countries that can still build cheap reactors aren't building them with less safety structures, they're not having to write millions of pages on how the plant won't impact newts while having "charities" take them to court all the time as we see in Britain.
I’ve posted in a few threads about my quest to find a more enjoyable and fulfilling career as an SE.
I’d love to hear an answer to the following from people in the field who are pretty satisfied in their current job.
Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission or from finding cool challenges to work on? Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
In my time as an individual contributor SWE, I had two really super fulfilling projects. One was a cool challenge, where we were really advancing the state of the art but doing so for a directly applied end, not as a toy research problem. The other was when I happened to be in the right place at the right time to realize that One Weird Trick would save the company $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER worth of compute. The common thread (n=2, such high statistical power!) was the combination of cleverness and clear application, even though in both cases nobody but a few of my fellow SWEs ever saw the direct results of the application.
Then I went into management, and at first was very unfulfilled. After awhile I discovered that what fulfilled me was finding the sorts of people who were doing the kinds of projects I just described, and coaching them on how to better succeed at it, either as ICs or team leads or managers in their own right. This was partly because of the coaching talent I found I had, but I think partly also because their enthusiasm for the fulfilling nature of their projects trickled down, so to speak, to me.
Interesting! I worry that 2 is a pretty low number and such challenges are very hard to come by
Not that I'm opposed to my company's mission or anything, but I think the main source of fulfillment is lower level - making the system you work on as good as you can. Having ownership and a relative lack of barriers can help with that.
I suspect that that the balance between those two varies between people. But there's a third important factor: do you connect with your team?
Aka do you think your team is a good learning environment? Do you feel they have your back? Are they pushing you to do your best work? Do they respect and seek your inputs--and can you do the same for them? Does conflict lean more towards constructive themes?
I raise this because I just recently changed teams. I was deeply dissatisfied with my work and began to loathe my job. But I stumbled into another team and I'm getting a lot of cool challenges that have reignited my interest in SE, but also the people are great, like I haven't been on a tr like this in years. It really feels like we're all rowing in the same tempo, even though we're all working on quite separate projects. I was shocked to hear my new manager typecast me (correctly) into a "craftsman" role after just a few weeks (my prev manager, I suspect, didn't really understand what I was doing).
It's maybe a virtuous cycle: a healthy team produces good challenges, and good challenges stimulate engaged work, which leads to more good challenges.
I actually really like the people I work with and still don’t find the work so fulfilling
Are they fulfilled in the work?
We don’t discuss it! I suspect a minority are and most people aren’t but don’t mind their work not being fulfilling
one things that stands in the way of fullfillment is that at the end of day, you don't have tangible results, that you can see or touch. On one hand that is a problem for the lizard-brain, because it doesn't feel that your effort actually had any point. On the other hand it is a problem, because abstract things make communication harder, e.g. with managers, when they ask why it takes a long time to fix something that looks simple.
For me the most fulfilling parts of SE comes, when you can see the actual results of your work (e.g. because you are in direct contact with the users, or if your software has some real-world impact) ,or when the stress is low and I can spent energy outside of work to get fulfillment from private projects.
> Does fulfillment come from connecting to the company’s product/mission
I have never really connected to the company’s product/mission, maybe I am too cynical, or maybe I was not lucky.
> or from finding cool challenges to work on?
This can be fulfilling, but not always. Sometimes you do something fun, and it later turns out you were overengineering a deadend. Sometimes you solve a hard problem, but management underestimates the problem, and belittles your achievment. If you work in a larger org, then most challenges come from politics, and not from technologie.
> Is this question is even well posed to begin with?
for me fulfilling programming sometimes happened outside work, when I was doing fun projects for myself or friends. So my personal recommendation for a fulfilling career would be to minimize your career and find fulfillment elsewhere.
LLM watch: in the past I've reported some queries that it occurred to me to pose to Google Gemini, all of which were flubbed somewhere between badly and so-badly-it's-hard-to-believe-people-think-this-is-useful.
This time I thought of a question that I expected an LLM might handle well. Here's the prompt and response:
--- prompt --
There's an old broadsheet ballad called The Victory, and Steeleye Span's rendition of the final verse starts with these lines:
Here's success unto the Victory / and crew of noble fame
and glory to the captain / bold Nelson was his name
What does the singer mean by these lines?
--- response --
The singer is celebrating the victory of the British warship 𝗛𝗠𝗦 𝗩𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆 in a famous naval battle. The "captain bold Nelson" is 𝗔𝗱𝗺𝗶𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 𝗡𝗲𝗹𝘀𝗼𝗻, a legendary British naval commander who led the Victory in the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.
The lines express admiration for the Victory and its crew, as well as for Nelson's courage and leadership. The "success" and "glory" mentioned in the lyrics refer to the British victory in the battle, which was a significant moment in British naval history.
-----
Contrary to my first thoughts, this is another for the "so terrible, it's hard to imagine someone thinking this tool can do anything" files. Following up:
--- prompt 2 (continuing on from the first response) --
What are the lines that follow the two I cited?
--- response 2 --
I'm sorry, I don't know the lines that follow the two you cited. I can only provide information that is publicly available. If you would like to know the full text of the ballad, you can find it online or in a book.
-----
This doesn't even make sense. I am indeed aware that I can find the text of the ballad online. That's possible because... it's publicly available. Not much risk of violating copyright in a broadsheet ballad either.
This seems to be a case of it being hamstrung from fears of violating copyright, such as stories from The New York Times. They probably made it so that any text completion requested is automatically blocked, and it doesn't have an override for that to check whether something is old enough to be out of copyright.
That will explain the second failure. The first one is worse. The information I asked for isn't included in the prompt, which was intentional - there's somebody downthread commenting on how LLMs are useful because they contain a lot of knowledge. Not in this case, apparently.
I want to register that, not having ever encountered the song before, the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context. (For people who don't want to do that themselves, the singer is bitter that her love was pressganged to serve on the Victory).
I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
> the AI answer sounded very reasonable until I actually searched the song and found the context
Well, that still puts you ahead of the other response I've received, which claims that the toast "Success to the Victory and her brave captain, whose valor in combat got my fiancé killed" is best viewed as a celebration of that event.
I've presented this as a counterpoint to the idea that LLMs are a source of knowledge that you can consult. An answer that sounds reasonable as long as you're completely unaware of the relevant facts isn't something you should hope to be getting. It's more of a worst-case scenario. It is something you would expect from the mechanics of an LLM, though.
> I feel like calling this a great disappointment is missing something substantial.
How would you rate the quality of the answer?
> was pressganged
For reference, the standard verb for this is "impressed". Your choice is probably less likely to confuse people unfamiliar with the practice.
I've always felt that there's a little bit of extra injustice in being impressed into a suicide charge.
>For reference, the standard verb for this is "impressed".<
I've always heard "Shanghaied".
No military connotation for "shanghaied". Impressment is legal.
+1
I'm not so sure, having Googled it as Gemini recommended. The poem as a whole certainly isn't about the battle and victory, but those two lines sure seem to be. I interpret as contrasting Britain's great victory with the poet's great loss.
So I kind of agree with the analysis. But poetry isn't really my thing, either.
That's kind of the point though, I think. If the LLM takes context from a few clues and makes up something that sounds plausible but is wrong, then it's misleading or outright wrong. The same happens when you ask it a question that sounds like something famous (I've seen the fox, rabbit, cabbage puzzle) but is just straightforward, but it answers the famous thing instead.
The bigger concern is not using these systems when the operator can fact check or just Google the answer. It's when we try to lean on it for daily use or as a black box to answer questions we cannot already answer. "Provide a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug" is extremely scary with current LLMs.
If you ask for a formula for a perfect cholesterol drug and then assume the answer you get is correct then you will be in for problems, whether the source is an LLM or a research lab. But you can then TEST the solution, first by asking whether it makes sense, and then by something like clinical trials.
Consider this completely made-up AI "formula": Combine dioxygen difluoride in a polonium solution. Results show total recovery from cholesterol.
I would hope no one would have low enough wisdom to consider this formula.
Sure, we can test a solution, but that's what I was talking about with fact checking or Googling the answer. It's an added, and currently necessary, step in order to use an LLM.
For the formula you provided, I'm not a chemist so I'm not sure what chemical that is. I might try to make that at home if I have high cholesterol, with apparently bad results.
If LLMs are for smart people who already understand enough about the results to keep themselves safe, then that may be helpful overall, but it's not that good of a sign for LLMs being revolutionary or whatever. Certainly not a strong indication that they would be dangerous, except in the accidental way (people consuming polonium).
I used to often have a problem when asking LLMs to translate a story where it would be too big to fit into the context window, so they'd only translate the first part and then seamlessly hallucinate a continuation of the story instead of translating the rest, with absolutely no warning.
The biggest problem with LLMs is that by construction, they're very good at emulating the surface level signals that people historically used to estimate credibility, regardless of whether they are actually correct or not.
I don't see the toast as a sincere blessing on the Victory. I would call it "bitter", not celebratory.
Pretty similar to the song "Friends in Low Places", which also takes the form of a toast.
I recommend the music of Two Steps from Hell while reading Unsong. There's tracks with appropriate names like Archangel or Sariel (that I conveniently misread as Uriel), Apollo, Starchild, Color the Sky (the seven colors of the rainbow, and the three extra ones you only get in heaven), and various things that you can make Comet King associated with a little bit of imagination and/or Kabbalah. Also, I really like the general vibe their music has.
Wait, do people enjoy reading while listening to music? That would be like torture for me.
When you read, do you picture the scenes vividly in your imagination? Maybe people who have a more visual reading experience can enjoy music better--like a movie soundtrack.
I've spent enough time reading on various forms of public transportation that I can happily read to music because its preferable to the noises obnoxious people constantly make in public.
I listen to instrumental music while reading all the time, but nothing with words. You need something that fades into the background and won't take your attention.
Need that stimulation, dopamine set points can get very unhealthy, watching math lectures are 4x speed while playing idle game until I get migraines so I take caffine and move my bed time hours *each day*. Working back down to 2x speed videos, or reading with classical music is a detox.
I find that listening to music makes it slightly harder to focus on what you are reading, but it's still tremendously fun. I read to music all of the time.
I used to listen to music while reading as a teenager, and it didn't really affect the immediate experience, but it ties the two together in my memories, so re-reading Dune, for instance, conjure up a certain album in my mind, hyperion got another, etc etc.
It makes the whole nostalgia lane very enjoyable, as every piece calls back to something else as well.
This has happened to me with travel—first by accident and now intentionally. I’ll listen to a song over and over while on a trip so that I can experience nostalgia when hearing it years later.
Sparingly or they lose their magic
It's more of an alternating thing: I read a bit, pause to picture the scene in my head, and that's where the right music can make it extra vivid.
That sounds alright.
I picture scenes fairly vividly while reading, and I find reading while listening to music pointless; if the music does not distract me from reading, then I don't notice the music at all.
Can "utilon models" of consequentialist utilitarianism wind up re-creating deontological, pseudo-deistic systems through Goodhart's Law?
I'm thinking of a Substack friends or at least neighbors of this blog, who I don't particularly care to call out (I'll save that in case, in my dotage, I start my own substack), or Vox's Future Perfect using "wrong side of history" or "failing moral tests" language (who I don't mind calling out, Vox delenda est). There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us, and that we're doing badly by not doing a very narrow set of (progressive-approved) tasks. Now that I feel a temptation to delve into the sociology of post-Christian Protestant heresy combined with Millennial indoctrination to score well on tests above all else, I'll leave the question to the audience.
>There is a sense in which utilons are just a communication tool to convey relative values, but it seems that some people fall into a stronger sense where they're actually *real*, that some cosmic scoreboard (ie, God) will judge you/us
I'm confused - the definition of utilitarianism is "doing good means maximizing utility," or in other words, "doing good means getting the highest score on the cosmic scoreboard." How you believe the universe is scored and how you go about maximizing that score might vary, but I don't understand how you could claim to be utilitarian if you aren't using *some* sort of scoring system to judge actions, or what difference it would make if utilons are "real" vs "just a communication tool." The score is measuring a real thing - how much suffering or happiness there is in the world - regardless of if you think God or Man is the one tallying up the score.
And the phrase "wrong side of history" has nothing to do with utilitarian scoring? I guess you could interpret such a statement as saying "I predict your actions will turn out in the future to be extremely negative-utility," but it could equally well be saying "I predict that in the future people will consider you to be extremely unvirtuous" or "I predict that people in the future will believe you were violating an obvious deontological principle." It's a statement about how you'll be viewed in the future, not a statement about which ethics system the speaker is using.
You seem to be complaining about something very specific but I completely don't understand what you're getting at here.
I would contend that recreating pseudo-Deism is a feature, not a bug.
I guess, are virtue ethicists falling into a similar trap for naively believing that virtue is "actually real"?
Most people don't have a unifying coherent ethical theory, and most utilitarians are, thankfully, not consistent in adhering to what they profess.
You're in a prisoner's dilemma. You know, with certainty, that the other participant will Cooperate. Do you Defect?
My instinct is to say no, I'd Cooperate. But on second thought, that's contingent on the situation resembling a conventionally-formulated Prisoner's Dilemma, where I have a sense of sympathy for and obligation towards the other participant, then I'm pretty sure I'll cooperate, and only the idea of higher obligations to others (e.g. having to go to prison for an extended period of time and not be there for my wife and our daughter) gives me significant pause. For a non-life-changing financial incentive (e.g. the "Split or Steal" phase of the UK game show "Golden Balls" where the two finalists have a prisoner's dilemma over the division of the prize money in the final round), I would definitely cooperate.
In something like EY's "True Prisoner's Dilemma", where the other participant is an evil being I have no obligation towards and no personal sympathy for their goals, then I'm defecting unless there are practical reasons (e.g. the possibility of retaliation) why cooperating is a necessary evil. Even if the other participant is a utility monster, my instinct is still firmly to defect.
That was a really revealing question, so well done asking it. I notice that a good chunk of the reasoning behind my answers is deontological, concerning honor-driven obligations, and most of the rest of the reasoning is also deviation from pure utilitarianism as it involves discounting the other participant's utility based on my opinion of them, what they deserve, and the legitimacy of their goals.
Contextually dependent. Is it iterated, who knows my response, what's the payoff matrix, etc.
In a public comment section the optimal strategy is, of course, to loudly cry "Cooperate" and note the importance of pre-committing to being cooperative in all circumstances. Then defect in the dark.
I choose Cooperate.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your comment and would love to read more of your writing. Here’s to a rapidly approaching dotage!
My timeline on Twitter has been flooded the past couple days with tributes to literary critic Fredric Jameson, who died at the age of 90 a couple days ago. I had never heard of him, but apparently he was a very influential Marxist and Postmodernist theorist and critic. I suppose most people don't like to speak ill of someone who just died, he sounds like the kind of thinker who, however smart and talented, was very, very wrong. At least one of his books has the word "late capitalism" in its title.
What I'm wondering is if there are non-Marxist readers who found Jameson worth reading. If so, do you just ignore his Marxism and move on?
Oh, *that's* who that is?!
My YouTube algorithm (Premium, no less!) is pretty darn good at making suggestions tangential to my main interests, so I was surprised when I "randomly" received a couple of posts and a video essay about this Fredric Jameson person whom I'd never even heard of. It was *very* weird; I've never had YouTube inform me of the death of a writer of any sort, so it felt extremely weird. I mean, my algorithm is such that YouTube has frequently neglected to mention *MAJOR* news events, so why this particular death, for someone who wasn't a household name?
I watch content from both teams, but way more Red and Purple team content than Blue (for whatever reason, Blue content is easier to take in written form). So that feels even weirder.
I'd hesitate before applying the term "postmodernist" to Jameson's work. Indeed, his book on postmodernism theory (the one with "late capitalism" in the title) takes great issue with the theory's ahistorical bent. And as a reader deeply committed to historicizing (however deterministically) a text, Jameson simply could never endorse postmodernism theory - and rightly so, if you ask me. For what it's worth, the postmodernism book's (critical) thesis, broadly stated, is that postmodernism theory represents the "spatialization" of culture, and does so at the expense of its further potential temporalization. If that sounds interesting, I highly recommend the book. I'll caution that, although not completely impenetrable, the book is difficult and weighs its words with great precision. However, I personally found it so well-argued, compelling, and persuasive as to justify its difficulty.
Interesting. Thanks.
“Late capitalism” doesn’t mean “the end of capitalism”; it’s a term of art referring to post-WW2 capitalism.
According to Claude: "The phrase suggests that capitalism has reached an advanced or possibly unsustainable stage, with some arguing it reflects the system's decline. The term became more popular through the works of theorists like Marxist economist Ernest Mandel and cultural critic Fredric Jameson."
I didn't mention Fredric Jameson in the prompt, FWIW.
So Claude is wrong? This thread is filled with LLM hallucinations! Here's what I got from an old-fashioned search engine. https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/marxism/modules/jamesonlatecapitalism.html This Jameson guy sounds pretty smart.
> Spartacus.app
Prediction: this wont solve anything, if it does it will be brutally attacked
Byzantine generals only wont if they feel shame about lying, online interactions don't involve physical danger or relationships and so it all falls apart even for simpler coordination problems like flirting, if dating apps are hard to solve with coordinating 2 people, why on earth would people imagine n-people is easy and you just throw tech at it.
I tried to check it out but I kept being redirected to other sites all claiming to be Spartacus.app.
After looking at the website, honeypots and fake accounts seem like a big potential problem to me.
Also, the website doesn't explain at all how you're supposed to share the link in an anonymous way. That seems like a massive info leak. Anyone you try to recruit will know you tried to recruit them, and possibly inform on you.
Obviously we will just teach everyone how to use tor and get everyone on peer to peer chat services, *then* we can solve private coordination problems
I could maybe picture this as being an effective way to change a single private company, a single large workplace. Or perhaps something like a single school district.
But if you scale it up beyond that, I doubt it can work.
Amazon is perfectly capable of buying this thing if it make a single union
Trying to buy us out will only make us stronger.
This seems custom designed for organizing a union in a workplace. So yeah, if the app proves to be effective, I expect an avalanche of hit pieces in the corporate press. (And a few supportive pieces)
We’d welcome the publicity. And yes, unionizing is one of the strongest use cases.
Yes, that was one of my first thoughts as well - this is well-designed to enable the formation of an union in a workplace.
My first thought in glancing over their website is that it reminds me a great deal of Secret Religion societies from Crusader Kings 2, which allows characters who secretly adhere to an underground religion to coordinate and recruit converts until they reach a critical mass and they all convert openly. In the game, it's effective enough that it can be really annoying as a player when NPCs are spreading heresy in your realm and there's not a lot you can do to stop them.
I don't think it would be quite as effective in real life, though.
Its very effective in real life, but only in real life. In ~100 years Christianity went from a non important cult to converting the emperor and setting up the institutions that maintained the books after the fall and the central question of "the separation of church and state" that arguably set up the modern world.
On Contingencies. I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line. For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online. The same is true for a lot of other problems, the ones that might only be overcome by all people working together against their short-term interests. Even AI. I loathe to say this, because on this blog, discussion of dangers of AI will probably hijack the comments, but still: I firmly believe that if a dangerous AI can be created and released into wild, it WILL be created and released, as long as there are some big short-term benefits to whoever does that first. If so, so what?
The answer to such question, of course, depends on exact parameters. But that just means there should be more than one plan, and we should assess probabilities of various failure modes and allocate at least some resources not to prevent them, but to survive the results.
One counter-argument is that we should concentrate on prevention (an ounce of which is said to be worth a pound of cure). But, what if prevention is actually impossible? Not physically, but politically, sociologically and economically? Shouldn't we at least devote SOME time to "cures"?
"Human nature" involves "motivation". For whatever reason, people seem to get less motivated when the possibility of failure is mentioned. So when success depends on motivation, people don't often discuss plan B, because that implies that plan A might fail.
In my line of work (civil engineering) we have been discussing climate change, as well as designing infrastructure (dams, bridges, flood protection) to account for those changes for at least 10 years now, i.e. plan B. The models used for that are very simplistic though.
Couldn’t agree more. While obviously the best path is to treat the underlying issue (risk of a malevolent, superhuman AI “escaping”, GHG emissions, etc.) that’s honestly very rarely a true option. The reason we worry about these things in the first place aren’t because we are worried someone will have some aesthetic or irrational preference for these dangers and release them upon the world, but because there are fundamental and almost impossible to control economic and incentive forces at play that exceed any centralized point of control. You’re not going to solve GHG by banning fossil fuels when people generally like having cars, consuming electricity, and raising themselves out of poverty.
Climate change mitigation discussions do not work on the English language Internet, because they are very necessarily local, not global. In the Hungarian-language Internet we are talking about water retention and drought-resistant agriculture. We need to bring back some of the floodplains eliminated in the 19th century. The whole discussion revolves around water. In other place, it might be around wildfires.
This is an interesting take. I don't see much of that in my own corner of Internet (but maybe I go to the wrong sites; I don't know any high-quality discussion forums on my language, only mainstream entertainment). I would expect to see at least some such discussions in English (that are local to USA), but I guess they might be drowned out by politics in this case.
Climate change is a continuum. There are distant poles where fighting it clearly worked because the world is now back to 1700s temperatures, vs where it clearly didn't work because the world is now 5 degrees hotter and Pakistan is uninhabitable. In the middle it's more a question of degree.
What's the plan if we can't overcome climate change? I guess we just have a few more bushfires and famines and a lot of refugees sometimes. What would a plan B mean here? Some kind of plan to fight famine? We already have disaster planning, strategic food stockpiles, and farming subsidies for that. A plan to fight bushfires? You can't really stop a big enough fire front, most of what you do is driving along beside and behind it making sure it doesn't spread perpendicular to the wind until it runs out of trees or the weather turns, and most countries are already pretty good at that. Refugee camps? As a species we have a hell of a lot of practice at setting those up and already have bodies dedicated to it. I can't think of a useful plan B that isn't already under control.
> I often wonder why people fight losing battles to the bitter end, and barely ever discuss "plan B", at least on-line
Because making a Plan B reduces the probability that Plan A will work, and this is generally true regardless of the context.
* Every moment of effort spent on Plan B is a moment of effort not spent on Plan A
* You might accidentally demonstrate that Plan B is better than Plan A (at least for some members of your coalition), and then you've done your enemies' work for them of divide-and-conquering yourself
Real-world example: in the run-up to the Scottish independence referrendum of 2014, the UK government refused to allow any studies into "What will actually happen if the separatists win" for fear that the answer might be "It won't be so bad, actually" and that would encourage separatism.
When engaging in a battle without a clear-cut win/lose condition, like we have in pro sports and political elections, it can be difficult to realize when the battle is loss. There needs to be a certain level of humility and self-reflection, otherwise it's easy to ignore any evidence that you and your allies are losing the battle and to soldier on as though everything is fine.
50. On hemmed-in ground, I would block any way of retreat. On desperate ground, I would proclaim to my soldiers the hopelessness of saving their lives.
51. For it is the soldier's disposition to offer an obstinate resistance when surrounded, to fight hard when he cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into danger.
http://classics.mit.edu/Tzu/artwar.html
That only works if your soldiers believe you, but I don't think this is what happening in many cases. Indeed, most people continue to ignore the issue, either because they feel it doesn't actually affects them, or that they have no power to affect it. It's a bit like proclaim hopelessness to a soldier who can clearly see a road to the next fortress at the rear: while from strategic viewpoint losing this particular battle might mean losing the war, it's hard to convince people to stay their ground when there is a lot of ground to give, and seemingly little harm in giving it up. This is rarely the case in real wars, but that's the problem: war, with its immediate violence, is kind of built-in into humans, so we *get* it; curbing consumption to fight climate change, or, as another example, having more children to ensure the future of your nation (at the expense of life quality), is not.
yeah, it wasn't meant to be comprehensive. just one possibility of many. I don't think there's a single, unifying reason that people often neglect backup plans. Moreso it depends on the particulars and circumstances. If I had to single-out a reason anyway though, I'd say what Erica Rall said: that there's a demoralization/defection thing going on. Which I think the Sun Tzu excerpt sort of speaks to. (ok, maybe it was not the best quote.)
According to my understanding of ancient warfare, group cohesion is hugely important variable, *in general*. If the formation breaks, you get routed. closing off the line of retreat can heighten the resolve and cohesion. But also, cohesion is important even without being backed into a corner. The "arguments as soldiers" analogy is fitting, not just because battles and flamewars can get messy, but also because it encapsulates the *seemingly* irrational urge to never break rank, under any circumstances whatsoever.
In the case of climate-change specifically, I suspect there's a few things going on. (N.B. I don't follow this topic very closely.)
A) availability bias. Most of the haranguing you've seen likely comes from people who are politically motivated to exaggerate reality. The most hyperbolic lefties say it'll be of apocalyptic proportions, while the most hyperbolic righties say it doesn't even exist. But ecosystems are complex, unpredictable phenomena. So I expect climate change is going to be a little of both. I.e. disastrous on some dimensions; but also less than apocalyptic on others. (i'm not appealing to the argument to moderation, i'm appealing to the heuristic that nature tends toward an equilibrium.)
B) (As others have said,) mitigations will be local. Many places are already feeling the effects. E.g. I met a guy once who was doing an environmental degree, and he said that there was a certain fungus that was killing a species of tree that's native to our area, and that it was probably due to climate change. I've heard from the news that Ethiopia/Somalia has been subject to an unprecedentedly-large locust-plague, and that this is probably caused by climate-change. I've also heard from the news that Iran is suffering from water shortages, probably due to climate change. I've heard that jellyfish populations are unexpectedly exploding, probs due to climate change. etc.
C) the ramifications are difficult to predict in detail. Climate science is still in its infancy, so none of the academics have unflinching confidence that reality will behave the way their models expect. When you can't predict the ramifications, it's hard to take preemptive measures.
D) (Like you said yourself,) the average joe doesn't care until he feels immediate, tangible consequences.
As for AI specifically, I think it suffers from A) C) and D) as well.
And if you want to follow the nitty-gritty details of climate-change mitigation, maybe pay attention to ecologists rather than climate-modelers. Especially anything to do with water, since that's strikes me as being comparatively easier to forecast, with an outsized impact on human settlements.
The issue with climate change is that it's a global issue that would require extensive co-operation between all major governments around the world. There's simply no mechanism for achieving such co-operation right now, especially with increasing tension between the west and BRICS.
The issue with cooperation about climate change is that the expected impact of its consequences is very unevenly distributed, ranging from "my region will be devastated and I'll have to flee" to "eh, we'll need to pay slightly more taxes to cover extra infrastructure", and there generally is a negative correlation between the impact and ability to influence climate change; those about to suffer the most don't have the ability to cut emissions and those who might make major (and expensive) emissions cuts aren't *that* badly affected, or even may have a vested national interest in prolonging the fossil fuel era so that they can sell as much as possible of their mineral wealth before the world stops buying it.
Well, this is what I'm talking about. If there is no way to solve this issue without cooperation, then at least every country/block should prepare to face the consequences of not solving it (if any; many commenters in this thread assure me that we don't need any special preparations; maybe that's even true and I just read too much sci-fi).
>For example, it seems pretty obvious that humanity will NOT overcome climate change (at least not by self-imposing limits). If so, so what? What's our Plan B? I don't think I EVER saw discussion this online.
There has been plenty of discussion of possible technical solutions, including on the front page of today's New York Times.
For climate change, for example, notice the resistance to nuclear power. What does this tell you?
It tells me that the "green movement" in many countries involves "useful idiots" that have been successfully manipulated by some fossil fuel exporters to sabotage and delay the transfer to renewables.
If Plan A is “massive coordinated public action,” then efforts to implement it are necessarily high-visibility. If Plan B is “everybody independently figures out how climate change is going to affect them, and adapts” then efforts can remain largely invisible to the public eye. Lots of organizations, both public and private, have quietly developed plans for how to continue their missions in the face of climate change. If Google changes where they build their next datacenter due to anticipated climate change effects, that doesn’t make the news.
Political tribes are a way of playing "ain't it awful?", the purpose of which is to find accomplices in maintaining the not-okay position. Even members of the tribe who attempt to rise above this game & position are treated with suspicion, members of other tribes are treated with outright hostility.
But isn't there a place for a 3rd tribe? For example if one tribe says "we should all cease our high-energy consumption and live simple lives", and other says "ha-ha, SUV goes brrrr", isn't there a place for people who say "OK, we better learn how to build great sea walls" or even "Maybe build automated turrets on the border to keep inevitable mass of immigrants away"?
For sure, the challenge is making sustainable alliances with other tribes.
When a community is defined by shared belief in the importance of Plan A, then arguing for consideration of Plan B, even as a backup, is a defection from group norms. Arguing that Plan B is needed as a backup reads as a defeatist argument against efforts towards Plan A, muddling the messaging, diverting efforts, and demoralizing the troops.
I think Plan B for climate is already being enacted anywhere Plan A isn't happening (which is pretty much everywhere). Maybe slow down CO2 production on the margins, but otherwise just live life. The worst case scenarios are unlikely, and there's not much we can do about it anyway. It's a slow enough process that you could buy beachfront property in Miami and sell it when you retire and not worry about the water. Maybe your grandkids can't, but by then whoever is in Miami will have slowly adjusted over several generations, just like the rest of us have about various other changes in life.
Lots of people started getting on the recycle/personal solar/bike type solutions, but the reality is setting in for normal people. I think that's the source of memes about Taylor Swift flying everywhere. More CO2 was used to fly famous politicians to climate conferences than everyone I know combined will use in a lifetime. And on top of that, the West produces less CO2 than China. We could entirely switch to nuclear or other clean sources, stop using fossil fuels, and still make no difference to the long term trajectory of the climate.
"But the private jets!" is the climate equivalent of saying theres no point fixing the 10m wide hole below the waterline in your ship because there is a leaky tap. Aviation alone is a tiny fraction of GHG emissions and private jets are an even smaller portion. It mostly just serves at a gotcha "oh those elites want to build less fossil fuel plants but they have a jet!".
It speaks to the seriousness of the issue. Surely for a fraction of the cost of those big conferences they could all meet up on Zoom, but instead do what they want to do even though it's more expensive *and* emits far more carbon. When the common man gets pressure to buy a smaller car and reduce their usage, against what they want to do.
More importantly, neither the jets nor household carbon are the big issues. I can emit none or twice as much and it makes no difference. Residential and Commercial (non-industry) carbon emissions combined are 13% of US emissions, and the US is less than 13% of the world total. Residential use in the US is less than 1% of worldwide carbon emissions. Doubling *all* residential use or cutting it to zero makes very little difference and leads to no change in outcome for the climate.
That supposes there will be no single catastrophic event. I guess rising sea levels aren't it - they do rise slow enough by human standards, but other stuff might come at us faster.
What "other stuff"? The IPCC analysis is considered quite thorough, evaluating all kinds of effects on agriculture, flooding, ocean fisheries, various disasters, migration pressures, secondary effects, etc; I would presume that whatever the IPCC reports highlight as the likely harmful consequences of the more severe warming scenarios is an accurate reflection of the actual dangers we should be worrying about.
The IPCC doesn't predict any single catastrophic events, so why should we?
On climate change, I think the most commonly-discussed plan B is geoengineering, and while it should be discussed (and researched) more than it is, I think it does actually get plenty of discussion.
On AI doom, I think the situation is different because I don't think there is a plan B other than "hope the AI decides to be nice to us for some reason we can't predict".
Right geoengineering, and when we run out of hydrocarbons, nuclear fission.
Geoengineering isn’t a solution, it’s a mitigation to reduce the impact while we solve the underlying problem of greenhouse gas emissions.
I guess the Plan B has been discussed by a bunch of science fiction novels and movies, including Dune and Terminator...
Plan A: Some sort of government regulation of AI
Plan B: Butlerian Jihad
Those are both Plan A: Prevent dangerous AI from being released.
In the case of government regulation, proactive prevention (which is clearly not going to happen).
In the case of Terminator, er, retro-proactive prevention?
How sad is it that the invention of time travel seems more believable than global cooperation and good sense?
As a sci-fi story, a possible solution to AI doom could be humanity flying away from Earth at a speed approaching the speed of light. It could be an interesting story, for example we might meet space aliens and yell at them that they need to join us if they want to survive.
But in real life, our technology is nowhere near what would be required for that, and even if we somehow built a large spaceship at least for a few thousand people and sent it away, the AI would probably get us before we could even leave the Solar system.
If we had the technology, I think there's a good chance the AI would let us leave. I think the balance of probabilities on AI opinions toward humanity leans much stronger towards "don't care" than "must destroy" (which has about the same odds as "must protect"). On the other hand, if we had the technology so would the AI, and whatever AI goals lead it to compete with humanity for resources would eventually lead it to competing with the extra-solar human population, assuming that population stopped fleeing and settled down somewhere.
What, mechanically, makes high-quality animation better? When I watch something like Demon Slayer, I can clearly see that they put in way more money and effort into the animation than your average cartoon on anime, but as a non-art person I can't quite tell the specific thing they do. What is the expensive thing you do to get better animation? More details? More parts made by humans instead of autofilled?
incidentally, the buzzword you're looking for is "sakuga". plugging the term into a search engine returns results like
https://anime.stackexchange.com/questions/40088/what-exactly-is-sakuga-and-how-it-pertains-to-the-animation-quality
> Sakuga is basically where animators go from using cheats like only animating the mouth or skipping frames to animating every frame with fluid movement.
> Sakuga (作画) (lit., "drawing pictures") is a term used in anime to describe moments in a show or movie when the quality of the animation improves drastically, typically for the sake of making a dramatic point or enlivening the action....
> The other end of this spectrum, however, is when the animation becomes exceptionally expressive and fluid -- when every single frame is animated, and the movements themselves are closely-observed and realistic (or, failing that, spectacular to look at). This is what's known as sakuga. Action-oriented shows tend to have the most instances of sakuga, but there are many examples of dramatic shows using them as well -- for instance, to highlight an exceptionally emotional moment.
> (...)
In animation, movement costs money. If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement. Loop whatever you can loop, hide whatever movement you can hide, never change the camera perspective until you have to, and for the love of God DON'T ROTATE AROUND AN OBJECT, THAT WILL CHANGE THE OBJECTS PROFILE FOR EVERY SINGLE FRAME WHICH MEANS EVERYTHING ON SCREEN IS MOVING AAAAAA!
(That last reason, by the way, is why so many animes will suddenly have a 3D CGI model show up when everything else is regular 2D animation: it is incredibly expensive to rotate the camera around a 2D object, and incredibly cheap to rotate the camera around a 3D model. So you'll often see them use a 3D model for a car during a car chase, or for a giant mecha that gets in a lot of fights that involve different camera angles.)
Anime will often save their "movement budget" for a fight scene, so you'll have episodes that are mostly people talking to each other while moving as little as possible, then a fight scene that lasts 2-3 minutes with lots of movement and action.
High quality animation has more things moving. It moves the camera more, it has as many things as possible moving in a scene at once, and it uses more frames of drawing for the movements it does show so everything is more fluid.
Next time you watch an anime, keep track of everything that is moving in any given scene. You'll start to notice right away how little most animes are moving anything, 99% of the time. They need to keep it cheap so they can pump out 25 episodes a year.
> Anime, as a genre, is defined by being cheap to produce while still looking good. It does this by moving as little as possible; have lots of quiet scenes, or transition scenes, where nothing moves. Have lots of scenes where characters are just talking to each other, so that the only thing that moves is their mouths. Maybe have a hair or two move on their head while they talk, but make sure if the wind is blowing their hair it's a loopable animation so you only have to pay for a few seconds of movement.
Another common trick you didn't mention is *not showing the characters at all in the first place*. In anime, it's very common for conversation scenes to cut to random shots of a characters feet, hands, random scenery, etc.
> If something is moving, it's costing the studio money. the longer it moves, and the more things that are moving on the screen at once, the more money.
That's true in general, but there are some caveats. For example, you can draw a 3d scene and then spin the camera around arbitrarily at zero marginal cost. It's pretty common to see moments of obvious CGI effects like this even in otherwise traditional 2d animation nowadays.
The cost is in the complexity of the initial scene creation, not the total amount of movement. I guess this is the 21st century equivalent of panning over a matte painting - the matte painting itself costs money, but the panning doesn't.
You have recieved a lot of good answers already, so I'll add something else: shading. It's a big part of what makes people compare old anime favorable to newer ones, even when the frame count is not particularly better (or even sometimes worse).
Detail yes, and more unique drawings per second of animation. You can create a pretty reasonable illusion of motion with no more than five or six pictures per second of animation; the standard motion picture rate is 24 frames per second. The old studio system would be for the main artists to do key frames (say every fifth or sixth picture) and then for other artists to do the tweenies.
The detail in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, particularly around facial expressions, is quite astounding.
Quoting from artist commentary on a webcomic with very involved art:
> Hechoton comes from a special alternate dimension called "being the author's favorite" where everybody is drawn with MORE LINES.
So, more details.
Years ago I watched some anime, which honestly wasn't very good. I don't remember the name. Anyway, there was a fight scene where a character kicked someone, and the animation was detailed enough to show leg muscles moving in what looked like a realistic fashion. I rewound and watched it multiple times, because it was fascinating. In all my years watching animated shows, I had never seen such a clear and obvious detail that live action would have had naturally.
It really helped me to see how much of animated programming was abstracted that didn't need to be. A few years later I noticed that some shows would clearly spend a lot of time and effort for certain scenes - maybe end of season fights or whatever, and there were a million subtle details that just *popped* and the scenes felt way better. I'm thinking specifically of Naruto, where the filler episode fights had minimal budget and looked crummy, and then the show-defining episodes like the Pain fight were just dramatically better.
Grappler Baki especially has a reputation for cranking the human-anatomy dial to 11, to the point where the story is in service to the musculature.
>mathy; wants art to make sense
Id look at non-linear curves, all time, space, color transitions can be rebased into functions of floats between 0 and 1, and there are a collection of functions that can take an input from 0-1 and return a different result, but still in an acceptable range
Often the difference is that high quality animation does things honestly, while lower quality animation cheats, cuts corners, employs little tricks meant to make like simpler: "let's not animate that figure in the background, let's have that limb move as a rigid flat piece of a paper and not try to animate 3d rotation, let's simplify that part away, let's put a smear there and call it a day, let's just keep that part out of the frame, let's just not have a character move in such a way, let's never move an imaginary camera in a certain way, let's replace drawing more frames with scaling and moving existing assets whenever possible, let's not even bother with dynamic light, cast shadows are literally shapeless blobs, let's say nothing ever rotates except in the plane of the camera, let's make that motion so fast, there's no need to draw more than two frames" and so on and so on, a million things. And all these tricks work pretty well, in that the result doesn't look terrible and the animators get away with it. But some thing is lost, and when you watch a higher quality piece of animation you feel the presence of something that cheaper animation is missing.
Other ppl might have a more detailed responses, but some factors are number of frames drawn, how much the details are drawn in transitions between movements (vs start position linearly moving to end position), how much they incorporate lighting, and using specific "camera angles" and cuts to give the impression you're aiming for.
One of the cool tricks from the glory days of Disney cell frame animation was the use of multiple cells, stacked one on top of the other with a bit of space between them. The far background at the very bottom progressing through to the foreground on the top, this would allow racking focus through the cells to achieve some lovely animation effects.
How do software-adjacent people handle changelists? Our customers are always asking for them, and our developers are always hit-and-miss about providing them. I suspect that perhaps Project Managers have more to gain by owning the changelist, but I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves? Seems like devs have to be somewhat involved, and it seems that is always going to limit the ceiling for what's possible.
I will usually forget about half the changes I made before writing it, but the customer too, so it is fine. Documentation is mainly a formality because no one can check its quality.
The kind of change list customers (typically) want is at a higher level of abstraction than the commit messages in your version control system, so you need to manually summarize somehow.
A change list item like "This package can now be built for RISC-V" is probably summarizing dozens, maybe hundreds, of commits.
To clarify: well-written portable code should "just work" on a new platform like RISC-V. Something like an operating system, on the other hand, probably has hundreds of places that need tweaking. Hopefully, most of them are located in a directory called something like machdep/riscv, but there may be nasty surprises scattered through the codebase.
If you can't easily generate a changelist, that means you are not paying enough attention to your version control system.
* work-in-progress commits are great for personal/team branches but have no place on master/trunk. Its history should be a sequence of logically self contained commits, each of which leaves all tests passing. Leave branches/tags if you need to preserve detailed history, but squash it down for master.
* commit comments should include a brief one-line summary of the purpose before the detailed description
* releases should not contain any commits that are not in master. Tag/branch, that's your release.
Changelists then become easy: diff the relevant histories and aggregate the summaries from the commit comments.
Not paying enough attention for what other purpose than generating changelists?
Cost and ease of development.
* if you don't have a clean history of stable commits, bisecting for regressions becomes much harder. If trunk spends part of the time broken, pulling from trunk becomes a miserable slog; people then do this less often, which means more merge hell when they do, in a vicious cycle that ultimately makes everything take much longer than it ought to.
* if your commit comments start with a summary, it makes the history much easier to browse since, to a first approximation, all vcs tools display truncated commit messages when displaying commit history.
* if your releases contain ad hoc changes that were not in master, they become more difficult to reproduce (and you WILL need to reproduce them) and also some of the changes will inevitably get lost / forgotten leading to regressions in future work
If your shop does none of these things, the rate at which your developers can actually get things done will be much lower than it needs to be, as will morale.
Info for changesets is a minor bonus.
Meeting those criteria does not imply that the commit messages will make for a useful change list.
For example, "Update to document tokenization handling to permit dynamic definitions for delimiter characters". I know what that means, the developer knows what that means - the project manager is unlikely to have any clue what that means.
Yes, but a logically self-contained commit that leaves all tests passing may well be at a finer granularity that the feature the customer cares about.
Agree. The question was:
> I'm not sure the extent to which others' find that PMs have enough info to generate changelists themselves
Certainly the PM should have as much or more info about the customers' needs as the devs. If they are going to the devs, it's because they can't get the rest of what they need for the customer facing documentation without doing that, and a clean vc history is one way to help here that is also very much its own reward.
If you're working on something like the LLVM compiler there is a strong incentive to make commits small (but self contained etc) to (a) simplify code review (b) reduce probability it conflicts with another change another dev made "simultaneously" and needs to be redone.
(Amusing feature of LLVM process, specifically ... commits can get reordered between passing code review and actually getting committed to main)
At most orgs I worked for, the changes to the software came from customer/stakeholder requests. That is, the "changelist" of a piece of a software is simply a subset of the JIRA tickets the customers themselves opened.
Given that, maybe that's your solution: rephrase every request in a completed JIRA ticket as a past tense verb and that becomes your changelist. ("fix fizzbuzz frobnicator" --> "fixed fizzbuzz frobnicator").
Pressuring the developers crudely is a shitty strategy. If you have Code Review, make it part of the review process to summarize the PR as a changelist entry. You don't need all developers for this, only the senior enough people who review the PRs, gradually the rest of the developers will learn to add the changelist summary before the reviewer asks for it. That's a smarter strategy of pressuring the devs than crude carrot-and-stick.
Also, it depends a lot on your release cadence. Are you releasing every week or every month or every quarter or every year, or every commit? Obviously, it's ridiculous to keep spamming your frequent releases with endless micro-updates, at this point the customers can just talk to your devs directly on Teams for all they care.
Even on a less frequent release schedule, not everything is worthy of an entry in the changelist. There are "plumbing" bugs that customers almost never care about, who cares if you had an off-by-one in a loop somewhere or a memory leak, really who cares. Who cares if you switched the JSON library. Those things are visible to non-technical customers as performance improvements or better UX stability, in which case maybe cite a metric ("reduced load time from x to y", "N bugfixes for better stability and user experience") that summarizes the total effects of all the maintenance your devs did and move on.
Depends a lot on the particular project/team, but high-quality git messages should get you most of the way there.
The PM has to crack the whip on the devs to get the information for each release. That’s the only way I’ve ever seen it get done consistently.
PMs need to be convinced of the important of a good changelog or they won’t do the dirty work.
Does verbal IQ predict performance in a STEM subject when CONTROLLED FOR NON-VERBAL IQ?
STEM is an overly broad category. Certain forms of programming (think doing WordPress stuff in PHP) are basically just precise writing, it is not "engineering" in any sense. So, yes. I am basically a human LLM, verbal intelligence only, I would be in deep shit if writing SQL queries would be anything like engineering.
It does, at least based on my personal experiences. I thought on it a long time ago and realized that pattern recognition is a large part of language proficiency (as it is for math-y subjects). Some character corresponds to a certain concept and sound, and some of these characters put together results in another concept and a sequence of sounds. Some character corresponds to a certain quantity (number) or way of manipulating other characters (eg, +, -, x, ÷), and some of these characters put together results in another quantity. This explained why students who seemed to pick up the math lesson of the day quicker were also more capable of writing grammatically correct sentences.
I also suspect that we conceptually divide math-related intelligence and language-related intelligence because everyone uses languages so often that we don't even notice how much pattern recognition is involved in it. And also maybe because we want to be nice and say that people who can't into maths can at least into English.
I don't have data on this, but intuitively it should. Even on the banal level of being able to talk about and write about STEM-related results and people being aware of your knowledge. The greatest math genius in the world may not be recognized if he or she had very bad verbal IQ.
Also, verbal and math tend to correlate anyway, so very high math IQ would tend to go with very high verbal IQ, even if a specific person didn't need a high verbal IQ to work in STEM.
FWIW when I was on the entrance committee for a molecular biology phd program it seemed to be the consensus view that high verbal GRE scores were better predictors of success than the math or analytic scores. At least one committee member also said they like student athletes as candidates - I think basically as a proxy for conscientiousness and non neuroticism.
Wow
Any source for that claim?
It came to me in a dream
Also, schools only have so many types of tests, many of them written. Verbal intelligence should help any trick question.
For anyone who has the autistic trait of disliking eye contact: what is the subjective experience of eye contact unpleasant? What does it feel like?
It feels overly emotionally intense, in an unpleasant way. Perhaps it could be compared a little to sensory overload?
Nothing, it is just that when I have a thought, which happens in two seconds, some force irresistably turns my gaze down or away. It is just not possible to think and look at eyes at the same time.
Looking at flat surfaces like walls or floors allow my mind's eye to easily project images onto those surfaces. Faces are the opposite, because they're bumpy and distracting. Imagine trying to read a textbook while Welcome To The Jungle is blaring in the background.
There's also a feeling of a lack of personal space, as if im participating in a Vulcan mind-meld, or trapped in a hall of mirrors.
Yes, I'm on the spectrum. I've become quite adept at socializing and making eye-contact, when I must. It's also mentally exhausting.
Maybe ask your son to look at eyebrows instead.
Just so you'll know: Typical eye contact during a conversion is that the listener looks at the speaker's face pretty continuously. The speaker is often gazing away from the listener, but keeps glancing at listener's fact while talking. So looking away from the listener a fair amount of the time while is perfectly normal. A lot of people have picked up the idea, from someone who was Wrong on the Internet, and whose Wrongness was copied by many stoopit sites, that the optimal, healthy thing is to look at one's conversational partner as close to 100% of the time as possible! It's not. If you do that the other person will gradually feel more and more uncomfortable, though they may not be able to put their finger on why they feel that way -- the closest they'll be able to come may be something like "he's looking at me too hard."
Looking away more than a bit while listening will be experienced by the speaker as lack of attention to what they're saying. Looking away a lot while talking will not be seen as odd by the listener, so long as the speaker glances at the listener occasionally. Looking right at the listener continuously while talking will be experienced as weird and aggressive.
This is all true but I'll add a caveat: looking right at the listener continuously while talking can be experienced as evidence of sexual attraction (sometimes accurately)
Yes, I agree. Though, like other manifestations of attraction, it's not always a winning move to just do what you feel like.
Have you ever listened to your own voice being played back 1 second later, and it makes you confused and unable to keep speaking? That's how I feel when I look at someone's eyes while speaking. It makes it harder to put my thoughts into words. Especially in socially fraught situations when I'm not at ease. I can get through it, usually, but it's easier to just look away for a second and then look back when I'm not the one speaking.
Thanks! Great description of the qualia.
If it is a sensation, maybe it is blood rushing to my head, like when you feel embarrassed?
I've learned to make eye contact but it feels uncomfortable/challenging. It might be analogous to sitting in an specific and mildly unnatural posture when you're trying to pay attention to a movie or something. It is also surprisingly easy to do "wrong", which can make it feel unnatural and uncomfortable to the person I'm interacting with, but I'm getting better at that too. Basically there's a lot of things that most people do during eye contact without thinking about it - small eye movements, adjustments, blinks, shifts of gaze away and back. Doing this right without the instinct for it can take a lot of attention for me and be distracting from the content of the conversation and other implicit signals I'm trying to notice. And doing it wrong can be perceived as uncomfortable or creepy, especially if it's too fixed or intense. Making it more complicated, different emotional contexts or degrees of closeness seem to demand a different degree/type of eye contact and all those small parts of it, so it's easy to accidentally signal the wrong thing if I'm not careful.
Unless the person I'm looking at is a romantic interest, I almost never need to think about the fact that I'm looking at a part of them consciously. My eyes wander to whatever part of their face is most interesting, e.g. whatever part moves more, my brain is processing what is being said and my own replies.
If I focus too much on their eye by accident, I could just look elsewhere and recalibrate before looking back. The point is that you almost never need to think deeply about the person's face or eyes, it's what they're saying and doing that is keeping your brain busy. When driving, you don't think "I'm looking at the road right now, this is a thing I'm doing, I'm looking at the grey Asphalt and the lines on it", you just think "I'm trying to avoid crashing the car into the dumbass speeding from behind me", looking at the road and the mirrors is a natural side effect.
Not sure I count (see below), but:
I don't really have an unpleasant "sensation" associated with eye contact, because it's all happening at a subconscious level. If I'm making eye contact with a person, then I'm paying attention to their facial expression, their emotions, and their immediate reactions to each word I say. But all that data is incredibly distracting if I'm trying to figure out how to clearly express something complicated. So my subconscious drops the "tracking your eye locations" task to focus on phrasing instead.
I handle it by looking off into the distance whilst I talk, rather than making eye contact. Then when I'm listening, I focus on making intense eye contact to show that I'm paying attention. (I stop making eye contact if you're really boring or really interesting, though. In the former case, I'm thinking about something else. In the latter case, you've inspired an idea into my head, and now I'm thinking about it.)
It's not that it's unpleasant, it's more that it doesn't come naturally to me. It's awkward and distracting to keep up, like standing on one leg. I think that if I got into the habit of making eye contact I could solve this problem. The thing is that there are a lot of conversations where it's fine to not make eye contact, like when one or both of us are performing a task while we talk, so it feels less urgent to fix it.
I also think that if I have gotten into the habit of making eye contact I wouldn't necessarily realize... It's possible I've already fixed this.
Thanks for sharing. I have a son with ASD who is young, and one of the things I'm grappling with is "should I encourage him to make eye contact." Like, if it's viscerally terrible for him, I don't want to subject him to it, or not much, but if it's just a matter of building a good habit, I think it'll be helpful for him.
Not going to take your experience as the only and final word on the topic, but a helpful data point.
I think pushing someone to be make a certain kind of eye contact is hard on them. We normally are not consciously aware of what we are doing with oureyes, and pushing someone to be is going to give them an additional difficult task to do when they are already doing the difficult task of talking with someone. Here's a gentler way to come at it with your son:
-Tell him that when he's doing the talking he should glance at the other person's face now and then to see how they are reacting. If they look friendly and interested, all is well. But if they are looking out the window or at their phone, that's a sign they're maybe not interested. And if course if they look upset he needs to think about whether they maybe didn't like what he said.
-And tell him when that he is the listener then if he is interested in what the person is saying he should look at their face most of the time, so they can tell he's interested. (And if he's not interested, he should look for a way to change the subject).
If he does the 2 things I described, his eye contact will be normal, but it will become that way without him trying to micromanage his eyes.
As an autistic person who has learned to make pretty "typical" eye contact, I think this is just not a high priority thing to do. Up until about age 14 I was under the impression that "eye contact" meant "stare directly into the other person's eyes with the minimum number of interruptions" (I didn't do it very often, or presumably someone would have corrected me earlier). Then I discovered more complete descriptions of how eye contact is *supposed* to work and over the course of a couple years taught myself how to make my eye contact habits more natural.
Compared to other social skills, this one was really easy to learn as a teenager. By that age I was reasonably good at self-monitoring (which meant that I could correct on my own) and eye contact really doesn't require particularly good social modelling to work. On the other hand, I do *not* think that I would have been able to learn that skill at age 6 (roughly the age when I discovered the term 'eye contact') without, idk, an adult forcing me to do drills.
I think a more useful skill for autistic kids - if you can't teach the people around them to just deal - is to teach them how to *fake* eye contact. Most people don't really care that you're looking at their eyeballs, so looking at their nose/forehead/just over their shoulder meets the same need in a way that's easier/more comfortable for many autistic people.
20 years ago a yoga teacher told me to look at the space in between the eyes and I've appreciated the advice ever since
Yeah, I agree, what I really want him to do is make his interlocutor feel like he's not ignoring them.
Looking directly into someone else's eyes is very intense.
Just to be clear: are you an autistic person who avoids eye contact?
What does "intense" mean? Like... how does this cash out? Do you feel hot? Flushed? Thoughts race? Heart races? Some emotions spring up?
Scott, this is *not* how you capitalize "Tetraspace" - her name is actually spelled in title case, just like any other mononymous person.
That's her internet name but she is just one of many people for whom their internet name has all but replaced their real name (c.f. PewDiePie, Stampylonghead, etc)
> her name is actually spelled in title case, just like any other mononymous person
> PewDiePie
Quick reaction to the latest episode of "Rings of Power" (only two more to go!)
This episode made me want to kill Tom Bombadil. Good work, show!
The Dwarven storyline is still the best, but the Celebrimbor-Annatar one is moving along nicely. And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar. Now, if only they could do something about that terrible wig.
The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park. One moment: "rabble rabble rabble! Pharazon king!" The next, "rabble rabble rabble! Miriel Queen!"
At least we didn't get more of Isildur wandering around as aimlessly as the rest of the 'action' on Númenor, though we did get Arondir massacring some peace-loving Orcs who were only going home to their wives and kids. That's literally it, one scene of him killing some Orcs and nothing more. Probably it'll lead into something in the next episode, but mainly I think it was just there to remind us he exists.
The show continues to elevate my blood-pressure by Doing The Thing. Oh look, they Did The Thing just like in the movies. Oh look, they Said The Line just like in the movies. And hence my desire for someone to bring me the head of Tom Bombadil: they straight-up lifted Gandalf's speech about mercy ("Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? ") and turned it into the Yoda and Luke moment from "The Empire Strikes Back" about "are you going to quit your training or abandon your friends?"
Some that live deserve death, right enough, and I'm looking at *you*, show!
And for those of you eager for some hot Harfoot-on-Stoor action (you degenerate perverts), we get Poppy and Merimac kissing. Oh, the romantic passion and ardour of deep, true love on display there! Not.
There will probably be a third season of this, though it hasn't been officially greenlit. I suspect that the third season will be to wrap up everything, because I honestly can't see this running for five seasons. But what do I know?
>And wonder of wonders, I thought Charlie Vickers was good here. I was "meh" about him as Halbrand, but this episode he really did well as Annatar.
Interesting. From s1 and s2e1 (all I've had the patience and stomach to watch so far), my impression has been that Vickers is a good actor, but miscast as Sauron. It's essential to Sauron's story arc that he's able to be irresistibly charming (at least until he loses his ability to assume fair form), utterly terrifying, or both. I haven't seen that from Vickers so far in RoP. Did he come through in the latest episode?
>The Númenor storyline continues to wander around and the plain people of Númenor continue to resemble their counterparts in South Park.
That's disappointing. The Númenor storyline had been one of the brighter points for me in s1. I mean, there were insultingly bad low points (especially the "they took our jobs" bit), but the actors playing Tar-Muriel and Ar-Pharazon were doing a good job of selling it and there were pretty good high points that gave me some hope for where the plotline was going. I take it the insultingly bad parts are dominating the Numenor plotline so far in s2?
This last episode was the first one where I felt "hey, this guy can act!" It wasn't a big thing, just small changes of expression that were appropriate to the situation.
My view of him as Halbrand in season one was that he went around with that stupid smirk permanently on his face (though he wasn't the only actor with only one expression). So I didn't find him interesting or convincing.
This episode, though, Annatar manages to look convincing when talking to/manipulating others, rather than "heh heh observe my secret smirk as I toy with you". Other times it's just a small secret smile or a sideways glance.
I agree that it's a pity about Miriel and Pharazon. I sort of liked Pharazon in season one as he seemed to be the only Númenorean with a brain, but so far this season he's just Evil Scheming Power-grabber and we're not getting any demonstration of "this is why the Númenoreans, numbskulls as they are, want him as king" (deus ex Eagle isn't enough to convince about that). I think the actress playing Miriel, if she got a chance, could be really good but the part is so thinly written there's nothing there to work with.
So far the Númenorean plotline has been: Elendil's invented daughter is sad her brother (she only has one, as Anarion seems to have been forgotten about or is stuck on "the other side of the island" since season one) is dead (he's not, but she doesn't know that) and she blames the queen for taking him off to war. So now she's plotting and scheming with Pharazon, his invented useless son Kemen, and some random Númenorean lord to overthrow Miriel. They do this at the coronation, where Daughter turns up with the palantir and calls it elf magic stone and this shows the queen is on the elf side, so the people immediately go "rabble rabble rabble!" She drops the palantir on the ground, Elendil tries to pick it up but gets shocked by a magic vision and thrown across the room. All is chaos, and then an Eagle shows up, which is supposed to legitimate the coronation, but Random Lord grabs the opportunity to say "the Valar support Pharazon!" and "rabble rabble rabble Pharazon king".
Miriel is now stuck in a tower like her father before her, and Elendil is trying to persuade her that there are enough people loyal to her to oppose Pharazon, but she stops him by asking what vision he had when he touched the palantir; he says he saw himself on a horse riding away from the city. So she thinks this means the prophesied doom has been averted, and orders him not to cause any trouble because this new path with Pharazon may be what saves Númenor.
Useless Son is given some power and a task by Pharazon and immediately starts being a spineless bully. The Seaguard who are still loyal are all disbanded and have to hand over their uniforms and swords. Elendil shows up and queries this, then does likewise (remembering Miriel's orders not to make waves). Daughter tries to persuade him just to go along and support Pharazon, but he won't. Useless Son insults him and Elendil takes it.
Then later they're all in a shrine having a ritual to send off the dead who died in the Great Epic War of the Southlands (all one village of it). Useless Son and guards show up to order everyone out as this shrine is going to be pulled down to build an aqueduct there instead. Friend of Isildur fights Useless Son and gets back-stabbed (it's such a pointless fight I can't even be bothered with it).
Next episode Elendil is being tried for fomenting rebellion or something, in the wake of the bust-up in the shrine. He again refuses to accept Pharazon as king, and assembled citizenry start rabble-rabble-rabbling. Random Lord advises Pharazon to put Elendil to death by seamonster (this is supposedly a trial that the Faithful undergo for the judgement of the Valar).
Daughter visits Elendil in prison, tries to talk him round, no go. She has arranged for Miriel to visit him and *she* tries to talk him round, still no go. So we then get to the seashore, where they're calling the seamonster. Elendil is ready to jump into the water but Miriel turns up, claims he was acting in her name so she should be the one undergoing the trial, and she jumps in instead. Seamonster turns up and looks at her. On shore all are awaiting the result, they think she's dead, but then she is spat out by the seamonster and the fickle mob once more rabble-rabble-rabble that the Valar have judged her to be the rightful queen.
The End (until the next two episodes and by now I'm longing for the Great Wave to hit). Also they seem to be setting up a Miriel-Elendil romance (he gets very handsy with her, more so than a subject with his queen should get) and I'm over here going 🤢
I've wanted to kill Tom Bombadil since I first read the books, so I guess Amazon has faithfully represented Tom as I experienced him!
I am impressed that you are still able to force yourself to see this stuff. I had to quit two thirds into season 1. I felt like Hal in 2001 when they disconnected his intellectual circuits one by one. Almost every scene offered a new internal contradiction compared to the scenes before, numbing my mind scene by scene as I desperately tried to uphold suspension of disbelief. I was slipping fast toward the stage where all that was left, was my ability to sing Daisy, Daisy. You are stronger than I am.
Like other reviewers have said, I'm spite-watching to see how more stupid they can get with every episode.
They came out of the gate strong this week, I have to say, with the Bombadil stuff and the Miriel-Elendil romance and Trial By Seamonster. Disa as Bat-woman is a contender, too, but the Dwarven storyline remains some of the better work despite all they can do.
I tried spite-watching as well, but it become too hard.
Scenes like Galadriel telling the Numenorian queen that she was “saved from certain death” by a Numenorian ship sailing by, implying that she must have forgotten that she voluntarily dived into the ocean in the former episode…or that elf-guy leading villagers into a castle to be better defended against the Orcs, but then leading them back into the village again afterwards, implying that he must have forgotten why he led them away in the first place… and so on and so on. I feared my brain would start to boil, the way the brains of the main characters in this show must be forever boiling.
As the Viking who had displeased his Lord and as punishment was forced to eat an enormous bowl of porridge (the Norse equivalent to this show) said after some mouthfuls: “Kill me, Lord, but not with porridge.”
These days I limit myself to vicarious spite-watching, through the Critical Drinker and other youtubers mocking new episodes of the show. Kudos to you for having the stamina to do the same.
Le Guin said, in reaction to one of the films based on her Earthsea series, something like "It's as if you changed LotR so that Frodo claims the ring for his own, puts it on, and then lives happily ever after." I wish that hadn't been a prediction of how badly the essence of the story is being butchered.
If we're talking about the animated film Tales From Earthsea, she has a quote where she says she liked the film on its own merits, but she was flabbergasted that anyone would claim it has anything to do with her novels, besides reusing some names.
No, I think she meant the 2004 TV series.
Why does not somebody spend 1 billion USD making an Earthsea triology? Great story.
Probably some version of "who owns the rights". They can't make a direct Silmarillion adaptation or call it that, I think?
Also ... depending on who you ask, either the first or the fourth book could be seen as vaguely problematic in some circles.
Life itself is vaguely problematic...but you are probably right.
From here:
"I wonder if the people who made the film of The Lord of the Rings had ended it with Frodo putting on the Ring and ruling happily ever after, and then claimed that that was what Tolkien 'intended...' would people think they'd been 'very, very honest to the books'?"
https://www.ursulakleguin.com/adaptation-earthsea-miniseries
She was a prophet in her own time. That's exactly what our boys Payne and McKay were going on about pre-first season, how they'd been so very, very faithful to the books (while changing the story because people who read the books would know what was going to happen, so they had to stick in mystery boxes).
If these niblets thought they could get away with it, they *would* have someone putting on the One Ring and being an enlightened democratic ruler.
The Celebrimbor-Annatar storyline is working out better than I expected. At least it's running on vaguely canonical lines. Of course, to make it work, they had to turn Celebrimbor into an idiot (why, exactly, does Annatar need him in this version, when he had to tell him about the secret extra-high hidden level in smithcraft that is "alloys"?) In this take, Celebrimbor is even more gullible than the Númenorean smiths who just beat him up and kicked him out when he tried getting into the forges. Dang, who knew those weak corruptible mortal Men would be less malleable than one of the Noldor? By contrast, all Halbrannatar had to do was turn up, look pathetic in the rain, get the soft-headed smith girl to persuade the soft-headed Lord of Eregion to at least talk to him, and Bob's your uncle, next thing you know Annatar is running Eregion as Acting High Steward and Grand Panjandrum.
If the Dark Wizard doesn't turn out to be Saruman, I will eat this Bombadil's not particularly yellow boots.
I love your episodes'reviews and "Some that live deserve death, right enough, and I'm looking at *you*, show!" is just great!
Oh, man (woman, child, Orc Baby, Ent Wife, or 'de knife-ears tuk er jerbs"' Númenorean), I was *so* mad at that part of the episode.
I swear by the Eagles of Manwe Sulimo, the Elder King, whom I hope will swoop down to get all Prometheus on the showrunners' livers, if they are setting up some dumb "Ha ha, turns out the *real* test was to see if you'd put the good of your friends above the destiny to fight the darkness and save the world!" test with Tom and his mangled quote, I will - invoke the Eagles to eat their livers.
They keep *doing* this, they keep quoting the movies scene for scene, line for line, but twisting this around. And it's particularly egregious here, because that speech is about how mercy is always good, even mercy to the undeserving, and the show used it to set up a fake dilemma where Tom is apparently coercing I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf into choosing "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few".
(Not alone are they quoting the LOTR movies, but Star Wars and possibly Star Trek as well).
Do we really think I Can't Believe It's Not Gandalf is going to abandon Nori and Poppy to CERTAIN DEATH as per his visions? We might wish he would, but of course he's not going to do that.
But neither can we really think that if he leaves now, Tom is going to stick to "So sorry, you missed your one and only chance to get your magic wand to fight the dark wizard and the darkness and the fire and last Tuesday's mouldy bread crusts, as was your mystic destiny which is why you were sent to me to be trained young padawan, so too bad, looks like the world will just have to burn!"
Not a chance of a leaf in a Balrog's fiery breath.
So it's a fake dilemma and fake 'conflict for the sake of conflict' and they had to fold, spindle and mutilate another piece of canon to do so. Grrr. No wonder I'm cheering for Adar and the Orcs.
Rip them all down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpphSBYFYso
On the subject of in-house large language models versus implementing frontier models
A recent survey (https://www.pw.hks.harvard.edu/post/the-rapid-adoption-of-generative-ai) in the US states that 39.4% of adults are using generative AI for tasks both at work and outside of work, which highlights the rapidly increasing dependency on these models. Anecdotally, I introduced my wife to chatGPT four months ago, and today she consistently consults chatGPT 4o not only for work related matters, but also for day-to-day tasks at home. In our household, googling is slowly becoming a thing of the past.
Over the last year and a half, I have heard lots of chatter of regular businesses hiring teams of engineers to design in-house LLM applications. The arguments for building in-house LLMs are obvious: You control the architecture, data, and sensitive information of your business, as opposed to exposing this data to these ‘black box’ models. A year ago, it seemed like a good tradeoff to make, but after GPT-4 and other frontier models have been released, it seems to me that any regular business that continues to develop LLMs in-house will be left behind. Frontier models have advanced so quickly in terms of complexity, data scale, and efficiency that matching this pace internally may no longer be feasible for most regular businesses.
Looking into the future, I am curious about the following:
Aside from the reasons stated above, are there any other reasons why regular businesses should be spending resources creating their own in-house LLMs?
Is there a way to identify which companies are partnering with the builders of frontier models versus those developing their own in-house models within an industry?
If one of the barriers of customizing and implementing a frontier LLM within a firm is data cleaning, as sarahconstatin mentions in this post (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7L8ZwMJkhLXjSa7tD/the-great-data-integration-schlep), is there a business opportunity in becoming a data cleaner, aka the bridge between regular companies and frontier model builders?
If you have any data scientists or statisticians or modeling teams, "data cleaning" is already a thing they do a lot of (hopefully in entirely or mostly automated fashion).
Being a "data cleaner" isn't really a standalone job, and is very vulnerable to "being replaced with a very small shell script" or equivalent.
It is a billion dollar industry at the moment. There are hundreds of "data cleaners" right now cleaning data of all types of companies so that Salesforce can be implemented more effectively.
There is a possibility that when regular businesses decides to implement frontier models, this type of work might be needed. Now granted, it could be done by the LLM provider itself, or maybe at that stage the LLM can clean the data itself.
One thing adjacent to that, with probably a good amount of latent demand, is fine tuning the LLM for a given company's specific background, context, data, KPI's, priorities, etc.
I'd be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic aren't doing this today with some large enterprise customers, but it would also be helpful to the next tier down of companies (so like F51-F600 or whatever, instead of only Fortune 50 companies) to be able to do this, and having done it with local LLM's, it's pretty fiddly and requires a lot of illegible expertise and messing around before you get good at it.
And of course, ultimately we'll all want a personal assistant who makes most of our c2b phone calls and emails and media curation and travel plans and whatever, and that's likely to have an LLM as a good part - the demand for "individual fine tuning" probably goes down to the individual level.
So there's almost definitely a niche for "AI whisperer" doing some combination of data cleaning, ETL, integration, and fine tuning, for businesses of practically any size all the way down to consumers.
"Building an in-house LLM" in practice mostly means "running an existing nearly-frontier open-source LLM, possibly fine-tuned, which AWS will host for you happily". It's pricy and a bit of a pain, but if exporting sensitive data to a frontier model provider is a non-starter, it's pretty much your only option.